drama – The Arts Are Life

Movie Review: Hustlers

A few weeks ago, I watched the film, Hustlers. I rented a bunch of movies from the library, and I had wanted to see Hustlers for a while, but I was kind of nervous about seeing it at first because I don’t like vomit scenes in movies (I have emetophobia, which is a fear of vomit) and I read that the film had a few vomit scenes in them (there is a character in the movie named Annabelle, played by Lili Reinhart, who vomits every time she gets nervous. It’s not projectile vomiting thankfully, but it was still kind of gross.) But then I watched an interview that was part of a series that Variety magazine does called Actors on Actors. In this interview series, actors interview each other about their work and their approaches to acting. As someone who knows nothing about acting, it is a really interesting series and it’s also informative because these famous actors, who have taken years to perfect their craft, are talking about what it’s like being an actor. Before watching the series, I had this idea that acting was this glamorous effortless job that was all about fame and fortune, but after watching the series, I realized I had a very shallow, two-dimensional perspective on what goes into acting and making movies. Even though these people love what they do, at the end of the day, it is still a job, and they still have to show up and practice their lines and get in character. There was one episode of Actors on Actors featuring Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lopez. They talked with each other about the movies they were in; Robert was in a film called The Lighthouse and Jennifer Lopez was in the movie Hustlers. Even though I hadn’t seen either of the movies yet, I really love how down-to-earth Jennifer and Robert were in their conversation with each other. You can tell they really, really love acting because they talk about it with such passion, and they loved watching each other’s movies. I think it helped for me to watch both The Lighthouse and Hustlers after seeing the interview, though, because after watching the movies, I was able to appreciate on a deeper level than before the work they did for both of their films. As a high schooler, I remember seeing Robert Pattinson playing Edward Cullen in Twilight and hearing my fellow classmates gush about Edward’s hotness and how he sparkled. I’m glad, though, that he went on to do other work like The Lighthouse and another movie called Good Time, because it shows another side of his acting that I hadn’t seen. Don’t get me wrong; Twilight was great and I admit, I was a bit of a Twilight fanatic back in the day. But then I saw Robert Pattinson in Good Time and then The Lighthouse, and he really takes the acting to another level in these films. In The Lighthouse, he and Willem Dafoe lose their sanity while living on an isolated island in the 19th century, and as the film progresses it gets darker and darker. But the acting was really good. I hadn’t seen Jennifer Lopez’s other films like Selena and Monster-In-Law, but like a lot of people I grew up jamming out to “Jenny from the Block” and “Love Don’t Cost a Thing.” When I saw her in Hustlers I was blown away. I’m not going to lie; Hustlers was an INTENSE movie. Then again, it is about a pretty intense true story. But I’m glad I watched it because I had never heard of it before, and I loved the acting and also the soundtrack for the movie. I love hip-hop, so I loved hearing “I Get Money” by 50 Cent and other songs. The soundtrack features a wide variety of artists, including Fiona Apple, Bob Seger, and a 19th century classical music composer named Frederic Chopin, and honestly each song went so well with each scene. I really love how they used “Night Moves” by Bob Seger for one of the scenes because it’s one of my favorite songs. And I think the song “Royals” by Lorde fits the ending pretty well because of how the film’s events led up to the ending.

If you haven’t seen the film, Hustlers is based on a true story about a group of strippers in New York who got male clients drunk and conned them out of their money. I haven’t read the story yet, but I want to so I can understand what happened in real life and how it compares to how the director depicted it in the movie. The movie is about a stripper named Destiny (played by Constance Wu) living in New York City who is struggling to take care of her grandmother, who is struggling to pay off her debts. She isn’t able to make much money from the male clients who frequent the strip club, but then she sees one of the strippers, Ramona, performing a dance to “Criminal” by Fiona Apple and making it rain with money as male clients shower her with dollar bills. Destiny approaches Ramona about her techniques and skills and wants to learn from her so she can earn more money, and Ramona shows her how to do certain moves and attract more clients. I really love the scene in which Ramona dances to “Criminal” not just because I am a huge Fiona Apple fan, but because I just loved how Ramona got really into it while dancing. Destiny makes more money, and she is able to go back to school and help her grandmother get out of debt. Destiny also meets a really cute guy at a party and they start dating and have a daughter together (I didn’t know that Destiny’s boyfriend was played by the rapper G-Eazy until I saw the end credits. He looked really familiar.)

However, things take a turn when the Wall Street financial crisis happens, and the dancers who work at these clubs find themselves losing male clients who can’t afford to keep going out to the clubs. Destiny also has a fight with her boyfriend, and they break up, leaving her to raise her daughter alone. Ramona is also struggling to pay her rent and take care of her daughter. Ramona ends up hatching a plan for her and Destiny to get together with some other dancers and put drugs in the male clients’ drinks and take all the money off of their credit cards while these men were unconscious from drinking drugged alcohol. For some reason, I thought about this movie I watched a few months ago called The Big Short, which is about the 2008 Wall Street crash. There is a scene that takes place shortly before the crash and it takes place at a strip club, and one of the people working in Wall Street who is warning people about the upcoming housing market crisis is telling a young woman working as a dancer at the strip club about how the housing market bubble is going to burst and people are going to lose everything in the financial crisis, and she refuses to believe that anything bad is going to happen by people inflating their lifestyles. She says in the scene that since things seem so great with the housing market, she owns four or five of these big homes and dealing with these properties (I forgot exactly what she said she did with the houses since I saw the movie a while ago) is another way she can invest in the market. However, as the movie progresses, the prospect of people holding onto that wealth looks really, really bleak. The movie shows how people are getting evicted from their homes, losing their jobs and being unable to make ends meet. During the financial crisis, with less men going to the strip clubs, Ramona and the other dancers have to take on extra hours at their day jobs to make ends meet. The plan to drug the male clients seems to work out at first, and there is a scene where Ramona and the other strip club dancers are celebrating in this big, luxurious apartment over the Christmas holidays with the expensive gifts that Ramona bought them with the money she and the other strippers took from the male clients’ bank accounts. Eventually, Ramona and Destiny get caught and Destiny has to speak to a reporter named Elizabeth (played by Julia Stiles) about everything that went down.

Another thing I loved about the film was the acting. It was incredible. I hadn’t seen much of Constance Wu’s other works other than Crazy Rich Asians, which she was also really good in. She acted the heck out of Destiny in Hustlers: the emotions, the facial expressions, the dancing. She and Jennifer Lopez both gave really powerful performances, and they put their all into expressing the dynamics between Ramona and Destiny in their friendship. Even when they call off the friendship after what transpires, they still share a struggle as these single moms who are trying to survive and make ends meet and also deal with disrespect and discrimination from society as women of color who are also strippers. The friendship dynamic between Ramona and Destiny kind of reminded me of this movie I saw called Zola, which is also about stripping and tensions in female friendship. If you haven’t seen Zola, it is based on a true Twitter thread by A’Ziah “Zola” Wells (last name formerly King) who worked as a stripper in Detroit and went on a trip to Florida with a white girl named Jessica Jessica’s boyfriend, Jared, and Jessica’s pimp. The trip ended up being a sex trafficking operation and Jessica ended up putting Zola’s life in jeopardy. In the movie, Zola (played by Taylour Paige) is working at a Hooter’s in Detroit, Michigan, and one day while serving she encounters a white girl named Stefani (played by Riley Keough). Stefani and Zola bond over being strippers, and they follow each other on social media and become fast friends. Stefanie texts her one evening telling her that a friend of hers told her about some opportunities in Florida to make extra money dancing. At first Zola is skeptical, and so is her fiancé, but Zola ends up taking the trip because her and Stefani are becoming such great friends, and so Zola packs her bags and goes with Stefani, Stefani’s boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and Stefani’s pimp named X (Colman Domingo). At first, they are all bonding over their time together in the car on the way to Florida and rapping, twerking and jamming to “Hannah Montana” by Migos. But as the trip wears on, Zola starts to notice some red flags in her friendship with Stefani, and as the movie progresses, she realizes that Stefani lied to her about this being just a fun trip for them to make extra money as dancers. Zola had to advocate for Stefani to charge more for clients she was having sex with because X wasn’t letting her charge more for her services. It’s also exhausting for Zola to have to watch Stefani have sex with all these clients, and also hard for Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek because he loves her and seeing her get involved in what turns out to be a sex trafficking operation is painful for him because he doesn’t want her to get hurt. Thankfully they make it out alive, but Zola is still traumatized and scarred by what Stefani put her through, and she feels (rightfully) betrayed that this girl she thought was her friend lied to her and put her in a dangerous situation. Zola realizes that Stefani was just taking advantage of her and wasn’t actually a true friend who cared about Zola’s safety. Sure, they both had in common that they were dancers, but at the end of the day, Stefani was only going to look out for her own interests and Zola even shouts at Stefani that her “brain is broke” for putting her through this crazy situation. There is a scene where Stefani briefly tells the story of how her and Zola fell out, but her side of the story is so ridiculous and makes Zola look like the bad guy instead of Stefani. She portrays herself as this good white Christian woman wearing a suit and wearing her hair in this neat bun, while Zola is shown with straw in her hair and later wearing a large trash bag. It is so absurd because I knew that Stefani’s version of the story was inaccurate while Zola was telling the truth about what happened. The film also showed the racial dynamics in their friendship. There is a scene in the film where Stefani is telling this offensive story about a Black woman and she says a lot of disrespectful things, like describing the woman as having a “nappy-ass head” and Zola is realizing, Yikes this white girl is real racist. It’s clear by the time the film is over that Zola and Stefani never actually had a genuine friendship, and even after all the shit that Stefani put Zola through during the course of the movie, she expects Zola to still love her and be her friend, but Zola ignores her as they continue the trip back home. The movie showed me that friendships can be messy even if you share a common experience with the person, and that’s why I thought about Zola when I was writing this review about Hustlers because it’s about female friendship and the complicated parts of that friendship, including how hard it is to leave toxic friendships. Zola couldn’t just go home and forget what happened; Stefani, Derrek and X put her through a LOT of shit, and Zola didn’t have her own car to just get away when shit hit the fan. She put up with a lot of nonsense, and was in a dangerous situation where X was threatening to kill her if she didn’t go with him and Stefani’s plans. Similarly, Destiny couldn’t just walk away from her friendship with Ramona and forget that Ramona had her participate in doing something illegal and was also getting her to involve other strippers in drugging the male clients. What Ramona put Destiny through was pretty intense, and so when Elizabeth (the journalist) asks Destiny about her friendship with Ramona and how they ended up falling out, Destiny is reluctant to talk about it because their friendship was so complicated.

I need to head to bed, but overall, I recommend watching Hustlers. It is an excellent movie.

Movie Review: Fancy Dance

Last week, I finished a movie called Fancy Dance. I really loved the Indigenous actress, Lily Gladstone, in the film Killers of the Flower Moon, so when I saw the trailer for this movie, which you can find on Apple TV, I was so excited. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily plays a woman named Mollie Burkhart, who in real life was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhart. Ernest and his uncle plotted the murders of several wealthy Indigenous people who live in Osage County in Oklahoma. Ernest is a chauffeur for Mollie, and he falls in love with her. They marry and have a child together. But Mollie finds out that members of her family and members of the Osage Nation are being murdered at alarming rates in the most gruesome disturbing ways, and Ernest also poisons her under the guise that she needs insulin shots for her diabetes. I had to pause the film a few times because I didn’t know about the Osage Murders and hadn’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon beforehand, so the film was really harrowing to watch, and each time I saw an Indigenous person get brutally murdered in the film, I would start crying. I finally was able to finish the film, but it stuck with me for a very long time, and thinking about the movie still gives me goosebumps, as it was intended to do because watching intergenerational racial trauma on screen depicted in the most realistic way is never easy to stomach, especially if your high school history textbooks never went into depth about this dark part of American history.

On Tuesday of last week, it was Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and I wanted to watch a movie that had Indigenous actors in it. Even though Killers of the Flower Moon blew me away, I don’t have the stomach to watch it again unfortunately, so that’s why I was really glad to have heard about Fancy Dance. The trailer was amazing, and thankfully I was able to watch it on Apple TV. Honestly, after watching the movie, it reminds me that we need more Indigenous voices in Hollywood. Lily Gladstone is going to pave the way for many more Indigenous actors and actresses to produce and star in movies where Indigenous people’s experiences are represented authentically and accurately. I haven’t seen a lot of movies with representation of LGBTQ+ Indigenous people, so it was actually really cool that Jax (Lily Gladstone’s character) was able to be her queer self in Fancy Dance. There is a scene where she goes to a strip club and meets with one of the strippers who works there named Sapphire, and Sapphire and her make love with each other. Lily Gladstone in real life identifies as queer and goes by she/ they pronouns. She explained in an article on Salon that in a lot of Native languages they don’t have gendered pronouns, and while growing up on a Blackfeet reservation people were more accepting of gender fluidity than outside of the community. I don’t know a lot about the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people of Indigenous tribes, but as someone who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community and loves anything LGBTQIA+, reading this article about Lily’s pronouns was very affirming. Growing up, I didn’t know a lot of other queer people of color until I got to college, and I also didn’t know much about the LGBTQIA+ terminology and diverse sexual orientations and genders until I got to college, which was, for the most part, an affirming environment for LGBTQIA+ people (I only say “most part” because I only know my own experience. I can’t speak for the experiences of other queer students of color who attended the college.)

It was an incredible film, and Lily Gladstone was also one of the producers of the film. She plays the protagonist in the movie, named Jax. Jax is searching for her missing sister, Tawi, and because her sister is missing, Jax is letting her niece, Roki, stay with her until they find Tawi. Roki wants to participate in the upcoming powwow to honor her mother, who participated in the powwow. However, child protective services barges into Jax’s house and takes Roki away because Tawi is gone and did drugs when Roki was staying with her, and they don’t think Jax is a suitable guardian for Roki. Roki ends up staying with her grandfather, Frank, and her step-grandmother, and she doesn’t enjoy it. One night at dinner, Jax asks if she can take Roki to the powwow in Oklahoma City, but Frank and his wife don’t want her to do that because they don’t want to get in trouble with child protective services. However, Jax sneaks out and has Roki come with her so they can travel to the powwow together. JJ, who is Jax’s brother, is trying to help Jax find her missing sister, but Frank and his wife have issued a search warrant to find Roki. When Roki goes into a gas station to get some snacks, she sees on the TV screen her and Jax’s face, and the reporters accusing Jax of kidnapping Roki. Roki and Jax continue to travel to the powwow, doing their best to stay undercover.

I think one of the most painful scenes of the film was when Roki overhears Jax telling JJ that Roki’s mom isn’t going to be at the powwow. Roki thinks that her mother is going to be at the powwow, but JJ ends up searching for Tawi and one evening finds Tawi’s corpse in a lake. While they are traveling to the powwow, Roki stops to go into the gas station, and the cashier recognizes her from the photos on the TV showing Roki and Jax. Earlier in the movie, Roki takes a lady’s purse, which has a gun in it, and in the scene where the cashier recognizes her and is about to call the cops, she aims the gun at the cashier, threatening to shoot him if he calls the police on her and Jax. Jax is outside, wondering why Roki is taking so long, when suddenly she hears a loud gunshot from inside the gas station store. She rushes into the store and finds Roki holding the shotgun and shaking with the impact after she fired the gun, and the cashier face down in a pool of blood. Jax calls 911 to send the paramedics over (Roki had shot the man in the shoulder) and Jax and Roki both run through the cornfields to escape the police. When Jax tells Roki to come with her, Roki stays behind. When Jax asks her why she doesn’t want to come with her, Roki tells her that she overheard Jax telling JJ that Tawi (Roki’s mom) wasn’t going to be at the powwow, and it really hurt that Jax lied to her because up until then, Roki placed all of her trust in Jax. Now that she knows the truth, she feels she cannot trust Jax anymore and runs away towards the oncoming police sirens.

There are some rare moments of shared tender joy between Roki and Jax in the film. Roki gets her first period (she calls it her first moon) and not having any menstrual products, Jax cuts up one of the diapers in the lady’s bag and has Roki use it as a sanitary pad. They celebrate by going to a diner, and Jax lets Roki order whatever she wants. Roki orders strawberry pancakes, crepes, waffles and other breakfast dishes, and enjoys them. When Roki and Jax are leaving, a cop interrogates them about their whereabouts and has Roki come into his police car to ask her a few questions. I seriously thought that they were going to get caught, but Roki gives an anonymous name, and the police looks her up in the system and says that Roki and Jax are cleared and can go. While they are driving, Roki admits to Jax that her menstrual blood accidentally stained the seat of the policeman’s car, and they both laugh about it.

**This is a total digression, but I remember when I got my period at 13; I wasn’t super excited. Instead, I was pretty moody. I don’t even know how I could have vegan chocolate cake on my period that day, because normally if I eat desserts or consume sugar on my period, I get terrible menstrual cramps. It’s a bummer but until I go see a gynecologist about any underlying causes of period pain, I need to be mindful of how much sugar I eat on my period. I often take it for granted that I have a period now that I’m much older, but after reflecting on the scene where Roki gets her period, I remember how significant my first period was, not just for me but for my family. I was becoming a young woman, and my body was going through these new changes. I wasn’t just throwing up when I got the flu. I was throwing up whenever I was on my period because my cramps were so bad, and I would often need to miss school, work or my SGI Buddhist activities because I was in such terrible pain. I remember when I watched this ad from Hello Flo, and this teen girl is jealous because all her friends were getting their periods and she hadn’t yet. The girl puts ruby-red nail polish on a sanitary pad and shows it to her friends to prove she got her period. The mom finds the pad and even though she knows that the daughter is lying about being on her period, she plays along with it and tells the daughter she is throwing her a “first moon party” that celebrates her first period. The daughter is embarrassed when her grandpa and other people start to arrive to the first moon party, and the mom invents games for people like “Pin the Pad on the Period” and has period themed foods, like a period-red fondue fountain where people can dip their marshmallows in period-red fondue. The daughter tells her mom to stop it, but the mom shows her daughter that she got her a period starter kit and lets her daughter know that she knew about her putting nail polish on the sanitary pad. It’s a cute commercial, and it actually made me appreciate having a period. Even though it’s not fun and it’s painful, as I learn more about periods and reproductive health, I think it’s pretty cool that my body has this interesting function. Whether I’m going to have babies or not, I don’t know, but I’m just going to let my body do its thing for the time being until I hit menopause. **

Movie Review: American Honey

Some time ago (I cannot remember when) I watched the trailer for a movie called American Honey. I really love A24 distributed films, so I immediately gravitated towards this one because it was an A24 film. And not just because it was an A24 film, but because the trailer was just really good, so I wanted to watch it. And honestly, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. This was a really good movie. It definitely wasn’t an easy film to sit through, but as I watch these heavy-hitting drama movies and independent films, I have come to appreciate that movies can stir a whole range of emotional experiences in us, and they should. This film was a really moving and raw portrayal of young people trying to survive in a harsh world.

The movie starts out with a young woman named Star dumpster-diving with two kids whose stepmother, Misty, doesn’t want custody of them, and she fishes out a chicken breast from the dumpster and gives it to the boy so they can bring it home. Star has a really rough life at home. Her stepfather is sexually abusive, and her mother died when she was really young of an overdose. She goes to a bar where the kids’ mother is dancing, and she tries to give the kids to her, but the mom wants nothing to do with the kids. Star goes to K Mart one day to run some errands, and she sees a group of teenagers running around and dancing to “We Found Love” by Rihanna. One of the young people in the group, named Jake, looks at Star and is attracted to her, and they share a mutual chemistry. The employees kick the kids out of the store, and Jake approaches her and tells her that she should come join them in their mag crew, where they go door-to-door selling magazines and other stuff. Star at first isn’t sure about Jake, but he comes off as this charming guy, so they fall in love. However, Star has to deal with the leader of the mag crew, Krystal, who hates Star for falling in love with Jake. Krystal does whatever she can to keep Jake away from Star, and things get tense when Jake tells Star that they can’t have a romantic relationship because Krystal thinks it’s “bad for business.”

Star has this interesting insight into life that kind of sets her apart from the other teens in the group. While she does play around with them and go along with them, she also retains a lot of her sensitivity, especially when she is around animals. Even though the film is pretty deep, it has its tender moments. While whooping and dancing around the campfire with everyone else, Jake gives Star a small turtle, and Star gently puts the turtle in the water and watches it swim away. There is also a scene where Star is sitting in an open field and a grizzly bear just casually comes up to her and says hi before going on its merry way. In another scene, Star sees a bee in the house that everyone is staying at and instead of killing it, she catches it in a glass jar and releases it outside so it can be among the flowers. It was these little scenes that I needed to take time to appreciate, because for most of the movie Star is just out here trying to survive.

I thought one scene in the film was particularly powerful and shows Star’s sensitivity. As they go door to door, the teens in the mag crew have to make up stories about their lives so that people who answer the door will have pity on them and buy the magazines from them. They start off going into wealthy neighborhoods, but then later on in the film Krystal drives them into a poor neighborhood and has them try to get the people in the neighborhood to buy magazines. Star knocks on the door of one house, and instead of an adult answering the door, a little boy wearing a Pikachu costume opens the door and a little girl wearing an Iron Maiden shirt invite her in. A third kid is holding a cat. Star looks around and finds that the TV is blaring Wendy Williams’s show, but the parents are nowhere to be found. When Star asks where their mom is, the boy says she is sleeping, and when Star asks where their dad is, he says that their dad is in Omaha, Nebraska, so he can’t take care of the kids. Star has this moment where she’s like, Wait, Krystal drove me here to get money from these people? These kids are struggling, I don’t think I can do this. The mom comes out of her room and lays down on the couch in front of the TV, not even looking at Star or any of the kids. Star sees a meth pipe on the table and realizes that the mom is a meth addict. Star asks for something to drink, and the kids open the fridge. There is almost nothing to eat or drink in the fridge, other than a liter of Mountain Dew. Star ends up going to the grocery store and buying the family a bunch of groceries. Even though she was struggling herself, Star was able to have that compassion for the kids because her own mother died of a meth overdose. It just reminded me of how in Buddhism, we go through challenges so that we can encourage others who might be going through similar challenges. I haven’t grown up in poverty or with parents who have struggled with addiction, but the film really showed me how poverty is very real, and people are really out here in America trying to get by paycheck to paycheck. To be honest, as I was watching the film, all I could think was, Wow, I really can’t fathom what these people in the film have to go through to survive.

Another thing the movie made me think about was the importance of having big dreams and aspirations. Star and the other teens are dropped off at a gas station where they find a bunch of men driving these big 18-wheeler trucks, and they promote the magazine subscriptions to them. The first guy Star asks isn’t interested and walks away, but the second guy actually gives her a ride in his 18-wheeler and they have a genuine conversation about their lives. The driver tells Star about his wife and that his daughter got married recently, and then he asks Star what her dreams are. Star tells him that no one has asked her what her dreams are before, and she tells the man that she wants her own place to live and to have a family. She later asks Jake the same question, and he tells her the exact same thing: no one has asked him what his dreams are. He tells her in private that he wants his own place in the woods and shows her all the money and treasures he has stolen from the houses of the people they sell magazines to. Star asks him how stealing these things is a dream of his, and he tells her that he is going to use these treasures to buy the thing that he wants eventually (i.e. his own place.) I just reflected on this scene where the man asks Star about her dreams, because in this book I’m reading called Discussions on Youth by the late educator and philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, Mr. Ikeda talks about how young people should have big dreams and can use the practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to bring out their unlimited inherent potential to achieve those dreams. Growing up, a lot of adults in my SGI Buddhist community would encourage me to have big dreams, so when at thirteen I told people at my Buddhist meetings that I wanted to play at Carnegie Hall in New York City one day, many people encouraged me to go for the dream and not give up. I often take it for granted that I have this Buddhist community where people encourage each other to not give up when achieving their dreams and that they can chant about what dreams and goals they want to accomplish. Watching this movie showed me that many young people are told that their dreams are impossible to achieve, and they aren’t around people who encourage them to have dreams and goals for the future. I really want to share more about the Buddhism I practice with other young people so that they can feel encouraged to bring forth the confidence to go for their dreams. I also want to recommend people read Discussions on Youth, whether you’re Buddhist or practice another religion/ no religion. It has given me a lot of hope over the years and has encouraged me to keep striving for those dreams that I think are impossible, like becoming a writer and a musician. I still battle my own doubts and insecurities about being a good enough creative, but chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helps me challenge those insecurities head-on so that I don’t let perfectionism, or my inner critic, keep me from taking action towards accomplish my goals and dreams. And at the end of the day, what my Buddhist practice has taught me is that it’s not just about reveling in my own success, but about encouraging others to achieve their dreams, too.

This movie reminded me of some other movies I have seen. There was this movie I saw called The Florida Project and it was directed by Sean Baker, who is a really good filmmaker, if you haven’t seen his movies. I have only seen Tangerine and The Florida Project, but I want to see his other films because he is a really good director. The Florida Project is about three kids who are all friends with each other and who all live in a budget motel in Kissimmee, Florida, which is near Walt Disney World. I had this idea of Walt Disney World being this magical place, but this movie showed me that income inequality is still a reality even in the most seemingly magical places. The people who stay in the budget motel are all struggling to make ends meet, and one of the main characters in the film, Halley, loses her job as a stripper and has to find other ways to make money, relying on her friend Ashley, who works at a diner, for food. Halley’s daughter, Moonee, is oblivious to the struggles that the adults go through, and she and the other kids do stuff like steal ice cream and set an abandoned house on fire. Halley and Ashley’s friendship goes down the deep end when Ashley finds out that Halley has resumed sex work and is bringing clients into her motel room, and she threatens to tell on her. Halley beats her friend up and when her and Moonee go to the diner where Ashley works, Halley gets upset when Ashley refuses to give her free food anymore. Finally Ashley caves and reluctantly serves Halley and Moonee breakfast. When Ashley finds out that her son, Scooty, was involved in setting the house on fire, she tells him that what he did was really bad and explains what the consequences of his actions are. Halley, however, doesn’t really care what Moonee does. She is struggling to survive and the antics her daughter gets into is the last thing on her mind. Like American Honey, this movie is a very sobering portrayal of poverty in America, and there is no savior character who comes to save the characters who are struggling to make ends meet. These movies give a realistic picture of class and income inequality.

I also really love the acting in American Honey. I saw Riley Keough in this movie called Zola (like American Honey and The Florida Project, it is an A24 movie) and she was really good in her role as Stefani. If you haven’t seen Zola, it’s a movie based on a real Twitter thread that A’Ziah “Zola” King posted about how she worked as a stripper in Detroit and met another young woman who was also a stripper, and how this young woman, named Stefani (in the Twitter thread, the girl’s name is Jessica) coerces Zola into going on a trip with her, Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek, and her pimp X, but the trip ends up being a sex trafficking operation. At first, Zola is thrilled to have a sisterly bond with Stefani, and when they are all in the car at the beginning of the film, they are all rapping to “Hannah Montana” by Migos and having a fun time. However, as the trip draws on, Zola starts to have a gut feeling that this trip isn’t going to be a fun time. Stefani, who is white but talks in a “blaccent,” talks in a degrading way about how this Black woman was “up in her face” and Zola is visibly uncomfortable. Zola ends up having to take stripping gigs that don’t compensate her fairly, and also Stefani’s pimp, X, is intimidating and threatens Zola, Stefani and Derrek throughout the trip if they don’t do as he says. It’s interesting how in American Honey, Riley Keough plays a character who is running the magazine crew and is in charge of getting the money everyone makes. Her character, Krystal, has a very scary power and wields it against Star, threatening to kick her off the team if she continues to pursue Jake. In Zola, however, Colman Domingo’s character is the main guy who everyone is scared of, and Riley Keough’s character, Stefani, has to submit to everything he tells her to do. In one scene, Zola helps Stefani make more money from her clients after she finds out that X was having Stefani charge clients a low rate. When X finds out that Zola was helping Stefani, he is upset and when Stefani gently asks him if she can have some of the money she made, X withholds the money from her, telling her she should be even grateful she has food in her belly. Stefani is left feeling powerless and Zola is left feeling angry.

The music in American Honey was incredible. I love hip-hop and the soundtrack had a lot of great songs. I was curious about the significance of the movie’s title, and in one of the scenes in the film, the teens in the van play “American Honey,” a song by a group I love named Lady A (they used to be called Lady Antebellum, but they changed the name in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement because “Antebellum” is reminiscent of the South’s racist past. Of course, racism isn’t a thing of the past in the South. It’s still very much alive.) To be honest, it was a little uncomfortable at first hearing the white characters use the N-word when singing to the rap songs and even calling each other the N-word. But it’s not something that’s new to me. Growing up in the South, I often heard white kids say the N-word in jest and even call me the N-word at times. I often heard kids of all races saying the N-word as a joke. In Tangerine, the white characters, Chester and Dinah, use the N-word around the Black women in the film, and they call an Armenian cab driver the N-word, but their use of the N-word doesn’t go mentioned or anything. I remember one time I was in the car with a bunch of my friends (I was the only Black person in the car) and “Holy Grail” by Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z came on. I and the friends started off having a grand old time singing to Justin Timberlake’s intro, but there is a verse where Jay-Z uses the N-word over and over again, and my friends sung along without censoring the word, giggling as they said it, like “Oh my gosh, this word is so fun to say!” I was uncomfortable, but I was afraid that I would come off as being overly sensitive if I told them that I wasn’t ok with hearing them use the word, so I looked out the window in silence, pretending to not care. One of the girls in the car asked if I was ok, and I told her I was fine. I’ve moved on since then, but I just wanted to mention it because I thought of that moment as I was watching the movie.

Ok, I’m pretty tired, so I’m going to wrap it up and just end things right here. I’ll probably have more thoughts about the movie that I want to share over the course of the week, but I’m going to take a break. In short, if you haven’t seen American Honey, it’s a really good movie.

American Honey. 2016. Written and directed by Andrea Arnold. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout, drug/ alcohol abuse– all involving teens.

Mavis, part 2

INT, MARK’S CAR: Herbie Hancock’s “Sleep Like a Child” is playing on Mark’s Spotify playlist in the car and Mavis looks out the window as they keep driving. They pull up to Mark’s house. Mavis gets out of the car. Joyce and the kids are waiting outside. Soft country music plays as Joyce hugs Mavis, who cries.

INT, DINNER TABLE: Mark is cleaning and washing the dishes and Mavis is sitting at the table, eating the leftover beef stew that Mark cooked for dinner.

MAVIS: Why didn’t you ever become a chef?

She licks her fingers and continues to dig in. This is some darn good beef stew. She takes a bite out of the lemon meringue pie that Lily, Joyce and Mark’s 12-year-old daughter, made.

MAVIS: My gosh, Joyce is a BAKER!

Mark chuckles.

MARK: Lily made that actually.

Mavis puts down her fork and gives Mark a surprised look.

MARK: But Joyce helped her.

Mavis shrugs and continues to take massive bites out of the pie, alternating between the pie and the beef stew. As Mark washes the dishes, Ella Fitzgerald croons softly on his Spotify playlist. Mavis takes a sip of her Budweiser beer.

MAVIS: So, um, how’s family life been?

MARK: Oh, you know. It’s been going. Taking the kids to school, helping Lily and Max with their homework. Joyce and I are going to visit her grandparents in South Korea next week, so that should be nice.

MAVIS: Oh, wow.

MARK: Yeah, um…hey, I know you don’t want to answer this, but have you gone to talk with someone yet?

Mavis stops eating, then gets up and starts washing the dishes, ignoring Mark’s question. He wants to know if she has sought professional help for her PTSD after the abuse (her uncle sexually assaulted her as a child.)

MARK: Mavis…

MAVIS: Mark, you’ve been up all day. I can wash the dishes. It’s the least I can do.

MARK: Mavis….

MAVIS: Mark, I’ve got this.

Mark grabs her arm and Mavis recoils. Once again, she is back to being that scared 14-year-old kid again, seeing Uncle Robert restraining her with his arm as she fought to get away from him. Mark realizes what he did.

MARK: Mavis, I am so sorry.

Mavis grabs her coat and proceeds to leave.

MAVIS: Thank you, Mark, but I don’t deserve–

MARK: MAVIS!

MAVIS: Quiet! You’ll wake the kids.

Mark looks around in distress, then says in a quiet voice.

MARK: You can stay. I won’t touch you anymore.

Mavis steps away from the door.

MARK: There’s room down here if you want to sleep. I will keep the door locked.

Mavis nods, then surrenders. Mark goes upstairs to grab her blankets and pillows. She wants to refuse because she doesn’t think she deserves his kindness, but she is too tired to fight. She needs someone she can trust, and Mark has always supported her.

Mark comes down and unfolds the bed sheets for Mavis on the couch. He props up pillows for her. She lies down and feels like she is in heaven. The pillows are soft and feel like clouds, and she wraps the warm heavy blanket around her. He goes back into the kitchen and finishes putting up the dishes. Mavis sleeps peacefully that evening.

INT, SATURDAY MORNING, BREAKFAST. Mavis is in the kitchen, helping Joyce and the kids make breakfast. Mavis was never a great cook, and she ends up making the first few pancakes all runny and undone.

LILY: I’ll help you, Ms. Mavis!

Lily pours fresh pancake batter onto the griddle and waits for 2-3 minutes before flipping them over.

MAX: I wanna flip them! Me, me, me!!!

JOYCE: One at a time, you two!

Joyce shakes her head at Mavis and laughs. Mavis laughs, too.

By the time she is done, the pancakes have come out fluffy and done. Mavis watches in fascination as Lily and Max take turns flipping the pancakes. It’s pretty darn cute.

MAX: I wanna serve Ms. Mavis breakfast!

MAVIS: Oh, it’s fine, I—

But before she can refuse, Max and Lily have started setting the table and Lily h put a porcelain vase with an assortment of beautiful flowers at the center of the table.

JOYCE: Let me call Daddy down for breakfast.

She goes to the staircase and calls from below.

JOYCE: Mark, honey! Your pancakes are ready!

She hears no answer. She goes upstairs and finds he is not in his room. She lets out a blood-curdling scream and rushes downstairs. Mavis is quickly snapped out of her brief moment of bliss.

JOYCE: Mavis! Call the police! Mark is missing!

(Cue suspenseful music.)

Mavis grabs the landline and dials the local sheriff.

SHERIFF: Cook County Police Department, this is Cherylynn.

MAVIS: Hi, um…my brother…

Mavis starts crying.

CHERYLYNN: Ma’am, I can’t understand you.

Mavis finally snaps.
MAVIS: MY BROTHER! HE’S MISSING!

INT, COOK COUNTY POLICE DEPARTMENT. Mavis, Joyce, Max and Lily have been waiting for several hours. Lily is reading a book and Alex is crocheting. Joyce looks up at the ceiling and closes her eyes, tears streaming down her face. Mark comes out of the sheriff’s office and his nice white T-shirt is stained with blood. His face is covered in blood. Joyce gasps and screams. Mavis struggles to breathe. Did her brother kill someone?

MARK: Mavis, I can explain. Joyce, please go home with the kids. I’ll tell you everything when you get home.

JOYCE: No, I am not “going home,” Mark, until you tell me what the hell is going on!

Max and Lily stare in silence at their father. Mark takes a deep breath.

MARK: I rode down to town an hour away and found Uncle Robert.

Mavis freezes.

Mavis: I thought he was dead. No one in the family had spoken of him for years.

MARK: Not yet. He was talking outside with his buddies outside a bar. I went outside and froze when I saw who it was.

FLASHBACK, EXT, 10:00 PM, DESERTED LOOKING TOWN. Mark is walking and comes across Uncle Robert talking with a group of men outside a bar. Mark freezes. Uncle Robert turns and gives him a nasty look. He is 50, divorced and an alcoholic.

UNCLE ROBERT: What’re you lookin’ at, motherfucker?

Mark goes straight up to Uncle Robert and knocks the daylights out of him. Uncle Robert’s face gets bloodier until Mark has beaten it a pulp.

MARK: You got away with what you did to my sister! I will never forgive you!

He turns away and hears a click. Uncle Robert has aimed his pistol at Mark and has a menacing look on his face. Mark takes a step forward and laughs.

MARK: You may seem scary, but you’re nothing but a coward. A piece of shit. I will never forgive you. And neither will Mavis.

Uncle Robert sighs and pants, then gives Mark a twisted smile and laughs.

UNCLE ROBERT: No one has caught me yet. Why should you be the first?

Mark tries to find a distraction.

MARK: Hey, police! Behind you!

Uncle Robert turns and before he knows it, Mark grabs the pistol and shoots Robert in the stomach. Twice. Blood pools around Robert’s body. Robert struggles to crack and smile before closing his eyes.

ROBERT: Tell Mavis I said–

He is dead.

Now Mark really hears sirens. The police are coming for him.

Movie Review: 50/50

I watched a movie a couple of days ago called 50/50. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Bryce Dallas Howard, Angelica Huston and Anna Kendrick. I really love these actors; I have seen their other movies, and they are all really good in their movies. I really loved Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days of Summer. This movie was pretty serious; it’s categorized as a comedy-drama, but it’s about a 27-year-old man named Adam who finds out he has cancer. It is based on the director’s own experience with finding out he had a rare form of spinal cancer in his 20s. (I also looked up Will Reiser, the director, on Wikipedia and I found out he attended Hampshire College, which is really cool because I took a couple of courses at Hampshire during my time in college and the people there are pretty cool.)

Even though he is a healthy person, Adam receives the cancer diagnosis, and it shatters his world. When he first tells his friend, Kyle (played by Seth Rogen), Kyle acts as if he is going to be okay and that the cancer is no big deal, but as the movie went on, I saw how Adam’s cancer diagnosis took a hit to his self-esteem and made him question his existence in life. It was also hard for his parents to find out about the cancer, especially because Adam was so young and his mom was already taking care of his dad, who has Alzheimer’s. When they are at the dinner table, Adam tries to prepare his mom for the news, and she laughs it off at first, saying “How bad can this really be?” But when he finally tells her he has cancer, she goes silent and then she cries when she finds out because she doesn’t want to lose her son. Adam also sees a therapist named Katherine, who tries to help him process all of the intense emotions that have come with hearing about his diagnosis and going through chemotherapy. At first, Adam doesn’t want to open up and he thinks that Katherine is only trying to make him feel better and cheer him up, but that what she is doing isn’t effective. However, Adam begins to reflect on what is important to him in life after going through chemotherapy. He is still friends with Kyle, and Kyle has his back the whole time, but it’s really hard for Kyle to see his friend going through this intense battle with illness. The scene where Kyle finds out that Adam’s girlfriend, Rachael, cheated on him was pretty sad, but it also showed me how hard it was for both Adam and Rachael when he found out he had cancer. They hadn’t had sex in several weeks and she felt like they were growing apart. She is late picking him up from the hospital one evening and she apologizes, but at this point he is too worn out to hear about her apologies. Kyle goes on a date and finds Rachael making out with another guy, and when Rachael comes home to Adam and pretends like nothing happened, Kyle comes in and tells Adam that Rachael is cheating on him. Rachael is at a loss of words, and Kyle kicks her out of the house. Rachael tries to come back, but Kyle tells Adam that she needs to leave and that they put her box of stuff outside the house. Rachael tries to reason with Adam that it’s been really hard for her lately and that no one picked up her art at her exhibition. At first, I thought Adam was going to feel sorry for her and want to get back together with her, but then Rachael starts kissing Adam and then he realizes that she cheated on him and he tells her to leave. Kyle then starts taking Adam to parties, celebrating his newly single status, and he tells Adam to use his cancer diagnosis as a tool to pick up girls, but it ends up not working out well. They go out with two girls, and one of them is curious about Adam’s cancer and asks if she could touch his bald head. He lets her, and they go home, but while Adam and the girl are having sex, Adam feels a lot of pain and is too tired from the chemotherapy to have sex, so the girl ends up leaving.

Adam’s cancer diagnosis gets him to start thinking seriously about what he wants out of life. In one hard-hitting scene, Kyle is drunk and wants to drive Adam home, but Adam insists on driving Kyle even though he neither knows how to drive nor has a driver’s license. Kyle at first doubts him, but then he lets him drive since Adam doesn’t have long to live. Adam almost gets them killed and almost hits other cars. Kyle finally has him pull over and shouts at him for his erratic driving and Adam has him get out of the car. Then Adam screams and then breaks down crying because he doesn’t have long to live, and nothing in his life is going as planned. He feels hopeless, but what helps is him calling Katherine to let her know that he is really not feeling okay. This was a total contrast to when he first met her because at first, when she tried to get him to open up, he didn’t want to talk about how he was feeling and insisted he was fine, even when he was going through a very intense chemotherapy process that made him feel like hell. But he realizes that it’s okay to reach out to people and admit that you aren’t okay. Katherine and Adam develop feelings for each other, and Adam begins to feel like he can trust her because she gives him space to feel what he is feeling. Adam also realizes that Kyle is also trying his best to support him because he goes back home and sees that Kyle has been reading a book called Facing Cancer Together, which shows that even though Adam thought Kyle was only focused on sleeping with women and getting high on weed with Adam, he really was doing his best to try and understand what Adam was going through and was willing to do the work needed to support Adam. I thought about this movie called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which is about a young man in high school named Greg who doesn’t have a lot of close friends but ends up befriending a young woman named Rachel, who has leukemia. At first, she doesn’t want him around, but as the movie goes on, they develop a strong bond and he and his friend, Earl, support Rachel through her battle with leukemia. It was a pretty sad movie, but it reminded me that facing illness is a battle that you can’t fight alone. I thought about this chapter I read in a book called The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace by philosopher Daisaku Ikeda. The chapter “Facing Illness” talks about illness and death from a Buddhist perspective, and Ikeda says that “illness teaches us many things. It makes us look death in the face and think about the meaning of life. It makes us realize just how precious life is.” (p. 255) I haven’t battled cancer, but I have battled mental illness, specifically clinical depression, and honestly, depression really forced me to look at how I was living my life and got me to examine honestly how I wanted to live my life moving forward. I had thought that I was so useless, that my life had no value or meaning, but through getting professional treatment and engaging in my spiritual practice of Buddhism, I have learned that my life has so much profound meaning and that I can encourage others who are battling depression that it’s okay to ask for help. For so many years I was reluctant to see therapy, to get on medication, but I am realizing that those things are important to taking care of my mental health. In the book I highlighted this one quote in the chapter that really encouraged me: “Though one may be ill, this has no bearing on the inherent nobility, dignity and beauty of one’s life. Everyone, without exception, is an infinitely precious and noble treasure.” (The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace, part 1, revised edition, page 254) I had to read this quote often because having depression made me feel like my life was worthless, that I wasn’t going to be able to live my life because I have depression, but I learned that I’m not the only one struggling and that it’s okay to ask for help. I realized after a certain point that it wasn’t safe for me to continue tackling depression without seeking professional help, and that getting professional help or treatment didn’t make me weak. I love reading the “Facing Illness” chapter in the book because it reminds me that my life is still worthy of respect and valuable even though I have this depression that is telling me that my life doesn’t mean anything. It’s still a battle, but I am hoping to encourage more people through sharing about my mental health challenges more often.

Another part of 50/50 I liked was when Adam made friends in the hospital who were also battling cancer. The first time he meets Mitch and Alan, Alan offers Adam cannabis-laced macaroons and Adam eats a few, and he finds himself going down a hallway with this dazed look on his face and it seems like he is heaven, even as he passes all these people on stretchers and the nurses and doctors running through the halls on these stretchers. Adam looks back and then starts laughing, but then he snaps back to reality, and he is back at home throwing up in a toilet. He develops a great friendship with Mitch and Adam, but then when he finds Mitch is not with him and Alan, Alan tells him that Mitch died. It’s during this scene that Adam has to grapple with the reality that he is dealing with a life-threatening illness, and it makes him feel depressed and wondering why he is still living. Even though Kyle at the beginning was telling Adam, “Oh you’re young, you’ll be fine,” Adam realizes that he can’t take life for granted anymore because he only has a 50/50 chance of living. The pivotal scene comes when Adam and his parents are at the doctor after Adam has gone through chemotherapy, and they are hearing the news of whether the tumor has gotten less or worse. The doctor tells him that the cancer has gotten bad and that they need to do a surgery on Adam to get the tumor out, but that it’s a life-threatening surgery. Adam gets the surgery, and right before he goes in, his mom hugs him and doesn’t want to let him go, but the doctors pull her away and lead Adam into the surgery room. It was pretty painful to see Adam’s parents being unable to spend more time with their son before the surgery because they didn’t know whether he was going to come out alive after the life-threatening surgery. Thankfully, he survives, but that scene was pretty intense. It was easy for me to think that because I was young, I didn’t have to worry about illness and dying, and I thought very much like Kyle, this attitude of “Oh, you’re young, you’ll beat cancer.” But many of my close friends who were older passed away, and it really made me face my own mortality, the inevitable reality that someday I, too, was going to die, so I started to study more about the Buddhist perspective on life and death. Reading this philosophy made me want to take my life more seriously, and I started to get more serious about what goals and dreams I wanted to accomplish. I have started to appreciate my life on a much deeper level, too.

Movie Review: The Miracle Club

Content warning: I briefly talk about abortion in this review since the movie touches on abortion.

I was browsing on Netflix what movie to watch, and I came across this movie called The Miracle Club. A few months ago I heard Dame Maggie Smith was in another movie, and I was like, What?!? Fuck yes!!! The woman has had a very long career as an actress: she was Professor McGonagall, she was the Dowager Countess, and so many other roles. So, I was very pumped she would be starring in a movie with Kathy Bates, another great actress. (I loved her as Molly Brown in Titanic) I had not known much about the movie before watching it, but it was such a great film overall. The acting was great, and it made me want to visit Ireland again.

The film also talks about some heavy subjects as well. It takes place in the 1960s and it’s about a woman named Chrissie who returns to Ireland after her mother’s death. Chrissie travels with two older women, Eileen and Lily, and a younger woman named Dolly, who formed a group called The Miracles as part of a talent show. They get the opportunity to go to Lourdes, France, because they believe that a pilgrimage to this place will help them heal from their problems. Eileen has a lump in her breast, Dolly’s son, Daniel, cannot speak, so she hopes that he will talk on the pilgrimage, and Lily wants to go because she has always wanted to go. However, Eileen and Lily bear a grudge against Chrissie for not coming back to Ireland until after her mother died. While on their trip to Lourdes, Chrissie tries to patch things up with Eileen and Lily, but it is difficult at first. However, the relationship between these four women is tested when they finally get into the baths at Lourdes. Dolly tries to get her son to get into the baths to try to cure him of his inability to speak, but he refuses to get in. I appreciate that they didn’t just magically cure him because it showed me that Daniel was going to talk when he was ready, and that Dolly didn’t need to feel like a failure just because her son wasn’t able to talk. Dolly feels like she failed as a mother, and she beats herself up. She also confesses to Eileen, Lily and Chrissie that she tried to abort Daniel when he was in the womb. Chrissie ends up being able to relate to Dolly because she tried to abort her child when she was pregnant. It is such a deep and profound moment between these two women, especially because Lily and Eileen made a lot of assumptions about Chrissie and were angry that she didn’t come back to Ireland. Lily has a moment when she is about to go into the baths and is sitting with Chrissie, and she says she won’t ever forgive herself for the grudge she bore against Chrissie, but Chrissie forgives her. Even though the four women found that the pilgrimage to Lourdes didn’t work these miracles they had wanted (Eileen still had to go to a doctor for her lump, it wasn’t magically cured by getting in the water) the priest who goes with them, Father Dermot, tells them that the real purpose of the trip was to have faith even if there weren’t miracles. This kind of reminds me of Buddhism because there is no magic; we bring out our Buddhahood as we are. Buddhahood isn’t a far-off destination we need to escape to; it is present in our immediate realities. It’s why I have to chant every day, because I have to understand that my enlightenment, my absolute happiness, is within my life, not outside of me.

I love the part where Dolly, Lily and Eileen leave their husbands to fend for themselves when they leave for Lourdes. The men are so used to letting the wives take after the kids and clean, so of course they are resistant to them going off to Lourdes. It kind of made me think of this movie I saw called Bad Moms, but of course this movie was set in 1967 and they were going on a trip with a priest, so they couldn’t get too wild like the women in Bad Moms. But it’s kind of similar to the movie Bad Moms because when Amy decides she is not doing anyone’s dirty work, she has her son and daughter figure things out on their own rather than doing their homework and making them breakfast. Kiki also learns to set boundaries with her husband and lets him take care of the kids for a while (of course, because he made her take care of the kids all the time, it is stressful for him at first and he is always calling her for help) In The Miracle Club, there is a scene where Eileen’s husband, Frank, go gets the groceries and he accidentally drops them everywhere and is having trouble picking them up. A woman in the neighborhood comes along and helps him and makes some comment about how now he knows what it’s like when his wife has to go out and get groceries and cook all day. When Dolly is away, her husband tries to change their kid’s nappy with disastrous results. And Lily’s husband sits in bed drinking tea and eating crumpets alone in bed. Through their pilgrimage, these four women become closer than ever.

Overall, I really liked this movie. For some reason, I totally forgot that it was set in the 1960s. I somehow thought it was set in the modern day. A couple of other great movies that take place in Ireland are The Banshees of Inisherin and Belfast. The former is a dark comedy that was pretty hard to watch at times, but it resonated with me because the main character experiences depression and loneliness, although I am grateful that today I can go to therapy and talk about my anxiety and depression with someone. Back then they called it “despair” and there probably wasn’t therapy or medication one could take to manage their depression (the film is set in the 1920s on a remote island, and this of course was way before cell phones and computers were around) Belfast was intense but a really touching film about a boy growing up during the 1969 riots in Northern Ireland. It also has Van Morrison’s music in it, which I love. I also really love Laura Linney’s acting in The Miracle Club. Several years ago, I watched a movie called The Nanny Diaries, and she played a really mean character named Mrs. X. Mrs. X treats Scarlett Johansson’s character, Nanny, like total dirt and Mr. X is a scumbag who makes inappropriate advances towards Nanny. I guess that is what I love about watching movies, though, because actors are so versatile and can play a variety of roles. Also, this is a tangent, but for some reason Dolly’s character (the very beautiful young one with the brown hair in an updo) kind of looked to me like the American singer Lana del Rey for some reason. Every time she was on screen, I just thought, “Wait, is that Lana del Rey?” and then I realized “Oh wait no, that’s a different person who just looks very similar to Lana del Rey.”

The Miracle Club. Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan. Rated PG-13.

TV Show Review: Succession (continued)

I haven’t finished watching the show Succession yet, but it is really good so far. I am currently on the second season. I was watching the Golden Globes and saw it had received a lot of awards and nominations, and so I became curious about the show. I was seeing it advertised on commercials for HBO, and so I finally decided to watch it a couple of weeks ago. And to be honest, I am hooked. The acting is so good. I also enjoy satire, so I really love this show. I was kind of nervous to begin watching it because I have a lot of anxiety around vomit scenes in movies and TV, and so I read some trigger warnings for the show and saw there was a vomit scene at the beginning of the first episode. However, because I had read about it beforehand, I knew when it was coming so I was able to close my eyes. And I am glad that my impending fear of this scene didn’t prevent me from watching the full show, because I would have missed out. I also really love the music in the show. I have heard Nicholas Britell’s music in movies, namely Moonlight and Vice, and especially the score for Moonlight was absolutely brilliant. I love the opening theme music for the show. It has these strings and the piano and I also love the percussive beats. It gives the show its theme, which is power, and a very Wall-Street New York City sort of mood (the show does take place in New York City).

I really love the acting in this show. I haven’t seen many of Brian Cox’s previous works, but he really acted the heck out of his role as Logan Roy. Even though the show is a drama, it incorporates elements of humor. And the dialogue is really witty. Greg Hirsch and Tom Wambsgans have an interesting dynamic. Tom is from the Midwest, but he marries into the Roy family and becomes wealthy. Greg, however, is always asking his mom for money and doesn’t have his own place to live. He also has a job being a mascot at a Waystar theme park (Waystar is the media conglomerate that the Roy family owns) but he does marijuana before his gig and then vomits, getting him fired from the park (if anyone is squeamish about vomit scenes, it is around the part where Greg is walking through the theme park in his mascot costume. I closed my eyes around that part.) His mom has him reach out to Logan, who is his great-uncle, and so he visits the Roy family. He is an outsider at first because even though his mom belongs to the Roy family, he sticks out like a sore thumb because he comes to the father’s birthday celebration wearing a baggy jacket and worn shoes and he has a very friendly personality. Tom gangs up on him and makes fun of him for being the new kid to join the party, and he continues to bully Greg. There was one scene in particular where he approaches Greg in the break room in the office building, and finds Greg stuffing cookies in a dog poop bag, and he insults him for wearing the wrong shoes and using a dog poop bag to put his snacks in. Greg is intimidated by Tom but in season 2 I really saw how Tom bottled up so many of his insecurities and that he was also dealing with a lot of his own personal stuff and needed someone to take it out on. There is a scene where Tom is having dinner with Shiv, Roman and Tabitha, and Tom talks about his work in the ATN news department and how he is digitizing its algorithm, and they all are happy for him, but Roman then pokes fun at Tom’s humble roots as a Midwesterner who grew up in the corn fields and how funny his suits look. Shiv also joins in on the fun, but Tom tells her to fuck off because he is really hurt that everyone is making fun of him. Tom wanted to show that he had moved up from being an average person and wanted to show people that he was an upper class person with status.

There is another scene that always sticks out for me, and it’s when Greg and Tom are talking in the office, and Greg says that he got his first paycheck and Tom congratulates him and says they should go out to eat. Greg is super happy, and he suggests that they go to California Pizza Kitchen. Tom snorts and giggles and tells him that California Pizza Kitchen isn’t great food, and Greg tries to reason that they make his favorite dish, cajun chicken linguine, and Tom makes fun of Greg for having what he calls an “undereducated palate,” and he tells Greg that he will take him out and teach him how to be rich. To be honest, my first reaction to Tom dissing California Pizza Kitchen was “WTF?!?” And as I was drafting this blog post and scribbling my thoughts on the first season, I wrote a long paragraph about how I would have loved to go with Greg to eat at California Pizza Kitchen. To be honest, I am lactose intolerant and vegan, so the last time I went to California Pizza Kitchen in 2019 I got a pizza that didn’t have cheese (it was pretty good, not going to lie, and the crust was slammin’. Also, I actually was in California eating at California Pizza Kitchen so it was pretty special and made me feel like a little kid again, which I loved. It was a dream come true.) As an ovo-lacto pescetarian kid, California Pizza Kitchen was my jam, and we went a lot when I was younger. The split pea soup was my favorite, as was the cheese pizza and the ice cream sundae for dessert (oh, and don’t forget the Shirley Temple!) So when Greg suggested California Pizza Kitchen, I was pretty pumped, and I kind of deflated when Tom dissed California Pizza Kitchen. Tom ends up taking Greg out to this fancy restaurant where they eat roast songbirds. Greg is really hesitant to eat the songbirds, but Tom has him put his napkin over his face as they eat. Early on, Greg’s grandpa, Ewan, takes Greg to get noodle soup at a restaurant downtown, and Ewan loads his son up on soup, so by the time Greg gets to the fancy restaurant with Tom, he is full and he tells Tom that his grandpa took him out to dinner already. There is another scene where Tom calls Greg and tells him he has an assignment for him to do over the Thanksgiving break, but Greg is driving in the car with Ewan. Greg tells Tom he is driving with his grandpa so he can’t come into the office to complete the assignment for Tom (Ewan lives in Canada, so Greg has to drive from Canada to New York for the Roy family Thanksgiving) and Tom insults Ewan over speakerphone. Ewan gives Greg a side-eye like “What did he just say to me?!?” and Greg is fumbling over his words, and Tom is telling him to hurry up. Ewan is not as enthused as Greg is to see the Roy family, and there is one scene that evening where Logan is showing off these veteran medals he collects, and Ewan points out that unlike him, Roy never served in the war. Ewan calls out the Roy family for being dishonest and corrupt people. Honestly, I gave the same side-eye that Ewan gave to Greg when Tom said, “Fuck your grandpa, Greg!” Like “Sir, you do not cuss out James Cromwell!” (James Cromwell is the actor who plays Ewan. I knew of him from the movie Babe: Pig in the City. Also, I just found out it’s James Cromwell’s birthday today.)

Greg is really inexperienced, and he wants to be part of the higher ups, but he hasn’t gotten there yet, and he still has to earn Logan Roy’s respect to get to the top. The Roy kids also pick on Greg and ignore him. When they are eating at the restaurant, Ewan warns Greg that he needs to steer clear of this family because they are a bunch of vipers who will eat him alive. However, Greg continues to get involved with the Roy family and curry favor with Logan so he can get out of working in the amusement parks division at Waystar Royco. But when he goes to Hungary with the family for one of Logan’s business deals, he almost gets in trouble because early in the episode he spoke with this biographer named Michelle Pantsil, who was planning to write a biography about the Roy family. Greg is nervous and tells her that he doesn’t want to disclose any information, but Michelle tells him he should have told her when he signed an agreement to meet with her that he wanted to remain an anonymous source. On the plane to Hungary, Logan is scouting out the person who spoke to Pantsil, and Tom is even scared of Logan at this point. During dinner, where everyone is eating the roast boars they hunted and killed, Logan forces everyone to play a cruel game called Boar on the Floor, where he has Greg, Tom and Karl fight each other for sausages and calls them “piggies.” He does this so that someone in the room will confess that they spoke to the biographer. I feel really bad, to be honest, that I initially thought the scene was funny, because when I read an article about the actors’ experiences with this scene, it was humiliating and stressful for all the actors to go through this Boar on the Floor scene. There have been times when I have laughed at someone for going through some problem, and then I go through my own experiences of humiliation and shame and realize, Wow, feeling these things isn’t fun for anyone. I really love reading Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown because she unpacks a lot of these emotional experiences that humans can feel at any time, and it really has expanded my view on emotions beyond just sad, happy, mad, and glad. There is a part in the book where she talks about experiences we have when we fall short, and one of these experiences is the feeling of humiliation, which is defined as “the intensely painful feeling that we’ve been unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or put down and that our identity has been demeaned or devalued.” (Atlas of the Heart, page 147) Reading this entry on humiliation helped me understand why the Boar on the Floor game was so terrible for everyone, and why many viewers found the scene unsettling. The day after Logan forces them to play that game, Tom goes to breakfast and says good morning to some of the people at breakfast, as if he is hoping to leave that experience in the past, but people chuckle when he comes in and the room is really silent because everyone is thinking about how horrible that game was. One of the people there that night, Syd, says good morning to Tom and offers him some breakfast sausage but he quietly declines. Greg is sitting by himself, processing the humiliation he felt after having an old man throw sausages at him and call him a “piggie,” but Tom joins him for breakfast because he, too, is feeling humiliated after what he had to go through. Greg thanks him for not telling Logan about him meeting with Pantsil, and Tom quietly rubs his arm in a quiet gesture of sweetness. Of course, he doesn’t suddenly become nice to Greg after that and he continues to be mean to him, but it was that one scene that showed me that both of them went through that painful experience of humiliation, so now that Tom knew how it felt to be made fun of, he could understand how Greg felt.

Movie Review: To Leslie

I just finished watching the movie To Leslie, a movie directed by Michael Morris and starring English actress Andrea Riseborough as Leslie, a divorced alcoholic woman who lives in rural Texas and is estranged from her son, James. She is living through poverty and homelessness and struggling to make her way through the struggles of life. I didn’t know much about the film before I saw it, I just kept reading the news that its nomination for the Oscars last year created a serious stir of controversy because there was a grassroots campaign for the film that it seems violated the rules for Oscar nominations, and also that it wasn’t fair that Andrea Riseborough, who is white, got nominated while Black actresses like Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler didn’t get nominated for their performances. I am not going to pretend like this part of the controversy isn’t important because Hollywood has a very long history of racism and even with a greater diversity of stories from directors who are Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian, Hollywood and the Academy I am sure still have a long way to go in addressing issues of diversity. I haven’t read enough about the controversy to form an articulate, well-formed opinion about it, but that was how I first heard about the movie was because of the news surrounding its nomination.

The movie, To Leslie, takes place in rural west Texas. At the beginning they show pictures of Leslie, from her childhood to her teenage years to the birth of her son James, to that moment when she won the lottery. One significant moment in that montage shows her bruised eye up close, and it implies that her marriage was an abusive marriage and that her husband was abusive towards her. The song “Here I Am” by Dolly Parton is playing during the montage of photos. There is footage of Leslie on television when she won the lottery and she is screaming and cheering in excitement while her son, James, looks quiet and subdued and uncomfortable to be on national television. Six years later, Leslie is curled up in a motel by herself and a man pounds on the door, telling her she needs to leave. She gathers her belongings and cusses out the manager and everyone at the motel, and leaves. She contacts her son, James, who she hasn’t spoken to in years, and he reluctantly allows her to stay with him. He gives her a condition though: no drinking. He lets her stay long enough so she can figure out a plan for what to do with her life. Leslie promises to not drink like she used to, but when James is at work, she goes through his drawers to look for cash so she can get alcohol. At first, things seem to be okay, and one night Leslie is smoking a joint with James and his coworker at the construction site, Darren. Darren informs James that something happened to Leslie, and James comes home to find empty liquor bottles under his mattress. When James finds out that his neighbor allowed Leslie to come over to his apartment and get alcohol from him, he beats the guy up and then screams at his mom for breaking the rules and drinking when he told her not to.

He threatens to contact Dutch and Nancy, two people in their Texas town who don’t like Leslie, and he has Leslie stay with them. Dutch and Nancy let Leslie stay with them, but they aren’t happy about it because Leslie left her son and wasted her lottery money. Dutch tells her she needs to stay and help with painting and household chores and needs to stop drinking. Leslie promises to work, but then she goes out to bars and drinks heavily. She is lonely and feels ostracized by the people in her life, and there is one scene where Dutch and Nancy are drinking around a campfire and everyone is talking trash about Leslie, but Leslie is cooped up alone in the house because everyone is gossiping loudly about her drinking and her past. She overhears Dutch and Nancy loudly fighting about Leslie’s alcoholism and her fraught relationship with her son. When she goes to a bar, she flirts with a man at the bar who is talking with a buddy of his. She is trying to get a conversation going and asks him to dance, but he is uncomfortable with her being drunk and rejects her advances, leaving her to dance alone. She also finds out from the bar owner that the picture they had of her winning the lottery was taken down, and so she leaves and gives the guy the finger. When she comes back to Dutch and Nancy’s place, they have locked the front door so that she cannot get in and they left her suitcase on the porch. She leaves and has to go find another place to stay. Pete, Dutch and Nancy’s friend, offers her a ride and buys her dinner. While she is eating in the car, he makes a crack about her drinking and tries to make sexual advances towards her, and she runs out of the car and leaves. She happens upon a motel and sleeps outside the motel. Sweeney, the motel manager (Marc Maron) kicks her off the premises, and Leslie goes. However, she leaves her suitcase behind, and Sweeney and his coworker, Royal (Andre Royo) go through the suitcase and figure out whether they should even bother giving it back to her now that she is gone. However, she comes back looking for the suitcase and Sweeney offers her a job at the motel. At first, Leslie doesn’t seem to show much promise. She sleeps in and shows up late, and she smokes and drinks frequently while working. Royal and Sweeney are frustrated with her, but they don’t give up on her. In fact, they are literally the only people who have not given up on her. All of Leslie’s friends have deserted her and her son kicked her out, so she doesn’t have a lot of people to talk with. Leslie goes to the bar and reflects on how she is living her life, and she also visits the old house that she and James used to live in. It is inhabited by a new family, and when she comes in, the husband who lives in the house is uncomfortable with her being there and she reminisces about the days when she would cook and clean in the house and how comfortable and nice her life was in it.

Sweeney finds Leslie and picks her up and takes her back to the motel, and Leslie resolves to quit drinking cold-turkey. This is incredibly difficult and she suffers from withdrawal. She vomits frequently and while eating dinner with Sweeney, her hands and body shake and she cannot keep her food down. However, she is determined to go through with her recovery. Sweeney opens up about his personal life to Leslie and doesn’t prod her about her alcoholism, and he tells her that he has a daughter and a granddaughter, and that he left his wife because she was an alcoholic. He apologizes for wanting to know personal details about her drinking and invites her to a party that the whole Texas town is going to be at. When Leslie hears that everyone in the town is going to be there, she declines but Sweeney insists on her going. She goes and at first she is having fun, and she gets to play carnival games with Sweeney’s daughter and his granddaughter, Bernice and Betsy. However, while Leslie and Royal are sitting and watching everyone dancing, Pete’s kids run up to her and asks her if it’s true that she really won the lottery. This brings up bad memories for Leslie, and Royal shoos them away when he finds out that they are Pete’s kids and that Pete and Nancy has been gossiping to them about Leslie. Leslie confronts Nancy and Pete when Pete gets atop the table and announces in glee that he won the lottery. Leslie tells him that he isn’t special just because he won the lottery and that he’s going to waste all the money anyway, and Nancy takes several nasty jabs at Leslie’s drinking and her leaving her son. Sweeney tries to break up the fight but Leslie decides to leave the gathering. Sweeney begs her to not go by herself, but Leslie refuses to stay and leaves.

Sweeney finds Leslie in her room and tells her he got a tape of old footage of her winning the lottery. He expects her to feel good about it and to regain her confidence, as a way to remind her that she is not the low life that Pete and Nancy made her out to be. However, watching the video makes Leslie feel ashamed, and she tells Sweeney to leave and cusses him out. She quits her job at the motel and leaves. She goes to a bar and a guy who finds her attractive goes up and starts talking to her, and she is suspicious about his motives and asks him if she really finds something in her or if he just sees her as a one stop shop. He backs off and tells her that she doesn’t have to be interested in him, and she leaves the bar. Nancy and Pete come into the bar, and Sweeney is looking for Leslie, and Nancy and Pete make some snide comment about Leslie and Sweeney punches Pete, prompting the owner to break up the fight. The bartender threatens to throw out Pete and Nancy and the guy who fell in love with Leslie offers to beat them up. Leslie sleeps in a run down ice cream shop that Royal’s dad used to own, and she peers through the window and finds Royal dancing and howling at the night sky and Sweeney comes over and they hug after not being able to find Leslie. The next day, Sweeney finds her and Leslie tells him that she wants to renovate the ice cream shop and make it a diner, but Sweeney thinks that it will be impossible because they don’t have the finances to open up a diner. But Leslie is determined and then when she asks why Sweeney was so kind to her, Sweeney reveals it’s because he has a crush on Leslie and they share a sweet kiss. Ten months later, Royal, Sweeney and Leslie have finished building Lee’s Diner out of the ice cream shop, and they are anticipating many customers coming on opening day. However, as night falls, no one has come to the diner and Leslie gives up hope. However, she hears a knock at the door and finds Nancy arriving to dine at the restaurant. Leslie gets angry and pretends to serve Nancy, and Nancy tells her to cut the bullshit and angrily opens up about how Leslie fucked up when she left her son and made bad life choices and didn’t take responsibility for them. Leslie is pained that Nancy is bringing up her past, but she ends up thanking her and Nancy brings in James to the restaurant. Leslie breaks down in tears and serves her son dinner, and when he expresses appreciation for the meal, she breaks down and gives him a hug because she has so many regrets about what she did and she just really wants to be a good mom.

This movie’s themes reminded me of some other movies I have seen in the past. A couple of years ago, I watched a movie by A24 called The Florida Project, a film directed by Sean Baker, and it’s about a single mom named Halley who is raising her six year old daughter, Moonee, in a motel in Kissimmee, Florida, which many tourists visit because Disney World is located close by. Moonee and her friends Jancey and Scooty seem to be enjoying their lives running around and getting ice cream and playing in parks with other kids whose parents live in the motel complex. But while watching the movie, I also saw how Halley and the other adults have to face the reality of poverty and struggling to get by, and how even though the tourists have this glamorous view of Disney World, it’s not super glamorous because a lot of people in the local community struggle with poverty and other challenges. Halley also has strained relationship with her friend, who is Scooty’s mom. Scooty’s mom works at a diner, while Halley struggles to make ends meet after losing her job as a stripper. Halley’s financal situation only gets worse as the film goes on, and she has to take up sex work again to make ends meet. Ashley is unhappy with what Halley is doing and Halley beats her up. The movie showed how no magical person was ever going to save the people from poverty and that everyone was a human being who was just trying to do their best to make ends meet and take care of their kids. Bobby, the motel manager (played by Willem Dafoe) is doing his best, too, to especially keep the kids at the motel from confronting the harsh realities that the adults have to face every day. There was one particular scene in the film that shows this, and it also stuck with me because it’s a pretty hard scene to watch. The kids in the motel are playing in the park and a middle aged pedophile starts to approach the children. Bobby approaches the guy and gets him a soda and then kicks him off the premises so he doesn’t mess with the kids again. It showed me how Bobby really cared about the residents at the motel and that he is willing to do anything to help them. However, he could only really do his best. He couldn’t protect or shelter Moonee from the harsh realities of day to day life, and this is evident when agents from the Florida Department of Children and Families comes to take Moonee away from her mom after finding out that Halley was doing sex work, and Moonee goes with one of the other kids and escapes from the DCF agents. The film pulls no punches when it portrays the reality of poverty and trying to survive in a harsh world, but it also shows how the kids in the movie create value and meaning from these harsh realities. Leslie in To Leslie has big dreams of starting an ice cream shop but Sweeney wants her to be realistic about her expectations. But after the lottery winning thing fell flat and her relationships didn’t work out, Leslie wants another shot at life and to do better, and opening the diner helped her start fresh.

To Leslie also shows the challenges of living with mental illness and addiction. In a pivotal scene towards the end of the film, Leslie takes a flask of alcohol from Royal’s coat, and she sniffs the alcohol and is tempted to drink again, but she remembers the promise she made to herself and closes the bottle without drinking it. It was pretty painful watching the physical impact that withdrawal had on Leslie, but as someone who has listened to experiences of people who recover from addiction, I have learned that the process of recovery is not easy at all and when someone gets sober, it’s a very major milestone for a lot of people. I haven’t struggled with addiction, but I have struggled with mental illness and loneliness, and it can feel painful when you feel that you have to battle your suffering alone, and it can bring up a lot of feelings of guilt and shame. You know you should reach out for help, but that guilt and shame holds you back so you tell people you don’t need help and suffer alone. I think that is why I had to see a mental health professional at some point because I could not face my anxiety and depression alone. Being in that dark place where you fight your inner negativity can be scary, and it can honestly feel like you are alone and don’t have anyone around to help you even when people offer to help. I also didn’t feel comfortable telling a lot of people about my mental health because I felt ashamed, so it helped to find someone who was licensed to deal with these issues and encourage me to do the inner work needed to look honestly at myself and realize that my anxiety and depression doesn’t define me and that I can overcome it with little baby steps each day. Seeing how Leslie pulled through and was able to reconcile with Nancy and her son actually gave me hope after seeing how she struggled throughout the movie. Sweeney and Royal don’t initially warm up to Leslie after seeing her struggles with addiction and how she treats her job at the motel but they also deal with their own stuff, too, and when they open up to Leslie about what they go through, it gives Leslie the courage to keep going because she has a couple of friends who she can trust to come back to even when it seems that she can’t pull through.

I also thought of the movie, Moonlight. In Moonlight, a young Black man named Chiron lives with a mother who struggles with addiction (Naomie Harris played her so well) and she depends emotionally and financially on her son, while also ostracizing him for being gay. The emotional abuse and homophobia Chiron suffered as a child and teenager follows him into adulthood, and he puts on this emotional armor and makes himself look like this tough person. He dons a grill, works out and deals drugs, and it seems like he has moved on from his past. However, his mother reaches out to him and she is recovering from addiction, and they meet up and she breaks down in tears and apologizes for the abuse she inflicted on her son and tells him that she really does love him even when she never really showed it. This brings Chiron to tears because he loves his mother, too, and forgives her but that forgiveness isn’t easy because it pains him that for so many years she neglected him and made him feel less than. At the beginning it seemed Leslie was going to live a blissful comfortable life with her son after she won the lottery, but this doesn’t end up happening and she becomes estranged from him for many years. She comes back but it’s only really to ask him for money so she can keep drinking, and at some point he gets sick of seeing her drink and not take care of herself that he kicks her out. However, when she sees him again it brings back a lot of shame and guilt for her and she feels like she was a bad mom for what she did, and like any mom, she wants to feel like she was doing the best for her kid.

This was a really powerful movie, and I also really love the acting. Andrea Riseborough was fierce in her role as Leslie and her acting captivated me even well after the end of the movie.

To Leslie. 2022. 1 hr 59 m. Directed by Michael Morris and written by Ryan Binaco. Starring Andrea Riseborough, Owen Teague, Allison Janney and Marc Maron. Rated R for language throughout and some drug use.

Movie Review: The Assistant

Saturday, July 15, 2023

A couple of weeks ago I watched a movie called The Assistant. It was definitely a powerful movie. I had not read much about the film but I heard it was really good. It’s not a long film but it packs in so much, and I normally take notes while I watch movies, but for this one because there wasn’t much dialogue I had to pay attention to the nonverbal communication in the movie. The Assistant stars Julia Garner, who I saw for the first time in the comedy-drama Grandma. In The Assistant she plays a young woman named Jane, an aspiring film producer who works as an assistant at her dream job, a film company. However, as the film progresses, it is clear that her dream job is not all it’s cut out to be and actually has a toxic work culture of abuse, gaslighting, and sexual harassment. At the beginning we see Jane going into the office early in the morning. It is clear that she hasn’t gotten much sleep and is being worked to the bone at this job. She eats Fruit Loops and then has to hurry back to her desk when she sees some of the executives walk past. Her coworkers are also intimidated by the boss, but they give into his bullying behavior and force her to deal with it, too. They don’t treat her with respect or value what she does every day. Every day Jane does stuff like make copies of spreadsheets, stock pills for her boss, distribute schedules to her coworkers, and take phone calls. Some of these calls she deals with people who respect her, but others, like the call from the boss’ wife, are very hard to deal with. In one scene, Jane’s coworker throws a crumpled ball of paper at her and tells her she needs to take a call from the boss’s wife. She gets on the phone with her, and the woman screams at Jane about how her husband cut off access to their credit cards and is with some other woman. When Jane asks her if she has her own credit cards, the woman gets angry with her and hangs up. Jane’s female coworkers also don’t treat her with respect. They ignore her and also make her feel invisible.

Tensions rise when a young beautiful woman named Sienna is hired on the team as an assistant. She is made to sign nondisclosure agreements and when Jane gets suspicious about this, no one says anything or encourages her to file a complaint because they know that the boss will intimidate them and probably fire them if they file a complaint. Jane goes to Wilcock in human resources and tells him that she finds it problematic that this young woman is being given this assistant job when she has very little prior experience. Even after Wilcock jots down what Jane tells him, he doesn’t take it seriously and laughs it off. He thinks that Jane is just jealous of this young woman and tells her that she will suffer serious consequences if she goes through with filing the complaint and asks if she wants to keep her job at the company. I think the part that was the worst was when he tells her before she leaves, “Don’t worry, you’re not his type.” I think watching this film a second time helped me understand why this kind of work culture is so toxic and problematic, and I think I came away from the film disturbed and deeply angered that this kind of work culture persisted for many years. When I first started learning about the Me Too movement, I wasn’t very sympathetic to the victims. I actually thought consent was as simple as saying “no” or speaking up, but what I had to understand is the ways in which power played a huge role in these Me Too cases, and the perpetrators of sexual harassment threatened to take away the victims’ livelihood and did what they could to keep these victims silent. When I found out about Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, I asked Why didn’t they just say no? And my friends had to remind me that these men used their influence and power to silence these women and threatened them with violence and harm if they didn’t remain silent about the abuse and assault. As I educated myself more about sexual violence, boundaries and consent I really started to understand how serious these allegations were.

The film left me feeling very upset and angered but also I had to understand that many of the real life cases of sexual assault and harassment in multiple industries, not just film, didn’t have happy endings. Many of these victims still carry trauma and pain. Around 2017, an article in The New York Times called “She Said” by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey came out (it is now a movie with Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan playing the aforementioned reporters) detailing the years of sexual abuse that Harvey Weinstein inflicted on actresses and so many other women. Harvey as many know ran these very successful film companies which produced films like Chicago, Good Will Hunting and many more, but when those allegations came out it was hard to stomach that someone would do something like that to all those women. In fact, I still get chills thinking about that article.

Throughout The Assistant, it is very clear that where Jane works enforces and perpetuates a culture of silence and bullying. No one talks to one another, even to just exchange small talk, and most people pass by without speaking to each other. Everyone is intimidated and stressed out by this boss, and what got me is that everyone knew that the boss was being predatory towards these women, putting them up in hotels and sexually harassing them. When Jane’s coworker asks Jane where she had Sienna go to, Jane reveals she had Sienna go to a nearby hotel, and it’s clear that everyone knows that the boss is doing this to multiple young women. When Jane goes downstairs she sees a young woman leaving the office, and gives her an earring that fell. The woman tries to explain but she hesitates and leaves without telling Jane probably because she is scared for her life and the boss probably threatened her if she didn’t remain silent about his inappropriate behavior. Jane going to HR and then HR not taking the allegations against the boss seriously isn’t an isolated event; many cases of sexual harassment have gone unreported because the victims weren’t taken seriously. And I have to remember that even though a lot of these allegations do in fact happen in the entertainment industry, sexual violence happens in many industries as well, particularly in the food service and retail industry. In these industries, many people, especially young women, face harassment and assault but are silenced into not reporting it. The Me Too movement really made me aware of how prevalent this culture of shame and silence has been for decades. At the end of the film, I found myself thinking, Couldn’t Jane just quit? But I reflected on it and thought that Jane probably couldn’t afford to quit the job because she had to pay her rent and bills. Also, her boss was a bully and I’m sure because he was so powerful and intimidating Jane felt she couldn’t leave. When she emails him an apology after he screams at her for the umpteenth time about how worthless and useless he thinks she is, he replies saying that he is trying to “make her great” and that is why he is so hard on her. However, I wondered, Yes, this is her dream job. She’s wanted to work at this company for the longest time. But after two months, is is worth it, after what she has witnessed? Wilcock tells Jane that she can’t dig at Sienna for not having much experience as an assistant because Jane has only been at the company for two months, but I wondered, If this job is taking a severe toll on your mental health and there is a toxic culture and you have a boss who is a sexual predator? Girl, get the fuck out of there. Then again, after educating myself on the Me Too movement I had to realize that for many people, it’s not as simple as just bouncing out. You still carry that trauma and pain with you long after you leave that toxic environment, and when people ask you to recall it it can be painful to relive that trauma over and over again. I’m sure people heal from the trauma but it’s not an easy process.

Overall, I highly recommend this movie. Julia Garner’s performance was excellent and it was a powerful film.

The Assistant. 2019. Drama. Rated R. 1 hr 27 m.

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