Medicine for Melancholy may be a mumblecore film in its aesthetics, but its financial and physical confines don’t hinder the film from achieving something emotionally and societally transcendent.
It’s not Mycah who brings Joanne to the museum, but the other way around. He mocks the idea, saying going to museums is what black people don’t do on a Sunday. Joanne’s boyfriend is a curator, which is why she was going to go to one of those places anyway.
The discussion of gentrification in the film makes a viewer want to smack their head against a desk, since they go right from complaining about the lack of housing to rallying for the rent control which keeps the housing supply low. After the film was made advocates of rent control succeeding in spreading it further in San Francisco, and sure enough studies (comparing housing it applies to vs grandfathered exemptions) show that it made housing less affordable.
Horror is my favorite genre, but not due to any social commentary. There’s generally no reason to expect artists to be good at that. Horror gets to reach into our most primal emotions and do things impermissible in other genres. It can also succeed on low budgets with no-name casts, making it more friendly to up-and-coming filmmakers.
San Francisco has a majority-minority population. You sometimes read complaints about the tech workforce being heavily white, but due to the overrepresentation of asians in tech it’s actually less white than the national average. As Eugene Volokh pointed out years ago, the popular press often seems to lump asians in with whites, treating blacks & hispanics as the only non-white groups (even though hispanic is an ethnicity rather than race and many hispanics also identify as white). English-speaking black hipsters might interact less with immigrant groups than a random panmixia model would assume, but that doesn’t make the city itself mostly white. Interracial dating has its own complexities which don’t fit with Mycah’s simplified description.
The first act of the film makes clear why Mycah just mailing her the wallet wouldn’t have worked: the address on her ID was out of date. He had to knock on doors until he eventually found her.
It’s not Mycah who brings Joanne to the museum, but the other way around. He mocks the idea, saying going to museums is what black people don’t do on a Sunday. Joanne’s boyfriend is a curator, which is why she was going to go to one of those places anyway.
The discussion of gentrification in the film makes a viewer want to smack their head against a desk, since they go right from complaining about the lack of housing to rallying for the rent control which keeps the housing supply low. After the film was made advocates of rent control succeeding in spreading it further in San Francisco, and sure enough studies (comparing housing it applies to vs grandfathered exemptions) show that it made housing less affordable.
Horror is my favorite genre, but not due to any social commentary. There’s generally no reason to expect artists to be good at that. Horror gets to reach into our most primal emotions and do things impermissible in other genres. It can also succeed on low budgets with no-name casts, making it more friendly to up-and-coming filmmakers.
San Francisco has a majority-minority population. You sometimes read complaints about the tech workforce being heavily white, but due to the overrepresentation of asians in tech it’s actually less white than the national average. As Eugene Volokh pointed out years ago, the popular press often seems to lump asians in with whites, treating blacks & hispanics as the only non-white groups (even though hispanic is an ethnicity rather than race and many hispanics also identify as white). English-speaking black hipsters might interact less with immigrant groups than a random panmixia model would assume, but that doesn’t make the city itself mostly white. Interracial dating has its own complexities which don’t fit with Mycah’s simplified description.
The first act of the film makes clear why Mycah just mailing her the wallet wouldn’t have worked: the address on her ID was out of date. He had to knock on doors until he eventually found her.