romance

Working Girl (1988)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Harrison Ford lately, mostly by happenstance. He’s in TV commercials promoting a new Captain America film as a tomato-red variation of The Hulk transformed by the magic of CGI. He’s lurking in the background of Awards Season ceremonies, disrupting live broadcasts with his signature geriatric-stoner aloofness. When I last went to the theater, he unexpectedly appeared against-type as a young, stone-faced villain in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Harrison Ford is everywhere, as long as you happen to be making the exact programming choices I am. So, when I was flipping through my stack of unwatched DVD purchases, I had to follow the pattern and watch the first movie that featured Ford’s handsome face on the cover: Mike Nichols’s late-80s romcom Working Girl, where Harrison Ford plays the lead romantic interest for star Melanie Griffith. Despite Ford’s lengthy screentime and central importance to the plot, it turned out to not be an especially great watch if you’re looking for pure Harrison Ford content. He’s mostly used as a sex-symbol prop, an object to be ogled. Like in my recent everyday life, he’s just kind of . . . there.

Besides the film being a star-vehicle for Melanie Griffith, the reason Harrison Ford doesn’t make much of a strong impression in Working Girl is that the cast is overflowing with a surplus of supporting players, of which he just happens to play the primary hunk. Alec Baldwin plays Hunk #2, a perfectly cast meathead himbo. Sigourney Weaver gives a hilariously broad performance as Griffith’s boss & romantic rival. Joan Cusack plays her even more eccentric bestie. Oliver Platt appears as her workplace enemy, a Wall Street slimeball. Kevin Spacey plays an even slimier Wall Street slimeball. David Duchovny shows up as a background player at her surprise birthday party. Working Girl has the kind of stacked cast of character actors that has you shouting “Holy shit, look who it is!” all the way until the final minute. The last one that got me was Suzanne “Big Ethel” Shepherd from A Dirty Shame delivering exactly one line as an unnamed receptionist in the final few minutes, one of two single-scene appearances from John Waters players, including an earlier appearance from Ricki Lake. Casting director Juliet Taylor was a real over-achiever, as evidenced by roping in someone as classically charismatic as Harrison Ford to just stand around and look handsome.

Working Girl is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy about a Staten Island party girl (Griffith) who struggles to be taken seriously in the Big Business world of Manhattan across the bay. She rides the ferry to work every morning in her stockings & tennis shoes, switches to the sensible heels stored under her desk, and struggles to keep her hairspray-sculpted lioness mane vertical while battling sexist stereotypes in the lion’s den of stock trading. Her big break arrives in the form of a broken leg, when her much more refined Manhattanite boss (Weaver) injures herself skiing and is briefly taken out of the picture. Our titular working girl makes a power move by taking over her boss’s life & wardrobe, Single White Female-style, and attempting to broker a major corporate-buyout deal with a hotshot fuckboy broker (Ford) before she’s discovered to be a fraud. After the movie comes dangerously close to kicking things off with a date-rape meet cute, they genuinely fall in love and a series of silly deceits & misunderstandings ensue. The entire two-hour runtime is dedicated to the contract negotiations of their singular business deal together, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is Griffith’s self-described persona of having “a head for business and a body for sin,” a line so perfectly written it belonged on the poster instead of in the dialogue.

Griffith’s sinful body is frequently put on display here, as lacy, overly complicated lingerie appears to be just as much of her Big Business uniform as her pencil skirt; she even vacuums in it. Harrison Ford is tasked to strip too, for a sense of balance, at one point taking a whore’s bath during a phone call in his glass-walled office while his female coworkers gawk & applaud. As a Reaganite cultural clash between the small-town vulgarity of Staten Island and the big-city sophistication of Manhattan, Working Girl is a little conceptually vague. As a collection of always-welcome faces, however, it’s exceedingly charming from start to end (Spacey excluded). You can tell it’s charming just by clocking that there are two overlapping cast members from Moonstruck featured here (Cher’s mom & Cher’s hairdresser), which is the undisputable masterpiece of this 80s NYC romcom subgenre. Harrison Ford is just one handsome face among many. He hadn’t yet learned how to be a dazed, scene-stealing agent of chaos, but thankfully there were plenty of other over-the-top performers around to pick up the slack (with Weaver & Cusack doing most of the heavy lifting in that respect).

-Brandon Ledet

Bratty Woman

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This year’s Best Picture winner at the Oscars was about a sex worker who foolishly allows herself to be swept off her feet by a fantasy romance proposal from a wealthy fuckboy client, clashing classic “Cinderella story” & “hooker with a heart of gold” tropes with the harsh, transactional realities of the modern world. There’s obviously a lot of Pretty Woman (1990) DNA running through Anora‘s veins, even if the older, schmaltzier film is distanced from its offspring by several decades and the entire length of the United States. As opposing coastal stories, both movies are appropriately anchored, with Anora playing the scrappy Brooklynite brat who throws stray punches at Pretty Woman‘s dream-factory Hollywood romance. They have too much in common to be purely read as polar opposites, though. Pretty Woman strut the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard so that Anora could clack its Lucite heels on NYC pavement. The former was rewarded with great box office returns & terrible reviews, while the latter is a niche art-circuit crowdpleaser that sneakily nabbed Cinema’s Top Prize despite a relatively meager scale & budget.

Julia Roberts sealed her status as a Hollywood A-lister by playing a fresh-faced streetwalker. She hooks a once-in-a-lifetime trick in the form of a sleepwalking Richard Gere, playing a slutty businessman who’s feeling numb & lonely after the recent loss of his father. Their single-night luxury hotel room tryst quickly escalates into a weeklong engagement for the lifechanging sum of $3,000 (a figure that provided the working title of the original screenplay) and then, eventually, a genuine proposal of marriage. In Anora, the modern fairy-tale romance of that premise unravels quickly & violently, leaving its titular sex worker scrambling to hold onto some compensation after blowing up her life for a dishonorable john. In Pretty Woman, the big-kiss acceptance of the proposal is the end-goal, a consummation of Roberts declaring she “wants the fairy tale” instead of being kept as an on-staff sex worker. The deal-sealing kiss is then punctuated by an unnamed observer on the street pontificating, “Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Everybody comes here. This is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t; but keep dreamin’. This is Hollywood.”

The original scripted ending of Pretty Woman had a distinctly Sean Baker touch, mirroring the end of The Florida Project with Roberts taking her fairy-tale romance to Disneyland. I doubt the toothless Gary Marshall’s version of that trip would’ve had the same dramatic or satirical impact as Baker’s, but they’re both consciously dealing in the same tropes & cliches. If anything, I don’t see Anora upending Pretty Woman‘s naive view of sex-worker-and-client romance; I just see it starting where Pretty Woman ends, logically teasing the story out past the rush of the first Big Kiss. Julia Roberts’s Vivian has plenty in common with Mikey Madison’s Ani throughout the movie. She’s just as defiantly bratty in the face of obscene wealth, and she’s just as friendly to fellow staff workers who serve the same clientele. Marshall mixes sex & slapstick in a way that recalls Baker’s sensibilities in Roberts’s first sexual act with Gere, having her initiate fellatio between giggling fits during an I Love Lucy rerun. I doubt even Baker would call Anora a refutation of Pretty Woman, given that Roberts’s declaration that her tryst with her new client is just like “Cinder-fuckin’-rella” might as well have been recited word-for-word in his version of the story.

Overall, Anora really is the better film. It’s got an anarchic energy that swings wildly from comedic confection to bitter drama within the span of a single scene, whereas Pretty Woman is almost pure confection. After Roberts’s & Gere’s first night together, they immediately slip into a comfortable, domestic dynamic, and most of their scene-to-scene interactions are genuinely romantic, like their Moonstruck trip to the opera or the john playing Vivian’s body like a grand piano. The darker notes of a rape attempt (from Gere’s sleazy lawyer, played by Jason Alexander) or a fellow sex worker’s body being discovered in a nearby dumpster are just illustrations of why the fairy-tale romance is necessary for Vivian, who will accept no less. Gary Marshall is working in tonal contrast there, while Baker lets opposing tones wrestle & tangle until they’re indistinguishable. The audience is scared for Ani in the same scene where we’re laughing at the bumbling incompetence of the male brutes keeping her in place. All we’re really allowed to feel for Vivian is pure adoration, only scared that Julia Roberts might hurt her back carrying the movie while Richard Gere shrugs & mumbles his way through the script. She does so ably, though, with a 3,000-watt smile.

-Brandon Ledet

Companion (2025)

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It’s no surprise that Companion is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the sweetly innocent girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she had a cute first meeting at a supermarket. The film opens on them making their way to the lakehouse of Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is the boyfriend of Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining for the weekend are Kat and Josh’s old friend Eli (Harvey Guillén), and Eli’s partner Patrick (Lucas Gage). After an awkward interaction between Kat and Iris that establishes Iris’s belief that Kat hates her isn’t all in her head, the group has a little dance party and Iris’s reaction to the story of Patrick and Eli’s own meet cute implies she may be overinvested in her relationship. Things go completely awry the next morning when Sergey attempts to assault Iris while the two are alone at the lake shore, with deadly results. 

I’m going to go into BIG SPOILERS here, even though I’m not sure we can even call them that, since the marketing for this film has largely given it away. In fact, one of the friends that I invited to the screening I attended spoiled herself from the trailer so much that she decided she didn’t even want to see it. It’s almost impossible to talk about this movie without getting into it. Still here? Okay. The title “Companion” isn’t just about Iris being Josh’s girlfriend; it relates to the fact that she is a gynoid girlfriend. If you manage to avoid being spoiled for this, as I was, this is foreshadowed several times. First, Iris awakens in the car when Josh says “Iris, wake up,” which doesn’t seem unusual at that time but later turns out to be her activation phrase (with its inverse being her sleep mode instruction). She’s also extremely polite to Josh’s self-driving car, which seems to bemuse him, and Kat later tells Iris that the latter’s existence makes her feel replaceable. The hints get thicker as the revelation approaches, like when Iris responds with precise temperature and forecast information when Josh asks her what the weather will be like that day. 

Iris herself is a model from the Empathix company, and although the companionship droids that they provide have safeguards built in—the same strength as a human of the same build, programming that prevents the droids from harming people or other living things, and an inability to lie—Josh has “jailbroken” her so that she responded with lethal force to Sergey. This is part of an elaborate plan between Josh and Kat to steal Sergey’s money, with Patrick and Eli in attendance to unwittingly provide corroborating testimony that Sergey was killed by Iris. When Josh reactivates Iris in order to “say goodbye,” he sets up his own downfall, as she is able to escape from the lakehouse and flee into the wilderness nearby, and Josh et al must track her down and reboot her before the police arrive in order to disguise his complicity in her reprogramming and ensure their impunity in Sergey’s death. 

Like Barbarian before it, this is an exciting ride with twists and turns beyond the initial reveal that Iris isn’t the girl she seems to be that propel the action along. Jack Quaid plays a variation on his 5cream character, the seemingly nice, perfect boyfriend who turns out to be a pathetic manchild whose motivations are driven by a sense of entitlement. In that slasher, it was that he was a superfan with a grudge (“How can fandom be toxic?”). Here, he’s a seemingly unambitious man who rants about nice guys finishing last and demonstrates other such personality flaws. That’s two-for-two for movies getting a lot of mileage out of Quaid’s cute face and presumed innocence, but I hope we don’t go to that well too often (this screening featured a trailer for his upcoming action-hero-who-can’t-feel-pain flick Novocaine, and it’s nice to see him doing something different). I praised Sophie Thatcher up and down for her work in Heretic, and she carries this movie with aplomb. Iris is both Sarah Connor and the Terminator (a comparison that the film makes textual through both recreating the metal endoskeletal hand scene and putting a killer android in a police uniform à la T2), determined but not unstoppable. I’m sure a lot of this may seem derivative to some: yes, we also saw sliders for personality traits for robotic humans on Westworld; yes, this is in some ways another take on The Stepford Wives. But all writing is rewriting and all creation is remixing, and Companion is clever and novel in its approach. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Happy Together (1997)

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When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema. 

Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker. 

Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again. 

Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone. 

This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment. 

The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Am I OK? (2024)

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Guys, I think I just really like Dakota Johnson. Whatever it is that she’s doing, her charm just completely works on me. I sang the praises of Madame Web both upon release and again months later when I forced Brandon and Alli to watch it so we could talk about it. I love her performance in the Suspiria remake and I am among those who thoroughly enjoyed Bad Times at the El Royale. Those last two show that she has range, but I find myself still thoroughly enjoying when she plays a character that is either (a) just like she is in real life, or (b) the “Dakota Johnson” character that she performs when she’s called upon to be “herself.” I first heard about this movie when a friend—whom I had drafted into watching Madame Web with me on my May rewatch—came back from vacation having seen it, and recommended it to me directly because of my fondness for MW and DJ. And he was right! 

Am I OK? tells the story of thirty-two-year-old Lucy (Johnson), a painter who no longer paints and instead earns a living as a receptionist at a spa. Her best friend, Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), has a more professional career and is settled with her boyfriend Danny (Jermaine Fowler), until her boss (Sean Hayes) offers her an opportunity for a promotion, albeit one that would require Jane to relocate to London. The night that she learns of this, Jane takes Lucy and Danny out to celebrate; once they’re all good and drunk, Jane admits to having kissed another girl in high school, causing Lucy to spiral and admit to herself for the first time that she’s not attracted to men. With six months before she must move to the other side of the Atlantic, Jane sets out to help Lucy find a girlfriend. The biggest stumbling block is Lucy’s awkwardness and a shyness that verges on being antisocial, and her feelings of anxiety about Jane’s upcoming move only grow when she learns that Jane will be accompanied by her outgoing colleague Kat (Molly Gordon), an eccentric and fairly self-absorbed woman with whom Jane is friendly but whom Lucy can’t stand. When a new masseuse at Lucy’s work, Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), seems very flirtatious, Lucy attempts to respond but has to overcome her extreme, ingrained tendency to resist change. 

This movie takes precisely one risk, which is that it demands that you be smitten with Dakota Johnson (or “Dakota Johnson”) and enjoy watching her do her thing. (Luckily, I am and I do.) The script is very funny, and the performances are quite engaging, but this is a movie that is all about pushing Lucy out of her comfort zone while never doing the same with the viewer. And, hey, maybe that’s all that a comedy like this one needs. There were many scenes that reminded me of a friend’s recent complaint after seeing Hit Man, which was that half of the movie looked like it had been shot in an AirBnB; this movie has a very similar visual … blandness. I’ve heard Brandon bring this up in many episodes of the podcast—that a lot of movies now have a very even, clean, TV-camera friendly, CW lighting—and although that’s something that I don’t often notice (perhaps because the CW was one of the many straws that broke the camel’s back of my mind a long time ago now) this movie made it almost impossible to miss. It’s probably not something that most people would notice or care about, but I’ve never experienced this phenomenon so clearly. I really don’t want to insult the people who made this movie; I quite liked it, and I love Tig Notaro (who, alongside Stephanie Allynne, is credited as director), but there’s no camera, lighting, or blocking choice in this movie that one could describe as imaginative, thoughtful, or stylish. 

Looking at the list of other works that the film’s cinematographer Cristina Dunlap worked on, it’s a lot of shorts, TV work, and music videos, which strikes me as odd. The static nature of a lot of TV photography is present in the movie, which is, as noted, shot so conventionally that it’s almost an apotheosis of inoffensiveness; but there’s a lot of life in some of the music videos (and tour footage) that she’s shot, which doesn’t appear here at all. One of the few times that the film does something dynamic instead of rotating through the same sets (yoga studio, spa, Jane’s office, Lucy’s apartment, the diner where Lucy always orders the same thing) is when Jane and Lucy go on an exercise outing together, and it’s the scene from which the poster image of Lucy crying is taken. Jane and Lucy are going up and down a set of outdoor stairs, and the setting felt like an homage to that scene in You’ve Got Mail that shows Tom Hanks and Dave Chappelle at the gym. It’s the only time that the film ever really breaks out of its shot/reverse-shot TV rhythm and its antiseptic interiors, but that this is the only time it does so (other than a short sequence near the end at a “hammock retreat”) means that there’s a lot of this movie that relies solely on the wittiness of the dialogue and the charm of the characters. Luckily, there’s more than enough of that to go around. 

I will admit that I was hoping I could play The Madame Web Game while watching this one (that’s where you point at the screen and shout “It’s a web!” every time something vaguely weblike appears), and while I have to give it a zero out of ten for web sightings, it’s a solid seven out of ten spiders for comedy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

White Room (1990)

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Patricia Rozema’s sophomore feature White Room is about to get its first-ever Blu-ray release through Kino Lorber, along with Rozema’s lesser seen follow-up When Night is Falling and her calling-card debut I Heard the Mermaids Singing.  I’m sure that the 4K restoration of White Room will be a worthy purchase for any crate-digging home video collector who’s interested, considering the sensual immersion of its video art fantasy aesthetic and its dreamy pop music soundtrack.  At the same time, I’m happy to report that the still-in-print Canadian DVD I bought for a third of Kino Lorber’s list price is impressively crisp and a great cost-cutting alternative to the upcoming upgrade.  I’m also holding out hope that the Blu-ray release will lead to White Room‘s return to online streaming platforms, since it’s not currently available and it’s the kind of bizarre discovery that makes you want to recommend it to anyone who’ll listen.

Maurice Godin stars as a squeamish suburban nerd with a bad habit of peering into his neighbors’ windows as the world’s least pervy Peeping Tom.  Like a boyish, wholesome variation on a De Palma voyeur, he accidentally witnesses the rape & murder of a famous rockstar while watching her lounge around her secluded home and spends the rest of the movie beating himself up over his inaction at her death scene (literally whipping himself with thorny roses, in this instance).  Determined to become a more courageous, active participant in his own life, he moves out of his confectionary family home and into the big scary city of Toronto, where he quickly finds himself at the funeral of the murdered woman: a famous rockstar named Madeline X, played by Margot Kidder.  At the funeral, he falls for an older, mysterious woman (Kate Nelligan) who appears overly distraught at the musician’s passing, and by following her further down the rabbit hole he accidentally uncovers a larger music industry conspiracy he wishes he had just left alone. 

White Room is part romance novel, part noir, and full urban fairy tale.  Despite its contemporary fascination with MTV-era music video artistry, its narrative operates on the kind of traditionalist fairytale logic that always makes for great cinema, no matter the era.  None of the acting or character details are especially convincing as Real, but they’re in total harmony with the storybook narration track that refers to our cowardly hero as Norman the Gentle instead of just Norm. Its fictional rock numbers (partially credited to frequent Robert Eggers collaborator Mark Korven) play into that fairytale vibe as well, falling somewhere between the timeless literary songwriting of classic Kate Bush and the dreamy rock & roll of the Mary Timony album Mountains, which wouldn’t arrive for another decade.  Norm only travels from the suburbs to the urbs, but he might as well have journeyed across several cursed kingdoms to break his beloved free from the witch’s spell that kept her imprisoned in a daze (by which I mean her record company contract).

By her second feature, Rozema was already incredibly smart as a low-budget indie filmmaker, squeezing major visual impact out of meager resources.  As the film’s only celebrity get, Margot Kidder’s time on set appears to have been limited to only a few days, which Rozema stretches out across music video & interview clips to build genuine mystique around the murdered pop idol Madeline X.  The location shooting around Toronto manages to transform familiar city streets into a convincing fantasy world just by isolating the geometric lines of architecture & infrastructure in abstracted frames.  Most importantly, Rozema fully embraces the low-budget aesthetic of MTV-era video art in a way that frees her from restrictions of the real, physical world.  Besides the obvious music-video tangents afforded by the mysterious Madeline X, the film also finds excuses to indulge in video-art inserts via Norman’s POV, giving us glimpses of primal feelings that he’s too timid to express in words through video-warped images of seagulls, chess pieces, softcore pornography – whatever abstract flashes of imagery overwhelm his imagination then disappear before he can pick up a pen to jot them down.

Speaking of Norman’s imagination, he’s a difficult character to pin down: a voyeuristic man-boy who’s both driven & repelled by sex but is somehow not a threat to the women in his life.  If anything, he’s a pure object of desire for those women, modeling a romance paperback blouse through the second half of the runtime while women stare at his denim-clad ass.  He’s sometimes feminized in the edit, taking the place of the women he stalks in their most vulnerable moments and cast as the only actor who appears nude onscreen.  Godin’s performance can be a little frustrating in its boyish naivety, prompting you to imagine what more eccentric actors might have done with the role (Crispin Glover, Kyle MacLachlan, and Matt Farley all came to mind), but by the time the more hardened urbanites around him mock his earnestness with laughter it’s clear his blank-slate screen presence was more of an artistic choice than an oversight.  Norm is a fairytale prince defined by his desires & pursuits, and a lot of the joy in the film can be found in the small smirks of the women who find his naivety irresistibly cute.

If there’s anyone I’d most enthusiastically recommend White Room to besides hardcore Rozema Heads already won over by I Heard the Mermaids Singing, it would be to anyone who was charmed by the urban fantasy logic of this year’s kids-on-bikes comedy Riddle of Fire.  The narrator’s introduction of Norman the Gentle’s is just as amusingly verbose as the introduction of Petal Hollyhock, Princess of the Enchanted Blade in that more recent oddity.  Both films understand the rhythms & reasoning of fairytale storytelling on such a deep spiritual level that they can include video games & MTV parodies without their participation in the ancient traditions ever being questioned.  We instantly get the magical thinking of their narratives based on vibes alone.  The only acknowledgement of influences White Room has to get out of the way is in an end-credits dedication “with apologies to Emily Dickinson,” since the poet’s work was heavily referenced in the fictional pop-music lyrics of Madeline X.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomer and Britnee watch Torch Song Trilogy (1988).

Brandon: On a recent vacation to San Francisco, I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury location of Amoeba Music, digging through the LGBTQ section of the record store’s used Blu-rays & DVDs.  There were plenty of obscure gems in there, as you might expect, and I took home copies of the surrealistic drag-queen freak show Luminous Procuress as well as the punk-and-junk porno chic documentary Kamikaze Hearts.  However, my biggest score that day was a used copy of a film distributed by Warner Bros subsidiary New Line Cinema, something much more mainstream than the other standout titles in the bin.  1988’s Torch Song Trilogy has been commercially unavailable since I first watched it on the HBO Max streaming service back in 2021, when it caught my eye in the platform’s “Leaving Soon” section.  Since then, it has only been legally accessible through used physical media, as it is currently unavailable to rent or stream through any online platform.  The Streaming Era illusion that everything is available all of the time is always frustrating when trying to access most movies made before 1990 (an illusion only made bearable by the continued existence of a public library system), but it’s especially frustrating when it comes to mainstream crowd-pleaser fare like Torch Song Trilogy.  This is not the audience-alienating arthouse abstraction of a Luminous Procuress or a Kamikaze Hearts; it shouldn’t feel like some major score to find a copy in the wild. It’s more the Jewish New Yorker equivalent of a Steel Magnolias or a Fried Green Tomatoes than it is some niche-interest obscurity.  I have to suspect it’s only being treated as such because it’s been ghettoized as A Gay Movie instead of simply A Good Movie, which is a shameful indication of how much progress is left to be made.

Torch Song Trilogy is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York.  It might be one of the few 80s & 90s gay classics that doesn’t have to touch the communal devastation of HIV/AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic.  The opening shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City feels like visual acknowledgement of how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s setting & production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality.  There’s a little hangover Boys in the Band-style, woe-is-me self-pitying in Fierstein’s semi-biographical retelling of his own love life, but he remains delightfully charming throughout as he recalls his two great loves: one with a strait-laced, self-conflicted bisexual (Ed, Brian Kerwin) that was doomed to fail and one with a perfectly angelic partner (Alan, Matthew Broderick) that only failed because of violent societal bigotry.  The major benefit of the film’s strange distribution deficiencies is that owning it on DVD means you can also access Fierstein’s lovely commentary track and double the time you get to spend with his unmistakable voice & persona; it’s like becoming good friends with a garbage disposal made entirely of fine silks.  Loving the movie means loving his specific personality, from his adorable failures to flirt graciously to his fierce defenses of drag queen respectability and the validity of monogamous homosexual partnership.  His stage performances as Virginia Hamm are classic barroom drag that feel like broadcasts from a bygone world (one I last experienced first-hand at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco), but a lot of his observations about seeking traditional love among strangers who are just cruising for sex still ring true, especially as modern dating rituals have been re-warped around the de-personalized window shopping of hookup apps.

There’s something about how complicated, interwoven, and passionate every relationship feels here that reminded me of Yentl of all things, except transported to a modern urban setting I’m more personally connected to.  Structurally, there are some drawbacks to Fierstein’s insistence on covering decades of personal turmoil & interpersonal drama in a single picture, but the movie’s greatest accomplishment is ultimately its approximation of a full, authentic life – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones.  By all accounts, the original stage-play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation.  One of the producers’ only contractual obligations was that the movie could be no longer than 2 hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for 4.  Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.  It isn’t until the final sequence that he really slows the story down to stew in the drama of one key event: a home visit from his loving, homophobic mother (Anne Bancroft).  After so many sweeping gestures covering long stretches in Arnold’s life, there’s initially something jarring about stopping the momentum cold to depict a heated bicker-battle between mother & son, but that’s also where a lot of the strongest, most coherent political arguments about the validity of gay life & gay romance are voiced in clear terms.  Boomer, what did you think about the lopsided emphasis on the drama of the final act and how it relates to the broader storytelling style of earlier segments?  Was it a meaningful dramatic shift or just an awkward one?

Boomer: There’s something important to note here about the original staging that contributes to this: each of the three segments were meant to be done in different styles, so much so that it’s almost a miracle that they work when smashed together into the veritas of the screen. In the first segment, International Stud, the story is told in fragments between Arnold and Ed, with the two actors kept apart on stage and the narrative being relayed through a series of phone calls (staged like this), while Fugue in a Nursery, which is the play in which Alan and Arnold visit Mr. and Mrs. Ed, is staged with all four actors in one giant bed (see this image from the 2018 revival). It’s only the final segment, about Arnold and his mother, that the style is more naturalistic and less surreal, in an effort to make the pain of those moments all the more visceral and meaningful. That carries over into the film, and in all honesty, it ought to. Joy can be fleeting, especially for those in the queer community (as we see all too gruesomely with Alan’s death at the hands of a band of bigots, who are seen standing around at the scene even after the ambulances arrive, watching with impunity as their victims are carted away while they remain free men). When you’re happy and in love, it really can feel like three years pass in the blink of an eye, while pain, especially that which comes from intolerance, ends up taking up much more room in our memories than our happiness. 

There’s verisimilitude in that, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t get to spend a long time in sympathetic happiness with Arnold and his loves during the good times, too, and the dilation of unhappy times isn’t merely realism for its own sake, it gives us time to really ground ourselves. This is a piece of fiction that’s about gay people but was breaking out of the mold at the time by not being simply for gay people as well. We see this in the difference between Arnold and his brother Phil, who understands his brother better than their parents do but whose life is clearly one with very few stumbling blocks and in which he can simply saunter without much trouble. The straights in the audience are presumed to be of the same cloth and thus need to have the portrait of what it’s like to have to deal with one’s (loving and beloved) mother also behave in a manner that’s dismissive, cruel, mean-spirited, and bigoted toward her own son, and they need to look into that portrait long enough to get it. Even if the need to provide some socially conscious “messaging” has dimmed in the intervening decades, this scene is also still the tour-de-force segment that makes auditioning for the role of “Ma” worthwhile, enough to attract an actress of the caliber of Estelle Getty (as in the original staging) or Anne Bancroft (as in the film). While I agree that it changes the timbre, I’m not sure I’m fully in agreement that it changes the momentum, as it still feels like it’s barreling through, helped along by the frenetic energy that the desperate-to-please soon-to-be-adopted David brings to the proceedings; he and Ed never seem to really sit still, so it creates the illusion of motion even if the subject matter at hand is heavy and slow. 

One of the things that I really loved about this one was that it wasn’t (and felt no need to be) a “message” picture. With the first cases of HIV being diagnosed in the summer of 1981, the triptych of plays first opened less than two weeks after the January 4th establishment of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), the first U.S. community-based AIDS service provider, on the fifteenth of that month. As such, there’s really no room in the narrative for the specter of HIV/AIDS to loom large, and although the intervening years between the play’s premiere and the release of the film were haunted by that epidemic, it’s still banished from the narrative. That’s because this is a story about queer . . . well, not queer “joy” exactly, but one in which the omnipresent shadow of social inequality, potential violence, and familial rejection is outshone by the light of authentic living, easy intimacy, and finding the humor in things. As such, although it may be telling the audience something they might not know or understand about the way that gay people are treated by their families, it doesn’t feel the need to educate them about those broader social issues, the way a lot of other queer films of the time did. 

Britnee, given that this was originally a (series of) stage production(s), there’s a lot of room for more sumptuous, lived-in set design in a film adaptation, as well as the opportunity to do a little more visual storytelling. One of favorite bits of this is how Arnold shows us that the ASL sign for “fucking” is to make two rabbits with your hands and bang them together, and then we see that Arnold’s decor is more rabbit centric than your local grocery store in the lead up to Easter. Another is the change that we see in Ed’s farmhouse between Arnold’s first and (possibly) last visits there, that tell us how much time has passed as Ed has had the time to repair the steps and put up proper supports on the porch. This, more than the change in tempo, is what stands out to me about the final scenes with Mrs. Beckoff, as they are heavier on dialogue (read: argument) for exposition and character work, as those last few scenes of the two of them feel more like a stage play than any other part. Are there any visual flourishes or touches of visual storytelling in particular that stood out to you? 

Britnee: Torch Song Trilogy has been on my watchlist for years. I didn’t have much knowledge of what the film was actually about or based on, but I knew that Harvey Fierstein starred in it. That’s more than enough to pique my interest because he is such a gem. I had no idea that it was based on a play that Fierstein wrote himself! Like Brandon, it reminded me so much of Steel Magnolias, which was also a film adapted from a play with a personal, auto-biographical touch. Both films have loveable characters, witty dialogue, and create a feeling of intimacy between the audience and characters. I felt like I was Arnold’s confidant, following him throughout his journey. Of course, that intimacy with the audience is very typical of a stage play, but it doesn’t always translate to film as successfully as it does in this one.

Until you mentioned it, Boomer, I didn’t notice the rabbit connection! I was admiring the rabbit tea kettle among all of the other rabbit trinkets of Arnold’s, but I had no idea that it was in reference to the ASL bit. There are just so many layers to discover! If I had to highlight any other the visual storytelling touches, there is only one that really stuck with me. I adored the opening sequence of a young Arnold playing dress-up in his mother’s closet, which then transitions to adult Arnold in his dressing room before the first drag performance. There were so many important moments that occur in his dressing room, and to remember one of his earliest crucial moments occurred in his first makeshift dressing room (his mother’s closet) really touched my heart. The ultimate sacred space. 

Lagniappe

Brandon: I’m glad to hear y’all were also delighted by the overbearing rabbit theme of Arnold’s home decor.  I’ve obviously only seen this movie a few times so far, but with every watch my eyes are drawn to more rabbit decorations that I didn’t catch previously.  They’re hopping all over the frame, and yet the only acknowledgement of them (besides the ASL connection) is a brief moment when a hungover Alan quizzically examines a rabbit-themed mug Howard hands him with breakfast before noticing he’s surrounded by them.  Otherwise, it’s just one of many small touches that makes Arnold feel like a full, real person instead of a scripted character and a political mouthpiece.  

Britnee: The dramatic relationship between Arnold and his mother gave us some powerful moments, but I kept wondering about the relationships Arnold had with his brother and father. We do see these characters interact with each other and there’s some dialogue referring to each in various conversations, but I would have loved to see their relationships explored more. Since the play is twice as long as the movie, I’m curious to see if they’re more explored there and were cut for time.

Boomer: Because I always want to recommend it to everyone, especially because it’s one of the few musical theater adjacent texts that I, a musical agnostic, enjoy, I want to call attention to the fact that Tovah Felspuh is totally channeling Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Beckoff in her introductory scene in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, beyond just cashing in on some of the same character tropes. Secondly, as a film that is filled with countless quotable lines, the one that has resounded around in my skull the most since the screening is “He used to be a euphemism, now he’s just a friend.” And finally, I find it funny that Brandon should mention the apps in his intro, since I watched this film in a way that I hope Fierstein would appreciate: lying on a bed in a Denver hostel, swiping away app notifications as they attempted to grab my attention and cover the top half of my screen. 

Next month: Boomer presents Notorious (1946)

-The Swampflix Crew

The Beast (2024)

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There’s something warmly familiar about the premise of two destined-to-be-together characters cyclically falling in love across past & future lives through reincarnation, but I can’t immediately name many concrete examples.  There’s a somber melodrama version of it in The Fountain, a cartoony alternate-universe version in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and a bodice-ripping romance version in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I’m certain there’s a much longer list of titles I’m forgetting.  However, I’m also certain that I’ve never seen that dramatic template distorted in the way Bertrand Bonello distorts it in The Beast, the same way he distorts the terrorism thriller template in Nocturama and the zombie outbreak template in Zombi Child.  The Beast is a sci-fi fantasy horror about a woman who falls for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of her past & future lives, and all that changes across them is the temporal context in which he sucks.  During the Great Paris Flood of 1910, she is seduced out of a loving marriage by the horny, handsome pest.  In the 2010s, he stalks her as a creepy incel with a low-follower-count YouTube Channel, planning to make an example out of her as revenge on all the women who’ve sexually rejected him despite being a Nice Guy.  In the 2040s, the specifics of how he sucks are mysterious until the final moments, as the doomed couple are estranged by an isolating, unemotional society dominated by A.I.  She does fall for it again, though, and the cycle continues.  Usually, when you say a couple was “meant for each other,” you don’t mean it in a Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote kind of way, but there’s something darkly, humorously true to life about that romantic dynamic that makes for a refreshingly novel use of a familiar story template.

Léa Seydoux stars as the Wile E. Coyote of the relationship, helpless to find her puppy-eyes suitor attractive in every timeline even though he consistently destroys each of her lives.  George MacKay is her Roadrunner tempter: an arrogant nerd who pursues her across centuries even though he’s cursed to “only have sex in his dreams.”  Their centuries-spanning relationships qualify both as science fiction and as fantasy.  The 2040s timeline is used as a framing device in which our future A.I. overlords offer to “cleanse our DNA” of residual trauma to make us more efficient, emotionless workers; it’s through this cleansing procedure that Seydoux relives her past flings with MacKay and learns no lessons through the process.  The crossover between timelines is also confirmed by multiple psychics, though, both of whom warn Seydoux to steer clear of the fuckboy loser to no avail.  They also explain that their mystic practices are only considered supernatural because science has not yet caught up with the real-world logic behind their effectiveness – a gap that has presumably been closed by the A.I. machines of the 2040s.  In every version of her life, Seydoux is plagued by an overbearing sense of dread that something catastrophically awful is going to happen (in an allusion to the Henry James novel The Beast in the Jungle), and she is always right.  After all, in order to live multiple lives you have to die multiple deaths.  Whether that premonition is related to the natural disasters that coincide with MacKay re-entering her lives or simply to MacKay himself is up for interpretation, but either way he’s physically attractive enough that she never learns the lesson that his physical presence is bad news.  It’s like a cosmic joke about how someone always falls for the same loser guys despite knowing better, taken literally.

The Beast is one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure is intended to be taken entirely seriously until the second act, when Bonello tips his hand by making you watch clips from Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.  Its closest reference points are crowd-displeaser genre exercises from esteemed film festival alumni: Assayas’s Demonlover, Petzold’s Undine, Wong’s 2046, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, etc.  It builds its own micro mythology through visual motifs of pigeons, babydolls, and seances that can feel meaningful & sinister in the moment but read like generative A.I. Mad Libs screenwriting when considered as a whole.  Bonello is clearly genuine in the ambition of his scale, crafting a story that requires him to convincingly pull off costume drama, home invasion, and sci-fi genre markers all in the same picture, depending on the timeline.  He’s also constantly poking fun at his own project, though, something that’s indicated as soon as the film opens in a chroma-key green screen environment as if he were directing a superhero film in the MCU.  Sometimes the dolls are creepy; sometimes they’re M3GAN-style jokes about uncanny robotics.  The pigeons foretell the immediate arrival of Death, but it’s also hard not to laugh when one attacking Seydoux is scored as if it were a flying hellbeast.  Like all of Bonello’s previous provocations, The Beast was designed to split opinions, but I thought it was a hoot.  It can be funny, scary, sexy, or alienating depending on the filmmaker’s momentary moods; the only constant is the male entitlement of the central fuckboy villain, which is only effective because he’s such a handsome devil.

-Brandon Ledet

Brief Encounter (1945)

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“Nothing lasts, really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.”

All of the stills and promotional posters for David Lean’s 1945 adultery drama Brief Encounter had convinced me that it was going to be a noir, not a stately stage play adaptation.  Having now seen the film in full, I’m not entirely sure I was wrong.  Brief Encounter is a kind of classic noir where the inciting crime is an emotional affair instead of a heist or a murder.  It has all of the stylistic markers of noir: the drastic camera angles, the haze of urban steam, a morally compromised lead recounting their crimes in a confessional narration track.  The fact that there’s no actual crime to speak of does little to muddle that flirtation with the genre.  When the potential adulterers develop their first inside joke it’s like watching them load a revolver.  Each kiss is another bullet unloaded from its chamber.  When they chain-smoke on empty city streets to calm their nerves, they act as if they’re on the lam, avoiding eye contact with city cops.  The whole affair is just as thrillingly romantic as it is unavoidably doomed.

The opening shots of this lean, 86-minute stunner are of two commuter trains passing in opposite directions at a furious speed, their billows of steam settling into a wispy veil over the platform where our would-be lovers first meet.  Later, the lovers are similarly veiled by the gauze of cigarette smoke under movie projector lights, in the cinema where they spend Thursday afternoons sitting in the tension of each other’s desire.  Their entire affair carries the impermanence and impossibility of a dream, with both dreamers daring each other to make it real.  Celia Johnson narrates their emotional crimes in flashback, looking for someone safe to confess to and eventually settling on an internal monologue to her doting but unexciting husband.  In her months-long flirtation with Trevor Howard’s mysterious but gentlemanly doctor, she never gets a glimpse of his homelife with his wife, but we get the sense that it’s just as sweetly serene.  Their entire relationship is based on the spark of excitement found in flirting with a stranger while waiting for their opposite-direction trains home, a romance that can only flourish in a liminal space.  If they did leave their spouses for each other, they’d likely settle into the same warm but bland domestic routines; the spell would be broken.

Whether David Lean was knowingly playing with the tones & tropes of film noir here is unclear.  Since the genre had not yet been fully codified or even named, it’s more likely that he simply framed an adulterous dalliance as if it were a legal crime instead of just a moral one, and the stylistic overtones of the era took care of the rest.  Either way, it’s clear that Brief Encounter has endured as a major influence on modern filmmakers, from the moody high-style tension of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love to the opening across-the-bar “What’s their deal?” speculation of Celine Song’s Past Lives.  Because it’s such a dialogue heavy stage-to-screen production, a lot of its power is creditable to Johnson & Howard’s acting chops, especially in the physicality of their guilt-haunted faces.  When Johnson reassures the audience, “I’m a happily married woman,” her body language tells a different story, and there’s similar complexity lurking behind every line delivery of her imagined confession.  Still, Lean is a formidable third wheel, guiding this trainwreck romance from the director’s chair with such intensity that you can practically feel his hand tilting the frame.  There’s no event or action I can point to that would help classify it as a thriller, but it is thrilling from start to end, with a final line of dialogue that’s more explosive than any stick of stolen dynamite.

– Brandon Ledet

This is Me … Now: A Love Story (2024)

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Jennifer Lopez is an amazing dancer, a magnetic actress, and . . . a singer also.  Outside her soulful tribute to Selena and the freak-chance payoff of the dance hit “Waiting for Tonight”, JLo’s decades-long singing career hasn’t produced many highlights, which is what makes it so awkward that she’s insistent on commemorating her legacy among the two towering pop acts of the current moment: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.  Instead of sitting it out while those two titans fight for the throne in their own competing, career-defining concert films, Lopez has naively entered the fray with a couple career-recappers of her own – first, through the grand spectacle of a Superbowl halftime show (greatly aided by collaboration with Shakira) and, now, through a self-funded “visual album” retracing the steps of Beyoncé’s culture-shifter Lemonade.  This is Me … Now: A Love Story is an hour-long collection of music video vignettes, titled as a follow-up to JLo’s 2000s era pop album This is Me … Then, which is only notable for puzzling the world the personal-brand PR anthem “Jenny from the Block”.  This is Me … Now is a massive vanity project that cost $20mil of Lopez’s own money, meant to celebrate her romantic reunion of the Benifer partnership and to solidify her status as one of the great artistic minds on the modern pop landscape.  Personally, I would’ve much preferred that she just work with talented, established filmmakers like Tarsem or Soderbergh again, but at least this latest project was an interesting failure, which is more than you can say for most of her recent streaming-era acting jobs (and most of her post-90s music video work as a pop star).

This is Me … Now starts with abstract, poetic ambitions, as JLo self-narrates storybook romance fantasies about her rocky path reuniting Benifer (illustrated as an uncanny CG motorcycle crash), about her years of suffering repeated heartbreak (illustrated as uncanny CG steampunk dystopia featuring a giant mechanical heart powered by rose petals), and about her lifelong idolization of true love (illustrated by an uncanny CG hummingbird searching for its floral soulmate).  In this early stretch, it’s seemingly competing with fellow post-Lemonade projects Dirty Computer & When I Get Home to challenge the boundaries of the music video as a cinematic artform.  Then, it quickly backslides into standard-issue romcom tropes, making for a weirdly talky & plotty “visual” album.  All of the fantasy elements of the narrative are contextualized as dream sequences, each to be analyzed in therapy sessions with a teddy bear psychologist played by Fat Joe.  Teams of celebrities, factory workers, and stock romcom characters join Joe to coach JLo through her crippling love addiction so she can find her way back to her beloved Ben, a destination she can only reach by learning to love & hug her inner child (again, in a dream).  It’s all very tidy and, frankly, unimaginative, which is a shame considering the free-for-all fantasy promised in its opening heart factory sequence.  By the time the closing credits pad out the runtime for a 12-minute eternity—just barely stretching the film over the one-hour feature length finishing line—it’s clear there isn’t enough artistic drive behind this project to justify the classic MGM title card announcing it as A Movie.  Meanwhile, Lemonade, Dirty Computer, and When I Get Home all ranked among the best movies released in their respective years, regardless of form.

I’m not sure that JLo has the ability to stage her own sprawling, Tarsem-style fantasy piece, but I do think she could manage Maid in Manhattan: The Musical if tasked.  The only times This is Me … Now pays off its “so bad it’s good” irony-watching potential is in generic romcom voiceover about how people call her crazy for wanting to commit to traditional monogamous partnerships, about how she still believes in “soulmates and signs and hummingbirds,” and about how when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always answered “In love.”  It’s a thoroughly committed “me, me, me, I, I, I” tribute to her own hungry heart, combined with a genuine cinephilic soft spot for classic romances like Singin’ in the Rain and The Way We Were.  The problem is that her artistic ambitions reach far beyond those Blockbuster Video romcom boundaries, and they ultimately prove to be an Icarian downfall that exposes her limitations as both a pop singer and a visual artist.  Of course, none of these shortcomings really matter, because This is Me … Now has already accomplished everything it set out to do; it refreshed JLo’s name in the pop stardom conversation by promoting her new album and promoting her ongoing tabloid romance with Ben Affleck.  Whether or not it’s any good is beside the point, which is generally how her pop music career at large contributes to her overall celebrity.

-Brandon Ledet