Asking For It is the first movie Friend and I watched for the opening day of the Cinejoy Film Festival, going on now from Oct 1st to the 14th. The festival is the return of Cinequest in San Jose, which has preserved a lot of its offerings from the spring and given viewers a lot of flexibility to stream movies on their own time throughout the festival period. Ultimately, the goal is to watch about a movie a day for the next two weeks and post some reviews.
On that point. It’s been a couple of months since I wrote my last review. It’s not because I’ve stopped writing. Actually, I’ve been writing a lot more now than I most other points, except during the film festivals and the beginning of Quarantine, when we were on that breakneck schedule of watching new bad movies for a few weeks (remember that?). It’s felt nice to be writing on deadlines (even if I’m not always meeting them) with editors (even if they don’t always like what I’ve written) for readers (who are not actually just a small circle of people I know, actually to be honest, there is no direct proof that anyone has read that other work yet, but the net is at least a little bit bigger than here). There’s more writing than ever, more work than ever. The lack of entries here has been a reflection of the cyclical nature of my work, but also New Exciting Stuff.
That being said, I missed keeping track of things here. I have been watching movies in the intervening weeks, too. I have six drafts sitting in my To-Do list right now, a couple documentaries at film festivals online, two major motion pictures, and some smaller films too. I don’t write about old movies, as you know, but Friend and I have been on an 80s dance movie kick for a bit, and before that, a Quentin Tarantino-esque fan club, and lots and lots of new television. Anyway, I’m going to spend this week to catch up, because I like keeping in touch through films and the Cinejoy festival is a special gift that we’re all receiving right now.
The protagonist Jenny (Stephanie Hsu of Season Two of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) slow rolls into your heart in Asking For It. She has excellent comic timing and plays the millennial hopelessly flailing through a quarter life crisis effortlessly without the schmaltz or the self awareness to be able to voice that deep discomfort in trite aphorisms. Other characters, like the righteous queen of RBF roommate Lisa (played by Irene Morales) and a biting satire of the NYPD, played with all the No Fucks Given energy of an uncle whose niece is experiencing her first period while sleeping over at the house on a weekend. The film blends absurdist humor with social commentary while keeping the pace at a fairly quick clip with a few slow patches, usually quiet conversations inside of cars or directly before bed.
There are multiple points at which, I laughed so hard and for so long that I am certain I missed jokes buried under other jokes like humor landmines in at the comedy DMZ: minesweeping for you right now the Step Daughter scene and basically any interaction with Andy, the hapless keyboard warrior who Jenny and her coworkers believe is trying to ruin her life. Jenny’s boss, played by Janeane Garofalo (also the “creative consultant” for the film), plays a character somewhat in line with Get Out‘s Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), a wealthy white person who espouses liberal progressive values while harboring problematic motivations and a lot of resentment for whiny millennials. I tend to think that this kind of political critique cuts deeper than some of the parroting of conservatism we’ve seen in recent years in movies like Knives Out or more recently Becky (even The Hunt was trying to do some mental jujitsu with political tropes, it just never really was able to get past the fact that it had made an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory into a full feature film). The commentary seems more likely to be widely internalized than some of the polarizing and othering style of humor.
The movie wrestles a fair bit with the broad strokes of toxic masculinity and incel culture, while also brushing up against some magical realist fantasy-fulfillment about online harassment. When Jenny quips about getting threatening messages from men on the internet “who’d probably rape me if I weren’t so ugly,” she’s saying it tongue-in-cheek for laughs from her female colleagues, but she’s also genuinely concerned for her safety. Asking For It is devoid of romance. Sexual interest is a means of extracting information, something that should be politely recognized and excused. The only real flicker of sex and sexuality comes indirectly at the moment when Jenny is being fired, when she says off-offhandedly that the photos of her that were sent to her boss were–in fact–intended for a college boyfriend years ago. Jenny is not concerned about the existence of sexual photos of her. She doesn’t feel guilt or shame for their existence. She’s upset by the violation of her privacy.
Men are buffoons in general in Asking For It, whether they’re self-serious cavemen, scratching themselves in the office, or eye-rolling paternalistic figures, gaslighting women into not worrying about threats, or glassy-eyed creeps “manifesting” romance into their lives. The chemistry between Lisa and Jenny buoys the film. Their dynamic together is electric, effortless, the perfect opposites attract story.
Asking For It should be near the top of the list for anyone casting about through the 100+ filmes at Cinejoy.
