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. 

Thoughts on Hummingbirds

     On Criterion, I watched Hummingbirds, a 2023 documentary directed by Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras (with co-directors in Jillian Schlesinger and Miguel Drake-McLaughlin), documenting themselves in their summer together as friends, in their fleeting youth as they grow out of being teenagers and become young women.

    They live in Laredo, Texas, bordering Mexico, and Beba is an undocumented immigrant, and she talks about having been deported with her mother when she was in third grade, and being like “I had perfect attendance!”, but making it back to the U.S., and trying to gain residency and citizenship. They also talk about not fitting in as Mexican women in the U.S., but not being seen as “really” Mexican in Mexico.

    They use their summer for creative self-expression as artists, like playing music, filming dancers and dancing themselves, and working as activists to advocate for abortion (like changing a yard sign from Pray to End Abortion to Pray 4 Legal Abortion) and immigration rights, calling out injustices of the U.S. Border Patrol.

    They talk about how hard their moms worked, and how they want their moms to be able to relax and enjoy their lives, while also saying how they grew up quickly as children with experiencing food insecurity, taking care of their younger siblings, and the challenges with immigration and their citizenship statuses.

    I really liked this movie. It’s short, at just 77 minutes long, and has an artsy look with the girls dancing at the magic hour sunset and being illuminated by it, and being punks and activists and switching easily between English and Spanish and straddling both U.S. and Mexican cultures. It’s a coming of age movie that combines their cultural identities with their activism, and was really interesting to watch.

Thoughts on It Happened Tomorrow

   On Criterion, I watched It Happened Tomorrow, a 1944 fantasy film directed by René Clair, and co-written by Clair, Dudley Nichols, and Helene Fraenkel, based on the one-act play "The Jest of Haha Laba" by Lord Dunsany. The film has a fun, whimsical feeling to it, mixing a fantasy premise with romance, set in the 1890s, where Lawrence Stevens (Dick Powell) is a newspaper columnist who writes obituaries, and he is given tomorrow's evening newspaper by an elderly newspaper man named Pop Benson, though he doesn't read the newspaper at first. He and his friends go to see a mind-reading act featuring the "Great Siglioni" Oscar Smith (Jack Oakie) and his "clairvoyant" assistant, Sylvia (Linda Darnell) (they are actually uncle and niece). Lawrence later gets Sylvia to go out on a date with him, and he notices the future date on the newspaper, as well as the predictions, like snowfall the next day, a job opening for a waiter preceding the firing of one, and most, importantly, a robbery at the box office of the opera during a performance. Lawrence takes Sylvia to the opera so he can be present during the robbery and write the article for the paper, but it backfires when the police question him on knowing things if he was there and knew all the details ahead of time, thinking he was in on it.

    The movie swirls in a series of adventures, with Lawrence taking advantage of the future editions of the newspaper, until the news isn't in his favor, and he tries to prevent fate from taking its course. I thought it was a fun movie with a quirky premise, adding in time travel via the future newspaper, the period setting of the 1890s (the film opens with a bookending sequence of the couple celebrating their 50th anniversary with their friends and family), and very charming. Clair also directed the equally charming I Married a Witch (1942), starring Veronica Lake as a witch who was burned at the stake in colonial Salem, puts a curse on the lineage of the man who burned her by causing his male descendants to marry the wrong woman, and she comes back to life in the 1940s to torture his latest male descendant, only to fall in love with him instead. I did prefer I Married a Witch more to It Happened Tomorrow, but they are fun, enjoyable fantasy comedies of the 1940s.

    The plot of It Happened Tomorrow, where a man tries to change events based on a future newspaper, did make me think of the 1990s TV show Early Edition, where Kyle Chandler played an everyman who receives "tomorrow's newspaper today," and they are local stories and headlines about bad things that he has to work to figure out the cause of, and doing the detective work to prevent from happening. I watched it sometimes as an adolescent, and thought it was a decent TV show, though not too well-remembered today.

    I would recommend this movie as an offbeat fantasy film with time travel elements, and something unique of the time in which it came out.

Thoughts on the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Shorts Tour

    Yesterday at the IFC Center, I went to see a screening of a selection of shorts from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Most were narrative films, with one documentary, and one animated film. It was really interesting to watch a variety of short films, and I keep up with some short films that I see through Criterion, Le Cinema Club, and the Oscar-nominated and shortlisted short films. 

    My favorites were the following:

    Grandma Nai Who Plays Favorites, written and directed by Chheangkea, from Cambodia/France, where during her family's annual Qingming visit to sweep her tomb and have a picnic together, the ghost of Grandma Nai (Saroeun Nay) watches her chaotic family, who just pray to her for money and cars, and sees her likely queer grandson be made to court a girl for possible engagement. I liked the quietness of Grandma Nai sitting by her grandson and looking caring and understanding as the boy is polite but not romantically attracted to the girl, including when he is pressured by his mother to give her Grandma Nai's bracelet as a gift, something he clearly doesn't want to part with. It's a really lovely story that ends with dancing in a karaoke club.

    Susana, written and directed by Gerardo Coello Escalante and Amandine Thomas, from Mexico/U.S.A. Susana (Bonnie Hellman) is an American tourist in Mexico City, and is a middle-aged awkward-looking woman with thick glasses and bobbed red hair. She feels alone, and is taken in by a group of young American tourists, and parties with them, despite that they are condescending and clearly see her as their pet for entertainment. Mexican locals look on with wariness at how the group takes advantage of Susana. The story goes some interesting places, and I liked how it reminded me of Margo Martindale's touching performance in Alexander Payne's short film 14e Arrondissment, included in Paris Je T'aime, where she plays a solo middle-aged woman visiting Paris and contemplating her life.

    We Were the Scenery, directed by Christopher Radcliff, from the U.S.A. This was a documentary short focusing on Hoa Ti Le and Hue Nguyen Che, who fled Vietnam in 1975 and lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines, and ended up working as extras in Apocalypse Now. It was really fascinating listening to them talk about their memories of the war, fleeing via boat, and looking back on their scenes in the film and pointing out people they knew from the camp who were also cast in bit parts, and looking at their history as survivors of the Vietnam War. 

    The other films were good, but not as standout to me. Such Good Friends, written and directed by Bri Klaproth, from the U.S.A., focuses on the aftermath of a woman ending her toxic friendship via voicemail and the ripple effects it causes where his family take advantage of her. It was decent, and nice to recognize Mindy Sterling as the friend's mom, and I liked the darkly comedic ending. Hurikán, directed by Jan Saska and co-written by Saska and Václav Hašek, from the Czech Republic, was an animated short where the title character is a man with a pig's head, who is trying to impress a female bartender he has a crush on by rushing to get a beer keg for her stand, running into trouble with gangsters and cops and his own beer thirst. I liked the animation and the weirdness of it. Debators, written and directed by Alex Heller, from the U.S.A., focuses on an early morning debate team arguing a bill on minimum wage in front of their teacher judges (J. Cameron Smith and Kenneth Lonergan). It was decent, good for the first one to open the selections. And Azi, written and directed by Montana Mann, from the U.S.A., focused on the titular teenage girl on a weekend vacation with her best friend's family, and gets into an unexpected match of mind games with another guest. This I thought was OK, but didn't feel like it had much of a point to it, it just ended with a flat resolution to me.

    It was really good to go to the IFC Center, as I hadn't been there in many years, and it was formerly the Waverly Theater. I had gone to a midnight movie screening of Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer there nearly twenty years ago, and that film still stands as one of the more chilling films I've ever seen. I had attended the DOC NYC film festival there in 2009-2010, and I'm glad that it's still going strong all these years later. It's a nice theater, situated in the West Village, and was really nice to revisit this past weekend.

Thoughts on Hobson's Choice

    On Criterion, I watched Hobson’s Choice, a 1954 British film directed by David Lean, and co- written by Lean, Wynyard Browne, and Norman Spencer, adapted from the 1916 play of the same name by Harold Brighouse. The film starred Charles Laughton as an 1880s Victorian widowed bookmaker who is a miser and has three grown daughters, and doesn’t pay them wages. He is fine with his two younger daughters getting married but laughs at the thought of his eldest daughter, Maggie (Brenda de Banzie) ever getting married, telling her she’s too old to think about it, “thirty and shelved.” Though when he’s around his bar friends, he says he needs Maggie around to help with the business, vs. his less serious daughters.

    Out of spite towards her father, Maggie decides to marry Will (Sir John Mills), a meek boot maker in the shop, and she’s essentially telling him they are going to marry, even if he doesn’t love her.

    The movie becomes more of a romantic comedy, with a Taming of the Shrew twist feel on it, and Mills brings a lot of nerdy charm as Will, who starts out as nervous and shy and builds more confidence and self-assurance as the story progresses. de Banzie was really fun in a very matter of fact way, knowing she’ll be the one to take care of her alcoholic father and running the business, and using her business sense and pragmatic skills to figure out situations. And Charles Laughton is fun in a gregarious, hammy kind of way as Hobson, playing drunk in a very theatrical way and being a bit of a doofus. It’s really a lovely gem to watch, and I heard of it from hearing Michael Cera recommend it on his Criterion Closet episode, saying “It’s like a Disney movie, flourishing music, every wall to wall gesture,” and called it a magical experience.

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.