I can't stop thinking about Anora
Before getting to what spurred this post, I wanted to pass along some quick updates first.
As many others have done, I’ve left Twitter. My account is still there if you’re someone who is using something like this to follow users from Twitter over to BlueSky but all of the tweets aside from my final one are gone. Sayonara to 14 years of posts there, I guess. The only platforms I actually enjoy at this point are BlueSky, Discord, and Letterboxd. I have accounts on other platforms, but I can’t say I care for any of them. If you have any interest in joining the Munch Casts Discord, there are general discussion areas that aren’t related to either of the podcasts, including to this admittedly infrequent newsletter, so feel free to add us to your servers.
I also want to use this chance to plug the newer podcast* I’ve been doing with long-time friend, Sean McGrath. We’ve completed recording all of the guest portions of our second season of Unkind Rewind, which has now seen six episodes drop of the 20 that will come. There’s a ton of fun stuff in this batch, much like there was in Season 1. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, we sit down with a guest for two episodes. In the first, we let you get to know them and then ask them about their experiences and memories surrounding a movie they watched and loved pre-adulthood but which they have not seen as adults. We then watch the movie and get back together for our Main Events, where we dive into how their memory held up and how the movie held up, exploring the relationship memory and nostalgia has with our perception of these movies.
*Munch My Benson is on hiatus (for the first time in over four years) while my co-host Adam Schwitters adjusts to having a second child to parent—congrats to the Schwitters clan! For the time being, we’re dropping old episodes that have been behind the paywall for a couple years back into the public feed.
Unkind Rewind has been a blast to record and put out there for a growing audience, and whenever I tell someone about it, they instantly have at least one movie they’d love to explore (and maybe ruin) from their youth, which I think speaks to a broad appeal for the podcast. We’ve had a slew of great guests, and the movies we’ve discussed have covered the gamut between Angel Heart (which the aforementioned Adam somehow saw at the age of 8 or 9—or 8 or 9 years too young…) and Tuck Everlasting or Cocoon and this week’s installment, Cloak & Dagger. In the episode description, I try my damndest to share where these movies can be streamed as of when it drops, so if you want to watch the movie first to have it fresh, you should generally get a little help from dear old Josh.
I think all the episodes are really great, and they’re only getting better as Sean and I have really gotten into a groove together on mic. There’ve been movies from our guests’ lists we’d never heard of, movies we’d both seen, and movies neither of us was looking forward to watch, but every time out has ended up being really fun irrespective of our excitement level going into watching the film.
Now on to what was initially the impetus for jumping on Substack…
This year’s crop of new movies hasn’t done a lot for me. While I’m a far cry from my average moviegoing pace of my late 20s and early 30s, where I’d see somewhere around 40-50 movies in the theater every year, I’ve still seen quite a bit, and it’s mostly been a disappointing year where new stuff that has grabbed me has tended to be strange stand-up specials or action movies that were more fun than they should have been but don’t really stay with you. There’s been one exception though.
For the past month and a half or so, I’ve been unable to get Sean Baker’s newest film, Anora, out of my head. For the uninitiated, Baker tends to write (often co-writing with Chris Bergoch, but not on Anora) and direct films centered around people living on the margins, often immigrants or sex workers but always richly drawn characters who often end up being played by non-actors. While that last bit could derail a movie in less hands, Baker has this preternatural ability to cast these unknown performers and get truly heartfelt performances from them. It’s a dazzling high-wire act every time. In perhaps his best-known film to date, 2017’s Florida Project, which garnered Willem Dafoe a best supporting actor Oscar nomination, much of the success of the film relied on a then-6-year-old Brooklynn Prince to be the ostensible lead despite having no large acting credits to her name, and she’s great. He famously shot his transgender sex worker slice-of-life 2015 film Tangerine on three iPhone 5S with just a few modifications to add another degree of difficulty on top of having the two top-billed actors not being professional actors, and it’s incredible.
So while I’ve adored every Sean Baker film I’ve seen, I truly don’t know if I’ve seen a film since Mandy that I loved as much as Anora. Centered around an exotic dancer—the titular Anora, or Ani, which she goes by—who gets coaxed into spending a week with the scrawny 21-year-old party boy son of a Russian oligarch for a cool $15K, only to have that week turn into something more, Baker uses this Pretty Woman scenario to explore what feels like a much more grounded and prescient story. And while one might jump to the conclusion from that framing that Anora is what Pretty Woman would have been if it was gritty and realistic but wouldn’t read as being fun, well, that would be wrong because the second half of this film is so fun, as all of the people in the orbit of the oligarch family without power scramble to make their own lives a little less terrible while doing the bidding of their masters.
Anora also features great acting performances, chiefly from Mikey Madison (Better Things and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) playing our heroine in a true tour-de-force breakout performance wrought with heartbreaking vulnerability and electric vivaciousness. Baker company player Karren Karagulian (Toros) is great as always, and Yura Borisov, who’s playing Toros’s henchman, is a complete revelation, as I’d not seen any of his work in Europe—primarily Russia, but he was in the 2021 Finnish film Compartment No. 6, which tied for Grand Prix at Cannes (second-place prize) and seems to have been moderately popular amongst weirdo movie nerds I follow on Letterboxd.
All of this is to say, I can’t recommend Anora highly enough. It’s about a sex worker, so there is predictably some nudity that could make for an awkward viewing with children or parents, but that’s not to say that everyone shouldn’t watch it, as none of it is especially explicit. The ride is so enthralling and the film so memorable that you should gladly accept it for what it is. Art should make you feel, and Anora does that.