July 10, 2021

I almost made it through the week -- shortened by having Monday off --  going into work, but yesterday I felt sick and worked from home. I was on time every day this week, which meant I did my thing with waking up early enough and leaving the house early enough. I want to keep that up. 

My cat sat on the desk next to my computer while I worked all morning. It's cute and sweet how she wants to be near me. What a good girl! 

I haven't watched any of the movies I rented last week, and I didn't start reading my husband's novel like I meant to. But I did go watch a movie in theaters last night. 

Mlog Time! 

ZOLA

2021

Directed by: Janicza Bravo

Written by: Janicza Bravo, Jeremy O. Harris

Watched: 7/9/21

This is that movie based on the tweet thread that everyone was talking about in 2015. Zola meets this white girl who dances and recognizes her as a dancer. (Zola is a waitress and part-time stripper.) The two get each other and become friends fast. The white girl, Stephanie, invites Zola to come down to Florida to strip in a $$$ club. Zola’s only known her for a day, but she goes anyway. On the trip are Stephanie, her boyfriend, and Stephanie’s “roommate” who goes unnamed for the first 48 hours. They get to Florida, and it becomes clear that it’s a hooking trip, not a dancing trip. (Not sure I’m getting my terminology right there, but you know what I mean.) Stephanie’s roommate is actually her pimp. He puts Stephanie’s boyfriend Derek up in a cheap hotel while the girls work. Zola refuses to have sex with the clients, and when she finds out how little X (the pimp) is charging for Stephanie, she edits the ad. Stephanie makes a lot more than normal, and X is impressed if at first offended. They all find out that Derek was talking to a guy back at the cheap hotel and told him what they were in Tampa for. Anyways, it escalates. X puts Zola in charge, giving her a gun, and has Zola, Stephanie, and Derek drive around on house calls. The guy Derek talked to kidnaps Stephanie, brandishing a gun and pulling her into his hotel room. Zola tells X and X goes in to get her with the other two. He shoots the guy. In the end, Derek, feeling slighted by Stephanie, jumps off the balcony at X’s house. He falls one story and hits his head on the concrete. They drive him towards the hospital. X has promised Zola a ticket home. 

That was a lot of plot! This movie was so much better than it had to be. A few standouts: we see Zola and Stephanie peeing in a rest stop bathroom. (Gross, right?) We see the toilet water after they’re finished. Zola’s pee is relatively clear but Stephanie’s is dark yellow. That’s a character moment I’ve never seen before. It got a laugh and goes towards enforcing Zola’s eventual critique of Stephanie: “You’re messy. And your brain is broke.” 

The first client Stephanie gets for her pussy work, – sorry, I mean to have sex with – Zola’s in the room, and the man is gross. The whole thing takes a long time, and is not sexy. I mean, it’s believably sexy for the man, but the whole theater is cringing. Then we see the 16 other guys show up one at a time. They’re the whole spectrum of white and ugly. We get a rapid-fire montage (from Stephanie’s POV) of these men pulling down their pants. Full frontal nudity of a bunch of weird looking penises. 

The movie starts with some sexiness of Zola and Stephanie dancing and then progresses to this deeply unsexy place. I read on Wikipedia that originally James Franco was supposed to direct. Thank god he didn’t. I have a hard time imagining this film being directed by a man and coming out as good as it did. We stay with the protagonist. We get her world, her view, her sympathy for and understanding of Stephanie. The whole thing was about sex and showed sex yet it was the opposite of pornography. That frontal nudity montage could be paused and used as a text for medical residents to diagnosis odd growths and skin plasticity with age. 

Plus, it’s remarkable (and this was in the tweet thread as well) that Zola resists becoming the victim. She’s in a situation where she doesn’t have a lot of control. She’s way far from home, she doesn’t have any allies, she doesn’t have a ride or much money, and X is way bigger and stronger than she is. But she keeps resisting, keeps making choices, keeps drawing her boundaries and making her requests – my time is up, I want to go home. 

Rating: ★★★★