MOVIE DIARY 2023: I HOPE THAT WHEN I DIE I'LL HAVE OWNED A SPORTS CAR
Yes hello! We’re back again this week with America’s number one Ethan Hawke scholar, Kyle Amato! Kyle’s been here before, so he knows the score. When I found out what he was writing about I freaked out. You’re in good hands!
Phone Booth (2002) - dir. Joel Schumacher
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: KYLE AMATO
When I think of Joel Schumacher, I think of Minnie Driver’s eulogy tweet.
Putting aside the hysterical fact that she is 100% talking about Emmy Rossum, this tweet is such a genuine and affectionate celebration of a director whose name became shorthand for campy nonsense thanks to Batman & Robin. But his long career is far more than Bat-Nipples. If you haven’t seen The Incredible Shrinking Woman, fix that now. You probably don’t have to watch The Number 23. But if you want to witness gay vulgar auteurism in its finest form, you need to watch Phone Booth.
Phone Booth tells the story of an extremely 2002 publicist named Stuart Shepard (Colin Farrell). He’s cheating on his wife (Radha Mitchell) with a younger woman named Pam (Katie Holmes). He calls Pam from the last phone booth in Times Square and just before he leaves, the phone rings. When he picks it up, we are suddenly hearing Kiefer Sutherland (Schumacher’s Lost Boys muse) in crystal clear surround sound, a great menace in his voice. Jigsaw before Jigsaw, the Caller wants Stuart to confess to both his wife and mistress about his misdeeds or he will snipe him from some unseen location. Stuart of course finds this ridiculous and tries to hang up (“Go mindfuck some other guy”), but a warning shot takes out a nearby pimp (before dying he says “You done made me hurt my dick hand”... Schumacher may have been chic but he was not too culturally sensitive…) and Stuart understands this is all very real. For 80 minutes, the Caller torments Stuart and keeps him in the damn phone booth, not relenting even when Forest Whitaker shows up with the NYPD. All the while the camera is whipping around the phone booth, talking heads popping up as picture-in-picture boxes like The Boston Strangler or an NFL game. In many ways, Phone Booth is basically 25h Hour if it were about a repressed bisexual.
Schumacher shot this film in ten days. And maybe you can tell from Colin’s accent slipping through his tough guy voice, but who cares. Phone Booth gets in, gets out, leaves you laughing, much like Schumacher with the 10,000 men he claimed to have slept with. By the time Colin screams “I like it in the fucking booth!”, you’ll understand what Schumacher meant defending Minnie Driver on the set of Phantom of the Opera. There’s nothing more important than tormenting a bisexual man to get him to come out of the closet. No one ever paid to see under the top!
Kyle Amato is the Calendar Editor for Boston Hassle. He lives in Somerville and has a podcast about Ethan Hawke that is on hiatus, mostly, until he has new projects, which is often.
Boston Strangler (2023) - dir. Matt Ruskin
You know what, at first I was gonna make a little fuss about how blatantly this movie rips its visual style from Fincher’s in Zodiac (2007), but to be honest you could do way worse than borrowing from Zodiac. I might even go further and say that the similarities to Zodiac are actually kind of comforting, and Boston Strangler (not to be confused with 1968’s The Boston Strangler, they dropped the “The”— it’s cleaner) feels like a pretty capable iteration. While we were watching this, Tessa said something like, “It’s like Zodiac for girls, but they didn’t realize Zodiac is already for girls.” I think that’s really kind of the perfect description of this movie.
Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon play the real life reporters Loretta McLaughlin (Knightley) and Jean Cole (Coon) who were investigating the murders, and they’re both great in this, but the entire thing feels like very well-tread territory. Violent crime, reporters who have become obsessed with the mystery to the detriment of their home life, getting the scoop, it’s all there. I liked it, but I feel like I liked it in the way that I used to like to sometimes put on an episode of something like Law & Order while I dicked around on my phone. There’s a formula to this movie. All the beats are there and they’re all in the right place, so it’s predictable enough if you’ve seen this kind of thing before, and you have because you’ve seen Zodiac.
There’s a clear intention here to map the themes of this movie to our current sociopolitical landscape, and I think that’s where this movie kind of sets itself apart. It’s done in a way where it’s noticeable, but it’s not so heavy handed or distracting. The struggles of being a woman working in investigative journalism aren’t anything particularly unknown or shocking, but when we see this come into play it doesn’t seem like a tacked-on thing, it feels real and it feels stressful, which keeps the tension throughout. It’s also interesting to see the theme of Police departments fucking up investigations by not communicating or cooperating with each other. It’s something that comes up in Zodiac, but I think Boston Strangler takes a more confrontational stance on the Police as an organization, which I really liked.
In addition to this serial killer threatening women in the area, the Police department casts its long, incompetent shadow over Loretta and Jean’s entire investigation. The cops are all too ready to downplay this, and then later sweep this under a rug and move on, which further hinders the investigation, but beyond that, the whole idea of the Police being this unquestionable institution becomes a significant obstacle in Loretta and Jean’s reporting. The failings of the police are a huge part of what their big story on The Boston Strangler is about. The police are blowing it, more and more women are dying because of their failure to communicate with other Police departments, and the Chief of Police refuses to acknowledge this. It’s obvious why cops wouldn’t be thrilled about what Loretta and Jean aren’t writing, but their Editor and Publisher are also upset about their story because of their adherence to the fiction of the police being good men who are just doing their best out there. The serial killer element of the movie ends up being pretty standard with a nice twist that comments on society, media, violence, men and women, etc etc, but the real story here is about all the shit that two women have to wade through as they try to push the police to do their jobs for once.
Poison Ivy (1992) - dir. Katt Shea
I think I wanted to like this movie more than I actually did. It was part of Criterion’s Erotic Thrillers collection, and I guess I was kind of hoping for more of everything that makes Eric to thrillers erotic and thrilling. I think my main problem is that this movie just doesn’t go far enough.
Sylvie (Sara Gilbert) is a classic poor little rich girl teen, acting out because her mom is slowly dying from emphysema and because her dad’s a jerk and an alcoholic. She befriends a girl at her school who she calls Ivy (Drew Barrymore), a mysterious “bad girl” from “the wrong side of the tracks” who has much more dangerous going on beneath her wild exterior (“Ivy” isn’t even actually her real name, just a name that Sylvie calls her because of this ivy tattoo she has on her thigh, and in fact we never do find out what her real name is). Ivy is attending their school on a scholarship, she lives with her often absent aunt, and she’s kind of a loner. The two find kindred spirits in each other, and Sylvie and Ivy quickly become best friends. Sylvie is attracted to Ivy’s wild and carefree attitude, while Ivy is drawn to the comfort and security of Sylvie’s home life, those same things that Sylvie is rebelling against. Things take a turn as Sylvie soon discovers that Ivy is trying to work her way into the family by manipulating and seducing her dad.
Darryl’s (Tom Skerrit) affair with his teenage daughter’s equally teenage friend is supposed to be the erotic part of this erotic thriller, and I guess it is, but it’s so so wrong and not in a hot way, more of a “this is just an objectively terrible decision” way. Every time this goofy conservative dad awkwardly flirts with Ivy, I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of the greatest twitter threads of all time.
The relationship between Sylvie and Ivy as two shithead best friends is the best part of this movie, and there’s an implied layer of gay subtext in there that creates some tension and confusion for Sylvie. It’s furthered by the Freudian angle of Ivy apparently being a dead ringer for a younger, healthier version of Georgie, Sylvie’s mom who is currently bedridden and suicidal. Ivy’s resemblance is also how the movie sort of explains Darryl’s attraction to Ivy, beyond the fact that she’s very hot and he hates his life. It’s rich in that particular sort of psychological subtext that the best erotic thrillers has, but I think that sometimes the actual text of it felt like it wasn’t going far enough. I think the physical attraction that Sylvie has to Ivy could have been played up a bit more, and I get that the implication is that maybe Sylvie is only beginning to grapple with her own ideas about her own sexuality so she’s not sure what she’s feeling, but I think taking it even just a little further and making the implicit more explicit could have given more of an opportunity to see into Ivy’s character as well. Plus, the mother/lover or virgin/whore dynamic is usually used in these sort of cliched heterosexual relationships, and it might have been an interesting spin on this dynamic to see this in the context of a relationship between two women. On the other hand, the sexual attraction between Darryl and Ivy is a little too much, but I feel like if you’re doing an erotic thriller, too much is probably better than not enough. Like Joel Schumacher says, “No one ever paid to see under the top.”
I have a couple movies that I saw this week that I didn’t get to write about in this post (as you all know, I am a very busy, motivated, and productive person with fingers in many pies), but next week you’ll hear all about Please Baby Please (2022) (Insane!) and First Cow (2020) (Grindset!).
While you wait, make sure to pop into the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord to connect with your peers and to get the full MOVIE DIARY 2023 EXPERIENCE!