popsublime: 2025

Wicked and Wicked: For Good are a once-in-a-generation cinematic experience. Moreover, these two films will have a dedicated global audience for at least two generations, probably for fifty years or more, not dissimilar to the long-range success of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. These two new movies amply honor that movie’s glorious (and serious) legacy, while also very generously augmenting and expanding it. If Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande don’t both receive Oscars for their indelible performances, I will be rioting. And why is the director, Jon M. Chu, receiving so little attention overall in the wake of these films? Perhaps he doesn’t need any. He made two perfect movies that are both consummate entertainment and deep, meaningful explorations of a wide variety of themes and dialectics: female friendships and rivalries, outsiderdom and insider-ism, secrecy and honesty, old and new orders, dreams and nightmares, humanity and animalism, and I’ll stop there since this list could clearly go on for quite a while.

I’m going to dispense with most of the typical movie review trappings for what I’ll write here, including plot, delving into the original source materials, and the (kind of obvious) political subtext. Instead, I’ll just call attention to what I saw and explore a bit why those details resonate with me, and also perhaps situate them into some sort of cultural and historical lineage. Have you ever heard the phrase “friends of Dorothy” in reference to gay men? There’s a reason why that phrase exists, which extends far beyond the stereotypical reverence gay men were known to have for Judy Garland (whose death jump-started Stonewall). In an era not so long ago, gay life was a life lived underground, both socially and in terms of individual gay men’s psyches. Our lives, historically, had to be sublimated due to entrenched social shame, which still persists today in most places around the world, even if it’s slightly less overt these days. In many cases, gay men’s real lives were secondary to their fantasy lives. The lives that they imagined for themselves as escapes from prejudice and persecution are the reasons why films like The Wizard of Oz, as well as Wicked and Wicked: For Good, 1) came into being in the first place, and 2) became reliably long-lasting cultural outlets and touchstones for gay men to enjoy their own collective mental space and claim a corner of existence for themselves. (Whew.)

Some of these things are so obvious that they’re barely worth saying, but alas. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion were all clearly coded as gay. Not even “coded.” Just GAY, full-stop. And not shy about it either. Back in 1939, that was a novelty, and a necessary one. Since you couldn’t live your life openly out in the wider world itself, you could do that up on the screen, while Dorothy and Toto led the way, because you couldn’t trust anybody else, but you could trust a wide-eyed Kansas farmgirl and her cute little dog, so you just follow them to get to where you need to go: over the rainbow, through a tornado, across sprawling fields of opium high-inducing poppies. (In Wicked and Wicked: For Good, those fields of poppies are broad stripes of rainbow colors. I mean, just go ahead and overdo it. We won’t mind at all.)

And the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion all re-appear here, though briefly, and in each case they’re the product of a type of twisted nightmare. And that’s where Wicked: For Good in particular gets really interesting. The Wizard of Oz is, in its entirety, both intra- and extradiagetically, a fever dream. So when Wicked: For Good tilts into the nightmare realm, which it does often and deliciously well for anybody who’s got even a slight goth sensibility, the effect is nearly overwhelming in the best possible way (especially with a pair of Real D glasses on, trust me…the two fangirls seated next to me were pretty much totally losing their minds during all of those scenes, as was I). Just like the characters in these films themselves, you are forcefully shoved right out of the theater and into an alternate virtual reality, perhaps the land of the Shifting Sands, as L. Frank Baum coined it, an endless pastel dunescape that surrounds the Land of Oz and protects it from outside intrusion (as well as keeping its citizens from ever leaving, or at least not without the penalty of death in the vast majority of cases).

As much as we love Elphaba and Glinda, who will now remain iconic in perpetuity as Wicked: For Good rolls out across the world, Fiyero for me is the most important figure in the second film, and his significance is tied to one brief scene, specifically, when the guards of Oz bind him to wooden poles out in the vast fields, to try to get him to reveal Elphaba’s whereabouts. I knew from the initial shouts of the men who surround him, even before we see the actual flash of the image of him bound to the fenceposts, that it was a direct reference to the death of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was bound to a roadside wooden fence and left there to die by two homophobic young men in Laramie, Wyoming, back in 1998. Time has now washed over that deeply tragic murder, and the film captures in this scene that sense of cultural forgetting, too. But more importantly, the film revives Matthew Shepard and lets him live again in the form of Fiyero’s Scarecrow. I have almost no doubt that this was intentional, particularly in the spirit of a revisionist text like the book by Gregory Maguire from which these films (and the musical before them) were adapted. I recalled some lines about Matthew Shepard’s death from Eileen Myles’ poem “Taxicabs”: “little scarecrow / with his / scarecrow / desire.” This vitally important connection to Fiyero’s redemptive character arc in Wicked: For Good is one that I feel certain most critics and audiences will otherwise miss, unfortunately. I was (and remain) really moved by it. It’s my very favorite aspect of the film, and if any of its creators happen to read this: I’m grateful.

What would the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum (who named Elphaba from the sounds of his three first initials), think of his own legacy? Would these films inspire him, move him, overwhelm him? I think he would probably be extremely pleased, and also quite surprised. His books about the Wizard of Oz were popular enough in his lifetime that his publisher wouldn’t let him abandon writing them, even when he wanted to move on. He was married to a woman in his own era, but who knows how else he might have identified more inwardly. He had a clear interest in outsiders, and social justice, and (way ahead of his own time) transgender-identified characters as well. I could say a lot more right here, some of which might border on mere conjecture or speculation or suspicion, so I won’t. All I will say is (and the finale of Wicked: For Good also makes this abundantly, gorgeously clear): the human heart is the desert dunescape of the Shifting Sands, whether we tread that beautifully treacherous terrain alone, or in the fortunate company of others.

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Three Films from NewFest37 (October 9th - 21st, 2025)

I watched all the virtual feature films and documentary offerings from NewFest37 over the past couple of weeks, along with several virtual programs of short films, and the annual festival of LGBTQ+ films in New York followed the pattern of cinema in 2025 for me: for every twenty-five or so movies that I watched, only one made me reflect deeply enough to comment. Therefore, that amounted to three films on NewFest’s virtual slate that inspired me to write this post. I’ve taught college courses for nearly thirty years now, and I think the causes of the problems that are plaguing the entire field of education right now, from bottom to top, are the exact same issues that are hindering worthwhile creative generativity across most cultures globally right now, too. I don’t have the energy to expound upon any of that at the current moment (even the various sorts of faux virtue-signaling in the visual content leading into the virtual NewFest films this year was driving me pretty crazy every time I watched another movie, to be honest), so I’ll just turn to my discussion of the three films themselves instead.

Jaclyn Bethany’s In Transit, written by and starring Alex Sarrigeorgiou, is set in wintertime where I currently reside in the state of Maine. Sarrigeorgiou’s lead character, Lucy, lives in small-town Maine with her man, Tom (Francois Arnaud). She bartends at a quaint and mostly quiet establishment that she and Tom are trying to buy from the owner, so that Lucy doesn’t lose her job if he sells it to somebody else. One night, in walks Ilse (Jennifer Ehle, in a memorable performance of great subtlety), a local painter who asks Lucy if she’d like to make some extra cash as a model. Hijinks eventually and very hesitantly unfold between the two women, though it takes nearly a full hour of this 80-minute film to get to that point. (I was reminded, of course, of Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 slow-burner High Art, which is definitely a better movie.)

A long time spent waiting for a spark to ignite doesn’t necessarily make for a bad film, if it’s handled in the right way. Unfortunately, that’s not quite the case in this instance. The character-building feels minor even if the performances feel mostly strong; still, they really need to be undergirded and driven by some kind of genuine dramatic engine. Yet In Transit is too hushed, literally and emotionally, for the drama to gain any overt traction, and so it remains almost completely internalized until it’s too late for the viewer to care very much. Hinging everything upon one moment, a sudden kiss that leads up a totally unseen hookup (with a few erratically blinking distress signals in the aftermath), gives us little sense of who these women actually are and what’s motivated them to be drawn to one another. The scene of the fallout between Lucy and Tom seems to be drawn directly from the same (far more confidently executed) confrontation scene of the lead character and her boyfriend in High Art after she sleeps with a character named (you guessed it) Lucy. At least this Lucy gets a surprise check for $50,000 from her painter fling at the end of the movie, instead of dying like the Lucy in High Art does.

And now I’ll get down to the point that I’d really like to make, aside from praising the austere cinematography and the clearly well-intentioned aims of the filmmakers. The spoken introduction that Jaclyn Bethany and Alex Sarrigeorgiou filmed for NewFest37's virtual screening of their movie really gave me pause. Sarrigeorgiou kind of makes a huge deal of pointing out that they wanted to avoid making a film in which queer characters die or undergo a “big coming out.” But this movie is both a WAY too muted coming out AND a narrative avoidance of what truly transpired between the two lead characters whom the filmmakers have created. In my view, the film sidesteps what should be its mission, and for all the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, the screenplay and performances are able to keep running on fumes, essentially, due to the commitment of the actors, especially Jennifer Ehle as the painter Ilse, who’s had more life experiences as the older of the two women. Ehle doesn’t just build a character despite the holes in the script; she also makes the connections to herself as a female artist of her own age evident in ways that very few actors could pull off, through the micro-moments of her expressions, tiny pivots and surrenders and ultimately usurpations, and those elements collectively make the film worth watching.

Two Black Boys in Paradise, a nine-minute animated short film directed by Baz Sells and adapted from a poem by the British poet Dean Atta (who was born to a Greek Cypriot mother and a Jamaican father), might well be one of the most beautifully rendered short films that I’ve ever seen. Atta’s poem was re-treated with a handful of judicious edits in the screenplay, and at least one key two-word addition: "They fuck," which allows the sweetly clever device of a curious onlooking peacock fanning its feathers to coincide with the two Black boys' shared orgasm. That bold maneuver earns the short its sexual racing stripes in a medium where sex between two men, even in our modern-day world, too often gets drained of its actual sexuality. The film's animation seems to be a hybrid of visually augmented stop-motion and perhaps Claymation, focusing as it does on the two Black boys of its title as a pair of slim yet muscular puppets. Every aspect of the two puppets and what surrounds them is gorgeously crafted, in order to thoroughly evoke the colorful paradise in which Atta’s poem skillfully places them.

Atta’s poem, which is featured on the Forward Arts Foundation’s website for anyone who’s curious to read it, makes stylistic and thematic nods to several formidable poetic predecessors: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Walt Whitman (particularly his poem “We Two Boys Together Clinging”). Nonetheless, the poem is utterly contemporary and functions on its own daring and dignified terms, which is further highlighted by the English musician and actor Jordan Stephens’ deeply moving narration; I doubt whether anybody else could have read the poem as perfectly as he does for this film. The short’s framework finds the two Black boys floating unclothed in a wooden rowboat on an idyllic lake, an idyll that they’re jolted out of by some disruptive police intervention back in the unidyllic everyday world that we all inhabit. Tying the alternating harshness of racism and homophobia into the dreamworld of the cartoon itself is just the right move, one that makes where the short goes in its final minutes all the more profound.

I was close to tears by end of the film but kind of too moved to even cry. Its authentic open-heartedness and equanimity in showing how far we’ve come as LGBTQ+ people in a homophobic society, and how far we still have left to go, is truly admirable (“Maybe it will be two Black girls in paradise next time. / Maybe they won’t have to be / boys or girls”). What really made the short work for me as an adaptation of a poem was how it set its own distinct pace with plenty of gaps and pauses and silences, all of which are filled with specific, precise visuals that let the film do what it needs to do, in order to bring the poem vividly and bracingly to life. The filmmakers generously have in mind every kind of viewer of every age and from every generation: “Maybe it will be you in paradise / with that person, / you know, that person you’re thinking of / right now.” I still get chills all over again just typing that barrier-spanning ending.

Finally, Omer Ben-Shachar’s super-cute short film Houston, We Have a Crush imagines life on a deserted Martian planet, in the form of a lonely, saucer-eyed Big Bird-like extraterrestrial named Ditto (Sam Humphrey). Ditto finds the lost cell phone of a very hot blond-haired, blue-eyed, scruffy astronaut (Ben Rigby), who realizes just a few minutes too late that he dropped his cell phone on the terrain that he's departing; "Oh shit," he mutters to himself inside his space helmet, right after his rocket launches off of Ditto’s dusty empty planet and back into outer space. The short’s impressive widescreen cinematography amply captures Ditto’s home and daily scavenging walks across the orange-hued dunescape.

The playfulness of the short is what makes it a good fit for a NewFest shorts program, as Ditto surfs through all of the pics and videos on the hunky astronaut’s cell phone day and night, until its battery eventually gives out. It’s never made clear what gender Ditto might be, if any, which is part of the short’s appeal. As an alien life form, Ditto’s outsiderdom all by itself convinces the audience that having a crush on the crush-worthy astronaut makes Ditto a candidate for queerness, especially since the crush remains bluntly unrequited upon the astronaut’s return to retrieve his dropped cell phone (though too late since Ditto already cracked the phone’s screen with his big beak while trying to re-start it after the battery died). In our age of Grindr and Scruff, Houston, We Have a Crush feels like a timely commentary on longing for that elusive, interplanetary (and obviously str8 & handsome) Mr. Right.

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Him (dir. Justin Tipping, 2025)

No film since David Fincher’s half-assed Fight Club has been more misconstrued by its intended audience than Justin Tipping’s latest movie Him, a supposed horror film that’s really more of a boner-inspiring (and boner-inspired) horror-comedy, and one which really only makes sense as the most intentionally homoerotic movie of our current century, at least so far. Almost nobody is seeing it in cinemas; I’ve now seen it four times and can therefore confirm that without a doubt. A product of Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw production company, Him has received nearly no promotion whatsoever for the aforementioned reasons. This is not a horror movie about football, though the physically stacked and questionably brain-damaged football player at its center (expertly rendered by Tyriq Withers, himself a former football player in a once-in-a-lifetime performance which I’ll never tire of watching) will convince 99.7% of viewers that Him is a movie about football. The other .3% will be gay and bisexual men who are sharp enough both to know the truth and to admit that truth to themselves.

I’m guessing that one of the reasons why Justin Tipping made this movie in the way he did is because on the level of its homoeroticism, it’s entirely unprecedented in the history of cinema since it revolves pretty much solely around a sports-mystique drama between two African-American men: Withers’ character Cameron Cade and his personal hero/coach (and daddy/tormentor) Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans in an immersive, incendiary role that would ideally garner Wayans an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in any just universe, which our own universe doesn’t happen to be. Without giving away too many of the plot details (none of them are earth-shaking anyway), Cam finds himself whisked off to formerly legendary and soon-to-be-retired Isaiah White’s bunker-like desert compound to be re-trained and rehabilitated after his head injury, subsequent to Isaiah’s own potentially career-ending injury many years before. Of course, it’s all part of a larger design for Cam to become Isaiah’s inheritor in a long-standing, quasi-corporate sponsorship where one star quarterback simply replaces the one before him who’s aged out of the game. The comical ugliness of the team’s owners, parodies that those actors all play into with obvious relish (and too much of it), is sheer Harmony Korine-esque nonsense for nonsensical moviegoers who bought a ticket for the wrong movie, I think because Tipping probably felt somewhat forced to add those standard horror & gore elements. The ending is particularly abysmal and unfunny, yet it’s also clearly kowtowing to figures like Jordan Peele and the powers that be, who hold the mainstream cinematic purse strings in order to prevent the movie from totally tanking at the box office. Tipping’s directorial intelligence makes the film evade what would have been its artistic fate.

As a result, what’s extraordinary in spite of all this for my own movie dollars is that Tipping (and Withers, and Wayans) didn’t have to sacrifice the movie that I believe Tipping wanted to make, a relentless, rhythmic, and visually vibrant critique of masculinity that’s unafraid to look the most brutal arenas of homophobia fully in the face. We hear a steady stream of homophobic (moreover, effeminophobic) jokes and playful insults throughout the obstacle course of the film, mostly from Isaiah White as he physically and mentally shapes Cam to his own desires and specifications. Isaiah’s (and his team’s) wide-ranging yet narrowly focused fixations include: cock size, handjobs from male fitness trainers, buttholes, blowjobs (I suppose I should technically say bro-jobs), skin tone, Grindr, a naked physical exam in a fieldhouse full of highly curious older white sports professionals, masculine flirtations that border on intimate physical encounters that border on implied sexual intercourse. Marlon Wayans is winningly on board for all of it because he totally gets what Tipping’s film is aiming for, and so Wayans is the main player who helps it get to that place. As a result, he also gets top billing (yes, that’s also a pun), even though Withers is the one whose mechanically perfect body is put through the homoerotic wringer mercilessly throughout the movie’s entire 90-minute running time.

It’s not at all coincidental how the making of this film unfolded during the extremely public courtroom trial of Sean “Diddy” (or didn’t he?) Combs, who was accused of doing everything that Wayans’ character very unashamedly does and gets away with, all the way up to the film’s confrontational climax between Isaiah and Cam. Nothing is surprising or unique about the movie’s typical genre trappings. The jock somewhat brainlessly suffers and endures his twisted mentor’s torturous advances until he uses his muscle (plus a whole lot of blood, including Isaiah’s and other people’s) to turn the tables in a riveting red-lit sequence that’s brilliantly conveyed as the camera circles around the actors and also follows them both individually as Cam prowls around and around and around Isaiah in a dizzying pacing circle. The aura of that scene and numerous others is blatantly ritualistic, a clever move to circumscribe the ruthless, covert rituals of masculinity (“FOOTBALL!” Isaiah screams) so tightly within the context of actual rituals: social, financial, homoerotically heterosexual, homosocial (female characters are almost utterly and quite purposefully expunged), semi-religious, and pagan. Critics like the late Eve Sedgwick wrote seminally and unforgettably about how closely the homoerotic and homosocial must parallel one another while also dying (literally) to intertwine yet also trying quite hard never to do so. Knowingly, Justin Tipping’s film explores that exact tension in ways that are as daring and memorable visually as Sedgwick’s cultural critiques themselves were theoretically. Critiques of gender by contemporary philosophers like Judith Butler also figure into what Tipping is doing, partly by accident and partly by design. Butler has often written about how gender uses blunt violence (or at least the ongoing threat of it) to keep social gender roles in check.

But the way that femininity gets completely trounced, ridiculed, and abandoned in Him, alongside the incessantly seductive/destructive meat-machine that masculinity becomes, is also what rather innocuously highlights Tyriq Withers’ performance as almost entirely unique in the history of cinema, particularly in the history of hypermasculine (and hyper-str8) representations of African-American men in the cinema of this country since its very inception. (I’ll refrain from more thoroughly invoking the far-too-obvious origins of such tropes via D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, not to mention its recent and much-maligned anti-remake that reclaims and inverts its predecessor's title and racial themes.) What gives Withers’ portrayal of Cameron Cade its rocket fuel, however, is the way in which he manipulates to his own advantage what would otherwise be a full-scale and empty objectification of his distinctive face and body. As most gay/bi men out there will understand from the inside out, he controls that level of scrutiny and objectification by submitting to it with deft, hardcore precision as an actor, and the fact that Justin Tipping elicited such a consummate, flawless performance from him (former football player or not) is beyond commendable. I was reminded by Withers’ willingness to lend his body to the camera for the film’s very specific purposes of Karl Glusman’s equally astounding (and pretty much ignored) central, body-baring performance in Gaspar Noé’s Love from a decade ago now. What Withers’ and Glusman’s uncompromising performances amply display is still where so-called manhood or maleness now currently stands.

To close, I’d also like to consider the angles from which Him is a bit too retro or outdated, something that I think Justin Tipping was aware of as well, so he amped up those retro aspects even further for that reason. The casual manner with which Grindr and bro-jobs trip off the tongue of Marlon Wayans’ character more than suggests that such formerly “gay” acts and territories have now been somewhat more openly embraced by bi and str8 men, not just as a quick means of obtaining pleasure but as occasionally more active pursuits, or intensive curiosities, or even overt enthusiasms. (Go ahead and google “gooning” at your own risk.) Wayans’ mock-fellating the barrel of a gun in heavy jest may not exactly be new, but a few key other things are; for instance, how queerness extends to include whoever might self-identify with it, to the extent that queerness will one day no longer even be “queer” perhaps. For me that’s the real significance of Him, as a sign of instrumental cultural progress. When the once-hegemonic category of str8 male cisgender heteronormativity has been loosened or destabilized to the point where it’s now relaxed enough to be able to question its own implicit power (Isaiah’s body, blood, and psyche are basically subsumed by the movie’s finale directly into Cameron Cade’s own, and then Cam obliterates not only Isaiah’s but ALL of the useless corresponding bodies around him), then we kind of know for certain that the earnest goals of the politics surrounding gender identity and various forms of queerness over the past fifty years have now been partially achieved.

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

East of Wall (dir. Kate Beecroft, 2025)

I was grateful to breathe a sigh of relief last weekend while watching East of Wall, the first film I’ve seen at the cinema so far this year that didn’t feel either like a total bore or a letdown to me on some level. It’s reassuring to see a movie that not only holds together well and very intentionally inspires the viewer, but that also looks unsparingly at difficult but important topics such as poverty, suicide, and how women’s lives fit against the widescreen backdrop of the sprawling (and typically overly masculinized) American West. An impressive hybrid of fictionalized documentary filmmaking written and directed by Kate Beecroft, East of Wall brings to mind several other recent films that I enjoyed just as much: Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and The Rider, Morrisa Maltz’s The Unknown Country, Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song, and Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete.

What distinguishes East of Wall from those other films are its stars, amateur actors who are also a mother/daughter pair, Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga, whom Beecroft met incidentally while traveling through South Dakota on the 3,000-acre horse ranch that Tabatha oversees. Tabatha has a rebellious, upstart personality and a mane of blond hair with a buzzcut on one side of her head, as well as a quiet, intuitive understanding of her horses and their needs. She possesses an entrepreneurial insight about her horses’ strengths and marketability, using TikTok videos of Porshia and her friends riding the horses at local rodeos, in order to sell the horses at auctions. During that pursuit, she meets Roy (Scoot McNairy), who offers to purchase her ranch and make her life easier in the wake of her husband’s sudden death. Tabatha takes care not only of the horses on the ranch but also her children and a gang of teenagers who’ve landed there over time, which increasingly made ends somewhat harder to meet. Roy has a personal investment in continuing to train Porshia as a horse rider, too, having lost his own daughter to suicide. Tabatha will ultimately safeguard her own interests, naturally, from being overridden by those of the wealthy intruder.

Porshia narrates portions of the film in a voiceover style that’s reminiscent of Linda Manz’s classic child’s-eye-view narration in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Those spells of Porshia’s reflective thoughts about her family and the geological origins of the dramatic landscape on which she was raised have a cumulative power that forms the emotional framework of the film. We also watch her galloping briskly on her horse at speeds that can almost keep pace with cars on a highway, in visuals that are a direct homage to the very first motion picture: the sequential images of a galloping horse by Eadweard Muybridge from 1878. Is that kind of referential connection lost on an audience at the multiplex these days? Probably, but I also sense that the historical bridge to it remains implicit. We are treading on territory that has primitive value and meaning, especially regarding the inherent and inherited violence of both the American landscape and the American enterprise. It’s a particular brand of violence that persists just as it always has, yet continues to shapeshift and take on new forms in the present day.

Perhaps the main reason to watch East of Wall on the big screen at a cinema is to see how finely it showcases the Badlands of South Dakota via breathtaking aerial drone footage. We hear in Porshia’s narration about how the Badlands’ canyon-like structure was carved by an ocean that used to flow right on top of it and the intense speed with which the water drained away millennia ago. That ancient natural force is just one of many ghosts that haunt the movie. Another is memorably depicted by the always excellent English actress Jennifer Ehle, who portrays Tabatha’s ne’er-do-well mother Tracey as a livewire of compressed yet jaded energy, serving as a sort of humorous release valve and ballast to Tabatha’s forthright attitude and stoic seriousness about her own responsibilities to protect her family. Tabatha rarely ever smiles or laughs in the film, in part because she realizes how much everybody who surrounds her at all hours of the day and night, including her mother, is relying on her to keep all of them going, though she takes it all in stride with a measured sense of ordered chaos, from her eldest son Skylar (Wyatt Mansfield) to her semi-adopted son Jesse (Jesse Thorson), right down to her little blond three-year-old son Stetson (Stetson Neumann), who’s inherited the horse ranch from Tabatha’s late husband John.

And John, of course, is the main ghost who haunts the film. We see the family at his gravesite early in the movie, and then we finally hear the full story of his suicide in graphic detail from Tabatha later in the film, at a fireside gathering of the community’s women in celebration of her mother’s birthday. After the women bond over some drinks in a circle around the amber glow of the campfire, the conversation turns quieter as each woman recalls point-blank a harrowing memory of trauma or heartbreak that they’ve endured. I’m certain that Tabatha Zimiga’s unadorned delivery of her monologue during that scene will be the most riveting moment by any actor in a film this year, and she should absolutely receive recognition for her performance during next year’s awards season. East of Wall and Tabatha Zimiga’s subdued powerhouse performance are unique cinematic rarities.

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger, 2025)

I watch around 200 or so movies per year in cinemas, and I’m bummed to report (now that we’re in mid-August) that 2025 has been the worst year for movies in a couple of decades, maybe even in my lifetime. Others have already written about the various industry factors that have caused a dearth of worthwhile films this year, so I won’t waste any time on that. But I will take the opportunity to use one new mainstream movie, Zach Cregger’s Weapons, to point out some unfortunate trends that are behind this problem, from a creative perspective rather than an industry point-of-view. Some critics have mentioned how Weapons and Cregger’s previous film, Barbarian, demonstrate the director’s familiarity with reliable tropes in the horror genre, though I’m afraid that I get less a sense of allusion or reference than derivative symbols and overused material, not just in Cregger’s movies but in nearly all contemporary horror films, a genre that’s historically been known for its daring and ingenuity, when it’s not just functioning in “sequels and rip-offs” mode.

I really wanted to trust the lead male actor Josh Brolin’s enthusiastic praise for this movie on social media, until I realized during the closing credits that he was also a producer for the film. Yes, there are elements to be praised from a cinematic standpoint. The actors (especially Alden Ehrenreich and Amy Madigan) are game, and their performances up the ante for the kind of portrayals that will reliably engage an audience. Josh Brolin and Julia Garner are well-cast in their central roles, if only as vehicles of expression since the film’s plot pivots around them and their reactions to outlandish situations. The film’s opening premise is that all of the students but one in an elementary school class, for which Garner’s character Justine Gandy is the teacher, ran out of their homes unnoticed at 2:17am on one quiet suburban night and remain missing. (The name of the school, Maybrook, might push the boundaries of good taste since it's a bit too intentionally close to Sandy Hook for comfort.)

While Cregger mounts the mystery and builds the tension admirably (and at times absurdly), the outcomes in the movie’s second half make the successes of its first half kind of pointless, except from a box office profit standpoint. The only remaining student in Miss Gandy’s class, Alex, has a sick aunt visiting who’s thrown his home life into demented chaos, carefully controlled by the film’s parameters though ultimately too silly (and again, derivative) to matter very much, aesthetically or otherwise. Amy Madigan turns in the film’s best performance as Aunt Gladys, a terminally ill witch with no background story and very memorable fashion sense. Even just watching how Madigan’s countenance changes from scene to scene is a lesson in how to inhabit this kind of whacked out, unpredictable character properly (she’s fully revealed after a series of clown-like jump scares in which only her makeup-caked face suddenly fills the screen).

As I was watching the film, I remembered seeing Amy Madigan in an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child, in which she co-starred with her husband Ed Harris. The memory threw into contrast the movie’s intellectual shortcomings with the artistic strengths of a stage drama that’s no less horrifying than Weapons on certain similar metaphorical levels. That comparison doesn’t undercut Madigan’s notable performance as Aunt Gladys since Zach Cregger’s film and Sam Shepard’s play are clearly very different enterprises overall. But it does beg the question: what exactly are you making for your audience and why? Also, if it’s a film or a play, what’s the dramatic provenance of your material since a dramatic representation is the particular medium that you’ve chosen as a writer/director?

And it's exactly at the intersection of these questions that a movie like Weapons, along with its totally obvious corollaries in the contemporary horror genre, begins to fall apart and unravel as art, losing both the audience and (serious) critics who’d have otherwise ensured its prosperity. Gladys brings with her into Alex’s home a little black thorny tree to use for her dark magic, and an ancient-looking golden bell with the number 6 engraved on its side. It’s more than a bit embarrassing when the horror movie Together starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, which is also currently screening in cinemas right now, has a nearly identical if larger emblematic golden bell overseeing its witchcraft and curses, not to mention that each film also features a gay male couple who suffer truly brutal and gruesome fates. These are not mere coincidences but a lack of imagination that lets down the paying viewer. Lurking behind the tired usage of the sinister golden bell is that idiotically hypnotic teacup in Jordan Peele’s abysmal Get Out (they gave him an Oscar for Best Screenplay for writing that?), an image which then became the logo for Peele’s film company, of course. These kinds of derivative tricks and blatant signposts aren’t scary, and they aren’t clever. They carry no greater depth or meaning whatsoever, and to put it bluntly, they’re just lazy.

So everything comes down to another blunt yet pointed fact: there are different forms of creative intelligence. Some are in service of commerce, while others are in service of art. The intelligence of Weapons, behind a fairly flimsy smoke-screen of so-called “elevated” horror, is an intelligence of technicality. The film succeeds visually and sonically, it’s well-performed, and its structure (arranged in chapters subtitled for individual characters, to allow for a variety of perspectives on the story) at least shows some ambitions toward audience engagement. When the intent is money-making, the technical aspects will get people to the cinema with the right kinds of promotion, as the very lucrative opening weekend box office tallies of Weapons attest. But the movie does not aspire to a higher and more important form of creative intelligence, one that brings technical prowess together with genuine ideas, ideas that have relevant long-term human resonance as well as aesthetic longevity. (Those who think that their own subjective interpretation of a film matters most would be wise to read Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay “Against Interpretation.”)

When the missing children come crashing through the windows and doorways of random suburban houses at the end of the movie, there’s a hint of a deeper idea that remains almost completely unexplored: the separateness and isolation of those individual homes on each suburban block, and the death of true community that they represent, which is a far more chilling, bizarre, and even truthfully surreal actuality of the sort that’s “too close to our reality,” as Sontag potently observed in her 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The film does descend into some darker corners and the always-obligatory horror movie basement, but rather than giving its audience real connected and developed themes to ponder by the film’s end, we get to watch the children devour Aunt Gladys and rip her body apart in fountains of fake blood instead. One guy online tried to argue that the ending is an image of intergenerational revenge, an overdetermined notion which he’s planting there himself as a kind of wishful thinking that the movie isn’t strongly constructed enough to support. Sure, the fate of Aunt Gladys harkens back to the violent endings supplied to us by classic fairy tales like those by the Brothers Grimm, but it’s a fairly flat finale that viewers will hardly care about at all once they’ve left the theater.

Ironically, I watched Weapons at the cinema immediately after I’d watched a Fathom Events screening for Ghibli Fest of the 1988 animated masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, yet another story of seriously imperiled children whom the audience is anxiously hoping will survive. As a powerful recollection of the filmmaker Isao Takahata’s personal memories of the widespread fire-bombings in Japan at the end of World War II and the struggles of people there to remain alive in its aftermath (adapted from Akiyuka Nosaka’s celebrated, heartbreaking memoir), the movie is a frame-by-frame model of how a story’s execution can fuse technical and aesthetic (and even historical) intelligences in ways that the movie’s audience will long remember. Does Weapons need to be Grave of the Fireflies? Obviously not. And yet it still needs to be more and go deeper than what it’s able to evoke in its current derivative form, in order for all of the films like it to mean something greater than the revenue that they return to those who crafted them.

Monday, June 16, 2025

27th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 11th - 15th, 2025)

As always in mid-June, I was very much looking forward to attending the annual film festival in Provincetown, just in time to balance out the kinds of movies that take over all of the cinemas elsewhere for the summer season. This year I had mostly documentaries on my schedule of films to see at the festival, all of which I enjoyed; those that I’ll be writing about in depth this time all focus on individual artists of various sorts, from a musician to actors to a Provincetown painter. I’d also been anticipating the gay drama Plainclothes, which got me thinking in a variety of different directions, even while I wanted it to probe its subject a little more deeply and extensively than it’s able to do. Part of the pleasure of seeing about fifteen movies in five days is simply thinking about the movies together in between watching them, as this post continued to take shape in my mind from movie to movie: how they converge and differ, what they say about cultures past and present, and how they contribute to the wider fabric of film history.

The movie that I was most excited to see in the festival this year indeed turned out to be the one that I’ve been thinking about the most since watching it, Amy Berg’s insightful and carefully assembled documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, which is the first major documentary treatment of the late singer-songwriter’s career in over two decades since the 2002 BBC documentary Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You. That Buckley’s birth, life, and tragic early death at age 30 should feel like such a readymade story, yet one that’s still challenging to tell, speaks to why he’s remained an enigmatic ghost since his accidental drowning in 1997. The film works to unravel his enigma through many traces of archival footage and audio recordings that he left in his wake, accentuated with live performances and animation, as well as personal memories and commentary from other artists such as Ben Harper and Aimee Mann.

Jeff Buckley was born in 1966 to a single mother and is the son of famed folk musician Tim Buckley, who didn’t want a child to hinder him from touring at that point in his career. The presence of his absence and the overall sense of abandonment can be keenly felt throughout the early parts of the documentary that explore Jeff Buckley’s childhood, in spite of his obvious affection for and attachment to his mother. Jeff spent only one four-day period with his father during his youth, which ended with Tim putting Jeff on a bus home to his mom with a matchbook that he’d written “Love you” inside of, along with his phone number. All calls went unanswered, and Tim Buckley died within a year thereafter of a heroin overdose at age 28. The darkness of that loss haunts the film and clearly haunted Buckley even if he tried to escape or downplay it, remarking that it felt strange to have outlived his father when he turned 29. At that point, his career had already taken off, based on the popularity of his transfixing live performances and the strengths of his only studio album, his 1994 debut Grace. David Bowie praised it as the greatest album he’d heard.

Aimee Mann’s recollection of her conversation with Jeff Buckley at a noisy jazz bar has lingered with me the most since watching the film. Because of the loud volume of the music in the bar, the two wrote notes back and forth on a large white paper placemat throughout the night. His comment that he really likes sex gave Mann pause since he was the kind of guy who clearly needed love and rescuing. Her description of him as a very “liquid” person and his need to be rescued as a “tidal wave” that she had to protect herself from being drawn under by, despite the intrigue of his seductive, “self-medicating” sexual advances, reveals a lot and works on multiple levels, given his tragic death by drowning in Memphis. The sadness of that loss still brings her to tears as she recalls it nearly three decades later in this film. Ben Harper similarly recounts watching Buckley dangling dangerously from the rigging far above the stage at a Led Zepplin concert, in order to let the music totally surround him, so an animated image of Buckley falling through open space recurs throughout the documentary. In the end, curiously, it's a cultural aesthetic product about someone who was himself being turned into a product of commerce and deeply skeptical and distrustful of that process at that point in his young lifetime, but it works in the film because the documentary intelligently examines that exact same friction.