Hard Truths (2024)

This movie might do more without dialogue than many films do with words. So much of this film's dialogue is unkind and ingracious words that the non-verbal scenes bring attention and relief. And this film is beautiful and tragic by these two contrasts intertwining.

Sometimes life has hard truths and scars run deep, so the healing involves pain to try to address the core issues. 

Pansy is a 60-something African-English woman who has the temperment of a traumatized small dog. She barks at anything that moves, is paranoid that the world is too big and mean for her, and so rarely ventures outside her pristinely clean house. She has Curtley, a henpecked plumber ,for a husband and Moses, her 22-year old unemployed quiet giant of a son. She berates them day and night for whatever they are doing to exist in her house and disturb her peace.

In contrast, Pansy's  53-year old sister, Chantelle, is a hairdresser and single mom to two daughters near their twenties. Their scenes have such intimate joy and pleasure, it is hard not to feel like a fourth member of an in-group in their element. Chantelle's clients feel heard and supported in her chair, and tell her about her lives and hopes with their relationships in life.

These two sisters are the core of the movie, and how they handle day-to-day life and conflict. Pansy's interacts with the world with the sensitivity of an open wound, raising tension with her personal thunderstorm in her wake. Chantelle isn't perfect, but her wake is more of a gentle rain to soothe the soul. Chantelle wants Pansy to visit their mother's grave on a Mother's Day Sunday, urging her to leave her house, do something together, and share a meal.

I saw the trailer for this film in a theater and it looked like a hard pill to witness and swallow. And it is, but I didn't see the representation that was Chantelle and her slow honey from a spoon. Grace is patient and steady, and has a habit of catching those quick to anger by surprise.

I am so glad that I saw this film, though it pulled no punches on the speed bag of cutting remarks, it held in the moments and showed love and compassion in the face of deep fear and careless hatred. The last scene lingers with unspoken tension, and lets the audience sit without commentary for how it will be resolved.

All That Jazz (1979)

I watched "All That Jazz" tonight. I do believe this is one of the most insane accomplishments caught on film.  I am beside myself with awe at the ego and audacity to write something like this and the sheer determination and humble exhibitionist grit to pull it off.

Bob Fosse. I had heard of this choreographer's work before, but had never experienced it. And this is a movie about effortless perfection, and the cost of a body and soul to reach that ideal. 

The film follows Joe Gideon, a creative genius who has spent his whole career defying gravity as a director, choreographer, and writer. But Gideon's story is like multiple Greek characters in their glorious blessing and cursedness at once. Straining ever higher towards the sun like Icarus, with a restless partying hedonism like Dionysus in Gideon's downtime, and the fate of Tantulus in everything at which he grasps is just out of reach of his desire. He has the Midas touch, but his perfectionist tendencies come with a heavy weight of time to carry out.

The film allows for Gideon's genius to be undeniable and yet exasperating in that working with him brings others to justified tears. By the time his vision is realized, yes, he has managed to sharpen it, but it is branded with his stamp of style, burning every stable relationship he has as fuel to his fire, all with catchy songs and choreo to his fever dream downfall. It is cutting, brilliant, and tragic. Everything is firing at all levels to see this guy's workaholic efforts consume him in his glorified work. It is a metaphor realized and made flesh. I don't know how someone has this vision to tell this honest story and then the ability to make it be accurately depicted and shown.

I don't think I will ever want to watch it again. It is insanely well made in every frame. But it is an enchanting mirror like in the fable of the Ice Queen, where ugliness is amplified and you cannot remove the mote from your eye. Everything works here from the music to the dancing to the performances. It is a staggering work of creative brilliance and the broken bodies and minds it leaves to pick up the wreckage when that flame is snuffed and the music dies away. It is a haunting tale to see myself in the film, knowing the director has managed to convey the agony and ecstacy, the loneliness and insatiability of having the best taste in every room you enter and having to shape the flawed people around you into suitable tools to reach that vision. I can't live this way and yet now that I know it is possible to do something like this? What excuse have I not to give it my best shot to craft a shadowplay of whatever was accomplished in this piece of work?

Next Exit (2022)

I am not doing this on purpose, but this is another piece of media about people driven by self-annihilation. I heard about this indie movie on the Feeling Seen podcast hosted by Jordan Crucchiola, when the guest was Rahul Kohli, who was promoting this film. It sounded interesting and I was vaguely familiar with the actor as a Twitter lightning rod for his strident opinions on mostly benign topics that somehow hit viral nerves.

Anyway. This film is premised on a world in which a recent scientific discovery pierces the veil of the afterlife, causing everyday people to get windows of interaction with the shades of the dearly departed. The leading researcher in the field is stationed in San Francisco, and is accepting participants in a "right to die" waiver to track them into the afterlife for study. Two volunteers cross paths in a New York car rental and have under a week to get across the country to make their appointments.

This could be framed as a black comedy with the brevity of my description, but it is more like a mirror image of "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles", except only in an automobile. The two characters are Blossom Rose, who is haunted by her past and Teddy, who is haunted by his lack of a memorable one. Both are hoping that the opportunity to be a ghost will solve their unresolved selves to be at peace with their respective lives. But Teddy haunts Rose with his optimism about making something of his life by being a pioneerij the study of death. And Rose refuses to live but can't go through with ending her own life, so she determines to push away any hope or connection with others, like a cursed Jonah crying to be swallowed by a whale.

I am intrigued by stories about people wanting to be unusual things, and this one explores what could drive a person to want to become dead, even as they have to sit with this decision while on a long drive with a stranger with the same destination. It takes a while, as that is the nature of car trips, and their respective masks and walls begin to dissolve. They were not always hopeless or full of blustery gallows humor, there are memories at their core that they gradually admit to each other. "I was not always this way, but something happened to me and I was overwhelmed by its shadow. I can't see the light outside this dark veil shutting out sunlight and life. I could have been different, but I am me."

The scenery through the car windows along their journey is lovely and gave me wonderlust. The soundtrack builds quiet moments as these two have to weigh their decision for these to be their final days. There is small stories pondering what life means in the wake of this discovery of a shadowed afterlife. What this means for faith and criminal behavior declines in the curiosity of whether there will be consequences for a life when considering the afterlife as a probable fact.

It is a film about death that speaks honestly on what it means when a person chooses to live rather than to fade into a shade or shadow in a cloud of quiet despair and darkness.

We Could Be Rats - Emily Austin

I picked up this book for its title off a library shelf. It was a hardcover book with a pink dust jacket and images of sketched people in blue on a amusement park giant swing.

The contents of the book concern self removal at the least inconvenience to the schedule of other people's lives. It is apologetic and tells anecdotes from a small town childhood where the protagonist and her sister have to navigate a volatile household of parents constantly fighting. The reader learns of the family and people in this small town through the lens of scenes throughout the life of a twenty year old high school dropout with a job at a discount store. There are sweet gems of moments of joy, and honest moments of struggle to communicate just why the road has led to this irreversible, but ultimate conclusion to leave this mortal plane at such an early age.

The older sister of the suicidal young lady handled the trauma of waking on eggshells by trying to appease and make peace, avoiding triggers of conflict. This caused some strain as the younger sister is constantly blundering into triggers, setting off emotional bombs and being blamed for the mess of shrapnel in her wake.

The sisters are both shaped by this household, by their mutual love of their grandmother, who has been an anchor in their stormy waters, and their aunt who was an occasional lifeboat with one oar to try to have a temporary break from the unstable ship, but could only circle them back to where they started.

The older sister headed off to college, as an escape from the small town and it's gravity, leveraging her perfectionist path of coping skills and practice of navigating people's moods.

The book shifts gears both light and heavy with deftness and care. People are imperfect, and can let you down in disappointment from the dreams of how it could be if they cared to stop and listen.

I found this a fast read and tender in a broken spirit of things found too late, and held up like a kaleidoscope to try to make sense of a mundane and monotonous world.

Maniac Magee - Jerry Spinelli

How do you describe this book? It is about a legendary kid, with threadbare sneakers and breakneck speed. It is about an absolute innocent savant, a male Pippi Longstocking. Except he doesn't have a house, a horse, and isn't a shameless liar. He is just Jeffrey "Maniac" Magee, a kid who runs off the page and into the prejudice of a small, divided town.

I read this book as a preteen kid and it captivated me. Rarely do I see an immediate need to reread a book, but this had me in a chokehold for about a year and a half. It was told like a tall tale, but had moments of vulnerable poverty of soul and spirit as this homeless 12 year old survives through persistent and unrelenting sweetness, to take shelter from those with a spare seat, cot, moment, and have their lives changed and beliefs shaken by this strange vagabond child.

He is an athletic savant, with quick reaction time, and blazing speed, who is like Pablo Sanchez in Backyard Sports, preferring to lead with actions and not words. He is beloved by young kids, who see themselves in this innocent big kid who does not understand skin color or cultural mores, as he untangles their "rat nest" shoelace knots and patiently reads story after story to them. He is a paradox who refuses to attend school, but has a voracious love of reading; a kid who is a prodigy at running, but has nowhere to go; a kid who longs for a home, but can't stand still long enough to be pinned down; a kid who loves so hard that he doesn't understand hatred.

He wanders through people's lives like a modern kid Jesus, blessing them with his gifts, but unsettling whispers surround him that "It is straight up unnatural that the kid is the way he is. No one is that good, he must be hiding something awful." He is not a tame kid, but he is good. And though his footsteps are quick, he can't outrun a sorrow fate from the bitterness in the hearts of man.

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021)

I was haunted by the eerie resonance to the world building of Jane Schoenbrun's "I Saw The TV Glow". Which intrigued me even with the trailer for whatever it was. And then I heard a podcast host mention the same weird identification to that director's work, in the atmospheric sense of unfamiliar familiarity to the specificity of the subject. And the host recommended checking out the director's previous film, as it had similar seeds of the most accurate depiction to "the experience of being extremely online".

"I saw the TV Glow" encapsulated being obsessed by a niche piece of media culture at a formative time and how powerful a connection that is to share when you are seen by someone else who shares that exposure. How deep and fragile that bond rests as you explore how it shaped your personality and perspective to where you arrived now. There are people who root their identity to things they saw and admired and wanted to embody for themselves. And when you are rooted in something mainstream, that can be a broader connection to others. But what if your formative experience was to something obscure and fleeting? At best, it might be a pop culture thing that might have a resurgence in niche nostalgia to laugh at it being dated in its time.

But this film, this earlier work by Jane, yeah, I can understand some threads, but this is much more small scale in scope and narrowed vision. While "TV Glow" has a parallel in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and other, even more doomed teen TV pilots and shows. "World's Fair" is influenced by "LonelyGirl15" and other niche online video communities and creepypasta forums. 

It is a matter of timing for being caught in the wave and riding it down a rabbit hole of specific momentum in tandem with others in a chatroom of private and long distance Marco Polo with a specific password and frequency. For people in this period, they heard about a specific online trend of a "horror role playing game", documented through an uploading an online video of repeating "Wanting to go to the world's Fair" and shedding a small amount of blood while watching a specific video. Something between Bloody Mary/Beetlejuice and The Ring. Then the participants continue to document what changes in their lives over time by performing this ritual.

The main character is in her early teens and rehearses what she is going to do for the ritual at night before going live in her room and filming it. The perspective is from her MacBook camera into her room as a fixed shot. After she turns on the video, the activating video's colors wash over her face, illuminating and shadowing her place in an inconsistent pattern. It is extremely personal and unsettling to be this unfiltered. It is almost a relief to leave the room's fixed camera and see short fixed shots of the suburban town in the dead of fall, at various big box stores at the mall and the road of passing cars. Then a sequence of the main character walking along a fence in a handheld shot before switching to tracking her at a fixed distance behind like a normal walking shot.

Eventually, the camera shows her back in her room as she sets up her camera to take a video of her sleeping at night, trying to document what changes will happen from the ritual. But she can't sleep and starts looking up videos from other accounts who report going to the World's Fair and being changed. One guy is on a treadmill and his video title announces that "I CAN'T FEEL MY BODY", as he runs, he keeps slapping his face and not flinching. The video finished and queues up a follow up in the World's Fair participant playlist, where an attractive girl is smiling and making duck faces at the camera with a title of "I'm turning into plastic" and a description of "I don't know why it feels so good." The main character leaves her room and goes out to the barn, where she lays on a couch and watches an ASMR comfort video with a young lady stroking gently at the camera with long nails telling the viewer softly "You're okay. you can go to bed and have sweet dreams" as the camera changes angled to show the projector perched on a pool table and slowly pans in to the screen to be filled with the ASMR video. The video wraps up, queueing a followup video, one in which the main character, Casey, is featured in a still image from her first video we watched, distorted and with coal black eyes. Discordant music plays, and there is cuts to scrawled text that "You Are In Trouble" and "Please Talk to Me".

Casey gets up and stands in front of the screen. The next morning, she looks up that user and contacts them on Skype. This user goes by the moniker "JLB", is middle aged, and doesn't turn on their camera from showing a ghoulish sketch as a profile icon. They apologize that the video message was unsettling, but they couldn't find a better way to get Casey's attention to respondThere are long pauses in the conversation, as the user mentions that they only talk to serious game players and that there is deep lore and theories of the "World's Fair" and the effect it has on its participants. Casey is told to be careful and that she should contact the user if she has any questions, but to keep making videos to let them know her status in the process of her gradual horrific physical and/or mental metamorphosis.

And so begins a uniquely online and parasocial relationship between Casey as a content creator documenting her life in sporadic updates and JLB as a concerned commenter on the effect this "World's Fair" is having on her. The camera switches to JLB as they wrap up audio response videos and calls to Casey. And they live in an organized and stable large house, JLB seems to have a successful life aside from this niche community. But they are haunted by the rawness of Casey's unstable updates and care about her wellbeing.

The cinematography switches between video blog updates from Casey and other World Fair users who have various body horror elements and bizarre rambling stories of how the Fair changed them and also following Casey and JLB when they are not actively being recorded for content or calls. The lines between paranoia and real life begin to blur and the focus of the frame doesn't let you get grounded in scenes or dialogue outside the tension. There are long lingering scenes where nothing appears to happen and there is no dialogue, forcing the audience to sit and be uncomfortable wondering if there is any significance to a small detail changing our understanding of what is going on here.

The movie feels too personal and voyeuristic, the audience both knows too much about quiet moments and too little about the subjects to know a grounding context for what is true and what is performance here.

But in the final act, where the two main characters have another Skype call, this modern, awkward relationship is attempted to be navigated, with huge blind spots for the uneven nature of the extremely niche exposure they have to each other's lives. It is too accurate and unflinching, to have to witness this encounterto unveil what has been unsaid for so long. But the audience is a third party here and is at an extremely helpless disadvantage to be an active participant and satisfy a curiosity for what was happening and what the outcome of this whole thing could be.

 

I have spent time on social media, and, through trial and error, learned how to curate a persona which is a faceted extension of my identity, but not everything I am. Because everyone can wear masks in a masquerade and not everyone you meet is your friend. It doesn't do to be careless and risk exposure of your private life which is not for strangers to access. Information assymetry on the level you are willing to be comfortably known by what you reveal to be seen and understood. But this sometimes means I develop a fondness for others I encounter in the space when I am wandering these online environments and I care about their lives. I wish them well in their continued existence, but there is much about them that I know I do not know and should not have an entitlement to access. Some of them become inactive users and I have no way of reestablishing how they are doing. And no one in my offline life can quite comprehend the depth of this loss of an online companion who had amusing thoughts, witty banter, funny jokes, or interesting stories to relate. And I can't explain adequately to my real life friends and family the nature of things, because they were not there in the time and place, they don't have the context of the timing in which you find these people in these communities for a fleeting moment of season. They also can't speedrun an accurate accounting of key moments to understand the dynamic established, because that file can't be compressed like that, something was lost in trying to zip it up neatly for quick file transfer. Unpacking it in full would be likely an effective failure to transmit.

 

This film was uncomfortably accurate in what was shown and not said. It was universal in the silences to be received by those whose antenna were exposed to those frequencies at some point. Echoing resonance to the awkward memories of knowing this could be either very special and/or an extremely foolish interaction, a mutual ritual of a possible trust fall forward with both parties' eyes wide open to witness, in excruciatingly slow motion, if they will let you be shattered by falling through an illusion to an unforgiving ground of a reality check.

Boys Go To Jupiter (2025)

The equation is simple - Demi Adejuyigbe shared that he was part of this animated film in his Instagram story and I determined to watch it.

It was playing in an independent theatre nearby and I caught a showing today. The voice cast is studded and stuffed with comedic talent. The plot is that Billy 5000, a Florida high school student, drops out of school to exploit a currency glitch in a food delivery app. He hopes to make enough money to be able to move out from his nurse sister's garage. He has buddies who hang out and have no greater ambition than to snag cool stuff, freestyle rap original songs, and find out whether there is really an alien worm washed up at the local beach. There is a different plot concerning a local juice tycoon's difficulties with her brilliant, but unmotivated daughter who has vague ideas about capitalism's evils and wants to be called "Rozebud".

This movie is genuinely the most fun I have had at a movie this year. There are musical interludes and excellent bits of dialogue throughout. I was often delighted by how much space was given for time to breathe to sustain a joke or build anticipation in timing the set up for a new one.