REVIEW: Red Rocket [2021]

I’m in. After buying the bus ticket from California to the place he swore he’d never return (his hometown of Texas City, TX), Mikey (Simon Rex) has twenty dollars left in his pocket to passive-aggressively offer his estranged wife (Bree Elrod‘s Lexi) when begging to stay at her mother’s (Brenda Deiss‘ Lil) house for a few days. He does what he does best by leveraging his ego and smarmy charm to fast-talk his way back from the property line to the porch to the shower to the kitchen. Mikey says…

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REVIEW: The Florida Project [2017]

What are you playing? It’s hard not to think about another A24 produced film while watching Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project. The themes it presents due its impoverished central characters barely scrapping by financially on a day-to-day basis are identical to Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey and its band of twenty-somethings traveling the countryside to scam cash in return for a no-strings-attached freedom slaves to a weekly paycheck simply cannot understand. Whereas the latter focused upon adults who have chosen this life, however, Baker’s look at an Orlando motel turned off-the-books…

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REVIEW: Tangerine [2015]

“Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped lie” ‘Twas the night before Christmas and Tinseltown’s intersection of Santa Monica and Highland is bustling. A hotbed of sex work and drug use, Sean Baker‘s unfiltered Tangerine takes us into a world we haven’t quite seen on the big screen—especially not from a major distributor like Magnolia Pictures—by following three characters on a mission towards personal joy they know Santa won’t be bringing this year. For Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) this means the satisfaction of retribution against the boyfriend she learned cheated on…

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