Novocaine review – Jack Quaid is put through the grinder in ultraviolent action comedy

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A man’s inability to feel pain comes in handy in this extravagantly gory bank heist caper Risk-averse San Diego assistant bank manager Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) lives a cautious, cotton wool-wrapped life. It’s not that he’s afraid of getting hurt. Quite the opposite, since a rare genetic abnormality means he’s unable to feel pain. Rather, Nathan is concerned that because of his sensory quirk he risks inadvertently injuring himself. When the girl of his dreams, sparky fellow bank employee Sherry (Amber Midthunder), is abducted during a heist, and Nathan embarks on an off-the-cuff rescue mission, his unusual condition suddenly comes in handy. While Nathan may feel no pain, the audience certainly does: this is an amped-up, cartoonish blitzkrieg of ultraviolence and – fair warning – a bit of an endurance test if deep-fried fingers and snapped bones give you the ick. Directors Robert Olsen and Dan Berk take a sadistic glee in dreaming up extravagant horrors to inflict on their irrepressib...
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‘He was always voraciously watching’: Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist

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The Oscar-winning director has donated over 50 storage boxes of tapes that show a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s

In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.

Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.

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