Sinners (2025) - who are your people?

A Southern Gothic tale - with all the symbolism you care to find from that genre.

What does it mean to belong? How does a community treat its undesirables? What role does religion play in defining good and clean? What do you have to give up to be part of the clan? This movie probes some very deep stuff.

If you just want the top-level show without all the questions this flick evokes - you get gangsters, vampires, and blues music. It is all the magic I found in a Pizza Hut Supreme when I was a kid.

Wonderfully grotesque metaphors. Moving scores. Impact through sound design, camera focus, tracking, color palette and lighting. This movie is brilliantly made.

I am trying to put my finger on a performance that is stand out, but I can't really. It is quite an ensemble.

I think if there is one series I loved it is when Stack goes to get supplies for the party: that negotiation with the girl by the truck, the greeting at the 'black' grocery, the shooting, the '1-shot' where we track Lisa fetching her mom from the 'white' grocery across the street, and the negotiation with Grace. All of that. Even Grace and Bo's speech patois to code themselves 'acceptable' to the people they served. It was a lived-in set of moments - the Chao's are probably my favorite characters. Also, I think I could watch Wunmi Mosaku (aka Hunter B15) spray paint a mailbox if anyone wanted to cast her in that role.

If you don't care for gore, I do not recommend this film. I did not find it scary, but it is messy. If you like rich, textured story telling - packaged for pop consumption ... you definitely gotta see this thing.

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Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) - it is a good deal better than the remakes

I got around to watching the original 1958 comedy caper film - the one that "Welcome to Collinwood" was pantomiming. "Big Deal on Madonna Street" is hilarious. It is 25 minutes longer than the remake and never once did I feel the need to check my watch. I even paused to go refill my water glass. There will be no problem telling who is who or how the story goes - it is well shot and characters are unique. The story is a simple and fun. Comparing the "BDoMS" and "WtC" - they are identical in terms of characters and scenes. "Big Deal on Madonna Street" street is terrific, and "WtC" is a slog. The biggest difference is seen in the dialog. In "Big Deal" the people just talk, like you might expect people to talk. They are funny, but not odd. The colloquialisms happen, but they aren't hard to see through. In "WtC", they are using a vernacular to make sure you are immersed deep in an Eastern European ethnic nei...

Lara Croft vs. Tony Stark - a comparison of Earth's mightiest defenders

I watched “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” (2001) recently. It is not nearly the deep exploration of the human psyche I remembered. Maybe that is why I had time to think that her story has a lot of similarities to the MCU Iron Man, just smashed into a single movie. There is not the same degree of character growth for Croft as for Stark, but there is an archetype here that stuck me. They are both: Athletic with distinctly styled dark brown hair Exceptionally smart & adventurous Utilize clever tools and gadgets Snarky / Funny / Patronizing to the people around Attended to by an attractive personal assistant Rich / Entitled / Play(boy/girl) / Philanthropist-ish Compelled to protect the world from BIG evil Driven by living up to a relationship with father In terms of contrasts: Laura Croft rides a motorcycle, listens to hip-hop and talks with a posh (and yet reed thin) English accent. Tony Stark was able to build [a hockey puck sized nuclear reactor] in a cave! With a box of scraps! (Jef...

Running with the Devil (2019) - Ok folks, let's make a ¿something?

How do you take a 100 minute movie with Nick Cage, Larry Fishburne, Leslie Bibb, and Barry Pepper - as well as Cole Hauser, Adam Goldberg and Peter Facinelli - and somehow make an unwatchable stew of tones and over the top cliches? I think you give it to a TV director, TV writer, and TV editor. I could not actually finish it. Even for me, that is pretty bad. It is a series of scenes that could have been part of a TV-series, but they weren’t. They were just the beats from a TV-series. Maybe it was put together by some people who read the wikipedia article for “Traffic” (2000) - then sketched a storyboard for a telenovela - then remembered they were making a movie and just cut it back down from there. It is like it has been sequentially translated into 2 different languages, each time by someone who wasn’t a native speaker. Set designs were thrifty, but not too cheap. Cinematography is somehow gray and lurid at the same time. If there was a highlight, it is the music. It was the onl...

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