Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight, 9.8) is a kind of Bride of Frankenstein story.

Boilerplate: A young woman, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is a corpse brought back to life by scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Baxter had her brain swapped with that of an unborn fetus, resulting in her having an infant’s mind. While designed to be Baxter’s companion, her sexual appetite causes her to pursue other men, including Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) and a foppish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), with whom she elopes and embarks on a hedonistic odyssey around Europe, Northern Africa and Central Asia. Freed from the prejudices of her times, Bella demands equality and liberation.

Poor Things costars Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter and Suzy Bemba.

Filming began in Hungary in August 2021.

SPOILERS WITHIN: Celine Song‘s Past Lives (A24) is a very subtle, oh-so-very-gently expressed love story — a story about things unsaid and certainly not acted upon.

The action between the lovers, Nora and Hae Sung (played as adults by Greta Lee and Teo Yoo), happens in three stages.

One, a primal and very nourishing attraction they feel as 10-year-old children in Seoul, only to be separated when Nora’s parents move the family to Toronto. Two, aspiring playwright Nora and aspiring engineer Hae Sung Skype-chatting at age 20 but never arranging to meet. And three, both still wanting to see each other after a separation of 20 years and with Hae Sung having flown to New York to visit the now-married Nora, both conveying volumes of feeling with their eyes but doing zip to try to make this long-simmering romance finally kick into gear.

You can feel the “In Yun” every step of the way, but Nora and Hae Sung are so polite and constrained and well-behaved, and are certainly mindful of the feelings of poor Arthur (John Magaro), Nora’s bearded husband with the rag-mop haircut and obviously the odd man out in this situation.

All through the second and third acts you want the lovers to somehow break through and say something and risk emotional exposure or even erupt in some messy way, but they don’t, they won’t and they never will.

You’re silently pleading with both to “please risk it….please don’t allow yourselves to become Anthony Hopkins at the end of The Remains of the Day…even if it’s just a big hug and a long kiss at the airport as Hae Sung is about to fly back to Seoul…a little catharsis, please!”

Catharsis finally happens at the very last minute, but more in the way of Anthony Quinn’s Zampano character at the very end of La Strada.

Past Lives, in short, is all about subtext, impossible distances, zero physical contact, impossible social constraints and quietly pleading, gently leaking expressions.

A couple of hours after seeing Song’s film I told a friend that it’s “a woman’s version of a Wong Kar Wai film about soul-crossed lovers who never get aroused much less climax, and without the Chris Doyle lensing.”

I understand why people might admire or even adore Past Lives. I certainly understand why almost every critic (except for Alison Wilmore) has done handstands, and why the Sundance crowd flipped for it last January.

I respect it, but it doesn’t quite do the thing.

The late Sydney Pollack used to say that the most affecting love stories are ones that don’t end happily. Example #1 is the final scene in Pollack’s The Way We Were. There’s no denying that it works — you can’t help but feel it.

The ending of Past Lives is poignant and affecting, but it leaves you hungry and somewhat disappointed. I know, that’s the point but still. It certainly doesn’t envelop and hold you the way Pollack’s closing scene did. It just doesn’t.

Is it a Best Picture contender? It’s a very respectable little film, but it doesn’t really ring the bell. It’s too disciplined, too schematic, too committed to not letting anyone even flirt with the possibility of emotional release (except for the Zampano moment at the very end). It’s a movie about sad, bittersweet denial…no, no, no, no, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t.

An actively insane opinion:

I’ve been lucky a few times, and each time I felt I’d either dodged a bullet or had been gifted for no reason at all.

Reports about the Canadian forest fire smoke turning the air in the tristate area (New York City Connecticut, New Jersey) into a region that vaguely resembles Blade Runner 2 and is blanketed with air quality that’s worse than the most polluted Indian cities…okay, they haven’t been inaccurate.

But if you’re from Los Angeles, which has long grappled with occasionally dense smog (especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s) and infrequent forest fire smoke, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

That’s what I was telling a friend…”this is just a typical bad-smog day in Los Angeles with a little Malibu fire overlay…no one’s idea of healthy, but ya gotta roll with it…flush it out…man up.”

The sun is smaller with a muddy-orange hue and yes, there’s an eerie atmospheric visual thing going on, and no, I wouldn’t recommend jogging or long hikes until it all starts to blow away on Sunday.

But overall HE has been much more fascinated than spooked. “I don’t trust air that I can’t see” is too blustery, too Lee Marvin or Robert Conrad but I have, as a rule, eaten this shit up and shrugged it off for decades. You should try breathing Hanoi air on a shitty day. Tough guys only.

40 years of living in Los Angeles has taught me that truly sparkling, blue-sky days are relatively rare. Having hiked in Switzerland and Colorado and Vermont and Mill Valley, I know what radiantly clear air feels and smells like. And I will breathe it again.

Monday, 10:50 am: Healthy skies.

Earlier today I was urged to read The New Yorker‘s craven attack this week on FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) and Bari Weiss, titled “Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?”

HE to author Emma Green: It’s not only possible, but an actual story about the lives of many people these days…sensible liberals grappling with progressive nutterism on a day-by-day, blow-by-blow basis.

Friendo #1: “New Yorker editor David Remnick is all in on the woke agenda, and because he has the power and the intelligence to know better, he’s kind of a bad guy. As in ‘get outta here, man…you’re bad news!’

“In the FAIR/Bari Weiss piece, The New Yorker is trying to characterize the sensibles — not rabid right-wingers, but liberal/moderates who reject wokeness — into some tiny fringe group of stragglers, like the Japanese soldiers who were still fighting World War II after it ended.

“In fact, I would characterize the people who reject wokeness as 80% to 90% of liberal/moderate adults nationwide. Nobody and I mean nobody likes this shit.

“Green’s New Yorker story is flat-out propaganda posing as journalism.”

Friendo #2: “Ww’re living through a kind of Weimar Germany time. Do the hard-left wackos really think it won’t lead to an even worse backlash on the right?

“The piece is so unfair to Weiss. For Remnick and Green to call her site, The Free Press, which she’s worked so hard to keep as neutral as possible, just another ‘far right’ site is really disgusting. I hate the gaslighting. These problems exist. They are real. No one would have even known about the French Connection censorship thing had one of Jeff’s readers not noticed.

“They’re going back and changing words of books, and suddenly we’re just like China [during the Great Cultural Revolution]. But don’t worry — it’s all okay because it helps the wokesters feel like they’re better people. Well, that’s what it did in China too!

“I miss the old left.”

Friendo #1: “The right is banning books (which I despise), but the left is banning ideas (which I despise even more). Both sides are cults. That’s a lose-lose situation.

Supply and demand.

Reportedly Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon (Apple, 11.22) isn’t a chapter-and-verse history of the rise and fall of the mercurial French emperor (Joaquin Phoenix), but a story of “Napoleon’s rise to power through the lens of his addictive and volatile relationship with Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).”

With this in mind, I was struck yesterday by a passage from Stanley Kubrick‘s Napoleon script, which of course was never filmed. It appears near the end of the story, and is basically Napoleon’s conveyance of the heart of his relationship with Josephine when they were both young.

The idea is that the pain and torment of a love affair is preferable to its absence — that nothing is worse than the void.

“This Page Six article is so misleading,” an attorney friend wrote yesterday. “He, Elliott Page, did not have the affair with Olivia Thirlby. Ellen Page did. The article’s use of pronouns to me is totally misleading.”

The article is drawn from an excerpt from “Pageboy,” the trans actor’s recently published memoir.

I was recalling last night how things were 15-plus years ago, back when Page, 36, was Ellen, 20 or 21, and the blogaroos (myself included) were having a field day with her/his/whatever’s performance in Jason Reitman‘s Juno.

Page’s performance was peppy and upfront and fully relatable, but I always had trouble with her (am I guilty of dead-naming Page by recalling the old days?) as a sexual being, which is to say a person who generates stirrings along said lines.

Posted on 12.16.07: Ellen Page‘s Juno performance is highly likable and sympathetic. You’re with her from the get-go because of her indefatigable spunk and pizazz. But the first time I saw Juno (at the Toronto Film Festival), I had a thought that wouldn’t leave me alone. It’s going to sound a little oddball but here it is. My first thought was ‘how and why did Page’s character get pregnant?’

More to the point, why did director Jason Reitman cast an actress based on her sass and spirit, but with no regard for the fact that in the real world a young woman who looks like Page — midget-sized, on the scrawny side, looking like a feisty 11 year-old with absolutely nothing about her that says ‘alluring breeding-age female’ — most likely wouldn’t exactly be fighting off the attentions of hormonally-crazed teenage boys, including nice-guy dweebs like Michael Cera‘s character?

Unfortunate pregnancies happen to young girls of all shapes and sizes — obviously, sadly — but I kept saying to myself (and I’m writing this having once been 16 and 17 years old) that Page is the super-bright girl you want for a good friend — someone you can talk to at 12:30 ayem on a school night when you’re depressed or in trouble or enthusing over a band you just heard. But she’s not what any teenaged boy would call a hot package. She’s got the soul and the wit and the attitude of a Dorothy Parker (and the value that comes with such a person is priceless), but Juno is about an accidental breeder, and certain qualities need to be evident for this to happen in most circumstances.

Every time I’ve seen a too-young pregnant girl in real life I’ve quietly remarked to myself for this or that reason, “Too bad, but I can sorta see how that happened.” I’m just saying it didn’t quite calculate when I first laid eyes on Page. I’ve been sitting on this impression for three months now, and didn’t express it because I knew people would call me a dog. But it’s a fair thing to say, I think. Page is great on her own, but she doesn’t seem right for the role. Or rather, she’s right in every way except physically.

I ordered a soft vanilla swirl cone with chocolate sprinkles from a dessert truck guy. Me: “How much is that?” Dessert guy: “Ten.” Me: “Ten fucking dollars for a cone and it’s not even real ice cream? Fuck, man!” I turned and walked away.