At Home With…December Picks
Friends of Metrograph Naomi Fry, Lynne Tillman, and Phoebe Chen each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Variety, dir. Bette Gordon, 1983
“In the morning, the guys stand outside and wait for the doors to open… they don’t say much. And then, when the doors do open, the smell of Lysol comes out. It really stinks.”
This is how Christine, the protagonist of Variety, describes the Times Square porn theater where she has recently started working the box office. Christine, an aspiring writer who is young and pretty and in dire need of a job, is repelled by the scummy environment, but as time goes on, she becomes intrigued. Who are these men who fondle themselves in the putrid darkness while larger-than-life women, high up on the screen, go through the motions of mimicked desire? And how do her own sexual yearnings fit into the template established by this pornographic logic? An open-ended plot that involves Christine’s growing obsession with one of the theatre patrons is almost beside the point. What comes to the forefront, instead, is the movie’s early-’80s downtown-scene time-capsule quality, and its pervasive atmosphere of horned-up dread.
Naomi Fry is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, dir. Matt Wolf, 2019
From the mid-1970s until her death, Marion Stokes recorded every broadcast TV news program. With the advent of cable, TVs and VHS machines filled rooms and rooms. Her decision, obsession, was based on the belief American people weren’t getting the whole truth, and she was right. Recorder amazed me: it is a fascinating and moving account of a complex, brilliant, singular woman. From Stokes’s immense archive, Wolf has made a pictorial parade of news events, and the recent past flashes by like bits of forgotten memory. Recorder is bigger than one woman’s life and impossible without it.
WATCH RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT
Lynne Tillman’s most recent novel is Men and Apparitions. Her latest, Mothercare, an autobiographical essay, was published in August.
Lady Vengeance, dir. Park Chan-wook, 2005
You already know this image: in the evening’s gentle snowfall, a sudden spray of blood mars the pall of new frost, seeping into the once-pristine. Lady Vengeance pairs such motifs of purity with violent bursts of carmine: fresh tofu and red tapered candles; a shock of crimson eyeshadow on a seraphic face. It’s an apt visual for Park, who’s known for melding carnage and pathos to mutually maximizing effect. In Lady Vengeance, our avenging angel Geum-ja emerges from a 13-year prison stint for the murder of a young boy, though we soon learn she has long plotted retribution against the real perpetrator. That maternal loss has lit the fuse of her grief and rage—you can only imagine the explosive catharsis that lies ahead.
Phoebe Chen is a writer and PhD candidate living in New York. Her work has been published in Artforum, The Nation, Criterion, and elsewhere.
