Thoughts on Household Saints

     On Criterion, I watched Household Saints, a 1993 drama directed by Nancy Savoca and co-written by Savoca and Richard Guay, based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Francine Prose. The film centers on three generations of Italian-American women: Carmela Santangelo (Judith Malina), an Old World immigrant woman in New York City who is very superstitious; Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman), a reserved daughter of an Italian immigrant named Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), who is "won" in a pinocle game bet by the local sausage butcher Joseph Santangelo (Vincent D'Onofrio) and marries her; and Teresa Carmela Santangelo (Lili Taylor), the teenage daughter of Joseph and Catherine who is devoutly Catholic and is looking for miracles and wants to be a Carmelite nun.

    The film spans from 1949 to 1970, and tracks how Italian-American culture in New York City can be very insular, very bigoted (the film's characters are racist against Black and Asian people with their attitudes), and following Catholicism to a rigid degree, as an excuse for controlling women's lives and shaming them for anything they do wrong. When Joseph holds Lino's word that he will marry his daughter if he loses (a bet that Lino made while drunk and not serious, and insisting that his daughter is plain and not worth marrying), Joseph tries wooing Catherine, who is skeptical and doesn't want to be married off as if it's the old country, but grows to love Joseph anyway in their marriage. But Carmela hates the Falconettis, openly insults the food that Catherine cooks for them, and is overbearing towards Catherine, criticizing anything she does while pregnant, including instilling fear in her that her baby will born a literal chicken because she witnessed Joseph slaughtering a turkey in his butcher shop. 

    In 1952, Carmella has passed away, and Joseph and Catherine, while pregnant, read a book debunking old wives' tales about babies and superstitions, to rid their future of that toxic influence Carmela had on them. They have a girl, Teresa (portrayed by Rachael Bella as a child), and raise her in a Catholic school, where she begins to question miracles and expecting the Pope to share news of a supposed letter from the saint Fatima. She sees her uncle Nicky Falconetti (Michael Rispoli) struggling with depression and alcoholism, as he is shamed for being attracted to Asian women and not "sticking to his own kind," then being rejected by Chinese and Japanese women, as well as being verbally abused by his domineering father. His character is a tragic case, of someone expected to stick to narrow rules of Italian masculinity, and not being given the opportunity to break out of it to be happier as himself. Rispoli, a character actor I've always liked from films like Rounders, To Die For, While You Were Sleeping, and Kick Ass, is excellent in this film.

    Teresa, as a teenager, wants to be a Carmelite nun, but her father forbids it, seeing nuns as wasting their lives in devotion to "God" but really lining the pope's pockets, and not standing up for themselves, like if they shop at his butchery and don't get the meat they want, and decide it's God's will and don't argue or assert themselves. She goes to a Catholic college to get a teaching degree, and is courted by Leonard Villanova (Michael Imperioli), a fellow student who wants to work in "T.V. law" and talks big about it without knowing that isn't a real thing. He invites Teresa out to have coffee, and as he is talking, Teresa begins to feel like she's having a religious experience, seeing "miracles" all around her of couples and friends and families together, and this experience is all because Leonard is holding her hand. They begin dating, but Teresa, while she is reconsidering her ideas on becoming a nun and being with Leonard, has a hallucinatory experience where she talks to "Jesus" in her home, and her family has to confront her mental health issues and unhealthy devotion to Catholicism.

    I hadn't seen this movie since I saw it as a teenager on Bravo in the 1990s, and I really liked it a lot, while noticing a lot I hadn't remembered before, like the first half of the film largely focused on the Italian Old World characters, I mainly remembered the Lili Taylor and Michael Imperioli parts. (This was also the first time I had seen Imperioli in a film, prior to his breakthrough role as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos five years later). I did think it was funny to see D'Onofrio and Taylor play father and daughter when they had played a couple of the same age in Mystic Pizza five years prior, as Ullman and D'Onofrio are only eight years older than Taylor, and Taylor did not look believable as a fourteen-year old in the 1966 scenes.

    Although I couldn't stand her character, I really liked Judith Malina's performance as Carmela, in how diabolical she was in breaking the spirit of Catherine in her new marriage and filling her head with worries on how her baby was going to turn out, and Catherine being too polite to lash out at her mother in-law without being shamed for it. Malina was fantastic in this film, coming from her history in co-founding The Living Theatre and being a veteran character actor.

    As a third-generation Italian-American who grew up in Long Island and lived in New York City for twenty years, I can unfortunately understand the limited views that the older generations had, though I don't share those views. D'Onofrio as the father giving sarcastic retorts in his New York accent was very close to home, as is the feeling of having to respect your elders even when they're wrong and being shamed for going against them or for getting angry. I'm not in the same generation Savoca is in, so I don't have that same kind of closer relationship to Italian relatives that she has, but I can understand a lot of that Italian-American experience that she shows onscreen. I also grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school for two years, but my family is more secular and relaxed, not treating the Pope like a God or following the conservative attitudes of the church.

    I'm glad this film is streaming on Criterion and hasn't fallen into obscurity, it's a really interesting slice of the 1990s independent film boom.

    

Thoughts on Sentimental Value

     On Friday at the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I went to see Sentimental Value, a 2025 Norwegian drama directed by Joachim Trier, co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, centering on a family drama of an estranged relationship between an acclaimed filmmaker named Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) and his daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Gustav and his wife Sissel split when Nora and Agnes were young girls, and he went on to be a successful filmmaker, leaving his family behind, except when he cast Agnes as the lead in one of his films when she was a child twenty years prior.

    The film opens with a narration about the house in which they grew up, which belonged to Gustav's family for generations, and the narration is from the girls' point of view, of how they felt the "belly" of the house was full when there was life in the house and play and action, and how hollow the house felt when there was misery and depression. It's a great opening that sets the mood for the film, giving a personality to the house, and how it has affected the lives of Gustav's family, like his mother, who was a Resistance fighter against the Nazis in WWII, and imprisoned and tortured for her rebellion, and the trauma led to her suicide in the house when Gustav was seven.

    In the present-day, Gustav has been making documentaries and is still well-respected, but hasn't made a narrative film in fifteen years, and wrote a script with the intention for his daughter Nora to star in. Nora is a theater actress in Oslo, but struggles with stage fright and anxiety. She is also having an affair with her married costar, Jakob (Anders Danielson Lie). Gustav comes to Oslo for the funeral of his ex-wife Sissel, and after the wake, he meets with Nora to ask her to star in the script, where the script is inspired by his mother and he wants to film it in his family home, but she rejects it because he has been an absentee father and alcoholic, and is only interested in her when it benefits him and his artistry.

    Gustav decides instead to hire the American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who is popular, and her involvement convinces Netflix to secure the financing. But while she is initially enthusiastic, she feels insecure about not being able to speak Norwegian for the role or do a convincing accent, is self-conscious about Gustav translating the script into English for her, and feeling like she's too American and too removed from the story to do it justice. Gustav is kind and empathetic to her, but more condescending towards his daughters and insulting them with microaggressions, like telling Nora that her internal rage prevents her from finding love.

    Her sister Agnes works as a historian (side note: as an archivist myself, it did please me to see the brief work montage of her using the rolling archival cabinets and analog card catalogs to do her research work in, as well as seeing the same kind of library montage when she later researches archives about her late grandmother), and is married to Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) with a young son, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven). She is more sympathetic to her father, but when Gustav, who connects more with his grandson through films (like teaching him about filmmaking techniques with his smartphone), wants to cast him in the film, she refuses to allow it, remembering how it was fun when he doted on her when she starred in his film but he ghosted her afterwards, and she doesn't want to set her son up for that kind of disappointment from Gustav.

    I really liked how this film shifted between the perspectives, and gave a deeper understanding of each character, and I liked how rich it felt as a character study of a fractured and complicated family. The lead performances were excellent, and while I know that Skarsgård and Reinsve will get the majority of acting nomination attention, I really liked Lilleaas' performance as Agnes, which was more subtle and quiet as the "good" sister who isn't as explosive as her father or sister, but feels things intensely, and has her own struggles with her father. And I liked that Fanning as Rachel isn't depicted in a cruel way as a dumb Hollywood actress out of her depth, but that she really tries hard to understand the script, the character, the Oslo setting and the house, and doing her work, even while feeling like she is more of a consolation prize to the director for the role than who he really wanted.

    This is a really great film, especially as a follow-up to Trier's outstanding 2021 film The Worst Person in the World, also starring Reinsve, and one of the best films I've seen this year.

Thoughts on Carol & Joy

    On the Criterion Channel yesterday, I watched Carol & Joy, a 2025 short documentary film directed by Nathan Silver, executive produced by Natalie Portman, featuring the actress Carol Kane and her 98-year old mother Joy in their shared New York City apartment. Nathan Silver had directed Carol Kane in the 2024 film Between the Temples, and made this short film, at 38 minutes long, to focus on the interesting life of her mother, Joy. 

    Joy is originally from Cleveland, OH, and grew up with an abusive father who beat her when she wet the bed at three years old, and had a mother who undermined her and criticized her body. Yet, despite that upbringing, Joy was passionate about dance and music, having been brought to the symphony by her father when she was a girl, and feeling the music lift her in her body and having a spiritual experience. 

    Yet when she was a young woman, her family forced her to marry a young man, Michael Kane, putting in an engagement announcement in the newspaper without her knowledge or consent, and her father threatened to put her in a sanitarium if she tried to escape to New York City to be a dancer. So she married Michael, who became Carol's father, and felt stifled and unhappy in the marriage, hinting that she later cheated on him as a way to get him to divorce her, but that he still wanted to stay married. They finally divorced in 1964, when Carol was 12, and she was made to be examined by doctors through a psychological exam afterwards, a sign of the times of distrusting women's feelings and wanting them to stick to the status quo. She moved to Paris, where she could make her life with her own artistic visions, became a music teacher, and has been living in New York City in her Manhattan apartment for the last 25 years, with Carol's apartment right above hers, and they have lived together since the pandemic in 2020.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. Joy was fascinating and thoughtful and spoke deeply about her life, and Carol, despite being famous, largely takes a backseat to listen to her mother's stories, spending the first few minutes of the documentary making coffee for her mother and looking for the half and half creamer.

    The filmmaking crew had a habit of running out of film, saying "roll out" to mean the film had ran out, so the picture would go but the audio would be running, and often interrupting Joy's stories, and afterwards I felt it was rude to keep doing that to her, as they are a professional film crew and should know better, as well as to respect the time of a woman who is nearly 100 years old telling them her life story.

    I could see how Carol Kane, with her charming eccentricities and her commitment to being independent (she has never married or had any kids) could be influenced by her mother's strive for autonomy and being an artist on her own terms. I really enjoyed this lovely slice of life documentary a lot.

Thoughts on Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

    A while back on Tubi, I watched Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, a 2014 drama written and directed by David Zellner. It starred Rinko Kikuchi as Kumiko, an office worker in Tokyo who is 29 and working a dead-end job, who lives alone with her pet rabbit, and deals with both her mom asking why she isn’t married yet and her boss asking her why she’s still in a job largely occupied by younger single women. She likes treasure hunting, and finds a VHS copy of the 1996 film Fargo on the shore, and when she sees the scene with Steve Buscemi’s character burying a suitcase full of money in the snow, she thinks the suitcase is really there (as the movie had a fake disclaimer by the Coen Brothers saying that it was based on a true story) and plays the scene over and over, mapping out where the suitcase may be in Fargo, and she even tries to steal an atlas from the library, where the security guard takes pity on her and lets her take a ripped out page of a map of Minnesota.

    She goes to Minnesota, abandoning her job while having the company credit card with her while running work errands, with limited English skills, and is trying to get to Fargo, with a sheriff’s deputy (Zellner) confused by her mission and trying to get her to understand that the film is fictional. Yet, she keeps going on to find the suitcase.

  

    I really liked this movie. Kikuchi as Kumiko is a lonely character with mental health issues, and it’s sad watching her go further into delusion, but she makes her sympathetic and understandable. The story is based on a real-life story about Takako Konishi, a 28-year old Japanese office worker whose body was found in 2001 in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, ruled a suicide, and an urban legend said that she thought the buried suitcase in Fargo was real, but the story came from a misunderstanding between her and a Bismarck police officer with whom she had been speaking.

    This film was really interesting, and I’m glad I came across it.

Thoughts on Hamnet

    Last Friday, I went to the Angelika Film Center in New York City to see Hamnet, a 2025 historical drama directed by Chloé Zhao, co-written by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell, based on O'Farrell's 2020 novel of the same name. The film is a historical fiction look at the death of the son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway (sometimes known as Agnes), Hamnet, who died at age 11 from pestilence. The film focuses on the burgeoning romance between Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and William (Paul Mescal) in Stratford, England in the late 1500s. Agnes' reputation precedes her, as many people gossip that she is the daughter of a forest witch, because her mother taught her how to use herbs for medicinal purposes and to connect with nature and the earth. Agnes spends her free time alone in the lush green forest, and taking care of her hawk, and bristles under her stepmother, who her father married after her mother died young, presumably from childbirth. Agnes lives with her father, stepmother, and her supportive stepbrother. Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), who often stands up for her against his mother.

    William and Agnes fall in love and get pregnant, and both families oppose them marrying, because of Agnes' witch reputation and because William's family see William as a useless dreamer who teaches Latin to Agnes' younger brothers instead of following in the family trade of being a glovemaker. Nevertheless, with the support of Bartholomew to advocate on their behalf, William and Agnes are married, and Agnes gives birth alone by a giant tree in the forest, screaming in agony yet connected with nature during her act of childbirth. She has a daughter who she names Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach).

    William is feeling stagnated by his attempts to be a writer but being pressured into working a labor job by his father John (David Wilmot), being abused and ridiculed. Agnes makes the sacrificial decision to have William move to London to work in the theater community where he belongs, despite that she knows it will put distance between them and their marriage, especially as she is pregnant again. When the labor begins, William's mother Mary (Emily Watson) prevents her from going to the forest alone to give birth, forcing her to give birth at home, screaming in agony as she has not one, but two children, naming them Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes).

    The marriage between Agnes and William becomes more strained, especially with his absences for work in London and leaving Agnes on her own to raise their three children. And when the pestilence virus spreads and first infects Judith, Agnes fights hard to save her, as she had been stillborn at first but miraculously came back to life, and Agnes uses her herbal concoctions to prevent her from passing away, only for Hamnet to become sick after her and die a painful death.

    Jessie Buckley is incredible in this film. She possesses this earthly, primal spirit as Agnes, when she is hollering and letting out these guttural moans, whether she is giving birth or grieving the loss of her son. She is captivating to watch, and truly amazing in this film.

    The majority of the film belongs to Buckley, but Mescal shines in the finale, when the premiere of Hamlet performs and Agnes is realizing that the play is named after her son (a prologue states that Hamlet and Hamnet in Renaissance England were the same name), and as the play goes on, and William, playing the spirit of Hamlet's father, is able to express the grief and pain of losing his real son, as well as saying the goodbye that he wasn't around to say to Hamnet when he died, and it's a stunning performance by Mescal in that sequence.

    Jacobi Jupe, as Hamnet, is outstanding in this film. He had the hard choice of playing a character who dies young as a child and inspires one of the most famous plays of all time, while still having to play him as an innocent child. His scenes where he is in between worlds of life and the afterlife are heartbreaking, and he deserves accolades for his performance. Fittingly, his older brother Noah Jupe plays Hamlet in the play within the film.

    The film stays focused in stationery spots with the work of cinematographer Łukasz Ża, who worked on Cold War (2018), The Zone of Interest (2023), and I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), which featured Buckley as the female lead alongside Jesse Plemons. In Hamnet, there are scenes where Buckley and Mescal are in the foreground at his desk centered in a triangular shot, with her bed in the background, and a fire offscreen warming them, as he is frustrated with his writing and his outbursts wake baby Susanna. I really liked how focused the camera and blocking was in that shot, and holding on two talented actors carrying the scene.

    The film was edited by the great Affonso Gonçalves, whose past work includes Paterson (2016), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Carol (2015), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Winter's Bone (2010).

    I read the novel two years ago, and the film stayed very accurate to the novel, which helped a lot with O'Farrell adapting her own story to the screen. I had remembered how the novel had more about Agnes' home life with her stepmother and her complicated relationship with her, which felt shortened in the film to get past it, but it wasn't a detriment to the story. And the Hamlet finale follows the exact finale from the novel, and felt more powerful onscreen, making me feel devastated inside.

    I really adored this film, and thought that Jessie Buckley was fantastic, and that it was a great adaptation of a wonderful novel.

Thoughts on Innocent Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Aftersun

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Die My Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Popcorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on To Sleep With Anger

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Bones and All

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on The Mastermind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

Thoughts on If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

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

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

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

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