¡Que Color! (Patreon)

Sorry for the inactivity, but man alive, it has been too hot to move, think, or write. The AC can only do so much to keep up when it's over 100 degrees (37.7 celsius if you're nasty) for much of the day. Still, I didn't want to fall too far behind, so I'm going to try to knock some of these recent films out in semi-short order.

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2022)

As I mentioned on Twitter, I almost always appreciate the quirky late styles of major auteurs. And while I mostly liked First Reformed and The Card Counter, I found a lot of Master Gardener to be, for lack of a better word, dotty. Introducing Maya (Quintessa Swindell) wearing a "GOOD VIBES ONLY" t-shirt, or having the parole officer (Esai Morales) wearing a t that reads "Everyone Should Be a Feminist," is just weird. Like, is this Schrader's idea of humor? He has always been more of a writer than a visual stylist, but much of this script bore only a syntactical relation to the English language, never resembling how actual humans would speak. Narvel (Joel Edgerton) asks his boss / lover Norma (Sigourney Weaver in "Designing Women" mode) not "how old is Maya," but "she is what age?"

But on a broader thematic level, Master Gardener just felt like it was the result of someone pummeling through writer's block, withholding judgment by deciding there were "no bad ideas." So much seems to be riding conceptually on Narvel's past as a white supremacist, but Schrader and Edgerton offer next to nothing by way of explanation. For all the film shows, he might've been an FBI plant from the very start, although Narvel's guild suggests otherwise. In fact, the whole thing reads like an aging liberal's reckoning with their own internalized racism, but being so revolted by those ugly thoughts that he must channel them through an outright Nazi.

Reality (Tina Satter, 2023)

When looking at the image above, you may have the following thought: is this a room? Okay, maybe not, but that odd phrase, uttered by an FBI rando (Benny Elledge) provided the original title for Satter's off-Broadway production, based entirely from the transcript of the Bureau's recording of their questioning and arrest of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney), an Air Force veteran working as a translator for the NSA. I suspect Reality worked a bit better on the stage, since even Satter's completely understated attempts to "cinematize" the production feel awkward and obtrusive. I kept comparing the work with one of my favorite films / plays, Charlie Victor Romeo, a production composed of transcripts from the flight recorders of planes in trouble. When the theater company made it into a "film," they just retained the nearly empty stage setting. (Although now that I think about it, CVR may have been riffing on the concept of "black box theater.")

Put another way, Reality's (tran)script is so fixated on minutiae, and seemingly off-the-wall digressions -- everyone is really worried about Winner's pets -- that framing it with any semblance of realism just serves to . . . not normalize it, exactly, but make it a lot less alien. As for the work's conceptual approach, I am on the fence. Satter's decision to address the Winner case probably means she required a bit more context than her method could provide. After all, while Snowden and Manning blew whistles that proved very real (NSA domestic spying and civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively), Winner's claims are hazier. Yes, Russia tried to influence the 2016 election, but the extent to which it actually mattered is still debatable. Nevertheless, Winner's defense of her actions is rather reasonable on its own terms. Why is the political class debating whether or not something happened when the intelligence community knows it happened? What are these institutions for?

You Hurt My Feelings (Nicole Holofcener, 2023)

At a point in history where everything is devolving, becoming unfathomably worse, there is one bright spot. Holofcener is, in a way, "the new Woody Allen," and in a lot of ways she's actually an improvement. It's not just that her films tend to center complex, well-rounded women characters, although that's indeed a plus. More than this, Holofcener isn't locked in the way Allen could be, by the sense of their own cleverness. The main idea of YHMF, the ways that long-term relationships always entail a certain degree of benevolent dishonesty, never goes away, but it often cedes space to other incidental life-business, such as career anxieties, the pitfalls of liberal parenting, and sibling relationships that have developed way past rivalry and into a zone of almost incidental irritation.

Some reviews have said that Holofcener's casting of the central couple was too lopsided, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus effortlessly overpowering the admittedly charisma-challenged Tobias Menzies. And yes, even as an ensemble piece, YHMF is a showcase for Louis-Dreyfus doing what she does best: portraying an aggrieved but fundamentally likeable urban bourgeois, balancing essential competence with middle-age shpilkes. And since her Beth is a "creative," it stands to reason that she'd have the more vivid personality. Don, meanwhile, is a mediocre therapist, in part because the job suits his maddening passivity. ("Well, what do you think it means?") At any rate, I'm glad Holofcener finally crystalized by distaste for men's v-neck shirts.

Kokomo City (D. Smith, 2023)

It seems flippant somehow to describe Kokomo City as a film that "goes there," but the film is radical simply in terms of its subject matter. An in-depth profile of four Black trans women sex workers, Smith's film is a remarkable break with so-called "respectability politics." As the women themselves remark at various points, they are seldom seem as appropriate representatives for their respective communities. They face transphobia from other Black people, racism from other trans women, and a general misunderstanding about what their work entails and how it enables their lives without defining them.

I've seen a number of comparisons with Paris is Burning, but more than this I found myself thinking about Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason. While Smith and the women are speaking their truths and trying to set the record straight about "trade," horizontal misogynoir, and the specific struggles of being trans in a hostile world, just as much of Kokomo City consists of these women telling stories, discussing their pasts, and articulating their dreams for the future. (The occasional statements by trans-attracted Black men are largely unnecessary, but did help Smith reach feature-length.)

There is often a reluctance in the Black community about giving voice to certain problems internal to the race. That's because many fear, quite reasonably, that white culture will weaponize these fissures against Black people. So there's a bracing honesty in Kokomo City that many of us aren't accustomed to, when the women describe the shame that Black men feel for desiring them, the hatred from Black women who see them as competition, and in the film's most powerful moment, the anger that their mothers sometimes feel toward them. As Daniella Carter explains, Black women are so vulnerable in society that they sometimes feel a betrayal when their sons, who could have protected them, emerge as equally vulnerable women.

This vulnerability forms the heart of Kokomo City, the bitter and poignant undercurrent that these women defend with a feminine hardness -- "serving cunt," as they say. This film will rankle some members of all those communities in which these women exist and intersect. But the entire enterprise comes from the rage and defiance of having nothing whatsoever to lose. This is a protest against a society that treats Black trans women as disposable. Tragically, this horror has left its mark on Kokomo City itself. One of its subjects, Koko Da Doll, was murdered this past April.