By Design

Movie Pick of the Week

Dear Friends,

Moving on to next week’s film pick: disappointingly, in all of NYC I can find only three new woman-directed movies: Wuthering Heights (Emerald Fennell), Twenty-eight Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta), and, in a single time slot in the morning each day at IFC Center, the Oscar-nominated documentary The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir).

OK, so I just watched the Bone Temple trailer and there’s no way. I’m too squeamish even for the trailer, and on top of that a friend who is not squeamish told me he didn’t like the first 40 minutes because of all the human torture. Are we even glad a woman directed this movie? I guess?

I am not at all sold on Wuthering Heights and Susan refuses to see it with me anyway. Instead, I’m waiting for the novel to become available at my local library–I’ve never read it, and I enjoy 19^th Century English literature.

I do want to watch The Perfect Neighbor, a harrowing film edited primarily with police bodycam and home surveillance footage. It’s available on Netflix, however, and I’m not sure I want to watch it in the theater, much less before noon.

So what to do? … wait! What’s this!? Susan mentioned a film to me, and it turns out it just opened at the Quad Cinema ... how did I miss By Design, a woman-made absurdist comedy in which Juliette Lewis swaps bodies with a chair? Problem solved! Written and directed by Amanda Kramer, we’ll see it Thursday (Feb 19) at 6pm.

To the pleasure of films and the discussions they spark,

Josh