The View From The Mountain

Zoë Kravitz, the future Catwoman, stars in Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film. Kravitz plays an agoraphobic young woman who’s living through the pandemic in Seattle. She works for a tech company, fixing “bugs” that pop up in the code of Kimi, an Alexa-like computer assistant. Whenever Kimi mishears someone asking for something, or does something in error, it’s up to Kravitz’s character, Angela Childs, to make a note of what went wrong and how to fix it. This is a well-paying tech job that Angela does in her spacious, luxury apartment and she’s as happy as a clam. That is, until Angela hears something on a particular audio file, where Kimi was accidentally switched on while people were having a severe argument in the background. But as Angela cleans up the audio, she discovers to her horror that what initially sounded like an argument turns out to be a murder that Kimi had innocently recorded. Clocking in at just 90 minutes, Kim...

Even as a kid, I was never that crazy about werewolves. A monster that only appeared during the full moon seemed like a pretty easy creature to beat. Just like how sharks stayed in the ocean, rendering them impotent as long as you stayed out of the water, werewolves could also be easily avoided just by staying inside during nights of the full moon. It didn’t matter what the werewolf movie was--from the original Wolfman, to An American Werewolf in London--werewolf movies never really held an allure for me. But then The Howling was released. Director Joe Dante’s Little Werewolf That Could was released in 1981, and in honor of it being released in 4K this month, I decided to revisit The Howling. I first watched it on video (VHS!) back in the day, and enjoyed it. The main reason was because it was the first werewolf film that I saw that presented the big, furry bastards with a twist: they could change into a wolf any time they wanted; to hell with waiti...