Thoughts on Memoir of a Snail

     On Hulu, I watched Memoir of a Snail, a 2024 Australian stop-motion animated tragicomedy film written and directed by Adam Eliot. The film centers on a twin brother and sister, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Grace (Sarah Snook), who come of age in 1970s Melbourne, being separated by being orphaned in youth, and largely following Grace's life as a lonely misfit.

    The twins' mother had died in childbirth, and they are raised by their French father Percy (Dominique Pinon), who was once a juggler and street performer but is now a paraplegic alcoholic. Grace develops an affinity for collecting snails, which her late mother was fond of as well, and her brother protects her from bullies who tease her for her cleft lip. When their father dies from sleep apnea, the children are split into different foster families and separated on opposite ends of the country, with Grace in Canberra and Gilbert in Perth. Grace is raised by a nudist swingers couple who are kind but often absent to pursue their own adult lives, and Gilbert is raised by a Christian fundamentalist family who abuse him and force him to do grunt work of putting stickers on their apples for very little pay, which he is expected to give to the church collection jar weekly.

    Grace, while receiving letters from Gilbert and hoping to be reunited, makes friends with Pinky (Jacki Weaver), an eccentric and kind older woman who has lived a colorful life despite setbacks (both her husbands died by accident; she got fired from many jobs; she lost her pinky finger while dancing), and she becomes Grace's foster mother when her foster parents retire to join a nudist colony. She acts as a supportive rock for Grace, as Grace grows up and becomes an obsessive hoarder with her snails and snail-related collectibles, wearing a snail hat with eyes on wires on top.

   This film was incredibly touching to me. It has a very dark, weird, sepia-toned look to it, and it's a film meant for adults, not a children's film. As Grace and Gilbert grow up, they face more challenges and struggles, and I related a lot to Grace wanting to cocoon herself at home with her favorite things, especially as her trauma has kept her from really living her life. Pinky's words to her at the end of the film (Pinky dies as an old woman right at the beginning of the film, then the film starts at the twins' childhood to get to how Pinky came to be in Grace's life) really resonated with me:

    "No, I won't tell you the horrors I remember, but do want to tell you what it's like to feel imprisoned, caged. It was simply dreadful. But in the years since, I've learnt that the worst cages are the ones we create for ourselves. You have created a cage for yourself, Gracie. Your cage has never been locked . . . but your fears have kept you trapped . . . Start anew. A bit of self-pity's OK, but it's time to move on. There'll be pain, but that's life. You have to face it head-on. Be brave."

    The film was loosely based on Eliot's own life, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Film. Eliot had won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for his 2003 short film Harvie Krumpet. The lead actors are great in the film, but especially Jacki Weaver, who was fantastic as Pinky and brings a lot of heart to this wonderful oddball character who acknowledges that life is hard, but doesn't want to dwell on looking backwards. She will help Grace by making comparisons to snails, saying that snails only move forward, and don't go backwards over their own paths.

    I'm glad I checked out this film, it was a strange little gem to watch.

Thoughts on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

    On Criterion, I watched The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a 1972 West German New Wave psychological romantic film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, based on his play of the same name. The film centers on the title character Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen), a fashion designer who lives in a luxurious apartment in Bremen, and the whole film takes place in the apartment. She is rich, very thin, and lounges around in gowns and wigs, ordering around her silent personal assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann), who keeps a taciturn expression.

    Petra is twice-married, her first husband having died in a car accident when Petra was pregnant with their daughter, Gaby, and she recently divorced her second husband because of his controlling nature. Through her cousin Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), she meets Sidonie's friend Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young 23-year old woman, who just returned to Germany after having lived in Sydney for five years with her husband. Petra is immediately attracted to Karin, telling her she should be a model, and the two develop a quick relationship, with Petra offering to financially support her while she trains to become a model. They talk about their lives, Petra having grown up happy and comfortable while Karin came from a traumatic background. Petra projects an obsession onto Karin, being enraptured by her, while Karin is flattered by the compliments but doesn't feel the same for Petra.

    The film is more of a melodrama, and Petra's obsession with Karin does feel over-the-top, especially when she's only known her for a short time, but codependency is a big part of the story, as Petra feels lonely, often at home with Marlene at her beck and call, and clings to Karin's youth and beauty, despite that Petra herself is only 35 and still very beautiful and young herself.

    The film is set in the then-present of the 1970s, but has a 1930s look, with the women having short, styled hair, wearing cloche hats and long gowns, projecting more of a 1920s-1930s glamour to them, it did confuse me at first to figure out the time period of the story.

    I found Marlene more fascinating in her silence, especially when observing this doomed sapphic affair from a distance but unable to comment on it to stay professional, but judging it all the same.

    I liked the film, but the melodrama was too much for me, and made me talk back at the screen like, "C'mon, Petra, get it together" when she's moaning over wanting Karin to love her back or wanting her to return. It was a nice film to watch, but not really for me.

Thoughts on No Other Choice

     On Hulu, I watched No Other Choice, a 2025 South Korean black comedy thriller directed by Park Chan-wook, co-written by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye, based on the 1997 novel The Ax by Donald Westlake. The film centers on Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a veteran employee of 25 years at a papermaking company, who lives a happy life in his childhood home that he bought, living in bliss with his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) and his children Si-one (Woo Seung Kim) and Ri-one (Choi So Yul). When his company is bought out and he refuses to fire his fellow employees, he is laid off, and promises his family that he will find another job in the paper industry within three months.

    Thirteen months later, he hasn't found a new job, and his family is in dire financial straits. His house will be foreclosed in three months; Mi-ri has taken a part-time job as a dental assistant, and Ri-one, who is an autistic cello prodigy, is recommended by her instructor for advanced lessons that the family cannot afford. Man-su has been trying to get a job as a manager with another papermaking company, Moon Paper, a Japanese-owned company expanding in South Korea, and is jealous of his competition, and is driven to stalk and murder them in order to win the job.

    His competition are all ordinary middle-management types who aren't better off than he is. Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) is an unemployed alcoholic with an actress wife A-ra (Yeom Hye-ran, in one of the film's standout performances outside of Lee Byung-hun) who resents his sloth attitude; Si-jo (Cha Seung-won) works at a shoe store and isn't happy, but is fine to have a job and get by; and Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), who works at Moon Paper and may get promoted. The scenarios are over-the-top and ridiculous, and the movie, at nearly two and a half hours long, does extend past a point where it feels like three victims is one too many, where Man-su desperately wants a job to be a cog in the capitalist corporate machine, romanticizing how important paper is to create cigarette filters and books and other items, where he feels he doesn't have any other purpose in his life outside of his job and his family, and his obsession reveals more that he's just a horrible and demented person.

    I really liked the dark comedy, and how the film keeps repeating the line "no other choice," taking on different meanings for it. The cinematography by Kim Woo-hyung was fantastic, like the zoom-out tracking shots that looked unique and impressive, layering characters in superimposed images, or other playful ways of filmmaking that I enjoyed.

    I was disappointed that this film didn't get an Oscar nomination, though there were a lot of great international films that got nominated or short-listed. I'm glad I watched this and checked it out.

Thoughts on Portrait of Jason

     On Criterion, I watched Portrait of Jason, a 1967 documentary directed by Shirley Clarke, where she and her then-partner, actor Carl Lee, interview Jason Holliday, a gay Black hustler and aspiring cabaret performer, who tells stories about his life and his friends in a very charming, bon vivant kind of way, getting drunker throughout the 12-hour shooting of the interview in December 1966 at Clarke's Chelsea Hotel penthouse apartment in New York City. 

    His personality is loud, and as a gay Black man living in the 1960s, it's important that his personality takes up space, because he has had to live with racism and homophobia, and his attitude is a performance to protect his more vulnerable self. He tells stories of sex work and musician friends and his abusive parents, and he easily slips into impressions of Katharine Hepburn and other stars, putting on a show for Clarke and Lee.

    Throughout the film, the production keeps being interrupted, with off-screen talk from Clarke and Lee, the screen going to black with the audio heard, fading in and out of focus, re-starting shots, etc. It is interesting to watch a documentary from the 1960s that leaves all the messy bits in, as well as in the last third of the film, where Lee keeps antagonizing Holliday and telling him he's full of shit and cursing at him, trying to get him to open up about painful parts of his life, even as Holliday is very drunk and crying and being broken down emotionally. It's rough, as that part of the film becomes more raw and vulnerable to watch. It feels more exploitative, and yet Clarke left it in anyway, as if to feel more "real."

    I've read other reviews that explore this film in a much more insightful way than I can, bringing up themes of classism (Clarke came from a wealthy family and made this film where she enabled an addict hustler for a film to show white "intellectual" audiences); racism (Holliday came up in the Jim Crow-era South), homophobia, and blurring the lines between performance and reality.

    I really liked this film and found it fascinating, to watch for two hours, with an interview with a man who was interesting, and luckily lived a long life (he died in 1998 at age 74). The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2015 by the Library of Congress for its historical and cultural importance.

Thoughts on Marvelous and the Black Hole

     On Tubi, I watched the 2021 coming of age drama Marvelous and the Black Hole, written and directed by Kate Tsang. The film stars Miya Cech as Sammy Ko, a teen girl whose mother has recently passed away, and is struggling with her grief and anger, acting out at school and getting into fights and failing classes. She is in danger of being expelled, therapy hasn't helped her, and her father Angus (Leonardo Nam) places her in a community college business class, telling her if she fails the class he will send her away to a reformatory summer camp. Her father treats her like the problem child, letting her sister bully her to be "in charge," and is dating a new woman, who Sammy resents.

    Sammy takes the business course, but isn't interested in it, and ends up meeting in passing an eccentric and salty old woman named Margot (Rhea Perlman), who is a children's magician, and tells folk tales to children using magic, like sleight of hand tricks and making her rabbit appear out of thin air. Sammy is initially resistant to Margot trying to help her, but after she decides to focus on magic for her business course project, she befriends Margot, finding calm and focus in learning how to do sleight of hand magic. Margot also allows Sammy a way to let out her anger and frustrations, like screaming into a pillow, and redirecting her fantasies, like when Sammy imagines murdering her father's girlfriend in a "saw a woman in half" trick and Margot gently tells her not to think about murder as her emotional outlet.

    I really liked this movie a lot. Miya Cech was great in playing Sammy, a girl who feels trapped by her family suppressing her and their emotions, blaming her for getting angry, and refusing to really listen to her. Her father keeps threatening to punish her and take her freedoms away, or sending her away to therapy and classes to have other people manage her or keep her busy while he focuses on his future with his new girlfriend. Only when the family is able to acknowledge their own grief and anger do they drop the formalities with one another, and they can truly accept the mother's death while not forgetting about her.

    The film is intercut with animation, from Tsang's animation background, and it really suits the film well, like when Sammy is telling a fantasy story with her mother as the heroine, and illustrating what is going on inside of Sammy's head.

    Rhea Perlman is wonderful in this film as Margot, an artistic and interesting woman with her own family trauma, and choosing to see joy and light in the world, and bring happiness to children through her use of storytelling and magic. She and Cech really work well together with their oddball friendship and bonding, and it made the film very charming and unique to watch.

Thoughts on News From Home

    On Criterion, I watched News from Home, a 1976 avant-garde documentary film directed by Chantal Akerman. The film consists of long takes of New York City life as Akerman reads in voiceover letters from her Belgian mother that she sent her between 1971-1973. 

    Akerman had moved to New York City at age 21 in 1971, where she did odd jobs, befriended filmmakers like Jonas Melkas and Babette Mangolte, and made films of her own. She returned to Belgium in 1973, and came back to NYC to shoot long takes of the city, then going through a financial crisis. As the camera holds on long takes of people in the subway, walking the streets, or people working the graveyard shifts late at night. 

    Over these images, Akerman in voiceover reads letters from her mother, which often have a passive aggressive tone to them, like "We know you're busy, but please find some time to write back to us," or bugging her about when will be the next time she'll come home to visit. Her mother updates her with mundane news, like when someone got married or had a baby or moved or whatnot.

    There's an interesting contrast between the mother's loving yet nagging correspondence, and the long shots of grimy city life, where people just walk on their way or stare ahead on the subway, save for the few who notice Akerman's camera and stare at her, like one old man on the subway. It brings up feeling lost and alienated in the city while the letters are about news close to home in more closer suburban life.

    I liked it more for seeing shots of 1970s New York City and relating to the feeling of being annoyed by a parent's hectoring for not being close to home, and I saw this more as an experimental art piece, not really as interested in sitting through it, as I let it play on streaming while getting up around my home and doing things, then sitting down to watch more of it. It runs slowly, with the long takes and redundant letters, and I felt I understood it without watching all 90 minutes of it, but I still liked it as an experimental art film.

Thoughts on Marc by Sofia

    At the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, I saw Marc by Sofia, a 2025 documentary film directed by Sofia Coppola, about the fashion designer Marc Jacobs. The film follows him as he prepares for a fashion show, and sits with Sofia, his longtime friend of over thirty years, discussing his career and influences.

    The film has a bit of an insider, cool kids feel to it, as Marc and Sofia, both of the elite arts upper classes, speak with a bit of a airy sound to their voices, which can make the audience feel like a third wheel to their conversation. The film gets more interesting when Marc talks about his childhood growing up in New York City as a 70s kid, spending time with his grandmother, and being inspired by pop culture icons like Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, and Bob Fosse's choreography in Sweet Charity, bringing his influences with the thick, clumped eyelashes and sequined mirrored dresses onto his models for the show, bridging between his childhood loves and his professional work as a designer and artist. 

    I really enjoyed the parts with Jacobs and Coppola talking about their 90s heyday in fashion and music and art, focusing on Jacobs' "grunge" collection in 1992 for Perry Ellis, and the controversy of him commodifying the grunge fashion subculture into the mainstream with supermodels like Christy Turlington dressed in flannel on the runway, and Jacobs saying how Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain hated it. Coppola going "Oh, yeah?" with her detached voice made her sound a little out of touch, since I could definitely understand, even having been a kid back then, how it would look to people who grew up in a scrappy environment and were broke seeing their clothes turned into expensive fashion for the upper classes and being annoyed.

    In their 90s flashbacks, I did like that the film talked about the famed 1994 X-Girl fashion show, when Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (who Jacobs said he was intimidated by when asked to do the fashion for one of Sonic Youth's videos) and Daisy von Furth had the X-Girl fashion line at the time, and did an outdoor show that was produced by Coppola and Spike Jonze, with models including then-club kid Chloë Sevingy at 20. It definitely felt like a moment of the time, bringing together fashion, alternative rock music, photography, and a lot of cool kid energy.

    I enjoyed a lot of the music needle drops, like hearing an Elastica song over the ending credits, and hearing various Sonic Youth songs like "100%" and "Dirty Boots."

    I liked watching the scenes of Jacobs with his team discussing differences in fabric when looking at swatches for clothes, and distilling down to particular "handfeels" and textures that he wanted, I was interested in the technical parts of fashion and creativity. I also liked Jacobs' metallic nail polish that he was sporting.

    It was a decent movie. It felt safe because he and Coppola are longtime friends, so there was bias there, and as much as I do like pop culture and celebrity stuff, I can feel a distance from it at the same time when watching videos of celebrities interviewing each other and being in their own insular world. I also had questions about how Jacobs and his fashion contributed to the negative parts of the fashion industry, like using overly thin models or any unethical factory practices or making clothes too expensive for the general public, but given the bias, I knew that wasn't to be explored as a hit piece on him or on the industry in general. So it was nice for the parts about 90s nostalgia and the scenes where he is working on his craft with his team of fashion professionals.

Thoughts on Will

    On Criterion last week, I watched Will, a 1981 drama directed by Jessie Maple. It was the first independent feature film to be directed by a Black woman. The film centers on themes of addiction and recovery, focusing on Will (Obaka Adedunyo, in his first film role), a man in Harlem who is recovering from a heroin addiction and has been sober for two years, who lives with his wife Jean (Loretta Devine, also in her first film role). He meets a 13-year old boy nicknamed "Little Brother" (Robert Dean), who he can tell is being influenced by the same cycles of drugs and addiction in their neighborhood that pulled him in, and he befriends Little Brother, inviting him to live with him and his wife to be a positive role model and to keep him away from the temptations of drugs.

    Will had been a star basketball player in his youth, and he becomes a coach for a high school girls' basketball team, helping the team get better and score well in games. Getting back into coaching basketball is a great way for him to get past his addiction and heal more in recovery. 

    But Little Brother is still curious about drugs, even snorting some cocaine he finds, and Will yells at him and is angry because he doesn't want him to go down the same path he did. It doesn't help that the neighborhood boys are mocking Little Brother for not wanting to do drugs and are pressuring him into it.

    This was a decent movie. I felt it got better when the actors were more natural with each other, like in scenes where Will and Little Brother are roughhousing with each other, or when Will and Jean are being flirtatious and teasing one another. When it got more into plot-dependent dialogue scenes, it felt more stilted, and had the feeling of an after-school TV special about the dangers of drugs. 

    I liked the film more for watching scenes of early 1980s Harlem, with documentarian filmmaking; seeing Loretta Devine in an early role (she would star in Dreamgirls on Broadway around the same time, her star-making role); and comparing it to later films like 2006's Half Nelson (where Ryan Gosling played a schoolteacher in recovery trying to mentor Shareeka Epps' high school student) and 2016's Moonlight (where Mahershala Ali plays a drug dealer trying to protect a young gay boy from his abusive home even if he knows he is complicit in selling drugs to his mother).

    Will won an award at the Athens International Film Festival and was used as an educational film in New York drug rehab centers. In 2024, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural significance. 

    Jessie Maple, the director, who passed away in 2023 at age 86, initially studied medical technology, but switched to become a filmmaker through training in Ossie Davis' Third World Cinema, and through a program run by WNET public television in NYC. She worked hard, through a lot of discrimination and legal action, to be the first Black woman admitted to the New York camera operators union in the 1970s, and used her perspective to make sure that Black voices were heard in news stories and not cut out. She made Will in 1981, and the basketball drama Twice as Nice in 1989, and screened her own films and other films by Black directors in her Harlem brownstone under the name 20 West Theater, Home of Black Cinema. The Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University holds her papers and films in the Jessie Maple collection.

Thoughts on The Drama

     Yesterday at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw The Drama, a 2026 romantic comedy drama written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli. The film stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as Emma and Charlie, an engaged couple whose wedding is in a few days, but their relationship is tested when they learn secrets about each other.

    The couple live in Boston, and Charlie (Pattinson) had originally approached Emma (Zendaya) in a coffee shop by pretending that he had read the book she was reading. He stumbles over his words, thinking she's ignoring him, until she reveals that she is deaf in her right ear and was listening to music in her left one. She gives him a chance to start over, and they begin their courtship, and are engaged two years later.

    When the couple are walking one night, they see their wedding DJ out on the street in front of a bar with others, possibly smoking heroin, and deliberate whether to continue to have her as their DJ. They talk with their friends, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Rachel defends the DJ, saying they've all done bad things, and they take turns admitting the worst things they've ever done. Mike used his ex-girlfriend as a human shield against a dog attack; Rachel as a teen locked a mentally disabled child in an RV closet and left him there overnight; and Charlie as a teen helped bully a peer so bad he had to move away. When it comes to Emma's turn, she admits that at 15, she had planned to commit a school shooting, having a rifle ready, but backing out of her plan. Everyone immediately turns on her, treating her like she's a psychopath despite that she didn't go through with it. Despite that Mike gave Charlie a pass on his actions for his brain "not being fully developed yet" at 14, Emma isn't given the same grace, and Rachel is harshest on her, because she has a cousin who is paralyzed from a school shooting.

    Charlie's view of Emma is completely changed, and he keeps picturing her with guns, and wondering whether to go through with the wedding. Emma explains that she was in a dark and depressed time in her life, and only after another shooting happened and she saw how it affected her community did she change her mind, and became a teen activist for gun control. Despite that this was fifteen years ago, and that Emma didn't cause any actual harm to anyone (unlike the other three, whose actions all hurt people), she is shunned by Rachel (whose true colors had been shown early in the film when she casually told Emma that she looks ugly when she cries), and Charlie is panicking at work.

    The film works in both exploring trust issues with a couple, as well as the hypocrisy of demonizing one person as "bad" while downplaying their own actions, as well as being darkly hilarious. In the flashbacks of young Emma (Jordyn Curet) trying to film her manifesto via webcam, posing with a gun with smudgy eye makeup and dressed in fatigues, her computer keeps interrupting with updates, breaking up the flow of her "by the time you see this I'll be gone" speech. 

    When Emma and Charlie are meeting with the wedding photographer (Zoe Winters) and she's detailing her schedule of photographing guests, she goes "So I'll shoot you first, then I'll shoot your parents, then I'll shoot the guests, and," and constantly saying "shoot" and making them feel jumpy, as well as the snaps of her camera sounding like gunshots as the couple pose with pained, fake smiles in front of a gray backdrop. The uncomfortableness of trying to act as normal while being stressed and anxious was really funny to watch.

    I found this film interesting. I felt like the characters were reacting in over the top ways to Emma's confession, when she hadn't gone through with her ideation and plan, but later realized that the point was that the other characters were terrible people, who hadn't done the work like she did to become a better person and to be more mentally healthy, and that they were unfair to her. 

    I did like the physical acting of Zendaya and Pattinson, like their body language when they are uncomfortable with each other, or when she is picturing him being playful with her the morning after her confession, rather than being distant and aloof. Those reactions helped to illustrate the characters' sudden unease with each other.

    The marketing for the film worked really well, promoting the film like a wedding announcement and the trailer leaving out the big reveal of Emma's secret, which made the film more intriguing, and it worked well for me to examine it afterwards.

Thoughts on SLC Punk!

 

    On Criterion, I watched SLC Punk!, a 1998 comedy-drama written and directed by James Merendino. The film is set in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1985, focusing on pre-law graduate and anarchist punk Stevo (Matthew Lillard), who is disgusted by his parents, who were 1960s hippies who sold out to Reagan-era corporate life (as his father says, "I didn't sell out. I bought in."), and is rebelling against fascism and Nazis and the boring life of his hometown in a state run by conservative Mormons. Stevo and his best friend, Heroin Bob (Michael Goorjian), who has the nickname despite that he is afraid of needles and only uses beer and cigarettes as his vices, believing that any drug is inherently dangerous, slam-dance at the local punk rock shows and get into fights with other subcultures. Stevo is casually dating a girl named Sandy (Jennifer Lien), while Bob has a crush on Trish (Annabeth Gish), who owns a head shop.

    As Stevo is in his early twenties, he is questioning his life and how to stay committed to his anarchist morals while not wanting to be seen as a poser or a sellout. He sees his friends moving on in their lives with romantic relationships and college and careers, and he sees the downsides of the punk rock life. A local teen, Sean (Devon Sawa) had attempted to stab his mother while high on 100 tabs of acid that had accidentally bled into his skin when he got wet while holding them in his pocket, and he gets sent to an institution. When Stevo sees him years later, he's panhandling on the street with obvious mental issues, declaring himself a bum, and having no contact with his family.

    Matthew Lillard does really well in the narration to the audience, often talking to the camera while interacting with other characters in the scenes, the others unaware of the fourth wall breaking, and it feels very Goodfellas to me with Henry Hill's narration to the audience. He's a bright and charismatic actor who shined a lot in this role at the peak of his 90s fame following Hackers and Scream. He's had more of a resurgence in recent years, with his dramatic role on the show Good Girls, renewed appreciation for his role as Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo series, and coming back to the Scream series in Scream 7.

    Michael Goorjian at the time was best known for playing Neve Campbell's boyfriend on Party of Five, and he gives a sensitive performance as Bob, a guy whose father has deep psychosis issues and believes that the C.I.A. is watching him, and he's afraid of ending up like his father. He sees the effects of drugs on people, including the dependence on prescription medication, and is firmly against it, seeing it as poison and corrupting the mind.

    The film has a great soundtrack, and brought me back to being a 90s teen hearing 80s hardcore for the first time, hearing classic songs like "I Love Living in the City" by Fear, and "Amoeba" by The Adolescents, as well as cuts by The Stooges and The Velvet Underground.

    The film doesn't have the gritty or messy look of a low-budget punk underground film, it may look too slick and mainstream to be seen as a film talking about punk anarchism, and it has a confusing conclusion that feels like it gives in to the characters "selling out" while still wanting to maintain their punk credentials. But I thought it was a decent film helped a lot by the soundtrack and lead performances.

Thoughts on Evil Cat

    On Criterion, I watched the 1987 Hong Kong supernatural action film Evil Cat, directed by Dennis Yu and written by Wong Jing. The film is about a family that, every 50 years, must fight the resurrected cat demon until its nine lives are up, and only the son born every 50 years can fight the demon with his inherited energy and strength. The demon is now on its ninth life, coming back and possessing people and sucking out people's lifeforces, jumping and pouncing in big leaps like a cat. Master Cheung (Chia-Leung Liu) has cancer, and is worried that he will die of the disease before he can defeat the demon, so he decides to train his daughter Siu-Chuen's (Lai-Ying Tang) boyfriend Lo (Mark Ho-nam Cheng) to be the warrior.

    Despite that this film has some heinously sexist moments (a young woman who is seen as whiny and annoying on a car ride is left tied up on a pole by guys laughing at her), the film is very neon atmospheric and combines excellent wire work with the cat-like jumps and claws and arched backs, blue lightning that follows the demon around (including a part where it attacks a woman by shooting a beam right at her vagina in a ridiculous moment), and the violence is gory, with punches that go through torsos. There are left-field moments, like when the movie suddenly cuts to a singer performing a canto-pop song, and he just pops into the story, with fans adoring him outside, only for him to be a victim of the cat-demon seducing him, having sex with him in a car, then biting off his tongue and killing him.

    I liked how the film ends in a surprisingly heartbreaking way, not the triumphant ending that I was expecting. It's a weird horror-fantasy, and very interesting to watch.

Thoughts on Project Hail Mary

    At the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan, I went with my friends to see Project Hail Mary, a 2026 sci-fi adventure film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, written by Drew Goddard, and based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir. The film centers on Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a man who awakens from a coma on a spacecraft. The other two passengers died in their comas. He struggles with temporary amnesia and figuring out why he's on this spacecraft, and he slowly remembers as the film intercuts the present-day scenes with flashbacks scenes from 12 years prior, as he has been traveling for nearly 12 light years on the spacecraft Hail Mary. 

    Grace was a middle-school science teacher and a former molecular biologist, and there is news that the Sun is dimming due to a fictional microorganism called astrophage eating up the sun's energy, and that in thirty years, the Earth will have cooled 10 to 15 degrees, destroying food sources, plant life, and making humans and animals extinct. Grace is recruited by government agent Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) because of a paper he wrote in the past, and has been working with scientists from all over the world to develop a solution to save the sun. Grace figures out that astrophage, coinciding with the development of an infrared line from the Sun to Venus called the Petrova line, breeds on Venus via their carbon dioxide and energy from the Sun. The mission to Tau Ceti, the only undimmed main star, is a one way one, as the spacecraft only has enough fuel to get there, but can send probes back to Earth with the crew's findings to save the world.

    Grace wakes up on Hail Mary and gets his bearings, and he encounters an alien spacecraft, who is trying to communicate with him, sending him cannisters of materials. The alien spacecraft makes a tunnel walkway of xenon to allow Grace to enter, and he meets a spider-like alien with a rock-like body, who speaks by rubbing its limbs together, creating a musical speech, and Grace makes a computer translator program to be able to communicate more, with a voice (James Ortiz) to give the alien, named "Rocky," more of a human quality.

    

    It turns out that Rocky, from the star system 40 Eridani, is the sole survivor of a mission to stop the astrophage. Neither Rocky nor Grace can survive in each other's atmosphere, so Rocky enters the Hail Mary in a small, pressurized glass ball as a spacesuit, and the two of them work together to save each other's worlds from extinction, and develop a bond as friends and roommates.

    

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. At 156 minutes, it is long, and there were parts in the last third that I felt could have been cut down, where the story seemed like it was ending but kept going, so that part felt tedious. But I liked the mix of realistic science with humor, and Andy Weir, the novelist who wrote the Project Hail Mary book, also wrote The Martian, and there were similar feelings between the film adaptations, mainly with a man alone in space or on a planet, who has a biology background and uses his scientific knowledge and sense of humor to survive on his own and avoid losing his mind. Ryan Gosling has an easygoing charm as Grace and is fun to watch, and his relationship with Rocky (performed by Ortiz and several puppeteers as an animatronic robot) was funny and delightful, and got into real pathos as the story reached higher stakes. There are also funny ongoing gags of Grace wearing shirts with science puns on them, like a periodic table joke on one shirt, and the inspiration came from Val Kilmer's character in Real Science, who also wore a lot of funny pun shirts.

    I really liked Hüller as Eva Stratt, a no-nonsense East German woman who is frank and honest with Grace about the risks to Earth if a solution is not found, and believes in him even when he has self-doubt and just sees himself as a lowly science teacher and not a hero. She is wryly funny, and especially shines in a karaoke scene during a moment of levity and steals the film from Gosling in that moment. I really liked her a lot in Anatomy of a Fall, so I was happy to see her back again.

    Lionel Boyce, best known as part of the hip-hop collective Odd Future and as pastry chef Marcus on The Bear, delivers a strong supporting role as Carl, a government agent who acts as a security guard, who Grace takes a liking to and brings him along on his science experiments, including a fun moment of shopping on the government's expense account at a big box store and bowling down the aisles.

    I would recommend this film if you like science fiction comedies that mix realism in science with humor, and obviously if you liked The Martian.

Thoughts on Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

    On Hulu, I watched the 2023 coming-of-age dramedy Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), based on the 1970 novel of the same name by Judy Blume. The film is set in 1970 and focuses on 11-year old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson), who lives in New York City with her mom Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb (Benny Safdie). Her parents tell her that they are moving from NYC to a New Jersey suburb, and Margaret is upset about leaving her friends and her life behind, and most importantly, her grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates). The family moves to the suburbs, and Margaret is immediately befriended by her neighbor and soon-to-be classmate Nancy Wheeler (Elle Graham), who shows up at the Simon's house already knowing the basic stats on Margaret and being like, "You're with me now." She invites her into her friend group with Gretchen Potter (Katherine Kupferer) and Janie Loomis (Amari Alexis Price). Nancy organizes the group to have a secret club where, according to Nancy, none of them can wear socks (leaving Margaret with blisters on her first day of school), they all have to wear a bra (in which three of them get a Gro-Bra training bra), and they have to keep a "Boy Book" of their school crushes, mainly admiring the same boy, Philip Leroy (Zackary Brooks). And the famous "we must, we must, we must increase our bust" chant with the arm pumping looks ridiculously funny when acted out than when reading it on the page.

    Margaret adjusts to her new school and her friends, trying to fit in with Nancy, even though Nancy encourages bullying of Laura Danker (Isol Young), a taller girl who developed earlier than the other girls, making up slut-shaming rumors about her. Margaret though is struggling more with her religious identity, as her mother is Christian and her father is Jewish, and she wasn't raised with either religion, her parents wanting her to choose when she is an adult. Her class is assigned a year-long research assignment, and based on Margaret's answers in a class questionnaire, Mr. Benedict (Echo Kellum) encourages her to choose religion as her research project. Margaret goes to temple with her grandmother on an NYC visit, much to Sylvia's joy, and she goes to church with Janie and her family.

    Meanwhile, Barbara is trying to adjust to suburban life, joining various PTA committees, though her activities keeps her away from her true passions of painting and teaching art. Herb tries to mow the lawn, but cuts his finger, so a neighborhood boy, Moose (Aidan Wotjak-Hissong) cuts the lawn. The parents are happy together, and there is a cute flirtatious moment on the lawn when Herb pretends to rev up the mower seductively to tease Barbara.

    The film spans over the school year, as Margaret experiences the high and lows of her adolescence, like crushes and peer pressure, and anxiously awaiting growing breasts and getting her period, not wanting to feel left behind in her friend group, especially when other girls get their period ahead of her. There is more grappling with her religious identity, and not wanting to disappoint her parents or grandmother over which religion to pick, and feeling stressed out by her internal struggles.

    I really liked this movie a lot. I read the book when I was around 11, and while it's not my favorite of Judy Blume's books (that would be Starring Sally J. Freeman As Herself, based on Judy Blume's childhood in the 1940s), it's memorable for a funny childhood memory of mine as a 1990s kid. I hadn't had my period yet, and I was reading the book and read the 1970s description of a sanitary pad attached to a belt, which clips onto the underwear, as that was the feminine hygiene product at the time before adhesive pads were invented. I was upset and went downstairs to my mom and told her about that, and whined, "I'm gonna have to wear a belt?!" My mom laughed and said, "It's not like that anymore." Later printings of the book did change that part to an adhesive pad, and the movie depicts it as an adhesive pad as well, even though that would have been anachronistic with the period setting of the movie.

    Abby Lee Fortson was wonderful as Margaret. She brought a lot of realism and sensitivity in her portrayal, making Margaret not perfect, a little messy (especially when she snaps at Laura Danker and goes along with Nancy's bullying, then immediately regrets it when Laura calls her out on her meanness), and overall a normal kid. Fortson had played Paul Rudd and Judy Greer's daughter in the first two Ant-Man movies, and was just cast as Velma in the latest Scooby-Doo project, so it'll be good to see how her career progresses.

    Elle Graham had a harder role to play with Nancy, of making her a Type-A leader with a controlling personality, who bullies another girl over being too tall and having boobs, yet isn't a monster or a horrible person, and it's a fine line to balance, and Graham is great in making Nancy feel like a normal kid as well. She is immature while is a natural leader, encourages her friends to talk about their periods and their crushes and their breasts, and is still a kid, like when she gets her period for the first time while out at a restaurant with her family and Margaret, and is embarrassed and is calling for her mom to help her. She really shines in this film with a more complex role to play.

    Rachel McAdams is great as always, playing a woman who is watching her daughter grow into puberty, not wanting her to grow up too fast. When they go bra shopping (and Barbara is hesitant, like "Do you think you really need one?") and Margaret tries on a bra and is like "I immediately want to take it off," Barbara goes, "Welcome to womanhood." Her parents disowned her because she married a Jewish man, and she and Herb wanted Margaret to make her own decisions about religion and not have it define her life or choices. 

    When Barbara is trying to fit in with the local moms, she is eager to join, but finds it tedious, like cutting out lots of cloth stars for a school dance to fill up the ceiling, or having to put on a fake smile for things she doesn't want to do. It is a relief for her that, at the end of the school year, when time comes to re-enroll in committee activities, she at first looks for an excuse before happily going, "I don't want to do it!" and driving off.

    I liked how the music had early 1970s songs without them being the obvious hits, or that the characters seemed more contemporary and not hitting the audience over the head with "This is the 70s!" in a cartoonish way. It's like when I watched The Wonder Years as a kid and didn't notice that the show was set in the 1960s and 1970s, because I wasn't noticing the costumes or period details, paying closer attention to the stories and characters, and that the themes about family and school and friends were still relatable today. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. had the same feeling, of a story about girlhood being the same regardless of the period details, and I really thought it was a wonderful film.