Movie Reviews Archives

“Fitting In” Is a Queer and Heartfelt Coming-Of-Age Movie About Body Diversity

This review contains mild spoilers for Fitting In.

Molly McGlynn’s Fitting In opens with a quote from Simon Debeauvoir and a quote from Diablo Cody — Jennifer’s Body to be exact. “Hell is a teenage girl,” the screen reads, and then the film goes on to show us its truth. Hell is a teenage girl, hell is being a teenage girl, hell is being a girl, hell is being a person, hell is having a body.

The movie begins like an average teen girl coming-of-age tale. Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) is an average girl who spends her days running track, bickering with her single mom (Emily Hampshire), talking about sex with her best friend Vivian (Djouliet Amara), and lusting after boys, specifically Adam (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai). Vivian is more experienced, something Lindy hopes to change as she and Adam get closer.

But at 17 years old Lindy has never had her period. She’s managed to ignore this until she goes to the gynecologist to get birth control and mentions it. A series of invasive tests later, she finds out she has MRKH syndrome which means she has no uterus and no vaginal canal.

With the help of a strong performance from Ziegler, McGlynn allows Lindy to react to his news in a realistically teenage girl way. Instead of confiding in Vivian or even vaguely confiding in Adam, she antagonizes and alienates herself from both. She sabotages her track career, fights with her mom, begins drinking and smoking more, and stumbles through sexual exploration.

The one positive shift is her newfound connection with Jax (Ki Griffin), a transmasculine intersex student who goes to Lindy’s school. Lindy is drawn to Jax’s charm and Jax’s own experience with an unconventional body. But even this bright spot finds a shadow in Lindy’s fear of her queerness — and any reminder that she is different.

And Jax is a teenager too. While they may be more settled in their queerness, they approach Lindy with a touch of oversensitivity. They’re justified in their frustrations with the way Lindy treats them, but McGlynn allows them to react to these frustrations without perfection. There are visible, human cracks in Jax’s mask of confidence. They’re also just a kid trying to fit in — or stand out on their own terms.

While Jax is thankfully more than a symbol in the movie, their presence does deepen its message. As a trans woman, I related a lot to Lindy’s struggle. It’s hard to be a woman who doesn’t have a vagina and can’t have kids. Throughout much of the film, Lindy is dilating to try to deepen and create a vagina, something I’ve never seen on-screen despite being commonplace for friends of mine who have had bottom surgery. Even the responses of “you’re lucky” that Lindy receives about not getting her period had a recognizable sting.

Jax’s character makes that connection I felt to Lindy more than an accident. Fitting In is explicitly a celebration of our different bodies and the disconnect of certain biological markers from gender. Even some cis women don’t have uteruses. Even some cis women need to dilate.

It’s a positive for all of us if we work to detach our assumptions about biology. It’s a positive for all of us if we approach other peoples’ bodies and our own with less judgment.

Having a body might be hell, but Fitting In shows us just how beautiful that hell can be.

Fitting In is now in theatres.

Sundance 2024: “Love Lies Bleeding” Is a Queer and Carnal Neo-Noir Western

Autostraddle is back at Sundance, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for our coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

“Careful where you sleep here, it’s dangerous.”

It’s rural New Mexico in the late 80s and everyone is glistening with sweat and desire. An ugliness permeates the landscape coupled with the threat of violence. This is the world of Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s darkly funny and queer neo-noir western about love, family and revenge. In the vein of films like Thelma & Louise and the Wachowski Sisters’ Bound, we are taken on an unforgettable, brutal journey.

The quiet Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at a grimy gym cleaning toilets and being bored out of her mind when Jackie (Katy O’Brian) and her impressive muscles saunter into her life. Jackie is a young bodybuilder from Oklahoma, training for an upcoming competition in Las Vegas and looking for a job. Lou is instantly smitten and a late-night hookup quickly becomes a blooming romance filled with passionate sex, eggs, and steroids. Lou — turned on by Jackie’s growing muscles — gets her lover started on the juice. Jackie moves and starts a waitressing job at a nearby gun range. But Lou was a loner for a reason and once this new woman enters her life, her troubles start to catch up with her.

Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) is married to the abusive JJ (Dave Franco) but refuses to leave. So Lou stays, bringing her new girlfriend into the complicated family dynamic. And as if that isn’t enough, Jackie’s boss is Lou’s estranged father (Ed Harris) — also named Lou — and he uses their relationship to try and reconnect with his daughter. No one knows for sure where his wife is and two nosy FBI agents are curious about that mystery. Glass crafts a caustic web of familial and professional entanglements that threaten to derail Jackie and Lou’s love story. But it’s not just fate that’s interfering — there’s also the steroids.

Not much is known about Jackie’s past aside from the implication that she can’t go home again. She’s young, impulsive, and dedicated to getting as big and strong as possible. But as her steroid use spirals out of control, she starts to lose her grip on reality. Lou can see it, but she doesn’t want to let her go. And when Beth ends up in the hospital badly beaten, it sets off a bloody chain of events as Lou fights to protect herself and Jackie as they try to avoid the police and get out of town. Complicating matters is Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), Lou’s jealous and suspicious ex-lover who will do anything to get her away from Jackie.

Full of twists and turns, Love Lies Bleeding blends its noir elements with pure body horror as Jackie transforms into something beyond human. Her strength both scares and excites Lou and their attraction to each other is brash and carnal. Stewart and O’Brian have explosive chemistry, gazing at each other with an intensity that feels both too soon and eternal. It’s almost as if fate has brought them together to look after each other. Though lacking in physical strength, Lou gets her power from love, devoting herself to looking after Jackie no matter what. Just as Jackie is addicted to steroids, Lou is addicted to her.

There aren’t many lesbian films like Love Lies Bleeding. Glass’s sophomore feature is a truly unique vision of two misfit women who blow up their lives and the world around them. Expanding on the themes of her debut Saint Maud, Glass once again explores the poetry of brutality and the transformation of the body for worship as well as pleasure. There’s no one way to describe the nature of love or what it takes to hold on to it. Even with only two films under her belt, it’s clear that Glass is fascinated with desperate women. Not simply to gawk at them, but to push us as an audience to descend into madness alongside them, if only for a short while.

Love Lies Bleeding is an exciting, instant classic that will hopefully usher in a new era of unapologetically weird lesbian cinema.

Love Lies Bleeding will be released in theatres on March 8.

Sundance 2024: “Ponyboi” Is a Crime Drama with Cowboys, Springsteen, and an Intersex Lead

Drew Burnett Gregory is back at Sundance, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

The thing you need to know about Ponyboi is that it’s so fucking fun.

It’s true writer and star River Gallo has crafted a movie with intersex representation unlike anything we’ve seen before. It’s true there is an emotional arc of an intersex sex worker struggling to forgive his family for the surgeries forced upon him as a child. It’s true the film is filled with a range of violence and heartbreak.

But, my God, is this film FUN.

The brilliance of Ponyboi — an expansion of Gallo’s short film of the same name — is the way it wraps itself in both a romantic fantasy and a delicious crime story. You can see the beats one might expect from a Sundance film focusing on an underrepresented identity. But they’re presented with laughs and gasps and eroticism.

Ponyboi is about an intersex person named Ponyboi (Gallo) who works as a sex worker out of a laundromat owned by pimp/drug dealer Vinny (Dylan O’Brien). Vinny is about to have a baby with Ponyboi’s best friend Angel (Victoria Pedretti), but Vinny and Ponyboi are also fucking on the side. Vinny is trying to get Ponyboi to switch from testosterone to estrogen and to get his tits done — less because that’s something Ponyboi wants and more because it would be good for business.

On Valentine’s Day, Ponyboi’s melancholy life is upended when Vinny’s shitty latest batch gets them in trouble with some gangsters. Ponyboi wants to run away — possibly with sexy cowboy Bruce (Murray Bartlett) — but first he needs to refill his hormones. All before Vinny or the gangster catch up with him.

The genre conventions aren’t just a way to serve an ignorant audience intersex knowledge. Gallo, director Esteban Arango, and the entire cast are having a blast playing in this world. O’Brien is alternately hilarious and terrifying as a cliché Jersey boy and Pedretti is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking as a cliché Jersey girl. All the gangsters flounce around with the subtlety of a Tarantino movie. And Bartlett is a fantasy of masculinity come to life. All of these ingredients combine for a plot that may not be original outside of its lead, but does always remain tight and propulsive.

The first scene with Bartlett is especially wonderful as his cowboy Bruce and Ponyboi flirt over a shared Jersey love of Bruce Springsteen. Their duet of “I’m On Fire” that could have been trite, feels only hot and sweet with performers this talented.

There are multiple ways to read the reality of the action on-screen. I love that the film lives in the fantasy space without over-explaining. Is Bruce a fiction? Maybe. Is he any more fictional than the crime plot of Ponyboi’s life? Not really. Are these genre conventions any more absurd than the horror movie of operating on children to conform their bodies to socially constructed ideas of gender? No.

Reminiscent of the Wachowskis’ Bound, Ponyboi is a queer cinema genre pastiche that understands a movie can be artful, emotional, and incredibly entertaining.

My only complaint is that Springsteen’s “Pony Boy” doesn’t play over the end credits. But that’s okay — “I’m On Fire” is better anyway.

Ponyboi is streaming for the rest of the day on the Sundance virtual platform.

Sundance 2024: “Grace” Is a Beautifully Constructed Black Queer Short

The most beautifully shot film at Sundance 2024 isn’t any of the buzzed about features that will sell for millions — it’s Natalie Jasmine Harris’ short film, Grace.

It’s not just that the photography is pretty — although it certainly is — it’s that every moment is captured exactly as it should be. The camera is stationary when it should be. The camera is handheld when it should be. Close-ups and wide shots are used to great effect.

I’m a big proponent of shooting on film, but it’s only worth it when the entire visual approach is motivated by character and story. It’s more than worth it here.

Grace is about a 16 year old girl named Grace in the rural 1950s South. She’s spent the summer getting close to another girl — all the excitement, uncertainty, and intimacy of young queer love — but, as she prepares to be baptized, she questions whether she needs to repent for her feelings.

Harris, whose previous film Pure was one of my favorite shorts at Newfest 2021, trusts in her craft. Many shorts feel the need to have an obvious hook or an easy twist — or are obvious samples from an already written feature — but Grace is a simple moment in time enriched by a depth of feeling. The attention to detail in everything from production design to performance allows the film to stand as a contained work of art. It washes over you during its ten minute runtime like the sea washes over its protagonist at the film’s end. A mix of heartbreak and beauty.

Cinematographer Tehillah De Castro previously shot Tahara and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, so it was not surprising to see her name appear in the credits. She’s one of the best cinematographers working today. Not one of the best up-and-coming, not one of the best at shooting indie queer movies — one of the best period.

Harris’ excellent taste in collaborators doesn’t end with her DP. Again, the production design, editing, and performances are all exquisite, and everything is brought together by a gorgeous score from Taul Katz and Damsel Elysium.

When people lament the amount of lesbian period pieces, I think they’re actually complaining about a predictability. It’s not the period setting — it’s the sameness of stories and the sameness of who’s on screen.

Grace may work as a contained short, but I hope someday soon Natalie Jasmine Harris gets to make a feature length period piece. If this is what she can do in a ten minute Kickstarter-funded short, I can’t even imagine what she’ll conjure with more time and a bigger budget. I hope we’re lucky enough to find out.

Grace is now streaming as part of Short Film Program 5 on the Sundance virtual platform.

Sundance 2024: “Stress Positions” Is a Queer Farce With Bite and Depth

The two narrators in Theda Hammel’s debut feature Stress Positions each speak with the syntax of literary fiction. No one has told them they’re in a farce.

Whether literally or figuratively, everyone in this film is better at writing than they are at living. Or, maybe, we’ve become a world better at writing aka storytelling aka narrativizing than we are at living. Or, maybe, it’s absurd to make generalizations about our entire world based on a handful of toxic queers living in Brooklyn.

Stress Positions is about Terry Goon (John Early), a washed up party gay whose rich older husband has left him for an even younger man. It’s also about Terry’s 19 year old Moroccan American nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash) who is a model and is living in Terry’s (his husband’s) ramshackle brownstone because he is “very injured.” (He has a broken leg.) And, finally, it’s about Karla (Hammel), a bisexual (self-identified lesbian) trans woman in a relationship with a cis lesbian (Amy Zimmer) who wrote a successful book about her transition.

The film is bookended by narration from Karla, but it’s Bahlul we hear from most throughout. He’s pivoting from model to writer and we hear snippets from his life story that he’s jotting down in a little notebook. Is your life so interesting? Karla questions before informing Bahlul that fiction is freedom.

Is transness a sort of fiction? Does that make it untrue? “I wanted to kill myself and this sort of helped,” Karla states with the sardonic edge she delivers many of the film’s best one-liners. What kind of escape can the reinvention of transition provide? What will fall short?

For a film that is laugh-out-loud hilarious from beginning to end, there’s a lot of thematic density here. The satire of ignorant privileged Brooklynites is there for laughs, but underneath these (well-executed) easy jokes is something grander about the disconnect between people. And not just because it takes place in the summer of 2020.

Bahlul’s (white) mom raised him to believe his uncle Terry was evil. It’s fascinating to watch him discover the truth to be far less grand and far more pathetic — but maybe just as sinister. If being queer does not grant us a unique immorality or a unique moral superiority — if these are just stories people tell about us and we tell ourselves — then where does that leave us? To abandon the fictions is to confront the minutiae of our feelings and failures, to face the feelings and failures of the world around us.

For the characters in Stress Positions, the fiction of queerness (and even the fiction of nonfiction) are attempts to keep the world theoretical. Karla’s story is that she’s a lesbian — even if she lusts after just about every eligible boy she meets. How one labels their own sexuality doesn’t matter. But some of Karla’s self-narrativizing is not as harmless.

Ultimately, the way these characters engage with the world and their world is as performative as Terry disinfecting his food deliveries. He thinks it’s keeping him safe, but many of our greatest fictions are ones we believe ourselves to be fact.

Don’t let all my pondering mislead you. Again, this is a very funny movie. Most post-Old Hollywood American farce is a pastiche of that era. It’s thrilling to get a film that understands what made the comedy in those films work while discovering something wholly its own. The privileged Brooklyn setting may have people recalling mumblecore and its off-shoots, but this is far broader and far smarter than that. If anything it recalls early Almodòvar in its filtering of the genre through a new lens.

Since seeing Theda Hammel in her production of Wallace Shawn’s Marie and Bruce, it’s been clear she would approach the path of being a “Trans Artist” in a way uniquely her own. This film does not disappoint. It’s the clear work of a trans auteur, a writer/director/actor/composer who understands it’s as important to take formal risks as it is to entertain.

Fiction may be freedom, but not all fiction is free. Stress Positions is free.

Stress Positions is now streaming on the Sundance virtual platform.

Sundance 2024: “Power” Is an Effective Introduction to the Violent History of American Policing

During the first moments of his documentary on the history of American policing, director Yance Ford (Strong Island) asks the audience for curiosity or, at least, suspicion. Then he concedes it’s up to each individual viewer to abide by this request.

Through talking head interviews, archival footage, on the ground interviews, and narration, Power lays out a clear timeline of the police from their origins to the present. It begins with slave patrols, militias tasked with stealing Indigenous land, and officers maintaining order among the working class. It then moves into the first official police forces in major cities, the blurring of police and military, the violence against social and class movements, the War on Drugs, Stop and Frisk, and the failure of diversified law enforcement.

Most of this information will be repetitive for anyone interested in the topic, but, as a Netflix documentary under 90 minutes, this is a film with a clearly defined audience. It is meant to be an introduction — a teaching tool ideal for classrooms or for adults open to change.

While Ford pointedly pulls back from showing certain footage in full, there are still a lot of upsetting images included. But if these images were enough to move those with privilege out of complacency, the abuses of the police would have ended long ago. And so it’s not the emotional plea that’s essential here — it’s the intellectual one.

Despite the short runtime, Ford is thorough in providing American Policing 101 alongside a primer on the way race manifests in this country and how that has developed — and developed alongside policing — over time.

One of Ford’s most compelling archival finds is a documentary from 1970 narrated by actor Ben Gazzara. It’s fascinating to see how policing was discussed over half a century ago and to witness the fundamental fallacies pumped into our culture about policing even then.

A section on the Kerner Commission that shows sympathetic white people passing the report out to other white people to try and change minds is harrowing in its familiarity. The government response to this report was to increase police funding. The government response to the 2020 protests was the same.

Ford includes a montage of almost every president since Lyndon B. Johnson bragging about their increase in police funding. It’s these repetitions, these cycles, that hit hardest. It’s not cynicism — it’s just reality. As journalist Wesley Lowery states, American policing has conceded nothing. They’ve doubled and tripled down on their power.

Understanding the police as a tool of racial and class subjugation and seeing how that has functioned in the U.S. and abroad — one interviewee notes that, yes, the police have been militarized, but also the military has been policified — is essential in fighting back in the present and in the future.

I’m glad this film exists as it’s easier to point people toward a short Netflix documentary than it is to get people to read a book. But the film does an excellent job showing how different groups have not only assimilated into whiteness but assimilated into American policing. I’m not sure if the problem is a lack of education about the police or a lack of will among those with any power to destroy these systems.

Those with the most power will never concede it. Many with even less won’t concede either. And so we return to Ford’s initial request. Are enough people willing to consider this history with curiosity and suspicion? How large of a majority is needed to fight the powerful minority that grants these individuals their violence? This film does not have the answers. But it prompts more people to start asking questions.

Power documentary will stream on Netflix later this year.

Sundance 2024: “Desire Lines” Is an Experimental Documentary About Transmascs Who F*ck Men

Watching Jules Rosskam’s experimental documentary, Desire Lines, I had to remember there was a time I didn’t know trans people could be gay.

It feels absurd now. While I certainly know some straight trans people, the vast majority aren’t just queer, they make dyketactics or faggotry — or both! — their entire personality. But, once upon a time, I questioned my own ability to be trans, because I had only dated women and my understanding of transness was still shaped by the theories of 20th century pioneering cishet doctor Harry Benjamin.

Desire Lines is about Ahmad (Aden Hakimi), an Iranian American trans man, embarking on his own queer journey through gay and trans history. He arrives in a liminal space of an archive run by a transmasc named Kieran (Theo Germaine) — an archive that literally transforms into the past taking Ahmad from looking at a photograph to suddenly being in a bathhouse.

Ahmad is learning about the history of cis gay men and the history of transmasculine people who fuck cis gay men and figuring out where he fits in. As he researches — and time travels — the film embraces more conventional tools of documentary like archival footage and interviews with a wide variety of queer transmasculine people.

Of course, Lou Sullivan is a major part of Ahmad’s journey and the film’s archival footage. And while there may be nothing new in this inclusion for trans people who have been out for a while, it’s worth noting that the only documentaries that exist about Sullivan are still the two shorts by Rhys Ernst (watch here and here). He may be famous in the community, but he’s not famous in the world at large — which means he’s not famous for trans people who are either new to their transness or new to that part of trans history.

Many of the interviews feel similar. Not much in Desire Lines hasn’t already been said at many trans hangouts. And yet, there’s still a value to having these varied experiences captured on-screen.

Ultimately, that’s what the film is about: the importance and magic of an archive. It’s about the experience of discovering there have always been others like you and the necessity to make this experience more accessible for all.

For queer trans guys who are not in community with other queer trans guys, I can imagine there will be an immense comfort in hearing such a vast range of relationships to one’s genitalia, to the types of sex one has, to what words are used during sex, and to who people have sex with. It can be a cinematic version of that first trans party you attend when you learn not only are you not alone, but you’re actually kind of cliché.

And for trans people who are not in need of this education, there’s still something touching about witnessing a character go on this journey. The dreamy sequences that take place in the past are lovely, especially an erotic moment between the two lead actors in a recreated bathhouse.

To be trans is to constantly be discovered. Every decade cis people act as if we’re new and every year a trans person invents themself and finds our history. The longer I’m out — approaching seven years — the more exhausted I am by the former and the more heartened I am by the latter. Every newly out trans person deserves a Kieran guiding them through the archive.

At least, until there are enough Kierans and enough Ahmads to change the world and this history is known to all.

Desire Lines is streaming on the Sundance virtual platform January 25-28.

Sundance 2024: “In the Summers” Is a Different Kind of Queer Coming-of-Age Story

Vicente is in his car outside the small airport of Las Cruces, New Mexico waiting for his kids. He’s nervous. His hands are shaking. He smokes to calm himself or just to have something to do. The flight attendant exits the airport with his two kids, tomboy Violeta and girly Eva, and he does his best to shift into father mode.

The movie shifts too. This opening moment is one of the few we’re with Vicente, the rest alternating between Violeta and Eva. This brief glimpse will endear us to him even as he hurts his kids. We’ll know he cares. We’ll know he’s trying his best. But it doesn’t ease the hurt. It might even make it worse.

Alessandra Lacorazza’s debut feature, In the Summers, is split into four sections, four summers where Vicente’s kids visit from California. The film spans over a decade as Violeta and Eva are played by three different actors.

Even as a child, it’s obvious Violeta is queer. But her dynamic with her father and her sister and the rest of the world is as complicated as queer existence often is in life. Vicente has a respect for Violeta, a clear favoritism built on their shared masculinity — even though he still has homophobic outbursts. It’s Eva who faces the most rejection from her father, even as it’s Eva who is most desperate for his love.

It’s also not as simple as Violeta being masculine and Eva being feminine. Especially as they get older, those lines are blurred as Eva evolves into her own kind of tomboy. Violeta is more emotional while Eva is hardened. Eva skateboards and excels at pool and both Violeta and Eva attach to local dyke bartender Carmen.

The greatest strength of In the Summers are these well-written, realistic, complicated characters and watching how the change — or don’t — and how their relationships change — or don’t — over time. Lacorazza’s sharp writing is paired with several excellent performances including Réné Pérez Joglar (aka rapper Residente) as Vicente, Emma Ramos as Carmen, Leslie Grace as Vicente’s girlfriend Yenny, and Lío Mehiel and Sasha Calle as the eldest versions of Violeta and Eva.

But it’s the middle versions of Violeta and Eva who are the heart of the film — old enough to be fully aware, young enough to leave down some of their defenses. Allison Salinas and Kimaya Thais give phenomenal performances that are a testament to their burgeoning talents and Lacorazza’s talent as a director.

Each part opens with a video still life marking the next chapter. It’s a nice cinematic flourish and I wish the film had more like it. In the Summers is at its best when it supports its writing and performances with a clear form — a sweaty party in shallow focus, an accident lost in darkness. Too often the film falls back on a flat naturalism that doesn’t quite fit with its snapshot memory structure.

Nevertheless, this is a film that prioritizes character and that is where it excels. Watching Mehiel and Calle synthesize Violeta and Eva’s childhoods into their adult selves recalled the last chapter of Moonlight — pretty much the highest compliment I can give.

When we leave Violeta and Eva they’re in their early 20s, still so young. They each have so much growth left to stumble through, so many more chapters to live. In the Summers is a queer coming-of-age movie that understands childhood and adolescence are just the beginning — our memories shape us for the rest of our lives.

In the Summers is streaming on the Sundance virtual platform January 25-28.

Sundance 2024: “Sebastian” Fails in Its Self-Critique of a Gay Sex Work Story

Even Max’s publisher is disappointed to hear he’s writing about sex work. It is kind of a “stock character of queer literature,” he sheepishly admits.

But he promises he’s bringing something new, a modern day story of sex work in the internet age where his protagonist will be without shame. This is the part he shares. The part he doesn’t share is that he himself has become a sex worker as research.

Mikko Mäkelä’s Sebastian first appears to have some self-awareness around its protagonist. His love of Bret Easton Ellis, his angst around only having a short story collection published by 25, his empty espousing of literary theory. But Mäkelä is either too fond of Max or relates too closely to Max to give his film the bite it requires. Instead it ends up with the same flaws as the character at its center.

Despite what Max claims, sex work in the internet age has been plenty explored on the page and on-screen. In fact, every year I’ve covered Sundance, there has been at least one film — from Pleasure to Work to Good Luck to You, Leo Grande to The Stroll and Kokomo City. A common profession, and a common day job among artists, there’s plenty of room for more movies about sex work. But sex work as a topic is not enough to make a story interesting.

Max, the tourist sex worker, is not the only stock character on display. There’s the pathetic man, the mean man, the man who surprises Max with group sex, and the man who develops a tender relationship with Max, because he reminds the man of his deceased partner. These figures may be tropes for a reason, but Max is too enamored with these boring characters as interesting material. Not only is he new to sex work, he appears new to stories about sex work.

The ease of Max entering this profession only faces one hiccup — a prospective client who rejects Max upon seeing a face pic. There’s something interesting — and funny! — about Max’s entitlement and self-esteem being undermined by someone suggesting he isn’t hot enough to be charging 200 pounds. Unfortunately, Max starts working out more and this thread is dropped with him quickly returning to high demand.

It’s not just that the film fails to reinvent its trope-filled story. There are also inconsistencies in Max as a character. He’s framed as ambitious and eager, but then he falters in his culture writing day job and in an important literary space. Of course, an ambitious person can still self-sabotage. Unfortunately, here it feels less like character nuance and more like plot convenience. This was a story that needed the bite of a filmmaker like Fassbinder or, for a more recent example, Ira Sachs’ Passages. Instead Max experiences the same gentle treatment from Mäkelä as his privilege allows him to receive in publishing.

The film is well-made and well-acted with a strong central performance from Ruaridh Mollica as Max and a standout performance from Jonathan Hyde doing a lot with a lot as one of the clients. I just wish the acting and craft were servicing a story that had more to say about sex, sex work, and the literary world.

Sebastian circles around the idea that to be a successful sex worker or a successful author in the internet age, you have to put forth a persona on social media. Alas with Max a luddite averse to even being on Instagram, this feels more like a slipped in gripe rather than a central thread.

Who has the right to tell which stories? How important is persona to an artist’s success? How has the internet changed all of our various economies? These are all questions I care about and find worthy of exploration. Instead Sebastian gets distracted by a middling version of a story almost as old as its protagonist’s new profession.

Sebastian is streaming on the Sundance virtual platform January 25-28.

Sundance 2024: “Frida” Documentary Lets the Queer Disabled Communist Speak

In Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, her protagonist explains why she had to write a corrective biography of her enigmatic artist wife: “Now that Mr. Smith’s false narrative was out there and I was in our cabin alone, I had nothing to do but avenge him and his lies, to avenge reality itself, to avenge everything.”

I thought of this explanation while watching Carla Gutierrez’s documentary, “Frida,” a work that aims to tell the life story of one of the twentieth century’s most famous artists in her own words. With another feature documentary already released in 2020, a docuseries released just last year, and, of course, the 2002 Oscar-winning biopic starring Salma Hayek, it’s fair to question if we really needed another documentary about Frida Kahlo. But every life — like every story — can be altered by its framing. And Gutierrez’s reframe is one worthy of existence.

Using Kahlo’s own words from diaries, letters, interviews, and other writings, Frida has the artist narrate her own life along with the words of friends and lovers including two-time husband Diego Rivera. (All performed by actors, of course.)

The lack of talking heads is supplemented by visuals consisting of photographs, archival footage, and animated renditions of Kahlo’s paintings. While the animation is well-done, there is something that feels counter to the film’s perspective to manipulate Kahlo’s art rather than simply portraying it. Watching the film, I yearned for a more radical approach that allowed for stillness as we listened to the voices.

But the words themselves are excellent. Due to her self-portraiture and her tokenization as one of the few women allowed into the canon, Frida Kahlo the person is often flattened. Not here. The film displays her intelligence and poetic voice, as well as her day-to-day frustrations as person and as an artist — a woman artist in a male world, a Mexican artist in the US and France. She’s vivacious and despairing and annoyed and bored. The film doesn’t force her to always be Frida Kahlo, famous artist. She’s allowed to just be Frida.

And who is Frida? Gutierrez doesn’t shy away from her queerness — with sexuality or gender — nor does she reduce her communism to a brief mention. A lot of time is also spent on the accident that caused her to live with chronic pain. It’s not framed as inspirational or depressing — it just is. Every aspect of Kahlo’s life and worldview and art was shaped by being a queer disabled communist.

The best parts of the documentary focus on Kahlo’s time in the US and France, allowing her to express the absolute disdain she felt for the bourgeoisie and the rich. There’s an understanding that these spaces are required for success in the arts while also a relatable exhaustion at this requirement. French surrealist André Breton is not credited with “discovering” Frida’s work, but rather lambasted for displaying her art alongside random Mexican trinkets — as if her worth as an artist was dependent on her ethnicity as curio.

Centering her voice is also valuable in portraying her illness. There are moments of immense grief — especially related to her miscarriage — but mostly there is just the mundane frustrations of living with chronic pain.

And, finally, this approach is divine when Kahlo — and her lovers — are discussing sex. “It’s good to have sex even when one is not in love,” Kahlo says before detailing the sensitivity of her breasts. It’s delicious to hear about her many affairs with men and women from her own voice and from theirs.

Every year at Sundance, there are a handful of portrait documentaries that were either produced by or are quickly bought by major streamers. Many of these are straight forward portraits unworthy of their fascinating subjects. While Frida may be imperfect, I admire its ambition and its less conventional approach to form. I also admire its commitment to portraying a version of Kahlo more controversial than her iconography.

If she’s going to be one of the famous women in history, she should be famous as queer, as disabled, and as a loud and proud communist. That is the biography Frida Kahlo deserves.

Frida is streaming on the Sundance virtual platform January 25-28.

Sundance 2024: “I Saw the TV Glow” Celebrates the People and Shows That Shape Us

When I interviewed Jane Schoenbrun about their debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, they mentioned their next film was written during the early months of physical transition and would be “about the egg crack.” That film is I Saw the TV Glow and it’s a mix of styles, ideas, and emotions fitting for that chaotic moment in a trans person’s life.

I Saw the TV Glow is about Owen (Justice Smith) who we fall through time alongside from 7th grade (played then by Ian Foreman) until somewhere well into his adulthood. He’s a quiet kid who loves his mom and fears his dad. He doesn’t share the interests of his peers — except 9th grader Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who loves a fantasy show called The Pink Opaque that Owen isn’t allowed to watch because it airs after his bedtime. Oh and because his dad says it’s a show for girls.

The Pink Opaque is an obvious stand-in for Buffy and Schoenbrun has a lot of fun recreating that era of teen fantasy show. Maddie educates Owen on “monsters of the week” and “big bads” and then begins slipping him VHS tapes so he can actually watch the episodes.

I Saw the TV Glow does for television and cool older girls (who might not be girls) what We’re All Going to the World’s Fair did for the internet and inappropriate adult men. The bond that forms between Owen and Maddie is deeply recognizable both in how tightly they connect and in the gaps they cannot fill.

By remaining truthful to the quiet awkwardness of many closeted trans girls, Schoenbrun has given themself a challenging task. Owen is fearful and self-conscious in ways that are pointedly alienating. After delivering the best line of the film, Justice Smith lets out his only laugh and one of his few smiles and it feels like a relief. That relief is quickly snatched away.

Because Owen — and, to an only slightly lesser extent, Maddie — are so internal, the film is at its best in its moments of quiet. The film’s masterful visuals, haunting sound design, poetic score, and cinematic flourishes combine to create moments that are transcendent. Schoenbrun confirms themself here as a singularly talented filmmaker unafraid to take risks — stylistically and emotionally.

But, from the beginning, the lines between Owen’s life and the world of The Pink Opaque are blurred. Schoenbrun allows characters to mimic the sort of overwrought dialogue and monologues found in Buffy and other teen shows. It’s fascinating to see this style used to represent trans teenagehood instead of Buffy’s cis girlhood, but it’s a choice I found myself admiring more than connecting with. Teenagers and newly out trans people both believe they’re discovering new ways of thinking and feeling that other people have been thinking and feeling for centuries. I experienced this myself and there’s a poignant nostalgia to seeing that represented on-screen — there’s also occasionally a distance.

Schoenbrun is currently working on an adaption of Imogen Binnie’s Nevada and it’s a fitting union of artist and material. Despite all the Buffy references, it’s that book that feels most closely tied to this film. Reading Nevada years into my transition — and after reading several books from trans authors inspired by Nevada — I felt grateful for its existence while experiencing a similar distance from the moment of transness it portrayed.

During that same interview, Schoenbrun told me they started working on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair before knowing they were trans, and they felt obligated to honor that uncertainty in the film itself. They’ve made a similar choice here — even though they were further into their transition during production and post-production, they honored the emotions of those early moments this film was written. There’s something quite vulnerable and quite rare about an artist trusting the person they were in the past. It’s easy for us — especially as trans people — to be so eager for the future that we ignore even the present. I love that Schoenbrun has resisted that temptation.

I Saw the TV Glow is about the art that shapes us, even if someday we grow beyond it. The film warns against looking at this art with dismissal or disdain. To do so is to look at our past selves with these same negative emotions. To do so is to deny our full personhood. To do so is to deny the tools we need to move confidently into the future.

I came to Buffy even later than I came to Nevada. But as a teenager, there was other art — good and bad — that shaped the woman I am today. And, next to me, also experiencing that art, was someone I thought was a girl — another queer human — who shaped me even more.

The two of us often sat side-by-side, staring at a screen, dreaming of the people we might someday become.

I Saw the TV Glow will be released by A24 later this year.

“Poor Things” and the Monsters We Know

There’s a scene in Poor Things that, for me, serves as a key to unlocking the mystery behind what the film is trying to get at. That is, if it’s trying to get at anything at all.

About halfway through the film, Bella (Emma Stone), who up until this point has been on a luxurious vacation without a single worry in the world beyond how she is going to pleasure herself from one moment to the next, is forced to see that not everyone in the world has it nearly as good as she does. That human suffering exists due to the way society is structured, and, unfortunately, we are somewhat powerless to do anything about it. Bella feels empathy for the people forced to live in abject poverty, but that empathy is limited — her reaction is simply to throw money at the situation and then move forward the best she can. You could argue it’s her naïveté that doesn’t allow her to fully grasp her role and the roles of the people around her in the fates of the lives of the refugees in this scene, but maybe that’s not exactly it.

After all, how should we expect an adult baby whose life has been charmed and imbued with the power and privilege that comes from being “born” into vast generational wealth react to this situation? Of course, Bella’s particular brand of cluelessness is different from what we’d see in real life. After all, she’s the reanimated corpse of a woman who attempted to kill herself with the brain of the baby she was carrying implanted to replace her own. But what we see happen to Bella over the course of Poor Things’ almost two and a half hour runtime points to something very real about our culture. Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) and writer Tony McNamara (along with the writer of the novel the screenplay is adapted from, Alasdair Gray) have created a monster in Bella, for sure, but it’s a monster we’re all more familiar with than some might think. And although the male characters in the film believe what makes Bella monstrous is that she’s an adult baby with her childlike wonder fully intact who wants to be free, the real horror of Poor Things is the fact that no matter how hard she tries to buck against the circumstances of her “birth,” she ultimately chooses not to fully break the cycle that made her life possible — even though she knows she could if she wanted to.

A Victorian farce, Poor Things begins from the perspective of Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), a young medical student (?) who is immediately taken by the knowledge and practice of his strange and unorthodox professor, Dr. Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe). God hires Max to help him and his maid, Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine), take care of Bella as she evolves and, God hopes, matures. At first, Max has no idea that Bella, much like God himself, is an experiment in the capabilities and limitations of the human body. Time moves quickly in Poor Things, so it’s difficult to know exactly how long Max is with Bella and God, but as he continues spending time with them and tracking Bella’s intellectual progress, he witnesses a variety of interesting behaviors from Bella. At first, she can barely speak or take care of herself; she mispronounces words she knows and pees whenever and wherever the sensation comes to her. Headstrong and resolute in her desires from the beginning, she throws tantrums about what she can and can’t do and gets incensed when she doesn’t get her way. Max begins to believe something else is going on with Bella, but it isn’t confirmed to him until God admits the truth of what he’d done.

Despite this and Bella’s behavior, Max is immediately taken with Bella’s beauty, but being the “good guy” he is, he resolves to wait until she is more cognizant of herself and the world around her before he makes a move. When it seems like she’s able to consent, Max asks her to marry him. Even though she agrees, she develops a yearning to escape both God and Max’s control of her destiny. This yearning grows when she discovers masturbation, a moment that helps her realize bodily pleasure is within her power to create and control. The arrival of a smarmy, lascivious lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who God hired to draw up the contract for Max and Bella’s marriage, provides a way out of God’s mansions for Bella, and she takes it. This leads Bella on a journey of discovery, not necessarily of herself, but of what is possible when you’re free to make decisions about how you’ll spend your day. In Lisbon, Bella and Duncan eat, drink, and fuck their way through the trip. The more Bella is exposed to and engages with these various acts of pleasure, the more defiant she becomes to Duncan’s requests and demands. In an act of desperation, Duncan essentially imprisons her on a cruise through the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes he’ll finally have her under his control, but that backfires, too. On the cruise, she begins reading books, making friends and having lengthy conversations with them, and she learns quickly that pleasure isn’t just confined to what she puts into or on her body.

Duncan begins to drink and gamble heavily while Bella’s enlightenment continues, and their time on the boat culminates in a moment of money mishandling by Bella that gets them kicked off and stuck in Paris with nothing. To make money, Bella begins sex work in a move that seems rather abrupt but actually makes sense as the film moves forward — Bella wants to spend as much time as she can engaging in the activities she actually wants to do and the least time doing work. Sex work is labor, and the film makes that explicit, but in Bella’s case, this labor gives her the ability to work on her own schedule and spend the rest of the time doing whatever the hell she wants. At the brothel, she befriends and hooks up with another sex worker, Toinette (Suzy Bemba), who introduces her to socialist theory and brings her to labor organizing meetings. But just as her life in Paris seems like it’s about to take a radical turn, she’s called back to God’s mansion, her old life, and a series of events ensues that don’t exactly bring her back to where she started but fairly close.

At the end of the film, Bella is much more intelligent, more capable of making rational decisions, and better adjusted to the world she was “born” into. And that’s not a value judgment, just a matter of fact explanation of what’s happening in the film. After God dies, Bella takes it upon herself to continue his practice. She stays with Max, though their relationship isn’t explicitly defined, and she moves Toinette into the mansion with them. Mrs. Prim is still there, but in the final moments of the film, she’s being served a cocktail on a tray, which feels like a nod to the fact that Bella views her as more of an equal than God did when he was alive.

Throughout most of her journey, Bella ignores the confines and expectations of the society around her to indulge in her every whim. She has sex when, where, and with who she wants. She eats and drinks what she wants. She says what she wants. She dances and moves through the world in ways that are not expected or accepted by the “polite society” around her. When she finally does decide to get a job, she picks one that is most explicitly reviled by the people she knows (Duncan serves as the conduit here, trying to shame her and Toinette for being sex workers by using “whores” as an insult). She even begins to study socialist literature and connect with other people who share her beliefs. Before the return to God’s mansion, everything about who Bella has become points towards a new possibility: one in which the privileged child of an aging aristocrat decides to forgo her inheritance and the expectation of who she should be to become a true comrade.

But that doesn’t happen.

Instead, she returns to God’s mansion, takes up his practice, and becomes him (a version of him who is interested in medicine and how it can serve humanity, not just the science and progression of it, but a version of him nonetheless). She spent all that learning what life is really about — yes, life is about the pleasures of our bodies, the pleasures of our minds, the pleasures and struggles of human connection, and the pleasures and struggles of fighting for and standing up for one another — only to come back and assimilate right into the fold of the bourgeoisie society she was trying to escape. There isn’t much difference between who Bella is and who she would’ve been if she never decided to join Duncan on his trip. The only difference now is that she knows better. She knows a different life is possible, a different world is possible, but the trappings of the system get to her, and she fools herself into believing that knowing better is enough, that she can use the enlightenment she gained to help others in a way God was never interested in.

It might not seem like it at first, but it’s such a cynical ending to a film that spends the better part of 90 minutes showing us the radical possibilities that exist within us if we would just forget all the bullshit we’ve been indoctrinated to believe and let ourselves be free for a while. But it makes sense for Lanthimos and McNamara to bring us back to reality. Shortly after Bella witnesses the pain and suffering of the refugees in Alexandria, the character who brought her there in the first place, Harry (Jerrod Carmichael), tells her, “Don’t accept the lie, of religion, socialism, capitalism, we are a fucked species. Know it. Hope is smashable. Realism is not.” Of course, Bella disagrees with him because she believes (and I would argue, she knows) he’s wrong, but it gives way to the inevitability of the rest of the film.

The truth is, there are a lot of people like Bella walking around — people who have the power and ability to blow up our systems and redistribute that power and their wealth — who get a taste of what life could be like if they truly dedicated themselves to changing the structures of our society and then ingratiate themselves to many of those structures when they feel like that battle is just too difficult. Much of the conversation about this film is in relation to Bella’s liberation as a woman in a patriarchal society, and I can see why we’d latch on to that idea. She does seem more liberated than she was in God’s mansion for much of those 90 minutes, but she never really is and, from what I can see, she seemed to understand that. How could she — or anyone — be truly liberated in a society governed through the boundaries placed on us and our potential by racial capitalism? From the very beginning, Bella’s freedom was dependent on her ability to pay for it and to keep paying for it. That other people were financing her freedom for a time doesn’t take that away. In this way, she’s never fully outside of the system, but at least in Paris, she was closer or getting closer to what that could look like for her (and for Toinette). When the possibility of a life of defiance becomes more strenuous for Bella and the comforts of a life of compliance begins to look more attractive to her, she finds small ways to keep some of that defiance with her without ever fully shaking or challenging the confines of the system she was born into.

Harry’s cynicism is reminiscent of the cynicism that runs through a lot of Lanthimos’s work. But Poor Things shows, perhaps a little less clearly and a little more hysterically, that like Harry, this cynicism is likely not an actual characteristic he possesses. Rather, it’s an attempt to wake us up, to clue us into the behaviors and violences we replicate over and over again, even when we think we aren’t. And on that front alone, Poor Things is a success. Bella is a monster, no doubt, but she’s one of the most common ones we know. So common, we almost forget how monstrous they really are.

“Going to Mars” Is the Queer Black Women’s Triumph That Nikki Giovanni Deserves

This review of Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project is a slight departure from our typical review style. After editor discussions, we decided to frame the review as vignettes in conversation with Giovanni’s own words from the documentary, mirroring some of the play with form that “Going to Mars” achieves so well on its own.

“A lot things that I don’t remember, I don’t choose to remember. I remember what’s important, and I make up the rest.” — Nikki Giovanni

These are the first words Nikki Giovanni speaks in Going to Mars, a documentary released on Max this month dedicated to her life’s work. It’s simple, a flick of empowering creative snark embedded in “I remember what’s important, and I make up the rest” that’s fitting to the poet laureate of Black girls who love themselves. It’s also a mask. Later in the documentary we learn that a seizure following lung cancer has left Giovanni’s memory rattled.

When an on-stage interviewer asks her where she was on April 4th 1968 (the day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered), Giovanni responds, “I don’t remember.” Pushed more, she offers genuinely, but firmly, “I’m sure it’s a great question, I… I already answered it. I can’t take it any further.”

Following the exchange, a voice over of Taraji P. Henson, an executive producer of Going to Mars, reads Giovanni poem “Reflections on April 4, 1968”: “The assassination of Martin Luther King is an act of war. And some honky asked about the reaction. What do you people want? Isn’t it enough that you killed him? You wanna tell me how to mourn? You want to determine how I, a lover, should respond to the death of my beloved? May he Rest In Peace.”

Giovanni muses that her shortened memory is a blessing. Going to Mars presents a supplemental argument to her conclusion, when you’re one of the greatest living Black artists, one of the living greatest artists period, of the last 60 years — your work speaks for itself.

“I’m what they call a ‘personal poet.’ And I try to bring out the personality of my life, you know?

That my family was a good family. Because they are Black people and Black people are good people. And from that goodness, we can create the revolution. So that the revolution isn’t a reaction to whiteness, but a forward thrust of Blackness.” — Nikki Giovanni

I often say that I wrap myself in my Blackness like a blanket. Blackness is my security. My comfort. I’ll be honest that I’ve not always excelled at loving myself, but loving Black people? That’s no more of a question than my body’s ability to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. My mother taught me that, whispered loving tributes pressed into the lotions she used on my baby soft skin before my first steps. And did I mention that my mother’s favorite poet is Nikki Giovanni?

It shocked me, really, how much watching Nikki Giovanni reminded me of my mother and my aunties. The visceral reaction I had in seeing them in her hands, in the warmth and clarity of her voice. There’s a clichéd Che Guevara quote, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” But I’ve found it near impossible to speak into life the depth of love that comes from being parented by people who were first radicalized in the 1970s. People who once scribbled Nikki Giovanni poems into the margins of their notebooks.

In “Nikki-Rosa” Giovanni writes, “And I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me, because they never understand Black love is Black wealth. And they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while, I was quite happy.”

I’m always amused at how surprised white people are to discover — Black people don’t think about them much. Whiteness is a governing societal norm, but that is not the same as being a certainty in our homes or guiding light from which we find our North Star. No one has been better equipped or able to express that than Nikki Giovanni, who’s dedicated her life to being the words unspoken on our tongue.

Nikki Giovanni: “There has to be a way to do what we do and survive, which to me seems to be missing.”
James Baldwin: “Sweetheart, sweetheart. Our ancestors taught us how to do that.”

Of course, Going to Mars includes Nikki Giovanni’s infamous (well, at least infamous to YouTube children of the internet) sit-down conversation with James Baldwin. Along Giovanni’s poems, sometimes performed by the poet herself and sometimes performed evocatively by Henson, her conversation with Baldwin is the only other continually returned to narrative device in the documentary.

Anyone who’s seen the conversation would understand the choice, Giovanni and Baldwin’s spark captivates. Originally filmed in 1971, Baldwin would have been 47 years old at the time — 16 years after the publishing his groundbreaking Notes of a Native Son and 15 years after the publishing of Giovanni’s Room. Conversely, Giovanni is 28. James Baldwin sat at the dais during the March on Washington. Giovanni describes her participation in the Civil Rights Movement as a young person as, “We could tell our grandmothers, ‘we can’t do it.’ Or we could change the world… it was way easier to change the world.”

Here are two Black queer icons, both standing at the precipice of life’s intersections, Giovanni at her rise and Baldwin transitioning into becoming a community elder. They may spar with their intellect might, but they also take boundless care of each other. The resulting dance is breathtaking.

While young in her years, in this moment Giovanni is already exhausted. She’s rightfully preoccupied with wondering what does sustainability and love look like for Black women engaged in this kind of work. Baldwin, who lived large passages of his life by finding his fresh air and freedom in France, away from other Black Americans, doesn’t seem to have the answers that Giovanni is looking for. But I think Going to Mars answers it for her instead.

Giovanni’s spouse Virginia “Ginny” C. Fowler, Emerita Professor of English at the University of Virginia (where Giovanni also holds the same position), and co-producer of Going to Mars, shares a well lived and loved in, if not slightly cluttered and quirky, home with Giovanni and their dog. Though she says little directly in the documentary itself, Fowler’s mere constant, steady presence at Giovanni’s side speaks volumes. In fact, it’s Fowler who expresses that Giovanni’s relationship with her son, Thomas, strained over the years. They’ve since mended and through their now-friendship, Giovanni gets to spend time with her granddaughter, Kai, who clearly lights up her life.

“When are we gonna get those folks to let you come down, so you can learn how to play bid whist and fry some chicken?” Giovanni playfully teases Kai after noting how tall the 13-year-old has gotten. Maybe it’s because my family’s game of choice is spades that I knew “let me love on you, so you can always know that love” is what’s said underneath.

“I’m a big fan of Black women. ‘Cause in our blood is space travel. Because we’ve come through an unknown, to an unknown. And that’s all that space travel is. If anybody can find what there is in this darkness, it’s Black women.” — Nikki Giovanni

The New York Times called Going to Mars “an Afrofuturist Space Odyssey,” which is fitting because I’ve seen few other documentaries like it. Rather than live in a pure biographical space, Going to Mars collages archival footage of Giovanni with well-known moments of Black history, woven between images of orange moons, ice-purple planets, starlight swooping through at warpspeed with rainbow streaks in its wake. Giovanni spends quiet time with her family, or she speaks on stage to a crowd of hundreds. Young women come up to her to tell her that she’s made a difference in their lives: they’ve named their babies after her (yes, at one point Giovanni does take a picture with said baby, and yes I did cry), they stayed in school, found courage to leave abusive families, gotten PhDs. Giovanni reads her famed “Ego-Trippin” at Brooklyn’s iconic Afro-Punk festival to a constellation of Black people with sparkles sprayed into their afros, electric blue lipstick, and crop tops with their tits hanging free. Over a span of 60 years, her poetry never stops narrating. All the while, she’s imagining another world for us.

Given everything I just said, it might feel surprising that what I most admired about Going to Mars is its restraint. Nikki Giovanni is a fan of Black women. In fact, she says it multiple times. I believe that, more than anything, that’s what she wants to be known for. She so loves Black women that she never waivers that our strength can only be matched by the stars themselves.

And maybe that seems lofty, but Giovanni speaks of it merely as fact.

“Mean Girls” (2024) Made Us Feel Too Gay To Function

This review will have spoilers for the 2024 movie Mean Girls… and also the 2004 movie Mean Girls, and the 2018 Broadway musical Mean Girls.

The new Mean Girls movie finally did what the original movie hinted at and the Broadway show didn’t commit to: Janis is canonically, unabashedly, officially queer. Finally.

But let’s back up a little. As a person of a certain age (that age being millennial), Mean Girls has been part of my life for the past 20 years. Which is an insane number to type out, but it’s true. Although we didn’t know each other, Nic and I (Valerie Anne) were both in our final semester of sophomore year when this movie came out, getting ready to become juniors like the girls in the movie. It was hilarious, it was quotable, and I was instantly obsessed. My friends and I constantly expressed our disapproval by saying “boo, you whore” for years. We would regularly call things “grool” and “fetch” when we were trying to be unserious. Over the years my friend groups would change but our shorthand would be the same. As I grew up and came out, my queer friends and I would often call ourselves “too gay to function.” We would randomly shout “I’ve got a big LESBIAN crush on you” to make each other laugh. “The limit does not exist” was just a phrase we used to express our capacity for fangirling. It was, and frankly still is, part of the fabric of our existence. This was only amplified by the movie becoming a Broadway musical in 2018. It borrowed the same overarching plot as the movie (teenagers being cliquey and bullying each other is, unfortunately, timeless content), but punched it up with catchy songs.

And then came the 2024 movie. Reboots are hard. Turning a musical into a movie is hard. So being a movie turned musical turned movie musical, Mean Girls (2024) had a lot of hurdles to overcome. It gracefully leaps over some and stumbles over others, and that’s what Nic and I are here to discuss today. One thing is for certain though: this is the gayest adaptation of Mean Girls yet.

Valerie Anne: My friends and I were deeply into the original Mean Girls movie. Did you have a similar experience?

Nic: I did! In fact, hearing you talk about your experience unlocked a core memory for me. Some of the details around why we did this elude me (Halloween? Spirit Day??), but I have a visceral memory of scouring my closet and the mall (Delia’s and Claire’s, of course) for the perfect pink outfit to wear when my friends and I dressed up as the “Mean Girls” for school. It was a huge deal because I went to an all-girls Catholic school where plaid-skirted uniforms were the name of the game, and we yearned to express our personalities in any way we could without getting written up for violating the dress code.

Anyway, we were also very into quoting our favorite lines from the movie. Everyone was talking about it. Not to be all “get off my lawn!”, but I kind of miss that about this “peak content” era we’re in. Sure, our smaller friend groups have our go-to inside jokes and one-liners that we quote, but EVERYONE knew Mean Girls lines; it was a cultural phenomenon. One part of my experience that was different from yours was while some of my friends got to decide which cast member they were emulating, I was simply “generic mean girl number 4” because there were very few cast members who looked like me. Thankfully, they remedied that with this reboot. I’m also a big ol’ theater nerd, so the 2018 musical adaptation immediately skyrocketed to the top of my favorite soundtracks after seeing it live. I still listen to it regularly thanks, in part, to your “High School’s a Bitch, the Musical” playlist.

Valerie Anne: One thing we both noticed that I want to talk about is the…pop-ification of some of the songs. I personally think it worked for some — like Janis and Damian’s songs being rockified worked for me; Auli’i sold me as a rock star 100%. And a lot of the power ballads still rang true. You can take Reneé out of Broadway but you can’t take the Broadway out of Reneé. But some of the other songs felt…watered down. Broadway songs are punchy and you have to hit your consonants like they’re punching bags, but they took sandpaper to a lot of these songs’ edges. It felt especially weird with the new song, “What Ifs,” because it was the first song that was an in-universe/daydreamy song. (The very first song, “Cautionary Tale,” was cleverly filmed as a video for social media.) Even though it didn’t SOUND too musical theater-y, it did have some musical theater chorus dancing going on out of nowhere. It felt a little discordant at times. But then “World Burn” was literally perfect, from the lighting to the staging to the singing, no notes. How did you feel about the music overall?

Nic: I completely agree with you. Auli’i’s rocker version of “I’d Rather Be Me” was incredible! I know we were both eager to hear what she did with the “Someone Gets Hurt (Reprise)”, and my WORD did she exceed my expectations.

Valerie Anne: I think we both audibly yelped at that part.

Mean Girls Janis queer: Auli'i Cravalho as Janis from the Mean Girls movie

I genuinely don’t know how Janis wasn’t canon queer from day one but glad we’re here now!

Nic: On the flip side, “Stupid With Love” is one of my favorite songs from the musical, and a lot of that has to do with the arrangement and Erika Henningsen’s delivery. Okay, and also because I can’t resist a pun. But the punniness of lyrics like “I’m astounded and nonplussed, I am filled with calcu-lust” just didn’t hit as hard when, like you said, the consonants were more smoothed out than punctuated. Don’t get me wrong, I thought Angourie did a fantastic job as Cady, I just wanted a bit more…pizazz in my movie musical. And then there’s Reneé. (Is it time to yell about Reneé yet?!) My absolute favorite sequence was “Someone Gets Hurt” from the Halloween party. At least I think so. I may have blacked out during it from sheer awe. The choreography and camera work were brilliant. Reneé was mesmerizing. I’m honestly still speechless.

Valerie Anne: I think that was my favorite scene, too. It felt like it had Broadway staging and Reneé just took complete charge of that scene. So good.

Renee Rapp as Regina George sitting sexily on a cafeteria table

Regina Regina Regina!

Valerie Anne: Let’s talk about some changes; there were plenty, as expected, even though all three adaptations had overlapping creative teams. What were some things you think they changed for the better, and/or things that weren’t changed that maybe should have been? Is there anything you think changed for the worse?

Nic: Some of the immediately noticeable and positive changes to me were in the jokes and one-liners. We don’t use the same language now as we did in 2004, and the script was updated to reflect that. Language evolves, comedy changes, and I was really glad to see that they didn’t keep problematic dialogue just for the sake of nostalgia. Probably my favorite change though, was the Regina/Janis backstory lore drop. In the OG film, there’s a brief conversation involving Regina not wanting to invite Janis to her birthday party because there would be girls in bathing suits there, and honestly, I don’t think a Gen Z Regina would exhibit that kind of homophobia.

So in this version, Damian and Janis tell a different story still involving Janis getting jealous when Regina got a boyfriend, but some key changes to details as well as Jaquel and Auli’i’s delivery really made the scene stand out. As far as things I wish were changed, I really wanted them to lean harder into Regina’s bisexuality. Some would argue that by casting the famously bisexual Reneé Rapp, they did just that, but I long had a theory/hope that they would change Shane Oman’s gender in the reboot so nothing about that plot point would change, and they’d have a very clear way to confirm Regina’s queerness. After you and I saw the movie though, you made a fantastic point about them possibly not wanting to play into the “cheating bisexual” trope, so I will concede and allow Reneé’s casting to stand as confirmation. *bangs gavel* What about you? Is there anything you wish they did differently?

Valerie Anne: I think if you wanted to, you could read into the Janis/Regina lore drop as Regina being into Janis but then having a bit of a panic about it and walking it back but her defense mechanism was cruelty. But that’s giving the movie too much credit; I think you’re right in that Regina is only queer in that she’s played by a bi icon who loves to tell interviewers Regina is queer. Which works for me!

I agree I love that they updated the casting and the language. I do think it’s a little strange that they changed Gretchen from being Jewish since that was specifically called out in both the original movie and the musical, but maybe they just really loved Bebe Wood so they made her Cuban instead since Bebe isn’t Jewish. I also don’t know why they randomly decided to slut-shame Karen? I get dropping the incest storyline from the first one but they were already making fun of her for not being smart, I don’t think the slut-shaming needed to happen.

The thing that bugged me the most is they kept the kalteen bar storyline. It’s not that I don’t believe teenagers today are fatphobic and have body issues, but I just don’t think we needed to go there. I’m grateful they didn’t give Reneé weird butt pads like they gave Rachel McAdams in the original, but I think they could have left it at them giving her the kalteen bars, but then everyone just thinks she’s hotter. (The line in the song is, “God, look at her figure, did her boobs get bigger?” and it’s sung with admiration. Regina, Regina, Regina!) If they had to have the storyline at all (even though I think it’s weird that Janis, whose best friend is fat, would have the idea of making Regina fat. Even though I know it’s not that JANIS thinks being fat is bad, it’s that she thinks Regina thinks being fat is bad…I don’t know the whole thing is a mess.) As a fat person, I just wish they had gone with something else. Seeing Regina obsessively on the treadmill later in the movie just made me feel sad, which I don’t think is supposed to be the vibe.

I think in both of these cases, the problem wasn’t even just the inclusion of these questionable lines/plots but also that they weren’t called out in-movie by anyone as being shitty in the end. Aside from an off-hand joke from Regina’s mom, no one was like “you never needed to lose three pounds in the first place” or Cady wasn’t like “we used your insecurities against you when we should have been helping you get over them” or any kind of closure. It was just “oh that didn’t work okay moving on.”

I do love Karen so much. Just happy to be here!!!

ANYWAY. Let’s talk about the pyro lez in the room: JANIS IS FINALLY QUEER!!! (And her name is not Janis Ian, it’s Janis ‘Imi’ike.) Not implied, not hinted at, not walked back by calling her “Lebanese,” no winking, no nudging, just rainbow flags and coming out lore drops. Thoughts, feelings, opinions?

Nic: When this movie originally came out, I hadn’t yet, and I was in that stage where anything related to queerness made me uncomfortable. The one line that didn’t become part of my everyday language was “I have a big LESBIAN crush on you!” because oh no, that seems like a bad word and I can’t be that bad word, no way. And the 2004 film played it as if it was the worst thing; so to see that, in this version, while Janis and Regina’s falling out involved Janis’s queerness it wasn’t BECAUSE of it?? It’s huge. And Janis taking a girl to the Spring Fling instead of awkwardly dancing with Kevin G?! Beautiful, no notes. More Auli’i playing queer, please and thank you.

Valerie Anne: Janis came out in sixth grade and never looked back!! And I agree, I like that they removed all the homophobia from present-day Regina. An excellent update. I also think it just makes sense that the two loner “art freaks” that found each other in the jungle of high school are both queer. Especially since Auli’i herself is bi.

And speaking of Auli’i Cravalho, I feel like she and Reneé Rapp absolutely stole the show. Perhaps it’s because I am, indeed, too gay to function but dear GODDESS the vocals on those two. I know it’s also partially because they get the beltiest songs but also I can’t imagine anyone belting better than they belted!

Nic: Listen. They stole the show, gave it back, slapped us, we said “thank you”, and then they stole it again. It should frankly be illegal to look directly into the camera as much as the two of them did while possessing the amount of charisma and talent that they have. ILLEGAL, I tell you. You know in Tangled when Flynn Rider is going on and on about his smolder? Well his smolder doesn’t have SHIT on Reneé’s. Whew, is it hot in here? What’s happening?

Valerie Anne: I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Let’s talk guest stars. We had some familiar faces we knew would be returning, like Tina Fey and Tim Meadows. Plus Ashley Park, who was in the trailers, who plays their French teacher which is funny because not only did she originate the role of Gretchen Wieners in the Broadway version of Mean Girls, but she also most recently starred in Emily in Paris. Nonbinary star of Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies Ari Notartomaso was randomly there, though somehow not really in any big singing way despite their talents. And then there was the big one. (Do we spoil the big one?)

Nic: I so badly want to spoil the big one, but I think we’ve got to give the people something to look forward to.

Valerie Anne: I think you’re right.

I’ve been thinking a lot about who this movie is for. Especially since they started releasing trailers that don’t make it obvious at ALL that it’s a musical, despite the fact that they have entire goofy dance numbers. I don’t think it’s for people who have never seen any of the previous iterations of Mean Girls. I don’t know if it stands alone as a modern story, even though they did clever updates like having the Burn Book spread by social media instead of by photocopies, and other small changes like that. I don’t think it has enough character development to stand up to modern media, especially on the (high) heels of Barbie. It has a message, sure, but the message is essentially “fight fire with fire and watch the world burn” or “be nice to each other.” It sort of has the “women need to support each other not take each other down” message, but in a very 2004 baby step feminism way, a step that I feel most of Gen Z learned in the womb. And it’s not for people who loved the original movie but didn’t even know there was a musical. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only thing a person who hates musicals hates more than a musical is a surprise musical.

So I think it’s literally for us. The people who a) have strong nostalgia ties to the original movie, b) loved the musical and c) have big lesbian crushes on Reneé Rapp and Auli’i Cravalho. What are your thoughts on that?

Nic: Honestly, the only thing I have to add to what you’ve already said is that it’s also for people who d) wished there was way more diversity in the original.

Valerie Anne: Yes! That was definitely a marked improvement. And I think as long as you aren’t going into this movie looking for a deep, epic thinkpiece on modern feminism, you can have a blast.

Nic: Overall, I thought this movie was really really fun. You said this at the beginning, but reboots are tough to get right, and this one comes with the added pressure of, I guess, refusing to market itself as a musical? And sure, it wasn’t perfect, but neither are we, and isn’t that the point?

Valerie Anne: *tosses you a piece of a broken plastic crown*

Mean Girls (2024) is now playing in theaters.

“Stroking an Animal” Is a Sensuous Portrait of Polyamory

This review of Stroking an Animal contains mild spoilers.

Stroking an Animal: close up of two women kissing in red light

A man becomes involved with a lesbian couple and tests their relationship. We’ve seen this before. Since early classics like The Fox and The Children’s Hour, it has been a stalwart of “lesbian” storytelling.

But what about the reality of this tired trope? What about a story of two queer women in a relationship who begin sleeping with a man, not because he’s going to rescue one of them from lesbianism, but because they are bisexual and polyamorous? Ángel Filgueira’s new film Stroking an Animal tells that story with a deeply felt eroticism.

We begin with the film’s first underrepresented sexual scenario: lesbian tent sex. Filgueira films actors Lidia Veiga and Ánxela Ríos in tight close-ups establishing the intimacy of characters Mariña and Ada and our intimacy with them as an audience.

Much of the film is shot this way with an attention to detail and framing. Handheld cinematography can sometimes feel tiresome — not here. Every shot, no matter how close, is beautiful and clear.

When the story isn’t being told in close ups or the rare and precise wide, Filgueira uses camcorder footage shot by the characters themselves. The first introduction of this technique is also the introduction of the male interloper Tomás, played by Xulio Besteiro. He seems to be a stranger spying on the women, filming them as they swim naked. But no! It’s not that kind of movie. He’s not some vague male threat — he’s simply another human being, another body, their friend. He jumps in the water and they all swim together, laughing, flirting.

Split into snapshots marked by seasons and diaristic text on-screen, Stroking an Animal takes us through Mariña and Ada’s relationship with and without Tomás. The women first and foremost care about each other. Tomás is just a fun fling. Even when his involvement starts to challenge the relationship, it feels less like Tomás taking over and more like Ada having a different desire for polyamory than Mariña.

Close up of two women looking at each other

A lot of queer couples are non-monogamous, even more dabble in non-monogamy. It’s refreshing to get a film that portrays these experiences without falling into melodrama or abandoning its central couple.

Even during the film’s most dramatic beat, Filgueira holds back. The characters surprise each other and the audience and react in a way that’s very recognizable in real life but often replaced with tired screaming matches on-screen.

This is the kind of movie with a long scene of the characters reading tarot. This is the kind of movie with several great sex scenes despite a short runtime. This is the kind of movie with camcorder footage of dragonflies that recalls the best of Stan Brakhage.

All three actors are grounded in their characters, allowing Filgueira’s lo-fi style to feel real. Lidia Veiga is especially strong in her moments of quiet, offering glimpses into Mariña’s uncertainty about her life, her relationship, and herself.

Bookended by camping trips, Stroking an Animal is an arthouse movie that reflects the messiness of real queer lives. Tender and sexy, joyous and melancholy, this is queer cinema in its purest form.

Stroking an Animal: one woman holds another woman with waves crashing behind them.

Stroking an Animal is now available to rent.

Hear Me Out: What if Your Silly Horror Movie DIDN’T Have an Elaborate Backstory?

Yes, while I don’t pretend my horror gay tastes are always of the pretentious variety, I like my fair share of critically acclaimed horror. At the same time, I like my fair share of low brow fodder. Slashers clocking it at under 90 minutes that don’t really add much new to the subgenre but still deliver some interesting kills; zany premises buoyed by unfamous but compelling actors; tropes stitched together with verve and mania. It doesn’t all have to make me think. It doesn’t all have to inspire a 4,000+ word essay from me. But inevitably when watching some of the more pulpy horror films, there comes a moment, about halfway or more into the story, when the action pauses, the monsters quiet, and we’re treated to a round of exposition, to some elaborate backstory explaining Why This Is Happening. Most of the time, it’s overwrought for no reason. Most of the time, it isn’t needed at all.

The latest offender I’ve watched is All Fun and Games, now streaming on Hulu and starring Sex Education‘s Asa Butterfield in a much more demonic role than sweet boy Otis, Natalia Dyer of Stranger Things, Laurel Marsden of Ms. Marvel, and Annabeth Gish of many Mike Flanagan productions. The film makes good on its name initially. It’s all fun! And games! A young boy in the town of Salem mistakenly awakens an old evil by reading the inscription on a knife that eventually leads to his brother (Butterfield) being possessed by a demon who forces the others to play kid games with lethal twists. In a game of hang man, a man is literally hung as he guesses letters. In a game of hide and seek, you get stabbed when you’re found. In a game of red rover, well, having known multiple kids who broke bones while playing in my youth, it’s only slightly more dangerous here than its real life correlation!

The acting is solid, and the goofy premise is fun. It’s not a particularly queer movie, but there’s a spunky teen lesbian who is out from the start: Sophie (Marsden), best friend to Billie (Dyer). She’s going to Smith next year! While being pursued by a game-loving demon with a very cursed knife, I kept hoping this little baby dyke would make it to Smith! The film largely works for fans of Fear Street, even if a lesbian love story isn’t at the center.

Halfway into those fun and games though, we get derailed by that erroneously required backstory. The knife’s curse was spurned by the violence of the Salem witch trials (ever heard of em?). We’ve got a bunch of stuff about a mourning mother, a vengeful son, a town defined by mistrust of one’s neighbors and its dangerous conclusions.

Natalia Dyer and Laurel Marsden in All Fun and Games sit on a couch together

The fact that All Fun and Games is a mere 75 minutes? Love. Much like I’m a fan of short books, I’m a fan of short feature films. The fact that so many of those 75 minutes are eaten up by this journey into the town’s past? HATE.

Perhaps it would be a tad easier to swallow if there were some connection to the present more explicitly made, especially on a thematic or societal level. Perhaps the central siblings’ mother Kathy (Gish) has been persecuted as a financially insecure single mom (the film begins with her having to pick up a graveyard shift) in ways similar to the persecution of accused witches. Fear Street does a fine if heavy-handed job of drawing parallels between the past and present in its mythology, which also falls into tedious territory but at least operates on levels deeper than mere exposition most of the time. All Fun and Games doesn’t use this backstory to complicate or deeper the terrors of its present action. It doesn’t draw connections. It just stabs itself in the foot and then struggles to run towards its finish line after a strong if straightforward opening act.

Butterfield and Dyer in particular make the most of what they’ve been given. The few kills in the film (that’s the other axe I have to grind with a lot of these low brow scary movies; more characters should die!) are done well. If anything, it’s a horror movie to watch while cooking or doing some other activity, so that perhaps you can busy yourself with something else when the backstory begins. I know that probably sounds harsh, and I know I’m holding this film’s feet to the flames for a sin committed by an entire swath of the horror genre, but All Fun and Games really is the most egregious example of unnecessary backstory I’ve seen in a long time! “This knife is cursed because we’re in Salem” would have been all we really needed!

Hallmark’s “Friends and Family Christmas” Is The Cheesy Holiday Romance Sapphics Deserve

As a longtime romance girlie, I love love love a cheesy Hallmark Channel romance, and their Christmas ones are the best: they inject holiday spirit into my veins and require absolutely no critical thinking whatsoever. That’s what I want to be doing all holiday season. No thinking, just vibes.

Unfortunately, us sapphics have largely been missing from the Hallmark holiday romance conversation. Every year, straight people get dozens of movies in which generic looking women in fabulous coats head to small towns to fall in love with grumpy lumberjacks. And while I love it, every year I can’t help but think “when’s it going to be our turn?” This year, Hallmark finally gave us their first lesbian Christmas romance movie, Friends & Family Christmas. It’s everything I love about the genre, and there were no bearded men in flannel trying to kiss anyone under the mistletoe.

When Happiest Season was announced, I was so fucking excited that we were finally getting a sapphic holiday romance. And I love that movie. But it’s not really the “light Christmas romcom” that I was hoping for. Not every lesbian movie has to have the main conflict revolve around coming out or being closeted! Why couldn’t it be like, they had to fight against the evil developers who wanted to buy Harper’s family home and turn it into an Airbnb?

Friends & Family Christmas is everything that those of us who want an easy, cheesy Christmas romcom could ask for. Low stakes, lots of twinkly lights, and two openly queer actresses playing the romantic leads.

two lesbians with a platter of food

Ali Liebert (Bomb Girls) is Amelia, a corporate lawyer who is on the fast track to take over her dad’s law firm, and Humberly Gonzalez (Utopia Falls, Ginny & Georgia) is Dani, a photographer who is looking for her next inspiration. Amelia and Dani’s dads were college roommates, and when Amelia still isn’t over her ex almost a year after their breakup, the dads meddle and get their daughters to meet. After a questionable coffee date (Amelia drinks plain black coffee like a monster, while Dani loves extra peppermint hot chocolate), Amelia lies to her dad and tells him that they hit it off and plan to see each other again.

With this movie, you get two classic romantic tropes in one: Fake Dating and High-Powered Career Type meets Carefree Artist. Putting those two together is holiday movie gold, and it works so so very well in this movie. They don’t lean too heavily on the tropes to do the story’s heavy lifting, which is actually quite refreshing! If anything, I’d say they should have stuck to the career trope, because the fake dating plot kind of disappears pretty quickly. Amelia is immediately taken by Dani, and as a result, it quickly feels less fake on her end. Dani is still too preoccupied with everything she has going on to realize that Amelia is really into her until the end.

The chemistry between Liebert and Gonzalez is one of the best things about Friends & Family Christmas. So often with Hallmark Christmas movies, the leads feel like they’re not even in the same room most of the time, let alone people who are supposed to be falling in love with each other. But from the moment Dani and Amelia meet, you can believe that they’re on track to fall in love before Santa Claus leaves the North Pole. There’s a scene where they dance together at a party, and while the dance was brief, the chemistry was palpable. Ali Liebert could teach a class on how to convey a million emotions with your eyes. And Humberly Gonzalez is sweeter than a double peppermint hot chocolate.

Now, you can’t have a good holiday romcom without an ensemble cast of wacky, funny supporting characters! My absolute favorite supporting characters are Dani’s parents. They remind me of my own parents in that they’re overbearing and don’t know how to chill. They mean well, but like many parents of only children, they just don’t know how to relax. I also loved Dani’s art initiative friends and Amelia’s delightful friend who we didn’t see nearly enough of.

I have one grievance with Friends & Family Christmas, though. It’s set in New York City, I assume because where else would a corporate lawyer and an artsy photographer fall in love? But, as a native New Yorker, I think this movie failed to summon a believable facsimile. I kept yelling at my TV! Their Brooklyn was too clean, too generic, too reliant on exposed brick. Also, who was paying for photographer/artist Dani’s apartment? She’s got one roommate, but she’d need at least two more to be able to afford that nice roomy place.

If you’re looking for something sweet to go along with your Christmas festivities, you really can’t go wrong with Friends & Family Christmas. It doesn’t reinvent the holiday romance wheel, but it’s a solid outing with a good cast in a delightfully predictable format. It’ll definitely go on my list of top sapphic holiday movies. Don’t forget to watch it with a double peppermint hot chocolate!

If Only “The Color Purple” Had Loved All of Us

I know that a lot of Autostraddle readers have likely come to this review looking for one question to be answered: Will this iteration of The Color Purple be gay?

It’s fair to ask. Alice Walker’s 1982 novel of the same name is the first, and remains the only, Pulitzer Prize winner with a Black queer woman protagonist. Celie, an abuse survivor with whom we travel from her girlhood in turn of the century rural Georgia through her late adulthood, quietly explores her lack of attraction to men (who’ve also been the source of her abuse) and her deep attraction to Shug Avery, a bisexual Blues singer. In the novel, Shug and Celie’s intimate relationship opens up a new confidence in Celie, ultimately allowing her to break past the cycle of what she’s endured. They are sisters, yes, but also lovers — all encompassing in the way that only happens when Black women are given space to fall in love with each other’s wholeness. They are each other’s healers, protectors, source of pleasure. But in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 Oscar-nominated film, Shug and Celie’s relationship is instead played off as platonic.

During a 2011 retrospective of his work with Entertainment Weekly, Spielberg reflected “I was shy about it. In that sense, perhaps I was the wrong director to acquit some of the more sexually honest encounters between Shug and Celie, because I did soften those… I got a lot of criticism for that.” (Not enough criticism, if you ask me.) When a film adaptation of The Color Purple’s 2005 and 2015 staged musical was announced, what would come of Shug and Celie’s relationship was at certainly at the top of mind. For his part, Marcus Gardley, the queer screenwriter of the new Color Purple, noted that Shug and Celie’s relationship was at the core of his adaptation: “That’s part of the reason I got the job. My pitch lead off with, ‘This is a love story between two women.’ It was the most important thing to Alice Walker… I wanted the love story to be prominent and didn’t want to brush over that these two women are in love.”

Shug and Celie embrace during 2023's The Color Purple

So to answer that burning question, yes, it is gay. That’s not to say that I didn’t walk away without my quibbles or concerns, some of which we can talk about after the film’s wide release when its been seen by more audiences, but to the technical letter of the law, this is a queer movie. It makes clear Celie’s attraction to Shug and Shug’s interest in Celie in return. In particular, Taraji P. Henson’s understanding of Shug in these moments is resplendent.

As Shug Avery, Taraji P. Henson has reached a new height in her already storied career that I have to admit, I did not think possible. It is maybe because I was so wrongly doubtful of Henson’s ability to hold such a key musical role that she blew me away, not with her singing chops but with her commitment to embodying every aspect of Shug’s being.

In Henson’s hands, Shug melts the camera. It’s easy enough to play Shug as sexy, after all she’s one of the most famous sexual characters in Black canon. Henson shines by seeing depths of Shug’s hurt (there’s a subtle choice in a church scene between her and her father, played by David Alan Grier, that I keep returning back to). She takes Shug’s bisexuality seriously, even within the in-between beats of what’s not on the page.

Shug performs "Push Da Button" in Harpo's Juke Joint in 2023's The Color Purple

That said, while this new adaptation (being billed as “for a new generation” and “for a new audience” has become ubiquitous in the musical’s promo run) pushes Shug and Celie’s relationship closer to Walker’s intent than Spielberg did in 1985, I’m less convinced that it takes their relationship as far as did the staged productions. I’ve grappled with writing this review over the last few weeks, and that’s become something of a pain in my side.

For last 38 years, producers at the helm of The Color Purple (Spielberg and music industry legend Quincy Jones both served as executive producers of the 1985 film, Winfrey — whose role as Sofia in the original film is arguably the best of her career — has executive produced both Broadway adaptations, all three share producing credits on the new film) have seemed to be in their own complicated relationship with their source material. As a Pulitzer Prize winning, Tony winning testament to the strength of Black womanhood, spirituality, self-actualization, and resilient sisterhood, everyone seems ready to get on board. As a incredibly important, purposeful Black queer text by a Black queer woman author? Less so.

There’s almost an air of discomfort, an unspoken agreement: “OK we’ll finally say Celie and Shug were gay for each other — but not too much now on our (straight) Sisterhood Icons.” As if Celie and Shug’s queerness isn’t at the root of the very sisterhood we proclaim to be honoring. The Color Purple has never been only about Black women saving each other. It’s about Black women finding beauty and worth in each other, in all aspects of who we are, and on this Alice Walker could not be more clear: that means in our bedrooms, too.

I’ve seen staged productions of The Color Purple musical that somehow still portray Celie and Shug’s relationship as close platonic friends, despite having four full songs sung between the couple detailing their romance explicitly in the lyrics (“Dear God – Shug,” “Too Beautiful for Words,” “What About Love,” and the “What About Love Reprise” which showcases their break up). Of those four songs — in the 2023 rendition of The Color Purple, only two remain.

Walker, of course, has been remarkably consistent over the last 40 years in her reaction to these adaptations of her work. She hasn’t cared for them, but has also accepted that her novel is her own, and the film (plus what has come after) is its own work of separate imagination. She, and her daughter Rebecca, signed on as executive producers for 2023’s The Color Purple. I’m relieved, if nothing else, they are still getting checks off of her life’s work.

Celie and Nettie on a tree in The Color Purple

And perhaps on some level, that is what I keep bumping up against. What is a life’s work? A legacy? Alice Walker wrote a seminal Black queer text and went on to become the first Black woman to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In a career the heights of which few others will ever see, The Color Purple stands out as one of Steven Spielberg’s greatest works, and he’s still asked about his reluctance to include as much as a kiss nearly 40 years later. Oprah Winfrey has taken her portrayal as Sofia and over the decades carefully turned it into a project that’s become synonymous with her name.

During a recent profile with People magazine in promotion for the film, Winfrey pondered the meaning of legacy. Fitting, in the middle of a press tour that has shown me more of Oprah donning the infamous purple than I’ve seen at any other point in my lifetime. She described a conversation with the late Maya Angelou, wherein Oprah hoped that the school she built for girls in South Africa would be what she was most known for. Dr. Angelou responded that none of us can predict our legacy, “your legacy is never one thing. Your legacy is every life you’ve touched.”

Every poster, trailer, and commercial promises that we are witnessing a Color Purple for a new generation. But what is that generation learning? What tools are we leaving them with? And what silences are we telling them are OK?

Danielle Brooks as Sophia, sitting on the porch, in the color purple

There is a lot to say about the new The Color Purple. I wasn’t personally a fan of all of director Blitz Bazawule’s stylized choices (I did not find they mapped well onto the tone of the source material), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how beautifully lit our melanin is on the screen. I wish Gardley’s script had followed more closely with both stage productions and the 1985 film when it comes to using Walker’s original words; there were more than several lines where I was puzzled at the choice to rewrite Walker for something more broad and honestly, worse. Black audiences can handle complicated language, and it’s hurtful not to trust them to do so. There are so many songs cut from the stage production that it borders on disrespectful to the original Broadway fans (and disrespectful to those with a reverence for Black theatre; I have a hard time imagining that there would be a choice to cut so many songs from Les Mis, for instance). Danielle Brooks is as good as you’ve heard as Sofia. She eats the screen alive.

For almost 40 years The Color Purple has been core to the DNA of Black American pop culture. It’s basically engraved in our bones, codified in how we speak. Celie and Shug and Squeak and Sofia and Nettie, they’ve become sisters to us at least as much as they are to each other. I’ve never had a clear answer for that, a reasonable explanation for why a graphic story about a woman’s abuse has become so beloved by Black audiences that we’re now greeted with cheery purple posters across the internet encouraging us to “celebrate” its release on Christmas with our families. But I think it’s about recognition. I think that it’s about the vulnerability of our humanity. Of seeing something and being able to sigh in no longer being alone.

Whatever else aside, I love that for us. I only wish that, over the years, The Color Purple had loved all of us, too.

The Color Purple is opens in theatres on December 25th.

We Got High and Watched Hallmark Hanukkah Movie “Round and Round,” and Yes of Course the Sister Is a Lesbian

Welcome back to another edition of “I Got High and Watched” and this time… I have company! That’s right it’s Hanukkah and I’m having a Hanukkah party a.k.a. getting high and watching the new Hallmark movie Round and Round with fellow Senior Editor and fellow Jew Riese Bernard.

This is a pretty freewheeling conversation so I’m going to give you some plot help up top if you have yet to watch this cinematic achievement. First of all, this is a Groundhog’s Day, as in the main character, Rachel, must live the seventh night of Hanukkah again and again. Her boyfriend Adam cancels on Hanukkah the day of the party, claiming to be sick. Her new love interest is a nice Jewish boy named Zach who is into nerd stuff which comes in handy when trying to solve the timeloop. Oh and Rachel’s sister Shoshanna is gay and pregnant and married to a woman with dyed blonde hair named Bex.

ALSO Vic Michaelis who plays Rachel is nonbinary!! We didn’t learn this until after our discussion because they are giving the performance of a lifetime here as “straight cis women.” But worry not! We returned to excitedly discuss this revelation.

Okay then, eat some latkes, spin your magic dreidel, and join us as we watch Round and Round.

Drew: Hi sorry! I was sorting DVDs and lost track of time.
Riese: That’s so on brand for you
Drew: One sec lemme have another hit lol
Okay ready??
Riese: I am!!!

Round and Roud Title card

Riese: Okay so we open on a Seventh Night of Hanukkah dance party for adult singles?
This is where Rachel’s parents met.
This is a wild concept for an event.
Drew: I thought you meant an 80s party was a wild concept for an event. And I was like, “no, this is a flashback.”
Riese: Is this what it was like to be an adult Jew in the 80s?
I was a child Jew in the 80s so we didn’t party like this
Drew: Cream cheese isn’t sexy. Is that a hot take?
Riese: I don’t think cream cheese is sexy so no

Round and Round: Jewish woman in the 80s eating a latke while I'll stop the world and melt with you" plays

Riese: Okay so now we are in the present day and our protagonist Rachel overslept, but luckily her Mom called her to wish her a happy seventh night of Hanukkah so she woke up.
Does your mom call to wish you a happy 7th night of Hanukkah?
Drew: My mom does call me to wish me a Happy Hanukkah.
So on the seventh night she’ll be like, “Did you light the candles?”
And I’ll say, “No I just moved in. I don’t have a menorah yet.”
And she’ll say, “Oh.”
Riese: Yes, when my Mom asks me that I say “yes” even when I didn’t.

"Please don't start the latkes without us"

Drew: Wait is this movie gay or are we just doing this for fun?
Riese: Well, there is a small gay part.
But I fear it might be so small that in an hour and 20 minutes you will be cursing my name.
Drew: I spent my life with straight Jews I’m prepared.

Riese: Okay now they are at their local Jewish bakery, Goldberg’s.
Riese: I have to be honest it doesn’t feel very Jewish to me!
It’s very polished
Drew: No it doesn’t have jewish bakery vibes

people in line at a Jewish bakery

Drew: Wait, is the man with the Christmas blazer playing his guitar in the train station singing an original song??
Wait
Her boyfriend is also at this train station?
Riese: Those donuts look good
Drew: Donuts!
Riese: Wait who is this other man

Round and Round: man eating donuts off the ground

This is Zach, the man Rachel ran into at the train station, which made her drop the donuts.

Drew: Who is this actor she just bumped into?
Riese:Well it’s not her boyfriend
Maybe it’s the Jewish boy of her dreams.

Riese: Ok so now we are meeting her Dad.
Riese: Her Dad was in Suits. Did you watch Suits?
Drew: I did not.
Riese: Ok well this guy playing the dad is like iconic in Suits.
Drew: Is her dad gay? Is everyone gay?

dad smiling in an apron that says "i love you a latke"

Riese: THE LESBIAN IS HERE
Drew: Oh okay this is the gay. I can tell because she has dyed blonde hair.
Riese: Yeah she is Rachel’s sister’s wife
Everyone is gay.
Rachel hugs her nephew while the lesbian character Bex looks on

Riese: Drew…
Have I ever told you…
That I love you a latke?
Drew: I love you a latke too !!
Riese: Dad’s excited for the new condo ’cause they have a stream room where they can have a Shvitz! Ok horny jewish parents.
Drew: I do love the horny Jewish parent trope.
My friend Tirosh’s parents are like that IRL.

Riese: Ok I think this girl on the beanbag chair is also a lesbian

This is Rachel’s lesbian sister who is listening to her podcast in a quiet room

Drew: Rachel says “I thought I’d be writing the novels not covering them in red ink”
I thought I’d be making the Hanukkah movies with gay characters not watching them for a high review.
Life takes us fun places.
Riese: One day you will be making the Hanukkah movies with gay characters.
Drew: That sounded negative. I love this job. I’m high watching a movie for work.
Riese: That’s true not a bad gig.
Drew: I’m just salty because my very trans short keeps getting rejected from the big straight festivals and I’m about to turn 30 so I need to have a little crisis.
Riese: I did think, personally, that I too would be writing the novels by the age of 30
and yet I have done no such thing
Drew: I want to do this AND make movies
Riese: Same!! I want to do this AND write a novel.
Drew: I’ll never be too famous to not high watch a Hanukkah movie with you for this site.
Riese: THANK YOU DREW.
That means so much to me.
Drew: It’ll get even more clicks if I’m famous.
Imagine how fun it would be if you were doing this with like Desiree Akhavan right now.
Riese: I don’t know her though and I know you.
Drew: Right but I’d still be me.

Riese: Honestly these parents are cool.
Even though they have glass vases of bath beads.
Drew: Is the drama that the lesbian sister is doing Hanukkah at her wife’s next year? There are eight nights. Split ’em, babe.
Riese: Yeah four and four.
Drew: Even if the other parents lived far you could do three and three with two days off for travel/recovery.
Riese: True, an easy split.

sisyert whispering "hey check it out"

Riese: This is so quiet for a Jewish event!!!
Everybody should be screaming!
Drew: It’s true !
So much more screaming

Drew: Autostraddle writer Christina Tucker was just saying “there should be more romcoms about loneliness” and I think this is that.
She was saying that during While You Were Sleeping.
I was in Philly most of today.
Riese: Well that’s adorable

Drew: This actor playing Zach The Love Interest is in something.
Also I don’t know who he is or why he’s at this party.
He has Dungeons and Dragon dice! We had such a good piece about that this week.
Riese: We did!
It’s all connected.
Drew: Wait okay but who is this actor?
At first I thought he was one of the British men who has dirty gay sex in God’s Own Country. But it’s not.
Riese: I’ll look him up
Drew: I’ll have Elise do it. She’s next to me.
Oh Zach is at the party because he teaches art with Grandma Rosie.
Okay.
They’re not related
Thank god

Drew: I love this dad actor
Riese: Yeah he’s a star of Suits, Louis Litt!
Drew: He is?? Should I watch Suits? What’s it about?
Riese: Lawyers who have papers in manilla envelopes.

Drew: You know, a lot of Jewish dads, even the straight ones, tend to be a little fruity.
Riese: Yes Jewish dads are lazy femmes
Drew: Hahahaha.

Round and Round: Rachel looking at her driedel

Drew: Wow that is a beautiful dreidel that Grandma is giving to Rachel.
When is someone going to give me some fancy Jewish stuff?
Riese: I had a Jewish boyfriend who got me a Tiffany’s bracelet.
I think that’s fancy jewish stuff

Riese: Ok so I have a theory which is that I think maybe Hallmark Christmas movies can’t just become Hallmark Hanukkah movies.
Drew: No Hanukkah movies should be louder !!!
Riese: Right because like the culture of a Jewish family event is just not quite this.
There is not enough Jewish energy here.
Drew: My family gatherings are like straight Transparent.
Riese: Yes exactly.
Drew: Your mom is gay.
Riese: That’s true.
So my family gatherings are just Transparent.
But if Shelly was the only character.
Drew: Is the rest of your family as gay as the Transparent family?
Riese: No, just my mom and me. My brother is straight.
Drew: Good for him!

Riese: Omg a burning bush! i mean burning curtains!
Drew: Fire special effects!
Riese: Wow even the fire was quiet!!!

Drew: I want you to know I’m watching this on my new 4k TV.
As I’m sure it was intended to be watched.
Riese: You’re getting the full Hanukkah experience
Drew: AND the TV is on the credenza Elise just redid.
It was $20 from Out of the Closet and Elise redid it and it’s beautiful now.
Riese: Oh wow you’re experiencing the magic of the cinema.
You came to your own apartment for magic.
UH OH SHE WAKES UP AND IT’S THE SAME DAY

Round and Round: Rachel waking up on Hanukkah saying "i'm sorry, what day is it?"

Drew: WAIT WHAT
It’s a Groundhog Day??????
Riese: Omg it’s like Groundhog’s Day but Seventh Night of Hanukkah
Drew: ITS A GROUNDHOG DAY????
Riese: Now I have another chance to understand the plot and why her boyfriend and also Zach were at the train station with the christmaz blazer singer.
Drew: Wow I am so happy it’s a groundhog day.

Drew: Her boyfriend Adam is bad.
I think if she tells off Adam and falls for Zach, then she’ll break this time loop
Riese: Or if she catches a jelly donut in her mouth
Drew: Can you imagine !
How did she drop the donuts again??
Riese: Just a Klutzy Kathy!!!!!!
Wait ok so just to be clear
Never mind I don’t understand.
Drew: It’s a Groundhog Day. Have you seen Groundhog’s Day?
Riese: I saw it in theaters Drew!
Drew: Omg
Riese: But where was her boyfriend? Was he lying about being sick?
Drew: He was lying !
Riese: How do we know he’s lying
Drew: Because he’s a jerk.
He said he was sick but was out on the town.
And then told the music man he had no change.
Riese: He does not love her a latke.
Drew: He does not. He abhorahs her.

Bex looks skeptical as Rachel explains she's living the same day over again

Rachel telling Bex that she is living the same day over again

Riese: I wish someone would tell me they were stuck in a timeloop.
I would be so excited if my friend was stuck in a time loop.
Drew: I would LOVE to be the sidekick in a body swap or groundhog day
Riese: I would have SUCH a good time.
I just read a time loop book: Before I Fall.
Drew: Oh I saw the movie adaptation of that!

Riese: Make out with Bex. There’s sexual tension
Drew: Wait so the lesbian with the dyed blonde hair is married to the sister?
Riese: Yes. Her name is Bex. The pregnant sister is Shoshanna. I looked it up.

Drew: Wow already a time loop days going by montage
Riese: I wish they’d bought a real 80s song.
I would love a right round baby right round
and round.
Drew: When they do comps like this though they get musicians to write them and it’s how up and coming musicians can make money.
So it’s good!
Riese: Oh that’s nice ok

"Dance to the music" while she stands sad with boxes of donuts Donuts fallin on the ground with "round and rounda nd round we go"

Drew: This feels rushed.
Riese: Yeah it’s too early for a montage
We need to see her live through this day again one full time at least before a montage
Drew: This movie should be two hours not 80 minutes.
Movies should be longer
Riese: Yeah five hour movies.
Then it’s like $4 an hour.
Drew: Chantal Akerman was Jewish.
She made long movies
Riese: a two-hour movie is $10/hour, so better rate for a longer movie.

Drew: Oh wow they’re doing references.
It’s like Scream or in the body swap movie I wrote when my character mentions The Hot Chick.

Groundhog Day!

Riese: Everybody’s hair is too gentile. Nobody has frizzy curls.
Drew: My mom and sister’s dream.

Riese: I wish my mom was making me latkes right now
Drew: Me too.

Riese: Wow her fate is to drop the donuts.
Drew: Devastating

Riese: This man should have glasses and curlier hair!!!!!
Drew: Idk he feels really Jewish to me.
Judaism can look like so much.
Riese: Yeah it really can.
It can look like me, even
But the actor playing Zach is named Bryan Greenberg so.
So he is for sure Jewish
Drew: That would’ve been my last name if my grandpa didn’t change it to avoid antisemitism
Riese: That’s so real.
Drew: Drew Greenberg is like… no thank you. But maybe that is internalized antisemitism
Riese: Probably.
Drew: I have a theory that I don’t want FFS because it feels weird to get rid of my nose.
I’m like who decides what is feminine? Why isn’t a big Jewish nose feminine?
Riese: Yeah I feel like I am not allowed to comment on this topic.
Drew: Lmao smart
Riese: So I am just nodding supportively and letting you know that I support you keeping your face or changing your face if that’s what you want.
Drew: My new plan is to find a doctor who will crush my jaw and forehead and cheeks and whatever but let me keep my crooked Jewish nose.
Riese: Well i bet you can find a Jewish doctor to do that.
Drew: Although Elise has pointed out that I only talk about wanting plastic surgery after I’ve recently visited my family. As long as Jewish families are on topic.

Drew: Wait, I love that Rachel writes fantasy and Zach loves fantasy. That’s sweet.
Riese: Yeah that is cute.

Drew: Wow they left the house.
Riese: They’re at Zach’s friends comic book shop! They invested in another set.

Round and Round: So the fire breaks out in a different way each itme?

Riese: Do you know that they have a village?
Drew: On-set? Yeah video village
Riese: Hallmark.
Drew: Oh wait. Like a Hallmark village where they film all their movies?
Riese: Yeah I think I read that somewhere.

Riese: Who is that woman at the family Hanukkah party by the way? The British one.
Drew: I don’t know! I just asked Elise.
She didn’t know either.
Riese: Is she married to someone in Rachel’s family?
Drew: I think she’s a family friend
Riese: Oh ok like in The Bear.
Drew: Yes. Wow what a great episode.
Riese: Yeah I was just thinking about sitting there with my mouth open for an hour.
Drew: That’s more my family gatherings than this.
Riese: Yes 100%
Drew: Remember Russian Doll?
Great show. I think that’s my favorite groundhog day.
Riese: That was a great show.
Drew: Sweet birthday baby.
I turn 30 in two weeks. Soon I’m going to be the sweet birthday baby.
Riese: Well, i for one am so pleased that you are alive and thus experiencing birthdays of advanced age.

walking throguh the bar

Riese: Is this a gay bar?
Drew: Anything can be a gay bar
Riese: Word
Drew: Depending on what you do in the bathrooms
Riese: Poppers or dreidel
Drew: Exactly

this is rachel’s boyfriend adam who ditched hanukkah to come dance at the bar

Drew: Wait, the boyfriend bailed on her to dance alone? He’s not even cheating??
Riese: Uh huh just to hang with his cool friends
Drew: Just bros being guys.

sorry you can’t see the boyfriend in this screenshot cuz his head is turned but you get the idea

Riese: He probs has no idea that she has such a chill hanukkah house
nobody is going to lick their finger and wipe schmutz off his face at Rachel’s house
Drew: Yeah they seem like easy parents to meet
Riese: And her Dad was in Suits!

Riese: Is he sitting? Is he sitting down to break up with her?
Drew: I think he is.
Riese: Stand up!!!!
Get on your feet!
Get up and make it happen!!
Drew: I’ve never broken up with someone sitting down. Wait except my first serious girlfriend but then we got back together and then she broke up with me.
Riese: Were you both sitting? It’s just that she was standing up and he was sitting down.
Drew: The first time? Yes in Central Park. The second time idk I was in bed and she broke up with me via text message. She could’ve been standing.
Riese: Those sure are different approaches to a breakup.
Drew: Lmao yeah summed up our approaches to the relationship as well.

Drew: God this would be SO FUN!
Imagine you’re going to a hanukkah party.
And then you meet a pretty girl who is like “I’m in a groundhog day.”
Riese: Yes
Drew: And now you’re at a bar with her? Working through stuff.
Riese: Wait except how does that work because I am in the day with her
What happens to me
My consciousness has to be moving forward right
Drew: No
It’ll start over
Riese: Ugh I don’t know how to do a time loop
Drew: I no longer want to be the sidekick. I want to be the love interest.
Anyway, the new guy is so much cuter.
Riese: Yeah. The boyfriend looks like he would’ve gone out with Samantha Jones for one date in 2003 because he had one (1) good quality.
Drew: Lol yes.

Riese: Is she gonna break groundhog curse by staying up late?
Drew: I have no idea where the movie is. Like if we’re midway. Or it’s almost done
Riese: Me neither.
Drew: I love bagels
Riese: Omg. We have 34 more minutes.
I love bagels too
Drew: Oh that’s not bad.
I was worried we were ten minutes in.
Riese: Yeah that felt possible.

the guys at the comic store saying "check us out"

Drew: This is working on me. Zach and Rachel have chemistry. He’s cute.
Riese: THEY MENTIONED PAPER GIRLS! Wow whomever wrote this screenplay likes a lot of cool things.
Drew: If I was stuck in a time loop I wouldn’t think time loop fictions would help.
Riese: I would. I read like 50 dystopian novels at the start of the pandemic
Drew: What did you learn?
Riese: I cured covid

Drew: She should try kissing Zach. Maybe that’ll do it.
Riese: Yeah that might help.
If Rachel was gay she could write for us.
“I Stole My Sister’s Wife While She Was Pregnant”
Drew: Bex can. “YNH: I Think My Sister-in-Law Is Flirting With Me (And Also Stuck In a Time Loop)”

Riese: What is Bex’s job?
Drew: Gay.
Riese: I think she works at REI

Drew: Don’t they have to get to the Hanukkah party at some point on this day?
In this version are the parents just alone?
Riese: Yeah but in time loops it’s ok to just let your Sims wander around the house one of the days.
Drew: I do think I’d do one crazy one. Or maybe I’d be scared it would stop
Riese: Right, what if you stopped on cocaine day
and blew a hole in your nose

Drew: Aw Zach loves Rachel’s book! He’s illustrating it!
This is nice.
Riese: Her book is a hit!
Drew: Imagine someone reading your book at a party.
And not in 3-6 months.

Round and Round: Cousin gushing about the book

Riese: Ok Zach is a little gay.
Not like gay for men.
But like “dude that’s so gay.”
Drew: The best kind of straight guy
Riese: Yes he’s sensitive.
Drew: Someday he’ll be a vaguely gay straight Jewish dad.
Riese: Yes

Riese: Ugh those latkes look so good. I want a large cookie.
I realize we should be explaining more about what’s happening in the movie so people know what we are talking about
Drew: Nah they’ll get it. Our readers are sharp.

Round and Round: "Come on, out with it," Dad lying on his bed

Riese: Her dad is lying on her bed in such a gay way
Bex is rubbing off on them
Drew: Oh Dad says there was another woman before her Mom!
Another woman!
Riese: He was dumped right before Halloween?
Drew: Devastating
Riese: He’d sworn off love by Hanukkah!!!
Like her dad, I always think about my moods vis a vis their distance from Hanukkah
Drew: Lmao
Also like her dad I think about my breakups in relation to halloween
Riese: They want her to step outside her comfort zone so i think she should go to belarus
Drew: I’ve never been!
Riese: Right i don’t think she has either
Drew: There are so many places I’ve never been

Drew: The lesbians really aren’t in this a lot
Riese: No this is two straight girls sitting on a bed talking about boys.
Drew: She’s not very close with her sister.
She’s closer with her cousin.
The straight/gay divide

Riese: She has to get the donuts home
Drew: To fix the time loop they need to eat a donut like lady and the tramp.
Riese: Oh good call.
This is a great set.
Drew: I love sets.
Riese: I love Disneyworld.

Riese: These characters really do not understand how to do a time loop.
By this point Zach should’ve told her like one thing he’s never told anybody.
Drew: Right haha
Riese: It would make this so much easier.
Drew: This has had some good jokes.
I’m glad this is a groundhog day. I had no idea
Riese: I wish a mom or grandma would yell something embarrassing about one of their children so this would feel more authentically Jewish
maybe just one like, “you never call, you never write”

Riese: Did you have different themes for different nights of Hanukkah?
Drew: No! Themes?? Like under the sea?
Riese: Oh god that would’ve been epic but not like that.
Like one night was the night we had neighborhood Hanukkah and did a Secret Santa gift exchange, at the Tylers’ house, there were like five Jewish families on my block and all the kids were the same age.
Another night was the night we got calendars for the next year.
One night was when we gave presents to lower income people and did not get presents.
One night was clothes. One night was hand-made gifts for each other?
Drew: Oh yeah we had that more with Passover.
Different nights different traditions

Riese: The energy in the comic book shop guy’s van is Jewish I’m on board
literally!!!
Omg the bakery lady knows Rachel’s grandma!
I hope these old ladies hooked up on the kibbutz in college

lady in the van asking if that is rose landau

Riese: Wow Zach and Rachel bumped into each other a tiny bit in the van and acted like they’d just accidentally conceived a child
Drew: That is how it’s done.
I appreciate that they kissed before the end. Sometimes they just do one kiss at the end.
Not enough.
Riese: Yeah it would’ve been better if they’d gone to a role-playing sex party but I’m glad that they kissed.

Drew: Once the boyfriend was dumped he showed up! Ego!
Riese: Do you love her a latke or no?
a question all Jews should ask themselves.

boyfriend is here "look who showed up to surprise you"

Adam, Rachel’s boyfriend, showed up to surprise her on the time loop day where Rachel broke up with Adam earlier in the day

Drew: The boyfriend also seems gay.
Riese: Do you think we think everyone is gay because they are or because we are or because we are high or because of Jewish?
Drew: These are great questions.
I think I tend to think everyone is gay.
Because so many people around me are gay.
Riese: He seems so gay! Like he would be a hairdresser in another Christmas movie!
Drew: Good for him!

Drew: Zach doesn’t wanna be her “Timeloop Rebound”
Riese: That’s a good name for a movie
or a basketball team

"oh? oh thank you." says lesbian getting a present

Drew: Why are they being sad?
Riese: Yeah cut it out.
We didn’t make the oil burn for eight (8) nights just to have you standing there being sad.
are there candles that burn for 8 days
Drew: No you light new ones every night
Riese: Ok I know
But I mean
Is there a giant candle
That burns for 8 days
I am describing a lamp

Drew: Imagine being like “I can’t do timeloop with you anymore.”
Riese: I would never!!!!!
Oh now Zach’s got a yamaka on. Shit is getting serious.

Rachel is sighing quietly, Zach is in the background in his yamaka

Riese: Rachel should eat the driedel
Or stick it up her boyfriend’s butt
I bet that would break the time loop
It would break something
Drew: Grandma knows about the magic driedel?? She’s a witch!
Riese: Yeah grandma has powers.
Drew: That’s fun.
Riese: Do adults play dreidel?
Drew: If they’re young at heart.

please note that this next section is a major spoiler for “Round and Round” so if you want to watch it, stop reading now!!!

Round and Round: SHIN SHIN SHIN SHIN SHIN SHIN SHIN the people are chanting

Drew: Did she break the loop??
Riese: SHE’S FREE! Like Willy.

Rachel wakes up and it's a brand new day

Drew: Omg
Riese: Wow the dad from Suits knew about the dreidel ALL THIS TIME
omg everyone in the family has found their soulmate on seventh night of hanukkah time loop

"Tanta sophie gave it to me the night i met your mother"
Drew: Now THIS is a twist
Riese: This is like Gone Girl level twist
SHOW US THE MOVIE OF BEX AND SHOSHANNA GROUNDHOG DAY
Drew: I WANT
I love that the message is “true love takes time” instead of “love at first sight.”
That’s nice
Riese: Yes that is nice.
Why are santas
She couldn’t take the risk of letting her true self shine.
Chutzpah!
Turtlenecks
Oh now she can choose who to time loop!
I hope she chooses you.
Drew: What lesson would I be learning?
Or is it soulmate specific.
I don’t think I believe in soulmates
Riese: Hmmm hard to say
Drew: Also does the magic dreidel only match Jews together?
Riese: Yes, it’s an arm of the state.
Birthright time loop.
Drew: Horror movie where I’m trying to stay with Elise but the magic dreidel is being weird about bloodlines.

the man [sighs]

Riese: Omg a flashback montage! Wow, I love cinema.
Drew: He’s remembering everything that happened in all the other versions of this day!!
Riese: I’m so happy for this girl and her not-Jewish hair.
Drew: Wow some actual good kissing.
Riese: Omg all of the elderly people are watching them kiss i love it

"Oh, don't stop on our accounts!"

Drew: What is this jacket on Bex??
Riese: Everybody’s in their Sabbath Best
Drew: Wait I just realized… per family tradition someday that little kid is going to be terrorized by the magic dreidel.

Round and Round: everyone cheersing to donuts!

Drew: Wow and that’s the end of the movie. We did it.
Riese: We fixed the time loop!

24 hours later…

Drew: The lead of Round and Round is nonbinary??
Riese: qwhaaattt
I didn’t even know they were queer!
Drew: Yes !!!
An ACTOR
We believed they were just RACHEL
Riese: ER Fightmaster follows them on insta?? Wow they really are gay.
Drew: We need to add this to the convo.
Riese: Yes. No wonder they had so much chemistry with Bex.

Round and Round is available on the Hallmark Channel.

“Eileen” Doesn’t Deserve To Be Called “Carol for Psychos”

This review contains mild spoilers for Eileen.

To call Eileen “Carol for psychos” is to view the 2015 film through the blur of its signature snow-paned windows; to reduce a work of sound and images to a plot summary.

Because, yes, like Eileen, Carol is about a quiet young woman who falls for an older woman in a fabulous coat around Christmastime. But Carol’s achievements are found in the subtle nuance of the characters, the poetry of Ed Lachman’s cinematography, the emotion of Carter Burwell’s score, the attention to detail and performance director Todd Haynes brings to every aspect of his filmmaking. Film is rarely about the what — it’s about the how.

I begin with this comparison because I’m struggling to parse out why William Oldroyd’s Eileen feels like such a failure. It has a stellar cast led by Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway, it has a queer story tailor-made to my interests, and it has a huge tonal shift that should delight the devilish side of my cinephilia. And yet, the film falls flat — its elements failing to cohere.

Eileen is about its titular character (McKenzie), a young woman who spends her days in a small Massachusetts town working as a secretary in a boys prison and her nights tending to her abusive, alcoholic father. She is bored and she is horny and she has a vibrant, violent imagination. Her world explodes when a psychologist named Rebecca (Hathaway) is hired at the prison. Eileen is immediately smitten, desperate to be and be with this confident, older blonde who flirts with ease and always has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth.

The film is based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel and co-written by Moshfegh and Luke Goebel. The two screenwriters previously worked together on Causeway, another movie with a queer protagonist that confused subtlety and emptiness. Read the Wikipedia synopsis for Moshfegh’s book and you will have a near-identical experience to watching this film. It’s not that loose adaptations are inherently better than loyal adaptations, but there should be some understanding that the mediums of film and literature differ. Lacking the explicit interiority of the page, a film must find the nuances of its characters, story, and themes in specificity. It’s this specificity Eileen often lacks.

There’s a moment midway through the film that encapsulates this problem. Eileen and Rebecca are at a bar, the only bar in town according to Eileen. It’s established that the bartender knows Eileen and her father. But then Rebecca tells some men who are flirting with them that her name is Eileen and Eileen’s is Rebecca. Who are these men? Wouldn’t they know Eileen already? How small is this town? This may seem like an annoying nitpick, but it’s representative of the film scene-by-scene, moment-to-moment. The setting and the characters fluctuate based on plot convenience. This is mirrored in the film’s craft. It looks great, it sounds nice, the performances are solid, but none of the choices feel inspired by character or story. One gets a sense of the kind of film this wants to be more than it actually fulfills its goals.

The mediocrity of Eileen wouldn’t matter if the film was just a deliciously twisted affair where Anne Hathaway looks sexy as hell in a blonde wig. The problem is the film’s self-importance. Set at a prison, featuring a subplot about sexual assault, and filled with discussions of criminality, reform, and repression, Eileen has lofty thematic ambitions. Unfortunately, its approach to these topics is confused at best.

Director William Oldroyd’s previous film, Lady Macbeth, was similarly broad. He gravitated toward a sense of depth without actually saying much at all. That film claimed to tackle issues of sexism, race, and power, but it did little except shout them with the nuance of a hollow Instagram infographic. Eileen has a similar problem. Its empty characters and muddled plot fail its serious topics.

I’d rather a film tackle serious subject matter with nuance rather than stating a point like a persuasive essay. But if a filmmaker doesn’t have anything to argue, they should at least have things they want to explore. They should have something to add to the conversation whether or not they reach any conclusions.

Ultimately, Eileen is evidence of what happens when we group films together without an eye toward quality. All lesbian films about two cis white women filled with angst and longing are not the same. All films that take big tonal swings are not the same. All movies that tackle subject matter like sexual abuse are not the same.

As audience members, we may be more responsive to some subject matter and types of films than others. But, ultimately, what matters most is whether a film is good. Eileen is not good.

Eileen is now playing in theatres.

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“A lot things that I don’t remember, I don’t choose to remember. I remember what’s important, and I make up the rest.” — Nikki Giovanni

“I’m what they call a ‘personal poet.’ And I try to bring out the personality of my life, you know?

That my family was a good family. Because they are Black people and Black people are good people. And from that goodness, we can create the revolution. So that the revolution isn’t a reaction to whiteness, but a forward thrust of Blackness.” — Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni: “There has to be a way to do what we do and survive, which to me seems to be missing.” James Baldwin: “Sweetheart, sweetheart. Our ancestors taught us how to do that.”

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Nikki Giovanni: “There has to be a way to do what we do and survive, which to me seems to be missing.”
James Baldwin: “Sweetheart, sweetheart. Our ancestors taught us how to do that.”