Finally a movie that shows how great drugs are

Okay but to be fair, Back to Black (2024, Sam Taylor-Johnson) also shows how great having a serious drinking problem, bulimia, and being in a toxic co-dependent relationship are as well. If, like me, you were going in expecting a tragedy, you’ll get one; but it’s not one that has anything to do with the setbacks its protagonist faces.

     The morally sick feeling I got watching Back to Black comes primarily from the way it has assembled its narrative to glamorize all of the self-destructive plot points in the main character’s life without any consequences; and does so in a way as to romanticize them as a means to giving us a fairytale melodrama. While I was playing along with all of this I even imagined this careless, uneven, full of plot-holes manner of storytelling to be in the style of someone who was so messed up themselves that their impaired judgment is to blame. So, reading it that way it works. Secondary to my take on the tragedy is that whoever is responsible for approval of the rights to Amy Winehouse’s life story signed off on it. That’s what’s sad to me. All of these despicable low-lifes cashing in on this is the real tragedy.

     The flaws mostly have to do with structure. There are a couple of separate cases she says she’s pregnant and then it's never brought up again. And there’s a point where she decides to go to rehab, then we see her winning Grammys for that song with the lyrics she wouldn’t go to rehab? And I don’t want to spoil the ending but it definitely feels either forced or fake in the way she gets clean and therefore happily ever after. 

     None of this is to say I didn’t love this movie—I very much do. I had only seen Marisa Abela in that series about financial institutions set in Britain that I never at all could follow, but then the only reason I watched that show was because of Marisa Abela. She’s screen-gorgeous in the kind of Hollywood glamorous way that makes this stupid fairytale magical. When AMY is supposed to be too skinny in an unhealthy warning sign way, by today’s standards Abela looks fit with a cute tummy—not like say Haynes’s Karen Carpenter gaunt razor blade emaciated Barbies, or for that matter, the real Amy Winehouse. And I laughed out of shock when she smokes crack for the first time and the camera on her underscored with rapturous swept away with joy cue happens. (Well, she smokes some rock drug that’s amber in hue and because they don’t say, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be crack or meth.) And later as if the first time wasn’t enough, after she’s married, BLAKE gives her a gift in a black velvet jewelry case that’s the same drug, but this time illuminated from within with a light gag. So I should clarify, while the movie may not condone her drinking or eating disorder, it sure as hell seems to stylistically glorify her drug use; and maybe it’s worth mentioning that at no other time does the movie break from its verisimilitude in such an expressionistic way.

     Back to Black taps into everything a romantic work of art needs. Young, beautiful, talented, and true to herself, fairytale Amy gets her prince, her kingdom, and all that makes her happy. And she feels real emotions both highest and lowest. She turns her pain into great art and numbs it through a kind of self-destruction that makes her art better so it’s as if she doesn’t live by the rules of us mortals. And because the real Amy Winehouse’s life story is too compelling to make a bad movie out of, even though this is such a bad movie that doesn’t stop it from being a satisfyingly dark melodrama. So I both admire and enjoy its uneven quality because it crams so much exposition into its 2 hour runtime yet throughout it wisely never strays from the emotional world of all these little moments that it makes the most out of and never suffers from that biopic curse of doing what a documentary should do and forgetting that it's cinema and that's someone else's job.

04/19/2024

AMC Madison Yards 8

DCP

Sometimes I feel like Jane Schoenbrun films are more real than real life

I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun) brings out the beauty in loneliness and alienation, while remaining sensitive and acutely aware of the requisite painful fear in it all. And its style is that of its filmmaker—maybe like a cool kid who is cool because they’re not cool by popular mainstream appeal standards, yet instead prove themselves even more desirable to the rest of us. 

     The first thing you notice is the music. I was enamored with a type of music that was coming out of Olympia and Portland in the ‘90s from like K records and Kill Rock Stars, then moved to what happened to it? Did it reemerge in Brooklyn or something? Has it vanished? Schoenbrun gets it though. It was like indie lo-fi folk twee, but also encompassing anything from Riot grrrl to hardcore. And in I Saw the TV Glow it’s fundamental to the mood and emotionally stimulating catharsis Schoenbrun excels in.

     Then there’s the look. Shot on 35mm, its compositions veer towards saturated primary cool colors. And oh so dark. Visually this all evokes something like a scary nocturnal space we get lost in, yet somehow safe and secure, even comfortable, at the same time. 

     And if you recall in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021, Schoenbrun) there seemed to be this almost like ASMR hypnotic vacuum quality to the dialogue. In I Saw the TV Glow there’s a little of that, but the rest of the time the actors deliver their dialogue in that atonal way you find in all Fassbinder’s movies. 

 

So moving on from its style to its content, what is I Saw the TV Glow really all about? I think there's some significant amount of doubling going on. Like with media (the TV show is also a symbol of and interchangeable with music) some of us can use it to escape our everyday real life, but also become overwhelmed by the emotions we discover about our own realities we are confronted with through it. And when this gets depicted in parts of the narrative that may become confusing I think that’s the point. Mr. Melancholy can be different things to different people: depression, drugs, suicide, disassociative thoughts or behavior. 

     The doubling of OWEN and MADDY’s drives could be seen as respectively attachment/fear of change vs runaway impulses/desperate for freedom. Owen has a voice that sometimes sounds like the weird sound device used when someone wants to remain anonymous as they’re recorded on an audio track, which could be a doubling of the ambiguous distortion of identity as akin to something someone genderqueer might experience. In contrast to Maddy, who’s firmly embraced that she’s a lesbian but has her own struggles with assimilating and fitting in. But the beautiful thing is that they find each other.

 

All of the Pink Opaque scenes are so much fun. And this nostalgia dependency as psychological horror mechanism is the perfect vehicle for Schoenbrun to yet again break free from conventional cinematic formalism and achieve such an effectively enjoyable form of personal artistic expression. Just go with it. For me the most haunting moment I encountered was when Owen is old and he says how happy he is because he finally got a family of his own. What does that mean? What does that line mean to you? I find it sad that I find it so difficult to believe him. And the way I identify with where that desire would come from in him and his need to assert this makes me so sad. This feels like the first movie to be scary in a touching, achingly connective with ourselves and those around us way.

04/27/2024 Plaza Theater ATLFF

Atlanta, GA

DCP

That was the best screenplay I've ever seen in my whole life

So lately there’s been this idea I’ve become completely obsessed with. It’s like there are these films that do something so innovative within a genre that they communicate a truth about life that far surpasses anything else that’s ever been done in the language of cinema before them. And yet these innovations seem counterintuitive, or at the very least like they wouldn’t be the first thing the writer thought of to convey a story in the style of the given genre it emulates. 

 

In Lisa Frankenstein (2024, Zelda Williams), there are quite a few instances wherein its screenplay brings a jolt of life to the gothic teen romance genre. Foremost among these is the way its protagonist’s arc shows her not only eventually embodying everything she would seem to be in opposition to (something like a shallow, selfish, slutty mean girl), but also introducing a love interest who in turn takes up her former role: the hopeless romantic outcast loner. Yeah I know that sounds like the arc of the guy in Can’t Buy Me Love (1987, Steve Rash), except there the love interest doesn’t become everything Ronald Miller was in the trade off/reversal way we get here.

     And then there’s the way the couple first meet. One would think LISA SWALLOWS (Kathryn Newton) is in love with FRANKENSTEIN (Cole Sprouse), and when she brings him to life her dreams have come true. But Diablo Cody’s screenplay instead does the contrary: it subverts our expectations by having Lisa accidentally bring Frankenstein to life through the mixup of her wishing she could be dead and him perceiving her to have meant she wished to bring him back to life so that she could be with him. And it’s emotionally brutal. She’s not into him at all. Never was. And this inciting incident sets into place Frankenstein now having become the hopeless romantic outcast reject Lisa was. Now I’m in the story. Now that feels more true to life and even more true to the gothic romance genre. 

     The other thing is how excessively dark Lisa’s backstory is, which also happens to lead to a very vague probably not at all intentional or seen by anyone else buy me half-baked theory I have. Presented as a flashback told by her step-sister Taffy, supposedly one night when Lisa and her mom were home alone a masked intruder broke in and murdered her mom; and yet the dad seems to meet and happily fall in love with Taffy’s mom 6 months later. Obviously the tonal shift here is meant to be shockingly funny—and it is. But when I weighed up how the dad doesn’t seem to care at all when either of his wives and his daughter all die (the Fuddrucker’s line), this kinda makes me feel like maybe he’s a predator. 

     And in closing, Taffy’s end of the telephone conversation with the investigator trying to get clues about her mom’s disappearance has gotta be the funniest moment in the movie, and is some of the best gag writing around.

02/09/2024 

AMC Madison Yards 8

DCP