And then the next day, I watched my second 2024 film of the post-2024 era.
Both of these were films I had been meaning to see in time to rank them, but missed them for one reason or another. And both feature human beings who might not be quite human.
The first was Marielle Heller's Nightbitch, and there's one of these every year. Well, maybe not every year -- the last one I remember for sure was CODA in 2021. And by "one of these" I mean a movie I wanted to see before my ranking deadline but did not realize was actually easily accessible to me until it was too late.
You may remember I was trying to work our TV at our Air BnB in Los Angeles so that I could get into Hulu and watch this. You may also remember that I was unsuccessful in that endeavor.
Even more unsuccessfully, I failed to realize that a lot of Hulu content is actually available to us on Disney+ here, due to some agreement I don't properly understand and needn't bother to properly understand. Anyway, I could have watched it before my deadline, but only noticed this a few days later when it was too late.
The first thing I want to tell you about Nightbitch is that it does not star Sandra Bullock. "Why would I think it starred Sandra Bullock, Vance?" I just think the picture in that poster above looks a lot more like Sandra Bullock than it looks like Amy Adams, which is funny because I have never for a moment thought they resembled each other.
Actually, this isn't at all what Adams looks like in the movie. I think that's quite a beautiful picture above, but Adams never looks as beautiful as she actually is in this movie, which was a choice by both Heller and Adams to underscore how much she has been physically reduced by being a stay-at-home mother to a two-year-old. When Adams was younger I thought of her as an actress who would always take roles in which she was clearly very pretty, but the last ten years of her career have changed that impression significantly. She's really in touch with her feral side here, even beyond what is required by the story itself. (Which, if you did not know, is either a real story about some part of her that is turning canine, or just a metaphor for the transformation she wants to undergo to get her old self back.)
I really liked Heller's approach to this script, which consistently breaks out of the ordinary scenes involving Adams' Mother (I only just realized, looking at IMDB, that the character doesn't have a name) in her communications with friends, former classmates and her husband, delivering some sort of soliloquy about her true thoughts -- scenes that really allow Adams to go the extra mile in finding the miserable center of a woman whose life has become only taking care of other people. Heller also intentionally blurs the line between "Is this real?" or "Is this in her head?" as there are some moments where no disinterested observer can confirm what's happening, and some where what's happening does poke its head out into other people's reality. (Though, I suppose, their reactions could still be in her head.)
Obviously in its thematic preoccupations, but also in a certain lacerating quality, the movie reminded me a lot of Jason Reitman's Tully, written by Diablo Cody and starring Charlize Theron. The way Theron eschewed all vanity in that movie to give us a specimen of exhausted motherhood (one who was also currently pregnant in that case) was very reminiscent of how Adams does the same thing here. And in both movies, a well-meaning but lazy husband/father gets called out for the way he passively shirks duties he knows his wife will do if he just shows himself to be even marginally disinclined toward them. Here it's Scoot McNairy, and I have to say, I could see in him a lot of my own failings to do more than 30% of the household tasks in our house -- though Scoot (also nameless, only "Husband" on IMDB) is probably closer to 10%. I'm not as bad as he is ... right? (Or in any case, my kids are now 14 and 11 so it's all long since been forgiven.) I especially liked clever observations in Heller's script such as when she reminds him that she's going into the city that night so he has to be the parent present, and he says "I know, I know, I'm babysitting." And she shoots back "It's not babysitting if it's your own child." Too right.
I might like Tully a smidge better, but I like them both a lot and I think this would have made my top 40 of last year if I'd seen it in time.
I didn't know anything but the title of Zelda Williams' Lisa Frankenstein. In fact, that means I did not know it was written by Diablo Cody, making my referencing of her in relation to Tully quite the coincidence. (Yes, I wrote the Nightbitch half of this post before I watched Lisa Frankenstein, already knowing that was my plan for Saturday night so also knowing in advance the concept for this post.)
If you had asked me to guess what it was about, I would have told you that Lisa was the daughter of either the mad scientist himself, or of Frankenstein's monster, depending on how this particular film wanted to interpret the identity of "Frankenstein." But just from having seen the poster, I could have told you it was not set in the 18th century.
Making assumptions about this film was the reason it didn't quite make it off my Letterboxd watchlist during the 2024 ranking season, even though I had (paid) access to it for most of the year. It was seeing it pop up on Netflix -- which also may or may not have happened while I was still ranking -- that allowed me to belatedly catch up with it this past weekend.
It turns out the movie was not what I thought it was about, textually, but was similar to what I thought it was about in spirit, and also a little better than I would have thought it might be. Lisa here is actually Lisa Swallows (the charming and very capable Kathryn Newton), it's just the movie thinks of her as "Lisa Frankenstein" because she ends up inadvertently raising a man from the dead by visiting an old graveyard in her town and dreaming herself away into the statue of him next to where he's buried. Yes, the statue looks a bit dreamy, but Lisa's wish was actually to be dead like him, not to have him alive again with her. See, her mother was killed by an axe murderer the year before, protecting Lisa from said axe murderer at that, and though I called Newton the actress charming, Lisa the character is more mopey and goth adjacent, as you might expect from someone whose mother recently died and whose ineffectual father (Joe Chrest) has since taken up with the town bitch (Carla Gugino) and her kind but vacuous cheerleader daughter (Liza Soberano). Oh yeah, it's also 1989.
Lisa Frankenstein humorously reminded me, in its inciting incident, of a movie I did see and rank in 2024, which was Hot Frosty. In that holiday romance for the Hallmark crowd, Lacey Chabert wishes a handsome snowman (Dustin Milligan) into existence in a similar fashion, and indeed does begin her own romance with that snowman, just as Lisa becomes involved with Cole Sprouse's initially wordless exhumed corpse, who steadily regains his complexion as he regains missing body parts through means not entirely savory. This is surely a better movie than Hot Frosty, though I did like that one too, in spite of my better critical instincts.
As a leftover from Juno, we still think of Cody as a bit of a try-hard as a screenwriter (she probably rolls her eyes every time someone confronts her with the phrase "home skillet"). However, I have not found that to be Cody's dominant mode of writing in most of her movies since then (including Tully) and I continued to find her work more positive than negative here. I didn't embrace it as much as Nightbitch but it still gets a solid 3.5 stars from me.
And now back onward to non-2024 movies ... again.
