Thoughts on Language Lessons

    On Tubi, I watched Language Lessons, a 2021 dramedy directed by Natalie Morales and co-written by Morales and Mark Duplass. The film was produced while in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Morales and Duplass, who had worked together on the TV series Room 104, and made the film in the style of "screen life," where the POVs are all from webcams on computers and phones, and the characters interact with each other through video chat and video messaging. It's a style that is experimental, and varies on quality. I liked it a lot in Searching as a detective story, using social media and saved desktop files as clues, but found it boring and stale in Open Windows. Here, due to the charming and warm performances of Morales and Duplass, I enjoyed it a lot, and got into the story.

    Adam (Duplass) lives a wealthy life in Oakland, CA with his husband Will (Desean Terry), and by surprise, Will got him Spanish lessons via online videochat with Cariño (Morales), who lives in Costa Rica. Adam is confused and taken aback, but goes along with the lesson, speaking in advanced beginner/intermediate Spanish, saying how he had lived in Mexico as a child and missed speaking Spanish, and is a little embarrassed by his wealth with his large house and pool, making the common mistake of saying he is "embarazada," which means "pregnant" in Spanish. Will wanted him to get back into speaking Spanish, and signed him up for 100 weekly lessons for $1000. Despite his hesitancy, he promises Cariño, who finds the whole interaction amusing, that he will return in a week.

    A week later, Cariño logs on to find Adam depressed and despondent in bed, and he tells her that Will died the night before, having been hit by a car while jogging, and he is grieving and in disbelief, at one point vomiting off-camera. Cariño is saddened by the news and is trying to comfort Adam, but doesn't know what to do since they only just met through videochat and don't know each other in real life. When Adam begins panicking about having to tell people about Will's death and handling logistics, Cariño calms him down by switching the perspective on her cameraphone to show him the gardens where she lives, speaking to him in Spanish and describing the plants and flowers, lulling him to sleep.

    Cariño, in her limited capacity but deep empathy, offers homework assignments to Adam as a way to busy him and distract him from his grief, and while at first he declines them, he gets into it, and they develop more of a friendship, speaking mostly in Spanish with some English, playing guitar and piano with each other, and she helps him to be able to connect with another person after Will's death, sharing stories about Will, and learning more about Cariño's life, though she wavers between being a friend and wanting to keep a professional relationship.

    I turned on this movie because I've always liked Natalie Morales, and felt like she's a comedic actress who is warm and beautiful and funny, but didn't have the luck of having a breakout role or being a standout star, more so the supporting actress in various TV series (Dead to Me, Parks & Recreation, Santa Clarita Diet), and any show she was the lead on didn't last more than a season, like The Middleman or Abby's. In recent years, she has been on The Beast in Me, The Morning Show, and Grey's Anatomy, so she has been busy in TV work. She not only directed this film, but she directed Plan B, a 2021 teen comedy about two teen girls going on a road trip to get the Plan B pill from the nearest Planned Parenthood a state away after being denied at their local pharmacy. I really liked that film a lot, and thought Morales was a really empathetic director in her portrayal of the girls.

    I went through a long period where I couldn't stand Mark Duplass as an actor, because I didn't like him as a romantic lead in films, and I wasn't a fan of the shaky-cam zooming in and out style of filmmaking that he and his brother Jay would do in films like Jeff, Who Lives at Home and Cyrus. It felt like this irrational dislike I had for someone who seemed so inoffensive, and who didn't seem bad as a person, but I found it hard to get past my dislike. But in this film, I liked him much more, and the fact that he spoke good Spanish made him more likable, and even through the screens, he and Morales shared a lovely friend chemistry that made the film really enjoyable to watch, getting past the video chat gimmick to be connected to the story and characters. 

    The film is definitely a relic of the pandemic era, which already seems so far past from nearly six years ago, but since video chatting is very common, and Zoom and Teams chats are still being conducted long past the lockdown days, I didn't mind that the characters became friends online, across countries and cultures and shared languages. This was a sweet movie to watch, and I'm glad I came across it.

Thoughts on The Testament of Ann Lee

    At the Village East Cinema last week in New York City, I went to see The Testament of Ann Lee, a 2025 historical drama musical directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written by Fastvold and Brady Corbet. The film centers on the origins of the Shaker movement, particularly focusing on Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), the founding leader, who formed the religious sect in Manchester, England. In 1758, she had joined an English sect founded by Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin) and her husband, preacher James Wardley (Scott Handy), in an organization that was a precursor to the Shaker sect. This sect was called the Shaking Quakers because of its similarities to the Quaker movement, but also the practice of "removing sin" through dancing and chanting.

    The film follows Lee's life, from her childhood in poverty to finding religion with her friends. Throughout Ann's childhood and early adulthood, she is repulsed by sexuality, associating it with sin (likely with sex work), as well as viewing it in close proximity and finding it vulgar and unattractive. She married young, to Abraham Stanley (Christopher Abbott), and never enjoyed sex, and experienced trauma with losing all four of her babies during infancy, none of them surviving to one year old. In her development of her religious beliefs, as well as a hallucination she had while imprisoned, with vision of Adam and Eve and original sin, she declared that the Shakers take a vow of celibacy, even within marriage. She also believed herself to be the second coming of Christ, and in 1774, the Shakers moved from England to New York, where they continued practicing, but were accused of treason and witchcraft, although they were neutral pacifists during the American Revolution.

    I was mixed on this film. I loved the dancing, choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall, that had a mix of praise dance and modern dance to it, with movements like hand percussion on the body and swaying and undulating, and the dance sequences were stunning with fluid camera dolly work by William Rexer capturing the movements, and how rapturous the Shakers would be in feeling cleansed of sin through dancing and chanting. In a Q&A I attended after the screening, writer-director Mona Fastvold spoke of how the costumes and corsets were designed for more freeing movement, and that the costumes were created for the film, because renting period costumes wouldn't allow for that same time of dancing.

    The music was composed by Daniel Blumberg, drawing from original Shaker hymns, and complements the film beautiful, setting it in its period well.

    Amanda Seyfried was great in this film, throwing herself into the dancing and physicality, as well as singing with her gorgeous soprano voice, and portraying Ann Lee with the religious fervor and conviction that borders on psychotic.

    In the supporting roles, Lewis Pullman played William, Ann's brother, and it's an understated role, but he was good. Thomasin McKenzie played Mary, who narrates the film and has one blind eye, and is often on the sidelines watching the action, with an eerie presence. Tim Blake Nelson appears as Pastor Reuben Wright in the New York scenes.

    I felt lost in the last third of the movie, where I didn't feel like I could connect with the Shakers as much, especially when they receive criticism from others that their night chanting can be heard from miles away, and I didn't agree with the vow of celibacy or equating sexuality with sin, that felt more controlling and more on the sanctimonious Evangelical side for me. I lost connection with the story as it felt like the movement had been trying to convert people when moving to New York, and seeming incredibly naive. I didn't agree that they deserved violence from angry mobs or to be imprisoned, but I wasn't liking them very much, either.

    Overall, I loved the dancing and the music and the uniqueness of the film as a period musical that felt more unusual and unconventional, and focusing on a female religious leader who was strange and controversial. I wasn't as into the later storytelling as much, but I still found this to be a very interesting film to watch.

Thoughts on Lost in America

     On Criterion, I watched Lost in America, a 1985 comedy written and directed by Albert Brooks, starring Brooks and Julie Hagerty as David and Linda, a yuppie couple in L.A. who feel bored with their bourgeois lives. David works at an advertising agency, and Linda works at a department store. David is expecting to get a promotion to senior vice president after having been at the agency for eight years, while Linda, despite getting promotions, is bored at her job and doesn't like the house they've lived in for seven years or the house they've just bought. When David doesn't get the promotion and is instead offered a transfer to their New York offices to work on an account for Ford, he throws a fit and curses out his boss and is immediately fired. He convinces Linda to quit her job too, and that they should sell their house, liquidate their savings, having $150,000 to their name, and go get a motor home and live out on the open road, living out David's Easy Rider fantasies. They do all of that, and go to Las Vegas with the plans of renewing their vows, but then Linda loses all their money in gambling at the roulette table, and they are dead broke and have to figure out how to manage from then on, not being prepared for being poor without their nest egg.

    What is hilarious and smart about this film is how good Brooks is at making fun of Reagan-era yuppies who fantasize about the 1960s counterculture movement, but still want the security of their massive nest eggs. When David is talking about wanting to "drop out," but still having a lot of money, and Linda says how the guys in Easy Rider dropped out but weren't rich, David counters by saying they sold cocaine to get by, insisting that they still had a high income.

    Brooks nails the entitlement of these characters, especially David, who keeps trying to bribe people or wanting special treatment at every corner. When they go to a Vegas hotel, he bribes the concierge $50 to check again if the bridal suite is occupied, then bribes another $50 when the concierge tells him his price is $100. Then the "bridal suite" turns out to be the "junior bride suite" with double heart-shaped beds instead of a single, and no tub for their bath fantasy.

    One of the standout scenes of the film is when, after Linda loses all their money, David meets with the casino manager (Garry Marshall) to try to get their money back, and continually acts as if he is different than other Vegas tourists who lost at gambling, insisting that he and his wife are the "bold" ones who just made a mistake, and aren't like the "schmucks to come to see Wayne Newton." The manager: "I like Wayne Newton. That makes me a schmuck?" He tries his angle of offering advertising tips for the casino, to make them seem more welcoming and open to giving money back to tourists who lose, and keeps trying to act as if he's better or more special than others, to which the casino manager stays professional about their policy but is clearly annoyed by David's hubris.

    Another wonderful scene is when David goes to an employment office, and to the employment agent (Art Frankel), after listing his white collar resume with his past job of $80K yearly salary and a bonus of $15-20K, is asking if there are any jobs in the $100K salary range, which is ludicrous to ask of an employment office that mostly have minimum wage jobs and low-level secretarial jobs at best. David goes "I wanted to change my life." The agent "You couldn't do that on $100,000?"

    I really liked this movie a lot, and I liked that it wasn't so much of a fantasy of them living on the open road, but about them immediately not being able to handle financial challenges or setbacks and wanting to run back to their old lives as soon as possible. It's a great film, and I'm glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Household Saints

     On Criterion, I watched Household Saints, a 1993 drama directed by Nancy Savoca and co-written by Savoca and Richard Guay, based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Francine Prose. The film centers on three generations of Italian-American women: Carmela Santangelo (Judith Malina), an Old World immigrant woman in New York City who is very superstitious; Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman), a reserved daughter of an Italian immigrant named Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), who is "won" in a pinocle game bet by the local sausage butcher Joseph Santangelo (Vincent D'Onofrio) and marries her; and Teresa Carmela Santangelo (Lili Taylor), the teenage daughter of Joseph and Catherine who is devoutly Catholic and is looking for miracles and wants to be a Carmelite nun.

    The film spans from 1949 to 1970, and tracks how Italian-American culture in New York City can be very insular, very bigoted (the film's characters are racist against Black and Asian people with their attitudes), and following Catholicism to a rigid degree, as an excuse for controlling women's lives and shaming them for anything they do wrong. When Joseph holds Lino's word that he will marry his daughter if he loses (a bet that Lino made while drunk and not serious, and insisting that his daughter is plain and not worth marrying), Joseph tries wooing Catherine, who is skeptical and doesn't want to be married off as if it's the old country, but grows to love Joseph anyway in their marriage. But Carmela hates the Falconettis, openly insults the food that Catherine cooks for them, and is overbearing towards Catherine, criticizing anything she does while pregnant, including instilling fear in her that her baby will born a literal chicken because she witnessed Joseph slaughtering a turkey in his butcher shop. 

    In 1952, Carmella has passed away, and Joseph and Catherine, while pregnant, read a book debunking old wives' tales about babies and superstitions, to rid their future of that toxic influence Carmela had on them. They have a girl, Teresa (portrayed by Rachael Bella as a child), and raise her in a Catholic school, where she begins to question miracles and expecting the Pope to share news of a supposed letter from the saint Fatima. She sees her uncle Nicky Falconetti (Michael Rispoli) struggling with depression and alcoholism, as he is shamed for being attracted to Asian women and not "sticking to his own kind," then being rejected by Chinese and Japanese women, as well as being verbally abused by his domineering father. His character is a tragic case, of someone expected to stick to narrow rules of Italian masculinity, and not being given the opportunity to break out of it to be happier as himself. Rispoli, a character actor I've always liked from films like Rounders, To Die For, While You Were Sleeping, and Kick Ass, is excellent in this film.

    Teresa, as a teenager, wants to be a Carmelite nun, but her father forbids it, seeing nuns as wasting their lives in devotion to "God" but really lining the pope's pockets, and not standing up for themselves, like if they shop at his butchery and don't get the meat they want, and decide it's God's will and don't argue or assert themselves. She goes to a Catholic college to get a teaching degree, and is courted by Leonard Villanova (Michael Imperioli), a fellow student who wants to work in "T.V. law" and talks big about it without knowing that isn't a real thing. He invites Teresa out to have coffee, and as he is talking, Teresa begins to feel like she's having a religious experience, seeing "miracles" all around her of couples and friends and families together, and this experience is all because Leonard is holding her hand. They begin dating, but Teresa, while she is reconsidering her ideas on becoming a nun and being with Leonard, has a hallucinatory experience where she talks to "Jesus" in her home, and her family has to confront her mental health issues and unhealthy devotion to Catholicism.

    I hadn't seen this movie since I saw it as a teenager on Bravo in the 1990s, and I really liked it a lot, while noticing a lot I hadn't remembered before, like the first half of the film largely focused on the Italian Old World characters, I mainly remembered the Lili Taylor and Michael Imperioli parts. (This was also the first time I had seen Imperioli in a film, prior to his breakthrough role as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos five years later). I did think it was funny to see D'Onofrio and Taylor play father and daughter when they had played a couple of the same age in Mystic Pizza five years prior, as Ullman and D'Onofrio are only eight years older than Taylor, and Taylor did not look believable as a fourteen-year old in the 1966 scenes.

    Although I couldn't stand her character, I really liked Judith Malina's performance as Carmela, in how diabolical she was in breaking the spirit of Catherine in her new marriage and filling her head with worries on how her baby was going to turn out, and Catherine being too polite to lash out at her mother in-law without being shamed for it. Malina was fantastic in this film, coming from her history in co-founding The Living Theatre and being a veteran character actor.

    As a third-generation Italian-American who grew up in Long Island and lived in New York City for twenty years, I can unfortunately understand the limited views that the older generations had, though I don't share those views. D'Onofrio as the father giving sarcastic retorts in his New York accent was very close to home, as is the feeling of having to respect your elders even when they're wrong and being shamed for going against them or for getting angry. I'm not in the same generation Savoca is in, so I don't have that same kind of closer relationship to Italian relatives that she has, but I can understand a lot of that Italian-American experience that she shows onscreen. I also grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school for two years, but my family is more secular and relaxed, not treating the Pope like a God or following the conservative attitudes of the church.

    I'm glad this film is streaming on Criterion and hasn't fallen into obscurity, it's a really interesting slice of the 1990s independent film boom.

    

Thoughts on Sentimental Value

     On Friday at the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I went to see Sentimental Value, a 2025 Norwegian drama directed by Joachim Trier, co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, centering on a family drama of an estranged relationship between an acclaimed filmmaker named Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) and his daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Gustav and his wife Sissel split when Nora and Agnes were young girls, and he went on to be a successful filmmaker, leaving his family behind, except when he cast Agnes as the lead in one of his films when she was a child twenty years prior.

    The film opens with a narration about the house in which they grew up, which belonged to Gustav's family for generations, and the narration is from the girls' point of view, of how they felt the "belly" of the house was full when there was life in the house and play and action, and how hollow the house felt when there was misery and depression. It's a great opening that sets the mood for the film, giving a personality to the house, and how it has affected the lives of Gustav's family, like his mother, who was a Resistance fighter against the Nazis in WWII, and imprisoned and tortured for her rebellion, and the trauma led to her suicide in the house when Gustav was seven.

    In the present-day, Gustav has been making documentaries and is still well-respected, but hasn't made a narrative film in fifteen years, and wrote a script with the intention for his daughter Nora to star in. Nora is a theater actress in Oslo, but struggles with stage fright and anxiety. She is also having an affair with her married costar, Jakob (Anders Danielson Lie). Gustav comes to Oslo for the funeral of his ex-wife Sissel, and after the wake, he meets with Nora to ask her to star in the script, where the script is inspired by his mother and he wants to film it in his family home, but she rejects it because he has been an absentee father and alcoholic, and is only interested in her when it benefits him and his artistry.

    Gustav decides instead to hire the American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who is popular, and her involvement convinces Netflix to secure the financing. But while she is initially enthusiastic, she feels insecure about not being able to speak Norwegian for the role or do a convincing accent, is self-conscious about Gustav translating the script into English for her, and feeling like she's too American and too removed from the story to do it justice. Gustav is kind and empathetic to her, but more condescending towards his daughters and insulting them with microaggressions, like telling Nora that her internal rage prevents her from finding love.

    Her sister Agnes works as a historian (side note: as an archivist myself, it did please me to see the brief work montage of her using the rolling archival cabinets and analog card catalogs to do her research work in, as well as seeing the same kind of library montage when she later researches archives about her late grandmother), and is married to Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) with a young son, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven). She is more sympathetic to her father, but when Gustav, who connects more with his grandson through films (like teaching him about filmmaking techniques with his smartphone), wants to cast him in the film, she refuses to allow it, remembering how it was fun when he doted on her when she starred in his film but he ghosted her afterwards, and she doesn't want to set her son up for that kind of disappointment from Gustav.

    I really liked how this film shifted between the perspectives, and gave a deeper understanding of each character, and I liked how rich it felt as a character study of a fractured and complicated family. The lead performances were excellent, and while I know that Skarsgård and Reinsve will get the majority of acting nomination attention, I really liked Lilleaas' performance as Agnes, which was more subtle and quiet as the "good" sister who isn't as explosive as her father or sister, but feels things intensely, and has her own struggles with her father. And I liked that Fanning as Rachel isn't depicted in a cruel way as a dumb Hollywood actress out of her depth, but that she really tries hard to understand the script, the character, the Oslo setting and the house, and doing her work, even while feeling like she is more of a consolation prize to the director for the role than who he really wanted.

    This is a really great film, especially as a follow-up to Trier's outstanding 2021 film The Worst Person in the World, also starring Reinsve, and one of the best films I've seen this year.

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.