Features

La La Land: Hard to Love, Hard to Hate, and Impossible to Resist (Brooklyn Magazine)

"Chazelle clearly loves and respects musicals in much the same way that Seb loves the real jazz, and I sincerely believe that his own love is both authentic and, at times, overwhelming. But if all that an artist can say to his beloved art is 'I love you,' and 'You’re beautiful,' those sentiments are going to ring hollow after a while—even if they’re true. (It’s the problem of the cracked kettle drum again.) Love alone isn’t enough. And that, in the end, is the problem."

Move Over, Die Hard: Three Days of the Condor Is The Christmas Classic That No One's Watching (Slate)

"Three Days of the Condor is the Christmas spy thriller that no one ever asked for but that everyone needs to see."

Ghost Stories Suck (Brooklyn Magazine)

"When Halloween comes around, I want nothing more than to watch scary movies and read scary stories about the things that traditionally scare us, but this year I finally came to grips with the fact that the genre of ghost stories is bankrupt. In fact, the more I think about it, the less it seems to exist at all..."

Edgar Wright's List of His 1,0000 Favorite Films Is Canon Kryptonite (Brooklyn Magazine) 

"Over here stands The Canon: its power stemming from an ancient yet abiding force, its resolve as unmovable as stone. (It is backed by a force of thousands, for use in case of emergency, or of better things to do.) Meanwhile, over here, is Edgar Wright’s whole deal. It wears no costume—it couldn’t fit into one if it tried—and it has no cool nickname or origin story. It’s just lumbering and weird and kind of fun. And yet…."

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Little Bundles of Joy: BoJack Horseman and the Art of the Minor Epiphany (FLOOD)

"The baby seahorse is one example of how the show’s adherence to its rules can take it to places that are deep because they are organically true, not because they are trying to be philosophical. But it’s one example among many. It’s the same thing with the episode’s punch line. It’s funny because it’s sad, and it’s sad because it’s funny, and it’s all set up by the very serious question: what would BoJack Horseman look like literally underwater."

In Defense of Cloud Atlas (FLOOD)

 "In a world where so many adaptations exist solely to bring stories from the page to the screen, Cloud Atlas sought to do the book one better—and succeeded. By the film’s end, the cumulative effect of having watched so many humans and humanoids brutalized is, for lack of a better word, affecting. Film has little trouble achieving the effect that Mitchell so desired: of connecting time and people across incredible distances. They even have a word for it in the film industry. They call it a cut."

Profiles & Interviews

An Interview with Keith Maitland, director of Tower (FLOOD)

"I think one of the greatest lies in common currency right now is this idea about the “greatest generation.” I don’t think the greatest generation is all that great. They invented plastic, they invented preservatives, they destroyed the world, and I think this idea that it was better then, it just doesn’t hold up."

Kumail Nanjiani Can Hot Take It or Leave It (FLOOD)

"Nanjiani has no answers for the rise of Donald Trump (“he’s made it OK for people to say bigoted things in public forums without feeling shame…and that’s really frightening”) and no immediate plans to resurrect his video game podcast (“but I hope it does come back”), but he does have an explanation for why it is that on February 21 of every year, Twitter rises as one to congratulate him on another year of life—despite the fact that his real birthday is on [REDACTED]. This is not a joke. This is Kumail Nanjiani's Groundhog Day...."

Movie Reviews (2015-2016)

Resistance Is Futile, Again: On Sean Ellis's Anthropoid (FLOOD)

"Bravery means nothing if you can’t understand fear, and deaths mean nothing if you can’t appreciate the life that preceded it. This movie is about bravery but it is not brave, and it portrays death but it has no life to it. In the end, it’s just there."

Needs More Cowbell: On Lonely Island's Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (FLOOD)

"Popstar doesn’t grapple with these problems so much as it donkey rolls right past them. This is a narrative film in the same way that “Lazy Sunday” is a narrative music video: both tell a story, but neither story matters. (Suffice it to say that Popstar is a movie about a pop star who rises, falls, and rises again via an audience-friendly rebranding). "

The Taste of Death: On Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room (FLOOD)

"In this new vision of the horror genre, the characters may be better developed and the rules may be more organic, but people still die for no good reason. It’s actually even worse than that. “Because she went outside” may not be a good reason for someone to be hacked to death by a masked assailant, but at least it’s a reason. “Because nothing matters” is just depressing."

Highway to Heaven, Highway to Hell: On Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special (FLOOD)

"Nichols' eloquence, like Michael Shannon’s, lies primarily in silence, but that silence provokes much more in the way of suspense than it does in surprise. And the silence that this director give us in his final shot is enough, I think, to keep any damning verdicts at bay. When the danger is everywhere, we are always outflanked. Or, as Jeff Nichols might put it: 'Congratulations, it’s a boy.'”

Precision and Soul: On Kent Jones's Hitchcock/Truffaut (FLOOD)

"Los Angeles is not a bad place to go see a movie. Whether you’re looking for some cult vibes, some art-house shit, or the Cineplex experience, it’s out there, and it’s often surprisingly proximate. But the audience for movies about books about movies directed by critics and starring directors is not robust. And so, in order to see Kent Jones's new documentary, I had to make a pilgrimage. I had to go to the other side of town...."

Occult Classic: On Robert Eggers' The Witch (FLOOD)

"The witch is, in a way, superfluous to the family's downfall. She is gratuitous. But gratuitous destruction is the hallmark of horror, and here it is delivered with a true killer’s instinct. Two cuts, maybe three, and we are dead...."

OK, Great: On Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa (FLOOD)

"Anomalisa takes on some of the most legitimately awful bogeymen of the modern psyche—conformity, mediocrity, inauthenticity, and despair—and, by reducing them to their perhaps more proper scale, provides a thrilling account of ourselves, to ourselves…"

Going Homeless: On John Crowley's Brooklyn (FLOOD)

"Brooklyn is set in the past and makes very little effort to connect to contemporary issues and concerns—let alone to contemporary Brooklyn—but in slowing the past down Crowley also makes it overwhelmingly present. By the end, Eilis’s journey may be over, but there is a sense that she will keep going. And for such an ostensibly slow movie, that’s an awful lot of inertia. Eilis’ “soul,” we feel, is a vital one: it will never stop looking for shore."

Horror Show: On Justin Kurzel's Macbeth (FLOOD)

"Michael Fassbender plays Macbeth as a desperate proto-tyrant whose unmooring precedes his villainy. He is a man born of war, and war’s urgency and desperation inform all of his actions. But this is the rare case where knowing the cause does little to assuage our anxiety. He remains a terror, and in some ways it seems that he is a terror even to himself...."

Book Reviews (2015-2016)

Beyond the Great American Novel: On Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad (FLOOD)

"So what is an author supposed to do with a book that needs to entertain its audience while at the same time honoring the enslaved, the maimed, the raped, the dead?  I’m not sure, but I think Whitehead’s decision to use an unknown narrator to tell what will always be, in a sense, a secret history, provides us with the opportunity to reckon with the American past without a false sense of satisfaction, or the feeling that we have somehow completed that reckoning. The work of historians remains vital, of course, but this book shows how fiction too can play an important role in reminding us that the stories we tell are also the things that keep us in the dark. This is an industrious country, after all, so it’s reasonable to assume that we will forever be discovering new tunnels."

The Magic of Realism: On Alvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death (FLOOD)

"Enrigue uses a European tennis ball and an American scapular to show how relentlessly uncertainty fuels the progress of civilization. No one knows exactly what it is that they want and no one knows exactly how to get it, but the collateral damage still accrues. And when the dust settles, we call that damage history...."

The Gears of Reincarnation: On David Mitchell's Slade House (FLOOD)

"We don’t need to see or understand the workings of a clock to know that it works. It bears itself out, and there’s a pleasure in that, even if we can’t reengineer it ourselves. Mitchell’s multiverse has only ever been vital because of the characters the populate it, and Slade House seems to have moved the focus over to the machinery that governs their lives...."

TV Reviews (2016)

The Opposite of Death and Diarrhea: On Pamela Adlon's Better Things (FLOOD)

"After seeing people open up about their own darker moments (Sam has a knack for engendering such honesty), Max finds the courage to open up as well, and what follows is a monologue that sounds utterly timeworn and trite, but feels just about as real as life. That’s this show in a nutshell. It looks just about like everything else, but it bursts to life like revelations."

Comic Artist Q&As (2016)

Lists (2016)

Pop Culture Cures (2016)

FLOOD’s weekly Pop Culture Cure offers an antidote—or ten—to the most upsetting developments of the past week. Recent entries include:

'N Stuff (2011-2016)

On Wikipedia, in conversation with Nate Rogers

On the search for a cheap tuxedo (Brokelyn)

"At Sym’s there are three possible outcomes: you (a) happen upon the perfect suit for absolutely bottom effing dollar; or (b) you find the perfect tuxedo but the tuxedo you find is only available with supersized pants; or (c) you find nothing but chaos – rack upon rack of indignant vests, clownish pants, and dapper blazers that seem to have no time for the 48L “trousers” drowsing nearby...."

On streamable Oscar nominees, circa 2011 (Brokelyn)

"Every year, February provides us with a special opportunity to worship two very different Gods: one is a strange sort of rodent-priest, and the other is an anatomically ambiguous statuette: Oscar. Like Punxsatawny Phil, Oscar is a frivolous God, but in order to know when he has Titanicked us, we need to watch some movies. But how, when tickets are expensive and time, like Tom Cruise, is short? The answer, of course, is Netflix...."

On free movies in Brooklyn (Brokelyn)

"Movie theaters are great, but they are also out to get us. They charge us for popped corns (which are made of air); they tell us to be silent (because silence is golden and they want our gold); they torture naked hot dogs on a pitiless, fiery rack, and they’ve even begun hoarding our precious bedbugs. But no more! To the beer parlors, my friends – where the movies are free, the drinks are hard, and cell phone service is restored! Brooklyn bars offer a steady diet of free movie screenings for every taste, and Brokelyn is here to help you find the screen that suits you best...."