On Saturday, Feb. 6, 1993, the Garrens Comedy Troupe had their first sellout show — all 319 seats in room 2084 (no longer there) of the Jesse Knight Humanities Building (now the Jesse Knight Building) at Brigham Young University (still called that, for now). We had just started performing two weeks earlier. We achieved the sellout by advertising heavily at the dorms called Deseret Towers (no longer in existence), where two other cast members and I lived. DT was having a big dance the same night as our show, and we put up flyers everywhere imploring people to come see the Garrens before the dan ..read more

Happy New Year! When I started keeping track of everything I watched (2004), I was a freelance writer whose livelihood largely depended on seeing movies, particularly new stuff in theaters. That continued to describe my situation until November 2019, when I took a full-time regular grown-up job writing content for a large religious organization that pays well and on time (which does not describe most freelance gigs). Now I continued to see movies, because I love movies — that’s generally why people become film critics, you know — but there were no longer movies that I HAD to see. My viewing ha ..read more

Hello to the people who are reading this! I hope you are doing well, all things considered. I’m still at my non-movie-related day job, which I like well enough and which I’m especially grateful to have in Times Like These. I came out of retirement to cover the Sundance Film Festival last January (and will do so again in a few weeks), but other than that, I continue to enjoy emeritus status as a film critic. MOVIES I do still watch movies, though — 404 in 2021. That includes 98 movies released in 2021, 16 from Sundance or the Telluride Horror Show (which I went to as a civilian) that will come ..read more

First things first: Here is the latest version of “The General Authorities Song.” And now, the story. Late in the fall of 1995, I was back at BYU after my missionary service (I’d been in Philadelphia) and was trying to think of funny religious-themed things I could write for the Garrens Comedy Troupe. Mormon, Utah, and BYU culture (which are deeply intertwined) had always been targets for us — we were all Latter-day Saints who performed at BYU in Provo for a mostly LDS audience — but it was especially on my mind now because I had just spent two years thinking of little else. First I tinkered ..read more

MOVIES For a long time I’ve aimed to watch approximately one movie a day, averaging around 350 a year. In a typical year as a movie critic, about 200 of those were new releases, films that came out that year. The rest would be about an even mix of first-time watches and movies I’d seen before that had come out before the current year. This year things were different, obviously. It was my first year in non-movie-related employment, meaning I no longer had any obligation to see movies in theaters if I didn’t feel like it. And then the movie theaters closed and movies stopped being released anywa ..read more

Don’t want to read this whole post? OK, it’s kind of rude to just come out and say that, but here’s a summary: – I live in Provo now. – I’m not reviewing movies anymore. – I also stopped doing that movie podcast that you never listened to anyway. – I have a full-time day job now! I like it, especially every other Friday, if you catch my drift ($$$). – I still watch movies, just not professionally. Well. It’s been a funny sort of year, hasn’t it? Let’s catch up. In September 2019, the Before Times, I left my beloved Portland, where I’d lived since 2005, to return to my beloved-in-a-different-wa ..read more

I always thought it was remarkable that I liked Miranda July’s previous films, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and “The Future,” considering her vibe of hippie New Age whimsicality is usually a turnoff for me. Well, my luck ran out here, as I found “Kajillionaire” insufferable. And it sounds so good! It’s about a family of low-rent grifters in Los Angeles, with Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger as the disheveled parents, Evan Rachel Wood as their daughter, named Old Dolio. Everything’s a hustle with this family. They love each other, more or less, but are not demonstrative: Old Dolio has litt ..read more

“Spree” is a title with a contrived double meaning. The movie is about someone who goes on a killing spree, but guess what? He’s also a driver for a rideshare service CALLED Spree (I suppose Uber and Lyft weren’t interested in a promotional deal). What a funny coincidence that the screenwriter made happen! This is a dark satire about a young man named Kurt (Joe Keery) who desperately wants to be an internet “influencer” and acts like he already is one even though his livestreams usually top out at eight or nine viewers. All of that will change, he figures, when he installs cameras in his car a ..read more

We know that Alan Ball, writer of “American Beauty” and creator of “Six Feet Under,” is interested in repressed homosexuality and death. Both are front and center in Ball’s “Uncle Frank,” set in North Carolina in the 1970s with Paul Bettany as the title character, an NYU college professor who is not out to his family but might have to come out when he returns home for his father’s funeral. It’s told from the point of view of Frank’s teenage niece, Beth (Sophia Lillis), seemingly the most open-minded member of the family. The cast is great: Stephen Root as the father, Margo Martindale as Mammaw ..read more

“Possessor” is set in a world where it is possible to transfer your consciousness into someone else’s body and take over that person — “possess” them, if you will. This is achieved via medical implants in the head, and the person being possessed usually has not consented to it. That this comes from writer-director Brandon Cronenberg, son of body-horror master David Cronenberg, gives us some idea of where things are going. Our heroine, Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), works for a shadowy organization that carries out assassinations in this fashion: have the hitperson possess someone, kill the ta ..read more