Thoughts on Christine

     On Criterion, I watched Christine, a 1983 supernatural horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by Bill Phillips, based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. The film starred Keith Gordon as Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy high school senior who purchases a 1958 Plymouth car for $250 and becomes obsessed with it, naming it Christine, as the car is possessed by an evil spirit and kills anyone who she sees as a threat to her and Arnie.

    The film opens with the car being produced in a Detroit auto plant in 1957 (with the anachronistic choice of George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" playing over the prologue), and maiming one worker by slamming its hood on his fingers, and killing another worker because he dropped cigar ash on its seat.    

    In 1978 California, teenage Arnie is bullied on his first day of school by Buddy (William Ostrander) and his gang, and Arnie's best friend Dennis (John Stockwell) intervenes and saves him, and Buddy is later expelled for threatening them with a switchblade. After school, Arnie and Buddy are driving home when Arnie sees the car, now in a beat-up state, and wants to buy it from an elderly, rough around the edges man (Roberts Blossom), the brother of the previous owner, who recently died. Despite Dennis' protests, Arnie buys the car, and his parents are mad that he at 17 made a big move like that without consulting them, and he blows up at them over wanting to keep him a sheltered nerd. He takes Christine to a garage to restore her, where the garage owner Will Darnell (Robert Prosky) gives him a part-time job in exchange for letting him have access to his junk pile to fix Christine.

    Arnie is in love with his car, and his newfound confidence gets him a date with the new girl, Leigh (Alexandra Paul), who Dennis and his friends are immediately smitten by, and Dennis' friends make lewd sexual comments about her on first sight. Leigh and Arnie begin dating seriously, and Dennis, distracted by seeing them kissing by Christine while he's playing a football game, gets tackled so severely that he ends up in the hospital for a month and it ends his football career.

    Christine and Arnie have a co-dependent abusive relationship, where Christine is insanely jealous and possessive of Arnie and will kill people by running them over/pinning them to a wall or asphyxiating someone while keeping the doors locked, and Arnie becomes combative and verbally abusive to his parents, Dennis, and Leigh, emboldened with toxic masculinity after being a bullied nerd for so long.

    I liked how effective the characterization of the car was in the movie, how Christine would only play 1950s rock songs that expressed its emotions in a scene ("We Belong Together"; "Bony Maronie"; "Come on, Let's Go"), bringing an eerie, creepy feel to the songs, and the special effects when Christine regenerates herself after being destroyed were fantastic, through hydraulics crumpling the car and puckering in, then the film played in reverse to show the car "fixing" herself. I especially liked a sequence where, after Christine starts a fire at a gas station and kills two people while gunning to kill the main bully, the car is fully engulfed in flames and being driven by stunt veteran Terry Leonard, who had doubled for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark around that time.

    I liked this movie a lot, mostly for the special effects and the personification of the car as the villain, as well as the depiction of the bullied nerd becoming a horrible person and his best friend and girlfriend becoming the heroes of the film. It's a really interesting and haunting film of the 1980s.

Thoughts on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

     On Hulu I watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, a 2025 sci-fi comedy directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Matthew Robinson. It was decent, but overly long at two hours and 15 minutes, it should've been a tight 90 minutes. It did get hamfisted with the "everyone's on their phones" stuff, but I liked the basic premise of Sam Rockwell as a time traveler from the future who is trying to prevent AI from taking over the world, and he has time-traveled to the same Norm's diner in L.A. 117 times to find the right combination of patrons in the diner to join him on his quest to stop the AI apocalypse from happening. It's like Terminator 2 if it was more of a goofy comedy and less about Sarah Connor trying to kill the creator of Skynet in front of his family.

    The film has a good cast with Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz, and Michael Peña as some of the diner patrons picked for the mission, with their own backstories told in flashback about their experiences with technology and AI, and the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network described their backstories as being in their own Black Mirror episodes. Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña play a teacher couple whose students are always on their phones in class and ignore the teachers; Juno Temple plays a woman whose teen son dies in a school shooting and other mothers of school shooting victims lead her to a place where they can clone her son, albeit more like a physical copy than having his same personality; and Haley Lu Richardson plays a woman who is allergic to cell phones and WiFi and gets nosebleeds around them, and her boyfriend, who once was against cell phones, gets addicted to a VR headset and wants to live in virtual reality than the real world. Their stories are all pretty interesting, especially the one with Juno Temple's character, and I did prefer their backstories to the main plot thread, which feels like too many plot ideas thrown in at once.

Thoughts on Wild at Heart

     On Criterion, I watched Wild at Heart, a 1990 Southern Gothic crime film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, two young lovers who, after Sailor is released from prison for having murdered a man in self-defense, go on the run from Lula's domineering mother Marietta (Diane Ladd), who has hired hitmen to kill Sailor. 

    Nicolas Cage brings out his Elvis Presley impersonations as Sailor, as a romantic outlaw who sings Presley ballads to his girlfriend but says he will only sing "Love Me Tender" to his future wife, and does high kicks and punching the air while dancing. Laura Dern brought out a more sexual side as Lula, a young woman of twenty who is a survivor of sexual assault as a child and has a passionate excitement for Sailor, even after he bludgeoned a man to death (initially in self-defense because Marietta sent him to kill him, but then going beyond into a murderous rage) and acts jealous and threatening towards a guy at a rock show for dancing with Lula.

    Diane Ladd plays up soap opera theatrics as Marietta, painting red lipstick all over her face and being in hysterics over the phone, seeing Sailor as dangerous for her daughter, but she is also involved with hitmen and gangsters, and was complicit with the death of her husband. 

    Sailor and Lula travel together from North Carolina to California, breaking his parole, driving in a convertible and stop in Texas along the way, where Sailor meets up with an old acquaintance, Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini), and he doesn't know that she knows that there is a contract out on him, and that she is linked up with Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), a slimy criminal with rancid teeth.

    The movie is a weird and wild mess, but really captivating to watch. Cage and Dern bring a lot of raw sexuality and passion to their love scenes, and their characters' relationship has a romantic "us against the world" feel to it, that amazingly doesn't end in flames. 

    The film is stacked with character actors: Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover (in a tragic flashback story as Lula's cousin who is struggling with psychosis issues and breaks with reality), J.E. Freeman, Jack Nance, W. Morgan Sheppard, Grace Zabriskie, David Patrick Kelly, Frances Bay, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and others. There's an early role by Sheryl Lee the same year she played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks as a hallucination of Glinda the Good Witch, and Sherilyn Fenn, also from Twin Peaks, played a traumatized survivor of a car accident with brain damage who succumbs to her injuries.

    The film has a lot of references to The Wizard of Oz, with Lula clicking her red heels to want to escape a traumatic situation; the Glinda hallucination; Lula picturing her mother as the Wicked Witch of the West; referring to the road they traveled on as the yellow brick road, and other mentions. It goes along with the fantasy of the film, of being this weird road trip/romance/Southern Gothic movie, playing Elvis Presley songs and briefly the intro of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" in one scene.

    Isabella Rossellini had a lot of glamour with her blonde wig and dark unibrow as Perdita, but the role would be better known when played by Rosie Perez in 1997's Dance with the Devil (also known as Perdita Durango). The character was from the novel and from Barry Gifford's 1992 novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango. In Rossellini's 1997 memoir Some of Me, she said that she based the look of Perdita on Frida Kahlo:

    "For my character, Perdita Durango, I used Frida Kahlo, whose paintings are a series of obsessive self-portraits. Frida Kahlo portrayed herself as attractive and repulsive at the same time. She is beautiful and feminine, but she is hairy, a bit like an ape, with a mustache and two eyebrows that are really one big one across her forehead. This combination of attractiveness/repulsiveness fascinated me . . . I used a bad blond wig that exposed black roots and a tight dress, sexy but vulgar. I changed my body posture and I added hair so I, too, could have one eyebrow across my forehead. My Perdita, I believe, conveyed the impression of a person who is repulsive and attractive at the same time . . . Perdita is my best example of modeling skills applied to acting."

    But Willem Dafoe was the scene-stealer as Bobby Peru, a truly disgusting person who sexually threatens and assaults Lula, triggering her childhood rape, and whom Sailor joins in a robbery, against his better judgment. Dafoe is fantastic in this film and utterly memorable.

    I really liked this film. I hadn't seen it since I was a teenager, and barely remembered it aside from the main romance and Lula's line to Sailor, "You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt." I liked revisiting it and understanding it better and taking it all in, and enjoying the weird ride of it all.

Thoughts on Delicatessen

    On Tubi, I watched Delicatessen, a 1991 French black comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, and co-written by Jeunet, Caro, and Gilles Adrien. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic France, possibly during the 1950s, focusing on the tenants of a dilapidated apartment building. Food is in short supply, and grain is used as currency. The landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) works as a butcher in his shop on the first floor, and posts job opportunities for handymen, so he can lure unsuspecting men to his building and butcher them and sell them to his tenants as cheap meat.

    The next applicant for the vacant position is the circus clown Louison (Dominique Pinon), who is handy with fixing things around the building and has a trick knife/boomerang he calls the "Australian." Clapet is reluctant to murder him so soon because of his usefulness, and he develops a cute romance with Clapet's daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). The other tenants know they are eating people and are resigned to it for survival, but like Louison too for his charms.

    I first saw this movie as a teenager in the 1990s, and really liked how bizarre and weird it is. The film has a yellow and sepia-toned look to it, making the colors look like vomit, with a lot of wide angle shots and exaggerations and cartoonish humor, like with a group of underground mole people who come into the last third of the movie and take over the film. There's a fun sequence of simultaneous noises like the bed squeaking from sex, Julie playing the cello with her bow, and other tapping sounds as a calamity of sounds, with credit to the sound designer and editor. There's an ongoing joke of one of the tenants trying to die by suicide with elaborate Rube Goldberg setups (like sitting in the bathtub beside a sewing machine attached to a string attached to other things attached to a doorbell in hopes that her lover will ring the buzzer triggering the action to kill her). I love the date scene where Julie is preparing to mime pouring tea for Louison and practicing what to say, and when she tries to do the date without her glasses and Louison has to keep saving her from overpouring the tea and catching her mistakes because of her nearsighted blurry vision. It's an oddball movie that works really well with the vision that Jeunet and Caro put forth. 

    The two would collaborate again on 1995's The City of Lost Children, before parting on their separate creative ways, with Jeunet becoming the more well-known name with directing 1997's Alien: Resurrection, 2001's Amelie and 2004's A Very Long Engagement. Marc Caro has worked as an art director, often collaborating with Jan Kounen on his films.

    I love how creative and beautiful and strange this film is, and the romance between Louison and Julie is so sweet and cute amidst the madness. I'm really glad I revisited this film and understood it a lot better in my older age.

Thoughts on Felicia's Journey

     On Criterion, I watched the 1999 psychological thriller film Felicia's Journey, written and directed by Atom Egoyan, based on the 1994 novel of the same name by William Trevor. The film centers on two lonely people: Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), an Irish teenager who goes to Birmingham, England to find her boyfriend Johnny; and Joseph (Bob Hoskins), a Birmingham catering manager who is the son of a French TV chef from decades past. 

    Felicia is pregnant, and her boyfriend Johnny (Peter McDonald) has gone to join the British Army, being seen as a traitor to Ireland by Felicia's widower father. Johnny's mother looks down on Felicia, and her father opposes the relationship, encouraging her to forget Johnny and find another guy. But Felicia is young and idealistic, and doesn't get how Johnny isn't serious about her (he ignores her when he talks to a friend, not introducing her, and he doesn't leave a forwarding address, claiming he'll write her when he gets there). So she travels to Birmingham, with barely any identification, and only has the barest information that Johnny was in the army and works at a lawnmower factory, but doesn't know what factory. She's wandering around on her own, and meets Joseph, a local who offers her directions but is often on his way to visit his ailing wife in the hospital. At home, Joseph cooks meals while watching his mother's 1950s-era cooking TV shows, connecting with his mother through that way instead of in his actual childhood, when she would make him eat raw liver on TV and be annoyed at him coughing and gagging. Joseph is kind and reserved and polite, but harbors a lot of trauma inside from his childhood and living in the house he grew up in.

    As Felicia struggles more to find Johnny, she is approached by a representative of a Christian group and given shelter by them, but they prove to be hypocritical and self-righteous. She gets accosted by men at night on the street, going "Are you working?", assuming she's a sex worker. She ends up staying with Joseph, but he has his own unsettling past with helping vulnerable young women like herself.

    I really enjoyed this film. I like how Atom Egoyan's films are often quiet Canadian dramas that are slow and focus on character studies of lonely people, like in The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, and how the film slowly unveils itself to be a thriller without the Hollywood markings of loud music or jump scares. I like how the film largely takes place during the day, in mundane parts of Birmingham, and the horror more creeps up on the viewer, when Joseph seems like a nice, unassuming person until more of his past is revealed. And that Felicia is a good and innocent person who wants to believe that Johnny cares for her, and it takes her a long time to realize that he has abandoned her.

    Both lead actors are fantastic in this film. Bob Hoskins, who was largely known for playing rough, working-class characters in both British and American films, brought a quiet sensitivity to this role, and it was one of the best performances of his career. And Elaine Cassidy, early in her career, brought a sweet shyness and naivete to her role that made her character nearly feel tragic.

    I wanted to watch this before it left the Criterion Channel streaming site, and it was a wonderful little gem of a film.