Tag Archives: Drama

You Have to See This! Staying Alive (1983)

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Streaming on Amazon Prime, Paramount Plus, and Hulu. 

“Staying Alive” has always been a notorious movie that always came with the legacy of being one of the worst movies ever made, and one of the worst sequels, barnone. It’s hard to achieve a feat as high as “Saturday Night Fever” which wasn’t just a movie about disco music, but was also a wonderful coming of age drama. With star John Travolta taking any role he could in the seventies and eighties, “Staying Alive” is that classic case of both being incapable of catching lightning in a bottle twice, and a studio not knowing what made their first film so great, in the first place.

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BAD MOVIE MONDAY: A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975)

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It’s a bit of a misconception about me to say that I hate modern movies and have a particular loathing reserved towards the superhero genre. I do not. Well, not exactly anyway. What has happened is that I’ve grown extremely weary of films that are written in this very mundane “Screenwriting 101” style. Almost every movie made these days is about a hero’s journey or a redemption arc or some sort of variation on a theme outlined in SAVE THE CAT! Which is a book about screenwriting that Hollywood seems to treat like it’s the Holy Bible of Cinema.

This is why I really respect a movie like A BOY AND HIS DOG. If nothing else, it’s definitely not formulaic.

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My Son Went Quiet (2023) [Slamdance 2024]

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The Slamdance Film Festival runs Digitally and In-Person from January 19th to January 28th.

Director Ian Bawa’s short film is a very sad and gut wrenching drama about grief and how we deal with a major loss in our lives. Bawa’s film is a half documentary half fictional tale through the eyes of an East Asian man who just lost his wife. After her sad unfortunate death, he and his son struggle to cope, but he falls silent. The pair go through various doctors who rule him “sick in the head” despite feeling immense loss from his mother.

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Complications (2023) [Slamdance 2024]

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The Slamdance Film Festival runs Digitally and In-Person from January 19th to January 28th.

Director Ivan Aase’s “Complications” is a movie that’s begging to be turned in to a feature. I’d love to see more movies about the lives of sex workers and director Aase takes down this uneasy avenue in to an interesting tale about loneliness and companionship. Anna Laagegard is great as dominatrix Lotte, a young gorgeous woman who dominates middle aged Arne every week over a web camera.

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I.S.S. (2024)

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Exclusively in theaters January 19th.

It’s the classic tale of humanity. When you dig deep and throw away all semblance of civility, we’re all savages that will do anything to survive. “I.S.S.” is a mean but thought provoking science fiction thriller that teeters on the edge of horror quite often. It’s that classic post apocalyptic tale about man kind resorting to desperate measures to stay alive; by the end of Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film, the whole setting of science and technology are merely props meant to spread a cloak of the nastiness that humans are capable of. “I.S.S.” is one in a trend of post apocalyptic movies that don’t really fetishize the idea of the end of the world, but depict it as a waking nightmare.

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How Deep is the Ocean (2023)

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Now Streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Tubi TV.

Director Andrew Walsh’s microbudget indie film thrives on being a mumblecore character journey that is unabashedly aimless with its narrative. It’s not so much a linear narrative so much as it is a series of encounters a small journey our character Eleanor experiences. She’s in search of stability and has a hard time adjusting in a city where she comes across nothing but oddballs and unusual characters. Eleanor is an admitted victim of her own being as she spends so much time self sabotaging her own life, and can never figure it out.

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A Best Man (2022)

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Dylan Tuccillo’s short drama is not what I expected it to be and that might be its best weapon. It’s a movie about marriage, and regret, and ultimately the lengths some of us will go through to correct what we think is the right course. Director Tuccillo really is great at catching the audience off guard, setting down on a normal hectic marriage one day where a trio of friends is bouncing back and forth with Josh, the best man trying to smooth things over between the bride and groom.

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