Cat Person
This realistic Cyrano adaptation from the woman’s perspective starts off as very awkward rom com that gets darker, and darker, and darker. It’s better than Obsession.
It’s not funny after a while, the villain remains pathetic, he never goes full moustache twirling. His flaws are societal, the dude remains very human.
Emilia Jones is a Winner, she carries the film with ease. The villain does a better job at awkwardness than Obsession.
Geraldine Viswanathan, from Drive Away Dolls is a very annoying best friend, always yapping about her sub-reddit moderator problems. She represents the most radical post #MeToo elements, the one that warps into man hating harpies.
It’s unbelievable, her main arc is that she is terminally online, moderates /r/TheVagenda as BitchPerfect, and just found her co-moderator LadyTalk is actually a man! This part is not in the source New Yorker story.
There’s other theatre kids around, but they are not in most scenes, they mostly provide colour for karaoke or musical jokes.
Ultimately, our protagonist is a 20 years old concession stand girl. She says her favourite film is Spirited Away, but her day job is some kind of archaeology major with Isabella Rossellini as another man hating feminist, of the old-school second-wave variety. She keeps an ant colony for the specific purpose of mentioning males try to fuck the queen DIE by disembowelment.
Like many female service workers, she is constantly harassed at work, but there’s an awkward guy that she finds cute, so she gives him her number. This starts a Cyrano relationship, cutesy texts and all, they barely meet in real life. The only time they do, she almost has a panic attack about being raped, and he destroys the precious ant colony the professor had been tending for nearly 20 years.
She goes back home for a while, and they keep texting. She meets an ex-boyfriend who tells her he’s asexual, but it’s not her fault! In this low point, she sends him a non-naked “nude”, but he ghosts her for a long time. Her friend points out the dozens of red flags, but she plows ahead anyway, she can fix him.
They go on a “proper” date that includes her being carded and denied entry in a bar, one thing leads to another, and they go back to his place. It is completely filled with trash, as a bachelor pad usually does, but she doesn’t care, it’s mostly for him, he is so eager… Her Jiminy Cricket (herself with her clothes on) keeps pointing out the red flags, but she doesn’t want to kill the vibe.
This sexual experience with an older dude was so terrible, she wants nothing to do with him anymore, but nor does she wants to ghost him or something. She doesn’t want to break his heart. This horrifies her friend on many levels, but she is continues nonetheless.
He keeps stalking her but chickens out anytime he tries to do anything. He just lurks in the background for a while, which creeps her out. She tries to get some “protection”, but that makes it much worse. As she tries to put a tracking device on his car, she is busted and there’s a massive discussion about stalking and shit, escalated when she maces herself! The fight gets physical, and it only stops when the house burns down.
They live, but he goes away, and she keep that nagging feeling of being wrong, somehow. In this particular case, it’s true.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.