Thoughts on Materialists

     At the Angelika Film Centre this week, I went to see Materialists, a 2025 romantic film written and directed by Celine Song. The film centers on Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a failed actor who works as a successful agent at a matchmaking company, who has matched people leading to nine marriages, and sees love and romance as mathematical equations, matching people based on stats and similar backgrounds and levels of attractiveness and incomes and class status, and she herself wants to marry a rich man and be well-taken care. She makes an annual salary of $80K at her job, lives in a first floor apartment in Manhattan, and can easily pitch her services to people by offering it as a way to enhance their lives and customize partner matches for them.

    At the wedding of one of her matches, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the groom's brother, who comes from a wealthy family in finances, works in private equity, has a $12 million penthouse apartment, and is the perfect package, according to Lucy's standards. She calls him a "unicorn," saying that he is the kind of perfect match a client would hope to find, but wouldn't able to find someone who is rich, handsome, kind, stylish, all in one package, and settling for what is more attainable. She tries inviting Harry to have a membership at the matchmaking service, but he wants to date her. She refuses at first, saying she grew up poor (which is funny to hear, given Johnson comes from a Hollywood family going back two generations), is in her thirties and older than the typical early-twentysomething most older men want to date, that her looks will fade sooner than later, etc. But Harry is attracted to her, and they have a whirlwind romance, fulfilling her fantasies of being swept up by a rich man.

    But at the same time she meets Harry at the wedding, she runs into John (Chris Evans), who is working as a caterer there and continues to pursue acting. They end up reconnecting, and he still has lingering feelings for her, but she remembers that she broke up with him because she hated that he was poor and always broke, driving a rundown car, living in a grimy apartment with roommates, and still seemed immature well into adulthood. She felt guilty for resenting him for being poor, but that she herself wanted financial stability from a partner, not just earning her own income. John is 37, working catering jobs while acting in a play in a black box theater, and clearly outgrowing the messy chaos of living with roommates who don't wash the dishes or leave used condoms on the kitchen floor.

    When John learns that Lucy is dating Harry, he is polite about it, but does question Lucy about it, and it becomes more of a complicated love triangle between her feelings for Harry and John, of wanting money and financial security vs. being poor with someone with whom she has history.

    I was mixed on the movie. I appreciated that Song was exploring the mechanical feelings of dating and finding someone compatible based on stats and money, as well as superficial values on age and appearances, and there are funny montage scenes where Lucy is talking to potential clients who have rigid criteria for their dating preferences, and Lucy's quiet sarcasm (as Johnson charmingly displays in press interviews) is fun to watch, like when she goes off on someone who essentially wants the company to create a man from scratch based on her two page list of requirements, being like "I cannot build you a husband." Those scenes worked really well, and the film opens with a sweet prologue of early humans displaying courtship with flowers and the man placing a flower tied like a ring on the woman's finger. 

    Plus, the film had beautiful cinematography by Shabier Kirchner, who worked on Song's directorial debut Past Lives (2023) and Steve McQueen's five-part anthology series Small Axe (2020). I especially liked a dinner scene between Lucy and Harry where the camera is stationery and shows them in profile, having conversations in long takes, which created more quiet intimacy for the characters and the audience in that sequence.

    But I couldn't get invested in the characters themselves, because they felt empty to me. Johnson is charismatic and funny in interviews, but when she's doing the dramatic scenes, comes off as flat and wooden, and lacking romantic on-screen chemistry with either Pascal or Evans. Pascal looks lost in this film, even if he does get to have a good scene much later on that shows more hidden depth to his character beyond his wealthy appearances. And Evans looked mentally checked out during the romantic scenes, and I didn't find it believable with his Hollywood superhero looks that his character would be slumming it in a crappy apartment at 37 (nearly 45 in real life) with roommates, scrapping by to earn a living.

    I couldn't feel enough history between Lucy and John's backstory as a former couple to root for them to get back together, being unsure if they only broke up because of her class issues or if there were other mitigating factors. I also felt like her romance with Harry was more based in fantasy than reality, because I didn't feel like either of them got to know each other as real people, just being interested in each other for superficial reasons.

    I also got angry at a subplot that happens with a tertiary character, that I felt was completely unnecessary and cruel to the character, and while I got it was supposed to serve as a contrast to the romantic fantasy that Lucy was living with Harry, I was still mad that the movie took those directions, dumping it on a character who felt like Lucy was treating in a patronizing way, and their story got wrapped up way too quickly in a way that I felt was unrealistic.

    I preferred Past Lives because I felt more of a genuine connection and intimacy between the characters that I didn't feel in this, and I liked its quiet simplicity, which this film had in some parts, but lost when it went towards more Hollywood-type third act drama. I'm glad that Celine Song got a sophomore follow-up, and a wider audience, I just felt parts of this movie felt underdeveloped and could have been improved with better choices in screenwriting and casting.

Thoughts on The Swimmer

   On Criterion, I watched The Swimmer, a 1968 drama written and directed by Eleanor and Frank Perry, based on John Cheever's short story of the same name. The film starred Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill, a middle-aged, fit, and wealthy advertising executive who lives in an affluent suburb in Connecticut, and he drops by a pool party held by old friends, wearing only a bathing suit, and having drinks with them. He's popular, with many rich friends, and skates through life, repeatedly referring to his daughters "playing tennis at home." He looks over the hilly area where his home is further south, and connects a "river" of swimming pools at his friends' homes that lead to his home, and decides he is going to swim his way home, walking barefoot in his bathing suit and taking swims in each pool. His friends think his plan is amusing, though they are also nursing hangovers from a party the night before, so they may not be thinking clearly.

    So Ned sets on his way, walking through the woods and dropping up unexpectedly at his friends' homes, and as he makes his odyssey home, the people he meets with are from his past, and reveal more about his character as being a shallow, cheap, snobby person. He sees Julie (Janet Landgard), a former babysitter who watched his kids, who is now a young woman of 20, and confesses that she had a crush on him as a teen, only for her crush to become more disillusioned when she briefly joins him on his journey. He stops by friends who are a nudist couple, who aren't bothered by his eccentricities but are put off by his posturing. He is condescending to the hired driver (Bernie Hamilton) of one of his friends, asking about where the previous driver Steve is, who the new driver doesn't know, and being oblivious to the new driver being put off by his classist attitude towards "the help."

    As his path home becomes increasingly grim, the film becomes more of an allegory about Ned living in a fantasy, refusing to accept realities of his true character or how people really see him, and Lancaster is excellent in starting off as a broad-chested, handsome man and becoming a broken shell of a person with his whole life shattered, having a psychotic break with reality. 

    This film was excellent, feeling like a horror film without being classified as one, because it's about an entitled upper-class man having a crisis where, beyond his sunny demeanor, all of his ugliness comes to light, and especially pointed out by people he's hurt and stepped on (especially in an excellent scene with Janice Rule as his former mistress), until he looks like a loser standing in the rain in just his bathing suit, a complex performance of vulnerability by a symbol of machismo like Burt Lancaster, known for noir films and tough guy roles.

    I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts were each giving their top ten list of the best 24-hour movies in an episode from last year, and thought it sounded really interesting, and I'm glad I watched it, it was a great movie.

Thoughts on Bring Her Back

   Last week, I saw the 2025 Australian supernatural horror film Bring Her Back, directed by Danny and Michael Philippou and written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman. The film focuses on step-siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), who are placed in foster care after finding their father dead in the shower. Andy is a few months away from turning 18, and wants to apply for guardianship of Piper, who is also visually impaired. They don't want to be split up in the foster care system, so they are placed in the care of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor whose daughter Cathy (who also was visually impaired) recently passed away, so she is excited to take care of Piper, seeing her as a surrogate daughter, and showing much more favoritism towards her than to Andy, who she views as a troublemaker. Laura is also taking care of her mute foster child Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who keeps acting out in disturbing ways and is a threat to the pet cat (and thankfully no actual harm comes to the cat during the movie).

    Laura is all smiles and cheeriness, playing up that kind of positivity that Hawkins portrayed in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, but views Andy as a threat, who sees more red flags going on than Piper is aware of. She goes through his phone messages, she makes him kiss his father's corpse at his funeral, she blames him if Oliver gets out of his room and destroys things, and she manipulates things to make Andy seem dangerous to get rid of him and have Piper to herself. Andy is determined to protect Piper from Laura's danger, and keeps trying to reach out to authorities for help, but Laura keeps finding ways to swing things back around to her favor.

    Sally Hawkins is fantastic in this film, and is great at playing up the manipulative personality of a woman who is grieving the loss of her daughter, and going to extremes to want to "bring her back," which includes conducting occult practices, as seen in VHS found footage tapes of demonic cult rituals. Laura also takes advantage of Piper's disability, lying to her about her surroundings whenever there is anything disturbing, since she can see blurry shapes and colors but not definite images like a sighted person can.

    Andy is torn between grieving the loss of his father, while also remembering his father as abusive towards him, but affectionate towards Piper, so Piper has a more loving memory of him than he did, and having nightmare flashbacks of his father when he's in the shower, reliving the trauma of finding him dead there.

    The child actors excel in this film, especially with Phillips playing a disturbed child, in difficult scenes where he is performing twisted acts, especially a scene involving a knife, so hopefully he was well taken care of while filming horror scenes like that. Wong shines more in the last third of the film, as she as Piper becomes more aware of Laura's nature, and having to defend herself while being visually impaired, which makes for some really suspenseful scenes. And Barratt holds the film together with a lot of vulnerability as Andy, as a traumatized kid on the brink of adulthood struggling with grief while trying to protect his sister from danger.

    There's a lot of dread in the film, and a frequent use of water as a threat, like the empty swimming pool filling up with rainwater, hearing rain tapping outside, the isolated feeling of Laura's home, and the loneliness while the main characters are all grieving in their own ways.

    I really liked this film, and found it interesting in being about grief and focusing more so on character studies. I wasn't as into the demonic cult stuff, especially if it got too gory, but the film was held together by solid acting performances and a bleak narrative that was compelling to watch.

Thoughts on Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

     Yesterday, I went to the Angelika Film Center and saw Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a 2024 French romantic comedy written and directed by Laura Piani. The film stars Camille Rutherford as Agathe, a young Parisian woman who works at Shakespeare & Company with her best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly). She lives with her sister and her six-year-old nephew, and is struggling with trauma since her parents were killed in an automobile accident in which she was injured. She takes her bicycle everywhere and is afraid to get in cars. She is told by her writing teacher not to write "cheap romances" anymore and to get out of her comfort zone, but when she's drinking sake in a Chinese restaurant, she imagines a man's face at the bottom of her cup and fantasizes about him, inspiring her to write romances. She has confused, unrequited feelings for Félix, who is a casual player in dating, and she hasn't had sex in two years. She isn't into the dating app culture or swiping, and is lonely and pines for more of a romantic connection.

    Her sister tells her she needs to break out of her funk and get out of her head. Then, she gets an invite in the mail to the Jane Austen Residency in England, a two-week writing retreat. Félix, knowing that she adores Austen and identifies with Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion (for being an old maid), secretly sent her work to them and got her accepted. She reluctantly goes, taking the Channel ferry across from Paris to London, and she kisses Félix and departs.

    At the ferry's terminal in England, she is picked up by Oliver (Charlie Anson), a distant descendant of Jane Austen, who is not a fan of her work, and takes her to the retreat in a mansion, hosted by his elderly parents. There, she meets the other writers, and struggles with writer's block, and over the course of the time, struggles with her romantic feelings towards Félix and later Oliver, who starts off seeming arrogant but opens up more to Agathe about his personal struggles.

    I really enjoyed this film. I liked how it was mostly about a woman struggling with her creative process as a writer, dealing with trauma from her past, and learning how to get out of her writer's block to be an artist and let go. I wasn't as into the love triangle parts, finding it predictable as who she would end up with, but it's a romantic comedy, so I knew that would be a part of it going in. 

    Rutherford is really lovely and charming as a lead, with romantic dark brown curls, and is French-British in real life and fluent in French and English, as is her character, and the film is written so that the majority of characters are bilingual in both languages, easily switching between both languages whenever they want. I really enjoyed her connection with Oliver's mom Beth (Liz Crowther), an old English woman speaking to her in French and being very hospitable and sweet, and encouraging her in her talents and passion as a writer. I also liked when she developed friendships with two other women (Annabelle Lengronne; Lola Peprow) at the residency, of them being supportive of each other and going out to a bar to sing and get drunk and have fun. In the film opening, there's a fun scene of Agathe in the bookstore singing along to the song "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke, and it's really adorable and cute.

    I thought this was a really nice movie, a sweet bilingual romantic comedy, and I'm happy I checked it out.

Thoughts on Sister Midnight

    At the Angelika Film Center this week, I went to see Sister Midnight, a 2024 black comedy written and directed by Karan Kandhari. The film stars Radhika Apte as Uma, a young Indian woman who is dragged into an arranged marriage with Gopal (Ashok Pathak), someone she had only briefly met when they were kids, and they live in a shack on a busy street in Mumbai, with hardly any privacy between them and a mattress on the floor to sleep on, and she is clueless on being a homemaker or how to connect with her husband. Her husband will be away all day working, and she'll be sitting at home, bored out of her mind. Or Uma will struggle with cooking, go to her neighbor Sheetal (Chhaya Kadam), and Sheetal will teach her the basics of cooking rice, throwing big chunks of vegetables in it to make her man happy, and soaking lentils, and be like, "The rest you have to figure out yourself."

    Uma will argue with Gopal, who will come off as awkward, being as clueless as she is as to how to make a marriage and a life with a stranger, and be berated by her and not knowing what to say back. Uma is mad that she is expected to be a housewife with a lack of domestic skills, and that Gopal doesn't challenge her right back and acts immature and childish, which makes her more contemptuous of him.

    Uma decides to go get a job to get out of the home and try to escape her boredom, and she gets a job as a night cleaner in a building, developing a quiet friendship with the elevator operator. When she asks why he looks so sad, he goes, "God painted my face this way." She travels far for her job, both riding halfway on the elevator operator's bike and walking. She gets greeted by women in her neighborhood who initially seem to be mocking her, calling her "hey, cutie," and asking what whitening cream she uses, but eventually she sits with them and finds that they are just normal, regular women. She will also keep feeling sick, not eating, and looking pale (hence the colorism comments), but then be dismissed by the doctor for just having a "stomach bug," and not getting any real help for her obvious problems.

    With Uma's frustration in her life, she develops peculiar behaviors, descends into feral psychotic hallucinations, and the film takes much more of a horror comedy turn, and I liked how goofy and weird it got, and how it just kept going with it. The film has a bit of a Wes Anderson feel with the camera blocking and set design, and has a rock and pop soundtrack of The Band's "The Weight" and music by Buddy Holly and Motorhead. 

    I really liked Apte's performance, in how Uma looks pissed for a lot of the movie, and is unhinged, vulnerable, and feels lost in her life. There are scenes where there is a lot of busy things going on in the background, with people and cars and vendors, which makes Uma look confused and out of place, a misfit in her surroundings.

    I went into this blind, not wanting to know too much about the plot, and I really enjoyed how it felt realistic and relatable for the first half with the misfit couple feeling isolated, then it got more bonkers and weird to watch and I got into that too. So I'm happy that I checked this out.

Thoughts on Final Destination: Bloodlines

   Yesterday, I went to see Final Destination: Bloodlines. The film was directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (Freaks, Kim Possible) and written by Guy Busick (Ready or Not, Abigail) and Lori Evans Taylor. I liked it a lot. It still had goofy death scenes, but I liked that they expanded the story by having someone in the 1960s prevent a disaster from happening because of her premonition, this being the collapse of a high-rise restaurant tower, and it leads to decades of people who avoided the disaster being killed in gruesome situations, and that her descendants weren’t meant to exist, and now they are getting picked off one by one.

    The basic premise of the horror series is that someone has a premonition of a disaster, tries to warn people and saves themselves and several others, the disaster happens, and Death comes after them because they were fated to die in the tragedy. This movie switched it up, having a whole blood family line being cursed, so it made it more interesting.

    I liked that the characters weren’t just made to all be jerk teenagers that you want to see die, but a regular family where you feel bad when they die, even if the death is ridiculous and over the top.

    There’s also a lot of interesting talk about the cost that the grandma Iris' (Brec Bassinger and Gabrielle Rose as young and old Iris) premonition had on the family, with her being overprotective and fearful that everything was going to kill them, leading to a lot of mental illness and family estrangement over the years. Even though Iris is proven right, her scrapbook of calculations of how any random thing could kill someone, as well as collecting horrific obituaries of the survivors who avoided the disaster, does make her look insane, living in a heavily armed house in the middle of nowhere.

    I did like that the movie had fake out moments of not always predicting how a scenario would play out, or someone else dying instead of the expected one. A whole scenario focuses on a piece of glass in an iced drink, and keeping suspense over who is going to be the one to swallow the glass, and it pays off in an unexpected way.

    At one point, characters learn that they can break the curse if they die and are revived, and want to try to intentionally die so the ER can revive them from flatlining, and I’m thinking “I saw Flatliners, that’s just going to cause a new set of problems.”

    Tony Todd, who passed away in 2024, appeared in his final cameo in the series, and while he doesn’t die in the movie, his character does talk about being terminally ill and accepting death, and the movie gave him a classy send-off scene with respect and dedicated the movie to him.

    There’s an impressive stunt sequence during the disaster premonition where a stunt performer is walking fully on fire, in a take that holds on her for a good amount of time, and the stunt was performed by Yvette Ferguson, who is 71 and came out of retirement for the fire stunt in the scene, and may be the oldest person to do a stunt onscreen, or a stunt of that level.

    Most of the young cast was fine, though I felt like Richard Harmon was a scene stealer as Erik, one of the cousins who works in a tattoo shop and has a sarcastic, dickish personality. The actor’s charisma made him a big standout in the cast, and he was the oldest in the young cast at age 33.

    I’ve seen most of the series, mostly liking Final Destination and Final Destination 3, and this was really good as well.

Thoughts on Eye of God

  On Criterion, they are highlighting five films that actor Tim Blake Nelson has directed, and I watched his 1997 directorial debut Eye of God, a crime drama in the style of a Southern Gothic tragedy, and thought it was fantastic. I initially turned it on because it starred Martha Plimpton, an actress I've always liked, and I've seen interviews with Nelson where he sounds like he would be the cool acting professor at a college. It's not surprising that when an actor directs a film, they often get a lot of talented character actors in their cast, like with Sean Penn's directorial films, and this film had a cast of talent like a young Nick Stahl, Richard Jenkins, Hal Holbrook, Kevin Anderson, Margo Martindale, and Mary Kay Place.

    The film is told in a nonlinear narrative, which makes more sense over time, and the film doesn't have any intertitles or chapters like "Five months earlier" or "Two days later," so it's up to the audience to figure out the timeline of events. The film takes places in a small rural town in Oklahoma, a dying former oil town where jobs are scarce, and centers on two seemingly unrelated narratives: one in which a 14-year old boy, Tommy (Stahl), is found by the police covered in blood and traumatized by the tragedy that he has witnessed; and a young waitress, Ainsley (Plimpton), who meets the ex-con Jack (Anderson), that she had been in correspondence with during his incarceration, and quickly marries, despite barely knowing him. Their two storylines do intersect over the course of the film.

    Plimpton was fantastic in this film, as a lonely young woman whose father was abusive and died in a fire in a work accident, who latches onto this inmate, seeing a kind soul who has become a born-again Christian and found Jesus. As their relationship develops, his real nature comes out as being abusive and controlling, as well as antagonizing his own parole officer (Jenkins) over his and his wife's inability to conceive children. Anderson brought out this chilling menace in the character that worked perfectly, as someone who used religion to control his wife, like not wanting her to leave the house and cutting off her contact with other people, and to act superior to the townspeople and local police force.

    The film is really grim and sad, but so gripping and stunning to watch, I had to sit quietly for a few moment as it ended, not wanting to disrupt it with other media sounds, to let it sink in with me. I really liked this film a lot, and want to check out other films Nelson has directed, as I'm only familiar with him as a character actor who has played a lot of goofy Southern characters, despite his more serious demeanor in interviews.

Thoughts on High and Low

    Last week on Criterion I watched High and Low, a 1963 Japanese crime thriller directed by Akira Kurosawa, loosely adapted from the novel King’s Ransom by Evan Hunter. It starred Toshiro Mifune as a businessman struggling for control of the shoe company of which he is a board member. He negotiates a buyout of the company with his life savings, then a kidnapper mistakenly abducts his chauffeur’s son, thinking it’s the businessman’s son, then decides to extort him for 30 million yen anyway.

    I liked how this movie, over the course of two and a half hours, was broken up into three parts: the businessman and the kidnapper: the events after the crime and the police trying to find the kidnapper and his accomplices; and the kidnapper himself. There’s a lot about class commentary, as the businessman is wealthy and lives in a house up high, while the kidnapper is down in the slums and resents the rich capitalists. It was a really interesting movie, and since Spike Lee has his American remake of it coming out soon, Highest 2 Lowest, I wanted to watch the original.

    I also liked seeing Tatsuya Nakadai as the chief inspector in the kidnapping case, as I just mainly know him from The Human Condition film series from the late fifties/early sixties.

Thoughts on The Meddler

    On Tubi yesterday, I rewatched The Meddler, a 2015 comedy written and directed by Lorene Scafaria. Susan Sarandon starred as Marnie, a recently widowed Brooklyn native who moves from New Jersey to Los Angeles to be close to her daughter Lori (Rose Byrne), a T.V. screenwriter. Marnie is financially set for life from her late husband’s inheritance to her, so she has a lot of free time and often butts into her daughter’s home and personal life, bugging her to get back together with her ex-boyfriend, who has already moved on with a new girlfriend. Lori is depressed over the breakup and hates her mother hovering over her, essentially telling her mom to get some hobbies. Marnie even visits her daughter’s therapist, but the therapist guides Marnie to figure out her own issues.

    So she volunteers at the hospital, uses her finances to pay for the vow renewal ceremony of Lori’s friends, makes friends with an Apple Store employee and drives him to night school, and inadvertently becomes an extra on a film shoot. She also dates a retired cop (J.K. Simmons), who is divorced and is estranged from one of his daughters, and they connect over their issues as parents and boundaries with adult children.

    It’s a fairly light movie, but I really liked it. There are recurring scenes where Marnie sings along to the same Beyoncé song in the car, and Sarandon’s Brooklyn accent sounds natural and not forced. There’s a fun scene where, after the cop shows her his chicken coop and gives her some eggs, she cooks an omelet, and the eggs are so delicious that she is mopping up the egg with bread to get every last taste from the plate.

    I liked that even if Marnie does overstep her boundaries, she isn’t made out to be a cartoonish monster or oblivious to her actions, she comes off as a realistic character. She is grieving her husband, but still wants to live life and not live in the past, hence finding friends and a community in her L.A. life. It’s a really nice movie, and I’m glad I watched it again.

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Thoughts on Blithe Spirit

    On Tubi, I watched Blithe Spirit, the 1945 British supernatural black comedy directed by David Lean, co-written by Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and associate producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, based off of Noel Coward's 1941 play of the same name. It starred Rex Harrison and Kay Hammond, and was a delightful weird story about ghosts and marital drama and poking fun at stuffy British colonial culture. The film was shot in Technicolor, and has a glorious effect when it comes to the visuals and ghostly apparitions.

    Charles Condomine (Harrison) is a writer who is seeking research for an occult-based novel he is writing, and invites the eccentric medium Madame Arcati (a fantastic and scene-stealing Margaret Rutherford) to his home in Kent to perform a seance. Charles' first wife, Elvira (Hammond) died seven years prior from pneumonia, and he has been married for five years to his second wife, Ruth (Constance Cummings). Charles is a typical stiff upper lip old-school Englishman, and goes along with the seance, not being a believer while Madame Arcati is completely serious, talking about communicating with Daphne, a seven-year old girl with a cold who died in 1884. When Madame Arcati performs the seance, the table will rap one for yes, two for no, and she speaks with the voice of Daphne, singing an old childhood song. 

    But, to Charles' surprise, he sees and hears the ghost of Elvira, who enters with a greenish tint to her body, with an ethereal nature that Charles described her as having had in life, and teasing and mocking him. Nobody else can see or hear her, so naturally Charles is treated like he's out of his mind. There are comedic misunderstandings where Charles will argue with Elvira, calling her a guttersnipe and telling her to shut up, and Ruth thinking those insults are directed at her, it's some good back and forth angry banter. As Elvira makes her appearances, usually at night, she keeps pestering Charles about his current marriage, thinking he married a dull person and insulting Ruth, while Ruth, slowly realizing that Elvira's spirit is actually there, is resenting her and her influence over Charles.

    The film takes more of a black comedy turn, with a plot development I wasn't expecting, and I found this movie to be really fun and delightful. Kay Hammond is clearly having fun playing up Elvira's cunning, flirtatious nature, pressing Charles' emotional buttons. Margaret Rutherford had this gleeful charm to her as the medium, Constance Cummings was good as the "straight man" to everyone else's antics, seemingly the only person with any actual sense going on, and Rex Harrison's lines were full of vocabulary words I had to look up, like "irascible," meaning to be easily angered, and frequently saying "What the devil?!" The writing was really sharp, with banter being exchanged like a table tennis game, and made the film feel very light and breezy.

    I'm happy I checked this out, as I had vaguely heard of it, and knew of the 2020 remake with Dan Stevens, Leslie Mann, and Isla Fisher, but didn't know the plot outside of "ghost of first wife comes back to haunt husband and second wife." This was fun to see, and came out around the time of Lean's wonderful WWII romantic drama Brief Encounter, about working-class, ordinary people. That movie as a contrast with this one about rich people makes for an interesting double feature.

Thoughts on Saving Face

    On Criterion, I watched the 2004 comedy-drama Saving Face, written and directed by Alice Wu, centering on inter-generational family drama, queer issues, Chinese culture in New York City, and traditions. I had heard of this film before, and really liked Wu's 2020 Netflix film The Half of It, as a teen lesbian take on Cyrano de Bergerac, but I hadn't seen this film, which was groundbreaking at the time as a Hollywood movie that centered on Chinese-Americans, the first since The Joy Luck Club over a decade prior. The film briefly references that film and The Last Emperor (which star Joan Chen had been one of the leads in) in a video store scene, where the film compares Hollywood depictions of Chinese women to general audiences to pornographic depictions of Chinese women in films geared towards white men.

    The film centers on Dr. Wilhemnia "Wil" Pang (Michelle Krusiec), a surgeon living in New York City, who is a lesbian but is closeted to her mother Hwei-Lan (Joan Chen) and her mother's friends. Hwei-Lan's friends are Chinese women who live in Flushing, Queens and often gossip about each other, especially if others don't stick to traditionalist mores. Hwei-Lan is trying to set her daughter up with her friend's son to get her married, but Wil is attracted to Vivian (Lynn Chen), a dancer with the New York City Ballet who has more of a freer, sexier air about her, is the daughter of one of Hwei-Lan's friends, and is recently divorced. Vivian's father turns out to be Wil's boss at the hospital, and she is struggling with her own relationship with her father due to wanting to pursue modern dance and leave the classical ballet world.

    Wil discovers that her mother has been kicked out of her parents' home due to becoming pregnant at age 48 and out of wedlock, and her father shames her as if she is a child, talking down to her and worrying about what others will think of him, and she holds her head down in shame as if she is a young girl and not a grown woman of nearly 50 years old. She refuses to say who the father is, and she moves in with Wil, where they have a relationship where Hwei-Lan speaks Mandarin Chinese while Wil will respond in both Mandarin Chinese and English, being the daughter of immigrant parents where it is common to respond in English to the parent's native language as a bi-cultural person.

 

    Joan Chen delivered a scene-stealing performance in this film, one of the best performances of her career. She plays Hwei-Lan in a shy, reserved way, feeling ambivalent about having this child but not considering abortion, and wanting to please her father and not break family traditions, including when her father is trying to marry her off to a friend because he doesn't want her to be alone or face the shame of being an unwed mother. And despite that she is clearly a beautiful woman, her spirit has been broken and she feels embarrassed to go out on dates at her age. 

    But her commitment to being traditional also has led her to deny the truth about her daughter's sexuality, not wanting to accept her being gay. Wil had told Vivian that her mother had once caught her with a girl and never brought it up again or acknowledged it, pushing her to date men. This denial ends up hurting Wil's burgeoning relationship with Vivian, where she's too scared to kiss Vivian in public or be open about her sexuality, worried about what others will think, and not live her life publicly as openly queer.

    Chen and Krusiec have this familial warmth between the two of them that makes them believable as mother and daughter, showing the intimacy and fraught secrets in their relationship, when both would avoid uncomfortable truths or answering questions. But due to their closer relationship and breaking down those barriers, both are able to live more openly and more confidently with their truthful selves, changing their adherence to traditional values and repressive family cultures, and caring less about "saving face," the concept of performing roles to maintain the family's "proper" reputation in their community

    I really loved this film, and connected to it a lot, despite not being queer or from an immigrant household. I really connected to the chokehold that upholding traditional ways of life can have on a person's life and mental health, and wanting to please family members at the risk of one's own happiness or freedom, to keep the peace and avoid confrontations. It's a really wonderful film, and I'm glad I watched it.

Thoughts on Sinners

     Last Sunday, I went with my friends to the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan to see Sinners, the 2025 musical/gangster/horror film written and directed by Ryan Coogler. The film was a powerhouse experience to behold, both being inspired by other films (From Dusk Till Dawn, The Thing, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Devil in a Blue Dress), and being a commentary on white supremacy trying to take from Black culture and possess it, especially with the transcendent power of Black music styles.

    The film is set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta, in Clarksdale and identical twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown after working for the Chicago Outfit, the mob led by Al Capone. They stole money from both the Italian and Irish mobs, and come back with beer and wine and buy a sawmill from a racist landowner so they can start a juke joint for the Black community in Clarksdale. When the twins say, "So does this mean none of your Klan buddies will be coming around here?," he laughs and says, "The Klan doesn't exist anymore," when he is a lot closer to the Klan than they know. 

    The twins find their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton, in his screen debut and known as a singer who is just 20 years old currently), an aspiring blues musician whose preacher father (Saul Williams) disapproves of the music, connecting it with the Devil and saying the music brings in evil supernatural forces, with an attitude of "if you dance with the Devil, the Devil will follow you home."

    The film does distinguish the twins to the audience by having Smoke dressed in blue and Stack dressed in red, and both of them having different temperaments, though both are gangsters and react with violence when provoked. As the film is set over the course of a day and a night, the twins spend the time gathering support from locals to provide food and entertainment to the juke joint, like the Chinese shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) as suppliers, Smoke's estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) as a cook, fieldworker Cornbread (Omar Miller) as a bouncer, and blues pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo in a standout performance) and Pearline (Jayme Lawson) as performers. Stack also reconnects with his ex-girlfriend, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a woman with Black heritage who passes for white, who resents that he left her to go to Chicago.

    But while they are planning this party, especially for the community who work as sharecroppers in the cotton fields (a commentary on how, despite the film taking place roughly 70 years after the Reconstruction period, that poor Black people in the South would still be working in the field for poverty wages), an Irish vampire, Remmick (Jack O'Connell) flees from Choctaw vampire hunters and turns a Klansmen couple into vampires, and plan to infiltrate the local Black community to turn them into vampires and take from their culture, like trying to enter the juke joint and playing their Irish music outside as a way of connecting as musicians.

    The film takes a lot of fascinating turns as a mix of genres, and I don't want to reveal too much, because it's best going in cold and not knowing a lot aside from the initial set-ups. I really enjoyed how the film felt layered and had this controlled chaotic feeling, and that a movie that combined excellent music sequences, gangster violence, and vampires could work so well, with characters that I liked sitting with, and could just enjoy watching even if there was no horror film, to just enjoy the party scenes for a big chunk of the film. Michael B. Jordan carries the film well with playing twin characters, and makes them distinct, so that even when they are interacting with each other onscreen, I could believe it and not think about any movie magic happening behind the scenes. 

    Hailee Steinfeld was excellent as Mary, with a sultry performance as a woman who felt in between different worlds as a white-passing Black woman, and her role reminded me a lot of Jennifer Beals' performance in Devil in a Blue Dress, where she also played a Black woman who passes for white. There was a scene in Sinners where Stack doesn't want Mary to talk to him in public because he doesn't want white people to think he's bothering a seemingly white woman, and Devil in a Blue Dress had a scene where Denzel Washington's character, in the setting of the late 1940s, is standing around at night waiting for someone, and a white woman approaches him and is trying to chat him up, and he's trying to avoid talking to her or looking at her, because he sees a group of white dockworkers who would think he was trying to bother a white woman, and is trying to avoid trouble. It was interesting for me to notice those parallels, since the film is rightfully compared to From Dusk Till Dawn because of the genre switch midway through the film with the vampires showing up, and I wanted to highlight an underrated noir film that this film may have taken inspiration from.

    Delroy Lindo hasn't had a role this good since 2020's Da Five Bloods, and he's fantastic in this film, as a blues musician who is a local legend, but also dismissed as the town drunk, and he's always been a great character actor that gets overlooked, so I'm happy that Coogler recognized his talent and gave him a meaty role to play. 

    And Miles Caton, as a very young singer, acts as the audience surrogate to introduce us into the story and among the locals, and has a fantastic voice and really gets into the 1930s blues setting of the film, he was a great joy to watch as a "non-actor" among the cast.

    I'm happy that this film has been so successful, as an original film with an unusual mix of genres as a musical and horror film and gangster film, and I really enjoyed seeing this with my friends at the Alamo Drafthouse, where their preview package before the film included trailers of 70s vampire Blaxploitation films like Blacula, Scream, Blacula, Scream, and Ganja & Hess, and a fun video of Michael B. Jordan in Japan shopping for anime on a guided tour through a store.