Tag Archives: film movement

Relaxer

Blu-ray Review Round-Up: Films by Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Pavel Juráček and more!

CarmenFirst Name: Carmen (1982)
Détective (1985)
Hélas Pour Moi (1993)
Kino Lorber

The standard line about Jean-Luc Godard is that he’s never come close to replicating the string of masterpieces he made in his astonishingly productive 1960s output. The ’70s get the militantly political works that dare you to find a shred of anything resembling “entertainment” while the past few decades are afforded a series of perversely playful essay experiments.

It’s a stretch to call the ’80s and early ’90s a lost era for Godard, but there’s relatively little appreciation for his return to narrative filmmaking as only Godard could imagine it. In upgrading three of the four films from Lionsgate’s DVD box set, Kino offers an excellent way to rediscover three key works of the period. In each, Godard refracts myth and genre, deconstructing ideas about storytelling and ideas about some of his previous films, which Détective and First Name: Carmen seem especially in dialogue with.

First Name: Carmen considers the filmmaker, with Godard starring as a version of himself who’s “all washed up,” annoying the staff at a hospital where he’s staying for no identifiable reason. His niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers) convinces “Uncle Jean” to lend her the use of his house for a film she’s making, but it’s all a ruse in service of several shakily conceived robbery and kidnapping plots.

In adapting Bizet’s opera, Godard reimagines the tale of passion and doom as one of strictly doom, as Carmen’s affair with a security guard, Joseph (Jacques Bonaffé), is defined by disconnection from the start, even as he ties himself to her in an attempt to prevent her from robbing a bank.

The only real passion here is a string quartet practicing (Beethoven — not Bizet), their music soundtracking a series of mechanically performed violent and sexual encounters. The music frequently gives way to cacophonies of noise, Uncle Jean somewhere behind the scenes fiddling to get the feeling right.

First Name: Carmen is archly meta, Godard puncturing the films’ traditional pleasures — a lovely scene of Joseph mourning, his outstretched hand in front of TV static, dissipates amid one of the soundtrack’s strangest mash-ups. Like many of Godard’s films, it’s challenging to put your finger on just why this works so well, but First Name: Carmen becomes a beguiling tale of loss wrapped in a jokey structure without a hiccup. It’s a great film.

DetectiveThe other two offerings don’t quite achieve the same heights, particularly Détective, which never coheres into more than a tossed-off genre riff in its two-headed story about a pair of detectives (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Laurent Terzieff) attempting to solve a murder and an unscrupulous boxing trainer (Johnny Hallyday) trying to stay ahead of his debts in the same hotel. Less overtly self-reflexive than First Name: Carmen, the film still feels like blatantly artificial, every half-understood plot twist piled up on each other in a personal competition to devise the shaggiest noir story ever.

In Hélas Pour Moi, Godard refashions the Greek myth of Alcmene and Amphitryon into a bleak meditation on what it means to be human. Legend has it that a god came to earth and inhabited the body of Simon (Gérard Depardieu) in order to seduce his wife, Rachel (Laurence Masliah), and experience carnal pleasure for the first time. In scenes full of portent, shot by cinematographer Caroline Champetier with a stillness one doesn’t usually associate with Godard, the relationship progresses.

Or does it? After Depardieu quit the film midway through production, Godard fashioned a frame story about a publisher (Bernard Verley) trying to reconstruct the story of Simon and Rachel, if it even happened. Though much of the film is inscrutable, the Simon and Rachel flashbacks have a kind of mystical aura that carries them through. Not so for the scenes set in the publisher’s present, which are very much of the earthly variety, him trudging through a series of baffling anecdotes with little hope of connecting the dots. The dichotomy between heaven and earth is a wide gap, and as the god who visited ultimately decides, it’s not one he’d like to bridge.

Helas Pour MoiAll three Kino discs are outfitted with a 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer, and each represents a big upgrade from the previous DVD set. Clarity and fine detail are stunning in all three transfers, with the heavy-on-natural-light Hélas Pour Moi the standout. In this presentation, it’s tempting to call it Godard’s most beautiful film.

Each transfer offers a film-like appearance, with perfectly rendered grain and pops of color (yellow hotel bathrobes in Carmen; a red and blue neon sign advertising cassettes in Détective). Some light speckling occurs, most noticeably in Carmen, but it’s hard to imagine these films looking better on the format. DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 tracks (mono on Carmen, stereo on the others) are uniformly excellent, offering clean showcases for a variety of aural trickeries.

Each disc includes an audio commentary and a booklet essay, while Carmen also includes Godard’s 1982 short Changer d’image.

RelaxerRelaxer (2018)
Oscilloscope Laboratories

The latest film from Joel Potrykus confirms it: The man knows how to create worlds that have a genuine lived-in shittiness. There’s no whiff of artfully arranged faux-squalor. From the fluorescent hell of the mortgage office in Buzzard (2014) to the haunted cabin in the woods of The Alchemist’s Cookbook (2016) to the skin-crawling rot of the apartment in Relaxer, the milieu is always uncomfortably real.

These locations are fertile grounds for Potrykus’ twisted fantasies and their refractions of toxic masculinity. In Relaxer, the decay of the film’s only location acts as a hilariously grotesque salute to end-of-millennium American culture. In this version of 1999, the Y2K apocalypse hastens, and Potrykus greets it with a blast of ’90s anti-nostalgia.

Joshua Burge, who channeled uproarious and troubling levels of impotent rage in Buzzard and Potrykus’ first feature, Ape (2012), delivers his best performance yet as Abbie, a pathologically committed figure, determined to complete any challenge — and weather as much abuse as necessary along the way — from his shithead older brother, Cam (David Dastmalchian). The first one we see involves drinking nearly an entire gallon of milk. The results are predictable. The route there isn’t.

Cam has one more challenge: Beat the nigh-mythical Level 256 on Pac-Man, and don’t leave the couch for any reason until it’s completed. Abbie accepts. Now-disgraced gamer Billy Mitchell’s offer of $100,000 to anyone who can accomplish the feat is a factor, but Abbie’s motivations are ultimately much more personal. He’s not getting up from that couch.

Relaxer feels like the culmination of Potrykus’ films thus far, pushing the slacker ideal to its absolute breaking point and luxuriating in the grotesque like never before. Between spilled sour milk, guzzled cherry Faygo and progressively more disgusting fluids of other varieties, the film has a sticky tactility I might not get over.

Potrykus refashions a bit from Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel as a scatological nightmare and reimagines Chaplin eating his shoe in The Gold Rush as a cringe-inducing grace note. Burge, who bears a striking resemblance to Buster Keaton, essentially transforms into a silent film star by the film’s end, every gesture performed by Abbie’s increasingly atrophied body focused on one quixotic goal. It’s disturbing. It’s funny in ways you never saw coming. It’s the Platonic ideal of a Joel Potrykus film.

Oscilloscope’s Blu-ray offers a 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer with exceptional clarity and excellent reproduction of the film’s generally muted look. A stereo DTS-HD Master Audio track is pretty dynamic and lively in parts. Extras include a Potrykus audio commentary, a collection of behind-the-scenes footage split between high-quality digital and camcorder-like footage, rehearsal footage with Potrykus and Burge, promos, and a kind of challenge to the viewer: 2001-era footage of Potrykus and his friends puking at a “milk party.”

One SingsOne Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977)
The Criterion Collection

The feminist films of  Agnès Varda take many shapes, but whether she was working in a mode of documentary realism or sunnily lacerating satire, she never had time for sentimentality. That’s especially apparent in One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, which treats both the separation of its main characters and their fight for abortion rights in Europe as perfectly surmountable obstacles. When the women in Varda’s sort-of-musical face a problem — sudden abandonment by romantic partners, friendship-testing distances, political resistance — they simply do what needs to be done to get past it.

That matter-of-factness can make One Sings, the Other Doesn’t resonate somewhat less than more formally playful Varda films, but the film’s depiction of female friendship is undeniably moving.

Teenaged Pauline (Valérie Mairesse) reconnects with Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard), an older friend whose pregnancy has put her in dire straits. Pauline helps come up with the money to pay for an abortion, and a loose bond becomes an unbreakable connection, even as circumstances keep the two apart for a decade. When they reunite, each has deepened their involvement in the feminist cause: Pauline now goes by Pomme, and performs with a political all-women band, while Suzanne has opened a family planning clinic.

There’s a fundamental optimism to One Sings, the Other Doesn’t and its affirmation of feminism as liberation for women of all walks of life. Its generosity and openness is wonderful.

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.66:1 transfer is sourced from a 2K restoration of the original camera negative. The image occasionally leans into the teal-zone, with some slightly unnatural cold hues as a result, but image clarity, fine detail and grain resolution are excellent. The same restoration is featured on the Artificial Eye Region B Blu-ray set, and the transfers look basically identical.

Extras include Katja Raganelli’s on-set documentary and two Varda shorts: Réponse de femmes and Plaisir d’amour en Iran, which briefly expounds on an underdeveloped thread in One Sings. Also included: a trailer, an insert with an essay by Amy Taubin and notes from Varda, and a separate booklet that recreates sections of the 1977 press book.

RookieA Case for a Rookie Hangman (1969)
Second Run

The last film Czech director Pavel Juráček would make in his sadly abbreviated career, A Case for a Rookie Hangman reads like a handbook for how to anger an authoritarian regime. And it did, as the film went basically unreleased and Juráček was blackballed from the industry for the rest of his life.

Loosely adapting a segment of the third part of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Juráček uses the setting of the kingdom of Balnibarbi and the island of Laputa floating above to plunge a far-from-heroic Gulliver (Lubomír Kostelka) into a series of intractable conflicts. The government is incomprehensibly rigid, the people are ready to coalesce into an angry mob at a moment’s notice and Gulliver can’t convince anyone he’s not Oscar, the owner of a pocket watch he acquired shortly before being plunged into this mess. Oscar is, naturally, a rabbit in clothing (an obvious nod to Carroll) that Gulliver ran over in his car.

The slipperiness of Juráček’s free-floating storytelling is mitigated somewhat by chapter headings that delineate the episodic tumbling some. A perhaps sturdier guidepost is the emotional state of Gulliver, who keeps seeing flashes of the young woman he once loved who drowned. Kostelka communicates a dazed anguish in his performance, and Juráček visualizes the disorientation with a number of clever shots — most notably one in which a house’s floorboards suddenly turn elastic.

Second Run’s Blu-ray features a 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer sourced from the Czech Film Archive’s 4K restoration. This is a very pleasing transfer, with healthy levels of fine detail, solid grayscale separation and impressively mitigated damage, with reel change marks left intentionally intact. The 2.0 LPCM mono track is quite clean.

Second Run’s extras nearly turn this into a “Complete Directed Works of Juráček” set, with only his debut feature, Every Young Man (1966) absent. (Juráček’s career as a writer produced more well-known works, with films like Daises and Ikarie XB 1  also available from Second Run.) Here, we get two shorts, Cars Without a Home and Black and White Sylva, along with short feature Josef Kilián (1963), an absurdist piece about a man’s struggle to return a cat to the location he borrowed it from. An episode of the Projection Booth podcast discussing Juráček’s career is offered as a kind of audio commentary, while the booklet essay by Michael Brooke does a deep dive into the film and its place in Juráček’s brief career.

LilyAll About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)
Film Movement

Films about youth don’t come much more honest than Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou, in which teenagers’ unvarnished exuberance and surprising capacity for cruelty collide. As a document of the early Internet age, the film taps into the way obsessions became communally turbocharged, with the film’s characters coalescing around their love for singer Lily Chou-Chou. Visualizing an online forum, the film shows breathless comments and usernames flying across the screen, many exalting Lily and the “Ether,” the creative aura fans have ascribed to her art.

In the offline world, Iwai maintains a similar feel, his weightless camera work and Lily’s ethereal music (provided by Takeshi Kobayashi and Salyu) contributing to the dreamlike state. But the realities are much darker here, as friends Shūsuke (Shugo Oshinari) and Yūichi (Hayato Ichihara) have a falling out that involves the formation of a gang and a prostitution ring. The violence and brutality that follow are shocking, but the film never abandons the dreaminess.

Frequently, Iwai returns to a grassy field where a character listening on headphones drifts away on Lily’s music. Music is a genuine balm — but it has its limits, as does a community based around a common interest, as the film’s gut-punch of a final sequence makes clear.

The 1080p, 1.78:1 transfer on Film Movement’s Blu-ray is limited by the source, shot primarily on the Sony HDW-F900 digital camera, then brand-new technology. The film’s vibrant colors are mostly true, and detail is solid when the light allows for it. Expected macroblocking isn’t too bad, apart from several moments during the film’s midway excursion to Okinawa where a switch in viewpoint (and camera) results in totally smeared, degraded images. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is dynamic and offers an excellent showcase for the music.

Extras include an oddly described “making-of featurette” — actually an 86-minute documentary on the online origins and the production of the film. The included booklet features a director’s statement and an essay by Stephen Cremin.

La Belle

Blu-ray Review Round-up: Films by Jacques Rivette, Derek Jarman, Frank Borzage & more!

La BelleLa Belle Noiseuse
Cohen

Jacques Rivette’s engrossing La Belle Noiseuse, surely one of the swiftest four-hour films ever made, at once affirms the quasi-mystical draw of the creative process and punctures the mythos of the artist-muse relationship.

Erstwhile painting great Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is enlivened by meeting Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), the girlfriend of a younger artist who idolizes Frenhofer. He resurrects an old project with Marianne as his nude model, and he quite literally controls the physical boundaries of their relationship, repositioning her with a utilitarian brusqueness that only amplifies her vulnerability.

Outside of the studio, the emotional repercussions are less violent but more complicated, given the histories between Frenhofer and his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), and Marianne and her boyfriend, Nicolas (David Bursztein). Liz was once her husband’s model and Nicolas’s idolization of Frenhofer prodded Marianne into agreeing to model. But feelings have a way of changing.

Rivette, a great chronicler of the minutiae of the artistic process, devotes languorous but orderly scenes to Frenhofer’s work, moving from rough sketches, the scraping of the pen on paper acting as an evocative soundtrack, to the fits and starts of moving to a larger scale. Piccoli’s performance has a focused detachment that makes his sudden emotional shifts feel all the more capricious. Béart defiantly asserts Marianne’s boundaries with a fire in her eyes, a counterpoint to the more knotted feelings that emerge when she truly discovers the power imbalance in this partnership. These knots don’t unravel easily in La Belle Noiseuse, and in fact get more tangled the longer the film goes on.

Cohen’s Blu-ray release, sourced from a new 4K restoration, presents a 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer of the film, split over two discs. (The film has an intermission built in.) Largely, this is a fantastic presentation, with perfectly managed grain, beautiful levels of fine detail and exceptional clarity throughout. This is easily the best the film has ever looked on home video. Unfortunately, there is a teal-ish hue to the film’s color palette that wasn’t there on previous home video versions. While it’s possible this was the original theatrical look, it does seem to fall in line with a fairly common trend in new restorations. This is far from the worst offender; scenes in natural light appear mostly normal and colder-hued scenes appear to just be pushed a little further blue.  The 2.0 PCM mono track is excellent: clear, crisp and free from distraction.

Extras include a new audio commentary by film historian Richard Suchenski and archival interviews with Rivette and screenwriters Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, ported from previous DVDs.

Cohen Media Group / 1991 / Color / 1.37:1 / 238 min / $34.99

SacrificeThe Sacrifice
Kino Lorber

If not exactly dismissed outright, Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, doesn’t quite have the cachet of most of his other films, which range from mere masterpiece to staggering works of sublime, life-changing art. Made while he was exiled from the Soviet Union and dying of cancer, The Sacrifice is ponderous, ungainly, gorgeous and sometimes pointedly nonsensical. It’s an odd, misshapen thing, capable of inspiring awe and dismissiveness. As Robert Bird notes in his essay for Kino’s new re-release, the film is caught between sparseness and theatricality; large, sometimes ridiculous gestures play out on a palette unmoored from narrative structure. But make no mistake: the stakes couldn’t be higher.

In some ways, the irreconcilable peculiarities of The Sacrifice are the only logical response to the madness of nuclear war, which invades the life of a Swedish family living on a remote Baltic island and the birthday celebrations for its patriarch, Alexander (Erland Josephson).

The film opens as he plants a withered tree with his beloved son, Little Man (Tommy Kjellqvist). He relates a story about a dead tree unerringly tended to that came to life and asserts that a single action performed with conviction can have far-reaching consequences.

Later, the family gathers in their home, where Alexander is surrounded by his wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), his older daughter Marta (Filippa Franzén) and mercurial mailman Otto (Allan Edwall), among others. The celebration is cut short by a TV report declaring World War III to be imminent, sending everyone, particularly Adelaide, into an emotional tailspin.

Alexander’s grasps wildly for a self-flagellating solution. He’ll get rid of all his possessions. He’ll have sex with a woman who’s an alleged witch. Why would these actions avert nuclear war? That’s almost as crazy as the very notion of a nuclear weapon itself.

Kino’s new Blu-ray release, sourced from a new 4K restoration, features a 1080p, 1.66:1 image that is largely an upgrade over its previous Blu-ray, which looks particularly muddy in its drained-of-color middle section now. The new image is tighter, with a better defined grain structure, better clarity and much better shadow delineation. Detail isn’t lost in low-light scenes. The one area of potential complaint? Surprise, surprise: It’s the color, which leans in a distinct greenish direction. (Hey, it’s not teal.) This is a pretty big departure from the previous look, though taken by itself, the pleasing aspects of the transfer outweigh this slightly off hue. Audio is a nice 2.0 uncompressed mono track.

This edition has also received a bump in the extras department. A new audio commentary features Layla Alexander-Garrett, Tarkovsky’s on-set translator, and the booklet features excerpts from the filmmaker’s diaries alongside Bird’s essay. Like the previous release, a second DVD disc has feature-length making-of doc Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Kino Lorber / 1986 / Color / 1.66:1 / 146 min / $39.95

MoonriseMoonrise
The Criterion Collection

One of my least favorite storytelling crutches is the kind of overt psychologizing that explicates a character’s action by tying it directly to an event from their past. This is essentially the beginning of Moonrise, one of Frank Borzage’s last films, as young Danny is tormented by his father’s execution for murder, and shortly commits one himself once the film catches up to the present.

But Borzage — one of the great atmosphere conjurers of the silent era — suffuses this prologue with a nightmarish dread that can’t help but spill over into the main events of the film. Danny (Dane Hawkins) is basically stuck in an awful dream he can’t escape from, and a series of reckless decisions involving self-destructive violence don’t break the spell. Borzage uses ultra-thick noirish shadowing; everything and everyone seemingly coated in an extra layer of darkness. Hawkins, his face often conveying an amoral blankness, plays Danny less like a tortured soul and more like a man who knows his actions don’t matter.

Danny’s stupor is partially broken by alluring schoolteacher Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), who just so happens to be the fiancée of the man Danny killed, and his moral compass gets recalibrated thanks to the advice of swamp-dwelling Mose (Rex Ingram, who deepens his clichéd wise black man role). The plotting of Moonrise, which was based on a now-obscure novel, is stock, but Borzage’s filmmaking elevates the material. Even an old noir standby — the carnival scene — gets a new look with a Ferris wheel scene where matched head-on shots of Danny and his pursuer heighten the panic and pin him further inside his own head.

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer is sourced from a new 4K restoration, and it handles the film’s darkness very well, maintaining healthy levels of detail and avoiding any issues with crush or artifacting. The image has some intentional softness and a few isolated instances of damage are visible, but this is a strong example of this kind of black-and-white filmmaking on the format. Uncompressed mono audio is reasonably clean.

Aside from a booklet essay from Philip Kemp, the only extra is a new conversation between film historians Peter Cowie and Hervé Dumont.

Criterion Collection / 1948 / Black and white / 1.37:1 / 90 min / $39.95

Intimate LightingIntimate Lighting (Intimní osvětlení)
Second Run

There’s a scene in Ivan Passer’s impeccably observed Intimate Lighting around a dinner table, where pieces of a roast chicken get passed around, everyone trying to defer to one another and making the whole affair much more complicated in the process. This is one of the more action-packed scenes in Passer’s film, which is a wisp — but a delightful wisp.

This scene — and all of the scenes in this episodic slice of life — unassumingly lays out the underlying expectations of its characters. A moderately successful musician, Petr (Zdeněk Bezušek) has returned to the small town where he grew up, and in visiting old pal Bambas (Karel Blažek), there’s that little tinge of benign tension that can occur between friends who haven’t seen each other in some time.

Calling Intimate Lighting a comedy of manners would probably be overstating things, but Passer is very interested in the gentle peculiarities of human interaction, and he lets them play out in scenes of a string quartet struggling to perform Mozart or a late-night rendezvous in an unfamiliar house or a toast that doesn’t quite go according to plan. The films’ charms are as elusive as its plot is simple.

Passer, like his Czech New Wave collaborator Miloš Forman, found his greatest success in the US. But this debut film is a unique jewel that displays some of the wryness of his films he co-wrote with Forman, but without the sharper satirical edge. That it feels so effortless as it occupies this tonal balance is part of what makes the film so enchanting.

Second Run’s region-free Blu-ray release features a 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer sourced from a new 4K restoration by the Czech National Film Archive. This is a nice-looking disc, with solid levels of clarity and detail. Grain is handled well, and the appearance is convincingly film-like throughout. 2.0 uncompressed mono audio is very clean.

Extras include Passer’s debut short film, A Boring Afternoon (1964), an interview with Passer and a booklet featuring essays from Trevor Johnston and Phillip Bergson.

Second Run / 1965 / Black and white / 1.37:1 / 74 min / £19.99

EdwardIIEdward II
Film Movement

Derek Jarman’s adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan play is a study in contradictions. Pulsing with sensual imagery, yet affecting a cool, removed manner, the film is both formally austere and tonally nimble. One can feel a chill in the air from the stage-like environs of the unadorned castle the film was shot in, but each tableau is impeccably designed, whether it’s a sexually charged bedroom scene, an anachronistic gay-rights protest or a headlong leap into pop fantasy when Annie Lennox materializes, singing Cole Porter.

Jarman extracts and expands on the homoerotic undertones of Marlowe’s play, in which new king Edward II (Steven Waddington) exercises his newfound authority to bring back his lover, Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), from exile. Gaveston is historically known as Edward’s “favourite,” a term that couldn’t much more transparently imply a sexual relationship, but in Jarman’s telling, there’s no need for such a euphemism. The pair flaunts their relationship in front of an increasingly irritated Queen Isabella (Tilda Swinton) and her lover, Mortimer (Nigel Terry), prompting plans for a coup.

Most complaints about the film have to do with a lack of cohesion or simplistic renderings of Marlowe’s dense play and complex characters, but Edward II is one of those films where the greatness of the parts makes up for a whole that might not exactly come together. These complaints aren’t totally off-base, and there’s a haphazardness to the modernizing that’s reminiscent of many current stagings of hundreds-year-old plays, but Jarman’s eye for arresting production design and interesting compositions — not to mention his righteous political anger — make for a bracing experience where every image has a renewing effect on the viewer’s attention.

Film Movement’s new Blu-ray presents the film in 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer that’s a big improvement over the previous DVD release, which I remember as a murky, frustrating mess. Billed as coming from a “new digital restoration,” this transfer has a bit of a hazy look, with some fluctuating image density. Small flecks are common, though they’re mostly unobtrusive. Grain appears to be in good shape, and fine detail is acceptable, given the shadowy look of the film. It’s not a stunning transfer, but it’s quite watchable. Audio is an excellent 2.0 LPCM stereo track.

Extras include an interview with producer Antony Root and a booklet with an appreciation from Swinton and an essay by filmmaker Bruce LaBruce.

Film Movement / 1991 / Color / 1.85:1 / 90 min / $39.95

 

 

Dusty Somers is a Seattle-based writer and editor who splits his critical ambitions between writing Blu-ray & DVD reviews and theater criticism. He’s a member of the Online Film Critics Society and Seattle Theater Writers.