The Penguin

I saw Infinity Pool  with my fiancée for Valentine's Day, and we spent the rest of the car ride home discussing it. It's certainly a thinker. I love movies that operate like intricate layered puzzles that can be picked apart for their themes - movies like Jordan Peele's  Nope come to mind. While Peele likes to wear his themes on his sleeve (not necessarily a bad thing), Brandon Cronenburg is subtler, more willing to obfuscate and play games with his audience. I really wanted to take some time and analyze this film.     I haven't seen any of Brandon Cronenburg's previous films, so I'm a bit fresh in terms of his recurring motifs; obviously I'm quite familiar with the work of his body horror-obsessed father. Brandon takes a much more cerebral tack that's still quite terrifying in its implications. **Spoiler Alert!** for the entire film - so if you haven't seen it, go out and see it! I. Synopsis Writer James Foster and his wife Em are vacationing at a ...

Glass Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, and Samuel L. Jackson Directed by M. Night Shyamalan Universal Pictures I can tell James McAvoy's "Horde" - a collection of 34 distinct personalities serving the animal-like "Beast" - is supposed to be the most interesting character in this movie. But in terms of split personalities, the award for "All Over The Place" really goes to the movie itself. I'll spare you the buildup and just get my big pun out of the way first: Glass  is splintered. And some of those pieces are little more than fiberglass. The plot revolves around three characters from Mr. Shyamalan's previous outings: The Overseer (Bruce Willis) and Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) from Unbreakable,  and Horde (James McAvoy) from Split. After a big dustup between Horde and Overseer, they are captured by a psychologist ( American Horror Story's  Sarah Paulsen) who keeps them locked in a psychiatric ward while she attempts to cure t...

Punch-Drunk Love  (2002) Directed and Written by Paul Thomas Anderson Starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson Punch-Drunk Love is a surrealist rom-com. Then again, it's an underdog story. Then again, it's a bit of a drama/thriller...let's cut to the synopsis, shall we...? Adam Sandler stars as Barry Egan, a novelty-business owner with deep social issues, part of which stem from dealing with seven overbearing sisters who run his life an berate him constantly. He meets the lovely Lena (Watson), and appears to have the perfect scam going with Healthy Choice pudding, but runs afoul of a phone-sex extortion ring. Barry's hard road to love is fraught with exasperating humans and frightening circumstances, and he must find the courage to finally be himself and flail through the obstacles in his path in order to win Lena's heart. Paul Thomas Anderson takes all the elements of a fairly standard boy-meets-girl story and plays 52-card pickup with them. From ...

The movie: Kill Your Darlings (2013) Directed by: John Krokidas Starring: Daniel Radcliffe (Allen Ginsberg); Dane DeHaan (Lucien Carr); Michael C. Hall (David Kammerer); Jack Huston (Jack Kerouac); Ben Foster (William Burroughs); David Cross (Lou Ginsberg). Kill Your Darlings follows a young Allen Ginsberg as he enters Columbia University and takes the first tentative steps in his poetry career. There he meets the irrepressible Lucien Carr, who introduces him to William Burroughs, and later Jack Kerouac. The four form a literary circle dedicated to "The New Vision" which focuses on, in Burrough's words, the "derangement of the senses." The gay Ginsberg immediately falls in love with the attractive and volatile Carr; but Carr already has an admirer, the intense, sinister professor-cum-janitor David Kammerer. Kammerer has pursued Carr from school to school, and appears to be merely a predator out to control Carr's life. But as Ginsberg becomes more e...