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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.

Tragedy Girls (2017)

I imagine the pitch for Tragedy Girls being something like, "It's Scream from the killers' perspective!" After twenty-one years and countless imitators, director Tyler MacIntyre and co-writer Chris Lee Hill (working from a screenplay by Justin Olson) stick the landing in a warts-and-all successor to Wes Craven's genre-bending, meta-horror smash. Squeaky-clean high schoolers/social media obsessives Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) build a following with their coverage of the grisly murders plaguing their sleepy little town. Turns out they're the ones doing the killing, and Tragedy Girls presents the audience with a unique challenge: how much clever dialogue; inventive, splatterific deaths; and twisty storytelling can distract us from the fact that these girls are irredeemable psychopaths? MacIntyre and company ratchet up the cruelty from first scene to last, evolving Craven's legacy of movies that are less meant to be enjoyed than feared. And, of course, blogged about.

78/52 (2017)

Mayhem (2017)