Orbiting

Janet Planet (2023) - Baker Playwright Annie Baker's feature film debut, Janet Planet, is a small wonder. It might lack the emotional impact or drama of Aftersun or Ladybird as far as a parent/daughter relationship goes, but in its quiet small ways, it depicts a meaningful, authentic mother-daughter relationship on film. Even though it's set in the summer of 1991 and the lack of cell phones indicates the era, Janet Planet is not at all a nostalgia trip. Its rural New England setting, the creaky wooden bungalows peppered with New-Age types emanate that distinctive short summer rental/impermanence vibe.

Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is first seen sneaking out of the lodge in the middle of the night of her summer camp to call her mom Janet (Julianne Nicholson). She demands mom to pick her up, otherwise she will kill herself. Next morning, to her displeasure, she finds that both mom and mom's moody boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), waiting to drive her home. She says she changed her mind. Too late.

Divided by chapters with Janet's love interests and friends' names, the film is seen from Lacy's point of view and her single mom making bad choices in men. Lacy, 11-years old, still insists on sleeping with mom in her bed. Janet doesn't treat her precocious and lonely daughter like a child, and always have heart-to-heart conversations - about her career trajectory (she recently got a license to be an acupuncturist and named her practice Janet Planet), her bad tastes in men, her beliefs that she can make any men fall in love with her if she tries, and how Lacy's forthrightness and (sometimes) aggressiveness make her wonder that she would be better off if she turns out to be a lesbian (and she means this as a complement). There are many other gems like that throughout.

Both Ziegler and Nicholson are wonderful. Sophie Okonedo and white bearded Elias Koteas make memorable appearances too. The dialog rings true. No character comes across as out of balance or overly stereotypical, considering its hippie environment. Baker gets the world of Lacy in detail- her odd doll collections, lying under the dining table and on the grass aimlessly for hours, getting sick with anxiety at the bus stop on the first day of middle-school and most important of all, fighting for her mom's attention among series of men that orbits her planet. Baker gets the haziness and dream-like pre-adolescence right. With a blink of an eye, it will be gone. But the grownup world, as witnessed by Lacy, is not that much different. There will be plenty of fights and screaming matches and resentment and all that in the future. She will find a girl her age to talk to, as evidenced in the beginning of the film with Wayne's daughter Sequoia. But for this brief time, mom and daughter relationship is precious, like a planet and its moon.

Scariest of Them All

Oddity (2024) - Mc Carthy Horror genre is having a good year with many successful releases. Some of them are very good. But I find most of them overhyped and not at all scary. Irish director Damian Mc Carthy, whose sleeper hit debut Caveat (2020), a 'haunted house' genre, was in my opinion, both original and scary horror film in an ominous remote island setting. He comes up with perhaps the scariest film of the year.

Just like Caveat, the location plays an important part. This time it is a big old remote castle. Dani (Carolyn Bracken) and Ted (Gwylim Lee) are in the process of renovating the property that they just moved in. While Ted is at work (he is a doctor at a mental hospital nearby), Dani has to fend for herself at the big, cold, empty castle. As far as atmospheric horror goes, Mc Carthy is very skilled at creating the feeling that something is off. He is very good at not only jump scares, which there are plenty, but the sense of forbodding with startling images.

After Dani gets brutally murdered in the castle by a masked intruder, her twin sister Darcy, a blind clairvoyant who owns an oddity shop in town stops in at the castle, with a hideous housewarming gift, a wooden life-size mannequin with terrifying expression, for Damian and his new, unsuspecting girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton). Darcy suspects it was Ted who arranged Dani's murder. He is doing some insidious stuff in the mental hospital. And he in turn, challenges the notion of supernatural with his daring arrogance: you wanna play with me? I will play with you. Yana finds strange objects in the holes in the creepy manequin's head - a lock of hair, a tooth, a viale of blood and a picture of Dani and Darcy as children. Unexplained things start happening - Yana's car key disappears, the wooden figure changes its positions by itself, Yana gets to see the glimpse of Dani's apparition in the dark. Freaked out, Yana leaves.

Carolyn Bracken has a great presence in her double roles while Gwylim Lee is appropriately creepy as smarmy, insidious villain. There are many truly terrifying moments in Oddity. The sense of unease Mc Carthy creates has no equal. It's his effective filmmaking - unnerving framing, sense of claustrophobia and timing that really pays off. His playing with the expectations of the audiences provide many spine tingling moments. Horror fans, watch this movie!

Rehash

Alien: Romulus (2024) - Alvarez Quick thoughts after viewing:

-Rehash of the first from the set design to plotpoints. But not as good or as effective. It gets grimyness right but nothing really memorable.

-The cast is too young. It feels like kids playing dressup.

-Facehuggers are rubbery. The first Alien came out 47 years ago and it has more realistic looking practical effects? How?

-Xenomorphs not menacing or scary enough.

-What they did to Ian Holm is a travesty

-Thoroughly PG-13

-I never thought I'd say this but I miss Ridley Scott. However trashy and incomprehensible Prometheus and Covenant were, they were superb entertainment.

Luminations

Afterglows (2023) - Kimura A Tokyo cap driver, Morishima (Kentez Asaka) lost his wife Sayuri (Megumi), an accomplished pop singer, to suicide. It's his obsessive spying that pushed her to end her life. Afterglows is about him processing his guilt while driving around Tokyo, mostly at night shot in contrasty black and white with glowing soft lit Tokyo skyline. The film is beautiful to look at, even inappropriately so. Things take a turn when he picks up a passenger who looks exactly like Sayuri. His obsession, believing his wife is still not dead, starts again as he stalks the woman. Morishima is confronted with his wrongdoing by a sly journalist who befriends him at a small late night eatery.

First time director Taichi Kimura creates a dreamy landscape where you don't exactly know if it's afterlife/purgatory or the protagonist's imaginings. Don't matter - empty Tokyo at night has never been more beautiful.

Hong Kong Mon Amour

2046 (2005) - Wong There is a train that goes to a place called 2046, a place trapped in memory, at least for characters in Wong Kar-Wai's filmography. Also the year 2046 is the eve of Hong Kong's supposed return to the control of mainland China. The end of an era marking the 50 years of self-governing after British Handover in 1997. Memories are nothing but trails of tears, the title card says. Once you get to 2046, you can't escape from it. So starts WKW's a sort of sequel to Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love.

Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), the same man who had a platonic relationship in In the Mood for Love and cultivated his gigolo status at the end of Days of Being Wild, is a hack writer for a newspaper in 60s Hong Kong. The film, in nonlinear fashion, traces his many encounters with various female characters who tread his pad, room 2047, in Hotel Oriental. The film is an observation of a gigolo from his room the goings on in the room next door 2046. Su Li-Zhen from in the mood for love, played by Maggie Cheung, is now played by Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi, with Cheung making a brief appearance as a memory/dream. Faye Wong of Chunking Express also makes an appearance as the hotel manager's daughter who is in love with a Japanese man (Takuya Kimura).

2046, like most of Wong's films, is about unrequited love and yearning. Chow, who is incapable of emotional attachment, is the only one who can observe the love's fickle nature objectively. He even creates science fiction to exemplify the unanswerable nature of love - the train to 2046 is attended by fembots that passengers shouldn't fall in love with. In 2046, everyone is a reminder of lost love or what would have been. Time and timing are the enemies.

In true WKW fashion, 2046 took 4 years to make, with three different DP attached. But it's stunning. Gorgeous costumes and beautiful actors unhurriedly go in and out of tightly held frames. Chow gets to consummate with Su Li-Zhen, who is now a high-priced call girl. Zhang Ziyi is at the height of her youth and beauty and thrives in Wong's astute melodrama. But again, I'm Chunking Express/Fallen Angels/Happy Together Wong fan, not In the Mood for Love fan. I find this revisit to the film since its initial release, overlong and tedious. If 2046 is a lamentation of a bygone era and a specific place, Wong has a funny way of (not) showing the place except for some heavily CGI shot of the neon landscape.

I rewatched Fallen Angels just before 2046 and the contrast can't be more obvious. It was his humor, light touch and Chris Doyle's handheld, intimate photography that made his 90s films so iconic. 2046 is more of an idea of the lamentation of a place that gave Wong much freedom to capture the place's spontaneity and vibrance. And the film marks the end of WKW supremacy.