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Welcome to Kicking the Seat!

Ian Simmons launched Kicking the Seat in 2009, one week after seeing Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. His wife proposed blogging as a healthier outlet for his anger than red-faced, twenty-minute tirades (Ian is no longer allowed to drive home from the movies).

The Kicking the Seat Podcast followed three years later and, despite its “undiscovered gem” status, Ian thoroughly enjoys hosting film critic discussions, creating themed shows, and interviewing such luminaries as Gaspar NoéRachel BrosnahanAmy Seimetz, and Richard Dreyfuss.

Ian is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He also has a family, a day job, and conflicted feelings about referring to himself in the third person.

Free Fire (2017)

Thanks to the aughts, “pop culture junky” has morphed from a cute phrase into the diagnosis of acute, collective nostalgia addiction. Is there a better example of art writhing and dying before our glassy eyes than Free Fire, Ben Wheatley’s eightieth-generation Xerox of the Tarantino/Ritchie aesthetic? Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A group of chatty criminals gathers at a warehouse. One of them is a loose cannon who steers the whole deal south in a flash of violence. Some are not who they appear to be. Everyone dies—except the weasel who grabs the money and runs, just as police arrive. Wheatley clumsily substitutes wardrobe for character while playing human misery exclusively for laughs, unwittingly (and unwittily) revealing the limited vocabulary with which he delivers a cannibalized, nothing message. It's tempting to write Free Fire off as hollow, first-person-shooter filmmaking. But that would imply the film is about people.

 

Listen to Kicking the Seat Podcast #216 for Ian's high-caliber Free Fire chat with Keeping it Reel's David Fowlie!

The Fate of the Furious (2017)

Female Trouble (1974)