I have spent a lot of time outside of the movie theater this month: I spent a week visiting my boyfriend’s family, went scuba diving in Palm Beach, and started a new job on Monday. So this month’s diary is going to be short, and I’m looking at home streaming rather than new releases.
In the meantime, I am still collecting opinions about movie theater etiquette. Make your voice heard!
Smile, Parker Finn, 2022 (streaming on Amazon Prime and Paramount and also Delta airlines)
Perhaps this is scarier if not watched on a turbulent airplane surrounded by screaming children, because against this admittedly stiff competition for my soul, it obviously falters. This ghoulish horror movie is It Follows or the Ring made even more middlebrow, where regular people are plagued by an invisible, eerily smiling monster that taunts them into killing themselves.
Between a cat named Mustache and one of the tackiest onscreen tattoos I have ever seen, I’m both repulsed and bored by the character played by not-Jennifer Garner (Sosie Bacon, channeling none of the charisma of either famous parent). I love the big reveal that Rose’s fiancé (Jessie T. Usher, or A-Train of The Boys), who is a grown adult that’s been dating a mental health therapist for years, has recently gone onto the World Wide Web and discovered that mental illness often has a genetic component. There is one half of a second that feels like we might get a Society-style body horror shunting but of course it chickens out and just steals some more from Hereditary. Between the nonstop jump scares, some pretty awful messaging around suicide, and the casting of TV MD royalty Kal Penn and Judy Reyes, this firmly feels like a movie meant for at least 15 years ago.
Enemy, Denis Villeneuve, 2013 (streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime)
Is Jake Gyllenhaal playing two separate men, or a single man with a double identity, or one man cleft in a cycle of two halves? As Adam, Gyllenhaal is a powerfully bland professor whose only attachment to the physical world is his inexplicably-still-around girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent). As Anthony, he’s a hotheaded actor with a neglected wife in her sixth month of pregnancy. When Adam sees Anthony in a film, he descends into an obsession that will torment both men along with the women who entertain their nonsense.
None of where the Adam/Anthony line matters so much as the path of destruction he wages through Toronto, the women whose lives he pulls apart as he alternates between hedonism and tweedy repression. Toronto is awash in an oppressively yellow color grading I haven’t seen since the Mexico episodes of Breaking Bad, and the city seems to loom over and terrorize Adam like a heel over his recurring cornered spider. Never does he consider that he is the heel.
I’ve now seen all of Villaneuve’s English language stuff, and for me, the balance is tipped 4-2 in his favor (I’ll let you guess which is which). I await the Muad’Dib’s coming.
Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai, 1994 (on HBOMax and Amazon Prime)
My friend Joe invited me to see this at Fort Greene Park last night. There are some movies I am reluctant to watch at home and this was a nice one to see for the first time in a crowd of others. In Chungking Express, two urban police officers who frequent the same snackbar mourn their lost loves while falling in love with different strangers.
The snackbar owner is a good salesman, able to push an extra order of fish and chips or a date with a female server onto a customer. If a date doesn’t work out, he just recommends they try the next girl. Just like the food that comes packaged in even numbers (thirty cans of pineapple, four tin foil wrapped chef salads), there’s always another waitress about to start a shift, another cop assigned to this beat. But in the static between the central foursome, we see that there is something different about each love affair that cannot be mass replicated.
Ooo more (not Smile tho) to add to my list, thank you! I keep forgetting to watch Chungking Express, now I can't wait!