Tag: Academy Awards

Movie Review: Anora

Contains spoilers

I cannot believe it, but next week is officially the Academy Awards, and I have been doing my best to watch as many movies as I can before next Sunday comes around. Some of the movies I won’t be able to stomach, like The Substance and Gladiator II, because I am not a fan of body horror and I saw the first Gladiator and the film score was incredibly beautiful and blew me away, but unfortunately I have a weak stomach and often flinched and closed my eyes during all of the battle scenes (being a wimp about movies with lots of blood and gore kind of ruined my experience watching the movie because well, it’s a movie about gladiators and killing people and buckets of blood was the form of entertainment back in that time, so I probably should have just listened to the soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and called it a day instead of forcing myself to watch it because it was a cinema classic. Even though Russell Crowe, Connie Nielsen and Joaquin Phoenix’s acting was fierce A.F., after the first battle scene in the arena, I wanted to throw up as I watched folks get decapitated, cut in half and killed in other bloody unpleasant ways. But alas, I digress.)

So, I won’t be able to watch some of the movies, but I have already seen a few of the nominees: A Real Pain, starring Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (who also directed the movie), The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones and directed by Brady Corbet, and just five minutes ago, I finished streaming Anora, which was directed by Sean Baker and stars Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn as the main characters. I had heard about Anora many times in the past few months and saw the trailer, which looked really good. However, I am squeamish about vomit scenes and pretty much all of the films I have seen that are directed by Sean Baker have a pretty gross vomit scene in them. In one of his movies, Tangerine, which is about trans sex workers, an Armenian cab driver (played by actor Karren Karagulian) is driving around Los Angeles on a normal day, and two drunk guys vomit in his cab. I know it sounds silly, but I have emetophobia, which is a weird and irrational fear of vomit. I don’t know how I ended up getting emetophobia in the first place, but it has haunted my life for 31 years and it’s the reason why I had to keep getting up and going to the restroom whenever my health class teachers showed the class Super-Size Me, because there is a really gross vomit scene, and it freaked me out and I almost got a panic attack. So long story short, I have to look up the parent’s guides on IMDB and go on Doesthedogdie.com to often look up whether movies that I watch have vomit scenes in them so I can be prepared to close my eyes (and sometimes ears) in case they do. Sure, I would be reading spoilers, but honestly, I would rather read a few important plot points than go into a panic attack when someone surprise-vomits in a movie scene. So, I did the same for his other movies, Red Rocket and Anora.

But honestly, my fear of vomit is not the most important part of this blog post, of course. It’s what I thought about the actual movie, Anora. As I write this, I am catching my breath (in a good way) because MY GOLLY GOSH, MIKEY MADISON CAN ACTTTTTTT. Seriously, I had chills while watching her performance. She is not a damsel in distress, even though she is a very dangerous situation. She is a tough-as-nails Brooklynite who takes no nonsense and swears like a sailor (I was going to say, “she swears like a born-and-bred-New Yorker”, but I am not from New York City and don’t want to offend those native New Yorkers who don’t cuss a lot.) I could tell she really worked very hard to prepare for her role as the title character, Anora, who goes by Ani. Ani is a sex worker living in Brooklyn who is struggling to make ends meet, and she works at a strip club called HQ Kony Gentlemen’s Club. Her life changes, however, when her boss assigns her to a young male client who speaks Russian. Because Ani speaks Russian, she is able to communicate with this young man, who she finds out is named Vanya (or Ivan). At first, she is just treating him like any old client, but he woos her and then wows her when she finds out that he is the son of this wealthy Russian oligarch. They end up developing an intense infatuation with one another. Ani at first doesn’t think he is serious about wanting to be with her, and when they spend the night together at his super lavish pad (which he doesn’t actually own. His parents do) she wakes up the next day and tells him she has to go back to work. However, he tells her that he will pay her a ridiculous amount of money for her to be his girlfriend for a week. He takes her to these lavish parties, showing her off as his girlfriend and making her feel like most important person in his life. He has maids that clean up the floor while he plays video games all day, and she does her work and dances for him. He is entertained and she thinks, “Well, I need to go back to work and my regular life,” but Vanya tells her that he is sad that he will have to go back to Russia to work for his father, and that the only way to get out of having to go back to Russia is to marry an American woman so that he can stay in New York City. Ani doesn’t think Vanya is serious, but when he actually proposes to her, she does so, and they get married in a chapel in Las Vegas.

Ani is living the dream, but the next day, her romantic fantasy is quickly crushed when some guys who work for Vanya’s father come barging into Vanya’s penthouse suite when they find out that Vanya married Ani in Las Vegas. Igor and Garnik, two henchmen who work for Vanya’s dad, come in and demand to see the marriage papers so that they can annul Vanya and Ani’s marriage. When Vanya and Ani don’t comply, Ani is tied up while Vanya escapes from the house. Ani screams bloody murder and attacks Igor and Garnik, while Toros, who works for Vanya’s dad, too, has to leave a baptism at an Armenian church because he has to now get involved with annulling Vanya’s marriage to Ani. Igor assaults and restrains Ani while she screams for them to let her go, and Toros finally arrives and tries to calm Ani down, but she continues to yell at them to let her go. Igor gags her and Toros calls Vanya on Ani’s phone, but Vanya doesn’t pick up. So Garnick, Igor, Ani and Toros have to drive all around New York City to find Vanya. After they spend hours looking for him, they find him at the HQ Kony Gentlemen’s Club in a private room where Diamond, Ani’s red-haired jealous competition, dances for Vanya while he cheerfully stuffs dollar bills in her thong, with Iggy Azalea’s banger hit “Sally Walker” thumping on the soundtrack, not knowing how much heartbreak and suffering he caused for Ani, Garnik, Igor, Toros and his parents in Russia. While he is intoxicated, Ani tries to convince him that she and him are going to stay married and get away from all this drama in their life, but Vanya laughs it off and doesn’t care. Ani and Diamond have a brutal fight with each other, which gets the attention of everyone at the gentlemen’s club, and Garnik, Igor and Toros grab Vanya and get him out of the club into the van so that they can take him over to the courthouse and get Vanya and Ani’s marriage annulled (and get them prepared for a serious vodka-infused ass-whooping from his parents, Nikolai and Galina, who DO NOT PLAY.) Ani tries to convince Vanya to take this entire matter seriously and tells him how worried sick she was when he escaped, but he acts like it was no big deal. They go to the courthouse and Ani, pissed as fuck, cusses out the judge and Toros and everyone who made her life a fucking nightmare (including the once-dreamy-Prince Charming-now-scumbag-Vanya), and the crazy part? The judge says they have to go to Las Vegas to sign the annulment papers because that is where Ani and Vanya got married. They can’t annul the marriage in New York. So, Vanya’s parents fly from Russia to the U.S., and even when Ani tries to gain Galina’s approval, Galina refuses to shake her hand and tells her coldly that Ani will never be part of Vanya’s family because of her reputation as a sex worker. At first, Ani refuses to get on the plane, but Galina tells her with an icy smile that if Ani refuses to fly with them to Las Vegas to get the annulment papers signed, she will lose everything. Ani finally gets on the plane, and they go to Las Vegas to sign the papers. Vanya and his parents go back to Russia, even after he tries to reason with them that what he did was no big deal, and Ani comes back to New York City with Igor, shattered, destroyed and heartbroken. Even though Igor violently restrained Ani at the beginning of the film, he ends up being the one to bring her some much-needed consolation in the end and seems to be the only one who is willing to sit with Ani in her pain and suffering. When the credits rolled, I was speechless. All I could think was, When they announce the nominations next Sunday evening, this movie HAS to win at least one Oscar. Seriously. It was another reason why Sean Baker is one of my favorite directors.

What I really appreciate about Sean Baker is that he presents a very realistic portrayal of what life is like for sex workers in his movies. And I appreciate that Hollywood is gradually starting to portray sex workers as these human beings with regular lives rather than as these objects of men’s desires who don’t have a voice or a narrative of their own. Even when watching the 2005 film Hustle and Flow, because I had seen the film Zola, which is told from the perspective of a Black female sex worker, I couldn’t help but notice that the female characters in the movie don’t have much of a voice of their own. They are just supporting characters in helping a man further his hip-hop career. Don’t get me wrong, Taryn Manning and Taraji P. Henson were absolutely incredible in the movie, but I am glad I watched a movie like Zola that doesn’t exploit sex workers in the movie and gives them agency and a voice of their own. In Zola, Zola is a young Black woman who meets a white girl named Stefani while they are stripping in Detroit, Michigan. They become fast friends, until Stefani coerces Zola to go with her on what she thinks is going to be a fun trip to Florida where they get more clients but instead is actually a dangerous sex trafficking operation that Zola finds herself unable to get out of. Even though Colman Domingo’s character, a pimp named X, and Nicholas Braun’s character, Derrek (Stefani’s boyfriend) are key characters in the film, they are supporting characters in the movie. The film focuses on Stefani and Zola’s complicated friendship. Even though they bonded over being sex workers, at the end of the day, Stefani didn’t respect Zola and was just taking advantage of her, and the two of them fight throughout the film and are no longer having fun as friends. I watched the movie twice because it was so good, and the acting was incredible. I didn’t know anything about the original Twitter thread that Zola had published, but when I watched the movie, I started to read more about it and became more interested in the story because I am not a sex worker and don’t have much knowledge about sex work.

Anora was a really powerful movie, and even though it is a romance movie, it definitely defies the typical fairytale romance storyline. Today, I did a study presentation at my Buddhist center for a morning chanting session, and the study I did my PowerPoint on was from an article in the February 7, 2025 World Tribune (our weekly Buddhist newspaper) called “We Create Our Own Happiness.” In the article, the late Buddhist educator Daisaku Ikeda shares a quote by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, and the quote, to paraphrase, is that while wealth and property can be inherited, happiness cannot. People can possess lots of money and status and power, but those things bring a temporary form of happiness and doesn’t get rid of people’s problems. Of course, there are plenty of examples of people who use their wealth for good causes, to help other people and fund various charities and nonprofit organizations. However, what Buddhism has taught me is that happiness is a matter of what we feel inside, our inner state of life. Even though Ani married this young man who came from money and thought he could give her true love, he was actually just using her and didn’t truly love her at all. He inherited all this money and took her on all these lavish trips and parties, but he was still empty and miserable and so was she. Even though his parents let him stay in this luxurious penthouse suite, he does not have a very warm loving relationship with his parents at all. They are controlling, and even when Ani tells Vanya that he doesn’t have to listen to his parents, he can’t just leave his life because then that would mean giving up this lavish lifestyle that he has simply by virtue of being the son of a wealthy Russia oligarch. His parents, however, could never hand him happiness on a silver platter. They didn’t even care about his happiness. Even when Ani tried to make it work with her and Vanya, she could not. Their marriage was transactional, not real love. That is what Toros was trying to tell Ani even when she kept convincing him that her marriage to Vanya was true love and was going to make her happy. Toros told her over and over again that Vanya really didn’t love her and that she was not legally married to him, and that this fairytale idea of her and Vanya getting married was just that, a fairytale, not reality. Vanya was always going to treat Ani like she was disposable and was only going to see her as a prostitute who was just there in his life to give him a short-lived thrill before he moved on to someone else. Seriously, the final scene of the film where she cries after having sex with (and slapping) Igor as he cradles her in his arms really broke my heart. It made me think of when I fell in love with this guy and had all these delusional daydreams about us ending up married with children, living a blissful carefree life well into retirement. I fell in love with him because he thought I was attractive, and as a girl with terrible self-worth at the time, I assumed that the way he felt about me in college was the same way he felt about me at 27 when we reconnected. But by then, I quickly realized that he had moved on, he had changed, and he was in a happy soon-to-be marriage with someone else. It took years of therapy, Buddhist practice and self-care to finally get to a place where I could confront the reality that me and this guy were never going to be together, even though it was painful. My crush was my escape from the humdrum reality of my 9 to 5 office job. However, I think chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and studying The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin and Daisaku Ikeda’s writings reminded me that I had profound self-worth even if I wasn’t in a relationship with this guy. I also realized that this guy couldn’t ever give me the happiness that I wanted. I had to be responsible for my own happiness because I have my own problems to deal with, and he has his. It took a lot of deep digging and human revolution, but I have developed so much profound love for myself in the process and have developed what Buddhists call “absolute happiness,” which is a kind of happiness that can’t be destroyed by changing external circumstances because it is within our own lives, and we cultivate that happiness through our practice of Nichiren Buddhism. I really love looking at movies through the lens of Buddhism because it helps me understand both the good and dark sides of human nature.

I am sure that this what Ani went through is not just something that happens in fiction only. A lot of young women deal with heartbreak, and I am sure there are women who are coerced into these unhealthy marriages where they never find true happiness and are just being treated like a transaction instead of a flesh-and-blood human being with thoughts, feelings, needs, and wants. Sean Baker’s films have really opened my eyes to the tough reality and stigma that a lot of female sex workers (including trans sex workers of color) face on a daily basis. Of course, as someone who doesn’t work in the sex work industry, I don’t know if the film speaks for the reality of all sex workers, and I am sure plenty of sex workers have good and bad things to say about the movie just like they have various opinions about the movie Hustlers. But it was definitely empowering to see a young woman who works in sex work playing the main role as this bold protagonist who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone. I think after watching his other movie Red Rocket, which is about a washed-up 30-something male adult film star who falls in love with a 17-year-old cashier at a donut shop and tries to get her into the adult entertainment industry, watching a movie like Anora was a different experience. Red Rocket was a black/dark comedy that really left me disturbed and unsettled because of its subject matter. Simon Rex’s character, Mikey, wasn’t supposed to be likeable. He was a creepy middle-aged white guy who flirted with a teenager (even though in the movie he justifies that in Texas, he can flirt with her because she is 17 and that is the legal age of consent) and also took advantage of his ex-wife and her mother, as well as the people in his community.

I need to head to sleep, but I am just glad that I got all my thoughts about the movie out so that I can sleep at night.

Anora. 2024. 139 minutes. Distributed by Neon. Directed by Sean Baker. Rated R for strong sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language and drug use.

Movies I Have Watched So Far

I am gearing up for the Academy Awards, which is coming up this Sunday, so I am trying my best to cram in as many movies as I can before the awards ceremony. To be honest, I haven’t made time to watch all of the movies. I’m still trying to finish up Killers of the Flower Moon, but to be honest, it is really intense and during the first hour and a half I found my stomach getting pretty queasy. But I had to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo about how I was feeling after the movie, and I realized that it wasn’t the director’s job to make me feel comfortable. This was a very disturbing movie about the Osage murders, and the murders weren’t pretty, so it would be a pretty big “fuck you” to the Indigenous community if someone watered down the history of the Osage murders. I haven’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon yet unfortunately, but after watching the first half of the movie it reminded me that is why I need to study history, especially Native American history. I remember we studied about it in history class, but that was several years ago and that class flew by pretty quickly, so by the time I graduated I had forgotten most of what I studied. Also, it’s one thing to read a classroom textbook about white settlers’ exploitation of Indigenous peoples, but the thing about movies is that those images stay with you for a pretty long time. My experience watching Killers of the Flower Moon made me think of when I was in my junior year of college, and the summer before school started, I was reading a lot of reviews about the film 12 Years a Slave. Many people said it was harrowing to watch, and so when my professor put the film on the curriculum for the class to watch, my stomach dropped a little, and during office hours I expressed my reservations about watching the film. I ended up watching the movie after he gave me a very no-nonsense reality check about the movie, and I ended up watching it four times because I wanted to study and analyze the movie. Looking back, I think watching it one time would have sufficed considering my sensitivity threshold when it comes to violence in movies, but as distressing as it was to watch Solomon Northrup’s trauma unfold within the first ten minutes of the movie, from the minute those white men got him drunk and had him shackled in chains to the moment he left the plantation after twelve years of being whipped, prodded, beat, strung up in a tree and called the N-word, the acting was very spot-on and the film score was brilliant, beautiful and gave me chills.

A couple of weeks ago, I did watch Maestro, a Netflix movie that actor Bradley Cooper starred in, directed and produced. Honestly, I cried after watching it. At first, I was ambivalent about watching it because it received a lot of push back from people. Bradley Cooper had to put on prosthetics to look like the Jewish composer, Leonard Bernstein, and considering the history of Hollywood casting non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters or real-life people in biographical dramas and other movies, I can see why it received some pushback. However, I read somewhere that Leonard Bernstein’s children didn’t mind that Bradley Cooper, who isn’t Jewish, was playing Leonard Bernstein. As someone who loves listening to classical music as much as I love playing it, I really appreciate that they made this movie. I don’t know a lot of movies where classical musicians, conductors or composers are the main characters on the big screen. I haven’t seen Amadeus, but I remember watching TAR with Cate Blanchett and thinking, Oh, man, this is the year for classical music! We’re not just playing on the film score; we’re actually acting! The girl who played Lydia Tar’s love interest in the movie is a real-life cellist named Sophie Kauer, and in general I was just happy to see a film about classical music. During the film Maestro, I remember getting goosebumps when Leonard conducts the orchestra in a performance of “Adagietto” from the composer Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. It was a beautiful performance and it really tugged at my heartstrings. I really loved that scene because it reminded me of when I was in my senior year of high school, and my orchestra played the “Adagietto.” It was honestly the highlight of my senior year because it is such a beautiful piece, and it challenged me as a musician, especially because it is a long piece and requires a lot of control when playing it. The cello part has a lot of whole notes, and the piece has a wide variety of sounds and colors, from the soft to the deeply intense. It is also hard to play in tune, and intonation has always been a pitfall of mine when playing the cello, so it really forced me to have a keener ear when working on the piece. As someone who feels intense physical reactions when I hear music, I remember while playing the piece during rehearsals I would often get teary-eyed because it was such a moving piece. The movie Maestro also reminded me of TAR because both of these conductors were members of the LGBTQ community. Of course, Leonard Bernstein was a real person and Lydia Tar was a fictional character, but it was encouraging to see not just representation of classical musicians on screen, but also classical musicians who identified as LGBTQ. I also saw the actor Gideon Glick from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in Maestro; he plays Tommy, a young man who Leonard has an affair with. In TAR, Lydia finds herself falling in love with a cellist named Olga, which puts a strain on Lydia’s marriage to her wife, Sharon.

I am currently watching The Holdovers with my family. I really wanted to see this movie because Da’Vine Joy Randolph won several awards for her performance in the movie, and I also really loved the trailer. So far it is a really good movie, and it has some heartfelt moments. Over the weekend I watched an animated feature called Nimona, which stars Eugene Lee Yang of Buzzfeed and The Try Guys, actress Chloe Grace Moretz, and Riz Ahmed. It was a really excellent film about a shapeshifter named Nimona who becomes a sidekick to a knight who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Nimona has a sharp wit and also kicks butt. I don’t have the stomach to see Chloe Grace Moretz in her earlier film Kick Ass, but I was at least able to see her kick ass in a PG-rated setting when I watched Nimona. I really resonated with Nimona’s struggle of being different and not feeling like you belong anywhere, and how it can put you in that dark place of despair sometimes because you don’t fit in anywhere and want to be accepted for who you are. I really appreciate the LGBTQ representation in this movie, too.