2025 Film Challenge

I'm going to eventually watch it anyway, just wondering what others thought of it

Here's the short version:
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo: Fabulous
Its point of view on women's rights: Very upper class/privileged/meh
It's forgiveness of men who would have sex with a literal toddler: inexcusable

It's sitting at a for me currently.

got a few more sections done. atp

B. Eat, Pray, Love
[watch a film matching each of the themes listed below]
1. a film centered around food - The Royal Hibiscus Hotel (2017)(2.5/5)
"A solid watch with some unintentionally unfortunate scenes."

2. a film in which religion is a central theme - Daughters of the Dust (1991)(3.9/5)
"My favorite of the section. It's a beautiful movie that doesn't explain itself. I liked everything about it: how it was shot, the casting, the symbolic symbolism. Everything"

3. a romantic film - Paris Blues (1961)(3/5)
"I liked it. But it was some obvious tweaks to it. I felt like it was meant for Diahann Carroll to be paired with Paul Newman, but the times made that a taboo. Their chemistry, IMO, felt more interesting and Poiter felt like a toss in so Carrol wasn't a 3rd wheel. A good movie, that can only get better with more views"

Round up the usual suspects
watch 10 films from the same genre - Documentary

1. Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali (2021)(3/5)
   "Nice presentation. But I didn't get any new information out of it really."
   
2. Luther: Never Too Much (2024)(3.5/5)
   "I feel like Luther is an underappreciated talent and while I did enjoy the documentary and found it informative, I wanted more."
   
3. Daughters (2024)(4.3/5)
   "A bittersweet documentary about a father/daughter dance in prison. I really liked it despite it making me cry."
   
4. Tongues Untied (1989)(4/5)
   "An great set of performance pieces and spoken word. Really a time capsle to the late 80's/early 90s Black LGBT life. It's a must watch"
   
5. Summer of Soul (2021)(4.6/5)
   "My favorite of this category. It's about a music festival that happened before my existence and it made my wish I existed so I could be there. Made by a true to heart music lover and it shows in every way."
   
6. Black Barbie: A Documentary (2023)(3.3/5)
   "I found this very informative regarding the history of black barbie dolls, but it kind of losses momentum near the end."
   
7. Black Wax (1983)(4.2/5)
   "My second favorite documentary. The things presented in this are just relevant today as in was 42 years ago when it released and that's so unfortunate."
   
8. Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (2025)(4.6/5)
   "While I did give this one a higher score than Black Wax, it's solely due to the overall presentation. Questlove makes really good music documentaries but I found everything said in this one was also said in the UnSung episode about Sly Stone. It's just presented better. I dug it none the less."
   
9. Dahomey (2024)(3.8/5)
   "A very creative documentary on stolen artifacts from the Dahomey people by the French being return to Benin. Half is spent with 26 of 7,000 of artifacts returned. Enough said."
   
10. Descendant (2021)(4.3/5)
    "My third favorite. About the descendants of the last slaves bought to American and the search for the ship that bought them here illegally. Like Dahmoey, its a reclamation story and what it means. By the end I'm not so optimistic."

Just finished:
H. The Duality of Life
[watch a film prominently featuring each of the services listed below]
1. a film featuring a wedding: The Quiet Man (1952) - John Ford
2. a film featuring a funeral: Lirica ucraina (2024) - Francesca Mannocchi

I think you're a lot kinder to that movie than I was. The toddler part was cringe. I felt there was more to it than what was presented in that film and that was my gripe. It felt unexplored.

Yeah, it’s a weird line it toes here. I don’t recall if Ruffalos character was aware of her “condition”, I seem to thibk he accepted her behavior as quirky. She has an adult body, after all.

For a film I had heard touted as feminist, I felt it missed the mark. I couldn’t stand Emma’s character. There were also some ideas in this film that were largely ignored.
For example, when she confronts Dafoe over his latest “project” and contemptuously calls him a monster….and that’s it. Nothing more dealing with whether his actions are right or wrong (hint: it’s wrong) or any philosophical debate over what he was truly trying to accomplish. It just seemed like he was bored.

And don’t get me started on her so vc allows journey of self discovery. There’s a scene where she is brought face to face with social issues and it’s glossed over, essentially.

My score may drop as I actually write about it.

According to this film, equality and feminism and freedom and basic humanity is 97% about if you're getting the kind of sex you want. And the way that Stone's character is able to just glide past so many social ills (racism, oppression, wage slavery, sexual exploitation, disease, etc) reflects poorly on the film, in my opinion.

A friend of mine, after seeing the movie, wrote "You know, for a movie about the sexual exploitation of a child, we sure saw a lot of that child naked."

I found it really bizarre that Ruffalo's character (who didn't, in my recollection, know about her situation) is the villain, while two characters who know they are talking about wanting/having sex with a BABY are

This is exactly my point, yeah. All of this. Exploited by her “creator” and his so called love interest.
Bella is selfish, as well. She treats Ruffalo coldly, as well as her love interest (I forget his name) and is more interested in learning about the world. Which would normally be fine, but they don’t really go into any real lengths of her exploring said world in any meaningful way, especially any of the social issues you already described. Anytime they’re broached, they’re pushed aside for more gratuitous nude scenes involving Bella. Then it just becomes Bella wants more sex. I forget what she called it.

Now listen, I like nude women. I do. However, I know the when it’s merely being exploitive, which is was in many cases here, rather then being sensual. If it doesn’t do anything for the film, it doesn’t work for me. This reminds me of our conversation about the nude women on the horse on Nosferatu.

So many opportunities they could have explored but didn’t. So disappointed.

I don't mind Bella being selfish, because she's basically a child. However . . .

It's not so much that I disliked the nudity, but more that the film did a poor job of tracking the mental maturity and "age" of the character. In one moment her dialogue suggests that she is something like an 8 year old, and in another it seems like she might be more of a teenager.

The effect, for me, was not knowing if I was watching a child, teenager, or woman engage in those acts. And while her activities are always portrayed as consensual, that sort of doesn't matter. A 5 year old can "consent" to a sexual encounter with an adult, but we all recognize that in such a case, it's not really consent.

And it didn't feel like that was the point at all. It felt like the movie, at many times, just didn't want us to think about her actual age. And it can all be hand-waved away by the vagueness of the "science", because she's clearly developing, mentally, at an accelerated rate.

The movie loses points by not really dealing with her mental age, and focuses entirely too much on her physical age. It just kind of doesn’t want to address the moral implications of it. That would have made a better idea for the movie, but alas, it isn’t the movie we get.
I’m just remembering it’s based on a book, right? How much does the film differ from the book, I wonder?

There is something to the idea--which I do think is intentional---about how women are infantilized by men and how Bella's relationship to the men in her life changes as she moves from being an actual infant to an adult woman.

And the joke, of course, is that a woman who literally acts like a child (impulsive, blunt), is not considered acceptable in society and is mostly impervious to the emotional manipulation tactics used by men like Ruffalo's character.

But keeping so much of the focus on Bella's sex life---and skirting issues like sexual assault, pregnancy, disease, violence---that would impact a woman living the way Bella is living is cowardly. In fact, I would say that rather than being empowering, the portrayal of Bella implies that women won't be victims of violence/exploitation if they just, you know, don't let men exploit them or hurt them. As if it's the case that if a woman just wants to be independent enough, wants to be a doctor enough, wants to have casual sexual relationships enough, society will simply get out of her way. When the real answer is that Bella gets all of those things because she is a rich person.

i considered it and even started drafting a list of possible titles, but i'm basically never here these days so i decided not to go through with it. i hope you understand.

__________________
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

>However, I know the when it’s merely being exploitive, which is was in many cases here,

Disagree. The nudity was to represent a person who isn't raised with the usual hangups we have about nudity. Heck, your comment here is itself an example of those hangups where we act like someone ripping their clothes off is this big sacred act...the movie is asking, "is it?"

Not to mention that I felt a lot of the nudity was for the sake of comedy with many of the scenes chuckling at the silliness of sex in general. It also was kind of refreshing to see sex portrayed as just this fun activity with the characters laughing and enjoying themselves...the scene where she tells the joke beforehand was excellent. I feel this is much more realistic in terms of my experience anyway.

>The movie loses points by not really dealing with her mental age, and focuses entirely too much on her physical age.

I kind of disagree here. I felt the mental age thing was handled by her going through dramatic phases of being a teenager at light-speed fashion. She discovers sex and loves it like a teen but then starts getting an urge to learn as she goes into her late teens and early-20s. Then it's about having to make a living and reconciling with her past which is all part of her maturation which is going at a high speed. And a big part of her is not knowing about societal "do's and don't's" so these things never hold her back.

That said, I don't think it was a great movie. Music was weird, a lot of humor didn't work, the backgrounds often looked too fake, the entire Paris part of the movie drags, the Carmichael character is plain awful, and the ending was just silly. But her character concept and the performance worked for me.

I completely understand. I hope this is a temporary hiatus and that we'll see you return in future challenges.

I finished two sections! 🥳


K. The End is Nigh

[watch a film matching each of the world-ending themes below]

1. an environmental collapse film
Flow (2024)
2. a film about Artificial Intelligence
Alien: Romulus (2024)
3. a film concerning nuclear issues
Sonic 3 (2024)
4. a totalitarian control film
Wicked (2024)


M. Are we there yet?
[watch one film for each of the miscellaneous challenges listed below]
1. a film taking place in a single day
Spider Baby (1967)
2. a psychedelic film
Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
3. a narrated film
Mufasa (2024)
4. a film in theaters
Dog Man (2025)

Given that films for category C are not plentiful, I may as well mention I accidentally bumped into one of them last night by watching The Beguiled, which takes place at a boarding school for girls.

Buddies is exactly the kind of movie I do this challenge for: one that I might have otherwise passed by, but I'm glad I didn't.

I remember being not too impressed by Philadelphia when I saw it back in 1993. The first big Hollywood treatment of AIDS, with non-threatening Tom Hanks as Andrew Beckett in the lead, it is certainly well-made and well-acted, but unconvincing at its heart, especially in its glancing treatment of Beckett's romantic partner. (To be clear, I'm sure this was a deliberate choice, to make it "safe" for the median American.)

So Buddies, the first U.S. film about AIDS, in 1985, is refreshing in its authenticity. It is a very simple story: Robert Willow is in a hospital, dying of complications from AIDS, and the Gay Men's Health Center has sent David Bennett, a volunteer, to be his "buddy." (It was not uncommon for those stricken with AIDS to be more or less abandoned--fear of contagion, fear of death, fear of association--so having a person who would visit was a genuine mitzvah.) These two are in fact the only characters who really appear in the movie, other than in photos, videos, or dreams/flashbacks. Everyone else is either a voice on the phone, or seen from behind or through glass, or otherwise obscured. It emphasizes the isolation but also the closeness of these two people.

The acting is a bit wooden, and the film is cheaply made, but it is also utterly sincere and deeply felt. It does not shy away from the romance and sexuality of these two men but neither does it overly dwell on it. And though both are gay men, they are clearly very different in important ways, and that tension drives the narrative of the film. Highly recommended as a bittersweet, honest portrayal of a very specific time in this country.

It leaves Criterion at the end of the month--I watched it for being set in a hospital, but I think it would also work for romance or narrated film (David keeps a journal that he narrates, and there are letters).

I really liked Buddies as well.


Here's my review of it.

The director and one of the lead actors both died of AIDS in the years following the film.

Just finished this category!
B. Eat, Pray, Love
[watch a film matching each of the themes listed below]
1. a film centered around food: Babettes gæstebud (1987) - Gabriel Axel
2. a film in which religion is a central theme: La moglie del prete (1970) - Dino Risi
3. a romantic film: Paris, je t'aime (2006) - Bruno Podalydès, Gurinder Chadha, Gus Van Sant, Joel and Ethan Coen, Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, Christopher Doyle, Isabel Coixet, Nobuhiro Suwa, Sylvain Chomet, Alfonso Cuarón, Olivier Assayas, Oliver Schmitz, Richard LaGravenese, Vincenzo Natali, Wes Craven, Tom Tykwer, Frédéric Auburtin and Gérard Depardieu, Alexander Payne

This made my day. I will catch Buddies soon.