Thoughts on The Friend

    Last week, I went to the Angelika Film Center in New York City to see The Friend, a 2024 dramedy written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End; What Maisie Knew; Bee Season), based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez. It stars Naomi Watts as Iris, a writer and college professor living in Greenwich Village in her late father's rent-controlled apartment on Washington Place, whose longtime friend Walter, a fellow writer and professor who has been married three times, suddenly dies by suicide, and unbeknownst to her, made her the "continency plan" to take care of his five-year old, 150-lb Great Dane, Apollo. Iris learns about this from one of his ex-wives, and despite that her building doesn't allow dogs, and that she doesn't want this responsibility while she is still grieving the loss of her friend, she takes in Apollo, who proceeds to take over her bed and trash her home when she's out, as when Iris comes in, a neighbor (Ann Dowd) knowingly says, "He missed you," meaning he was likely barking and howling so the neighbors could hear. The super warns Iris about no dogs, not wanting management to evict her and make her lose her rent-controlled cheap apartment.

    Iris is struggling with taking care of this dog, who is grieving the loss of Walter like she is, through some particular good animal acting by Bing, like sitting and listening to Walter's writings being read aloud or howling at the ceremony when Walter's ashes are spread over water. Iris didn't ask for this, and doesn't like that her friends treat her as a charity case, telling her she lives in a "shoebox" (when her apartment as a studio/1 bedroom is much larger and more spacious than average NYC apartments today), and as she tries to find a permanent home for Apollo while feeling guilty that she can't take care of him like Walter entrusted her to do, she is coming to terms with her grief, with her anger over Walter's decision, and knowing the dog is one of her last connections to Walter. She is also left to edit his unfinished novel, as well as dealing with Walter's three wives, and his adult daughter who suddenly showed up in the picture, all with their own individual histories with him.

    I felt the movie was long at two hours, and there were several times in the last quarter of it when I kept thinking it would end, but it would continue. Despite that, I liked the movie as a drama about grief, writing, dogs, and friendship. Naomi Watts was wonderful to watch in the film, especially in a scene when she meets with a therapist to try to have the dog registered as an emotional support animal so she can keep him in a last-ditch effort, and she delivers some marvelous acting when venting about her grief and sadness and anger about Walter and her history with him.

    When I saw the film on March 28th, there was a Q&A afterwards with Scott McGehee, David Siegel, and Naomi Watts, talking about the film and finding the right dog for Apollo, selecting Bing after a nation wide search. Watts talked about how she had two 20-minute sessions a day with Apollo, in order for him to slowly get used to her, and how she as a dog person had to play someone who isn't fond of dogs, and improvising along with him in scenes when he wasn't acting, like a scene where she argues with a security guard who won't allow dogs in the building, and the dog just sat down, so she sat down too, going along with it.

    It was nice seeing Carla Gugino in the film as one of Walter's ex-wives, as I've always liked her. Bill Murray himself was fine, but his image to me has been more tainted with allegations of him being abusive to several people, both professionally and personally, and him forcing a kiss on Naomi Watts during the press tour, when she just got married last year to Billy Crudup, makes him more odious to me, so I don't have much positive to say about him.

    I would recommend the film as a decent drama starring Naomi Watts and a regal, beautiful dog played by Bing the Great Dane.

Thoughts on Mickey 17

    This week, I went out with my friends to see Mickey 17, a 2025 sci-fi comedy written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. It takes place in 2054, where Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is a nobody who, along with his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), are poor and struggling and owe money to a murderous loan shark, and in order to escape Earth and their debts, they sign up to work on a spaceship expedition that is led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) to colonize another planet. Timo gets work as a shuttle pilot, and Mickey, not having any prospects in life and not thinking things through, signs up to be an "Expendable," essentially donating his body for scientists to use for testing in experiments, and his DNA, brain, and memories are captured, so that when he inevitably dies in these experiments (like testing the air on a new planet and dying from viruses until a vaccine can be developed), and his body is tossed down into a furnace, he is regenerated within a day through a 3-D printer, printing out his whole body, including stops and starts like an actual printer spitting out paper.

    When the film catches up to the most current version of Mickey, he is in his 17th life, with all his memories intact, including remembering all his previous deaths. People on the ship, working grunt jobs and on limited rations, keep asking him "What's it like to die?" and he can't say anything more than "It sucks." Through all of his lives as Mickey 1-17, he has had a relationship with security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a sexy, fun, and playful romance where they share private jokes like drawing stick figure sex positions to each other. 

    Four years into the expedition, after a vaccine has been developed, Mickey 17 is to capture one of the indigenous creatures on the planet, called "creepers" by the spaceship crew (but whom my friends compared to the creatures in Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). He falls through the ice, is left for dead, but rather than being eaten by the creepers, he is rescued by them and returned to the surface. But this causes more problems, as Mickey 18 (also played by Pattison) was developed in his presumed death and absence, and as there are laws against multiple clones existing at the same time due to past crimes, neither can be alive at the same time.

    The film is a lot of fun to watch, very offbeat and weird, and a lot of credit goes to Robert Pattinson's dual performance as Mickey 17 and Mickey 18. It's hard when an actor plays twins or clones and is acting opposite themselves, to make themselves distinct so that the "twins" don't get confused by the audience, and with both Mickeys having very different personalities and slightly different voices, it's easy to tell them apart as two separate characters. Pattison affects this kind of pathetic, squirrelly voice, similar to when he put on an exaggerated character voice as the Heron in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki's film The Boy and the Heron (2023), and he's a fantastic actor, committed to physical comedy (like quick scenes where Mickey is being printed out but there is no tray to catch him so he just droops out of the printer and flips onto the floor) and facial expressions like mocking gestures that Mickey 18 makes at others.

    Mark Ruffalo's performance as Kenneth feels inspired as a mix between the tele-evangelist theatrics of Jimmy Swaggart and the pompous arrogance of Donald Trump, and as Kenneth is described as having had two failed presidential elections before deciding to leave Earth to start his own colony elsewhere, it's clear that Bong may have written this with the idea of Trump losing the 2024 election, but he couldn't have predicted the results. Ruffalo is a charming and likable actor, so even if he's playing a despicable villain, it's hard to completely hate him because of Ruffalo himself. Toni Collette's role as Kenneth's wife Ylfa is more conniving and like the Lady Macbeth to her husband, sneaking him ideas while being into developing sauces and fancy foods, as the crew of workers will get their rations cut in half and be starving.

    Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance With Somebody; Blink Twice; Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) is a delight to watch in this film, really bright and funny, with a gap-toothed smile, and game for action sequences and commanding the film as the heroine, especially in the finale. She and Pattinson have sweet chemistry, and were enjoyable to watch together. 

    The film is 2 hours and 17 minutes long, and the finale goes on for much longer than it needed to be, when it starts turning into a war film, and more and more gets layered on top of each other, where I couldn't tell when the end point was going to be. I would think it would be over, then more sequences and plot points would be added. I felt the finale got too bloated with too many ideas at once, but up until then, I really liked the movie a lot, and enjoyed seeing a creative and weird sci-fi comedy with my friends and discussing it afterwards.

Thoughts on All Shall Be Well

   Last week on Criterion, I watched a 2024 Hong Kong film titled All Shall Be Well, written and directed by Ray Yeung. The film focuses on Angie (Patra Au) and Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin), a happy and affluent lesbian couple in their sixties, who have been together for forty years and living together for thirty years. They aren't legally married, but Angie has always been known as "Aunt Angie" to Pat's extended family, who have been loving and accepting of their relationship. 

    But tragically, Pat suddenly dies, and as Angie didn't co-own their apartment and wasn't married to Pat, her legal rights as her long-term partner are in jeopardy, as control of Pat's estate go to her brother, whose family have been poor and rely on a fortune teller to help improve their luck and finances. Then, Pat's brother and his family start showing that their "allyship" to Angie and Pat was only surface-level, as they ignore Angie's wishes about how Pat wanted her ashes spread at sea, to having control of her apartment and deciding whether to let Pat still live in her home she's been in for three decades, and essentially now treating her as if she doesn't count as family because she and Pat weren't married.

    Angie has her own friend group of lesbians, including one who is a lawyer and works to advocate for Angie's right as Pat's partner. It's a great film, but so frustrating to watch because the film depicts a reality that queer people have faced, when their partner dies and their partner's heterosexual family takes over and has the legal right to kick their partner out of their home, or treat them as if they were just their "roommate" and not their long-term romantic partner. People in the LGBTQ community fought for civil rights for decades, including having the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples, when it comes to estate laws and housing and receiving benefits and inheritances. The nationwide law that passed for same-sex marriage was only just ten years ago, following a few states that allowed it, and there have been more legal rights for same-sex married couples, which is a great improvement. So it makes it so sad to watch a movie where a family, who seem like allies, are quick to be dismissive of their loved one's partner when it's convenient for them, and control the estate and do what they want instead of what the deceased person would have wanted.

    And Angie, through encountering the waning kindness of Pat's family, is also grieving the loss of essentially her spouse of forty years, feeling lost without her, and being in her sixties and not knowing what to do. They didn't make legal preparations because they didn't want to think about death, and just lived in the moment. Their scenes together early in the movie are sweet, like when they shop together at a street market stall where they are friendly with the shop owners, and there's a lot of familiarity and warmth with them. Only with her found family is she able to find some kinship with fellow queer women who can understand her loss much more than anyone else can.

    Despite the film leaving me emotionally gutted at the end, I really liked it a lot, and thought Patra Au was fantastic in the film, bringing a lot of lived experience where one could feel the years of her history as Angie with Pat, and she and Maggie Li Lin Lin had a lot of sweet chemistry in their few scenes together. I highly recommend this film, but know that the actions of Pat's family in the film may leave you feeling pissed off in the end.

Thoughts on The Super

    I had heard of this 1991 movie The Super years ago, when I was telling a friend about Hal Ashby's 1970 film The Landlord, where Beau Bridges plays a rich guy who becomes the landlord of a Park Slope, Brooklyn building, in a low-income Black and brown neighborhood, and plans to gentrify the building by evicting the tenants and turning it into a luxury place. He undergoes a change of heart through the movie, getting to know the tenants and caring about people. My friend said, "That sounds like a Joe Pesci movie called The Super."

    I just watched The Super on Tubi, directed by Rod Daniel (Teen Wolf, Beethoven's 2nd) and written by Sam Simon and Nora Ephron, and really liked it. It bombed when it came out, and it's hard to find now, since the video included, made by Hats Off Entertainment three years ago, said it's only on VHS. It's a similar plot, in that Joe Pesci plays the son of a slumlord (Vincent Gardenia) who profits off of buildings in low-income neighborhoods, where he never gets anything fixed and collects the rent, and gives a building to Pesci, who takes after his greedy jerk of a dad. Pesci is taken to court for all the housing violations in the building, and made to live in the building for four months to get the building up to code and face the problems himself, like poor plumbing, a lack of heat, a rat infestation, etc.

    He starts out the movie a slimeball jerk, being continually pressed by a housing authority lawyer (Madolyn Smith Osborne), who he sexually harasses throughout the movie, and thankfully she never shows interest in him and always puts him in his place). But as he gets his comeuppance, he starts caring about the tenants, and learns how to stand up to his father, who is full of racist dogwhistles like calling the tenants "animals."

    

    The tenants are played by character actors like Ruben Blades (more known as a famous salsa musician), Paul Benjamin, Beatrice Winde, and Eileen Galindo.

    I did like hearing the early 90s dance music, like "You Can't Touch This" and "Gonna Make You Sweat" during scenes when the tenants party whenever they have electricity and heat, and how the scenes were clearly shot in Brooklyn, even if the exterior of the building is in the East Village. Joe Pesci's character becomes more likable as the movie goes on, and it has a similar resolution to The Landlord. So I enjoyed this, more of an average early 90s comedy.

Thoughts on Peppermint Frappé

     On Criterion, I watched the 1967 Spanish pyschosexual thriller Peppermint Frappé, directed by Carlos Saura and written by Saura, Rafael Azcono, and Angelino Fons. The film starred Geraldine Chaplin (who was Saura's partner at the time and appeared in several of his films throughout the late 1960s and 1970s) and José Luis López Vázquez. López Vázquez played Julián, a middle-aged conservative physician who becomes obsessed with his best friend's new, much younger wife, Elena (Chaplin), a flirty and vivacious blonde who embodies the New Wave spirit of European culture of the 1960s. She reminds him of a woman he saw beating the drums during the Holy Week ritual in the Spanish village of Calanda. While she denies that she is that woman, he is attracted to her cosmopolitan air and carefree attitude. 

    But since she is not interested in him, and he cannot possess her, he decides to remake her image on his meek, mousy brunette assistant, Ana (also played by Chaplin). Ana is shy, not glamorous, and harbors a secret crush on her boss. Julián, having old-fashioned and sexist attitudes about women and beauty standards, pressures Ana to work out in her sweater and skirt on a rowing machine in the office, dictates that women must be small and thin, and pressures her to wear more stylish makeup, trying to turn her into Elena's image.

    The film takes more turns with Julián treating Ana like a doll to dress up, taking advantage of her subservient position to him, while Ana may be manipulating him as well, playing a passive role intentionally, becoming what he wants in order to win him for herself. Elena still doesn't have any interest in Julián, and she and her husband Pablo lightly tease him, mocking him, which only makes him feel more stuck in the past and his conservative ways. The film takes more of a big climatic ending, which felt like it was being rushed in the end, whereas it worked a lot more in being a commentary about the Old Guard being more repressed vs. the younger generation in the waning years of the Franco administration in Spain.

    I mostly liked this film for Chaplin's dual role as Elena and Ana, playing two incredibly different women, and being very convincing as both a flirty, elusive blonde who loves to travel, prefers older men and isn't interested in having children at the moment; and Ana, a shy and mild-mannered nurse whose body language is tucked in and doesn't wear form-fitting dresses or style her hair in a fancy way, but possesses her own quiet strength. She's really charismatic and captivating in this film, and I liked watching her in her early roles and the beginning of her collaboration with Saura.

    I couldn't stand Julián's sexist attitude, and didn't like that the ending felt rushed to give it a big finale, but otherwise I thought it was a decent movie, feeling of the time as a New Wave film with inspirations from Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel.

Thoughts on I Like It Like That

On Criterion, I watched I Like It Like That, a 1994 dramedy written and directed by Darnell Martin, making her the first Black woman to direct a studio film. The film starred Luna Lauren Vélez as Lisette, a married mother of three kids in the Bronx who is struggling to keep her family together, between her cheating fboy of a husband Chino (Jon Seda), who is in jail for stealing a stereo during a neighborhood blackout; financially supporting her family; her racist mother in-law (Rita Moreno) who is anti-Black and blames her granddaughter’s textured curly hair on Lisette being Afro-Latina; and her loud, roughhousing kids, where her son is being lured into crime by local kids to prove he’s a “man.”

    Lisette hustles to get local modeling work, angles her way to be the assistant of a record executive to promote a Latino music group, and is stressed out by her family and her nosy neighborhood and trying to develop her own sense of identity and independence.

    I had seen this movie many years ago, but didn’t remember it well. I really liked it, and like the depiction of the worn-out Bronx old-school apartment, the messiness of the home, and the closeness of the neighborhood, despite everyone being in each other’s business. Luna Lauren Vélez is really great in this, and I mainly know of her from this movie and voicing Miles Morales’ mother in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse movies. Jon Seda is cute, but his character pissed me off throughout the movie, someone who definitely coasted on good looks but not brains.

    One of the best parts of the movie is Alexis, Lisette’s transgender sister, who lives in the same apartment building as Lisette and her family. Despite that Alexis was played by Jesse Borrego, a cis straight man, his performance was incredibly touching and caring, playing a woman who is accepted as trans by the local community, but not by her parents, who cruelly reject her. She has a small cat that she carries around her home, and there is a cute exchange where she tells Lisette that her yelling is scaring “the baby.” Lisette goes, “That’s not a baby, that’s a cat.” Alexis quietly adds, “Baby cat.”

    This scene is a highlight of the pressure that Lisette is under from her family and trying to get $1500 to bail her husband out of jail, and hiding in the bathroom while nearly having a breakdown.

Thoughts on A Face in the Crowd

    On Criterion, I watched the 1957 satire/drama A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, based on his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler." It centered on Andy Griffith in his film debut as Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a drifter who is discovered in the drunk tank of a local jail by a radio journalist named Marcia (Patricia Neal) who highlights him for her "A Face in the Crowd" human interest weekly program, where, in this case, she just surprises prisoners in a rural Arkansas jail and tries to mine entertainment out of them. Lonesome is woken up by the jailer, and, on a deal that he'll be released the next morning if he provides a song for the radio program, proceeds to perform a white-man blues song, hollering and taking over the broadcast. Marcia follows up with her radio colleagues, decides she wants him back for weekly shows, and finds him hitchhiking the next day, offers him work, and he soon becomes a radio sensation, preaching to the audience with charm and a big laugh. He takes advantage of his celebrity, criticizing local politicians and ridiculing his show's sponsors, and gaining Memphis-area popularity, all with an underlying sinisterness behind his big laughs enveloping the screen like a python swallowing its prey.

    As the film progresses, and Lonesome moves on to his own TV show, he becomes more corrupt behind the scenes, hiding it with a folksy, everyman TV persona. He hawks sugar pills as if they are male enhancement pills, he leers at teenage girls in a majorette competition and marries the 17-year old winner (a young Lee Remick also in her film debut), is brought on as an influencer to political hopefuls and develops his own political ambitions, and reveals himself to be more of a narcissist egomaniac stepping on everyone to get ahead.

    While Griffith obviously hams it up in this role, which would be a far distance from the more kinder and likable TV characters he would become known for, like Andy Taylor and Ben Matlock, Patricia Neal delivered a more understated, pained performance as the person who inadvertently created a monster, and is sinking in regret throughout the film. She had made Lonesome famous, thinking he'd be a fun weekly segment to her show, and his persona ran away from her, and she couldn't do anything but sit and watch, and resign herself to profiting off of his success, because he knows he owes her for his success. She even has a brief affair with him, only for him to callously reject her, first to claim he has an estranged wife in an unsettled divorce, then to marry a teenage adoring fan as a public performance. Marcia says of her: "Betty Lou is your public, all wrapped up with yellow ribbons into one cute little package. She's the logical culmination of the great 20th-century love affair between Lonesome Rhodes and his mass audience." When Lonesome leaves the room, Neal as Marcia lets out this choked little cry before collapsing onto the bed, and it was some really great physical acting from her. In the finale, as she is witnessing Lonesome's downfall, she still can't help but care about him, and has to be convinced by her show's writer, Mel (Walter Matthau) that while Lonesome is able to con people for a while, ultimately people see through it, and "we get wise to him - that's our strength."

    As a cultural reference, the scene where Lonesome's true nature is revealed to the public made me think of The Simpsons episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled," where he loses his show to a ventriloquist dummy named Gabbo, who wins over Krusty's audience, until he too, loses them due to the same way as Lonesome. I don't know if The Simpsons was making a reference to A Face in the Crowd, but it felt possible.

    This is an excellent film, that I had heard of through a casual mention in an old Winona Ryder interview as one of her favorite films. The film still holds up well, and what is sad is that in the present day, Donald Trump can act completely crass, drop any notions of seeming relatable or caring about the public, and he still gets voted for a second term. Whereas this film follows more of a rise and fall of a public personality, assuming the public will turn on him when his real personality is revealed, and sadly, that hasn't been the case in real life with current politics.

Thoughts on Alma's Rainbow

 

    On Criterion, I watched the 1994 drama Alma's Rainbow, written and directed by Ayoka Chenzira, centered on women in a Black family in Brooklyn, exploring themes of sisterhood and motherhood, set in a spacious Brooklyn brownstone home, and having this old New York City feel to it that I really appreciated. The film focuses on teenager Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), who hides Day-Glo shorts under her Catholic school uniform, and practices hip-hop dancing with her friends in the park, and binds her breasts, and doesn't want to be seen as either a tomboy or a girly girl, but embracing both sides of her, as she has romantic fantasies about Miles (Isaiah Washington). Her mother, Alma (Kim Weston-Moran) is more conservative and straight-laced, telling her daughter to stay away from boys, and runs a beauty salon out of their home. The family dynamic gets shaken up more when Alma's sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby) comes back after living in Paris for ten years, being flighty and dramatic and romanticizing Josephine Baker to her niece Rainbow, to which Alma flatly repeats about Baker, "Died broke."

    The film features a beautiful jazz score by Jean-Paul Bourelly, with Me'Shell Ndegeocello on bass (simply credited in the film as "Meshell"), and a rich cinematography captured by Ronald K. Gray, who also shot Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground in 1982. This is a story about women in a family bonding with each other, and sharing intergenerational history, as there are black and white flashbacks to Alma as a child with her own mother, and her mother's ashes kept in an urn in the living room.

    On Letterboxd, theironcupcake wrote a stunning review that captures the film much more eloquently and deeply than I can, and I share a passage from their review: "Ultimately this is the story of a family realizing the strength of its bonds, whether in the comforts of holding each other while asleep in bed, Alma and Ruby (the latter dressed in a floor-length, off-the-shoulder canary yellow gown with matching boa) healing some of their longstanding rift by wrestling each other to the floor (laughing all the while), Ruby teaching Rainbow how to walk in such a way as to project confidence, both Alma and Rainbow individually (re)discovering the desire to be touched and for feelings reciprocated in acts of love (though Rainbow is still a little too young for much more than dreams; she has a few of a boy named Miles, played by Isaiah Washington), and Rainbow cutting her hair into a flapper bob in homage to her aunt's affection for Josephine Baker. As Ruby says, the reality of life is that it is not "always great books and heartfelt jazz; I don't care what they say. But I keep on keepin' on because that's what I do best." Survival, that's the ticket. Any way you can do it, get it done, but it's definitely more fun if you and your loved ones stick together."

    Ayoka Chenzira is a director, animator, experimental filmmaker, and storyteller. She grew up in North Philadelphia, in the same building where her mother owned a beauty salon. Her mother made reimagined designer clothing, and encouraged Ayoka to follow her artistic passions, and she got into filmmaking at 17, becoming one of the first African-Americans to be a film educator in higher education. In the ending credits for Alma's Rainbow, she thanks fellow Black female filmmakers like Julie Dash, Ada Griffin, and Mabel Haddock, as well as the late Kathleen Collins and the late screenwriter Waldo Salt.

    Her film is a tribute to Black women family and finding connections with each other. In one scene, Rainbow gets her period for the first time, and the women alternate sitting by her side as she lays in bed with a rubber hot water bottle on her stomach to relieve cramps, and one cuts up ginger to make tea for her. It's an example of the shared womanhood of their family to show support and pass down stories as she goes through this rite of passage. It's a lovely and beautiful film, and I'm glad I checked it out.

Thoughts on Omni Loop

     On Hulu, I watched the 2024 time-travel sci-fi drama Omni Loop, written and directed by Bernard Britto, and starring Mary-Louise Parker as Zoya Lowe, a quantum physics textbook author who was diagnosed with a growing black hole in her chest, and is given one week to live. She visits her mother in her assisted living community, spends time with her family at the beach, and gets an early celebration for her upcoming 55th birthday. But just as her nose begins to bleed, and Zoya knows this is the time of her death, she goes into the bathroom, takes a pill, and wakes up right back in the hospital a week ago, living the same week again in a self-induced time loop. She had found these pills when she was 12, in a bottle with her name on it, and would take them throughout her life to get ahead by going back in time to know how to improve things, but only started taking them again recently after her diagnosis.

    She is frustrated at living the same week over and over again, and decides to do research on the pills, and by chance, she meets Paula (Ayo Edebiri), a research assistant at a local community college, and they work together to do lab experiments on the pills, including using the help of a man who was shrunk to nanoscopic-size in a past experiment, who lives in a pet store box and helps with the calculations on the pills. They are trying to solve the mystery of time travel, but each time Zoya repeats the loop and they try different experiments, they are no closer to finding out how time travel works than before.

    It's an interesting movie that is about Zoya living alternate timelines each time she repeats the loop, as well as having anticipatory grieving for her own death within a week, and feeling like she was never good enough at her career no matter how many times she used the pills to her advantage to know answers in advance and get ahead. The film runs a lot longer than it should, at nearly two hours, when it feels like it should be 90 minutes, and can be a slog when going into Zoya's past history with her former colleague and ex Mark (Eddie Cahill). But Parker and Edebiri work really well together with great chemistry, as science professionals in very different positions in their life, and Paula talks about her past with her family and how she wishes she could have had the ability of time travel like Zoya did to fix past mistakes.

    I mainly watched this for the two leads and the time loop story, and while I felt it dragged at times, I thought it was a decent movie, focusing on women in STEM fields and trying to figure out time travel.

Thoughts on Georgia, Georgia

    On The Black Film Archive, I watched Georgia, Georgia, a 1972 drama directed by Stig Björkman, and starring Diana Sands, Dirk Benedict, and Minnie Gentry. The film focuses on both Sands as Georgia Martin, a singer touring Stockholm, and being pressured to speak on behalf of Black people in Sweden as a Black celebrity, and not wanting to be tokenized or expected to speak for the whole Black experience; and the experiences of Vietnam war deserters, with both Michael (Benedict), a white deserter who works as a photographer in Sweden, and Bobo (Terry Whitmore, a real-life deserter who wrote a 1971 memoir about his experience in the Vietnam War), a Black war deserter who wants Georgia to advocate for Black deserters in Sweden.

    The film was written by Maya Angelou, and Georgia, Georgia is known as the first known film production for a screenplay written by a Black woman. The film is notable for being centered on a Black woman figuring out her identity and challenging race relations, and Sands, who would tragically die at age 39 from cancer the following year, is great in portraying this complex role, with a lot of grace and charm and poise. And the early 1970s fashions she wore, like her dresses and coats, all looked fabulous. 

    Unfortunately, the rest of the movie drags in its 90 minutes, and it feels weak and amateurish in its production, despite the talent involved. The Black Film Archive describes the film as "visually disjointed as it doesn't wade into the nuances of being a Black woman which is essential to this film," and I agree. It's trying to both be a character study of a Black woman singer who is questioned on her Blackness by both white and Black people, and also trying to be a political commentary on defectors of the Vietnam War, and it doesn't really come together well, it feels stronger when it focuses more on Sands' character and her romance with Michael, as well as her relationship with her mother figure Mrs. Anderson (Gentry), who is controlling and disapproves of the interracial relationship. And if Maya Angelou had directed the film and kept it more in focus of Georgia and her journey, it would have been more interesting and insightful.

    I'm glad I watched it to check it out, and to see the streaming options on The Black Film Archive, which has a collection of films from the 1910s-1990s of obscure Black films that have been digitized and preserved for cultural and historical significance.

Thoughts on Crossing Delancey

     On Criterion, I watched the 1988 romantic comedy Crossing Delancey, directed by Joan Micklin Silver and adapted by Susan Sandler from her play of the same name. The film starred Amy Irving as Isabelle, a woman who works for an old bookstore in New York City, and mingles with the high-class literari, who she admires and wants to be part of their circle. She comes from an Lower East Side Jewish background, and regular visits her Yiddish-speaking Bubbe, Ida (Reizl Boyzk, a New York stage actress of Yiddish theater whose only film role was this movie), who lives in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side, who is pressuring her granddaughter to get married, despite her protests that she is happy as a single, independent woman. Ida hires a matchmaker (Sylvia Miles), and with Isabelle's hesitant agreeance, she sets up a meeting with Isabelle and Sam (Peter Riegert), a small business owner who runs a pickle stand.

    Isabelle is polite to Sam, who is more of a nice, down to earth guy, but she turns him down because she is more interested in the Dutch-American author Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbe), who represents the more cosmopolitan, intellectual lifestyle that she wants. Sam seems too "working-class" for her, as well as seeming too close to her Jewish roots and too close to home. Yet, Isabelle is caught between the two of them, figuring out what she wants and dealing with both men, and coming to terms with her own interest in love while still maintaining her independence.

    I really loved this movie. Amy Irving was fantastic in it, as having this city woman glamour to her that seemed stylish and attainable and cool, and I liked how she and Peter Riegert had such great chemistry with each other, where their conversations feel warm and realistic, and the film, as a romantic comedy, can feel more like a character study of people than just a light movie with caricatures. The movie is very 1980s in a old-school New York way, with Isabelle talking about living in her rent-controlled apartment and saying how cheap it is compared to others paying $1500 for their apartments (which, in 2025, would be considered cheap today for New York City), and Ida being a lifer in New York City and a part of the old Yiddish part of NYC that isn't around as much anymore, a person from another time. 

    Reizl Bozyk was a total scene-stealer in this film, and a really bright and funny presence who added so much character and lived-in experience as a star performer in the Yiddish theatre world. Though this was her only film role, I'm glad it's preserved for a mainstream audience to see how talented and wonderful she was.

    Joan Micklin Silver was a director of films and plays, and only just passed away in 2020 at age 85. Her best-known films were Hester Street (1975), which received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Carol Kane; Between the Lines (1977), starring John Heard and Lindsay Crouse, Big Girls Don't Cry  . . . They Get Even (1992), a family comedy that was originally known as Stepkids (to people like me who as children saw the trailer on the VHS tape to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze); Invisible Child, a 1999 TV movie where Rita Wilson plays a woman who invents an imaginary child and the rest of her family just goes with it and indulges her delusion; and A Fish in the Bathtub (1999), a indie comedy starring Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara with a young Mark Ruffalo as their son. The Criterion Channel is doing a collection retrospective on their channel, streaming several of her films.

    One of my favorite scenes was when Isabelle is in Gray's Papaya, a famous local chain in NYC of hot dogs and fruit drinks, and a woman comes in to sing "Some Enchanted Evening." The woman is a total stranger, but her lyrics have resonance for Isabelle and her feelings toward Sam. It's a mix of feeling like a precursor to the singing telegram scene from The Fisher King (with Michael Jeter singing to Amanda Plummer to promote Mercedes Ruehl's video store to establish a love connection with Robin Williams) and a tribute to a very New York City landmark, I used to go to the one on W. 4th St in the 2000s when I was in my twenties.

    The film came out in 1988, the year after Norman Jewison's film Moonstruck, a romantic comedy centered around Italian-American Brooklynites, and as that film had a range of adult ages and focused on love in middle and senior age, in a very Italian focus, Crossing Delancey is similar in that it is very focused on Jewish New York, with a mix of characters in their thirties and in their senior ages, and both films feel like they depict a kind of New York City that isn't around as much anymore post-gentrification and major rent hikes, so it feels warm and nice to watch old movies set in New York City with specific cultural identities of older ages as the main characters.

Thoughts on Hard Truths

 

    Last week, I went to the Angelika Film Centre to see Hard Truths, Mike Leigh's 2024 British film starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin as sisters in London, whose personalities greatly contrast. Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) is a woman who is struggling with anxiety and depression, and is angry all of the time, to an uncontrollable degree, looking for any excuse with her short temper to lecture or chastise someone about why they're wrong or how they've hurt or offended her. She yells at her meek plumber husband Curtley (David Webber), who is resigned to taking her verbal blows and doesn't argue or fight back with her. She yells at her son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who she sees as a lazy layabout at 22, telling him not to go outside for walks or people will say he's "loitering with intent," and he stays quiet and keeps his headphones on to stay in his own world. And Pansy picks fights with everyone she comes across, arguing with salespeople, the dentist, random shoppers, everyone who she antagonizes and looks for an excuse to feel like the victim. She rants at animals and flowers, despising the pigeons in her backyard, and it's clear that her anger is unhealthy, and she isn't managing well with the grief of her mother's death, now five years past.

    Chantelle (Austin), on the other hand, is a jovial, friendly hairdresser with two adult daughters, who jokes with her clients, teases her kids, who are both healthy and talk about having active social lives and busy careers, and who all live more full lives than the grief and sadness that hangs over Pansy's house. 

    Chantelle puts up with Pansy's complaining and temper, in a scene where she is trying to do her hair but Pansy keeps picking everyone apart and going on long-winded rants (especially in an earlier dinner table where the camera holds on Jean-Baptiste delivering long monologues criticizing everyone she comes across while her husband and son sit silently at their plates, practically dissociating in the moment), and Chantelle is more good-natured and still loves her sister, and is trying to get her to join her on Mother's Day to visit their mother's grave, which Pansy is hesitant to do for obvious reasons.

    The film's trailer marketed it more as a comedy, with out-of-context moments of Pansy making fun of people (like calling a random woman an ostrich or questioning why a baby's clothes would have pockets), but it's much more of an intense drama, about a woman who is hurting so much that she lashes out at everyone, wants to just stay in bed and sleep (and whenever she is woken up, she rouses up like she's being attacked), and is sick of hating everything but can't stop. The film is an incredible character study about a person who rants a lot, but is unable to talk about what is really troubling her, because it's too sensitive and raw for her to address.

    Bobby Finger in his Letterboxed review brought up a great point about how the film's characters will seem very honest, but will omit the "hard truths" from their interactions. As Pansy doesn't want to talk about her trauma and grief, Chantelle's two daughters will put on happy faces when talking to each other about their day, but leave out the less cheerful details. "What about every thought that hasn’t spewed from her mouth like acid? There’s so fucking much of it hidden beneath all of those hard, shouted truths. And if that weren’t enough (because maybe no one can do juxtaposition as elegantly as Mike Leigh), he gives us that scene of Chantelle’s daughters, the two brightest lights in the whole movie, discussing their days with each other and leaving out all the dreariness… keeping the painful details from each other while somehow maintaining something honest and real." It's an astute point about how excellent Leigh is at writing realistic characters who are complex and messy and interesting.

    The film takes a slower pace in the second half, as the characters are sitting more with their grief, and Pansy is exhausted by her anger and is just silent and sad. Her character hasn't been diagnosed, but it's possible she may have manic-depressive disorder, as it fits with her symptoms, but the film doesn't go into those questions. It leaves unanswered questions, like just stepping into someone's life and not having everything fixed or wrapped up by the end, and while it is an emotional heavyweight of a film to watch, I thought it was fantastic, and incredibly relatable for anyone who has felt immense grief and anger at the same time.

Thoughts on The Last Showgirl

    I went to the Angelika Film Center in NYC and saw The Last Showgirl, a 2024 film directed by Gia Coppola and written by Kate Gersten. The film stars Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a Las Vegas showgirl in her fifties who has performed in a revue for thirty years, then faces uncertainty when she finds out it's closing due to low ticket sales and being outdated and passe.

    As the oldest performer with the most seniority in the show, Shelly values the old-fashioned style of the show, seeing it as classier than other Vegas shows (to her own detriment, as she often slut-shames other shows while defending the topless revue as artistic and "French"), she denigrates the burlesque-style circus show that is replacing them as the "dirty" circus show, and is a mother figure to the other dancers, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka). She is also close with Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a cocktail waitress at the casino who was ousted from the show six years prior.

    Eddie (Dave Bautista), the show's producer, breaks the news to Shelly and her friends that the show is closing in two weeks, and it sends Shelly into a spiral, as she barely has a pension or any retirement plan, had always lived for the show and the glamour, and doesn't have any backup plans for other survival day jobs.

    Shelly reaches out to her semi-estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who has largely grown up with family friends and her surrogate mom, and is graduating from an Arizona college with a degree in photography. She is emotionally distant from her mother, who wasn't there for her during her childhood, valuing the glory of being beautiful and feeling alive in the stage show over being a reliable parent, and Hannah is more realistic and blunt while Shelly, in Pamela Anderson's trademark soft breathy voice, had her head more in the clouds.

    It had some good needle drop moments, like Annette doing an impromptu dance in the casino floor area to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," or Shelly cueing Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night" for an audition for another show. And I kept picturing Jamie Lee Curtis as having worked on this film in between her appearances on The Bear, especially when her character is in the kitchen and getting flustered, making me think of Carmy's mom and her unchecked mental health issues.

    I thought the movie had a good lead performance with Anderson, who is given the chance to shine in an artsy indie drama, but the rest of the film felt lacking. It kept following similar beats to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008), with the aging performer refusing to accept that their time in the spotlight was over, being overly romantic about their glory days. and both having an estranged relationship with their daughter. It made it hard to see the movie as its own story, and Shelly often came off as unrealistic and self-centered, beyond her sweet-natured demeanor. The movie feels like it just abruptly ends, when it didn't really feel complete, and I wanted the story to feel more fleshed out. So I liked it OK, but felt it could have been stronger and less of hitting predictable emotional beats in a drama.

Thoughts on Daughters of Darkness

    On Metrograph’s streaming page for members, I watched Daughters of Darkness, a 1971 European erotic horror film directed by Harry Kümel and starring Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, and Danielle Ouimet.

    The film centers on a newlywed couple, Stefan (Karlen) and Valerie (Ouimet) traveling through Europe. They stay at a Belgian seaside hotel, and at nightfall, the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory arrives, with her “secretary” Ilona (Andrea Rau). The middle-aged concierge remarks that he had seen the countess forty years ago at the hotel when he was a child, but that she has not aged. She takes the suite next to the couple, and Valerie, translating Flemish from her fluency in German, reads of a series of child murders in the area, each a girl whose throat was slashed.

    Elizabeth makes the acquaintance of the couple, being mysterious and seductive, having a Marlene Dietrich-like glamour to her with her pencil-thin eyebrows and platinum bob. She takes a fixation on the couple, particularly Valerie, while Ilona works on seducing Stefan. Elizabeth is most likely a vampire, and her charm takes hold over Valerie.

    The film has a high art feel to the vampire film, not over the top campy, and Seyrig brings a lot of grace and elegance combined with a quiet threatening presence to her role as Elizabeth. The film takes advantage of the now-debunked myth that the real-life Elizabeth Báthory was a vampiric serial killer who bled young women to stay young, as that it is now considered a blasphemous rumor.

    The film also challenges Stefan’s gender identity as a man and his view of women, like how he refuses to call his mother in England and sees his wife, who he married after a short time knowing her, as his trophy wife and property, while Elizabeth, though she preys on Valerie, values her as more of an individual and kindred spirit.

    Bryan White of the Bring Me The Axe! podcast writes: “Gender stands at the center of the movie. It’s the entire operating principle. Stefan, as the film’s lone male character of consequence, regards Valerie as a thing to be owned or mastered. Through the first half of the movie, the matter of Stefan’s mother looms heavily over everything. He is uncomfortable at the very mention of her. He bribes the man at the hotel’s desk to aid him in his avoidance of his mother."

    I liked this movie. I normally am not into these kind of 70s lesbian vampire movies, but I saved the recommendation from the YouTuber Be Kind Rewind, and it was lovely to watch the great Delphine Seyrig drink up this role.

Thoughts on Romeo is Bleeding

    On Tubi, I watched Romeo is Bleeding, a 1993 noir film directed by Peter Medak (The Changeling) and written by Hilary Henkin (Wag the Dog), where Gary Oldman played a corrupt cop named Jack who is on the take by the mob (he gives tips to them for cash and gets informants killed), and gets entangled with a Russian assassin, Mona (Lena Olin, who is clearly having a lot of fun playing a hot psychopathic killer); cheats on his wife with his mistress, and has this cliched New York City film noir voiceover throughout the whole movie that feels way too heavy handed to me.

    On the plus side, I liked watching depictions of pre-gentrification Brooklyn and Queens, of empty, sparse neighborhoods in the Coney Island area and far reaches of Queens under the elevated trains, with a great cast lineup: Oldman, Olin, Juliette Lewis (albeit with a stereotypical Brooklyn accent), Annabella Sciorra, Roy Scheider, Michael Wincott, and cameos from Dennis Farina and Ron Perlman. The movie is fun to watch even as it gets more over the top and ridiculous.

    One of the funniest moments in the movie to me was likely unintentional. Natalie (Sciorra), as Jack’s wife, is talking to him about how their marriage is falling apart and suspects he’s cheating on her and involved in questionable activities. She goes, “I don’t know what you’re doing, Jack, but whatever it is, don’t bring it back here.” The next time she sees him is after he gets two of his toes cut off by the mob because he didn’t kill Mona by a certain time, and he bursts into the house, all bloody and dirty, and goes “Honey, I fucked up! Pack your suitcase, we have to leave!” I just lost it laughing at that, picturing her mental reaction after telling him not to bring his corrupt drama and seeing him come in like that.

A Tribute to David Lynch

     The film director and auteur David Lynch passed away today at age 78, after retiring in 2024 due to health problems from being diagnosed with emphysema. His style of directing with surreal, dreamlike images became so iconic that any other filmmaker who was inspired by him was called "Lynchian." His body of work was expansive, in film, art, photography, and music. There will be many tributes to him, and he helped launch the careers of actors like Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Lara Flynn Boyle, Heather Graham, Sherilyn Fenn, Mädchen Amick, Sheryl Lee, Justin Theorux, and many others.

    I had heard of Twin Peaks as a child, but was too young to watch it at the time. I had seen it for the first time in my freshman year of college in 2002-2003, when I paired up with a classmate for a school project to pick a piece of pop culture media and how it greatly influenced culture and society. He was a big fan of Twin Peaks, so I watched the show on DVD and liked it, though I didn't absorb everything in my viewing back then. I did like the Angelo Badalamenti score, the way the show had a moody, slow pace, an odd sense of humor, mixing soap opera drama with dreamlike images, and how the teenagers seemed to dress both like 1950s teenagers and 1990s teenagers at the same time. I especially liked the character of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), just found her captivating. In the project, we discussed how the show, though only on for two seasons, greatly influenced television and the mainstream audience being more open to seeing more out-there, unusual television shows, opening the door for shows like The X-Files, American Gothic, and Millennium, as well as prestige TV like The Sopranos (which occasionally went into surreal imagery), Six Feet Under, and, past the year of our project, shows with mystery like Lost. 

    I haven't seen the show since then, nor have I seen Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, but on Criterion, I did watch the 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and thought it was sad and tragic and horrifying. It can be haunting and beautiful in some parts, but the whole tragedy of Laura Palmer being abused and used and murdered is very visceral and terrifying, and seemed to be overlooked when talking about horror films.

    When I was 12, I watched Tank Girl on video, the 1995 comic book action hero film starring Lori Petty as a post-apocalyptic punk heroine in the desert, and while the movie was a major flop, I found it a lot of fun. One of the standouts in the movie was Jet Girl, a mechanic played by a then-unknown Naomi Watts. With dyed brown hair and glasses, she is made to look meeker next to Lori Petty's Rebecca/Tank Girl, but I quickly found her stunning and charismatic to watch onscreen. For several years after that, I never heard of her again, so I just assumed she wouldn't become a star, until I went to see Lynch's Mulholland Drive in theaters in 2001, and was mesmerized by his masterpiece of a film, assembled from an unsold TV pilot with more scenes added in. I had long forgotten about Watts by then, so it was a revelation when, midway through the film, I recognized Watts from Tank Girl, despite her now having blonde hair and no glasses. Watts was excellent in this star-making role, so great that, when her character shifts as one person to another, I had thought another actress had taken over. Watts would blow up as a A-List actress after this film, and continues to be a celebrated actor to this day.

    I loved the sharp division of fantasy and reality in the film, the theme of characters with double identities, and how beautiful and painful the film felt. Afterwards, I had looked up an analysis of the film on Salon.com to understand it more, as Lynch has famously not explained the mysteries of his films, preferring to let his audiences come to their own interpretations.

    One last memory is of watching The Elephant Man on TV with my brother many years ago. I didn't know that Lynch had directed the 1980 film, or that Mel Brooks had produced it. We had just watched it by chance, and I thought it was so gorgeous with its black and white cinematography and late 19th century setting, but that it was one of the saddest films I had ever seen, that the film just gutted me. I was touched by how Anne Bancroft's actress character showed such grace toward John Merrick (portrayed by John Hurt, and named Joseph Merrick in real life), giving him the dignity that he deserved as a man with a facial abnormality, for lack of a better term. Their scenes were incredibly touching, and the finale made me want to cry inside. Though David Lynch was known for "weird" films, he was also known for portraying humanity with a lot of nuance and understanding, especially for the more misunderstood characters, be they John Merrick, Laura Palmer, or Betty.

    I had also enjoyed watching films like 1997's Lost Highway (especially for the soundtrack featuring Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, and Smashing Pumpkins) and 1990's Wild at Heart, and while I had seen Inland Empire (2006) in theaters and couldn't understand it well, I at least respected that Lynch and Laura Dern really went for a three-hour long movie that can be interpreted in its own way. David Lynch will be remembered as one of the most influential film auteurs in recent history, and his passing is truly a loss to the arts and culture.