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Zosha on 28 Years Later

While in many ways it might seem closer than ever, the idea of a true apocalypse is something my brain can’t comprehend. Loss is sudden, but its tendrils stretch too far to understand in mere hypothetical. I already can’t figure life years down the line, I don’t think a world-breaking phenomenon will change that.

It’s with this mindset I went in more or less neutral to 28 Years Later, a sequel to 28 Weeks Later, which is a sequel to 28 Days Later, a pair of zombie movies I think are strong but have no real connection to. In the new film, we follow Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old who’s part of a tidal island community able to move to mainland Britain during low tide. His father is eager to take him on his first pilgrimage to the mainland; his mother is suffering from an illness that leaves her restless and forgetful. Life here is full and fitful.

The moat-like defense of their island feels like Chekhov’s causeway. Immediately the way they live, fortify, and caution those crossing it that there will be no rescue missions all insist upon a total failure of safegaps. But 28 Years Later isn’t so interested in pure survivalism.

Where so many stories about zombies (and so many days spent in real life, even) feel like an endless interrogation of how do we not die, 28 Years Later makes full use of its title’s conceit. More than just a novelty to track the passing of time post outbreak, 28 Years Later presents a challenge: What does it mean to keep living? To keep deciding to fight for this bit of life we’re able to eke out?

A post-zombie apocalypse life has plenty of miseries; I’m sure many of us know someone who is happy to watch a zombie movie and announce that nothing looks worth all that. Certainly the 28 franchise is no stranger to that kind of nihilism. But 28 Years Later, across its two imperfect halves, pulls at the narrative thread of what keeps us here the way you catch a single strand of hair out of your head — that is to say: with singular, surprisingly precise pain points.

Danny Boyle is quick to bring us into the thought early, showing Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) sneaking his son a bacon; taking a deep, weary breath when he thinks he’s out of his son’s sightline before going upstairs to take care of his ailing wife.

Spike, of course, sees him anyway. But he’s not quite able to connect the lines between his dad taking that burden and taking some bit of fleeting, adulterous joy for himself. He’s only 12, and raised in this hellscape — how can he possibly know what it means to keep choosing to live? How can he comprehend what it means to die?

28 Years Later stalks this question strangely (complimentary), already a bit of a novelty to take on as earnestly in the zombie genre as it has. When Jamie and Spike head to the mainland they’re intercut with a recording of “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling and sprinkles of British soldiers throughout (Hollywood) history. It’s as if the film is dipping its finger in a pond and causing a ripple, drawing past and present together as a new installment in a long line, a future that can be defended through fortitude and will. Soldiers of fable and film meeting the new cruel reality that will define their bloodline.

Those men died in legacy, leaving behind them a legend that grew far beyond a mere loss. 28 Years Later seeks to do the same, providing Spike with a childish innocence on making life matter, first by hunting with his dad, and then by trying to help treat his mom Isla (Jodie Comer). You can read the masculine and feminine into the two halves of the lesson that Spike needs to get from his parents. It feels like an oversimplification to me; they both dip into “either” “mode” depending on what kind of protection the parental figure is stepping in to give in any given moment, and the movie is less halves than it is a slippery series of instructors for him.

When he finally finds Dr. Kelson (Ralph Finnes), a feared survivor who lives on the mainland and seems to ritualistically dispose of bodies, Kelson introduces his towers of skulls. Here the movie shifts into something more solemn and quiet: Dr. Kelson lives slathered in prayer. He seems to accept that death (and, with it, no one to remember him or the ideas of the place he built) could come any time, and yet he builds traps and covers himself in iodine in hopes of getting one more day.

28 Years Later makes this its sort of grand pronouncement, that to die is to live, and to live is to die. In Alex Garland’s script it’s a bit simple, but in Finnes’ careful, ever-thoughtful tranquility, it’s deeply felt. I am of two minds about the way Boyles toys around with new technology (I don’t think the iPhone quality adds much and it’s often jarring, but I deeply appreciate someone who’s willing to try). But I think his adventurous filmmaking sense is most successful when it adopts an almost omniscient third-person perspective for Spike depending on who he’s close to: An action hero on an epic quest; a coming-of-age story of parental love; a memorial; and, finally, an episode of Power Rangers. Each has their own way to survive, their own mode of cinema, their own value system to proselytize. There’s no wrong answers here. Just the opportunity to truly live.

Cate on Sinners

“You know something? Maybe once a week I wake up paralyzed, reliving that night. But before the sun went down, I think that was the best day of my life. Was it like that for you?”

“No doubt about it. Last time I seen my brother. Last time I seen the sun. Just for a few hours… we was free.

-Sinners (2025)

When director Ryan Coogler's epic, original science-fiction, musical, period piece was released to the public back in April, there was a lot of industry consternation about the (almost) unprecedented deal he brokered with WB. There had been a bidding war, and only they were willing to grant what other studios considered a risk: first dollar gross, final cut, and a return of copyright after 25 years.

But, if you've seen Sinners, (and paid attention) then it should be plainly obvious why Coogler would push for a deal like this on this specific film. In fact, not holding the line for this film would have been a betrayal of his work’s own politics.

Because in Sinners, ownership is freedom. Every creative choice in the film reinforces that point. It may not be much, but it’s ours.

Set in the 1930’s in the Mississippi delta, the Smoke Stack twins are back in town from Chicago, and they’re planning to open a juke joint. As they gather their resources and welcome their people, they’re greeted by an otherworldly force that covets what they have.

Smoke — played deftly by Michael B. Jordan, in easily the best work of his career — is the character most demonstrably searching for his freedom. His and his brother’s immediate goals are the same, but Smoke is looking much farther into the future.

Much of the community are sharecroppers, still working the same land owned by the same white men as they always have. To Smoke, it’s an indignity. And he knows they deserve more. This juke will be for them, and he and his brother will build something that’s theirs.

When the brothers purchase the mill from a white man they will later learn is the head of the KKK, Smoke reminds him that it is wholly theirs now. They won’t be paying him any more money, and if he shows up again, they’ll shoot him dead. Cathartic as the scene is, it also sets the agenda for the night. The transaction is done, and there is nothing left to tie him to his seller.

It’s why Smoke is so opposed to accepting the scrip that helps power the local economy. Sure, you can exchange it for goods and services. But it’s worthless outside the very plantations they cannot escape. It literally ties them to a site of violence and oppression, because that’s the only place where the little they have is worth anything. It’s a notable contrast to his ex-wife Annie, (Wunmi Mosaku) the community’s local conjure woman. Despite Smoke’s protestations, she has no issue taking the scrip. She’s not trying to escape the land. The land is hers, and she won’t be driven from it. Whether it be literally or spiritually, she owns it, and she’s staying put. She likes this freedom just fine.

Now, ownership can mean different things to different people. In Sinners there are two answers: property and music. Smoke wants to put down roots and build a life better than the one he left behind. But as far as we know, no one else in the community has a secret stash of guns and liquor stolen from Al Capone. So that leaves music. The blues is theirs. It’s as close as they have to magic, and they’ve got to keep it — make sure that it remains theirs.

Sinners invites you to try to get your arms around how much of it is deeply tied to everything else. You can’t extricate the prominence of Delta blues, from the majesty of that spectacular midpoint scene — or Remmick’s (Jack O’Connell) incredulous disavowal of the KKK from the symbolic meeting of the generations. They each enable each other.

So, naturally, the film’s music plays the biggest role in demonstrating the characters’ search for freedom, and the ways that Black cultural tradition has grown directly out of the pain we’ve been forced to endure. Music is the tool we use to access the escape we need to keep going. The Blues are called the blues for a reason.

An early scene with Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) demonstrates that deep connection beautifully. In the car with Stack and Sammy (Miles Caton), he tells a story about an old friend who was lynched. The sound design immerses us in the horror of that moment while Slim becomes visibly agitated. When the story is over, he rocks himself gently, trying to self-soothe. Soon a hum becomes a song — a deeply held trauma transmutes into rhythm. When pain is too big, it becomes music.

In many ways, that scene is the thesis of the film. All the themes of cultural appropriation, theft of black art, racist predation and — of course — freedom, are distilled into those few minutes: our music, our culture must be protected from interlopers because it’s how we survive this hell on earth. It’s how we find pockets of joy where there are none. It’s how we commune with our ancestors and progenitors — as in that much-lauded juke scene. It’s how we get free.

The Black diaspora has suffered so much. They’ve taken our histories, our families, our culture, our language and our lives. They don’t get to open the wound and take the salve too.

When our main villain Remmick descends upon the old mill in an attempt to get to Sammy, we start to understand why he won’t let up. As a vampire, he’s disconnected from his people. He’ll never crossover to meet his family, and he doesn’t have a griot to bring them here to him. He needs something only these Black people can give to him, and he’s perfectly happy to take it. The ostentatious rock opera that reverberates in the background when he enters the scene is a clever reminder of yet another musical genre that’s been snatched from the people who made it.

When Sammy plays his guitar and opens the veil to the next world, he invites everyone in the juke to step into a mythic space between here and hereafter. It’s exactly what Remmick needs from him. White vampires preying on Black people’s music is not a subtle metaphor, but it’s an effective one. Without Sammy, our protagonists won’t be able to reach the ancestral plane either. Why should they have to give up the one place where they can be free? The one place that promises a future, a lineage of survival and helps them to endure the horrors of this life? The one place they might find the barest hope for self-determination? By defeating Remmick, they kept themselves safe and retained the futures they had already glimpsed.

Decades later, when Stack visits Sammy in his club after all that time, there’s lamentation in his eyes. He and Mary are clearly doing fine, decked out in all the flamboyant finery the 80s can provide. But when Sammy plays for him — the blues, “not that new shit” — there’s also a flicker of light. That night, decades ago, Stack and Mary chose to leave. They chose to go make a life where they could be together. But it came at a cost. Like Remmick before them, they’ll never truly be able to get back to that place of ecstasy and joy. They’ve severed their claim to the freedom their loved ones built for themselves. They’ll never see their people again.

They’ll never be free.

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Cate on Wicked

It may seem like too harsh a pronouncement, but we get the movies we deserve. A crass society produces crass films, and creeping social progress slowly makes itself known in the stories that we tell each other. It’s why filmic eras can seem both distinct and distinctive; we’re laundering our values through mass media. As those changes, so do the narratives that surface to the mainstream.

So it follows then that our films also tell us when we’re in danger, and Wicked is the most prominent in a recent string of similarly themed films that remind us that we understand right from wrong just fine.

Wicked’s life as a Broadway musical has made it one of the best known properties of all time. In the two decades since it premiered onstage, hundreds of thousands of patrons have sat through the fable of a marginalized young witch who is demonized for her opposition to institutional oppression. Like The Hunger Games before it, there’s no doubt about where our sympathies should lie. In this endlessly popular retelling of a classic American story, it’s those who are different who have the courage to do the right thing. Which is why it’s so interesting that this fantastically rendered version of the story only made it to our screens in 2024.

There’s no need to expound on the current political climate to make the film’s thematic similarities clear. In the Land of Oz, fascism is on the rise — the Wizard himself has orchestrated a social crisis that demonizes its animal residents (who speak and participate in Ozian society just as any human). They’ve become literal scapegoats who have regressed in their development, such that humans have decided they should be put in cages “for their own safety”; no one said it was subtle. When Elphaba – ostracized all her life for her green skin – discovers that the Wizard has no real power, she rejects his offer to use hers to continue his genocidal project.

Seeing the very same ideas play out in the news everyday has a sobering effect. But it’s impressive that in this rendition of the story, frequent movie musical director John M. Chu still manages to reveal a beautiful world that can be escaped into, even as it so resembles our own.

First, the criticism of the film’s lighting and colour-grading are valid, but so is the rebuttal. Wicked is not a sequel to The Wizard of Oz and has no obligation to mimic its visual language. That said, it’s a little washed out. What does sing however is the production design. Chu builds a massive, immersive world that audiences can easily step into. The magic of Oz is clear and legible, and so are its apparent politics. From the costuming to the performances to the musical numbers themselves, the film is a spectacular example of a movie’s potential to transport you to a new world.

Ariana Grande (who plays co-lead Glinda) and Cynthia Erivo (who plays Elphaba) have a dazzling chemistry onscreen that’s hard to miss. You could recommend the movie on the strength of their performances alone. Vocally they’re both at their best, riffing off each other and harmonizing so sweetly you can feel it settle into your belly. But it’s Cynthia Erivo who really runs away with the movie. She is the star, so that isn’t saying much. But her presence is something to behold.

The choice to cast Elphaba as a Black woman adds a layer to the story that brings it closer to our own world. Though Elphaba is traditionally cast as a white actress, here Cynthia brings her Blackness and her queerness into focus to drive home the metaphor. Those who are different are equally deserving of love and care. In an especially moving scene at a school dance, Elphaba’s defiant strength gives way to vulnerable grief when she’s finally given the permission to fall apart. Every ripple of feeling is evident in her face, and Cynthia makes it clear why she was so perfect for this role. She’s been where Elphaba is, and it’s generous of her to share that with her audience.

But the real attraction of the film is Cynthia’s voice. What a voice! It cannot be overstated that she is a generational vocal talent. Her rendition of The Colour Purple’s “I’m Here” will reliably bring you to tears, and her first number in the film — The Wizard and I — will likely do the same. And that’s to say nothing of the musical’s most popular song, Defying Gravity. Nothing short of a battle cry, Cynthia unleashes the full power of her instrument to give Elphaba her well-earned moment of revelation: it’s always worth it to battle the forces of evil and stand up for the vulnerable, even if they hate you for it. Not everyone will follow you down the path of righteousness. Even the people you love are capable of betraying their principles if it earns them a modicum of power. But soldier ahead anyway. Even if they call you the Wicked Witch of the West.

Wicked tells a very clear story of good and evil; of a wastrel of a man who tries to consolidate his power to oppress on the back of a marginalized woman, then punishes her when she refuses. In 2023’s Oppenheimer, a brilliant man must contend with the generational horrors he inflicts in service of immoral men, even as he tries to shirk responsibility. And finally, in The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, an ambitious young man learns just how easy it is to whittle away at your soul to justify heinous deeds in the name of your own self-interest. The movies echo and follow each other in quick succession. It’s almost as if there’s something in the air.

It’s almost as if we understand right from wrong just fine.

Zosha on Dune: Part Two

I will always respect a story that refuses to slow down and explain itself. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies are such stories. Very quickly in Dune 2 we are thrust into new halls, with new rules. It’s a distinctive structure; meandering as it does through Paul’s rise through the Fremen power structure. In a sense I like the first film more, more because I appreciate palace intrigue and the way that story mounts, compared to this one. But it’s hard to deny the scope of what Dune 2 does, what it is. Dune 2 is an epic, and a fulfillment of grand ambition.

But Dune 2’s story is not one of a polished messiah. For as much as the soundtrack might chant or the Fremen might pray, the movie version of Paul resists simple categorization like that. He has his powers, his natural senses. But also he has to run really fast, muttering a quick “Fuck!” under his breath as he tries to catch a worm. He shares a goofy grin with Gurney when he first reveals his face. And when when he misjudges the distance between arms of an enemy harvester when running for cover, he yells out an “Aw shit!” This is not the messiah of the scriptures. It’s a dude barely making it to the next day.

To me, this humanity is what makes Dune 2 work so well. Too many stories these days are filled with protagonists who just know things — not because of any Bene Gessiret prophecy measured in centuries, but because writers can’t be fussed to think through what a character should know or modulate intelligence across the cast. Contrast that to Paul, a young man who doesn’t seem preternaturally gifted so much as he is lucky. He may know their ways as if they are his own, but Dune 2 never loses sight of him as just… a guy.

There’s a sense that Dune 2 could be weirder; we could hear the plotting fetus talk, or go bigger with the flare. But for as cerebral as Villeneuve can be as a filmmaker, his approach to Dune is, largely, the right kind of grounded for a story with such mythic implications. This is an epic of individual tragedies, fate determined by choices and circumstance. Chani and Paul aren’t a melancholy love story because his Destiny is to lead her people into a holy war. And unlike the books, she isn’t merely tragically committed to him and his vision by nature of the story. (For as many ideas as Dune is stuffed with as a franchise, its portrayal of Chani is weak, to say the least.) Rather it’s because of the way she giggles when she’s in the desert with him, or cheers his successes.

Villeneuve’s direction keeps the story looking stark, be it on the arid hills of Arrakis or the austere structures of Giedi Prime. But his intense, detached focus lets the humanity peek through. Chani and Paul’s time together is sun-kissed and full of lens flair. Feyd-Rautha’s — cold, like a snake. Every battle won by Paul has a different approach, with even shared DNA like the harvester attack and Paul’s reunion with Gurney serving totally different purposes, borne of opposing vantage points. Chani’s blue ribbon moves from her brow to her arm as her feelings for Paul shift. Gurney and Stilgard bother each other about whether the nukes are well hidden.

I love that Paul’s rise and the dueling narratives around him are set against that texture. Dune is a story about stories — the ways they shape who we are, what we believe, what is possible. To paint it as too mythical or beyond our understanding would be to lose the anchor for Frank Herbert’s most ambitious ideas. At the same time Timothée Chalamet’s performance shows how Paul opposes the story his mother pedals around him, Villeneuve frames him in myth. Paul might impress the fremen by walking as if he is one of them, but Villeneuve stalks him along the sand dune as if he is part of the desert. And though I think Dune 2’s structure doesn’t have the same fluid momentum as the first, it undoubtedly builds something more ambitious in its wake.

“Now that — that is power,” Gurney says of the Atreides warheads. He is, of course, correct; even in a world of such casual atomic use, these bombs have the potential to swing a whole planet — and with it, control of the universe — in their favor. And yet, Dune 2 is filled with so many versions of power, so many iterations of control and demand, so many actions that alter the course of history. Paul is a nexus point for them. But his story only works if he feels like a human.

Assorted Internet Detritus

A messy insider look at one couple making themselves an enemy of the state (Disneyland). Looking back on the emptiness of Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” How the State Department let Israel get away with Gaza horrors. What does accountability between friends who fuck up really look like? That gd Salesforce ad is using a delusion to sell AI.

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Zosha + Cate <3

It’s Friday, so let’s just get into it, shall we?

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Zosha on Conclave

You may have heard about Conclave as a bit of a party: A bunch of bitchy cardinals gather to pick the next pope, which means gossip, and politicking, and piety by way of power struggles. There is a sense that if Conclave is a party then it got here on Oct. 25, 2024, right when the party ended (such that you could call any modern Democratic campaign in the face of Republican authoritarianism a “party,” let alone an enjoyable one).

It was a funny experience to see Conclave a good month or so before the election, where the press screening I attended chuckled softly at the notion of “Is this what we're reduced to, choosing the least worst option?” When I’d see it again a month later, a week out from the election, that line got full-on groans.

Conclave is about the papacy. This is the fundamental root of the story and its struggle. When its cardinals declare themselves “liberal” they do not mean that in the way we understand it in our politics. But it’s understandable why we’d feel like they could: Everything feels fraught and political. Cardinal Lawrence’s (Ralph Finnes) insistence that there’s a deeper good that exists outside of jockeying agendas is true, but Conclave presses us about how much it matters. It’s not so much naivete, as Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) might want to believe, so much as it’s beside the point. Do you win a game by refusing to play? Does it feel like you should?

Still, what sticks with me all these months out from those initial viewings isn’t the curveball ending. It’s a fun kisser; an eloquent twist on ideas around Catholic ideas around the body and God’s divine vision. But what stays with me is the hush of Conclave. The halo of light around cardinals in a darkened auditorium. The lingering gaze of Edward Berger’s direction on little vignettes of iPhones and a mass of cardinals moving through the stairwell. Finnes’ furrowed brow, cast up to the sky with so much unseen between him and what he wants to hear.

Memes would have you believe the movie is filled with adolescent Mean Girl backstabbing; the closest it gets is a vaping 71-year-old who is ready to steamroll anyone with his self-righteousness. I enjoy these the much as the next person. But they don’t really capture my experience of the film, a movie so purely adult in the way it wrestles with impossible impasses. What makes it so interesting to me is how it flirts with fecklessness, refusing to be a 1:1 analogy or stand-in for anything. In the era of so much Literal Horror and literal horror — that would be: horror movies that are single-mindedly direct about their analogies (and with other genres following suit), and the crushing defeat that comes with checking the headlines every morning — it’s refreshing to have a film like Conclave commit to its types as characters and let them spin out from there. Like warring tops, they bounce off each other and sometimes spin out all together. But for as much as characters are forced to come out and say an almost mechanical version of what they mean, there is so much spirit and quiet that leaves some room (for Jesus, or anything else ones want to fill in).

Ultimately Conclave stops right where it’s meant to; a steep escalation of its thoughts, with no real denouement to tie things up. There is, instead, its own sort of calm. It gives no answers, just as it doesn’t easily align with any simple politics. Instead we’re left with Cardinal Lawerence looking out the window. In a lesser film there would be a whole third act left, but Conclave wants us to sit with the questions rather than the destination. After all, what else is there to say after listening to so many people saying nothing in order to stand for something? Life goes on, even if we’re not really sure how. The party’s not over, even if it feels a little fucking dead.

Cate on The Substance

There’s not a lot to say about The Substance that hasn’t been said already. Director Coralie Fargeat’s latest feature is an ambitious examination of women, aging, and the extreme measures the former are willing to take to evade the latter. The film cannot be accused of subtlety, so generally speaking, its themes are quite legible. But while the story’s focus on the glorification of youth is its preeminent fascination, what remains most interesting to me, is the very existence of the substance itself.

For the uninitiated: Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an 80s style television fitness star whose show is unceremoniously dumped by her network on her 50th birthday. In an act of desperation, she takes “the substance,” which allows a new, better version of herself to emerge: Sue (Margaret Qualley). But as with all things that involve injecting green liquids into your body, there are complications.

The film never shows us who exactly is administering these full-service substance kits. The enterprise is entirely anonymous. Elisabeth must travel to a hole in the wall and access a lock-box accessible only by a card she’s been sent in the mail. When she has problems or questions about the process, the voice at the end of the number she’s been told to call is unfeeling, unhelpful and distant.

The only significant bit of advice he imparts is that Elisabeth and Sue need to “respect the balance.” “There is no you or her, there is only the matrix. You are one.” It’s trite enough, and it seems fair to assume the instruction was merely meant to remind them to follow the rules as set out in the packets they’ve been sent. But conveniently, there’s no mention of the consequences for not doing so. Sue, having a good time, “steals” a few hours from Elisabeth before switching them back. When Elisabeth awakes, she finds that one of her fingers has nearly rotted.

You can probably extrapolate how the film ends from there. But the substance itself remains a mystery. It’s not a secret that the beauty industry thrives on insecurity. Problems are invented so that products can solve them. Hell, the only reason women started shaving their legs is because Gillette wanted to sell more razors. But in addition to being extraneous, there are also lots of beauty products that actively harm women. Everything from douches to hair relaxers ask women to risk their health in service of being, or attempting to be, younger, more beautiful and more desirable. There’s always a magic cure or potion promising women that they can, effectively, consume their way out of the patriarchy.

The immediate downside of that though, is that women’s pain isn’t taken seriously. A slowly desiccating husk of a body isn’t a common side effect, but it’s the one that Elisabeth is left with after Sue’s indiscretions. And as expected, there’s no recourse. Her failing body is presented as punishment for her vanity; a deserved fate for the crime of trying to fit into the box she’s been cast out of. When she calls again for help, she’s given a choice: continue or stop. Simple as that. But reclaiming her life won’t reclaim her body. In effect, her choice is to remain a disfigured outcast, or take her chances with the young and beautiful Sue.

It’s hard not to think of the way women in the real world are gaslit into ignoring the symptoms brought on by the products they use. Sure, we can stop using them, but we’ll have to accept that we’ll never be part of the privileged class who enjoys a facsimile of respect. Youth must be chased at all costs, injury be damned.

In an essay for The Cut, Tavi Gevinson wrote that “youth does carry currency, which can be mistaken for power. If you are a woman, however, this currency is not on your terms.” The dichotomy produced by Sue’s existence replicates this truth exactly. Though she now has access to everything that Elisabeth lost, she too is subject to the whims of the leering men in charge. It’s part of why her violent abuse of Elisabeth’s body is so frightful. In her mind, she’ll never be the new, improved her, if she doesn’t get rid of her literal older self. But who is it even in service of?

For Elisabeth, the substance promises much but takes even more. So it makes a sick kind of sense that the ramifications of engagement aren’t illuminated until it’s much too late to make a difference for her. Youth is everything. Vanity is vile. How you square the two is up to you.

Assorted Internet Detritus

REI needs to start doing better. The old rules are for losers. The mysterious hunt for an expert therapist who is maybe just totally made up. TV shows like Paradise keep using the same dirty trick. The latest chapter of the (very!) longform series on Beyoncé and her cinematic influences I have been eagerly awaiting (now up to self-titled). I’m also reading up on Vietnam’s own brand of Modernist architecture.

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If you’re just finding this newsletter, do us a favor and subscribe. It feeds our fragile egos. And if you’re already a loyal reader, help us out and tell a friend. Happy movie yelling!

Zosha + Cate <3

We’ve got an audacious crop of films in the mix this year. But for now, we’re starting with Cate on the controversial frontrunner Emilia Pérez, then Zosha on the Bob Dylan meditation, A Complete Unknown.

Please enjoy, and welcome back :)

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Cate on Emilia Pérez

I’m aware of the new controversy around Karla Sofia Gascon’s racist tweets, but I don’t feel like talking about them engaging with her horrific racism. Consequently they are not considered in this review.

Emilia Pérez is the kind of movie one yearns to enjoy despite the fact that it refuses to let you. The newest project from french filmmaker Jacques Audiard is a musical crime thriller that began its life as an opera — a fact that’s made very clear by the film’s outsized ambitions. But despite its lofty goals, what the audience has been left with is a deeply-offensive attempt at cultural engagement that trivializes every aspect of the story it’s trying to explore.

The film’s plot is simple enough: a young lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldana) is enlisted by “Manitas” (Karla Sofia Gascon) a transgender drug lord, to fake her death, help her complete her medical transition, protect her family, and begin a new life as the woman she knows herself to be. (At this point in the story, she’s already gotten breast implants, which she needlessly flashes to Rita, apparently unfamiliar with modesty.) With two million dollars on the table as payment, Rita complies, then disappears into a new life of her own. Years later, Emilia — now living as the titular character — reappears with a new request: she wants to bring her family back home to Mexico. She’ll pretend to be the cousin of her “old self” and take her ex-wife (Selena Gomez) and their two children in as their benefactor.

In theory, there’s a lot of potential in a story like this. Statistically, there’s bound to be a trans person who is also a drug lord. And a musical to boot? I can’t think of a single thing better suited to become a new queer classic. But the narrative goes off the rails almost immediately, largely by committing the sin that would be needed to make it work — it fundamentally misunderstands the trans experience.

Parallel to the philosophical critiques there are a handful of things to credit the film. The performances by the three leads are genuinely pretty good and worthy of note — even if Selena Gomez’s Spanish is abominable. Zoe Saldana gives us a performance we’ve never seen from her before. The film’s best numbers belong to her, with engaging and precise choreography that bring some focus to the scattershot story. She plays Rita’s underlying fear quite viscerally, precisely as the character demands. Selena, making a clean break from her Disney days, plays the abandoned ex-wife with grit and urgency, determined to reassert her independence in the face of her newfound solitude. Karla Sofia Gascon carries much of the film on her back, with the difficult challenge of generating sympathy for her character while reminding the audience of the life she thinks she’s escaping.

The actual songs are pretty uniformly bad unfortunately, with very little that even approximates a melody. There’s a lot of unnecessary whisper-singing that doesn’t add to the film, and instead leaves the audience confused. But the film’s production design is its biggest strength, and precisely where its imagined aspiration to camp is most at home. The colours are sharp, the camera work is expansive, and the entire enterprise feels pitched for memetic repetition. But that’s where the accolades end.

As a matter of course, the film frames Emilia’s transition as both a becoming and a separation. She’s become the woman she was meant to be, but she’s now left running from “the man she used to be.” And all of that happens through the conspicuous medical transition she undergoes after a catchy but cringeworthy musical number about all the surgeries she must undergo. When she awakens after surgery, the first thing she does is grab a mirror so that she can look between her legs. Audiard invites us to gawk at a trans woman’s body, normalizing impolite curiosity, and condoning it through his character’s own actions. Surgery is not the center of the trans experience. This is, as writer Drew Burnett Gregory put it, cis nonsense.

After her transition, Audiard’s choices reinforce again and again that “Manitas” more or less lurks under the surface of Emilia’s skin, while she fights like hell to keep her hidden. But that is not how identity works! That very idea introduces the decades old transphobic smear that trans women “are really men” on the inside. It lends credence to the suggestion that Emilia transitioned not to become herself, but simply to escape accountability for her bloody actions as the leader of a crime cartel. Essentially, she is lying about her trans identity to fool the people around her. There are few stereotypes as noxious as the insistence that trans people are deceptive by virtue of their very existence. That’s how you end up with a disproportionate risk of murder against trans people — right alongside the trans panic legal defense to justify it.

But unhelpfully, the film more or less requires those interpretations in order to string its plot together. Over and over Emilia’s musical numbers engage with the idea of her “two selves.” “Manitas” stalks her every move. Noticeably, one of the show’s big set pieces has her straining to sing a melody that is a little higher than Gascon’s range, as if to highlight that a man’s register would likely be lower. When Emilia brings her family back to Mexico, she struggles with having to be her children’s aunt rather than their parent. She covertly elicits gossip about their defunct marriage from her ex-wife Jessie (Selena Gomez). And when Jessie informs her that she’s getting remarried, Emilia violently assaults her and threatens to take their children. But worst of all, the register of her voice drops significantly. The violent “Manitas” has broken free, the “man who’s been hiding within her” all this time. Here, Manitas isn’t her old self, she’s her “real” self. And Jessie’s terror is not only understandable, but warranted.

A major plot point of the film is that Emilia funds an NGO aimed at finding the missing family members of the people they’ve left behind. Effectively venerated as a saintly figure, she gains the love and trust of her community. It’s necessary work. But the audience already knows that she’s cleaning up a mess that she contributed to. In her time as a cartel boss, she herself was responsible for many of the deaths and kidnappings she’s now “solving.” She even reconnects with old members of her cartel for leads on where to find the mass graves she presumably sanctioned.

Because of that, it’s hard to solidify where the audience’s sympathies should lie. Emilia is a pillar in her community, a patron to her family and her NGO, and a kind and sympathetic partner to her new girlfriend. But she was also a violent drug dealer who escaped consequences for her crimes. So when Emilia is violently assaulted and killed after being kidnapped herself, the film must undo a narrative knot it can’t untangle. Emilia is our protagonist, but she’s also a villain. In death she suffered the very same fate she subjected so many others to, making it a death she “deserves.” Which means we, as the audience, have come back around to justifying the violent killing of a trans woman of colour — the group most at risk of violence. Audiard’s clumsy handling of this deeply queer story reinforces the very ideas he presumably meant to challenge.

Emilia Pérez’s narrative is so entangled that it’s hard to say if a queer director would have given us something much different that what Audiard has managed to string together. But it does feel safe to say that they might be able to tell a more audacious story that allows trans people to exist as more than mere metaphor.

Zosha on A Complete Unknown

You don’t really get to know Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. That is by design; the musician has spent the entirety of his career trying to evade being too known. Despite rocketing to fame as a folk musician in the 1960s, and a sustained reputation as a sort of artist’s artist, Dylan has maintained an air of enigma, reportedly even going as far as telling co-writer/director James Mangold to insert at least one totally fabricated anecdote to A Complete Unknown (a Dylan tradition really as old as Dylan’s career, at least). This is all well and good; I, personally, love knowing less about celebrities, and think it’s funny when they make things up. I just wish A Complete Unknown let us know anything else.

The biopic starts admirably apocryphal and prophetical: Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) lands in New York with his guitar and heads straight to the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey to play for his idol Woody Guthrie. His entrance is like a folk second coming; immediately Woody and fellow folk star Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) see his immense talent, and take him under their wing. The stage is set, and the players are drawn into orbit: He makes his open mic debut after a stirring cover of “House of the Rising Sun” by Joan Baez (Monica Barrero). He meets long-time girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who pushes him to care about the future and the now of the 1960s, not just the past of folk. He sells out on his first record, and hits pay dirt on his next one.

Facts should feel somewhat beside the point for A Complete Unknown — this is a folk hero, and a hero of folk. From the very opening scene, where Chalamet practically emerges from a divine light, A Complete Unknown wants you to understand the idea of Dylan more than the character of Bob. A Complete Unknown wants to preserve the man, the mystery, the legend at the heart of the story. And so, despite the limited focus of the movie (covering just the first six or so years of his career), it feels bizarrely unfocused. As the movie begins to hinge more and more around the magnetic pull of Dylan (even when he’s a total asshole, as many characters rightfully label him), it becomes less and less clear what it wants to do with that.

A movie like Complete Unknown should feel like watching a cult of personality in motion. But as the film shies further and further away from defining Bob (and, by extension, his draw), the people around him become murkier as well. No one suffers more from this than the women in Dylan’s life; both Joan and Sylvie are painfully two-dimensional, with little to show for their arcs than a few heated scenes with Bob. There’s a number of things that Sylvie could be picking up on when she hears Bob and Joan sing together — they’ve, by this point, already slept together, made music, traded ideas, and known each other in a way that she could never — but the film mostly leaves her revelation locked inside her, turning away from making this too much of her story. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think long and hard about Walk Hard when you should be thinking about how fucking wild it is Dylan exists in the first place.

Were this just a rotely written music biopic, c’est la vie. But the truth this there’s little that makes A Complete Unknown come alive in almost any sense. It feels like a formalistic experiment that’s too anxious to do much boundary pushing at all. There are a few good scenes — Bob defiantly coming out at the Newport festival after releasing a record with electric instruments, or seamlessly sitting down with a blues legend on TV. These are scenes that give you a better sense of what he was, what he was up against, the bizarre miracle of contradictions that he contained. Like Bohemian Rhapsody before it, Complete Unknown is indulgent about its soundtrack — and why not be? Bob Dylan’s music is classic for a reason, and if the movie reminds us of anything it’s that it’s crazy how many of his early career hits could define an entire star on their own, let alone with one guy.

And yet, even its most interesting ideas, like the above Newport scene, feel more interesting in real life, the complexities of a crowd’s reaction rendered to boring mob mentality in the film. I say this as someone with little loyalty to Bob Dylan; it’s just that the ease with which genuine and delicious drama bounces off even a cursory check of real-life events makes the movie feel even more stilted. Who is Bob Dylan? I’m not sure it really matters. The answer is blowing in the wind. The fact of the matter is it shouldn’t matter what the truth is, but it should at least be a good story.

Assorted Internet Detritus

It’s not just you: The internet is getting worse. The good news: Buttons are hopefully making a comeback. One further (more informed) review Zosha read and liked about A Complete Unknown. A wild switched at birth story (with a happy ending). A brief history on “boundaries” — and a good primer on why we should throw them out for “limits.” It can’t be said enough: Thank you David Lynch (for a lot, but) for this performance.

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As long as there has been TV there has been procedurals. Investigations into crimes that even in early iterations like Dragnet wanted a reason — what drove people to do all that? Who could imagine such a thing?

These are questions that, abstractly, are often asked of the work of David Lynch. His very name has become its own unique descriptor for something viscerally understood as beguiling and containing a distinct type of strangeness. His modes were indelible and singular, and his creations were as uncanny as half remembered dreams clearly felt and grasped, if not as easily explained.

There’s no shortage of work from Lynch’s oeuvre to recommend in the wake of his passing this week. But Twin Peaks, his and co-creator Mark Frost’s seminal television show, feels like the one that best answers the gaping void that we’re left with. It’s there that the intersection of so much of what made him beloved collides into something remarkable and eccentric. Like the bulk of his work, it didn’t just look death in the face but felt around the vacuum of it the way you might rummage around an empty pocket.

The drive of any murder mystery is captured in the name: whodunnit? The mystery of the thing focuses on the who and the how and the why. But the meaning of those mysteries, and the procedural genre built on them, always plumb far deeper. Investigators at the heart of these stories often find more than they bargain for: affairs, betrayals, resentment, unrest. This isn’t just a means of establishing red herrings — the core of these stories are the communities jolted by the murder itself and left to pick up the pieces. At their best, the genre examines the way crime and death could unrepentantly tear a hole in our reality so profound that anything might tumble out of it.

Such was the world of Twin Peaks, where a high school girl’s murder shook a community with such force that the very universe seemed to fall off its axis. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was the ad copy that pulled in both viewers and Special Agent Dale Cooper (and, ultimately, drove the network pressure a little too hard). But that was more setup; around the investigation, Twin Peaks listened as the loss of Laura echoed around the community.

Like most stories of grief, it’s less of a logical line than it is one of ever-changing waves lapping against the shore. Laura’s boyfriend, her friend, her secret lover, her parents, even people who barely knew her — their lives are all devastated in ways both quiet and loud, big and small. The mystery of who among them might be a murderer loomed large, but it was small potatoes compared to the agony of her loss. And in her void, people were left to make choices; decisions that impacted those as far removed from Laura Palmer’s life as you could get.

And yet even when the show tilted into more cosmic proportions, its stakes felt immediate. Look no further than The Return circling back to Laura’s mom, in her living room alone with the TV blaring and cigarettes burning and drinks littered everywhere. For whatever Coop and viewers might take away from Laura’s place as a celestial being or a wronged victim, here too was the reality, a stark and quietly tragic counterbalance to the eccentricities of Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks, like so much of Lynch’s catalog which plumbed the depths of smiling Americana, never seemed to fear death. On a very Lynchian level, this was because of the introduction of the magical and mystic lodges that connected our world and others. But it marked a clear departure from other procedurals, where death wasn’t just the inciting incident but the threat constantly leveraged against those left alive — the fear that this could happen to anyone, at any time. People died unexpectedly in Lynch’s works, but living was sometimes the more perverse option; you never knew when you were just watching rabbits live their life or a strange man was going to slide out from behind a dumpster and put the fear of god into you. By contrast, in Lynch’s hands, death felt bizarrely approachable, revealing to us the strange and profound miracles of life the same way a dream does.

Death never really felt like the end in Lynch’s works. People linger, memories swirl. It doesn’t matter if it’s a stray mention, a loaded line-reading, or an apparition as a homecoming-queen smile — an absence plays just as big a part in the story as the living, and no one ever really feels like they’ve left. Quietly, we are always reminded how hard and vital it is to look something in the face when all we want to do is curl up and cry.

Perhaps that’s why Lynch’s passing has been met with so much “gone too soon” sentiment. There was a wisdom to his approach — to art, to stories, to weather reports, maybe even life itself — that seemed eternal and ever-bursting. As friends and I swapped texts sharing disbelief, it seemed like many of us weren’t just mourning a creator whose work had shaped culture in unfathomable ways, but the possibility that there were more peculiarities, that could seem at once so eerie and so familiar, suddenly lost to us. Rumors of projects that promised to be wonderfully unknowable suddenly really were. For whatever he had taught us about death being just another phase, we were suddenly left behind.

And yet, to turn to Lynch’s work is to be reminded joyfully of the absurdity of being alive, how the end could be near at any moment and our time here is what we make of it. When Glinda the Good Witch tells Sailor not to turn away from love at the end of Wild at Heart, when the camera tilts up to the sky after Dorothy hugs her son in Blue Velvet, when Coop tries to help Laura one last time — all of these are just as much an expression of life as Fire Walk With Me’s agonizing march toward the end, or Maddy’s doomed trip to Twin Peaks. Even on American Dad he urged us to let the fear wash over us, and not turn away from what we couldn’t understand. In a way we’ll never be able to understand what drove him to all that, but in another way it’s all right there, you just have to find the way to look at it. He made living its own weird miracle. May he forever be connected to the moon.

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Another day, another issue of shorts. Today, here are reviews of two films that deserved a little more space to noodle on them. First, Vlog, an emotional outing by Yvonne Strahovski about the trials and tribulations of the stay-at-home mom. Then, Technicians, by Kevin and Kelly Luu, exploring the solidarity of class consciousness. Enjoy :)

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Vlog

written and directed by Yvonne Strahovski

I don’t need to tell you that mommy vloggers can make bank. With their curated meals and beautiful homes, they exist to give other mamas something to aspire to — and of course, to move product. Motherhood was commodified and commercialized long before “influencer” became a job title. But in the age of social media, the appearance of grace, wealth, and perfection are part of the job. When you’re a walking, talking advertisement, you have to perpetuate the lie that women can have it all. In this new short written, directed, and starring Yvonne Strahovski (in her native accent!) she exposes the lie of digital momfluencer culture. 

Yvonne (no character name was given) , a young married stay-at-home mom with “two under two,” spends her days corralling her children, doing chores, and filming the vlogs required of her various brand deals. Her house is cluttered with the detritus of wayward toddlers — abandoned toys, pacifiers, and the messes they make to amuse. There is nowhere in her home where her kids won’t follow. She is visibly exhausted and overwhelmed. But it’s clear how much she loves her children. She spends hours playing with them and amusing them — being the kind of parent that they deserve. When, early in the film, she discovers that she is pregnant yet again, she’s excited. 

Now you might be asking, “Where is her husband?”And the answer is the same as it always is: not there. Though, that may be too harsh an assessment. He is there. He is omnipresent. But he is wallpaper. Tellingly, his face is never even shown onscreen. He ignores the scattered toys and dirty kitchen, only stepping in when her morning sickness gets so bad that she can barely move. And even that is barely managed. When she laments that she’s a “shit mum,” he reassures her that she’s not. But he never actually lifts a finger to help her. Later — sitting on the floor and surrounded by dirty clothing — she tells him that she’s already done 6 loads of laundry. His response? “I’ll give you a seventh load.” 

All the while, she is still pumping out her beautiful videos for her followers (20% discount with code calmmama20!). She is sparkling white in every video, flanked by generic but pretty enough wall art. There’s no aspect of her life that she doesn’t feel compelled to cover in an artificial sheen of forced joy. In her second semester, when she finally announces her pregnancy to her followers (she’s hit 100,00! Yay!), the veil of perfection remains. Horrifying morning sickness doesn’t sell.

It’s why watching her pad through the story feels so frustrating. At multiple junctures, her husband walks into cacophony and simply walks out again. She’s left to handle every aspect of their lives on her own. The imbalance wears on her. So much so that when her young son snatches her phone as she’s recording a vlog, she loses it. She gets angry and swears at him, screaming. The one thing she asked her husband to do was keep the kids quiet while she filmed, and he couldn’t even manage it. It would seem the impulse really is foreign to him. 

The next day, her husband wakes her. She’s uploaded the wrong video. 275,000 people have seen her tantrum, pregnant belly on full display. She’s understandably mortified — but no one else is. Comment after comment reveal other mothers similarly overburdened. This candid moment makes them feel seen. 

Vlog is a wonderfully sweet and honest look at the lives so many women are living. Stuck in the ouroboros of forced perfection, it can be isolating to feel like other moms have everything together — and they’re making it look easy too. Here, Yvonne shows the reality behind that lie, and it’s as charming as it is frustrating.

Technicians

written and directed by Kevin Luu & Kelly Luu

As the gulf between rich and poor widens exponentially, it makes sense that art would begin to reflect that change. There are so many more of us than there are of them, and the minutiae of the lives we live — the stories we tell to get us through — deserve to be told.

Answering that call is Technicians, a beautiful short by Kevin Luu & Kelly Luu. Starring J. Alphonse Nicholson and Cathy Bui, the story follows David (Alphonse) as he arrives at a nail salon to install new machines that will replace the Vietnamese women already working as technicians. That includes Tippi (Bui). And when she volunteers to stay late to help David close the store after installation, the two begin a dance that impacts both their lives and leaves them changed for the better. 

When we meet David, he is taking care of his ailing mother, and working as an automation technician while he codes video games on the side. He is behind on paying for his mother’s medical treatment, (incurring an additional 12% late fee) and trying his best to get by on the one-off assignments his boss sends his way.

When we meet Tippi, she is working with the other Vietnamese women in her community at the nail salon. They’re all about to be fired and replaced with the machines David will install. But she refuses to go down without a fight. As the night creeps in and David works late, she asks him to let her give him a manicure. 

The conversation they have as she files and buffs his nails pulls out emotional things for both of them. For her, nail care as culture — passed down from mother to daughter. And for him, the life his mother used to be able to lead, getting a “haircut for your nails” whenever she could. The memory brings tears to David’s eyes. It’s a fleeting acknowledgment of the strain he is under. Sure, he’s surviving. But just barely. And that isn’t enough. Tippi tells him that disclosures like these are part of what make the personal touch of a manicure so special. When it comes down to it, the service she provides is connection.

Tippi makes her case and asks him not to install the manicure machines. But he refuses. He tells her that this is just the way the world is. They’re being replaced, and now it’s up to her to hustle harder. Furious, she takes his car keys, one of the machines, and makes a run for it. Her desperation is palpable. Losing this position is about more than just a job. It’s something that ties her to her mother, grandmother, and the rest of her immigrant Vietnamese community. This is existential to her.

But it’s existential for David too. A fuckup this big would cost him his livelihood, and with it his ability to care for his mother. Tippi relents. The look on his face is one of desperation. She knows they’re in the same position, left to fend for themselves in a world that is sucking them dry for their labor. 

David installs the machines.

The next day, the new (white) owner comes in to test them. But mysteriously, they’re bricked. It’ll take months to repair them. David can’t fix them, but he promises to run it up the chain to his boss. Tippi’s services are needed once more. 

One of the lessons of Bong Joon  Ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite is that we can’t survive if we turn on each other. Class solidarity is imperative if we’re all going to make it out alive. And it’s this idea that comes to mind t again in Technicans. David and Tippi  — technicians both — choose to side with each other instead of with capital. It isn’t an overthrow of a system, but it’s a targeted act of rebellion meant to give each other relief. It’s coalition building in its most nascent form. And as the Luus expertly demonstrate, even that can make a profound impact on someone’s life.

Assorted Internet Detritus

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Surprise! It’s been a while, but we couldn’t pass up this opportunity to stretch our legs a bit. For the first time, Cate covered the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival. It’s a festival for — you guessed it — short films. Now that it’s over, we’re rolling out our coverage of some of the best shorts she screened. Issues will be published over the coming week. Shorts often get ignored as the significant cultural contributions that they are, but there are always gems, and we’ve reviewed some here. Enjoy!

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Deal of a Lifetime

written and directed by Lev Pakman

Deal of a Lifetime is a delightfully quirky little film. Starring David Cross as Roland, it follows his quest to find an affordable burial option for his parents’ eventual demise. After striking out at every funeral home within a 20-mile radius (the cheapest packages are $25K), he heads home, distraught that he cannot afford what he thinks his parents deserve. But then his teenage son suggests a DIY burial. There are build-your-own-coffin kits on Etsy! So they order and build one.

Cross’s neurotic energy brings a kind of ironic archness to the proceedings, and it’s interesting watching him noodle over a problem he is not yet facing. Connor Ausman as his son Bo acts as comic relief, his Lanthimosian dialogue adding a noticeable kind to the sullenness of the atmosphere. The color grading too echoes Roland’s dismay, all muted tones and grainy scenes that play on his growing despair. 

But it is Cross who really brings the whole thing together. When he confesses to his parents that he cannot afford a burial, they tell him they’d never expect him to shell out $50K. They want a home burial, to be closer to him. You can order the coffin kits online! The flash of shock, relief then muted joy that flashes over his face is worth the price of admission alone. He easily accesses the kind of gnawing anxiety that comes as one’s parents age. After all, soon, it will be up to you to be the adult in the room. And you’re not always quite ready to take off the training wheels.

Concrete

written and directed by Eli Vidis Newman

It’s hard to say what to make of this little film. A dreamy, trippy sci-fi story, Concrete follows one man who discovers that his reality is not, in fact, real. Here, every citizen must wear a “cranial static pineal mount.” A government-mandated circular stem no bigger than a button adorns the foreheads of everyone we meet. We are told that to remove it would risk “pineal combustion.” Basically, their heads will explode.

It’s a fascinating premise for a story, but of course, the logline itself gives away the coming twists and turns. While trying to find someone to repair his mother’s wheelchair, our hero instead encounters a young woman with a bandage around her head. Manic and determined, she accosts him with a sedative, then takes his pineal mount out by force. His head does not explode.

Instead, his reality begins to shift — here and not here, real and not real. Soon, he finds he cannot keep hold of or process his rational experience. So he visits an older homeless man (Ed Harris) who helps him to replace the mount. But not before explaining that the mounts were instituted as a means of population control. The world had stopped being able to reach consensus. And that made the masses dangerous. 

It’s an easy comparison to invoke The Matrix here, especially when some scenes directly imply the existence of some kind of simulation. But the premise isn’t stretched far enough. While our hero does find his way to a voluntary removal of his implant by the film’s end, we don’t get to see much of his internal change. Sure he’s chosen to stay in reality. But why? What has he gained? What has he lost? 

At 15 minutes long, I don’t expect an epic sci-fi film. But here, an excellent idea feels undercooked and underdeveloped, to the detriment of the exciting ideas bubbling under the surface.

The Dog

written and directed by Danielle Baynes

(trigger warning: severe suicidal ideation)

Kate Walsh may be best known as the great Addison Montgomery-Shepherd (of Grey’s Anatomy fame). But in The Dog, she gives a performance altogether more daring and substantial than her most well-known onscreen counterpart. That is not to say her previous work did not brook such accolades. But in this deeply melancholic short, she displays the full extent of her artistic range in ways that inspire relent, and relief.

An experienced veterinarian, Claire (Walsh) spends her days watching people mourn as she gently puts down their beloved pets. Snot-nosed and teary-eyed, her clients openly grieve as their companions slowly drift away. But over the course of this one lonely night, the excessive death is taxing on Claire, who is alone, and isolated from the people she loves — a text from her sister goes unanswered yet again. Over and over we see Claire washing her hands after one of these procedures, emotionally removing the blood on her hands. But those hands shake. And they can’t take much more of this. At the end of one work day, she takes one of the syringes containing the chemicals she uses on the animals, and packs up to go home. 

And then comes the dog. And he asks her to kill him.

At first bewildered, Claire tries to talk the dog out of it. She has to do an examination and determine if the procedure is necessary based on a series of factors she tells him. But approaching her — calm and comforting — he repeats the request.

“We’re in pain.”

That’s all it takes to change Claire’s mind. She lays next to the dog on the clinic floor and waits to die.

Much of the film is focused on Walsh’s face — and for good reason. Claire’s pain is palpable in every ripple of her brow; every deep exhale. The screen nearly vibrates off its axis each time she stares into the bathroom mirror, willing herself to get it together. Her red eyes telegraph sorrow, but also determination. Tight shots convey the claustrophobic nature of her malaise. She can’t escape it.

Assorted Internet Detritus

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And bringing up the rear, it’s Cate with more films from this year’s festival. As always, there’s a dud or two in the mix. But these films largely stood out as moving portraits of the lives of ordinary people. As the great Roger Ebert once said, film is a “machine that generates empathy.” And we need a lot more of that in the world right now. So go ahead. Read and enjoy!

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What Cate Watched

Daughters

directed by: Angela Patton and Natalie Rae

“Cardi B has a twin sister who works out a lot. Her name is Cardi O.”

It's hard to argue for the cultural merit of a corny dad joke. But in the deeply moving new documentary from directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, dad jokes are nothing short of a mark of triumph. 

Centered on a Daddy-Daughter Dance initiative for young black girls with fathers in prison, Daughters gets up close and personal with a group of incarcerated black men. Spearheaded by Patton, the program requires the men to complete 10 weeks of group counseling with a moderator, culminating in a small prom in the prison’s gymnasium. 

Daughters is equal parts heartbreaking and full of hope. The men in the program find that with the guidance of the program director, they finally have a safe place to talk about and process their feelings. Prompted by their fellow inmates and encouraged by their assent, they open up about the circumstances that led to their incarceration. They tell stories of their own absent fathers and the wishes they had for their daughters.

Back on the outside, the daughters themselves are painfully aware of their father’s absence. They’re burdened by the longing they feel for the parent they have limited or no access to — usually due to the limitations of the prisons themselves. Whether it’s the elimination of “touch visits” at the prison, or the imminent threat of being transferred to facilities outside the reach of their families, the separation affects not just the men who long for comfort and home, but the families they’ve left behind. People rarely talk about incarceration through the lens of family separation, but Daughters make it frighteningly clear that that’s exactly what it is. 

Through the prism of these young girls, the film explores the dehumanizing reality of the American prison system. These men are isolated from everything they know, unable to maintain the kind of support that would prevent them from lapsing into the lives that got them sentenced to prison in the first place. Even the phone calls cost money, and they’re billed at exorbitant rates that many families cannot afford. The prison system makes it nearly impossible to maintain family ties. A few of the men lament that they’ve never even held their daughters — born after the fact of their incarceration. They worry that their little girls will not recognize them. 

But Daughters intentionally makes time to carve out and display the deep benefits of programs like this. As stark as the realities of these men’s lives are, it’s equally thrilling to see grown men nervous about the opportunity to feel like a person again instead of just s number — even if just for a little while. They worry about finding suits that fit (provided by the program), how to tie a tie, and whether or not they can actually dance! The broad looks of love on their faces, as they see, hug, and touch their children for the first time in years, are enough to make even the biggest cynic melt.

It feels like a punch to the gut to watch these men and their daughters openly sob as they sway to Beyoncé’s rendition of “Before I Let Go,” desperate for a few more minutes together as the night comes to an end. A year later, not everyone in the film has a happy ending — some men are transferred away from their families, while others struggle to maintain strong ties with daughters who are growing older. But the enduring benefits of the program are deeply felt and plain to see. Shepherded by Kerry Washington and Joel Edgerton as executive producers, Daughters uncovers so much of the residual damage of the prison system that it’s impossible to come away from it and not lament the level of dehumanization that has been allowed to fester. It’s time to radically rethink crime and punishment.

Veni Vidi Vici

directed by: Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann | written by: Daniel Hoesl

It's always a disappointment when a film doesn't stick the landing. A clever premise cleanly executed is all one needs for a good solid onscreen romp. But Veno Vidi Vici doesn’t deliver. 

A presumptive class satire about the corruption of wealth, the film attempts to make a simple point: we all bend the knee to wealth. The problem is that… it’s not a particularly new insight in a capitalist society. In the film, The Maynards are a family of guileless, leisure-class billionaires who terrorize their town. The film’s patriarch Amon (Laurence Rupp) is a serial killer who hunts people with a crossbow for sport. The exercise is highly choreographed, with every aspect timed and organized for easy repeatability — think, a seemingly endless supply of unobtrusive white cars. 

This fact is not a secret. And in fact, the entire town, including its elected leaders and the police, speaks in hushed tones about the crimes whenever a new body turns up. But the Maynards are also casual benefactors to galleries and political campaigns. His murderous delight is treated as a cost of doing business. And that is the point. As Amon casually details with near-sociopathic ease, no one will stop them. Amon is revealed to be the killer almost immediately, but it doesn’t matter. As long as they maintain the pretense of propriety, they’ve effectively bought themselves the right to break the social contract. 

There are clever bits to the film. An early scene reveals that the family’s butler used to be a journalist. Later, as a different journalist gathers insurmountable evidence of the Maynards’ crimes, he is stymied at every turn. No newspaper will run the story. The police refuse to investigate. But when he confronts Amon directly, the billionaire effectively dares him to publish. He doesn’t. Instead, Amon’s teenage daughter invites him and the family butler into a closed room full of various weapons. She threatens the journalist, then summarily executes the butler. The journalist has a choice. Would he like a new job? Repeatability is the name of the game after all. 

While the film takes things to the extreme for the sake of satire, it doesn’t add much to the conversation. Solid though the performances are, Veni Vidi Vici gives the audience little to hold onto. These people aren’t “monsters.” On the surface, they’re the platonic ideal of respectability and altruistic wealth. But their disregard for other people doesn’t quite clog up the gears of the story the way it should. Sure, all it would take to stop them is for everyone else to decide they won’t let the Maynards get away with it anymore. But the film tries to indict the audience in this pursuit. “You could stop the monsters if you had a backbone and weren’t so greedy for the crumbs they toss aside” it scolds. The problem with that conclusion however, is that as the film shows, the wealthy are never short on ways to fight back. 

Exhibiting Forgiveness

written and directed by: Titus Kaphar

Titus Kaphar’s beautiful new film Exhibiting Forgiveness is a quiet meditation. In it, Tarrell (André Holland) a renowned contemporary artist, battles with his personal demons and childhood trauma as he sets out to move his ailing mother across the country and into his family’s home. 

Manifesting as violent night terrors, Tarrell is forced to contend with the deep well of anger he carries for his drug-addicted father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks).  La’Ron’s recent resurgence blindsides Tarrell. He wants nothing to do with the man who was terrifying and abusive long before he discovered heroin. But as his father gets clean and attempts to reconnect with his son, Tarrell struggles to make peace with his first bully. 

La’Ron’s already already made peace with his ex-wife Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). But the abuse he inflicted on her during their marriage is a central trauma for Tarrell — an emotional wound he can’t heal. Repeatedly we see flashbacks to a particularly violent fight between them, in which La’Ron throws Joyce across the room, shattering the mirror. It was the final straw before La’Ron left them for good. 

Using Tarrell’s gorgeous, saturated art, the film lovingly explores ways in which he can heal. Super-imposed against the backdrops of his childhood, Tarrell tries to contend with his complicated feelings. He hates his father, and he resents his mother for forgiving him. How could she betray him by taking back the man who terrorized them for so many years? But as his wife Aisha (Andra Day) sagely tells him, “that shit is just gonna follow us back home if you don’t deal with it here.” 

And the cast is firing on all cylinders here. Holland’s performance is rage, bluster and grief. Tarrell’s struggle is made viscerally real in his every movement. There’s a vibration that emanates from him and brings his pain dangerously close to the surface. As always Ellis-Taylor brings a regal self-possession to her role, weary and settled all at once. She plays Joyce’s contemplations with the sageness of a saint. Jelks meets and matches his counterpoints, holding court in La’Ron’s best and worst scenes, easily straddling the line of vicious and pitiable. And Day, with less to do, is nothing less than serene as Aisha — also a musician and singer. Her haunting vocal infuse the film with a lightness that bolsters the film’s story.

Lachlan’s Milne’s stunning cinematography lends the film a meditative feel that instructs the audience the sit and ponder. Healing isn’t easy and it doesn’t happen overnight. When Tarrell finally agrees to face his father, he does so on the condition that he is free to probe La’Ron with all his burning questions. What he discovers is an empathy he was adamant did not exist. His violent, abusive father is… a person. A man who made one wrong choice that led him down the path of many, many, many others. Tarrell is surprised to learn that his father has long been following his career. His glove compartment is full of news clippings touting his talent and artistic prowess. His regret and shame, and mixed with pride for the son he failed so miserably. 

In the end, Tarrell manages to find and make peace. He forgives, but for himself. He has no interest in maintaining a relationship with La’Ron because the wound will never scab over. But he releases the torment he’s been subjecting himself to, content in the knowledge that he understands where he comes from, and the man who made him. Finally, he can just be still. 

Seeking Mavis Beacon

directed by: Jazmin Renée Jones

People often forget that there are black people in the future. It’s a failure of imagination to conceive of a world where Black people exist as more than helpmeets or objects of projection. Through her debut documentary feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, director Jazmin Renée Jones goes on a deeply personal quest to examine and pull apart that reality. Her goal? Search for and identify the Black woman who served as the face of the popular computer program.

“Mavis Beacon” was invention of the two white men who created the software program “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.” A beautiful woman in professional attire, Mavis lent the program and authoritative air of expertise and credibility. But over time, the identity of the woman who lent her face to the men’s creation was lost. Now, she’s been found. And she’s a Haitan woman named Renee L’Esperance who the developers claim to have “discovered” in Saks Fifth Avenue.

With the help of her friend and “digital doula” Olivia, Jazmin connects the dots on the little information that’s available to her. To them, finding “Mavis” is more than about answering a long-held question. Instead, the journey they embark on pushes them interrogate the way Black women show up in digital spaces. If white men make the systems of technology that we all rely on, how can there be space for Black women to show up as their full selves. How can we disrupt those systems entirely?

Mavis Beacon is one of the first ever consumer-facing AI assistants. Like, Siri (Apple)  Cortana (Microsoft) and Alexa (Amazon), Mavis existed as a servile fembot, calmly and calmly helping users achieve their goal of learning to type. That may seem like harsh assessment. But there’s very little separating Mavis from Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben. They’re unknowable Black people whose solitary purpose is to make help make life easier for their users. Sprung from the minds of white executives and companies, their presence as an imagined helpmeet speaks volumes about how racism has shaped this country. Who better to alleviate their domestic burdens but the Aunt Jemimas and Uncle Toms they can no longer compel to do so? 

And there’s so much to say about the dynamics that normalize such an arrangement. Mavis Beacon is one of the original blueprints for how tech can make things easier for people. She is a Black woman designed for service. She may be a professional woman with the skills and expertise you desire, but she is unreal enough to never supersede you. She is safe. She’s a Black woman who is rendered inert.

As their journey continues and Jazmin adnd Olivia get closer to identifying Mavis Beacon, they find themselves stonewalled by the men who made her. Each has a slightly different story about how Renée L’Esperance came to be the face of their wildly successful software. And inbetween the lines, once can see the cracks where their lies begin to form. As it turns out, they had long fallen out with L’Esperance over a dispute about the use of her image. The original “cat scratch” design was unflattering, and she sued to get them to remove it. They did so, and then they replaced her entirely, erasing her from her historical impact within the technological world. She was a helpmeet gone rogue — challenging them by asserting her autonomy and identity, and in turn, reclaiming her image. Her punishment was losing the thread of her legacy. And they rewarded themselves by getting rich off her back.

And her image specifically is a point of contention. When today’s AI is asked to render a Black woman smiling, it couldn’t do it without distorting their faces or masculinizing them. The AI can produce what it doesn’t know. When these technologies come from developers who themselves cannot imagine Black women’s personhood, that bias is passed down to the tech. 

At various points Jazmin is told that it’s ok if they never find Mavis Beacon. After all, she’s not real. But as she says, “people only ever say that about Black women.” A stark reminder of the hundreds of missing and murdered Black women ignored and rejected by the system that is allegedly meant to protect them. Part of what Seeking Mavis Beacon tries to prove is that Black women and their contributions in technology have been erased. To connect this cultural thread is to reclaim Renée as a technological pioneer.

In the end, Jazmin and Olivia get as far as L’Esperance’s son. She doesn’t want to meet them. And while it’s gutting for the women, they accept her decision. Just because they are seeking doesn’t mean they’re entitled to find. In the same way that they recognize hoe important it is to affix her impact on tech into the cultural consciousness, they know that she’s entitled to reject it. The documentary is their project, but it’s her life. And there’s something revelatory about her decision to not shape her relationship to that time in her life in order to satiate their curiosity. They’ve found her. That’s all they get. 

Seeking Mavins Beacon  is less a documentary than it is a meditation on and manifesto for black women. An attempt to firmly root Black woman in the digital world, the film makes it clear that Black women have always been in those spaces. It’s the hostility their presence generates that’s the real problem.

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Quick heads up that this issue is extra long and will likely be truncated by your email client. For the best experience, read it in your browser!

It’s Sunday! Don’t panic. These next two issues are long overdue (Cate hides in shame), but we wanted to make sure that we didn’t miss the chance to tell you about the best (and worst) that came out of the festival this year.

We’re gonna level with you: nearly all these movies aren’t available yet for you to watch. And we’re not saying that to flex! It’s more to make clear that what we’re offering up here are films to take note of for the rest of the year — good or bad, frankly.

Sundance (remote) had some hits and misses, as it always does, so we’ve catalogued some of the most notable in either direction. Read on, enjoy, and look out for Cate’s picks later tonight!

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What Zosha Watched

The Moogai

directed by: Jon Bell | written by: Jon Bell

It should be a happy time: Sarah (Shari Sebbens) and her husband have brought home a healthy second child, and everything seems to be shaping up nicely. That is, until Sarah starts seeing a malevolent spirit that she believes is trying to take her baby. When no one believes her, Sarah has to turn to reunite with her birth mother, and reconnect to her Indigenous roots. 

The Moogai has all the creepy, reality-questioning set-up for a great horror movie. Unfortunately, it never quite makes it there, with the story rarely really reaching to make anything interesting out of its tangled web of terror. Instead, as it weaves together what should be a layup it trips over itself, letting people seem willfully obtuse or just straight up flat. By the time we finally see the creature, you almost have to laugh — not just because the makeup is lackluster, but because it’s clear that the whole time the scariest thing this movie had going for it was straining purely for prestige instead of point.

The Greatest Night In Pop

directed by: Bao Nguyen

There comes a time in almost every documentary where you think I wish we had gone a little bit deeper there, I’d love to see where that thought was going. Netflix’s The Greatest Night in Pop is full of these moments, and yet totally transcends them; this is a movie built entirely off of stray moments, and it’s all the better for it. 

Helmed by Lionel Richie and recalling the night he (and several others) pulled together the recording of “We Are The World,” Greatest Night is celebrity at its most knowing. This group of people came together knowing it was all about them — their name, their star power, their artistry, and their time. Both the song and the documentary aren’t super concerned with probing the actual impact of the charity single, here or elsewhere. And that’s totally fine; this is a project about reflecting on a time when the impossible happened, and the true impossibility was getting that many celebrities in a single room. The story of how it came to be is delightful, full of small treasured memories, big collaboration, and Bob Dylan looking the most uncomfortable a person has ever looked. It is a doc whose foundation is the side-memory pocket of a larger documentary, and it’s damn fun to watch those play out.

Kneecap

directed by: Rich Peppiatt | written by: Rich Peppiatt

Here’s the thing about Kneecap, or a few things anyway: This movie is very funny. It follows an Irish teacher struggling to connect to the students in his Gaelic class about why the language matters, only to find two young delinquents who speak Irish fluently — and, it turns out, write pretty good Irish raps. He decides to produce their sound to get the word out and the trio quickly find success, along with a target on their backs. And here’s the other thing about this, is that the movie is a funny enough good time that I didn’t even realize this is the real rap group playing versions of themselves. Who knew! I thought they just found people who were also really good at rapping. Oh, also Michael Fassbender is in it. Here’s the final thing I’ll say: It rules!

Love Me

directed by: Sam and Andy Zuchero | written by: Sam and Andy Zuchero

The world is over and all that is left is a buoy — Me (Kristen Stewart), as they come to call themselves. They light up when they catch the eye of Iam (Steven Yuen), a roving satellite set to seek out life, and together the two AIs create a life together. Only, their vision for life is based on the scraps that are left from the internet: an Influencer couple. 

Love Me is incredibly astute as it turns over these various hot button topics, looping them together and spiraling as it goes. Me and Iam try to define love, happiness, life, and living with each other, all while still trying to put a fine point on it themselves. There were times early on when I thought the movie’s concept would bore me, and a few more times where it completely bucked what I expected to happen. Ultimately it’s a beautiful little meditation on how we define ourselves in a world where so much is algorithmically displayed and not seen.

Thelma

directed by: Josh Margolin | written by: Josh Margolin

Anybody can get scammed (just ask a financial writer). Not everybody can empower themselves to go out in the world and try to get their money back with their own two hands — then again, Thelma (June Squibb) isn’t just anybody. She’s a 93-year-old grandma, on a quest to prove herself and take back what’s hers. 

Thelma benefits in a lot of ways from the cast — Squibb is equal parts brassy and witty, a dash of sweetness covering up for all the punch she packs into the smallest motion. But she’s joined by the likes of Richard Roundtree (gently graceful), Parker Posey (so good at her job), Clark Gregg (always the perfect level of try-hard dad), and Fred Hechinger (who echoes Squibb’s performance beautifully), and armed with a script that makes them all pop in their own ways. 

One can point to the way it artfully threads the heady issues in with the laughs, but I’m most impressed by the way it balances Thelma’s journey as totally her own. We see she loves Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. But this is her journey, her struggles, and her triumphs. We could all stand to be a little more like Thelma.

Assorted Internet Detritus

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Viaje de Negocios

written and directed by: Gerardo Coello Escalante

There are many ways for a child to lose his innocence, but few would presume it involved a pair of sneakers. In director Gerardo Coello Escalante’s thrilling new short, all it takes is a new pair of sneaks to break open a newly discovered family secret. When a young Mexican boy gleefully shows off the new sneakers his dad has just brought him from a recent business trip (he got the very last pair!) he’s happy to bask in the unique thrill of being the coolest kid in class. His father is very important and very busy but he made time to get these sneakers for his only son. 

But then… another boy joins his class. And he has the same pair of sneakers. And the story of how his mother’s new boyfriend got them for him he sounds… familiar. You can see where this is going. The film’s young actors, especially its lead, are wonderful at relaying the spark of disappointment that happens when children realize their parents are not just people, but people they may not necessarily like. This loss of innocence, though unusual, is not unfamiliar. People keep secrets. And secrets shape lives.

The film culminates in a fairly predictable act of vandalism meant to set the scales right. But no amount of trying can erase the knowledge gained but not sought. Viaje de Negocios is a rigorous little film chock full of wonderful child actors who bring the unlikely specificity of the story to life. Its tight scripting is key to its gripping — and inevitable — climax.

Pasture Prime

directed by: Diffan Sina Norman | written by: Carolyn Purnell

Pasture Prime, from director Diffan Sina Norman, is nothing short of a fever dream. In short: Shirley, an aging widow meets Marvin, a younger man at her local church, then becomes dangerously fixated on their imagined romance. Marvin looks like the Marlboro Man you see, and because of an apparently indelible encounter with one of the brand’s cigarette ads in her youth, Shirley is convinced this man is her soulmate. 

At first, the premise is simply kind of arch and maybe funny. Older and lonely, her imagined Marlboro Man’s kindness is a salve to her empty days. After all, the trope of the lonely widow is not a new one. But when Shriley’s infatuation turns into full-on stalking (think, unsolicited cakes of all things) things spiral out of control. 

With the letters and cakes showing up where he is, Marvin is understandably regretful of ever instigating a relationship of any kind with Shirley. Despite warnings from her son and daughter-in-law, Shirley refuses to stop sending Marvin letters pleading with him to come to her, save her, acknowledge her. In the end, Marvin exercises the only option left available to him and files a restraining order. 

Shirley’s near-immediate about-face is entertaining but sinister. By rejecting her advances, Marvin has proven he’s a snake in the grass. But… she plans to make him pay. And it’s delicious to think about how. Aided in part by the very idea that a little old lady must necessarily be harmless, Pasture Prime looks at what obsession can look like when it’s the only thing bringing meaning to someone’s life.

Border Hopper

directed by: Nico Casavecchia | written by: Mercedes Arturo and Nico Casavecchia

I’d be lying if I said this short didn’t hit particularly close to home. In it, Latinx filmmaker Laura is caught between a rock and a hard place when the opportunity for a career-changing new project in a different country puts her immigration status in jeopardy. Barred from travel outside the United States, she finds solutions to her rapidly approaching economic limitations in… a fremium phone game called “Candy Candy.” With each fantastical (and/or hallucinated depending on your preference) new level, she slays the real-life obstacles preventing her from living her American dream.

As an immigrant currently waiting on her own green card, I found that Border Hopper exquisitely captured the anxiety and exhaustion of winding your way through the labyrinthian US immigration system. Full of obstacles and hard stops, “doing it the right way” is an expensive logistical nightmare that limits your choices, and often your freedom. Here, Laura’s husband Jorge becomes collateral damage. If she risks her visa to take this job, he’ll be the baby thrown out with the bathwater. It is an emotionally grueling situation, and indeed, falling “out of status” is something I myself have routinely had nightmares about. Because despite its glossy, oft-repeated Ellis Island mythology, America is no friend to immigrants.

Blending magical realism and elements of horror, Nico Cassavecchia’s candy-coated video nightmare highlights just how restrictive American bureaucracy really is. It’s much easier to complain about ~illegals at the border~ when you have no concept of the years-long wait in limbo required to… pay taxes to a government you can’t even vote for. 

But, key to the film’s success is that it acknowledges that though this situation is exceedingly difficult for Laura (and me) we are still the privileged few with the resources to hang on with our fingernails until we cross the finish line. If things are this bad for us, how much worse are they for the would-be immigrants who don’t have access to our resources?

Assorted Internet Detritus

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This week we bring you two movies that we caught up with this week and immediately felt compelled to write on. First up, Zosha with the shallow reflections of Saltburn, and then Cate on the “iconic” May December.

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Zosha on Saltburn

I want to start this review off by making the depths of my displeasure unknown: How dare Saltburn give me the first ever bad Barry Keoghan performance. 

Keoghan has always been a soulful performer, even at his most deranged. You can look to the depths of his performance in Banshees of Inisherin for that; the butt of the joke that turns small embarrassments into tragically poignant scenes. Though his face may be the most prototypical “punchable” (The Killing of the Sacred Deer, The Green Knight), his eyes are emotional, and he is able to find the humanity in any little weirdo he plays (he’s one of the only people who actually manage to effectively emote in Eternals, and maybe one of three who make use of it). Which is all to say that for Saltburn to give Keoghan no chance to find the nuance of his latest little creep seems like a problem. 

Keoghan plays Oliver, a lonely kid who’s made it to Oxford but hasn’t managed to make any friends — at least, until he manages to catch the eye of Felix (Jacob Elordi), a rich and popular charmer. Ultimately, Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer at his family’s home (Saltburn, more aptly described as a “small castle”), and before too long tragedy, intrigue, and class politics are all swirling to change both of their lives forever. 

When the movie is working it is gliding entirely on the charm of its cast. Elordi’s performance feels most notable as the central gravitational pull upon which Saltburn must orbit, and he’s not bad. His turn as Felix feels a bit airy, but so does Felix’s life; it’s the sort of turn that doesn’t quite cohere the whole time, but set against the density of his brooding on Euphoria (I haven’t seen Prisicilla yet, don’t yell at me) it’s always clear what work he’s doing to make Felix feel incandescent. At its best the movie is engaging at the level Rosamund Pike is (and pretty much every good moment comes from or around her), who fully understands and embodies the frothy venom that the rich can engage in when they are thoughtlessly parading through their lives. In her role as Felix’s mother — and matched by Richard E. Grant, playing his father — Saltburn makes a stab towards coherent message. 

Still, the movie is left to run on these actors’ fumes in the hand of Emerald Fennell’s script and direction. And ultimately its attempts at provocation simply feel punctured, like hearing a child attempting to make a cuss word sound normal. The first part at school will make you long for The Secret History, and even the more delightful bits at Saltburn feel like a pale imitation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The trick of the latter is that Ripley’s character was always clear; we could see him be normal, but only he was surprised by the depths of his desperation and depravity as he sought out wealth. Saltburn wants Oliver’s descent into money to be a hat trick, but it’s barely even a secret. And because the characters — Oliver especially — feel too thinly drawn, it’s all too easy to find the hollowness on the other side of the story. 

The movie is filled with imagery that Fennell clearly thinks is titillating and taboo, but mostly just seems kind of unearned; repeatedly Saltburn makes stabs at kink, but it too literally drives these points to the ground. What I want is the movie that deserves those moments, that felt brave enough to take them on and grapple with the characters that would have wrought them. I didn’t find them at Saltburn, with all its quiet moments that one imagines were supposed to be pregnant with meaning but mostly felt meticulously hushed. And, sadly, didn’t find it with Keoghan, who’s left to say the Themes™ of the movie clumsily out loud. This was never the only way the movie had to make its aims clear, but it was always the route it was going to take. Saltburn is a movie that wants to make its displeasure known; if only it had managed to have anything to say.

Cate on May December

This review contains discussion of child sexual abuse. Please read carefully. 

The thing about May December is that it isn’t really about either of two characters most prominently featured in its marketing. And that may in fact be the point. 

May December — starring Julianne Moore (Gracie), Natalie Portman (Elizabeth) and Charles Melton (Joe) — is a not-so-subtle pirouette in triplicate. The three circle each other like wolves in the night, their emotional triptych fighting for dominance as psychological truths are discovered. 

But it’s hard to ignore that Joe is the one whose story is really being told. And yet again, it is happening without his consent. Twenty-six years after the reveal of his habitual rape as a teen by his now wife, Joe has settled into a quiet suburban life. He and Gracie have college-aged children. He has a beer gut and a preference for grilling. He’s older and rounder, just like any other suburban dad. So when Elizabeth comes to town — in the hopes of spending time with Gracie so that she can better play her in a movie — it is notable the way she engages with each half of the couple. 

Gracie’s resistance is evident from the start. She feels her space invaded, and she’s defensive about recalling her misdeeds — up to and including her prison sentence and then ongoing tabloid appearances. But importantly, she is not repentant. There is no shame to be found. Joe however, is hesitant and pliant — a lifetime of subservience kicking into gear. 

And while these two women dance around the crime Gracie committed against Joe, they mostly cut him out of the process. The power play over his life, and his trauma largely happens without him. That fact is made even more stark when looking at the situation through the frame of race — two white women entertaining themselves by twirling in the sandbox of an Asian-American man’s pain. Was Joe consulted before Gracie’s decision to allow Elizabeth into their home? Would he have been heard if he had objected?

The perversity of the situation is further spotlighted by Melton’s incredible performance. Already in conversations as an Oscar contender, Melton surfaces the shame and trauma of a boy who was failed by every adult around him, and forced to take responsibility for their mistakes. Initially, Joe keeps his distance from Elizabeth, letting Gracie take the lead. But as he grows more comfortable with her — a woman his own age — he begins to let his walls down. Which of course, in turn, Elizabeth exploits.

But one thing her attention does do for him is open the lid on the well of deep repression he has been burying for what may as well be his entire life. As the film progresses, Melton — in an incredible physical performance — demonstrates Joe’s regression into the boy he once was. His voice, posture, speaking pattern all work together to build a clear portrait of a 13-year-old stuck in a man’s body. A child unsure of how to protect himself or his own children. 

And Melton’s youth plays a big factor in the success of his performance. In a critical scene on the roof with his son Gabriel (Charlie Atherton-Yoo) Joe, at 36, looks barely older than his teenaged child. In fact, as Gabriel indulges in some classic teen rebellion with a joint, it is he who has to teach his father how to participate. These routine milestones of burgeoning adulthood were stolen from Joe. He and his some are effectively, emotional contemporaries. And when Joe breaks down, he is hyper-conscious that he risks perpetuating the same trauma on his son that was once inflicted on him.

And at the other end of the room, Gracie is leading Elizabeth into a kind of storm. It’s easy to see why the latter is so fascinated by the former. Moore plays her as a not -so-covert narcissist intent on sticking to the fiction of her story. Her great love — with a literal child — is the only narrative she’s willing to acknowledge. 

But even Gracie’s dynamic with Joe reveals the truth. She orders him around like a child being reminded to do chores. She is very much the one in control of the relationship. Their dynamic will always be that of a teenager, and an adult who should have known better.

That’s what makes it so much more worse when, late in the film, in a deeply upsetting scene, Gracie blames Joe for his own abuse. Upset and nearly shaking, he comes to her asking why they never talk about what happened between them. Was he really old enough to be making those kinds of decisions? 

“Who was the boss?” Gracie repeats in a direct reference to the attitude of her progenitor. “Who was the boss?” Not even in the privacy of their marital bed will she drop the façade. He pursued her. He was the aggressor. He seduced her. 

A tactic Gracie uses repeatedly throughout the film is to “introduce” a lisp in any circumstance where she is defending her decision to rape her now husband when he was a teen. It turns up in a charged conversation with Elizabeth about her emotional maturity at the time (“I am naive”) and it reappears here, is the scene with Melton. Her intent is clear: I was a child too. We were the same. 

But the lines and wrinkles etched into her face tell a different story. Gracie blew up her marriage, embarrassed her family and traumatized her children, because she is pedophile and a narcissist, and there’s really nothing more to the story. Even her younger children with Joe all openly despise her. She has tainted them by association, and it’s a stain they didn’t ask for and will never be able to wash out. 

And the evidence of Joe’s grooming seeps into Ellizabeth’s choices too. She manipulates him into a sexual encounter (presumably as research?) and lets herself slip further and further into a mindset that justifies Gracie’s abuse. She uses him exactly the way Gracie did then and continues to do now. But, “that’s just what adults do.” Joe’s utility to Elizabeth ends at his ability to inform her own continued tabloid fascination with the pain he has suffered. Nothing more, nothing less.

When Elizabth is sent headshots for teen actors who might play Joe in the film, she dismisses them, saying they need “sexier teens.” Even in this passive and likely grotesque approximation of his abuse, the (white) people around him are tacitly trying to normalize what happened to him by representing him as “older” than he was. Of course Gracie fell for him. He seduced her with his “exotic” looks. He was practically a grown man! 

Gracie ruined Joe’s life, stole his childhood and left him with trauma he may never unpack. On the surface he is happy with his life. But it’s only over the course of the film do we see him question if that is actually true. He never chose this life. Did he ever have any other options? 

And are we, the audience complicit for desperately wanting the know the answer?

Assorted Internet Detritus

ZOSHA: The terrain Scorsese couldn’t traverse in Killers of a Flower Moon. Why won’t musicals admit they are musicals in the trailer? 2023 was the year of Megan Thee Stallion, that’s a rock fact. Deinfluencing isn’t the end of consumerist influencer culture.

CATE: Joaquin Phoenix is a sad boi, nobody goes to college in books, and they’re not horny in the movies either, oh to be the jobless employed, the best movies of 2023 (until we tell you otherwise), and camp is good actually.

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First, Cate tackles the absurdist nature of Emma Seligman’s raunchy teen comedy Bottoms. Then Zosha discusses the suave monotone of David Fincher’s moody new film The Killer.

Take care of yourselves, and happy movie yelling.

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Cate on Bottoms

What happens if you mix the brutal archness of Glee with the silly indignation of Book Smart, the sharpness of Do Revenge, the sincerity of Moxie, and the perfectly 90s brand of anti-feminist feminism of Jawbreaker? Well, you get Bottoms, the absurdist second feature from director Emma Seligman.

The premise is simple: two lesbian virgins and best friends PJ and Josie, start an all-female fight club at their school as a front to get closer to the cheerleaders they have crushes on. Their plan works, but when a handful of careless lies are exposed, it threatens to damage the new relationships they’ve built with the girls who needed the club’s safe space to process the traumas they’ve experienced as young women who are coming of age. 

Starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebri as PJ and Josie, and written by Sennott and Seligman, Bottoms is a pitch-perfect farce about budding sexuality taken to the extreme. The film’s unrelentingly dry tone contributes to its playfully ridiculous feel — it is at once the thing and a send-up of the thing. Teen sex romps have a formula for a reason. And by leaning into the usual tropes, queering them, and following them to their logical end, we get something that makes us both laugh and roll our eyes. By the film’s end, it is squarely in the realm of fantasy, as — spoiler — the girls murder most of an opposing school’s football team to save their own quarterback from coming into contact with pineapple juice. He’s allergic you see, and the other team is trying to murder him, per the tradition of the 50-year rivalry between the schools. Just normal teenage stuff, right?

In the world of Bottoms, every adult is an incompetent rube incapable of appropriately interacting with the teenagers in their orbit. Every football player is a malicious, self-absorbed meathead. And every girl is an insecure mess desperately struggling to find a solid foothold to build their identity around. The magic of Bottoms is that it lets them find precisely that when they come together. They girls in the club are seeking community and recognition, and Seligman expertly manages the tonal shifts of the girls’ earnest plea to be seen, with the inherent ridiculousness of a gym teacher declaring himself a feminist ally for doing precisely nothing. 

And the film is carried by its two lead performances, particularly Edebri, who brings a sweet desperation to Josie’s horny quest for sexual conquest. Shy and criminally awkward, she hides behind PJ’s more domineering nature, allowing herself to be pulled along on a journey she isn’t brave enough to take herself. But as her arc progresses, she grows more confident, especially as she begins to capture the attention of her crush Isabel (Havana Rose Liu). It’s lovely then that when the film’s driving action is over, she gets to have the Big Kiss™ that so many straight leads before her have enjoyed — a lovely moment of self-actualization and stilted romance. It’s notable too that neither half of the couple is white. For too long, that part of the equation has been mandatory, and it’s nice to see that challenged in such an odd little queer film. 

The film is funny, smart and near-imbecilic all at once — something that I daresay is close to impossible to achieve. But Seligman does achieve it, and shows significant growth in her creative vision since her 2020 debut feature Shiva Baby. Bottoms is well worth a watch, and it’s a worthy entry into the teen movie canon.

Zosha on The Killer

The Killer (Michael Fassbender) might be the funniest movie protagonist of the year, though from meeting him you’d never know it. On the surface level, Fassbender’s Killer — that is, in fact, his whole name in the credits — is all silent sizzle; the kind of imposing you get from staring down a brick wall you’re trying to run through. Inside, he’s all zen, meting out nuggets of wisdom like the audiobook of a jaded, weary assassin self-help book. This would be a potent combination for the character if his most centered and professional moments internally weren’t always followed by him getting his ass beat. 

This is the delightful tension David Fincher is always playing with in The Killer, a movie that wouldn’t work without any part of itself — but because it has a killer (look I’m sorry) lineup of talent behind it works so well. On paper, it’s possible Andrew Kevin Walker’s script reads far too robotic. But in Fassbender’s hands — and, more specifically, his finely tuned American monotone — it’s smooth as silk. His vocal performance is incredible, all flat voiceover that betrays so little of his character while his thoughts let on much more. There’s a version of this character that feels in on the joke, a wink from the performer that this man is selectively focused to a fault. But Fassbender keeps a tight lid on all that; The Killer isn’t even aware of the joke. He is single minded and focused, an alpha male fantasy that Aggro Dr1ft could never dream of. And then the script drops another joke or another (literal) punchline, and it’s all masterfully undercut. To call the script robotic is just to recognize that it understands the exact story it’s trying to tell. 

Which is what’s fun about The Killer: You can read into its muted sleekness any number of metaphors about his career, or callbacks to his past films. But the result is unbothered by that, more intent on looking forward and building itself up than trying to work through some older material. The Killer feels like Fincher in conversation with consumerism or corporate culture in the same way Fight Club did, but less about being in your face about the fucked upness of it all, and more highlighting the way it makes asses of us all. Here’s a methodical hit man, expertly disposing of bodies and stalking his prey, and he’s stuck ordering supplies from Amazon or dealing with car rental counters just like the rest of us. Fincher isn’t searching for a laugh so much as showing how easy it is to find one without even trying. 

In the age of fast fashion, it can be easy to take craftsmanship for granted (if you can even find it). The industry churns out so many “basics” that you can forget (sorry Miranda) that the good stuff, the really well-made stuff, looks totally normal; the sheer level of competency belying the skill and effort that made it all come together to actually be the ideal in the first place. This is exactly how The Killer feels — craftsmanship so skillfully smooth it almost feels baseline until you get a chance to pull at the seams. When you’re watching the movie it’s engaging and amusing, never afraid to switch gears on a dime and remind you that Fincher could’ve made the whole movie brutal fights and that would’ve been sick as hell too. For me, its masterstroke comes at the end — which I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say: As The Killer zeroes in on his target, the movie is smart enough to know exactly who he is and what he needs to do. He may not have a ton to say, but the movie lets his actions speak for himself.

Assorted Internet Detritus

CATE: HBO brass is very silly, Halloween is over but good horror movies are forever, Marvel may be shitting the bed, romcoms ruined millennial women, and a little bit of Christmas joy, and some moral clarity in a trying time.

I’ve even got a little pop culture treat. The podcast I produce, Even The Rich is having our first-ever live-streamed show next Wednesday 11/8 at 5pm PST/8pm ET. We’ll be doing a deep dive into all things #Scandoval, and previewing a brand-new episode you won’t find anywhere else. (Unless you sign up to Wondery+ that is…)

ZOSHA: Shoemakers on how DeSantis is at the very least (also) clearly lying about wearing poorly fitted lifts. Guts good! Happy open enrollment season: Why dental insurance is different from other insurance. Some more thoughts on NYFF I loved.

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If you’re just finding this newsletter, do us a favour and subscribe. It feeds our fragile egos. And if you’re already a loyal reader, help us out and tell a friend. Happy movie yelling!

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twitter:@30FlirtyFilm
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Ferrari

directed by: Michael Mann | written by: Michael Mann and Troy Kennedy

What I like most about Ferrari is how confident it is in its ambiguity. When we first see Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) he’s waking early, careful to untangle himself from the woman in bed with him and tuck in a sleeping kid, before making his way to his car. The great car tycoon and former racer starts his car by rolling it down the hill and, briefly, keeping the engine off. For a moment we are left to wonder if this is for an extra few dozen feet of quiet around the house, or if his car is, in fact, broken. Only when we see his wife Laura Ferrari (Penélope Cruz), grumpily roaming their house on the same morning, do we start to get a sense of the reality Enzo is living. 

And so Ferrari, directed by Michael Mann with a screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin, rolls out from there, zeroing in on the strange stretch of Enzo’s life where his marriage is more strained than ever while his company is at risk of going under. His only way out, of both: Winning the Mille Miglia, an impossibly hard and formidable race.

Ferarri could come down hard on Enzo, Laura, their associates, the situation — but instead, Mann and Martin let scenes settle like an old house: mostly quietly and yet with an inescapable sense of things in flux. This is a man whose world is spinning his control. And yet, Ferrari feels like a work of exacting command, a smooth glide into some great unknown.

Hit Man

directed by: Richard Linklater | written by: Richard Linklater and Glen Powell

Gary (Glen Powell) is an unassuming guy. By day, he is a teacher at a local community college. By other day, he assists the police with sting operations, specifically people who are looking to hire a hit man. When Gary one day has to step into the role of “fake hitman” he finds a calling — turns out he’s remarkably good at sizing up people and knowing just what kind of hit man would best speak to them. 

The movie sails a lot on these moments from Powell, who tackles each persona with an unparalleled charm. As he molds himself into whatever killer the people want, you can at once feel his movie star charisma pinning together the whole enterprise without undercutting the innate quietness that defines Gary’s life. Or at least defined; when he meets Maddy (Adira Arjona), who’s trying to get out of a bad marriage by calling a hit, the chemistry is instant, as Maddy and “Ron” hit it off without even trying. 

And so a rom-com of sorts ensues, built on tangled lies, good intentions, and really strong performances from Arjona and Powell. True to the oeuvre of Richard Linklater, who directed and co-wrote the movie with Powell, Hit Man is about a little weirdo who gets in over his head and has to face tall consequences. Linklater loves these eccentrics, and we are always better for it when a movie like Hit Man gets to do his delightful dance in the strange gray of a story “mostly based” on a true story. 

Aggro Dr1ft

directed by: Harmony Korine

Imagine a movie that’s original Playstation graphics, with a sort of existential XBox live voice over done by Vincent Price emulator. You are close to imagining the effect of Aggro Dr1ft, Harmony Korine’s latest. Only now also imagine those visuals are being filtered through a CRT on its last legs, so that everything looks like technicolor on acid. And also you’re following an aging assassin who’s begun to question the life he’s led. 

That’s about as much story as Aggro Dr1ft offers, centering its story almost entirely in BO’s (Jordi Mollà) mind as he narrates his work, his home life, his deepest thoughts. Korine clearly wants the movie to be provocative, with BO’s nemesis being a misogynistic beast of a man (dubbed “The Beast”) who yells things like “Dance bitches!” at the scantily clad women around him. Instead, Aggro Dr1ft mostly only succeeds at being boring; degenerate ASMR whose lasting impact is almost exclusively on your retinas. And even that fades after a few minutes outside the theater. What few shots or moments of interest Korine weaves in to Aggro Dr1ft easily drift away, the same way Travis Scott’s “role” does. Korine is engaging in a level of performative artifice that would be hard to stomach if it felt like much of a meal at all.

Assorted Internet Detritus

If you’re just finding this newsletter, do us a favour and subscribe. It feeds our fragile egos. And if you’re already a loyal reader, help us out and tell a friend. Happy movie yelling!

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twitter:@30FlirtyFilm
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For our triumphant return, we’re covering two films we can’t stop thinking about. From Zosha, a missive about the missed opportunity of Cat Person. Then, Cate explores the love and longing of Past Lives.

With that out of the way, we’re so grateful you all subscribe to our tiny little newsletter, and we can’t wait to hear from you.

Welcome back, and happy movie yelling :)

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Zosha on Cat Person

I will give Cat Person this: The movie understands that you need to backfill your texts. I am not wholly convinced the movie really understands texting, per se — or at least, the way you do it to the people you like day-in and day-out. But then again, after watching the movie based on the viral New Yorker short story of the same name, I’m not convinced Cat Person knows much at all. 

The New Yorker story took the internet by storm in December 2017. Here was something weird, knotty, and not entirely clean cut. Margot meets Robert at her movie theater job; they develop a texting-based relationship, something she’s alternatingly skeptical and enchanted by. For whatever you think of the story’s merits, it touched on enough things that the virality made sense — it was at once dealing with gendered dating dynamics, online relationships, being a cat person, and bad sex. Even if everybody was only interested in discussing one thing, there was enough meat on the bone to keep feasting for days (which, if you were online at the time, you’ll remember they did). 

Cat Person, the movie, has no such charms. The movie has decided there is only one issue at play at the heart of the story, and it must be everywhere. Gender is everywhere — the B-movie commercial audio playing over the opening, the call Margot (Emilia Jones) makes to her best friend when she’s walking home at night, the subreddit said bestie moderates (the “Vagenda”), the ant colony Margot’s boss has been cultivating for 17 years and how the queen’s body is “meant to provide support” with a “sacrificial” annihilation. 

It often feels like Cat Person thinks these moments are very smart, when instead it just seems like there’s a Twitter tab open in the background. What it ultimately succeeds in doing is making so much of the dialogue feel trite and pat, whether it’s directly confronting the themes or not. These choices perhaps seem most poorly done when Margot is struggling to make sense of where Robert (Nicholas Braun) fits in her life. They text constantly, and yet, when she invites him to her work and they get locked in a closet, she starts to genuinely panic. It’s an intriguing idea cut to its barest self, with ominous music and moody lighting meant to heighten the fear she feels when instead it just kind of cheapens the spectrum of suspicion she’s feeling. 

Which is a shame because Braun and Jones are great in their respective roles. Jones feels competent and assured without making her perfect. Braun is the perfect kind of generic dude you can project a lot onto (as Margot does): he’s tall and imposing and kind of brusque in possibly (or at least sometimes) a sweet way. It’s easy to believe how he would inspire — and she would imagine — thoughts of him in his therapist’s office, bemoaning how intimidating she is, or how he could slot into any job she could picture for him once she realizes they’ve been talking for months and she has no idea what he actually does for a living. It’s almost enough to let you believe that after that truly awful first kiss (which, honestly, good for the movie for that one) she would still want to believe. 

Then after the first hour — oh yeah folks, buckle up; this is a New Yorker short story stretched to a two-hour runtime — the movie really just goes for it, fumbling every centimeter of nuanced set up in the process. The last act is egregious, taking every single part of the movie too far, turning from “possible” horror movie to “definite” horrible movie as it teeters from cringe into full-blown genre flick. If Cat Person as a story had any merit, Cat Person’s final third makes sure to send that shit up in smoke and burn off any good will it has. In the end, it leaves itself to rest on its laurels, thinking it’s making “big” points when in reality it’s not saying anything at all. It’s hard to say that a movie this easy to yell about isn’t worth seeing out of morbid curiosity, but I can at least say it’s better to have just left Cat Person on read. 

Cate on Past Lives

“You dream in a language I just can’t understand.”

Arthur’s words to his wife Nora get at a hard truth that runs through Celine Song’s intimate debut. A stunning portrait of longing, love, and the limits of fate, Past Lives makes space to validate the yearning of “what-ifs” while keeping its characters grounded in their realities. 

A first love is a precious thing. And despite the inherent irrationality, it can be hard to let go of the golden sheen that covers a fond memory. But that is precisely what Song guides her characters to achieve in her film. 

The people we used to be are vestiges of who we are now. But they’re no more than the ghosts of our identity — past lives if you will — hanging around as we struggle to move forward and remake ourselves anew. It’s an idea all three of the film’s main characters grapple with throughout the story. 

Arthur (John Magaro) struggles to accept that Nora’s decision to be with him was an active choice, rather than a circumstance she fell into. Would the person she used to be, be happy with the life she’s built now? If she had the choice, would she keep choosing him? 

Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) finds himself pulled towards a girl who broke his heart; drawn ever more to the love they used to share. The memory of their intimacy is so strong that it compels him to seek her out. How can he make space in his life for a woman who is only half there? 

But for Nora (Greta Lee), both things are true at once. What is left of the girl who loved Hae Sung? If she had to do it all again, would she make the same choices? Did she merely settle for the life she has now?

“When you leave something behind, you gain something too.”

As Hae Sung and Nora explore the possibilities of their past, Song repeatedly frames them as equidistant forces. They are oppositional entities, drawn together by their shared in-yun. But the space between them is always maintained. They are close, but not quite — a tension born of unspoken affection. Their lives run parallel to each other. Their paths never cross.

That’s why it’s no surprise Past Lives isn’t a story about a woman who runs off with her lost love, as Arthur fears. Instead, it is about a woman making the painful choice to definitively close the book on a chapter of her life that until now had remained unfinished. As emotional as Nora is by the end of the film, she’s confident her love lies with Arthur. And that’s precisely what she tells Hae Sung when the three of them go to a bar after a night out. 

And here too, Song makes light work of her thesis. Sat between both Hae Sung and Arthur, Nora bridges a gap that is both linguistic and romantic. As one reads the language of the screen, Hae Yun, to her left, is her past. Arthur, on her right, is her future. She may be losing the love of an old flame, but she’s reveling in the love of a new one. 

“I always come second place to you and I never cry.”

Nora and Hae Sung’s connection overflows with longing and sincerity. Their connection was and is real. But they have outgrown it. 

In the end, the what-ifs are an echo — a tribute to the life they could have built together had they decided to do so. But they’re no longer the people who could have created the private bubble needed to sustain it. They’ve moved past it.

As Nora literally watches her past love fade away, she says goodbye to the person she used to be. Her curiosity about her own convictions is sated. Ending the speculation about what could have been frees her, so that she can finally fully embrace the life she’s chosen. She’s found her ending.

Because though fate may poke and prod at us, it is ultimately our own choices that define the people we become.

Assorted Internet Detritus

ZOSHA: No seriously you should be following the Google Antitrust trial — here’s a newsletter for that. You can hear Seattle on Transatlanticism, literally. The review that talked me out of seeing Exorcist: Believer.

CATE: The end of Netflix DVDs, marriage won’t save you, portrait of a tortured artist and our interview with same, Only Murders In The Building and radical housing politics, the girls are getting gay y’all, and a shameless plug for the pop culture podcast I produce: Even The Rich.

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If you’re just finding this newsletter, do us a favour and subscribe. It feeds our fragile egos. And if you’re already a loyal reader, help us out and tell a friend. Happy movie yelling!

Zosha + Cate <3
twitter:@30FlirtyFilm
instagram:@30FlirtyFilm

The little gold men are ready, the envelopes are packed, and those who are dedicated to screening all the nominees are down to the wire. Welcome to Oscar weekend, folks!

We thought about sharing the Oscar narratives we’re watching, or the ballot selections we’ve made. But like the hosting gig, we’re feeling a bit nebulous at the moment. And, to be fair, we’ve already covered quite a few of the Oscar nominees. So in light of that, we’re giving everyone a few days to catch up on some of the Academy Awards coverage we’ve done already.

Maybe you missed them in your inboxes, or maybe you’re new here (oh look, a subscribe button!) But either way, we’ve got you covered. After this issue, we’ll be taking a little hiatus to rest and watch some more movies. And we’ll be back soon. But until then, here’s a refresher on our reviews of this year’s Best Picture Nominees. Enjoy!

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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

directed by: Edward Berger | written by: Edward Berger, Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson

“At two-and-a-half hours, All Quiet doesn’t have the delicacy to carry its thoughts with the same subtle gradation as its color tinting. The latter is treated to highlight the blues of dying eyes and the muted lushness of green uniforms, finding a spectrum of war far more striking than most do. But with its changes to the story, All Quiet wants the story to be tragic in a very loud way, curdling the poignancy of the narrative itself.” -Zosha

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

written and directed by: James Cameron

“Avatar 2 has its more perverse pleasures (a movie with that runtime would have to) and against the odds, it’s the smaller beats of the epic movie that have stuck with me.” - Zosha

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

written and directed by: Martin McDonagh

“Delightfully, the movie seems to understand that while these two are pitted against each other, the impasse they find themselves in is one that’s created — even if that doesn’t make it invalid. Colm wants what he wants; Pádraic values are different. The hard part is that those things are intractable because Colm has decided they are, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong, nor does it make the fiddle compositions (also titled “The Banshees of Inisherin”) he’s crafting suddenly genius. The movie isn’t about creating the space for brilliance, just for expression.” -Zosha

ELVIS

directed by: Baz Luhrmann | written by: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner.

“It’s hard to be a lover of filmic excess without also being a Baz Luhrmann devotee. The enigmatic director has near-cornered the market on bombast, and Elvis his latest feature is no different. In fact, Elvis may be the most “Baz Luhrmann” Baz Luhrmann has ever been. And it’s hard to imagine there’s any way for him to top himself from here.” -Cate

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

written and directed by: The Daniels

“In the nihilistic world of EEAAO, life is the meaning you ascribe to it, the things you decide are worth fighting for. The multiverse is vast, and we are quite small. But in many ways, that story is just getting started. The grass may be greener on the other side, but that potential is always right here with you.” -Zosha

THE FABELMANS

directed by: Steven Spielberg | written by: Steven Spielberg and Tony Kusher

“The Fabelmans is a movie about making The Fabelmans. It may seem counterintuitive, but the film is essentially a record of its own existence — a retelling of why Spielberg needed to create stories in the first place.” -Cate

TÁR

written and directed by: Todd Fields

“Blanchett, as usual, brings both gravity and a kind of grace to her character — a quality that bolsters Lydia’s casual dismissal of the power dynamics that turn in her favor. And in the end, Tár is a masterwork that gives us a glimpse of the way these reckonings look from the other side of the table. Does the guilt consume them? Do they grasp to retain their cache? And finally, how does a person digest a reputational downfall of their own making? It’s a question the film meticulously explicates to marvelous effect.” -Cate

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

directed by: Joseph Kosinki | written by: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie

“Top Gun: Maverick may possibly be the most effective form of not-explicitly-state-sanctioned military propaganda many of us will have seen in our lifetimes so far. As commendable as it is as a demonstration of technically impressive filmmaking, it is still a story where the primary stakes hinge on figuring out the most effective way to bomb a foreign nation unprovoked. It reflects a fundamentally conservative and nationalistic worldview, and it is very nearly offensive to hang a man’s emotional arc on the devastation wrought by preemptive warfare.” -Cate

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

written and directed by: Ruben Östlund

“Ruben Östlund’s English language debut Triangle of Sadness is not a movie one enjoys. Instead, one tolerates that… questionable art still has the right to exist. The film is not enjoyable or fun, so much as it is an abruptly truncated and overambitious eat-the-rich satire. Or so it thinks. Filled to the brim with insufferable characters, this black comedy is more “black” than “comedy.” Here, the rich are so detestable that it’s not even fun to watch them get a taste of their own medicine.” -Cate

WOMEN TALKING

written and directed by: Sarah Polley

“Women Talking’s greatest strength is perhaps the source of its greatest critique: its message is valuable, so why is it so afraid of wrestling with its ambiguity? By the end, its characters have all taken a swing at the concept. One would think all those hits would leave the truth battered, misshapen — distinct. But in Women Talking all it serves to do is smooth down the thorny bits. While it calls itself an act of “radical female imagination,” it can’t imagine a world beyond gender essentialism collapsing under pressure. It has no hope for the necessary conversations that have to happen, and it has as much space for empathy as it has silence.” -Zosha

“In the end, it is optimism for a future free from gendered terrorism that guides their choice. Forgiveness is being demanded of them, but they all know that forgiveness must be freely given to be sincere and true. But ultimately, it’s a tragedy that women’s salvation only becomes possible in “an act of female imagination.” -Cate

Assorted Internet Detritus

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Cate on Triangle of Sadness

Ruben Östlund’s English language debut Triangle of Sadness is not a movie one enjoys. Instead, one tolerates that… questionable art still has the right to exist. The film is not enjoyable or fun, so much as it is an abruptly truncated and overambitious eat-the-rich satire. Or so it thinks. Filled to the brim with insufferable characters, this black comedy is more “black” than “comedy.” Here, the rich are so detestable that it’s not even fun to watch them get a taste of their own medicine. 

In the film, a model/influencer couple is gifted a free luxury cruise on a superyacht populated by the obscenely wealthy. These are the kind of people who have amassed so much capital that you don’t even know they exist because they’re too busy pulling at the strings of industry and shaping the world’s geopolitical future with their choices. They have the kind of money that would make even the ladies of The Gilded Age blush. One passenger, who made his fortune in the arms trade, casually discusses the business of war over dinner and laments the UN regulations on “personal exploding devices” that resulted in a 25% loss for his company. Another lecherous guest proudly declares that he “sells shit” and feels no particular shame about being a Russian oligarch.

When the yacht hits a storm during the Captain’s dinner, many of the guests become violently seasick, vomiting and shitting wherever they stand. As the storm rocks the boat, the sewerage floods, and excrement gushes through the hallways — taking guests and crew alike. And if that weren’t enough, a handful of people are stranded on a “deserted” island after the ship is attacked and sunk by pirates.

The film relishes its chance to mock and torment its clueless characters. And that in itself is not a problem. In fact, it’s almost the point. But Triangle of Sadness forgets the golden rule of the “rich people problems” genre — detestable as they may be, the audience still needs someone to root for. Even if they suck!

Think of the delightful torment of Succession or the full-throated lampooning of Knives Out and Glass Onion. Obnoxious as they may be, I’m still all in for Roman Roy and Birdie Jay. Not because they’re good or moral, but because they’re FUN. The number of Roman Roy gifs circulating is proof in itself that what we want is not to mock, eat or laugh at the rich, but to pity them. And Östlund provides no such opportunity.

Structurally, the film is also a little scattershot. Broken into three sections — Carl & Yaya, The Yacht, and The Island — each part feels like its own unconnected, bad short film. It’s reminiscent of the Romanian film Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn, but lacks its bite or cutting social commentary. What we get instead is an endless stream of not just rich entitlement on the part of the guests, but endless bootlicking from the ship’s white, visible crew members. The rest of the support staff — maids, cooks, handymen — are hidden away in the ship’s hull, tasked with serving and cleaning up after people who look through them. 

The only vaguely enjoyable part of Triangle of Sadness occurs in its final section — The Island. When a mixed group of survivors, both guests and crew find themselves stranded, the group’s social order inverts. Cleaning lady Abigail (Dolly de Leon) assumes control as the “Captain” because she is the only one with any survival skills. No one else can fish or build a fire. De Leon is wonderful in the role, bringing an almost dismissive authority to the situation. On the ship, she is a maid. On the island, she’s the captain. And if the others want to eat, they’ll remember that. 

Triangle of Sadness is the kind of film that’s made for a very specific audience. After all, it did win the Palme D’Or. Overall, it’s an odd choice for a Best Picture nomination, but as they say, there’s no accounting for taste. However, it oddly does make me curious to see more of Östlund’s work, if only to decide if the missteps here like with the film, or the director himself.

Zosha on All Quiet on the Western Front

There was a time during the deep, early pandemic, where my accessories became like ghosts. I was stuck in an apartment, unable to see the people I loved safely in real life, faced with the yawning day-in and day-out of quarantine life so many of us were, and like everyone else the idea of getting fully dressed became its own thing. My clothes are comfy, so I never really stopped getting dressed up — but jewelry? Well, I kept going on with that because it inspired something in me (and I like them too; I own nice things!), often directly connected to the people I got them from. My headstrong grandma’s earrings, the necklace my sisters and I all have, or the remaining stud from the pair my mom got me. In a certain light, these items carried the spirits of those who endowed me with them, and that was connection enough. 

All Quiet on the Western Front starts with a similar principle captured in a different kind of misery: A young soldier, shot down in the line of duty has the uniform stripped from his body, sent to the cleaners, then to a warehouse where seamstress patches up the bullet hole, before it gets sent along to the next recruit. That recruit is our hero, 17-year-old Paul (Felix Kammerer), who’s so excited to enlist for the German army in World War I he forged his dad’s signature. The uniform when it arrives is schlubby, a muted, green that’s still grimier than the pristine blue-gray of the officer who hands it to him. But he’s proud to wear it all the same. 

For those unfamiliar, All Quiet is not about the honor of his service. Instead, Paul and his friends will be put through hell, exposed to the harsh, anguished realities of war fast and quick. The movie is well aware of how objects carry weight: In their first day, Paul and his troop have to experiment with putting on their gas masks, and bail out the freezing trench with their helmets. Of course the metaphor extends further: they too are the objects of war, pawns in a game far larger than themselves; a drop in the endless bucket of death, or the flooded trench drowning their dreams of glory. 

Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front remake (this 2023 movie is the second adaptation of a 1929 book, the first film coming a year later) underscores this by pulling back to Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and his efforts to sign an armistice and end the war. It’s a change the story doesn’t need, an exercise in narrativization that makes the movie feel more hollow and trite than it ought to. The horror isn’t in the repeated juxtaposition of the good eats of the officers versus the stolen duck cooked over a meager fire by the soldiers. It’s the unassuming way the officer who hands Paul his uniform pulls the nametag from the jacket, assuring him it was probably just too small for the last lad; “it happens all the time” he says with a grimace, tossing the label on the floor with the rest of them. 

At two-and-a-half hours, All Quiet doesn’t have the delicacy to carry its thoughts with the same subtle gradation as its color tinting. The latter is treated to highlight the blues of dying eyes and the muted lushness of green uniforms, finding a spectrum of war far more striking than most do. But with its changes to the story, All Quiet wants the story to be tragic in a very loud way, curdling the poignancy of the narrative itself. 

While the original story wears its intentions on its sleeve it feels more subtle than most of what 2023’s All Quiet on the Western Front does as it tries to burden every single moment with meaning. It assumes gore as prestige and misery as a trumpet, and ends up kind of droning and stumbling over itself trying to outdo itself. 

In its opening moments, All Quiet turns its rich gaze first on landscapes, idyllic and calm. We see trees and animals; it’s all cozy and quiet. Then: an aerial of a battlefield, men held in the same stillness, forever. They are part of nature (or, maybe, nature is part of war?), and serenity of death a rare and all too common mercy. Over and over, the film traces what becomes of the men after that: Their bodies to coffins in a mass grave. Their dog tags broken, so records can be taken hundreds of miles away. Clothes sanitized and fitted for the next one in their place. In its final moments (indeed its final shot) All Quiet underscores that some of these men — maybe even most of them — are war around them forever, getting the same sick ashy brown of the planks behind them and living out the promise of their recycled uniforms. Even when given with care, the spirit we give an object can only go so far. At its best, All Quiet on the Western Front remembers that those things can still be important because of what we bring to it, not because of what’s foisted upon us. But for too much of the film gets spent trying to force a connection to a larger world.

Assorted Internet Detritus

CATE: Rubbernecking the Vanderpump Rules drama, a table read infinitely better than the movie, Poker Face is great even when it’s not, how to fix the Oscars, on Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, more about how bad The Whale is, the New York Times is obsessed and it’s getting weird, and beautiful photos of Oscar nominee Bryan Tyree Henry just because.

ZOSHA: The intense literal darkness of Aaron Rodgers’ offseason. What if we all rewatched The Americans right now. What was the girlboss? Shout out to Worf! Insulin prices cut by 70%, what a concept.

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twitter:@30FlirtyFilm
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To help guide your viewings, we’ve got two more Best Picture nominees in the newsletter today: first up, Zosha on the very specific pleasures of Avatar: The Way of Water; then Cate on Spielberg’s semi-biographical The Fabelmans. Will one of these take home the little gold guy next Sunday night? Who’s to say, we’re just movie yelling!

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Zosha on Avatar: The Way of Water

What is there to say about Avatar: The Way of Water that hasn’t already been said at this point in the cycle? Quite literally I just went to check, and the brief introduction I was envisioning here — about how the story is fine and the visuals are sometimes truly spectacular; classic Jimmy C! — is almost word for word what I wrote in our final issue of 2022. Consistency is a virtue, for both me and James Cam. 

But Avatar 2 has its more perverse pleasures (a movie with that runtime would have to) and against the odds it’s the smaller beats of the epic movie that have stuck with me. One in particular: Early on, as Jake Sully and his family are still with the Omatikaya clan (the way of Avatar 1), Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and his team of Avatar’d goons have landed on Pandora. As they make their way through the forest, the military team stumbles on the skeletal remains of a human solider. They’re struck for all the reasons one would be, and then for one in particular, when Quaritich looks at the paint on the side of the mech suit and sees his own name. 

It’s a bit of Pandora Gothic that I simply adored. Here were these Recombinants (Na’vi avatars implanted with the memories of humans who have died, keep up) being confronted with the remnants of their humanity. The foliage of Pandora has grown over him, like he’s a post-apocalyptic Rip van Winkle, and in his swirl of emotions, Quaritch crushes his literal skull, my guy! 

No part of me really thought Oh this is gonna be the movie now, the thought of more gothic confrontations with death delighted me still. That’s not the movie that Cameron was writing, by any means; this scene here is a neat illustration of the series’ interrogation of identity and belonging, but the general gothic aesthetic is at odds with the vibrant Pandora palette. 

Or at least it would be except that I think about it all the time. And in a very clumsy way drafted some offerings for Jimmy Cams should he want to lean into for the next 3-6.5 Avatar movies should he want a totally new aesthetic for no functional reason. (They might not even be true gothic, but then again, what is?)

• The Hometrees start to grow closer and closer together and block out the sun. It’s so dark that the bioluminescence starts to fade in certain nooks of the forest. Lo'ak likes to sit in those dark spaces so he can think about his brother, until one day he sees his brother’s eyes staring back at him from the dark. 

• Kiri keeps hearing a ghostly wailing from under the sea, but when she goes to investigate she can’t find a source. When she asks Eywa to show her where the cries are coming from she’s met with silence. 

• The Metkaniya clan’s encampment exists on foggy moors, but nothing else about the way James Cameron writes them is different. 

• Spider (whom I loathe) kills his Recombinants!dad — why not? And yet still, sometimes, when he’s in the house and the rest of the Sullys are asleep, he swears he hears the static of his dad’s earpiece coming from beneath the corner of the hut.

• Since Cameron is apparently going to keep Worthington in the fold (I thought Avatar 2 might be a way to write in the next generation, but then he also cast Sigourney Weaver [queen] as a 14-year-old, so who knows anymore) we may as well just lean into it and go real traditionally haunting with it: The photo that Miles shows Na’vi of Jake Sully seems to get older and older. But in the glimpses he sees in his rare brushes with Jake in battle, Jake’s stayed quite youthful. 

• Instead of starting the next film with a weird summation of the 20 or so years since the last movie, we get a letter being read in voiceover by some stranger. In the desert (where Cameron is maybe [sure] thinking about setting future movies) he’s run into a Na’vi doctor by the name of Frankenstein (public domain), who tells him about some bizarre artificial human avatars he’s made. 

• OK picture Tom Hiddleston as a Na’vi. Idk maybe that mental image is enough for us to remake Crimson Peak, why not there’s so many of these movies coming, eventually they gotta go to Earth. 

Cate on The Fabelmans

At 76 years old, Steven Spielberg has had a long and significant run as a director. As the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time, some may even say that he is unmatched in the medium's history. But with The Fabelmans, Spielberg takes his viewers back to the origins of his career, using a parallel family to work through his relationship with his own.

In some ways, The Fabelmans is a movie about making The Fabelmans. It may seem counterintuitive, but the film is essentially a record of its own existence — a retelling of why Spielberg needed to create stories in the first place. Several critics have complained that the film feels too insular and frozen in time. Why were we invited into an old man’s therapy session? But to ask that question is to misunderstand the movie — it makes its function extremely clear.

In the film’s opening scenes, little Sammy Fabelman goes to his first movie with his parents. The crashing trains and cars tilted off their axes frighten him, and he replicates the action with the trainset he receives for Hanukkah. Watching his toy trains crash over and over — and filming it with his mother’s camera — help him to wrap his arms around the new big thing he didn’t understand. And that’s it. Samuel Fabelman makes movies because they help him to make sense of the world. That much of course is plainly obvious. But the error is in assuming that there was something else missing.

As he gets older, Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) uses filmmaking as a source of comfort to his mentally ill mother, a source of hard truths about his family, and as a way to gain favor with the anti-semitic bullies at his school. By taking his life and shrinking it down to the size of a photograph, he can gain control of the new and more difficult things he encounters. With film, he has a way to put himself at a remove from the hard things in life. His life experiences become curiosities he can examine on a film strip — dissecting and rearranging them until he can metabolize them on a cellular level. 

And it’s not just Sammy who experiences this in the film. Michelle Williams’ Mitzi Schildkraut-Fabelman discovers an ugly truth about herself in one of her son’s films. And the fallout is that Sammy gives up the camera for an extended period of time. Now, not only has he understood the world through his films, he’s also learned that the truth of those films have real-world consequences. As a rapper of recent ill repute once said, “no one man should have all that power.”

In the same way, that very idea explains why Spielberg has waited so long to make this film. This is the way he works through the things he cannot understand, or wants to examine. In the press, he has said that seeing his parent brought to life onscreen made him burst into tears, and it’s easy to see why. After nearly eight decades, he is finally taking the time to purposely turn the lens on himself, and continue his long-established penchant for investigation through film. For Spielberg, the falsity of films gives us room to tell the truth. Even this film’s title “The Fabelmans” is a not to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

But The Fabelmans is also another addition to the “magic of movies” genre. In spots, it can be cloying and obvious. But those are intentional choices — Spielberg is reflecting on his life with the hindsight of a life lived by, for and through the movies. The familiar tropes at play, and its saccharine conclusion are the tools he’s using to contextualize his relationship to his past. It almost feels like the flip side of Damien Chazelle’s ambitious flop Babylon. That film was about the excesses caused by drink, drugs and the power of a dream in Hollywood. But The Fabelmans is about what keeps us coming back, and the comfort, joy, shock, and love they can encourage. As Ebert said, “movies are like a machine that generates empathy,” and this film is Spielberg’s chance to look back, and extend empathy to the man he used to be. Because that’s the man who made him who he is today.

Assorted Internet Detritus

ZOSHA: This video essay on the best movie of 2022. What makes a good life? The Star Wars prequels were the MCU blueprint. From offline (but available online): My good friend’s incredible book on Paul Thomas Anderson you can buy now!!

CATE: We’ve forgotten how to find movies, the new Black Film Canon, the New York Times makes its priorities clear, Native American stories are changing for the better, the Last of Us is a queer uchronia and Ant-Man isn’t quite cutting it anymore.

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If you’re just finding this newsletter, do us a favour and subscribe. It feeds our fragile egos. And if you’re already a loyal reader, help us out and tell a friend. Happy movie yelling!

Zosha + Cate <3
twitter:@30FlirtyFilm
instagram:@30FlirtyFilm

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Cate on Tár

The magic trick of Tár is that there isn’t actually very much going on. In Todd Field’s new film, Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. The fictive maestro has risen to the top of her field, and is rising still when the death of an old student brings her world tumbling down. Plot-wise, the story is quite straightforward. But what makes Tár so interesting is the way it shapes its story around a female perpetrator of the same kinds of abuses of power that have traditionally been the domain of men. 

Married with a daughter, Lydia’s life is more than respectable on the outside. But as we later learn, she has routinely used the musical foundation she co-created to support female conductors as her own personal dating pool. Implicitly trading favors for affection, her behavior has not been as discreet as she assumed. 

In Tár, Lydia is the lauded genius whose reputation must be protected because of the stature of her work. The conservative world of classical music dislikes scandal. But as with many of the men who came before her, Lydia’s continued immunity makes her bold. She humiliates a student in her class at Juilliard for interrogating his relationship to the traditional canon of music. She grants a new Russian cellist a soloist position — flouting the traditional rules of orchestral convention. And she spends much of the film dodging the overtures of a former student. We’re meant to imply that the student, Krista, either refused or halted Lydia’s advances. And as we follow the story, we find that Lydia has made her pay for that transgression.

Over the course of the film, Lydia tells multiple characters that “Krista had issues.” It’s her go-to response whenever the one pockmark on her reputation is raised. And it mirrors the way men in Hollywood have ruined careers by undermining women who won’t play ball. In an effort to reinforce her own standing in the orchestral community, Lydia has been waging a furious email campaign to prevent Krista from ever joining it. Every ensemble that asks her for a reference is told in no uncertain terms that Krista is “unbalanced” and shouldn’t be trusted with a chance to conduct. But in quick succession, Krista dies by suicide, and a heavily edited video of Lydia’s encounter with the student dents her prestige significantly. Throw in a scorned assistant and a wife at the end of her rope, and all at once, she finds her world crumbling. 

It’s almost ironic then that all it takes to “cancel” Lydia Tár is one woman’s suspicious death and an obviously manipulated video. Usually, in these #MeToo tales, the evidence of a man’s abuse is so overwhelming that when it is revealed, the disclosure feels inevitable. But for a woman at the pinnacle of her profession, it still only really takes the word of one person to disrupt her life and career. It’s merely what she did to Krista refracted back unto herself.

There are interpretations of this film that posit Lydia has dreamed up her own consequences. That, haunted by the ghost of her former protégé, she has essentially descended into a madness that culminates in her final, fiery act of rebellion. It’s an explanation that makes the film even riper with meaning — how much of the story is merely Lydia’s guilt personified?

It’s a curious thing to consider. Which interpretation of the film do we prefer and why? Are we like Lydia, meeting the movie where it is and reading its intentions at face value? Or are we like her mentor, Leonard Bernstein, reinterpreting the story in order to make it into something new and novel that serves our own emotional needs?

Take, for example, her tiff with the conducting student at Juilliard. When he tells her he has difficulty connecting with the intentions of misogynistic old white men like Bach, Lydia rants about the need to separate the art from the artist. She insists that the merits of the music always outweigh the transgressions of the composer, because as conductors they have the ability to reinterpret the work. So passionate is her defense that in a move that comes back to bite her, she actively insults him, humiliating him in front of his peers.

But was she defending Bach, or her own long whispered-about behavior? Is this a tell that her previous and habitual misdeeds have been on her mind? In a way, she tips her hand. No one questioned the merits of the work, merely their own relationship to it. And in fact, in order to have a conundrum such as this, the work almost by definition must be good. Because it is the recognition of the art that makes it so difficult to divest from creatives who routinely produce incredible interpretations of the world.

See too, her threat to her daughter Petra’s bully. Lydia tells a small child that if she continues to hurt Petra, she will “get” her — and that if she tells anyone what Lydia said, no one will believe a child over an adult. What is that if not a frank replication of the power dynamic she enjoys with the young musicians whose careers she influences?

And that doesn’t even take into account her decision to stay in the same hotel room as Plácido Domingo. It’s easy to miss the hastily typed text message that clues us in to the fact that Lydia clearly feels an affinity with the Spanish singer. Is it because he’s been accused of sexual misconduct with subordinates at the company he helped found? Is he who she fears becoming? What is he to her if not a glimpse into her own future?

Blanchett, as usual, brings both gravity and a kind of grace to her character — a quality that bolsters Lydia’s casual dismissal of the power dynamics that turn in her favor. And in the end, Tár is a masterwork that gives us a glimpse of the way these reckonings look from the other side of the table. Does the guilt consume them? Do they grasp to retain their cache? And finally, how does a person digest a reputational downfall of their own making? It’s a question the film meticulously explicates to marvelous effect.

Zosha on The Banshees of Inisherin

I cannot, in The Banshees of Inisherin, get over the color red. On first watch I hardly noticed it — the gleam of Colm’s (Brandon Gleeon) blood, maybe, or the flaps on a cozy sweater of Pádraic’s (Colin Farrel). But on rewatch it stuck out to me, everywhere: the tablecloth, the skirts in town, the inside of the “ghoul’s” cape, or Siobhán’s (Kerry Condon) favorite jacket. The color seemed to puncture every shot of the tranquil Irish countryside, even in the smallest, most unobtrusive ways. 

Which is usually what writer/director Martin McDonagh’s prose does the work of. McDonagh, known for his black comedies like In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, and then a movie that won Frances McDormand an Oscar, likes to balance the happy and sad, quiet peace and charm with sometimes equally quiet desperation and cruelty. In Banshees those impulses are on full display, complete with two diametrically opposed forces battling out for their own peace of mind. Pádraic goes to the house of his best friend Colm for their usual 2 p.m. appointment at the pub, and Colm refuses to acknowledge him. Eventually Colm’s resolve thaws only insofar as he’ll tell Pádraic that he doesn’t want to speak to him any more. He expects Pádraic to honor the request, or else Colm will begin cutting off his own fingers every time Pádraic attempts to speak to him. 

The thing I love about Banshees of Inisherin is it tells you exactly what it’s about. If you’re someone who watched the trailers this might come you are a person who bases your assumption of a movie off a trailer (and if you go to the movie theater at all or watch Youtube, you simply must be, in some respect), the thrust of the narrative is a why. And that’s something Pádraic dutifully chases down in Banshees pursuing every avenue he can think of as Colm continues to stonewall him. But Colm and Banshees don’t see it as a mystery: As Colm puts it, Pádraic is dull, and with only 12 or so years left in his life (give or take an estimation) Colm simply doesn’t want to waste time making boring chit chat, even if it’s of the perfectly nice variety Pádraic is peddling. 

Instead, Banshees becomes thorny and messy. Throughout the two-hour runtime, Pádraic gets numerous signals that seem believably mixed, with Colm going out of his way to be kind or listen to what he says. And still, those fingers get hurled at Pádraic’s front door. Delightfully, the movie seems to understand that while these two are pitted against each other, the impasse they find themselves in is one that’s created — even if that doesn’t make it invalid. Colm wants what he wants; Pádraic values are different. The hard part is that those things are intractable because Colm has decided they are, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong, nor does it make the fiddle compositions (also titled “The Banshees of Inisherin”) he’s crafting suddenly genius. The movie isn’t about creating the space for brilliance, just for expression. 

As the movie wears on, it goes over and over the question of what we owe to each other — decency, as Siobhán and some others push Colm to see? Attention and kindness, as Pádraic wants? Greatness, as Colm doesn’t dare dream for? Though their life on Inisherin is simple, it’s governed by a set of principles that Colm has run afoul of but only Pádraic gets wounded by. Their church, their law enforcement, even their local gossip all demand something from them, and the question of what it costs to engage with those around you gets knottier still. 

So what of the red, omnipresent but rarely dominating the screen? As my housemate and I talked after the movie, we went full color theory, finding a sort of neat symbolism to the way primary colors got used: Red, the community and placidity; yellow, the individual and self actualization; and blue, the land, the very island keeping them all together (for a time) and maybe mooring them in place. In that way it seems telling that Colm never wears red (or so we think — he only bleeds red, if memory serves), but often wears yellow. Conversely, Pádraic so often wears red, only to blanche to simply black and white in the end. By the end, their rowin’ has cost each of them what they wanted to love about themselves. And poor Dominic (Barry Keoghan), so often in blue-grays, will never leave the island at all.

Still, the most telling balance of the story is Siobhán, who takes care of her brother until she finally leaves the island for a promising job offer. She is the middle between Pádric’s and Colm’s end points, the one who can find a way to be decent and still make the life she wants. Banshees is smart enough to know this comes at a cost; her leaving the narrative kicks off truly dour times for Pádric, and it’s clear her choice comes with sacrifice. But she does it anyway. Color theory is pretty hard to apply willy nilly to any project of this size. But it seems telling that after walking around (often) in a yellow/red shirt, tending to her brother in a red coat, and tromping across the island in a blue skirt to help manage the feud, when she gets on the boat she’s bright and vibrant mustard coat.

Assorted Internet Detritus

CATE: This week, the last memories of André Leon Talley, have sex or don’t, men need to make some friends, why it’s on sight for Harry and flowers for Bey, the Fleishman moms need to listen to Nice White Parents, a treatise on the defense of trans lives, and a reminder of what we’re fighting for.

ZOSHA: Marc Maron is still grieving Lynn Shelton just like the rest of us. Rethinking the value of cleanliness. Fran Magazine on M. Night. Trigun Stampede had to transform Trigun to be faithful to it. The ice cream conspiracy!!

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If you’re just finding this newsletter, do us a favour and subscribe. It feeds our fragile egos. And if you’re already a loyal reader, help us out and tell a friend. Happy movie yelling!

Zosha + Cate <3
twitter:@30FlirtyFilm
instagram:@30FlirtyFilm

For some of us, awards season is the closest we get to organized sports (Cate) so the stakes are high! Over the next few issues, we’ll be covering all the nominees in the category — minus the two we’ve already done: Elvis and Women Talking. We hope that it’ll get you prepared to win your Oscar Party ballot. And if time permits, there may even be a bonus Sundance Dispatch in the works. It’s the simple pleasures. So as always, happy movie yelling.

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Zosha on Everything Everywhere All at Once

It can be very very hard these days to not feel small. Even the act of describing the magnitude of forces pushing down on us — headlines rolling across your attention span, or obligations piling up like the print subscription you never got around to canceling — feels trite; a tiny scream in a yawning void. It’s no surprise that so much of the pop culture of 2022 was about compensating for that fact, even less so that multiverses were the device du jour to explore the idea. What better way to spin out than to think of all that could be? Perhaps even more so, it’s no shock that Everything Everywhere All At Once became the undisputed multiversal champion of the year, the little maximalist darling that could (and did, which is why you’re reading about it in the first of our Oscars issues). Maybe better than all the other versions, EEAAO understands that the beautiful, tragic, endless appeal of the multiverse is that it’s all about potential, in more ways than one. 

If you haven’t heard already (and truly, what multiverse are you living in?), EEAAO is about Evelyn Quan (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner and mother who — in the midst of being audited by the IRS — discovers that she’s at the center of a battle to save the universe being waged across multiple timelines. Together, she and her husband Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) and daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) have to find a way to connect and fight parallel universe versions of themselves and (hopefully) prevent a powerful being from destroying the universe. 

Evelyn is not the most exciting version of herself, something the movie makes sure both the viewer and Evelyn understand acutely. When she’s first jacked into the system that links her to the full multiverse, she sees her life flash before her eyes — it’s full of sadness, sweetness, and ultimately disappointment — as her dreams for a better and happier life turn into mundane days at the laundromat and fights with her daughter. Looking at things this way, it’s easy to see how a life lived can feel like a battle lost. But EEAAO is just getting started at this point; before too long, Evelyn is exposed to all the alternate versions of herself: a chef, a movie star, a hot-dog-fingered bisexual. Put simply, anywhere there is some place she’d rather be. 

But again, EEAAO is just getting started. As the movie goes on, it’s gotta make its case for this Evelyn, and its case is simple: She’s The One because she has missed out on so much. She is seething with untapped potential. I can take or leave this plot device — it’s a smart enough flip on the chosen one narrative, but I’m more impressed with the way the rest of the movie falls in line behind it. Every time Evelyn is exposed to a new version of Waymond, or sees just how much the universe has in store for Joy, it highlights its own facet of the versions she lives with. Waymond’s kindness is his most defining feature (one Eveyln doesn’t fully appreciate as the balance to her own strength of will), but in alt-Waymond she sees how dashing he is, his charm, his power, his solidity. So much of multiverse fiction explores how parallel universes feel jarring and foreign, but EEAAO posits something else. Waymond feels like home to her in so many universes — or even just the one she’s in — because of all the things he is across them. Even when, like EvelynPrime, he’s only some of them at a time. 

And so it’s important to reflect on how much of this is captured in just the opening shot. Evelyn, Joy, and Waymond (or at least some version of them) crowded around a mic singing karaoke, laughing and smiling and aghast at a possible swear, framed in a perfectly round mirror on a table surrounded by clutter. This point in time is everything and nothing, all at once. It’s a highlight in a quiet life, a fluke by some standard, the thing we’re doing it all for. It’s a small moment, and representative of all things really need to be. In the nihilistic world of EEAAO, life is the meaning you ascribe to it, the things you decide are worth fighting for. The multiverse is vast, and we are quite small. But in many ways, that story is just getting started. The grass may be greener on the other side, but that potential is always right here with you.

Cate on Top Gun: Maverick

The biggest problem with Top Gun: Maverick is that in order to enjoy it, you have to be able to wrap your head around the ceaseless military propaganda. If nothing else, this is a movie that wants you to know that the armed forces do important work that is absolutely crucial to the safety and security of the United States. Instead of, you know, being yet another cog in a vastly overfunded warmongering industry. Bombing other sovereign states? No big deal! They built a thing we told them not to. Got a couple extra tanks? No worries! Super easy to hand them over to domestic police departments across the country to help them continue their ongoing reign of stochastic terrorism against minority communities!

Unfortunately — and I may regret saying this — if you do manage to clear that hurdle… you’re in for the ride of your life. Because Top Gun: Maverick is an emotionally satisfying, visually stunning film that illuminates the true nature of Tom Cruise’s enduring stardom. 

It’s no secret that they don’t make stars the way they used to. The A-list used to be made up of actors and musicians who could guarantee millions at the box office, or multi-platinum album sales. Now, the very concept of the A-list has all but lost its meaning. The most famous celebrities of our time are Tik-Tok creators and social media influencers best known for minute-long video memes and sponsored content. Naturally, they’re all vying for the same elusive fifteen minutes. But Tom Cruise has managed to stay relatively above the fray (minus those deeply concerning Scientology allegations) and maintain his cultural cache for four decades by simply doubling down on what he does best  — being an action star.

By my count, Tom Cruise has been starring exclusively in action films since at least 2012. In the decade since, he’s made two Jack Reacher films, two more Mission Impossible films (with two more currently in production) and a handful of standalone action epics. Tom Cruise knows his lane. But what sets him apart is that he’s honed and refined his place within it. With Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise has found a way to build an “Oscar-worthy movie” out of the genre he’s most comfortable with. He’s an action movie star, so he made the action movie version of a prestige film.

In a way, it enables him to bend The Academy to his will, specifically because this isn’t the usual pathway an actor might take to court a nomination. With this film, The Academy is finally free to reward a film that is both a commercial and artistic success — without being browbeaten into appreciating what they might otherwise consider lowbrow fare.

And Top Gun: Maverick is very much an action film. It follows the same beats and conforms to the same genre conventions. But what makes it such an effective awards contender is that it artfully maintains the film’s commercial sheen, while shaping a beautiful and refined interpretation of the genre. 

Much of that comes down to the cinematography. Claudio Miranda seems to intimately understand that every frame is a new decisive moment — a fresh opportunity to create an indelible image for the viewer. Miranda positions Maverick (Tom Cruise) as an astronaut rather than a pilot — he frames the skies with the same reverence usually reserved for epic depictions of the vacuum of space. Even an early shot of an exploding plane looks like a supernova shooting through the cosmos. It’s a handy visual metaphor for the career heights Maverick could have achieved if he’d stopped punishing himself for the death of his friend. Miranda replaces the usual clichés of frenzied, hyper-masculine set pieces with lyrical poetry in motion. The film is a genuinely stunning masterwork, and it’s baffling that Miranda did not receive recognition from The Academy. Thankfully, his fellow cinematographs picked up the slack at their own guild awards.

Overall, the movie has a romantic sensibility that recalls the Golden Age of Hollywood. There’s a grandness and theatricality to the tone that is so self-serious as to be camp. The difference is that this seriousness has not failed. It happily indulges in the very bigness it’s trying to rein in and redefine.

Another critical key to the film’s success is that despite being a sequel, it is largely a self-contained narrative. Top Gun: Maverick builds on the history and consequences of its predecessor to surface a deeply moving story about grief and forgiveness. With the help of a handful of flashback sequences, you’re given everything you need to know in order to be invested in the story — no homework required. 

It’s why despite Ryan Coogler’s best efforts, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever does not rise to the level of this much-lauded sequel. Too much of making sense of the plot relies on the audience’s familiarity with not just the first Black Panther film, but the expansive lore of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. And that doesn’t even count the death of its star, and the film’s many production hurdles. While it also rendered a beautiful story of grief, it simply had too much else going on in its plot for the final product to properly cohere. Top Gun: Maverick avoids these complications by narrowly focusing on one man’s redemption, and making it achingly legible.

This is a story about two underdogs separated by their competing interests in grieving one man. Maverick’s journey is about finding a way to open up enough to cultivate the tender relationship he wants to have with Rooster (Miles Teller), his dead best friend’s son. The screenplay is tight, effective and judicious. At no point are you ever given more information to metabolize than is strictly necessary to bring you along for the journey into the next part of the story. 

Top Gun: Maverick may possibly be the most effective form of not-explicitly-state-sanctioned military propaganda many of us will have seen in our lifetimes so far. As commendable as it is as a demonstration of technically impressive filmmaking, it is still a story where the primary stakes hinge on figuring out the most effective way to bomb a foreign nation unprovoked. It reflects a fundamentally conservative and nationalistic worldview, and it is very nearly offensive to hang a man’s emotional arc on the devastation wrought by preemptive warfare.

In fact, the movie never even bothers to explain who its foreign antagonists are, or why the airstrike is even really necessary. It’s a dance that expertly sidesteps the issue by making everyone’s motivations just vague enough to obscure the jingoism right beneath the surface. The “prize” these recruits are fighting for is a chance to embark on what is explicitly described as a likely-suicide mission. And it’s all in service of the (nefarious, let’s be real) economic and geopolitical interests of the United States.

It’s a valid critical interpretation that Top Gun: Maverick is merely propaganda wrapped in a very pretty bow. But boy, that bow is really something.

Assorted Internet Detritus

ZOSHA: Exploring Aftersun and its ending. Will Seattle’s mayor actually win in his crusade against graffiti tags? January is now the only good movie month. Anyway, it’s about old friends.

CATE: The UK nepo-babies are worse, reflecting on Gossip Girl 2.0, the full matrix of JLo getting married onscreen, more lies from George Santos, why we need to abandon objectivity, the most romantic episode of television you’ll see this year, all of our Sundance coverage, behind the awards campaign, my third Ambie nomination, and the podcast I won it for: Even The Rich!

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