Thoughts on Peppermint Frappé

     On Criterion, I watched the 1967 Spanish pyschosexual thriller Peppermint Frappé, directed by Carlos Saura and written by Saura, Rafael Azcono, and Angelino Fons. The film starred Geraldine Chaplin (who was Saura's partner at the time and appeared in several of his films throughout the late 1960s and 1970s) and José Luis López Vázquez. López Vázquez played Julián, a middle-aged conservative physician who becomes obsessed with his best friend's new, much younger wife, Elena (Chaplin), a flirty and vivacious blonde who embodies the New Wave spirit of European culture of the 1960s. She reminds him of a woman he saw beating the drums during the Holy Week ritual in the Spanish village of Calanda. While she denies that she is that woman, he is attracted to her cosmopolitan air and carefree attitude. 

    But since she is not interested in him, and he cannot possess her, he decides to remake her image on his meek, mousy brunette assistant, Ana (also played by Chaplin). Ana is shy, not glamorous, and harbors a secret crush on her boss. Julián, having old-fashioned and sexist attitudes about women and beauty standards, pressures Ana to work out in her sweater and skirt on a rowing machine in the office, dictates that women must be small and thin, and pressures her to wear more stylish makeup, trying to turn her into Elena's image.

    The film takes more turns with Julián treating Ana like a doll to dress up, taking advantage of her subservient position to him, while Ana may be manipulating him as well, playing a passive role intentionally, becoming what he wants in order to win him for herself. Elena still doesn't have any interest in Julián, and she and her husband Pablo lightly tease him, mocking him, which only makes him feel more stuck in the past and his conservative ways. The film takes more of a big climatic ending, which felt like it was being rushed in the end, whereas it worked a lot more in being a commentary about the Old Guard being more repressed vs. the younger generation in the waning years of the Franco administration in Spain.

    I mostly liked this film for Chaplin's dual role as Elena and Ana, playing two incredibly different women, and being very convincing as both a flirty, elusive blonde who loves to travel, prefers older men and isn't interested in having children at the moment; and Ana, a shy and mild-mannered nurse whose body language is tucked in and doesn't wear form-fitting dresses or style her hair in a fancy way, but possesses her own quiet strength. She's really charismatic and captivating in this film, and I liked watching her in her early roles and the beginning of her collaboration with Saura.

    I couldn't stand Julián's sexist attitude, and didn't like that the ending felt rushed to give it a big finale, but otherwise I thought it was a decent movie, feeling of the time as a New Wave film with inspirations from Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel.

Thoughts on I Like It Like That

On Criterion, I watched I Like It Like That, a 1994 dramedy written and directed by Darnell Martin, making her the first Black woman to direct a studio film. The film starred Luna Lauren Vélez as Lisette, a married mother of three kids in the Bronx who is struggling to keep her family together, between her cheating fboy of a husband Chino (Jon Seda), who is in jail for stealing a stereo during a neighborhood blackout; financially supporting her family; her racist mother in-law (Rita Moreno) who is anti-Black and blames her granddaughter’s textured curly hair on Lisette being Afro-Latina; and her loud, roughhousing kids, where her son is being lured into crime by local kids to prove he’s a “man.”

    Lisette hustles to get local modeling work, angles her way to be the assistant of a record executive to promote a Latino music group, and is stressed out by her family and her nosy neighborhood and trying to develop her own sense of identity and independence.

    I had seen this movie many years ago, but didn’t remember it well. I really liked it, and like the depiction of the worn-out Bronx old-school apartment, the messiness of the home, and the closeness of the neighborhood, despite everyone being in each other’s business. Luna Lauren Vélez is really great in this, and I mainly know of her from this movie and voicing Miles Morales’ mother in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse movies. Jon Seda is cute, but his character pissed me off throughout the movie, someone who definitely coasted on good looks but not brains.

    One of the best parts of the movie is Alexis, Lisette’s transgender sister, who lives in the same apartment building as Lisette and her family. Despite that Alexis was played by Jesse Borrego, a cis straight man, his performance was incredibly touching and caring, playing a woman who is accepted as trans by the local community, but not by her parents, who cruelly reject her. She has a small cat that she carries around her home, and there is a cute exchange where she tells Lisette that her yelling is scaring “the baby.” Lisette goes, “That’s not a baby, that’s a cat.” Alexis quietly adds, “Baby cat.”

    This scene is a highlight of the pressure that Lisette is under from her family and trying to get $1500 to bail her husband out of jail, and hiding in the bathroom while nearly having a breakdown.

Thoughts on A Face in the Crowd

    On Criterion, I watched the 1957 satire/drama A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, based on his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler." It centered on Andy Griffith in his film debut as Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a drifter who is discovered in the drunk tank of a local jail by a radio journalist named Marcia (Patricia Neal) who highlights him for her "A Face in the Crowd" human interest weekly program, where, in this case, she just surprises prisoners in a rural Arkansas jail and tries to mine entertainment out of them. Lonesome is woken up by the jailer, and, on a deal that he'll be released the next morning if he provides a song for the radio program, proceeds to perform a white-man blues song, hollering and taking over the broadcast. Marcia follows up with her radio colleagues, decides she wants him back for weekly shows, and finds him hitchhiking the next day, offers him work, and he soon becomes a radio sensation, preaching to the audience with charm and a big laugh. He takes advantage of his celebrity, criticizing local politicians and ridiculing his show's sponsors, and gaining Memphis-area popularity, all with an underlying sinisterness behind his big laughs enveloping the screen like a python swallowing its prey.

    As the film progresses, and Lonesome moves on to his own TV show, he becomes more corrupt behind the scenes, hiding it with a folksy, everyman TV persona. He hawks sugar pills as if they are male enhancement pills, he leers at teenage girls in a majorette competition and marries the 17-year old winner (a young Lee Remick also in her film debut), is brought on as an influencer to political hopefuls and develops his own political ambitions, and reveals himself to be more of a narcissist egomaniac stepping on everyone to get ahead.

    While Griffith obviously hams it up in this role, which would be a far distance from the more kinder and likable TV characters he would become known for, like Andy Taylor and Ben Matlock, Patricia Neal delivered a more understated, pained performance as the person who inadvertently created a monster, and is sinking in regret throughout the film. She had made Lonesome famous, thinking he'd be a fun weekly segment to her show, and his persona ran away from her, and she couldn't do anything but sit and watch, and resign herself to profiting off of his success, because he knows he owes her for his success. She even has a brief affair with him, only for him to callously reject her, first to claim he has an estranged wife in an unsettled divorce, then to marry a teenage adoring fan as a public performance. Marcia says of her: "Betty Lou is your public, all wrapped up with yellow ribbons into one cute little package. She's the logical culmination of the great 20th-century love affair between Lonesome Rhodes and his mass audience." When Lonesome leaves the room, Neal as Marcia lets out this choked little cry before collapsing onto the bed, and it was some really great physical acting from her. In the finale, as she is witnessing Lonesome's downfall, she still can't help but care about him, and has to be convinced by her show's writer, Mel (Walter Matthau) that while Lonesome is able to con people for a while, ultimately people see through it, and "we get wise to him - that's our strength."

    As a cultural reference, the scene where Lonesome's true nature is revealed to the public made me think of The Simpsons episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled," where he loses his show to a ventriloquist dummy named Gabbo, who wins over Krusty's audience, until he too, loses them due to the same way as Lonesome. I don't know if The Simpsons was making a reference to A Face in the Crowd, but it felt possible.

    This is an excellent film, that I had heard of through a casual mention in an old Winona Ryder interview as one of her favorite films. The film still holds up well, and what is sad is that in the present day, Donald Trump can act completely crass, drop any notions of seeming relatable or caring about the public, and he still gets voted for a second term. Whereas this film follows more of a rise and fall of a public personality, assuming the public will turn on him when his real personality is revealed, and sadly, that hasn't been the case in real life with current politics.

Thoughts on Alma's Rainbow

 

    On Criterion, I watched the 1994 drama Alma's Rainbow, written and directed by Ayoka Chenzira, centered on women in a Black family in Brooklyn, exploring themes of sisterhood and motherhood, set in a spacious Brooklyn brownstone home, and having this old New York City feel to it that I really appreciated. The film focuses on teenager Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), who hides Day-Glo shorts under her Catholic school uniform, and practices hip-hop dancing with her friends in the park, and binds her breasts, and doesn't want to be seen as either a tomboy or a girly girl, but embracing both sides of her, as she has romantic fantasies about Miles (Isaiah Washington). Her mother, Alma (Kim Weston-Moran) is more conservative and straight-laced, telling her daughter to stay away from boys, and runs a beauty salon out of their home. The family dynamic gets shaken up more when Alma's sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby) comes back after living in Paris for ten years, being flighty and dramatic and romanticizing Josephine Baker to her niece Rainbow, to which Alma flatly repeats about Baker, "Died broke."

    The film features a beautiful jazz score by Jean-Paul Bourelly, with Me'Shell Ndegeocello on bass (simply credited in the film as "Meshell"), and a rich cinematography captured by Ronald K. Gray, who also shot Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground in 1982. This is a story about women in a family bonding with each other, and sharing intergenerational history, as there are black and white flashbacks to Alma as a child with her own mother, and her mother's ashes kept in an urn in the living room.

    On Letterboxd, theironcupcake wrote a stunning review that captures the film much more eloquently and deeply than I can, and I share a passage from their review: "Ultimately this is the story of a family realizing the strength of its bonds, whether in the comforts of holding each other while asleep in bed, Alma and Ruby (the latter dressed in a floor-length, off-the-shoulder canary yellow gown with matching boa) healing some of their longstanding rift by wrestling each other to the floor (laughing all the while), Ruby teaching Rainbow how to walk in such a way as to project confidence, both Alma and Rainbow individually (re)discovering the desire to be touched and for feelings reciprocated in acts of love (though Rainbow is still a little too young for much more than dreams; she has a few of a boy named Miles, played by Isaiah Washington), and Rainbow cutting her hair into a flapper bob in homage to her aunt's affection for Josephine Baker. As Ruby says, the reality of life is that it is not "always great books and heartfelt jazz; I don't care what they say. But I keep on keepin' on because that's what I do best." Survival, that's the ticket. Any way you can do it, get it done, but it's definitely more fun if you and your loved ones stick together."

    Ayoka Chenzira is a director, animator, experimental filmmaker, and storyteller. She grew up in North Philadelphia, in the same building where her mother owned a beauty salon. Her mother made reimagined designer clothing, and encouraged Ayoka to follow her artistic passions, and she got into filmmaking at 17, becoming one of the first African-Americans to be a film educator in higher education. In the ending credits for Alma's Rainbow, she thanks fellow Black female filmmakers like Julie Dash, Ada Griffin, and Mabel Haddock, as well as the late Kathleen Collins and the late screenwriter Waldo Salt.

    Her film is a tribute to Black women family and finding connections with each other. In one scene, Rainbow gets her period for the first time, and the women alternate sitting by her side as she lays in bed with a rubber hot water bottle on her stomach to relieve cramps, and one cuts up ginger to make tea for her. It's an example of the shared womanhood of their family to show support and pass down stories as she goes through this rite of passage. It's a lovely and beautiful film, and I'm glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Omni Loop

     On Hulu, I watched the 2024 time-travel sci-fi drama Omni Loop, written and directed by Bernard Britto, and starring Mary-Louise Parker as Zoya Lowe, a quantum physics textbook author who was diagnosed with a growing black hole in her chest, and is given one week to live. She visits her mother in her assisted living community, spends time with her family at the beach, and gets an early celebration for her upcoming 55th birthday. But just as her nose begins to bleed, and Zoya knows this is the time of her death, she goes into the bathroom, takes a pill, and wakes up right back in the hospital a week ago, living the same week again in a self-induced time loop. She had found these pills when she was 12, in a bottle with her name on it, and would take them throughout her life to get ahead by going back in time to know how to improve things, but only started taking them again recently after her diagnosis.

    She is frustrated at living the same week over and over again, and decides to do research on the pills, and by chance, she meets Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a research assistant at a local community college, and they work together to do lab experiments on the pills, including using the help of a man who was shrunk to nanoscopic-size in a past experiment, who lives in a pet store box and helps with the calculations on the pills. They are trying to solve the mystery of time travel, but each time Zoya repeats the loop and they try different experiments, they are no closer to finding out how time travel works than before.

    It's an interesting movie that is about Zoya living alternate timelines each time she repeats the loop, as well as having anticipatory grieving for her own death within a week, and feeling like she was never good enough at her career no matter how many times she used the pills to her advantage to know answers in advance and get ahead. The film runs a lot longer than it should, at nearly two hours, when it feels like it should be 90 minutes, and can be a slog when going into Zoya's past history with her former colleague and ex Mark (Eddie Cahill). But Parker and Edebiri work really well together with great chemistry, as science professionals in very different positions in their life, and Paula talks about her past with her family and how she wishes she could have had the ability of time travel like Zoya did to fix past mistakes.

    I mainly watched this for the two leads and the time loop story, and while I felt it dragged at times, I thought it was a decent movie, focusing on women in STEM fields and trying to figure out time travel.

Thoughts on Georgia, Georgia

    On The Black Film Archive, I watched Georgia, Georgia, a 1972 drama directed by Stig Björkman, and starring Diana Sands, Dirk Benedict, and Minnie Gentry. The film focuses on both Sands as Georgia Martin, a singer touring Stockholm, and being pressured to speak on behalf of Black people in Sweden as a Black celebrity, and not wanting to be tokenized or expected to speak for the whole Black experience; and the experiences of Vietnam war deserters, with both Michael (Benedict), a white deserter who works as a photographer in Sweden, and Bobo (Terry Whitmore, a real-life deserter who wrote a 1971 memoir about his experience in the Vietnam War), a Black war deserter who wants Georgia to advocate for Black deserters in Sweden.

    The film was written by Maya Angelou, and Georgia, Georgia is known as the first known film production for a screenplay written by a Black woman. The film is notable for being centered on a Black woman figuring out her identity and challenging race relations, and Sands, who would tragically die at age 39 from cancer the following year, is great in portraying this complex role, with a lot of grace and charm and poise. And the early 1970s fashions she wore, like her dresses and coats, all looked fabulous. 

    Unfortunately, the rest of the movie drags in its 90 minutes, and it feels weak and amateurish in its production, despite the talent involved. The Black Film Archive describes the film as "visually disjointed as it doesn't wade into the nuances of being a Black woman which is essential to this film," and I agree. It's trying to both be a character study of a Black woman singer who is questioned on her Blackness by both white and Black people, and also trying to be a political commentary on defectors of the Vietnam War, and it doesn't really come together well, it feels stronger when it focuses more on Sands' character and her romance with Michael, as well as her relationship with her mother figure Mrs. Anderson (Gentry), who is controlling and disapproves of the interracial relationship. And if Maya Angelou had directed the film and kept it more in focus of Georgia and her journey, it would have been more interesting and insightful.

    I'm glad I watched it to check it out, and to see the streaming options on The Black Film Archive, which has a collection of films from the 1910s-1990s of obscure Black films that have been digitized and preserved for cultural and historical significance.

Thoughts on Crossing Delancey

     On Criterion, I watched the 1988 romantic comedy Crossing Delancey, directed by Joan Micklin Silver and adapted by Susan Sandler from her play of the same name. The film starred Amy Irving as Isabelle, a woman who works for an old bookstore in New York City, and mingles with the high-class literari, who she admires and wants to be part of their circle. She comes from an Lower East Side Jewish background, and regular visits her Yiddish-speaking Bubbe, Ida (Reizl Boyzk, a New York stage actress of Yiddish theater whose only film role was this movie), who lives in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side, who is pressuring her granddaughter to get married, despite her protests that she is happy as a single, independent woman. Ida hires a matchmaker (Sylvia Miles), and with Isabelle's hesitant agreeance, she sets up a meeting with Isabelle and Sam (Peter Riegert), a small business owner who runs a pickle stand.

    Isabelle is polite to Sam, who is more of a nice, down to earth guy, but she turns him down because she is more interested in the Dutch-American author Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbe), who represents the more cosmopolitan, intellectual lifestyle that she wants. Sam seems too "working-class" for her, as well as seeming too close to her Jewish roots and too close to home. Yet, Isabelle is caught between the two of them, figuring out what she wants and dealing with both men, and coming to terms with her own interest in love while still maintaining her independence.

    I really loved this movie. Amy Irving was fantastic in it, as having this city woman glamour to her that seemed stylish and attainable and cool, and I liked how she and Peter Riegert had such great chemistry with each other, where their conversations feel warm and realistic, and the film, as a romantic comedy, can feel more like a character study of people than just a light movie with caricatures. The movie is very 1980s in a old-school New York way, with Isabelle talking about living in her rent-controlled apartment and saying how cheap it is compared to others paying $1500 for their apartments (which, in 2025, would be considered cheap today for New York City), and Ida being a lifer in New York City and a part of the old Yiddish part of NYC that isn't around as much anymore, a person from another time. 

    Reizl Bozyk was a total scene-stealer in this film, and a really bright and funny presence who added so much character and lived-in experience as a star performer in the Yiddish theatre world. Though this was her only film role, I'm glad it's preserved for a mainstream audience to see how talented and wonderful she was.

    Joan Micklin Silver was a director of films and plays, and only just passed away in 2020 at age 85. Her best-known films were Hester Street (1975), which received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Carol Kane; Between the Lines (1977), starring John Heard and Lindsay Crouse, Big Girls Don't Cry  . . . They Get Even (1992), a family comedy that was originally known as Stepkids (to people like me who as children saw the trailer on the VHS tape to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze); Invisible Child, a 1999 TV movie where Rita Wilson plays a woman who invents an imaginary child and the rest of her family just goes with it and indulges her delusion; and A Fish in the Bathtub (1999), a indie comedy starring Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara with a young Mark Ruffalo as their son. The Criterion Channel is doing a collection retrospective on their channel, streaming several of her films.

    One of my favorite scenes was when Isabelle is in Gray's Papaya, a famous local chain in NYC of hot dogs and fruit drinks, and a woman comes in to sing "Some Enchanted Evening." The woman is a total stranger, but her lyrics have resonance for Isabelle and her feelings toward Sam. It's a mix of feeling like a precursor to the singing telegram scene from The Fisher King (with Michael Jeter singing to Amanda Plummer to promote Mercedes Ruehl's video store to establish a love connection with Robin Williams) and a tribute to a very New York City landmark, I used to go to the one on W. 4th St in the 2000s when I was in my twenties.

    The film came out in 1988, the year after Norman Jewison's film Moonstruck, a romantic comedy centered around Italian-American Brooklynites, and as that film had a range of adult ages and focused on love in middle and senior age, in a very Italian focus, Crossing Delancey is similar in that it is very focused on Jewish New York, with a mix of characters in their thirties and in their senior ages, and both films feel like they depict a kind of New York City that isn't around as much anymore post-gentrification and major rent hikes, so it feels warm and nice to watch old movies set in New York City with specific cultural identities of older ages as the main characters.