Three Favorite Films of 2022

As the first year when movies and moviegoers truly returned to cinemas in full force in the three years since the global pandemic began, 2022 made for an interesting and unusual year in film. Some releases had been delayed and pushed back for nearly that long, like Tom Cruise’s long-awaited Top Gun: Maverick, a decades-later sequel that’s mostly impressive as action movies go (or on the flipside, Michael Bay’s Ambulance, an almost comically breakneck action flick that fewer people saw but that I still enjoyed as an offbeat summer movie). And that seemed to be the trend this year from a business or industry perspective since 2022 felt slightly imbalanced in terms of what was on offer at the box office. The studios behind a hefty backlog of mainstream movies that waited out the lengthy period when seats at venues had remained emptier could finally capitalize on their products, alongside some smaller movies that were made during the pandemic and often had to leap over sizeable hurdles to accomplish the task. The mainstream offerings are rarely the movies that interest me most, however, and for the most part, my three favorite films of 2022 were no exception. I did watch each of them at least twice at the cinema, and in one case even multiple times, and I felt equally involved during every repeated viewing.

Max Walker-Silverman’s sublime lyric poem of a movie, A Love Song, was the film that moved me the most in 2022, so much that I watched it at three different cinemas three nights in a row. The film’s pitch-perfect lead actress, Dale Dickey, had received the Excellence in Acting award at the Provincetown International Film Festival back in June, and I attended her conversation on stage about her career while I was at the festival, though I hadn’t watched A Love Song there. I liked how relaxed and offhand she was with her answers, as someone who’s been a successful character actress in well-known films for many years now. Her leading role as modern-day nomad Faye is long overdue then, but what an ideal role it is, fully inhabited and imbued with the spirit of someone who’s experienced enough of the world to be slightly weary of it, yet who’s also managed to retain her sense of wonder in the face of loss.

We’re never quite sure about why Faye ended up living in her camping trailer out in the desert wilds of Colorado at a peaceful lakeside location dotted with wildflowers (which often get their standalone still-shots at key points in the film). We simply see Faye flip open a calendar to a month and date sometime after March of 2020 and watch her write “TODAY,” resetting the present moment for herself in the wake of something that pushed her previous life off course, which happened to so many people throughout the pandemic. She has a tiny perch of a bookshelf with only two books on it: John James Audubon’s Birds of America for birdwatching and learning to identify birds by their calls, and a book on astronomy for stargazing and identifying the constellations. On my second viewing of the film, I noticed that the movie actually begins while the screen is still dark, when we hear the sound of a mourning dove cooing. That bird and its sound will play a pivotal role during the film’s quietly powerful climax with Faye alone on a windswept mountaintop at night later in the film, my favorite moment from any movie this year.

We also learn that Faye is awaiting the arrival of Lito (beautifully portrayed by Native American actor Wes Studi), a long-ago friend of Faye’s from high school days, with whom she shares an unresolved attraction. A young girl and her band of brothers who live nearby stop by to ask if Faye can move her trailer so that they can unearth the body of their long-buried father from under the site, to which she kindly replies, “Someone’s expecting to find me at this one.” The gentle dance between Lito and Faye plays out in semi-silence and through songs, both songs that they perform and songs that they spin the radio dial to see what fate will play for them. To see how that relationship unfolds, you’ll just have to watch the movie to appreciate how delicately it’s handled. Some might compare A Love Song to recent Oscar-winner Nomadland, which shares a few elements of its storyline and a similar locale, but whereas Nomadland is drawn on a wide canvas, A Love Song draws its energy from intimacy and quietude, paying homage to the tiny yet universal details that rescue us from heartbreak and urge us to keep going.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a film that I was surprised to enjoy as much as I did. While I’m fine with all of Luhrmann’s previous movies, the flashiness of his style never quite drew me in entirely. Elvis, while also obviously flashy at times, operates on a different scale and in a different register, perhaps because it’s ultimately attuned just as much to its subject’s quietly tragic fall and early death, not simply to his turbulent but meteoric rise to pop stardom and worldwide fame. Austin Butler’s nuanced and tireless powerhouse performance remains my favorite performance of the year, and even if he doesn’t win an Oscar for it, I can’t imagine that the award should go to anybody else. His performance feels deep and transformational in a way that the central role in a biopic rarely ever can (notably, in a year that also saw the release of a worthwhile biopic of Whitney Houston, another top-selling popstar whose life ended tragically early). 

Perhaps because Austin Butler’s face and voice were up until now less familiar to audiences overall, he was able to slip into Elvis Presley’s skin and persona more subtly. When we watch him perform the songs and recreate pivotal moments from Elvis’ career, he’s believable in ways that span generations. One friend of mine who saw the movie at the cinema said that everyone from her kids to her father enjoyed it, and she mentioned how rare it is to find a movie like that these days. Coincidentally, I watched the movie at one cinema with an older audience and at another cinema with a younger audience of mostly high school students, and both were equally and clearly under the considerable spell that the movie casts over its viewers, certainly in scenes where Elvis’ own audiences breached the standards of propriety in that era as the United States careened towards the civil rights movement.

Although the movie explores the biographical details of Elvis’ life, from his family’s conflicted ambitions for his career to his problematic business partnership with the shifty, self-christened “Colonel” Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks with relish in a performance that I admired more than other moviegoers in the United States did), the film’s real focus is on Elvis’ music and its popular appeal to the American public, over whom it washed like a tidal wave for two decades, winding through genres from rock & roll to blues to pop to country to gospel to film soundtracks. That broad cross-section of musical styles seemed intentional, and it’s one reason why Elvis became the template for later popular artists like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson, each of whom refused to be tied down to any single genre of music, bending the rules to defy those conventions. Several scenes depict how Elvis sparred with his handlers and often improvised on the spot to avoid being ensnared by giving his listenership exactly what Tom Parker thought they might want at every particular moment. The standout montage scene is the recreation of a major televised production that was supposed to be an innocuous Christmas special that found Elvis instead swerving to elevate it to an upper echelon that matched his talent.

Of course, the movie does eventually descend into Elvis’ struggles to hold onto his relationships with his wife Priscilla and his young daughter Lisa Marie, whom it became harder for Elvis to keep as the focus of his life when his worldwide fame (alongside various dangerous addictions) began to overwhelm his attentions, not to mention his mental and physical health. But by the time the forces around him try to help him rally to keep things together, it’s already too late and slipping out of his control. At those moments especially, Austin Butler’s performance seems to access a higher level of authenticity and veracity. Some have argued that at 30 he might have been too young an actor to play the role at Elvis’ later stage, but since Elvis’ career started in his teens and he died at 42, the casting feels smart and well-timed to me. As things stand, Butler totally owns the performance, and by the time we arrive at a clever diptych that segues from Butler’s recreation of a late televised performance of Elvis singing “Amazing Grace” back to Elvis’ original performance, the film’s magic has been fully consummated and the deal is sealed.

Finally, Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies surprised me by being the movie that made me laugh the hardest in 2022 both times I watched it at cinemas. At my first viewing, the audience was mostly a crowd of younger women who often laughed when they heard me laughing from the back row since many of the film’s cleverest moments spin along the generational lines of gender. My second viewing was with a group of college students from my university whom I took to see the movie the week before fall classes began, and they were just as into the film as the first crowd I saw it with. It’s a movie that’s been somewhat categorized as a horror film, though I think a spoof of a horror movie is about as close as it comes to fitting that description. For me, it’s actually a satire of a satire of Generation Z, who get colossally skewered by the intelligent screenplay and the actors who are all-in from start to finish, giving Gen Z the most precise X-ray of itself that it’s likely ever to receive.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (or Bodies x 3 as I’ve come to call it) is set at a “hurricane party” poolside and then mostly inside a big country estate owned by the parents of one of its richest characters (memorably played by Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson, doing his goofy lost-boy thing at its best), a sprawling mansion that loses electricity in the storm for the greater portion of the film. With the exception of a ripped older guy portrayed by Lee Pace in a performance that should galvanize his career for a whole new generation of viewers (plus one other male character who wanders in briefly at the tail end of the film), the rest of the cast is totally female, and importantly so, given that the movie was written and directed by women and begins with a long lesbian make-out scene between the two lead characters (Amandla Stenberg as Sophie and Maria Bakalova as Bee), which intentionally recalls the notorious opening scene of Larry Clark’s Kids.

A lingering masculine face-off between the two male characters, though, is the fallout of the central game of the film’s title that’s also the movie’s initial gimmick, a bit of a red herring that’s meant to mislead the audience into miscategorizing the movie. It’s like a deadly version of hide-and-seek that’s supposed to end with a character pretending to be dead, but instead ends up with a character who’s actually dead. Far from a Clue-like whodunit, however, Bodies x 3 uses that gimmick to spin out into a trenchant social commentary about how little its characters trust each other and why, in fact how much they actively dislike one another, even when pretending outwardly just seconds before that they do like each other. As the characters wander around the darkened house lit by their multi-colored glowstick necklaces and glowing cell phone screens, the scenario opens up the possibility for all of the characters to turn against each other, much to the delight of the audience. Some awesome lines arise from those circumstances, which touch on class status when an African-American character is told she’s not middle-class but upper middle-class because her parents are professors at a university. Her simple and hilarious retort: “It’s public.” Issues like gun control and police brutality also get thrown into the mix to great effect, delivered with the best comic-timing pause of the year (“You shot me! With a gun!”).

Like a wry Shakespearean drama, the bodies upon bodies do pile up on the set by the film’s end; their deaths are often brought about by the very breaking of the bonds of social trust that pitted the characters against each other. (Nobody who’s seen the film will soon forget Lee Pace’s tightly constructed and finely edited scene in the mansion’s gymnasium.) One character’s death that set everything into motion early on turns out to be the most pitifully tragic and also somehow the funniest, too, making a clear statement about how a generation that’s supposedly connected by technology also became treacherously disconnected from reality in the process. Bodies Bodies Bodies, like my other two favorite films of the year, recalls plenty of now-classic Hollywood movies in its structure, characters, and themes. I have a feeling that all three of these films will last and find their audiences for a very long time.

Monday, October 17, 2022

8th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 12th - 16th, 2022)

This year’s GlobeDocs Film Festival had me thinking in kind of opposite directions film by film. I think we’ve reached a tipping point in the culture where virtue signaling has begun to override worthwhile philosophical thought and artistry, though all of the documentaries that I watched in this year’s festival were well-made and enjoyable. What’s interesting is that documentaries are largely observational in their aims, and yet they’re also crafted, so we’re watching something that’s shaped to the political mindframe of the filmmakers, regardless of their intentions in terms of objectivity. As soon as one edits a piece of film, the narrative becomes creative and interpretive, which is where I’d like to see more rigor put back into place regarding how deeply a film is willing to dive into its own material to emerge with more demanding artifacts.

Ryan White’s Good Night Oppy is a good place to start since it was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin brand and bears all of the classic feel-good trademarks of his own movies. The documentary traces the 15-year journey of the Mars rover Opportunity, a robot that was designed to last only 90 days but just kept rolling along in the red dust of another planet, taking photographs, sending and receiving communications, and being cute enough to garner a faithful following on social media. (At one point we see the robot taking a photo and telling itself not to be afraid because “that’s just your shadow”). I mean, it’s hard to resist a film that starts off with the robot wandering around its long expedition on Mars to the tune of The B-52’s song “Roam.” Like the great animated movie WALL•E, Good Night Oppy anthropomorphizes its central figure as it goes about its daily and nightly business, which is why it ends up moving people. And that’s all very strategic on the part of NASA.

While I don’t question the authenticity of their mission, my cynical side did begin to question a roomful of adults crying over a robot in the guise of teamwork. Try looking around at our current world and its actual problems. It’s an ongoing controversy whether NASA’s colossal expenditure of public money could be used to do something like feed people instead, especially in an inflation economy that’s now becoming unsustainable for most of us here on this planet. For me, this seems bound up with the fact that the general public can now be more easily moved by a robot than by other human beings, though maybe it’s just nice to be reminded what human compassion used to feel like, even if it’s only something people feel for a machine. The most important aspect of the documentary, potentially, is the way that it (somewhat tentatively) emphasizes how vastly alone human beings are in the universe, both individually and collectively. Yet while re-emphasizing that bleak reality, the film also tries to undercut it. Trust me, unless the zoo hypothesis is correct, we’re alone, and no social media campaign driven by public awareness of NASA’s rover missions on Mars (Perseverance is the next iteration of the robot after Opportunity conked out with the message, “My battery is low and my world is getting dark”) can really change that stark truth. Oppy’s final wake-up swan song, Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” contains some irony perhaps in the sense of how little we really see ourselves and our predicament. The human race won’t be escaping to Mars anytime soon, kids.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras, traces the activist mission of celebrated photographer Nan Goldin to take down the Sackler family for their role in the half-million deaths caused by the opioid crisis in this country via the pharmaceutical company that Richard Sackler funded and ran (Purdue Pharma, developer of OxyContin). About 15 years ago, I met a gay couple at a party who’d been photographed by Goldin together in their bathtub long ago, a photo that ended up being included in Goldin’s famous 1986 artist’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The seemingly accidental quality of her photographic work has made it legendary and deeply influential to the generation of artists since then. She’s an excellent and reliable guide throughout Poitras’ film, and nobody in the audience won’t be pleased to see the Sackler family get its comeuppance when a judge requires them to be present to hear painful and harrowing personal testimonies (if only via Zoom) from parents who’ve lost their offspring to opioid overdoses.

Because the Sackler family also donated millions of dollars to museums worldwide to have wings named after them, Goldin and the activist organization PAIN staged demonstrations and “die-ins” at museums and art spaces in major international cities. Goldin would cancel art exhibitions to protest the Sackler family’s involvement at an institution, so her activism sought to get those institutions to refuse funding from the Sackler family, with the ultimate aim of having their name removed from institutions all over the planet. That footage is carefully interwoven by Poitras with Goldin’s memories of her sister’s tragic death from suicide, a death that she interrogates her own parents’ role in bringing about. By the end, the film becomes a skillful meditation on the secrets we keep, with Goldin’s powerful claim that “the wrong things are kept private in this society.”

While I have total admiration for Goldin’s artistic and activist work, as well as her argument that “survival was an art” throughout her early years as a photographer in places like Cambridge, Provincetown, and New York, I found it a little hypocritical that she’s pictured smoking cigarettes throughout the film, including in indoor spaces with the activists from PAIN surrounding her during their filmed conversations. Perhaps tobacco companies simply aren’t within the scope of Goldin’s activist concerns, though to be honest, those companies have knowingly murdered far more many millions of people than the company that developed and pushed OxyContin on the populace. This culture seems to view cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse as “self-medication” or “comfort addictions” that the rest of us are just supposed to accept as our friends and family members succumb to those addictions and often become seriously ill over time and die from them. Sorry, but that also needs to be fucking challenged in this culture and other societies around the world. I’m not willing to overlook it, and the younger activists working with Goldin should have taken her to task rather than just sitting there breathing in second-hand smoke because it’s supposedly cool.

Ondi Timoner’s Last Flight Home is about as intimate as documentaries come. The film invites viewers into the final days in the life of her father, Eli Timoner, who ran an airline called Air Florida. He’s feisty right up until the very end of his life, a life that he chooses to end due to the pain of paralysis and old age. While getting a professional massage after work one day forty years before, the massage therapist cracked his neck, resulting in an accidental stroke. His life was never the same again, but it’s clear from his extended family who surround him by his deathbed that he remained loving and lucid for the rest of his days. A series of very sweet Zoom calls with his former employees demonstrates their clear devotion to him, even many years after Eli Timoner’s Air Florida airline company had ceased to exist.

The director’s close eye on the proceedings, while refreshingly candid, feels perhaps a bit too close at times, and I think the documentary may have benefited from some editorial objectivity to help distance it from the familial insularity. Yet we do get to know the various characters in the family quite well, especially Ondi’s sister and brother, who respond in nuanced ways to their father’s process of dying; her sister is a rabbi who approaches things cautiously and philosophically, whereas her brother mentions that he never cries except maybe once during a Pixar movie. (We do see him break down by the end of the film.) Eli remains at the movie’s center, appropriately, airing his views about the world at the time of the filming (he really hated Donald Trump), but mostly just being a steady beacon of love and compassion for his family members. It’s definitely one of the sweetest and most layered portraits of a family, and one taken from the inside, that I’ve ever seen on film.

I have quite fond memories of the much-loved, Emmy-winning PBS children’s television show Reading Rainbow, hosted by LeVar Burton. Butterfly in the Sky, a documentary directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, revived and deepened my interest in the show in a very moving way that I hadn’t really anticipated. We hear many interviews with the show’s creators, including the composer of its well-known and instantly recognizable synthesizer theme song (which was sung by Chaka Khan), who recreates the song in real time to demonstrate how exactly those nostalgic sounds were made. We also see the various “book review kids” all grown up and relishing their chance to relive their years as childhood public television stars. I was reminded, too, of the many celebrities who read books as part of the series: Angela Bassett, Matthew Broderick, Peter Falk, Whoopi Goldberg, James Earl Jones, and Regina King, among others. Even the early hip-hop trio Run-D.M.C. made an appearance rapping on the show to emphasize for kids the importance of reading. But my favorite moments in the documentary were the most surreal ones, like when we’re taken for the filming of one episode into a bat cave in Texas, the floor of which is covered in bat guano, in which carnivorous worms live, who devour to a tiny twist of skeletal bones any bat unlucky enough to fall down from the cave walls. The most powerful aspect of the documentary details just how many important themes Reading Rainbow touched upon, from slavery to gangs to incarceration to war to childbirth. Scenes from the episode about 9/11, with kids in a Manhattan school talking to LeVar Burton about finally being able to return to their school right near Ground Zero, moved me to tears.

LeVar himself was clearly an inheritor to Mister Fred Rogers, who’s featured in the film talking with LeVar at one point. Burton was also obviously a forerunner in highlighting race issues in relation to children’s lives, and he insisted on crafting his own image from season to season, despite pressure from the producers to keep his look consistent. LeVar recalls how, as a black man, he’d always been made to feel that something about his presence wasn’t right, so he rightly demanded his autonomy with his own self-image throughout the show. He also spoke eloquently at hearings on public broadcasting when the show had to fight for continued federal funding. By the time the show finally went off the air in 2006, there were no funders left, and no merchandise to sell to viewers as with a show like Sesame Street. As one commentator says of how adults now feel about LeVar Burton while thinking back to when we all watched Reading Rainbow as kids, “We knew he loved us.”

Another celebrity’s resurgence into public view is the focus of Kathlyn Horan’s documentary The Return of Tanya Tucker, a rousing look at the recent career revival of that particular country music legend, whose artistic trajectory got sidetracked as a result of an attempted shift from country to rock music. Fellow country musicians Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings enthusiastically helped to get Tucker’s superb 2019 comeback album While I’m Livin’ recorded and produced, winning Tucker her first two Grammy Awards in the process, both for the album itself and also for her gorgeous song “Bring My Flowers Now.” Carlile says that she knew from Day One in the recording studio that Tucker’s Grammy Award wins would be coming. That’s some very long overdue recognition for an artist who signed a $1.6 million recording contract way back at age 16.

Despite some initial industry skepticism about Tucker’s renaissance after her long-ago crash and burn due to drug abuse and temporarily hitting the skids, Carlile gently encourages Tucker about just how great the songs and her singing are as they’re recording them in the studio, comparing Tucker’s project to Johnny Cash’s famed American Recordings from late in his life. Tucker’s realness is what makes the movie. Throughout the documentary, she’s open and honest about her anxieties, saying that all she ever wanted was simply to be a singing entertainer. She certainly proves her masterful command at that particular skill during a live concert toward the end of the film, as well as proving the timelessness of her own songs. Tucker owes Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings a lot for plucking her out of a potential early retirement, and she clearly knows that. Tucker glows with appreciation for Brandi’s championing of her music, and Brandi glows with appreciation for having the opportunity to champion her musical hero.

Finally, Wildcat, directed by Melissa Lesh and Trevor Beck Frost, takes us deep into the Amazonian rainforests of Peru, where we meet a young British veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Harry Turner, who’s struggling from PTSD and volunteers to raise a wild ocelot named Khan at a sanctuary for wild animals. Having witnessed children dying in Afghanistan haunts Harry and pushes him into ongoing bouts of depression, which his caring for Khan helps to lift him out of, until Khan gets shot in his front leg by a stationary gun placed in the jungle by hunters, resulting in a tearful and excruciating burial scene. Harry’s colleague and girlfriend, Samantha Zwicker, who founded and later expands the wildlife sanctuary in the rainforest, tries to steer Harry through his spells of suicidal depression as best she can, though it’s a challenge for her since she had also grown up with an alcoholic father whom she loved very much in spite of his own regular harrowing spells of darkness and addiction.

Fortunately, Harry has another chance to raise a second young ocelot, this time one who’s named Keanu. As we watch heavily tattooed, baby-faced Harry frolic with Keanu and guide the ocelot through life in the jungle, it becomes clear just how calming it is for Harry to be with this small creature, and how much love he feels for the animal. “He’s saving me,” Harry says, “and I’m saving him.” And yet he continues to struggle with his PTSD-based depression, cutting himself on his forearm and wrists at his lowest points. “I’m in the most beautiful place in the world, and I can’t be fucking happy,” he laments painfully. Even though his relationship with Samantha doesn’t last, his work with Keanu at the animal rescue facility in Peru clearly prepared him to re-enter society by the time 18 months had passed and Keanu was ready to be released into the wild. Harry returns home to his family in England, and later heads overseas again to do more volunteer service with animals in Ecuador. He also goes a little overboard, perhaps, when getting dotted ocelot stripes tattooed right down the middle of his back, his tribute to the little animal that rescued him and brought him back to life.

Sunday, September 25, 2022

David Blair, True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021 (MadHat Press, 2022)

Somebody (Williams Carlos Williams? Billy Collins? who even knows at this point) once said that a poem is a contraption that’s designed to produce the same emotional response in any reader. In the twenty-five years that I’ve known the poet David Blair (we taught together at a college in Boston for a little over half of that time), his poems have always swerved well out of the way of such a tidy and self-assured description. In large part that swerving, not unlike the filmmaker David Lynch’s, seeks to find new and heretofore undiscovered pathways for human logic, embodying (though his poems’ bodies are more fluid than our limited understandings of bodies usually are) a kind of presence of attention that invites every aspect of the poet’s wide-ranging interests into his poems, including every kind of reader, potentially. Neruda (or a character based on him in a biopic) democratically remarked that all one needs to understand poetry is a nature open enough to understanding it. Indeed.

And so to counteract these poems’ effects, I will take a more strictly logical approach to writing this review. I’ll comment on my thirteen favorite poems in the book in some depth, in the order in which they appear in his excellent and consummate new collection, True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at David Blair

“Sonnet for Robert Reich”: Here in Boston and its surrounding suburbs, where David Blair and I have both lived for nearly three decades now, people know this dude, Robert Reich, a politician and thinker who remains lucid and outspoken on political issues, in spite of his not winning his run for governor of Massachusetts a number of years ago. Anybody should be so lucky to have an artist like David Blair take such an omniscient portrait of you: “Mr. Peanut on his cane, tilting his urbane body skull / at all the ungovernableness.” And because Mr. Reich is small in stature, despite his admirably capacious and judicious mind, Blair encourages all of us to “lift him up in a light / that melts stubborn icicles,” perhaps the best metaphor around for Reich’s opponents, the Republicans. I think Reich would be happy to read this sonnet, and hopefully he will someday, if he hasn’t already.

“Sound Solution (‘Die Spinnerin’)”: Because “a young person around me with a jetpack” is probably a great analogy for parenting (I don’t know for certain since I don’t have any kids of my own). Then we get a trio of things that only Blair would know how to hinge together, with slight nods to James Tate and John Ashbery before him: “I missed my ping-pong paddle, all of my hair, / and the entire cut of the record. Rueful.” This is what I meant before by “presence of attention.” Blair’s strategy is not pure surrealism. Look at how tangibly rudimentary that little sequence of objects is, and yet as pure surrealism aims to do, Blair’s goal I think is perhaps to evoke specific maybe unknown feelings through his unique combinations of language and imagery. His poems decidedly do not go where others’ poems go.

“Election of the Saints”: By choice as a pacifist anarchist, I have never registered to vote and never will, a truth that I recently revealed to David Blair in an email, and it’s possible that he may never forgive me for it or see me the same way again. Yet “Election of the Saints” I’d say captures why I refuse to vote quite well, and gives an imagistic sort of exit from the problem by its deft close. The poem begins, “Traveling through the landscape / of election signs, / did you ask, Who is he? / and Who is he? / and Who is he? of names / held aloft at intersections / on fresh pine stakes / in yards?” We never really know who politicians are. History will also treat them as merely names (ask any student in any kind of history class about that), unless they happened to get shot (I think we know that by now). And then the poem pivots so intelligently into our predicament: “When you tell / me how your mother ran / out of gas on purpose, / so the two of you would / walk along the lavender / medians and across/ the margins of pine / along the road.” Politics ran out of gas on purpose long ago. This country has run out of gas. So Blair concludes, “I imagine / loving a person in his faults / or hers: allowing the car / to run out of gas, gladly, / to stop driving and walk.” What other choice do we have? That’s where we are now.

“Vinyl Raingear”: This one you just kind of have to read. It’s an awesome description of Cambridge near where we live at entirely its own pace. It’s a weird and special place. I hate it and love it equally every day. And I hate it and love it intensely. David’s poem captures the people there (in motion through rainswept wind verging on winter), who are both gross and gorgeous. (Usually more gross, but hey, that’s me.) “In the middle there is light-splashed tang / of the street with the bus not there yet.” Yeah, after thirty fucking years, I get really tired of waiting for it, too. But at least we have the light, while it lasts.

“At Park Street Station”: I was actually there just yesterday, on my way to the cinema as usual. Park Street Station is the hub of our transportation system in Boston. In fact, it’s why Boston is often referred to as “the Hub,” and you might already know that that station has the oldest stretch of streetcar tracks in the United States: “the subway on one level, / slim streetcars up here, // walls, ceilings, tunnels / sprayed with fire repellant, // against fire, but not mud, / catacombs, a Venetian future.” Is that global warming, since the ocean is just a few blocks away across the financial district? Will our subway tracks soon be submerged in canals? Probably. Blair’s ironic closing stance is both cheerful and not. “Isn’t it romantic, / and won’t it be? // Yes, and yes.”

“Primitive”: Here’s another one that you’d just have to read rather than watch me quoting every word. Our mutual friend, the poet Tanya Larkin, makes an appearance here, in her grandfather’s yard in (I think) New Jersey, and a little shrine he built there “around his Virgin Mary statue, / lawnchairs pointed at it, a stone in each chair.” Walt Whitman swims in from Camden like a great gray ghost, too, “like a long-horned sheep in a meadow / wedged as a paper stopper for elderberry wine,” that very vinegary elderberry wine that Oscar Wilde himself once drank.

“Mothership Prose”: The college where David and Tanya and I all taught together is gone now. It got closed down, basically, because it was a for-profit school run by well-paid big-wigs who ran the school like a car dealership. (Google New England Institute of Art and Department of Justice if you’re curious, but why would you be?) David opens the poem by asking, “Where is the boss? Maybe Vermont.” Those of us teaching couldn’t really afford to go there, or not for very long. “As for the boss under that boss, I give up on Fridays in July.” Don’t we all. Then we get spoiled by Blair luxuriating us out of all that mess, via a cruise ship journey through “depopulated summer” in an education mecca like Boston: “I am about to step into the golden assistance of late afternoon where the bicycles with training wheels and lacrosse sticks will be out on quiet streets.” The streets of our city in the wavering heat of July, an escape from “these tubes of fluorescent light” overhead inside the cool of air conditioning and office cubicles and menace.

“The Adorable Couple”: Now give me a dialogue-based scene, with half of it in ALL CAPS. As a gay man, I kind of hate heterosexual romance, but guess what, you have to deal regardless, and so I learned to love it anyway from John Hughes’ movies in the 1980s. I still love those films and the characters. These are not those characters. A music therapist who works in palliative care and a hospice physician. Clearly, they were meant for each other, as they shout across the din in some local dive bar. Good luck to them.

“Doris Duke in Newport”: Have you ever been to Newport, Rhode Island? I’ve been there once, maybe twice. Once for the famous folk festival there, and maybe once because I was dating some guy. I didn’t do the walk along the ocean by the mansions (“the big Bellevue eyesores,” which only David Blair would think to call them) because I can’t stand ocean-walk shit like that. It’s all over New England and you just can’t avoid it, so you start to hate it after a while. Yet David finds an estate that’s a true winner: “at Rough Point, mansion / museum of Doris Duke, / keeper of pet camels, / friend of Martha Graham, / Malcolm Forbes, / jazz musicians, / Imelda Marcos.” And of course David goes from that particular shoehorned historical figure to “the footbridge… / down at the front of her mansion’s / seaside backyard / for the Cliff Walk, / you see a cave full of ocean.”

“Vagrant Song—Boston Players”: Now we’re downtown, on Boylston Street in Boston, beside the entrance to the Lord & Taylor department store where “the modern wing of the library had driven aground / its white hull into pedestrian space,” along the roadways and sidewalks spread out far below “the Morse code of the antennae / on top of the buildings,” “basic and beautiful buildings.” Boston is provincial in the best sense of the word, and therefore, it’s both basic and beautiful. A vagrant’s song, of course, disturbs the proceedings, or augments them, outside of the 7-11 by Symphony Hall. The orchestra’s players go out with a splash: “Backstage, oboists were cranking / salsa and hip-hop, playing grab-ass, snapping jocks and ties.”

“Beach Blanket”: All the random things we do while sea level continues to rise by gradual increments: “shell beans,” “drink gimlets,” “slice tomatoes,” “pull weeds,” venture to outer space. “That way, we not only prepare for global catastrophe but can get over shocking boredom.” Ha. Isn’t it always so.

“Sonnet, Viking Funeral for a Workweek”: Shove it the fuck off, for real: “After work, I put my foot on the edge of the weekdays / and give them a shove back out into the harbor.” I mean, you have to remember where we worked. We basically taught ourselves to death, so each weekend was like a funeral, a funeral for us. “I salute you as you disappear, lazy porpoises, dear students, / with all of your pigtails, your tattooed faces, your sloppy hearts.” It’s a poem about not death but love. And survival.

“The Armies of Being Here”: Finally, a poem in which the legendary gay matinee idol and movie star Montgomery Clift teaches with us, the “half-employed” (oh, were we ever). We deserve that kind of dignity. So did Monty. Thank you, David.

Monday, June 20, 2022

24th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 15th - 19th, 2022)

As the world gradually rebounds to a state of relative normalcy in the wake of the global pandemic, the wonderful annual film festival in Provincetown began to do the same this past week, after holding virtual and hybrid festivals over the past two years. For this year’s festival, full slates of narrative features, documentary screenings, and short film programs were hosted in person at venues all across the town, with audiences and filmmakers enthusiastically attending events throughout the five days of the festival. I was excited to see many familiar faces around P’town and also meet some new ones, and the movies that I saw were excellent as always, with top-notch programming that consistently makes the Provincetown International Film Festival one of the very best fests of its kind in the world. As I did with last year’s festival, I’m focusing my post about this year’s fest on the gay-themed movies that I enjoyed seeing the most over these past several days, full of superb writing and performances, and even some fun surprises.

The film that affected me the most at this year’s festival, Bretten Hannam’s Wildhood, is a movie that I missed during the Wicked Queer film festival in Boston back in the spring, so I was grateful to have a chance to watch the film in Provincetown. A winning, picaresque road buddy movie set along the east coast of Canada, the film follows an entertaining trio of young upstarts: sweet but troubled peroxide blond Link (Philip Lewitski), his feisty tag-along younger half-brother Travis (Avery Winters-Anthony), and an alluring drifter named Pasmay (Joshua Odjick), who introduces some gay and two-spirit vibes that he senses are running not too far beneath the surface for Link as well. The young men are Mi’kmaq, though Pasmay is more familiar with the indigenous tribal customs, so he begins to teach Link a bit of their native language and some pow wow dances. Link’s the darker personality of these central figures, and he’s also the one who recently fled with Travis from their abusive father, after Link discovered that their father had cruelly lied to him for years by telling him that his mother had died, when in fact she’d run away from their family.

On the young men’s journey from Cape Breton across the wilds of eastern Canada to find Link’s estranged mother Sarah (Savonna Spracklin), they’re informed by a mystical drag queen in a gay bar that Sarah now lives in her birthplace, an indigenous Nova Scotia community called Blanket Hill. Pasmay and Link gradually grow closer and form a tight bond as they travel onward, a relationship that’s consummated in a beautifully filmed, evocative nighttime sex scene under a waterfall. Of course, that sounds like a typical cinematic approach to youthful physical exploration, but the film and the actors bravely and sensitively elevate it to a totally different level. Hannam’s direction also makes some distinctive visual nods to previous gay classics, such as a scene when the three young guys run to bathe in a lake that recalls the mood of a very similar scenario in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, as well as a scene in which Link takes a shower and the water slowly streams from his hair, a mirror image of an identical moment for the central character in Gus Van Sant’s under-appreciated 2007 gay skater drama Paranoid Park. (There’s also a cool echo of Ryan Gosling’s little-seen directorial debut Lost River early in Wildhood when Link and Travis abscond with some copper pipes from an abandoned building site and get chased down afterwards, just as the cute protagonist of Gosling’s movie does.)

When Wildhood shifted into its gently moving final act, I wasn’t at all prepared to be as emotionally blindsided by the movie’s gentle, remarkable resolution as I was. Mother/son reunions are certainly not new to cinema or coming-of-age narratives in general, but how Wildhood handles that particular subject is such a refreshing departure, one that’s totally subdued and undramatic, which only further deepens the emotional impact of the film’s finale and its closing scenes. As we learn during the young men’s journey to locate Sarah, she’d long ago struggled with addiction issues and a feeling that she didn’t belong in her community, both reasons for her estrangement from her son Link. His sudden reappearance in her life, which she welcomes in a naturally understated manner while the two gather herbs and wildflowers together in the forest, brought to mind my own long-ago memories of my mother, whom I haven’t seen at all for over 30 years now. By the time the end credits had finished rolling, I was still sitting stunned in my seat unable to stop crying. When the auditorium was empty and the lights came on, I finally forced myself to stand up and made my way to the exit door. Outside, a woman who’d been in the theater watching the same film saw me wiping away tears as they streamed down my face and asked me very kindly if she could give me a hug. That sort of uncontrollable crying had only happened to me past the end credits of one other movie, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, when I watched it at the cinema with my then-boyfriend way back in December of 1993.

My favorite surprise of the festival was attending a secret screening, the first time that it’s ever been done at the fest to my knowledge. I was thrilled to find out that I’d even correctly predicted which movie it would be: the great gay French director François Ozon’s latest film Peter von Kant, and this screening was actually the North American premiere, too. Ozon’s prolific cinematic output falls fairly neatly and evenly into two sets of styles. About half of his films are dramas exploring themes of sexuality and gender, and the other half are campy comedies that examine similar subjects in a lighter manner. Peter von Kant, Ozon’s free-wheeling adaptation of legendary gay German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, combines aspects of both of Ozon’s styles, though its dramatic elements are often so melodramatically over the top that it’s easier to categorize the film as one of his campy movies, and I’m happy to say that it’s also among the best of his campier films.

The movie is anchored by a magnetic and progressively unhinged performance by Denis Ménochet as Peter von Kant, an intense and semi-tortured film director and stand-in for Fassbinder himself. Ozon’s take on the original film is a masculine riff on themes of artistry and creativity as they relate to other forms of love and obsession. The object of Peter von Kant’s obsession throughout the movie (and his own movie within Ozon’s movie) is Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), a beguiling young aspiring actor who’s cunningly delivered to Peter by his former muse, an iconic actress and singer named Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani, irresistibly vamping it up); she's since moved on to her more illustrious, if artistically stalled career in Hollywood movies. Working away silently like clockwork at Peter’s every whim is his seemingly faithful assistant of three years, a slim wisp of a man named Karl (a hilarious and poignant Stefan Crepon). We as the audience are always aware just from his eyes that Karl knows everything about Peter’s unhealthy habits, despite that Karl doesn’t speak a single word of dialogue in the film, a wondrous aspect of Crepon’s portrayal of the character. Karl does, however, get to have the last word of sorts in the movie’s devastating penultimate scene.

Most of the barebones storyline traces how irreversibly, and how foolishly far, Peter falls for Amir, transforming his apartment into a shrine to Amir’s perfectly fit image, alongside the requisite queer iconography of St. Sebastian. Sidonie, of course, knew exactly how seriously Peter’s fixation on Amir would derail him, her way not only of turning Amir into a movie star through the vehicle of Peter’s films, but also a way to get her own kind of revenge for Peter’s ultimately condescending view of her. Peter’s unwavering and reckless passion for Amir is a standard plot device in gay cinema, to be sure, yet what marks Ozon’s film as truly special is the sharp and whipsmart screenwriting throughout nearly the entire film. The dialogue is far more clever and intricate than it seems on the surface, mainly because Ozon is mining many decades of gay male cultural tropes and their cinematic corollaries at once, a tightrope walk from which his footing rarely ever slips. Again, I think it’s one of the finest of his campier scripts, one in which he keeps winking playfully at the viewer because he knows that most of us are in on the joke. The film works, therefore, both as entertainment and as an artistic document of cultural value.

Craig Boreham’s Lonesome is a pensive and involving Australian film about a massively hot itinerant hustler named Casey, memorably played by gay actor Josh Lavery in a frequently unclothed and potentially star-making performance. (His Instagram handle, I feel compelled to report, is @twinkindecline.) After sleeping rough and roaming his way towards the urban metropolis of Sydney because he claims that he’s never seen the ocean, Casey’s able to wander into crowded late-night house parties to find some food and charge his phone. Gay dating apps like Grindr lead him to hookups and eventually to a steady boyfriend, Tib (Daniel Gabriel), whom he ends up living with for a slightly longer-term timeframe, at least by Casey’s less-than-commonplace standards.

Because both men are young, hot-headed, and horny, their idyllic situation doesn’t last for too long, yet Casey is earnestly attempting to find an authentic sense of peace and stability for himself. The character feels like a realistic creation, in spite of his omnipresent Joe Buck ornament, a ten-gallon cowboy hat, which lends him some credibility, as well as some cool shade from the blazing Australian sunshine. And even though Josh Lavery’s sweetness, tempered by some casual raunchiness, remains alluring throughout the duration of the movie, it never fully kicks into the higher gear of a riveting emotional performance like Félix Maritaud’s in the frenetic 2018 gay French hustler drama Sauvage. Lavery endows Casey with a tone that’s steady, nonchalant, and downbeat, perhaps somewhat too taciturn at times or maybe even too easygoing at others. He's both attractive and laidback enough to get away with that type of distant stance.

As bad luck would have it, Casey’s predicament turns more desperate as he’s left dangling in the winds of the circumstances that had initially set him adrift. Earlier in the film, he reveals to Tib that he’d been involved with a married closeted guy back in his small rural hometown, a situation that had unraveled and gotten unfairly blamed on Casey, tragically culminating in the married man’s death in a car accident. After Casey and Tib part ways abruptly due to a threesome hookup gone very wrong, the film’s storyline also turns swiftly in more uncomfortable directions as Casey again retreats to sleeping out on the streets. Provincetown audiences are almost always well-prepared for anything, and in the movie’s hardcore final stretch, including a difficult-to-watch BDSM sequence, I was reminded of when I first saw Gregg Araki’s masterpiece Mysterious Skin in this same film festival over 15 years ago now. Some in the audience couldn’t quite handle where that movie fearlessly went, but Lonesome seemed easier for the diverse audience to handle since the actors never fully ramped up the energy in the same way, as effectively filmed as Lonesome’s particularly graphic sequence is. Without giving away too many concluding details, let’s just say that the movie offers Casey a hopeful and redemptive finale, although one that leans a bit too neatly on wish fulfillment to provide a sudden and easy denouement.

The documentary that I’d most anticipated seeing in the festival was All Man: The International Male Story, directed by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed. The infamous International Male fashion catalog is otherwise known as an underwear magazine that launched a gazillion gay identities for guys who were going through their boyhood and adolescence back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I was one of the lucky recipients of the catalog in those days, and I never even understood how I’d started receiving it. (I have a feeling it was my teenage subscription to the cinema magazine Premiere that set the ball in motion.) As commentators from Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears to comedian Drew Droege vividly recall in the documentary, the images of the gym-bodied, underwear-clad models were the bridge to gayness for many young American men.

Anybody who’s ever seen the magazine knows that the fashion it showcased was mostly terrible, including pirate-style puffy shirts and bizarre dalmatian-print pajamas, so obviously all that really mattered about the publication were the reliable images of tan, ripped guys in their skivvies. The documentary covers the standard bullet points, from the business background of the diverse crew of gay men and straight women who founded and ran the catalog, to the culturally rich intersections of gay and straight masculinity, to how gay liberation had a harder time reaching very far inland from the American coasts in those years. Gay male employees who answered the phones to take orders recall how many of the calls were from gay and bisexual men who were seeking not just to buy some clothing but to make some kind of connection with someone because they lived in places too far away from the action. Several employees also recall how the AIDS epidemic ravaged the business and even the very office of the California-based company that they worked for, while also realizing that the catalog’s fashion spreads offered a kind of parallel world of fantasy where illness and the widespread loss of gay and bisexual men’s lives couldn’t disturb the picture of perfection.

Overall, the commentaries of the catalog’s models were most interesting and revealing because they were the ones whose carefully sculpted physiques were actually selling the clothes and the image of a certain kind of lifestyle that they represented. The documentary includes candid interviews with ubiquitous superstar models like Tony Ward and Brian Buzzini, who still remain handsome and recognizable today, as well as equally appealing models like David Knight, who’s gay himself and claims that he was one of only two gay International Male models he’d met in a sea of chiseled straight guys. It’s refreshing that they all approach their iconic status back in those days with a down-to-earth sense of humor, a levity that they also brought to their photo shoots given the ridiculousness of most of the clothes they had to model. As fate would have it, the International Male catalog was eventually bought out by big capitalism for $25 million by the Hanover mail-order conglomerate at the height of its public notoriety, and then it gradually sputtered out of relevance soon thereafter.

I was also very glad to watch some short film programs during the festival, the most interesting of which was a collection of experimental shorts called Dreamscapes. I was especially psyched to see Jonathan Caouette’s elliptical and quasi-political new short film  The Blazing (because I totally loved his previous groundbreaking full-length documentary Tarnation back in 2003), as well as Cam Archer’s imaginative, self-reflective, and offhand personal meditation His Image (since I loved his 2006 feature film Wild Tigers I Have Known). Both of their short films are fine demonstrations of the slippery process of image-making, evoking the sometimes daunting task of capturing moving images in their transitory act of shifting and evaporating, thereby shaping montages within the context of our current world of sensory overload. (Plus, Caouette’s short includes some sonic collaborations by Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins and the great gay musician John Grant, so that alone made Caouette's new short film worth watching.)

One true highlight of the festival for me was the chance to talk with energetic young artists and filmmakers at the various parties around town throughout the week. During Saturday’s press luncheon I had a fun conversation with the talented actor Antonio Marziale, who recently starred in the 2018 Netflix film Alex Strangelove, just a day after I’d watched his edgy new gay short film Starfuckers, which he also wrote and directed. His daring short shows a ton of promise by crafting an atmospheric Hollywood revenge tale that’s both innovative and distinctively rendered in a poetically compressed timeframe. Later at the filmmaker party on Saturday night, I also enjoyed talking with Fredgy Noël about her new short documentary The House of Labeija, which re-contextualizes some key members of that legendary drag-ball house, first introduced to the world in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 classic documentary Paris Is Burning. I’d been teaching my students in my summer course about Crystal Labeija, the house’s founder, only a week ago, so I look forward to seeing Fredgy’s short when it begins streaming at noon today on the festival’s website for viewers anywhere in the world to watch.

Provincetown has always been and still remains today a collectivity of inspired and spirited misfits, coming together at the edge of the world to advance our creativity and create social and artistic change. As a longtime resident of Boston, I’ve been a regular year-round visitor to Provincetown for nearly three decades now, and I’ve been attending and reviewing the annual film festival for almost two of those decades. (The festival will soon be celebrating its 25^th year in 2023.) Witnessing the collaboration of everyone who organizes such a fantastic film festival every year has provided me with many real lessons in community-building, and what a unique community of people it continues to be. As this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge honoree Luca Guadagnino hilariously summed it up during his conversation with John Waters at Sunday’s awards ceremony, “The only two people here who aren’t perverted are you and me, John.”

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Jason

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