lee_eisenberg

After director Jeff Baena's recent suicide, I decided to watch his movies that I hadn't seen. I started with 2016's oddball "Joshy", and have now seen 2020's enigmatic "Horse Girl". This one casts Alison Brie as an introvert whose line between reality and imagination starts fraying. It has some truly bizarre things, to the point that you might have to watch it a second time to see if you missed something.

So what's one to take from it? Hard to say. Like "Donnie Darko", it seems that the movie's main purpose is to mess with your mind. Even so, I thought that it was worth seeing, if hard to follow at times. So far I recommend every Baena movie that I've seen (I still have yet to see "Spin Me Round").

Around the age of seventeen, I learned of Joan Jett when I heard "Weird Al" Yankovic's spoof of her cover of "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" (called "I Love Rocky Road"). I later learned that she started out as a member of a group in the late '70s called the Runaways, whose hard rock sound marked a sharp contrast to a lot of the bubblegum stuff at the time.

So now I've seen the documentary "Edgeplay", about the Runaways. One of the main things that I noticed was Jett's absence, as she refused to participate and thus only appears in the archival footage. It's mostly interviews with the band's other members, talking about how the group got formed and eventually broke up.

I guess that the documentary will mean more to people who lived through the era and were into the Runaways' output back then. To me it was just commentary about something that I never knew. Even so, I will say that the Runaways turned out some interesting music.

There was later a movie about the group, starring Kristen Stewart in one of the roles. I'll probably see it eventually. In the meantime, this is an okay if not great documentary.

While we may have learned about slavery, we most likely never learned about one of the most important events: Nat Turner's rebellion. He was an enslaved black man in Virginia who led a group of other enslaved people against the slave-owning class, executing several slave-owners. Eventually caught and executed, he remained an icon of the abolitionist movement.

Charles Burnett's documentary "Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property" focuses partly on the rebellion, but also on the changing image of Turner over time. After all, how people learn history depends on the era and the teacher. The documentary features some reenactments and interviews with people (among them Ossie Davis) discussing Turner's legacy. Definitely one of the most important figures in US history.

There was a movie about Turner that got released in 2016 (I haven't seen it). I'd also like to see a movie about John Brown, who tried to free a bunch of slaves and got executed, leading to the song "John Brown's Body".