Thoughts on The Friend

    Last week, I went to the Angelika Film Center in New York City to see The Friend, a 2024 dramedy written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End; What Maisie Knew; Bee Season), based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez. It stars Naomi Watts as Iris, a writer and college professor living in Greenwich Village in her late father's rent-controlled apartment on Washington Place, whose longtime friend Walter, a fellow writer and professor who has been married three times, suddenly dies by suicide, and unbeknownst to her, made her the "continency plan" to take care of his five-year old, 150-lb Great Dane, Apollo. Iris learns about this from one of his ex-wives, and despite that her building doesn't allow dogs, and that she doesn't want this responsibility while she is still grieving the loss of her friend, she takes in Apollo, who proceeds to take over her bed and trash her home when she's out, as when Iris comes in, a neighbor (Ann Dowd) knowingly says, "He missed you," meaning he was likely barking and howling so the neighbors could hear. The super warns Iris about no dogs, not wanting management to evict her and make her lose her rent-controlled cheap apartment.

    Iris is struggling with taking care of this dog, who is grieving the loss of Walter like she is, through some particular good animal acting by Bing, like sitting and listening to Walter's writings being read aloud or howling at the ceremony when Walter's ashes are spread over water. Iris didn't ask for this, and doesn't like that her friends treat her as a charity case, telling her she lives in a "shoebox" (when her apartment as a studio/1 bedroom is much larger and more spacious than average NYC apartments today), and as she tries to find a permanent home for Apollo while feeling guilty that she can't take care of him like Walter entrusted her to do, she is coming to terms with her grief, with her anger over Walter's decision, and knowing the dog is one of her last connections to Walter. She is also left to edit his unfinished novel, as well as dealing with Walter's three wives, and his adult daughter who suddenly showed up in the picture, all with their own individual histories with him.

    I felt the movie was long at two hours, and there were several times in the last quarter of it when I kept thinking it would end, but it would continue. Despite that, I liked the movie as a drama about grief, writing, dogs, and friendship. Naomi Watts was wonderful to watch in the film, especially in a scene when she meets with a therapist to try to have the dog registered as an emotional support animal so she can keep him in a last-ditch effort, and she delivers some marvelous acting when venting about her grief and sadness and anger about Walter and her history with him.

    When I saw the film on March 28th, there was a Q&A afterwards with Scott McGehee, David Siegel, and Naomi Watts, talking about the film and finding the right dog for Apollo, selecting Bing after a nation wide search. Watts talked about how she had two 20-minute sessions a day with Apollo, in order for him to slowly get used to her, and how she as a dog person had to play someone who isn't fond of dogs, and improvising along with him in scenes when he wasn't acting, like a scene where she argues with a security guard who won't allow dogs in the building, and the dog just sat down, so she sat down too, going along with it.

    It was nice seeing Carla Gugino in the film as one of Walter's ex-wives, as I've always liked her. Bill Murray himself was fine, but his image to me has been more tainted with allegations of him being abusive to several people, both professionally and personally, and him forcing a kiss on Naomi Watts during the press tour, when she just got married last year to Billy Crudup, makes him more odious to me, so I don't have much positive to say about him.

    I would recommend the film as a decent drama starring Naomi Watts and a regal, beautiful dog played by Bing the Great Dane.

Thoughts on Mickey 17

    This week, I went out with my friends to see Mickey 17, a 2025 sci-fi comedy written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. It takes place in 2054, where Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is a nobody who, along with his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), are poor and struggling and owe money to a murderous loan shark, and in order to escape Earth and their debts, they sign up to work on a spaceship expedition that is led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) to colonize another planet. Timo gets work as a shuttle pilot, and Mickey, not having any prospects in life and not thinking things through, signs up to be an "Expendable," essentially donating his body for scientists to use for testing in experiments, and his DNA, brain, and memories are captured, so that when he inevitably dies in these experiments (like testing the air on a new planet and dying from viruses until a vaccine can be developed), and his body is tossed down into a furnace, he is regenerated within a day through a 3-D printer, printing out his whole body, including stops and starts like an actual printer spitting out paper.

    When the film catches up to the most current version of Mickey, he is in his 17th life, with all his memories intact, including remembering all his previous deaths. People on the ship, working grunt jobs and on limited rations, keep asking him "What's it like to die?" and he can't say anything more than "It sucks." Through all of his lives as Mickey 1-17, he has had a relationship with security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a sexy, fun, and playful romance where they share private jokes like drawing stick figure sex positions to each other. 

    Four years into the expedition, after a vaccine has been developed, Mickey 17 is to capture one of the indigenous creatures on the planet, called "creepers" by the spaceship crew (but whom my friends compared to the creatures in Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). He falls through the ice, is left for dead, but rather than being eaten by the creepers, he is rescued by them and returned to the surface. But this causes more problems, as Mickey 18 (also played by Pattison) was developed in his presumed death and absence, and as there are laws against multiple clones existing at the same time due to past crimes, neither can be alive at the same time.

    The film is a lot of fun to watch, very offbeat and weird, and a lot of credit goes to Robert Pattinson's dual performance as Mickey 17 and Mickey 18. It's hard when an actor plays twins or clones and is acting opposite themselves, to make themselves distinct so that the "twins" don't get confused by the audience, and with both Mickeys having very different personalities and slightly different voices, it's easy to tell them apart as two separate characters. Pattison affects this kind of pathetic, squirrelly voice, similar to when he put on an exaggerated character voice as the Heron in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki's film The Boy and the Heron (2023), and he's a fantastic actor, committed to physical comedy (like quick scenes where Mickey is being printed out but there is no tray to catch him so he just droops out of the printer and flips onto the floor) and facial expressions like mocking gestures that Mickey 18 makes at others.

    Mark Ruffalo's performance as Kenneth feels inspired as a mix between the tele-evangelist theatrics of Jimmy Swaggart and the pompous arrogance of Donald Trump, and as Kenneth is described as having had two failed presidential elections before deciding to leave Earth to start his own colony elsewhere, it's clear that Bong may have written this with the idea of Trump losing the 2024 election, but he couldn't have predicted the results. Ruffalo is a charming and likable actor, so even if he's playing a despicable villain, it's hard to completely hate him because of Ruffalo himself. Toni Collette's role as Kenneth's wife Ylfa is more conniving and like the Lady Macbeth to her husband, sneaking him ideas while being into developing sauces and fancy foods, as the crew of workers will get their rations cut in half and be starving.

    Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance With Somebody; Blink Twice; Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) is a delight to watch in this film, really bright and funny, with a gap-toothed smile, and game for action sequences and commanding the film as the heroine, especially in the finale. She and Pattinson have sweet chemistry, and were enjoyable to watch together. 

    The film is 2 hours and 17 minutes long, and the finale goes on for much longer than it needed to be, when it starts turning into a war film, and more and more gets layered on top of each other, where I couldn't tell when the end point was going to be. I would think it would be over, then more sequences and plot points would be added. I felt the finale got too bloated with too many ideas at once, but up until then, I really liked the movie a lot, and enjoyed seeing a creative and weird sci-fi comedy with my friends and discussing it afterwards.

Thoughts on All Shall Be Well

   Last week on Criterion, I watched a 2024 Hong Kong film titled All Shall Be Well, written and directed by Ray Yeung. The film focuses on Angie (Patra Au) and Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin), a happy and affluent lesbian couple in their sixties, who have been together for forty years and living together for thirty years. They aren't legally married, but Angie has always been known as "Aunt Angie" to Pat's extended family, who have been loving and accepting of their relationship. 

    But tragically, Pat suddenly dies, and as Angie didn't co-own their apartment and wasn't married to Pat, her legal rights as her long-term partner are in jeopardy, as control of Pat's estate go to her brother, whose family have been poor and rely on a fortune teller to help improve their luck and finances. Then, Pat's brother and his family start showing that their "allyship" to Angie and Pat was only surface-level, as they ignore Angie's wishes about how Pat wanted her ashes spread at sea, to having control of her apartment and deciding whether to let Pat still live in her home she's been in for three decades, and essentially now treating her as if she doesn't count as family because she and Pat weren't married.

    Angie has her own friend group of lesbians, including one who is a lawyer and works to advocate for Angie's right as Pat's partner. It's a great film, but so frustrating to watch because the film depicts a reality that queer people have faced, when their partner dies and their partner's heterosexual family takes over and has the legal right to kick their partner out of their home, or treat them as if they were just their "roommate" and not their long-term romantic partner. People in the LGBTQ community fought for civil rights for decades, including having the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples, when it comes to estate laws and housing and receiving benefits and inheritances. The nationwide law that passed for same-sex marriage was only just ten years ago, following a few states that allowed it, and there have been more legal rights for same-sex married couples, which is a great improvement. So it makes it so sad to watch a movie where a family, who seem like allies, are quick to be dismissive of their loved one's partner when it's convenient for them, and control the estate and do what they want instead of what the deceased person would have wanted.

    And Angie, through encountering the waning kindness of Pat's family, is also grieving the loss of essentially her spouse of forty years, feeling lost without her, and being in her sixties and not knowing what to do. They didn't make legal preparations because they didn't want to think about death, and just lived in the moment. Their scenes together early in the movie are sweet, like when they shop together at a street market stall where they are friendly with the shop owners, and there's a lot of familiarity and warmth with them. Only with her found family is she able to find some kinship with fellow queer women who can understand her loss much more than anyone else can.

    Despite the film leaving me emotionally gutted at the end, I really liked it a lot, and thought Patra Au was fantastic in the film, bringing a lot of lived experience where one could feel the years of her history as Angie with Pat, and she and Maggie Li Lin Lin had a lot of sweet chemistry in their few scenes together. I highly recommend this film, but know that the actions of Pat's family in the film may leave you feeling pissed off in the end.

Thoughts on The Super

    I had heard of this 1991 movie The Super years ago, when I was telling a friend about Hal Ashby's 1970 film The Landlord, where Beau Bridges plays a rich guy who becomes the landlord of a Park Slope, Brooklyn building, in a low-income Black and brown neighborhood, and plans to gentrify the building by evicting the tenants and turning it into a luxury place. He undergoes a change of heart through the movie, getting to know the tenants and caring about people. My friend said, "That sounds like a Joe Pesci movie called The Super."

    I just watched The Super on Tubi, directed by Rod Daniel (Teen Wolf, Beethoven's 2nd) and written by Sam Simon and Nora Ephron, and really liked it. It bombed when it came out, and it's hard to find now, since the video included, made by Hats Off Entertainment three years ago, said it's only on VHS. It's a similar plot, in that Joe Pesci plays the son of a slumlord (Vincent Gardenia) who profits off of buildings in low-income neighborhoods, where he never gets anything fixed and collects the rent, and gives a building to Pesci, who takes after his greedy jerk of a dad. Pesci is taken to court for all the housing violations in the building, and made to live in the building for four months to get the building up to code and face the problems himself, like poor plumbing, a lack of heat, a rat infestation, etc.

    He starts out the movie a slimeball jerk, being continually pressed by a housing authority lawyer (Madolyn Smith Osborne), who he sexually harasses throughout the movie, and thankfully she never shows interest in him and always puts him in his place). But as he gets his comeuppance, he starts caring about the tenants, and learns how to stand up to his father, who is full of racist dogwhistles like calling the tenants "animals."

    

    The tenants are played by character actors like Ruben Blades (more known as a famous salsa musician), Paul Benjamin, Beatrice Winde, and Eileen Galindo.

    I did like hearing the early 90s dance music, like "You Can't Touch This" and "Gonna Make You Sweat" during scenes when the tenants party whenever they have electricity and heat, and how the scenes were clearly shot in Brooklyn, even if the exterior of the building is in the East Village. Joe Pesci's character becomes more likable as the movie goes on, and it has a similar resolution to The Landlord. So I enjoyed this, more of an average early 90s comedy.

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.