Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews

I enjoyed reading your review as well and I found your point on the kids immersing them in material goods/music to prepare for the end fairly interesting. That said, if more scenes had the emotional resonance/implications/build up which the "My Way" rendition had, I might've been more into it.

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I sort of agree. But I struggled somewhat with that scene because it just felt so much like something a person wanted to put in a movie. Do you know what I mean? It's almost trying too hard to be iconic (and it WORKED because when you look for images from the film, that's a lot of what pops up). And there's also something a little dated to me about "We're going to die? Oh, well, then, yo, guys: I'm gay and/or gender-queer!"

But I think that goes back to the fundamental problem with these kids: who are they?! Like, they are so against the system yet one of them has felt the need to be closeted? Obviously people can be in different places in their journey of sexual/gender self-discovery, so it could make sense that the impending doom of their situation has hurried him into expressing something he hasn't felt comfortable expressing before, but for me it only highlights our lack of understanding of their relationship to each other. And they're so numb at this point that you can't even judge their reactions to different moments/revelations.

Visually what I liked most were the moments like the ones I used in my review on the last page: those times where they see themselves in the mannequins. I feel as if they are hovering on an understanding that maybe they've been used. Maybe they've just been recruited into roles that are ultimately hollow. (Greg, the one "real" adult conveniently disappears after the attacks . . . hmmmmm.) Are they just props? Who was really behind what they did? As the narrative builds in the television coverage, you can see that their attacks are just confirming the xenophobia/fear that tend to drive more oppressive policies.

I went to Google the film out of curiosity and I personally didn't find any screenshots of the scene in question, but you might've looked in different places. At any rate, I think coming out right out of the blue in a situation like this can be corny, but I think removing the blunt "Guys, I'm gay" dialogue a weaker film might've had (I'd say the plane turbulence scene in Almost Famous fits what you're describing better), being unclear as to his specific sexual orientation, and showing his friends were already partly aware of (or suspected) his identity prior to that scene (I forget the specifics, but a character asks him to "perform" for them and he refuses at the time) made it a compelling, nuanced sub‐plot.

Fair enough to your second paragraph though.

You're right. It was this shot that I was seeing quite a bit:



Though I still can't help but feel that the sequence feels far too staged.

It does give the character depth, but there's context lacking that undercuts that. And maybe, in some ways, that's a bit of the point? Like, that these people are a bit unexceptional and that could go a way to explaining how someone convinced them to throw their lives away in the name of a cause. I don't know. I feel like this movie is full of things that work and don't work at the same time.

I think the scene works really well in a nutshell, but I agree that including more context to their character relationships with each other would've made it work even better.

I am watching the documentary Warrendale and it is straight up triggering. I feel for the kids, I feel for the staff. It's all well-meaning but it is TOTALLY UNHINGED.

Okay, I liked it in the sense of it as an artifact, but Warrendale was absolutely not the right film to watch the night before the first day of the new school year.

Our Body, 2023

In this documentary, director Claire Simon and her crew follow the staff and patients in a gynecology ward in a Parisian hospital. Everything from fertility treatment to gender-affirming care, cancer, and births are explored.

In turns inspiring, funny, harrowing, and heartbreaking, this is an involving look at the life-changing events that play out every day in hospitals around the world.

Just about everything in this movie, happy or sad, moved me to tears or close to it. I find myself, in wanting to talk about this movie, on the edge of just describing scene after scene from the film. Everything put on the screen had something remarkable about it, something that feels worthy of discussion and respect. I think that this is a huge testament to the bravery of the men and women who agreed to be filmed in such vulnerable moments, and the care with which Simon directs her camera as she allows us a look into their lives.

It’s hard to pick a favorite moment, but there are two that really stand out to me. The first is the footage of a Senegalese woman who is giving birth. (We see her have a talk with a doctor in a consulting room, so it’s not clear to me if this woman was already in labor or if she came into the hospital to have the labor induced). Several moments in the interview seem to cast a negative aspect on this woman’s life. She looks to be in her 30s, but her husband is in his 60s. She has undergone female genital mutilation. She already has several other children. When she gets to the delivery room, she tells the midwife that she doesn’t have anyone who will be supporting her with the birth.

But then something really incredible happens: alone in the room, just the woman and the doctor, they deliver the baby. The most stunning thing about this sequence is how quiet it is. The woman does not scream or cry. We can see that she is in pain and discomfort, but the energy in the room is calm and focused. The doctor tells the woman to work with her baby and push her down toward the outside world. And she does. I have been present for the birth of a baby, and boy did that experience come flooding back watching this scene. It was absolutely beautiful, and it’s magical watching the baby’s color and even the shape of her face change as she rests on her mother’s chest.

The basic structure of this film is to show several people pursuing similar treatment, but often with different situations or needs. (For example, we see a shaky teenager pursuing abortion medication after an ill-advised no-protection sexual encounter with a boy who wants nothing to do with her now that she is pregnant, followed by a more confident women in her late 20s doing so and casually talking about how her boyfriend will be there to support her as the medication takes effect). Immediately after watching the birth run by the doctor, we go to a room where a woman is having a c-section. I’m not normally squeamish about this kind of thing, but holy smokes! Watching that baby be delivered was something else and it’s surreal seeing what looks like such a serious procedure happen while the mother is conscious and her male partner standing by her side.

The other sequence that I think is a real standout is one toward the end, in which a doctor has an emotional conversation with a woman who has probably reached the end of trying to treat her cancer, as the last thing they have tried doesn’t seem to be working. It is an incredibly emotional thing to witness, and even in her fear the personality of the patient comes through when she shocks the doctor by announcing that she’d anticipated this turn of events and already called the funeral parlor. When the doctor asks how she knew---perhaps expecting the woman to talk about her symptoms and lack of appetite---the patient answers that she knew because she could tell that the doctor was feeling defeated. Of all the things in this film, many of which include intimate looks at bodies, this feels the most personal.

It’s also interesting to consider how, despite the doctors and staff coming across as genuinely wanting to help their patients, we can clearly see multiple ways in which the medical system might not be meeting the needs of the patients or, worse, even doing them harm. In one interview, a woman is dealing with serious pelvic pain, especially after sex. The doctor repeatedly asks the woman about wanting to have a baby---”You got married, so you must have plans,” he says. Um, plenty of people get married without plans to have a baby, sir---apparently not really tuning into what she is saying about her pain and how it’s affecting her. “Having sex with the person I love is causing me pain,” she cries. She then later says that she’d rather deal with the pain than the loss of sex drive that comes with the medication used to treat her (likely) endometriosis. The sex and her connection to her husband is clearly her focus, while the doctor stays locked in on the fertility side of things. (The doctors at this hospital are VERY fertility focused, which is fine if you’ve actually checked to see if that’s something the patient cares about).

Subtle harm also shows up in multiple sequences involving women undergoing procedures. It’s an incredibly common complaint in my circle that very painful procedures around gynecology are often done without sufficient numbing/medication. (The CDC recently updated its IUD insertion guidelines, which is long overdue. The insertion is often described with language like “may cause discomfort,” if by that you mean “so painful that you may black out or vomit”). You can see this in several sequences. In one scene, a woman is having her oocytes surgically collected, and when the surgeon moves the probe you see the woman suddenly visibly go pale and start to sweat. But instead of doing anything about the pain, she’s told that she can help direct the probe (GEE THANKS!) and the way she’s asked about her pain clearly encourages the expected response: “it’s bearable.”

The most overt portrayal of harm---which I really appreciate the director including---is not actually seen in footage in the hospital, but comes from the accounts from women who are conducting a protest outside of the hospital. One of the stories told at the protest---that a woman came in for treatment and was told that she had “no choice” about multiple medical students performing invasive exams on her body---sounds horrific. There are lots of stereotypes about doctors dehumanizing their patients----and to a degree some detachment is probably very healthy in that line of work---but it’s distressing to hear that someone was treated this way in a very vulnerable moment.

The last thing I’d mention is just how interesting it was to see certain procedures that I’ve only ever heard of (or worse, seen portrayed in movies, lol). In this film you get to watch a doctor grab sperm one at a time and insert them into oocytes. You then get to watch the process of the artificial insemination. You see endometrial tissue removed with the surgeon sitting across the room from the patient, using an interface to control the tools with microscopic hand movements. And, as mentioned before, you get to see a c-section. (I was not ready for that water breaking.)

This movie is incredibly human, and despite it being a total emotional rollercoaster, I’m really glad that I watched it. Whether you’ll ever use the services of a gynecological ward or not, these are powerful stories told with a fly-on-the-wall camera that sits at just the right place between detachment and empathy.

"After nine months of complicity, we’ve met each other at last."

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

Calvaire, 2004

Marc (Laurent Lucas) is a traveling entertainer who performs largely for a crowd of older people. On his way home for the holiday, his van breaks down in an isolated rural town. Stranded at the home of the oddball Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), who offers accommodation and the promise of the ability to repair the van. Soon, however, Bartel’s interest in Marc’s company takes a sinister turn, and the people living in the village may be just as demented.

A foreboding atmosphere and discomforting imagery make for an eerie trip through a strange village.

The conversation around parasocial relationships has really heated up in the last few years, driven by the way that social media has created an unprecedented link between famous (or even everyday) people and their fans. But while the term has really come into more high profile discussion recently, the idea that people might develop unhealthy relationships with others, projecting their own reality onto someone else, is not at all new.

The framing of the film is highly centered on gender. For reasons we can only guess at, the village doesn’t seem to have any women. This contrasts sharply with the scene where we first meet Marc, surrounded by adoring older women. The absence of women means that the men of the village take out their romantic and sexual interests and frustrations on whoever is available, and this frequently includes non-consensual encounters.

To be sure, there’s a certain degree to which the shock of the film comes from seeing a male character treated the way that we are very accustomed to seeing women treated in horror movies. Seeing a man be groomed, forced into a particular outfit, submitted to sexual aggression, and abused for the perceived rejection of that sexual interest stands out just for the rarity of it. And the men of the village are not queer-coded at all---these are not characters who fall into the “predatory homosexual” trope at all, and nor does it fall into the sometimes seen construction of a man sexually abusing another man as a show of dominance. They are, instead, straight-coded men treating a man the way that they’d be treating a woman if the village had any.

But the film has more on its mind than just the shock of a gender-swapped dynamic. The strange turn here (and this is perhaps a moderate spoiler, so please consider not reading further if you haven’t seen the film yet) is that everyone in the film seems to suffer from a range of delusions about reality. Bartel seems to think that Marc is his long-gone wife, Gloria. Another character is later convinced that a calf is his long-lost dog.

For me, the real horror of the movie sits in the discomfort of being both misidentified by those around you AND being treated in accordance with that perception. This is a very twisted version of a class “wrong man” plot, one in which someone believing you to be a certain thing or a certain person justifies horrible behavior. And it goes to another level as everyone in the village seems to perceive an alternate reality.

There’s also something in the film, I think, to do with the importance of distance in a parasocial relationship. The older women at the beginning of the film seem to have a bit too much attachment to Marc, but there’s a safety in the fact that he can drive away from them. It’s when Marc is trapped in uncomfortable proximity to Bartel and the other men of the village that their misconceptions about him actually become dangerous.(And, yes, there may be some gender commentary here regarding the more serious danger that an unhinged, enamored man represents to the target of his obsession).

Berroyer’s performance as Bartel is very interesting because for all the extremity of Bartel’s actions, the performance stays relatively understated. The very unsettling implication is that Bartel’s perception that Marc is Gloria is certainly madness, but the rest of his actions, violent and disturbing as they are, are what he would consider “normal” behavior of an aggrieved husband. Laurent, for his part, does a good job at showing a befuddlement that slowly slides into alarm and then panic. Marc as a character is a bit tricky, because it’s a bit hard to buy that a man who travels for work knows nothing about vehicle repair, and that he wouldn’t have more strongly pursued a professional repair or just a ride out of the village. The character is a bit at the mercy of the script needing him to just hang around the village, and so hang around the village he does. In fact, there’s a certain passivity to Marc’s character that ends up having the effect of making him feel superficial. It leaves the first act feeling a bit limp, despite some disturbing moments.

A strong point of the film is that it does become more impressive heading into its final act, which is where many horror movies tend to lose their grip. The spinning, disoriented camera seems to reflect both Marc’s shock at the abuse inflicted on him and the widespread delusions of the villagers. If seen through that lens of the boundaries of parasocial relationships, the ending packs quite a punch.

A solid horror film with a strong final act.

I love the music and dance scene at the tavern in Calvaire - I always got the impression that all of the women had long since fled this particular village. I can't imagine it would have been particularly tolerable, and it's a much preferable impression to take away than the obvious alternative.

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After Blue, 2021

At some indeterminate point in the future, teenager Roxy (Paula Luna) lives with her hairdresser mother Zora (Elina Lowensohn) on a planet called After Blue where all of the citizens are women. When Roxy comes across a strange woman buried up to the neck on the beach she naively helps her escape, only to discover that she has freed notorious outlaw Kate Bush (Agata Buzek). Their community exiles Roxy and Zora, declaring that they can only return once they have killed Kate Bush.

While it overstays its welcome by about 30 minutes, the intriguing visuals and interwoven sexiness keep you engaged.

This is the second film I’ve watched from Bertrand Mandico, so I was, you know, prepared. Much like The Wild Boys, this film takes its themes and motifs and dials them all up to 100. For the most part, this saturation and overstimulation really works, thanks to a game cast and the inherent intrigue of many of the characters and visuals.

The look of the film in many ways made me think of a more adult, muddy version of the landscapes of movies like The Neverending Story or The Dark Crystal. In particular, it’s that surreal look where the foreground is real and sculptural, and the backgrounds are these swirling, painting-like skies. (Yes, I know they might be paintings and not just “painting-like”, lol). The props and set details are just really great and gritty and disturbing. One of the most noteworthy is the creature that is created when Kate Bush captures and skins Zora’s horse . . . only for the skinned horse to come to life. While at moments you can sense the specter of the dreaded budget in some of these choices, there’s so much creativity and fun to it that it feels more like innovation than cut corners.

Another strength of the movie is the genuine sexiness it evokes all through the narrative. During Roxy’s first encounter with Kate Bush, she sees that the woman has a strange arm and also an eye on her vulva . . . and falls in love. In many ways, Roxy’s journey with her mother ends up doubling as a sexual awakening/exploration phase for Roxy. “Planet full of lesbians in sexy outfits doing sexy things” sounds like the premise for a film written by the archetypal horny nerd, but the film manages to make many of those sequences work without feeling like it’s just pandering. The staging alone makes many of the sexy scenes noteworthy, from Roxy masturbating in a crawlspace under her mother’s house to a sexual exploration with a male android who ejaculates a marble through his nipple (just like in real life!), there’s a mix of eroticism and anxiety or wrongness that really captures the uncertain sexuality of young adulthood. This aspect of the film is further enhanced by some really interesting costume choices, with a range of fashion on display that helps the women on screen not feel too homogenous.

Finally, the film is just kind of deliriously weird and stupid in an unabashed way that is very endearing. The minute you find out the criminal’s name is “Kate Bush”, it’s like, oh, okay movie. And you will hear that name spoken probably a thousand times during the film, and it never stops being kind of funny. This humor extends to a kind of self-awareness, which also takes some of the sense of exploitation out of the sex scenes. Heck, just the fact that Zora is a hairdresser has a certain giggle-worthy quality to it when presented with a society whose aesthetic is very Mad Max.

For all that I really enjoyed about this film, it is definitely too long to the tune of about half an hour. And as the film stretches toward the two hour mark, some of the redundancy and male gaze sci-fi elements start to stand out a bit more. On a planet composed entirely of women, all of the important characters are slim white women? Sure. The inclusion of a wider range of body types and skin tones in a handful of scenes with larger groups just highlights the deliberate choice in who gets to be considered sexy. It’s a fundamental issue of hanging around a bit too long but not with anything new to say or show after a certain point, revealing cracks and limits that were less apparent when the movie had more momentum.

Certainly worth a look.

Jessica Forever, 2018

In an undefined near future, male orphans are violently hunted down and killed by a government controlled army of drones. Coming to their rescue is Jessica (Aomi Muyock), the leader of a group of abandoned young men. Constantly on the run, Jessica and her crew attempt to create space for the young men to overcome their trauma and integrate into society.

An outlandish premise and a handful of stunning visual moments don’t quite give this sci-fi drama the emotional resonance it seems to be chasing.

There has been a lot of conversation over the last 10 or so years about boys in crisis, something that is particularly on my radar due to working in education. It’s a complex issue, and I’m not sure that a movie review is the right place to unpack my many thoughts (some of them deeply empathetic, some of them more exasperation), I definitely appreciated the idea of using a sci-fi framework to examine the way that society treats young men and the best way to respond to people who are not “appropriately attached” to others.

There are a lot of conceptual elements that I think really work in this movie. It makes a lot of sense to have one of the authority figures in the group be a woman, because the young men who have been left alone to fend for themselves are more likely to accept love, compassion, care, and intimacy from a woman/mother figure than from other young men. I was also with the movie----to a certain degree---about the idea that people who are socially isolated can trend toward anger, depression, resentment, and even violence, and that people in those positions deserve compassion. Probably the best character in the film in terms of realizing this thematic arc is a young man who is able to form a romantic relationship with a young women. It’s his involvement with Jessica’s group that gives him the social skills to make that romantic and sexual connection in a healthy way.

Further, the film uses very strong visual language to portray the fragile emotional state of the different young men. They wear army-like clothing, and are often clad in literal armor. One of the young men even wears a mask over half of his face. These are people who are guarded in every sense of the word. One character is haunted by the image of a sister in whose death he may have played a strong part. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, a quiet day suddenly turns tragic when one of the young men engages in a surprise act of self-harm that shocks the group.

For all of the parts that are engaging, though, the film doesn’t quite cohere the way I’d hope it would. As terrible as this sounds, young men are at the very least useful in filling out armed forces and doing physical labor----the idea that a government would go to great trouble and expense to kill them off doesn’t make all that much sense. (Perhaps I missed a key piece of exposition somewhere along the line). It’s also not entirely clear what Jessica’s goals are. Is the idea that the young men will somehow reintegrate themselves into society? Are they going to be their own little tribe forever? This feels very much like a story that works in the now, but as soon as you start thinking about the past or the future it gets a bit fuzzier.

Another element of the film that I’m not sure was intentional is the fact that having just one woman in the group, while great for a movie poster, creates some questionable dynamics. We are meant to see Jessica as a noble character, but the movie positions her simultaneously as mother-figure and as an object of desire. (At one point, she even gets an 80’s movie-esque moment of getting her hair wet in the pool and doing a dramatic hair fling that sprays droplets behind her). Considering these young men are already vulnerable, this mixing of maternal and sexual roles feels off, and possibly even coercive/abusive. Again: I don’t think that this was intentional, but it adds a sour note to what is meant to be a positive, loving relationship system. If the genders in this film were reversed----if a man in his early 30s was surrounding himself with young women ages 15-18---many eyebrows would be raised.

I did enjoy this film for the most part. Movies that question what we are meant to do with and/or for people who do not fit into our social structure are always interesting. I wish it had either stayed more abstract or done a better job of nailing down the specifics and rationale of the world it was building.

The Advent Calendar, 2021

Eva (Eugenie Derouand) is a young woman who is currently paraplegic as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident. On her birthday her friend Sophie (Honorie Magnier) gifts her a strange advent calendar that comes with a warning that if she eats one treat, she must eat them all. As the days go by, the chocolates from the calendar seem to cause small miracles. But it soon becomes clear that for every gift that the calendar gives, it will take something for itself.

Wisely embracing its main character as an anti-hero, this is an engaging portrayal of a devil’s bargain.

There’s a delicate balancing act in this film regarding Eva’s situation, and it does a very good job of showing ways that her disability negatively impacts her life but also ways in which her friend and family situation exacerbate her feelings of inferiority and isolation. Eva obviously has mobility challenges, though her use of her wheelchair is practiced and mostly seamless. But the real issue is how she feels its impact in her social life. Eva is gorgeous, and men are clearly interested in her. But even the slightest moment of surprise when they notice her wheelchair is enough to convince her that it isn’t meant to be. Further, she has no feeling below the waist, and is understandably intimidated by the sexual implications.

While these are obviously ongoing challenges for someone with a disability like Eva’s, we meet her at a particularly bad time. Her father is dealing with serious dementia and is being kept isolated by his villainous younger wife; she spends a night out with Sophie where a hot guy talks to her all night . . . before going home with Sophie, leaving Eva at the mercy of a drunk “friend” with dubious ideas about consent. Finally, she is unceremoniously let go from her job by a completely unsympathetic boss. The sense is very much that the calendar has chosen this moment to tempt Eva, primed as she is by humiliation and resentment.

As you’d expect, it takes a while for Eva to connect the calendar to the things happening in her life. But once she does, it’s clear that the incredible gifts----like an unexpectedly ludic phone call from her father---outweigh the costs. Eva is hooked, and by the time she realizes the way that the calendar will escalate, it’s too late.

Where the film really starts to hit its stride is when the calendar begins to hand the responsibility of the “miracles” over to Eva. Initially, the calendar seemingly causes events on its own. But after a little while, it begins to require action from Eva. Gifted a heart-shaped chocolate, Eva intuitively puts it into the drink of a man she finds attractive. Effectively having drugged him into liking her, Eva doesn’t seem to feel any regret about her actions, too taken with having a loving partner and ally.

The movie does lose a bit of steam in the last act, as Eva tries to figure out if there’s a way to escape the calendar’s curse. A character who was formerly very secondary suddenly becomes central in a way that doesn’t feel quite right. Further, the movie gets a bit too bogged down in its rules. There’s a totally unnecessary speech from a character telling us things we (and Eva) have already figured out. In my opinion, there’s a point of no return that happens about thirty minutes before the end of the film, and from that point very little in the movie felt surprising.

This is a fun twist on a devil’s bargain plot, and it’s an easy recommendation for any horror fans.