Viewing entries tagged
Bottoms
The world might be falling apart by almost any metric you can imagine, but one thing (maybe the only thing?) that gave me solace this year was the amazing slate of films that 2023 provided. To my mind, 2023 was the best year in cinema since 2007, another banner movie year with an incredibly rich set of releases.
As you’ll see, 2023 offered up a similarly seemingly bottomless well of great cinema.
Director Emma Seligman has made the next great teen sex comedy by parodying all the ones that have come before it. At the same time, Bottoms also wickedly satirizes David Fincher’s Fight Club. It’s unapologetically queer, giddily violent, and subversively hilarious. With her two stars, Rachel Sennott – who helped write the screenplay with Seligman – and Ayo Edebiri, the trio have crafted the kind of comedy that makes you laugh out loud at least once every scene by wielding a gonzo and cutting sense of humor.
If you need any X-mas gift ideas for me this year, here’s one: a custom-made shirt that says, “I went to SXSW in 2023, and all I got was a case of covid.” After successfully avoiding that spikey little bastard for three full years, it finally got me. Unfortunately, that means it got my wife, too, since I didn’t know I was sick until after I returned home. She says she’s not mad at me. I believe her, because, frankly, she’s a better person than I am.
It was probably the one music show I attended at South By that got me sick. It was a small venue, fairly tightly packed, and I didn’t wear a mask at all for it. (My only defense is, after a trip to Ebert Interruptus, Fantastic Fest, and Las Vegas last year, I was clearly under the mistaken assumption that I was invincible.) When Melody, my friend and couch-provider-for-the-week, told me that Tangerine Dream was playing after my last screening for the day, I was all in. I audibly gasped when she told me about the show.
