Thoughts on Manhunter

    At the Philadelphia Film Society in Philadelphia, PA, I saw a 4K restoration of Manhunter, a 1986 crime thriller written and directed by Michael Mann, based on the 1981 novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. The film starred William Petersen as Will Graham, an FBI profiler who is hunting a serial killer named Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), otherwise known as the Tooth Fairy. The killer stalks families from a distance and mass murders them in their home, and Graham, having previously caught the serial killer and former psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Brian Cox) is taking on this job, trying to get inside of the mind of the killer to catch him, and it is triggering his mental health issues and psychosis. He also has to meet with Lecter, who is being held in a high-security prison, to get his insight on the killer's mind and face his demons, as Lecter tried to kill him years earlier.

    I really liked this film a lot. It's very moody with a synth score by Michel Rubini and The Reds, and as the film came out at the time Miami Vice was on, which Mann created, it echoes the same atmospheric style, like with Graham's Florida beach home and the musical montages with rock and pop songs, and big electric guitar solos heightening the drama.

    I liked that a lot of the film was focusing on the forensics of catching the killer, like analyzing a note written by the Tooth Fairy on toilet paper, seeing that it was broken up into two parts and analyzing the ink and paper under infrared light to figure it out, with Graham and his FBI superior Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina)'s body language ready to pounce and run to the next place to get the results, having a short window of time where the evidence is usable. It brought a lot of suspense to the scenes, while also adding it 1980s-era forensic science to the film that made it more fascinating in a nerdy way.

    The casting is excellent. When I initially saw some of this film, William Petersen's character made me feel anxious and uncomfortable, and I stopped watching, but this time around, I stuck with it, and the film's story about him recovering from a mental breakdown and trying to protect his sanity made a lot more sense on why he gets so agitated and tries to think like a killer to catch one. The scene in which he speaks with his son while grocery shopping about why he had mental health issues after Lecter attacked him was really well-acted, and it seemed rare to see a depiction of men talking about their mental problems at that time.

    Dennis Farina was a lot of fun to watch with his nasal Chicago accent and bringing in his background as a former police detective to the role (he had worked as a police consultant to Michael Mann for his film Thief and appeared in his projects). Stephen Lang was excellent as an annoying tabloid reporter who meets a tragic end, and Joan Allen was really convincing as a blind woman, and her scene where she strokes and pets a sedated large tiger was gorgeous to watch.

    Brian Cox was fantastic as Hannibal Lecter, who is only in a few scenes of the film, but is intelligent and funny and manipulative, and finds ways to antagonize Graham under guises of politeness. And Tom Noonan was chilling as the Tooth Fairy, a tall, lanky figure who cannot get emotionally close to anyone. The sequence of the film from his perspective, where Joan Allen's character seduces him and he doesn't know how to handle a woman being attracted to him was really interesting, and how he feels like he could be normal with a woman before inevitably reverting back to his serial killer ways.

    I'm glad I watched this film again and understood it much better, it's a really fantastic crime thriller of the 1980s, and started off the film and TV franchise of the Hannibal Lecter series that would go on for decades.

Thoughts on Postcards from the Edge

     On Hulu, I watched Postcards from the Edge, a 1990 comedy-drama directed by Mike Nichols and written by Carrie Fisher, based on her 1987 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. The film stars Meryl Streep as Suzanne Vale, a once-successful actress who survives a drug overdose and does a stint in rehab, and will only be covered by her next film's insurance company provided that she stay sober and live with her mother, Doris (Shirley MacLaine), an alcoholic actress who had her own fame as a cabaret star and still relishes attention.

    Suzanne starts out the film making a political thriller set in Central America, doing a long take that she messes up a few minutes into it, pissing off her director Lowell Kolchek (Gene Hackman), who sees her as a drug addict ruining his movie. The next morning, she is passed out in bed with Jack (Dennis Quaid), a film producer and random man she met the night before, and she has accidentally overdosed on pills, and he drops her off at the hospital. Her life is saved when the doctor (Richard Dreyfuss) pumps her stomach, and she wakes up in a rehab center, admitted by her mother, Doris. Her intake counselor (CCH Pounder) informs her that she is in detox, and Suzanne has no memory of what has happened, but insists she is not suicidal.

    Suzanne completes her time in rehab, making friends with fellow addict-in-recovery Aretha (a funny and wry Robin Bartlett) then her agent tells her that the studio will only insure her if she lives with a responsible person to keep her sober and accountable, and the only person who is available for her to live with is her mother. Suzanne is hesitant because her mother is a show-off who sucks up the attention in the room (when she visits her in rehab, another patient approaches her as an adoring fan and says he performed one of her songs in his drag act), as well as always feeling in her shadow. 

    The two live together while Suzanne works on the film, a lower-budget schlocky film in which she plays a cop, where the film is on a tight budget and doesn't have time for rehearsals, so she's thrown into scenes with little preparation, like a scene where she is tied to a prop cactus then told afterwards there will be live snakes in the scene. Suzanne and Doris butt heads, where Doris will make passive-aggressive comments at Suzanne's expense and pretend like she didn't mean any harm, and Suzanne will deal with things with humor and sarcasm, a touch from Carrie Fisher's writing and personality. 

    In one scene, Doris throws a surprise party for Suzanne to celebrate her completion of rehab, and Suzanne is pushed to sing in front of the partygoers by a live pianist. She chooses Ray Charles' "You Don't Know Me," initially with her back to the audience, and singing it with sadness and vulnerability, looking at her mother and wanting her love and recognition, only for Doris to be in performance mode, mouthing the lyrics and miming stage directions to Suzanne to remove her jean jacket when performing. Afterwards, Doris is pushed to sing, and pretends to act bashful before saying to the pianist, ""I'm Still Here" in D flat," a Sondheim number from Follies. Doris performs a number clearly well-rehearsed with gestures and inflections, flashing her legs for sex appeal, and completely overshadowing Suzanne at a party that was meant to be about her, with a look of disappointment on Suzanne's face.

    Suzanne struggles with the film, getting feedback that her performance is weak and without energy, and overhears the wardrobe department criticizing her body and calling her out of shape. She has a fling with Jack, only to learn later that he is a womanizer who uses the same lines on women ("You smell like Catalina" being one of them), with Suzanne learning about this from a fellow actress, played by Annette Bening during her rise to fame (she would also shine greatly in Stephen Frears' The Grifters the same year). Suzanne feels vulnerable and angry that she let herself be romanced by this man when she is still in recovery and trying to rebuild her career, and being under Doris' judgmental eye doesn't help her sense of self.

    The film focuses more on the mother-daughter drama, and Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine are really good in this, especially in scenes when they are arguing with each other and Suzanne is trying to really be seen by her mother. Doris doesn't want to be blamed for her daughter's drug addiction, but can't see how her alcoholism and putting her daughter on sleeping pills as a kid influenced her inclination towards addiction. The film has a great supporting role performance by Mary Wickes as Suzanne's grandmother and Doris' mother, who is very judgmental of her daughter, and easily showing to the audience how generational trauma between the women is passed down, with one criticizing the other and refusing responsibility for someone's self-medicating but harmful behavior.

    Gene Hackman is only in a few scenes, showing up much later when Suzanne has to do ADR looping to improve her performance in her previous film, and with sobriety she is able to see how terrible her past performance was, even as her director still tells her she has talent. Suzanne cries after she redoes a line, and explains it as "Nothing you say to me is as horrible as what I say to myself... and at least it's happening outside my head where I can deal with it easier." She talks about how she knows she has a great life as a famous actress, but that it's hard for her to feel good in her head, to have good mental health to match her outside life. And her director talks to her about how her epiphany and realization doesn't mean that her life will immediately change for the better, and that life isn't like the movies, there will be a delayed reaction in just continuing to live life as a sober person and work on getting better, and his words resonated with me, the feeling like life is a continued work in progress on being better even when you've messed up or had setbacks.

    Carrie Fisher was a smart and funny person who used her celebrity and privileged status to destigmatize mental illness, being frank about her bipolar disorder and substance abuse, and using her talent to become a successful writer of several novels and memoirs, as well as a script doctor on films like Sister Act, The Wedding Singer, and Anastasia. Watching this film, as well as rewatching the YouTuber Be Kind Rewind's video on Fisher and this film, made me miss her more as a personality. 

Thoughts on The Invite

     At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw The Invite, a 2026 dramedy directed by Olivia Wilde and co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones. It is an English-language remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs (Sentimental), and stars Wilde and Seth Rogen as Angela and Joe, a couple living in San Francisco whose marriage is on the rocks, and Angela invites over a neighbor couple, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for dinner and drinks.

    Joe is a jazz band teacher at a local conservatory, and used to be in a 2000s pop-punk band that had one hit song before flaming out, and he's felt bitter about not being more successful and working at a low-rate music school, as well as living in the large apartment that he grew up in because he can't afford to move out. Angela is a stay-at-home mother to their twelve-year-old daughter Maggie (who is away at a friend's house the entire night), and she is nervous and anxious and wants to impress the glamourous couple with her decorating taste and make friends with them. Joe can't stand them because he doesn't like it when Hawk tries to make small talk with him in the elevator, and that during the night, Joe and Angela frequently hear loud sex coming from Hawk and Piña's apartment right above their home. Joe wants to confront them about it, while Angela is adamant that he not bring it up as not to cause a fight.

    Joe and Angela have a lot of tension between them, which is obvious to Hawk and Piña when they arrive, saying they could hear them arguing from outside the door. Hawk is a retired firefighter, while Piña is a psychotherapist. There are a lot of awkward mistakes, like Joe forgetting to buy wine and Angela scrambling to use a spare bottle of wine saved for an anniversary, and Angela trying to impress the Spanish Piña with serving her jamon, only for Piña to say that she is vegan, gluten-free, and sugar-free. Joe is often sarcastic and antagonizes the couple, only for Hawk to appreciate his honesty and push for him to be more blunt and open with them.

    The night unfolds more as the couples share secrets and insecurities and their pasts, and the movie gets really funny and messy and loud, and it's really enjoyable to watch. Olivia Wilde was really hilarious with physical comedy as Angela, doing a lot of "looks" to Joe when she's annoyed with him, or making a "see, I was right" face when the other couple agrees with her on something. Edward Norton gets a really touching monologue scene in the last third when he talks about his past relationship with his wife before he met Piña, and Penélope Cruz was really funny in often cutting through people's bullshit, like being annoyed when Hawk tries to correct her English in front of company and telling him he doesn't speak Spanish well and she lets it slide. Seth Rogen was good, though I didn't really believe him and Olivia Wilde in portraying a long-term couple, feeling like she would have broken up with him long before and not just staying together for their daughter.

    The first ten minutes of the movie had a loud score by Devonté Hynes of screeching cello music to emphasize the tension between Joe and Angela as she prepares for the neighbors visiting, and I thought the score was overkill and practically drowning out the actors, it didn't feel necessary, though the music calmed down after that.

    I liked that the film felt like a contemporary version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with the visiting couple being older and with past marriages instead of being young newlyweds, who are able to see the anger and resentment in Joe and Angela's marriage and give them words of wisdom from life experience. The film was mature and funny, and not just frank about sex, but about love and relationships and complications with life changes and growing together or growing apart. I think that Olivia Wilde, given her hit with directing Booksmart and her flop with directing Don't Worry, Darling, excels much more with comedy than she does with melodrama, and this film played more to her talents as an actor and director.

Thoughts on Christine

     On Criterion, I watched Christine, a 1983 supernatural horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by Bill Phillips, based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. The film starred Keith Gordon as Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy high school senior who purchases a 1958 Plymouth car for $250 and becomes obsessed with it, naming it Christine, as the car is possessed by an evil spirit and kills anyone who she sees as a threat to her and Arnie.

    The film opens with the car being produced in a Detroit auto plant in 1957 (with the anachronistic choice of George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" playing over the prologue), and maiming one worker by slamming its hood on his fingers, and killing another worker because he dropped cigar ash on its seat.    

    In 1978 California, teenage Arnie is bullied on his first day of school by Buddy (William Ostrander) and his gang, and Arnie's best friend Dennis (John Stockwell) intervenes and saves him, and Buddy is later expelled for threatening them with a switchblade. After school, Arnie and Buddy are driving home when Arnie sees the car, now in a beat-up state, and wants to buy it from an elderly, rough around the edges man (Roberts Blossom), the brother of the previous owner, who recently died. Despite Dennis' protests, Arnie buys the car, and his parents are mad that he at 17 made a big move like that without consulting them, and he blows up at them over wanting to keep him a sheltered nerd. He takes Christine to a garage to restore her, where the garage owner Will Darnell (Robert Prosky) gives him a part-time job in exchange for letting him have access to his junk pile to fix Christine.

    Arnie is in love with his car, and his newfound confidence gets him a date with the new girl, Leigh (Alexandra Paul), who Dennis and his friends are immediately smitten by, and Dennis' friends make lewd sexual comments about her on first sight. Leigh and Arnie begin dating seriously, and Dennis, distracted by seeing them kissing by Christine while he's playing a football game, gets tackled so severely that he ends up in the hospital for a month and it ends his football career.

    Christine and Arnie have a co-dependent abusive relationship, where Christine is insanely jealous and possessive of Arnie and will kill people by running them over/pinning them to a wall or asphyxiating someone while keeping the doors locked, and Arnie becomes combative and verbally abusive to his parents, Dennis, and Leigh, emboldened with toxic masculinity after being a bullied nerd for so long.

    I liked how effective the characterization of the car was in the movie, how Christine would only play 1950s rock songs that expressed its emotions in a scene ("We Belong Together"; "Bony Maronie"; "Come on, Let's Go"), bringing an eerie, creepy feel to the songs, and the special effects when Christine regenerates herself after being destroyed were fantastic, through hydraulics crumpling the car and puckering in, then the film played in reverse to show the car "fixing" herself. I especially liked a sequence where, after Christine starts a fire at a gas station and kills two people while gunning to kill the main bully, the car is fully engulfed in flames and being driven by stunt veteran Terry Leonard, who had doubled for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark around that time.

    I liked this movie a lot, mostly for the special effects and the personification of the car as the villain, as well as the depiction of the bullied nerd becoming a horrible person and his best friend and girlfriend becoming the heroes of the film. It's a really interesting and haunting film of the 1980s.

Thoughts on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

     On Hulu I watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, a 2025 sci-fi comedy directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Matthew Robinson. It was decent, but overly long at two hours and 15 minutes, it should've been a tight 90 minutes. It did get hamfisted with the "everyone's on their phones" stuff, but I liked the basic premise of Sam Rockwell as a time traveler from the future who is trying to prevent AI from taking over the world, and he has time-traveled to the same Norm's diner in L.A. 117 times to find the right combination of patrons in the diner to join him on his quest to stop the AI apocalypse from happening. It's like Terminator 2 if it was more of a goofy comedy and less about Sarah Connor trying to kill the creator of Skynet in front of his family.

    The film has a good cast with Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz, and Michael Peña as some of the diner patrons picked for the mission, with their own backstories told in flashback about their experiences with technology and AI, and the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network described their backstories as being in their own Black Mirror episodes. Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña play a teacher couple whose students are always on their phones in class and ignore the teachers; Juno Temple plays a woman whose teen son dies in a school shooting and other mothers of school shooting victims lead her to a place where they can clone her son, albeit more like a physical copy than having his same personality; and Haley Lu Richardson plays a woman who is allergic to cell phones and WiFi and gets nosebleeds around them, and her boyfriend, who once was against cell phones, gets addicted to a VR headset and wants to live in virtual reality than the real world. Their stories are all pretty interesting, especially the one with Juno Temple's character, and I did prefer their backstories to the main plot thread, which feels like too many plot ideas thrown in at once.

Thoughts on Wild at Heart

     On Criterion, I watched Wild at Heart, a 1990 Southern Gothic crime film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, two young lovers who, after Sailor is released from prison for having murdered a man in self-defense, go on the run from Lula's domineering mother Marietta (Diane Ladd), who has hired hitmen to kill Sailor. 

    Nicolas Cage brings out his Elvis Presley impersonations as Sailor, as a romantic outlaw who sings Presley ballads to his girlfriend but says he will only sing "Love Me Tender" to his future wife, and does high kicks and punching the air while dancing. Laura Dern brought out a more sexual side as Lula, a young woman of twenty who is a survivor of sexual assault as a child and has a passionate excitement for Sailor, even after he bludgeoned a man to death (initially in self-defense because Marietta sent him to kill him, but then going beyond into a murderous rage) and acts jealous and threatening towards a guy at a rock show for dancing with Lula.

    Diane Ladd plays up soap opera theatrics as Marietta, painting red lipstick all over her face and being in hysterics over the phone, seeing Sailor as dangerous for her daughter, but she is also involved with hitmen and gangsters, and was complicit with the death of her husband. 

    Sailor and Lula travel together from North Carolina to California, breaking his parole, driving in a convertible and stop in Texas along the way, where Sailor meets up with an old acquaintance, Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini), and he doesn't know that she knows that there is a contract out on him, and that she is linked up with Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), a slimy criminal with rancid teeth.

    The movie is a weird and wild mess, but really captivating to watch. Cage and Dern bring a lot of raw sexuality and passion to their love scenes, and their characters' relationship has a romantic "us against the world" feel to it, that amazingly doesn't end in flames. 

    The film is stacked with character actors: Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover (in a tragic flashback story as Lula's cousin who is struggling with psychosis issues and breaks with reality), J.E. Freeman, Jack Nance, W. Morgan Sheppard, Grace Zabriskie, David Patrick Kelly, Frances Bay, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and others. There's an early role by Sheryl Lee the same year she played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks as a hallucination of Glinda the Good Witch, and Sherilyn Fenn, also from Twin Peaks, played a traumatized survivor of a car accident with brain damage who succumbs to her injuries.

    The film has a lot of references to The Wizard of Oz, with Lula clicking her red heels to want to escape a traumatic situation; the Glinda hallucination; Lula picturing her mother as the Wicked Witch of the West; referring to the road they traveled on as the yellow brick road, and other mentions. It goes along with the fantasy of the film, of being this weird road trip/romance/Southern Gothic movie, playing Elvis Presley songs and briefly the intro of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" in one scene.

    Isabella Rossellini had a lot of glamour with her blonde wig and dark unibrow as Perdita, but the role would be better known when played by Rosie Perez in 1997's Dance with the Devil (also known as Perdita Durango). The character was from the novel and from Barry Gifford's 1992 novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango. In Rossellini's 1997 memoir Some of Me, she said that she based the look of Perdita on Frida Kahlo:

    "For my character, Perdita Durango, I used Frida Kahlo, whose paintings are a series of obsessive self-portraits. Frida Kahlo portrayed herself as attractive and repulsive at the same time. She is beautiful and feminine, but she is hairy, a bit like an ape, with a mustache and two eyebrows that are really one big one across her forehead. This combination of attractiveness/repulsiveness fascinated me . . . I used a bad blond wig that exposed black roots and a tight dress, sexy but vulgar. I changed my body posture and I added hair so I, too, could have one eyebrow across my forehead. My Perdita, I believe, conveyed the impression of a person who is repulsive and attractive at the same time . . . Perdita is my best example of modeling skills applied to acting."

    But Willem Dafoe was the scene-stealer as Bobby Peru, a truly disgusting person who sexually threatens and assaults Lula, triggering her childhood rape, and whom Sailor joins in a robbery, against his better judgment. Dafoe is fantastic in this film and utterly memorable.

    I really liked this film. I hadn't seen it since I was a teenager, and barely remembered it aside from the main romance and Lula's line to Sailor, "You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt." I liked revisiting it and understanding it better and taking it all in, and enjoying the weird ride of it all.

Thoughts on Delicatessen

    On Tubi, I watched Delicatessen, a 1991 French black comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, and co-written by Jeunet, Caro, and Gilles Adrien. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic France, possibly during the 1950s, focusing on the tenants of a dilapidated apartment building. Food is in short supply, and grain is used as currency. The landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) works as a butcher in his shop on the first floor, and posts job opportunities for handymen, so he can lure unsuspecting men to his building and butcher them and sell them to his tenants as cheap meat.

    The next applicant for the vacant position is the circus clown Louison (Dominique Pinon), who is handy with fixing things around the building and has a trick knife/boomerang he calls the "Australian." Clapet is reluctant to murder him so soon because of his usefulness, and he develops a cute romance with Clapet's daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). The other tenants know they are eating people and are resigned to it for survival, but like Louison too for his charms.

    I first saw this movie as a teenager in the 1990s, and really liked how bizarre and weird it is. The film has a yellow and sepia-toned look to it, making the colors look like vomit, with a lot of wide angle shots and exaggerations and cartoonish humor, like with a group of underground mole people who come into the last third of the movie and take over the film. There's a fun sequence of simultaneous noises like the bed squeaking from sex, Julie playing the cello with her bow, and other tapping sounds as a calamity of sounds, with credit to the sound designer and editor. There's an ongoing joke of one of the tenants trying to die by suicide with elaborate Rube Goldberg setups (like sitting in the bathtub beside a sewing machine attached to a string attached to other things attached to a doorbell in hopes that her lover will ring the buzzer triggering the action to kill her). I love the date scene where Julie is preparing to mime pouring tea for Louison and practicing what to say, and when she tries to do the date without her glasses and Louison has to keep saving her from overpouring the tea and catching her mistakes because of her nearsighted blurry vision. It's an oddball movie that works really well with the vision that Jeunet and Caro put forth. 

    The two would collaborate again on 1995's The City of Lost Children, before parting on their separate creative ways, with Jeunet becoming the more well-known name with directing 1997's Alien: Resurrection, 2001's Amelie and 2004's A Very Long Engagement. Marc Caro has worked as an art director, often collaborating with Jan Kounen on his films.

    I love how creative and beautiful and strange this film is, and the romance between Louison and Julie is so sweet and cute amidst the madness. I'm really glad I revisited this film and understood it a lot better in my older age.