still remarkably impressive on a technical level, especially the car chase featuring the driver of one car handcuffed to the enger of another through open windows, which is the kind of shit that you expect from an 80s HK movie, not an early 90s Hollywood horror programmer

Y2K Diabolique 

Andy Milligan’s No Blade of Grass (!?) — a relentlessly dour post-apocalyptic drama that starts slow before ultimately exploding in violence; of his more grim outings, which is saying something

closest to the monochromatic melodrama of Seeds as far as Milligan is concerned, even if the Mishkin script is far less insidious, anchored by the expected histrionics and unexpectedly striking on location NY photography (which includes an incredible fourth wall break and perhaps Milligan’s best death scene) — one of the more surreal moviegoing experiences of my life is attending the first public screening of this in decades with the cast in the theater

Cop Follows 

classist cringe drama that gets hysterical to a point that it borders on dark comedy, sort of an After Hours for the disenfranchised, an anti-yuppie quest for stability in a space where that seems unattainable

"the sicker you write a screenplay, the more universal it is"

arguably, if not obviously, of most interest to the Milligan faithful who have carried his torch for years, but it works not only as a necessary primer for the uninitiated but as a loving testament to the importance of film preservation and how easily marginalized voices can disappear from the public record if those able to preserve them do not — essential viewing for Milligan fans and those who have never heard of him alike

nothing quite captures the ennui of the Y2K era like Hugh Jackman forced at gunpoint, while getting a blowjob, to hack into the Department of Defense on a Dell laptop while John Travolta with the dumbest haircut in any movie watches and yells at him — didn't think I was at a point in my life where I'd willingly watch Swordfish twice in one year, but here we are

the platonic ideal of a documentary for people who like a) old new york b) old new york's trash and/or c) old new york art scene — so, me

the trash cinema equivalent of what Jeremy Saulnier did with Rebel Ridge, eschewing technical finesse for something much scrappier, meaner and, well, exploitative — if this was shot on 16mm, it would likely land better and RZA’s aspirations would be more obvious and realized, but as it is it’s a pretty nasty homage to a lost era even if it’s digital sheen doesn’t match its gutter ethos

the only thing more insufferable than improv comics is improv comics on or around cocaine

akin to watching Charlie Kaufman remaking Metropolis (which, perhaps, he did to some extent with Synecdoche, New York), layering genre tropes, philosophy and various fetishes for architecture into a modestly budgeted ion project that would never be greenlit today, let alone by a major studio — Proyas’s unwillingness to be pigeonholed made this sing in 1998 but it is even more refreshing almost thirty years removed, an immensely nerdy mix tape of inspirations, obsessions and prescient genre tinkering (that this predates both The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor is rather astonishing); in any case, one of the great sci-fi films of the 90s