Stuff I watched in...April 2025

Severance, season 2

The first season of Severance, the science-fiction show about people "severing" their memories in half so that their work selves have no knowledge of their non-work selves and vice versa, blew me away. It immediately became one of my top TV shows ever with its intriguing mix of dystopian world-building and gut-wrenching emotional depth.

Season 2 lost a bit of that season 1 shine, but there are three episodes in particular (episodes 7, 9, and 10) that hit it out of the park. We learn more about the fate of Gemma Scout/Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) in ep. 7, which treats us to flashbacks of Gemma and Mark's relationship as well as chilling scenes of how Lumon is using her now. Episodes 9 and 10 give a lot of airtime to one of the series' best characters, Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), a man who has given his all to Lumon only to receive disrespect in return.

Severance is a show that is not afraid to ask some pretty intense questions about human consciousness. The ability to be severed begs the question of what makes us us. Who would you be if you were "born" tomorrow as a full grown adult, but without any memories or experiences that would repress or influence your "true" personality? 

Grade: A-

***

What Lies Beneath

The last time I saw this supernatural homage to Rear Window I was in high school and it scared the hell out of me. I randomly rewatched it and really enjoyed it! Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford play Claire and Norman Spencer, a well-to-do middle-aged couple getting used to being empty nesters after their daughter heads to college.

Norman is a scientist who works at a university and Claire stays home in their absolutely gorgeous lakeside house in Vermont (in addition to being a spooky movie, What Lies Beneath is total house porn). Claire takes an interest in her new neighbors, Mary and Warren Feur, especially when it appears that there may be domestic violence occurring between the couple. With not much to do around the house, Claire becomes a bit obsessed with spying on the couple, leading to tensions between her and Norman.

However, there are darker secrets at play that are revealed in good time throughout the film. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, What Lies Beneath is a very satisfying homage to Hitchcock with a supernatural twist. It's also a rare movie where Harrison Ford plays a villain. Well worth checking out if you haven't watched it, or revisiting if you have.

Grade: B+

***

The Rule of Jenny Pen

This New Zealand horror film is absolutely bonkers and unlike any horror movie I've seen before. Geoffrey Rush plays Stefan Mortensen, an older judge who has a stroke and is forced to convalesce in an assisted living home since he has no family to help him. Mortensen is very intelligent and also quite arrogant. He sees himself as not like the other old folks in the care home who are in various stages of aging, dementia, and illness and has trouble making friends with them. 

Mortensen becomes suspicious of another resident, Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), who always has a puppet, named Jenny Pen, on his left hand. The employees at the care home think Crealy is a harmless old coot, but Mortensen comes to find out that Crealy used to be an employee at the very same home and uses his old access card to wander the home at night, torturing the other residents. The residents are terrified of Crealy and won't snitch on him. 

There are a fair number of horror films that focus on elderly people (Relic, The Manor, The Taking of Deborah Logan, and The Visit come to mind), but not like this one. The Rule of Jenny Pen taps into the fear of aging and losing independence while also allowing the characters to retain dignity. But it's also a delightfully weird and surprisingly nasty little movie. Lithgow is genuinely scary as Dave Crealy--a sociopath with a captive group of victims to bully and abuse. Rush is sympathetic as a man who is frustrated by his situation and uses his superiority complex as a shield to protect himself from his fears of aging, disability, and death...but who eventually realizes that he wants to protect the other residents from the psycho roaming the halls. 

Many horror movies about elderly people either treat the geriatric population with kid gloves, or do the opposite and lean into eldersploitation, goosing the audience with images of adult diapers and drooling mouths. The Rule of Jenny Pen does neither: it shows that older folks can be just as brave and determined (or just as mean and violent) as anyone else, and it shows the hard realities of aging while never looking down on its subjects. 

Don't sleep on this one!

Grade: B+ 

***

The Game

I really thought I would like The Game since it is directed by one of my favorite directors, David Fincher. However, I was not impressed. The film is about a wealthy investment banker, Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), who is gifted a "personalized recreational experience" on his 48th birthday by his brother, Conrad (Sean Penn). 

Turns out, the "game" is basically a bunch of people trying to ruin your life to make you appreciate everything you have. It's kind of like Saw but with less razor wire. Van Orton is thrust into a series of situations which threaten his reputation, his money, and his life. 

Spoiler alert: he's totally fine! It's all a game. And it helps him appreciate his life a lot more and heal from his traumatic past. *farrrrttttt* This movie was boring. I found myself playing computer solitaire while watching it, which on the one hand was my choice and I could have paid more attention and possibly appreciated the movie more, but on the other hand, movies that are actually good tend to hold my attention and this one obviously didn't. Michael Douglas is kind of a drag in The Game. He underreacts a lot. If I was in the middle of "the game", I would be absolutely losing my shit. Crying, throwing up, curled up into a corner and rocking. Douglas just kinda...gets mad. He doesn't even yell that much! He just seems annoyed.

Fincher mostly turns out excellent thrillers: Gone Girl, Se7en, Zodiac...but this is one movie of his that I was bored by. I guess they can't all be winners!

Grade: C

Stuff I watched in...March, 2025

Anora

I didn't get a chance to see Sean Baker's Anora before the Academy Awards on March 2nd and when it sweeped with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay I was champing at the bit to see it. I think going into it with high expectations hurt my viewing of it a tiny bit. Don't get me wrong, it's a very good movie...but I can't say it blew me away.

Anora is about a 23-year old stripper/escort, Anora "Ani" Mikheeva, who meets 21 year old Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov at the strip club she works at. When he asks if she "works outside the club", she agrees to meet him at his insanely huge mansion and the two begin a relationship that starts as purely transactional but seems to deepen into something more. 

After a glamourous sex-and-drug-filled week in Vegas, Vanya reveals that his parents are making him return to Russia to start working for the family (it's unclear what exactly his family does, but it's very clear that they are oligarchs of some sort and have more money than God). On an impulse, Ani and Vanya decide to get married at one of those Vegas chapels so that Vanya doesn't have to leave. And they live happily ever after! The end!

LOL. Of course not. When Vanya's parents find out what happened, they send Vanya's godfather and some toughs to the mansion (which is, of course, owned not by Vanya, but by his parents) to force the couple to annul the marriage. Hijinks, both funny and sad, ensue. Ani slowly comes to grips with the immaturity of the man she married. The boy she married, really, because despite being of legal age, Vanya is still just a boy under his parents' thumb.

Anora is very funny, though at times it's a lot. There is a lot of screaming and yelling, which irritated me after a while. It's also a little hard to believe that Ani, ostensibly street smart due to her line of work, wouldn't realize that marrying Vanya is an incredibly stupid idea. But then we have to also consider that she's only 23, not yet cynical about the world, and is caught up in the fantasy of wealth and star-crossed love. 

If you're up for a funnier and sadder version of Pretty Woman, you'll likely enjoy Anora. Did it deserve Best Picture? In my opinion, no. But I'm not mad that it won.

Grade: A-

***

Tangerine

Immediately after finishing Anora, I watched Tangerine, which is also directed by Sean Baker and is also about sex workers...although Tangerine could not be more different than Anora. Tangerine is a very short, slice-of-life type of film about Sin-Dee Rella, a Black, transgender sex worker who is recently released from a month in prison and finds out that her pimp/boyfriend, Chester, is cheating on her. She goes on a quest to find the "fish" (cisgender woman) Chester cheated with and confront both of them.

Hijinks ensue. This is kind of Baker's whole vibe: hijinks ensuing. 

Tangerine is VERY funny and outrageous. It's interesting to compare it to Anora, which is also about a sex worker, but a higher end, white, cis sex worker. Sin-Dee Rella (played wonderfully by Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are basically homeless. They are streetwalkers. One bad day could mean ruin for them. Yet, they're also deeply protective of one another. When Sin-Dee is released from prison with 2 dollars to her name on Christmas Eve, she spends the 2 dollars on a donut that she gives to Alexandra as a Christmas gift. 

Sean Baker has come under criticism for his personal politics, but also about the way he portrays sex workers. Some people feel that he looks down on them, or essentially makes his bread off of "poverty porn". I can see that angle for sure, but I also think that he gives a voice to people that many wouldn't even give the time of day to. And he avoids the "hooker with a heart of gold" stereotype, instead portraying sex workers as three-dimensional people with flaws and strengths just like anyone else. I admire his work, even if it's not perfect.

Grade: B+

***

Eve's Bayou

This film, directed by Kasi Lemmons, had been on my "to-watch" list for a long time. It wasn't what I expected at all, but I still enjoyed it. The film poster makes it look like a sultry romance, but there isn't much romance to be found in this film at all.

The movie takes place in 1960s Louisiana. Eve Batiste (played by Jurnee Smollett) is 10 years old. One evening, at a party, she accidentally catches her father, a well-respected doctor, having sex with a woman who is not his wife. This freaks Eve out and her father, Louis (played by Samuel L. Jackson...miscast, in my opinion), convinces her she didn't see what she saw. Eve's older sister, Cisely (Meagan Good), who is very close with her father, also convinces Eve that she misunderstood what she saw.

During the rest of that summer, Eve spends a lot of time with her Aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), who has the gift of sight and tells fortunes for a living. Eve herself has the gift too, although she doesn't fully understand it yet. Eve's Bayou reminded me a bit of Practical Magic--another film that focuses on sisters and aunts and magical powers. But Eve's Bayou is far sadder and melancholic than Practical Magic. 

I wanted something more out of Eve's Bayou. I wanted it to be spookier and more empowering or something. It's a sad, Southern Gothic soap opera with some bewitching moments (such as when Mozelle tells Eve the story of when her husband confronted her lover, leading to tragic consequences), but overall the film felt a bit limp. 

Grade: B

***

The White Lotus, season 3

I was very impressed with the third season of The White Lotus, the anthology TV series that follows rich people at various "White Lotus" hotel locations around the world. Season 3 takes plan in Thailand and has some really fantastic actors: Parker Posey, Jason Isaacs, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins among them. 

I won't go into much detail since I can't review an entire season of television in a paragraph, but I'll mention a few things I found particularly interesting or well-done this season. There is a focus on spirituality in season 3 that I found very profound. Specifically, it's about the limits of spiritually and what happens when the shit really hits the fan. The two actors I was most impressed with this season were Jason Isaacs as Timothy Ratliff and Walton Goggins as Rick Hatchett. Timothy is a very wealthy financier who finds out that a former business partner just got busted for illegal activity that implicates Timothy. He spends the rest of the season contemplating how his and his family's life will change is he loses everything and ends up in prison. Rick is a middle-aged guy with a younger girlfriend who clearly has some heavy baggage due to the death of his father. He is in Thailand to try to find the man who killed his dad. And he'll go to any length to meet this man face-to-face.

Series creator Mike White (a bit of a controversial figure himself) walks a very fine line between satire and sincerity. There are a lot of moments in the series where you don't know if you're being encouraged to laugh at the privileged, entitled rich characters or the empathize with them. Or both. Say what you will about the series, it definitely gives three-dimensions to the majority of its characters, even when that means they disappoint us in the end.

Grade: A

***

The Pitt, season 1

I never watched ER and have rarely watched any medical shows (with Scrubs being the exception, although I've only seen a few seasons), so I was surprised when I found myself drawn to The Pitt, a show that takes place in real time during a very long shift at the Pittsburgh Medical Trauma Hospital. 

Noah Wyle plays Dr. "Robby" Robinavitch, the senior attending in charge of the day shift. On this particular day, he is supervising two medical students and an intern as well as a number of residents. The Pitt really throws you in the deep end with all the medical jargon and hierarchies. 

The thing about The Pitt that people will either appreciate or hate is that it takes time to give attention to social issues that impact medicine. For example, a Black woman is brought into the hospital tied to a gurney because she was exhibiting "drug-seeking behavior". Turns out, she has sickle cell anemia, which can cause agonizing pain. One resident recognizes this and treats her correctly. All of this is discussed out loud for the benefit of the viewer. Issues such as neurodivergence, fatphobia, drug addiction, and human trafficking come up throughout the day, making each episode have a bit of an "afterschool special" vibe. But despite some awkward exposition, I still think The Pitt fucking slaps. 

If you can handle a bit of medical gore, it's worth checking out. It's very bingeable. 

Grade: A

***

Yellowjackets, season 3

The first two seasons of Yellowjackets, about a girl's soccer team that ends up stranded in the Canadian wilderness, was the perfect blend of spooky and edgy. Cutting between two timelines, we saw the horrible things the girls had to resort to doing to survive in the woods and the aftermath of the survivors, trying to live normal lives 25 years later.

Season 3 has lost some of that magic. It opens during the springtime and shows the girls not just surviving, but thriving in the encampments they built after the cabin they discovered and lived in during the first two seasons burns down. I know this show isn't supposed to be realistic, but to me they were really pushing it with all the extra shit the girls seem to have made or found allowing them to do fancy crafts like paper lanterns. They also have a pen of animals like goats and sheep...do many goats and sheep roam in the mountains of Canada? I guess that's the supernatural part of the show coming to the forefront. 

Despite the show spinning its wheels a bit, it's still a really good time. My main beef is that it seems to be tilting more towards the ridiculous than the genuinely creepy in this season. But I'm going to keep watching! I just hope they get back on track in season 4.

Grade: B+