Thoughts on Carol & Joy

    On the Criterion Channel yesterday, I watched Carol & Joy, a 2025 short documentary film directed by Nathan Silver, executive produced by Natalie Portman, featuring the actress Carol Kane and her 98-year old mother Joy in their shared New York City apartment. Nathan Silver had directed Carol Kane in the 2024 film Between the Temples, and made this short film, at 38 minutes long, to focus on the interesting life of her mother, Joy. 

    Joy is originally from Cleveland, OH, and grew up with an abusive father who beat her when she wet the bed at three years old, and had a mother who undermined her and criticized her body. Yet, despite that upbringing, Joy was passionate about dance and music, having been brought to the symphony by her father when she was a girl, and feeling the music lift her in her body and having a spiritual experience. 

    Yet when she was a young woman, her family forced her to marry a young man, Michael Kane, putting in an engagement announcement in the newspaper without her knowledge or consent, and her father threatened to put her in a sanitarium if she tried to escape to New York City to be a dancer. So she married Michael, who became Carol's father, and felt stifled and unhappy in the marriage, hinting that she later cheated on him as a way to get him to divorce her, but that he still wanted to stay married. They finally divorced in 1964, when Carol was 12, and she was made to be examined by doctors through a psychological exam afterwards, a sign of the times of distrusting women's feelings and wanting them to stick to the status quo. She moved to Paris, where she could make her life with her own artistic visions, became a music teacher, and has been living in New York City in her Manhattan apartment for the last 25 years, with Carol's apartment right above hers, and they have lived together since the pandemic in 2020.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. Joy was fascinating and thoughtful and spoke deeply about her life, and Carol, despite being famous, largely takes a backseat to listen to her mother's stories, spending the first few minutes of the documentary making coffee for her mother and looking for the half and half creamer.

    The filmmaking crew had a habit of running out of film, saying "roll out" to mean the film had ran out, so the picture would go but the audio would be running, and often interrupting Joy's stories, and afterwards I felt it was rude to keep doing that to her, as they are a professional film crew and should know better, as well as to respect the time of a woman who is nearly 100 years old telling them her life story.

    I could see how Carol Kane, with her charming eccentricities and her commitment to being independent (she has never married or had any kids) could be influenced by her mother's strive for autonomy and being an artist on her own terms. I really enjoyed this lovely slice of life documentary a lot.

Thoughts on Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

    A while back on Tubi, I watched Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, a 2014 drama written and directed by David Zellner. It starred Rinko Kikuchi as Kumiko, an office worker in Tokyo who is 29 and working a dead-end job, who lives alone with her pet rabbit, and deals with both her mom asking why she isn’t married yet and her boss asking her why she’s still in a job largely occupied by younger single women. She likes treasure hunting, and finds a VHS copy of the 1996 film Fargo on the shore, and when she sees the scene with Steve Buscemi’s character burying a suitcase full of money in the snow, she thinks the suitcase is really there (as the movie had a fake disclaimer by the Coen Brothers saying that it was based on a true story) and plays the scene over and over, mapping out where the suitcase may be in Fargo, and she even tries to steal an atlas from the library, where the security guard takes pity on her and lets her take a ripped out page of a map of Minnesota.

    She goes to Minnesota, abandoning her job while having the company credit card with her while running work errands, with limited English skills, and is trying to get to Fargo, with a sheriff’s deputy (Zellner) confused by her mission and trying to get her to understand that the film is fictional. Yet, she keeps going on to find the suitcase.

  

    I really liked this movie. Kikuchi as Kumiko is a lonely character with mental health issues, and it’s sad watching her go further into delusion, but she makes her sympathetic and understandable. The story is based on a real-life story about Takako Konishi, a 28-year old Japanese office worker whose body was found in 2001 in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, ruled a suicide, and an urban legend said that she thought the buried suitcase in Fargo was real, but the story came from a misunderstanding between her and a Bismarck police officer with whom she had been speaking.

    This film was really interesting, and I’m glad I came across it.

Thoughts on Hamnet

    Last Friday, I went to the Angelika Film Center in New York City to see Hamnet, a 2025 historical drama directed by Chloé Zhao, co-written by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell, based on O'Farrell's 2020 novel of the same name. The film is a historical fiction look at the death of the son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway (sometimes known as Agnes), Hamnet, who died at age 11 from pestilence. The film focuses on the burgeoning romance between Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and William (Paul Mescal) in Stratford, England in the late 1500s. Agnes' reputation precedes her, as many people gossip that she is the daughter of a forest witch, because her mother taught her how to use herbs for medicinal purposes and to connect with nature and the earth. Agnes spends her free time alone in the lush green forest, and taking care of her hawk, and bristles under her stepmother, who her father married after her mother died young, presumably from childbirth. Agnes lives with her father, stepmother, and her supportive stepbrother. Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), who often stands up for her against his mother.

    William and Agnes fall in love and get pregnant, and both families oppose them marrying, because of Agnes' witch reputation and because William's family see William as a useless dreamer who teaches Latin to Agnes' younger brothers instead of following in the family trade of being a glovemaker. Nevertheless, with the support of Bartholomew to advocate on their behalf, William and Agnes are married, and Agnes gives birth alone by a giant tree in the forest, screaming in agony yet connected with nature during her act of childbirth. She has a daughter who she names Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach).

    William is feeling stagnated by his attempts to be a writer but being pressured into working a labor job by his father John (David Wilmot), being abused and ridiculed. Agnes makes the sacrificial decision to have William move to London to work in the theater community where he belongs, despite that she knows it will put distance between them and their marriage, especially as she is pregnant again. When the labor begins, William's mother Mary (Emily Watson) prevents her from going to the forest alone to give birth, forcing her to give birth at home, screaming in agony as she has not one, but two children, naming them Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes).

    The marriage between Agnes and William becomes more strained, especially with his absences for work in London and leaving Agnes on her own to raise their three children. And when the pestilence virus spreads and first infects Judith, Agnes fights hard to save her, as she had been stillborn at first but miraculously came back to life, and Agnes uses her herbal concoctions to prevent her from passing away, only for Hamnet to become sick after her and die a painful death.

    Jessie Buckley is incredible in this film. She possesses this earthly, primal spirit as Agnes, when she is hollering and letting out these guttural moans, whether she is giving birth or grieving the loss of her son. She is captivating to watch, and truly amazing in this film.

    The majority of the film belongs to Buckley, but Mescal shines in the finale, when the premiere of Hamlet performs and Agnes is realizing that the play is named after her son (a prologue states that Hamlet and Hamnet in Renaissance England were the same name), and as the play goes on, and William, playing the spirit of Hamlet's father, is able to express the grief and pain of losing his real son, as well as saying the goodbye that he wasn't around to say to Hamnet when he died, and it's a stunning performance by Mescal in that sequence.

    Jacobi Jupe, as Hamnet, is outstanding in this film. He had the hard choice of playing a character who dies young as a child and inspires one of the most famous plays of all time, while still having to play him as an innocent child. His scenes where he is in between worlds of life and the afterlife are heartbreaking, and he deserves accolades for his performance. Fittingly, his older brother Noah Jupe plays Hamlet in the play within the film.

    The film stays focused in stationery spots with the work of cinematographer Łukasz Ża, who worked on Cold War (2018), The Zone of Interest (2023), and I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), which featured Buckley as the female lead alongside Jesse Plemons. In Hamnet, there are scenes where Buckley and Mescal are in the foreground at his desk centered in a triangular shot, with her bed in the background, and a fire offscreen warming them, as he is frustrated with his writing and his outbursts wake baby Susanna. I really liked how focused the camera and blocking was in that shot, and holding on two talented actors carrying the scene.

    The film was edited by the great Affonso Gonçalves, whose past work includes Paterson (2016), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Carol (2015), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Winter's Bone (2010).

    I read the novel two years ago, and the film stayed very accurate to the novel, which helped a lot with O'Farrell adapting her own story to the screen. I had remembered how the novel had more about Agnes' home life with her stepmother and her complicated relationship with her, which felt shortened in the film to get past it, but it wasn't a detriment to the story. And the Hamlet finale follows the exact finale from the novel, and felt more powerful onscreen, making me feel devastated inside.

    I really adored this film, and thought that Jessie Buckley was fantastic, and that it was a great adaptation of a wonderful novel.

Thoughts on Innocent Blood

    Last night on Tubi I watched Innocent Blood, a 1992 horror comedy directed by John Landis and written by Michael Wolk. The film starred Anne Parillaud, who was hot off of her fame in La Femme Nikita at the time, as Marie, a French vampire who goes to Pittsburgh and decides to feast on the local Italian mobsters. She is sexy and can play up an innocent act to lure in mobsters, and kills one (Chazz Palminteri), and shoots him in the head afterwards to cover her tracks and prevent him from waking up as a vampire. Anthony LaPaglia plays an undercover cop named Joe who had infiltrated the mob for three years, and Marie skips over him because “his eyes looked too sad,” like he looked too nice to kill. Joe and the cops are trying to take down the crime boss Salvatore Macelli (Robert Loggia), but when Marie attacks Macelli and is interrupted while feeding on him, he doesn’t die and comes back as a vampire, then feels more invincible and works on turning his mob into a vampire crime syndicate.

    This was a lot of fun to watch. It’s weird and funny, kind of mixes some sleazy sexiness with the bizarreness of a vampire mob, and pairing a vampire and a cop together to take down the mob was creative.

    There's a a running motif of characters watching old monster movies on TV, like a Godzilla movie, the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie, a Hammer horror-era vampire movie, etc.

    Robert Loggia seemed like he was having a lot of fun playing a vampire Mafia boss, just chewing up the scenery and eating other mob guys.

    There are so many character actors in this movie. Loggia, Palminteri, Kim Coates, Marshall Bell, Tony Sirico, Luis Guzmán, and Leo Burmester.

    And so many horror icon cameos too: Dario Argento, Sam Raimi, Linnea Quigley, Tom Savini, and Forrest James Ackerman.

    Angela Bassett has a small part as a cop just before she got big, and Don Rickles plays a mob lawyer.

    The special effects with the glowing vampire eyes weren’t that great, and did take me out of the movie with how ridiculous it looked.

    I really enjoyed this weird horror comedy a lot, I heard of it from a film podcast episode of Critically Acclaimed Network talking about vampire movies.

Thoughts on Aftersun

    On Tubi, I watched Aftersun, a 2022 semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Charlotte Wells, starring Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio. The film is about an 11-year old girl named Sophie (Corio) on vacation in Turkey with her father Calum (Mescal), who is amicably separated from her mother. It's a holiday where he is trying to be a good dad, but is clearly struggling internally with his own mental health issues, and trying to disguise it from his daughter to have a good time.

    She is more perceptive though, and in one brutal scene, when, after she sings "Losing My Religion" at karaoke and he offers to pay for singing lessons if she really enjoys singing, she says he shouldn't offer if he knows he doesn't have the money. It's blunt and clearly hurts him, and she's not trying to be hurtful, but clearly knew from past experiences of empty promises with him to call him out.

    Throughout the film, there are abstract sequences of an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) in a rave with strobe lights, seeing her young father dancing and trying to reach out to him, and it plays in this memorable and touching sequence that blends the past memories and present self together beautifully with a re-edit of the song "Under Pressure."

    I liked how this film feels more it's about a woman looking back on her seemingly idyllic trip with her father, who had her at too young an age, and her trying to figure out his own identity apart from being her father. The film keeps it vague on how he died, and he likely died young, as that is how adult Sophie remembers him, but there's a kind of haziness to the memory that worked well for me, it had an artsy short film idea expanded to a full-length feature.

Thoughts on Die My Love

    At Cinema Village in New York City, I went to see Die My Love, a 2025 psychological thriller directed by Lynne Ramsay, and co-written by Ramsay, Edna Walsh, and Alice Birch, based on the 2012 novel Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz. The film stars Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a young woman struggling with postpartum depression and is spiraling into psychosis, and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) is often away at work and doesn't know how to cope with her when he's home.

    When Jackson's uncle dies by suicide and leaves his Montana home to him, he and Grace, who is pregnant, move there to the rural house, and have a baby boy. But Jackson is often away, and Grace is left on her own to care for their child, and is feeling lonely and bored, trying to busy herself with chores around the house. When Jackson is around, he expects Grace to be the primary caretaker, blames her for any chores not done, and randomly brings home a feral little dog, whose incessant barking combined with the baby crying is driving Grace insane inside, thanks to the excellent sound design depicting her feelings of being trapped in the house.

    Grace acts out more as she is losing a grip on reality, be it going out into the field at night to either meet up with a married lover (LaKeith Stanfield), when it's unclear if this is happening in the present time or was a past lover; tolerating patronizing talk from other mothers about getting past the hard first year of motherhood and choosing to strip off her dress to jump into the pool at a party; throwing herself through a glass door; trashing the bathroom and squirting lotion and soap all over the floor; or imagining talking to Jackson's late father Harry (Nick Nolte), who had struggled with likely dementia or Azheimer's before his death.

    Jackson is more bewildered at his wife's actions, but often cowers and doesn't know how to help. His mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), is more sympathetic to Grace's stresses as a new mother, even if she mostly gives platitudes like telling her to take yoga to relax.

    The music needle drops are inspired, like hearing "Mickey" by Toni Basil; "Crossroads" by Cream during a car accident scene; "Little April Shower" from Bambi during a rain scene; "In Spite of Ourselves" by John Prine and Iris DeMent in a car scene where Jackson and Grace sing along to the song in a shared romantic moment; and a cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" over the ending credits.

    I liked how Ramsay's direction and focus on Grace's mental health issues made the film more intense and uncomfortable to watch, and Lawrence was great in playing a character who seems mentally far away and checked out. She loves her son, but she cannot connect with anyone else, and resents being dismissed and expected to be a happy homemaker. She had been a writer, but can't bring herself to begin writing again, and is angry at women telling her "it'll come back" when she says she hasn't been writing anymore. I could definitely relate to those feelings of depression and anger and being met with "Well, have you tried yoga? Have you tried journaling?" or toxic positivity sayings like "It'll all work out" or "You'll get past this," and feeling stymied inside while trying to be polite and calm among company.

    Despite liking her performance and the journey of the story, I didn't feel as connected with the film as a whole, I felt distant and outside of it. I didn't think it was great, but I didn't hate it either, I more thought it was decent to watch. I have liked Ramsay's other films, like Ratcatcher, Movern Callar, and You Were Never Really Here, so I do like her dark, heavy style mixed in with black comedy, but I wasn't as into this one as much.

Thoughts on Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus

     On Criterion, I watched the 2024 documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, directed by Eva Aridjis Fuentes, about the singer Diane Luckey, better known by her stage name Q Lazzarus, who had only one song released during her lifetime, the 1987 haunting synth ballad "Goodbye Horses," which became forever linked with a scene in The Silence of the Lambs during the serial killer Buffalo Bill's dance. 

    Q, originally from New Jersey, grew up singing in the church, and came out to New York City as a young woman in the late 1970s to make it as a singer, being influenced by rock like AC/DC, blues like Janis Joplin, soul like Aretha Franklin, and trying to figure out a place for herself to put it together as a Black woman singer. She worked as a backup singer and wrote jingles, but mainly worked as a cab driver to have more freedom and independence in her schedule. She made friends with the dancer Danny, formed a band, and created the stage name Q Lazzarus (explaining that Q came from the Alutiiq word Quiana, meaning "thank you," and Lazzarus as a Bible reference of a man named Lazarus being raised from the dead by Jesus). She kept being rejected by record companies who claimed to love her music, but didn't know how to market her, since her music didn't fit their narrow visions of what a Black female singer should be.

    By chance, she met the director Jonathan Demme while driving him in her cab, and she was singing to herself, and he loved her voice, she played him her demo tape, and they exchanged information afterwards, and several months later, her son "Candle Goes Away" was included in his 1986 film Something Wild. In 1987, she and her friend Danny wrote and recorded "Goodbye Horses" in his East Village apartment, with their friend's Casio keyboard as the synth backing music. Demme included the song in his 1988 film Married to the Mob, and Q, tired of getting shut down by record companies in the U.S., moved to London and formed a band there, following the long line of Black American artists who were more appreciated in European countries than in their home country, like Josephine Baker and Nina Simone.

    She lived in London for several years, played many clubs, and had a romantic relationship with her manager, Richard, who unfortunately introduced her to hard drugs and beginning her substance abuse disorder. She also still faced opposition from British record labels, not knowing how to market her music, and even after "Goodbye Horses" was featured in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, and Q had a singing cameo in Demme's 1993 film Philadelphia, singing the Talking Heads' song "Heaven," she still couldn't catch a break to have a real record deal.

    The second half of the documentary goes into Q's life after she largely disappeared from the public eye, and from her friends and family. She struggled with substance abuse, was unhoused in New York City, did sex work to survive, and found a kindred spirit in Bob, a fellow downtown eccentric who she met by chance on the street and had a drink with. She was going by Pam then, having shed her past as Q Lazzarus, and didn't tell Bob at first about her music past, claiming to have had been an RN, which he tells in his interview segment that he called her out on the lie when she asked him a health question, and he goes "How should I know?! You're the nurse!" and her going "I never said I was a nurse!" He says, "If she said she was a rock star I wouldn't have believed that."

    Q married Bob, got sober after a stint at Riker's Island for drug charges and entering rehab, and they had a son, James (her Wikipedia page says she had two children, but only one is mentioned in the documentary), and moved to Staten Island, where she reconnected with her family and vowed to give James a more stable home life after the craziness of her previous life. James, now around 30, is involved in activism, as seen in the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, and when Q sadly passed away from a sepsis infection following a broken leg in 2022, James calls out the hospital for malpractice and ignoring her as a woman of color, which is a sign of medical racism and bias against Black women patients who aren't believed or are mistreated in the medical field.

    Q had a big personality, and she was a lot of fun to watch throughout the documentary, as Eva Aridjis was a fan of her song and did investigative work to find her, meeting her when getting picked up in her car service in 2019 in New York City. Q supplied her with many cassette tapes of her unsigned music, all her history as a rock singer in New York City and London, a mix of rock, dark wave, and synth pop. 

    I likely had heard "Goodbye Horses" from The Silence of the Lambs, but the song didn't stick with me then, I had heard it elsewhere by itself and really liked it, and mistakenly though that Q Lazzarus was a man, as the deep voice sounded masculine to me, but can read as androgynous. This documentary had been long in the works for the last few years, and it is bittersweet that it comes out after Q's passing, when she can't be around for a worldwide audience to learn her story and hear her music, it feels more unfair, as it was when she was trying to get signed as an artist and continually rejected. I'm glad that Aridjis made this film, as it was important to share Q's voice and her incredible story.