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.