October Offerings Part 3: The Persian Version & Dicks: The Musical

From the ridiculous to the sublime - the final two films I saw this month vary widely in tone and gender dynamics, but they are both wonderfully entertaining in their own way. Whether you want to watch two adult men Parent Trap their insane parents, or watch an Iranian-American lesbian learn to appreciate her mother's background, you're going to have a very unique experience at the theater.

Dicks: The Musical: Written by Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson (who also star in the film), and directed by Larry Charles, this is a supremely silly movie (based off their supremely silly off-Broadway musical) about two very straight white men in New York (they are gay in real life, which is why their attempts at playing straight are called out right away in the opening credits) who are top salesmen for their respective companies. When those companies merge, they are pitted against each other and become bitter rivals. But they look like each other (they don't actually, but they are supposed to be identical twins, so just roll with it OK!) and eventually realize that they were separated at birth. What follows is a ridiculous musical where these two men get to meet their parents, played by the insanely well-cast Megan Mullaly and Nathan Lane, and come up with a plan to bring the two of them back together again.

Listen, your mileage is definitely going to vary with this movie. But it's barely 90 minutes, so even if you hate it, you won't have to endure it for very long. It is extremely bizarre, very New York, and oh, did I mention that Bowen Yang also plays God in it? Like, the literal God. I cannot over-emphasize the silliness. But it's kind of amazing that this movie exists and it is a campy ridiculous good time. And the closing credits feature a lovely blooper reel where Nathan Lane has a moment where he just goes, "I can't believe I'm in this movie." Neither can I, Nathan, neither can I.

The Persian Version: Immigrants, roll on up to see this film, because it will blow you away. It is a very specific story, but tells a very universal tale of growing up in America when your parents have grown up somewhere else and trying to reconcile those two identities. It also offers up a tender portrait of the harsh relationship mothers and daughters can have, that is only resolved when you sit down and think about what exactly your mother's life was like before she moved to America. Written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz, this is a supremely beautiful, funny, and touching movie about women (Muslim women in particular!), and the resilience that is the foundation of any immigrant's journey across the globe.

The cast of this film is particularly wondrous - Layla Mohammadi plays Leila, an Iranian-American filmmaker in Brooklyn who is the ninth child of her family: the only daughter and a lesbian to boot. She and her mother have experienced a significant rift because her mother did not approve of her marriage to another woman, and their differences seem irreconcilable. But as the movie progresses, we watch Leila's journey, and how it eventually parallels her own mother's journey as a young girl in Iran. It's a bittersweet story, told with a great deal of heart and humor, and Niousha Noor's performance as Leila's mother, Shireen (as well as Kamand Shafieisabet's performance as her younger self in Iran), is remarkable. In a particularly profound moment, Shireen, who becomes a realtor, sells a storefront to an Indian immigrant in New Jersey who sets up the first Patel Brothers in the state. She believes in helping out other immigrants and that one moment was all I needed to stop seeing this film as an Iranian movie, and see it as a movie about the melting pot. This is also a beautifully shot film, with many artistic scenes and flourishes that make me very excited to see more of Keshavarz's work. Immigrants, we get the job done!

October Offerings Part 2: Killers of the Flower Moon & Cassandro

Next up in October, I watched one movie that was three and a half hours long and purported to be about Native Americans while really mostly just being about white dudes, and another that was an hour and a half long and focused on the world of Mexican wrestling and a gay man who was trying to break barriers as an "exotico." Both are based on true stories, and no points for guessing which film proved to be far more entertaining and compelling.

Killers of the Flower Moon: Sigh. I watched this movie just to get it over with. And I swear I went in with hope. I wanted this to be the kind of three and a half hour movie that is truly worth it, something where you go into the cinema and come out transformed and awed. But no, halfway through I started looking at the time and wondering why I was still trapped in the theater.

This film is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of David Grann's book of the same name. Set in the 1920s, this is the story of how a number of Osage Native Americans were killed in Oklahoma as part of a plot to get their oil rights. At the time, the Osage Nation was incredibly wealthy following the discovery of oil on their tribal land, but a crime boss named William King Hale (played very effectively by Robert De Niro) came up with a scheme to murder several members of the tribe and inherit their rights via his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio, playing a both weaselly and hapless man to excruciatingly good effect) who was married to an Osage woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone, a phenomenal actress who unfortunately spends most of this movie weeping as more of her relatives die tragically).

Look, I get that Scorsese thinks he started with a movie that was about two white dudes and he managed to actually incorporate a great deal more about Osage culture and tradition and make it "diverse." But at the end of the day, this is still just a movie about two murderous white dudes and the Native Americans are mostly hapless victims being exploited by colonizers. And yes, that is the history of America in a nutshell, but why not tell this story from Mollie's point of view instead? Also, not for nothing, but I had to do a lot of research to even understand the beginning of this film and how the Osage got all this wealth. Why not spend more time exploring that backstory that is exclusively Native American before we spend an interminable three and half hours with DiCaprio and De Niro bumbling their way through some gruesome murders and courtroom drama? This movie absolutely did not need to be this long - there was not enough plot to sustain it, and it was bloated and self-indulgent. Marty, you tried, but you failed.

Cassandro: Directed by Roger Ross Williams from a script he wrote with David Teague, this is a beautiful movie about the real-life lucha libre Mexican wrestler, Saul Armendariz (played with much heart and warmth by the always reliable Gael Garcia Bernal). In the early 1980s, Saul lived in El Paso, Texas but regularly crossed the border to wrestle as a character named El Topo in lucha libre matches. But after meeting a trainer named Sabrina (the equally amazing Roberta Colindrez), she suggests that he might be more suited to wrestling as an "exotico," a wrestler who performs in drag and incorporates feminine movements and gimmicks as they wrestle. 

Saul is openly gay, and the world of lucha libre is pretty explicitly homophobic, with people routinely yelling out slurs during matches and deriding the exotico wrestlers. Also, Saul's main argument against wrestling as an exotico is that they are never allowed to win. Nonetheless, Sabrina convinces him to give it a try, and thus, the character of Cassandro is born.

You have to watch the film to understand the transformation that takes place. There's some exquisite stunt choreography at play, and at its core, this is a story of how you can only be the most powerful version of yourself when you embrace who you really are. Cassandro brings such a wild and joyful energy to his matches that the crowd is swept away, and before you know it, people aren't screaming the f-word at him, and are rather chanting for him to win the match. This is a great biopic, destined to make you smile, and a reminder of how we always need more positive stories about people who break barriers and make the world see that there's nothing to fear by being different. And it's only an hour and a half long, so really, you have absolutely nothing to lose. Cassandro! Cassandro!

October Offerings Part 1: Dumb Money & Fair Play

Your first cinematic selection this October is either a rousing true story from the not too distant past about average people fighting back against Wall Street, or a dark thriller about the screwed up gender dynamics between a couple who work on Wall Street. Either way, we can all agree. Wall Street = bad.

Dumb Money: This is the story of how a bunch of people on Reddit ended up buying GameStop stock and frightening a bunch of Wall Street billionaires who had shorted that stock with the expectation that the company was due to go bankrupt. Instead, Keith Gill (Paul Dano, putting in a subdued and masterful performance), a lower middle class financial analyst in Massachusetts, did a ton of research, saw that GameStop might be poised for a short squeeze, and decided to invest most of his life savings into the stock. What follows is a rousing tale of the people he inspired along the way and the fat cat Wall Street investors who had to sit up and take notice, until the whole thing eventually went all the way to Washington for an investigation into the stock market and corrupt trading practices. 

Written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, and directed by Craig Gillespie, this movie is clever and propulsive. You will root for Keith and all the working class heroes and students who want to stick it to the man. The cast is particularly stellar, featuring great performances from America Ferrera, Shailene Woodley, Pete Davidson, Anthony Ramos, Seth Rogen, and Nick Offerman, to name a few. This is also an excellent Covid movie, a reminder of how we all used to live during the grim times of 2020 before we had a vaccine and didn't really know what the hell was going on. It's particularly telling how all the rich guys are always portrayed as being unmasked while the servants around them are masked up and serving them in silence - future generations will have no idea what a profound commentary that is on their villainy. This is a wonderfully entertaining film, a David vs Goliath battle, where some of the Davids get to win, but of course, Goliath is still undeterred, because...capitalism. 

Fair Play: Written and directed by Chloe Domont, this is a steamy Netflix thriller about Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), two analysts who work at a fast-paced Manhattan hedge fund that is straight out of Wolf of Wall Street. The two of them have been dating for a while, and the movie opens with their engagement (5-minute spoiler alert?), but no one at work has any idea that they are a couple (in flagrant violation of every HR rule in the book). Luke wants to disclose their relationship once he gets a big promotion that's up for grabs at work. Of course, Emily gets that promotion instead, and things quickly deteriorate into a resentful paranoid hellscape.

This is a twisty movie and it's reasonably watchable for a while, commenting on a lot of familiar gender dynamics and misogyny and the general finance bro douchiness of it all. I was also distracted by a large number of British actors who were playing very staunch New Yorkers and doing the classic "English actor does accent they have learned by watching American movies." But towards the end, everything got way too disturbing and I found myself unable to root for anybody. While Luke was definitely a terrible, terrible partner, I found myself equally fed up with Emily for retaliating with bad behavior, and treating Luke like dirt in the same way that he was dismissive of her. Sometimes I fear that people think feminism means that women get to act just like men, whereas I think the whole point of feminism is that women usually have more emotional intelligence and we need to make it more acceptable for men to act like women. Unfortunately, this film just goes off a cliff with everyone being obsessed with money and status and sex and violence. But, as a positive blow for feminism, this movie does not shy away from featuring a graphic amount of period sex. Rebecca Bunch would have been proud.