Thoughts on The Big Clock

 On Criterion, I watched the 1948 thriller The Big Clock, directed by John Farrow, and starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. I watched this because of the Amoeba Records "What's in my Bag" video with Bill Hader, and he recommended this movie and did impressions of the male leads. He mentioned that John Farrow was Mia Farrow's father, and I forgot that Mia Farrow's mother was Maureen O'Sullivan, though I knew that her mother was a famous actress.

This was a lot of fun to watch. Ray Milland works as an editor at a crime magazine where he and the staff are reporters that solve sensationalist crimes for tabloid headlines, it's very ahead of its time as them being true crime junkies and wannabe detectives. Things get more tricky when Milland gets framed for murder by his boss Charles Laughton (who is excellent at playing quietly malevolent and conniving in a hammy, theatrical kind of way), and the staff is trying to solve the murder, and Milland realizes he's being set up, and trying to clear his name before anyone suspects him. The movie is meant to be a thriller, but it also just feels like a lot of fun, and kind of proto-Columbo-ish in that the audience already knows who the killer is long before anyone else does.

One of my favorite parts of the film was Elsa Lanchester as a kooky artist whose artwork proves crucial to the case. She plays it up with a trilling voice, feeling like a possible inspiration to Madeleine Kahn's performances decades later, and shines as a character actress who is delightful in this movie. I couldn't find individual scenes of her online, but I really liked this photo of her when she's in her apartment with several kids by past dead husbands and being questioned by one of the reporters.

Thoughts on Girls of the Night

     On Criterion, I watched the 1961 Japanese film Girls of the Night, also known as Girls of Dark, directed by Kinuyo Tanaka and written by Sumie Tanaka. The film is a drama that is an indictment of the criminalization of sex work, and the moral judging by society of women who are sex workers, putting a stigma on them, refusing to let them move on from their past, and forever marking them with a scarlet letter. The film is set after the passing of the real-life Prostitution Prevention Law, a Japanese law passed in 1956 to to prevent prostitution, and to protect and rehabilitate sex workers, where in the film, former sex workers are sent to a reformatory to learn new skills and to start their lives over. While the law is not meant to punish sex workers, it is an anti-sex work law, and the law doesn't prevent women from being stigmatized for their past work.

    The film centers on Kuniko (Chisako Hara), a former sex worker who is trying to build a new life for herself after staying in the reformatory. She goes through a cycle of jobs, working in a grocery store, a factory, and a rose garden, but each time her past is uncovered, both men and women either treat her like a threat or a target of abuse. In one scene, three men go for a walk with her, expecting to run a train on her, but she scares them off when she asserts herself like a businesswoman, demanding that they pay her, before they run off and she collapses into tears at the disappointment of being treated like a whore again. She's abused by a group of women who want to "teach her a lesson," thinking she's haughty or stuck-up. Or when she feels like she's found love, only for his family to shun her and say that they come from a lineage of great samurais and that their son marrying an ex-prostitute would ruin their family legacy.

    Tanaka's film takes a remarkably sensitive approach to addressing the plight of sex workers in Japan, whose careers were suddenly made illegal, and not condemning them for their lives. The headmistress at the reformatory, Nogami (Chikage Awashima), notes how the women had entered sex work for their survival due to poverty, lack of opportunities, or a man leading them into it, and she has great sympathy for the women she works with, and does believe that they should not be criminalized for their past livelihoods in an unfair society.

    Kinuyo Tanaka was an actress and director, and worked with the director Kenji Mizoguchi, on 15 films including The Life of Oharu (1952) and Ugetsu (1953). With her 1953 directorial debut, Love Letter, she became the second Japanese woman to direct a film, after Tazuko Sakane. Similarly, Sumie Tanaka was a screenwriter and playwright with a feminist agenda, who collaborated with Kinuyo Tanaka on several films, and was acclaimed for her career.

    Hara was fantastic in this film, playing Kuniko with a lot of strength and dignity, and refusing to be beaten down no matter how many times others try to shame or denigrate her for her sex worker past. She sees herself as her own heroine, finding redemption in herself and not from other people, and the film ends on a hopeful note with her being her own woman on her own journey, feeling like Giulietta Masina's sex worker character in La Strada, always moving forward with her own sense of optimism despite what others may say.

   

Thoughts on Short Term 12

    On Tubi, I rewatched the 2013 film Short Term 12, written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Just Mercy, The Glass Castle, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), adapted from his 2009 short film, starring Brie Larson as a supervisor at a foster care facility, Short Term 12, for abused teenagers who are wards of the state, and featuring a stellar cast of future rising stars: John Gallagher, Jr., Stephanie Beatriz, Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek, and LaKeith Stanfield.

    Larson played Grace Howard, a young woman living with her boyfriend and co-worker Mason (Gallagher, Jr.), who shows an amazing sense of kindness and understanding towards the kids. She calls them out on their outbursts when they curse or act inappropriately, putting them on behavioral-level punishments according to the center, but sits and listens to them when they are having mental health episodes and doesn't judge them because they are angry, confused kids who are hurting from abusive childhoods. Grace herself has had a complicated past, but finds it hard to open up emotionally to Mason, who also came from a similar background and found parental love and support in a foster family.

    The film has Nate (Malek) as the new worker at the care facility, essentially like the audience surrogate into this environment, where he makes bad wannabe P.C. statements like saying how he's always wanted to work with "underprivileged kids," to which Marcus (Stanfield, reprising his role from the original short film) responds with, "What the fuck do you mean by that?!" It's a good moment to course correct Nate, since the teenagers are not meant to be seen as charity cases or narrowed down to statistics, but as actual people hurt by their families who are struggling with their mental health and dealing with trauma.

    Grace is great at her job, and particularly bonds with Jayden (Dever), a 15-year old girl with a surly, sarcastic attitude, who acts distant and removed, but Grace, sitting with her in the "cool down" room after Jayden has a violent outburst, connects with her over drawing sketches and talking about their shared histories with distant mothers, As they get to know each other more, Jayden shares a story she wrote with illustrations about an octopus and a shark that is a heartbreaking analogy to her likely being abused by a parent, and Dever is fantastic in this scene, saying a lot in this cryptic story without having to state the obvious through her soft and shy delivery. Dever was doing double duty on both Justified and Last Man Standing at this time, both wildly different TV shows, and would continue to excel in later shows, most notably the 2019 teen comedy Booksmart.

    Similarly, Marcus, sitting with Mason, opens up to him and tells his story through a rap, having Mason keep the beat going with a hand-drumming pattern, and Marcus tells a raw and painful story of being abused by his mother, who did sex work to survive, and beat him, and Marcus is about to graduate out of the system at 18 and is scared to leave and doesn't know where to go in his life afterwards. He asks Grace to shave his head, and before he can look at himself in the mirror, he asks Grace and Mason if he has any lumps or scars on his head, and they reassure him that he looks good without any signs of his childhood abuse showing. Stanfield is incredible in this film, revealing so much sensitivity, and it's no wonder that he would later be Oscar-nominated for his role portraying the FBI informant William O'Neal in Judas and the Black Messiah in 2021.

    Grace has been hurt by her father, who is serving time in prison, and her absent mother, who had a string of boyfriends, and even though Mason loves her and wants to marry her, she finds it difficult to be honest with him about her emotions and history, to feel worthy of love, and to truly process the trauma her parents did to her. Larson and Gallagher, Jr. are stunning in this film, and despite that both have gone on to major careers (as Gallagher, Jr. had already been a Broadway musical veteran by this point in Spring Awakening and American Idiot, and Larson broke out as a leading star in this film and would win an Oscar for her role in Room in 2015 and play the superhero Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel in several MCU franchise films), they both feel very intimate and honest in this film about people with traumatic childhoods trying to define themselves by their futures and not their pasts.

    Cretton based this film on his own experiences working in a group facility for teenagers. The film feels incredibly honest, like watching a documentary, and having to remember that they are actors, and ones who would go on to greater fame. It is a truly beautiful and touching movie, and I'm glad I revisited it.

My Favorite Films of 2024

     I kept track of the movies I saw in 2024, and listed 24 of them in my Notes app. I didn't go out to the theater often, and would watch movies on streaming, and often watch a lot of older movies to write about and be "new" to me. So I will likely see the prestige movies and underseen gems of last year when they hit streaming, but can write about the new movies I saw of 2024 that I really did like a lot, and with honorable mentions.

    Between the Temples: This is a really lovely and wonderful little movie, directed by Nathan Silver, where Jason Schwartzman plays a middle-aged cantor at a shul and he can't sing anymore, and through chance he reconnects with his old teacher Mrs. Kessler, aka Carla (Carol Kane), who never got to have her bat mitzvah and wants to have it in her 70s. It's this sweet friendship that blossoms into a tentative romance, more so feeling like Harold and Maude if Harold was in his 40s, and Carol Kane is a gem in this movie, one of her best roles in recent years. 

    The Substance: Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, this body horror/dark comedy takes its inspiration 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. Demi Moore gets a major comeback role (not counting her brief role in the FX miniseries Feud: Capote vs. The Swans) as a former star being pushed out of the fitness industry because she's in her fifties, and going to drastic measures to take a black-market mysterious green substance to reproduce a younger, more conventionally attractive version of herself (Margaret Qualley) out of her body, and they have to switch off every seven days, and the film takes their competition in strange and twisted ways. 

    A Real Pain: Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed this road trip/buddy comedy about two cousins David and Benji (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who go on a trip together to Poland to both revisit their recently deceased grandmother's hometown, and to go on a Holocaust tour to honor her as a Holocaust survivor (she had escaped Poland before the Nazi invasion). This movie was both really funny and touching, talking about mental health issues and grief. The cousins contrast with each other a lot, and David does confess to Benji that he wishes he could be more charismatic like him, lighting up a room, but also resents how erratic he is and how he can blow up a room just as easily. Culkin portrays this nervous energy as Benji that is more of a cover for his own anxieties, especially missing his grandmother and how she would snap back at him when she felt he was self-destructing with substance abuse and a lack of direction. The movie is a tight 90 minutes, and it just felt very honest and real to me, and I really liked it a lot.

    Strange Darling: This thriller, directed by JT Mollner, seems more like a sleeper hit than anything bigger, but I did like how it unfolded as a story told out of chronological order, and I liked the subverted expectations of the movie, centering on a serial killer and their victim, stemming from a one-night-stand. Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner were the stars, and I got invested in their dynamic, especially when they are talking with each other in the car before going into a motel, trying to size each other up and measure the risk of this hookup. The film is soundtracked by a great synth score, and I really enjoyed getting into this unusual horror thriller, albeit with some plot turns that will likely be seen as controversial because of the killer's way to deceive people.

    The Wild Robot: Directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch), this animated film is set in the future where a helper robot (Lupita Nyong'o) lands on an island as a misdelivered package, and immediately wants to be of help to people, but she's on an island full of animals, who find her frightening and attack her as a threat. Roz learns to communicate with the animals and inadvertently becomes a “mother” to an orphaned gosling, befriending a smartass fox (Pedro Pascal) and slowly bonds with the other animals as she gains more intelligence beyond her initial programming. I liked how thoughtful the film felt, how much heart it had, and even if it seemed more formulaic than the Lithuanian animated film Flow, also with animal characters (albeit who do not speak in an anthropomorphic way), I still found it really lovely and interesting, and would highlight it as one of my favorites of last year.

    His Three Daughters: Technically this film is from 2023, but it was released last year on Netflix and in theaters in 2024, so I'm counting it. Written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, the film stars Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as three estranged sisters who come together because their father, Vincent, is in hospice, soon to die any day, and they gather at his rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Rachel (Lyonne) has been living with their father, and the sisters aren't close, are wildly different from each other, and come at their anticipatory grief with varying ways of coping with it. They try to keep a polite front when the hospice staff members visit, but otherwise fight with each other, with a lot of high tension in the air. This is a really great movie, featuring three outstanding actresses, acting more like they are in a play than a film, and I deeply connected to this film, with the sister stresses and arguments, especially with the strained relationship between Katie and Rachel. I do hope this movie gets remembered during the awards season.

    I Saw the TV Glow: Directed by Jane Schoenbrun (We're All Going to the World's Fair), about two teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigitte Lundy-Paine) who, in 1996, become obsessed with this supernatural teen TV show called The Pink Opaque, that looks like a Nickelodeon preteen show mixed in with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The teens are both very isolated, both on the queer spectrum (Maddy is a lesbian, Owen might be asexual/ace), and get wrapped up in this show to escape their empty, depressing lives. The show effects them both in greatly different ways, using the media consumption of the show as a substitute for actually living their lives, and using the show to identify themselves rather than anything in their real lives, being obsessed with the TV screen and sitting in the dark with the TV glow. And although I think the film's text about equating their experiences to the trans experience may have gone over my head because I'm cis, I still really liked how creative and unique the film felt, very different from anything else I've seen from the past year. And, by chance, Emma Stone produced this and my other choice, A Real Pain, so I'm glad she's choosing interesting projects to produce and elevating voices like Schoenbrun's, who is now on my radar for anything in the future they will create.

Honorable Mentions:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Thelma

Anora

My Old Ass

Cuckoo

Nosferatu

Monkey Man

Handling the Undead

Kinds of Kindness

Thoughts on Cairo Station

     On Criterion, I watched the 1958 Egyptian film Cairo Station, directed by Youssef Chahine, co-written by Abdel Hai Adib and Mohamed Abu Youssef, and starring Chahine as Qinawi, a peddler with a limp who works selling newspapers in the train station of Cairo, Egypt, eking out a living while being mocked by everyone for his disability and timid demeanor. He is obsessed with Hanuma (Hind Rostom), an attractive and vivacious woman who sells cold soft drinks with her fellow women in the station, and is brash and outspoken, and often sneaks selling drinks on the trains themselves. She is engaged to Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi), who is a luggage porter and trying to unionize his co-workers for better pay and more rights. He unfortunately is abusive to Hanuma, trying to forbid her to work and beats her when he catches her having a party on a train while selling soft drinks.

    When Qinawi does profess his love to Hanuma, she laughs at him and rejects him because he is poor and cannot support himself, let alone her, and his obsession turns more maniacal, getting ugly in a more misogynistic kind of way. As one Letterboxd review by sydney read, "Once again women are the casualities of the incel vs. markists war." The film takes more of a thriller direction, whereas before it was more about working-class merchants in the train station, and I more preferred the neorealism, slice of life feeling to the film, in seeing a depiction of life in Cairo in the 1950s, then the darker turn that the film went towards in its second half.

    Qinawi is initially depicted as a sympathetic hero, but I couldn't feel bad for him and his obsession with not getting to have the popular woman because too many women have been injured or died due to a man feeling "slighted" by them. I understand that he can be seen as an "antihero," but I, likely more because I am a woman, felt more sympathy for Hanuma and her friends in the station. I do appreciate that the film was tackling tough subjects like unionizing of the underclass, gender-based violence, and combining film noir and neorealism, and it is a standout film that depicted a development of a more modern Egypt following the 1952 overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy.

    Hind Rostom as Hanuma is stunning and a lot of fun to watch in this film. She had this lively sensuality that made her "pop" on the screen, and was compared to screen icons like Marilyn Monroe and Anna Magnani. I liked how modern she felt in talking back to men and being outspoken and funny, and she just commanded the screen. She retired in 1979, passed away in 2011 at age 81, and in 2018, Google honored her with a Google Doodle.

Thoughts on Victims of Sin/Víctimas del pecado

    On Criterion, I watched the 1951 Mexican musical melodrama/crime film Victims of Sin, or Víctimas del pecado, directed by Emilio Fernández, co-written by Fernández and Mauricio Magdaleno, and starring the Cuban-Mexican icon Ninón Sevilla as Violeta, a popular dancer at a nightclub in Mexico City run by the ruthless and maniacal gangster Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta). At the club, Rodolfo refuses to acknowledge paternity of a baby boy by one of the dancers, Rosa (Margarita Ceballos), and forces Rosa to choose him over the baby, pressuring her to put the baby in a trash can. Violeta rescues the baby, and, with the help of neighborhood women and her own fight to survive as she goes from dancing in the club to doing sex work on the street, that she has tenacity and toughness and won't let anyone hurt the baby or break her spirit.

    When Violeta dances at the club, Sevilla is riveting to watch, dancing with a mix of sensuality and athleticism and a lust for life. She knows she is in a patriarchal society that she has to literally fight against, standing up to brute men who demand that women know their place, and takes a huge risk in taking care of the baby, earlier stating that they as poor dancers "don't have the right to have children." Her dancing is stunning to watch, with way more abandon than in a usual Hollywood musical, and the climatic dance is when she finds her way to the nightclub La Maquina Loca, doing an impromptu audition to prove her dancing skills to get out of sex work, and she performs as a rumbera to Cuban music, and she reaches an emotional peak of her character truly having her happy joie de vivre as a dancer, finding power within herself, and doing a fun call-and-response dance with a drummer who joins in on the dance floor. It's a truly spectacular scene to behold.

    The film is a fantastic mix of musical moments, including songs with sexual innuendo sung in a flirty manner, soap opera melodrama, and film noir, with gorgeous black and white cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa, considered one of the greatest cinematographers in Mexican cinema. There is an excellent scene where, when Rodolfo is slapping and hurting Violeta, a whole lineup of fellow sex workers swarm in to protect her by pulling Rodolfo off of her and beating on him, it's glorious to watch.

 I had heard of the film through the YouTube channel Be Kind Rewind, highlighting Sevilla's performances in her annual Twelve Days of Actress video to celebrate female actors' performances in films across genres and cultures, and I'm really happy I took her recommendation to watch this film.

Thoughts on Nightbitch

    On Hulu, I watched the 2024 black comedy written and directed by Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), based on the 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder. The film stars Amy Adams as a former artist and current stay-at-home mother simply known as "Mother," who is struggling with feeling stifled at home taking care of her toddler son while her husband is busy at work, essentially making her feel like a single parent. 

    She keeps a polite smile when talking to others, while having fantasies about wanting to vent about her frustrations at putting her career on hold for motherhood and feeling like she is losing her sense of self. She goes to a library event for mothers and toddlers, for the kids to listen to a children's music performer play, and is initially resistant when the other moms are trying to bond with her, wanting to have normal conversations with other adults outside of being stay-at-home moms.

    Her husband (Scoot McNairy), just known as Husband (the child is known as Son or Baby) is glaringly oblivious to her struggles, thinking she's having fun being at home and playing with the baby all day, not realizing the toll it's taking on her to be alone with their child all day, with his dependence on her. The child refuses to sleep by himself, and will keep her up when she is trying to read him to bed, and she blames herself for not following a sleep cycle idea for him when he was a baby, thinking she screwed him up.

    The story takes a magical realism turn where Mother finds strange new developments on her body, like a patch of white fur on her back, pulling out a tail through a pustule boil on her lower back, and growing two rows of eight nipples on her torso. And that local dogs are attracted to her, coming up to her in the park and at her front door. She realizes that she is turning into a dog, and at night, she transforms into a dog, racing around her neighborhood, and feeling more free as a dog. As a person, she has heightened senses, bonds with her son more by pretending he is her puppy, and feeling a renewed sense of life with her dog spirit. 

    She learns more by going to the library and checking out books recommended by the librarian (Jessica Harper of Suspiria and Shock Treatment fame), researching cultural myths and of animal spirits and transformations in women to understand the change in her. Harper as the librarian has this mystery to her that makes her feel more understanding of Mother's position in life, and she brings this quiet and eccentric grace to her role.

    The film is interesting when tackling how a woman could feel isolated and lonely as a stay-at-home mom, especially with husbands who only want the fun parts of parenting and don't know the day-to-day routines of childcare. And it has a lot of great needle drops that is influenced by Heller being a Gen-X director, like Weird Al's "Dare to be Stupid," songs by the Cocteau Twins and Joanna Newsom. 

    I wasn't as interested when the film would try to make it more about female empowerment in a way that felt cliched, or how her resolution with her marital issues felt too pat and like her husband still wasn't going to be emotionally there for her. I liked it more leaning into the dark satire and weirdness, not trying to have a wrapped-up happy ending that felt too "nice" for me. And as this film's plot reminded me a lot of Marianna Palka's 2017 film Bitch, where a similarly-frustrated SAHM starts acting like a dog as a nervous breakdown reaction, I felt Rachel Yoder may have taken some inspiration from that and made the protagonist turn into a literal dog. 

    It's a decent movie at just over 90 minutes, that likely could have gone weirder and darker (though I was annoyed at a scene of implied animal abuse, though nothing was shown graphically), but it's always great to see Amy Adams onscreen, and I liked that Heller took on this film as a comment about motherhood and artistic expression and feminism.