Demon
“Demon” makes the best of spatial awareness – you can feel the breadth of space around the property, while also succumbing to the suffocating corridors of the interior shots – but there are too many creative hiccups to maintain this taut feeling of suspense.
In Any Language: Best in Foreign Films
I speak one language fluently: English. I understand enough Spanish to get myself in trouble if I wander into Tijuana. My Italian language skills have faded horribly since my grandparents passed away. But I can read subtitles.
Devendra Banhart: Ape in Pink Marble
This is more “Veneer”-era Jose Gonzalez than it is mystic-era Devendra Banhart. The salacious and sardonic lyrics still slink and slither – and the artist’s humor is forever intact – but he’s also somewhat more confessional in his most recent opus.
Futurespective: Comic Book Movies in the Future
It’s amazing to think how far comic book movies have come in the eight or so years since “Iron Man” (2008). Before, comic books were sort of molded into whatever Hollywood thought an action movie was supposed to be at the time, with no acknowledgment that thousands of comic book characters fight in the same universe.
Japanese Breakfast Slays the Night
Directed by both Adam Kolodny and Michelle Zauner, self-medication and jovial excess clasp hands with cavalier shrugs and dogged existentialism – this is tongue-in-cheek surrealism.
Livin’ Is Dyin’ In This Nothin’ Town
San Diego in the seventies was a sleepy Navy city with a decaying downtown. Plenty of gorgeous beaches but little else. The United States National Bank (owned by C. Arnholt Smith) collapsed in 1973, giving the city plenty of negative publicity. As the decade moved forward, a growing younger generation needed something to do, and somewhere to do it.
Albums for August
While “Channel Orange” had more memorable individual tracks, “Blond” feels well produced and executed. It’s quieter, more soulful, painted with pastels.
Author: The JT LeRoy Story
Albert’s work hummed and hissed under the pseudonym of JT LeRoy, a boy whose wily, acerbic and perceptive prose earned him celebrity.
Operation Avalanche
What if the moon landing was staged? It’s not a new thought, of course, but one that has been lit by its fair share of flints. Still, filmmaker Matt Johnson’s enthusiastic exercise in revisionist history is kettle-popped with strangeness.
Snowden
It’s easy to sum up the film by saying it feels like “Mister Smith Blows the Whistle on Washington.” Snowden discovers the government is overstepping its authority and data is being shared, secrets revealed, lives ruined. Gordon-Levitt’s face carries plenty of drama and conflict as he wrestles with what to do.
