The Cell (2000) starring J.Lo is a science fiction horror movie about entering a serial killer’s mind to locate a victim who hasn’t yet died in his basement. It’s very sexual, very gory. It looks like the music video for Closer by Nine Inch Nails and somehow feels a bit like Silent Hill, though its closest genetic relative is surely Silence of the Lambs (1991).

I can’t explain why this is one of my favorite cozy movies BUT IT IS. There is something truly SO COZY and reassuring about the flimsy serial killer genre. Where they are monsters, not people. Where there is some mystery to unpack and not merely senseless violence. Where law enforcement CARE and are hellbent on solving problems.

As usual, mental illness is thrown under the bus for our serial killer here. He’s got a kind of fictitious viral schizophrenia called “Whelan’s Infraction,” which is magically brought about by trauma involving water. In this case, our killer was “activated” by a violent baptism.

Law enforcement catches him early in the movie, but Whelan’s Infraction has rendered him sorta-semi-braindead and he has a living victim with ~40 hours left.

Luckily my wife J.Lo has been working as an unusual kind of therapist: she goes into the mind of a sick billionaire’s son using a fictitious machine. This “neurological connectic transfer system” can “map the mind and send the signal to another party.”

This is in an era (have we even left that era?) where people are obsessed with this idea that there are broken little children inside serial abusers, giving them mystique and charm. Its story depends on the extremely common mistaken assumption that a childhood history of abuse explains adult abusers. “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft is an interesting rebuttal to that myth (though I recommend reading it with caution, as it’s very triggering).

I don’t mind the pseudoscience, including the bad psychology. Everything about The Cell feels unreal, inside and outside the shared dreamscapes, in a manner that is extremely cohesive. After all, The Cell is firmly in the fantasy universe where cops Actually Do Stuff and serial killers are brilliant; why bother with real science?

As I get older, the more I see The Cell as a fetish fantasy. It’s always obviously had major elements of fetishism. As I’ve grown, I’ve seen how many people really have explicitly serial killer, horror, and murder-related fantasies as part of their sex life, and i’m like, ohhhhhh. That’s what I’m watching. Perhaps my associations of the security in a well-controlled BDSM environment are also why I find it so cozy!

The performances are really good too.

Vince Vaughn is the lead detective in the movie. Yes, THAT Vince Vaughn. His role is not meant to be remotely comic, but I still laugh at everything he says. They realize the killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) has an albino dog. And Vince Vaughn says all grittily, “He’d love a dog like that.” SURE VINCE. His performance doesn’t detract from the film; I would have no notes if I weren’t familiar with him from other media.

The ability for J.Lo to commit to a movie where she was surely not seeing things we’re seeing, in sequential order, cannot be overstated. Director Tarsem Singh does a LOT of practical effects, but even so, there’s a lot here demanding an actor’s very best imagination. She’s extremely believable. (Fun fact: according to IMDB, Sandra Bullock was originally meant to play this role. I can imagine it, but I also think it would have been a weird fit for her career.)

The physicality of Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance is so amazing. He manages to feel both like a vulnerable boy at times, and like a looming monster at others. He is beautiful and ugly.

Last time I watched The Cell, I was coming off a Hannibal/Lambs binge, and I enjoyed it but the story felt more lacking. Coming at it from watching more horror movies, it felt pitch-perfect. This is a great example of a movie that makes more emotional sense than rational sense, much like The Fountain (2006).

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On a note about the format I watched: The Cell doesn’t seem popular enough to have a remaster, so my version has those dots up in the corner indicating reel changes. There’s a lot of other visual grit too! The Cell is very consciously cut so that there are dramatic tonal/visual shifts whenever reels change! Many movies used to be edited with TV commercial breaks in mind as well, and it’s striking how anachronistic it feels a quarter of a century later.

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

(This review was adapted from my live watch thread on Bluesky.)

Argylle is a movie about a red-haired genre fiction author with a cat and a big ol’ booty getting entangled with the spies she writes about. Think Romancing the Stone meets Kingsman: The Secret Service, which is the easiest and most accurate comparison because both Kingsman and Argylle are Matthew Vaughn movies.

I can’t tell you that Argylle is a good movie because I don’t think it is, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was convinced from the trailer that Argylle was made for me. And it was. I loved Kingsman 1&2, and I too am a dump trucked sometimes-redheaded author of genre fiction who loves cats.

But Argylle was “for me” in ways I didn’t expect, too. By the time the over-wrought ending comes around with peak terribad CGI and an “okay, is it over now?” aroma, Matthew Vaughn is dangling genderfuckery and gay subtext over my head like a cat toy. I get it Matthew Vaughn! We’re both disaster bisexuals who want to be topped by Bryce Dallas Howard! gawd.

This is another outing for Samuel L. Jackson, who appears to be spending his recent career years doing Only Movies Where He Can Fuck Off and Enjoy Himself. He has a spectacularly shallow role in the plot, along with other Vaughn-bff Sofia Boutella, playing her minor part in the disaster bisexuality of it all. And there are cameos from Ariana DeBose playing a lesbian in CGI locations.

Catherine O’Hara plays Moira from Schitt’s Creek, Bryan Cranston plays a real ~daddy~, and nobody here was working all that hard but they’re kinda too amazing to suck anyway.

I’m convinced there is a clause in Sam Rockwell’s contract that allows him to *always* do his fancy footwork dancing. He radiates Husband Who Doesn’t Wear the Pants vibes, so I like him a lot, except for the part where his character doesn’t like cats. That’s not negotiable.

But mostly I’m here for Bryce Dallas Howard, my wife, boobular and asstastic, serving up size-12 action movie doe eyes. The thirst is so, so strong. She looks good in every look. I want her to destroy me.

I guess Henry Cavill is there too.

You’ll guess the twist in the first twenty minutes if you don’t already know it, and the plot really labors over spy twist after spy twist, and somehow I enjoy the whole thing. Every twist *feels* pointless and shallow, but they’re also clearly tropes that gives Matthew Vaughn a raging stiff Vaughner, and it works on me too.

You know how I talk about some movies being intended to push buttons exclusively? Like when directors just make something because the idea is so hot to them, they don’t care if it actually works on any other level? Well, Argylle (and I suppose Kingsman) is this for Matthew Vaughn, and it’s fully this for me. It kickpunches every last spy fetish button I have and slips in some genderfuck to make sure I’m left drooling for fanfic. (There’s barely any fanfic! Guess I’m gonna be writing a spy romance.)

I highly recommend this movie to people like me, who don’t mind that the whole thing looks like one of those old CD-ROM games where people were filmed in front of green screens and plastered over 90s pixel art, who are very gay, who like spy movies. So I guess basically I recommend this for people who liked Tenet too.

(image credit: Apple and Universal Pictures)

“Lisa Frankenstein” is a revenge fantasy for depressed girls who read Jane Eyre at graveyards in the 1980s.

Diablo Cody says the name is a “coincidence” because she was naming the character after Lisa from Weird Science, and she didn’t mean to invoke “Lisa Frank,” a brand which might be litigious if the writer said otherwise. The movie definitely has a lot more to do with Weird Science than Lisa Frank. It’s about a magically resurrected person who exists to fulfill the teenager’s romantic and sexual fantasies. Thank you, magical lightning!

I was sold on the concept from the get-go. The lively teaser trailer had me pumped, and the movie certainly fulfills the expectations of the trailer. But there’s not a lot more than that. If you search up the version of the trailer that is ~4 minutes long, that is almost exactly the movie, except Lisa Frankenstein has been extended to ~90 minutes.

I’m not saying this as a complaint. The trailer should tell you whether or not you’ll like the movie. This is all button-pushes without much substance: amazing goth aesthetic, melodramatic performances from talented actors, and an Edward Scissorhands aesthetic homage.

If you want early Tim Burton done with feminine sensibilities, then Zelda Williams has you covered.

If you want Jughead Jones doing a mostly dialogue-free Demon Barber of Fleet Street, you’re in the right place.

If you’d like a whole lot of new screenshots for your angsty colorful Tumblr mood board, then there may have never been a better movie for you.

My question for moviegoers broadly is, do you love the idea of a tanning bed resurrecting Frankenstein’s Boyfriend so much that you’ll get something out of the movie version more than the trailer?

I did, but it’s less because the movie bounced on my buttons and more because debut director Zelda Williams did an amazing job. I was so obsessed with everything visual that I literally could not resist drawing while I worked on it. What a strong style. I look forward to more from this director, and I hope she drags her cinematographer along.

The story, eh. Diablo Cody’s writing often feels hollow to me. Concept is made king because Cody doesn’t create fully realized characters that feel human. There is something terribly flat and mean-girl about the way that Cody draws characters in every movie I’ve seen outside Juno, and sometimes I really wonder how Juno managed to be so human given the givens.

The story *mostly* works if you see it as being written by someone with a grudge toward certain archetypes which may or may not actually exist. It’s all emotional catharsis without needing to grow up. Our heroine can remain forever in a stunted state of teenage love.

Fabulous performances cover a lot of shaky ground. Kathryn Newton is divine as a very old high schooler (she looks and feels 27, even slouching her way between lockers, but this is normal for the Hollywood High School Cinematic Universe). Liza Soberano is precious. Carla Gugino puts a lot of work into realizing her villainous stepmother. Jughead Jones joneses Jugheadily.

Show up for the concept, stay for the aesthetic, and just kinda step over the writing. Lisa Frankenstein is fabulous fun.

“Priscilla” is a movie following the courtship and marriage of its titular character to Elvis Presley, beginning as a hazy teenage dream of romance with a pop star and ending with disillusionment and divorce.

This is my first Sophia Coppola movie, but most everything I have to say about “Priscilla” seems to be normal for her films. As a claustrophobic, shallow confectionary, “Priscilla” is as much aesthetic as plot. Interiority is inferred rather than explicit. We are tightly limited to Priscilla’s perspective, and as the one who is left behind at Graceland while Elvis lives his life, there is little opportunity to guess at greater context unless you know what’s going on.

I’m not an Elvis fan. I’m too young to have any opinion about his legacy outside of the weird fact he’s a major element of Lilo & Stitch. I couldn’t even get through the first few minutes of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” So I’m coming at this with virtually nothing.

I expect that people with more cultural context will find more meaning in the film. As a standalone, Priscilla really doesn’t have a lot going on outside of its aesthetic.

The beginning of the movie immerses us with 14-year-old Priscilla as she becomes immersed in a world-famous man with enormous influence who is a decade her senior. We can make guesses about why a famous pop star would want her specifically (versus any other fawning teenage girl), but there is so little context on Priscilla as a person that I initially assumed it was a weird sex thing.

Except Elvis declines to have sex with Priscilla until she is older; it appears that he mostly wants a cute little “pure” doll who will do whatever he wants, and that tarnishing her would make him lose interest. They have a playful sexual relationship for a period of time but he is distracted by older, more experienced women. In a typical virgin/whore dichotomy, Elvis again loses sexual interest in Priscilla once she bears their child.

Ultimately it feels that Elvis mostly wants a staff member who will put up with his shit while fulfilling his idealized role of girlfriend; reaching the point where he “must” marry and procreate isn’t really what he wanted, but life is moving on, and Priscilla is growing up.

Once Coppola has made her point about Elvis’s initially predatory relationship to Priscilla, Coppola seems to lose interest in the subject matter, too. As Priscilla becomes more of an individual with agency, the movie speeds along at a faster clip, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that Coppola doesn’t care all that much about Priscilla once she’s no longer a more easily manipulated teenager.

As such, this feels like a really aesthetic way of saying “your hero was a shitty human,” without putting all that much work into the main character whose long-lashed eyes we are always looking through. While searching around for more context on the movie, feeling like I was missing important details to make it more meaningful, I was struck by how powerful Priscilla-the-human seemed to be — how willful and intentional she must have been in order to live the life she has lead. We get glimpses of this from Cailee Spaeny’s performance, but Coppola doesn’t want to hang out with a Priscilla who is breaking free of her cage.

The fact so many people are in denial about Elvis’s abusive, controlling behaviors toward Priscilla makes me *want* to five-star this in a bite-my-thumb-at-you type maneuver. People are offended by the bare facts involved because facts make Elvis look bad. As the “Priscilla” movie is based on her autobiography “Elvis & Me,” it’s wholly fair for her to be frank about the conditions of a relationship where she was groomed and dehumanized, even when she also seems to have sympathy for the man himself.

This movie gave me the clear impression of a cosseted man whose flaws were never challenged or given the attention needed to heal; he just turned toward addiction and sycophants, like many people with power do.

I don’t even mean Elvis levels of power. This is far from the only imbalanced relationship in the world, and it’s pretty normal for people who have done well at something to find themselves trapped in the amber of their own success, paralyzed by enablers. What I’m saying is that it’s completely human to demand exactly what you want and become ruined when you get it. It’s extremely easy to believe this portrayal when it’s extremely common for women to get smacked around by a man who doesn’t know any coping mechanism outside the veneer of control.

There’s no reason to think Elvis was worse than this, either. Priscilla and Elvis apparently remained good friends until the end of his life, and Elvis seemed to need genuine friends. He’s an icon of stunted man-child nonsense that generations of women have indulged.

I wish that Sophia Coppola had cared more about Priscilla the human outside the time of her life where she was most confined. I wanted to jump through the screen and pummel the adults allowing Priscilla to be obviously groomed for the first half of the movie, but I kinda wanted to ask Coppola “what the fuck?” at her evident disinterest in the complicated adult who developed from those circumstances.

It’s a good movie, though – based on my standards of good movie, where a creator sets out to tell a particular story, and I believe Coppola accomplished her intent. It’s skillful and beautiful and kinda boring. After a quick read about Coppola’s other movies, and what has become defined as her style, I almost wonder if Coppola herself isn’t trapped by her successes too, incapable of moving beyond one type of heroine in one type of setting. Most creators have a particular story they want to tell. This one could have used bolstering from someone with more of an interest in the entirety of the woman.

(image credit: A24)

In Kingsman 1, a hot young chav gets Eliza Doolittle’d by the sexy older daddy figure who grooms him to become Twink James Bond.

There’s other movie going on here, but that’s the part I care about.

From what I can discern, Matthew Vaughn cares about the part where he says, “What if xyz unexpected person got to be James Bond?” His idea for Kingsman is “lower class young guy becomes gentleman spy,” in much the way his idea for Argylle is “hot redhead author with a dump truck and a cat is a spy.” (I haven’t seen Argylle yet but the movie is just a Matthew Vaughn take on Romancing the Stone.)

Of all Vaughn’s movies I’ve seen, Kingsman is most effective. It’s a genuinely good action-spy movie that also satirizes the genre. A lot of the cartoonish silliness that puts people off Kingsman 2 and (from what I hear) Argylle is deployed under tight control for this first outing. It’s the perfect balance of exciting stakes and laugh-out-loud goofiness. Vaughn wanted to make a Bond movie, and he was doing it as sincerely as he is capable.

To enjoy Kingsman, you’ve got to have a high tolerance for violence, however cartoony; there is one church scene that is somewhat less cartoonish and much bloodier. Killing off the ruling class is done in a fashion that is absolutely meant to draw a laugh. They also expect you to laugh at people pointing guns at cute dogs at least once. (All dogs in this movie are safe; the only dead dog is one that died at 11-years-old of natural causes and is taxidermied). Mostly Kingsman leans on irreverent shock-humor intended to please teenage boys, Matthew Vaughn, and other people with a teenage boy’s sense of humor (me).

It’s sort of funny-huh if not funny-ha-ha seeing a movie with 2014 liberal sentiments (the church is filled with bigots whose killings are justified by their use of slurs before the shoe drops) that also makes its villain what was, at the time, regarded as a liberal-leaning figure (a tech billionaire who wants to save the world).

On that note, Samuel L. Jackson plays a cooler version of Flan Musk: a tech billionaire who wants to save the world, but he wants to be the only one who can save it, and he wants full control. There’s a bunch of sci-fi magic handwavium about SIM cards and slightly less (?) handwavium about brain chips akin to Neuralink + exploding heads. Considering Star Trek was still name-dropping Musk as some positive historic figure paving the way toward the Federation at the time, it’s almost…prescient? Or just maybe had its head up its butt less than Paramount.

Taron Egerton is adorably convincing as Twink Bond simping for Colin Firth, who is the hottest, gayest mass-murdering gentleman spy on the planet. I think Colin Firth enjoyed playing a gay daddy so much in Mamma Mia! that he was like, “I’m gonna do this four times as hard in the spy thing.” I’ve seen him in enough movies to know the difference between Gay Firth and Straight Firth. I mean, go look at Bridget Jones. Way less of a hinged wrist in that one.

I wouldn’t actually give this movie five stars nowadays if not for the fact it bounces on my fetish buttons. I don’t mind the objectification of the Swedish princess so much; I’m enough of a dirtbag to recognize someone else’s fetish and there are multiple non-stereotyped woman characters elsewhere. I just don’t get much a laugh out of generalizing about anyone needing to die. Funny coming from someone who is uniformly opposed to the very existence of a ruling class, I know; obviously I disagree with the church bigots on everything too. I just don’t care for stylization that involves dehumanizing any group of people. The world is actually too terrible for that. Leftist idealogues are just as dangerous as right wing ones and if we pretend *anyone* deserves to die en masse (like working class henchmen) then we’re on a slippery slope. Plus, Kingsman 3 totally undermines any radical message Kingsman 1 may have allowed in its interpretations.

But then again, we have Daddy Firth taking home his twink to teach him how to be a real man, and my Clitoris Activation Process also disabled the Rational Thinky Brain part of me, and all I can say is “that’s my fetish.gif” so of course it’s five stars. Taron Egerton spends a lot of time avenging his hot daddyfigure, like. So hot. Silly, homoerotic, unserious, great action scenes, smart satirization of a genre – this is peak Vaughn, and I have fun rewatching it every time.

Throw this one on the pile of “best examples of a franchise that aren’t part of the franchise” movies with Galaxy Quest and Willy’s Wonderland.

(image credit: 20th Century Studios)