Honey Don't!: In Which Margaret Qualley Plays a Rotary Dial Woman in a Touch-Screen World

HONEY DON'T! 

(Ethan Coen, 2025, USA, 

89 minutes) 

Writer/director Ethan Coen and co-writer/co-editor Tricia Cooke set themselves up for a very specific critique when they decided to title their second "lesbian B-movie" with Margaret Qualley Honey Don't! 

I get that it's a reference to a few different things: the 1956 Carl Perkins B-side (famously covered by the Beatles in 1964), Qualley's gumshoe character's name–Honey O'Donoghue–and Honey's rather heedless approach to romance, but the film's detractors are likely to describe the film as a "don't," as in "Don't go to this movie." I mean, it's right there in the title. 

I understand the impulse, but I'm not wild about cheap shots, and Qualley makes Coen and Cooke's black comic take on the sunshine noir or hardboiled detective story worthwhile–I just wish the film rose to her level.

It begins, as these things must, with a dead body. Disheveled Detective Marty Metakawich (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day) assumes it was a suicide, but the prologue suggests that it may have been murder, or a  convenient accident for a Bakersfield evangelist (Chris Evans, most recently of The Materialists) with a sideline in various vices. 

Honey, who had recently met with the victim, is certain something hinky is going on, so she decides to look into it. Though she's openly gay, she doesn't use words like that. She simply tells the detective, "I like girls," but he's too dense or too besotted to take her meaning. Not even after she says it several more times.

Honey dresses like a George Cukor heroine in puff-sleeve dresses, crisp white shirts and beige trousers, red lipstick, and "clickety-clack high heels." She refuses to use a cellphone and stores her contact information in a Rolodex. She's a woman out of time, except she's unapologetically queer and as hot-to-trot as Jamie, Qualley's Drive-Away Dolls character. 

While looking into the mystery, for which no one appears to be paying her, Honey meets with potential clients, like an uptight germaphobe (Billy Eichner), who believes his partner is cheating on him. She also has a fling with the police department's evidence custodian (Aubrey Plaza). 

I wasn't bored by any of these developments, but I wasn't fully engaged either. The actors are game, but the writing hems them in. Evans' Reverend Drew, for instance, is a thoroughly repellant individual–greedy, self-obsessed, and narcissistic–but once that's established, the character has nothing left to offer other than an unseen comeuppance that isn't nearly as satisfying as it should be. For a more effective heel turn from Evans, look no further than Knives Out.  

Coen and Cooke also present bondage gear as something inherently shocking, except it feels more like kink-shaming, which probably wasn't their intention, though Honey's enthusiasm for sex toys, including the dildos and anal beads she washes with loving care, doesn't merit the same treatment. 

As with Drive-Away Dolls, their first narrative, Honey Don't! has a screwball vibe, but lacks the requisite energy. It isn't long, slow, or listless, but it's consistently behind the beat. Something is off. Coen and Cooke are working with some of the same ingredients as Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, but that lesbian noir had a sense of urgency this one lacks, though it shares a predilection for gory violence that crosses into horror-movie territory. 

Though the film doesn't do Evans or Plaza many favors, Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) shines as Honey's niece, a fast food worker and goth girl with lousy taste in boyfriends. 

Coen and Cooke don't give Ryder anything funny to say or do--to the extent that she seems to have wandered in from a different, possibly better, film--but she's genuinely sympathetic. When she disappears after an encounter with a strange old man (Kale Browne), the film comes to life in a way it hadn't previously before returning to the less interesting central mystery. 

The filmmaking duo intends to make a third film with Margaret Qualley called, um, Go Beavers, but it remains to be seen if they're able to pull it off. Drive-Away Dolls didn't exactly light up the box office, and Honey Don't! may not fare much better--not even after Qualley's dazzling turn in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance--but she certainly acquits herself nicely.

For me, the film isn't a "do" or a "don't" so much as a maybe.

   

Honey Don't! opens on Fri, Aug 22, at SIFF Cinema Uptown, Pacific Place, the Meridian, and other area theaters. Images from Screen Rant (Margaret Qualley), Wikipedia (1956 Sun 78, "Honey Don't", Carl Perkins), the IMDb (Qualley and Aubrey Plaza), and Thought Catalog (Qualley and Plaza). 

As Long as We Live, It's You and Me Baby: On Spike Lee’s Music Biz Thriller Highest 2 Lowest

HIGHEST TO LOWEST 

(Spike Lee, 2025, USA, 133 minutes) 

Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee's idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 High and Low, is the kind of overstuffed film a late-in-life director makes when they're still bursting with energy and ideas even as dozens, if not hundreds, of younger guns are nipping at their heels. 

Might as well remake a favorite film, reunite with a favorite actor, shoot on location in a favorite city, and throw all your favorite stuff--Toni Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat--at the screen. After all, you've earned it. 

That isn't to say it's nostalgic. Despite the 62-year-old source material and the references to an elder's past glories–from gold records to magazine covers–it's very much about today, and Lee has decidedly mixed feelings about that. Though he has shifted the business from ladies footwear to music, the allusions to the movie business aren't hard to miss, since both have been transformed by social media, streaming, and digital technology. 

Left: Toshirô Mifune and Kyôko Kagawa in High and Low

To be sure, 68-year-old Lee has embraced all of these things, but that doesn't mean he isn't skeptical, and who can blame him when it comes to AI, which merits a few mentions–it's helpful when the cops are trying to identify the voice of a kidnapper, but it's no replacement for the flesh-and-blood artists music mogul David King (70-year-old Denzel Washington in his fifth go-round with the director since 1990's Mo' Better Blues) signed in his younger years.

If King was a different kind of cat, he would have retired to live out his days with his glamorous wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, who recalls Lee's wife, Tonya Lewis Lee), in their dee-luxe apartment in the sky, but he's been hustling for so long, he doesn't know how to quit. If there's one characteristic that unites the different versions of the character, starting with the blond, broad-shouldered shoe magnate in Ed McBain's 1959 novel, King's Ransom, it's that they came from nothing, worked hard, and made it to the top. 

Though Kurosawa set the story in Yokohama, Lee brought it back to McBain's New York, except he opts for the city over the suburbs--King's Brooklyn penthouse is spectacular--and begins with the news that he needs to come up with a staggering amount of cash fast lest he get sidelined at the record label he made legendary. He may be rich, but it's more than he can afford, so he decides to roll the dice with everything he has. Pam, with her designer wardrobe and diamond-encrusted jewelry, is less than thrilled. 

Then, King gets a call that his teenaged son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been kidnapped. To bring him home, he needs to pay 17.5 million in Swiss Francs. He'll do anything for his only son, but when he discovers that the kidnapper mistakenly abducted his chauffeur's son, Kyle (Elijah Wright), he balks, even though he's Trey's best friend, and even though Paul (Elijah's father, Jeffrey Wright, who first caught my attention in 1996's Basquiat), a Muslim ex-con, is as much a surrogate relative as a trusted employee. 

It causes a rift in the family with mother and son united against the father until he finally relents. Up until that point, I had my doubts about this film, which is too static in its early stages. King and Paul, who trade rhymes whenever they go for a ride, are terrific together, but too often Pam comes across as shallow and humorless. Lee and Hadera have worked together before, starting with his 2013 Oldboy remake, and I quite enjoyed her chemistry with Forest Whitaker on Godfather of Harlem, but a looser, warmer presence would have been ideal (Hadera is also 30 years younger than Denzel, though Alan Fox's screenplay suggests they're the same age). 

Once King and the anonymous kidnapper–Surprise! It's A$AP Rocky–come to an agreement about the ransom drop, which will take place at some to-be-determined stop during a subway ride, Lee lets his freak flag fly, and Highest 2 Lowest finally takes flight, not least because it takes place during an exuberant Puerto Rican Day Parade and just after a Yankees/Red Sox game. 

Left: Spike and Nick Turturro's brother, John, at a Knicks/Bulls game in 2013.

Prior to the game, the film gets in a few jabs at Boston, one involving former Celtic forward Rick Fox, who plays a high school basketball coach, but once King gets on the train, the Yankees fans who follow in his wake go absolutely and hilariously apeshit. Their ringleader: longtime Lee associate Nicholas Turturro (another Lee associate, Rosie Perez, appears as herself during the Puerto Rican Day sequence). 

In a move that recalls Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me, which incorporates footage from the Monterey Jazz Festival, editors Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson cut repeatedly from the ransom drop, which involves black-clad motorcyclists zipping across the city, and a performance by the Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra. It's a significant improvement over Howard Drossin's orchestral score, which can be distractingly heavyhanded, though Drossin shifts to a lighter, brighter register for the subway sequences. 

Then, once King and Paul follow a lead to the Bronx, where the mogul grew up, Lee throws James Brown's thematically appropriate "Payback" into the mix. By that time, I was willing to forgive Drossin's score, because I believe–or I would like to believe–that it represents the rich man's rut in which King has found himself; hustling to stay on top, taking his family for granted, and losing touch with the human-made music that once invigorated him as the producer and A&R guy with "the best ears in the business."

And that's the film in a nutshell: old dude gets his groove back. Not everyone needs a board coup or a kidnapping to get their head straight, but King let his get twisted, and what could have been a by-the-books genre exercise feels deeply personal, something I couldn't say about High and Low, a superior effort in many respects--though I can't imagine Toshirô Mifune spitting bars like Denzel Washington--but not one that tells me as much about its maker. 

If Highest 2 Lowest is Lee's most successful remake to date–a low bar in light of his misguided Ganja & Hess update Da Sweet Blood of Jesus–it's neither his best nor his worst film, but rather a Spike Lee joint through and through, and I'll be damned if the not-so-young dude doesn't still have it. 

Highest 2 Lowest opens at SIFF Uptown and Regal Meridian on Fri, Aug 15. It comes to Apple TV+ on Fri, Sept 5. Images from the IMDb (Denzel Washington times two and Toshirô Mifune with Kyôko Kagawa as Kingo and Reiko Gondo), Screen Rant (Washington with Ilfenesh Hadera), and VIBE (Spike Lee with John Turturro / Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images).

Anchorage Daily News Flashback: Herzog: A Little Risk Keeps Life Interesting for Director

In 1986, my mom, Doreen Ransom, interviewed Werner Herzog for The Anchorage Daily News. 

I don't recall that she had done any other film writing, before or since, though she certainly enjoyed going to the movies regularly, often with her only child. The following year, she won an Alaska Press Women award for the piece. 

In 2021, after being diagnosed with dementia in 2019, she moved to an assisted living facility in Anchorage. Her symptoms include aphasia, which has greatly reduced her ability to communicate with any cohesion.  

Mom's journalism career was relatively brief--she spent more time working for the State of Alaska Department of Corrections as an institutional counselor and pre-sentence reporter--but this is one of the best things she ever wrote, and she worked hard on it. Getting things right was very important to her; I would like to think I inherited the same trait. The interview isn't archived at the Daily News site, so I have reproduced it here.

Right: candids of Mom, probably from sometime in the 1970s.  

In 2005, I also got to see Herzog in person, presenting four of his documentaries--or documentary hybrids in the case of that year's The Wild Blue Yonder--at the Seattle Art Museum, in his inimitable style. It was a real treat, though I regret that I didn't get to meet the filmmaker, let alone to have a sit-down conversation with him.

Note: I have reproduced this piece exactly as published with the exception of the images and the captions. I was unable to find a copy online of the original Michael Penn portrait of Herzog that accompanied it, so I found another I liked (above), though it's from 1977 rather than 1986.

HERZOG: A little risk keeps life interesting for director

by DOREEN RANSOM

Daily News correspondent

    Seeing his early movies again, according to internationally acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is "like looking back on my own childhood."

    Herzog was in Anchorage last week to speak about his recent offering, "Ballad of the Little Soldier," the 1984 documentary about the Miskito Indians and their rebellion against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

    Growing up in Nazi Germany, the maker of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo" didn't see his first movie until the age of 11. The film industry at the time was suffocating in the repressive atmosphere of the Third Reich.

    "I had to invent cinema for myself," he says, explaining how he developed his unique cinematic vision, incorporating intense personal themes and hypnotic visual images.

    Herzog, who is vacationing in the Alaska bush, spoke at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Here are excerpts from an interview.

HERZOG: Director's career has thrived on calculated risk [Continued from Page D-1]

Do you write all your own scripts?

    Yes, I have done that all my life. I am also producer of my own films. I became producer out of necessity. I have never found anyone who would have produced the kind of films I wanted to do.

You received a strong reaction to "The Ballad of the Little Soldier."

    I didn't expect the reaction to be that strong. But of course, there is a tendency, particularly among the dogmatic left, to (treat) the Sandinista movement like a sacred cow. There must not be anything negative said about them or shown about them.

    It is evident that the minority of the Miskito Indians have an enormous cultural problem in their own country and that the Sandinistas have never understood these people. You can read it in the government statements from the Sandinistas -- they admit they committed grave and dramatic mistakes.

    Unfortunately, the tragedy is still going on. There is so much military pressure from outside on the Sandinista government. As long as this pressure continues internally, they will only find military answers to the challenge of the Miskito Indians. And that's a tragedy of big proportions.

Right: journalist Denis Reichle, co-director of Ballad of the Little Soldier.

Did you have an anti-war film in mind before you arrived in Nicaragua?

    No. I didn't know too much about the situation beforehand. I went with a friend of mine, Denis Reichle, a French reporter who spent eight months with the Miskitos. He advised me to join him with a movie crew. He is a very trustworthy man. He has spent his last 35 years doing intimate reports on oppressed minorities all over the world. He was in Timor, in Cambodia, in Angola, in Lebanon, and I just trust in his competence.

    Many of the things were a big surprise for me, in particular that there are such young kids fighting in the war. When you read about Iran and Iraq -- the war there -- everyone is upset that there are very young soldiers, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old. But they are already in puberty and halfway grown up. In Nicaragua you find soldiers who are kids age 9, 10 and 11. They are real children, and that's very upsetting and disturbing.

Is this your first trip to Alaska?

    No, I was here a year ago. I spent a few weeks west of the Alaska Range on Lake Telaquana.

You have mentioned in other interviews that the landscape is a character -- a character you can direct. In your movies, you have focused on very extreme landscapes, such as the jungle and the desert. Is this on your mind during your visit here?

    Oh, it's not an extreme landscape. It's how landscapes should be It's exactly like God wanted the Earth to be.

The films you've produced are often shown in art-film theaters in this country, while "Rocky IV" draws long lines. Are German audiences so different?

    It's like everywhere else in the world. People would rather see "Rocky" than one of my movies. I don't worry too much about it. Some of my films have become more successful over time, even in the United States. In the third re-release of "Aguirre," the film became successful at the box office. A film like "Rocky" is used up as a consumer good and then it's gone. But some of my films will be seen 20 years from now. I have no doubt about that.

You've taken many personal risks. But you've said most of these risks have been calculated.

    Yes, actually. I have to emphasize that I am a professional worker. For the sake of professionality, you try to avoid difficulties. You have to look for the safest solutions you can find. There's only one exception, "La Soufrière," which was a sheer gamble because nobody knew whether the mountain would explode. It was a situation like Mount St. Helen. We stayed on the crater and shot the film. In this case -- and it was the only one -- it was sheer roulette.

You said that Western society is over-concerned with safety and that this makes our souls sterile.

    Yes, I see that danger. I sense it everywhere. Every single one of us has to make his own decision -- how far to go, where to limit the risks, when to put it on the shoulder of an insurance company. But something like life insurance sounds scandalous to my ears because there's only an assurance of death. That's the only sure thing. I have an attitude that's a bit against this over-insurance kind of life. It becomes sterile, boring, inhuman and uninspired.

I understand you were disappointed you couldn't continue to work with Mick Jagger in "Fitzcarraldo."

    Yes. The problem with Mick Jagger was that he went overtime in my production. Jagger at the time had signed contracts for a world tour with the Rolling Stones. In the second round of shooting, we decided that it wouldn't make sense to shoot around him for eight days. It would have been insane. So I decided to let him go, which was very sad. It was so sad that I wrote the entire part out of the screenplay. I didn't want to replace him.

In your 1982 Rolling Stone interview, you said of the late director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "He was like a sweating, grunting, fat and nasty wild boar who would just run through the underbrush and open a path behind him that was passable for everyone else." I thought that was great writing. Do you do other kinds of writing?

    Yes, I have published some poetry and have written prose books like "Of Walking in Ice," which was released here in the U.S. It's a book almost like a diary, when I walked once from Munich to Paris in the winter. I walked because a very good friend of mine, Lotte Eisner, an old lady, was dying. Out of protest and despair, I walked on foot for three-and-a-half weeks in a straight line as quickly as I could. I somehow knew if I came on foot she would survive and be out of hospital. And she was actually out of hospital. It was a pilgrimage, and I wrote the book, which I like better than all my films together.

Images: Rolling Stone / Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty ("The film-maker Werner Herzog giving a press conference, Stockholm, Sweden, January 27th, 1977"), the IMDB (Ballad of the Little Soldier), MUBI (Denis Reichle), Harvard Film Archive (Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God), and Goodreads (Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974).    

Capitalism Proves Crushing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Satirical Thriller Cloud (Though People With Guns Can Be Pesky, Too)

CLOUD / Kuraudo 
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024, Japan, 124 minutes) 

"You operate on impulse and instinct? No effort whatsoever?"--prospective seller 
"That's how I work."--Yoshii

Yoshii (The Boy and the Heron's Masaki Suda) works in a laundry factory by day. Though he could earn more as a manager, a promotion his pushy boss offers more than a few times, he would prefer to manage things rather than people. Company man Mr. Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa from Bong Joon-ho's Tokyo! contribution "Shaking Tokyo"), who mistakenly believes they're cut from the same cloth, can't understand why his employee wouldn't want to trade freedom and unpredictability for stability and repetition. 

In his spare time, Yoshii pursues his true passion: buying and reselling medical equipment, collectible figurines, and knockoff luxury goods. He takes photos of the items, posts them online, strings together a few persuasive key words, and waits for customers to click the "buy" button. 

Granted, Yoshii isn't a thief, and he ships the products he sells, but he underpays for merchandise, uses deceptive pricing, and fails to verify authenticity before listing designer wares, generating resentment among buyers and sellers alike. Initially, though, no one reaches out directly to complain, so he feels no shame and suffers no consequences. Granted, he uses a pseudonym, Ratel--the Dutch word for honey badger--so it isn't as if disgruntled associates can look him up online, though that will soon change. 

Yoshii might sound like a loner, except he isn't, and Suda doesn't play him as someone especially off-putting. Moral complications aside, he looks and acts like a regular guy. If he isn't a hero–and he doesn't necessarily qualify as an antihero–he isn't a villain either, but rather the catalyst for an uprising against a virtual world that has exacerbated capitalism's worst tendencies. His enemies list, which grows throughout the film, consists of buyers, sellers, and others even shadier than him. 

Though his sweet-faced girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), initially seems like a port in the storm, she's possibly the worst kind of partner for someone like Yoshii, because she encourages him to amp up his activities regardless as to the repercussions, so she can quit her job, buy a fancy espresso maker, and move to a bigger place. "I'll buy this and that," she enthuses. "There's so much I want." Her avarice makes it easier for Yoshii to justify his actions. 

One day someone leaves a dead rat outside his door. Then someone strings a trip wire between trees in front of his building, causing him to take a spill on his scooter. Could it be an unhappy seller, his resentful boss, or the schoolmate who becomes peevish when he refuses to invest in his new auction platform? One way or the other, Yoshii feels like he's being watched. 

So, it's presumably a good thing when he and Akiko relocate to a modernist house by the lake, just outside Tokyo, where he resumes his business and hires an eager young local named Sano (Mother's Daiken Okudaira) to assist him. 

Despite the move, Yoshii still feels like he's being watched. It's a common experience for a character in a Kurosawa film. Though Cure took inspiration from Silence of the Lambs, and Pulse was remade in English in the wake of the Ring phenomenon, his films aren't horror in the conventional sense. 

Cloud can be chilling at times, but the disorienting ambiguity recalls Michael Haneke's psychological thriller Caché, more than the average American narrative with a known antagonist. Once the source of the antagonism becomes known, however, the film switches into a different register. 

Joseph Heller's famous Catch-22 adage "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" applies, because strange things keep happening, and I don't think it's all in his head, though knowing Kurosawa, it could be (for what it's worth, I've always associated that quote with the Nixon presidency, though Heller's book was published in 1961). 

Yoshii hasn't changed his ways, in fact, he's expanded his operations, and so the stalker--or stalkers--maintains their campaign of intimidation, undeterred by the change in location. As it turns out, resentment has been building over Yoshii's tactics for so long that the online furor has spilled over into the physical world. 

What he didn't know didn't hurt him, but Sano helps him to connect the dots. It's Kurosawa's way of showing how the things that happen online can have real-world consequences beyond the obvious. A customer who feels ripped off, after all, isn't just a screen name, but an actual human being. 

By the end, Yoshii is on the run from an armed posse, and the film segues from horror chills to satiric thrills involving a man who has made so many enemies that even his girlfriend, his assistant, and the cops–who know about the counterfeit goods–can't be counted on to get him out of the jam. 

It's one of Kurosawa's best thrillers in years, not necessarily because it represents a return to his roots, though it does, but because he's working with some of the same thought-provoking themes and spooky cues as before, while brightening the corners with his mastery of action and humor, and just when it seems as if the film couldn't get any darker or violent, it doesn't. It swerves, though the underlying message is blacker than black. 

That said, it's also a return to films about men, which is hardly a crime--for years, Kurosawa and Kōji Yakusho had a Scorsese/De Niro thing going on--but I was impressed by two semi-recent films featuring women as the focal point: 2019's To the Ends of the Earth, a lyrical character study set in Uzbekistan, and 2020's Hamaguchi collaboration, The Wife of a Spy, a wartime thriller. 

I assumed they marked a new direction for the veteran filmmaker, but he's previously taken detours into other genres, like science fiction, and other countries, like France, so I guess it's not surprising that it wasn't.

It isn't disappointing either, since Yoshii, and his honey badger ways, turns out to be one of his more captivating protagonists. With Masaki Suda's placid appearance and pragmatic affect, he has a certain blank quality; not bland, but open to a variety of readings. Where some saw a scoundrel, I saw someone who was a victim of the same system that ensnares us all. Love him or loathe him, you'll want to see exactly how his story plays out. 

Cloud, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF 2025, opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Fri, Aug 15. Images from the IMDb (Masaki Suda and super-creepy stalker), Wallpaper Magazine (Suda and Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), MovieWeb (Suda and Kotone Furukawa), and Austin Film Society (Suda).