Thoughts on Innocent Blood

    Last night on Tubi I watched Innocent Blood, a 1992 horror comedy directed by John Landis and written by Michael Wolk. The film starred Anne Parillaud, who was hot off of her fame in La Femme Nikita at the time, as Marie, a French vampire who goes to Pittsburgh and decides to feast on the local Italian mobsters. She is sexy and can play up an innocent act to lure in mobsters, and kills one (Chazz Palminteri), and shoots him in the head afterwards to cover her tracks and prevent him from waking up as a vampire. Anthony LaPaglia plays an undercover cop named Joe who had infiltrated the mob for three years, and Marie skips over him because “his eyes looked too sad,” like he looked too nice to kill. Joe and the cops are trying to take down the crime boss Salvatore Macelli (Robert Loggia), but when Marie attacks Macelli and is interrupted while feeding on him, he doesn’t die and comes back as a vampire, then feels more invincible and works on turning his mob into a vampire crime syndicate.

    This was a lot of fun to watch. It’s weird and funny, kind of mixes some sleazy sexiness with the bizarreness of a vampire mob, and pairing a vampire and a cop together to take down the mob was creative.

    There's a a running motif of characters watching old monster movies on TV, like a Godzilla movie, the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie, a Hammer horror-era vampire movie, etc.

    Robert Loggia seemed like he was having a lot of fun playing a vampire Mafia boss, just chewing up the scenery and eating other mob guys.

    There are so many character actors in this movie. Loggia, Palminteri, Kim Coates, Marshall Bell, Tony Sirico, Luis Guzmán, and Leo Burmester.

    And so many horror icon cameos too: Dario Argento, Sam Raimi, Linnea Quigley, Tom Savini, and Forrest James Ackerman.

    Angela Bassett has a small part as a cop just before she got big, and Don Rickles plays a mob lawyer.

    The special effects with the glowing vampire eyes weren’t that great, and did take me out of the movie with how ridiculous it looked.

    I really enjoyed this weird horror comedy a lot, I heard of it from a film podcast episode of Critically Acclaimed Network talking about vampire movies.

Thoughts on Aftersun

    On Tubi, I watched Aftersun, a 2022 semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Charlotte Wells, starring Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio. The film is about an 11-year old girl named Sophie (Corio) on vacation in Turkey with her father Calum (Mescal), who is amicably separated from her mother. It's a holiday where he is trying to be a good dad, but is clearly struggling internally with his own mental health issues, and trying to disguise it from his daughter to have a good time.

    She is more perceptive though, and in one brutal scene, when, after she sings "Losing My Religion" at karaoke and he offers to pay for singing lessons if she really enjoys singing, she says he shouldn't offer if he knows he doesn't have the money. It's blunt and clearly hurts him, and she's not trying to be hurtful, but clearly knew from past experiences of empty promises with him to call him out.

    Throughout the film, there are abstract sequences of an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) in a rave with strobe lights, seeing her young father dancing and trying to reach out to him, and it plays in this memorable and touching sequence that blends the past memories and present self together beautifully with a re-edit of the song "Under Pressure."

    I liked how this film feels more it's about a woman looking back on her seemingly idyllic trip with her father, who had her at too young an age, and her trying to figure out his own identity apart from being her father. The film keeps it vague on how he died, and he likely died young, as that is how adult Sophie remembers him, but there's a kind of haziness to the memory that worked well for me, it had an artsy short film idea expanded to a full-length feature.

Thoughts on Die My Love

    At Cinema Village in New York City, I went to see Die My Love, a 2025 psychological thriller directed by Lynne Ramsay, and co-written by Ramsay, Edna Walsh, and Alice Birch, based on the 2012 novel Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz. The film stars Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a young woman struggling with postpartum depression and is spiraling into psychosis, and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) is often away at work and doesn't know how to cope with her when he's home.

    When Jackson's uncle dies by suicide and leaves his Montana home to him, he and Grace, who is pregnant, move there to the rural house, and have a baby boy. But Jackson is often away, and Grace is left on her own to care for their child, and is feeling lonely and bored, trying to busy herself with chores around the house. When Jackson is around, he expects Grace to be the primary caretaker, blames her for any chores not done, and randomly brings home a feral little dog, whose incessant barking combined with the baby crying is driving Grace insane inside, thanks to the excellent sound design depicting her feelings of being trapped in the house.

    Grace acts out more as she is losing a grip on reality, be it going out into the field at night to either meet up with a married lover (LaKeith Stanfield), when it's unclear if this is happening in the present time or was a past lover; tolerating patronizing talk from other mothers about getting past the hard first year of motherhood and choosing to strip off her dress to jump into the pool at a party; throwing herself through a glass door; trashing the bathroom and squirting lotion and soap all over the floor; or imagining talking to Jackson's late father Harry (Nick Nolte), who had struggled with likely dementia or Azheimer's before his death.

    Jackson is more bewildered at his wife's actions, but often cowers and doesn't know how to help. His mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), is more sympathetic to Grace's stresses as a new mother, even if she mostly gives platitudes like telling her to take yoga to relax.

    The music needle drops are inspired, like hearing "Mickey" by Toni Basil; "Crossroads" by Cream during a car accident scene; "Little April Shower" from Bambi during a rain scene; "In Spite of Ourselves" by John Prine and Iris DeMent in a car scene where Jackson and Grace sing along to the song in a shared romantic moment; and a cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" over the ending credits.

    I liked how Ramsay's direction and focus on Grace's mental health issues made the film more intense and uncomfortable to watch, and Lawrence was great in playing a character who seems mentally far away and checked out. She loves her son, but she cannot connect with anyone else, and resents being dismissed and expected to be a happy homemaker. She had been a writer, but can't bring herself to begin writing again, and is angry at women telling her "it'll come back" when she says she hasn't been writing anymore. I could definitely relate to those feelings of depression and anger and being met with "Well, have you tried yoga? Have you tried journaling?" or toxic positivity sayings like "It'll all work out" or "You'll get past this," and feeling stymied inside while trying to be polite and calm among company.

    Despite liking her performance and the journey of the story, I didn't feel as connected with the film as a whole, I felt distant and outside of it. I didn't think it was great, but I didn't hate it either, I more thought it was decent to watch. I have liked Ramsay's other films, like Ratcatcher, Movern Callar, and You Were Never Really Here, so I do like her dark, heavy style mixed in with black comedy, but I wasn't as into this one as much.

Thoughts on Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus

     On Criterion, I watched the 2024 documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, directed by Eva Aridjis Fuentes, about the singer Diane Luckey, better known by her stage name Q Lazzarus, who had only one song released during her lifetime, the 1987 haunting synth ballad "Goodbye Horses," which became forever linked with a scene in The Silence of the Lambs during the serial killer Buffalo Bill's dance. 

    Q, originally from New Jersey, grew up singing in the church, and came out to New York City as a young woman in the late 1970s to make it as a singer, being influenced by rock like AC/DC, blues like Janis Joplin, soul like Aretha Franklin, and trying to figure out a place for herself to put it together as a Black woman singer. She worked as a backup singer and wrote jingles, but mainly worked as a cab driver to have more freedom and independence in her schedule. She made friends with the dancer Danny, formed a band, and created the stage name Q Lazzarus (explaining that Q came from the Alutiiq word Quiana, meaning "thank you," and Lazzarus as a Bible reference of a man named Lazarus being raised from the dead by Jesus). She kept being rejected by record companies who claimed to love her music, but didn't know how to market her, since her music didn't fit their narrow visions of what a Black female singer should be.

    By chance, she met the director Jonathan Demme while driving him in her cab, and she was singing to herself, and he loved her voice, she played him her demo tape, and they exchanged information afterwards, and several months later, her son "Candle Goes Away" was included in his 1986 film Something Wild. In 1987, she and her friend Danny wrote and recorded "Goodbye Horses" in his East Village apartment, with their friend's Casio keyboard as the synth backing music. Demme included the song in his 1988 film Married to the Mob, and Q, tired of getting shut down by record companies in the U.S., moved to London and formed a band there, following the long line of Black American artists who were more appreciated in European countries than in their home country, like Josephine Baker and Nina Simone.

    She lived in London for several years, played many clubs, and had a romantic relationship with her manager, Richard, who unfortunately introduced her to hard drugs and beginning her substance abuse disorder. She also still faced opposition from British record labels, not knowing how to market her music, and even after "Goodbye Horses" was featured in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, and Q had a singing cameo in Demme's 1993 film Philadelphia, singing the Talking Heads' song "Heaven," she still couldn't catch a break to have a real record deal.

    The second half of the documentary goes into Q's life after she largely disappeared from the public eye, and from her friends and family. She struggled with substance abuse, was unhoused in New York City, did sex work to survive, and found a kindred spirit in Bob, a fellow downtown eccentric who she met by chance on the street and had a drink with. She was going by Pam then, having shed her past as Q Lazzarus, and didn't tell Bob at first about her music past, claiming to have had been an RN, which he tells in his interview segment that he called her out on the lie when she asked him a health question, and he goes "How should I know?! You're the nurse!" and her going "I never said I was a nurse!" He says, "If she said she was a rock star I wouldn't have believed that."

    Q married Bob, got sober after a stint at Riker's Island for drug charges and entering rehab, and they had a son, James (her Wikipedia page says she had two children, but only one is mentioned in the documentary), and moved to Staten Island, where she reconnected with her family and vowed to give James a more stable home life after the craziness of her previous life. James, now around 30, is involved in activism, as seen in the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, and when Q sadly passed away from a sepsis infection following a broken leg in 2022, James calls out the hospital for malpractice and ignoring her as a woman of color, which is a sign of medical racism and bias against Black women patients who aren't believed or are mistreated in the medical field.

    Q had a big personality, and she was a lot of fun to watch throughout the documentary, as Eva Aridjis was a fan of her song and did investigative work to find her, meeting her when getting picked up in her car service in 2019 in New York City. Q supplied her with many cassette tapes of her unsigned music, all her history as a rock singer in New York City and London, a mix of rock, dark wave, and synth pop. 

    I likely had heard "Goodbye Horses" from The Silence of the Lambs, but the song didn't stick with me then, I had heard it elsewhere by itself and really liked it, and mistakenly though that Q Lazzarus was a man, as the deep voice sounded masculine to me, but can read as androgynous. This documentary had been long in the works for the last few years, and it is bittersweet that it comes out after Q's passing, when she can't be around for a worldwide audience to learn her story and hear her music, it feels more unfair, as it was when she was trying to get signed as an artist and continually rejected. I'm glad that Aridjis made this film, as it was important to share Q's voice and her incredible story.

Thoughts on Popcorn

     Through Le Cinéma Club, a weekly online newsletter that streams one film a week, rotating films every week, I watched Popcorn, a 1991 slasher horror film directed by Mark Herrier and written by Alan Ormsby. The film is centered around a group of college film students, who decide to hold a film festival on campus as a fundraiser for the film department, and they choose 1950s-1960s-era B-movies that are fake movies within the movies, meant to be homages to actual 1950s B-movie auteurs like Jack Arnold (It Came From Outer Space; The Incredible Shrinking Man), William Castle (The Tingler; House on Haunted Hill), and Japanese monster movies dubbed over in English for the U.S. market, like the Godzilla series.

    The film's protagonist is Maggie (Jill Schoelen), a film student and screenwriter who has recurring nightmares of a girl named Sarah caught in a fire and chased by an attacker. She writes notes about these dreams, hoping to use them in a film. But when the film students are looking at films to use in the festival, one of them is a short cult film called Possessor, and the images resemble her dreams, and the film professor (Tony Roberts) tells the students that the film was made by Lanyard Gates, who killed his family onstage while the film screened and then set the theater on fire. Maggie asks her mother Suzanne (Dee Wallace) about the film, who feigns ignorance about it and tries to get Maggie to quit the festival, saying that her ambition was adorable at age 8, it was inspiring at age 18, but at age 28, it's embarrassing. She then receives a threatening phone call, hinting that Suzanne knows more than she is letting on.

    Throughout the film festival, the audience is packed, and the film students have set up fun gimmicks to go off during the screenings, like electrified seats a la The Tingler (as William Castle would put buzzers on seats to go off during key moments of the film to give audience members a thrill) and a giant mosquito prop to fly around on wires during the fictional 3-D film Mosquito. But as the festival goes on, a masked and deranged killer wears different masks to murder the professor and several of the film students, disguising his kills with the movie gimmicks so the audience will think it's part of the show.

    I really liked this movie. I thought it was a lot of fun, mixing in tributes to actual B-movies with the fictional movies-within-a-movie, and recognized the actor Barry Jenner alongside his real-life wife Suzanne Hunt in Mosquito, knowing him as Lt. Murtaugh, Carl Winslow's cop partner on Family Matters. I liked the "getting the festival ready" montage with the song "Saturday Night at the Movies" by the 1960s group The Drifters, adding in some charm. 

    And I especially liked Jill Schoelen as the lead, who dressed in an early 1990s alternative thrift store look, and reminded me of both Winona Ryder and Krysten Ritter. She is retired now, but acted as a "scream queen" in horror films of the 1980s and 1990s like The Chiller, The Stepfather, Cutting Class, and The Phantom of the Opera. She was very cute and carried the film well with a lot of talent and charisma.

    I did like the reveal of the killer, and the makeup and special effects involved in their reveal were really great, and the reveal made sense with the story and wasn't tacked on.

    I'm glad I checked this out, this film felt like the kind of horror film that I would like, with cinephiles and self-awareness about old horror films and the styles of past B-movies, as well as celebrating the communal experience of watching these films at the theater with like-minded geeks.

Thoughts on To Sleep With Anger

    On Criterion yesterday, I watched To Sleep With Anger, a 1990 black comedy written and directed by Charles Burnett, and starring Danny Glover as Harry, a charming, easygoing man who comes to visit his old friends, Gideon (Paul Butler) and Suzie (Mary Alice), who live in South Central L.A. after having moved from the South. They haven’t seen him in years, and invite him to stay, and his seemingly gentle presence hides his true intent as an agent of chaos, as he bears witness to the family strifes as Gideon and Suzie keep having to take care of their young grandson well into the evening while his parents Samuel, or “Babe Brother” (Richard Lee Brooks) and Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph) work throughout the day.

    Samuel resents that his dad calls him “boy” in a demeaning way and compares him to his brother Junior (Carl Lumbly). There’s a lot of inter generational conflict between the grandparents who moved from the South during the Great Migration and their children who grew up in L.A.

    And Harry, hinting at practicing in witchcraft, just sits back and lets the chaos flow, turning people against each other, so much that Suzie and Hattie (Ethel Ayler) suspect him of being insincere and call him out on his phoniness, Hattie stating “You ain't worth the salt you put in greens.”

    I really liked this movie, it was messy and funny and full of family drama while adding in some magical realism influence.

Thoughts on Bones and All

    On Criterion on Saturday, I watched Bones and All, a 2022 romantic horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by David Kajganich, adapted from the novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. The film stars Taylor Russell as a teen girl named Maren in 1988 Virginia, who is prone to cannibalism from since she was a child. When she nearly eats a girl’s finger off at a sleepover, she and her father (André Holland) quickly move, then she wakes up to find that he’s abandoned her, leaving behind an audiotape about how he’s always known what she is, and tried to protect her, but now she’s on her own.

    So she becomes a drifter in Middle America, meeting Sully (Mark Rylance), a fellow cannibal, or “eater,” who essentially sniffed her out as one of his own, and brings her to eat a dying old woman in a house, establishing rules about cannibalism. Maren goes along with it, but is horrified by her own behavior, and continues on, and meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a fellow young drifter and eater, and they travel together, building a romance, and Maren struggles with trying to have a moral line with her condition, while Lee is more prone to killing to survive.

    It’s an interesting movie that feels like an allegory for drug addiction, as the characters have their cycles of eating someone and feeling self hatred afterwards, seeking out each other as a family to not feel alone, and trying to have a moral code that they find hard to stick by as their hunger grows more.

    Taylor Russell is really great in this, in playing the vulnerability of Maren, and Chalamet is really good at playing a seemingly romanticized version of the rebel boyfriend who has a violent past, but it’s fine as long as the girlfriend isn’t hurt, which is a fantasy. Both have this deep chemistry together in their roles, and I enjoyed watching them.

    There are brief cameos from Jessica Harper, David Gordon Green, and Chloë Sevigny, and Mark Rylance shines as playing a creepy “mentor” who is very lonely, but deeply damaged from his condition.

    I really liked this movie a lot, and liked it as a road movie with a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross film score, and how it both felt romantic and gory at the same time.

Thoughts on The Mastermind

    At the Angelika Film Center last week, I went to see The Mastermind, a 2025 heist film written and directed by Kelly Reichardt. The film is loosely based on a 1972 heist of the Worcester Art Museum, while being inspired by the heist films of Jean-Pierre Melville, known for films like Bob le flambeur (1956) and Le Samouraï (1967). The film centers on James Blaine "J.B." Mooney (Josh O'Connor), an unemployed carpenter who lives with his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two young sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) in Framingham, MA, in the early 1970s, and plots to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from a small local museum that he frequents, where one of the guards is frequently sleeping while on duty. He tests the limits in the opening sequence, where, while one of his sons is rattling off trivia facts to his mom, J.B. lifts open a protective case and pockets a small figurine, and keeps his distance from his family in the museum, pretending not to know them until he joins them outside.

    Since he's a regular at the museum, he doesn't want to be the one in the museum stealing the paintings, so he arranges a crew to pull off the heist. He borrows money from his mother (Hope Davis), who is skeptical that he will pay it back since he's already borrowed money before, under the pretense of using it for work so he can pay the men for the heist job. One man backs out of being the getaway driver, so J.B. acts as the driver, while the other two men, without any sense of discreetness, bust into the museum during the day with pantyhose on their heads to brazenly steal paintings off the wall and threaten a teenage girl with a gun and beat up a security guard.

    Despite the public nature of the crime, J.B. displays one of the stolen paintings in his living room, and hides the other paintings in the loft of a barn. But police are inquiring his family, one of the thieves is arrested for a bank robbery, and J.B's judge father (Bill Camp) criticizes the thieves for their rookie mistakes and lack of ambition. Soon, it becomes more apparent that J.B. will be found out as the ringleader of the crime, and he doesn't have any real follow-up plans for after the heist is completed.

    I liked how this film is very slow-paced, but still quietly funny, and how O'Connor could be captivating in playing a character who seems boring on the surface, but is this fascinatingly inept loser. The film's backdrop is set against the Vietnam War and counterculture movement, where J.B. is rebelling against his family's middle-class background by doing something wild and exciting, but doesn't think of other options in his life or what to do afterwards. He takes advantage of his wife and kids, expecting them to be understanding, as well as borrows money from his mother, knowing he won't bother to try to pay her back. He takes advantage of the women in his life, assuming they'll have his back and be his support to his status as a privileged white man.

    I was happy to see Gaby Hoffmann in a small supporting role as Maude, J.B.'s art school friend and wife of his friend Fred (John Magaro). She has this wryness and bullshit-detector vibe to her that I really liked, and when J.B. briefly stays at their home while on the run from his crime, she does call him out on putting her and Fred at risk for harboring a fugitive, and makes him leave the next day to avoid taking further advantage of them. Hoffmann doesn't act too often anymore, although this year she also appears in the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere as Springsteen's mother Adele, so it's nice to see her whenever she pops up in something.

    The film has a great score with snappy jazz music composed by Rob Mazurek, I really dug the music throughout the film.

    Reichardt has always been good at finding the humor in small moments in life, and doing introspective character studies in her films, like in First Cow (2019) Certain Women (2016), and Meek's Cutoff (2010). She has a very special and unique touch to her work that I've always appreciated, and I was happy to check out her latest film. 

    

Thoughts on If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

    At the Angelika Film Center yesterday, I went to see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, a 2025 psychological horror film written and directed by Mary Bronstein. The film stars Rose Byrne as Linda, a therapist who is struggling with a lot of stress and mental anguish. Her daughter (Delaney Quinn), whose name is never given and whose face is always offscreen, has a mysterious illness where she uses a feeding tube in her stomach at night, and Linda is pressured by her daughter's doctor to make sure she makes her goal weight of 50 lbs by a deadline so that the tube can be removed. Dr. Spring (Bronstein) repeatedly tells her to come in for meetings, with the threat that if Linda isn't reaching those goals, that the care for her daughter will be re-assessed. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater, mostly heard through phone calls) is away on a work trip, and only calls her to criticize her and complain, and treats her as if she just sits on her butt all day as a therapist and doesn't do real work.

    Things get worse when the family's Montauk apartment floods from a collapse in the bedroom ceiling, and Linda and her daughter must stay in a motel. Through this catastrophe, Linda is trying to manage her job as a therapist, with a patient (Danielle Macdonald) who brings her baby to sessions because she's afraid of leaving her child alone or being seen as a bad mother; seeing her own therapist (Conan O'Brien), who is unhelpful and sees her as a mental drain; trying to get her daughter, who frequently complains and whines off-camera, to behave; fielding calls from Dr. Spring, fielding calls from her husband; calling to get the ceiling fixed and being given the runaround and hung up on, and picturing the hole in the ceiling as getting bigger and deeper and more cavernous, a metaphor for her own deteriorating mental and psychological state.

    The film is unsettling to watch, from both the sound design that drove up the tension, and the tight close-ups on Byrne's face in the first few scenes of the film, where her daughter and the doctor are heard off-camera, and setting the mood with lines about how her daughter sees her mother as putty that she can stretch, and Linda refuting that claim, despite all of her sacrifices. Byrne is fantastic in playing a woman who is being pushed to her limits, pressured by external voices to do everything right, and blamed for anything going wrong. She unwinds at night by leaving her daughter alone in the motel room to go get wine at the motel shop, where the clerk (Ivy Wolk) is snarky about not selling her wine past 2 AM, and develops an almost-friendship with the motel superintendent James (A$AP Rocky), whose calm demeanor helps her in her time of chaos.

    I felt anxious watching the film, jumping a little bit at a couple of early scares with the collapsing ceiling, and felt for Linda being pulled in different directions and wanting to snap. This film is listed as a comedy-drama, but it felt more like a horror film to me. It doesn't feel like a film I'd watch again because of its intensity, but I enjoyed being in the theater and feeling stuck in the madness of the same character, the theater like the black hole like she imagined her dwindling psyche to be.

Thoughts on Something Wicked This Way Comes

 Last month for my book club, I read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, his 1962 novel about an eerie carnival that comes to a small town in the 1930s and lures people in with winning prizes and promises of riches and youth, but at the price of their souls. The book focuses on two boys, Jim and Will, who are suspicious of the carnival and the effect it has on the townspeople, and Will's father, Charles Halloway, feels anxiety about his older age at 54 but doesn't trust the carnival either. It's a good book that, while definitely of its time (the book treats being 54 like being 84, Charles keeps acting like he's too old for his young son, and the book sidelines a lot of female characters as less important to the story), was interesting to read for its foreboding sense of dread, especially with the carnival leader, Mr. Dark, who seems more like a vampire feeding on the town's hopes and dreams.

    The book was dedicated to Gene Kelly, and there was an author's note written by Ray Bradbury decades after the book came out, talking about how he became friends with Gene Kelly through a mutual friend, and he wrote a treatment of one of his older short stories and gave it to Gene to shop around his film contacts in the 1950s. No film came of it at the time, but Bradbury decided to make it into a novel, and published it in 1962. In 1983, it became a film directed by Jack Clayton, and produced by Disney, during a time when they were having financial difficulties and experimenting with making darker films for children, like this one, Watcher in the Woods, and The Black Cauldron, none of which did well at the box office.

    At the time of the book club meeting, I said that the film wasn't streaming online, and that it is less accessible now. Then this month, one of my friends told me it's now streaming on Disney Plus, and this is the first time it's been streaming anywhere. So I watched it, to compare with the book. The movie starred Jason Robards as Mr. Halloway, who was made into a librarian instead of a library janitor like the book, and Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark. Jim and Will were played by Shawn Carson and Vidal Peterson. The film is 90 minutes long, and feels more like a TV movie than one in theaters. I like that, since it takes place in October, it has a fitting autumn feeling, with cool, crisp weather, fall leaves, a pumpkin patch, and carnival ghouls that feel very Halloween-y.

    It's mostly faithful to the book, with an adapted screenplay by Bradbury, with some changes, like how Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield) the middle-aged teacher in the book is turned into a child and her fate is unknown, whereas in the movie she is turned into a pretty young woman but made blind (Sharan Lea), and seems to be stuck that way at the end. I liked how the haunted carousel, which can make someone older or younger depending on which direction it rides in, was used to nightmare effects in the finale, with the demise of Mr. Dark in a way that seemed intense for a children's film at the time.

    I figured Jason Robards was older than 54, and I was right, he was 60 at the time of filming, which made it seem even less likely that he'd have a child-aged son. The boys in the book were on the cusp of turning 14, but seem younger in the movie, like around 10 or 11. I really liked Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, he really sank into this quiet but malevolent character where he's very patient but there's a menace underneath his clipped words. And I didn't know until later on that Pam Grier played the Dust Witch, she was unrecognizable under the makeup and veil, but had a seductive voice as she slows down Mr. Halloway's heartbeat to give him a taste of what death will be like.

    I'm not as into this work by Bradbury as I am by "All Summer in a Day," which was my introduction to his writing in junior high that made an impact on me, in both identifying with his outcast lead girl character and getting into sci-fi and speculative fiction, though I can also credit Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time for doing that too. But I enjoyed reading the book and seeing the film adaptation, and making my own compare and contrasts.

Thoughts on Fairyland

     At the Angelika Film Center this week, I went to see Fairyland, a 2023 coming-of-age drama written and directed by Andrew Durham, based on Alysia Abbott's memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of my Father. The film is about Alysia as a child (Nessa Dougherty) being raised by her widower father, Steve Abbott (Scoot McNairy), a writer and activist, after the death of her mother in a car accident in 1973 when Alysia was 5. Her dad, who is gay, move to San Francisco and live in a house with several others queer artists and writers, where her father can be more open with his sexuality and not feel closeted like before. When Alysia asks him why he only has boyfriends now and no girlfriends, he gives a simple pat answer of "Because your mother was the only girl I loved and I could never love another girl after her." 

    Alysia grows up in the house with revolving roommates, getting to know people like Paulette (Maria Bakalova), essentially the den mothers; Johnny (Ryan Thurston), a cisgender gay Black man who likes wearing women's clothes, and Eddie (Cody Fern), who casually dates Steve for awhile. Alysia is often left to her own independence by her father, much like a typical Gen-X latchkey kid, where he assumes that at 5 years old she can take the bus by herself and get home, or stay up late by herself at home while he's out at bars picking up guys to bring home. Steve isn't prepared to be a single dad, but didn't want to give up care of his child to his mother in-law Munca (Geena Davis) and feel like an absentee parent to a child who just lost her mother. So he raises his daughter with more freedom and independence to counter the repressive and punishment-based childhood he had as a closeted gay kid.

    The film spans between 1973 and circa 1987, as Alysia grows up into an 80s punk teen (Emilia Jones), and keeps her dad's sexuality a secret from her friends, who are casually homophobic, as well in a culture where the AIDS crisis is robbing the gay community of its members, and Alysia feels resentful of her father's laissez-faire attitude towards her, wanting more structure and balance. She chooses to go to NYU to live far from her father, and even gets to study abroad in Paris and have a boyfriend, but when her father writes her with the news that he has contracted HIV and wants her to take care of him, she flies back home, feeling angry that her father now needs her to take care of him when he wasn't there for her, and cutting her studies and abroad trip short.

    I liked how the film felt complicated, and that Steve was trying to balance having his young life as a gay writer and activist with his friends and community, while also trying to care for his daughter in the best way that he knew how. I liked how Alysia didn't hate her father, but resented having to raise herself and be more the parent than he was. I liked how the film depicted the time of 1970s and 1980s San Francisco, and shifts in the free acceptance of the gay community to the shunning and loneliness during the AIDS crisis. The film depicts activists who cared for young gay men with AIDS who didn't have family to support them, like when Steve and Alysia visit a friend of his who is in hospice, in a local house run by community members, not by formal medical staffs, who would treat AIDS as if it was contagious and stigmatize those who had it. 

    The film is a great depiction of love and resilience in the face of tragedy, and I liked the close bond between Steven and Alysia, working well with McNairy as Steven and both Dougherty and Jones as the younger and older versions of Alysia. It was nice seeing Geena Davis in a rare acting performance as Alysia's grandmother Munca, and Adam Lambert has a small supporting role as Steven's friend Charlie.

    I felt emotionally touched by this film, and thought it was quite good.

Thoughts on A Chinese Ghost Story

    On Criterion, I watched A Chinese Ghost Story, a 1987 Hong Kong folklore horror film directed by Ching Siu-Tung and written by Tuen Kai Chi. The film stars Leslie Cheung as a debt collector named Ning Choi-san, who goes to a rural town to collect debts, but is unable to collect the money, especially when his book of debt becomes wet and unreadable, thus allowing a shop owner to claim he doesn't owe money if his name can't be read in it. He is also dodging a group of men trying to capture fugitives for the reward money, putting up the posters of the illustrations of the fugitive up against random men, trying to match them.

    With no money and nowhere else to go, Choi-san is told to take shelter at a deserted temple in a forest outside of town, where everyone assumes he will be mauled by wolves on his way there. He meets a beautiful and mysterious woman named Nip Siu-sin (Joey Wong), and immediately falls in love with her. But her secret is that she is a ghost, and she is bound to a demon, the Tree Demoness, who forces her to seduce young men so that the demon can rob them of their lifeforce. She keeps pushing Choi-san away, trying to save him from that same fate, but he is determined to be with her. 

    Choi-san gets the help of a Taoist priest and swordsman, Yin Chik-ha (Wu Ma), who told him that the people in the temple are ghosts, and Chik-ha wants to banish Siu-sin's spirit because she isn't human and doesn't want Choi-san pining for her. But they work together to save Siu-sin's soul from being bound to the Tree Demoness by moving her remains from the foot of the tree that the demoness resides in, hoping to free her to the afterlife.

    I really liked this movie a lot. It was the first of a trilogy, and I liked how it mixed wushu stunt work, folklore, horror, and goofy comedy. It had a lot of influence from The Evil Dead, with the tree demon attacking with her branches, as well as the camera zooming as the POV of the demon racing to attack a frightened victim. I liked the windy effects during the fight scenes, the blue lighting, the stop- motion zombie skeletons, and the romantic love story at the center of the film.

    There's a particularly fun sequence where Siu-sin is trying to hide Choi-san in a bath when the demoness and other young ghost women come in, and he keeps peeking out to take breaths of air, and she has to prevent others from seeing him, and the back and forth ultimately leads to an underwater kiss that Siu-Sin does to hide Choi-san, by dipping forward into the water to push him down, and it's very sexy and romantic, one of the standout moments of the film.

    Leslie Cheung unfortunately died by suicide at age 46 in 2003, and he was a wonderful actor and singer in Hong Kong and Chinese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. I heard of him through watching Farewell My Concubine (1993), directed by Chen Kaige, a love triangle story between three young Peking Opera performers (Leung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li) in early to mid-20th century China, and thought it was a stunning and beautifully sad film. I also liked him in Happy Together (1997), a Hong Kong gay romantic drama directed by Wong Kar-wai and starring Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, that felt both very mature and casual at the same time. In a 1992 interview, Cheung stated that "My mind is bisexual. It's easy for me to love a woman. It's also easy for me to love a man, too" and "I believe that a good actor would be androgynous, and ever changing," making him one of the first public figures in Chinese media to come out, being brave and open at that time.

    I'm happy I checked this out, and I'll likely watch the sequels too, since I really enjoyed this film a lot.

9 of My Favorite Film Scores

     I was listening to an episode of the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, and the hosts, who are film critics, did a Top 10 list episode of their "Iron List" series, each picking their top ten best film scores. I wanted to share some that I really like. I'm not great at noticing film scores, as the music is often in the background as I'm watching the movie, but some of these stood out a lot to me:

Jon Brion's experimental score for Punch-Drunk Love.

Danny Elfman's fantasy fairy tale score for Edward Scissorhands, especially with "Ice Dance," with the choir singing in parts, like when Edward makes it "snow" around Kim.

The Chemical Brothers' electronic score for Hanna.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' electronic score for Challengers.

David Michael Frank's recurring theme for Showdown in Little Tokyo, particularly "Saving Minaka"

Antonio Sanchez' drum score for Birdman.

John Du Prez' haunting score, especially "Shredder's Theme" for the 1990 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Yann Tiersen's French playful score for Amelie, with "La Valse d'Amelie"

Eric Serra's kinda-synth score for La Femme Nikita, with both "Rico's Gang Suicide" and "A Smile"

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.