Thoughts on Emily the Criminal

     On Tubi, I watched Emily the Criminal, a 2022 crime thriller written and directed by John Patton Ford. The film stars Aubrey Plaza, as Emily, a young woman who has $70,000 of student debt and is working menial jobs in the gig economy to get by in Los Angeles. She is having trouble getting a steady job because of her past felony conviction for assault, as well as a DUI arrest, and is stuck in dire financial straits.

    A coworker connects her to a "dummy shopper" service that turns out to be part of a credit card fraud ring, where she can earn $200 in an hour if she buys a flat screen TV with stolen credit card numbers and a fake I.D. She does it and wants to do more, so one of the organizers, Youcef (Theo Rossi), sends her out to buy a car, with the same credit card scam. However, when she is about to drive away with the car, the dealer discovers the scam, and tries to drag her out of the car, assaulting her, but she maces him with pepper spray, and drives off, demanding the $2000 owed to her by Youcef for pulling off this dangerous scam.

    Emily gets more into the criminal underworld, even as she is hoping that her friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke) hooks her up with a job at the advertising agency she works for. Emily's criminal background, quick temper to fight, and tenacity makes her quickly adept at moving products through scams, though it puts her at more risk for violence and retaliation from others. All she wants is to pay off her student debt, do her painting, and have a steady, decent job, and she sees the crime as a temporary means to an end.

    I had seen this movie before, and really liked it. Aubrey Plaza is great at playing these dark characters who are morally gray, who are relatable even if their actions are questionable, and depicting how far someone who is in deep debt would go to pay off their loans, while also dealing with blocks in their career from past criminal records. She feels realistic as someone who would work in the gig economy to get by, while being angry at the system that is setting her up to fail.

    Theo Rossi as Youcef is really great in this film as well. He plays Youcef initially as a streetwise scammer, but is revealed more to be a funny and likable person who also has turned to a life of crime to survive. His dreams are to own an apartment and be financially stable, having immigrated from Lebanon with his family. A romance sparks between him and Emily, which makes his cousin Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori) more suspicious of Emily getting too involved with the fraud ring and jeopardizing their anonymity as scammers.

    This was an interesting little crime thriller to watch, and I'm happy I revisited it.

Thoughts on Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and Lovedolls Superstar

    On Criterion, I watched Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, a 1984 underground film directed by David Markey, shot on super-8 film, that focus on a fictional all-female punk rock band called the Love Dolls, made up of teenage runaways who are trying to survive on the streets of Los Angeles. Kitty Carryall (Jennifer Schwartz) and Bunny Tremelo (Hilary Rubens) break out of their homes and form a band together, finding a drummer, Patch Kelly (Janet Housden), and fight rival gangs and bands. A manager named Johnny Tremaine (played by then-teenage Steven McDonald, of the band Redd Kross) offers to take them under his wing, but uses them for sex and to make money off of them. The Love Dolls want to get revenge on those who have hurt them, and make it as a huge rock band.

    The movie has a lo-fi vibe to it, with awkward and bad acting, though it's intentionally hilarious at times, like how one of their moms is clearly played by a young man in drag playing up a "nagging old lady" stereotype that is too ridiculous to take seriously. Or when Bunny tells Kitty that Johnny Tremaine assaulted her, going, "Johnny raped me," and Kitty blows right past that with, "Don't worry, we'll make it to the top. We'll show them that we're no tramps, we're real rock stars." "OK!" It was so silly that I thought it had to be intentionally dumb.

    The movie is short at 49 minutes, and has a great soundtrack of 80s punk rock like Black Flag, White Flag, the Bags, as well as several songs by Redd Kross, as McDonald and his brother Jeff act in the film. This movie has a very genuine feel to it, of being a part of the Los Angeles punk rock subculture of the 1980s, and its roughness makes it feel more charming.

    The sequel, Lovedolls Superstar, came out in 1986, and was also directed by David Markey, and is longer at 81 minutes. Following the events of the first movie, with a recap at the beginning like a TV episode, the band reunites after having fallen on hard times, like Kitty sleeping in the gutter, and Patch has become the lead of an acid-damaged religious cult. Bunny is replaced by Alexandria (Kim Pilkington), a sex worker on the streets of Sunset Boulevard, and Johnny's twin brother Rainbow Tremaine (also played by Steven McDonald) comes out of his hippie desert life to look for his brother, who met an ill fate in the last movie.

    The movie gets even more bonkers than the first one, with newcomers vowing to kill to avenge their loved ones, and an obsessed Lovedolls fan (Jeff McDonald) becoming an assassin to target a Bruce Springsteen impersonator. There are guest appearances from Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, Vicki Peterson of The Bangles, and Sky Saxon of The Seeds. There's clearly more money in the budget for the soundtrack, with music by Sonic Youth, the Dead Kennedys, the Meat Puppets, as well as Redd Kross and Black Flag returning. And there's a lot of fun humor in the band being openly antagonistic towards a feminist talk show host, or commanding their fans to kill and thinking they're stupid.

    Despite that it's a short movie, it feels like it could have been cut down even more, as it often feels like padding for a movie with a slightly bigger budget, and even not by much. It can be messy to watch, but like the first one, it has the same kind of DIY heart and energy that I liked. And although Steven McDonald is a bassist and not an actor, he was a lot of fun to watch in both movies as the cock-rock sexist manager and the blissed-out desert hippie.

    David Markey is a filmmaker and musician, and his work has documented the Southern California punk scene of the 1980s, and he has worked with many of the bands featured in these movies.

    I watched these movies on Criterion as part of their programming of movies featuring all-female rock bands, and this was cool to come across these underground cult hits depicting the 80s L.A. punk underground culture.