Thoughts on Double Happiness

     On Criterion, I watched the 1994 Canadian drama Double Happiness, written and directed by Mina Shum. The film starred Sandra Oh in one of her earliest screen performances (and for which she won a Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role) as Jade Li, a Chinese-Canadian woman who lives at home with her traditional Chinese family, and is struggling with wanting to be an actress and a creative artist, while also wanting to please her parents, who want her to marry a Chinese man and uphold their values. Her older brother Winston has been disowned and lives in the States, and she fears disappointing her parents and facing the same fate.

    She switches between speaking English and Cantonese with her family, and is close with her younger sister Pearl (Frances You). Her family is concerned with putting on a good public persona to their friends, like when her father's (Stephen Chang) childhood friend Ah Hong (Donald Fong) comes to visit and the mother (Alannah Ong) makes her daughters wish him luck and a happy new year in rehearsed Cantonese unison. Jade's family sets her up on dates with the Chinese sons of their friends, including one, Andrew (Johnny Mah), who is secretly gay and just goes along with the dates once a year to appease his mother. For the dates, her family makes her dress up in pearls and an overly coiffed hairdo, to which her mom approvingly tells her that she looks like Connie Chung.

    The "double happiness" of the title is from Jade trying to live both her paths in life, as an aspiring actress and hanging out with her friend Lisa (Claudette Carracedo), and being in deference to her parents, who scold her for any mistake she makes and treat her like a child despite that she is a grown woman in her twenties. She wants to move out, but is afraid to confront her parents about it, not wanting to be cast out like Winston was.

    Through a chance meeting and brief hookup, she meets Mark (Callum Keith Rennie), a shy but cute nerd who had awkwardly flirted with her outside of a nightclub they were both denied entry to, and while Jade is hesitant to date him because he is white and her parents wouldn't approve, she still feels drawn to him, and they see each other casually, with her feeling torn between her desires for him and her duties towards her family. Their chemistry is really sweet and adorable, and their romance was one of my favorite parts of the movie.

    There's a lot of talk about a conflicting pressure to assimilate while still upholding her family's culture, like being expected to be fluent in English and Cantonese at the same time, and being held to Asian stereotypes when auditioning, or being told by an Asian woman that she's not really Chinese if she can't read Chinese in a script.

    I really liked this film a lot. I liked how it felt relatable to me in feeling family obligations, and wanting to be free to do things while not wanting to feel controlled by parental influence and being shamed for it. Sandra Oh was excellent in this film, and I especially liked the sequences when she is in her room practicing monologues and going into abstract worlds, with the colors and costumes changing, before one of her family members would be calling for her from downstairs and interrupting her inner world, it had a very dreamlike feel to it.

    There's an excellent sequence where Jade is escaping one of her dates (whose face is never shown, he's meant to be representative of the generic Chinese white collar men she is set up with by her parents) by running down the street, throwing off her coat and mussing up her Connie Chung hairdo, crying and literally breaking free while Sonic Youth's "Sugar Kane" plays, it's very emotional and thrilling to watch.

    The film will also have confessional sequences, done documentary film style, where the characters will talk to an unknown person, and there's a great scene where Alannah Ong as Jade's mother talks about being a child and joining in on the bullying of a mute woman, calling her "Dumb Dumb," then only after being a mother herself learning about the trauma that was inflicted on that woman that caused her to never speak again, and feeling shame for her ignorance and cruelty towards her.

    Some of the film score is by the Toronto-based band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, who are best known for doing the theme song to the TV show The Kids in the Hall.

    I really liked how the film is more about holding onto a sense of self and not giving up one's identity just to satisfy family expectations, as it can feel good in the short-term to appease what parents want but isn't good for someone's long-term mental health. The film is dated as a 1990s Canadian independent film, but still holds up a lot with its messages about family and identity and being a first generation child of immigrant parents.

Thoughts on Laggies

    I rewatched Laggies today, a 2014 film directed by Lynn Shelton and written by Andrea Seigel, and I liked it, but I couldn't suspend my disbelief that Sam Rockwell's dad character Craig would really let this random near-30 year old woman named Megan (Keira Knightley) stay in his house because she is friends with his teen daughter Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz) (which already came off as weird and questionable), buying her cover story of "waiting to move into her new apartment," and just being dumb enough to give her a pass because she's attractive. It felt really implausible to me, especially since Craig comes off more as a sarcastic cynic type, and is a lawyer, and should have seen the red flags come up more.

    Megan had been with her boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber) since high school, she's had the same friend group since then, and they're all 28 and Megan is going through a quarter life crisis, not having a real career and being stagnant in her life, so when Anthony proposes to her, she freaks and makes an excuse to go to a seminar for a week on nearby Orcas Island, and really by chance befriends Annika and her friends (including a pre-fame Kaitlyn Dever), uses the apartment excuse to lay low at her and Craig's house, and is operating under false pretenses while getting involved in their lives.

    I like the movie, mostly the lead performances, but the stretches that people will believe Megan's lies makes the story less believable to me.

    A funny aside: when I watched the movie years ago with the commentary on by the late director Lynn Shelton, she comments on a sexy moment where Sam Rockwell drops his umbrella and pulls Keira Knightley by her coat into a kiss, and Lynn goes, "And that's why Sam Rockwell gets paid the big bucks." Lynn Shelton passed away way too soon, she was a great talent in the indie film world.

Thoughts on Bright Star

   I had heard of Bright Star way back in 2009, Jane Campion's romantic period drama about the brief love affair between John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). It was so quiet and full of longing, set in 1818 Hampstead, England, where John Keats is a shy, quiet poet who is a penniless instructor, and Fanny Brawne is a outspoken flirt interested in fashion who comes from a middle class family, and they share a double house, living on different sides of it, and eventually fall in love, but can't be together because of his meager circumstances. As her mother says, of his reluctance to initially pursue her, "Mr. Keats knows he cannot like you, he has no living and no income." She pines for him when he goes to London to try to get work, waiting for his letters and is melodramatic in the period between receiving responses from him, acting like she will die of despair. When he returns, her mother is worried that she is growing too attached to him, wanting her to be available for more eligible suitors.

    I really liked a scene where they communicate with each other by rapping on the walls opposite their rooms, trying to listen to each other, it was really sexy in a hidden desires kind of way.

    I liked how it was a quiet courtship, how they kiss so softly with a lot of restrained emotion, and how delicate yet powerful Ben Whishaw's performance as Keats was. I liked Abbie Cornish's performance, how it was a little more broad because Fanny can afford to be more dramatic than John can, but still had a lovely soul to her characterization. I liked how they bonded over poetry, and how the film honored Keats' poetry and legacy while describing the beauty and intimacy of his relationship with Fanny.

Thoughts on Scarlet

    Scarlet (2025) was a gender-bent fantasy version of Hamlet, where the princess Scarlet, in late 16th century Denmark, tries to avenge the death of her father (the king killed by his brother to usurp the throne), only to be killed by her uncle and end up in the Land of the Dead, where people roam deserts and can still be killed in the afterlife, being turned into dust and nothingness. She still wants to avenge her father's death and kill her uncle, who is now in the afterlife along with his men and all the people of her kingdom, as centuries has passed, and she is joined by a contemporary paramedic who is in denial that he died, and she only has revenge on her mind and killing minions while he wants to heal people and not kill anyone.

    I really liked the animation, as there were some stunning shots, though the switch between 2D and 3D animation was a little jarring, it reminded me of watching Titan A.E. and the rocky switch with 2000s-era CGI mixed with 2D animation, and this movie came out last year.
I wasn't into the forced love interest with the guy, as I found him pretty dull, and she had been dead for centuries and still obsessed with killing her uncle, which made the afterlife seem more miserable if people could still die a second time there or be forced to just roam aimlessly.

    At one point, the guy plays a lute and is like, "Here's a song from the far future," and I started giggling in the theater, because I half-expected it to turn into a "anyway, here's 'Wonderwall'" meme or for him to play "Baby Got Back."

    The story was mostly about how she was letting vengeance consume her and that she had wasted her life plotting to kill her uncle with her fight training, only to die and still be obsessed with wanting revenge, and her having to learn how to let go.

    This was directed by Mamoru Hosoda, who also directed Belle in 2021, an anime film I had really liked that is more contemporary, where the main character is a teen girl who has a popular Internet avatar as an alter ego.

    I liked the movie, I don't hate it like the other reviews on Letterboxd do, but I just think it was really pretty and gorgeous to look at with an interesting fantasy version of Hamlet, but could have had better story and character development.

Thoughts on Peter Hujar's Day

   On Criterion, I watched a 2025 biographical drama titled Peter Hujar's Day, written and directed by Ira Sachs, based on the 2021 book of the same name by Linda Rosenkrantz. It's likely because of my own close ties to NYC, though I grew up in Long Island. But I'm 42, lived in NYC for twenty years, and now live in Jersey City but commute to Manhattan for work. So it's still always been very close to me.

    The film was taken from the transcript of a lost-to-time audio recording that writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) made while interviewing her friend, photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) on a December day in his downtown NYC apartment in 1974, asking him about all of his activities from the day before. Peter is a successful photographer whose work had been in The New York Times and The Village Voice, but is often broke and just getting by, chasing down people to get paid for his work, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and chain-smoking cigarettes in his apartment. He sits with Linda as he smokes and talks about tracking down Allen Ginsburg to photograph him for the Times, finding contrast between his chanting and Eastern religion vibes and then being crude about William S. Burroughs' proclivities for prep school boys in neckties; acting as the go-between for Susan Sontag and another artist friend; and making his way through the loose artsy bohemian world of friends and friends of friends. Linda just listens and doesn't judge and is very understanding and not surprised by anything.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. I liked how Hall and Whishaw, two British actors, nailed this 1960s-1970s liberal intellectual NYC accent that I can't describe how it sounds, but is the kind of voice heard in 1970s Woody Allen movies. The language is dated in a 1960s book kind of way, like saying "we were making it on the couch" for sex. The film has this quiet cozy vibe to me, that I felt relaxed just watching two excellent actors play the kind of New Yorkers of a bygone era, that now really exists with the kind of elderly New Yorkers who have lived in their rent-controlled apartments for over 50 years and have tons of books in tall bookcases and a lot of old-school charm to them.

Thoughts on Hidden in the Fog

    On Criterion I watched Hidden in the Fog, a 1953 Swedish mystery noir film directed by Lars-Eric Kjellgren and co-written by Kjellgren, Vic Sunesson, and Barbro Alving, based on Sunesson's 1951 novel of the same name. The film starred Eva Henning as Lora, a woman who is on the run after shooting her abusive and unfaithful husband Walter (Georg Rydeberg), and she thinks she killed him by shooting him, and is wandering around the streets of Stockholm in a daze. She gets caught by the police, and learns that he had died by poisoning prior, and he was already dead when she shot him. The detective Kjell Myrman (Sven Linberg) is trying to figure out the murder mystery, with Lora as the prime suspect, and there is a lot of speculation among her friends and family on how her husband could have been poisoned.

    I liked this film, for the beautiful black and white cinematography by Gunnar Fischer (who also shot Ingmar Bergman films like Port of Call and The Devil's Eye), the allusions to Otto Preminger's 1944 film Laura (where one of the characters directly references it and compares her to the title heroine), and the intriguing murder mystery and flashbacks on piecing the story together. I really liked Dagmar Ebbesen as Lora's maid Vilma, who has more to do with the plot than one expects, and had funny asides as a character actor, as if she would be played by Thelma Ritter in the 1950s American equivalent of this film.

    This was included as part of the Criterion Channel's Nordic Noir selection, and this was really interesting to check out.