Thoughts on Marvelous and the Black Hole

     On Tubi, I watched the 2021 coming of age drama Marvelous and the Black Hole, written and directed by Kate Tsang. The film stars Miya Cech as Sammy Ko, a teen girl whose mother has recently passed away, and is struggling with her grief and anger, acting out at school and getting into fights and failing classes. She is in danger of being expelled, therapy hasn't helped her, and her father Angus (Leonardo Nam) places her in a community college business class, telling her if she fails the class he will send her away to a reformatory summer camp. Her father treats her like the problem child, letting her sister bully her to be "in charge," and is dating a new woman, who Sammy resents.

    Sammy takes the business course, but isn't interested in it, and ends up meeting in passing an eccentric and salty old woman named Margot (Rhea Perlman), who is a children's magician, and tells folk tales to children using magic, like sleight of hand tricks and making her rabbit appear out of thin air. Sammy is initially resistant to Margot trying to help her, but after she decides to focus on magic for her business course project, she befriends Margot, finding calm and focus in learning how to do sleight of hand magic. Margot also allows Sammy a way to let out her anger and frustrations, like screaming into a pillow, and redirecting her fantasies, like when Sammy imagines murdering her father's girlfriend in a "saw a woman in half" trick and Margot gently tells her not to think about murder as her emotional outlet.

    I really liked this movie a lot. Miya Cech was great in playing Sammy, a girl who feels trapped by her family suppressing her and their emotions, blaming her for getting angry, and refusing to really listen to her. Her father keeps threatening to punish her and take her freedoms away, or sending her away to therapy and classes to have other people manage her or keep her busy while he focuses on his future with his new girlfriend. Only when the family is able to acknowledge their own grief and anger do they drop the formalities with one another, and they can truly accept the mother's death while not forgetting about her.

    The film is intercut with animation, from Tsang's animation background, and it really suits the film well, like when Sammy is telling a fantasy story with her mother as the heroine, and illustrating what is going on inside of Sammy's head.

    Rhea Perlman is wonderful in this film as Margot, an artistic and interesting woman with her own family trauma, and choosing to see joy and light in the world, and bring happiness to children through her use of storytelling and magic. She and Cech really work well together with their oddball friendship and bonding, and it made the film very charming and unique to watch.

Thoughts on News From Home

    On Criterion, I watched News from Home, a 1976 avant-garde documentary film directed by Chantal Akerman. The film consists of long takes of New York City life as Akerman reads in voiceover letters from her Belgian mother that she sent her between 1971-1973. 

    Akerman had moved to New York City at age 21 in 1971, where she did odd jobs, befriended filmmakers like Jonas Melkas and Babette Mangolte, and made films of her own. She returned to Belgium in 1973, and came back to NYC to shoot long takes of the city, then going through a financial crisis. As the camera holds on long takes of people in the subway, walking the streets, or people working the graveyard shifts late at night. 

    Over these images, Akerman in voiceover reads letters from her mother, which often have a passive aggressive tone to them, like "We know you're busy, but please find some time to write back to us," or bugging her about when will be the next time she'll come home to visit. Her mother updates her with mundane news, like when someone got married or had a baby or moved or whatnot.

    There's an interesting contrast between the mother's loving yet nagging correspondence, and the long shots of grimy city life, where people just walk on their way or stare ahead on the subway, save for the few who notice Akerman's camera and stare at her, like one old man on the subway. It brings up feeling lost and alienated in the city while the letters are about news close to home in more closer suburban life.

    I liked it more for seeing shots of 1970s New York City and relating to the feeling of being annoyed by a parent's hectoring for not being close to home, and I saw this more as an experimental art piece, not really as interested in sitting through it, as I let it play on streaming while getting up around my home and doing things, then sitting down to watch more of it. It runs slowly, with the long takes and redundant letters, and I felt I understood it without watching all 90 minutes of it, but I still liked it as an experimental art film.

Thoughts on Marc by Sofia

    At the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, I saw Marc by Sofia, a 2025 documentary film directed by Sofia Coppola, about the fashion designer Marc Jacobs. The film follows him as he prepares for a fashion show, and sits with Sofia, his longtime friend of over thirty years, discussing his career and influences.

    The film has a bit of an insider, cool kids feel to it, as Marc and Sofia, both of the elite arts upper classes, speak with a bit of a airy sound to their voices, which can make the audience feel like a third wheel to their conversation. The film gets more interesting when Marc talks about his childhood growing up in New York City as a 70s kid, spending time with his grandmother, and being inspired by pop culture icons like Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, and Bob Fosse's choreography in Sweet Charity, bringing his influences with the thick, clumped eyelashes and sequined mirrored dresses onto his models for the show, bridging between his childhood loves and his professional work as a designer and artist. 

    I really enjoyed the parts with Jacobs and Coppola talking about their 90s heyday in fashion and music and art, focusing on Jacobs' "grunge" collection in 1992 for Perry Ellis, and the controversy of him commodifying the grunge fashion subculture into the mainstream with supermodels like Christy Turlington dressed in flannel on the runway, and Jacobs saying how Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain hated it. Coppola going "Oh, yeah?" with her detached voice made her sound a little out of touch, since I could definitely understand, even having been a kid back then, how it would look to people who grew up in a scrappy environment and were broke seeing their clothes turned into expensive fashion for the upper classes and being annoyed.

    In their 90s flashbacks, I did like that the film talked about the famed 1994 X-Girl fashion show, when Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (who Jacobs said he was intimidated by when asked to do the fashion for one of Sonic Youth's videos) and Daisy von Furth had the X-Girl fashion line at the time, and did an outdoor show that was produced by Coppola and Spike Jonze, with models including then-club kid Chloë Sevingy at 20. It definitely felt like a moment of the time, bringing together fashion, alternative rock music, photography, and a lot of cool kid energy.

    I enjoyed a lot of the music needle drops, like hearing an Elastica song over the ending credits, and hearing various Sonic Youth songs like "100%" and "Dirty Boots."

    I liked watching the scenes of Jacobs with his team discussing differences in fabric when looking at swatches for clothes, and distilling down to particular "handfeels" and textures that he wanted, I was interested in the technical parts of fashion and creativity. I also liked Jacobs' metallic nail polish that he was sporting.

    It was a decent movie. It felt safe because he and Coppola are longtime friends, so there was bias there, and as much as I do like pop culture and celebrity stuff, I can feel a distance from it at the same time when watching videos of celebrities interviewing each other and being in their own insular world. I also had questions about how Jacobs and his fashion contributed to the negative parts of the fashion industry, like using overly thin models or any unethical factory practices or making clothes too expensive for the general public, but given the bias, I knew that wasn't to be explored as a hit piece on him or on the industry in general. So it was nice for the parts about 90s nostalgia and the scenes where he is working on his craft with his team of fashion professionals.

Thoughts on Will

    On Criterion last week, I watched Will, a 1981 drama directed by Jessie Maple. It was the first independent feature film to be directed by a Black woman. The film centers on themes of addiction and recovery, focusing on Will (Obaka Adedunyo, in his first film role), a man in Harlem who is recovering from a heroin addiction and has been sober for two years, who lives with his wife Jean (Loretta Devine, also in her first film role). He meets a 13-year old boy nicknamed "Little Brother" (Robert Dean), who he can tell is being influenced by the same cycles of drugs and addiction in their neighborhood that pulled him in, and he befriends Little Brother, inviting him to live with him and his wife to be a positive role model and to keep him away from the temptations of drugs.

    Will had been a star basketball player in his youth, and he becomes a coach for a high school girls' basketball team, helping the team get better and score well in games. Getting back into coaching basketball is a great way for him to get past his addiction and heal more in recovery. 

    But Little Brother is still curious about drugs, even snorting some cocaine he finds, and Will yells at him and is angry because he doesn't want him to go down the same path he did. It doesn't help that the neighborhood boys are mocking Little Brother for not wanting to do drugs and are pressuring him into it.

    This was a decent movie. I felt it got better when the actors were more natural with each other, like in scenes where Will and Little Brother are roughhousing with each other, or when Will and Jean are being flirtatious and teasing one another. When it got more into plot-dependent dialogue scenes, it felt more stilted, and had the feeling of an after-school TV special about the dangers of drugs. 

    I liked the film more for watching scenes of early 1980s Harlem, with documentarian filmmaking; seeing Loretta Devine in an early role (she would star in Dreamgirls on Broadway around the same time, her star-making role); and comparing it to later films like 2006's Half Nelson (where Ryan Gosling played a schoolteacher in recovery trying to mentor Shareeka Epps' high school student) and 2016's Moonlight (where Mahershala Ali plays a drug dealer trying to protect a young gay boy from his abusive home even if he knows he is complicit in selling drugs to his mother).

    Will won an award at the Athens International Film Festival and was used as an educational film in New York drug rehab centers. In 2024, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural significance. 

    Jessie Maple, the director, who passed away in 2023 at age 86, initially studied medical technology, but switched to become a filmmaker through training in Ossie Davis' Third World Cinema, and through a program run by WNET public television in NYC. She worked hard, through a lot of discrimination and legal action, to be the first Black woman admitted to the New York camera operators union in the 1970s, and used her perspective to make sure that Black voices were heard in news stories and not cut out. She made Will in 1981, and the basketball drama Twice as Nice in 1989, and screened her own films and other films by Black directors in her Harlem brownstone under the name 20 West Theater, Home of Black Cinema. The Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University holds her papers and films in the Jessie Maple collection.

Thoughts on The Drama

     Yesterday at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw The Drama, a 2026 romantic comedy drama written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli. The film stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as Emma and Charlie, an engaged couple whose wedding is in a few days, but their relationship is tested when they learn secrets about each other.

    The couple live in Boston, and Charlie (Pattinson) had originally approached Emma (Zendaya) in a coffee shop by pretending that he had read the book she was reading. He stumbles over his words, thinking she's ignoring him, until she reveals that she is deaf in her right ear and was listening to music in her left one. She gives him a chance to start over, and they begin their courtship, and are engaged two years later.

    When the couple are walking one night, they see their wedding DJ out on the street in front of a bar with others, possibly smoking heroin, and deliberate whether to continue to have her as their DJ. They talk with their friends, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Rachel defends the DJ, saying they've all done bad things, and they take turns admitting the worst things they've ever done. Mike used his ex-girlfriend as a human shield against a dog attack; Rachel as a teen locked a mentally disabled child in an RV closet and left him there overnight; and Charlie as a teen helped bully a peer so bad he had to move away. When it comes to Emma's turn, she admits that at 15, she had planned to commit a school shooting, having a rifle ready, but backing out of her plan. Everyone immediately turns on her, treating her like she's a psychopath despite that she didn't go through with it. Despite that Mike gave Charlie a pass on his actions for his brain "not being fully developed yet" at 14, Emma isn't given the same grace, and Rachel is harshest on her, because she has a cousin who is paralyzed from a school shooting.

    Charlie's view of Emma is completely changed, and he keeps picturing her with guns, and wondering whether to go through with the wedding. Emma explains that she was in a dark and depressed time in her life, and only after another shooting happened and she saw how it affected her community did she change her mind, and became a teen activist for gun control. Despite that this was fifteen years ago, and that Emma didn't cause any actual harm to anyone (unlike the other three, whose actions all hurt people), she is shunned by Rachel (whose true colors had been shown early in the film when she casually told Emma that she looks ugly when she cries), and Charlie is panicking at work.

    The film works in both exploring trust issues with a couple, as well as the hypocrisy of demonizing one person as "bad" while downplaying their own actions, as well as being darkly hilarious. In the flashbacks of young Emma (Jordyn Curet) trying to film her manifesto via webcam, posing with a gun with smudgy eye makeup and dressed in fatigues, her computer keeps interrupting with updates, breaking up the flow of her "by the time you see this I'll be gone" speech. 

    When Emma and Charlie are meeting with the wedding photographer (Zoe Winters) and she's detailing her schedule of photographing guests, she goes "So I'll shoot you first, then I'll shoot your parents, then I'll shoot the guests, and," and constantly saying "shoot" and making them feel jumpy, as well as the snaps of her camera sounding like gunshots as the couple pose with pained, fake smiles in front of a gray backdrop. The uncomfortableness of trying to act as normal while being stressed and anxious was really funny to watch.

    I found this film interesting. I felt like the characters were reacting in over the top ways to Emma's confession, when she hadn't gone through with her ideation and plan, but later realized that the point was that the other characters were terrible people, who hadn't done the work like she did to become a better person and to be more mentally healthy, and that they were unfair to her. 

    I did like the physical acting of Zendaya and Pattinson, like their body language when they are uncomfortable with each other, or when she is picturing him being playful with her the morning after her confession, rather than being distant and aloof. Those reactions helped to illustrate the characters' sudden unease with each other.

    The marketing for the film worked really well, promoting the film like a wedding announcement and the trailer leaving out the big reveal of Emma's secret, which made the film more intriguing, and it worked well for me to examine it afterwards.

Thoughts on SLC Punk!

 

    On Criterion, I watched SLC Punk!, a 1998 comedy-drama written and directed by James Merendino. The film is set in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1985, focusing on pre-law graduate and anarchist punk Stevo (Matthew Lillard), who is disgusted by his parents, who were 1960s hippies who sold out to Reagan-era corporate life (as his father says, "I didn't sell out. I bought in."), and is rebelling against fascism and Nazis and the boring life of his hometown in a state run by conservative Mormons. Stevo and his best friend, Heroin Bob (Michael Goorjian), who has the nickname despite that he is afraid of needles and only uses beer and cigarettes as his vices, believing that any drug is inherently dangerous, slam-dance at the local punk rock shows and get into fights with other subcultures. Stevo is casually dating a girl named Sandy (Jennifer Lien), while Bob has a crush on Trish (Annabeth Gish), who owns a head shop.

    As Stevo is in his early twenties, he is questioning his life and how to stay committed to his anarchist morals while not wanting to be seen as a poser or a sellout. He sees his friends moving on in their lives with romantic relationships and college and careers, and he sees the downsides of the punk rock life. A local teen, Sean (Devon Sawa) had attempted to stab his mother while high on 100 tabs of acid that had accidentally bled into his skin when he got wet while holding them in his pocket, and he gets sent to an institution. When Stevo sees him years later, he's panhandling on the street with obvious mental issues, declaring himself a bum, and having no contact with his family.

    Matthew Lillard does really well in the narration to the audience, often talking to the camera while interacting with other characters in the scenes, the others unaware of the fourth wall breaking, and it feels very Goodfellas to me with Henry Hill's narration to the audience. He's a bright and charismatic actor who shined a lot in this role at the peak of his 90s fame following Hackers and Scream. He's had more of a resurgence in recent years, with his dramatic role on the show Good Girls, renewed appreciation for his role as Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo series, and coming back to the Scream series in Scream 7.

    Michael Goorjian at the time was best known for playing Neve Campbell's boyfriend on Party of Five, and he gives a sensitive performance as Bob, a guy whose father has deep psychosis issues and believes that the C.I.A. is watching him, and he's afraid of ending up like his father. He sees the effects of drugs on people, including the dependence on prescription medication, and is firmly against it, seeing it as poison and corrupting the mind.

    The film has a great soundtrack, and brought me back to being a 90s teen hearing 80s hardcore for the first time, hearing classic songs like "I Love Living in the City" by Fear, and "Amoeba" by The Adolescents, as well as cuts by The Stooges and The Velvet Underground.

    The film doesn't have the gritty or messy look of a low-budget punk underground film, it may look too slick and mainstream to be seen as a film talking about punk anarchism, and it has a confusing conclusion that feels like it gives in to the characters "selling out" while still wanting to maintain their punk credentials. But I thought it was a decent film helped a lot by the soundtrack and lead performances.

Thoughts on Evil Cat

    On Criterion, I watched the 1987 Hong Kong supernatural action film Evil Cat, directed by Dennis Yu and written by Wong Jing. The film is about a family that, every 50 years, must fight the resurrected cat demon until its nine lives are up, and only the son born every 50 years can fight the demon with his inherited energy and strength. The demon is now on its ninth life, coming back and possessing people and sucking out people's lifeforces, jumping and pouncing in big leaps like a cat. Master Cheung (Chia-Leung Liu) has cancer, and is worried that he will die of the disease before he can defeat the demon, so he decides to train his daughter Siu-Chuen's (Lai-Ying Tang) boyfriend Lo (Mark Ho-nam Cheng) to be the warrior.

    Despite that this film has some heinously sexist moments (a young woman who is seen as whiny and annoying on a car ride is left tied up on a pole by guys laughing at her), the film is very neon atmospheric and combines excellent wire work with the cat-like jumps and claws and arched backs, blue lightning that follows the demon around (including a part where it attacks a woman by shooting a beam right at her vagina in a ridiculous moment), and the violence is gory, with punches that go through torsos. There are left-field moments, like when the movie suddenly cuts to a singer performing a canto-pop song, and he just pops into the story, with fans adoring him outside, only for him to be a victim of the cat-demon seducing him, having sex with him in a car, then biting off his tongue and killing him.

    I liked how the film ends in a surprisingly heartbreaking way, not the triumphant ending that I was expecting. It's a weird horror-fantasy, and very interesting to watch.