My Favorite Movies of 2023

     Often, I haven't always seen a lot of new movies, usually watching older movies on streaming, but this year had a lot of good stuff come out. I missed other films, but will likely catch them on streaming next year. So these my favorites:

Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)

I saw this while on vacation in Amsterdam, and while I had Dutch subtitles during the Korean language parts, which was challenging for me having only learned Dutch for a few months, I still really loved how this film was quiet and thoughtful, about childhood friends growing up in different countries (him in South Korea, her in Canada), and having had a puppy love phase as kids, and growing more connected through Skype chatting, and Greta Lee as Nora having conflicted feelings over growing apart from Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) while seeing him as her connection to her childhood in South Korea. And when he comes for a visit in New York and she is long married, more confused feelings between them come up, wondering about fate and destiny and what could have been. Lee is is stunning and wonderful in this film, and a more starring role as years in supporting roles in comedies like High Maintenance and Russian Doll. This film felt like a mix of Love & Basketball and the Before series by Richard Linklater, but had this poignant quietness that I really resonated with.

May December (dir. Todd Haynes)

I have seen this twice, and I really liked it a lot both as a comedy making fun of the fragility of white women being manipulative to get their way, as one (Julianne Moore) is a sexual predator who abused a young boy but presents it as a "great love story" to avoid guilt, the other (Natalie Portman) a duplicitous actress studying her and her family to play her in a film to get critical acclaim for herself, and a drama about a young man (Charles Melton0 who was sexually abused as a child and groomed to marry his abuser and have kids with her, and who is coming to terms with his abuse in his 30s as his kids are all young adults and leaving the nest. I've always liked Todd Haynes' films, and like his creative collaboration with Moore and Portman, and seeing a standout performance by Melton, coming fresh off of Riverdale.

No One Will Save You (dir. Brian Duffield)

Kaitlyn Dever was incredible in a dialogue-free tense thriller, playing the town pariah living alone in her childhood home, mourning the losses of her mother and best friend, and being terrified by a home invasion of extraterrestrial aliens, and forcing her to confront her past and what made her a pariah in the first place. Dever was excellent in her physical performance and subtle facial expressions that tell so much of the story, she has this raw scrappiness contrasted with a sweet girlish face that works really well in this role. This film also reminded me a lot of a classic Twilight Zone episode called "The Invaders," and would be a great companion piece to this film.

Rye Lane (dir. Raine Allen Miller)

I really enjoyed this British romantic comedy set in South London among Caribbean communities. A dorky, timid guy named Dom (David Jonsson) is grieving a breakup that happened three months past, and meets a charismatic woman named Yas (Vivian Oparah) by chance, and they spend the day hashing over their exes and goofing around the neighborhood and learning how to move on from their exes and have fun seeing each other. It was witty and breezy, and it had a sequence centered around A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory album, and a karaoke scene with them rapping Salt n' Pepa's "Shoop."

Broker (dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu)

From Kore-eda Hirokazu, the director of Nobody Knows and Shoplifters, is a Korean film helmed by a Japanese director, with similar themes to Shoplifters of a makeshift family of underground criminals and misfits. It features a cast of major film stars, like Song Kang-ho (The Host, Parasite, Snowpiercer), Bae Doona (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Air Doll, Cloud Atlas), and Lee Ji-eun, aka IU (famed South Korean pop star and actress). It's a really interesting film about mothers, adoption, and feeling rejected by society and being outcasts. It centers on two men who run a black market business stealing babies who are placed for adoption in an anonymous baby box, turning them over for a broker price to sell to couples. A baby's mother, a sex worker in a rough situation, wants her baby back, then agrees to be a part of the process selling her baby, as long as she approves of the couple. Plus two detectives are trailing them and setting up a sting operation to bust them. It's an excellent and compelling film to watch.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (dir. by Joaquim dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson)

The film was fantastic, and so intense to watch with all the different animation styles and comic panels. It's longer than the first, so there's much more going on, especially more with Gwen (big highlight to Hailee Steinfeld in this role). I appreciated that Miles' mom, Rio Morales, got more screentime in this film, it was great to hear Luna Lauren Velez shine in this role. And Daniel Kaluuya as Spider-Punk looked like a punk 'zine cutout come to life, and I loved how Miles kept feeling so envious of his ease with coolness and street London accent. The film gets more complex with the multiverses and Miles growing up more and finding more shades of gray with being Spider-Man, including trying to change the future so that tragedies are not inevitable to a superhero's origin story.

Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lathimos)

I really liked how this movie starts off with a bonkers premise (a pregnant woman dies by suicide, and a mad doctor transfers her still-living baby's brain to her head so she is resurrected with an infant's brain), and she grows and matures throughout the film, gets into sexual pleasure and hedonism and immaturity, before coming into her own as a philosophical, intelligent young woman who discovers herself, and realizes that all the men around her want to control her, either as a daughter or a wife or a sex plaything. Emma Stone was fantastic in this film, and her evolution of her character of Bella feels natural throughout the film, which is a testament to her talent as an actor.

Bottoms (dir. Emma Seligman)

A really fun queer teen sex comedy starring co-writer Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri as teen girls in this weird, heightened reality of high school where high school football stars are worshipped to a ridiculous degree, always wearing their uniforms, and students run the pep rallies with seemingly no intervention from adult school officials. The girls, PJ and Josie, want to have sex with cheerleaders, so they decide to start a school fight club, lying about having been in juvie fights, with the pretense of teaching self-defense to girls, but really wanting to get close to the girls they want to have sex with, feeling like fighting will raise endorphins and make them horny. It's a goofy premise that ends up leading to girls feeling more self-confidence, becoming friends with each other across clique lines, and the main girls feel moral conflicts about lying while getting close to the girls they like. It's a really fun movie to watch, and I'm looking forward to anything else Seligman has next.

Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismaki)

A deadpan Finnish romantic comedy about two working-class stiffs who are struggling to get by, and trying to build a romance with each other, while dealing with conflicts like alcoholism, missed connections, and bouncing around jobs. Both the characters (Alma Poysti, Jussi Vatanen) have this quiet charm about them, as well as a no-bullshit, sarcastic way of delivering lines and being blunt without being hurtful. The film has this feeling of being old-fashioned with her vintage radio and the tube trains, but being current with the news on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, smartphones, and the pair going to see Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die. There are recurring scenes in a karaoke bar where characters sing old mid-20th century pop crooner songs, and largely seem outside of the main metropolis of Helsinki, living more in the working-class outskirts among dive bars, construction sites, and quiet apartment houses. I just liked how this film felt more quiet and funny and lowkey, and really enjoyed it.

Honorable Mentions: (I liked all these movies, but didn't have strong enough opinions to put them on the Favorite Movies list)

Joyride, Godzilla Minus One, They Cloned Tyrone, Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Shorts, Barbie

Thoughts on Godzilla Minus One

 

I went to see Godzilla Minus One today, and liked it a lot. I wasn’t interested initially, because I’ve never been into Godzilla movies, but this one got great reviews, so I checked it out. The film was written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. I liked that most of it is a character story about a Japanese kamikaze pilot named Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) in the last days of WWII who backed out of completing his suicide mission, then felt like a coward for not saving others, and struggled with survivor’s guilt, coming home to a bombed Tokyo, and falling into a makeshift family with a young woman named Noriko (Minami Harabe) and an orphan baby she found, and keeping himself emotionally distant because he doesn’t want to get too close.

    All the while, Godzilla is attacking, and growing more powerful with nuclear energy, and looking like a rough barnacled monster of the sea. And the government doesn’t want to tell civilians about Godzilla to avoid panic, so they won’t even tell them if Godzilla is headed their way.

    It’s an interesting movie about the emotional conflicts of being told to die for your country and die with honor, then feeling like a failure for not doing that, or not even being in a war, then questioning the government for not supporting civilians and withholding information for “their own good,” even if their lives are destroyed by a giant monster stomping on them and breathing fire on them.

    And the parts in the storyline about shaming someone for being a coward in war reminded me of the Tales from the Crypt episode “Yellow,” which takes place during WWI and is a father-son story of a general and his son (played by Kirk Douglas and his son Eric Douglas), where his son was raised in a military family and given a higher rank, though he is opposed to war and is a pacifist, and his cowardly actions cost others their lives, and he is court martialed and shamed for not sacrificing for his country. It had a lot of similar themes that I found in this movie relating to patriotism and war.

    I found this really interesting, and liked the shifts between the human stories and the Godzilla scenes. The only other Godzilla movie I’ve seen is the 2014 Gareth Edwards one, titled Godzilla, and aside from a good final battle, I thought most of the movie was dull with boring characters, so this one, all in Japanese with English subtitles, was a great deal better. And it kept playing the Godzilla theme, which I keep associating with a hip-hop song that sampled it, Pharoahe Monch’s “Simon Says.” So overall, it's a really good movie, and a much more interesting monster movie than I had expected.

Thoughts on 8 Seconds

   On Tubi I watched 8 Seconds, the 1994 movie starring Luke Perry as the bullrider Lane Frost, who was a rodeo champion in the 80s and died at age 25 when a bull gored him in the ribs in 1989. I thought the movie was OK, remembering it as a flop when it came out, and it was Luke Perry's attempt to be a movie star in a big biopic, crossing over from being a teen TV idol in Beverly Hills: 90210, and I'm sure the title made it easy for critics to make jokes, like saying it lasted 8 seconds in theaters or whatever. After that, Luke Perry mostly had an average career, though by the time he died of a stroke at age 52 in 2019, he had more success on Riverdale as Archie's dad, and I still felt bad for him anyway for dying of a stroke in early middle age. His son Jack Perry is a major wrestler with AEW, wrestling under the name Jungle Boy.

    The movie was fine, I liked Stephen Baldwin's performance more as his fellow bullrider friend Tuff Hedeman, and I had to put on captions to understand characters speaking in Oklahoma accents, as stuff would just fly past me. Cynthia Geary was OK as Lane's wife Kellie, a barrel runner (a horseback rider who races around barrels in rodeos), and I don't know if any of the marital drama in the movie depicted was true or not, or the running theme of Lane trying to please his taciturn dad (James Rebhorn) and never hearing "I love you." I didn't really care, I just watched it as something light, but never felt invested in the sports drama because I don't like bullriding, think it's a dumb sport, and couldn't feel any emotion for Lane winning or losing.

    Renee Zellweger had an early bit role as a groupie who goes after Lane while he's on the road, and I had known she was in the movie, but thought she would be the female lead. I was wrong, and honestly, given how far her career has gone, she could have been more fit as the spunky, funny wife who can still deliver tearful emotional scenes. Geary was OK, but not memorable at all, and even when the movie is having her question herself on putting her dreams aside to support Lane, it didn't feel like she was genuinely torn, more like "other characters tell her how to feel and then she parrots what they say." So I also didn't really care, and think in retrospect that Zellweger would have been way better as the lead than as just some random floozy.

    I know I'm being mean, but I did laugh at how quickly the movie glosses over his death. He gets gored by a bull, his friends rush out to save him, then it jump-cuts to his coffin being carried out of the church, and it was a ridiculous edit, like if people came in not knowing he had died in real life and the movie is like "He died, next scene." And most of the credits are a PowerPoint slideshow presentation of Lane Frost's life, with sappy country ballads playing over it to try to wring out emotion, and I didn't feel anything, not liking the forced manipulation for sadness. Though I did like how his wife in real life had 80s permed hair while the movie wife had straight hair.

    So mostly I thought the movie was just OK, and Perry himself was fine, looking more like the Hollywood version of Frost. The movie isn't very memorable, just middling, but was fine to watch.

Thoughts on Fallen Leaves

     At the Quad Cinema in New York City, I saw Fallen Leaves, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, and starring Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen. It's a deadpan romantic comedy about two single people in Helsinki with quiet, solitary lives who try to build a romance, but keep dealing with obstacles like job loss, missed connections, and alcoholism. At just 90 minutes, it's a quiet tragicomedy about two people who would seem like lonely losers, at the bottom of the labor chain, but who want to build a connection to feel less alone. This film is part of Kaurismäki's Proletariat series, which includes Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and the Match Factory Girl (1990).

Ansa (Pöysti) lives in a tiny apartment she inherited from her godmother, and works at a supermarket, pricing and stocking items. She gets fired for taking expired food home that she was told to throw out, and bounces around odd jobs, like a dishwasher in a bar and a factory worker sorting recyclable plastic. She listens to news updates on her vintage radio about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and meets Holappa (Vatanen) by chance, a construction worker who is a habitual alcoholic, and who keeps sneaking drinks from his flasks on the job, which continually gets him fired. They initially encounter each other at a karaoke bar, but don't really meet each other until later. They're trying to make their budding relationship work, but his drinking gets in the way, they both switch around to different jobs, and the relationship seems dead before it can even get started.

But both of them have this quiet charm about them, as well as a no-bullshit, sarcastic way of delivering lines and being blunt without being hurtful. The film has this feeling of being old-fashioned with the radio and tube trains, but being current with the news, smartphones, and the pair going to see Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die. There are recurring scenes in a karaoke bar, where patrons sing old mid-20th century pop crooner songs, and largely seem outside of the main metropolis of Helsinki, living more in the working-class outskirts among dive bars, construction sites, and quiet apartment houses.

    This film is shortlisted by the Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film, and won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, so it has been highly acclaimed. I feel like at the Oscars, the more likely winners for International Films would be either Anatomy of a Fall or The Zone of Interest, both much heavier films, but I liked this film as a quiet romantic comedy about two ordinary people dealing with job insecurity and trying to make a romance work against the odds.

Thoughts on Poor Things

     Yesterday at the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan, I went to see Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos' new film. An adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the film stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, and Ramy Youssef. It's a dark comedy that is inspired by Frankenstein with a feminist enlightenment twist, and started off weird and got more deeper to watch. 

    In Victorian London, amidst a lot of steampunk imagery, Dafoe plays Dr. Godwin Baxter, a doctor with a scarred up face from his father's experiments on him as a child, who has created hybrid animals a la The Island of Dr. Moreau, like pig-hen hybrids or roosters that bark like dogs. He hires a medical student, Max McCandles (Youssef) to work with him on treating a woman with a brain injury (Stone), who is a grown woman with limited speech who acts like a baby, tossing things around and being immature. Early in the film, the woman's unusual backstory is revealed, where it turns out she was a pregnant woman who had died by suicide by falling off a bridge, only for Baxter to retrieve her body, and instead of reviving her, feeling it's not his place to bring back a suicide, decides instead to replace her brain with her living baby's brain, and resurrected her with electricity, bringing her back to life, as a woman with an infant's brain, and naming her Bella.

    Bella's brain matures more, and through masturbating, she discovers she has a high sex drive, and though she has accepted Max's hand in marriage, she desires freedom, as Baxter has kept her as a prisoner of his home, and she wants to see the world and have adventure. So on a whim, she goes off with the rakish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo) to Lisbon, Portugal, and other travels, indulging in her sexual escapades and learning more about the world. And as she learns more, and meets intellectual types on her travels, she learns not just about pleasure and hedonism, but also about sadness and despair, and becomes more aware of her own feminist and philosophical thoughts, especially as she sees her sexuality and her mind as her free will to use however she wants, and how the men in her life keep trying to imprison her or keep her in her place as a daughter, wife, or plaything.

    The film's first quarter is all in black and white, and then immediately switches to color once she has sex for the first time, as her awakening. I also just watched a video analyzing Pleasantville (1998), and the characters see swatches of color once they have more epiphanies and awakenings in their life, so there seemed to be some cinematic inspiration there, as well as, of course, from The Wizard of Oz.

    Emma Stone is a natural comedienne, and uses a lot of slapstick physical comedy initially when Bella has an infant's brain, throwing things around and breaking things, but as her character grows and evolves, she becomes a more interesting person, slowly aware of the limitations that men want to put on her, and seeing herself as a free person with agency who cannot be trapped. Even when she eventually finds work as a sex worker in a French brothel, she is not interested in just being seen as a hole for men to use, but wants to engage with them with jokes and philosophy and chat, to make the play more fun and more worthwhile for her. It's nice to see Stone back on the big screen after a break during the pandemic and having a child, and her intelligence and sense of humor brought a lot of depth and thoughtfulness to her portrayal of Bella.

    Mark Ruffalo is a lot of fun to watch in this film, playing a seductive cad who starts off a charming rogue, and over time, through frustration with Bella not having emotional ties to him and doing whatever she wants, starts breaking down and becoming more pathetic, and it's hilarious to watch. Ruffalo often gets cast as shy and bashful types, which seems close to his real-life persona, as he seems very humble about his success and career. A couple of times in films like In the Cut and Collateral, he played more macho cops, but that didn't feel as believable. Here, he plays a character more outright sexual and flirty, but the character becomes better when he starts coming apart, and Ruffalo's comedic chops come through, just being ridiculously funny to watch as he goes insane over this woman that he claims is the "the devil" because he cannot control her.

    The production design has a cool steampunk look to it, with matte paintings of Victorian London in the distance on rooftop scenes, trams on cable cars practically appearing to fly above the streets, and warm colors for the seaside scenes in Lisbon. It can look a little overly whimsical, but not in an over the top Tim Burton kind of way, and I liked the dark fantasy world of it, finding the film more interesting as it progressed, as it went from having a ludicrous premise to being more about a woman discovering her own agency and philosophical look on life, which made it much richer to watch. I recommend this film as one of the highlights of 2023's year in movies.

Thoughts on The House of Yes

   On Criterion, I watched the 1997 film The House of Yes, written and directed by Mark Waters and adapted from the play by Wendy MacLeod. I had seen the film as a teenager, but had forgotten a lot aside from Parker Posey's character being obsessed with Jackie Kennedy, dressing as her in her Halston pillbox hat and pink suit. Rewatching it, I really liked it as a dark comedy that deals with an obsession with Jackie Kennedy, mental illness, and a dysfunctional family, with Tori Spelling as the new fiancée who just walks into all this mess and is completely blindsided.  

  Set at Thanksgiving in 1983, Marty (Josh Hamilton) and his fiancée Lesly (Spelling) arrive from New York City to McLean, Virginia to visit his family: his mother (Genevieve Bujold), his brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), and his twin sister, Jackie-O (Posey), who just got released from a psychiatric hospital. Jackie-O is obsessed with Jackie Kennedy, and the film opens with a childhood home video from 1971 of a young Jackie-O (Rachael Leigh Cook) recreating Jackie Kennedy's famous TV tour of the White House, reciting her dialogue as she makes her way through their expansive home. She connects the loss of JFK with the loss of her father, and has been deeply psychologically impacted, as well as having an unhealthy relationship with her brother Marty, bonding over trauma, which Anthony tries to warn Lesly about.

    Parker Posey is fantastic in this film. She has this airiness to her voice that can capture so much with subtle humor, saying dark things with a deadpan face, and laughing to get past anything that is uncomfortable for her. She is a gem to watch, is delightfully weird, and I'm happy that Criterion is doing a retrospective of her work, many of which I have seen, from Party Girl to Clockwatchers to Broken English. I love that even when she's in more mainstream movies and TV, she still stands out as being charming and interesting, like in Blade: Trinity as a vampire or Josie & the Pussycats as an insecure record exec wanting to be seen as cool by teenagers.

    Besides Posey, the cast in this film works well as a strong ensemble. Freddie Prinze, Jr. in an early role shows a lot of heart as an awkward brother who has stood witness to his twin siblings' disturbing relationship, and is trying to woo Lesly away from his brother to spare her from learning about it. Josh Hamilton comes off as a straight-laced dork trying to appear normal and together, but gets lured back into the dysfunction by his sister. Genevieve Bujold as Mrs. Pascal is more of a conservative and wealthy mother who turns a blind eye to what is going on with her children. Rachael Leigh Cook as a young Jackie-O has brief screentime, but captures the energy and manic feelings that would further affect Jackie-O later in life. And Tori Spelling is sweet and naive as the newcomer to the family who thought that Marty was just a normal person and believed his cover stories about his scar or thinking that Jackie-O was in a regular hospital.

    It's a wonderfully weird dark comedy, and Mark Waters would go on to direct the teen classic Mean Girls, as well as many other Hollywood films. I'm happy I revisited it and got to understand it much more as an adult and pick up a lot more on the details of the family dysfunction.

Thoughts on Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

    On Criterion, I rewatched Matt Wolf's 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a film about a Philadelphia-area civil right activist and librarian named Marion Stokes, who recorded American television, like news programs, commercials, sitcoms and talk shows, twenty-four hours a day, from 1979, the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis, to her death in 2012, the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre. She was capturing the beginnings of the twenty-four hour news cycle, and capturing wars and tragedies and cultural milestones, like the aforementioned hostage crisis, the Challenger disaster, the Baby Jessica rescue, the O.J. Simpson trial, the reactions to the Rodney King beating and the race rebellion in L.A., 9/11 and how different news channels were grasping the events as it happened, and many other major American news stories.

 

   I had seen this film on PBS years ago in 2020, and really liked it a lot, liking how she was both an activist who was involved in Philadelphia civil rights organizations, appearing on local TV chat shows, and was also a librarian, a former member of the Communist Party, and a cultural historian. She had this quiet assertiveness to her that I really liked, and chronicling American television history with her more than 70,000 VHS tapes, which were donated to the Internet Archive after her death to be digitized and preserved online. Her dedication may have been obsessive, and caused rifts in her family, but her background as a librarian and an activist made her personal project extremely vital to archiving cultural history through television, and educating audiences long after her passing.  

    She had a great eye for predicting trends, and when Apple came out with the Macintosh computer, she not only bought many Macs, she also invested in Apple when it was a fledgling company, and became wealthy through her life from her smart investments in the company. 

    As a fun aside, she was also a major fan of the original Star Trek, liking how the show depicted a multi-national, multi-racial group working together to understand other cultures, and she saw the Federation as socialism, which appealed to her personal beliefs. The film ends on a lovely shot of her sitting in one of the Enterprise's chairs in a museum reconstruction of the show's set.

    The director Matt Wolf also made the documentaries Spaceship Earth (2020), about a collective who built and lived in the Biosphere II in 1991, being both seen as environmental visionaries and a possible cult, and Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), about the multi-talented cellist and composer Arthur Russell, bridging pop and classical music and creating disco records. On Criterion, I watched two of his short films: Another Hayride (2021), about the new age guru Louise Hay, who taught self-love workshops to people with AIDS during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, fostering community, love, and support even if her methods to claim to cure AIDS were questionable; and The Face of AIDS (2016), about the controversial photograph of AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed with his family, which was used as a Benetton ad to spread awareness, which led to discussions about a corporation using the AIDS epidemic for capitalistic reasons and AIDS activists being split on the decision with the photo's publicity. Wolf is an incredibly talented documentarian with a variety of subjects in his films, with a thoughtful eye and a deep research in archival material, and I look forward to seeing more of his films.

Thoughts on Mixed Nuts

    On Tubi, I watched Nora Ephron's 1994 Christmas dark comedy Mixed Nuts, a remake of the 1982 French film Le Pere Noel est un ordure (Santa Claus is a Stinker), with a major ensemble cast led by Steve Martin, and featuring Madeleine Kahn, Rita Wilson, Anthony LaPaglia, Juliette Lewis, Robert Klein, Liev Schreiber, Adam Sandler, and smaller roles by Parker Posey and Jon Stewart as Rollerbladers, Garry Shandling as a landlord, veteran voice actress Christine Cavanaugh as a cop, Haley Joel Osment as a kid in one shot, Joely Fisher as Steve Martin's ex, and Steven Wright as a suicidal caller. The film was a big flop when it came out, especially coming after Nora Ephron's romantic comedy hits with writing When Harry Met Sally and directing Sleepless in Seattle, and coming out with a dark comedy centering around a suicide hotline operating on Christmas Eve, with a screwball comedy style to offset the bleak and dark comedy. I really liked it, for the great cast lineup and its mix of accepting the bleak and depressing and accepting it as part of life with good humor.

    The film takes place over several hours on Christmas Eve, in a costal California town as Philip (Steve Martin) runs a suicide hotline business called LifeSavers, and Catherine and Mrs. Munchnik (Rita Wilson and Madeleine Kahn) are his coworkers. They run the business out of an apartment, and the landlord Stanley (Garry Shandling) is going to evict them due to unpaid back rent, giving them until Jan. 2nd to move out. Philip is trying to figure out how to get $5000 together to pay the rent, but his girlfriend dumps him, and their state funding got cut, so they hardly have any options. They answer calls from suicidal people (including a really funny and dark moment from Steven Wright), hoping to get more calls because the holiday season can make people feel more depressed and lonely, and try to prepare for the inevitable of losing their jobs. There is also a recurring fear of a local serial killer called the Seaside Strangler, which has a big payoff in the finale.

    One of the callers is from Chris (Liev Schreiber), a transwoman trying to escape her mocking family by getting LifeSavers to reveal their address so she can come see them in person. Despite that now a trans actor would be cast in the role instead of a cis male actor, Schreiber delivers a sensitive and touching performance, and the role is played straight, no mocking, and aside from a brief moment of Philip misgendering her, nobody treats her in a disrespectful way, the characters are welcoming to her and don't reference her being trans in an othering way. She dances with Philip in a fun and playful scene, and is wooed by Adam Sandler (seemingly playing one of his SNL characters instead of talking in his real voice) playing the ukulele and singing a silly love song. So I do like that for a 1994 Hollywood comedy they had a nice and kind treatment of a trans character.

    Felix (Anthony LaPaglia) and Gracie (Juliette Lewis) are a struggling couple expecting their first child, where Gracie runs a quirky little shop while Felix is an ex-con with difficulties staying straight, and they argue and get frustrated with each other, with her hitting him in the head with a fruitcake and him being concussed, having initially being brought to a veterinarian (Rob Reiner), then taking an overdose of dog tranquillizers and taken to the hospital.

    Mrs. Munchnik (Madeleine Kahn, in one of her final film roles, preceding Nixon, A Bug's Life, and Judy Berlin) is uptight and sticks to the rules, not having much sympathy for Catherine's bleeding heart attitude towards the callers, and clashes with the neighbor Mr. Lobel (Robert Klein) over his dogs. She ends up stuck in a elevator for hours, calling for help, and has a fun moment singing along with a toy karaoke machine from presents she opened up.

    A pre-fame Parker Posey and Jon Stewart pop up throughout the film as a Rollerblading couple trying to carry their Christmas tree home, only to have their tree destroyed twice by run-ins with the main characters.

    It's a screwy comedy that tackles a lot of dark humor and bleakness with a empathetic understanding, especially when people can be more depressed and have suicidal ideation around the winter holidays, as the forced happiness and family togetherness  to erase over blue feelings can make people feel even worse and more lonely. I do like that this film handles those issues with grace, contrasting a serious topic with silly screwball madcap humor, and the film has a great and talented cast to round out this story. I had heard of this film, but never knew what it was about until now, hearing it recommended on the Critically Acclaimed podcast for the episode "The Iron List #47: The Best Non-Traditional Christmas Movies Ever!", and I'm glad I checked it out, it's an interesting comedy.

Thoughts on May December

     Today at Film at Lincoln Center, I went to see May December, the new film by Todd Haynes, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, with the screenplay by Samy Burch. The film is based on the story of the late sexual offender and teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who assaulted her 13-year old male student, Vili Fualaau in the mid-1990s, became pregnant by him, and married him after she served her prison sentence. They were married from 2005-2019, well into his adulthood with multiple children, until she died in 2020 from cancer. 

    Her story was made into a 2000 TV movie starring Penelope Ann Miller, Mary Kay Letourneau: All-American Girl, and Haynes' film takes an interesting look into the story, with a fictionalized version of Letourneau as Gracie (Moore), who, decades after the tabloid story and her prison sentence, is living with her former victim/husband Joe (Charles Melton) in a Savannah, Georgia community in 2015, with a college-aged daughter and brother and sister twins who are about to graduate high school. Gracie speaks with a soft lisp, has billowy blonde hair, and mainly bakes pineapple cakes and sells for orders. Joe is 36, but comes off as if he's more like her grown son than her husband, and seems as if his life and having children just happened to him instead of him really feeling like an adult, not fully grasping that Gracie had sexually abused and manipulated him into a life he wasn't ready for, gaslighting him into thinking he was the seducer.

    Elizabeth (Portman) is a glamorous TV actress, who is starring in and producing a film about Gracie and Joe, and wants to make a story that depicts her as a more complex character beyond the initial tabloid sensation of her being a sex offender who preyed on a seventh grade boy. She comes to Savannah to meet Gracie and gather research on her motivations and story, as well as interviewing Gracie's current family and her ex-husband and older children from her first family. Gracie greets her with kindness, but often seems to stay a little emotionally remote, giving a polite surface and airy naivete that allows her to deflect any deeper questions Elizabeth may have about the psychology of her relationship with Joe.

    Elizabeth can come off as remote herself, more seeming like a beautiful star just dropping in on the normal plebeians, being admired by starstruck teens, and always thinking with one foot out the door, gathering notes on Gracie's community and practicing her mannerisms at home, like her lisp and feathery tone. She acts more like a reporter than like an actress, interviewing people and claiming to want to tell a honest story that shows Gracie as a three dimensional character, but others are wary of her intentions in capitalizing on a tabloid story from the 1990s to try to do a revisionist take that is more in Gracie's favor, despite the trauma that affected Joe, as well as realizing that Gracie is keeping her at arm's length and using her seemingly naïve persona to weaponize against others.

    The film will be on Netflix in December, so I don't want to give away too much, but I really liked how this film featured Portman and Moore as complex characters who aren't really likable or sympathetic, both come off as guarded and putting up false fronts, both can be condescending to others (Gracie in telling her daughter that she is "brave" to wear a dress that shows her bare arms, insinuating that she thinks her daughter has fat arms; Elizabeth receiving a compliment from a fan about her show by saying it "means the world to her to hear that," when she in private told Joe she hated the show), both use their own glamour and beauty as a shield against others, and neither is really honest with each other or with others, they both come off as disingenuous and phony. Yet while Elizabeth distances herself from Gracie to try to mimic her voice and facial expressions for the character, she also begins to identify more with Gracie, as feeling like a seductress and manipulator, and being attracted to Joe for his adult beauty with his childlike demeanor.

    But both Portman and Moore are fantastic in this film, and do some of their best work in recent years. Moore has had a longtime collaboration with Haynes, with Safe in 1995 and Far From Heaven in 2002. Charles Melton, best known from Riverdale, delivers a thoughtful performance where he looks like a kid in a grown-up body, seemingly confused about how he got to where he is in life, not questioning much and following Gracie's lead from when he was a child, and slowly starts questioning the abuse and manipulation that has ruled his life, and feeling lost, having more of an epiphany about the uncomfortable aspects of his "love" with Gracie for over twenty years. He also raises Monarch butterflies and is fascinated by their metamorphosis process from eggs to larvae to caterpillars to being in chrysalis to being set free as butterflies. The metaphor isn't lost, as he seems mentally stuck as being a shy adolescent boy despite being in his late thirties, and not being able to escape from his past or arrested development.

    The film has a musical score by Marcelo Zarvos, adapted from Michel Legrand's music for Joseph Losey's 1971 drama The Go-Between, which plays like a 1950s melodrama score at times, sometimes to comedic effect (haunting piano music with a zoom-up to Gracie at the fridge, then she says, "We don't have enough hot dogs.") The music is a funny contrast that adds camp to the film, as well as heavy music to quiet scenes in a melodramatic way.

    I really liked this film a lot, it felt like a mix of being funny and dramatic, about examining how tabloid scandals can still be mined decades later to capitalize on trauma and antiheros, and featuring two female leads as complicated and interesting characters to follow.

Thoughts on Three on a Match

   On Criterion, I rewatched the 1932 Pre-Code classic Three on a Match (directed by Mervyn LeRoy), one of my favorite films of the 1930s. I had seen this decades ago when my mom gave me a VHS copy of it, one that had an intro from Leonard Maltin on it, and I liked how it was a film centering on three women, splitting off into different paths after middle school, and reuniting in unexpected ways. It also both depicts a woman (Ann Dvorak) who had been valued for her popularity and beauty only to feel bored being married to a rich lawyer with a three-year old son, and a woman (Joan Blondell) who had been a delinquent now working as a showgirl with more of a wiser look on life.

    The film's prologue shows the women as adolescents in the early 1920s, then cuts ahead ten years (with a lot of newspaper headline montages about notable events like the beginning of Prohibition, women's right to vote, and the early years of the Depression), with the women in their adult lives. Mary (Blondell) is a showgirl who is past her bad girl youth, finding stability in her life. Ruth (Bette Davis) is working a regular job as a stenographer. And Vivian (Dvorak) married a prominent lawyer and has a cute little son, but feels bored and empty in her life. 

    

Vivian and Mary have a chance meeting at the beauty salon, all three women reunite for lunch, reference the title ("three on a match" is from a wartime superstition that if three soldiers each lit their cigarettes from the same match, one of them would be killed or the third one on the match would be shot), and when Vivian decides to take a trip abroad, Mary and her gangster friends join her for a party on the ship prior to departure. Vivian, having taken her son with her, falls for one of the gangsters (Lyle Talbot), and instead of going on the trip, runs off with him and her son, causing scandal as a wealthy woman running out on her husband. Mary and Ruth work to find Vivian to prevent her from further ruining her life and concerned about her son being neglected, while Vivian gets into substance abuse with her new boyfriend, who is desperately broke and owes money to other mobsters.

    The film becomes more of a gangster film in the last third (the film is just barely over an hour long), and features a young Humphrey Bogart as one of the gangsters. Even though it's a Pre-Code film, the ending feels more like the kind of Hollywood notes given to punish a "fallen woman," and it comes off as hastily written and kind of ridiculous.

    But outside of that, I do really like this film. The women have great chemistry together, Joan Blondell is cute and sassy and smart, and Ann Dvorak was a knockout in playing a character who cracked under pressure to be beautiful and perfect and got lost in a bad romance instead. It's fun seeing Bette Davis in an early role before she became a huge star with Of Human Bondage just two years later, and outside of Talbot, Bogart is the only other gangster character that gets the most screen time as a typical hood. I'm glad I saw this many years ago, before I really knew about Pre-Code Hollywood, and it was fun to revisit this weekend.

Thoughts on Brainstorm

    On Criterion, I watched the 1983 science fiction film Brainstorm, directed by the late Douglas Trumbull, and starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, and Louise Fletcher. Trumbull, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 79, was a director and visual effects supervisor, who created special effects for iconic films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, and directed Silent Running. 

  

 This film has a complicated history, as Natalie Wood died in a drowning accident in 1981 after having completed most of this film, while she was on a weekend boat trip with Christopher Walken and her then-husband Robert Wagner in North Carolina, and died under mysterious circumstances. The film was almost cancelled, but Trumbull fought for it, and it was completed two years later, with Wood's sister Lana doubling for her in some scenes. The film received good critical reviews but bombed at the box office, likely due to the notoriety of Wood's death and the suspicions of Wagner and Walken, because Wagner was accused of killing her and Walken was accused of having an affair with her. It's a tragic end for a very talented and likable actress who was making her way back into films after taking a hiatus to raise her kids, and it was different to see Wood as a middle-aged woman with curly 80's hair after having been a youth for so long in old Hollywood films from the 1940s-1960s.

    With that necessary backstory out of the way, the film is a really interesting look at a version of virtual reality, where Walken and Louise Fletcher as two scientists, Michael and Lillian, who create a brain-computer interface that records people's memories and can play it back for others who can not only see the memories, but feel the same experiences emotionally in their minds and bodies. The project brings on Michael's estranged scientist wife, Karen (Wood), and they create this project that seems incredibly groundbreaking, allowing others to go past empathy and truly feel what another is feeling with the experiences in their bodies. When the military wants to use the invention, Lillian is firmly against it, seeing the creation as hers alone (despite Michael's objections about it being a collaborative project), and not wanting the military to use it for defense or torture purposes.

    The project didn't need the military to abuse it, as members of the team end up taking advantage of it for their own selfish interests, be it a man who plays back a sex tape on a loop to stay in continual arousal until he nearly dies from sensory overload, to Michael, who records his happiest memories with Karen and plays them back for her in a best-of montage to try to win her back.

    I liked the film as a creative look at 1980s technology and mixing virtual reality with computers and emotional manipulations. In 1995, Kathyrn Bigelow's film Strange Days would also explore this, with people selling memories on disks like a street drug, and Ralph Fiennes' character replaying memories of his ex-girlfriend (Juliette Lewis) in a self-abusing cycle of loneliness and living in the past. The police would also take advantage of the device when it records an act of police violence, which also leads to a sex worker being murdered while videotaped, and the whole use of recording memories and feeding off of them in a disturbing cycle of violence.

    The film has some cool special effects, like how the memories are stretched out to be wide-screen, stretched out on either side of the screen, with a different color grading to make them look different than the present-day world. And the finale gets very trippy with images of angels and Heaven and Hell and all these colliding images that make for a stunning ending.

    I really didn't like Michael in this, as charming as Walken can be in the role. Michael's abuse of the technology to win his ex-wife back by only playing the happy moments of their relationship came off as manipulative and disingenuous to me, trying to make her forget why they divorced in the first place (a major conflict being his obsessive workaholic personality). I preferred Lillian, as an assertive woman in STEM who was defending her creation from becoming a part of the military-industrial complex, and being surrounded by men who were treating her as if she was "hysterical," to dismiss her. It was also nice to see Louise Fletcher not be typecast from her most famous role as the cold and insensitive Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and see her in a more complex role. Fletcher also passed away in 2022, at the age of 88.

    Wood was good in her final role, though it felt like she was often sidelined as the ex-wife/love interest to win back. Still, I did like her in the film, seeing her as a middle-aged woman in the 1980s after years of being a pretty young ingenue, and her death was sudden and sad, but at least her final film was a good and unique science fiction film directed by a visionary artist, and her legacy is still celebrated decades later. 

Thoughts on Trouble Every Day

     On Criterion, I watched Claire Denis' 2001 body horror film Trouble Every Day. I wasn't really sure what to expect, and I liked how it was a mix between a slow art house film and then cannibal gore, with Beatrice Dalle just devouring men alive in bloody glee.

    Vincent Gallo and Tricia Vessey star as newlyweds Shane and June in Paris on their honeymoon, being very quiet and romantic with each other on the plane. But June is unaware that Shane picked Paris not just because it's a romantic honeymoon spot, but because he is seeking a neuroscientist, Dr. Léo Sémeneau, (Alex Descas) to help him cure his bloodthirsty disease. Shane knew Leo's wife, Coré, (Dalle) and was obsessed with her. Coré is a cannibal who her husband keeps locked in their home, but she occasionally breaks out to have sex with men and murder them, eating them alive.

 

  Gallo is well-cast as looking like a strange, unwell man with a mysterious disease, and his unsettling weirdness fits for this kind of film. He mostly feels like he just floats through Paris, not really mentally connected to the environment, and barely spends any time with his new wife, often leaving her alone in the hotel, where she mostly makes pleasantries with the hotel maid, who the film follows sometimes but doesn't seem to have much going on beyond the mundanities of her job.

    Beatrice Dalle barely has any lines in this film, but has a striking screen presence with her jolie-laide off-kilter beauty and demented joy in biting a man to death as he cries in pain. Outside of her attacks, she's quiet throughout the film, either staying in bed, slowly stalking around her home, or banging against the boarded-up windows while a couple of young men outside try to get a glimpse at her.

    Alex Descas is a regular in Claire Denis films, like No Fear, No Die; 35 Shots of Rum, and Nenette et Boni. He has been in ten films by Claire Denis, two films by Jim Jarmusch, and four films by Oliver Assayas. He works well as a reliable character actor, and has a quiet dignified presence about him, portraying a doctor trying to keep his wife from hurting other people, but still burying the bodies to cover up her crimes when she does.

    I thought the film was decent, but aside from the gore scenes, a little too slow-paced for me, and I'm not a fan of Vincent Gallo, so I wasn't into his presence, despite him being a fitting cast for his role. It was mostly interesting to watch Dalle playing a bloodthirsty and strange character, who some reviewers called a vampire, because she stays in during the day and hunts at night. I can see that, with elements of vampirism, but she just seemed more like a cannibal to me. It was fine to watch as an artsy slow horror film, where a lot of the characters just felt like they were in a trance or a reverie.

Thoughts on Dust Devil

   On Criterion, I watched the 1992 supernatural horror film Dust Devil, directed by Richard Stanley (Hardware, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Color of Space), and really liked it a lot. It had a Western meets horror vibe to it, set in the small town of Bethanie, Namibia, where a mysterious shapeshifter (Robert John Burke) poses as a hitchhiker in the desert and murders his victims, believed to be known as the "Dust Devil"; a local cop, Sgt. Ben Mukurob, (Zakes Mokae) is investigating the grisly murders and consulting a witch doctor on the supernatural elements of it, and a South African woman (Chelsea Field) is escaping her abusive husband, on a journey with no real destination. 

    The three all intersect with each other, and the film had this stunning look to it with the Namibian desert and haunting dreamlike atmosphere of the horror genre, where the shapeshifter justifies his murders by claiming he finds people who want to die, as if he is performing a mercy on them. I didn't fully believe that, as his methods of murder were pretty gruesome and awful, whether murdering a woman during sex or massacring a man in a bloody manner. Burke does have a great psychotic look to his eyes, where he can just be silent with a piercing, unsettling stare that one could find chilling in real life.

   

Chelsea Field was great as Wendy, as a woman looking for an escape from her awful husband, who slaps her and accuses her of infidelity, and she takes off from South Africa to Bethanie in Namibia, just on a journey for a way out. Field is stunning, with a muscular, lean figure, and she also casts a haunting look over the desert in her long purple dress, and is both attracted to the Dust Devil and disturbed by him. 

    Zakes Mokae was excellent as the local cop Sgt. Mukurob, as a more unique character as a Namibian cop in a Western horror movie, being one of the heroes of the film, using both detective skills and supernatural knowledge to find the Dust Devil. He would also stand up to Wendy's idiot husband, who has come looking for her and stands out as a clueless white Afrikaner among Namibian men, especially in a time that was just two years away from the abolishment of apartheid. Mokae also played a cop in Body Parts, the film I previously reviewed, so it was great to see him pop up again as an interesting and underrated character actor, who passed away in 2009 from a stroke.

    I really adored this film, I loved how it felt surreal and strange and weird and beautiful, and I'm happy I got to watch it.