cappiethadog Reviews

The 15:17 to Paris (2018)

We are all both

[4/10 · 8 February 2022]

Ayoub El-Khazzani(Ray Corsani) could have been an ordinary guy from Morocco, just another anonymous passenger from Brussels boarding a train bound for Paris. El-Khaddani had a backpack, a rolling backpack. So it was heavy. He headed straight to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes passed. So he had an issue unrelated to his bladder and bowels. An old married couple, seatmates on a train, converse about the exorbitant amount of time that the occupant is taking. They're not panic-stricken, or display even the slightest hint of anxiety; they're just curious as to what the delay could possibly be. Both know the man comes from the Middle East; his face would have been visible since the locality of their seats is en route to the lavatory. Without any urgency, without nary a clue about the forthcoming melee, Mark Moogalian leaves his wife Isabelle, and forms a two-man line. The only indication that El-Khazzani gets dealt with differently, as being the "other" rather than a fellow compatriot, is the space he's given. Potential terrorist never gets voiced aloud from either man's lips, but perhaps it crosses their minds, since it's customary, a situational norm to knock on the door to check up on a person's welfare. Statistically speaking, the stomach flu or drug use involving paraphernalia are the more likely explanation for the fifteen-minute wait. The elephant in the room, the point the filmmaker makes, is that nobody wants to be accused of racial profiling. Nearby, Spencer Stone, Alex Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler, in Clint Eastwood's "The 15:17 to Paris", adapted from the Jeffrey E. Stern autobiography "The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, and Three American Heroes", are on stand-by for their date with destiny. In "The Mule", Earl Stone(same surname as Spencer), a 91-year-old drug runner for an international drug cartel, complains to the FBI agent and then, a motel occupant banging on the vending machine, that their generation spend half their lives staring into a tiny screen. Call it divine intervention, or a technological glitch, but Spencer's need for cell phone reception becomes the grounds for their serendipitous move to the first-class section, where passengers have access to hi-fi.

The narrator, in "Homeland Elegies", a bildungsroman by Ayad Akhad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, recounts his life as an American; the many challenges that it poses when your outward appearance diverges from the platonic ideal. The narrator, a second-generation Pakistani, summons the ghosts of NYC, the course of his day on 9/11, when Asha, an off-and-on girlfriend, discovers her bed partner's cross when she accidentally knocks it off from the top of his medicine cabinet. The narrator, a Muslim like Asha, but non-practicing, had stolen the crucifix from a pastor who runs the Salvation Army thrift shop. No different than any New Yorker, concern over a loved one, a nephew attending NYU, draws the narrator to the periphery of ground zero. Sealed off by law enforcement, in the interim, the narrator falls in line for an impromptu blood drive, where a watchful man, an angry man behind him, starts an interrogation about his background, which results in the usual racial epithets. The pocketed cross never leaves the narrator's neck in the intervening months, he explains to Asha. His father, a well-respected heart specialist, once treated the former president for a condition called Brugada arrhythmia, and ends up being an unlikely supporter during his ex-patient's candidacy. Like father, like son; donning the most American of signifiers is no heretical act to the assimilated Pakistani-American, who needs the cross to stave off the collective animosity that sometimes made itself exquisitely explicit to the narrator, despite his appetite for capitalism and secular lifestyle. Ayad Akhad doesn't want "Homeland Elegies" to be agitprop, a screed, but readers can suss out for themselves how the narrator's faux-Christianity perfectly mirrors his father's hero's enigmatic spirituality. Neither man, wanting access to the toilet, sooner rather than later, in "The 15:17 Train to Paris", wants to be that guy, a xenophobe who makes the unfounded judgement that all Muslims are terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers. The Thayls train attacker could have been the narrator in "Homeland Elegies", just another guy, whose only crime is having a different complexion from you and me.

Fundamentalism is ubiquitous to all major religions. It's inevitable that faith will produce the occasional zealot, regardless of geography of denomination. Spencer Stone and Alex Skarlatos were next-door neighbors; they attended the same suburban Christian middle school. Their moms were best friends. The third musketeer, Anthony Sadler, the alleged troublemaker they meet in the principal's office, is of African-American descent. Instead of the bad egg school officials purport Anthony to be, most likely his multiple stints with detention is a result of the lone black kid's retaliation against school bullies. Spencer invites Anthony home where he meets Joyce(Judy Greer), his mother, a single parent like Heidi Skarlatos(Jenna Fischer), Alex's mom, who both have no objections toward their sons' predilection for prop guns. Anthony is allowed to keep a rifle, albeit unloaded and no father to hunt with, in his room. Instead of shooting hoops or playing video games on an Xbox console, they simulate war, man-to-man combat, in the woods. Where firearms are concerned, these boys could have channeled their preoccupation with weaponry into the real world with dire consequences. Quite pointedly, Spencer's nightly prayer starts like this: "Lord make me an instrument of your peace." Peace is a homonym. In Gus Van Sant's "Elephant", the worst case scenario materializes. Even though Joyce, Spencer's mom, says things like: "My god is bigger than your statistics," when a schoolteacher suggests that boys with single moms experience pronounced emotional problems later in life, her son, as well as Alex, are well-adjusted boys who turn out to be men of exemplary character, due in no small part to their serious, but not rigid religious upbringing. With great subtlety, the filmmaker suggest shadow selves of both men. When Spencer tells Anthony that he's going to enlist and save lives as an Air Force paratrooper, the college undergrad scoffs at the notion, pointing out a suggested checkered past; his high school reputation as a quitter in athletics, and quite possibly, in scholastics, too. Lack of depth perception disqualifies him from being a Pararescueman. A lesser person could have become disgruntled, go wayward; go to war with society. Be in the attacker's shoes. On the train, after the American tourists subdue the Moroccan terrorist, Alex picks up the man's automatic assault rifle and goes searching for potential accomplices. He gives the passenger a fright, mistaking Alex for the shooter, which is the whole point of "The 15:17 to Paris", if you're looking for a subtext. "He's one of the good guys," a woman calls out, recognizing him as the man who helped her elderly father board. Sometimes the Americans are the good guys. Spencer Stone, Alex Scarlatos, and Anthony Sadler became international heroes in France, decorated each with the Legion of Honor medal for incomparable bravery.

Sometimes the Muslim is a writer, just another law-abiding citizen categorically associated, unfairly, with the men who flew a plane into the World Trade Center. Sometimes the Muslim comes at you with a knife, pistol, assault rifle, and 300 rounds of ammunition.

Protagonists and antagonists, in regard to race or creed, are interchangeable.

Anybody can be a hero.

Anybody can be a villain.

The Mule (2018)

He just smelled flowers

[7/10 · 1 February 2022]

"I have more in common with these people than my own spoiled rotten family," Walt Kowalski(Clint Eastwood) grumbles to his reflected self in a medicine cabinet mirror. Sue(Ahney Her), in "Gran Torino", invites his neighbor to a party, and surprisingly, he accepts. But maybe it's not the shocking revelation that audiences perceive it to be. A throwaway scene, seemingly, in "The Mule", also directed by Clint Eastwood, based on the NYT article "The Sinaloa Cartel's 90-Year-Old Drug Mule" by Sam Donik, shows Earl Stone(Eastwood) making an unscheduled stop on the side of a highway to help an African-American couple change a flat. Right in the middle of a job, which echoes back to "Gran Torino", when Thao(Bee Vang) asks Walt for jumper cables during his wife's wake. Earl unwittingly refers to he man and woman as... When they take umbrage by the outdated labelling, the nonagenarian male looks astonished without a hint of self-knowing coyness. In "Gran Torino", Walt dismisses Thao replete with a slur as he slams the door on him, and yet, which is something the audience may miss, but not Sue, the war veteran is out in the hot sun helping out a neighbor on the saddest day of his life. His wife, whose kitchen Walt thrashes late in the film, was the racist. He's just politically incorrect; he has an off-color nickname for everybody, and that may describe horticulturist and raconteur Earl Stone, as well; culturally insensitive but not hateful in any meaningful way. At the outset of "The Mule", the day lily specialist encounters a colleague on the flower circuit before he takes his station at the fauna and flora convention. They trade barbs. The man calls him an _______. Earl acknowledges that his Mexican workers would agree with him. But when the internet forces Earl to foreclose on his nursery, twelve years after seeing the advent of online retail at that flower show, the audience can plainly see the respect in his small crew's eyes, and know that Earl is a good man; the same assessment Sue makes about Walt Kowalski.

"Just drive," Earl tells himself, when a guest at his granddaughter's engagement party slips him the phone number for a job opportunity. There is no naivety on Earl's part as to what sort of business he'll be partaking in. Uttering aloud: "Just drive," helps him compartmentalize, absolving himself from the ugly connotations that one normally associates with the drug industry. He's just the go-between, the mule; he doesn't make nor sell the drugs. The mantra "just drive" gives him permission. As a veteran, fighting in the same war as Walt Kowalski, he, no doubt, had his fair share of morally ambiguous days, so being an outlaw, an antihero, is nothing new to Earl Stone. In a pickup truck that has seen better days, Earl pulls up in front of a tire shop garage, nestled away anonymously in a busy industrial district. Right away, the audience knows that Earl is self-aware about playing his part, albeit small, in a criminal enterprise. The man holding a semi-automatic rifle doesn't rile him; it's part of the rogue landscape he was prepared for. It helps that Earl worked with Mexicans before; he employed illegals, but they were his underlings. Now the tables are turned; he's the employee, but the American will prove to be slow in realizing the change in the social dynamics of their interracial working relationship. Earl reprimands the tool-carrying crewmen as if he's in charge when they make plans for outfitting his truck with hiding places for the contraband cargo. Right from the start, Earl knows something that they don't, and the duffel bag stuffed with cocaine bricks gets tossed in the back alongside the pecan sacks.

Back in the halcyon days when his flower business was booming, Earl would make off-the-cuff border control jokes with his workers. The former day lily king still carries in himself an air of invincibility, conducting life on his own terms without being conscious that times have changed. For much of the man's married life, Earl Stone came and went whenever he pleased, abiding by his own schedule without any accountability or regard for the repercussions. Despite his estrangement from Iris(Alison Eastwood), his daughter, and barely being on speaking terms with ex-wife Mary(Diane Wiest), Earl still believe he has agency, confusing these drug dealers with his old crew, confusing these associates as friends. Any alteration made to his truck would drag Earl down to their level; he's just driving, after all, not participating in the drug trade as an entry-level employee. His skin power is a superpower; he's rendered invisible to law enforcement. On the third run, curiosity gets the better of him, so he pulls over and opens the bag. Behind him, a policeman checks to see if Earl is in need of any assistance. The cop has a dog. Earl doesn't fit any profile to the lawman that would arouse suspicion regarding the contents of his vehicle. A truck, modified or not, is no match for a German Shepherd. The cop should be wary about Earl when he pets the drug-sniffing canine, which is a tactic to throw the dog off a scent, but he lets him go because the old man is categorically a law-abiding citizen. Earl doesn't look like Tony Montana(Al Pacino).

In Brian DePalma's "Scarface", the Cuban emigre sees the scale of his business venture stateside when he and Omar(F. Murray Abraham), acting as surrogates for Frank Lopez(Robert Loggia), are invited to Bolivia and meet Alejandro Sosa(Paul Shenar), the kingpin. No doubt about it: Tony Montana is a violent psychopath, but in essence, "Scarface" is an immigrant-makes-good story, the pursuit of the American dream, albeit drenched in blood. That counter-narrative, however, gets subsumed whole by the official text in South America, in which the viewer can see the far-reaching ramifications of cocaine's illegality. Omar, a suspected informer, dangles from a helicopter, as seen through the lenses of Tony's binoculars. It doesn't phase him. He could be next. But the pros outweigh the cons. Likewise, in "The Mule", Earl Stone becomes a person of interest to the cartel. Earl earns an invite to meet Laton(Andy Garcia), the big boss, in Mexico. Admiring the head honcho's palatial estate, Earl asks: "So how many men did you have to kill to get a place like this?" He knows the answer, but like Tony Montana, the old mule lost his moral compass along the way because money is the most powerful drug on earth. "Just drive," his old mantra, turned into "just make money".

The glory years of his day lily business instilled in Earl Stone a sense of privilege, which manifested itself in the unsolicited advice he parceled out to his workers. Jose(Cesar DeLeon), Laton's highest-ranking foot soldier, whose job is being Earl's handler, doesn't intimidate Earl, similar to how Walt Kowalski never backs down from the Hmong gang members who terrorize his neighborhood. They're alpha males. Jose, on his first meeting with Earl, draws a gun on the war veteran, but the horticulturist can't bring himself to even flinch. He shares the same Harry Callahan DNA as Walt. As in a social setting as when they're collaborating on a job, when Earl makes frequent unscheduled stops of his own volition, the mule tries to engage Jose in a heart-to-heart talk, advising the career criminal on what his future plans should be. Jose was right when he first meets Earl and his colleagues: "Mules don't talk." Being American, to Earl, makes his different from other mules; he can talk without any regard for the hierarchy of the operation.

Over lunch, at a place where Earl wants his overseers to try the pulled pork sandwich, Jose tells the old man: "Perhaps you enjoy the moment too much." His whole life, Earl Stone lived by his own code of conduct without any regard for other people. His nonchalant manner clashes with the hazards of the job. Nefarious forces, a faction in Laton's crew, doesn't appreciate the disregard for their welfare, just like Earl's beleaguered ex-wife and daughter, are unappreciative of this disregard for their welfare, and enacts a regime change with one pull of the trigger. Gustavo(Clifton Collins Jr.), the new boss, is strict. Earl should keep his personal and professional life separated. It's the wrong time to go rogue, especially when he's moving the cartel's biggest haul yet, but the mule comes in from the cold, when Mary is on her death bed, waiting out her last days at home. In "Scarface", Tony Montana puts his mama(Miriam Colon) and Gina(Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), his younger sister, in danger by paying them a visit. Both men bring the potentiality for violence in the sanctity of the hearth and home. Earl has a cell phone provided by the cartel. What if it had a tracking device? His truck is parked outside the house. The whole family could have been murdered. Whereas Gina, lured by Tony's exciting mobster life, gets caught up in the prevailing maelstrom and becomes collateral damage from the gun of his brother's rival.

Mary, however, is a similar victim. If Earl was a real husband, he would have detected his wife's shortness of breath, and send her to a doctor as a preventive measure. But in a sense, Mary was dead years ago, a victim of emotional violence. Married to a man who stopped to smell the flowers.

Cry Macho (2021)

To be forgiven

[7/10 · 20 January 2022]

People have regrets, actions they want to take back. If you're an artist, sometimes you're afforded the luxury of apologizing in a public sphere. At the outset of "Cry Macho", Mike Milo(Clint Eastwood), a has-been rodeo star, is late for work at the cattle ranch, run by Howard Polk(Dwight Yoakam), who keeps the aging cowboy employed, even though it's been years since his horse trainer groomed a winner. On the radio, AM radio to be specific, since "Cry Macho" is a period piece set in 1979, the lyrics to Will Banister song "Find a New Home" tell the story of why the filmmaker had an interest in adapting the 1975 N. Richard Nash novel of the same name.

A year passes. Mike Milo returns home to find his old boss waiting for him. Despite being fired, Howard still pays for his expenses. Genre notwithstanding, "Cry Macho" bears a passing resemblance to "Rambo: Last Blood", directed by Adrian Grunfield, in which the rescue of a minor involves crossing the US/Mexico border. "Cry Macho" is the real "Unforgiven", Clint Eastwood's 1992 Academy Award-winning film for Best Picture, which came advertised as a treatise against violence. In this neo-western, there is no bloodbath climactic scene, as when Eastwood, playing William Munny, a once-notorious gunslinger, walks into a saloon and mows down seven men, including Little Bill Daggett(played by Gene Hackman) in cold blood. In "Cry Macho", Mike Milo carries no gun. Eastwood's antihero days are over.

If you're a cowboy, even a cowboy well-past his prime, you don't check into a Holiday Inn or cheap motel when you're in Mexico. You sleep outside on the prairie under stars with a ten-gallon hat to protect your eyes from the moonlight. In his macho days, "Cry Macho" would have been an action movie. Eastwood could have staged his search for Rafael(Eduardo Minett) with more flair, breaking into the boy's mother's mansion while the household is asleep, armed, just in case anybody wakes up. But Eastwood is a nonagenarian now, so he walks through the front door as an uninvited guest while there's a party in progress, and simply asks Leta(Fernanda Urrejola) about her son's whereabouts without a gun or grabbing her head at knifepoint. Howard, the cowboy's benefactor, was right to be concerned about his long-lost son's welfare. The mother is loose, a party girl, and maybe something worse, as suggested by Rafa upon laying eyes on his rescuer for the first time after authorities shutdown an illegal cockfight. He accuses Mike of being another predator, another associate of his mother who pimped him out for the night. After repeated god only knows how many emasculations, it's no wonder that he gets involved in a blood sport, and names his champion rooster Macho. The cowboy doesn't tell Rafael he's there to rescue him, "Cry Macho" is not an action movie, but in essence, that's what he's doing. In Gregory Nava's "El Norte", a Guatemalan brother and sister pay the coyote to get them over the border. Rafael has Mike Milo, who has enough of the old Clint Eastwood persona to let the audience know that the crossing will go with hardly a hitch.

On the run from Aurelio(Horatio Garcia Rojas), his mother's goon, both man and boy take refuge in a church. Mike Milo is agnostic, similar to his predecessor Walt Kowalski in "Gran Torino", Clint Eastwood's 2007 film about a war veteran learning to get along with his Hmong neighbors and community. Mike dismisses Rafael's protestations over treating the house of worship as a cheap motel. It's no coincidence, perhaps, that the boy has a pet rooster. In "Gran Torino", Walt calls his neighbors "barbarians" after witnessing their religious practice of sacrificing the bird. Quite pointedly, his detestation for the people next-door is matched by their matriarch, simply known as Grandma(Chee Thao), who wants the curmudgeon to "strut away" like a "rooster". Walt is the last American in a neighborhood overrun with ethnic diversity. Likewise, Mike Milo is a stranger in a strange land. The rooster acts as a motif, a bridge between both films. Macho is what Rafael names his champion cockfighter, a killing machine, in the boy's estimation. The old man laughs at his young friend's definition of masculinity, which acts a demythologization of Clint Eastwood's career, in which the filmmaker/actor killed his fair share of men. "That's the most exciting story I ever heard," Mike tells the kid with more than a little derision in his voice after being regaled with the rooster's origin story. As a filmmaker, violence no longer interests Eastwood. At the road trip's outset, when Rafael stows away in the backseat of his Chevy truck, Macho announces their uninvited presence as he drives back home. Rather than rescue the boy, he heeds Leta's hands off warning and is headed back to the border, leaving Rafael to fend for himself. Like Walt Kowalski, initially, the American isn't going to stick his neck out for a foreigner. In "Rambo: Final Blood", John Rambo(Sylvester Stallone) is saving his own blood, a niece, and puts himself in constant life or death situations. So anyway, Macho is riding shotgun; the rooster occupies the passenger seat, which semotics-wise, for the filmmaker, acts as a mirror image of his antihero past. The backseat, representative of his filmic history(spaghetti westerns, police procedurals, etc.) is where he wants Macho seated, framed in a rearview mirror, because the filmmaker's macho days are over. Likewise, in "Gran Torino", after Walt befriends Sue(Ahney Her), the niece of his dreams, he mentors her younger brother Thao(Bae Yang), who is targeted by gangbangers. In the war veteran's own words, he wants to "man him up", so Thao can face his enemies, but he doesn't take the boy to a firing range for target practice. Walt doesn't teach Thao how to load a 44-cal. Magnum revolver. Walt mentors the boy like a grandfather, not a vigilante. He takes Thao to an old school barber, Martin(John Carroll Lynch), where the young blood, who lives in a house of women, to learn the art of guy-talk, as a training ground before the war veteran introduces him to Tim Kennedy(William Hill), his friend and foreman on a housing construction site, for an honest-to-goodness blue collar job. Likewise, in "Cry Macho", Mike Milo picks up a gun only as a last resort, when Aurelio catches up to them.

In both films, "Cry Macho" and "Gran Torino", the filmmaker doesn't assume, but rather, knows there are good people, not just bad, in any ethnic group. Whereas Walt Kowalski takes an instant liking to Sue, who senses that his neighbor's misanthropy applies to everybody, not just her own people, Mike falls hard for Marta(Natalie Travern), the widowed owner of a desert inn. He finds other lodging, realizing his cultural insensitivity when the woman tells him that he can't be sharing the same quarters as the Virgin Mary. Mike doesn't protest. Just like Walt, in "Gran Torino", when Sue tells Walt that the soul resides in the top of a Hmong's head, so you don't touch her people there. Eastwood, as a filmmaker, dispels the notion of the ugly American stereotype. When their gets repaired, Mike finishes the job, delivering Rafael to the US/Mexico border where the boy's father waits on the other side. Back at that Mexican desert town, Mike had taught the boy another way to be macho, breaking wild horses. Before Rafael crosses over, the rooster exchanges hands, having learned the lesson that violence isn't how you prove your manhood. It's a loaded joke, when Clint Eastwood as Mike Milo asks: "Are you sure? He might end up as barbeque." The wizened filmmaker no longer believes in killing either. Being macho is an identifying feature of his on-camera persona that he wants to burn in effigy, to turn into barbeque.

That's because his Harry Callahan days are over. Walt Kowalski never backs down from a clash, so, of course, he is going to retaliate against the Hmong gang after they shoot up his neighbor's house and harms Sue. Referencing the vigilante character of yesteryear he played in Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry", Wally stands unafraid outside the gang's hideaway and "shoots" all of Thao's enemies with a gun fashioned out of thumb and index finger. The scene references "Unforgiven", of course, as a correction. It's a suicide mission. Wally reaches for his lighter, fooling the boys into thinking he's armed and purposely allows himself to be gunned down Bonnie and Clyde-style, which is to say, a lot. At confession, just before Wally turns himself into a human sacrifice for the Hmong neighborhood, he unburdens himself of past transgressions to Father Jankovich(Christopher Carley), but leaves out his war record. He doesn't want to be forgiven for that. He wants to pay the price.

Without calling attention to itself, "Cry Macho" works as a penultimate film of an unfinished trilogy about pacifism. Mike Milo doesn't flee Mexico as soon as he reunites father and son, but retreats to Marta, because the old school cowboy's instincts are right. Marta is a good person.

On the Rocks (2020)

Imitation of life

[9/10 · 16 December 2021]

It's fun to speculate what Bob Harris(Bill Murray) whispers to Charlotte(Scarlett Johansson) in confidentiality out of earshot after he spots the ingenue in a crowd from his running cab, and chases her down. It's definitely not: "Whenever you return to the states, call me." The famous Hollywood actor is attracted to the much-younger woman, and it would have been so easy for this man with all his money and power to seduce the newlywed, but Bob Harris is a principled man with set boundaries in matters of the heart. Sure, the guy isn't infallible. The lounge singer(Catherine Lambert), more than likely, isn't his first rodeo, in regard to sex outside the marriage. The issue is love; he doesn't love the Sausalito frontwoman; he loves Charlotte, but he has a moral compass, and knows that a physical relationship would ruin the purity of the idealized love he has for her. Under different circumstances, they would be a match made in Tokyo, Sometimes, love isn't enough, though.

Nearly twenty years after "Lost in Translation" reinvented Bill Murray into a first-rate dramatic actor with unforeseen gravitas, Sofia Coppola reunites with the former SNL star in "On the Rocks", this time starring as Felix, an aging womanizer who would have no qualms about sleeping with Charlotte. As Bob Harris, Felix would take delight in having international fame, as well as exorbitant wealth in his arsenal to seduce nubiles and cougars alike during his charm attacks. Laura(Rashida Jones), the older daughter, adores Felix, warts and all, and compartmentalizes all of his failures as a father and wife to her mother, until the limits of unconditional love can't account for the residual wreckage that his extramarital transgression created. The age difference Bob Harris and Charlotte, more or less, corresponds to Felix and his daughter. He tells Laura, as the maitre d' at his country club shows them to a table: "He thinks you're my date," with pride. Felix wants everybody in the dining room to think that Laura is his lover. The screwball comedy part of "On the Rocks" features a pointed scene in which Felix embraces Laura to escape detection from security. The daughter is grossed out. So is the audience. In "Lost in Translation", it's not marriage vows, but Charlotte's youth that prevents him from making the first move. Bob doesn't have to. Charlotte makes herself emotionally and physically available in the karaoke club, selecting The Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket", which features the alluring line: "I've gotta have some of your attention, give it to me," sung in Bob's direction with panache; the shimmying shoulders that coincide with "gonna use my sidestep". When they share a bed in the hotel they're both staying at, Charlotte looks ready to spoon, whereas Bob lies down in a straight line as if there was an electrified fence between them; his desire betrayed only by the cupping of Charlotte's heal, hardly an erogenous zone, which technically doesn't violate the bylaws of a platonic relationship. At that same karaoke club, Roxy Music's "More Than This", Bob's choice, acts as an answer song to "Brass in Pocket". He croons: "More than this, you know there's nothing," as if reminding Charlotte, and more importantly, himself, that they have no future outside this finite amount of spent time together. Bob is a father and acts like one for the daughter of a father he never met, advising Charlotte about the joys and hazards of marriage, career, and children, proving Laura right about her charming, but morally reprehensible father. Felix is quick with a default excuse for his lothario past, insisting that man is "biologically hardwired to impregnate all females." This canned quasi-intellectual remark is made within earshot of their waitress(Natia Dune), a ballet dancer, that Felix flirts with shamelessly to his daughter's utter mortification. Laura points out, correctly, that it's him, not his caveman brain, who chose to cheat on her mother. Bob Harris, presented with the same opportunity, exercises self-control.

Charlotte is not one who suffers fools gladly. The Yale graduate feels nothing but contempt for Kelly(Anna Faris), a vapid Hollywood actress who openly flirts with John(Giovanni Ribisi), her husband, a celebrity photographer. People from the elite class, at times, confuse being rich with being smart, and Kelly, a millionaire many times over, thinks Charlotte doesn't get the double-entendre when she tells John: "I only want you to shoot me." Even worse, the husband doesn't defend her, probably because he feels like Charlotte's intellectual inferior, too. In a conspiratorial tone, Kelly tells the young couple that her alias is Evelyn Waugh. Charlotte scoffs at this, knowing full-well that the "Brideshead Revisited" author is an English male. With more subtlety, and this comes with age, Laura, blessed with two daughters, deals with mothers from her younger girl's preschool who exhibit the same toxic self-absorption and cerebral deficiencies by remaining silent as they ramble on about their banal lives with Proust-like detail. Whereas Charlotte was finding her way in the art world, searching for a medium that suited her, Laura is a novelist with one book under her belt, and listens to, not suffers fools gladly, because their mannerisms and comportment may turn up in her next publication. As of late, though, Laura has very little patience for Vanessa(Jenny Slate) and her tragic dating monologues, because Dean(Marlon Wayans), her husband, may be having an interoffice affair with Fiona(Jessica Henwick), his subordinate, whose toiletries she discovers in his suitcase after coming home from an alleged business trip. Also, when Dean crawled into their bed the night prior, he performed a double-take at Laura, as if mistaking his wife for the purported mistress, when her voice pulls him out of the waking dream. As it turns out, Dean was faithful all along. Felix's presumption that all males behave like him, fed into Laura's paranoia. Marital fidelity forces the audience to revisit the bedroom scene, now turned even more enigmatic. What was Dean thinking? What was the filmmaker thinking?

Sofia Coppola references Douglas Sirk's "Imitation of Life", the 1960 melodrama starring Lana Turner. The title, "On the Rocks", alludes to Sirk's opening credits sequence, with its showering diamonds(read: rocks) which collects at the bottom. Annie Jordan(Juanita Moore), a woman of color, has a daughter, Sarah Jane(Susan Kohner), whose light skin complexion allows herself the luxury of passing herself off as white. Unlike Sarah Jane, who suffers from feelings of self-loathing about her black genes, Laura neither hides nor overstates her biracial identity, since mixed marriages and miscegenation are no longer societal anomalies that the world entire frowns upon. Without ceremony, because the opening sequence, a wedding, isolates Dean and Laura from their respective families, it comes as a minor surprise when the audience first meets Diane(Alva Chinn), Laura's mother, and Amanda(Juliana Canfield), her younger sister, at the home of Gran Keane(Barbara Bain), Felix's mother, the very emblem of old money. It slowly dawns on us that Felix married a woman of color. Whereas Amanda is darker than her older sister and visibly African-American, Laura has a much lighter complexion and can pass as white. Long-divorced from Felix, the mother is still welcome in the Keane compound, and yet the audience can't help but wonder what Gran's first impression of Diane was. Did the grand madam interpret Felix's choice for a girlfriend as a rebellion against his privilege? Do the math as the filmmaker undoubtedly did, and you'll realize that Diane's timeline encompasses the period in which "Imitation of Life" takes place, when Annie Johnson, out of self-perseverance, hides the fact that Sarah Jane's father was white. She explains to Lora Meredith(Lana Turner) that Sarah Jane's daddy was "light-skinned". In the Sirk film, the mother outs Sarah Jane as black to her grammar school teacher and classmates by showing up to her homeroom unannounced with her daughter's lunch in an ungainly brown paper bag. Conversely, Laura lives in a different place and time. This is the echo. Running late for preschool, mother and daughter take their respective places on the floor while a group singalong is already in progress. Nobody bats an eye. But that's not an interpersonal situation; that's just polite society. What about one-on-one situations? Vanessa knows Dean is black; she sees the children, Maya(Liyanna Muscat) and Theo(Anna Chanel Reiner), but does she know that Laura is part-black? Does it matter to Vanessa? Would she reveal to a black woman every single intimate detail, sometimes blow-by-blow, about her tortured love life? What if she met Amanda?

What if the policemen who pull Felix over for not coming to a complete stop on a right turn and speeding knew that his passenger was black? Beneath the madcap comedic hijinks of a father and daughter in a red sports car convertible chasing down a taxi they witnessed Dean enter with Fiona, lurks the phantom of Douglas Sirk. There is no room for Sarah Jane because an Alfa Romero is a two-seater. Laura passes as white, but arguably, she's never aware that being black is something that needs to be hidden. Not like in "Imitation of Life", when Sarah Jane gets beaten when her steady beau discovers the truth. Quite possibly, that's what the bedroom scene is referencing, an inverse of the boyfriend's confusion in "Imitation of Life". "On the Rocks" breaks the fourth wall. When Dean kisses Laura, the husband forgets, not who, but what his wife is.

Coppola uses "Imitation of Life" as a pun; an inside joke. Imitating life is what Laura does for a living. She writes novels. Laura was born into a world of privilege. She doesn't understand what the average black person undergoes. Laura shouldn't be criticized for writing what she knows about, just like the filmmaker.

Candyman (2021)

The mirrored utopia

[7/10 · 8 December 2021]

Candyman(Tony Todd) and Helen Lyle(Virginia Madsen) knew each other in a previous life. Destiny predicated that the graduate student, doing her thesis on urban legends, would stumble upon the Cabrini-Green serial killer, in the original 1992 "Candyman", directed by Bernard Rose, based on Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden". Helen is the reincarnation of a land owner's daughter during the antebellum days. Her father commissioned an unnamed artist to have her likeness rendered in oils. Love, and miscegenation born out of love, beget a baby, which beget a lynching, and the legend of Candyman was born. To summon the one-time artist, you say his name five times, and the long-dead man with a hook for a hand will materialize, and slice you up, regardless of your age, sex, color, and creed. Helen, Candyman's patsy, made to look responsible for his new cycle of fresh murders, saves the final potential victim, a baby, from being consumed by flames in a bonfire, redeeming herself to Anne-Marie McCoy(Vanessa Estelle Williams), the baby's mother. At Helen's memorial service, in a scene somewhat reminiscent of Robert Mulligan's "To Kill a Mockingbird", the Cabrini-Green community pays their last respects to the woman, with the exception of wrongly believing that she was flawed. A young boy, Danny(Adam Phillipson), Anne-Marie's neighbor, tosses Candyman's hook into Helen's open grave, setting the stage for the film's pointed final scene. Trevor Lyle(Xander Berkely), Helen's philandering spouse, newly married to one of his students, absently mutters Helen's name the requisite five times in grief, and suddenly he has an invited, but surprising guest sharing his personal space in the bathroom. On the surface, especially back during the film's original theatrical release, most audiences probably presumed that Helen was avenging Trevor for his extramarital affair. Jordan Peele, the man behind "Get Out" and "Us" knows why Helen does Candyman's bidding. Directed by Nia Costa, this reimagining of "Candyman", has Peele's imprimatur all over it, even though he's not at the helm. This 2021 reboot gives Candyman his agency back, because although it's important for everybody to come together and fight for a common problem that ails society, it's equally essential for the filmmaker that he shows downtrodden people capable of fighting their own battles.

Two black female curators stand and talk in front of an art installation entitled "You Are In The Wrong Place". Brianna Cartwright(Teyonah Parris), a curator, is being wooed by another empowered African-American female, Christiana(Danielle Harrington), who works for an art gallery with more prestige. For Barry Jenkins completists, it's hard to miss the appearance of two black people, especially women, and a loaded sentence as aforementioned as mere happenstance. Jenkins' little-seen "Medicine For Melancholy" frames "Candyman", a jumping-off point for a new dialogue about black consciousness. Filmmaker Nia Costa not only updates "Candyman" for a divided America, but it also works as a prequel to the 2008 Barry Jenkins debut feature, since both movies deal with people of color in the art world and gentrification. Brianna is the woman Jo(Tracy Huggins) aspires to be. She is in the art world, a very exclusive club, but only on the periphery, as the girlfriend of an important curator. The door is open to her because she possesses documents for an artist her boyfriend, away on business in London, is currently working with. Micah(Wyatt Cenac), Jo's one-night stand, waits outside for her, safeguarding their parked bicycles. Their one-night stand is continuing well-past its due date. The political activist shoots down the assimilationist's suggestion that they drop in on MoMA. Micah's worldview sets forth the belief, to Jo's horror, that visiting museums is not "what black people do on a Sunday afternoon." As a compromise, Micah takes his date to MoAD, The Museum of African Diaspora. Jo tolerates his condescending lectures, because on some primordial level, she suspects that their city, billed as an unbiased one, is illusory, vaunted as one by the people in charge. For Micah, gentrification becomes the single-minded issue that his very existence revolves around. "You shouldn't have to be middle-class to be a part of this," he explains to Jo, who lives in the Marina, and without a trace of self-awareness, blurts out that "she didn't even know it was there," the MoAD, and other city landmarks honoring black history that they pass by on foot. Jo lives in a different world, mingles with a different class of people, and quietly thanks her lucky stars when she first enters Micah's modest one-room flat. The mirror plays a big part in "Candyman". It does so, too, in "Medicine For Melancholy". Jo promises Micah a song, but on the condition that he doesn't look at her. His face is the first mirror. Jo turns around, too, not wanting to deal with the second mirror, the literal mirror behind Micah's bed, before the classically-trained guitarist strums a decidedly bourgeoisie ballad for the proletariat, and feeling, perhaps, some chagrin about her newly transformed self. On an intellectual level, she knows that Black History Month falls on February because Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass' respective birthdays occur within the same week. In Micah's company, however, Jo recalls a time when she was one of "those people", like her paranoid date, that February got designated by a systemic apparatus because of its brevity relative to the other months. Estranged, to a degree, from the challenges of class and race that Micah deals with on a daily basis, Jo resembles Bernadette Walsh(Kasi Lemmons), Helen Lyle' partner from the original "Candyman"; an aspiring scholar with the same post-colonial notions that she's just a woman, not a black woman. Bernadette exhibits more trepidation than Helen about the methodology(first-person interviews with Cabrini-Green residents) being employed for their dissertation paper, because she doesn't self-identify with people from the inner-city. To Bernadette, Cabrini-Green may as well be another "country", as Professor Purcell(Michael Culkin), a rival academic studying urban legends, puts it. Bernadette has no words for the gang members they encounter as she and Helen approach the tenement building where the first Candyman murder took place. The interview with Anne-Marie, mother of Anthony McCoy, is solely conducted by Helen. Quite pointedly, Bernadette remains silent throughout the question and answer session, not having to act as mediator for the black Anne-Marie and the white Helen, since like Jo, she doesn't see herself in terms of black and white. It's Helen who interacts with the baby. Bernadette, as indicated by her quietude, can't wait to flee the apartment, and out of the projects. Anne-Marie is her mirror, whose reflecting gaze she averts; it's the luxury of privilege, and privilege can be colorblind.

In "Candyman", the 2021 remake, the filmmaker dramatizes the integrated world that both Jo and Bernadette dreamed about, a utopia where African-Americans can get ahead without any self-apparent evidence of a revolutionary hegemonic shift. Whereas Micah was a potential victim of gentrification, Brianna Cartwright, just like Helen Lyle, benefits from a ghetto remade and remodeled for enterprising transplants. Whereas Jo needed a mentor to get her foot in the door of the high-art scene, Brianna is one of its gatekeepers, a tastemaker who allows Anthony McCoy(Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), her boyfriend, to persevere despite being an artist in decline. The filmmaker, with a light touch, with great adeptness, shows how class differs from race. Helen Lyle, so infatuated with the personal and professional achievement of being a published writer, never stops to consider the subject's grisly nature and effect it had and continues to have on a debased subculture. Likewise, Anthony McCoy looks thrilled when a broadcast journalist mentions his name and artwork, in conjunction with the double-murder that claimed the lives of Clive Privler(Brian King), the museum owner, and Jerrica(Miriam Moss), his intern, to the horror of Brianna, and Troy(Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), her brother. Careerism, the filmmaker makes the fair point, encompasses all demographic groups. They're the first victims after Anthony had naively brought Candyman back into the corporeal world. Anthony's piece, entitled "Say My Name", is a bit of class-conscious satire, in which "Candyman" makes ironical use of the Janelle Monae song "Hell You, Talmbout", whose call-and-response form acknowledges the deaths of black men and women who were victimized by extra-judicial force from law enforcement. It's a fate, in which Anthony and Brianna both feel that they successfully circumvented, having chosen assimilation over self-imposed segregation a long time ago. Like Bernadette in the original "Candyman", Brianna makes a similar pilgrimage to Cabrini-Green, where she is accosted by William(Colman Domingo), a laundromat owner, who never left the inner-city, not after witnessing the murder of Sherman Fields(Michael Hargrove), a guy from the neighborhood cosplaying Candyman. William isn't Micah's analogue, but it's close; he resents Anthony's success in the art world, and punishes him for it. In "Medicine For Melancholy", Micah, after a night of clubbing, half-yells at Jo: "Everything tied to indie is tied to not being black." Brianna, Jo's stand-in, learns first-hand about Micah's assertion that Jo is not just a woman. "That's not how society sees it," Micah had insisted. For all that Brianna accomplished, there she sits in the backseat of a squad car being coerced by the arresting officer to lie about the circumstances around her boyfriend's murder. Anthony, the cause celebre artist, to Brianna's shock, turned out to be just another unarmed black man.

Brianna says his name.

Clifford the Big Red Dog (2021)

The naive dog

[4/10 · 23 November 2021]

Clifford is a good boy. For starters, he doesn't have rabies. Cujo, however, couldn't help it. It's biology. Film history, however, tells us how a dog can go bad.

Carruthers(Burl Ives) trains wild animals; his business supplies lions and tigers and all sorts of exotic beasts to the film and television industry. A R2D2 poster hangs on his office wall. Julie Sawyer(Kristy McNichols) has a problematic German Shepherd; he's an attack dog in need of reprogramming. For the time being, she watches Carruthers throw darts at his perceived enemy, who he refers to as a "tin can" during his tirade about how an "event film" such as "Star Wars" poses a threat to his profession. Samuel Fuller's "White Dog", released in 1982 then promptly shelved, proved to be prophetic. Seventeen years later, one can't help remember Hugh Grant as a masquerading Horse and Hound journalist embarrassing himself at a press junket in Roger Michel's "Notting Hill", when he asks Anna Scott(Julia Roberts) if there will be any horses(or hounds, for that matter) in her latest film, which happens to be set in space. In retrospect, the scene plays like a homage to Samuel Fuller, who passed away in 1997, two years prior. Fuller wouldn't be alive to see the advent of animatronics. The irony about CGI, of course, is that simulacrum, no matter how beautifully rendered, ends up looking less realistic than fabricated. The spirit of Fuller and industry professionals of Carruther's ilk is slyly suggested in Walt Becker's "Clifford The Big Red Dog". The audience can tell right away that the animals Emily(Darby Camp) and Casey(Jack Whiteall), her uncle, see inside the animal rescue tent are not computer-generated. Mr. Bridwell, the proprietor, piques the young client's interest with his menagerie's latest addition, a blood-red puppy. During animal control's sweep of an abandoned warehouse near a pier, they overlooked the canine anomaly, largely because he wasn't playing with his siblings or being tended to by the mother. For an ostracized dog, the red puppy has an affable disposition. Nature versus nurture, that's the subtext of "Clifford The Big Red Dog". The title is a pun. Fuller directed "The Big Red One", a WWII flick starring Mark Hamill. Bidwell tells the young girl that the puppy's growth dependent on how much love it receives, which is hardly accurate. Since "Clifford Th Big Red Dog" comes advertised as a children's movie, it may be harder for some to decipher, but stalking is stalking. That's why Bidwell doesn't leave any footprints on the Internet. There he is, a man who doesn't want to be tracked down, standing outside the house of a vulnerable tween at night. Against Uncle Casey's orders, Bidwell gifts Emily with the red puppy, magically transporting the dog into her backpack. Before settling on the name Clifford, the dog passively rejects Emily's suggestions of Floyd and Ebenezer as potential monikers, but violently reacts, mildly, to Ishmael, a biblical name, which the audience construes as a subtle nod from the filmmaker, perhaps, that he's aware how Clifford could be Hellboy's dog. The DC superhero, too, is fodder for the nature versus nurture dialogue; a different upbringing could have transformed Hellboy into the devil, a Hellman, if you will. Nurture will inevitably win the day in "Clifford The Big Red Dog", but Bidwell could not possibly know that at the outset. He grants Emily's wish for Clifford to be bigger. The almost Willie Wonka-like man puts the onus on the young girl in preventing Clifford from being a menace to society. A scholarship kid at a ritzy private school, Emily becomes an easy target for the rich girls, especially Florence(Mia Ronn), who bullies her at school and in cyberspace. Raised by a single mother, Maggie(Sienna Guillory), the absentee parent, we suspect, goes on numerous business trips and doesn't fully grasp the extent of Emily's alienation from her peers. Maggie's foreign accent, despite being American, is a dead giveaway, suggesting that she spends more time abroad than at home. It's an affectation which distances herself from both Emily and her younger brother, who explains to the fragile girl that he was his sister's millstone growing up. Maggie was forced to turndown a scholarship to Oxford, having been suddenly orphaned and forced into surrogate motherhood. The limitations of genre prevents Emily from expressing similar feelings of neglect to her uncle. Bidwell must intuit that Emily is a loner with enemies at school. When he grants Emily's wish, Clifford transforms into a potential enemy to remedy the cruelty of her rivals.

Puppies are stupid. Ask any dog owner. You have to train your puppy when they're young, or you have problems with far-reaching consequences going forward. The potential for catastrophic injury attributed to Clifford gigantism is only hinted at, comically, as when Uncle Jack can't stop the red dog's tail from thrashing him against his niece's bedroom walls. It's a fallacy that a puppy would know its own strength; it's a contrivance that Clifford never attempts to jump on Emily, which would result in instantaneous death, due to the impact of her head hitting the wood floor. In essence, the enormous dog is a naive attack dog. In "White Dog", Carruther's position on the fate of Julie's German Shepherd coarsens after witnessing the dog's unprovoked attack on an animal shelter employee. He double-downs on euthanizing the four-legged animal upon his realization that the lethal canine selects his victims with an achromatic eye. Keyes(Paul Winfield), Carruther's business partner, isolates this feral beast from the public sphere by staging an intervention of the German Shepherd's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde mind at his own private training facility. Similarly, Emily has a classmate, Owen(Izaac Wang), whose rich father(Russell Wong) arranges for Clifford to live in an animal sanctuary on another continent, away from the general public. "Clifford The Big Red Dog" doesn't seem to understand its own writing. Zack(Tony Hale), the CEO of a biotech company, whose mission is to feed the world by supersizing livestock, is the supposed villain, and yet, by imprisoning Clifford in a lab, people, like the ones who run(read: live) in body-enclosing bubbles that the red dog likes to fetch at a public park, don't have to worry about being trampled by a monster dog, albeit friendly, on the loose. Back at Owen's palatial compound, as preparations are being made for Clifford's transfer, the film hints at the incidental violence that the dog was capable of all along. He swallows Owen's pet, a bulldog, whole. Played as comedy, for laughs, the audience isn't supposed to wonder if Clifford may have been hungry. Emily further defuses the implied violence with a joke: "You don't see that everyday." Loose on the streets, since Clifford doesn't know his own strength, the possibility of this behemoth mutt accidentally killing somebody always looms. In "White Dog", a mother and child enter a grocery store, just escaping notice of the German Shepherd in the foreground, scrounging around for food. The absence of cats, in "Clifford The Red Dog", makes it easier for the filmmaker to obfuscate the unrealized collateral damage that a chase would entail. Miraculously, nobody occupies the sidewalk while Clifford whips around the corner to save a man who had fallen from his apartment complex roof. Ironically, Lyfepro has the right idea. The biotech company, under Zack's orders, confines Clifford to their lab facilities where he can't harm innocent bystanders. Whereas Julie, in "White Dog", seeks professional help to rehabilitate her damaged German Shepherd, Clifford, equally dangerous in his own right, if not more so, gets no training, only compassion from the audience, because Lyfepro utilizes the innocent dog as a lab animal, tapped for testing. Arguably, Clifford should be put down. Lyfeform is not your stock evil corporation we're trained to root against, Zack's odious personality notwithstanding, since the multi-national corporation's mission statement to feed the world is actually, on closer inspection, a noble one. Ethics aside, tagging Clifford as Lyfepro's property may be unscrupulous, but arguably, a necessary evil. Clifford is Emily's pet, but a dangerous pet, just like Julie's German Shepherd. Hypothetically, if Lyfegrow's scientists discover Clifford's genetic code, isn't the dog's sacrifice beneficial for the greater good? A stronger case for Bidwell as the real antagonist can be mounted. He made Emily sole custodian, a mere child, who in a different sort of film, would be a ticking time bomb with too much power and responsibility.

Emily is an outcast; she takes the bullying in stride, never allowing her temper to flare at the injustice of being in Florence's constant crosshairs. She resents Emily's poverty. The children's film isn't Gus Van Sant's "Elephant", but a dissonant subtext hangs in the diegetic air. During the cafeteria scene, Emily prepares Clifford's lunch, a platter of pigs in a blanket, an allusion, perhaps, to Dawn Wiener. What would "Wiener Dog" do to her enemies, the taunting cheerleaders at lunchtime, if endowed with a big puppy? Would she train him to attack like the German Shepherd's original owner, Wilbur(Parley Baer), who appears late in "White Dog" to reclaim his property from Julie. Armed with a ketchup bottle, Emily squirts the popular condiment on Florence's blouse, which looks like retaliation for the constant harassment, even though the badgered girl claims otherwise; an accident. The ketchup acts as performative blood. Clifford, like any dog, can sniff out its owner's enemies, and zeroes in on Florence as Emily's foe. He drools on her. The saliva is performative, too. Bidwell, in essence, gave Emily the means to avenger her peers, but like Julie in "White Dog", Clifford is destined to be a companion animal.

Clifford is a good boy. There are no bad dogs, only bad owners. Emily is a good girl.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Peeping Thom

[7/10 · 15 November 2021]

Eloise's grandmother is played by Rita Tushingham; she starred in Tony Richardson's "A Taste of Honey", the crown jewel of a genre that is commonly known as the "kitchen sink drama", the United Kingdom's answer to Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. Tushingham played Jo, who just happens to be the same age as Eloise(Thomasin McKenzie); eighteen. For the young woman from Cornwall, the world is her oyster. Jo, on the other hand, never knew she was in the prime of life. If you were from Manchester, you were poor. The casting of Rita Tushingham is the lynchpin for understanding "Last Night in Soho"; her presence creates the juxtaposition of then and now. Helen(Dora Bryan), Jo's mother, an aging party girl, encourages her daughter to attend art school after stumbling upon the girl's portfolio. Like the film itself, Jo is a realist; she realizes that in order to have a future, you need money. The absence of a college fund means that Jo can't afford to dream, and dismisses her mother's silly blathering about furthering her education. "Last Night in Soho", directed by Edgar Wright, utilizes "A Taste of Honey" as its main building block for his tale of two cities, cross-generational Londons, whose heroine, a fashion major, has access to, bouncing backwards and forwards in time without ever leaving her dormer.

"Last Night in Soho" opens with Eloise, an unapologetic Anglophile, dancing throughout the house to the Peter and Gordon song "A World Without Love". The filmmaker ably demonstrates how music can be time travel, not nostalgia, which in this case, is mutually exclusive, since Eloise was born thirty-eight years after The Beatles were all the rage. Audrey Hepburn is her fashion icon, this incoming London School of Design student . Striking a Hepburn-esque pose in front of "A Breakfast at Tiffany's" movie poster, the viewer can be excused for thinking that "Last Night in Soho" is a period piece. Merseybeat fanaticism describes Eloise's room, which probably was her deceased mother's room. An Austin Powers poster is not so much an anachronism, but rather it works as a visual bridge to the present, and delivers a slight shock to the system. Eloise's world is an insular one; she lives in a past that passed her by. And she sees dead people; her mother(Aimee Cassettari), who suffered from mental health issues, perhaps, lives inside the young woman, a question that isn't so much left open to the audience, but instead goes unaddressed. A possession would explain why Eloise lives out of time. From conversations with Peggy(Rita Tushingham), we learn that making it big in London was the mother's dream. Big in what goes unstated, but we suspect fashion design. Eloise is a girl in amber; her music: Petula Clark, Cilla Black, The Kinks, etc., becomes her music through inorganic means. The mother lives vicariously through Eloise as a sort of friendly parasite, informing the daughter's country mouse personality and the baggage of hereditarial clairvoyance, a gateway to the potentiality of a psychotic break. Unintentional or not, "Last Night in Soho" suggests the presence of a benevolent force informing Eloise's every move. Eloise "is" her mom. Saddled with a pretentious and downright vile roommate, Jodcasta(Synnove Karlsen), Eloise, born with the handicap of rural roots, knows that fitting in at the fashion school amongst all these privileged rich girls may prove to be impossible, and yet, knowing this, she reveals too much, oversharing with the other first-year students that her mother committed suicide. Are those Eloise's words? Or does the mother want to be accounted for and uses her daughter as a conduit? As Eloise's guardian angel, this narcissism has the effect of making her daughter conspicuous. Not only is Eloise known as the poor girl on scholarship, Jodcasta predicts that her roommate will crack when faced with adversity. At a nightclub, from another bathroom stall, Eloise learns the extent of the animosity against her is from her classmates with their gallows humor about suicide, and starts looking for off-campus living arrangements. Serendipitously, while on the phone with Peggy, an index card advertising an apartment vacancy sits on the floor near a bulletin board. The mother, perhaps, knocked it off to gain Eloise's notice. With its absence of contemporary signifiers, the room that Miss Collins(Diane Rigg) shows Eloise is period-specific to her mother's heyday. The old-fashioned furnishing suits the young woman fine. On an extra-diegetic level, the lives of Miss Collins and Eloise intertwine. As a prerequisite to be the old woman's newest tenant, the fashion major must pay two-months rent in advance on top of a deposit. Miss Collins, courtesy of the filmmaker's judicious casting of Rita Tushingham, could have been the slumlord who Jo's mother, Helen, stiffs in another life. It's just one of the many ways that "Last Night in Soho" riffs on "A Taste of Honey". More or less, Miss Collins describes how Jo and her mother escaped through the window of a one-room flat that Helen couldn't afford in broad daylight. It's a sort of filmic karma. Eloise pays the price for the sins of being poor in celluloidal Manchester.

Shelaigh Delaney wrote "A Taste of Honey" for the stage. Fans of The Smiths know Delaney well; she's the cover model for the compilation album "Louder Than Bombs". "This Night Has Opened My Eyes", an album track, quotes directly from the film; most famously: "The dream is gone but the baby is real," reflecting Jo's pregnancy. Controversial for its time, the unborn child's father is black, Bert(David Bolive) a naval cook on shore leave. Even more scandalous, Geoffrey(Murray Melvin), Jo's only friend who studies textile design, is openly gay. With John(Michael Ajab), in "Last Night in Soho", the filmmaker creates a composite of Bert and Geoffrey; he's a black fashion designer she studies alongside and socializes with outside the context of their classroom setting. He, too, is not posh; he calls North London his home, not so far from Manchester. Eloise invites him back to her room. There is no baby, but the baby is a real possibility. "Last Night in Soho" also makes use of the Morrissey/Marr song, but it never really gets past the title. This night, paraphrasing Morrissey, the first night Eloise spends under Miss Collins' roof, opens the girl's eyes. It's a different set of eyes, neither her mother's eyes nor her own, but the eyes of a young woman she believes to have been murdered. The image staring back at Eloise is not her own; it's Sandy(Anya Taylor Joy), an aspiring siren, Britain's next singing sensation. The filmmaker, perhaps, borrows an idea from Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich". Whereas Eloise is the puppet designing a retro pink chiffon dress that wows the instructor, the same sort of dress mom, the puppetmaster, would have concocted back in her day, as the aspiring diva, Eloise can only observe, like Craig Schwarz(John Cusack) who watches passively through the eyes of a young girl. Eloise is powerless to change Sandy's fate. Very quickly, the girl with romantic notions of days bygone gets to know the reality of the era she fetishizes. Sandy walks into the nightclub as if she owns the place, nonplussed by Cilla Black performing live just inches away from her, because she has decided to skip steps one and two. Sandy declares she is the next Cilla Black to anybody who's listening. Despite her insouciance and nonchalance, it's studied. London cracks her open, revealing the naif inside. Mistaking Jack(Matt Smith) for a potential manager, Sandy fails to notice that her audition at a lesser club is the venue for a burlesque revue; a breeding ground for prostitution. Jack manages her alright. He's Sandy's pimp. Rialto is a gentlemen's club. Jack puts her in the chorus, half-dressed, supporting the headliner, also half-dressed, for a prurient audience who couldn't care less if Sandy can carry a tune or not. In her own time, Sandy fell for the same lie, believing like Eloise does that London was like waking up to a beautiful dream; believing Petula Clark when she asks: "How could you lose?" from her international smash hit "Downtown", which reached #2 in the UK. Anya Taylor-Joy's rendition of Clark's signature song reminds the audience that it was written by a man. "Downtown", when slowed down, is reappropriated as a tool of propaganda, recruiting naive young woman to be the playthings for rich men who they ply with liquor and bed down. Arguably, Eloise's mother is not quite the benign figure that "Last Night in Soho" thinks she is. Like a pushy stage mother, she purses her own ambition to be a famous designer, using Eloise as the vehicle, at the risk of the young woman's mental health. "Last Night in Soho" establishes that London, although some people say otherwise, always was a dangerous place, full of murder and mayhem. The music lied to Eloise, The mother should have made the daughter aware of how patriarchal London was in her own time, and still can be.

It's a case of mistaken identity. The angry male ghosts, Sandy's old clientele, confuse Eloise for the prostitute, who turns out to be Miss Collins. For its twist ending, "Last Night in Soho" takes its cues from Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom". The starlets of the serial killer's snuff films don't fight back. Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, who inhabits a London that moviegoers in 1960 didn't want to reckon with. They believed in Petula Clark, too. The respectable-looking customer who buys photographs of nude women from the pharmacist, sharply resemble the sort of blokes with secret lives that take advantage of Sandy. In "Last Night in Soho", the woman fights back, and unexpectedly transforms the prostitute we feel great sympathy for, the antagonist, into an anti-heroine, a woman who hides the bodies in the floorboards of her apartment.

The filmmaker burdens the moviegoer with this question: Did these men deserve to die?

Do we want that burden?

Halloween (I) (2018)

Meta-halloween

[6/10 · 6 November 2021]

Michael Myers is flesh and blood, a real person, not some monster that manifests itself when we close our eyes. This is how John Carpenter and Debra Hill imagined Haddonfield, Illinois' most wanted. As a six-year-old child, in "Halloween", Michael(Will Standin) stabs his older sister Judith(Sandy Johnson) repeatedly with a knife he procured from their kitchen. The POV shot of the killer was John Carpenter's contribution to film language. For better or worse, every slasher flick that followed in its wake would adopt the same style in a murder event, usually involving a teenager. Dressed like a clown, still gripping the bloodied kitchenware, Michael's father asks: "What have you done?" It's not the boogeyman; it's a disturbed little boy. Adults aren't supposed to believe in the boogeyman. Children are irrational; adults are rational; that's how it was in 1978. When Laurie Strode(Jamie Lee Curtis) placates Tommy Doyle(Brian Andrews) that there is no such thing, this evergreen pagan holiday cipher, the babysitter needs some convincing of her own. She has seen the boogeyman herself, but neither Annie(Nancy Kyes) nor Linda(P. J. Soles), Laurie's two closest friends, can verify Michael's existence. The reality/fantasy binary starts in earnest. Up to this point, Michael Myers is corporeal. His assignation of boogeyman, merely a default position; Annie simply didn't see Michael in time when Laurie told her to look, as both girls walk home from school. Further proving Michael Myers' humanity, Laurie manages to lift up his mask during a struggle after having discovered her friends' bodies in Annie's house. A face is there: Michael at 21. In David Gordon Green's "Halloween", and the penultimate follow-up "Halloween Kills", the filmmaker has a cultural reason as to why the audience never gets a good look at Michael Myers, senior citizen.

It would turn out to be the last shower she'd ever take. Alfred Hitchcock shocked audiences when Marion Crane(Janet Leigh) was stabbed to death by the Bates Motel owner in the proto-slasher pic, "Psycho", starring Anthony Perkins. Hitchcock broke an implicit rule with the audience; you don't kill the protagonist midway through the film. Without Leigh, our rooting interest, moviegoers had nobody to identify with. More than likely, moviegoers of lore would be horrified, not delighted by a serial killer's actions. But that was 1960. As Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis' replacement, Scout Taylor-Compton, in the 2007 Rob Zombie reboot, lacked her predecessor's gravitas and modern audiences, arguably, sided with Michael Myers, cheering on the body count. Curtis' return is important; it repositions Myers back from antihero to antagonist. Under David Gordon Green, a Terence Malick acolyte, the franchise had a filmmaker who didn't make sadism the point. Green made a thinking man's "Halloween", but his genre-transcending ideas doesn't stop the narrative cold to announce itself; the ideas are seamlessly integrated, hiding in plain sight if you're looking for horror not only within the diegesis, but outside, as well. "Halloween" introduces us to a different kind of assassin, the character assassin. Jefferson Hall(Aaron Korey), a podcaster, has a partner-in crime, Dana Haines(Rhian Rees), who generously calls themselves investigative journalists in order to snag an interview with the famous Laurie Strode at her fortified compound. They're hacks; they specialize in true-crime. They're online hacks; professional journalists don't offer money over people's intercoms in order to gain access. The UK-based reporters sport British accents, which gives them a veneer of undeserved respectability. Before tracking Laurie Strode down, Jefferson tries to get Michael Myers on the record: "Say something," he implores. Dr. Ranbir Sartain(Haluk Bilgnier), a protege of the ate Dr. Loomis(Donald Pleasence) is more than pleased to host these quasi-journalists. The mainstream press stopped calling him. In the car, Jefferson expounds on his grand theory to Dana, which belies the sketchiness behind the whole enterprise. One monster beget the creation of another monster, Laurie Strode, the twice-divorced mother of one. Jefferson's rhetoric addresses the false equivalency phenomena that is part and parcel of our media landscape. Laurie doesn't like these award-winning podcasters' line of inquiry and shows them the screen door before they can complete their hatchet job. Up to this juncture, "Halloween" plays like an episode of the conspiracy-minded television series "The X-Files", created by Chris Carter. It's no accident that Jefferson's partner is named Dana. The conjuring is purposeful. For the time being, Jefferson and Dana are the focus of "Halloween". The legend of Michael Myers is like the latest X-File, which were nothing less than fantastical cold cases. Laurie Strode is their material witness. Fox Mulder(David Duchovny), however, believed in magic. Jefferson is explicitly un-Mulder-like, when he tells Laurie: "I don't believe in the boogeyman, but I do believe in Michael Myers." Mulder would believe in the boogeyman. Dana Scully would believe in Michael Myers, then come around to Mulder's side, whereas Jefferson Hall and Dana Haines believe in nothing. "Halloween", with this line of dialogue, deconstructs Michael Myers into a binary: man/myth. It calls attention to the fantasy industry complex, a term that author Kurt Anderson recently coined. Laurie changes course, understanding the damage these online journalists can do to her reputation, agrees with Jefferson that Michael Myers is indeed a human being. Filmically, feminist film theory taught us that women are punished. "Halloween" updates the feminists, showing us how final girls are punished for having the audacity to fight back. Jefferson can paint her as a vigilante and land her on the FBI list. In an homage to "Psycho", Dana is murdered in a gas station restroom. For good measure, Jefferson dies, too, in gruesome fashion. Running through the journalist's mind as he fights for every breath must be Michael Myers' inordinate strength, which belies his biological age of sixty-plus years. When it's too late, Jefferson Hall believes more in the boogeyman than the existence of Michael Myers. Unfortunately, he won't live to tell the tale on his podcast. Listeners would have decided for themselves if his attacker was man or myth, or more pointedly, if the online host is broadcasting fact or fiction.

David Gordon Green plays revisionist; he looked at the original "Halloween" and seized on Tommy Doyle's fear of "the boogeyman". Laurie, as is her job, being the adult in the room, puts the boy's fear to rest, ensuring him that there is no such thing. In the reboot, Laurie Strode is older and wiser, but ironically, sounds more like a child than adult, because she, too, believes in the existence of monsters who walk among us. And the irony is two-fold: Jefferson Hall and Dana Haines work in a medium in which fantastical tales about boogeymen and their ilk are accepted as conventional actualities by a devoted fabulist-friendly subculture. Fox Mulder was searching for the truth in a world that still believed in truth. "Halloween" reimagines Mulder and Scully as modern-day podcasters. Mulder has friends now. We all, to some extent, believe. Dr. Sartain, just like his mentor, Dr. Loomis, knows that he has a patient that science can't answer for. Sartain knows about that Halloween night in 1978, the night that Loomis fired several rounds of bullets into Michael's chest, then fell off the patio balcony. Lying prostrate on the lawn below, Loomis was confident about his patient's inability to survive, and goes to check on Laurie. When he returns to peer over the deck a second time, Michael is gone. You could say "Halloween" cheats. The audience saw Michael as a child, and briefly, as a young man, maskless, confirmation of his biological makeup. John Carpenter was breaking the law of physics. David Gordon Green, however, recognizes this disconnect from materiality. "Halloween", and it's sequel, "Halloween Kills", explores the fluidity between reality and fantasy.

In both movies, the filmmaker makes the purposeful creative choice of obscuring Michael Myers' face. Shot from behind, in the former, we can see that the serial killer is carbon-based; the unmasked man's appearance aligns with his chronological age. Balding, facial hair gone white, and a wrinkled forehead, are all signifiers of biological disintegration, and yet, David Gordon Green dislocates them from a face the audience can positively ID. In "Halloween Kills", the mugshots of two inmates materialize on a television in Mick's Bar; it's breaking news, a bus transporting Michael Myers and other prisoners crashed. None of the bar patrons are paying attention to this important clue that would help them with the manhunt, furthermore, Michael Myers' face is blurred, therefore protecting his identity from moviegoers. Anybody could be the boogeyman; no one man is the boogeyman. That's why the hospital mob goes after the wrong mental hospital escapee, the second inmate; chasing the wrong man is beside the point, though, the wrong man fits the hoi polloi's version of the truth that "evil dies tonight". Tommy Boyle(Anthony Michael Hall), all grown-up, leads the charge for justice. His truth is as valid as truth itself.

Laurie Strode knows her old nemesis better than anybody else. She commiserates with Sheriff Frank Hawkins(Will Patton), both laid-up and high on morphine in a shared hospital room. Laurie Strode understands that "you don't beat Michael with brute force," but rather, she implies, you beat the boogeyman by not believing in him. "Halloween" goes metaphysical. Michael Myers is a myth living in the real world.

David Gordon Green recycles the old line from John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", as a critique on the modern world.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

No. You print the facts.

Cryptozoo (2021)

I have a nightmare

[9/10 · 30 October 2021]

"Utopias never work out," Amber(Louisa Krause) muses quietly to herself, perched atop a high fence that Matthew(Michael Cera), her boyfriend, just scaled down and is waiting patiently, going on and on about utopias, trespassers both, and high. Set in the late-sixties, "Cryptozoo", directed by Dash Shaw, begins in earnest, two counterculture types, both vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War, just finished making love, and as counterculture types were inclined to do, they break into what they think is a government facility. Amber fights the good fight, but is preternaturally aware that their protestations against the establishment, inevitably, won't make an iota of difference. Amber is a realist, whose idealism has strictures; she fights the machine, knowing all the while that it's about the process, not the end result. Matthew is the dream, yang to her yin, the personification of our fixed idea of the flower child, a young American in the Summer of Love, believing with ardent certainty that civil disobedience will result in change. Contravention of federal land is a statement, and an adventure. "There might be magic here, Amber." It's not the pot. Matthew actually stumbles upon an honest-to-goodness unicorn. Amber verifies the existence of the horned horse. At first, the couple thinks they discovered a top secret nature preserve, but after Amber commits unicorn murder, avenging her boyfriend's death(don't try to pet a unicorn), she sees all these strange animals locked in cages. They're cryptids, defined as "an animal whose existence is unsubstantiated." Well, cryptids exist. With her equilibrium restored, Amber remembers what she is, a hippie, and overcompensated for bashing the unicorn's head in with a rock. She lifts Pandora's Box.

This is a couplet from The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter": "Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'/Our streets today/Burns like a red coal carpet/Mad bull lost its way." From the 1969 album "Let It Bleed", this antiwar song serves as the namesake for the David and Albert Mayles documentary about Altamont, the last stop on The Stones' American tour, a free concert, which historians point to as the end of the sixties; its coda, after the death of three festival attendees, one captured on celluloid, a fight that broke out between a gun-wielding concertgoer and a security man equipped with a hunting knife. Billed as another Woodstock, on the surface, Altamont seems to deliver as advertised. We observe the same sea of humanity, same musicians: Jefferson Starship, a Woodstock alumnus, performs "The Other Side of Life", same recreational drug use, and yet, the slapdash festival put on by Mick Jagger and his cohorts showed signs of tribulation in the works well before the fatal showdown between vigilante law and wayward law-abiding citizen. This time around, the drugs are harder; it's a different high, a buzz not accordant with the communal spirit. Crowd surfers were kept aloft at Woodstock. Ironically, nobody seems too concerned when they crash to the ground, since Altamont Speedway, located in Tracy, California, was less than an hour from the beach. Meanwhile, appropriately enough, Grace Slick never got to sing "Somebody to Love", the band's signature song, because a security guard knocked out Marty Balin, Jefferson Starship's lead guitarist, unconscious. Woodstock was a fluke. Lightning never strikes twice.

Cryptids, just like their real-life counterparts, belong in the wild, not locked-up in cages. Lauren Grey(Lake Bell) collects these singular animals, previously thought to have been mythical, for a sanctuary run by its founder, Joan(Grace Zabriskie), an heiress, who used her own inheritance to finance Cryptozoo. Both Lauren and her benefactor have blind spots. Neither woman can see that they're the lesser of two evils. Lauren's rival, Nicholas(Jay Ryan), pursues the cryptids for commercial gain; he sells them to the military, whose intentions, of course, are nefarious. The military is going to weaponize their magic powers. The filmmaker transposes the maxim that there are no bad dogs, only bad owners. The military will be bad owners. As a child, Lauren, an army brat growing up in Okinawa, was visited by the baku, a blue and orange elephant-like creature with the ability to eat dreams. Nightmares, in Lauren's case. Under governmental lock and key, the baku is scheduled to be reprogrammed, taught to eat good dreams. On this point, Joan echoes Matthew, with her idealistic talk about the potentiality of the counterculture movement ending Vietnam. Military brass could pervert the baku to suck out the dream that Matthew, and other romanticists in Matthew's vein, had about installing a utopian regime within the halls of power. Joan, however, differs slightly, because despite having this same benevolent wish, she wants a return on her investment; she wants to profit from exhibiting cryptids. Phoebe(Angeliki Papouli), Lauren's partner, a Medusa-like cryptid, who hides her bouffant comprised of snakes under a headscarf, is posited as a stand-in for the audience. The gorgon recognizes all the blind spots, both Lauren's and especially, Joan's. Touring Cryptozoo for the first time, Phoebe is taken aback by the homemade contraption Lauren utilizes to snare her assignments; a long pole with an adjustable loop at the end to tighten the cryptid's neck. "You use that?" Phoebe asks. So self-assured about the righteous design of Joan's vision, Lauren completely misses the shock in her partner's voice. The veterinarian doesn't realize that this instrument makes her look indistinguishable from a hunter, and the cryptid, her prey. Nevertheless, Phoebe likes her; she likes Joan less, one intuits. For all of the old lady's good intentions, her wealth begets privilege, and Phoebe, is made to feel like "the other". The gorgon feels this gap as the two women chat on the airplane, en route to Cryptozoo(read: theme park) in California. Noticing her engagement ring, the gorgon is made to feel like a freak, on par with an animal, when Joan rhapsodizes over the prospect of Phoebe birthing crypt-an babies with her human partner. Joan comes across sounding like a dog breeder.

Joan is something of a modern-day P. T. Barnum; her Cryptozoo resembles nothing more than a freak show masquerading as a sanctuary. The cryptids are locked in cages. The cryptids should be allowed to roam free on a large tract of land. Zoo employees shoot cryptids down with a water hose; these mythical creatures are treated no differently from common animals. From a distance, it's hard to tell if the keepers, young men and women, are playing with or teasing their charges. During Phoebe's guided tour, Joan appears to be more interested in the marketing side of her operation; the merchandise, little plastic replicas of all the cryptids on display, rather than the nuts-and-bolts of day-to-day maintenance. The cryptids, are foremost, commodities. The gorgon's questions test Lauren, forcing the true believer in the unprecedented position of defending Cryptozoo. Up to this point, she never doubted her benefactor's vision, until a fresh set of eyes suggests that the empress has no clothes. The filmmaker literalizes this metaphor, cutting to the tower, an ivory tower, so to speak, where Joan conducts an interspecies love affair with Von, a cryptid. In an interview with "Art Forum", Dash Shaw tells film critic Amy Taubin that Todd Haynes' "Poison" made an impression on him while attending the School of Visual Arts. Joan's lavish domicile recalls Haynes' next film, "Safe", starring Julianne Moore, in which Carol White's guru, Peter Dunning(Peter Friedman), who runs Wrenwood, a facility for chemically-sensitive people, similarly lives in a palatial home, suggestive of a socioeconomic hierarchy, so antithetical to the utopian ideal. Wrenwood is for profit. Peter Dunning comes across as a former bohemian, the same generation that provides "Cryptozoo" its milieu. He exemplifies the cliche of the hippie who sold out; a hippie who coarsened over the years, transforming himself into a yuppie, while still retaining vestiges of his former persona. It's the same new-agey gobbledygook Peter espoused as a young man, but now he makes a living off it. Joan, near death, about the cryptids, tells Lauren: "I love them so," which may be true, but we suspect she loved the power of cornering the cryptid market, more.

On 'wild planet", no Tragg can harm an Om. This is their dream, a utopia. Anywhere is better than Ygam, in Rene Laloux's "Fantastic Planet", where these kidnapped humans are subjected to routine exterminations by giant blue aliens, who themselves are living in a utopia, until the Oms fight back and kill a Tragg. Some Oms are kept as pets, like Terr(Eric Baugin), whose Tragg owner, Tiwa(Jennifer Drake), has a father, Master Sinh(Jean Topart), who taught her compassion. Terr isn't subjected to the same casual cruelty inflicted upon other Oms, made to fight like gladiators by their child masters. A successful runaway, at long last, Terr meets the wild Oms. In his possession, Tiwa's bracelet, a proto-computer that dispenses lessons directly to the brain, gives him leverage. Incorporating Draag technology and Om know-how, the wild ones build a rocket. Wild planet, alas, is uninhabitable; it's not the foundation for the planned utopia they were banking on. Draag remains the Om's home planet. All living descendants, it appears, of Oms who remember earth have passed on. And for sure, were they alive, they would impart this wisdom to the younger ones, echoing Amber's sentiments in "Cryptozoo". "Utopias never work out."

"It's just a shot away," Mick Jagger sings. Joan giveth the cryptids shelter and Amber taketh away. When she frees the cryptids from their cages, they become fair game for hunters. It's tragic. Many cryptids die. But Amber understood that Cryptozoo was more prison than utopia.

Titane (2021)

I feel safest of all

[10/10 · 22 October 2021]

Julia Ducournau is a student of "body horror", a David Cronenberg acolyte who transforms grindhouse into high art, like a Quentin Tarantino unhindered by the trappings of commercial instincts that entails from working in Hollywood. Julia Ducournau is from Paris. This Belgian filmmaker hails from the new school of New French Extremism. "Titane" will make a Tarantino film buff blush. Ducournau reimagines Cronenberg's "The Brood" as an action-thriller. She matches Tarantino's flare for pastiche. Alexia(Agatha Rouselle), you could say, is "The Bride" of "The Brood", a stand-in for both Uma Thurman's assassin and Nola Craveth(Samantha Egger), freed from the trappings of a partriarchal construct, the Somafree Institute, a mental hospital where Dr. Hal Raglan(Oliver Reed), her megalomaniacal psychotherapist, has absolute control over her. Or so it seems. Alexia, an exotic dancer, works at a club for fetishists, a club where scantily-dressed women dance provocatively next to cars, a reference to "Crash", also directed by David Cronenberg, adapted from the J. G. Ballard novel. "Crash", a meditation on ***********, shocked audiences with its audacious premise: James Ballard(James Spader), a filmmaker, and Catherine Ballard(Deborah Kara Unger), his wife, belong to a subculture, whose members share the same kink; they're aroused by twisted metal and broken bodies, an underground proclivity that involves attending invitation-only car crash recreations of the rich and famous, and monitoring police radios for real accidents. The influence of "Crash" is even more explicit in "Raw", Ducournau's 2016 debut feature about two sisters, cannibals both; one aware, the other unaware that it runs in the family and is coming of age. "Raw" begins with a car crash, whereas the Cronenberg film ends with one. Rather than being a stage for matrimonial love, a consummation in which Catherine's death reaffirms James' love for her, both body and soul, the victims of a one-car accident that Alexia(Ella Rumph) creates by dashing in the driver's way, consummates the older girl's hunger for the most exotic of meats; the human animal. "Titane", on the other hand, advances the theme of *** and machinery in "Crash" to its logical conclusion. But arguably, Julia Ducournau isn't the first filmmaker to get there.

It's an alternate universe, right? Instead of people, the world in John Lasseter's "Cars" is populated by anthropomorphized cars. These automobiles have eyes and a mouth; they have genders. "Cars" opens with a race, the Piston Cup. Cars aren't only on the track, they're in the stands, as well, without a human or animal in sight. Nothing is alive, in the biological sense. Lightning McQueen(voiced by Owen Wilson), the four-wheeled protagonist, so close to making Piston Cup history by becoming its first rookie winner, approaches a serious pile-up. Rather than drive around the wreckage, McQueen leaps over the indisposed competition, and startingly sticks out his tongue like a professional basketball player, in admiration of his own hang time before the dunk. But "Cars" is just another post-modernist movie, right? No different than its ilk, contemporary films aimed at young adults who can identify with the parodic renaming of popular culture figures(for instance, Bob Costas plays Bob Cutlass), a practice that goes all the way back to "The Flintstones", when Ann Margaret played Ann Margrock. In most, if not all cases, the filmic world parallels the corporeal world, not situate it on the same astral plane. Accident or not, the world of "Cars" becomes our world, the moment when Filmore(George Carlin) a stoner van in Radiator Springs, blasts Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner", annoying his neighbor, Sarge(Paul Dooley), an army-issued Jeep with an adverse reaction to counterculture gestures. Quite pointedly, Filmore doesn't modify Hendrix's name. "Respect the classics," he admonishes Sarge. It's a variation of a theme, made more explicit in Andrew Stanton's "WALL-E", earth as dystopia, when the little robot watches "Hello, Dolly" on a planet designated for the detritus of our consumer culture. In "Cars", the people never left; they don't live out their days and nights on spaceships as big as luxury cruisers, instead they merged with heavy metal(Hendrix, get it?) and became hybrids(get it?).

Alexia is done for the night. Outside the club, groupies wait for her, gushing female form aficionados who seek autographs, desperate to make a connection with their dream girl. One male fan is persistent; he follows Alexia to her personal car, and won't leave until he makes his case as a potential beau. The exotic dancer rolls down her driver-side window, low enough so the fan, thinking his words of love got through to Alexia, can lean in for a deep kiss. That's when she reaches for her hairpin and plunges the sharp instrument in his neck. After Alexia hides the body in the trunk, she returns to the club. She showers. It was self-defense, right? Blood circles down the drain. So far, the audience is on the fence, unsure if Alexia was potential victim or predator. A good proportion of moviegoers will side with the exotic dancer, as moviegoers are prone to do; we sympathize with the female. The prologue, still fresh in our minds, in which Alexia, as a young girl, survives a near-fatal car accident when the father momentarily takes his eyes off the road to discipline her in the backseat, keeps us rooting for her. Alexia, we remember, is outfitted with a metal plate near her brain. But then she returns to the showroom; returns to the scene of her last performance, next to the Cadillac. This car, without any explanation, is alive; its headlights go on by itself, like a greeting, as does the hydraulic system when Alexia enters the vehicle. The exotic dance is like Dr. Doolittle. Instead of talking to animals, she talks to cars, and more. The Cadillac, to our surprise, has a gender. To make a case for her humanity, to prove that she's compatible with people, Alexia starts a relationship with Justine(Garance Marillier), another dancer. It doesn't pan out. Soon after, Alexia starts to show. The Cadillac was male. It's a shock to the moviegoer's system when Alexia uses her hairpin on Justine. As it turns out, Alexia is a serial killer. Her first victim, the aggressive groupie, was never the predator, always the prey, unknowingly lured. Male or female, black or white, Alexia kills indiscriminately, like a car without a conscious.

Think of the face as a wheel. The nose, when broken, is covered. In car terms, Alexia modifies her face. A wanted woman, Alexia emerges from a public bathroom with a new nose. She needs a bandage, or rather, a rim. Next to the "wanted" flyers are missing children posters. Alexia impersonates a boy named Adrien, missing since he was seven. She fools Vincent(Vincent Lindon), the boy's father, who is so damaged inside, the fire captain wills himself to believe anything, even after the truth comes out. Being around men, his subordinates 24/7, Vincent must sense his alleged son's female energy from day one. Does he sense Alexia's vehicular side, too? The exotic dancer bleeds oil, a fluid, a metaphor, perhaps, for gender fluidity; masculine/feminine, which doesn't just apply to Alexia/Adrien, but Vincent and his men, as well. Julia Ducournau, without a doubt, has seen Claire Denis' "Beau Travail", as well. Vincent is modeled after Adjuant-Chef Galoup(Denis Lavant), a heterosexual male who nevertheless seems at ease, like the fire captain, in the company of men. It's no conincidence that the firemen dance to Future Islands' "Lighthouse". "Beau Travail", set in Djibouti, uses Goubet Al-Kharab, one of the East African country's satellite of islands, as a backdrop during the Foreign Legion training sequence. Like Galoup, who reveals an unbeknownst feminine side in the film's dramatic last scene, a solo dance to the Corona song "Rhythm of the Night", likewise, Adrien confuses Vincent's squad when he/she recreates his/her nightly routine at the strip club.

In "The Brood", the wife, equipped with an external womb, gives birth to another in a series of dwarf-children while Frank(Art Hindle) watches, beside himself at the spectacle. Nola recognizes her husband's disgust as she licks the blood off the newborn, Conversely, in "Raw", pere(Laurent Lucas), the lone male in a household of women, took over the role of mere(Joana Preiss) after she gave birth. This brood, pere's daughters, were passed down the cannibal gene from their mother. The family secret gets revealed in the final shot. Pere unbuttons his shirt, inviting Justine, the younger daughter, to fed on him, like mere and Alexia before her. Being female and French, it's practically the filmmaker's duty to subvert the masculine/feminine binary. In "Titaine", Alexia(Ducournau recycles the name) during childbirth. Vincent delivers the baby, but that's expected; he has EMT training. The baby is a monster. Vincent knows that. He plainly sees the exposed titanium running up the infant's spine. The baby should be destroyed. He should track down the father, the Cadillac, and send it to the scrap yard. But the masculine/feminine binary which informs "Titaine", dictates that the film has room for one killer, and that's Alexia. Vincent is a nurturer. He brings people back to life. Besides, this hybrid junior is an extension of his "son". Last seen, Vincent holds the baby gently against his chest, like a mother. Ducournau, once again, like secreting motor oil, plays around with the fluidity of gender. Vincent's masculine side doesn't stand a chance against his feminine instincts to protect the baby from science. The baby is another imperfect surrogate for Adrien, his dead son, but the man needs somebody, or something, anything, to love.

Arguably, "Titane" is the origin story that "Cars" needed.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

Woman of the sun

[8/10 · 14 October 2021]

Masaki Kobayashi was a pacifist. The celebrated Japanese filmmaker, best-known for "The Human Condition", took the unusual and daring position of denouncing his country's military actions during WWII. Somehow, Kobayashi got "The Thick-Walled Room" financed, and pushed it past the censors, even though it broached the largely taboo subject of war crimes. Set in an American detention center, war veterans express guilt and remorse, and most importantly, hold themselves accountable for their actions. "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings", directed by Dustin Daniel Cretton, is evocative of Kobayashi's ideology circumlocutorily by referencing "Kwaidan", in particular, "The Woman of the Snow", the second in a quartet of ghost stories, which was the filmmaker's only foray into genre; the horror movie. Xu Wenwen(Tony Leung), aka "The Mandarin", a warmonger blessed with everlasting life, learns the whereabouts of Ta Lo, a village secreted away behind thick foliage. It's people know how to fight like gods. Surviving the ambulatory trees that claim the Xu's discovery party, he encounters Li(Fala Chen), the divine martial arts' most experienced practitioner, his future wife, in what can only be described as a grindhouse meet-cute. Whereas The Mandarin harnesses his power through the ten rings, Li only needs her bare hands to win the battle with relative ease. Without the ten rings(nunchucks being its closest analogue), The Mandarin is no Bruce Lee, whose hands they say, as the legend goes, were unregistered lethal weapons. Inexplicably, Li falls in love with this psychopath, whose penchant for violence rivals The Joker.

From "Kwaidan", for starters, the filmmaker, having the advantage of CGI in his tool kit, draws out the plant life's malevolent subtext, in which its lunging movement towards the two woodcutters, caught in a terrible snowstorm, seems not only a condition of the wild winds, but an innate cognition to do them bodily harm. The trees are sitting ducks. The trees can't defend themselves from the woodcutters' axes. They're lives are dependent on the Woman of the Snow, a glacial apparition whose arctic breath entombs men in ice. The "Yuki-Onna"(Keiko Kishi) blows on Mosaku(Jun Hamamura), one of the woodcutters, as he sleeps in an abandoned hut. It's a superpower that any villain in the Marvel universe would regard with a modicum of awe. The surviving woodcutter witnesses the older man's killing and expects the same ignominious end-result. But when the woman gets a closer look at Minokichi(Tatsuya Nakadai), she is smitten, indicated by an elusive smile, and ends up citing his handsomeness and youth as reasons for her charity. Clearly, the woman of the snow is lonely, her Achilles heel; the ultimate cougar, who must be at least a thousand-plus years his senior. In "Shang Chi", it's more clear-cut that Li is abdicating her duty to defend Ta Lo from potential marauders, choosing personal happiness over communal obligation. Harder to glean, but not too hard, Yuki-Onna also has deep-seated commitments. A sort of Mother Nature, but militant, her job is to fend off those who wish to shorten the lives of flora and fauna; she's a warrior for the natural world. Trees will fell unchallenged by the axes of future woodcutters, similar to how the Tai Lo villagers die in war waged by Wen-Wu and his army. Each respective woman chose love over duty; a domestic life, husband and children, over their calling.

To both Shang Chi(Simu Liu) and Xialing(Meng-er Zhang), son and daughter, Li bequeaths her sired ones a green emerald pendant that even through adulthood, never leave their necks; these precious gemstones handed down from their deceased mother, refashioned into bling. Green, coincidence or not, is the same color as the crystal which guides young Clark Kent(Jeff East) to the farthest reaches of the north, in Richard Lester's "Superman", where the Krypton-based jewel initiates construction on the Fortress of Solitude, Superman's man cave. Both women, Li and Yuki-Onna inhabited fortress solitudes of their own, a village cut off from mainland China and rural Japan, respectively. Even Superman chooses Lois Lane(Margot Kidder) over being earth's champion, when he exposes himself to the red sunlight of his home planet, which strips him of his superpowers. Nobody wants to be alone, not even the Man of Steel. Quite understandably, Li, being a responsible custodian, leaves her magic back in Tai Lo, not even trusting her husband with god-level Kung Fu. The ten rings, on the other hand, could be put to good use, but reappropriating the weapon into a tool to protect mankind isn't in his nature. All he can do is store them away in a desk drawer, neutralizing its awesome power, in the interim. The Mandarin could be a potential superhero, but his reformation is conditional; it's contingent on romantic love, not brotherly love. There are limits to love. He can only be a retired foe to earth, not its friend. Because of this, Li keeps secret from her husband the purport of those emeralds, which are actually emblematic eyes of a mechanized statue, not mere heirlooms passed down from parent to child, in which its niche as performative dragon eyes radiate water held in suspension long enough to yield a map that directs The Mandarin to Tai Lo. The mother played no favorites, whereas Jor-El(Marlon Brando) provided no duplicate green crystal for Kara(Helen Slater), Superman's female cousin, in Jeannot Szwarc's "Supergirl". Ta Lo is a country within a country. Growing up without a mother, Xialing, saddled with a father who abided by the unyielding tradition of China's patriarchal strictures put on women, she could just watch in secrecy as Shang-Chi, training to be an assassin, fought alongside the men; a boy among men, shadowing his every move. That's China. As the forgotten daughter, waiting for her father to show up, Jiang Nan(Michelle Yeoh), to Xiangling's surprise, is informed that men and women train and fight like egalitarians. That's not China; that's a Chinese utopia. Shang-Li, previously attacked stateside, in which his cover as a underachiever is blown, when the car valet reveals himself to be Bruce Lee incarnate on a moving bus, to the amazement of Katy(Awkwafina), his childhood friend, disposing all-comers with exceptional ease. Under attack again, this time in his home country, once again he faces the same gang, this time, joined by Xiangling, at a fight club, an enterprise she built from scratch, it goes unsaid, to earn her father's love after leaving home as a lost sixteen-year-old girl. Just as Shang-Li is about to put the finishing touch on his old trainer, identifiable by a fancy yellow and black mask. The father uses the ten rings to stop Shang-Chi. It's a strange reunion. With paternal love, Mandarin admits that he put a hit on Shang-Chi. But like a proud papa, he knew that his assassin training would, more likely than not, stave off annihilation, and is overjoyed that he was right. Nothing personal, he just wanted the pendant. The same hit is put on Xiangling, but in the absence of a similar heart-to-heart talk, the father implies an indifference to his daughter's life. The father has enough love for just one child.

An actor lives under their father's roof; an actor who once impersonated Mandarin, as a decoy for Aldrich Killian(Guy Pearce), a terrorist, in Shane Black's "Iron Man 3". Trevor Slattery(Ben Kingsley), this time, has no role to play; his Fu Manchu beard is gone. He plays himself. On the surface, Trevor Slattery's appearance can seem contrived, because otherwise, "Shang Chi" would be a stand-alone movie, untethered from the Marvel Universe. Duly noted, by countless film theorists, no doubt, Kingsley is sending-up..., who some believe was impersonating...in the network television series "Kung Fu". Lee, however, did star in "The Green Hornet", playing Kato, a sidekick to the titular star. It's "The Green Hornet"(green, the same color as the emerald pendants), not "Kung Fu", that's explicitly referenced in "Shang-Chi", especially when Xiangling instigates an escape from her father's compound by literally breaking down a wall. In the getaway car, Slattery sits shotgun; he doesn't get to be the hero. Katy drives. Brother and sister, the superheroes, sit in the back like VIPs. Slattery is the sidekick, not to the hero like Kato was, but to the hero's best friend. Quite pointedly, in Tai Lo, the film simultaneously tweaks, but also rejects the Hollywood trope of... The native people fight their own battles. When Razor Fist(Florian Monteau), whose right hand is a machete blade, fight with the villagers, he's an equal, not a savior, and also, it's the prudent choice. They have a common enemy, a demonic beast with tentacles of behemoth proportions. Meanwhile, as both sides combine forces to stop this hellacious creature from being let loose into the outside world, Slattery plays dead, in an act of character arc subversion. He's just a coward. Whereas in "Enter the Dragon", the hero saves his country, in "Shang-Chi", the hero saves the world.

Her smile is genuine. The woman of the snow looks like a natural born domestic. The perfect wife and mother. She smiles with pride at the woodcutter's cleverness, making new sandals for her and their three children. She tries them on. It's a perfect fit. The betrayal is complete; she wears the wood from murdered trees. She returns to her sewing. And then, like something out of an inverted "Vertigo", Minokichi, seeing his wife barefoot again, perhaps, the woman of the snow comes back into the woodcutter's life, a ghost from the past. Being recognized, Yuki returns to the woods feeling great shame about the unspoken vow of chastity she broke by being involved with the trees' enemy, a woodcutter. It was real love, though. Yuki keeps the sandals.

What about Li? Did she really love The Mandarin, or did she love mankind, marrying him to protect earth from the awesome power of the ten rings.

The Sparks Brothers (2021)

We're an american band

[7/10 · 2 October 2021]

Was Sparks the original inspiration for David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls?

Some people thought Spinal Tap was a real band, those audiences who saw Rob Reiner's "This is Spinal Tap" during its original theatrical run in 1984. Nobody knew what a "mockumentary" was. People, especially non-music fans, took the film at face value. "This is Spinal Tap" opens with Reiner, playing filmmaker Marti DeBergi, talking directly to the camera about a UK band called Spinal Tap, which should have tipped everybody off because a work of filmic non-fiction would have used the then-actor's real name. But what if you never saw "All in the Family"? Or failed to recognize Reiner with a baseball cap, hiding his Michael McDonald hair? Since "This is Spinal Tap" adheres strictly to the form and content of a proper documentary film, you accept Marti DeBergi as a real person, and Spinal Tap, a real band. It also helped that Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer, despite having television and film credits to their names. Weren't so famous that they would break the illusion of put-upon reality. People who weren't in on the joke may have presumed, oh, we never heard of them because they're from England.

Sparks never had a song that charted stateside. "Cool Places", a duet with Jane Wiedlin came close. But not even a cute Go-Go could push these art school weirdos into the top 40. Alas, Ron and Russell Mael never got to hear Casey Kasem say their name. Sparks, however, were superstars for a brief period in the mid-seventies. "This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us", from their third album "Kimono My House", reached #2 in the UK. For this reason, despite both brothers being California-born, many fans contemporaneous of their fame, thought they were from England. For a modern audience, "The Sparks Brothers", directed by Edgar Wright, the confusion about their homeland will be lost on them, because for most people, this unlikely documentary is an introduction to Ron and Russell Mael, whose career spans five decades, yet remains, by design, as it turns out, largely under the radar. For rock and roll aficionados, regular folks and stars(such as Beck, Todd Rundgren, and other luminaries) alike, it's a bit of an inside joke. Sparks could be a fictitious band. As the old maxim goes: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Across the Atlantic, "This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us" landed Sparks on "Top of the Pops", but here in North America, it didn't make a dent in the Billboard Pop/Rock 100. The filmmaker, with methodical, almost perverse rigor that outs him as a diehard fan, "The Sparks Brothers" covers all twenty-five studio albums. Success and failure; it's all relative. Sparks' story is a foreign one. Taking its cues from Floria Sigismondi's "The Runaways", the rags to riches story arc, so typical of music biopics, takes the same circuitous route to justify the subject's worthiness for a feature-length film. Like Ron and Russell Mael, The Runaways were big in Japan, too. And like the fictitious Spinal Tap, they hopped from genre to genre.

"He wrote this," David St. Hubbins(Michael McKean) announces to the sparsely-attended audience, as Derek Smalls(Harry Shearer) unleashes "Jazz Odyssey", when Spinal Tap, primarily a heavy metal outfit, transitions into free form jazz, after lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel(Christopher Guest) walks off the stage during mid-performance. This time, albeit by default, Spinal Tap isn't chasing the hottest trend. At best, a midlevel band, Spinal Tap broke into the music biz by jumping on the psychedelic bandwagon. "Listen to the Flower People" was their first chart success. They were hacks. When heavy metal became a commercially-viable genre, the band traded in their paisley threads for leather ones. Spinal Tap were shrewd careerists, pale imitations of superior musical artists, pleasing crowds until the crowds started to wise up. To nobody's surprise except Derek, "Jazz Odyssey" is roundly-booed by the festival crowd. They paid good money to hear "Big Bottom" and "Sex Farm"; the hits. For the first time in their topsy-turvy career, the band alienates their fans, and expects them to follow along, no matter the musical direction of their own choosing.

Sparks was comfortable The second single, "Amateur Hour", also reached the top ten, nestling comfortably at #7, and the numerous singles off the follow-ups to "Kimono My House", albeit not smashes, also landed in the UK charts, led by the oft-covered "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth"(#13) from "Propaganda". It's a sensitive turn by the band, which recalls, in "This is Spinal Tap", the soft piano ballad that Nigel plays for the filmmaker in the rehearsal room; the ballad with the decidedly rude name. The Mael brothers' obsession with eclecticism wasn't obvious at the time. Career sabotage wasn't in the cards. "Indiscreet", while not glam, had tunes that people could still hum: "Get in the Swing" and "Looks, Looks, Looks", both reached the middle rungs of the singles chart, #27 and #26 respectively. It was a baby step, this shift from glam to power pop. But the next album, Sparks' foray into hard rock, not only failed to produce a hit, the album itself failed to chart on both sides of the Atlantic; it was Ron Mael's "Jazz Odyssey".

Russell Mael was a high school quarterback, a popular kid; a jock. Conversely, Jane Wiedlin's formative years were spent in the dive bars of Los Angeles; an outsider, a punk. This incongruity of their respective places on the high school hierarchy, perhaps, explains how "Cool Places", a staple of the synth-pop genre, wasn't a bigger hit than it should have been. Wiedlin's band The Go-Go's were a global phenomena, whereas Sparks was "Big in Japan", but seemingly nowhere else on the planet. Ironically, at long last, they were a local favorite, after years of being confused for being British. As a teen, Jane Wiedlin was a Sparks fan club president. In this context, "Cool Places", in essence, plays like "A Star is Born" as a short-form music video; the proverbial student becomes the teacher scenario in day-glo colors. "Cool Places" would have made more sense with Belinda Carlisle as Russell Mael's partner-in-crime, since The Go-Go's frontwoman was herself a former cheerleader, a pairing that was more in simpatico with their former lives, which could have pushed the song into the chart's upper reaches where it belongs. Arguably, the backstory for "Cool Places", despite not detectable to the listener, caused it to stall inexplicably at #49.

The Runaways were even less successful than Sparks. Many music fans, male music fans, dismissed an all-girl band as being a novelty. But a film was made about these trailblazers because of who they influenced. Primarily, one of the talking heads in "The Sparks Brothers". A commercial and critical failure at the time, the Giorgio Moroder-produced "No. 1 in Heaven" is credited with setting the synth-pop template. Representatives from Duran Duran(Nick Rhodes), Erasure(Andy Bell) and Depeche Mode(Vince Clarke) are all here to testify. A song such as "Beat the Clock" married dance music with a pop sensibility. In a nutshell, that's The Pet Shop Boys.

Meta happened when Spinal Tap, who started out as a faux-metal English band, began to tour and produce albums that people bought. Suddenly, "Big Bottom" was no longer a novelty song. Maybe that's why Sparks' 18th album is titled "Balls", which could be construed as a reference to the Tap-like song "Big Balls", an AC/DC classic. "Balls", both song and album, comes across as a coded protest about the double standard. Flea, and many other commenters in "The Sparks Brothers", agree that Ron and Russell Mael's lack of domestic commercial success has a lot to do with their comic sensibility. People confused Sparks for a novelty act. Ironically, America started to take Spinal Tap seriously.

Hopefully, America will do so likewise after watching "The Sparks Brothers".

They're really funny. And talented.

Seriously talented.

Nine Days (2020)

The show

[10/10 · 2 September 2021]

"9 Days" is jazz. Director Madison Oda has the soul of a jazz master. The first-time filmmaker is a student of Hirozaku Kore-eda. He studied him well. Oda is adept at improvisation, a must for any jazz great wanna-be. And yes, he riffs with aplomb, creating something wholly new out of a canonical text: "After Life", the 1999 follow-up to "Mabirosi", Kore-eda's well-received debut film. "After Life" reinvented the great beyond, just like Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire", conceptualizing heaven as a film studio, a sort of god-by-committee, in which angels help the recently-dead shoot a memory they want to keep replaying on a cognitive loop for eternity in order to ascend. "9 Days" is a variation of "After Life", suggesting the existence of an annex in Kore-eda's filmic world, a place that deals with pre-life; a waystation of arrivals and departures servicing earth and heaven, a purgatory, if you amalgamate both films as a postulatory whole. Oda substitutes the movies with the theater, as a medium to orientate the god proxy's subjects for peaceable annihilation. In this sense, "9 Days" is not so different from "A Chorus Line". There are interviews. The man behind the desk selects one lucky "soul" for the part of a lifetime: Human being, on the big stage: Earth. Just one more voice in a chorus of the living. These souls who converge, one by one at appointed times, to the dislocated house in a barren landscape are not lost souls; they are new, just born. It's a pilgrimage all potential human life must undertake. To meet the man who is their judge and jury, the lord of televisions.

Will(Winston Duke) was alive once. Corporeality is a mandatory criterion for the job of interviewer; his assistant, Kyo(Benedict Wong), can only supervise since he was a reject, but a reject of distinction, which allowed him to live past his expiration date. Kyo is like the proverbial next-door neighbor always dropping in unexpectedly. He shows up at Will's front door with a bag of "supplies". On earth, they could be just two sports nuts getting ready to watch the big game. The old soul joins Will in the living room, taking his usual spot on a ratty old couch, and helps monitor people's lives that Will personally hand-picked(or cast), the lucky ones who aced their auditions. This cosmic voyeurism, this implicit relationship between viewer and subject recalls, simultaneously, Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and Peter Weir's "The Truman Show"; this wall of analogue televisions circa 1997 is like an update of the apartment building that photojournalist Jeff Jeffries(Jimmy Stewart), confined to a wheelchair with a leg fracture, watches from across the courtyard. Like the couch potatoes, L. B.(Jeff's nickname) has his attention diverted wherever the routine of life takes an unexpected dramatic turn. But instead of uncurtained apartments, it's televisions. Kyo can choose from "The Miguel Show", a long-running police procedural about a Hispanic cop, learning to cope with life as a parapalegic after being shot in the line of duty. Or "The William Show", whose star is subjected to repeated bullying by his classmates, set at a nondescript high school in Anywhere, U. S. A.. Or "The Christine Show", Will's favorite program, starring Christine, a child prodigy on the violin who fulfills her potential as an adult, seemingly destined for international stardom. It's Kyo's favorite show, too. The next episode could be called "The Concerto". Unlike Christof(Ed Harris) in "The Truman Show", Will has no creative control over content; he can't manipulate time and place to devise the best possible storyline for the protagonist, Christine; his star. Life, after all, is reality, and an observed life, is reality T. V., for real. So Will can only sit helplessly as Christine drives her vehicle at a high-speed off the highway and square into a wall. The world-class musician cancels herself.

Every nine days, the whole process starts all over again; these tryouts for the human race. So it follows, according to Will, that the formerly living is the best judge, and yet, it's this fallibility that all of mankind possesses which should recuse the unsuccessful actor from exuding so much concentrated power. What being alive entails, having experienced the highest highs and lowest lows, this rollercoaster of peaks and valleys, can be a gross detriment. A suicide such as Will is bound to remember the lows moreso than the highs, and therefore cloud his judgement since this imbalance led to an act of violent self-annihilation. What being dead entails is objectivity, something Will never had. This paradox, Kyo notices, becomes more problematic, the prerequisites for being an interviewer, after Christine's unscripted reality TV show ends with an unexpected plot twist. Will, none the wiser, doesn't realize that the violinist's death changes his criteria for these souls, aspiring to be people. Instead of picking the most qualified candidate, Will picks the soul he predicts to be better adapted for life. Soulful types, like himself, are categorically purged, akin to a mercy killing. It's a bad time to display a potentiality for art. Each contestant who survived the first round is handed a pen and pad with the following instructions: Write what they like best about their televised predecessors. Write what they like about life. Mike(David Rysdahl) likes the beach; he draws the beach, and unknowingly takes himself out from consideration, essentially signing his own death warrant by being too sensitive. Unlike other interviewers, Kyo tells Emma(Zazie Beetz), an eventual finalist, that Will gives the unrealized people the vicarious thrill of fleeting life. He recreates the image that a soul liked best from their primer, the television, and adapts that scene for the stage. The filmmaker understands that theater is the appropriate medium for these unlucky souls; there are no cameras rolling. It's ephemeral. For Mike, a simulated beach is constructed out of plywood, backscreen projection, imported sand, and real water, which Will pushes with a paddle to simulate the tide. This imitation of life dies with Mike, a nobody, just the concept of somebody, but in Will's estimation, a "good", as in a good idea. Mike was good enough to be a man.

"9 Days", in a sense, works as a prequel to "After Life", as if Will inhabits the same geography, the same heightened astral plane as the movie studio, in an undisclosed location. In the Kore-eda film, Iura(Takashi Arata), a recently widowed man, now in the same boat, during a similar interviewing process, selects a memory from his loveless, but perfunctory marriage after a considerable amount of mulling; an exterior, the park, the sun is out, a good day to take in a matinee. Unlike Mike, this old man had lived, so his memory lives on, as he elevates to a higher ground, while at the same time, leaving behind a document of himself, a celluloidal ghost, which is what actors and actresses are, a permanent archive of captured spirits. Both films, "9 Days" and "After Life", discreetly portrays television as a debased art, hardly the equivalent of cinema and theater. On the small screen, Iura's life looks small. The old man arrived at his decision from the seventy-one volumes of VHS tapes that Ichiro(Taketoshi Naito) orders from the library to jog his client's memory. The video is grainy. What seems banal on television, seems grand on the big screen.

In "9 Days", events on television happen in real time, episodic and seemingly infinite, until it's not. Before Mike fades away, Will assures the budding artist that he lived with as much, if not more integrity than most people. Mike is like an anthropomorphic "pilot" that never made it on-air, deemed either too good or not good enough for prime time. In this case, the former. Just like Maria(Arianna Ortiz), another gentle soul, a hopeless romantic, who Will suspects is destined for a premature cancellation, just like Christine, and like himself, since quality television doesn't prefigure a long run. Alexander(Tony Hale) isn't picked up for the season, but he outlasts Mike and Maria, because he's better suited for a longer run on television, a "cesspool" of bad programming, which doubles as Will's euphemism for the world we live in.

"9 Days" ends abruptly, reminiscent of John Sayles' "Limbo". Are those castaways being saved or marked for murder when the chopper arrives. Literally, Will is in limbo, after Emma, as her final wish, asks the former actor to perform a scene from Walt Whitman's "The Song of Solomon". Will he ascend? Is Emma his protege, just like Kyoko( Natsuo Ishido), who takes over for Takashi after he makes his at-long-last film debut and achieves immortality?

During his time in purgatory, Ichiro, a WW2 pilot, never forgot what is was like to be dying, but as the cameras roll, he sits on a park bench on the soundstage, and remembers what it meant to be living. Kyoko finds the reel in which Ichiro is a character, a lost love, in a war widow's film. He was remembered. Similarly, Will receives the gift of being remembered, too. Emma, the soul who filled her notebook with copious notes, from start to finish. The soul who watched television and loved everything about it, the good and the bad.

Emma is life itself, a television show that refuses to be cancelled.

Old (2021)

The ballad of an island

[9/10 · 10 August 2021]

It was only supposed to be a three-hour tour, as the song goes, but the Howells packed enough clothes to last a lifetime on "Gilligan's Island", the CBS sitcom about the shipwrecked survivors of the S. S. Minnow, who stayed lost for three seasons(1964-1967) in black and white, then color. Creator Sherwood Schwartz pitched the show as a social psychological experiment to network executives. When M. Night Shyamalan read "Sandcastle", the graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederick Peeters, he wrote a script that suggests an updated "Gilligan's Island", a "Gilligan's Island" with a "Lost"-like sensibility. Playing the hotel van driver, Shyamalan posits himself as a stand-in for Schwartz, who films the people that the hotel manager(Gustaf Hammarsten) preselected for medical testing. From the van driver's point-of-view, it's like he's shooting a reality show about drug trials. Technically, it's the pilot. Nobody is expected to be alive for the second episode. Like any television show or film, time is truncated, but here, the aging process exists in an accelerated space-time continuum. Prisca Cappa(Vicky Krieps), a museum curator, found the unnamed resort on a tropical island she tells Guy Cappa(Gael Garcia Bernal), her husband, an insurance adjustor, as being "better than Cancun." She'll come to rue this assessment. The secluded beach that the hotel manager conspiratorially recommends to the Cappa family, turns out to be a sort-of movie set they can't escape from.

Three is the magic number. The van driver drops Prisca and Guy, along with their two children, Maddox(Alexa Swinton) and Trent(Nolan River) at the site. He hands Guy a picnic basket that, in the father's estimation, contains too much food. Three, accent on the three, children, including Kara(Kylie Begley), the daughter of a surgeon and swimwear model, is the flimsy excuse for the inordinate amount of provisions, similar to all the different outfits that Thurston(Jim Backus) and "Lovey"(Natalie Schafer) preened against the foliage in presumed humidity, whereas the other castaways wore the clothes on their backs throughout the show's entire run. Three hours, incidentally, is all the time that some of the hotel guests will get. From the audience's vantage point, as these unsuspecting people wind their way through a passageway cut through a mysterious rock formation, the distance between the resort and the beach acts as a performative shipwreck since the beach, for all intents and purposes, is an uncharted desert isle. Nobody is looking for them. Warren and Warren, a pharmaceutical company, made sure their human test subjects left behind no trace of their movements. They're beagles. Not coincidentally, if you subtract the minors; the adults, including rap star Mid-Sized Sedan(Aaron Pierre), the lone survivor from the last group, total seven, as in seven castaways.

As it turns out, each guest has a physical ailment, ranging from Prisca's potentiality for stomach cancer(her benign tumor, the hotel manager knows, will turn malignant in sped-up time) to epilepsy, in which Patricia Carmichael(Nikki Amuka-Bird), to the hotel resort's luck, has a grand mal seizure on the patio, and is handed an experimental drug, just like Prisca, disguised as a cocktail. Also, Chrystal(Abby Lee), the doctor's trophy wife, has a calcium deficiency, whereas Charles(Rufus Sewell), the grandiose surgeon, battles schizophrenia. The hotel manager guesses right that Charles wouldn't get along with Mid-Sized Sedan. The doctor acts a little more violently than The Skipper(Alan Hale Jr.) hitting Gilligan(Bob Denver) on the head with his sailor's cap. "Old" is especially smart about debunking stereotypes. Agnes(Kathleen Chalfant), the doctor's mother, barely registers what her daughter-in-law has to say, dismissing Chrystal as an airhead, but the blonde bombshell, a sort of Ginger(Tina Louise), turns out to be the smartest one on the beach. Chrystal was in favor of rejecting the VIP treatment, preferring instead, a yacht rental. When Mid-Sized Sedan's friend(both suffered from multiple sclerosis) washes up on the beach, dead, the other adults to varying degrees, are suspicious of his alleged role he played in the woman's death. His stage-name, however, provides a clue to his middle-upper class background, which is unfair, since inner-city appellation shouldn't categorically designate you as a menace. Ironically, in the end, it's Charles who poses the greatest threat to Prisca's family.

"Old", which goes unremarked upon by the filmmaker in any number of press junkets and formal interviews, has more in common with "Gilligan's Island" than Peter Weir's "Picnic on Hanging Rock", whose influence is largely visual. In particular, "Old" recalls "The Castaways on Gilligan's Island", directed by Earl Bellamy, the made-for-television movie in which Thurston Howell turns the "uncharted desert isle" into a resort. It was the penultimate film in the unofficial comeback trilogy, following up on the heels of "Rescue from Gilligan's Island". The Professor(Russell Johnson), don't ask me how, thatched together their rafts and turned it into one giant raft, in anticipation of a hurricane, he just knew, would catapult them onto the open ocean. In due time, a helicopter spots their hut-cum-raft, inspiring The Skipper to declare those immortal words: "After fifteen years, we're finally rescued." "Rescued" is repeated six times. It's not an echo; it's emotion. Maddox and Trent, their adult selves(Embeth Davidz and Emun Elliott), likewise, end up in a helicopter, but not before they escape their doomed fates by swimming to the coral. With his binoculars, the van driver watches for the "kids" to resurface. Arguably, he doesn't wait long enough. The van driver, perhaps, didn't like the violent confrontation between the surgeon and rap artist, agreeing with Sidney(Matthew Shear), the lead scientist, who complains to his boss that test subjects with physical and psychological ailments should be separated. It's an ethical breech. On a filmic level, it's favoring spectacle over narrative. Mid-Sized Sedan's murder was a gratuitous act of violence. The van driver wants the "show" cancelled.

Only yesterday, Maddox and Trent were kids, which is how you feel when you're old. Near the end, their father says something Gilligan-like, when sitting with their similarly aged mother, observes: "There's no place I'd rather be than here on the beach." At the end of "Rescue from Gilligan's Island", the titular character seems happy, when the S. S. Minnow II implausibly shipwrecks on the same island. "We're home," Gilligan observes.

44 years.

44 years those kids lived on that beach. Trent buried his stillborn child and the mother of that child, Kara(Eliza Scanlen) on that island. Maddox sang to her mother just before she passed.

They were together for a little while.

They were together for a long time.

Time can be like that.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

Empirical love

[5/10 · 8 July 2021]

There is never a priest around when an exorcism needs to be performed. That's the motif which runs through all three films in "The Conjuring" series. Ed Warren(Patrick Wilson) fills the void, even though he's just an affiliate of the church. Ed and his wife Lorraine Warren(Vera Farmiga) are paranormal investigators, demonologists who have permission to assist in exorcisms, despite not being official members of the clergy. The tradition continues in "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It", directed by Michael Chavez, taking over for the franchise's helmsman James Wan. The afflicted victim, this time, David Glatzel(Julian Hillard), an eleven-year-old boy, similar to Carolyn Perron(Lili Taylor) and Janet Hodgson(Madison Wolfe) before him, doesn't get to church on time, like a pregnant mother who gives birth without the luxury of an obstetrician and hospital. After the near-fiascos of the last two exorcisms that Ed had to perform on the fly, you would think that Father Gordon(Steve Coulter), the Warrens' liaison, would master the craft himself and nip the devil in the bud. But, alas, no. "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It" is not your grandfather's "Exorcist", in which Father Karras(Jason Miller), a priest who doesn't specialize in casting out demons, nevertheless, assists Father Merrin(Max Von Sydow), an exorcist who makes house calls. Ed and Lorraine performs yet another exorcism. Father Gordon sits this one out; he's concerned, probably, with the potentiality of a lawsuit should the child die. The Warrens save David, not realizing, however, that the evil spirit jumped bodies. The evil spirit is in Arne Johnson(Ruari O'Connor) now.

Bureaucracy is the devil. When presented with video evidence of a self-evident possession, in James Wan's "The Conjuring", the Warrens' intermediary has to be coaxed and needled into quick and decisive action. The church official, initially, is unmoved, at the spectacle of some invisible force that causes a young girl to slide violently around her living room. Father Gordon cites Nancy Perron(Hayley McFarland) being unbaptized, and overall, her family's secularism as being problematic. But, to his credit, he makes the call for final approval on the archaic ritual and assignation of an ordained priest to the exorcism site. It's too late, though. Ed gets a call from the girl's father, Roger Perron(Ron Livingston), who returns home from work to his harried family's refuge, a motel, and learns that Carolyn, in essence, kidnapped her their own children: Christine(Joey King) and Andrea(Shanley Caswell). Ed Warren tells the father to meet him at the house; final approval be damned. Ed has a bible and knows how to use it.

Agents of the church, still, in James Wan's "The Conjuring 2", Father Gordon sends Ed and Lorraine to the UK, just hot off the Amityville case, the same source material for Stuart Rosenberg's "The Amityville Horror". It's like watching a film within a film; a sequel within a sequel. Known as the Enfield Poltergeist, the Warrens are utilized as proxies because the church is worried about bad publicity should the claims of Peggy Hodgson(Frances O'Connor) turn out to be an elaborate hoax; an Amityville copycat. A recorded voice heard stateside seemingly belonging to a seventy-two-year-old man should be all the proof the clergy needs to greenlight an exorcism, but the conditions for action involve evidence more baroque, such as objects flying violently around the house or the requisite levitating subject. The soul-saving ritual can't be performed until the last possible moment before the entity asserts its complete governance over the soul. Janet needs to be sufficiently satanic on video. With the cameras rolling, inexplicably, the young girl is caught demolishing the kitchen with nobody's will but her own, proving skeptics like Anita Gregory(Franka Potente) and her ilk right about demonology being a quasi-science, at best. Instead of trusting their instincts, the Warrens leave, telling the bereft mother, Ed does, that "the church will take one look at that video and that'll be the end of it." The paranormal investigators choose the politics of their faith over the faith the faith they're supposed to hold unconditionally for the people nobody believes, ostracized little girls like Janet. Lorraine, who went through the same life experiences as Janet, inexplicably bails after the first hint of adversity. To a certain extent, she's brainwashed. "We're agents of the church," Ed explains to Maurice Grosse(Simon McBurney), the Warrens' British analogue. Reluctantly, he shakes Ed's hand, but leaves him with this parting shot: "Sometimes you need to make a leap of faith. Believe when nobody else will." Unfortunate for Janet Hodgson, the Warrens are company men.

Lankester Merren is targeted, in William Friedkin's "The Exorcist", because the occupying devil within Regan(Linda Blair), perhaps, recognizes the venerated priest from the archaeological dig in Iraq, and knows that he poses a far greater threat than Damien Karras, a neophyte. The demon, in "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It", bypasses Father Gordon, who ducks his responsibility, suggesting David be brought to the church, despite evidence to the contrary, like, say, a showerhead that explodes blood. Even after David Glatzel goes after his father(Paul Wilson) with a knife, the procrastination persists. Father Gordon is afraid. Ed makes the call in no uncertain terms that the exorcism is going to happen right here, right now. The devil has ears; the devil knows who's in charge. En route to Arne's body, the unholy adversary tries to kill Ed, making good o his promise to stop the paranormal investigator's heart. While Ed performs the exorcism, Lorraine has a vision; an occultist(Eugenie Bondurant) who specializes in heinous arts and crafts, whose decorative totems cause people to die in the same grisly fashion. Bruno Sauls(Ronnie Geve Blevins), Arne's landlord, gets stabbed by his possessed tenant twenty-two times, right in front of Debbie Glatzel(Sarah Catherine Hook), David's sister, engaged to the newly-minted murderer. The occultist made more than one totem. Katie Lincoln(Andrea Andrade), a young college student, is also on the receiving end of twenty-two stabbings, the holder of the knife is her dormmate, possessed likewise. Twenty-two, by all appearances, is the new number of the beast. And then there is Ed Warren himself. The totem tucked away in a flower bouquet was overlooked. He goes after Lorraine with a sledgehammer. Meanwhile, the demon, at long last, faces a church official, Father Newman(Vince Pisani), who is unsuccessful in ridding the intruder from Arne's body at a mental health facility.

Ed Warren is a man of god. Ed is good. Crispina(Eileen Walsh), one of the "fallen women" in Peter Mullan's "The Magdalene Sisters", never encounters real charity during her time at the "laundries", which is just a euphemism for asylum. Ed and Lorraine are slow to recognize their own power. The Warrens can pray at home. The bible saves Ed's life in "The Conjuring 2", but it's Lorraine's bible; she had written the name of the demon in the good book. She screams: "Valak(Bonnie Aaron)," before sending the evil spirit to hell. Ed uses his own bible in "The Conjuring". A white light shines down on Carolyn Perron as the mother fights for dominion over her own soul; it's the light of god, but the light is filtered through the prism of Lorraine's heart; it's the light of real love.

Ed uses the sledgehammer on the occultist's infernal altar. He saves Arne Johnson's life. Ed Warren is not only a man of god, but a man who loves his wife, an empirical love, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Boogie (2021)

Man-to-man fighting

[7/10 · 28 June 2021]

"Boogie", directed by Eddie Huang, is not a rags to riches story. The filmmaker doesn't posit Zhi Xiang Chin(Taylor Takahashi) as David, when he takes on Monk(Bashar Jackson), the top-rated basketball player in NYC. This is not the 20th century; this is not Rocky Balboa(Sylvester Stallone), a decided underdog, in John G. Avildsen's "Rocky", when he challenges Apollo Creed(Carl Weathers) for the world heavyweight championship. Set in Queens, circa now, the idea of an Asian-American basketball player is not an implausible one as it would have been in the seventies: Lamont Johnson's "One on One", Jack Smight's "Fastbreak", Gilbert Moses' "The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh" were all released around the same time, the latter two comedies. Not a single Asian-American in sight; not even a bench-warmer or team manager. Quite pointedly, at the outset of "Boogie", the filmmaker utilizes a long-standing Far East trope: The Magical Asian who can tell your fortune in Chinatown. Boogie's parents ask the fortune teller(Jessica Huang) about their marriage prospects; their compatibility, while the future basketball star incubates in his mother's womb. The fortune teller doesn't have a mogwai for sale, but then again, nobody asks her. This conversation takes place in 2001. That fateful day in September is never dramatized or spoken about. "Boogie" is not that type of movie. 2001 is significant, because the following year, Yao Ming broke into the NBA and became a global star as the starting center for the Houston Rockets. Zhi Xiang grew up with a role model that Americans from all walks of life could relate to. Generation Z, arguably, represents the first era of Chinese-Americans who didn't have to grow up in the shadow of Bruce Lee.

Don't get me wrong. The star of "Fists of Fury" and "Enter the Dragon" was a paragon of cool. But wanting to be Bruce Lee wasn't. "The Last Dragon", directed by Michael Schultz, inadvertently makes this clear. The three Chinese males who work at a fortune cookie company are utilized as comic relief. But for an Asian-American spectator who reads against the grain, he can appreciate that they're not practicing the latest Kung Fu moves outside the factory on their break. They dance; they talk, coopting hip-hop moves and its correlative idiom, jive, specific to African-American culture, in an attempt to distance themselves from their inherent otherness. When Leroy Green(Taimuk) shows up in a classic Wing Chun jacket and conical hat, Johnny Wu(Glenn Eaton), the ringleader, and his pals are confronted with the stereotype they spent half their lives running away from. Leroy's "sifu"(Thomas Ikeda) sent his pupil on a mission to find the "master", who can teach him about "the glow". These working stiffs, unlike the martial arts teacher, have no intention of playing a role in the Bruce Lee movie that unspools in Leroy's head. The master, as it turns out, is a machine that spits out pseudo-profound gibberish on thin, white-stripped paper that passes as wisdom found in the heart of the cookie. The sifu, despite his appearance of being benign, doesn't suffer fools gladly either. He knowingly sent Leroy on a wild goose chase. He too, perhaps, can't tolerate being treated less like a person than an exotic. Chinese-Americans needed a domestic hero, somebody other than a man, worshipped as a minor deity, from across the Pacific who could immobilize all-comers with nunchucks and break wooden boards with punches or kicks. In real life, nobody's hands were lethal weapons.

Michael Chang was Rocky Balboa. At seventeen, the American-born Chang from Hoboken, New Jersey upset Ivan Lendl in the 1989 French Open semifinals. Mr. Chin(Perry Yung), Boogie's father, tells his son: "This was the greatest moment in Chinese-American history." Boogie is too young; he doesn't get it, as they watch an old VHS-recording of the history-making tennis match. That's because Boogie didn't have to grow up with the playground bullying that earlier generations of Chinese boys dealt with because of films like "The Last Dragon", and especially, "The Karate Kid". Without spelling it out explicitly, the father calls his son privileged, reprimanding him gently for not showing the proper respect for what Michael Chang's success meant to the community. Tennis, back in the father's day, was still a predominantly achromatic sport. It didn't have the street cred that basketball enjoys. Mr. Chin was a little kid, probably about nine-to-twelve when Chang defeated Stefan Edberg in the finals to claim the French Open title. It was something to brag about when he heard the taunts of his peers on the basketball court. Tennis wasn't enough to offset the specter of Kung Fu. Practicing with his son under moonlight, Mr. Chin holds up a martial arts blocking pad, a vestige of his past Bruce Lee worship, as both protection and provocation tool when Boogie makes his drives toward the basket. Out of the blue, he utters an anachronism, given the time and place; he tells Zhi Xiang that "the idea of a Chinese basketball player is a joke," which is patently false, given the success of the aforementioned Yao Ming and Jeremy Lin. Despite Boogie's success and a father's pride that goes along with it, the misnomer belies sore feelings that persist inside Mr. Chin's medulla oblongata about never getting a fair shake with coaches and players who categorically dismissed him as their athletic equal. The father, by all appearances, taught his son all the fundamentals required to play D1 ball; the proverbial chip off the old block, who must remain content with the consolation prize of living vicariously through his talented son. Not coincidentally, Boogie's team has a second Chinese player on its roster. Arthur(Ming Wu), a scrub from last year's three-win team. After Zhi Xiang describes his teammates as "hot trash" to the coach, word gets back to Mrs. Chin(Pamelyn Chee), Boogie's mother, who agrees with her son's assessment. The husband gets it; he understands that his wife is calling him "hot trash" through circuitous means. Arthur is Mr. Chin's stand-in, a benchwarmer, "picked last". The idea of a Chinese basketball player, even as recently as the eighties, when Boogie's father was coming-of-age, would have been laughed at, still. Bruce Lee's popularity hadn't run its course yet. Midnight showings of "Enter the Dragon" was still an attraction in the grindhouses of New York City, inspiring characters like Sho'nuff(Julius Carry) in "The Last Dragon", to get on stage and anoint himself "The Shogun of Harlem". Out in the real world, however, being Bruce Lee had no real cultural currency.

Boogie code-switches. At home, he's Zhi Xiang, fluent in Mandarin, honors his ancestors, and obeys tradition from back in the old country. At dinner, being the youngest, he takes over the duty of tea pouring from his Uncle Jackie(Eddie Huang), without ego, like any earnest son would. At home, he's Rocky-like. "The Italian Stallion" would start the morning by downing five raw eggs before his 4AM run. The raw egg makes a purposeful cameo in "Boogie". Mrs. Chin serves hot noodles. The egg is used to cool the broth. But at school and on the hardwood, he's Apollo Creed; a world-beater. As Boogie, his "stripper name", Zhi Xiang speaks English with an African-American inflection that's as natural as his Mandarin. He wouldn't be caught dead hanging around Arthur. The filmmaker, just like Justin Lin("Better Luck Tomorrow") before him, is out to kill the stereotype of the model minority. By design, his creation disorientates an audience unused to seeing somebody who looks like Zhi Xiang act like any other jock, being crude with the ladies, when he uses a vulgar pick-up line on Eleanor(Taylour Paige) at the gym. He's obnoxious. That's the point. "Don't tell me..." Eleanor confers with Alissa(Alexa Mareka), her best friend. He is. That's new. Whereas in "The Way of the Dragon", directed by the legend himself, Tang Lung(Bruce Lee) lacks the emotional wherewithal to react when an Italian beauty(Malisa Longo) comes on to him in a Rome hotel suite, and similarly, Leroy Green, like Bruce(who is something of a performative eunuch in his brief oeuvre), uses martial arts to overcompensate for his shyness around Laura Charles(Vanity), Boogie can walk and chew gum at the same. In other words, he can score on and off the court.

"Ever since you were a boy, you've dreamt of being Kung Fu guy," Charles Yu writes, from his 2020 NBA-award winning novel "Interior Chinatown" which follows the acting career of Willis Wu, whose resume includes the ability to play the "disgraced son", "caught between two worlds", and "striving immigrant". Taylor Takahashi, a former California prep star, at various junctures in "Boogie", slips in and out of these historical filmic stereotypes, but Takahashi never plays "generic Asian man". Boogie is the alpha male; the best athlete at a NYC prep school. "Everyone on that team wishes they could be you," Richie(Jorge Lendebourg Jr.), Zhi Xiang's best friend, tells the star player. It's no accident that the school's nickname is the Dragons. In "The Last Dragon", Richie Green(Leo O'Brien), Leroy's younger brother, doesn't want people to know that he's related to a nerd. Purposefully, the filmmaker recycles the name Richie. Of Dominican descent, Boogie's Richie extols his admiration for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", whose titular character is an outcast like Leroy, a comic book and science fiction geek. The author, Junot Diaz, is on record as being a Bruce Lee fan. Being around Zhi Xiang makes Richie feel cool. The filmmaker is, more than likely, aware of the juxtaposition between both Richies.

Monk, ironically, comes across as the biggest geek, when he calls Zhi Xiang "little ninja". It's quite possible that Boogie never watched a Bruce Lee film. Why would he? It's been nearly fifty years since Bruce Lee's tragic, unexpected demise at the age of thirty-two.

It's ancient Chinese history.

Wonder Woman (2017)

No spinning

[9/10 · 6 June 2021]

Wonder Woman doesn't spin, not in this century. With apologies to Lynda Carter, who starred in the CBS television series that ran from 1975 to 1979, Diana Prince looked fairly ridiculous and set a poor example for Drusilla(Debra Winger), her younger sister. Wonder Girl never quite got the hang of it. If anybody deserved a reboot, it was Princess Diana of Themyscira. More than a comic book...

...you can read "Wonder Woman". This film contains multitudes.

Petrox, an oil company, in the 1976 remake of "King Kong", directed by John Gullimero, sends an exploration team to an uncharted island, believed to be rich in crude oil. Fred Wilson(Charles Grodin), the company point man, briefs his crew ahead of landfall. During a slideshow presentation, Fred talks excitedly about an island obscured by what he describes as "cloud cover"; a fog. Jack Prescott(Jeff Bridges), a paleontologist and stowaway, offers a contrasting theory; it's H2O build-up, possibly emanating from a large primate. Filmmaker Patty Jenkins borrows heavily from this sequence in "Wonder Woman", an origin story about Diana Prince(Gal Gadot), whose home, Paradise Island, acts as a counterpoint to the patriarchal construct of Skull Island. In "King Kong", the oilmen encounter natives, indigenous men and women whose god walks among them, a fifty-foot gorilla, the centerpiece of a pagan religion that features an elaborate ceremony, characterized by song and dance, in which the natives offer their offer their god a human sacrifice. The women are complicit, accomplices; they aid the men in preparing the chosen female for the wedding ceremony. The bride, it should be noted, wears a headdress made of straw that resembles blonde hair. When the shaman glimpses Dwan(Jessica Lange), a budding Hollywood starlet, he sees, perhaps, a hieroglyph come to life; a goddess that will satiate Kong and the potentiality of a union with staying power, which would give his people, at long last, peace. Paradise Island, by contrast, in "Wonder Woman" is a feminist utopia, a population comprised solely of women warriors called Amazonians, ruled by Queen Hippolyta(Connie Nielsen), Diana's mother. Remaining faithful to the creation myth laid out by DC writer/creator William Moulton Marston, Diana was sculpted from clay; Hippolyta as master ceramicist, shaping her greatest work of art, a baby, which Zeus animates like only a Greek go can, transforming shale to flesh and blood. "That's neat," Steve Trevor(Chris Pine) answers, when Diana regales him with the fantastical story of her birth, as they journey to England by boat. But it's not true. Jenkins shows, not tells, in plain sight, but coded, how DC Comics remythologized Wonder Woman in 2011, offering an alternative to the fettling knife tale. The real story is Nikos Kazantzakis-like. In Brian Azzarello's "Blood: Volume 1(The New 52), science takes precedence over magic, as it's revealed that Zeus is, in actuality, Diana Prince's biological father. Patty Jenkins, hailing from the indie film sector, brings feminist film theory to the comic book movie. She references "Monster", her debut feature, starring Charlize Theron, as well as the aforementioned seventies-era "King Kong" remake. Jenkins, by all appearances, is a student of semiotics, as well.

Steve Trevor is a pilot. Like the oil exploration team in "King Kong", the British spy pilot pierces a fortress cloaked with biological matter that protects an uncharted island from outsiders. The Nazis, ******, pursue Steve by ship. In the prologue, we learn that Zeus camouflages Paradise Island; it's not H20, arguably, it's something more viscous. One of the German sailors spots wreckage from Steve's downed plane. When the Nazi soldier sticks his head through the invisible barrier, he resembles a newborn child. This barrier, separating Paradise Island from civilization, can be construed as a binary: feminine/masculine, the ocean as both sides of a... And furthermore, a second binary emerges as a result: science/religion, pitting Diana, a daughter who came out of her mother's body, as opposed to the Amazonians, fully-formed women, like an army of apple eaters, emerging from the ocean to quell man's tempestuous side. When Diana Prince of Themyscira follows Steve to England, the British soldier robs the hyper-sovereign island of its "magic", just like the Petrox man, in "King Kong". "A year from now, that island will be an island of burnt-out drunks," predicts Jack, alluding, it would seem, to Native Americans, practitioners of the bow and arrow, the weapon of choice used by the Amazonian warrior. All their lives, these women have been training for a battle of the sexes. They were waiting for Ares(David Thewlis), not Germany., but nevertheless, they won the war. Now what? In the process, these ancient immortals lost their god, along with the historical artifacts that defined who they are as a people: the Lariat of Truth, an electric lasso, the Godkiller, a sword, and the Necklace of Freedom, a tiara of sorts. When Wonder Woman cuts down the God of War, in the climactic showdown, she transforms these warriors into women of leisure. Are they equipped for peacetime? Unlike the outside world where women are constantly proving themselves as the equal of men, the Amazonian identity is taken for granted; they are, superior even, highlighted by great athleticism, fighting prowess, and unrivaled bravery. They have no other persona to fall back on. Life was more interesting with the prospect of Ares discovering them. Ironically, these women need a man(Sir Patrick Morgan was Ares' human guise) in their lives.

Aileen Wuornos didn't need a man in her life. It was man who helped engineer a monster. Jenkins frames "Wonder Woman" around "King Kong" as a way of alluding to the similarities between interspecies womankind, human primate and primate; the loneliness that derives from isolation and being the perpetual "other". The first time we see Aileen as her adult self, she is sitting on slanted ground beneath an underpass, cars whizzing past her; drivers and passengers alike not seeing the "hooker" as a human being. And then she meets Selby Wall(Christina Ricci) in a bar on what was supposed to be her last night, her last hour, on earth. The filmmaker, as early as 2003, had the big gorilla on her mind. Selby Wall is not the name of Wuornos' real-life girlfriend. Wall was chosen for its metaphorical possibilities. Wall can be interpreted as a reference to the high barricade that the Skull Island natives erected to keep their hirsute god out. Selby looks tiny standing next to Aileen Wuornos, purposely so, perhaps, as a way of evoking Kong and Dwan. Film theorist Linda Williams cites "King Kong" as a filmic example of the "female gaze" in her essay "When The Woman Looks", published in, a-ha, 1984. Jenkins, as a film scholar, knowingly turns the masculine/feminine binary on its head. Steve Trevor assumes the position usually reserved for the woman. Diana Prince is the "monster"(non-human), so to speak. Williams argues that Kong is "not the monster as double for the male viewer," but instead, "the monster as double for the woman." When Dwan meets Kong's gaze, according to the tenets of feminist film theory, the woman realizes that she and the monster share a common enemy, man, who treats them both as "fetish objects". The key line that alludes to "When The Woman Looks" isn't delivered by the displaced hero, Steve Trevor; it's Sameer(Said Taghmaoui), the WWII fighter pilot's colleague, when the assembled team recruited to hunt down Ludendorff(Danny Huston), Britain's arch-villain. (Ludendorff's importance is diminished; he's subordinate to Ares, Diana Prince's mortal enemy.) Sameer quips: "I am both frightened and aroused," after witnessing Diana toss a heavy man across the bar floor with shocking ease. According to Williams: "There is not much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned." Sameer is both "aroused" and "frightened", which corresponds, respectfully, to both "desire" and "horror". In "Monster", that spell between woman and "monster" is broken, since Selby can only hear, but not see Aileen, during a FBI-monitored phone call. Without visual confirmation, Aileen becomes just another ordinary woman, not a heightened one. Left with only a disembodied voice, Selby ceases to be a Dwan surrogate, and transforms into one of the men in combat helicopters who takes aim at Kong standing atop the World Trade Center, which the big gorilla scales because of the Twin Towers' similarity to a pair of mountains back home. Arguably, the filmmaker knows that "twin peaks" is a slang word, so Aileen as monster, protects Selby from the penitentiary and selflessly endures every kill-shot from the lawmen on the other side of the phone line.

With Ares' urging, in the climactic showdown, Wonder Woman gets the chance to kill Dr. Maru(Elena Ayana), whose mask is reminiscent of the titular character in Rupert Julian's "The Phantom of the Opera"(1925), also cited by Williams in her seminal essay. Diana lets her live. Ares is the monster, not Dr. Maru; he acted as the disfigured woman's muse. The god of war tries to convince Wonder Woman that they're alike. But Diana Prince is a god, not a monster. Like Kong, she fetishizes a human. The feeling is mutual. Trevor identifies with the god/monster; a man in drag. He admires Diana's strength. Trevor stops being intimidated by the "monster", and starts to love "her".

Just like a (wo)man.

And just like a man, Wonder Woman tries to protect her (wo)man, similar to Aileen Wuornos, similar to Kong, from anybody laying a finger on the object of her(his) undying love.

Borrowing a tagline from Richard Lester's "Superman":

You will believe a woman can fly.

Little Sister (I) (2016)

Gwack gwarniccus

[9/10 · 13 May 2021]

Black Narcissus is not the name of a goth band; it's a 1947 film about rival concupiscent nuns, a bizarre love triangle in the thin air of the Himalayas, directed by Michael Powell. Sister Clodaugh(Deborah Kerr) and Sister Ruth(Kathleen Byron) both have their vows put to the test by Mr. Dean(David Farrar), the roguish go-between for General Toda Rai(Esmond Knight), the Raijut ruler, who wants to build a nunnery over a former house of ill repute. Clodaugh and Ruth are sisters of passion, the secularized kind; one latent, the other made manifest through facial gesture and body language, but both are more interested in him than hymns. Sisters of Mercy, a Brooklyn convent, is the home of a novitiate nun, Colleen Lundson(Addison Timlin), and also the name of an English musical group fronted by Andrew Eldritch, a noted goth practitioner, in Zach Clark's "Little Sister", a film with layers and multitudes because of its allusions to Mopu Palace, God's Nepalese provisional house. Who called Colleen? God works in mysterious ways, but not this mysterious. God didn't call Colleen. Colleen called God. This former Satanist/performance artist's reasons for joining a convent are clearly secularist in nature. The unnamed abbess(Barbara Crampton), known only as Sister Mother, doubts Colleen's devotion to Jesus Christ, suspecting correctly that the young woman is running away from the actuality of being. Atonement, born out of self-hatred, can cause a person to do extreme things. Being a nun, the audience suspects, is a preventive measure against a truth that Colleen doesn't want to face about herself. The vow of celibacy every prospective nun has to undertake gives the young woman an excuse not to explore her sexual orientation. What Colleen chooses to do in her free time gives her tenuous connection to incorporeality away from the beginning. Not a man in sight, the bar Colleen walks into, but with her future all mapped out, she can pretend to be on a mission, a tourist, there to support Debbie(Amber Williams), a friend, and bad experimental theater; an agitprop production about 9/11 and the Iraqi War. Outside the venue, Colleen lectures Debbie, who reacts incredulously at her friend's approach to her, sounding more like a life coach than a pal, even though they're contemporaries. As a nun, letting this crush object know that she should pursue a professional singing career is the only way for her latent romanticism to breathe.

The runaway daughter returns home. Not so much a calling, but an escape, three years ago when Colleen chose God over family; her dysfunctional family. The GWAR fan didn't hear voices like Joan of Arc; she was probably an atheist, if the upside-down cross in her childhood bedroom is any indication. The voice she heard was internal, a voice of her own beckoning; a whisper, a scream, or otherwise, granting herself permission to abdicate the rudimentary duties of a daughter and sister, like offer solace to dad(Peter Hedges) when mom(Ally Sheedy), a recovering junkie, attempts suicide, while Jake(Keith Poulson), her older brother, was fighting a war in Iraq. Sister Clodaugh, in "Black Narcissus", leaves Ireland in a haste after Con(Shaun Noble), the man she had set her heart on marrying, chose America over a provincial Irish life by boarding a plane to bountiful without her. In flashbacks, it's hard to reconcile the red-blooded gal who once loved to fish for trout in pristine lakes, join the men on rabbit hunts with impeccable horsemanship, and model grandma's heirlooms; green emerald earrings that matched her green necklace, in a full-length body mirror, with the person she would become, a Sister Superior, donning the habit, inhabiting the comportment of a post-woman, giving up on life. Rather than blame the wild and impulsive girl she was for making a rash decision to love god and recognize god's silence as the sacrifice every nun makes in a loveless ecclesiastical marriage, she casts animadversions on her exotic surroundings, attributing the thin air as an addling aphrodisiac, a natural drug that undoes the act of forgetting. God is designated to be the sole listener to the petitions of a nun in crisis, but Sister Clodaugh shares her innermost secrets to an impious set of ears, telling Mr. Dean, a hairy-chested agnostic in short pants, about the woman she was before her calling; a calling about as unconvincing as Colleen's consequential life choice. In "Little Sister", Colleen, too, betrays God, but the catalyst of change when she returns home isn't an improper love interest(like an old flame from high school; she never had one), but Jake, a sibling, home again, never the same again, after being scarred bodily whole by fire from a bomb that detonated during his tour of duty. Cosplaying a goth, that's what Colleen did as a teenager, but now, Jake, the ex-soldier, has more goth cred than his younger sister ever accrued, passing his days and nights indoors as if the sun and moon were rumors. The upside down cross she turned right side up, remains right side up, but for old times sake, Colleen returns to her death metal roots, dyeing her hair pink, and locating her makeup kit containing the usual suspects of goth chic: white pancake makeup, black eyeshadow, and blood red lipstick, and turns herself into the undead; a zombie, not Lazarus. Both Sister Clodaugh and Sister Ruth are both the protagonist in their respective filmic universes, so we're privy to their backstories, but it's not Clodaugh that the filmmaker modeled Colleen after; it's Sister Ruth, who in "Black Narcissus" isn't cosplaying goth; she is religious mythology incarnate. The novitiate nun must be running away from somebody, but who?

Emily(Molly Plunk), an animal rights activist, was Colleen's best friend in high school, albeit by default. The student body didn't like them. Their accidental reunion convenes at a health food store where Emily works as a stock person. To catch up on old times, she invites Colleen back to her parents' house, the scene of their goth heyday. Fully-clothed, lounging around in an empty bathtub, Emily, also a recovering goth, asks the nun if she still has her "v-card". Colleen does, which is the main difference, or rather, the only difference that matters between the novitiate sister and Clodaugh; the Sister Superior lost hers. Why the bathroom, of all places, for these full-grown women to take a nostalgia trip? It's a tell; it's inevitable, this cusp of being. Why the tub and not a table with chairs, or the plush couch in the living room? As a teenager, Colleen had an inkling of who she was, but didn't stick around to find out for sure. Emily, likewise, quashes the truth about herself by dedicating her life to animals, love surrogates; she's like a militant version of Lottie Schwartz in "Being John Malkovich", who ends up with Maxine, and not needing the animals anymore to feel loved. The second time Colleen stops by for a visit, Jake tags along. When she catches Emily making out with her older brother, the filmmaker denies the audience a reaction shot. Is Colleen jealous? And what about Emily? She must know that Colleen will spot them. It's transference, perhaps; kissing Jake is six degrees of kissing somebody whose life choice made her unkissable. In her spare times, Emily constructs bombs, filling a need that the animal liberator can't quite put a finger on, until her best friend returns home. Since "Little Sister", quite pointedly, is set in 2007, Colleen can't marry Emily, so she marries God instead. Sister Clodaugh marries God on the rebound, after Con forsakes her. Sister Ruth, on the other hand, doesn't know a whole lot about love, and becomes a nun before she tested the real world. That seems to be Colleen's story, too.

Sister Ruth, the original goth, knows how to make a splashy entrance. All over her apron, in Technicolor, is blood, the gore of a hemorrhaging local woman, which upsets the Sister Superior, who feels that medicine should be left to the doctors and nurses, whereas Mr. Dean tells Ruth: "I'm very obliged to you," for her assistance in the saving of a worker he values. Blood can symbolize humanity, or life itself, but the context in this case relates to Sister Ruth's fledgling worldliness, a second puberty; the blood is menstrual. In the presence of Mr. Dean, who never fully buttons his shirts, Ruth experiences the flush of love for the first time. She misconstrues Mr. Dean's nicety, reserved for any man or woman who did him a favor, as a declaration of love. Unlike Sister Clodaugh, both she and Colleen allowed the church instead of the outside world to form them. Colleen's avant-garde theater piece, shock art as therapy for Jake, unmistakably references "Black Narcissus"; the all-white habit, smeared with "blood"(gelatin), recalls the aftermath of Sister Ruth's misadventure in the infirmary. A person can change, undergo a transformation from unholy to holy, but what Colleen does with her props, accompanied by the GWAR song "Have You Seen Me", acts as an origin story, an accidental commentary on the controversies that films such as Peter Mullan's "The Magdalene Sisters" and the Amy Berg documentary "Deliver Us From Evil" addresses, especially the former, which tells the story of The Magdalene Laundries. These so-called bad girls, these "fallen women", were imprisoned at what, for all intents and purposes, were asylums, in which they were subjected to cruelties by a type of woman Colleen role-plays as shock art. Literally(the nun doesn't renew her vows) and metaphorically(the nun falls over the side of a mountain cliff), Ruth is a fallen woman. When Mr. Dean rejects the former sister's advances, sensing correctly that he loves her rival, Ruth sneaks up behind Sister Clodaugh at the bell tower, and ends up killing herself instead. In "Little Sister", Colleen, ironically, asks a stripper: "Does your parents know what you do for a living?" Colleen dances, too.

Does her parents know what she does?

The Unknown Girl (2016)

The doctor knows

[8/10 · 29 April 2021]

Jenny Davin(Adele Haenel), a general practitioner, once was an intern like Julien(Olivier Bonnaud), making the same rookie mistakes, but learning from those mistakes, while under the tutelage of Dr. Habran(Yves Larec), whose practice she is leaving to further her career in a more affluent part of Belgium. Earlier that day, in "The Unknown Girl", directed by The Dardenne Brothers, a boy of tender age braved a seizure while Julien stood and watched, impervious towards his mentor's curt orders to act. For Julien, hard feelings persist, afterhours at the clinic, as the doctor justifies her loss of temper. The door buzzer goes off. They're closed. Julien makes a motion to answer it, but Dr. Davin tells Julien to ignore it, probably because she is running late to a small ceremony, a meet-and-greet with her new colleagues at a bigger infirmary. This cursory decision will change the trajectory of Jenny's personal and professional life forever. The late night nuisance turns up dead the next day. In short order, Jenny turns down the job, tossing away a golden opportunity for career advancement as penance. That's because the girl was running for her life; a prostitute counting on the clinic to provide safe harbor from unseen pursuers. The police tells Jenny she's being too self-critical, but the detectives don't understand what her job entails. As a student, Jenny, like every prospective doctor, is expected to take the Hippocratic Oath, which asks of the physician that they administer the best care possible to every patient encounter of an examining kind. The dead girl, a foreigner, was never Jenny's patient; was never her mentor's patient either. This unknown girl, nevertheless, becomes her case, when the doctor starts moonlighting as an amateur sleuth. "The Unknown Girl" can best be described as an incidental genre film, a part-time police procedural that interrupts the filmmakers' usual brand of character-driven neorealism. It's as if Jenny discovered an unabridged version of the Hippocratic Oath.

The teenage boy is not a doctor. He should be in school studying to be one. The kid has the right stuff. Some doctors may know the words, but not the music. This kid on the motor scooter knows what makes the Hippocratic Oath sing, in "La prommese", Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's 1996 debut feature. The father is wasting his son's potential, removing him from a classroom environment to be his foreman at a construction site, composed solely of illegal aliens. Igor(Jeremie Reiner), the labor contractor's offspring, is equipped with what every acceptable physician needs, a moral compass, something that his father Roger(Olivier Goirmet), a human trafficker, sorely lacks in good, and especially, bad times. Amidou(Rasmane Ouedraogo), a Burkina Faso national, fearing expedient deportation, falls off his scaffolding when Igor sounds the alarm on the imminent arrival of labor inspectors. Without hesitation, Igor tries to stanch the bleeding by tying a belt around Hamidou's calf. In "The Unknown Girl", Julien freezes, ignoring Dr. Davin's order to garner a pillow for the epileptic child. Igor unknowingly follows the most important tenet of medicine; keep a cool head. Checked emotions help the physician assess a situation and make the proper diagnosis. It's the same advice that Jenny imparts to her green intern. Hamidou is an unknown man; his wife, Assita(Assita Oureadrago), an unknown woman. Hamidou and Assita have a son. To the Belgian authorities, however, they're an unknown family, invisible to the naked eye. Roger, not so dissimilar from the father(Jeremie Renier) of Brian(Louka Minnella), Jenny's patient, in "The Unknown Girl", undoes Igor's amateur doctoring, because Hamidou, he has deemed, is not worth the risk of putting himself in legal jeopardy. The belt wrapped around Hamidou's leg is removed. Blood is on Igor's hands, but he's not a doctor; he's a gravedigger's assistant, a cement mixer. Before Hamidou loses consciousness, he asks Igor to take an oath, a promise akin to the Hippocratic Oath, which is that the boy take care of Assita to the best of his ability.

Doctors in Belgium make house calls. Prior to Bryan's examination, Jenny samples a waffle that his mother(Christelle Cornil), a recovering alcoholic, baked for the people she works with. The waffles echo "Rosetta", The Dardenne Brothers' 1999 Palm d'or-award winning follow-up to "La prommesse", since the titular character(Emilie Dequenne) works at a waffle stand, and happens to be the child of an oft-inebriated mother, too. When Dr. Davin shows the unknown girl's image on her cellphone, the boy's heartbeat races. She knows that Bryan recognizes the young African prostitute, and possibly, what was her fate. To Jenny, the abecedarian detective, Bryan is a person of interest. The boy admits, later on, that he and a friend saw the unknown girl servicing a client through the camper window. By chance, after a threat is made on Jenny's life, an instance of genre convention usurping the filmmakers' penchant for verisimilitude, Bryan and his pal pass her in the opposite lane of a highway. She meets up with them at the quarry, where Jenny tries to interrogate Bryan's clueless friend. Bryan won't allow it, going so far as pushing his general practitioner into a trench, preempting any further questioning. Bryan returns, making a ladder accessible for Jenny's escape. The boy isn't a killer, nor was Rosetta, who mulls over the decision to save Riquet(Fabrizio Rongione), her waffle stand rival, from drowning in a pond. In retrospect, the act of killing emerges as a theme. Rosetta nearly joins Roger and, as it turns out, Bryan's father, in the act of negligent homicide. The husband and father wanted to be the unknown girl's next john. He chased the prostitute by car, then on foot, and watched the dark-skinned foreigner stumble near the harbor; her head made contact with a hard surface and bleeded out, just like Hamidou. Casting Jeremie Renier as Bryan's father suggests that the girl's ethnicity wasn't necessarily a factor in the Belgian man's failure to render aid. Renier, after all, played Igor in "La promesse". Skin color doesn't matter to either character. Arguably, Roger would have treated all of his international workers with the same callous disregard. Igor, on the other hand, considers himself no better or worse that the people who work as post-slaves for his father. A talent for color blindness is the aspect of a good doctor, such as Jenny Davin, who treats these people, by choice, in an economically-depressed city, predominantly non-native. Jenny lives in Seriang, whereas her predecessor, we suspect, commuted from a better neighborhood, and lacked the humanity to sit down for a cup of coffee in a morbidly obese man's humble abode.

Careerism, Jenny feels, played a role in the unknown girl's death. The doctor stops Julien from answering the call because an unscheduled appointment would have made her late for the party. She chastises herself for wanting to consort with doctors whose clientele lived without government subsistence. The clothes in her closet might as well be a collection of hairshirts. Jenny's new mission is to unmake the Jane Doe, who may have been Dr. Habran's patient. The unknown girl buzzes once, not twice, as if she had been there before, knowing the clinic's closing time and giving up. Jenny's mentor, however, fails to ID the victim, but he qualifies his inability to recall a doctor/patient relationship with a faint admission of indifference to the "forty African families" during his tenure. As a child, maybe the unknown girl paid him a visit, but how can he be expected to recognize her older self? Jenny, the audience suspects, would remember all the names, all the faces, all of it, the birthing, the aging, the dying.

Sacrifice and penance, action and reaction, that's Igor's story, too. Dr. Jenny Davin would have loved this kid. They're two peas in a pod. Igor pawns the gold ring his father bought him, and with that cash from the sale, he buys one-way train tickets to Italy. One last hurdle, the procuring of official papers to fool immigration authorities on Assita's residential status, and they're in the clear. Igor will have then fulfilled a dying man's wish, and in the process, save his own soul. By putting on a stranger's headscarf, a legal African resident who lends Assita the proper documents, the country itself, not just Jenny's mentor, who renders the immigrant invisible, or rather, unknown. Igor chooses a random Belgian, a man, and points to the seated women, asking him which one is the face in the passport; he picks Assita. In "The Unknown Girl", the police don't get the girl's name right, and don't care.

Jenny Davin sees people, really sees them. She would have been able to match the passport photo with the right dark-skinned woman. For people like Dr. Davin, all people are known.

I Care a Lot (2020)

Marla and Fran

[8/10 · 22 April 2021]

This is the scene from "Thelma and Louise" that sealed the deal for Callie Khouri when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed her with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1992. This is the scene that filmmaker Ridley Scott, then known for high octane sci-fi/action films such as "Alien" and "Blade Runner", needed to get right. Louise Sawyer(Susan Sarandon), wanted for questioning by the FBI in the parking lot shooting death of a notorious lothario, sits alone in the passenger seat of a blue 1966 Thunderbird, while her partner-in-crime, Thelma Dickinson(Geena Davis), walks across a dusty road to pick up a few things at the grocery store. Unbeknownst to Thelma, two old women, from their picture window, have been monitoring the sad woman with self-recognition, ever since Thelma turned off the engine. Her disillusionment with life is visible with every breath she takes. They don't need to know the particulars of Louise's story, intuiting for themselves that it's the same story women of a certain generation were fed as girls: Find a man, get married, rear children, settle down, and happiness will follow. At first, Louise rejects their unwarranted pity, using her lipstick as a weapon to put some distance between her relative youth and their inevitable disintegration. But the waitress' reflection in the rearview window is a rude awakening; she puts down the tube and succumbs to the outreach of sisterhood with resignation. Louise, in essence, meets her future self, an aging spinster, because she didn't settle for Jimmy(Michael Madsen), her off-and-on boyfriend, betting wrong that there would be other men, other marriage proposals. Conversely, in "I Care a Lot", directed by J Blakeson, a woman, a senior citizen, admiringly winks at Marla Grayson(Rosamund Pike), epitomizing the liberated woman in this post-"Thelma and Louise" narrative of feminists gone wild.

"I was once like you," confesses the self-described lioness, at the outset of "I Care a Lot", an origin story that is only hinted at, in a rare moment of introspection when Marla wasn't so super. Some life-changing event, we suspect, flicked on a switch in Marla Grayson's mind that transformed her from "prey" to "predator", a health care professional with teeth, all pearly white and sharp. The first-person narration coincides with the arrival of a man, an adult son, at a nursing home, being wrestled to the ground by security, who denies him, not for the first time, apparently, the right to visit his mother. Whereas Marla's years as prey is only hinted at during the guardian's interior monologue, in the Ridley Scott film, the audience watches Louise, a rape survivor, turn into a predator before their very eyes. After intervening on Thelma's behalf in the parking lot, she shoots Harlan(Timothy Carhart), her best friend's attacker, dead in cold blood after he utters one too many obscenity-laced insults. Harlan had presumed wrong that a woman wouldn't pull the trigger. As a point of emphasis, in "I Care a Lot", Marla never carries any firearms; her mouth is a lethal weapon, a gun. Feldstrom(Macon Blair), the adult son who was denied his visitation rights, confronts her mother's legal guardian outside the courthouse, where he failed to extricate the statutory looter from their lives. Fran(Eliza Gonzalez), Marla's partner-in-crime(and life partner), stands idly by while her lover emasculates Feldstrom, whose projectile spit unleashes in the lioness a maelstrom of expletives that annihilates the overmatched man without any blood spilling. Strong women, both, intimidating even, women to be reckoned with, Marla and Fran, despite being free from the systemic patriarchy which took their predecessors awhile to untangle themselves from, these unprincipled ladies are more post-feminists than feminists. Thelma robs the grocery store out of necessity; she didn't want to beg Daryl(Christopher McDonald), her husband, for money. Thelma makes the policeman cry out of necessity, not pleasure; he posed a roadblock to Mexico. Thelma and Louise blow up a gas truck out of necessity; the driver had made obscene gestures and off-color remarks on each road passing. For Marla and Fran, crime is fun and games. That pensioner who winks at Marla sees a heroine, a real man-eater, never guessing that this predator cannibalizes her own kind, too.

People are commodities. A wealthy retiree with no known family; no pesky relatives who come out of the woodworks to claim their inheritance money when the oldster passes on, is coined a "cherry" in the lexicon of lionesses. The term encompasses both sexes, male and female, because in the eyes of insiders like Dr. Karen Amos(Alicia Witt), and others of her ilk, old people are less human than living breathing banks. The latest cherry, Jennifer Peterson(Diane Wiest), turns out to be a mock bing. Jennifer Peterson is an alias for the mother of a Russian drug kingpin, Roman Lunyov(Peter Dinkage), who precipitates Marla's retrogression. Prey, once again, tied up in a chair, Marla forgets how to play the victim, openly mocking her apprehender's dwarfism. It's suicide, in a sense, six degrees of Louise driving the Thunderbird off the cliff. She doesn't want the little Russian person to see her cry. Like Thelma Dickinson and Louise Sawyer, fugitives of the law by circumstance, Marla Grayson would rather die than compromise. Prison time, real prison time awaits them, but their lives, women's lives: one, a waitress pining over her non-committal beau; the other, a homemaker taken for granted by a cheating husband, the regional manager of a wholesale carpet warehouse, were prisons in their own right, servants in a patriarchal hell. Marla, on the other hand, can't bring herself to be acquiescent when Roman gives the "brave, but stupid woman," an out; release Jennifer Peterson from her malfeasant guardianship or die. The predator, who used to be the prey, has come full circle, sentenced to death by a person, a man, with more power than her, a lion.

Both women were armed, the housewife and the waitress; they could have gone down shooting, just like Butch Cassidy(Paul Newman) and The Sundance Kid(Robert Redford), outnumbered, but with the same fatalistic and determined us against them mentality. The year, however, was 1991. Women in movies didn't do that, kill indiscriminately; in this case, policemen just doing their jobs, so Thelma Dickinson and Louise Sawyer made a spur-of-the-moment suicide pact, then drove their car into the Grand Canyon. Both films end with a freeze-frame; we know that the two desperados go down in a hail of bullets; we know the Thunderbird will not be needing any body work when they find the flaming wreckage at the bottom of the canyon. The men look strong. The women look weak. Marla is the opposite of weak and performatively speaking, the opposite of female. Marla wakes up from her drug-induced state in the midst of a staged suicide attempt. The trees don't get her, but the lake does. Marla's determined swim to reach the water's surface retells the origin story in miniature of her climb up the American corporate ladder. It's harder for a woman. She put in the time, though; all those hours on the exercise bike at the gym with low-key lighting; all those hours in the office fending off unwanted sexual advances and being passed over for promotion by idiots. Most women would have drowned, but most women are not Marla Grayson. The lioness emerges from the lake, reduced by her near-death experience; a dislodged tooth, soaked from head-to-toe in dirty lake water, and the humiliation of being born again; a damsel in distress.

Marla walks into a convenience store. She could be prey, an assaulted woman, but the man behind the register could care less. He asks no questions. An opportunist, the cashier doesn't wave Marla's offer of fifty dollars for the use of his cellphone. For warmth, Marla leans her face against the hot dog roller, a reflexive memory, perhaps, of days past when she was a child; poor, with a mother, possibly abusive. What muse be eons for Marla, who has been self-reliant for so many years, asks a man for help: "Can you call me a cab?"

A little oral surgery and Marla is back at the top of her game. In short order, she sells out, teaming up with Roman to monopolize the nursing home industry. Marla may be a lioness, and Fran, the lioness' mate, but man is still king of the jungle; a sharp-dressed dwarf with a well-manicured beard. And although a lion, even a lady lion, is a fierce and intimidating animal, there are men who hunt big game. Feldstrom doesn't have a trophy room. He's not a (wo)man-eater. In the hunter's eyes, his mom, in her prime, was a lioness, too. Marla broke up his mother's pride. Marla thought the judge was the law, and the courtroom, a jungle. She forgot about poachers. She should have known better than anybody that rules were meant to be broken.

"I Care a Lot" punishes the woman. But not for the usual reasons that you mostly see in horror movies. Marla is punished for acting like a lion. The kingdom belongs to Fran.

Fran is the final lioness.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

1968, a matrix

[7/10 · 15 April 2021]

Three people are stranded on a deserted Alaskan island. They look out towards the sky at a twin-engine plane, piloted by Jack(Kris Kristofferson), a Port Henry local with a past, who has returned with a larger aircraft with extra seats. Joe Gastineau(David Strathairn) wonders aloud if the extra seats are for them, or occupied by the assassins who killed Bobby(Casey Siemaszko), his half-brother, an amateur drug smuggler. It's an overcast day without a trace in the sky. "Limbo", directed by John Sayles, ends with a close-up of the clouds, white like pages from an empty book, and the plane's whirring motor. It's one of the "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark". How does it end?

Stella Nicholls(Zoe Colletti) is a girl out of time, living in a small town out of time. It's the late-sixties, but in Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, the fifties hangover that was cured by The Beatles' stateside arrival and prevailing counterculture never got past the city limits. Vietnam unfolds on a black-and-white television. Richard Nixon's bid for the White House, too. But the conspicuous absence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the social unrest that defined the late-sixties' post-slow decade swoon lollapalooza of happenings, makes the news at six look like transmissions from the future. It's Halloween night in Andre Ovredal's "SSTTITD" and Stella Nicholls(Zoe Colletti), a horror short story writer, is alone in her bedroom with all her stuff: B-movie posters, comic books, and monster memorabilia, stuff you normally associate with a guy, especially in the Summer of Love. The phone rings; it's Augie(Gabriel Rush), begging Stella to go trick-or-treating with him and Chuck(Austin Zajur), one final time before they go their separate ways after high school is over. As they walk through their quaint and somewhat anachronic neighborhood, it may strike the viewer that this small band of nerds, especially the boys, seem more like little kids than high school seniors. They're draft-eligible, most likely, but the most pressing matter on their minds is the prank that Chuck devised against Tommy Milner(Austin Abrams), the requisite town bully, and his letterman-jacketed lackeys, which involves eggs and flaming poo directed at the head honcho's car. The ensuing chase by foot ends at a drive-in, a mode of film exhibition more synonymous with the iconography of the fifties. It wasn't time for "The Last Picture Show", but a theater better delineates setting. Period detail, in "SSTTITD", is allocated from the diegesis, seemingly coming from a second authorial voice, somebody more mature with a better grasp of time and place than the creator. For instance, Donovan's "Season of the Witch" plays over the soundtrack(an extra-diegetic source) in the opening sequence to describe the literality of Stella's chosen costume, a witch, whereas the outside voice would better understand that "witch", as conveyed by Donovan Leitch, has more in common with social change than a woman with magical powers. George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead"(non-diegetic insert) unspools on the drive-in screen when Stella meets Ramon Morales(Michael Garza), whose car she and her friends pile into, a disappearing act they pull on their Halloween night pursuers. Stella likes zombie flicks. She can quote and do the voice that goes with it. Using her best Sheriff McClelland(George Kosana) imitation, she says: "All right, Vince, hit him in the head, right between the eyes," a memorable, but apolitical line, suggestive of a girl who misses the film's subtext: Vietnam and racial strife. "Search and destroy," is military jargon; it's used by the newscaster, in reference to the zombies. "Marauding ghouls," he calls them, or in other words...Does Stella pick up on this? In "Night of the Living Dead", it's the townsfolk who kill Ben(Duane Jones), not the zombies. The author may miss the allegory, but the extraneous voice doesn't. Like the African-American actor on the screen, Ramon is the "other". His exoticness is a non-issue for Stella, but it isn't for Chuck. Augie catches his friend's casual racism, apologizing to Ramon, who just saved their bacon, when Chuck asks the stranger: "You're not from around here, are you?" just like Police Chief Turner(Gil Bellows) at the gas pumps. Even worse, he sniffs Ramon's first, as if it stinks, perpetuating an ugly stereotype. Stella remains quiet all throughout this mini-drama, but celluloid speaks louder than words. "Night of the Living Dead" was shot in the same state, in a city probably not that far from this fictional town. Film historians credit George Romero with making the first modern horror movie. A graveyard would be more fashionable and contemporary, but Stella invites Ramon to the filmic world of Robert Wise's "The Haunting" and Jack Clayton's "The Innocents", a haunted house.

Therein lies a fallacy to categorizing fiction and non-fiction as such, since both divisions involve storytelling, the novel and the memoir, respectively. Truth is always a subjective concept, one version; one point-of-view of real-time events. Gordie LaChance(Richard Dreyfuss) as an adult, in "Stand by Me", directed by Rob Reiner, writes a bildungsroman about the time he and his buddies made the journey to look at a dead body; a classmate who had been reported missing for weeks. There's no reason to doubt Gordie's remembrances, yet it's only human nature for the writer to gild the lily, so to speak, when describing one's self and one's friends. Taking Gordie(Will Wheaton) at his word that Chris Chambers(River Phoenix) encouraged him to keep on telling stories, therefore giving credit to the deceased friend for making him a successful writer, it would stand to reason, with a stroke of the mighty pen, that he change history and improve a troubled kid's legacy. Maybe Chris, in fact, did not return the stolen class money to the teacher, but kept it for himself. Based on the short story "The Body" by Stephen King from "Different Seasons", a collection of novellas, it's tempting to view Stella Nichols as a stand-in for King's wife, a novelist, telling the story of her own youth as a young artist. There are echoes, no doubt, to "Stand By Me". Stella has her own one-person rooting section, as well, in the form of Augie, who encourages his classmate to submit her short stories for publication in the school newspaper. Is it an answer film, in code? Stella, a genre film fangirl, could be Mrs. Gordie LaChance, except for the fact that this fictional Pennsylvania town looks more like a matrix of the Summer of Love than the real thing, written by somebody who wasn't alive, but only heard about the sixties. So maybe not. So who is?

Joe Gastineau, in "Limbo", was a high school basketball star, before he blew out his knee, and became a career drifter. John Wooden, the legendary head coach at UCLA, had sent one of his scouts all the way to Alaska. Noelle(Vanessa Martinez), the daughter of a lounge singer, Donna DeAngelo(Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), makes regular visits to the trophy case at her high school that saved all the hardware of a could-have-been never-was. The year was 1968, the same unfolding year in "SSTTIND". Noelle has a puppy love crush on her mother's boyfriend. For Stella Nicholls, it's the new kid in town. When Stella and her two surviving friends, Ramon and Chuck, fool the front desk nurse and penetrate the restricted area at the mental hospital, it's Ramon who disposes of the clipboard and adjoining forms in the swing door trashcan like a basketball star scoring two with panache, a thunderous dunk. Chuck stays behind while Stella and Ramon go to the Red Room(an acronym for Records and Evaluations Department), where they go through old boxes to learn the truth about Sarah Bellows, the spirit who haunts her childhood home, a manor. Stella, unwittingly, becomes the custodian of the dead woman's short stories. She took the book from Sarah's room. To her surprise, the author is still active, writing new tales from the afterlife in blood; her own blood, a work-in-progress that foretells the death of everybody in Stella's universe, both friend or foe. Everybody's lives, you could say, are in limbo, all dependent on the whims of a, literally, tortured artist. Sarah's family institutionalized, then killed her with repeated electro-shock treatments, torture disguised as therapy. Noelle, in "Limbo", cut herself, little slices under her arm where it joins the shoulder. Blood droplets stained the paper she wrote her stories on. Noelle was a short story writer, just like Stella. On that uninhabited island, Noelle discovers the diary of a similarly-aged girl who lived in the same shack that the castaways use as shelter. Every night, over a campfire, Noelle reads an entry to her mother and Joe. When the narrative inevitable ends, she picks up where her predecessor left-off. The mother discovers Noelle's secret, and is immediately dismayed by the emotional and physical violence of her daughter's storytelling.

Noelle is the author of "SSTTITD". She slips into Sarah Bellow's skin. Ramon is a stand-in for Joe, her unrequited love. It's 1968, the year of free love, but it feels more like 1958 when Noelle doesn't join Ramon on her bed, but instead gives him his marching orders to the basement, but not without a pillow, sheets, and a warm blanket. Noelle, most likely, was intact, so, too, is Stella. Noelle doesn't have the skillset to write about intimacy with a man. "SSTTITD" could have been the first thing she wrote after being rescued.

"Limbo" had a happy ending, after all.

Think of Tabitha King, the author of "One on One", a novel about love and basketball, as Noelle's mentor. "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" is a collaboration. The film has a cornfield and a clown, or rather, a Pierrot, according to Augie, and a haunted house that resembles The Overlook. Imagine Noelle reading "Children of the Corn", "It", and "The Shining" with the fairer King reading over her head.

Horse Girl (I) (2020)

Safety talk

[7/10 · 6 April 2021]

Wes Craven, the mastermind behind "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "The Last House on the Left", told filmmaker Todd Haynes that "Safe", the 1995 film about a Los Angeles housewife who inexplicably becomes allergic to modern life, was the scariest movie he saw that year. Whereas high-end sci-fi gets labeled as "speculative fiction", because the author extrapolates what the future holds in store for our species, Haynes, a formally-trained semiologist and well-versed in literary fiction, made a film that encompasses two filmic genres: science fiction and horror, without crossing either line into the realm of escapism. Haynes posits two binaries: horror/human horror and alien/alienation, to tell the story of Carol White(Julianne Moore), whose flower garden she resides over at the outset of "Safe", slyly recalls both Philip Kaufman's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and Bryan Forbes' "The Stepford Wives", two films that straddle the aforementioned binaries; two films about clones.

Dan Baena, perhaps, best-known for his original screenplay "I Heart Huckabees", directed by David O. Russell, is an unacknowledged Todd Haynes acolyte. Baena explores the horror/human horror dynamic in "Life After Beth", his 2014 debut film, starring the filmmaker's ingenue Aubrey Plaza, who plays the titular character, and how she comes to terms with the human horror of being dead, but alive. "Horse Girl", Baena's fourth feature, directs its attention to the other filmic binary: alien/alienation, in which Claire(Alison Brie), a kind-hearted introvert who works at a craft shop, comes to the conclusion, after conducting an online search, that her unexplained time lapses is a result of periodic alien abductions. On the search results page, Claire glosses over carbon monoxide poisoning as a more plausible explanation for her blackouts. Carol White knows a thing or two about carbon monoxide poisoning. In "Safe", exhaust fumes from a truck blows Carol's way as she follows the large vehicle down Ventura Boulevard, forcing the housewife to pull into a parking garage, gasping for air when she finally gets the driver-side door open, as if the toxins set this woman's lungs on fire. Carol is afflicted with an E. I., short for environmental illness. Haynes uses the acronym over the soundtrack; it's from the self-help tape on fasting(carbo unloading) that Carol plays in the car as she picks up her husband's dry cleaning at a modest strip mall. The female narrator warns that molds can be hard on the immune system "whether you're E. I. or not." The acronym's similarity to E. T., as in extra-terrestrial is no accident; the environmentally ill, in "Safe", are portrayed as alien life forms, metaphorically speaking, atypical beings incompatible with earth's atmosphere. Carol nearly dies like E. T. in the Steven Spielberg film. She wants to go home. But this is home. In "Horse Girl", aliens, arguably, from Claire's point-of-view, perform tests on Claire in a spaceship consisting of nothing but white light. Wrenwood, in "Safe", is a clinic that treats environmental illness. The desert landscape looks otherworldly, but it's earthbound; it's New Mexico, but Peter Dunning(Peter Friedman), the facility's resident guru, poses the same danger as the aliens from outer space; both man and spaceman possess the power of mind control. Lester(Rio Hackford), a longtime Wrenwood resident, appears to Carol from faraway, walking the expanse of her vision field, as Peter counsels her, one-on-one under the desert sun. The man's whole comportment; his style of dress and walk, suggests that the treatment people receive at Wrenwood inevitably will make them even more alienated and alien-like to the outside world. By the end of "Safe", Carol White indeed resembles Lester more than Greg(Xander Berkeley), her husband, and stepson Rory(Chauncey Leopardi) when she steps inside the dome-like safe house, which wouldn't look out of place on a terra-formed Mars.

In "Horse Girl", the filmmaker makes literal the semiotics that Todd Haynes utilizes to suggest the latent science fiction elements in his motion picture's form and content, since the diegesis he assembles is representative of the empirical world, steeped with objective truths, or rather, hard science, a discipline of the non-genre film that safeguards against magic. Similarities abound, if you're looking for them. At work, Claire tends to a tarot card reader, helping her pick out the right fabric for her business. She tells Claire that all colors transfer differing gradations of energy from textile to person. Orange is settled on; it's the same color that Claire uses to build the safe house, a converted apartment that she shares with a roommate, Nikki(Debby Ryan), when her delusions get out of control. A safe house, which in the Haynes film was lined with porcelain to protect Carol from deadly toxins, is a bargain-basement safe house, in which the windows are draped with orange fabric that most people would mistake for curtain placeholders. The makeshift curtain, the orange makeshift curtain, protects Claire from the aliens; extra-terrestrials who, as it turns out, worship a cult-like figure of their own called Satico Satellite. Just like Carol White, who possesses secret knowledge privy to only a decided minority, Joan(Molly Shannon) from work and the medical professionals all concur that it's more likely Claire is undergoing a psychotic episode than the possibility of diagnostics being run in outer space. "Safe", during its original theatrical run, when recognition of idiopathic environmental intolerances were in its infancy, you had a split audience; half who though Carol was made sick by chemicals, and half who believed that Carol's doctor was right about her worsening condition being psychosomatic. In retrospect, despite multiple chemical sensitivity not being officially recognized by the World Health Organization, people are more likely to side with Carol, even though her condition isn't backed by mainstream medicine, especially in today's climate. "Horse Girl", consciously or not, reinforces the belief that aliens live among us, people such as Carol White and other Wrenwood residents who aren't like the proverbial you or me. Both protagonists experience nosebleeds. For Carol, it's chemical-related. For Claire, it's the aliens. Lean backwards or forwards, Claire asks, should another epistaxis episode occur. Forward, the doctor recommends, because bending backwards can lead to blood buildup in your throat, like Carol, in the ritzy salon, after the hairdresser hands her client a post-perm Kleenix. Later, at home, all that accumulated bleeding leads to a climax of vomit when she withdraws from her husband's embrace. "Horse Girl" is a housewife whisperer reaching across diegeses, telling Carol that she's not alone.

"Horse Girl" uses dream logic, expressed as nonsensical geography, the juxtaposition of physical spaces. With the mere sliding open of a shower door, the sleepwalking woman turns the bathroom door knob and is baffled to find herself at the fabric store's showroom, still nude and dripping water, while wrapping her head around this compartmentalization of time. Or is it? This is, seemingly, the proof that Claire gets subjected to mandatory medical appointments in spaceships. The aliens pick her up, then unceremoniously drop her off with little regard for the state she's in, a state of undress during business hours. At first, "Horse Girl" makes the case for Claire's lucidity, just like her counterpart, Carol White. At the mental hospital, Claire rooms with another abductee, who unwittingly cajoles Claire to delve deeper into her conspiracy theories, thus undermining the hospital psychologist's best efforts to wrangle his troubled patient back to earth. Claire, initially, thought she was a clone, but this Jane Doe, a reluctant time-traveler, gives her roommate the idea that she's not, in fact, a clone of her grandmother, but grandma as a younger woman, in the flesh. Claire's conviction grows stronger, the same pull from the physical world Carol White experiences after months of being in, arguably, a cult; the non-stop contact with people who never believe otherwise, that they may be the crazy ones. Claire is stuck in the same echo chamber, spending too much time online in chat rooms, collecting unhealthy symbiotic relationships with complete strangers who reaffirm to each other the validity of paranormal events as uncontested truth. For Claire, a homebody, the television was safe; the characters on her favorite show, "Purgatory", existed in a closed world, unlike the home computer with its capacity to manufacture alternate realities, which is what she does after escaping from the hospital. Hiding out in her apartment, Claire gets restless and escapes Nikki's persistent door-pounding by crawling out through the bedroom window. Inexplicably, Great Lengths is her neighbor. To underscore this world is of her own making, Claire breaks into the craft store and emerges with the orange fabric, then unrolls it against the building wall, like Harold, from "Harold and the Purple Crayon", because Claire is an architect with superpowers; she has the ability to project her interior life onto the corporeal landscape. The last scene is an open-ended one. You're Harold; you have a purple crayon of your own; you decide what it means when Claire levitates towards the sky, then disappears. Is she an alien? Or is this fantasy, the drug of choice for the alienated?

The concept of an oasis, a safe place, appears in "Life After Beth", too, marking Jeff Baena as an auteur. For Beth, and others like Beth, the undead, it's the attic. Human horror, the realization that Beth is dead, crosses over into horror, when she gets hungry and tries to eat Dane(Zane Orfman), her steady beau.

Beth is a zombie.

Nobody is safe.

Aliens and zombies walk among us. You may know one. Keep the conversation going. Never stop talking to them.

David Byrne's American Utopia (2020)

Imperfect world

[10/10 · 28 March 2021]

David Byrne isn't "woke". He's been awake since the latter-half of the 20th century. The former lead singer of the legendary post-punk bank Talking Heads is the same as he ever was in "American Utopia", an adaptation of the Broadway musical, directed by Spike Lee, a fellow NYC urbanite in arms who knows that Byrne has been trying to do the right thing for five decades. The journey started in 1979. "I Zimbra", the lead track from the band's fourth album "Fear of Music", paired Dadaist lyrics with popular African music, commonly known as Afro-Beat. An alarm clock went off in Byrne's head and the ringing never stopped. The world is a big place. Bigger than "The Big Country", a song from their last album "More Songs About Buildings and Food". "I Zimbra" was an outlier. "Fear of Music" going forward, otherwise, was another stellar collection of cerebral "new wave" music, highlighted by the frontman's signature obtuse lyrics and agitated delivery. His bandmates: Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Franz had an inkling what their next album would sound like. Weymouth wanted to leave Talking Heads. She fled to the Bahamas with her drummer husband, Chris. That's where the band's masterpiece was recorded. "Remain in Light", released in August 1980, stood out. The landmark album, with its blending of West-African polyrhythms, funk, and jazz, set David Byrne on a path of pan-culturalism, Along the way, Byrne made stops in Hollywood, California("Stop Making Sense") and Dallas, Texas("True Stories") before reaching Broadway full-formed as a performer, comfortable in his own skin, and comfortable with people of other skins.

"This song is for everybody," actor/musical artist Janelle Monae would tell Byrne, when he asked her permission to cover "Hell You, Talmbout, a *** anthem that the African-American singer-songwriter performed at the...in DC. Describing himself as "a white man of a certain age," Byrne tells the audience, recalling his phone call with Monae, the song's author, just like the filmmaker, knew that David Byrne was a white man of a certain age she could trust. "Hell You, Talmbout" is an open invitation for the real world to experience the potential of Byrne's hypothetical America; an America in a theater lab. Driven by percussions, in which the musicians, carrying portable instruments, pair off, and take turns chanting the names of the dead like a mantra, appended with the refrain "say his name," transforming a rote reading into a call-and-response prayer. The filmmaker, taking full-advantage of his medium, intersperses the live show with images of the prematurely departed. Although the theater crowd isn't made privy to Lee's documental punctuation, since Byrne foregoes the use of multi-media, the performers' mournful roll call, made lyrical by Monae's signification of their common cause of death, is more than enough pathos for them to handle. "This song is for everybody" could be the thesis for "True Stories", Byrne's only feature film directing credit to date, in which people of color cover songs that appeared on the unofficial soundtrack with the selfsame name. Ramon(Tito Larriva), a man of Hispanic descent, gives "Radiohead" the Tex-Mex treatment. "Radiohead" is for everybody. Similarly, the premise behind "Wild Wild Life" is an open mic lip-syncing hootenanny that welcomes all-comers from all walks-of-life, taking turns, mouthing words, at varying intervals. "Wild Wild Life" is for everybody.

The sum of the parts in "Hell You, Talmbout" is a collective true story. It was reported in newspapers, not tabloids. But some people are "Blind"; some people "Don't Worry About the Government", and that's okay with Byrne. "American Utopia" takes great pains at not being overtly political. "There's a city in my mind," sings Byrne in "Road to Nowhere", and he welcomes you, no matter who you are, to "come on inside." The former "angry, young man" is offering you an olive branch. What was once exaggerated social satire, "True Stories", like Sidney Lumet's "Network", has evolved over time into speculative fiction, putting David Byrne in the same company as Paddy Chayefsky and Margaret Atwood when it comes to predicting the future. The world in "True Stories" is a topsy-turvy one, unrecognizable to a contemporary audience. The screenplay was stitched together from actual stories that were published in tabloids, fantastical stories passed off as the truth. Two teenage boys at a newsstand both laugh hysterically as one of them reads a headline: "Starving peasants sell their bodies to vampires for blood money." Today, there are pockets of America, in which a majority of its constituents would accept this story at face value, a true story. "Men in Black", directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, has Byrne's DNA coursing through its celluloid, especially when Agent K(Tommy Lee Jones), an agent in charge of policing aliens from other worlds, grabs tabloids off the newsstand, looking for a hot tip on the latest alien invasion, proclaiming that these alternative newspapers feature "the best investigative journalism on the planet." David Byrne, in "True Stories", is the man in black, a nameless tourist who drives his red Chrysler LeBaron convertible into a small Texas town, enthused about his planned observance of festivities surrounding Virgil's "150 Years of Specialness" celebration. The gala is being sponsored by Varicorp, a computer manufacturing plant, where an employee(Mark Posey), instilled with a rosy outlook towards the forthcoming digital revolution, gives The Narrator a guided tour. Still early in the game, this programmer doesn't see the big picture, nobody did. He spouts romantic notions about astronauts reading poetry and having at out disposal, a new means of expression. The year was 1986.

"American Utopia" is a David Byrne revue, a career retrospective of his solo outings, underrated collaborations, and Talking Heads standards. No new songs were written specifically for the Broadway show or Spike Lee movie. "I Should Watch T. V." was a track from the one-off album "Love This Giant" with St. Vincent in 2013. The song, if you're familiar with David Byrne's body of work, alludes to Miss Rollins(Swoosie Kurtz), The Lazy Woman who is bedsit by choice, spending countless hours with her clicker, observing the world from a distance; a television woman to be still the heart of Byrne's "Television Man"(from "Little Creatures"). Her only human companion, Mr. Tucker(Pops Staples) has a life too, practicing some benevolent form of voodoo in his own church, a converted tract house, but The Lazy Woman knows very little, if anything about her butler. She probably never asked. For "American Utopia", refashions "I Should Watch T. V." as a coded song, updated to suit a world in tumult. The Byrne/Annie Clark-written tune is a pay-off to the rhetoric of the opening monologue. What's giving America brain damage? Byrne, quite pointedly, holds a life-size replica in his hand, recounting to the crowd a story he read in a magazine that surprised him. "Babies," Byrne says, "have hundreds of millions more neural connections than adults," then frankly states that we all reach "a plateau of stupidity." The neuroscience lesson continues five songs later: "Did the T. V. contain those millions of lost connections between me and them?" It's a question, in actuality, he's asking on behalf of America. Byrne proceeds to stick his hand through a beaded curtain. On the other side of the onstage/offstage divide, there beams a hot white light, the same light emitted from our own electronic devices. The Varicorp representative, in "True Stories", tells The Narrator that "you can never explain the feelings or connections to anyone else," without understanding that the industry he works for, with the advent of the Internet, is going to open up Pandora's Box. So potentially, Mrs. Rollins, thirty-plus years later, if she's still laid up in bed, would have a mouse instead of a clicker at her disposal. That's why "I Should Watch T. V.", a lesser-known song than, say, "Life During Wartime", made the final cut; albeit unperformed, the "Fear of Music" track, to the knowledgeable Talking Heads fan, knows how Byrne imbeds its themes of violence in the concert movie's subtext. The war is in our homes, sitting on a table, where Byrne keeps his brain, seen in the first shot, an overhead one, as if the ordinary guy is being spied on by a drone; a domestic enemy. The brain is a stand-in for the computer. In "True Stories", since Miss Rollins never goes outside, she never hears the sermon delivered by a conspiracy theorist preacher. But someday, a woman(or man) of her ilk, for better or for worse, depending on who you are, will. During her own time, though, "Papa Legba" is performed by her butler. "Papa Legba" is for everybody.

"Looking at people, that's the best," that's how David Byrne introduces "This Must Be The Place". The set decoration for "American Utopia" is a decidedly stripped-down affair, especially when compared to Jonathan Demme's "Stop Making Sense", with its props and multi-media presentation. There is no lamp to look at, nor arty photos of a vain sofa looking for its best side being flashed on a movie screen in the background. There are just people, beautiful people of all colors and sexual orientations to look at; Byrne's ace band, led by Angie Swan. In "True Stories" is a Texas utopia, an American utopia. Louis is Ramon's friend. He's in attendance, along with The Narrator, in that packed Tejano club. When Louis performs "People Like Us" at the talent show, this Mexican-American friend, in a show of racial solidarity, permits his Tex-Mex band to back the lifelong Virgil resident, a "gringo". Sometimes life imitates art. After David Byrne curated four volumes of Brazilian music, some of those same musicians backed him on "Rei Momo", his debut solo album.

Conspicuous by its absence, "Perfect World" goes unperformed in "American Utopia".

Because it's not.

Marriage Story (2019)

Kramer vs. Bergman

[9/10 · 19 March 2021]

The divorce attorney gets his first look at the Barber file. In trial, he'll use the term "avant-garde" with authority, but in the interim, Jay Mirotta(Ray Liotta) needs Charlie(Adam Driver) to explain what "Exit Goat" means. It's the name of the client's repertory theater back in NYC. He's the director. Nicole(Scarlett Johansson), his wife, was the actor. Born and bred in Los Angeles, Nicole returns home to shoot a pilot for network television. The filmmaker, avoiding the trope of the runaway mother, something new to an audience in 1979, who couldn't believe the audacity and gall of Meryl Streep's character, Joanna Kramer, when she leaves her son behind, has Henry(Azry Robertson) join Nicole on his mother's personal journey of self-discovery. "Marriage Story", directed by Noah Baumbach, rehabilitates Joanna Kramer, but not in a ham-fisted manner that puts Nicole on a pedestal at the expense of demonizing Charlie for the sins of Ted Kramer's chauvinism. The wife, too has the same temperament, and ego, of an artist, as the husband. Back in California, back in the nest, her childhood home, Charlie is served, when he fails at wrangling his wife back on the east coast. After putting Henry to sleep, the father stands in the hallway, looking at pictures of a shared life, now jeopardized by the fraughtness of temporality. Sandra(Julie Haggerty), Nicole's mother(a former television star), framed, too, the clipping of a magazine article entitled "Scenes From a Marriage", which highlights their lives as personal and professional partners. Noah Baumbach, of course, is a Woody Allen acolyte, a synonym for Ingmar Bergman fan.

The opening montage can be interpreted as a Swedish nutshell; it's the 397-minute original version of the Bergman film as prologue. "Exit Goat" could just as well be the title of the 1974 film starring Liv Ullman and Erland Johansson about a man who leaves his wife for a younger woman. In "Marriage Story", Nora(Laura Dern), Nicole's legal representation, rants about the double standard, regarding the expectations of a mother and father in child custody battles. A kibosh is put on the court proceeding rehearsal after Nicole provides answers that are overtly honest to questions that Nora's assistant peppers her with for the upcoming court date, when the former Ms. Charlie Barber has to sit in the witness chair and endure a crossfire of questions meant to denigrate her character. "Let's face it, the idea of a good father was only invented like 30 years ago," Nora asserts, referencing Dustin Hoffman as the ad executive who tugged at people's heartstrings when he fails at making French toast for his distraught, abandoned son in "Kramer vs. Kramer". Johan, a mediocre academic, in "Scenes From A Marriage", announces to his wife that he'll be taking an eight month sabbatical from his teaching post at a backwater college, in order to be with his new girlfriend on an extended Paris holiday without apology. Nora is spot-on. The professor shirks his responsibilities of fatherhood. It's up to Marianne to break the news to their two young daughters. Watching Johan's callous disregard for anybody's feelings but his own, the audience realizes with a start that the obligatory scene we've grown so accustomed to, the one in which the parents have a sit-down with the kids(like in Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale), an anxiety-reducing assurance in the form of a heart-to-heart conversation about how parental love is unconditional and indefatigable, has a relatively short history. In "Kramer vs. Kramer", the mother practically flees, leaving Billy(Justin Henry), as he slumbers unaware before dawn's break. Joanna Kramer shocked America. Men do this, not women. Even worse, Joanna tells her son, an eight-year-old boy, in a letter, no less, that she has found being his mother to be an unfulfilling experience.

Charlie, a New York transplant, came from humble stock, the heartland. His wife describes him as being "self-made", whereas the California native, it should be noted, was born into privilege, the daughter of showbiz parents, who, in essence, chose slumming. when she gave up a lucrative movie career to do "weird theater". Nicole was already a rising star before she crossed paths with Charlie. "Marriage Story" subverts the filmic paradigm of the female student surpassing her male mentor, as seen in numerous versions of "A Star is Born". As archetypes go, that's not Esther Blodgett(Judy Garland), the aspiring ingenue, telling her life story on Nora Fanshaw's couch in an upscale Beverly Hills law office, it's Norman Maine(James Mason), the mentor. "Marriage Story" is a feminist reworking of "A Star is Born", putting out to pasture the old tropes about men and women in showbiz. The filmmaker gives Nicole the agency; she was the big Hollywood star whose fame gave the unknown director instant credibility. Charlie's first audiences were fanboys and fangirls who knew Nicole from "All About the Girl"; they bought tickets based on name recognition alone. Their fruitful collaboration, over time, remained productive, but now Charlie was the draw, Nora learns, as the client explains that she felt herself getting "smaller", or in other words, feeling resentful towards being usurped by Charlie, whom the wife feels, owes her the chance to direct. Since "Marriage Story" bills itself as a course correction for the anti-feminist stance taken in "Kramer vs. Kramer", who expected Joanna, a fashion designer, to give up her career and raise their son, which was, indeed, part and parcel of the arrangement, back in the day. Although Charlie should have been more supportive towards his wife's venture, arguably, and the husband knew this, being the lead actor in a successful Broadway play is the crowning achievement for anybody in Nicole's profession. That's why he can't fathom the undertaking. Without his star, the play closes immediately after its debut. What goes unsaid is that Nicole disappointed all the people she worked with. The sudden move, arguably, was a calculating one. Nicole does, in fact, know her own value, even though she tells Nora otherwise. Her departure prevents Charlie from being the toast of Broadway. Nora, in an arbitration meeting with Nicole's husband and his new lawyer, Bert Spitz(Alan Alda), lets Charlie know that she admired the off-Broadway version of the failed play, recalling the toast's aroma from her seat. Charlie, quick with the quip, responds: "They couldn't smell the toast," while Bert offers his condolences. Nicole elicits a slight chuckle, relishing, perhaps, in the fact that Charlie failed on the biggest stage imaginable. "Marriage Story" is an aborted "...Star..." No star is born. The diva couldn't handle Charlie supplanting her place in the limelight, like Judy Garland(Adam Driver plays the woman's part) receiving all the hosannas from the adoring public as James Mason(Scarlett Johansson plays the man's part) watches from backstage. Nicole's greatest fear is that she'll be remembered as the actress who took her top off in a teen *** comedy romp. The filmmaker, not wanting to overplay his hand, never spells out Charlie's alleged selfishness, his obsession with wanting to remain a New York family. The husband had turned down a directing gig at the L.A.-based Geffen Theater earlier in their marriage because he knew, then and now, that it's easier for the intelligentsia to see you by maintaining the same zip code and time zone. After the divorce becomes finalized, Charlie returns to her mother's house. Nicole gloats a little, reveling in her recently-announced Emmy nomination for directing. Charlie accepts the news graciously, and lets it go unremarked that she could have been the toast of Broadway, not himself. During their torrential argument, Charlie calls her a "hack". It's not really a criticism; it's a fact. Nicole is unaware of her own potential for transcendence. If only they read their letters to each other at couples therapy. Charlie writes: "She's my favorite actress." He respects her professionally. Nicole, on the other hand, is not nearly as generous. But that's okay. Nobody blinks if the male has the artistic temperament of an egomaniac.

In "Scenes From a Marriage", the husband never learns that his wife had girlhood aspirations of being an actress. Johan falls asleep while his wife reads from her journal. And Marianne, likewise, would never guess that her husband wrote poetry. He can't write. Neither can Charlie, according to Nicole. "Marriage Story", of course, is Noah Baumbach's homage to the late Ingmar Bergman. Most pointedly, when Charlie accidentally cuts himself with a retractable blade to the horror of a court-appointed observer, there to document how Charlie "performs" as a father. In the Bergman film, all the interior settings look stage-inspired, like you're watching a play. When people go into different rooms, there are cuts, as if in the interim a curtain is drawn and lifted to end, then introduce the next scene. Charlie isn't supposed to cut himself. It's normally a trick to entertain his son. This time, however, the blade doesn't retract all the way. When the observer leaves, Charlie tends to his cut, but not before he faints. His son's lack of concern about the anomaly of his father lying down flat on the kitchen surface suggests less than a dream, but a scene from a play. It's meta.

Charlie Barber doesn't want to commit suicide, but "Charlie Barber" does.

Kajillionaire (2020)

Performance mother

[8/10 · 15 March 2021]

Critics poo-poohed the talking cat. The general public, perhaps, read about the talking cat and stayed away in droves. "The Future", despite being nominated for a Golden Bear at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival, bombed at the box office. Even the Sundance crowd shunned it. Miranda July, in the interim, wrote a well-received novel, "The First Bad Man", a New York Times Notable Book, but the performance artist didn't work in the film medium for nine years. "Kajillionaire", for all intents and purposes, is the follow-up to "Me, You, and Everyone We Know", the 2005 winner of the Camera d'or at Cannes. What the filmmaker took away from the disappointing reception for "The Future" is that people like to laugh.

Paw Paw wasn't funny. Voiced by July, as it turns out, a miscalculation on the performance artist's part, nobody wanted to hear the interior monologue of a stray cat's dashed hopes to be loved. Paw Paw gets euthanized. His would-be owners, Jason(Hamish Linklater) and Sophie(Miranda July) missed the cat's pick-up date. "Never been petted, not even once," Paw Paw says, in a love-it or hate-it voice. Depending on who you are, July's caterwaul will either sound lamentable or cloying. People approached "The Future" with preconceived notions about the filmmaker. They expected another quirky comedy, not Brechtian drama. The conceit of a talking cat was confused for deadpan schtick. Miranda July made a real attempt to capture the emotional life of four-legged sentient being, and not with easy kid-movie level anthropomorphism, but through animal cognition, a translation of gradating purrs and meows. Per chance, call it serendipity, Paw Paw bloodied his paw, and the passersby, the couple slated to adopt the Siamese, brought the then-anonymous cat to an animal shelter, what the learned feline calls a "cageatorium". Love invented Paw Paw. Beforehand, he was just "cat", unfamiliar with heaven on earth. Paw Paw was ignorant about cat toys, and that wet food comes from cans and dry food comes from bags. Paw Paw accepted the world he was born into. But after this glimpse into how other cats live, Paw Paw can't go back, now that he is so close to the precipice of domesticity. To receive and reciprocate love, the fundamental need to touch and be touched, it's a through line, this theme, starting with "Me, You, and Everyone We Know", in which the filmmaker, presumably, playing a version of herself, Christine Jesperson, a struggling performance artist , is rebuffed by the shoe salesman of her dreams, Richard Swersey(John Hawkes), a recent divorcee with two biracial sons. In "Kajillionaire", the language of love is harder to translate from the heart to the soul. The filmmaker, more or less, recycles the same theme of first love from "The Future". Not romantic love, but love in the holistic sense, the finishing touch that makes you uniquely human, or in this filmic instance, uniquely cat, and not just the end product of simple biology left to fend for itself. Old Dolio(Evan Rachel Wood), the daughter of careerist grifters, in "Kajillionaire", isn't coming of age, she's coming to life.

"Kajillionaire" begins with a comic set piece, a post office heist, which hardly passes for your typical family outing, but Old Dolio doesn't know this. Robert(Richard Jenkins) and Theresa(Debra Winger), the young woman's parents, act as if they are strangers, which in and of itself is not unusual since they're a crime family at work. They're doing a job. In an alleyway, they go through the contents of the stolen parcel that Old Dolio lifted from somebody's post box. For all her trouble, the risk of committing what is essentially a federal crime, Old Dolio's booty is a small stuffed animal. Undeterred, she reaches for her wallet, takes out a toy store receipt from one of the plastic sleeve where normally pictures of loved ones are kept, and seems happy(what passes for happiness in her hermetic world), with a match that nets her thirteen dollars. Old Dolio's androgyny isn't a personal choice. Richard and Theresa raised their child with no respect to gender. She's an it. Old Dolio is a name you give to a cat or dog. With a start, the audience realizes that on or off the job, Old Dolio's parents treat her like a business associate. Later in "Kajillionaire", Melanie(Gina Rodriguez), an "Ocean's Eleven"-loving woman they meet on an airplane, asks Old Dolio: "How did you meet them?" It never occurs to Melanie that they're related, let alone, her parents. Twenty-six and unformed, Old Dolio's signature outfit is a green tracksuit, because nobody taught her to be a girl, or the slightest bit feminine, even. By default, she's a tomboy. The next job, there is always a next job, requires her to return a wristwatch to the owner they stole it from. As a reward, Old Dolio receives a gift certificate for one free massage. Going forward, "Kajillionaire" switches gears, moving into darker territory. When Jenny(Da'vine Joy Randolph), the masseuse, starts the session, Old Dolio's body stiffens at the slightest touch of her hands. This bit of seeming physical comedy, which started with the ninja moves at the federal facility, and then the funny walk, in which Evan Rachel Woods, with great limberness, leans backwards without breaking stride, as a means of avoiding detection from her character's landlord, curdles, In retrospect, what was mistaken for physical comedy, actually is tragi-comic body horror. Like Paw Paw, the young woman is a feral being, never having experienced romantic or parental love, never having ever been touched.

Home is a rented office in the business district. Their next-door neighbor is a bubble factory. The office walls drip soap, like blood from the Lutz family house in an imagined version of "The Amityville Horror" directed by Jacques Tati, whose hose factory in "Mon Oncle" can be construed as a reference point. Old Dolio, without any reservations, wipes down the office walls every time the factory owner releases the pink bubble runoff, as if this household chore was commonplace, the equivalent of dishwashing or vacuuming. And then, finally, at long last, some divine intervention changes her life. To help raise delinquent rent money, for twenty bucks, Old Dolio attends a prenatal class in place of a complete pregnant stranger, Kelli(Rachel Ashley Redleaf), the accidental angel. The class instructor(Diana Maria Riva) shows a video, a mother/baby bonding exercise called the "breast crawl". Old Dolio, for the first, realizes that her family isn't normal. In "The Future", Jason and Sophie, due to the cat's renal problems, are under the impression that they're committing to five months of round-the-clock care. The veterinarian informs the couple that Paw Paw, with enough tender loving care, can live well-beyond this predetermined time frame. Old Dolio are like those good, but not great samaritans; they're just not willing to put in the time to care for another living creature, cat or otherwise, probably from the outset. The young woman can't imagine Theresa permitting her to do the breast crawl.

Theresa is a terrible mother. It's no coincidence that the filmmaker, in both "Me, You, and Everyone We Know" and "The Future", play childless women. Richard, in the former, invites the performance artist to meet Peter(Miles Thompson) and Petey(Brandon Ratcliff), but the filmmaker cuts to the younger boy, Petey, leaving the familial property with urgency, suggesting that his first encounter with their future stepmother was a disaster. He encounters a man waiting for the bus; he bangs a coin against the metal pole of a sign. The man explains that he's "just passing the time," a commentary, perhaps, on parenthood, as opposed to pursuing artistic endeavors. In the latter, Gabriella(Isabella Acres), the daughter of Sophie's new boyfriend(David Warshofsky), digs a hole in the backyard. "To...?" the former dancer jokes. It's a bad joke, a joke only a childless woman would make, since...is still practiced there. Gabriella, quite pointedly, buries herself up to the head. In "The Future", the filmmaker offers up another version of herself, the struggling performance artist who gave up. Sophie teaches dance to children with a visible lack of enthusiasm. The filmmaker expresses her possible alter ego's unsuitability for motherhood with surrealism. A yellow plastic bag, an exact replica of the tarp in miniature that the children hide under in a dance class activity, slowly creeps up the street like a haunting. The bag stops in her room. Sophie, already in the process of settling into life as a suburban housewife, allows herself to be subsumed by the growing fluid bag. It's an awakening, long dormant. It's the dance of the woman as artist. She emerges from the chrysalis, newly-born, unrecognizable to Marshall, a performance artist. They split up. She returns to Jason.

The filmmaker is a confessional artist, unafraid to show us her warts and all. In "Kajillionaire", consistent with her short, but impressive filmography, she deploys a stand-in, and it's not Old Dolio; it's the mother, Theresa, who explains to her daughter that she lacks the maternal instinct gene. For the whole of the money from their latest scam, Theresa can't call her biological daughter "Hon," a term of endearment that rolls off her tongue so easily, Old Dolio had observed, when talking to Melanie, while role-playing the perfect family to please a dying man, whose house they plan on ransacking. Being a mother, the kind that asks how your day was, Theresa explains, is not who she is. They're con artists, emphasis on the artist. Like the filmmaker, Theresa collaborates, not coddles; treats them like little adults.

To be anything otherwise, would be performance art.

In "The Future", Jason literally stops time. On a subconscious level, both he and Sophie can't even commit to a cat.

"Kajillionare" is a what if film.