Thoughts on Thelma

  On Hulu, I watched the 2024 comedy Thelma, written and directed by Josh Margolin, starring June Squibb as the titular character, a woman in her nineties who gets scammed out of $10,000 by a caller pretending to be her grandson, and she goes on a mission to track down the scammers and get her money back.

    I really liked how the film is a mix of being a comedy about an elderly widow who borrows her friend Ben's (Richard Roundtree, in his final film role before his death in 2023) scooter, with her family panicking and trying to find her and driving around L.A., but mixing in serious issues about the realities of being old, the body hurting and breaking down, and needing to ask for help despite priding oneself on being independent. 

    Thelma doesn't like to be patronized or talked down to, and isn't going to let this money loss go, because she wants justice and her money back. She doesn't like that her grandson worries about her, wanting him to focus on his own life, and refusing to wear the medic alert bracelet that he had given her. When he tries to guide her in using a computer and talks down to her, she gives a sarcastic reply that seems to go over his head.

    Parker Posey and Clark Gregg are decent in supporting roles as Thelma's daughter Gail and son in-law Alan, and Fred Hechinger gives a nice performance as Thelma's grandson Danny, a young man who feels aimless in his life and empty after his recent breakup with his girlfriend.

    The finale with the scammers halfway plays out like a climax to an action film, but as it involves two elderly people with health issues, it doesn't go the way of a John Wick or Equalizer kind of gun battle finale. Rather, it's more like two people recognizing each other's desperation and mortality, but not having much sympathy for the other.

    The director Josh Margolin based the movie on his 103-yr old grandma Thelma, who was almost duped by scammers in a similar scheme. The film ends with a cute clip of the real-life Thelma, as sassy and as funny as the fictional version.

    June Squibb is fantastic in this film, and it's great seeing her in a film where she isn't just playing someone's funny grandma with one-liners, but is the lead character and shows a lot of heart and lived life and emotional resonance in the role of Thelma, and was really captivating to watch.

Thoughts on Fear City

 

   On Criterion, I watched Fear City, a 1984 exploitation film written by Nichols St. John and directed by Abel Ferrara. They have collaborated on nine films together, including Ms. 45, China Girl, King of New York, Dangerous Game, Body Snatchers, The Addiction, and The Funeral. The film centers on two talent agents for adult entertainment performers, the agents being Matt (Tom Berenger) and Nicky (Jack Scalia), who provide strippers for Manhattan night clubs, specifically the seedy Times Square area. A serial killer begins targeting the dancers, knifing them, and his attacks later turn fatal, and Matt and Nicky are being pressed by a police detective (Billy Dee Williams) to help him find the killer.

    Matt is a former boxer who accidentally killed his opponent, and he is connected with the mob over witnessing a mob hit as a child and not telling anyone about it. His ex-girlfriend Loretta (Melanie Griffith) is one of the star dancers, and as her friends get attacked and murdered, Matt rekindles his relationship with her and is trying to protect her from the same fate.

    

    The killer, Pazzo (John Foster) practices martial arts in the nude in his barren loft, writes about his attacks, and stalks the women late at night. Some of the dancers are played by notable actresses in early roles, like Maria Conchita Alonso, Rae Dawn Chong, and Ola Ray (best known as Michael Jackson's girlfriend in the Thriller video). The scenes of the killer doing martial arts while naked feels like inspiration for Die Hard 2, with the scenes of a naked William Sadler practicing karate or kickboxing while nude in his home. There are also similarities to the 1983 Charles Bronson movie 10 to Midnight, focusing on a serial killer who performs his murders in the nude as to not get any blood on him, and that movie also had Ola Ray in a small part as a friend of Bronson's character's daughter.

   

    Melanie Griffith had been acting since she was a teen in the 1970s, and in her early roles as an adult, she did get typecast in sex worker parts, with roles showing off her body, sex appeal, and soft voice. In the same year, she had been in Brian de Palma's Body Double as an adult film actor, and would become more of a mainstream star with roles in Something Wild (1986) and Working Girl (1988). She was a lot of fun in Cherry 2000 (1988), where she played a tracker of sex doll robots to help a guy find a model of his robot to replace, crossing a dangerous post-apocalyptic wasteland of 2017.

    This movie definitely feels like everything that Abel Ferrara likes about 1980s New York City: strippers, gangsters, cliched Italian New Yorker stereotypes, street violence, and an overwhelming feeling of sleaziness in the nighttime. It's nice to watch as long as one knows what to expect, of a 1980s B-movie neon thriller, with a cool theme song by David Johansen and Joe Delia.

Thoughts on The Linguini Incident

 On Criterion, I watched The Linguini Incident, a 1991 indie film directed by Richard Shepard (Cool Blue), an offbeat forgotten movie where Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie work at a trendy SoHo restaurant with a pretentious hipness, and she’s a waitress named Lucy whose grandfather worked with Harry Houdini as his agent, and she’s trying to become an escape artist, practicing with a noose, a straitjacket, and being locked in a sack. He’s a British undocumented immigrant named Monte, who is a pathological liar and has a quietly psychotic edge, looking for someone to quickly marry for a green card before he gets sent back. And they both are plotting to rob the trendy restaurant because it rakes in cash every night.

It’s weird to watch a movie where David Bowie is trying to play a regular person, albeit an attractive non-violent psycho. He’s still handsome and charming, but his rock star icon status makes it hard to see him as a struggling immigrant in NYC. I could believe him as a vampire in The Hunger or as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, but not as a guy who works as a bartender.

I like how quirky and sexy and funny Rosanna Arquette is, she’s really charming in this. I see this movie as like a sequel to her character in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan, after she as Roberta leaves her yuppie husband to live with boho Aidan Quinn in his barren loft and becomes a magician’s assistant in a downtown dive. I see her as Roberta having broken up with him, trying to become a magician of her own through the escape arts, and getting by on her waitress job while living with her roommate Vivian (Eszter Balint) in an old apartment. I much preferred the friend interactions of Lucy and Vivian, as they had a nice chemistry of downtown NYC girlfriends living together.

It’s an OK movie, more just interesting for the leads and depiction of early 90s downtown NYC in the indie movie boom.

Thoughts on The Substance

    At the Angelika Village East Theater in New York City, I went to see The Substance, a 2024 film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), starring Demi Moore as fading actress-turned fitness TV host Elisabeth Sparkle, who, decades after she won an Academy Award, is being pushed out of her fitness TV show by her sexist boss (Dennis Quaid), telling her she's 50 and aged out of being seen as attractive for a media audience. As she walks down a long red hallway, she passes by blown-up photos of her through the decades, done-up magazine style from the 1980s to the 2000s, and her huge and cavernous apartment is also adorned with a giant portrait of her younger self in fitness wear, a shrine to her Hollywood peak of beauty.

    She sees a billboard of herself being torn down, gets into a car accident, and a handsome young orderly passes her a flash drive labeled "The Substance" with the note "It changed my life." She plugs the flash drive in her computer, and an ominous male voice narrates a cell-replicating process (the film opens with a syringe being injected into an egg yolk, and the egg yolk reproducing an identical yolk out of its side, like in a mitosis kind of way), explaining how she and her other self will switch off every seven days, using a scientific process with a syringe kit and bags of liquid food for each body when not being in use, and the other self will be her younger, more conventionally attractive self, and that they are the same person even when split apart. 

    Elisabeth is at a desperate point in her life, so she orders it, and goes to a secret back alley location, where the gate won't open the whole way and she has to crouch under it, using a key card to get the package, and the process is painful, with her back splitting open violently and another person climbing out of her body. The other person is a younger, dark-haired beauty (Margaret Qualley), with the same consciousness as Elisabeth, who is now curled on her bathroom floor as a shell of herself, and the other woman, who names herself Sue, goes to audition for Elisabeth's old spot on the fitness show and immediately gets it because she radiates youth and sexiness and beauty, wearing 80s workout gear, and the show is re-tooled to be much more sexualized, with a lot of focus on her butt, doing suggestive positions, and the movie goes with this heightened reality, hardly anyone questioning where Sue came from, and her becoming an immediate TV star.

    But when they switch off, Elisabeth, having no job, and seemingly no hobbies or any friends and family, just spends her time alone at home, bingeing on food in front of the TV, trashing her apartment, and waiting to switch off so she can be young and dazzling. And the black market operation behind The Substance (which purposely stays vague on who runs it or where the substance comes from) gives strict rules in bold lettering about sticking to the seven-day rule, no exceptions, but, as Sue enjoys her popularity, she starts bending the rules and not wanting to switch off at the seven-day mark, thinking "Just one more day won't hurt." And Elisabeth starts resenting Sue for all the fun and celebrity she gets to enjoy, and even if they technically are the same person, and not conscious at the same time, they do start rivaling with each other to be the matrix, or the alpha, or the one in charge. And the ones who caused all of this are the sexist media and society who pushed Elisabeth out when she was deemed "old" and "unattractive," pushing her to extremes to regain her youth and vitality in a cartoonishly misogynist world.

    This movie is highly stylized, with a satirical sense of humor, with loud synths, big title cards for both Elisabeth and Sue, being overly flashy, and it's a lot of fun to watch. It's the most interesting role that Demi Moore has had in years, a comment on the sexist treatment she received from the media in the 1990s for seeming too intimidating, too sexual (especially with 1996's Striptease), and seen as too unlikable and "bitchy." Moore was essentially pushed out of her movie star career, though she produced the Austin Powers and Charlie's Angels movies, and appeared as the villain in Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle in 2003, seen as her "comeback" at the time. She was also mocked for her marriage to Ashton Kutcher because he was 15 years her junior, though bigger age differences with older men and younger women wouldn't be criticized as much. She continued acting in films, occasionally getting some critical acclaim (Margin Call), but this film does feel like full circle of her playing a movie star who is largely seen as past her prime. With the physical challenges of the film, especially as the movie gets more bizarre and over the top, she shows a lot of ferocity to throw herself into the weirder aspects of the film, and deserves all the acclaim she's gotten.

    Margaret Qualley, a dancer turned actor, who comes from a Hollywood family (her mother is model turned actress Andie MacDowell) has the talent of being both a charismatic dancer with captivating looks, and an interest in taking on offbeat movies like Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Drive Away Dolls. She is fun to watch as someone who can play up being sexy and flirty with ease, but also excels with her frustration with Elisabeth sabotaging her life out of jealously, and she really shines in the finale as she takes things much further even when everything is falling apart.

    Fargeat's film really takes a lot of influence from weird, batshit horror films like Basket Case, The Fly, Society, as well as influenced by Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and John Frankenheimer's Seconds, and a lot of use of practical effects, which does give the film more of a visceral feel, especially as body parts decay or fall off, or the cell reproduction process out of Elisabeth's back, and heavy prosthetics as Elisabeth changes over the film. There have also been TV episodes of horror anthology shows like Tales from the Crypt and the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone where women go to extremes to fight aging and seeing their beauty fade, seeing youth and attractiveness as their worth and commodity in life, and with major side effects if they go too far or don't follow the set rules. And, as Fargeat is a French director, the film does share similarities with other French horror movies like Raw and In My Skin, and it does mix satirical feminist commentary on women only being valued for their youth and beauty with over the top horror comedy from B-movies. It's a really great movie, it won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, and is a standout of this year.

Thoughts on Anora

   At the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I went to see the 2024 film Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket), starring Mikey Madison (Better Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) as Anora, aka Ani, a Brooklyn stripper living in Brighton Beach near Coney Island who is romanced by a young and rich Russian playboy, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) , in the club and swept into a week-long binge of sex and drugs and partying and an impulsive Vegas quickie marriage. 

    When his wealthy oligarch family hears of it, it's up to his family's handler, Toros (Karren Karaguilan) and two henchmen to act as the middlemen to get the marriage annulled, but Ani, having been slut-shamed and insulted in Russian (a language she understands but doesn't speak fluently), refuses to be shut up, and her brassy personality proves a force that the family cannot easily buy off her silence, as she demands respect as her husband's wife and not just seen as a disposable sex worker.

    The film takes a screwball comedy approach, where a lot of scenes that could be played as serious drama (Ani being partially tied up by a guard to keep her from running away; Ivan taking off from his family's mansion and the group searching all over Brighton Beach for him at Russian-language spots) is played more as farce, with misunderstandings and fights, with a hilarious scene of Ani fighting the henchmen with biting one and kicking another and breaking his nose, smashing objects all over the living room. Toros later gives extra money to the housekeeping crew, letting them know that the house is messier than usual and not to ask questions.

    I liked how the film combined the goofy comedy with a somber realization on Ani's face as she is searching for Vanya, trying to call him, and being sent to voicemail, and as she keeps defending herself as his wife and proclaiming her love for him, as well as not wanting to be dismissed as a sex worker, it feels more obvious that he doesn't feel the same for her, and that he isn't worth the effort to stay married to just to prove his family wrong. It's a hard lesson for her to learn, even as a streetwise Brooklyn woman used to hustling men as a stripper, but Vanya tapped into her romantic side with all the sex and playground antics, and she proves to be more of an adult than he is.

    As I had seen Madison on the FX show Better Things as a teenager playing the eldest of Pamela Adlon's screen daughters, it did feel a little strange for me to see her in a film where she is topless in several scenes and playing a sex worker, but as she is 25 now, I got past it. The film even has a little in-joke about her age, where 21-year old Vanya asks her age, and she says 23, and he says she looks 25. Madison carries the film with a lot of fiery energy, affecting a strong Brooklyn accent, and portrays Ani as both rough around the edges as a young woman and smart beyond her years. She made me think of Cardi B, with her charismatic personality as a stripper and deep outer borough accent.

    With Sean Baker's films, it's a tricky balance between whether he wants to show marginalized characters with a respectful eye, but also coming in as a white, straight, cis-gendered man as an outsider, and possibly showing a stereotypical view. When I watched Tangerine, I could only watch half of it, and didn't know if the world of Black trans sex workers was being portrayed fairly through a white male director's eye. 2004's Take Out did have more of a documentary feel to it, as well as being an early film on a very low-budget, but as that also portrays the world of Chinese migrant delivery workers, I can't say whether Baker's film portrays them accurately. The Florida Project is one of his best films, with Willem Dafoe as the only well-known actor (aside from Caleb Landry Jones in a minor role), portraying children in low-income single mother families living in a motel just outside of Disney World in Orlando, FL, where the kids are messy and weird and annoying, but making the best of their living conditions in an unstable environment, and Dafoe as the motel manager looking out for them.

    Anora won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and has gotten a lot of acclaim, especially for Madison's performance. I did enjoy the movie as a weird and messy ride, though I wouldn't think of it as one of my current favorites of the year, just as a good comedy with sad, downbeat moments placed throughout the film.

    

Thoughts on The Entity

   On Criterion I watched The Entity, a 1982 horror film directed by Sidney J. Furie (Lady Sings the Blues, Iron Eagle, Ladybugs), and written by Frank De Felitta, adapted from his novel based on Doris Bither, a woman in the 1970s who claimed to have been raped by a phantasm, and went under observation by UCLA doctoral students.

    Barbara Hershey starred as Carla, a fictionalized version of Bither, who is a divorced mother of three, and she is violently raped in her home by an invisible assailant, but cannot prove the attacks because the attacker wasn't seen by anybody. She is repeatedly attacked, in brutal and graphic ways, and once in front of her children, where her grown son tries to save her, but is thrown back by an unseen force and breaks his wrist. When the attacks happen, the room shakes, mirrors break, doors slam, and it's obvious that she is being haunted. The film came out the same year as Poltergeist, but whereas that film is more about a suburban family being haunted because their home was built on indigenous burial ground, this is more of a psychological horror film about women and trauma and institutional sexism.

    The attacks are really rough and difficult to watch, and aren't depicted as horror movie exploitation, but really focusing on Carla's trauma and effect on her mental psyche. Hershey is really incredible in this film, in likely one of the best performances of her career, in playing a woman who is trying to be taken seriously by reporting her assaults, but is brushed off and treated in a condescending manner by medical professionals. Her scenes feel much more terrifying and more realistic than most horror movies could show, because her pain as an assault survivor feels much closer to real-life experiences of many women.

    When she sees a psychologist (Ron Silver), he keeps letting his professional skepticism get in the way of believing her, despite that she has bruises on her body that she wouldn't be able to inflict herself, and keeps insinuating that her past trauma of childhood abuse is allowing her mind to manifest these attacks, not wanting to believe in the paranormal or anything outside of scientific reasoning.

    Carla reaches out to paranormal scientists to help her, much like how the family in Poltergeist do to exorcise their house, and the psychologist sees them as quacks and feels like they are derailing his work with Carla, and she is torn between the scientists who see her as a lab rat to experiment on, including putting her in a simulation of her house in a gymnasium to summon the ghost, and the psychologist who talks down to her and thinks she needs to be committed to a psychiatric institution. It places Carla as even more of a heroine, amongst a world of mostly men in the sciences who keep pulling her in different directions based on what they want out of her to feel like heroes.

    It's a really fantastic film, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who is a survivor of sexual assault, as the scenes of her being attacked are quite disturbing and graphic.

Thoughts on The Company of Wolves

 

    On Criterion, I watched The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan's 1984 film adapted from Angela Carter's feminist retelling of fairy tales, often twisting the stories to either include more female agency or being about men as predators in the guise of wolves. I really liked it a lot, how slow and dreamlike it felt with the soft-focus and slow-motion, and how the movie would have stories within a dream, occasionally having reality bleeding into the dream, and it being very misty and atmospheric and moody.

    The story initially takes place in the present day, where Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) is a young girl who has a moody relationship with her sister, then she dreams that her family lives in a woodsy village centuries ago, and that her sister is killed by wolves. Rosaleen within the dream is sent to live with her grandmother (Angela Lansbury), who frequently cautions her about "never straying from the path," i.e. being a good girl who never is tempted by desire or doing anything wrong, and never trusting any man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. In this eerie take on Little Red Riding Hood, Rosaleen often disobeys her grandmother by wandering in the woods alone, and is drawn to a strange older man with a unibrow, who may be the wolf her grandmother is warning her about.

    The film interweaves stories of both Rosaleen's dream and stories told to her by her grandmother, often stories about women tempted by wolves and being led astray, or Rosaleen tells stories about others tempted by the Devil or shunned women having their revenge. The stories all mix together, so sometimes it's hard to tell which is in Rosaleen's dream world and which is in the story within a story, but it's all wonderful to watch as Gothic horror.

    I thought this movie was haunting and beautiful, with excellent special effects with the werewolf transformations, where the wolves shed their human skins with puppet wolf head coming out of the mouths of their human heads, it's graphic and glorious to watch. The film is full of obvious metaphors about Rosaleen becoming a woman, like blood dripping onto a white rose and turning it red, or her childhood toys falling to the ground in the finale as a lost of innocence. 

    I had read some of Angela Carter's writings as a teenager, and really liked her a lot, finding her fascinating as a mix of an academic and a fantasy nerd. She sadly died from cancer in 1992 when she was in her fifties, but I'm glad she was around to co-write the adapted screenplay to have her voice in this film, one of Neil Jordan's early directorial efforts. Other notable actors in this film besides Lansbury include David Warner as Rosaleen's father, Stephen Rea as a werewolf, and Terence Stamp in a cameo as the Devil. The film fits in well as a Halloween watch with its autumnal setting, and I highly recommend it.