Thoughts on Kinds of Kindness

    At the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I saw Yorgos Lanthimos' 2024 film, Kinds of Kindness, co-written by Lathimos and Efthimis Filippou, starring an ensemble cast of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamodou Athie, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn. The film is an anthology film, in the style of absurdist black comedy, with three loosely connected stories, with the cast playing different roles in each story. An ongoing theme is of a character searching for something, to either feel a sense of belonging, being validated, or finding connection.

    In the first segment, "The Death of R.M.F.," Robert Fletcher (Plemons) works for his controlling boss Raymond (Dafoe), who controls his life in a seemingly BDSM master and servant kind of way, where Robert follows all of Raymond's orders in his personal life, including having his wife Sarah (Chau) set up for him, his house and car paid by his boss, and reporting all his daily activities, including his meals and sex with his wife, to his boss. When Raymond orders him to intentionally crash his car into another man's car to murder him, the titular R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos), Robert does it, but the other man survives. When Robert refuses to do it again, Raymond fires him, cuts off all contact with him, and takes his wife (and the present he gave them, a broken tennis racket destroyed by John McEnroe in 1984) away from him. Robert is distraught without a master to follow, repeatedly begging Raymond to serve him again. When he meets Rita (Stone) by chance, he has an opportunity to get back into Raymond's good graces again.

    This story was interesting, and unfolded well, in which Plemons as Robert comes off as desperate and pathetic when he keeps hounding Raymond, wanting to feel validated in serving him and having a rich man dictate his entire life to him, not having a sense of identity outside that role to Raymond. It started the film off strong, with the characters all speaking in this didactic way to each other, very matter of fact with very little slang or colloquiums. 

    The second story, titled "R.M.F. is Flying," features Plemons as Daniel, a police officer whose wife Liz (Stone) has just turned up after having gone missing after a work expedition trip. He is thrilled to have her back, but he noticed things about her that don't seem like the Liz he knew, and worries that she may be an imposter who just looks and sounds like his wife. He doesn't remember what his favorite song is (where he tells his best friend that it's Madonna's "Holiday," but in a jump cut in the car she played Dio's "Rainbow in the Dark"), she is more sexually forward, and has more of a craving for chocolate. Daniel is trying to convince his best friends (Athie, Qualley), who are skeptical, and he also thinks her co-worker, who survived but is dying with an infected leg, may be an imposter too.

    I liked this story, where it got more into paranoia and suspicion and speculative fiction, and it stood out in an intriguing way, especially with Stone's performance in playing it very deadpan. It was likely my favorite of the segments.

    The third and final story, titled "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich," is about two cult members, Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons), who are looking for a woman with the power of necromancy, the ability to bring the dead back to life. They serve their cult, and try with one woman (Schafer), but aren't successful, and Emily talks about how she had a dream where she was trapped in the bottom of a pool with her hair stuck in the filter, and two nearly identical synchronized swimmers came into the pool, and one rescued her and cut her hair, and Emily is convinced that the woman exists in real life, with her twin deceased. A waitress (Qualley) gives them information to find her twin, a veterinarian, who may have the gift. Emily is also secretly visiting her ex-husband and her daughter, which the cult likely has forbidden outside contact with family members.

    With the rest happens in the story, I didn't like it as much. For content warning, there is a sexual assault that happens that I felt was really unnecessary in the story, and felt awful watching it. The film will show thin young women topless, but depicts a heavyset woman in her underwear in a light that felt unflattering. For a film that wants to seem weird and offbeat, it still stuck by Hollywood standards of wanting to show thin, conventionally attractive young women nearly nude, and it did feel a little gratuitous. Nudity in movies doesn't bother me much, but in this film it just felt like putting it in just for the sake of seeing Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, and Hunter Schafer nearly naked because they are thin and beautiful.

    One of the last sequences in that story is when Emily does a happy celebratory dance, to Cobrah's "Brand New Bitch," and the backstory to that is fun: during the making of Lanthimos' Poor Things, Emma Stone was goofing around with a friend, and started dancing to the song while in costume for her character Bella Baxter, doing jerky dance moves to a club song, and it's really fun to watch the contrast of her in her fantasy period costume doing modern dance moves, so it's a cool little moment in the movie that has already gone viral online.

    I was happy to see Mamodou Athie get more attention. I've liked him since the Netflix movie Unicorn Store with Brie Larson, and the short-lived Netflix series Archive 81, and he voiced one of the lead characters in Elemental, so I'm happy to see more of him, he has this intriguing quiet calm to him that makes him compelling to watch onscreen.

    Hong Chau was Oscar-nominated for her role in The Whale, and received critical acclaim for her performances in Downsizing, Inherent Vice, the TV show Treme, and The Menu. She has this character actor, realistic persona to her acting that made her feel more like a real person outside of the lead characters, and I found her engaging to watch.

    So in all, I was mixed on the movie, liking some aspects and the dark humor, but feeling like the third story really brought the movie down, especially for a nearly three-hour movie, as the last segment felt like it ran too long. I don't like it as much as Lanthimos' previous movies, but I still think it's decent and to watch as an offbeat film with Hollywood stars in it.

Thoughts on Tuesday, Blue Collar, and An Experience to Die For

- On Thursday, I had off from work, so I went to the Angelika Film Centre to see Tuesday, a new drama directed by Daina O. Pusić and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It was decent, a drama with a magical realism feel. The story centers on the Angel of Death, or a psychopomp, in the form of a parrot who appears right when someone is about to die, and just waves its wing over their face to let them pass on peacefully. Zora (JL-D)’s 15-year old daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is dying of cancer, and is at hospice at home, and Zora is unemployed but doesn’t let Tuesday know that, and has sold everything on the second floor of their house to pay for her medical bills, with Tuesday living downstairs and using a wheelchair to get around. Zora just goes to the park and kills time and sells items to a pawn shop.

The bird shows up to Tuesday, and she knows what it is, but holds off on dying, stalling the bird with telling it a joke, listening to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” and hanging out. But when Tuesday tries to say goodbye to her mother, Zora just waves her off, not wanting to deal with the inevitable, until the bird shows up, and she does not take it well.

From then on, it becomes more of a drama with fantasy elements, and while I felt it became more of a muddled mess in the last third, I did like watching JL-D, feeling for her trying to keep it together, and the performance by Lola Petticrew, as a funny and likable kid.

- I rewatched Blue Collar on Criterion, not having seen it since I saw it at MoMA many years ago, and really liked it a lot, understanding it a lot better. It’s a 1978 film directed by Paul Schrader, and starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto as three workers at a Detroit auto plant who are clashing with their union, all having money problems, and when they pull off a heist to steal from their union, they discover more corruption, mob connections, and get in over their heads.

It’s a great movie about working class guys who get torn apart by the union and capitalism pitting them against each other, and despite that the stars all fought with each other and with Schrader behind the scenes, none of that is apparent on screen, where they all seem like great friends with a warm chemistry. Like a scene where Kotto and Keitel try to do some sort of bro-handshake, mess it up, and just laugh about it in a way that felt candid and natural.

This was one of Pryor’s best screen performances, he really brought a lot of pain and heart to a character trying to bring more equal treatment of Black workers to the union and getting patronizing treatment from the union rep, played by Lane Smith (who, thanks to Son in-Law, I can only see him as the farmer dad from that), and feeling pressured to give him to their demands to ensure financial support for his family. He’s really excellent in this film, playing a complex and flawed character, and I’m glad I checked it out again.

- On Metrograph’s streaming page for members, I watched An Experience to Die For, a 1990 South Korean film by Kim Ki-young, and the film is also known as Be A Wicked Woman and Angel, Become an Evil Woman. The director wasn’t happy with the film, and re-released it years later under a different title in 1995. It was a gender-flipped take on Strangers on a Train, where in this one, two women who are strangers to each other decide to murder each other’s husbands to pull off the “perfect murder,” to get rid of men who have been unfaithful to turn and left them stuck in unhappy marriages. Youn Yuh-jung (who won an Academy Award for her performance in Minari) played Yuh-jung, whose husband refuses to divorce her even if the love is long lost from their marriage, and has organized crime ties. The other character is a young woman whose husband blames her for not bearing his children, beats her in front of his parents and demands a divorce, then it turns out he had kids with another woman, she made him get a vasectomy afterwards, and that woman framed her in public to make her look like a pickpocket. So both Yuh-jung and the woman decide to get revenge on this murder plot.

I thought it was fine for the first half, if feeling very cheap with a bad synth score and overacting, then it became a confusing mess in the second half, and I couldn’t stay interested in the plot, just watching it through the end, feeling it got more ridiculous and a slog to get through. I assumed it would be more fun in a Park Chan-wook kind of way, but it wasn’t that stylish or interesting.

Thoughts on Perfect Days

    On Hulu, I watched Perfect Days, a 2023 film directed by Wim Wenders and co-written by Wenders and Takuma Takasaki. It won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival, Best Actor for Kōji Yakusho and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. 

    It centers on Hirayama (Yakusho), who works as a public toilet cleaner in the upscale Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan. The film has a very quiet, contemplative, peaceful pace like Jim Jarmusch's Paterson (2016), a film about a bus driver who lives the same daily routine and is content with his life. In this film, he lives in a small apartment, with a large music cassette collection of albums by American artists like The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, The Animals, and Nina Simone. The music figures into the plot, as he plays his music in his car while working, and his co-worker's love interest, Aya (Aoi Yamada), requests to listen to Patti Smith and takes in her song "Redondo Beach." 

    He makes his rounds of The Tokyo Toilet, which were established post-pandemic at 17 locations in Shibuya, with unique designs, like flipping a lock that shutters the toilet enclosure for privacy. Hirayama is a quiet man, who is reserved and doesn't speak often, but is greatly communicative with his gestures and facial expressions. He gets his coffee from a vending machine outside of his apartment building, he chooses his music cassettes for the day to listen to, and he ends his days hanging out in a local bar, observing and people-watching. His younger co-worker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), is trying to impress a potential date and keeps relying on Hirayama for help, begging as if any lost opportunity with her is the end of the world.

    Hirayama enjoys taking photographs of the sunlight through the branches at a shrine during his lunch break with an analog camera, and at night, he reads literature by William Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith, and Aya Kōda. He plays an ongoing game of tic-tac-toe with a stranger, leaving a piece of paper in one of the toilet stalls and playing the game back and forth throughout the film.

    The film gets even better once his teenage niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano) comes in unannounced, after a fight with her mother. She bonds well with her uncle, seeing beauty in the world through his eyes, and the actors have lovely chemistry together, that brings more serenity into the film, even as they both talk about having difficulty with their family history.

    The film is very minimalist, and it felt really relaxing to watch. Yakusho is excellent in this film, he has this calm, lived-in quality as Hirayama, and has this dignified, content aura to his performance. Yakusho is a well-renowned actor, best known for his roles in Shall We Dance? (1996), 13 Assassins (2010), and Cure (1997). This also may be one of my favorite films I've seen by Wim Wenders, next to 1984's Paris, Texas and 1991's Until the End of the World. He combines quiet character studies with contemporary music that makes it feel very inviting and engrossing, and was a lovely gem for me to watch.

Thoughts on A Question of Silence

 On Criterion, I watched the 1982 Dutch film A Question of Silence, written and directed by Marleen Gorris. It was controversial at the time, about three women, strangers to each other who randomly decide to murder a male shopowner in a dress shop when he catches one of them stealing. They each meet with a criminal psychiatrist, Janine van den Bos (Cox Habbema) who is assigned to their case, and she is trying to determine their sanity when interviewing each one about the case. None of the women will say why they committed the crime, and the psychiatrist realizes that they were just fed up with the patriarchy and something in them just snapped.

    Christine (Edda Barends) is a housewife who doesn’t speak, and her husband works outside the home and refers to their kids as “your kids,” putting all the responsibility on her. Andrea (Henriëtte Tol) is a secretary in an office run by men, and casually does some sex work on the side, seeing it as a big joke to her. And Annie (Nelly Frijda) is an outspoken waitress at a diner, a widow glad to be rid of taking care of her husband and not wanting another one.

    I liked how this movie had this punk 80s feminism feel to it, like not being nihilistic but just about three women being fed up with the patriarchy and simultaneously attacking the same prey, cornering him and just beating him to death in his store. And that this breaks through to the psychiatrist, not seeing any of them as insane, and defending them in court.

    Marleen Gorris is retired now, but directed several films, her best-known ones being this one, Antonia’s Line (which won the Oscar in 1995 for Best Foreign Language Film), and Mrs. Dalloway in 1997. She also came out as a lesbian around the time of Antonia’s Line, which I’m happy she was able to come out as queer decades ago.

Thoughts on Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

     On Criterion, I watched Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a 1974 film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It's loosely inspired by Douglas Sirk's 1955 film All That Heaven Allows (which Todd Haynes was also inspired by for his 2002 film Far From Heaven), and centers on an interracial couple, a white German widow named Emmi (Brigitte Mirra), who is about 60 years old, and Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan man 20 years her junior, who meet in a bar and develop a deep relationship, and get married quickly out of convenience. They face a lot of racism and xenophobia from her neighbors, her family, and the bar patrons, as the Germans say a lot of outright ugly and racist comments about Arabic people, especially as the film takes place shortly after the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

    The film is interesting because it doesn't just frame Emmi as being targeted and being gossiped about by her neighbors, but it also frames Ali as being othered, often referred to as a "foreigner, and being both racially fetishized by white women and treated as if he is less "pure" than they are. He doesn't feel a sense of belonging among German society, and when he wants Emmi to make couscous for him, she brushes him off by telling him he should get used to German culture and not expect Arabic cuisine.

    Emmi just wants love and companionship as a widow, and is treated as a kook by her family and friends when she introduces them to Ali, and they react with "death in their eyes," as Ali describes the look one of her friends gave him. Ali faces discrimination from a shopkeeper, claiming he can't understand Ali when he speaks broken German, in short and halted sentences, but using that as an excuse not to serve him, and Emmi defends him as her husband. Yet when they return from a vacation and the community is nicer to her and polite to him (though not overcoming their prejudices), Emmi begins to fall into acting like her neighbors, ordering Ali around and treating him like a servant and a sex object, leaving him to feel more alienated by her.

     In real life, ben Salem was Fassbinder's then-partner (and their relationship ended in disaster and tragedy), and Fassbinder cameos as Emmi's misogynist son in-law Eugen. Irm Hermann, who played Emmi's daughter Krista, had had a volatile and abusive relationship with Fassbinder.

    I really liked this movie a lot, as a character drama about racism and prejudice in a small community, and the pace flowed well in a 90-minute movie that made it really engrossing to watch. I had heard of it through the Criterion Closet video with playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris, who highly recommended it as part of his picks, and I'm glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Full Moon in New York

    On Criterion, I watched Full Moon in New York, a 1989 drama directed by Stanley Kwan (Center Stage), written by Kang-Chien Chiu and Acheng Zhong, and starring Maggie Cheung, Sylvia Chang, and Siqin Gaowa as three immigrants living in New York City. I really liked it a lot, it was a rich drama centering on three women from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China all coming to Manhattan and trying to make it in their lives, and while they initially seem all different, they do connect and become close friends through their struggles.

    Lee Fung-jiau (Cheung) is from Hong Kong, and is the manager and owner of an upscale Chinese restaurant that caters to Americans (including removing the heads of ducks prior to bringing out the dishes to patrons), and has found financial security with the restaurant, owning property, and the stock market, but is a closeted lesbian, and her mother keeps trying to set her up with men for an arranged marriage. She struggles with keeping her real sexuality hidden and presenting an outward appearance of success, avoiding her former lesbian partner and shunning her out of insecurity.

    Wang Hsiung-ping (Chang) was an actress in Taiwan, but struggles to find her place in the city. After a relationship with a white American man doesn't work out, she lives with a male friend for awhile, and endures biased opinions from theater directors, and defends herself when a white male director asks why she thinks she, as a Chinese woman, can play Lady Macbeth. She uses an ancestral wife of an Emperor as a fitting example of the history and culture she carries within herself to play any classical theater role.

    Zhaohong (Gaowa), from mainland China, was a teenage girl when her father died during the Cultural Revolution in 1960s China, and she and her mother have been taking care of each other ever since. Zhaohong comes to NYC to marry a Chinese-American man she barely knows, and lives with him in his yuppie high-rise apartment of black, white, and gray modern furniture. (Hsiung-pang's friend also has a similar apartment with stereo equipment and records by Patti Smith). She feels stuck between trying to assimilate as an American, adjust to her in-laws, and feeling tied to her Chinese heritage and feeling like Chinese-Americans don't understand China like she does, like when she wants to bring her mother over from China to take care of her, as is done in many immigrant households, but her husband is against the idea. 

    The finale, where the women are all drinking on a rooftop, throwing glasses after raising toasts to themselves, reminded me of the end of Waiting to Exhale, where the four women friends all drink outside ringing in the New Year, laughing and celebrating, and I liked that the film ended on a celebration of female friendship and sisterhood.

    The film does have some audio issues with obvious ADR dubbing over some actors' dialogue, and the film translates gwailou, Cantonese slang for Westerners or white people, for "Americans," and it is a term that be used in a general sense, but can also be used to be pejorative. It was just a little funny to me to hear the term be simply translated to "Americans."

    I liked how this film was a mix of being an American film about immigrants from countries with Chinese dialects, trying to figure out balancing their cultural backgrounds with American life, and feeling torn as immigrant women adjusting to a new culture and life. It's a really good drama, and I'm glad I checked it out.