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 (1665/0)
Movie Review: 'Mope' is a True Crime Story in the World of Low Rent Porn
Mope is an exceedingly unpleasant pseudo-comedy-drama about the lowest depths of the porn business. Co-written and directed by Lucas Heyne, Mope opens on a porn set with a group of terrifyingly misshapen and desperate men performing an unspeakable act on a willing female porn star. She wants this thing to happen, apparently, but that does not alleviate the horror of this graphic scene, a jarring introduction to this story and to our main characters.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Filthy
Movie Review: 'The Short History of the Long Road'
Parents and children are an area of drama that movies don’t explore enough. The rich layers of life in the parent-child relationship make for wonderful stories. Proof of that concept is the new movie The Short History of the Long Road, an award worthy drama that explores the life of a young woman dealing with the dual traumas of lost and absent parents. Nola, played by the exceptional Sabrina Carpenter, demonstrates beautifully how loss and absence adds up to so much of who she is.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Geeks
Pride Month Movie Review: 'Boy Erased'
Boy Erased is a powerful, infuriating, and deeply compelling work. This 'based on a true story' drama, from writer-actor-director Joel Edgerton, tells a very effective story in a straightforward and properly dramatic fashion. The story happens to tap a deep well of disdain in me, not toward the movie, but toward the subject. As a long time supporter of the LGBTQ community, love to my non-binary friends, Boy Erased made my blood boil just as it intended to.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Artemis Fowl' is Good Enough
The new Disney Plus movie Artemis Fowl was one of the theatrical releases lost to the COVID-19 shutdown of most American movie theaters. The film based on the popular young adult book series of the same title, written and created by Eoin Colfer, has spawned numerous book sequels over the years and has long been sought and awaited as a film franchise. And yet, the movie feels too small and compact to be the start of an epic franchise.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: ESPN 30 for 30 'Long Gone Summer'
The summer of 1998 went from something none of us baseball fans would ever forget, to one that we have all collectively tried to wash away from history. The cloud of steroids and the ugliness of lies and deceit that accompanied hearings in Washington D.C and public battles in the sports media are memories we’d all like to leave behind as much as the summer of '98 itself. It is the memories of bitter arguments among baseball historians and everyday fans that clouds what was once the most magical moment in the history of the sport, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s pursuit of Roger Maris’s single season home run record.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Unbalanced
Movie Review: 'The King of Staten Island' is a Mixed Bag
It’s tempting, as an observer and critic of culture, to attempt to place movies within large contexts. “What does this movie say about insert grand subject here?” That’s not a bad approach per se but when it is applied too liberally, as to ANY movie you see, it doesn’t work so well. Some movies don’t have that kind of ambition or intent. Not every movie is trying to say something important.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: Bruce Lee is Well Remembered in Remarkable 'Be Water'
Imagine being incredible. Think of what it might be like to believe and be able to prove in many ways that you are exceptional. For some of us that will all we'll ever have is an imagining of our own greatness. For Bruce Lee, greatness was evident, it was provable and undeniable. And yet, despite his greatness being obvious to anyone who witnessed him, he was still denied what he should have been assured, worldwide stardom on a scale similar to or exceeding any Hollywood star in history.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: Four Women Shine in 'Shirley'
Have you ever met someone whose mood is capable of controlling the temperature in the room they are in? The Shirley Jackson portrayed by Elisabeth Moss in the new movie, Shirley, is one of those people. Whatever room Shirley is in appears colder when she’s there. Her very being bespeaks a menacing intelligence so present it could bite. Shirley is portrayed here as being so quick witted that she could kill with words.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Geeks
The Inspiring Lynn Shelton: A Look Back at Humpday and Identity
R.I.P Lynn Shelton and thank you for inspiring this essay. On the latest Everyone’s a Critic podcast we paid tribute to writer-director-auteur-iconoclast, Lynn Shelton by making her 2009 movie Humpday our classic for the week. When I first saw Humpday back in 2009 I rejected it immediately as a gimmicky bit of mumblecore nonsense. I was arrogant and brash and rejecting mumblecore was part of my critical posturing, a way of establishing myself against the rise of younger, hipper critics.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Filthy
A Father, A Son, Identity and Back to the Future 3
Back to the Future 3 places me into an odd mindset 30 years later. In its innate nostalgia for the western, Back to the Future 3 took me to a place of examining the things that my father embraced as a young man, the kinds of things I thought that I had rejected in creating a personality separate from my father. In this review/essay, Back to the Future 3 will be the vehicle with which I will examine maturity, childhood, identity and my relationship with my father, abstractly of course, I would need a therapist to tackle the subject directly.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Futurism
Movie Review Throwback: 'Fire Bird' Nicolas Cage Loves a Helicopter
If you thought silly almost parody levels of jingoistic patriotism was just a relic of 1980's action movies, you're not entirely wrong. That said, the genre of fetishistic love for American military might did linger a little ways into the 90's before we all started to fully tire of it. As evidence, here is Fire Birds, a 1990 love letter to American military might that doubles as a right wing thesis statement on how we could have won the war on drugs with super-cool, super-expensive helicopters.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Geeks
To Better Days and My Return to the Movies After COVID-19
Every day, amid the threat of the virus, I find ways to stay positive and think of the future. That's not easy for those of us with pre-existing lung conditions. I have asthma and I live with the specter of COVID-19 and the damage it does to the ability to breathe. It's terrifying, I have been on a ventilator and I know the horror of not catching your breath.
By Sean Patrick4 years ago in Humans