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Posts Tagged ‘Utah’

Riddle of Fire

Thursday, June 20th, 2024

RIDDLE OF FIRE is a distinct and very funny movie about three hellraising dirt bike rider kids named Alice (Phoebe Ferro), Hazel (Charlie Stover) and Jodie (Skyler Peters). Their day long quest to get a blueberry pie for Hazel and Jodie’s sick mother (Danielle Hoetmer, bit part in one episode of every TV show) so they can play video games strands them deep in the woods with a family/cult of witchcraft-practicing poachers called the Enchanted Blade Gang. This takes place in rural Ribbon, Wyoming, but it’s filmed in Park City, Utah by rookie feature director Weston Razooli, who grew up there.

The kids are introduced hiding behind ski masks, but with their names written on the racing plates of their bikes. There’s a montage of loading and assembling their paint guns, the attention to the metal clinks and air canister pffts as fetishistic as any actual-gun preparation sequence you’ve ever seen. Now armed, they break into a warehouse and pull some ninja shit to steal an Otomo Angel video game system. When they’re caught by a worker, Hazel distracts him with a handful of gummi worms. (read the rest of this shit…)

Rubin & Ed

Thursday, June 23rd, 2022

“It’s gonna get weird now, isn’t it?”


I know I’m way behind on this summer retrospective, still doing May releases well into June, but some new information and my perfection-ish-ism have forced me to skip back a little bit. It turns out there was another lowbrow comedy released in May (approximately May 15th) but in a limited enough capacity that it didn’t show up on any of the lists I used for research. Unlike ENCINO MAN this is one that I did see – more than once – after it came out on video, and it’s a better representation of what I personally was into at the time. But I can’t argue whether it’s better or worse than ENCINO MAN. That is for each individual patron of the arts to decide for themselves. What’s relevant here is that it’s very on brand for Weird Summer. Arguably too much so. (read the rest of this shit…)