3 Best Movies To Watch After Metal Lords (2022)

If you’re not a skateboarding fan, you’ll likely only be aware that Tony Hawk exists, rather than anything specific about his life or accomplishments. Maybe you’ll know there’s a bunch of video games named for him, or that he appeared in a Police Academy movie. But the fact that you’ve heard of him, even if you wouldn’t know a quad deck from a cheese sandwich, speaks volumes about both his impact, and his role in bringing mainstream respect to a sport once dismissed as a pastime for bored kids and delinquents. Continue Reading →

Is Satanic panic even a thing anymore? When’s the last time we’ve heard anything about backmasking, or songs somehow influencing impressionable teenagers to kill themselves? It’s entirely possible that this is all still a thing, and I’m simply too old and out of touch to know anything about it. B.J. McDonnell’s Studio 666, the feature film debut of Foo Fighters, is a lovingly hokey homage to a time when “the Devil’s music” was such a grave concern for parents (and Tipper Gore) that Congressional hearings were held about it, and lawsuits were filed against heavy metal bands in an attempt to hold them responsible for what was more likely caused by untreated mental illness and drug abuse. Continue Reading →

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is an alternatively madcap and melancholic retelling of the artistic and personal life of the peculiar Louis Wain by making a lot of noise but not saying much. Biographical films have to tread a very difficult line. They must tell their central characters’ life and accomplishments while humanizing them through their rituals and quirks. And they must do this all without turning the movie idealization or fetishization of such things. Narratively, what Louis Wain gets right is that focusing on the man as a deeply troubled individual and melds his artistic work along with the afflictions that he suffered. What it gets wrong is its inability to dig deeper into Louis Wain beyond his whimsies and mannerisms and the surrounding greater Victorian English culture.  Continue Reading →