Thoughts on Strange Darling

I saw Strange Darling today at the Angelika Film Center in New York City. It’s a thriller, directed by JT Mollner, and I went into it cold, not wanting to be spoiled, and liked the subverted expectations of the movie, centering on a serial killer and their victim, stemming from a one-night-stand. Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner were the stars, and I got invested in their dynamic, especially when they are talking with each other in the car before going into a motel, trying to size each other up and measure the risk of this hookup.

I’ll say that throughout half of the movie, I was convinced that there were two actresses starring in the movie, and it took me too long to figure out that it was one, Fitzgerald, because her eyes looked narrow in one part of the movie (told in chapters out of chronological order) and larger in others, as well as wearing a magenta wig for half of the movie. The last time I thought something like that was watching Mulholland Drive, and thinking a different actress came into the second half when it was Naomi Watts in a dual role.

I liked the indie synth music soundtrack, and Giovanni Ribisi was the D.P. and producer, and the movie looked stunning and bright and viscerally gory.

Ed Begley, Jr. and Barbara Hershey have cameos as an old hippie couple, but aren’t in the movie as much, it’s mostly dominated by lesser-known actors, which was good.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, and liked that it felt a little different. And I think the director was really inspired by the final moments of King of New York for the last scene of this film.

Thoughts on Drive My Car

 

    On Criterion, I watched the 2021 Japanese film Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, screenplay by Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe, and based on the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami. It’s a three-hour drama that I found really compelling and engaging, about grief and loss and regret, and centering on a stage actor and director, Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) grieving from the sudden loss of his wife, and two years later taking a residency in Hiroshima to direct a multilingual stage production of Uncle Vanya, casting actors of Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese descent to perform their roles in their own languages, including a mute actor using Korean Sign Language.

    His wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) was a TV screenwriter, and came up with her detailed stories while having sex, narrating them out loud, and having her husband repeat them back to her later so she wouldn’t forget them. They had been married for over twenty years, and had the loss of their child at four years old, but despite their history, Oto seemed a bit of an enigma to Yūsuke, and he didn’t want to lose their dynamic as a creative artist couple.

    In his grief, he is staging the show, and he is assigned a personal chauffeur for insurance reasons, and meets Misaki (Tōko Miura), a quiet, independent young woman who is at first professional in being emotionally removed as a hired driver, then later bonds with Yūsuke, revealing the complicated history she had with her abusive late mother, and together they commiserate over their shared grief and complex feelings.

    I not only really liked the performance by Miura, as this introverted character working through a rough childhood to be financially independent through her driving skills, but I also really liked Park Yu-rim as Lee Yoo-na, the Korean mute woman who can hear and communicates in sign language. She had this quiet calm to her, and as more is revealed about her character, she becomes even more intriguing, with layers of depth. I’m surprised it was her film debut, as she really stood out in the film, and gave a stunning performance in the finale.  

    I had heard great things about this film, and I liked how quiet and peaceful it was, how it was sad without being depressing, just more contemplative on life and learning to deal with the past and move forward.

Thoughts on Last Exit to Brooklyn

 

   On Tubi, I watched Last Exit to Brooklyn, the 1989 film based on Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1964 novel of the same name, depicting the underclass and marginalized members of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 1952. Directed by Uli Edel (Body of Evidence, The Little Vampire, Christiane F.), with a screenplay by Desmond Nakano, the film had an incredible cast of character actors and up-and-coming stars: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephen Lang, Stephen Baldwin, Alexis Arquette, Jerry Orbach, Burt Young, Ricki Lake, Rutanya Alda, Mark Boone Junior, and a very young Sam Rockwell in one of his early screen roles.

    The film focuses on a union strike of metalworkers, and how the strikes affects the neighborhood, where the young and arrogant strikers spend most of their time getting drunk at bars and picking on people to jump for fights. The neighborhood is very old-school, working-class, Italian and Irish, which makes it a dangerous place for queer people, like the transgender Georgette (Arquette), the closeted union leader Harry (Lang), and the sex worker Tralala (Leigh).

    Stories between the union strikers, the queer characters, the sex worker, and military officers preparing to ship out to the Korean War all interconnect, and the movie has this roughness and griminess that makes it hard to watch, but gripping because of the excellent cast talent. The film was filmed in Brooklyn, and since parts of 1980s Brooklyn hadn't changed much since the 1950s, especially the remote parts of Red Hook, the movie feels lived-in and genuine, and uncomfortable to watch for its ugly and raw depiction of a bigoted and close-knit neighborhood of people.

    I hadn't seen this movie since high school over twenty years ago, and only remembered parts of it, and blanking out the rest of the film. When I was in my junior and senior years, I knew an acting teacher named Rob Kramer, who taught drama at the arts magnet school I went to half-day to do creative writing and playwriting, and he had a small part in this movie. I had watched it, and then asked him what role he was in the movie, and he went, "I'm the guy who instigates the gang rape on Jennifer Jason Leigh." Bold of him to be that blunt to a teenage student, but I appreciated the honesty.

    It's a really great film, and I came away really feeling for the marginalized characters, and impressed with what a powerhouse of an actor Stephen Lang is. I'm only casually familiar with him from Avatar and Don't Breathe, but he gave a knockout role as a closeted husband and father carrying on a secret romance with a gay man that uses him for his money than caring about him.

    And Jennifer Jason Leigh had already proved that she could take on tough roles, like her role in Paul Verhoeven's Flesh and Blood in 1985, and this role would further influence her 1990s career of playing sex workers, people with substance use disorder, and mental health issues, and bringing heart and honesty to them.

    It was a very bleak film to watch, but really good to revisit it after so many years and come at it with an older perspective.

Thoughts on The Last Word

   I liked the 2017 film The Last Word, I thought it was decent as a "unlikely women become friends" kind of movie, and I like Shirley MacLaine and Amanda Seyfried. It's directed by Mark Pellington, whose name I recognized as a music video director from the 90s (Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video, U2's "One" video, etc.), and he has also directed movies like Arlington Road and The Mothman Propecies. It's a dramedy where MacLaine plays Harriet, who is the town grinch, and a major control freak, and she's jealous of the glowing obituaries printed about people she knew were awful in real life, so she goes right into the local newspaper's offices to talk to Anne (Seyfried) the obituary writer, to write an obituary for her while she's still alive so she can be remembered as a great person. But when Anne interviews people who know Harriet, nobody has anything nice to say about her, and when Anne is blunt with Harriet after much prodding about that truth, Harriet decides she wants to control the narrative and do good deeds just so she can have nice stuff written about her in her obituary.

    Part of the movie ends up being a road trip film, and that part can drag out more, but I did like the interactions between MacLaine and Seyfried. MacLaine is really great at playing grumpy old women, very much set in their ways, and Seyfried has more of the modern-day millennial sarcastic attitude that I like. There's also some fun scenes where Harriet talks her way into getting a radio DJ job because she knows how to make the right playlist flow and has good taste in rock, jazz, and blues.

    AnnJewel Lee-Dixon is very cute and sweet as Brenda, a young girl from an at-risk center who Harriet casually acts as a mentor to, and ends up coming along with them on their road trip. Her character is a little one-dimensional as "cute kid who swears," and I would wonder who in her family knows that she's off in a car with two women she barely knows, so some of that would take me out of the movie. But her acting was good and she was adorable.

    Harriet had been partner of a major advertising firm until she essentially got pushed out, and in a cameo with the late Anne Heche as her estranged daughter in a lunch meeting, Harriet refuses to acknowledge that she might have OCD like her daughter was diagnosed with. Harriett is a woman of the 1950s, who had to fight to be accepted in the corporate world, and carried that chip on her shoulder throughout her life. So it does explain her attitude more, even if it doesn't excuse her rude actions towards others.

    Like I said, the movie runs a little long, and there's a romantic subplot between Anne and a radio DJ (played by Seyfried's real-life partner Thomas Sadoski) that felt more tacked-on, though I did like a scene where Seyfried explains why Andalusia, Spain has cultural importance to her due to a childhood memory with her estranged mother.

    It's a nice movie, nothing too memorable, but good for the leads and a decent entertaining story.

Thoughts on The Hot Spot

    On Tubi this week, I watched The Hot Spot, a 1990 noir film directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Don Johnson as a drifter named Harry who ends up in a small Texan town, being seduced by his boss’s vixen wife Dolly (Virginia Madsen) and pursuing a local girl just barely out of her teens, Gloria (Jennifer Connolly), and is set on robbing the bank, but ends up getting involved in twisted plots of sex and blackmail and deception.

    I really liked this. It had a good steamy, late 80s neo-noir vibe to it, Virginia Madsen seemed to be having a lot of fun putting on a whole Southern Belle accent while being incredible obvious about seducing Harry, and, like my friend Bill Scurry said in his review, the movie both plays to the male and female gazes, sexually objectifying Madsen, Johnson, and Connolly.

    William Sadler is fun to watch as a local sleazy dirtbag who keeps bugging Gloria for later revealed reasons, and Connolly was still very young at the time, but had this look where she could look demure and studious, then walk out in a bikini in the water like an Ursula Andress moment.

    I also liked that the movie subverted some tropes of the noir film, like how Harry refuses to be duped into killing Dolly’s husband or go with her scheming, and that Dolly survives at the end instead of being killed as a punishment. It felt interesting to watch, if a little muddled at times with two plots going on that try to come together at the end. But the cast worked well (other people considered for the movie were Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Debra Winger, and Uma Thurman, and I can see them working well too), and I liked watching it.

Tribute to Gena Rowlands

    In tribute to Gena Rowlands, Unhook the Stars was one of my favorite films of hers, and it’s not as well-known as her films that she did with her late husband John Cassavetes. I really liked Minnie & Moskowitz, Opening Night, and Gloria, but I also really liked her later work, like her segment with Winona Ryder in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth in 1991, and her role as Uma Thurman’s mother in the Mira Nair-directed HBO film Hysterical Blindness in 2002, and her onscreen pairings with Ben Gazzara in the Cassavetes films, in Hysterical Blindness, and in their segment in 2006’s Paris Je T’aime titled Quartier Latin, which she also wrote.

    Unhook the Stars came out in 1996, and was directed by her son Nick Cassavetes, who also directed her in The Notebook, which younger audiences likely know of her better as the elderly version of Allie. In this movie, she’s a widow living alone who has fractured relationships with her adult children, and she’s lonely. A single mom (Marisa Tomei) and her son (a pre-Star Wars Jake Lloyd) move in next door, and the mom is going through a messy separation with her son’s father, and is trying to support them alone. She asks the widow to baby-sit him once, and the widow volunteers to do it regularly, because she likes feeling needed and taking care of the boy.

    The two women become friends, and in the scene below, they go out to a local bar, to have a night out, and the mom is just ranting about her ex and full of chatter, while the widow, who has seen life, just takes it in quietly, reacting without speaking in the bathroom, and gives her simple advice. I just really liked their chemistry in playing friends, and I really enjoyed this movie a lot. Rowlands was a fantastic actress, who felt like she was living her characters rather than just acting, and I’m glad she’s being remembered and honored.

    Also, she looked like my grandma, who had blonde hair, was a New York City native, and had a quiet glamour to her, so it’s like I see my grandma when I see Gena Rowlands.

Thoughts on The Spirit of the Beehive

     On Criterion, I watched The Spirit of the Beehive, directed by Victor Erice, and written by Erice and Ángel Fernández-Santos. It is a Spanish film from 1973, and considered one of the best films of 1970s Spanish cinema. It takes place in 1940 in the Castilian countryside just after the civil war, where the Franco regime has won (and still existed in its waning years at the time of the film's release), and centers on a rural family, who are often all separated in a large manor and only spend one scene all together. 

    The film's main focus is on Ana (Ana Torrent), a seven-year old girl who is stunned after watching a local screening from a traveling projectionist of James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein, particularly the scene where the monster accidentally kills a little girl. This scene awakens in her thoughts about life and death, losing her innocence both post-civil war and analyzing this scene. She asks her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) why the monster killed her, and she would reply that he didn't kill her because the movie is fake, nobody died. But then later, when prompted more, she messes with Ana's gullibility by telling her that the monster is a spirit that can be called on, haunting their home. Fantasy and reality get confused for Ana, when she finds a wounded Republican soldier hiding in their barn, and sees him like the misunderstood monster, or like a spirit.

    The family feels like they act in a daze post-war, often busy in their own pursuits and thoughts. The father, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), is a beekeeper who attends to his hives, is quiet and withdrawn, and has a very serious, taciturn air about him. The mother, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), is significantly younger than the father, and writes letters to a former lover, and the film shows a photo montage of her youth with her lover, like a past life before she settled with her husband and had children. Ana is often wandering alone or with Isabel through the countryside, and when Ana finds the soldier, she gives him an apple and ties his shoes, the acts of kindness that a child as young as her can show him. Isabel, meanwhile, has more of a mean streak in her, where she tries to choke the family cat before it scratches her to run away, and she scares her sister by playing dead or creeping up from behind her with large gloves.

    The film is slow-moving, and has a haunting feel to it, like times in life after major tragedies that affect the world, where everything can feel empty, and people are moving in slow-motion. Ana is awakened by the film, questioning life, and showing a small act of rebellion in helping the soldier without realizing it's forbidden.

    I had heard of this film from two podcasts, Critically Acclaimed Network and Zebras in America/Popcorn Eschaton, and it sounded really fascinating to me, a film that is inspired by Frankenstein, but is about childhood, loss of innocence, the power of cinema to change someone's perspective, and historical fiction post-war. I read a lot more in-depth views on Letterboxd, and don't want to imitate other people's more cultured analysis, so I will say that I really liked this movie a lot, found it really intriguing and sad and beautiful, and that I'm glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on The Savages

    On Criterion, I watched the 2007 film The Savages, as part of the channel's celebration of Philip Seymour Hoffman movies. It was written directed by Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills, Private Life, writer of Juliet, Naked), and starred Hoffman, Laura Linney, and Philip Bosco in his final film role before his death in 2018.

    It's a drama about fractured families, where Hoffman and Linney play Jon and Wendy, two single siblings who each have trouble with personal relationships because of their estranged father's domestic and emotional abuse on them in their childhood, while their mother walked out on them early on. They're brought back together when their father, Lenny (Bosco) is diagnosed with dementia, his longtime partner died, and he needs to be put into a nursing home for professional care. Jon is a theater professor working on a book about Bertolt Brecht, while Wendy is a struggling playwright working as a temp and sending her plays based on her dysfunctional childhood to several foundations for grant funding. 

    The two siblings have to work together to help their father, deal with the meager resources they have to put him in a no-frills, basic nursing home, and bicker with each other about their own seemingly "loser" places in life. Jon doesn't want to commit to his girlfriend, who is Polish and has to move back to Krakow because her visa expired, and Wendy is having an affair with a married man, who is thirteen years her senior (yet teases her when she calls herself the "younger woman" in their affair, reminding her that she's in her 40s and not so young). It's a messiness with the characters that feels really honest and ugly and relatable, and it's a combination of Jenkins' storytelling about the complexities of middle-aged life with the deep talents of Hoffman and Linney that really makes this film great.

    I've really liked Tamara Jenkins' films a lot. I adored The Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) a lot, both as a teen and as an adult, really digging Natasha Lyonne's performance when I was a teen, and understanding Alan Arkin's character more as an adult. Private Life (2018) is a really interesting movie where Paul Giamatti and Kathyrn Hahn play a couple struggling to conceive a child in their middle age, discussing fertility options, and it felt very realistic. And Jenkins wrote the screenplay for Juliet, Naked (2018), one of my favorite recent romantic comedies, where Rose Byrne plays a woman whose boyfriend (Chris O'Dowd) is obsessed with an elusive singer-songwriter (Ethan Hawke), their paths all inter-cross, and it was a really charming movie that not only took away the cult worship of the singer to show him as more ordinary, but also gave Byrne a great performance to play a woman who wanted a child, felt stuck in life, and didn't want to take care of either man.

    There were some supporting role performances I really liked a lot. It was nice to see Margo Martindale in a bit part as a nursing home representative interviewing the family for the father's possible residence there. But I really liked Gbenga Akinnagbe as the Nigerian nursing home aide Jimmy, who had this quiet vibe about him that brought more calm to the film, especially as he works in a place that frequently sees the deaths of its elderly residents as routine, like when he tells Wendy about how when the residents' toes curl while they are sleeping or resting, it's usually a sign that they will die within a couple of days, like the soul preparing to leave the body. I don't feel like he got as much acclaim as the major stars did, so I wanted to highlight him because he was interesting to me.

    I really connected to this film a lot. I don't know if it's because I'm 40, so I'm closer to the character's ages than I was in 2007 when it came out, or I just liked how both characters are both screw-ups who are both kind of jerks but still compelling to watch. There was just this raw honesty to the brother-sister relationship that I connected with, as well as the reality of having aging parents and thinking about the future. 

    Linney was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, and Jenkins was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. I remembered this movie being a big critical hit back then, but never saw it, and I'm glad I finally checked it out, it's a fantastic film.