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I Would Like to See It: January 2021

Hey gang! So, next week I kick off my new column, I Would Like to See It, where every week I watch a new-to-me movie and write about it on here. 

For those who would like to watch along, January's movies are as follows!

J...

I Would Have Followed You: Masculine Love and Devotion in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings

In December of 2003, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens’ Return of the King—the third and final film in their trilogy adapting J. R. R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy epic Lord of the Rings—premiered to a gigantic ...

You Love to See It: The Apartment

In the opening voiceover to Billy Wilder’s 1960 Christmas movie The Apartment, C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) explains that shifts in his insurance company’s vast NYC headquarters are staggered so that its more than thirty thousand worker...

You Love to See It: First Blood

There have been a hundred parodies of Sylvester Stallone’s mush-mouthed delivery of John Rambo’s final monologue in First Blood. The actor’s huge, haunted eyes and phlegmy sobbing are certainly memorable enough to warrant riffing, b...

In the Flesh: Rhymes for Young Ghouls

It’s hard to believe Rhymes for Young Ghouls is director Jeff Barnaby’s first feature-length movie. It has its flaws — jumpy pacing, a few awkward cuts, an animated sequence that detracts from the grisly story it accompanies — but...

You Love to See It: The Terror

In a few short minutes and with no more than a pinch of fog-assisted CGI, The Terror’s eighth episode stages an action sequence more exciting, immediate, and emotionally intense than anything Hollywood produced in the 2010s. So...

You Love to See It: Black Christmas

John Carpenter’s Halloween typically receives the nod as the first proper slasher, but Black Christmas — Bob Clark  and A. Roy Moore’s spare, mean-spirited tale of a sorority house falling prey to a disturbed killer �...

Bulbous Hymenopus: Wishes of the Shimmering Chunk

PROMPTS

A pretty Martian girl with a big dumptruck ass

- trying to score weed before lockdown hits

Datura infused astral journey gone HORRIBLY wrong

a snake and a mongoose who have a homoerotic rivalry like from a 1980's mo...

You Love to See It: Rogue One

Juggling overlapping and technically oriented action scenes at the climax of a movie is no mean feat, but Tony Gilroy manages to take a final battle revolving around landline access, a broadcast tower, and stellar gate mechanics and spin all that ...

We Are Gone: Emptiness and the Unknown in The Terror

In the first episode of David Kajganich’s The Terror, the British Discovery Service’s Franklin expedition attempts to dynamite its way through the Arctic ice pack and into the Pacific. For minutes on end the screen is alive with a fre...

You Love to See It: Noroi

Noroi: The Curse, Kōji Shiraishi’s 2005 pseudo-documentary, is one of only a small handful of films to use its chosen genre to the fullest extent. Along with The Blair Witch Project, it wields the cutting edge of plausible ver...

You Love to See It: 13 Assassins

As the stoic swordmaster Hirayama in Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, Tsuyoshi Ihara moves like a force of nature, his sinewy arms swinging his sword with irresistible strength. Even the Foley work reflects his terrible power, emphasizing ...

In the Flesh: First Love

First Love is like if Snatch had a tender little love story in the middle of its high-speed blender of colliding criminal mishaps. It also has the advantage of being written and directed by longtime jack of all trades Takashi Mii...

You Love to See It: Flesh and Bone

Moira Walley-Beckett’s Flesh and Bone isn’t what I’d call a good TV show. The pacing is jumbled, the plot both absurdly grimy and off-puttingly precious, and the characters often repetitive. Still, scattered throughout its bog-stand...

Jacob's Children, Part 2: Nymphs

NYMPHS

Krine, alone among the hidden people, was born with her wings formed. In her first memory she tastes the fear of the onlooking swarm. She hears the voices saying she will die, that her first moult will claim her, snagging on her freak...

You Love to See It: The Loved Ones

The Loved Ones, an out-of-nowhere Australian abduction flick from the otherwise deeply mediocre Sean Byrne, is plenty grisly. Power drills, razor blades, syringes full of bleach and boiling water — it has all the trappings of ultraviole...

You Love to See It: The Last Unicorn

As a child I used to lie in bed at night and beg God to change my body, to remake me into anything but what I was. As I grew older and abandoned God, those pleas took on a formless, aching desperation which puberty sharpened to a killing point. As...

In the Flesh: Possessor

Just before psychic assassin Tasya Vos seizes control over the body of Colin Tate, one of the technicians operating the machinery which connects her to Tate’s mind tells her it might be “a little bumpy” going in. The images accompanying her ...

You Love to See It: In the Realm of the Senses

There comes a point somewhere toward the middle of In the Realm of the Senses, Nagisa Ōshima’s fictionalization of the real-life story of lovers Sada Abe and Kichizo Ishida, when the act of fucking becomes the most boring, soul-sucking...

You Love to See It: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

"Papa, if your happiness depends on wearing the cap of a court official, then I will go to his majesty as you wish, and after you have put on that cap as part of the court, I will kill myself." Chloë Grace Moretz’s quietly resigned delivery of ...

You Love to See It: Caligula

Actor Guido Mannari has a single fleeting scene in which to transform the infamous ‘Wall of Death’, the most outrageous image in a film famous for little else, from banally demented fantasy to tragic backdrop. It’s a tall order. Caligula...