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.

Thoughts on Outrageous!

     On Tubi, I watched Outrageous!, a 1977 Canadian comedy-drama written and directed by Richard Brenner. The film was adapted from "Making It," a short story by Canadian writer Margaret Gibson from her 1976 collection The Butterfly Ward, and she and star Craig Russell had been roommates in real life, which the story was based on.

    The story is about Robin (Russell) a hairdresser and aspiring drag queen, and his best friend, a schizophrenic woman named Liza (Hollis McLaren). Robin does costumes and makeup for local drag performers, and wants to perform himself, but is too shy and insecure to take his career further. He specializes in doing performances of divas like Carol Channing, Judy Garland, Mae West, and Ethel Merman, as well as a show playing Joan Crawford and Bette Davis characters. He is mocked by his closeted hair salon boss for being slightly chubby, and saying that the women won't want to have their hair done by gay men, and a customer yells at Robin for making her look like the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra, because he wanted to give more glamour to the local women in their Toronto neighborhood.

    Liza was released from the institution in which she was being held, and kept on a strict schedule of several prescription pills to take, including a lot of Valium. She has hallucinations of the "Bonecrusher" lying on top of her, and Robin will help her by miming with her to push the weight of the delusion off of her. They become roommates, and Liza meets with a social worker, who advises her to not become pregnant, seeing Liza as too mentally fragile to handle being a mother. But she has various flings with men, mostly cab drivers, and eventually becomes pregnant, and wants to keep the baby, against her social worker and her mother's wishes. Her mother will blame Robin for Liza trying to be more independent, and calling him by homophobic slurs. The friends are also trying to make it to New York City so that Robin can perform in Manhattan clubs and Liza can be on her own more.

    The film feels very much of its time, with a title that makes the film feel more silly than it really is, and I liked it more as a historical curiosity, a film focused on gay characters and drag culture with people who, though they live in Toronto, feel like they're in a small town with everyone in each other's business. I really liked the friendship between Robin and Liza, and how Robin is pushed to have more confidence in himself as a drag performer, and Liza is pushed to be more independent and not defined by her schizophrenia. The film felt very inspiring to be weird and one's authentic self, and not letting mental health issues keep them from living their lives.

    I especially liked the finale, where Liza is confiding in Robin, and they have both talked about having had depression, and she feels dead inside, and he says, "You're Liza. You'll never be normal, but you're special. And you can have a hell of a good time. You know, there's only one thing. You're mad as a hatter, darling. But that's all right, because so am I. I've never known anyone who wasn't worth knowing who wasn't a positive fruitcake. We're all mad. You and me, are here to love and look after each other. You're not dead. You just have a healthy case of craziness."

    Sadly, the director Richard Brenner and the star Craig Russell would succumb to AIDS both in 1990, so the film does feel like a capsule of gay life pre-AIDS in the late 1970s. The film had a sequel in 1987 titled Too Outrageous!, and a stage musical was produced in Canada in 2000.

    I really liked the film a lot, enjoying the quirky gem of the central friendship and the queer issues explored in the film, and am glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Still Walking

    Last Sunday on Criterion, I watched Still Walking, a 2008 Japanese film written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. The film is a drama about a family coming together on the twelfth anniversary of the eldest son's death, and the complicated dynamics between the parents and the surviving adult children and their families.

    The Yokoyama family come together every year to commemorate the death of the eldest son, Junpei, who drowned twelve years prior while saving a 13-year old boy. The father Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is a retired doctor, and idealizes his deceased son, while treating his living son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) like a disappointment because he went into art restoration instead of becoming a doctor like him, and leaves Junpei's items untouched like a shrine to him. Ryota brings his wife Yukari (Yu Natsukawa), who is widowed from a previous marriage, and her son Atsushi (Shohei Tanaka), and Ryota's family is initially distant and cold towards Yukari, thinking it is bad luck to marry a widow, but gradually warm to her once they get to know her as a person. Ryota's sister, Chinami (You, aka Yukiko Ehara), wants her family to move in with her aging parents to take care of them.

    The film progresses over one day into the next morning, and I liked how quiet the film felt, but very rich with family moments and vignettes that give a lot of coloring to the family's history with each other. Like how Kyohei would retell a positive anecdote about Junpei, and forget that the anecdote was actually about Ryota. Royta would feel bitter towards his father's obvious favoritism towards his older brother. Or how the mother Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) would reminisce at dinner about her and Kyohei's personal romantic song, "Blue Light Yokohama" by Ayumi Ishida, and how she had heard Kyohei singing it from another woman's house, and purchased the record and would play it in private. And that the couple, despite decades of mutual resentment where Kyohei criticizes his wife in front of the family, still stayed together anyway.

    The film shows just one day in this family's life, and there are no big changes or revelations to their relationships. People avoid conflict just to get along, even if they have resentment, and are trying to be nice and polite to "keep the peace." Even if Ryota suggests a change to how his family does a certain ritual, concerned on how it affects someone, he just gets told that the ritual is done out of habit to avoid confronting difficult feelings, even if it's at someone's expense and comes off as cruel and selfish, and that they won't change their behavior even when called out on it.

    I really like Kore-eda's films, having seen Air Doll, Shoplifters, After Life, The Truth, and Broker, After Life and Shoplifters being my favorites. His films excel at focusing on complex emotions and fraught relationships, where no one is a hero or villain, and has shades of gray to their character. Like the family of criminals in Shoplifters, or the brokers selling abandoned babies on the black market in Broker, or the rules of the afterlife being that the recently deceased can only hold on to one memory for eternity in After Life. He is a highly acclaimed filmmaker, and I had heard of Still Walking as one of his best films, but hadn't seen it, and I enjoyed just sitting with it and letting the scenes pour over me. This was a beautiful and stunning film to watch.

Thoughts on Love, Brooklyn

    At the Angelika Film Center on Monday, I saw Love, Brooklyn, a 2025 romantic comedy-drama directed by Rachael Abigail Holder, in her directorial debut, and written by Paul Zimmerman. The film centers on Roger (Andre Holland), a writer living near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY, and he is writing a piece on how gentrification has hurt Brooklyn, specifically with Black communities. He is close friends with his ex-girlfriend, Casey (Nicole Beharie), an art gallery owner who inherited her gallery building from her grandmother, and has been continually rejecting offers from a developer who has been buying buildings on the block, wanting to hold on to her building because of her heritage and as a Black business owner. Roger and Casey have a very playful, teasing friendship, often joshing around like kids in the park.

    Roger is casually dating Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a widowed mother of a young girl, Lorna (Cassandra Freeman) who lives in a Brooklyn brownstone, and whose husband died in an accident. She and Roger are cool with having a casual, friends with benefits relationship, but Roger isn't sure if he wants to be more serious with Nicole, and when Lorna who knows him as her mother's "friend," wants to get to know him, Nicole is trying to balance her own emotions with opening up a relationship between Roger and her daughter, while not wanting to hurt Lorna's feelings regarding the loss of her father.

    The film is beautifully shot, showing neighborhood scenes of Roger riding his bike down residential streets in Brooklyn, hanging out in front of a coffeeshop with his friend Alan (Roy Wood, Jr.), who is married and wants to live vicariously through Roger's single life as a bachelor. Alan is happily married and settled down as a middle-aged man, but likes the idea of an affair or having another woman be into him, but he turns down the possibilities that could lead to it, not wanting to actually blow up his life over an affair.

    The love triangle parts of the drama were decent, but I was more interested in learning more about Casey and Nicole's individual stories, as their own dramas were more compelling than about their feelings with Roger and his attraction towards both women. Casey is struggling with the pressure to sell her building, as well as mainly having one artist client that is keeping her in business, and when she tries calling Roger to talk about a difficult day he had, he's not up for listening at the moment, and Beharie plays it very well with the look of restrained frustration on her face, really wanting him to be a supportive friend, before being like "No, it's fine." Beharie has a lot of charisma and brightness as Casey's goofy self, and she's equally as good when she's playing the more subtle dramatic moments.

    I also wanted to know more about Nicole's inner life, as I felt like the film would just scratch the surface of her troubles as a single mom who is still mourning her husband, working multiple jobs to support her daughter, and juggling people's emotions. There is a fantastic scene in the finale when Roger comes to her after he's had a rough night, basically trying to crash at her home in the middle of the night, and she shuts him down for trying to use her for sex, saying she misses her husband every day, and standing her ground and not letting him take advantage of her. Wise is really great in that scene, and it made me want to know more about her character and not just being viewed as a FWB through Roger's eyes.

    Andre Holland was good, as he has soft eyes and a way of doing small gestures like scratching at his neck when he's nervous or hesitant, but I didn't find his character as compelling. I wasn't interested in his romantic drama, or that he kept struggling to write his piece on gentrification in Brooklyn, though I did like scenes that reflected the themes of the film, like when he and Casey are looking at a painting of Sodom and Gomorrah and the moral of leaving what you can't take with you. The film has an epilogue speech about loving your city and struggling with seeing it change, when it doesn't feel like your home anymore, and you can't hold onto the past, but that you can learn to love your city in the new shape its taken, and it can still have personal significance for you. That part really resonated with me a lot, as I lived in Astoria, Queens for 16 years and currently live in Jersey City, but still feel connected to Astoria as my longtime home, even if it's different than how it was when I was younger. The film had paralleled Roger's personal evolution with the evolution of his Brooklyn neighborhood, and it worked well together, more so with Casey's struggle with her own evolution.

    I thought the film was decent, that it could have had more depth with the script, but that the acting was all very good and the cinematography was gorgeous, so it was worthwhile to watch.

Thoughts on The Booksellers

     On Tubi, I watched The Booksellers, a 2019 documentary by D.W. Young, and executive produced by Parker Posey, about booksellers, rare book dealers, and archivists in New York City. The film mostly follows antiquarian and rare book dealers and their bookstores, as they collect and purchase books for large sums of money, having specific criteria like special autographs by the author (either to a fellow famous person or to a loved one in their life), an interesting dust jacket, or a prized first edition. They got their start working in used bookstores; following in their families' footsteps, or just falling into the career as nerdy collectors. 

    I found this film really fascinating, and as an archivist myself, I could relate to how much the book dealers and shop owners valued the archival history of the books, and wanting to preserve their legacies and support independent bookstores. As one person said, "We didn't call them independent bookstores back then, they were just bookstores."

    I did like when the film focused on people that weren't just the white middle-aged men who fit the stuffy, elitist book dealer stereotype, but spoke with Black archivists and librarians, like Kevin Young, a librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem (who highlighted the James Baldwin archives at the library, like his personal notes on napkins or unfinished literary drafts), or Syreeta Gates, an archivist who collected hip-hop journalism from the 1990s, like from XXL and The Source, and, full disclosure, I briefly met a couple of times when I worked for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Harlem because she did some research work there as an archival fellow. Three sisters (Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample and Judith Lowry) run the Argosy Book Store, which is New York City's oldest independent bookstore, founded by their father Louis Cohen in 1925.

    The film felt very warm and cozy to watch, and I like watching people thrive in their fields nerding out over their passions, and seeing them in their bookstores and homes surrounded by books and having their own library system and figuring out what to do with their books after they die. I'm not as much of a collector, due to limited space and funds, nor am I interested in hunting for rare items like they are, like "digging for gold" as they would put it, but I can relate to the joy and enthusiasm that one would elicit from discovering these historical materials and maintaining them for posterity. It's a lovely movie, and I'm glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Judgment Night

   Last week I watched Judgment Night on Criterion, a 1993 action film that is much better known for its great soundtrack that is full of rap and metal/rock collaborations, like an Ice T and Slayer song, or a Cypress Hill and Sonic Youth song. I didn’t know what the movie was about, thinking it was a sci-fi action movie. It’s more of a thriller, and is really well-shot with night scenes nearly the whole movie, and there is some really good tension in long sequences.

    The basic plot is that Emilio Estevez is a suburban family man in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago who is going into the city with his friends and brother to see a boxing match, and there’s all this weird tension where his friends still act immature and want to get into fights, and tell Estevez that he’s “gone soft” because he has a family and doesn’t want to get into reckless fights. The guys end up driving off the expressway to get out of traffic to get to the fight, only to end up in some desolate rough area, where they accidentally witness a gang-related shooting, done by Denis Leary’s crime boss character, and spend the whole movie trying to escape Denis Leary and his crew (one of them played by Everlast, who was in House of Pain at the time and was on the soundtrack), sneaking into a train yard and a housing projects building and empty streets and alleys.

    It works pretty well, even if I felt like the movie was trying to have some kind of arc with Emilio having been a rough punk and having to tap into his violent side to survive, and it didn’t seem fleshed out. But Denis Leary was fun as the bad guy, even if it felt like he was the same character he was playing in Demolition Man that same year, same pissed-off underground leader guy who hates rich people.

    Michael DeLorenzo had a small part as the guy who gets killed early on, and is called “the kid,” even though he was in his mid-30s at the time.

    Between this and Very Bad Things, I thought “Nobody should ever invite Jeremy Piven on a guys’ night out, because he will be the catalyst for things going wrong.”