Sean Patrick
Bio
Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.
Stories (1977)
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Classic Movie Review: 'Female Trouble'
John Waters has become an icon of those with eclectic tastes. Waters is a fascinating personality and artist whose fame as an iconoclast may at last have surpassed his fame as a filmmaker. He’s written a number of bestselling books based almost entirely on his style and personality. Film is almost secondary to who John Waters has become in popular culture. This is not to say that his movies are or should be forgotten, it’s more an indication of how the art of John Waters has evolved.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Babysplitters' Can't Even Pander well
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories but if I were to subscribe to one, it would be one in which filmmakers were inculcated to reinforce traditional family dynamics. Any time a movie attempts to deviate from the norm and present unconventional types of sexual or familial dynamics, you know that this is merely a Trojan horse and that by the end, the characters will be in their loving, two person, hetero-normative relationship with kids that are genetically their own.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Families
Classic Movie Review: 'Some Like it Hot'
If you told me that I could only save one legendary film director’s career and the rest were to be destroyed, I would probably choose to save Billy Wilder’s remarkable catalog. Don’t get me wrong, I would miss Alfred Hitchcock or Michael Curtiz or Ernst Lubitsch but Wilder’s catalog has movies I simply cannot live without. The Seven Year Itch, The Apartment, Ace in the Hole, and Some Like It Hot are movies I could not think of losing forever.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Dirt Music' is a Hidden Gem of 2020
There is no reason to deny it, I am a sucker for a romantic melodrama with a great soundtrack. Dirt Music, the new movie from director Gregor Jordan (Ned Kelly) and starring Garrett Hedlund and Kelly McDonald, is exactly that, a terrific romantic melodrama with a wonderful soundtrack of folksy acoustic tracks. I adored every single moment of this movie, even as I could feel the plot mechanics click-click-clicking away.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Humans
Documentary Review: 'Flannery' Inside the Life of a Southern Gothic Legend
Part of the obsession many have with author Flannery O’Connor is in the way she mixes her Catholicism with wildly entertaining and often profane characters. O’Connor’s colorful characters leapt off the page and yet, there is a wholesome, southern quality to them that grounds those characters in a reality that is remarkably relatable for those familiar with the mid-20th century American south and endearingly quirky for us northerners.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'The Sunlit Night' is Charming and Quirky
The Sunlit Night is just quirky and good natured enough to work. Star Jenny Slate plays an artist seeking a voice who earns an apprenticeship that takes her to the farthest northern point of Norway. The romantic setting, oddball sense of humor and offbeat characters are kind of my jam. It may not be for everyone, but weird characters in a unique setting is sometimes just enough to get me to recommend a movie.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Easy Does It' is a Confused Homage to 70s Cinema
Easy Does It is a pointless meander through pretentious filmmaking homage couched in down home, redneck posing. Writer-director Will Addison sets out to critique the American dream via a dark comic crime/road movie and misses in just about every way you can imagine. Unfunny, downright dreary, at times, and visually chaotic, Easy Does It is a slog to get through as the story desperately searches for a point.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
The Iconography of Bogart and Bacall
The Big Sleep is the classic on this week's Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast. We haven’t passed the title card and I am hooked by The Big Sleep. So massive and singular were Bogart and Bacall that Director Howard Hawks flashes up a silhouette of Bogart lighting Bacall’s cigarette and he knows that we know what we are seeing. This duo is so iconic that something as simple as a man lighting a woman’s cigarette is a recognizable image, a signifier of Bogart and Bacall’s couples aesthetic.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Greyhound' is Relentlessly Exciting
Greyhound is an exciting, fast paced, action movie written by Tom Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider, a director not exactly known for fast paced action. Schneider directed the slow paced, not particularly well remembered Get Low, about a character played by Robert Duvall as a man struggling to plan his own death and burial. Get Low is actually a pretty good movie but it doesn’t exactly prepare you for the whipsaw action of Greyhound.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Serve
Documentary Review: 'Denise Ho: Becoming the Music'
What is it about American pop stars? Why is it always so awkward when they step up and attempt to say something important? I have a theory: it’s our fault. We, the audience, the consumer, the fan, demand that our pop stars be relatable, they need to have themes that resonate on the widest possible spectrum. If an artist takes a confident stand on an issue, we become uncomfortable.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Beat
Movie Review: 'The Tobacconist'
The Tobacconist is yet another in a long line of dreary dramas about pre-World War 2 Europe. Ostensibly a coming of age story, The Tobacconist takes us to Austria circa 1938, just before the arrival of the Germans and the coming of age of a strange young man named Franz Huchel (Simon Morze). Franz has an affinity for being underwater. Repeatedly, Franz’s mother finds him hiding underwater holding his breath, be it in a lake or in a barrel holding a dead animal. Why? Who the hell knows.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
Classic Movie Review: 'They Live' is John Carpenter at His Best
As a film critic one of my most reviled and despised opinions is that I don't care for John Carpenter’s 1978 horror movie Halloween. I find the film to be amateurish, if I may be frank, with an almost absurd level of over-praise for its filmmaking. Thankfully, my disdain for Halloween was not enough to sour me on the work of John Carpenter as a whole. I was lucky that I stuck with Carpenter as movies like The Fog, Escape from New York and the movie I am writing about today, 1988’s They Live, are genuinely brilliant movies, far more worthy of praise than Halloween.
By Sean Patrick6 years ago in Geeks
