Jon_Kissel Pro

Favorite films

  • Kill Bill: Vol. 2
  • The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
  • Network
  • GoodFellas

All
  • Saltburn

    ★★

  • An American Werewolf in London

    ★★

  • Stalker

    ★★★

  • Sound of Noise

    ★★★½

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Saltburn

2023

★★ Watched

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn takes place amongst the perfectly manicured lawns and ornately decorated halls of the titular English estate, but it’s a mess of a movie. Fennell casts Jacob Elordi as the aristocratic object of a lower class boy’s (Barry Keoghan) obsessions. Clearly a fan of the Euphoria TV series, Saltburn shares the HBO show’s florid update on teen drama with frequent drug use and rampant sexuality, but, being English, it’s most interested in class. The film makes some observations…

An American Werewolf in London

1981

★★ Watched

Its famous transformation scene notwithstanding, An American Werewolf in London is just not for me. I’ll put it on writer/director John Landis, an embodiment of 80’s meanness whose work never connects. Any horror movie that treats its kills unseriously gets my cold shoulder, and this was more dismissive than most. Throw in the trope of the female character falling in love for no good reason, and An American Werewolf in London fails. Great creature effects, though. C-

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The Boy and the Heron

2023

★★★★★ Liked Watched

The world is broken, and is broken in such a way that the people who suffer the most are children. Those children, in spite of their brokenness, are then handed custody of the world that broke them, and are expected to somehow maintain it, if not improve it. Also, birds are weird. Hayao Miyazaki packs that and so much more in what might be his final, messy, nevertheless perfect film. A

Full review at www.mediocremovie.club/reviews/the-boy-and-the-heron

The Comedy

2012

★★★★ Liked Watched

The idle, hipster, New York rich have never been as ripe for the guillotine as they are in Rick Alverson’s The Comedy, a title that implies the arc of the film far more than its uncomfortable contents. Experimental comedy pioneer Tim Heidecker stars as the fittingly-named Swanson, a trust-fund kid who’s reached middle age by being as ironic and insincere as possible with his like-minded friends. Alverson opens his film with these pasty, shiftless layabouts jumping around in shirtless mayhem,…