Honey Don't! (2025)
dir Ethan Coen
Rewatch. Am I the only one who actually liked this film?
I honestly love Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke collaborations. Drive Away Dolls was such a fun campy flick, and Honey Don’t is fun and campy but in a totally different font. Both movies have a distinctly Araki-esque flavor to them, which makes total sense when you think about Coen and Cooke’s marriage dynamic for longer than a second. Straight man blessed with good comedic timing + lesbian who knows how to rock a suit = another homosexual movie by Gregg Araki.
Let’s discuss the things that push it into this category:
- Showcases the dusty, unappealing side of California. Bakersfield this time, not LA, but still.
- Corrupt church/pastor trying to exploit young people.
- Storytelling through advertisements, business signs, billboards, etc.
- Ridiculous character names: Honey, Spider, MG, Chère, Shuggie, etc.
- Lots of gay sex on screen, including sex toys. Hello!
- This one almost counts as two: weird guy following you who is trying to deliver a message, aka absent father returns with something dramatic to say.
- Horned up French woman who thinks American men are only good for fucking.
This is just Nowhere (1997) in a different time and place.
The biggest problem here in my opinion is the soundtrack. The best tracks (Wanda Jackson’s Honey, Don’t! and Margaret Qualley’s cover of Little Black Star) are timed with the credits, which I know almost everybody skips out on. I don’t! I promise. Otherwise I wouldn’t know about those two songs, huh? If there was some shoegaze in here, people would’ve dug it more, I just know it. We needed Slowdive’s Crazy for You and Ride’s Leave Them All Behind….
