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2004

★★★ 2

Unlike his vaguely like-minded contemporaries Gary Numan and Lene Lovich, Klaus Nomi’s recorded endeavors could not compete with his remarkably striking visual presentation. He released only two albums during his short life, their musical backing generic and uninspired despite his startling falsetto vocalizing and his bizarre song selections; he’s better served by a posthumous archival release. But his countertenor operatics, combined with the exceptionally beautiful and hugely influential German Expressionism-meets-Soviet Constructivism imagery that he devised, captured the emerging downtown aesthetic…

2008

★★ Added

Pontypool is a somewhat stylish ultra-low budget zombie movie with a commanding performance by Stephen McHattie as a broken down radio dj in rural Ontario who, along with his producer and his engineer, receives concerning reports about civilians going mad and murdering each other. Its fatal flaw is that the (ridiculous) solution to stemming the violence is provided by a Quebecois government dispatch quite early on in the proceedings that is completely ignored by the trio, who continue to flail…

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1979

★★★★★ 8

Shale and salmon: there’s no green, no indicator of life or hope in the world of Quintet, Robert Altman’s masterful and definitive exploration of a planet’s final days, where ice and cold doom its sentient race to extinction. Quintet asks (and answers), what would we do if we finally came to the awful realization that before us, and especially after us, there is only our non-existence? Would we futilely strive to make a mark on our dying culture, or would…

2024

★ 3

“Elizabeth Sparkle—Talk about raising the dead!” Its Big Pharma TV commercial-level cinematography is nausea-inducing, its Disney Channel-level lighting is seizure-inducing, its Barney the Dinosaur-level digital glare is migraine-inducing, its Gerwig/Barbie-level social commentary is mind-numbing, its Bay Watch-level sexist exploitation is feminism-rejecting...and don’t get me started on its scripting, its acting, its editing, its pacing. I tried to entertain myself by quoting the relevant corresponding lines from Death Becomes Her, of which this is a laugh-at (not laugh-with) remake, to no…

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