New York

Slime City

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Four stars

Men’s-Rights-activist, young-Republican, Travis-Bickle-wannabe, motherfucker moves to skid row.  Drinks ghost sludge.  Continues to be whiny,self-righteous asshole.  Murders the downtrodden.  Tries to cheat on his girlfriend.  Morphs into pulsating goop monster.  Finally gets his in gleeful gory glory.  It’s a mean-spirited, right-wing, reactionary romp through exploitation splatter in the vein of Street Trash but played a little more straight.  Charmingly “flawed”, offensive, & original.  There’s a cheapo Ingmar Bergman pastiche.  There’s a squirting vagina-dentata chest wound.  I had a lot of fun hating the protagonist, hooting at the politics, and waiting for the DIY gore FX.  I recommend it.

D,W & E by: Greg Lamberson; P: Peter Clark, M: Robert Tomaro, More E: Briton J. Petrucelly, w/Craig Sabin, Mary Hunter, Bunny Levine, T. Clay Dickinson, Dick Beil, T.J. Merrick, Marylin Oran, Dennis Embry, etc…81 min, USA, 1988
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Teenage Turtles 6: Shadowlands

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Three stars

According to Eckhart Tolle our slavish devotion to the mind robs us of the deep divine stillness of being.  Turtle brothers battle a brain.  Taoist, hormonal, subterranean, CGI New Yorkers in the latest filmic entry of an ip with an awesome/grotesque toy-line from my youth.  Megan Fox symbolically strips onscreen out of old April into new.  Will Arnett does a comedy bit with a wall cable.  There’s a pop punk cover of the 80’s cartoon theme.  Tyler Perry is wonderfully unrestrained here, he never turns into a fly though.  Not even post-credits.

D by: Dave Green, W by: Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec, P by: Lula Carvalho, E by: Bob Ducsay & Jim May, M by: Steve Jablonsky, A by: Ryan Bradley, Oz Gani, Wong Joe, Kai-Hu Lan, etc…thnx Peter Laird, Kevin Eastman, Michael Bay; w/Laura Linney, Tyler Perry, Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Stephen Farrelly, Gary Anthony Williams, Brain Tee, Tony Shalhoub, etc..112 min, USA, 2016

Heaven Knows What

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Three stars

Cinematic beacon on highway underpasses.  New York smells like cold old garbage.  That stink wriggles into the exposed arteries of the romantic street cutter.  There’s no cover from wind and rain but a needle’s fill of junk.  Headlights interrupt the night and she stands there indifferent to your “good intentions”.  Proselytizing on love she throws it all away again.  She lives aboard an ancient pizza box.  Her kiss a breath of rot from a cracked casket.  Her friends play French New Wave bikers for the camera.  Sexy crust punk spangers.  The ultimate freedom of addiction.  The real walking dead.  Hardstyle beatz & halfway houses.

D, W & E by: Josh & Ben Safdie, More W: Arielle Holmes & Ronald Bronstein, More E: Ronald Bronstein, P by: Sean Prince Williams, M by: Ariel Pink, Paul Grimstad, Isao Tomita & Headhunterz, w/Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, Buddy Duress, Necro, Yuri Pleskun, Elenore Hendricks, Robert Shulman, Manny Aguila, etc..97 min, USA, 2014

Escape From New York

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Three stars

New York’s skyscrapers like silent sentinels, it’s dark and cold in the valleys of abandoned progress.  You walk amongst this history and your footsteps echo off canyons of cement and you truly feel what it’s like to be Godforsaken.  I know this isn’t really the place to say it, but I’m deeply terrified of a Trump presidency.

D, W, & M by: John Carpenter, More W: Nick Castle, More M: Alan Howarth, P by: Dean Cundey, E by: Todd Ramsay, FX: Roy Arbogast, James Cameron, Brian Chin, Jenna Holman, etc…, S by: Buff Brady, Tony Brubaker, Glory Fioramanti, etc…, w/Kurt Russell, Isaac Hayes, Ernest Borgnine, Adrienne Barbeau, Harry Dean Stanton, Lee Van Cleef, Tom Atkins, Frank Doubleday, etc…, 99 min, USA, 1981

Ned Rifle

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Three starsTwo stars

Philosophers, poets, and laborers.  In hotel rooms, bars, and bookstores.  The highway winks away over the horizon.  We have time enough to choose our words precisely, to etch and carve the minutes into these salty bed sheets.  There are such things as love & lust & God & consequence.  The pistol has one loaded chamber and Chekhov demands it must be fired.

D, W, & M by: Hal Hartley, P by: Vladimir Subotic, E by: Kyle Gilman w/Liam Aiken, Aubrey Plaza, Thomas Jay Ryan, Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Martin Donovan, Robert John Burke, Lloyd Kaufman, etc…, 85 min, USA, 2014