leebutler Editorial

Best Performances of 2024

Every year it’s remarkable how much a good performance can salvage a film. Your film can be a boring waste of time but a single great performance can make it worth watching. Every year film nerds love guessing who is going to be given the awards for Acting, those of us into horror are often left disappointed because our faves don’t win, but lists like this let us throw a tiny bit of praise out into the void and so that’s what we’re going to do here.

In normal years this list would be 20 entries long but this isn’t a normal year, I didn’t see my normal amount of films so this is only going to be 10 entries long but god damn are these some memorable entries. 1 entry per film, no honourable mentions this time, here we go.

Continue reading “Best Performances of 2024” →
leebutler Drama, Horror, Review

The Substance (2024) – Substantially Brilliant

Released: 19th September
Seen: 19th October

In April 2015, the show Inside Amy Schumer aired an episode titled “Last Fuckable Day” which contained a sketch featuring Amy alongside iconic actresses Tina Fey, Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette. In the sketch Amy comes upon Tina, Julia and Patricia celebrating Julia’s Last Fuckable Day, the day that an actress goes from being considered fuckable to just being considered an elderly woman reserved for mother roles. It’s a hilarious and scathing indictment of the very real agist sexism that pervades the entertainment industry and how it treats women. Over the years there’s been several ways to talk about the culture’s obsession with looks, youth and fuckability in the media. Still, for the longest time the strongest indictment I saw came from this silly mid-2010’s sketch comedy series… and now we have The Substance, proving that horror is still the best genre for exploring complex concepts like this.

Continue reading “The Substance (2024) – Substantially Brilliant” →
leebutler Uncategorized

IO (2019) – Zzz

Released: 18th January
Seen: 22nd January

IO Info.png

 

There is nothing on this earth that is quite as boring as spending time watching paint dry. The very concept is used as a mocking description of boredom, an understandable comparison since the idea of enduring the sight of a wall covered in a beige coloured liquid comprised of pigment, binder and solvent until that liquid becomes a solid is an interminably long one as paint can take a very large amount of time to lose its liquid quality. This concept is a cousin to a similar explanation of boredom that we call “Watching Grass Grow”, both ideas suggesting just staring at something that does something so slowly that it’s almost impossible for the naked eye to witness it happening. I would like to also include the phrase “Watching the movie IO” as a new descriptive term for boredom.

Continue reading “IO (2019) – Zzz” →