Worth Mentioning - The Female of the Species

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody watches a trio of films about women who may or may not (and sometimes definitely are) be dangerous.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (2022)

Book-to-film adaptations can be tricky to pull off. Scenes can play longer in books, and they can allow the reader to dig deeper into characters’ thoughts and feelings than movies can often allow. So emotional scenes adapted from books to the screen can sometimes come off as rushed or superficial compared to how impactful they were on the page. There are scenes like that in the film adaptation of Delia Owens’ bestselling novel Where the Crawdads Sing, which was directed by Olivia Newman and scripted by Lucy Alibar. Some moments in the movie don’t work as well as they did in the novel. But overall, I found Where the Crawdads Sing to be a fine version of the story.

The film introduces us to Catherine "Kya" Clark when she’s a young child, living in a shack on the edge of a marsh with her dysfunctional family. But one-by-one, every other member of the family ditches the life they have in this shack, just walking out – most of them never to be seen again. The first Clark to leave is Kya’s mother. The last to leave is her alcoholic father. By the age of 7, Kya has been left to fend for herself. But she finds a way to survive. Thanks to some people in town, she finds a way to make money, and even manages to receive an education... without even attending school. She does give school a try one day, but the other kids don’t react well to having the dirty “marsh girl” in their midst. So she goes back to life on her own.

Kya, played for much of the film’s running time by Daisy Edgar-Jones, even manages to find love in her teen years. Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) visits her in the marsh, spends time hanging out with her, is even the person who gets her home education started. They fall for each other, but Tate isn’t exactly the perfect boyfriend. So after a while, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) also enters her life. And Chase causes her even more hurt and trouble than Tate does. Which is a major problem, because when Chase turns up dead in what could have been a tragic accident, the local authorities find a reason to accuse Kya of murdering him. She’s put on trial... and there is question of whether or not the “marsh girl” can get a fair trial.

Where the Crawdads Sing is an interesting story, a captivating glimpse into a woman’s very unique life. The movie isn’t as fascinating as the book was, but Newman and Alibar had to tell the story in a greatly condensed way and they did a good job of it. Edgar-Jones also makes for a terrific Kya, and this was the second time I have been impressed by her work in the last year. The first time being in the horror thriller Fresh.

MOTHER’S BOYS (1993)

Jamie Lee Curtis is known for playing the heroine in horror movies and thrillers. Prom Night, Road Games, Terror Train, The Fog, Blue Steel, various entries in the Halloween franchise. But in 1993 she decided to give playing the villain a try for the film Mother’s Boys, which Yves Simoneau directed from a screenplay by Barry Schneider and Richard Hawley (based on a novel by Bernard Taylor). 

Curtis plays Jude Madigan, who walked out on her husband Robert (Peter Gallagher) and their three young sons. She’s off on her own for three years, she doesn’t even visit her mother (played by Vanessa Redgrave). But when she’s notified that Robert has filed for divorce, she’s shocked and offended. She can’t believe he has had the audacity to move on and start a relationship with another woman, Joanne Whalley as Callie – who happens to be the assistant principal at the school the Madigan kids attend. Jude immediately sets out to work her way back into the lives of the husband and children she left behind, hoping to win Robert back and force Callie out of his life. And she’s willing to use whatever methods that might take. She tries to seduce Robert. She tries to ruin Callie’s career. She plays the “cool mom” for her kids – and even manages to convince them to help her try to get rid of Callie.

Mother’s Boys isn’t quite on the level of most of the films where Curtis played the heroine, but it’s a serviceable enough thriller that’s worth checking out just to see what it’s like when Curtis goes bad. And she certainly is a bad, inappropriate person, sometimes to ridiculous levels. There are vague attempts to explain exactly why Jude is so messed up, but most of the film just involves her doing things that are totally nuts. Which gives Curtis the chance to prove that she is fully capable of playing an unbalanced, dangerous, totally unlikeable character.

I first watched Mother's Boys when I was around ten years old, and there are elements of the film that have stuck with me over the decades since. Watching it again in 2022, I wasn't as impressed by it as I was in the '90s, but it's still not a bad way to spend some time.

THOROUGHBREDS (2017) 

Writer/director Cory Finley originally intended to share his story Thoroughbreds with the public as a stage play, which makes sense since it primarily plays out through a series of conversations that take place in and around one location. But it was purchased by film producers and Finley ended up making Thoroughbreds as a movie – which is a lucky break for us, because now we’ll have the chance to watch Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, and Anton Yelchin play Finley’s character again and again as years go by.

Taylor-Joy and Cooke carry most of Thoroughbreds on their shoulders, playing childhood friends Lily and Amanda who drifted apart for a while but have now come back together... at first because Amanda is dealing with legal issues and her mom offers Lily $200 an hour to spend time with her daughter. But Lily finds Amanda to be fascinating and they have history together, so soon she starts spending time with her without the promise of monetary reward. 

Amanda is quite an unusual character, because she reveals to Lily early in the movie that she has a condition where she doesn’t feel emotions. She’s blank on the inside, and every time she has appeared to show emotion in Lily’s presence it was actually an act. You might think a character who doesn’t have emotions would come off as stiff or dull on screen, but Cooke manages to make the character incredibly interesting to watch. And Taylor-Joy does the same with Lily, who is running into trouble of her own at home. She hates her stepfather... and when she finds out that she’s being sent away to a boarding school, that’s the final straw. She ropes Amanda into a plan to kill her stepfather.

That’s where Anton Yelchin’s character comes in. This was Yelchin’s final role, as he died in a tragic accident just a couple weeks after filming wrapped, and he is quite amusing as a guy named Tim. A convicted criminal and drug dealer who believes that selling drugs is his first step on the road of becoming a wealthy entrepreneur. Tim isn’t down with the idea of becoming a killer, but Amanda and Lily have some nasty ways of trying to “convince” him to commit this murder for them.

Thoroughbreds is an intriguing thriller with some great acting and a dark sense of humor. I was five years late checking it out, but there will definitely be more viewings of it in my future.