Andy Andersen

Boy, we’re in the thick of it now, aren’t we, folks? Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the game of sex, drugs, and crime in the city, you find the board beneath your feet is like six levels of 3-D chess deeper than before, and bravado is no substitute for true prowess. Main players on all sides are lost in the weeds right now, and as things stand, it’s tough to see who’s got enough of either to come out on top.

“The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” This is more or less the central thesis of BLOODY ORANGES, the new French end-times black comedy/satirical thriller from director Jean-Christophe Meurisse. It’s a quote from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, popping up on the screen at the halfway mark when things go from absurd to absurdly violent in a kaleidoscopic slow-burn trip through the banal collapse of western civilization in the foul year of our lord 2020.

Damn, welcome to episodes four and five of Tokyo Vice, where everything heats up. We last saw Jake Adelstein in the custody of the yakuza in the final moments of “Read the Air,” seemingly ready to break the next barrier and get closer to what’s really happening. We also left Sato at his own crossroads — in deep shit with Hitoshi Ishida (Shun Sugata), head of the Chihara-kai crime family, for beating the hell out of a fellow yakuza — offering up a hot tip that will hopefully prove his loyalty.

Thirty seconds into Tokyo Vice — Michael Mann’s dank-ass return to the collective, vice-coated neon-TV dreamscape — and dudes are strappin’ on their bullet … uh, knife-proof vests under dark suits and lacquered hair, to which I say: Hell yeah. The pair of lonely dudes in question are expat reporter Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) and Tokyo PD detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe), and together, they’re taking on the yakuza.

“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell,” wrote William S. Burroughs. “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Few images feel more malignant today than Hollywood’s potent, illusory image of the American policeman.

Jerry Garcia's favorite movie was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy/horror mashup that he says gave him "a general fascination with the bizarre" that would fuel his music career. "There are things in this world that are really weird. I don't think I knew that before I saw that movie, that there are things that are really weird, and there are people who are concerned with them," Garcia said in "The Movie That Changed My Life" in 1995. "That became important to me, and I guess I thought to myself, on some level, I think I want to be concerned with things that are weird. […] It seems like fun."

Hey hey, it’s October 2021 which means it’s Spooky Season and fuckin’ Bond season. Daniel Craig’s final 007 outing is finally out after a year and a half of COVID delays, and since this’ll probably be the last time I have a calendared excuse to write about James Bond for a while I figured I’d indulge in a not-so-humble, non-definitive ranking of every Bond movie.

Hey hey, goin’ a bit off the usual script this week. Haven’t done a straight review of a new release on here before (I think the closest we ever got was our rapid-fire convo about Mank) but I saw the new Candyman over the weekend and for various reasons — chief among them my nagging sense of conflict with the calcifying critical consensus — I feel compelled to get my full two-cents out there in the ether.

Jesus, we’re halfway through 2021 already. Didn’t want to let any more time pass without givin’ y’all my favorite movies of the year so far now that we’re on the downslope.

It's summer y'all, which means it's time to cozy up with some sungrown bud and indulge in the great tradition of summer movie watching. Whether you're hitting the vape and venturing into a cool, dark theater to escape the heat, catching a cult classic at a retro summer evening drive-in, or just throwing a classic summer comedy on your TV at home while nursing an indica from your favorite bong, there's no summer-movie experience you can't successfully augment with a little cannabis.

The question of ‘what to watch’ can become an overwhelming proposition fast, especially if you’re stoned, couch-locked, and faced with an ever-multiplying mess of major streamers on your TV. In the age of infinite content options, curation is key. That’s why we’re giving you a roundup of top-shelf streaming options to hit up with your next evening joint, edible, or casual vape.

If you've spent any amount of time smoking weed and watching movies, you already know the two activities make an ideal pair. You might say film is the most psychotropic art form, engaging multiple senses and modes of thinking and feeling at once for an experience that, at its best, you can intuit sensorily as well as emotionally. The late filmmaker and legendary stoner Robert Altman once described the ultimate cinematic experience as such on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972.

1981: it’s the witching hour in America. A recession is in full bloom and Ronald Reagan’s promise to “make America great again” remains, for good or ill, unfulfilled. Strung out between the aching, post-’60s come-down nihilism of the late ’70s and the neoconservative free-market mass-consumption orgy of the Reagan era, the masses occupy a strange, pre-apocalyptic no-man’s-land moment in American culture, and so do the movies.

Most of Nolan’s movies I like more than I dislike, but I also get turned off by the fussiness and preciousness with which Nolan approaches his concepts and how his films often feel like looking at an MC Escher drawing with someone behind you demanding you see something more profound than what’s actually there. Fortunately, I mostly found Tenet to be a stylish thrill ride that wasn’t begging me to revere it more than it deserved or even care about understanding it that deeply. And I think what makes that possible is that it’s a loving, Byzantine monument to James Bond movies first, and a Chris Nolan joint second.

It’s as a good a month as any to start doing this thing ‘cause I really went all the fuck over the place with what I watched. A lot of people do “Noirvember” which I’ve never really attempted ‘cause after October I’m always in a horror hangover and feel like I need to decompress by not putting a lot of thought into what I’m watching and just sorta vibe around.

The name may or may not ring a bell, but you know the work of Ralph Bakshi even if you don’t know you know it. You’ve likely come across a Fritz the Cat poster at your local comics or record store, caught snippets of the animated Lord of the Rings on Cartoon Network as a kid, or seen memes and stills of a young, pre-fame Brad Pitt with an animated buxom blonde Jessica Rabbit-type in Cool World.

It’s hard to remember a time when Disney wasn’t the behemoth media/entertainment empire it is now. But in 1981, the company was a whole different, non-Earth crushing animal. It was on the verge of being bought off and broken up, in fact. And in this transitional period, a small band of folks at Disney Records put together a sci-fi stadium rock band called Halyx. Live from the Space Stage: A Halyx Story is a new documentary that uncovers this fascinating piece of forgotten pop history...

If this were a normal, non-pandemic summer, UNHINGED would’ve been exactly the type of B-movie I’d relish seeing at a theater on a hot afternoon – popcorn, maybe a hot dog and a soda in hand, in the company of strangers as ever-so-momentarily carefree as I. So it feels super weird to have watched this strange and scruffy Russell Crowe B-thriller from home on a screener, days before it’s supposed to be the movie that “reopens theaters” in the U.S. All this is to say, be careful out there

You ever get obsessed with a good movie year? Lately I’ve been really diggin’ 1981. I’m not sure if it’s generally thought of as iconic or important a movie year as, say, 1980 (The Shining, The Empire Strikes Back, Raging Bull — all of which are getting the big 40th anniversary treatment this year), but it should be. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Escape from New York, Scanners, Heavy Metal, The Evil Dead, Excalibur, Blow Out, The Road Warrior, An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, Halloween II

I’m always game for a good documentary about a movie. You Don’t Nomi, the new doc about Paul Verhoeven’s notorious NC-17 “trashterpiece” Showgirls, ranks among the best of them. Taking a similar approach as Room 237 did with the cottage industry of conspiracy theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, You Don’t Nomi looks at Showgirls from every possible angle...