The Zone of Interest

 "Yes, they are very clever"

A man and his family live a lovely little life in a lovely little house with a lovely little garden. The sun shines, they play in the lake behind the house, they plant flowers and shoo the dog away from the table. The pool has a slide. Visitors come. There are birthday celebrations and bickering between siblings. Business meetings are had, orders are placed for clothing and chocolates. The parents love each other very much and they love their children. Everything is idyllic. 

That family is the Hoss family, led by Rudolf Hoss, the man who ran Auschwitz, which is behind their garden wall. He learns about new crematorium science. He talks numbers and efficiency, up to 12 thousand new Jews a week. If his wife, Hedwig, wants a new coat, he will have the perfect one taken from a Jew recently torn from their home and have it wrapped for her. She likes the coat, but the lining will need to be fixed. The lipstick in the pocket is a bonus. 

The Hoss family hardly hears the pistol shots anymore. Hardly sees the constant plume of smoke in the air from ever-running ovens. Hardly hears the trains pulling in. Hardly hears the screams. We hear all of it. We see none of it, only the smoke in the corner of the screen. Fresh fires light the sky orange briefly. Prized gold teeth are counted by children in their beds. 

Jonathan Glazer has made one of the more haunting films that I've ever seen. This a cold movie. Brightly lit and freezing cold. My stomach hurt. I couldn't cry. I just sat horrified. 

The Eras Tour

"Welcome to the Eras Tour. My name is Taylor"

Know what? Fuck it. Call me a Swiftie, see if I care. Wanna watch the Eras Tour? Come to my place, we'll count sequins and have a great time. 

This film is three hours long and encompasses ten albums and 17 years of music, which is impressive for someone who's only 34. 

She's pretty cool, you guys. As a person, not just a musician. She sued a guy for groping her during a photo op, and she won, and that fucker had to pay her...one dollar. She sued him for one single solitary dollar to shame him and show her power. So there. She's re-recording her first few albums so she can actually own and license the songs, as opposed to her former record label having all the say. So there. She wrote a song about her grandma. That is a sweet and baller move. 

She stomps her way through this show in Louboutins and ten sparkly outfits. There are multiple shiny guitars, a mossy baby grand (maybe it's a grownup grand, identifying pianos is not my forte), and an upright piano involved. Her songs are...pointed. The 10-minute "All Too Well" off of the Red album stands out here. "Casually cruel in the name of being honest" hits kinda hard. I'M TALKING TO YOU, JAKE GYLLENHAAL; GIVE HER BACK THE SCARF. "Don't get sad, get even" and boy howdy does she ever. That said, she drops zero names other than Blake Lively and Ryan Reynold's children. Evermore's "Tolerate It" is kind of beautiful, and not only because of the extremely handsome dancer playing the cold-hearted boyfriend. The "Reputation" era is the closest that she gets to being sexy, body-rolling to her angriest songs. Dancing is not what I think of when I think of Taylor Swift, and maybe that's wrong; I'm new to this. She keeps up with her dancers pretty well in a vaguely awkward way which is very charming. She is #relatable.

The shots of the enormous crowd are very sweet; there's a woman hysterically crying in the first five minutes, people are hugging each other, everyone's wearing friendship bracelets (awwww), there are multiple children and one particularly adorable child gets a big hug and kiss from Taylor. I call her Taylor because we're friends now, we can be casual. 

"Folklore" is her first pandemic album, and marked a growing-up moment for her, whether you believe her when she says it was written as a series of characters or believe that it's about an illicit affair with Karlie Kloss, which is how it was pitched to me. I'm always here for salacious stories. 

I'm rooting for the anti-hero. To flip one of her lyrics, her reputation has never been better. 

Soft and Quiet

 

What does a swastika pie taste like? In this movie, just like cherries. "Can no one take a joke anymore?" asks the baker. The baker in question is, for lack of a better term, a Nazi Karen, and she has gathered more Nazi Karens to fight for their white rights by forming the self-help and "empowerment" group Daughters for Aryan Unity, which we see scrawled on a blackboard at their meeting. The members of the group are a frazzled soccer mom, a casually elegant teacher, a young woman who has just gotten out of prison, and another young woman who believes that she did not get a job because she is white. They don't "look" like Nazis. They don't consider themselves racist or hateful, but they do think that The Jews and words I will not write or say, are taking over the world and crowding these sick women out. The meeting we see is their first. Everyone is a little hesitant at first to share their own personal stories, but as they grow more comfortable with each other, we learn that the soccer mom is proudly from a long line of KKK members, though she herself has been getting "more into Stormfront these days." Stormfront, for those who don't know, is a Nazi website trumpeting lies, hate, vitriol, and violence against everyone who is not a white Christian nationalist. They are a hate group. They are on the Southern Poverty Law Center's HateWatch list. It takes about 20 minutes or so to realize that the former convict's jacket reads, "Lieben zu Hassen," (Love to Hate), one of many many moments that made the color drain from my face.

The film opens with the elegant kindergarten teacher taking a pregnancy test. Shortly thereafter, she takes it upon herself to tell a 5-year-old (white) boy who is waiting for his mom to pick him up to go tell off a Hispanic cleaning woman. Then off she goes into the woods with her pie for her group meeting in a lovely church. The pie unveiling is a stomach-turning moment for those watching (I hope), but a real hoot for the group, who can't believe she really did that, but they laugh and laugh and dig into that pie. Eventually the priest of the church grocks what's going on and kicks them out. 

Before they can go somewhere more hospitable to drink chardonnay and bond further over their filth, they make a stop at the convenience store that one of their crew owns, and they're the only people in there. Two Asian-American sisters, Emily and Anne, walk in and it goes just as you might think. They are shamed, they are threatened, they are humiliated. On their way out of the store, they make sure to remind the teacher that her brother is in jail for raping Anne. She snaps. She becomes hysterical. Her husband, who has joined them for this piece, speaks out against what they plan to do, and is berated for not being man enough. The teacher and her cronies go to the sisters' house, and here is where it becomes even less soft and quiet. They ransack the house for fun, steal passports and ruin the place. But then the sisters come home and all hell breaks loose. There are deaths here, violent deaths. There is language used, as I pointed out before, that is sick and twisted and nauseating. 

Beth de Araujo wrote and directed this movie to look as though it's shot in one take and it largely appears to work. A 91-minute-long shot of revolting women on a revolting rampage. This movie is not a good one, but it cannot be ignored. 

May December

"Do it nicely, it really matters how it looks."

The first thing I will say is that for some bizarre reason, this has been nominated in the Musical or Comedy categories for the Golden Globes. I am baffled. 

This Todd Haynes film gave me a creeping feeling of anxiety and low-grade fear. It is largely quiet, the music being the loudest piece of it, which serves to help the anxiety settle in. This is a story taken from that of Vili Fualaau and Mary Kay Letourneau, the subjects of a media frenzy that began in the 90s and has yet to end. As in the Letourneau/Fualaau case, the couple here (played by Julieanne Moore and Charles Melton) met and fell in love when he was 13 years old. What falling in love means versus being taken advantage of is obviously a topic here, spoken of haltingly, heartlessly, and with grief. The couple, Gracie and Joe, have stayed together through media backlash, Gracie's imprisonment, and three children. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, an actress from a TV show who has been cast as Gracie in an independent film and has come to Savannah to study her subjects up close and personal. 

Portman is intensely creepy and cold here, like I've never seen her. There is something off about her from the beginning, when she meets the family and their friends at a summer barbecue. The brilliant Moore's expertise in rattled hysteria is on full display, weeping over a canceled baked-goods order. She is a home baker now, having had to upend her whole life. 

Melton is something of a revelation. The actor, like Portman's character, comes to this movie from a TV show, and I can say whole-heartedly that Riverdale did not show his skills to their fullest (no shade, I watched a lot of Riverdale). He plays 36-year-old Joe as a sheltered man in a mid-life crisis, his children all older than he was when he met his future wife; one in college and twins coming up on their high school graduation. He is a care-taker of sorts, cradling Gracie in his arms while she cries, more than once. 

Elizabeth scours the town for interviews with locals and Gracie's children with her ex-husband. She spends some time watching the audition tapes of 13-year-old boys from LA wanting to play the young Joe. None of them are "sexy" enough for the story, she argues. She makes a roomful of teenagers and their drama teacher uncomfortable, talking about the nature of doing sex scenes as an actress. She, sitting alone in the stockroom where Gracie and Joe were first caught together, acts out the sex that she imagines them having. 

The intimacy between Gracie and Elizabeth is electric and feels dangerous. Gracie paints Elizabeth's face to look like hers, teaches her to bake, holding her hands as they pour the cake batter together. These innocuous actions seem much deeper here, the eye contact between them never wavering, the mixture of obsession, pity, and hatred all on quiet show. 

Do not go into this thinking it's a salacious piece. It's a character study that raises and does not answer all of the many questions it poses, and that's ok. Answers aren't always easy, and sometimes, they're unnecessary. 

The Whale

“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” Sorry, Thumper, but I must break this rule. Don't

watch The Whale. I watched it for you. I am not better for it. I am close to dumbfounded by it. For a scene-by-scene evisceration of this trash heap, I give you this blog entry by the wonderful Lindy West. I don’t have it in me to do that.

My overarching feeling here is that if you hate fat people, love to disparage people, or love to watch people be humiliated and degraded by the people they love and who ostensibly love them, you will enjoy this movie. If you don’t have those traits, you will hopefully be horrified. 

Wanna see fat suit-wearing Brendan Fraser, who deserves better (I know he won the Oscar, I stand by my statement), gorge on pizza sandwiches full of ranch dressing and joke with his nurse that she can stab him as much as she wants because HIS ORGANS ARE TOO DEEP IN HIS BODY FOR IT TO MATTER? Go for it! Wanna see his estranged shitty teenage daughter PUT AMBIEN IN HIS FOOD for kicks?? Go for it! Wanna see that same shitty daughter AND the nurse AND his ex-wife (Samantha Morton, what are you doing here???) AND the weird missionary kid who keeps showing up at the house tell him to his face that he’s disgusting? Go for it! Wanna see multiple background characters literally fall silent with horror when he turns his webcam on to show his students what he looks like? Go for it! I will not be joining you.

Charlie, our main character, is a writing professor. He teaches entirely remotely, but not because of the pandemic. No no, this takes place in 2015, during the traumatizing Republican primary, so we are treated every now and then to news clips from that time, as a sort of shit cherry on top of this rotten egg sundae. He teaches remotely because he doesn’t want anyone to see what he looks like, so he tells them his camera has been broken all semester, and they roll with that because no one in Idaho is qualified to fix a webcam, I guess? 

There’s a scene where he’s out on his porch and I was genuinely surprised that they decided to let this character fit through the door frame, considering how hateful the movie is to him. That said, once in his wheelchair, they do NOT allow him to fit through the frame of the room that he used to share with his boyfriend, Alan. The room has been left immaculate but lightless, a kind of shrine full of photos of Alan and Charlie before he succumbed to the Darkness of Fatism. 

Darren Aronofksy has decided that everyone wants to hear the essays that Charlie’s students are writing, and also essays that his shitty teenage daughter has written. He is so excited by these essays. These essays, dear reader, are very bad. Very very bad. They are derivative and stupid. Charlie loves them, he loves their “honesty.” They are honestly crap. Charlie’s favorite shitty essay, written by his shitty daughter, is about….MOBY DICK. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, hilarious move, Aronofsky, soooooo on the nose. My eyes could not roll farther back in my head.

The cruelty exhibited here is really wild. A walker (in use) ripped away from him by his daughter, the background story of a boyfriend who starved himself nearly to death and then jumped off a bridge as a reason for Charlie’s physical decline, the aforementioned drugging, the strain of masochism that runs through the whole film (“Do you find me disgusting?”), the offer to write his daughter’s essays and buy her love and respect for $120K, every scene where he eats. We are instructed by this movie to be horrified by fatness, to see fat people as feral helpless animals. Charlie is a human being. He is a human being surrounded by demons who see him as a beast, who feed him buckets of fried chicken while simultaneously telling him he’s dying, who make beep beep reverse sounds when he’s in his wheelchair, who threaten (lovingly!) to stab him. 

Sidebar: It rains for the entire movie.. Is it Seattle-like in Idaho? Who knew? Yet no one is ever wet. Charlie’s floor is never damp from all the people barging in and out of his house every day from the rain. The only dampness in this movie is Charlie because he sweats all the time. He sweats and he wheezes, and he has several near-heart attacks from things like laughing at his shitty daughter's poetry which he loves, and from orgasming. That’s how we meet Charlie, nearly dying from watching porn. It's gay porn, and the weird missionary kid sees it and he could not be happier to have found Charlie, a "disgusting" gay who needs his help to get to heaven, where he won't be fat anymore.

I’m sorry, but I must speak more about this daughter. Her name is Ellie and she is the worst. I was a teenage daughter once and Ellie takes the whole cake on the Being Shitty to Her Parents thing. I was no angel, but damn. Along with drugging her father and calling him disgusting numerous times, she blows weed smoke into his (drugged) sleeping face and threatens to accuse the weird missionary boy of rape if he refuses to smoke weed with her. So he does! Even though…he got kicked out of his house in Iowa for being…addicted to weed. I am unable. 

To paraphrase Chekhov, “If you tell someone they’re dying in the first scene of a movie and then again and again over the course of the movie, they’re going to die.” Or at least something like that. So Charlie dies. He dies after the weird missionary kid assures him that dying will make him not fat anymore. He dies after his daughter suddenly decides that even though she thinks he’s disgusting and she kind of tried to kill him, he’s her dad and she wants him around. He dies, glows, and ascends. The movie ends. Praise be. 

My Policeman

First, how excellent to have a film about queerness with four of the major stars being queer (maybe three, I'm unclear on the Harry Syles situation), and a gay director, Michael Grandage. For whatever reason, I honestly did not think I would be moved by this movie. My impression from the trailers was that it would be surface-level queer with no real exploration, sex, or romance. I am pleased to report that I was incorrect. This is more than one love story, it's at least three. It bounces between 1957 and 1999, joy and sadness, romance and hatred, passion and relative apathy, white lies and much bigger lies.

The titular "My" here is not one person. The first love story is between the policeman in question, Tom (Styles) and his wife-to-be, Marion (Emma Corrin, goddess Diana of The Crown), who is the first My of the story. She's a shy school teacher, all pleated skirts and no makeup. He's a terribly handsome (come on, you know it) young "copper" in Brighton, the small coastal Sussex town where this all takes place. David Dawson, who I knew only from Ripper Street (which also gave us Josh O'Connor of The Crown fame; he’s in some really fabulous heart-rending movies, ask me later) is the second My, and what a devastating and understated My he is. To be clear, this film is in part a tragedy, but it is not full of death. No one in this movie dies for being queer, please know that going in. There is violence, all committed by cops (surprise!) and homophobic pricks (not a great word choice, I know). Dawson is Patrick, the museum tour guide who forms a friendship with the married couple. They go on picnics together, they go to the opera, they study JMW Turner’s paintings, and Tom exchanges furtive glances with his wife and with Patrick. And we’re off. 

Tom moves swiftly from being a cop with the power to arrest men caught in homosexual acts or accused of the same, to being a civilian softly and unthinkingly touching the neck of his friend, to being in love with that friend. Marion is at least partially aware of some sort of relationship between the two men, made all the more difficult because she loves them both, in wildly different ways, but she loves them. This is not a polyamory story, but it isn’t not one, though not in the way we tend to think of those. 

The film begins in 1999 and we see the fate of all three characters, specifically that they are sharing a home, though not quite willingly.  I won't give away anything else, but the actors are Linus Roache (older Tom, also very handsome, from Law and Order), Gina McKee (older Marion, still frumpy, from Croupier), and Rupert Everett (older Patrick, a bit beaten down, from My Best Friend’s Wedding). 

Whether the film gets the older and younger versions of the characters to “match” in their behavior is up for debate. People change, of course, but the expectation that we have for movie characters to retain every bit of their younger selves as they age is silly, that is simply not the way of things. Harry Styles’ performance as Tom is that of a young and confused sweet man, unintentionally hurtful to his lovers. Linus Roache’s Tom is hardened, mainly interested in taking his dog for long walks on the rocky beach and not discussing the past. 

I’m so glad that Dawson is getting his due and I hope that this will be his ticket the way that The Crown was for Corrin. Harry Styles doesn’t need a ticket, he’s had his for years, but it’s always exciting to see a multi-hyphenate prove people wrong, which I believe he has done here.

Blonde

I've gotta give credit to the director, this movie is a masturbatory masterpiece. He has made explicitly clear that there is no room here for anyone other than himself, least of all the audience. Unfortunately for him, the only good thing about this movie is Ana de Armas' turn as Marilyn Monroe, and that's not even very good because there is only one note for her to play over the course of the almost three-hour running time. Ana and Marilyn both deserve far better than this. Yes, this is a "fictionalized chronicle of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe," so take literally every shot of this movie with a grain or bushel of salt, or don't take it at all. 

A movie about the inner life of Marilyn Monroe should, by all accounts, be terribly sad and fraught, but also layered and with some manner of forward movement and growth. None of that is here. This is not really about Marilyn, it's about Marilyn via the men in her life. These men are unnamed in character (The Ex-athlete, The Playwright), for reasons that baffle me, especially since at one point a newspaper headline pops up stating, "Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe to Marry." No matter. Bobby Cannavale (deserving of more) is Joe DiMaggio (the ex-athlete), a one-note predatory brute. Adrien Brody (deserving of more) is a perhaps two-note Arthur MIller, the only man (really the only person other than her makeup artist) in this movie to show Marilyn anything even remotely like love, or kindness of any sort. Evan Williams and Xavier Samuel are the two beautiful young men playing Edward G. Robinson Jr and Charlie Chaplin Jr, whom Marilyn is shown as being with in a years-long throuple. 

Each partnership ends in pregnancy, and each pregnancy ends in miscarriage or forced abortion. Don't forget the talking fetuses begging her not to "kill" them like she did the others. There's a lot more to say about that, but I'll let other people do that so I can retain some amount of sanity. There's an NC-17 rating to this movie for the one and only reason that there are a couple of shots from "inside her vagina" during a previously-mentioned abortion. Let's remember that if it showed someone's head exploding right off of their body, it MIGHT be rated R. But vaginas are SCARY and women's wants and needs are UNIMPORTANT and and and and and. The lighting changes, the switches between b/w and color, and the focus shifting throughout the movie? No idea. Just another way to show off, I suppose. Andrew Dominik, the writer and director (double threat of bad) really wants us to know that he's seen movies before and he knows the tricks, even if those tricks make not one whit of difference or add any depth here. 

Marilyn is written as a completely helpless, weak, stupid, hystrionic siren undeserving of her own humanity or story, only useful as a vessel for rape and shame multiple times over.

Would not recommend.