popsublime

India Donaldson’s debut feature film Good One offers an exemplary answer to an important aesthetic question: is it possible to craft an entire work of art merely from subtleties? Thanks to its three finely tuned central performances and a handful of intimate, precisely written dialogue-based scenes amongst those three actors’ characters in the film, Good One is also able to etch out a place for movies that needn’t rely on action to command an audience’s attention, though there’s plenty of movement in Donaldson’s film, too. Specifically, the characters traverse a weekend through the mountains (and creekbeds and waterfalls) as a kind of family retreat away from the din of New York City. Good One is a drama in which the dramatic elements unfold internally, often via silences, pauses, glances, and language that’s both flowing and halting.

Sam (Lily Collias) is living her final summer at home before leaving for college. Her dad Chris (James Le Gros) takes her backpacking in the Catskills, along with his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). The set-up is intentionally simple since the complexities grow inward from there. I won’t describe the interpersonal dynamics of this trio, although of course it’s tempting to do so. All of that is best left to simply watching the film. I can comment, however, on a number of decisions and aspects that make the movie distinctive, and that earn it a place among this year’s best films.

Early in the movie, for instance, after they’ve set up camp, they encounter three younger guys who are experienced hikers. The two trios of characters hang out and talk together, prepare a meal side by side, and plan a tentative hiking trip to China together for the following year. It’s clear that the younger trio of guys, more sensitive to each other and to contemporary ways, is intended to contrast with the slightly older male characters Chris and Matt, who can be a bit abrasive, corny, and dismissive of Sam on more than one occasion. As an extension of that contrast, Good One does suffer a bit from what I’d call Thelma & Louise Syndrome, allowing the middle-aged male characters to border a bit too much on cariacature at times. Chris is a developer/contractor, and Matt has had a career as a successful television actor, so in actual life, they’d obviously be a little more sensitive and not quite as stupid (to be blunt) as the film portrays them.

The actors rescue the movie from being derailed by that. Expert at lending their dialogue and expressions layers of close-up nuance, Le Gros and especially McCarthy diversify what could otherwise be a monochromatic pair of performances. The light sparring that they engage in with Sam throughout the movie is innocuous enough, until late in the film when it quite suddenly isn’t. How the film pivots based on a single line of dialogue has been critically misconstrued in my view, and the movie itself is invested in exploring why that is. I won’t reveal what exactly gets said (and by whom & to whom), though you can just google that easily enough if you want.

Lily Collias gives the year’s best performance by any actor in her age bracket. We are with her every step of the way, in terms of what its like to feel like a young woman at her age, one who has to contend both with men and with her female friends (as well as her period, which descends on her just as the trio are getting packed to depart for their weekend camping trip). How she expediently yet patiently deals with things like being somewhat sidelined and controlled, mansplaining, and being forced into something of a caretaker or “emotionally available” role for the duration of the movie coaxes the viewer into trusting her point of view despite our initial hesitancy to do so because she’s someone who’s very much still in the process of growing. Everything that Collias reveals through her portrayal of Sam is measured, exact, and natural in ways that allow anyone, not just young women, to relate to her character and what she endures.

Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples made me laugh out loud just as much as it moved me. Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane are quirkly pitch-perfect as Ben Gottlieb and Carla Kessler, respectively. Raised in a time and place that made having her bat mitzvah impossible at age 13, Carla seeks out cantor Ben to help her prepare for a bat mitzvah at her much later age, a favor that he’s amenable to because Carla happened to be his grade school music teacher.

Schwartzman and Cane share the most powerful scene between two actors from any film in 2024. As Ben and Carla are getting to re-know each other through their initial discussions of Carla’s later-years bat mitzvah, Carla tells Ben in painful detail the story of why she never had a bat mitzvah when she was thirteen. Then, she makes Ben repeat the entire story back to her verbatim, using “I” instead of “you,” so that he’s reiterating Carla’s own story in the first-person voice. The effect is profound, an authentic encapsulation of the spiritual notion that “you are everything, and everything is you.” We see this depth of empathy clearly in the two actors’ eyes, and Silver’s camera abundantly captures it. After Ben finishes repeating Carla’s story back to her, she simply looks at him and says, “You got it, Benny.”

Midway through the movie, there’s a hilarious scene at a restaurant called The Chained Duck, in which the characters hold menus the size of a folded map of the world, certainly the most oversized prop menus ever devised for any film. Their dinner out is Ben’s re-introduction to Carla’s son, who went to grade school with Ben but doesn’t remember him. Another riotous dinner scene a bit later in the movie very directly invokes John Cassavetes’ films, both in its grainy close-up visual style and its chaotic capturing of the characters’ seemingly semi-impromptu dialogue. Robert Smigel (who voiced Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show) as Ben’s rabbi, and Dolly De Leon (from Triangle of Sadness) as Ben’s mother-in-law, both add comic relief with their swerves of trenchant humor and swiftly timed curveballs throughout that sequence.

The film’s ending, however, is what makes it truly special and worth sitting through its entire two-hour running time. What if your temple is a rolling hillside out beyond your rural-suburban backyard? What if your temple is the world?

This is the final post of popsublime, my blog of over fourteen years now. I will close it with the final poem from my fifth and final book of poetry:

PROVIDENCE HIGHWAY

Between midday cinema screenings
at Legacy Place and Dedham Square,
I walk a mile of Providence Highway

beside four lanes packed with cars
under heat of summertime sunshine
intensified by an even greater heat

radiating from the metallic traffic
continually churning past me
as I thread my way past parking lots,

shattered debris of old asphalt,
blank storefronts staring forlornly,
taking me back to Colerain Avenue

in Cincinnati where I walked alone
in second grade to see a matinee
of “Annie” at Northgate Mall Cinema

and paid for it myself with a tiny bag
of 200 pennies I had collected.
In this country you can opt out

of capitalism just once in youth
and after that last chance to get out
you’re subsumed into the system

forever, even if you think otherwise.
The cars, the heat, blazing currents:
you know how the world will end,

or at least human life, which means
for us the world. I will no longer give
this world what it doesn’t deserve.

— Jason Roush

Monday, August 12, 2024

Three More Summer Movies of 2024

I didn’t anticipate that I’d find three more summer film releases interesting enough for me to write about in 2024, but indeed there have been some more excellent movies out in cinemas, which I watched multiple times in order to puzzle through what I want to say about them. It’s a diverse range of films, each one powerful in a very different way. Who knows, from an industry standpoint at least, what causes these little bursts of worthwhile movies to get released at around the same time? Perhaps it’s all just sheer coincidence. Does anybody other than movie critics even notice? Perhaps not. Would any of them agree with me about what I’ve found worthwhile?

Rich Pepplatt’s Kneecap follows the hip-hop group of the same name, a rowdy trio of Irish language speakers from West Belfast who rap in Gaelic. Their fictionalized yet true-to-life story shifts into high gear as their band starts to gain both artistic traction and popular momentum in the north of Ireland, while also becoming the target of political slings and arrows due to their Irish-speaker, language-centric stance and "Brits Out!" subject matter. I got a bit addicted to this movie, honestly, in part because it’s an overdue reminder of why men would always be wise to shave their handsome faces. (And bearded DJ Próvaí in the group, who must obscure his face because he teaches Gaelic to students at a local public school, wears a balaclava in the colors of the Irish flag whenever Kneecap performs in concert; maybe he also somehow intuited my preference for clean-shaven mugs, though his neat beard does look quite dashing as well.) Anyhow, Kneecap was a total kick of adrenaline for me every time I watched it at the cinema over the course of the past week or so. I downloaded the band’s 2018 album 3Cag as soon as I got home from my first viewing of the movie, and I’ve enjoyed listening to the songs and their break-neck, intelligent lyrics over & over again. Why oh why is there no soundtrack for this brilliant film yet? Oh well...I’ll just wait for it to surface out there in the record shops eventually.

As much as I adore these young Irish hoods, however, I mustn’t forget about Michael Fassbender, who plays the political dissident father of Móglaí Bap, who's just barely the second-cutest of the rappers. (I currently have a gay man-crush on frontman Mo Chara [sorry, mate!] due to the unique combination of his jughead crewcut and his widescreen electric smile, charms that he’s fully aware he possesses because he uses them to dazzling effect at several key moments in the narrative.) But back to Michael Fassbender, on whom I’ve long had a nearly equal crush. His grizzled daddy character named Arlo blew shit up all over Belfast in protest of the British occupiers two decades prior, then faked his own death at sea to avoid serving prison time. Some citizens of Belfast think he’s actually dead, some think he’s still alive, and some are eager to embrace him again if so, such as the punk-mouthed leader of the Radical Republicans Against Drugs, another trio of hooligans who effectively act as a collective nemesis for the lads of Kneecap throughout the movie. I’d say more about the sweet kinetic flow of this motion picture, its fun plot twists and deft Roland 808 beats, plus the actresses who are uniformly admirable in their well-rounded roles, but guess what? It’s my blog, and I prefer to let my focus on the male hotties be the mission of this particular review since those muckers are all both talented and sexy.

I enjoyed seeing Sean Wang introduce his film Dìdi at Coolidge Corner Theatre a couple of weeks ago. He said that his idea for the movie originated with films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and he wondered whether he could make that kind of classic movie about childhood, except with Asian-American characters instead. He’s succeeded, and he even pays homage to Truffaut’s masterpiece at the climax of his own movie, when his central character Chris Wang (played by Isaac Wang, who’s hilariously bittersweet and pitch-perfect for every single second of Dìdi’s running time) starts running at full speed in the opposite direction after having a terrible blowout fight with his mom (the absolutely phenomenal Joan Chen) out in their car one night. Wang-Wang (his friends’ nickname for him, whereas Dìdi is his family’s nickname for him) is kind of continually grumpy because his dad has been far away working in Taiwan, so he feels like he’s being nagged constantly by the three females in his life: his mom, his otherwise beloved grandmother Nǎi Nai (Zhang Li Hua, a sweetly wrinkled firecracker), and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who’s getting ready to leave home for college at the end of the summer.

The film is set decisively in 2008. Audiences of a certain age group will laugh at the many strategically crafted messenger chats on MySpace and details like that, even though it’s all been done before by now. Nevertheless, I heard a shocked female gasp ripple through the audience in unison at my screening when Chris blocked online the girl whom he’d been pursuing, Madi (Mahaela Park), after they had a typical teenage falling out. The other teen actors are all wackily precise in their roles, from skateboarders who recruit Chris to film their antics around their suburb of Fremont, California, to peripheral semi-friends who often try to bully and taunt Chris despite (or maybe because of) their own apparent nerdiness. The film adequately captures the insecurities, anxieties, and occasional cruelties of American kids at that age, along with a petulant, entitled adolescent attitude that Nǎi Nai scolds her daughter for not more sternly countering as a mother who always lets her two children get away with things.

After all, their mother is a painter who lives in her own little world a bit, in spite of faithfully attending to her children’s daily needs. Her delicate, Mary Cassatt-like paintings of maternal care are the film’s first indication of the emotional curveball that Joan Chen’s masterful performance will be throwing toward us as the movie progresses. One of the greatest rarities, and also one of the greatest pleasures, is to be able to see an actress actually thinking, and Joan Chen subtly conveys every gentle layer of her character’s inner workings. Her motherly portrayal is so good that it’s kind of supersonic. I’ll be beyond disappointed if she receives no attention during awards season, but sadly, because her performance is so deep and unflashy, I predict that most viewers will unfairly forget about her role in this film by year’s end. Although Sean Wang’s movie treads ever so slightly inventively on familiar ground for most of its duration, two profoundly moving scenes between Chris and his mother during the film’s final minutes have secured his future place as a director to watch. They’re two of the most memorable mother/son sequences ever committed to celluloid, and both of the actors in those scenes know it, too.

I’d like to live forever at the relaxed yet steady pace of Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch, a beautifully unhurried tale of an Icelandic man named Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson), who’s facing a serious medical diagnosis later in life and decides to try to find a woman whom he was involved with long ago, back when he worked at a Japanese restaurant during his student days in London. Frustrated with the conservative administration at the London School of Economics during the era when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were cultural forces for promoting peace, young Kristófer (Pálmi Kormákur, a born runway model if ever I saw one) drops out of school to work as a dishwasher and cook at the restaurant owned and run by Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), alongside his family and close friends. Takahashi is very protective of his daughter Miko (Kôki), for complex and historically tragic reasons that are revealed gradually later in the film. Miko is the woman whom Kristófer returns to London and then Tokyo to find over five decades later, right in the initial days of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, just as the whole world was slowly and bizarrely winding down to a hitherto unforeseen standstill.

What Kristófer and Miko experience together is best kept in the world of the story for the viewer to appreciate when watching the film. Much of its success rests on the subdued performance of Ólafsson, whose character is content with the life he’s lived, yet he also feels that something has been missing or gone unresolved for far too long. The movie’s strongest element is how it explores what it must be like to sense that one’s life could have gone in an entirely different direction, a life that would perhaps have been a better fit, and so a person in that predicament must continue to live with an unarticulated yet ongoing tinge of regret, even if the events that set the alternate life-path into motion were totally beyond anybody’s control. When Kristófer finally re-connects with the older Miko (Yoko Narahashi), the quiet cascade of emotion which the audience is guided through was intense enough for one young woman in the cinema at my screening to make her cry uncontrollably right up to the end of the film’s closing credits. The final outcome is not one of despair but rather beauty and redemption.

Thursday, August 1, 2024

Maxxxine (dir. Ti West, 2024)

I was excited to watch Ti West’s latest film Maxxxine because I loved Pearl, the previous movie in West’s accomplished neo/retro-horror trilogy. Pearl was like an old-school graphic novel come to life in Technicolor, a film that changed the game rules of the horror genre in my view. Even if Maxxxine is no Pearl, it’s also not too far off the mark. Indeed, Maxxxine is a consummately enjoyable ’80s horror-comedy throwback that’s impeccably made for its particular genre. A mainstream film director’s job is to assemble a reliable machine, a contraption that the viewer can set into motion anytime, not just on a device or player, but in their own memory as well, which is why no artistic medium taps into the sensory capacities of the human mind better than film does. Set squarely in Hollywood in 1985, Maxxxine revels in the fun aspects of memory, with touchstones from the decade to which it pays homage tucked away in all corners of the movie. For instance, when Mia Goth’s central pornstar-in-trouble character heads out for a night of clubbing (simply a lure to entrap the detective who’s pursuring her), her makeup with a bold streak of color airbrushed across her eyes invokes Dale Bozzio’s look from the cover of Missing Persons’ classic 1982 album Spring Session M.

There’s no need to synopsize the plot of Maxxxine (which includes standard elements like a night-stalking serial killer, a religious cult, an evil daddy, etc.) because it’s a character-driven movie. The actors all know that and appropriately play to it. Despite a male presence in some key roles, this is essentially a women’s movie, and it’s a movie about being a woman in Hollywood. Elizabeth Debicki’s precisely haughty director Liz Bender, who’s at the helm of The Puritan horror movies within the fictional world of Maxxxine, is a stand-in for someone like Kathryn Bigelow, and she’s also a professional oracle for Maxine Minx, the pornstar whom she’s hired to star in her new sequel. Liz pointedly dispenses lessons to Maxine in dialogue that Ti West has smartly crafted to speak to the realities that actresses and female directors have dealt with in Hollywood for decades now. In Liz’s weary worldview, Hollywood is a beast, with all that description implies. It’s a town that gives zero fucks about artists. Is Maxine an artist? Does she want to be one? For the duration of this film, she’s merely trying to survive, and in order to do so, she must first beat down the beast of her own past, a sinister one that originated in the first movie in West’s trilogy, X, which we see a multitude of important flashbacks to throughout Maxxxine.

Mia Goth opens Maxxxine with a movie audition monologue of several minutes in length, picking up where her long devastating monologue that ended Pearl (in a performance that deserved way more awards attention) left off. In combination, those two scenes prove that Goth is now the single-most actress to be reckoned with in her generation. Her monologues have an emotional sweep and amplitude that showcase her range, which was clearly Ti West’s main aim in writing all three films in his trilogy with Mia Goth specifically in mind. At the close of Maxxxine, when the newly crowned “legitimate” Hollywood starlet Ms. Minx gazes in the mirror and says, “You’re a fucking movie star,” Mia Goth herself is obviously saying the same thing. And when Liz Bender asks her what she wants to do next, Maxine replies, “I just never want it to end.” Maxine’s comment early in the film that actresses in hardcore pornography age like bread, not wine resonates more deeply in that final context. Actresses in the mainstream film industry are nearly always faced with a cruel and unfair expiration date for their careers, an ageist cutoff (or more typically, a gradual fade-out) that’s based on their appearance rather than their talent.

During the closing credits of the screening of Maxxxine that I attended, I overheard a guy of about 23 in front of me remark to his girlfriend, “I wish I’d liked it more.” I rolodexed back through the movie’s feminist moments and thought, “It’s not as easy to like a movie when it’s not about you, is it?” To paraphrase Susan Sontag’s 1966 critical text Against Interpretation: a work of art is what it is. It is not — contrary to popular belief in our current era of endless streams of comments that nobody reads — only what you want it to be.

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Four Summer Movies of 2024

Summertime is traditionally a commercial wasteland for people who take cinema seriously, and 2024 hasn’t been much of an exception, yet I’ve seen a few films so far this summer that have held my interest in various ways, at least to some degree. To my surprise, I’ve enjoyed a handful of the Minions movies in bursts and snippets over the past several years. I mean, they’re not really worth watching beyond the Minions themselves, yet the comedic onslaught of those little troublemakers usually makes the ticket price worthwhile. The kids and teens dressed up as Minions out in the cinema lobbies clearly agree. I’ll confess that I fell asleep through the middle of Despicable Me 4 a total of three times before I finally made it through the entire thing without dozing off. When I managed to stay awake, that middle stretch of the movie wasn’t even well-written, of course, because it focuses on Gru’s family. To be frank: nobody cares, even if the infant son who hates Gru is enough to maintain our attention in brief spells. The basic desire of the audience at these movies is consistently “bring back the fucking Minions or we’ll leave.”

The only reason why I’d watch this particular movie four times, other than to give myself some time to drift off into dreamland, is because the screenplay was co-written by the great Mike White, who worked on one other film in the series previously. Given the noticeable slack in the middle of the movie, I have a feeling that Mike White was simply brought in to doctor the script. The bookends of the first and last portions in the movie are entertaining, with plenty of smart jokes and rapidly dispatched dialogue, along with characters like the villainous Maxime & Valentina and Principal Übelschlecht, campy creations that obviously didn’t spring from the mind of some random straight guy. But as usual, the only reliable homosocial, bromance-driven, and slightly raunchy humor arises from the frenetic, slapstick, irreverent interactions of the Minions themselves.

At the opposite end of the summer movie spectrum tonally is the origin story A Quiet Place: Day One. The first two films in the series didn’t indicate how and when the aliens-slash-insects-slash-monsters arrived to start attacking anything that makes noise, so now we get to see the introductory part of the narrative in this prequel. We also get plenty of suspenseful and well-crafted action sequences, chase scenes, underwater antics, and visual echoes of 9/11. I wasn’t expecting the actually valuable aspect of the movie to be its performances by its two central actors, Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn, as they evade and face off with the invading creatures from outer space. Because so much of the film must be silent, the two actors are forced to rely on their eyes and expressions to convey the depths of meaning, far more than they’re required to do in other films, and they accomplish that feat subtly and expertly throughout the movie.

The relationship between these two characters is calibrated carefully through a sequence of quiet and intimate scenes that excel the overtly trashy genre they inhabit. Joseph Quinn’s sweet-tempered law student, Eric, is intrigued that Lupita Nyong’o’s troubled character Sammy is a published poet. “Used to be” is her blunt retort, one to which I related, and it’s also one that the actress clearly gets. That converted me to someone who’ll follow her career more than I’d previously been interested in doing. There’s a lot that her character must navigate, both physically and emotionally, and she knows how to balance that in a way that few other actors could manage. She builds a background for the character out of things that are dead and gone, while also building up to a fierce final moment in the film that ensures that her character will not be back for another prequel. Move on to “Day Two” without her, so that she can move on to something that her talent deserves.

The milieu that’s embraced Jane Schoenbrun’s impressive film I Saw the TV Glow might despise the two previous movies that I’ve written about in this post as much as the characters in the film might potentially enjoy them. They’re mid-to-late 1990s kids who are obviously aligned with fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, so they predate the ridiculous penchant for perpetuating sequels and multiverses that Hollywood has now settled into and settled for. High schoolers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) are diehard fans of a fictional TV show called The Pink Opaque. It’s a hallucinatory mixture of teenage television and edgy horror by way of both David Lynch and Dawson’s Creek, in that its main characters Isabel and Tara rarely speak like teenagers at all. The same might be said, to some extent, of Owen and Maddy, in a kind of parallelism that’s rife with meanings which gradually unfold for an audience that’s willing to pay enough attention.

As the movie progresses, we begin to understand through the main characters’ ongoing obsession with The Pink Opaque that I Saw the TV Glow is an intricate commentary on transgender identities and also quite an intelligent one. (I was reminded by the fictional TV show’s title of the gender theorist Judith Butler’s referring to sexuality, and by extension gender, as a “region of opacity.”) The atmospheric symbols present that forwardly, sometimes even through hazy clouds of pink that saturate and obscure the suburban lawnscapes, or oversized pink shirts that drape themselves over Owen’s angular, lanky frame. The seventh-grade version of Owen (played by Ian Foreman) stands in quiet fascination during gym class, for instance, beneath the dome of a parachute that’s stitched together in the colors of the trans pride flag; a couple of years later, similarly, ninth-grade Owen walks down a corridor of the high school that’s lit in pastel pink & baby blue and white on each wall of the hallway. Those suggestive shades oppose and balance one another on either side of Owen, and they also envelop Owen as the character passes between them while continuing to struggle to arrive at an adolescent version of self-understanding.

The two central actors courageously tackle all that the film requires of them and liberates them to do. Often they sit right next to each other or directly face one another in a manner that implies that they’re two sides of the same persona in a way, connected on a spiritual level like Isabel and Tara, and in other ways this staging toys with our perception of whether they exist at all. Are they from the show? Or are they the show? A later scene in a bar called the Double Lunch lets us know outright that the lines of reality and fiction are blurred. The dialogue between Owen and Maddy in this scene, which is set a decade after their high school years, and especially an artful monologue delivered by Maddy (whose name is no longer Maddy at that point in the narrative) inside an inflatable planetarium, gives Schoenbrun an opportunity to let viewers puzzle things out in a way that reminded me of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, perhaps the best compliment that I can give this layered, slippery, and innovative film. And so the movie’s final act, which finds Owen working and near-fatally languishing in a local Fun Center twenty years later, felt too forced to me, making overly explicit what the film’s prior acts had worked so hard and so successfully to make implicit. (I think the right earlier ending might have been “there is still time” scrawled across the pavement of a suburban street in trans-toned sidewalk chalk.) Nevertheless, I Saw the TV Glow is a stylish and ambitious achievement overall.

My favorite “formula film” so far this summer, and one that also happens to be directed with a grand and majestic sweep, is Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon, a spirited recreation of the Apollo 11 mission and what went on behind the scenes to produce the July 1969 televised broadcast of the historic event. Channing Tatum’s strapping launch director, Cole Davis, orbits Scarlett Johansson’s marketing guru Kelly Jones (actually Winnie, we find out later), circling closer to their long-awaited kiss that closes the movie. It’s an old-school romantic comedy with historical underpinnings, and it made me cry a couple of times at the expected dramatic moments, but also because of how I miss that kind of romance in our culture and in daily life. I was also moved to see Greg Berlanti working on such a resplendent widescreen scale with so many resources at his disposal. He’s come a long way from his 2000 gay romantic LA buddy comedy The Broken Hearts Club, one of my favorite gay movies that I still watch at least once a year.

What with the rocket launches and moon landing and many scores of NASA minions running around Cape Canaveral to orchestrate, Berlanti wisely lets his actors convey what they’re consummately adept at communicating, including Woody Harrelson and Ray Romano as head honchos with hearts. The quasi-political messages about American democracy and the perks & pitfalls of capitalism are nothing new, though they click along admirably as the plot advances alongside a mischievous lynchpin of a black cat named Mister. Past traumas are revealed and dealt with expediently by the central characters. Readers can discover those details on their own by seeing the movie on a big screen before it streams on Apple’s platforms. For me, the tawdry highlight was a solid Channing Tatum looking hotter than he ever has, sporting a colorful series of short-sleeved vintage shirts that had me waiting for the next one to appear. After all, it’s summer.

Friday, June 28, 2024

The Bikeriders (dir. Jeff Nichols, 2023)

Jeff Nichols’ film The Bikeriders exists in a realm beyond sexuality, and that’s one reason why it’s able to comment intelligently on masculinity and male sexuality in particular. The movie is narrated by Jodie Comer’s character Kathy, who marries Austin Butler’s alluring bikerider named Benny just five weeks after she meets him. But the heart of the story, which spans from 1965 to 1973, is really a love triangle in which Kathy is competing for Benny’s affections with Johnny (Tom Hardy), the shifty leader of a Chicago motorcycle gang called the Vandals. All three actors seem quite aware of the deeper implications of these complicated relationships, and the screenplay is tailored for the audience to grasp what’s going on clearly as well. In one confrontational scene, Kathy tells Johnny point-blank of his man-crush on Benny, “You can’t have him,” and then later in the film when Benny disappears for over a year on the road, she says to Johnny outright, “Looks like neither of us got him.”

Despite Kathy’s narration of the movie, the focus throughout remains fixed on the men, whom she mentions upon first meeting the Vandals at a bar are all just walking around “half-naked,” showing off their muscles and torsos. Like studded leather jackets, chains, and motorcycle gear, Kathy and the other women in the film are a type of accessory for the bikers, whose entire reason for forming the biker club is their interest in each other. The guys hang out together, drinking, brawling and stirring up trouble, and they remain in close physical proximity to each other the whole time. They want certain kinds of freedom and seek to live outside the zones of propriety that the culture has constructed around them, including pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality, even if the era in which the film is set limits the extent to which that can be openly acknowledged. When Kathy tells Johnny that she’s Benny’s wife, not him, Johnny exclaims, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” while knowing full well exactly what Kathy means.

Austin Butler, who deserved the Oscar for Best Actor for his recent portrayal of Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, endows Benny with a lanky, semi-tortured sensuality that’s also in total control of its own sense of self-awareness. He’s like a bundled-up hybrid of the Dillon brothers back in their ’80s movies heyday. After Benny nearly gets his foot chopped off in an altercation with two men from a rival biker gang, he’s lying in bed recovering from the injury when Johnny stops by to see him and says that Benny’s all propped up like the queen. “Who you callin’ a queen?” replies Benny, a little more than fairly knowingly. Jodie Comer’s performance as Kathy is also knowing and precise in a way that’s hard for an actress to telepathically convey to viewers because her character has to keep Benny’s attention while understanding that doing so too much could also cause her to lose him forever to Johnny and the gang.

Johnny is both Benny’s protector and enabler. A kind of daddy figure, Johnny wants to keep Benny by his side, but he also wants Benny to maintain a badboy image, get himself in trouble, and earn his stripes as a member of the motorcycle club. Of course, it’s ultimately a poisonous relationship, even though Johnny is the only person whom Benny sheds any tears for when Johnny’s shot and killed later in the film; we’re told by Kathy that Benny hadn’t even cried when his own actual father died. To refer to the motorcycle club as a brotherhood or fraternity is accurate, yet the men also seem to serve as more than that for one another. The risks they take for each other are similar to the sacrifices men make in wartime scenarios. We also learn that some of the bikers had been turned away from military service because they were simply too rowdy and not fit for it. Their shared identities as outlaws and outsiders only further bond them together as a group of social misfits.

The most intimate scene in the movie happens during a biker rally by the campfire late at night, when Johnny pulls Benny aside to inform Benny of his plan to pass along his leadership of the gang to Benny. The way that Tom Hardy plays the scene physically, moving in close enough to kiss Austin Butler on more than one occasion, makes it obvious that there was always something more to why Johnny always wanted Benny around. Johnny also shows almost no interest whatsoever in his wife or his two daughters. In the few scenes in which they appear, it’s as if they’re just a distraction to him, or like they’re not even there at all. His marriage and fatherhood are merely social expectations that he’s fulfilling because he’s supposed to, and he’s also living in a period of history in which being gay or bisexual instead wouldn’t even have been an option for him. And so he became the founder of the motorcycle club to create his own kind of homosocial space for men to join up and for him to lord over. Benny finally escapes Johnny’s power over him when Benny re-appears at the very end of The Bikeriders as its closing image, appearing content in his marriage to Kathy and in his job as a car mechanic, yet he’s still feeling lured back to the open road by the sound of roaring motorcycles passing by in the distance, clearly a metaphor for other kinds of potential masculine temptations.

The Bikeriders is based on Danny Lyon’s 1967 photography book of the same title, in which Lyon supplemented his images of the bikers with text inspired by his extensive interviews with the bikers and their wives and girlfriends, conducted while riding along with them all over the country for several years. The photographs remain striking and indelible, with dashes of (anti-)fashion sensibilities that have influenced everything from George Michael’s infamous biker look for his “Faith” music video to wider swaths of gay male leather and BDSM subcultures. I browsed through a portfolio of the photos and found one picture of two bikers nicknamed Corky and Funny Sonny (both of whom are characters in the film) in an intense and dedicated liplock with each other. It’s a serious kiss in the spirit of the open road, surprisingly, and not being played for a joke. Jeff Nichols’ film regards male sexuality with the same sort of seriousness, in a manner that’s also appropriate for the decades in which the movie takes place.

Sunday, June 16, 2024

26th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 12th - 16th, 2024)

This was my twentieth year attending the annual film festival in Provincetown, and it’s a little hard to believe that it’s been so long since the first time I attended the festival back in 2004. I watched fifteen movies over these past five days, a few of which were more spontaneous selections that shaped the direction of what I wanted to write about for this year’s post. Although I did watch some narrative features, I’ve decided to focus mainly on documentaries this time around, with some brief mentions of the narrative films to explain why. Even if I’ve felt this way for a while now, this was the year that reality pretty much outstripped fiction for me. Perhaps that’s my own taste, or maybe it’s just evidence of my feeling that works of fiction are simply more challenging to craft. The maxim that “truth is stranger than fiction” doesn’t completely capture it either. I think it’s more likely that what makes both fiction and reality strange is truth, or at least the appearance of truth, if one can attempt to approximate some form of veracity in convincing ways, which is what well-made documentaries seek to do and moreover seek to problematize. I enjoyed several excellent ones at this year’s festival.

As a collector of pop music, and especially ’80s pop, I was most looking forward to seeing Alexis Manya Spraic’s The World According to Allee Willis. A visionary and willfully eccentric artist who became best known as a songwriter, Willis co-wrote major hits like Earth, Wind & Fire’s pop/funk anthem “September” (the fifth most successful pop song of all time), Pet Shop Boys’ “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” featuring Dusty Springfield, Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” and The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” the familiar theme song of the television show Friends. Born and raised in Detroit, Willis (who grew up with the first name Alta) was deeply influenced by the sounds and styles of Motown, and she would listen to music being recorded at their “Hitsville, U.S.A.” studio while sitting outside on the lawn. There’s both a groove and a shimmer to many of the songs she collaborated on. By 1994 she felt like songwriting was a bit of a meat factory and took a hiatus from it for a decade, until she started working with Stephen Bray and Brenda Russell on the songs for the musical version of The Color Purple. Other later Allee Willis tracks include one that I heard playing out in the theater lobby before the movie, Toto’s “The Little Things,” which she co-wrote with the band’s keyboardist Steve Porcaro. I listened to the song on a loop on my iPod for most of the rest of the day.

Willis cultivated her personal style with a keen eye for ’50s kitsch (she founded a museum of kitsch since her home basically was one) and a desire to emphasize her individuality rather than fitting in, a clear counterpoint or rebuttal to her somewhat controlling and difficult father, who had unwisely warned her to “stay away from black culture.” She also openly grapples with how to define or convey her sexual identity in some vintage ’80s footage in the documentary, which was executive-produced by her female partner of many years, Prudence Fenton. In her younger days and the earlier stages of her music career, Allee tells a friend point-blank that she’ll kill herself if she’s gay, a darker stance that’s at odds with her optimistically bright creative pursuits, and her feeling that you can either choose to be miserable or instead revel in your own sense of invention to find a way out of the misery. Her comfort with her lack of fit grew over time as she moved into music video art direction, brilliant retro furniture design, and premonitions of the internet, social media, and the multiverse via her global media village-based concept willisville, all driven by a quality that her close friend Paul Reubens (aka the late Pee-wee Herman, with whom she recorded the song and music video “Big Adventure”) could refer to only as “excess.”

Willis was known for throwing major parties and quirky social events at her home in Los Angeles, the most notorious of which was actually for a television show that the guests hadn’t even been told about beforehand. She was a tireless creative force that connected people across many facets of the entertainment industry in ways that were uniquely her own. While she wanted to be famous (she’d gifted her friend the actor Lesley Ann Warren with one of her own paintings titled “Into the Hearts of Millions”), there was also an earnest aim in her work to make the world a better, more fun, and more bearable place for herself and others. Cyndi Lauper comments on the sadness and loneliness in Willis’ lyrics for her song “Who Let in the Rain,” and Allee had clearly struggled with feeling isolated in the wake of her relationships with people like the singer/songwriter Lauren Wood. On the other hand, later in her life Willis wrote a song for and about her beloved hometown of Detroit, for which she gathered thousands of participants to get it recorded. Willis died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve of 2019 at age 72, but she left a legacy that people will be appreciating and untangling for decades. Some of her younger proteges interviewed in the film mention that she felt her life’s work was to leave behind a treasure trove of stuff for artists in future generations to piece together, and this documentary goes a long way toward making that work happen.

At the other end of the artistic spectrum is Stephen Soucy’s documentary Merchant Ivory, an engrossing in-depth exploration of the famed filmmaking duo, with many inside revelations about how their signature aesthetic evolved and how exactly their movies got made. I had a feeling I’d enjoy this movie, but I enjoyed it much more than I’d anticipated I would. The film is cleverly constructed in subtitled chapters that follow the work of director James Ivory, producer/director Ismail Merchant, and their longtime team of close collaborators mostly chronologically, with plenty of detours into their personal lives and complex relationships. Richard Robbins, the composer who scored the majority of their films, was involved in something of a triangle with Merchant and Ivory at points (alongside Robbins’ being involved with Helena Bonham Carter for a number of years). The trio of men were kept in check in various ways by their screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The four of them formed an upper-crust yet semi-bohemian group who shared a country home in upstate New York and got intricate movies finished many times over, despite often not having the funds immediately on hand to do so, much to the frustration of their casts and crews, who were given weekly elaborate meals prepared by Merchant as a substitute for pay, or impromptu picnics at exclusive palatial residences in India when filming there.

Because they made refined and intelligent movies, it makes sense that they get refined and intelligent commentary from the documentary’s interviewees. Actors, editors, and other collaborators share their memories, enthusiasms, and superlatives. Emma Thompson praises Anthony Hopkins’ “perfect” performance in The Remains of the Day, which Hugh Grant agrees would be his choice of the finest performance for a master class in film acting. Rupert Graves similarly expresses his accolades for James Wilby and Hugh Grant in Maurice, though Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who later won an Academy Award for her screenplay adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, felt that his posthumously published gay-themed novel was second-tier Forster. Grant also mentions the subliminally charged atmospheres on set back when the movies were made, unlike the more sterile and controlled environments on film sets today. The documentary’s openness about how tightly knit and sometimes volatile the Merchant Ivory team were, in more ways than one, only serves to make their films themselves more interesting.

Every Little Thing, Sally Aitken’s delicate and moving documentary about hummingbird caretaker Terry Masear, who’s the author of the 2015 book Fastest Thing on Wings, closely traces Masear’s work as she patiently aids recovery of injured or damaged hummingbirds until they can be released back into the wilds of Los Angeles. It’s a hard narrative to make engaging since the birds heal gradually in tiny increments, but it works since they’re all named and identifiable characters. Raisin, who suffered head trauma and internal damage. Cactus, who fell out of a nest and landed on a cactus, with spines from the cactus stuck in one of its wings. Sugar Baby, who’d had sugar water dumped on her, damaging her feathers. We root for them to survive, so magic happens by the end of the film as they ascend from the aviary one by one, if they were lucky enough to make it that far. Those who are less fortunate are quietly buried with a little red flower out in the yard, where their light bones disintegrate underground within two days.

Masear’s own trauma of surviving childhood abuse is addressed only briefly because she says that she’ll “evaporate” if she discusses it, though what the documentary provides is sufficient to fill in the blanks about how it affected her decision to pursue such a distinctive occupation of tending to small, vulnerable creatures who need intensive care to make it back out into the world. Masear recounts the death of her partner, who was also a writer whose work was rooted in the natural world. Her memories of him bring the documentary’s focus on mortality and loss into even sharper focus, as well as what it means to be alive. One man who delivers a wounded hummingbird to her after it exhausted itself trying to escape from the skylight in his home marvels that such a little creature breathes the same air that he breathes, and a young woman who rescues a baby hummingbird in her yard along with its tiny nest is startled when Masear points out that the bird’s mother had plucked the young woman’s own hair from the dryer vent and woven strands of her hair into its nest. Our interconnectedness with the animal kingdom and remnants of wilderness that surround us, even in big cities, is one of the film’s key themes. It reminded me a lot of the legendary documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.