Screen Slate

Contributions to Screen Slate:

Linda Linda Linda Screen Slate (September 4, 2025)

“Let’s sing an endless song / For this asshole of a world.” Korean exchange student Son (Bae Doona) spits out those words with joyful vitriol toward the end of Linda Linda Linda (2005), a coming-of-age movie in which no one wants to come of age. It’s set in 2004 when Japan was in the middle of its “lost decades” of economic stagnation, so instead of studying for a future that seemed fucked, four high school girls start a punk band, religiously rehearsing The Blue Hearts’ anthem “Linda Linda” (1987) to prep for a local performance. A cult hit in Japan, the film also received a small release in the US, but has been out of circulation here for many years. It’s been easier to find a music video for the L.A. pop-punk band The Linda Lindas than to watch the movie that inspired their name. Thankfully, for its 20th anniversary, Linda Linda Linda has been restored in 4K and is opening in theaters this Friday, September 5th.

Be Careful What You Wish For: A Conversation with Paul W.S. Anderson about In the Lost Lands (March 7, 2025)

In the Lost Lands is the seventh collaboration between the apocalyptically-inclined husband and wife and director-star duo Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich. They met on Resident Evil (2002), constructing innovative ways to decapitate the drooling zombies created by a sadistic multinational conglomerate. Over the course of its brain-spattered six-film franchise run, they become pulp poets laureate of civilizational collapse, working through sci-fi, horror, and monster movie templates to depict the flailing end of humanity.

Half Baked: Totally High + How High 2 (April 20, 2024)

Universal 1440 Entertainment has cornered the market on decades-late sequels to cult stoner comedies. This direct-to-video shingle of NBCUniversal produced How High 2 (2019) eighteen years after the original, and is releasing Half Baked: Totally High (2024) this month, twenty-six years after the first blazed onto screens. 1440 is an IP scavenger for Universal that generates cheaply made DTV sequels and prequels for hits like American Pie and Bring It On, but also for vaguely remembered bombs like Bulletproof (1996) and R.I.P.D. (2013). They also produced a “reimagining” of The River Wild in 2023 starring ex-SNLer Taran Killam. I imagine that their greenlight process is to get super high and watch YouTube clips from random MTV Movie Awards, funding a sequel to whatever cracks them up. I urge more studios to take up this practice.

Action Item: iQIYI (February 25, 2024)

As the big US streamers continue to raise prices, add commercials, and winnow their offerings down to anemic, algorithmically-determined “originals,” there are vanishingly few reasons to subscribe. While it’s a satisfying dopamine hit to cancel Net/Max/Cock and instead burn through your Tubi queue (next up for me, the Meatloaf kids comedy To Catch a Yeti,1995), there are other routes open to the adventurous viewer. For example, I have spent 2024 burning through Chinese direct-to-video action movies via iQIYI.

Karnan (May 24, 2021)

Writer-director Mari Selvaraj calls Karnan (2021) a “lifestyle movie”, telling Film Companion it would be “about the simple and joyful life of ordinary people.” It was an unusual way to promote a big-budget Tamil melodrama led by megastar Dhanush, especially one promoted with images of him brandishing a giant sword astride a mighty steed. And yet for the majority of its runtime, Karnan does indeed focus on the everyday life of a small village in Tamil Nadu, devoting segments to its religious ceremonies, sporting events, and the halting way in which a donkey with its forelegs tied together can still hop down a path. This attention to detail accumulates into an entire portrait of the village, one that is threatened with collapse when a riot breaks out over the lack of bus service to their poverty-stricken locale.