As Netflix prepares to end its DVD service, I\u2019ve been plowing through my queue as fast as I can. These are in order of when I watched them.<\/p>\n
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days<\/strong><\/em>: An unbearably tense 2007 Romanian movie, set in the 1980s, about a young woman trying to help her friend get an illegal abortion. From Cristian Mungiu, the director of the also-harrowing lesbian nun exorcism film\u00a0Beyond the Hills<\/em><\/a>. For much of its runtime it isn\u2019t \u201cabout\u201d abortion, but about other things that accumulate around this specific abortion: the ubiquity of the black market, and of lying in general; the comfort we find in blaming somebody when things go awry, The woman whom you put here with me\u2013she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate<\/em> it;<\/em> how a party feels when you can\u2019t tell anybody what is really on your mind.<\/p>\n Nobody bothers considering the moral rightness or wrongness of Gabita\u2019s decision, and this too felt very real in its way\u2013the fact of a choice gets obscured beneath all the practical chores you have to do to hustle that choice across the finish line. Mungiu was influenced by the Dardenne brothers (Kid with a<\/em> Bike<\/em>, The Unknown Woman<\/em>,\u00a0The Son<\/em>), and he shares their attentiveness to the time and effort it takes to do anything. All the cigarettes you have to gather for bribes, all the excuses and conversations, everybody you have to placate or evade or endure.<\/p>\n The abortion is horrible because it\u2019s illegal; there\u2019s no one Gabita or her friend Otilia can tell about the cruelty inflicted on both of them. And then once the abortion has happened something changes. Most of the movie has the tension of a heist or suspense film without any of the fun. But now the film starts to feel like genre horror: shuddering electric lights, a woman running in and out of streetlights in a night full of threatening footsteps and barking dogs. Only now do the characters, and the film itself, raise the question of the unborn child. Everything about this final stretch of the film seems to me designed to make you feel the child\u2019s humanity, even (in the final scene) in a somewhat heavyhanded way. It ends on a note of repressed anguish. The film feels like it is an attempt to say everything that couldn\u2019t be said for so long\u2013not just some things, but everything.<\/p>\n Victor Morton noted<\/a> how often the film uses mirroring and images of crossings, like the trains that rattle past one another in opposite directions. He suggests that this imagery is how Mungiu casts the shadow of choice across this otherwise choiceless film. Doubling figures and crossing paths represent the fact that one\u2019s actions are not inevitable, the possibility of living a different way. I don\u2019t know that this is quite how it hit me. The trains, especially, seemed to me like a representation of how it feels when you think that another life exists, but not for you. That feeling is usually false but it is very convincing.<\/p>\n Thieves\u2019 Highway<\/strong><\/em>: Set along the California coastline, this 1949 drama follows returning soldier Nick and his quest to avenge his father by exposing the crook who not only swindled the father, but arranged an accident in which he lost his legs. Nick\u2019s scheme involves hauling apples to San Francisco before anybody else can get their load in. For me, the best things about this picture were the long and harrowing scene of Nick trying not to fall asleep at the wheel; the attentiveness, in general, to the physical tasks and risks of long-haul driving; the brutal scene when one trucker dies after an accident in which a couple low-level goon\/shlimazls were complicit; and the slightly febrile, hard-bitten bad girl (Valentina Cortese), who wins the day.<\/p>\n The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love<\/strong><\/em>: Oh, you know, God bless the 1990s! I watched this thing in the theater when it first came out, and I kind of assumed it wouldn\u2019t hold up. Maybe it doesn\u2019t? But I was completely charmed by it, even though it is a precursor of all the Wholesome<\/a> queer media in which we\u2019re currently drowning. Maybe that\u2019s okay sometimes???<\/p>\n Working-class white stoner butch Randy falls for well-combed, wealthy black honor-student Evie, and their relationship causes havoc in their high school and their differently- but equally-catawampus families. Laurel Holloman and Nicole Ari Parker are endearing as the girls, everything\u2019s handled lightly but with desperate adolescent sincerity, all problems are solved through individual effort because it\u2019s the 1990s. The humor is slight but pleasing (there\u2019s a refrain of \u201c\u2026Nice car\u201d whenever a new character spots Evie\u2019s Range Rover) and Randy listens to some of the same bands I did.<\/p>\n Final moments rewrite Walt Whitman in a way that every \u201cside B<\/a>\u201d homosexual has already written a full thesis on. Fine! Of course! Whatever!<\/p>\n The Watermelon Woman<\/strong><\/em>: Also very charming! The first feature directed by an out Black lesbian, this 1996 mockumentary does the audience the favor of not \u201cunpacking\u201d or lecturing us on its themes. It simply presents us with Cheryl\u2019s (writer\/director\/star Cheryl Dunye) quest to find the truth behind the mysterious 1930s Black actress, \u201cthe Watermelon Woman.\u201d Representation, our relationship to #problematic art of the past, interracial dating, Who Tells Your Story (TM)\u2013all of these things get mentioned, but there\u2019s no thesis or conclusion, it\u2019s more that Dunye is showing us how these seemingly-abstract \u201cissues\u201d weave into our daily lives.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all driven by Dunye\u2019s performance as a comically youthful and adorable butch. Valarie Walker is also great as her long-suffering partner in video serfdom. There are cameos from Cheryl Clarke and Toshi Reagon, and a very funny cameo by Sarah Schulman. AND let me say, AND there is one other cameo, which I will not spoil because you guys deserve to have your jaws drop as fast as mine did, but it is HILARIOUS and is perhaps the only humble thing that specific lesbian has ever done.<\/p>\n Rambling, sweetly serious but also willing to do some self-deprecating satire, equal parts time capsule and still-relevant sheaf of questions.<\/p>\n Flaming Ears<\/strong><\/em>: Unintelligible queer punk science-fiction atmosphere piece. I regret to say that I found the first word in that sentence to be the important one. \u201cThe revolution of love is bloody. A melancholy bird flies over a sea of cruelty. Do you feel the moisture in your armpits?\u201d An ominously roller-skating androgyne pours gasoline over a desk, then humps it, then lights it on fire. I know you think that sounds fun, and it was at first, but the more it just accumulated in a heap, the less I cared. Why is German cinema like this?!<\/em><\/p>\n Cropsey<\/strong><\/em>: \u201cThat was the summer all the kids from Staten Island discovered that the urban legend was real.\u201d<\/p>\n OK, this is a true-crime documentary about whether a specific person or group of people were the real-life kidnappers and child killers behind the local legend of \u201cCropsey.\u201d It turns out that at least one missing child really was buried in the woods near a shuttered institution for children with intellectual disabilities. One former orderly at the hospital really had returned to its grounds to live in camps in the woods. People really did (probably) live in the tunnel system underneath the hospital.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to go into too much more detail, since Cropsey<\/em> is really well-paced in doling out both large and small revelations. I will say that there are a few themes here that made this a genuinely memorable film for me. It\u2019s a film about the dehumanization of people with intellectual disabilities\u2013that theme emerges from more than one angle. It\u2019s about the elusiveness of certainty\u2013what happened, whodunnit, and why it happened remain unresolved. It\u2019s got some startling Catholic cameos, including an appearance by Veronica Lueken<\/a>, hence the title of this post. Everybody\u2019s got a different line they draw with true-crime stuff, but to me, at least, this film felt more haunting than exploitative\u2013at least in part because so much of its story is about the worth and belovedness of children with Down\u2019s Syndrome and other disabilities.<\/p>\n On an artistic level, my main criticism is that the music is bland. I think it\u2019s being used to add a tragic note, to recall us to the real misery at the heart of this story rather than letting us skid off into \u201coohhh a spooky mental hospital!!!\u201d land, but the thing is that true-crime stuff always wants to fake respectable, so the sad music feels more like a disclaimer than like an elegy. Either no music, or more unique music, might have been better.<\/p>\n