Thoughts on Oh Lucy!

     On Tubi, I watched Oh Lucy!, a 2017 Japanese-American drama co-written and directed by Atsuko Hirayanagi, starring Shinobu Terajima as Setsuko, a lonely middle-aged woman working as an office drone who is distant from her co-workers, lives alone, and is estranged from her sister. She goes out to karaoke with her co-workers for a retirement party, then drunkenly yells that no one actually likes the retiree and that everyone laughs at her behind her back. She gets a call from her niece Mika (Shioli Kutsana), who is working as a waitress in a maid uniform in a restaurant, and tells her that she had signed up for a year of English language classes, but can't afford them anymore because she needs to save money, and gets Setsuko to pay for the remainder of classes and take them in her place. Setsuko goes to the school, which seems hidden behind a seedy exterior, and meets John (Josh Hartnett), the American teacher who is very friendly and open and frequently hugs his students, of which Setsuko and later Takeshi (Kōji Yakusho), are the only ones. John gives them English names to use in class, Lucy and Tom, and gives Lucy a blonde wig to wear as "Lucy." Setsuko is charmed by John's friendliness and develops a crush on him, liking the warm embrace of his hug and becoming another identity as Lucy.

    But when she returns to the class, John has left for America, and the replacement teacher is more conventional and not as physically affectionate, and Setsuko preferred John's eccentricities. Then she finds out that Mika and John are dating, and that Mika has run off with John to the U.S., driving a further wedge between her and her mother Ayako (Kaho Minami). Setsuko receives a postcard from Mika, letting her know that she and John are in San Diego, and invites her out. Setsuko lets Ayako know, and they go together to San Diego to confront Mika and convince her to come home. But when they find John, he's alone in his apartment, saying that Mika has run off, and the three of them, combined with John's limited Japanese and Setsuko and Ayako's limited English, go look for her.

    I found this movie to be pretty interesting. I liked that it focused on a middle-aged woman going on an adventure and getting out of the rut of her life, and how a lot of it was about her and her sister having a complicated relationship with each other. Ayako would pick at Setsuko, calling her selfish if she didn't also get her a drink at a vending machine after getting herself one, then refuse a drink once Setsuko bought one for her. Setsuko accuses Ayako of stealing and marrying Setsuko's boyfriend, and still harbors resentment towards her. Terajima's performance as Setsuko brings a lot of sensitivity to the role, and I liked how she would still want to slip into being "Lucy" when she wanted to feel more brave or more open to trying new things. I looked her up, and saw that she was in a film I had really liked, Vibrator (2003),  where she plays a young woman who meets a handsome truck driver and goes on a journey of sexual self-discovery. It was a very intimate drama that felt very character-driven, and felt like a little hidden gem of a film.

    I wasn't as into the second half, when Setsuko is more deluded towards John because of her unrequited crush, leading her to make bad decisions that alienate people, and really didn't like that she makes a mess of her life and other people's lives, especially since John was often at fault for taking advantage of Mika, likely fetishizing her as his cute Japanese girlfriend, and bringing her to the U.S. and away from her life in Tokyo. He also kept calling Setsuko Lucy, not bothering to learn her real name, with a colonizer perspective of not wanting to call someone by their real name if it's too hard for him, out of internalized xenophobia. Even when he calls out a waiter for mocking Setsuko's English in a diner, he still calls her by her fake Anglicized name anyway.

    I really liked seeing Yakusho in his smaller supporting role as Takeshi/"Tom," as I've liked him a lot in films like Shall We Dance? (1996), 13 Assassins (2010), and Perfect Days (2023). He as "Tom" first seems very smiley, into hugging and speaking stilted English in the class, then when walking with Setsuko after class, introduces himself as Takeshi, and is more sensitive and quiet and reserved than as his Tom persona with a wig on. He appears more in the finale, and explains more about how putting on the persona helps him when he doesn't want to deal with struggles in his own personal life as himself, much like how Setsuko did when she liked the Lucy persona better.

    I liked checking this movie out, more so for the acting and the journey of the main character than for the film as a whole.

Thoughts on Punch-Drunk Love

     On Criterion, I watched Punch-Drunk Love, a 2002 romantic comedy/drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán, and Mary Lynn Rajskub.

    The film centers on Barry (Sandler), a lonely bachelor who owns a company that sells themed toilet plungers, and he bears the brunt of verbal abuse and insults from his seven sisters, seeing him as a loser and picking apart his turns of speech, like mocking him for saying "chatting" instead of "talking," and interrupting him at work with phone calls reminding him to come to one of their birthday parties. Barry is generally quiet and reserved, but prone to short fits of rage in destroying things or yelling at people, not having a healthy outlet for his pent-up anger.

    He also has a side plan going, finding a loophole in a Healthy Choice promotion and wanting to amass a million frequent flyer miles by saving the coupons from purchasing vast quantities of pudding, as Barry has done the math on the risk vs. reward and deciding the pudding was the best option to purchase instead of soup cans or frozen meals from Healthy Choice. This subplot was based from an actual story of David Phillips, a civil engineer who in 1999 figured out that the value of the frequent flyer miles from the Healthy Choice coupons was more than the cost of the pudding, and accumulated 1.2 million frequent flyer miles.

    Early in the film, he witnesses a horrendous car accident, and retrieves a harmonium from the street, keeping it on his desk and tinkering with it. His sister Elizabeth (Rajskub) brings by her co-worker Lena (Watson), who Barry had briefly met before, in order to get them to date, but Barry's life is in disarray. He is not only busy with work and his side hustle with the pudding, but he had called a phone sex line the night before out of curiosity, is swindled into giving his Social Security number, and the sex worker he had spoken to on the phone is calling back to extort him for money and sending "her" brothers after him to intimidate him. This gets in the way of his budding relationship with Lena, although the two of them have a sweet chemistry and a romantic innocence that draws them closer together.

    I really loved this film. This was my first time watching it, despite knowing how famous it is and that it came out well over twenty years ago, but I hadn't ever bothered to watch it before. The film podcast This Had Oscar Buzz did an episode of it, timing it with the upcoming release of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film One Battle After Another, and the hosts really liked it, and it sounded really interesting to me and like I should finally see it.

    Adam Sandler was fantastic in this, and I liked how he could snap back and forth between the sweet shyness of Barry with snapping into rage, in a way that didn't come off as cartoonish or exaggerated as it does in his usual comedies. According to the podcast, Anderson chose Sandler because of an old Saturday Night Live sketch he did, where he plays a guy who hosts his own public access TV show, "The Denise Show," where he is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend and taking calls from people keeping tabs on her for him, and essentially stalking her. When his dad calls him and berates him, like saying "You're embarrassing the family!" and "Be a man!" Sandler as the guy would shout back "Shut up! Shut up, old man!" and shouting him down, then snapping back to calm reality. Anderson really liked the weird comedy in it, and it works really well in this film.

    Emily Watson is so sweet in this, and while she is largely the love interest and not the focus like Sandler is, I still liked how sensitive her performance was, and how sexy and intimate her chemistry with Sandler was, like in a love scene in bed where they are whispering pillow talk like "I'm lookin' at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fuckin' smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You're so pretty" and "I want to chew your face, and I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them and chew them and suck on them." And the silhouetted scenes of them embracing each other in front of windows are really beautiful imagery.

    The cinematographer was Robert Elswit, and his camerawork makes the film look stunning, especially in a lot of long take, panning shots that flows in musical symmetry with Jon Brion's experimental score of tones and sounds, as well as with the more romantic music reminiscent of Jacques Tati's 1960s French comedies. The visual interludes were done by the late artist Jeremy Blake, with gorgeous purple and blue colors blending against each other. "He Needs Me," a song from the 1980 film version of Popeye, sung by the late Shelley Duvall, plays in a scene too, and is a cute and endearing love song. The film was edited by Leslie Jones, and the scenes connect together really well to make for an oddball romantic comedy with an unusual musical score.

The film would be the start of Sandler's occasional dip outside of his mainstream comedies, with his acclaimed performances in Reign Over Me, Funny People, and Uncut Gems, in more dramatic roles and/or experimental indie films. It's obvious that he's more into his comfort zone with his more current Netflix comedies and children's films, but it is nice whenever he takes a break from that and does a more unusual film.

I just really found this movie both very romantic, with having the same weirdo spirit that both Anderson and Sandler share, and the film connected their wavelengths very well. I'm really happy I finally watched this.

Thoughts on Outrageous!

     On Tubi, I watched Outrageous!, a 1977 Canadian comedy-drama written and directed by Richard Brenner. The film was adapted from "Making It," a short story by Canadian writer Margaret Gibson from her 1976 collection The Butterfly Ward, and she and star Craig Russell had been roommates in real life, which the story was based on.

    The story is about Robin (Russell) a hairdresser and aspiring drag queen, and his best friend, a schizophrenic woman named Liza (Hollis McLaren). Robin does costumes and makeup for local drag performers, and wants to perform himself, but is too shy and insecure to take his career further. He specializes in doing performances of divas like Carol Channing, Judy Garland, Mae West, and Ethel Merman, as well as a show playing Joan Crawford and Bette Davis characters. He is mocked by his closeted hair salon boss for being slightly chubby, and saying that the women won't want to have their hair done by gay men, and a customer yells at Robin for making her look like the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra, because he wanted to give more glamour to the local women in their Toronto neighborhood.

    Liza was released from the institution in which she was being held, and kept on a strict schedule of several prescription pills to take, including a lot of Valium. She has hallucinations of the "Bonecrusher" lying on top of her, and Robin will help her by miming with her to push the weight of the delusion off of her. They become roommates, and Liza meets with a social worker, who advises her to not become pregnant, seeing Liza as too mentally fragile to handle being a mother. But she has various flings with men, mostly cab drivers, and eventually becomes pregnant, and wants to keep the baby, against her social worker and her mother's wishes. Her mother will blame Robin for Liza trying to be more independent, and calling him by homophobic slurs. The friends are also trying to make it to New York City so that Robin can perform in Manhattan clubs and Liza can be on her own more.

    The film feels very much of its time, with a title that makes the film feel more silly than it really is, and I liked it more as a historical curiosity, a film focused on gay characters and drag culture with people who, though they live in Toronto, feel like they're in a small town with everyone in each other's business. I really liked the friendship between Robin and Liza, and how Robin is pushed to have more confidence in himself as a drag performer, and Liza is pushed to be more independent and not defined by her schizophrenia. The film felt very inspiring to be weird and one's authentic self, and not letting mental health issues keep them from living their lives.

    I especially liked the finale, where Liza is confiding in Robin, and they have both talked about having had depression, and she feels dead inside, and he says, "You're Liza. You'll never be normal, but you're special. And you can have a hell of a good time. You know, there's only one thing. You're mad as a hatter, darling. But that's all right, because so am I. I've never known anyone who wasn't worth knowing who wasn't a positive fruitcake. We're all mad. You and me, are here to love and look after each other. You're not dead. You just have a healthy case of craziness."

    Sadly, the director Richard Brenner and the star Craig Russell would succumb to AIDS both in 1990, so the film does feel like a capsule of gay life pre-AIDS in the late 1970s. The film had a sequel in 1987 titled Too Outrageous!, and a stage musical was produced in Canada in 2000.

    I really liked the film a lot, enjoying the quirky gem of the central friendship and the queer issues explored in the film, and am glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Still Walking

    Last Sunday on Criterion, I watched Still Walking, a 2008 Japanese film written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. The film is a drama about a family coming together on the twelfth anniversary of the eldest son's death, and the complicated dynamics between the parents and the surviving adult children and their families.

    The Yokoyama family come together every year to commemorate the death of the eldest son, Junpei, who drowned twelve years prior while saving a 13-year old boy. The father Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is a retired doctor, and idealizes his deceased son, while treating his living son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) like a disappointment because he went into art restoration instead of becoming a doctor like him, and leaves Junpei's items untouched like a shrine to him. Ryota brings his wife Yukari (Yu Natsukawa), who is widowed from a previous marriage, and her son Atsushi (Shohei Tanaka), and Ryota's family is initially distant and cold towards Yukari, thinking it is bad luck to marry a widow, but gradually warm to her once they get to know her as a person. Ryota's sister, Chinami (You, aka Yukiko Ehara), wants her family to move in with her aging parents to take care of them.

    The film progresses over one day into the next morning, and I liked how quiet the film felt, but very rich with family moments and vignettes that give a lot of coloring to the family's history with each other. Like how Kyohei would retell a positive anecdote about Junpei, and forget that the anecdote was actually about Ryota. Royta would feel bitter towards his father's obvious favoritism towards his older brother. Or how the mother Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) would reminisce at dinner about her and Kyohei's personal romantic song, "Blue Light Yokohama" by Ayumi Ishida, and how she had heard Kyohei singing it from another woman's house, and purchased the record and would play it in private. And that the couple, despite decades of mutual resentment where Kyohei criticizes his wife in front of the family, still stayed together anyway.

    The film shows just one day in this family's life, and there are no big changes or revelations to their relationships. People avoid conflict just to get along, even if they have resentment, and are trying to be nice and polite to "keep the peace." Even if Ryota suggests a change to how his family does a certain ritual, concerned on how it affects someone, he just gets told that the ritual is done out of habit to avoid confronting difficult feelings, even if it's at someone's expense and comes off as cruel and selfish, and that they won't change their behavior even when called out on it.

    I really like Kore-eda's films, having seen Air Doll, Shoplifters, After Life, The Truth, and Broker, After Life and Shoplifters being my favorites. His films excel at focusing on complex emotions and fraught relationships, where no one is a hero or villain, and has shades of gray to their character. Like the family of criminals in Shoplifters, or the brokers selling abandoned babies on the black market in Broker, or the rules of the afterlife being that the recently deceased can only hold on to one memory for eternity in After Life. He is a highly acclaimed filmmaker, and I had heard of Still Walking as one of his best films, but hadn't seen it, and I enjoyed just sitting with it and letting the scenes pour over me. This was a beautiful and stunning film to watch.

Thoughts on Love, Brooklyn

    At the Angelika Film Center on Monday, I saw Love, Brooklyn, a 2025 romantic comedy-drama directed by Rachael Abigail Holder, in her directorial debut, and written by Paul Zimmerman. The film centers on Roger (Andre Holland), a writer living near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY, and he is writing a piece on how gentrification has hurt Brooklyn, specifically with Black communities. He is close friends with his ex-girlfriend, Casey (Nicole Beharie), an art gallery owner who inherited her gallery building from her grandmother, and has been continually rejecting offers from a developer who has been buying buildings on the block, wanting to hold on to her building because of her heritage and as a Black business owner. Roger and Casey have a very playful, teasing friendship, often joshing around like kids in the park.

    Roger is casually dating Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a widowed mother of a young girl, Lorna (Cassandra Freeman) who lives in a Brooklyn brownstone, and whose husband died in an accident. She and Roger are cool with having a casual, friends with benefits relationship, but Roger isn't sure if he wants to be more serious with Nicole, and when Lorna who knows him as her mother's "friend," wants to get to know him, Nicole is trying to balance her own emotions with opening up a relationship between Roger and her daughter, while not wanting to hurt Lorna's feelings regarding the loss of her father.

    The film is beautifully shot, showing neighborhood scenes of Roger riding his bike down residential streets in Brooklyn, hanging out in front of a coffeeshop with his friend Alan (Roy Wood, Jr.), who is married and wants to live vicariously through Roger's single life as a bachelor. Alan is happily married and settled down as a middle-aged man, but likes the idea of an affair or having another woman be into him, but he turns down the possibilities that could lead to it, not wanting to actually blow up his life over an affair.

    The love triangle parts of the drama were decent, but I was more interested in learning more about Casey and Nicole's individual stories, as their own dramas were more compelling than about their feelings with Roger and his attraction towards both women. Casey is struggling with the pressure to sell her building, as well as mainly having one artist client that is keeping her in business, and when she tries calling Roger to talk about a difficult day he had, he's not up for listening at the moment, and Beharie plays it very well with the look of restrained frustration on her face, really wanting him to be a supportive friend, before being like "No, it's fine." Beharie has a lot of charisma and brightness as Casey's goofy self, and she's equally as good when she's playing the more subtle dramatic moments.

    I also wanted to know more about Nicole's inner life, as I felt like the film would just scratch the surface of her troubles as a single mom who is still mourning her husband, working multiple jobs to support her daughter, and juggling people's emotions. There is a fantastic scene in the finale when Roger comes to her after he's had a rough night, basically trying to crash at her home in the middle of the night, and she shuts him down for trying to use her for sex, saying she misses her husband every day, and standing her ground and not letting him take advantage of her. Wise is really great in that scene, and it made me want to know more about her character and not just being viewed as a FWB through Roger's eyes.

    Andre Holland was good, as he has soft eyes and a way of doing small gestures like scratching at his neck when he's nervous or hesitant, but I didn't find his character as compelling. I wasn't interested in his romantic drama, or that he kept struggling to write his piece on gentrification in Brooklyn, though I did like scenes that reflected the themes of the film, like when he and Casey are looking at a painting of Sodom and Gomorrah and the moral of leaving what you can't take with you. The film has an epilogue speech about loving your city and struggling with seeing it change, when it doesn't feel like your home anymore, and you can't hold onto the past, but that you can learn to love your city in the new shape its taken, and it can still have personal significance for you. That part really resonated with me a lot, as I lived in Astoria, Queens for 16 years and currently live in Jersey City, but still feel connected to Astoria as my longtime home, even if it's different than how it was when I was younger. The film had paralleled Roger's personal evolution with the evolution of his Brooklyn neighborhood, and it worked well together, more so with Casey's struggle with her own evolution.

    I thought the film was decent, that it could have had more depth with the script, but that the acting was all very good and the cinematography was gorgeous, so it was worthwhile to watch.

Thoughts on The Booksellers

     On Tubi, I watched The Booksellers, a 2019 documentary by D.W. Young, and executive produced by Parker Posey, about booksellers, rare book dealers, and archivists in New York City. The film mostly follows antiquarian and rare book dealers and their bookstores, as they collect and purchase books for large sums of money, having specific criteria like special autographs by the author (either to a fellow famous person or to a loved one in their life), an interesting dust jacket, or a prized first edition. They got their start working in used bookstores; following in their families' footsteps, or just falling into the career as nerdy collectors. 

    I found this film really fascinating, and as an archivist myself, I could relate to how much the book dealers and shop owners valued the archival history of the books, and wanting to preserve their legacies and support independent bookstores. As one person said, "We didn't call them independent bookstores back then, they were just bookstores."

    I did like when the film focused on people that weren't just the white middle-aged men who fit the stuffy, elitist book dealer stereotype, but spoke with Black archivists and librarians, like Kevin Young, a librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem (who highlighted the James Baldwin archives at the library, like his personal notes on napkins or unfinished literary drafts), or Syreeta Gates, an archivist who collected hip-hop journalism from the 1990s, like from XXL and The Source, and, full disclosure, I briefly met a couple of times when I worked for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Harlem because she did some research work there as an archival fellow. Three sisters (Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample and Judith Lowry) run the Argosy Book Store, which is New York City's oldest independent bookstore, founded by their father Louis Cohen in 1925.

    The film felt very warm and cozy to watch, and I like watching people thrive in their fields nerding out over their passions, and seeing them in their bookstores and homes surrounded by books and having their own library system and figuring out what to do with their books after they die. I'm not as much of a collector, due to limited space and funds, nor am I interested in hunting for rare items like they are, like "digging for gold" as they would put it, but I can relate to the joy and enthusiasm that one would elicit from discovering these historical materials and maintaining them for posterity. It's a lovely movie, and I'm glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Judgment Night

   Last week I watched Judgment Night on Criterion, a 1993 action film that is much better known for its great soundtrack that is full of rap and metal/rock collaborations, like an Ice T and Slayer song, or a Cypress Hill and Sonic Youth song. I didn’t know what the movie was about, thinking it was a sci-fi action movie. It’s more of a thriller, and is really well-shot with night scenes nearly the whole movie, and there is some really good tension in long sequences.

    The basic plot is that Emilio Estevez is a suburban family man in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago who is going into the city with his friends and brother to see a boxing match, and there’s all this weird tension where his friends still act immature and want to get into fights, and tell Estevez that he’s “gone soft” because he has a family and doesn’t want to get into reckless fights. The guys end up driving off the expressway to get out of traffic to get to the fight, only to end up in some desolate rough area, where they accidentally witness a gang-related shooting, done by Denis Leary’s crime boss character, and spend the whole movie trying to escape Denis Leary and his crew (one of them played by Everlast, who was in House of Pain at the time and was on the soundtrack), sneaking into a train yard and a housing projects building and empty streets and alleys.

    It works pretty well, even if I felt like the movie was trying to have some kind of arc with Emilio having been a rough punk and having to tap into his violent side to survive, and it didn’t seem fleshed out. But Denis Leary was fun as the bad guy, even if it felt like he was the same character he was playing in Demolition Man that same year, same pissed-off underground leader guy who hates rich people.

    Michael DeLorenzo had a small part as the guy who gets killed early on, and is called “the kid,” even though he was in his mid-30s at the time.

    Between this and Very Bad Things, I thought “Nobody should ever invite Jeremy Piven on a guys’ night out, because he will be the catalyst for things going wrong.”

Thoughts on Weapons

     Yesterday, I went to the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan with a friend to see Weapons, a 2025 horror/mystery film written and directed by Zach Cregger, who also directed Barbarian (2022) and was a part of the Canadian comedy troupe The Whitest Kids You Know. The film is told in vignettes from different characters' perspective in a nonlinear narrative, allowing the audience to get pieces of the story from different angles and to uncover the mystery with the final narrative.

    The story is initially narrated by an unnamed child, talking about an incident two years prior in the town of Maybrook, PA, where seventeen children from Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)'s elementary school classroom all inexplicably ran away from their homes at the same time at 2:17 AM, and went missing, and only one student, Alex (Cary Christopher) remained in her classroom the next day. 

    The missing kids cause panic with their distraught parents, as a month has passed by with no sign of the kids, and though a police investigation cleared Justine of any foul play, the parents, led by Archer (Josh Brolin) as their representative, blame her, thinking she's withholding information and wondering why it was only her class that disappeared. Someone defaces her car with "WITCH" written in red paint, she gets threatening phone calls, and people ring her doorbell or pound on the door to scare her. Justine is a vulnerable person with a messy personal life, like a history of alcoholism, seduces her ex-boyfriend Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), and is chastised by her principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) about her past history with getting too close to students and crossing boundaries, urging her to stay away from Alex and not to bother him about the trauma they're going through.

    Justine keeps investigating on her own, sneaking around Alex's house, which has newspapers covering the windows, and knows that something weird is happening there, but can't get anyone to take her seriously. Then, when the narrative shifts, it goes to Archer, who has been sleeping in his son Matthew's bed, having nightmares about him being missing, and is obsessed with analyzing the Ring camera video of Matthew running away, and pressing another couple of a missing classmate to see their Ring camera video, and trying to connect the dots of where the children were running to. The narrative shifts to Paul and his complicated personal life, as well as starting out like a nice guy but being an awful cop with a short temper, who clearly has a history of bad behavior according to the police chief (Toby Huss), and to James (Austin Abrams), a homeless drug addict and burglar who is a scummy person, but also figures out the potential whereabouts of the children but can't get anyone to take him seriously because of his criminal background.

    The story switches through narratives until the final one focuses on Alex, and unveils the mystery, and I didn't like that the story, which had been an interesting mystery and character study of several people, with illusions to real-life tragedies like the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting (the missing children, PTSD of the parents, and trauma of the suburban town reflected a lot of the feelings and experiences after the tragedy), it went more into a cliche of a villain that felt based in sexist and ageist stereotypes. It felt like trying to be "scary" in a stereotypical way, and the reveal felt like it came from a fairy-tale setting that didn't really fit in with the realism of the rest of the story, and I didn't get why the villain was the way they were, aside from saying "they're just evil." The performer as the character was very good, but I didn't really like the direction that felt more like the movie was trying to put in a more typical horror third act that didn't really work for me. Although the finale did some hilarious moments of slapstick violence that did make me laugh, and culminates in some really insane imagery.

    One of my favorite elements of the movie were POV shots that would track a character's path in a one take shot, like when Justine goes to the liquor store early on and the film follows her path from the parking lot through the store. Those scenes worked well in an immersive way that I really liked.

    Julia Garner was great in this, in playing a schoolteacher with a complex history that made her relatable, and I especially liked Austin Abrams' performance as James, a guy who would be on the phone trying to get money out of his sister while talking about his new job, while trying car doors to see which one is open to rob. He took a dirtbag character and made him more sympathetic as a guy who figures out what may have happened to the children, and I thought he was a standout in the film.

    This was a pretty good movie to watch, and I liked that the pre-show reel at Alamo Drafthouse had clips like a skit about the signature run from Naruto (as the children's running mimics that run with airplane arms), skits from The Whitest Kids You Know, old trailers of Children of the Damned, and offbeat clips of children performing in choirs and bands, like dressed in red while dancing to DMX's "Ruff Ryders Anthem" or singing about poop and butts and farts in Spanish. I'm glad that my friend and I saw it together, as we both like horror films, and discussed the film more afterwards.

Thoughts on She Rides Shotgun

    At an AMC Theatre in NYC yesterday, I went to see She Rides Shotgun, a 2025 crime thriller directed by Nick Rowland, co-written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Jordan Harper. 

    The film stars Taron Egerton as a ex-con named Nate who formed an alliance with an Aryan white supremacist gang while in prison, only for him to have betrayed the gang in some vague way, and now the gang is out to kill his family. The gang killed his ex-wife and her new husband, and before they can get to his nine-year old daughter, Polly (Ana Sophia Heger), when she's waiting to be picked up after school, Nate pulls up in a car with a broken window and makes her get in the car. She has barely seen her father through her young life, so she hardly knows him, but is at first enjoying the time together in a motel room, where he's teaching her how to swing a bat to hit someone in the knees and back of the head, and changing her hair to disguise her identity. Both things she's seeing as play, while it hints more as his nervousness about being on the run. When she sees a news report about what happened to her mother and that she is a missing child, she freaks and runs and finds a phone to call the cops, then quickly learns how that was the wrong thing to do, as she and Nate are on the run not just from the Aryan gang members, but from corrupt cops who are part of the gang (identifiable by a blue lightning tattoo) as well.

    The film has a lot of really good tension in it, and I liked how the film was only hinting at Nate's backstory, where he doesn't want to seem like a monster to his daughter, but that he likely isn't a good guy, and may not be that much better than the gang, just more of a lowlife dirtbag than a violent white supremacist. He fights to protect his daughter, even when he keeps putting her in danger with other killers and corrupt types while on the lam, and she witnesses a lot of trauma throughout the film, which the film's final shot, while moving and touching, insinuates will stick with her long after she's "saved." 

    Ana Sophia Heger gives an excellent performance as Polly, handling a lot of rough subject matter in this film while often acting without words, her round eyes seeing a lot of shadiness and violence well beyond her years, and picking up quickly on how to defend herself, and seeing her dad more as a scared person beyond his tattooed and shredded physique. She and Egerton's scenes work well together as a father and daughter who barely know each other, and trying to rely on one another while the clock is ticking.

    Taron Egerton is almost 36, and has grown out of the young ingenue roles he played in The Kingsman: Secret Service films, and is really good in playing the vulnerability of Nate, a guy whose moral compass is gray, and who can't convince himself that he isn't a monster. When he sees the effect of his violence on Polly, he worries that he is going to ruin her and turn her into being like him, and is remorseful, not wanting her innocence to be tainted by his ugliness, though by the end of the film it's too late for that.

    A supporting character role that deserves recognition is Rob Yang as Detective John Park, a cop who is not part of the gang, and is tracking the story and figures out that Nate is not responsible for the murders and is being chased by the gang. He is a morally grey character, using blackmail to get what he wants, but isn't as corrupt as other cops, knowing how to game the system to help people, and often comes off like the smartest person around. Yang carries a lot of quiet magnetism in his role, and is really great in this film.

    The veteran character actor John Carroll Lynch appears as Houser, a corrupt cop who is one of the leaders of the Aryan gang, and controls the drug trade and strings up people to torture them for information, killing them afterwards. Lynch in this role is deeply psychotic and intimidating, a long way from when he's played warmer, more cuddlier characters in films like Fargo.

    I liked how intense this film was, and how it kept its emotional core about the father-daughter relationship, often people about them trying to trust each other and building a family connection, which helped keep the film more ground among all the other gun battles and car chases going on. I'm glad I checked out this thriller, it feels like a modest sleeper hit.

Thoughts on The Phoenician Scheme

   At the Angelika Film Center this week on Tuesday, I went to see The Phoenician Scheme, a 2025 espionage black comedy written and directed by Wes Anderson, starring an ensemble cast featuring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Park, Mathieu Almaric, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Bill Murray. 

    The film takes place in 1950, where the arms dealer and industrialist Anatole "Zsa Zsa" Korda (del Toro) keeps narrowly avoiding death after a series of assassination attempts and controversies, as well as being criticized for his unethical business practices, shown through surviving a plane crash and in a newspaper montage. After he is briefly in the afterlife, while unconscious, where he faces a divine court before coming back to life, he knows that he will die for real someday soon, so he tracks down his estranged daughter, a Catholic novice, Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), and wants her to be the sole heir to his estate. Liesl is wary of her father, since he sent her away to live in a convent when she was 5, and she believes that he killed her mother, which he denies. 

    The title refers to his plans to stake his fortune on overhauling the infrastructure of Phoenicia with slave labor, and an government agent, Excalibur (Rupert Friend) wants to drive up the price of building materials, which would bankrupt Korda.

    The film takes a lot of turns of Korda going to various associates and conspiring in his scheme to get money and build contacts, while denying that he killed Liesl's mother and finding out the truth about what happened to her. He also has a personal assistant, Bjorn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist. 

    I had trouble completely following this film, and I was in it more for liking the cast and Wes Anderson's trademark storybook look to his films than being invested in the plot. I had to read more in the Wikipedia plot summary to understand a lot that just went over my head, either if the characters spoke too quickly or I wasn't paying close attention. I did like some fun parts of it, like a scene with Michael Cera that is an equivalent to the "hot girl takes off her glasses" trope but with a nerdy guy, letting Michael Cera play against type for a little bit, and a goofy fight scene between Benicio del Toro and Benedict Cumberbatch where I liked the physical comedy in it. The opening title sequence, which plays as an overhead shot as del Toro is in a tub as attendants take care of him and the cast credits run on the screen, was nice to watch the whole scene play out for the length of the opening credits.

    This isn't as memorable as other Wes Anderson films, as I much preferred The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, but it's far from his worst, which was The Darjeeling Limited for me (aside from the moving sequence with Irrfan Kahn). I would think this would be a two and a half star film at best.

Thoughts on Summertime

     On Criterion, I watched Summertime, a 1955 romantic comedy-drama, directed by David Lean and co-written by Lean and H.E. Bates, based on the play The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents. The film stars Katharine Hepburn as Jane, a middle-aged "spinster" secretary from Akron, Ohio, who takes a trip to Venice, Italy, after having saved for it for many years. She's amazed by the gorgeous sights of the city, and staying in a home run by a glamourous widow, Signora Fiorini (Isa Miranda) who rents out the rooms as a pensione. She meets other American tourists, both are pairs of couples, and she feels lonely when surrounded by couples in Venice, wanting her own romance and not to feel so alone. Throughout her trip, she is often pestered by a barefoot Italian street kid, Mauro (Gaetano Autiero), who hustles her for money in exchange for small trinkets and helping her find her way around Venice. Mauro yells like he's a middle-aged Italian man in a little boy's body.

    Jane often wanders around Venice, filming the sights with her mini-camera, taking pictures, and wearing fitted light dresses. On her trip, she meets Renato (Rossano Brazzi), an Italian antiques dealer who had noticed her sitting alone in the Piazza San Marco, and they spark up a romance, while Jane knows that this will be fleeting and end when she returns home.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. I had heard of it before, but confused the plot with Hepburn's 1957 film Desk Set, thinking she was playing a librarian visiting Venice in Summertime, instead of playing a librarian in Desk Set. There's some wonderful quiet scenes when the camera just lingers on Jane as she walks around in a quiet place by herself, like hanging around after her new friends have left, and just sitting in her solitude and embracing the quiet, and Katharine Hepburn does some devastatingly good physical acting in those moments. The film really feels like a solo emotional journey for a female character, and I could see it inspiring more contemporary films like Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), with the depiction of Diane Lane's character as a new resident in Tuscany and finding fleeting romance and making friends with charming locals.

    I wasn't as into the romance part of the film with Jane and Renato, mostly seeing Renato as taking advantage of her as an American tourist and trying to give her a fantasy of a romance with an Italian man rather than something more real. I much preferred the scenes with Jane and Signora Fiorini, where I felt they had more warm chemistry with each other, and while a 1950s mainstream film was not going to outright depict a lesbian relationship, I felt there was more interesting potential in that unexplored story than with a man who seemed to be putting on airs to impress Jane.

    One of my favorite lines in the film was in the finale, when Jane's trip is coming to an end and she's sad that her romance with Renato has reached its conclusion. She says how when she was younger, she would stay at parties too long because she didn't know when to go, but now with him, and being grown up, she knows when to leave. It was very mature and poignant and showed a lot of her character's growth throughout the film and her journey.

    This was a really lovely and interesting movie, and I've found lately that I've watched more David Lean films, but not his major epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago, but more his smaller character-driven films like Brief Encounter, Hobson's Choice, and Summertime. They've been interesting to watch, and I'm happy I checked this one out.

    

Thoughts on Leningrad Cowboys Go America

     On Criterion, I watched the 1989 Finnish road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, about a fictional band called the Leningrad Cowboys, who were from the Siberian tundra and had exaggerated pompadour/mullet hairstyles (also called a quiff, from the 1950s British Teddy Boy movement), long Winklepicker shoes. They're trying to make it as a working band, playing their version of polka with guitars and horns. Their manager Vladimir (Matti Pellonpää) is trying to promote them, but they keep getting shuffled around to different countries and markets. A Russian man tells them to go to America, that "they'll buy anything" there. They head to New York City, followed by Igor (Kari Kyösti Väänänen), the mute village idiot who they don't invite along but he stows away anyway. They bring along their band member who had frozen outside while practicing music, and carry him in a coffin with them and tie the box to the top of their used Cadillac limousine.

    In New York City, they go to CBGB's, and the manager takes a listen, then tells them to go to Mexico to play at a wedding, and to change their music, that Americans like rock music. So the band goes on the road to drive from New York to Mexico, playing bar gigs along the way, and learning to adapt to the U.S. and local tastes. When they encounter a rough biker crowd at one bar, they switch to playing "Born to Be Wild" to win them over. At a bar on the Mexican border, they play "Tequila" to please the Mexican audience. They add rockabilly riffs to their music, blending in with their retro 1950s hairstyles. 

    It's a quirky and unusual movie, and the director Jim Jarmusch has a cameo as a car salesman from whom they buy the limousine, and Jarmusch's films seem like a clear influence on how Kaurismäki sees America, like with his 1980s films Down by Law and Stranger Than Paradise. The film has title cards marking the days and locations of the band's road trip, and at one point, they get arrested for a minor crime, and spend five days in jail, and the sequence is a montage of them in the jail cell banging beer cans and making music with them, with "third day" and "fifth day" punctuating in-between, until the cops just let them go, likely just to get rid of them.

    I've seen a couple of Kaurismäki's films, like Le Havre (2011) and Fallen Leaves (2023). He's a really interesting and funny filmmaker, with a deadpan sense of humor, finding humor in mundane yet offbeat moments. I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts, William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, who are film critics, did an episode listing their Top Ten lists of favorite road trip movies, and one of them included Leningrad Cowboys Go America, and it sounded weird and funny and interesting to me. This stood out as a droll and standout film of the late 1980s, which got a sequel in 1994, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses. I'm glad that I checked out this odd film.

Thoughts on Drylongso

    On Criterion, I watched Drylongso, a 1998 coming-of-age drama directed by Cauleen Smith and written by Smith and Salim Akil. The film was shot on 16MM film in Oakland, CA, and explores themes of race, gender, and identity, focusing on a Black female photography student named Pica (Toby Smith) who takes Polaroid photos of young Black boys and men in their neighborhood, because she fears they will be lost to prison or violence, thinking they are like an "endangered species" and will disappear without anyone remembering them. Her college professor is skeptical towards her project, likely seeing it as too dark subject matter, despite it being a close reality for many in their neighborhood. She lives with her mother and grandmother, and works a night job papering walls, which puts her safety at risk, as there are news reports of a serial killer going around in the neighborhood, with some of the young men she's photographed as their victims.

    Pica meets Tobi (April Barnett) a young woman who is being abused by her boyfriend, and dresses as a guy on the streets, in a durag and flannel shirt and jeans, to avoid being harassed by men, and is initially mistaken as a male by Pica when she asks to take her photograph. They become friends and talk about their shared fears for their safety. I sometimes got a bit of a queer vibe through their connection with each other, though they stay platonic friends.

    Malik (Will Power) is a local guy in the neighborhood who is friends with Pica, with some light flirtation going on, and he keeps asking Pica when she's going to take his picture. Pica doesn't take his photo likely because she's afraid that by taking his photo, it seals his fate, and dooms him to the same tragic end that she sees happening to Black men in her home. She wants to preserve memories and legacies of the men in her neighborhood, while being keenly aware of the futures they have due to class and race. She is at both an archivist and an artist, a memory keeper, and her work is crucial in making sure that community members are not forgotten.

    The film has a quiet, personal feel to it, where there aren't any well-known actors in the film, so it's easier to get involved in the film as though the characters were real. The neighborhood in Oakland is depicted as a close-knit, working class/middle class community where everyone knows each other, Smith based the film on her experiences working at the Haight Asbury Free Clinic and the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, where she would hear about Black men being murdered or going to prison, while also hearing from young Black women about teen pregnancy and a complicated welfare system, as well as having to ward off violence from men. Smith said in a 1998 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: "I was seeing young black girls 8 or 9 years old who really needed someone to care for them. I got tired of seeing young black women being talked about in terms of blame -- teen pregnancy, welfare -- whereas young black men were being talked about as victims in need of defense. Girls are treated with such disrespect. Pica came out of that frustration." 

    I heard of this film through the YouTuber Yhara zayd, who posted a short video review of the film for her Patreon subscribers, of which I am one, and I found her insight fascinating, giving a spotlight to a hidden gem of 1990s indie films. She discusses how Pica's method of using a Polaroid camera, as opposed to a camera where she would have to develop the film later, speaks to not wanting to waste any time, taking as much photos as she can while using a camera that was becoming obsolete as technology. She astutely states how even though the film is centered on a Black female character, who befriends another Black woman, the film is largely remembered for being about the erasure of Black men, which I also headlined my review with because it is a major focus in the film. However, the friendship between Pica and Tobi is important, as they can find self-preservation when with each other, as well as protecting one another from violence by men. She notes how Pica keeps people at bay to protect her emotions, while Tobi, living in a more upwardly mobile neighborhood, feels like her feminine appearance makes her a target for abuse, and feels like she is in a gilded cage.

    It's a really special, understated small film, and I'm glad that I watched it thanks to Yhara zayd's recommendation.