Thoughts on By Design

     On Tubi, I watched By Design, a 2025 absurdist, body-swap comedy written and directed by Amanda Kramer. The film has an artsy, avant-garde feel to it, with sequences of a group of dancers representing the emotions in a character's mind, as well as the characters speaking in a very clipped, overly proper way that is intentionally stage-y. 

    Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a depressed woman who is lonely and feels unappreciated. She has weekly lunches with her friends, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney), who have more money than her, who complain to her about their problems because Camille is a good listener. Camille gives advice about not envying other women, saying that if aliens came to Earth, they wouldn't see any different between the women, and to appreciate what they have. She repeats the old adage of jealously being "drinking poison while waiting for the other person to die." Despite that Camille is a good friend, she feels depressed and empty, and wants to be loved.

    The women go into a furniture showroom store, where they look at assorted chairs that are centered in the room, until Camille comes across a chair that just speaks to her in an emotional way. She wants the chair, but the saleswoman is cagey on the price, assuming that Camille can't afford it, going, "We don't do installments." Camille comes back the next time (budgeting with her checkbook to skip some lunches with her friends to afford the chair), but the chair has already been sold. Camille is insistent on touching the chair, even as the saleswoman is telling her to accept that it's not hers and to leave. Camille sits on it anyway, and in a dance sequence in her mind, the chair and Camille have swapped bodies. Camille's body slides off the chair, and while she is breathing, she cannot move or speak. Camille's spirit is now in the chair, and her spirit makes the chair more mesmerizing and attractive to others.

    The chair is bought by Marta (Alisa Tores), a wealthy woman who bought it for her friend, a jazz pianist named Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), who is immediately attracted to the chair, and he also pictures dance sequences in his head when he is falling in love with the chair. He is so in love with the chair that he becomes very possessive of it, bringing it to a dinner party instead of sitting in another chair at the table, and having to be pried off of it when others want to sit in the chair too.

    Meanwhile, Camille has been laying on her mattress on the floor in her bedroom, unable to move or communicate, and her friends and her mother (Betty Buckley), and they continue to pour out their emotions and problems to Camille, still seeing her as a good listener and taking advantage of her. Only later when they do realize that she can't speak or move do they realize something is wrong, and make the connection with the chair to try to make things right away.

    The film is narrated by Melanie Griffith, and she has this sweet, soft voice that makes the film feel more like a dark fairy tale, about a woman who wanted to be appreciated, but instead was more loved as an object than as a person. I liked that the film cast the friends with Gen-X actresses who are all in their fifties, and who look more natural and aged and don't have a Hollywood look to them, that made their characters feel more real to me. 

    Juliette Lewis was really good in a physical role where she is often limp and being propped around, while still conveying sadness and emptiness on her face. There is a darkly funny sequence where a prowler (Clifton Collins, Jr.) breaks into her home and drags her out onto the balcony, threatening to rape her or kill her, but is disappointed that she isn't fighting back, and instead starts crying about his ex and unloading his problems onto her as everyone else has done.

    Mamoudou Athie has a very graceful and quiet quality to his acting that I've enjoyed since I saw him in Archive 81 and Unicorn Store, and he really gets into the dance sequences and using his body as an instrument of pleasure and ecstasy. 

    I liked how this film felt more like a weird art piece about women being objectified, mixing in the dance sequences with the narrative scenes, and it felt really interesting and unusual to watch.

Thoughts on Emily the Criminal

     On Tubi, I watched Emily the Criminal, a 2022 crime thriller written and directed by John Patton Ford. The film stars Aubrey Plaza, as Emily, a young woman who has $70,000 of student debt and is working menial jobs in the gig economy to get by in Los Angeles. She is having trouble getting a steady job because of her past felony conviction for assault, as well as a DUI arrest, and is stuck in dire financial straits.

    A coworker connects her to a "dummy shopper" service that turns out to be part of a credit card fraud ring, where she can earn $200 in an hour if she buys a flat screen TV with stolen credit card numbers and a fake I.D. She does it and wants to do more, so one of the organizers, Youcef (Theo Rossi), sends her out to buy a car, with the same credit card scam. However, when she is about to drive away with the car, the dealer discovers the scam, and tries to drag her out of the car, assaulting her, but she maces him with pepper spray, and drives off, demanding the $2000 owed to her by Youcef for pulling off this dangerous scam.

    Emily gets more into the criminal underworld, even as she is hoping that her friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke) hooks her up with a job at the advertising agency she works for. Emily's criminal background, quick temper to fight, and tenacity makes her quickly adept at moving products through scams, though it puts her at more risk for violence and retaliation from others. All she wants is to pay off her student debt, do her painting, and have a steady, decent job, and she sees the crime as a temporary means to an end.

    I had seen this movie before, and really liked it. Aubrey Plaza is great at playing these dark characters who are morally gray, who are relatable even if their actions are questionable, and depicting how far someone who is in deep debt would go to pay off their loans, while also dealing with blocks in their career from past criminal records. She feels realistic as someone who would work in the gig economy to get by, while being angry at the system that is setting her up to fail.

    Theo Rossi as Youcef is really great in this film as well. He plays Youcef initially as a streetwise scammer, but is revealed more to be a funny and likable person who also has turned to a life of crime to survive. His dreams are to own an apartment and be financially stable, having immigrated from Lebanon with his family. A romance sparks between him and Emily, which makes his cousin Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori) more suspicious of Emily getting too involved with the fraud ring and jeopardizing their anonymity as scammers.

    This was an interesting little crime thriller to watch, and I'm happy I revisited it.

Thoughts on Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and Lovedolls Superstar

    On Criterion, I watched Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, a 1984 underground film directed by David Markey, shot on super-8 film, that focus on a fictional all-female punk rock band called the Love Dolls, made up of teenage runaways who are trying to survive on the streets of Los Angeles. Kitty Carryall (Jennifer Schwartz) and Bunny Tremelo (Hilary Rubens) break out of their homes and form a band together, finding a drummer, Patch Kelly (Janet Housden), and fight rival gangs and bands. A manager named Johnny Tremaine (played by then-teenage Steven McDonald, of the band Redd Kross) offers to take them under his wing, but uses them for sex and to make money off of them. The Love Dolls want to get revenge on those who have hurt them, and make it as a huge rock band.

    The movie has a lo-fi vibe to it, with awkward and bad acting, though it's intentionally hilarious at times, like how one of their moms is clearly played by a young man in drag playing up a "nagging old lady" stereotype that is too ridiculous to take seriously. Or when Bunny tells Kitty that Johnny Tremaine assaulted her, going, "Johnny raped me," and Kitty blows right past that with, "Don't worry, we'll make it to the top. We'll show them that we're no tramps, we're real rock stars." "OK!" It was so silly that I thought it had to be intentionally dumb.

    The movie is short at 49 minutes, and has a great soundtrack of 80s punk rock like Black Flag, White Flag, the Bags, as well as several songs by Redd Kross, as McDonald and his brother Jeff act in the film. This movie has a very genuine feel to it, of being a part of the Los Angeles punk rock subculture of the 1980s, and its roughness makes it feel more charming.

    The sequel, Lovedolls Superstar, came out in 1986, and was also directed by David Markey, and is longer at 81 minutes. Following the events of the first movie, with a recap at the beginning like a TV episode, the band reunites after having fallen on hard times, like Kitty sleeping in the gutter, and Patch has become the lead of an acid-damaged religious cult. Bunny is replaced by Alexandria (Kim Pilkington), a sex worker on the streets of Sunset Boulevard, and Johnny's twin brother Rainbow Tremaine (also played by Steven McDonald) comes out of his hippie desert life to look for his brother, who met an ill fate in the last movie.

    The movie gets even more bonkers than the first one, with newcomers vowing to kill to avenge their loved ones, and an obsessed Lovedolls fan (Jeff McDonald) becoming an assassin to target a Bruce Springsteen impersonator. There are guest appearances from Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, Vicki Peterson of The Bangles, and Sky Saxon of The Seeds. There's clearly more money in the budget for the soundtrack, with music by Sonic Youth, the Dead Kennedys, the Meat Puppets, as well as Redd Kross and Black Flag returning. And there's a lot of fun humor in the band being openly antagonistic towards a feminist talk show host, or commanding their fans to kill and thinking they're stupid.

    Despite that it's a short movie, it feels like it could have been cut down even more, as it often feels like padding for a movie with a slightly bigger budget, and even not by much. It can be messy to watch, but like the first one, it has the same kind of DIY heart and energy that I liked. And although Steven McDonald is a bassist and not an actor, he was a lot of fun to watch in both movies as the cock-rock sexist manager and the blissed-out desert hippie.

    David Markey is a filmmaker and musician, and his work has documented the Southern California punk scene of the 1980s, and he has worked with many of the bands featured in these movies.

    I watched these movies on Criterion as part of their programming of movies featuring all-female rock bands, and this was cool to come across these underground cult hits depicting the 80s L.A. punk underground culture.

Thoughts on Only Yesterday

     On HBO Max, I watched Only Yesterday, a 1991 Japanese anime drama written and directed by Isao Takahata, based on the 1982 manga Omoide Poro Poro by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone. The version I watched had a 2016 English dubbing cast of Daisy Ridley, Dev Patel, Alison Hernandez, Laura Bailey, and Ashley Eckstein. The film jumps back and forth between the past and present of Taeko Okajima (the adult version voiced by Daisy Ridley, the child version voiced by Alison Fernandez), a 27-year old unmarried office worker who lives in Tokyo in 1983, and takes a summer trip to the countryside to work on picking safflowers for the harvest season, and reminisce on how much she loved visiting the countryside as a ten-year old child in 1966.

    Adult Taeko is nagged at by her family for being single at 27, saying she can't afford to be picky, and they don't understand why she prefers the rural countryside, or going there to do farm work as a vacation. On the sleeper train there, she reminisces about when she was a child, and often feeling picked on by her family for not being good at math or for being outspoken, with her mother admonishing her behavior and her older sisters mocking her. Her mother would scold her for not eating all of her lunch, saying the food was going to go to waste, and not listen when Taeko would say she doesn't like onions. At school, the lunch rules would allow children to leave only one thing on their plate, which leads to a mock debate on whether that was wasteful of food. As those scenes take place in 1960s Japan, with the parents having survived WWII, a lot of postwar anxiety about struggle and hunger and not being wasteful would carry over into their parenting, and carrying generational trauma onto their children.

    Taeko at school would struggle with embarrassment over crushes, and when the girls would talk about puberty with breasts and periods, and how one girl was an "early developer," and her mom wrote her a note to skip P.E. when she was on her period, which carries over as a rumor that any girl who skips P.E. is on her period, leading to Taeko feeling angry when she has a cold and has to sit on the sidelines and be mocked by boys for supposedly having her period and "cooties."

    She was much happier as a child when she got to go to the hot springs in the countryside, bathing and feeling like she was almost drowning, both literally and in a state of contentment, like she was where she belonged. Her adult self holds a lot of nostalgia for her time in the countryside, while feeling like she is romanticizing too much as an adult and not thinking about the downsides of farming, like droughts or bad seasons.

    When Adult Taeko arrives at the country town, Toshio (Dev Patel), the second cousin of her brother in-law, is there to greet her, and she barely knows him. But they connect and bond over their interests in organic farming and the countryside, and later, he talks about how the rural landscape was built by farmers as a collaboration with nature, instead of nature building itself, as outsiders would see it as, pointing out the irrigation ditches and gardens that people built. It's a wonderful way to see it as humans and nature working together to support one another, and it brings Taeko and Toshio closer together, even as she knows her time in the countryside will be brief before she returns to her city life.

    I really loved this film. It's a mix of being very sweet in parts, like with crushes and being excited as a kid to perform songs and watch children's TV shows, while also being honest about the more hurtful parts of being misunderstood as a child and being talked down to, holding onto small moments as core memories.. The film switches between the different ages of Taeko in a way to tie them together, for her to understand her past and figure out what she wants in life, and it culminates in a spectacular finale.

Thoughts on Resident Evil (2026)

    In Manhattan, I went to see Resident Evil, a 2026 horror film directed by Zach Cregger and co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, based on the Resident Evil video game franchise. The film stars Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier who is fighting infected monsters while trying to deliver a last-minute package to a hospital in Raccoon City, the fictional city where the Resident Evil stories take place. He is trying to get the package there in under an hour, but he is facing icy and snowy conditions on the road, but constantly faces obstacles with the monsters, when he just wants to get home to his girlfriend Michelle to talk about her being newly pregnant.

    The film begins with Bryan as a medical courier in a hospital delivering an organ in a cooler bag while talking on the phone to his girlfriend Michelle (voiced by Sara Paxton), who found out she's pregnant, and him being unsure on how to talk about it, saying it could be a false positive, and things like that. He delivers the organ, and a doctor immediately offers him twice the pay to go to Raccoon City to deliver another item. Despite that Bryan promised his girlfriend that he'd be home in twenty minutes, he takes the job for the extra cash, and makes his way driving through icy streets, and accidentally hits a woman on the road. He goes out to find her, and she's frozen up and bloody. He brings her into his car, and the mayhem starts from there, with her being an infected monster, killing a cop who had pulled him over and offered to escort him to the hospital, and Bryan, who has only ever shot guns in video games and not in real life, is freaked out and inept. He can't shoot well, he accidentally electrifies himself when he jumps an electric fence to escape her, and throughout the night and on his way to the hospital, he encounters many monsters, with tentacles coming out of their bodies to grab him and mutate with him.

    It's a really fun horror movie, that has an atmospheric, creepy vibe to it, with the dark snowy night, that evokes the style of the game without using any stories from it. Austin Abrams, from Cregger's previous film Weapons, as well of Euphoria fame, is a really likable, relatable lead in it. As Bryan, he is a normal person working a gig job, who messes up with his girlfriend when he is trying to be supportive but sounds indecisive (when she asks him what he thinks of the pregnancy, he goes "It's your body, your choice," thinking that's the feminist boyfriend answer she wants to hear, but it doesn't help her); finds that shooting a gun is much harder in real life, like when he can't shoot padlocks off of chains or has trouble assembling a gun (as he says to Paul Walter Hauser's scientist character, "I'm not a gun guy."); and accidentally shoots the engine of his own car when trying to defend himself from the first monster. The humor helps the film feel more engaging in a "you wouldn't be able to survive this either" kind of way, like with Bryan's constant cursing or his muttering to himself anytime he's annoyed by somebody lecturing him.

    Without getting too much into spoilers, there is a scene where Bryan is at a dire moment after surviving a lot of monster attacks, and he leaves a voicemail message for his girlfriend, not being certain if he will further survive. It’s a really good scene, and it reminded me a lot of a scene from the 1986 horror comedy Night of the Creeps, where alien slugs get into people’s brains and kill them. The main leads are two male best friends, and in the scene, one of them is listening to a message his friend left him after he got attacked, as a goodbye message and describing what the slugs feel like inside of him, and it’s a really sad and heartbreaking scene. I don’t know if Zach Cregger got any inspiration from this scene, but it came to my mind while watching Resident Evil. 

   There's an excellent elevator sequence late in the film, a sequence with Bryan screaming and running down a city street as people fall from buildings onto parked cars, and a POV shot modeled after first-person shooter games like Resident Evil, Doom, and Duke Nukem. It really does well in the survival horror structure, and makes the film more immersive to watch. I did feel that the film ended abruptly, when it felt like it could have still gone on a few minutes more, so that felt a little jarring as a viewer. But overall, it's a really good adaptation of the video game, and Cregger, an alum of the 2000s comedy sketch show The Whitest Kids You Know, has excelled in the last few years as a horror film director with this, Barbarian, and 2025's Oscar-winning Weapons. I recommend this film for fans of body horror and survival horror.

Thoughts on The Little Sister

   On Criterion, I watched The Little Sister, a 2025 French coming-of-age drama written and directed by Hasfia Herzi, adapted from Fatima Daas' autobiographical novel The Last One. The film stars Nadia Melliti in her debut screen acting role as Fatima, a 17-year old French-Algerian girl living with her family in Paris, and is the youngest of three daughters. She is athletic and plays soccer, and her sisters chastise her for not helping out more with cooking. She goes to university, and is struggling with exploring her sexuality as a lesbian, keeping it a secret from her family and meeting women at clubs and through dating apps, using fake names and backstories, like saying she has seven brothers. Her peers know she's queer, though she denies it and even joins in on the mocking of a gay student, despite him calling her out for being a lesbian afterwards.

    She has asthma, and her pulmonologist has her attend a seminar to learn how to improve her breathing, and she meets the assistant to the doctor, Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min), who is French-Korean, and is also secretly queer. She and Fatima can sense that the other is a lesbian, and they begin a romance, bonding over being the children of immigrant parents who learned French as a second language, and being queer women. Their romance comes to an abrupt end when Ji-Na reveals she struggles with severe depression, and pulls away from Fatima out of shame and guilt, leaving Fatima to feel lost and confused, and exploring more femme queer communities to understand herself better. She also has trouble reconciling her Muslim faith with her lesbian identity, and visiting an imam to ask advice about a "friend" only leaves her with feeling shamed for being homosexual.

    I really liked this movie. It's an interesting drama that focuses on a Muslim queer girl figuring out her identity, and portraying more of the LGBTQ culture of Paris, with queer dance clubs and pride marches and chants for trans rights. Melliti gives a very sensitive performance as the quiet yet headstrong Fatima, who is blunt when she needs to be while clearly apprehensive in early dates with women, and Park gives an introspective performance as Ji-Na, struggling with feeling like an outsider because of her sexuality, race, and mental health issues. There's a very personal and intimate feel to this movie which I got into, being inside of this world of French queer life. I agree with the consensus that this film is restrained yet powerful.

Thoughts on Hope

     At the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, I saw Hope, a 2026 South Korean science fiction action film written and directed by Na Hong-jin. The film centers on the citizens of a small village named Hope Harbor, which is close to the border of North Korea, or the DMZ, who are being attacked by mysterious creatures and fighting back with lots of ammunition.

    The film focuses on a few characters as they are fighting against the creatures: Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief, who is racing through the town trying to figure out what's going on; Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), one of a group of hunters who are being hunted themselves in the mountains; and Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), a rookie cop who is more capable than other cops and fires back at the creatures. As people are discovering the destruction of the town and the rotting corpses of cows, they initially think a tiger from the mountains killed the cows before finding the town's wreckage and realizing it's something much bigger, before seeing cars being thrown airborne and crushing people from a distance.

    The movie works well because it combines a lot of action and humor, and running gags like Ko Bum-seok being shocked at the heavy artillery that the elderly residents have and being like "How did you get all of this?" and they go, "That's not important right now." Or an inept younger guy is impressed at Ko Sung-ki's horseback riding skills during a chase sequence and is like, "How does he know how to ride so well?" An elderly local, Mr. Hae-sul (Im Hyun-sik) tells a story about hiding from the monsters while trying to keep from pooping in a bush and holding it in so hard ("the hardest I've ever clenched") that even Im Sung-ae laughs when she is trying to take his testimony because it's so bittersweet and funny.

    The action sequences are really fantastic, especially a couple of intense chase sequences that combine a lot of impressive stunt work with cars, horses, and people, and none that I want to spoil right now.

    The downside to the film is the CGI of the creatures, especially when there is a lot of build-up to the first one. The design looks good, but once they move more, they look more pasted into the film, and it's hard to believe them as part of the story when they aren't blended in as well. Some later CGI characters look okay, it's just a flaw of the film, as well as the last few minutes, that adds in some lore about the creatures that feels way too late to add at the end of a two hour and forty minute movie.

    I enjoyed this film as a funny monster movie with a variety of likable characters to root for, and felt it stood out well for its stunt work and character development.