drive by note: on girls i’ve seen
Just a couple of things I’ve watched over the x number of months, during which I haven’t been here at all.
San Junipero (Black Mirror S03E04)
I don’t even go here — I have stayed away from TV since Lexa (I know) — but it’s not like I could resist something sold to me as “How Clarke and Lexa and the City of Light should have gone” because HELLO. It’s been a while, and I wasn’t really expecting anything, but my god, how could I tell you just how much I loved San Junipero without spoiling you?
Okay, I’ll go ahead and spoil you anyway.
So the story goes: Kelly and Yorkie meet in a club in San Junipero, a seaside beach town where people are laid back and having fun and drinking and dancing. They hit it off over drinks; Yorkie is adorably awkward, while Kelly’s a bit more smooth and clearly in her element. Kelly looks her over; tells her she’s regarding her. It was the moment I decided I was going to love this episode.
Full disclosure: I came in blind; this was my first Black Mirror episode. I had no idea things were going to get weird, at any point, so when it started to go Eternal Sunshine-ish on me I felt a deliciously cold sensation creep up my spine.
Goddamn it. Why do the days end at midnight? Also, why is the music so damn good?
Okay, so it turns out San Junipero isn’t a place, but a state of mind (hah! take that, traffic!) — it’s some form of therapy! Where people in coma/in the last stage of their lives go! WHAT THE FUCK. What’s more: It’s an interactive dreamscape! Where people can have sex.
Nice.
So yeah, that’s the basic premise of the thing — and I am so into it like wow. I’ve always wanted a shared dreamscape. Considering the sordidness of These Days, if anyone offered to upload my entire consciousness onto a beach town, I would probably say yes.
Anyway, the biggest spoiler of all: They figured out how to mash-up the Bury Your Gays trope with a happy ending.
Here’s that last scene, set to Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth, which is still on loop on my Spotify (I’m not even kidding.)
Baka Bukas (2016)
Watched this Cinema One original featuring Jasmine Curtis-Smith and Louise delos Reyes before its run ended and was pleased to have been greeted by a packed moviehouse. I was really glad to see that we have an audience that would gladly patronize LGBT films. I’m a fan of Jasmine’s work, and have been following Louise since Lipgloss (I KNOW — don’t me), so naturally I was very excited to hear that these two women were pairing up to portray lesbians in a coming of age film about best friends falling in love.
It’s my favorite trope; how could it go wrong, right?
I have said things, and I have said things. Good things first: It’s a visual delight — it plays like an extended music video, with beautiful imagery wrapped in fantastic music. I dig this. It feels like Skins.
In terms of story, however, I felt myself looking for elsethings, which I did not get. It felt like walking into a room halfway through a party, where everyone already knew everyone and there was already an ongoing conversation that I was not privy to, and it was as if everyone just expected me to just take everything as is.
As a story-lover, I am all about motivation and history and context. I wanted to know more about these two women. I wanted to know more about the lead, Alex. Most especially, I wanted to know why Alex was in love with her best friend, Jess.
I’m a sucker for beginnings, truth be told; I wanted to be there at the start. I wanted to know where they met. I wanted to be introduced to the people they were before this movie started.
But the thing is, the movie starts in medias res — Alex and Jess are already best friends, and Alex is already in love with her. I felt like as a viewer, I was just supposed to take this in, de facto. In addition to that, Alex has an ex-girlfriend named Kate (which gave me the briefest of delights), whose story I also would have wanted explored yet was also expected to accept, as is where is. It would have been great to see the difference between the Alex/Jess-Alex/Kate connections, and I felt this could have been exposed in dialogue, but be that as it may, the dialogue left me wanting more as well.
Let us not forget that side-story about Alex’s gay best friends, though I felt like the movie wanted to take on so many things (as would have been my choice myself, given one rare chance to tell A Story), but in the end, all the thin story-threads suffered altogether. Was it a coming out/coming of age movie? Was it a childhood best friends-to-lovers kind of movie? Was it a lost twenty-something trying to find herself kind of movie? The possibilities are endless, but in the end, a solid choice would have been appreciated.
(Speaking of thin story-threads: What happened to The Whole Pitch thing?)
In all, I’m happy to have a movie like Baka Bukas helmed by a young queer Filipino director. Perhaps, had I watched this at a younger time, it would have spoken directly to me. As it is though, there are certainly spaces for improvement, story-wise but I’m glad to have watched it, and I am thankful it exists.
