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Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 6, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 6, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 3, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 1, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 1, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 30, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 30, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

AMERICAN ASSWIPE: Laughing All the Way to Cruelty
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In the tradition of ruining humor by explaining it—something that’s plentily toyed with in The Comedy, I’ll have to justify the vulgarity in my title. Soon after the film starts, protagonist Swanson (comedian Tim Heidecker) leisurely munches on cookies, sips scotch, as he watches a nurse tending to his comatose father. In an off-hand obnoxious manner that we’ll come to see again and again, Swanson wonders out loud how the nurse, who’s male, feels about cleaning patients’ excrement. The abrasive joke doesn’t land, so Swanson doubles down by asking if the nurse has ever ingested patients’ feces by accident. Still bombing, his free association takes him to lecturing the nurse on what anal prolapse is. “Did they teach you that in nurse school? You and the ladies get that lesson? … I'll give you a lesson. A prolapsed anus is when the anus which is a muscle gives out after years of abuse, comes out of the rear and hangs like a, like a, slack bag, tissue, uh, like a purse you might have, a nurse might have. You imagine what it would take to make your anus do that?”

The nurse bites his tongue and walks away. In one fell swoop, Swanson’s stream-of-consciousness borrows from the comic format to weaponize issues of class, gender, sexuality, and illness for his own amusement. Swanson thinks that by opening his mouth about what everyone else is thinking, he’s performing the truth-telling duty of iconoclastic comedians who say the quiet parts out loud. As we follow Swanson’s picaresque journey around NYC’s hipster haunts, we see variations of the same offensiveness. The world is the stage for Swanson’s insult comedy as he roasts family , unleashes pranks on unsuspecting strangers. Nothing is off limits—racism, religion, misogyny, homophobia, slavery, immigration, capitalism, gentrification, bourgeoisie, Hitler; controversies are just materials for his bits.

A schlubby, paunchy shock jock in dressed-down preppy summerwear (because scruffy J. Crew is the new black), Swanson wards off boredom at others’ expense. To earn social capital among his aging hipster friends (among them Eric Wareheim, Gregg Turkington, and LCD Soundsystem’s frontman James Murphy) and a couple of young women of interest, he’s always at a ready to disrupt the Hobbesian social contract. Scotch, Pabst Blue Ribbons, buzzy music (including The Disintegration Loops and a couple of tracks by Gayngs), immature pranks, and disrespect of fellow New Yorkers keep coming. In one scene, Swanson and co. enter a church and mock worshippers. In another scene, he baits a taxi driver with $400 to let him drive for 20 minutes; after a few minutes of reckless driving and verbally harassing pedestrians, the alarmed taxi driver protests “This is not a playground… This is my life!” In another scene, he’s one-on-one with a young woman when she suddenly goes unconscious in a seizure attack. He nonchalantly observes her convulsing while raising, not an eyebrow, but a glass of scotch for a sip. After all his DGAF rebellious posturing in public, his disregard of the civil conduct pervades his private situations even when there’s no audience.

If we can get past the distaste of Swanson’s behavior, we have to wonder what creates this monster, a 2000s predecessor of the current cruelty-is-the-point manosphere and MAGA asswipes. Director Rick Alverson gives us some food for thought while withholding overt didacticism. Alverson said he shot the film with 20-or-so-page script with no written dialogue, typical of all his movies. Yet, it manages to dissect what’s at stakes when humor is not victimless, thereby self-interrogating the medium of comedy. Further, it situates Swanson and co. and Williamsburg, Brooklyn in America’s throughline of privileged men behaving badly and getting away with it.

By that I mean how the men decide what issues are funny, who to make us laugh at, and if there’s a fallout, we’re told we’re too woke and need to lighten up. From Andrew Dice Clay in the 1980s to the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles of now, comedy has commoditized punching down, making the disenfranchised the butt of the jokes. Evoking free speech and comedy’s irreverent exposé of truths, other comics have defended them. Jerry Seinfeld once blamed “the extreme left and P.C. crap” for killing comedy (he’s since walked back that comment). In 2024, Jon Stewart defended the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe whose punchline at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally was calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” It’s not just the pro comics who are ing off offensive jokes as a badge of honor; Trump and J. D. Vance have framed their subjugation of others as jokes: trans people, immigrants, and unmarried or childless women. Media critic Melanie McFarland wrote on Salon.com: “Everybody thinks they're a roast comic.” Still laughing? “What we hadn’t considered is the extent to which a complicit entertainment industry has been softening us up by elevating clowns into sages. Before the legislative attacks on transgender people came jokes. Lots of jokes.” We’re practically “laughing our way into autocracy,” McFarland warned.

About The Comedy’s roasting of hipsters, Williamsburg’s not just Williamsburg. Alverson hinted as much in an interview: “All the minutiae of hipsterism doesn’t really interest me … [except for the fact that it’s] a cultural delineation based on fashion and taste, and increasingly it’s in sync with commodities and consumerism…” At one point when Swanson visits a Harlem bar, he does an impromptu bit no one has asked for about Blackness and gentrification. To get a rise out of the baffled Black bar patrons, he jokingly justifies his presence there: “Williamsburg represents!” The thing is Swanson’s sandbox—Williamsburg, Brooklyn, does represent something about America, that is the pervasive hierarchy of male and wealth privileges found everywhere else, White hipsters or not. Swanson’s trust-fund hipster identity is not the ultimate target of Alverson’s roast here; it’s society’s handing out permission slips for Swanson to free-style his roast comedy in his everyday life. Williamsburg is simply a location where Swanson and his buddies get their concessions. Hipsterdom is simply pairing callous indifference with other newfangled attractions like irony, postmodernity, and niche connoisseurship, and repackaging it as a subcultural identity.

Watching The Comedy in the mid-2020s, I can put it in a lineage of modern American allegories that explain a lot about the racist, venal, anti-woke, anti-immigrant march towards fascism we’re witnessing now. It’s all the same shit that’s been building up for at least half a century in different packaging. Swanson’s place in the ignominious family tree is clear if you spend a minute thinking about it: Jackass (an MTV series starting in 2001) got together with the ethos of the George W. Bush’s istration (2001-2009). They gave birth to a baby raised by Homer’s Odyssey (Swanson lives on his small yacht in NYC’s East River), and walked in the footsteps of Dante’s Divine Comedy (original 14th-century title: Comedìa). It’s no accident that, like Dante and Virgil crossing the river Styx in Inferno, Swanson rides on a dinghy from his boat to Brooklyn for all kinds of debauchery, or gets ferried around the city by taxicabs for the next deadly sin to indulge in.

Not only is The Comedy a recursive text that queries the insult comedy (and therefore the film’s own existence), it also fingers the unability of the privileged class’s infliction harm on the rest of society. Still considering the film in the lineage of American cultural eras, Swanson in The Comedy is the aughts’ answer to Patrick Bateman’s 1980s class carnage in American Psycho. Instead of body mutilations standing in for yuppies’ wealth-centric usurpation, we have Swanson’s self-gratifying abrasive pranks and cruel improvs. When Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho was published in 1990, the world had known the likes of Patrick Bateman for a decade, and they could decipher that the young upwardly mobile narcissist stands in for the previous decade’s “greed is good” mentality. When Mary Herron adapted it to a film in 2000, Reagonamics had been entrenched for two decades, and the allegory of the capitalistic comic-horror was hard to miss in the film’s body count. The Comedy, released in 2012, similarly does a bone-dry roast of the American cultural zeitgeist in the preceding decade. Adding several more years of remove, we can appreciate the ugly cruelty that has spread to the manosphere to Trump 2.0’s executive orders and legislation.

A field study of hipsterism, The Comedy provokes our curiosity about its origins. It’s the melancholic vacuity that plagues those who want to maintain and enjoy their privileges, yet desperately wanting to reject the prior eras’ cultural trappings like the 1980s striving. It’s rebel without a cause because in America, you’re nobody if you’re not a disruptor. (A similar exploration of White privilege in NYC, just as delicious, is Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, set in Manhattan just before 9/11.) Swanson’s generation of White cishet dudes grew up seeing President Clinton impeached for blowjobs in the Oval Office. If that’s not enough of “nothing is sacred anymore,” their next president was one of the most notorious nepo babies whose presidency was marked by one blunder after another. It’s not just the infamous malapropisms and juvenilia, but also W’s egregious wartime power grab in Iraq and at home, and his cruel indifference to tragedies and torture.

Swanson and co. were probably apathetic to the politics of the day—too cheugy, but they learned from W’s examples anyway. Buoyed by elitism and power, George W. Bush did all the partying up front as a rambunctious frat boy at Yale, yet still wound up a two-term POTUS. So why try harder? Although comedy and irony were temporarily suspended in the somber wake of 9/11 attacks (some prematurely called “the death of irony”), Bush ended up modeling irony and unseriousness to Americans with his life and presidency: as long as you’re rich, White, straight, and male, everything in the world is made for laughs. You, too, can be an amateur comedian, a practitioner of zingers, wisecracking, and cringe comedy. Is it any wonder that Swanson and co. would put on the hipster routine and prank their way into semi-orgasm? That sequence when Swanson does nothing to help an epileptic woman on a date with him? That’s George W. Bush’s The Pet Goat moment in the morning of September 11, 2001, or his watching Hurricane Katrina’s devastation from Air Force One in a flyover above New Orleans. 

Well, uhm, ironically, Bush signed into law in 2002 the No Child Left Behind Act, because some people in his istration thought it’d be good to counter the perception that he’s anti-intellectual by doing something that looked like he gave a shit about education. The federal program failed abjectly to reach its goals. The Comedy shows that a capitalist, consumerist society would give free es to pathetic men like Bush and Swanson. Call it No Man-Child Left Behind. Rim shot.

Watched on Wednesday April 23, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 19, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 16, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 16, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 15, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 15, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 11, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

ONE FOOT IN, ONE FOOT OUT
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With that title—named after the film’s depraved serial killer—Longlegs sure trips over itself big time. Blame the coordination problem on having one overworked leg that gets in the way of the other clumsy one. Not only does the aesthetic polish overshadow the narrative merits, it makes the undercooked and flawed story more obvious.

Starting with what Longlegs does well, the film has style and atmosphere in spades. Osgood Perkins meticulously and methodically builds the world of dread, chock-full of touches that are clever most times, and overkill at other times. The foreboding gestalt in Longlegs is that of Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse, Creepy); here Tokyo’s muted urban hellscapes are transferred to Oregon's overcast skies, snow-blanketed exurbs, and suburban uniformity. The austere FBI offices and drab domesticity of mid-90s America announce horror cinema’s favorite subtext: Behind the blandness of modern Americana lurks a panoply of perversions. Wickedness erupts to the placid surface in the form of heinous crimes with its own clockwork and internal logic. It’ll take a special person to link the unrelated potpourri of depravity together. While one foot of Longlegs is planted in the empiricism of modern forensics, the other foot wades in the supernatural malefice rooted in Christianity.

I ire Longlegs’s aesthetic commitment to lugubrious color palette, dowdy production design (hey, some of us today may still live and work in unglamorous environs left over from the 90s). Andrés Arochi Tinajero’s deep-focused, wide-angle, often symmetrically composed cinematography augments the harrowing slow-burn. Typography choices in the title, credits, and chapter cards are DIY Letraset grotesque typeface—a nice period touch. The world building effectively conjures up the paranoid folklore that plagued late-20th-century America, including Satanic panic, stranger danger, home-invasion massacres, serial killers, and the vulnerability of the nuclear family. 

But Longlegs is also guilty of design overindulgences. The film compulsively fucks with the image formats. It’s a choice to open the film with a rounded-corner squarish frame that says vintage home-video footage. Considering the story’s domestic context and the childhood events of FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), that stylistic decision should work. But it only takes a few seconds to squander that illusion: the video clip has image stabilization (maybe shot on a tripod), editing, multi-angle shots (including some that cut off Longlegs’ face to suggest that the camera operator’s shorter height). Nagging questions emerge: if this is long-lost footage, who recorded it when the child was meant to be alone with this stranger? If it’s Agent Harker’s gauzy recollection of her childhood encounter with Longlegs, why the specificity of vintage analog technology? Then the footage’s frame is slowly stretched right before our eyes in the opening credits. This formalistic ostentation spoils the seriousness that the film aims to develop. Tipping off its inauthenticity and cluelessness, it’s like typesetting an obituary in Comic Sans, or wearing a t-shirt and a toddler during a business visit to the Oval Office.

And we haven’t even gotten to the film’s weaker leg. It’s not a good sign when somewhere in the middle act of a brutal thriller, I felt like nodding off amidst the arcane details of a serial-killing investigation. The final act’s gory violence shook me out of my slumber, only to get befuddled by the rushed twists and preposterous reveals. What does the metallic ball do? Who removed the dolls from the crime scenes? How did the killer sit through bloody massacres then leave without a trace? Does anyone else understand how the devil makes a timetable to slaughter families based on a pretty geometric pattern? Maybe I can organize my vacuuming schedule that way.

Not being a trained crime solver with ESP, I cry foul over Perkins’ half-baked medley of macabre details. Could there be any subtexts in the film more than “it’s just a scary movie about a one-man Satanic cult, so don’t overthink it”? If I come up empty-handed, I’d have to conclude that Longlegs is ultimately all style in search of substance, a vacuous exercise cobbled together from a checklist of serial-killer chillers and Satanic horrors’ greatest hits: A vulnerable young law enforcement agent with a traumatic past? Check. A creepy and outlandish villain designed for maximum media buzz? Check. While you’re at it, check the boxes for creepy dolls, The Shining ESP, chronic mental illness, an unreliable narrator, the Zodiac Killer-type ciphers, and home-invasion horror.

And don’t get me started with the oldest trick of the trade: upping the villainy quotient by tapping into societal prejudice about people’s appearances. Making Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) androgynous doesn’t serve the plot beyond exploiting the formula that gender nonconformity = deviance = monstrosity. Horrors and exploitation have been bedfellows for centuries. With all the attention Perkins lavished on the film’s aesthetics and atmosphere, he didn’t think to do something imaginative with Longlegs’s villain but retreading the way Nosferatu and The Silence of the Lambs weaponized and demonized diversity.

I tried to play a film sleuth figuring out if all the brutality in Longlegs could stand for something more ambitious. Many other viewers have tried this and concluded that the film’s plot machinations are flat out “lazy” and don’t make any fucking sense. I strained some more in search of any shred of social relevance. Ruth (Alicia Witt), a single mother who’s also a woman of faith, saved her young daughter from brutal murder. Could her Faustian bargain be a metaphor for anti-abortion activists who aim to save all pregnancies while making pregnant women’s lives hell? Being faithful to the deal, so goes pro-life fanatics’ reasoning, maybe saving a life requires savagely butchering dozens of other lives? Unlikely—the film is too pleased with its bleak angle about evil’s intrusion on unsuspecting families, and the sadism serves no ideologies but its own wicked aims. In interviews, Perkins has cited inspiration from the secrets kept at all cost within his own family of origin. As heartbreaking as those tragic origins are, Longlegs is far from doing justice to his personal history or any other families-in-distress out there.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

ANNIHILATION IN PLEASURE DOME
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Clearly meant to be a cinematic shot heard around the world, Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature Targets sure knows how to demonstrate its marksmanship. Made on a $130k budget ($1.2m now) and an impossible, riddle-like requirement brief from producer Roger Corman, it’s a taut, effective thriller that easily holds its own against anything else in the genre. But if you want more than a suspenseful time at the movies (a triggering turn of phrase, IYKYK), you’ll find piercing critiques of the American gun culture and public precariousness. Targets is also riddled with self-reflexive commentaries about the sixth art: cinema as modern mythmakers, its parentage and magic of storytelling, and the mechanicals of the make-believe enterprise. It suggests that, with our steady diet of the media and entertainment, we’re pacified yet titillated, informed yet influenced. It even asks a contentious question about the causal relationship between media violence and real-world aggression. Taking a potshot at the NRA’s and gun-rights advocates’ slogan—“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”—that has obfuscated public debates with its false dichotomy and bumper-sticker logical fallacy since the 1910s, Targets posits an analogous query that puts itself in the crosshairs: If guns make massacres possible, does violent media trigger homicidal behavior?

Bogdanovich and his wife Polly Platt (co-credited as screenwriters) open Targets with a bait-and-switch. The opening credits are superimposed on a dramatic climax of a horror film, a European castle with a raging storm outside, all looking silly and schlocky. Turns out that the gothic goings-on are from Roger Corman’s period B-horror The Terror (1963), starring Boris Karloff. It’s being screened in the bowels of a Hollywood film studio as a pitch for a new movie by Sammy Michaels, a young director (played by Bogdanovich himself, age 28 then). In the audience is Karloff himself, playing a faded horror legend named Byron Orlok, formerly dubbed “King of Blood,” who flatly declines Sammy’s pitch and announces his retirement from acting.

Orlok’s reason is that he and horror films are obsolete as American life has become more terrifying than fiction. As evidence, Orlok’s shows Sammy a newspaper headline “Youth kills six in supermarket” and adds “my kind of horror isn’t horror anymore; no one’s afraid of a painted monster.” Here we have Hollywood horror vs. real-life existential terror. Another ironic contrast: Orlok’s disillusioned view of the film industry he’s about to depart versus the sanguine ambition of the young director Sammy (and first-time feature director Bogdanovich himself) who just wants to make it in Tinsel Town. Not one to give up the hustle, Sammy continues to hound Orlok who’s in town for another day for his honorary appearance at a showing of The Terror at a San Fernando Valley drive-in theater. It’s the kind of venue for B-movies, often made quickly and cheaply by AIP (American International Pictures) and starring Boris Karloff. By the 1960s, Karloff, like Orlok, was indeed a fading legend, and Targets would be Karloff’s final film. And the drive-in would be where we end up in the film’s terrifying finale. The silver screen veteran monster who has struck fear in moviegoers for decades will converge with a mass-shooting monster who treats viewers as shooting targets.

That latter monster is a young war veteran and gun enthusiast Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly). To evade the police after his shooting spree earlier in the day, Bobby hides out in the drive-in and climbs up behind the theater’s screen with his rifles, waiting for nightfall. The murderous rampage is inspired by the clock tower mass shooting at the University of Texas the year before wherein a young Marine veteran committed the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. history up to then. Before the murderous spree, Bobby looks like a likeable all-American man whose life is ordinary in every way. He lives with his wife and his parents in a middle-class suburban home that looks uncannily like a movie set. Earlier in the film, he gets into his own house and looks around as if he’s never been there before—perhaps that’s the disorientation that many young Americans felt in their own world, especially military service returning home.

A case of life-art mimesis born out of Targets’s low budget, Polly Platt (also the Production Designer) makes the interior of Bobby’s house overwhelmingly white and pastel, staging it like a vaguely surreal propaganda for American post-war consumerism. Background radio and TV permeate his home (and heard from his white Mustang convertible) like atmospheric pressure, an always-present ambience of media and entertainment. Recall that the Vietnam War, also called the “living room war” or the “television war,” and combat horrors were brought nightly to millions of American homes in the mid-1960s. Does the media coverage cumulatively re-traumatize Bobby?

Then there’s the ubiquity of automobiles: a family’s dialogue about changing oil, an arsenal of guns is in the trunk of Bobby’s car, and L.A. landscapes are dominated by roadways (Orlok mutters “Gosh, what an ugly town this has become” as his limo es one car dealership after another). With fossil-fuel combustion engines and the media dominating all aspects of American life, it’s no surprise that Bobby’s killing rampage is from the top of an oil storage tank and at a drive-in theater. While social sciences are still inconclusive about mass media violence’s effects on real-world aggression—the association is found but disputed on methodological and interpretation grounds—it’s hard to think of any other messages when Bogdanovich and Platt have a sniper shoot at movie viewers from behind the screen. Cinema kills.

And let’s not overlook the unfettered availability of firearms. At the gun shops where Bobby buys his rifles and ammo, the NRA logo is on display, and hundreds of guns and paraphernalia show how normative the gun culture is in the U.S. The salesman asks Bobby, “What are you hunting this time?” Shooting cans with his father, the old man reminds Bobby that “deer season opens up next week” as they look forward to their male-bonding ritual to “get away from the girls for a couple of days.” Firearms were especially relevant at the time Targets was released in theaters. President John F. Kennedy was shot 4 years prior, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder 4 months and Robert F. Kennedy 2 months before the film opened. While these murders didn’t fit the mass shootings definition, the victims’ statures and the crime scenes were as public and visible as they get. The list of firearms casualties would grow in the following decades, and so were the lobbying efforts to keep assault weapons.

Targets shows no motives for Bobby’s killings. He bears no misgivings towards any of his victims, making them simply nameless “targets” guilty of nothing other than co-existing with him in the same culture—one that fiercely defends its various entitlements which, in this case, interpreted by a deranged killer as entailing the taking of lives. The fanatical preoccupation with gun ownership, individual liberty, and consumerism has made America the land of perpetual open season. That message in Targets alone qualifies the film as a modern American gothic horror at its core.

Bogdanovich was a film afficionado, critic, and curator before directing his debut, and his obsessive cinephilia suffuses Targets with a thematic key: how our sensation seeking and fascination with horror and monsters may end up killing us. Targets interrogates these morbid social issues, but Bogdanovich manages to make it a love letter to the magic of storytelling and the art of inducing thrills, regardless of the medium’s caliber. Using The Terror in the film’s false opening, only to abruptly switch to the present-day film studio, is an act of provocative recursion (Brian De Palma would do the same in Blow Out, 1981, and Body Double, 1984). We’re made self-conscious of our voyeuristic immersion in the film industry—itself a business that peddles vicarious curiosity and scopophilia. The bait-and-switch is also an acknowledgment of the artifice, deception, and manipulation essential in storytelling.

Therefore, the movie-within-a-movie in Targets comes full-circle when The Terror is screened at the end. It’s especially apropos—scratch that, on-target—that the referential mise en abyme is none other than Roger Corman’s film, given Corman’s place in the film industry as the purveyor of scary thrills and spooky monsters, catering to the audience’s lust to see sex, violence, and depravity projected on the screen (from the movie projector or from their unconscious, depending on your literal or Freudian preference). But Bogdanovich and Platt go further in their tracing the history of storytelling as one of civilization’s legacies. In an unbroken scene, Orlok masterfully regales four rapt young people with a Mesopotamian chiller The Appointment in Samarra, set to words by Somerset Maugham. Then there’s a scene in which Orlok reminisces with Sammy about Howard Hawkes when the TV shows The Criminal Code (1931), a crime drama starring Karloff. Whether it’s the age-old oral tradition, Universal Studios’ classic monsters, humanity’s dark side portrayed by the likes of Hawkes, or cheap thrills like Corman, we’ve been predictably drawn to the taste of fear. In Targets’s denouement, the imagined gothic “terror” playing out on the screen is contrasted with the public nightmare unfolding in real time. The latter has become more quotidian in modern life, with mass shootings so endemic that they’ve virtually become America’s disgraceful, horrific folk tale.

I can’t get over Bogdanovich and Platt’s turning the drive-in theater, that most American of cinematic venues, into a scene of carnage. This is my take regardless of authorial intention: the So Cal drive-in is a metaphor for utopian America. For two centuries, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have created this mid-20th-century pleasure dome. A refuge from the daily grind, some come for a romantic time with their dates, others for quality time with family, and yet others for their solitude, all in the privacy of their cars, a perfect union of the automobile and entertainment cultures. They gorge on factory-made, ultra-processed foods sold at the concession stand. They feast their eyes on the terror manufactured fast and cheap. The proletarian nature of the drive-in and its crowded snack bar is about a nation in search of egalitarian pleasure. Flawed and hindered as the search is by capitalism and other endemic woes, it’s democracy. There’s no shame in that, only pride.

Enter a man with a different idea about his inalienable rights. The screen becomes a hideout and an advantageous place where he fires his weapon. You know where I’m going with this; both Reagan and Trump weaponized their screen presence for populist appeal. When the lights go down, we’re picked off one by one while others look straight ahead unawares. Taking out the projectionist takes care of checks and balances; the movie experience is now hijacked by the cruel gunman. Early targets may not be you. Perhaps they start with women's reproductive rights, trans kids, and undocumented immigrants. Then the casualties will be people of color, disenfranchised populations, educational institutions, academic research, and international humanitarian programs. Next targets will be marriage equality, public health, environmental regulation, consumer protection, labor unions, and small businesses. Not far off are your social security, the value of your retirement funds, your job, your freedom. The danger keeps getting closer and closer. Targets may be a fictional terror at a specific time and place—the Reseda Drive-In in 1968, but it foretells the annihilation that, in 2025, is happening here and now.

Watched on Friday April 4, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 2, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 2, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 1, 2025.

TRICKY DICK AND TROJAN STUD: The Weathercocks of American Hypocrisy
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The adage “looks can be deceiving” is apt for a film about a hairdresser’s sudsy sexcapades that in fact exposes the hypocrisy that drives American politics and economy. Who better to represent that rot than Richard Nixon? (Well, another sociopathic autocrat comes to mind, but that’s for another time.) The chronology of Shampoo is crucially bound up with Nixon’s Presidency. Plotwise, the film takes place on two days in 1968 before and after the election that puts Nixon in the White House. Production-wise, it’s conceived by Warren Beatty and Robert Towne around the time that Nixon rose to his Presidency. The film hit the screens in 1975 six months after Nixon resigned. The year depicted in the film, 1968, was a particularly harrowing year in American history, with violent riots, shocking assassinations, a three-way Presidential race with lousy candidates, and staggering numbers of lives lost in Vietnam and Laos. And there it is in Shampoo, Americans somehow thought Nixon and Agnew were the answer to their grave problems at home and abroad.

By the time Nixon won the electoral race, his nickname “Tricky Dick” had been around for two decades thanks to his dirty tricks with campaign funding and malevolent lies about his opponents. The Nixon-Agnew istration would be found guilty of unprecedented abuse of power and a host of other destructive decisions too many to list here. Watching Shampoo in 1975 soon after Nixon’s resignation, moviegoers must have been struck by the putrid hypocrisy of Tricky Dick’s promise in his victory speech aired on TV and shown in the film, “… the great objective of this istration at the outset [will be] to bring the American people together. … This will be an open istration.” With the hindsight of what would come, Americans in 1968 are shown in the film as misguided by their apathy, hedonism, narcissism, or blind faith in the trickle-down economics. In a few years’ time, their innocence would suffer a poignant death, but not until numerous lives had been lost in the war that Nixon furtively prolonged to get himself elected. Shampoo is therefore a veritable text of America in the 1960s and Nixon era, its moral com, politics, capitalism, and sexual revolution.

The provenance of Shampoo also factors into its mythology as a product of New Hollywood. Beatty and Towne collaborated and butted heads on the script throughout the Nixon istration and the roiling Watergate scandal. The script was finally ready, and director Hal Ashby entered the picture in December 1973—two months after VP Spiro Agnew had resigned due to corruption charges, and a month after Nixon’s televised speech proclaiming “I am not a crook.”

The long gestation of Shampoo saw Beatty, Towne, and Ashby go from having only Beatty as a hot commodity from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to all three men’s rise to spectacular success. These were Beatty’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Parallax View (1974), Towne’s Academy-nominated script for The Last Detail (1973) and his Academy win for Chinatown (1974), and Ashby’s critical and commercial success from his direction of The Last Detail. On top of all that cred, Beatty added buzz by playing on his Don Juan reputation in his role as the womanizing George Roundy. For George’s various conquests, Beatty cast Hollywood stars Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, and Lee Grant, all of whom, according to rumors if not acknowledgment, had relationships with Beatty. New Hollywood was doing synchronized publicity like the best of Old Hollywood.

With all the fanfare as its tailwind, Shampoo went on to earn 15 times its budget (grossing $350M in 2025 money). Many butts were in seat no doubt because of the early clamor about the line “well, most of all, I’d like to suck his cock” blurted out by Jackie (Julie Christie) in a scene where elite L.A. Republicans convene at a stuffy dinner soiree to watch the election results. Co-writer Robert Towne is on record as saying that the scene alone makes “$40 million! Right there!”

Promoted as a sex farce starring Hollywood celebrities, Shampoo’s raunchy form is rooted in the long tradition of risqué entertainment in which social injustices are exposed and ridiculed. According to Towne, these include Greek satyr comedies, Moliére’s plays, and Jean Renoir’s 1939 film Rules of the Game. Most important, Towne cited the 17th-century English Restoration comedy, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife in which a mischievous London man in a circle of flirts, cheats, and adulterers poses as a eunuch to gain entry in women’s inner circle. Reportedly inspired by a high-end hairdresser Gene Shacove (who would serve as the film’s technical consultant), Towne said in amazement that he saw Shacove “going like a bee from one flower to the next. The most beautiful girls … The only rooster in the hen house.”

As a hairdresser for privileged women in Beverly Hills, George Roundy (Beatty) is in constant pursuit of sex, romance, and financial prospects. George’s nonconformity to the patriarchal order grants him rare benefits. His presumed queerness deems him unthreatening to straight men concerned with their wives and girlfriends’ fidelity. Making women feel desirable, George has uncommon access to their interiority like the Trojan Horse for heteropatriarchy. The hollow stud takes full advantage of that privilege but his sexploitation proves more consuming than expected. The film’s unmistakable aftertaste of melancholy speaks to the growing recognition that the American Dream, be it on the streets or in the sheets, has evaded or failed its followers.

Alternatively, the dense subtexts and contexts of Shampoo can be understood through the lens of the Western, that most American of cinematic genres. George is an improbable incarnation of the genre’s outcast cowboy who seeks opportunity in the wild west. Here, the libertine hairdresser’s secret weapon is not his sharpshooting, but the gift of his good looks and an unmasculine occupation. He’s armed with a hair dryer instead of a handgun, and equipped with a motorcycle in place of a horse. In one scene, we see George tuck his handheld blow dryer behind his concho leather belt before he rides off on his Triumph.

Once arid and rugged, the luxurious enclave with lush gardens and sparkling pools of Beverly Hills stand as a shining mecca for materialism, wealth worship, and beauty fetishism. The city is rendered a lawless frontier town due to its shifting mores, the sexual revolution, and endemic greed. Nobody wins except those already powerful. Having slept with both the wife and mistress of an investor Lester (Jack Warden), George is at the mercy of a powerful man who can crush him or help him start an enterprise. Thinking he’s getting in on the game, George is coming undone by it. In the final shot, the lone gunslinger learns a disillusioning lesson as his unrealized dreams speed off into the sunset clouded by L.A.’s smog.

On that dispiriting note, Shampoo’s subtext on eroded idealism dually applies to America as well as Hollywood. The film’s release is a closing chapter in the book of New Hollywood Cinema. Shampoo opened in February 1975, and four months later Jaws would usher in the age of the Hollywood blockbusters, the death knell for politically motivated filmmaking. As apt for 1968 as it is in 2025, Shampoo portrays in both its text and context how hunger, hustling, hedonism, and hypocrisy are the engines that drive American capitalism. America’s love affair with the frontier mentality looks sexy and glamorous by the light of the sixties’ free love and seventies’ fashion. The rugged individualism will pave the way for Reaganomics and the subsequent MAGA movements. Like a weathercock indicating the direction of unseen currents, Shampoo anticipates American politics in the following decades that would make a right-turn towards neoliberalism and away from ethical principles.

SPECULATION AND SPECTATORSHIP
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My first Marcel Carné film. According to people who know things, Daybreak (Le jour se lève) precedes American film noir with its unconventional visual compositions, chiaroscuro lighting, and dark themes of obsessive love, betrayal, and crime. Me: yes, please!

I’m pretty taken by Daybreak’s innovativeness. The film starts in medias res, and long flashbacks fill us in how the protagonist François (Jean Gabin) ended up where we first found him, which was when he freshly shot a man dead. A man is killed in François’s top-floor apartment, and the dead body falls down the stairs for all the building’s tenants to see. The police force arrives, fires at his door and window, but François is unharmed. The po-po lay siege to the building for days while François holes up in his one-room abode in the top floor. The standoff becomes a local sensation for his neighbors and local folks as they peek at him through the apartment’s window day and night. The crowd’s speculation and spectatorship mirror what we do as the film’s audience; our minds piece together a narrative from whatever flashbacks Carné chooses to present.

When François’s not dodging the police’s bullets, he reminisces on his budding romance with a beautiful, innocent young woman Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent). Carné portrays François and Françoise’s meet-cute charmingly with exceptional parsimony and poetry. The young couple’s romance leads us to Valentin (Jules Berry), a shady stunt-dog showman and Clara (Arletty), his world-weary assistant who seems to have something to hide. With the ensuing jealousy, secrets, and betrayals, can murder be far off?

All the cast turn in excellent performances. The central romance is compelling, thanks to Gabin and Laurent’s realistic acting and the excellent script that makes their interactions endearing but not cloying. Speaking of the script, writers Jacques Viot and Jacques Prévert brilliantly keep us engaged as we try to figure out the nonlinear narrative. Reality shifts when characters’ pasts come to life, and lies and deception are exposed. Having my grasp of the narrative challenged and overturned is part of Daybreak’s pleasures. The writers make use of clever throughlines, like the recurring motifs of Françoise’s teddy bear and the mysterious brooch that keeps popping up in unexpected places. When we eventually find out about the origin and value of the ornament, it’s a nifty commentary about deception, seduction, and how inanimate objects earn sentimental values from the story attached to them. Françoise dreamily talks about the sunny French Riviera’s beach she sees in postcards, and that throwaway tidbit later connects the hidden arc of the story. Unhampered by the American Hays Code, Daybreak is also pretty frank about the characters’ sexuality outside a marriage. There’s a scene where Clara is shot in the nude (if you’re into that kind of thing).

I can’t get over how astonishing the cinematography is (three people are credited, with Philippe Agostini as the lead). In one scene, François walks down the apartment building’s stairwell, and the camera follows him vertically through the floors. In another scene, the camera pulls back through an opening in the window where the glass is shattered by the police’s bullets. There are some clever shots of François and Valentin in a heated convo in a cramped apartment, with one of them contained as a reflection in a mirror. To toggle between the present and the flashbacks, Carné crossfades the same area of François’s apartment to show an intact exit door in flashbacks dissolving into the present-day bullet-pocked and barricaded door during the siege. At one point, the camera looks at François from up high outside his window, showing him above a steep drop five floors above the street. Then Carné moves on to another shot like, pffft, no biggie, I do that kind of thing all the time.

Daybreak’s innovativeness is a welcome surprise. That says how little I know about cinema of that period. I’ll be sure to check out more of Marcel Carné’s work.

THINGS NOT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE A CRIMINAL JUSTICE PROFESSIONAL
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Pulpy and noirish with a large dose of melodrama, Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof is entertaining enough to watch. That is, if you can overlook the overly moralistic tone and the outlandish conceits in Helen Deutsch and Samuel Fuller’s script. I suppose the Hays Code in the height of its power has done the same thing to countless pictures: turning creative ideas into some misshapen oddities. If you’re looking for nuanced notions of redemption, ethics, and recidivism in the criminal justice system, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Having killed a man, Jenny (Patricia Knight) is freshly released from a five-year stint in prison. Before she finds an apartment to live, she goes right to a beauty salon for a makeover. The woman knows her priorities. Now a dazzling blond in a nifty outfit, Jenny’s next stop is the Parole Office. Griff (Cornel Wilde), the do-gooder Parole Officer initially does his best to put the fear of law and order in Smart-Mouthed Jenny, but soon loosens up and believes in her potential for rehabilitation. Griff begins to do all kinds of small favors for her; one thing leads to another and Jenny’s now a lived-in carer for Griff’s blind mother in his own house.

I mean, I don’t know what kind of P&P the Department of Probation had in 1949, but six decades later it looks all kinds of wrong. Griff’s mixture of paternalism and chauvinistic infatuation strikes me in 2025 as not the healthiest, but check our privilege for having had years of The Jerry Springer Show to help us judge his character. Then the officer of the law goes and proposes a marriage to the ex-con. Oh, Griff. Meanwhile, Jenny keeps her relationship with her shady ex-boyfriend Harry (John Baragrey) on the down-low, and he hatches up a scheme to betray poor Griff. As femme fatales go, Jenny is not so much malevolent as she’s suggestible and manipulated. So not very intentionally fatale, despite all that take-no-shit impression before. The MPAA might have required that if you want your heroine to survive the ending, she’d better not crib from Phyllis Dietrichson.

I questioned if the 1949 audiences would approve the corrosion of Griff’s professional conduct in the name of love. Sure enough, the script provides proper disincentives of that kind of unlawful action. Things in their under-the-radar marriage go south, so Griff and Jenny go on a run from the law in the last act. After a somewhat exciting evasion of the Police, the former L.A. Parole Officer finds a manual labor job in an oil field. Oh Griff. The married couple live in a workers’ shack next to pumpjacks. We see Griff frequently smeared with oil, and at one point shows an oiled-up muscle-y upper body right out of Physique Pictorial mag. Nice. Jenny, meanwhile, returns to being a brunette but still keeps herself dolled up in plainer-looking ’fits.

Sirk brings his directorial panache especially in the beginning scene when Jenny goes through a transformation; a former plain-ish brunette becomes a flashy blonde. Also well done with the scenarios in Griff’s house as Jenny acclimates to his family; the script is playful with his mother’s blindness and the idea that she could appreciate Jenny’s inner quality thanks to her sightlessness. At the oil field, Griff and Jenny come close to being flagged by Griff’s fellow worker after their faces are printed in the newspaper—an amusing reminder of our state of wall-to-wall, around-the-clock news cycles that have come so far from the late 1940s media coverage.

I suppose there’s also noir’s bleak message in the film that warns against betraying your cornerstone professional principles, like falling for someone in your correctional care will ruin a decent man’s life. But Shockproof goes for an uplifting conclusion about the virtues of sacrifice in a marriage and coming clean about your past demons. I still don’t know what the title Shockproof has to do with anything.

Watched on Tuesday March 25, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 24, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 23, 2025.

PERSONAL BOUNDARIES, NATIONAL BORDERS
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First World Problems are what Chantal Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna (Les rendez-vous d'Anna) is about, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. It takes place in 1978 when Western Europe’s national borders have been dissolving for a few decades. In response to WWII devastation and the massive need for restoration, borders opened up for an unprecedented number of migrant workers in the “3-D” jobs (dirty, dangerous, and dull). In a matter of a two decades, mass migration has transformed the physical landscapes in the European Economic Community (EEC) as well as the social psyche of its populace. Well fed, employed, and safe, what’s left of the three Ds is the least perilous one—dullness. Western Europeans, like the boiling frog, have slowly become restless First-World citizens who can’t quite name their unmet yearnings, or, even when they can, don’t feel the right to complain.

That vague ache of modern life has been memorably portrayed in Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles three years earlier. Here, Akerman turns her unsparing lens to more diverse demographics and cultures to show that the creeping ennui affects beyond a single mom in her Brussels apartment. In the span of a few days, Anna (Aurore Clément), a Belgian native, travels by train to her Paris apartment after a job in West . Among the faceless crowds, Anna inhabits spaces we’ve come to call liminal “non-places” like hotel rooms, train stations, restaurants, lobbies, and other places designated for the transitory masses. While Anna crosses national borders, she makes decisions about her personal boundaries with others, be it her mother back in her hometown of Brussels or the strangers she meets en route. Anna attempts a long-distance phone call with a romantic interest in Italy, and picks up a German man for a hook-up, but both efforts do not go as planned.

Anna’s conversations with these individuals paint a picture that geopolitical liberties and personal freedoms come at the cost of belonging. Feeling uprooted, unmoored, and scattered about, longtime immigrants mention not having mastered the local language, while future immigrants talk about practicing a second language and losing their accents to blend in at their future locales. A German man mourns losing his ex-wife when she ran away with a Turkish immigrant. When opportunities broaden, once people secure one, the net gains versus losses aren’t always clear, and their longing for better things starts all over again.

When your future may lie somewhere on the horizon as far as the train tracks take you, your personal boundaries undergo troubling transformations. During one of Anna’s job trips, she developed a romantic interest in a woman in Italy, but their distance keeps getting in the way of a decent phone call. In Brussels where Anna’s family home is, Anna reconnects with her mother at the station, but opts to spend the night together at a nearby hotel. The German man played by Helmut Griem seems to crave Anna’s company more than sex; even after Anna coldly kicks him out of bed, he still invites her to lunch at his house the next day. No one seems to notice the social awkwardness when the two negotiate a date in the hotel’s lobby with a hovering clerk. Anna accepts, but when she visits him, we are shown only the outside of his house where he overshares his life stories; in the distant background, a train travels across the horizon.

All the public spaces around Anna are built to last, factory-made, quality controlled, and mass-produced. Assembly-line sameness is a feature, not a bug. Urban social engineering calls for sanitized surfaces that resist humans’ corrosion, pollution, and inefficiencies. We see this in the hotel lobbies’ gleaming wood s and sliding glass doors that can be scrubbed clean, train stations’ grid-like tiles that repel grime, and the double layers of sturdy windows in Anna’s hotel rooms that block out noises. First-class train tickets give Anna extra personal space compared to the packed engers we see in economy cars. At a vast restaurant attached to the train station, customers sit at their tables with their heads bowed in silent observance of the modern deity that is public etiquette and personal space. Convenience, cleanliness, privacy, and peace of mind are all purchasable products. Built by the hands of the postwar “3-D” migrants, modern facilities have arrived for the proletariat and Western Europe might think it’d created a modern utopia. Instead, we’ve got new kind of engineered purgatory where durable structure, cheap manufacturing, efficient civil management are all at the service of its anonymous masses.

Form follows function in modernism, and Akerman recursively applies the stripped-down modernist ethos to tell a story of modern life in The Meetings of Anna. That means no nondiagetic score, no showy costumes or sets. The no-frills cinematography makes use of geometric symmetry and mechanical camera movement. Like Ozu’s camera works, the upright vertical lines and level horizontal lines form grid-like compositions. Dialogues are sparse, as the polite and composed Anna speaks guardedly with everyone, be it strangers or her own mother.

Akerman makes sure we see Anna’s predicament not as a deserved outcome for a woman who refuses traditional gender roles. Some people she meets swear by the conventional wisdom of having a family and settling down, but they’re also far from being fulfilled. Anna’s blank anhedonia and emotional distance made me think about neurodivergence. Perhaps without resorting to the neuroscience framework, one of Akerman's points is just that: neurotypical connections are untenable in a multicultural and multilingual world where wires are crossed and subtleties are lost in translation. It’s the price of the economic growth, safety and freedoms, and efficiencies, and 20th-century modernity wasn’t prepared to for it. Half a century after the film, Akerman’s 1970s world of elusive horizons now has a new manifestation. Social media, telecommunications, and the globalized workforce have expanded our reach and eroded community borders. With opportunities broadened and dreams emboldened, our personal boundaries have become more contracted and ambiguous than ever.

The Meetings of Anna pairs well with Here, a 2023 film by Bas Devos, another Brussels-based director. Devos’ film is also about connections in the EU’s globalized economy but decidedly more heartwarming than Akerman’s; Devos whispers a tender notion that in unlikely places, nomads may stumble on life-compatible habitués. Akerman’s austere modernist ethos, it’s been said, radically rejects narrative conventions, and just like the only other Akerman's film I’ve seen (that's Jeanne Dielman), mileage will vary for viewers on the fence with slow cinema.

Instead of showing or telling, Akerman makes us co-experience Anna’s alienation, boredom, and transitoriness. I’ll call her method “Akermansplaining." She wordlessly tells you a story while giving no fucks about narrative economy or viewing pleasure. Akermansplaining is as matter-of-fact as an ethnographic field study before someone collates and interprets the data. It’s a bracing shot of modernist formalism when modernism was still defining itself in the latter half of the last century. For my assessment of The Meetings of Anna, I’ll have to rate it how I’ll do a review on Tripadvisor of the public facilities in Anna’s journey: Cold, stark, and not just a little unpleasant to see, the film earns its stars from the commitment to dually portray and critique modernity. That’s modernism through and through.

Watched on Saturday March 22, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 22, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

PETROPUNK PANDEMONIUM
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The day after I recovered from the fossil-fuel speed demon that was Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, I was ready to hit the road again with a rewatch of Mad Max: Fury Road. It takes George Miller’s genius to make this late-late quinquagenarian have an urge to feel the agitation in my pants again so soon. I’m talking about the vibration from the road surface, you sicko. With fond memories from the first watch almost ten years ago, this rewatch confirms that this cinematic carnage is a masterpiece. 

Fury Road is repeated doses of adrenaline-dopamine cocktail injected straight up. Miller throws us into the mayhem like we’re his hostage, not unlike our hero. Before we even know what Max looks like, he’s strapped to the front of a car in a high-speed chase, like a figurehead at a warship’s prow. Tom Hardy’s face may still be obscured by a metallic muzzle, but we see his eyes wide open in horror as jagged and fiery objects fly by. “That’s my head!” he protests after a spear missed him by inches. That overload of haywire danger is exactly what the audience surrenders to throughout the film when high-stake scenarios come at us at a break-neck speed.

I detect some nifty writing when I’m not too busy dodging aerial debris. The plot, a rag tag group of heroes rescuing imperiled nymphs from an all-powerful tyrant’s vengeance, has some Greek mythology echoes in it. That makes it a touch more ambitious than its following prequel Furiosa, and perhaps grounding the chaotic action with something faintly fabled and familiar. Hardy’s sun-seared mug (and a lovely one at that) is not shown until after he’s done being used as a muzzled hood ornament. Weary and appropriately DGAF, Max does not say his name until a moment way late into the film that might be the last he sees of Furiosa (Charlize Theron). That pathos subverts Max’s hypermasculinity-coded demeanor, and forms a nice mirror image of how his identity/face was withheld until long into the film. He’s a nobody who doesn’t want to be known unless it’s really called for. I also like that the nubile nymphs are more than just beauties in wet gauzy cotton dresses. As the Imperator Furiosa, Theron delivers a taciturn and driven (ha!) woman with an agenda, and her stoicism is as mesmerizing as it is charming.

But we all came for the spectacles, and what spectacles we have here. The film feels a bit more handmade than Furiosa which focuses more on the ornate choreography of risky attacks on the gleaming War Rig. The costumes, décor, and vehicles are thrilling petropunk pageantry—here I thought I came up with that coinage (“petropunk”), but the interwebs said no. Concocted from the resurrected detritus of our current gas-guzzling civilization, their Frankensteinian parts are both clever and eerie at the same time. It doesn’t get better than when Immortan Joe’s cavalcade is announced by a warfare musician slung in front of a wall of speakers with an electric guitar that spits flames. Who could come up with that?

Fury Road is Hieronymus Bosch’s postapocalyptic grotesqueries played out in double speed, a dehydrated garden of earthly destruction. Exhaust fumes, roaring engines, searing heat, kicked-up dirt. War Boys flicked off motorbikes and high poles on accelerating vehicles like toy soldiers in a demented child’s make-believe hellscape. The delirious action sequences are a ballet of Newtonian casualties composed of flesh-ripping velocity, punishing mass, and bone-crushing momentum. Fuck the carbon footprint, let’s finish all that off with some explosive fireballs that caramelize what’s left of you and our future to a nice golden crisp.

FOSSIL-FUEL FANTASIA
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For 2 hours and 28 minutes, my overthinking brain is beaten into submission, hypnotized into a state of alert wakefulness where I hold on to every action spectacle in front of me. I can barely distinguish the characters (except the names like “Dementus,” “Scrotus,” “Rictus,” and “Toe Jam” all sound like candidates for a good Letterboxd handle if I ever had to pick one again). The plot is scant and fairly unoriginal. But the operatic action choreography, production design, cinematography, and editing come together like a raging sand storm, all enveloping and a world unto itself. George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga dumps me in the middle of the postapocalyptic wasteland where my blood vessels pulse with gasoline, my lungs breathe out exhaust fumes, and my throat growls like rumbling engines.

I bow at the altar of nonrenewable petrochemical dominance and repurposed metallic marvels. I worship at the break-neck speed, bone-crushing bodily harm, blinding orange fireballs and blood-red flare guns. I’m enraptured by assailants on propelled hang gliders crisscrossing aerially like vicious wasps, or War Boys knocked off a speeding rig like a ballet of expendable human bodies. Sweat, heat, dust, grime, rage, revenge, all under a blistering sun. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a high-octane celebration of all that’s ugly, destructive, and horrifying about the human civilization that paradoxically makes me feel an anticipatory nostalgia for our existence when we’re all wiped out from this planet.

FLORAL FIXATION
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Known to cinephiles for the collaboration with Pen-ek Ratanaruang on a couple of Thai New Wave entries (Last Life in the Universe and Invisible Waves), Prabda Yoon is a formidable intellectual, artist, and writer. He impressed me to no end with his 2016 directorial debut feature Motel Mist, an arthouse satire so uncompromising in its artistic vision and political subtexts. Now he’s a showrunner with two series bankrolled by Netflix Thailand (available for streaming in the U.S.); one I haven’t seen yet (Bangkok Breaking) and this one, Dalah: Death and the Flowers (ดาหลา บุปผา ฆาตกรรม). It’s a mystery in which the murder of a promising young man is contrasted with floristry, the art of arranging flowers cut in their prime. 

Two powerful Bangkok families collide as a high-profile wedding approaches for an elite couple. A scion of an old-money Thai family, the groom is a rising star in politics favored to be the next Prime Minister of Thailand. His feminism-focused campaign is coordinated by his future bride, an accomplished daughter of a wealthy Sino-Thai family. At the pre-wedding meeting, the two families have a power struggle over public appearances and wealth signifiers. Bickering over the smallest of details, the wedding’s highest stake is saved for the grand floral centerpiece (…I know). Enter our titular Dalah (Norwegian-Thai actor, Urassaya “Yaya” Sperbund), a celebrated floral designer for the rich and famous. With possibly a secret agenda all her own, Dalah invites the families to view the design at her studio. The next morning, the groom-to-be’s lifeless body is found among the floral arrangements.

A slow-burn whodunit with #metoo and eat-the-rich angles, Dalah: Death and the Flowers is replete with dramatic tensions and dark secrets bubbling underneath the ravishing aesthetics and the lyrical metaphors of death and impermanence. At least that’s what the proposal promises. But like how an unexpected death aborts the floral design, the film’s lofty aims didn’t live to see the day.

Starting with Prabda Yoon credited as the series’ creator, it must’ve been intentional that two women (Thanika Jenjesda and Alisa Pien) codirected the series from a script co-written by two women (Aticha Tanthanawigrai and Rutaiwan Wongsirasawad). For a story in which sexual victimization of women is at the center, that’s a good start. It’s unclear what Yoon’s input was, but his interview with ScandAsia indicates the whodunit genre from his childhood inspired the series. Like Motel Mist’s use of sci-fi and sexploitation films as a foundation for sociopolitical critique, there’s plenty to like about Yoon’s ambition to create a stylish mystery that unflinchingly highlights Thailand’s heteropatriarchy and oligarchy. Agatha Christie-style mysteries and police procedurals serve as a vehicle to explore sexual violence, wealth-based impunity, family dysfunction and betrayals, and the hypocrisy of politics.

Hell yes to all of that!—that’s me before watching the series (even without knowing what it would be about). Hell no! was my reaction two episodes in. It’s “hell to the no” to the plodding pace, mediocre characterization, overwrought style over substance, and unoriginal repurposing of conventional tropes. 

Let’s at least start with what I liked. As a premiere floral designer and a teacher of ikebana classes, Dalah ruminates about the transience of life and buried sorrows of the past—each episode is titled like a key concept in Dalah’s ikebana lessons. I like her point that floristry is an art of deception that extends flowers’ beauty long beyond their deaths, making aesthetics out of mutilated botanical parts. But even this promising format soon becomes a chore when it’s done over and over again. 

The most objectionable choice is to make Dalah an inscrutable femme fatale, what with all the ambiguous countenance, double entendre speeches, and furtive smirks. Even with all her internal voiceovers ladled over everything like an unwanted sauce, we still don’t know what she’s about until the final episode. She sips her beverages mysteriously, raises her brows mischievously, and produces tears on cue to signal deep pain in her history. She never blinks, so her eyes must be fucking dry, so maybe that’s why she needs to shed tears dramatically. She listens to other characters’ words and there’s that sphynx-like face again. She de—li—be—rate—ly leaves seconds of silence between her sing-songy urbanite enunciation—an affectation that afflicts all the young, hip characters. Non-Thai viewers: imagine a series populated by characters affecting Kim Kardashian’s vocal fry in every conceivable dialogue, and you may feel my pain.

I may risk a misogyny accusation for policing the leading woman’s acting, which is apt for a show in which the pro-feminist Golden Boy is exposed for his hypocrisy. Honestly, everyone else on the show turns in good performances (there’s a lot of tear-flowing on demand, perhaps more than optimal). But there are other grave problems that have nothing to do with Yaya. There are too many characters in the show, with the idea that they all have their little secrets for twists and turns. Most of the side characters are tedious, especially the ones put there for comic relief. Despite the premise of addressing social class, which Altman’s 2001 Gosford Park does splendidly under the guise of a Cozy Mystery, the working-class characters have nary a thing to say, and are there as plot devices. Seeing the abundance of flower in the show, there may be a reference to Claude Chabrol’s 2003 The Flower of Evil (La fleur du mal) about an uppercrust Bordeaux family’s dark secrets inherited over generations.

The writers save their prickliest jabs for the rich characters, all of whom are rotten to the core one way or another. The two families’ ethnic origins are played out to some degree in their different ways of life and their paths to riches: the last name of the bride’s Sino-Thai family is a simile for the self-made wealth of her Chinese immigrant ancestors, while the groom’s politician family has a last name that suggests the (false) magnanimity of their old money. One middle-aged ne’er-do-well man is seen preening around with a teacup Pomeranian like he’s Paris Hilton. Another young man is a vacuous pretty-boy popstar in love with his own fame. A few contentious women make snipes and side-eyes at each other every chance they get. These are overused stock characters straight from the lowbrow Thai melodrama genre nam nao (fetid water, as in polluted urban waterways), which the bourgeoisie turn up their nose at. The women’s “bitch, please” sentiments may point out that, to dispute F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote, the very rich are no different from you and me at least when it comes to their dysfunctions and vulgarities. But the nam nao broad comedy squabbles don’t mix well with the hushed tone of poignancy the series works to achieve. For a more self-aware use of these comedic harpy archetypes, see Wisit Sasanatieng’s 2023 feature The Murderer (also on Netflix) that has the hoi polloi genre entertainment dialed up to 11.

Dalah’s victim/villain ambiguity reaches its DEFCON1 level of annoyance in the final episode when she gathers the victim’s surviving relatives for a Poirot- and Miss Marple-style reveal. Where, you ask? You guessed it: her floral design studio where the murder happened (because we haven’t seen enough fucking flowers on this show)! The revelations are so torturous and complicated, made worse by Dalah’s overlong delivery that makes me think she’s training to be an edging dominatrix. By that point, I was fresh out of fucks about who did what to whom, and came to a realization that I’ve been hate-watching all the way since Episode 2. The question “what the hell happened here?” maybe apropos to ask when looking at the murder scene. “What happened here?” is also an apt question for a talent like Prabda Yoon who fumbled the bag on a show with the highest floristry budget Netflix’s line producers ever came across.