Category Archives: The Boomstick

by | May 4, 2016 · 7:12 am

The Boomstick Film Club: Look Who’s Back

Watch it with us: Netflix streaming

If Look Who’s Back had been released in any other year, it would have been a clever, amusing cautionary tale positing an answer to the age-old question: what would happen if Hitler was magically transported, unchanged and unharmed, to modern-day Europe? How would we respond to him now that we know what he’s capable of? And it’s certainly a clever, amusing film. But since it was just released in the US by Netflix in early April, it also reads as an eerily prescient political allegory.

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by | April 5, 2016 · 1:12 pm

The Boomstick Film Club: No No: A Dockumentary

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If you’ve been paying attention to baseball scuttlebutt during the off-season, you probably know there’s been some spirited back-and-forth among current and former players about the propriety (or lack thereof) of flamboyant behavior or emotional displays on the field. But this isn’t a new phenomenon. In anticipation of baseball season, I watched No No: A Dockumentary, the story of larger-than-life Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis, who, among other antics and anecdotes, famously threw a no-hitter in the summer of 1970 while high on LSD.

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by | March 7, 2016 · 7:19 am

The Boomstick Film Club: Girlhood

Watch it with us: Netflix streaming

Girlhood is so outstanding I almost don’t know what to say about it. So let’s dive right in, shall we?

Marieme is sixteen and has a crappy home life with an older brother who beats her up recreationally and a largely absent mother. Faced with the prospect of vocational school or no school at all, she drops out and is immediately befriended by three female juvenile delinquents. They party and shoplift and brawl with other girl gangs, but they also form a close friendship and take care of one another. Marieme falls in love with a friend of her brother’s, and when her brother finds out she’s had sex, he beats her up and she runs away, bidding a tearful goodbye to her girlfriends and her younger sister. She starts selling drugs for a gangster named Abou, and he moves her into an apartment with a young prostitute in his employ. But Abou proves to be just as much a bully as Marieme’s brother, so she runs away from him as well. She has to find somewhere else to run to. Continue reading →

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by | February 8, 2016 · 7:25 am

The Boomstick Film Club: Angel Heart

Watch it with us: Netflix streaming

If you’ve never seen Angel Heart, there’s still a good chance you’re aware of its notoriously explicit sex scene between Lisa Bonet, who was nineteen and playing seventeen, and Mickey Rourke, who was thirty-five and playing washed-up. There’s obviously a conversation to be had about whether the scene was exploitative, and about the fact that Bonet’s most vocal critic at the time was America’s Dad, Bill Cosby. But for now I don’t want to lose sight of how extraordinarily weird that scene is, and how it fits within an even weirder movie. And consider yourselves forewarned: this movie has a twist that I am going to spoil, since there’s no way to talk about the film without it.

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by | January 18, 2016 · 7:00 am

The Boomstick Film Club: Two Step

Watch it with us: Netflix streaming

I stumbled onto Two Step while trawling Netflix, and it turned out to be so tailored to my interests that I was embarrassed I didn’t know about it sooner.

Alex R. Johnson’s directorial debut focuses on two characters whose storylines converge halfway through the film. The first, James (Skyy Moore), is a socially awkward college dropout who inherits his recently deceased grandmother’s house and forms a friendship with Dot (Beth Broderick, better known as Aunt Zelda from Sabrina, the Teenage Witch), the middle-aged dance teacher living across the street. There’s a hint of G-rated May-September romance to their relationship, which stays endearingly innocent and believable largely due to Broderick. She invests her character with warmth and humor but never lets it spill over into floozy-with-a-heart-of-gold caricature.

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by | December 21, 2015 · 7:00 am

The Boomstick Film Club: Darkman

I’m not a monster, so obviously I enjoyed the hell out of Darkman. Sam Raimi’s wild-eyed vision of the world always charms me, even when the movie itself isn’t great. And Darkman is not great. It has plot holes you could drive a truck through, and the performances aren’t what you’d call realistic. But if you enjoy your body horror with a dash of comedy and a Batman-esque Danny Elfman score, you could do worse than spend an evening with Darkman.

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