27 Dresses (2008) +

A paint-by-numbers romantic comedy, redeemed by intelligently appealing lead performers in the lead roles. Katharine Heigl is great - so beautiful, yet somehow plausible as a young professional woman with a vacuum of self-recriminating fantasies that actually explains how she could be "looked past"... With virtually any other equally attractive performer in the role, the character would have almost certainly not work, but Heigl's performance makes the character plausible. James Marsden, too, is very very good - his suspect/suspicious charm suits the character and he's equally likable. Even Judy Greer as the wiseacre best friend is very very good - she's got some great laugh lines and, while she's no Emily Blunt (who salvaged a full characterization from comparable material) at least Judy Greer here avoids her tendency toward the self-congratulatory. The wedding conceit of the film is really nice, with the commentary on the wedding industry providing a nice corrective to the boilerplate plot. Beyond those three principals, the secondary characters are, almost as a rule, badly written and banally performed. Malin Akerman is especially poorly cast as the "pretty sister" - a role which required a Cameron Diaz complexity but, with Akerman, remained a shallow cliche. Very cute, very harmless -- with adorable and intelligent leads. If you don't like Marsden or Heigl, you ain't gonna join the party.

Protagonist (2007) +

Wow. Jessica Yu is brilliant. This meditation on the plays and characters of Euripedes becomes a profound meditation on masculinity, performativity and character. Four articulate men who have led extraordinary lives tell their stories and, in concert, create a portrait of identity, struggle, obstacles, catharsis, redemption and awareness that are epic in their emotional, spiritual and dramatic scope. But the simple (albeit insanely smart) comingling of these stories is not what makes the stories so powerful. It's the puppets and the cartoons. Yu uses text from Euripedes to frame the whole inquiry, animating the "beats" of the hero's journey with core concepts, while also having little carved wooden puppets enact both the Euripedes text and selected scenes from each narrator's life. The puppets both elevate and abstract the emotional stakes of the conflicts being depicted. The guys tell their stories as talking heads, but -- through visual montage and through the use of the puppets -- so much more than reenactments happen. It's just an astonishingly smart, meditative documentary. A meditative essay, really, with great subjects telling enthralling stories of humanness. And Jessica Yu's little interview is excellent as well, explaining and elaborating so many of the most interesting features of the documentary. So nice to see a little interview rather than listening to the extended director's commentary. A great piece, really. I'd love to teach using it but I'm not sure how...
1.26

The Savages (2007) +

An aptly empathetic portrait of difficult people encountering a difficult situation. The script is solid, mature and intelligent. I wish we could see more movies about basically grown up people dealing with situations that bear a passing resemblance to real life. (I think this is why I cut Noah Baumbach some slack.) Anyway, Laura Linney plays a prickly, neurotic princess. Philips Seymour Hoffman plays a rumply, self-absorbed ween. And Philip Bosco plays an imperious, thoughtless bully. And all are great. I'm not a big fan of any of them. Indeed, PSH and La Linney both stress me out a little. I admire them more than I like them and both make me feel like I would be really uncomfortable in their presence. But here those qualities suit the characters and both performers give performances that seem to be among the most relaxed I've ever seen. Neither has any of the "floating above it all with mild superiority" that I tend to fault them for and both seem to convey genuine empathy for these broken, lost souls. I also admire the casual way that the characters seem to carry a storied, mild humiliating intimacy. You get that each knows things about the other that the other wishes they didn't and that punctuates the most banal interactions with a weight and history that is really nice. I don't love Bosco's performance, though I do admire its fearlessness and seeming lack of vanity. He has that one great moment in the car, where he turns off his hearing aid in order to hide from the accusatory shrieks of his children. I honor the filmmaker for the brutal honesty of the whole endeavor -- the scene on the airplane is one of the most incredible depictions of the humiliations of elder care that I've ever seen. And the whole film "gets it right" when it comes to the anxious imperfections of the nursing home process. The ending is, gratefully, nominally upbeat - though MrStinky questioned the clarity of what happened (ie. what was with the dog?). My answer -- that the whole time Wendy just wanted to offer care to a creature in pain but that her father was beyond such care, that caring for Marly the dog was her way of doing right by a creature in pain whom she loved -- is I think what the movie sets us up to appreciate but it was still a little odd. But thank goddess there was some hope at the end. An admirable effort, one which reminds me how much I admire Hoffman and Linney even as I really don't enjoy either much at all.

Fame (1980) +

I do love this movie. I've easily seen it more times than any other, but this time through it was the first time I screened the dvd with the director's track playing. Parker's self-aggrandizing track didn't provide much in the way of information except that (a) Parker and Barry Miller didn't get along, that Miller was difficult and even Maureen Teefy didn't like him; (b) that they didn't get to film in the real school because the school district was concerned about the 4-letter words and that Parker might -- in the words of one administrator -- "do for NY public high schools what he did for turkish prisons" in Midnight Express; which (c) forced him to find alternate locations which was really much better; and (d) the film is a hybrid of the school for Performing Arts as well as Music and Art. He must have made each of those points 19,000 times. I do love how much he hates the tv show; at one point, he calls it "hideous." A few thoughts came up: why was Barry Miller cast as Ralph? Why no Puerto Rican actor? Why is Ralph the only character who graduates who's missing from the finale? (It's only Ralph and Hilary who aren't in "Body Electric" and, for Hilary, it makes sense but not so for Ralph.) I think the main thing I kept thinking about during the film was the character of Montgomery MacNeil. Again a character who's casting I wonder about. But more importantly I'd love to hear a little bit more about the character, what the creators were thinking in setting Montgomery up as the only queer kid at PA. I love the character but there's something absurdly heterosexist in the way the character is situated in the film: pathetic, lonely, isolated. What I sorta love about the character is that he's a normal, basically masculine gay man who's aesthetically inclined, shy and lost in the big city. The friendship between Doris and Montgomery makes sense, same too for his friendship and empathy for Ralph, but I'm wondering what informed the decision to emphasize his difference through tropes of loneliness and isolation when (really) he's in NYC at the end of the 1970s at a performing arts school (where plenty of sissy guys are getting all fierce in "Fame"). That said, when you place Montgomery's very existence in the context of all the ensemble microcosmic melodramas of the 1970s and 1980s, Montgomery becomes all the more remarkable for the fact of his existence in that all heterosexual genre. (I can think only of Fame and The Decline of the American Empire, which each include a gay man, albeit problematically, where Nashville, American Graffiti, Secaucus Seven, Big Chill, St. Elmo's Fire, Breakfast Club, etc, are all unquestioningly heterosexual.) I should probably do a performance profile of Paul McCrane in some blogathon because I'm really interested in the way the character operates... But I could watch this movie again and again and again.

El Orfanato/The Orphanage (2007) +

A vivid tale of emotional horror. The scenario is pretty conventional: young family with a precocious kid moves into a big scary house. A house with a creepy history. A house on a violent beach complete with caves. A house where the mother has unfinished personal business. Yeah, yeah, yeah - only in a scary movie. So, of course, the kid -- a moppet prone to imaginary friends -- goes missing. Has he been taken by the spirits? Is all the creepiness in the mother's head? The film maneuvers the scenario with emotionally resonant economy, which is to be admired given the cliche traps at every turn. But the scenario itself is perhaps the least interesting part of this effective genre piece. Essentially, it's a ghost story along the lines of Rebecca: equal parts a story of a haunting and a fairly straight-up whodunnit, with the added, evocatively contemporary "missing child" aspect. This duality is what is both superficially frustrating and ultimately exciting about the film. I sorta love that there are two possible explanations for the events that transpire -- the forensic version (the truth according to medicine and the police) and the fantastic version (the truth according to authorities of the heart and the spirit). This duality taps into a very Iberian/Catholic spiritual epistemology as it also dodges one of the more annoying trends in contemporary horror ("explaining" the terror through some psychological defect). I love that the main character might be stuck in a form of mild, grief-induced psychosis...but, then again, she might also be seeing real ghosts, that her traipse toward the brink of sanity might open her to spiritual realms beyond conventional consciousness. It's Guillermo Del Toro's especial genius to allow a multiplicity of possible explanations and, though this film is more 2nd-tier Stephen King than Del Toro, I do enjoy traveling this sort of terrain. The female performances (Belén Rueda in the lead, Geraldine Chaplin as the aptly named medium Aurora, as well as some great women in several cameos: Mabel Rivera as the shrink Pilar; Montserrat Carulla as the whackjob Benigna; and Blanca Martínez as anonymous grieving mother) are deliciously dimensional, even if none of them blew me away; for his part, the hubby (the yummy Fernando Caya) is a treat all unto himself (and I really like how he doesn't get mean when his understanding of the situation departs from his beloved wife). Another thing I appreciated about the film was how it dangled a whole range of red herrings before returning us to the simplest answer. An effective, smart, mature piece of scary -- the kind of film that, say, Birth might have been had they not shied so from the paranormal when crafting the resolution. Also, it's worth noting that the section with the medium Aurora (Chaplin's incredible vivid presentness serves her gorgeously here) works incredibly well, easily as well as -- if not better than -- the paranormal expert scenes from The Exorcist or Poltergeist. (Just went to the review over on fourfour cuz I remembered he hated it: reading his critique, which is all about how the film gets gummed up in its preponderance of recognizable cliches, I'm struck at how Scream-y his critique is, how there's a certain stripe of horror aficionados who are invested in the genre for the purposes of sheer surprise, for the gratifications of new experience, sort of a fetishistic innovation. His main beef was that the movie was without surprise, that the conspicuous foreshadowing robbed the film of whatever pleasures it might have had because, in a strange way, the foreshadowing itself evacuated the surprise. I see his point, but find myself interested that I found the careful, meticulous construction to be a crucial part of the movie's meditative appeal. It's clearly trying to operated (hear the Del Toro here) on an archetypal level, where there's dimension to consciousness that cannot be explained through reference to objective reality. I sorta like that the film put all that shit on the table. I could get annoyed by the psychoanalytic obviousness of the cave as birth canal in which the adoptive child is lost. But I like the way the film plays with the consciousness knot that Aurora describes: when something traumatic happens, or when someone nears death, the separation between realms gets confounded and things beyond explanation happen. I'm thrilled that there was no talking cure in this, that it was her experience of the new and old psychic traumas that proved to be her guide. I don't think it was a great movie, but I do like it for exactly what fourfour likes about torture porn: it's honest about what it is -- a horror film about the terrors of consciousness. It's not a plot flick - 2nd tier Stephen King, remember - but it is doing something I'm glad to spend time with...)

Indie Sex: Extremes (2007) -

What's perhaps most interesting about this entry into the Indie Sex series is that it's the most personal, the most intimate, the most exploratory. To a one, the commentators share what feel to be more intimate details about their own spectatorial histories and how films about "alternative sexualities"" (which, here, seem mostly to refer to fetish/kink/sm etc) have informed their own fantasy lives. Also, the idea of "the emotional dimensions of human experience" comes up a lot (via intense films like Belle du Jour, The Night Porter, The Piano Teacher). Alternately, the commentators note their own naivete in encountering the dimensions of kink. Again, this one chooses a fairly arbitrary starting point (Lolita) that feels late to me. The section toward the end where the commentators offer their perspective on the distinction between pornography and art: Catherine Breillart says if you have to ask the question then it's art; Jami Bernard says it's the subtext; the British critic says it's the lighting. But they all go back to the question of character, context and narrative (beyond scenario), underscoring the basic argument of this section of the series (that taboos press upon the limits of social convention, but also on the emotional dimensions of the human experience). Also, the notion of "unsimulated sex" is very useful (getting away from "real" or "explicit" or whatever to modify "the act") -- an interesting conceptual conceit... John Cameron Mitchell -- "there's nothing 'natural' about putting sex on camera" and his discussion of the group sex scene in Shortbus. Another key conceit is that cinema is a "safe" space to explore the more drastic dimensions of the sex as a component of human experience, which is how the film maintains its defiantly "sex positive" vibe while also dabbling in the darker aspects of sex on screen.

Indie Sex: Teens (2007) -

Not nearly as competent as "Indie Sex: Censored" from the same series. This installment suffers from a presentist bias, that skews the teen-ness to everything post Porky's. We don't get a useful discussion of the construction of teenagers in the US, just that it's an especially US thing. The clips and featured films are fine enough, but there's no historical or analytic frame through which to view the products of the last 30 years, nothing to anchor these in productive context, either culturally or in terms of industrial practice. Basically, if this film is to be believed, there is no such thing as a teen movie prior to Halloween (1978). (The premise is that teen audiences were cheaper to reach in the blockbuster era.) The problem with this is that you don't get any sense of teen audiences being important in the 1930s or 1950s (periods when concern about teen movie consumption fueled cultural debate and industrial reform). We get a real quick nod back to 1950s rock'n'roll pictures during an extended section on Dirty Dancing, but that's it. Further, the film stays pretty literal with teen sex, without edging at all into the erotics of horror and the importance of horror as a consistent genre for teen sexuality. And once again, I'm left to wonder why Little Darlings has not been released on dvd.

Indie Sex: Censored (2007) +

Screening this to possibly use in my course this semester. Verdict - I think I will. Cinematically, it's nothing: a VH1/Bravo style survey of great moments in popcultural history. What's nice about this one is that it's so current and that it's got a lotta ween. Shockingly frank male nudity frames the story, basically -- and the narrative is one which frames nudity/sexuality/censorship as a push-pull story between technology and regulation. The nudity makes me a little anxious, for teaching purposes. But there's a really nice "cultural history of sexuality in popular performance" narrative that I think might be handy, if only to introduce undergrads to the broad U.S. cultural trends regarding the ubiquity of sexual expressiveness in performance cultures and also the moments of breakthrough/retreat. This film does a really nice job with the Production Code, detailing some of the way that "coded" presentations helped to convey sexuality when frankness was forbidden. Likewise, it does a nice job introducing the tensions: local/national; male vs female nudity; private consumption vs public gathering; the levels of censorship that prevail; the historic breaks in constitutional law. I'm not sure where I'm going to squeeze this in; let alone how I'm going to frame the whole nudity thing; but it does cover a wide range of ground. A nice primer on the whole history of sexual censorship in the 20th century.

Red without Blue (2007) -

A tender but ultimately banal account of the extraordinary story of twins, whose journey through life together begins as sissy boys in Missoula, Montana. The film recounts the complexly comingled histories of divorce, peer sexual abuse, a shared suicide attempt, and enforced estrangement as such informs the twins's current lives in their early 20s, as Mark (who has taken to calling himself Oliver) seeks love and companionship in San Francisco and as Clair (formerly Alex) completes college in NY while contemplating the surgical completion of her transition to femaleness. The film does well respecting the intricate layers of hurt, fear and uncertainty as the two maneuver independent but forever connected lives amidst the concentric circles of relation created by their mother, father, and community in Missoula. Add into this a family history of Christian Science -- wherein any physical ailment is the manifestation of something wrong between you and god -- and a deeply wounded but loving mother who's got a complex intimate life of her own (she shares her home, her bed, and her life with a woman but adamantly refuses to be identified as gay)... All told, Red without Blue -- the title derives from the colors worn by twins when they were small boys -- operates from a fascinating premise. The film is less fascinating, at least as a film. There's an incredible ethical sensibility at work that I admire, but the film is neither visually nor emotionally compelling. (Though the use of snapshot montages and intertitles are occasionally quite effective.) The POV of the film is a bit obtuse and I can't tell whether it's adopting a posture of radical nonjudgmentality or whether its just Indie Oprah. In either case, this is not a film built around a polemic, though an inclination toward advocacy for social justice does infuse it nearly completely; rather, it's more of an old school documentary ethic, a belief in the power of people telling their own stories. It's ok. The ideas are powerful. And the slow slog to acceptance of family as it is (rather than as we might like it to be) remains a powerful modality of documentary inquiry. Might be interesting to watch next to something like Daughter from Danang. (The additional interviews with the filmmakers, as well as Mark and Clair, are really great. Helping to amplify the communal/collaborative aspects of the filmmaking process.)

The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959)-tcm/dvd (+)

So interesting to see this so soon on the heels of I Am Legend. This apocolypse fantasy also builds from an accidental decimation of the earth's population leaving a black man as apparently the single surviving human in NYC. The parallels are striking -- the super-competence of the sole surviving black man; the radio transmission every noon; and -- perhaps most conspicuously -- the use of mannequins as a faux community with whom the isolated man builds a kind of comic communitysuggesting that the makers of I Am Legend drew consciously upon this film. The substantial pleasures of the depopulated NYC are continuous between the two films. Here, though, the arty high-modern angles are thrilling in a different way and the montage of the miscellaneous lions in NYC in this film is just really cool. The biggest difference between the two films is the disparate source of tension between them. In I Am Legend, it's the virus-infected zombies; here, the possibility of contagion has passed (the nuclear poison was, apparently, deadly for only a week or so) and the real threat is the possibility that the evils of the prior civilization (especially, even singly, racial privilege and segregation) will survive in this new world. The film rides on Harry Belafonte as Ralph Burton, a black man who happened to be working underground when the nuclearness happened. Belafonte carries the first third (or so) of the movie alone. Inger Stevens (as Sarah Crandall, the last woman, who happens to be white) arrives and focuses the next third, with the two of them becoming friends and stirring the beginnings of an obliquely, but intensely, erotic connection. The scene where Sarah orders Ralph to cut her flaxen blonde hair is just fraught with erotic tension, he just hacks away at the fetish of her blonde hair, she coaxes him in palpably erotic tones. He ends up refusing her, for reasons that are not entirely clear, though he does speak of her casual embrace of white privilege. Then, right when it looks like Ralph and Sarah are going to get together, a third arrives in New York. A white man on a boat - Ben Thacker (Mel Ferrer). When Ralph introduces himself and Sarah as the "total population of New York," Ben introduces himself as the "total population of the southern hemisphere" (though it later turns out that he lived with his wife and kids in NYC on Sutton Place, was he at sea at the time of the nuclearness?). With Ben's arrival, the tension of the piece becomes all about the romantic triangle, with Belafonte's Ralph stepping waaaaaaaaaay back and allowing the white folks to get it on, though Sarah's loyalty to Ralph ends up thwarting Ben's desire to get with her and start with the business of repopulating the globe. (There's a big no-sex-sex scene with Ben and Sarah too, where Sarah demands that Ben make love to her, even shouting "harder" etc -- in both she's the instigator and the more active partner, coordinating the film's economy that femininity equals sexuality.) Ultimately, the two men have a series of confrontation over Sarah, culminating in the climactic sequence in which Ben basically starts hunting Ralph in the urban jungle. Ralph, of course, has an existentialist moment affirming pacifism which end up diffusing the whole situation and, as Ralph determines to leave town, Sarah insists that they stay together, an extended shot of their clasped hands signaling the very distinct possibility of a miscegenated future. (Of course, in the film's final final moment Sarah reincorporates Ben as well, making it really complicated.) This premise of a mixed race future is underscored by the film's concluding title: THE BEGINNING, as these three actors walk hand in hand into the urban horizon.

Intruder in the Dust (1949) +

An interesting enough social problem picture from the late 1940s. I caught snatches of it when it broadcast as part of TCM's Race in Cinema series, paying attention to it mostly because it starred/featured Juano Hernandez in a central role. The basic premise is a cross between To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobacco Road and some formulaic procedural. Basically, a black man (Juano Hernandez) in a southern town in apprehended as the suspect in a mysterious murder of some redneck up on redneck hill. As he's being led into the jail, amidst an agitated mob of snarling southern faces, he catches the attention of a young white teen and beseeches him for help. The teen runs home, late for dinner, and over dinner details his history with the black man -- the man saved his life and the white teen insisted on treating him as his inferior, arriving to a confused lesson along the lines of "negroes are people too". The teen's uncle or somesuch is an attorney, the only one in town who'd be willing to defend a black man accused of killing a white man. Soon a set of circumstances emerges, wherein, basically, the kid and some old white lady become convinced that the black man didn't kill the white man and, in the dark of night, they retrieve proof from the empty grave of the dead man. So it becomes a stand off, between a small gaggle of sympathetic white characters and a large horde of snarling crackers intent on breaking into the jail and lynching the black man. The old white lady (Miss Haversham) fends off the vigilantes by parking herself on the jailhouse steps, depending on their deference to white womanhood. Ultimately, in a twisty twist, the real killer is revealed and the black man set free. The whole film is pretty declamatory, with little in the way of nuance. The only performances that warrant any real attention -- aside, of course, from Juano Hernandez's -- are Will Arnett (aka Grampa Walton) as the curiously sympathetic sheriff and Elizabeth Patterson, in an appealing character turn as Miss Haversham. A lanky Claude Jarman (the iconic kid star of The Yearling) is an awkward lead, which is unfortunate since it is his pov that the film most depends. As the accused black man, Lucas Beauchamp (pronounced "Beecham") Hernandez gives what is for me an emblematic performance. He's enigmatic, charismatic, formidable, immediately likeable, and yet fundamentally non-threatening. The character of Lucas Beauchamp -- I should have probably said this before -- is something of a town freak in that he's a nominally successful farmer, planting on his own land which he never sharecropped. In an interesting way, he's positioned as living in a kind of exile -- between the black and white communities in that he's a landowner and not a laborer, which affords him a sort of status not acceptable for a black man in his community. What's worse, his utter lack of obsequiousness and deference to whites makes him an even greater menace. It's an interesting character -- and it showcases Hernandez's particular gift for playing a different sort of black man. (There's also a really odd opening shot with an attractive white man running in and taking a shower; it's so not clear how it relates to the narrative - may need to look at that section again to see if I missed the connection.)

Lost Boundaries (1949) +

Another social problem film, though ostensibly based on a true story as told in The Reader's Digest. The basic scenario is that a light skinned black couple are forced by circumstance -- too light to work in a Negro hospital, and just black enough to have no chance in a white hospital -- to choose to "pass" in a remote New Hampshire town. The ruse begins in the 1920s and picks up again in the 1940s, when the couples are established and beloved in their town and have two teenage kids. What's interesting is that there's enough back story to make this deeper than your standard passing melodrama. Plus, the Northern setting allows for a different depiction of both white racism and the various sites of integration. (Indeed, the sights of integration -- at the med school graduation, the post graduation party, the Harlem precinct -- are fairly astonishing in cinema from this period.) It's a fascinating account of the black middle class, and a reasonable depiction of how working class professions were some of the only options for educated black men in particular. The more I'm thinking about it, the more I really like the whole set up and the way that the filmmakers incorporate aspects of social reality into the melodrama. Especially interesting is how segregationist policies (ie. segregated blood supply; no commissions for Negro enlistees) are the nemeses and crucibles for action. Canada Lee is excellent as the Harlem police officer who helps the identity crisis of the newly black teen who's come to Harlem to figure out what it means to be black. The female performances are really bad, but the male performances are much more solid. Carleton Carpenter is really neat in a bit part as the teen daughter's naive beau. Some great/weird moments: wife's paranoia that her child's being named after a black man might out them; the fact that he passes unwillingly, maintaining a life of principle commuting to a negro hospital in the city one day a week; the weird way the daughter grooves to black swing music; the mysterious ending with the daughter leaving the church at the end; the son's dream sequence where his family transforms into broad-nosed, brown-skinned folks. The whole narrative aims toward desegregationist sentiment, even to the point of "interracial" romance, and there's a fascinating diversity of respectable folks who are racist as well as a comparable array who are anti-racist. Additionally, the phenomena of passing is framed as a social perversion, a mutation borne of the social injustice of racist culture and society. (It's a collision between american ideals of opportunity and the social injustices of racist prohibition.) Mel Ferrer is a really interesting presence among the "passing" characters -- he's by far the most visually distinctive, his cadaverous skull making him a very vivid presence. He's ok, but the most interesting aspect of his performance is the ease he demonstrates being white and being black, while also conveying an implicit sense of political awareness.

Girl 27 (2007) +

As far as Hollywood insider documentaries go, this one's just so so. But as a meditation on the way cultural ideas about rape have (and have not) changed in 75 years, it's pretty interesting. The film tells the story of how a Hollywood historian unearthed a relatively obscure Hollywood scandal -- a 17 year old actress, raped and beaten at a big inhouse MGM event, sues in federal court before disappearing into relative oblivion -- and his journey in piecing together the fragments of this true Hollywood story. As a documentary, it's not unlike what you might see on any cable channel but there's a heart there, derived from the historian's growing emotional investment in the story and its central figure, "Girl27" Patricia Douglas. As a film, the piece successfully maintains the suspense (will he find her, will she meet with him, will she participate in the documentary, etc) while basically spelling out the barebones of the story and the clear implication of a concerted effort on the part of MGM and LA County officials to suppress the story, the case, etc. The film emerges as an emotionally intriguing meditation on the idea of cultural complicity in sexual assault, and a big part of the film's premise is that Patricia Douglas was a brave hero for standing up and claiming her rights as a victim of a crime (and the concomitant injustice that followed the mishandling of the case). I also admired the film's willingness to position Douglas as a difficult figure, with a lot of family wreckage behind her that may or may not have been the result of her assault. The film doesn't really delve into the historical coincidence of the silencing of the Douglas case and MGM's embrace of the Production Code at nearly precisely the same historical moment. And Greta Van Susteran (as a talking head) is lamely declamatory without offering any particular insight. But all told - not a bad vehicle for thinking seriously about mainstream US film and its complicity in a culture that blithely endorses violence against women.

September (1987) -

I know next to nothing about this generally disregarded Woody Allen film. MrStinky wanted to revisit some Woody Allen, and requested this film, so here we go. I was nearly asleep for much of the movie, so forgive me, and I spend the first half of the film loudly proclaiming "who are these people and what are they talking about" but by the end several hours later (oh, wait, the film was only 83 minutes it just felt hours long) but by the end I did land upon several interesting-ish observations, so I feel nominally justified in sharing. Basically, my take -- which might be in the press materials for all I know about this film -- on September is this: if Hannah and Her Sisters is Allen's riff on Chekhov's The Three Sisters, then September must be his spin on Uncle Vanya. I didn't catch on until the very end but, when I did, boy howdy was it obvious. Mia Farrow is at her hangdog, whiny, depressive worst as the Vanya/Sonya character, who loathes her powerfully charismatic mother (Elaine Stritch in a performance that would be utterly brilliant on the stage, human and precise, but which reads a little large on camera) and has fallen in swoon with her idly attractive neighbor. Oh well I don't really have the energy to go into the Chekhovian algebraics, which are ultimately less important than the fact that Allen really goes to the existential despair at the expense of the comedy YET the only things that really work about the piece are aspects of the Chekhovian original. Stritch and Jack Warden are great; Sam Waterston and Dianne Wiest are game; Denholm Elliott is utterly lost; and Mia Farrow is awful. But it's still often fascinating -- possibly just because Woody Allen is always fairly fascinating even when everything's just mostly bad.

I Am Legend (2007) -

A ripe hollow stunt. It's built on a gorgeous conceit: a scientist discovers a cure for cancer through genetic mutation only to have the "cure" turn viral and devastate the world's population save for a small handful of infected zombie creatures and a smaller handful of those who happen to be mysteriously immune to infection. But the movie's flummoxed by a lame, empty screenplay/story. The visuals (of a New York City overrun with weeds and wildlife while entirely bereft of people) are, at times, stunning and the astonishingly fit Will Smith fully earns his status as the most reliably accomplished box office superstar performer of the current moment. Indeed, for nearly 2/3 of the film's overlong running time, Smith carries the film on his well-developed shoulders with admirable humor and aplomb. But there's something oddly missing from the heart of the piece. An emotional clarity, perhaps. And the monsters provide more in the way of stress than actual fear. (What I found most curious but compelling was the way the first encounters with the zombie creatures were staged: dark hallways reminiscent of the descriptions of "the piers" in the 1970s, around the corners of which you find the heavy breathing bodies huddled in hungrily in a circle. The whole thing really carried the homo-allegory of infection and survivor's guilt in very interesting ways. Basically, John Legend as the only one among his beloveds who has not succumbed to a surprising and terrifying infection; he now lives a solitary life, assiduously avoiding the night where the only others still alive gather but carry with them the peril of deadly infection; so he lives carefully alone in his well appointed apartment, surrounded by evidence of his past life, with a dog to whom he is devoted. The metaphor of AIDS-survivor guilt is not too much a stretch. But I made all that shit up, mostly because, even as I was visually stimulated by I Am Legend, I nearly constantly bored on an emotional level.) The film just doesn't GO anywhere interesting at all. It just made me wonder about the source material and whether or not the queer allegory was there or whether it was all in my imagination. Finally, the neo-spiritual dimensions of the story -- that Legend must surrender his being in control, he must surrender to a faith that something beyond himself might provide redemption, that he is part of something but that he is not in charge -- did hook me emotionally at the very end. And I keep thinking about how the end of I Am Legend and The Mist are basically the same: that you don't always know how things are about to turn out. But, again, I made all that shit up because I was mostly bored. Frequently anxious and stressed by the movie, but bored. Not awful but pretty perfunctory, and -- worst of all -- oddly shy of the actual metaphysical dimensions of the gorgeous conceit.