every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with random anti-alphabetical cheats)

I Am a Gotdamn Comedy Writer (2024)

Wearing a t-shirt that says “Unreliable narrator,” comedy writer Aaron Paxton Arnold hesitantly endures his first session with a bald white therapist he calls only “Therapist Guy.” Arnold doesn’t want to be there, but his wife pre-paid for the session.

I was unaware of Arnold’s work and still am, but he wrote this and it’s funny. Over its 15 minutes, it left me in a better mood than before I’d clicked ‘play’.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Vitelloni (1953)

At a European beachside resort, the Miss Mermaid beauty pageant is the last big event of the summer, but the winner passes out soon as she’s sashed. She’s preggers, by Fausto, a local lothatio who tries to leave town before being forced into marriage. Rough luck, his father won’t have such a shame in the family, so Miss Mermaid becomes Mrs Fausto.

They honeymoon in Rome, and soon as they return Fausto resumes his womanizing ways, and generally ignores his wife and eventually the newborn.

The movie is mostly about Fausto and his buddies, who remind me of thousands of similar men I’ve known and wished I hadn’t. There’s a whisper of character improvement for Fausto by the end, but it’s just an act and he’s still a schmuck. We’re supposed to love him for being incorrigible, but pttthh.

Google says the title translates to ‘The Young and the Passionate’, which seems as generic as the story I’ve just watched. It’s directed and co-written by Federico Fellini, a pretty good moviemaker, but this flick has all the depth of a very special episode of According to Jim, in Italian.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

A nurse is summoned to a tropical sugar plantation, to care for the wife of one of the half-brothers who own the place. The brothers tolerate but don’t love each other, and the patient is a zombie — not a George Romero zombie, but a real zombie, as seen in the Haitian Vodou religion. She doesn’t want to eat your flesh, because she doesn’t want anything. She simply sits there, or walks around, but she says nothing, does nothing, thinks nothing, and can’t be cured — or can she?

The natives’ voodoo rituals seem exotic, strange, scary, and probably bear only coincidental resemblance to an actual voodoo ceremony. There are black workers, technically no longer slaves, but they know their history and plight. They cry when one of them has a child, but celebrate when a brother or sister dies, for that’s the only way toward freedom.

The movie’s aura is enjoyably creepy, and delivers what the title promises. It’s slightly spooky, but not nightmare material, and it’s intelligent. You might forget that it was made on the cheap and filmed in California, far from its Caribbean setting.

Produced by Val Lewton (Cat People), and directed by Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past). Written by Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man) and Ardel Wray (The Leopard Man).

Those names and movies should convince any movie buff to walk with a zombie, but at Wikipedia someone’s claimed that this movie was inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I laughed, but the canard has been picked up all across the stupid internet, from the Criterion Collection to IMDB, where Brontë’ is listed as an “uncreditied” writer of the film. Yeah, and I co-wrote Slumdoug Millionaire.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Dead Zone (1983)

A David Cronenberg film, adapting a Stephen King novel, with several of my favorite actors — Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Nicholas Campbell, Herbert Lom, and Martin Sheen, plus Anthony Zerbe and Colleen Dewhurst at no extra charge. I was there on opening night for The Dead Zone, 42 years ago, and I’ve been there again every few years, via cable, then VCR, then DVD, and now streaming.

Johnny (Walken) survives a car crash with a milk truck, but when he wakes from a five-year coma he’s unemployed, can’t hardly walk, and his girlfriend has married another man and had a child. And somehow, through the accident or an act of God, he’s developed “either a very new human ability, or a very old one” — when he touches someone, there’s sometimes a flash of connection so deep, he can see into that person’s past, or future.

All the real elements feel absolutely real: When Johnny tries to walk, he wobbles, like someone who hasn’t used their leg muscles in years. When he sees his now-married ex-girlfriend, he’s hurt, angry, confused, like you’d feel in such a heartbroken situation.

When he touches someone and has a vision, it’s a powerful fright. When he shakes hands with a particular candidate for the US Senate, a vision shows him that man’s political career — he’ll be president one day, and start World War III.

What’s Johnny going to do about that?

This is, I think, the best movie from all of King’s books, and Cronenberg’s most accessible film. It never disappoints. The goose bumps are goosey and bumpy, and over the course of an hour and a half I come to care about these characters, every time.

It’s a political statement disguised as a mainstream popcorn movie, and damned near perfect on both counts.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Secret Mall Apartment (2024)

In 2003, artist Mike Townsend discovered an odd, unused, angular corner, deep inside a Providence shopping mall. With six of his students and colleagues, they claimed the space, first simply for hanging out, but eventually they snuck in tons of cinder block to construct walls and a full-on living and sleeping area, with furniture and lamps and a fridge, running off an extension cord stretched across a cavern of concrete and plugged into an outlet on a lower floor.

Being art geeks, they filmed their work and antics obsessively, and those home/mall movies are the backbone of this documentary, along with interviews with everyone involved. They lived at the mall for four years, undetected and without paying rent. The movie tells that story and tells it terrifically, but more, it becomes a heady, joyous meditation on humanity and art.

The main guy, Townsend, is charismatically kooky, a self-effacing artist whose work can’t be confined to a mall, or a museum. He’s created temporary artworks in the most unexpected places all across America, and seeing his work he’s the real deal, no poseur. The secret mall apartment was, in a manner of speaking, one of Townsend’s longest-running art installations, which is nuts but also true.

It’s 2025. Nuts and true and no longer mutually exclusive.

Directed by Jeremy Workman (Lily Topples the World) and produced by Jesse Eisenberg (yeah really), Secret Mall Apartment is an esoteric and marvelous film, about a handful of people who did something nuts but true, and brilliant. It’s an education in art without the snoot that ordinarily accompanies both art and education, and watching this made me smarter and also darn happy!

Verdict: BIG YES.

5/31/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

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