Flash Frames

I have to be clear about something here: I don’t think Mad Max is my cup of tea. Leading up to the latest installment, I decided to not only re-watch Mad Max: Fury Road but also watch the Mel Gibson-starring trilogy of movies for the first time. Outside of The Road Warrior , which I thought was good fun, the original and Beyond Thunderdome were just plain bad in my eyes. I also understand that Fury Road feels completely different when compared to the original three movies, but I just adore the overall energy of Fury Road that the entries before it, understandably, lack. That’s not to say that I wasn’t excited for Furiosa , an origin story/prequel to Fury Road . However, in both good ways and bad ways, it wasn’t what I was expecting. As the world fell and Australia became The Wasteland, a young girl is snatched from the Green Place and falls into the hands of a Biker Horde led by Dementus, a warlord. He goes to war with The Immortan Joe, another warlord of The Wasteland. While the ...

I’m not exactly the biggest Ryan Reynolds defender here, but he’s certainly not worn out his welcome with me. Sure, it’s a big thing on the internet to clown on him for being annoying, but I think that break for the last year of any major roles helped me out. What’s funny about that is that it never felt like a break. His last leading role was Spirited back in 2022, which I think was a fun enough movie for a straight-to-streaming holiday musical thing. Ever since then, all the movies he’s been in have been cameos like Bullet Train or Ghosted , which is all on top of his Mint Mobile commercials and his venture into football club Wrexham A.F.C. with Rob McElhenney (and its accompanying show). So, it’s never felt like a break in that regard. However, on the flip side, I’m actually curious to see what John Krasinski could have up his sleeve as a director outside of A Quiet Place . I think he’s done a pretty good job with those movies and it feels like Krasinski wants to show off some ver...

Vampires have been tough to crack recently for me. I’ve given a go at some of the more popular vampire movies out there, but they just haven’t been my thing. The Twilight movies are in the so-bad-it’s-good camp for me, and I probably should’ve watched Interview With the Vampire before I watched the awful Queen of the Damned , as much as I love Aaliyah. I’ve realized that I’m more into horror-leaning vampire movies as opposed to romance or dramas. I like Nosferatu quite a bit, and I’m especially excited for Robert Eggers’s version coming out this Christmas. I was even into both Renfield and The Last Voyage of the Demeter from last year, the vampire movies that came out last year that no one really saw. So, there are only a few vampire movies I genuinely like, and with Abigail , maybe that trend will continue. In New York City, a little girl named Abigail is abducted by a group of professional kidnappers. Abigail happens to be the daughter of a powerful figure in the crime underworld...

I really don’t have a good clue of where to start off with this one. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun really hit the consciousness with 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair , a lo-fi, borderline-Lynchian psychological drama that’s slowly become one of my favorite movies of this decade so far. I’ve even got the limited edition Blu-Ray from Vinegar Syndrome, which admittedly says a lot about me. Ever since World’s Fair , I’ve been wanting to see what Schoenbrun would have up their sleeves, and it’s a bit of a doozy. I didn’t even know until a few days before I Saw the TV Glow released nationwide this weekend that Emma Stone was a producer on this through her Fruit Tree banner, who’s been on a hell of a run, which includes not starring *and* producing my favorite movie AND show of 2023, Poor Things and The Curse . So, my expectations were nothing short of high, and even then, I’m pretty sure they were not only met but exceeded. Justice Smith plays Owen, a teenager just trying to ma...

You wanna know something? The idea for a movie can propel something forward in the industry. You wanna know something else? The person involved in a movie can also propel something forward in the industry. That being said, I think Jerry Seinfeld is pretty funny. For the most part. I watched Seinfeld a lot growing up, and I admittedly have a good pair of rose-tinted glasses for the show. I think we all know that Jerry’s not exactly a great person (look up "jerry seinfeld 17” to find out more!), but we admittedly have an interesting case here with this movie, Unfrosted . Seinfeld’s apparently been wanting to make this movie for a very long time, even eclipsing the run of Seinfeld . So, all things considered, this is Jerry’s dream project. Even hearing the awful reviews for this thing, I wanted to go into this with a fresh set of eyes, but even with that, there’s just something so wrong with Unfrosted . As I mentioned earlier, this honestly has a pretty decent idea at its core: Diff...

I’m going to be totally honest when I say that I’m not exactly a Planet of the Apes connoisseur. I’ve seen the classic 1968 movie that kicked this whole thing off, along with the reboot trilogy of movies: Rise , Dawn , and War for the Planet of the Apes . All of them are pretty spectacular in their own right, especially that classic one, but right now, most people know the franchise for its last three movies, which are undoubtedly just spectacular. The groundwork was laid in Rise , which was directed by Rupert Wyatt, and while it’s a pretty good movie, Dawn and War , which were both directed by Matt Reeves, raised the bar. I’d even go as far to say that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is one of the best blockbuster sequels ever made. That being said, I do have to add that the accomplishments of Dawn and War made Rise better in retrospect. Rise was fine, but going to it after seeing the other two movies after it just made it better in my eyes. Either way, that trilogy is over, and...

I’m going to be honest, this is one of my most anticipated movies of the year. AGGRO DR1FT has fascinated me since it was announced last summer. Its director, Harmony Korine, who’s made movies like Gummo and Spring Breakers , has also actively shown his distaste for movies right now. He’s even dubbed AGGRO DR1FT as “gamecore,” being much more inspired by Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto cutscenes than other movies. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival last September, it’s mainly gone on to be screened in strip clubs and be the background for Boiler Room sets by Yung Lean. So, whether or not I’d think it’s good or bad, AGGRO DR1FT was basically being set up as something new for the film industry, even if it’s a deep dive into experimental film and, at certain points, video art. Against all odds, though, AGGRO DR1FT does end up occupying a very strange space in my head. It’s worth mentioning what the plot is, even if it isn’t the focal point of the movie. Jordi Mollà play...

Sports movies have never really been my thing. To double down on it, sports in general really isn’t my thing. Sure, I like watching basketball and baseball, but I don’t want to actively play them. I’m admittedly partial to some baseball movies like Field of Dreams and Moneyball , but I don’t know anything about tennis. Like, anything at all. The most I know is from Wii Sports, just to give you a sense of how much I really know. However, I am familiar with director Luca Guadagnino, even though I haven’t seen what’s probably his most popular movie, Call Me By Your Name . The only movies I’ve seen of his are his remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (which I think is one of the only horror remakes that has elements that surpass the original) and Bones and All , his last film. This movie, Challengers , originally was supposed to come out in September of last year but was delayed because of the strikes in Hollywood from last summer, but I do think it benefitted Challengers because it’s curr...

We’re finally coming to a point in my writing since the beginning of this decade. If you don’t know, I wrote album reviews from about 2020 to 2022, and even though that really isn’t my thing anymore, it did help shape out what my current taste in music would end up being right now. That blog is actually still up to read somewhere (it’s not exactly hard to find). However, I’m going to throw a big curveball in there: I barely knew who Talking Heads were about two years ago. I knew the name David Byrne, but that was at the point where I regularly mixed up the names David Byrne and David Lynch. It’s actually been a little over a year since I watched Stop Making Sense , the 1984 concert film conceived by Talking Heads frontman Byrne and directed by the late Jonathan Demme, who’d go on to direct movies like The Silence of the Lambs , Philadelphia , and The Manchurian Candidate . Watching it for the first time as a 720p rip on YouTube wasn’t exactly the ideal way for me, but something clicked...