Thoughts on Hope

     At the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, I saw Hope, a 2026 South Korean science fiction action film written and directed by Na Hong-jin. The film centers on the citizens of a small village named Hope Harbor, which is close to the border of North Korea, or the DMZ, who are being attacked by mysterious creatures and fighting back with lots of ammunition.

    The film focuses on a few characters as they are fighting against the creatures: Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief, who is racing through the town trying to figure out what's going on; Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), one of a group of hunters who are being hunted themselves in the mountains; and Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), a rookie cop who is more capable than other cops and fires back at the creatures. As people are discovering the destruction of the town and the rotting corpses of cows, they initially think a tiger from the mountains killed the cows before finding the town's wreckage and realizing it's something much bigger, before seeing cars being thrown airborne and crushing people from a distance.

    The movie works well because it combines a lot of action and humor, and running gags like Ko Bum-seok being shocked at the heavy artillery that the elderly residents have and being like "How did you get all of this?" and they go, "That's not important right now." Or an inept younger guy is impressed at Ko Sung-ki's horseback riding skills during a chase sequence and is like, "How does he know how to ride so well?" An elderly local, Mr. Hae-sul (Im Hyun-sik) tells a story about hiding from the monsters while trying to keep from pooping in a bush and holding it in so hard ("the hardest I've ever clenched") that even Im Sung-ae laughs when she is trying to take his testimony because it's so bittersweet and funny.

    The action sequences are really fantastic, especially a couple of intense chase sequences that combine a lot of impressive stunt work with cars, horses, and people, and none that I want to spoil right now.

    The downside to the film is the CGI of the creatures, especially when there is a lot of build-up to the first one. The design looks good, but once they move more, they look more pasted into the film, and it's hard to believe them as part of the story when they aren't blended in as well. Some later CGI characters look okay, it's just a flaw of the film, as well as the last few minutes, that adds in some lore about the creatures that feels way too late to add at the end of a two hour and forty minute movie.

    I enjoyed this film as a funny monster movie with a variety of likable characters to root for, and felt it stood out well for its stunt work and character development.

Thoughts on Clean

    On Criterion, I rewatched Clean, a 2004 drama film directed by Olivier Assayas, and co-written by Assayas, Malachy Martin, and Sarah Perry. The film stars Maggie Cheung as Emily Wang, a former MTV VJ, who is in a common-law marriage with her rock-star husband Lee (James Johnston, of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and they are both heroin addicts, and Lee is frustrated over the decline in his career, and Emily is seen by Lee's friends as a bad influence on him. Their young son, Jay, is being taken care of by Lee's parents Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry) in Vancouver.

    After a fight in a motel in Hamilton, Canada, Emily storms off and later shoots up heroin in her car, and when she returns, she finds that Lee has died of a drug overdose, and the police find drugs in her bag and arrest her. Despite that she wasn't around when Lee died, she is largely blamed by the press for his death. She spends six months in prison, and custody of Jay was awarded to Lee's parents. Upon her release, Emily moves to Paris, but not before meeting with Albrecht, who is sympathetic to her but advises her not to see Jay for a few years while she gets her life together.

    In Paris, Emily works at a Chinese restaurant owned by relatives and doesn't enjoy it, and is accused of not wanting to be around other Chinese people. She has become addicted to methadone as a way to get off of heroin, and reaches out to her old music industry friends for prescriptions for it. She doesn't relapse, but she falls into the same patterns of associating with shady people, and naively thinks that if she can get a letter to the singer Tricky through her friend, that he will help her get custody of her son. Her old friends bust into an apartment, where someone has overdosed, and rob the place of drugs before calling the police to alert them of his passing.

    Albrecht, Rosemary, and Jay are in London because Rosemary is ill and needs medical treatment, and Albrecht lets Emily know and arranges for them to meet but Jay initially doesn't want to meet her because Rosemary blamed Emily for Lee's death, so Jay thinks his mother killed his father. Emily and Jay eventually meet, but it's a rocky relationship when they barely know each other and Jay is hurt and angry and confused.

    Maggie Cheung is fantastic in this film, bringing a lot of heart and sympathy and understanding to Emily, and moves easily with her polyglot skills, speaking English, French, and Cantonese throughout the film.

    Nick Nolte is great in this film, and plays Albrecht as a grieving old man, who has just lost his son, and may soon lose his wife, and knows he doesn't have a lot of time left (though as of this review, Nick Nolte is currently 85 years old), and wants Jay and Emily to have a connection with each other since Jay has so little family to rely on. There's a comforting warmth to his craggy voice and a knowledge that he's seen life, and wants the best for both Emily and Jay.

    The film has cameos from Tricky and Emily Haines of the band Metric, and feels rooted in the early 2000s with brief mentions of Limp Bizkit and System of a Down. Béatrice Dalle has a nice supporting role as Emily's friend in Paris, and there's a subplot with Emily's former boss Irene (Jeanne Balibar) having a messy love affair with her younger assistant Sandrine (Laetitia Spigarelli) that Emily is the observant to.

     It's a movie that flows without judging the characters, letting scenes play out, focusing on a complicated lead character who is grieving her husband and doesn't know what are the next steps to take to move on in her life. I like that the film ends with some ambiguity. It's not all wrapped up in a happy ending, but it's not depressing, either. She still has to work to have a relationship with her kid, to stay sober, and to have a career, and just keep going. It's a really interesting and great film, and I'm glad I revisited it.

Thoughts on Grace of My Heart

    On Criterion, I watched Grace of my Heart, a 1996 comedy-drama written and directed by Allison Anders, and loosely based on the career arc of Carole King as a 1960s songwriter creating pop hits for girl groups before coming into her own as a solo artist. The film starred Illeana Douglas as Edna Buxton, a Phildelphia steel heiress who wins a talent contest as a singer-songwriter, and the prize is a record contract, but after nearly a year in New York City, she hasn't gotten anywhere with her career. A studio producer tells her that "girl singers" are not currently trendy in the music business, and advises her to write for others to make a living. She is led to record producer Joel Milner (Joh Turturro), who renames her "Denise Waverly," invents a blue-collar persona for her, and has her re-work her song for a male doo-wop group (played by the 90s R&B group Portrait), and it becomes a hit.

    She become a songwriter in the Brill Building, a famed office building where songwriters wrote pop hits in the early 1960s, and after a rocky start, she begins dating and later marries the songwriter Howard Caszatt (Eric Stoltz), and brings in her friend Doris Shelley (Jennifer Leigh Warren), whom she met years earlier as a fellow contestant at the talent show, and Denise writes a song for Doris and her friends to sing as a girl group, called the Luminaries. Denise and Howard write a song called "Unwanted Number," based on a girl's unwanted pregnancy, and the film has an interesting sequence that shows Denise with Doris near the fire escape where the girl, who got pregnant at 12, is telling her adolescent boyfriend and is struggling with being a mother so young, and that moment goes back and forth with Denise and Howard crafting the song, like Howard thinking it's more poetic for them to be under streetlights, while Denise says it's more "urban" for them to be on the fire escape. (The film doesn't question how Denise as a white woman is writing songs for Black music artists and becoming successful off of them, often having Doris and the young girl, who later becomes a babysitter for Denise's child, as her friends instead of focusing on their stories). The song is banned from the radio, but the controversy brings the attention of radio DJ John Murray (Bruce Davison), who brings the songwriting duo on his show and is supportive of Denise's career.

    The film follows Denise's career and her two marriages, to Howard (who she leaves for being a cheater) and the surf-rock singer Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon), who she struggles with because of his mental health issues and substance abuse disorder. She becomes friends with a fellow songwriter, Cheryl (Patsy Kensit), and I liked how the film subverted expectations with making it seem like she was going to be a sexy threat to Denise's marriage, only for Cheryl to not already be married to her writing partner, but that their friendship becomes close and outlasts both their marriages, that felt more positive for portraying female friendship and not jealously or rivalry between them.

    The film struggles with the lip-syncing scenes whenever Denise or any actor being dubbed over performs, because the dubbed voices don't sound anything like the actors' voices, and the lip-syncing is too obvious and takes me out of the movie. John Turturro's character has awful facial hair, where he would look better without it, and the film relies on costuming to boldly let the audience know what time period they are in, as the film story spans from 1958 to 1970. I was distracted by hearing Sonic Youth's "Little Trouble Girl" play in a scene as a song that Denise and Cheryl wrote for a bubblegum 1960s TV show, because even though vocalist Kim Gordon is evoking the Shangri-La's talk-singing style for the song, I immediately recognized it as a song from the band's 1995 album Washing Machine, and I couldn't see it as a 1960s fictional song the songwriters had made.

    There are obvious pastiches and references to real-life musical artists of the 1960s era. Jay Phillips is modeled off of Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, with his eccentric musical tastes and personal struggles, and Bridget Fonda has a fun cameo as a Lesley Gore-esque young singer, who is a closeted lesbian with her "roommate" Marion (Lucinda Jenney), and Denise and Cheryl write a queer-coded song for her called "My Secret Love." There is a musical act based off of the Everly Brothers, and the record producer Joel Milner is a mix of Phil Spector and song published Lester Sill.

    Illeana Douglas is great in this movie, and in her career, she has often played supporting roles, like sisters (To Die For, Stir of Echoes), sassy best friends (Picture Perfect), or quirky art teachers (Ghost World). She's rarely gotten to lead her own movie, and she's really charming and wonderful to watch in this film, holding it together even when the pieces seem a little messy.

    Director Allison Anders made the fantastic 1992 film Gas Food Lodging, a coming of age film centered on a single mother and her two teen daughters living in a trailer park in New Mexico. She drew upon her own history of sexual assault to make 2001's Things Behind the Sun, about a musician struggling with the long-term aftermath of rape. She is almost 72 now, and largely works in TV now.

    I'm glad I watched this, because it seemed like an interesting movie, but I hadn't come across it now, so I'm happy that Criterion added it this month for their "Girl Bands" programming on streaming.

Thoughts on The Christophers

     On Hulu, I watched The Christophers, a 2025 dark comedy directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon. It stars Ian McKellen as Julian Sklar, an elderly and eccentric artist living in London in an old house with small floors. In the 1990s, he created two series of paintings he dubbed the "Christophers," but never finished the third series. He is in his eighties and dying, and his opportunistic children, Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden) want those works completed before he dies, so they hire an art forger, Lori (Michaela Coel) to pose as a potential new assistant to gain access to the unfinished canvas and forge the rest, so that Barnaby and Sallie can sell them for a huge profit after their father dies.

    Lori accepts the job, and meets Julian while he is recording Cameos for his fans, and he is cranky and jaded towards her, assuming she's a wannabe artist or a fan, and mentions that he thinks his kids put her up to this to do something with the "Christophers," which she denies. He orders her to shred the "Christophers," but instead she makes copies of the originals and shreds the forgeries. They have a rocky start to their relationship, with Lori having a no b.s. attitude while Julian is rhapsodic about his former glory as an artist, though he knows his quality went down a lot and that his work became rote and lost its vitality.

    When Julian learns his predictions about Lori and his children are true, his friendship with Lori grows a lot deeper, as she drops her guard and talks to him about the highs and lows of his artistry, sharing a deep knowledge of his work and career, and he in turn is very astute and is hesitant to destroy his own work because of the past significance of the "Christophers."

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. It's a small film that is mainly a two-handed between McKellen and Coel, and they have great chemistry together, with Julian and Lori able to see through one another and draw a deeper connection about their passions and failures as artists, and teaming up against his selfish children. There's a sweet and funny intimacy to the film that I liked, with the messiness of Julian's home, like his art studio, and the joke of him having two doors and two buzzers and shouting "other door!" when Lori buzzes for him. The old staircases leading up to each small floor was a nice touch in making the house feel more lived-in as part of Julian's character and history.

    I liked that Lori didn't have guilt over being an art forger, not seeing it as important if people who buy and admire the art don't know the truth, as long as people appreciate the art and makes them happy or brings joy to their life. Michaela Coel was excellent in this film, and I've been a fan of her since Chewing Gum, and am happy to see her thriving more as an actress and show creator.

    Ian McKellen is wonderful in this film, and at 87, he is still vibrant and funny and can go on long monologues and sound so natural, and he's very charming and engaging to watch in this role. He can play Julian as cranky without making him a miser or a jerk, and that's a difficult balance to achieve.

    I missed this when it was in theaters, so I'm glad I saw this on Hulu, it's a gem to watch.

Thoughts on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

     At the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I saw Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a 2026 surrealist psychological thriller written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. The film stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a young queer filmmaker who is 29 years old, and after some critical acclaim with her debut indie film, a reimagining of Pyscho from the perspective of the shower curtain, she has been given the reins to direct a reboot of the 1980s-1990s slasher film franchise Camp Miasma, where the slasher killer, Little Death (Jack Haven) resurrects from the lake at a summer camp whenever young counselors are having sex to murder them with a spear. Because the films have been seen as transphobic through a modern sense, with the killer being a genderqueer trans figure that is presented as a "freak" through the film's lens, Kris knows that as a queer filmmaker, she was hired to smooth over the film's problematic past, make it more modern and "woke," and bring good PR to the studio for hiring a queer filmmaker for the job.

    As part of her research, she wants to cast the first film's star actress, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), Camp Miasma's "final girl" who immediately retired from acting after the first film. Kris travels to the Pacific Northwest and finds her living on the abandoned campgrounds that were used to film the first Camp Miasma. There, in all her Southern belle glory, Billy is warm and charming and open to Kris, who is nervous and excited and fanning out a little over Billy and the Camp Miasma series. As they get to know each other, with Billy wanting to know more about Kris beyond her filmmaker credits and job, Kris reveals how Camp Miasma was her queer awakening as a child, watching the film at too young an age, and connecting her sexual awakening with the thrill of watching people get stabbed while having sex or being chased by Little Death (which is a not-subtle reference to le petit mort, the French expression for orgasm). Billy and Kris watch Billy's print of Camp Miasma, and Kris is trying to watch the film through Billy's eyes, seeing the younger Billy (Amanda Fix) star in the film, playing a shy young virgin who is seduced by another counselor (Arthur Conti) in the film.

    The film is a really interesting mix of being satirical, like making fun of Kris being progressive in a performative kind of way, like when the characters in the film are about to tell the origin story of the killer and Kris whispers to Billy "This is the transphobic part," and Billy shushes her to shut up, or when Billy clearly doesn't get Kris' Psycho remake of analyzing the sexuality and gender politics of the film through the perspective of the shower curtain. 

    Kris has a nonbinary partner and is polyamorous, and her partner has a bisexual male partner, but Kris has never been able to relax with sex or feel sexually comfortable in her own body and let go, and her pleasure comes more from her love of candy, specifically gummy worms (there are a couple of fun sequences when Kris is in a town gas station and stocking up on different types of candies, filling her shopping cart with them). Billy decides to help Kris discover her own orgasm and sexual understanding, and how her sexuality relates to the slasher film, in ways that blend fantasy and reality in surrealistic sequences.

    I really liked this film, and how it explored the connections of sex and death with the slasher film genre, like the stabbing of a knife or spear as a penetrative reference, and the blood gushing out as metaphor for an orgasm, and how conflicting and weird it can feel for someone to have their sexual awakening come from an unusual source. Einbinder and Anderson have really sweet, fun chemistry together, and Anderson is just glorious to watch in this film, soaking up the kind of Blanche DuBois accent she did in a stage performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, and having mystery to her as Billy living alone as a recluse on the old campgrounds.

    Highlighted scenes: the close-ups of dipping sauces as Billy and Kris eat fried chicken, with exaggerated foley noises of the chicken being dipped into the sauce; the cover by Okay Kaya of R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming" that plays over the opening credits that pans through the history of the Camp Miasma films, with their reviews starting out positive, then middling, then reappraising the first film, then questioning its transphobia in blog articles; the fun side performances of Kevin McDonald and Patrick Fischler as gas station employees who had small parts in Camp Miasma as locals; the hilarious Zoom meeting that Kris has with the studio in pitching her ideas for the reboot of Camp Miasma, and the performances of Amanda Mix and Jack Haven in the Camp Miasma film, with small roles but bringing a lot of care and understanding to their parts that made it more engaging to watch beyond being slasher movie tropes.

    I haven't seen Schoenbrun's first film, We're All Going to the World's Fair, but I really liked their second film, I Saw the TV Glow, for both the 90s TV nostalgia as a fellow millennial, and for the trans allegories with Jack Haven's character; and I like how their film casts a lot of actors who are on the queer spectrum, like Einbinder, Anderson, Haven, Eva Victor, Jess McLeod, Jasmine Savoy Brown, Quintessa Swindell, and Louise Weard. I like how the movie is sexy and funny and weird and looks beautiful, and I'm glad that Schoenbrun has gotten a higher platform with each movie they make in terms of budget, casting, and music licensing, especially with a few needle drops of well-known songs throughout the film. I recommend this film if you're interested in watching something unusual and different.

Thoughts on Manhunter

    At the Philadelphia Film Society in Philadelphia, PA, I saw a 4K restoration of Manhunter, a 1986 crime thriller written and directed by Michael Mann, based on the 1981 novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. The film starred William Petersen as Will Graham, an FBI profiler who is hunting a serial killer named Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), otherwise known as the Tooth Fairy. The killer stalks families from a distance and mass murders them in their home, and Graham, having previously caught the serial killer and former psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Brian Cox) is taking on this job, trying to get inside of the mind of the killer to catch him, and it is triggering his mental health issues and psychosis. He also has to meet with Lecter, who is being held in a high-security prison, to get his insight on the killer's mind and face his demons, as Lecter tried to kill him years earlier.

    I really liked this film a lot. It's very moody with a synth score by Michel Rubini and The Reds, and as the film came out at the time Miami Vice was on, which Mann created, it echoes the same atmospheric style, like with Graham's Florida beach home and the musical montages with rock and pop songs, and big electric guitar solos heightening the drama.

    I liked that a lot of the film was focusing on the forensics of catching the killer, like analyzing a note written by the Tooth Fairy on toilet paper, seeing that it was broken up into two parts and analyzing the ink and paper under infrared light to figure it out, with Graham and his FBI superior Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina)'s body language ready to pounce and run to the next place to get the results, having a short window of time where the evidence is usable. It brought a lot of suspense to the scenes, while also adding it 1980s-era forensic science to the film that made it more fascinating in a nerdy way.

    The casting is excellent. When I initially saw some of this film, William Petersen's character made me feel anxious and uncomfortable, and I stopped watching, but this time around, I stuck with it, and the film's story about him recovering from a mental breakdown and trying to protect his sanity made a lot more sense on why he gets so agitated and tries to think like a killer to catch one. The scene in which he speaks with his son while grocery shopping about why he had mental health issues after Lecter attacked him was really well-acted, and it seemed rare to see a depiction of men talking about their mental problems at that time.

    Dennis Farina was a lot of fun to watch with his nasal Chicago accent and bringing in his background as a former police detective to the role (he had worked as a police consultant to Michael Mann for his film Thief and appeared in his projects). Stephen Lang was excellent as an annoying tabloid reporter who meets a tragic end, and Joan Allen was really convincing as a blind woman, and her scene where she strokes and pets a sedated large tiger was gorgeous to watch.

    Brian Cox was fantastic as Hannibal Lecter, who is only in a few scenes of the film, but is intelligent and funny and manipulative, and finds ways to antagonize Graham under guises of politeness. And Tom Noonan was chilling as the Tooth Fairy, a tall, lanky figure who cannot get emotionally close to anyone. The sequence of the film from his perspective, where Joan Allen's character seduces him and he doesn't know how to handle a woman being attracted to him was really interesting, and how he feels like he could be normal with a woman before inevitably reverting back to his serial killer ways.

    I'm glad I watched this film again and understood it much better, it's a really fantastic crime thriller of the 1980s, and started off the film and TV franchise of the Hannibal Lecter series that would go on for decades.

Thoughts on Postcards from the Edge

     On Hulu, I watched Postcards from the Edge, a 1990 comedy-drama directed by Mike Nichols and written by Carrie Fisher, based on her 1987 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. The film stars Meryl Streep as Suzanne Vale, a once-successful actress who survives a drug overdose and does a stint in rehab, and will only be covered by her next film's insurance company provided that she stay sober and live with her mother, Doris (Shirley MacLaine), an alcoholic actress who had her own fame as a cabaret star and still relishes attention.

    Suzanne starts out the film making a political thriller set in Central America, doing a long take that she messes up a few minutes into it, pissing off her director Lowell Kolchek (Gene Hackman), who sees her as a drug addict ruining his movie. The next morning, she is passed out in bed with Jack (Dennis Quaid), a film producer and random man she met the night before, and she has accidentally overdosed on pills, and he drops her off at the hospital. Her life is saved when the doctor (Richard Dreyfuss) pumps her stomach, and she wakes up in a rehab center, admitted by her mother, Doris. Her intake counselor (CCH Pounder) informs her that she is in detox, and Suzanne has no memory of what has happened, but insists she is not suicidal.

    Suzanne completes her time in rehab, making friends with fellow addict-in-recovery Aretha (a funny and wry Robin Bartlett) then her agent tells her that the studio will only insure her if she lives with a responsible person to keep her sober and accountable, and the only person who is available for her to live with is her mother. Suzanne is hesitant because her mother is a show-off who sucks up the attention in the room (when she visits her in rehab, another patient approaches her as an adoring fan and says he performed one of her songs in his drag act), as well as always feeling in her shadow. 

    The two live together while Suzanne works on the film, a lower-budget schlocky film in which she plays a cop, where the film is on a tight budget and doesn't have time for rehearsals, so she's thrown into scenes with little preparation, like a scene where she is tied to a prop cactus then told afterwards there will be live snakes in the scene. Suzanne and Doris butt heads, where Doris will make passive-aggressive comments at Suzanne's expense and pretend like she didn't mean any harm, and Suzanne will deal with things with humor and sarcasm, a touch from Carrie Fisher's writing and personality. 

    In one scene, Doris throws a surprise party for Suzanne to celebrate her completion of rehab, and Suzanne is pushed to sing in front of the partygoers by a live pianist. She chooses Ray Charles' "You Don't Know Me," initially with her back to the audience, and singing it with sadness and vulnerability, looking at her mother and wanting her love and recognition, only for Doris to be in performance mode, mouthing the lyrics and miming stage directions to Suzanne to remove her jean jacket when performing. Afterwards, Doris is pushed to sing, and pretends to act bashful before saying to the pianist, ""I'm Still Here" in D flat," a Sondheim number from Follies. Doris performs a number clearly well-rehearsed with gestures and inflections, flashing her legs for sex appeal, and completely overshadowing Suzanne at a party that was meant to be about her, with a look of disappointment on Suzanne's face.

    Suzanne struggles with the film, getting feedback that her performance is weak and without energy, and overhears the wardrobe department criticizing her body and calling her out of shape. She has a fling with Jack, only to learn later that he is a womanizer who uses the same lines on women ("You smell like Catalina" being one of them), with Suzanne learning about this from a fellow actress, played by Annette Bening during her rise to fame (she would also shine greatly in Stephen Frears' The Grifters the same year). Suzanne feels vulnerable and angry that she let herself be romanced by this man when she is still in recovery and trying to rebuild her career, and being under Doris' judgmental eye doesn't help her sense of self.

    The film focuses more on the mother-daughter drama, and Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine are really good in this, especially in scenes when they are arguing with each other and Suzanne is trying to really be seen by her mother. Doris doesn't want to be blamed for her daughter's drug addiction, but can't see how her alcoholism and putting her daughter on sleeping pills as a kid influenced her inclination towards addiction. The film has a great supporting role performance by Mary Wickes as Suzanne's grandmother and Doris' mother, who is very judgmental of her daughter, and easily showing to the audience how generational trauma between the women is passed down, with one criticizing the other and refusing responsibility for someone's self-medicating but harmful behavior.

    Gene Hackman is only in a few scenes, showing up much later when Suzanne has to do ADR looping to improve her performance in her previous film, and with sobriety she is able to see how terrible her past performance was, even as her director still tells her she has talent. Suzanne cries after she redoes a line, and explains it as "Nothing you say to me is as horrible as what I say to myself... and at least it's happening outside my head where I can deal with it easier." She talks about how she knows she has a great life as a famous actress, but that it's hard for her to feel good in her head, to have good mental health to match her outside life. And her director talks to her about how her epiphany and realization doesn't mean that her life will immediately change for the better, and that life isn't like the movies, there will be a delayed reaction in just continuing to live life as a sober person and work on getting better, and his words resonated with me, the feeling like life is a continued work in progress on being better even when you've messed up or had setbacks.

    Carrie Fisher was a smart and funny person who used her celebrity and privileged status to destigmatize mental illness, being frank about her bipolar disorder and substance abuse, and using her talent to become a successful writer of several novels and memoirs, as well as a script doctor on films like Sister Act, The Wedding Singer, and Anastasia. Watching this film, as well as rewatching the YouTuber Be Kind Rewind's video on Fisher and this film, made me miss her more as a personality. 

Thoughts on The Invite

     At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw The Invite, a 2026 dramedy directed by Olivia Wilde and co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones. It is an English-language remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs (Sentimental), and stars Wilde and Seth Rogen as Angela and Joe, a couple living in San Francisco whose marriage is on the rocks, and Angela invites over a neighbor couple, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for dinner and drinks.

    Joe is a jazz band teacher at a local conservatory, and used to be in a 2000s pop-punk band that had one hit song before flaming out, and he's felt bitter about not being more successful and working at a low-rate music school, as well as living in the large apartment that he grew up in because he can't afford to move out. Angela is a stay-at-home mother to their twelve-year-old daughter Maggie (who is away at a friend's house the entire night), and she is nervous and anxious and wants to impress the glamourous couple with her decorating taste and make friends with them. Joe can't stand them because he doesn't like it when Hawk tries to make small talk with him in the elevator, and that during the night, Joe and Angela frequently hear loud sex coming from Hawk and Piña's apartment right above their home. Joe wants to confront them about it, while Angela is adamant that he not bring it up as not to cause a fight.

    Joe and Angela have a lot of tension between them, which is obvious to Hawk and Piña when they arrive, saying they could hear them arguing from outside the door. Hawk is a retired firefighter, while Piña is a psychotherapist. There are a lot of awkward mistakes, like Joe forgetting to buy wine and Angela scrambling to use a spare bottle of wine saved for an anniversary, and Angela trying to impress the Spanish Piña with serving her jamon, only for Piña to say that she is vegan, gluten-free, and sugar-free. Joe is often sarcastic and antagonizes the couple, only for Hawk to appreciate his honesty and push for him to be more blunt and open with them.

    The night unfolds more as the couples share secrets and insecurities and their pasts, and the movie gets really funny and messy and loud, and it's really enjoyable to watch. Olivia Wilde was really hilarious with physical comedy as Angela, doing a lot of "looks" to Joe when she's annoyed with him, or making a "see, I was right" face when the other couple agrees with her on something. Edward Norton gets a really touching monologue scene in the last third when he talks about his past relationship with his wife before he met Piña, and Penélope Cruz was really funny in often cutting through people's bullshit, like being annoyed when Hawk tries to correct her English in front of company and telling him he doesn't speak Spanish well and she lets it slide. Seth Rogen was good, though I didn't really believe him and Olivia Wilde in portraying a long-term couple, feeling like she would have broken up with him long before and not just staying together for their daughter.

    The first ten minutes of the movie had a loud score by Devonté Hynes of screeching cello music to emphasize the tension between Joe and Angela as she prepares for the neighbors visiting, and I thought the score was overkill and practically drowning out the actors, it didn't feel necessary, though the music calmed down after that.

    I liked that the film felt like a contemporary version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with the visiting couple being older and with past marriages instead of being young newlyweds, who are able to see the anger and resentment in Joe and Angela's marriage and give them words of wisdom from life experience. The film was mature and funny, and not just frank about sex, but about love and relationships and complications with life changes and growing together or growing apart. I think that Olivia Wilde, given her hit with directing Booksmart and her flop with directing Don't Worry, Darling, excels much more with comedy than she does with melodrama, and this film played more to her talents as an actor and director.

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.

Thoughts on Obsession

   At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw Obsession, a 2025 supernatural psychological horror film written and directed by Curry Barker. The film stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a young man in his early twenties who works at a music store with his friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Sarah (Megan Lawless), and Nikki (Inde Navarette). Bear has a crush on Nikki, but is too nervous to confess his feelings to her, and Ian wants him to just get it over with and ask her, but not during their weekly bar trivia night, as to not spoil the fun. Bear comes home to find that his cat Sandy has died after accidentally consuming Bear's oxycodone pills. The next day, he shops for a gift for Nikki because she lost her crystal necklace, and he goes to a crystal shop, but instead of getting a crystal, he finds a novelty toy called "One Wish Willow," where the user can make one wish and break a plastic log in half. 

    Later that night, after bar trivia, Bear drives Nikki home, who is asking him if he likes Sarah, hinting that Sarah likes him. Bear completely whiffs the chance to confess his feelings, denying it when Nikki directly asks if he likes her, and as she is at the front door of his house, Bear in his car goes, "I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone else in the world," and snaps the willow log. Suddenly, Nikki stops before going into the house, then runs back to Bear in his car, and her behavior is erratic, switching between wanting him to come inside and then screaming, and then brushing off her own behavior as "weird." Bear is confused by Nikki's behavior, but comes in, and she keeps switching between trying to seduce him and having screaming fits. Bear doesn't understand any of this, and despite his own hesitations, he is flattered when Nikki is attracted to him, and against his better judgment, takes advantage of the situation, and they become a couple, with Nikki being overly possessive and jealous, manipulating him with her mood swings.

    This movie could be taken in different ways, how it is about an unhealthy, codependent relationship, where the monster that has taken over Nikki (it is implied that the real Nikki's consciousness is trapped in some kind of hell while the "loving girlfriend" persona takes over, with large, forced smiles that she holds for an uncomfortable amount of time) is the abuser, taking advantage of Bear's attraction to her by keeping him close to her and acting out in random violence of hurting herself or others. But that it can be seen as Bear having unwittingly taken away Nikki's free will, and rather than finding a way earlier to undo the spell or fix things, he lets it go on because he is happy that his crush is so into him and his fantasy has become a reality. Nikki may be the violent one causing mayhem, but Bear is the one who started this by being unable to face rejection or get out of his arrested development of acting like a teenager when he is past 21 years old.

    The movie is very effective with silhouettes and shadows, often hiding Nikki's face, or the brief times when the real Nikki will get control of her body to speak her own words or ask for help before the monster shuts her down again. 

    The two leads are fantastic in the film. Michael Johnston takes a character that can be sympathetic at first as a lovelorn loser who is pining after his crush, unaware that his other female friend is into him, and seems emotionally stunted and needs to grow up more. But then he becomes more selfish in taking advantage of the situation, and though his idle wish doesn't deserve such punishment, when the real Nikki reaches out to him for help, he still can only think of his own desires and not her feelings.

    Inde Navarette is in a star-making turn with this performance. Director Curry Barker had her study performances from Betty Gabriel in Get Out, Toni Collette in Hereditary, and Mia Goth in Pearl to develop the character of Nikki, and there are elements from those roles, like Betty Gabriel's performance as a woman whose body is possessed and whose soul is in the Sunken Place, only able to briefly reach out with her real life briefly, and Mia Goth's performance as a manic woman who tries to act "normal" but, in the finale, greets her horrified husband with an unsettling wide smile throughout the ending credits. Navarette switches between voices and personas quickly; saying "no" several times in one scene with different rising intonations; and her physical performance is raw and emotionally taxing. The film helps with showing Nikki before the transformation, as a regular person, making it more tragic when her body and mind is stolen by this demon because of Bear's unrequited crush.

    The movie is also darkly funny. It's meant to be grim, but there are several moments that are funny, like Nikki's intense frowny face; the reaction from a crystal shop employee saying that people come back to complain about the wishes they got and Bear not understanding the risk he's taking; the response from the One Wish Willow customer service representative that Bear calls to try to cancel the wish; and another attempt to fix the wish that goes horribly wrong. 

    I really liked this movie. I kept forgetting the characters were young adults because they acted like teenagers, and it did speak a lot to their own immaturity and limited life experiences when trying to handle adult situations. I'm glad this movie ended up becoming a sleeper hit, it's well-deserved.

Thoughts on Modern Girls

     On Tubi, I watched Modern Girls, a 1986 comedy film directed by Jerry Kramer, and co-written by Laurie Craig and Anita Rosenberg. The film stars Daphne Zuniga, Cynthia Gibb, and Virginia Madsen as three young women in their early twenties, living together as roommates in L.A. and working menial jobs. Margo (Zuniga) works in telemarketing, a boring job where the manager repeats "keep dialing"; Cece (Gibb) gets fired from her makeup job in a department store, and Kelly (Madsen) does very well working in a pet store and selling pets and pet supplies, mainly due to her looks. 

    They all work crappy jobs, but the highlight of their life is going out to clubs at night, where, due to their "pretty privilege," they can work connections to skip lines and get into clubs for free, and never have to pay for their own drinks, always flirting with guys to get drinks out of them.

    When Kelly takes Margo's car to see a DJ ex she's re-connected with, Margo and Cece are left stuck at home, until Kelly's blind date Clifford (Clayton Rohner) shows up. The girls are hesitant to tell him that Kelly went out with another guy, but take advantage of him to get him to drive them out to the club to "find Kelly," seeing him more as a dork and not their usual type. 

    At the club, Clifford quickly finds out that Kelly ditched him for the DJ, and only sticks around in the club because he's the other girls' ride home. Margo and Cece do their act to get free drinks, and dance around, while feeling bad about how they treated Clifford and including him more as part of their group, getting him a free drink too.

    The story goes into a "one crazy night" plot, as the girls and Clifford chase Kelly around various clubs/bars in L.A. as she deals with rejection by the DJ by getting intoxicated, taking drugs, rolling around on a billiard table (in a fun display of physical comedic acting by Madsen), and twice having to be rescued from near-rape by her friends due to her carelessness and using her looks to charm random men.

    Cece is enamored with a rock star, Bruno X (also played by Rohner), who she meets in a club and instantly falls for her, but says he's leaving for Rio in the morning, then they get separated and Cece is searching for him all over. In one scene that makes sense with the same actor in both roles, the group show up at an outdoor video shoot to look for Bruno, only for the director to see that Clifford resembles him and uses him as a body double in a scene with four women dressed in black leather dancing around him, and Clifford has to improvise and just go with it.

    I really enjoyed this movie. It's very much set in a 1980s club culture with outlandish outfits, a killer pop/dance soundtrack, very bright with neon colors in nighttime scenes, and an apartment with a fantastic pop art look (including the movie poster with a comic, Roy Lichtenstein look to it).

    I really liked how this film largely centered around the women, and even if they start out taking advantage of men to get free things and coast on their looks, they're not dumb bimbo stereotypes. They all work crappy day jobs, and this is their release to party at night and have fun. And even if they are chasing men through various clubs, they still value their friendships above any dates or boyfriends, and are always looking out for each other. 

    I liked that Clifford starts out being rightfully annoyed at being taken advantage of, but he's not a jerk. He never leaves the women to be stranded anywhere, he helps rescue Kelly from sexual assault, and he has fun being mistaken for Bruno X and being in the video for a second, switching from his more conservative appearance to having his hair mussed up and wearing a long black duster coat that looks great on him.

    Virginia Madsen had this Marilyn Monroe-like pink dress on with a silk scarf around her neck that looked really pretty, and did make her stand out as the most "classically" pretty of the women, though Cynthia Gibb was really cute and Daphne Zuniga had a rugged sexiness to her. They're all a lot of fun to watch in this movie, especially early on in their careers.

Thoughts on The Final Girls

On Tubi, I watched The Final Girls, a 2015 horror comedy directed by Thomas Strauss-Schulson and co-written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller. The movie stars Taissa Farmiga as Max, a teen girl whose mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) is an actress that is best known for her "scream queen" role in a 1986 slasher film called Camp Bloodbath. In the present day of the 2010s, she only has a handful of screen credits, is broke, and is still typecast from her horror role and unable to be cast in other projects. On the way home from a film audition, the two get into a car accident and Amanda is killed.

    Three years later, Max, an orphan living with her aunt, is hanging out with her friends Gertie (Alia Shawkat) and Chris (Alexander Ludwig), when Gertie's stepbrother Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), a horror film nerd, shows up and tells them that Camp Bloodbath 1 and 2 are showing at the local theater, and wants Max to make an appearance there to talk about her mother at a Q&A afterwards. Max is hesitant, not wanting to watch her mother die on screen or talk about a movie that her mother was sick of being associated with. But they go to the theater, where Chris' ex-girlfriend and Max' former best friend Vicki (Nina Dobrev) shows up, trying to woo Chris back. During the movie, the theater is accidentally set ablaze by a stray cigarette and a rolling bottle of liquor on the floor, and the group of friends can only escape through cutting a hole in the movie screen, trying to find an exit, but end up in the movie itself.

    The group are in the woods, and a van comes by with two of the Camp Bloodbath characters, Tina (Angela Timbur), a ditzy "slut" archetype, and Kurt (Adam Devine), a jockbro stereotype frequently making sexual comments about women. The group initially turn down the ride to the summer camp, but a title card reads "92 minutes later" (the runtime of both the fictional movie and this real movie), the van comes back again with Tina and Kurt, saying their same lines, NPC-style, and again 92 minutes later. The group realizes they will be in a time loop if they don't get in the van and continue the plot, so they pretend to be new camp counselors and go to the camp, where Max meets Nancy (Akerman), and while she knows it's not really her mother, she wants to save Nancy from dying in the movie, transferring her feelings about wanting to save her real mother from death. 

    The group initially lets two murders happen without interference, but when their interference causes characters to die out of order, or realizing that not being movie characters doesn't make them immune, more calamity happens, as the group realizes they are not going to survive just following the original movie's plot, and have to be more creative, as well as interacting with the movie characters who don't know that they aren't real people.

    I really enjoyed this movie a lot. I liked the gags like when Nancy is telling the origin story of the slasher killer, and gray matter starts dripping from the roof and wraps up the group and transports them to the black-and-white 1950s flashback of the killer's story as Nancy is narrating, having to step over large subtitles reading "Summer 1957" in block letters. Or when Kurt gets called out by Chris for his homophobia, hearing Chris has two gay dads, and mockingly goes, "Oh, do they go to discos and have sex with each other?" before dropping the derisive tone and adding, "Actually, that does sound kind of cool." Devine is really good in this movie, in playing the 80s horny guy stereotype who constantly objectifies women with crass language and obviously mocking him.

    The heart of the film is with Max and Nancy/Amanda, and Taissa Farmiga and Malin Akerman are excellent in this film. Max is still just a kid, and even if Farmiga was about 20 when she was in the film, she brings a lot of young vulnerability to this role, as a girl who lost her mother too soon, and is trying to save a version of her to bring her back. And Akerman is so warm and kind as Nancy, who initially starts in the fictional film as "I'm just a shy girl who's a virgin and wants to have sex with this cool guy" before getting killed, and as Nancy is further developed as a person, she talks about wanting to go to college and do more with her life and not be so shy. Even if Max can't let on to Nancy that she sees her as her mother, Nancy does take more of a big sister/mothering role to Max, caring about her, and the finale with them and the use of "Bette Davis Eyes," the song playing in the car before the accident, is incredibly moving and stunning, with a synth score and gorgeous colors.

    The film was co-written by Joshua John Miller, a former child actor who was in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Near Dark, River's Edge, and Teen Witch. His father, Jason Miller, played the priest in The Exorcist, and Miller said the film was partially inspired by that experience, saying ""I grew up watching my dad in The Exorcist, and there's something haunting, strange, confusing, and a little bit unnatural to see your parent constantly die in a film. But it's something that also becomes iconic, and we tried to deconstruct what the effects of that would be, as well as what it would be like if you had a second chance, but your second chance was inside of a movie?" It works really well in the film, as Max is struggling with her grief and seeing a version of her mother and wanting to save her, even when knowing that Nancy isn't real.

    I had heard that this film was really good, and I'm glad I caught it on Tubi, I found it much more moving, as well as funnier, than I expected.