Happy Friday! It’s the weekend and there are some interesting things in theaters and streaming this weekend but I’m going to start this Your Weekend Watch edition off with a warning about a what not to watch, or at least, watch with extreme caution:
The Perfect Neighbor
Ajike Owens was a Black mom of 4, killed in front of her children by her racist white neighbor Susan Lorincz after Lorincz had harassed them for two years, unabated. Through bodycam footage, Florida’s Marion County police documented in great detail their own incompetence, their own inadequacies, their ongoing failures, which led to Lorincz being free to murder Owens. That footage has been turned into the Netflix documentary The Perfect Neighbor.
The initial fears that sparked the need for Director Geeta Gandbhir to start filming—that Lorincz wouldn’t be arrested at all, and then that she would get off using Florida’s Stand Your Ground defense—were thankfully averted. Thanks to Gandbhir’s team keeping pressure on the police and media attention on the case, in 2024, Lorincz received her punishment: 25 years in prison, essentially the rest of her raggedy life. It was a relief for Owens’ family, but healing is a long way off.
No matter; this is not a documentary about healing. Owens’ mother wanted this documentary to tell “what happened” to AJ, and it does. And proceeds will provide financial support to the family, as it should. Gandbhir won the prize for directing at Sundance in January, and the most recent headline I’ve read on the film calls it one that “the Oscars can’t ignore.”
But what good is that to her children? I can’t help but wonder how the children will feel when they become adults with agency, knowing that images of them in their most vulnerable, devastated, traumatized state are streaming in over 190 countries on Netflix. Watching their screams, I felt like a vulture circling their pain without their knowledge (how could they know they were being recorded by police cameras at that moment?) or their consent (what is the age of consent in Florida for sharing images of your trauma in a documentary?).
Like the screams of Trayvon Martin captured by a 9-1-1 call as George Zimmerman’s gun blast silences him, I’ll be haunted by the sounds and images captured in this “true crime” documentary that I’ll never watch again. Without doubt, if you watch it, it will break you. But then what? If it doesn’t stir us to abolition, then it’s just another in a long list of bodycam snuff videos of Black life. And who does that serve?
You can read my full breakdown over at Contraband Camp.
Platonic
Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen are comedy gold in this series about two platonic best friends from college who reunite after a period of separation. Love and shenanigans ensue when these two spiritual soulmates get together, causing the kind of friction and toxic codependency that only happens when someone really sees and knows you for a really long time. I love shows about friendship and how important they are, and this may be the first I’ve seen across gender lines where the friendship is explicitly what the show is about. It’s grown comedy, situational comedy, physical humor, and the best I’ve seen Byrne and Rogen yet. Between this and The Studio, Rogen is 2 for 2. If you’ve not yet seen the show, you have a joyous two seasons ahead of you!
Platonic is streaming on AppleTV+.
After the Hunt
I was about 5 minutes late to my screening of After the Hunt, entering the dinner party scene at the fabulous home of Julia Roberts’ professor Alma like a tardy guest. Alma’s way-too-close rake of a colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) is holding court, waxing poetic about “kids today” needing safe spaces and how D.E.I. might help Alma beat him in the race for tenure since everybody loves giving women jobs now apparently. Ayo Edebiri’s student Maggie takes offense and spars with him in a retread of the better-done classroom scene in Todd Fields’ brilliant Tàr, and it reminds me that I never wrote about Tàr.
Anyway, Hank and Maggie leave the party together and the titular Hunt begins when Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault the next day.
Everything after this moment in the film pulled me out of my suspended disbelief. Maggie is Black from a generationally wealthy family that has a dorm named after them in an Ivy League school. I’m sure that may be a thing somewhere and I still don’t believe you, nor do I believe that Maggie was written as a Black woman and not just changed to Black with the casting of Edebiri. But this is not Grey’s Anatomy, Bridgerton, a production wherein you can just swap races without doing any other work to the script (a good example of which I can’t think of right now!). Sure, her wealth and status at the school would matter, and it would also be heavily weighed against the fact that she’s Black and queer and a woman accusing a popular white male professor of assault.
Yet, in a world where men have canceled #MeToo and 7 of the last 10 presidents have been credibly accused of rape or sexual assault, After the Hunt dares to ask: what if an Ivy League institution took sexual assault against a woman of color seriously and there were consequences? I couldn’t help but think about Emma Sulkowicz, the Asian and Jewish student at Columbia University who carried her dorm mattress around campus as protest performance art after the school dismissed her rape allegation. Columbia then paid the accused a settlement after he sued the school for gender-based discrimination by allowing her to bully him with mattress art. Way more realistic outcome.
But I’m not sure director Luca Guadingo (Challengers) is interested in realism.
He’s less ambiguous in his presentation of whether Hank did the things he was accused of, contrasted with the climax of Tàr, which asks us to ponder what we lose when we cancel maybe-abusive genius. But like Tàr, Guadingo is also interested in exploring female ambition under patriarchy and how many other women a traumatized, male-centered girl-boss must step on to climb up.
There are concepts of a good movie in here and Roberts and Garfield are particularly great, but After the Hunt does not earn its runtime and the coda of the film is a disaster that only exists to fulfill the promise of the title. In that case, start the movie later or just name it something else.
After the Hunt is in theaters now. But Tàr is streaming on Peacock, so you could just watch that instead.
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You / Die My Love
And we’re back with some more intense films. I watched Rose Byrne’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You and Jennifer Lawrence’s Die My Love back to back, and let me say, this White Women Are Not Okay double-feature is not for the faint of heart! Pace yourself. These are emotionally exhausting rides.
In both, Byrne and Lawrence play women suffocating under the patriarchal chokehold of motherhood while their male partners are off in the world doing this and that in the background and coming home later, dripping with disappointment at how their wives are handling their duties. Also, strangely, both feature Black men as potential threats to these unhappy homes.
It could just be these two films, or it could be an expression of growing anxiety, as even high-profile Black women like Michelle Obama and Ayesha Curry talk about how much it sucks to be second-at-most in your own life. The girls are throwing themselves into the ocean and escaping naked into the forest instead of being wives and mothers! At least on film.
Robert Pattinson’s American Accent returns in Die My Love, as the titular love who should die—presumably because he stopped sleeping with Lawrence’s Grace once she had their baby and she goes absolutely rabid. Lakeith Stanford’s Karl becomes a potential sexual cure for Grace in the wake of Jackson’s impotence, and I really wish people would be cognizant of what it means to make a character you wrote as white but cast with a Black actor. Though we’re in Grace’s perspective and are meant to be sympathetic to her, she’s in the midst of what is clearly post-partum depression and irrationality—or at least that’s how everyone around her views it. Potentially hooking up with a Black Peeping Tom in the woods as evidence of her descent into breakdown is prob-lem-a-tic! for a plethora of the age-old racist stereotypes showcased in the film that gave rise to the KKK, The Birth of a Nation. Jackson also brings home a black female dog that destroys their white tablecloth and adds more chaos to their marriage. Grace calls the dog Jackson’s “girlfriend,” and *TW/spoiler alert for those concerned about animal cruelty*: awful things happen to the dog (though not in this clip):
Sigh. Is this good acting? Is this funny? I was confused on what the tone was supposed to be in this scene. I wish director Lynne Ramsey had put more thought into some of these choices.
In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Byrne plays Linda, a psychiatrist and daily caregiver for her young disabled daughter. While her husband is deployed for months, the literal ceiling of her apartment caves in, forcing her to flee with her daughter into an even more confined space. Though everyone in the movie has legs, Linda feels either not capable or not brave enough to fight back against what’s constraining her. In A$AP Rocky’s second movie of the year, Rihanna’s husband appears like a Magical Negro with a drug connect who has nothing else to do but try and help a very resistant Linda. Why is this character Black and what does this mean for the story? is a series of questions I’d like more writer/directors to ponder in development. Anyway, Linda can’t be helped. Not really. Not by men. Her weird, funny relationship with her therapist co-worker Conan O’Brien is, well, weird and funny, but she is also far beyond talk therapy at this point, and too lost in a swirl of generational mother-daughter wounds that mirror the gaping hole in her ceiling.
Her resentments of her husband’s absence are justified. What she wrestles with are her resentments of her disabled daughter, which make her feel like a bad mother and a bad person. Her rage, grief and resentment are so palpable that, when it was over, I’d walked all the way to my car in a panic before I realized: I’m not married and I don’t have a kid and everything is fine! Phew! I’m far more interested in what disabled critics have to say on this film though, but my go-to critics haven’t reviewed it yet. If you see any good ones, send them my way!
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in theaters now & Die My Love will be in theaters Nov. 14.
The Morning Show
There are so many Black people on the show in season 4! And by so many, I mean there are four. Aaron Pierre pops in as a potential love interest for Greta Lee’s Stella, the new CEO of ATN and my favorite, William Jackson Harper (The Good Place) becomes a rival for Karen Pittman’s Mia to run the newsdesk. And thank goodness, after a powerhouse season 3, Nicole Beharie’s Chris, who was on the fence about staying at ATN last season, returns to steal another season. Y’all are watching The Morning Show, I am watching Chris & Mia in the Morning. Give Beharie and Pittman a spin-off, stat! The two overlooked divas team up and make moves that are best for them, rather than the network that they’ve been loyal to, with mixed results. The viral clips from the season, once again, are Beharie’s, proving that if you give her a scene, she’s gonna eat.
*Trigger warning* there is talk of pregnancy loss this season as we delve deeper into Chris’s backstory. As the former track Olympian prepares to host ATN’s Olympics coverage, she faces her biggest challenge yet that could make her break her reputation and her career. While I usually fast-forward through the scenes of Reese Witherspoon’s absolutely insufferable MAGA-adjacent Bradley Jackson, I must admit, Jennifer Aniston’s big finale gagged me a bit! Consistently good TV.
Watch The Morning Show on AppleTV+.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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