Arab-American Comedy Tour (2006) +/-

A fairly low-rent collection of concert footage of the three leading Arab-American comedians working today: Ahmed Ahmed, Dean Obeidallah, and Maysoon Zayid. The audiences for these sets are largely community audiences at Arab-American cultural events in such locales as Deer Park, Michigan, or Seattle. As such, some of the material collected here addresses its audience of "Middle Eastern heritage" more explicitly than any other Arab comic dvd I've seen. This video is marred by the erratic sound quality and occasionally amateurish camera work. The sound/camera work is of especially poor quality during Ahmed Ahmed's set (unfortunately during some of the only material with which I was unfamiliar). Obeidallah's set is mostly the standard stuff, with some interesting "new to me" bits about his Sicilian mother. Maysoon Zayid's set is good. Her presence as "a Palestinian virgin with cerebral policy who lives in New Jersey" adds what I think to be a necessary complexity -- especially regarding the racially marked body -- that is clarifying. If the production quality was a little better this would likely be the best Arab comedy dvd to own; as it is, the sound quality mars the product so that the dvd becomes mostly useful as a reference point for other video captures of these performers' work.

The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (2006) +/-

An effective introduction to the core themes/figures in the new "Arab" comedy moment/movement. Ahmed Ahmed and Dean Obeidallah appear doing their core material, along with Maz Jobrani (who's very good) and Aron Kader (who's fine). There's not much really to say about this except that it's a Comedy Central special and the four comedians each do a representative set before a largely Middle Eastern concert audience. The material is solid and the framing conceit (each comic passing through an airport security check) is not distracting. I feel like I've heard the entirety of Obeidallah's and Ahmed's set, but this is a feature I think of this concert/show being targeting a more mainstream audience who might not yet know these two comedians. Unremarkable but effective introduction to these key figures within this particular moment in American stand-up comedy.

Heckler (2008) -

An odd, dispiriting exploration of the critical impulse and the damage it can do (and does do) to the creative spirit. Comedian/actor/filmmaker Jamie Kennedy's style is comparatively direct: by collecting observations and insights from a broad array of comedians, as well as a smattering of other performers (athletes, singers, directors, actors, authors, etc) and a handful of hecklers (comedy club hecklers, print critics/reviewers, bloggers/web-critics), Kennedy examines the ways in which criticism is a burden and nuisance for the real work of art-making. The basic argument of the film informs the film's structure. Kennedy is suggesting that all critics are basically "hecklers" -- the arrogant, no-talent, attention-craving yahoos who ruin the show for everyone else because they're so sure they know the artist's not doing his job right. This core premise informs the structure of the film, as Kennedy's many very smart and very funny talking heads craft an analysis of the heckler's action. (In this collective theorization, the heckler wants to both snag a part of the glow of attention while also asserting their own importance within the performance event. In this conceptualization, men do this because they're losers who can't get laid; women do this because they're drunk and possibly horny.) Building from the location of the comedy club, and the core dynamic of the various strategies a comedian might use in dealing with a heckling member of the audience, the film next moves outward, first to print/broadcast critics and then to internet critics (bloggers and web-writers mostly). The film becomes progressively less interesting as it moves away from the comedy club heckler, and Kennedy's frustration with the idea of criticism of any kind becomes increasingly annoyed and defensive as his focus moves away from the concentrated dynamic of the heckler-comic. One of the most entertaining and interesting aspects of the film is its portrait of the various ways professional comedians have for "winning" battles with hecklers. And Kennedy himself seems often quite adept in doing just that -- shutting down the heckler in a comedy club. And, as the film moves away from the dynamic liveness of the comic-heckler dyad, it seems Kennedy is also exploring how various folks "shut down" such hecklers when they're not in the same room, but writing in a magazine or snarking on a teevee show or blathering on a blog. The film begins powerfully -- smart, funny, intense -- but by the end (when Kennedy is basically picking fights with white guys who gave his 2003 movie Malibu's Most Wanted really mean reviews in regional weekly papers or glossy snark rags) the enterprise of the documentary just feels petty and defensive. All the familiar screeds against criticism ("who are these people and are they any good at doing this thing they're criticizing me for?") are mixed in with easy internet cliches ("probably a [insert disparaging reference to age, body type or sexual inexperience] loser writing in his mother's basement") so that Kennedy, however consciously or inadvertently, replicates the action he most judges the critic for: tearing people down just because he can, just because he has the access and technology to do so. (You can sorta tell the moment when the film starts losing the clarity of its intelligence when we stop hearing much about female hecklers and, by extension, female critics.) What's unfortunate in this is that the exchange between audience and performer -- the very dynamic that the heckler so poisonously exploits -- is lost as Kennedy's film moves along, and as Kennedy's conception of criticism and commentary becomes increasingly about defending his own rights not to be criticized. Which just stops making sense after a while. Several interesting routes of inquiry -- the rise of snark, the proliferation of opinion, the spectacle of artist abuse -- are left unexplored, while Uwe Boll's notorious beatdown of several "critics" is depicted in detail. It's too bad that Kennedy's genuinely interesting premise -- use of heckling as a model for explaining the complicated ways in which criticism and creativity are often uncomfortably conjoined -- devolves so into a confusing/confused defensive rant.

Revolutionary Road (2008) -

A pretty pretty postcard of marital misery. The film tells the story of "The Wheelers" -- a "special" couple living in suburban New York. Rick (Leonardo DiCaprio in a sincere performance that once again demonstrates his limits in playing period style) is an in-house copywriter for a nondescript firm. April (Kate Winslet, luminous as always in a performance that demonstrates none of the actress's capacity to subtly plumb unforeseen depths) is a stay-at-home mom who studied acting back in the day. As the film begins, Rick's on the precipice of his 30th birthday as April's reeling from the humiliation of being reduced to performing in an especially bad community theatre production. The coincidence of these challenges to their respective self-esteem occasions a crisis of faith for each partner's confidence in themselves and in their shared marriage. Rick reacts by instigating a predatory affair with a girl in the typing pool (Zoe Kazan, captivating in a throwaway part); April reacts by concocting a scheme to sell everything and move to Paris, where she can work and he can begin to find himself. Both Rick and April get completely hopped up on this fantasy and their love seems to be reanimated. As they spin this new fantasy future, those around them react variously. The dissipated, sissy-ish man who shares Rick's cubicle (Dylan Baker, in a quite thrilling performance -- I wanted to follow him into his own movie) observes with bemused cynicism. The Wheelers's neighbor pals The Campbells react with shock, with Milly (Kathryn Hahn, vivid and utterly human) reacting in frightened terror and Shep (David Harbour, in perhaps the film's most dimensional performance, responding with a melancholy fury). Of course, Rick and April's grand plans are patently unrealistic and they are humbled soon, in the most gendered of terms. Rick is offered a promotion at work and April discovers that she's pregnant. The threat to their shared plans (and private fantasies) posed by this pair of realizations causes their relationship to spiral deeper into the despair from which their Paris fantasy had briefly lifted it. Then it all really goes to hell. Rick takes up again with the girl from the typing pool; April has a cruel fling with Shep. A disastrous dinner with a mentally unbalanced guest compels a new kind of clarity for both Rick and April and, the next day, Rick starts his new job and April attempts to induce her own miscarriage (with devastating results). The problem with the film is one of tone. Director Sam Mendes plays the sincerity of the scenario, which only amplifies the shrillness of each character's shallow self-obsessiveness, without a clarifying frame. (I liked it better when Winslet played this same character arc in Little Children two cycles ago.) Winslet and DiCaprio spend a good deal of the film shrieking at each other, in ways that were likely quite challenging (and gratifying) as actors but do little to illuminate the characters of Rick and April. Michael Shannon does is feral force of nature thing as the mentally unstable son of The Wheelers's realtor (Kathy Bates, in an almost really good performance). As an intellectual currently undergoing electro-shock therapy at a nearyby loony bin, Shannon's character is poised to be the "speaker of truth" -- the one citizen capable of calling out that the emperor has no clothes. He seems at first to understand Rick and April's impulse to flee their perfect life; then, he calls each out for their cruel hypocrisies in not following through. He's patently a device -- like Mrs. Miller in Doubt -- who arrives to throw a monkey-wrench into things and thus amplify the tension for the last act. Shannon is good, but obvious, in the role. Ultimately - SPOILER ALERT - the film concludes with April dying as a result of her self-induced miscarriage/abortion; Rick leaving the community; and the neighbors left to sift through their own ambivalences about the "special" Wheelers. The narrative scenario is deeply cynical, ostensibly a satire on the conventions of self compromise that characterized post-WWII American middle-class privilege. The tragedy of Rick and April is borne of the fact that neither believes in anything, only their shared "idea" that they were "special" -- that Rick was "above" his job and that April was so much more than "just a housewife." I knew I was doomed when Rick and April shared the moments they knew they were alive: Rick's being the moment he marched to battle in France and April's the first time she had sex with Rick. This hollow fantasy of Rick as superman is the shared illusion that collapses on top of both characters, and it's at the root of the film's/narrative's most compelling critique: choosing to believe in the fantasy (of a future in Paris; of happiness in the suburbs; of how "special" The Wheelers are; of the importance of maintaining polite appearances) will be the source of one's devastation, if not one's doom. I actually quite like that premise. However, this film -- for whatever reason -- elides that tension in a curiously self-gratified indulgence in the intensity of each moment as it comes. Instead of this being a devastating satire of middle-class self-deception, the film becomes a meticulous dissection of the petty cruelties animating an unhappy marriage. Neither as intricately crafted as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf nor as emotionally stark as Scenes from a Marriage, this film feels stunty and intellectually lazy. Really good actors get lost in their roles (Winslet, DiCaprio, Bates) while smaller roles shine (Shannon, Baker, Kazan) because of their relative clarity. Only David Harbour seems able to maneuver the three tracks necessary -- tracks that are (aptly enough perhaps) easiest described in the most simplistic psychoanalytic terms (id, superego, ego). Harbour (and to a lesser extent Bates) provide a really palpable sense of the pressure of the "rules" of proper behavior (superego), and Harbour also really taps into this guy's competing/conflicting desires (id). As a result, Harbour really is able to play -- in every scene -- the real conflict Shep feels as he tries to negotiate between his desires and his sense of obligation/duty. It's a dynamic, surprising, humane, and complex performance. I wish Harbour's subtle complexity had been matched by the other principal players. Alas. Everyone else gets too lost in id or too gummed up in superego and it's just tiresome. But the part that really pissed me off? How this film's depiction of a historical subculture (white suburbia at midcentury) characterized by rank, chauvinistic misogyny ended up as a replication of that misogyny rather than a lucid critique of it. The film's concluding moments are especially outrageous. As folks deal with the aftershocks of April's suicide-by-self-induced-abortion, the "blame the woman" aspects of this story really fly. In each of the concluding scenes (Rick on a playground, Shep meeting the couple who have just moved into the Wheelers old house, Mr. Givings as he turns down the volume of his hearing aid as his wife natters on), our sympathy is ostensibly invested with the men. And the only woman who isn't the "cause" of the man's discomfort? Milly -- the perfect housewife who does and says exactly as her husband asks and who believes in the principles of middle-class suburbia as social gospel. It's an appalling moment really: as we're asked to absorb the tragedy of April's death the reason for these men and their current unhappiness. Indeed, I left the film thinking less of Kate Winslet for having bought into this tacit misogyny -- I was so infuriated by the film and its bizarre resolution. We are offered these scenes as simple depictions of the characters's realities and it all points back to April: if she hadn't been so selfish, so unrealistic, so grandiose, none of his would have had to happen. It's a despicable conclusion, one that reveals not the satire, not the historical commentary, not the idea that things were so bad then...just that women are to blame for men's unhappiness and discontent. If only they could all be like Milly... Ack. Feh. Gah. Whatever.

Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland (2006) +

A deceptively simple concert movie, showcasing the trek of four stand-ups on a whirlwind, old-school bus tour of the southwest and the south. Produced by actor Vince Vaughn with his close friend Peter Billingsley (best known as the kid star of A Christmas Story), the rationale behind the tour is both simple and obtuse: take these unknown comics on the road to introduce them to a wider audience and to introduce parts of middle America to these comics. And then there's also something in there about the road show/variety show/vaudeville aspect I think? I'm not sure. But the movie's totally entertaining and engaging, a humane portrait of what it's like to be a working comedian. Because all the comedians are straight guys, and because only one of the guys is not white, the film also stages a pretty insightful glimpse into the "normative" business of comedy and comedy audience expectations. John Caparulo is a white trashy guy with a potty mouth and a mode unpretentious humor that seems to really reflect the experience of a white guy who drinks more than he dates and who experiences few of the benefits of his white, masculine privilege. He seems also to be the kind of comic whose life will likely be spent on the road, as opposed to on a sitcom or in the movies. His closest peer on the tour is Bret Ernst, a handsome (in a regular guy way) guy who seems like a generically funny comedian (though his backstory about his single mom and gay elder brother emerges as one of the more startling and moving threads within the documentary -- an excellent example of a straight comic successfully doing non-homophobic gay material). Ahmed Ahmed is perhaps the most recognizable comic on the tour, at least to me, and his material comes the closest to talking specifically about gender and race. Finally, the most interesting comic in some ways is the prissy guido Sebastian Maniscalo, a handsome rubberfaced guy with a knack for incisive physical comedy for whom the tour is his first real professional break from waiting tables. Add to this mix cameos by Vaughn buddies Justin Long and Jon Favreau, among others, and it's a cascade of comedic testosterone. What I like about the film is how simple it is: a concert documentary of this tour, with some clarifying chapters/threads that anchor the onstage fragments and backstage shenanigans in a generally accessible way. Not the most memorable bit of filmmaking, but this film is a generally entertaining and basically generous glimpse into the hard work of contemporary stand-up comedy.

In Bruges (2008) +

A witty, intense, gorey caper that plays out a drama of ethics and morality...among British thugs and gun/drug traffickers in a unifying Europe...amidst the sugar-candy landscape of a Belgian tourist town. Director/writer Martin McDonagh develops a dramaturgically concise conceit (you can almost feel how this narrative could fairly easily adapt to one of those old school farces, with everything set in the lobby/bar/bedchamber of the nondescript hotel) and opens it nicely to include the landscape of Bruges as a kind of silent character. The script is one of the most intricately witty I've heard this year, with character detail and essential backstory embedded within the unfurling banter of the film's central characters, Ken and Ray (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, respectively). Farrell and Gleeson are charismatic, hilarious and formidable -- the hitman and the hitman's apprentice -- sent away by their terrifying boss (Ralph Fiennes, brilliant as ever) to lay low in Bruges. (Farrell's Ken, while on an assigned hit, inadvertently killed a child, thus causing a complicated set of stinks that must be resolved before things can continue.) McDonagh and his ensemble allow the scenario to unfold slowly. Once we think we understand what's going on, a new wrinkle or revelation complicates things further, until finally the piece builds toward a real suspense (both emotional and cinematic) which resolves in the most surprising of ways. Peppered around this core relationship dyad (or triad, if you count Fiennes) is an array of impressive performers, familiar and not, in large and small roles. I especially enjoyed the ubiquitous Zeljko Ivanek as the prissy Canadian who gets caught in a shocking altercation with Farrell's Ken. I also liked Jordan Prentice, as a hard-partying dwarf actor -- who happens to be filming on location in Bruges -- who happens to animate Ken's fascination with dwarves/little people and their supposed statistical predisposition toward suicide. Prentice's Jimmy is, possibly, the fourth hand in this story and it's testament to McDonagh's skill as a scenarist that I didn't realize until much later that the character of Jimmy permitted the subject of suicide to be floating in the air of the story long before it becomes a specific narrative tension. I also quite liked Thekla Reuten, in the comparatively undeveloped role of Marie, the innkeeper. Reuten's presence is essential to the piece and she's indelible. The only weak link I noted was Clémence Poésy, as the drug peddler/thief who develops a soft spot for Farrell. She's fine but... The film, though, is about the banter and affection between the three leads: Farrell, Gleeson and Fiennes (Fiennes being the antagonist to the dual protagonist of the other two). The relationship between Ken and Ray emerges, for all its early trashtalk, as one of the most tender relationships between men I've seen on screen in some time. Both actors play their roles perfectly. Gleeson is utterly believable as a cold-hearted professional killer who's got a truly tender heart. Farrell is completely right as the arrogant thug just out of his depth as he moves up the crime ladder. Farrell's performance in particular is appropriately adorable and completely terrifying. He's very sweet, very funny, very damaged, and at times very scary. It's nice to see the actor in a role that highlights his particular gifts. And he and Gleeson are one of the best screen pairings I've seen this year, including Sheehan/Langella and Streep/Doubt cast. A deservedly admired film. Funny, suspenseful, effective. I'm only sorry there wasn't a stage version before this perfect "opening up" of the tight, taut and intelligent dramaturgical universe. Good stuff.

The Wrestler (2008) +

A fascinating, stylish exploration of the emotional, spiritual and physical costs accrued by performers hustling for a dream that's finally slipping away. The movie's ostensibly about Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke, in what promises to be an iconic performance). Rourke's Randy is a guy who's been wrestling since the 80s and now finds himself at the end of the only lifepath he's ever really known. When an escalating series of health challenges culminates in a near fatal heart attack, Rourke's Randy finds himself -- however uncharacteristically -- reflecting on his life choices and what potential for happiness might yet be his. At about this moment, Randy's ongoing flirtation with a local stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), seems to be on the verge of becoming a "non-professional" relationship. It's a gorgeous conceit really. Randy (whose real name is Robin) and Cassidy (whose real name is Pam) are both really good at what they do. Both are still meeting the intense, physical demands of their jobs long after their bodies should have given out. And both are deeply attuned to the ways that their success is measured by the pleasure their physical performances give their fans. It's an elegant, obvious parallel really and what's nice about the film is that it really allows the fact of these performers' lives to be recognized for the hard, gruelling, and incredibly skilled work that it is. I especially admired how Aronofsky used Randy's pervy grocery store boss to underscore the weird ways that Randy, as a macho wrestler, is disparaged for the overt sexuality of his job. An artful way to depict the stigma of the wrestler/stripper as profession. I like that Aronofsky seems so intent on depicting the bleakness of working-class New Jersey, the gruesome brutality of low-rent wrestling, and the incredible loneliness experienced by these bottom-rung entertainers. The wrestling culture sequences -- whether in the ring or the changing room -- are frank and astonishing. Early on, Tomei's Cassidy quotes the film The Passion of the Christ, likening Randy's injuries to the flayed flesh of the Christ. It's a fascinating invocation. But I didn't quite register when I heard it that it was also a warning that some of the subsequent scenes would contain some of the most intimately gruesome injuries that I have seen on film since Mel Gibson's gruesome opus. Both films really do use the abused bodies of their heroes as an external depiction of an internally borne suffering, a self-acknowledged martyrdom as each man pursues his calling. But wowza -- depiction of physical suffering in this film is really intense, largely because we are so inside Rourke's Randy that we not only feel the pain of each blow but also the hurt that will come as his body tries to heal. It's a profoundly different use of violence than, say, spectacular gore and Aronofsky really explores its dimensions here. I'm not sure what to make of the film as a whole. It's a fascinating conceit. It's a glorious convergence of actor and role. (On the whole, the film is exceedingly well cast.) The music is perfect. I just don't know what to make of the story. I like the oddly mythic open-ending but still -- I'm just not sure what I think of the narrative/story. Rourke is very good in the role. I'm struck that the characterization isn't that remarkable but it's more the spectacle of this bruised hulk of a man being so emotionally vulnerable that's so impressive. He's a hulking, scarred beast and here he is -- showing his most vulnerable underbelly. It's really captivating, even/especially as he marshals his talent for self-sabotage in a devastating ways. (I'm not sure I've ever seen a film where I felt like I was watching someone commit suicide by performing.) Evan Rachel Wood too is very good, as always. She brings a taut emotional openness to her character, Randy's estranged college-aged daughter. (The sequence of scenes between Rourke's Randy and Wood's Stephanie are certainly the most conventional scenes in the film, and both actors are vivid in their emotional openness and intensity.) I was sorry that, in its emphasis on Stephanie's tectonic shifts in emotion, Wood's performance was not richer in character detail. Her emotional immediacy is so ripe, so present, but I didn't feel that I got any hit on who Stephanie was through Wood's performance. Tomei, on the other hand, nails both the emotional immediacy while also bringing, without fanfare, an incredible depth of character detail to the role of Cassidy/Pam. Essaying one of the most cliched roles in supporting actressness, Tomei brings the lurid reality of Cassidy/Pam's work to vividly unremarkable life while also clarifying her distinctive individuality. Tomei is vivid, precise, and real in the role. Almost any actress would have been impressive in the part, gathering sympathy easily, but Tomei does something much more risky: she makes Cassidy/Pam normal. Her heroism comes not from the fact that she's a tart with unexpected depth, but because she's a weary, frightened person who's taking a giant emotional risk. I find it remarkable that Tomei's big moment of clarity -- her character-transforming epiphany -- happens when the character's almost entirely nude. She's naked and we're watching her inner conflict. Amazing. Again, I'm not sure why I remain so uncertain about whether I actually liked the film or not. It's a great conceit, and an impressive stunt, pulled off with style, sophistication and heart. An admirable accomplishment on all counts, with one of the best uses of music I've noticed in a long time. Sure to be an enduring film.

Mildred Pierce (1945) +

A pitch-perfect genre treat that somehow is able to maneuver several genres at once. As a visual feast, it's a fabulous noir -- broad angles, high shadows, crazy California locations all converging to make for a sumptuous visual treat. As a women's picture, it's a deliciously melodramatic weepie in which female strength and fortitude are commingled with conniving and deceit to make for an emotionally thick saga of female relationships. As a glamorous romance, it's twisty and turny with something akin to true love prevailing. The mystery tension is there. The characters are there. The romantic intrigue is there. And the visuals are certainly there. It's very nearly a perfect feast of mid1940s Hollywood treats -- which is exactly why the camp pleasures of this film are also so renowned. It's two full hours of big-shouldered broads telling each other what's what while Joan Crawford plays the martyr, with a couple of slapfests and a contrasting set of negligible hunks in the mix to keep things truly entertaining. And, truly, the shoulder pads in this picture are formidable. There are times when Joan Craword is wearing a particular fur coat -- the one she's wearing during the framing narrative sequences -- that she sorta looks like one of those old commercials where the dancing girls are wearing costume in the shape of their product box. Joan Crawford's very good -- though very Joan Crawford. She hits every Joan note with alacrity and intensity and camera-intoxicating flair. There's little depth to her Mildred Pierce, and you really get no sense of what Mildred Dunnock's character in The Corn Is Green might have idealized as "mother love." But there is a ferocity that serves the character well. Watching the fabulous veneer that is Joan, though, I found that I wanted a better sense of Mildred's trashy background -- her Erin Brockovichness if you will. The character seems, essentially, to be both a flirt and a frump -- men see her as a profoundly sexy creature; Veda sees her as a wornout frump; Ida sees her as a fellow traveler...but, in this movie, she's mostly a JoanCrawford concoction. I do think her work here is great movie star acting -- she's compelling, entrancing, fascinating...but she's never particularly the character. The guys are all fine -- each mildly skeevy in his own particular way, though none are quite as menacing/dangerous as they might be. Eve Arden is a welcome presence as Mildred's best friend and business associate, Ida. Would that the script had permitted her more than a wisecrack. There's a weariness and a devotion to Mildred that I really like. Ann Blyth is a bit one-note as the awful Veda -- she's fun to watch and her giant square-ish head and somewhat flat face is perfect for this kind of cinematography. Plus she's tee-tiny. She's perfect as Joan's daughter -- they both have the same giant head and tee-tiny body so they sorta look like they could be related. But Blyth's performance lacks something -- an internal integrity, I guess, as a rotten brat. I never get a sense of what drives Veda, and as such I never truly buy into the potential of her danger. Granted, Veda's fundamentally shallow but I would have valued some depth to her vicious selfishness. (Though I must say, I would LOVE to see the sequel that follows Veda to prison -- some queer should really develop that spin-off, Veda's Turn or La Veda Loca or something.) So, even though I thought this film was lacking in several key emotional areas -- it's incredible clarity of style and craftsmanship more than made up for it. A truly great film that deserves a better dvd treatment.

Frost/Nixon (2008) -

A meticulously conventional cinematic treatment of the stage play about the legendary interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon, in the year or three after Nixon stepped down from the Presidency. The film is basically effective. A solid cast, deliciously apt production design and a deft neo-documentary framing conceit to cover necessary expository bases. For example, the film uses archival footage to remind a presumably foggy/clueless audience of the particulars of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's subsequent ignominy. And, not unlike the prefatory use of archival footage in Van Sant's Milk, the device serves to amplify both the distance of this particular piece of recent history while also underscoring the affinity/continuity with contemporary political concerns. Both films, too, are delicious in their attention to the material culture, decorations and fashions of their mid1970s moments. Yet the two films could not be more different in their emotional immediacy. Where I found Milk to be startlingly open-hearted, Frost/Nixon is blithely mechanical, even glib in its treatment of this moment in U.S. history which, arguably, tore more people up in more profound ways than the fact of Harvey Milk's brief political career. Howard's direction is both assiduously clinical and patently obvious, which helps us in some ways never to get lost in the fracas of facts, conjectures, and giant egos. Yet Howard's accommodation of the (presumably) easily confused viewer also, perhaps inadvertently, removes the threat/delight of discovery. Early on, we know pretty much for sure that Howard won't let us miss any important detail -- he'll let a character offer the detail in an aside, then his camera will fix on a visual articulation of the central detail and (most likely) we'll get an interstitial talking head moment to explain that detail's significance. While this strategy amplifies the clarity of the intellectual machinations that make up the narrative's action, it also removes the tension. As such the film becomes uniformly interesting/fascinating but almost never affecting. The other part of the film I found curiously hollow was Howard's choice to discover the narrative's urgency in the ostensible drama of the genre of an artist building his opus. (Here, the interview is Frost's masterwork and much of the narrative's tension is derived from the historically obviated question: "will he be able to pull it off?" Again to draw a Milk comparison: it would be as if the film tried to make drama out of the question of whether or not Dan White would actually kill Milk and Moscone. In both films, this historical event -- the assassination of Milk; the phenomenal impact of the Frost-Nixon interviews -- is the whole point of the story. So I remain astounded that Howard made the weird choice to squeeze narrative tension from such a conspicuously false "mystery.") And while I found the idea that Nixon was a blackout drinker with an alcoholic's distorted ego/priorities, I found the "insight" into his character less than compelling. The performances are generally first-rate. Michael Sheen is once again captivating in what could have easily been a historical caricature. Oliver Platt, Matthew MacFayden, Toby Ross and Kevin Bacon are vivid and entertaining. Rebecca Hall looks like a movie star and invests her peculiarly empathetic screen presence generously within an appallingly unwritten role. Only Frank Langella, in the showcase role of the piece, is distracting. Admirable enough, I suppose -- but I always saw Langella, never Nixon. A deft, conventional, and (ultimately) glib telling of an often fascinating story.

The Boys in the Band (1970) +

An always challenging film, The Boys in the Band is like the proverbial "layers of the onion" -- I never know quite how what will hit me, what buttons the film will push and what insight the film will amplify. On this viewing, I'm struck by how contemporary it feels. Sure, the cultural references and camp signifiers are way old school and the ethnic/racial tensions in the piece seem grotesque -- but on a fundamental emotional level, I'm struck by the fact that this feels more contemporary to me on this screening than on any previous one. (Basically, I'm thinking about the banal homophobia, self-closeting/fetishizing the straight boy, the sissyphobia, and the tensions between monogamy and polyamory. We may wish these issues were old school but they feel more contemporary than the last time I screened the film, nearly ten years ago.) I remain convinced that the original BITB phenomena is a fundamentally important document -- the play's premiere in 1968 and the film's in 1970 bookending the 1969 of Stonewall. The piece "straddles" the moment of gay liberation, and the characters seemed so dated in 1970 largely because they exist in a universe when gay liberation isn't comprehensible (where, by 1970, gay lib had already started transforming the vision of gay possibility). In a way, this is the part that feels most contemporary. These characters seem to simply want their niche in society, to live their private lives privately -- no remaking society toward goals of equality or social justice, simply an aspiration to maintain whatever privilege they already possess. And this seems to me to be very cognate to our current gay historical moment: a not altogether radical investment, on the part of gays and lesbians, to be included. It's astonishing, on the one hand, how comparable the aspirations are, given how much so much has changed. This time through, also, I was struck by the dimensions of alcohol and drug abuse -- the depth of self-medication going on, how much booze/pot/pills are being consumed, etc. More substantially, I'm struck by the fact that Michael's basically a mean drunk who seems to be trying to get sober. Adam's comments on the film flagged the piece's debt to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf -- especially the cruel party game aspect -- in a way I found very helpful and I found that I responded to this film in much the same fashion. I don't think I knew until this time through that Crowley insisted on using the Broadway cast for the screen version. This provides one explanation for the highly theatrical/broad/big performance by Kenneth Nelson as Michael. At several moments, I thought "this is stage acting" and I'm relieved to realize that it's exactly that. I'm also fascinated by how many among the cast were actually gay (if we're to interpret their late 1980s and early 1990s deaths from AIDS-related causes as signals of this fact). It's a hard movie to watch, one that always burrows into my discomfort in surprising ways, but one which seems to hold enduring potency as a kind of intergenerational gay palimpsest. It will be fascinating to continue revisiting it as the years pass.

The Corn Is Green (1945) -

A tedious (although ostensibly comic) account of a teacher's transformative impact on the life of one Welsh miner, and the sacrifices entailed by that devotion. Based on an autobiographical play by Emlyn Williams (one of the most successful playwrights of the 1930s), the story tells of Miss Moffat (Bette Davis, doing well enough), a highly educated spinster teacher who arrives to a Welsh mining town. Through her tutelage, the largely illiterate, poverty-plagued town discovers the delight of reading and one particularly gifted student (the ever-strange Richard Ball) earns a scholarship to Oxford. Two main obstacles beset Miss Moffatt's success in the town. First, the anti-intellectual (and at times explicitly misogynist) bias against her; second, the temptations that goad her prize pupil in the form of drink and in the form of a trashy young woman. (The trashy young woman is the daughter of Moffatt's cockney maid, played with atrocious verve by Supporting Actress nominee Joan Lorring.) Mildred Dunnock is sweet as a sensitive fellow teacher/spinster. The story legibly contributes to the formation of the basic template of the "heroic teacher" genre. The final twist, though -- wherein Moffat adopts her prize pupil's illegitimate child so the trashy girl will leave him alone and so that he can move on to Oxford -- is a doozy. There are few pleasures in the film to recommend it. The delight in Welsh local color is at times sweet (there's one tertiary character who delivers a telegram wearing a folk costume straight out of a "costumes of their native lands" volume). Dunnock and Davis acquit themselves respectably. The rest of the cast is a little less effective from this distance. The accents are pure Hollywood, with the exertions toward Cockney and Welsh being especially unfortunate. But, in general, the film is awkward and unpleasant -- a sentimental feel-good picture with little cinematic art to the storytelling. (Indeed, watching this made me appreciate the wit and nuance of Come to the Stable -- imagine that.) The culminating confrontation between Davis's Moffat and Lorring's Bessie holds the promise of a grand camp throwdown, but the overweening respectability of the project impedes the scavenging of even the simplest camp pleasures. Plus, Lorring is just not good as the trashy Bessie. A mostly unfortunate piece of self-impressed pap.

The Reader (2008) +

A fascinating account of the residual damage of one boy's erotic awakening. The story is at once intricate and simple, told in three distinct parts which interweave in roughly chronological order. In the "first" part, in a still reconstructing Germany, a comparatively privileged youth stumbles into a sexual affair with a working class woman, about two decades his senior. The affair appears mutually sustaining, even though the two share little but sex, baths and a love for literature (which the boy reads to the woman as a prelude to lovemaking). At the end of the summer, the woman mysteriously packs up her apartment and disappears, leaving the boy in the lurch of his first heartbreak. lmost a decade later, Michael is a young man studying law when a seminar he's taking obliges his attendance at a trial of six SS guards who worked at a workcamp that was a waystation for Auschwitz. Due to a recently published survivor memoir, these six women have been named as defendants in one of the nation's first trials of SS workers for murder. Michael is stunned to realize that one of the defendants is his former lover, Hanna. As the trial unfolds, Michael must confront the incomprehensibility of his own past as he contemplates the actions of regular Germans in the Nazi era. At the same time, his intimate connection with Hanna causes him to realize a key deception at the center of the trial and must decide whether or not to act on that knowledge, as well as decide whether or not to reconnect with Hanna. In the "third" part (which both frames and punctuates moments in the other two), we encounter Michael at two or three other points in his life, mostly as he very slowly comes to accept the ways in which his summer with Hanna has remained a defining feature of his selfhood, especially his in/ability to be fully emotionally honest with anyone else. The film culminates as Michael takes a set of actions which acknowledge the importance of his past as he also makes a transformative step toward a different future. This narrative, absorbing and complex as it is, is the least compelling feature of the film. Each narrative twist is fairly evident and there are few surprises. Whether this is the fault of the source material, or Stephen Daldry's meticulous direction, I'm not sure. However, despite the fact that I could see each twist well before it twisted, I remained somehow compelled by the filmmaking. Indeed, even though I didn't especially care about any of the characters in this piece, I nonetheless found myself utterly fascinated by them. The performances are uniformly strong. Kate Winslet -- portraying Hanna in all three story segments -- is brilliantly opaque. There's no knowing what she's thinking or feeling, but there's no looking away from her. Moreover, she nearly disappears into the role. It's a great Best Actress performance (unfortunately pitched as Best Supporting, which makes next to no sense). David Kross as the young Michael, both at 15 and 23, is thrilling. So callow, so German, so exuberant, so sexy. His is a heartwrenching performance of a prickly, distant adolescent character -- a character moving from innocence into the defining conflict of his soul. Ralph Fiennes is less compelling as the mature Michael (playing the character from his early 30s through to his early 50s), but he's solid nonetheless. Fiennes is left to play some of the most mysterious aspects of the story: a man living with the consequences of the actions of his young adulthood, as well as habits of intimacy cultivated even earlier. Basically, Fiennes is a man who has chosen to maintain the most intimate secret of his first love and it has stunted his ability to be emotionally open, to truly share his life with anyone. As a result, he's an emotional zombie, cut off from everything -- especially himself. Fiennes is haunting as this sad elder Michael and the quiet bloom he discovers as the picture proceeds is a subtle, sophisticated accomplishment. But most extraordinary, perhaps, is Lena Olin in one of the films few surprises -- in a double role, playing an elderly Auschwitz survivor in the "middle" section of the story as well as that survivor's daughter thirty years later. It's a stunty move, but it's thrilling that it works. Olin delivers a simple, throttling performance in both roles -- each woman as unwavering in her certitude as Michael/Hanna are equivocal. It's a startling, thrilling set of scenes -- certainly one of my favorite supporting actress moments of the year, tragically lost amidst the category consternation surrounding Winslet here and in Revolutionary Road. Also remarkable is Stephen Daldry's unapologetically beautiful filming of this despairing story: the cast is uniformly gorgeous; the decoration is spot-on; the ancillary characters are strikingly well-cast. (I especially thrilled at the casting of the five women who are Hanna's co-defendants at trial: five more hilariously yet horrifyingly apt visions of post-Nazi womanhood could likely not be found.) I remain uncertain about the narrative structuring the piece, and how Daldry maneuvers the fact that Hanna is "simpler" than Michael in his tendency to view the central relationship through a lens of "great love." However, I did truly admire the film's explication of the vestigial impact of adolescent experiences of love, betrayal, and intimacy. In many ways, Michael's story is one of a man finding a way to undo the damage done by his first experience of love, a trauma exacerbated by the incredible historical circumstances of his first lover's life. I'm impressed that Daldry used the age disparity between Winslet and Kross to amplify the exploitative aspects of their sexual relationship. Kross's frontal nudity and peachfuzzy skin never permits us to entirely forget that this is a teen's body and, concomitantly, that this woman (despite her lack of class and cultural privilege) does have a kind of power within this erotic transaction. Indeed, Daldry carefully, unobtrusively always maintains what could have easily been "The Summer of My Cougar Lover" the exploitative tensions within this erotic scenario, despite its many (apparently mutual) pleasures. As such, the film -- even more than the source material I suspect -- marks the peculiarly intimate damage done to Michael as a young boy/man arriving to emotional/sexual maturity through the vehicle of this relationship. As the film shows Michael parsing through this damage of this experience, the film is at its most compelling and gratifying. Yet, truth be told, I wasn't especially emotionally affected, even as I was consistently fascinated. A fascinating, artfully made film, loaded with impressive performances.

Bad Influence (1990) +/-

A big80s neo-noir exploration of the perils of masculine intimacy. The scenario is a Brat Pack Fight Club: James Spader (I'll dispense with character names as the characters are subsumed within the b-list celebrity personae of their enactors) is a striving finance guy in LA who's on the verge of his first midlife crisis as he approaches his 30th birthday. He's freaking out about turning 30, terrified of his über-yuppie wife (Marcia Cross, looking healthy and not skinny-brittle), and mortified that he's becoming a patsy at work as he and an especially skeevy colleague are being considered for an important promotion. Enter Rob Lowe, a confident enigma who -- after rescuing Spader from a strange bar fight -- seems to know the answer to every one of Spader's existential questions. The two begin a tempestuous friendship/partnership, in which Lowe "schools" Spader on how to get what he wants -- professionally, sexually, and personally. Of course, along the way, Lowe reveals himself to be something of a sociopath and Spader finds himself totally enmeshed in all kinds of sticky problems (including dead bodies). The rest of the film tracks Spader's anxiety as he tries to outwit/outplay/outlast Lowe in their noirish "game" of cat-mouse. The film is, in many ways, a hoot. The landscape of Los Angeles (if I am recalling things correctly, this film is referenced repeatedly in LA Plays Itself) acts as a curiously depopulated, dystopic urban landscape. There's some racial panic, a lot of gender panic, and a good deal of panicked acting to keep things entertaining. What I found most compelling about the film is that it operates as a masculine courtship narrative. Spader's anxieties about living the life scripted for him (good job, good marriage, etc) collide with the two contrasting models of masculine intimacy: the relationship he has with his brother, which is full of affection and trust but doesn't DO anything to make his life better; and the thrilling contrast of the relationship Spader discovers with Lowe. They didn't have the word in 1990, but when Spader develops a "mancrush" on Lowe, his life changes immediately. Through Lowe's Alex, Spader's Michael is reintroduced to the thrill of discovering new aspects of himself, as well as the potential for unknown pleasures and excitements. Yet, at the same time, what Lowe and Spader have together is an intrinsically incriminating intimacy. Spader's Michael could, potentially, get in a lot of trouble if any of this goodtimes with Lowe's Alex are discovered. In some ways, I might argue that Bad Influence follows what we might call a "down-low" narrative, in which the exhilaration and danger found through macho flirtations and intimacies are counterposed to the respectably masculine responsibilities of public life. Basically, once Spader's Michael "falls in" with Lowe's Alex (and especially after they see each other having sex and start wearing each other's clothes), the threat to Spader's Michael is that his new secret life might be discovered. In only the most oblique, but nonetheless most compelling ways, it's a "closet" thriller, in which the narrative tensions are derived from the threat of intimate revelation. Spader's Michael is terrified that his private actions with Lowe's Alex will be publicly revealed, that the depth of the intimacy of his relationship with Lowe's Alex will not be explainable. This is also why narratives like Fight Club and Strangers on a Train always operate from a different core charge than, say, comparable surrogation narratives centering around women. In, say, Single White Female or The Hand That Rocks The Cradle or Rebecca, the threat is of a kind of erasure, where the ominous figure (either the new friend or the absent predecessor) stealthily overtake the life of the central character, until she must fight back and protect her own integrity/personhood. In Fight Club or Strangers on a Train or Bad Influence, the threat embodied by the ominous new character is not so much about identity dissolution/displacement but more about the threat of revealing a core truth about the male protagonist. He's consented to reveal his true desires to this other man, and now this other man can use that "secret" to compel him to do terrible things. They're both queer narrative structures, but distinct in gendered terms. And that's what I think I enjoyed about Bad Influence, seeing Rob Lowe as the embodiment of the perils of masculine temptation. And even though Lowe is often horribly not good in certain moments (the accents, puh-leeze), he's great on the whole: the camera adores his embodiment of pretty, giddy dissipation and he inhabits the character with a delightfully thoughtless glee. He's a delight to watch here, both because he's so good and because he's so bad. Spader's fine, and haunting imagery punctuates the film. (Terrorizing the donut shop man while Spader in the bunny mask hops around is just gross, and so early90s urban dystopia.) Not a great, or even good, film -- just fabulous trashy fun.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008) -

At once appallingly bad and delightfully brain-numbing. This exuberant "conclusion" to the hugely popular trilogy brings the tv-movie phenomenon to the big screen with decidedly mixed results. The basic conceit of the franchise -- that the contest over "who rules the school" between the familiar factions of The Brains and The Brawns can only be resolved through elaborate musical production numbers -- guides the proceedings here, albeit with the stakes somewhat heightened as the central romance between Troy (a winning Zac Efron) and Gabriella (a wan Vanessa Hudgens) is threatened by the geographical trauma of college. Moreover, our charismatic protagonist is forced to consider a choice between basketball and theatre. What oh what will he do? HSM3 is, however, a complete fabulation, blithely divorced from such banal realities like school calendars (a 3-week college orientation during the school year?), financial aid (targeted scholarships capable of footing the bill at Yale, Stanford, Julliard, or Berkeley?), and interstate road travel (that truck made it from ABQ to Palo Alto in less than a day?). But, upon brief reflection, I realized that HSM3 is a franchise that shares a good deal in common with James Bond: the thinnest narrative thread, itself an implausibly grandiose conceit, gathers a collection of eye-popping set pieces which are largely forgotten and which only serve to move the plot forward in the simplest of ways. I found this comparison helpful, in that it helped me to appreciate the pleasures of HSM3 as something other than a broadway musical aesthetic (ie. in which the musical moments are transcendent moments in which the feeling reaches a height which can only manifest through the convergence of song and dance). In this kind of musical, the musical numbers are not so much about character, story or emotion but are instead the sissy/princess equivalent of a car chase. Thrilling, fun, forgettable -- all about the eye-popping spectacle, ideally leaving the audience to catch their breath during the subsequent dialog scene and ready themselves for the next explosive musical interlude. Following this formula, HSM3 is generally effective. (The only really unfortunate piece is that the musical is generic and uninteresting, so much so that it's nearly impossible to discern one song from the other, let alone remember a melody or lyric after the spectacle has finished.) The other really unfortunate thing: the intervening years since the first franchise's installment, as well as the amplified scale of the big screen, only serves to underscore disparities among the ensemble. Basically, Zac Efron is a star. His limits as a singer, actor and dancer are there, but he commands the screen. Watching him "opposite" Vanessa Hudgins is just sorta sad; his charisma simply dwarfs hers. (This poses something of a narrative problem, in that the Gabriella character is ostensibly the catalyst for all the social heirarchy disruption that happens in the series.) And where Zac Efron's talent and charisma have grown with, even matured with, him as the series has progressed, Corbin Bleu's has not -- Bleu's competent and charismatic, but seemingly stuck in an increasingly ill-fitting adolescent mode while Efron wears his mild maturity (both physically and persona-wise) with an easy grace. Among the ensemble, Lucas Grabeel continues to carry an impressive intelligence, wit and spark in what is an incoherent character. Likewise, Ashley Tisdale is a delightful comedic presence, clearly capable of handling much better material. The rest? Appealling but forgettable. I'm really glad I saw this film on the big screen, even though my screening circumstances -- among a near-capacity crowd at the dollar theatre -- only made the gaps in the spectacle more conspicuous. (During nearly every dialogue scene, the sound of mewling newborns and infants inspired me to lean over to my screening partner and whisper: High School Musical makes small children CRY!) And finally, the part I wasn't really expecting to see: this is a text with all kinds of protoqueer possibility. Of course, the Grabeel's notoriously crypto-gay character and Tisdale's drag-queen-ala-MissPiggy are obvious for the baby fags. But the part I found most fascinating is how much Bleu and Efron can be read as babydykes: their look, their relationship, their outfits. The homosocial erotics between Troy and Chad are not so much gay as they are lesbian, and it's a fascinating spectacle at times. All told, an effective franchise pic, aptly revealing both the pleasures and the limits of its formula-dependent genre.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) -

An occasionally diverting treatment of the enduringly strange Wilde tale. The scenario is haunting: a fey Victorian dandy makes a soul pact of some kind (here, it seems to be effected through an Egyptian cat statue) which permits him to remain young and beautiful, while a portrait painted of him at the height of his beauty shows all the ravages -- external and internal -- of the life he lives. The story operates at two main registers, both of which seem to be about corruption and the ambivalences of heeding one's "true" nature. On the one hand, we have the story of Dorian Gray and the ways that his fiendish pact for beauty everlasting corrodes his soul; he becomes ugly on the inside because of his single-minded devotion to external beauty. On the other, we have the story as a platform for the standard-issue Wilde character of Lord Wotton (played here by the always annoying George Sanders), the ancillary wag whose task it is to comment wickedly and cynically on the action as it unfolds. Here, Sander's Wotton is like a really nasty Jiminy Cricket for Dorian Gray (played by Hurd Hatfield in a fashion that's not unlike an animatronic wax figure). Because this is MGM, and because this is at the height of the Production Code's certitude, the film struggles a touch to maintain its sense of internal horror and perversity. Basically, the most compelling aspects of the story are glancingly referenced, often in voiceover or "did you hear what happened" kind of episodes. The figure of Dorian Gray is an extraordinary enigma: does his charisma cause folks to reveal their "true" natures to him, thus sealing their doom as he uses the information against them? Or is it something else? Likewise, I'm fascinated by this film's depiction of Dorian Gray as a central figure in the neo-homosexual demimonde of elite England. Basil Hallward's studio is a veritable treasure trove of queer tropes -- in which both Lord Wotton and Dorian remain quite fluent -- and the subsequent suicide of the promising scientist seems tragically, inevitably queer. Indeed, the hint of lurid scandal that haunts Dorian seems all about the gays. However, here, the film carefully frames it -- in aptly Production Code logic -- as Dorian reaping the consequence of his devastation of Sibyl Vane (Angela Lansbury, in a charming performance). Sibyl is Dorian's first true victim, the conquest through which Dorian "learns" the pleasures of being vicious, and this film depicts Dorian's dissolution as the payback for his destruction of Sibyl. MGM contract players Donna Reed and Peter Lawford are pleasant and appealing as the young lovers nearly caught in Dorian's snare. (Lawford is so CUTE!) But the film struggles a little to sustain the perverse suspense necessary to be a genuine thriller. The film does nice stuff with the gimmick of presenting the portrait in lurid technicolor (while the rest of the piece is lusciously glossed in black/white neo-gothic/noir). I also love the staging of Sibyl Vane's venue -- The Two Turtles -- and the curiously queer aspects of her brother the sailor. I'd love to see a better adaptation of this story, one that really traverses the polymorphous perversity of the narrative while also maintaining a genuine tension (that may or may not be in the source material). A fascinating, if lugubrious, cinematic adaptation of a hauntingly strange narrative.