Jake Cole

Atlanta

Writer at Freelance

Writer at Slant Magazine

Like the phoenix from the ashes. Writing at @Slant_Magazine, @hyperallergic, others.

Articles

A Brilliantly Staged, Subtext-Rich Vampire Movie

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Set in 1930s Mississippi, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners pulls liberally from the folklore surrounding that period’s explosion of blues talent in the Delta area. Musicians of the time, crushed by the weight of Jim Crow and the Great Depression, generally plied their wares in juke joints, and the film centers on one such establishment newly acquired by identical twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), dubbed the Smokestack Twins.
'Two Films by Claude Berri' Blu-ray Review

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

The first of Claude Berri’s two-film adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s novel The Water of the Hills, Jean de Florette begins in the aftermath of World War I, though it would be easy not to realize it. The Provençal countryside is a vestige of the Old World not yet swept away by the conflict. People still get around mostly by horse and wagon, wear clothes knit by locals, and engage in farming and craftwork methods that have surely remained unchanged for centuries.
The Criterion Collection

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Chris Cabin |Jake Cole

The first time Marilyn Monroe, as the perfectly named Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, walks onto the screen in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, even the train—with a whistle of steam—can’t resist catcalling her. Heading off to front the Sweet Sues, an all-girl brass band starting a residency as the house band at a posh Florida hotel, Sugar Kane has vowed to land a rich hubby, and the way she retrieves a flask of whiskey from her garter, it’s hard to imagine any man passing up the opportunity.
'Merry-Go-Round' Blu-ray Review: Flicker Alley

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

The placement of Erich von Stroheim’s name above Rupert Julian’s on the cover of Flicker Alley’s release of Merry-Go-Round is mostly a marketing strategy capitalizing on von Stroheim’s auteurist bona fides. The film was to be von Stroheim’s next project after Foolish Wives, but what little goodwill remained between him and studio heads after that production ran wildly over time and budget soon evaporated during the making of Merry-Go-Round.
A Spirited Love Letter to Late-'80s Oakland

3 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Freaky Tales is an ode to 1987 Oakland rife with references to (and cameos by) various music and sports icons of the city’s underdog era.
'The Brutalist' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: A24

4 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer |Jake Cole

Even though it also concerns an architect fighting entrenched elites to achieve his singular vision, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist doesn’t bow before the altar of The Fountainhead. Yet he takes a gauntlet thrown down early in King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel—no place originally exists in architecture, and the past cannot be improved upon—more seriously than either Vidor or Rand.
'Godzilla vs. Biollante' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Ômori Kazuki’s Godzilla vs. Biollante opens immediately after the events depicted in 1984’s The Return of Godzilla, showing agents from two private biomedical firms descending on the site of Godzilla’s carnage to collect his cells for genetic research. Not merely content to raid the scene, these competing companies sic mercenaries on each other to ensure a monopoly on future bioengineering breakthroughs.
The Criterion Collection

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Jake Cole

There’s a sentimental heart to Michael Mann’s films, as much as his fans might not like to hear about it. Run a movie like Heat or Thief alongside the finest crime novels of the same bygone era Mann taps as fuel for his ongoing, elegiac meta-saga on heist men, bag men, and hit men. Run them against key works by Westlake, Chandler, Hammett, or Bezzerides—authors whose heroes and antiheroes are all hard, bad edges.
The Criterion Collection

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Eric Henderson |Jake Cole

Awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival amid much mouth-frothing from the American press over its alleged communist credentials, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear now seems much less like a potboiler spin on Salt of the Earth and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.
The Criterion Collection

1 month ago | shorturl.at | Jake Cole

Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy is a road movie on opioids. Its characters are nomadic drug addicts who roam the Pacific Northwest in search of pharmacies and hospitals to raid, but the thrill they get from thieving is as fleeting and mocking as the highs they get from speed and other drugs. The leader of this pack is Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon), who’s developed a kind of gambler’s intuition about their robberies.