StinkyBits

The King's Speech (2010)

2010-12-27T17:51:00.002-07:00

A surprising film. More fun and more absorbing and more moving than I might have expected. I expected to be good in a "what's on PBS this Sunday night" kind of way but found this film to have an emotional immediacy that proved to be totally surprising. Generally i don't have an emotional reaction to a film in its first moments but here I was actually and honestly moved -- to the edge of tears -- in the opening scene. That scene -- in which the Duke of York struggles to deliver an address to a crowd of people in a stadium and listening throughout the empire via wireless -- to convey the shame at root of what is the king-to-be's struggle throughout the film. His struggle, his shame, his terror -- all were utterly palpable in a way that, while not subtle, made the predicament become immediately real to me. Thus, I responded with forceful empathy from the outset of the film. Colin Firth does the work of the role with charismatic humanity -- developing the king's nasal reedy vocality while also conveying a forcefully genteel masculinity. He's a strong man hobbled by circumstance and this comes through powerfully in this opening scene. (Gratefully, the film chooses to begin with the Bertie, the Firth character, rahter than with Lionel, the Geoffrey Rush character. Both the scripting and the performance of the Lionel character proved a bit harder sell for me, so I am glad that the film anchored itself so deftly within the character and struggle of Firth's Bertie.) I didn't realize until I was doodling the notes on the above film doodle that the film is constructed as perhaps the first Merchant-Ivory/BBC entrant into one of the most successful recent genres of American film: the bromantic comedy. Indeed, this film is most essentially a love story -- of the unlikely, transformative and redemptive friendship of between the man who would be king and a brewer's son from the Australian outback. The narrative is simply how a man could barely speak became the orator whose words guided the British people through the darkest hours of war. That narrative hook ups the stakes for the story -- it MATTERS that Bertie learns to speak with/through his stammer. But the heart of the move comes from the struggle of these two men becoming friends. In true RomCom tradition, the film even gives us the post-breakup montage sequence in which each is depicted as being miserable without the other after some ridiculous fight. And it is the film's adherence to romantic comedy genre formulations that delivers the least effective and most manipulative sequence (the one in which Lionel's lack of credentials is revealed as a betrayal of trust). It's an unnecessary wrinkle, one seemingly utilized by the film to ratchet up additional emotional tension just as the historical details threaten to overtake the film. But it's a brilliant move by the filmmakers, really, to make this not as a buddy movie (those typically need a common obstacle -- like "the man" -- to work) but to imagine it as a bromantic comedy. And I do think that genre choice makes it a crowd pleaser as well as crack for anglophiles.

But what I think hooked me emotionally was not the friendship story but this as a narrative about fear. Bertie's stammer literalizes the way that unconfronted fear can paralyze even the most formidable of creatures. The film does edge a teensy bit toward psychobabble but the film also develops the peculiar lives of the royals as something to empathize with. (Usually only romance does this in the movies, the queen can't marry the one she loves blah blah.) Here, though, the royal must develop emotional insight. ANd this is where the character of Bertie really sang to me -- his stammer literalizes his experience of fear and connects it to his anxieties about not performing to expectations. Thus, for all his strength of intellect and principle and character, Bertie is ever certain that he's doing it wrong and is confident in his fundamental inadequacy. It's a powerful character arc, one that spoke immediately to me in that opening scene, and which then had purchase upon my emotions throughout.
In terms of performances, Colin Firth delivers an expertly charismatic performance -- compelling, focused, amplifying the core integrity necessary to the role. What I so admired about this performance (something missing from Firth's exceptional work under Tom Ford last year) is that this performance harnessed Firth's gift for witty self-deprecation, which he deploys here to convey both Bertie's humility and his arrogance. It's what elevates Firth's work here and, in some ways, showcases all of his strengths as an actor in a way that A SINGLE MAN did not. Geoffrey Rush (who I never can quite get myself to like that much) is fine in the role. I was struck that the character of Lionel really does well utilizing Rush's sloppy and vaguely reprobate presence in service of the character. The problem I had here, as I often do with Rush's work, is that everything was spot on yet I somehow missed the sense of personhood in the role. All the details were right, and he seemed to be inhabiting the character, but Lionel seemed always a character and never a person. Helena Bonham Carter gave a delightful return to old kind of performance. In the first decade of her film career, HBC seemed most adept at amplifying the contemporary registers within her corseted characters, retrieving them from the Royal Shakespeare embalming school and delivering them with a new wave-ish verve to contemporary audiences. And that's what she does here with the Queen Mum -- an acerbic, sharp, loving and present wife to a husband who rightly adores her. It's fun to see HBC back in these wigs, after so much Tim Burton and Harry Potter inspired ravings/rovings and HBC does deliver a vivid and clarifying performance. The film is really, pretty much, only about the three of them. But Guy Pearce does a nice job as Edward/David and Derek Jacobi is perfectly obsequious as the archbishop. Jennifer Ehle is great as Lionel's wife and a raft of capable and charismatic younger actors do well as the kids in each of the respective houses. Claire Bloom is brilliant as Queen Mary (her reaction when Pearce collapses with grief in her arms is stunningly funny). Only Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill is off-pitch, but that might be because I just never like watching him.
I should also note that the sound design in this film is really deft. I don't know much about such things but it worked in ways I found exhilarating. Also, the wall in Lionel's shabby studio -- a ruined wall, bearing the bruises of too many wallpapers -- is probably the coolest looking wall I've ever seen and one I want for my dream house. So there. That's it. I liked THE KING'S SPEECH -- much much more than I expected.

Mi Vida Loca (1994) +

2010-10-23T21:14:00.004-06:00

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.23.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

A startling, direct portrait of life for young women in Chicano Echo Park during the late 1980s and early 1990s. I remember not loving the film as much as I wanted to when I first saw it during its theatrical release. I recall craving the film to address lesbian possibility for the gang women featured. I also remember thrilling to the scenes when the women gathered for the council. In that scene the principals and recurring/supporting characters appear alongside women who are clearly non-actors and the scene carries a curious authenticity as a result. A few thoughts on the film. FIRST: It's a brilliant screenplay, I think. The diction and syntax are really quite extraordinary. The actors have screen presence but they aren't always the most dynamic performers, which doesn't make the screenplay necessarily come to life. But listening to the screenplay this time through I was very impressed. NEXT: I didn't remember Jacob Vargas from this, nor did I notice Salma Hayek, though she does pop from the screen here. NEXT: The film walks a really fine line between placing the women at center while also marking the ways that relationships with men configure their sense of self and sense of possibility. I really admire the feminist filmmaking I see here. The way Anders maintains the centrality of female experience even in contexts where the guy stuff is much more spectacular. The way the men are filmed, too, suggest a really compelling feminist filmmaking sensibility at work. It's quite extraordinary, I think. And one more thing on this -- I like how men are dogs, good guys, and doofuses but no one is necessarily demonize, not even Ernesto. NEXT: I love the way this film caused me to think about the funeral as a device in films featuring female ensembles. How the funeral is a narrative device particularly suited to feminist/female-centric projects...not exclusively of course...but a remarkably efficient scenario within which female-centric relationship networks and community can be mapped. Makes me want to build a list of funeral women. But I'm not good at lists. FINALLY: I'm still perplexed by my earlier ambivalence about this film. It's an encounter with my more selfish filmgoer self, where I think I wanted the film to give me particular pleasures and I was predisposed to resenting it if it didn't go far enough in the ways I wanted to. Seeing this film tonight, though, i was impressed by just how extraordinary a film it is. Have we seen such a film since? In which women's community is the focus, rather than a dyadic love story? I'm now a fan of the film, in ways I don't think I expected. I see the seams in the film, but I don't care because for some reason now I can see what the film is actually trying to accomplish (where before I think I wanted to be delighted by the chola camp of it all). A worthwhile film of distinguished accomplishment; one of the rare early 90s indies that comes off even better now than it did then.

The Strange One (1957) +

2010-10-23T13:21:00.001-06:00

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.23.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

A controversial hazing incident instigates this fraught exploration of power, privilege and masculinity a Southern military college in the 1950s. With Ben Gazzara in the central role, the dialogue-driven film (adapted from a play END AS A MAN) is redolent with the neo-Freudian erotic subtext that so delighted denizens of the Actor's Studio. The film, most simply, offers a portrait of a dormitory bully with the unlikely name of Jocko De Paris.

Gazzara's Jocko is the bully who rules the school right under the noses of the actual military folk running the place (which is clearly modeled on The Citadel). He's basically Mary Tilford in college ROTC garb. The machinations of the plot are fairly simple. In the earliest scenes, Jocko stages an elaborate scene -- involving alcohol, gambling, and a fight -- all to implicate two vulnerable first year cadets in his actual vengeance scheme of getting the Major's son expelled from the academy. It's a complicated ruse, and the first third of the piece is devoted to unraveling Jocko's actual intentions (and also revealing how he staged the ruse to incriminate everyone but himself). The remainder of the piece follows one of the recruits as he struggles to reconcile what he's done with what he incrementally understands about Jocko, which all leads toward the requisite humiliation scene, wherein Jocko's own scheming machine mobilizes against him and ousts him from the academy. The piece is interesting to me for a three main reasons. First, the reason I got the dvd in the first place, is that Jocko De Paris and the boys-school hazing scenario is fraught with not especially oblique late1950s homoeroticism. Second, the film offers a really interesting pivot in the popular understanding of youth criminality/misbehavior, especially vis a vis the Red Scare. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the film really displays what was compelling about the American method, via Ben Gazzara's extraordinary performance as Jocko. They all blend together in some ways but I'll try to take them in turn.

First, the homoeroticism is WILD. There's an incredible secondary character Perrin "Cockroach" McKee, played here by Paul A Richman. Richman's Cockroach is a simpering sissy -- a self-proclaimed "creative writer" who worships Gazzara's Jocko and professes to using Jocko as the model for the hero of his own novel "Nightboy."

Jocko and Cockroach sustain a fraught flirtation, with Gazzara's Jocko realizing that Cockroach can bring him down. (Cockroach follows him and knows everything Jocko's done. Moreover, Cockroach has little allegiance to the institution that berates and belittles and excludes him at every turn.) Gazzara's Jocko strings Cockroach along, in part to cover his bases but also, it seems clear, because he actually enjoys being worshiped even/especially by someone he holds in contempt. It's a fascinating dynamic, nearly apologetic in its twisted sadomasochistic dimensions.

Richman's Cockroach is, quite simply, played as a simpering fag but -- strangely -- he's also depicted as somewhat strong, clear and confident in his identification as an outsider. He craves an intimate relationship with Jocko ("All I want is to have your confidence and your friendship") but he's also queerly confident as an outsider. Richman's performance is at times cringe-inducing, but there's an authenticity within the character and characterization that I found surprising.

THE STRANGE ONE's Cockroach is not that different than GLEE's Kurt Hummel or WEST SIDE STORY's Anybodys. The role is punctuated by humiliations but there's a resilience and an autonomy that I found curiously compelling in the character, which I did not suspect. I also did not expect the play to be so much like all the other "teen fabulist" stories I talked about in my Modern Drama article. I am relieved that this piece is set in a college setting, else I might have been anxious that i did not know to include it in the essay, but thankfully these guys are college age and therefore outside the perameters I set for my teen fabulists. But the story operates on many of the same levels, so typical of homsex stories in the McCarthy era, in that it pursues the knowability of truth and the ease with which malevolent figures can twist the truth of even the most transparently noble and worthy characters. The whole dramatic scenario is impelled by someone being cruelly punished for doing the right thing. What becomes interesting, though, is how this piece ends up moving toward a grassroots/vigilante reprisal against Jocko and how the narrative endorses the overthrow of Jocko as tyrant (notably by revealing Jocko's cowardice in a faux-lynching scene). The piece is really interested in conspiracy and that fascination shifts the register both of what Jocko's abuse means and what his extralegal expulsion from the community accomplishes. It's a really wacked out meditation on the operation of social power. Finally, Ben Gazzara. He is such an emblematic example of the possibilities and the limits of the American method. Gazzara's performance as Jocko is indelible and charsimatic, utterly believable and utterly captivating. Yet its also a cipher. Basically, what I learned about the method from Gazzara's performance is that it's not actually about revealing the character's motives at all. Rather those motives become the wave upon which the character -- as a compelling presence BEING in the moment -- rides through the script. I have no idea WHO Gazzara's Jocko is but I get an absolutely clear sense THAT Jocko is WHAT he is. Basically, the technique that Gazzara and Brando distilled in ways better than anyone invites us to be fascinated with these extraordinary creatures. Not characters we are to understand, but creatures we are to experience. And Gazzara is brilliant at that here, even though his work tells me little about Jocko's motives. I don't understand Jocko much at all but I do get an extraordinary experience OF Jocko from Gazzara's experience. I wish I could explain this more precisely but that's what I've got. Gazzara's utterly fascinating here, but I still don't think he's an especially interesting actor.

And that's the limit of the Method -- it's often fascinating but often less than satisfying, from an audience's point of view. (A quick aside: one of the devices the film uses to amplify Jocko's difference is to remind us that he's Italian which as it goes and goes serves to remind us that he's not normatively masculine, that his masculinity is not the sort of masculinity celebrated in the military traditions guiding this academy. This racialization of Gazzara's character is amplified by the piece's ending wherein, after leading him to believe that he's being "lynched" in a way, the vigilantes deposit him in the "colored" car of a passing train so that he might leave the community. Thoughout the film, there are incongruous moments when the absurdities of the military man-boys behavior is observed bemusedly by black women and children. And the film punctuates the fact of Jocko's expulsion from the fraternity of the school by having him "come to" in front of an older black woman who looks at him with a banal blank expression. This moment seems to underscore his expulsion from white normative masculine privilege in a particularly unsubtle way. All told, THE STRANGE ONE is indeed a strange one, but one that remains utterly fascinating as a document of all kinds of cultural and aesthetic trends on stage and screen in the 1950s. I sorta already love it and am so glad (after holding a netflix copy of it hostage for more than a year) that I finally forced myself to watch it.

Jack Smith & The Destruction of Atlantis (2006) +

2010-10-22T13:17:00.010-06:00

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.22.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

An enthralling homage to one of the most notorious and legendary experimental filmmakers cum performance artists of the twentieth century. Mary Jordan's film is presented as a documentary portrait and it's an apt tagline. This film's primary project, it seems, is to introduce the extraordinary Jack Smith as a person and as an artist to a whole bunch of people (not unlike myself) who mostly know him (if they know him at all) because he made a film called "Flaming Creatures." The film neither defends nor critiques Jack Smith but, instead, through a captivating meld of experimental montage and deftly integrated talking heads develops a thorough and at time discomfiting portrait of Jack Smith's extraordinariness. Indeed, the main "takeaway" from this film is a clear appreciation of just how influential Smith was on more known figures and movements (most notably Warhol, Cindy Sherman, John Waters, etcetera). Smith did it all and, in most cases, did it first. Yet the film does a nice job of attending to Jack Smith as "self-absorbed ass" as well. I came away with nothing but admiration and affection for Smith, and feel I have a much deeper appreciation of the genealogy of some of my most treasured late 20th century innovators (Waters and Charles Ludlam among them) but I'm also clear that, at some point, Jack Smith took that fateful left turn to Crackpotville. (At some points, I was a bit overwhelmed by just how much he reminded me of one of my dearest friends who, like Smith, is living in squalor in great mistrust of the way that the art world works.) But this film offers glimpses to rarely seen bits of the Jack Smith archive and gathers an exciting assemblage of his surviving collaborators. Several key themes: I love hearing Smith talk about the "baroque" -- which, to my ears, sounds like a mix of postmodern bricolage cut with DIY punk aesthetic, all avant la lettre; it's a great reminder of the art aspiration of the repurposing aesthetic. I'm also struck by Jack Smith the performance artist--living life as performance but also as emphasizing the creation of the work as the source of its meaning, in an almost Pollockian way. The tragedy, of course, comes in Smith's concomitant hostility to consumer capitalism and thus his refusal to "finish" any work, as an activist/artistic refusal of permitting himself and his work to become products. One talking head considers this as a signal of Smith's artistic purity. I don't know that I'd take it there, but it does signal some of the core precepts of what becomes "performance" in performance studies and I can see just how significant Jack Smith was and is as a (tacit) influence on subsequent generations. For example, I will now never think of Divine being raped by the lobster without contemplating the lobster as a symbol of captialism in a Jack Smith sense. As a film, Mary Jordan's work amplifies the formal and cultural work done by Smith's stuff in a way that seems to be both very respectful and deeply honest. This is a "warts and all" portrait and it's power -- both as a story and as a cinematic experience -- derives from that. An utterly captivating portrait of an artist who's influence we feel nearly every day but who's name goes largely unmentioned.

Training Rules (2008) +

2009-05-04T23:03:00.006-06:00

A compelling and poignant account of the decades of homophobic discrimination within the Penn State Women’s Basketball program during the years in which the team and the were program led revered coach, Rene Portland (who insisted “No Drinking! No Drugs! No Lesbians!”). Professionally filmed and edited. Generally well executed. Utterly conventional in style and structure. Stylistically, the film feels more like a television documentary (or an extended series on something like HBO Real Sports) than a more cinematic one. The six athletes profiled offer a productively diverse glimpse into the impact of the discrimination (the activist, the one whose life was nearly ruined, the former closet case, the straight one) but the film suffers for its singular focus/emphasis on the program at Penn State. Some might fault the film for not giving voice to “the other side” of this conflict, but what bothers me more is lack of a more meaningful national context for Penn State. The story feels at times like a (well-earned) hatchet job on Rene Portland, while only glancing toward the other sports or other programs and they way lesbians have been discriminated there as well. My favorite moments in the film reached toward some compelling, unexplored aspects of homophobic discrimination in women's sport (1: the discussion of "ponytails" and the shifting gender styles of women's athletics; 2: the reference to men coaching women's teams as a way of guarding against lesbians in the game). I love documentaries about lesbians in sport; I just wish they didn't all have to be so darn conventional. An important story/history competently conveyed, but lacking both the depth and breadth to really make it great.

88 Minutes (2007/8) -

2009-02-20T20:59:00.002-07:00

A stunning wrongheaded concoction posing as an "adult" thriller. Al Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist whose carefully crafted professional persona casts a long shadow. He's a famous provider of "expert testimony" who regularly makes the rounds of the television talkshow circuit. He also teaches an elite seminar at an apparently major university. And, as the film begins, he's the subject of a gaslighting by an anonymous stalker who keeps promising that he'll die in eighty-eight minutes. (The basic shtick is that one of Gramm's most high-profile convictions -- a serial rapist/murderer whose conviction rested almost exclusively upon evidence provided by Gramm -- is coming up for execution, occasioning a new round of scrutiny for this controversial conviction.) So, the story basically goes: a new batch of murder's matching the profile of the incarcerated killer begin popping up around town. The kicker is that all the victims happen to be young women in Jack Gramm's life. At the same time, the convicted killer is hollering once again about his innocence. Together, these three circumstances begin to cast suspicion on Jack just as his day starts becoming really complicated when he begins receiving cell phone calls from a mysterious voiced man who claims that Gramm will be dead in eighty-eight minutes. So, the narrative must maneuver all of these plot points -- exonerate Jack, reveal the perpetrator of the hoax, kill a couple more women along the way to keep things "interesting", blahblahblah. At center is Al Pacino in a giant wig, huffing and puffing his way through various close calls. The cast around him (Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Benjamin McKenzie) all are foils, alternately doubting Gramm's innocence even as their own guilt at the possible gaslighter opens and closes at arbitrary intervals. I found that I felt mostly sorry for this talented youngish cast, who (inevitably) hopped on board this ridonkulous project for the chance to work with Pacino. But a lot of good it does them. Some try their best to do good work (Witt, Brenneman, Forsythe) and come out relatively unscathed, while others provide proof of just how much they can (and cannot) do. (Truth be told, Sobieski does give Pacino a run for the "worst" acting in this movie, though the disaster of her performance is less tragic than that represented by his.) The real problem is that the film has no idea what it wants to be. It's really the kind of movie Michael Douglas might have starred in back in 1996 but, with Pacino in the lead role, there seems to be a greater sense of reach in the film but little intelligence, insight or irony to back it up. (A cynical "twist" toward the end -- in which Gramm's ethical vagaries are confirmed -- does little to amplify the emotional or moral significance of this utterly derivative conceit.) And every time we get Neil McDonagh on screen, it's a confirmation of how (a) utterly conventional this story is and (b) nobody but McDonagh knows how to play this kind of tripe. When he's on, it's fun. When he's gone, it's deadly dull -- by turns sluggish and silly. It's a genre piece done arty. Kitsch without enough cleverness/artistry to take it into the realm of camp/cheese. But with enough lurid, default misogyny to make the whole enterprise feel gross. Like Pacino's tanning booth face and Elizabeth Taylor wig.

For The Bible Tells Me So (2007) +

2009-02-20T12:58:00.001-07:00

An entirely lucid and utterly careful examination of the biblical basis of anti-gay rhetoric, sentiment and activism -- offered from the perspective of a group of families whose own views and activism within the church has shifted (albeit to varying degrees) as a direct result of loving a gay child. The film is not so much an expose of the radically arbitrary ways the bible is used to support and foment anti-gay sentiment (though, with the support of a diverse array of biblical experts, it does that too) but mostly an account of the various ways evangelical protestant families have made it "through" the challenges of loving a gay child. The families are a diverse lot -- a religious mom who shuns her lesbian daughter until that daughter's suicide transforms the surviving mother into a PFLAG activist; Senator Dick Gephart's maneuvering of the private/public challenge when his adult daughter comes out; two parents uncertain about their own feelings and beliefs when their attractive teen son comes out in high school; a mother and father's decision to love their daughter while disapproving of her life; the experiences of parents who are in their 70s and 80s when their son becomes the first avowedly gay Episcopalian bishop -- and this works to the films advantage, as the stories in concert demonstrate the particularities of each persons struggle reconciling homosexuality and faith. The film also feels very much like the kind of story one could show one's family with relatively little concern. An admirable piece of documentary filmmaking built around the project of awareness.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) +

2009-02-14T21:26:00.007-07:00

A sweet, simple teen romantic comedy with a distinctively contemporary verve. Michael Cera and Kat Dennings play the title characters. Cera's Nick is a painfully romantic kid, who's stuck in a swoonpit for his ex-girlfriend Tris (Alex Dziena giving an empathetic performance in the bitch role) even as she's moved on. Dennings's Norah is a "not high school pretty" and painfully intelligent girl who's burdened with big boobs and a famous/powerful father. This combination of features has cultivated an unhelpful cynicism in Norah, who regards any boy's interest with a weary wariness. Nora's ex-boyfriend -- a delightfully smarmy Jay Baruchel as the lead singer in an Israeli rock band -- embodies the worst of both of the mercenary attractions to Norah, and it's compelling to watch Dennings's Nora inhabit the unpleasantness of his attention. (What I like about the framing of this romance is that we see both Nick and Norah's humiliations in not letting go of these awful exes not as simply pathetic, but as a gesture of how hard it can be to let go of what you know. For both characters, the ex relationships are mostly verification that it is possible for someone to love them a little and it's really terrifying to let that go.) But I also like the framing of the story for the way these characters inhabit a complex social universe that's both plausible and delightfully fantastic. I love the simple high school conceit with music as the currency of self (Nick's been making Tris excellent mix cds, which Norah's been rescuing from the trash at school -- so Norah's sorta fallen in swoon with Nick long before she ever met him). I also like how Nick and Norah both have unlikely friends. Nick's the straight-boy mascot of a batch of cute, wackogay rock boys. Norah's best friend is the proto-alcoholic basket case Caroline (played brilliantly by the hilarious Ari Graynor, who inhabits a humiliation narrative with a just light enough touch to keep it from getting entirely sad). There're great comic set pieces, a "fantastic" (both in the most excellent and utter fantasy sense) culmination of Nick and Norah's romance, some genuinely funny/strange moments, and a sense of giddy adventure that comes from the "crazy NY night" conceit. In many ways, it's a perfect teen romantic comedy -- loaded with attractive kids giving sweetly silly performances while also being allowed to be smart at the same time. I guess I liked it for being everything I like/d about Juno (without the supposedly elevating gravitas) and also being everything I like/d about Can't Hardly Wait (without cloying Hollywood veneer). A genuinely sweet and genuinely funny and basically smart teen romantic comedy. They really should make more of them.

Coraline (2009) -

2009-02-14T18:05:00.003-07:00

A visually compelling parable about the temptations of ingratitude -- the perilous pleasures derived when you're certain that your life sucks. The film focuses on a little girl named Coraline, whose life is characterized by a constant barrage of mundane humiliations (beginning, of course, with the fact that no one seems capable of calling her by her correct name, insisting to address her as "Caroline"). When she and her work-obsessed parents move into a ratty apartment building in the middle of nowhere, Coraline is certain its all part of a scheme to make her miserable and sets out plotting her escape from the dreary new place she now calls home. A mysterious neighbor boy -- who Coraline treats miserably upon their first encounter -- delivers a gift, in the form of a doll that looks remarkably like Coraline. The doll is enchanted, and soon Coraline becomes absorbed in a series of delightful adventures in an alternate universe: one where her parents dote on her, delicious food is plentiful, and both the upstairs and downstairs neighbors present marvelous entertainments solely for Coraline's diversion and amusement. At first it seems like the alternate world is solely of her own dreaming but, as Coraline becomes incrementally more miserable in her daily life, the line separating the two worlds becomes ever less distinct. Of course, there's something ominous about the alternate world -- where everyone has buttons for eyes (kuh-reepy!) -- and soon it becomes clear that something malevolent is afoot on the other side of that little door. (A miniature door is the portal between these parallel dimensions.) As the narrative proceeds, Coraline must accomplish all sorts of formidable tasks in order to rescue several spirits trapped on the other side. The narrative is a moral parable addressed to children, melding the macabre whimsy of Edward Gorey and the magical sermonizing of Shel Silverstein, Carole Kind and/or Maurice Sendak. The one thing missing is the gleeful sense of whimsical possibility that Roald Dahl was so good at, wherein the scary comingled with the silly to make for truly gratifying journey toward moral resolution. The story here -- taken from Neil Gaiman -- seems always to be an adult speaking to a kid, and though Coraline is at the center of the story, she's as annoying and unappealing as "I Don't Care" Pierre or any of the unfortunate Golden Ticket holders. Which proves a problem. I don't know why I'm to care about Coraline, or Coraline's adventures. Indeed, I really am not encouraged to have even as much empathy as I do for Edmund in the first Narnia tale. Coraline's impossible, yet she's the hero. It's a curious narrative dilemma. Visually, however, this film is a feast. Incredible visual spectacles unfold at nearly every turn, all using a delightful "repurposing" sensibility (wherein everyday objects are transformed into thrilling discoveries). Unfortunately, the visual delight -- the film looks just amazing -- doesn't do much to clarify the cynical narrative. So the whole film's a little too scary, a little too arch, and way too emotionally obtuse. I wanted to like it at every turn, but never found my way in. The vocal performances are flat (Teri Hatcher's and Dakota Fanning's especially) and the lesson of this moral parable never truly coalesce. I love genuinely scary, animated ghost stories with kid protagonists -- Monster House, as one example -- but this one seems pitched a little strangely. While there was much to admire about this film, there was little in it love.

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th (2009) +

2009-02-09T18:38:00.002-07:00

A simple, entertaining, fan-centered documentary about the phenomenon of the Friday the 13th franchise. Directors, writers, and performers all talk about their participation in the developing franchise. Their varied points of view are effectively woven together to compose an interesting synthesis of the narrative constructed by the many many episodes in the franchise. Some great details emerge -- like the sound concept behind Jason's signature stalking motif -- and some amusing descriptions of how various scenes were accomplished. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film involve everyone's theorization of "who is Jason" (given that the character has been reanimated using so many different conceits) which opens surprisingly interesting questions about the meaning of the narrative diachronically or synthetically. Mostly, however, the film works as a promotional teaser making even someone like me want to revisit all the films. Like I said, it's a fan-centered homage -- the filmmakers and stars being presented as participants in the same circuits of fan-culture as the presumed viewer of the film. But, really, quite engaging and interesting -- for a glorified DVD Special Feature. But there's a lot of material and, even for someone who fell off the Friday the 13th wagon after PartII, I found this homage to the series and its enduring pleasures to be utterly captivating.

Doubt (2008) +

2009-02-08T13:47:00.002-07:00

Upon second viewing, Doubt impresses mostly for its hermetic efficiency. Shanley has crafted a diverting bauble, a compelling hypothetical that permits its well-intentioned audience much room to rehearse its pre-existing ideas. Nothing in this film -- or I suspect the play from which it is adapted -- requires that the audience confront their prejudices and predispositions. Rather, the film instigates a gratifying kind of self-reflexivity -- a lovingly filmed scenario that permits the audience to spend time mulling over their own thoughts and convictions. This, it seems to me, is what is most surprising about the piece: it doesn't provoke, really, at all. It invites thoughtfulness, but nothing so strenuous that it might cause someone to change their minds. And most insidiously perhaps, the film actually encourages the audience toward a kind of certitude: they film/play may not say but I know for sure. Which is sorta weird, actually, to stage a piece ostensibly about doubt and yet privilege the notion that people will believe what they are inclined to believe anyway. But what the film/play/narrative truly provides is the ring, the mat, the field of battle. As I was reflecting on the film, for the purposes of Viola Davis's Supporting Actress profile, that the film's many head-to-head confrontations are like a series of arm-wrestling matches, some of which end in victory for one or the other, but all of which are incredibly captivating. It's a hoot to watch these performers play through these roles, even if the roles make little sense beyond embodying key variables in Shanley's little game of morality algebra. Notably, Streep's performance was palpably richer on second viewing. Adams's work, too, signaled easily overlooked depths in nearly every scene. Davis's work was even more impressive, for its precision and its clarity, especially -- although I found it less emotionally compelling the second time through. And while Hoffman felt less mannered this time through, I found that I was more convinced of the performance's limits this time through. What I really admired this time through though (other than the surprising vulnerability with which Streep layers each of her dragonswipes) was Shanley's homage to working class NYC culture. It's a suspect romanticization, to be sure, as it's basically what was great about NYC before white flight, but it's stylishly done here. An interesting revisit... one that I found more gratifying than I anticipated.

He's Just Not That Into You (2009) -

2009-02-06T18:17:00.001-07:00

An astonishingly tedious rumination on the contemporary courtship rituals of the privileged and attractive and heterosexual. The elaborate yet simple-minded plot is exhausting for its dependence on familiar formulas/cliches of the romantic comedy genre. Basically, this is what happens when you try to use Sex and the City's signature episode formula -- a soupy base of recognizable romantic difficulty, a heaping dollop of lifestyle porn, a dash of cute boy/man, and a garnish of flashy/pithy cameos -- and expect it to stand alone. The problem? The heart of SATC -- like Designing Women, Living Single, or The Golden Grils -- is the sustaining friendship shared among quite disparate women. Contemporary American filmmakers, however, find it really difficult to trust female friendship. So these women aren't really friends, just chattery co-workers inclined to shooting glib opinions and half-baked sympathies from their well-clad hips...or they're the other woman. Oddly, the guys in this film are pictured as having much more emotionally anchored relationships, although even those scenes are mostly scaffolding for early exposition with the relationships themselves fading as the film lumbers along. The cast is uniformly appealing. The three chattery coworkers -- 2 Jennifers and a Ginnifer -- are the most tediously scripted, and Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connelly do well reaching beyond the material to craft adequately appealing portraits of basically unappealing characters. Ginnifer Goodwin, in what is arguably the film's lead role, is way cute -- too cute actually -- for the role Drew Barrymore might have played a few years back. Unfortunately, Goodwin's performance is more annoying than endearing, largely because she's stuck playing such an emotionally monochromatic character. And I guess its the casting of this film that I find most annoying. Everyone's playing their type -- to a one this film is "perfectly" cast. You can almost imagine the screenwriters saying "we want a Jennifer Aniston type for the role of Beth" and then what happens when they get Jennifer Aniston for the role of Beth? It becomes fundamentally uninteresting because there's little discovery left to do. There's one scene in particular -- when Goodwin's Gigi has realized that Justin Long's Alex actually likes her and tell's Connelly's Janine about it -- Janine, who is supposed to be experience the incremental collapse of her marriage, immediately jumps into planning Gigi and Alex's "destination wedding." Both actresses do what they can with this scene -- Connelly playing the move as an desperate expression of Janine's deep denial, Goodwin registering the shock at her friends grasping romantic delusions. Yet the scene trucks on, the actress's "playing against the grain" doing little to actually complicate the sturdy artifice of the scene itself. And this is basically the way the whole film works. The actors's best efforts are for naught, and the film basically depends on how much you crush on the lifestyles depicted. The set decoration is glorious...straight out of dwell. Jobs are glamorous...with little work involved. And the relationships resolve as you expect them to upon first glance. Tedious, disappointing, obvious. I knew I was in trouble in the first scene when a galling "cute" joke about women's refusal to see the romantic truth literally "went to Africa" depicting tribeswomen gossiping. Dumb, racist, not funny. Then in the first real scene between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston -- the couple who's choosing not to marry NOT because of something like a political commitment to marriage equality but because a vaguely anti-establishment mistrust of marriage as an institution -- when their first real fight over the idea of marriage is staged in front of some "edgy" painting with the word "should" written on it about twenty times -- when I saw that I sorta knew that this film's notion of sophisticated/subtle was pretty dumb and that I was in trouble. Sure enough. Dumb dumb dumb. And the film uses gay men and black people as obvious props while leaving lesbians completely out of the picture. (A smarter movie -- or at least Dan in Real Life smart -- would have had one of Aniston's sisters be a happily married lesbian, her partner sitting watching sports with the other brothers-in-law or something.) But then this movie appears to have had no interest in being smart. As MrStinky noted, it's enough to make you worry about the future of the "romantic comedy"...

The Last of Sheila (1973) +

2009-02-03T22:14:00.001-07:00

An utter lark of a murder mystery, cleverly crafted by the (perhaps) unlikely screenwriting partners of actor Anthony Perkins and composer Stephen Sondheim and filmed by longtime Sondheim pal, Herbert Ross. (In short, the project is about as A-gay as any Hollywood project could get, circa 1973.) The set-up is delightfully baroque: a set-up that camps on the early 1970s fascination with all-star Agatha Christie parlor plays restaged in exotic locales; a delightedly sour tone that layers a scathing critique of Hollywood's most mercenary shallowness; and an intricate and captivating central mystery that keeps the twists coming until the final moments of the narrative. Featuring a delicious/weird cast (James Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, Ian McShane, Richard Benjamin, and James Coburn), the film surprises for the array of pleasures it assembles. You can enjoy the mystery while also delighting at the silliness of the spectacle. James Coburn is clearly having a blast, as are Cannon and Benjamin. McShane is a treat to look at. Hackett's acting her balls off, while Mason outacts everyone while barely breaking a sweat. And then there's Raquel. It will likely remain a mystery whether or not the whole character of Alice was intended as a spoof of Raquel Welch's signature style -- what I have called her "strangely passionate alacrity" -- or not. The filmmakers give poor Raquel the lamest lines, and she delivers them with a crazy sincerity that just makes me wonder if Tony, Steve and Herb weren't just pissing themselves with giggles in the editing room. It's not that they're mocking her, exactly, because there is no hint of cruelty in the film's presentation of her. Rather, it seems that they are just spooling the rope to see how far she will take it... Indeed, I wonder if this performance will emerge as one of my favorite Raquel turns in her superstar period. I'm not sure why the film remained off my radar until very recently. It's smart, weird, hilarious. Some of the casting choices are strange, and possibly attributable to the likelihood that they wanted to make this movie with their friends. (For example, Dyan Cannon is nothing in the excellent role of Christine, the ambitious Hollywood agent; she's also about years too young for the role, a hard-bitten Hollywood dame who was a secretary in the HUAC era. It's not impossible that Cannon, who would have been in her mid-teens during the McCarthy moment, might have worked in the secretarial pool at 16 but Cannon always acts like she's sixteen so we don't really get it that she and Coburn and Mason are industry peers who understand each other. I would have loved to see someone like Bacall or Stapleton in this role; would have read entirely differently.) The whole treatment of male homosexuality, too, is a fascinating glimpse into the lives folks like Ross and Perkins must have led. And while I was able to "call" most of the later twists -- the final use of the puppets; the red herrings in the first interpretation of the crime; etcetera -- the film remained a complete hoot, of the sort that I wish they made more of... I don't like reading mysteries but I sure do enjoy watching attractive, ostensibly glamorous people play at murder. And the spectacle of James Coburn in drag while wearing a monk's robes? Cuckoo crazy in only the best of ways. A lark.

Play Time (1967) +

2009-02-01T22:41:00.002-07:00

A visually stunning comic opus. Jacques Tati constructs a visual landscape -- a high modern urban maze in which his character Monsieur Hulot gets variously lost. At the same time, Tati stages the parallel story of a warm American tourist who seems as at ease within this urbanized modernity as Hulot seems flummoxed. The film is meditative in tone, even as it executes some of the most intricate and subtle comic set pieces ever stage in cinema. The palette is all steel grey, with slight variations toward the green, blue and gold, so that the occasional splash of color (the blue of the elusive businessman's blazer, the american tourists's hats, the blue of a workman's uniform) becomes almost radiant. The fabricated landscape is loaded with giant sheets of glass -- doors, walls, windows -- which simultaneously force a curious lack of privacy even as they install a new kind of estrangement. The opening sequences in the modern office building and department store are enthralling but it's not until the extended sequence in the new restaurant that the film really becomes satisfying. There's a concentrated chaos in the restaurant, which permits a kind of gratification as we follow the vast array of running gags through the skein of confusion and chaos. I've never seen a film like Tatis's Play Time. It's poignant. It's literate. It's a visual feast. It's a tough go. Yet, for the most part, it's gratifying. I think what becomes most impressive about the film, at this historical moment, is that its an utter fabrication. Most of these sets -- interior and exterior -- were built on a soundstage, to Tati's precise specification. So, as such, none of them are "real" yet neither are they CGI. There's an old school artistry to the physical comedy, I guess, when we acknowledge that this is a built environment constructed solely for the purpose of making this elaborate series of refined visual jokes. As such, I guess, I'm fundamentally impressed by this as a triumph high-modern (and also post-modern) bit of physical comedy, of prop comedy, and of comedic commentary on contemporary society. I don't have much original insight on the film really. Most of my thoughts run the conventional routes -- this bit worked better for me than that; I'd love to see it in its intended 70mm; talk about redefining what masterpiece means -- but I am really glad to have seen the film, and I suspect the bits will haunt me for some time. (And I can't believe Professor Weinstein didn't show this in City and the Arts; must not have been available or something.) But an amazing piece of cinema, the kind that broadens your vision of what cinema is capable of, even/especially without the ornamental geegaws provided by cgi (though his use of 70mm does anchor this in the history of "new" cinematic technology in important ways). Anyway. Wow.

Arab-American Comedy Tour (2006) +/-

2009-01-30T21:04:00.001-07:00

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) +/-

2009-01-30T16:49:00.002-07:00

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) -

2009-01-30T08:14:00.007-07:00

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) -

2009-01-24T16:37:00.003-07:00

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) +

2009-01-21T11:00:00.004-07:00

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) +

2009-01-20T20:59:00.001-07:00

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) +

2009-01-18T17:38:00.002-07:00

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) +

2009-01-15T23:32:00.003-07:00

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) -

2009-01-14T17:51:00.001-07:00

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) +

2009-01-10T23:15:00.003-07:00

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) -

2009-01-10T14:52:00.004-07:00

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) +

2009-01-08T14:56:00.003-07:00

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) +/-

2009-01-06T23:07:00.007-07:00

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) -

2009-01-02T09:03:00.004-07:00

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) -

2009-01-01T23:03:00.002-07:00

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.

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) +

2008-12-28T22:08:00.004-07:00

An exceptionally effective documentary profile of the brief political life of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in a major U.S. city. This documentary is about as conventional as they come. Precise narrative detailing the biographical dimensions of a historical incident, fortified by aptly chosen archival footage and diversely compelling talking heads. The first feature-length documentary on gay themes to win an Academy Award, the film is startling today both for its simple frankness and emotional immediacy. It's remarkable to witness these folks relive the experience of Harvey Milk's political ascendancy and subsequent assassination with only about 5 or so years separating them from the events depicted. Likewise, it's astonishing to see this account of gay life in the late 1970s and early 1980s and realize that AIDS is never mentioned. It's an astonishing time capsule -- a snapshot of what tragedy in the gay community looked like before AIDS took over in scripting gay male devastation. In some way, I think it was important to me, in the later 1980s, to have this film as a touchstone of how grief might serve as a politicizing touchstone. The absence of AIDS in this film also is suggestive of how distant the recent gay past was for me as a young gay man coming to intellectual and political consciousness in the later 1980s. I'm struck by how much Dustin Lance Black's screenplay for the narrative feature film Milk owes to the narrative structure of the first two thirds of Epstein's film (opening with the recorded "in the event of my death by assassination" message; the narrative of folks arriving to the memorial rally and saddened by the lack of people at city hall only to realize the vast swath just around the corner). I'm also struck by the feature film's excision of Sally Gearhart and the Chinese American guy. The feature's narrative, in addition to being much more attentive to Harvey's personal life, is also much less attentive to Harvey's apparent commitment to racial and gender equity. Seeing this film now makes me realize how much the Van Sant film really is unconsciously about white male privilege (which might be why the Diego Luna bit proves so discomfiting). What's interesting to me is how much this film registers for me now, in ways I might not have been aware in the late 1980s, as a emotionally and politically complex document of what gay politics looked like before the onslaught of AIDS. I'm also struck by how different the two most marvelous actions: the vigil and the riot. Both reactions were startling in their eloquence in 1978, but they were also novelties. By the later 1980s when I first fell in love with this film, eloquent articulations of collective grief as well as increasingly confrontational modes of political demonstration were becoming ever more the norm. The historical distance of the recent gay past. The concomitant imperative of entering such stories into the archive. It was fascinating to watch this film, having been so recently reminded of the basic contours of the story. Easily one of the most important films in my political, intellectual and academic consciousness. I'm fascinated now to troll through the special features and listen to the audio commentaries.

Absolute Beginners (1986) +

2008-12-27T20:53:00.005-07:00

An enthralling, if confounding, pastiche of a musical film. The film ostensibly tells the story of a pair lovers -- the boy a photographer, the girl a fashion designer -- and their estrangement from each other (as well as their sustaining community of outsiders) in the Notting Hill district of London in the summer months just prior to the legendary Notting Hill Riots of 1958. The film is both about this period of cultural and racial transformation in post-WWII Britain even as it is also an excavation of the anxieties of authenticity in post-punk/big80s Britain. The film riffs off every musical you might imagine: from the teenybopper rock films to Tommy to Rocky Horror to West Side Story to Michael Jackson/Madonna to the most baroque of MGM musical production designs of the 1950s. What I admired about the film though, and what sustained me through its often numbing obtuseness, was director Julien Temple's searching inquisitiveness -- the film is about the characters, about the music, about the history, about the film's contemporary moment but even more than all of that this film seems to be about the perilous adventure of making a film in the first place. In discussions of 1980s postmodernism and pastiche over the last 15 years or so, it seems the conversations too readily lapse toward the an interest in irony, especially the notion of ironic certainty as a subject position for the either artist/auteur or audience/auteur. Yet I'm reminded how that television theory book Channels of Discourse used Pee-Wee's Playhouse as its example lesson of post-modernism. And though there was much irony in all of Pee-Wee, there was -- especially in the tv show and first film -- a great deal of sincerity. And this is the aspect of postmodern pastiche that I think often gets forgotten: the reassemblage and referentiality in these pastiche productions derive as much from appreciation as it does from derision. I admired this tension in Temple's film -- there is a sincerity to the production that doesn't diminish the archness of his commentary. And this is the complexity of postmodernism that sometimes, it seems to me, gets overlooked. The film is a fascinating (and possibly failed, I'm not sure) experiment that I appreciated more and more as the film wore on. Yes, I was relieved to see it end, but even then I was stunned by the hopefulness of the its basically cynical conclusion. This, it seems to me, was the aspiration of post-modernism, to deconstruct familiar forms so that an audience's habituated reactions might be challenged and transformed. And this, interestingly enough, is what Temple's film accomplishes. I don't know that I'd recommend it, nor would I necessarily seek out an occasion to screen it again, but I do admire and appreciate the film, both as a time-capsule of a very brief moment in mainstream media production and also as a fundamentally aspirational piece of cinema-making. Temple's trying something here (just look at the care/attention to production design and choreography), something substantial and something worthwhile, and it's worth noting. Finally, I think it's important to note Temple's insistence on including queers in his vision of an urban utopia -- remember, in 1986, it was still fairly unusual to explicitly (and affirmatively) include fags/dykes in cinematic microcosms, let alone underscore queer instrumentality in sustaining diverse community. Yes, Big Jill is played in drag queen style instead of as a bulldyke, but still. I don't know. I liked this film, a lot I think, for reasons I don't entirely understand.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) -

2008-12-26T18:28:00.003-07:00

A cloying spectacle of melancholic whimsy. The conceit is simple, even simplistic. Benjamin is a boy born old, a child trapped in a old man's body. However, marvelously, as Benjamin ages, his body becomes ever more youthful. Of course, this "simple" scifi paradox obliges all kinds of narrative cleverness to facilitate a legible story. I can't even bring myself to summarize it fully. The meandering maneuvers of this film detail an epic life in John Irving style, poignant quirkiness piles atop quirky poignancy, as delightful eccentrics punctuate the life path of our putative hero, Benjamin. There's the man struck by lightning seven times, the tugboat captain who's really an artist, a lovelorn woman who almost swam the English Channel, a faith healer with a heart condition, and an African man who performed as a "pygmy" in the monkey cages at the zoo. (I knew I was in trouble when the pygmy showed up shortly after a Kipling story had been read.) So, through this pile of poignant quirk, David Fincher stitches two main narrative subthemes (the peculiar estrangement intrinsic to parental love and the devastating vicissitudes of romantic timing) within the high concept's main conceit, itself a pensive riff on the glib aphorism "youth is wasted on the young." Basically, the film is a 168 minute affirmation of the idea that spiritual maturity is defined by the capacity to acknowledge and accept loss. But to make these ostensibly "big" ideas cinematic, Fincher et al decide to make a visually sumptuous film -- an epic of implausibly enlightening beauty. Indeed, the film feels, at times, like someone decided to tell someone else's life story using only those motivational prints they sell in the skymall catalog, the ones that have some aspirational ideal ("Make It Happen!") emblazoned beneath some impossibly beautiful vista (like a climber arriving to the apex of a snowy mountain). And, after a certain point, for me, the film's slideshow of profound poignancy became merely tedious, as though I was following in the footsteps of someone else's trudge of happy destiny. In short, the film -- while often captivating -- lacked an emotional urgency and/or a compelling mystery to sustain my fascination. I just wanted the many narrative threads to resolve. Indeed, one of the inadvertent problems of the film is that it depends so much on an elaborately aged Brad Pitt for its emotional hook that the one of few genuine aspects of suspense derives from the question: when is Brad gonna get pretty? And, once he does, it becomes a fleeting disappointment as we know this "real" Brad will shortly disappear again into some other elaborate cgi/make-up apparatus. (Two other problems emerge here: one, the convergence of the "unaltered" Brad and Cate almost cheapens the rest of the film, as it seems to suggest that the true height of lived experience is one's 40s; second, the filmmaker's choice to use unaltered children instead of elaborately crafted concoctions for the last years of Benjamin's life cheats the audience of the experience of our own loss of this strange, lovely creature.) But, really, whatever. The film is an elaborate, spangly concoction. I actually quite liked the way the film approached the intimate estrangement of parental love, how parenting is always a kind of loss. But the fated, destined love affair was obvious and lame. The only thing that really pissed me off, though, was the character given to Taraji P. Henson (an instinctively maternal, religiously devoted, sassy black female caregiver named "Queenie"). The day after admiring Doubt's Mrs. Muller as a black female character nearly bereft of cliche, I'm faced with a black female character that leaves no cliche un-embraced. Taraji Henson is a brilliant, charismatic actress, a actor who is gloriously capable of adding irreverent, complicating humor to even the most boilerplate of characters. And she is utterly effective in this Mammy role. But, cripes, why must her gifts be confined to this sassy black mammy character? And why is this character/ization being so celebrated? (The audience I saw the film with giggled and guffawed at the revival meeting in a way that was just beyond uncomfortable. No other group -- not even the bohemian Greenwich village hipsters or the tugboat crew -- suffers the same degree of spectacular mockery.) Taraji Henson is waaaaaaay overdue for recognition by awards bodies but this just...unfortunate. That said, I'm impressed at how -- once again -- the two most accomplished performances in this film (Taraji Henson's and Tilda Swinton's) help to underscore what is for me the central failing of the film: its inconstant, even incoherent, tone. Henson, Swinton, and even the lightning man all remind us that this film is a whimsical fantasy, even as much of the film seeps toward lugubrious epic style. Indeed, had this film been treated as a wacky, whimsical comedy approaching profound themes, I might have really been caught in its swoon. But at it was it felt like a really long episode of Touched by an Angel, or something else brought to you by the Hallmark Hall of Fame. The film is a formidable accomplishment and (judging by the audible reaction of the audience I saw it with) the film promises to be enduring crowd pleaser. (On the way out of the theatre, I overheard three separate intergenerational clusters of female moviegoers enthusing about buying the dvd when it comes out. The men in the pissoir, on the other hand, mostly chatted about either how long or how strange the film was.) I might have liked the film had it told the same story in about half the time but no measure of miraculous hummingbirds flying could assure me that I hadn't been sold a pile of piffle under the label of cinematic profundity. Gah.

Doubt (2008) +

2008-12-25T18:49:00.005-07:00

A confounding little parable of rightness and wrongness, of doubt and certainty, sustained by an accumulation of intriguing performances. I don't know the play. I've avoided it, in part, because it has long impressed me as one of those essentially middle-brow moral puzzlers that tend to delight middle-brow theatre audiences (an impression fortified by its cinematic adaptation here). Yet I also understood that the piece provided four delicious roles for actors to really show their mettle (another impression fortified by this cinematic adaptation) as they maneuvered the uncertainty surround allegations regarding a priest's possibly inappropriate relationship with an adolescent boy (a boy who happens, also, to be the first African American student at a Catholic grammar school in New York, I think). In the pre-Oscar blur/buzz, much has been made of the three female performances, with conventional wisdom aligning fairly neatly as follows: Viola Davis is electrifying in the scene-stealing role of the boy's mother; Amy Adams is the weakest link as the nicest nun who happens to instigate the tempest in this particular teapot; and Meryl Streep is over-the-top and often off-pitch as the raging gorgon of a Mother Superior who leads the charge for removal of the offending priest. Generally forgotten amidst this rapidly consolidated commonsense is Phillip Seymour Hoffman as said priest, his stature as a "great actor" unquestioned as his performance goes relatively uninterrogated. So that's the set-up. MrStinky articulated my main reaction to the film as a story/narrative/piece of cinema when he said something to the effect of: "I loved the characters, the basic scenario, and the whole catholic thing -- but the story was weird." Ditto. Shanley, in adapting and directing this for the screen, made the basic mistake most films make when removing "idea dramas" from theatre. He took the roof off the story, opening it up in ways not as carefully calibrated. It seems to me that the finely tuned dramaturgy of the piece is one dependent on the tightness, the confinedness of the campus of the church/school/abbey/rectory. When Shanley moves beyond the hermetic seal of that zone, the results range from decidedly ok (as with the walking conversation between Streep and Davis) to just bad (the stylized enactment of the gossip sermon) -- but they rarely serve to amplify the internal tension within the narrative. In contrast, the scenes that provide a "behind the scenes" look at life within the insularity of the disparate Catholic worlds contained on that campus are often thrilling. (Especially effective is the juxtaposition of the partying priests and the ascetic nuns, while each group is at dinner.) However, even when such detail amplifies our appreciation of the cultural life of urban US catholicism just after midcentury, all such scenes end up diminishing the dramatic power of the narrative's driving question: did he do it? In giving us so much more to appreciate about this moment in US Catholic cultural life, Shanley and his ensemble inadvertently diminish the dramatic force of what is, ostensibly, the narrative's main urgency. The narrative, it seems to me, is about the stark polarity of a transcendant yes/no diverting into four competing and highly personal truths. This journey is muddied by the dimensions added to this film version, and it's a signal of the peril of adapting such intimate dramas for the screen. However, to return to the performances, I find it interesting that the performances have borne what is to my mind more than their share of fault for Shanley's misguided but understandable choices. First, I don't agree at all that Amy Adams is the weak link. I think she's absolutely perfect in the part. The role requires that Sister James be pure and simple, the embodiment of the audience's hope that faith will be enough in times of deep uncertainty. Adams is preternaturally gifted toward sweetness and she melds that talent with just the right level of complexity: her Sister James may yet be blessed with a simple faith but she's no simpleton. I personally found her absolutely lovely -- humane and human -- in the role and whatever grief she's gotten from the Oscar punditocracy is, to my mind, utterly undeserved. (Indeed, I would not be at all surprised if Adams sneaks through to snag the trophy this year.) As for Viola Davis, her performance is the true gem in this film, possibly my personal favorite bit of supporting actressness all year. Davis is absolutely good in a role that is ripe with depth, dimension and surprise -- and a startling absence of cliche -- and thus a possibly unique character/ization within the entire catalog of African American supporting actress nominations. As for Meryl: she's brilliant, utterly brilliant...smart, funny, scary, larger than life and profoundly human. As Sister Aloysius, Streep does what she did in Prada: giving us a character we think we know, delivering all the anticipated delights of this stock character with electrifying alacrity, while also startling us with just enough glimpses behind the mask. Streep's Aloysius is a larger than life broad who happens to wear a habit. It's a very interesting performance, one that will likely endure well beyond the grousing of this Oscar season. It's Hoffman (by whom, yes, I tend to be unimpressed) who is least effective here. Hoffman carries a beleaguered defensiveness in many of his roles; when he fights, he so often does so with an "ow - I can't believe you hit me" kind of pathos, and it's that quality that I find least effective in his work generally, and this role specifically. He's puddly when he should be rigid, shrill when he might be stolid. When Hoffman's Father Flynn sits at Sister Aloysius's desk, it seems more impolitic than an assertion of his own belief in his authority. I just don't "get" Father Flynn's sense of entitlement, especially over and against the authority of a mere nun, in Hoffman's performance. And Hoffman's clumsy handling of Flynn's overconfidence, it seems to me, mishandles an essential dimension of the character. So, again, Hoffman's the weak link, in my view, not Adams. Finally, even though I've yammered on way too long as it is, two more things. First, I'm not sure whether I like that the film "shows its hand" regarding Flynn's guilt or not. I really like that we get to see some of the kids, especially Lloyd Clay Brown as Jimmy Hurley and Joseph Foster as Donald Miller. These young actors are really solid in their roles, and Brown's Jimmy is a compelling presence on screen, so much so that it tips the narrative balance a little. Two potential readings emerge, which might both be right: one that Jimmy Hurley is Shanley's own autobiographical proxy (the idea being that in the film Shanley could put his own story in the film a little) and the other that Jimmy Hurley was actually the kid that Father Flynn was messing with (the idea being that the Sisters Aloysius and James have the right idea about the wrong kid). It's fascinating narrative thread, but one that confuses as much as it intrigues. Finally, Sister Aloysius's doubts: I really regret that the film confuses this scene as much as it did. My interpretation is, based on this single screening, is that Sister Aloysius does not doubt Flynn's guilt but the wisdom of her the church she has made a vow to serve. However, MrStinky was confused by this speech, hearing it as being about her doubting her certainty about Father Flynn. Both might be accurate interpretations but I'm sorry that the film lets this complexity read as confusion. It diminishes the Aloysius character in unproductive ways as it also dampens the power of the film. A fair to middling film, sustained by a collection of spectacular female performances.

Synecdoche, New York (2008) +

2008-12-20T13:14:00.003-07:00

An enthralling excavation of the delicious, taunting terror of intimacy. Charlie Kauffman's film is most basically about emotional insecurity and uncertainty. The film's protagonist Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, generous and inconspicuous in the role), is an underconfident theatre director teetering on the cusp of serious success/obscurity when his artist wife (Catherine Keener doing Catherine Keener) leaves him, taking their young daughter with her to Europe where the ex-wife achieves unforeseen, formidable acclaim. At about the same time, Hoffman's Caden is named the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant and begins an ambiguous affair with, first, the quirky box office girl (Samantha Morton, in a consistently compelling and enigmatic performance) and, second, his actress-y leading lady (Michelle Williams, absolutely brilliant at the start, fair to middling toward the end). All of this soap operatic sturm and drang is mediated by Caden's own fractured powers of comprehension. He mishears words; he doesn't always understand what he is himself saying. The character, at least at the beginning, seems always just shy of understanding the world around him. With his MacArthur genius grant, Caden commences building his masterpiece -- an epic theatrical creation that is about nothing but the competing truths in daily life. The remainder of the film -- looped as it is with the romantic sagas that mark Caden's life -- explores the collision between art and life as Caden still seeks to resolve his originary pain (the loss of his wife and daughter to a life other than his) through the new work -- and life -- he's creating. The film is beyond legible explanation. Characters refract and multiply promiscuously. Narrative threads stitch knots and braids as well as seams. The film rarely makes sense, especially as Caden gets deeper into the rabbithole of his ever-more massive creation. (He basically builds a replica of his life -- the buildings as well as the people -- within an airplane hangar and he and his collaborators compose the script each day as they rehearse.) Conceit of the whole shebang is deceptively simple: how can you fully live your life if you are constantly imagining how you might adapt and adjust it to be closer to your own ideal of truth? It's the basic problem that informs most "artist dilemma" movies yet, somehow, Kaufman maintains the emotional immediacy of his experiment in ways that are astonishing. Even as the film becomes less scrutable, and more and more meta, Kaufman and his cast are somehow able to maintain not only an emotional accessibility but also a crucial sense of personal urgency. I continued to care about these characters even though I had little affection for them and had no idea who they actually were. The film is plump with excellent supporting actresses -- Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest -- each of whom do gorgeous work. (Indeed, Keener is the only mediocre link, and that's just because she's so familiar in the role.) I also really admired Tom Noonan's work as the strange actor who takes on the role of Caden. But the thing I most admired about the film is that, even though it was a complete rabbithole, I never felt frustrated or lost (the way I sometimes do at such moments in films by, say, David Lynch or Woody Allen). I found the film consistently emotionally compelling and the culminating set of scenes in which Dianne Wiest guides Hoffman's Caden toward the acceptance of his own limited mortality were -- like Wiest -- quite simply, luminous. I didn't expect to like this film much at all, having not been much of a fan of Kaufman's previous work. (Indeed, I sometimes feel I'm the only person who was utterly underwhelmed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though I did love Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) But as a director, I found Kaufman's vision much more immediate, much kinder, and much more human than I had before. I guess I had attributed the über-clever twisty smartypantsness to him. Here, his vision is brilliantly vulnerable and it's an astonishing experience. One last bit to remember: I was amazed by the strange bits of character detail. Hope Davis crammed and blistered into shoes too small for her. Emily Watson wearing a black bra with a backless dress. Samantha Morton's Hazel wearing only jewel tones. (Of course, nearly all the women have abundant bosoms which seems less about their individual characters and more about something else entirely.) But the attention to strange, compelling detail for each of these strange, compelling characters was a thrill to observe - a signal that I was pleased to be traveling this confounding, strange and surprising cinematic journey. Mortality, intimacy, creativity -- big abstract ideas that Kaufman brings to the screen with haunting immediacy. A bizarre, generous bit of genius.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008) -

2008-12-12T18:13:00.002-07:00

A visually stylish fairy tale, laden with enough easy laughs (and easier sentiment) to maintain what is basically a tediously schematic plot. The basic scenario is simple: Jamal (played as a young adult by the appealing Dev Patel) is a kid from the Mumbai slums who has somehow landed in the "hotseat" of the Indian version of the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. As the film begins, he has been jailed under allegations that he has somehow cheated his way to the final question. Danny Boyle uses this scenario deftly. As Jamal's being interrogated by the cops, we revisit the previous nights episode via a videotape which shows Jamal answering increasingly difficult questions. The police inspector (the always better than he needs to be Irfan Khan) questions Jamal about how he knew each answer and thus, however unknowingly, solicits Jamal's entire life story (beginning with his childhood fascination with a film star and the death of his mother in a religious riot). The film thus charts Jamal's life from about the age of 6 to about the age of 12 to about the age of 18 or 19, when he see him on the game show. It's an emotionally appealing story, in the fashion of any number of life-improving reality teevee programs, with Danny Boyle's exhilarating camera work (as well as the stunning complexity of Mumbai street life) amplifying the pleasures of the story. The flashback story, however, is pretty banal. Jamal is the quiet, sensitive brother and Salim is the elder, more mercenary and more violent. Latika is the girl child, also orphaned during the religious riot, to whom Jamal becomes immediately devoted, much to Salim's annoyance. The fates of these three characters -- Jamal, Salim, Latika -- thus become entwined and the film's romantic throughline is derived from Jamal's nearly obsessive devotion to his quest to be reunited with the beautiful Latika. All kinds of awful things befall the threesome, individually and collectively, and the nodes of their story comprise the life experiences from which Jamal draws as he answers each Millionaire question correctly and which he explains to Khan's inspector (and by extension, us). It's a gloriously clever framework, one which permits all kinds of thrilling emotional and visual flourish, even as the narrative itself quickly becomes utterly unsurprising. The narrative builds to a climactic sequence in which everything -- Jamal's reconciliation with Latika, Salim's final chance to act the hero, the hope of all Mumbai -- rides on whether or not Jamal can answer his final question and thus win the million. It's not much of a spoiler to say that he does, because the film works the adrenaline of the moment in a way that reminds us -- at every step -- that this is a fairy tale. Everything resolves in a way that's ostensibly happy and the film concludes gloriously with a Bollywood-style dance number on the fateful train platform. The film is loaded with exhilarating imagery, surprising humor (I love the first node, in which the youngest Jamal suffers a poopy fate to earn the autograph of his hero) and great locations. However, as much as there was to thrill with in this film, I found most of the enterprise to be tedious. In some ways, I wanted Boyle to embrace the formula less cynically -- to really make the movie scripted by the screenplay: a Charles Dickens tale told in contemporary Bollywood colors. Instead, it seemed to me, that Boyle was trying to dress up the romance and fantasy with some "real" and "gritty" touches of the violence, degradation and inhumanities of life in contemporary Mumbai. It's not exactly that Boyle seemed to want to avoid the sentiment, but that he wanted to dress it up with gritty reality to that people didn't turn off to the sentiment itself. Which is too bad, because it's the sentiment -- the romantic fantasy -- of the story that remains the most appealing. This is an epic melodrama and the film worked best for me when it went there, unapologetically. (Indeed, the only genuinely moving moment in the film came during the final dance as images of the adult Latika and Jamal dancing were intercut with the child actors dancing as well. A simple, sentimental juxtaposition of images -- but its where the honest truth of the narrative rests, this implausible, innocent, heroic romance.) Many folks have faulted the film's final act as being a little too over-the-top, as being too obviously contrived and formulaic, and thus (nearly or actually) ruining the film's previous pleasures. However, I see this critique as verification of Boyle's savviness in tarting up the melodrama with a gritty/real/muliculti veneer -- as proof that contemporary critics/moviegoers would really not admit how much the pleasures of melodrama inform their delight at the cinema. But this is also the source of my boredom with the film: in the end, it's a tricksy gimmick of a film. Appealing, affecting, stimulating, exciting -- but a tricksy gimmick. I was ready to love Slumdog Millionaire and was dismayed by the curious ways Boyle's strategic cynicism in packaging the story diminished the full weight of this epic, formulaic, brazenly sentimental melodrama.

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

2008-11-29T22:25:00.004-07:00

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) +

2008-11-28T12:14:00.005-07:00

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) +

2008-11-22T17:26:00.002-07:00

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) -

2008-11-18T21:34:00.003-07:00

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) +

2008-11-17T20:31:00.004-07:00

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) +

2008-11-16T22:47:00.003-07:00

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) +

2008-11-16T18:45:00.002-07:00

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) +

2008-11-16T18:31:00.004-07:00

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) -

2008-11-15T20:54:00.003-07:00

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) +/-

2008-11-15T17:39:00.002-07:00

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) +

2008-11-15T16:48:00.003-07:00

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) +/-

2008-11-15T16:46:00.007-07:00

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) -

2008-11-15T08:53:00.003-07:00

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) +

2008-11-04T19:36:00.003-07:00

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) -

2008-11-02T07:35:00.002-07:00

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) +

2008-11-01T14:33:00.004-06:00

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.

Carrie (1976) +

2008-10-28T20:09:00.002-06:00

What to say about this movie...this movie that is a component part of me. Two things come to mind. First: Every time I watch this I'm reminded how much I adore Sissy Spacek's performance...funny, sweet, real, terrifying. There are some imperfections along the way but jeepers. She's good. Second: This film may well be one of the foundational films for my obsession with supporting actressness. There are just so many excellent actresses at the edges...I could likely devote a profile to each of them. Piper Laurie and Betty Buckley and Amy Irving, of course. (Each time I watch this I realize, as something of a surprise, just how good Amy Irving is. The film would simply not work without the emotional clarity established by her work in the role.) But in addition to the obvious contenders, I also adore Nancy Allen as the awful Chris, not to mention the astonishing inclusion of Edie McClurg as Helen. For reasons I don't at all understand, I also just thrill at Priscilla Pointer's Mrs. Snell in this. (Indeed, the only female performance I don't like is P.J. Soles.) What's more is that, this time through, I was captivated by a performance I had barely noticed before, that of the girl who sorta takes Carrie under her wing at the prom. Really simple, really effective throughout. I haven't yet taken the time to discern the character/actor name yet. But it sorta proves my point that this film really hollers to my fetish for actresses at the edges. It's just loaded with interesting women and the boys just are nowhere near as (a) important or as (b) interesting. I also totally connect to this film as a parable of queerness, in much the same ways that I connect to X-Men 2. I just love this movie, and could watch it over and over and over again. What's nice is that I now have the 2002 made-for-tv version that I like a lot too... I love this movie.

Taxi Driver (1976) +

2008-10-25T20:07:00.002-06:00

A grueling and frank examination of the collateral damage wrought by stunted masculinity. This ür-text of the modern crisis of masculinity hinges upon the feral, elemental performance of Robert De Niro, whose characterization of the emotionally crippled Vietnam vet Travis Bickle remains a marvel of cinematic method acting. Yet the film falls into relief for me in the relationship that's established between De Niro's Travis and Jodie Foster's Iris, the child prostitute who instigates a fundamental shift in Travis's approach to the world. Basically, my read of this film is that Iris and Travis function as gendered embodiments of the film's core indictment of 1970s society. On the one hand, we have Travis, who's an adult man with no prospects, despite having been trained to be a killing machine by the same society that has no interest or investment in his future. On the other, we have Iris, a white girl child peddling her only assets (her sexuality) on the streets. When we see these two come together, in the strangely haunting "date" in the diner, we see that the two are basically peers -- emotionally compatible adolescents who aren't bad people (despite their respective skill at perpetrating violence or sex) but that they're lost in a society that's just not paying attention. Of course, on this point, the fact that the whole film operates with a major political campaign calling for change even as the city of New York seems to be decaying before our eyes -- it helps to make the point. This time through the film, I found it really profound how Travis was a character that was so socially stunted (he actually thinks that a porn movie is an appropriate first date) even as he had access to all the (anti)social privileges attending his adult, white maleness. I loved how Iris and Travis find their way to each other through the received language of respectable dating and how both are grasping for a future. I was also struck in screening this film this time that I had entirely forgotten the coda -- the fact that neither Travis nor Iris die in the devastation of the final shootout, that the film ends with both beginning life again. I'm told that the filmmakers saw the conclusion as leaving Travis cocked, a live wire ready to explode at any moment, and I don't see that as being not true. However, among a batch of films with largely largely dystopic conclusions, I was struck that the most dystopic film among them all actually had the most optimistic ending. It's an amazing film, rife with the most vicious misogyny -- yet something about the combined efforts of Foster and DeNiro elevate this film as one worth revisiting from time to time. (If only Cybill Shepherd weren't also part of the bargain...ack.)

Zoo (2007) -

2008-10-25T11:52:00.002-06:00

Hmm. An abstracted, ostensibly poetic documentary treatment of the sensational story of a Washington state man who died of internal injuries after his colon was ruptured while he was being anally penetrated by an Arabian stallion. The film takes a highly stylized approach to the subject, using heavily shadowed and obliquely filmed reenactments, overlaid with overlapping generally unidentified voiceovers, to sculpt a narrative portrait of both the situation and "the scene" of contemporary zoophilia. As a film, it's generally well done, and thoughtfully so. And yet I'm left wondering what the film actually accomplishes. The narrative styling shrouds the scenario in such mystery -- if I hadn't read the summary I don't know when I would have clued into what actually happened -- so that the film sorta gets off easy when the narrative (available from any newspaper account) finally falls into place: the narrative satisfaction of finally seeing the contours of the story ends up, to my mind at least, feeling more substantial than it actually is. Likewise, the voice of the horse rescue person (the single featured female voice in the film) ends up bearing a curious weight as she ponders what she describes as being "at the edge of understanding" zoophilia. The aural distinctiveness of her "normal" and female voice at the edges of this shadowy world of male perverts ends up lending a strangely substantial freight to her basically banal insight: they loved their critters and took that love farther than I would ever imagine. I find the film disappointing for the way it takes this fascinating story and boils it down to banalities. Are "zoo" folk kinksters? Or queers? Or predators? What of this subculture of kinship among erotic outcasts? How do these guys maneuver their erotic interests in relation to other more conventional sexual identities? What are the dimensions of "zoo" culture? Is it an exclusively male preserve? Are there refined distinctions between watchers and doers? (I'm especially struck by the fact that guys from the scene paid for "Coyote" to come out from West Virginia, as well as the fact that the one guy really needed MrHands to come out that night.) We get glancing glimpses of some of the dimensions of the subculture but the film's formal strategy does not oblige any real exploration. Instead, we get a ponderously pensive (and I would suggest blandly superficial) meditation on these themes, one which affords few insights. It's too bad, really. A fascinating story diminished by a skittish/squeamish documentary treatment.

Recount (2008) +

2008-10-24T21:56:00.006-06:00

A witty docudrama narrating the internecine complexities of 2000 presidential vote in Florida. Kevin Spacey holds the center with unobtrusive aplomb, creating a just-intriguing-enough center of gravity for the scores of other characters that are efficiently and effectively established throughout the piece. Spacey holds but does not overtake that center, something I wouldn't necessarily have anticipated him to be so capable of doing. Tom Wilkinson is effective but oddly cast as James Baker; John Hurt is creepily effective as the ineffective Warren Christopher; and Laura Dern is both humane and a hoot in her characterization of Katherine Harris. (About Dern's Harris: I appreciate the humanity of Dern's approach to this loony, over-the-top gorgon of a character. I'm also impressed at how illuminating Dern's work is, especially given that she developed this characterization just prior to the emergence of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann on the national scene.) Though the film does, I think, hew to a Gore-disposition on the crisis, I still admire the measured dexterity of director Jay Roach and screenwriter Danny Strong in developing an approach to the situation which is at once thorough, equitable and funny. Somehow, amidst the myriad narrative threads and heated political rhetoric, the filmmakers are able to maintain what is, for me, a sustaining light and satiric tone. The film is somehow utterly hilarious, completely informative and mostly without meanness. The film depicts the conflict over the Florida votes as, in some ways, an inaugural moment for a new millenial style of electioneering. And Spacey and Wilkinson establish themselves easily as formidable yet worthy adversaries. I really liked the way the film folded in archival news footage, casting actors in ways that felt accurate without ever lapsing toward a lame impression. The chorus of tv news voices provided a fascinating "way in" to the story, each little interpellation or montage an efficient evocation of that particular mode in the historical story. At the same time, the news footage amplified both the suspense and the irony of the story as it was being told. It's a really effective example of how to incorporate media footage in ways beyond simple illustration; here, the footage amplifes and accelerates the narrative. (I'm realizing that this film is likely the closest thing to All the President's Men that we yet have for the BushII era.) The film is diverting, by turns hilarious and horrifying -- a fascinating piece of political filmmaking.

The Duchess (2008) -

2008-10-19T21:23:00.002-06:00

An at times visually captivating account of thwarted female independence corseted as a bodice-ripping biopic. Keira Knightley stars as Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire, a high-spirited young woman stultified in her "successful" marriage to an emotionally stunted nobleman. This film fully establishes, at least for me, the dimensions of Knightley's appeal. She reminds me of Julia Roberts in the early 1990s: megawatt star charisma with some real gifts for conveying a particular variety of proto-feminist spunk that appeals easily to men and women. Knightley is not the most agile actress but, like Julia Roberts, she's extraordinarily skilled at winning my emotional allegiance. I may not be that interested in her character. I may not even like her character. But somehow I find that I'm always rooting for her character. It's a particular stripe of star quality and Keira Knightley is increasingly wearing it with ease. (She also wears clothes really well, her rail thin frame an apparently ideal coat-hanger for costume epics of all periods.) For some time now, MrStinky and I have been calling this film "the dirty q-tip movie" because, on first glance, Knightley reminded me of a life-sized q-tip what with those trapezoidal hair concoctions and all. Unfortunately, neither the costumes nor Knightley's charisma were able to maintain my interest in the film. Indeed, aside from one neo-lesbian moment, some glimpses of some tasty manflesh, and a truly excellent scene in which Knightley's Duchess gets really trashed, crashes into a chandelier and catches her wig on fire -- aside from such incidental pleasures, the film was exhaustively tedious. The novelistic biopic approach enervated any sense of dramatic urgency and, coming not long after Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, the neo-feminist conundrum of the drama failed to hold much in the way of discovery. Knightley's Georgiana is a privileged rich girl flummoxed when sold into a loveless marriage and burdened with the task of producing a male heir. Knightley carries the film relatively well, but the narrative doesn't permit us to do much more than root for her as she discovers the lessons of compromise chart maturity. The most interesting narrative thread in the film -- Georgiana's acceptance of her husband's long devotion to Georgiana's friend Lady Elizabeth -- remains a startling fact of the narrative and not especially well explored. (Neither Knightley nor the film are given much of an assist by Hayley Atwell who wafts wanly through the role of a lifetime. Atwell's character is the sort capable of getting me all thrilled and Atwell very nearly squanders the role.) Likewise, Charlotte Rampling as the Duchess's status obsessed mother is also completely banal. British hunk of the moment Dominic Cooper is sultry and swarthy and delectable as the Duchess true love, Charles Grey, but the young actor does little in this role that we haven't seen with more texture elsewhere. Among the principal supporting players only Ralph Fiennes (in what might be argued to be the male lead but feels more like a supporting role) delivers the genre pleasures of the piece in addition to an extraordinary and complicated performance. His awful Duke of Devonshire -- arrogant, greedy, selfish, emotionally stunted -- emerges as perhaps the most fascinating character in the piece because of Fiennes lucid and empathetic performance. Fiennes allows Devonshire to be the arrogant, selfish, elitist prick that he is without forfeiting the character's humanity. It's really great supporting actor work and, without Fiennes, the film would devolve into a cinematic version of a museum display case. It's a pretty film with some great details (and one great "wig on fire" scene) but the lack of dramatic urgency makes the whole enterprise basically tedious.

All the President's Men (1976) +

2008-10-15T16:53:00.001-06:00

An exceedingly well-crafted cinematic treatment of a fundamentally uncinematic story. The film tells the putative historic tale of two up-and-coming investigative reporters at The Washington Post as they begin to uncover the massive campaign of corruption and deceit for which the break-in at the Watergate hotel was but the tip of the iceberg. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are basically excellent as reporters Woodward and Bernstein, with Redford's easy rumpled charm working as an apt foil for Hoffman's slightly more clueless and aggressive style. The two are surrounding by a raft of excellent supporting players -- ranging from Ned Beatty to Polly Holliday to Lindsay Crouse to Stephen Collins -- in basically bit roles. (The guys at the paper, especially Jack Warden and Sam Robards, are less dynamic, if more central to the action of the piece.) The film deploys a variety of creative visual staging techniques -- angled overhead shots of cramped interiors, radical close-ups of mundane actions, inventive use of shadow to amplify tension -- to make this really dense puzzler of a tale visually compelling. Yet, I found that I really didn't have to "watch" the film to maintain my investment in the narrative (which speaks to the dexterity of the screenplay). Perhaps the most startling thing to me about this film is how tame the misdeeds seem today. Who'da thunk Watergate would one day seem so quaint? Another thought I had was how much information this film presumed its audience to already know/understand; the film at times seemed to presume that the audience knew the bold outlines of the story and that the film's task was to provide additional texture and shading. An interesting enough treatment of an interesting political moment.

Bigger Stronger Faster* [*The Side Effects of Being American] (2008)

2008-10-13T22:46:00.002-06:00

A radically informative -- and breathtakingly heartfelt -- documentary exploration of steroids in late 20th century (and early 21st century) American culture. Filmmaker Christopher Bell endeavors to take steroid use seriously as a moral question: is it ok to use performance enhancing chemicals to achieve your goals? His answer is somewhat surprising, although not surprising at all: In America, you've got to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals -- whatever...it...takes. The film is loaded with data that will likely forever shift my simple assumptions about steroid use (basically, it's really complicated and the data is not conclusive about the risks of steroids). The film also demonstrates that steroid use is utterly conventional in all sectors of the fitness industries. Moreover, the film makes the somewhat radical move to situate steroid use within a broader context of chemical/medical performance enhancements (Tiger Woods' lasik surgery, classical musicians use of beta blockers to alleviate performance anxiety, porn performers use of viagra, student use of adderall to enhance concentration, mandatory use of amphetamines by US fighter pilots). It's a broad reaching and incredibly informative film. Yet what makes the film so effective is Christopher Bell's startling frankness in sharing his own story, as well as that of his two brothers, and their collective journey with the pressures to succeed that steroid use seems to provide an answer to. It's in the personal stories of the three Bell brothers that the human impact of steroid use becomes most vivid. The distorted vision of success that gets layered into the level of achievement embodied by the physique. All three brothers -- entering or well in their thirties -- are encountering the first real blast of maturity -- the awareness that not all dreams can be realized. For each of them, this occasions a different kind of crisis: the eldest is still pursuing his dream of becoming a superstar professional wrestler (even at the expense of his family and his health); the youngest is finally getting off the juice to let his body rejuvenate so he can produce enough healthy sperm to father another kid; and the middle is making this movie. And the parents: sweet, devoted, religious working class parents who are devastated by their son's battles with self-esteem and recurring reliance on steroids. Christopher Bell folds his family's ongoing journey with steroid use into the texture of the film with a heartfelt frankness -- it's just heartbreaking at times. Yet, at the same time, this unflinching look at a basically normal family's struggle with this "drug" helps to really moor the more informational jaunts that the film takes along its journey (whether to congress, to the fitness industry, to Olympic doping scandals, etc). Christopher Bell also takes a really admirable approach: he's absolutely certain that there's a problem here but he's utterly suspicious of all the conventional wisdom available to address the problem. Plus he's a seemingly really nice guy with an adorably sweet babyface. So even as he cuts through the bullshit, it never feels abrasive or manipulative but almost preternaturally sincere. As such, we get a brilliantly instructive array of perspectives on the subject and Christopher emerges as a really trusty guide through the weeds of this unanticipatedly complicated contemporary phenomena. Smart, humane, generous and radically instructive. A great little film, built in the style of Farenheit 9/11 or Religulous but demonstrating a humane generosity that neither of those more acclaimed films were able to sustained. One of those thrillingly rare documentaries that fundamentally alters how I perceive a contemporary controversy.

Voyage of the Damned (1976) -

2008-10-11T22:16:00.003-06:00

A well-intentioned treatment of a devastating historical tragedy. The film takes on one of the most morbidly cynical instances of Nazi propaganda: sending a luxury liner loaded with exiled elite and middle class Jews from Hamburg to Havana with the expectation that they would be refused entry to Cuba or U.S., and thus "make the point" that no nation wanted the Jews and so fortify the ideological/propaganda claims for the efficacy of the Nazi's "final solution." The film endeavors to demonstrate this conscious, cynical manipulation of humanity through the largely fictionalized retelling of the historical tale. A vast cast of diversely celebrated actors inhabits the 20 or so roles and the film works steadfastly to maneuver these many storylines while amplifying the dramatic tension of a narrative which most audience-members would likely know or anticipate the outcome. The results are mixed largely, I suspect, because the film becomes a strange fusion of genres. By the mid-1970s, vast casts had accomplished critical and popular success on two main fronts: disaster epics and Agatha Christie mysteries. In many ways, this film feels like The Poseidon Adventure or Murder on the Orient Express with lots of noteworthy actors essaying a broad array of distinctive characters. Yet in this film, the murder is genocidal and the disaster is in the abstract -- so the genre pleasures of a disaster flick or a murder mystery are gone, making the work of this narrative feel like work. The film feels so overwhelmed by the sense of impending doom that it's hard to know where to position oneself as an audience member. Making things worse is that the acting styles are comparably incongruent -- lots of Actor's Studio types (Lee Grant, Nehemiah Persoff, Luther Adler, Julie Harris) mixed in with folks like Malcolm McDowell, Wendy Hiller and Jonathan Pryce who are all being presided over by the Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, and Oskar Werner (with Ben Gazzara, Orson Welles and Jose Ferrer tossed in the mix just for fun). The cast is vast and often fascinating but rarely brought to stylistic coherence. Instead the film becomes a curious kaleidoscope of different glimpses into different characters and, once again, it's left to the audience to piece it all together. Two things stand out to me in reflecting on the film. First, there seems to be an argument going on within the film about the psychology of victimization (perhaps most neatly embodied by the two camp escapees played by Jonathan Pryce and Aaron Pozner). The film seems to be rehearsing the tension between the options available to Jews in the face of mounting Nazism: standing up against the tyranny or trying to disappear for fear that you might be next. This tension -- respond with pride or react with fear -- are (a) both shown to be basically inadequate and (b) both teased out with more sophisticated nuance in the different approaches to the crisis embodied by the Kreislers (Dunaway and Werner) and the Rosens (Lee Grant, Sam Wanamaker, and Lynne Frederick). The film tacitly takes the side of pride (not the most precise word but it's what I have right now) but empathetically details the psychic costs of living in fear that it might be you next. Sam Wanamaker's Carl Rosen experiences a paranoid psycotic break; Frederick's Anna opts for a suicide pact; and Grant's Lili is first brittle and then broken with grief. I find this duality interesting as a first wave of pop cultural/pop psychological explanations of the emotional reaction to the historical phenomenon of Nazi fascism. Seems to twine well with psychoanalytic tropes as well as with much of the Actor's Studio basic approach to things. The second thing I found interesting is how vivid Katharine Ross was in her two scene role as a young woman working as a prostitute in Havana as a means to help her parents escape. In her two scenes, Ross delivers what so few of the other performers do: a legible characterization animated by palpable emotion. (Gazzara, McDowell and Von Sydow aren't bad either on this same front, but their characterizations are a touch less vivid.) I've been struggling to figure out why so few of the scenes in this film were able to develop the kind of emotional clarity that Ross was able to inject in her scenes. She's not the most sophisticated actress but she is emotionally present and fairly guileless as a performer; perhaps as a result, I never lost sense of what was at stake in Ross's scenes. A lot happens in both, from a plot perspective, yet those plot points are vividly alive in a way that comparably dense scenes elsewhere in the film are simply not. In some ways, it seems as if the film is relying on its historical facticity to inject empathy into the characters, as though director Stuart Rosenberg doesn't want to meddle in the crafting of performances. Unfortunately, the lack of a coherent, emotional texture among the performances makes this film unfortunately tendentious. This story might have been emotionally eviscerating; in this numbed out telling, it's a historical shockudrama with unfortunately blunted impact. A fascinating failure of a film.

Religulous (2008) +/-

2008-10-11T16:52:00.003-06:00

A consistently fascinating, and intermittently illuminating, comparative excavation of religious dogma by über-snarkster Bill Maher. Basically, Maher & Co. endeavor to "take seriously" what religious folk in the three major western religions profess to believe by asking, with apparent sincerity, them to explain some of the logical gaps in their tradition's theology. Intellectually, Maher adopts a fairly conventional posture: the rationalist's inquiry into conundrum of faith. Cinematically/Performatively, he uses the basic shtick of Borat and/or Michael Moore: placing himself in improbable situations and asking possibly impolite questions and thus allowing the answerer to dig their own holes. The problem is, as a comedian who's built his whole persona on being a very intelligent but basically arrogant prick, Maher can't resist jumping in to snidely interrogate his subjects as they spin their answers. (Maher & Co do this on a visual level as well, interposing quick visual edits to mock the reasoning of their interviewees -- with varying comic effectiveness -- or by imposing supertitles over the action on the screen -- with similarly unpredictable effect.) My reaction to the film was decidedly mixed. The project seems utterly worthwhile. At it's core, the film is an attempt to "take the piss out of" one of the most banal certitudes of contemporary public discourse: that being religious is good, and that whatever someone believes as a part of their "faith" is off-limits from civil critique/discussion. I find myself in absolute agreement that, as religious discourse becomes an increasingly ubiquitous feature of contemporary public life, it makes no sense to place "matters of faith" off limits. This film underscores both how risky such a proposition is even as it also demonstrates how necessary it is. At the same time, Maher&Co. frame the whole project a little dishonestly. On the one hand, Maher&Co claim to seek the coherence in these disparate religious doctrines even as they target some clearly iconoclastic sources as their experts (ie. the anti-zionist Jews, the minister who as a former pop singer, a random senator, the leader of religion devoted to pot-smoking, the guy who plays Jesus at a theme park called "HolyLand"). This strategy is cheap and basically lame, though it does make for some pre-John Steward Daily Show squirminess/entertainment. The film does an entirely adequate job confirming what we already know: religious doctrine is rife with internal contradictions and doesn't always make sense. Big whoo. And it seems to me that where the film really misses an opportunity is in exploring how/why folks choose to reconcile religious doctrine in their own lives -- basically, Maher&Co skip over the whole "spirituality" piece in their own "self-fulfilling prophecy" of über-rationalism. (Indeed, I wonder if the guy studying the religious brain might have had something to contribute on this score.) Indeed, by maintaining his own über-rationalism, Maher ends up talking mostly only to folks who are trying to rationalize their religious beliefs, which just makes them look goofy while doing little else. I do appreciate Maher's basic advocacy for "I don't know" -- his preaching the gospel of "I don't know" -- in the face of religious certitude but honestly don't think that's what he spends most of his time in this film doing. A fascinating but basically unsatisfying exercise.

Strait-Jacket (1964) +

2008-10-05T22:49:00.004-06:00

This stranger than strange little "hag horror" genre piece pitches Joan Crawford as a possibly insane former ax murderer against the perils of a new life on a farm somewhere east of Riverside. The conceit is nominally simple: Lucy (Joan Crawford, playing a character who shares her birth name of Lucille) is married to a cheating younger man, who thinks nothing of staging his drunken assignations in front of their young daughter while his wife is out of town. Crawford's Lucy arrives home one evening to discover the husband in bed with a floozy. Devastated (and possibly drunk), Lucy does the sensible thing: she takes an ax and whacks off the noggins of both hubbie and floozy, right in front of little traumatized daughter. Lucy goes to the crazyhouse; traumatized daughter Carol grows up to be a pretty girl, a talented scuptress and betrothed to the town's most eligible wealthy bachelor. Then, Lucy comes home and complications ensue. Lucy behaves erratically, especially when Carol dresses her up in improbable outfit and asks her to act as if the last 20 years had never happened. Lucy's especially loopy around sharp objects and it becomes suspicious when first a visiting doctor and then a hired hand begin to disappear. But the real question: will Lucy's insanity and possibly continuing criminality lead to the end of Carol's promising romance with the delicious John Anthony Hayes. I won't spoil it, as the tricksy resolution of the conflict remains a treat to watch unfold no matter how many times you see the film. Suffice it to say that the story is a mix of Mildred Pierce and Gaslight and Psycho, all knotted in one ugly wig. The film is loaded with cheap thrills. Red herrings and shrieking sound effects provide reliable jolts. The fetishization of (and lurid attention to) sharp objects offer additionally startling shocks. But the real pleasure of the film comes in the oddly sincere performances especially from La Crawford, Diane Baker as the daughter, and Edith Atwater as the awful mother of delicious boyfriend. (George Kennedy, too, as a ratty hired hand is a hoot, and Howard St. John is absolutely perfect at the boy's father.) The reliably bad Leif Erickson does not disappoint here. Diane Baker is great throughout, playing a perfect Sandra Dee kinda of character before things get really out of hand (and the way Baker says "insane" in the climactic sequence: buh-rilliant.) This movie is stunt-casting, stunt-horror, stunt-stunt-stunt...but my impression is that Castle hoped for this to be a bid for legitimacy and there is a sincerity and genuine artful aspiration here that makes this an enduringly odd camp classic. Indeed, any movie that culminates in dueling Joan Crawfords is an enduring gift, possibly for all time. Brilliantly bad, b-movie delight.

Burn After Reading (2008) +

2008-10-04T19:13:00.002-06:00

A giddy, gruesome comic caper demonstrating the Coen brothers at full strength. The film gathers a pile of excellent actors, some absurdly precise characters and turns them loose in an elaborately intricate little puzzler about grandiosity and deception. Some of the actors fare better than others. John Malkovich is having a blast as a self-impressed alcoholic intelligence analyst named Osborne Cox; Frances McDormand knows exactly what she's doing as Linda Litske, the personal trainer desperate for elective cosmetic surgery; and J.K. Simmons is pitch perfect as an über-practical CIA boss. MrStinky loved Brad Pitt as the delightedly dim-witted personal trainer Chad and I was impressed at how well Brad Pitt did his impression of a B-list "Brad Pitt type." George Clooney is strangely attractive in one of his least elegant roles in years, though his comic pitch slides in and out of tune fairly conspicuously depending on the scene. Tilda Swinton inhabits her cold-hearted pediatrician role with characteristically electric verve but, for some reason, stops short of coloring beyond the lines given her. I was least impressed with David Rasche as the Malkovich's immediate CIA superior, who seemed to have little sense of tone or style despite playing most scenes opposite Simmons. And perhaps most interesting of all was Richard Jenkins, as the goodguy/sadsack guy who has it bad for McDormand's Linda. The Coens deploy Jenkins in a way that shows how smart they are at doing this kind of movie. Jenkins plays the only character to wear his heart on his sleeve, the only one whose motives we don't doubt. As such, he contributes an essential simplicity to the increasingly convoluted storyline. Moreover, his fundamental integrity, when counterposed to Linda Litske's singleminded selfish obsessions, provides a near constant reminder that we won't get an easy romcom way out of this set of amplifying messes. I don't know that I loved the film, but I really found it utterly surprising and continuously captivating. I also really enjoyed it as a meditation on the perils of grandiosity. Most of these characters are really really content being who they are and are absolutely confident that they deserve better. Nearly all are completely self-obsessed, believing that they are really really important. All of which makes for all kinds of farcical misapprehensions with increasingly devastating consequences when these characters begin to believe that they are being surveilled. An expertly crafted diversion. It might not be a great film, but it's made by great filmmakers, which makes it pretty darn good.

Network (1976) +

2008-10-04T18:09:00.003-06:00

A prescient dystopic satire depicting the devolution of American culture as demonstrated by what's to be found in the idiot box. William Holden plays Max Schumacher, an old school television journalist, who's an executive at UBS (a fictional 4th network in the era of the big 3 which, at least as depicted here, proves a startling premonition of the FOX network) and who's utterly flummoxed by the trends directing television programming in the contemporary (ie. mid1970s) moment. The film charts Max's journey -- as an increasingly devastated everyman -- through this pop cultural wasteland via his defining relationships with the other two leads in the picture: Academy Award winners Peter Finch as a stentorian old anchordude Howard Beale who's gone of his rocker to become a kind of savant propet of contemporary dismay and Faye Dunaway as the man-eating, scene-devouring hyper-ambition proto-Yuppie female executive Diana Christensen, who's libido is directly wired to her aggressive ambition. Howard's mental breakdown proves to be a ratings breakthrough, bringing Diana into the news division and placing Max directly in her voracious path. It's a perfect storm and lo does it rage. The narrative is almost impossibly complex, ornate even, and the film has undergone a kind of renaissance of late (because, basically, it seems like a docudrama of the early 21st century television landscape even though it was made more than a quarter century earlier, well prior to vcrs, the internet or cel-phones). Among the many subplots, three I really enjoyed: one, the best supporting actress turn by Beatrice Straight, who in barely five minutes delivers a master class in characterization and emotional scoring; two, the hyperbolic and shrill fabulousness of Marlene Warfield as the faux-Black Power radical Laureen Hobbs, whose blast during contract negotiations is one of the greatest moments ever; three, Ned Beatty's cameo as a cynical industrialist who understands the situation, and Howard Beale, far better than anyone in the entertainment industry. The film is a dystopic horror show that works as a cynical comedy largely because the performers are all so respectable. (For an entirely different vibe on this same basic story see John Waters's Female Trouble [1974] and ask yourself: was Chayefsky merely tapping into the same cultural gestalt as John Waters or was he ripping him off in the best way possible?) (Likewise, run a double bill of this and Spike Lee's 2000 joint, Bamboozled, and you'll likely develop a far greater appreciation of how much Spike actually accomplished in that woefully underrated film.) All told, one of the greatest and most enduring political films of the last fifty years, one which bears especially poignancy considering our current media climate. (I love how the dvd design inserts the retro-Network into the contemporary visual vocabulary of the 21st century tube, with a newsticker etc. Pitch perfect and stealthy augmentation of the film.) In sum, a just amazing piece of filmmaking -- if only Conchata Ferrell had been given more to do...

Cabin in the Sky (1943) +

2008-10-04T14:56:00.003-06:00

A strange, fascinating parable detailing the battle between good and evil in the heart of one backsliding man. This black cast musical from MGM and directed by Vincente Minnelli boasts an incredible cast of African American superstars (Eddie Anderson, Ethel Waters, and Lena Horne in principal roles with Rex Ingram, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Mantan Moreland and others as featured players) with a score loaded with great songs. The narrative is a deceptively simple love story. Joe (Anderson) is a weak-willed man subject to easy temptation, much to the consternation of his devoted, pious wife Petunia (Ethel Waters). Petunia wants desperately to save Joe from a life of damnation yet Joe's craving for the pleasures of a sinful life constantly cause him to stray, occasionally into the arms of Georgia Brown (Lena Horne), a beautiful, gold-digging good-time gal. When Joe is shot in a brawl, the devil's son, Lucifer Jr. (Rex Ingram in a truly compelling performance), and God's man come to conflict over Joe's eternal fate. Joe's actions should send him to Hell, but Petunia's devotion has instigated a divine pardon. Joe is sent back to life, for six months, in which time his actions will determine his everlasting fate. Joe's soul becomes, curiously, a trophy of sorts for all involved and Joe ends up being tempted into trouble and the arms of Georgia Brown. The climactic scene comes as Petunia risks her own soul by venturing to the juke joint where Joe and Georgia hang out; another brawl erupts as a tornado blows through and both Joe and Petunia are victims of the gunfire. As the loving couple mount the steps to heaven, Joe's ever more concerned that he will forever be parted from his loving wife when a final set of twists confirm his fate, his future and his love for Petunia. The interesting thing about this film is that it is a musical, even though the songs themselves have little lyrically to do with the characters or the scenario. Instead, it's Minnelli's artful direction that, sometimes very cleverly, discovers ways to make the musical sequences -- song and dance -- make tangible sense within the dramaturgy of the story. As such, what is -- in effect -- a little religious drama punctuated with soon-to-be popular songs becomes a powerful musical because Minnelli so assiduously anchors the action of the story within each song. The aspect of the film I find least effective is the casting/performance of Eddie Anderson in the lead role. Anderson has undeniable screen charisma and, on that score, he's a worthy match for the formidable Waters and Horne, both. Yet, there remains a shallowness to Anderson's characterization that might make sense within the most didactic aspects of the narrative (he is a simple doofus prone to the most human of failings) yet Anderson's performance doesn't really prepare us for the intensity of the underlying emotional journey undertaken, ultimately, by both Petunia and Georgia Brown. Anderson's devotion to Petunia is sweet, but his performance is a disaggregated assemblage of assorted bits, which don't really cohere into a compelling characterization. This isn't to say that Horne or Waters are really adept actresses in their respective roles; their performances, too, at times feel clunky and cobbled together. Yet both Waters and Horne are somehow able to craft a coherent core for each character, from which the film draws its most potent emotional wallop. I really liked Rex Ingram, though, as Lucifer Jr., a fully rounded characterization maneuvering the (often racist) comedy with deft aplomb. He holds the center of that first scene (in the Devil's Idea Office) with impressive clarity, making it one of the most complexly effective scenes in the piece (despite the freight of racial cliche the scene carries). A compelling, enduring entertainment with a genuinely effective emotional/moral throughline and plenty of thrilling WTF visual moments throughout. (My favorite was probably the collection of naked "pickaninnies" dotting the path to heaven.) Fascinating, strange, well worth watching.

11 Minutes (2008) +

2008-09-30T21:13:00.002-06:00

A grueling and thorough "backstage" documentary examining the difficulty of assembling the pieces to make the "11 Minute" show that is a fashion show "in the tents at Bryant Park" during New York's Fashion Week. Jay Carroll, the first winner of the hit Bravo series Project Runway, is the figure at the center of this absurd and intense maelstrom, as he works his ass off (along with the collective asses of his infrequently compensated crew/staff). The film is unrelenting and unsparing in its documentation of the million pieces that must come successfully together for each show, as well as the astonishing array of giant personalities that must be maneuvered to get the job done. Luckily, Jay McCarroll is a charismatic, camera-ready figure, whose capacity for on-camera self-disclosure is rare for its generous sincerity and biting wit. McCarroll is a perfect sort of "reality" entertainer in the mold of Rosie O'Donnell. Charismatic, genuinely talented, incisively funny, Jay and Rosie are both possessed of loose cannon intelligence that predisposes them to showstopping outrages that somehow manages to always remain rooted in a kind of humility/sincerity. This film would have likely been nearly unbearable without Jay's lucid capacity for self-appraisal (as well as his fundamental sweetness and genuine talent). The film is really, though, about the brutalities of commercial collaboration, in which every step in crafting oneself as a commodity is subject to the whims of hundreds, even thousands, of other largely self-interested entities. It's heartbreaking to watch Jay and his collaborators work their collective asses off only to have one little thing go wrong, causing a cascade of other things to go awry -- and having that happen over and over and over again. All in service of what Jay winningly affirms is the stupidest, least important thing in the world: a fashion show. I think I expected the film to be more of a personality profile, depicting Jay in all his viciously witty persona, but the film works best as a brilliant backstage documentary of the fashion business. Also, the filmmakers do a really nice job of developing a visual and aural vocabulary that permits a cinematic pacing for what is basically a devastating sprint to a creative finish line. The film is tough going at times, not because it's not fascinating but because the adrenaline intensity is just overwhelming. To accommodate this, two techniques in particular stood out as examples of how clever the filmmakers were in creating an internal structure for the film. One the one hand, there are vivid and colorful interludes of Jay cavorting in a field of hot air balloons. It's sensible, as one of the key conceptual and visual motifs of his collection is the hot air balloon, but these sequences also work to slow things down for the audience, allowing the viewer to "tune in" to the colors and shapes that were Jay's inspiration. These interludes, remarkably enough, never feel intrusive, but instead work as visual palate cleansers amidst the gritty, sweaty and exhausting scenes that are core of the documentary. Likewise, at several points in the film, filmmakers Mark Selditch and Robert Tate utilize an interesting technique to convey lots of information very quickly: they overlap the dialog from brainstorming and/or bickering sesssions in ways that are both artful and effective. Artful in the way that this technique distills a lengthy conversation into an intense several minutes and effective in the way that the technique delivers an incredible amount of data in a relatively short piece of time. All the information in the quickly montaged bitchfests is relevant but the filmmakers do a really nice job of distilling everything so that this scene does not eat up too too much time. An interesting, intense backstage documentary that is deeper, richer and more challenging than I really ever expected.

"The Window" (2008) +

2008-09-29T21:09:00.001-06:00

A comic, erotic short in which three normal gay men each do their own little sexy dance in front of adjacent windows. Part music video, part j/o video, part strip tease, part performance art -- the film toys with our gaze. The parallel window panels invite and taunt us to look, while also forcing us to choose which window to focus on, while also manipulating the shades to take things into and out of view. Each of the three men are very attractive, though in an entirely normal way, with none of them being especially buff or magazine cover ready. This, it seems, amplifies the appeal of the film in that it opens additional questions about the reasons for these astonishing displays. And as if to amplify the question of "for whose pleasure is this performance being staged", through the magic of editing, all three men ejaculate on their windows within moments of each other, the spooge dripping down the glass and the blinds are finally, shyly drawn for the last time. A couple things come to mind in reflecting on the film. First, it seems to me to be an experiment with the conventions of depicting the spectacle of erotic pleasure. Second, it seems very much to be a post-Shortbus piece in which the cinematic pleasures of sexuality are affirmed through the act of explicit filmmaking. Remarkably, the sense of basic joyful exuberance captured in this short film mitigates the stark estrangements implicit in the visual conceit. In this way, I would submit that "The Window" is mostly interesting as a kind of document -- of an especially gay way of inhabiting visual discourses of pleasure. An intellectually interesting little piece of filmmaking that also works as an entertainment -- comic, sweet, charismatic, suspenseful (though the spoogy conclusion does result in a curiously discombobulating letdown). Interesting effort.

"Tranny McGuyver" (2008) -

2008-09-29T20:59:00.004-06:00

What I said already...but, back in July, I remember vacillating between sorta liking and really disliking this film. This time through, the balance tipped decidedly toward the dislike. I found the laughlines reliably funny, but the general vibe is sorta nasty and the comic pacing is lugubrious. There is no comic timing, except when a powerhouse performer like Cathy Shim blows through and paces the whole fandango for the rest of the crew. As a back-alley plastic surgeon/massage therapist/baby broker, Shim works the racist humor of the character with incisive wit. She's appalling, she's disgusting, she's f'n hilarous. But she's the only one. (That said, Willam Belli's performance of the title character is basically funny -- a great persona, often great line delivery -- just not especially good at maintaining chemistry or timing with other performers.) My impression is that this is sorta improv filmmaking, where some laugh lines and scenarios are established but I'm not sure the entire production ensemble is entirely up to the challenge. Again, the laughs that are here are good but, as a self-contained comic short, it's a bit ho-hum. (As such the self-consciously outrageous racism/sexism/homophobia/generalized cruelty isn't always fun.)

"For a Relationship" (2007) +

2008-09-29T20:49:00.001-06:00

A startling, haunting experimental short presenting a portrait of one young gay man's relationships with several former boyfriends as well as his possibly closeted father. The oblique narrative unfolds through a chronologically configured series of still photographs, interspersed and overlapping at various ratios of speed while a pensive voiceover ruminates and something that sounds like a drumstick maintains an irregular and surprising rhythm. Lots of pictures of pretty nude boys interlock with family photographs and nature shots to compose an aggregate portrait of the shifts in consciousness that arrive in early maturity. A pensive, poignant, and precise film.

"The Screening Party" (2007) +

2008-09-29T20:39:00.004-06:00

A delightfully smart and funny short about a group of friends and acquaintances who gather to watch the 1990 film, Pretty Woman. The film feels like a pilot of a tv series I would love to watch. An amusing array of characters -- the gay freelance writer whose magazine assignment instigates the screening party, his fabulous showboy roomie, their foul mouthed female comedian friend, a cluelessly attractive latino lawyer, the doofusy straight guy from the video store, and the feminist therapist who lives upstairs -- are all winningly portrayed, and collaborate as a witty ensemble of reenactors of various scenes from the film while also giving glimpses into their actual lives/characters. Somehow each character also offers their own analysis of the film (as babe magnet, as misogynist mythology, as personal touchstone of romantic fantasy) while discussing how the film or its characters have informed their own lives. It's sweet, human, very funny, and totally silly, with the high camp style combining with real characters to make for a genuinely entertaining 28 minutes. One of the best gay shorts I've ever seen; would that it would become a series.

"Cocktales" (2007) +/-

2008-09-29T20:09:00.003-06:00

Not much more to add than what I said previously, except to say that this diverting little short did not "blow up" well to the giant screen at a cineplex. Yet, is that a failing of a film that is mostly likely destined for film festivals and possible inclusion on a "Boys Shorts" compilation dvd? Hard to say, but the transfer of scale was not kind to the look of the film or to the (lack of) depth of the characters/storyline. Again, a strikingly nonjudgmental depiction of male bisexuality.

"The Pull" (2008) +

2008-09-29T19:59:00.002-06:00

As previously discussed here, I quite liked this short neo-documentary. In the context of this second screening, however, two things emerged. One: is it a documentary? I think my assumption that this was a neo-documentary were informed by some of its previous festival showings, but I realized this time that the film actually doesn't present itself clearly as a documentary. I found that I watched it this time as more simply a narrative piece, and found the intensity lacking somewhat. I still love the premise and the conceit. Two, what impressed me so in the first screening was how well suited the overlapping panels were to telling this kind of story. This time, however, screening this a mere ten minutes after seeing "Untitled Film Stills" caused me to wonder if this narrative technique was already passing into convention and/or cliche as a visual strategy for depicting intimate estrangement. An interesting, irreverent and challenging little film, whether documentary or no.

"Hirsute" (2007) -

2008-09-29T19:49:00.002-06:00

A tricksy scifi short that uses the conceit of time-travel to pose questions about the ways we do and don't like ourselves over time. Filmmaker A.J. Bond delivers a charismatic performance as two Kyles, the nerdy scientist experimenting in his home searching for the secret to time travel and a glamorous version of Kyle from the future. The film is visually stylish (a well-appointed apartment made over as a home lab -- excellent use of post-it-notes as a design element) and Bond is really cute/appealing. The story is bottom-tier "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and the final twist doesn't really play through to resolve the story. Also the conceit suggested by the title (the present Kyle is hairy; the future Kyle is hairless) doesn't deliver and reads more like a clever idea rather than a meaningful detail. Moreover, the scene in which the hairless future Kyle tries to have sex with the hairier Kyle of the past just doesn't make sense and veers perilously close to banal homophobia. (Indeed, it's not at all clear that the hairy past Kyle is gay, where the hairless future Kyle is clearly so; as such, the feature of future Kyle's queerness can be easily read as one of the features of future Kyle's monstrosity.) But the tipping point for me came in a beautifully filmed, suspenseful sequence in which two eggs boil and the sequence is resolved with a dumb, punny joke. One of the more disappointing films of this festival cycle, as so many of the elements for a great piece of work were there only to be squandered by tricksy/banal choices that did not square with the sophistication of the rest of the project. An appealing but ultimately disappointing short scifi erotic fantasy.

"Untitled Film Stills" (2007) +

2008-09-29T19:39:00.001-06:00

A fleeting gay romance -- part music video, part experimental short. Three separate panels depict the overlapping but distinct perspectives of two young men finding their way to each other. An engaging, impressionistic, and largely effective formal experiment.

"Babysitting Andy" (2007) -

2008-09-29T07:32:00.003-06:00

A sweetish, comedic short which, with conspicuously good intentions, stages a scenario ripe with potential for madcap hilarity. Andy is a mischievous pre-teen tomboy with an aggressive curiosity about all things filthy (sex, bodily functions, bad language). After her mother's water breaks at the precise moment Andy had convinced her parents to relent and tell her the meaning of "fellatio," Andy's loaded for mischief when her gay uncle Paul (and his boyfriend) are pressed into babysitting service. Soon, it's a battle, with Andy and Paul squaring off in battle of gross-out pranks until the boyfriend intervenes, making peace among them all. This short film is absolutely cute, but a little confused about where the narrative focus is. Is it about the gay disabled couple pressed into babysitting service in a house full of stairs? Is it about a queer kid in the beginning stages of her struggle to be taken seriously as exactly who she is? Is it about the pleasures of a nasty food fight? It's unclear. And overcomplicated. The premise is good, but the layers become a little too specific, especially because it's not clear what the core narrative is. Lots of potential, and a sweet premise, but the many many little pieces don't come together in to effective, gratifying resolution (despite a conspicuously "clever" twist to conclude the whole thing). Cute, promising, ok.

XXY (2007) +

2008-09-27T20:54:00.002-06:00

An emotionally complex depiction of the experience -- not the issue -- of living as an intersex person. Alex is fifteen and has spent a good chunk of those years living on the Uruguayan coast. Alex's father, Kraken, is a government scientist and Alex's mother seems to be home, keeping close tabs on Alex in all kinds of ways. When the film begins, Alex's family is welcoming visitors, an Argentine surgeon, his wife and their teenage son, Alvaro. Their arrival is not an entirely welcome one, with both Alex and Kraken suspecting that something's up. Of course, it is. At Alex's mother's request, the surgeon and his family have arrived to lobby Alex and Kraken to consent to gender corrective surgery for Alex. Alex, you see, is intersex and, though having lived mostly as a female, is not at all certain about making a surgical choice. Kraken, a biologist, is similarly perplexed, torn between his instinct to protect his beloved child and an intellectual/ethical inclination toward honoring the complexity of nature. (The surgeon, however, has made a career out of corrective surgery and is ready to "fix" Alex right away.) The wrinkle, of course, is Alex -- a rebellious teen who's as rowdy and assertive as any 15 year old boy and also as moody and emotionally intense as any 15 year old girl. It's a fascinating story, really, loaded with emotional textures that I, quite frankly, have not explored cinematically. The character of Alex is fascinating, largely because s/he's sort of an asshole -- a confused, self-obsessed teen with a well-earned resentment against pretty much everybody. I love that this is not a problem film or a journey film, but an experience film -- an "imagine what it would be like" film, with emotional depth and incredible humanity. I love Kraken's dilemma and the character is scripted -- in a still waters sorta way -- to be a decent man facing a seemingly impossible situation with intelligence, generosity and seriousness. But my favorite character is Alvaro, the macho surgeon's goofy teen son, who falls in with Alex and is forever changed as a result. Alex basically sets out to seduce Alvaro, and does, in a way -- a way that surprised me and which surprised Alvaro. (SPOILER WARNINGS FROM HERE ON.) The two start making out and Alex ends up taking charge and fucking Alvaro, who doesn't even know Alex is packing. Alvaro discovers he really likes it and, if it weren't for the two being discovered en flagrante by Kraken, who knows what would have happened next... The experience, however, rocks Alvaro's world and it's clear that Alex has opened a new door for him.) The film does something pretty interesting in its depiction of adolescent sexual bullying. Alex effectively rapes Alvaro though the sex becomes quickly consensual. Alex's best female friend describes a sexual bullying situation that became consensual after a time. And Alex is brutally assaulted by a group of boys who only want to see what she's got "down there" and, once they do, proceed to make her the object of cruel sexual sport. (I am struck by how reminiscent the sexual assault on Alex is to that upon Brandon in Boys Don't Cry; what's interesting here is that XXY doesn't need Alex to be a flawed hero -- it's enough that Alex is human and thus flawed.) It's fascinating -- the layers of consent here -- all of which feel absolutely real. Likewise, there's a conversation between Alvaro and his father which is just brutal in depicting how terrorizing a parent's naive expectations can be. Finally, what I think I loved most about the film is that both Alex and Alvaro end up confounding simple gender and sexual binaries. Alvaro doesn't come out as gay; Alex doesn't decide to be male or female; both end the film starting their own path toward whatever. (And at least Alex has loving, accepting, brave parents.) Beautifully shot, with a confident aural quiet, XXY is the kind of small international film that truly deserves its incredible festival buzz. An excellently executed film, featuring not one but three characters who are traveling emotional arcs I've rarely/never seen on screen before.

Were The World Mine (2008) +

2008-09-26T22:13:00.005-06:00

An enthralling musical fantasy about high school, Shakespeare, and the magical potencies of desire. Tanner Cohen (a lovely lanky lad) is Timothy -- the school sissy who's the preferred object of routine torment by the school's worshiped rugby team. On a daily basis, Timothy struggles to maintain himself as (a) he falls deeper and deeper in swoon with the star of the rugby team; (b) he does his best to help his best friends get together; (c) he hopes his devastated/divorced mom can keep her balance; and (d) he tries to learn the role of Puck for his all-boys high school's production of Midsummer Night's Dream. Within this very real scenario, the filmmakers insert a wild aesthetic sensibility cued first by Timothy's inclination to private reveries (usually glittery musical numbers featuring the rugby team and, of course, Jonathon -- the hunky captain). Then, in a literally fantastic twist, Timothy discovers the formula for a "cupid's arrow" love potion embedded within his lines for the play. He concocts the potion, douses it liberally upon his classmates and the whole town, and revels in the homo-affirming panic that ensues. The concoction basically causes the entire rugby team to fall in love with each other, though Jonathon only has loveydovey eyes for Timothy. In short, the potion changes Timothy's life, his entire realm of possibility, while also forever altering the perspective of everyone in this small conservative town (which soon becomes the center of all kinds of controversy when the mayor wakes up to discover he's in love with a man and decides to start enacting gay marriages). Madcap antics ensue and the world is righted before the curtain on the production falls, with plenty of Shakespearean referents to maintain appropriate levels of entranced confusion. The film -- though its pacing flags and the performances are a little inconsistent -- has a truly delightful energy within its conceit. The musical numbers are sweet, silly and sexy. And the cast is very cute. I especially like how the film captures the surly/sulky selfishness of gay teendom, allowing Timothy to be something of a dick as he exerts his newly found magical powers. There are some cheap characterizations (a bullying macho coach; a judgemental make-up maven) but the genuine charisma of the cast helps to balance the often inexpert filmmaking. All told, an adorable and delightful queer fantasy.

Rich and Famous (1981) -

2008-09-26T16:43:00.001-06:00

A fraught melodramatic epic ostensibly depicting the enduring power of female friendship. The final film of legendary director George Cukor, the film becomes interesting only insofar as it documents so many shifts in style, perspective and tone of so-called "women's pictures." Two college friends -- an ethereal Jacqueline Bisset as the serious Liz and a bizarrely cast Candice Bergen as the blowsy Southern gal with the improbable name of Merry Noel -- embark on different paths. Merry elopes before graduating college and Liz goes on to be a successful writer of literary fiction. Their friendship endures and grows, even as Merry decides to pursue her own (markedly more notorious) writing career and as Merry's husband pursues a relationship with Liz and as Merry becomes a household name but ever threatened by Liz. Blah blah blah. It's The Turning Point and Beaches and Mildred Pierce rolled into one, and neither the cast nor Cukor seem entirely sure about what movie they're in. Bissett is alternately wan and glib, her charisma a stated point of narrative fact that's never really manifested on screen. Bergen is simply implausible in a role that should have gone to Diane Ladd, or Dixie Carter, or someone who has a remote sense of how to play Southern verbal dexterity without lapsing into a Hee Haw horror show. (Unfortunately, for contemporary viewers Bergin's comedic abilities are -- perhaps unconsciously -- clearly on display in this role, a burden the piece did not bear in 1981, as Bergen was not yet then the comedic go-to that she is today.) Revisiting this film for the first time in a quarter century, I was struck by how much this "sophisticated" piece feels like a tv movie, or contemporary-retro pilot for some Dynasty style knockoff. The bids toward contemporaneity and mature themes are awkward and sketchy, with the narrative structure being utterly conspicuous. I'm also struck by how much Cukor seems to love the Bissett character, and wonder if the film might be more interesting to someone who knows the Cukor biography more. It's easy to read the film as a conflict between two halves of a single artistic self, with Liz being the frustrated artist and Merry being the insecure success. I'm also fascinated by the joke that Liz only writes for two audience -- Jews and homosexuals -- and the way it seems to cue a kind of coded legibility of Cukor within the film. I'm also utterly fascinated by the Matt Lattanzi scene, when Liz gets picked up on the street by a beautiful boy hustler accustomed to the patronage of wealthy old(er) (wo)men. Normally, I'm loathe to read any depiction of female characters as "stealth" gay men but the assignation scene, especially Lattanzi's age, character and actions within it, only really make sense in a gay male context. There's such a palpable tension, only partially erotic, in the scene that I find it really difficult NOT to read it as a kind of "coming out" for Cukor in terms of actually articulating desire. (Seeing this film makes me want to take-up that long-threatened essay about male sex work in 1960s and 1970s cinema based on writings by gay men, to start it with Roman Spring and end it with Rich and Famous.) It's a fascinating piece, for mostly the wrong reasons, one which stops short of being a camp treasure for the utter cluelessness of the central performances and the stunted sincerity of the filmmaking.

RENT - Filmed Live On Broadway (2008) +

2008-09-24T22:53:00.004-06:00

A fascinating document of one of the defining musicals of the genre. Rent - Filmed Live On Broadway endeavors to capture the Broadway production in its final iteration, as the last cast prepares to make its final NY bows. For a spectator like myself -- who knows the story, characters, score and legend of the show quite well despite having never seen RENT onstage -- the film provides an excellent document of the original narrative and visual structure of the piece (complete with intermission). Also, the final cast was very solid, loaded with pros (like perennial Idina Menzel shadow Eden Espinosa in the role Menzel created, as well as Traci Thoms performing the role on stage better than she did in the film) and really vivid sound-mixing (the cast voices, with only one or two exceptions, are clearer in pitch and diction than the original cast recording, permitting Larson's densely pattered lyrics to really be heard). Unfortunately, the camera work is not as clean. The digital video permits a jagged, frenzied approach which, while clearly inspired by the music, doesn't always serve the intricately calibrated balance among characters. Also, for whatever reason, the filmmakers seem inclined to emphasize banal -- typically lewd -- character gestures as visual beats, which cheapens what were (I'm sure) wittier and slighter gestures on stage. The camerawork also struggles to find the balance between close-ups, which almost always seem a little squished or off tempo, and necessary, establishing long shots. I was sorry not to get a more frequent glimpse of the entire stage picture. The cast is generally very good, with Renee Elise Goldsberry (who's almost my age) doing a knockout job as Mimi. Newcomer Adam Kantor is absolutely clear, and dear, and totally cute, as Mark; Will Chase is very rooted, if a little pretty, as Roger. In general, the cast isn't as raw as the original cast, but still quite solid. Justin Johnston and Michael McElroy are good as Angel and Tom Collins, and Rodney Hicks is entirely fine as Benny. (Though the standout for me was the white guy in the ensemble -- great look, great voice, really solid acting chops -- whatever his name is.) I made the commitment, to myself really, to see this production of the show so that I could give the show a more thorough chance. I've never particularly connected to it. The production happened right after my NYC moment (though it's ostensibly set in my NY neighborhood, right around the corner from me, right at the time I lived there) and I've found the score to be at times nearly unlistenable (with the necessary exceptions of "Seasons of Love" and "I'll Cover You" -- which are great musical schmaltz, in the best of ways). But seeing the whole thing front to back helped me to appreciate that it's just that I really sorta hate the first act. I like the characters just fine, but find that the set-ups of inter-character conflicts are obvious, dated, and often clumsy. I especially don't love the numbers I should -- Maureen's performance art and Angel's diva strut -- because, again, they just don't ring true. And all the relationships seem utterly contrived. That said, the characters themselves are compelling as stock characters who, when placed in the configuration they are at the beginning of Act 2, become quite effective. I hadn't quite realized that the show wasn't actually about "living at the end of the millenium" -- that's just the alibi that the show really pushes when it's really about the difficulties of showing up for the opportunity of love. The sequence at the beginning of Act 2, in which the three main couples simultaneously struggle to stay close as Mark observes, makes for an emotionally enthralling sequence. Plus, I suspect the multiracial and polymorphous perversity would have been all the more intense 12-14 years ago. (Though it makes me sorry that Larson didn't have the chance to do another piece, after RENT, which wasn't so f'n epic and ambitious; I actually think he's at his best when he's at his simplest -- something that can be said for Greif, too.) A few things about RENT persist in their annoyingness -- Angel's magical faggotry, Mimi's wheezing series of non-deaths, the whole squat conceit, the fact that Mimi and Angel are not art-makers/intellectuals but "inspirations", that whole restaurant in Santa Fe nonsense, the "gospel for dummies" approach to "soulful" vocalization, the dumb use of AIDS as metaphor -- all which conspire to (a) make me crabby and (b) make damn well sure I'll never be a RENT-head. But I suspect, as flawed as the camerawork in this documentation is, that RENT-heads could have done a lot worse -- thanks Chris Columbus! -- than this as a document of this essential, theatrical/cultural phenomenon of the 1990s. (Plus, it's nice to have so many of the original cast gather on stage at the end, along with Michael Greif and others -- the gathering affirms the generational aspects of the phenomenon in ways that are dear.) I'll likely never be a fan of this show, but I am glad to have seen this film.

Food of the Gods (1976) -

2008-09-07T22:31:00.003-06:00

An utterly idiotic little ecological revenge story, like so many from the 1970s. Basically, some cream-of-wheat-ish goo (we never learn what it is or why) is bubbling forth in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and it seems to be causing certain critters to grow to enormous sizes. Chickens become human-sized; wasps become pterodactyl-sized; rats become the size of minivans. And of course all these critters are hungry for human and are prone to chowing down on whatever human bits and pieces happen to be hanging out in their path on this remote island. Alas, the niftiest scenes -- Marjoe Gortner battling a giant chicken; Ida Lupino being chomped by maggots the length of a child's arm -- come toward the beginning, with the filmmakers just tossing all their interest in rampaging giant rats for the last half of the film. It's occasionally cute to track how the giant rat footage is incorporated to the scenes with live actors (I do love the shot of the actors on the farmhouse roof, above the flooded field teeming with drowning rats), but even that only holds one's attention for so long. (And I kept being a little creeped out by how they got the footage of the rats being shot. Did they actually shoot rats in the face with a bb gun or something? I'm no real animal activist, but scenes upon scenes of rats being drowned, shot in the face, or blasted with something or other causing them to lurch backward, flesh apparently torn from their bodies -- all of that started to grate on even me.) But basically, this is your fairly standard "when critters attack" epic, with a handful of clever scenes overburdened by a over-complex and overlong core narrative (with no compelling twist) and unredeemed by generally stiff performances. (I kept hoping that something would happen with the pregnant woman's fetus but no such luck.) Cute, but not especially interesting.

Hamlet 2 (2008) +?

2008-09-07T18:31:00.005-06:00

An adorably foul exploration of the delightful disasters, routine humiliations and occasional triumphs to be found in High School drama. High school theatre geekery has, I think, rarely received such a heroic treatment as it does here. With Steve Coogan's gloriously clueless Dana Marschz, a basically unsuccessful actor who finds himself teaching one class of HS drama each semester "for the gas money." A curriculum snafu lands an additional 2 dozen students in his class at virtually the same moment he receives word that the school will be canceling drama altogether the next term. A brief consultation with his nemesis -- the school newspaper's scrawny theatre critic -- inspires Marschz to take on his most ambitious project yet to bring attention to the drama program and, hopefully, keep it from being canceled. Marschz and his students stage an elaborate and controversial musical which brings them together for life lessons and the show emerges as a triumphant success. The remarkable thing about this basically boilerplate feel-good HS plot is that it's executed in a very contemporary raunch comedy style, with Steve Coogan's Dana Marschz emerging as an incredibly annoying combination of Steve Carrell in 40 Year Old Virgin, Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa and Christopher Guest in Waiting For Guffman. Sweetly clueless, disgustingly self-obsessed, and tragically grandiose -- all at the same time. (Unfortunately, I find Coogan basically charm-free and often unfunny; I laughed repeatedly at his capacity to convey the affect of devastating discomfort but -- unlike the performances that his evoked for me -- I never once believed that Coogan's Dana Marschz could have been a real person. He's got a little too much "Mr. Bean" for me to really buy into his extraordinary conceits.) But Coogan aside, I found much to love about the entire apparatus of this awful high school drama production. Elisabeth Shue plays a version of herself (in which she's quit Hollywood to become a nurse at a fertility clinic in Tucson) in a way that's both utterly believable and pretty effin' funny. Likewise, David Arquette is brilliant as some random jock guy who lives at Dana's house and ends up running away with his wife. (Were this film an Apatow production, Paul Rudd would have totally played the Arquette part and it was really nice to see another actor riff on the role.) Catherine Keener is -- well -- Catherine Keener as Dana's dissatisfied wife. (I am so officially over the Keener - not judging, just saying.) And Amy Poehler is -- well -- Amy Poehler in the role of Cricket Feldstein, a self-aggrandizing ACLU attorney. All of these pros are solid, but in basically different movies. Where this production gathers some real steam is in the ensemble of younger actors who play the high school kids, an appealing and diverse batch, some of whom I know from wildly divergent contexts. My two faves are the two major cuties: Joseph Julian Soria (who I recognized from his less effective portrayal as the homophobic jock in Tru Loved), who is absolutely dear and utterly plausible as Octavio, an academically gifted Latino kid who chooses to play gangsta, even though he's secretly already accepted to an Ivy: and Skylar Astin (who was so dreamy in the stage production of Spring Awakening as the curiously mohawked bespectacled one), who is also absolutely dear and utterly plausible in the problematically scripted role of Rand, the dramafag whose closet is visible only to himself and whose misguided devotion to his drama teacher manifests in surprising, inappropriate and plot-stirring ways. I also really liked Michael Esparza -- he of the gorgeous abdomen in I Know Who Killed Me; he's very sweet and very effective here in a basically unscripted role. The main girls -- Spring Awakening's Phoebe Strole and indie princess Melonie Diaz -- are good, and I liked Natalie Amenula a lot as the tragically abused Yolanda. This young ensemble anchors the piece (in the best tradition of teen triumph pictures) and it's a hoot to watch them have fun, especially in rehearsal and in the final production. The film, though, is missing something for me. The jokes are perfectly inappropriate and plenty funny. Loads of good bits of business keep everyone going. The story's not bad. But there's just something missing, and I suspect that it's Coogan's Borat-esque performance in the central role. I bought nearly everyone in the film, but him. And that proves to be a problem, finally. (Much of what I didn't like about Coogan derived from how every comic scenario seemed as much a stunt for the purposes of his humiliation, rather than something emerging from the character's actions or reactions. Consider, for example, Dana's supposed to be in recovery, 7 years without a drink, a character detail that works mostly to make Dana seem like a crackpot while permitting a requisite "spiked drink leads to madcap mayhem" scene or two. Yet, once the character starts drinking again, the idea of his being an alcoholic back in his cups completely disappears, as soon as the joke's over. This, for me, is an indication that this film, despite appearances, is actually not a character comedy but a fairly cheap stunt-comedy ala old school Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler, in which an overthetop comic persona does overthetop comedic things. And unlike, say, Peter Sellars whose Clouseau never changes, the fact that Coogan's Dana is precisely as arrogantly clueless, gross and self-obsessed at the end of the film as he was at the beginning, if not even more so.) All told, an inconsistently engaging film that's nonetheless consistently funny; excellent set pieces, astonishing laughs, and a genuinely appealing youth ensemble help, by turns, to elevate and ground the film when the central performance gets stuck or lost along the way. [An additional treat worth mentioning: Although the film is ostensibly set in Tucson (lots of jokes about Tucson), nearly everything was filmed in ABQ, with familiar locations and faces amplifying the relatability of the whole project for me.]

Little Shop of Horrors (1986) +

2008-09-05T22:44:00.002-06:00

A witty, whimsical screen adaptation of a tiny stage classic. I loved this movie when it first came out; I love it still. The film is basically structured in three acts: exposition; Seymour feeds the plant; Seymour decides not to feed the plant. And those first two acts? Fairly effin' perfect. The film somehow finds a way NOT to mess up the stage's smart use of The Urchins -- Ronette (Michelle Weeks); Crystal (Everybody Hates Chris's Tichina Arnold); and Chiffon (Tisha Campbell of Martin and My Wife and Kids) -- as a kind of Skid Row Greek Chorus, offering comment and context for nearly every major plot point. (I had hoped to develop a Supporting Actress Profile for The Urchins over on the main site but other obligations crowded me out.) (I also have to give another shoutout to Tisha Campbell, who deploys the musical, comedy and dance chops on display here to enduring dramatic effect in one of the greatest Supporting Actress performances of 1988, in Spike Lee's School Daze.) Anyway, Frank Oz's directorial sensibility here is perfect, simultaneously kiddie-silly and adult-sardonic. Supported by excellently dimensional comedic characterizations from the whole cast, but especially Ellen Greene, Steve Martin and Rick Moranis, the film maintains the delightfully inappropriate Muppet camp sensibility that was Oz's queerish contribution to the Muppets. (Oz's freakishness is Miss Piggy and Gonzo, while Jim Henson's hippie sweetness is Fozzie and Kermit.) Oz's Muppet style -- a mix of comic camera angles, broad characterization, and arch art direction -- really works for the ensemble production numbers like "Skid Row" and "Meek Shall Inherit," as well as his now-classic treatment of "Somewhere That's Green." Two things about Little Shop nag my adoration of it. First, the obviously strange racial politics of the piece -- so exacerbated by the casting of Levi Stubbs and the new song written for the film, "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space" -- are problematic in ways that are hard to put a finger on. As the plant gets bigger, as the lips get broader, as the leaves inside the plant's mouth become ever more labial, the plant becomes ever more like a manifestation of the vagina dentata, albeit with the voice of an urban black man. Two great castration anxiety tropes squished together in one giant puppet. I guess I always wonder if the filmmakers had any idea that, in Audrey II, they were building a perfectly monstrous manifestation of both the racial and gendered inflection on 20th century white male castration anxiety tropes... The other piece I wonder about is the banal use of profanity in this piece (mostly, again, from Audrey II). This time through, I kept wondering if the use of weirdly tonedeaf scatological humor might have been a lame attempt to contemporize the piece, to make it legible as a film for an adult audience as opposed to a kiddie movie. But I do love this film. It makes me giggle. My favorite bits? Ellen Greene's squeak. The Urchins dancing on the roof in homage to both West Side Story and Sweet Charity. Christopher Guest. The Dentist's Closet Shrine. Ellen Greene's belt. The Urchins walking through the rain without getting wet. The ensemble in Skid Row. And so much more... Screening this movie this week also reminded me of my experience revisiting Roger Rabbit, a film I don't like nearly as much. Both films now seem to me to anticipate all kinds of trends in humor, style, blending of high and low, kid and adult, puppetry/animation for grownups...all kinds of things that would become conventionalized in the 1990s following the smashout success of The Simpsons, etcetera. Yet in 1987, it's striking that no one knew what to do with this formidably accomplished musical film. I remain utterly appalled that Ellen Greene was not nominated for a Golden Globe for her incredibly textured, hilarious, and touching work as Audrey. It's among the greater screen performances of the decade and I'm still shocked that she received no award mentions whatsoever.

Alfie (1966) -

2008-08-25T22:38:00.004-06:00

A callow comedy about a London ladies' man hitting his limit. Michael Caine, in a deservedly legendary performance, lives "every man's fantasy" -- flirting with every woman he sees, often finding his way into bed them, while refusing any meaningful attachments. Women -- or "birds" as he more frequently refers to them -- are not people to Caine's Alfie, but objects or toys or things. Alfie routinely refers to this or that woman he's bedded as "it" -- a bit of verbal trickery that cues the deeper arc of the character. The story, in 12 step parlance, depicts a sex addict hitting bottom...twice, actually. And Alfie is a fascinating character, on some levels. The film starts by celebrating Alfie's awesome prowess, demonstrating his incredible skill in seducing all kinds of women. But while he begins as a playboy, Alfie soon becomes a cad before he's finally revealed to be an emotional infant. The most interesting thread in the film is the peril of pregnancy, situating this film upon a fascinating cusp in sexual history. The "pill" -- invented at the beginning of the decade and just entering widespread prescriptive circulation in the US as this film was being made -- would have totally changed this narrative. Basically, Alfie has it easy -- he never has to deal with the consequences of his promiscuity. Sure, he keeps track of his partner's menstrual cycles and routinely frets about the possibility of pregnancy, but he maintains a careful distance from it. The women bear the burden of pregnancy in this film, and Alfie shows himself -- repeatedly -- to be utterly incapable of shouldering his share. Yet his brushes with parenthood are what change him, whether through an adored son who he refuses to claim legally as his own (but whose adoption by another man causes Alfie to spiral into a nervous depression) or a devastating encounter with an aborted fetus. Alfie assiduously resists acknowledging these incidents (referring to at least two children he fathered as "a kid I used to know"). All of this combines to establish Alfie as a basically conservative narrative about the immaturity of sexual promiscuity. Alfie needs to grow up, commit to one woman, and shoulder his responsibilities -- and because he doesn't, he becomes prone to emotional crackups over lost women and unknown children. The women in the film are fascinating and fun (especially Shelley Winters as an American party dame, Millicent Martin as a wife with a wild streak, and Vivien Merchant whose life is devastated by one tryst with Alfie). The art direction is often a hoot. I adored the interiors of Shelley Winters' pad; there's a painting and a stuffed thing that I just need to have. An interesting, self-consciously hip, twisty narrative about erotic excess that turns in on itself to become something of a screed about the imperatives of masculine responsibility. Could easily work as a promotional film for the Promise Keepers in the ways it details the spiritual hollowness of masculine promiscuity. (Plus the one sneering reference to shrieking, cowardly queens would likely prove delightful for just such an audience.) One thing I certainly didn't expect to see was how much Sex and the City, either consciously or unconsciously, owes to this film. Between the crazy high style interiors and the intermittent direct address moments and the at times neverending parade of conquests: it all felt conspicuously like SATC, which I didn't expect at all. It's an interesting film, intelligent and stylish and surprising, while also containing one of Michael Caine's most efficiently remarkable performances. Yet for all that there is to recommend the film, it's hard for me to get too excited about a neo-conservative, generally misogynist, morality fable addressing the perils of overexerting straight male privilege. It's tough to be white, straight, male and sexually irresistible -- just ask Alfie.

A Man for All Seasons (1966) -

2008-08-24T12:25:00.004-06:00

Even more turgid, tedious and intellectual than I remembered it being -- which, quite frankly, I didn't think possible. Paul Scofield works wonders in a role of incredible intellectual depth and emotional vacuity. The script requires Thomas More to do things like express his loving devotion to his wife and daughter by offering them lessons in the finer points of law. And, somehow, Scofield makes it work, underscoring this man's defining sense of principle as part and parcel of his emotional life. The film captures the essential simplicity of this extraordinarily internecine piece, condensing it (if you can believe it) and enlivening it (if you can believe it) with aptly chosen exterior moments. All told, Fred Zinneman's film is an efficient adaptation of a grueling piece of theatre, which remains perhaps the best example of a certain mode of 1960s/70s Anglo-American dramaturgical sensibility/aesthetic. John Hurt is wonderful as the mercenary Richard Rich and the requisite young lovers (Susannah York and Corin Redgrave) provide the necessary jolt of attractive energy. (Best though is a luminous Vanessa Redgrave in a wordless cameo as the ill-fated Anne Boleyn.) The main supporting players, especially Leo McKern as Thomas Cromwell, Robert Shaw as Henry8, and the usually delicious Wendy Hiller as Lady Alice More, are all fairly insufferable, snorting and braying their way through their roles with a garish lack of nuance. They're all really good at doing exactly what they're doing, but what they're doing is most frequently obnoxious and annoying. Sigh. Tragically, I know this piece way too well -- having seen it staged more times than I care to note and even having appeared in a workshop production when I was a kid (I played the obnoxious servant I think). But golly. A vaguely accurate intellectual history lesson played as a morality tale of the spiritual triumph of principled reason? Sounds like FUN. And it is, exactly as much fun as it sounds...

A Certain Kind of Death (2003) -

2008-08-23T16:58:00.003-06:00

A straightforward documentary about the complex social service apparatus that attends to the deaths of individuals who die alone and with no known next of kin. A subject that caught my imagination due to an exceptional treatment of it in a This American Life episode from last winter ("Home Alone"), this documentary suffered in comparison. (In the TAL episode, they basically hit most/all of the same notes, crediting this documentary I think, but the material feels different visually than it did aurally. First off, and as someone who lets the tv dial rest on variants of CSI a LOT, the video documentary makes the whole image of decomposing bodies -- and, yes, they show them -- real on a whole 'nother level. Plus, I found that I was less concerned with what the civil servants might be missing when I listened on the radio, as the TAL ended up taking the workers who do this work much more seriously as subjects. This film is less interested in the human dimensions of either the decedents (a word I did not know prior to this pair of documentaries) or the public employees charged with making sense of and discharging their remains in as humane, cost-effective, and expedient manner possible. Instead, this film seems mostly interested in documenting the process itself, noting each stage of the internecine process. I, of course, find the people part the more fascinating. Moreover, in the film, one of the decedents is a 60something gay man of modest means, who the investigators read as a single person for a very long time (when the apartment and fragmented personal details are so obviously those of a gay man). There's one moment -- when the folks who are paid to remove his stuff from his apartment, separating the stuff with resale/auction potential from simple trash -- when a cache of programs and mementos from a independent gay film festival in 1970 are unearthed, along with pages from his scrapbooks. Trash. Interesting queerish art. Sold a pittance at auction. The archivist in me was shrieking, and the moment is such a poignant one from the perspective of how the "ephemera" (ie materials not connected to blood relatives) of gay history is so easily and so often just tossed as trash. But as a whole, the film -- while fascinating on some levels, because of all the death tasks that are required, tasks normally accomplished by surviving family members, here have to be executed by unknown public employees -- but as a whole the film avoids the emotional dimensions of the scenario in hewing its attention to the mechanics of the process. An interesting but curiously disappointing documentary treatment of a complex, startling subject.

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) +

2008-08-23T13:27:00.004-06:00

A surprisingly enthralling bit of cinematic history/criticism/theory in which Thom Andersen, an artist/scholar who's been teaching film theory to filmmakers forever, offers his interpretive history of how Los Angeles -- arguably "the most photographed city in the world" -- has been depicted in film. At 169-minutes, the film feels like a semester-long seminar of lectures, screenings and readings compressed into a brooding but somehow exhilarating cinematic frame. The film works as an uneasy blend of two distinct texts, an essay read in effectively uninflected voiceover by Andersen's friend and former student, Encke King, in juxtaposition with a visual montage of images, sequences and scenes from more than 100 movies in which city of Los Angeles "plays" some kind of role. These two dense and fascinating texts are overlain atop one another. The text does not simply describe or explain the images, just as the images do not merely illustrate the points being made in the voiceover. This is not to say that the images/voiceover are discordant or incongruous, but rather that in its loose intelligence the juxtaposition maintains an almost dialectic space for the viewer. The spectator, in a way, is obliged to reconcile the Andersen's artfully assembled images with his forcefully argued text. It's a fascinating experience, this film about ideas and images. As Andersen's text wanders through three "titled" sections -- The City as Backdrop, The City as Character, The City as Subject -- Los Angeles Plays Itself opens myriad additional routes of inquiry, highlighting intriguing aspects of canonical films in fascinating juxtaposition with the trashiest of trasy exploitation films and fairy obscure independent/art cinema, all while making inserting provocative claims about the history of cinema, Los Angeles, and the practice of commercial filmmaking. In the first section ("The City as Backdrop"), Andersen presents an often amusing account of how filmmakers have used and misused Los Angeles as a location. Andersen presents a diachronic survey of how specific buildings have been used (the demonstration of the different ways the skylit, staircase laden Bradbury Building is entrancing), how films toy with Los Angeles geography, and how filmmakers have inadvertently created an aggregate diachronic portrait of certain neighborhoods and how they have changed over time. The second and third parts (The City as Character and The City as Subject) are a little less distinct, with the "character" section deals more explicitly with Los Angeles as an actual place with an actual history and how cinema has made claims about Los Angeles. The final section (City as Subject) deals most provocatively with filmmakers who have endeavored to deal with Los Angeles as both a topic and also as a state of mind, a state of consciousness. (The film concludes with Andersen's contemplation of the neo-realist African and African American filmmakers of the 1970s and it's in this concluding section that Andersen's polemic is at its most exhilarating.) All told, the film is something of a mindblower, a movie about a city, sure, but also a movie about how movies shape consciousness and even history. His quickie readings are at times thrilling (in his treatment of Rebel without a Cause, which Andersen calls "the first teen film noir," Andersen praises Nicholas Ray's decision to film it in the style of a studio musical) and compelling (I can see why this film proved so instrumental in the rediscovery and subsequent restoration/release of The Exiles; having The Exiles, the first movie to be added to my "watch this movie" list is Bush Mama). Andersen's treatment of themes -- the necessity of a car; the obsession with the LAPD; the way that even the most cynical cinematic treatments of Los Angeles history pretty things up -- is witty, smart and haunting. The gaps are big. No shopping malls, few high schools, a fairly black/white conception of race. And it's so too bad that this film was completed before it could really take on a 2003's Crash. (Indeed, if I were ever to have the appropriate opportunity to teach a film & history course, I would really want to pair this film and Crash to see what happens.) All told, a fascinating "movie about the movies" that opens onto no end of fascinating rabbit holes. Los Angeles Plays Itself will likely never have a home video or other commercial release but, as yet, there have been no "cease & desist" actions. So, if it comes to an arthouse or classroom or private dvd collection near you, hustle to see this film and see what you think. Because, even if it puts you to sleep, you won't be able to avoid thinking some deep thoughts before you drift off.

This post is cross-listed in GoatDog's "Movies About Movies Blogathon."
Click here to peruse the many fascinating Blogathon submissions.
Click here to learn more about StinkyLulu.
And thanks to Oh, Well, Just This Once... for hooking me up with this film.

Hawaii (1966) -

2008-08-20T17:50:00.005-06:00

A turgid epic detailing the devastations wrought upon native Hawaii by the simultaneous scourges of colonial racism and religious zealotry (aka the beginnings of Manifest Destiny). The stiff spine of the story is provided by impetuous evangelical prig Abner Hale (Max Von Sydow in a curiously stunted performance, existential braying unmoored from any sense of the character's spiritual integrity) who journeys to Hawaii to bring the heathens to the lord. Von Sydow's Hale trundles a new wife (Julie Andrews doing a startlingly hollow version of her, by 1966, plainspeaking propriety shtik). Hale and Jerusha journey to a Hawaiian island where Jerusha is befriended by the island's queen, Malama (acting novice Jocelyne LaGarde, offering a fascinating conundrum of a performance) and the couple quickly finds themselves at the center of cultural life on the island. Of course, Jerusha's generous Christian spirit finds affinity with the natives, while Abner's gruesomely Calvinist style makes him few friends. (There's an additional backstory involving some licentious whaler who Jerusha nearly married, who -- of course -- crosses paths with the couple in the islands, but the film does so little with this subplot or Richard Harris in the role that I can barely recall the substance of the romantic triangulation.) LaGarde's Malama is a savvy leader, insisting that Jerusha teach her to write so that she can pen a plea to the US President. Malama also consents to convert to Christianity, mostly out of political expediency to set a solid example for her people of how best to withstand the haoli onslaught. (There's an additional subplot involving Malama's son Keoki, a Western-educated young man whose plea inspired Hale to come to the island but whose potential for religious leadership is dismissed by Hale as too corrupted by his heathen origins and predispositions.) Ultimately, things go badly. Malama dies, but not before issuing a decree that all her people follow the Christian ways, and the vacuum of spiritual leadership created by her death causes all kinds of awful things to happen. (The film implies that Hale's vengeful destruction of the traditional icons and talismans, coupled with his begging his Calvinist deity to visit wrath upon the heathens, instigates the devastation.) Soon enough, Jerusha dieas as well, but not before renouncing Abner's fundamentalism and offering her own more generous view of Christianity. The devastation wrought upon the native Hawaiians, coupled with the deaths of Malama and Jerusha, lead Abner toward a new form of Christian leadership, one prioritizing native sovereignty. And the film concludes with Abner encountering the glimmer of his true religious calling - ethical empathy. Blah blah blah. This overwrought epic, beautiful locations elaborately utilized, is turgid, brittle and utterly boring. The ideas are actually pretty fascinating -- the film (with screenplay by Dalton Trumbo from the James Michener source material) makes a surprisingly forceful case for the notion that the arrival of the white man was the worst thing to befall native Hawaiian culture. The film takes seriously what might be considered a "post-colonial" position, with the figure of Keoki emerging as a radically subaltern position and Ruth Malama enacting a complex hybridity, for explicitly strategic purposes. The film's aesthetic is strange, creating easy polarities between the drab New Englanders and the colorful natives. (The visual treatment of the native women is totally colonial soft-porn, National Geographic-style.) Conveniently enough for my purposes, the only actually interesting part of the film was Jocelyne LaGarde's performance as Ruth Malama. Not a great acting job -- she did learn the bilingual role phonetically -- but she's a formidable presence, and her character infuses some of the only genuine complications (as opposed to easy conflicts) in the entire narrative. (Her performance, though, feels a little like a cross between Hope Emerson and Yul Brynner, making up for what she lacked in spontaneity with formidable charisma.) The film, in some ways, anticipates Dances with Wolves, another story about a 19th century white man's spiritual crisis answered by the lessons learned from the natives. Unfortunately, the film does little to illuminate (or, dare I say, take seriously) Hale's religious identity; his is a blithely resolute faith and Von Sydow stiffens all Hale's internal conflict with repressed reserve. This may or may not be historically/culturally accurate for a 19th century Calvinist. The problem is that it makes for an exhaustingly turgid love story, with little genuine complication or tension. Indeed, by playing Hale so literally, the production is enervate, losing access to what seems to be the character's core conflict: a genuinely religious man encountering the limits of his faith. I don't know that a different interpretation of Hale would have made this adaptation of Michener's extraordinarily influential novel work. However, making Abner Hale a human being, rather than a priggish religious automaton prone to braying pronouncements, might have served the film's emotional architecture more substantially. But that didn't seem to be the point for Trumbo or director George Roy Hill, who seem to be using this narrative to tap into a palpable anger toward the cultural arrogance of Western expansion. An exhausting movie, loaded with things to think about, but with little to enjoy.

The Exiles (1961) +

2008-08-17T15:33:00.002-06:00

A beautiful narrative "documentary" -- haunting in its enigmatic, stylized directness -- about the lives of young urban Indians in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Filmmaker Kent Mackenzie intersperses voiceover interviews, reenactments, and neo-ethnographic footage to weave a startling story depicting 12 hours -- from dusk to dawn -- in the lives of a group of 20something native folk living in the "lost" neighborhood of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill. The folks featured in the film "play" themselves, reenacting scenes from their own lives while also improvising dramatic scenarios in a variety of "real" locations. Mackenzie's technique both hearkens back to early classics of indigenous documentary (like Nanook of the North while also providing a startling premonition for contemporary "candid reality" treatments of youth subcultures in the US (like MTV's The Hills and BET's The Hill). The film opens with a critical prelapsarian view of the ostensible decline of native culture and hegemony in the Western US by the end of the nineteenth century. Sepia-toned Edward Curtis photographs of wizened elders appear in proto-KenBurnsian montage while a generic (ostensibly white) male voice intones homilies about Western expansion and the challenges to the "old ways" etcetera etcetera. This now-familiar mode of critique (Western expansion as destructive force for native cultures and communities) foregrounds what is still today an unfamiliar cinematic narrative: a realistic, empathetic and serious account of the lives of young native people as they maneuver mainstream US culture and maintain (or not) their connections to their traditional/tribal origins. It's a stark, possibly bleak portrait too -- shocking in its frankness regarding alcohol consumption, intimate partner violence, sexuality, poverty, illicit economies, etc. Yet, as bleak as the scenarios often are, Mackenzie somehow maintains an integrity within the project, one which transfers to -- or emerges from -- the subjects. The folks in this film emerge as utterly flawed and yet utterly human. It's curiously thrilling to see all these native folk wearing late 50s fashions, utterly contemporary to their historical moment (mostly shocking for how infrequently I have EVER seen 10-20 distinct US Indian characters on a screen at one time, let alone the rarity of seeing so many such characters inhabit a US cultural moment contemporary to the making of the film). It's a Native-centric film, narrative in its style but documentary in its tone; Mackenzie offers little editorializing, beyond his simple (though importantly critical circa 1961) introductory montage. It's sad, depressing, bleak stuff and, I suspect, had the film been accessible through the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s it would have come in for much criticism (a la Paris Is Burning) for the devastating portrait it provides and/or its "white" gaze and/or its curious formal experimentation. Yet, arriving to critical attention now, nearly 50 years after its production, the film benefits from its nearly archeological aura, easing -- for me at least -- a more empathetic approach to routinely bleak subject matter. I found myself marveling -- "Who knew there was a native nightclub scene in LA in the late 1950s?" -- then correcting myself, "Of course there was, why wouldn't there be?" -- before moving on to marvel again -- "And look at how many folks were living, drinking, laughing and despairing." It's a cinematic treasure of cultural documentation, but it's also a captivating, challenging film. A few things really enthralled me. One, the central female presence in the film, Yvonne (played by Yvonne Williams), is a character unlike any I think I've ever seen on film. A stoic dreamer, hoping that her dreams will be realized but recognizing the odds. Her experience -- just beyond the carousing that absorbs much of the film -- contributes an emotional mooring that's hard to get a handle on, but one that I found absolutely captivating. Second, I loved the way casual details of Indian life -- references to boarding schools, jokes about being photographed by tourists, watching "Injun"-hating Westerns on tv -- just waft through the voiceovers. Again, a rarity. Third, I was truly impressed how Mackenzie incorporated a brief sequence in which another central character, Homer, imagines what his parents and siblings might be doing. The scene provides an unexpected continuity, in which Homer's fondness for his family and his home did not translate into nostalgia (thinks look pretty bleak and everyone's broke back on the rez too) but instead as a point of critical continuity in which the "horizons" for contemporary Indians weren't looking too good on the rez or in the city, but that native community -- as imperfect as it might be -- was the truly sustaining force for Homer in both locales. Fourth, the queer scene -- in which a white queen/faggot/fairy causes a mild stir while dancing (along with several other gays, mostly men of color) at the 2nd, divier bar Homer and Rico hit? The scene is an astonishing cinematic portrait of the swirl of mixed masculinities, sexualities and ethnicities in urban centers at midcentury, the sort of things I've only read about but never seen. Finally, the climax -- if there is one -- of the film comes just after the bars close and everyone heads up to the Hollywood hills somewhere, overlooking the lights of Los Angeles, and a spontaneous inter-tribal powwow party happens, right there encircled by the headlights. This scene is one of the most poignant, profound depictions of how traditions travel and are reinvented I know. It's not cloying, it's not noble, it's not especially spiritual -- but there's something deeply moving about the interplay between tradition and contemporary culture that happens in this sequence. I can't say I loved the film. It's slow; it's full of uncomfortable moments; the inexpert sound-synchronization troubles easy acceptance of the blurred line between verite and artifice (in ways, I suspect, are ultimately quite brilliant). And I also have no idea how the film might "read" to an audience with little exposure to US Indian cultural life and history. Yet I was consistently amazed by this film, as both a film and as a cultural document. It's visually stunning, emotionally challenging, historically important, and cinematically adventurous...obviously, I can't stop thinking about it.

Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) +

2008-08-15T19:04:00.001-06:00

A cosmopolitan comedy of manners that feels like a refreshing gust of romantic whimsy. Woody Allen -- formerly the master of the "romcom for New Yorker readers" subgenre -- offers his first genuinely entertaining feature in more than a decade. The film is hyperintelligent (but not baroque), featuring absurdly wealthy/privileged people undertaking absurd adventures. However, unlike the almost great Match Point (where Allen treated British class structures with the fascinated but soulless fetishism of a crabby taxidermist) and the basically awful Anything Else (where Allen seemed intent on reinventing himself with tepid surrogates 60 years his junior), in the Spanish setting of Vicky Christina Barcelona, Allen has rediscovered two of the essential elements that made his best "mature" work so effervescent: the wonderment of an outsider just allowed into an inner circle and a genuine sense of joy. The scenario is classic Allen. Two privileged white women from NY, 20something best friends from childhood, travel to Barcelona for two months of relaxation. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is about to get married to a trader, while Christina (Scarlett Johanssen) is, as she says, "at liberty." Two are elemental opposites -- Vicky knows exactly what she wants, Christina understands precisely what she doesn't want. When a charismatic Spanish painter named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) approaches them both, inviting them both to his bed -- the appeal of the invitation tosses both women into the swirl of overlapping erotic love triangles which create the nominal plot of this basically simple but totally complicated little love poem. The film meditates on a familiar Allen theme: the neurotic terror inspired by the encounter with genuine, profound emotion. The film really starts to make sense when Penelope Cruz arrives on the scene, as Juan Antonio's epic lover, about halfway through the film. Like so many instrumental actresses at the edges of the Allen ouevre (think especially of Maureen Stapleton in Interiors or Hazelle Goodman in Deconstructing Harry), the boldness of Cruz's Maria Elena puts the rest of the familiar scenario into a thrilling bold relief. As MrStinky noted, the film doesn't really make sense until she shows up. And that's sort of the point, I think of the film -- life doesn't always make sense, mostly a series of diversions to keep things amusing or busy, until that one person comes into it that helps it all make sense...and, more existentially, seem actually real. It's a familiar Allen saga, yet one amplified and clarified by Javier Bardem's formidably masculine erotic appeal in the lead role, as well as Penelope Cruz's hilarious, inspiring and heartbreaking verve. Scarlett Johanssen and Rebecca Hall are entirely adequate, though I found myself longing for someone like Maggie Gyllenhaal (or even Gwyneth) in the role of Vicky, someone more American in her angst. Patty Clarkson is gorgeous though a little underutilized as the expatriate "matron" who longs for the opportunities that Vicky has even as she sees Vicky making the same choices she did. The threesome -- the notion that Juan Antonio and Maria Elena's epic love needs a third to temper (or "tint") its perfection -- is a fascinating new wrinkle in Allen's long struggle with the imperative of fidelity, but -- amazingly enough given just how noxious and creepy it could have been given Allen's recent predisposition to terrifying, gross inappropriateness on screen and off -- somehow the whole threesome thing actually makes sense in this film. Vicky Christina Barcelona doesn't quite rank with Allen's best "mature" comedies of romantic manners, but it's truly a delight to see those familiar credits and hear that acute curatorial ear for music and then watch a narrative set in some wealthy fantasy land that is basically fascinating, funny, poignant and delightful. As one who fell in love with the Allen ouevre through Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days, it's a refreshing return to grace for one of the greater auteurs of our era.

The Wackness (2008) +

2008-08-11T19:32:00.004-06:00

A stealthy comedy about the intimate terror of depression that somehow manages to be brutal in its incisive wit yet absolutely tender in its quiet vulnerability. At its core, the film is about the unlikely friendship forged between a teenager and his therapist. What twists this scenario into surprising shapes is that the teen is a hip-hop obsessed Jewish kid from the upper East side of NYC who makes a good living as a pot dealer and the therapist is one of his most devoted clients (they barter dime bags for therapy time). The other twist? Both men are on the terrifying edge of an identity crisis (coming of age for the teen, mid-life for the shrink) in which they find themselves terribly alone. Josh Peck (late of the Nickelodeon kidcom Nick and Josh) is powerfully brilliant in the teen role of Luke Shapiro. Rarely does a film capture a really good young actor at the moment when he can play both boy and man so convincingly. Peck permits Luke to be a kid and an adult, as appropriate and necessary to the moment, while also refining an emotional core to the person who seems, at times, to be growing before our eyes. In what is one of the most over-rehearsed cinematic genres (the coming of age story), Peck's performance is a glorious rarity -- believably true on both sides of the transformation. Ben Kingsley, as the loopy therapist, is a trip, riffing this way and that as a man who has no idea who he is anymore. Kingsley is, of course, fabulous -- completely strange yet totally real. But it's really Peck who holds this film together -- totally a young actor to watch. (And with the promise of a genuinely beefy beauty that will likely be quite delicious in a couple years, it will be a delight to keep an eye on him.) Olivia Thirlby is great doing her "smarter than she looks" indie girlness; I hope she soon gets a role that asks more of her than being the glorious witness to an easily unappreciated wonder (what she does here as well as in Snow Angels and Juno). Cameos by Mary-Kate Olsen, Jane Adams and Famke Janssen are solid and fun (though I'm dying to see Janssen in a role that gives her something to do). Yet the real breakout star of this film, aside from Josh Peck, is the filmmaker Jonathan Levine. I'm easily bored by films in which the experiential effects of marijuana proves an essential narrative element, but Levine does something really smart here. He uses the incredible amount of pot smokage as a metaphor for depression, for an overwhelming emotional numbness, with pot as a device to blur out what might otherwise be an overwhelming sense of despair (what the film calls "wackness"). But as Peck's Luke begins to truly feel his own emotions the centrality of pot as a feature of who he is begins to shift. This can be seen most literally in the way the film utilizes a hazy color scheme in the first half and slightly warms/brightens as Luke awakens to his own emotions. The film also demonstrates a sublime sense of structure, with a low key narrative style (again the pot vibe) that is amplified by some real jolts of visual verve. (The retro graffiti marking the passage of summer time is a great stylistic choice which would have been pretty fabulous just on its own as a sequencing signpost, but Levine amps it up in August when it signals a hilariously stylized yet absolutely vivid quick passage of time.) All told, it's an artful, unpretentious, witty, humane and stylish coming of age picture, featuring a great soundtrack and a revelatory central performance by Josh Peck.

God Told Me To (1976) +

2008-08-10T23:03:00.004-06:00

A completely whackadoo bit of paranormal mystery that somehow manages to spin all those 1970s thriller tropes into one pot of B-movie madness. We've got a renegade cop & paranormally inclined catholics & arbitrary gun violence in the streets & satanic entities & mysterious elite cabals & drug dealing pimps in the ghetto & alien abductions & gender panic...all in a single nonsensical hoot of a movie. The basic premise is this: a sudden wave of seemingly arbitrary killings confounds all of NYC, save the one cop who has serendipitously heard several of the killers offer as explanation, "God told me to." This cop (a prime slab of sideburned 70s studness, Tony Lo Bianco) feels a calling to pursue the mysterious coincidences that might connect these seemingly arbitrary killings. As he begins to piece the puzzle together, he also begins to make sense of his own life. The extraordinary conceit of the film is (SPOILER) that the entity who has compelled the killings is the intersexed progeny of a virgin birth, a birth that may or may not have been the result of an alien abduction. The kicker? The cop might actually be a similar entity. It's whackadoo, really. The entity was born intersex, as the deliverying doctor notes, and bears a set of genitals that seem to be part sphincter, part vagina, part distended clitoris, possessed of what appears to be formidable suction power. Whackadoo. The story makes sense, but in no real compelling way. What elevates this film is how lucidly the whackadoo narrative unfolds, with just enough mystery and suspense to maintain one's interest and just enough clarity so that the whole thing doesn't spin into nonsenseville. It's all ridiculous but it all sorta makes sense by the end. But what really elevates this film is the collection of vivid performances. In the lead role, Tony Lo Bianco is absolutely right on -- hot, masculine, emotionally open, competent, vulnerable. A solid performance and presence. (Plus the scene where you can see the shadow of his bikini briefs through his thin cotton pajama pants -- strangely hot.) The film also features several vivid cameos: Sylvia Sidney as an elderly woman who's lived her entire life holding a secret that Lo Bianco inadvertently elicits; Sandy Dennis as Lo Bianco's estranged wife, patient yet unflinching in her clarity about what's going on; Sammy Williams (the original Paul from the stage A Chorus Line in his single film role), vivid and interesting as the first sniper. (Andy Kaufman has a tiny part as a patrol cop compelled to open fire at the St. Patrick's day parade.) Deborah Raffin is very Deborah Raffin as Lo Bianco's girlfriend. These performances are generally strong and, along with the whackadoo plot twists, helped to keep my interest in this crazy paranormal procedural. It's not a great movie by any means but it's just competent enough AND whackadoo enough to be a an amusing/confounding diversion.

You're A Big Boy Now (1966) -

2008-08-09T22:04:00.003-06:00

An at times fascinating comedy detailing the exploits of a nerdy momma's boy as he endeavors to come of sexual age in New York City in the moment just prior to the sexual revolution. Bernard is the coddled son of a overbearing mother (Geraldine Page, deploying her arsenal of neurotic tics in her portrayal of a prissy middle class matron intent on infantilising her nearly adult son, possibly forever) and an absent-minded father (Rip Torn, a prim hoot as a mildly lecherous librarian). Bernard (a vaguely constipated Peter Kastner) is trying to grow up but, between his overbearing parents and his own idiosyncracies, seems unable to bloom. He moves into an apartment building maintained by a 42-year-old virgin, Miss Thing (Julie Harris, incongruously cast in a role better suited for Elsa Lanchester...or Divine). Add two pretty girls to the mix ("introducing" Karen Black as a girl from the neighborhood and Elizabeth Hartman as the obnoxious dream girl) and you've got the makings of a very strange little sex farce. This film -- Francis Ford Coppola's MFA thesis film -- is perhaps mostly interesting for the location shots of NYC in the mid60s; the film is a thrilling visual time capsule of NYC street life circa 1965. My absolute favorite part of the film comes early when Bernard goes on a late night stroll through Times Square, a mildly lurid travelogue of the bookstores and peepshows and novelty shops that were among a man's illicit options. It's an enthralling little glimpse of a NYC that no longer exists. Throughout the film, Coppola captures fascinating scenes, faces and sequences. The film, however, is less fascinating. The story -- clearly a nerdboy's wish fulfillment fantasy -- is less than developed, with all four principal women representing the basic archetypes of femininity (overbearing mother; neurotic spinster/virgin; the girl you wanna marry; the girl you wanna...). These are not women, but "ideas" of women; each each is either the dream, the dream's obstacle, or both. The men don't fare much better -- each an idiot in thrall to the "power" of femininity, to the detriment of their careers, self-respect or basic humanity. It's self-consciously "now" romp about the difficulty of coming to maturity from the playpen of middle class comfort (and, as Mark Harris notes, you can see the influence of this film upon the soon forthcoming The Graduate). It might have been a poignant coming of age sex comedy but lapses to the profound (and/or "the quirk") when it probably should be just funny. Not especially good, not especially bad -- just a strange (and strangely unsatisfying) little picture about sex and the single boy.