Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews

Great review and I'm glad you liked the movie - the teens experimenting with drugs analogy is one of the first places my mind went, but like you said, it really grasped how a teenager's risk-aversion meter is usually worryingly skewed the wrong way during that period of our/their lives.

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Thanks--your original review is what put it on my radar and I saw it at the theater shortly thereafter.

One thing I loved were the repeated sequences where we saw the teens having fun with the hand. It helps you see how they built this false sense of security that they were in control, knew the "rules" (that 90 second rule feels like one dose movie nonsense and one dose "the kind of thing people make up as a rule but which is actually arbitrary" see also the five-second rule for dropped food), and that things don't go wrong if you do things the right way.

Mare of Easttown (8 Episode Mini-Series), 2021

Mare (Kate Winslet) is a police detective in a small town in Pennsylvania. Mare is dealing with a full plate of personal and professional issues. Her former basketball teammate’s daughter has been missing for a year and Mare has hit a dead end in the case. She and her family have been raising her grandchild following the death of Mare’s son, but the boy’s mother has sobered up and wants custody. Her ex-husband announces that he is getting remarried. When a young woman is murdered, Mare must try to sort through the case while keeping her family’s dramas in check.

Strong performances and a twisty-turny mystery help this series rise above some credibility-stretching plot elements.

You can put Kate Winslet in frumpy clothing, make her character a grandmother, and show her drawing on a vape pen like her life depends on it, and none of those things is going to make her seem like some average woman. However, what does the job in this series is the performance that Winslet gives, which is of a woman who is trapped in the unresolved trauma of her son’s death and growing increasingly desperate about her future. It’s a heartfelt performance, and so when the plot goes into more outlandish territory, we can always go back to the exhausted determination that Mare shows.

And boy does the show put Mare through the wringer! At the moment the series begins, Mare’s former friend and teammate, Dawn (Enid Graham) is trying to revive interest in her daughter, Katie’s, disappearance. While she and Mare’s best friend, Lor (Julianne Nicholson), try to convince Mare that the publicity isn’t really about Mare, Mare takes it as a criticism of the effort she put into finding Katie. Mare’s grandson’s mother, Carrie (Sosie Bacon), is gearing up to fight for custody of young Drew (Izzy King). As the series goes on, we come to understand the incredibly damaging relationship that Mare had with Carrie before her son’s death. Mare’s anger at outside forces--Carrie’s influence, her son’s addictions and mental illness--twist and merge with her own guilt about not stopping her son from taking his own life.

There are a lot of subplots in the series, and most of them are pretty decent. Following the death of the young woman, Erin (Cailee Spaeny), her less-than-likable ex-boyfriend, Dylan (Jack Mulhern) must assume responsibility for their child---though most of that responsibility is laid at the feet of Dylan’s indulgent parents. Hanging over this subplot is the strong possibility that Dylan was involved in Erin’s death. Probably the most compelling and realistic subplot centers on Mare’s friend, Beth (Chinasa Ogbuagu). Beth is the default caretaker for her drug-addicted brother, Freddie (Dominique Johnson). Beth must endure the humiliation, physical assaults, uncertainty, and fear that comes with trying to take care of someone who is not in control of their own mind.

So on the drama front, this is pretty much aces. The mystery is a bit more mixed, both in terms of the ultimate solution and how it is presented to the viewer. I watch (and read) a lot of mysteries, and I’m pretty attuned to the tricks of the trade in terms of how solutions and guilt are foreshadowed and/or obscured. By the third episode of this series I was well aware that a certain character was most likely the murderer OR would turn out to be the person who had information that would lead directly to the killer. I half hoped that I was wrong, but my guess was correct. Once you notice that a certain character keeps popping up in scenes where they aren’t necessary, being addressed by name too often (so that at the end no one’s asking “Wait, who is Stephanie?!”), and even getting inexplicable close-ups, you can’t stop seeing it. I wish that the series had been a little more subtle and trusted the audience a bit more.

This series also suffers from “it’s getting personal” syndrome, and bad. BAD. This is when a detective is working on a case and somehow they end up having an absurd number of personal connections to people involved in it. Is some of this excused by the mystery being set in a small town? Okay, sure. But if I were to list the number of ways that Mare’s friends and family were directly or indirectly involved in Erin’s murder, I think you’d agree it was bordering on the ridiculous.

I was also pretty tepid on a subplot about a younger detective, Zabel (Evan Peters) who is brought in to assist on the case. At first, Mare is understandably hostile. But the two soon form a partnership that begins to verge on romance. Nothing against Peters. And I’ve read several reviews that drool over the combination of Winslet and Peters. Are they aesthetically pleasing? Yes. Do they have good chemistry? Also yes. But there’s something unresolved and unsatisfying about the character, who largely seems to exist as a catalyst for Mare and later as a way to keep her in the loop when she’s forced to take some distance from the investigation. Zabel isn’t really fully formed, and this kind of dings the enjoyment of his character in a series where almost everyone else is pretty nuanced.

I also can’t shake the feeling that the series just plain dropped a plot thread or two. There’s a scene where a character very dramatically and violently threatens another character, implying that there’s something the former is hiding. And then . . . it’s just never mentioned again?

My only other complaint was the framing of the way that Mare is treated. I honestly can’t tell if it’s meant to be a commentary on the way that women are held much more accountable than men for how their children turn out or what. From the way that everyone talks, you’d think that Mare single-handedly failed to handle her son, Kevin (Cody Kostro). But, um, Mare had a husband at the time, Frank (David Denman), who never gets a single word said against him for what happened to Kevin. Like, was Frank an active father or not? Without exaggeration, everyone in this small town LOVES Frank. So if Frank is such a great guy, what role did he play in the lives of his children? Why doesn’t he get a single word of criticism? Mare’s guilt is something that makes sense in an internal way---she clearly is the kind of person who carries the weight of the world--but it just seems weird that everyone else falls in line with this way of thinking.

This was a fun series to watch. It’s disturbing without being overly graphic or exploitative. There were several scenes that could easy have veered into leering sexual violence, and I was very grateful that the creators didn’t go that route. There’s a lot of cruelty on display, especially in the way that teenage girls are treated, but there’s also compassion that keeps it from feeling too bleak.

A solid miniseries. Just wish that the mystery hadn’t been so easy to crack.

Nanny, 2022

Aisha (Anna Diop) is an immigrant from Senegal who gets a job as a nanny for a wealthy Upper East Side couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), caring for their young daughter Rose (Rose Decker). Aisha is hoping to raise money quickly to bring her son, Lamine (Jahleel Kamara), to the United States. While things seem good on the surface---Aisha has great rapport with Rose, and she begins to tentatively pursue a romance with the building’s doorman, Malik (Sinqua Walls)--Aisha soon becomes aware of a dark presence following her, and does not know how to read the strange signs she sees around her.

A fantastic melding of a story about the anxieties around immigration and supernatural horror, this is an emotionally powerful film across both the real and paranormal

Let’s begin with the fact that, for me, absolutely everything about this movie worked and worked well. It is rare for me to not know where a movie is heading, and this one contained so many wonderful surprises and subversions of horror tropes.

The performances are very strong, all of it firmly grounded on Diop’s shoulders as Aisha. There is a cinematic ancestor that hangs over this film, 1966’s Black Girl, also a story of a Senegalese immigrant who comes to a new country seeking a better life only to be disillusioned and mistreated. In Aisha we see some of that same despair, only Aisha’s character is a different woman. Motivated by the need to bring her son to live with her, Aisha has a streak of determination that buffers her up in the face of difficulty. Aisha, in short, knows when to advocate for herself, and it’s very interesting (and tense) watching Aisha try to stand up to her employers despite the huge imbalance of power between them.

Monaghan is very strong--and deeply unlikable--as Amy, a woman who has her daughter’s day mapped out to the minute and yet somehow manages to “forget” to pay Aisha what she is owed. Amy goes through the motions of caring for her daughter, and yet doesn’t see that her methods aren’t helping foster a healthy child. An interesting recurring theme in the film is everyone remarking that Rose is actually eating. And the flip side to Amy is Spector’s Adam, the “fun” parent who also conveniently doesn’t do any of the actual child-rearing and has a job that it could be argued exploits the suffering of the less privileged. Because of the horror trappings of this film, there’s the constant question about just what Amy and Adam are up to. And a bit of dark humor interwoven in the film is just how their behavior could be read as evil or merely as self-centered rich people.

On the less antagonistic side of things, Walls is incredibly charming as Malik, and he has good chemistry with Diop that grounds their growing romance. Leslie Uggams plays Kathleen, Malik’s grandmother, and while she’s clearly mainly in the story to deliver key exposition about the mythologies behind the strange events, she has a charismatic and charming presence. She delivers one heck of a monologue about her experiences with the strange creatures and how that intersected with her daughter’s mental illness. Decker also manages to escape most of the awkwardness that comes with child performances. Her Rose is neither a spoiled obnoxious brat, not an unbelievably compliant angel. She feels a lot like a real kid, and more importantly she feels like someone who is blossoming under the right kind of attention from a parent figure.

The relationship between Rose and Aisha provides much of the suspense of the film. Rose is very likable, but she is also prone to behavior and remarks that are spooky. She claims to see and have conversations with Anansi the spider. She often has ominous explanations for the strange visions that Aisha sees. Rose is obviously a key figure in what is happening to Aisha, but the question of how and why lingers in a nicely suspenseful way. At the same time, there is something fundamentally moving about the bond that develops between the two characters. It creates an investment in both of them and a horrible suspense about what might happen to either.

The anxieties around immigration are fertile ground for horror, and I loved the way that the film meshed real threats to immigrants---especially illegal immigrants--and the supernatural elements. Aisha is required to document her time, meticulously keep receipts, and follow a strict time-table. And yet when she asks for the money she is owed, she gets the run-around. When she pushes a bit harder, Adam agrees to “advance” her the money. She clarifies that it’s not an advance. Later, Adam takes advantage of a moment of vulnerability to kiss Aisha against her will. When she fights back he offers a half-hearted apology before telling her not to tell Amy and then making an ominous remark about “following the rules”. The idea of motherhood gets very wrapped up in everything, not only in Aisha’s relationship to Rose, but also the widespread phenomenon of children being largely raised by women who are immigrants. In one scene that feels like abundant layers of foreshadowing, Aisha talks to other nannies at a public park. As Aisha’s attention is drawn away from the conversation by a strange vision, the fading voice of another nanny talks about a young woman from the Dominican Republic who stabbed her young charge to death.

Finally, I loved the way that the film utilized the characters of Anansi and the mermaid creature. There is a cool nuance here, where creatures are spirits are not some binary of good or bad. They are forces of nature, and they operate outside of the rules of human morality. There is one element of the film that I felt was rather easy to guess in terms of what is happening, but that’s not really the key to it all. The key is how the strange visions and events are meant to intersect with Aisha when she finally approaches a breaking point. By inserting ambiguity about the motives and significance of the creatures, the film keeps you (or certainly kept me!) guessing up until the last minute of the movie.

This is a really heartfelt film that takes a well-worn premise and injects it with a fresh perspective.

Corpus Christi, 2019

Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia) is a young man serving time in prison for a second-degree murder. While incarcerated he finds religion and develops a close relationship with the priest at the detention center, but his dream of becoming a priest himself can never happen because of his criminal record. When Daniel is sent to be a worker in a sawmill in a small town, he is mistaken on arrival for a priest. The village’s vicar must take a leave of absence due to illness, and asks if Daniel will assume the duties at the church. Daniel agrees, but the deception soon grows to a large and intense scale when he becomes enmeshed in a local drama. The people of the village are grappling with a horrific accident in which a local man and a car full of young people had a deadly collision. Daniel’s own ideas about forgiveness and redemption come up against the culture of the village.

This is a compelling, emotional roller-coaster that masterfully balances optimism and bleak reality.

I was watching an interview with a filmmaker, who said that one of his favorite films from 2019 had come out of Poland, and named this movie. I hadn’t heard of it before, but threw it on my watchlist. There’s something really refreshing about watching a movie that you know nothing about, aside from an endorsement from someone whose work you like. This one just kept surprising me in really lovely ways, even when it was stressing me out.

Bielenia’s central performance is pretty stellar. The irony that someone who already in his young life has been forced to reckon with sin, anger, forgiveness, guilt, and faith can never be a priest sits heavily over the film. Now, obviously priests have a lot of control over people and access to them in a powerful and intimate way, so you don’t want just anyone being allowed to step into that position. But there’s also something to be said for a person who has taken the time to thoughtfully examine a religion and reflect on how it might help the people it is meant to serve.

Daniel genuinely wants to help the people of the village, and Bielenia captures the tumult of emotions that he goes through as he navigates the complex situation. Because of his own past, he is sympathetic to the plight of the woman, Ewa (Barbara Kurzaj), whose husband was driving the car that struck the vehicle full of teenagers. Everyone in the village has decided that the man must have been drunk and caused the accident. They call him a murderer. They write cruel letters to his widow. Her home is vandalized with spray paint calling her a whore. (I’ll resist a tangent here about the way that women are held responsible for the actions of their husbands/sons even when they had no control over them). Being himself someone who has been branded a murderer---and unless I missed something, we don’t get the full story of Daniel’s crime---Daniel finds himself empathizing with Ewa. Ewa’s husband has been denied burial in the village. They will not allow her to add his photo to a board that memorializes the victims. She has done nothing---and based on what Daniel learns, there’s a good chance that her husband has done nothing wrong--and yet she is shut out.

The film leverages a great amount of drama and suspense from the way that the internal politics of the village either align or clash with their religious values. There is a raw emotion in the family and friends of the people who died that muddies their ability to follow through on their religious beliefs. Everyone should have a right to burial. A woman whose only “crime” was being married to someone people don’t like and insisting that she’s sure he was sober on the night of the accident should be able to attend a church service without being called a whore or run off. Daniel learns bit by bit the ways that the regular vicar has been giving into the villagers, for example putting off burying Ewa’s husband. When Daniel forces the village to confront the gap between their values and their actions, it evokes strong emotions, and often some hostility. Implicitly the film is arguing that this should be the role of the priest: to call out hypocrisy and ensure equitable treatment.

The way that this film is shot is also immensely appealing. There’s a kinetic energy to it that vibes with Daniel’s youth and enthusiasm, and yet it knows exactly when to slow down a stretch a moment out. In a film full of intense emotions and even violence, it has a lovely way of finding moments of silence.

I can’t recommend this one enough. It had me on the edge of my seat until the closing credits appeared.

Enys Men, 2022

On an empty island off the Cornish coast, a volunteer (Mary Woodvine) lives in a solitary hut, venturing out daily to check the temperature and monitor the growth of a strange batch of flowers. The volunteer has strange encounters with the island itself, but also encounters a young woman (Flo Crowe), a fisherman (Edward Rowe), and a slew of strange voices that come over her radio.

This one oozes atmosphere, but the visual themes and character building feel a bit simplistic.

I have no problem with movies that are non-linear, experimental, weird, slow-paced, and so on. For me, this one slightly missed the mark, and not in a sense of not telling a good story, but simply because very little of what happened on screen evoked emotion from me.

What I liked most about the film was the way it captured the restless intimacy that you gain with your surroundings when you’re forced to be alone for a long period of time. Absent any company, and with no purpose outside of minimal note-taking and scientific observation, the volunteer forms an uneasy fixation on different aspects of her surroundings. She develops an ominous watchfulness over a large rock formation that stands about as high as a very tall man. She becomes fixated on the abandoned mine on the island, routinely throwing rocks down into it. When the flowers show signs of something happening, a parallel event happens to her.

The film is also very interesting from a visual point of view. Everything from the red laces on the volunteer’s boots, to the artificial look of the flowers, to some great shots such as when the power suddenly goes out and casts the interior of the hut into darkness. The film has a sort of retro/timeless look that at times evokes everything from the 70s to the 2000s. The intersection of the costuming and the landscape of the island setting is very satisfying.

If this film were just a mood piece, I think I would have liked it a bit more. Sure, it’s a bit slow-paced, but whatever. What I struggled with was that there was just enough story there to make it feel as if I was supposed to be interpreting and putting things together. Is the young woman meant to be the volunteer’s daughter? Her younger self? Something else? Are the flowers supposed to stand for . . . something? It seems odd to criticize such an abstract film for having too much story, but for me it really does land in this zone between nothing and enough.

It’s impressive that this film was shot during lockdown with a very small crew and that there was a priority of reducing the film’s impact on the environment. There’s plenty to like here, especially if you go in prepared for the non-linear storytelling and slow pace. I don’t think that the genre classification as “horror” is going to do this one any favors. It’s really more of a fantasy/abstract film with a handful of disturbing touches scattered throughout.

Glad I watched it, but wish I’d had more of a reaction to it.

The Haunted Palace, 1963

In the Massachusetts town of Arkham, the wicked Joseph Curwen (Vincent Price) is using dark magic to enchant the young women of the town in order to use them in a strange ritual in the dungeon of his home. Curwen is burned to death by the furious townspeople, cursing the town with his dying breath and promising to return from the grave for revenge. Over 100 years later, Curwen’s descendent, Charles (also Price) comes to Arkham with his wife, Ann (Debra Paget). The longer the two stay in the palace, the more Charles is taken over by Joseph’s personality, and he begins assembling a crew to follow through with the wicked plan he started a century earlier.

This one’s full of lush photography and genuinely disturbing moments of suspense and horror.

I don’t think I’ve run across many folks recommending this one when horror movie recs are being tossed around, even in the context of Vincent Price films. And I really have to wonder why, because this one has a lot going for it in the form of performances, oodles of atmosphere, a great color palette, and a twisted and bleak storyline.

Horror movies have frequently gone to the well of the old double performance. Whether it’s someone who is possessed, an evil doppelganger, a nefarious long-lost twin, or a wicked ancestor, it’s a great way to get two performances out of a lead actor. In this case, it’s a strategy that really plays off, as the guileless Charles slowly comes under the influence of the dastardly Curwen, a process watched over by his disoriented wife. Price is great in both roles. As Curwen, he is cruel and manipulative. When Ann is finally able to get a doctor to come and look at Curwen, he easily spins the situation into one where Ann is hysterical. On the flip side, Price’s Charles is a fundamentally gentle person who can’t make sense of his lost time or the strange hold that the palace seems to have over him. You can see in Charles the man Ann fell in love with, and the tragedy it will be if his mind is lost.

There’s plenty of good old fashioned horror trappings in this film to add thrills and chills. Under Curwen’s supervision, his minions (who have also possessed other bodies through means unknown) reunite him with his beloved necronomicon and help him dig up the corpse of his evil lady-love, Hester (Cathie Merchant). The town is also littered with the descendents of the people who burned Curwen to death: many of them suffering from severe physical and mental disabilities. Curwen conducts his dark business in a dungeon below the palace, centered on an altar with a door that opens to . . . somewhere.

The whole thing also looks great. As you might expect there’s plenty of fog. I’m not an expert, but based on this film one might suspect that the main export from Arkham is a slow rolling mist. But the most striking overall visual element is the eerie blue light that colors everything. This is a story told in perpetual twilight, and it adds a sense of doom to the proceedings. I particularly enjoyed a sequence where Charles wakes up in the middle of the night and wanders outside to the tree where Curwen was burned. There’s a lovely pan over to a spooky landscape of twisted trees, all cast in that eerie blue light.

So there are possessions, and demons in the basement, and mummified lady corpses, and a generation of cursed children roaming the streets. But for me the ickiest and most intense part of the film is what befalls Ann as she tries to weather the inexplicable changes in the man she loves. This isn’t merely a case of a sudden and total change. Curwen slowly takes over Charles in mind and body, and Ann cannot make sense of the fact that Charles is kind one moment and cruel the next. Curwen, for his part, is in love with Hester. His pursuit of Ann isn’t even really a pursuit. He simply enjoys being cruel to her using the power he has as her husband. In some sequences this merely manifests as him ordering her to bed as if she were a child up past her bedtime. But in two different sequences, he waits until she is uncomfortable before demanding his “husbandly rights”. It’s her fear and discomfort that he enjoys, and a scene where he sexually assaults her in her bedroom is made worse by the knowledge that she has no right to defend herself or even report what has happened as a crime. Ann is trapped not only by the isolated setting of the palace, but by the limited rights that she has as Charles’ wife. Paget gives a sympathetic and convincing performance as a woman who knows something is amiss and wants to get help for her husband. But no matter where she turns she finds only suspicious locals or her husband’s (aka Curwen’s) minions. As the film goes on, we feel for both Charles and Ann, but a wedge is slowly driven between them so that it seems unlikely they will both survive their ordeal.

I would say that the only main downside is that there’s a bit of a cyclic feeling in what happens. The locals are suspicious, they confront Ann, she defends Charles, Charles does more weird stuff. Repeat. Repeat. I wish that there had been a bit more development in the relationship between Ann, Charles, and the townspeople. Ann does have something of an ally in Dr. Willet (Frank Maxwell), but I found myself wishing that she had more of a sounding board. Even in her isolation, there’s something of a disconnect between the plot at the palace and the rumblings in the town.

This is a moody, bleak thriller. As many have pointed out, the inspiration for this film is supposedly Poe’s poem of the same name, but the vibes are much more Lovecraft. A really pleasant surprise.

Aftersun, 2022

Sophie (Frankie Corio) goes to a resort in Turkey with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal). The dynamics between father and daughter are somewhat unsteady: while they clearly care for each other, Calum struggles mightily with depression and anxiety, and Sophie is beginning to see and name her father’s behavior.

Grounded in strong performances, this one really hits home in its tumultuous final act.

I have to be very honest and say that I was kind of split on this movie until about the last 15-20 minutes or so. It wasn’t that there was anything bad about it. Not at all. It is a well-acted, memory-specific drama with an absolutely gorgeous setting. But sometimes when films mostly sit in observation, I can find myself feeling a bit listless.

But in the last twenty minutes, the film kicks into a higher gear. It breaks free from its zoomed in look at Calum and Sophie’s vacation and introduces some non-linear and more abstract elements. It’s a rewarding final act, and one that reverberates with many of the smaller moments that have come before. I don’t want to get into specifics, but I found the end of the film---and particularly one absolutely stellar sequence set to a distorted version of “Under Pressure”--incredibly emotionally resonant. After being sympathetic to the characters and watching their exploits and appreciating the performances, the final act brought a torrent of emotion for me and significantly upped my appreciation of the film.

Paul Mescal was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Calum, and I think that’s totally deserved. He plays a man who is masking a profound depression---someone who is trying to be better with his Tai Chi practice and self-help books, but still sinking. There’s an explicit framing of the film as being Sophie’s memories of this trip, with us catching glimpses of an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) but not of her father. With his fate or role in her life unknown, it can be hard to read different moments between Calum and Sophie. “I love you Sophie. Never forget that.” reads a card in the room. On board a boat out to swim in the ocean, Calum confides to another man aboard that he didn’t think he’d “make it” to the age of 30. Is Sophie in some way keeping Calum anchored to life? Or is this trip really some sort of goodbye? Mescal does an amazing job of letting the cracks show in the carefree facade that Calum wears around Sophie.

Corio, in her film debut, is really excellent as Sophie. She loves her father, but isn’t old enough to recognize the signs and symptoms of what is really happening to Calum. She sees behavior from her dad that frustrates and annoys her. When he refuses to join her onstage for a karaoke performance, but then later offers to get her singing lessons, she snaps that she wishes he’d stop offering to buy things when he doesn’t have the money. Sophie watches with jealousy the older British teens who saunter around the resort. One young woman wears a wristband that allows her unlimited food and drinks at the resort’s different buildings. It’s very human and age-appropriate that Sophie’s heightened awareness of her social standing distracts her from what is really happening with her dad.

The film pulls off a pretty neat trick----particularly in regard to someone suffering from depression and teenage angst---in that very little goes wrong on their vacation. Sophie meets a boy her age, Michael (Brooklyn Toulson), who tends to hang out with the older kids. While this seems like a set up for bullying or sexual harassment/assault with Sophie frequently going off unsupervised with the older kids, they are just . . . some nice kids. The “problems” on their trip never amount to more than Sophie accidentally losing a diving mask her father bought for her. But for me, this really captures the problem with depression and anxiety, namely that it can be at its worst when things are seemingly just fine. Sophie and Calum SHOULD be happy. They should be carefree. But they aren’t. Mental health can feel the worst when we rationally know that we should be happy, but aren’t. I found Calum’s moments of despair incredibly relatable.

The movie also makes great use of its setting, alternating between sun-drenched beaches and then those same beaches in ominous darkness, with only the sound of the waves existing beyond the lights cast from the resort. This is a film about someone looking back at a childhood moment as an adult and understanding, but understanding too late. The brilliance and the darkness of the Turkish beachside resort perfectly capture that painful binary of childhood memories.

As I mentioned, it took me until the final act to really sink fully into the emotions of the film. The whole thing is well-observed and very specific in a way that makes it feel like a deeply personal story. I also had a bit of a struggle with the dynamic between Corio and Mescal. While the two have good rapport with each other and a clear comfort, they somehow never felt like a father and daughter to me. When I looked at them, I always saw an adult man and a little girl. While their interactions are innocuous enough, I couldn’t shut off quite a few internal red flags every time he went to rub sunscreen on her, or when they would be in a bed together. And while it might have been intentional, there were some things that weren’t really age appropriate, like a scene where Calum cleans off Sophie’s face. Obviously, your mileage may vary on this front---believing that kids and adults are children and their parents is one of those suspension of disbelief things that you either buy into or you don’t.

At first I found the film a bit slight, but then that last act hit me like a ton of bricks, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Lamb, 2021

Maria (Noomi Rapace) and her husband, Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) live on a mountainside where they raise a flock of sheep. Unbeknownst to them, a strange force is stalking the countryside, and pays a visit to their flock one night. Maria and Ingvar are shocked when one of their sheep gives birth to a lamb that is part sheep, part human. The couple takes the lamb in, naming her Ada, and begin to raise her as their daughter. This strange arrangement is shaken up when Ingvar’s troublesome brother, Petur (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson), arrives unexpectedly and takes an interest in Ada.

Coasting mainly on atmosphere and an interesting premise, this one is more silly than spooky.

I didn’t care much for this movie, ultimately, and in the kind of way that makes it difficult to be motivated to write much about it.

There are plenty of things here that I’d consider strengths. Rapace, Gudnason, and Haraldsson do a good job of creating tension out of their domestic situation, with Ada’s presence as the element that nudges things into a crisis point. The effects, and very specifically the computer-generated Ada, are all solid. There is lots of strong use of the beautiful scenery.

There is also something effective about the way that all of the adults project onto Ada. Ada is seen as this easy-going, loving creature. Maria sees her as a baby. For much of his time with her, Petur sees her as an animal, feeding her grass in one scene to Maria’s disgust. The characters care for themselves, and not for Ada. She is the definition of innocent, and yet no one looks out for her best interest.

But this aspect of the adults projecting onto Ada is a side effect of the fact that Ada herself doesn’t really have a personality. I mean, she’s adorable. And she clearly has affection for the adults who care for her. But she’s something of a blank slate.

And the other characters, honestly, aren’t much better developed. Maria is yet another variation on “woman who wants a child but doesn’t have one.” Ingvar is sort of a non-event as a character. Petur injects some drama, but even he doesn’t make much of an impression. This movie feels like the kind of film that started with a heck of a hook---a sheep giving birth to a half-sheep/half-human---but then had no clue where to go from there.

The less said about the movie’s final act, the better. I’m not sure if “insulting” or “lazy” is how I’d describe it, but either way I was unimpressed.

Finally, I don’t know if the sequence of the lamb having its ears cut with scissors was real or simulated, but either way it was not something I wanted to see, thanks.

Underwhelming.

aka Cassius Clay, 1970

This documentary---filmed during the period where Muhammad Ali was barred from fighting due to his refusal to abide by the draft--traces the rise of Ali’s career, his point of view on the sport, and his activism as an adult.

Leveraging a tremendous amount of entertainment by simply shining a light of Ali’s insane charisma, the historical timing of the film adds a lot of interest.

Fresh off of plenty of Ali content in When We Were Kings, I expected a lot of repetition. I needn’t have worried. The man is an endless font of entertainment. Muhammad Ali is a person who has always been in somewhat of the periphery of my pop culture awareness. But as watching these documentaries has exposed me to more of him, I’m starting to think that Ali must have been one of the most charismatic people to ever walk the earth.

One of the most remarkable nuggets to come out of this film for me was the fact that Ali did not do well in school. I find that absolutely stunning and an indictment of whatever school system he went through. This is a person who basically sparkles, and who has an almost unparalleled mastery of the pace and shape of language.

And boy is that language on display here. Ali is a great boxer, but he’s an equally great showman and the documentary leverages that skillset for all it’s worth. We get a wild collection of archival footage of press conferences and interviews, fabulous sequences of Ali engaging in good natured debate with trainer Cus D’Amato, and Ali describing in half-seriousness how he would have whooped the greatest boxers from history if they were contemporaries.

The timing of the film is a large part of what makes it interesting. At the time of filming, Ali has been stripped of his championship title and is prohibited from boxing. Clearly at loose ends, Ali takes a part in a play, gives speeches at college campuses, and becomes more adamant about his political stances. As the movie is being made, Ali has no idea what his future will hold, and behind his joking and confident front, you can tell just how detrimental it would be if he were not allowed to return to the sport that he loves.

Where the film skimps out a bit is on exploring those political stances. I think that there are some really interesting ideas to explore when it comes to people living in an unequal society being asked to put their lives on the line in service of that country. I would have liked to see more of a conversation with Ali about his point of view instead of what just feels like a summary.

I get the impression that any film made up of at least 50% footage of Ali will feel worth watching. While this film pales a bit in comparison with When We Were Kings, it was certainly never boring, and those personal moments of Ali verbally sparring with D’Amato are unbearably charming. Frankly, I would have watched a full 90 minutes of those two jousting.

In some senses, not the most that could have been made of this. But the undeniable charm and watchability of its star makes this an easy, fun watch.

Sgt Kabukiman, NYPD, 1990

Harry Griswold (Rick Gianasi) is a police detective investigating a string of murders involving kabuki actors. One night, while attending a kabuki performance as part of his investigation, Harry witnesses a mass attack on the actors, one of whom with his dying breath passes on to Harry the gift of being able to become the hero Kabukiman. The dying actor’s granddaughter, Lotus (Susan Byun), doesn’t care much for Harry, but agrees to help him tap into his new powers. Unfortunately, several powerful men would like to see the last of Kabukiman, and a wicked entity known as The Evil One is expected to appear at any moment.

Fun lead performances and a few solid visual gags can’t quite get this one into the right kind of stupid fun zone.

I read a review of this film in which someone remarked that it “wasn’t their kind of movie.” For a minute I thought that maybe that’s why I didn’t care for it. But the thing is: I love plenty of dumb-fun, intentionally-cheesy stuff. I’ve watched Frankenhooker more times than most classics. I will hand-on-heart defend The Velocipastor---another film in which a person acquires a very eccentric superhero power---to my last breath. So this kind of movie can totally be my kind of movie.

Unfortunately, not this one.

There is some good stuff here, and to the film’s credit that good stuff is relatively spread out through the film. I thought that there was a decently spread out smattering of funny sight gags. Despite all the large-scale stuff happening, I appreciated some of the small touches. One running gag is that Griswold’s clothing will spontaneously start to transform into a kabuki costume. In one scene, he’s in his regular suit but wearing wooden sandals. It’s Griswold’s immediate acceptance of this turn of events that I found so enjoyable.

The film’s best assets are the lead performances from Gianasi and Byun who both seem to walk that line between “serious” acting and the kind of acting that has a bit of a wink behind it. I found Byun in particular to be very enjoyable on screen, and there’s an easy chemistry between the two leads that gives the film some necessary grounding. Griswold, as a character, is kind of messily written, and it says a lot about Gianasi’s performance that you stay with him through the end.

There’s a fine line of smart-stupid that a movie like this has to hit to be really good, and this movie just doesn’t land on the right side. (I’ll give you two guesses which side of the line it falls on). I’m not going to get into whether the use of kabuki here is offensive. Obviously it’s meant to be offensive, so whatever. But there’s a lack of knowledge and/or affection for kabuki to really make the concept sing. It comes off more as lazy caricature. The best joke comes in the first ten minutes, as we see that the performance Griswold is attending is a kabuki version of The Odd Couple. It’s too superficial and impersonal. As an outsider, you’d think that in the film you’d at least learn SOMETHING about kabuki, but that’s not the case and it’s weird. It feels like a missed opportunity. Partway through the film, Griswold begins to transform and then just turns into a clown. It’s a really weird thing to have happen, and he’s in clown mode for like 10 minutes of run-time. It’s lazy caricature whose vagueness hurts the film as it goes on. How many times am I expected to laugh at the fact that Kabukiman throws chopsticks?

I also have to dock it a bit for a few dips into mean-spirited territory. I don’t know what a woman named Carmen ever did to the men who wrote this film, but I was very put off by the treatment of this character. Played by Pamela Alster, Carmen is a colleague of Griswold’s. She’s a tough and capable person who, for plot reasons, is held down and gang-raped in a public park, a scene that is also used to give us a headless shot of her bare chest as her shirt is pulled off. She’s later mocked and murdered in a hospital with a ventilator inexplicably shoved in her mouth. I mean . . . wowza. Both of these scenes feel a bit extra compared to the nature of the violence in the rest of the film.

Like a lot of movies aiming for that so-bad-it’s-good groove, there’s about 20 minutes of good content stretched into a feature length film. The plot, to the extent that you can even say there is such a thing, is so thin that it simply can’t sustain that amount of runtime. I honest-to-goodness could not tell you the names of either of the villains or even what they actually wanted.

Good for a one-time watch, I suppose. Not something I’d highly recommend.

Tar, 2022

Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) is a star conductor, and the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s got an autobiography on the way, a lovely wife (Nina Hoss) and child (Mila Bogojevic), and audiences of admirers. But Tar is flirting with several looming scandals, including the death of a former mentee, her unfeeling treatment of her graduate students, and her questionable motives for pushing to add a very young and pretty new cellist (Sophie Kauer) to the orchestra.

Powered by Blanchett’s hilarious and disturbed performance, this is a very funny look at the collision of art, artist, and ego.

The IMDb classifies this film as “drama” and “music.” They are seriously remiss in not including “comedy” in their classification because, I’m sorry, this movie is hilarious.

We’ve all known people like Lydia Tar. And if we’re honest, maybe we’ve all been Lydia Tar, at least in some phase of our life. Desperate to have our intelligence, our wit, our specialness acknowledged. The problem is, Lydia Tar has been in this phase for seemingly all of her life, and now she’s acquiring a body count. Right from the start we see this in Blanchett’s Tar. The opening sequence sees Tar being interviewed, and we tune in as the interviewer is delivering a florid account of Tar’s professional life and accomplishments. When the interviewer notes that being an EGOT puts her in the company of many famous people and then ends his list with Mel Brooks, Tar cringes.

What follows in the interview is a heady mix of self-aggrandizing and contradictory statements. Tar, with false concern, notes that her wide range of talents might be a bad thing, because everyone expects a person to specialize. When asked about the role of gender in the classical music world, she notes that she has nothing to complain about, and neither do any of the other contemporary female conductors. It’s one thing to speak for oneself, but to speak for others . . . well. And what’s brilliant about this opening sequence is that we see that Tar does have quite a depth of knowledge. This is a person who knows what she’s talking about, and who has clearly put a lot of thought into it, both her role as conductor and music in general.

But somewhere along the way, things have warped for Tar. There is information, and there seems to be passion, but something about it is very empty. She has gotten good at turning a phrase about what it means to conduct, but somewhere in there, there is a disconnect. We see this in a scene where Tar gets into a confrontation with one of her students, Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist). Max is queer and non-binary, and sets Tar off when he tells her that he isn’t into Bach. While Max’s reasoning comes off as a bit shallow---dismissing Bach essentially as an old white guy---Tar’s response isn’t all the more enlightened. Instead of engaging in any kind of real conversation about Max’s discomfort with the classical canon, Tar uses every weapon that a teacher has to humiliate Max. On the surface it might look like teaching, but it’s not. It’s bullying. She begins with a sexual reference, alluding to the enjoyment of a contemporary composer as “masturbation”. She then uses her authority to get Max up onto the stage in front of his peers, where she then abandons him so that he is left facing the whole room plus Tar. She presents the false equivalency that Max not liking Bach is the same as people giving him a bad job rating due to his race or sexuality.

And this is the tragedy and the hilarity of Tar. It’s not that she’s wrong, per se. It’s that her fundamental motivation isn’t actually helping people learn or putting together the best orchestra: it’s bolstering her own profile and ego. Sometimes, those things go hand in hand. But the humor of the film derives from the way that her inability to take any little criticism spirals into petty confrontations, lies, and flexes of power.

For someone so seemingly intelligent, Tar manages to fall at even the most basic of hurdles. She has a loyal and dedicated assistant, who she strings along with promises of promotion that she never intends to fulfill. She has a gorgeous wife, but barely bothers to hide her attraction to the new cellist, Olga. When her daughter is being picked on at school, Tar goes immediately to the strategy of maliciously threatening the bully. And when she injures herself falling down on some stairs, she tells everyone that she was “attacked”.

I think that the brilliance of this film is the way that it resists commentary on what it is observing. We can see some unfairness in the way that Tar is treated as she heads for her comeuppance---such as a misleadingly edited YouTube video of her class that goes viral---but at the same time we can also see that Tar is guilty of many sins, both personal and professional. The film never tells us why Tar had it out for the young woman who died of suicide. In most of the scenes where Tar deals with it alone, even she doesn’t quite seem to know why she had to be so malicious. Does Tar deserve what happens to her? Pretty much everything she does falls into this fascinating ethical gray area where the question of appropriate consequences is somewhat nuanced.

I really liked the look of this film, as well as the unsettling atmosphere it creates. Tar suffers from a lot of anxiety, and many sequences do not make it clear if they are real or dreams. In one, Tar is on a run and hears a woman screaming in fear or pain. She tries to track the sound, but cannot. The woman screams and screams, and then we cut to Tar later in bed. Was this a dream? As things go downhill, Tar becomes more and more sensitive to the sounds around her, and the presence of those sounds looms larger and larger in her mind and in the film.

Just an all-around fabulous film, and if you aren’t laughing the whole way through, I’m not sure you’re doing it right.

Barbie, 2023

Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives in Barbieland, a pink plastic femme-topia where all the Barbies are gorgeous, empowered, and indulge in nightly dance parties. Barbie is longed-for by Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose every day is measured in the kind words or glances he gets from Barbie. When Barbie suffers a sudden-onset existential crisis, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) advises her that she must journey to the Real World and find out what’s happening with the young person playing with her. When Ken tags along for the ride, they both discover that the Real World is far different than they imagined, and a very far cry from the female-centric society of Barbieland.

Despite a bloated run-time, fantastic set design, engaging performances, and interesting questions make this a fun ride.

It’s been about two weeks since I watched the Barbie movie, and it has stayed on my mind ever since I left the theater. Before being privileged to watch the movie we actually paid for, we sat through several trailers that were so vapid and shallowly ironic that it was borderline painful. I think that one of the reasons I had such a positive response to Barbie is that so many big-budget films over the last few years have felt empty when it comes to actually exploring deep themes. Even if Barbie didn’t nail every question, I appreciated that it was asking them in the first place.

There’s been a lot of talk about Ken’s story being the superior one. It is a great plot/character arc, and I think that it connects with more viewers because it’s a bit more linear. Ken lives a life in which his happiness entirely revolves around someone else. His identity is that of an accessory (“It’s Barbie AND Ken”), and he doesn’t even have the dignity of a real job. Ken functionally has no power, and as a result of the anxiety that this produces, he is swayed by a social structure where he has power through oppressing others. But even when Ken (and the rest of the Kens) seize power, Ken’s sense of self-worth is still bound up in Barbie’s approval. So whether he’s just “beach” or king of the horses, Ken remains unhappy. Embracing the patriarchy changes Ken’s status, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s unhealthily dependent on winning Barbie.

Gosling’s performance is really pitch perfect, hilarious but also melancholy. We might laugh at Ken’s naivete, but he’s also very easy to sympathize with. The patriarchy that he enforces in Barbieland isn’t motivated by a desire to oppress women, but rather by a desire to have power and autonomy and to be the person who matters. There’s a wounded lack of malice to the character that lets you root for him even when he’s at his worst. And his unbridled (not sorry!) love of horses is incredibly endearing.

Barbie’s arc is a bit more complicated because it is more abstract. I saw Barbie’s story as being more about what it means to be an aspirational figure, and the ups and downs of such a role. In Barbieland, all of the Barbies believe the corporate line from Mattel: having Barbie be pretty and a scientist/writer/astronaut has solved all of the world’s problems and resulted in a Real World full of empowered women living their lives to the fullest in an equitable and collaborative society. Barbie is shocked when the women in the real world, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera), encounter daily struggles and can find themselves harmed by Barbie’s all-too-perfect life. There exists some tipping point where someone who is aspirational tumbles over into being an unattainable figure on a pedestal that intimidates rather than inspires.

Barbie is an icon, but in this film she is an icon who has attained self-awareness. Once she becomes aware of her real place in the world--both worlds--she cannot figure out how to navigate the simplicity of Barbieland or the everyday hearbreaks of the Real World.

What do we actually want from our dolls and toys? The film begins by acknowledging that a lot of play for girls is aimed at mommy-wife training. The girls at the beginning of the film happily reject their housework-lite play for the glamour and excitement that Barbie represents. But just as there’s something not quite right about teaching girls that play just means practicing for being a housewife, there’s also something a bit questionable about handing them a figure with a smoking hot body, an impeccable wardrobe, and a one-in-a-million job. I had quite a few Barbies growing up, and an unspeakable amount of my weekly allowance was saved up in order to buy them new outfits. I loved collecting them, putting different outfits on them, etc. But especially as I got to an older elementary age, I’d look at them atop my bookshelf and think, how? How could I ever be that?

I appreciate that the film wanted to grapple with these questions, even if I think it doesn’t totally stick the landing. It’s all bound up in the consumerist and nostalgic nature of it all. Gerwig is wanting to both critique and celebrate Barbie and the complicated relationship that a lot of women and girls have/had with her. It’s something of an unsolvable problem, because toys and dolls simply have inherent boundaries. Do I think that a toy can make someone feel more included or empowered? Actually, yes, I do. But do I think that empowerment is enough to have a really impactful effect on someone? Ehhhhhhh.

I really loved Robbie’s performance as Barbie. She begins with all of the certainty and confidence of a corporate press release, and then her emotional pendulum swings between certainty and doubt for the entire film. It would have been easy for the film to simply position Barbie and her friends returning Barbieland to the status quo as a victory and the ultimate end-game, but Robbie’s Barbie very quickly becomes a woman who lives between two worlds and two states of awareness. It’s a film about a character’s inner peace as much as it is about the little dramas of Barbieland and the Real World, and Robbie’s performance is very touching.

I also really enjoyed the supporting performances. Ferrera is solid as Gloria, a woman who does find Barbie inspirational and values her memories of playing with Barbie with Sasha. Ferrera gets the unwelcome task of delivering the movie’s Big Speech about what life is like for women in the Real World, and she does an admirable job of keeping that part of the movie afloat. I loved McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, with her unabashedly queer vibes and perpetual splits. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Michael Cera’s Allan, the only not-Ken male doll who finds himself just as excluded from the patriarchy as he was from the Barbie-run society. As to be expected in such a big budget film, there are a ton of awesome supporting/small roles. I was particularly pleased to see Rob Brydon as Sugar Daddy Ken and Rhea Pearlman as Barbie’s original creator.

But aside from appreciating the effort at some actual deep thought in a blockbuster film, my God did I love seeing this movie on the big screen. I’ve mentioned this to many people, but the joy that it gave me just looking at it made me think of musicals from the 40s and 50s. So much color and spectacle, and a kind of unashamed artifice that has impact because it’s obvious that so many of the props are really there and not computer generated. I read an interview with Gerwig where she talked about writing this movie during lockdown and specifically wanting to create a film that was TRULY made for the big screen. Boy, did they nail that in spades! The costumes and the sets are to die for. It’s hard to think of any word other than satisfying to describe how I felt looking at almost every frame of this film. And after years and years of Marvel this and Fast Furious that, it was really cool to see a big budget devoted to musical numbers and the best beach brawl ever put on film instead of (to quote a stand-up comedian) a bunch of happy meal toys punching each other on a giant rock. Even in its more serious or melancholy moments, there is a beauty to this film. And when the movie turns its gaze to the Real World, it manages to find a different kind of beauty. Further, the Real World is in many ways just a different kind of cartoon than the Barbieland.

In terms of criticisms, I really only had two. First, I thought that the subplot with Will Farrel and the rest of the Marvel board was totally unnecessary. Yes, we get one really good laugh out of the fact that the company designing toys for women is almost entirely run by men. LOL. But outside of that original gag, it’s totally not needed. The occasional set-piece or line got a laugh---yes, I laughed at ten men on a tandem bike, I’m not made of stone!--but none of those laughs were worth the several minutes of runtime devoted to them.

Second, like I alluded to before, I’m not sure that the film finds quite the right place for Ken and the rest of the Kens at the end. I did really like the final statement--I’m KENough--because it reflects that Ken has arrived at a place where he’s no longer needing to engage in a power struggle. The problem is that Barbieland is an imperfect allegory for the real world. The Barbies and Kens are fundamentally limited by their understanding of the world. Ken has his important epiphany about his self-worth not being bound to Barbie and her attention/affection. But what does this revelation mean for the Kens and Barbies? To what extent can they break their “programming”? It’s honestly too big a question for this movie to answer, and it feels like they just sort of hand-wave the end to get everyone to a happy place. (This opens up a whole other set of questions I had, such as whether the Barbies actually DO anything. Like, is scientist Barbie actually doing science, or is she just science Barbie and she shows up every now and then to collect her Nobel Prize?). I wasn’t that annoyed here, but I think it’s a place where you see the film’s intentions run up against the limitations of its world and the nature of its characters.

I’m so glad that I made sure to see this one in the theater. Literally at the moment the film delivered its Depressed Barbie joke, I had my hand in a bag of Starburst, and my sister turned and looked at me like a laser. I felt so seen! Just all around a good time and a great big screen experience.

Of an Age, 2022

Kol (Elias Anton) is a recent high school graduate who wakes up to a frantic call from his good friend Ebony (Hattie Hook), his partner for a dance competition. Ebony got trashed and is stranded in the middle of nowhere without her costume or a ride. Already walking a fine line with both their parents, Kol is able to get a ride with Ebony’s brother, Adam (Thom Green), to retrieve Ebony. On the ride, Adam and Kol strike up a flirty relationship that carries through the rest of the day and into the night.

Lovable characters and a bittersweet love story make this an unforgettable tale of longing and first love..

As I watched this film, I kept finding myself comparing it (in a nice way) to Moonlight. I was a bit wary about writing that down, because I think that it would be easy to take that comparison in a very superficial way. Both films feature a young gay man who faces bias due to his sexuality and his race/ethnicity. But what I actually mean when I compare the two---and, yes, they do have some similarities in terms of their main characters--is that both films have this magical, melancholic way of capturing how a single moment or relationship can sear itself into your mind.

This sense of a moment in time fits perfectly with the way that the events unfold in front of us. For the first half of the film, much of the action is restricted to Adam’s car. Kol and Adam have a cautious, building conversation consisting largely of sidelong glances at each other. Then there’s the time constraint, in that the film takes place within a single day. But rather than feel as if the characters are boxed in, the movie has the quality of memory, in which the physical and temporal constraints act as frames, not walls.

Anton, playing Kol, really embodies this young man who suddenly finds a spark and a sense of hope. We see that being mocked about his sexuality is nothing new. When he goes to a house party with Ebony, hoping to run into Adam, a trio of young women at the party openly speak down to him, referencing his Slavic family. For Kol, Adam seems almost downright mythical: not only does he like Kol, not care about his ethnicity, etc, he shares interests in movies, books, and music.

Green, for his part, is very solid as Adam. Adam is older than Kol and Ebony. They are maybe 17 or 18, while Adam is in his early 20s. A small difference in years, but a big one in terms of maturity and a sense of self. Where Kol’s shyness comes from meeting someone mature and cool, Adam’s hesitation seems to come from the opposite direction. This is his little sister’s friend, and on Adam’s part there is this sense of not wanting to overstep a boundary. And so they spend much of the film, each clearly longing for the other to give the first overt sign of interest or make the first real move. There’s something incredibly sweet about watching these two people who clearly have chemistry and affection for one another dance around each other, highly tuned to every word, gesture, or facial expression from the other person.

I’d like to stay vague in talking about the last act of the film. The first two-thirds all takes place in a single day, while the last act shows us what happens in the future between the two characters in the context of attending Ebony’s wedding.. So without getting into any specifics, the way that what unfolds is sewn with echoes and reversals and parallels to the first two-thirds is pretty incredible, and given the emotional weight of that moment in time, everything that comes around again in the last act hits twice as hard.

Overall I thought that this was just a lovely film. Yes, the main characters are gay, but I think that anyone can relate to having had an encounter with someone that settled in your heart and gave you a new sense of the possibility of what your life could be and what kind of love you could receive and be worthy of. No complaints (though boy is Ebony annoying!), and just a lovely film that manages to pack punches all the way to the end credit.

White Mischief, 1987

Based on a true story, this film follows the exploits of a crew of wealthy aristocrats living in Happy Valley in Kenya during World War 2. Drugs, drinking, and infidelity are everyday occurrences, and that’s all well and good until Diana (Greta Scacchi) and her older husband, Jock (Joss Ackland), roll into town. Diana is immediately smitten with local playboy Erroll (Charles Dance), a man who is the side-piece of practically every woman in the region. Tensions rise and rise until a deadly incident occurs and everyone is left questioning who pulled the trigger.

A so-so whodunnit, this one gets very little traction out of its portrayal of beautiful people behaving badly.

There’s a basic boundary that a movie--or any story--has to pass in order to go over well, and that’s that you need to actually care about something that’s happening on screen. This one never got past that hurdle for me, and it made pretty much everything that happened a bit of a slog.

Bad people being bad can be interesting, but there has to be some hook. In this case, I don’t know why we’re meant to care. Perhaps we’re supposed to be more appalled by the fact that these people are living a carefree and decadent life while others are engaged in a deadly battle for the future of the world? Perhaps I was meant to be swept up in the romances and sexy glances between the characters?

Really the problem here is a lack of character development. Diana is kind of a nothing character. She arrives, all the other women are like “Ooh, you’re sexy! And he’s sexy! You’ll be sexy together!” and then that’s what happened. Likewise Dance’s lothario totally fails to make an impact. Yes, Scacchi and Dance look nice in the buff, and there’s a certain degree of artistry to the way that one of their encounters is filmed, but I didn’t find myself rooting for them, caught up in their back-and-forth about how serious their fling is, or even caring all that much when someone catches a bullet.

The two best characters are probably Ackland’s Jock and Alice (Sarah Miles), one of Erroll’s lovers and a woman who has a very unique manner of mourning her lost love. Both of these characters experience the anguish of watching someone they love fall for someone else, and in the maddening context of a social setting where no one gives a hoot if your lover or spouse is flaunting their unfaithfulness in your face. There is at least some recognizable angst and anger to these characters. Frankly I found everyone so off-putting that just having a character to say “You are all awful!” made me identify with them.

The setting of the film is quite beautiful, though the way that the local people are portrayed feels a bit off. It’s not exactly that they are shown in a disrespectful manner, but more that they are treated like background furniture and set dressing. While you expect this attitude from the characters, it’s kind of crunchy to see the film itself do it. I think that this is part of the problem of the way that the characters don’t really distinguish themselves---every ten minutes or so there’s the need to put something on the screen that reminds you that they are in Kenya.

None of the pieces of this movie worked for me. The decadence wasn’t memorable enough; the mystery wasn’t mysterious enough; and the drama wasn’t dramatic enough. Not a bad film, necessarily, merely a weak one.

Manganinnie, 1980

Manganinnie (Mawuyul Yanthalawuy) is an aboriginal woman whose tribe is massacred as part of driving the native people from their land. Determined to find any of her people who may have scattered during the raid, Manganinnie sets off into the wilderness, heading for the coast. On the way she encounters Joanna (Anna Ralph), the daughter of a family of white settlers. As the pair journey through the wilderness, they form a bond with one another, though Manganinnie’s sense of despair grows the more she sees of what is happening to her country.

This one is a touching portrayal of an unsustainable clash of cultures.

There is a certain fascination with people crossing over into other cultures, and a particular Western fascination with white people/children who are integrated into those other cultures, whether it be through capture or some other means. I haven’t seen a take on that trope like this one, one so tinged with a potent mix of gentleness and despair.

The circumstances through which Joanna comes to be with Manganinnie are themselves very interesting, and portrayed with empathy. Many plot summaries describe Joanna as being “lost”, and that’s sort of true. Joanna wanders away from her family and into the woods where she is found by Manganinnie. But very shortly after finding the girl, Manganinnie sees Joanna’s father and another man calling for the child. We do not get any explicit insight into why Manganinnie continues to hide Joanna, but it seemed to me that it was a mix of fear (men who look like Joanna’s father just massacred her tribe without mercy or hesitation) and loneliness.

For almost the entire runtime, there is a bittersweet counterpoint between the growing relationship between Manganinnie and Joanna and the sorrow that Manganinnie feels as she realizes what is happening. Manganinnie carries a fire-torch, a small burning bundle of wood and bark, that becomes both functional and symbolic as the movie goes on. Manganinnie teaches Joanna how to survive in the wild, and together the two of them huddle by the fire to stay safe from an unknown darkness that waits for them in the woods.

Manganinnie has several opportunities to return Joanna to other white settlers, all of which she declines. The film remains neutral on Manganinnie’s continued “capture” of Joanna, resisting the urge to paint it as some benevolent or wholesome action, but also recognizing the deep pain that Manganinnie is experiencing and that she keeps Joanna with her out of a deep and desperate loneliness. Joanna, despite her young age and despite us seeing that her family are overall kind people, is part of the colonization that will mean doom for Manganinnie, her people, and their way of life. At the same time, Joanna is not at an age where she can control or even understand the power dynamics at play, and her experiences with Manganinnie are undoubtedly leaving a permanent mark on her.

Lanthalawuy and Ralph have a nice chemistry with one another. Their relationship sits at an uneasy intersection between friendship, mother/daughter, and siblings. Phillip Hinton and Elaine Mangan have small roles as Joanna’s parents, nice enough people who aren’t joyful participants in the destruction of Manganinnine’s people, and yet accept the killings and “clearing” of the native people with little question or hesitation. They look away from the suffering of Manganinnie and her people in a way that Joanna no longer can.

This is an interesting film that tells an intimate story against the backdrop of a larger cultural tragedy.

Close Your Eyes, 2002

Hypnotist Michael Strother (Goran Visnjic) specializes in curing people of smoking addictions, but his work takes a darker and more dangerous turn when one of his clients, Detective Losey (Shirley Henderson) , draws him into a case involving a sadistic kidnapping. Heather (Sophie Stuckey) was kidnapped, held captive, tattooed, and finally rescued, but has been mute since her ordeal. But Heather’s ordeal is far from over, and Michael has put himself in the line of fire regarding the sinister plot behind her kidnapping.

A game cast is totally let down by a bizarre and cliche-ridden plot.

I think that my teenage self might have enjoyed this film. Maybe. It’s got just enough of a plot and just enough disturbing imagery to string along an undiscerning viewer. But having seen any decent number of thrillers or horror movies, this one simply pales in comparison.

I can’t fault the cast. Visnjic is a very likable presence in the lead role, and the best scenes are the few sequences where he gently coaches Heather through reliving her traumatic experience. Visnjic has a wonderfully soothing and seductive voice, and so casting him as a hypnotist is a stroke of genius. In the scenes where we see him at work, and particularly the delicate way that he works with the child, you do grasp the emotional intensity of trying to walk someone through a life-destroying event and helping them come out the other side.

But not to put too fine a point on it: the rest of the movie is basically trash. There are way too many time-wasting scenes of Losey arguing with her bosses about giving Michael access to Heather. Likewise, Miranda Otto is basically wasted as Michael’s wife, who only appears in scenes to ominously say things like “We moved here to get away from this kind of thing” and make snarky remarks about whether or not he’s taken his “medication.”

The horror itself consists of satanic conspiracies, wicked tattoos and blood transfers, and an evil man who has managed to pass his consciousness down through multiple bodies. In a better film, this could be a passable supernatural plot, but it all comes off as an unpleasant mish-mash of bland and grimy exploitation.

It’s hard to talk about a movie like this. It’s a nothing burger. My main reaction to it was feeling sorry for the actors. The ending is offensively predictable and irritating.

Skip.

Hey - you found an Australian film there that I didn't even know about. Manganinnie doesn't get a lot of coverage, even here apparently. What happened to the indigenous population of Tasmania is a dark chapter of our history - maybe that's why, I don't know. (I must get around to seeing Of An Age as well - I missed it during it's theatrical run.)

Do women really do that? I had always thought it was a strawman, but the more women I talk to/listen/read, the more I see how extremely self-conscious they are of their bodies.

It's funny that the first person to find an aesthetic defect in a perfect 10/10 woman is not a man but a woman. Sometimes another woman, but usually, the very same woman who sees defects in her own body and instead of embracing them, keeps seeing herself as ugly.

Anecdotally, men aren't so. Or at least not so much. And with all the strongmen and shredded models in movies and commercials, I'm sure the potential to feel inferior is there for men, too.

While I could possibly understand a woman thinking "How could I ever be that" when looking at a real female model's body, I fail to grasp how they could do the same while looking at a doll (or an animated character with protruding features). One would think it's perfectly clear that dolls or animated characters are deliberately idealized/perfected for multiple reasons. Do boys say "How could I ever be like that?" when seeing Batman or Superman?
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The ingenious thing about Barbieland is that nobody works, nobody needs anything, nobody needs to clear the septic tanks or clean the garbage from the streets, so there's no need for economy. The whole power is only based on ideology, never on economy. The Kens don't *run* the world in Barbieland. But Barbies don't either! Nobody does because there's no need to!

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

Short answer: yes.

I mean, sort of. I started being ogled by men around the age of 10 or 12. Like, good luck growing up and not having men constantly remind you of how you look to them. Yes, you start becoming a critic of your own body, but it's driven by male standards of beauty. Though, of course, women can also be part of that policing.

I mean, I didn't literally think I could look like Barbie. But it was the idea of Barbie: a woman with an amazing career, incredible dresses, trim waist, gravity-defying breasts, on-point make-up, etc.

And further, no one menstruates! No one gets actually sick! No one gets pregnant (except Midge, poor, sidelined Midge)! The Barbie's "ruling" Barbieland reflects the empty ideology of "female empowerment" that is the corporate line of Mattel.