I keep a folder on my phone called "continuity error🤍." This brief compendium of movie discontinuity began with a scene that's been mystifying me since I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower at home for the first time, when I discovered one of the most perplexing "continuity errors" I've ever seen
And one night, every star in the universe aligned and there she was: Veronica Mars. Angry. Curious. Funny. Underestimated. I wanted to be her.
While having Mal and Inara act antagonistically towards each other helps keep viewers invested, it loses much of its merit when one realizes the writers didn’t properly utilize everything about their own characterizations.
For months, I painstakingly watched whole episodes of House, M.D. on TikTok, posted by an innocuous user who surely pirated it from somewhere.
One night after watching Dr. Phibes, I woke from a horrid nightmare, grisly death scenes flashing through my mind. Timidly—I knew I was too old for this—I knocked on my parent’s bedroom door and begged to sleep with them.
The black-and-white framing device of Asteroid City (2023) provides the narrative of the play with context, specifically context surrounding artists, especially queer artists, and their anxieties embedded within their art.
Call me Molly Shannon as Mary Catherine Gallagher. You may as well, Father. I'm that high school student with thick-framed glasses and an insatiable need for love and stardom.
Unlike myself, who was seemingly entrapped in a helpless limbo of awkward exchanges with my friend, Makoto reverses time to void Chiaki’s romantic confession to Makoto, as Chiaki’s confessions end up lost in a web of alternate timelines.
I settled on James Cagney, who was playing Lon Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces: The Lon Chaney Story. Lon Chaney was a famous actor and makeup artist on vaudeville and in silent films in the early 1900s. He was a CODA (long before the term CODA had been coined).
Vacations are exhausting. And what’s most exasperating about German writer/director Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009) is that there’s no escaping the claustrophobic world she’s created. The volatile coupling of Chris (Lars Eidinger) and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), holed up together at Chris’ parents’ Sardinian villa, defies any expectations for a customary on-screen getaway.
Phantom of the Paradise rewired me. Electrified me. This movie is, in the words of Jessica Harper’s character Phoenix, “special to me.”
When I was growing up, White Jesus was everywhere, but I never thought of him as a real person. He was like Zeus or John Henry or Captain Kirk—iconic figures operating outside my daily life, moving in worlds so far away they were impossible.
The season four finale plays out over two devastating storylines. In one thread, Jimmy (refuses to) grapple with the death of his brother Chuck. This exploration of grief leads Jimmy to officially adopt the moniker Saul Goodman. Until this point, we have only known the main protagonist as the charming fuckup Jimmy McGill.
Perhaps this is the anthem of Commando as a whole. Don’t think, don’t ask questions, just shut up, watch, and enjoy.
In fact, substance runs aplenty in Elvis cinema if you only know where to look. The films often challenge authority and prove downright fascinating in their portrayal of class dynamics, gender, and sexuality.
How shattering it is to be told by someone you consider a friend that they no longer have room for you in their life. I’m sure you see where this is going. Perhaps this isn’t even your first Banshees break-up piece that you’ve read.
The 1996 cult classic The Craft sets out to be a feminist movie, but like many movies of the late 90s, it loses steam about an hour into the movie, when its main characters, a group of teenage girls, turn on each other and it becomes a movie about what happens when teenagers, shoved together in the hothouse of high school, get too close to one another.
In an age of hollow CGI studio fare, endless superhero battles, and an increasing loss of artisanal talent in film, stop-motion animation provides a unique place for filmmakers and craftspeople to explore their craft and tell stories that feel earnest and unique.
The denizens of the United States have long been accused of being culturally deprived. We are starving, lacking an appreciation of the fine art of mime, Goethe and weinershnitzel. Nothing proves this point as well as the jeremiads delivered on the movie Teen Wolf, first released in 1985, starring a young Michael J. Fox. I offer this apology (in the formal sense), laying forth the visionary nature of the film.
I avoided Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” for years, knowing that it was about the individual experience of being in the military. I knew it was about the Vietnam War and the ensuing cruelty. I knew it was split into two parts, the first part depicting Marine Corps training and the second part in Vietnam itself. And I knew, having served two years in the Singapore Armed Forces, that those topics are rarely things I’m in the mood to watch.
