Fresh (2022)

Fresh starts as a movie about dating apps and The Dating Scene Today. That’s a premise I can buy for a horror show, and the opening scene fully delivers on all expectations. But Fresh has some other fish to fry and soon moves on to its destiny as a movie about billionaire cannibals and their exquisite tastes. One such, for example, is that they all believe women taste better. In many ways Fresh is riffing on American Psycho, featuring a yuppie scum guy, Steve (Sebastian Stan), who is making his way in the gig economy picking up women, capturing them, holding them, and eventually cutting them up into chops and cutlets. It offers up some very fine food cinematography along the way—fans of Big Night might think about giving Fresh a try (think hard, I say). Steve promises his victims to keep them alive as long as he can. But there’s something different for him about Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Why, he seems to be falling in love with her. What makes Fresh work for me is that it’s much less focused on gore and shock—there’s some, but it’s more antiseptic, just enough to convince you it’s horror. By contrast, and somewhat confusingly, it is more focused on maintaining a light and engaging tone. It’s entertaining, in short. A lot of it is clonkingly obvious by the points it wants to make. Director Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn seem aware these points are not that fresh, casting a wry and ironic wash over the proceedings. Still, billionaires consuming people, where have we heard that before? Women as disposable consumer product. Et cetera. To be clear, Steve is no billionaire. He’s just the moral equivalent of the Uber Eats driver delivering goods to the doorstep. He’s obviously making big money on it as he lives in a spectacular mansion with large walk-in freezers all over the place. Once we are hep to all the nuance of the details and tone in Fresh, the picture does start to flag some. It’s especially hard for me to believe the love story, and the action-oriented escape attempts only take you so far. But the picture is warmly humorous with an admirable relentlessness. A strange way to put over a cannibal holocaust, but there you go.

The Female Man (1975)

I’m not sure what to think of this Joanna Russ novel, billed as science fiction, nominated for a Nebula, and now widely considered a classic of so-called New Wave science fiction, though not without controversy and detractors. It bears a lot of the hallmarks of New Wave SF, but to me it seemed about two parts science fiction to seven or eight parts righteous feminist critique. What I liked best is that Russ is a witty and genuinely funny writer, skewering herself as well as men at large. What I liked least was feeling lost most of the time. Wikipedia helped with some of it. Reading it with others would probably be good too. That’s a feature I associate with New Wave SF—it’s often confusing. The Female Man is freewheeling and reads like someone’s head has just exploded, presumably Russ’s. There are multiple characters from multiple settings, a time travel theory, alternative histories, and more by way of high concept. The novel feels like it’s chasing its own tail for the first two-thirds, however entertaining. Then, with Part Seven, it focuses and bears down harder on its characters and even more on its complaints about men, which comes down to the famous quote from Sarah Moore Grimke, “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.” There’s a lot to complain about men, of course, and even more she may not have known yet in 1975. The endless sexualizing, the never taking women seriously, the use of women as slave labor, etc., etc. One thing she may not have known (or maybe did) is how much work women have done for science without credit. There’s also the whole baby-making expectation—men claiming motherhood as sacrosanct yet not offering much of anything tangible to help with it, as a matter of political policy, and even indignant about requests for life-saving healthcare. There’s not much new here for anyone who lived through the ‘70s and beyond. But Russ is way more fun than it might sound from the summaries. She’s playful, weird, and sardonic, all with a light touch. She’s angry too, with a good outlet for it here. The science fiction aspects feel more like a costume she has donned for the occasion. The ideas are intriguing but need more development and/or clarity. The main point here is—I don’t want to say the “war,” so let’s say the human condition between the sexes.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.