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.

9 of My Favorite Film Scores

     I was listening to an episode of the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, and the hosts, who are film critics, did a Top 10 list episode of their "Iron List" series, each picking their top ten best film scores. I wanted to share some that I really like. I'm not great at noticing film scores, as the music is often in the background as I'm watching the movie, but some of these stood out a lot to me:

Jon Brion's experimental score for Punch-Drunk Love.

Danny Elfman's fantasy fairy tale score for Edward Scissorhands, especially with "Ice Dance," with the choir singing in parts, like when Edward makes it "snow" around Kim.

The Chemical Brothers' electronic score for Hanna.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' electronic score for Challengers.

David Michael Frank's recurring theme for Showdown in Little Tokyo, particularly "Saving Minaka"

Antonio Sanchez' drum score for Birdman.

John Du Prez' haunting score, especially "Shredder's Theme" for the 1990 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Yann Tiersen's French playful score for Amelie, with "La Valse d'Amelie"

Eric Serra's kinda-synth score for La Femme Nikita, with both "Rico's Gang Suicide" and "A Smile"

Thoughts on Oh Lucy!

     On Tubi, I watched Oh Lucy!, a 2017 Japanese-American drama co-written and directed by Atsuko Hirayanagi, starring Shinobu Terajima as Setsuko, a lonely middle-aged woman working as an office drone who is distant from her co-workers, lives alone, and is estranged from her sister. She goes out to karaoke with her co-workers for a retirement party, then drunkenly yells that no one actually likes the retiree and that everyone laughs at her behind her back. She gets a call from her niece Mika (Shioli Kutsana), who is working as a waitress in a maid uniform in a restaurant, and tells her that she had signed up for a year of English language classes, but can't afford them anymore because she needs to save money, and gets Setsuko to pay for the remainder of classes and take them in her place. Setsuko goes to the school, which seems hidden behind a seedy exterior, and meets John (Josh Hartnett), the American teacher who is very friendly and open and frequently hugs his students, of which Setsuko and later Takeshi (Kōji Yakusho), are the only ones. John gives them English names to use in class, Lucy and Tom, and gives Lucy a blonde wig to wear as "Lucy." Setsuko is charmed by John's friendliness and develops a crush on him, liking the warm embrace of his hug and becoming another identity as Lucy.

    But when she returns to the class, John has left for America, and the replacement teacher is more conventional and not as physically affectionate, and Setsuko preferred John's eccentricities. Then she finds out that Mika and John are dating, and that Mika has run off with John to the U.S., driving a further wedge between her and her mother Ayako (Kaho Minami). Setsuko receives a postcard from Mika, letting her know that she and John are in San Diego, and invites her out. Setsuko lets Ayako know, and they go together to San Diego to confront Mika and convince her to come home. But when they find John, he's alone in his apartment, saying that Mika has run off, and the three of them, combined with John's limited Japanese and Setsuko and Ayako's limited English, go look for her.

    I found this movie to be pretty interesting. I liked that it focused on a middle-aged woman going on an adventure and getting out of the rut of her life, and how a lot of it was about her and her sister having a complicated relationship with each other. Ayako would pick at Setsuko, calling her selfish if she didn't also get her a drink at a vending machine after getting herself one, then refuse a drink once Setsuko bought one for her. Setsuko accuses Ayako of stealing and marrying Setsuko's boyfriend, and still harbors resentment towards her. Terajima's performance as Setsuko brings a lot of sensitivity to the role, and I liked how she would still want to slip into being "Lucy" when she wanted to feel more brave or more open to trying new things. I looked her up, and saw that she was in a film I had really liked, Vibrator (2003),  where she plays a young woman who meets a handsome truck driver and goes on a journey of sexual self-discovery. It was a very intimate drama that felt very character-driven, and felt like a little hidden gem of a film.

    I wasn't as into the second half, when Setsuko is more deluded towards John because of her unrequited crush, leading her to make bad decisions that alienate people, and really didn't like that she makes a mess of her life and other people's lives, especially since John was often at fault for taking advantage of Mika, likely fetishizing her as his cute Japanese girlfriend, and bringing her to the U.S. and away from her life in Tokyo. He also kept calling Setsuko Lucy, not bothering to learn her real name, with a colonizer perspective of not wanting to call someone by their real name if it's too hard for him, out of internalized xenophobia. Even when he calls out a waiter for mocking Setsuko's English in a diner, he still calls her by her fake Anglicized name anyway.

    I really liked seeing Yakusho in his smaller supporting role as Takeshi/"Tom," as I've liked him a lot in films like Shall We Dance? (1996), 13 Assassins (2010), and Perfect Days (2023). He as "Tom" first seems very smiley, into hugging and speaking stilted English in the class, then when walking with Setsuko after class, introduces himself as Takeshi, and is more sensitive and quiet and reserved than as his Tom persona with a wig on. He appears more in the finale, and explains more about how putting on the persona helps him when he doesn't want to deal with struggles in his own personal life as himself, much like how Setsuko did when she liked the Lucy persona better.

    I liked checking this movie out, more so for the acting and the journey of the main character than for the film as a whole.

Thoughts on Punch-Drunk Love

     On Criterion, I watched Punch-Drunk Love, a 2002 romantic comedy/drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán, and Mary Lynn Rajskub.

    The film centers on Barry (Sandler), a lonely bachelor who owns a company that sells themed toilet plungers, and he bears the brunt of verbal abuse and insults from his seven sisters, seeing him as a loser and picking apart his turns of speech, like mocking him for saying "chatting" instead of "talking," and interrupting him at work with phone calls reminding him to come to one of their birthday parties. Barry is generally quiet and reserved, but prone to short fits of rage in destroying things or yelling at people, not having a healthy outlet for his pent-up anger.

    He also has a side plan going, finding a loophole in a Healthy Choice promotion and wanting to amass a million frequent flyer miles by saving the coupons from purchasing vast quantities of pudding, as Barry has done the math on the risk vs. reward and deciding the pudding was the best option to purchase instead of soup cans or frozen meals from Healthy Choice. This subplot was based from an actual story of David Phillips, a civil engineer who in 1999 figured out that the value of the frequent flyer miles from the Healthy Choice coupons was more than the cost of the pudding, and accumulated 1.2 million frequent flyer miles.

    Early in the film, he witnesses a horrendous car accident, and retrieves a harmonium from the street, keeping it on his desk and tinkering with it. His sister Elizabeth (Rajskub) brings by her co-worker Lena (Watson), who Barry had briefly met before, in order to get them to date, but Barry's life is in disarray. He is not only busy with work and his side hustle with the pudding, but he had called a phone sex line the night before out of curiosity, is swindled into giving his Social Security number, and the sex worker he had spoken to on the phone is calling back to extort him for money and sending "her" brothers after him to intimidate him. This gets in the way of his budding relationship with Lena, although the two of them have a sweet chemistry and a romantic innocence that draws them closer together.

    I really loved this film. This was my first time watching it, despite knowing how famous it is and that it came out well over twenty years ago, but I hadn't ever bothered to watch it before. The film podcast This Had Oscar Buzz did an episode of it, timing it with the upcoming release of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film One Battle After Another, and the hosts really liked it, and it sounded really interesting to me and like I should finally see it.

    Adam Sandler was fantastic in this, and I liked how he could snap back and forth between the sweet shyness of Barry with snapping into rage, in a way that didn't come off as cartoonish or exaggerated as it does in his usual comedies. According to the podcast, Anderson chose Sandler because of an old Saturday Night Live sketch he did, where he plays a guy who hosts his own public access TV show, "The Denise Show," where he is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend and taking calls from people keeping tabs on her for him, and essentially stalking her. When his dad calls him and berates him, like saying "You're embarrassing the family!" and "Be a man!" Sandler as the guy would shout back "Shut up! Shut up, old man!" and shouting him down, then snapping back to calm reality. Anderson really liked the weird comedy in it, and it works really well in this film.

    Emily Watson is so sweet in this, and while she is largely the love interest and not the focus like Sandler is, I still liked how sensitive her performance was, and how sexy and intimate her chemistry with Sandler was, like in a love scene in bed where they are whispering pillow talk like "I'm lookin' at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fuckin' smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You're so pretty" and "I want to chew your face, and I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them and chew them and suck on them." And the silhouetted scenes of them embracing each other in front of windows are really beautiful imagery.

    The cinematographer was Robert Elswit, and his camerawork makes the film look stunning, especially in a lot of long take, panning shots that flows in musical symmetry with Jon Brion's experimental score of tones and sounds, as well as with the more romantic music reminiscent of Jacques Tati's 1960s French comedies. The visual interludes were done by the late artist Jeremy Blake, with gorgeous purple and blue colors blending against each other. "He Needs Me," a song from the 1980 film version of Popeye, sung by the late Shelley Duvall, plays in a scene too, and is a cute and endearing love song. The film was edited by Leslie Jones, and the scenes connect together really well to make for an oddball romantic comedy with an unusual musical score.

The film would be the start of Sandler's occasional dip outside of his mainstream comedies, with his acclaimed performances in Reign Over Me, Funny People, and Uncut Gems, in more dramatic roles and/or experimental indie films. It's obvious that he's more into his comfort zone with his more current Netflix comedies and children's films, but it is nice whenever he takes a break from that and does a more unusual film.

I just really found this movie both very romantic, with having the same weirdo spirit that both Anderson and Sandler share, and the film connected their wavelengths very well. I'm really happy I finally watched this.