MOVIE DIARY 2023: BACK TO MOVIE DIARY 2023 pt. 2
Hello! We’re back with part 2 of MOVIE DIARY 2023’s return from hiatus! I think I’ve got one more of these to do before we’re fully caught up with my first watches since July. The next one will be a true lightning round, but for this one I’m just going to talk about some of the 2023 movies I’d seen in July and August so far. More importantly, this week we’ve got one of my favorite writers on movies, baseball, and the New York Mets, filmmaker Caroline Golum returning to the blog!
Legally Blonde (2001) - dir. Robert Luketic
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: CAROLINE GOLUM
Last month I was flying back to New York after a long-ish July 4th weekend in LA. The visit was vaguely inspired by my perfect gentile boyfriend’s family trip out there to see his brother and spend a weekend at Disneyland. We saw each other exactly once the whole time: at a July 4th BBQ at my childhood home, where our parents met for the first time. Everyone finds their own parents embarrassing, notices little quirks and tendencies that are otherwise invisible to others. Ahead of this fateful fete, I wound myself in knots worrying about how my boyfriend’s parents - with whom I get along quite well actually! - would receive the spectacle of my own kin. It was a source of considerable stress, and turned out to be no big deal.
Commercial air travel in this country is a farce, and getting to LA proved to be a royal hassle: multiple canceled flights, cab ride to Newark, standing around, etc. I was relieved to encounter no such tsuris on my trip back - and it’s a shorter flight, to boot - so I figured I’d take the opportunity to catch up on some recent releases. Try as I might, I can’t beat the film critic allegations - I consider myself more of a “picture reviewer,” in the vein of Boyd McDonald - and some part of me feels a need to keep abreast of what’s new in our favorite failing industry. There is no finer place to do this than a cross-country flight: most new movies are garbage (IMO) and I can only bring myself to watch them if I have literally nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
So after a quick perusal I decided I’d roll the dice and check out The Fabelmans. I missed it last awards season, preferring the competing Jewish childhood saga Armageddon Time, but enough trusted friends and colleagues assured me I’d enjoy it. This piece isn’t about The Fabelmans, so you can guess how that went. I got about as far as the Hanukkah scene when my edible kicked in. Sammy is gearing up to open a gift, what I can only assume is a camera, and I thought: “Nope, not today, just came from there.” Maybe it was the weapons-grade legal Cali weed, or the too-recent recollection of prolonged family time, but I couldn’t sit with Paul Dano’s baby face and Michelle Williams’ bagelface shtick for three hours.
I’ve been seeding more and more 21st-century movies into my regular diet lately, since I spent the first decade of this century cultivating a snobbish cinephilia and probably overlooked a lot of hidden gems. Plus they didn’t have my usual go-to in-flight movie, Citizen Kane, which I perversely delight in watching on a tiny screen. What possessed me to settle on Legally Blonde, I can’t quite say, but I was in the mood for something brainless and fun. Turns out, like the heroine of this spectacular picture, I grossly underestimated its intelligence, political savvy, and skill.
In brief (surely someone reading this has never seen it): newly-dumped sorority girl Elle Woods defies “dumb blonde” stereotypes by going to Harvard Law School, getting one over on her ex, unmasking blatant sexual harassment at a white shoe firm, and empowering the women around her in the process. Chalk it up to my youthful aversion to hyperfemininity and Bush II-era Blockbusters if you must, but I’ll take that big slice of humble pie any day. There’s no zealot like a convert, and in Legally Blonde I saw so much of my own biases cheerfully, zanily reflected back at me with all the megawattage of a Nieman-Marcus makeup counter. Writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith polished a boilerplate hero’s journey story into a sterling-silver Tiffany charm bracelet of belly laughs and genuinely poignant scenes that, I hate to say it, pass the Bechdel test with flying colors.
If you’d sat me down in front of Legally Blonde twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready for its mille-feuille layer cake of sunshine and sisterhood. Like so many of us, raised in a miasma of facetious girl power marketing schemes, I spent my adolescence cultivating an innate suspicion of feminine performance. This was the haunted era of low-rise jeans, the Paris Hilton sex tape, and socially acceptable mass-media fat-shaming. It wasn’t until much later, when I got hip to the shortcomings of Third Wave feminism, discovered the discography of Dolly Parton, and experienced my own share of patronization from Ivy League poindexters, that I came to embrace lipstick, high heels, and designer clothing for what it truly is: a drag act, rooted in the realm of fantasy, and a fun one at that. What gave me “permission” to enjoy Legally Blonde was a kind of spiritual development: unlearning the rigid parameters of gender performance and making peace with my own flip-flopping, whether in the guise of a party-hopping high femme flapper ho or wrench-wielding tomboy during my stints as a bike mechanic.
The most richly-shaded relationship in Legally Blonde isn’t between Elle Woods and her fellow students - although an early meet cute with himbo Luke Wilson is a close competitor - but in her budding friendship with local manicurist Paulette Bonafonté, played to bedroom-eyed perfection by American MILF legend Jennifer Coolidge. Elle makes first foray into litigation when Paulette, reeling from her own recent breakup, is caught in an extralegal custody battle with her ex for their beloved dog. Armed with only a semester’s worth of study and a lifetime of chipper hubris, Elle rolls up to Pauline’s mobile home and spins a web of faux-legal bullshit around the slovenly dognapper. In offering what little she can to ameliorate her friend’s suffering, Elle’s bluster makes the leap from deception to cross-economic mutual aid.
Inasmuch as you can call Legally Blonde a feminist text - and noted film theorist B. Ruby Rich referred to it as such in her contemporaneous review - the strength of this picture is in its cafeteria approach to womens’ liberation. This movie starts at the first wave, skips waves two and three, and lands squarely on whatever wave we’re at right now. It’s a story that reminds the viewer that you can own being desirable and find it empowering, without denigrating other people. It’s a story that charts a woman’s self-actualization and shifting priorities, without asking her to sacrifice her modes of self-expression - whether in a powder-pink skirt suit or vintage Playboy bunny costume.
The joys of Legally Blonde transcend the purely aesthetic and, more than my own warm reaction, I was especially surprised by its effective politics. The early 21st-century was hardly a fecund time for American leftism - Occupy Wall Street was still a decade out, and the 20-year war machine set off on 9/11 was a scant three months behind the film’s initial summer release. But peer into the secret compartments of this cinematic Birkin bag and you’ll find a faint floral whiff of class politics incognito - and a presaging of our well-established fixation on self care. As a filmmaker (and, I’ll admit, occasional critic) who has spent her life watching boys grow into men who make movies about their feelings, Legally Blonde filled an achingly-empty niche in my soul. There were no heavy-handed “women can do anything!” bromides or well-worn tirades against the patriarchy - in fact, I’m near certain the “p” word isn’t uttered throughout - just good, clean slumber party fun.
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Caroline Golum is a filmmaker and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a contributing editor and occasional podcast co-host for Screen Slate. Her debut feature, A Feast of Man, is streaming on Amazon Prime, Vimeo, and Tubi. Her second feature, Revelations of Divine Love, is in post-production. You can follow her on Twitter @carolineavenue.
Passages (2023) - dir. Ira Sachs
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Great movie! Among my favorite new movies I’ve seen this year! There was a Q+A with Ira Sachs after the screening I went to, and he was talking about how he wanted to make a movie about sensuality and connection after a long period of Covid isolation. I loved what he said too about how he tries to set up his shots and his actors’ performances in such a way that it can create interesting accidents. He seems like a director who is very conscious and purposeful about what he’s doing, but he also seems to realize that you can’t control everything and that sometimes not being able to control every aspect will lead to possibilities that you’d never thought about. A great ‘tude for filmmaking and for being alive in my opinion!
Loved all the actors here, especially Franz Rogowski, who is such a perfectly manipulative emotional terrorist in this. Sachs had a bit where he was talking about how watching Rogowski in this is like watching Buster Keaton, except instead of willfully throwing himself into physical danger, he’s willfully throwing himself into terrible behavior. I love that, the idea of emotional stuntwork! Rogowski really is this incredible force in this movie, and it feels impossible to look away from whatever the fuck he’s up to mostly because you (as a normal and respectful member of human society) just can’t believe what he’s doing as you’re watching it. I also think part of it is these sort of playful yet aggressive outfits that he wears. The costuming does a lot of subtle work for all the characters, but particularly for Rogowski’s Tomas. There’s this incredible sequence where Tomas shows up to his recent ex husband, Martin’s (Ben Whishaw) apartment in this crop top to try to seduce him, then he bikes over to his current girlfriend Agathe’s (Adèle Exarchopolous) apartment, where he is late for a lunch with her and her parents. He introduces himself to her mother father while wearing his slutty little crop top. No one in their right mind would do this! It’s emotional stuntwork! He’s the Buster Keaton of bad behavior! Sidenote for my fellow Vanderpump Rules devotees: Tomas’ crop top is very Kristen Doute’s green dress-coded. It’s a garment that once had some sort of sexual power in a relationship, but seen outside of that context of a sexual relationship (ie meeting your current partner’s parents or picking up months-old mail from your ex) it becomes something ridiculous.
Another small thing I really liked about this movie is that we see them at their jobs, which gives us a look into their lives, but also can set things up for some solid comedy, similar to how the costuming does subtle work to inform the characters and add an extra layer of humor to some situations. We see Tomas in his work as a film director, totally in control of the situation, with everybody around him trying to please him, and we understand that he’s this way because he likes the control and he feels entitled to this feeling of everyone fawning over him. We see Martin running a printing press, a job that is creative, but ultimately in service to other creative and creative-adjacent people, and that is a reflection of his relationship with Tomas. Martin is himself a creative and interesting person, but he puts himself below his partners in his relationships. Agathe’s is maybe a little trickier to put a finger on. She’s a school teacher, so maybe Sachs is going for something like, she’s nurturing but ultimately under appreciated? Or maybe she’s a teacher so she’s used to dealing with literal children so maybe she has a higher tolerance for putting up with Tomas? Still not sure on that one, but the school setting gives a nice added punchline to a scene where Tomas bursts into her classroom to try to win her back and he’s met with snickering children. Then when he ultimately gets turned down, he gets escorted out by a hall monitor and has to take a shameful walk through a room full of kids running around and playing games.
Watching it all play out is just a really harrowing experience. It’s stressful, but it’s in a fun way, and I found myself just laughing at these situations Tomas puts himself in and drags others into 1. because I am a normal and respectful member of human society so this behavior is wild to me and 2. because it’s clear that Tomas is expecting no consequences to come from any of this. Tomas truly believes that he’s getting away with what he’s doing, then as soon as it’s clear he’s not going to get what he wants, he pivots immediately to the next option, pretending that it was his first choice all along. The culmination of this is at the end of the movie where Martin finally and definitively ends their relationship, and Tomas immediately storms off to tell Agathe that he wants to be with her. When Agathe tells him it’s never going to happen, we get this really beautiful final scene of Tomas, dressed in a tuxedo and his favorite fuzzy jacket, tearfully biking through the streets of Paris. Maybe these tears mean he’s finally understood that there are consequences to his actions, but more likely they’re just tears in the moment. He’s burned his bridges with these people in Paris, but he’ll be off to Venice for his film tomorrow where he’ll undoubtedly do the same sort of emotional terrorism with some other poor group of suckers.
Sanctuary (2023) - dir. Zachary Wigen
Not very good. Kind of a kooky premise, but the central joke, that this turns out to be a sort of twisted romcom, feels a bit lazy. Plus Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) has already done that like a million times better (I am going to write about that one in the next MOVIE DIARY 2023 post). I also thought that the staging felt sort of like a play (derogatory). I like both Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott, but this didn’t really feel like their best work. Qualley’s pretty fun when she’s playing pushy and annoying, and she’s definitely doing that in this one (complimentary). Abbott is so self serious, but in a way that I think usually enriches the movie (his problem in my opinion is that he’s always in pretty mid movies).
Talk To Me (2023) - dir. Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Pretty fun! The movie isn’t so scary, but there are some really shocking moments of violence. It’s at its best when it treats the supernatural like some sort of fucked up party drug, but it falls into the modern horror trap of being “about grief.” The ending was really fun and eerie. It’s also a bit predictable, but not in a boring way, more like in a satisfying full circle way. In some ways it feels less like a horror movie and more a plotty adventure movie, the kind of movie that was made to be seen by kids too young to watch it. Like, can’t you just picture some enterprising 10 year olds tricking their parents into renting this movie and then having it completely change their worldview? Can’t you just open your minds eye and imagine what the VHS box art would look like? Can’t you just see yourself transfixed by this scary-ass box art? Like doesn’t it feel like it’s been a looming presence in your imagination for years? And like you made a bunch of friends in your freshman dorm because they were also living with that haunting image of scary VHS box art? And can’t you just see yourself watching this movie as an adult and being like, “It’s not as scary as I remembered, but I still really love it because I saw it at such an impressionable age”? HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU??
Oppenheimer (2023) - dir. Christopher Nolan
I liked it just fine. Cillian Murphy is really great, and it was nice to see him in a Nolan movie as the lead. Some very strong performances in this one — it turns out that Robert Downey Jr. can still act! — but also some real duds in there as well. The look of the movie was beautiful, and I thought the black and white segments were shot so well. Some of the effects made to show up as abstractions of the A-bomb explosion kind of reminded me of the ones in The Fountain (2006), I thought they looked amazing (The Fountain is good btw idc). The scene with the detonation sequence is the high point of the movie — breathtaking, overwhelming; that excitement felt as you see them pull it off, immediately replaced by a deep sense of foreboding.
I guess maybe that’s kind of the deal with this movie, it’s all about showing overwhelming power. The overwhelming power of the bomb and its consequences for Oppenheimer and the world, duh, but also those overpowering shots of the New Mexico landscapes and that overwhelming score. Those wide shots of New Mexico are really breathtaking, and they come up in such a way that I kind of found myself gasping at how open and unspoiled the landscape looked. A neat, if obvious, contrast to the cramped and crowded meeting rooms and labs. It’s interesting to see how Oppenheimer’s relationship to New Mexico changes from this idyllic getaway to just another cramped and crowded space bearing down on him as the development of the bomb starts to pick up (Christopher Nolan is not subtle, but it works for him!). Sidenote: loved Oppy’s little New Mexico silver and turquoise belt buckle. A fun little detail, and I feel like that’s definitely a type of guy, an East Coaster who’s really into the Southwest. I liked it!
The score is really spectacular, and as much as I enjoy that Hans Zimmer’s loud and low synth blaring, I thought the kind of frantic build ups of scattered notes to huge, looming strings from Ludwig Göransson’s score were such a good fit thematically. Not only could it be a contender for best score, but it’s also already probably locked down MOST score. There’s so much of it! It infiltrates almost every moment of the movie, inescapable as an atomic bomb, or Oppenheimer’s guilt (once again, Christopher Nolan is not subtle).
It’s a big, unsubtle movie because it’s a big deal and every single aspect of it has to be as big as possible from the score to the shots to the gigantic cast of movie stars, and down to the fucking obviousness of the central metaphor. It’s opera! It worked for me but sometimes it feels like it’s just shy of being insulting. I do think Christopher Nolan isn’t being playful about any of this, like he just seems like he naturally treats everything in his movies so seriously. But that self seriousness is also why some of his shit can be so funny. Like, it’s funny to take Batman seriously, and Nolan made three movies where he’s like “Batman’s real and he moved to Italy.” It’s funny to have Einstein doing goofy hat business because you know that Nolan is like “Einstein is a symbol of wisdom and intellectual and moral clarity, and this hat business is very serious.”
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
I’ll do a couple more 2023 movies next week, and I’ll have a for real lightning round on the rest of my first watches from July and August to finally get us all caught up.
Big week for us fans of former MOVIE DIARY special guest Fran Hoepfner! You gotta read her on Oppenheimer in Bright Wall/Dark Room and on Maestro in the beloved and well-respected Fran Magazine, of which she is editor in chief. If you are in charge of a large media publication, please make sure to hire Fran to write about Bradley Cooper’s Maestro! You should also consider buying a subscription to Fran Magazine (easily my favorite substack newsletter) so that Fran can continue to have the money to be alive and writing about Maestro, even if you aren’t in charge of a large media publication.
Street Fighter 6 update: I continue to get my ass kicked, but I’m still somehow holding onto Iron ranking. I do think that I’ve gone down a star on Iron level though. The positives here I think are that I can see where I’m blowing it, and I can recognize when matches should be winnable. The next part is actually winning them lol.
This is currently my new favorite video. A cinematic achievement, and I think the funniest thing about it is that it’s clear that they’ve been doing this for a minute before the camera has even turned on.
See you next time!