Il y a longtemps que je t'aime/I've Loved You So Long (2008) -

A measured, assuredly enigmatic character study of a woman recently released from prison after having served a fifteen-year sentence for murder. Kristin Scott Thomas delivers a masterful performance as Juliette, a woman stunned by the circumstances of her crime, her sentence, and her return to society through the loving embrace of her devoted younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein, in an endearing and charismatic, yet curiously unrealized performance). The film follows Thomas's Juliette and Zylberstein's Léa as they awkwardly maneuver the pitfalls of Juliette's reentrance to provincial French society. Thomas's performance animates the central tension of the film. Juliette killed her young son and, when charged with and tried for the crime, opted for steely silence as her husband, her family, her profession and society-at-large judged her crime as a monstrous offense to nature. The film delivers this information in tiny fragments and Thomas's performance amplifies the mystery at every turn. Thomas's Juliette appears as a survivor of a death camp, her fine features drawn into a taut and impassive mask. Recoiling at the merest touch, seemingly resigned to the impossibility of her plight, Thomas's Juliette is a portrait of resigned ostracization. It is clear that Thomas's Juliette expects to be loathed, to experience the cruel spit of invective, to be forever banished from civilized society. So, when Ziberstein's Léa offers instead the welcome of a loving embrace into her own modest but wonderful life, Thomas's Juliette experiences an even more profound mortification. Will she be able to "come back into life"? Or has she been so damaged by her crime/conviction/incarceration as to be forever alienated from the sustaining simplicity of human connection? It's a compelling premise, assembled upon a routinely electrifying central performance. Yet as entrancing as Kristen Scott Thomas's performance was, the film itself felt like a contrivance. I hope it's not giving too much away to say that the film's single narrative impetus is the redemption of the reviled heroine through plot machinations that echo those advocated within the film by an especially awful tertiary character. For me, the plot contrivances proved unfortunate for, as the film seeks the explanation of Juliette's monstrous past actions and then finds them embedded in mysteriously concealed circumstances, the story begins to feel ever cheaper. Indeed, by the end of the narrative, Juliette's stony silence seems less a symptom of post-traumatic stress than a self-inflicted injury borne of selfish stupidity. It's a testament to Thomas's charisma that I remained in thrall of her character despite the late character/plot revelations. (For a movie so stylized as high naturalism, the plot is straight out of Scribe and Sardou's formula of the Well-Made Play -- with the central character experiencing obstacle after obstacle that amplifies the central narrative tension until all is resolved, typically with the revelation of some withheld secret, thus permitting the audience the shared relief of a collective exhale.) Indeed, I felt manipulated by the cheap formula on the one hand and cheated of a richer story on the other. Basically, the film is built nearly entirely upon the complicated challenge of empathizing with Thomas's Juliette, especially given the allegedly monstrous aspects of her crime/s. Yet, when the final "secrets" are discovered/revealed, the revelation utterly simplifies the central moral quandary of the film. I suspect I might anticipate a defense of the film as a meta-comment on the 19th century novel and its construction of the nobly suffering literary heroine but, really, I don't buy it. (And we won't even get into the weird subplot of the parole officer, a noxiously cynical, callow and uncharismatic plot device, not unlike virtually all the scenes depicting Léa's life as a literature professor.) Yet what is perhaps most dismaying about the narrative confines (or, natch, "narrative prison") of this film is the way it makes Zilberstein do so much heavy lifting while, in effect, depending on her character to play the fool to the central character's self-annihilating deception. Zilberstein is appealing and she has her moments but she's routinely overshadowed by the showier scenes given her co-protagonist. (Indeed, I think that's part of what pisses me off. Zilberstein should be co-lead in this but the force of narrative conceit insists that she play second banana, which diminishes the clarity of both Léa's character and the actress's work in the role. The film at every turn refuses to let this be a two-hander.) Thomas gets great moment after great moment -- the scene at the dinner party, the subsequent encounter with Michel, the explosive revelation scene, the encounter with the mother -- but Zilberstein's big outburst (that student smackdown) is unmoored and nearly comic. The film invests Zilberstein's Léa with a kind of naive cluelessness (her precocious daughter routinely outshines her in the insight department) that, by the end, begins to feel especially cruel. All told, I found the film deeply, cynically disappointing. Thomas is utterly marvelous in the role but that's almost to be expected as the entire apparatus is designed to make her the subject of our fascination. And it's to her credit that her performance is so consistently worthy our most rapt, curious attention.

Milk (2008) +

A heart-stirringly tender docudrama detailing the brief political life of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold elected office in a major U.S. city. Gus Van Sant's film chooses wisely (and strategically) to center the narrative on Harvey Milk as a flawed, charismatic man who happened to enter politics. Randy Shilts's 1983 biography does a better job telling the story of Milk's importance within San Francisco's maturing gay political scene; Rob Epstein's 1984 documentary does a better job telling the story of Milk's political persona as well as his assassination and its aftermath. I would, however, submit that Van Sant's film (guided by Dustin Lance Black's meticulous screenplay) endeavors something different. The film begins as Milk (played with winning, effervescent delight by Sean Penn) encounters Scott Smith (James Franco, both deliciously swoon-worthy and utterly effective in an essential and difficult role). This early encounter between Milk and Scott instigates the first of two main "instinctual" calls that the character of Harvey responds to in the film, each of which tacitly echoes Milk's instantiating instinct to express his own gayness. Through the mirror that Milk finds in Scott, Penn's Harvey determines to venture to San Francisco and remake himself and his life amidst the countercultural foment of the sexual revolution and gay liberation era. As Scott and Harvey begin to make their lives together in San Francisco, Penn's Harvey encounters his first real experience of homophobic backlash and discovers his talent for grassroots community organizing, soon becoming a leader within the merchants association and a key figure in the emerging gay ghetto centered around San Francisco's Castro Street. Van Sant's film derives its central dramatic impetus from these parallel instantiating calls to action/selfhood experienced by Milk. At the same time, Van Sant integrates a third strand: Milk's own awareness of his own mortality, marked both by his fateful "I won't see 50" proclamation on his 40th birthday as well as the interpolation of scenes showing Milk recording a final statement to played only on the occasion of his assassination. These three strands -- Milk's instinct to migrate to San Francisco, to become involved in city politics, and to anticipate his own assassination -- all present a glimpse of Harvey Milk who lived "historically" (or cognizant of his place in history) and, in the aggregate, the three strands comprise the braid of tension that guide this sprawling, often delightful mosaic of a film. Basically, Van Sant and Black amplify the narrative tension by setting the scene so we want Harvey and Scott's relationship to work, even as we root for Milk's political career to work out, even as we know that Harvey Milk would die a premature death. That this tripartite emotional structure works so simply is, for me, among the most impressive things about this film which bears the formulaic burdens of the biopic genre while somehow maintaining a surprising verve and excitement. (Indeed, I think the generic comforts of the biopic genre will likely serve as a necessary palliative for audiences less invested in the cultural, emotional and spiritual dimensions of queer political history/struggle.) The film is buoyed as well by an assemblage of exuberantly effective performances by a generation of younger actors who were born in the decade after Milk's death. Emile Hirsch is exhilarating as Cleve Jones. Allison Pill, Lucas Grabeel and Joseph Cross are all having a grand time in their respective roles, a merry band with Franco as their putative leader. Only Diego Luna -- as Milk's mercurial lover Jack Lira -- seems a little lost in the role. Even though I remain basically unconvinced of Luna's skill/depth as an actor, I'm disinclined to wholly blame Luna for basic failure of his characterization within this film. Not only is the Lira-Milk relationship a strange, mysterious episode that all Milk biographers get skittish about, and not only are there few historical sources to provide insight to Lira's side of the story, but Lira's relationship with Milk in this film functions as the only non-societal obstacle to Harvey's success in two of the main narrative threads of the feature (his realization of true love with Scott and his actualization of his political potential). As such, the film makes the curious choice of situating Luna's Jack Lira as the single significant character to be presented without sympathy. Even Dan White, David Goodstein, and John Briggs get glancing empathy from the filmmakers, while Luna's Lira remains a mostly hysterical hassle/nightmare. (Indeed, the film's handling of the Lira character is perhaps the single main flub.) Josh Brolin's turn as Dan White, too, was somewhat disappointing, although he's basically quite effective (though, to my mind, the film overplays the theory that White was a closet case). But the performance that really matters is that of Sean Penn, an extraordinary actor doing extraordinary work here. He disappeared for me into the role of Harvey Milk, much as Sissy did into Loretta or Jennifer into Selena -- creating a cinematic fabulation that I, at times, enjoy as a distinct but no less formidable than the actual historical personage. Most notably, perhaps, I found a joy in Penn's performance as Harvey Milk, of a kind that I frankly don't know that I've seen since Spicoli. It's not a perfect performance but it's buoyantly infectious -- much in keeping with the spirit of how the film chooses to understand Harvey Milk -- so the performance works, transcendantly. And although the film will most likely be praised (and reviled) for its generic effectiveness as a biopic, I found myself most impressed by the film's elegant accomplishment as a docudrama. I may have been more inclined to engage the film as a historical film because I was screening it while seated in the Castro Theatre the day after the 30th anniversary of the assassinations. Yet I couldn't help but respond to the film as a most effective version of that least effective genre: the docudrama, a cinematic retelling of a true story in ways that are mostly true to the historical events. The film is actually a portrait of San Francisco history during a heady period of years, a historical story that here is animated by the braid of emotional tension provided by the narrative of Harvey Milk's life/death/political career. Indeed, if you approach this as a biopic, the film's limits are readily legible; if you approach it as a docudrama, I suspect its strengths are most apparent. And it's the film's sophistication as a docudrama that I admire most. (Indeed, as I write this, I wonder if Black wrote a biopic but Van Sant filmed a docudrama.) Of course, the most conspicuous evidence of the film's success as a docudrama can likely be appreciated by its artful, sometimes seamless integration of historical footage into the narrative of the film. For me, it's perhaps the film's most thrilling aspect, this interpolation of historical footage into the narrative fictions. Adept, visually stylish, and emotionally powerful -- the (re)encounter with the historical footage of Anita Bryant is used to especially astonishing effect -- a young member of my screening party had trouble believing that Bryant was "real." And it's Bryant who helps to animate the marvel of historical serendipity that brings this film to the screen just as Proposition 8 has been passed. Like Harvey himself, MILK has extraordinary historical timing. Finally, I may be in first-blush swoon with this film but the fact that I am is I think testament to it. I came to consciousness as a scholar with deep historical inclinations through the cinematic and textual accounts of Harvey Milk. For a time, I was a Harvey Milk geek. And it would not be wrong to lay the blame of my becoming a historian squarely at the feet of Harvey Milk, Randy Shilts and Rob Epstein. (And my dissatisfaction with Emily Mann's play marked an early moment in my mistrust of theatre as a mechanism for the kind of historical inquiry I longed to do.) Now, while I find Van Sant's and Black's film no less hagiographic than any previous treatments of the Milk legend, I do find it a worthy contribution to the historiography of Harvey Milk as a watershed figure in U.S. gay politics and culture. All of which is to say: for a mere movie, this flick gets a lot of stuff done, and it does nearly all of it exceedingly well. So I find myself fairly unapologetic as I sit here raving about the film... The story of Harvey Milk has long had the effect of turning me into an unrepentantly giddy gay history geek, and I'm so very very pleased that MILK is continuing that tradition.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) +

BRIEFLY: A film of grueling intensity, the scenario of a Depression era Dance Marathon serving (not unlike a disaster movie) to stage a microcosmic portrait of an ostensible community's response to tragedy. Solid performances punctuate the film but it's the unrelenting intensity, the deeply cynical depiction of the convergence of capitalism, commercialized entertainment and popular (as in "of the populace") despair that makes this a startlingly, enduringly "timely" picture. Could as easily be about reality television in the BushII-era as it is about dance marathons in the depression. Compelling, difficult film.

Quantum of Solace (2008) -

OK. I am so not the target audience for this franchise. In fact, I don't know that I've seen a Bond flick in the theatres since For Your Eyes Only. That said, I will try to talk about this one, which I did see. The scenario is fairly simple: Bond is still trying to catch the folks who killed his love interest in the previous film when the pursuit of her killer leads him to unveil a global corporate conspiracy led by a French environmentalist tycoon. (I must say that confabulation of villainy -- a French environmental megacorporation? -- is such a pristine distillation of the baroque political stylings of the late BushII era.) Bond, of course, is being set up (sorta like Batman was earlier this year) to be the bad guy, so he must go rogue in order to do his job and save the world. The spectacular set-pieces are fun enough. Judi Dench and Jeffrey Wright lend effective gravitas as they also cash their giant paychecks. Matthieu Amalric is at once supercilious, scary and skeevy, just the way Americans like their French villains. The story makes just enough sense to follow the core vengeance arc. And I love the name (and the oily demise) of Strawberry Fields. But the only truly redeeming feature of this installment in the franchise is just how good Daniel Craig is in the role: he's sexy, he's smart, he's got a sense of humor, he's got a non-distracting potential for dimension so "feeling" sections don't seem forced; he looks good both in and out of clothes. A perfect Bond. But, really, I am so not the target audience for this stuff. Good enough, if you like that sort of thing.

Rachel Getting Married (2008) +

An emotionally vivid depiction of family dysfunction, an occasionally startling enactment of how the most meticulously maintained family secrets shape every dimension of intimacy and estrangement for that family. Director Jonathan Demme directs this electrified family drama with the carefully modulated intensity of a wedding planner, herding the cats inhabiting this overstuffed family drama with an elegantly attentive detachment. Rosemarie DeWitt is Rachel, who -- as the title indicates -- is getting married. Rachel's wedding instantiates the convergence of previously mostly estranged family members: Rachel's drug addict/loser sister Kym (Anne Hathaway); Rachel's desperately fragile father Paul (Bill Irwin): and Rachel's distant mother Abby (Debra Winger). Rachel is marrying Sidney (Tunde Addebimpe), a perfectly sweet musician man who promises Rachel a way from the family she's known and toward a family she wants. Rachel's wedding reflects both Sidney's musical identity (he's some kind of journeyman musician with roots planted in both the Caribbean and Hawaii) and her father's musical passion (though it's never stated outright, it does appear that Bill Irwin's Paul is some kind of musical expert, perhaps a professor of world music or at least a major collector/fan of world music objects/tunes). With her stepmother (Anna Deveare Smith) as her wedding planner, Rachel's wedding has become a world music fusion fest, complete with an Indian elephant cake done in fondant. (You almost expect the soundtrack of Rachel's wedding itself to be released on Putumayo Records.) So Demme creates this giant wedding surround for the quite intimate family drama to play against. And it works in surprising ways. The feeling of this film is like being invited, as a member of the wedding party, to a giant weekend wedding, where everyone has a "job" that's sorta mapped according to their relationship to the couple, and where everyone only knows the people they already know but everyone's supposed to be feeling part of one family, and yet even the familiar dynamics of those known relationships are tossed askew because of the utter absurdity of the event itself. Demme exploits the conventions of the wedding event -- the interminable toasts at the rehearsal dinner, the awkwardly exhausted moments of intimacy late at night, the embarrassments of the wedding reception -- Demme uses these as the spectacular backdrops for a quietly, super-intense drama about family secrets to unfold. And at the center of this family drama is Anne Hathaway's Kym, the family flameout/drug addict whose arrival on the scene (on a weekend furlough from an extended stay rehab) causes her sister, father and mother to visibly tense. I'm of two minds about the core emotional narrative of the screenplay (scripted by Jenny Lumet). On the one hand, I love that this story about shared family secrets is staged the way it is. Hathaway's Kym is clearly the family scapegoat, the often spectacular cause of the family's troubles. And everyone knows this, including/especially Kym. So, as often as not, Kym performs to the expectations of her family role. I like this narrative framing, especially how -- as the narrative progresses -- we become increasingly attuned to the ways in which everyone else has played a part in off-loading the family's troubles on to Kym. In what is arguably the film's most electrifying sequence, Hathaway's Kym confronts Debra Winger's Abby about a crucial set of decisions that she (as Kym's mother) made, a set of decisions that contributed to a family tragedy for which Kym was directly responsible. As Hathaway's Kym presses her mother to speak simply about what actually happened, to abandon rehearsed platitudes and actually talk, Winger's Abby erupts in an accusatory rage -- carefully stuffed emotions bursting forth with vicious force -- and wallops Kym across the face. And, being the feral sort that she is, Kym smacks back, a gesture less of rage than, as we soon see, as a desperate expression of a latent survival instinct and Kym flees, suicidally, into the night. This scene, like a scene that precedes it, in which Kym attempts to honestly answer her sisters questions while their father tries desperately to smooth things over with the official story (it was an accident! it was an accident!!!) -- both of these scenes do a really nice job of detailing how Kym's not the source of the family's problems but that she is really good at living up to the low expectations set for her in terms of personal responsibility, maturity and respect. I must say I really love how this film just goes there in terms of tough stuff of family dysfunction. The film is perhaps the most thoroughly frank depiction of what it feels like to be caught in such an emotional maze. That said, I regret that screenwriter Jenny Lumet had to go so "Oprah's Book Club" in defining the contours of the instantiating family tragedy. The film does what it can to alleviate the lameness of "the little brother that Kym killed" story (and almost does when Kym's caught in a past lie about a similarly hackneyed tale of child sex abuse) but the film can only do so much with this undefined spectral aspect of the story. I found the film to be really emotionally effecting. I identified, alternately, with Kym and with Rachel -- and I suspect the film will only work if the audience member finds one or the other or both to connect with. Without such clear point of empathetic identification, I suspec the film would not work very well at all. Anne Hathaway is really strong as Kym, a plausible terror and plausibly adorable. She does well capturing the addict's selfish immaturity even as she marks the startling shifts when Kym's not bullshitting but trying to follow a new impulse to tell the truth and deal with things. It's a vividly erratic depiction of the experience of early sobriety and Hathaway acquits herself with electrifying ease. Rosemary DeWitt is rock solid in the film's toughest role of Rachel. DeWitt's at her best when she's rooting for Kym and a little less clear when she's in her rage about Kym; it's a tough role and DeWitt is mostly good. Debra Winger in the truly supporting role of Abby is terrifying, a woman utterly confined within her own defensive, rageful pride. With comparatively scant screentime, Winger conveys both who this woman is and what it might be like to have had her as a mother (a contribution that places the rest of the narrative in important, clarifying relief). It's masterful work, haunting and complex without ever being ostentatious or mannered. Mather Zickel is adorable as the Sidney's best man and Kym's friend in recovery, and the scenes at the 12step meeting are apt, accurate and serve the narrative nicely as a platform for what might otherwise be interminable exposition. I found Bill Irwin good but strange; he seemed less like a person than a strange stage creature. All told, I admired this movie a lot, especially how so much emotional work was able to be conveyed with scant dialogue, against the various scenes of the wedding. The lengthy rehearsal dinner and wedding reception sequences worked in ways that I suspect are very distinctive to this movie -- incredible amount of intimate emotional terrain covered in comparatively scant amount of dialogue. It's a really good movie, emotionally challenging and frequently infuriating, but a really effective screen account of the intimate cruelties of family life.

Viva (2007) +

An often intoxicatingly pitch-perfect genre/style stunt...an eye-candy homage to the styles and sensibilities that informed the sexploitation genre in the last moments before the hardcore revolution. Director-producer-writer-costume designer-editor-star Anna Biller delivers this story about a bored/neglected housewife in the early 1970s who naively stumbles from the sordid infidelities of suburbia into the free-love bacchanals of the big city. The film is built with an attention to visual detail that edges into the fetishistic -- every prop, costume and furniture piece are either (a) exactly right or (b) reconstructed with just enough clarity to evoke the original. As the protagonist Barbie/Viva, Anna Biller is pristinely awful -- a cardboard cipher of singsong line readings and self-consciously sexy postures -- and is, thus, absolutely perfect. The narrative is an Alice-In-Sexual-Wonderland sort of story and Biller's performance anchors the entire film in a kind of cluelessness (is she innocent? is she wordlessly seductive? or is she just dumb?) that really helps modulate the pitch of the erratically configured performances. Biller does set the tone in a lot of ways but the rest of her actors are all over the place. As Barbie's more mercenary/slutty best friend Sheila, Bridget Brno has a really solid sense of theatrical style that infuses some essential clarity and verve into her scenes; hers is a performance of the old school (echos of Roz Russell and Elizabeth Montgomery and Tina Louise mixed with a dash of Kim Cattrall) that results in an elegantly slutty characterization of the perfect sidekick for our basically innocent heroine. Brno's performance, however, stands in stark stylistic contrast to that of Jared Sanford as Mark, Sheila's Husband. Where Brno's Sheila is slick and stylish, Sanford's Mark is garishly comic -- he's more Charles Nelson Reilly on the Match Game -- and his performance is as funny and as freaky as Brett Michaels on same. Finally, there's Chad England as Barbie's beloved husband Rick, the kind of stuff shirt hunky straight man whose a stock character in the camp theatrics of Charles Busch. The various performance styles can be a touch discombobulating but Biller's own auteurism helps to smooth the edges: Biller's Barbie/Viva is really at the center of this nonsense and her calming presence in every scene works almost as a quaalude to make it all just fine. I'm not sure what else to say about the film except that it's fun, funny, often fabulous and utterly strange. I laughed throughout, mostly in a Brechtian way, for the utter brilliance of Biller's manipulation of the genre. This isn't an exercise in Austin Powersish silly self-indulgence but a more mysterious journey through the variations of this genre -- from Jacqueline Susann to Russ Meyer -- with the fantasies of middlebrow opulence staged as a kind of hyperheterosexual lifestyle porn for wannabe swinging singles. (Indeed, the film doesn't feel all that different from Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice in its unselfconscious thrill at the trappings of upper-middle-class privilege.) One aspect of the film that is routinely startling is how Biller does not shy from the genre's reliance on sexual assault as an alibi for staging a sexual scenario; Biller does not offer comment on this but instead permits it to be a jarring aspect of this genre's pleasures when encountered by a contemporary audience. However, one feature of the genre that Biller does veer from is the use of casual nudity. To be sure, there is plenty of casual nudity in this film, especially that of secondary characters (for the most part the principals do not show ween or poon). That said, for every randomly naked girl there is a comparably random/naked boy. Weens are popping up all the time and it's often quite entertaining. There's one excellently funny sequence when Viva's visiting some guru guy and his followers are all naked and, during a musical number, we get to see extended scenes of wagging wangs as they boogie down to some hippie song. And I must say that my favorite scene was the one where Barbie (before she became Viva) visited a superfaggy hair dresser named Sherman, and there's an extended strange flirtation between Barbie, Sherman and some weird guy that mostly reminded me of Fred from Scooby Doo -- when some drug or another is ingested it becomes a threesome and Barry Morse's Sherman strips down to reveal the most muscular male physique in the entire film. It's a strange little scene, but quite amusing/thrilling. Same for the big set piece toward the end when Viva does an extended musical number dressed as Isis. The film is consistently strange, almost as consistently fun, and curiously effective. It's clear the movie was made as a labor of love and it shows. I don't know who the audience for this film really is, but it's an adoring homage to an era of culture and an era of filmmaking that is long gone.

"Breakup Sex" from Cinco Historias Para Ellas (2007) +

An artfully filmed (if inexpertly dubbed) explicit erotic short featuring two men confronting each other about deceptions and betrayals in their relationship. The confrontation heats up, seemingly escalating toward violence, when the two begin making out passionately. The sex that follows is appealing -- oral and anal penetration filmed from oblique but revealing angles. The black and white cinematic framing of the sex acts proves productive. We get to see everything, but not too much or for too long, and we also get to see more artily erotic physical stagings. It's not entirely clear how this is "porn for women," however. I s'pose the easiest answer is that the establishing narrative scenario roots the intensity of the subsequent sex scene in a legible emotional reality: these are two guys who really should have nothing to do with each other but apparently the sex is hot. I was a little bit annoyed that the guy set up to be the cheating asshole also took the dominant role in the sex, and the hotheaded shit-stirring partner was the submissive -- that seemed a little cliche. But the guys are attractive and the sex was appealing and the ending was sensible (the hotheaded guy storms out as the asshole curls up for a post-coital nap). Interestingly, there was little that was jarring about seeing this film excerpt on a large screen in a mixed crowd because (talk about cliches) it didn't carry a pornish vibe, but rather a feeling that was more along the lines of "explicit erotica." I would have liked to see another scene from the larger film to establish the conventions and context of Erica Lust's narrative and cinematic stylings. That said, I doubt I'll seek out the full film on my own.

Un Chant D'Amour (1950) +

A truly startling bit of erotic filmmaking -- a legendary film by a legendary figure which, for me, truly lived up to the legend, on both counts. The film bears all the hallmarks of Genet (especially as mediated by such interpreters as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes): an appreciation of the beauty of palpably masculine men; vivid strictures of social hierarchy and control; uniforms; criminality; fetishistic eroticization of the masculine mundanities (here cigarette smoke), all leavened with an instinct toward sublime beauty and a longing for romantic love. The scenario of this film is simple: two men share adjacent cells, a narcissistic young man and a virile older man. Both are supervised by a primly authoritative guard. The film begins with the guard observing the two inmates as they attempt to pass flowers from hand to hand, by swinging them back and forth outside the windows of their cells. The guard then passes through the cell block, surreptitiously viewing each of the half dozen prisoners in their respective units. Most are either whacking off or dancing naked or peeing. Only the narcissist and the elder prisoner are doing something not overtly lewd or base, and its to the two of them that the guard is drawn. He watches, rapt, as the narcissist dances with himself, occasionally pausing to receive cigarette blown through a straw, carefully inserted through a tiny hole in the wall separating the two men. The passing of smoke, from mouth to mouth, through this tiny straw amplifies an incredible longing for intimacy in both the guard and the elder prisoner, even as the narcissist appears to accept (or reject) the gift of the exhaled smoke as his due. As the charge of the exchange between the two men amplifies, we begin to see the fantasies of the elder prisoner and the prison guard interspersed into the scene. The elder prisoner imagines himself and the narcissist running free in a field, playing tag and collapsing into restful repose, taking comfort from an easy closeness together. The guard imagines a more abstracted, dancelike configuration of nude male bodies, his and the narcissists, configured in a thrilling chiaroscuro not unlike George Platt Lynes or Mapplethorpe's male nudes. At a certain point, as each fantasy begins to escalate in intensity, the guard interrupts the elder prisoner as he begins to masturbate. As the guard begins to beat the elder prisoner, their respective fantasies accelerate -- quick flashes of eroticized imagery of the beloved boy -- until the beating climaxes and the guard retreats from the prisoner's cell. The film concludes as the guard again observes the attempt to pass the flowers between the windows of the cell. As the pass is finally successful, the film ends. The short, intense film is thrillingly erotic -- a lush black and white photography, scored by the crackling silence of the 35mm projector, amplifying the quietude and intensity of the carceral isolation. The film also presents a vivid distillation of the erotics of Genet: authoritarian power, masculine romantic longing, the violent erotics of sexual transference/displacement. The men are beautiful. The images even more so. And the pornographic flashes -- the panoptical sequence of erotic surveillance is utterly strange but completely titillating -- are astonishing to witness, even without attention to the fact that this film was made in 1950. My heart was in my throat the whole time. The film's reverie in erotic suspense and longing was, for me, completely vivid. Of course, MrStinky was nonplussed and the man behind me fell asleep. So, it may just be a matter of my own curious conditioning via Jean Genet, but I found this to be among the most thrilling pieces of erotic art I have yet encountered. Simple, shocking, palpable, poetic, romantic -- with startlingly gorgeous men and captivatingly idiosyncratic sexual scenarios -- a deliciously ripe bit of cinema. Yum yum yum.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) -

A curious period piece that offers an ostensibly comic investigation into the dimensions of marital intimacy via a stunty narrative about "open marriage." The film opens as a privileged married couple Bob and Carol (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood, both innocuously adequate in the roles) arrive to a mountainside retreat center. We then follow as Bob and Carol participate in an "Encounter Group" session, an experience which radicalizes their approach to emotional honesty in their relationship. They giddily share the news over dinner with their best friends, Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon, respectively). Ted and Alice respond with polite, restrained smiles as Bob and Carol preach like true believers just returned from the mount. The rest of the narrative unfolds from this basic premise: Bob and Carol enact their new beliefs about emotional openness and radical truthtelling as Ted and Alice struggle to assimilate their friends' new beliefs into their own understanding of themselves. The twist comes with Bob has an affair while on a business trip, tells Carol in a gesture of radical emotional truthtelling, and Carol surprises them both by being gladdened by the fact that Bob told her. When Carol shares her happiness with Ted and Alice, expressing her joy that Bob told her of his own affair, the revelation rocks Alice especially to the core and instigates the film's main work of interrogating monogamous fidelity as a defining principle of a healthy marriage. Alice's unease drives the rest of the narrative, which includes both Carol and Ted pursuing their own casual affairs (Carol with the club's tennis pro; Ted's with a lady he met on a plane). The pivotal moment comes when, stunned to learn of both Carol's and Ted's affairs, Alice giddily demands that the two couples have an orgy to make good on all their newfound principles. The orgy almost happens, until Gould's Ted arrives to bed, and all four sit in bed (the iconic image from the film) getting increasingly uncomfortable. Then the next thing we see is the four of them, fully dressed in evening wear, as they parade out into the Las Vegas street, where a spontaneous multicultural encounter group seems to be beginning. The film is almost fascinating -- there are great period interiors and a couple of nice scenes. (I really like the staging of the first restaurant sequence, with the eavesdropping hostess and the table of curious queers. The opening scenes at the Encounter Group are similarly amazing and Alice's freakout at the nightclub is fun.) Cannon and Gould are very charismatic and quite charming, with Gould at the brief apex of his hotness. Culp and Wood, on the other hand, are aptly generic in the lead roles. But the film resonates with a coy self-satisfaction that doesn't feel very honest or, ultimately, very pleasant. There are feints toward contemplating the gendered differentials of swinging and open marriage, but those don't really amount to much. There's also an almost fascinating thread about how rich people perform their most intimate lives while (mostly Spanish speaking) servants are in close proximity, but this too seems ultimately ornamental. I was struck, watching this, how easily this film might be made today -- without changing much in the way of details -- say with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Will Smith and Jada Pinkett...or some configuration of the Apatow set...the narrative would easily still work, which seems to me to be more an affirmation of the core conservativism/conventionality of the original narrative, rather than confirmation of its superficially countercultural aspirations. A startlingly conservative film, really, given all its trappings as a comedy about wife-swapping.

Couch Surfers: Trans Men In Action (2008) +/-

An extended episode from a hardcore transman porn feature centering around Brett McCloskey, a chubbycute trans sex pig. The sexual set pieces happen in three discrete sequences which are configured to appear as one sustained sex scene (which may or may not be the case, the film maintains the realtime porn illusion fairly well, though, if we follow the conventions of "french scenes," the sequence actually operates as three separate scenes). The scene begins with biomale Ian Sparks and Brett McCloskey sitting beside one another, rubbing themselves under their shorts. The scene quickly escalates in intensity with mutual j/o, reciprocal oral, and finally some penetration as Ian fucks Brent from a variety of angles. As Brent and Ian Sparks fuck, a totally hot Dex Hardlove enters to mix things up a bit, asking if the guys would like have their asses played with. Both agree and Dex, with the assistance of a masked lube assistant, begins to work their buttholes. The scene continues as a side by side fisting scene, until its cumming time and Dex rubs Brent off a couple times before Ian Spask finally shoots his load and scurries off. The lube assistant then goes out to the reception area and invites another Ian, this time transman Ian Foxe, in to join the scene. What follows is a fairly standard double team on Brent, as Dex and Ian both fuck Brent every which way using their formidable rubber cocks (appliances which dwarf Ian Sparks's biocock in size). Much grunting and hollering ensues, as Brent gets fully worked over (and appears to fully love it). My reaction to the three sequences was really different. In the first (between Brent and Ian Sparks), I really enjoyed the fuckbuddy vibe; these guys were into performing and into each other's bodies in a really simple, relatable way. As both were chubby, and neither were adorned with porncocks (bio or appliance), there was an unconventionality in the scene -- these were not your standard pornboys for a variety of reasons -- that made it really interesting, plus there was an exuberant eroticism in this scene that made it pretty relatable. The second sequence was also interesting, as Dex is really sexy and makes for a pretty compelling fisting top. As fisting bottoms, neither Ian Sparks nor Brent were especially distended, so the extended assplay felt real and fairly erotic (though plenty of folks in the screening room had clearly never seen a buttfisting scene and found it a bit much, a fact made audibly clear as the scene progressed). I found it fascinating that the biomale cumshot maintained a kind of focus in this film. Ian Sparks struggled to pop his load, even as Brent was hitting multiplly orgasmic heights, yet the camera maintained its fixation on capturing Ian Spask's moment of ejaculatory truth. It was also odd that Ian Spask scurried off shortly after cumming, which seemed to be both scripted and a comic comment on how useless boys can be after cumming. This instigated the third and, for me, most problematic erotic sequence in Brent's extended scene. The masked lube assistant brings in Ian Foxe from the lobby area and Ian Foxe joins Dax as the two continue to really work Brent over from every angle. The scene is a fairly conventional domination threesome, with Brent a champ in the role of the submissive cockslave and Dax taking the role of the dominant sexual bully and Ian Foxe playing the novice dom thrilled to follow Dax's lead in dominating Brent. I've seen this scene in gay porn a million times and, here, it follows the basic formula with only minor physical adjustments (accommodating Ian and Dax both remaining basically clothed from the waist down as they use their rubbercocks to work Brent over). The thing that struck me most in this sequence was that it was the most performatively erotic -- and in some ways least physically erotic -- of all three. Of course, I have to acknowledge both that this is the only sequence I saw in which a biomale does not appear and I find that I'm fetishing the perceived "real" (ie. physical sensation) in this porn performance. I found myself somewhat discombobulated by the performative linkage of Dax and Ian Foxe's rubber cockness at the same time as they were envoicing gay porn cliche sextalk. The guys were vocally building an audible sexvibe, but there was something I did not connect to in their grunting professions of "it feels so good" as Brent chowed down on their latex-encased silicone cocks. The presence of what felt to be a "gay pornographic excess" in the verbal performance did not square for me with what was most powerful in the visual performance, notably Brent's piggishness and Ian Foxe's and Dax Hardlove's actual physical attractiveness. It seemed to me on some level that the hyperbolic performance of erotic virtuosity by Dax, in particular, worked almost as a stone mask -- a stone butch performance of hypercompetent masculinity in which the stone butch bringing her femme partner to extraordinary heights of erotic pleasure. Indeed, I found this sequence to be the strangest and most distanciating, especially because I was perhaps most familiar with the sexual script of this scene and also most attracted to the performers even though no biomale was present. The libinal verve of the role play was intense, almost funny in the way any role play scene is to one who's not in it, and I found there to be a fascinating intensity to how eroticized the rubbercock became in this scene. (Much more spectacular in both size and interest to the parties involved than Ian Sparks's humbly human member.) At the same time, I was flummoxed by Dax's and Ian Foxe's intense sex faces -- I coulnd't connect to the source of the pleasure being performed by Ian and Dax in these moment (both visual and aural) and that tended to jolt me from my erotic connection to the scene. Of course, it might just be a trans thing, so I wouldn't understand. But the whole thing made this sequence -- the most exuberant and voluble of all the scenes screened -- to be the most uncomfortably porn-cliche of them all. Indeed, it seemed that the audience "bought out" of this final sequence in ways that were audibly different from their discomfort with the fisting (more giggles). Also, this sequence was the only one in which I became really attuned to the fact that I was watching porn on the big screen and it wasn't all that cinematically intriguing (an awareness I had only intermittently in the earlier sequences). A fascinating, complicated experience -- my first with transman/all-male porn.

Trannymal (2005) +

Perhaps aptly subtitled "puppetry of the pudenda," this hilarious, strange video short uses two stick-on googly eyes (and a variety of other, uncredited accessories) to transform "one transgender genital" into all kinds of fabulous, funny faces. In the space of two marvelous minutes, we get to appreciate many views of "Trannymal." A delightful little video stunt which wittily challenges easy notions of genital uniformity.
Watch it here.

Linda/Les & Annie: The First Female To Male Transexual Love Story (1989) +/-

A fascinating time capsule of the early era of f2m transition experience, presented in a tender, witty and explicit documentary format. Legendary erotic performance artist Annie Sprinkle narrates, in her familiar slutty/sweetgirl persona, the experience of her first sexual encounter with her lover and friend, transman Les Nichols. The film's narrative is framed by Annie writing to her diary, her sweet voice detailing the possibly shocking details of Les's story as well as the dimensions of their first sexual encounter. Parallel to this narrative of Annie's sexual encounter with Les is a slightly more conventional documentary profile of Les himself, complete with before and after pictures as well as a handful of talking head sequences in which Les describes what's different about experiencing society as a man in contrast to experiencing society as a butch lesbian separatist. The point of the film, however, seems to be showing Les's full monty -- showing how his phallus works and how he and Annie have sex. It's startling to see Les's surgical scars, both up top and down below, though -- as always -- Annie's a calming guide through potentially discomiting sexual terrain. Les's phallus is definitely of the old-school variety -- basically a smallish reconstructed flesh tube that requires the insertion of plastic rod to accomplish "erection." The film demonstrates the limits of what is (I believe) an outmoded technology, humorously depicting how Les and Annie deal with the appliance's not infrequent malfunction. It's startling to watch this film in 2008 -- not quite 20 years since its production -- and to realize how rapidly the shifts in language, consciousness and technology have informed my own understanding of f2m trans issues. Here, the novelty of f2m transness is the main alibi for the production -- a premise that would be utterly unthinkable for a comparably progressive production today. Same goes for the tragically late80s videographic flourishes. For all its dated limits as a consciousness raising tool, not to mention the visual cliches inadvertently evoked by its dated videography, the film remains a powerful document of trans-history, however, tenderly affirming the emotional imperative of the erotic in appreciating the dimensions of gender transition.

L'Anticristo (1974) -

A filthy Exorcist rip-off, which exploits the standard Satanic possession/pregnancy narrative toward extraordinarily spectacular ends. The whole film feels like it's a bunch of Italian Catholics, fully steeped in various strands of Italian Catholicism, coming up with more and more outrageous ways to cinematically blaspheme. The story matters almost not at all: a woman, mysteriously paralyzed since childhood, begins having strange experiences after visiting a fringe religious site. Turns out, she's the reincarnation of a apostate nun who fled the convent and joined a cult of devil worshippers before being prosecuted and burned for blasphemy. Somehow, at the outset of this story, the dead nun's life has begun to be felt in the living, paralyzed body of Ippolita. And then madcap blasphemy ensues. The film is remarkable for it's nearly explicit sexual content, all of which is embedded in either religious or satanic content. The thing about the film is that its story is almost negligible, despite being incredibly complicated, as the whole apparatus of the story seems mostly to be there to provide a basic infrastructure for a series of crazyass possession and/or flashback sequences, each more scandalous than the one previous. I don't entirely understand the family scenario: Ippolita is the daughter of a Prince (Mel Ferrer, entirely unremarkable in the role) and nephew of a Priest (Arthur Kennedy - ditto) and she's got a devoted brother (who basically looks like a lesbian) and a nanny (a very vivid Scandinavianish actress). And then there's a very cute hypnotherapist. All of these folks convene around Ippolita as she tries to cure her mysterious paralysis and, in turn, each becomes involved in the escalating demonic events. I don't really understand. But what's occasionally quite fun about the piece are the possession episodes, some better than others. I especially enjoyed the following: a scene in which Ippolita seduces a German schoolboy in the catacombs; the crazy Devil orgy in which Ippolita -- in a previous life -- performs oral sex on a goat's hindquarters; and the bad table manners scene where Ippolita eats lots of meat before spitting it out and insulting her father's tarty new squeeze and then the giant paintings start flapping against the wall. I couldn't really follow the ending but it seems that the demon might have been purged from Ippolita, but I don't know that it matters. A strange, trashy, lurid and sensationalistic film.

Velvet Goldmine (1998) +

An enthralling, confounding fabulation about the vicissitudes of celebrity, style, music and selfhood. Todd Haynes's ode to the glam rock era is a routinely confounding whodunnit which basically asks the question: how does popular culture shape our sense of sexual selfhood. The central figure in the film is Christian Bale (in easily his most emotionally vulnerable bit of screen acting yet) as Arthur Stuart, a journalist who endeavors to answer a mysterious question that yet surrounds the legend of an iconic figure from his youth Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Myers doing what he does best: exude ambisexual erotic tumescence). Brian Slade is Haynes's proxy for a David Bowie-like figure who rose to a kind of transcendent musical superstardom through a savvy blend of visual style, musical mediocrity and erotic adventurousness. Around Brian Slade, Haynes gathers an assemblage of music biopic types: the first promoter (the enthralling Michael Feast); the first wife (Toni Collette, in a rare off-kilter performance -- lots of great bits that never exactly coalesce); the successful producer (Eddie Izzard, similarly erratic); and the main rival (Ewan McGregor in one of the sexiest performances I've seen in some time). McGregor's Curt Wild seems to me to be equal parts Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain -- a captivatingly feral sort of manchild whose intoxicating maleness combines with a preternatural sensitivity/sensuality to become a tornado of self-immolating eroticism. McGregor is amazing in the role, a cipher who is absolutely legible in every moment -- just the sort of actor with whom Haynes's style of filmmaking really soars. So, we have on the one hand Rhys Myers as the iconic Brian Slade, an entrancing contrivance who never fails to capture the audience's attention and imagination, while on the other we have McGregor as the mysterious flame-out Curt Wild (shooting stars are a recurrent image in the film) who haunts the screen long after he's left it. These two poles seem to underscore one of Haynes's main arguments with this film: that popular culture contains both the completely contrived and the utterly real, and both touch the souls of fans. For indeed, this is a film about fandom, especially about how fandom -- or falling into an eroticized obsession with popular culture -- can be a path toward and through the most confounding aspects of self. And, indeed, this thread is where the heart of the film seems to lay, in the Christian Bale's character. Having quickly read Nick Davis's essay on the film, in which he makes a very sophisticated argument about Haynes's layering of temporality to, among other things, underscore the historical dimensions of queer possibility, I'm especially struck by Haynes's use of Oscar Wilde as a framing device for the film's exploration of the sexual fluidity of the glam rock moment. The green pin, which falls from the heavens to become affixed to the blankets swaddling the infant Wilde, becomes a talisman of fabulosity which seems to affirm the genderqueer tradition of dandyish masculinity at crucial moments in the film's narrative. I find this thread to be especially provocative, especially when considering the film's argument about the historiography of male homosexual identity. Haynes, it seems to me, is arguing for the dandy's importance as a queer change agent (for lack of a better term). With Wilde and the glamrockers, we see the dandy embodying an essential gender fluidity at precisely the historical moments (British criminalization of homosexuality, Stonewall) when the contours of homosexual identity are being constructed, even ossified, with an enduring fixity. It's a fascinating frame that Haynes proposes with this film, one that permits the polarities of the social constructedness of queer sexuality to be coterminous with a vision of queer desire as a kind of cosmic consciousness. For me this manifested most profoundly in the moment when Bale and McGregor are frolicking on the roof and look up to see the UFO. The UFO -- a pinkish glowing circle that contains a prominent center and radiant lines emanating outward toward the circle's edge -- seemed to me in this moment to be a semiotic sphincter, a radiant pucker that also seemed to glow a little bit brighter at the precise moment when McGregor's Curt might have been anally penetrating Bale's Arthur. I may be making too much of this flying saucer/sphincter but it really does seem to me to be Haynes's way of reconciling the competing currents of homosexual historiography (homosexuality is a social construction that emerged in its current formation in the 2nd half of the 19th century in tension with a more essentialist notion that the instinct toward same-sex eroticism and gender variance exists across time and across culture as an essential creative force). It does seem to me that, at least on some levels, Haynes is wrestling with this precise theoretical question as he shapes this film. I also really just adore the brief doll moment in this film, in which Haynes uses boy children playing with boy dolls to instantiate the erotic connection between Brian Slade and Curt Wild. This brief sequence seems to me to be the moment when Haynes distills his argument about the way that folks use popular culture, and especially pop icons, as the raw material for their own expression of sexual selfhood. This is the core narrative of the film -- via Bale's haunting character arc -- and one that I find really interesting as a near constant theme in Haynes's work. As so often happens with Haynes, like David Lynch or Spike Lee, I find this film much more enthralling to think about and puzzle through than I do to actually watch. I should shout out to the palpable eroticism in this film, though. It's a confusing current, in that it doesn't really route in a way that's conventionally legible, but the I'm amazed by how erotic the filmmaking is, and suspect it's that frustrated eroticism that makes Bale's character arc so curiously devastating. A fascinating film, one I really undersold -- and probably misunderstood -- on my first pass. (Indeed, I'm struck by the fact that Haynes's accessibility seems almost directly proportionate to how few expectations you arrive with.)

Cactus Flower (1969) -

A hoary sex comedy that neither especially sexy nor especially comedic. The stagy, farcical conceit is this: Julian (the curiously cast but comedically expert Walter Matthau) is a sexy, swinging dentist -- yes, that Walter Matthau -- who's been seeing a quirky flower power pixie (Goldie Hawn, at the height of her exceptional kooky charm) who he's beginning to fall in love with. At the same time, his devoted nurse Stephanie (Ingrid Bergman, surprisingly charming in this light comedic role) is completely in love with him -- yes, that Walter Matthau, fending off Goldie Hawn and Ingrid Bergman. Hawn's Toni places great emphasis on truthfulness, which poses a problem for Julian because he lied about being married when he started the relationship with Toni. Now he wants to get serious, but has to reveal his lie. So he enlists his trusty nurse Stephanie to pose as his wife as part of his effort to get Toni to agree to marry him. And madcap hilarity ensues. Supposedly. I really don't care. The story's about as rich as an episode of Love American Style. The only thing to recommend this film -- aside from a kicky interior or two -- derives from the warm, humane performances of Hawn and Bergman. They're sweet and funny and you end up wanting both to be happy, which helped me to survive to the end of this otherwise stunted little late 1960s bit of utterly conventional unconventionality.

The Secret Life of Bees (2008) +

A sweet parable of self-acceptance and of the potential for our ancestor's stories to both hold us back and to see us through. The basic scenario isn't that basic: Lily (Dakota Fanning in an entirely competent and occasionally excellent performance) is a white girl living somewhere in the south with a father who hates her (Paul Bettany doing a very nice job of a thankless villain-ish role) and a housekeeper named Rosaleen who likes her well enough (Jennifer Hudson acquitting herself very nicely in a challenging role). Lily's haunted by memories of contributing to her mother's early death, and struggles with the core belief that she might not be worthy of love. A set of circumstances occur that impel Lily to pull a Huck Finn, and hit the road with Rosaleen (who's suddenly a legal fugitive because of a streetfight with some white men who tried to stop her from registering to vote). For reasons beyond her understanding, Lily is following a call to go to a small town a ways away, the name of which she discovered on the back of a painting (of a black madonna and child) which had belonged to her dead mother. This journey brings Lily and Rosaleen to the home of August Boatwright (Queen Latifah, doing that beaming, big-hearted magnanimity thing she's always doing) and her two sisters, the thin-skinned May (Sophie Okenedo, absolutely electrifying and adorable) and the proud, cultivated June (Alicia Keyes, doing a very nice job with the role). The Boatwright sisters take the fugitives in and a great many lessons of the heart are learned. It's a sweet, spiritual story of woman-centric survival affirming the power of love to heal all wounds -- Fried Purple Ya-Ya of a tale (endorsed by Oprah) that hits every one of its genre mandated bases. But if you like such a thing, which I absolutely do, the film proves to be a real treat. I admired the range of solid performances, especially Okenedo, Hudson and Bettany. (Indeed, Paul Bettany joins Ralph Fiennes this year in delivering genuinely interesting portrayals of "bad man" cliche characters in pulpy genre pictures.) I also admired the clarity of the teen romance between Fanning's character and a young black man (the very charismatic Tristan Wilds). The relationship felt plausible, without the requisite plot device-iness that sometimes attends such obvious plot twists; it actually felt like an honest (and honestly stupid) teen attraction between these two appealing characters/performers. I'm also a complete sucker for the "dark mother" spiritual sub-theme, which this film uses in a really emotionally potent way. An effective entry into an easily mocked genre...which I happen to really love.