Tag: warren daske

400 Words on: Mommie Dearest (1981)

or, “An Abundant Deposit of Effective Cringe”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

4.5 out of 5

To paraphrase Tarantino, a movie that successfully uses a piece of music, owns that music. Likewise, 1981’s docudrama “Mommie Dearest” (or MD) belongs to its lead actress, Faye Dunaway.

Audiences are fickle. As a broad example (pun not intended), Sydney Sweeney is objectively attractive, but sometimes we need to be reminded that her place in history – as a babe – will only occupy a small space: one inhabited by the ghosts of celebrity babes past, like Farrah Fawcett or Marilyn Monroe.

Same goes for legendary performances: they only become discourse if viewers put the proverbial poster on their wall. As much as I admire Dunaway, there’s only a handful of movies out of her six-decade career I can definitively name – most from one era.

[cont’d]

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Video: ¡Señor Que!

A Short Safe-for-Work Art Film

“The continuing adventures of everyone’s favourite third-rate ‘Doctor Who’ clone.”

Produced in 2012 //wd

Management would like to acknowledge & thank the participation of the involved, for their assistance in producing the above feature. It has been shortened from its original exhibition. It was made as a response to my dissatisfaction with post-secondary, and should not be taken seriously. For those interested, an unsanctioned IMDB listing can be found here.

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400 Words on: Thunderbolts* (2025)

or, “$180 and Not $180-Million”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

Marvel’s “Thunderbolts*” is lustreless – not just in its “New Avengers” advertising, or its ragtag group of antiheroes: accrued from a roster that studio boss Kevin Feige himself, ironically, would call “homework.”

A lifetime ago, I made an uncouth script pitch for a cop movie to a university girlfriend, with its villain a serial rapist. She asked why it was so important to use rape as a plot device. “Because it sells!”

What I meant to say (retrospectively) was that, along with child peril & domestic abuse, rape elicits a powerful viewer response, which they want ‘avenged’ by the time the credits roll. That’s just one of the stupid things I said & did to send that relationship into free-fall, much like Marvel Studio’s stupid choices since “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019 – theirs’ being a lack of creative honour, and too much contextual juggling.

Irrespectively, Marvel productions still carry a professional-grade aesthetic, even if you don’t connect with them on a human level. But while there’s no literal rape in Thunderbolts*, it violated my other sensibilities.

[cont’d]

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400 Words on: The Shrouds (2024)

or, “Reconciled to Live from the Sidelines”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1.5 out of 5

“…it’s been so long since I did that stuff, I literally cannot remember how we did most of it. […] I really have to insist that we don’t talk about ‘Scanners’, or special effects, or exploding heads…”

– Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on
Ken Finkleman’s “The Newsroom”, 1996

“The Shrouds” is an 82-year-old artist’s auto-elegiac statement. It’s aesthetically pleasing, and way too talky; its themes cerebral, though defeatist; its characters horny but dispassionate; and it’s told from a sanctimonious perspective that engenders viewer apathy.

My high school friends & I once drove an hour to see “A History of Violence”. We walked in late to the screening after getting a parking ticket, and immediately after the big 69’ing scene (but before the diner shootout). We didn’t find out until much later what else we had missed.

[cont’d]

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400 Words on: Until Dawn (2025)

or, “Buying-In to the Confusion”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

3 out of 5

While my wife would call me a “gamer”, I don’t clock nearly as many hours as when I was a kid: life gets in the way. So when I do play, it’s almost exclusively ‘arcade-style’ games that I can disconnect from quickly – physically & mentally – and there must be a Pause button.

Though I can’t attest, “Until Dawn” seems regarded as one of the premier, Western-made, story-driven video games of the previous console generation: a group of disposable teens trying to survive a throng of wendigos, with a branching narrative based on player interaction. “Until Dawn: The Movie” swaps out the choose-your-own-adventure input for a “Groundhog Day” esque time-loop, with some other surprises meant to mimic the discovery a player would get from the game.

My surprise was palpable. Though lacking the original’s star-power (which featured Rami Malek & Hayden Panettiere), the movie’s twenty-something players do a convincing job and, tonically, all five are spotlighted equally throughout the script. The savagery is effective, including a show-stopping water tower sequence & a close-up of a crushed face that gave me “Irréversible” flashbacks. The dialogue isn’t bad either, often breaking the fourth-wall to cheekily address the core plot’s uninspiredness, or the suicidal inclinations of its protagonists to reset the loop & try again.

[cont’d]

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