Hello and welcome to Thelma & Alice #16, the newsletter for people who want to watch more movies made by women.
Remember how I quit Netflix last month? Well, the 4-year-old in our household is distraught over this decision and very vocal in her displeasure. Apparently, she had plans to watch the movie My Little Pony: A New Generation and felt left out of a recent pre-school conversation having to do with Octonauts. She’s asked me multiple times over the past week if we can “please get back Netflix” and has given me a deadline of July. Meanwhile, Netflix is asking our household to return for the low price of $9.99 per month. Although I did manage to check out some Octonauts DVDs from the library, I don’t know how long we’ll be able to hold out. I’ll keep you posted! In the meantime, here are five new picks for you. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
Manic Pixie Dream Girl 2.0
Anaïs in Love (2022)
Written & Directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
VOD for $ 6.99 on various platforms
We used to have Manic Pixie Dream Girls who shepherded men on their spiritual journeys while looking very cute (Natalie Portman in Garden State being the ne plus ultra MPDG); now we have effortlessly stylish women on spiritual journeys whose wildly energetic presences confound their male love interests. I’m thinking of the recent stars of Licorice Pizza and Worst Person in the World: dilettante seekers with long legs and perfect hair. Their soulfulness is expressed by their utter aimlessness, which disguises a genuine search for meaning. They like to run, but not as a sport–it’s just that they are always in a hurry and they don’t have a faster mode of transportation. They can’t settle on a career and have trouble holding onto apartments, but when they set their mind to a specific task, they are actually quite competent. Their lives do not revolve around men but they keep getting tangled up with them. Their godmother is Frances Ha. If you have sympathy for this kind of young woman, you will love Anaïs. IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER
Bite-Sized Philosophy
Examined Life (2008)
Directed by Astra Taylor
Streaming on Kanopy
In this unexpectedly entertaining documentary, Astra Taylor, a filmmaker, author, and activist, follows eight contemporary philosophers to a particular location–chosen by the philosopher–as they speak extemporaneously about their areas of expertise. There’s Cornel West in a NYC taxi, Slavoj Žižek at a dump, and Judith Butler walking the streets of San Francisco. It’s very heady, but the visual element helps to keep your focus as you digest some seriously dense ideas; this wouldn’t work as a podcast or a lecture series. (It’s more meandering than a lecture, less concerned with getting across information than making you think.) I found it very inviting and stimulating, kind of like a late-night talk with a smart friend. IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER
The First But Not The Last
The Conductor (2022)
Directed by Bernadette Wegenstein
Streaming on PBS, VOD $2.99
I became interested in this documentary about the conductor Marin Alsop after catching a snippet of an interview with her on Terry Gross. In 2007, Alsop became the first woman to lead an American orchestra when she was appointed as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. It was a controversial appointment at the time, and Alsop remains an outlier in a musical tradition that has clung to the idea that only men should conduct, and that conductors should be pianists. Alsop doesn’t conform to either tradition; she plays violin, and as a little girl, she saw Leonard Bernstein leading an orchestra and decided that was the job for her. Eventually, Bernstein became one of her mentors. But it took a long time for Alsop to get her career started, and this straightforward documentary tells the story of her ambition and the workarounds she found to make her way. IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER
Nascent Nic Cage
Valley Girl (1983)
Directed by Martha Coolidge
Written by Andrew Lane & Wayne Crawford
Streaming on Amazon Prime
This movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, because even though it has more than two named women, they only ever talk about boys. Still, I enjoyed this rom-com quite a bit, and to be fair, it’s a movie about high school cliques and romance, so the conversations naturally revolve around boys and girls and what they think of each other. The story focuses on Julie (Deborah Foreman), a popular “Valley Girl” who falls for Randy (Nicolas Cage), a punk guy from another school. This was one of Cage’s first major roles and you can see immediately how unique his presence is. Most male actors are neatly proportioned, shortish, and conventionally handsome; Cage is tall, ungainly, and off-kilter. He reminds me of Adam Driver, when he first appeared in Girls: the archetype Hollywood didn’t know it needed. Randy’s effect on Julie is the same as his effect on the audience, and without him, I doubt Valley Girl would have worked. Another thing I loved about this movie was how it was such a perfect time capsule, with the teenage characters wearing delightfully weird 80s fashions and traipsing around suburban interiors tinged with the remainders of the 1970s. Finally, I will note this observation from Roger Ebert’s 1983 review: “Maybe because it was directed by a woman, Martha Coolidge, this is one of the rare Teenager Movies that doesn't try to get laughs by insulting and embarrassing teenage girls.” IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER
Documentary as Memoir
Cameraperson (2016)
Directed by Kirstin Johnson
Streaming on HBO
In her collage-like memoir, cinematographer Kirstin Johnson pieces together footage from the many documentaries that she has filmed over the course of her career. Some are documentaries that she directed but many snippets are taken from films in which she was helping another director to realize their vision. Johnson also intersperses home movies of her children and parents, and if you’ve seen Johnson’s 2020 documentary about her father, Dick Johnson is Dead, you’ll recognize some of the people and locations. Cameraperson seems, at first, to be less personal than Dick Johnson is Dead, and I wasn’t sure if I would even stick with it when I started watching. But as the meaning of what Johnson was doing began to sink in, I became transfixed. Johnson shows you the people and places she’s visited, and although we rarely see her, we hear her talking with her subjects and her crew as she frames stories that are not her own. Slowly, you realize that her memoir is a reflection on the ethics of her work, which requires her to record other people’s suffering and then walk away. I liked this documentary for its essayistic qualities, the way Johnson asks you to follow the thread of her thought as she looks back on what she’s seen. IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER