Albert Nobbs (2011) (Friday, January 27, 2012) (149)

There is one interesting scene in Rodrigo Garcia's film Albert Nobbs. At one moment, Albert (Glenn Close) and his friend Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), both of whom are living as men, though they are biologically woman, go for a walk on the beach dressed in women's clothes. This has a certain strange quality to it, as we know well that both of these characters are women and that dressing as such should not be a problem, but as we've spent 80 minutes watching them as men, it still feels like they're just two guys cross dressing.

This is not very dissimilar from a moment in Celine Sciamma's recent film Tomboy, where young Laure's mother makes her wear a dress, even though we've only seen her in boys' clothes. I would say, though that that scene was much more interesting as it was not simply a superficial statement, but much more of a psychological one. Garcia might have been attempting to make a psychological statement, though it just falls flat. It's a strange feeling to see a character we think of as a man dressed as a woman, though I'm not really sure what to make of it. I'm not sure Garcia explains his intentions well enough here.

Nobbs is a butler in a Victorian-era Dublin hotel, where he has worked for years. It seems at some point it became easier for her to get a job as a butler than as a woman servant, so she decided to cross dress and identify as a man. There's certainly a suggestion that he identifies as a gay woman, though the psychology gets very uncertain. One night Nobbs has to share his bedroom with Page, who is in the hotel repainting the walls, and they each find out the other's secret (by opening their shirts and showing their breasts. Subtle.). It seems Page made a decision to live as a man to protect herself from an abusive husband a long time ago. Now he lives as a transsexual in a relationship with a woman. When Nobbs decides to get out of the hotel game (why now?!), he decides he should marry young Helen (Mia Wasikowska) a girl who seems more interested in the hunky handyman than Nobbs.

Aside from the frustration of not really understanding the psychological point of view of Nobbs, this story is extra annoying as it shows Nobbs making only bad decisions. Why in the world would he want to marry Helen? She seems totally average and not unlike hundreds of other chambermaids he might have met over the years. Why would he decided to get out of hotel butlering now when it seems like a very safe place for him? Why not open a tobacconist shop alone without a wife?

I don't think Garcia explains enough here about the motivation of Nobbs or what goes into his decisions. It seems like he's leaving most of that interpretation work up to the audience to figure out, but I don't think that's very fair in the context of this film. I have no good idea about Victorian mores regarding cross-dressing and transsexuals and I don't think we know enough about what Nobbs' deep feelings are regarding Helen or any other woman. Does he really love her? Is she just the means to a "normal" end? Does he have similar feelings toward Page? It's all very muddy and difficult to understand.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Weekend (Tuesday, November 22, 2011) (103)

Weekend is a wonderful little movie about two guys who meet in a bar and have a weekend of falling in love before one of them has to leave town. It has the romance and sad nostalgia of a Noel Coward story (the bittersweetness of Brief Encounter comes to mind, though neither guy is cheating on anyone) and the freshness, sexual frankness and energy of a mumblecore movie.

This film is written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who has previous worked as an editor on big-budget fare and made one gay documentary, and shows lots of skills in terms of overall look, interesting point-of-view shots and an intense intimacy in the lives of the two guys. I think there are moments when the very slow pace of the film hurts the overall storytelling and perhaps less would be more there. That is, I understand that time, for the two guys, seems to slow down to a standstill because they're so in love, but standstills don't work well for holding audience interest.

The film is really about opposites and unusual juxtapositions. The main guy, Russell, played beautifully by Tom Cullen, is still in the closet and leads a very conservative lifestyle, while Glen, played by Chris New, is out and loves going to clubs and doesn't seem to work. Of course, the biggest "opposite" is that this is a movie that would otherwise be about a man and a woman, but here it's two men. It is a wonderful thing, thematically and theoretically, that this is not really a movie about two gay men being "normal" or "fitting in as a couple in society". This is just a movie about two lovers being lovers, who happen to be men.

This is a good movie and I look forward to other films by Haigh, who clearly knows how to direct.

Stars: 3 of 4

Beginners (Thursday, August 4, 2011) (63)

Beginners is a very intimate, funny, personal and sad movie by writer/director Mike Mills. It does sometimes boil over with sentimentality and cuteness (he is married to Queen of Cute Miranda July), but his enthusiasm is infectious and he communicates the difficulties of discourse brilliantly through montage, score and clever dialogue (sometimes from a dog).

As the film opens, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) tells us that his mother died five years ago and that his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer) has just passed away from cancer. Hal had just came out as gay after living as a straight married man since the 1950s; in his final years, he had a lover, Andy (Goran Visnjic) and began to open up to his son in ways that he had never done in the past.

The story is told simultaneously in the present and flashbacks at the past, sometimes at Oliver's childhood interacting with his off-beat mother and sometimes looking at the last years of his father'a life, but always from Oliver's point of view. He's a sad guy; now in his 40s, he is an artist living and working in LA and never totally connecting to anyone (including his friends). There is a suggestion from them that he used to be more "into it all," but he's gotten sadder and more quiet, either because of his father's death or exacerbated by that.

At any rate, he goes to a party with them where he meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) a French actress living in an LA hotel for some short period of time. The two immediately connect, probably they each see a similar dourness in the other, and they try to make it work together despite their individual distrust of humanity and Oliver's specific pain from losing his father, who had become a close friend in recent years.

I think that a well-crafted montage is one of the best and most interesting devices a director can use, and Mills employs them here wonderfully and rather unlike anything else I've ever seen. There is a refrain and a structure they all come back to. In a monotone voice-over we hear Oliver say, for instance "I was born in 1963. This is the President in 1963; this is what nature looked like; this is the sun; the stars." As we hear these things, we see advertising or publicity stills of the things being described. Yes, it's certainly a bit precious, but it's effective. This is how Oliver sees the world and this gets us into his literal frame of reference. He is not a very elaborate emotional person, rather he sees things in a binary way: happy/sad, pain/pleasure, good/bad, comfort/discomfort. These montages lead us into this understanding.

To say they are reminiscent of Hollis Frampton's seminal art film, (nostalgia), is an understatement, and perhaps strikingly naive. The disembodied voice feels close and uncomfortably clinical at the same time; the idea of images summing up emotions and acting as stand-ins for whole stories. Really what the connection comes down to is exactly the title, nostalgia - and more specifically sadness over things long ago (even things you didn't experience yourself).

As the film goes along, Oliver seems to be working on an art project about sadness, hand-drawn pictures that have some political message and some personal connection (they're about his father's suppression of his sexuality). Clearly Mills isn't subtle with his themes.

Back with Anna, they both have issues with their parents (she has an ongoing discussion with her father he wants to kill himself for reasons we never find out). They connect because they're both moving at the same slow pace experiencing everything, stopping to smell the roses, as it were. Oliver is clearly afraid of commitment, and ambivalent about "taking the next step" with her, for fear their relationship will evaporate (because things move toward nothingness, of course).

The connection they mutually feel is frightening to Oliver, who has connected to several people over the years. First we see his unconventional mother (who is a riot, played by Mary Page Keller), who seems to interact with the 10-year-old Oliver as if she is a 10-year-old. She does a silly dance in an art gallery, she has a game where she shoots him with her fingers as a gun and critiques his death-fall. It's clear that as a kid, he connected more to his mother. After she died, he clearly connected to his father and appreciated his joie de vivre and recognized his life-long struggles. After his father's death, he connects to his father's dog, Arthur, who doesn't speak, though we do see his glances subtitled several times (this is wonderful and very reminiscent of Miranda July's joyful eccentricity).

Oliver is worried that he might not be in an emotional position, at this moment, to properly give himself to Anna, and he wants to cut off the relationship before they get in too deep. Clearly this is a self-fulfilling action, as pushing her away for no good reason...well, it pushes her away. We feel bad for her, but also bad for him. He knows not what he does.

All four lead actors here are non-Americans (and then the fifth is a dog) and only Laurent is playing a foreigner. I found McGregor's American accent difficult throughout, as much as I tried to ignore and just chalk it off to a silly LA affectation. Really, Plummer, Visnjic and McGregor all struggle with their accents, though they all give very nice heart-felt performances. I guess Laurent's performance feels the most honest (possibly because she's playing a French woman who speaks with a French accent), because she doesn't seem to be reaching as far for the emotional connections to Anna's actions. (I'm very upset that I'm not dating Melanie. She's beautiful and talented... and Jewish... .)

Perhaps Mills relies too much on his montages. I think they would have been even more effective than they are if there had only been three or four of them rather than the six or seven we see. He's certainly a bit too blunt about the theme of sadness. Clearly the actors' accents are distracting too, but Mills gets great performances out of them all. He also uses technical stuff, like a wonderful, sad piano score by Roger Neil, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell to convey the darkness of the film, despite it's very funny writing. This is a movie that I expected to hate for being too sweet and too on-the-nose about child-parent emotions. It's much better than that and is a very nice work.

Stars: 3 of 4

Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D (Saturday, July 2, 2011) (48)

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemöller

On a space shuttle launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Simmons (John Turturro), a government-worker-cum-freelance-Transformers-hunter-expert paraphrases this poem as he speaks to the heroic Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf). He's talking about how as a gesture of weakness and conspiracy, the U.S. government agreed to the demands of the Deceptacons to send the Autobots out of the country and off into the wilds of space. Simmons is upset that the holocaust of the humans at the hands of the Decptacons will continue and, like the German pastor before him, he will have tacitly endorsed the heinous act by not fighting against it.

You might say that director Michael Bay and writer Ehren Kruger are being a bit heavy-handed, invoking the Holocaust to a sci-fi action story like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but you would be wrong. They are presenting a deeply searing critique of modern consumerism and a deep post-structuralist analysis of the past 60 years of world history. "Was it all worth it?" is the question that they wrestle with. Taken down to it's basic parts, we see how the hope, good fortune and lessons that came out of the Second World War was all an illusion, that capitalism and the concept of "freedom" are broken systems and that there is only a bright future for us today if we embrace femininity.

The basic story of the film is much too complex to understand from a wide point of view in the context of this column (a fact which is, in itself, a comment on American consumerism, of course), so to put it simply, you have to know that the Deceptacons have come back to Earth, are more Communist than ever and are trying to get a bunch of fuel rods that were crashed on the moon in our pre-human-history. It seems these rods (read: phalluses) are the basis for re-building the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron. If they can insert the rods into our buildings, they'll be able to summon Cybertron inside of Earth's atmostphere. (Spoiler alert: When they succeed in bringing Cybertron to Earth, it looks like a big breast with a gigantic nipple.)

The role of sexuality is ever-present and central to the story. It reminds me of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo: 120 Days of Sade, although here most of the sexual torture is replaced by violence and we are left only with symbolic rape. The Deceptacons are a class of super-masculine bourgeoisie, in the waning days of their own empire. They are led by a Prime (see: The President, The Bishop, etc. from Salo) whose goal is really just to dominate and subjugate. They have their own set of laws, which can be amended at a moment's notice; they appreciate youthful vigor and seem to have as much of an interest in boys as they do in girls.

Their main tool of destruction is Shockwave, a robot that can grow to infinite lengths (like an awesome erection) and burrows through the land and buildings with sharp teeth (like an awesome erection). He is, of course, a gigantic penis with teeth, a Freudian nightmare far worse than the vagina dentata. He is a clear symbol for the Deceptacon culture of over-excess, fucking the world, force feeding people excrement and acting on the most depraved thoughts and desires one could conceive.

But Bay and Kruger are not making a direct parallel to Pasolini, of course. In a very post-Roland-Barthes way they take the predicate of the Holocaust and twist it. Here the Capitalists (the Autobots and the US Government) are the Fascists and are fighting the Communists (the Deceptacons). The American freedom they are tying to defend is best symbolized in the hundreds of brilliant product placements throughout the film. One of the cars is a NASCAR stock car that is sponsored by Target. As we see our heroes fighting the bad guys, we see Target right there in the mix. The film is a polemic about American consumerism. What they are fighting to defend is a world of no choices, corporate overlords and the force-feeding of industrial crap (read: excrement). In the middle of the wreckage of post-battle Chicago, a brand new Ferrari drives down the street unscratched. Overconsumption and the post-feeling world have won and we can celebrate by dreaming of buying cars we'll never be able to afford.

The fact that Bay made this in 3D and has begged people to see it in that format, promising us more than we've ever seen, is a cynical commentary by him on the state of the movie industry and the filmic format. Like Werner Herzog did with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bay shows us here how everything we see is not just done well, but amazingly overdone and and we have to pay more money for the honor of beholding it. We already live in the world he's showing us in the film.

Even the human characters and locations are tied to this theme of post-choice hyper-saturation. The film is set in Washington, D.C. where Witwicky (even his name is a comment on the outsourcing of encyclopedias to the crowd-sourced Internet) is dating a bodacious blond English girl named... uh, I don't remember, but she's a Victoria's Secret model (even here, the poor woman's humanity is stripped away and she becomes a symbol of her employer in the real world; the nightmare that Marx feared has come true and we are all just drones to our corporate masters). In this post-hellish reality, there is no United States or United Kingdom. All Western governments are the same and they're all are marching in lock (goose) step to subjugate the masses with garbage (and to make us bend over so they can rate who has the best ass, so they can then kill that person).

Similarly, though the film is set in Washington, it is shot in Chicago (home of awesome tax breaks... again, a comment on the film making process) -- before the action ultimately moves to Chicago. This is a brilliant way of showing that all American cities are the same. There is no capital city and no "Midwest". There is just one big nightmarish post-Capitalist stretch of cities in American tied together by Interstate 88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway. The American government is a fascist organization, it will rape you. In the words of Pasolini's Duke, "the fascists are the only true anarchists." And, I'll add, in the words of his Bishop, "all is good if it's excessive".

Indeed.

Finally, the film shows us that the hyper-masculine nature of the Deceptacons cannot be defeated simply by complimentary warriors fighting a battle, but femininity is the key. It is only after Optimus Prime loses his trailer and rocket arm (is castrated) that he's able to beat Megatron and Sentinel Prime (a new character, a Prime who switched to the Deceptacons when he wasn't able to sell more product). And Wikipedia's girlfriend this time has even bigger lips and more amazing flowing hair than that Megan Fox chick, which means she's able to deflect danger with her feminine charms (read: her gigantic tits and super short skirts... and, by the way, she totally flashed us her crotch when getting out of the Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing car... a car once described to me by an Italian man as a "pussy magnate"... true story). But it's really only when WikiLeaks is totally emasculated, after he's beaten by Dr. McDreamy and that dude from the Las Vegas TV show, that he's able to help out in any significant way.

This is a deeply moving comment on our world and on our lives. It is a film that I would call *important* (and at 157 minutes, you can't not understand that). It needs to be studied more for it's intricate symbols and allusions. We need to understand better why Cybertron looks like a breast when the Deceptacons are so masculine (is it an Oedipal relationship they have with their world? Is that why there are no female Autobots?) and to figure out why exactly John Malkovich is needed in the story at all. I think he's the key to something. His three-piece suits stand out as some sartorial commentary, I think. They're certainly of the same quality as the members of the cabal in Salo. Woah, it's getting even deeper as I continue to think about it....

Stars: 7 of 4

Heartbeats (May 17, 2011) (32)

I never saw Xavier Dolan's first feature from last year called I Killed My Mother, but I heard very good things about it. When his second feature, Heartbeats, came out, I was interested to see it. To say Dolan is a wunderkind is an understatement, having written, directed and acted in two highly regarded films by age 22. (Shit. My life is a fucking waste.) He is super handsome, gay and lives and works in Montreal; he embraces youth culture and is very smart and apparently very well-versed in film history.

Heartbeats is about two friends, Marie (Monia Chokri) and Francis (Dolan) who both fall in love with the same guy, Nicolas (Niels Schneider). It is never clear to them nor to us whether Nicolas is gay or straight, so it seems totally reasonable that they could both have a chance. They both pursue him with cold-bloodedness, possibly ruining their own friendship in the process and possibly making themselves unattractive to him.

More than anything, Heartbeats is an examination of narcissism and how the presence of a narcissist makes those around him feel amazing. The magnetic power of such blind self-confidence is intoxicating for the less-than-confident souls who follow them. I feel like we have all been in a situation where we fall for a person (in a sexual or a friend sense), until we realize that we don't even register on their radar, because they are so narcissistic. Once they drop us, because we no longer help them with whatever they use us for, there is an emptiness left in us. We've just given something of our own away in exchange for the illusion of something substantial that was never there.

Dolan has a really beautiful style reminiscent of early Almodovar or Lynch films. He uses a soundtrack beautifully as well as slow motion and daring lighting choices. (Slow motion is very hard to pull off well and is hardly used these days because it is so hard to do right; Dolan does it wonderfully.) There is a melodramatic quality to the story, that the characters are just playing "types" and that the forces of the story are bigger than the characters inside it. Though I normally don't go in for such false formality, it works interestingly here in a near-operatic way.

One major gripe I have is that Dolan uses an epilogue after the story has effectively wrapped up that somewhat ruins the previous culminating scene. There is a suggestion at the end that although Nicolas might be a narcissist, Marie and Francis are partly to blame for falling so head-over-heels for the guy. I think this subverts the argument of the film and would have been better to leave out. It also suggests that the duo are bitter jerks, rather than helpless victims. I'm not sure I like that idea as much.

Clearly Dolan is a writer/director to look out for in the future. His maturity surpasses his years and his technique is second-to-none.

Stars: 3 of 4

Kaboom (Saturday, January 29, 2011) (4)

Oh boy - what to say about Greg Araki's Kaboom. Well, it's very frank about sex. Uh, yeah - that's about it.

This movie is some sort of gonzo laugh at John Waters-like camp fare, but is sorta impossible to follow and goes off in such weird directions that you lose track of what the hell you're watching.

Smith (Thomas Dekker) is a college freshman living in the dorm. He thinks he's gay, but starts getting interested in some of the hot women he sees around. He has a dream with a mysterious girl in it and then thinks he sees her on campus. He tries to find her and enlists his best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) to help him. She's a lesbian (you see the trend) and always has a strong scowl on her face.

At some point there is a cult that starts recruiting students in the school and seems to have some sort of suicide pact, like Jonestown or Heaven's Gate. Well, they're more like the latter because there's some stuff about celestial bodies and space or something. Somehow Smith's search for this mysterious girl and search for getting laid by as many people (of all genders) as he can runs into the cult story. I'm still a bit mystified about what exactly happens.

Araki uses a rather non-linear structure to the film and it's very hard to follow from one scene to the next. I not sure very much comes from this aside from confusing us. Well, maybe this as something to do with drugs or something, but it's rather difficult to understand.

I fully admit that there might be something great that I'm not seeing here. I think Araki is capable of brilliant stuff (I think his film Mysterious Skin - which was also non-linear - is amazing), but I didn't see it here. To me, John Waters at his best was in Serial Mom and Pecker - two films that mixed the gross-out shock camp of his early work with normal (and hilarious) story lines that were somewhat approachable. Earlier and later stuff he's done (like Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living or Cecil B. DeMented) is just too hard to follow and such pure camp it's hard to connect to. This film is much more like Araki's Desperate Living than it is Mysterious Skin.

Stars: .5 of 4

I Love You Philip Morris (2010) (Monday, January 10, 2011) (174)

There's something about Jim Carrey that just never quite works for me. I always feel that he's showing off and doing too much hamming for the camera and sometimes wish he would just act normal (look - Robin WIlliams who is just as silly can play normal beautifully). I Love You Phillip Morris is his latest "serious" role where I am supposed to be wowed by his range and his ability to be serious - but again, all I see is over-the-top zaniness and annoying facial expressions.

In the film, Carrey plays Steven Russell, a guy who seems to be addicted to scams and breaking the law. He begins as a cop in some small town, but them comes out as gay and moves to Miami Beach. Down there, he realized that "being gay is expensive", so rather than working, he figures out ways to get injured and suing for his injuries. At some point he is convicted of insurance fraud and goes to jail. In jail, he meets Phillip Morris (Ewan McGragor) a smart gay guy who was arrested for stealing cars. They two fall madly in love and then spend the rest of their lives going in and out of jail, but always for love... or something.

This movie is basically The Mask meets Catch Me if you Can. Every time Steven has a chance to scam someone, he does. When he's released from jail and goes looking for a job, he forges his resume, gets hired as a firm's CFO and then embezzles money from them. It's all a bit much. Oh, wait ... I can't say it's too much because it's apparently based on a true story. Whatever.

Carrey is wound up so tight, when you see him release into a scene, he goes around so fast, it's hard to concentrate on what the hell is happening. You get your dumb Jim Carrey voices, and your tired Jim Carrey faces, and your silly Jim Carrey physical comedy, but not much else.

I get that the story is based on real events, but it's hard to like a character who is so dimwitted about crime. Does he not think he's going to get caught? Does he think that anyone will care how elaborate his scams are? (They're very elaborate.) You want to shake him and say "STOP!"

McGregor is good here, but it is sorta hard to figure out what the hell he sees in Steven. I guess the fact that they are madly in love (after five minutes of meeting) is enough for us to understand, but it doesn't totally work.

Mostly this movie is fun and easy, but it was frustrating how it kept going on and on and on with Carrey's 1990s jokes, never learning from his mistakes or doing anything differently. He tries one thing and he gets arrested, then gets out of jail and tries the same thing again and again gets arrested, and then a third time and on and on. It's sorta tired and silly.

Stars: 2 of 4

Prodigal Sons (Monday, December 27, 2010) (165)

The writer/director of the documentary Prodigal Sons, Kimberly Reed, was born as Paul McKerrow in Helena Montana. Her older brother Marc was only 11 months her senior and was adopted by her parents just before she was born. Placed into the same year in school the two McKerrow brothers were competitive for attention, but Marc always seemed to lose to his younger brother, who was the high school quarterback and a hunk.

Secretly Paul was struggling with his own identity and ultimately transitioned to become a woman. Around the same time, Marc got in a car accident that left him with significant brain damage that made him volatile and not the same guy he was before the accident. The two broke off contact for about a decade.

As this film opens, they both are going back to their high school reunion where they are different people (on the outside or the inside) from what they were before. Kim is now a woman, living as a lesbian with a wife in New York City; Marc is functioning at a different speed than he used do and suffers from mood swings that he controls with meds. The two try to work on their relationship and try to rediscover who each one is now at this point in their lives.

This is a very beautiful story, one that is so perfectly balanced and symmetrical that it nearly has to be made into a documentary. At one point in voice over, Kim says something to the effect that Marc only hopes to be the man that she never wanted to be. It's a pretty fabulous line in an interesting story.

As with many documentaries, I think the last third is a bit rocky and loses its way a bit. Marc has a breakdown around Christmas time and assaults their younger brother (who is also gay). He's put in jail for a spell. Once this happens, some of the air is taken out of the story, without an interesting foil, Kim becomes less interesting to us.

This is a good movie, but I wonder if that is helped dramatically by the amazingness of the true story that exists. I am not sure that I would see another film by Kim Reed... nothing against her, but I think this was her story and now that it's done, it's done. (I don't want to ruin anything, but there's a totally amazing revelation in the middle of the film about who Marc's birth grandparents were. The film is almost worth seeing for that alone.)

Stars: 2.5 of 4

BearCity (Saturday, Octoer 23, 2010) (139)

BearCity is a very sweet movie about a young gay guy in New York City who comes out as a bear lover, a lover of big hairy men, and falls in with group of bear couples. It's basically Sex in the City but with bears.

Tyler (Joe Conti) meets bear Fred (Brian Keane) at a casting gig who then introduces the youngster to Roger (Gerald McCullouch), the king (or queen) bear in Chelsea. Tyler falls for Roger right away, but is nervous because his sexual exploits are legendary and he worries he's not ready for such a guy. Tyler has to gain confidence as a bear lover to win Roger's heart so they can fall in love and live happily ever after.

The story is totally silly here, but I appreciate that it sets up a world where everyone is gay and everyone is a bear. It's rather a gonzo world where there are simply no straights to be found and the spectrum of people goes from twink to polar bear.

The script by director Douglas Langway and Lawrence Ferber is very funny, though not all that amazing. Were this not a gay movie marketed specifically to gays, this probably would not have been made.

Most of the actors are very funny and great in their roles. Joe Conti, as Tyler, is a very likable kid who is clearly in love but isn't get comfortable enough in his own skin to feel very confident about himself or his feelings. He's funny and flirty in a very engaging way. Gerald McCullouch, as Roger, is also very funny and rather over-the-top - but in a charming way. He's a good mentor to the young Tyler, but also shows some real depth with his emotions... something I didn't expect from such a film.

This is not a movie that needs to be seen, but it is totally enjoyable if you do decide to see it.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Spring Fever (Friday, August 6, 2010) (95)

I admit that I am not an expert on so-called queer cinema. As much as I see movies that are necessarily gay or gay-focused, I really don't seek them out or know much about the genre or the merits therein. I don't think I have ever seen a gay Asian movie before, let alone any gay movie that was this interesting.


This is a film that if it were American would be a mumblecore movie. It basically has the same non-three-act structure of most mumblematerial and the same approach to the technical aspects of the filmmaking process as well as the same view of sex and relationships as cultural commodities. I am very interested in whether director Ye Lou knows the American mumblemovement or if this is just a wonderful parallel evolution.


As the film opens up, we see Wang Ping and Jiang Cheng, two professional men in their late 20s escaping the city to have a sexual tryst in a remote country house. We soon see they are being followed by another young man, Luo Haitao, who has been employed by Wang Ping's wife to spy on her husband and see if he's cheating on her, as she suspects.


Luo Haitao has his own girlfriend, but as he continues to follow Jiang Cheng (past the deal with Wang Ping's wife) he begins a sexual affair with him, which clearly threatens his relationship with her.


Basically the movie is about young people fucking other young people despite relationships they might have and despite their necessarily prescribed "sexuality," inasmuch as society deems them gay or straight. On a more specific level, the film is about how Jiang Cheng is a catalyst for the sexuality of a whole group of people, either leading them to have sex with him (homoerotic sex) or leading the women to act in ways they might not otherwise act.


In many ways this is a generally gay twist on Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig's 2007 film Hannah Takes the Stairs. Sexuality is a fluid thing that strikes you at unexpected moments. It can be traded with people for power, love or companionship, but the suggestion is that there is always a transaction of some sort - something is being traded for the sex. (In Hannah's case, she used sex as a way of gaining power over men and killing boredom; in Jiang Cheng's case, sexuality is a way of giving love and friendship to lost people as a way of relating to them.)


I think this is fascinating and very modern, especially in the setting of modern-day China which is so super-capitalistic. Sex and sexuality is merely another service that can be bought or sold (metaphorically, at least). Some people, like Jiang Cheng, are "rich" because they are sexually liberated, an object of attraction for many and get a lot of it; some people, like Luo Haitao, are purchasers on the market because they are in need of a connection and less comfortable in this world.


The style of the film is very beautiful and simple. It was shot digitally by Jian Zeng, much like its mumblefriends across the globe, and transferred to celluloid which gives an eerie grainy quality to the images. It's mostly blue-gray and dark, which is a very evocative look in general, but also relates well to the general melancholy, secretive tone of the film.


The one non-mumblething about the film is the score and musical sound track, which is quite beautiful and sad - but much more polished than the rest of the film. It is not used throughout the film, but comes in to heighten moments of drama and emotion. (I think the score might be the evidence that Ye Lou just happened to make a mumble-like movie by chance rather than by design. No mumblecore movie has a score nearly as traditional as this one. But that's a happy variation in this case, I think.)


My main problem with the film is something I'm rather embarrassed about. Through my non-Asian, Western eyes, the story is a bit hard to figure out as the two main women look a hell of a lot alike and play almost the same role (a woman whose husband is having an affair with Jiang Cheng). On top of this, the actors who play Wang Ping and Lou Haitao look somewhat alike (and also look a bit like another secondary character), making following the narrative a bit tricky. I do not mean to say "all Asians look alike," but these actors happen to look very similar. Considering I don't speak the language, it was a bit confusing (especially because the story has effectively two cycles and an AAB form, where the story repeats itself in the second act with different characters).


But I really do like this story structure and like it's mumbleness - how the three-ish acts really flow into one another and are not as clearly delineated as they would be in a traditional script. I like the gentleness of the film and how Ye Lou lets characters sit and gaze into the distance (into their deep thoughts) without interruption. This is not a fast-paced movie and I really like that. It's slow, steady and quiet with a very interesting and powerful message about love, relationships and sex.


Stars: 3 of 4

Eyes Wide Open (Saturday, February 20, 2010) (16)

Aaron, and Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem, walks to the door of his butcher shop. On it he removes a sign announcing his father's death. He goes into the shop, takes out the old meat in the freezers and begins to clean up and get back to work. He's a sad man, but it's not clear if this is because of the loss of his father, his sad life with a loving, but nagging wife and a bunch of kids who don't listen to him or some sort of midlife crisis.

After a few minutes a young man walks to the door and asks to use his phone. This is Ezri and he says he's studying at a Yeshiva nearby (Aaron tells him he thinks that particular one closed a year earlier). It seems Ezri has secrets and has come to this neighborhood to hide or get away from his past.

Aaron soon hires Ezri and puts him to work, showing him how to be a kosher butcher. Soon, young men from a Yeshiva come to tell Aaron that he has to fire Ezri because he's "unholy" and a "sinner". It seems that he was kicked out of his school for being gay and having sex. Over a period of time, the two men become very close and ultimately they have sex. For Aaron this is a revelation and brings untold amounts of joy into his life. The problem, of course, is that the Orthodox community he lives in (not to mention Aaron's wife) does not want Ezri around and Aaron is loathe to kick out his lover.

Like many recent Israeli films I've seen recently (My Father My Lord, Lebanon, Beaufort), this film is wonderfully simple and straightforward. Director Haim Tabakman does a beautiful job making very efficient and tight movies with some very powerful imagery. Here the story is very small and quiet. The story is not about the butcher coming out as a big flaming queen, but slowly falling in love with this interesting young man. The sex scenes between them are very short and gentle, but convey the point in a short time span (whereas most Western directors would probably hover over them in bed and make the scene more dirty).

I really like the use of color – or use of no color here. Clearly we associate Orthodox Jews with black and white, but the butcher shop is totally stark white and there’s a washed-out quality to everything we see. It makes you appreciate later when Aaron confesses to his rabbi that Ezri brought him back to life. There’s clearly a visual significance to this.

I think the script, by Merav Doster, has some problems in it, most notably how Ezri shows up out of nowhere and ultimately recedes back into nothingness rather all of a sudden (well, after he's beat up, but he seems to not fight back in a lame way). It was a bit too random and a bit too writerly for me. I like the humanity and naturalness of the story, but these parts felt a bit forced. I guess Aaron and Ezri were living an amazing dream and when physical violence came into their lives, they knew it was time to end it.

I'm very interested in how the Orthodox characters here are seen as very close-minded, clinical and unloving. There's a sense that Ezri is a rather "free spirit" and that he can be a good Jew and be gay. The community doesn't really know that anything has transpired between the two men, but just don't like Ezri because he's gay and seen as a sexual threat. In many ways these Orthodox people could stand in for any conservative religious group on the planet. Maybe this is a bit sweet and precious, but it works nicely here, I think.

Stars: 3 of 4