Tag: Neon

Movie Review: Anora

Contains spoilers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movie Review: Perfect Days

Last week, I watched a really good movie called Perfect Days. I didn’t know much about it, but my mom told me about it and so we watched it as a family. It’s a really touching film, and after watching a very intense film like Killers of the Flower Moon (great film, just couldn’t sleep for a few days after watching it) I needed a film that could let me go to sleep at night without getting nightmares. This film is about Hirayama, a man in Japan who cleans public toilets and gets great satisfaction from his work, even though few people are praising him for it. The film shows Hirayama waking up and spraying his plants with water, looking up at the sky with appreciation, getting his can of cold coffee from the vending machine, and driving to his job as a public toilet cleaner. We don’t know a lot about his personal life, like his past relationships, but seeing him go about his daily life reminded me why I need to continue having a morning routine. I loved Hirayama’s choice of music. Throughout the film, he puts on cassettes and listens to old hits like “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals, “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone and “Redondo Beach” by Patti Smith (I am not too familiar with Patti Smith’s music so listening to “Redondo Beach” was my first Patti Smith song.) He finds peace in his daily routine, and he takes his work seriously, regardless of whether people thank him or not. This film reminded me that there is intrinsic satisfaction in doing your best at work, even though it may not get a lot of praise, and it made me want to appreciate people who do these kinds of unseen jobs, such as in maintenance, retail and food service. Hirayama works with Takashi, a young man who doesn’t take his job seriously and is always goofing off with his friend or opening up about his girl problems to Hirayama. But Hirayama continues to take his work seriously. Honestly, I love the way that these public toilets operate, because the doors changed colors to show whether they were vacant or occupied. It was just kind of retro, speaking as someone who hasn’t been into a bathroom stall that changes colors.

I was really worried that Hirayama was going to have to sell his cassettes. As a 90s kid I remember listening to cassettes while my mom drove me to school, but ever since getting an iPod in middle school and then streaming music on YouTube, I had forgotten the lost art of listening to cassettes. And that there is a very specific way you have to take care of them so that the tape in the cassette doesn’t get tangled. Hirayama has a very specific way that he organizes his tapes, and he makes sure they are wound properly. He is also a voracious reader, and he is seen reading a book by William Faulkner. For some reason, I thought about Haruki Murakami’s writings because he sometimes references a lot of American literature and music in his books. I really like the scene where Aya, Takashi’s girlfriend, takes interest in one of Hirayama’s cassettes, a recording of Patti Smith’s “Redondo Beach.” One day, Takashi ends up driving Hirayama’s van to drop off Aya somewhere because his motorcycle is not working, and they listen to “Redondo Beach.” Aya falls in love with the song, and when Hirayama isn’t looking, takes the cassette with her. Later on, she returns it, but she doesn’t want to let it go because she really resonates with the song, so Hirayama lets her listen to it one last time. She probably didn’t grow up with cassettes and the kind of music that Hirayama listens to, and the song probably resonated with something personal in her life. I still listen to old hits from when I was a child because it brings back memories for me. There is just something about music that I cannot express in words to people; it allows me to express and feel emotions that I otherwise wouldn’t express in daily life.

This movie for some reason made me think of a movie I watched called Paterson. Paterson is a movie starring Adam Driver as a bus driver named Paterson, who lives in a city called Paterson in New Jersey. He works as a bus driver and is content with the work that he does, and in his spare time he writes poetry and spends time with his wife. Paterson doesn’t have a cell phone because he doesn’t feel he needs one, but there is a scene where his bus breaks down and he has to call for help, but he doesn’t have a cell phone, so he has to borrow someone’s cell phone to make the call. I remember throughout middle and high school I didn’t have a cell phone, so I would always call my parents using my teachers’ landline phones. One time in high school (this was ninth grade. I finally got a flip phone in sophomore year) there was inclement weather, and everyone had to go home, but I didn’t have a cell phone so that I could call my dad and have him pick me up, so I used my friend’s phone to call him. At the time I didn’t think I needed a cell phone, but nowadays it would be hard to not have a cell phone because I am in contact with so many people 24/7. I do look back on my flip phone days with fond memories, and now that I have used my smartphone for the past seven years I think I would need to go back to having more patience when using a flip phone because on a flip phone I had to take my time pushing the buttons while texting, because unlike a smartphone, where I can let my fingers fly across the keyboard and send a text message within six seconds, with the flip phone the numbers and letters would appear on the screen at a more leisurely pace, so I had to be patient and it would take a little longer to send that text message. Perfect Days reminded me of Paterson because both Hirayama and Paterson enjoy the seemingly ordinary and boring aspects of life and they have gratitude for each day. They are both introverted people who do jobs that the public takes for granted; for Hirayama, it is cleaning toilets, and for Paterson it is driving a bus. Both of them also love spending time in nature. Hirayama frequents a park where he eats his lunch; he doesn’t look at his cell phone, but instead enjoys the present moment. He uses an old-fashioned camera to take photos of the trees and he organizes the photos when he gets home. Paterson also likes to spend time in nature, and I think because he isn’t constantly checking his phone, he gets to be fully present in his interactions with people and while spending time in nature. While I appreciate having a smartphone, I am taking steps to be more mindful about how I use it. Anytime I face a stressful situation, the first thing I reach for is my phone and I end up scrolling on YouTube and the news because I want to distract myself from the stress that I feel. I don’t want to sit with my feelings; I want to run away from them, but the more I run away from them, the worse I feel. I think I need to be more like Hirayama and Paterson and live in the present moment.

Perfect Days also reminded me of another movie I saw called The Intern, which stars Robert de Niro and Anne Hathaway. Robert de Niro plays Ben, a widower who has hobbies but is looking for greater purpose in life after his wife’s death. While walking down the street, he finds an advertisement from a fashion company calling for applicants ages 60 and older to join their internship program. Ben is hired, but even though people are excited to see him the first day, when he meets his boss, Jules, she doesn’t give him any work to do. Jules isn’t great at working with older people, and most of the people working at the company are Millennials. However, rather than waiting for Jules to give him work, Ben decides to take initiative and starts finding creative ways to help around the office, like helping employees with carrying things or cleaning off a really cluttered area of the office that no one had time to clean. People at the office recognize Ben’s hard work and praise him, and he appreciates the praise, but he is also humble about it because he has been in the workforce for many years, so he knows it’s important to work hard whether you get recognition or not. At a crucial moment, Jules realizes that Ben is indispensable at the company. Ben looks out the window and finds that Jules’ driver is drinking, and so he approaches the driver and encourages him to call in sick. The driver takes Ben’s advice and tells Jules he can’t drive, which means Ben ends up driving her. Jules develops trust in Ben because he has shown that he can take initiative at work with minimal supervision, and he genuinely cares about creating value at the company, especially because several years ago, he started working in the same office that Jules is running her business in. The work he did was different, but he still has a fondness for the office. After watching The Intern and Perfect Days, it made me reflect on my attitude at work. When I first started working at my current company, I was training under a supervisor and I didn’t have any work coming in after finishing my assignments quickly, so I would often read my book. Some of the managers approached me and asked if I needed something to do, and finally after a few weeks, one of them gently told me, “You might not want to be reading, because it looks bad around here” and then she gave me work to do. However, at some point, I had to realize that I needed to learn to take responsibility on my own and not always wait for them to give me stuff to do, especially because they were busy with their own tasks and assignments. Sometimes I would think, Does this work matter even if I’m not receiving recognition for it all the time? But I think that is why chanting and studying the writings of my mentor, the late philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, helped because his writings encourage me to do my best every day. His mentor, Josei Toda, always used to say, “In faith[ our Buddhist practice] do the work of one. At your job, do the work of three.” There is also a quote from a letter in The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin where Nichiren, a Buddhist reformer, is telling a follower “Regard your service to your lord as the practice of Lotus Sutra,” (“Reply to a Believer,” The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, p. 905), which means that we express actual proof of our Buddhist practice through working hard at our jobs. It can be hard to gain a sense of intrinsic motivation for doing something, especially since most of my life has revolved around receiving external praise, but over time I gained an intrinsic satisfaction whenever I did something at work and realized that my workplace is a place where I can do my absolute best. Of course, I still have challenges and there are definitely days when I lose motivation or don’t know what to do, but I chant the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo every day to do my best. And I am becoming more serious about my writing and my cello playing, because that is what I love to do in my spare time, so even when the work I do seems tedious, I appreciate that I have a stable day job so that I can do what I love in my spare time.

Honestly, this film reminded me to have appreciation for each day. It’s easy for me to be impatient and think, Gosh, why don’t I have the apartment I want? Why don’t I have a boyfriend yet? Why am I so miserable? I tend to be really impatient, and it’s often easy for me to think I will be sad and miserable forever when things don’t go my way. But it’s easy to forget that I am still alive, and that life goes fast, and that I need to enjoy each moment of it so that I don’t lie on my death bed wondering, Geez LOUISE. Where did the time go? It is easy to forget sometimes because I get so caught up in the stress of daily life that I often forget to have gratitude, but I’ve been lately writing down on Post It notes small things that I am grateful for, even if it just being alive. I want to know when I die that I lived the best life possible. Watching a film like Perfect Days reminded me that it’s important to enjoy the ordinary things in life that I often take for granted.

Perfect Days. 2023. Directed by Wim Wenders. Running time: 2 hours and 4 minutes. Rated PG for some language, partial nudity and smoking.