Road House (2024)

I want to be clear: this is a 5 star movie for me. Not five stars the way the original is 5 stars, but five stars for this movie.

I know a lot of people are going to have a lot of opinions, because I am strangely possessive over the first one and I think a lot of people feel like that. It’s a campy, bloody, masterpiece and it has reigned for 34 years. It was made the year I was born, so in that way, it feels like we are one. I am Road House, Road House is me. I’ve never ripped anyone’s throat out, but that doesn’t really matter.

When I saw they were ‘remaking’ it, (kind of just reimagining now that I’ve seen) I was very excited but also skeptical. There’s two ways to go when remaking something as loved as the original Road House and people are mad either way. You either try to get in every single thing that made the original beloved, every joke, every detail, but update it, or you keep the bones of that but make it new, it’s own thing. In my opinion this is the only way to do it. Because then you’re just making another good movie with nods to something, rather than trying to rebuild a ship that has already sailed.

I feel like the White Men Can’t Jump remake did that and another one I’m forgetting and it’s good. Maybe Hocus Pocus the new one as well.

If somehow you’ve never seen the original Road House, I think that’s a problem you should fix, but it stars a in his prime Patrick Swayze as Dalton, a bouncer/fighter who gets hired to “clean up” the Double Deuce, a bar in a small town run by a rich evil man, Brad Wesley. He owns everyone in the town and does whatever he wants until someone comes who can’t be bought. After a lot of explosions, car chases, and fist fights, Dalton (and the people of the town) kill Wesley and his goons, and are free to live normal lives. In the process Dalton loses his best friend, Sam Elliot, but gains a girlfriend, Kelly Lynch.

There are a lot of elements that make this a stand out classic. The blind musician who plays the blues every night while bottles and people go flying, the over the top intimidation of a rich man who does whatever he wants: driving on both sides of the road, plowing a monster truck through a car dealership, a stop sign through the windshield of a parked car. There are so many unique, wonderful things but mostly we know and understand the characters and watch a bloody, satisfying arc where everything is all right in the end, and a polar bear falls on someone in suspenders.

This movie didn’t do that, instead it adopted the feeling the original movie gives and translates it for a new audience. Instead of Missouri, we are in the Florida Keys. Instead of living in a barn loft, he lives on a house boat. But see how these are parallel elements? Instead of horses running, it’s open water, trees and an alligator but we still have an unconventional home that no one else wanted, with a lot of nature and peace.

These echoes are throughout and they are great. Still a doctor girlfriend with a strange haircut, still no phone, still a beat up car. He’s all there. This Dalton is a retired UFC fighter who killed or paralyzed (I don’t think we ever find out) his friend in a fight which caused him to leave the sport.

The first scene is a fight tournament that Post Malone (or Austin Post as it seems he wants to be known in the credits) is winning. He’s 6-0, and the announcer calls for any more takers. Dalton walks into the ring and starts unlacing his boots. Connor (Post) immediately says he won’t fight, leaves, and Dalton gets the cash. All this is observed by Jessica Williams, “Frankie” (Frank Tilighman in the original) the owner of a bar looking for some help. She came to hire the other guy, but after seeing him run from Dalton, decides he would be better.

Dalton turns her down and she insists he take her number, and after almost dying from suicide by train, he decides to give her a call. Once down in the Keys, he meets Charlie (Hannah Love Lanier), a smart girl who helps run her dead mom’s book store with her living dad. She gives him a brochure about trees in the area, and drops some self-aware literary references about stories like this. Westerns where a tough out of towner comes in to help get rid of a ‘bad element.’ They have an immediate connection and friendship.

Dalton heads over to the Road House, just what it’s called, where we meet Lukas Gage, and B.K. Cannon, the bouncer and bartender respectively. He jumps right in (not waiting the requisite first night like the original) and orders black coffee but finds out they only have Cuban. Things seem to be picking up, he puts five people in the hospital literally and figuratively-beats them up then drives them there.

This is a motorcycle gang affiliated with Ben Brandt, the rich son of a real estate magnate played expertly by Billy Magnussen. I have to pause from the recap for a moment to say that all the casting was great but some people just shine. Billy as the rich evil son was one of them. He plays it so unique-I really enjoyed his performance. We are introduced to him while he’s getting a razor shave on a boat going through choppy waters. He keeps saying everything is fine, and to continue, but each time he gets a nick, gets a little more agitated. Finally he stands up, goes to the captain of the boat and punches him in the face.

Ben’s interactions with Dalton are the most interesting, he doesn’t have the characteristic blind anger of a villain, there’s a lot more going on. In one confrontation scene he pulls up the YouTube of the fight where Dalton hurt his friend, his last fight before he left UFC, and says, “I think this is the one that did it-anyone can see he’s done, but you keep going, punch after punch, I just want to know why.” And his tone is playful, a little curious but also shaming. It’s unclear exactly what he wants from the exchange, and why he’s talking to him this way. It’s such an interesting scene. Then he gets up and walks away and tells Conor McGregor to kill him, and to make it ‘hurt as much as possible.’

Yes, Conor McGregor is in this, and it’s such an interesting choice that I really respect. In terms of the acting it’s not quite all there, but it doesn’t totally matter because he’s playing a braggadocios fighter, which, he is. I loved the scene that intros him. He’s climbing out a window naked, leaving a tryst with a married woman while her husband stands there yelling. He’s walking naked through a busy street when we hear a phone ring. He bends over and takes it out of his sock/shoe, it’s Ben’s dad calling from prison asking him to take care of things. He agrees and says, “Hold on a minute,” then head butts a man for his coat. We see him walking away from a burning fire that it’s implied he caused, now wearing a beautiful coat saying, “I’m on my way.” It’s a great scene.

He doesn’t have all the emotional notes you would want in the main villain he’s just all gas all the time and it never quite lands (for me) but what they lost in that minor detail they more than gained in physicality. The same way the main opponent in Road House 1989 (Marshall Teague) was a real fighter, (an ex-marine double black belt), Conor McGregor obviously is too. But what this brings to the movie is more than I would have thought.

Anyone can learn fight choreography, (I guess not anyone but many people) but there’s a physical difference between someone who studies something for 8 months and someone who does something professionally for 16 years. Conor’s been an active fighter since 2008 and it’s in the way he walks, in the way he moves. Jake Gyllenhaal has a six (maybe 8?) pack and arms but McGregor’s whole body seems shaped by fighting. His shoulders are built out so his arms are always a little raised, his legs seem a little bowlegged for grappling, he just looks like a weapon. I thought this added a lot and he did a great job. The thing that’s terrifying about boxers is how fast they are, light on their feet despite all the muscle. A lot of people can be huge, but to be huge and fast is deadly, and McGregor is. All his movements are so quick, jumping over a bar, ramming three guys into a wall-he has the mass and the speed that I think is really hard to build and his body fills in the gaps his acting creates (for me).

The camera work for the action and fight scenes was really interesting. They seemed to have gone to the prepositional phrases school of film, anything a squirrel can to do a tree or a plane to a cloud, that’s how we were viewing the fights. Which makes it seem more like you are in the fight than watching the fight.

At one point Dalton gets hit by a car and the camera is not showing this to us in a landscape shot but a perspective one, we’re bouncing in the bed of the truck, then hanging over a bridge, then underwater coming up. It’s very disorienting and I think successfully conveys how chaotic and immediate a fight feels. There were some choices I wouldn’t have made, that didn’t feel as successful, but overall very good.

I liked the humor in the movie! And the writing. I think a big hallmark of 80’s action films is a clever one liner delivered right before a punch, or right after an explosion, it’s such a specific energy and I think this movie did an amazing job of getting those in. And making them actually funny or clever, not cheesy, something the 80’s often missed. Casting comedic actors in serious roles happened a lot more in the past, especially the 90’s and early 2000’s and I think so many movies benefited from that. Jessica Williams, Lukas Gage, and Arturo Castro are standouts for people who have great comedic timing and line delivery who can do a lot with a little. That type of nuance can carry a movie from good to great and that definitely is happening here.

The rest of the plot is what you would think but I was interested in how they incorporated the police in this version. In the original, the cops aren’t really mentioned, they’re in Wesley’s pocket and don’t make an appearance until the end after Wesley’s been murdered, with everyone declining to speak to them (which is correct!).

In this version they had a much more active role, and are responsible for one of the first scenes where Dalton seems scared or not in control. The sheriff (“Big Dick” played by Joaquim de Almieda) who is also Ellie (love interest doctor played by Daniela Melchior)’s dad, first comes to speak with Dalton and threatens to arrest him and put him in jail and says that he will lose the paperwork and be stabbed the day he’s supposed to be released (“would make a good song”), while officers chase him out of the car with guns pointed at him, kicking him on the ground. Later he lies and says his daughter’s been kidnapped to get Dalton to bring money he took back to Ben, but then realizes she has actually been kidnapped and in double-crossing Dalton, Ben was double-crossing him. Don’t worry, everyone gets blown up on the boat, but I liked how the corrupt police added another power dynamic.

The climax of the movie is a boat chase turned explosion turned brawl, where people are literally flying through the air. Conor (character name Knox, who has multiple chest tattoos of his own name) displays how bloodthirsty he is by killing Ben for yelling right before focusing in on Dalton. I liked and disliked this main fight for a few reasons. I liked how chaotic it felt for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but I disliked that it didn’t feel like the stakes were real. At this point in the movie, Conor and Dalton have been hit by cars, boats, been blown up, thrown down, you name it, and they’re still trading blows. It felt a little endless the amount of abuse they could take and it took me out of the fight a little, made it feel like a movie in a way I wasn’t wanting.

Something I love about the original is that Patrick Swayze can get hurt. He isn’t invincible. He just never loses. Whoever he goes in with, whatever happens, he will be the one to walk away. This is an amazing level for a fighter to have in a movie because it’s believable. He gets stabbed and beat up and almost dies, but not before killing the other guy. Believable.

In this movie, not the case. Which doesn’t make it bad, just a little less fun for me. All movies have a level of suspension of disbelief, but movie fighting is funnest when it feels real, feels like someone could actually do it. I did like how he finally killed Conor, with multiple stakes to the chest and body, like a vampire, it was satisfying and unique and climactic. But yeah, they’d both already scaled a bridge and survived at least three things that would individually have killed them. But it’s a movie, I’m aware!

I liked how much grappling there was in the fights, especially Dalton’s final one with Conor. I think movies like to show fights as these big moments, punches that connect, big sweeps, etc. but most fights are won and lost on the ground, who has the upper hand, can maneuver out of or into a better position. There’s so much skill there that’s harder to recognize visually, especially if you’re not used to looking for it but that added a lot to the authenticity and was why I was still invested even when the other stuff didn’t feel real. Balance.

I also loved how they translated the element of medical knowledge from the first into this one. In the original he travels with his medical records, gives himself stitches, this imparts on the viewer how often this happens, how equipped he is in this way, it informs his character a lot. In this version they gave him all that knowledge but displayed it differently. When he was hurting people, he would explain what was happening in their body or what he was going to do. There’s a scene where someone’s trying to threaten him with a gun and he explains, if I just break your middle and index finger you won’t be able to fire the gun so it’s not that much of a threat is it? Then does. Also when he goes ham at the end to avenge Charlie and her dad after they get sent to the hospital and their book store is burned, he punches a guy in the throat (a little nod to the original-“there’s still throat stuff don’t worry!”) and says, I just broke the ___ bone in your throat and collapsed your larynx. You won’t be able to breathe anymore now.” And then that guy dies in the pool. Sick!! I really liked those moments.

We also got a scene where he points out a hidden weapon on a patron and helps show a bouncer how to diffuse it. In the original it’s a blade on the boot, in this one it’s a knife under the shirt. Like I said, little things like that they were kept really do make it feel like a good tribute at least.

I think the word remake is wrong here, just because for me that implies a much closer interpretation, like you’re making that movie again, but I think it’s instead you’re using that movie as a guideline or blueprint to make a different movie that’s fun in similar ways. It’s like when someone owns the rights to a character and they reinvent or imagine it. Like how Miles Morales is Spiderman too. This was the Miles Morales of Road House.

I also liked that I learned that crocodiles (alligators?) hide their food. That was a fun fact that became narratively relevant and I love when movies do that.

I also liked that they staked his emotional landscape-there was a moment when he was going to leave, and people kept asking if he was scared and finally he clarified he was scared what he would do when pushed too far. And Conor has a line where he’s like, “There’s something wrong with you. Me too.” That was such a fun moment. Happy for Jake, it feels like he got this because he did Southpaw and I loved Southpaw.

Really great, everyone involved should feel proud. 5/5 crocs would masturbate again.

Face/Off

Wow. This movie, wow.

I started watching this with an ex-boyfriend many years ago but for some reason we never finished? I don’t even think we got that far into it. Probably fighting. I’m glad I didn’t watch it then because then I would associate it with him and now I don’t, I associate it with insanity and joy.

I had heard of this movie a lot and knew people really liked it (some people) like a cult classic kind of situation, but I don’t know, I never was that excited, the premise seemed a little gimmicky and I thought it would be a regular action movie where this crazy thing happens but everything else is what you would expect. That is not the case.

If you’ve never seen or have seen and forgotten, this is a movie that came out in 1997 starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage directed by John Woo, who has done a million movies and I want to watch all of them. One he has done that I have seen in Mission Impossible: II, which I have deep personal attachment to. Thank you John Woo.

John Travolta plays obsessed FBI agent Sean Archer who has a personal vendetta with a famous terrorist Castor Troy. That terrorist is Nicholas Cage, who likes to blow things up, release viruses into the general population, and have sex with women. Unfortunately he also killed John Travolta’s son. (It was an accident!) The first scene of the movie is John Travolta laughing on a carousel with his son while Nicholas Cage watches through the scope of a sniper rifle. He shoots and misses John but hits his son, kills, him, and some balloons float away symbolically, as if to say, “There he goes.”

There is so much to get through this movie is 2 hours and 18 minutes long but I wouldn’t cut a minute of it. Not one minute! So, the two men have this intense rivalry, it’s years later and there’s a plot to plant a bomb somewhere in downtown Los Angeles. There’s been a shootout in an airplane hanger, (which started from intercepting a plane about to takeoff and an undercover FBI agent posing as a flight attendant being shot and thrown from the moving plane) which led to a car chase on the runway that pushed the plane into a glass building and forced everyone to escape on foot. The action in this is unmatched. You will never see better or bigger or more well done chase scenes anywhere. None of it is CGI. If you see a boat flying through the air on fire, that’s really a boat flying through the air on fire. Which you will see many times.

During this snafu, Castor Troy’s brother (a little weirdo who makes the bombs) has been captured and Troy is in a coma. His brother won’t talk to anyone and the FBI don’t know the location of the bomb or when it’s planning to detonate.

Here’s where things go off the rails. Members of the FBI bring John Travolta to a secret doctor who has Castor Troy on an operating table. They tell John (Sean Archer) this doctor is the only one in the world who can perform a new kind of operation…face swapping. We see the doctor grow an ear then laser it on to someone, and he explains that he can remove the layer of facial tissue, then regrow it onto a different body. He can do surgical altercations on the rest of the body (liposuction, etc.) to make it match the desired swap. They want Sean to become Castor Troy so he can go talk to his brother in prison who will tell him where the bomb is, “Then we’ll switch you right back!” Never trust an experimental scientist with an ambitious plan!!

Sean wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, not even his wife, it’s kind of unclear why. Why is keeping your wife in the dark something your job can require? An aside about the wife. Eve Archer, played very believably by Joan Allen (Room, Death Race, The Bourne Ultimatum, Pleasantville) is a doctor and a mom. This casting choice was incredible to me. She looks like a normal human woman. Remember when actors had age appropriate wives? This woman has short blonde waves, wears sensible skirts, heels, and slacks, and is annoyed a lot of the time. I miss when wives were allowed to be annoyed. Having a husband who’s an action star/head FBI agent is probably very annoying. They’re probably late all the time, and everything else is always more important than you. I couldn’t do it.

So, Sean decides to do the surgery, this doctor takes his face off, we see it floating in a chemical jar. Then he replaces all his physical features with Castor Troy’s, and now he’s Nicholas Cage. He goes into the prison where Troy’s brother is, and tries to get him to talk. At first his brother doesn’t believe it’s him because he’s not being insane enough, but then he dials it up and assaults a guard and another inmate, and correctly remembers the medication his brother takes. One of the reasons they picked John Travolta to do this is because he’s been obsessed with/following Castor for years and knows everything about him.

Once Sean as Troy gets the location and time of the bomb plan he (stupidly) kind of reveals to Troy’s brother that he’s been ‘had’ and goes off to tell the police. HOWEVER, while all this was going on, Castor Troy woke up from his coma, and when he woke up he didn’t have a face. Which was pretty upsetting, as you might imagine. So Troy contacts some criminal friends who kidnap the original doctor/surgeon and bring him to the lab at night. Troy forces the doctor to give him John Travolta’s face and body, then one its’s done, he burns the doctor, the equipment, and all the other people who knew alive by dousing them in gasoline and setting the place on fire.

This is a he blow for Sean, now everyone who knew he had his face removed to “become” a terrorist are dead, as is any trace of this happening, and the only man who could turn him back. This to me was uniquely terrifying. It reminded me of the horror short story where a man in prison makes a deal with the mortician to escape. If you’re unfamiliar: The mortician tells the inmate the next time someone dies, at night climb in the casket, bring a bottle of water and some matches, then ride in the coffin to the cemetery, be buried alive, then I’ll come to dig you out. So the guy waits a few weeks/months until someone dies and there is a casket set out to be transported. He waits until night and climbs in with his bottle of water and matches. He feels himself being loaded onto a truck and driven out of the prison, then lowered into the ground and covered with dirt. Waiting until he hears the last truck driving away and it’s completely silent, he decides to light one match to calm himself while he waits. He lights the match and looks over, and the dead guy is the mortician!!! End of movie!! Chills!! !

This reminded me of that. I feel like I’ve referenced that in a review before, I think of it always. So when Sean as Troy goes to meet with his contact and alert them he knows the location and to pull him out, who arrives to meet him, none other than HIMSELF.

Just made my bed, cleaned my room and lit some gardenia incense and now I feel like this review is really going to take off. In the mental zone!!

Well, this is hell. I can’t imagine something worse. It’s one thing ethically to take someone’s face for justice, and safety, but for someone to take YOUR face? And no one knows? Hell. The scariest movies to me aren’t the bloodiest or the ones with the most jump scares, they’re the ones that create a situation I can’t think myself out of. This is one of those. He has no options. Now he’s just in prison. They’re in this weird high tech prison with gravity boots and a split screen full of TVs that shows nature documentaries and deer playing, but also sometimes the news.

Castor Troy, now Sean Archer the federal agent, gets his brother out of prison on the promise that he will give them information. Which he does, he “gives them” the location of the bomb and ‘Sean’ gets all the credit. The bomb team can’t get through the firewall and Troy as Sean tells them to leave (since he knows the code) and he stops it with only seconds to spare. This makes him a national hero (not the way the world works) and when he gets back to the office Margaret Cho tells him his wife is on line one and the president is on line two and he gets to tell her, “Can you tell the President to hold? Put my wife through.”

So now the fake cop real terrorist is a hero, and the real Sean Archer is dodging electroshock treatments and gravity boot hidden shivs. Soon he realizes the only time they take the gravity boots off hence the only possibility for escape is when you’re about to get electricity shot into your skull, so he causes a fight to get sent to the treatment room. There’s a half dead man who he already had an altercation with because the night that man went to prison Castor Troy had a “sex sandwich with his wife and sister” Troy’s brother explains to Sean when he attacks him with a knife. But they manage to put all that behind them with the shared goal of escape and they fight off the guards in the room and have a shootout but unfortunately that man falls to his death off a railing. But Sean as Troy escapes to the roof which is a helicopter platform over the ocean.

There is a helicopter there shooting at him with a mounted machine gun, but this is not enough to prevent him from rolling to a lower platform, getting rid of his shoes (where did he get them, do they wear shoes under the gravity boots?) because they caught on fire, and jumping to safety in the water? I forget how he got out of that one. But he did.

There’s a whole back and forth where Sean as Troy is trying to get to his family to protect and warn them, and Troy as Sean is already there trying to apprehend him. It’s a lot of cat and mouse stuff but with guns and dead sons. In an interesting twist, the lives of each men teach them something new about themselves, Castor Troy connects to the domesticity and closeness of Sean’s family, wanting to repair Sean’s relationship with his wife, and teaching his teenage daughter to protect herself. (Against a sexual predator date “played” by Danny Masterson. Sometimes they just get it right folks!)

Meanwhile, Sean as Troy is taken to a hideout where he is given drugs that he has to take to not blow his cover. He is freaking out and is comforted by a distraught but sexual Gina Gershon who he now sees as a person, not just a criminal. She introduces him to his (Troy’s) son, which no one knows because she is worried someone would try to hurt the little boy to get at Troy. Sean (the cop inside) realizes he’s been callous when Gina says he can’t be seen with her or they’ll take her son away (something Sean threatened in the beginning of the movie when questioning her). Sean also killed her brother but that doesn’t really come up until later.

Gina’s son is the same age as Sean’s own dead son and this causes pain but also lets him move past some grief and connect in a way that feels healing. But then everyone is shooting with guns again! Troy (almost wrote Tory, a cute alternative telling) ambushes the hideout and starts killing his friends (I think we’re supposed to see it as a further characterization that he doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and that he’s all in on his new cop career as a stepping stone to more power, will do anything to get it, etc.).

So now Sean is risking his life to save Castor’s real friends and family, who Castor has opened fire on, with a team of agents that Sean knows and likes. They end up in a shoot out on opposite sides of a freestanding mirror (in another movie this symbolism would feel heavy handed, but not in this one. In this one symbolism is everywhere. We are symbolism. Everything is a mirror and a gun and life is one big shootout).

They don’t kill each other, but they do both shoot each other through the mirror and miss? Somehow they live and escape. Sean as Troy goes to his house and sneaks in (Troy as Sean has guards all around because he know that’s where he will come) to try to warn his wife. He definitely has an uphill battle trying to convince his wife he is not the man who killed her son whose face he has, and is actually her husband, the man she loves. Since she is a doctor, he doesn’t go the normal route “ask me something only I would know,” he goes to science. He’s like, “Sean’s blood type is O negative. Castor’s is AB positive. See for yourself.”

So that night as she reads next to the man that looks like her husband as he sleeps, she manages to take a blood sample discreetly in bed then heads to the hospital to figure this thing out. As she waits for the machine there’s a very dramatic scene where the test is calculating, and it comes back…AB POSITIVE. Then Sean as Troy shows up and is like, “I thought you might come here” and goes to kiss her but she still doesn’t trust him! She doesn’t trust anyone! He recounts with tears in his eyes their first date which was actually insane, she chipped her tooth on bread and they had to try to find a dentist at night and the one they found was drunk and fixed the wrong tooth. Truly wild first date story. But this seems to make her believe it’s him.

At this point she believes him but still can’t touch him or be affectionate, because he looks and sounds exactly like the person who murdered her son. Fair. The next scene is in the hospital and the real Castor Troy comes in because he woke up and she was gone and he can tell something’s off. He ambushes her and takes the bandages off a man she’s attending to assuming it would Real Sean trying to hide but it is a Real Burn Victim. She’s like, “What are you doing?” and he relays he woke up and she was gone in the middle of the night and she’s like, “You’re married to a doctor who is on call? Get a grip?” and he backs down.

She does some great psychological maneuvering during this time when she knows it’s him but has to keep pretending. The next day (possibly later the same day) they have to go to the funeral of Sean’s boss that actually Troy as Sean killed in his office and passed off as a heart attack, Sean/Troy asks where their daughter is because he wants her as a hostage when Real Sean shows up later and the mom is like, “She won’t even go to Mikey’s grave you think she’s going to the grave of your dead boss?” Which doesn’t even make sense (she’s too emotionally distraught over losing her brother but doesn’t really care about his boss probably) but it sounds good and he drops it. Annoyed wives!! For the win!!

The funeral/right after turns into another shootout- so many shoot outs! (But they’re all good). The daughter (Jamie played by Dominique Swain who is most famously, Lolita which actually came out the same year as this-crazy time to be her) shoots her real dad because she thinks he’s a terrorist, but then the terrorist who looks like her real dad takes her at gunpoint and threatens to kill her. A lot to process for her. The mom gets her away and the men sort of wrestle each other onto water somehow and now they’re having a speedboat chase on the open seas! This was so cool, I loved this part. They are hitting each other in these boats like they’re bumper cars, then one boat goes through a different boat and Sean as Troy is wakeboarding on his own shoes and manages to flip onto Troy as Sean’s boat. This, as you can imagine, leads to more shooting.

This review and movie taught me that “melee fight” means ‘confused struggle’ and that’s what happened next. It ends with Sean as Troy shooting a speargun which Troy as Sean stops with his hand (they’re very close) and he’s fighting while holding off the spear gun but then something happens and he lets go and is murdered. Death by pressurized spear. What a way to go. This is actually the second movie I’ve watched this week that features a speargun (the other is a Croatian coming of age story about a girl and her controlling father called Murina. Also very good).

There should be a sense of relief but to the outside world, Sean as Troy is a criminal who just murdered the head FBI hero agent and he will be captured and sent to prison for the rest of his life. So he’s just sitting with his head in his hands on the dock but when Margaret Cho and someone else get to the scene they say, “Are you alright sir?” and he looks up and says, “What did you call me?” and it’s revealed, Eve called the agency and explained everything that happened and showed them the blood samples proving he’s him! Real Sean! He cries tears of joy and then a different surgeon who wasn’t murdered puts his right face back on.

Real Sean adopts Gina’s son (she was killed in a different shootout that was like 6 different people pointing guns at each other in a gym) and their family seems happy again. The End.

We did it!!!! I’m proud of me personally, that was a lot to get through. I haven’t looked into much of what the Internet says about this movie because I’m mostly uninterested, but I did see that people were mad/pointing out it’s a plot hole that in the beginning this was the only surgeon in the world who could do this surgery, giving a lot of stakes to his death, only for at the end, for some random other guy to be able to do it no problem. That didn’t bother me but I see it’s a discrepancy. I just think there’s so much else going on, and that’s not how this movie operates. (Pun!!!).

The most interesting thing to think about with this movie is how the actors prepared. Like for the scenes, Nicholas Cage has to act how John Travolta would act like him, and vice versa. That’s, insane.

I did worry about the plants in this movie because there’s a lot of explosions and it would always be in a place (apartment, home, office) where there would be plants and I could see the plants in the fire! Are they killing those plants?? I can’t imagine them using real ones for scenes then resetting with all fake plants (plant doubles?) Or maybe they used fake plants the whole time but they looked real in the scenes! In a way, this would be the plant’s Face/Off, the fake plants pretending to be real or the real plants pretending to being fake. I believe plants can experience grief and joy, so why not more complicated things, like identity swapping?

Roger Ebert gave this movie 3 stars and why do I keep checking? I don’t like his taste. Why do people trust him about movies? What has he done besides be old and wrong? He was the film critic of the Chicago Sun Times? Who cares? No, I’m sure he’s fine I’m just jealous.

This movie was insane I don’t know what else to say! It was so long and I loved every minute, it did take me a long time to watch it, spaced it out over the course of a few days which is unusual for me. It was very intense and I wasn’t always in the mood for it I guess.

The artistry of this movie I really liked. I like John Woo, are people talking about him? If they are it’s not around me and I wish they would.

I loved this movie! I thought it was a huge swing that could have been a big miss but it wasn’t. There were so many completely unhinged elements of it, for example Nicholas Cage in the beginning dressed as a priest, groping a woman in a choir robes (a young nun?) singing Hallelujah in an airport? I don’t know where they were or why they were there but it worked. We knew he was insane from the first minute. I thought both main actors did fantastic as each other, in a really impressive way.

It has to be said, John Travolta is obviously in a horrific cult and will not see heaven, but this movie is very good. I hope he gets out, gets help, and is able to make amends with all the people he’s hurt. It seems like he’s just going to keep being evil until he dies but we always want to hope.

I love how uncomplicated even the most wild shit was. The surgery? They just did it with lasers. None of this trying to explain the science of what they’re doing, it’s lasers. Get on board.

I’ve learned that Face Off is also the name of a reality makeup competition show, which should be illegal. We already have a perfect thing with that name, no need to cloud the media landscape.

I feel like that’s it. I’m sure there’s stuff I’m forgetting, but it was great. So glad I saw, really excellent movie. This movie is one of the very few that’s camp and doing things that register in your brain as insane, but don’t feel bad in practice. Like you’ll watch something and be like “Whoa!” but you’re still in the action of the movie and the scene still feels real.

Great movie. 5/5 gifted dad switchblades, will absolutely masturbate again.

Hope Springs

This movie is not a comedy. I don’t know who labeled it, but they’re wrong. It’s not a comedy, and it’s never trying to be funny. Maybe people were confused because Steve Carell is in it and he’s usually very funny but in this he is very serious. Not a hint of laughter, and I didn’t mind! Sort of a wind up for Beautiful Boy for him I would guess, have to check the years. But no, it’s not a comedy. It is a very sincere, moving and beautiful portrait of love, sex, aging and relationships. I loved it and I was touched!

Meryl Streep (Kay) and Tommy Lee Jones (Arnold) have been married 31 years, a number he keeps repeating as if it’s an explanation when she wants more, namely, to go to an intensive couples therapy week in Maine. The therapist guru is Steve Carell, and Kay found him in the self-help section of a Barnes N’ Noble. I’m not generalizing, I know it was a Barnes N’ Noble because of product placement. The same reason I knew she worked at a Coldwater Creek (clothing store). A store I never would have been able to recall the name of, but recognized the cursive of the brand. It’s like a Chico’s for more conservative women. Or richer women. Or more boring women. Hard to describe you just have to see it. A lot of layering scarves.

Meryl works there and has one friend. Tommy Lee is an accountant I assume, or does something with taxes, he talks a lot about taxes, and golf. They have not had sex in 5 years. She is at a breaking point and he’s oblivious. She asks him to go on this retreat that she paid for with her own money (4,000 for the two of them for a week) she got plane tickets and everything. He refuses. She says, the flight leaves tomorrow morning at 10:30 and I’m going to be on it, I hope you are too.

Arnold mentions the conversation in passing to a work friend who says that his wife asked for things when they were married that now he wishes he would have done because she left him and now he’s alone. This makes Tommy (Arnold) reconsider and he gets on the plane, but he is not happy about it.

Arnold does not believe in therapy, doesn’t want to acknowledge anything’s wrong, doesn’t like that breakfast costs 11.75. He’s grumpy and stubborn. Kay is calm and quiet without being a pushover or totally submissive, I really liked how Meryl played the role. Very realistic, not a character. She felt like a real woman who loved her husband and was trapped and didn’t understand why but wanted to change it.

I loved how the therapy was handled, no huge break throughs or instant fixes, just slow little things that let them see each other more. Bit by bit. There were things they tried that failed and they felt embarrassed and hurt and vulnerable. It felt really real! They go back home having made progress but not solving anything, and at first it seems like Tommy Lee Jones is just going to go back to the way he was before and Kay says she doesn’t think she can do that.

One of their setbacks is that he doesn’t look at her when they have sex, he closes his eyes and that makes her feel like he never wanted her he just wanted sex and it made her feel bad. They start to have sex again on this trip in a nice hotel after a nice meal and she tries to get him to look at her and he can’t. They/he stops.

There’s never a monologue explaining what’s happening or some piece that falls into place, they have a setback and then move forward slowly. I really like that depiction of love and relationships, especially over time it feels true.

When Steve Carell asked Meryl if she had any fantasies she said to renew their vows and he had to clarify, “sexual fantasies.” The last scene of the movie while the credits are rolling is a vow renewal on the beach with their adult children and Steve and others, and the vow speeches are so beautiful and honest and heartfelt.

I guess there are a few scenes that could be classified as comedic, they mainly revolve around Meryl “trying to get her groove back” as it were, which for some reason mainly involve food. She fondles a cylindrical package of something at the grocery store (sausage? What comes in those refrigerated tubes?) and practices the beginnings of a blowjob on some bananas. She also tries to go down on Arnold in a theatre (you, you, you, oughta know) but it’s too toothy and she can’t see without her glasses. I think there’s potential for comedy in scenes like this but neither of them play it comedically, this scene ends with her crying and leaving, and him apologizing and fumbling some comforting words while he goes after her.

I thought it was beautiful how they tried and grew and fell more in love. This movie is pro-Barnes N’ Noble and pro-therapy and so am I. Well, local bookstores are better, but in general the idea of a bookstore. Also very pro-Maine and lobster. Lotta lobster featured.

The cast felt really good. The mom from Freaks and Geeks was a waitress and I liked her. Not too sarcastic but knows what’s going on. Kay’s only friend was Jean Smart (of Hacks fame later) and Elisabeth Shue was a nice bartender! Cast!

In 2012 when it came out Roger Ebert gave it three stars and honestly, what’s his fucking problem? He mostly liked Tommy Lee Jones, saying this was a new kind of role for him. He dismisses Meryl Streep as one note, “determined but girlish.” I don’t think he got the movie. Maybe he was waiting to laugh. The radiator in my room seems to be broken, but it’s still hissing and the room is still warm. What is that a metaphor for here, in this film? Nothing? Or everything? I ask you, Roger Ebert! Alas, he is dead.

I guess the general consensus is that people didn’t think this movie was very good. But I think they’re all wrong. It’s mining the depths of human relationship and connection! In Maine!

The director David Frankel, is behind The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me, Jerry & Marge Go Large (which was very cute) and other ones I haven’t seen, but it seems like he gravitates towards emotional and sincere projects and presents them frankly (see what I did there? Frankel? Frankly). He also directed 6 episodes of Sex and the City and all of Band of Brothers (more alike than you might think).

I don’t know, I liked it. I liked the pacing, I liked the emotional stakes, the acting, the topics, the approach, I liked all of it. I think ultimately I like that it captured how hard relationships can be, how hard communicating is, how things build up over time, and how something can change so slowly you don’t realize it until you’re in a place you don’t recognize, often with the person who’s supposed to know you the best. I think the slow erosion of relationships is so common and often people never do the work to get to a new/better place, or even figure out what happened. I think it’s brave of Kay to ask for this and I think it’s brave of them both to do it, and I like that the movie centers these mundane acts of bravery that are often discounted or overlooked.

Movies can be about someone jumping out of a plane and finding treasure or fighting a snake with a knife, but they can also be about two people who want to love each other but don’t know how. I love that about movies and I loved that about this movie. Also its main problem is that this older couple isn’t having sex. I think it’s radical to even acknowledge that as a problem, most media acts as if once you are older than 50, especially women, you’re a non-sexual being. I think this movie was progressive in its own way and Roger Ebert just couldn’t see it.

5/5 vow renewal lobsters, might masturbate again.

p.s. Hope Springs, Hope Floats, what can’t hope do? There’s apparently another movie with the same title starring Colin Firth, Minnie Driver and Heather Graham that came out in 2003 ALSO about finding love in New England. Everything else is different, but wow. Really makes you think. There’s also a Hope Springs Eternal but that’s too much.

The Commuter

Every time I watch a Liam Neeson movie, I want it to be another Taken. Not like Taken 2 (which exists and I think is bad, don’t totally remember) but a new movie, with its own stakes and plot, that are as compelling and engaging as Taken, and let me watch Liam Neeson beat people up with a driving passion. I don’t think I’m alone in this, I think this is what a lot of people feel and possibly how he’s picking roles, or more likely, what’s being offered to him.

I have been burned. I watched The Grey, a movie where he has to fight a bunch of wolves. Sounds amazing right? It should have been. But it lacked an emotional mooring and they don’t even show the big fight with the wolves. Which actually I think I appreciated according to my Letterboxd review at the time, but overall lacking. There’s a whole slew of these on his IMDB.

In The Marksman he’s a rancher on the Arizona border who becomes the unlikely protector of a boy fleeing from cartel assassins, In Cold Pursuit, he’s a snow plow driver seeking revenge against the drug dealers who killed his son (that sounds amazing and Laura Dern is the mom), Honest Thief, he’s a bank robber who turns himself in only to be double-crossed by two “ruthless” FBI agents, A Walk Among the Tombstones, a private investigator is hired to find out who killed and murdered his wife (this one seems a little different but he has a gun on the poster), Non-Stop, ‘an air marshal springs into action after getting a series of text messages on a transatlantic flight saying someone will die every 20 minutes if he doesn’t meet their demands,’ Unknown, man awakens from a coma to find someone has stolen his identity (gun on the poster), I mean you get it. People like seeing him in this role. Gun on the poster.

Which is cool because he’s 71. Kind of an unlikely action star, but the one we wanted. And he’s great! The point is, there are a lot of these movies and they aren’t all winners. So my expectations were low. It came out in 2018, I haven’t heard anything about it and now it’s on Netflix? Doesn’t feel great. But it’s so good!!

I haven’t actually finished it yet, I have 11 minutes left, but EJ and I had to leave to go to a used bookstore and some coffeeshops (important business) so I will finish it later. But now he has meetings and real things and I have nothing, so I thought I would pen the beginning and middle of this review and finish it once I have seen the last eleven minutes. But you know, probably at least 5 minutes is credits, so I think it’s only 6 minutes or so.

Liam Neeson is a man with a wife a son, and a job. They live somewhere outside of the city, and he works in it, so each day his wife drops him off at the train station, then each night she picks him up. Bucolic, the American dream, etc.

He has some friends on the train (he’s been doing this commute for ten years) and used to be a cop. He now works in life insurance. We see him with a young couple (pregnant, white) and he’s explaining how he and his wife did everything right, worked hard, saved, 401K, etc. but that in 2008 they lost everything, had to take out a second mortgage, refinance, etc. But, he got this job and now things are better and his son is going to college, only five years until retirement, and the thing they wish they had when everything went under was life insurance. He didn’t really explain why because neither of them died, but the couple liked it and they bought some.

Then he gets called into a room and fired. He repeats everything you just heard to the guy, “But I’m 60-I’m retiring in 5 years!” and the younger manager is basically like, “Yeah, we don’t care, this is capitalism.” He is leaving the office when he gets a call from his wife, he doesn’t tell her what just happened, and she reminds him he needs to go to the bank because if they don’t get an extension on their mortgage the check she just sent for tuition won’t clear. Stressful stuff.

So he meets Patrick Wilson at a bar, (a cop bar where all the cops go), where we learn they were partners for seven years and now Sam Neill is captain. Remember Sam Neill? Actually I just learned googling him he has blood cancer and “isn’t frightened of dying,” (metal). Their relationship is less clear but it seems like there’s some tension between Sam and Liam. Character names unknown/forgotten/never important. Liam tells Patrick he got fired, they drink some beers, then he leaves to catch the train home.

There are cops (cops everywhere!) checking people’s bags as they get on the train and we see someone in the crowd who seems upset by this, and walks off. Someone bumps Liam as he gets on, and after a few moments he realizes he doesn’t have his cell phone. He tries to get off the train but the doors have already closed.

He sits down to read and is joined by Vera Farmiga, from The Departed. Her name in this I do remember, it’s Joanna. She is chatting, he says I’m married, and she excitedly goes, “Me too!” and shows him her ring. She says she’s in a behavioral field, observing how people act, etc. She then starts setting up a hypothetical for him: “Say you have to do one simple thing that would affect someone on the train in a way you wouldn’t know” and he asks why he would do that and she says, “Because there’s a reward.” She then explains there’s someone on the train going by Prynne but that’s not their real name. They are getting off at Cold Spring and have a bag. He needs to find this person, then put a tracker in their bag. ‘That’s it.’

She then lets him know there’s a package hidden in the bathroom in carriage 2 that has 25 thousand dollars in it, and if he completes the task he’ll get 75 more. Then she gets up and goes to exit, saying, “You have one stop to decide” and gets off the train.

Liam’s confused, and mutters, “There’s no way” while making his way to the bathroom. He checks all the normal bathroom places and soon feels like nothing is there. He’s ready to leave when THE VENT! He remembers the vent. The screws are loose and he takes the cover off with a key, and sure enough, a paper bag full of cash falls out.

Now, he’s in. He doesn’t know it yet, but the woman who spoke to him is working with “very powerful people” and they have eyes everywhere. More stuff happens, he says he doesn’t want to do it, Letitia Wright gives him his wife’s wedding ring as a threat, everything is happening. That Brad Pitt movie where they’re fighting on the train? Bullet Train? This is what I imagine that was trying to be. I didn’t see it, maybe they succeeded. It looked too flashy though. This was pure grit, just a retired cop having a bad day, they messed with the wrong guy, etc.

A lot of twists and turns happen that felt good/believable. Then he refuses some more once he realizes they want to kill the person he finds (two people have been killed so far) and “they” (unnamed evil people) cut the breaks and try to blow up the train. This is where it kind of goes off the rails (lolololol) and Liam and one of the train operators uncouple the cars but the steel chain gets STUCK so they both JUMP to the moving train car and somehow don’t die? Or the one guy dies but he sacrifices his life for the train? Unclear.

I like to at least be able to pretend what I’m watching could happen, like someone somewhere could do this. People do the Olympics! But when gravity and the laws of physics are dismissed, it’s simply not as fun. Then it just feels like we’re playing make believe. This can be done in a fun enough way (all the Fast & Furious movies) where everything is so over the top you just accept we are in a different world where a person can jump from a helicopter to a boat and not shatter every bone in their body, but when everything else has been normal and grounded except for one insane thing it doesn’t work as well.

That aside, everything was great. I don’t want to spoil it, also I don’t totally remember all the twists (I’ve now seen the last 11 minutes but it’s the next day, I had to pack and now I’m at the airport) but Patrick Wilson betrayed him and Liam then gets him shot through some clever maneuvering. The informant -I didn’t even say that yet- the person on the train he was trying to find/identify was a young girl who witnessed a murder that the police did and was reported as a suicide. The FBI were trying to get her into protective custody so she could testify and these people were trying to murder her before that could happen.

The politics of this movie was: “The police are corrupt! the system is broken! The only thing that can fix it? Other police! Different police! Big police! Higher up police!! Just kidding the system is fine!! Jail!!!” Which I didn’t love but the number of abolitionist action movies is very low. But not zero!

Florence Pugh is in this movie randomly? She has pink hair and a bad boyfriend. The final culmination is when Patrick Wilson reveals he is bad and wants to kill Prynne (named after Hester Prynne because she’s reading the Scarlet Letter) and it feels tense because he’s going to kill someone and the girl comes forward and says it’s her, then one by one everyone comes forward and says it’s them. Solidarity. Community. See, you wouldn’t get that kind of support if everyone drove. We need more trains! I’m always saying this!!

I liked it, it was great. There’s not much more to say. Some movies tackle larger issues and have a lot of themes to unpack or think about, not this one. This movie was: Train, Gun, Die in that order then different orders. But sometimes you just want to watch Train Gun Die. That’s what we look for when we see the gun on the poster. We are a group and we deserve rights.

Okay my flight is boarding, love you Liam if you’re reading, and I think Love Actually would have been better if you’d had a gun. Just kidding! !

4.5/5 Sports pages with messages written on them, would masturbate again.

p.s. The tagline for this movie is “Lives are on the line” which is funny to me.

The Curse

This show. I loved it. I unfortunately watched the last episode high which, if you’ve seen it, you know was a gamble. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but I still loved it.

This show is the brainchild of Benny Safdie of stressful films such as Good Times and Uncut Gems, and Nathan Fielder, the Canadian satirist who comes out with a perfect project once every ten years and then some if we’re lucky. He started with Nathan For You on Comedy Central in 2013 that ran for 6 seasons and was ingenious ways to help small business owners that often were too ahead of their time, but finished with a beautiful and searing portrayal of humanity in a stand alone documentary called Finding Frances which exemplifies Nathan’s best qualities as a performer and producer, his ability to sit with someone and follow them, be it physically or mentally or emotionally.

Then he made The Rehearsal, which took all this exponentially to another level and was a unique piece of media unlike anything else, except maybe his earlier works. I’ve already reviewed that on here so not going to go into it too deeply. This brings us now to The Curse.

This is the first time I’ve seen him not playing a version of himself, I guess I don’t know that for sure but he always seems to be the absurd straight man, an oxymoron but somehow what’s happening. I didn’t know if he could act and it didn’t really matter because I expected him to be doing more of what I have seen and I love everything he does.

Well, he’s not doing that, he is acting and it’s great. I was stunned. He’s so good. He plays Asher, one half of an HGTV couple on the first season of their new show, Fliplanthropy, where they build passive (eco-friendly) homes in Espanola, a low income neighborhood in Texas, where they also live. The other half of this couple is Whitney (Emma Stone). The daughter and heir to a slumlord real estate fortune, her past is in direct conflict with her present projection: a conscious white woman, who is anti-racist and “in touch.”

As we watch the show within a show, we meet Dougie (Played by Benny Safdie) an alcoholic producer who killed his first wife in a drunk driving accident that does not prevent him from continuing to drink and drive. He and Asher know each other from childhood, Asher remembers them as friends, but at one point there’s a scene where Dougie apologizes for bullying him all the time suggesting that’s not true.

Asher used to work at a casino and it’s teased that he has some whistleblower shit and he even talks to a local reporter about it and then goes back to the casino to break into his old computer and get the files, but when they are played on the news they show him, not only being complicit in bad behavior but laughing and making fun of the people he’s directly exploiting.

Asher seems to be very in love with Whitney, and is just trying to get everything right for her and wants her to think he’s a good person but often doesn’t understand what she’s trying to do or why. This somehow feels more honest than Whitney who lives in a practiced white delusion where she is always right and the victim despite not really engaging with anyone in a real way or navigating conflict at all.

Whitney’s character is a painful but important critique of liberal white women who want to think they’re “on the right side of history” but are tone deaf and still perpetuating white supremacy, just in a new, different way. For example, knowing everyone’s names she lives near, but not actually listening to them when they talk to her or believing that they could know more than her about their community, or maybe anything.

We see how her desire not to arrest anyone, leads to her letting people shoplift from one of the “stores” she has built, which are a house of cards in themselves, and charging everything to her credit card. This brings people into town by word of mouth who steal, and this upsets local residents. She dismisses their reactions and appraisal of the situation because she deems them out of tune with her enlightened view and doesn’t see how their reality is being affected more than hers, and how when you live in a system sometimes you have to participate in it in a way you disagree with but that is beneficial to the group instead of maintaining ideological purity in your eyes in a way that is harmful to the group as a whole.

I feel like I could write a thesis on this and I hope many people do, but the entire season has been this-a critique of whiteness and gentrification and cultural appropriation and liberal racism, etc. etc. etc., alongside this thing that happened on the first day, where Asher gives a little girl selling soda 100 dollars on camera then after they stop filming takes it back. Here we get mired in a classic intention vs. impact situation, because he wants to give her money but all he has is a 100, then he goes to get cash out but the ATM is broken and someone tries to help him but he doesn’t want to tell them his pin because he’s worried they’ll rob him, then he doesn’t give her anything because they have to leave. In the meantime, she curses him.

She says, “I curse you.” And he is shaken, but promises to get the money, which he does and brings to her later in a new trauma, chasing her and her sister down in an alley, until an older neighbor of theirs catches him and threatens him with violence to get him to stop. They have many more interactions because their family is living in a house Asher bought/took over because the landlord stopped paying and he got it after it was foreclosed, and he has many more uncomfortable interactions with them and their father (played excellently by Barked Abdi).

Weird things happen from time to time, for example the night she curses him when he gets home his delivery meal doesn’t have chicken in it, it’s a sealed premade dinner and the chicken is missing. He thinks it’s weird but doesn’t attribute it to anything until later when talking to her she says she wished the chicken out of his meal.

He then becomes obsessed with the idea of the curse, and often goes back trying to ask questions, until her dad asks him to stop. This has all been on one level, Asher thinking a lot about it but no one else really paying it any mind.

Now, the last episode, which again I did watch high unfortunately, opens with a very uncomfortable Rachel Ray guest appearance as promotion for the first season of Fliplanthropy coming out. Later in their home as a gift for Whitney, Asher announces he is giving the house to the little girl’s family outright. She asks if they can afford it and he says it’s worth it even if they can’t. This feels like a big move for Asher, doing something that is “right” over what makes financial sense. They go together the next day and tell the man they are giving him the home and he asks if he can get it in writing. They agree, then he asks who will pay the property taxes. They are visibly bewildered that he isn’t more grateful and that he’s asking about logistics. The father eventually asks them to leave and come back later that day with the contract. They console themselves in the car that he probably hasn’t processed it yet.

The next shot is morning, we see Whitney sleeping, then the camera goes up. A long way up, until we see Asher sleeping, facing the opposite way. He is on the ceiling.

She wakes up and asks what he’s doing up there, he wakes up and starts to freak out, they both think there’s an air pocket or something else happening in the home since it’s temperature controlled and pressurized. She’s crawling on the floor trying not to be sucked up, he’s pushing himself around trying to get down but he keeps being pulled back up. She’s also very pregnant, something we see for the first time in the Rachel Ray interview.

The discussion/question of kids has been present the entire season, in an early episode after having dinner with her parents it causes a fight in the car, they have many talks where she just seems not to be ready, then they get pregnant and have a miscarriage I think, but now I’m actually not sure. But I think so. But he’s SO excited about the baby, and to be a father and to be with her. He would do anything to be with her, we learn through a very intense and perfect monologue from him after confronted with some video footage of her saying she’s unhappy.

There’s a whole side plot with Dougie where he and Whitney have some kind of secret thing going, she’s maybe wanting to do the show on her own after Asher tests badly with the focus groups and Dougie convinces her she doesn’t need him. This gets abandoned after HGTV is very clear without a central couple there is no show.

But this all seems to be in the past, everyone is happy, but now Asher is on the ceiling. They’ve tried to pull him down to no avail, and they’re trying more things when Whitney starts having contractions, and after a few minutes, it’s clear she’s going into labor.

She manages to get her cell phone from their bedroom (no easy feat) and calls their labor and delivery team and gets someone to pick her up. Asher comes outside under the roof/overhang to say goodbye, and this is when the man picking her up decides to help. He tells Asher, he needs to come out from under there, to trust him. He takes his arms and pulls him, and Asher immediately flies up, as if magnetized to the sky, and catches himself on a tree branch very high up.

All their neighbors start to come out, the fire department gets called, Dougie shows up. Whitney has to go to the hospital, and she’s calling for Asher to meet her there, and bring the overnight bag. He is yelling back that he’ll be there, despite not participating in the laws of gravity currently.

The fire department doesn’t listen to what his problem is or believe him, they keep telling him to calm down and begin to saw the branch off the tree. He’s freaking out because he knows he’ll just float away, but no one listens to him, including Dougie on the ground who has assured him he’s being helped, but really just put microphones in the trees to capture the “drama” for the show.

Once the branch is sawed, just like he said, Asher immediately flies up up up up up into the sky, into the clouds, into the stratosphere, into outer space, into the atmosphere. We see his freezing, lifeless, bloating body rocketing through space until it’s clear he has died and is just floating.

After watching the episode my boyfriend started looking in a Nathan Fielder Facebook group we’re both in and someone had posted a screenshot from Reddit where some brilliant soul had pointed out the allegory between him needing a specific type of help and no one listening and just doing what they think is best, and it ends up killing him, to in many ways, how that’s exactly what he and Whitney were doing in this community they decided to “help,” and what gentrification and white supremacy are in general.

The final shot of the episode goes from him floating above the Earth, to snaking through the hospital, then following roads to their house where the firetrucks and a gathering of people still are. Three onlookers have a conversation where one goes, “What movie is this for?” and someone else goes, “This is that guy from HGTV,” and the other says, “Oh so it’s for TV?” and the other guy says, “I think so.” Then the camera goes into the house and blacks out.

Talking with my boyfriend we were saying about how no one could help him and then in the hospital they could help her, but it’s her whiteness that makes the hospital a safe place, for a lot of black and brown women, going to the hospital is a death sentence.

This show was such an exploration of a million different ideas and I could think about it for a long long time and I probably will. I’m so happy it exists, and that there’s still people making good art, which you might not know if you only have a Netflix account.

There are so many visceral awful scenes, akin to body horror, the father at the chiropractor especially comes to mind, but also psychologically tense situations, like Dougie’s date with a woman where he explains he killed his wife in a drunk driving accident, then drives this woman home drunk. Or when he wakes up in a field with three cars and no keys. Then there are things that are squirmy-cringey, like when Whitney and Asher try to recreate him pulling her shirt off when it’s stuck for Instagram and it turns into an ugly fight that she watches a few seconds of before deleting. Discomfort is present in many forms.

Probably because I am a white woman but the portrayal of Whitney was especially compelling to me. There are so many tenants of white supremacy that she specifically embodies, like aversion of conflict. She can’t have a direct conflict with anyone she deems a protected identity, mostly the indigenous members of the community she moved into, even though she often makes choices that go against their wishes or without consulting them, but instead of being honest about this, she just smiles to their faces then makes someone else do/say the hard part. Or will bend over backward to make something go away instead of listening and really trying to solve it. She also greatly benefits from the violence of her parents, but doesn’t see that and thinks she is separate from them, despite being supported by them.

Ultimately I think it’s a perfect show I want everyone to watch and I want to read more about. Texturally rich. Can’t wait for season two if there is one.

Another thing I didn’t even touch was that Asher has a micro penis and Whitney’s dad knows somehow and they talk about it, also his sex life with Whitney deals with a fantasy where she’s being fucked by another man and he’s watching (she has a vibrator and he’s masturbating next to her) and this is a recurring theme, that he wants to be cucked. I don’t have any thoughts about that at this present time, just a little piece to the puzzle that is this show.

When I saw the trailer I was so excited about an expose or satire around an HGTV world, which we are RIPE for. All these documentaries about MLM’s makes me chomp at the bit for a well-done 6 part series about all the exploitive aspects of our world, which are seemingly endless.

The Chip and Joanna Gaines of it all, is that these shows present a really clean view of what is in actuality a messy project in ways beyond knocking out a wall or moving a support beam. I feel like that’s the exciting part usually, there’s some problem you can’t imagine solving, then they somehow do in 21 minutes. All while her six kids are running around shaping horsehair blankets or whatever. It’s an image. But often they’re not actually solving it. In that show specifically, there are accusations that some of their renovations weren’t lead safe or up to code wiring in this thread of what Wacoans think of them. They have also never featured a gay couple in any of the 79 episodes of the show, belong to a church that preaches conversion therapy, and rarely if ever address the politics of the community they’re serving or changing by flipping houses for mostly white people moving in.

In general, many HGTV shows are entirely staged for TV then when cameras stop rolling it’s a different story, they will take back all the furniture and decor or charge clients if they want to keep any of it, often outside their budget.

This show was a different critique than I was expecting but one I was very happy to see, it went after the liberal white people, not the sanitized conservative people and honestly that’s harder and more valuable to do, in my opinion.

A lot of white people think they’re “the good ones” because they voted for Obama. The work of Get Out, showing the racism of liberal white people is in my mind continued here- those were racist people who had to change to fit the culture around them but still harbor the same racist beliefs and their grandparents, but the racism of these liberal white people is a different breed, in some ways more insidious because it’s protected by the delusion of self-righteousness.

This is something I feel I encounter all the time, mainly from white men who seem to think they’re ‘done’ with racism because they can see a line in the sand they’re on the better side of. They assume they’ve reached the apex of thought, that they are the most progressive, enlightened, liberal person to exist because they see people that they have more growth then. They “get it.” This then gives them the freedom from ideological uncertainty, because they know they themselves are not racist. They can’t be! Because being racist looks like this thing over here that they’re not. They can’t IMAGINE that racism also looks like them, or all of us raised in this system, and there’s still a ton of subversive and difficult work to be done. And that doing that work includes de-centering yourself and sharing/giving up power.

I could have and probably should have written episode recaps after each one, there’s so much to look at and talk about. But I’ve had a lot of depression and wasn’t able to. So there’s so many little things I know I’m forgetting that were mind-blowing or I had something I wanted to say but they are gone in this moment. But one thing I do remember is that I LOVE how the openings always came from a melting of some feature of the opening scene into the title card and eerie music. Often a person’s face but not always, would shift alongside some dissonant cords and form THE CURSE and I always loved that, each and every single time.

This show is so great. I know a lot of people don’t like Nathan Fielder and that I genuinely don’t understand. I think if you’re looking to experience with him what you do with something else that’s incorrect. He is a new different thing and that’s so exciting for me, someone who consumes an insane amount of media and knows that most of it is formulaic and often bad. He’s doing something no one else is or can do, with every project and honestly he’s only getting more powerful. I feel genuinely lucky to be alive while he is making things, I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Some people are speculating if there will or won’t be a season two, I hope there is, something I didn’t even discuss is Whitney’s “friendship” with Cara Durand (played by Nizhonniya Austin), an indigenous artist she pays to be a consultant on the show and is constantly in a state of fight or flight around emotionally. Something is going on with her, they went to an event at a collector’s house and Cara left a room with him very upset and went home and shortly after Quit Art, which was picked up by a paper as an artistic act and written about. Whitney seems to be competing with her all the time and vying for her approval and Cara seems to be putting up with her to have access to certain things that are helpful to her, we still don’t totally know what she thinks of Whitney. It’s hinted that she and Dougie make fun of Whitney, and in a scene with her close friend Whitney invites herself over so we don’t get to see Cara fully relaxed.

It’s such a rich show, there are so many little exchanges that fuel so much for me, I think they could build it out any number of ways.

5/5 three-hundred dollar shoplifted jeans, would masturbate again.

Barbie

Barbie!!!! Opening day!! This movie is such an experience, first all the promo was so exciting and fun, from the costumes for the press tour, to all the campaigns and collaborations- the AI dream houses in every country, the shoes, makeup, clothes, the viral songs- it just all felt so FUN. What a perfect summer movie.

I unfortunately didn’t have a fun pink outfit but I did wear pink glittery eyeshadow. My boyfriend and I decided to go today, we were deciding between this and Oppenheimer as a matinee while his kids are in summer camp and since Oppenheimer is 3 hours, this won! Sorry Cillian Murphy, another day.

It was playing every 30 minutes at this theatre nearby so we were trying to pick a time and looking at tickets and the theaters were all almost filled up! For every showtime! Which I’m so happy for them about. So we got some off-center tickets and were on our way!

EJ recognized the opening as a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I saw that movie once in high school and don’t remember almost anything about it so I didn’t catch it but it was very funny. It was all these little girls and Helen Mirren doing voice over narration saying since the beginning of time, girls have played with dolls, but they’ve always been BABY dolls. Then Margot Robbie appears, towering, in the original black and white bathing suit with the cat eye sunglasses and all the little girls start smashing their baby dolls into the ground.

Then we cut to a fun music opening showing Barbie waking up and saying hi to everyone and getting dressed and eating breakfast. This situates us fast in a near perfect replica world of Barbie toys!! Her clothes, food, feet, car, etc. it all looks nostalgic to vaguely familiar depending on how much you played with Barbies as a child. There’s no liquid in the cups and the food never gets smaller no matter how many bites she takes. She flies from the ceiling into her car, because as Helen Mirren explains, “You never make Barbies walk all the steps to get somewhere, you just, pick them up and put them where they’re going.”

Everyone is Barbie and we meet them, we also meet all the Kens, especially Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who is desperate for Barbie’s attention. We also meet Allan (Micheal Cera) who’s just there and very funny and I loved him.

We go through a day at the beach, and see all the Barbies as President, and on the Supreme Court, and in space, doing every job in the city, then having sleepovers every night. So fun. At night, Margot Robbie Barbie has a party at her house with a big choreographed dance which involves everyone in the city and they’re all dancing and singing under a big disco ball moon and at one point she asks, “Does anyone else ever think about dying?”

There’s a record scratch and everyone freezes and after a few beats she laughs it off, “I meant, I’m just dying to keep dancing!” and they all resume. But the next morning when she wakes up, everything’s off-her breath smells bad, her shower’s cold, she falls off the roof, and most upsetting, her feet are flat. After taking a spill at the beach when she removes her high heels to play volleyball, all the other Barbies tell her she needs to go see Weird Barbie, the only one who can help her.

Weird Barbie is Kate McKinnon, who became weird by being played with “too hard.” She has the classic tell-tale signs most girls would recognize, her hair is cut, she’s always in the splits, and her face is covered with marker. I loved the expansiveness of the Barbie universe, it wasn’t about being perfect it was about representing everyone and being weird, also some other things we will get into later.

Kate reveals that there is a thin membrane separating Barbie Land and the Real World, that has been breached and the little girl playing with Margot Robbie must be putting too much of her emotions into her, making her feel what she’s feeling. Sadness, fear of death, and a worry about cellulite.

Kate tells Barbie she has to go to the Real World and figure out what’s going on to restore the balance. Barbie doesn’t want to go and when offered the choice between staying and keeping everything the same, or venturing out and learning more about the world (represented by a pink high heel and a tan Birkenstock), she chooses to stay. Like three times. But Kate McKinnon tells her she was just pretending to give her a choice to maintain the illusion of control, but really she has to go.

Barbie gets in a pale pink convertible and begins a journey that spans every mode of transportation: car, rocket, sailboat, camper van, snowmobile, and rollerblades. But once just outside Barbie Land, she finds out that Ken has hidden in the back of the convertible and wants to come with her. She tells him he’ll just slow her down but after some pleading, gives in and agrees he can come.

Once in the Real World (Venice Beach), they are rollerblading in neon spandex and attracting a lot of attention. Barbie senses that her attention has an undertone of violence and Ken senses that his attention feels like admiration. They try to go to a construction site to get some good female energy and are dismayed to find only men. After all the men catcall her, Barbie announces that she can tell their messages have entendre, even double, and she lets them know she doesn’t have genitals. That shows them!

Barbie decides to sit on a bench to focus and try to figure out where the little girl playing with her is. Ken goes off on a walk. On this walk, (5 min or less) he discovers Patriarchy, and decides to bring it back to Barbie Land.

Barbie finds the girl she thinks is playing with her but when she tries to talk to her, Sasha, (the girl, Ariana Greenblatt) is angry at her and doesn’t like Barbies and calls her bad for women and a fascist. After sitting down and crying for the very first time (“She called me a fascist! But I don’t control the flow commerce!”) some men from Mattel come to take her away in unmarked black SUVS.

Ken sees her getting taken away but he thinks she’ll be fine since it’s Mattel, and he goes back to Barbie Land to pedal his newfound discovery. Inside the Mattel headquarters, Barbie is taken to the top floor where there’s a conference table of men in suits, headed by Will Ferrell. They want to put her back in a box and she gets in and the twisty ties have almost closed around her wrists when she jumps out. She asks to meet the CEO since she’s all the way here. “I’d love to meet her.” When Will Ferrell says he’s the CEO, she asks about the CFO (a man), the COO (a man) and all the way down she realizes they’re all men. She runs away and they chase her which is a really fun scene.

She finds her way to a room where Rhea Perlman is sitting drinking tea in what looks to be a cozy apartment in the middle of this sky rise . She introduces herself as Ruth and offers Barbie some tea and they talk for a little. Ruth comforts Barbie and instructs her how to escape. Barbie runs and out front is America Ferrara, who works for Will Ferrell and is Sasha’s mom. She jumps in the car and they decide the answer is for THEM to go to Barbie’s world so they can see how good it is and that they’re wrong about Barbie. (Sasha).

The women make the journey back but once there, Barbie starts to notice things have changed. The President (Issa Rae) is on the beach handing beers to Kens playing volleyball and the Supreme Court are cheering them on. The Mount Rushmore of Barbie Land which was previously all women is now horses. Barbie’s Dreamhouse has become Ken’s MojoDojo Casa House. When she asks what’s going on, Ken tells Barbie he brought patriarchy back to Barbie Land, because he was tired of the Kens being overlooked.

All the other Barbies seem to be brainwashed and don’t care that they’re doctors or Nobel prize winners, all they want to do is take care of and defer to the Kens. Barbie gets depressed and feel defeated, she tells America and Sasha to go back to the Real World and she’ll just wait for one of the leadership Barbies to fix it. They are on their way out (with discontent Allan in tow) when America realizes they need to help her. That playing with Barbie let her be her true self, and being with Barbie has let her daughter see and support that side of her. They turn around!

Meanwhile, the entire boardroom of men led by Will Ferrell have realized what’s happening and they followed the women back to Barbie Land, all on skates, then a tandem bicycle for ten, etc. The Kens have banded together and are going to vote in a new government that establishes patriarchy in Barbie Land.

At Weird Barbie’s house, America Ferrara has a breakthrough and monologues about all the contradictory things expected of women under patriarchy and how exhausting, defeating and impossible it all is. Upon hearing this, a Pulitzer Prize winning Barbie who had been brainwashed wakes up and remembers who she is.

They realize the cure for the Barbies is to hear patriarchy accurately described and that breaks the spell of patriarchy. One by one they get the Barbies away from the Kens to de-program them. This is funny because the way they distract the Kens lampoons common mansplain-y tactics, like saying they’ve never seen the Godfather, or pretending not to know how to use Photoshop, or letting them play guitar. The culmination of this is a guitar circle on the beach where all the newly deprogrammed Barbies each pretend to like other Kens, feeding the jealousy and animosity between them.

The Kens decide to go to war (the day of the vote) and have a musical battle on the beach with tennis rackets and volleyballs (no weapons in Barbie Land). This turns into a Grease-inspired musical and the Kens reach an understanding. This leads them to remember today was the day of the vote but it’s too late.

Ryan Gosling Ken is distraught once he realizes it’s all over and runs crying out of the room. Barbie follows to console him. He shares that being a leader was hard and he didn’t really like it, and once he realized patriarchy wasn’t mostly about horses he didn’t care about it that much. She apologizes saying she took him for granted and he says he appreciates that. He says he doesn’t know who he is without her and she says that’s what he needs to work on, finding himself, and that all the things he thought defined him, might not be who he really is.

A light goes off and he says, “Ken is me!” crying and laughing. He proclaims this to all the other Kens who have their own epiphanies that Ken is them too. By this time the Mattel board is there and America pitches them her idea for Normal Barbie that is a little long-winded and doesn’t make total sense (“She’s a doctor or not a doctor, she just has a nice top and days where she feels mostly good”) and Will Ferrell rejects it as terrible but when his CFO tells him it will make money, he says yes.

Everyone has an ending except for Barbie, and Ruth reappears and reintroduces herself as the inventor of Barbie. She shares that Barbie was never supposed to have an ending, she’s named after her daughter Barbara, and that she, Ruth, has committed tax fraud. Margot and Ruth go on a walk and seem to enter another dimension where Margot says she wants to be human, be the one making the ideas, not the thing being made. They hold hands and Barbie seems to feel all what being a woman and alive is and she sheds a single tear and says simply, “Yes.”

Barbie asks Ruth for permission to become human and Ruth says it’s not something she can give permission for. Then we cut to human Margot Robbie in the car with America and Sasha and their husband/dad (respectively) who has spent the entire movie playing Duo Lingo (relatable). She has a tiny diamond pendant with a “B” and PINK Birkenstocks. She walks into the building and gives her name, “Handler, Barbara” and announces she’s here to see the gynecologist. Then the movie is over! And we see all the original ads for the different Barbies while Barbie World (with Aqua) by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice plays.

Okay, I loved the movie, the music was great, everything was so fun and funny. It seemed like both an indictment of the world we live in, and an embracing of it which feels right and beautiful. I was surprised by the complexity and scope of the ideas tackled, and for the most part how well they were handled. Months ago when there was the Barbie selfie generator and you could upload a picture that would be in a hot pink circle in a background of blue clouds then fill in the sentence “This Barbie is…” with whatever you want, I did one that said, “This Barbie is experiencing dissociative nihilism” and that was quite literally the plot of the movie! Proud of me.

I liked having this absurdist backdrop to explore the issues of patriarchy and sexism. I loved seeing Barbie Land before it was tainted, I think we’re all so steeped in patriarchy it’s hard to name and see. I also just finished The Will to Change by bell hooks which is about patriarchy and how it harms men and how to move past it we as women have to not see men as the enemy, but the enemy as these systems that force men to harm themselves, and in turn, everyone else.

The America Ferrera plotline was the most unclear to me, everything else felt supported, that’s the only one that felt a little thin. She played with the Barbies because she was sad, but then being sad and weird let her daughter see her true self, then at the end she wanted a Barbie that was normal so more women and girls could see themselves in it, I suppose? It lines up on paper but it felt a little flimsy in the movie, but I didn’t care.

Allan was incredible, he’s just there. All Ken’s clothes fit him! I like that they didn’t make him gay, he just was Allan. Every person you’ve ever seen in anything was in here, especially if you saw Sex Education, a lot of them were in here. Clothes were fab obviously, also Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie knocked it out of the park.

Ryan Gosling was so funny, I think being funny in a big movie is the hardest acting job there is, harder than drama by a lot. It’s just hard to be funny! And he nailed it, the mannerisms, how he presented the character, the physical comedy, the facial expressions! He didn’t do it over the top where he’s this huge big character who’s a joke, he played it so grounded where you can tell these things really matter to him but with the tiniest wink like he’s in on the joke. Impressive. And Margot Robbie my god, it’s easy to think she was cast because of how she looks and while that’s clearly part of it I don’t even think it’s most of it because I know it was going to be Amy Schumer for a while and I don’t think she fits that image so I think they were considering other things.

But she plays this with so much heart and manages to feel authentic in a way that I think is hard to pull off. When Barbie is feeling negative feelings for the first time, like sad or anxious, there’s a huge range, sometimes it’s funny-like where she’s describing the emotion and it’s in a foreign way but sometimes she’s just experiencing it and cries a single tear and it’s so moving. I just thought this movie would be fun I didn’t expect to confront the human condition, but that’s what we did.

I left this movie feeling happy and grateful to be alive? In the parking lot walking out a girl came up to EJ and I (dressed in perfect pink and denim with jewels and purple and pink sparkly eyeshadow) and said how good the movie was then said, “I’m autistic Barbie!” and we talked for a while and she said that she also had TMJ and that she ate a pretzel. It really solidified for me that from the marketing to the messaging, the movie is all about using this platform for imagination to envision a funner better world. It kind of reminded me how a lot of abolitionists point out that people who are skeptical often go to the worst parts of ideology and live there: “What would we do with the rapists?” but so much of abolition is about imagining how much better and beautiful things that could be. There’s this poem called Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?” where Junauda Petras imagines a group of fly grannies cruising around in a top down convertible, keeping us all in line.

I just remembered that at the end there was this part where Rhea Perlman is asking Margot Robbie if she wants to be human even though people die and after she says yes a tiny child’s voice in the back said, “Did she say we die?” Which was HILARIOUS and wild at the same time. The range of people in the theatre confirmed this thing I have been saying and feeling too, there were different ages, races, genders, people were just having fun and wearing pink.

Emma Mackey was in it and I thought they were going to do more with the fact that she looks exactly like Margot Robbie but she had brown hair the whole time and no comparisons were made. Just another Barbie.

I noticed that the screenplay was written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, and one of the production companies was NB/GG, which I also assume is them. If you don’t know, she’s the director of the movie (and Little Women, Lady Bird) and he is a director too (The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story) and he directed Frances Ha which Greta Gerwig starred in and they also wrote together. They’re married, I thought Marriage Story was based on them but after some light googling I see that it’s based on his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh. So good for them.

Sharon Rooney was in this, the actress from My Mad Fat Diary who I love, and Hari Nef who did this really interesting interview, Ritu Arya, Dua Lipa, Ncuti Gatwa, John Cena, etc. It was so fun seeing all these people in such a fun alternate universe.

It was really fun. 5/5 burnt heart waffles, will masturbate again.

White Men Can’t Jump

I saw that they remade this and I was curious to watch but didn’t want my first impression to be the new one so I decided tonight to watch this one. I don’t really know what I was expecting, I like movies about basketball and I like movies about unlikely friendships (which is a really fun genre that includes Ratatouille and First Wives Club) but it’s older and sometimes those movies do not age well. Also Wesley Snipes is abusive. We’re separating the art from the artist for tonight but hold him accountable! No one talks about it and it’s pretty bad. But I did watch it and I’m glad I did. I really liked it.

This movie is about two guys, Billy (Woody Harrelson) and Sidney (Wesley Snipes) who are both really good at basketball in LA. Billy is a down on his luck, bad with money hustler who gets 60 dollars here and there for games that he brings back to Gloria (Rosie Perez) his girlfriend who is studying to be on Jeopardy. They together also owe 7,000 to some shady brothers who have been following them threatening to kill them unless they pay.

Billy hustles Sidney and wins, who gets the idea that they can make more together, or so we think. They do a couple of games and it’s going great until one game in Harlem for 1700 that Sidney just can’t seem to get it together for. They lose all the money and Woody Harrelson comes home crestfallen and explains to Gloria what happened. She then explains to him that he was scammed, and they get on a bus to Sidney’s house.

Once there, the winners of the earlier game are chilling watching basketball and they really get into it but Gloria and Sidney’s wife Rhonda (Tyra Ferrell) figure out a solution. They’re going to enter in a two on two tournament and win and split the 5,000 prize.

Something I liked about this movie is that there wasn’t a “big game” or normal climax how you would narratively expect. This was huge and they win but then Billy loses his half to Sidney betting that he can dunk in three tries, which he does not. This prompts Sidney to tell him the title of the movie and remind him, “White men can’t jump.” There has been a constant back and forth where Billy insists that white men would rather look bad and win but black men would rather look good and lose, and this is a philosophical point of tension for them throughout the movie.

It seems like they keep trading luck and losses back and forth, one will win and be on top, but then have a huge setback, then the other will come into a windfall, then be down on his luck again. I really liked that constant shift it drew your attention back to the context both of these men were in outside of the court which is all they seemed to care about and everything else was just noise, but often that noise reached an exigent decibel.

By the end they have traded favors back and forth many times and Gloria has left and come back to Billy. He got her on Jeopardy and she won a lot of money and she gave him 2,000 of it to buy nice clothes to get a job. But Sidney’s house was robbed and he comes to Billy asking for help to play and enter a tournament with a 2500 buy in. Rosie is upset and tells him that if he gambles with her money this is it, she’s leaving. He does it and they win but true to her word, she leaves him.

He and Sidney are talking after and Sidney says, “Maybe the two of you are just better off without each other” and other stuff. Then Billy asks him to help him find a job and Sidney asks if he has any references and Billy says, “You.” The movie ends with them on the court passing the ball in the sunset.

I really liked how much they didn’t like or trust each other for most of the movie. Their friendship was so begrudging and that felt really real.

I did not like Rosie Perez, I think I was tainted by her character in It Could Happen to You, she’s so money-grubbing, and in this the first scene of hers she’s holding a jar of money and asks how much Billy brought her. Then there’s more to her but I think the damage was done. They clearly loved each other but I kind of agree that they weren’t good together and they both did better when they were apart.

Something I was pleasantly surprised by- there was a lot of trash talking in the movie, in the games and tournaments especially people really went in, a lot of your mama jokes and digs and this movie came out in 1992, I was worried some of it would be dated and maybe homophobic or sexist or something but it was all these really specific cultural references, which was so sweet. Like someone yelling, “This Gomer Pyle motherfucker” etc. Who by the way, I looked up and that’s so funny as an insult. He’s just goofy enough for it to be brutal.

The way a lot of the hustles would go was Sidney would be playing and losing a game, and then he would offer a new game for more money where they could pick his partner, ANYONE they want. Cue Woody Harrelson, and the logic of the movie seemed to be that he was SO goofy looking they couldn’t help but pick him every time. The idea that someone looks SO humorously out of place, just by existing is funny to me. Imagine just sitting outside in shorts from Old Navy and someone being like, “OH THIS motherfucker can’t be serious.”

Also I’m not sure of the fashion at the time but to me it looks like they dressed really similar. They’re both in bright patterns sometimes and t-shirts and hats. I liked how they dressed. I also loved that Woody Harrelson is a sex symbol in this (I’m assuming) but he’s balding. I feel like we lost a lot when we decided love interests in movies have to be hot in a perfect way. I like actors more who are hot in an imperfect way. They’re still hot but it makes me feel like I could know them vs. feeling like they’re trying to sell me yogurt. Hard to explain but I stand by it.

It’s such a good movie. I think something I really like in movies too is when there’s an assumption about ability based on looks that someone else gets to exploit for money. It just feels sooo satisfying. I think I’ve mostly seen it with women, I can’t think of anything specific right now but I watch a lot of movies where someone assumes girls can’t fight or fix cars or something then they prove them wrong and get money in the process. In the first X-Men when Wolverine was entering and winning cage fights, is another example. It just feels so good to watch.

The dad from Smart Guy (John Marshall Jones) is in this movie, he’s the player who gets an injury that Billy replaces the first time he and Sidney meet. That was fun to see him young, I’ve only ever seen him with a tiny belly and a belt lecturing but here he was getting a head massage on some bleachers from a woman in a beautiful two piece workout set.

The clothes were really something in this. It was so fun to see the fashion. A a lot of men in tight, short clothing that it seems like we’ve allowed Evangelicals to dictate is gay or feminine for men to wear, which is a big loss. Men should be able to wear whatever they want that makes them feel good and have fun with their clothes. And they looked good!

Now I’m curious to watch the new one, see what the fashion is and see how they handle the main relationship. If they make it too feel good/heartfelt I think that’s a huge misunderstanding of what’s good about the original, Billy is betrayed by Sidney, a few times, and that’s foundational for their partnership.

We learn later in the movie that the reason they owe the Stucci brothers so much money is that Rosie originally buys a car for 3,000 but it turns out to be a piece of shit and she refuses to pay. They offer to let Billy throw a basketball game for them that they put a lot of money on but during the game one of the opposite team members says he’s a honky who can’t shoot. Sidney says, “You are a honky!” and Billy goes, “But I can shoot.” So he won the game but lost the bet and then owed them 7,000.

Billy also talks a lot about the ethics of hustling and when it’s okay to cheat vs. not. Shaking someone’s hand and agreeing to something you go back on later does not make the cut but exploiting someone’s own assumptions of you is fine. I thought something the movie did a really good job of was slowly showing the values the two men each had then letting them clash until they aligned.

I liked that the movie didn’t have the problem, goal, solution, setback, comeback, celebration formula that a lot of movies (especially sports movies) often have. Like, oh we need 2,000 to go to nationals, hey- there’s a local competition with a 2,000 dollar prize, etc. This had so many paydays and losses it was hard to keep track. It seemed more about who to believe and when, and how to know who to trust and why. Actually I don’t really know what it was about but I’m confident it wasn’t just about basketball.

Written and directed by Ron Shelton who also wrote Bull Durham and Bad Boys II, I liked all of the dialogue and pacing. I usually have more to say but I don’t think I know how to verbalize what I felt watching this movie, I just liked it and was glad it was good. Now I’m curious to watch the new one and see what they did and if it was good too. I’m also learning that Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson did four movies together (This, Wildcats, Money Train and Play it to the Bone). That’s more than Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore!

Harrelson dunks in the end and that felt really satisfying. I’m learning that this was one of Stanley Kubrick’s favorite movies and I love that.

5/5 low cut tanks tops, would masturbate again. Also the trash talk was so good, an art form we don’t appreciate enough.

Private Benjamin

I loved this movie, and it was nothing like what I expected. This is a 1980 classic starring Goldie Hawn. It’s called Private Benjamin and the poster is her in military fatigues and runny mascara. I assumed it would be a fish out of water about pretty Goldie Hawn who has somehow wound up in the military and she hates in but then she learns about herself and grows to love it and change for the better as a person. Propaganda but fun, with a lot of big physical comedy “gags.”

But it wasn’t really that at all and I was so happily surprised and then sad because I was feeling how much art is limited when the people in charge only care about money. When I imagined someone trying to make this movie now I immediately pictured a white man in a suit saying, “How will we market this? What kind of story is it? It’s too broad, you need to pick one thing.”

Let me back up, if you haven’t seen or aren’t familiar. Goldie Hawn plays Judy Benjamin, a woman we meet on the day of her wedding at 29 to a man named Yale (Albert Brooks). In the short time we know him, he coerces her into sex twice, once to give him a blowjob in the limo during their reception, and then on their wedding night when he insists on ‘taking’ her in the bathroom despite her numerous protestations and requests to move to the bedroom. Then he dies on top of her.

At the wedding we briefly meet Judy’s mother and father who gift her a ton of money then ignore her and mostly seem happy to have pawned her off on a successful man. It is briefly mentioned she had a marriage before this one that lasted 6 weeks and that her father “bailed” her out of.

Following the death there is a funeral (usually how it goes), where relatives seem pushy for her to “get back out there” because what else is she going to do/she has no skills. There is a very funny moment where Yale’s mother comes up crying and asks what his last words were and Judy says, “I’m coming.” Lol. She was also laying on this big blue receiving bed in the front room of the house where the memorial was held and that was cool. She’s in a black dress and sheer tights on the bed as person after person just comes up and isn’t consoling or helpful or kind at all, I really liked that scene and how it subtly established what people in her life think of her and how they treat her.

Judy leaves the house and checks into a motel for a week where she cries every night. We see her having a tearful conversation on the phone explaining her doubts and fears and you assume she’s confiding in a close friend but soon we discover she’s live with a radio station. I love how they did that too. The station opens the line up to callers and one man who seems to care and wants to help calls in. Judy agrees to meet him the next day downtown.

Upon arrival (He’s walking past her into the building and asks, “Are you Judy?” and when she says yes he’s surprised and says, “Am I late or are you early?” and she says, “Oh, I’m just a few hours early.” (These lines are so minimal but I think they do such a good job letting the viewer get a sense of who she is and how she thinks and feels, I thought a lot of her dialogue was really specific in this way and good).

When they turn to walk in we see on the door it’s an army recruitment center. In his office, she’s expressing trepidation and he keeps calmly shooting it down, saying, “Oh that’s how we used to do it, but it’s different now, this is the army of the 80’s!” and saying there are yachts and condos and she could get a desk job in Europe and they would take care of everything and if she didn’t like it she could just quit like any other job.

So she signs up, and gets on a bus to Biloxi, Mississippi. Once there she immediately finds out that it is nothing like what he said and she can’t quit, it’s for three years. This part I really appreciated because I have seen Tik Toks from people in the army doing a trend of, “What lies did your recruiter tell you” where it’s the youngest kids you can imagine in barracks saying how much an adult lied to them and that they regret signing up. They’re doing it in a joking way but it is so deeply sad and I appreciated how the movie portrayed army recruiters as predatory and dishonest. He heard her in tears on a radio show and capitalized on her sense of loss and uncertainty to push her into something she would have never normally done. And if you’re like, “He thought he was helping!” then why did he have to lie? You can help someone without getting them to sign a document under false pretenses. I think it’s true that the majority of the people in the army are people who were taken advantage of because they needed something. Be it a place to live, or money to pay for college, or an alternative to jail, etc. I think that’s disgusting and I think if you need to trick young people into joining to get members it shouldn’t exist.

A lot of politicians have let slip that if college was free the army would lose a huge percentage of recruits, as if that’s a bad thing to avoid but I think we should make life better for people so they aren’t forced into positions they didn’t really choose.

Anyway I was impressed the movie depicted it like that. Then she’s there and as you can imagine, she doesn’t fit in and doesn’t like it. She gets in trouble a lot, is tired, doesn’t get along with the other women, etc.

The turning point is one night I forget even what she did but she did something that her whole unit gets punished for, they have to march circles in the rain in the middle of the night and her supervisor calls her parents to get her. They have the paperwork drawn up ready to sign for her discharge but she doesn’t do it.

Her father gave her this big speech where he’s like, “Let’s not pretend anymore. You’re not smart and you can’t be trusted to make your own decisions. When we leave here, you’re not going to leave my side” and essentially says he’s going to dictate how she lives. She decides to stay which I thought was set up well, it made sense that she did, you also felt how bad it would have to be for her to willingly choose the army.

So then she has her “getting better” montage where she decides to really apply herself. And she does do better but not crazy, she’s still herself and she’s not better than most of the other people she’s just getting the hang of it and fitting in with her unit better and they become friends. The night before their graduation from basic training there’s a game between the entire camp that’s like capture the flag but with guns.

Benjamin leads her whole unit to victory through a mixture of luck and cleverness but in the process exposes an affair between a sergeant and a cadet who had been the favorite of her unit leader, Captain Doreen (Eileen Brennan who I loved in Clue), who was also sleeping with the sergeant. Captain Doreen takes it out on them and forces them to clean all night. They retaliate by sneaking into her bunk as she’s packing for a transfer and put blue dye in her shower head.

The graduation goes off without a hitch (unless you are Captain Doreen who is blue), and they are all getting their placements. Benjamin gets put in the Thornbirds, an elite unit of aerial fighters that’s so far only been men. She feels honored by the commander who seems to have taken a liking to her and taken her under his wing. She meets his wife and dog in a convoy and his wife congratulates her and says how special she must be, that her husband is an excellent judge of character, and Benjamin thanks him for believing in her. She trains with them for weeks and the time comes to jump out of a plane for the first time. They go up and she’s the last one out and she breaks down saying she can’t jump, that she’s afraid and embarrassed to say it, but scared to die.

He reassures her she doesn’t have to jump and she starts to calm down then he tries to rape her. She jumps out of the plane. On the ground he has initiated a transfer for her out of the country because he doesn’t want her “loose lipped insinuations to ruin his reputation.” She goes, “Insinuations? You mean rape.” Which I was so impressed she named! And the movie named!

Then she was allowed to pick where she went which I don’t think would happen in real life at all, but she picks France. On a night off all the girls went to a bar and she ran into old family friends who were sitting with a gynecologist from France. They ended up sleeping together and she has an orgasm and says, “Now I know what I’ve been faking all those years.” They part on good terms and he says to look him up if she’s ever in France. She looks him up and they start dating.

This was so well done to me, how they depicted the emotional abuse of this relationship. It starts off good, there are just minor things, he leaves her to clean up his dog’s mess when he has to play soccer, he won’t fire his maid who is bad and swears they’re not sleeping together even when Judy finds her necklace in bed, he points out a woman walking by and says, “That’s the hair color I was talking about” and then the next scene Judy’s hair is dyed, her days consist of running errands for him and staying home and he discourages any ideas she has of other things, etc.

Judy’s old supervisor Captain Doreen was also transferred to this base and has been spying on Judy. When she discovers her new boyfriend is a registered communist (he joined for a painter ex-girlfriend, Claire) she forces Judy to choose either the army or her boyfriend. Judy decides to marry him.

Leading up to the wedding there are more problems and fights but each time she is consoled and says “I know once we get married it’ll all be better.” The morning of the wedding he is late and she finds out he was with Claire. As they are being read their vows (all in French) she keeps looking over and seeing the groom as her ex-husband, father, and all the other people in her life that were controlling or dismissive. She breaks off the marriage, punches him in the face, and walks out. The credits roll as we follow her back walking down a long winding dirt road under a canopy of trees in her white dress.

I was impressed at how expansive the story was, and how subtle. There wasn’t a big speech where a character outlines all the emotional points or Judy numerates all the ways she’s changed, or explained what changed. She just leaves. I love that. And the husband definitely got shittier but I think movies are guilty of making all the bad people SO bad there’s no gray area when in real life people who are abusive are also sweet sometimes, that’s how they get people to stay for so long. By apologizing and groveling and saying it was a mistake or they lost their temper, etc. I think at the end he was guilty of that but I liked that it was pretty gradual and small shift. He makes her sign a prenup, something she and her second husband talked about never doing and I think in this felt like an echo of the recruiter pushing her to join under false pretenses, a man getting her to sign something she doesn’t really agree to.

There was also a scene where one of her army friends was at the wedding and was having a quiet moment alone before the groom showed up and she said, “I think you’d be better off without him, you seem not well” and I valued that honesty and it highlighted how Judy didn’t have anyone else in her life saying that to her. Her parents were just complaining about how far they came and how she’s failed before. She isn’t able to hear it in that moment but I still think it’s valuable to tell people if you see something that’s wrong.

Before joining the army Judy realized aloud that the week after her husband died was the only time she’d been alone since kindergarten. I think a lot of people are like that but don’t really identify it as something to be healed.

Something I’m working on in my own life is being alone and being still, having quiet moments with myself both with my thoughts but also without my thoughts, just being in the world and in my body with myself. I liked that this movie didn’t really have a lesson it pushed on me or the character, there wasn’t a nice ribbon at the end showing her eating a baguette in France with a dog writing in her journal or anything. It ends right in the middle of what in the beginning was her lowest moment, the end of a marriage, but this time she chose it and she’s happy.

The quiet symmetry of that is so beautiful and highlights her change in such an organic way that you can observe or not, appreciate or not. It felt almost zen and I was so blown away that a mainstream movie not that long ago was allowed to be this narratively grazing for lack of a better word. I feel like there’s so much emphasis on getting everything tight and formulaic and referential. “Lean” there’s a lot of talk of, “cutting the fat” in writing. I like the fat. This script has a lot of fat and I think the movie is better for it. I’m glad I saw it at this time in my life when I’m trying to figure out the kind of writer I am, and the kinds of things I want to make.

Beautiful movie. Also Goldie Hawn was the perfect casting because she’s so present and a large personality but understated. She’s funny but not a caricature, sexy, but not flawless or unreal.

Anyway, I loved this movie in a really unexpected way, a sleeper hit, not the 80’s Cadet Kelly I was expecting. 4.5/5 French communists, would masturbate again.

Election

I have wanted to watch this movie for a long time and I had tried once or twice before the pedophilia always stopped me. Not today.

Today I decided to paint my nails during the movie, essentially forcing myself to sit throughout. I’m glad I did but I can’t say I liked this movie and don’t really understand why any of you like it. What are you getting from it?

If you haven’t seen or it has been a while, this story follows a high school student body election where Reese Witherspoon is a kind of uptight overachiever, Matthew Broderick is a lonely teacher, Chris Klein is the original himbo, and other people are also there.

Tracy is the only one running for student body president but after Matthew Broderick plants the seed, Chris Klein decides to run. His sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) also decides to run after her best friend/girlfriend Lisa (Frankie Ingrassia) leaves her for her brother and they start dating.

Tracy accidentally pulls down her big poster and then in a fit of rage pulls down all the other campaign posters and hides them in a dumpster. Tammy sees her and takes the blame, it’s kind of unclear why. She doesn’t care about this position at all and gives a speech the main point of which is, “Who cares?” and “Don’t vote.” This angers the faculty who feel like she’s making a mockery of the process and them, and decide to suspend her for three days and kick her out of the campaign. She loves this.

Now it’s just down to Tracy and Paul and when they go to vote he says it doesn’t feel right voting for yourself so he votes for Tracy. During the independent count, Tracy wins by one vote. Matthew Broderick is mad and throws away two votes and declares Paul the winner, which they announce to the school.

Later they find the ballots in his trashcan and he is fired and moves away. His wife is also divorcing him because he slept with his neighbor, who’s single because her husband who also worked at the school was caught having an inappropriate relationship with Tracy.

The end of the movie is one year later and Matthew Broderick has moved to New York and works at the Museum of Natural History and is dating a woman there, Paul is in college at a frat that he loves, Tammy got sent to Catholic school and met her girlfriend Jennifer, and Tracy went to Georgetown where she didn’t have friends and is now working for a Republican congressman. Matthew sees her and throws his soda at the limo, then runs away. We later see a little girl in his tour group raise her hand to answer a question and him not call on her.

So, lots of things I didn’t like. First, obviously, the depiction of the teacher having sex with a student as a ‘relationship’ and not grooming-the principal shows a note Tracy’s mother found that he wrote her asking her to go to Maui and asks, “Did you cross a line with this student?” clearly implying if they’ve had sex or been physical but writing a note asking a female student to go on vacation with you was already crossing the line!

To me it was interesting that Matthew Broderick’s character had so much vitriol and dislike for Tracy but they seemed pretty similar. Passionate about what they think is right but lonely and alienated from meaningful relationships and connections.

It seems like Tracy is painted as a villain but she didn’t do anything wrong, she worked hard and got something and valued the wrong stuff but a lot of people are like that. They care about the job they get and their successes more than the community they have. She seems very capitalist to me which is why I’m not surprised she was so successful throughout.

Matthew Broderick seemed like a misogynist, why was he so upset that she win and get stuff? It seemed like he blamed her for his friend having a sexual relationship with her and divorcing his wife and having to move in with his parents but in what world is that the fault of the high schooler an adult man has sex with? I’m just very aware that this was based on a book a man wrote and I think it’s so common for men to see themselves as victims in these kinds of scenarios where they are clearly the person in the wrong.

And when he didn’t like any ambitious or smart little girls at the end? Weird, AND he fantasized about her while he was fucking his wife, which is disgusting I hope we can all agree? I think unfortunately the time where I could enjoy this movie passed, and if it had gotten in under the wire, like in the early 2000’s maybe I would like it like the rest of you but now it just seems like a weird movie about gross men.

I’m curious what Reese Witherspoon thinks about this movie now, and what she would say about this character.

Looking up reviews it seems like the reception/perception is that Reese Witherspoon’s character is manipulative and bad but what did she do that was wrong? She didn’t cheat that I can remember, he cheated! And who did she manipulate? She just puts out gum to get signatures and works hard. She’s annoying but she’s not wrong. Also was it funny? I’m seeing it be labeled a ‘dark comedy’ and ‘razor sharp’ and where was I? What was funny about it? Like actually what was one joke. I don’t remember and I just saw it.

I think I just didn’t like it. Jim (Matthew) hits on his best friend’s wife when he’s shopping with her then complains to his wife about her, then sleeps with her then when she tells his wife says she ruined his life- it’s comical how little self-awareness he has and how little accountability he takes. He is the villain! And I think people are like, “We’re not supposed to like him” but the movie is VERY sympathetic to him.

What healthy adult man has a feud with a teenage girl? It’s psychotic. I feel like depicting high schoolers as adversaries and sexual objects, it’s so diabolical and gross. Have you met a high schooler? They’re little and they don’t know anything. I mean, some of them are smart but their brains are still in the microwave and not finished cooking yet.

I think this movie disgusted me?? Lol. I think a lot of people’s response to some of what I’m saying will be, “It’s satire!!!!” But, why? Because someone said it is? Of what? Literally what is this satirizing, and in what way? According to dictionary.com, a reliable and trustworthy source it’s: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. If it was a satire of politics he wouldn’t have been caught, and if it was a satire of high school she wouldn’t have won. I think satire is just something people say when they they don’t get why it’s bad and they like it but they do. “It’s a SATIRE.” This is like when people really liked Baby Cobra. God.

AND if you think it’s a satire, what is it saying? Ambition and morality seem to be the major themes up for discussion, and loneliness-what is the film saying about them that is satirical? Because it seems to be saying ‘have ambition’ and ‘morality is subjective’ which don’t feel like big departures from anything in politics, certainly not a criticism.

I also feel like the casting is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the movie, like people REALLY like that Matthew Broderick was Ferris Bueller, a cool fuck school type, and NOW he’s a COG in the MACHINE of school! Different from the other character he played!! Reese Witherspoon is undeniably good but maybe too good because some of you are attributing things to her that just aren’t there. Like manipulation? When? I think she’s just a little delusional and cares too much about stuff but all she does is make posters and bake cupcakes and cry.

The book this is based on is written by Tom Perrotta who also wrote Little Children (a good movie) but both deal with adults sexualizing children, interesting!

I just kind of hated it. Tammy’s character I liked, I liked that she was adopted and that only got one line. I liked the freeze frames.

I just think people thinking she’s manipulative or a villain, stems from the opinion that she ‘got’ the male teacher fired, and seeing it that way instead of that he was sexually abusing and grooming her and he got himself fired feels like a big crux of dissonance here. I think when this film came out that would have been majority public perception (and still now) but that is an impossible view for me to hold and I feel like you need to hold it to like the movie, because otherwise everyone seems stupid and wrong. Matthew Broderick becomes an adult man harassing a child who his friend abused who later cheats on his wife. And the bee sting, this physicalization of his downfall, it’s just too much.

The idea that she’s SO ambitious I also contend with-she doesn’t have any friends and wants to get into a good college. Her mom has put all her dreams for her life onto her. When she’s devastated and crying that she lost the election, the only thing that matters to her, her mom is like, “You should have done the things I said” and “Why didn’t you do this?” essentially blaming her and not comforting her at all. She’s a sad character.

It’s also annoying I keep seeing a lot of reviews that are like, “It’s about how far you will go to achieve success” but who does that? Tracy wants success but doesn’t do anything underhanded to get it, she rips the posters but out of frustration that she ripped hers down accidentally, it’s not calculated, and then she lies about it because she doesn’t want to get in trouble. That’s not some mastermind high IQ chess plan, that’s a dumb teenage mistake. And Jim throws away two ballots but that’s not for “success” he’s not even in the election, he just hates Tracy. Paul doesn’t care either way and Tammy doesn’t care either way. So who is this attributable to? I just don’t think people watched the same movie I did.

2.5/5 sticks of gum in a fishbowl, would never masturbate.

God’s Creatures

Last night I went to a screening and Q&A of God’s Creatures with Emily Watson (Red Dragon), Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale), and Toni O’Rourke (Idk). It was at the British Film Institute which was really cool.

The movie is about a mother whose beloved son returns home (to Ireland) after being away (in Australia) for a long time. The return seems to be going mostly smoothly, he and his father butt heads and she had to steal some oysters from her job to get him started on his own operation, but nothing that out of the ordinary for this small religious town.

But after a night at the pub when she leaves early, the next day Sarah, her co-worker, friend, and former almost daughter-in-law, completely changes from the easy going happy girl she was and becomes withdrawn and angry and cold to Aileen (Watson). Soon Aileen finds out Sarah is saying Brian (Aileen’s son played by Paul Mescal) followed her after she left the bar and raped her.

Sarah goes to the police who bring Aileen in for questioning. They inform her Brian says he was with her all night and didn’t go out (they both went to the pub where they both saw Sarah). She immediately confirms this to the officer. Brian is released and she drives him home, kind of asking about what happened but not really, and not really getting a direct answer.

This causes some rifts at their job and at home (Aileen’s daughter Erin is close with Sarah) but it seemed like Aileen thought it would blow over. Sarah presses charges and they have to go to court where after Aileen testifies Brian was with her, the case is thrown out.

Sarah then is slowly ostracized from their small community, she is fired from her job for missing too many shifts, refused service at the bar the attack began at, and ignored by neighbors and friends even while singing for public events, like a blessing of the boats as they go out to sea.

A slow change starts to come over Aileen, especially helped along by Erin who point blank says what she did was wrong, and it appears she starts to stick up for Sarah and distance herself from Brian. When her dad dies and Sarah spits on Brian at the funeral, Aileen tells everyone not to touch her. In the pen penultimate scene Brian and Aileen go out on the water to collect the oysters (or check on them, whatever you need to do to oysters) and she asks him does he feel no guilt for what he did? it doesn’t effect him at all? and he yells that she holds him to this unattainable level of perfection. (Not raping someone seems like a low bar, but sure). She tells him she wants him out of their lives and struggles against the tide to get back to the boat and lays down at the bottom of it, exhausted. A few minutes later Brian also tries to make his way back to the boat but gets caught in a whirlpool and Aileen does not move from the bottom of the boat, she just listens to his cries for help as he drowns.

After some undetermined amount of time we see her going to Sarah’s house, who is leaving. Aileen isn’t asking for forgiveness but kind of sharing that she feels she was wrong. Sarah ignores this and talks about how hard her mother worked to buy this house and how proud she was to leave it to Sarah. And how Sarah assumed that she would live in it all her life and leave it to her children and so on and so on, “until the tide takes it.”

Sarah then gets into her car with all her things and her dog and drives away, the camera staying on her profile and the landscape zipping by for a long time.

I thought this movie was good not great but there were a lot of things I thought it did really well. Perhaps the best thing to me was that they didn’t show any of what happened between Brian and Sarah, but there’s never a question that he did it.

Sometimes movies set up a “he said/she said” thing, then dispel it by showing what happened and who was right. To me this confirms this idea in people’s minds that you can never really know what happened if you weren’t there or there isn’t video. But in this movie, the changes in her behavior and how she’s acting are enough for people to know and I respected that a lot. Her whole demeanor changes, she’s sullen and angry and hurt and hollowed out. Respecting people’s emotions as real was very powerful to me in a way that I don’t think our society has caught up to yet, 99% of women who are public about sexual assault are met with suspicion and skepticism. If they’re visibly upset it’s ‘put on,’ if they’re not it’s proof nothing happened. In this, Sarah wasn’t crying every second after it happened but she changed and it was so clear. I respect the movie a lot for setting it up that way.

They couldn’t have predicted the timing of this movie with the cultural moment Paul Mescal is having but it’s funny to me the timing of this release-that Paul Mescal is like, the heartthrob of the moment and in his newest movie he’s a rapist. To me it just showcases how talented of an actor he is because he’s working against people’s own affinity for him and built up goodwill, AND rape culture which sides with men and he still comes across as an asshole. And he’s an asshole in this completely organic way. I hate the movie villain rapist who is all black and white and it’s so easy to castigate him and other him as “bad.”

I feel like the movie worked hard to show how conflicted the mother was by giving us all the tender moments with him too, him singing with his grandad who is dying, working hard to rebuild himself after a big change, joking with his mom, etc. And he never is cruel to Sarah, or harsh that we see. We don’t see him being harsh or unkind to anyone. Just hardworking and quiet. I obviously don’t know what’s going through someone’s mind as they’re raping someone but I think there’s only a small percentage of people who think what they’re doing is wrong. I think most other people have some justification, or are angry and think in some way what’s going on is deserved.

There is definitely a commentary on how religion acts as a shield for horrible behavior, in the talkback Emily Watson outlined how visible religion is in the movie: meeting in churches for most big events, crosses hanging in every room, bibles and songs, etc. But how there is a “moral vacuum” at the center of the town that lets them ignore this horrible violence that takes place, over and over for generations.

Because something they didn’t talk about but I think is clear is that the only way a woman can excuse this kind of violence against another woman is if she’s been conditioned to her whole life, or when something happened to her she was forced to move on and no one gave her the help and support she needed so she stopped thinking you could ask that of people or the world.

There’s a scene with the grandad and Aileen where she is tending to him and he slaps her in the face. Watson pointed out that he can’t speak but he hits her. How ingrained and deep this type of gendered violence is. Especially in these small towns where the men often do difficult and dangerous work so it’s understood that their lives are hard and that somehow makes it okay for them to be violent to women.

The pacing for me was a little slow and there was a good amount that could have been cut. But I did like how rich and sparse it was at the same time. A lot below the surface, which fit into the fishing town vibe. This balance wasn’t struck exactly right for me, it’s clear there was SO much going on, especially from the talkback and hearing all the work the actors did to create the world and the lives of their characters and I don’t think the movie successfully conveyed all of that.

The ending shot didn’t make sense to me, and I think I wanted a little more maybe? They also had thick accents and were talking low and fast so there were points where I missed a line of dialogue which normally wouldn’t be that big but when everyone only says two things, it feels like a bigger loss.

The mother’s choice is to me the most interesting part, who do you choose to protect and how, and what do you owe to other people if someone you love has harmed them? To me it seemed like she had a knee-jerk reaction then slowly unpacked and found that what she did was wrong and tried to right it and overcorrected? But also how do you enact justice when your entire world isn’t just? Emily Watson said of this character, “she seemed incapable of making a rational decision at any point.”

I think we struggle with that, especially in America where the options are no consequences, or prison. Neither is right.

I think the movie was interesting and mostly good but kind of slow and long and didn’t explore the depths like it could have. I think there’s a fine line between saying too much and not saying enough artistically and this movie was dancing on it but seemed not to find a happy medium and erred unfortunately on the side of not saying enough.

3.5/5 gutted salmon, would not masturbate again.

Oh and I didn’t say anything about the title, but it comes from a line Sarah says, “We’re all God’s creatures in the dark” and I think how she says it it’s meant to be like, we’re all deserving of respect and care, but to me thinking about the religious elements in the movie that seemed to allow and cover up these transgressions I think I’m more inclined to interpret it as how viewing people through the lens of religion, especially if it has already been filtered through a gendered power imbalance, gives the illusion of piety while deep harm is being committed. And how this thing that’s supposed to be an equalizer actually highlights how different certain members of the community are treated within this doctrine. Something like that. I like the title a lot.