Honey Don't!

 

Director Ethan Coen

Ethan Coen and spouse Tricia Cooke

HONEY DON’T!                   C                                                                                              USA  Great Britain  (89 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke (uncredited)

What the world needs now is more lesbian-based private eye thrillers, as the opening sequence is right out of the exploitation evil pleasures of Russ Meyer and the lurid Tura Satana in FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965), where busty working-class women exact revenge with bats and knives, wreaking havoc with their ability to titillate while also providing loads of subversive fun.  Like that film, this should be so much more of a blast than it is, coming from a filmmaker with such an established reputation, where this is the second installment of Ethan Coen and his openly queer wife Tricia Cooke’s planned lesbian B-movie trilogy, with the conclusive third already entitled GO, BEAVERS!, all written together while she edits the films, following the curious yet less than scintillating Drive-Away Dolls (2024), though not as autobiographical, less personal, and not as much trashy fun.  This feels even more laid back and casual, yet much darker in tone with excessively cruel violence, more of a reimagining of the hardboiled detective genre through a lesbian lens, becoming a deliberately sunny, escapist neo-noir thriller.  If Drive-Away Dolls was the lesbian answer to the road trip, this injects the lesbian subculture to the traditionally male detective genre, skewering the hypocrisy of Christian megachurches and the nefarious activities in small town America, yet it already feels out of time, like we’ve somehow missed out on what drew this couple into making this picture, as the fun is already gone.  It shouldn’t be that contentiously controversial, as after all, the very first cinematic kiss was between two women, 1882 - The Kiss - Eadweard Muybridge YouTube (34 seconds).  In the opening credits, the names are etched into faded signs on dilapidated buildings and commercial establishments, where peeling paint hints at faded dreams, inspired apparently by John Huston’s FAT CITY (1972).  While there’s still some subversive fun to be had, most of it falls flat, leaving very little excitement about the final installment.  Premiering out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in a midnight screening, where it was largely panned, you wonder why a film like this would even get an invite, as there’s little to actually like about this film.  Nonetheless, it has the Coen name, makers of some of the best independent films produced in America since the 1980’s, but the infamous brothers broke up as a collaborating team in 2018 and have been on their own ever since, making their own separate films, though expected to reunite at some point in the future with an anticipated horror film.  It would be hard to imagine one of the Dardennes brothers making a film on their own, as these are two of the best brothers duo in cinema history, hugely influential, even going as far back as the Lumière Brothers.  While actually shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the film is set in the Central Valley of Bakersfield, California, of all places, a farm town with plenty of wide open spaces, not exactly known for their cultural notoriety, but the desert is never far away, and everyone here seems to be living on the edge of oblivion and total obscurity.  The opening says it all, easily the best sequence in the entire film, never living up to what it promises, establishing the tone for a darkly humorous exploitation movie as a badass beautiful woman (Lera Abova) does her best Uma Thurman Pulp Fiction imitation in shades, pulling up to the site of a car crash in her Vespa scooter wearing a leopard-print outfit with an exposed bra, as she walks down a steep slope to an upside down car with a dead woman inside, prying the distinctly recognizable ring off her finger before she wanders off to a nearby stream to bathe naked.  Cut to a distinctive copycat cover version of the hugely popular Eric Burdon and the Animals hit song from 1965, We Gotta Get Out of This Place YouTube (3:15).  Now that’s an opening statement.    

Unfortunately, that mysterious woman who defiantly commands the screen is barely seen again, as it’s not really about her.  It’s about the dead girl lying at the bottom of a gulch.  Arriving on the scene to investigate is the friendly town cop, homicide detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), who greets the arrival of small-town private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) with a smile, both wondering what the other is doing there, as it’s supposedly an accident, but they’re investigating it as a homicide.  Qualley, who starred in the Claire Denis film Stars at Noon (2022) and the earlier installment of Drive-Away Dolls, may be the recurring figure throughout the trilogy, providing a female version of a detached 1940’s film noir detective like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe updated to the modern day era.  A chic dresser in heels, always making quick witted, wise ass remarks (when asked if she drinks, she replies, “Heavily.  It’s a point of pride.”), she exudes a sexy swagger with what sounds like a Texas accent, a woman you don’t want to mess with, as she can dish it out with the best of them, easily having her way with the bad boys who get a tad aggressive, while picking up loose and available women in bars afterwards.  Driving a vintage turquoise 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 454 Convertible 4-Speed, just like guys in earlier 50’s movies, her car makes a statement, while still using an old-school rolodex for contact information instead of some new-age gadgetry, she remains emotionally guarded, yet possesses a mysterious allure.  Marty has a soft spot for her and attempts a friendly date, but she just laughs off the offer, reminding him “I like women.”  Befuddled by the thought that could even be possible, refusing the accept the obvious, Marty defies the odds and keeps trying, as it is a small town after all, but she keeps telling him the same thing, becoming a running gag throughout the picture.  Without sharing what drew her to the scene of the crime, the dead driver is Mia Novotny, a prospective client who called Honey earlier that same day, but she was killed before they could meet, where the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death expose a wider web of corruption.  Perhaps the unseemliest aspect of the film is its depiction of a corrupt and sleazy church that is basically a front for its behind-the-scenes drug trafficking operations.  Mia was a member of the Four-Way Temple led by the lecherous Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), who is a real sleazeball (Captain America, no less), a despicable but darkly humorous pastor preaching “active submission,” where we see raunchy sex scenes in the Reverend’s private chambers, taking full advantage of young women members of his flock, often with multiple partners, perhaps an ironic reference to the name of the church, which he runs like a cult, where it’s all about the supreme leader in charge.  The nastiness of how they conduct their business appears to be shockingly connected to Mia’s death, as the ring pulled off her finger had the insignia of the church, and we see how easily Devlin is willing to eliminate anyone who might be deemed a threat to his operations.  This is where the film really bogs down in over-predictability, as they are such an easy target, accumulating more and more corpses without a hint of suspense or tension, using dimwitted stereotypes that only drag this film down.  When Honey’s niece Corinne (Talia Ryder from Eliza Hittman’s painfully underseen 2020 Top Ten List #5 Never Rarely Sometimes Always) returns home battered and bruised, she turns to Honey, fearing her overly judgmental mother would only blame her for even going out with such an abusive local redneck, so Honey pays him a call in his trailer, which turns into an ugly and brutally violent affair, as she turns his aggression back on him, having the last word, even planting a rather humorous bumper sticker over his MAGA license plate that reads “I have a vagina and I vote,” one of the few moments that got a few snickers from the audience. 

In the course of her investigation, Honey runs into MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a policewoman who works in the evidence room, quickly meeting her at a bar frequented by police afterwards, discovering she’s a like-minded butch queer woman, where their flirtatiousness is one for the ages, with MG brazenly fingering her in public, commenting, “I love first date stuff.”  Taking their business back to Honey’s place, the lesbian sex is relatively tame, where the mildly amusing kicker is the following morning Honey is seen casually washing an array of sex toys in her kitchen sink with the look of a domestic housewife.  That’s something we don’t typically see.  There’s so little sex in movies today, what little we do see is perhaps a reflection of the regressively backwards culture that is becoming more puritanical, so even a glimpse is a throwback to more liberal times when sex was commonplace.  MG is friendly enough, but hides a dark and mysterious side, like many of the characters in this film.  Honey questions Devlin, as murder and criminal activity seems to lead to his door, quickly establishing a clever repartee, as Devlin acknowledges, “You’re fascinating,” with Honey quipping, “And you haven’t even seen the riddle tattooed on my ass.”  He predictably defends using his position to prey on vulnerable young women, suggesting we’re all a little lost in need of some spiritual guidance, and unlike other churches that only deal with saving souls, his guidance encompasses the total package.  When Corrine goes missing, Honey returns to the church, only to find it locked, but she hears a gunshot inside, with a woman on a scooter seen fleeing from the scene.  That’s the last we see of the crooked pastor, who apparently got his comeuppance by being too big for his britches.  Sex and violence are intertwined in this movie, with a series of strange deaths tied to this mysterious church, but the police are completely baffled and fail to make the connection, as Marty remains unconvinced there is a reason to search the Temple.  Audiences have a behind-the-scenes window into their criminal and sexual depravity, but the question is where does it all lead?  The mystery woman appears to have ended any speculation on where this is heading.  Having no other leads, Honey visits MG at her home, and what appears to be innocent banter suddenly turns ugly, with MG growing increasingly paranoid and unstable, turning into a ferocious, knockdown battle between two women, arguably the catfight men seem to fantasize about, as we suddenly learn the grotesque truth behind her repressive family secrets, where MG has no intention of letting Honey just walk out of there.  But Honey is no patsy, capable of getting down and dirty, which she needs to do in order to survive.  In the end, we learn the mystery woman on a scooter is named Chėre, speaks with a French accent, where it might be better to construct an entire film around her character.  Stay tuned.  It’s all a little peculiar, as outside of Honey, who is uniquely compelling, none of the other characters have any depth or are even remotely developed, remaining cardboard caricatures, which makes it difficult to relate with this movie, as it feels so lazily written and realized.  A better version of what this film may have been attempting to accomplish is Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (2024), which similarly flaunts its comic B-movie neo-noir mentality from a lesbian perspective, and before that was the Wachowski’s Bound (1996).  Perhaps the biggest surprise is the generic female-centric soundtrack, sounding amateurish rather than ironic, including a few songs sung by Qualley, with the titular song, a 1956 Carl Perkins rockabilly classic, which probably should have been the movie theme song, only heard over the end credits, and even then it’s an inept cover version compared to the original.  While they may not have had money for musical rights, these are some really poor choices.  Overall, it’s a lame experience, with no real standout jokes or scenes, except the opening sequence, where the normally reliable Coen humor just falls flat, making this a real slog to sit through.  Films feel more generic nowadays, and this may be a classic example, as a generally reliable creative team seems to have fumbled the ball and simply run out of ideas and inspiration.  There’s a lackadaisical emptiness here that feels like a bad parody gone wrong, making it hard to imagine there will be another.  

Ned Rifle

NED RIFLE               A-                   

USA  (85 mi)  2014  d:  Hal Hartley                         Official site

But it’s funny about Henry, Tom Ryan and I had this conversation about how he would be different.  I remember Tom articulating it really well, saying, No, Henry doesn’t change.  Henry is exactly the slob, the childish, self-involved but hilarious guy that he’s always been.  The context changes but he’s like a rock at the center.  I think there’s something in that.  I think the third one could be really quite hard on him, without bashing him, but coming to the brutal truth about a character like that. I could definitely see the son saying, ‘You know, Mom’s in a Turkish prison.’  Or, think about it, if Fay is accused of treason by the United States—we’re the only country in the world that kills people for this.  She could be executed.  You can be executed.  It could really come down hard on his father.  This could definitely be a Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader type thing, like he’s going to kill the old man.  But I could imagine him finally not doing it because he understands that this man is just a child.  He’s a perpetual child.  He doesn’t know what the implications are of everything that happens to him.

─Robert Avila interview with writer/director Hal Hartley from Fandor, August 16, 2013, MEANWHILE, Hal Hartley's Been Busy | Keyframe - Explore ...  

In typically unorthodox fashion, this is another spinoff from Henry Fool (1997), Hartley’s humorous critique of the modern world that won a Best Screenplay at Cannes when it premiered, the third variation on a theme that also includes Fay Grim (2006), where the revelation of this film is the introduction of a new character, Aubrey Plaza as Susan, identified as Simon Grim’s stalker, who is herself a study of secrecy and repressed motives, immediately fitting right in to the Hartley universe of deadpan expression and over-intellectualization, a somewhat salacious character who places herself at the center of this unraveling mystery along with Ned (Liam Aiken), the offspring of Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Fay Grim (Parker Posey), essential characters in all three features of the trilogy.  The Long Island-born Hartley studied painting before becoming a filmmaker, where critic J. Hoberman describes his work as a “Godardian mixture of ardent talk, deadpan hyperbole, and unexpected action.”  Hartley’s films are much funnier with more clever dialogue than anything Godard has done in half a century, yet he’s an author that fits into the category of least appreciated.  Think of the acidic black humor in the Coen brother’s Fargo (1996), but this is even more bleakly obscure, where the entire fascination with this film trilogy is never being able to take anything too seriously, as it all feels like a tongue-in-cheek satiric parody, where the smarter you are the more room there is for disappointment in your life, as if excellence in schoolwork and a college degree haven’t really prepared anyone for the calamity that’s waiting for them after they graduate.  Perhaps only Wes Anderson possesses the same overly satiric approach, where humor is literally entrenched through every developing scene, layered in a deadpan sarcasm that refuses to give away the punch lines.  Instead it’s the comic absurdity that awaits each character in every new situation, ensnared in a web of intrigue from which they can’t escape.  Bordering on the ridiculous, life is not what it seems, as the fear and paranoia of the post 9/11 world has altered our perceptions of one another, showing little tolerance or understanding anymore, where the capacity for human connection has become so confusing and disorienting that real intimacy is rarely ever achieved, as instead it resembles an apocalyptic sci-fi world of the future where the Keatonesque humor is so dry as to be almost unrecognizable.  Characterized by his trademark deconstructed storytelling where dialogue comes in rapid-fire outbursts, sounding like they’re commenting on the filmmaker himself, or perhaps the state of art in general, featuring deliberately artificial performances and offbeat deadpan humor, Hartley still writes his own musical scores and remains a true independent voice at a time when that term has lost much of its meaning and significance, and while his fan base hasn’t exactly grown, he’s stuck to the path that’s made him such a unique auteur.      

Perhaps it’s the modern era’s disconnection with films of the Silent era, where they simply don’t recognize nonverbal communication anymore, but Aubrey Plaza gives a master class on facial expressions and making the most out of silent moments, then completely catching the audience off guard with a verbal barrage of such intellectual weight and unaccustomed insight that we hardly believe what we’re hearing.  This emotional and intellectual imbalance is at the core of Hartley films, because it requires an off-center perspective to make sense of it all.  The beauty, of course, is that it doesn’t even have to make sense, but exists in a wonderfully constructed netherworld all its own.  Few other artists are so consistently unique and weirdly original where they can ever hope to actually create a look that is all their own, but Hartley’s been doing it with a loyal group of actors working with next to no budgets since the early 90’s while receiving some of the more scathingly negative reviews from film critics.  Despite having American indie roots at his core, he remains an enigma, a stranger in a strange land, something of a misunderstood misfit who places his own artistic dilemma front and center in his films, poking fun at his own obscurity.  As the film begins, the focus is upon Ned Rifle, the gloomy offspring of Fay Grim (Parker Posey) and Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), first seen as a 6-year old in Henry Fool where the debauched Henry brings him to a bar/strip club and offers him his first taste of whisky, now being raised in suburbia by a kindly minister (Martin Donovan) and his wife in foster care, hidden under the witness protection program, becoming a devoutly religious young man with a deeply troubled past, where he’s about to reach 18, the age of emancipation where he’s free to go where he wants.  On television we see the news reports of public demonstrations angrily protesting against the light prison sentence of his mother who is given a life sentence, with an irate public clamoring for an even harsher death penalty for betraying her country after having been convicted of committing a terrorist act, charged with conspiring with the known international terrorist Henry Fool who remains at large.  Immediately we see the mindsets at odds with one another, as we know his mother is no terrorist but simply an overprotective mom who was coerced by the CIA to retrieve valuable documents from what was believed to be her deceased husband, only to be drawn into a nefarious network of politically questionable operations by her very much alive at the time husband, where the government’s twisted spin on the story is a fabricated lie meant to conceal and protect their own bungled secret operations.  Nonetheless, Parker Posey is hilarious as a maximum security prison inmate, visited first by her loving son, somewhat astounded that he’s a religious convert, affectionately urging him to call as he leaves, reminding him “I’m always here,” and later visited by the minister who informs her that her son has left home with Oedipal designs to kill his father, who he blames for all his mother’s dismal misfortunes.  With that, the film turns into an extended road movie where Ned seeks out his father, where except for an aerial shot of Seattle consists entirely of local establishments in the state of New York made to resemble other parts of the country.  

Before he hits the road, however, Ned pays his Uncle Simon a visit, a poet laureate holed up in a New York City hotel that he never leaves, where he’s undergone his own conversion, of sorts, refusing to write serious poetry anymore that no one would ever read anyway, throwing that aside for a more popular YouTube website that channels his inner clown, writing jokes and posting comic videos, coached by a comedy instructor, believing in this manner he actually connects with his public, where among the more popular draws to his site are regular posted comments of excoriating personal denouncements of Simon’s stand-up blog coming from a disenchanted viewer somewhere in Seattle whose disgruntled voice can be none other than Henry.  Hanging out in the lobby of the hotel, however, unbeknownst to Ned, is a stalker of Simon, Susan Weber (Aubrey Plaza), someone who wrote a phonebook-sized graduate school dissertation on his work, who remains planted on the premises hoping to catch a glimpse of him.  With a penchant for lipstick, excess mascara and an overcoat covering thigh high stockings, she coolly nestles up to Ned for her way inside, becoming an alluring femme fatale figure, literally attaching herself to Ned throughout the rest of the film where she’s infinitely more interesting than he is, though she’s secretly motivated by traumatic events during her troubled childhood, which includes stints at a psychiatric hospital.  With Ned playing straight man to her crazy antics, she provides the twists of fate, the hyper-literate dialogue, the comic bewilderment, and the central thrust of the film, much as Parker Posey did in the previous installment, becoming her natural heir apparent.  Simon is obviously deeply touched by the complexity of her academic analysis, showing incredible psychological insight into a dysfunctional situation that he finds a bit troubling, believing she must be seriously disturbed herself.  But when she recommends he ditch the website, he asks, “You think its okay for me to be unpopular?” to which she bluntly replies, “Oh, I think it’s necessary.”  Ned and the uninvited Susan, who always seems to show up, set out for Seattle on an adventure together searching for the missing Henry, perceived as a diabolical fugitive from justice, where the trip only grows more convoluted along the way, where the personal motives and deeply reflective philosophizing are subject to change at any given moment, where Hartley’s shrewd writing ability blends a group of irreverent moments and satiric asides into emotionally compelling glimpses of an underside of America, as seen through unanticipated detours (delusions) and side effects of the war on terror, religious fundamentalism, secret prisons, the CIA, Homeland Security, gun love, a pharmaceutical industry gone amok, and the pretentiousness of academia.  Like a world spinning out of control, the innocent get arrested while the guilty remain free to commit even more havoc, where Ned’s naïve innocence is manipulated at every turn, leaving him devastated to discover that his dad is even more incorrigible than he ever imagined, a man incapable of expressing remorse, yet even his innate goofy charm doesn’t begin to match just how delightful the unusually bewitching Susan becomes over the course of the journey, where her intoxication level rises to the unimaginable, leaving the open-ending film in a state of limbo, with no real resolution except an ending that recalls the zany prison finale of THE PRODUCERS (1968), as Fay forms a book club in prison where they begin with some of the longest works on record, like Don Quixote and War and Peace, as these women have plenty of time on their hands.