Tag: movie-review

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.

Movie Review: The Humans

I just finished watching a movie called The Humans. I love films from the distribution company A24, and The Humans is an A24 film. I didn’t know much about the movie, but I saw the trailer a while ago and it looked interesting. I read some reviews saying it was a horror movie but without jump scares. I’m not a big fan of horror, and as a child I was always stressed going into movie theaters and Blockbuster during Halloween because they always had these big advertisements for scary movies, and I got nightmares. And not just Halloween, but summer as well. I was around eight or ten years old and there was a poster for a film in the Chucky franchise, and the minute I turned to look at it, I almost screamed. So, I thought it was really interesting when I looked at the genre for The Humans and saw that people were calling it a horror film. I remember seeing a movie called Lamb (another A24) film and it was categorized as horror, but it didn’t have any jump-scares. It just had a lot of disturbing scenes. There are some jump scares in The Humans, but it’s not like anything supernatural is jumping out at you. It’s just the sounds and the overall atmosphere of the movie that makes it extremely unsettling.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it takes place in New York City, and the family is meeting together for Thanksgiving. Erik and Deidre have two daughters, Aimee and Brigid, and their mom, Momo, has dementia. They all go to visit Brigid and her boyfriend, Richard, for the Thanksgiving holiday, and at first things start off really chill, but as the film goes on, the interactions get more stressful and there is a lot of tension in the family. The apartment Brigid and Richard live in is pretty creepy, and they always hear suspenseful noises coming from upstairs or stuff is coming out of the walls. I think the most stressful part of this film was the conversation that Brigid has with Erik and Deidre. Brigid is a musician, but she keeps getting rejected for opportunities. She has her parents and sister listen to a piece of music she composed, and they like it, but she said she didn’t get the grant for the music, and she feels dejected. Erik doesn’t provide any consoling advice, and instead tells her that she should find a real job instead of chasing her passion. Brigid is upset that her dad doesn’t support her dreams, and Richard tries to reason with her, but Brigid is sick of feeling like no one supports her dreams. Erik is in a lot of hot water himself; he tells his daughters that he and Deidre had to sell their lake house because Erik lost his job at the school that he worked at for having an affair with one of the teachers, so he is working at Walmart to pay the bills. Even though he assures Brigid and Aimee that he and Deidre are working it out, Brigid and Aimee wonder why he did what he did and whether he has anything saved up, and they start to worry about his financial situation. Aimee is also dealing with a lot of stuff; her partner, Carol, broke up with her and is seeing someone else, she lost her job, and she has health issues. In between these stressful moments, Erik is hearing strange noises from the house and honestly, the ending of the film gave me the creeps. I really thought some ghost was going to pop out, but it was just more of a suspenseful moment, the feeling of being in this dark room when everyone else has gone. Honestly, I felt for Erik at that moment because as a kid I remember hating dark spaces. We went on a tour to this big cavern when I was younger, and it was pitch black and I’m pretty sure I almost got a panic attack. There was another time when I was in fifth grade and we had to learn about slavery and the conditions on the slave ships, and the teachers had us go in this classroom and we had to lay down next to each other and they turned off the lights. We had to imagine that we were slaves on these ships with no ventilation, no lighting, all cramped together in chains. The minute they turned off the lights, my heart started racing, my breathing shortened, and I started to hyperventilate. I did not want to be in the pitch-black room anymore, and I almost screamed and started crying. The kids around me had to convince that it wasn’t real, that I was going to be ok, but honestly that did very little to assuage the intense panic I felt at that moment in that pitch dark room. I remember my parents saying I used to not be afraid of the dark as a kid, but honestly, I can’t remember that time anymore because as I got older, I started hating being in rooms where it was pitch black and I couldn’t see anything. Maybe this is why I fear death because it’s going to feel so weird losing my consciousness, losing my breath, losing my hearing, my taste, my tactile senses. While Erik was in the dark by himself, I felt like I was in that dark room, wondering how you are ever going to get out. Erik starts panicking and he rushes downstairs and recites a Biblical verse over and over again while crying. Brigid tells him his cab is ready to take him and Deidre home, but it takes him a while to recover from the scare he had until he finally musters the courage and strength to leave the house.

I also related to the theme of family tension, especially when Brigid was talking to her family about her dreams as a musician, because there were many times I would talk to my family about wanting to move to a big city like New York or Los Angeles to follow my dreams as a musician, and they would tell me, “It’s too expensive to live there” and I would always get so defensive and upset, to the point where I would be passive-aggressive during meal times or throw tantrums because my dreams weren’t working out the way that I wanted them to. It’s something I still struggle with, to be honest, and sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with me, because there will be times during family meals where I will be totally quiet and thinking about some stressful event, and I will just be reluctant to talk about it with my family because I worry about them judging me. I also related to Richard’s past struggles with depression, because I have struggled with depression. It’s not easy to talk about one’s mental health, especially because there is a lot of stigma attached to talking about it. There is a scene where Richard talks about how he was depressed, and Brigid tells him he doesn’t have to bring it up with her family because she doesn’t want him to feel pressured to talk about it, but he tells them he was depressed at one point. Erik then tells him that in their family, they don’t believe in depression or taking medications and going to therapy. Instead, Erik believes that religion is the best antidepressant, and he wonders why his daughters aren’t religious anymore. I’m a religious person, too, but I realized after a certain point that the purpose of my prayer was to give me the wisdom to seek proper treatment for my depression. I was just praying for it to go away, but I realized that it was neither realistic nor safe to wish a serious medical condition like depression away, and that I needed to get help for it right away. As much as I loved my friends and family and people in my religious community, I found seeing someone who is trained in dealing with mental health issues to be immensely helpful and therapy gave me tools so that I could continue to do the work on myself to manage my depression. I also realized that a lot of people struggle with depression, so I could use my experiences with mental illness to encourage someone going through it. It’s easy to think there is something inherently flawed about you when you go through a depressive episode, but getting the right treatment helped me learn how to manage it better and that instead of beating myself up for being depressed, I needed to have more self-compassion and understand that recovering from depression takes patience and effort, and that I needed to take it one day at a time. It definitely wasn’t an overnight one-time event, and for many years I struggled with moments where I felt ok and where I felt like, I’m not feeling great, I need to go see someone about this.

One part of this film that I really loved was the dialogue. It was just incredibly brilliant. When I first saw the trailer, I thought it was going to have supernatural creatures because the characters at one point talk about these scary stories and scary dreams that they have, but there are no supernatural entities that jump out during the film. It’s just the overall suspense that leaves your heart racing during this film. It’s not a fast-paced movie at all; in fact, it reminded me of my experience watching this film called The Zone of Interest (which is another A24 movie. Like seriously, A24 is killing it with these incredible dramas. I don’t know how they do it.) At the beginning, it was slow and starts off with a pitch-black screen and ominous choral music at the beginning, but as the film builds it just gets more and more disturbing and by the end I was like, Wow, that was…something. I like films that don’t feature a lot of frenetic action or stylized violence. Sometimes the films that get me are movies that start off slow but build with suspense until my skin is crawling. Also, I saw June Squibb (the actress who plays Mo-Mo) in another movie called Nebraska. I haven’t finished the film yet, but she was a really great actress in the movie. I also really love Beanie Feldstein, who plays Brigid, in Booksmart, which is a funny movie about two high school straight-A students who decide to party and not take themselves seriously during their senior year. I also love Amy Schumer, who plays Aimee, in her sketch show Inside Amy Schumer. I watched that show a lot when I was in college and going through a rough time. I haven’t seen a lot of work by Steven Yeun but I saw a movie he was in called Sorry to Bother You. It was about a Black man named Cassius living in an alternate reality who becomes successful as a telemarketer when he starts to sound like a white person, and the film shows the dark side of capitalism. Steven Yeun plays one of Cassius’s friends who rejects capitalism and ends up dating Cassius’s girlfriend, Detroit, when Cassius becomes a sellout. Another Steven Yeun movie I love is Minari (another A24 film), which is about a family from Korea who moves to the American countryside and learns to adjust to their new life in America. I really want to see his Netflix series with Ali Wong called Beef because I watched a lot of awards shows this year, and Beef won quite a few awards. I saw Richard Jenkins in this movie a long time ago called The Visitor. It’s about a middle-aged man living in New York who meets a couple who is undocumented, and he lets them stay with him. It was a very moving film, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Richard Jenkins was also in another film I love called Kajillionaire, which is about a family of con artists living in Los Angeles who encounter a mysterious woman who goes on a heist with them and falls in love with the couple’s daughter, Old Dolio. Richard plays Old Dolio’s dad, who doesn’t have any real love for his daughter and is just stringing her along so that they can scam people out of their money. Even though it was a depressing film, I loved the acting in that movie.

I didn’t know this movie was based on a play until I saw the opening credits. I’ve seen a few films that were originally plays, and it’s interesting to see how they bring the play to the big screen. There was a film I saw called The Whale that was originally a play. The movies Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom were originally plays by August Wilson, and the movie Doubt was a stage play. Watching these movies makes me want to see the original stage plays.

The Humans. 2021. Rated R.