The COVID Diaries--Part 2

Movies: various

Here's what I'm watching during the quarantine for  COVID-19.

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Blow the Man Down

Written and directed by Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole, Blow the Man Down is an absolutely delightful, strange little comedy-thriller. The film takes place in Easter Cove, Maine--a small town that relies on fishing as its main source of income. Morgan Saylor and Sophie Lowe play sisters Mary Beth and Priscilla Connolly, whose mother just passed away, leaving them the family fish shop. On the night of the funeral, the sisters get into an argument and Mary Beth, the younger and more reckless of the two, leaves in a huff and goes to a local watering hole where she gets drunk with Gorski (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, whom you might recognize as Desi from Girls). When they arrive at Gorski's house, he pops the trunk and for a second, Mary Beth sees blood, hair, and women's clothing in the trunk. This leads to a scuffle where Mary Beth fights Gorski and ends up skewering him with a harpoon and beating his head in with a brick.


After coming clean to her sister, the two young women chop the body up and throw it into the sea, thinking that's the end of that. But when a different body--that of a local sex worker--washes ashore, the sisters get pulled into the dark underbelly of Easter Cove, which involves a local brothel run by Enid Devlin (Margo Martindale, amazing as always). The film slowly reveals secrets and betrayals among the matriarchs of the town (played by Martindale, June Squibb, Annette O'Toole, and Marceline Hugot--the film is packed with talented actresses).

Blow the Man Down has literally everything you could want in a movie: sea shanties, death-by-harpoon, a nearly all-female cast including a number of women over 60, thick New England accents, and fish guts galore! Basically, imagine if Manchester By The Sea was 100x funnier (but still dark) and didn't star an abusive asshole as the main character.

I HIGHLY recommend Blow the Man Down to all movie lovers.

Grade: A

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Safe

Well, I wouldn't recommend Todd Haynes' Safe to everyone, especially these days, but it is an absolute masterpiece. Though the film came out in 1995, it is set in 1987. Julianne Moore plays Carol White, a very wealthy homemaker who lives in a giant home in the San Fernando Valley with her husband and stepson. She is extremely timid and polite and spends her days ordering fancy furniture and lunching with her other housewife friends.

But Carol starts to feel vaguely ill, and overly sensitive to chemicals around her. It starts inconspicuously enough when she has a coughing fit after driving behind a truck emitting exhaust fumes. But soon she is having allergic reactions to everything: milk, pesticides, and her expensive new couch. Her doctor says nothing is medically wrong with her and her husband is annoyed by his wife's ailments. Carol finds a flier in her gym about chemical sensitively that leads her to stay at a retreat called Wrenwood, where people can strip away all the chemicals in daily life in order to reduce their chemical load--or "clear" as the call it.


Safe is ambiguous about Wrenwood. To the outside observer, the retreat is a chemical-free place for folks to heal. But the founder of Wrenwood, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), comes off as a cult leader, especially in his insistence that individuals cause their own sickness by being filled with anger, rage, and despair. To me, the bigger idea in Safe is that even though Carol is truly physically sensitive to chemicals, she's also spiritually sick. Her life is empty: she lives in a huge house with a husband who treats her more as a nuisance than as a partner. She spends her days with inauthentic people talking about fruit diets and baby showers. At Wrenwood, all of the luxuries of her life are stripped away and she has to confront herself head on.

Safe is a masterpiece of social commentary and how we tend to fill ourselves up with material possessions and mindless activities in order to blot out the yawning emptiness inside. In a way, Carol's illness is a gift since it no longer allows her to live a shallow, unthinking life.

Grade: A-

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Always Be My Maybe

I don't care for most romantic comedies. AV Club has a series called When Romance Met Comedy, which explores romantic comedies and their impact on culture. Scrolling through the entries in this series, I realize that nearly every movie they cover I either haven't seen or don't like. Why is this? I think I have two problems with the genre: 1) it's formulaic and 2) it's inauthentic. Real love doesn't look like romantic comedy, and I'm more interested and emotionally drawn to realistic depictions of love.

All this is to say that, yeah, the Netflix original Always Be My Maybe is a conventional romantic comedy. It has: misunderstandings that could be cleared up with one honest conversation, wise old people dispensing common sense, wacky sidekicks, cross-country travels in order to make grand gestures, annoying love interests the main characters have to dump in order to be with "the One". I could go on....but...

...but Always Be My Maybe has a trick card up its sleeve in the form of a dope and hilarious cameo that takes the movie from "meh" to actually kind of hilarious in the couple scenes this person is in. Ali Wong and Randall Park as Sasha and Marcus, the lovebirds at the center of the film, are really great (though it was weird to see Ali Wong doing PG-13 comedy) but this cameo, you guys. It makes the entire movie worth watching.

In conclusion: I am a monster that hates love, but loves cameos where famous actors portray asshole versions of their real selves. Always Be My Maybe is cute, sweet, at times laugh-out-loud funny even if it is formulaic and cliche-ridden.

Grade: B

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The Platform

And here we have the complete opposite of a sweet rom-com: a dystopian thriller/social commentary film that takes place in a vertical prison where a platform of food is sent down level by level--each lower levels gets the leftovers of the levels above, and of course because people people are disgusting, selfish animals, by the time it reaches the lower levels there is no food left.

The Platform is pretty fuckin' on the nose. You're telling me if people only took what they need in life there would be plenty for all? My mind is blown. But the movie gets points for capturing my attention and not letting go until the end. The main character is Goreng (Ivan Massague), an intellectual who trades six months in the prison for a college degree (which hints at, but maddeningly never fully explains, what the actual fuck is up with this prison in the first place). He wakes up in a cell with Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), a jaded old man who explains how this shit works. Each month, the two will wake up on another level--and there is no rhyme or reason to how high or low they go (i.e. you don't get to a higher level for good behavior...much like how social class works in reality).

You can probably guess what folks on the lower levels resort to in order to survive, but Goreng is different--he wants to find a way to send a message to everyone in the prison. To figure out how to get food to the lower levels and/or get the people at the top to figure out a new system.

As I said, The Platform is very unsubtle in its symbolism, but it's still an interesting, shocking film and one that I'm still thinking about a week after seeing it. It's not quite Snowpiercer, but it's worth a watch if you like sci-fi/horror/thriller.

Grade: B+