Thoughts on I Saw the TV Glow

    I went to see I Saw The TV Glow yesterday and really liked it. It's an A24 artsy indie movie directed by Jane Schoenbrun (We're All Going to the World's Fair), about two teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigitte Lundy-Paine) who, in 1996, become obsessed with this supernatural teen TV show called The Pink Opaque, that looks like a Nickelodeon teen drama mixing the monster of the week Buffy the Vampire Slayer drama with some Secret World of Alex Mack 90s effects, and references to Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The teens are both very isolated, both on the queer spectrum (Maddy is a lesbian, Owen might be asexual/ace), and get wrapped up in this show to escape their empty, depressing lives. The show effects them both in greatly different ways, using the media consumption of the show as a substitute for actually living their lives, and using the show to identify themselves rather than anything in their real lives, being obsessed with the TV screen and sitting in the dark with the TV glow.

    I was really into the movie, and liked how the director is clearly a millennial, as they depicted the fictional show in a very mid-90s, SNICK kind of way (SNICK was the programming block that Nickelodeon would do on Saturday nights to air more teen-oriented shows, like Are You Afraid of the Dark? or All That), with the TV's show credits done in the same font as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's. The show, which was basically about two teen girls who are psychically connected to fight monsters, definitely had a queer coding vibe between the two girls, hence why a character like Maddy would be so drawn to it.

    I don't think I really understood the second half of the movie, as the first half is told through Owen's point of view, then when Maddy is talking about the show and their teen years, as the second half takes place a decade later, she looks back on events with a very different perspective, and I wasn't really sure if I was to take her perspective literally or not, I think some of it was lost on me.

    But I did like the movie a lot, and it did benefit from having more of a budget and added star power for more distribution. Besides being an A24 film, it is produced by Emma Stone and her husband Dave McCrary through their production company Fruit Tree, it had Danielle Deadwyler as Owen's mom, Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst in a nearly silent role as Owen's dad, and the dance choreographer Emma Portner in multiple roles (Maddy's friend Amanda, as well as the monster characters in the show).

    I also really liked Brigitte Lundy-Paine a lot, they were dynamite in this role. I had heard of them years back from the Netflix show Atypical, playing a teen girl, and they also played Keanu Reeves' daughter in the third Bill and Ted movie, so it's nice to see their star rising more.

    I read the Stereogum music blog, and they've been covering the soundtrack for this movie, and it's really excellent. There is a sequence in this movie where the teens go to a bar where a band fronted by Phoebe Bridgers is performing onstage, and it's like a whole music video just takes over, and it's fantastic.

    Jane was on this past week's Criterion Closet video, and I liked their picks, like Peeping Tom (a British 1960 psychological horror film about a serial killer who films people with a mirror to witness their own deaths), and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, one of my favorite films by him next to The Royal Tenenbaums. I like Jane's nerdy enthusiasm about films, and am glad their movie is getting way more attention, as We're All Going to the World's Fair got critical acclaim but came out in 2021 during the pandemic and had limited availability to see.

Thoughts on Seconds

    On Criterion, I watched John Frankenheimer’s 1966 sci-fi thriller Seconds, starring Rock Hudson, and liked it a lot. I had heard recommendations of it a few times, and I liked how it felt like a feature length version of a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode, with a lot of artsy tilted camera angles from cinematographer James Wong Howe. A middle aged banker named Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) feels bored and unfulfilled in his life, with his love for his wife dwindling, and missing his adult daughter, who lives far away and started a family of her own.

    He gets a call from a friend who was long presumed dead, and sets him off on a journey that leads him to a secret place that offers him the opportunity to fake his death, get plastic surgery, and become a whole new identity to live his life anew. He takes the offer, and is remade into Antiochus 'Tony' Wilson (Rock Hudson), a successful visual artist. He is moved into a community of other “reborns,” and learns that even with a new face and name, he’s still essentially the same person mentally, with only superficial signs of glamour and success, and feeling like this new identity isn’t him.

    I really liked this movie, and appreciated how Rock Hudson was trying to break out of his romantic comedy roles and being taken more seriously. He’s really good in this as a man who is conflicted over having a handsome face but still having insecurities over his identity and feeling content in life. The film was really interesting to watch, and I’m glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Le Havre

    On Criterion, I watched Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki's 2011 comedy-drama set in the French port city of Le Havre, and starring Andre Wilms as Marcel Marx, a humble shoeshiner who lives a frugal life in a small house with his wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) and their dog. He used to want to be a literary author in Paris, but gave that up to live a more simple life on his meager earnings, enjoying the company of his wife and the patrons at his favorite bar. 

    When Arletty falls seriously ill, Marcel's path crosses with an adolescent African boy, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), who traveled with other refugees in a giant cargo container by sea, and were caught by police, led by the inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin). Idrissa is encouraged by his grandfather to make a run for it, and he evades the police, and ends up meeting Marcel by chance, who has sympathy for his situation and doesn't give him up to the police. He takes him in to hide in his home, and Marcel's friends agree to be a secret network to hide him too, sneaking Idrissa food and keeping him in the back of their shops. 

    Marcel is now juggling responsibilities of visiting his beloved wife in the hospital, whose condition is more serious but she doesn't want her husband to know it; hiding Idrissa from the authorities, and going through the refugee center system to track down Idrissa's grandfather to help him get to London to reunite with his mother.

    It's a really nice movie, that combines present-day politics of boat immigration of undocumented people coming to Europe from African nations, with this 1950s small-town whimsy that feels out of classic French cinema. Kaurismäki chose to name characters as homages to French cultural icons, like Arletty is named for the actress Arletty, who was a film star in the 1930s-1940s, and a doctor named Becker is named for the director Jacques Becker, whose 1940s films inspired the French New Wave directors. Marcel Marx was named for Karl Marx, and the character also appeared in Kaurismäki's 1992 film La vie de Boheme, also played by Wilms.

    The film also has this whole musical cameo and sequence by the French musician Little Bob, portraying himself and performing late in the film, and while it can feel different to have a whole concert going on in this one part, his R&B/blues rock style is really great and cool to listen to.

    There's a nice friendly chemistry between Marcel and Idrissa, who quickly trust each other, and Idrissa isn't a naive youth, but knows that he was supposed to land in London, got in Le Havre by mistake, and just wants to be reunited with his mother, as his father passed away, likely during the journey. He and Marcel develop a good bond and understanding, and while they only know each other a brief time, it's very meaningful and caring as they help each other out.

Thoughts on Eileen

    On Hulu, I watched the 2023 film Eileen, directed by William Oldroyd, based on the 2015 novel by Otessa Moshfegh, who co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Luke Goebel. The film starred Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, and Shea Wigham. It's a psychological thriller set in 1964 Massachusetts that starts out seemingly as a young woman's need to escape her damaging home life and falling for a stranger, but reveals itself to be much darker and more complex.

    Eileen (McKenzie) is a 24-year old woman taking care of her alcoholic, unemployed police chief father (Wigham), whose drunken antics and paranoid ranting, in part from being a WWII veteran with PTSD, have made him a pariah in their small town, and him being blamed for her mother's slow death from an illness. He exerts control over Eileen by emotionally abusing her, telling her she's plain and ordinary. "Some people, they are the real people. Like in a movie, they're the ones you're watching, they're the ones making moves. And the other people, they're just there filling the space. And you take' em for granted. You think, they're easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That's you, Eileen." She fantasizes about killing him or herself to escape their dank hellhole of a home. 

    She works in a corrections facility for teenage boys, being shunned and mocked by her colleagues, like the bitter Mrs. Murray (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), and treated like a mousy kid. Eileen, on occasion, will drive out to a lover's lane secluded area, watching other couples in their cars have sex, and she will masturbate, but then scoop out ice from outside and put it down her pants, to repress her own desires and cool herself down.

    A new prison psychologist named Rebecca (Hathaway) comes in, speaking in a clipped Transatlantic sophisticated accent, with platinum blonde hair and fitted dresses. Eileen is immediately transfixed by her mysterious glamour, and Rebecca takes a liking to her, inviting her out to have drinks (where they dance together on the floor and Rebecca swiftly knocks an aggressive man against the wall for trying to cut in), and Eileen, whose sexuality had long been dormant, is falling for her and seeing her as an escape from her dead-end, depressing life.

    Rebecca is like a noir heroine off of the movie screens, with a mysterious past, saying how she never likes to stick around for too long, and uses her psychology skills to figure out Eileen, telling her she's meant for bigger things, and saying while she's not "beautiful," she still has an interesting gaze about her. This only pulls Eileen in more, without realizing how manipulative Rebecca is being for her ulterior motives.

    At the juvenile detention center, one of the inmates is Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), who is serving time for having stabbed his cop father to death. The townspeople think he's a psycho for killing his father, a "good cop," and think he just snapped and is a monster. Rebecca is assigned to work with him in therapy sessions and assess his character and possibility for reoffending. There is more to the story that I won't spoil, but I will highlight that Marin Ireland as his mother gave an incredible performance in this film that steals the film from the two stars, and was stunning to watch, being a standout actor largely known for her theater career.

    Both McKenzie and Hathaway are fantastic in this film. McKenzie, a New Zealand actor, does a great working-class Massachusetts accent, and can play the definition of "still waters run deep," with her looking meek on the outside but wanting to explode. And Hathaway speaks in a Katharine Hepburn-like voice, standing above everyone in her platinum hair and high heels, and has an "above it all" attitude when working in the prison and being amongst the general public of the town, the type that gets quickly gossiped about by small town folks not used to outsiders.

    The film is made to look like 1960s film stock, in an intentionally B-movie thriller way, but was shot on digital cameras. It gave a great look to make the film seem older than it actually is, and to be more immersed in the story.

    This is a really great film,  a movie that seemingly starts like a queer awakening story and then turns into something else. I highly recommend it.

Thoughts on Go

     On Criterion, I watched Doug Liman's 1999 film Go, as part of their 1999 film showcase. I had seen this movie way back in college circa 2002, in a dorm room with other kids, and re-watching it now, it brought me back to when I was a teen in the late 1990s. My teenage life was nothing like this movie, but I remembered aspects like Katie Holmes' teen TV stardom from Dawson's Creek, late 90s rave culture and electronic music, Timothy Olyphant being a scene-stealer and somewhat unknown at the time (aside from playing one of the killers in Scream 2), Sarah Polley's breakout as a mainstream star (only to prefer small indie films and Canadian dramas and ultimately becoming a director), Scott Wolf being a TV star with Party of Five and often compared to Tom Cruise, and songs like No Doubt's "New," Len's "Steal My Sunshine," a remix of "Macarena," Massive Attack's "Angel," Fatboy Slim's "Gangster Tripping," and DJ Rap's "Good to Be Alive" setting a whole late 1990s pop-electronic music dance soundtrack.

    The film's setup of three interconnected segments owes a lot to Pulp Fiction, with an ensemble cast broken up into three story acts where events loosely connect with each other, as well as the popularity post-Quentin Tarantino fame of wise-cracking characters making pop culture references (The Breakfast Club, the Family Circus comic strip, Tantric sex as popularized by Sting and Trudie Styler), and drug culture being very casual with various pills being bought and dealt all over the place. And it's set on Christmas Eve in L.A., so it adds to being an unconventional Christmas movie with no snow but Christmas lights all over the place.

    The basic setup is that Ronna (Polley) is a checkout girl in a supermarket who is going to be evicted fast if she doesn't pay the rent, so she agrees to cover for her co-worker Simon (Desmond Askew) to handle his drug-dealing for the weekend so she can make extra cash and he can go party in Las Vegas with his friends (Taye Diggs, James Duval, Breckin Meyer). She finds the drug dealer (Olyphant) to be sketchy, but has to deal with him, and leaves behind her other co-worker Claire (Holmes) to stay with him in his apartment as collateral while she does the business, dealing out pills to club kids. Simon ends up having a crazy weekend with his friends, involving strippers, a gun, and a pissed-off bouncer. And soap opera actors and couple Adam (Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) are looking to score some pills while working with a cop (William Fichtner) to avoid some trouble. It's all a messy, weird Christmas Eve for young Angelenos looking to score some drugs and have some fast fun.

    One of my personal favorite moments was with a pre-fame Melissa McCarthy as a roommate of a friend of Adam and Zack's. She had a little scene-stealing moment of seeming like a more normal person amongst all the fast-paced antics, and had this cheeky mischievous look to her face that made her funny and charming. I had heard of her name later from Gilmore Girls, but had remembered this little moment in the film.

Thoughts on Challengers

    I went to see Challengers this week, Luca Guadagnino’s new film, where his name is now on the poster above the title, and promoted as a sexy love triangle about tennis players, with a heavy and fantastic synth score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The score was fun to listen to, but sometimes it played too loudly over scenes, or made scenes seem way more dramatic than they actually seemed. I did enjoy listening to the score by itself, which felt to work more than when it seemed to be drowning out scenes.

    The film starred the trio of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist as Tashi, Patrick, and Art, as collegiate and professional tennis players, caught up in a love triangle that spans thirteen years from ages 18-31, with events told out of chronological order with lots of flashbacks, culminating in a challenger match between Patrick and Art at a critical crossroads in their careers and friendship, and Tashi as both Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex-girlfriend in the middle, manipulating their emotions and friendship for her own mind games and power plays.

    I went into the film thinking it would have a threesome eroticism like Y Tu Mama Tambien or The Dreamers, in a foreign art house film kind of way, but while the film does have one effective seduction scene between the trio, in which Tashi toys with Patrick and Art as the object of their affection, it feels like it pulls its punches in any other sexually charged scene, like more teasing the audience or keeping it from going past its R rating.

    I liked the creative POV shots during the tennis matches, like the POV of the players during the game, or even of the tennis ball during the match, but I felt like the characters all felt very shallow, and I couldn’t understand why tennis was important to them beyond it being their most talented skill in life. The film will touch on the men coming from wealthy backgrounds, while Tashi gains wealth from her skills, and it will briefly touch on racism in the privileged tennis world, but I couldn’t really understand the characters beyond them being competitive and manipulative with each other. I wanted more of a character drama, and I felt like the writing didn’t go much deeper than I wanted it to.

    The actors were good, particularly with Josh O’Connor playing a scummy person with Patrick, who seemed to really relish to both cut down his best friend Art and his girlfriend Tashi, to be an asshole and bring out the anger in them, with his competitive spirit. Patrick is in a slump in his career, and getting by playing low-level matches and living paycheck to paycheck, and feeling lost in his career.

    The film centers Zendaya as the femme fatale, but she didn’t seem convincing to me, as a seductress manipulating men beyond the teenage scenes. Partially is that she still looks younger than her nearly 28 years, which makes her look more girlish, and the trio, despite being in their late twenties and early thirties, came off more like high schoolers than adults, with a lot of their immature romantic drama. I am glad that Zendaya is playing more adult characters, to not be pigeonholed as teen characters at nearly 30, but I just didn’t find her believable to think she’d still screw with two men’s lives far into adulthood. But I could understand how she was doing anything she could to still be connected to tennis through the two loves of her life.

    Mike Faist was good, and I was surprised to find out he’s American, as he has a very British look to him, and he was previously known for playing Riff in the remake of West Side Story. His character had more vulnerability to him, as someone who felt like a second choice to Tashi, and trying to get his game success back on track.

    While I feel the movie was overhyped, it was still nice to see a mainstream artsy drama mixing sports and eroticism (which also could be said for the recent Kristen Stewart film Love Lies Bleeding), and it has a great synth score and was decent to watch.

Thoughts on Monkey Man

    Last week I went to see Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s directorial debut in which he stars as Kid, a guy in India wanting revenge for his mother’s death by infiltrating the gangster world as a waiter, in a luxury brothel where corrupt politicians and police hang out at, and already having been an underground fighter who does matches in an ape mask to protect his identity (as do the other fighters donning animal masks, in a lucha libre kind of way in hiding their faces). It’s very inspired by John Wick (the movie even namedrops the John Wick movies when Kid is trying to buy a gun), and has this very red, neon look to it of the backstreets of the fictional city of Yatana, like in the back alleys of restaurants where servers smoke and feed scraps to stray dogs.

    He works his way around gangsters, befriending a sex worker who works as a high-class escort for rich club patrons, and after he has a mid-movie defeat, builds himself back up again with the help of the keeper of the temple of Ardhanarishvara and a group of transwomen in the hijra community (transgender people who live in communities that follow a kinship system known as guru-chela system), and getting back to training and punching at a bag of basmati rice, fighting not just for himself but for marginalized people too.

    The movie is two hours long, and I felt it could have been 90 minutes, as I felt bored in parts and was losing interest in the story. I also really don’t like the trope of “woman in male hero’s life is brutally attacked or murdered, so hero goes on vengeance killing spree,” it’s played out.

    But besides those two gripes, I thought the movie was all right. Dev Patel has come a long way from playing stringbean awkward dorks, now has a more regal handsome look, and wanted to make a movie where he’s the badass action hero, so good on him for that. I liked the red cinematography, and while I felt the fight scenes would have a choppiness that felt unnecessary, there were some cool sequences to watch, including a scene with a knife in an elevator that felt way more visceral and intense to see. The movie seemed very steeped in Indian culture, like the repeated references to Hanuman, a Hindu deity of a monkey man in folk tales that Kid deeply relates to from childhood stories his mother would tell to him.

    So it was a decent movie, more like a B-level action movie with a prestige star having fun with his own crime film.

Thoughts on Made in Heaven

 

    On Criterion, I watched the 1987 romantic fantasy film Made in Heaven, directed by Alan Rudolph, and starring Timothy Hutton, Kelly McGillis, and Debra Winger. This was an interesting and nice romantic movie to watch, about life after death and reincarnated souls and trying to find love again with the same person.

    Timothy Hutton plays Mike, who in 1957 gets dumped by his girlfriend (Mare Winningham), and decides to head out from his small town to go to California. He barely makes it out of the town before rescuing a family from their sinking car, only to drown and end up in heaven, where he is reunited with his aunt (Maureen Stapleton). He's drifting around, and falls in love with Annie (McGillis), who is a new soul who has never been reincarnated, and has never been on Earth. She and Mike have a whirlwind romance, where they can communicate telepathically, and plan to get married in heaven, only for her soul to be chosen for a new life on Earth. 

    Mike begs to Emmett (Winger in male drag, and going uncredited at the time) to be given another shot to be with her, and Emmett gives him and Annie thirty years to find each other again, where they will be new people and unknown to each other. Thus, the film spans from 1957-1987, where Mike is now Elmo, a struggling musician who is a hitchhiking drifter, meeting various rock star cameos along the way, like Neil Young as a trucker, Ric Ocasek as a mechanic, and Tom Petty as a bar patron. Annie is now Ally, who married an artsy director (Tim Daly) she met in college who was a fan of the French New Wave, only to make his career directing TV commercials to pay the bills, winning awards but feeling creatively unfulfilled. Both Elmo and Ally feel a void in their lives, but don't know what's missing, and have to take risks to take control of their own lives rather than just coasting and existing.

    I really liked this movie. I do like romantic fantasy movies like this, as I previously enjoyed Defending Your Life, A Matter of Life and Death, and Always, so this went right along with it. I like stories about heaven and second chances at life or finding love again and all of that.

    Hutton and McGillis had nice chemistry together when they played a couple in heaven, and I like how McGillis had this striking, mature presence to her as a 1980s star actress, in roles in Top Gun, Witness, and The Accused. Hutton was decent, more of a nice guy everyman type, and he seemed less mature when paired next to McGillis, but he was good to watch.

    Debra Winger was the obvious standout in the film. As Emmett, she wore a short-haired orange crew-cut wig, chain-smoking with a rough voice, walking with a cane in a suit, and had this whole male drag persona that made her more captivating to watch, looking like Annie Lennox in the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" video. I wouldn't have recognized her if I didn't already read the IMDB and Wikipedia on the film. She and Hutton were married at the time, and have a child together, and I also think her persona seemed way sexier and more mature than Hutton's was, so I can't really see the connection they had. But even if Winger went uncredited and unrecognized, she still shined as an interesting character who appears sporadically throughout the film, reminding Elmo, who doesn't remember him, to stop screwing around and look for his lost love before he turns 30.

    Ellen Barkin also had a fun quick cameo as a woman who charms Elmo only to quick con him out of his money, her little part felt more like she was doing a favor to someone.

    This movie really seemed to have a thing for cameos. Winningham as the ex-girlfriend, the rock star cameos plus Martha Davis of The Motels, and Amanda Plummer as a musician friend of Elmo's, who helps him put together a song his past life self came up with in heaven, which Davis ends up singing and sounds very much like a 1980s ballad.

    This was a really nice little movie to watch, nothing too memorable, but interesting to watch as a love story set in the afterlife and reincarnated souls.

Thoughts on Comrades: Almost a Love Story

 On Criterion, I watched Peter Chan’s 1996 romantic drama Comrades: Almost a Love Story, starring Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung as two Chinese mainlanders striving to make money and achieve their dreams in Hong Kong, him as a naive innocent named Li Xiao-Jun, who barely speaks Cantonese and English, and is trying to raise money to bring his fiancée to Hong Kong; and her as a streetwise swindler named Li Qiao, who has several hustles going (working at McDonald’s and taking a commission from getting people into an English class), and plays the stock market to get rich. Both are lonely in the city, as immigrants who don’t have other friends around, so they become friends, and eventually they have a brief tryst, but break it off since Xiao-Jun is engaged.

    Eventually, Xiao-Jun marries his fiancée, and Li Qiao marries a mob boss who she met while working as a masseuse. The movie spans over 10 years, where the two friends are loyal to their spouses but still having lingering feelings for each other, and both end up in New York City years later, on different paths that end up converging.

    The movie made me think of movies like Before Sunrise and Past Lives, movies about old friends who keep a lingering attraction to each other despite living far apart with separate lives over a long period of time. I thought this was a decent movie, watching it for Maggie Cheung, and liking how it’s a story about loneliness and immigration and trying to make money to achieve one’s dream, and having a close bond with one another over a decade of life changes.

    The movie also threads in the music of Teresa Teng, who was a Taiwanese pop idol of the 1970s through the 1990s until her death in 1995 at age 42 of either asthma or heart failure, her cause of death was never truly determined. She was one of the biggest Asian pop stars ever, and her music plays throughout the film, with the Chinese title of the film referring to her song “Tian Tian Mi” (literally “sweet honey, or “very sweet”).

Thoughts on Brute Force

  

 On Criterion, I watched Jules Dassin’s 1947 prison noir film Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster as Joe Collins, the leader of his cell mates in prison organizing an escape, and Hume Cronyn is Captain Munsey, the sadistic, by the book guard who abuses the prisoners and sees them as objects to control and punish. I really liked this movie, and some parts went a lot harder than I expected, like Munsey mentally torturing a prisoner and instigating his suicide, including the movie showing his death in a crude way, even during the Production Code era of Hollywood. And the finale is really explosive and kind of wild to watch, like the way one character basically gets used as a human shield to die.

    This very much felt like a “dad” movie, of a “men in prison” tough guy kind of movie, and not what I’d normally be into, but I really liked it. It was compelling, and Lancaster was great at playing tough guys with soft hearts. The men all ended up in prison due to their loves for the women in their lives, and keep a pinup photo in their cell as a fantasy stand-in to think about their lost loves. Like one man stole money to buy his wife a fur coat, another guy stole food while fighting in Italy in WWII for his girlfriend (played by Yvonne de Carlo, aka Lily Munster), and Collins wants his wife to get surgery to treat her cancer, but she won’t do it unless he’s with her.

    I’ve always liked Hume Cronyn, but never saw him as playing a threatening character, but he was great in this, as this guard with Nazi-like tendencies to want order and abusing prisoners both by mentally torturing them and beating them with a stick, just on a power trip and gunning to be warden of the prison.

    The movie makes it very clear that it’s about the injustices of the prison system, the guards and warden using prisoners as cheap labor, and punishing all of them for any isolated incidents. It is an indictment of the prison industrial complex, one that is unfortunately still relevant today.

Thoughts on Takeout

    On Criterion I watched a 2004 indie film called Takeout, directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, about an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Ming (Charles Jang), struggling to get by in NYC, sending money back to his family in China, and in debt to a loan shark, needing to raise $800 by the end of the night, with 30% interest included. He works as a delivery man for a Chinese restaurant, hustling to get enough tips and pay to add to his stash, and dealing with pressure from the loan shark’s hired goons, stress from the restaurant and difficult customers, trying to keep his bike from breaking or getting stolen, and trying to keep it together during a difficult day of working in the rain.

    I did like seeing what a big difference twenty years makes, seeing past delivery with calling the restaurant and paying in cash at the door, as opposed to today’s app-based delivery and pre-paying for meals. And that with a lot of migrants working as delivery people on motorbikes today, it’s still very relevant with the struggle.

    I got really into this, how realistic it felt, and could get into how frustrating things felt for the characters, especially whenever a wrench gets thrown into Ming’s way and making me feel for him a lot. Sean Baker would go on to make Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, and Shih-Ching Tsou would produce those films, so it’s cool seeing some early work from them.

Thoughts on Mikey and Nicky

        On Criterion, I really enjoyed watching Elaine May’s 1976 crime drama Mikey and Nicky, starring John Cassavetes as Nicky, a low-level mobster who is on the run from a hit man after having stolen money from his boss, and calls on his childhood friend Mikey (Peter Falk), who is his last resort after he’s alienated everyone else in his life. Nicky looks rough and unwashed and desperate, and Mikey is trying to calm him and stay by his side, even if he can’t call off the hit. The two hash out a lot of drama and history in their friendship while on the run in this one night, as their relationship has turned sour, and it’s really compelling to watch because of Cassavetes and Falk, long-time collaborators with a deep friendship, who make the relationship feel more real.

    Ned Beatty is really good as the hitman, and acting teacher Sanford Meisner plays the mobster who orders the hit, with William Hickey as his associate. Carol Grace, aka Carol Matthau, was really good as an older gun moll who Nicky carelessly uses and discards.

    I liked how downbeat this movie felt, a movie about losers who are bottom-level mobsters, and just living in 1970s grime in the city.

Thoughts on Manny & Lo

    On Tubi, I watched the 1996 indie film Manny & Lo, directed by Lisa Krueger, and starring a very young Scarlett Johansson and Aleksa Palladino, as orphaned sisters who escape their foster homes and live on the run, traveling in their station wagon, stealing food from stores, sleeping outdoors or in model homes. Lo (Palladino) is a pregnant teenager, and is trying to take care of her sister to keep them both out of the system while figuring out how she is going to take care of her baby when it arrives.

    While they stay in an empty winter cottage, they spot a clerk (Mary Kay Place) at a baby store, decide they need her to help them, and abduct her, keeping her hands and feet bound, as Lo is trying to call the shots and control everything. The clerk, while not intimidated by the girls, is very righteous, claiming that people will come looking for her, and even when they unbound her hands and she realizes Lo is pregnant, she still stays around because she doesn’t want to leave minors alone to handle a pregnancy.

    Manny (Johansson) who has been having more of a crisis of conscience between being loyal to her sister but also liking the clerk and having empathy for her, feels stuck between the two of them. I had heard of Johansson from this movie when I was 13, watching it way back on Bravo, and really liked her in this movie, thinking she came off as smart and talented at a young age, and she acts well against the veteran Mary Kay Place, where she doesn’t come off as childish next to her.

    Palladino was good, I liked that she had this messy punk teen look to her, and her freakouts and mood swings when in this messed up situation felt very realistic, like how a pissed off but scared teenager would actually act.

    I’m glad I watched this again, it held up well as a good 90s indie film with an early performance by a future movie star.

Thoughts on Deathstalker 2: Duel of the Titans

    On Tubi I watched Deathstalker 2: Duel of the Titans, a 1987 B-movie sequel to the Conan the Barbarian knockoff Deathstalker, but the sequel not only cast a different actor as the barbarian Deathstalker, but made his character completely different too, going from a predatory killer who is often thisclose to raping a woman, to being someone with a roguish, Bugs Bunny meets Bruce Campbell personality, who mostly wisecracks in between sword fighting and hooking up with wenches, played by John Terlesky with a lot of charm and good fight skills.

    The 80s Penthouse Pet and softcore star Monique Gabrielle plays a dual role as a princess/seer who was replaced by an imposter by an evil sorcerer, and is trying to make it back to her kingdom to reclaim her throne. While her acting isn’t good, she comes off as cute and endearing with her awkward delivery, and her dorkiness is more fun to watch as the actual princess than as the imposter, who often just goes into porn-y seduction mode.

    The film was directed by Jim Wynorski and produced by Roger Corman, so it not only recycles scenes from Deathstalker, but mixes in cheap action scenes, boobs, and re-using the same three wrestlers as different hired goons in masks. The movie makes obvious homages to Rocky, Indiana Jones, James Bond, plays the theme so often the villain comments on it, the leads break character in laughter after a joke about an erection, and the late Queen Kong from the original G.L.O.W. makes a cameo in a wrestling scene.

    It’s a goofy and fun movie, and really enjoyable to watch on its own, even if it’s nothing like the other Deathstalker movies.

Thoughts on Anatomy of a Fall

    On Hulu, I watched Anatomy of a Fall, the French movie from 2023 directed by Justine Triet that was a big Oscar movie this year. I really liked it, how it was a murder mystery that mixed in a strained couple’s fighting, their visually impaired adolescent son and his guide dog, the father’s death by falling from the family chalet and the mother being accused of murder, the recurring use of an instrumental steel drum version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.”, and how the movie had really good pacing for a two and a half hour movie that weirdly felt light and funny for a movie about a murder trial that could tear a family apart.

    Sandra Huller deservedly was nominated for Best Actress, whose character may or not be a killer, and comes off as a snob sometimes, but was still compelling and interesting to watch.

    I really felt for the kid in this, for him mourning his father’s death while not wanting to believe his mother could have killed him, and choosing to testify in the trial and refusing to be shielded from the gorier details of his parents’ marriage.

    I had seen Saint Omer a while back, so I had already seen a depiction of how French court trials are practiced, albeit I assume both that and this movie may exaggerate for dramatic purposes. The way the trials come off like theater in a circle where everyone is speaking together and standing while testifying is definitely different to see vs. the seated witness stand next to the judge in U.S. courts.

Thoughts on Birth

     On Criterion, I watched Jonathan Glazer's 2004 film Birth, co-written by Luis Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, and starring Nicole Kidman, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall, and Cameron Bright. I remember it being a controversial film when it came out, as the plot is that Kidman plays a widowed New Yorker named Anna, whose, soon to be remarried, is confused when a ten-year-old boy appears in her life, claiming to be the reincarnation of her late husband, Sean. The controversy was of a bathtub scene in which Kidman and Bright appear naked together, but while the scene is a little uncomfortable to watch, it's clear that both actors are not actually nude, are wearing private coverings that aren't in the camera's view, and the scene is handled delicately and is very brief. Rather, the film is about grief and love's transcendence, and Anna really wanting to believe that this is her husband's spirit coming back to her, especially as the boy knows personal things that only Sean would know in his marriage to Anna. The rest of her family is doubtful, and find the whole thing disturbing, worried about Anna being hurt by wanting to believe in this possible delusion.

    I liked how the film felt like a quiet thriller, and it really reminded me of Rosemary's Baby, both with Kidman's pixie haircut like Mia Farrow's, the setting of wealthy upper Manhattan in old apartment buildings that feel large and cavernous, and the heroine not being believed by her family and not being taken seriously in her convictions. Kidman is really vulnerable and emotional in this film, because she makes it convincing that Anna is falling in love with her husband all over again, trying to look past him being in a child's body, and wanting another chance to be with him, even hoping that they can marry when Sean is an adult in ten years, wanting to wait that long with wishful thinking.

    Cameron Bright, at ten years old, gave a very mature performance, as he had to act like an adult spirit being channeled through a child's mortal form, and talk about sexuality beyond his years with Kidman and Heche. It can be a little unsettling, and likely not surprising that his more well-known role later on would be as a vampire in the Twilight saga, performing an uncomfortable creepiness in his teen years.

    It was a little sad seeing Anne Heche, thinking of her tragic death in 2022, and in a scene where she corners Sean in an intimidating way, her eyes look cold and dark, and reminded me of Robert Shaw's memorable line reading as Quint in Jaws: "Y'know the thing about a shark, he's got  . . . lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. " Her pupils looked so big and dark to me, and with her smug smile, it made her character come off as more predatory, even if she doesn't really mean to be. It was just this moment in the film that really struck me with her performance.

    This was at the time when Kidman had, post-divorce to Tom Cruise, reached more to working with film auteurs and doing more unusual films, and getting more critical acclaim than she had in her 1990s Hollywood career. She had already been great in The Others, directed by Alejandro Amenabar, and continued her streak in arthouse offbeat films with Dogville (dir. Lars von Trier, 2003); Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (dir. Steven Shainberg, 2006); Margot at the Wedding (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2005); Rabbit Hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell, 2010); The Killing of a Sacred Deer (dir. Yorgos Lathimos, 2016), and The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers, 2022). She is an interesting actress, who, in between doing more Hollywood and TV work, does like to jump into weirder stories and have more of a dry sense of humor when embodying these characters.

    Jonathan Glazer, who this year was nominated for several Oscars for his 2023 drama The Zone of Interest, about a family of a Nazi commander living the suburban idyllic life right outside the walls of Auschwitz, taking home the Oscar for Best International Feature Film (and winning for Best Sound for Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn), and in the 1990s, had been critically acclaimed as a music video director, for Radiohead's "Street Spirit" and Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity," among others. He made his feature film debut with the British gangster film Sexy Beast in 2000, which made Kidman want to work with him on Birth. In 2013, he directed the stunning sci-fi horror film Under the Skin, where Scarlett Johansson played a predatory alien in a seductive body form in Glasgow, a bit of a commentary on the image of Johansson herself as a sex symbol and being fetishized. His directing in Birth is very sparse and quiet, letting the scenes sink in for the audiences to interpret for themselves.

    This was a really interesting film to watch, and while I do think the ending takes a cop-out choice, to steer away from anything stranger after talking about the metaphysical for so long, I did like the rest of the film, and felt the controversy was overblown and overshadowed what was a unique and memorable film in the early 2000s.

Thoughts on The Silent Partner

    On Criterion, I watched the 1978 Canadian thriller The Silent Partner, directed by Daryl Duke and written by Curtis Hanson, and starring Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, and Susannah York. I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts did an episode each counting down their top 10 favorites of "The Best Non-Traditional Christmas Movies Ever!", and discussed this as a thriller set at Christmas time that felt unsettling and tense to watch.

    Miles (Gould) is a teller at a bank in the mall in Toronto, and finds a note threatening to rob the bank, and figures out that it's the mall Santa (Plummer), Arthur Reikle, who is planning to do it, based on matching the note's handwriting to his handwriting on a sign encouraging donations to the needy for Christmas. Anticipating the robbery, he skims some money for himself, and gives the rest to Reikle when he commits the robbery. The robbery makes TV news, and Reikle realizes he's been shorted on the money, goes into his psychotic mode, and proceeds to threaten and terrorize Miles throughout the film, like calling him from a pay phone outside his apartment building, ransacking his home searching for the money, and even pops open the mail slot on his door to reveal his icy eyes as he makes more threats.

    Even though Miles seems more like a mild-mannered dork, he's smart enough to anticipate what Reikle is going to do, and makes sure he's a step ahead of him as he's being stalked. Like he doesn't identify him in a police lineup because he knows Reikle will out him for stealing from the bank, but he was smart enough to store the money somewhere where he can't be accused of being a thief.  It is interesting to watch as Miles is a little messy, and knows that Reikle could easily kill him, but has the sense to think ahead of him, especially in the finale. Gould has had this interesting 70s appeal of looking like a hairy Jewish stud who talked in a Brooklyn accent and combined this dorky neuroticism with a wiseass attitude.

    Reikle is ruthless, and a violent misogynist, as this movie does have some graphic violence against women that does get grisly and disturbing to watch. Duke refused to film a scene in post-production where a woman is brutalized, so he was replaced by Curtis Hanson to film that part, and even over 45 years later, it's still uncomfortable and awful to watch. Plummer is excellent in this role, having this classic handsomeness that still can make him look chilling and intimidating to watch.

   The film isn't great for female characters, as they are largely cast to be romantic interests for Miles, with brief nudity, and having one-dimensional depictions that aren't as interesting. Susannah York and Celine Lomez are both good to watch, but the film doesn't offer them much depth besides seeming just to serve Gould's character in different ways. There is also another bank employee, a cute young blonde, who often wears shirts with cheeky slogans on them, like "Penalty or Early Withdrawal."

    The film is notable for being an early film appearance of John Candy, who has a small part as one of the bank employees, and though he doesn't really do much in the film, it's still nice to see him anyway.

    I really liked this film a lot, and liked how it was a 70s thriller that felt very Canadian, being a cat and mouse caper set around Christmastime, and it felt unique and interesting to watch.

Thoughts on Barb Wire

    On Criterion, they are showing a selection of Razzie-winning movies, movies that got voted as the worst movies, and I watched Barb Wire from 1996, the Pamela Anderson dystopian superhero movie where she’s in a tight bustier, talks in a bored, annoyed monotone the entire movie, and the plot shamelessly rips off Casablanca, where her ex-boyfriend is married to a woman that is a fugitive, and they are trying to escape the Nazi-like government during the Second American Civil War in 2017.

    Pam Anderson is Barbara, aka Barb Wire (and it kept making me chuckle anytime someone calls her “Miss Wire), who runs her warehouse club where an industrial band does a cover of Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot,” and the totalitarian government does retinal scans on people to check their identity and does weird electroshock torture on people that only just seems to turn them on.

    It’s easy to just crap on the movie, and I can’t really defend it as good, but some stuff I genuinely liked. I liked Jack Noseworthy as her brother who was blinded in the war, he was fun with a sarcastic sense of humor, and I cared more about their brother-sister relationship than her past relationship with her blank slate of an ex-boyfriend. The movie is set in 2017, but clearly takes more of the 90s industrial look of raves and hard rock and bondage clothes. Clint Howard is fun to watch because he knows when he’s in B-movies and doesn’t phone it in, he just has fun, especially in this scene. And in the action finale, Pam Anderson’s stunt double clearly was putting in a lot of work doing fight scenes on construction equipment in tight clothing, and it was more of a creative stunt scene to watch.

    And from reading the IMDB trivia, the whole running joke with her getting pissed at being called Babe was from the original comics: “The entire "Don't call me, Babe" leitmotif of Barb Wire comes from the original advertising for the Barb Wire Dark Horse comic book, in which she said those words to differentiate herself from a buxom, slightly airy comic book heroine named Babe by John Byrne.”

    So this was dumb, but not that bad to watch, just kind of schlocky and an attempt for Pam Anderson to star in a big-budget movie, since her previous movies were mostly forgettable straight to video erotic thrillers. She did star in the fun campy TV series V.I.P. after this, which was much more tailored for her style of self-aware comedic skills.

Thoughts on Cruising

     On Criterion, I watched the 1980 film Cruising, written and directed by William Friedkin, based on the novel by Gerald Walker, and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, and Karen Allen. The film is notorious for having been protested by the LGBTQ+ community, because it is about a cop named Steve Burns (Pacino) on an undercover assignment to go into gay leather bars in the West Village and Christopher Street area to find a serial killer that has been targeting gay men, and using him as bait because he matches the slim, dark-haired look of his victims. The film depicts gay men as victims, murderers, and into the S&M scene, and given that so little of mainstream Hollywood at the time would depict queer characters in a more well-rounded way, it's understandable that the gay community would be against it. The film is largely seen through the straight cisgender lens, of the straight cop being internally weirded out by seeing public gay sex and kinky club scenes, and whenever he comes home and has sex with his girlfriend (Allen), who is unaware of the nature of his assignment, it's like he's trying to prove his straightness and quickly shed his gay cover identity.

    It's an interesting movie, and outside of the straight male lens of the film, it's unique to see a movie capture the sense of the gay leather bar scene of downtown NYC, trying to show as much as they could of the sexuality without getting an X rating, and showing a glimpse of the gay scene before the AIDS crisis would take over and change the whole cruising scene afterwards. The film incorporates elements of the giallo horror genre, and Friedkin slipped in quick cuts from gay pornography during the film's first murder scene, that can be seen when the film is slowed down, a la Tyler Durden's projector trick in Fight Club.

    Friedkin had stated that he was originally interested in Richard Gere for the lead, and that while he was satisfied with Pacino's performance in retrospect, he felt like Pacino was uncomfortable with the overtly queer scenes, while Pacino has said that he didn't know what Friedkin wanted from him as an actor, and the film is left open-ended with a finale with his character that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, and could be interpreted a couple of ways. I do agree that I can see Gere fitting in, as he would have a rough trade, hustler look circa 1980, and would blend in more in the scene than Pacino does, whose eyes often make him look more nervous and out of place.

    I liked the supporting performances of Don Scardino as a struggling gay playwright who is Burns' neighbor, more of a shy, quiet guy in contrast to the more sexually assertive characters in the cruising scene, and James Remar as the playwright's boyfriend, who only appears in one scene but stands out with a lot of screen presence and boldness. I was surprised to see Ed O'Neill in an early role as a cop, as well as William Russ as the killer's friend, Mike Starr as a cop, Maniac director Joe Spinell as a cop, and Powers Boothe as a salesman.

    I liked seeing Karen Allen, but felt her character was very one-dimensional and underused. She's just cast as the worried girlfriend, either getting pounded in a sex scene, or saying cliched lines like "Are you still attracted to me?" or "I feel like I don't know you anymore," stuff that just makes her character look boring and shafted off to the side. It's a thankless role, and luckily she would get a much meatier part in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark as Marion, the hard-drinking adventurer by Indiana Jones' side.

    The gay community of the West Village circa 1979 would protest the film by purposely disrupting filming with pointing mirrors to mess up lighting shots, blasting whistles and air horns, and playing loud music. The audio would have to be overdubbed to remove the distractions from people off-camera. Also, gay-owned businesses wouldn't allow filming on their premises, and real leather bars wouldn't allow their places to be used, so the film would make up a club but use real patrons from gay bars as extras for authenticity. 

    The film is accurate in depicting police brutality and the targeting of queer people by the cops, and how corrupt and awful it is. The film has an early scene with two cops (Spinell and Starr) in their car harassing two transwomen sex workers, and making them get in their car and perform sex acts on them. Then one of the women, when she tries to tell a cop (Sorvino) what happened later, is not believed and ignored. The film also has an interrogation scene where, while Burns is undercover and had been arrested with a potential suspect, are both beaten by a 6'5 man in a jockstrap, who just seemingly is on retainer by the police for this one task, and the suspect, a young gay man who looks more like a kid, is humiliated by the police, and is obviously not the killer. The police later dismiss a murder of a gay man as a "lover's quarrel." The film is honest about the police being abusive and corrupt, and no punishment comes to them, as unfortunately would be likely in real life.

    It's not the kind of movie I would watch again, and it is limited by being a movie about gay life through the eyes of straight men, but I felt like it was an interesting cop thriller to watch that felt very much of its time.