Thoughts on To Sleep With Anger

    On Criterion yesterday, I watched To Sleep With Anger, a 1990 black comedy written and directed by Charles Burnett, and starring Danny Glover as Harry, a charming, easygoing man who comes to visit his old friends, Gideon (Paul Butler) and Suzie (Mary Alice), who live in South Central L.A. after having moved from the South. They haven’t seen him in years, and invite him to stay, and his seemingly gentle presence hides his true intent as an agent of chaos, as he bears witness to the family strifes as Gideon and Suzie keep having to take care of their young grandson well into the evening while his parents Samuel, or “Babe Brother” (Richard Lee Brooks) and Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph) work throughout the day.

    Samuel resents that his dad calls him “boy” in a demeaning way and compares him to his brother Junior (Carl Lumbly). There’s a lot of inter generational conflict between the grandparents who moved from the South during the Great Migration and their children who grew up in L.A.

    And Harry, hinting at practicing in witchcraft, just sits back and lets the chaos flow, turning people against each other, so much that Suzie and Hattie (Ethel Ayler) suspect him of being insincere and call him out on his phoniness, Hattie stating “You ain't worth the salt you put in greens.”

    I really liked this movie, it was messy and funny and full of family drama while adding in some magical realism influence.

Thoughts on Bones and All

    On Criterion on Saturday, I watched Bones and All, a 2022 romantic horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by David Kajganich, adapted from the novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. The film stars Taylor Russell as a teen girl named Maren in 1988 Virginia, who is prone to cannibalism from since she was a child. When she nearly eats a girl’s finger off at a sleepover, she and her father (André Holland) quickly move, then she wakes up to find that he’s abandoned her, leaving behind an audiotape about how he’s always known what she is, and tried to protect her, but now she’s on her own.

    So she becomes a drifter in Middle America, meeting Sully (Mark Rylance), a fellow cannibal, or “eater,” who essentially sniffed her out as one of his own, and brings her to eat a dying old woman in a house, establishing rules about cannibalism. Maren goes along with it, but is horrified by her own behavior, and continues on, and meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a fellow young drifter and eater, and they travel together, building a romance, and Maren struggles with trying to have a moral line with her condition, while Lee is more prone to killing to survive.

    It’s an interesting movie that feels like an allegory for drug addiction, as the characters have their cycles of eating someone and feeling self hatred afterwards, seeking out each other as a family to not feel alone, and trying to have a moral code that they find hard to stick by as their hunger grows more.

    Taylor Russell is really great in this, in playing the vulnerability of Maren, and Chalamet is really good at playing a seemingly romanticized version of the rebel boyfriend who has a violent past, but it’s fine as long as the girlfriend isn’t hurt, which is a fantasy. Both have this deep chemistry together in their roles, and I enjoyed watching them.

    There are brief cameos from Jessica Harper, David Gordon Green, and Chloë Sevigny, and Mark Rylance shines as playing a creepy “mentor” who is very lonely, but deeply damaged from his condition.

    I really liked this movie a lot, and liked it as a road movie with a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross film score, and how it both felt romantic and gory at the same time.

Thoughts on The Mastermind

    At the Angelika Film Center last week, I went to see The Mastermind, a 2025 heist film written and directed by Kelly Reichardt. The film is loosely based on a 1972 heist of the Worcester Art Museum, while being inspired by the heist films of Jean-Pierre Melville, known for films like Bob le flambeur (1956) and Le Samouraï (1967). The film centers on James Blaine "J.B." Mooney (Josh O'Connor), an unemployed carpenter who lives with his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two young sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) in Framingham, MA, in the early 1970s, and plots to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from a small local museum that he frequents, where one of the guards is frequently sleeping while on duty. He tests the limits in the opening sequence, where, while one of his sons is rattling off trivia facts to his mom, J.B. lifts open a protective case and pockets a small figurine, and keeps his distance from his family in the museum, pretending not to know them until he joins them outside.

    Since he's a regular at the museum, he doesn't want to be the one in the museum stealing the paintings, so he arranges a crew to pull off the heist. He borrows money from his mother (Hope Davis), who is skeptical that he will pay it back since he's already borrowed money before, under the pretense of using it for work so he can pay the men for the heist job. One man backs out of being the getaway driver, so J.B. acts as the driver, while the other two men, without any sense of discreetness, bust into the museum during the day with pantyhose on their heads to brazenly steal paintings off the wall and threaten a teenage girl with a gun and beat up a security guard.

    Despite the public nature of the crime, J.B. displays one of the stolen paintings in his living room, and hides the other paintings in the loft of a barn. But police are inquiring his family, one of the thieves is arrested for a bank robbery, and J.B's judge father (Bill Camp) criticizes the thieves for their rookie mistakes and lack of ambition. Soon, it becomes more apparent that J.B. will be found out as the ringleader of the crime, and he doesn't have any real follow-up plans for after the heist is completed.

    I liked how this film is very slow-paced, but still quietly funny, and how O'Connor could be captivating in playing a character who seems boring on the surface, but is this fascinatingly inept loser. The film's backdrop is set against the Vietnam War and counterculture movement, where J.B. is rebelling against his family's middle-class background by doing something wild and exciting, but doesn't think of other options in his life or what to do afterwards. He takes advantage of his wife and kids, expecting them to be understanding, as well as borrows money from his mother, knowing he won't bother to try to pay her back. He takes advantage of the women in his life, assuming they'll have his back and be his support to his status as a privileged white man.

    I was happy to see Gaby Hoffmann in a small supporting role as Maude, J.B.'s art school friend and wife of his friend Fred (John Magaro). She has this wryness and bullshit-detector vibe to her that I really liked, and when J.B. briefly stays at their home while on the run from his crime, she does call him out on putting her and Fred at risk for harboring a fugitive, and makes him leave the next day to avoid taking further advantage of them. Hoffmann doesn't act too often anymore, although this year she also appears in the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere as Springsteen's mother Adele, so it's nice to see her whenever she pops up in something.

    The film has a great score with snappy jazz music composed by Rob Mazurek, I really dug the music throughout the film.

    Reichardt has always been good at finding the humor in small moments in life, and doing introspective character studies in her films, like in First Cow (2019) Certain Women (2016), and Meek's Cutoff (2010). She has a very special and unique touch to her work that I've always appreciated, and I was happy to check out her latest film. 

    

Thoughts on If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

    At the Angelika Film Center yesterday, I went to see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, a 2025 psychological horror film written and directed by Mary Bronstein. The film stars Rose Byrne as Linda, a therapist who is struggling with a lot of stress and mental anguish. Her daughter (Delaney Quinn), whose name is never given and whose face is always offscreen, has a mysterious illness where she uses a feeding tube in her stomach at night, and Linda is pressured by her daughter's doctor to make sure she makes her goal weight of 50 lbs by a deadline so that the tube can be removed. Dr. Spring (Bronstein) repeatedly tells her to come in for meetings, with the threat that if Linda isn't reaching those goals, that the care for her daughter will be re-assessed. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater, mostly heard through phone calls) is away on a work trip, and only calls her to criticize her and complain, and treats her as if she just sits on her butt all day as a therapist and doesn't do real work.

    Things get worse when the family's Montauk apartment floods from a collapse in the bedroom ceiling, and Linda and her daughter must stay in a motel. Through this catastrophe, Linda is trying to manage her job as a therapist, with a patient (Danielle Macdonald) who brings her baby to sessions because she's afraid of leaving her child alone or being seen as a bad mother; seeing her own therapist (Conan O'Brien), who is unhelpful and sees her as a mental drain; trying to get her daughter, who frequently complains and whines off-camera, to behave; fielding calls from Dr. Spring, fielding calls from her husband; calling to get the ceiling fixed and being given the runaround and hung up on, and picturing the hole in the ceiling as getting bigger and deeper and more cavernous, a metaphor for her own deteriorating mental and psychological state.

    The film is unsettling to watch, from both the sound design that drove up the tension, and the tight close-ups on Byrne's face in the first few scenes of the film, where her daughter and the doctor are heard off-camera, and setting the mood with lines about how her daughter sees her mother as putty that she can stretch, and Linda refuting that claim, despite all of her sacrifices. Byrne is fantastic in playing a woman who is being pushed to her limits, pressured by external voices to do everything right, and blamed for anything going wrong. She unwinds at night by leaving her daughter alone in the motel room to go get wine at the motel shop, where the clerk (Ivy Wolk) is snarky about not selling her wine past 2 AM, and develops an almost-friendship with the motel superintendent James (A$AP Rocky), whose calm demeanor helps her in her time of chaos.

    I felt anxious watching the film, jumping a little bit at a couple of early scares with the collapsing ceiling, and felt for Linda being pulled in different directions and wanting to snap. This film is listed as a comedy-drama, but it felt more like a horror film to me. It doesn't feel like a film I'd watch again because of its intensity, but I enjoyed being in the theater and feeling stuck in the madness of the same character, the theater like the black hole like she imagined her dwindling psyche to be.

Thoughts on Something Wicked This Way Comes

 Last month for my book club, I read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, his 1962 novel about an eerie carnival that comes to a small town in the 1930s and lures people in with winning prizes and promises of riches and youth, but at the price of their souls. The book focuses on two boys, Jim and Will, who are suspicious of the carnival and the effect it has on the townspeople, and Will's father, Charles Halloway, feels anxiety about his older age at 54 but doesn't trust the carnival either. It's a good book that, while definitely of its time (the book treats being 54 like being 84, Charles keeps acting like he's too old for his young son, and the book sidelines a lot of female characters as less important to the story), was interesting to read for its foreboding sense of dread, especially with the carnival leader, Mr. Dark, who seems more like a vampire feeding on the town's hopes and dreams.

    The book was dedicated to Gene Kelly, and there was an author's note written by Ray Bradbury decades after the book came out, talking about how he became friends with Gene Kelly through a mutual friend, and he wrote a treatment of one of his older short stories and gave it to Gene to shop around his film contacts in the 1950s. No film came of it at the time, but Bradbury decided to make it into a novel, and published it in 1962. In 1983, it became a film directed by Jack Clayton, and produced by Disney, during a time when they were having financial difficulties and experimenting with making darker films for children, like this one, Watcher in the Woods, and The Black Cauldron, none of which did well at the box office.

    At the time of the book club meeting, I said that the film wasn't streaming online, and that it is less accessible now. Then this month, one of my friends told me it's now streaming on Disney Plus, and this is the first time it's been streaming anywhere. So I watched it, to compare with the book. The movie starred Jason Robards as Mr. Halloway, who was made into a librarian instead of a library janitor like the book, and Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark. Jim and Will were played by Shawn Carson and Vidal Peterson. The film is 90 minutes long, and feels more like a TV movie than one in theaters. I like that, since it takes place in October, it has a fitting autumn feeling, with cool, crisp weather, fall leaves, a pumpkin patch, and carnival ghouls that feel very Halloween-y.

    It's mostly faithful to the book, with an adapted screenplay by Bradbury, with some changes, like how Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield) the middle-aged teacher in the book is turned into a child and her fate is unknown, whereas in the movie she is turned into a pretty young woman but made blind (Sharan Lea), and seems to be stuck that way at the end. I liked how the haunted carousel, which can make someone older or younger depending on which direction it rides in, was used to nightmare effects in the finale, with the demise of Mr. Dark in a way that seemed intense for a children's film at the time.

    I figured Jason Robards was older than 54, and I was right, he was 60 at the time of filming, which made it seem even less likely that he'd have a child-aged son. The boys in the book were on the cusp of turning 14, but seem younger in the movie, like around 10 or 11. I really liked Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, he really sank into this quiet but malevolent character where he's very patient but there's a menace underneath his clipped words. And I didn't know until later on that Pam Grier played the Dust Witch, she was unrecognizable under the makeup and veil, but had a seductive voice as she slows down Mr. Halloway's heartbeat to give him a taste of what death will be like.

    I'm not as into this work by Bradbury as I am by "All Summer in a Day," which was my introduction to his writing in junior high that made an impact on me, in both identifying with his outcast lead girl character and getting into sci-fi and speculative fiction, though I can also credit Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time for doing that too. But I enjoyed reading the book and seeing the film adaptation, and making my own compare and contrasts.

Thoughts on Fairyland

     At the Angelika Film Center this week, I went to see Fairyland, a 2023 coming-of-age drama written and directed by Andrew Durham, based on Alysia Abbott's memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of my Father. The film is about Alysia as a child (Nessa Dougherty) being raised by her widower father, Steve Abbott (Scoot McNairy), a writer and activist, after the death of her mother in a car accident in 1973 when Alysia was 5. Her dad, who is gay, move to San Francisco and live in a house with several others queer artists and writers, where her father can be more open with his sexuality and not feel closeted like before. When Alysia asks him why he only has boyfriends now and no girlfriends, he gives a simple pat answer of "Because your mother was the only girl I loved and I could never love another girl after her." 

    Alysia grows up in the house with revolving roommates, getting to know people like Paulette (Maria Bakalova), essentially the den mothers; Johnny (Ryan Thurston), a cisgender gay Black man who likes wearing women's clothes, and Eddie (Cody Fern), who casually dates Steve for awhile. Alysia is often left to her own independence by her father, much like a typical Gen-X latchkey kid, where he assumes that at 5 years old she can take the bus by herself and get home, or stay up late by herself at home while he's out at bars picking up guys to bring home. Steve isn't prepared to be a single dad, but didn't want to give up care of his child to his mother in-law Munca (Geena Davis) and feel like an absentee parent to a child who just lost her mother. So he raises his daughter with more freedom and independence to counter the repressive and punishment-based childhood he had as a closeted gay kid.

    The film spans between 1973 and circa 1987, as Alysia grows up into an 80s punk teen (Emilia Jones), and keeps her dad's sexuality a secret from her friends, who are casually homophobic, as well in a culture where the AIDS crisis is robbing the gay community of its members, and Alysia feels resentful of her father's laissez-faire attitude towards her, wanting more structure and balance. She chooses to go to NYU to live far from her father, and even gets to study abroad in Paris and have a boyfriend, but when her father writes her with the news that he has contracted HIV and wants her to take care of him, she flies back home, feeling angry that her father now needs her to take care of him when he wasn't there for her, and cutting her studies and abroad trip short.

    I liked how the film felt complicated, and that Steve was trying to balance having his young life as a gay writer and activist with his friends and community, while also trying to care for his daughter in the best way that he knew how. I liked how Alysia didn't hate her father, but resented having to raise herself and be more the parent than he was. I liked how the film depicted the time of 1970s and 1980s San Francisco, and shifts in the free acceptance of the gay community to the shunning and loneliness during the AIDS crisis. The film depicts activists who cared for young gay men with AIDS who didn't have family to support them, like when Steve and Alysia visit a friend of his who is in hospice, in a local house run by community members, not by formal medical staffs, who would treat AIDS as if it was contagious and stigmatize those who had it. 

    The film is a great depiction of love and resilience in the face of tragedy, and I liked the close bond between Steven and Alysia, working well with McNairy as Steven and both Dougherty and Jones as the younger and older versions of Alysia. It was nice seeing Geena Davis in a rare acting performance as Alysia's grandmother Munca, and Adam Lambert has a small supporting role as Steven's friend Charlie.

    I felt emotionally touched by this film, and thought it was quite good.

Thoughts on A Chinese Ghost Story

    On Criterion, I watched A Chinese Ghost Story, a 1987 Hong Kong folklore horror film directed by Ching Siu-Tung and written by Tuen Kai Chi. The film stars Leslie Cheung as a debt collector named Ning Choi-san, who goes to a rural town to collect debts, but is unable to collect the money, especially when his book of debt becomes wet and unreadable, thus allowing a shop owner to claim he doesn't owe money if his name can't be read in it. He is also dodging a group of men trying to capture fugitives for the reward money, putting up the posters of the illustrations of the fugitive up against random men, trying to match them.

    With no money and nowhere else to go, Choi-san is told to take shelter at a deserted temple in a forest outside of town, where everyone assumes he will be mauled by wolves on his way there. He meets a beautiful and mysterious woman named Nip Siu-sin (Joey Wong), and immediately falls in love with her. But her secret is that she is a ghost, and she is bound to a demon, the Tree Demoness, who forces her to seduce young men so that the demon can rob them of their lifeforce. She keeps pushing Choi-san away, trying to save him from that same fate, but he is determined to be with her. 

    Choi-san gets the help of a Taoist priest and swordsman, Yin Chik-ha (Wu Ma), who told him that the people in the temple are ghosts, and Chik-ha wants to banish Siu-sin's spirit because she isn't human and doesn't want Choi-san pining for her. But they work together to save Siu-sin's soul from being bound to the Tree Demoness by moving her remains from the foot of the tree that the demoness resides in, hoping to free her to the afterlife.

    I really liked this movie a lot. It was the first of a trilogy, and I liked how it mixed wushu stunt work, folklore, horror, and goofy comedy. It had a lot of influence from The Evil Dead, with the tree demon attacking with her branches, as well as the camera zooming as the POV of the demon racing to attack a frightened victim. I liked the windy effects during the fight scenes, the blue lighting, the stop- motion zombie skeletons, and the romantic love story at the center of the film.

    There's a particularly fun sequence where Siu-sin is trying to hide Choi-san in a bath when the demoness and other young ghost women come in, and he keeps peeking out to take breaths of air, and she has to prevent others from seeing him, and the back and forth ultimately leads to an underwater kiss that Siu-Sin does to hide Choi-san, by dipping forward into the water to push him down, and it's very sexy and romantic, one of the standout moments of the film.

    Leslie Cheung unfortunately died by suicide at age 46 in 2003, and he was a wonderful actor and singer in Hong Kong and Chinese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. I heard of him through watching Farewell My Concubine (1993), directed by Chen Kaige, a love triangle story between three young Peking Opera performers (Leung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li) in early to mid-20th century China, and thought it was a stunning and beautifully sad film. I also liked him in Happy Together (1997), a Hong Kong gay romantic drama directed by Wong Kar-wai and starring Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, that felt both very mature and casual at the same time. In a 1992 interview, Cheung stated that "My mind is bisexual. It's easy for me to love a woman. It's also easy for me to love a man, too" and "I believe that a good actor would be androgynous, and ever changing," making him one of the first public figures in Chinese media to come out, being brave and open at that time.

    I'm happy I checked this out, and I'll likely watch the sequels too, since I really enjoyed this film a lot.