Thoughts on Miss Juneteenth

I really enjoyed watching Miss Juneteenth, a 2020 indie film directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples, about a single mom (Nicole Beharie) raising her teen daughter in Texas and preparing her for a Miss Juneteenth pageant, which the mom won as a teen, so her daughter can get a scholarship to a good school. She also doesn’t want her daughter to fall into the same life she’s had as being a mother too young and getting caught in a poverty cycle or raising a kid alone, so she’s pushing for her to succeed to have better opportunities than she had, particularly to attend an HBCU like Spelman.

I really loved seeing Beharie shine in another great leading role after all of the mess with Sleepy Hollow, and how her character Turquoise was proud of her past glory but also of her current life in working at a bar and making ends meet with applying makeup to bodies at a funeral home. She played the role with a lot of heart and dimension and authenticity, and felt like a real person, she was fantastic in this film.

She had a great rapport with Alexis Chikaeze as her daughter Kai, who isn’t into the whole pageant thing and just wants to audition for the dance team and hang with her boyfriend. They really felt like mother and daughter, with a lot of warmth and closeness, as well as the mom knowing when to set her daughter straight, especially when it came time to focus on her academic studies and using the pageant to win a scholarship. Chikaneze had a sweetness to her, feeling like a kid who is testing the waters of acting grown while still being very innocent, and ends up finding a nice middle ground between being her sweet kid self and acting more like a mature young woman, especially when seeing her mother as a complex person with history and not just her mom.

I liked how warm and lived-in the film felt, based on the director’s own upbringing in a predominantly Black part of Fort Worth, Texas. The community was depicted as tight and small, albeit people knowing about each other’s business too much, but it felt genuine, and it had a side plot about the bar owner not wanting to give his place up for gentrification or white supremacy, and holding onto his place to pass on to his people, which ends up with a nice resolution.

Overall, this was a really good film, that got accolades at Sundance earlier this year, and I’m happy I checked it out.

Thoughts on To the Ends of the Earth

On Metrograph’s virtual cinema page, I really enjoyed watching the 2019 Japanese film To the Ends of the Earth, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse, Tokyo Sonata). It was a really engrossing comedy-drama in which J-pop star Atsuko Maeda plays the host of a travel reality show, shooting an episode in Uzbekistan with a small crew of all men. She has this bubbly personality when hosting, but off-camera, is a lot more withdrawn and introverted. She feels totally out of her element in the country, as well as dealing with everyday sexism from locals, like a fisherman who thinks her presence brings bad luck in catching fish, or an amusement park manager who thinks she’s a child when she goes on a ridiculous ride three times in a row for the show.

I really liked how the movie depicted scenes of her isolation and vulnerability with exploring alone in the country, like feeling nervous at night as a solo woman or racing out of a bazaar when being hassled by merchants, especially when she cannot speak the language and struggles to understand and communicate with locals. And when she would be shooting scenes for the show, one could feel her guilt whenever shoots were unsuccessful for reasons out of her control, but feeling some silent blame pointed her way by men.

I wasn’t as into her musical moments, when she bursts into singing an old Edith Piaf standard in a fantasy sequence, because it felt inserted in and obligatory because Maeda is a famous pop star, and the character truly wanted to be a singer as a hidden desire. It just didn’t really fit as much for me, as these moments were the rare times that she sang, and it felt totally out of left field if I didn’t already read in the plot summary that the actress is a known singer. I got that it was part of her journey of self-discovery, but it still felt a little sudden when it happened.

It was a really rich and interesting film to watch, and I’m happy I checked it out.

Thoughts on The Sunlit Night

I really liked The Sunlit Night, a 2019 indie film directed by David Wnendt and starring Jenny Slate that I watched on Hulu. She plays a struggling artist dealing with a breakup and family drama and takes an apprenticeship far up in Norway with an curmudgeonly older artist to paint a barn, during the late summer season where it’s 24-hour daylight. I liked how quiet and contemplative the film was, and how a lot of it was of her finding peace with herself, slowly bonding with the artist, painting a portrait of a grocery store worker, hanging out by the ocean in sweaters, and having a brief thing with a boyishly dorky-looking guy there to bury his father and reminding me of Harold in Harold and Maude. Jenny Slate has a natural and warm relatability to her, a unique beauty, and a sweet oddball voice. This was just a really lovely little film to watch tonight.

Thoughts on Twenty Bucks

Last month I watched on Tubi a 1993 movie called Twenty Bucks, directed by Keva Rosenfeld, about a $20 bill that passes through various people and their stories. The movie was pretty good, a mix of Hollywood stars (Brendan Fraser, Elisabeth Shue) and indie stars on the rise (Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy). My favorite part was a story with Christopher Lloyd and Buscemi as two thieves who spend a night robbing liquor stores together. Lloyd is like the seasoned career criminal, Buscemi is the dirtbag loser. Lloyd was one of the best actors of the movie, and it was nice seeing him play a serious part and not being hammy. Melora Walters was also one of my favorites as a bachelor party stripper whose day job is working at a mortuary, I found her character varied and interesting. Fraser was the weaker part, he just seemed lost and too clean and boring for an offbeat movie like this.

Thoughts on Sidewalks of New York

Last month, I rewatched Sidewalks of New York, a 2001 romantic comedy directed by Edward Burns. I’m almost watching this in a historical context, because it is representative of the kind of late 1990s indie romantic comedies that are just full of talking and neurotic characters. It’s definitely a thing from Woody Allen movies, which carried over into the indie film boom of the 90s, and is around today in the form of indie movies about millennial hip gentrifiers obsessed with their romantic lives.

The film also takes a bit of the mockumentary style, with talking head interview clips with the characters, and it’s never established who the “documentary filmmakers” are, they just show them at random on NYC street corners talking about sex and love and relationships. The film quality is also slightly grainy and always has a bit of a shaky handheld feel to it. It comes off like HBO’s Real Sex when they would have interview segments asking random couples on the street about sex, or the first season of Sex & the City, which resembled more of a 90’s indie film with rough edges before it got more fashionable and polished.

It feels dated in part of the constant walk and talk, how characters date by just asking out random strangers they meet by chance in video stores or cafes, and how the Twin Towers are framed prominently next to Edward Burns’ head in his character’s interview scene.

It has a good cast (Burns, Heather Graham, Brittany Murphy, Stanley Tucci, Rosario Dawson, David Krumholtz) with interconnected stories tying current and former couples with each other, and a lot of talk about infidelity and messy romantic histories and the like. They flow well with each other and make the connections feel believable, like they would cross paths with each other in Manhattan.

Watching this also reminds me of seeing this around age 18 in my hometown art house movie theatre, being an inexperienced kid watching a movie about neurotic NYC adults and their confusing romantic lives. Luckily, this kind of interconnected drama has never figured in my life.

Thoughts on The Happiest Season

I was mixed on The Happiest Season, directed by Clea DuVall. It had a good cast, and I thought Kristen Stewart as Abby was decent and had really good chemistry with Daniel Levy as her best friend and Aubrey Plaza as an ex of Mackenzie Davis’ Harper.

But I wasn’t into the slapstick comedy, and was annoyed by just how Harper blindsides Abby, her girlfriend of a year, by only telling her that she’s not out to her family when they’re in the car on the way to her family’s home for Christmas. I got that Harper should come out on her own time, and why she was nervous to come out to her conservative parents. And nobody should force her to come out or be outed against her wishes.

But I still hated how she brings this up to Abby on really short notice, and lets the family walk all over her and talk down to her, thinking she’s just her platonic straight roommate, and how crappy it was. Abby is stuck there for a week, and it made Harper come off as insensitive to her. That did make it frustrating, especially since the characters are not young kids, but are likely around thirty, and should be more adult in their relationships.

So I thought the movie was OK, like around a B, but was annoyed with Harper being so immature with Abby and their relationship.

Thoughts on Zappa

I really liked Zappa, Alex Winter’s new documentary on Frank Zappa. I only casually knew some things about him, and just knew a couple of songs by him, so this was a really thorough and interesting film tracing his life as an offbeat musician leader who felt like a mix of contrasts, like an eccentric weirdo onstage who was firmly against drugs, hated hippie culture, and led a tight and focused band of veteran sidemen.

Of course, one of the things that bugged me was that he openly cheated on his wife with groupies, who was aware of it and not happy but had to put up with it. He uses being a touring rock star as an excuse, but it felt more like a side effect of the 1960s “free love” culture being more beneficial to men than women.

I really loved the part about a stop motion animator who created early music videos for Zappa and is incredibly talented in matching Zappa’s experimental music with odd claymation figures, that looked like a fantastic mix of artist collaboration. It started out after Zappa was attacked onstage and was injured, and the videos replaced the live performances for awhile and just stuck around as part of his image.

Towards the end, I loved seeing the evolution of his conducting skills, how he went from being the leader of his 1960s jazz rock fusion band at the height of the tune in, drop out era to his last concerts leading orchestras in a mix of jazz, classical, and experimental music in formal circles. It showed a lot of his range and ability to grow as an artist and with life changes and all. I appreciated this film, and seeing the tons of archival footage that Winter’s team organized for the film.