Rob and I got into a marital tiff the other night because I made the claim that I never lie. He didn’t agree. He contests that I omit details in a way that leads people to believe something that isn’t true. That’s not lying right? That’s just a totally healthy need for people to like me. So, in our interview with Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, this plays out […]
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead specialize in making movies that squander a fantastic—in both senses of that adjective—sci-fi premise. They don’t actually set out to squander anything, I’m quite confident, and certainly there are many rabid Benson & Moorhead fans who’ll disagree (and perhaps even some who don’t mentally mistake “Benson & Moorhead” for a tony cigarette brand). I want to be up front, though: Something in the Dirt is […]
The filmmaking duo of Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson has hit upon a very reliable schema – I will not call it a formula, because it’s not really the same thing every time. But in every one of their films, we see a quiet story about the relationship between two people filtered through a mash-up of genres, one of which is sci-fi, as well as an ingenious ability to maximise […]
Thanks to those who have offered suggestions for future columns. I will begin fulfilling requests on a “first come, first serve” basis starting in January 2024. As always, I am open to suggestions for future topics. Feel free to leave a comment below or on Discord! “The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. The so-called divinities of Olympus have not a single worshipper among living men.” So writes […]
1999’s Lake Placid does have its fans, and I’m certainly not going to try to take it away from them. Lord knows I don’t want it. That film was directed by slasher expert Steve Miner, but much more importantly, it was written by television auteur David E. Kelley, then at the absolute height of his influence thanks to The Practice and Ally McBeal. As a direct result, it is a […]
In a marvelous decade for low-budget indie sci-fi, the writing-directing team of [Aaron] Moorhead & [Justin] Benson still stand out for making some of the most offbeat genre films out there. They’ve gone-three-for-three now on films that start out as a low-key character dramas about two people who like each other a lot but are in some critical way hurting each other, and after about 50 minutes suddenly rip off […]
Today, the occupation-war in Iraq is five years old. During this war, there have been 3990 US military fatalities, 308 military fatalities among the other coalition armies, and a yet-uncalculated number of Iraqi civilian causalities: as few as 80,000, as many as 10 times that. These figures have all been taken from the Iraq Coalition Casualties Count and Iraq Body Count. For perspective, here is a list of the US […]
