• movie image credit: Universal Pictures
    movie reviews

    Movie Review: The Breakfast Club (1985) ***

    The Breakfast Club is a legendary culture moment for Gen X about growing up. Five teenagers have detention at school on a Saturday, and the long, boring time in the library helps kids across cliques and caste realize they’re all fundamentally human.

    I was born ‘88; this takes place in ‘84; this was not part of my personal canon growing up. I’ve seen it before though, just not in a while. These days I usually watch older movies and think, “Wow, everyone looks so young.” Everyone in The Breakfast Club somehow still looks exactly my mom’s age. I think it’s because this is such an anachronistic movie: beyond the music and fashion, the exact dynamic expressed between generations is distinct to Gen X.

    I expected the story to be more timeless. If you boil it down to the core message — one where People Are People, and Growing Up Is Hard — that feels extremely timeless. Yet the way that the people interact feels distinct to its time.

    We’ve spent decades growing away from the sort of social attitudes that made open mockery of weird, naive, earnest, or *anyone* culturally acceptable. Relentless bullying from Bender against his fellow students gets groans and eye-rolls, even when he pulls a switch blade–that’s how commonplace it seems. One kid is found with a gun in his locker and sent to detention instead of help. Violence is both explicit and verbal. Also, there is no communication between these children that is not hyper-aware of their position in society and prioritizes that before anything else, so accepting other people as human must be their primary development. They are still far away from a point where they might actually be able to build healthy relationships, and that’s so depressing.

    Further, the dynamic between Gen X and their parents is distinct. Older gens were extremely traumatized by the depression and great wars; they passed a lot of authoritarian junk onto their children out of fear. There was such a rift in trust between many parents/kids, and this haunts our protagonists. Remember how we judged Helicopter Parents? That was a lot of Gen X trying to figure out how to *actually* bond with their kids, because their parents expected them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Millennials, meanwhile, have coined “gentle parenting” and get judged for being too nice. I suspect we’re going to see a swing back into more trauma-influenced parenting trends through the 21st century, but I’m not sure the teen/parent dynamic will ever quite look the way it did in 1980s.

    Every character in The Breakfast Club feels vividly real–probably because they *are* so screwed up in such authentic ways. The personal-feeling nature of it — the fact I can only associate these characters/situations with people I actually know, who were not adults for me when I needed them — means I just feel uniformly bad encountering it. But that same very evocative personal nature is its charm for many fans.

    I can’t add anything about the Claire/Bender dynamic that wasn’t better described by Molly Ringwald in a thoughtful article reflecting on her time working with John Hughes. I feel pragmatic about the toxic masculinity of this era of cinema. Even before seeing Ringwald remark that Hughes took rejection like Bender did, I sensed the story is obviously a very personal one to Hughes, and the fact he can harass the girl thusly and get at her by the end is obviously fantasy fulfillment for the creator. This is true of quite a few movies. If someone is narratively rewarded for bad behavior, it’s usually fantasy fulfillment for the creator.

    Of course, one wants to sympathize with Bender/Hughes, especially if Bender’s story of abuse has any reflection from Hughes’s life. Men have learned throughout the generations that they can get sympathy despite bad behavior if they claim an abuse history. It’s human instinct to protect our fellow person. But loads of people are abused without turning into abusers, sexually assaulting girls, and pulling knives on classmates; likewise Hughes was more than grown enough to handle rejection without violent explosions.

    I don’t think anyone likes seeing Allison’s transformation at the end of the movie, nor do I find her HFN with Andy satisfying or compelling. We’ve seen too many transformation from “ugly” girls to “actually pretty” (whether or not the movie meant to say that) to take it as anything but policing aesthetics of femininity. I mean, the two of them are still better than Claire and Bender. I am willing to accept these things as an expression of the theme, though: In order to accept that people are just people, these kids had to realize that they can do and be all the same things as their peers. They can date anyone, dress any way they like, and be who they want. That’s a good message, even if it gets bogged down by grossness.

    After all, this movie is predominantly a fantasy for a successful white dude who wrote extremely offensive coked-out comedy (citation: Molly Ringwald’s article), and I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it to be anything else. It is what it is. It’s a microcosm of a generation that feels toxic as hell, but it was trying to heal. And when I take it from that direction, I can appreciate it, even if my urge to rewatch is going to be pretty low. All I can think is that the people who relate to this movie must have *really* needed it, and I’m comfortable setting it down as “not for me, not my time, but clearly a noteworthy part of cinema.”

    We are all screwed up in our ways, and Hughes allowed those people to be visible, to be heroic, to be *cool*. His work is fascinating, problematic, and nuanced, and The Breakfast Club is one of the problematic but also more iconic examples.

    (movie credit: Universal Pictures)

  • movie reviews

    Movie Review: Zoolander (2001)

    This movie has lived so long in my soul that I don’t need to watch it anymore, really. Zoolander may well be the origin of memes as far as I’m concerned. Infinitely quotable, both absurd and stacked with cameos, Zoolander arrived in my young life at a time where it basically branded itself on my gray matter.

    The version in my head, edited by the memories of a young teen, is kinda better than the actual movie. The jokes are so absurdly funny when you anticipate them and quote with them. “What is this, a school for ants? It needs to be at least…three times bigger than this.” “I’m not an ambi-turner.” “Orange mocha Frappuccino!” “I’ve got the black lung, pop. Cough. Cough.”

    I didn’t pick up on the bits that I wasn’t old enough to understand. The various sex stuff, whatever. But I completely forgot this movie has blackface in it. It’s the kind of “plausible deniability” blackface that white folks like to do. Zoolander makes himself up as a Black man for a disguise — which is initially really funny here because they cast a man who looks very different from Ben Stiller but does the facial expressions perfectly — and then wipes off some of the makeup to turn back into Ben Stiller.

    But only some of the makeup is removed and much of his skin remains painted dark-brown while he begins acting like one of the primates from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The brown skin coloring is left in a way to make him look more like a monkey. When I was young, it never registered. These seemed to be two distinct unrelated jokes.

    There was also plausible deniability for Ben Stiller’s use of blackface in his movie Tropic Thunder. One thinks maybe Ben Stiller just thinks blackface is funny.

    I’m now old enough to hear the racist dog whistles, and uh, bark bark bark.

    It kinda ruins the whole thing for me? I have this petty thing where I think white people trying to wink-nudge about blackface means they’re actually garbage humans telling on themselves. Tina Fey, looking at you. They’ll talk about how “humor has changed” and you “can’t do that anymore” like it was *ever* okay. It is not. It was not. What changes is how safe and common it is to call out the racism.

    This point occurs near the end of the movie, shortly before the climactic fashion show. There is other humor that is edgy and inappropriate but still so funny—like the bulimia joke *kills* even more now that I have recovered from an eating disorder. “You can read minds?”—but blackface is a world apart in violence. This kind of thing makes me so cynical.

    Also, trigger warning for Donald Trump jumpscares.

    I want to comment on everything else I love about it. David Duchovny as a hand model. The entire performance by Milla Jovovich. Billy Zane shows up to have Zoolander’s back. A young Lightning McQueen is pretty adorable as Hansel—kachow! wowww! The central romantic couple is played by an IRL married couple and I’m SUCH a sucker for it. Plus, addressing the exploited labor in the fashion industry is (unfortunately) timeless in its relevancy. I completely understand how Zoolander transformed my brain. But…I don’t think I really want it in my rewatch rotation and it’s lost its stance as a benign comedy in my head.

    Ben Stiller has always had a good ear for such goofy stylized comedy. He’s also really good at leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I guess that’s the stuff you can get away with when you have so many extremely famous friends like Billy Zane.

    As with George of the Jungle, where I am left feeling bereft by a childhood influence that is not aging well, I elect not to rate this movie in my review.

  • Diaries

    diary of a reformed stoner, day 2

    Day One of my new weed-free life went well. I pined for my vape several times but got over it quickly. I have no appetite, I still felt stoned all morning, and now I’m getting that weird empty feeling. That’s all fine.

    My weirdest symptom of withdrawing from cannabis: My gag reflex is back, and it’s more sensitive than I’ve ever experienced.

    I did not discover that by doing the thing you’re thinking about. But go ahead and think that I did, because it’s much funnier.


    I guess I’m afraid of losing the third eye that it feels like I gained from being on enough cannabis to experience psychedelic effects, over a long period of time.

    Hang skepticism up on a hook; I’m not being especially silly here. Usage of psychedelic substances just changes the scale of perspective. You lose a lot of mindfulness/immediacy of the moment and your thoughts turn to the universe. Greater rhythms seem more obvious. It’s a really nice meditation aid. I have done a lot of soul-searching about myself and my position in the world. It’s lovely-weird to feel like you can gain clarity when you’re zooted all to beans.

    One of the reasons I decided to quit-quit instead of just switching to edibles is because I think that sense of perspective needs to…not be a daily thing. Or even a weekly/monthly thing. I am not a universal being, haha. I’m a human who exists inside of skin. I am sitting at a table, I touch the wood grain, my cats meow at me. Frankly the matters of THE UNIVERSE are so big as to be none of my business.

    But I will miss it!

    I was already cutting way back so I was mostly just getting the soporific lazyguy effects of cannabis anyway, realistically, full honesty. The last couple months was just sitting around feeling vaguely paranoid and sleepy and coughing up junk. Like, that’s not a beautiful glimpse of the universe, and I have to be SO HONEST about how stupid it would be to remain in a groggy/sick state.

    I feel extremely silly typing this out because I think you all know that psychedelic insights *feel* very meaningful and fascinating, and they can be personally useful, but it’s also like. Yes Sara. You can’t do that all the time. It doesn’t actually mean anything.

    But I really LOVE feeling like there is no differentiation between myself and all the other star-stuff in this universe. I find it harder to hate anyone now that I “see” we are made out of the same thing. That we are all here together in this universe-scaled system in the way that proteins are together in our cells, doing our lil guy jobs to make the cell work, and the cell working makes the organ work, and the organ working makes the body work, and the body working makes the community work, and–

    Do I get to keep those insights? Will that profound feeling of completeness, oneness with the stones and the earth and my friends and my enemies and my plants and my cats, will it stay? Can I keep it when the chemicals fade from my system, or will the chemicals take away my ability to feel that unity because it was only chemicals all along? What if the world is a bleak magicless place that isn’t pumping along to the great music of existence?

    This is why I think I should get into yoga. And maybe transcendental meditation. lol

  • sara reads the feed

    Day One Actually Sober, ketosis, and blah blah blah whatever

    Quitting cannabis, so far, is absolutely 10,000% easier than nicotine. At least on day one. Day one quitting nic was like an itchy haze of random sobbing and shouting at people and tearing my hair out. So far, I’ve just kept remembering that I can’t vape and getting a little bummed because I miss being fucked up. But it’s okay, I don’t have to be fucked up. It’s a lot easier to switch between tasks and Do More Things and that is worth giving up the peace of vaping through my day.

    …well, BREATHING is worth giving it up, and the other stuff could be worse.

    Again: I have been at this for eight years, and before that (with overlap), I was an alcoholic. I don’t really know what a Sober Sara is like. Certainly not a Sober Sara who has been a grown ass adult for so long. I was quite a young adult when I was last Chronically Sober and not just California Sober. A lot of people keep telling me that I might not change much at all from this. Will I be the same as I was last week? Last month? Is there a different Sara who’s been snoozing under the weight of our happy green flower friend, waiting to perk up and blossom?

    It’s just so hard to imagine because I’m also really productive and full of interests when I’m stoned. Like, all the amazing things I’ve done in the last eight years, I did stoned. Being stoned didn’t let me do it, obviously. But it suppressed my energy (a desirable side effect for me, frankly) so I’m like…if that’s how awesome I am when I’m smothered by THC, how much more awesome am I gonna be the next few years when the fog is clear? Can I control the frenetic human-scribble energy of my psyche unconstrained by the sensory numbing of weed? Guess we’ll find out.

    ~

    NPR has an article about the medical applications of a ketogenic diet. I spent years on a ketogenic diet. I did experience a lot of benefits. But I also found it was incredibly punishing on my digestive system, isolated me from my family because I ate so differently, and fed into my neuroses around “clean” food.

    I think the conversation around ketogenic diets misses that it really should just be a medical diet. I really think the average person should not be on keto. If you are dealing with seizures that need a ketogenic diet – or schizo-affective disorder – then obviously the costs of medicalized eating are absolutely worth it. But eating shouldn’t be medical or even functional for most people. It *should* be cultural, emotional, and a source of relief. (Not talking about binge eating. I’m talking about just eating normal meals with people you love and enjoying food that tastes good.)

    The hormonal effects on women are not well understood, but there is reason to believe ketosis is not good for women (source: apocrypha). Also, ketosis is a stressful survival state. Your body will be more stressed, all the time. They call this “eustress” to mean that the stress is good for you…but think about how many other sources of stress are in your life, and ask if you need to be systemically stressed out *further*.

    This article is fine because it’s urging medical applications, but I can’t see “keto” pass my feed without panicking a little because the scientific/medical appeal of it really, really appeals to orthorexia, and I don’t know many women who aren’t worried about eating clean in some way.

    ~

    I knew that 23andme had gotten hacked. I didn’t know they were going explicitly for accounts with genetic data associated with Ashkenazi and Chinese ancestry. (Engadget) Of course it has to be racist evil, it can’t just be more general bad behavior.

    ~

    I didn’t realize Cracked was still around, but they published an essay from Penn Jillette, famously libertarian, explaining why he is no longer a libertarian.

    ~

    Jessica Valenti reports that multiple states are trying to make it “trafficking” to take minors to states where they can legally get abortions.

    On the other hand, Washington State is trying to enable pharmacists to prescribe and issue abortion pills.

    ~

    Al Jazeera English has a roundup of national reactions to the ICJ interim ruling in regards to the Gaza conflict.

    ~

    John Oliver says that it’s really exciting to see Jon Stewart back on late night for an election year, but also, he thinks Amber Ruffin and Roy Wood Jr should maybe have the desk. I agree. (Variety)

    ~

    AJE’s article about Panama’s “Little Hiroshima” was a sobering lesson in recent American history.

    ~

    Sierra Space is experimenting with inflatable habitats for humans in space. (Ars Technica)

    ~

    Variety’s interview with Suzy Bemba, a French actress in Poor Things, was a really interesting glimpse at the state of working in French cinema.

    ~

    ElevenLabs was identified as the creator of the Biden robo-phonecall discouraging Democrats from voting in the primaries, and they banned the account behind it. Okay, have fun with whackamole, guys. Pandora’s AI box is wide open. Are we going to pretend that things like fake political phone calls aren’t the main reason this crap exists?

    ~

    JD Barker, who came up in publishing because of a (distant) working relationship with Stephen King, was not protected by his faint friendships when he decided to ask for nudes from underage people on TikTok. He has been dropped by his agent. (Publisher’s Weekly)

    Genres outside romance aren’t always good about moderating bad behavior so I was glad to see the hammer fall swiftly on this one.

    ~

    Britney Spears fans are NOT having it with JTimberlake’s new nonsense. (Variety)

  • facebook

    The crossroads of January ’24

    Posted on: 1/24/24 at 2pm. Facebook.

    Today I released ladybugs into my plant collections, as I periodically do, and I never get over the surprise at how LOUD ladybugs are.

    Loud, you ask? How is this possible?

    Imagine 1500 tiny cows climbing on top of a forest and falling off constantly. That’s how.


    Posted on: 1/25/24 at 4pm. Facebook.

    Doctor didn’t have appointment. Went to urgent care.

    Me: I have my biannual chest infection because I have asthma and I vape. I need prednisone.

    Physician’s assistant: Do you have any signs of sickness? Fever, sore throat, ear…? *doing all sorts of poking and listening*
    Me: No, I’m quite sure I just have a chest infection from the vaping.

    PA: OMG you absolutely cannot vape, you do not have the luxury, you cannot inhale anything but inhalers when you have asthma.

    Me: OMG nobody ever told me that before.

    PA: Really??

    Me: No.

    Nobody told me that getting lectured by young-20s medical professionals would get more annoying as I get older.

    I know she’s right; I know everyone who has told me this is right. I quit nicotine, I quit alcohol, I even quit my eating disorder (and boy was that an Everest). I know I’m gonna quit vaping everything else someday. I think about quitting every single day, and I do not because I am waging some internal war that I have yet to win. A twenty-whatever doctor telling me, “You cannot vape,” does absolutely nothing to help me win that battle? Because here I am, right now, writing this post and vaping, and even though I “cannot” and “don’t have the luxury” somehow we’re still going.

    It’s like when my midwife told me I needed to stop gaining weight so fast in pregnancy. Like…I was struggling with crushing depression, unable to be medicated because I was pregnant, feeling constantly awful, and had absolutely no way of regulating my diet or exercise while I was going through the mental health chaos storm of pregnancy. But they tell you you’re supposed to stop gaining weight like someone telling you that is the ~magic switch~ they can flip.

    Give me resources to help me quit vaping weed, give me actual medically based suggestions for winning against my impulse control, or give me the dignity of silence because the alternatives do not help at all.

    At least I got the prednisone though!


    Posted on: 1/26/24 at 9am. Facebook.

    Today King is getting his Stelfonta injection for a cutaneous non-metastatic mast cell tumor on his left mammary chain. It will cause mast cell degranulation. He won’t feel very good, so he’s on a lot of antihistamines and steroids, which also don’t make him feel great tbh.

    I just keep reflecting on how much it sucks that King, who is fully our sweet little family member, so important to us, never has done anything wrong in his darn life, cannot possibly understand what is happening to him or why he has to feel bad. I know it’s just EMOTIONS but I jump straight to “welp this how we know there’s no god.”

    Please turn your thoughts toward healthy vibes for King: hoping that this falls off in totality, he heals without infection, and we don’t get any more tumors for a long while. They are very common in his breed but he’s only five years old.


    Posted on: 1/26/24 at 3pm. Bluesky.

    every time Scott Adams exists perceptibly, I remember writing him a hate email when I was like 12. he actually responded to me. I was so confused as to why he was even reading hate mail from kids, much less responding, lmao.

    (I loved Dilbert and I was REALLY disappointed to learn his politics)

    my hate mail was honestly not really hate mail, but as argumentative as i always am and can never resist being. i had seen some anti-gay writing of his (iirc) and i wanted to break down the errors in his logic because, well, i loved dilbert so I Should Fix Scott Adams.

    Perhaps it’s more confusing why I thought a cartoonist *wouldn’t* read all his email. I guess in my head, the guy in the funnies was the biggest celebrity ever, so I was actually just criticizing his viewpoints into a void. I did not respond to his response because it was just weird. ahahaha

    leave it to a 12yo to yell at an adult online, and then when the adult yells back, just kinda say “lol loser” and wander off picking her nose

    i guess the point of this story is that i’m amazed a fragile racist who can’t draw is still around, existing perceptibly.

    perhaps a secondary point is that i have not changed, at all, and i will probably be 112 years old continuing to pick small debates with people in the hopes i can improve their politics/compassion/art


    Posted on: 1/26/24 at 9pm. Facebook.

    I decided it’s time to quit-quit cannabis, period. I’m just not a guy who can moderate. If I keep at edibles, I’m gonna get back to vaping, and I need to take my lung health seriously. So that’s that. You win, 20-something doctor who told me to quit yesterday. I will prioritize asthma.

    I’m nervous because I have been on this stuff so long, I associate its use with…everything in my life. Yanno? I bet a few of you know. But I don’t even “need” the benefits anymore (I have grown so much) so it’s time.

    Considering I’ve quit nicotine before, this is gonna be easy-peasy, right? I went through months of mental chaos and sweating and itching and sleeplessness with that. This one can’t be like that. My brain’s just gonna be really confused for a minute and I need to reprogram associations. I can do it. NBD. Um.

    I already sent my husband around to grab all my stuff and throw it out so I’m already without Stuff. I’m gonna do it. I’m not losing my friend the happy herb; I’m losing frequent chest infections and gaining happy lungs.


    Posted on: 1/27/24 at 8am. Facebook.

    When I quit nicotine, I did a ton of reading about how it works, how it clears from your system, and how to manage withdrawal symptoms. There is a LOT of support for quitting nicotine – I’m sure because it’s been a public health problem since, idk, they were throwing cartons at soldiers in WWII, and we really really know how this goes.

    I’m frustrated trying to find the same information about cannabis. It probably doesn’t exist because, until recently, its classification as a drug precluded most studies. Everything surrounding it is community apocrypha, and for some reason, going off cannabis has been claimed by the same right-wing aesthetes who thought you should eat Kellogg’s cereal to stop masturbating in the 1940s. I’m not kidding. You can find a bunch of *total* *nonsense* that will ultimately link you back to places like Prager U.

    No thank you, I’m staying a leftist hippie and I don’t need fascism to give my life order, you predatory nards.

    So I tried Allen Carr’s Easyway book, since a lot of people like it for nicotine, but the version for cannabis is just…so wrong about cannabis? I can’t get over the recurring claim that cannabis itself does not have an effect, but rather that it relieves the discomfort of withdrawal. That’s how nicotine works: It doesn’t really make you feel better, but once you’re dependent on it, you’ll feel worse whenever you don’t have it. Cannabis actually does do a lot. The whole complex of THC molecules is fascinating.

    That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to develop a maladaptive behavioral relationship! We can even call it addiction if you want. But I find myself totally unwilling to take advice from a book that seems to be lying to me. They’re like, if you take it only once every three weeks, you are still ENSLAVED TO THE DEMON. I’m like, have you ever used weed? lmao.

    The reason it’s hard to quit weed (imo) is that it’s a big nothingburger with very few consequences and it’s genuinely nice. Like, who doesn’t want that? Asthmatics, that’s who. And people who live in places where you can only travel by car. I don’t drive stoned so I don’t go anywhere. I want to go places again. I want to breathe. That’s it. Those are big essential things, but it’s not because weed is a demon, and it’s *hilarious* trying to treat it that way.

    I mean, objectively hilarious. If you’ve ever seen Reefer Madness, you know that people have been talking nonsense unscientific crap about cannabis for generations. Stoners have learned to fully ignore people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I spent eight dollars to read a book by someone who has no idea what he’s talking about. lol.

    I suppose this means I just have to do this the old fashioned way: cluelessly. I found it helpful to understand the timeline of nicotine withdrawal symptoms, but that’s not gonna happen with cannabis. I’m just going to have to feel bad and keep feeling bad until I feel better again. The end.

    My best guess is that my dopamine pathways are screwed up, so I won’t be able to enjoy anything for maybe a month (which is how long it typically takes to “pee clean” with cannabis) and I’m gonna sleep real bad this week. Expect me to flop around on the internet acting depressed a lot.

  • image credit: Warner Bros
    movie reviews

    Movie Review: Joker (2019) ****

    Joker was too political in its moment to be evaluated on its own merits. The PR around Joker’s release turned into an arm of Trump-era pre-pandemic culture war. Joker, both the movie and central figure, were claimed as icons of right-wing reactionaries. Being part of the left-leaning internet, I mostly saw analyses talking about how much incels loved it. It didn’t feel at the time like anyone was actually watching the movie.

    But basically, if you wanted to be a libertarian neckbeard pissing off SJWs for the lols, you associated with Joker (often seen alongside memes like Pepe); if you were mostly trying to survive these guys, then you were following Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn redemption journey instead.

    Now that we’re five years out from the mess of its Discourse, it’s easier to see that Joker is just a character piece akin to Taxi Driver wearing Batman clothes. Fleck’s journey is one of a man let down by society and his mother, the only two possible support systems he has, and gets real revengey about it. The revenge element, and knowing what power the Joker gains as a crime boss after the end of the movie, certainly makes this an appealing fantasy for a certain kind of person.

    Does Joker intend to appeal to right-wing reactionaries? I don’t think so. Does Joker do anything to dissuade bad behavior from such reactionaries? Also no, but Joker’s bad behaviors and public shootings are not narratively approved. They are only *Joker* approved, and the movie can’t say anything Joker doesn’t think by virtue of its close POV.

    This falls into the trap of any character piece about a villain: when you take a sympathetic and aesthetic look at bad guys, you give irl bad guys someone to misinterpret.

    My biggest issue with the movie is that I personally don’t like incarnations of Batman’s Joker which give him a back story. I have never liked Red Hood. I wouldn’t even acknowledge The Killing Joke if Babs hadn’t spent so much time as Oracle thereafter. My preferred Jokers play into his role more like a chaos-entity, like the mischievous Coyote of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, emblematic of themes and serving as a mirror to Batman/Bruce Wayne’s character issues. Turning Joker into an actual person takes away the arcane magic of the Batman mythos.

    I don’t mind this Joker backstory too much. It doesn’t feel like a real Batman-universe movie, really. It’s an adoring homage to cinema that appealed to a trend of comic book movie dominance in order to get funded.

    Enormous narrative tension surrounds both literal and metaphoric loaded guns, which you know must fire, but not when or how or who will catch the bullet. The close POV with an unreliable narrator means having no clue which parts of the movie are real until you get the perspective of a conclusion. You can sense that Arthur’s making things up, but the seamless slip through his version of reality and actual reality makes it difficult to grasp the difference. Truth doesn’t seem all that important after a while.

    The editing and score have a gorgeous confluence, evoking some of Nolan Batman’s rhythms and grit but without any of the action. The style is beautiful to look at, in a horror movie way; Gotham’s 80s NYC wear-and-tear has been rendered in stark shadows and shocks of virulent neon.

    The performances are outstanding. If you’ve never understood when someone says “the actor disappears into this role,” Joaquin Phoenix manages to do it with Arthur Fleck here. His development of Arthur Fleck is really such great work, hand-in-hand with director and writers who take great care to show us that Joker is actually a really bad guy and his barely sufficient healthcare really was keeping him from turning into a monster. It’s a fun approach to the king of the Batman Rogue’s Gallery. Batman’s rogues are so traditionally representations of mental illness and trauma that they literally go to an asylum instead of jail when caught. But Joker’s really, really just a Very Bad Man.

    I agree it’s easily read with bad motives, too. It felt more irresponsible to release a movie so easily appropriated by right-wing reactionaries in 2019 when Americans were suffering under a chaotic orange clown in the White House. But within itself, on its own rules, Joker doesn’t have to say anything about that — it just has a terrible sense of humor and legendarily bad timing for its political moment. Arthur Fleck couldn’t have done it worse himself.

    ~

    What I personally find irresistible about Joker is how I relate to Arthur Fleck’s early movie struggle with his “mental illness.” I saw the movie not too long after my stay in a mental hospital. The healthcare system in my state was like participating in my own degradation for the betterment of my health. It meant spending a lot of time in very old buildings with peeling walls. It meant fighting side effects for medication that were sometimes worse than the illness itself.

    My outcome was ultimately positive, but it felt bleak to trudge through. Fantasies constructed for self-preservation in such an environment can easily skew toward seeking a horrible catharsis. I don’t have the angry character of someone like Fleck, but I can *feel* it sometimes. The dangerous allure of leaning into the worst fantasies. This is a lot of the reason I also can’t resist Donnie Darko.

    If the arc where Joker goes from being an infantilized fool into a serial killing kingpin mostly by stopping his medication doesn’t convince you to keep taking those meds, then maybe nothing will. (I’m kidding.) (Is it a joke? Would Arthur Fleck laugh?)

    (image credit: Warner Bros)

  • movie reviews

    Movie Review: Fire Island (2022) *****

    “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” -Lizzy from Pride & Prejudice

    “Somehow, I’m mad and horny.” -Noah from Fire Island

    ~

    If I’m in a TV mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I watch the BBC version starring Jennifer Ehle.

    If I’m in a movie mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I grab the 2005 one with Kiera Knightley–then fling the DVD straight out the window! Sorry, Tom from Succession, you’re a great Mr. Darcy but I just don’t dig the adaptation.

    I’m watching Fire Island, baby!

    What I love about Jane Austen books – surely what everyone through the ages has loved about Jane Austen books – is the timelessness of gossip, relationship fuss, class arrogance, and how amazing femmes are. It’s only right to transpose the courtship drama of Pride & Prejudice on a bunch of modern queens as they spend their summer vacation on Fire Island.

    Rather than sisters, we have a bunch of bff gay guys who spend every year visiting their fag hag, who is like Mrs. Bennet with all the good parts and none of the bad parts. The sisters’ personalities are flawlessly transposed on each of the friends: a lovely sensitive older sister (Bowen Yang!!!!), the two completely inappropriate little sisters, and the brainy one who thinks you’re all fools for subjecting yourself to toxic beauty standards.

    Everything works perfectly compressed into a week. The nation’s gays have converged on Fire Island, a real vacation destination favored by mostly East Coast homos, and everyone’s around for a good dance and snort and suck. By everyone, we mean anyone who can afford it. Fire Island is real fancy and our girls are…not as much. Lesbian Mrs. Bennet is about to lose her house on the island. This is their last summer together. It’s easy to project the precarity of the Bennet economic situation upon our gays teetering on the brink of rich enough for the ultimate gay vacay.

    This is their last chance for a big blowout. So Noah and Howie (Lizzy and Jane) seek to get laid, of course. Noah has sworn he shall not hook up until they find someone for Howie. They trip into the companionship of an especially wealthy group of friends. That’s where we meet Jane’s Mr. Bingley (really adorable and clueless in this adaptation) and Lizzy’s Mr. Darcy (the hunkiest robot-man-lawyer who makes dorkiness look cool). Everything you think will happen, happens – this is a great adaptation. It’s just that this version is if Jane Austen took poppers and wrote her book at a sauna.

    Look, I don’t know how to tell you that our culture *needed* Queer as Folk mashed up with Pride & Prejudice. But it did. It really did. This is a celebration of femme gays with the textured writing of Joel Kim Booster, who plays Noah, and obviously knows exactly what he’s talking about. The Mr. Wickham scandal is handled with an especially deft modern hand.

    There’s a season for all movies. In much the way there are different horror movies for Halloween season versus Valentine’s Day, there are also different romcoms for Valentine’s Day versus summertime. Fire Island belongs on a list of summer rewatches. You can put it on any time you want to recall the smell of sunblock, lube, and salt water, or when you want to feel like you’re watching your gorgeous best friends get up to bitchy nonsense wearing virtually nothing, the way God intended it.