Sorry, Baby (2025)

Eva Victor wrote the screenplay, directs, and stars in this gentle story of Agnes, a 28-year-old student and professor of literature. IMDb summarizes, “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on—for everyone around her, at least.” Wikipedia calls Sorry, Baby an “independent black comedy-drama,” noting that it debuted at Sundance earlier this year. I don’t know about the comedy part, black or otherwise. The bad thing—I don’t think this is a spoiler, it occurs early in the picture—is that her grad school advisor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), shows a great deal of interest in her work but later lures her to his home and rapes her. The extremes of violence seem to be limited, but Agnes is sensitive and it’s a deeply troubling, traumatic event. The way she describes it it’s not so much the physical act as her entire loss of confidence in herself that hurts most. Was Decker just praising and flattering her for sex? Sorry, Baby might be a kind of challenge to those with less empathy because it makes it so easy to say or think things like “that wasn’t so bad.” Agnes’s resulting depression and withdrawal from social interactions, however—it’s pretty bad, though doubtless some will call it an overreaction. But Decker does quit his job at the college and move away soon after. It’s possible the assault was worse than we think. Agnes spent hours at his place though she shows little sign of being injured. She tells her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) about it within 24 hours. Lydie takes her to a hospital and helps her report it to the police. But the reaction tends toward indifference and minimizing, especially once authorities learn she bathed soon after. It’s another sad portrait of the way women who report rapes tend to be treated. Ever since the incident Agnes has been reclusive, holing up in her isolated place in the country and mostly keeping to herself. But she does get some good news—she’s been hired for a tenure-track position at the college where she studied, in the New England region where she wants to live, she finds a kitten and adopts it, and she connect with her neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges) in an odd but not apparently unhealthy sexual relationship. Agnes, and Sorry, Baby itself, is almost too withdrawn, you almost miss that she is even there, crisis and all. Yet it might be good practice for empathy. I had to keep telling myself to stop minimizing what happened to Agnes and what she is going through. I felt like an unfeeling beast, not taking it seriously enough. It might be good practice for you too—although I can’t be entirely sure that was ever Victor’s intent.

Gone With the Wind (1939)

USA, 238 minutes
Directors: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood
Writers: Margaret Mitchell, Sidney Howard, Oliver H.P. Garrett, Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, John Van Druten
Photography: Ernest Haller, Lee Garmes
Music: Max Steiner
Editors: Hal C. Kern, James E. Newcom, Ernie Leadlay, Richard L. Van Enger
Cast: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Barbara O'Neil, Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, Victor Jory, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Rutherford, Laura Hope Crews, Harry Davenport, Jane Darwell, Ona Munson, Ward Bond, George Reeves, Rand Brooks, Carroll Nye, Oscar Polk

It's arguable that the two most significant American movies of the first half of the 20th century were D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which invented epic cinema, and Gone With the Wind, which fully implemented it in technicolor with sound. It's arguable, but I wouldn't want to make the argument, because they look to me too much like propaganda exercises for the valorization of the South and its slavery culture, busy with misleading historical reclamation projects. Or maybe I would prefer to argue that screwball comedies have more significance than epic cinema. Still, the ticket buyers have voted. That's Gone With the Wind even now sitting atop the list of all-time domestic grosses adjusted for inflation. It's the most commercially successful movie of all time, even taken out of circulation for decades after its initial release. (For the curious, the rest of that all-time top 10 goes Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, The Ten Commandments [1956], Jaws, Doctor Zhivago, The Exorcist, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.)

I have never warmed much to Gone With the Wind, which I finally had a chance to see in the early '80s on VHS, and I like it less all the time as the country spirals backward in values. Alabama's Roy Moore, for one, specifically pointed to the South's slavery period as the last time America was great, and it seems as likely as anything (because who knows what that "great" is supposed to mean in "Make America Great Again") that's the era they're thinking of and clamoring so hard for. I find myself arguing all the time with the title cards in this ridiculous overwrought show: "Here in this pretty world," an early one burbles, "Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave ... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered." Dream for some, nightmare for many. I'm sure you can guess my complaints. As an exercise, as a remedy, and to maintain the equilibrium I need for this movie, I decided to focus on what I think is good in Gone With the Wind.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

USA, 102 minutes
Directors: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, Norman Taurog, King Vidor
Writers: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf, L. Frank Baum, Arthur Freed, Irving Brecher, William H. Cannon, Herbert Fields, Jack Haley, E.Y. Harburg, Samuel Hoffenstein, Bert Lahr, John Lee Mahin, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Jack Mintz, Ogden Nash, Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, Sid Silvers
Photography: Harold Rosson
Music: Harold Arlen
Editor: Blanche Sewell
Cast: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Margaret Hamilton, Billie Burke, Charley Grapewin, Clara Blandick, Terry (Toto)

(Early cut for the Facebook countdown here.)

In the 79 years since its release, The Wizard of Oz has come to represent virtually all things to all people. Several years ago, for example, you can see I attempted to drop the overlay of horror on it for the Facebook countdown, comparing it to It's a Wonderful Life and Blue Velvet. I was sincere—The Wizard of Oz has scared me nearly as much as any other movie. Things like the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys are pretty serious business, and not necessarily just for kids. The joke TV description is funny because it's true: "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again." More recently I've noticed The Wizard of Oz taken by some as a road movie. It's certainly a cartoon, and obviously a musical, and the Munchkins briefly transport it into Freaks territory. Like Casablanca, it speaks to the power of Hollywood collaboration and against the idea of auteurs, with its five directors and 19 writers. Like A Christmas Story (and It's a Wonderful Life) its reputation was cemented only long after its release, facilitated by television. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon got roped into the circus at some point by stoners. By now, we know The Wizard of Oz so well there's a version of it edited to alphabetize every word. I enjoy it and you might too, a few minutes at a time, but before viewing Of Oz the Wizard take heed of the warning: "This film contains extremely fast editing, flashes of light, abrupt changes in image and sound."

I still forget, or really never knew, the popularity of the original series of children's novels by L. Frank Baum. They arrived at the turn of the century, were wildly loved for decades (though somewhat disreputable among librarians, like Nancy Drew mysteries), and are paid respect in a note at the start of this picture. This iconic 1939 Judy Garland breakout vehicle was actually already the seventh attempt to film Oz—seventh time's the charm, right? It reminds me of the Frankenstein story—once Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published two centuries ago, stage and then film productions never stopped coming. But now I'm drifting back to talking about it in terms of horror, so let me be clear. I think the best way to view The Wizard of Oz is by taking it as what it's intended to be: an expensive MGM musical built on the bones of vaudeville and meant to be seen in color.