romcom

Oh, Hi! (2025)

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If I had a nickel for every 2025 picture about a woman named Iris going on a romantic retreat with her boyfriend only to learn that he means much less to her than she thought, I’d have ten cents. What, were you expecting a Doofenschmirtz joke here? Please, I’m almost forty. 

Iris (Molly Gordon, who also has a “story by” co-credit) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are on their first romantic weekend away together after seeing each other for four months. The two abscond to a rented farmhouse in High Falls, NY, where things seem to be going really well. They have great sexual and conversational chemistry, and they end the first lovely day together with a scallop and pesto pasta meal that Isaac prepares before they head to the bedroom, where they use the bondage gear that they discovered in a locked closet to cuff Isaac’s wrists and ankles to the bed. Afterward, when Iris starts to talk about their relationship, Isaac tells her that he never assumed that they were exclusive, and the conversation they previously had about their status was interpreted differently on both ends; she thought that they were dating dating, and he assumed that she simply didn’t want him to have unprotected sex with other people. Hurt (and more than a little drunk), Iris leaves Isaac chained up while she spends the rest of the night frantically googling ways to make him realize that she’s the one. The next morning, she tells him that she’ll uncuff him after twelve hours but that she intends to spend that time convincing him that they are meant to be together. After this time elapses, however, Isaac still isn’t won over, so she refuses to release him and calls her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) for help, not realizing that she also brought her own boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), whose Law & Order expertise means he knows that what Iris has done is a felony, and she’s now made Max and Kenny accessories. 

Molly Gordon is a lot of fun here as the deranged Iris, whose actions are unjustifiable but also ultimately sympathetic. If you had Logan Lerman chained to a bed, would you ever let him go? I didn’t think so. At one point, Max explains to Iris that Isaac is a “soft boy,” a variation on the fuck boy archetype who uses apparent emotional vulnerability and openness as a manipulation tactic to make women fawn over them, and she’s not wrong. Although we get a hint that Isaac is a bit of a dick in the film’s opening scene, wherein he flirts with a roadside strawberry stand worker with little to no regard for Iris’s feelings as she watches the whole thing go down, his actions once they get to the farmhouse are openly romantic and sweet, playing the part of the perfect boyfriend through and through. The cracks show once he’s been chained to a bed for over half a day, but one can hardly hold it against him that he resents the position that he’s been put in, even if what’s happening to him is not totally undeserved. Iris is doing something that we all have fantasized about doing at one point or another in our lives: forcing the object of our yearning and affection to spend enough time with us that they realize that it’s foolish not to give things a real chance. Although my daydreams about getting a heartbreaker to settle down have never involved a bound Logan Lerman (that’s filed under a completely different section of my fantasy catalog), one can’t help but appreciate the feelings that Iris has, even if we can’t justify her actions. 

Max and Kenny arrive at the midpoint of the film, and they’re delightful as well. Max is all-in on helping Iris get her man, even after she realizes that her U.S. visa is endangered by her presence at the scene of the crime, and Kenny’s devotion to her is admirable and charming to watch. John Reynolds calls to mind his characters from Horse Girl and Save Yourselves! here, and it’s an archetype he’s quite good in (so much so that he’s able to leverage it into something more sinister, as he did in the second season of Yellowjackets); he feels settled. After having to play second fiddle to Margaret Qualley in Drive-Away Dolls last year, Viswanathan gets to roll out the comedic chops that she demonstrated on Miracle Workers, and even though she’s billed lower this time around, it’s great to see her having so much fun. Her absolute insistence that her witch cousin’s spell to make Isaac forget the last two days will work is a delight to watch, especially as it spells out just how desperate the situation has become and Viswanathan’s conviction sells the scene. It doesn’t work, of course, but a playing-along Isaac does have a dream about Iris that indicates although Iris’s attempts to make him hers aren’t likely to be successful, Isaac’s faux self-reflection may be replaced by actual inspection of the issues he has that lead him to treat relationships as casual and disposable. Lerman isn’t called upon to do too much heavy lifting, acting-wise, but his underplaying of the scene in which he plays along to finally escape and his heartfelt conversation with Iris once she helps rescue him in the woods after he injures himself demonstrate that he’s more than just a toned chest and a pretty face. 

A nice, easy, fun romcom for anyone in the mood for it, Oh, Hi! is currently available on Netflix. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Eternity (2025)

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Do movies ever premiere on airplanes? I’ve occasionally seen ads from airlines proudly declaring that they are the exclusive in-flight entertainment home for a recent theatrical release, as if there’s a customer base out there willing to book a flight on Delta instead of Southwest specifically so they can watch Predator: Badlands on the back of a headrest. Has that kind of competitive bidding on fresh in-flight content created enough of a market to support direct-to-headrest film productions, though? Could it possibly be lucrative for a traditional Hollywood movie to skip theaters entirely and instead exclusively premiere as in-flight entertainment? I ask this having just watched the supernatural romcom Eternity, which drifted quietly through American multiplexes without much fanfare but will soon make for a major crowd-pleaser as an in-flight movie selection. It’s cute, harmless, weightless, and just overall pleasant enough to make a long fight go down smooth, already evaporating from you brain by the time you walk to baggage claim.

Miles Teller & Elizabeth Olsen star as an elderly suburban couple who die within a week of each other, rematerializing as their younger, happier selves in a Limbo-like eternity. Their decades of functional but unexciting marriage are threatened to be undermined by the return intrusion of Olsen’s first husband: a noble war hero hunk played by Callum Turner, who died tragically young. Now, she has a short span of time to choose between which of her two deceased beaus to spend her eternity with, essentially choosing between bright romantic spark and long-term marital comfort. Despite all of the supernatural shenanigans that distract from the competition between her two love interests, it’s a fairly straightforward romcom dynamic, which the movie openly acknowledges by having one of the two competing husbands rush to the train station to stop her from leaving at the climax. There isn’t even much tension in guessing which of the two men she’ll ultimately choose, not if you keep in mind that hot people don’t write movies; they just star in them. Of course the more nebbish Teller is inevitably going to be selected as Olsen’s prize; no hunky Turners were invited to the writers’ room.

If Eternity has any major flaws that keep it from rising above standard-issue romcom fluff, it’s all in the casting. Miles Teller simply isn’t enough of a certified uggo to contrast Callum Turner, whose main selling point appears to be that he is tall. We’re told by the script that Turner is as handsome as Montgomery Clift, but we can clearly see that is not the case, so he plays the stand-in idea of Montgomery Clift instead of the real deal. Olsen is also a kind of symbolic stand-in, playing the torn-between-two-hunks heroine with just enough blank-slate blandness that anyone watching from home (or, ideally, from the plane) can imagine themselves in her place without being distracted by the distinguishing specifics of her character. The only signs of life among the main cast are in the comic-relief pair of “Afterlife Coordinators” played by Jon Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who are employed by the unseen corporate gods of Limbo to talk this trio of lost souls into one afterlife or another as if they’re hurriedly selling timeshares out of a brochure. They’re funny, but not too funny. Nothing about the movie is too anything, presumably by design.

A24 is reportedly looking to upscale their in-studio productions to reach a wider market, recently trying their hands at the big-budget war thriller with Warfare, the movie-star sports drama with The Smashing Machine, and the period-piece Oscar player with Marty Supreme, with other mainstream audience ploys to come. I have to wonder how much the greenlighting of Eternity was influenced by that boardroom conversation. Was its marketing potential as a surefire in-flight entertainment favorite part of the justification behind that decision? The movie largely feels like it’s set in the liminal corporate spaces of an airport lounge & bar, with Early & Randolph’s afterlife realtors costumed as retro flight attendants. My only other theory on the initial pitch for the film’s commercial appeal is that it would make a great backdoor sitcom pilot, since Olsen gets to briefly taste-test different afterlives with her potential forever-husbands as she debates which eternity to settle into. There’s some brief magical twee whimsy in her climactic sprint between those worlds as she defies the laws of Limbo to reunite with her true love that recalls previous work from hipster auteurs in the A24 mold: Michel Gondry, Julio Torres, Girl Asleep‘s Rosemary Myers, etc. There just isn’t enough budget to fully flesh out the idea, though, so it ends up being a proof-of-concept sketch for a potential Good Place-style supernatural sitcom, coming soon to an Apple TV console near you. In the meantime, enjoy this low-stakes, low-emotions romcom set at the edges of those infinite-possibility worlds, for now boiled down to simple-concept settings: mountains, beach, train station, etc. And if you can, go ahead and pair it with a complementary ginger ale and a single-serving pack of pretzels — the way it was clearly meant to be seen.

-Brandon Ledet

Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)

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It never pays off to be the first person to do something. Lindsay Denniberg’s 2012 feature debut Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a prescient collection of everything that’s hip & trending in genre filmmaking circles right now: VHS tapes as fetish-object collectibles, the burgeoning nostalgia for shot-on-video slasher textures, the black-box theatricality of Grace Glowicki’s Gothic horror throwback Dead Lover, the green-screen psychedelia of Vera Drew’s copyright-testing personal essay The People’s Joker, etc. If Video Diary of a Lost Girl were currently making the theatrical rounds in our new warped-VHS genre nerd dystopia, it would be humming with film nerd buzz, and Denniberg would be enjoying the same kind of Extremely Online microcelebrity of current cult directors like Matt Farley, Amanda Kramer, and Jennifer Reeder. Hopefully, its recent Blu-ray release through AGFA will help correct that oversight, as Denniberg’s time is very much now, after spending a decade tapping her foot in the horror schlock waiting room.

Pris McEver stars as the relatively young, immortal succubus Louise, self-named after the silent movie star Louise Brooks (who also inspired the name of Denniberg’s production company, Pandora’s Talk Box). Louise first saw the Old Hollywood star of the original Diary of a Lost Girl in the initial 1929 theatrical run for Pandora’s Box, when she was first starting out as a succubus and a cinephile. Nearly a century later, her cinephilia has continued through her slacker job as a VHS rental clerk, and her supernatural function as a succubus has continued through her routine acts of rape revenge. In this movie’s lore, all succubi are descendants of the Biblical figure Lilith, and they need to kill once a month by fucking a man to death in order to prevent bleeding out in the “unending bloodshed” of a lethal menstruation cycle. Louise has no drive to kill, really, but she does get horny and does want to keep on living (if not only to make time to watch more vintage horror movies), so she targets the neverending supply of street rapists who seemingly lurk in every alley between her job & home. The trouble is that she eventually falls in love with a boy she genuinely wants to fuck without hurting, and he may be the very same lover she first fell for and lost in her early silent cinema days, reincarnated.

At its heart, Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a supernatural romcom that just happens to be decorated with classic horror references. Not only is Louise’s apartment wallpapered with posters for cinematic provocations like Liquid Sky, American Psycho, and Anatomy of Hell, but she also spends most of her time on the clock watching public-domain horror classics like Carnival of Souls, Nosferatu, and Night of the Living Dead instead of, you know, actually working. Stylistically, Denniberg splits the difference between the German Expressionist fantasia of old and the straight-to-Tubi horror schlock of now. The whole thing is gloriously, grotesquely cheap, playing like what might happen if Annie Sprinkle directed a vampire movie. Every surface is bathed in blacklight fluorescents. Onscreen menstruate glows like red-glitter TV static. All exterior spaces are set in a greenscreen version of Stephen Sayaidan’s Dr. Caligari sets. Characters often sit around doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack is overpowered by spooky goth bedroom pop. It’s all just an excuse to watch video store occultists surf the channels of public-domain horror relics and scrambled-cable porno while, against all odds, falling in love.

Within the opening few seconds of psychedelic video-art color swirls and tongue-in-cheek gratuitous nudity, audiences should know whether Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a friend or foe to their sensibilities. There are plenty of buzzy, hip counterculture touchstones of recent years that indicate the movie has a sizeable cult audience waiting out there, though, however dormant. The problem is that those touchstones didn’t yet exist in 2012, so Denniberg was essentially shouting into the digital void. That’s a common story for underground filmmakers & outsider artists, most of whom don’t get this kind of decade-late victory lap, no matter how deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

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

Heart Eyes (2025)

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Christopher Landon has his heart set on reviving the slasher, and he only has one plan on how to pull that off. In Happy Death Day, Landon combined the slasher with the time-loop Groundhog’s Day comedy, hoping to bring some novelty to a horror template that’s been stale since at least the late 1990s. In Freaky, he combined the slasher with the 80s body-swap comedy, and now, as a producer & writer on the latest slasher-mashup Heart Eyes, he has repeated the gimmick by combining the slasher with the mainstream romcom. All of these novelty mashups have a killer logline premise and a few amusing individual gags, but they’re not doing much to revive the slasher on its own merits. If anything, by comparing & merging the slasher with other genres decades beyond their own respective expiration dates, Landon is making a dispiriting admission that it is an effectively dead medium. It’s like improvising a full meal out of several incongruent, insufficient portions of leftovers before they get tossed out or mold in the fridge. Sure, it’s filling, but it’s also desperate and ultimately unsatisfying.

To be specific, Heart Eyes combines the early 2000s third-wave slasher with the 2010s straight-to-Netflix romcom, inadvertently calling attention to how long both genres have been culturally dormant (and how dire of a state they were in when they were most recently relevant). The romcom plot at its center is purposefully tropey as a They Came Together-style parody of the genre, complete with verbal references to decades-old relics like Notting Hill, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and 10 Things I Hate About You. Olivia Holt (doing her best Kate Hudson) stars as an over-worked, under-compensated marketing professional whose latest, failed ad campaign has put her job in jeopardy. Mason Gooding (doing his best Ryan Phillippe) co-stars as the hotshot ad agency hunk who’s threatening to take over her job but, wouldn’t you know it, they end up falling for each other despite the professional conflict. Of course, this swooning reverie is broken when a masked maniac who only kills lovers—only on Valentine’s Day—interrupts their meet cute with meaty cuts, hunting the unlikely couple during their first after-hours business meeting together while they desperately insist that it is not a date.

If there’s any thematic justification for this clunky genre mashup, it’s based in a cynicism against modern romance, as annually escalated by the cultural Valentine’s Day ritual. Heart Eyes ties its slasher-romance premise to a longer violent-romantic literary tradition, citing Romeo & Juliet, Bonnie & Clyde, and Jack & Rose as iconic couples who meet a violent end in their respective stories. In practice, though, its only real commentary on the nature of romance is mired in current, derisive assessments of love in the internet age, as typified by social media envy, dating apps, incels, kinks, throuples, etc. It’s a rallying cry for anyone frustrated with the state of modern romance, offering ironic, gory counterprogramming for people who groan at the very mention of Valentine’s Day, an emblem of a great societal failure. Thankfully, the mascot of that counterprogramming is at least well designed: a leather-hooded figure with glowing hearts for eyes and a full arsenal of deadly weapons, including some Cupid arrows for the sake of holiday-specific branding. The reveal of that mysterious killer’s identity is a bit of a letdown, but the mask is memorably distinct and the kills are memorably brutal, which is more than most rote slashers deliver.

Speaking of romantic traditions, the Valentine’s Day slasher is a subgenre with its own history of unrated gems, namely Valentine & My Bloody Valentine. If Heart Eyes has a permanent place in the greater horror canon, it’s as a novelty to be watched on that specific holiday, the way dedicated horror nerds plan their calendar around titles like April Fool’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Christmas, and New Year’s Evil. That seasonal context is much more forgiving to its charms than the context of Christopher Landon’s career project of saving the slasher through an ongoing series of genre mashups. As a blending of the slasher and the romcom, Heart Eyes feels disappointingly out of date and insincere, especially when compared to more conceptually thorough mashups like last year’s slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature. So much of the modern slasher’s current state is defined by nostalgia for past successes, with recent revivals of Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Slumber Party Massacre being typical examples (along with broader pastiches like Ti West’s X trilogy). Tying that revival to other long-stale genres like the romcom and the body-swap comedy doesn’t exactly imply progress or innovation; it’s a lateral move at best.

-Brandon Ledet

Pillow Talk (1959)

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Rock Hudson was an enormous presence in Old Hollywood, and I don’t just mean as the personification of movie star handsomeness or as an archetype of “open secret” closeted gay celebrity.  He was physically enormous, towering over his co-stars at 6’5″ with a burly lumberjack build to match his cartoonishly square jaw.  Somehow, that imposing figure never really stood out to me in the romantic dramas of Hudson’s prime, starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Giant or Jayne Wyman in All that Heaven Allows.  Where he becomes most glaringly imposing is in his career-pivot to comedy in 1959’s Pillow Talk, which features several gags about his gigantic build.  Pillow Talk gawks at Hudson’s enormous body as he struggles to squeeze it into bathtubs and sportscars that were designed to house mere mortals, then concludes on a gag where he carries co-star Doris Day’s pajama-clad body through New York City streets like a firefighter rescuing a small child while she kicks her feet in petulant protest.  Tony Randall looks even mousier in comparison with that towering wall of beef as his ill-equipped romantic rival, posing next to him like a civilian fan taking photos with their favorite professional wrestler – physically mismatched to great comedic effect.

Hudson plays a jolly fuckboy giant in Pillow Talk, a skyscraper cad.  His meet-cute with Day involves a shared partyline between the two mismatched lovers’ NYC apartments, which Day is never able to use because Hudson is constantly tying up the line wooing a bevy of short-term lovers.  That partyline etiquette premise is just as relatable to kids today as their absurd romcom-trope professions: Broadway songwriter & interior decorator, respectively.  Day is understandably annoyed by Hudson’s playboy antics, describing him as a “sex maniac” in her request to the phone company to break up their partyline.  Meanwhile, Hudson is frustrated by Day’s immunity to his fuckboy charms, diagnosing her with “bedroom problems” during one of their shared-line squabbles.  According to romcom law, the pair are obviously destined to couple up by the end credits, but it takes some Three’s Company-style sitcom hijinks on Hudson’s behalf to make that happen.  He invents a flimsy naïve-Texan-in-the-big-city persona so that he can date her in person, which mostly amounts to Hudson doing a half-assed John Wayne impersonation while “aw, shucks”ing his way through several low-stakes dates.  Meanwhile, Day experiments with being overtly sexy onscreen for the first time in her career while maintaining a sense of cocktail-hour class, which is mirrored in her character’s struggles to loosen up enough to finally solve her “bedroom problems” once & for all.  Tony Randall also hangs around as their ineffectual third wheel, landing none of the successful smooches but most of the successful punchlines.

Pillow Talk precariously teeters between a more buttoned-up, euphemistic era of Hollywood screenwriting where characters are described as “bothered” instead of “horny” and the looser-morals Hollywood to follow where characters brag about bedding & marrying “strippers” in free-wheeling locker room talk.  If it were directed by Frank Tashlin in the mode of Rock Hunter or The Girl Can’t Help It, it might’ve been a perfectly anarchic, amoral comedy, but workman director Michael Gordon keeps it all at an even keel (likely just happy to be working again after being blacklisted for Communist ties).  In our collective memory, it’s lingered as cutesier and tamer than what Gordon delivered in reality, as evidenced by its ironic, post-modern homage in Peyton Reed’s 90s send-up Down with Love.  Like most comedies, a lot of Pillow Talk‘s individual punchlines have not aged well politically, especially when punching down at date-rape victims, racist stereotypes, and fat-bodied uggos.  Still, its willingness to offend leads to one of its more metatextually interesting gags, when Rock Hudson briefly indicates that he is a closeted homosexual so that Doris Day will up the stakes of their sexual contact to test his orientation.  In that moment, he’s a known-to-be-closeted actor playing a hyper-straight himbo slut who’s only pretending to be closeted so he can bed even more women.  The open discussion of that perceived queerness feels wildly out of sync with the Hays Code-era Hollywood glamor of the film’s Cinemascope extravagance, which twinkles in every one of Doris Day’s gowns & jewels, as spotlighted in the opening credits.

The segmented comic book framing of Pillow Talk‘s 1st-act phone calls conveys a modern, chic playfulness, while every one of its punchlines are underscored by stale, goofball sound-effects.  During a dual bathtub scene, its two near-nude stars play footsy at the barrier between their respective frames, so that you get a full view of their muscular gams, and yet they’re not allowed to consummate that mutual desire until they agree to marry at the end.  It’s a 1960s sex comedy made within the bounds of a 1950s romcom that’s not allowed to openly joke about sex.  None of this truly matters, though, since the main selling point is the spectacle of its two main stars.  Doris Day’s uncomfortable transformation into a Hollywood sex symbol makes for great comedic tension against Hudson’s rock-hard leading man physique.  Meanwhile, Hudson’s massive body is a spectacle unto itself, one that every woman onscreen instantly swoons over . . . Except, of course, for the one he loves.  It’s a dynamic so charming that it led to two more romcom pairings of those stars in Send Me No Flowers and Lover Come Back, both of which brought Tony Randall along for the ride to ensure no chemistry was lost.

-Brandon Ledet

Tokyo Pop (1988)

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The names behind the production & restoration of the international 80s punk romcom Tokyo Pop can be a little jarring at first, but you quickly get used to it.  Kino Lorber’s recent Blu-ray release of the movie states that its restoration was made possible by the Jane Fonda Fund for Women Directors.  I did not previously know that fund existed, but it does track with Fonda’s keen, career-long political awareness within the Hollywood system.  The statement goes on to say that funding was supported by contributions from Dolly Parton & Carol Burnett, who aren’t regularly in the business of film preservation & distribution.  The Dolly Parton donation makes the most immediate sense, given both her collaboration with Fonda on the classic workplace-politics comedy 9 to 5 and her philanthropic contributions to other worthy causes, like developing a viable vaccine for COVID-19.  Burnett’s involvement only makes sense once you learn that her late daughter, Carrie Hamilton, stars in the film in her biggest role outside of her TV credits.  So, the only collaborator here that I can’t fully make sense of is the namesake of the Woman Director in question who’s being supported by Fonda’s fund.  Tokyo Pop was Fran Rubel Kuzui’s debut feature as a director and earned great accolades after its premiere at Cannes.  What I can’t fully wrap my mind around is the fact that Kuzui’s only other directorial credit is the 1992 movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another high-style cult classic with great sleepover VHS rental appeal.  Why didn’t she get an opportunity to direct more movies?  It’s the kind of sexist Hollywood funding disparity that requires activist intervention, say, from a Jane Fonda type.

Hamilton stars as an NYC rock ‘n’ roller who moves to Japan on a whim and becomes an unlikely popstar.  Arriving without a plan or much pocket change, she’s saved from going destitute by a soul-crushing job playing hostess to drunk businessmen at a karaoke bar and by a fortuitous hookup with the singer of a rock ‘n’ roll band who’s looking for a gaijin (foreigner) vocalist.  She’s reluctant to take the singing job at first, since part of the reason she fled New York in the first place was that she was tired of “singing backup for creeps.”  She eventually gives in, though, and the band quickly becomes a kind of Japanese novelty act, performing karaoke-style covers of pop tunes like “Do You Believe in Magic?” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”.  The songs are admittedly corny, but Hamilton is admirably thorny in a Smithereens kind of way, playing the sour counterbalance to romantic co-lead Yutaka “Diamond Yukai” Tadokoro’s childlike sweetness.  In one standout sequence, he teaches her Japanese as sexual foreplay, but then she stops the session short once he mounts her with boyish over-enthusiasm.  The movie constantly undercuts its romcom beats in that way, ultimately deciding that it’s even more romantic if its central players don’t end up together in the end – prioritizing personal triumph over interpersonal connection.  As far as white-women-soul-searching-in-Tokyo stories go, it’s at least as effective as Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, with the added benefit of not taking itself nearly as seriously.  Incredibly, Diamond Yukai also appears in that film, but that time without his band Red Warriors in tow.

As smartly balanced as its romantic-comedy notes are, Tokyo Pop is most remarkable as a documentary time capsule of 80s Japanese pop kitsch.  It gawks at the pop-art iconography of Tokyo from every angle it can manage, taking the audience on a tour of psychedelic rock clubs, karaoke bars, fast food restaurants, kaiju-scale advertisements, pro wrestler locker rooms, unlicensed Disney-themed hostels, and pay-by-the-hour sex motels.  Our lead has no defined persona of her own, imitating famous American singers in her stage performances and advertising her availability to any band who’ll take her, regardless of genre.  Tokyo’s cultural persona more than makes up for that deficiency, overwhelming the screen with the bright, cartoonish colors of a city-size arcade.  It’s entirely possible that Fran Rubel Kuzui never directed much after this debut because she never wanted to leave that arcade.  Most of her non-Buffy career highlights after Tokyo Pop are tied to the Japanese entertainment industry rather than Hollywood or the NYC indie scene, mostly exporting low-budget American films and seasons of South Park there.  Tokyo Pop ends with Hamilton bravely deciding not to allow Tokyo to swallow her up, so that she gives up a loving relationship with a fellow rock ‘n’ roller so she can be her own person instead.  Maybe Kuzui gave into the candy-coated mania of that city instead, allowing herself to get fully lost in translation.  Or, just as likely, she just wasn’t given many worthwhile opportunities by the money men of American film studios so she created her own career path outside the US instead, refusing to play “backup for creeps.” 

-Brandon Ledet

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

Honeymoon in Vegas (1992)

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Allow me to introduce you to a 1990s romcom starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a lovelorn Manhattanite whose romantic rut dating commitment-phobic bachelors is disrupted by the attentions of a brash Big Spender.  Instead of talking it out over brunch with the gals, she’s rescued by a skydiving Nicolas Cage in an Elvis costume.  Okay, in all honesty, Honeymoon in Vegas has very little in common with Sex and the City outside of Parker’s casting.  If anything, the film is more weirdly predictive of the Adrian Lyne erotic thriller Indecent Proposal than it is of Parker’s signature HBO sitcom.  For one thing, its story is filtered through the perspective of her reluctant fiancée, a marriage-cynical private eye played by Nic Cage.  While Sex and the City is narrated by Parker’s voice as a cosmopolitan sex columnist, Honeymoon in Vegas allows Cage to narrate the story in 1940s noir speak, the film’s only notable stylistic touch (before it floods the screen with Elvis impersonators in the third act).  The closest Parker’s allowed to get to a full Carrie Bradshaw moment is in her casino-lobby outrage with Cage for getting them into an Indecent Proposal scenario in the first place, shouting within earshot of children & milquetoast Midwest tourists, “I’m a whore, Jack! You’ve made me into a whore. You brought me to Las Vegas, and you turned me into a whore!”  It’s impossible to watch this incredulous meltdown without recalling Bradshaw’s outburst at an Atlantic City craps table in the classic Sex and the City episode “Luck Be an Old Lady.”  That is, it’s impossible if you happened to have spent all of this year catching up with and thinking about Sex and the City for the first time in your life, which is exactly where I’m at right now.

I’m only focusing on Sarah Jessica Parker so much here because it’s rare to see her out of Carrie Bradshaw drag, whereas opportunities to see a frantic Nic Cage impersonate Elvis are much more plentiful.  See also: David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, SNL’s “Tiny Elvis” sketch, and Cage’s real-life marriage to The King’s daughter, Lisa Marie.  I guess it’s pretty rare to see him dressed up in the full Elvis costume, though, unless you’ve happened to be personally invited to tour his home full of Elvis memorabilia.  In order to justify this indulgence, Cage had to team up with workman comedy director Andrew Bergman, who cast him in two back-to-back mediocre romcoms as a hapless leading man: Honeymoon in Vegas & It Could Happen to You.  He’s less of a Nice Guy dreamboat here as he is in that latter film, spending most of his honeymoon tailing James Caan’s high-roller conman villain as he seduces Parker away from him.  Cage starts the film terrified of marriage because of a deathbed promise he made to his mother, but he loves Parker’s sweetheart schoolteacher character so much that he’s willing to go back on his word.  Only, he doesn’t act quickly enough, so Caan swindles him into a rigged card game, bullying him to put a weekend with his fiancée on the table as a substitution for poker chips.  Parker’s outrage with being “turned into a whore” isn’t played for the same moral or seductive complexity as Demi Moore’s own monogamy crisis in Indecent Proposal, even as she flirts with the idea of letting Caan sweep her off her feet (via helicopter).  Mostly, it’s just an excuse for sweaty, farcical Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World shenanigans as Caan elbows Cage out of the picture . . . until he skydives back into it dressed as Elvis.

There isn’t much on Honeymoon in Vegas‘s mind besides setting the stage for its ludicrous skydiving-stunt finale, which is emphasized in a marketing tagline that sells it as “A comedy about one bride, two grooms, and 34 flying Elvises.”  The Elvis costumed skydiving team The Flying Elvi has since become a legitimate Vegas attraction, boasting on their website to be “the only officially licensed skydive team by Elvis Presley Enterprises.”  The creation of that novelty act might be the movie’s only lasting triumph, but it’s at least more a more appropriate movie tie-in than, say, the Mardi Gras scooter gang The Krewe of the Rolling Elvi hosting a private screening of Sofia Coppola’s dour drama Priscilla (a real thing that recently happened at The Prytania; I cannot imagine the mood that took over that room by the end credits).  Otherwise, there’s nothing especially recommendable about Honeymoon in Vegas except for its opportunities to think about where it fits in its various players’ long-term careers.  James Caan coasts along as the comedic heavy.  Pat Morita & Peter Boyle give career-worst performances as a disaffected cab driver and a Hawaiian mystic, seemingly having gotten their scripts swapped in the mail.  Seymour Cassel is given the funniest character detail as a mobster named Tony Cataracts.  A young Tony Shalhoub is adorable as a nervous concierge who’s terrified of Caan.  An even younger Bruno Mars is even more adorable as the world’s tiniest Elvis impersonator.  Nic Cage gets in a few signature bizarro line-readings in his sing-songy angry voice, getting increasingly funnier as his character gets increasingly apoplectic.  And then there’s Sarah Jessica Parker, who gets one big scene where she gets to shout about being made into a hooker before being passed around like a trophy between the two male leads.  Luckily, she got a lot more to do down the line in the Sex and the City series, unless you want to take a really cynical view of Carrie’s long-term love triangle with Aidan & Big.

-Brandon Ledet

Fallen Leaves (2023)

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Finnish arthouse darling Aki Kaurismäki is neither the first renowned director to return from self-imposed “retirement” (Miyazaki, Soderbergh, Lynch), nor will he be the last (Tarantino).  What’s funny about the six-years-later follow-up to his announced “retirement” film The Other Side of Hope is that Kaurismäki has not returned for some grand, career-defining statement that shakes the foundation of everything he made in his heyday (The Boy and the Heron, Twin Peaks: The Return).  He simply just made another Aki Kaurismäki movie.  Everything I’ve written previously about Kaurismäki classics like Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl could easily be copied & pasted into a review of his comeback picture, Fallen Leaves.  So, I’m just going to go for it.  It looks like “a Polaroid in motion.”  It totally nails “the absurd indignities of modernized labor & urban living.”  It’s got everything you could possibly want from a Kaurismäki film: “the carefully curated visuals, the low-key absurdist humor, the fixation on the embarrassing exploitations of entry-level labor.”  He’s maybe the most consistent, unsurprising director around, and yet each individual film is so thoroughly, methodically lovely that he keeps getting away with it.  Every Aki Kaurismäki movie is another refresher on why he is one of the greatest; Fallen Leaves is just the latest.

If there’s any late-career reflection on the director’s previous work here, it’s all in the background.  One of the film’s central locations is a Helsinki arthouse movie theater plastered with posters advertising an assortment of New Hollywood, French New Wave, and genre schlock classics, suggesting Kaurismäki has spent time pondering where he fits in the grand, ongoing conversation that is cinema.  You will not believe which Jarmusch film he plucks from that conversation to illustrate the confusion.  Otherwise, he just sticks to the usual script.  Fallen Leaves is a low-key, high-charm love story about two pitifully lonely people struggling to make room for each other’s messes in their small, tidy lives.  They’re cute together, but it takes a while to make the pieces to fit.  One hands the other their phone number, and it’s immediately lost.  One is an alcoholic, while the other is hurt by their family’s history with the disease.  One adopts a pet, while the other suffers a horrific accident.  Their parallel lives in Helsinki are soundtracked by throwback rock ‘n roll karaoke and radio news broadcasts covering the Russian-Ukrainian war.  Eventually their missed connections and self-guarding defenses recede long enough for them to meet on the right page.  It’s sweet, even though the world around them can be so sad & cruel.  It’s like finding love in real life.

I can’t confidently say where Kaurismäki’s work fits in the grand conversation of cinema, mostly because his artistic statements remain so intimately personal & self-contained.  In in the interest of keeping things small & tidy, it’s much easier to hear where Fallen Leaves chimes in on the cinema of this year in particular.  It fits neatly in two of 2023’s more rewarding trends: established directors excelling just by playing the hits (Anderson, Coppola, Haynes) and Mubi absolutely killing it in curating their festival acquisitions (The Five Devils, Passages, Rimini).  It also fits neatly in Kaurismäki’s larger catalog: modest, tidy, uncluttered, expressive only in its primary colors and Tati-styled visual gags.  He’s the kind of director who makes people say, “Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”  Only, every time you watch one you find yourself thinking “I really need to see them all.” 

-Brandon Ledet