3 MOVIE REVIEWS

My thoughts on A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE, JANET PLANET & KINDS OF KINDNESS

Here in New York, it’s been hotter than the current season of Love Island US, and humid too! As a result, my lifestyle has grown increasingly similar to that of my cats. I’m just shifting from one position of repose to another, sighing, and screeching whenever I get hungry. To be fair, they bathe themselves more often than I do.

This summer, one of the only activities I’ve been able to stomach is going to the movies. I have always loved movie theaters - the vibrant colors of the Icee machine, the toasty smell of fake popcorn butter, the previews, the memories!!!! One of my first ever dates was a trip to a Loews Cineplex to see Nacho Libré with a boy I had a crush on. I wore a powder blue American Eagle spaghetti strap top that matched my braces and he put his arm around me for six to ten minutes.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen three movies of note and I am going to rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 ICEES:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

Director: Michael Sarnoski | Writers: Michael Sarnoski, John Krasinski & Bryan Woods | Stars: Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Schnitzel & Nico as Frodo the cat.

I loved the original A Quiet Place, and A Quiet Place: Day One is its prequel, which stars… A CAT! And the Quiet Place cat…

…. sort of looks like my two cats, Cookie and Olive!

…right???

Anyways, I’m a huge thriller/horror fan and I have an affinity for villains that come from either outer space or the deep sea (two sides of the same unknowable coin).

As a baseline, I’m seeking a range of emotions from a thriller or horror experience - tension, relief, tension, relief, heartfelt sadness, dread, a peak of tension and then the ultimate relief of an ending that leaves at least one protagonist safe, for now. My favorite horror/thrillers go heavy on the tension, even heavier on the heartfelt sadness, and transcend that pattern to explore some sort of theme that either highlights human resilience or illuminates human darkness. A Quiet Place: Day One checked all boxes!

The original film takes place years deep into an alien occupation of the human world. A Quiet Place: Day One shows what happened when the aliens first arrived in New York City, on an otherwise normal and peaceful day. Rather than explain what brought the aliens to earth or how the government realized they are provoked by sound, or what the global impact might’ve looked like, the writers of this prequel decided to focus on a smaller, grounded story of two people who find each other within the chaos.

A Quiet Place: Day One follows Samira (Lupita Nyong'o), a young poet with terminal cancer who is already going to die when the alien apocalypse begins. Samira is in New York City for a field trip with her hospice care co-residents when the aliens strike, and after losing a close friend, she resolves to walk to Harlem and have one final slice of New York style pizza with her service cat Frodo. Along the way, while dodging alien attacks and human stampedes and fighting the chronic pain of her illness, Samira’s solitary mission is intercepted by Eric, a soggy British man who just wants someone to be next to because his loved ones are all in the UK. What follows is a moving, tense, and terrifying journey that explores how human connection can prevail through the most disastrous of circumstances. That message, plus Nyong'o’s incredible performance, the constant presence of an adorable cat AND an unexpectedly emotional ending, make this movie a big hit for me!

My rating: 4 ICEES!

2. KINDS OF KINDNESS

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos | Writers: Yorgos Lanthimos & Efthimis Filippou | Stars: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie & Taylor Swift’s ex

This month, I experienced a loss. I was forced to grapple with the absence of something I can never get back.

Three hours of my valuable, Friday night time were wrenched away from me at the hands of Yorgos Lanthimos, in the form of his latest film Kinds of Kindness.

I love all of the actors in this movie and I respect their work. I did not see Poor Things or The Favourite, but I did enjoy The Lobster and Dogtooth.

HOWEVER.

Here are two of my BIGGEST pet peeves in movies:

1) When I feel like the director is trying to manipulate my innate tendency toward low self-worth.

I don’t like when I'm faced with an hours-long pile of meandering nothingness that does not appeal nor make sense to me at all but is scattered with so many flashy distractions like A-list stars and specific lighting choices that my first instinct is to assume this must be so brilliant it goes over my head. In reality, it’s likely that even the director didn’t know what he was trying to say with this, or if he did, it got muddled and confused by all his many layers of myopic egoism and subconscious misogyny. But he is a man and has therefore ascended so far in the awards-delusion pipeline that no one will tell him the truth and companies will fund his expensive experiments no matter the substance. Or maybe he just wanted to take a vacation with a bunch of hot famous people and the marketing team sold it to us as prestige. Plots and character development are concepts for a reason and entertainment is meant to be entertaining (in my opinion).

2) When women are naked in scenes that do not at all require or imply nudity and their naked bodies are shown for unnecessarily excessive amounts of time and in specifically objectifying positions. I’ve only witnessed this happening in films and TV shows directed by men.

It has been my experience that the unnecessary objectification of women is so widely and deeply ingrained in the framework of contemporary media that it has to be violently glaring to even stand out enough to be noticed. Exposed, reduced, two dimensional women, existing only in response to male desires are the norm and therefore easy to absorb without consciousness of their implications. The nudity of the women actors in Kinds of Kindness felt deliberately exploitative and impossible to ignore.

The film is separated into three vignettes in which the same ensemble of actors play different characters. The first shot of Margaret Qualley in the first vignette is an unnecessarily long pan over her bare legs. The final vignette has her playing twin sisters that a religious cult has been trying to track down because one of the sisters possesses magical healing powers. In the role of one sister, Qualley has a drunken night that leads her to jump into an empty pool. For no apparent reason, she removes her clothes before jumping and lands in a bloody, twisted, naked heap. As the other sister, Qualley is attacked by Emma Stone’s cult-brainwashed character. Stone removes all of Qualley’s clothing before putting her naked body on a scale and weighing her. In the same vignette, Hunter Schafer is shown naked, standing on a scale for a pointlessly long amount of time.

The male actors are shown partially nude a couple of times in the movie, but they are only nude when in positions of power - while fucking even more exposed women, or presiding over their cult followers.

Kinds of Kindness hit both of my big movie pet peeves hard. I found it to be pretentious and misogynist and wayyyyyy too goddamn long.

My rating: 1 ICEE!

3. JANET PLANET

Director: Annie Baker | Writers: Annie Baker | Stars: Zoe Ziegler & Julianne Nicholson

This is not only one of my favorite films this year, it is one of my favorite films EVER. I believe it is vitally important for people to go see this movie while it’s still in theaters so that independent films like this can continue to get made and tell small-scale, human stories with the wide-reaching power to make people feel seen and understood.

Janet Planet is the first work of playwright Annie Baker that I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know much about it before I bought the tickets, but it was recommended to me by someone I respect. Within the first three minutes, I was engrossed in the 90s-set story of 11-year-old protagonist Lacy, played by Zoe Ziegler, as she ran from her sleepaway camp cabin to a pay phone to beg her mother, played by Julianne Nicholson, to pick her up and bring her home. Before she leaves camp, one of Lacy’s cabin mates gives her a parting gift in the form of a troll doll. When her mother arrives with her mentally ill boyfriend in tow, Lacy asks if she can stay at camp because she thought nobody liked her there but now realizes she was wrong. Lacy returns home to a rural Western Massachusetts house where the rest of the film takes place in three parts, each named after a character that enters her mother’s life.

The dialogue is funny and thoughtful and real. I found every moment of this movie to be both relateable and perspective-altering. Each scene felt like it ached with the powerlessness of adolescence and the complexities of parental attachment. The story allows both mother and daughter to make mistakes and show each other love and scare each other and comfort each other and ultimately, to change together. The characters are so specific, yet I saw myself and so many people that I know in each of them.

There are no aliens or cult kidnappings in this movie, but to me it was astonishing.

My rating: 5 ICEES!

More movie reviews to come! Stay tuned.