Alphabet Movie Meme: StinkyLulu's Guilty Treasure Edition

Over the last week or so, lil StinkyLulu has been tagged a couple times (most recently by the lovely Self-Styled Siren) to complete an especially popular movieblog meme: Blog Cabin's Alphabetical Movie Meme. The rules of the meme go something like this:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. [As regards franchises and sequels,] movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgment to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

As my list began to emerge, I was struck by (a) how accurately the list reflected my truest movie passions and (b) how trashy my list of favorites actually was. Now, I will go down defending the merits of each of these films but I also know that this list contains something to appall nearly every reader. Thus, I feel compelled to qualify my list as...

StinkyLulu's Guilty Treasures, Alphabetically

All That Jazz
Broadway Rhythm (1944)
Carrie
Decline of the American Empire
Earthquake
Female Trouble
G.I. Jane
Hannah and Her Sisters
I Want to Live!
The Jerk
Klute
Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
Myra Breckenridge
Network
On the Town
Parting Glances
Querelle
Radio Days
School Daze
That's Entertainment III
Under the Same Moon
Vanya on 42nd Street
West Side Story
X2: X-Men United
Yentl
Zorro, The Gay Blade

Even though it seems that everyone has already completed this one, I nonetheless now I tag: Criticlasm; The Oscar Completist; Alex in Movieland; MrPeenee; and Canadian Ken. And, of course, I'm absolutely fascinated to hear what you make of my little list in comments...

StinkyLulu's Home Movies - 2008

FOR CURRENT LIST CLICK HERE

Movies Screened at Home since January 1, 2008...
(The "+" or "-" indicates general yay/nay sentiment about a given flick.)

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following are generally unedited and routinely rambling riffs on the films in StinkyLulu's haphazard rotation of movies screened at home, in class, for research or just because they happen to be playing on the tube. Comments on this post will read as comments on the entire year's filmlog. But if you've got something to say about these random ramblings, or if you feel strongly I should promote a particular rambling to the mainpage, I genuinely invite you to just holler. Your POV is always especially valued.

• She's a Boy I Knew (2007)-dvd (-)
In this well-made video autobiography, Gwen Haworth, a Canadian MTF trans filmmaker, tells the story of her journey toward and through her gender transition by inviting the six people closest to her (her mother, father, two sisters, male best friend, and ex-wife) to tell their story of Gwen’s transition. Crafted mostly from interviews and home movies, with Gwen’s voiceover charting the narrative through-line, the film presents a measured, starkly emotional portrait of gender transition from the family’s perspective. Pensive yet witty, the film stands as an informative and empathetic portrait of transgender transition as a family experience.I found the film engaging, at times fascinating, but also found myself at a curious remove from the entire proceeding. I liked all these people and quickly developed formidable empathy and admiration for each of them. But there’s an almost clinical detachment within the entire film that I found, ultimately, to be somewhat dissatisfying. And it’s not merely that this very Canadian cast of human characters seems predisposed against histrionics. Rather, it’s as though Haworth herself is maintaining a sense of distance and reserve – the kind she speaks of repeatedly within the film as a feature of her gender dysphoria – and the film inadvertently documents this continuing aspect of Gwen’s evolving selfhood. All of which is to say, fascinating but not particularly satisfying. It’s at once an impressive piece of filmmaking and an ultimately underwhelming film, though not nearly as emotionally challenging as Red Without Blue.

5.14.2008

• Manuela y Manuel (2007)-dvd (+)
A sweet romantic farce done telenovela style with a girlpower twist. Manuel/a is a moderately successful female impersonator who's pining for the lover who recently abandoned her when Coco -- Manuela's best friend -- arrives with a problem: she's pregnant, wants to keep the baby, and hopes that Manuel/a will marry her so as not to disappoint her conservative parents. So begins a madcap romp, complete with a variety of wacky female characters including Manuel/a's bible-thumping landlady who waits every day for a letter from her teen suitor; the landlady's niece devastated after her recent divorce; a diva performer who's secretly supporting her boyfriend; and Coco's mother -- a romantic trapped in a loveless marriage. (An added twist is that Coco's father is regular patron at the club where Manuel/a performs.) Manuel/a's decision to don male drag in order to support her friend tosses Manuel/a into an existential crisis about the nature of romance. Should a girl sacrifice all for the promise of love or should she live her own life on her own terms? The characterizations are uncomplicated and broad, directly out of a comic telenovela, with a farcical first conclusion at the wedding at which a womanizing macho finally gets his. The second conclusion is a big girlpower dance number at the club. And the final conclusion shows Manuel/a offering the lessons she's learned to the camera (apparently she's filming a video diary for something or another). An autonomous entertainment, the film feels more like the pilot episode for a series. Everything's pleasant enough, but the film's has neither the emotional depth of an Almodovar nor the glittering melodramatic punch of Priscilla. It's often pretty to look at, with some genuinely sweet moments, but, without any genuinely memorable or distinctive performances, the entire entertainment remains quietly amusing but ultimately fairly thin. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that it's a Puerto Rican film, which -- quite frankly -- we don't get to see a lot of.

5.12.2008

• The King of Kong (2007)-dvd (+)
A fascinating documentary that somehow works as a morality tale documenting the struggle between base moral forces -- all set in the peculiar world of competitive classic video gaming. The basic scenario is that a middle class family guy in the Seattle area seems to be threatening the world record for Donkey Kong, a record which has been held for several decades by a leading figure in the "sport." The filmmakers use this contest as a narrative frame for an extensive documentation of the history of classic video games, the ongoing cult of these early games, and the subcultural celebrities and rivalries within this scene. What's excellent about the film is that it makes its story -- a story that should be absolutely arcane and tedious -- absolutely enthralling, complete with flawed heroes and charismatic villains within a social structure as dependent on faith as much as fact. The story within the documentary becomes a nearly universal one about the perils of both pursuing a passion as well as building one's identity around it. A very conventional documentary that actually is completely effective.

5.9.2008

• Sweet and Lowdown (1999)-dvd (-)
An innocuous, pensive, romantic rumination about a fictional early jazz legend which quietly emerges as a testimony to the tenuous possibility of love. Sean Penn is genuinely fun to watch as the (fake) jazz guitarist Emmet Ray whose myriad superstitions and idiosyncrasies seem certain to keep him from genuine success in either life or love. Set up as a mockumentary (of the Woody Allen old school) in which talking heads reflect on the history of a fictional figure, the film generally works. There are some genuinely dear moments -- the misbegotten moon, the costumes, the hollywood section -- as well as an array of solid supporting and cameo performances. Allen seems less invested in the vagaries of Emmet Ray's formidable ego as he lapses toward a rumination on fate, love, and generally the accidental nature of life (life happens as you're making other plans). Uma Thurman should be better as a fast-talking wealthy dilettante who takes up with Penn's Emmet in the last portion of the film and Samantha Morton is utterly adorable as the mute Hattie who quietly (!) emerges as the legendary/true love of Emmet's adventurous life (she's the "sweet" to his "lowdown"). The problem here might be obvious as even Morton's savvy performance can't ameliorate the creepily misogynist tinge to Allen's construction of Hattie as a fancifully idealized character. (The perfect woman is to silently wear her transparent emotions on her adorable face...and, of course, it would help if she were incapable of talking back and wasn't afraid to eat a lot.) We all remain grateful that Penn was slated in the role of Emmet Ray, both because Allen originally wrote the role for himself and because the role provides Penn a genuinely sweet and fun character to have a good time playing. The role highlights Penn's largely ignored gift for style and for comedy, while also providing him a fascinating character to contour with interesting nuance. I suspect his Oscar nom was entirely deserved, though I'm not as confident about Morton's worthiness for the same honor. All told, the movie made me want to watch Radio Days.

5.7.2008

• The Living End (1992)-dvd (+/-)
A fascinating document of a very particular moment in queer time/history. Araki's film -- an early breakthough in what later became known as independent queer cinema -- holds interest in this careful remastering mostly for the screenplay's acuity in capturing a generational gestalt for those who might have counted themselves citizens of a queer nation. The film remains shocking for its frank portrayal of two attractive, HIV-positive guys finding a sense of purpose (and rebellion) in their erotically charged courtship. This time through I remained unimpressed by Araki's sense of narrative urgency as well as his seeming disinterest in developing sophisticated performances. However, I did encounter some arresting visuality that I don't recall noting before and found the screenplay to be absolutely enthralling. Revisiting the film today also recalibrated -- for me at least -- some aspects of the trend toward a hedonism-chic, the idea that drugs and sex are their own queer rebellion. This film -- which looks startlingly conventional with a 15 year remove -- seems to have instigated a kind of queer cinematic vernacular of hedonistic rebellion. This vernacular, as presented and preserved in this film, emerged from a historical moment of urgency when gay men in their 20s were facing an uncertain future with no viable cures (or therapies) for HIV/AIDS on the horizon. Just five years after this film, however, came the moment of protease inhibitors (as well as Will&Grace). With that quick passage of queer time, the politics of early 1990s rebellious hedonism shifted (even as aspects of its cinematic iteration became conventionalized) nearly as drastically as gay men's lives had changed in the half decade separating the late 1970s from the middle 1980s. What I admired about this film this time through was how legible it became as a document of a very precise moment in queer time and, as such, a marker of the changes that have manifested (in terms of visibility, in terms of consensual and "informed" unprotected anal sex, in terms of what HIV means) in the lives of gay men. As a historical document I find this film absolutely entrancing. As a piece of cinema, I remain underwhelmed and frequently unimpressed. Araki's DIY punk auteur flourishes don't hold up well, although I do acknowledge just how influential this film has proven to be. But Araki's screenplay? Yowza -- it's worth remaking as a period piece, exactly as written.

5.3.2008

• Girl, Interrupted (1999)-dvd (-)
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5.6.2008

• "Godspeed" (2007)-dvd (+)
A short film detailing a transman's problems with impulse control. Jim (played by co-director Lynn Breedlove) is a bike messenger who lives for the rush of speed, both in its crystal and experiential form. Jim's in swoon with intellectual sex worker Ally, who wants him to stay clean but does not trust him to do so. The 15 or so minutes of the film chart how Jim loves his job, even though he loses it because he can't resist visiting the girl he loves when on a rush delivery of a time sensitive parcel. The single requirement that Ally places on Jim is that he stay clean, which he fails to do pretty much immediately upon discovering that he's been fired (the single interaction that clarifies Jim's trans status -- as the boss, while firing him, mocks Jim by calling him Elizabeth). The film -- with simple clarity and effective production values -- details the addictive mind, presenting Jim as a speed junkie who's unable to discern between the various "rushes" that his life provides. The best part of the film is the Breedlove's voiceover, which renders Jim -- who's largely inarticulate in the diegesis -- as a kind of comic raconteur of the queer addict's consciousness. The use of the voiceover creates a surprising tension in the film which allows for an aptly comic poignancy to infuse the basically pathetic story. (The auto-narration of the "fish dance" is profound and hilarious and terrifying all at once.) Because of the voiceover, we are able to like Jim much more than his actions might warrant which -- along with the adept photography and excellent soundtrack -- make this dark film a gratifying experience. Breedlove's status as star and director of this film (while also being the frontwoman for the legendary riot/punk band Tribe8) might help explain how this little film has the best lesbo-feminist punk soundtrack perhaps ever. This soundtrack, in tandem with Jim's voiceover monologs (also likely authored by Breedlove), infuse the film with critical voice that well surpasses the banality of the narrative scenario.

4.30.08

• 25 Cent Preview (2007)-dvd (+)
A vaguely obtuse erotic-laconic "thriller" set amidst the skanktastic environs of male street prostitution in San Francisco's tenderloin district. The elliptical narrative skitters in the wake of Marcus (Merlin Gaspers), a pretty white man who acts like a surly teenager as he tricks and trips his way through a 24 hour period on the street. Marcus and his best street pal, the loquacious DotCom (Dorian Brockington in a frequently excellent, always vivid performance), loop in and out of each other's paths, occasionally tricking together and always looking out for one another. The relationship anchors this trippy, druggy, dazy film (the story is credited to the director and two principal actors, while the dialogue is attributed to "actors). The thematic of the film considers the cycle of victimization as one that doubles back on the victim in ways he might never see, with the final moments suggesting that the simple choice to "not perpetrate" violence or exploitation is the first step toward a kind of humanizing redemption. For the first 2/3 of the film -- at least until the reality of Marcus's anticipated confrontation with the elderly priest who molested him helps to focus the narrative action of the film -- the film is a dark, murky ordeal of partial interactions and curiously complicated scenarios that hold together only circumstantially. (A subplot of Marcus' girlfriend's brother stalking and then bashing him is just distracting -- I can see how it fits in the thematic but I don't feel how it connects to the wispy narrative). Additionally, the improvised dialogue by the actors is only occasionally apt, with only the banter between Brockington's DotCom and Gasper's Marcus elevating beyond the amateurish. Perhaps my biggest challenge with this film, though, was the absence of a director of photography and the reliance on a cinema verite style of natural/situational lite. The scenarios mostly take place outside at night, and the lack of careful lighting muddies much of the project (with the few nighttime interiors flat and unengaging). Occasional visual beauty does punctuate the film, with the climactic sequence during daylight at the shore being actually quite beautiful. I basically found the first 2/3 of the film utterly tiresome, save for Brockington's occasional flashes of excellence, but the genuinely compelling concluding sequence ended up putting me on the bubble....

4.29.08

• Pickup on South Street (1953)-dvd (+)
A delightfully noir genre study in which pickpockets, stool pigeons, and loose women take up the good fight against Communism. Everybody's great. Richard Widmark and Thelma Ritter are the plucky pros you expect them to be, even when saddled with often merely adequate material. Jean Peters as the femme fatale and Richard Kiley as the ever-sweaty wannabe secret-seller are delightful (especially Kiley, who's achieves a Hitchcockian dimension of ambivalent/ambiguous menace). The film is captivating and fun, with delicious style often triumphing over the utterly conventional (and occasionally pandering) substance. I really like Fuller's camera work in this. His reverence for Widmark's easy complexity and precision, as well as his obvious adoration for Thelma Ritter (the way Fuller's camera treats Ritter's death soliloquy is the stuff of a film actor's dream), is warranted and welcome. Also, several suspense sequences -- like the awesomely beautiful dumbwaiter sequence -- are worth watching the movie for. Indeed, I quite liked it -- in spite of the essential banality of the narrative and characters and the brazen/craven redbaiting (a narrative detail that instigates an array of tone-deaf platitudes).

4.25.08

• Hondo (1953)-dvd (-)
An uncharacteristically pensive deployment of the John Wayne persona, with startling touches of visual beauty and emotional complexity. The basic scenario is simple: the Apache are coming and Wayne wants Geraldine Page and her annoying son to hit the high road. The complications to this basic narrative urgency are less conventional, including a nuanced meditation on the imperative of marital fidelity and a complicated empathy for Native American ways of living. Geraldine Page gives a startlingly understated performance, one tethered to an emotional plausibility that tosses the rest of the cardboard characters into a curious relief. Though nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Page is basically/nearly a lead -- certainly the romantic lead if we approach this Western as a romance -- and her centrality to the film's emotional architecture (everything Wayne does is inspired to a greater or lesser extent by his instinct to do "right" by her and her son) elevates the whole project in a subtle but substantive way. And though the apache characters are presented as blood-thirsty savages (only the leaders demonstrate anything approaching ethical restraint), Page's character leads in according the Apache a modicum of human respect. I must say, though, that the plastic center-part wigs, the rusty face paint, the coal black body paint and THE FACT THAT THE INDIANS DON'T WEAR PANTS (despite wearing long sleeved high collar tunics) is just weird. The natural settings look like New Mexico (though 'twas apparently filmed in Mexico) but the built environment looks like SE SoCal (ala Ramona). John Wayne living up to his caricatures but, even with him, Page's intelligence and clarity provides a palpably human anchor to the generalized genre absurdity.

4.23.08

• Near Dark (1987)-dvd (+)
A melancholic, existential romance set against the timeless struggle between neo-cowboys and neo-vampires. Basically, a hoot. With lots of intelligence, strong acting and cute boys to keep things extra entertaining. Kathryn Bigelow accomplishes a stealthily feminist take on things (whether she means to or not) by framing the whole drama from the instigating action of a teen guy wanting to get into a teen girl's pants and not taking "no" for an answer. Here, in what is perhaps the only AIDS reference in the piece, dogging the girl gets the guy a life sentence of struggle, hardship and physical pain. But the date rape instigation of vampirism (which is never explicitly specified in the film's narrative) is only the beginning of a more extended exploration of the dimensions of addiction, detox and recovery -- as the central character of Caleb (a dewy, delicious Adrian Pasdar) refuses to go as low as his craving demands. His refusal to become a killer in service of his painful hunger stands as a surprisingly plausible redeployment of that 80s homily: Just Say No. And through that clarity, Caleb not only reconciles with his biological family but also determines a strategy to detox from his ostensibly permanent addiction. It's a primordial struggle between good and evil, in which we get to know and appreciate evil a little bit more. But the film is smart, gory and entertaining -- with an extraordinary, unforgettable supporting performance by Bill Paxton that becomes the parallel emotional center of the piece. (Indeed, the moment when Paxton's Severen burps lightly after feeding on the stubbly neck of a biker in a skanky bar is one of the most brilliantly, most complexly comic moments in horror.) Even more, I'd put Paxton on my short list of great horror acting (along with Perkins, Laurie and Spacek) for the incredible humanity he brings to his monster, a humanity that helps to calibrate the balance and the "stakes" for this genre-fucking piece. I could talk about this movie for a long time. Unpretentious, off-the-radar brilliance at its best.

4.20.08

• Life After Tomorrow (2006)-dvd (+)
An occasionally fascinating account of life as a kid performer on the Broadway stage (though the most interesting stories seem to come from the national tour). The major accomplishment of the film is the aggregation of these women -- now mostly in their thirties and only a few of whom remain in the business -- who as girls of 8-14 appeared in some iteration of the musical ANNIE. As the women reflect on the nature of the experience, a bunch of things come up: the fleeting aspects of fame; Annie as peculiar cultural phenomenon; the curiosities of being a working child; the irreality of the entertainment business for anyone let alone a kid; growing up way fast in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The main fault of the piece is that there's little in the way of structuring impulse -- just an aggregation of stories, loosely cobbled together thematically, to create an 80 minute diversion. Without an organizing event (a reunion? a revival?) to focus the proceedings, the conceit doesn't really hold together as nothing ends up getting meaningfully sustained attention. It's not really a history of ANNIE, nor is it an examination of fame, success and childhood. (Indeed, it seems some of the more incisive possible themes are blunted to permit a broader participation.) As such, some of the more meditative/spiritual accounts (ie. April Lerman & Sarah Jessica Parker) get confused by the embittered (the Kate & Allie girl), the optimistically nostalgic (the chubby mom), and the just plain weird (the pie faced blonde who got jew-baited; the crazy rocker girl). And what were the creepy collector and the Sandy handler doing there? Disappointing, mostly because I wanted it to be better, because the material's just so rich. Still a decent opener to a conversation about kid labor in the entertainment industry.

4.20.08

• Mogambo (1953)-dvd (-)
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4.19.08

• Searching for Debra Winger (2002)-dvd (-)
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4.16.08

• Torch Song (1953)-dvd (-)
In the dvd extras, Janine Basinger has a funny little thing where she basically describes this film as a giant WTF, defying easy description, even/especially her own. There you have it; I couldn't agree more. Basinger also suggests that this movie is about stardom, featuring one of the most undeniable stars of the Hollywood era, and thus becomes a whole self-referential circuit about the phenomenon of stardom. This is, I suspect, the most productive way to view this turgid, defiantly unentertaining film: as a cinematic biology experiment, dissecting Hollywood stardom as a formaldehyded frog. Of course, Joan Crawford is that frog. The story is not that complicated: A self-sufficient superstar opens her heart to a man who will always remember her as she was before she got successful/bitter/old (because he's blind and can't witness the changes to her visage). It's a scenario perfect for a sentimental weepy, featuring June Allyson or Jane Wyman (or Delta Burke in the Designing Women episode that follows essentially the same plot). But with Joan Crawford, this sentimental musical melodrama morphs into something epic, something almost scientific. Crawford is amazing -- fierce, brittle, expert in her execution of every line and every moment...but, of course, she's abjectly soulless and utterly terrifying. No wonder the dog barks upon sight of her. She's a beast in this film, tearing into each scene as if she were the lion and it were the gazelle. Perhaps as a result, the movie becomes about the spectacle of Crawford, not the character or the story, and it's fascinating but joyless to behold. It's also a great example lesson of one of the most elusive aspects of the queerest camp pleasures: how it helps when the diva is "in"(to some extent) on the joke. With every turn of this screwball film, however, Crawford is utterly, seriously sincere and it's deadly to watch. There is so much camp material but few camp moments, even with a giant queen as the director. There is much queer pleasure to be taken from Torch Song, but surprisingly little to be found in it. (Though MrStinky really does like "hothouse clotheshorse" as a euphemism for a gay man.)

4.12.08

• Hell House (2003)-dvd (+)
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4.10.08

• From Here To Eternity (1953)-dvd (-)
A notably cynical war film. The basic premise of this sustained critique of bureaucratic hypocrisy is that the army really screwed up Pearl Harbor because everyone was so darn caught up in internal boot camp politics to pay attention to the real enemy. Or at least that's the alibi for a sustained, occasionally lurid portrait of GI life. The three male leads each chart a main plot narrative: Burt Lancaster plays an officer's assistant who's having a torrid affair with the officer's wife; Montgomery Clift plays an enlisted guy who refuses to exploit his abilities as a great boxer and a great bugler in order to stay just a regular soldier (he also falls in a romantic affair with a dance hall hostess in town); and Frank Sinatra a regular joe, a party boy with a big mouth who's mostly looking to have a good time in this life (who develops something of a blood feud with a bully). It's a sudsy soap, with each of the three guys curiously devoted to each other's being treated right. The women are barely realized stock characters -- the bad wife, the good whore -- who largely exist to heterosexualize the charged homoeroticism of the main relationships as well as the general scenario. Like much post-1940s moviemaking about the war, the spectacular display of homosocial fraternization in various states of physical exertion and undress makes for quite the testosteronic spectacle. Moreover, this film seems premised upon a curiously masochistic kind of narrative pleasure -- each of the male characters (though especially Clift) opt for a kind of self-abnegation, a self-denial that leads them to curiously spectacular modes of suffering. (The SM dynamics are literalized in the creepy totally electric scenario between Sinatra and Ernest Borgnine as a sadistic prison guard.) It's a strange film with little in the way of generalized pleasure or gratification, but this is totally one of those films you want to see "mashed up" or excerpted -- it doesn't take much to turn this whole movie into an oblique Querelle. The women are props, alibis for the charged erotic relations among the men -- the army a great big, semi-nude, homosocial barracks of teeming queerness. As a free-standing film, though, it's basically underwhelming. Also, Lancaster is occasionally hot but he's still Burt Lancaster. And Clift -- in what many claim is one of his most important roles -- seems a little too genteel for the everyjoe soldier he's playing. He brings a clarity and intelligence to the performance -- which flatters both the character and the audience -- but I can't help but feel he's a little too refined for the role. His uncertainties, his reluctances, his defiances all seem to emerge from a sense of internal decorum -- rather than an elementally frustrated constipation about his view of his role in society. I like Clift more here than I usually do, but I still think he and Reed would have both been more exciting in the Lancaster/Kerr roles.

4.5.08

• Ballad of a Soldier/Ballada o soldate (1959)-dvd (+)
This film (part of the Janus box set) offers a poignant, elliptical account of a young man negotiating competing instincts of obligation -- should he follow society's rules or should he follow the mandates of his heart? After showing surprising individual heroism, Private Aloysha something or 'nother is allotted a special, short term leave so that he might visit his single mother in their country town. He wants to help her with the roof or something. He rides the rails home and, in so doing, encounters a number of other individuals, each of whom present a particular challenge to his own sense of moral certainty while also delaying his return (and thereby reducing the amount of time he will be able to spend with his mother). The film animates this journey by placing Aloysha in close quarters with a comparably beautiful and young girl and they make much of the journey together. Also, the whole journey is presented within a narrative frame which tells us that Aloysha is a casualty of war, buried anonymously in a grave honored by folks who never knew him. It's an interesting gesture. Through Aloysha's actions -- he's an intrinsically decent guy, savvy without being mercenary, able to appreciate the difference between right and wrong without lapsing into casual arrogance or judgementality -- he seems like a decent, good kid and the knowledge that he dies as a youth creates a nearly intolerable poignancy to the film. This, however, being Soviet era realism -- we are never allowed to lapse into easy romanticism of Aloysha as tragic or special. He's just a soldier -- an everysoldier, we are meant to assume -- and our sense of attachment to him should -- the film suggests -- appreciate every soldier as much as we do Aloysha. I'm foggy right now about the concluding action, writing this now several weeks after screening it, but I am haunted by the gloriously poignant, elegiac visuals of the film. Likewise, the scene where he delivers a present to the deceitful wife of a colleague -- before retrieving the gift and re-gifting it to his comrade's beloved family -- resonates in my memory. The film also is loaded with gorgeously photographed faces, young and old, beautiful and ordinary. Also, I'm recalling how artfully director Grigori Chukrai calibrates the tension of the film: it's a story with a foregone conclusion -- Aloysha dies -- but the film stages any number of animating tensions: will they kiss? will he be able to see his mother? will they be found in the boxcar? All of which help to sustain the delicious bittersweetness of the film as a whole. I'm also reminded how palpably this film reminded me of the Japanese dramatic/aesthetic principle of mono no aware, the delirious tension of fleeting beauty. I didn't necessarily groove on the film when I watched it but it totally stuck with me in ways I'm only discovering now, as I write.

3.29.08

• The Station Agent (2003)-dvd (+)
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3.22.08

• Shadowboxer (2005)-dvd (-)
Boy howdy. When bad concepts happen to decent actors. This ostensible thriller adopts several fairly conventional tropes of the "hired gun" genre (existential crisis of faith; love being an luxury) and attempts to tart them up with a handful of hip actors, a high veneer production design, and a familial conceit that aspires to mythic -- or at least Freudian -- symbolism. As best as I can tell, the main hook is that Cuba Gooding's dad cultivated him to be a killer but, after murdering Cuba's mom, he started beating on Cuba until young Helen Mirren killed him. This instigated a kind of neo-Oedipal thing with Cuba and Helen falling into a deep primordial sexual bond, not literally incestuous but yeah. Skip ahead to the present, when Helen's character has got cancer and finds that she can't kill a pregnant woman but instead adopts the mother and child as a surrogate legacy for her family with Cuba. (Of course, not dead pregnant lady -- an entirely adequate Vanessa Ferlito -- is the squeeze of a brutal crimelord -- played with characteristically sleazoid hotness by Stephen Dorff -- the same guy contracted Ferlito's murder.) Fold in a babyfaced shady doctor (a mildly confused Joseph Gordon Leavitt) who's banging his crackhead nurse (Mo'nique in one of the film's better performances) as well as the not-dead pregnant lady's ghetto-ditz best friend (Macy Gray in a nearly inscrutable cameo). Well, you got the makings of a complicated mess of a film that really doesn't know what it wants to be. So it covers over the seams with some heavyhanded color saturation as well as a curiously off-pitch brutality. The film draws a moral line with the violence by establishing evil violence as eroticized (all of Dorff's violations connect in some way to sexuality) while the professional violence is athleticized (Cuba's constant "shadowboxing" of the film's title). Notably, Cuba's breakdown/breakthrough scene is the only on implicating him in sexualized violence. Of course, none of this melange actually makes sense, which makes the conclusion all the more confused. Basically, after Helen's death, Cuba continues to live with Vanessa and her boyspawn until they become his surrogate family. A fake family that's consecrated in the bloody conclusion in which the Oedipal configuration is recast with in the boychild role. The whole shipoopie is aspiring to a kind of mythic status which is just lame. Notably, the film makes much of male nudity while dealing comparatively little with female display. We see an extended scene leading up to the rape/murder of a young man at the beginning, his nude buttocks on full display. We see Dorff's condom covered wang wobbling for an extended shot. We have various approaches to Cuba's buttocks. We even see a man bend over to take it from/like a man, just prior to his murder. It's a weird film, with few pleasures.

3.22.08

• The Ten (2007)-dvd (-)
A potentially excellent experiment (high concept comedic riffs on each of the 10 Commandments) yields unremarkable and consistently unfunny results. It's a high concept comedy piece -- ala Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex -- without the necessary schtick to keep the concepts from reeling irretrievably into abstraction. Everything's fine but little's funny. Sad that a film with such intelligence, with such comedic talent, remains so assertively unfunny. The concept for each commandment become too heavy somehow, casting a labored pall over what might probably needed a featherlight touch. I dunno.... Deeply disappointing but not in a way that hurt my feelings.

3.19.08

• The Bachelor Party (1957)-tcm/dvd (+)
I'm not sure why but Chayefsky really works for me. These chattering sad sacks remain interesting today, making me wonder if Chayefsky -- rather than Miller or Williams -- is actually the most influential screen writer in normalizing the American method as "good' screen acting. Anyway, this film -- which charts 24 hours in one guy's life as he contemplates and then goes on a buddy's bachelor party -- is a cogent and effective piece of midcentury realism. Chayefsky's art is in his ability to make "new" stock characters of mid-century urban types, while also crafting enough room for skilled actors to shade the roles with idiosyncracy and nuance. I like that these guys seems like they would know each other, not from the neighborhood but from the workplace -- each is a guy who's barely a generation away from the blue collar whose white collar fits a touch uncertainly. The movie is "a new york night" movie, where we careen through a variously drunken and desperate evening with a set of microcosm of nominally interesting characters as the central character -- Don Murray, attractive appealing and effective as Charlie Samson -- has an early identity crisis (basically, because his wife has just announced that she's actually pregnant). As always in this period, Chayefsky ends up affirming a fairly traditional view of heteronormativity by the end, but -- along the way -- there are a couple of really interesting surprises. Of course, there's the brilliant and electrifying cameo by Carolyn Jones as The Existentialist. But she's only the most attention-getting. Additionally fascinating to me are: the scene with the working class pro; the extraordinarily frank discussion about abortion instigated by Nancy Marchand as The Sister in Law (an excellent bit of actressing that makes me long for her portrayal of Clara, the girl in Chayefsky's Marty, which she did in the original tv version of the story. And then there's the scene where all the guys watch a stag film and all we see is their expressions. It's a brilliant scene. And in that scene a fascinating queer thread emerges around the character of The Bachelor, who first seems to be a real player but who is slowly revealed to be pretty desperate and lonely. What's interesting about this character -- as played by Jack Warden who's great but possibly miscast -- is that he's curiously devoted to male companionship in a way that almost reads queer (which could just be the idea of male homosexuality being a feature of emotional immaturity, a constellation of ideas quite common in the period) but there's a fascinating exchange in which Warden's character compares the groom's appearance to the man in the stag film. And there's a so so brief queer moment in the Greenwich Village party when an attractive young man notes the humor in a comment made by our main guy. Murray's character doesn't react much to the guy's comment, though Warden does with an immediate, abrupt and somehow knowing rebuff. All of which is to say that there's some really interesting stuff about sexuality in this film which I frankly did not expect at all. Finally, I feel like Scorsese must have been tacitly or directly referencing this film in After Hours. Though there aren't as many women here as in Scorsese's picture, there is a narrative structure -- as well as some art/production design -- that seems very reminiscent. A fascinating and surprising film. Though Carolyn Jones remains possibly the best thing about it...

3.15.08

• One Million Years B.C. (1966)-dvd (+)
WTF? Who knew I would find this so f'n enjoyable. On the one hand, it's complete drek; on the other hand, it's totally cute. I love how it's got the moral allegory sincerity of the original Star Trek series. The cheesy (but creative) special effects working to amplify what is, at its core, a message movie about the necessity to transcend primitive instinct toward hatred/bigotry/violence and unite in the face of potential apocalypse (the volcano explosion at the end a clear reference to the possibility of nuclear annihilation). I mean, really. This is movie -- with Raquel in her bikini -- is the stuff of such disdain, that I was frankly astonished at how much I found to enjoy in it. It's silly. It's scary. It's creative. (I love the way the monsters are both animated puppets AND reptilian stock footage.) I confess to not giving it my full attention, so I don't really know how boring it might be. But I can say the oogabooga gibberish ended up working with surprising effectiveness (half the time I could follow the dialogue, without watching the screen, even though it was all in oogabooga). I'm also impressed at how this might just be one of Raquel's better performances -- she always holds the screen with a strangely passionate alacrity, which can be distracting when she's ostensibly portraying an actual character/person. But, here, where her Loana is ostensibly the first "civilized" woman, her peculiar enthusiasm really suits the role, as does her formidable charisma/presence. I really didn't expect this to be interesting at all, so count me surprised. (I frankly expected it to have all the intelligence and few of the visual treats of the Sinbad movies -- on both counts, i was wrong. It's smarter -- which isn't saying a lot -- and the visual treats are at least as nifty.)

3.5.08

• Kansas City Bomber (1972)-dvd (+)
What a hoot. Roller Derby Melodrama with a neofeminist twist. Basically, the scenario is that KC (Welch) is a charismatic and successful Roller Derby racer who's pulling the gig mostly because she's a single mother trying to make a living. She's beautiful, good at her job, and always running into catfighty nonsense with fellow skaters. She's torn between wanting to be a nice person in an inhuman job, wanting to have success without compromising her morals, and wanting to be near her kids. She's also an athlete in a sport driven by business interests in the spectacle and showmanship she's capable of providing. The basic arc is that KC can't do anything right, without pissing someone off -- her boss, her kids, her teammates -- so how can she live her life on tolerable terms. The melodrama is punctuated by a whole variety of nemeses, as well as repeated returns to the spectacle of Roller Derby matches. The plot culminates when KC determines to run a final race against her arch nemesis honestly -- skating to win (rather than throwing it the way her boss wants her to) and she does win (thus screwing the deal her boss has made with a guy buying the franchise). By the way, KC's been sleeping with her boss and he's been trading/firing any skater that threatens to mess up his sweetheart deal with KC as both lover and business property. The film struggles to maintain the basic clarity of the throughline while sustaining the totally tack scenario of the Roller Derby races. The film is an excellent document of the earlier days of this hyperbolic bloodsport in local American culture, with the admonition for "Color!" being a job requirement that all these performers are capable of doing. The other part of this film that's a real hoot to watch is the behavior of the fans -- some of the freakiest early 70s faces you'll ever see on screen, mostly middle aged and female, who are snarling shrieking fans of the sport and the skaters. A total hoot. And I actually like the melodrama overlay for the way that it expands the reach of the aspirational drama (she's just a single gal trying to make her way in a man's world) which places the lurid derby stuff in a whole different relief. As for Welch, she's totally game for what the film requires of her. (Though her passionate screen kisses are a little scary in their voracious gape-jawed fashion.) The putatively lesbian rivalry is nearly opaque to today's eyes. A wild and often fascinating time capsule.

3.1.08

• 100 Rifles (1969)-dvd (-)
So brilliant in its deplorable way. The basic scenario is fascinating: Jim Brown plays an American sheriff, sent from Arizona to frontier Mexico in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican revolution (and, implicitly, immediately subsquent Arizona's admission to statehood) in 1912. He's pursuing Burt Reynolds, a half-breed Yaqui Indian (his daddy's from Alabama) who's charged with stealing $6000 from an Arizona bank. In the middle of all of this is Raquel Welch as Sarita a Yaqui maiden who's been politicized by the predations of the Mexican military officials (who are being advised by American business interests and German military advisors to exploit the indigenous people and their land as they build trading routes through Yaqui territory). Brown's only really interested in collecting his bounty (Reynolds) but, in pursuing him (and the 100 rifles that the money's tied up in), Brown and Reynolds end up being cuffed together ala The Defiant Ones (and because Welch is the freedom fighter who's looking to Reynolds for munitions, she's along for the ride as well). Madcap hilarity ensues -- or would if this were a comedy. Instead, elaborately complex contests between the Yaquis, this threesome and the evil Mexican military (lorded over by Fernando Lamas portraying a mercenary, racist Mexican general). Somehow in this Brown becomes the central hero, and he and Welch develop a mostly erotic friendship. The famous Raquel Welch bathing scene comes as a decoy moment at a climactic moment in the caper. Ultimately, the anti-heroes prove triumphant with the American business guy aligning with the rebel threesome once it's clear that they have the most power. Reynolds and Brown emerge triumphant from a final blowout battle, with Brown releasing Reynolds having retrieved the rifles. Reynolds wants to stay together and form a team. Raquel's Sarita, however, is killed in the final battle, thereby releasing Brown from that relationship (while also releasing the film from a possibly miscegenated future). What's interesting about this film is how Indian the Yaquis are presented as being, with the Mexican revolutionary imagery of both Sarita and Yaqui Joe Herrera as being reappropriated as icons of an indigenous rebellion. Meanwhile, the Mexican's are presented as banana republic warlords -- aspirational Europeans in affect, demeanor and barbarism (the US is figured as mendacious and Europe ala the German military advisor -- portrayed by Eric "Victor Newman" Braeden, sans stache -- is figured as brutal, inhuman and mercenary, with few compunctions regarding the human cost of military success). Additionally, the spectacle of lynched Indians punctuates many scenes, a visual mechanism that racializes the struggle in particularly American terms. As for Raquel, as she's playing the Yaqui Sarita, she does so at full Latin tilt -- lotsa JH sounds and standard Welchian shriekiness. But she's clearly playing Sarita as Latin (the Yaquis speak Spanish and wear campesino outfits -- as well as black brush straw wigs).

3.1.08

• Myra Breckenridge (1970)-dvd (-)
This is just such a categorically unpleasant film. Which is I so love it, when I love it. When I'm not in the place to love it, the noxious unpleasantness makes it really tough. This time through, when I was admittedly giving it less than my full attention, I was struck by two main things. First, how complex the intercutting of Hollywood stock footage is and how essential it is the to operation of the narrative (not just the film but the narrative). Second, how perfect Raquel Welch is in the role. It plays upon her particular gifts: her presence, her beauty, that vague impression of superiority that she somehow always conveys, and her ability to be absolutely, believably, sincerely artificial. It's not a simple vacuousness (ala Farrah Fawcett's really sweet performance as the dimwitted actress) but it's a studied artificiality that Welch is able to do well and here it suits the role. (Indeed, that simplicity is what throws Mae West off -- her presence is completely artificial but always somehow also insincere.) Raquel Welch is really good in this part, perhaps because her weaknesses as an actress are totally suited to this character. Got a few key ideas from the opening sequence. Otherwise, thsi was an un-fun screening, reminding me how much this film really comes alive on a big screen.

2.27.09

• Sayonara (1957)-vhs (+)
Always an amazing experience to watch this film. As MrStinky noted, the central story of Major Gruver and Hana-Ogi being structured as a romantic comedy, with the ancillary storylines creating the contours of the romantic tragedy. Of course, the reason I watched this was to think through the Nakamura story (Ricardo Montalban as the Kabuki actor) but what became more clear was how the all the likable characters are involved in some American on Japanese action, which for some reason I did not recall. The narrative locates the interracial/international romance in terms of unjust laws - social conventions that are legally sustained and which do not acknowledge the maneuvers of the human heart. It's an anti-segregationist, anti-JimCrow view of international/interracial romance, with the old guard (military authority as embodied both by the general, as well as the cracker colonel; society rules as embodied by Martha Scott's Mrs. Webster; even the hoodlums at the end) standing stubbornly in the way of blossoming new love. Michael's right this is the basic, in a Northrop Frye sense, of the romantic comedy. The media interest in the Gruver/HanaOgi romance is itself an interesting redeployment of the society: the press and the fans as a way to suggest a new model of societal sanction. The thing that's important to note about Montalban's presence in the film is how segregated he is: the only named MALE Japanese character, the only Japanese character to be not performed by a Japanese or Japanese American actor. Montalban's presence in the film is also the only vision of a masculine spectacular. His near nudity in the early costuming scenes, his light brown skin and lanky limbs connoting a clearly non-white physicality even as his skin is whitened. The contrast of the whiteness of his makeup and his undergarments, as well as the lean musculature of his frame, are some of the only extended scenes of individuated physical spectacularity of any gendered body in the film. In contrast, Red Buttons' scene in the bath is a spectacle of Katsumi's domestic service; Hana-Ogi's performance montage (notably, her virtuosity here is constructed not as skill of performance, but much more in the Ziegfield sense of a model wearing different outfits). The only male physical spectacle that is anywhere as pronounced is Brando's "gone native" scene in which he greets Eileen Webster (Patricia Owens) wearing a kimono, a kimono notably in the same shades of steel blue as his military uniform. The other thing to note about Nakamura as a character is that he's the only character who demonstrates any meaningful cosmopolitanism, as lucid in American cultural referents as he is enmeshed in Japanese tradition. He becomes, like Eileen, the only presence aware of the complexity of the interracial/international romance, in emotional, cultural and political terms. Eileen's final line renders an open space of unexamined and undiscussed possibility ("There's only one person I want to talk about this, mother, and he's JAPANESE!") -- the implication is that the interracial/international romances are not truncated by the governmental policies or social sanction, that they will continue on their own terms -- not to survive, necessarily, but to continue on their own terms. Nakamura's character is a racially queer figure -- neither white nor Japanese, neither American nor not American -- and his physical attractiveness is alibied by his Latinness. (The Marilyn Monroe references anchoring his heterosexuality, while the female fandom -- think of the American woman who claims that her young daughter is a big fan -- anchors his appeal as being different than competitive masculinity.) Nowhere does the film suggest that Eileen chooses Nakamura over Gruver, but the film does go far to imply that she enjoys more chemistry with Nakamura, that she might prefer Nakamura though she would of course choose Gruver.

2.9.08

• Casting About (2004)-dvd (+)
Fascinating tribute to the work of acting. The conceit of the film - 184 actresses auditioning for roles in an independent film which features the audition footage as a component of the film, a film which was never made - allows for startling insight into the work of actressing. The hard-to-define distinctions between good and bad, interesting and banal, competent and excellent. Most interesting is how the unvarnished aspects of the auditioner performance -- especially the single takes and the lack of professional makeup -- all of that makes the "feel" of the acting work very different. It's great to see the same monologue done by two actresses simultaneously. It's great to see the montage of different women answering the nudity question. It's great to see an actor tell a true story before moving into a similarly intense monolog, only to realize that she was a more compelling screen presence when she didn't have lines to say. Also great was the actress toward the end, Naomi Krass I think, who performed mostly in German but who was just amazing. A fascinating film but mostly for actressexual and acting geeks, probably.

2.2.08

• Indie Sex - Taboos & Interviews (2007)-dvd (+)
Really good. I love this series. The interviews were great - the producers arranged some of the talking head commentary into topical/thematic sections. It's excellent to hear actors/directors especially talk about the experience of nudity and filming a sex scene. Perhaps the most interesting approach to the topic I've seen. Definitely usable for class. The Taboo film again avoided race, which is just weird, instead emphasizing kink in ways that seem very sensible from a sexuality perspective but less so from social history perspective.

2.2.08

• Protagonist (2007)-dvd (+)
Wow. Jessica Yu is brilliant. This meditation on the plays and characters of Euripedes becomes a profound meditation on masculinity, performativity and character. Four articulate men who have led extraordinary lives tell their stories and, in concert, create a portrait of identity, struggle, obstacles, catharsis, redemption and awareness that are epic in their emotional, spiritual and dramatic scope. But the simple (albeit insanely smart) comingling of these stories is not what makes the stories so powerful. It's the puppets and the cartoons. Yu uses text from Euripedes to frame the whole inquiry, animating the "beats" of the hero's journey with core concepts, while also having little carved wooden puppets enact both the Euripedes text and selected scenes from each narrator's life. The puppets both elevate and abstract the emotional stakes of the conflicts being depicted. The guys tell their stories as talking heads, but -- through visual montage and through the use of the puppets -- so much more than reenactments happen. It's just an astonishingly smart, meditative documentary. A meditative essay, really, with great subjects telling enthralling stories of humanness. And Jessica Yu's little interview is excellent as well, explaining and elaborating so many of the most interesting features of the documentary. So nice to see a little interview rather than listening to the extended director's commentary. A great piece, really. I'd love to teach using it but I'm not sure how...

1.26.08

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

1.20.08

• Indie Sex: Extremes (2007)-dvd (-)
What's perhaps most interesting about this entry into the Indie Sex series is that it's the most personal, the most intimate, the most exploratory. To a one, the commentators share what feel to be more intimate details about their own spectatorial histories and how films about "alternative sexualities"" (which, here, seem mostly to refer to fetish/kink/sm etc) have informed their own fantasy lives. Also, the idea of "the emotional dimensions of human experience" comes up a lot (via intense films like Belle du Jour, The Night Porter, The Piano Teacher). Alternately, the commentators note their own naivete in encountering the dimensions of kink. Again, this one chooses a fairly arbitrary starting point (Lolita) that feels late to me. The section toward the end where the commentators offer their perspective on the distinction between pornography and art: Catherine Breillart says if you have to ask the question then it's art; Jami Bernard says it's the subtext; the British critic says it's the lighting. But they all go back to the question of character, context and narrative (beyond scenario), underscoring the basic argument of this section of the series (that taboos press upon the limits of social convention, but also on the emotional dimensions of the human experience). Also, the notion of "unsimulated sex" is very useful (getting away from "real" or "explicit" or whatever to modify "the act") -- an interesting conceptual conceit... John Cameron Mitchell -- "there's nothing 'natural' about putting sex on camera" and his discussion of the group sex scene in Shortbus. Another key conceit is that cinema is a "safe" space to explore the more drastic dimensions of the sex as a component of human experience, which is how the film maintains its defiantly "sex positive" vibe while also dabbling in the darker aspects of sex on screen.

1.17.08

• Indie Sex: Teens (2007)-dvd (-)
Not nearly as competent as "Indie Sex: Censored" from the same series. This installment suffers from a presentist bias, that skews the teen-ness to everything post Porky's. We don't get a useful discussion of the construction of teenagers in the US, just that it's an especially US thing. The clips and featured films are fine enough, but there's no historical or analytic frame through which to view the products of the last 30 years, nothing to anchor these in productive context, either culturally or in terms of industrial practice. Basically, if this film is to be believed, there is no such thing as a teen movie prior to Halloween (1978). (The premise is that teen audiences were cheaper to reach in the blockbuster era.) The problem with this is that you don't get any sense of teen audiences being important in the 1930s or 1950s (periods when concern about teen movie consumption fueled cultural debate and industrial reform). We get a real quick nod back to 1950s rock'n'roll pictures during an extended section on Dirty Dancing, but that's it. Further, the film stays pretty literal with teen sex, without edging at all into the erotics of horror and the importance of horror as a consistent genre for teen sexuality. And once again, I'm left to wonder why Little Darlings has not been released on dvd.

1.17.08

• Indie Sex: Censored (2007)-dvd (+)
Screening this to possibly use in my course this semester. Verdict - I think I will. Cinematically, it's nothing: a VH1/Bravo style survey of great moments in popcultural history. What's nice about this one is that it's so current and that it's got a lotta ween. Shockingly frank male nudity frames the story, basically -- and the narrative is one which frames nudity/sexuality/censorship as a push-pull story between technology and regulation. The nudity makes me a little anxious, for teaching purposes. But there's a really nice "cultural history of sexuality in popular performance" narrative that I think might be handy, if only to introduce undergrads to the broad U.S. cultural trends regarding the ubiquity of sexual expressiveness in performance cultures and also the moments of breakthrough/retreat. This film does a really nice job with the Production Code, detailing some of the way that "coded" presentations helped to convey sexuality when frankness was forbidden. Likewise, it does a nice job introducing the tensions: local/national; male vs female nudity; private consumption vs public gathering; the levels of censorship that prevail; the historic breaks in constitutional law. I'm not sure where I'm going to squeeze this in; let alone how I'm going to frame the whole nudity thing; but it does cover a wide range of ground. A nice primer on the whole history of sexual censorship in the 20th century.

1.17.08

• The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959)-tcm/dvd (+)
So interesting to see this so soon on the heels of I Am Legend. This apocolypse fantasy also builds from an accidental decimation of the earth's population leaving a black man as apparently the single surviving human in NYC. The parallels are striking -- the super-competence of the sole surviving black man; the radio transmission every noon; and -- perhaps most conspicuously -- the use of mannequins as a faux community with whom the isolated man builds a kind of comic communitysuggesting that the makers of I Am Legend drew consciously upon this film. The substantial pleasures of the depopulated NYC are continuous between the two films. Here, though, the arty high-modern angles are thrilling in a different way and the montage of the miscellaneous lions in NYC in this film is just really cool. The biggest difference between the two films is the disparate source of tension between them. In I Am Legend, it's the virus-infected zombies; here, the possibility of contagion has passed (the nuclear poison was, apparently, deadly for only a week or so) and the real threat is the possibility that the evils of the prior civilization (especially, even singly, racial privilege and segregation) will survive in this new world. The film rides on Harry Belafonte as Ralph Burton, a black man who happened to be working underground when the nuclearness happened. Belafonte carries the first third (or so) of the movie alone. Inger Stevens (as Sarah Crandall, the last woman, who happens to be white) arrives and focuses the next third, with the two of them becoming friends and stirring the beginnings of an obliquely, but intensely, erotic connection. The scene where Sarah orders Ralph to cut her flaxen blonde hair is just fraught with erotic tension, he just hacks away at the fetish of her blonde hair, she coaxes him in palpably erotic tones. He ends up refusing her, for reasons that are not entirely clear, though he does speak of her casual embrace of white privilege. Then, right when it looks like Ralph and Sarah are going to get together, a third arrives in New York. A white man on a boat - Ben Thacker (Mel Ferrer). When Ralph introduces himself and Sarah as the "total population of New York," Ben introduces himself as the "total population of the southern hemisphere" (though it later turns out that he lived with his wife and kids in NYC on Sutton Place, was he at sea at the time of the nuclearness?). With Ben's arrival, the tension of the piece becomes all about the romantic triangle, with Belafonte's Ralph stepping waaaaaaaaaay back and allowing the white folks to get it on, though Sarah's loyalty to Ralph ends up thwarting Ben's desire to get with her and start with the business of repopulating the globe. (There's a big no-sex-sex scene with Ben and Sarah too, where Sarah demands that Ben make love to her, even shouting "harder" etc -- in both she's the instigator and the more active partner, coordinating the film's economy that femininity equals sexuality.) Ultimately, the two men have a series of confrontation over Sarah, culminating in the climactic sequence in which Ben basically starts hunting Ralph in the urban jungle. Ralph, of course, has an existentialist moment affirming pacifism which end up diffusing the whole situation and, as Ralph determines to leave town, Sarah insists that they stay together, an extended shot of their clasped hands signaling the very distinct possibility of a miscegenated future. (Of course, in the film's final final moment Sarah reincorporates Ben as well, making it really complicated.) This premise of a mixed race future is underscored by the film's concluding title: THE BEGINNING, as these three actors walk hand in hand into the urban horizon.

1.08

• Red without Blue (2007)-dvd (-)
A tender but ultimately banal account of the extraordinary story of twins, whose journey through life together begins as sissy boys in Missoula, Montana. The film recounts the complexly comingled histories of divorce, peer sexual abuse, a shared suicide attempt, and enforced estrangement as such informs the twins's current lives in their early 20s, as Mark (who has taken to calling himself Oliver) seeks love and companionship in San Francisco and as Clair (formerly Alex) completes college in NY while contemplating the surgical completion of her transition to femaleness. The film does well respecting the intricate layers of hurt, fear and uncertainty as the two maneuver independent but forever connected lives amidst the concentric circles of relation created by their mother, father, and community in Missoula. Add into this a family history of Christian Science -- wherein any physical ailment is the manifestation of something wrong between you and god -- and a deeply wounded but loving mother who's got a complex intimate life of her own (she shares her home, her bed, and her life with a woman but adamantly refuses to be identified as gay)... All told, Red without Blue -- the title derives from the colors worn by twins when they were small boys -- operates from a fascinating premise. The film is less fascinating, at least as a film. There's an incredible ethical sensibility at work that I admire, but the film is neither visually nor emotionally compelling. (Though the use of snapshot montages and intertitles are occasionally quite effective.) The POV of the film is a bit obtuse and I can't tell whether it's adopting a posture of radical nonjudgmentality or whether its just Indie Oprah. In either case, this is not a film built around a polemic, though an inclination toward advocacy for social justice does infuse it nearly completely; rather, it's more of an old school documentary ethic, a belief in the power of people telling their own stories. It's ok. The ideas are powerful. And the slow slog to acceptance of family as it is (rather than as we might like it to be) remains a powerful modality of documentary inquiry. Might be interesting to watch next to something like Daughter from Danang. (The additional interviews with the filmmakers, as well as Mark and Clair, are really great. Helping to amplify the communal/collaborative aspects of the filmmaking process.)

1.08

• Lost Boundaries (1949)-tcm/dvd (+)
Another social problem film, though ostensibly based on a true story as told in The Reader's Digest. The basic scenario is that a light skinned black couple are forced by circumstance -- too light to work in a Negro hospital, and just black enough to have no chance in a white hospital -- to choose to "pass" in a remote New Hampshire town. The ruse begins in the 1920s and picks up again in the 1940s, when the couples are established and beloved in their town and have two teenage kids. What's interesting is that there's enough back story to make this deeper than your standard passing melodrama. Plus, the Northern setting allows for a different depiction of both white racism and the various sites of integration. (Indeed, the sights of integration -- at the med school graduation, the post graduation party, the Harlem precinct -- are fairly astonishing in cinema from this period.) It's a fascinating account of the black middle class, and a reasonable depiction of how working class professions were some of the only options for educated black men in particular. The more I'm thinking about it, the more I really like the whole set up and the way that the filmmakers incorporate aspects of social reality into the melodrama. Especially interesting is how segregationist policies (ie. segregated blood supply; no commissions for Negro enlistees) are the nemeses and crucibles for action. Canada Lee is excellent as the Harlem police officer who helps the identity crisis of the newly black teen who's come to Harlem to figure out what it means to be black. The female performances are really bad, but the male performances are much more solid. Carleton Carpenter is really neat in a bit part as the teen daughter's naive beau. Some great/weird moments: wife's paranoia that her child's being named after a black man might out them; the fact that he passes unwillingly, maintaining a life of principle commuting to a negro hospital in the city one day a week; the weird way the daughter grooves to black swing music; the mysterious ending with the daughter leaving the church at the end; the son's dream sequence where his family transforms into broad-nosed, brown-skinned folks. The whole narrative aims toward desegregationist sentiment, even to the point of "interracial" romance, and there's a fascinating diversity of respectable folks who are racist as well as a comparable array who are anti-racist. Additionally, the phenomena of passing is framed as a social perversion, a mutation borne of the social injustice of racist culture and society. (It's a collision between american ideals of opportunity and the social injustices of racist prohibition.) Mel Ferrer is a really interesting presence among the "passing" characters -- he's by far the most visually distinctive, his cadaverous skull making him a very vivid presence. He's ok, but the most interesting aspect of his performance is the ease he demonstrates being white and being black, while also conveying an implicit sense of political awareness.

1.08

• Intruder in the Dust (1949)-tcm/dvd (-)
An interesting enough social problem picture from the late 1940s. I caught snatches of it when it broadcast as part of TCM's Race in Cinema series, paying attention to it mostly because it starred/featured Juano Hernandez in a central role. The basic premise is a cross between To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobacco Road and some formulaic procedural. Basically, a black man (Juano Hernandez) in a southern town in apprehended as the suspect in a mysterious murder of some redneck up on redneck hill. As he's being led into the jail, amidst an agitated mob of snarling southern faces, he catches the attention of a young white teen and beseeches him for help. The teen runs home, late for dinner, and over dinner details his history with the black man -- the man saved his life and the white teen insisted on treating him as his inferior, arriving to a confused lesson along the lines of "negroes are people too". The teen's uncle or somesuch is an attorney, the only one in town who'd be willing to defend a black man accused of killing a white man. Soon a set of circumstances emerges, wherein, basically, the kid and some old white lady become convinced that the black man didn't kill the white man and, in the dark of night, they retrieve proof from the empty grave of the dead man. So it becomes a stand off, between a small gaggle of sympathetic white characters and a large horde of snarling crackers intent on breaking into the jail and lynching the black man. The old white lady (Miss Haversham) fends off the vigilantes by parking herself on the jailhouse steps, depending on their deference to white womanhood. Ultimately, in a twisty twist, the real killer is revealed and the black man set free. The whole film is pretty declamatory, with little in the way of nuance. The only performances that warrant any real attention -- aside, of course, from Juano Hernandez's -- are Will Arnett (aka Grampa Walton) as the curiously sympathetic sheriff and Elizabeth Patterson, in an appealing character turn as Miss Haversham. A lanky Claude Jarman (the iconic kid star of The Yearling) is an awkward lead, which is unfortunate since it is his pov that the film most depends. As the accused black man, Lucas Beauchamp (pronounced "Beecham") Hernandez gives what is for me an emblematic performance. He's enigmatic, charismatic, formidable, immediately likeable, and yet fundamentally non-threatening. The character of Lucas Beauchamp -- I should have probably said this before -- is something of a town freak in that he's a nominally successful farmer, planting on his own land which he never sharecropped. In an interesting way, he's positioned as living in a kind of exile -- between the black and white communities in that he's a landowner and not a laborer, which affords him a sort of status not acceptable for a black man in his community. What's worse, his utter lack of obsequiousness and deference to whites makes him an even greater menace. It's an interesting character -- and it showcases Hernandez's particular gift for playing a different sort of black man. (There's also a really odd opening shot with an attractive white man running in and taking a shower; it's so not clear how it relates to the narrative - may need to look at that section again to see if I missed the connection.)

1.08

• Girl27 (2007)-dvd (+)
As far as Hollywood insider documentaries go, this one's just so so. But as a meditation on the way cultural ideas about rape have (and have not) changed in 75 years, it's pretty interesting. The film tells the story of how a Hollywood historian unearthed a relatively obscure Hollywood scandal -- a 17 year old actress, raped and beaten at a big inhouse MGM event, sues in federal court before disappearing into relative oblivion -- and his journey in piecing together the fragments of this true Hollywood story. As a documentary, it's not unlike what you might see on any cable channel but there's a heart there, derived from the historian's growing emotional investment in the story and its central figure, "Girl27" Patricia Douglas. As a film, the piece successfully maintains the suspense (will he find her, will she meet with him, will she participate in the documentary, etc) while basically spelling out the barebones of the story and the clear implication of a concerted effort on the part of MGM and LA County officials to suppress the story, the case, etc. The film emerges as an emotionally intriguing meditation on the idea of cultural complicity in sexual assault, and a big part of the film's premise is that Patricia Douglas was a brave hero for standing up and claiming her rights as a victim of a crime (and the concomitant injustice that followed the mishandling of the case). I also admired the film's willingness to position Douglas as a difficult figure, with a lot of family wreckage behind her that may or may not have been the result of her assault. The film doesn't really delve into the historical coincidence of the silencing of the Douglas case and MGM's embrace of the Production Code at nearly precisely the same historical moment. And Greta Van Susteran (as a talking head) is lamely declamatory without offering any particular insight. But all told - not a bad vehicle for thinking seriously about mainstream US film and its complicity in a culture that blithely endorses violence against women.

1.08

• September (1987)-dvd (-)
I know next to nothing about this generally disregarded Woody Allen film. MrStinky wanted to revisit some Woody Allen, and requested this film, so here we go. I was nearly asleep for much of the movie, so forgive me, and I spend the first half of the film loudly proclaiming "who are these people and what are they talking about" but by the end several hours later (oh, wait, the film was only 83 minutes it just felt hours long) but by the end I did land upon several interesting-ish observations, so I feel nominally justified in sharing. Basically, my take -- which might be in the press materials for all I know about this film -- on September is this: if Hannah and Her Sisters is Allen's riff on Chekhov's The Three Sisters, then September must be his spin on Uncle Vanya. I didn't catch on until the very end but, when I did, boy howdy was it obvious. Mia Farrow is at her hangdog, whiny, depressive worst as the Vanya/Sonya character, who loathes her powerfully charismatic mother (Elaine Stritch in a performance that would be utterly brilliant on the stage, human and precise, but which reads a little large on camera) and has fallen in swoon with her idly attractive neighbor. Oh well I don't really have the energy to go into the Chekhovian algebraics, which are ultimately less important than the fact that Allen really goes to the existential despair at the expense of the comedy YET the only things that really work about the piece are aspects of the Chekhovian original. Stritch and Jack Warden are great; Sam Waterston and Dianne Wiest are game; Denholm Elliott is utterly lost; and Mia Farrow is awful. But it's still often fascinating -- possibly just because Woody Allen is always fairly fascinating even when everything's just mostly bad.

1.08

click here for previous Home Movies

StinkyLulu's FilmLog - 2008

FOR COMPLETE LIST, SEE STINKYBITS...

Movies Screened since January 1, 2008...
(The "+" or "-" indicates general yay/nay sentiment about a given flick.)

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following are generally unedited and routinely rambling riffs on the films in StinkyLulu's haphazard screening rotation. Comments on this post will read as comments on the entire year's filmlog. But if you've got something to say about these random ramblings, or if you feel strongly I should promote a particular rambling to the mainpage, I genuinely invite you to just holler. Your POV is always especially valued.

• Young at Heart (-)

5.17.2008

• The Visitor (+)
A surprisingly simple yet effective drama, infused with a fascinating blend of romance, melodrama and social commentary. The basic premise is simple. Walter, a depressed academic, discovers an illegal immigrant couple - Tarek and Zainab - squatting in his long-neglected NYC apartment. Walter kicks the couple out into the street but, in a fateful act of empathy and/or fascinated boredom, invites them to stay. In short order, Walter is utterly enthralled by the couple and his life soon becomes forever transformed by them. Richard Jenkins expertly portrays the central role of Walter with utter plausibility and acute vulnerability. He's an arrogant ass by habit and conditioning (years of academentia will do that to a person) and he's currently wandering through his days with little sense of purpose, passion or meaning. (The film implies this depression is the result of his beloved wife's death, who knows how many years prior; likewise, the film implies that, with his wife's death, Richard has lost touch with music in his life/soul.) Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is an impossibly beautiful man with incredible charisma who just happens to be a thrilling drummer; Tarek awakens something in Walter's being and he soon falls hard for Tarek's infectious enthusiasm. (Haaz Sleiman, the actor who plays Tarek, gives Tarek a luminous smile -- a megawatt blast of teeth that is its own charm offensive. Sleiman's work here isn't necessarily nuanced, but it is stirring, haunting, effective -- the character must be the center of emotional gravity for this piece and Sleiman's Tarek makes that completely believable.) The title is an evocative device to suggest the uncertainty of place (who, really, is the visitor in a global circuit) while also underscoring the core circumstances that frame most relationships in the film (an uninvited guest in one person's home; an unwilling detainee in an immigrant prison). Like La Misma Luna, director/screenwriter Thomas McCarthy addresses the core social tension in the film (illegal immigration) as an essentially human issue, and the film adeptly demonstrates all the academic and jingoistic posturing about globalization do little to address the complicated emotional landscapes of global im/migration. The two women in the film -- Danai Jekesai Gurira as Tarek's fiancee Zainab and Hiam Abbass as Tarek's mother Mouna -- are as efficiently brilliant in the film as Jenkins and Sleiman. What's more: Gurira, Abbass and Sleiman are each astonishingly beautiful. Some of the prettiest people I've seen on screen ever. And though I could get all cynical about the "magical negro" aspects of the narrative (pasty white guy has life transformed by multicultural beauty), to do so would likely miss what is smartest about the film: its deployment of social melodrama as a politicizing device. As Walter becomes radicalized by the circumstances of globalization (which he has studied but not experienced), so too are we. A social melodrama, structured by three distinct romantic narratives, comprising an effective drama of surprising intelligence and humanity.

5.17.2008

• Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (-)
.................................................................

5.3.2008

• Smart People (-)
An adequately engaging comedy of manners for mildly intelligent grownups. The film benefits from a relatively undertstated approach to the sitcom scenario characters: a widowed, misanthropic and egotistical middle aged professor ignores both his precociously overachieving young-republican daughter and his sullen son who writes poetry while he fumes at the injustice of being passed over professionally, both for by his department as they select a new chair and by all the potential publishers of his new book. An unexpected health emergency coincides with the arrival of his underachieving brother and also instigates an awkward flirtation with the attending ER physician. Madcap hilarity ensues as these crazy characters rediscover in each other the power of love in making life worth living. That's basically it, and it's to the film's credit that the journey is not as noxious as might have been. The cast is nearly uniformly likable and most of the scenarios are nearly plausible. The supporting cast (Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page especially) are generally effective and even Sarah Jessica Parker is generally effective/appealing. The main problem is Dennis Quaid in the lead role, a role that would have likely gone to William Hurt a generation or so ago. It's as if Quaid misunderstood the direction to "turn down the charm a couple notches" and undertook instead to make this embittered but decent man into a complete toad. Jack Nicholson's made something of a second career out of this kind of charming asshole role, and unfortunately it seems Quaid modeled his performance on that Nicholson style. It also doesn't help that Quaid clearly has no idea why anyone would make their career reading 19th century British literature, which debilitates the not inaccurate depictions of academic life. Quaid is the emotional and narrative center of the film and his blithely superficial performance diminishes the whole. Page and Haden Church work wonders in their scenes together, though something's been edited from the relationship which tosses it off balance. With additionally distracting gaps (the son's relationship with the father's student and Christine Lahti in a role that must have been larger in some earlier version of either the film or the screenplay), the film comes to rest on Quaid's arc -- which is the least effectively explored in the film. I basically enjoyed the film, however. And was grateful to be in the company of these kinds of characters. I just found something to be more than a little off-kilter about the general narrative balance.

4.12.08

• Stop-Loss (+)
Perhaps the most intelligently empathetic war movie I've ever seen. Kimberly Pierce's film has been resoundingly praised for its opening sequence, uniformly criticized for its pacing/structure, frequently faulted for filmmaker Pierce's "good intentions" and righteously lambasted for its posterboy ad campaign. All of which seems to me to be utterly conventional commentary encrusting upon a defiantly unconventional film. And, frankly, it's beginning to piss me off. I found Stop-Loss to be a profound -- and fundamentally moving -- explication of the soldier's dilemma: the alternately existential and moral and personal challenge of staying invested in the fight. It seems to me that Pierce built this film around the oxymoronic notions of passionate ambivalence, of righteous uncertainty, of resolute confusion -- metaphors that seem as apt as any for life during wartime. Moreover, these contradictions seem absolutely real when you, as Pierce had done here, attempt to take on the subject of an ongoing war from the soldier's POV. What I perhaps admire most about the film is that Pierce allows her hero map his journey back to his own integrity: in the course of this film, Ryan Phillippe's Brandon encounters the limits to each of his rationale for "why" he fights (respectively -- 9-11; his country; his hometown; his buddies; doing the "right" thing) as he finally struggles toward a clarity about why he does anything (the love of his beloveds). Ultimately, the film's controversial conclusion underscores this simple lesson: Brandon lives for his beloveds and he elects to fight so that he might be returned to them. We know that he knows that its a might big "might" but Pierce helps us to understand that little else gives life meaning. I cried at least 4 different times in this film, for at least as many different reasons (and I'm becoming emotional again as I write these notes). All of which fuels my pissed-offed-ness at the general swirl of commentary around this film. It's all so petty -- faulting the film for its perceived flaws in narrative or stylistic coherence. Whatevuh. Pierce's film endeavors to prioritize a kind of cultural work that few artists in any media seem to be engaging. The film doesn't speak clearly for or against THIS war (though it doesn't seem to be too fond of war as a general concept), which I suspect is a problem for some viewers (on both "sides"). What this film does do is ask hard hard hard questions about what it means to be at war, what are the costs of thinking seriously about being at war, what are the costs of NOT thinking seriously about same. The film allows us into the soul of this set of contradictions and challenges us to feel our way through them, with Phillippe's Brandon and Abbie Cornish's Michelle as our guides. It's a brave piece of filmmaking, accomplished with formal precision and humane respect. I hate that the film has been so dismissed for what seem self-flattering reasons, rather than engaged respectfully as a film that's trying to use this medium as a device for critical, communal reflection. The work of the actors ranges from just fine to very fine (with Linda Emond a standout for her galvanic but quiet turn as a mother grieving her son's experience of war even before he's dead from it). And any movie that has Margo Martindale in a voiceover cameo is one to make my heart quake. But this film ain't about the performances, but rather the journey of going with these simple characters on the very complicated journey of life during wartime. I remain astonished at this movie's haunting power and long for a cinematic companion with whom I might share my unapologetic appreciation of all that this film actually DOES accomplish (in stalwart defiance of the general tut-tutting consensus that's gathered to dampen this film's power)...

• Snow Angels (-)
A nearly fascinating account of the devastating consequences of non-communication. In this complicated tale, the emotional aftershocks of a child's accidental death rock the foundations of a whole constellation of relationships in a small town, fortifying the strength of some while causing others to tumble terrifyingly down. This is the kind of novelistic narrative that requires a sublime directorial talent to execute effectively. Unfortunately, David Gordon Green is not quite there yet and the result is a generally tentative melange of great moments that fail to cohere into a meaningful synthesis. Of course, the fault is not entirely Green's. He's saddled with a bunch of Lifetime movie acting (both great and not so great) with two or three independently excellent performances (Sam Rockwell as the dead girl's despairing father, Jeanette Arnette as the mother of the teen who found the body) to emphasize the banality. Indeed, I have to lay a good deal of the blame for the failure of this film upon Kate Beckinsale's pallid performance as the dead girl's mother. If the film had a female lead performance as elemental as Rockwell's, the other pieces might have just fallen into place. Toss Marisa Tomei in this part and you've got a real movie. Unfortunately, we're stuck with Beckinsale, which is just too bad. Olivia Thirlby is fine and Michael Angarano is utterly delightful (but I'm always gonna say that) and Amy Sedaris is adequate in a role that really needs someone bigger, both physically and emotionally. Nicky Katt continues in his crusade to think him one of the most annoyingly lame actors of his generation (as the trailertrash lothario Katt's beyond wrong -- gimme Donal Logue or Jeremy Sisto or Mark Eddy or someone else PLEASE). Unfortunately, the filmmaker got lost in all the details and lost track of what the movie's actually about: a young man learning that choosing NOT to communicate about things that matter almost always leads to disaster. A message -- which in the context of this film -- is problematic as the poor dumb people don't know how to communicate while the rich college types do. Too bad. I usually love this kind of movie...

• La Misma Luna/Under the Same Moon (+)
An efficient -- and effective -- sentimental melodrama, which also happens to be one of the more startling political films of recent years (at least among narrative/non-documentary features). First time director Patricia Riggen (herself a native of Mexico who emigrated to the US for film school) maintains an steady balance, layering the socio-political dimensions of the "illegal" immigration story as ambient texture for the essentially human story of a child separated from his parent. I can't think of another narrative feature film that either takes point of view of an "illegal" as empathetically as this one or which structures the story so explicitly as an im/migration narrative. While the kid's-eye view permits the film to jump through a handful of empathetic hooks, most of the narrative twists are not necessarily easy jumps. Riggen assembles a professional cast, mostly recognizable Latin American television stars doing roles that break from their most typical. (Kate del Castillo and Eugenio Derbez are both really solid, with both delivering top-notch work.) Even more interesting are a handful of genuinely supporting turns -- like Gabriel Porras as the kind-hearted Paco and Carmen Salinas as Doña Carmen (La Coyota) who is just perfect as the single character capable of connecting all the missing pieces. (Unsurprisingly, with her garish makeup and streetwise harshness, I just loved Doña Carmen -- she's a great La Chata type role and Salinas gives her all the right edges). I was additionally impressed with Riggen and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos' ability to layer the political context of border crossing, policing and militarization via a carefully wrought soundtrack of corridos and Spanish-language radio broadcasts. This film does not shy from the political stakes of this story even as it exploits (and I don't mean that in a bad way) the universally human contours of the dramatic scenario. I can only think of two other films that have mined the emotional complexities of the Mexican border crossing as poignantly -- Nava's Mi Familia and Sayles's Lone Star -- though both of those had the border as an incidentally illuminating secondary plot. And unlike Babel, which dodged some of the dicier aspects of the political issue of illegales by hardening the border itself as a rigidly militarized zone, La Misma Luna acknowledges that the border exists as an emotional, experiential terrain on both sides of, not just at, the border itself. (This film also is only film I know to take an unqualifiedly empathetic but critical view of those involved in human trafficking.) It's a simpler, more soapy story than some might like but, at a moment where Lou Dobbsian anti-immigration rhetoric heats to a scald in mere moments, the poignant deliberateness of this film is simply extraordinary. It would be great if this film went all Tyler Perry phenomenal for the Latino immigrant communities (of the sort who seemed to be in attendance at my midday ABQ screening - MrStinky was the only white boy in the house, with only a handful or two white ladies) but I doubt it. And I don't expect this film to carry much crossover appeal. But it's a worthy film, truly worthy -- one I expect I'll teach if ever I do a latino popular performance course again. Made me laugh, made me cry, made me really appreciate the power of the sentimental melodrama ala Uncle Tom's Cabin (which I write and talk about all the time -- melodrama is much better for politics than satire, it seems) - La Misma Luna is an unusual and remarkable film...

3.22.08

• 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (+)
This ain't what they had in mind when they were talking about socialist realism, but jeepers. The suspense of this basic story (the myriad risks attendant an illegal abortion) is textured in extraordinary ways by the grim realities of the film's devastated, stark backdrop (Milosevic's Rumania). Filmmaker Cristian Mungiu holds the reins of this piece with a steady reserve -- and occasionally brutally long single shots -- that emphasize the banality (and thus the humanity) of this situation. It's hard to find the words, really -- to describe the ways that Mungiu delivers on the essential ordinariness of the situation even as he plumbs the extraordinary depths of injusticae and inhumanity in it. What I found most startling was how heroic the central character of Otilia was (Anamaria Marinca). Basically, the way I see it is that Mungiu's film draws upon the perhaps surprising fact that one of the most debilitating brutalities of life under the dictatorship of Milosevic was not all the material deprivations and humiliations, but rather that such a society devalues basic human kindness in fundamental ways, transforming each individual into a private mercenary. (Then add a layer of brutally casual yet rapacious misogyny -- the overwhelming forces of dehumanization are depicted with unflinching honesty.) Yet I admire the simple screenplay as a startling hero's journey, albeit with a hauntingly ambivalent conclusion. By constantly considering how her actions might or might not help another, Otilia is waging a personal resistance against this dominant cultural trend toward base selfishness. It's an extraordinary journey and struggle to watch, as this young woman takes risks and makes sacrifices to help another person -- a person who may or not deserve Otilia's help, but who Otilia chooses to help because this person needs help. It's an exceptional film. Brutal, to be sure (barring the ouevre of David Lynch, I can't remember the last time I considered leaving a film simply because I found it to be so unbearably tense), but worthy of all kinds of notice. (I also want to see more of Mungiu's cinematic documentations of life under Milosevic -- this was an extraordinary homage to the difficulties of life in Rumania. I empathetically comprehended aspects of Soviet-era life in ways I have previously never even considered.) A truly exceptional accomplishment. Another thing: I was struck by how patient this film was, especially in its seemingly arbitrary displacement of our gaze. I certainly didn't expect to see some of the extended shots that I saw here, even as I was impressed at the things Mungiu chose not to show us. Smart, antagonistic, elegant filmmaking.

3.21.08

• Caramel (+)
A film of deceptive simplicity, containing a subtle and surprising depth. The scenario is basic: a collection of unmarried women working in female trades in Beirut. Three of the women operate a beauty shop, another takes in sewing across the street while another tries to find work as an actress/model after her husband has left her with two teenaged children. In a patriarchal society, the lives of these unmarried women might normally be pitied or mourned, their purpose as women unrealized for a defining relationship with a husband. Yet the film does not attack the patriarchy of Lebanese culture per se. Rather, it takes a more substantially incisive approach, by staging the story of the film within these overwhelming patriarchal expectations while subtly defying them. What I admire about the film is that the filmmaker does not pause for a moment in her conviction that the lives of these women absolutely matter, even if their heartfelt, poignant struggles remain largely illegible to those around them. In a US context, the characters would be the stuff of chicklit stereotypage. The beauty pining for her married lover. The strong one readying for her marriage to a domineering man while anxiously maintaining secrets of her past. The aging beauty who only knows herself as a young woman and so she engages in elaborate rituals of deception that fool few but provide her incredible solace. The already older woman -- never married -- who catches a quick glimpse of the romance she's never had only to feel it slip through her fingers as family obligations, once again, intervene in her private happiness. And, then, perhaps the most radical character: the proto-lesbian, a tomboy who thrills at a fleeting flirtation with a woman who comes to the salon to have her hair washed. What's poignant about this film is that, even though it concludes with a wedding, the film does not lapse into a misplaced confidence that romantic realization will solve these women's struggles. Rather, the wedding becomes a valuable but limited palliative for such hopes of self-realization. This is, of course, most pungently demonstrated when the "good omen" doves poop in our heroine's eye -- literally -- as the marriage bouquet is tossed. Moreover, it's underscored when the titles scroll past an image of the films "saddest" figures, the aging spinsters -- as they dance in the street. It's an extraordinary, tender and contrary film -- a quiet, stubborn, contradictory cinematic feminism virtually unparalleled in contemporary US filmmaking. I suspect, too, that it would be an easy film to misunderstand, without careful recognition of the middle eastern cultural context.

3.19.08

• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (+)
A sweet trifle, not much depth or surprise but delicious nonetheless. The premise is precious: a prim governess, desperate for work in London just before the war, hustles her way into the temporary employ of an impetuous, mildly trashy aspiring actress (who happens to be American) who's juggling the affections and attentions of three starkly different suitors (the shady club-owner, the callow son of a wealthy producer, and the sincere piano player). It's the kind of very British sex comedy that would make almost more sense on a stage with an opulent unit set. (Indeed, the scenario is very Boeing Boeing, albeit with a girl at the center.) This film, though, exists almost exclusively to showcase the comedic treats of Amy Adams and Frances McDormand, both of whom deliver delectable performances. Adams, once again, utilizes her preternatural cuteness as both foundation and gilding for a very specific and surprisingly human characterization; her Delysia LaFosse is giddy, uncomplicated and basically shallow, but Adams permits her a surprising depth that only enhances the farcical delight. McDormand lays everything a little thicker as Miss Pettigrew, but still makes the character utterly endearing. The two women have a great time playing together, with their best scenes being simply between them. A few other performances -- all generally effective -- punctuate the margins of the narrative's happy idea. Shirley Henderson's performance (as the snide, mercenary complicator) was just short of being adequate, which is too bad -- the character's a hoot and I do find Henderson a fascinating screen presence (at some level, I don't really care that she's not very good, just so's I can listen to her deliver lines with that incredible voice). The boys are all attractive enough, though the show really belongs to Adams and McDormand. My biggest consternation? I don't think I consider Adams a supporting actress, though she will almost certainly be pitched that way. I feel it's a co-lead and I wonder if I'll be one of the only ones.

3.12.08

• Honeydripper (+)
Cute genre experiment with surprising, subtle depth. Sayles takes the radical approach by allowing the char/actors time to maneuver the simplistic formula and stock character tropes that this narrative provides them. It's the digging at the edges of the characters and the scenarios that allows for a differently dimensional kind of storytelling here. This is the kind of movie that inspires my instinct to defend. Yes, it's slow. Yes, it's sweet. Yes, it's predictable. But it's also John Sayles who - for better and worse - is ever interested in the surprise and depth hidden in plain sight along well-worn, ostensibly familiar paths. The worst aspects of this piece come from the central male performances -- Danny Glover who's both too old and too ostentatious for this piece and Charles S. Dutton who demonstrates that he's tone-deaf to the subtleties of style that this genre riff requires. Yaya DaCosta is adequate but beautiful/compelling nonetheless. The main kid is wonderful, as is the guitar ghost guy. One aspect of the film that's also nice is how the two white characters are just as cliched/stock as the black characters and they too are afforded surprising depth in expert cameo/supporting performances by Stacy Keach (as good as he's ever been) and Mary Steenburgen who's just beyond good as the depressed southern housewife who Lisa Gay Hamilton's character works for. A secondary plotline of rabbling cottonpickers is handled well with solid/excellent performances throughout (especially from Kel Mitchell who should just have much more of a career he's so interesting). This isn't a great movie but is surprisingly deep/rich/nice. (I'm also struck by how much the barely hidden spiritual message of the film -- get out of the way and allow the miracle to happen -- so resonates with my own experience this week.) Plus, I just love Lisa Gay Hamilton.

2.29.08

• Be Kind, Rewind (-)
Cute but limited experiment. The premise -- a gaggle of loser outsiders band together to craft a grassroots cinephile community through the magic of vhs -- creates a number of setups for a whole range of homages to home video trash. The film doesn't make sense on a certain level (why vhs?) but there's a lot of pleasures in the film (mostly observing the wacky crafty clevernesses of the scenery/props/costumes in the remakes). The cast -- Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz -- are all just fine, each doing their characteristic schtick. This, of course, creates a dilemma...if you don't hook into the charms of a particular performer, their component of the piece becomes a real charm gap. And since this movie totally depends on the CHARM and WHIMSY and CUTENESS, that can be a problem. Diverting enough, most of the time, but ultimately sorta dumb.

2.22.08

• Boom! [1968] (!)
Wow. Well. That was an experience not to be missed. Probably an experience not to be repeated either. The film is an extraordinary, incomprehensible mess. Elizabeth Taylor's too young for the role of an elderly wealthy woman staving off paranoia and insanity as she desperately clings to her fantasies of herself. Richard Burton's too old for the mysterious, masculine drifter capable of stirring the souls of women on the verge of death, reawakening long dormant desires and longings while pressing them ever closer toward surrendering to final mortality. Noel Coward's too glib for the role of Taylor's queer corollary, his gentility cutting awkwardly across the lascivious and lurid bitchiness of his character's lines. Plus, the whole scenario makes next to no sense. All of which, however, doesn't stop the extraordinary excess of the production from bringing some genuine thrill into the proceedings from time to time. Like when Noel Coward arrives to Taylor's mountaintop abode riding upon the swarthy shoulders of some mediterrannean macho. Or when Taylor arrives to a patio dinner consisting of many beasts roast on spits wearing a spangly caftan and a giant headdress sculpted, it seems, entirely from paper mache, dixie cups and soda straws. Or when Burton melifluously intones the Xanadu-Kubla-Khan poetry to which Taylor responds with a shrieking "Whaaaaaat?!" An extraordinary, excessive mess that must be experienced.

2.16.08

• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (+)
Surprisingly, deeply effective film. The screenplay and cinematography work brilliantly to enhance the incredible drama of the situation -- a paralyzed man who can only communicate by blinking one eyelid. The ensemble of women surrounding the central guy are great, especially the wife (Emanuelle Seigner) and the speech therapist (the simply extraordinary Marie-Josée Croze). What I found so surprising about the film is that it works outside conventional narrative structure, using the cinematic apparatus to construct an empathy of consciousness. At our Friday afternoon screening, the whole crowd of 16 audibly squirmed when a fly landed on the tip Jean-Dominique Bauby's nose (the adorable Matthieu Amalric, freaky paralyzed here). And I surprised myself by bursting into tears when Bauby's friend Laurent -- who's a disaster working on the alphabet techique -- comes to read Balzac to him. I don't have much profound to say about the film, beyond the simple fact that it worked on a visual and emotional level in ways that so surpassed so many films. I've not been a fan of Schnable until now really and I think this film marks a really important cue into how to access his films: using visuality to explore the narrative and emotional dimensions of consciousness. (Max Von Sydow is also really good here.) A good movie. Surprising, pensive, subtly intense...

2.15.08

• Persepolis (+)
Tender and pensive, Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir/novel receives an apt cinematic adaptation here. Gorgeously animated in (mostly) black/white 2-dimensions accomplishes something marvelous in conveying the aesthetic sensibility of Central Asian/Islamic cultural practice as it collides with Western visual principles of perspective and chiaroscuro. Notably, I feel the animation fundamentally and aptly centers the story in a Middle Eastern cultural perspective, thus "making strange" the visual and cultural predispositions of Western Europe. I especially like the telling of Iranian/Persion pre-history using the techniques of Turkish shadow puppet theatre. Works on so many levels, both humorous and poignant, while also conveying the essential historical context to which most Western audiences would be otherwise completely naive. The b&w also does a nice job of deracinating the story so that the political and/or cultural distinctions between the characters become the most legible markers of difference. Poignant, pensive, sensible. A generally gratifying film. As MrStinky noted immediately upon its conclusion: "I want to see the sequel." A strong testament to the effectiveness of the film's style of life narrative.

2.8.08

• I'm Not There (-)
A possibly brilliant failure. The second pass through Todd Haynes explication of persona, celebrity, identity, biography, history and Bob Dylan wasn't much more entertaining than the first time. The art of the intertwinings is more evident, as well as the thematics underlying each characterization. However, while the 2nd pass permitted me a greater appreciation of the art of the intersections, it also emphasized the emotional vacuity of the enterprise. Without the aspect of emotional aspiration of surprise, it seemed all the more clear that this is a film of images and ideas and occasional exhilarations. There are perhaps two actual relationships staged in film - Blanchett's Jude with the journalist Keenan and Charlotte Gainsbourg with Heath Ledger's character. However, even there, the characters are in relationship with their ideas of the other. All told the film is an excellent explication of the same celebrity dynamics elaborated in Joseph Roach's IT, with Dylan being the abstracted role-icon that ghosts each narrative as they are each deployed in implicit tension with the other. It's an intriguing enterprise but, again, I found it emotionally vacuous. Only Gere and Bale have a clear handle on their character's emotional reality. Ledger's good, appropriately interior but ultimately obtuse. The kid is fine, more so than I originally thought, as is the interrogated poet. The only manifestation of the Dylan role-icon that I found to be entirely dissatisfying was Blanchett's Jude. I can't tell if I'm reacting to the fact that Jude's supposed to be Dylan at his most self-satisfied/terrified and solipsistic, but there's an affect of interior detachment that Blanchett adopts that I find really annoying. Blanchett's Jude seems to be watching himself act out, with only Keenan and/or perhaps the Michelle Williams figure able to really distract him from his self-fascination. This makes intellectual sense to the architecture of the film, but Blanchett's accomplishment in crafting this creature does not extend to tethering Jude to any actual emotional reality. Blanchett's Jude is an object lesson in self-abstraction, of getting so caught up in one's idea of one's self as to become estranged from the experience of life. Again, it's an amazing accomplishment that Blanchett's characterization is so convincing, but the one thing it's not is alive. Blanchett's Jude is absolutely vivid in the word's sense of producing clear mental images, but not in the word's more basic sense of being emotionally lively. The thing is -- as much as I feel that Blanchett nailed the ideas Haynes needed, I feel just as strongly that she neglected to invest these ideas with necessary humanness. The characterization is as a strange creature, not a man estranged from his experience of self... Moreover, although Blanchett's characterization is the most clearly memorable of them all, watching the characterization in isolation (as you can on the website) from the other aspects of the character reveal the simplistic -- even tediously repetitive -- dimensions of the characterization. Incredibly accomplished work, without the emotional texture to elevate beyond the level of occasionally enthralling stuntwork.

2.6.08

• American Gangster (-)
A paint-by-numbers gangster epic, overlaying a civil rights "uplift" narrative in the conventional template of the cop/criminal love affair. It's just a really bloated, self-consciously serious epic featuring two of the most self-consciously serious A-list actors in contemporary film. I haaaaaaated it. It's very well done and loaded to the rafters with interesting actors but none of them get to do anything that's at all emotionally compelling. It's pretty much all about the spectacle of criminality in 1970s New York, with the actors all inhabiting ideas instead of characters. I can't believe that people like Chiwetel Ejiofor and John Hawkes and Joe Morton are made to be so negligible and generic by the massive operations of the film. Some actors have somewhat showier moments (like Roger Bart as a racist State Department functionary or, more prominently, Armand Assante and Josh Brolin as, respectively, a supersleazy mafioso or a supersleazy cop) which are diverting but nothing seems to bring the film anywhere near the realm of emotional impact. The closest thing we get to an emotional reality is the relationship between Carla Gugino and Russell Crowe. Gugino -- who is just surprisingly, subtly good -- plays a handful of scenes as Crowe's exhausted ex-wife, and her presence is perhaps the only piece of the film that jolts with an emotional integrity (which, to his credit, Crowe participates in -- she makes him better). Less effective are the women in the Denzel Washington storyline, Ruby Dee and Lymari Nadal, both of whom are much better than their roles but who can only do so much when overwhelmed by the soul-sucking, stentorian superiority of Denzel Washington's approach to the role. The character may have kept his emotions at a distance but it feels here that everytime Denzel's acting opposite a woman he lets her do all the work which he barely acknowledges. That may be an apt character choice, but as an acting choice it's deadly, creating a vacuum in which the work of Dee and Nadal get stifled by Denzel's emotional silence. Washington's better with men, as with the impossibly hot Richard Guenver Smith (who, once again, just slays me with the force of his strange attractiveness).

2.2.08

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

1.30.08

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

1.25.08

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

1.19.08

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

1.1.08