To Love Again: An Alternate February Calendar

Are you feeling romantic? In the mood to Criterion Channel and cuddle? These movies might not be the most romantic choice for date night, but they are a love letter of sorts from your favorite Austin film club. Were you utterly infatuated with our February calendar? Or are you looking for something new to get your heart racing? From Mothmen to bank robbers, here are the film pairings our contributors just couldn’t resist putting together.

Erica’s First Holy Shit—Young Adult

Watching Erica’s First Holy Shit is a divine experience. Traveling through the Lush-induced wormhole of self reflection with Erica, you may feel joy, confusion, and maybe even a little frustration as we learn more about how and why her life has hit a boiling point. Ultimately, though, there’s catharsis. Erica’s vulnerability is entertainment, but also serves as a mirror, pushing you to audit your own life, to better understand how you got to the point you’re at now, and how you want to move forward. 

It’s hard to be honest with yourself about how much of your dissatisfaction is by your own hand, as we also see in Young Adult (2011), which follows a deeply unhappy–not that she’ll admit it–YA author as she returns to her hometown to try to win back her high school boyfriend… who is married and has a newborn. Mavis, played by Charlize Theron, is far less charming than Erica. It’s evident to everyone but her that she is absolutely the problem: she’s a bitter, jealous alcoholic who holds no accountability for herself. Though both films follow characters as they revisit their pasts, Mavis and Erica are on opposite trajectories; rather than taking a journey of introspection, Mavis is barreling through her hometown on a bullet train of delusion. 

Revisiting the place you grew up in can feel a bit like soaking in a psychotropic bath bomb, and sometimes, it leads to a pretty bad trip. Your sense of time, of what’s now and what’s past, is skewed, and you have to push through the confusion and ground yourself in what’s real. Both Mavis and Erica show us that it’s crucial to lean in and ride that wave of confusion so that we can wake up to the rest of our lives with at least a little bit of clarity.

Miracle Mile—Victoria

Miracle Mile is a film that throws its protagonist into a dying world while searching for true love. Putting him through a series of obstacles to get to the finish line, surviving the apocalypse with the love of his life. Taking this aspect from Miracle Mile, Victoria dials it up to 11. A woman meets a charming young man and his group of friends on a night out. After partying with them, she is convinced to become a driver for a sudden job they need to do. Turns out, they owe a German criminal a favor and need to rob a bank. As the heist goes wrong and characters begin to disappear, the protagonist and her love interest experience their own sort of apocalypse as their world, as they knew it, crumbles around them. Both propelled with outstanding vibrating synth scores, Victoria serves as a perfect double bill to Miracle Mile. Love in the time of the apocalypse.

X-Files: Fight the Future—The Mothman Prophecies

X-Files: Fight the Future piles on the explosions, helicopters, and creature goop in its blow-up to multiplex proportions.  Those looking for cinematic explorations of paranoia and conspiracy similar to the more modestly-scaled TV show can find surprising parallels in Mark Pellington’s haunting B-picture The Mothman Prophecies from 2002.

For one, Richard Gere has never looked more like a silver-fox version of David Duchovny as John Klein, an affluent reporter for the pre-Bezos Washington Post who finds himself chasing the titular entity.  And not only does Klein also become alienated from the establishment that employs him, à la “Spooky” Mulder, he is paired with not one, but two Scully-esque redheads: Debra Messing as Klein’s ill-fated wife, and Laura Linney as the West Virginia cop struggling to protect her town from the evil presence.  

While its premise points toward lurid monster-of-the-week thrills, the film settles into a bleak atmosphere where invisible evil lurks in broad daylight.  The Mothman barely shows himself, preferring to invade the characters’ heads with visions of future calamity that are (of course) brushed off by the big-city elites.  While not exactly a classic, Pellington’s film effectively transports the yearning Mulder-isms “I want to believe” and “the truth is out there” into the existential realm of “we’re not allowed to know,” as one exposition-spouting character intones.  In Mothman’s world, the future fights us.

Set it Off—Dead Presidents

Grade-A dialogue. Girl gang shenanigans. Glaring systemic racism.

There is no other movie like Set It Off. Even if you can find a women-led heist movie, it won’t be centered around the unique struggle that black women face—and it won’t have that somehow soft-yet-gritty 90s vibe. Plus, that incredible casting. Holy shit.

But there is another film that captures the same feeling of inescapable entrapment by a broken system. Dead Presidents comes just a year before Set It Off, and it tells a similar story of disenfranchisement to the point of desperation—and inevitably crime. In both stories, our protagonists carry a strong desire to break free from their societally imposed circumstances. They play the cards they’re dealt for a while, and then decide to take what the system owes them by force. Or as Vivica A. Fox’s character Frankie says, “We just taking away from the system that’s fuckin’ us all anyway.”

But where Set It Off feels authentic and draws you in close to its characters, the dialogue and relationships in Dead Presidents creates a strange sense of detachment, forcing you to watch the events in an objective way. This difference in tone creates a relationship that’s more fraternal than identical, but both are born from the same purpose: to take an unflinching look at deep-seated injustice.