A strangely packed week of movies, as I saw three (!):
District 9: This gorily violent science fiction film starts with a mothership containing a million or so “refugee aliens” parking over Johannesburg, South Africa. Defenseless, the aliens (derisively referred to as prawns) are put into a camp below the ship known as District 9. 20 years later the district is a huge slum and a private military contractor is tasked with moving the aliens to a new camp 200 miles away from the city (and conveniently out of sight). The movie starts with the mass eviction and follows as the head of the eviction plan gets a little closer than he’d like to the aliens and ultimately finds himself sympathetic to their plight.
Shot in a pseudo-documentary style, the movie is brutal, at turns funny and pulls off the neat trick of engaging and holding the viewer when none of the characters initially are even likable. Smart and incisive (especially in its portrayal of the ugly world of private military contractors and their ethics — or lack thereof), the only criticism I have of the film is the way it relies on a few “in the nick of time” moments to keep things moving along but these are quibbles. Highly recommended.
9: This animated post-apocalyptic film features an alternate history where machines built for war turn on their human masters, Terminator-style, wiping out all life. The only “survivors” are nine small burlap dolls who are strangely sentient. The movie follows as they fight to survive against the few remaining machines and ultimately explains how they came to be. Each of the nine is a stereotype — the set-in-his-ways old leader, the cruel, unthinking muscle, the “crazy” guy (voiced by Crispin Glover, naturally) and so on — but by movie’s end the stereotypes are actually explained in a way that works. What may not work for some is the somewhat esoteric ending that veers toward metaphysical, leaving a lot up to the viewer to decide. I actually found myself agreeing with a fairly solid criticism of the ending and yet it didn’t hurt my reaction to the film overall. The world it creates is dazzlingly presented and the machines are a nightmarish blend of mechanical and organic, with spiders, skulls, scissors and sinewy red string leading the way. Any parent taking a young kid to this film probably guaranteed the little bugger having nightmares for a week. 😛 Recommended.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: (some spoilers follow, if you care about that sort of thing) I have not read the books so I don’t know what’s been left behind in adapting them to the screen, though I understand with each successive novel getting longer, the writers are being more challenged in what to keep in the films to present a coherent story. Since the title mentions a Half-Blood Prince, I figure he’s going to be prominent to the story. Eventually there is a scene where Harry grabs a potion book and the inside cover reveals it is the property of the Half-Blood Prince. A-ha, I think! I wait for an elaboration on this. Late in the movie Snape, waving his wand all nasty-like at Harry, reveals that he is the Half-Blood Prince. And that’s pretty much it. It felt like a major chunk of the story went missing and we got a Quidditch game thrown in instead. Dumbledore’s demise was also telegraphed so blatantly I almost expected to see a bullseye painted on his robes. The least-satisfying Harry Potter movie to date. It’s not horrible, though, and the young cast remains capable and engaging.
Last week I went to four films at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and as one might expect, it was a mixed bag (or fruit basket, if you prefer). Below are my reviews.
Ciao
Here’s the description from the VQFF website: “When Jeff’s lifelong best friend Mark dies, he is left in charge of handling Mark’s possessions and tying up loose ends. Through a trail of Mark’s email correspondence, Jeff learns of Mark’s secret online romance with Andrea, a handsome Italian who is scheduled to visit the United States and meet Mark for the first time. With the trip already booked, Andrea decides to come anyway and learn more about his recently departed friend. In the midst of grieving, these two strangers share a single night of intimate conversation, good old American country music and sexual tension that leads to perhaps what is the most tender (yet still steamy) brief encounter ever portrayed in queer cinema.”
And my take: The premise is interesting but the execution is thwarted by stiff acting and a script filled with wooden dialogue and lots of not much happening. There are three main characters: Jeff, his adopted Asian sister and Andrea, the man from Italy. Jeff is an earnest but bland character and Adam Neal Smith’s portrayal isn’t bad per se, he just shows no real emotion until the very end and I suppose it’s meant to be seen as a cathartic release but it falls flat instead. Alessandro Calza fares better, perhaps because he can hide behind the facade of a character handling a non-native language. The sister has some amusing lines but again the acting feels rather wooden. As the tone is consistent across all actors, I wonder if it may have been an issue with the director’s handling of them.
Another negative was not that the film was low budget but that it didn’t acknowledge that and work within its limitations. There is a scene with Jeff and Andrea driving to the cemetery and apparently the production could not afford to have the car towed on a trailer. Instead the camera is placed in the backseat. While Calza is seen in profile while chatting, Smith never looks anywhere except at the road — which is understandable because he is actually driving — but as a result you never see his face for the entire scene. Why not shoot the scene with them walking in the cemetery instead or somehow frame it so you could properly see the actors? There were also a series of long framed shots or tracking shots of the city skyline at night that didn’t serve any purpose but to pad out the film’s length.
Perhaps the highlight of the film came during that “brief encounter”. When Jeff and Andrea started kissing some guy in the audience began applauding loudly, as if this heralded a great moment in gay cinema or something. Definitely the best laugh in the movie. 🙂
The Coast is Queer
“This year’s local shorts program could have been renamed The Coast is Brave and Outrageous due to the bold and shameless stories, like lisa g’s look at women in Riverview Mental Hospital in the 1940s and Clark Nikolai’s exploration of foreskin ‘docking’.”
My take: This is a collection of 13 shorts. I’ll highlight the ones I found most memorable (for better or for worse). Asylum is a surprisingly sympathetic look at the long-closed Riverview mental facility narrated by a former staff member, ending with a “twist” as a lesbian inmate checks out with one of the female staff, a rather surprising event during the 1940s. Another tale set in the 1940s (1948) is Caught, a silent look at two high school students — one a member of the drama club, the other a Bible group — whose innocent sleepover ends up being not so innocent. This is a wistful and well-shot drama, combining moments of comedy with the crushing pain of a love — and life — denied. Withchrave struck me as a pointless visual exercise, showing “witches” in various states of dress and undress cavorting, smoking and doing “witchy” stuff. Did I need to see a full frontal shot of a nude woman peeing? No, I didn’t. But hey, one more thing to scratch off the list of “things I never planned on seeing but saw anyway”. I guess this film was meant to evoke a feeling of sensuality or something so it’s perhaps not surprising that it didn’t click with me.
Galactic Docking Company was a rather randy but very funny short that combined stock NASA footage (mainly from Mission Control) with dockings involving rockets and love rockets, if you know what I mean. The combination of music and perfectly timed editing showing the reactions of the various NASA engineers made this a bawdy ol’ good time. Swans was essentially penis worship set to music that I found uninteresting despite being a personal fan of the subject. The lowlight of the collection was Cindy Doll. Before the shorts began, a number of directors spoke about their films and the director of Cindy Doll warned that her piece tackled a taboo subject and it might offend or make people uncomfortable. She invited people to discuss the film with her afterward. I correctly pegged it as a take on child abuse before it started. The film consisted of the director naked in a bathtub with the titular Cindy Doll. As the horrors of child abuse were depicted with the doll being stripped and spanked among other things, loud, discordant noises would occasionally blare out for some kind of effect (maybe this was the uncomfortable part the director referenced, as my ears were not experiencing what I would call pleasure). The director would regularly begin pleasuring herself with the doll, looking up at the camera with (guilty?) eyes. Um, symbolism! Maybe. The whole thing came off as self-indulgent twaddle. The only part that offended me was knowing I’d not get back the time I’d spent watching it. Here’s my advice: If you were abused as a child, see a therapist, don’t make a short film about it.
I’ll end with the highlight of the show, Coffee. This was one of the few professionally-shot pieces (several were done specifically for a Super 8 competition or by high school students as part of an anti-homophobia campaign — and those were well-done for what they were). The premise is simple — a lesbian and gay friend are having coffee at a cafe and it quickly becomes apparent that the woman’s recent failed relationship has pushed her off the deep end, as she has become obsessed with Kate Walsh from “Grey’s Anatomy”. The writing is sharp and funny and the two actors deliver their lines with expert timing. It was inspiring enough to make me want to finish “The Famous Polka”. It’s one of 10 different vignettes culled from a longer piece and can be viewed here. Highly recommended.
Otto; Or, Up With Dead People
“Film theorists claim that the zombie genre is a form of social commentary, relevant to our consumerist and apathetic present times. If so, then what comment does Bruce LaBruce make with his gay zombie flick? Attack the heteronormative establishment? Fuck your brains out (then eat them)? Whatever social messages might be gleaned from LaBruce’s work, the Canadian director brings us a perverse and satirical cinematic original.
Otto is a young neo-Goth loner and pretty hot for a dead guy. Wandering the streets of Berlin, Otto stumbles upon a casting call for a zombie film. After seeing his half-hearted audition, radical lesbian filmmaker Medea Yarn not only becomes convinced that Otto will be the next big underground movie star, but forces the lead actor, Fritz, to take Otto home with him. While Medea and Fritz struggle to finish their film, Otto searches for the human beneath the zombie.”
This was both a send-up and an affectionate (?) homage to zombie movies, gay porn and pretentious art films. Shot in Germany with a local cast, Otto features plenty of gore (mostly disembowelment and entrails, as one would expect in a zombie film), fleeting but explicit sex scenes and at times a hilarious take on the self-styled film auteur personified by Medea as she works to finish her underfunded “masterpiece”, “Up With Dead People”, a film chronicling the rise of gay zombies. Into this comes Otto, who fails to convince the director that he is in fact an actual zombie but gets cast in the lead role, anyway.
The film starts rather slowly and for the first 20 minutes or so felt more like a clumsy homage to art films than anything else but when the various characters intersect it pulls together and the rest of the ride is pretty enjoyable. There’s a graphic scene of zombie penetration that will likely put you off your lunch for a week or so and a sex orgy that is the film-within-a-film’s conclusion also has some very naughty bits that, while enticing, seemed gratuitous in the given context. I found the ending a bit confusing as it strongly suggests Otto is no longer a zombie, then seems to revert him back to a more undead state. As expected, the film’s ending is not exactly happy but appropriate. The actress that played Medea was probably my favorite, if only because she was so appropriately over-the-top with her views on the terrible capitalist society she is part of. She also gives a small girl eating chocolate the what-for in what may have been the film’s funniest moment.
Boycrazy
“Everywhere I go there’s a guy to catch my eye. It makes me kinda crazy, like I’m back in junior high.” Is Corey—the dreamy lead in Boycrazy—singing your song? If so, there are plenty of guys to catch your eye in this lineup of men’s short films.
Serving up the first piece of eye candy is Zak, an underappreciated topless waiter in Dinx. Filmmaker Michael Mew treats us to some homegrown guys, co-starring local drag diva Symone, in his new science fiction romance Q-Case. A chorus line of “show bears” dances in King County. And the quirky musical Boycrazy explores the pros and cons of single life.”
As noted above, this was four short films. Dinx features a cute and short protagonist who seems to suffer a dimensional rift that takes him back to his childhood while still dressed as a topless waiter. Much like that character, this film was cute and short, amusing but not laugh-out-loud funny. Q-Case is a parody of the X-Files with a definite queer twist. Perhaps not surprisingly, the central premise centers around anal probes. This was a solid effort, although the acting of several of the characters was leaning more toward the amateur side. The love interest of the alien/clone handled his part well and reacted perfectly to his precious shoe collection getting vaporized. I admit I also enjoyed the idea of the Mulder character getting a giant black drag queen as his temporary partner and voice of reason. King County is a series of scenes centering around a theater group auditioning actors for movies turned into stage musicals. Among some of the entries: Mommie Dearest, Fame (with bears) and most hilariously, a musical version of Top Gun featuring “butch lesbians” that has Maverick and Goose (or was it Ice?) singing and dancing on the flight deck. The actress playing Maverick looked similar enough to Tom Cruise to be somewhat disturbing. The final and longest piece was Boycrazy, featuring James May, an actor who could be Neil Patrick Harris’s younger brother. This is a musical about dating and relationships (online and otherwise) and is done in a style very similar to Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. The singing is uniformly excellent and the dance numbers, though not flashy, are energetic, as is the film as a whole. I really enjoyed this funny and sometimes insightful look at the trials and tribulations of men dating men — and not just because I have gone through some of my own recently (none set to music, alas).
Among my many books, you’ll find a pile of short story collections and anthologies. I’ve just added two more today–Flights Volume 2 and 20th Century Ghosts, a collection from Joe Hill, son of Stephen King. Because I suck at recalling details of short stories later on (I’m good with the broad strokes but always amazed by people who can recall the most subtle of storytelling nuances years later) I thought I’d start offering mini-reviews of short stories as I read them.
The current collection I’m working through is called Dark Delicacies. It is modestly sub-titled “Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World’s Greatest Horror Writers.”
Ray Bradbury, “The Reincarnate”. I actually read this story months ago and don’t recall the details (see what I mean?) but leafing through it quickly, it’s written in second person, so everything is about you. You talk to her, you go there, you do this. I have never liked the second-person POV for fiction, it just rings wrong, as if the story is being dictated instead of simply unfolding for you. Sorry, Ray!
Lisa Morton, “Black Mill Cove”. A straightforward suspense tale in which a man and wife go camping and have an argument. The man heads off to the cove in the title to catch some abalone, hoping a full haul will help patch things over with his wife. As he threads his way into the difficult-to-reach tide pools, he comes across what he thinks are the remains of a shark attack. It turns out to be more sinister than that, and he faces a life or death struggle before the twist ending. No spoilers here but suffice to say this is a nicely presented tale o’ terror.
Whitley Strieber, “Kaddash”. A heavy-handed satire that imagines an alternate America after “Obliteration Day” in which a nuclear attack strikes Washington, leading the country to a full conversion into a Christian theocracy. The main character is a warden at a Texas prison who oversees executions of secular humanists and other troublemakers. This is completely over-the-top stuff and is presented as such knowingly, contrasting the ultra-religious fervour of the populace against the banalities of everyday life–shopping at Walmart, rooting for the high school football team. It’s a serviceable piece, but I felt it could have been funnier and still made its point. Still, it had Fox paying $11 million to broadcast executions, so there’s that.
Robert Steven Rhine, “The Seer”. This is a classic Twilight Zone tale, complete with twist ending in which a man can foresee the (inevitably) terrible ways people will die, including his own. The story is sad and funny, and there is some suspense in seeing whether the protagonist can cheat his own fate.
D. Lynn Smith, “The Fall”. A story told in the present tense about a boy and his family who are apparently being attacked or hunted by demon-like creatures that can assume human form. This one felt a bit rote to me and features people behaving in ways that serve the plot but are not necessarily believable–a big pet peeve of mine. The ending is especially unsatisfying, as the boy simply does not act in a way that has been credibly built up prior.
F. Paul Wilson, “Part of the Game”. An extremely racist cop threatens to bring down a horde of detectives on the illicit activities in Chinatown unless he gets a 50% cut of the illegal gambling revenue. “The Mandarin”, through the haltingly-spoken English of his representative, rejects the threat and the cop finds himself sleeping with a very poisonous–and pregnant–millipede. As the poison begins working through his system, the cop finds himself indeed “part of the game.” The ending is nicely satisfying, though I felt the racism was depicted in a cartoonish manner that was unnecessary.
Roberta Lannes, “The Bandit of Sanity”. I didn’t care for the title of the story, since the presumed “bandit” doesn’t really come off like one. A well-heeled psychiatrist begins to show symptoms of what he first thinks is some kind of mental disorder, possibly even multiple personalities, leading to a Jekyll and Hyde-like life. As he realizes an old case has literally come back to haunt him, the story works toward a reasonably predictable conclusion. This is not really a bad thing, as it works. My biggest complaint is how brand names are thrown around like excerpts from a James Patterson novel, as if we need them as reminders of how successful the guy is. Yes, he has Donghia chair. Oh, look, he’s sitting in his Donghia chair again and has Hugo Boss slacks. WE GET IT.
Brian Lumley, “My Thing Friday”. The lone survivor of a spaceship crash discovers he is on a planet inhabited by a group of interlinked and intelligent species he comes to call The Pinks. Some are winged, some are quadrupeds, some are biped and more humanoid. They have a great reverence toward the dead and the survivor’s journal chronicles his efforts to understand them, in particular, one that seems to follow him around as he ekes out a living on this strange world. Things turn stranger indeed as he better understands The Pinks. I quite liked this one. Told in the first person, Lumley captures a whimsical tone that remains believable, right to the disturbing finale.
Nancy Holder, “Out Twelve-Steppin’, Summer of AA”. A pair of middle-aged rock stars who happen to be cannibals try to “go straight” by attending AA. Despite the premise, it’s not quite as funny as it sounds and the ending is a bit left field. Still, a breezy read.
