Movies I reviewed the past two weeks (Featuring birds, Texas killers, ska-punk pioneers, and human centipedes)

What do The Big Year, Texas Killing Fields, Everyday Sunshine: The Story Of Fishone, and Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) have in common? Not much, but let’s try to make some connections anyway!

At least two of them are films about obsession. In The Big Year, Owen Wilson, Steve Martin, and Jack Black play obsessive birders. In Human Centipede II, some actor I hope never to see again plays a man obsessed with the first Human Centipede movie and determined to do some ass-to-mouth stitching of his own.

I guess Texas Killing Fields, which felt more like a promising TV pilot than a finished film to me, is sort of about obsession, too, albeit of the garden variety cops-and-killers-doggedly-pursue-their-professions variety. Or maybe that’s compulsion. Compulsion certainly figures prominently in Everyday Sunshine: The Story Of Fishbone at first it’s about the compulsion to make music that gripped a bunch of black L.A. kids in the ’80s who wanted to erase the lines between punk, funk, ska and whatever music floated their boat. Then it’s about what happens when a pair of them keep the band going after turmoil and commercial disappointment shakes it up.