Thoughts on No Other Choice

     On Hulu, I watched No Other Choice, a 2025 South Korean black comedy thriller directed by Park Chan-wook, co-written by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye, based on the 1997 novel The Ax by Donald Westlake. The film centers on Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a veteran employee of 25 years at a papermaking company, who lives a happy life in his childhood home that he bought, living in bliss with his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) and his children Si-one (Woo Seung Kim) and Ri-one (Choi So Yul). When his company is bought out and he refuses to fire his fellow employees, he is laid off, and promises his family that he will find another job in the paper industry within three months.

    Thirteen months later, he hasn't found a new job, and his family is in dire financial straits. His house will be foreclosed in three months; Mi-ri has taken a part-time job as a dental assistant, and Ri-one, who is an autistic cello prodigy, is recommended by her instructor for advanced lessons that the family cannot afford. Man-su has been trying to get a job as a manager with another papermaking company, Moon Paper, a Japanese-owned company expanding in South Korea, and is jealous of his competition, and is driven to stalk and murder them in order to win the job.

    His competition are all ordinary middle-management types who aren't better off than he is. Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) is an unemployed alcoholic with an actress wife A-ra (Yeom Hye-ran, in one of the film's standout performances outside of Lee Byung-hun) who resents his sloth attitude; Si-jo (Cha Seung-won) works at a shoe store and isn't happy, but is fine to have a job and get by; and Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), who works at Moon Paper and may get promoted. The scenarios are over-the-top and ridiculous, and the movie, at nearly two and a half hours long, does extend past a point where it feels like three victims is one too many, where Man-su desperately wants a job to be a cog in the capitalist corporate machine, romanticizing how important paper is to create cigarette filters and books and other items, where he feels he doesn't have any other purpose in his life outside of his job and his family, and his obsession reveals more that he's just a horrible and demented person.

    I really liked the dark comedy, and how the film keeps repeating the line "no other choice," taking on different meanings for it. The cinematography by Kim Woo-hyung was fantastic, like the zoom-out tracking shots that looked unique and impressive, layering characters in superimposed images, or other playful ways of filmmaking that I enjoyed.

    I was disappointed that this film didn't get an Oscar nomination, though there were a lot of great international films that got nominated or short-listed. I'm glad I watched this and checked it out.

Thoughts on Portrait of Jason

     On Criterion, I watched Portrait of Jason, a 1967 documentary directed by Shirley Clarke, where she and her then-partner, actor Carl Lee, interview Jason Holliday, a gay Black hustler and aspiring cabaret performer, who tells stories about his life and his friends in a very charming, bon vivant kind of way, getting drunker throughout the 12-hour shooting of the interview in December 1966 at Clarke's Chelsea Hotel penthouse apartment in New York City. 

    His personality is loud, and as a gay Black man living in the 1960s, it's important that his personality takes up space, because he has had to live with racism and homophobia, and his attitude is a performance to protect his more vulnerable self. He tells stories of sex work and musician friends and his abusive parents, and he easily slips into impressions of Katharine Hepburn and other stars, putting on a show for Clarke and Lee.

    Throughout the film, the production keeps being interrupted, with off-screen talk from Clarke and Lee, the screen going to black with the audio heard, fading in and out of focus, re-starting shots, etc. It is interesting to watch a documentary from the 1960s that leaves all the messy bits in, as well as in the last third of the film, where Lee keeps antagonizing Holliday and telling him he's full of shit and cursing at him, trying to get him to open up about painful parts of his life, even as Holliday is very drunk and crying and being broken down emotionally. It's rough, as that part of the film becomes more raw and vulnerable to watch. It feels more exploitative, and yet Clarke left it in anyway, as if to feel more "real."

    I've read other reviews that explore this film in a much more insightful way than I can, bringing up themes of classism (Clarke came from a wealthy family and made this film where she enabled an addict hustler for a film to show white "intellectual" audiences); racism (Holliday came up in the Jim Crow-era South), homophobia, and blurring the lines between performance and reality.

    I really liked this film and found it fascinating, to watch for two hours, with an interview with a man who was interesting, and luckily lived a long life (he died in 1998 at age 74). The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2015 by the Library of Congress for its historical and cultural importance.

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.