tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51284793133731998912024-03-14T17:40:42.404-04:00popsublimeAppreciations of art and popular culture (movies, music, books, theater) from long ago to now.Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.comBlogger101125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-81913667876220242902024-01-07T00:47:00.000-05:002024-01-07T00:47:27.741-05:00All of Us Strangers (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2023)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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Because I’ve already written at length here about my three favorite films of 2023 (<i>Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe</i>, <i>Scrapper</i>, and <i>The Unknown Country</i>), it makes sense to begin 2024 with a post about the film that I’d been anticipating the most this past year, but that I couldn’t see until it was released here in Boston in the new year at the end of the first week of January: Andrew Haigh’s latest gay cinematic exploration <i>All of Us Strangers</i>. While the movie wouldn’t quite have made my year-end Top 3 list anyway, I was still affected by the film, especially the earlier three-quarters of it. In loosely adapting his screenplay from the 1987 Japanese novel <i>Strangers</i> by the late Taichi Yamada, Haigh takes wide liberties to make the story serve his own narrative’s purposes. The result bends and expands conventional boundaries of gay-themed storytelling for the most part, a unique mixture of romantic fantasy and bleak realism that’s lingered with me even while not entirely convincing me of its aesthetic fortitude.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal star as two gay men living in a nearly abandoned high-rise tower block in London, and the two gradually become involved as they realize there’s not really anybody else around to lift their feelings of loneliness, a commentary both on contemporary urban malaise and the solitude of being a single gay man living in a sprawling cityscape. The movie’s tone and tactics operate on several levels as a form of magical realism; it’s a love story in which the passage of time slips backward and forward, as well as a ghost story in which the dead can fairly freely commingle with the living. The net of that device gets cast suddenly wider as the film moves toward its sad and gentle finale, after plumbing the depths of a serious childhood trauma that Andrew Scott’s character Adam, a writer who’s struggling to mine that exact material for a new screenplay, has endured for years but never fully outgrown.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Early in the movie, Haigh uses a clever device to draw us into Adam’s closer inspection of the tragic loss he faced at age 12. After he takes a train to the outskirts of London, a seeming cruising encounter on a suburban heath with a handsome man who beckons to him from the trees turns out soon after to be his own deceased father, at the same age as when he would have died, coaxing Adam through a kind of time portal to come back to his childhood home. Adam’s father and mother were lost in a fatal car accident, so he’s able through the intervention of these ghosts to re-examine his past wounds and converse with his parents about what his life has become since their death: as a creative artist and as a single gay man who at age 46 has just begun a tentative relationship with Paul Mescal’s younger and somewhat less conflicted character Harry. Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are excellent as Adam’s parents, stuck in time yet earnestly reaching across decades to try to comprehend how the world has changed since they exited it during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, in a time before being a gay man in the United Kingdom had become a more mainstream phenomenon.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Andrew Haigh orchestrates the maneuvers of his central ensemble quite admirably throughout, directing the film with a delicate grace that maintains just the right amount of distance, giving Andrew Scott especially the space that his carefully calibrated performance requires to go where it needs to go. Scott keeps us intimately by his side as audience members, with the camera often gazing closely at his face, which makes the more emotional scenes work overall. It’s worth pointing out that the “flashback” scenes between Adam and his parents were filmed in the same Croydon house that Andrew Haigh himself had grown up in, so there’s an authenticity to how the three characters begin to re-connect and discover their tensions, empathies, and occasional disconnections from one another. Throughout all of it, Adam is returning to Harry at their empty tower block in London, until a ketamine-fueled scene with the two together out at a nightclub goes careening off the rails due to Adam’s pain and grief over preparing to lose his parents for a second time, as the return-to-childhood fantasy proceeds toward its inevitable end and begins to overwhelm him, along with threatening his newfound relationship with Harry.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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It's an interesting experience, to say the least, to sit in a cinema and realize while looking at the people sitting around you that you’re the closest person in the audience to the film’s protagonist, and nearly an exact match for him: a writer, a gay man around 50 who came of age in the 1980s, and also one who hasn’t had a family at all since his teenage years. (I totally felt the precision of Haigh’s ’80s UK pop song choices for the movie’s soundtrack, from Fine Young Cannibals’ “Johnny Come Home” to Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind,” and especially The Housemartins’ “Build.”) Having been disowned at age 16 myself in part for being gay, I probably related a bit too closely to Adam’s predicament, even though his character’s loss happened in such a different way from my own. His disowning was accidental while mine was more intentional, though I think the effect is probably much the same. What does the idea of being disowned mean to most people, if they can even relate to it at all? It’s the experience of being cut adrift, which at once liberates you from the past while also binding you to it permanently since all of us must live connected somehow to ourselves as children and then as teenagers. Perhaps that’s one reason why I just sat there still and silent during the big emotional climax between Adam and his parents before their final departure, accompanied by scattered sniffles from around the audience. I’d already felt that myself long ago as a much younger person and had to steel myself against it back then, in order to survive what I’ve since survived.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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There’s a muted quality to many of the movie’s scenes that I think serves the actors more than it serves the narrative or the audience, and maybe that’s part of why the last quarter of the film underwhelmed me in its final act. Though it cohered overall, both with the earlier parts of the film and within the final stretch, I’m not certain if it really <i>aligned</i>. The alignment might be with the source material itself, with which I’m unfamiliar, and the film ultimately didn’t inspire me to familiarize myself more with the source material either. I also noticed how clearly the movie’s closing image, as the camera slowly ascends into the dark night sky far above Adam and Harry embracing each other in bed, gives a hard visual nod not only to the opening of the music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love,” the song selection that closes the movie, but also to the same final image in Gregg Araki’s 2005 film <i>Mysterious Skin</i>, in which two characters embrace and comfort each other alone together in the wake of re-connecting over their own deep and shared childhood traumas. Some viewers, of course, will find the ending somewhat bleak in our current era. (I’ve avoided tossing in the big spoiler.) I found it fitting, even if I wasn’t as markedly moved by it as I’d expected I would be.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-67757186771182259852023-11-01T12:53:00.007-04:002024-01-07T03:54:12.529-05:009th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 25th - 29th, 2023)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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The two films selected for the opening nights of this year’s GlobeDocs film festival could not have been programmed any better by the festival’s director Lisa Viola, and it’s rare that a couple of documentaries could be paired as well as these two films were. The festival hosted the world premiere of Isara Krieger’s excellent exploration of educational equity and opportunity, <i>The Highest Standard</i>, which takes an in-depth look at the daily struggles and lofty aspirations of a diverse group of 8<sup>th</sup> grade students at Beacon Academy here in Boston, all of whom are taking a year to prepare for applying to high-caliber, private preparatory high schools. The equally superb documentary <i>American Symphony</i>, in its New England premiere at the festival, covers a year or so in the life of the jazz/classical/R&B musician Jon Batiste, who was on the road to winning five Grammy Awards at the same time that his wife Suleika Jaouad was hospitalized to receive a bone marrow transplant and extensive treatments for cancer. The emotional wallop of watching both films back-to-back over two nights at Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline proved to be both intense and invigorating at once.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>The Highest Standard</i> is set mostly back in 2017 and focuses on three students in particular, Makai, Meleah, and Exavion, as they attend Beacon Academy day school and bounce between their school’s demands and support systems to their families’ ongoing tribulations and expectations. Given that their entire class of students is spirited and distinguished, I felt that these three individual students were well-selected by the filmmakers. Their stories complement each other and intertwine in deep and often surprising ways. We get glimpses early in the film of their “present day” statuses; Makai attended the post-screening Q&A and said that he was now ready to graduate as a Philosophy major at Tufts University (after having completed high school at St. George’s School in Rhode Island), for instance, while Meleah is an undecided major at Brown University and Exavion is attending a larger public university down south.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Meleah is an especially charming and lively subject throughout the film. She’s down-to-earth and honest about her reasons for being so interested in applying to attend Concord Academy back when she was finishing her middle school years. As someone who focuses on her academics and schoolwork (much to her father’s woe since he thinks it’s stressing her out too much), while still maintaining a social life and her offbeat sense of humor, she had a feeling that she would be teased or bullied if she had attended a public high school in Boston instead. It’s a special moment later in the documentary when her application to Concord Academy proves to be successful, and our glimpses into her life there as a resident assistant in her dorm later in the film are gratifying since we can see the maturity and sense of responsibility that she’s grown into, along with a clear upswing in her feeling of self-confidence, as well as her poise and direction.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Exavion (who goes by Zay once he starts high school) attended a private high school in New Hampshire, and he’s very open about the difficulties that he faced after the death of his grandmother, who champions his directions early in the film as the person who raised him as his guardian, due to his mother’s lengthy struggles with drug addiction. He’s also quite honest about the kinds of quietly racist attitudes that he encountered when he was attending high school in the countryside of New Hampshire, where he felt that white people on his campus were open to addressing racial issues but only in ways that suited or benefitted them. He emphasizes that really addressing the issues more openly at the school and dealing with the messy parts of what still makes something like race a mostly unaddressed issue at such a place needs to change now, so that the lives of all people on his high school’s campus could then be altered for the better.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Overall, however, all three students and their classmates at Beacon Academy are able to see how far they’ve come over time, and how much their lives were able to change in light of the many opportunities that were presented to them. We see them attending a museum field trip and analyzing paintings there side-by-side, and a whole world of ideas (in both the playful and serious senses of that phrase) just kind of opens up visibly for them right before our eyes on screen. Their teachers and administrators must also be commended for keeping them on a tight track to success since these particular students’ life circumstances often threw tremendous hurdles in their way. I was reminded a lot of the students whom I’ve advised and taught for nearly a decade now at UMass Boston, the vast majority of whom had graduated from Boston Public Schools and faced the same kinds of issues that students in <i>The Highest Standard</i> also faced themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I can imagine that those students might also aspire to the sort of widespread success and acclaim that musician Jon Batiste has now experienced. He’s been nominated for fourteen Grammy Awards and won five statuettes, and he’s performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the nightly bandstand on Stephen Colbert’s popular television talk show. His music is a strong yet delicate and frequently astounding fusion of sounds, bridging his New Orleans jazz roots to the worlds of pop and soul (on stage, he’s the lovechild of James Brown, Little Richard, and Janelle Monae in a way), alongside a slice of contemporary classical compositions. The close-up look at his artistry in Matthew Heineman’s intensive documentary examination <i>American Symphony</i> is a very unique treat, one that digs beneath the surface of a true artist’s technique, in order to unearth the source of both his aesthetics and his humanity.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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My favorite aspect of the documentary is just how real it gets at times. Batiste obviously gave very wide access to the cameras and Heineman’s crew. We have not only a front-row seat at his super-intimate wedding to his wife Suleika, but we also get to crawl right into bed beside him as he tosses and turns while speaking with his psychotherapist on the phone in their marathon remote therapy sessions. At one of his lowest points, he’s been awake for three days straight, deeply depressed about his wife’s physical condition in the midst of trying to prepare for his big Carnegie Hall show. Then right in the middle of that lifetime-highlight show, the electricity on stage goes out. To watch Batiste pause at his piano and plow right into the most incredible improvisational detour around that sudden and unexpected technological snafu is not only incredibly awe-inspiring, but it’s also a ground-level lesson about how we can face and overcome the most unanticipated types of adversity to transform them into being part of what drives our creativity.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I also enjoyed the more artful spins in Heineman’s film craft-wise, such as the framing that finds Batiste alone in natural settings. The movie opens in a freezing cold landscape of breath-clouds and marshes, which Batiste is traversing by himself with an instrument, an early potent metaphor for what he’ll be facing throughout the rest of the film. At the height of Suleika’s illness, we also see him wading out into the ocean when he’s at a stop on tour in Florida, wading out into the waves and crashing tides, again alone, to feel the force of nature push against him and sweep over his body. By the end of the documentary, I felt more respect for him as both a person and an artist than I’ve felt after watching any other documentary about a musical artist, perhaps, and that’s as someone who was mostly unfamiliar with Batiste’s music going into the documentary.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Batiste’s wife Suleika is nearly an equal focus in the movie, someone who’s not just there to cheer her husband on and bask in the Grammy-fueled glory of his musical adventures and successes, but also to closely collaborate with him as well, as a partner and as an artist herself. During her cancer treatments when her vision starts to blur, she turns from words and writing to paintings instead, creations that she shares with Batiste from her hospital bed, visual works from which he clearly draws inspiration and artistic fire when he’s working on his own musical compositions and interpretations. When Suleika is finally released from the hospital and is rolled along in her wheelchair, still in a very fragile state, down a hallway crowded with applauding hospital workers who let her cut a string draped across the exit doors to make her way back out into the world, it’s pretty much impossible for anybody watching the documentary not to be moved to tears.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Thanks to the awesome and generous staff at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, I was also fortunate that they let me just remain in my seat in Moviehouse 2 at the theatre to review Pedro Almodóvar’s bold new short film <i>Strange Way of Life</i>, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, which screened with his previous short film <i>The Human Voice</i>, starring Tilda Swinton. (Both short films feature stunning costumes since Yves Saint Laurent’s house of fashion funded the making of these short films.) I loved how unabashedly gay <i>Strange Way of Life</i> is because I still find in 2023 that gay cinema gets shunted off to the side and under-watched, especially if open physicality between male actors is involved. Let’s just be totally honest: the straight world simply does <i>not</i> get it most of the time, even when they think they do. But Pedro Almodóvar does entirely get it, and he lets Hawke and Pascal do ample work as a closeted western sheriff and his long-ago boyfriend, respectively, who weather a reunion night in bed together <i>and</i> a hardcore shoot-out (yes, the kind with guns). <i>The Human Voice</i>, as much as I adore Tilda Swinton, cohered a little bit less for me, more verve and style than substance, with Swinton swooping around swanky interiors swinging a shiny hatchet in the tizzy of a fraught monologue (inspired by Jean Cocteau and microtheatre) and the aftermath of a lost lover. I did appreciate the interview with Almodóvar that’s included with these shorts, in which he admits that while his fellow film directors feel that their future is in episodic television, he’ll just stick to making short films instead. I think that’s because he’s an actual artist and not just a commercial one. I could listen to (or read) him talking about absolutely anything. He’s that intelligent, and that unashamedly gay; it’s never a boring time with Pedro Almodóvar, and neither are these two distinctive shorts, which feel to me like a culmination and a distillation of his whole body of cinematic work at once.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-17668674728443885512023-09-24T16:50:00.028-04:002023-09-26T00:56:33.880-04:00Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (dir. Aitch Alberto, 2023)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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Over the past couple of weeks, I watched Aitch Alberto’s film <i>Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe</i> a total of six times in cinemas, and I cried my eyes out three of those times. Between viewings when I wasn’t watching the movie, I was thinking about the movie. The movie never left my mind, and my heart remained right in the zone of the movie, too. The movie showed at only one cinema here in Boston, at AMC Boston Common, so that’s where I saw all of my screenings except for one last Sunday, which I watched from way at the top of the balcony of the gorgeous Art Deco cinema up in Brattleboro, Vermont called the Latchis Theatre, where I thanked the manager through my tears after the movie for showing it on the big beautiful screen in the historic main moviehouse. And now, before I say what I have to say about the film (which is quite a lot), I’ll make one really big statement: for me this movie is even better than Ang Lee’s <i>Brokeback Mountain</i>, which is a movie that I still adore today, and as much as I totally and unendingly love Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in that film, the two young actors in this new movie, Max Pelayo (as Aristotle Mendoza) and Reese Gonzales (as Dante Quintana), give performances that are even deeper and more significant than those in <i>Brokeback Mountain</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The film is adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s popular and groundbreaking 2012 young adult novel of the same title, which I read several years ago at the online suggestion of the gay novelist Garth Greenwell, who really championed its importance. The movie’s screenwriter and director Aitch Alberto, a Latina transwoman, has perfectly distilled what’s necessary to retain from the novel on every single level and translated it to film exactly in all of the right ways, stylistically and otherwise, and I honestly don’t think that the book could have been adapted any better than it is in this film. Apparently, there’s a much longer director’s cut, and although I could feel a few of the missing parts that trimmed the movie down from nearly three hours to about 90 minutes, I still felt that it all fit together admirably despite the standard commercial compromises that producers and studios often force upon directors. Aitch Alberto’s director’s cut will make its way to us someday, I’m fairly certain of that. What’s clear is that this director poured her entire heart and soul into making this movie, and into walking the slim tightrope to craft it in ways that will not only move a wide array of audiences internationally for decades to come, but will also actually help to save and reconfigure the lives of young LGBTQ+ viewers. Yes, this movie is that important.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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At the film’s delicate center is Max Pelayo’s Ari Mendoza, a conflicted yet still hopeful young Mexican-American guy in high school in El Paso, Texas in 1987. He meets Reese Gonzales’ more outwardly cheerful and (semi) well-adjusted Dante Quintana that summer at a local swimming pool, where Dante teaches Ari how to swim since he’d never learned. The tenderness of those opening scenes, leading up to and including the film’s opening title card, could not be more flawlessly balanced and conceived. The year 1987 happens to be my favorite year in pop culture, and I was whisked right back to my own youth as a struggling soon-to-be-gay kid in Cincinnati, Ohio by the film’s details and specificities. All of this is done in a very gentle way, so that we’re immediately invested in the complicated interplay between these two characters. Pelayo and Gonzales expertly (especially as younger actors) set up their dichotomy, and what’s fascinating is how the relationship of the two boys in the film develops gradually and intimately but not necessarily along the definitive lines of sexuality itself, though that does eventually arise as the two boys come of age via a series of letters that they write back and forth to one another when Dante’s English professor father Sam (Kevin Alejandro, an adorable dad if ever there was one) takes his family away from El Paso to Chicago due to a university teaching gig for a year.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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By that point in the narrative, Ari and Dante have already cemented their intense friendship. Dante shares with Ari some poetry and art to try to open him up. Ari’s heart has mostly clamped shut because his parents’ hearts have also closed somewhat, for tragic reasons that are revealed to us later in the film regarding Ari’s older brother Bernardo, who’s in prison. I wish that the amazing Latinx cast of older actors who portray the parents and guardians of Ari and Dante, actors who are all so excellent in finely calibrated roles — from the wonderful Eva Longoria as Dante’s caring mom, to the remarkable Eugenio Derbez as Ari’s distant yet loving father, to the touching Valerie Falcón as Ari’s deeply supportive mother, to the luminous Marlene Forte as Ari’s doting lesbian aunt, Tia Ophelia — would receive the kind of attention they so fully deserve for their performances (such as a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble, to be honest).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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What’s subtle and tucked away in the corners of the film is equally as powerful as those actors who are front and center; for instance, the smartly timed reappearances of a pair of birds high above in flight that Dante remarks look “so free” when he first sees them overhead during a scene with Ari early in the movie. Several other intelligent stylistic details it took me all six viewings to finally notice, such as the subtlety with which some Christmastime scenes are framed. Unlike most mainstream movies that make a big to-do about Christmas scenes, mainly for releases later in the year, here we get only a brief “Merry Christmas” in a letter from Dante to Ari, along with a magical faint blue glow at the very edge of the screen during a scene inside Ari’s home, which I finally realized were Christmas tree lights around a silver (and intentionally slightly out-of-focus) ornament nestled in its branches. Some of the El Paso landscapes and multicolor sunsets were clearly influenced by Robby Müller’s seminal cinematography in Wim Wenders’ now-legendary 1984 film <i>Paris, Texas</i>, a great visual touchstone for Aitch Alberto and the talented cinematographer Akis Konstantakopoulos to refer back to.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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There’s also a short but pivotal scene in which Ari, who’s sixteen, finds a way to get himself a six-pack of beer by having an older guy buy it for him at a local convenience store. The older guy (precisely portrayed by Marcelo Olivas), who’s clearly gay and playfully says that he’s 45 when Ari asks, has a few moments of interaction with the teenager that reveal more about the deep complexities of intergenerational issues in the gay male community than just about any other scene that I’ve ever seen on screen. The important aspect is that this is accomplished in part through great acting and minimal dialogue, but it’s conveyed even more through mood, as well as through some small yet knowing glances and tiny gestures, something that felt vividly real to me (while bordering on a kind of magical realism) each time I watched that scene again. The subtle intensity of that brief exchange between the two characters captures something that many, many other films have tried to achieve before and never quite accomplished. This scene, in its backlit sense of mystery, as seen from Ari’s younger point-of-view, totally does.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Of course, since Ari and Dante are high schoolers, we get a good serving of nostalgic details that align with mid-’80s John Hughes classics: upturned shirt collars, constant teasing about who fits in and who doesn’t, neon-toned clothing and bangles, plus a beautiful Latina leather-clad goth girl temptress (Luna Blaise’s sweetly realized Elena Tellez) to lure Ari just a bit while Dante is away with his family in Chicago. I will mention only vaguely two more abrupt and violent scenes later in the film, on which the entire narrative depends, and on which its grounding in harsher realities and truths about our world firmly rests. We would not be able to arrive at the film’s cathartic conclusion in a desert landscape outside of Ari’s old 1957 pick-up truck without those more difficult scenes, so it’s important that audiences of all ages endure those two scenes, in order to understand their key purpose in the film.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I haven’t seen a more gorgeous or moving ending to any film in several years now. Though it’s culturally complex in a number of ways, I’ll try to explain why. After Ari kisses and briefly rejects Dante until a tragic turn sends him back into Dante’s hands, the two young men are then forced to confront what their relationship to one another actually is, and with the loving support of both of their families, what it might mean to their futures. Ari Mendoza is the film’s protagonist, tortured and shifting from his closeted adolescence into his more liberated adulthood. To hear him finally express, in so many words, that he was afraid of being gay himself (and therefore also afraid of Dante), and that he won’t be afraid to love Dante Quintana, is a transcendent moment that also cuts two ways, not because it isn’t earnest since it clearly is, but because I think, in the real world outside of transformational fiction, it’s probably incredibly rare, especially between two young men. I’d like to see a mainstream film in which the protagonist is the more openly gay and more outwardly effeminate Dante. Where is <i>his</i> story? And why is this essentially Ari’s story instead? I think it’s because the people who really need to see this film and benefit from watching it are the young guys like Ari all over in the greater world, though of course, they’ll be the ones least likely to watch it in a cinema. Every audience of the six I viewed the film with were nearly all teenage girls, or young women who’d recently been teenage girls when they’d read the book that the film was based on. The guys like Ari out there in the world may be more likely to find and watch the movie a bit more privately when it's streaming online, or at least that's my hope. Our world will change if they see this film and its core message reaches them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Masculinity and its inherent social expectations entrap both Ari and Dante, along with entrapping the other young men in the film. The movie’s open-hearted, climactic finale (as well as its cosmically beautiful denouement) gives a solid and loving push towards toppling those unfair, damaging, and compulsory gendered expectations. While I have no doubt that there are young gay male romantic couples out there like Ari and Dante, some of whom actually do commit to one another and make it happen together, I’m not convinced that it’s at all widespread amongst the gay male population, though I’d also like to believe that it’s more than just a mere fantasy. Those young men out there who do find any kind of love like Ari and Dante should count themselves very lucky.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-80125498911929121422023-09-03T11:27:00.017-04:002023-09-05T23:10:59.148-04:00The Unknown Country (dir. Morrisa Maltz, 2023)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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This past week, I drove north to Rockland, Maine, and then also took the ferry out to Provincetown on Cape Cod to watch Morrisa Maltz’s film <i>The Unknown Country</i> on the only two screens on which it was showing in all of New England. The film stars Lily Gladstone as Tana, a young Native American woman who, in the wake of her grandmother’s death, takes a long road trip to return to the reservation on which she grew up, from Minnesota to South Dakota, reconnecting with people and places from her past along the way. After finding a photo album of her late grandmother’s own road trip off the reservation when she was a young woman herself, Tana decides to trace her grandmother’s footsteps and visits the places in her photographs, extending her travels south to Dallas, Texas, and the desert wilderness in the surrounding landscape there. Not only is <i>The Unknown Country</i> my favorite film this year, but I think it’s also, after my two close viewings of the film, one of the most important movies to be released in the past decade.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Most of the figures whom Tana encounters on her picaresque journey aren’t actors but real people portraying themselves in the film, so it’s a smart fusion of fictional framework with a documentary heart. Tana attends the wedding of her cousin Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux to her husband Devin in a moving scene during which the couple exchange their heartfelt personal vows because of how their family had tried to keep the two of them apart when they were younger. Their solution was to “get pregnant” in order to have even more of a reason to stay together. Tana also crosses paths with a man who runs a motel, a woman who owns a local dancehall, and a group of like-minded young adults during a freewheeling night of fun out in the city. These side stories throughout the narrative become the film’s focus in the same way that Alma Har’el’s film <i>Bombay Beach</i> did with the longtime denizens who live around the Salton Sea in California. Through hearing about the lives of these diverse individuals, we’re given an authentic collective snapshot of America, our sprawling country that’s otherwise nearly impossible to succinctly summarize or explain to those from outside of our culture.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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That <i>The Unknown Country</i> is a Native American woman’s story goes a long way towards redeeming a particular strand of American life that often gets completely ignored. Lily Gladstone’s performance in the film is for me among the finest in cinematic history, to be honest. Her consummately expressive face gives her an ideal opportunity to show her complete emotional range throughout the movie’s 86 minutes. The power of her performance is the exact opposite of most powerhouse performances in that there’s no trumpeting of any kind, just pure raw honesty. Yet the film’s tactics and parameters are also poetic and elliptical. We’re not given details about Tana’s journey and her past in any outright ways, but rather through subtle implications and shadings of emotion. In two separate scenes, we can sense that something violent may have happened to Tana in her relationships with men, given her look of fear and potential panic when a few men linger near her in menacing ways during those two scenes. The film doesn’t rest on those moments, however, but rather incorporates them into the flow of the rest of the movie.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Accompanying Tana’s journey on the film’s soundtrack are stunning songs by Neil Halstead of the shoegaze band Slowdive, as well as intermittent radio broadcasts with carefully selected and edited commentaries from across the American divide on various talk shows. Through our hearing and being reminded of those divisions, the film builds deeper connections to the history of genocide of indigenous people in this country, the still-open wound that we should all be more aware of living with on a daily basis in our capitalist country that’s built entirely on stolen land. An older woman from Tana’s tribe tells her how the land itself will heal her, advice that echoes vastly across the film’s mesmerizing and engrossing landscapes, thanks to Andrew Hajek’s brilliant cinematography. We as a culture will never be able to move beyond that wound of our ignored, shared history unless we can fully acknowledge the effects of that violent past on our present and future lives. The current trend of making “land acknowledgments” is only the very tip of the iceberg in that regard.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The film excavates this most effectively through its main thematic focus on individual and communal grief, past and present. As Tana carries her grandmother’s memory across the countryside, we witness her grief up close, sometimes in quick downward glances, and at other times in fully exposed ways when she breaks down in tears in bed late one night. I think the film asks some important questions. What exactly is grief? How do we navigate it, both by ourselves and as a culture? What effect does grief have on us over time? Does it permanently change us? Many widescreen shots in the film show Tana threading her way through snow-covered fields and roadways in an older car that kind of resembles a white hearse, so in that sense, I felt like Lily Gladstone’s character is carrying the collective grief for all of us.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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When Tana visits her grandmother’s brother, Grandpa August (beautifully portrayed by Richard Ray Whitman), he gives her a small blue suitcase packed with some of her grandmother’s belongings, including a vintage white cotton dress with a simple print. At the film’s quietly climactic finale, Tana ascends to a windy mountaintop vista wearing that dress, recreating a photograph of her grandmother’s as she stood in the exact same place. That moment and image flawlessly open up the floodgates of the past, connecting Tana not only to her grandmother, but also to the deep well of time itself. She’s now the fountain through which that healing and empowering tributary can flow. <i>The Unknown Country</i> is that rarest of things: a perfect and seamless film.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-44081075356310954112023-08-13T01:47:00.014-04:002023-08-13T03:07:51.198-04:00A Brief Treatise on Moviegoing<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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I turn fifty-years-old next month, and one of the only places where I still feel comfortable in public anymore at this point in my life is in a cinema during the screening of a film. Preferably, the cinema is empty except for me. I want total silence, I want total darkness, and I want absolutely zero distractions. Fortunately, this does actually happen for me sometimes at cinemas in remote locations up in the awesome state of Maine, as it did just last weekend when I went to see a matinee of the new movie <i>Dreamin’ Wild</i>, a beautiful little film that I'm quite certain almost nobody else out there will see. The very next day at the same matinee showtime, I watched that same movie again at the exact same totally empty cinema, in order to experience that same feeling of solitude and isolation yet again as my mind unspooled into the anticipated parameters of the film, parameters that I already knew and remembered from just the day before.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The world is erratic and chaotic for someone whose neurological disposition, like mine, depends on clear-cut routines. That’s how I get through daily life. Movies at cinemas begin on schedule, and barring any unforeseen technical issues (which rarely ever arise these days with automated digital projection booths), they also end on schedule. What unfolds in between those bookends both suspends the chaos outside and also lifts me out of it. I can just relax, something I can’t do when I walk back outside the cinema’s doors. Other people in the general public today are just too unpredictable, too unreliable, and as mean as it may sound, too disappointing in my five decades on this planet.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I prefer to interact with other people through the things that they create. Moviegoing as an experience is an immersion in that relationship. Going to a concert or to a live theatrical performance is also great but never quite the same. I prefer to plane out the element of spontaneity. I want the mechanical exposition of the narrative, a worthwhile narrative, one that can deepen with repeated viewings and lodge itself deeper into me, and in a way that can’t be rewound or fast-forwarded through. I simply want to see what I’m seeing, feel what I’m feeling, think what I’m thinking, and then contemplate it critically alone in my own head afterwards.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Now let me take a kind of inverted but intentional detour. For the past thirty years, I’ve lived in and around the city of Boston. I’m gay, and during those three decades, I’ve had various kinds of physical encounters with about 2,000 other gay men (plus a handful of straight and bisexual ones, obviously), which equates to an average of roughly one guy per week. (If that sounds like a lot to you, then perhaps you can find some reassurance in knowing that it’s less than half of the number of such encounters experienced by the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas as he notes in his memoir <i>Before Night Falls</i>; furthermore, Arenas died of AIDS-related complications in New York City at the age of only 47, so his pace was way faster than mine.) Like the great gay Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, I now live with my vividly cinematic memories of those encounters since after age forty, it’s been mostly crickets for me in that regard, especially once those encounters ceased to be fulfilling for me because I felt like I was never being seen as a whole person by the guys with whom I met up.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Hence the unreliability and resulting disappointment in other people that I mentioned previously. I could go into the reasons why I think that’s the case (both for me and for the other gay men whom I’ve met), but I think I’ll just avoid psychologizing it and let it rest as a hard fact: the overwhelmingly vast majority of gay men don’t treat each other very well as a general rule (and why would we when society-at-large doesn’t treat us very well either?), and in many cases I’m certain that gay men don’t even care if other gay men whom they meet on the fly even survive or not. Hey, it’s a big world and a big ocean. One with lots of other fish swimming around in it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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So yeah, I’ll take my artful entertainment (at least when I get lucky by purchasing the right ticket at the box office) that begins on time, ends on time, keeps me company in between for about two hours in a comfortable air-conditioned space, and doesn’t make me feel the kinds of things about my own existence that I’d rather not feel. I’ll take a screen full of perfect male faces and bodies like those in Francis Ford Coppola’s <i>The Outsiders</i>, some cheap and finely positioned objects of beauty that I can admire and love, and not care that they won’t admire and love me back.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-24111874753572754622023-06-19T01:53:00.015-04:002023-06-20T00:43:19.229-04:0025th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 14th - 18th, 2023)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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I went into this year’s Provincetown International Film Festival looking forward to seeing one face in particular: Harris Dickinson’s in his latest movie <i>Scrapper</i>. I first saw him on screen at this same film festival several years ago in Eliza Hittman’s mesmerizing film <i>Beach Rats</i>, and I remain just as captivated by him now as I was then. No other actor of his generation possesses such an intense, seductive stare. As the character Jason in Charlotte Regan’s feature film debut <i>Scrapper</i>, a heartfelt if scrappy father-daughter reunion tale set in the UK, Harris is in a certain peroxide-blond mode inherited from Daniel Day Lewis’s Johnny in <i>My Beautiful Laundrette</i>, a punky streetwise British drifter on the boyish side of 30 in more ways than one. After ditching his fatherly responsibilities at age 18 to carouse around the European continent following the birth of his daughter Georgie (Lola Campbell, who’s pitch-perfect), he’s hesitantly beckoned to return home in the wake of her mother’s death. The film opens with 12-year-old Georgie fearlessly fending for herself in their council estate flat, with the help of a few friends and neighbors, until Jason turns up at her doorstep, not a re-appearance that she welcomes at first.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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It's interesting that <i>Scrapper</i> follows so closely on the heels of Charlotte Wells’ Oscar-nominated film <i>Aftersun</i>, a movie that I wasn’t particularly fond of, even if I understood all of the supposed reasons why many critics praised it. I didn’t buy the elliptical quality of <i>Aftersun</i> because it leaned too heavily on what remains unsaid and indeterminate, narratively. Art is often more valuable when it’s less impressionistic and more decisive, and <i>Scrapper</i> gradually and gently cracks open its deeper emotions by following that path instead. There’s still a lot of playfulness involved in how the otherwise irreverent and less-than-dependable Jason coaxes Georgie to warm up to him slowly after her initial blunt resistance to his presence. Many of the scenes in which the two dance or invent unusual little games for themselves seem partly improvised and are definitely intriguing to watch due to their sense of spontaneity. Because of the childlike ways in which he tries to teach himself how to care for his daughter, we’re willing to forgive Jason’s directionlessness (the two make money by stealing and hustling bicycles), at least until he temporarily knocks himself off-track again. When he discovers Georgie’s imaginary plan to construct and move to her own little tower made entirely from random pieces of salvaged scrap metal, he questions whether he’s equipped to have any place in her life. The scene that follows, in which Georgie listens to the voicemail that her mother had sent to Jason to convince him to return home and take care of his daughter, features the most moving and hardest-earned single tear that I’ve ever seen from a child actor.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Angus MacLachlan’s new film <i>A Little Prayer</i> is another movie that I was looking forward to in this year’s festival because <i>Junebug,</i> for which he wrote the screenplay, is still somewhere in my Top 20 movies of all time nearly two decades later. <i>A Little Prayer</i> is cut from a similar cloth, a family domestic drama that takes place mostly inside the household amongst the same southern milieu. The majority of the dramatic scenes, several of which are top-notch in every way, also focus on a father’s relationship with his daughter-in-law. One of them late in the film on a woodland bench mirrors a nearly identical scene near the end of <i>Junebug</i>, along with echoing the emotional scenes at the end of two of Kenneth Lonergan’s films, <i>You Can Count on Me</i> and <i>Manchester by the Sea</i>. When I asked Angus MacLachlan about it following the screening that I attended, he said, “I love being compared to Kenny Lonergan,” as well he should.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The father this time around is played by the great David Strathairn in a flawless turn as Bill, who’s forced through a series of revelations to scrutinize his family in ways that he wasn’t prepared to do, and much of the movie’s dramatic engine is powered by intergenerational conflicts, in the sense that the older generation doesn’t quite comprehend why the younger generation flounders as much as it does. Celia Weston as the hilariously quippy (verging on critical) matriarch Venida matches David Strathairn scene for scene, and it’s gratifying to watch these two actors work together that way at the very peak of their craft. The dialogue is often deceptively realistic; it seems simple but isn’t at all easy to write or capture as finely as MacLachlan does. After the film’s biggest plot twist is revealed, Bill asks Venida, “Am I just supposed to play dumb?” to which she replies without missing a beat, “Yes, you’re good at that.” He takes the opposite approach and watches the house of cards come tumbling down around him.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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It's hard to convey the rest of the plot without giving things away, so it’s probably best to say that opioid addiction and alcoholism both arise, as do marital infidelity and abortion. The younger actors navigate this little onslaught of issues expertly throughout the movie, especially Will Pullen as Bill’s son David, a military veteran who also works at his father’s place of business, and Jane Levy as Tammy, Will’s wife who’s stuck around for longer than she’d planned. Levy has a couple of extraordinary scenes that could do for her career what <i>Junebug</i> did for Amy Adams. A scene of Levy’s at a medical clinic is carefully filmed in a 360-degree close-up shot, so that we can witness her character experience an entire range of feelings in a single short monologue. And in her later scene with Bill on the woodland bench, her words “Nobody has ever paid as much attention to me as you,” delivered in such an unadorned manner, will linger for a very long time with anybody who hears them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>It's Only Life After All</i>, Alexandria Bombach’s documentary about the popular lesbian folk duo Indigo Girls, hits the requisite notes and runs out of fuel about halfway through the film, though I enjoyed the first half of it, having been a longtime fan of Indigo Girls’ songs over the years, especially those on their first four albums. More focus on the lyrical content and the albums themselves would have been nice, yet it’s clear why the documentary would swerve more into the lives and perspectives of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers instead. Following the pair from their initial friendship as schoolmates in Georgia to their current time-tested musical partnership, the film is most successful when it gives Ray and Saliers a chance to contextualize their music and explain what it arose from. An interviewer asks them in some vintage footage what they hope their audience will get out of their music. Amy replies, “Self-esteem,” while Emily responds, “Shared experience.” As reasons for creating any kind of music in the pop/rock realm, those are about as open-hearted as it gets.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I also appreciated how much LGBTQ-related material made it into the film. Ray and Saliers both movingly discuss the homophobia they faced while growing up in Georgia, and the ways in which internalized homophobia by extension affected each of them. I wasn’t formerly aware of John Blizzard, a gay man who’d helped jumpstart their career at his Little 5 Points pub in Atlanta before succumbing to AIDS in the 1990s. There’s also a biting and important segment of the documentary during which Amy and Emily take turns reading and mocking passages from a <i>New York Times</i> review of their music by rock critic Jon Pareles; they point out the various kinds of latent or blatant and long-standing sexism that often lurks behind the criticism lobbed at them. Regardless, I still spent a good part of the film singing along with my favorites from their catalog.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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A totally different brand of documentary that really blew me away was Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s <i>Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music</i>, a massive and totally meticulous undertaking that had the entire audience at Provincetown’s Town Hall on its feet by the finale of the movie. I first heard Taylor Mac perform in Provincetown about fifteen years ago as an act in Ryan Landry’s weekly <i>Showgirls</i> showcase, so seeing the documentary about Mac’s biggest concert undertaking really brought things full-circle for me. The film powerfully captures the communal experience of Mac’s 24-hour performance piece, which Mac performed only once in its entirety back in October of 2016 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The show features 239 songs spanning the 24 decades from 1776 to 2016 as a way to comment on the glittering Dumpster fire of United States history. That also makes the show nearly impossible to synopsize, which is clearly among its many intentions.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Mac mentions early in the film that the idea for the performance piece arose from the AIDS epidemic and the tragic amount of loss that it caused. In each successive hour of the show, one member of the company leaves the stage, and by the time Mac’s amazing costume designer Machine Dazzle departs late in the show, Mac remarks directly on the parallel to losing so many talented young gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic. All of the songs that Mac carefully researched and chose to incorporate in the show work to staggering effect, but the most memorable ones are those that lodge a potent message in an unexpected way, like Mac’s brave rendering and reclamation of Ted Nugent’s overtly effeminophobic lyrics in his song “Snakeskin Cowboys.” Audience involvement is key throughout the concert; for instance, at one point Mac instructs the audience members to find another concertgoer who shares their gender for a romantic slow-dance amongst strangers. The cumulative impact of these scenes is deeply moving because Mac demonstrates just how separate we’ve become from each other, while also providing a communal, artistic remedy for that widespread cultural problem.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Austin Bunn’s <i>Campfire</i> won this year’s festival award for Best Queer Short Film, an accolade that it totally deserves. I’m an admirer of Bunn’s two excellent previous shorts, important LGBTQ historical pieces titled <i>Lavender Hill</i> and <i>In the Hollow</i>, and his latest short film rounds out his trilogy with both strength and tenderness. The film takes place at Hillside Campgrounds in New Milford, Pennsylvania, which has provided a natural refuge for gay men since its founding in the mid-1980s. Bunn includes documentary interviews in which longtime campers mention how they could finally be themselves once they entered Hillside’s big green gates. That footage is supplemented by a fictionalized narrative about an outwardly straight middle-aged man named Carl (Mark Rowe), who visits Hillside in search of a man whom it’s suggested he was romantically or sexually involved with long ago, Marty (Carlos Cardona), a hot guy that appears in a series of hazy, sunlit, beautifully shot flashbacks.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>Campfire</i> is a fantasy tale on multiple levels. Not only is Carl hoping to find Marty again many years later; he’s also making something of an attempt to come out later in life, a change he resists in the course of the film and then opens up to more as he grows comfortable with the men at the campground, most of whom are nonchalantly cheerful bears who are undisturbed by his presence. I’ll leave the subplot with Marty unexplained for those who want to watch the short, and I’ll just say instead that the narrative culminates in an emotional resolution that I hadn’t been anticipating, one that reminded me of a Radical Faeries camp that I’ve visited several times up in Vermont over the years. During the festival this weekend, it was fun to catch up with Austin (whom I’d initially met in Provincetown back in 2015) and meet the actor who plays George in the short, George Hoxworth, an easygoing guy who welcomes Carl to the campground and sweetly urges him toward what he seems to be looking for.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I’ve always loved the photography of George Platt Lynes, whose work I first encountered just after I came out as gay at age 18. He’s best known for his classically inspired male nude portraiture, though he also worked in commercial fashion photography and was the principal photographer for the New York City Ballet for thirty years. <i>Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes</i>, a superb documentary directed by Sam Shahid, gives the artist long-overdue exposure through close examination of his life and work, a collection of photography that’s been somewhat neglected by art historians, in part due to the bold and unflinchingly sensual quality of his images, and also perhaps in part because of his own sexuality. His photographs seem born out of shamelessness, an early sense of pride, and a touch of youthful vanity, yet there’s also a consistent seriousness to George Platt Lynes’ photographs, which aspire to an aesthetic achievement beyond all of those qualities.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Platt Lynes and his ever-shifting body of male models formed a sexual identity-based community at a very specific point in gay history, prior to Stonewall and the gay liberation movement, a community that one historian in the film argues wasn’t really all that closeted for its time period, thereby debunking claims that gay men couldn’t be fully out in that earlier era as simply untrue. The years during which George Platt Lynes made his art in the 1930s and 1940s may have been less hospitable to gay men in a wider public sense, but in their semi-secluded circles, those men were able to socialize and meet friends and lovers in a way that was actually quite contemporary.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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George was involved in a longtime threesome with the writer Glenway Wescott and his partner Monroe Wheeler, the latter of whom George took very intimate and sometimes explicit photographs with, and then left them behind in an envelope marked “Private.” Platt Lynes was also linked to other well-known figures in his lifetime, including the famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and the Kinsey Institute houses a number of Platt Lynes’ photos. Despite his artistic successes, George Platt Lynes’ career gradually ended in a kind of slow-motion ruin that left him penniless and somewhat obscure by the time he died of cancer in 1955. His lack of more widespread and longterm acclaim is largely due to the cultural anxieties surrounding his unashamed images of male nudity, but this new documentary goes a long way towards attempting to revive George Platt Lynes and his photographs back into broader recognition and historical relevance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-784649717591339182023-05-20T19:17:00.010-04:002023-05-31T15:13:12.065-04:00Some Thoughts on Physical Media<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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Every so often I have a hard time thinking of something to write about on here, or deciding on a movie, album, book, or theatrical production to reflect back on. I’ve now written a little under a hundred posts, most of them longform, in a little over thirteen years. Not so prolific I suppose, even given that I’m being fairly selective about what I choose to spotlight on here. I hesitate at this point even to call it a blog. Is it a blog? Was it ever? Maybe we just have such wide and easy access now to so many movies, songs, books, and recorded performances that it just gets overwhelming trying to decide what’s worth paying attention to anymore. I feel like most of my life, or at least my aesthetic life, has been one long exercise in trying to turn down the volume of the white noise and static that contemporary culture continually generates, in order to find and focus on the stuff that’s worthwhile, or at least speaks to me in some way at that moment in time.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I think perhaps that task was more enjoyable or less annoying when physical media surrounded us because I spent hours browsing in record shops, video stores, bookstores, libraries, and sometimes I still do, though less frequently these days. Even though I’ve always loved being able to hold artifacts in my hands, they can get lost or broken, nicked or scratched, gather dust, get damaged by sunlight or water or other elements, in spite of being as careful as possible with anything I handle. Really think about the word “lossless.” Nothing is actually lossless. Whenever each of us eventually goes, it’s all permanently lost, at least to us. What will happen to the library of books and CDs and DVDs and memorabilia I’ve accumulated after I die? Will I be fortunate enough to have the foresight to donate it to a good library, where somebody can slap a plaque with my name on the door of a quiet little room in memory of me? Or if I die suddenly, will it all just end up in a Dumpster since I have no family to rescue the ephemera that I’ve collected? Will I be lucky to have someone to oversee my estate if anybody deems any of what I’ve written or gathered worthy of keeping? I’m a little stunned by the number of albums and books and posters and programs and concert tickets that I’ve had autographed and inscribed by various kinds of artists over my past three decades of living here in Boston, some of them quite famous, some of them mostly unknown. Several hundred of them at this point I’d estimate. Without physical media, which is clearly where things are now headed, you won’t have any of that.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 philosophical essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” kind of foresaw it all, of course: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Not unlike human beings, who can be “reproduced” in the biological sense but never replicated. I went down the long rabbit hole of somebody’s blog a few weeks back, a woman whose handsome young son had killed himself almost totally unexpectedly just before graduating from high school about fifteen years ago, whose bodily presence could never be replaced. She was clearly grappling with how to let go of him in post after post after post, and trying to rationalize his death intellectually, but it became increasingly clear that she couldn’t. By the time the French movie <i>The Artist</i> came out in 2011, she was posting photos of its charismatic leading man, Oscar winner Jean Dujardin, beside photos of her son to show the resemblance: the face of someone whom her son might have grown up to look like had he stayed alive. Bittersweet to read about but mostly quite sad.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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That which cannot be replaced. Earlier today I couldn’t find in my apartment (despite being as super-organized as I am) my copy of Peter Gabriel’s 2000 CD <i>OVO: The Millennium Show</i>. I wanted to listen to “Downside-Up,” a song on the album that features vocals by Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, and whose lyrics eerily seem to predict exactly what unfolded on September 11 a year later, when late capitalism came crashing to the ground. No matter that I couldn’t find the CD because I could simply listen to not just the album track on YouTube, but also watch a YouTube video of an excellent live performance of the song backed by an orchestra as it was recorded on Jools Holland’s TV show on the BBC back then. Shades of Jacques Derrida’s <i>Archive Fever</i>. Derrida long argued in his philosophical texts that everything and everyone leaves a trace, a riot of traces, so that from the very inception of human language and understanding, nothing ever truly gets entirely erased, not even in “the absence of a presence.” The older I get, the more I think our seeming immortality through the objects we create and acquire and possess only highlights our mortality and how easily we can and will disappear, except perhaps as echoes of energy, or maybe ideas if we’re lucky.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Walter Benjamin also gets a bit spiritual in his meditation on physical reproductions of artworks when he considers the importance of the original object’s “aura,” which he wonders whether could ever be carried forth in a reproduction. Film, of course, is the medium that challenges this notion because of the human capacity to see and remember. We replay scenes from films over and over again in our minds, and the most indelible or mysterious or methodical or meticulous ones get absorbed into the vast imaginative machinery of film history, endlessly replicated, imitated, re-imagined, defiled. Benjamin’s central point is that reproducible physical media led to “a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind,” a shift that also “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” Many people today still love attending cinemas, concerts, museums, and theatrical productions, just as I do, though the feeling of participating in a ritual has obviously become strained and diluted by commerce over time, and also by a slow death of community that’s (no surprise) coincided with the gradual demise of physical media. One might mention the resurgence in the popularity of vinyl records as CDs are currently on the wane, though I think that’s mostly a novelty or a fluke. I should have known and did sort of see the doom on the horizon when I overheard some crazy-eyed guy in the late ’90s blaring non-stop in an aisle of Tower Records in Harvard Square about how vinyl would make a real comeback someday…he just knew it! (Sure, revive the most easily scratchable medium that gets played with a <i>needle</i>. Crazy is as crazy does.) I also recall watching a documentary about Tower Records in which Elton John referred to the closure of Tower Records as one of the greatest tragedies of his life, from the point-of-view of a lover of music, not just as a musician himself.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The truth is probably that we’re just making marks in time, marks that fade with time, even if some of our individual marks take longer to fade than others. Echoes of old songs on radio stations, scenes from films that everybody knows or that hardly anybody on the planet has seen, poems etched in stone or jotted down hastily and stashed away in the back of a desk drawer. It might be closer to the truth of the mystery to think about the infinity of created things that never get found, never get heard, never get seen, except by their makers. On the flipside of the reassuring heft of physicality is an untraceable ghost.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-52046294533450511172023-03-11T18:00:00.003-05:002023-03-11T23:17:59.963-05:00Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loneliest Time (Interscope Records, 2022)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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When I saw Carly Rae Jepsen in concert here in Boston this past fall, it became obvious that her career has been kind of a barometer for mainstream pop and its public reception. Her fans often lament that her music isn’t more widely celebrated, yet she’s continued to swim soundly in the mainstream ever since her 2012 breakthrough single “Call Me Maybe,” which I first heard at a gay club downtown back when we all still stared up at the giant video screens on the walls, rather than down at the tiny screens in our hands. Carly Rae Jepsen’s gay following has a lot to do with her ongoing relevance since the gay men who love her songs are a diehard group, both the younger generation down on the floor by the stage at her concert, and the older guys who were dancing up in the balcony like I was. It’s no coincidence that her fellow Canadian crooner and gay icon Rufus Wainwright performs a duet with Jepsen on the disco-infused closing title track of her latest album <i>The Loneliest Time</i>, a title that’s an honest admission by Jepsen not only of heartbreak but also that the past three years weren’t easy for any of us globally, least of all touring pop musicians whose line of work got shut down perhaps the hardest.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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And so <i>The Loneliest Time</i> is also a return on several levels, including a return to celebrating music together in person around the world, and it’s Jepsen’s best collection of songs since 2015’s fantastic pop masterstroke <i>Emotion</i>. I still have <i>The Loneliest Time</i> on frequent rotation several months after its release, and the songs haven’t yet lost their appeal, probably because the sonic palette is more mature and diverse this time around, the musicianship solid and deeper, although about half of the album is as playful as one would expect. Having witnessed the kids belting along loudly in unison to songs like “Talking to Yourself” at her concert, a trend that’s gotten a bit overwhelming at other pop shows that I’ve attended recently (let’s all just let the singer sing, you guys), I’m sure that’s the upbeat strand of Jepsen’s catalog that most of her audience prefers.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Yet the cute guy dancing next to me and I agreed that the breezily percussive, semi-tropical “Western Wind,” co-written and produced by Rostam Batmanglij, was one of the best songs we heard that night, and it’s equally among the finest cuts on the album, the sort of jam that puts its listeners directly into a trance and doesn’t soon let go. “Joshua Tree,” with its vivid reminiscence of hanging out at night in the California desert with one’s friends decked out in glow-in-the-dark body paint, feels just as transporting. But Jepsen is just as adept at keeping things friendly and accessible in the way only she can, as on the song “So Nice,” which wisely benefits from the R&B-flavored backdrop of her supporting vocalists, who are also a key part of her songs on tour. Carly Rae knows how to make fun of herself in the right ways, too, as she details her history of beyond shifty boyfriends on “Beach House” and kisses off another one on the more contemplative “Go Find Yourself or Whatever.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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In fact, the entire album is a smart succession of modulations in tempo, from the uplifting opener “Surrender Your Heart” to more downbeat numbers like “Far Away,” “Sideways,” “Bends,” and my favorite, “Bad Thing Twice” (“You’re my little rock-skipper, skipper, skipper...”). Lyrically, Jepsen’s songs tend to stay consciously within certain bounds and thereby avoid overreaching. Taylor Swift’s <i>Midnights</i> is another album I’ve listened to often over the past few months, and while Swift is clearly a great songwriter and lyricist, she keeps herself visible in her lyrics in overarching ways that can feel at once like a little too much and also maybe not quite enough. Though plenty of gay men idolize Taylor Swift as well, I have a feeling that Carly Rae Jepsen’s very vocal gay fanbase is kind of championing her more classically pop-based approach in a way that makes me want to say to the younger gays down on the dancefloor: trust us. We raised you.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-36214837838235311542022-12-31T20:37:00.013-05:002023-01-03T18:21:39.758-05:00Three Favorite Films of 2022<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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As the first year when movies and moviegoers truly returned to cinemas in full force in the three years since the global pandemic began, 2022 made for an interesting and unusual year in film. Some releases had been delayed and pushed back for nearly that long, like Tom Cruise’s long-awaited <i>Top Gun: Maverick</i>, a decades-later sequel that’s mostly impressive as action movies go (or on the flipside, Michael Bay’s <i>Ambulance</i>, an almost comically breakneck action flick that fewer people saw but that I still enjoyed as an offbeat summer movie). And that seemed to be the trend this year from a business or industry perspective since 2022 felt slightly imbalanced in terms of what was on offer at the box office. The studios behind a hefty backlog of mainstream movies that waited out the lengthy period when seats at venues had remained emptier could finally capitalize on their products, alongside some smaller movies that were made during the pandemic and often had to leap over sizeable hurdles to accomplish the task. The mainstream offerings are rarely the movies that interest me most, however, and for the most part, my three favorite films of 2022 were no exception. I did watch each of them at least twice at the cinema, and in one case even multiple times, and I felt equally involved during every repeated viewing.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Max Walker-Silverman’s sublime lyric poem of a movie, <i>A Love Song</i>, was the film that moved me the most in 2022, so much that I watched it at three different cinemas three nights in a row. The film’s pitch-perfect lead actress, Dale Dickey, had received the Excellence in Acting award at the Provincetown International Film Festival back in June, and I attended her conversation on stage about her career while I was at the festival, though I hadn’t watched <i>A Love Song</i> there. I liked how relaxed and offhand she was with her answers, as someone who’s been a successful character actress in well-known films for many years now. Her leading role as modern-day nomad Faye is long overdue then, but what an ideal role it is, fully inhabited and imbued with the spirit of someone who’s experienced enough of the world to be slightly weary of it, yet who’s also managed to retain her sense of wonder in the face of loss.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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We’re never quite sure about why Faye ended up living in her camping trailer out in the desert wilds of Colorado at a peaceful lakeside location dotted with wildflowers (which often get their standalone still-shots at key points in the film). We simply see Faye flip open a calendar to a month and date sometime after March of 2020 and watch her write “TODAY,” resetting the present moment for herself in the wake of something that pushed her previous life off course, which happened to so many people throughout the pandemic. She has a tiny perch of a bookshelf with only two books on it: John James Audubon’s <i>Birds of America</i> for birdwatching and learning to identify birds by their calls, and a book on astronomy for stargazing and identifying the constellations. On my second viewing of the film, I noticed that the movie actually begins while the screen is still dark, when we hear the sound of a mourning dove cooing. That bird and its sound will play a pivotal role during the film’s quietly powerful climax with Faye alone on a windswept mountaintop at night later in the film, my favorite moment from any movie this year.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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We also learn that Faye is awaiting the arrival of Lito (beautifully portrayed by Native American actor Wes Studi), a long-ago friend of Faye’s from high school days, with whom she shares an unresolved attraction. A young girl and her band of brothers who live nearby stop by to ask if Faye can move her trailer so that they can unearth the body of their long-buried father from under the site, to which she kindly replies, “Someone’s expecting to find me at this one.” The gentle dance between Lito and Faye plays out in semi-silence and through songs, both songs that they perform and songs that they spin the radio dial to see what fate will play for them. To see how that relationship unfolds, you’ll just have to watch the movie to appreciate how delicately it’s handled. Some might compare <i>A Love Song</i> to recent Oscar-winner <i>Nomadland</i>, which shares a few elements of its storyline and a similar locale, but whereas <i>Nomadland</i> is drawn on a wide canvas, <i>A Love Song</i> draws its energy from intimacy and quietude, paying homage to the tiny yet universal details that rescue us from heartbreak and urge us to keep going.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Baz Luhrmann’s <i>Elvis</i> is a film that I was surprised to enjoy as much as I did. While I’m fine with all of Luhrmann’s previous movies, the flashiness of his style never quite drew me in entirely. <i>Elvis,</i> while also obviously flashy at times, operates on a different scale and in a different register, perhaps because it’s ultimately attuned just as much to its subject’s quietly tragic fall and early death, not simply to his turbulent but meteoric rise to pop stardom and worldwide fame. Austin Butler’s nuanced and tireless powerhouse performance remains my favorite performance of the year, and even if he doesn’t win an Oscar for it, I can’t imagine that the award should go to anybody else. His performance feels deep and transformational in a way that the central role in a biopic rarely ever can (notably, in a year that also saw the release of a worthwhile biopic of Whitney Houston, another top-selling popstar whose life ended tragically early). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Perhaps because Austin Butler’s face and voice were up until now less familiar to audiences overall, he was able to slip into Elvis Presley’s skin and persona more subtly. When we watch him perform the songs and recreate pivotal moments from Elvis’ career, he’s believable in ways that span generations. One friend of mine who saw the movie at the cinema said that everyone from her kids to her father enjoyed it, and she mentioned how rare it is to find a movie like that these days. Coincidentally, I watched the movie at one cinema with an older audience and at another cinema with a younger audience of mostly high school students, and both were equally and clearly under the considerable spell that the movie casts over its viewers, certainly in scenes where Elvis’ own audiences breached the standards of propriety in that era as the United States careened towards the civil rights movement.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Although the movie explores the biographical details of Elvis’ life, from his family’s conflicted ambitions for his career to his problematic business partnership with the shifty, self-christened “Colonel” Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks with relish in a performance that I admired more than other moviegoers in the United States did), the film’s real focus is on Elvis’ music and its popular appeal to the American public, over whom it washed like a tidal wave for two decades, winding through genres from rock & roll to blues to pop to country to gospel to film soundtracks. That broad cross-section of musical styles seemed intentional, and it’s one reason why Elvis became the template for later popular artists like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson, each of whom refused to be tied down to any single genre of music, bending the rules to defy those conventions. Several scenes depict how Elvis sparred with his handlers and often improvised on the spot to avoid being ensnared by giving his listenership exactly what Tom Parker thought they might want at every particular moment. The standout montage scene is the recreation of a major televised production that was supposed to be an innocuous Christmas special that found Elvis instead swerving to elevate it to an upper echelon that matched his talent.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Of course, the movie does eventually descend into Elvis’ struggles to hold onto his relationships with his wife Priscilla and his young daughter Lisa Marie, whom it became harder for Elvis to keep as the focus of his life when his worldwide fame (alongside various dangerous addictions) began to overwhelm his attentions, not to mention his mental and physical health. But by the time the forces around him try to help him rally to keep things together, it’s already too late and slipping out of his control. At those moments especially, Austin Butler’s performance seems to access a higher level of authenticity and veracity. Some have argued that at 30 he might have been too young an actor to play the role at Elvis’ later stage, but since Elvis’ career started in his teens and he died at 42, the casting feels smart and well-timed to me. As things stand, Butler totally owns the performance, and by the time we arrive at a clever diptych that segues from Butler’s recreation of a late televised performance of Elvis singing “Amazing Grace” back to Elvis’ original performance, the film’s magic has been fully consummated and the deal is sealed.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Finally, Halina Reijn’s <i>Bodies Bodies Bodies</i> surprised me by being the movie that made me laugh the hardest in 2022 both times I watched it at cinemas. At my first viewing, the audience was mostly a crowd of younger women who often laughed when they heard me laughing from the back row since many of the film’s cleverest moments spin along the generational lines of gender. My second viewing was with a group of college students from my university whom I took to see the movie the week before fall classes began, and they were just as into the film as the first crowd I saw it with. It’s a movie that’s been somewhat categorized as a horror film, though I think a spoof of a horror movie is about as close as it comes to fitting that description. For me, it’s actually a satire of a satire of Generation Z, who get colossally skewered by the intelligent screenplay and the actors who are all-in from start to finish, giving Gen Z the most precise X-ray of itself that it’s likely ever to receive.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>Bodies Bodies Bodies</i> (or <i>Bodies x 3</i> as I’ve come to call it) is set at a “hurricane party” poolside and then mostly inside a big country estate owned by the parents of one of its richest characters (memorably played by <i>Saturday Night Live</i>’s Pete Davidson, doing his goofy lost-boy thing at its best), a sprawling mansion that loses electricity in the storm for the greater portion of the film. With the exception of a ripped older guy portrayed by Lee Pace in a performance that should galvanize his career for a whole new generation of viewers (plus one other male character who wanders in briefly at the tail end of the film), the rest of the cast is totally female, and importantly so, given that the movie was written and directed by women and begins with a long lesbian make-out scene between the two lead characters (Amandla Stenberg as Sophie and Maria Bakalova as Bee), which intentionally recalls the notorious opening scene of Larry Clark’s <i>Kids</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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A lingering masculine face-off between the two male characters, though, is the fallout of the central game of the film’s title that’s also the movie’s initial gimmick, a bit of a red herring that’s meant to mislead the audience into miscategorizing the movie. It’s like a deadly version of hide-and-seek that’s supposed to end with a character pretending to be dead, but instead ends up with a character who’s actually dead. Far from a <i>Clue</i>-like whodunit, however, <i>Bodies x 3</i> uses that gimmick to spin out into a trenchant social commentary about how little its characters trust each other and why, in fact how much they actively dislike one another, even when pretending outwardly just seconds before that they do like each other. As the characters wander around the darkened house lit by their multi-colored glowstick necklaces and glowing cell phone screens, the scenario opens up the possibility for all of the characters to turn against each other, much to the delight of the audience. Some awesome lines arise from those circumstances, which touch on class status when an African-American character is told she’s not middle-class but upper middle-class because her parents are professors at a university. Her simple and hilarious retort: “It’s <i>public</i>.” Issues like gun control and police brutality also get thrown into the mix to great effect, delivered with the best comic-timing pause of the year (“You shot me! With a gun!”).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Like a wry Shakespearean drama, the bodies upon bodies do pile up on the set by the film’s end; their deaths are often brought about by the very breaking of the bonds of social trust that pitted the characters against each other. (Nobody who’s seen the film will soon forget Lee Pace’s tightly constructed and finely edited scene in the mansion’s gymnasium.) One character’s death that set everything into motion early on turns out to be the most pitifully tragic and also somehow the funniest, too, making a clear statement about how a generation that’s supposedly connected by technology also became treacherously disconnected from reality in the process. <i>Bodies Bodies Bodies</i>, like my other two favorite films of the year, recalls plenty of now-classic Hollywood movies in its structure, characters, and themes. I have a feeling that all three of these films will last and find their audiences for a very long time.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-73271387862816120872022-10-17T01:07:00.023-04:002022-10-19T07:13:36.504-04:008th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 12th - 16th, 2022)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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This year’s GlobeDocs Film Festival had me thinking in kind of opposite directions film by film. I think we’ve reached a tipping point in the culture where virtue signaling has begun to override worthwhile philosophical thought and artistry, though all of the documentaries that I watched in this year’s festival were well-made and enjoyable. What’s interesting is that documentaries are largely observational in their aims, and yet they’re also crafted, so we’re watching something that’s shaped to the political mindframe of the filmmakers, regardless of their intentions in terms of objectivity. As soon as one edits a piece of film, the narrative becomes creative and interpretive, which is where I’d like to see more rigor put back into place regarding how deeply a film is willing to dive into its own material to emerge with more demanding artifacts.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Ryan White’s <i>Good Night Oppy</i> is a good place to start since it was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin brand and bears all of the classic feel-good trademarks of his own movies. The documentary traces the 15-year journey of the Mars rover Opportunity, a robot that was designed to last only 90 days but just kept rolling along in the red dust of another planet, taking photographs, sending and receiving communications, and being cute enough to garner a faithful following on social media. (At one point we see the robot taking a photo and telling itself not to be afraid because “that’s just your shadow”). I mean, it’s hard to resist a film that starts off with the robot wandering around its long expedition on Mars to the tune of The B-52’s song “Roam.” Like the great animated movie <i>WALL•E</i>, <i>Good Night Oppy</i> anthropomorphizes its central figure as it goes about its daily and nightly business, which is why it ends up moving people. And that’s all very strategic on the part of NASA.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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While I don’t question the authenticity of their mission, my cynical side did begin to question a roomful of adults crying over a robot in the guise of teamwork. Try looking around at our current world and its actual problems. It’s an ongoing controversy whether NASA’s colossal expenditure of public money could be used to do something like feed people instead, especially in an inflation economy that’s now becoming unsustainable for most of us here on this planet. For me, this seems bound up with the fact that the general public can now be more easily moved by a robot than by other human beings, though maybe it’s just nice to be reminded what human compassion used to feel like, even if it’s only something people feel for a machine. The most important aspect of the documentary, potentially, is the way that it (somewhat tentatively) emphasizes how vastly alone human beings are in the universe, both individually and collectively. Yet while re-emphasizing that bleak reality, the film also tries to undercut it. Trust me, unless the zoo hypothesis is correct, we’re alone, and no social media campaign driven by public awareness of NASA’s rover missions on Mars (Perseverance is the next iteration of the robot after Opportunity conked out with the message, “My battery is low and my world is getting dark”) can really change that stark truth. Oppy’s final wake-up swan song, Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” contains some irony perhaps in the sense of how little we really see ourselves and our predicament. The human race won’t be escaping to Mars anytime soon, kids.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>All the Beauty and the Bloodshed</i>, directed by Laura Poitras, traces the activist mission of celebrated photographer Nan Goldin to take down the Sackler family for their role in the half-million deaths caused by the opioid crisis in this country via the pharmaceutical company that Richard Sackler funded and ran (Purdue Pharma, developer of OxyContin). About 15 years ago, I met a gay couple at a party who’d been photographed by Goldin together in their bathtub long ago, a photo that ended up being included in Goldin’s famous 1986 artist’s book <i>The Ballad of Sexual Dependency</i>. The seemingly accidental quality of her photographic work has made it legendary and deeply influential to the generation of artists since then. She’s an excellent and reliable guide throughout Poitras’ film, and nobody in the audience won’t be pleased to see the Sackler family get its comeuppance when a judge requires them to be present to hear painful and harrowing personal testimonies (if only via Zoom) from parents who’ve lost their offspring to opioid overdoses.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Because the Sackler family also donated millions of dollars to museums worldwide to have wings named after them, Goldin and the activist organization PAIN staged demonstrations and “die-ins” at museums and art spaces in major international cities. Goldin would cancel art exhibitions to protest the Sackler family’s involvement at an institution, so her activism sought to get those institutions to refuse funding from the Sackler family, with the ultimate aim of having their name removed from institutions all over the planet. That footage is carefully interwoven by Poitras with Goldin’s memories of her sister’s tragic death from suicide, a death that she interrogates her own parents’ role in bringing about. By the end, the film becomes a skillful meditation on the secrets we keep, with Goldin’s powerful claim that “the wrong things are kept private in this society.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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While I have total admiration for Goldin’s artistic and activist work, as well as her argument that “survival was an art” throughout her early years as a photographer in places like Cambridge, Provincetown, and New York, I found it a little hypocritical that she’s pictured smoking cigarettes throughout the film, including in indoor spaces with the activists from PAIN surrounding her during their filmed conversations. Perhaps tobacco companies simply aren’t within the scope of Goldin’s activist concerns, though to be honest, those companies have knowingly murdered far more many millions of people than the company that developed and pushed OxyContin on the populace. This culture seems to view cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse as “self-medication” or “comfort addictions” that the rest of us are just supposed to accept as our friends and family members succumb to those addictions and often become seriously ill over time and die from them. Sorry, but that also needs to be fucking challenged in this culture and other societies around the world. I’m not willing to overlook it, and the younger activists working with Goldin should have taken her to task rather than just sitting there breathing in second-hand smoke because it’s supposedly cool.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Ondi Timoner’s <i>Last Flight Home</i> is about as intimate as documentaries come. The film invites viewers into the final days in the life of her father, Eli Timoner, who ran an airline called Air Florida. He’s feisty right up until the very end of his life, a life that he chooses to end due to the pain of paralysis and old age. While getting a professional massage after work one day forty years before, the massage therapist cracked his neck, resulting in an accidental stroke. His life was never the same again, but it’s clear from his extended family who surround him by his deathbed that he remained loving and lucid for the rest of his days. A series of very sweet Zoom calls with his former employees demonstrates their clear devotion to him, even many years after Eli Timoner’s Air Florida airline company had ceased to exist.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The director’s close eye on the proceedings, while refreshingly candid, feels perhaps a bit too close at times, and I think the documentary may have benefited from some editorial objectivity to help distance it from the familial insularity. Yet we do get to know the various characters in the family quite well, especially Ondi’s sister and brother, who respond in nuanced ways to their father’s process of dying; her sister is a rabbi who approaches things cautiously and philosophically, whereas her brother mentions that he never cries except maybe once during a Pixar movie. (We do see him break down by the end of the film.) Eli remains at the movie’s center, appropriately, airing his views about the world at the time of the filming (he really hated Donald Trump), but mostly just being a steady beacon of love and compassion for his family members. It’s definitely one of the sweetest and most layered portraits of a family, and one taken from the inside, that I’ve ever seen on film.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I have quite fond memories of the much-loved, Emmy-winning PBS children’s television show <i>Reading Rainbow</i>, hosted by LeVar Burton. <i>Butterfly in the Sky</i>, a documentary directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, revived and deepened my interest in the show in a very moving way that I hadn’t really anticipated. We hear many interviews with the show’s creators, including the composer of its well-known and instantly recognizable synthesizer theme song (which was sung by Chaka Khan), who recreates the song in real time to demonstrate how exactly those nostalgic sounds were made. We also see the various “book review kids” all grown up and relishing their chance to relive their years as childhood public television stars. I was reminded, too, of the many celebrities who read books as part of the series: Angela Bassett, Matthew Broderick, Peter Falk, Whoopi Goldberg, James Earl Jones, and Regina King, among others. Even the early hip-hop trio Run-D.M.C. made an appearance rapping on the show to emphasize for kids the importance of reading. But my favorite moments in the documentary were the most surreal ones, like when we’re taken for the filming of one episode into a bat cave in Texas, the floor of which is covered in bat guano, in which carnivorous worms live, who devour to a tiny twist of skeletal bones any bat unlucky enough to fall down from the cave walls. The most powerful aspect of the documentary details just how many important themes <i>Reading Rainbow</i> touched upon, from slavery to gangs to incarceration to war to childbirth. Scenes from the episode about 9/11, with kids in a Manhattan school talking to LeVar Burton about finally being able to return to their school right near Ground Zero, moved me to tears.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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LeVar himself was clearly an inheritor to Mister Fred Rogers, who’s featured in the film talking with LeVar at one point. Burton was also obviously a forerunner in highlighting race issues in relation to children’s lives, and he insisted on crafting his own image from season to season, despite pressure from the producers to keep his look consistent. LeVar recalls how, as a black man, he’d always been made to feel that something about his presence wasn’t right, so he rightly demanded his autonomy with his own self-image throughout the show. He also spoke eloquently at hearings on public broadcasting when the show had to fight for continued federal funding. By the time the show finally went off the air in 2006, there were no funders left, and no merchandise to sell to viewers as with a show like <i>Sesame Street</i>. As one commentator says of how adults now feel about LeVar Burton while thinking back to when we all watched <i>Reading Rainbow</i> as kids, “We knew he loved us.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Another celebrity’s resurgence into public view is the focus of Kathlyn Horan’s documentary <i>The Return of Tanya Tucker</i>, a rousing look at the recent career revival of that particular country music legend, whose artistic trajectory got sidetracked as a result of an attempted shift from country to rock music. Fellow country musicians Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings enthusiastically helped to get Tucker’s superb 2019 comeback album <i>While I’m Livin’</i> recorded and produced, winning Tucker her first two Grammy Awards in the process, both for the album itself and also for her gorgeous song “Bring My Flowers Now.” Carlile says that she knew from Day One in the recording studio that Tucker’s Grammy Award wins would be coming. That’s some very long overdue recognition for an artist who signed a $1.6 million recording contract way back at age 16.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Despite some initial industry skepticism about Tucker’s renaissance after her long-ago crash and burn due to drug abuse and temporarily hitting the skids, Carlile gently encourages Tucker about just how great the songs and her singing are as they’re recording them in the studio, comparing Tucker’s project to Johnny Cash’s famed <i>American Recordings</i> from late in his life. Tucker’s realness is what makes the movie. Throughout the documentary, she’s open and honest about her anxieties, saying that all she ever wanted was simply to be a singing entertainer. She certainly proves her masterful command at that particular skill during a live concert toward the end of the film, as well as proving the timelessness of her own songs. Tucker owes Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings a lot for plucking her out of a potential early retirement, and she clearly knows that. Tucker glows with appreciation for Brandi’s championing of her music, and Brandi glows with appreciation for having the opportunity to champion her musical hero.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Finally, <i>Wildcat</i>, directed by Melissa Lesh and Trevor Beck Frost, takes us deep into the Amazonian rainforests of Peru, where we meet a young British veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Harry Turner, who’s struggling from PTSD and volunteers to raise a wild ocelot named Khan at a sanctuary for wild animals. Having witnessed children dying in Afghanistan haunts Harry and pushes him into ongoing bouts of depression, which his caring for Khan helps to lift him out of, until Khan gets shot in his front leg by a stationary gun placed in the jungle by hunters, resulting in a tearful and excruciating burial scene. Harry’s colleague and girlfriend, Samantha Zwicker, who founded and later expands the wildlife sanctuary in the rainforest, tries to steer Harry through his spells of suicidal depression as best she can, though it’s a challenge for her since she had also grown up with an alcoholic father whom she loved very much in spite of his own regular harrowing spells of darkness and addiction.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Fortunately, Harry has another chance to raise a second young ocelot, this time one who’s named Keanu. As we watch heavily tattooed, baby-faced Harry frolic with Keanu and guide the ocelot through life in the jungle, it becomes clear just how calming it is for Harry to be with this small creature, and how much love he feels for the animal. “He’s saving me,” Harry says, “and I’m saving him.” And yet he continues to struggle with his PTSD-based depression, cutting himself on his forearm and wrists at his lowest points. “I’m in the most beautiful place in the world, and I can’t be fucking happy,” he laments painfully. Even though his relationship with Samantha doesn’t last, his work with Keanu at the animal rescue facility in Peru clearly prepared him to re-enter society by the time 18 months had passed and Keanu was ready to be released into the wild. Harry returns home to his family in England, and later heads overseas again to do more volunteer service with animals in Ecuador. He also goes a little overboard, perhaps, when getting dotted ocelot stripes tattooed right down the middle of his back, his tribute to the little animal that rescued him and brought him back to life.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-64599751816922985592022-09-25T16:50:00.019-04:002022-09-25T22:58:28.032-04:00David Blair, True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021 (MadHat Press, 2022)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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Somebody (Williams Carlos Williams? Billy Collins? who even knows at this point) once said that a poem is a contraption that’s designed to produce the same emotional response in any reader. In the twenty-five years that I’ve known the poet David Blair (we taught together at a college in Boston for a little over half of that time), his poems have always swerved well out of the way of such a tidy and self-assured description. In large part that swerving, not unlike the filmmaker David Lynch’s, seeks to find new and heretofore undiscovered pathways for human logic, embodying (though his poems’ bodies are more fluid than our limited understandings of bodies usually are) a kind of presence of attention that invites every aspect of the poet’s wide-ranging interests into his poems, including every kind of reader, potentially. Neruda (or a character based on him in a biopic) democratically remarked that all one needs to understand poetry is a nature open enough to understanding it. Indeed. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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And so to counteract these poems’ effects, I will take a more strictly logical approach to writing this review. I’ll comment on my thirteen favorite poems in the book in some depth, in the order in which they appear in his excellent and consummate new collection, <i>True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>Thirteen Ways of Looking at David Blair</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Sonnet for Robert Reich”: Here in Boston and its surrounding suburbs, where David Blair and I have both lived for nearly three decades now, people know this dude, Robert Reich, a politician and thinker who remains lucid and outspoken on political issues, in spite of his not winning his run for governor of Massachusetts a number of years ago. Anybody should be so lucky to have an artist like David Blair take such an omniscient portrait of you: “Mr. Peanut on his cane, tilting his urbane body skull / at all the ungovernableness.” And because Mr. Reich is small in stature, despite his admirably capacious and judicious mind, Blair encourages all of us to “lift him up in a light / that melts stubborn icicles,” perhaps the best metaphor around for Reich’s opponents, the Republicans. I think Reich would be happy to read this sonnet, and hopefully he will someday, if he hasn’t already.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Sound Solution (‘<i>Die Spinnerin’</i>)”: Because “a young person around me with a jetpack” is probably a great analogy for parenting (I don’t know for certain since I don’t have any kids of my own). Then we get a trio of things that only Blair would know how to hinge together, with slight nods to James Tate and John Ashbery before him: “I missed my ping-pong paddle, all of my hair, / and the entire cut of the record. Rueful.” This is what I meant before by “presence of attention.” Blair’s strategy is not pure surrealism. Look at how tangibly rudimentary that little sequence of objects is, and yet as pure surrealism aims to do, Blair’s goal I think is perhaps to evoke specific maybe unknown feelings through his unique combinations of language and imagery. His poems decidedly do not go where others’ poems go.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Election of the Saints”: By choice as a pacifist anarchist, I have never registered to vote and never will, a truth that I recently revealed to David Blair in an email, and it’s possible that he may never forgive me for it or see me the same way again. Yet “Election of the Saints” I’d say captures why I refuse to vote quite well, and gives an imagistic sort of exit from the problem by its deft close. The poem begins, “Traveling through the landscape / of election signs, / did you ask, <i>Who is he?</i> / and <i>Who is he?</i> / and <i>Who is he?</i> of names / held aloft at intersections / on fresh pine stakes / in yards?” We never really know who politicians are. History will also treat them as merely names (ask any student in any kind of history class about that), unless they happened to get shot (I think we know that by now). And then the poem pivots so intelligently into our predicament: “When you tell / me how your mother ran / out of gas on purpose, / so the two of you would / walk along the lavender / medians and across/ the margins of pine / along the road.” Politics ran out of gas on purpose long ago. This country has run out of gas. So Blair concludes, “I imagine / loving a person in his faults / or hers: allowing the car / to run out of gas, gladly, / to stop driving and walk.” What other choice do we have? That’s where we are now.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Vinyl Raingear”: This one you just kind of have to read. It’s an awesome description of Cambridge near where we live at entirely its own pace. It’s a weird and special place. I hate it and love it equally every day. And I hate it and love it intensely. David’s poem captures the people there (in motion through rainswept wind verging on winter), who are both gross and gorgeous. (Usually more gross, but hey, that’s me.) “In the middle there is light-splashed tang / of the street with the bus not there yet.” Yeah, after thirty fucking years, I get really tired of waiting for it, too. But at least we have the light, while it lasts.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“At Park Street Station”: I was actually there just yesterday, on my way to the cinema as usual. Park Street Station is the hub of our transportation system in Boston. In fact, it’s why Boston is often referred to as “the Hub,” and you might already know that that station has the oldest stretch of streetcar tracks in the United States: “the subway on one level, / slim streetcars up here, // walls, ceilings, tunnels / sprayed with fire repellant, // against fire, but not mud, / catacombs, a Venetian future.” Is that global warming, since the ocean is just a few blocks away across the financial district? Will our subway tracks soon be submerged in canals? Probably. Blair’s ironic closing stance is both cheerful and not. “Isn’t it romantic, / and won’t it be? // Yes, and yes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Primitive”: Here’s another one that you’d just have to read rather than watch me quoting every word. Our mutual friend, the poet Tanya Larkin, makes an appearance here, in her grandfather’s yard in (I think) New Jersey, and a little shrine he built there “around his Virgin Mary statue, / lawnchairs pointed at it, a stone in each chair.” Walt Whitman swims in from Camden like a great gray ghost, too, “like a long-horned sheep in a meadow / wedged as a paper stopper for elderberry wine,” that very vinegary elderberry wine that Oscar Wilde himself once drank.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Mothership Prose”: The college where David and Tanya and I all taught together is gone now. It got closed down, basically, because it was a for-profit school run by well-paid big-wigs who ran the school like a car dealership. (Google <i>New England Institute of Art</i> and <i>Department of Justice</i> if you’re curious, but why would you be?) David opens the poem by asking, “Where is the boss? Maybe Vermont.” Those of us teaching couldn’t really afford to go there, or not for very long. “As for the boss under that boss, I give up on Fridays in July.” Don’t we all. Then we get spoiled by Blair luxuriating us out of all that mess, via a cruise ship journey through “depopulated summer” in an education mecca like Boston: “I am about to step into the golden assistance of late afternoon where the bicycles with training wheels and lacrosse sticks will be out on quiet streets.” The streets of our city in the wavering heat of July, an escape from “these tubes of fluorescent light” overhead inside the cool of air conditioning and office cubicles and menace.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“The Adorable Couple”: Now give me a dialogue-based scene, with half of it in ALL CAPS. As a gay man, I kind of hate heterosexual romance, but guess what, you have to deal regardless, and so I learned to love it anyway from John Hughes’ movies in the 1980s. I still love those films and the characters. These are not those characters. A music therapist who works in palliative care and a hospice physician. Clearly, they were meant for each other, as they shout across the din in some local dive bar. Good luck to them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Doris Duke in Newport”: Have you ever been to Newport, Rhode Island? I’ve been there once, maybe twice. Once for the famous folk festival there, and maybe once because I was dating some guy. I didn’t do the walk along the ocean by the mansions (“the big Bellevue eyesores,” which only David Blair would think to call them) because I can’t stand ocean-walk shit like that. It’s all over New England and you just can’t avoid it, so you start to hate it after a while. Yet David finds an estate that’s a true winner: “at Rough Point, mansion / museum of Doris Duke, / keeper of pet camels, / friend of Martha Graham, / Malcolm Forbes, / jazz musicians, / Imelda Marcos.” And of course David goes from that particular shoehorned historical figure to “the footbridge… / down at the front of her mansion’s / seaside backyard / for the Cliff Walk, / you see a cave full of ocean.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Vagrant Song—Boston Players”: Now we’re downtown, on Boylston Street in Boston, beside the entrance to the Lord & Taylor department store where “the modern wing of the library had driven aground / its white hull into pedestrian space,” along the roadways and sidewalks spread out far below “the Morse code of the antennae / on top of the buildings,” “basic and beautiful buildings.” Boston is provincial in the best sense of the word, and therefore, it’s both basic and beautiful. A vagrant’s song, of course, disturbs the proceedings, or augments them, outside of the 7-11 by Symphony Hall. The orchestra’s players go out with a splash: “Backstage, oboists were cranking / salsa and hip-hop, playing grab-ass, snapping jocks and ties.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Beach Blanket”: All the random things we do while sea level continues to rise by gradual increments: “shell beans,” “drink gimlets,” “slice tomatoes,” “pull weeds,” venture to outer space. “That way, we not only prepare for global catastrophe but can get over shocking boredom.” Ha. Isn’t it always so.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“Sonnet, Viking Funeral for a Workweek”: Shove it the fuck off, for real: “After work, I put my foot on the edge of the weekdays / and give them a shove back out into the harbor.” I mean, you have to remember where we worked. We basically taught ourselves to death, so each weekend was like a funeral, a funeral for us. “I salute you as you disappear, lazy porpoises, dear students, / with all of your pigtails, your tattooed faces, your sloppy hearts.” It’s a poem about not death but love. And survival.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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“The Armies of Being Here”: Finally, a poem in which the legendary gay matinee idol and movie star Montgomery Clift teaches with us, the “half-employed” (oh, were we ever). We deserve that kind of dignity. So did Monty. Thank you, David.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-33982958209316655062022-06-20T01:30:00.017-04:002022-06-26T01:46:36.301-04:0024th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 15th - 19th, 2022)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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As the world gradually rebounds to a state of relative normalcy in the wake of the global pandemic, the wonderful annual film festival in Provincetown began to do the same this past week, after holding virtual and hybrid festivals over the past two years. For this year’s festival, full slates of narrative features, documentary screenings, and short film programs were hosted in person at venues all across the town, with audiences and filmmakers enthusiastically attending events throughout the five days of the festival. I was excited to see many familiar faces around P’town and also meet some new ones, and the movies that I saw were excellent as always, with top-notch programming that consistently makes the Provincetown International Film Festival one of the very best fests of its kind in the world. As I did with last year’s festival, I’m focusing my post about this year’s fest on the gay-themed movies that I enjoyed seeing the most over these past several days, full of superb writing and performances, and even some fun surprises.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The film that affected me the most at this year’s festival, Bretten Hannam’s <i>Wildhood</i>, is a movie that I missed during the Wicked Queer film festival in Boston back in the spring, so I was grateful to have a chance to watch the film in Provincetown. A winning, picaresque road buddy movie set along the east coast of Canada, the film follows an entertaining trio of young upstarts: sweet but troubled peroxide blond Link (Philip Lewitski), his feisty tag-along younger half-brother Travis (Avery Winters-Anthony), and an alluring drifter named Pasmay (Joshua Odjick), who introduces some gay and two-spirit vibes that he senses are running not too far beneath the surface for Link as well. The young men are Mi’kmaq, though Pasmay is more familiar with the indigenous tribal customs, so he begins to teach Link a bit of their native language and some pow wow dances. Link’s the darker personality of these central figures, and he’s also the one who recently fled with Travis from their abusive father, after Link discovered that their father had cruelly lied to him for years by telling him that his mother had died, when in fact she’d run away from their family.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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On the young men’s journey from Cape Breton across the wilds of eastern Canada to find Link’s estranged mother Sarah (Savonna Spracklin), they’re informed by a mystical drag queen in a gay bar that Sarah now lives in her birthplace, an indigenous Nova Scotia community called Blanket Hill. Pasmay and Link gradually grow closer and form a tight bond as they travel onward, a relationship that’s consummated in a beautifully filmed, evocative nighttime sex scene under a waterfall. Of course, that sounds like a typical cinematic approach to youthful physical exploration, but the film and the actors bravely and sensitively elevate it to a totally different level. Hannam’s direction also makes some distinctive visual nods to previous gay classics, such as a scene when the three young guys run to bathe in a lake that recalls the mood of a very similar scenario in <i>The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert</i>, as well as a scene in which Link takes a shower and the water slowly streams from his hair, a mirror image of an identical moment for the central character in Gus Van Sant’s under-appreciated 2007 gay skater drama <i>Paranoid Park</i>. (There’s also a cool echo of Ryan Gosling’s little-seen directorial debut <i>Lost River</i> early in <i>Wildhood</i> when Link and Travis abscond with some copper pipes from an abandoned building site and get chased down afterwards, just as the cute protagonist of Gosling’s movie does.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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When <i>Wildhood</i> shifted into its gently moving final act, I wasn’t at all prepared to be as emotionally blindsided by the movie’s gentle, remarkable resolution as I was. Mother/son reunions are certainly not new to cinema or coming-of-age narratives in general, but how <i>Wildhood</i> handles that particular subject is such a refreshing departure, one that’s totally subdued and undramatic, which only further deepens the emotional impact of the film’s finale and its closing scenes. As we learn during the young men’s journey to locate Sarah, she’d long ago struggled with addiction issues and a feeling that she didn’t belong in her community, both reasons for her estrangement from her son Link. His sudden reappearance in her life, which she welcomes in a naturally understated manner while the two gather herbs and wildflowers together in the forest, brought to mind my own long-ago memories of my mother, whom I haven’t seen at all for over 30 years now. By the time the end credits had finished rolling, I was still sitting stunned in my seat unable to stop crying. When the auditorium was empty and the lights came on, I finally forced myself to stand up and made my way to the exit door. Outside, a woman who’d been in the theater watching the same film saw me wiping away tears as they streamed down my face and asked me very kindly if she could give me a hug. That sort of uncontrollable crying had only happened to me past the end credits of one other movie, Jonathan Demme’s <i>Philadelphia</i>, when I watched it at the cinema with my then-boyfriend way back in December of 1993.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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My favorite surprise of the festival was attending a secret screening, the first time that it’s ever been done at the fest to my knowledge. I was thrilled to find out that I’d even correctly predicted which movie it would be: the great gay French director François Ozon’s latest film <i>Peter von Kant</i>, and this screening was actually the North American premiere, too. Ozon’s prolific cinematic output falls fairly neatly and evenly into two sets of styles. About half of his films are dramas exploring themes of sexuality and gender, and the other half are campy comedies that examine similar subjects in a lighter manner. <i>Peter von Kant</i>, Ozon’s free-wheeling adaptation of legendary gay German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film <i>The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant</i>, combines aspects of both of Ozon’s styles, though its dramatic elements are often so melodramatically over the top that it’s easier to categorize the film as one of his campy movies, and I’m happy to say that it’s also among the best of his campier films.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The movie is anchored by a magnetic and progressively unhinged performance by Denis Ménochet as Peter von Kant, an intense and semi-tortured film director and stand-in for Fassbinder himself. Ozon’s take on the original film is a masculine riff on themes of artistry and creativity as they relate to other forms of love and obsession. The object of Peter von Kant’s obsession throughout the movie (and his own movie within Ozon’s movie) is Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), a beguiling young aspiring actor who’s cunningly delivered to Peter by his former muse, an iconic actress and singer named Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani, irresistibly vamping it up); she's since moved on to her more illustrious, if artistically stalled career in Hollywood movies. Working away silently like clockwork at Peter’s every whim is his seemingly faithful assistant of three years, a slim wisp of a man named Karl (a hilarious and poignant Stefan Crepon). We as the audience are always aware just from his eyes that Karl knows everything about Peter’s unhealthy habits, despite that Karl doesn’t speak a single word of dialogue in the film, a wondrous aspect of Crepon’s portrayal of the character. Karl does, however, get to have the last word of sorts in the movie’s devastating penultimate scene.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Most of the barebones storyline traces how irreversibly, and how foolishly far, Peter falls for Amir, transforming his apartment into a shrine to Amir’s perfectly fit image, alongside the requisite queer iconography of St. Sebastian. Sidonie, of course, knew exactly how seriously Peter’s fixation on Amir would derail him, her way not only of turning Amir into a movie star through the vehicle of Peter’s films, but also a way to get her own kind of revenge for Peter’s ultimately condescending view of her. Peter’s unwavering and reckless passion for Amir is a standard plot device in gay cinema, to be sure, yet what marks Ozon’s film as truly special is the sharp and whipsmart screenwriting throughout nearly the entire film. The dialogue is far more clever and intricate than it seems on the surface, mainly because Ozon is mining many decades of gay male cultural tropes and their cinematic corollaries at once, a tightrope walk from which his footing rarely ever slips. Again, I think it’s one of the finest of his campier scripts, one in which he keeps winking playfully at the viewer because he knows that most of us are in on the joke. The film works, therefore, both as entertainment and as an artistic document of cultural value.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Craig Boreham’s <i>Lonesome</i> is a pensive and involving Australian film about a massively hot itinerant hustler named Casey, memorably played by gay actor Josh Lavery in a frequently unclothed and potentially star-making performance. (His Instagram handle, I feel compelled to report, is @twinkindecline.) After sleeping rough and roaming his way towards the urban metropolis of Sydney because he claims that he’s never seen the ocean, Casey’s able to wander into crowded late-night house parties to find some food and charge his phone. Gay dating apps like Grindr lead him to hookups and eventually to a steady boyfriend, Tib (Daniel Gabriel), whom he ends up living with for a slightly longer-term timeframe, at least by Casey’s less-than-commonplace standards.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Because both men are young, hot-headed, and horny, their idyllic situation doesn’t last for too long, yet Casey is earnestly attempting to find an authentic sense of peace and stability for himself. The character feels like a realistic creation, in spite of his omnipresent Joe Buck ornament, a ten-gallon cowboy hat, which lends him some credibility, as well as some cool shade from the blazing Australian sunshine. And even though Josh Lavery’s sweetness, tempered by some casual raunchiness, remains alluring throughout the duration of the movie, it never fully kicks into the higher gear of a riveting emotional performance like Félix Maritaud’s in the frenetic 2018 gay French hustler drama <i>Sauvage</i>. Lavery endows Casey with a tone that’s steady, nonchalant, and downbeat, perhaps somewhat too taciturn at times or maybe even too easygoing at others. He's both attractive and laidback enough to get away with that type of distant stance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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As bad luck would have it, Casey’s predicament turns more desperate as he’s left dangling in the winds of the circumstances that had initially set him adrift. Earlier in the film, he reveals to Tib that he’d been involved with a married closeted guy back in his small rural hometown, a situation that had unraveled and gotten unfairly blamed on Casey, tragically culminating in the married man’s death in a car accident. After Casey and Tib part ways abruptly due to a threesome hookup gone very wrong, the film’s storyline also turns swiftly in more uncomfortable directions as Casey again retreats to sleeping out on the streets. Provincetown audiences are almost always well-prepared for anything, and in the movie’s hardcore final stretch, including a difficult-to-watch BDSM sequence, I was reminded of when I first saw Gregg Araki’s masterpiece <i>Mysterious Skin</i> in this same film festival over 15 years ago now. Some in the audience couldn’t quite handle where that movie fearlessly went, but <i>Lonesome</i> seemed easier for the diverse audience to handle since the actors never fully ramped up the energy in the same way, as effectively filmed as <i>Lonesome</i>’s particularly graphic sequence is. Without giving away too many concluding details, let’s just say that the movie offers Casey a hopeful and redemptive finale, although one that leans a bit too neatly on wish fulfillment to provide a sudden and easy denouement.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The documentary that I’d most anticipated seeing in the festival was <i>All Man: The International Male Story</i>, directed by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed. The infamous <i>International Male</i> fashion catalog is otherwise known as an underwear magazine that launched a gazillion gay identities for guys who were going through their boyhood and adolescence back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I was one of the lucky recipients of the catalog in those days, and I never even understood how I’d started receiving it. (I have a feeling it was my teenage subscription to the cinema magazine <i>Premiere</i> that set the ball in motion.) As commentators from Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears to comedian Drew Droege vividly recall in the documentary, the images of the gym-bodied, underwear-clad models were the bridge to gayness for many young American men.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Anybody who’s ever seen the magazine knows that the fashion it showcased was mostly terrible, including pirate-style puffy shirts and bizarre dalmatian-print pajamas, so obviously all that really mattered about the publication were the reliable images of tan, ripped guys in their skivvies. The documentary covers the standard bullet points, from the business background of the diverse crew of gay men and straight women who founded and ran the catalog, to the culturally rich intersections of gay and straight masculinity, to how gay liberation had a harder time reaching very far inland from the American coasts in those years. Gay male employees who answered the phones to take orders recall how many of the calls were from gay and bisexual men who were seeking not just to buy some clothing but to make some kind of connection with someone because they lived in places too far away from the action. Several employees also recall how the AIDS epidemic ravaged the business and even the very office of the California-based company that they worked for, while also realizing that the catalog’s fashion spreads offered a kind of parallel world of fantasy where illness and the widespread loss of gay and bisexual men’s lives couldn’t disturb the picture of perfection.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Overall, the commentaries of the catalog’s models were most interesting and revealing because they were the ones whose carefully sculpted physiques were actually selling the clothes and the image of a certain kind of lifestyle that they represented. The documentary includes candid interviews with ubiquitous superstar models like Tony Ward and Brian Buzzini, who still remain handsome and recognizable today, as well as equally appealing models like David Knight, who’s gay himself and claims that he was one of only two gay <i>International Male</i> models he’d met in a sea of chiseled straight guys. It’s refreshing that they all approach their iconic status back in those days with a down-to-earth sense of humor, a levity that they also brought to their photo shoots given the ridiculousness of most of the clothes they had to model. As fate would have it, the <i>International Male</i> catalog was eventually bought out by big capitalism for $25 million by the Hanover mail-order conglomerate at the height of its public notoriety, and then it gradually sputtered out of relevance soon thereafter.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I was also very glad to watch some short film programs during the festival, the most interesting of which was a collection of experimental shorts called <i>Dreamscapes</i>. I was especially psyched to see Jonathan Caouette’s elliptical and quasi-political new short film <i>The Blazing</i> (because I totally loved his previous groundbreaking full-length documentary <i>Tarnation</i> back in 2003), as well as Cam Archer’s imaginative, self-reflective, and offhand personal meditation <i>His Image</i> (since I loved his 2006 feature film <i>Wild Tigers I Have Known</i>). Both of their short films are fine demonstrations of the slippery process of image-making, evoking the sometimes daunting task of capturing moving images in their transitory act of shifting and evaporating, thereby shaping montages within the context of our current world of sensory overload. (Plus, Caouette’s short includes some sonic collaborations by Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins and the great gay musician John Grant, so that alone made Caouette's new short film worth watching.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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One true highlight of the festival for me was the chance to talk with energetic young artists and filmmakers at the various parties around town throughout the week. During Saturday’s press luncheon I had a fun conversation with the talented actor Antonio Marziale, who recently starred in the 2018 Netflix film <i>Alex Strangelove</i>, just a day after I’d watched his edgy new gay short film <i>Starfuckers</i>, which he also wrote and directed. His daring short shows a ton of promise by crafting an atmospheric Hollywood revenge tale that’s both innovative and distinctively rendered in a poetically compressed timeframe. Later at the filmmaker party on Saturday night, I also enjoyed talking with Fredgy Noël about her new short documentary <i>The House of Labeija</i>, which re-contextualizes some key members of that legendary drag-ball house, first introduced to the world in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 classic documentary <i>Paris Is Burning</i>. I’d been teaching my students in my summer course about Crystal Labeija, the house’s founder, only a week ago, so I look forward to seeing Fredgy’s short when it begins streaming at noon today on the festival’s website for viewers anywhere in the world to watch.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">
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Provincetown has always been and still remains today a collectivity of inspired and spirited misfits, coming together at the edge of the world to advance our creativity and create social and artistic change. As a longtime resident of Boston, I’ve been a regular year-round visitor to Provincetown for nearly three decades now, and I’ve been attending and reviewing the annual film festival for almost two of those decades. (The festival will soon be celebrating its 25<sup>th</sup> year in 2023.) Witnessing the collaboration of everyone who organizes such a fantastic film festival every year has provided me with many real lessons in community-building, and what a unique community of people it continues to be. As this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge honoree Luca Guadagnino hilariously summed it up during his conversation with John Waters at Sunday’s awards ceremony, “The only two people here who aren’t perverted are you and me, John.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-20660656297170082472022-03-12T22:20:00.014-05:002022-04-10T01:45:48.771-04:00Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (dir. Brent Wilson, 2021)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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Although I was born just a decade after the release of The Beach Boys’ 1962 debut album <i>Surfin’ Safari</i>, their music always felt to me kind of like the playfully distant past, steeped as it is in a carefully cultivated sense of pop nostalgia. Nevertheless, the legendary story and career of Brian Wilson still retain a certain allure for me, and it’s clear why so many other longtime listeners are equally drawn in by his continued trajectory through pop music history. Brent Wilson’s recent documentary <i>Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road </i>presents perhaps the most personal view of Brian Wilson’s contributions to that history, a truly close-up portrait in terms of artistry, musicianship, and emotion, along with insightful analysis and commentary from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Don Was, Linda Perry, Jakob Dylan, and even Nick Jonas (whose own career was launched, just like Wilson’s, in a popular band with his two brothers). The result is a film that’s intimate, moving, and at times heartbreaking in its exploration of Wilson’s art and world.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Brian Wilson’s guide and sidekick throughout the documentary is <i>Rolling Stone</i> writer and editor Jason Fine, whose easygoing and gently calibrated interviewing style helps to relax Wilson’s nerves and allay his anxieties about participating in the film, a very particular sort of skill that Fine has developed since Brian Wilson has been his “beat” at <i>Rolling Stone</i> since 1995. The majority of the documentary shows the two hanging out over a series of interview lunches at the Beverly Glen Deli, and mostly just driving around the streets of Los Angeles with a dashboard camera to revisit key landmarks from Wilson’s past, while talking and listening to music together. The ultimate impression those conversations leave is that Wilson must be among the sweetest musicians on the planet, one whose persona and disposition have been characteristically misunderstood by some throughout his time in the music industry, while also being unrelentingly championed by others who could see and understand the full picture. In examining both Wilson’s music and prominent factors from his upbringing and family, <i>Long Promised Road</i> travels some significant mileage to provide many important details and subtly fill in those gaps.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The aspect of Wilson’s experience that moved me most is just how much he’s survived, and how much loss he’s faced. His brothers Dennis and Carl (his closest Beach Boys bandmates, alongside band members Al Jardine and Mike Love) had both died at relatively early ages, dual tragedies that still register painfully in his eyes when Fine asks about his brothers. Wilson remarks that he wants to hear Dennis’ only solo album released during his lifetime, 1977’s celebrated <i>Pacific Ocean Blue</i>, when they get back to his house because he says that he’s never listened to it before at all, astoundingly, perhaps a willful avoidance of the memories it might dredge up. He sits back and listens intently and excitedly, clearly impressed with the songs as Fine streams them for him on a laptop. Based on Fine’s praise, I went back after watching the film and listened to Dennis’ “River Song,” the album’s opening track, and it’s indeed a fantastic creation that obviously owes a debt to Brian Wilson’s orchestrations of The Beach Boys’ classics in the studio years before.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Similarly, the film’s commentaries by fellow musicians gave me a whole new appreciation for Brian Wilson’s craftsmanship on some of the best songs from The Beach Boys’ catalog: “Good Vibrations” (which I previously had no idea was recorded at <i>four</i> different studios from verse to chorus to verse, but I can definitely hear that element in the song now), “California Girls,” “Long Promised Road,” the endlessly haunting “In My Room,” “Sail On Sailor,” and especially the seminal numbers from 1966’s <i>Pet Sounds</i> like “God Only Knows,” which famed music producer Don Was breaks down into separate vocal and instrumental tracks to demonstrate how ingeniously they’re layered. Bruce Springsteen speaks precisely about how the songs gave Wilson access to “the joyfulness of an emotional life,” which he could then share with listeners. The great singer-songwriter and producer Linda Perry perceptively notes how Brian Wilson’s competitive spirit has kept him in the game all the way up to the present moment, a competition not just with The Beatles’ album <i>Rubber Soul</i>, but mainly with himself. She comments that when she watches Wilson perform today, she sees not age but “fucking history, and continuing to make history.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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That thought returns to the notion of survival. Wilson and Fine openly address Wilson’s history of mental illness and his eventual diagnosis with schizoaffective disorder. Wilson mentions that from his youth onward, he would hear voices in his head taunting him and criticizing him, which seems linked to how his father, who’d managed The Beach Boys early on in their career, would verbally abuse him and often took things too far. For a sensitive artist like Wilson, it’s as though his mind became entrenched in a form of post-traumatic stress in the wake of that intense early criticism that he’d internalized. Wilson was fortunate to meet and marry his second wife Melinda just as his mental health was hitting its lowest point, a relationship that’s consummately recreated by actors John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks in the 2014 Wilson biopic <i>Love & Mercy</i>. Melinda has remained a steadfast partner and loving guardian to Wilson ever since, and the couple have adopted and raised several children together. As Elton John remarks, Wilson deserves as much praise for the integrity of his personal life as he’s received for the brilliance of his music.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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After I watched the documentary, I noticed how many film critics online mentioned in their reviews that they found Wilson’s seeming lack of responsiveness to Fine’s interview questions to be “frustrating” because Wilson often simply states (and re-states) plain facts rather than rationalizing. Yet that seems to miss the point of Fine’s intentionally delicate, intuitive approach to interviewing Wilson, an approach that wisely takes the issue of neurodiversity into account. I’d suggest that the important part isn’t just documenting <i>what</i> Wilson says when he responds during interviews with Fine, but rather showing <i>how</i> exactly Wilson responds. For instance, there’s a stunning moment when Fine tells Wilson that Jack Rieley, who’d managed The Beach Boys at one point and also helped to produce their 1973 album <i>Holland</i>, had recently died. Wilson lets it sink in, says he wasn’t aware, asks how Rieley died, and stares ahead blankly. Then we realize that he’s quickly wiping away tears. A minute or two later, he says to Fine that it broke his heart to learn of Jack Rieley’s death, and it’s clear that Wilson is someone whose mind just processes emotions differently, and therefore causes him to express his emotions differently. Earlier in the film, he also tells Fine that it’s been three years since he’s had a friend simply to sit and talk with, and then we know where the profound solitude, insularity, and loneliness at the heart of a song like “In My Room” arises from. I think it’s something that every wonderful musician who still performs with Brian Wilson on stage today seems perfectly aware of, and it’s something that the audiences who enthusiastically embrace his live performances at his concerts know as well. They’re amazed and grateful that he’s still here to create and perform for us despite the difficulties, and Brian Wilson is just as amazed and appreciative that he’s made it through everything, too.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-33792179848604179112022-01-01T00:30:00.013-05:002022-01-10T02:19:01.957-05:00Three Favorite Films of 2021<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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With the pandemic continuing throughout 2021, it was another highly unusual year for cinema, as movie theaters here in New England faced lengthy (and often quite sudden) shutdowns and hesitant re-openings as public health parameters shifted locally and globally. Some cinemas and theater chains didn’t survive those changes and the subsequent loss of film audiences when more people retreated to streaming films online at home. Somehow, I was able to keep myself going to see movies in person at cinemas throughout nearly the entire year, though the rollout of worthwhile new films was slow and halting, as film companies carefully measured and re-calibrated what might be worth releasing and when. Release schedules continued to get jostled around as film releases were postponed and timed for when they might get the best kind of audience response at the box office. Therefore, as with my year-end post for 2020, just three movies lingered with me most throughout 2021, and in each case, I was drawn to them as much for their subtle emotional pull as for their narrative and visual craft. I felt like these movies spoke to my own levels of sadness at the ongoing state of the world and offered some consolation and distant yet intimate company via their artistry.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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It’s fitting that Heidi Ewing’s moving and relatively little-seen gay Mexican immigrant romantic saga <i>I Carry You with Me</i> was my favorite movie in a year when Jane Campion’s much-lauded, quasi-gay Western tragic epic <i>The Power of the Dog</i> could win Best Picture (and Best Director) at the Oscars. While Campion’s novel-like film is certainly finely made, intricately deployed, and superbly acted, its mystifying effect on the mostly straight audience that I saw it with seemed to be its intended goal, whereas a gay male viewer like me could easily see the planted curveballs coming. <i>I Carry You with Me</i> has fewer tricks up its sleeve, perhaps because it wears its heart more openly there, which isn’t to say that it’s a simple story, nor one that’s simply conceived. Based on the actual relationship of two of Ewing’s gay friends, Iván (Armando Espitia) and Gerardo (Christian Vásquez), a chef and a teacher, respectively, the film follows the two young men from their initial meeting at a club in Puebla, Mexico in the ’80s through their struggles to immigrate to New York City, to nearly the present day and their celebration of their time together running a restaurant there. I was engrossed in their story and right with them every step of the way, and the immigration scenes especially were some of most powerful I’ve seen on film. Their romance is equally well-developed and sincere, at a time when more movies still need that sort of earnest depiction of gay male characters.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Drama and hardship aren’t left out of the picture, of course, since Iván is a closeted and married father of a young son when he and Gerardo first meet, and both face intense and overt familial homophobia during their youth and upbringings. Machismo and the masculine pressure to conform in erasing any form of effeminacy in boys runs rampant throughout the culture, one in which fathers like Gerardo’s and Iván’s are pressured to punish and cruelly abandon their own young sons for the boys’ inability to meet their society’s unfair masculine standards. For that reason, it’s also quite uplifting and reaffirming to watch a gay film in which the characters can all transcend those hardships and eventually overcome their obstacles to actualize their dreams. The moment when Iván’s chance at fulfilling his ambitions finally arrives by happenstance in the kitchen of a Manhattan restaurant was perhaps the most moved I felt at the cinema this past year.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The best innovation of the movie is the twist in its latter half, when we meet the characters in their older incarnations; rather than using actors, all of the characters are simply portrayed at that point in the film by the real-life people themselves. It’s the perfect way for Ewing to balance the often dreamlike tone of the film’s first half and to allow these two men to claim their own story, as well as giving the audience a true opportunity to get to know them. (Also, it makes sense that the director would shift into documentary mode since her best-known previous films were documentaries.) Despite the acclaim that <i>I Carry You with Me</i> received at the Sundance Film Festival and at a few other awards ceremonies, it’s dispiriting that the movie earned under $200,000 at the box office upon its official mid-year release, which had been delayed by several months. Cinemas across much of the country were still just beginning to open up again at that point, and audiences were still somewhat wary of going to see movies in person at a movie theater, so clearly those factors were part of why few people have found the film. In an ideal world that would surely not be the case because this is an artfully rendered and deeply human movie that deserves to be widely seen.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Robin Wright’s <i>Land</i>, her feature directorial debut, was actually one of the first films that I saw at a cinema up in Maine in 2021, way back in late February, just after a shutdown of several months had closed the cinemas there. I didn’t expect to be as emotionally affected by the movie as I was, probably due to a combination of the film’s subject matter, the circumstances in which I watched it by myself in the back row of an almost empty theater, and mainly seeing it at the time when I did, during the first winter of isolation and solitude at the worst point in the pandemic. Just as central to the movie’s power is Wright’s enduring performance as Edee, full of soul and gravity, which lasts for the entire length of the film. Even more impressive, perhaps, is how nearly all of the movie takes place at a single location, inside and around a small cabin high up in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming (though the actual filming location was in Alberta, Canada).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Edee has retreated there from city life, determined to live in the mountains alone on her own terms, in spite of the difficult conditions and warnings from a local man who drives her up the mountain and hesitantly drops her off. Much to its advantage, the film doesn’t reveal the reason why Edee has fled her former life until almost the end of the film; she only mentions that she didn’t want to be around any other people. She experiences some peace in autumn and tries to grow more accustomed to living on the land. As the season turns brutal and her winter alone on the mountain takes serious hold, however, her situation indeed disintegrates rapidly from grim to desperate to catastrophic. On some level, we know that her plan for this to happen was semi-intentional, that she in fact no longer wanted to be alive, and yet she’s able to force herself to continue to survive by focusing on thoughts of her sister Emma, to whom she speaks early in the movie before going permanently off the grid.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Her character comes quite close to meeting a painfully gruesome and untimely end, and then she’s saved by a shy and kind-hearted local hunter named Miguel (played by the extraordinary Mexican actor Demián Bichir) and his caring but skeptical friend Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge), who’s a nurse in a nearby town. After Edee’s health gradually returns, Edee and Miguel become friendly over time and begin to open up to one another, with all the right notes of chemistry and trust between the actors, until Miguel eventually disappears from Edee’s life without notice or explanation. She soon persuades herself to try to track him down, once she’s feeling fortified enough to interact with other human beings again and face civilization. I typically resist movies that seem to pile on the heaviness, but where the film went next in briefly re-connecting Edee with Miguel made perfect sense to me, again an absolute testament to the strength of the acting. By the end, the movie becomes a study in grief and how we navigate it, share it, help each other survive it, and then if we’re lucky, how we attempt to emerge from the shadow of it and move on. Although the source of Edee’s grief is far more tragic than anything that I’ve ever lived through, I related instantly and intuitively to her feeling of being unable to persist anymore, and I felt inspired by how she finds a sense of resolve through her friendship with Miguel to gently push herself forward. Not many films have made me cry twice, but <i>Land</i> was one of them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>The Green Knight</i>, based on the medieval English narrative poem about young Sir Gawain, is the latest film that I’ve loved by David Lowery, who’s among the best American filmmakers working today. As with his previous films <i>A Ghost Story</i> and <i>The Old Man & the Gun</i>, Lowery again constructs a picaresque adventure tale in a way that’s never really been presented before, handling the inherent slipperiness of time and the scope of humanity in relation to it with both inventiveness and a relaxed sensibility that embraces subtlety and abstraction. His relationship to the original tale of Sir Gawain is grounded enough for all the signposts of the legendary Arthurian romance to remain recognizable, yet he reimagines and expands on plenty of the details to place his own cinematic mark on the text. The casting of Dev Patel as Sir Gawain, certainly, puts a significant contemporary spin on Gawain’s journey to find the Green Chapel where the treelike and thick-trunked Green Knight (resonantly voiced by Ralph Ineson) lushly resides, after Gawain swiftly beheaded him as a challenge during a dinnertime tale-telling at his uncle King Arthur’s Christmas feast. The deal is that the Green Knight will then return the blow and strike Sir Gawain’s neck to behead him in exchange exactly one year later.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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From the importance of honor to the enduring power of nature, the various literary meanings and interpretations linger as echoes throughout the movie, while Sir Gawain’s own legend spreads throughout the land and he becomes a kind of medieval celebrity whose quirky, youthful abandon makes him crush-worthy and enviable. Puppet shows pop up in towns across the countryside, where children crowd in to watch playful re-enactments of the Green Knight’s beheading and foreshadow the one that’s predicted to befall Sir Gawain in return. Along his winding quest to find the Green Chapel, Gawain encounters a skeleton at the crossroads swaying in a rusty iron cage, a band of punky thieves and swindlers who plunder his goods and leave him for dead, an ominous talking fox as his somewhat faithful guide and sidekick, naked giants who roam silently across the land, and a Gothic castle with a Lord (Joel Edgerton) and Lady (Alicia Vikander) who share a seductive interest in Sir Gawain that’s both platonic and sexual, prompting a rather special appearance of Gawain’s magical green cloth belt that gives him his trademark brand of mojo throughout the film. Vikander appears in two roles in the movie: as the mysterious Lady who heightens Sir Gawain’s erotic experiences on a new and more electric level, while having also portrayed his peasant lover Essel earlier in the film.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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The style of the movie reminded me more authentically of the totally awesome ’80s adventure tales like <i>Labyrinth</i> and <i>The Dark Crystal</i> than any other movie I’ve seen since then, though scores of other films have attempted to approximate that winning formula and fallen short of achieving it. (Lowery has also professed to being a major fan of Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy epic <i>Willow</i>.) But the detail-rich imagery and mesmerizing auras that Lowery evokes throughout <i>The Green Knight</i> are far more ambitious and maturely realized than any of its well-meaning predecessors. The payoff when Sir Gawain finally arrives to kneel before the Green Knight in the secluded oasis of his Green Chapel feels both knowingly subdued and grandly opulent. It’s a finale that takes its time with plenty of silence and a sense of dutiful purpose, before it segues in Sir Gawain’s momentary panic into one of the greatest “my life flashed before my eyes” sequences that’s ever been committed to film, as Gawain is plunged headlong into ruling his own kingdom and the ensuing waves of public chaos and familial tragedy and personal loss. How the movie allows Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to peacefully part ways and take their leave of one another aspires to a higher notion of storytelling. Rather than simply proclaiming Gawain’s honor for his courage and willingness to lay down his life as promised, the film’s ending also asks us what it means to let someone fulfill his own narrative mission, as well as what it means to have mercy on the brave and vulnerable who surround us.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-34906910240332068522021-10-17T22:45:00.002-04:002021-10-19T17:10:05.930-04:007th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 13th - 17th, 2021)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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The return of the excellent GlobeDocs film festival here in Boston this past weekend found the <i>Boston Globe</i>’s annual documentary film festival in its seventh incarnation and its first “hybrid” year, with select films screening in person at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline and the Brattle in Harvard Square, as well as streaming virtually online, so that viewers could watch some additional films remotely at home. The three documentaries that I enjoyed most in this year’s festival are also the films that I’d most anticipated watching, and as always, the subject matter was rich and diverse: from tracing acclaimed pop singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette’s rise to stardom over 25 years ago in <i>Jagged</i>, to exploring the lives and works of celebrated LGBTQ comic book artists and graphic novelists in <i>No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics</i>, to movingly recreating via animation the turbulent immigrant journey of a young gay man from Afghanistan in the brilliant <i>Flee</i>.</span></p><p
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I’d been curious to watch Alison Klayman’s <i>Jagged</i> ever since Alanis Morissette publicly denounced the film last month and somewhat distanced herself from its depiction of her life from her teenage years to the present, saying that she wouldn’t be appearing at any film festivals or release events in support of the documentary. Alanis is candidly interviewed in her home for a good portion of the movie, and I can imagine that such in-depth interviews do probably get fairly tiresome over time, especially when trying to articulate one’s personal views on such long-ago memories. Then when they’re shaped into a filmmaker’s own narrative, re-sequenced, and subjected to editing, often what the interview subject intended to convey can come across quite differently. Morissette mentioned that being interviewed during the pandemic after the birth of her third child also made it more difficult to feel emotionally steady throughout the filming.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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This is especially true when the topic of Alanis’ early relationship experiences with older men who were involved in her career arises. She’s already handled that sensitive subject expertly in the lyrics of her own songs, both in one of her first runaway hits, “You Oughta Know,” and what I consider to be the finest song in her catalog, “Hands Clean.” While she makes a point of saying that she chose never to be vindictive in those songs or to publicly shame anyone in particular, she also looks back and realizes how vulnerable she was when she was still just a teenager. Those songs were intended as a clear warning to younger and underage women about the kinds of predatory dangers that seem to be dressed up in the guise of some romantic pursuits, and in a way, Morissette was a boldly prophetic figure of the #MeToo movement long before it existed as such. In part, this was an aspect of her music that helped shape her appeal to her core audience.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>Jagged</i> focuses mostly, however, on the album release and extensive worldwide tour for <i>Jagged Little Pill</i> back in the mid-’90s, and how exactly she became associated with her co-writer and producer Glen Ballard while landing a record deal with Madonna’s Maverick “boutique” label. We see plenty of archival footage of Alanis and the guys in her touring band back in those days. If there’s an aspect of her life that the documentary left me wanting to learn more about, it was her relationships, but for the reasons mentioned above, it’s also obvious why she would now be working diligently to keep those kinds of details about her life strictly private. The film does cover some of Morissette’s family life in her early years growing up in Canada, now perhaps juxtaposed with the shots of a savvy businesswoman speedily handwriting her way through boxes of special-edition autographed vinyl copies of <i>Jagged Little Pill</i> at her home before they’re shipped off to fans. Despite that distancing, the film does close with a very sweet rendition of her recent song “Ablaze” while she’s holding her young daughter and performing the song remotely for Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show. I was hoping to see more about that side of Alanis.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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For its very different approach to a pop cultural rise into mainstream visibility, I found Vivian Kleiman’s <i>No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics</i> both informative and entertaining. I’ve always paid only peripheral attention to comics as an artistic medium, so the documentary was more of a learning experience for me at times. The film provides a consummate overview of the history of how LGBTQ comics gradually transformed from an underground, anti-censorship driven phenomenon in the wake of the Stonewall Riots into a widespread communal artistic enterprise in the ’80s and ’90s, and finally to gaining mainstream recognition through the event of a cultural touchstone like Alison’s Bechdel’s <i>Fun Home</i> (and its ensuing, Tony Award-winning musical stage adapation) over the past fifteen years or so. A wide array of cartoonists and graphic novelists are interviewed, both from a roster of older, more established comic book artists and a diverse line-up of younger emerging “next generation” LGBTQ figures as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I was particularly interested in seeing some of the inner processes of drawing and reproduction that go into making graphic novels, which the interviews with Alison Bechdel detail in fairly intricate fashion, showing elements of her hand-drawn style in close-ups while she’s working. Another figure who’s central to the documentary and whose work was fairly new to me was Howard Cruse. The founder and editor of the <i>Gay Comix</i> anthologies in the early ’80s, as well as his own well-known gay comics creation <i>Wendel</i>, he’s referred to in the documentary as “the godfather of gay comics” and sadly died quite recently near the end of 2019, when the documentary was in the process of being completed. He seemed to be an ongoing fixture in the LGBTQ comic book community that many of his contemporaries and younger artists sought out for advice about the business. We also see some moving domestic scenes of him and his longtime partner hanging out together at home in their older years, alongside corresponding images from a comic book that he created about older gay people who are often left out of the cultural LGBTQ discussion.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I’d heard wonderful things about <i>Flee</i>, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary about his friend Amin Nawabi, who grew up in Kabul as a boy, immigrated with his family to Russia to escape war-torn Afghanistan, and then eventually settled as an asylum-seeker in Denmark. Winner of the Documentary Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance, the film certainly lived up to all of its advance notice. In addition to rendering the director’s own extensive present-day retrospective interviews with Amin in a calm animated palette of (mostly) soft pastels, the movie reimagines Amin’s own earliest memories from 1984, when he’s running through the streets of Kabul with his Walkman and listening to the band A-ha’s notorious New Wave classic “Take on Me” in his earphones as a young child, up through roughly 1995, when he finally successfully flees from Moscow to Copenhagen as a teenager after a halting series of attempts to immigrate, harrowing setbacks in dark forests and on stormy oceans, and the various struggles and re-connections with his family. During his adolescence as he’s watching Jean-Claude van Damme action movies on television alongside his older brother, Amin also gradually begins to realize that he’s gay while gazing at the images of the muscular actor. Amin’s sexual identity is an important aspect of the film that underscores and highlights all of Amin’s other qualities and perceptions: his shyness, his melancholy, and his attentiveness, as he starts to grasp his own sense of outsiderdom on numerous levels.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Even in the context of animation, the documentary retains its sweeping narrative scope, yet we come to know Amin most closely through the moments of his smallest but most significant encounters and reminiscences. For instance, late in the film when he secretly flees toward Copenhagen as a refugee, he’s being covertly transported and smuggled in a vehicle with another young man, who’s slightly older than Amin, as his only fellow passenger. The two are talking quietly while lying down side-by-side on the floor of the truckbed so as not to be seen, and the other nameless youth notices that Amin is entranced by his gold necklace, which he then sweetly and generously gives to Amin as a gift just before they part ways to their two separate destinations at the airport. Amin laments that he never even found out the name of the other young man since Amin’s memory of him had such a profound and lasting effect on his life. Amin eventually goes to university, does post-doctoral work at Princeton, speaks at conferences about his experiences, and marries his husband Kasper in Denmark to settle down together in the countryside, when the animation on the screen briefly shifts to an actual shot of the trees and waterfront where they live. In the opening voiceover of the documentary, Amin equates home with safety, and it’s clear by the end of the film that he’s finally found both.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-9235410726873361312021-08-08T01:30:00.043-04:002021-08-08T12:16:21.222-04:00Christina Pugh, Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmttfPQiXDKWflB7Cfj2zgR_gZx7TtcPLH7hyphenhyphenDgJFS8JAk6ckQH-nSJ0IA3Bsla1WZlNnkA3gIdBZZIczjexL-k5MNdn9J1f_BT4FG3dN6csJ_dINsilWbLsca_yYJJHOIkfmDpv9eFLQ/s590/StardustMediaChrstinaPugh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmttfPQiXDKWflB7Cfj2zgR_gZx7TtcPLH7hyphenhyphenDgJFS8JAk6ckQH-nSJ0IA3Bsla1WZlNnkA3gIdBZZIczjexL-k5MNdn9J1f_BT4FG3dN6csJ_dINsilWbLsca_yYJJHOIkfmDpv9eFLQ/s200/StardustMediaChrstinaPugh.jpg"/></a></div>Christina Pugh’s fifth and latest collection of poetry, <i>Stardust Media</i>, is also for me her finest, though I could honestly say that about all of Pugh’s previous books, too, because fineness is the central quality that links her five volumes stylistically, at the level of attention, perception, and intelligence. Whenever I begin reading one of Christina’s books for the first time, I know that those properties are inherent from the start, so I never feel as if any grand proclamations about the work are even necessary since I know its character intuitively at the outset. I met Christina Pugh exactly twenty years ago now, when we taught a course together at Emerson College back in the spring of 2001, and I already admired Christina’s poetry at that point in time as well; therefore, I’m honored that we’ve remained close friends over the past two decades, through correspondence, phone conversations, and in-person reunions, mostly for dinners, poetry readings, and visits to the cinema. (I use the word “close” intentionally, in part because I consider Christina to be a true practitioner of the art of closeness. These days, that art is increasingly rare.) Our friendship has persisted across distances and weathered the changes and upheavals that we’ve witnessed both nationally and globally throughout that span of time. Only a few months after we taught our course together, the events of 9/11 transpired when Christina was living and teaching on Staten Island, and in a certain sense, it feels like that was the incipient moment of everything we’ve all endured culturally since then. As Christina writes at the end of “My Twenty-First Century,” the poem that opens <i>Stardust Media</i>, “When the towers blazed, / I’d stood on the shoreline, seared as I had ever / Been, and carefully watched that smoke cross the water.”</span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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Awarded the prestigious Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in Amherst, <i>Stardust Media</i> was released in April of 2020, right after the world had initially shut down for our ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. After living through the past year and a half of intermittent lockdowns and quarantines, vaccinations and their days of after-effects, continually exhausting news cycles, and widespread social interiority as we all retreated into our own private spaces, the deeply insightful poems in <i>Stardust Media</i> now make me feel like it’s a prophetic book. Thematically, Pugh’s focus throughout the collection fixates on our contemporary networks and technologies, the various forms of social and visual media that connect and separate us simultaneously. Her stance is equally one of openness and resistance to the types of sweeping changes that those technologies have brought to our culture and to the art that we create; the poems are both engaged critiques and participatory observations. Pugh does not exempt herself from our digital landscape, which would be the easy decision for a poet to make. Rather, she endorses and questions earnestly her own place within it, which doesn’t mean, of course, that her own position is always comfortable. When one of the poems in the book is titled “I Don’t Know How to Make a Website,” we know the sort of interrogative and self-reflective territory that we’re in.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">That particular poem, actually, is one I’ve kept returning to, mainly for its direct association with Robert Frost’s brilliant sonnet “Design.” Pugh’s poem counterpoints “website” with “web-sight,” and a contemplation of spiders and the secret hazy cobwebs they spin opens the connection to the “dimpled spider, fat and white,” holding up a moth on a white heal-all in Frost’s poem, an image that encouraged Frost to wonder about the origins of its symbolism in one of his greatest questions: “What but design of darkness to appall? — / If design govern in a thing so small.” Pugh’s own response couldn’t be any richer: “An <i>if</i> around design, that / white heal-all, keeps haloing the web-sight.” It’s a perfect metaphor for Pugh’s poetry itself, a kind of literally intricate web-weaving, suspended up in a tucked away corner for those who seek it out, softening the angles of the room, gauzing our gaze as we sharpen our vision to see it more clearly, in order to match Pugh’s artful vision. She guides her readers to that point and trusts them from there.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Perhaps that’s why, a little bit later in the book, Pugh tells us straightforwardly that “Frost would have junked the telescope.” As much as she looks outward (at nature and art, at color and light, at shape and texture), she’s essentially an inward-looking writer, a poet of complex human nuances and details. “I love my life in a nautilus shell,” she writes in one poem, plainly and revealingly. That’s not to say I would ever situate her with the people of our current younger generation who’ve tunneled and burrowed so far inward via social media. Pugh’s book is titled <i>Stardust Media</i> for a reason, instead of some other brand of more familiar or less evocative media. The collection’s title poem, which takes its epigraph from Cocteau Twins’ vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, pushes toward the boundaries of the transcendent that we most often find through music, and certainly through the Cocteau Twins’ songs that devise their own language; “the Sirens would have / never sung in words — so their semitones / unspooled the way that bodies pool and crash / together, raptured after sex.” Other well-known musicians appear throughout the book, from the realms of pop, folk, blues, and alternative rock: Kurt Cobain, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Charley Patton, Steely Dan, and most transfixingly, in a sequel to the book’s title poem, Ian Curtis of Joy Division (“he reached for / a magnetic field from far within that foaming [. . .] // place a stone inside / the music”). Together, they all provide a sort of under-voice for the collection, or maybe they even loosely cohere as a disparate chorus of the underworld, an inverted heaven that the book’s title again seems to suggest.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">If those aural spirits provide <i>Stardust Media</i> with its haunting soundtrack, then the volume’s plethora of visuals construct for us its endless chain of glowing screens of every size, our handheld devices and laptops with their luminescent wallpaper. Early in the collection, “Smartphone Inlet” presages that trend through a deft comparison of embroidery to texting, reaching back for contrast through history to eras when “women / would brood like robins on inchoate / letters pulled airily from cloth,” but whose “words were never / lit from within, the way that ours are.” Pugh dances back and forth from the clack and chime of a manual typewriter’s carriage in “Toll,” to stolid Ohio barns along the interstate highway (“Sky-blue / with white roofs. Wait, isn’t sky-blue brighter / than any sky you really see?”), to a meditation on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic masterpiece <i>Blue</i>, to “the promiscuity of television,” naturally, “its screen, I mean, since it flickers to anyone.” And so our present-day technologies are met in Pugh’s poems, ultimately, with a democratizing embrace, although more tangible physical artifacts also maintain their foothold: Italian Renaissance art, handcrafted lace, Luigi Ghirri’s photographs, James Turrell’s geometrical lightscape installations, the spotlit set design accompanying a stage production of David Lang’s composition “Where you go,” which inspires a moving dedication to Pugh’s husband, Richard DelVisco (alongside echoes of another major theme of the book, the recent death of Christina’s father).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMkQqYfisGB-Q1_FDeEuk37aNhRkZipFaZYbrFVSnmvzTtP6XkFQuP53ChXSgynTIYCNC7u-NMOgr0Wx19-pj3Q1lMH1HQ46QuNW0RCTSY5R16D8ULs9BWF9qqyTMuvDFSovcIHqPrx5U/s275/ChristinaPugh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMkQqYfisGB-Q1_FDeEuk37aNhRkZipFaZYbrFVSnmvzTtP6XkFQuP53ChXSgynTIYCNC7u-NMOgr0Wx19-pj3Q1lMH1HQ46QuNW0RCTSY5R16D8ULs9BWF9qqyTMuvDFSovcIHqPrx5U/s200/ChristinaPugh.jpg"/></a></div>One exciting aspect of the book for me was reading a poem about a musical performance that I attended myself with Christina and Rick when I was visiting their city of Chicago back in November of 2015. It’s actually the very first time that I’ve ever “seen” myself in a poem in exactly this way, and that makes it quite special to me. During my visit, we went to watch a concert at City Winery by the singer/songwriter Susan Werner, which prompted Pugh’s poem “Pink, Pink, Pink,” particularly Werner’s choice of song for her encore that evening (“we heard an Iowan / sing <i>La vie en rose</i> with, to my ear, no American accent. / And I was listening hard for a caving of the <i>r</i>”). The concert happened on the same night in 2015, Friday, November 13th, when several coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, France, killed 130 people and injured hundreds more. Due to the timing of our pre-show dinner and the concert itself, we weren’t aware of this tragic news until just after the show had ended: “When she sang, / I hadn’t yet heard about the murders in France / or seen our own monuments lit blue, white, / red and American ambidextrous. But nobody / says <i>rose-colored glasses</i> anymore.” In this poem, and throughout <i>Stardust Media</i>, Christina Pugh amply captures the world at its own pace, on the brink of where we all now currently stand.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-61513230675266269502021-07-10T23:53:00.014-04:002021-07-13T19:55:54.974-04:00Robert Hamberger, Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press, 2019)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLz7cItWp__jnbja04sLvLmvHsQDeIvUT3WI5Mr6Ar-tPpy5qp458f8gV3ig0zat6LVIuFB2fSnafuGdVTSg9Khlfo7q2jWuX6iiEqk5ys6OKi4FEEU_9LIskTV6uxgRnfb0WHQ7o3rZU/s400/BlueWallpaper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLz7cItWp__jnbja04sLvLmvHsQDeIvUT3WI5Mr6Ar-tPpy5qp458f8gV3ig0zat6LVIuFB2fSnafuGdVTSg9Khlfo7q2jWuX6iiEqk5ys6OKi4FEEU_9LIskTV6uxgRnfb0WHQ7o3rZU/s200/BlueWallpaper.jpg"/></a></div>I remember meeting the wonderful English poet Robert Hamberger (through our mutual friend, the equally wonderful English poet John McCullough) about a decade ago now where he lives in Brighton on the southern coast of England. When I asked Robert the title of his latest collection of poetry that he was working on at the time and he said, “<i>Blue Wallpaper</i>,” I thought it was one of the best book titles I’d heard in a long while. The book came out several months prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and now that our international mail delivery is finally back to normal here in the United States, I was very happy to receive Robert’s book in the mail just a few days ago, after looking forward to reading it ever since that time we met in Brighton.</span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The poems and themes in the book are beautifully consistent with those in his three previous volumes, and having now read through <i>Blue Wallpaper</i> twice, I’m more convinced than ever of Robert Hamberger’s permanent place in the canon of English poetry. His mastery of the sonnet and other poetic forms, along with his limber command of the line in free verse as well, should secure his position in a literary lineage that makes me think of the great World War I poets Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon, and perhaps especially Edward Thomas, who crafted some of the most perfect formalist poetry in the English language. In the case of many of those poets, love between men is frequently central, as it is in Hamberger’s writing, too.</span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Blue Wallpaper</i> opens with “The lesson of sand,” one of six subtitled sections that give the volume its intricate structural solidity. The seven sonnets in this first section of the book are elegies in remembrance of Hamberger’s mother, both in her younger years when she resembled a glamourous Ingrid Bergman in <i>Casablanca</i>, and in her later years struggling with aging and memory loss, when Hamberger would visit her regularly at a care home: “I stay for an hour, watching the lesson / of sand giving way again to sea.” It’s a precise and careful metaphor that encompasses so much: time as it slips away from us, our delicate human relationships under the power of something greater, yet also bearing witness to the traces of our lives that still remain after the waves have washed over us and receded again.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Similarly, in the book’s wistful second section, “Coming home,” Hamberger reflects back on his family relationships from his youth, etching an indelible boyhood memory of a lost brown jumper with a yellow camel on it, which his mother had knitted for him before his father “went / the way of camels and palm trees.” Hamberger is always adept at lifting these sorts of tokens of memory back up into the light and showing them to us in their vivid and moving resonances: listening to “Dancing in the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas up in his bedroom as his mother shouts for him to turn the music down, memorializing an injured war veteran and “cloth-cap tenor” who would serenade for coins in the streets of their neighborhood, and detailing an older gay man with a “citrus scent / he must have sprayed at his wrists and throat” who chatted him up during the intermission at a screening of <i>The Sound of Music</i> before Hamberger’s mother ushered him back to their seats. One of my favorite poems in the book, “Mr Muxworthy,” gorgeously recalls Hamberger’s schoolboy crush on a handsome teacher who “peeled off his shirt in front of us / that time before gym, baring his hairy chest, / its tangled fascination, elbowing himself / into maroon and yellow stripes, / ready to shout at us to run and run.” Then the poem pivots towards darkness as Hamberger imagines climbing inside the man himself, to “tunnel to the trees barred by his ribcage, / stroke the smoky branches there.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The fabulous third section in the middle of the book collects seven sonnets by Arthur Rimbaud, adapted by Hamberger from literal translations by his husband Keith Rainger, ranging in subject matter from the leaner socioeconomic life of poets in “My Bohemia,” to a colorful meditation on the vowels of the alphabet, to the hilarious “Arsehole sonnet” that pays riotous tribute to that particular part of the human anatomy. I was reminded on several levels of Robert Lowell’s 1961 book <i>Imitations</i>, his terrific collection of loose translations and re-imaginings of poems by a wide array of famous European writers throughout history, which included several renderings of poems by Arthur Rimbaud as well. The powerful fourth section of <i>Blue Wallpaper</i>, “Golden dragon,” turns to poems about mythical and natural creatures of various kinds: a kestrel spotted out on the patio (“that head a claw-hammer”) making a meticulously violent meal out of a fledgling starling, a lobster wielded on a silver platter in a restaurant “like an armoured warrior” (with deft echoes of Elizabeth Bishop’s warrior in her poem “The Fish”), right down to the very last fly of winter “uselessly fussing against glass.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">“Husbands,” the book’s fifth section, features a wide and attentive array of love poems. I was riveted (and also reminded of legendary gay performance artist Leigh Bowery) by the tender scrutiny of Hamberger’s poem “Becoming a Lucian Freud nude,” a semi-self portrait of an aging male body seen in a long bathroom mirror: “Blotches, moles and blemishes / map my years / in coral, oyster, pink,” and yet because every sign of age is also evidence of survival, Hamberger rightly proclaims by the poem’s end, “Victory’s here.” The final section of the book, “Being the sea,” re-traces Hamberger’s move to Brighton, where he settled after a series of major life changes recounted in his previous collections. The contemplative “Unpacking the books” locates Hamberger’s place on the bookshelf amongst the poets he admires, while “35C” maps the interior of his living space in relation to the world outside of it. “The AIDS memorial,” one of the finest poems to arise from the aftermath of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, remembers twenty years after their deaths Hamberger’s close friends, the artist Clifford Haseldine (one of whose paintings appears on the book’s cover) and Clifford’s partner Andrew: “Tonight your names / join a list at the service. / Couples and singles cup their flames / by this floodlit memorial. / Once I’m numb from too much snow / I’ll kneel before the sea’s crashed gardenias.” The title poem of <i>Blue Wallpaper</i>, which closes the volume, envisions the poet himself poised again at the edge of the sky and the ocean where “I’m here and a hundred miles away; / this morning and fifty years ago / roll together.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-30968099478386849372021-06-20T18:10:00.024-04:002021-06-22T22:31:34.919-04:0023rd Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 16th - 25th, 2021)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBLbGjMlAPlEgbI3toYf9Iw3bQVg7wYyX-zGqgeyM2dgNsorW2VAkmMteM5y8HR2siAnQUgiIG6rBoiLpoV18pBFU7ajPcIlHfNYos0dj9hGl2cIGHZZWBRkMHocwoc0AOlkSyL1_Bvb0/s642/PtownFilmFestLogo2021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBLbGjMlAPlEgbI3toYf9Iw3bQVg7wYyX-zGqgeyM2dgNsorW2VAkmMteM5y8HR2siAnQUgiIG6rBoiLpoV18pBFU7ajPcIlHfNYos0dj9hGl2cIGHZZWBRkMHocwoc0AOlkSyL1_Bvb0/s200/PtownFilmFestLogo2021.jpg"/></a></div>The film festival in Provincetown made a gradual post-pandemic return this past week, with Waters Edge Cinema hosting the majority of the screenings. I watched four films there over the past several days, as well as one at the Mary Heaton Vorse House in town, in addition to streaming some of the festival selections online. While it felt quite different from my routine at the festival in previous years, when I’d watch as many as twenty movies at the venues around town over five days, it was also nice to ease my way back into things this year because it’s been quite a long time since I’ve sat shoulder-to-shoulder with other moviegoers at a cinema, given the restrictions during the various lockdowns internationally throughout the past year and a half. Of course, that made it even more fun to see the five in-person screenings that I was able to attend at this year’s festival, so here are the details on my four favorite films that I watched.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqSgz2PTK-plWoQuxQ65GnDH8v_KJXI7f56p1KXnkFOrjDuKFzLPTqaGc8QDyc3i6ftGANjPAwDlP5nQhtySBEhQY8MHzT4wMxX5iJ00xrqKFT6kSAwdL7CbFSkcODV-e5QTFNXpPJVA/s2048/SummerOf85Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqSgz2PTK-plWoQuxQ65GnDH8v_KJXI7f56p1KXnkFOrjDuKFzLPTqaGc8QDyc3i6ftGANjPAwDlP5nQhtySBEhQY8MHzT4wMxX5iJ00xrqKFT6kSAwdL7CbFSkcODV-e5QTFNXpPJVA/s200/SummerOf85Poster.jpg"/></a></div>I’d really been looking forward to seeing <i>Summer of 85</i>, the latest film from gay French director François Ozon, who’s long been one of my favorite filmmakers. The movie was just about as enjoyable as I’d anticipated, and well in line with the themes and tones of Ozon’s previous movies. A unique hybrid of a gay teenage love story and a darker-edged thriller, <i>Summer of 85</i> is loosely adapted from Aidan Chambers’ 1982 young adult novel <i>Dance on My Grave</i>, and I could definitely feel the tendons of that particular source material connected to the movie at various points while watching it, especially in the adorably innocent scenes of Alex (Félix Lefebvre) and David (Benjamin Voisin) falling for one another and exploring the intensity of their physical attraction. Of course, the characters are somewhat too young and fresh-faced even to know what to do with that attraction to a certain degree, and so Alex becomes instantly jealous when David’s attentions suddenly turn instead to a young woman named Kate (Philippine Velge), whom the two boys have recently befriended.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1svmNftbV_Ou8jTndyKQ6od6YI5d4r46ZSCa_W04M0kUjcT_SapJev4qzQvWm1EOfqT0q__ozWmAAY1Ol9IRD2NKwtlEquGo4mHpSr2YWA5JAMTWBzNSJHCKD7E34KtRlD9QajfsZyQ0/s2000/SummerOf85Alex%2526David.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1svmNftbV_Ou8jTndyKQ6od6YI5d4r46ZSCa_W04M0kUjcT_SapJev4qzQvWm1EOfqT0q__ozWmAAY1Ol9IRD2NKwtlEquGo4mHpSr2YWA5JAMTWBzNSJHCKD7E34KtRlD9QajfsZyQ0/s200/SummerOf85Alex%2526David.jpg"/></a></div>And that’s where the storyline clearly takes a turn toward the tragic. Some critics have remarked on the clashing tones of a film that swerves from a fun and sunny gay teenage love story to a somber tale of heartbreak and loss, but having watched many of Ozon’s films numerous times, I saw plenty of worthwhile consistencies and linkages with his other movies and therefore understood why he’d have been interested in adapting Chambers’ novel for the screen in the first place. My two favorite films by Ozon, <i>Time to Leave</i> and <i>Le Refuge</i> (<i>Hideaway</i>), explore the difficulties, disappointments, and sustaining qualities of sexual and emotional relationships. Ozon always pursues those complexities ardently, rather than simply letting his films remain in an overly comfortable zone for his longtime viewers. Although the moments of discomfort in <i>Summer of 85 </i>can feel a bit too overt at times, and its plot twists a little too blunt, the actors all sustain the audience’s interest and make feeling concerned about these characters a rewarding endeavor, ultimately, even if invoking Luca Guadagnino’s <i>Call Me by Your Name</i> was excessive, given my views of the shortcomings of that over-praised film.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">One aspect of the Provincetown Film Festival that I always love best is how it makes me feel like LGBTQ+ life stories, and particularly those of gay men, really matter and still have a significant place in our ongoing social discourse. As the world has continued to progress and change in profound and crucial ways over these past several years of remarkable cultural upheavals and political action, I’ve sometimes wondered how much our collective experiences as gay men have spoken to people inside and outside of our own community. The artistic and communal events at the annual film festival in Provincetown help to promote and fortify a world and a future where those stories will continue to matter in shaping society and our own directions within it throughout the coming decades.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-3708685073277006302021-06-13T15:07:00.014-04:002021-06-16T19:37:37.867-04:00Five Favorite Gay Cinematic Losers<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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There’s a book of queer theory from 2007, Heather Love’s <i>Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History</i>, whose central concept I still love today: “Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.” For this reason, the gay “losers” of cinema are always the characters that have interested me the most. Their more successful counterparts steer clear of the loser designation either by mimicking straight culture so well that they can pass for straight, or by following the gay rulebook so closely that they effectively give up their own sense of an individual identity. Within twenty minutes of thinking of the idea to write this post, I had already compiled a list of twenty gay cinematic losers, and that was just from browsing my own shelf of DVDs at home. Maybe I’ll write a sequel (or two) to this post eventually, but for now, I’ll focus on my five favorite gay losers of cinema, the characters who’ve stayed with me the most over time, and what they all share in common, as well as where exactly they diverge.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuSo7kVp4VYd7H3XnNkxi2CFYCckayuiYXAB7Y9AGu-AaHeuh0dl4t9ZboS_caTfL36VbIWwEw-UZMtiqQ4mD44c5bJNEShf3LT2LSAH79GO1imRTdkuMihHnn7Dz-hdSoWrwNpoRpm4A/s475/Chuck%2526Buck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuSo7kVp4VYd7H3XnNkxi2CFYCckayuiYXAB7Y9AGu-AaHeuh0dl4t9ZboS_caTfL36VbIWwEw-UZMtiqQ4mD44c5bJNEShf3LT2LSAH79GO1imRTdkuMihHnn7Dz-hdSoWrwNpoRpm4A/s200/Chuck%2526Buck.jpg"/></a></div>Miguel Arteta’s 2000 film <i>Chuck & Buck</i>, written by and starring Mike White in a gloriously unashamed performance as the perpetual man-child Buck, is somewhere in my top three favorite movies of all time. I remember that at the time of its release, actors as diverse as Jeff Bridges and Catherine Deneuve praised the movie and Mike White’s performance in it. During the course of the film, Buck tries to re-connect with his childhood friend Chuck (Chris Weitz), another kid from his neighborhood who’s now a straight, married music executive in Los Angeles, and whom we find out later in the movie had sex with Buck for a period of time in their youth. I related a lot to the film’s main storyline because I’d experienced exactly the same thing with a boyhood friend from school back when I was growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and at pretty much the same age. I assume that plenty of other boys had such experiences, too, but for obvious reasons, they almost never get addressed by the culture in any serious way.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTG7cMpP9gg3FPBOSVNSGSMf5V7_SGj17HHJfbfZVPgG7N99bulc8SC18cyhxJfMg4aGVwkaiGhzBq4bwT0TvDtpGCUx1ZJXgzF2Hc9zZIlRFk_YbBJJ2NKukRPTVEXbHRbr15zIvrOEo/s602/KingCobra.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTG7cMpP9gg3FPBOSVNSGSMf5V7_SGj17HHJfbfZVPgG7N99bulc8SC18cyhxJfMg4aGVwkaiGhzBq4bwT0TvDtpGCUx1ZJXgzF2Hc9zZIlRFk_YbBJJ2NKukRPTVEXbHRbr15zIvrOEo/s200/KingCobra.jpg"/></a></div>The only ripped-from-the-headlines performance on this list is Christian Slater’s career-best portrayal of online gay porn purveyor Bryan Kocis (here named Stephen) in Justin Kelly’s 2016 film <i>King Cobra</i>. Kocis, who discovered the porn star known as Brent Corrigan (perfectly embodied by Garrett Clayton) and filmed the gay porn movies in which Corrigan starred early in his career, was brutally stabbed and killed in 2007 by two guys who were running a rival porn company (Keegan Allen as Harlow Cuadra and James Franco as Joseph Kerekes). Slater’s performance in the film has received far too little attention, probably because it’s so on-the-nose that it kind of floats along under the radar. Slater deftly hits all of the requisite notes of regret, frustration, and desire that most gay men can relate to at midlife, aging into their nether years while still trying to hold onto some semblance of youth and social connection. Molly Ringwald, in an underdeveloped role, plays Stephen’s concerned sister who’s aware of some but not all of her brother’s shady dealings.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOJG6BPQUe-n95VYRAylPx5wMZHVECmfZb3Ex_0UPEX9mUeW14VWfcrS8glgcWdI0ICYYCxFnmfFUZvv6DyY56fSGJZhI4ukOkN6GD2LvkbIDcGSB-6yrWn5aea8LvlGhQo-UR_sJgYYs/s1020/JackTwistCries.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOJG6BPQUe-n95VYRAylPx5wMZHVECmfZb3Ex_0UPEX9mUeW14VWfcrS8glgcWdI0ICYYCxFnmfFUZvv6DyY56fSGJZhI4ukOkN6GD2LvkbIDcGSB-6yrWn5aea8LvlGhQo-UR_sJgYYs/s200/JackTwistCries.jpg"/></a></div>It’s probably a bit of a controversial choice to include on this list Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist from Ang Lee’s 2005 gay romantic blockbuster <i>Brokeback Mountain</i>. After all, it’s not entirely Jack’s fault that he falls deeply in love with a man who’s even more closeted than he is himself, and not just briefly but over a substantial series of years and semi-covert encounters. This role was clearly the pivotal point in Gyllenhaal’s career when he became a serious actor who’s in it for the long haul, and the performance gathers its power from watching Jack Twist transition from a randy young sheep herder and rodeo bull rider to an emotionally tormented wreck of a man who can’t shake how much he cares for Ennis Del Mar (the wonderful late Heath Ledger). If there’s one quality that all five of the gay characters on this list share: they fall in love with emotionally unavailable men, and then they never quite find their way out of that experience.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-82135756438342303472021-05-23T19:57:00.021-04:002021-05-23T23:27:35.461-04:00Sublet (dir. Eytan Fox, 2020)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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Israeli director Eytan Fox’s latest film, <i>Sublet</i>, which is currently screening in film festivals prior to its theatrical release here in the United States this summer, captures the soul of Tel Aviv. That kind of intimate encounter is achieved both through cinematographic details, like panoramic shots of curved tidal pools rolling onto the beaches of Tel Aviv by day and by night, as well as through the central gay characters, Michael and Tomer, at the heart of this gorgeous two-hander. As viewers, we experience the city both through the fresh perspective of professional tourist Michael (John Benjamin Hickey, in a perfectly calibrated performance) and the more familiar perspective of Israeli native Tomer (Niv Nissim, who hits all the requisite notes of sexiness, jaded youthful humor, and depth). The movie opens with Michael, a 50-something <i>New York Times</i> travel writer, landing in Tel Aviv for an assignment over a five-day visit. When he arrives at Tomer’s apartment to sublet it for the week, the 20-something filmmaking student has totally forgotten that his subletter would be arriving that day, setting up a standard odd-couple scenario that turns out to be so much more than that. <i>Sublet</i> is the finest and most delicate May/December semi-romance in a far-flung location since Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Tokyo-set Oscar winner (for Best Original Screenplay), <i>Lost in Translation</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Later in the movie, when Tomer’s mother (Miki Kam) asks Michael about his impressions of Tel Aviv over a quiet dinner at her home in the kibbutz near the end of his stay, he replies that the city is a unique mixture of intensity and laidback vibes, which is actually a great description of the film itself as well. Because Tomer’s bicycle gets stolen during the film’s early scenes, we experience the city — along with Michael and Tomer’s relationship — on foot at ground level as Tomer becomes a tour guide for Michael, and so the film unfolds with exactly the pace that such a relationship would. What’s special about <i>Sublet</i> as a piece of gay cinema is its cross-generational component. That element is handled in a sensitive manner that’s quite rare in gay movies, achieved through subtle moments that are fairly easy to miss: Michael’s glance of realization when Tomer’s mother mentions that she’d had him with a sperm donor and raised him alone, for instance, or Tomer’s gradual recognition of the hardships that gay men of Michael’s generation have faced over time.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>Sublet</i> also isn’t afraid to face more difficult truths about contemporary gay culture and why plenty of younger gay men today can struggle to find stability and contentment. After Tomer invites over a hot guy from a hookup app for a potential threesome midway through the movie, we catch on long-partnered Michael’s face a dismissive glimpse of disappointment as he excuses himself from the scene, despite his clear feelings of desire and physical interest. It’s such a deft momentary expression for an actor to convey, and it reminded me of a comment that I heard the actor/director John Cameron Mitchell make a while back, about how younger gay men have been poorly conditioned by the instant gratification of apps like Grindr, to the extent that any attempts at actually getting to know somebody (or even enjoying the pleasures of foreplay) just get totally omitted these days. Although Tomer claims to like the quickness of those sexual interactions that require “no drama,” Michael senses otherwise and so begins to nudge the younger man gently in another direction.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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I was fortunate to see John Benjamin Hickey starring on stage as Henry Wilcox in Matthew Lopez’s epic two-part play <i>The Inheritance</i> on Broadway in late November of 2019, several months prior to the shutdown of theaters prompted by the global Covid-19 pandemic in mid-March of 2020, which occurred just a couple of nights before that play was scheduled to close its Broadway run. Hickey portrays a similar character in <i>Sublet</i>, someone who lived through the AIDS crisis, lost his first boyfriend to the disease, then survived to weather the cultural changes of the ensuing decades, only to end up overseeing the lives and antics of a younger generation of gay men in New York City, providing them with support and good counsel as an older gay man. Eytan Fox relies on Hickey’s gently timeworn facial features to ideal effect here, so that we, too, can feel the span of time that the character has endured, enabling a kind of closeness via Hickey’s performance that winds up feeling more internal, rather than being focused solely on age or the distinctions of external appearance. This is probably the movie’s most distinguishing emotional aspect, and Fox and Hickey both seem to be aware of that.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Niv Nissim’s performance as the younger and somewhat disenchanted Tomer is equally profound on many levels, believably inhabiting a character who doesn’t want to be tied down to strict definitions of sexuality or long-term monogamous relationships, nor even obligatory “happy endings.” He’s happier having more fleeting encounters with a wide variety of people, sexually and otherwise, while making art through unconventional horror films with the help of his young actor friends in Tel Aviv. (One of his student films that he shares with Michael was perhaps a little too clearly inspired by <i>Rosemary’s Baby</i>.) Tomer's predilections provide an important contrast to Michael’s own relationship with his partner David (Peter Spears) back in New York, with whom he face-times on his cell phone and laptop at a couple of strategic points in the movie. They argue and discuss, in particular, whether they should pursue having a child via a surrogate again, after their first attempt to do so went tragically wrong, as we find out during a deeply moving and matter-of-fact scene late in the film.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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Where the movie goes from that point in its final act is better left unsaid, simply in terms of the audience’s emotional payoff. And while the film’s central pair of characters do move on and resolve their issues on a number of levels, where exactly Michael and Tomer will go in the wake of their encounter remains open-ended, even if it’s clear that the encounter has changed both of them in key ways as they return again to the familiar grooves of their individual separate lives. I’ve seen and loved all of Etyan Fox’s films, which collectively provide an essential document of gay Israeli life over the past three decades, but at this particular point in my own life as a gay man at age 47, <i>Sublet</i> is his movie that’s meant the most to me on an immediate emotional level, and also the one that I’ve related to most closely. I watched the film twice over the past couple of months, and both times I was moved to tears by the exact same scene. It’s obviously the scene that the director intended to make his audience cry, as a result of all that’s been expertly held back by the actors up to that moment, and then all that’s finally allowed to reveal itself more fully in the brightness of an airport’s waiting area, a space of anonymity and transit.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-63876819726918615802021-05-12T12:15:00.006-04:002021-05-13T01:39:45.953-04:00Pretty in Pink (dir. Howard Deutch, 1986)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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I asked Andrew McCarthy specifically about what it felt like to be seen as a kind of template or role model for younger men back in the ’80s, and his response to my question was at first slightly perplexed. “Did it really happen like that? Is that how people saw me?” he wondered in reply, recalling how frequently he’d been told back then that he needed to lift weights and beef up to transform himself into a standard matinee idol. What’s interesting is how that’s essentially the only masculine type that existed in Hollywood films. Any male performer who seemed too sweet or too sensitive bordered on something not quite masculine enough at that point in time. Andie’s lifelong friend and other suitor in the film, Duckie (portrayed so memorably by Jon Cryer), leans a bit further in that less macho direction: offbeat, artistic, even somewhat self-consciously effeminate, when he’s not lip-synching to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and pretending to be butch. Molly Ringwald has gone on the record as saying that she assumed in retrospect that Duckie’s character was actually gay.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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This explains to me why I felt such an affinity for the movie as a teenager, and why I retain such deep associations with the film today. I was already pretty certain that I was gay at that point in time, but it was the ’80s in Cincinnati, Ohio, so my social options for open self-expression were still limited. Cinema, notably the sort that winds up feeling nostalgic years later, provides an avenue for considering other available forms of selfhood, and I think back then I’d convinced myself that Blane and Duckie, vying for Andie’s affections, were for me two sensible and accessible versions of (potentially straight) early manhood. Since I couldn’t yet fully imagine myself to be what I actually was, I let the movie’s fantasy overwrite my own visions of myself for a couple of hours whenever I watched the film, while simply admiring the well-told story of a heterosexual romance in John Hughes’ screenplay. I think John Hughes was probably closest to Duckie himself, and his teen comedies almost always placed the issue of class status near the heart of the drama. It’s no coincidence that <i>Pretty in Pink</i>’s opening shot is literally of a street sweeper driving down the road on the wrong side of the tracks.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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James Spader’s character, Steff, the hilariously condescending, obscenely rich asshole best friend of Blane, is another type of male template in the film, and he’s no less fun to watch for being totally revolting, swishing around their high school in his crisp linen suits and sport jackets. There’s also a fairly obvious level on which John Hughes clearly implied (and the actors intelligently conveyed) that Steff isn’t only competing with Blane for Andie’s romantic attentions out of sexual jealousy. In the homosocial sense, Steff is also afraid of losing Blane to Andie, when even only as a best friend, he really wants to have more of Blane all to himself. James Spader is smart enough an actor to wink at the audience about that aspect of his character between the lines of dialogue that he so tantalizingly delivers throughout the movie.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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And that’s how Andrew McCarthy actually ended up answering my question about whether he’d become a kind of archetype for young guys back in the ’80s. He said that he’s realized as he’s gotten older that he was very lucky to be an avatar for people’s own youth through his first several film roles, the key that continues to grant them some kind of access to their earlier selves. All three performers in the movie’s central love triangle — Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, and Jon Cryer — seem to know just how well-rounded their characters are and how carefully John Hughes crafted them in his script. Each actor infuses his or her respective character with their own personality in ways that make them continue to be indelible nearly four decades later. I can’t imagine their effect on popular culture waning anytime soon.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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One of my favorite scenes out of many in the film is the movie’s dramatic climax, when Andie screams at Blane in an empty hallway of their high school after he’s given her the cold shoulder due to peer pressure from his wealthy friends. The set-up is theatrical, with the audience aware that both Duckie and Steff are watching from the edges of the scene as Andie and Blane fight it out in public, a Shakespearean device that I’m sure John Hughes was knowingly using. The unbridled bitterness of that scene, and of Duckie’s earlier falling out with Andie, only makes their reunion at the prom in the movie’s finale all the more moving and fulfilling for viewers. Duckie’s gentlemanly final bow as Andie’s steadfast friend, encouraging her to go to Blane and embrace the romance that the film wants her to have, ultimately represented the kind of guy who seemed worth striving to be back in my high school days. I remain grateful to John Hughes and the actors for giving young men back then — gay or bi or straight — a sketch of an ideal to aim for.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-80298855356465338232021-02-07T16:17:00.009-05:002021-02-08T01:47:57.448-05:00Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2020)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuOxmmMCYbNnEUda1OSzvzXyozvdIIrmd2BZdmZ6aQjjCYr5aX0AWCA7syim86SZswQwyVURsurK2bu5t1bkJ244iRxq2fXAH3bCTnV4M2GY6z1WKR3s6O91CR_o37TwvcDrtnKhCnUp8/s512/NomadlandPoster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuOxmmMCYbNnEUda1OSzvzXyozvdIIrmd2BZdmZ6aQjjCYr5aX0AWCA7syim86SZswQwyVURsurK2bu5t1bkJ244iRxq2fXAH3bCTnV4M2GY6z1WKR3s6O91CR_o37TwvcDrtnKhCnUp8/s200/NomadlandPoster.jpg"/></a></div>Due to the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing cinematic shutdowns throughout this past year, Chloé Zhao’s latest film <i>Nomadland</i> was one of the only movies that I had the pleasure of anticipating throughout 2020. Of course, the film’s release date kept being postponed, so that <i>Nomadland</i> wasn’t even theatrically released until well into 2021. I finally had the chance to watch it this past Friday night when the big multiplex in downtown Boston reopened for the first time since Christmas Day. Fortunately, the movie is screening only in IMAX theaters for its initial run, so I was able to enjoy its fine cinematography on a gigantic screen, which I doubt would have happened in any other year, when those screens would have been reserved for the usual blockbusters and superhero fare. Though as I think we’re all quite aware by now, no blocks around cinemas anywhere in this country are being busted anymore, and perhaps (at least from how dire things look at our present moment) they may never be again.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqO5IfXfNCedgy-Xf63XXvhUewK3NJBk2gjpYFYXwezfHHqEZR7wfTwpVfTRSJcrytVTEd7MW_wjk6x5Gy7_xncGAXUkaUL0C7CUSJceOld_fpvJb6iemzDOtVN2H9mk3ARtJxWH1sHKE/s1000/FernEmpireNomadland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqO5IfXfNCedgy-Xf63XXvhUewK3NJBk2gjpYFYXwezfHHqEZR7wfTwpVfTRSJcrytVTEd7MW_wjk6x5Gy7_xncGAXUkaUL0C7CUSJceOld_fpvJb6iemzDOtVN2H9mk3ARtJxWH1sHKE/s200/FernEmpireNomadland.jpg"/></a></div>It’s in that same shellshocked, post-capitalist socioeconomic landscape, actually, that the stark and vital narrative of <i>Nomadland</i> unfolds, as the nomads of the movie’s title (based on Jessica Bruder’s eponymous 2017 non-fiction book) stop and start and scatter their way across the semi-obliterated vastness of the American west. Like Chloé Zhao’s previous film <i>The Rider</i>, which was among my favorite movies of 2018, <i>Nomadland</i> is a careful and distinctive hybrid of real-life documentary and loosely scripted fiction. Frances McDormand, in a demanding, career-defining performance, stars as Fern, who’d lived and worked for years in Empire, Nevada, a town of less than 1,000 inhabitants that shut down and essentially ceased to exist, having even its zip code discontinued after its sole industry of mining gypsum to manufacture sheetrock closed in 2011, due to lack of demand in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and housing market crisis. Fern then fled and hit the open road, living in her big white outfitted camper van, nicknamed Vanguard. The other middle-aged and older American nomads she encounters along the way, who’d made the same decision after their own lives went awry — and who now work in seasonal shifts at massive, mechanized Amazon warehouses or in cramped and busy kitchens at roadside diners — are the focus of the film and help to provide many of its most deeply moving moments.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFreFawdfWv3TKCCPS_PazS8ew0WGx00h2JOIN85jIKz3mFzpCh7Z12eAUEVjwZG3G5dfEWhXoj7wHKJGCo2FBAYu3U3y8yGxxI9lhNdnGESZyQ0ZglWnsottcs7w7J5ZAymcgInK6lgg/s1280/FernSwimsNomadland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFreFawdfWv3TKCCPS_PazS8ew0WGx00h2JOIN85jIKz3mFzpCh7Z12eAUEVjwZG3G5dfEWhXoj7wHKJGCo2FBAYu3U3y8yGxxI9lhNdnGESZyQ0ZglWnsottcs7w7J5ZAymcgInK6lgg/s200/FernSwimsNomadland.jpg"/></a></div>McDormand should certainly win another Oscar for this role, a subdued yet tenacious emotional achievement that also doesn’t shy away from the rudimentary physical hardships that Fern must learn to tolerate in her daily life: urinating outdoors in frigid temperatures (one of the earliest images we see of her in the film), being stricken with dysentery and only a plastic bucket in her van as a makeshift toilet, seeing her treasured Autumn Leaf china plates get broken when she has to clean out Vanguard due to an ant infestation. It’s clear why McDormand secured the rights to the film and staked out this role for herself, though I’m not sure any other American actress working today could have or would have done that. And while she’s transfixing to watch in the movie, a film that she carries in every successive scene often just by the subtle calibrations of her gestures and facial expressions, there’s nothing showy or grandstanding about it. Her performance is entirely in service to the story and the importance of the film’s messages about freedom and capitalist exploitation at this particular moment in contemporary American history.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOJnxRV0W5agyXnWo7tK1J8ERWvOvLbVoclT_Fk_gzkMf6aJUWi0Nm1gkBmpNX3vNAJ6IlidyzZ9duBrMg9WyY1lnrHs3kyry-0O0HH5WMCKca_1KQgZjftb3iasMLBkjC9JU7wrrvAJ4/s1600/FernRushmoreNomadland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOJnxRV0W5agyXnWo7tK1J8ERWvOvLbVoclT_Fk_gzkMf6aJUWi0Nm1gkBmpNX3vNAJ6IlidyzZ9duBrMg9WyY1lnrHs3kyry-0O0HH5WMCKca_1KQgZjftb3iasMLBkjC9JU7wrrvAJ4/s200/FernRushmoreNomadland.jpg"/></a></div>Some of the movie’s key scenes are filmed documentary-style around a campfire, with the transient community of nomads sharing various memories and anecdotes from their lives. One such woman recounts a male colleague who’d worked with her for decades and then was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, only to die one week before his scheduled retirement. Another woman who ends up being a fixture in the film, Linda May, recalls a similar shock and disappointment at discovering only $550 in her Social Security savings account after working for nearly her entire life and struggling to raise her children. These point-blank truths about the inherent corruption of living in a soulless capitalist system are revealed to us as testimonials, and they reminded me of the heart circles at Radical Faeries gatherings that I’ve attended, where people simply sit together and share aloud their feelings about their lives and experiences. Zhao’s empathetic direction (along with the attentive, humanizing cinematography of Joshua James Richards) both dignifies and enriches the stories of the film’s subjects, in a way that makes us feel like they could be, and perhaps even are, our own stories. As Fern connects with certain individuals, we connect with them as well, such as Swankie, an older woman who hangs a black skull-and-crossbones flag on the side of her van because she’s gradually dying from a brain tumor. After bonding with Fern, who looks after Swankie and even cuts her hair, Swankie departs for Alaska, where she sends Fern a video of the cliffside of swallows that she’s returned to see before she dies, hundreds of them who’ve built their mud nests and fly out together in dark murmurations over the water.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij95Grz3nx6XjaYcmkezksiWNPZvC3TVlklzsumioTKlLU91JIRo0xaPBrWsu4vWR0obFAEfNZT6GmLYrK2XL2wMGKtARtd067JUg-7wocepQ0psouOpiR0VKXu50JKvdf1lUXqA2j1oU/s768/Fern%2526DaveNomadland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij95Grz3nx6XjaYcmkezksiWNPZvC3TVlklzsumioTKlLU91JIRo0xaPBrWsu4vWR0obFAEfNZT6GmLYrK2XL2wMGKtARtd067JUg-7wocepQ0psouOpiR0VKXu50JKvdf1lUXqA2j1oU/s200/Fern%2526DaveNomadland.jpg"/></a></div>One of my favorite moments in the film is when Fern is in her van alone late at night, staring at a wallet-sized photograph of her late husband, who we soon learn had himself died a difficult and relatively early death. With just a few changing glances that shift quietly across her face, McDormand conveys their entire relationship in a way that few actors could do. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Fern’s fixed resolve to live “houseless” on the road is a result of her unresolved grief for him, a refusal to move on from a life and a landscape that have been permanently shattered, instead preferring to reside inside that endlessly broken present as a ghost, wondering why the world can’t just return to being the way it was when things were fine. She does receive an opportunity at having a stable new home through another drifter, Dave (David Straithairn, sweetly reliable), whose son and daughter-in-law have just given him his first grandchild, for whom he retreats from living his nomadic life. Fern visits them at their idyllic home and stays in their comfortably appointed guest room, with an open invitation from their family to stay for much longer, but she chooses to return to sleeping in her van instead and then departs early one morning without saying goodbye, after watching Dave and his son play the piano together late at night and silently realizing that she feels like an intruder in their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBXeDPGY_f6F6vknUHYzCZDvOU4hv1B5VJlehOcTAbVNLn1qgvq3K_pAEuotmfyIZliqGtm3WiUQt3wCV7JnzVGYXmJoydN79dwq1VgSoi9pHJ_JyEqNYYKKcOU3H-TxAKka0uGlVhCxY/s1200/NomadlandLantern.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBXeDPGY_f6F6vknUHYzCZDvOU4hv1B5VJlehOcTAbVNLn1qgvq3K_pAEuotmfyIZliqGtm3WiUQt3wCV7JnzVGYXmJoydN79dwq1VgSoi9pHJ_JyEqNYYKKcOU3H-TxAKka0uGlVhCxY/s200/NomadlandLantern.jpg"/></a></div></div>The subject of suicide arises at two crucial points in the movie. The first is when Linda May tells Fern about the lowest point of her own despair, when she considered turning on the gas and drinking an entire bottle of alcohol, deciding that if she woke up, she’d light a cigarette to blow up everything and end her own life permanently. But compassion took over when Linda May knew she couldn’t do that to her two small dogs, and therefore she couldn’t do that to herself either. The film’s delicately sunlit and purely emotional climax is the second pivotal mention of suicide, when a wise and gray-bearded RV lifestyle guru named Bob Wells shares with Fern how he lost his son five years before, when his son tragically ended his own life at the age of 33. As someone who, at age 47, hasn’t really wanted to be alive for the past 25 years or so now myself, but who has continued to endure that feeling and wander somewhat aimlessly as a kind of living suicide, I related easily to <i>Nomadland</i>, and particularly to that central aspect of the film. I’m sure that there are plenty of other people who can’t relate to that or find it to be self-pitying, and therefore they may not like or might even outright dislike this movie. Maybe they’re the lucky ones.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-67023895969505375772021-01-01T03:30:00.017-05:002021-02-02T15:50:46.710-05:00Three Favorite Films of 2020<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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In a year as bizarre and unusual for cinema as 2020 was, writing my usual year-end post about my favorite films of the year was more of a challenging task this time around. In past years, I’ve written about five or six favorite movies annually. With cinemas closed and new film releases postponed for much of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, I was able (and also fortunate) to see and determine three favorite new movies this year. Actually, the most challenging part was not being able to watch nearly as many films at the cinema as I normally would. Moviegoing has been a weekly, life-sustaining habit for me for almost three decades now. In a typical year, I’ve seen at least one or two films at the cinema each week, sometimes even more, averaging somewhere around 75 to 100 movies at the cinema per year. With cinemas here in New England open only in the first quarter and final quarter of 2020, I saw somewhere between 25 and 30 movies at cinemas, so only a third of what I’d see in a standard year. To get myself through this year’s midsection, I watched movies at drive-in theaters up in Maine and down on Cape Cod almost every weekend, though only two of those were new releases (<i>Tenet</i> and <i>Bill & Ted Face the Music</i>). Most of the rest were retro screenings of movies that I loved from my childhood and teenage years, and I wrote a few blog posts and poems about several of those this past summer: <i>The Goonies</i>, <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i>, and the original 1978 <i>Superman</i>, among others.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFvCA6Haqh1MteovkaUEqSsUWnS2sEThfnFXchSVrZ5wB425d0ibWNhBjnPq4Ha8k_rN-Qr0DIuz4Pq9nFJqzwpjF5voJ9Cdv1sYEgFbQDsPYiaiYx75UhHDZ6Hww5YLjmbtKRzUfCzaA/s2048/FirstCow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFvCA6Haqh1MteovkaUEqSsUWnS2sEThfnFXchSVrZ5wB425d0ibWNhBjnPq4Ha8k_rN-Qr0DIuz4Pq9nFJqzwpjF5voJ9Cdv1sYEgFbQDsPYiaiYx75UhHDZ6Hww5YLjmbtKRzUfCzaA/s200/FirstCow.jpg"/></a></div>Kelly Reichardt’s <i>First Cow</i> was one of the last movies that I saw before the lockdown began in March, in a special advance screening at Harvard Film Archive, with Reichardt in attendance for a conversation and Q&A after the film. That was on March 9th, and details about the screening changed throughout the day as concerns about the pandemic set in. By the time I arrived for the screening, it was limited to 100 attendees so that audience members could easily distance themselves around the auditorium. I knew while I was watching it that <i>First Cow</i> would be my favorite movie of 2020, even while having no idea at that point that so few new movies would be forthcoming for the remainder of the year. A friend of mine sitting behind me who helps to run the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline expressed concern that a shutdown of only two weeks would make it difficult for the organization to survive, at a moment of uncertainty when we just didn’t know what the rest of the year would have in store. Even Kelly Reichardt voiced some surprise and uncertainty about the future just as the dire global situation had begun to unfold.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<i>First Cow</i> opens with a long shot of a present-day shipping vessel passing through a sound in Oregon, and a young woman (Alia Shawkat) walking her dog in a woodland area nearby. As her dog sniffs around and digs in the tall grass, she soon finds herself silently unearthing by hand the buried skeletons of two men who had lived and died there in the 1820s, during the early settler period in the Pacific Northwest, prior to the start of the California Gold Rush. Because it’s a shallow unmarked grave, we have an early sense that their shared deaths were tragic, as the film gently shifts to the scene of a woodland settlement two centuries before. Of course, the opening is also a metaphor for the kind of archaeological and historical excavation that Reichardt will herself be undertaking as the film’s director (she co-wrote the screenplay with her frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, adapting it from his 2004 novel <i>The Half-Life</i>).</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtMc1zunSX02MFxJ_JkV5QhKoUWDaILNfg9brEs2fXc663E4IZbEvNiLV5kPJn8CzjYRr351FDs1uVvzxdi5SKDE2ETxVnYY6vfBdrdmDrpvnK1LVwcMKC55tCB-OMzQgnLryoMtLuWEg/s1763/FirstCowCookie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtMc1zunSX02MFxJ_JkV5QhKoUWDaILNfg9brEs2fXc663E4IZbEvNiLV5kPJn8CzjYRr351FDs1uVvzxdi5SKDE2ETxVnYY6vfBdrdmDrpvnK1LVwcMKC55tCB-OMzQgnLryoMtLuWEg/s200/FirstCowCookie.jpg"/></a></div>The story centers on Cookie (John Magaro, so moving in my favorite performance of 2020), otherwise known as Otis Figowitz, who’s the designated cook for an encampment of itinerant, rough-and-tumble fur trappers. While foraging for wild mushrooms in the forest, Cookie comes across another young man named King-Lu (Orion Lee, quietly magnetic), a Chinese immigrant who’s hiding out in the woods to escape a gang of Russian vigilantes who’ve been pursuing him. The two form a quick bond and devise a plan to make some money together by selling handmade donut-like pastries called oily cakes to the random assortment of drifters who wander through their encampment. To do so properly, they also pilfer milk each night from the first cow to be brought to the settlement, sneaking through the dark to a meadow beside the house of the Chief Factor (Toby Jones). “History isn’t here yet,” King-Lu accurately remarks, encouraging Cookie to take advantage of their window of opportunity to benefit from a timely, well-placed business start-up. The pair’s cakes become an overnight sensation, literally. As their bounty of earnings grows, the narrative expands to include complex themes of colonization and capitalism, specifically the notion of property, embodied in an image late in the film of the first cow (who’s listed in the film’s credits as Evie) eventually encircled by a homely wooden picket fence, after the midnight milk thefts by Cookie and King-Lu go terribly awry and their cover is blown.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimzPArKr6wNHLcPv74y35xEMF4vSNw7T9uGMn46Ilao4m-wFZ3cBexgVM8fBNBhbOI9lx_MLeQwX9g-MfN8g4ChzH98AhXSa7_XywqSgEFvYFbrYwb-WqaISZ_YXl7Fxh2VaZ3RT16ufs/s970/FirstCowKing-Lu%2526Cookie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimzPArKr6wNHLcPv74y35xEMF4vSNw7T9uGMn46Ilao4m-wFZ3cBexgVM8fBNBhbOI9lx_MLeQwX9g-MfN8g4ChzH98AhXSa7_XywqSgEFvYFbrYwb-WqaISZ_YXl7Fxh2VaZ3RT16ufs/s200/FirstCowKing-Lu%2526Cookie.jpg"/></a></div>The film’s final half-hour is a suspenseful chase driven by the cruel hierarchies of class and rank, one that finds King-Lu trying to escape downriver in a canoe and Cookie healing from an injury under the care of two Native Americans in a tiny shack, which Reichardt said she and her crew referred to as the “ghost hut.” Even this extended chase scene, however, takes on the laidback and tender tone of the rest of the movie (accompanied by William Tyler’s delicate, atmospheric score), as the separated characters move carefully through the autumnal hues of the landscape, with any violence lurking at the periphery yet also held at a deliberate distance. The film’s ultimate focus is the authentic love and friendship of its two central characters, once they’ve been reunited in what will be their final resting place, and I was very grateful to have the movie’s last words, “I’ve got you,” echoing in my mind throughout the months following the screening.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR_S0a6lfJNt1Aj9VYHemnduIMuU9-4VFPJmNgpp-ukKjMAqipyCsQbmOf7QGk-0TZdat23myFeKetE2WBvks14909-rRAF6Ybl3gIo4uEoa9FZ5c-eVGWzGDKrR8GkpysT04CKqeVrpw/s900/Kajillionaire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR_S0a6lfJNt1Aj9VYHemnduIMuU9-4VFPJmNgpp-ukKjMAqipyCsQbmOf7QGk-0TZdat23myFeKetE2WBvks14909-rRAF6Ybl3gIo4uEoa9FZ5c-eVGWzGDKrR8GkpysT04CKqeVrpw/s200/Kajillionaire.jpg"/></a></div>Because cinemas around Boston would then be shuttered almost half the year until around Labor Day weekend, Miranda July’s <i>Kajillionaire</i> was the movie that I looked forward to seeing the most over the next several hard months, though I was unsure of whether or not it would ever actually happen. Fortunately, it was one of the few new films that didn’t get delayed by an indefinitely postponed release. I drove much further north to see it at a cinema in Auburn, Maine, and I was the sole viewer in a gigantic auditorium of about 250 seats on an overcast Saturday afternoon, one of a number of private screenings that I was able to enjoy in 2020, even if seeing movies in empty cinemas became increasingly eerie over time. Miranda July’s previous film, <i>The Future</i>, was my favorite movie back in 2011, and <i>Kajillionaire</i> continues to stake out her distinctive cinematic terrain, where strange characterizations and awkward comedic moments directly confront life’s deeper mysteries and conundrums. From the initial scenes, we know that we’re back in her world, a universe with its own individual terms, parameters, and boundaries.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhU_nt8_aikLZKzFsCI6k5Pn8Nsl0VPuDfQadTB1hc8r5NDNkPComeqLgpo6O66zI7GEGEeZNvIUu-ebAbyJmiQyALkYy1ucN4UlN1CNDoxLaaOvaA8BKYdnYJl0JXTwE2nhsOF_7cyrg/s2048/KajillionaireBusStop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhU_nt8_aikLZKzFsCI6k5Pn8Nsl0VPuDfQadTB1hc8r5NDNkPComeqLgpo6O66zI7GEGEeZNvIUu-ebAbyJmiQyALkYy1ucN4UlN1CNDoxLaaOvaA8BKYdnYJl0JXTwE2nhsOF_7cyrg/s200/KajillionaireBusStop.jpg"/></a></div>July’s films are like post-industrial, apocalyptic fables in which enigmatic signs and events arise, ranging from magical to threatening. In <i>The Future</i>, a character is able to stop time and bring the planet to a standstill, while the moon speaks in the voice of an old man who appears elsewhere in the film. <i>Kajillionaire</i>, set in present-day downtown Los Angeles, is disrupted by a series of earthquake tremors that cause the characters to react as everything on the screen trembles and shakes for a few tense moments, culminating in a transformational cosmic blackout later in the movie, during which we the audience members float through outer space as dialogue continues undeterred on the film’s soundtrack. These devices border playfully on a kind of magical realism yet manage to come across as thoroughly integral to the action and movement of July’s films.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4F_RlXcsT0V-d2bUYccGFtu_YS2hosjN-wqvKFi8kvE9i8PbumzEEhQ6YdtSPs9RFpQC9_hLyuXF4lfwOfqhfzz3kF4P8jz9Y-Nsvbc5SyoqjT2wRVfuk-uSAvSkdatlxaiIdfG53Ew/s800/KajillionaireBubbles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4F_RlXcsT0V-d2bUYccGFtu_YS2hosjN-wqvKFi8kvE9i8PbumzEEhQ6YdtSPs9RFpQC9_hLyuXF4lfwOfqhfzz3kF4P8jz9Y-Nsvbc5SyoqjT2wRVfuk-uSAvSkdatlxaiIdfG53Ew/s200/KajillionaireBubbles.jpg"/></a></div>The movie follows the Dyne family, with their comically stoic 26-year-old daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood in a manically controlled tightrope walk of a role, including some trans vibes) being taught the tricks of petty crime — a trade in which the family does <i>not</i> excel — by serious contenders for the worst set of parents ever to appear in any film (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger, both alternately hilarious and trenchant in masterful swerves). The trio of small-time crooks con, scam, and steal their way into post office boxes, airplanes, and strangers’ homes in an attempt to keep paying the rent on the tiny office cubicles where they live cramped together in a disused space adjoining a bubble factory, where the rear wall leaks thick pinkish foam that must be scooped up with plastic trash buckets every afternoon at exactly the same time, in order to avoid getting drowned out of their makeshift home.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzOYySGWk1ahmSv_TZidsvIQMaUjpIwEMzU1UshVp2mRPIEBc0RcjponlY3duNbh6svBlBBngAu46hrmQgAv_LjaxZb4PIvCTUYu2pjS5Uo-vT6Y-uepUZrwXhnLEvMm6PZ0XkrpyCaXM/s1280/KajillionaireKiss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzOYySGWk1ahmSv_TZidsvIQMaUjpIwEMzU1UshVp2mRPIEBc0RcjponlY3duNbh6svBlBBngAu46hrmQgAv_LjaxZb4PIvCTUYu2pjS5Uo-vT6Y-uepUZrwXhnLEvMm6PZ0XkrpyCaXM/s200/KajillionaireKiss.jpg"/></a></div>During a quick detour to New York and back by air, on their return flight the family meets Melanie (Gina Rodriguez, fantastic and perfectly upbeat), who joins their heists based on her love for movies like <i>Ocean’s Eleven</i> and its ensuing sequels. Gradually, Melanie’s position on the team and her genuine affection for the totally resistant, repressed, and (until now) unloved Old Dolio, begin to challenge the authoritative hold that Old Dolio’s parents have had over her entire life and personality. Since her childhood, they’ve split the profits of every con equally three ways, so of course that’s how she inherently views every transaction, a mathematical equation that pays off grandly in multiple ways at the film’s irrepressibly romantic and liberating conclusion. Most importantly, though, the outwardly wacky surfaces of July’s films ironically allow her to get closer to difficult truths than most other artists. For instance, there’s a pivotal scene midway through the film when the Dyne family and Melanie pretend to be the actual family members of a man whose home they’ve infiltrated for a scam and who also happens to be dying alone in his bedroom. He wants to hear their familial sounds out in the living room and kitchen, asking them to watch television and clink silverware, to give him a sense of not being alone during his final moments. As someone who hasn’t had a family for thirty years now, I felt the gravity of that scene keenly, and even if it was beyond sad to witness, I also admire how Miranda July and her actors could pull off the demanding balancing act of evoking an otherwise obscured feeling to put me there in such an immediate way.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht-gv7yHx8UshOFOsuTqAoO1A_SxKCwQFUGnHSqZF0cvdnx1l96lCAX6qvbNeiD9ewX9iO1xWLrcZ_dlgZ8bpFtT1OPoaqCIhjjF6xzr6eNqr7xMY-nZTNdP2Xr2HAvNuEiEiiGmHwiio/s2048/NeverRarelySometimesAlways.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht-gv7yHx8UshOFOsuTqAoO1A_SxKCwQFUGnHSqZF0cvdnx1l96lCAX6qvbNeiD9ewX9iO1xWLrcZ_dlgZ8bpFtT1OPoaqCIhjjF6xzr6eNqr7xMY-nZTNdP2Xr2HAvNuEiEiiGmHwiio/s200/NeverRarelySometimesAlways.jpg"/></a></div>Finally, Eliza Hittman’s brave and essential drama <i>Never Rarely Sometimes Always</i> rounds out my short list of favorite films from 2020. (Chloé Zhao’s <i>Nomadland</i> may have made my year-end list as well, but its cinematic release was pushed back to February of 2021, so I haven’t yet been able to watch that one.) I loved the astute realism and grit of Hittman’s previous film <i>Beach Rats</i> when I saw it at the Provincetown Film Festival back in 2017, and her latest movie secures her place as one of our most promising younger American filmmakers. The well-timed and urgent storyline of <i>Never Rarely Sometimes Always</i> concerns the unwanted teenage pregnancy of a 17-year-old woman in high school and her right to choose an abortion, despite her surroundings in conservative suburban (and borderline rural) Pennsylvania, where parental consent is required to terminate the pregnancy that her parents are completely unaware of. Sidney Flanigan’s performance as the sullen and determined Autumn feels naturalistic, precise, and absorbing throughout, anchoring the movie and Hittman’s screenplay in a way that draws viewers directly into her character’s very personal and painful dilemma.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz334NcPwWuiaKNd7RVUkjtXw85TG_pTK2dLEJI89_xmDh57Xd-cfBB7wUlgpe3I54NpsgCIxfgpmzXKZiNMudklTBLrq1UhiTQVKT4oH2gaUBk5Lza_Nv-CS1HHiJNtu0Dpro6wKkWbo/s1500/NeverRarelyBakery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz334NcPwWuiaKNd7RVUkjtXw85TG_pTK2dLEJI89_xmDh57Xd-cfBB7wUlgpe3I54NpsgCIxfgpmzXKZiNMudklTBLrq1UhiTQVKT4oH2gaUBk5Lza_Nv-CS1HHiJNtu0Dpro6wKkWbo/s200/NeverRarelyBakery.jpg"/></a></div>Equally impressive and also instrumental to the narrative is Talia Ryder’s portrayal of Skylar, Autumn’s supportive cousin, who accompanies her on a bus ride to New York City, where the two are shuffled from a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brooklyn back across the river to the clinic in Manhattan. The film becomes a bleak, picaresque journey for the two young women, who are left to fend for themselves over two unforeseen nights in the city with relatively little money (and then no money at all after the balance of the abortion is paid for by cash stolen from their job as supermarket cashiers back home), dragging their bulky rolling suitcase from Port Authority, through the maze of New York’s subway system, and then back again, dodging various potential pitfalls and dangerous run-ins along the way. The story teeters on the verge of becoming a darker tragedy without ever settling there, so that we worry about the characters and their safety almost constantly, without ever feeling that they’re imperiled. We want to try to protect them but realize that they’ll have to navigate the city and the problems that they encounter mostly on their own.</o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpc5n1e4UHDSwvwpSNcChif1iopwIMrNcWxfCCyNZbAXkl_OAxeGRtEr-nzjKke_zyfU9rfaSzFf-fbEK72LNsN-dF3wQEGyDfxq4_sdnHdqznfvDyCZDZ4PEIi-5bYjfI6yTBUzYAKCM/s997/NeverRarelyAutumn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpc5n1e4UHDSwvwpSNcChif1iopwIMrNcWxfCCyNZbAXkl_OAxeGRtEr-nzjKke_zyfU9rfaSzFf-fbEK72LNsN-dF3wQEGyDfxq4_sdnHdqznfvDyCZDZ4PEIi-5bYjfI6yTBUzYAKCM/s200/NeverRarelyAutumn.jpg"/></a></div>At the movie’s emotional core is the most unflinching scene of any movie from 2020, when the down-to-earth yet sisterly Planned Parenthood counselor at the Manhattan clinic asks Autumn, prior to her abortion procedure, a series of required questions on her relationships. Autumn’s hesitant replies, long silences, and heartbreaking expressions tell us all that we need to know about how her pregnancy came about. The film’s title comes from the four multiple-choice answers that Autumn can give in response to each question. Hittman’s writing and directorial approach in the scene are exactly as they should be, point-blank and matter-of-fact, to the extent that it’s the pivotal fulcrum of the film and Sidney Flanigan’s characterization of Autumn. Up to that point in the movie, we can feel her holding everything back as a way of holding herself together, and this is the key moment when she’s finally able to let go and acknowledge her own level of internal distress, at least as much as she can as someone who’s so afraid at such a young age. Then, the scene gives way to a vision of female solidarity as Autumn undergoes her abortion procedure with the women who work at the clinic by her side.</o:p></span></p><p
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</br>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-16806311161862406372020-11-01T15:27:00.006-05:002020-11-01T18:59:24.982-05:00The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifATEVRHdhRwtHkjNcl2cjSEuYvjMrtQYAoNKpxx0oKwgS5CTaiForS5DXyn8kx4TWQwelF0482fY5KjIOdSK6BZLBy1GyjhFv_fW_T2CkXuxCsiU7nj-Xg85p_Bc1kDukeo02ai70ilE/s386/ShiningPoster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifATEVRHdhRwtHkjNcl2cjSEuYvjMrtQYAoNKpxx0oKwgS5CTaiForS5DXyn8kx4TWQwelF0482fY5KjIOdSK6BZLBy1GyjhFv_fW_T2CkXuxCsiU7nj-Xg85p_Bc1kDukeo02ai70ilE/s200/ShiningPoster.jpg"/></a></div>A couple of weeks ago, I attended a Halloween-time showing of <i>The Shining</i>, a revival of the Turner Classic Movies “event” screening, thankfully on a colossal screen at a remote cinema on the coast of Maine. There was only one other viewer in the theater, though fleetingly, a middle-aged woman who bolted out the door early on, as soon as Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance viciously lashed out at Shelley Duvall’s Wendy with an arch stream of verbal vitriol. I’m not sure if that woman even saw me sitting in a dark corner of the back row, so perhaps thinking she was alone with that particular film at the cinema was just too much for her to bear? More room for me then, and Kubrick’s psychological horror masterpiece (though it never rests snugly in that genre for very long) allows for plenty of interpretive space of its own. Critics have surmised that it’s about everything from colonization of the Americas to overwhelming addiction that hinders an artist from creating. Considering that the film was released in 1980, at the height of what I’ve come to refer to as the “divorce generation,” I’d say that the film is about the dread and anxiety provoked by how many young kids’ family units, including my own, were rapidly falling apart at right around that same time.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOdy6E5guffEchrxqUwsaD9N3ufoo1SpBzXxjN-1sqMyjfTFKzghNZGaBXov-VIQOs7AXyJkzGqJVRO2OnBO0LGrayPwunWunr-7Nhj13klPASk87cz9gNPEUR4LP46zZZJ6fvx_eTa6Y/s1024/ShiningHeresJohnny.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOdy6E5guffEchrxqUwsaD9N3ufoo1SpBzXxjN-1sqMyjfTFKzghNZGaBXov-VIQOs7AXyJkzGqJVRO2OnBO0LGrayPwunWunr-7Nhj13klPASk87cz9gNPEUR4LP46zZZJ6fvx_eTa6Y/s200/ShiningHeresJohnny.jpg"/></a></div>Nearly the entire film takes place inside the sprawling Overlook Hotel, a notoriously claustrophobic setting, despite how spaciously Kubrick designed almost every interior that we see in the film. The deceptively vast spaces are clearly intentional, highlighting the impossibility of intimacy between the characters, while also forcing the audience into a kind of distant intimacy with the characters inside those spaces. It’s one of the few films that transports us, indeed envelops us, so fully and immersively within its imagined, hallucinatory world. The discomfort is palpable throughout every room and winding corridor of this seemingly warm hotel as a blizzard rages outside; the Overlook is a place that’s supposed to be a home away from home, though it never feels like one. The fractured family that inhabits it for a winter, under the guise of caretakers, is rightly Kubrick’s focus, which is perhaps why Stephen King felt that Kubrick’s adaptation was the wrong fit for his 1977 novel. The scenes that shift to the typical trappings of horror — rivers of blood cascading from the elevators, the impish ghosts of identical young sisters — have now long retained their value as camp as much as horror, and they distract from the central trio of characters, momentary diversions that audiences have fixated on at the expense of the film’s core family drama. Ultimately, because Kubrick must acknowledge his source material, King’s novel haunts the film that Kubrick tried to wrest away from it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjkNhAbeEPbI1GeHPwwAHREwJGn9-Dto3O0ZwXgiwLtJWJwqH64j0Cz5Q7hV8DRfvlxuaQnzPUHzTgokhWN6kMnjWgD_iK8h0IeiusEBS-U_mEQRF_f0PdiSj8fBVW55ZXYt4yFrZnHik/s440/ShiningJackTypewriter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjkNhAbeEPbI1GeHPwwAHREwJGn9-Dto3O0ZwXgiwLtJWJwqH64j0Cz5Q7hV8DRfvlxuaQnzPUHzTgokhWN6kMnjWgD_iK8h0IeiusEBS-U_mEQRF_f0PdiSj8fBVW55ZXYt4yFrZnHik/s200/ShiningJackTypewriter.jpg"/></a></div>The theme of impending divorce is indeed explicit in King’s book, and while Kubrick’s approach to the topic is more implicit, it’s clearly the one thing on Jack Torrance’s mind. Upon the film’s initial release, Jack Nicholson’s performance, along with Shelley Duvall’s, was criticized and even ridiculed for being so far over the top. But it’s also obvious from any scene in which the two actors appear together that Kubrick relentlessly pushed them there and, from accounts of how long and grueling the takes and overall shooting schedule were, intentionally exhausted them into a kind of manic overdrive. The result is a stark and darkly humorous portrait of a mother and father trapped inside a structure that’s driving both of them crazy and that they know can never last. Jack might be attempting to use his “work” of writing a novel as a smoke-screen, providing a form of escape for himself as a charade of “providing” for his wife and child, yet his ruse collapses horrifically when Wendy discovers his hefty manuscript: page upon page upon page of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” endlessly repeated and arranged differently from line to line and paragraph to paragraph.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6zqZWvNbKn5cncFPOGRbClbAIBkm5oAIdcHJJ4aSGRMd8k9i2WXpASwIb31WF5Qe5Ie9wDcclHkEM33ouNlKxaPrz-0XBQUSDoB2P8licue430EWx7qdtN0FUPhupTX9wraSJe2Eg43g/s510/ShiningJackLabyrinth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6zqZWvNbKn5cncFPOGRbClbAIBkm5oAIdcHJJ4aSGRMd8k9i2WXpASwIb31WF5Qe5Ie9wDcclHkEM33ouNlKxaPrz-0XBQUSDoB2P8licue430EWx7qdtN0FUPhupTX9wraSJe2Eg43g/s200/ShiningJackLabyrinth.jpg"/></a></div>That neurotic and empty perfectionism is the primary counterpoint and antithesis to Kubrick’s own rich and full perfectionism that’s become the film’s critical trademark over the past four decades. The performances that he coaxed from the actors within the context of strikingly meticulous visual compositions, all nestled within a semi-mythological framework of the narrative, guaranteed within a few years of the film’s release that its initial critics were wrong, which I’m sure Kubrick knew from the start. His certainty in the ambition of his vision is much of what drives the film itself, as well as what’s secured its enduring popularity. The head-on shot of Jack staring out over the small-scale model of the labyrinth of mazework hedges that lies waiting just outside the hotel is probably the film’s most revealing image. His lordlike gaze is at once imperious and uncertain, with a touch of an early bemused realization of what he’s up against. And the gleefully violent flipside of that image is his later realization, in the film’s drunken and iconic climax, that if he can’t write his way out of the maze of his own alcoholism and insanity and familial entrapment in his unwanted, conscripted role of being a husband and father, then he’ll just have to try to hack his way out of all of it with an ax.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuvqLp7TY37YOCWhm7MulewtAujLmEJQPcKOkoE-z0vRkTtsb7fSr3SCRdc9-RwNbJtx5lIBovEgrcQsmOYidUY7AvxeQUn8Z6ih48ueVctV0QW5HFzINuklyinR_HeCnisTXwar2GLL4/s1280/ShiningGoldRoom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuvqLp7TY37YOCWhm7MulewtAujLmEJQPcKOkoE-z0vRkTtsb7fSr3SCRdc9-RwNbJtx5lIBovEgrcQsmOYidUY7AvxeQUn8Z6ih48ueVctV0QW5HFzINuklyinR_HeCnisTXwar2GLL4/s200/ShiningGoldRoom.jpg"/></a></div>Kubrick’s film plays with time in a way that’s unavoidable in addressing all of this as well. Jack is, of course, at odds with the decades of masculine expectations behind him for how a father is supposed to act, how his worst sin would be to be remiss in caring for the well-being of his wife and his son. It’s a duty that many men in American culture had begun to shrug off by the arrival of the 1970s and early ’80s, in the wake of a sexual revolution that made it clear to them that if the choice to be made was between working day and night as breadwinners and caretakers or sitting alone at the bar to drown their sorrows, then they’d honestly rather just be sitting at the bar. Hence, Jack’s tipsy yet forthright interactions with Lloyd, the bartender in the Gold Room prior to the flashback of the historical ballroom scene and the ghost of the hotel’s former caretaker and waiter Delbert Grady, who’s rumored to have murdered his own wife and children in the hotel, precipitating all of the hauntings of various kinds that transpire throughout the film.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSi4X9AkLocUhcZuYMLeEUgk0zVVMfJAO8AdnrBMo4dtcpedh4eX11wf18CfGxpt6Ul2viLtJ0hKtKG1L5BW2Z4vvpmwYuEkCGzfHXfFsrmB-9LxAkdyXAK-drKAxPUfKiLxsIF_U8eP0/s2048/ShiningDannyApollo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSi4X9AkLocUhcZuYMLeEUgk0zVVMfJAO8AdnrBMo4dtcpedh4eX11wf18CfGxpt6Ul2viLtJ0hKtKG1L5BW2Z4vvpmwYuEkCGzfHXfFsrmB-9LxAkdyXAK-drKAxPUfKiLxsIF_U8eP0/s200/ShiningDannyApollo.jpg"/></a></div>It’s easy to overlook the key role of Danny (Danny Lloyd) in all of this. Jack’s son is gifted with frightening and telepathic abilities that give the film its title. Whether or not he’s too young to intuit everything rationally, he does realize on some level what’s coming, how doomed his family is, how doomed his father is, and what exactly he may need to do in order to salvage something for himself and for his mother, who’s tried her best and sometimes failed to succeed in protecting him. With his mother’s help, he’s able to escape from the confines of the Overlook just prior to Jack’s most dangerous moments. Danny slides his way down a steep snowdrift that’s almost entirely buried the side of the hotel, in one of the most unforgettable images from any of Kubrick’s movies, and from there Danny devises his plan to trap his father in the snow-filled labyrinth that awaits just outside the interior mazelike corridors of the Overlook. We can be liberated from the labyrinth of the family, but only into the far more difficult and potentially equally lethal maze of society and the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLIu0EGCsbCvSQS_v3DDJN0bCd6qs40Y0Oje2kx_R9rakjfWsvTn3EsKEb11HrzwBAB6vkzhjJbnoTSj_cCEdv-rltpBIubdFalg0yst8uur0IvOIo12uZQUZ0hYFCgsSTc06TKELEwGQ/s1432/ShiningDannySnowdrift.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLIu0EGCsbCvSQS_v3DDJN0bCd6qs40Y0Oje2kx_R9rakjfWsvTn3EsKEb11HrzwBAB6vkzhjJbnoTSj_cCEdv-rltpBIubdFalg0yst8uur0IvOIo12uZQUZ0hYFCgsSTc06TKELEwGQ/s200/ShiningDannySnowdrift.jpg"/></a></div>I felt like I knew that labyrinth well the first time I saw Kubrick’s <i>The Shining</i> at the age of nine in 1983, when it aired as ABC’s <i>Friday Night Movie</i> for its network television premiere here in the United States. My parents had divorced several years before, so the idea of the lost father was already quite familiar to me, and all that’s lost as collateral alongside that original archetypal loss. Even at such a young age, I intuitively understood that particular undercurrent of Kubrick’s film. I’ve written elsewhere about that aspect of my childhood and how it shaped my life then, how it continues to shape me over time, so I won’t have much else to add about it here. After Danny loses Jack inside the labyrinth’s twists and turns and again escapes to his survival, and Jack gives up to freeze to death out in the snow, we see a somewhat younger ghost of Jack enshrined in one of the Overlook Hotel’s vintage photographs of a black-tie ballroom celebration of the 4th of July from 1921, reabsorbed among the lineage of the other lost fathers and sons of history. With my own father lost, I knew that I’d always remain somewhat lost, too, while still trying to find myself in the wake of his presence.</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5128479313373199891.post-59396600305972421552020-10-12T00:35:00.022-04:002021-02-02T15:28:52.411-05:006th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 1st - 12th, 2020)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjul7TuHHhpWPTHZvmFct9wwU8q5_Rzym2oWHHAqM4cZnpcKibwxKahQIslr5mcuFZB9nc752ZVkHmVCNq_dNPyJTYVeNIVcD8PVVqtEWwuOdSN3Tq0icxAN3kr53z2h8-PhHHZ6PnTZPw/s664/GlobeDocs2020.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjul7TuHHhpWPTHZvmFct9wwU8q5_Rzym2oWHHAqM4cZnpcKibwxKahQIslr5mcuFZB9nc752ZVkHmVCNq_dNPyJTYVeNIVcD8PVVqtEWwuOdSN3Tq0icxAN3kr53z2h8-PhHHZ6PnTZPw/s200/GlobeDocs2020.png"/></a></div>This year’s GlobeDocs film festival, which also happened to be the festival’s biggest year so far with over 35 films, was my first time attending a film festival virtually. While I did miss the event of attending screenings in person, there’s something to be said for being able to concentrate on documentaries while watching them alone at home, especially when writing reviews of a number of films after watching them for several days in a row. This year’s excellent roster of selections was no less powerful for being viewed remotely, and the Q&A sessions between <i>Boston Globe</i> correspondents and filmmakers, both live-streamed and pre-recorded, were wonderful supplements to the films themselves. The documentaries that I saw ranged widely in topics from indigenous rights and the global climate crisis to the first gay rugby league, from school shootings and gun control to the inner workings of a city hall in a major metropolis.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNWWEHQ7rXXnaToY79ELsoVxoBpLHoUiPdpB0ugPuV-3IL2KXn3z9KyQLBbEmXaa28dbUvY1oVyUC2_GGGNLwJzP0rZVlkzI-iXaCjpvvTTD2vvG46MYxpqnL0iscJBzZxtoviY2MxWUw/s1024/TheLastIceDocumentary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNWWEHQ7rXXnaToY79ELsoVxoBpLHoUiPdpB0ugPuV-3IL2KXn3z9KyQLBbEmXaa28dbUvY1oVyUC2_GGGNLwJzP0rZVlkzI-iXaCjpvvTTD2vvG46MYxpqnL0iscJBzZxtoviY2MxWUw/s200/TheLastIceDocumentary.jpg"/></a></div><i>National Geographic</i>’s documentary <i>The Last Ice</i>, directed by Scott Ressler, focuses on a remote but crucial geopolitical area in terms of climate change and globalization: the far northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, an Arctic archipelago that’s still inhabited today by the native Inuit people. Bordering on Greenland across Baffin Bay, Nunavut is a contentious zone for several reasons. As Arctic sea ice continues to recede, its shipping lanes provide quicker and more direct access to North American trade routes, with over 900 industries currently vying for position, mostly from Russia and China, polluting the pristine channels of the North Pole in the wake of massive icebreaking vessels and cargo ships. Not only does the Arctic wildlife suffer as a result, but the native Inuit people, who often make their living by hunting, have also found themselves at the center of a historical struggle for their rights in their homeland, led by Aboriginal Canadian politician John Amagoalik, who’s often referred to as the “Father of Nunavut.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAu6etbI5XZ2K1ngxTGI-e7xAnXsed_878U-ZYzLvb07twynarPjUqrFwiLV2eU9ZzMNaQ6PBt6Kjh6pFC_qlBylQ6Dae_tvdlryB5LgiokitWo3oC-OVNwi88XsIoDhu9FPOTX_uFhmk/s889/TheLastIceAleq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAu6etbI5XZ2K1ngxTGI-e7xAnXsed_878U-ZYzLvb07twynarPjUqrFwiLV2eU9ZzMNaQ6PBt6Kjh6pFC_qlBylQ6Dae_tvdlryB5LgiokitWo3oC-OVNwi88XsIoDhu9FPOTX_uFhmk/s200/TheLastIceAleq.jpg"/></a></div>Two younger subjects ground the documentary firmly in today’s contemporary realities as well and speak to a current audience among the newer generation. Aleqatsiaq Peary, a musician and hunter, is a descendant of Robert Peary, who’s believed to be the first person to reach the North Pole early in the 20th century. Aleq describes his time growing up on the remote terrain of Nunavut, as well as his unfulfilling education in Denmark, from which he returned in order to resume his hunting life, only to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease a few years later. Despite his disability, he continues to support the ancestral connection of the Inuit to the land and the ritual of hunting. Maatalii Okalik, who lived for a time in Ottawa and also returned to Nunavut after ending an abusive relationship, movingly and eloquently recounts how dreams of her ancestors guided her through a month-long depression that convinced her to reconnect with her native people in her home territory, where she served as President of Canada’s National Inuit Youth Council. The documentary ends on a note of both uncertainty and hope, in looking toward a future where indigenous people persist in trying to retain political control over their own lands.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPCn1feNARL35x5MraQQ24SVe9FlTrSFmbkFvaeCoMBTYIeTLw6XiCd9yC0Cn3DV471fWM9bnZgPahXJ1Ektlji8-NCeoZjjJpXvEqfbN9bbY46vdatlWF6E4MtjSYg0EEliexg0C4oZ8/s889/SteelersDocumentary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPCn1feNARL35x5MraQQ24SVe9FlTrSFmbkFvaeCoMBTYIeTLw6XiCd9yC0Cn3DV471fWM9bnZgPahXJ1Ektlji8-NCeoZjjJpXvEqfbN9bbY46vdatlWF6E4MtjSYg0EEliexg0C4oZ8/s200/SteelersDocumentary.jpg"/></a></div>First-time documentary director Eammon Ashton-Atkinson’s <i>Steelers</i> celebrates the world’s first gay rugby club, the Kings Cross Steelers, founded in London in 1995, as they pursue a victory at the annual Bingham Cup world tournament of gay rugby in Amsterdam nearly 25 years later in 2018. Under the expert and careful guidance of their female coach, Nic Evans, herself a lesbian rugby player, the team meets its many challenges head-on, giving its team members both a sense of community and a way to bond with other gay men while overcoming individual obstacles. The director was also a member of the Kings Cross Steelers until an injury sidelined him and compelled him to pick up his video camera to make this rousing documentary.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipTLiKl8JPvDWe8befeQ9lv-NKQmNsRaPAj6gGngcRrbVFSVgqd9JoFoyUb7l2AcwgMRjTNyjAO0vxVy38HtFUuu19wKb8QYK_5FZ6M2eGeAEeJ1QELTn9gUSL2WgF18cbsp-0q9OZZso/s720/SteelersTeam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipTLiKl8JPvDWe8befeQ9lv-NKQmNsRaPAj6gGngcRrbVFSVgqd9JoFoyUb7l2AcwgMRjTNyjAO0vxVy38HtFUuu19wKb8QYK_5FZ6M2eGeAEeJ1QELTn9gUSL2WgF18cbsp-0q9OZZso/s200/SteelersTeam.jpg"/></a></div>The film concentrates mainly on the journeys of four members of the team: director Ashton-Atkinson, coach Evans (whose final season with the team coincided with the making of the documentary), Simon Jones, who struggled through a lengthy depression after he came out to a straight friend he’d been in love with who’d initially rejected him, and Drew McDowell, a club promoter and drag queen on the side. A fun stretch of the documentary finds Drew organizing and hosting an annual drag event at the huge gay club Heaven in Charing Cross in central London, for which most of the Steelers appear in drag themselves for a competition and to do some fundraising. An especially touching aspect of the documentary moves Nic Evans to tears when she describes the hesitancy of many gay rugby players who are successful and confident in so many other areas of their lives but have a harder time feeling at home as gay men on the rugby pitch, and how she pushes them to overcome that sense of inadequacy in athletic arenas.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ykOEMrCM3uQwXeZGpDZt9Qxluc5GdcbkIAIKmfGq4t_JhlCP_fQyOo_6i__s5Re_3MgDHOU0BeWf4JlsFvRZFM5eAKrdCTpEtxrzQyimx1JGOeDv0OOGFUBsVz0u-eBhTQO8qXigkSs/s800/UsKidsDocumentary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ykOEMrCM3uQwXeZGpDZt9Qxluc5GdcbkIAIKmfGq4t_JhlCP_fQyOo_6i__s5Re_3MgDHOU0BeWf4JlsFvRZFM5eAKrdCTpEtxrzQyimx1JGOeDv0OOGFUBsVz0u-eBhTQO8qXigkSs/s200/UsKidsDocumentary.jpg"/></a></div><i>Us Kids</i>, directed by Kim A. Snyder, powerfully traces the months following the school shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14th, 2018. It’s impossible to watch this documentary and not feel tremendous admiration for the young people who rallied together to pull their community through the grieving process and then demanded immediate change from our government on a nationwide scale, culminating in the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., and a cross-country tour to turn the tide in municipalities where gun violence is in desperate need of being brought under control. Familiar faces like Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, and Sam Fuentes are matched by their own uncompromising personalities as they spearhead demonstrations and debates across a wide swath of our deeply divided (and increasingly divisive) United States of America.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn10hNUPaz1ATY23o33xietedBGl3DqNSQNGGlf8cNVvjp4O4gH_6MBWIDhlw-DEETio_QSLJeHU3BexUsgmzVNr8Uw5nCjAFPyFAOPmxgIr2mYeeMu88a1rBPMWhbghGwFYifQKQmowg/s1100/UsKidsDavidHogg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn10hNUPaz1ATY23o33xietedBGl3DqNSQNGGlf8cNVvjp4O4gH_6MBWIDhlw-DEETio_QSLJeHU3BexUsgmzVNr8Uw5nCjAFPyFAOPmxgIr2mYeeMu88a1rBPMWhbghGwFYifQKQmowg/s200/UsKidsDavidHogg.jpg"/></a></div>These brave students’ forthright honesty about the traumas that they’ve endured and the deep authenticity of their activism easily dispel any notions that they were lured into being political symbols by national media outlets. Their aims and tactics are specific, as are the desired results. The heartbreaking footage of students’ speeches from the March for Our Lives events unleashes a torrent of sorrow and frustration at the tragic failure of adults in our culture to protect young people’s lives in their own schools and communities. We see David Hogg intelligently strategizing how to build the itinerary for their cross-country tour, in order to visit locations where they can persuade citizens to vote out of office any politicians who’ve taken campaign funding from the National Rifle Association. Very much to the credit of these determined kids, their strategy succeeds almost uniformly, proof that politicians should totally fear the blue wave of the younger generation. After the exhaustions of their travels to places all around the country, I’ll remember the peaceful image of David and Emma coasting on an airboat in the Everglades, the one landscape on the map of Florida that’s undisturbed by shootings and gun violence.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMLm2fh4yUx49XbTR1czI8MmErMohhwkLWwPw4uw2KIMMgUEGiLcR9Qa0HbxH3TXyzhZQzTR1okjAwWzgGnxffyky-V55I1K0fanwL6jufFe9_dZX0IuPUCtFt-GFHmFFC_depu_qzkj4/s1896/CityHallDocumentary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMLm2fh4yUx49XbTR1czI8MmErMohhwkLWwPw4uw2KIMMgUEGiLcR9Qa0HbxH3TXyzhZQzTR1okjAwWzgGnxffyky-V55I1K0fanwL6jufFe9_dZX0IuPUCtFt-GFHmFFC_depu_qzkj4/s200/CityHallDocumentary.jpg"/></a></div>Finally, I was excited to see Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary <i>City Hall</i>, an inside view of government services provided in the city of Boston, where I’ve lived for over 27 years now. Clocking in at just over four and a half hours, the film provides a comprehensive picture, to say the least, especially in its heroic portrait of our current mayor, Marty Walsh, who’s successfully led the city on all levels since 2013. The son of working-class Irish-American immigrants, Mayor Walsh is seen championing all the right causes in all the right ways, promoting a truly diverse and cutting-edge city, despite its somewhat provincial remove from more sprawling metropolises such as New York. We also see many other moving parts in close-up detail: hearings on parking tickets, exchanges of same-sex marriage vows, public testimonials from veterans on Veterans Day, planning for Red Sox World Series victory parades, stocking up the city’s food pantries for Thanksgiving, and a multitude of other complexities that comprise what makes a city’s daily urban life happen.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg655XCmxZsThM60I1exaJF6k6TShfGkRzDeFlKFvnGSeZNO7mV65OmSxRwx4MeevyXWgkW9HZPDw4ZjG9jQT08AwTo2tnnQ_1lgJ-lBp_TPQT0sDlh4UkJiIWqAsfzmamVfC1Q6xX1qU4/s581/CityHallMartyWalsh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg655XCmxZsThM60I1exaJF6k6TShfGkRzDeFlKFvnGSeZNO7mV65OmSxRwx4MeevyXWgkW9HZPDw4ZjG9jQT08AwTo2tnnQ_1lgJ-lBp_TPQT0sDlh4UkJiIWqAsfzmamVfC1Q6xX1qU4/s200/CityHallMartyWalsh.jpg"/></a></div>This is the latest installment in Frederick Wiseman’s series of documentaries about various institutions, which has also included films about the New York Public Library, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the University of California at Berkeley. As noted in his live-streamed Q&A about <i>City Hall</i> with Ty Burr of the <i>Boston Globe</i>, Wiseman resists being called simply an observational filmmaker. Despite the 110 hours of footage that he filmed for <i>City Hall</i>, Wiseman argues that what makes his movies more active than merely observational is his rigorous editing process, whereby he structures the ideas about his subject and determines not just what the film is about, but what the film itself even <i>is</i>. He claims that’s not something he’s aware of at all until he arrives at that stage of the filmmaking process. Similar to his tone in his Norton Lectures at Harvard University back in 2018, Wiseman’s responses to questions are often hilariously matter-of-fact. The stately footage of Boston’s cityscape alone in <i>City Hall</i> shows him to be an artist of the highest order, but it’s the immersive, even meditative structure of his documentaries that demonstrates why his films are finely tuned constructions built by a masterful architect as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03004111643204359175noreply@blogger.com0