Flash Frames

“A look behind the curtain.” Director: Taylor Swift Synopsis: “The exclusive world premiere of the music video “The Fate of Ophelia,” along with behind-the-scenes footage from the music video shoot, brand new lyric videos, and Taylor Swift’s personal reflections on songs from her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl .” __________________________________________________ I’m sitting in a hotel room in a different state, pretty much wiped from the first day of being at the Eerie Horror Fest this past weekend. Most of this is being written on downtime from the fest, especially since I went to my first midnight screening experience for Rats: Night of Terror last night/this morning. Although, I did just wanna talk about something I saw at a movie theater a few weeks back. I didn’t see a movie, though. That’s why I said “something” and not “movie” or “film,” or if you wanna get real fancy, a “picture.” For this little article, I’m writing about a musician. Not just any musician, though,...

Abel Tesfaye in Hurry Up Tomorrow What I like to show in these reviews is an exercise in bias. Every single person has their own bias to something, whether they realize it or not. I feel like I’ve stated this in at least one other review on this site, but let me promise you this: The statement “exercise in bias” will permeate throughout this review, mainly because of this movie’s star/driving force. I like Abel Tesfaye, who grew to popularity as his stage name The Weeknd, a lot. The man’s got insane musical talent, and as I think you know, he’s not a great actor. Some people say that he isn’t an actor at all. If you don’t know, Tesfaye has already tried acting in the HBO series The Idol , which was a massive disaster for nearly everybody involved. You know a show is bad when they cut the last episode and gaslight everyone into thinking that it was 5 episodes instead of 6 the whole time (yes, that’s real). However, it’s not to say that he won’t quit. This movie here, Hurry Up Tomorrow ,...

Still from SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) I’m aware that I have my blindspots in film, so this post is going to be a little bit outside of my comfort zone. Documentaries haven’t only been pretty tough for me to write about, but I haven’t seen a lot of the popular documentaries. When it comes to documentaries on things I know a good amount about, I think I could maybe get something down together. There are two recent documentaries that I’ve recently seen that really should’ve gotten more awards consideration. The first is Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story , and as incredible as this was to see in a theater, the Oscars normally don’t nominate the celebrity-focused documentaries that feel one step away from a biopic. The second is Mati Diop’s Dahomey , and I was really shocked that this didn’t get any sort of love. It did win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, though, which is a huge honor. It was shortlisted in a couple categories, but it didn’t make the cut a...

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown Musician biopics are something that I’m very partial to, especially when an actor just sinks into a role. However, the worst of the worst can be painful to sit through. The worst ones just seem tone deaf more than anything, and the best paint an image of who the subject is, with the good, bad, and ugly parts. While it definitely does lean in the more “wow, what a guy he is” angle, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is one of my favorite movies of the decade so far. It captured the energy that Elvis had at his heights, but the only real critique I have is that Priscilla Presley was just left by the wayside for most of that movie. It felt poetic that a movie surrounding her life, directed by Sofia Coppola, released just a few months later and feels monumental. Coppola’s Elvis is kept at a distance because you know how Elvis was. A Complete Unknown , James Mangold’s second go-around at a music biopic after 2005’s Oscar-winning Walk the Line (and a great title ch...

Angelina Jolie in Maria Pablo Larraín is the Chilean director mostly known these days Jackie and Spencer , two of three in a loose trilogy of films that focus on iconic 20th century women. The first, which has a mesmerizing lead performance from Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy, really snuck up on me the first time I saw it. That let Spencer , where Kristen Stewart gives a knockout performance of the late Princess Diana, blow me away as one of my favorite films of the 2020s so far. There’s also Larraín’s last film, the Pinochet-skewering satire El Conde , which is also a stunning slow-burn. That being said, my interest was through the roof for whatever Larraín’s hands were on next. Maria , the third film in this loose trilogy not only doesn’t have the magic of Larraín’s past work, but has seemingly lost what made the other entries so interesting. Angelina Jolie plays influential opera singer Maria Callas in her final days, ones where she still can’t escape the spotlight that she’s be...

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...