***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+*starring Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Marianne Jean-Baptistewritten by Mark Protosevichdirected by Tarsem Singh by Walter Chaw It’s a collision of travel-worn ideas, this movie–a tired serial-killer thriller married to Dreamscape–and the wear shows whenever someone mouths their ration of exposition like a toothless shut-in gumming their daily soup-soaked toast. Yet Tarsem’s The Cell is also a collection of astonishments, vision...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
***/****starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Emma Stonewritten and directed by Ari Aster by Walter Chaw The problem I have with Ari Aster movies is that Ari Aster is contemptuous of his characters. He gives them anxieties he then maximalizes into catastrophes so extreme they’re funny. (How else does a cake allergy turn into a telephone-pole beheading?) And once he creates an unbearable situation, he scoffs. It’s tempting to draw a corollary between his work and that of pos...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
**½/****starring Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsellwritten by Thomas Martindirected by Lorcan Finnegan by Walter Chaw A time or two during Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer, I wondered if it wasn’t at least a spiritual cousin to Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, seeing as how both films offer an overarching metaphor of going home while examining an aimless, tortured masculinity on the existential skids. Indeed, there’s a literary quality to The Surfer that smells like the ...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
ZERO STARS/****starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tom Hiddleston, Annalise Basso, Mark Hamillwritten by Mike Flanagan, based on the short story by Stephen Kingdirected by Mike Flanagan by Walter Chaw I admit it: I have an allergy to sentimental treacle. I get that this shit is like mother’s milk to some–that fading stars and, indeed, entire cable channels have tied their strings to the “shameless tearjerker” to great if niche fame and fortune; it’s a “me” problem, and I accept that. I r...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
the mysterious Stephan Poag did a comic about them!| False Machine
– a multi-part video series by Laura Knight-Jadczyk Differential Diagnosis in Spirit Release, Part 1 In this fascinating introductory talk Laura looks at the history of the modern spiritual movement and the pitfalls and traps awaiting any would-be “channeler”. Laura also provides a look at the events that led to the beginnings of the “Cassiopaean […]| Cassiopaea
(My first piece ever at that grand old group blog The Mitrailleuse, November 2014. With an intellectual background like the one below, no wonder I wrote a novel titled Sanity…) The first refe…| Sanity in The Diamond Age
Reality Scene 33 The ReHumanist Manifesto. October, 1975. For Private Circulation Only. Page 34 The Mechanism Men have not always needed to know how a thing worked for them to use it to their ad…| Sanity in The Diamond Age