The COVID Diaries--Part 15

 Movies: various

Here is what I am watching (so far) during the quarantine for COVID-19.

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Feels Good Man

Can a meme be dangerous? Feels Good Man is an insightful documentary about Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, and how his creation was eventually co-opted by the alt-right. If there is any lesson to be learned from Furie's experience, it's to copyright your shit. Furie is just an average comic book nerd, with no Nazi or alt-right leanings. Pepe was one character in Furie's comic Boy's Club. Furie shared his comic on MySpace, and folks took a particular liking to Pepe, the laid-back frog with an "if if feels good, do it" attitude.

But it was the infamous hive of scum of villainy, 4chan, that eventually turned Pepe into a symbol of all things nasty, racist, and misogynist. They were pissed that "normies" were sharing Pepe memes, so they began to create memes with Pepe as Hitler, Pepe as a terrorist flying a plan into the Twin Towers, etc. And by the time the face of American Neo-Nazism, Richard Spencer, was explaining his Pepe pin to a reporter when he got slugged in the face, the die had been cast: Pepe belonged to the alt-right.

Feels Good Man shows how Furie took back some of his power by suing various people and companies--namely, Alex Jones--for using the image of Pepe on merchandise (Furie has won dozens of cases). But more importantly, it answers the question of why the alt-right would even want Pepe as a mascot in the first place. The answer is simple: if they have a silly mascot, they can hide their repulsive ideas behind the thin curtain of "it's just a joke". Adam Serwer, a writer at The Atlantic, puts it best when he says, "They [the alt-right] want you to be scared of the threat, and be mocked for being scared in the first place".

Grade: B+

***

A Cure for Wellness

I so desperately wanted to like this Gore Verbinksi thriller. It just feels like it should be a lot scarier, cooler, and sexier than it actually is. The film takes place in modern day, but has a distinctly vintage feel about it. Dane DeHaan (aka "young Leonardo DiCaprio") plays a businessman named Lockhart (no first name, a trope in movies that annoys the fuck out of me) who is sent to the Swiss Alps to retrieve a senior member of his firm from a wellness spa that the older business man went to for a vacation and then just refused to leave.

After he is told that he won't be able to see the man he came for, Lockhart gets into a car accident on his way back down the mountain, and winds up basically a prisoner of the strange spa: with his leg in a cast, he has few options for escape. The spa is run by Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), who believes in the curative powers of water--and the first minute he encourages Lockhart to drink up, we know something is wrong with the H2O. 

A Cure for Wellness starts strong but quickly falls apart when Lockhart discovers the secret of the spa (which is painfully obvious long before it is officially revealed). The film has beautiful and disturbing imagery, mixing a little body horror in with the psychological tension. But by the film's final third, it's more ridiculous than scary. I have a weird interest/possible slight kink (?) for the concept of medical spas where sinister treatments are performed for "your own good", so this movie seems made for me. But alas, I think A Cure for Wellness has more style than substance.

Grade: C

***

Sator

Sator is a low-key horror flick about a demon that haunts a family. Spoiler alert (or maybe not): the demon is a metaphor for mental illness. Sator is one of about 10 horror movies I can name off the top of my head where the subtext is all about what we inherit from our parents and what we pass down to our kids. It's a trend!

I would say that Sator, which stars a bunch of unknowns, is effectively spooky, but ultimately forgettable. It opens on an elderly woman, Nani (June Peterson, the director's actual grandmother), discussing with surprising frankness, an entity named "Sator" who basically would jump into her head and tell her stuff, which she would then write down. The film hops between Nani's house, where family members congregate to help her out, and the little cottage out in the woods where Adam (Gabriel Nicholson), one of Nani's grandsons, lives. It becomes apparent that both Nani and Adam's mother had the "gift" of communing with Sator, and Adam knows he is next in line. He seems to be trying to avoid his fate by living alone in the woods. But just as family history tends to catch up with you, it's only a matter of time before Sator sinks his claws into Adam.

Definitely recommended for horror buffs, especially those who like the slow-burn style of horror, I would say that Sator is a fine but not great horror movie. 

Grade: B

***

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women was a sweet surprise. It is your typical Hollywood biopic, but with more bondage and threesomes. So, even though it's about the creator of Wonder Woman, this is not a movie for the kiddies. 

Professor William Moulton Marston was a teacher of psychology at Radcliffe and Harvard in the early 20th century (which functioned as "his and hers" schools back when most colleges were single-sex). He and his wife, Elizabeth, invented the lie detector machine as well. Long story short: they both fell in love with their student assistant, Olive, and the throuple begin living and raising babies together. This leads the Marstons to being fired from their positions, which spurs William Marston to create Wonder Woman and sell her to DC Comics as a way to make ends meet, but also to get his propaganda before the eyes of children. Yes, Wonder Woman was--in her creator's eyes--propaganda designed to get little boys comfortable with the idea of female supremacy. Marston truly believed that women were the ideal sex to run the world and that we would all be living in a female-dominated society by now (ha. ha.) He also believed that in order for people to be comfortable with submission, submission needed to be pleasurable. Thus, all the scenes of bondage in the Wonder Woman comics (see the end of this blog post for a taste).

So Marston was a poly, kinky fucker who invented one of the most iconic super heroes of all time. Pretty wild story, right? What's perhaps even more surprising is that after Marston's death in 1947, Olive and Elizabeth stayed together until Olive's death in 1985. This truly was a triad-style relationship, by all accounts, and not just two women humoring their man. 

Although the movie is highly corny at times, it's a rare "mainstream" movie that completely normalizes poly relationships and kink. There are those in the poly and kink communities who don't want poly and kink to become "normalized" since the idea is to reject traditional relationship styles and the pressure to be monogamous, vanilla, etc. However, I tend to be of the mindset that so-called "non-traditional" forms of loving (between consenting adults) should be normalized because guess what--there is no such thing as normal! And I think it's good for people to be exposed to ideas like the concept of loving multiple people at once, or that ropes and pain can be a healthy form of sexual expression, because if these ideas are kept in the shadows, it's easy to dismiss them as wrong and sick. But the only "sick" thing is when adults are societally pressured into lifelong choices that aren't right for them.

So, the movie itself gets a "B", but I'll throw in the plus since it does God's work of making kink and poly a little less scary and a little more...intriguing.

Grade: B+

***

City Island

City Island is a pleasant little comedy about a family of New Yorkers (or New Yahk-ahs, if you prefer) who each have one or more secrets they're hiding from the rest of the fam. Daughter Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) has dropped out of college and is working as a stripper--a revelation she knows would deeply upset her parents, neither of whom have college degrees. Son Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller) has a secret kink for large women and starts spying on his plump neighbor when he discovers that she has a website dedicated to making and eating large feasts. 

Mom Joyce (Julianna Margulies) is dissatisfied with her marriage and feels like her husband, Vince (Andy Garcia), is keeping secrets from her. And boy howdy, is he. Dad Vince has two secrets--one, he's taking a weekly acting class but is hiding that from Joyce and telling her it's a weekly poker game. But the second secret is that two decades ago, he fathered a child. That child is now all grown up and... residing in the very prison that Vince works at as a security guard! Vince finds out that Tony (Steven Strait) is technically allowed to be out on parole, but has no family that will take him. Without revealing the secret of his parentage, Vince offers to take Tony in and give him a job fixing up an old boathouse in Vince's backyard. Vince does not consult his wife on this. Or tell her that Tony is, in fact, Vince's son. 

Obviously, all these secrets come to a head and are revealed in the final act, which brings the family closer together than ever before. It's a really sweet film and reminded me a bit of The Slums of Beverly Hills with its lived in, comfortable take on family relationships. It's nice to watch a movie where you just know everything is going to work on in the end. A nice palate cleanser after some of the nastier films I usually watch. 

Grade: B

***

These were in the original comics, you guys. 

Yeah, I know, right?

The COVID Diaries--Part 14

 Movies: various

Here is what I am watching (so far) during the quarantine for COVID-19.

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Crip Camp

Crip Camp, which is a documentary by Nicole Newnham and James LeBrecht, gives the audience an inside glimpse into Camp Jened--a summer camp in upstate New York for teens with disabilities. Camp Jened opened in the 1950s and ran until 1977. It provided a place for teens and young adults who had disabilities such as cerebral palsy, spina bifida, and complications from polio to just be themselves during a time in which people with disabilities were at best treated like children and at worst social pariahs.

Watching Crip Camp did a rare thing for me: it made me cry. Not tears of pity (yuck!) but tears of joy at watching the archival footage of young people experiencing freedom, self-expression, romance, and much more possibly for the first time in their lives. The first half of the film mostly focuses on the freewheeling ways of the camp, which included campers smoking pot alongside their counselors, experiencing first kisses (and more), and expressing  themselves through music, arts, and sports. 

The second half of the film zeroes in on Judy Heumann, a former camp counselor who became a disability rights activist who was involved in so many fights for disability rights, that I'll just link her Wikipedia page and let you explore for yourself. It also followers some of the other former campers who worked alongside Judy to reach such achievements as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. 

I really can't recommend this movie enough. I didn't know a ton about the history of disability rights, so not only was it a joyful, fun, and funny documentary--it was also very enlightening and inspired me to want to learn more.

Grade: A

***

American Psycho

This was a rewatch for me, and I have to say that American Psycho just isn't my favorite. Believe it or not, it's really not that gruesome (I've seen horror films with MUCH more graphic carnage). Being a satire, American Psycho is more funny than anything else. I think the humor stems from the incongruity of Patrick Bateman being a complete dork (Huey Lewis sucks. What is wrong with this guy's musical taste?) and also a prostitute-murdering psychopath. 

I've only read chunks (pun intended) of the book and, look, it takes a lot to gross me out but I will give it to Bret Easton Ellis: you got me buddy. I couldn't read your damn book because it's fucking disgusting. Ya happy?! But director Mary Harron explicitly said that she wanted to excise some of the violence from the story and focus more on the dark humor, and I think she achieved her goal. 

I think people will mostly self-select into watching this movie. If you're the kind of person who would be interested in American Psycho, you've probably already seen it, and if you're the kind of person who is squeamish about violence, I don't think I'm going to convince you. 

Grade: B

***

Piercing

I was really disappointed in this 2018 horror-thriller. It was directed by Nicolas Pesce, who also directed the supremely creepy The Eyes of My Mother. The movie is based on a book Ryu Murakami who also wrote Audition. So, the horror pedigree for this film is flawless.

Sadly, I found the movie boring and unoriginal. Reed (Christopher Abbott), who is a husband and new father, has a fantasy of murdering someone. So, on a business trip, he hires a prostitute, Jackie (Mia Wasikowska), to act out his demented dream (unbeknownst to her, obviously). Turns out, Jackie is kind of nuts and randomly starts stabbing herself in the thigh, forcing Reed to take her to the hospital. She then invites him back to her home, but discovers what he is up to and turns the tables on him.

Although Abbott and Wasikowska are excellent actors, their chemistry is far too dull to pull off what should be a cat-and-mouse game of a film. Instead, Piercing is a movie that really wants to be transgressive, but just feels derivative and a bit boring. Only recommended for superfans of horror.

Grade: C

***

Eyes Without a Face

The history of the French horror classic Eyes Without a Face is interesting. By today's standards, the film is more beautiful and atmospheric than anything else, but in 1960 it was pretty shocking--especially one scene in particular which admittedly I was surprised got past the censors in its heyday. 

The film was released in the United States under the name The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and marketed as a schlocky b-movie, which is wild because I've seen schlocky b-movies from the 50s and Eyes Without a Face isn't anything like them. It's about a young woman whose face is horribly scarred due to a car accident and whose father--a doctor--keeps attempting face transplants by kidnapping young women and removing their faces to graft onto his daughter's face. The "spooky" part of the movie is when the daughter, Christine, wears a custom mask that gives her face a poreless, expressionless appearance. Hence, eyes without a face (yes, the excellent Billy Idol song was inspired by the movie). 

While by no means a great film, Eyes Without a Face is pretty solid for early 1960s horror and is just a beautiful and strange film to watch. Classic cinema buffs should definitely add it to their queues. 

Grade: B

***

Wonder Boys

Another rewatch for me. Wonder Boys was my muthafucking JAM in like, 9th and 10th grade. I already loved the concept of "college" even though I wasn't there yet. So a movie about a pot-smoking English professor who drives around with baby gay Tobey Maguire was basically catnip to me (I was very into gay men at this time in my life). 

Rewatching this was fun, although some of the jokes don't land well in 2021, especially the entire subplot about Robert Downey Jr.'s "transvestite" date in the first third of the film. There's also some weirdness with RDJ, who plays a hilarious and naughty book editor, having sex with aforementioned baby gay James Leer (Tobey Maguire) despite being a lot older than him, but I'm going to assume everyone is over 18 and consenting. 

But other than that, the film holds up. The acting is phenomenal and how couldn't it be with a stacked cast including Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, RDJ, the Tobes, Katie Holmes, and Rip Torn? I will admit that some of the aspects of the film that felt intensely profound to me as a 15 year old now feel a little...cheesy? But in general the beauty and goofiness of Wonder Boys holds up.

Grade: A-

***

Terrifier

What's more scary than a clown? How about a chainsaw-wielding serial killer clown? Terrifier is an indie-horror film by Damien Leone that follows Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a clown that looks scary as fuck and doesn't speak. 

Tara (Jenna Kanell) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) are two besties out late on Halloween night. They stop at a pizza place for a slice so that they can sober up to drive home. At the pizza place, they see Art, who is in full costume. But that's not *too* strange since it is Halloween. When they go back to their car, they see that the tires are slashed. While waiting for Jenna's sister to pick them up, Jenna goes into an abandoned apartment building to use the bathroom. Clown terror ensues. 

Terrifier isn't particularly inventive: a clown chases a girl around and kills multiple people. One of the kills in particular is horrifically gruesome. But the movie isn't scary-scary, ya know? It's just your run-of-the-mill slasher that you'll gasp during and promptly forget about a week later (if you're me, at least). I would recommend it for horror aficionados looking for a couple hours of bloody entertainment. But otherwise, you can pass on this one.

Grade: B-

***

Hard Candy 

Talk about a feel-bad film. Hard Candy came out in 2006 and stars Elliot Page (acting under his deadname at the time) as Hayley Stark, a 14-year old girl, and Patrick Wilson as Jeff Kohlver, a 32-year old photographer. It opens on the two of them flirtatiously chatting online and deciding to meet in real life. 

The first chunk of the film seems like a straightforward story of a predator grooming a young victim--Jeff buys a gift for Hayley, lets her come to his apartment, and offers her screwdrivers to drink. But after the first 20 minutes or so, the truth is revealed: Hayley roofies Jeff's drink and he wakes up tied to a chair. She's more than a 14-year old girl--she's a hunter of pedophiles, and Jeff is fucked. 

The rest of the film is an incredibly intense cat-and-mouse game in which Hayley psychologically (and physically) tortures Jeff in order to find out his secrets and punish him for his behavior. While it's not easy to sympathize with a pedophile, the movie is a little hard to watch and really serves as a revenge or justice fantasy for people who, well, hate pedophiles. I think it's a testament to the acting ability of Page and Wilson that they make you really volley back and forth over whether you feel bad for Jeff--who is, in fact, a monster--or not. 

Hard Candy is a psychological thriller and is not for everyone, especially if violence and discussions of child abuse are triggering for you. 

Grade:  B

***

High Fidelity

And here's another rewatch. I've seen High Fidelity (the film, not the Hulu series) many times. I remember thinking Jack Black's character was so funny, that I would randomly think about his lines in the movie and start laughing uncontrollably. Upon rewatching, Black is easily the best part of the movie. His character, Barry, is as gregarious and offensive as ever. Speaking of offensive, High Fidelity wears its age like an aging hipster dad wears a nose ring: cringingly. What I mean to say is that while High Fidelity still has a general aura of cool, given the excellent performances and general coolness of a plot about a guy who owns a record store (not to mention the very good soundtrack), the sexism and condescension of the characters (and film itself) ages it quite a bit.

John Cusack plays Rob, a 30-something record store owner whose long-suffering girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjejle), finally dumps him because 1) he won't commit and 2) she's going places whereas he's going nowhere. It's a movie about a man-baby years before Judd Apatow made man-babies de rigueur. Rob deals with his misery by revisiting his old "top five all-time breakups" and derives comfort by discovering that the women he once thought were so great are just kind of "meh" in retrospect. 

Let's just say it how it is: Rob is sexist. When he finds out Laura might be sleeping with the vegan hippy-dippy dude who used to live upstairs (Tim Robbins in a wonderful cameo), he flips out on her. When she tells him she has not, in fact, had sex with Mr. Vegan, Rob celebrates by...having sex with a new partner! Boys will be boys, right?! Rob also tells the audience about his anger at finding out that women only save the nicest pairs of their underwear for when they're going to sleep with someone. Oh, I'm sure your underwear is all super sexy and not just 15 pairs of hole-y tightie whities, ROB.

Still, the nostalgia factor is in High Fidelity's favor (heck, I loved the movie so much in high school I even read the book it was based on). It's a solid comedy, ok? It's not great, and it's not going to be one for the history books (The 40 Year Old Virgin, on the other hand? Stone cold classic), but if you can accept the imperfections, it's still an enjoyable movie. Not anywhere near my top 5 though.

Grade: B

In Vino Veritas

 Movies: Another Round

"To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems!"

~Homer J. Simpson

Films that deal with alcohol use tend to go one of two ways: either the booze is an accelerant for good/crazy times, like in any movie about college, weddings, celebrations, etc, or alcohol is shown as a crippling drug that ruins lives, such as in films like Smashed, The Lost Weekend, and Days of Wine and Roses. Another Round, directed by Thomas Vinterberg, is the rare film that takes a more balanced approach to alcohol. 

This Danish dramedy stars the incomparable Mads Mikkelsen as Martin, one of four friends--all male, all teachers at the same high school, and all middle-aged--who are finding life a bit boring lately. Martin, especially, is clearly depressed. At a dinner out to celebrate Nikolaj's (Magnus Millanj) 40th birthday, quiet Martin bursts into tears after a couple glasses of champagne. He is a mess: his marriage has lost its spark, he is no longer the inspiring history teacher respected by his students that he once was, and he's just tired and worn down. The other men agree and Nikolaj's suggests a rather wild experiment to see if the friends can get their collective groove back: he cites the work of Finn Skarderud, a psychiatrist who posits that humans are born with a blood alcohol level 0.05% too low, and actually function and work best with a glass or two of alcohol in them at all times.

The friends set down some rules for the experiment: they will *only* drink during working hours on Monday-Friday and will stop drinking at 8pm on weeknights and not drink on the weekend. Since they are only supposed to be operating with a BAC of 0.05%, they will aim for one unit of alcohol per hour, on average.

So, uh, this leads the men to bring water bottles of vodka to the high school (!!!) they work at and teach while ever-so-slightly inebriated. Man, only in Denmark! 

They discover that the experiment...works! Martin goes back to being the cool, loose, funny teacher he was before. Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), a gym teacher who coaches boys soccer outside of school, connects with one lonely kid--nicknamed "Specs" due to his glasses--and inspires him to play fearlessly on the field. Likewise, Nikolaj and Peter (Lars Ranthe) find that their lives are improving also. 

So they decide, "if a little alcohol is good, more must be better!". Because that's how alcohol works, right? This is where the movie starts to move into "after school special" territory. As the friends up their alcohol intake, they begin to face consequences. This culminates in an evening where they "experiment" by drinking as much as they possibly can to "see what happens" (I mean, did these dudes even go to college?). Well, Martin's wife kicks him out, Nikolaj pisses the marital bed, Tommy comes to work drunk, and I can't remember what happens with Peter because he's kind of the boring one of the group. But I assume he had a wicked hangover the next day.

This is where I had an issue with Another Round: not that it showed the consequences of drinking too much--in fact, I'm actually quite glad the film did that--but that it expected the audience to believe that four grown ass men wouldn't realize that drinking nearly every day, more and more, and while at work wouldn't lead to a dark place*. It's almost like these men are space aliens who are like "we are experimenting with the substance known as "alcohol" that earthlings seem to love. What will happen?" The entire premise of the film is pretty unbelievable in the first place--would all four men really agree that drinking at their job (A HIGH SCHOOL!!!) could be a fun experiment? Martin, in particular, seemed to be a teetotaler or only occasional drinker who jumped right into bringing booze to work. It just stretches the limits of believability.  

The film gets even darker than a night of drunken revelry before the end, and I won't go into what happens to avoid spoilers. But I found the final third of the film pretty jarring in how it went from very dark to the final scene of Mads Mikkelsen dancing (and drinking) alongside his graduating seniors in a moment of pure euphoria and lust for life. The final scene is a delightful one, but it comes so quickly after some really intense shit that it just feels like whiplash. I think Vinterberg really could have done a better job on pacing in this movie.

Overall, Another Round is a celebration of life and a reminder that you're never too old to change things up. It also has a message buried deep inside that you don't actually need drugs to get high. You can apparently get high on life, even in Denmark. Despite the somewhat implausible plot and pacing issues, I found Another Round charming--most of the credit goes to Mikkelsen who could read a phone book for two hours and still be a compelling actor. 

Grade: B+ 

*I want to be clear that I'm not saying it's implausible for someone to develop a drinking problem (at any age) without really even being aware that that's what's happening. That happens all the time, and is very serious (and nothing to be ashamed of!). In the case of this film, it's about four guys who by all accounts seem to be average-to-occasional drinkers who latch onto the wild idea that drinking at work will be a good thing and kind of peer-pressure each other into going along, and drinking more and more. It was as if they barely knew how alcohol worked. That was what I found implausible.