I really liked A Date for Mad Mary a lot, I found it very emotionally touching. It is a small Irish film directed by Darren Thornton from 2016 about a young woman named Mary (Seána Kerslake) who returns home to her small town after a brief time in prison, and is struggling with wanting to be a supportive maid of honor in her best friend’s wedding amidst having a prickly personality and a rough past. She puts pressure on herself to find a guy to take as a date for the wedding on short-notice, but ends up falling for a female wedding photographer, and doesn’t know how to figure her life out post-prison.
I really felt for Mary, and liked how the film had this very intimate feeling with its camerawork, with a lot of close-up shots of Mary done very handheld-style, like literally following her on her path. She was very torn between wanting to be there for her friend and fit into heteronormativity standards while also wanting to punch anyone who looked at her wrong and shake off town gossip.
Then when she falls for a woman, she still doesn’t know if she can call herself a lesbian, she just likes her and feels less defensive, like her face can relax more and show contentment.
This was a really interesting and nice little movie, and it is available on Hulu to watch.
I just watched Miami Blues last week. I really liked it a lot. It’s a crime comedy from 1990, directed by George Armitage, in which Alec Baldwin plays a con man who goes around impersonating a cop, busting crimes so he can steal from robbers, as well as killing people, and seemingly just running into one crime after another. He was really funny in playing the absurdity of a guy just winging it on his hustling skills with no plan ahead of him.
Jennifer Jason Leigh played his hooker girlfriend, and played her with a sweet optimism and a charming Southern accent, just wanting to live a straight life and to be normal. It was a nice difference to see Leigh play a more comic character that wasn’t jaded by life or having a twisted dark side, she seemed to really dig into playing this sweet young woman who had a very matter-of-fact attitude about her career as a sex worker while wanting to improve her life through college courses and move on.
And Fred Ward as the cop trailing Baldwin had this salt of the earth grit to him that I liked, seemingly more like a regular person than a movie star. There was a running joke of him with his false teeth that never got old to me, his character had a warm sense of humor about it that made me enjoy following him a lot.
I liked how the film had these warm Florida colors of pink and light green that really evoked the heat of Miami. And it was a nice touch that the camera would switch from stationary to handheld whenever there was an action scene, with wider closeups and a looseness to capture the unpredictability of a crime in action. It made me think of Wong Kar-Wai’s later work with Fallen Angels, with his use of wide-angle handheld shots to capture the absurdity of everyday life in the underbelly of Hong Kong.
This was just an odd and fun film to watch, and I really enjoyed it.
I saw You Were Never Really Here, directed by Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Movern Callar, We Need To Talk About Kevin), and starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lone mercenary hired to rescue young girls from sex traffickers. I really dug the downbeat feel, the heavy synth music by Jonny Greenwood, how the character would use near-obsolete technology like pay phones in a modern world (I wasn’t sure if the film was taking place in modern day until I saw iPhones), the gritty cinematography, the broken-up action scenes where the editing shows the aftermath through the path of violence, and a standout scene seen through the POV of multiple security cameras. It was really great at capturing a brutality in the underworld, and did fit the kind of low-budget grimy action films that I like. I adored Movern Callar back in the early 2000s, and was happy to see Ramsay back in theaters.
But I didn’t like Phoenix in the role, he seemed heavily miscast. His performance was lumbering and dull to me, and he’s been like that in his recent films. There were times when I just thought, “Why should I care what happens to this guy?” I didn’t really feel for him or his personal life with his mother. I got that he was essentially a hired gun and didn’t get attached to people, but I just didn’t find him particularly interesting. I more just liked the downbeat style and blunt brutality of the film more than its protagonist.
I still highly recommend the film if you like these kind of films. And there isn’t any sexual violence against girls or women depicted onscreen, it’s more implied than seen.
I liked Let the Sunshine In, a new film by Claire Denis, though I didn’t realize it was supposed to be more of a type of romantic comedy, I was seeing it more as a sad movie about a middle-aged woman lonely for love. Juliette Binoche plays a divorced artist named Isabelle who wants to be in love again, and has a series of trysts with men that keep ending in disappointment, with excuses about why they cannot be together. I kept feeling so much for Isabelle, each time her eyes would light up at the possibility of love, only for them to be brimming with tears when it didn’t happen, as the men would say she was charming and attractive, but they didn’t want to “move too fast” and gently let her down with an “I’ll call you.”
Binoche looks absolutely stunning in her fifties, and she plays Isabelle as a sweet but hopelessly naïve character, a person who gets way too excited over each man she dates, projecting him as her new love. She seems more in love with the romance than an actual relationship, and worries that she is too old and missed her time for another relationship.
There are varied funny moments in the film, like the indecisive back and forth with her and a date about whether or not she should exit his car or continue talking about their feelings; a picky date ordering the bartender around with very particular demands and asking if there are gluten-free olives; and Isabelle snapping at her friends on a nature hike after they are being pretentious about their knowledge of the land to appear intellectual, with her yelling at them across a bridge, “It’s all yours! The trees, the sky, the birds, everything belongs to you!” Those moments broke up the momentum of Isabelle continually being hurt by each broken would-be romance.
I liked how Denis would hold on scenes with slow pans or one-take setups, it felt very languid and free, reflecting real life. This was an interesting film, and I’d like to watch more of Denis’ work, as the only other film of hers that I have seen is 35 Shots of Rum from 2008. I stayed for the post-film Q&A with her, and found her to be really charming and funny and quiet, just an intriguing person. Apologies for the poor quality of my image of the discussion.
