Thoughts on All of Us Strangers

 

    On Hulu, I watched the 2023 British film All of Us Strangers, written and directed by Andrew Haigh, based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada. It starred Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy. It's described as a romantic fantasy film, which makes sense, but it has a lot to do with grief and loneliness and isolated feelings from being gay and not feeling one's family's acceptance. I really loved this film and felt very emotionally affected by it.

 

  Adam (Scott) lives in a high-rise tower building in London, in a large apartment where he feels isolated and lonely. A gay man, he's largely led a solitary life, afraid of letting people in emotionally, and affected deeply by the deaths of his parents in a car accident when he was twelve years old in the 1980s. His friends have gotten married, had kids, and moved out to the suburbs, and his large windows overlook London, but he feels further from it. By chance, he meets his neighbor Harry (Mescal), who is also a gay man living alone, and over time, they tentatively begin a relationship, though Adam keeps emotionally holding back, while Harry, feeling shut out and ignored by his family because he's not in a heteronormative lifestyle, wants closeness. It's a very touching relationship portrayed with actors with a lot of tenderness and sensitivity, and I really thought Scott and Mescal had great chemistry together, I could really feel the burgeoning love story between them.

    Adam, missing his childhood, takes a trip back to his hometown, and goes to the now-empty home where he grew up. Only now, he meets his parents, who are either ghosts or in his imagination, still their young selves in 1980s fashions, immortalized as they were the day they died over 30 years earlier. Portrayed by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, both deliver fantastic performances of a small-town British couple who are nice and well-meaning, but, when Adam comes out to them, they are polite but have ingrained homophobia, as a product of their time and limited experiences with queer people. His mother is shocked that gay people can get married and no longer have to live in fear of the AIDS virus, and his father admits that he had harbored some toxic masculinity towards queerness. But while they initially show some dated reactions, they do become accepting of Adam, just wanting him to be happy, and pushing him to develop a relationship with Harry, to not let himself be isolated anymore.

    Adam describes his feelings like a knot tightening in his chest, and it's an apt feeling of feeling anxiety and being hard on oneself, holding onto his grief, and not wanting to let others in or be emotionally intimate with others, but it only hurts oneself in the end, not letting himself move on from his trauma and allowing himself to be happy in his life. He is affected also by having grown up during the AIDS crisis while Harry is a lot younger, without the same sexual fear.

    Music of the 1980s plays a major role in this film, with a lot of queer pop acts like The Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood as recurring motifs, and Jennifer Rush's "The Power of Love." Music is nostalgic, bringing Adam back to his childhood with his parents, with the Pet Shop Boys' "You Were Always on My Mind" playing in a poignant scene with his mother while decorating the Christmas tree, a deeply emotional moment perfectly played by Foy. And Frankie Goes to Hollywood's different song also titled "The Power of Love" has lyrics that are repeated throughout the film, spoken by Adam and Harry, like "I'll protect you from the hooded claw, keep the vampires at your door," an all-consuming, powerful love that Adam wants but is afraid to accept.

    It's an incredible film, and I was very touched by it, drawn into this very intimate world with only four principal characters, and though I've already made my "Best of 2023" list, I would include this as one of the best films of last year.

Thoughts on the 2023 Oscar-Nominated Short Films

I watched several of the Oscar nominated shorts, the ones I could find for free or on streaming sites I’m already on.

* I’m taking a break from Netflix, so I didn’t see the short film starring David Oyelowo called The After, that got nominated as well.

1. Nai Nai and Wai Po - documentary directed by Sean Wang (on Hulu): a sweet documentary about his Taiwanese grandmas who live together like sisters, are in their 80s and 90s, and are cute and funny, keeping active to stave off any injuries if they fall, and know the end of their lives is near and being mentally prepared for it. This was produced by Disney, and nice to watch.

2. The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar - live action directed by Wes Anderson (on Netflix): Wes Anderson made about four-five short film adaptations of Roald Dahl stories, and this one, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Ben Kingsley, was really good to watch, where the characters narrated the story, including the actions, and turn to talk to the audience a lot, like they’re in a play. Dev Patel was really good as well.

3. Ninety-Five Senses - animated directed by Jerusha and Jared Hess (on Documentary Plus for free): Narrated by Tim Blake Nelson, it’s the story of an old man meditating on his five senses as his life is coming to an end, to be executed for murder. I liked Nelson’s narration, and the animation was nice, but I wasn’t too interested in the character or his story. His murder story was him trying to get petty revenge and accidentally killing people, and I couldn’t feel sorry for him.

4. The Barber of Little Rock - documentary directed by John Hoffman and Christine Turner (on the New Yorker website): a really good documentary on economic inequality with poor Black citizens in Little Rock, Arkansas, and a Black-owned loan program that gives emergency loan grants to people and helps them start their businesses, pay their rent while they find a new place to live, and find jobs and get coverage for their medical expenses. The film follows Arlo Washington, a young man who started the loan program and a barbershop school to train people and provide job opportunities. It talks about Black people wanting to build wealth and own houses and have a stake that is theirs, and to close the racial wealth gap.

5. The Last Repair Shop - documentary directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Powers (on Hulu): a really good documentary on an L.A. warehouse where craftspeople and technicians work on repairing musical instruments that children use in school, and the movie features interesting backstories of the technicians, like immigrants escaping war and hardship to find a place in the U.S., finding job opportunities with the instruments and skills in repairing them, and clips of the kids talking about what the music means to them. It was interesting and really nice to watch.

6. Island in Between - documentary directed by S. Leo Chiang (on the New York Times website): This was about Chiang’s experiences growing up on the Taiwanese islands of Kimmen, just a few miles from mainland China, and reflecting on his relationships with Taiwan, China, and the United States, comparing it to a three-way parental relationship. I thought it was okay, and interesting to learn more about Taiwanese people talking about Chinese colonialism and seeing their planes fly over them, and the ferry to China being closed, and other issues. I wasn’t as into it as some of the other films, but it was decent.

Thoughts on Drugstore Cowboy

    I rewatched Drugstore Cowboy on Criterion, Gus Van Sant’s 1989 indie breakthrough about a group of addicts robbing pharmacies in 1971 Portland, Oregon, just scraping by on drug deals and highs. Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James LeGros, and Heather Graham play the crew, and this movie definitely feels like a precursor to the 1990s indie movie boom, it feels more like a 90s movie than an 80s movie. It’s a weirdly comfortable movie to watch despite the story of desperate addicts, likely because they feel more like scrappy losers in a darkly comic story.

    Matt Dillon is really good at playing losers and dumb guys, like guys who peaked in high school as handsome popular guys, then didn’t have the brains to go further in life beyond getting external validation from popularity. He transcended well from being a Brat Pack-era teen idol to a talented actor not afraid to poke fun at himself.

    I like how others react to the group, like Dillon’s mom hiding their valuables when they come over, or this scene, where Dillon is in rehab and has pretty much nothing to his name, no identity or job history, essentially being a vagrant with his only paper trail being his priors.

Thoughts on We Own the Night

    Last night I watched James Gray’s 2007 crime film We Own the Night, where in 1988 Brooklyn, Joaquin Phoenix plays a club owner named Bobby who turns a blind eye to drug dealing going on in his club, getting wrapped up in casual drug use, until his cop family (Robert DuVall and Mark Wahlberg) are working vice and street crimes and targeting the drug crime ring operating at the club. Then Bobby is torn between his fractured relationships with his cop father and brother, and being complicit with cocaine trafficking coming into his club and inviting more violence in.

    It’s a pretty good movie, engaging to watch, and while Mark Wahlberg feels like he can play a cop in his sleep, Joaquin Phoenix is good in this as a guy wanting to live the party life with no consequences, and ends up feeling sick and awful when his complacency does come back to bite him.

    I forgot how famous Eva Mendes was in the 2000s, since she’s long retired from acting (save for a 2021 voice cameo on Bluey), and she really had this 1960s glamour look that worked so well for her. She plays Amara, the partying girlfriend of Bobby, but this scene shows her dealing with violence hitting too close to home, getting too real for her, and trying to convince her boyfriend not to take more risks. It’s a really good scene between her and Phoenix.

Thoughts on Gothic

    On Criterion yesterday I watched Gothic, a 1986 film directed by Ken Russell, a fictionalized take on a stormy night in the 1810s where literary friends Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson), and John William Polidori (Timothy Spall) entertained each other by telling horror stories, from which came Shelley’s Frankenstein novel and Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre.” Because this is directed by Ken Russell, the movie is full of erotica and horror and weird visuals, and is a good mix of over the top Gothic horror with real-life literary figures.

    It’s a little bittersweet watching Natasha Richardson and Julian Sands together, as both died in tragic ways, Sands only this past year. Sands was good at both playing villains (in Warlock), and playing Percy Shelley and going mad in this horror house that has a dungeon with rats in it. And Natasha Richardson had a romantic beauty to her that feels very Shakespearean, and had a commanding queenly feel to her presence. The movie includes graphic images of her having visions of her miscarriage, so a content warning there.

    One of my favorite effects in this is NSFW, but it’s when Percy hallucinates seeing eyes in breasts, so when he sees the bare breasts of his sister in-law, the effects place eyes where her areolas are, and it’s a creepy but good effect.

    I liked how over the top this was, and how it made me think of the 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where Kenneth Branagh’s Victor Frankenstein has a similar frantic, mad vibe that Julian Sands as Percy Shelley did, and this film makes clear allusions to the creation of Frankenstein, with Mary wanting to resurrect her dead baby, and Shelley saying “It’s alive” in one scene.

    So this was interesting to watch as a British horror film that could go more crazier than the Hammer horror films due to more lax standards on erotica in film, so Ken Russell could go nuts with it.

Thoughts on Love is Strange

    On Hulu I watched the 2014 film Love is Strange, directed by Ira Sachs, co-written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, and starring John Lithgow, Alfred Molina, and Marisa Tomei. I loved this movie, it just felt funny and realistic and lived-in. Lithgow and Molina play a couple, Ben and George, who have been together for almost 40 years, and finally are able to get married. Then George (Molina) gets fired from his music teacher job at a Catholic school for discriminatory reasons (they “tolerated” him being gay with a partner, but objected at him marrying and posting honeymoon pictures online, wanting him to stay quiet about being gay), and without income and Ben’s job as an artist, they have to sell their apartment, and are unprepared for the then-current high costs of NYC real estate and rent, being priced out of a city they love. They’re able to stay with family and friends, but due to limited space, they must live apart after they just got married. Ben goes to stay with his nephew and his family, sleeping on the bottom bunk in a teen boy’s room, while George sleeps on the couch at a younger couple’s place, where they frequently have late night parties and he feels too old for it.

    It’s a movie about a couple just trying to deal with financial challenges while living apart, feeling out of place in the homes they’re in, facing struggles with NYC housing, including Ben being in his 70s with heart issues, and trying to work something out while still being a deeply loving couple.

    Lithgow and Molina are great in this film, and have wonderful chemistry together, where I can believe the history between them. Molina is especially good in this, and it’s nice hearing his natural English accent. And I liked how Marisa Tomei, as Ben’s nephew’s wife, is trying to keep it together to work on writing her novel while Ben is an unintentional distraction, babbling a lot, and looking like she’s going to crack.

    I’m glad I watched this, it’s a lovely little gem of a film.

Thoughts on Defending Your Life

    On Criterion, I watched Albert Brooks’ 1991 fantasy romantic comedy Defending Your Life, that he wrote, directed, and starred in, and adored it. I had seen some of it many years ago, just stumbling upon it and liking it as an unusual movie.

    Albert Brooks plays Daniel, an auto exec who dies in a car accident and ends up in an “in between” place, a paradise called Judgement City, where for five days, his life will be reviewed in a hearing with lawyers and judges, determining whether if he lived his life to the fullest, without fear holding him back, and whether he goes on to the next spiritual realm, or is reincarnated into another life on Earth to do it again to get it right. So with Rip Torn as his lawyer, and Lee Grant as the prosecutor, Daniel has to look back on scenes in his life where he let fear hold him back, like refusing to fight back with a bully in childhood, to accepting a lowball salary in his adulthood.

    Albert Brooks is really great at playing anxious characters that have more layers and depth than just being neurotic worriers. He confronts the lawyers on their black and white views of the world, not having lived in his world where there is more gray area or risk with confronting fears.

    He meets Julia, played by Meryl Streep, who had been a loving wife and mother, and led a generally good life, and has more smooth sailings with her hearing than Daniel does. She has this lovely glow, where she already looks like she would ascend to becoming an angel, and her charm wins Daniel over, and they have this sweet romance amid eating delicious feasts in their brief stays, and Daniel has to confront his fears of expressing his love for Julia, knowing how fleeting this all is, and worrying about hurting her or spoiling things.

    I found this movie to be really romantic and funny and unique, and enjoyed watching a romantic comedy starring middle-aged people who actually look middle-aged, looking like regular people. This was just really touching to watch.

Thoughts on Be Kind Rewind's video on Sofia Coppola and The Godfather III

    I really liked this Be Kind Rewind video on the controversy with Sofia Coppola's casting in The Godfather III, and while I agree that she wasn't good in it, the criticism seemed way over the top, and just ripping apart a then-19-year old woman because she was the director's daughter, a very last-minute replacement, and was insecure acting against veteran heavyweights when she had only had bit parts in movies as a kid.

I liked how Izzy of Be Kind Rewind went over nearly every movie that Sofia Coppola was in as a kid, mainly bit parts or kid sister parts in movies Francis Ford Coppola directed, from appearing as a baby in The Godfather, a kid in the background as Vito sails to America in Godfather II, as a buck-toothed kid sister in Rumble Fish and Peggy Sue Got Married, and, in one of her non-Coppola movies, Tim Burton's initial directorial debut with the original short of Frankenweenie. I've seen these movies, and thought she looked like an awkward and weird-looking kid, but she grew up to have a more unusual beauty and unique quirk to her looks.

A lot of the review talks about how she was unprepared to take this principal role, was insecure on set, knew she would get called out for nepotism, felt awkward at having to do kissing scenes with a much-older Andy Garcia in front of her father and crew members she knew since her childhood, and that she could feel the contempt from other actors who didn't want her there. And I do think she is awkward and wooden, and her monotone Californian accent doesn't fit in with the rest of the family. The other choices after Winona Ryder dropped out due to illness included Annabella Sciorra and Laura San Giacomo, and while I don't think they could portray naivete, I do think they would have been better casting to both play a mature young woman and a daddy's girl type kept out of the mob business.

And the critics picked apart her appearance in a really nasty, cutting way, trying to call her ugly, and I think she is fucking gorgeous. It reeked of when Chelsea Clinton, a nerdy-looking 12-year old child in 1992, got ripped apart by adults in the press for her appearance, and Saturday Night Live included a dig at her appearance in a Wayne's World sketch, which later got edited out in an obvious jump cut.

And I don't think she's the problem with the movie. I thought it was boring and dull, and lacked the more classic epic feeling of the first two movies, it just felt weak by comparison. Francis Ford Coppola made it because he was in serious debt and figured making another Godfather movie would be an easy success and get him out of the hole and avoid bankruptcy for a third time. So, I agree with Izzy that, like how Mary gets the bullet intended for Michael, Sofia took the majority of the blame and criticism for the weaknesses of the movie that FFC made.

I do generally like Sofia Coppola's movies, even if I wasn't interested in seeing Priscilla last year because I don't have any interest in Elvis or Priscilla Presley. I liked her as a Gen-X stylish It girl in the 90s, I adored The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, and I liked Somewhere a lot. I couldn't ever get into Lost in Translation, I didn't like The Beguiled remake or The Bling Ring, and I didn't see On the Rocks because I don't have Apple TV and it came out during the pandemic when it wasn't showing in theaters, though my parents rented it on DVD and liked it a lot. And I liked the mention of her and Zoe Cassavetes' short-lived show Hi-Octane, which combined MTV-style 90s graphics with guest appearances from their cool celebrity friends like Thurston Moore, the Beastie Boys, and interviews with Martin Scorsese and Naomi Campbell, while having a very Gen-Z indie cool girl vibe to it.

It's an hour long video, so it's long, but it's worth watching if you're a fan of Sofia Coppola or feel like she got unfair criticism for her middling performance in The Godfather III.