Walk Run Cha Cha (2019)

  This is a documentary short from this year's Oscars.  It's not my favorite but it is on YouTube so at least it's accessible.

As young adults, Paul and Millie Cao dated for about six months.  Then Paul's family had to flee Vietnam because of the Communist regime.  He was a refugee but eventually made it to the United States of America.  For six years, Paul worked with the embassy to sponsor a visa for Millie, eventually bringing her over.  After so much time had passed, both had reservations about whether or not they were still a good match.  And then they started dancing together.

This is a very cute story but I would have liked a little more detail than could be fit in 20 minutes.  The dance performance at the end was almost enough to make up for it, and frankly, I would have been okay with it if they had just focused on their dancing and competitions.

Addams Family Values (1993)

  Do you have a movie that you can quote from endlessly?  For a lot of people, it's The Princess Bride or Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail.  For me, it's Addams Family Values.  This is the rare sequel that surpasses the original in almost every way while also being super personal.  I was Wednesday Addams.  My mom also sent me to summer camp in a misguided attempt to expose me to nature and community activities.  It did not end well.

With the arrival baby Pubert (Kaitlyn Hooper, Kristen Hooper), the Addams Family status quo has been shaken.  Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) find a new edge to their sibling rivalry, while Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) is overcome with loneliness.  The timely introduction of new nanny Debbie (Joan Cusack) seems to solve both problems.  Except Debbie is a fortune-hunting serial killer who plans to murder Fester.  The children are suspicious so Debbie has them shipped to their own personal hell, Camp Chippewa, run by Gary (Peter MacNicol) and Becky (Christine Baranski) Granger.  It's up to Gomez (Raul Julia) and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) to rescue their family from this interloper.

It is astonishing how well this movie has held up.  Everything about it is perfect and I will not be taking questions at this time.  There's a lot of uncertainty and panic in the world, especially right now, but one thing is always true.  The Addams Family is the best family, and Addams Family Values is the best Addams Family movie.  The End.

The Finest Hours (2016)

  Remember how I said Ford v Ferrari was a dad movie?  Here's a mom movie.  Clean-cut, appropriately dramatic, and zero controversy.

The Pendleton, an oil tanker, breaks in half during a particularly vicious winter storm off the coast of Massachusetts in 1952.  One half happens to have the engine room and at least a couple of empty ballast tanks so it's afloat, but not for long, and the 30-odd men left inside are facing their last moments.  The U.S. Coast Guard station nearest has sent its bigger boat out to assist in the rescue of a second split tanker, so when the Pendleton's distress is finally noted, all that is left is a 12-man capacity headed by Bernie Webber (Chris Pine).  Webber is already feeling pressured because this time the year before, he was unable to get out of the protected bar during a storm, and a fishing crew died.  So he is determined to atone for that by completing this rescue.

This is based on a true story of one of the most daring small-boat rescues in the history of the Coast Guard.  The movie does a great job of showing the scale of the storm so you can see the magnitude of what these men were facing.  I've never been out to sea on anything smaller than a cruise ship so this was eye-opening for me.  I love Chris Pine and Ben Foster, even if their accents were grating, and this was a much different animal than Hell or High Water for the pair.  They are both great character actors, even if Pine is most often typecast as a pretty face.

It is pretty, tho.

The Finest Hours is currently streaming on Disney+ but who knows for how long since they've already taken it off and put it back on once.

The Art of Self-Defense (2019)

  Full disclosure, I didn't pick this movie and I didn't see the opening 20 minutes.  Tyler was watching it and I couldn't sleep so I played on my phone while it was on in the background.

After a vicious attack, Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) feels fragile in body and spirit so he joins a martial arts dojo led by an absurdly influential Sensei (Alessandro Nivolo) who tells him his problem is that he is not masculine enough.  Under Sensei's guidance, Casey remakes his entire personality to conform to what is deemed "true" masculinity, from his taste in music to his wardrobe to how he interacts with his boss (Hauke Bahr).  As he moves into Sensei's inner circle, Casey begins to see exactly how toxic and counterproductive the teachings are while becoming more and more enmeshed.

Yikes.  Not sure how this is billed as a comedy, even a dark comedy, but then I don't think toxic masculinity and all its bullshit is funny or cute.  I've seen way too many real-world examples of this kind of soap bubble machismo.  I will say that the movie does keep you interested in just how fucked up everything is, even if you can guess kind of where it is going.  I did not find the third act twist all that twisty but it was still satisfying.

Content warning:  suicide, a dog dies

Currently available on Hulu.

Hesher (2010)

  I don't think Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets the proper amount of respect that is due him.  He is quietly a Very Good Actor and yet I almost never hear his name mentioned.

TJ (Devin Brochu) is having a rough year.  His mom died, his dad (Rainn Wilson) is basically comatose with grief, he's being bullied at school, and a weird drifter named Hesher (Joseph Gordon- Levitt) has moved into his house.  Hesher isn't some mystical hobo rich in the ways of life, though.  This isn't that kind of movie.  He's a foul-mouthed metalhead with a penchant for vandalism who nevertheless manages to teach some life lessons in appreciating what one has instead of mourning what is lost.

This has two powerhouse leads in Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman but it came and went without much fanfare.  Honestly, I'm not sure who this movie was written for.  It is a weird little oddity that is kinda funny, kinda sad, and a whole lot of WTF.  I managed to catch it on Tubi but it is leaving that service in like three days, so if you want to see it, do it fast.

Ford v. Ferrari (2019)

  I kept hearing this referred to as "dad cinema" and I guess that's accurate.  I've never been a car or racing person so some of the nuances were lost on me, but this is a pretty solid underdog story and that's universal.

Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) is trying to stay close to the industry he loves by designing and selling sports cars but is feeling pushed out by age and his own health.  Ken Miles (Christian Bale) is a driver striving for perfection.  Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) is a junior executive for Ford Motor Company with a radical idea for how to modernize the staid, practical image of its cars.  All three men are fighting against a system that does not want them to succeed, that praises with one hand and sabotages with another.  Of course, this being the 60s, all of that is sublimated under the quest to dethrone the reigning car champion, Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone), at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race.

James Mangold has really mastered the art of men feeling lost but nonetheless dying nobly.  Everyone in this movie acts like it is their last night on Earth and that no decision is as important as the one they are making this very second.  It would be exhausting if it weren't also filled with snappy dialogue, fast edits, and Christian Bale being a complete lunatic behind the wheel.  Overall, absolutely the kind of Sunday-afternoon movie you put on to watch with your dad.

Richard III (1955)

  Since everyone is stuck at home now, some of you may be looking to enrich yourselves by starting an online class or reading those classic books people are always talking about.  But why put in all that effort when there are movies that are just as cultured?

Edward IV (Cedric Hardwicke) has emerged victorious from the Wars of the Roses, seized the throne, married a lovely woman (Mary Kerridge), and had the requisite heir and spare.  Everything seems to be heading towards peace, but his youngest brother, Richard (Laurence Olivier) covets the throne.  Richard schemes and plots to have his middle brother, George (John Gielgud), discredited, thrown in jail, and eventually murdered, and has his flunky, Buckingham (Ralph Richardson), spread rumors that Edward was actually a bastard and that Richard is the only true heir, all the while wooing the rich widow (Claire Bloom) of a man he killed in battle.  Richard is not a good dude.  But it works and he becomes Richard III, only to see his paranoia unravel all the gains he made.

It's kind of nice when the villain is just completely unrepentant.  In the opening monologue, Richard directly faces the camera and tells the audience that he is just The Worst.  There's no shades of gray, no antihero, no wrong-thing-for-the-right-reasons.  He just wants to be king and he wants both his brothers and their heirs out of the way to get it.  It's refreshing in a way I didn't know I needed.

And despite that, Olivier is so charming that he almost gets away with it.  (Except for the parts with Anne.  That's just straight gross and creepy.)  Seriously, though, this version is like the gold standard of Shakespearean adaptations.  Everybody who's anybody in British theater is in this.

It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

The Edge of Democracy (2019)

  This was nominated for Best Documentary at this year's Oscars but lost to another Netflix film.  I think this one might be more important than American Factory but it is hindered by an insider-only knowledge of Brazilian politics.

Petra Costa grew up the child of pro-democracy revolutionaries.  Her parents were jailed for opposing the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for most of her life.  She is elated at the true democratic election of President Lula Da Silva and his hand-picked successor Dilma Rousseff, only to witness their implication in a corruption scandal that paved the way for extreme right-wing conservative Jair Bolsonaro.  A scandal revealed by leaked wiretaps to be purely an invention of the oligarchy who feared losing their power.  Costa presents this with incredible proximity to these leaders, scoring personal interviews with da Silva and Rousseff, as well as personal reflections and comparisons of her family's struggle.

I could have used a more comprehensive overview of Brazil's politics, since I'm not super familiar with that country, but the documentary does a decent job of outlining why this particular moment is important in their recent history.  However, given the current situation re: pandemic and critical mismanagement of resources at the federal level, Americans might want to pass on this for a bit.  Maybe watch something happy instead.  I hear Frozen 2 is on Disney+ and Onward just got released on VOD so, you know, choose wisely.  Edge of Democracy is currently streaming on Netflix.

Kinky Boots (2005)

  This is part two of the Bethany Education double feature where we continue our theme of fabulous drag queens magically transforming the lives of sad, white people.  This time we skip over to England and custom shoes.

Charlie (Joel Edgerton) is a fourth-generation factory owner for men's sensible shoes.  Except he'd rather do anything but.  See, Charlie's never felt like he belonged in his dad's company but when his father dies unexpectedly, Charlie tries his best to step in.  (Get it?  It's a shoe joke.  I'm so funny.)  He learns in quick succession that his dad was barely getting by and he's going to have to either lay off a bunch of people with nowhere else to go or drastically change the company by searching for a niche market.  While on his own little pity party, Charlie runs into Lola (Chewitel Ejiofor), a cabaret singer despondent over the fact that women's shoes are not designed to accommodate men.  Eureka.  Charlie's found his niche.  He brings Lola on board as a designer and muse and galvanizes the factory to overcome their prejudices and get these new designs ready for Milan's fashion week.  But can he manage this without tripping over his dick?

This would have probably been a better story if Charlie had ended up with Lola instead of foisting off some lame, heteronormative, HR-pushing relationship between Charlie and his employee, Lauren (Sarah-Jane Potts), but we apparently can't have nice things.  By 2006, we had moved beyond "Kill Your Gays" to "They Can Live But Not Have Any Relationship of Their Own and Must Instead Just Be Happy for the Straights."  Also, this is a Miramax release, which means Weinstein.  So we should probably feel lucky it made it to the light of day.

All of that aside, it's still a really fun movie with a lot of heart and the soundtrack is amazing.  It's currently available for rent on Amazon.

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

  Yesterday was another Bethany Education day, so I picked two related films that I enjoy and for- uh, asked her to watch them.  Considering that the world is a bleak hellscape, I picked fun ones.

Young drag queen Chi Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo) is devastated when he doesn't win the New York City drag contest.  The winners, Vida Bohemme (Patrick Swayze) and Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes), decide to trade in their plane tickets and buy a car so they can take Chi Chi with them.  But a terrible incident with a backwoods sheriff (Chris Penn) and car trouble leave them stranded in the tiny town of Snydersville and the three must use all their glamour to help the townsfolk discover a new way of looking at life.

This is incredibly dated by the standards of today but I still think it has value, if only to show how far we've come and how far we have to go.  It does rely heavily on the "Magical Gays" stereotype but also shows real issues, like the fear of even just being seen in drag and the danger of self-expression in a society that will not respect it.

Obviously, the cast is the real draw here.  Patrick Swayze was a dancer and probably had zero problems picking up this role but Wesley Snipes had never done anything like this before or since and it is amazing he is in this movie.  John Leguizamo was just starting out on a movie career and this was really his big break.  And then there are the cameos!  RuPaul, Robin Williams, a blink-and-you-miss-it Naomi Campbell and of course, Julie Newmar herself.

I love this movie.

Pain and Glory (2019)

    This is the most brightly colored film about heroin that I've ever seen.  Honestly, if this were an American movie, it would be all blue filters and overcast skies but this is drenched in bright, vibrant color.  Outstanding.

Salvador (Antonio Banderas) is wracked with pain both physical and mental.  Invited to a retrospective for his first successful film, he reaches out to his first star, Alberto (Asier Exteandia), with whom he had been estranged for 30 years.  Alberto is a functional heroin addict and gets Salvador hooked.  In exchange for more heroin, Salvador gives Alberto the rights to one of his unproduced screenplays that Alberto turns into a successful theater production seen by Salvador's first love, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia).  This in turn prompts Salvador to re-evaluate what more is left for him at this stage of his life.

I was not expecting this to be as wholesome as it was.  The minute someone broke out the crack pipe I was like "Oh shit, it's Requiem for a Dream all over again."  But I underestimated the power of Almodóvar behind the camera.  This was, shockingly, the first Oscar nomination for Banderas and he is phenomenal here in a stripped down, emotional performance given mostly through his eyes.

Oh and just as a side note:  the MPAA rating comes up after all the preview and tells you this film is rated R for (among other things) graphic nudity.  This is some bullshit on their part as there is only one nude scene and it is less than 5 seconds long.  But because you can clearly see some dude's dick, it's obviously destroying the fabric of America or something equally as dumb.

The Neighbor's Window (2019)

  I know, it's a lousy poster but it's the only one I could find that wasn't huge.

This won Best Live Action Short and I really don't get why.  It just didn't appeal to me in any way.

Alli (Maria Dizzia) and Jacob (Greg Keller) are normal, middle-aged adults who care about each other and raise their three children together.  But when they notice their across-the-street neighbors having sex one day, light voyeurism turns into full-fledged envy.

I guess because I just legitimately do not care about what other people do, this made no sense to me.  I found it really creepy, to be honest.  Like, right up there with stalking.  If you buy binoculars to watch your neighbors, you are gross.  Full stop.  Man, woman, I don't care.  Leave people alone and stop projecting your insecurities.  But, of course, that's not the takeaway from this film because **SPOILERS FOLLOW** the hot neighbor tells Alli that she and her husband used to watch them too while he was dying of cancer and it brought them comfort.**END SPOILERS**  Which, blah blah blah, we're all connected, no man is an island, sure.  But also ew.  Close your fucking curtains.

The Neighbor's Window is currently streaming on Vimeo.

The Accountant (2016)

I can't believe I haven't watched this since it came out in theaters.  Watching it again, I still really liked it.  I think this and Gone Girl are the best movies Ben Affleck has ever done.  This time around, I was also able to appreciate J.K. Simmons more.

When I was a kid, the autism spectrum wasn't as widely known as it is today.  You had to be an extreme case to get a diagnosis.  If it were more like today back then, my brother and I would probably have fallen somewhere on the high-functioning end.  So this film has an extra level for me as someone who grew up "weird" with a brother who struggled to communicate.  Originally posted 30 Oct 16.    I liked this more than I thought I would.  I don't know why, but I've just never warmed to Ben Affleck.  He does good work.  I just can't bring myself to like him.  This one I'd actually buy, though.

An autistic boy grows up to be an accountant (Ben Affleck) for some extremely dangerous people.  In order to maintain his cover, he also takes regular jobs for large companies who need help when their revenue streams are too complicated for anyone else to untangle.  The job at Living Robotics seems to be just that but when he starts to get closer to where the missing money has gone, people are sent to kill him and the company accountant (Anna Kendrick) who originally discovered the discrepancy.  Meanwhile, a retiring Treasury chief (J.K. Simmons) puts his most promising recruit (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) on the accountant's trail to discover once and for all who he really is.

It seems like an action movie and it mostly is but it's also a shockingly sweet movie about family and the importance of connecting.  It does rely very heavily on the "autism = superpowers" trope, like if you mixed Rain Man with James Bond, but I was able to put that aside.  It's definitely worth a look if you were on the fence.

The Princess Diaries (2001)

  After all the doom and gloom last week, how about a bright sunny movie for once?

Mia (Anne Hathaway) is used to being unnoticed, whether its in the shadow of her fiery best friend Lily (Heather Matarazzo) or the cold shoulder of the popular kids, led by Lana (Mandy Moore).  But all that changes when Mia's grandmother, Clarisse (Julie Andrews), comes to town and reveals that Mia is the heir apparent to the throne of Genovia, a micro nation between France and Spain.  Mia must choose between a life of glamour but obligation and her comfortable but non-entity existence.

The clothes and the hair keep this pretty dated but it's not terrible.  I could see young girls still enjoying it.  Parents maybe not so much unless you also grew up with it.  I didn't.  I was far out of the targeted age range when this came out and it never made much of an impression on me.  My boyfriend remembers that his sister was obsessed with it so he watched it a lot as a kid.  It's currently streaming on Disney+.

Bullhead (2011)

  Woof.  Yet another heavy foreign drama, this time courtesy of Belgium.  This took me something like three days to watch, partly because Tyler hates movies like this so I have to watch it when he's not around and partly because it's such a fucking drag.

Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a cattle farmer who buys and sells illegal growth hormones.  His vet (Frank Lammers) has an in with a big-time hormone gangster named Marc DeKuyper (Sam Louwyk) but Jacky gets cold feet after seeing someone from his past at the meet-up.  This chance meeting stirs up all his memories of a truly horrific childhood trauma and puts everyone involved on a downward spiral.

Literally and metaphorically, this movie is about balls.  There's really only one female character and she is basically treated as a prop the whole film.  (Eva doesn't count because she's a cop and therefore has bigger balls than most of these dudes.)  Men are emboldened, shrunken with fear, bolstered with drugs, and left to stew with the consequences of previous cowardice.  There's a lot of homophobia and some violence against women, as well as the previously mentioned childhood trauma.  Toxic masculinity is the dark, rotted heart of this film, however, and pretty much every event stems from it. Schoenaerts is phenomenal as Jacky and it looks like he's used this role to deservingly catapult his career.  I look forward to him being in a movie that isn't horrifyingly painful to watch.

Bullhead is currently streaming on Tubi with ads.

Mustang (2015)

  I really don't like many coming-of-age films.  I find them irritating and generally non-relatable.  Mustang is less of a coming-of-age, however, than a desperate escape attempt.

Lale (Güneş Sensoy) is the youngest of five sisters in rural Turkey and the main narrator of the film.  She and her sisters only want to have fun on the last day of school but a nosy neighbor tells their grandmother (Nihal G. Koldas) that they were behaving indecently.  Word eventually reaches their very conservative uncle (Ayberk Pekcan), who moves in to the house so he can keep an eye on them. The harder Grandma and Uncle restrict, however, the more rebellious the girls become until there is nothing left to do but marry them off as soon as possible to save the family name.  As Lale sees her sisters disappear one by one, she begins to make plans for one final escape to Istanbul.

Purity policing is gross.  After the neighbor narcs on the girls, their tightly-wound uncle takes them to a doctor to have their hymens checked to ensure that they're still virgins and therefore of value to the family.  If that sounds like some medieval bullshit to you, you clearly haven't heard that in 2019 rapper T.I. faced media backlash after revealing that he also takes his teenaged daughter to the doctor every year for the same reason.  2019.  Because as a society we have not fully accepted that women should have control over their own bodies.

Well, Mustang directly confronts what happens when those policies are enforced on young women, with outcomes ranging from forced unhappy marriage, rebellion and runaways, and suicide.  In that sense, Mustang is an anxiety-inducing nightmare of a film.  But it also shows how smart and resilient these girls are in refusing to comply with this oppression and building lives and little moments for themselves despite the forces arrayed against them.  It's a good movie but it's not an easy movie.

Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.