Zach Vasquez

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Zach Vasquez

This week’s Saturday Night Live starts off the same as the last several Mother’s Day episodes have, with members of the cast – Bowen Yang, Marcello Hernández, and Kenan Thompson – standing front and center with their mothers.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Zach Vasquez

The first of the final three episodes of Saturday Night Live’s historic 50th season kick off inside the Oval Office, where Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) celebrates the first 100 days of his second term. In that short time that feels like a much longer, he’s single-handedly managed to help people win elections (“Mostly in Canada”) and signed 147 executive orders.

3 weeks ago | crookedmarquee.com | Zach Vasquez

One of the unexpected pleasures of Ryan Coogler’s recent blockbuster Sinners is how much of it is based in musicology. Coogler sets his vampire siege film in a jook joint in the Mississippi Delta, a foundational locale for both blues—indeed, all forms of American roots music—and Black folklore.

4 weeks ago | crookedmarquee.com | Zach Vasquez

There is a reason that Terry Zwigoff’s brilliant documentary Crumb (1995) isn’t called R. Crumb, despite the fact that its central figure is the legendary comic artist who bears that name. Although the film started out as an intimate, yet straightforward study of the man and his work, over the course of the six years that Zwigoff shot it, it became a movie about the Crumb family, their shared genius and their shared psychoses.

1 month ago | crookedmarquee.com | Zach Vasquez

Studio movies of the last 20 years have been driven and defined by fake nostalgia. Endless remakes and reboots and sequels and prequels and sidequels. Superhero movies, video game movies, toy movies; movies about every true-crime phenomenon or celebrity tragedy. Movies about brand-name consumer goods. Movies about people’s favorite childhood snacks. It’s a dire time for American cinema. As ever, if it has any sort of future, it’s through the independents.