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.