popsublime

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 campy characters like the villainous Maxime & Valentina and Principal Übelschlecht, who clearly 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 that 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.

I’d been curious about Dawn Porter’s documentary Luther: Never Too Much since I’m a fan of Luther Vandross’ vocals, particularly on his 1988 album Any Love. Some elements of his early career that the film illuminates I wasn’t previously aware of at all, such as his singing role on Sesame Street in the show’s initial episodes. I was interested to learn more details about him since he’d been such a private public figure, whose struggles with weight and sexuality were often the focus of the media’s attention on him. The way in which his music career faced how to categorize his sound as a “crossover” artist is also intriguing, in part because of how the appeal of his distinctive voice bridged different audiences during a pivotal era in popular music. The documentary showcases how he simply wanted more people to enjoy his songs, and that he preferred remaining somewhat enigmatic and uncategorizable for that reason. (As a side note, it was also revealing to watch 1-800-ON-HER-OWN the very next night, a documentary about the independent folk musician Ani DiFranco, whose entire brand is based on openness and honesty.)

Speculation about Vandross’ sexual identity doesn’t enter into the documentary Luther: Never Too Much until much later in the film, and his refusal to be easily categorized arises again in a more forceful way since he felt that it was nobody else’s business. As he makes clear in some interviews, he was there just to sing and for people to enjoy his music. After Vandross’ death, Patti LaBelle revealed to Andy Cohen on his talk show that Luther remained closeted because he didn’t want to upset his mother. Nor did Vandross want to confuse or alienate his legions of female fans. After all, he’d recorded mostly love songs and founded his career on making romantic music, so keeping that fantasy alive was a large part of his mission. Jamie Foxx and others hilariously recall how Luther’s soulful music played a significant role in the bedroom for them back when they were coming of age. Luther himself never found the kind of love that he sang about. Perhaps that’s one reason why energy gathered around his later 2003 Grammy-winning hit “Dance with My Father” (co-written by Richard Marx), in which Vandross examined familial and paternal love instead. Vandross died in 2005 from complications after suffering a massive stroke, from which he partly recovered, though he was unable to continue his singing career from that point on.

Jazmin Jones’ hybrid documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon (which clearly takes a cue from the memorable 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier) was like a missing puzzle piece for me in determining how these film reviews would fit together for this post. Along with her younger collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, Jones plumbs the depths of her longtime desire to find the woman who was the face of the instructional computer software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which had inspired her when she was a girl because of how empowering it was to see someone like herself featured in a prominent and important position. As it turns out, Jazmin and Olivia discover through their quirky and byzantine research process that Mavis Beacon wasn’t ever an actual person, but an invention of the software designers. The face of Mavis was originally a Haitian-born woman named Renée L’Espérance, who was discovered while working behind a perfume counter at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. She had been paid $500 for the modeling gig, and the company later sold for $400 million. Jazmin and Olivia set out on a journey to find her since there’s barely any trace of who she is or how to locate her whereabouts. We discover gradually as the documentary unfolds, however, that even those scarce details are uncertain because they rely on individual people’s memories that themselves must be mined for information, interrogated, and challenged.

Without giving away too many of the rather amazing twists, let’s just say that the software developers know way more about the woman who was their original model than they initially let on, something that Jazmin Jones intuited. When even the late actor Robert Blake’s former wife turns up as a someone whose involvement unlocks other necessary secrets, it becomes obvious how documentary trumped fiction for me in this year’s batch of films at the festival. The ground is always shifting under us, no facts are actually reliable, some people will disappear for good (mostly) and not want to be found. Jazmin and Olivia are counseled via the wisdom of several women of color throughout their project, scholars and writers who convince them that they may have to let go of the person they’re seeking if it turns out that she prefers not to be sought, and that respecting that wish would be more vital than pursuing their own wishes for the sake of the project. Some maps must be burned, some flowers must be tossed into the ocean, and some projects must be abandoned, though all of that can be the culmination of the project itself, ultimately, as well as a profoundly insightful commentary on our current precarious position in a world that’s been fractured into various forms of social media, where we’re both people and not people, figments of imagination that also must live daily lives and exist, even as the terms and meanings of what existence is constantly get altered, changed, and continue to bend alongside the flow of time.

I’ll conclude this post by mentioning several gay-themed narrative feature films that I watched during the festival: Greek director Zacharias Mavroeidis’ cruising beach dramedy The Summer with Carmen, Finnish director Mikko Mäkelä’s London-based hustler foray Sebastian, Italian director Marco Calvani’s Provincetown-set High Tide, and Belgian director Anthony Schatteman’s sweet coming-of-age tale Young Hearts. While I loved seeing such a wide array of international movies exploring gay male lives and what kinds of predicaments we face in contemporary society, they also rely on plenty of familiar tropes. Of course, there’s nothing inherently problematic about stories of gay best friends, sex work, finding one’s sense of belonging, or first love, and I enjoyed many moments in these films, as well as much of the writing and all of the performances in them. There’s a sense of affirmation in these movies that can be a worthwhile aim in itself. I also don’t feel like such films even need to do anything particularly “new,” and a movie like Young Hearts obviously intends to end on a hopeful note, manifesting in the standard wish fulfillment for its two central characters, Elias and Alexander, who are just leaving boyhood and entering their adolescent years. After enduring the usual struggle for both self-acceptance and the approval of their peers, they get to have their relationship and the support of their families and friends, something we’d all have loved to be lucky enough to receive at that age. They’re able to ride off happily on their bicycle together in an image that reminded me of the great gay French film Wild Reeds from nearly 30 years ago. Perhaps it’s simply seeing the distinction between films as mirrors of experience (or fantasies of experience), rather than as opportunities to unravel (or further entangle) the complexities and mysteries of experience, which the documentaries that I watched seemed to achieve in a more assured or nuanced fashion. Or maybe it takes seeing and appreciating all of these approaches just to make that distinction clear?

Sunday, January 7, 2024

All of Us Strangers (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2023)

Because I’ve already written at length here about my three favorite films of 2023 (Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Scrapper, and The Unknown Country), 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 All of Us Strangers. 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 Strangers 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 aligned. 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 Mysterious Skin, 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.

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

9th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 25th - 29th, 2023)

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, The Highest Standard, which takes an in-depth look at the daily struggles and lofty aspirations of a diverse group of 8^th 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 American Symphony, 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.

The Highest Standard 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.

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.

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.

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 The Highest Standard also faced themselves.

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 American Symphony 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, which screened with his previous short film The Human Voice, 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 Strange Way of Life 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 not 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 and a hardcore shoot-out (yes, the kind with guns). The Human Voice, 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.