The Lower Depths: It might have been good

The Lower Depths is a film directed by Renoir. Not the painter, his son. I saw it almost a month ago and I can't remember a thing about it.

Not. A. Thing.

Gay Movies: Spider Lilies

Spider Lilies is a Taiwanese film (Taiwan: The other China) about an uptight young woman being seduced by a younger free-spirited girl. Maybe uptight isn't the best way to describe a tattoo artist but Takeko is definitely reserved and afraid of making an emotional connection, especially with another girl (why yes, that can be linked back to a traumatic event from her youth). On the other hand, Jade is an engaging high-school girl who has a part-time job as a sex worker on the Internet.

Jade's career as a webcam girl sparks an odd and completely irrelevant sub-plot. The film keeps cutting away from the would-be couple to a woefully inept police officer who is assigned to monitor these sights. His entire job appears to be watching Internet porn and he doesn't seem that good at it. He's more interested in chatting with underage girls than he is with ending their exploitation. This goes nowhere and has nothing to do with anything.

The girls are cute and you want them to get together. Actually, you really want them to hook-up just to see something happen. It's a really slow movie. I'd say that more girl-on-girl action would help but really, when isn't that the case?


On IMDb there's a message board thread called "Any Similar, Better, films?" I think that sums up my feelings on this movie.

Gay Movies: Each Time I Kill

Seeing Each Time I Kill confused me because the only gay thing about it is a very brief cameo by John Waters (Full disclosure: I don't know that Waters is gay, I just assume). Maybe Doris Wishman, the cult director behind this movie, was a lezzie. I say "was" because the guy who introduced the film told us she had died shortly after filming this and that the editing was done after her death. Looking her up on IMDb, I noticed that she shuffled off this mortal coil in 2002. So they certainly took their sweet time getting this thing together.

The film is about Ellie, an awkward and unfortunate-looking girl, who discovers a magic doodad that allows her to switch one of her physical features with someone else. However, in order to achieve this she must first murder the person whose feature she wishes to steal. She makes a couple of good kills giving herself a great complexion and ridding herself of her frightening buck-teeth but she looses the audience's sympathy when she murders a fellow high-schooler for her hair. I mean, I can understand bumping a couple people off to get glowing skin and a winning smile but slaying someone to get rid of your lady-mullet? Why not try treating yourself to a fancy salon first and only fall back on murder if absolutely necessary? However, I was glad to see that she did refrain from homicide when it came to her tits. She just did some bizarre thing with duct tape to make the twins pop out a little more. Girlfriend's not completely heartless.

Gay Movies: Nina's Heavenly Delights

Nina's Heavenly Delights is just like Bend It Like Beckham, only with food instead of soccer. And Scotland instead of England. And Parminder Nagra ends up with Keira Knightley.

It might not be great but it's a thoroughly enjoyable trifle.

Before the film started, the director came out and warned us that there weren't any sex scenes and jokingly commented that her film contained "food porn". She was right. A lot of the plot involves Nina teaching a Scottish girl how to make Indian food, and the cooking scenes were hot. Watching two cute girls flirtatiously prepare ethnic food combines too many of my favorite things to ignore. There was also some stuff about a ghost dad, saving the family restaurant, winning a cooking competition, and old flames being rekindled. But, honestly, who cares about that when there's good food and chicks making out?


I bet you're wondering if this film contains a big Bollywood-inspired musical number. But do you really have to ask?

Gay Movies: Love Sick

If you want to portray a lesbian relationship in a positive light, what should you contrast it with? Love Sick answers with heterosexual incest. I think the director felt that he had to frame his argument in that way because the relationship between the two young Romanian ladies isn't a particularly healthy one. That's not to say that it's an unhealthy relationship. It's just troublesome (read: real).

Alex (the girl on the left in the above picture) is a sweet but shy girl who is seduced by the more outgoing, and out of control, Kiki (the one on the right). From the start we see why these two opposites are attracted to each other. Alex seems inexperienced and ready for a more worldly girl to lead her through her sexual awakening, while Kiki needs a more grounded person to help her work through her family issues (like, the fact that she's sleeping with her brother). The beginning of the film follows their charming courtship that involves a lot of "sleepovers" in Alex's room under the nose of her clueless landlady.

However, the cracks in their relationship are readily apparent and everything goes downhill once Alex decides to go back to her parents' house in the country during the school break. Kiki feels abandoned and begins dropping really strong, really passive-aggressive hints that she wants to go with her. Alex allows Kiki to come along but it is understood that their love affair must be hidden from Alex's old-fashioned parents.

In the country things get off to an awkward start. Then Kiki's brother/former lover shows up in a jealous rage, having been driven by the older woman he's having an affair with.

Things get pretty ugly pretty quick.


Chicks. Can't live with 'em, can't have hot lesbian sex without 'em.

Gay Movies: Rope

This year I decided to experiment with the 13th Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (yeah, it ended a while ago but I got a little behind with these posts). I volunteered for advanced ticket sales and box office. This allowed me to see some movies for free and I can use my leftover comps for what the staff and volunteers at this festival kept referring to as "the straight film festival". However, I think it would be more accurately described as "the bi-curious film festival", they've got a little bit of everything.

I started off slow by seeing Rope, an excellent film by Alfred Hitchcock that I'd seen before. I love that it begins with the murder and then all of the suspense is generated from whether or not the two murderers will get away with it. All of the action is confined to one apartment (Hume Cronyn adapted the script from a play) and Hitchcock films it with long takes that are seamlessly connected to give illusion that the entire movie consists of two or three extremely long tracking shots. All of this adds an immediacy with a claustrophobic edge that ratchets up the tension.

The plot itself is loosely inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case. Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb were University of Chicago students who murdered a 14-year-old boy, believing themselves to be Nietzschean supermen capable of committing "the perfect crime" without fear of capture. They were wrong.

Leopold and Loeb also had a homosexual relationship which the film implies without ever dealing with directly. For example, at one point their maid, commenting on the students foul post-strangulation moods, says "They must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning" gently implying that a single bed was involved.

To be honest, I was a little surprised that PIGLFF decided to show this film. It plays on outdated stereotypes and clearly associates homosexuality with deviant behavior. I guess they were just happy to get any screen-time in 1948. But I suppose the main reason they decided to show it is because they were giving the Artistic Achievement Award to Farley Granger and they were like, "Hey, let's show that really good gay-Hitchcock movie. You know, while we're at it."


Jimmy Stewart's in this too but he's not gay. Or is he?

Sicko: Does Moore know what he's trying to accomplish?

Disclaimer:
For this post I'm just recycling a paper that I had to write for class. I apologize for it being dry and unnecessarily verbose (I had to fill two entire pages).

Michael Moore has devoted his life to altering American society through his film and television work. One can argue with his complaints or his suggested solutions but these criticisms are not particularly relevant. Moore’s work attempts to influence opinions and it should be judged by how effective it is at achieving that goal. Whether that goal is worthwhile should be a matter of politics.

The primary hurdle that Moore needs to overcome in Sicko is his image as a member of the radical left. In order to have his message generally accepted he must be perceived as the populist he wishes to be rather than the extremist his detractors accuse him of being.

Moore seems aware of this issue and begins his film with a fake-out. He introduces us to a couple of characters who have suffered from a lack of insurance. Although there are many Americans who are uninsured, they still constitute a minority and the middle-class demographic that Moore must play to in order to get his message across may not be able to relate to their situation. It is at this point in which Moore, rather ingeniously, stops the film and informs the viewers that the movie will not be about these people.

At this point Moore informs us that Sicko will be about people who are insured but find that their coverage is inadequate to deal with medical emergencies that they have encountered. This is a constituency that Moore’s audience can relate to. It immediately raises the question in their minds about whether or not their own insurance would cover all of their expenses in the wake of a catastrophic disease or other dire medical need.

This is the films greatest strength. It exposes the risks that face regular Americans who never know how extensive their insurance is until they are faced with doctor’s bills. It also allows Moore to explore the corporate policies that have victimized sick people and their stories make for very emotional sequences. Even someone who is completely opposed to Moore’s proposed solution of socialized medicine would be hard-pressed to watch this film without feeling that these patients have been treated unfairly.

For this reason, it is such a shame that Moore looses his way during the second half of the film. By incorporating the 9/11 rescue workers into his narrative Moore conjures up memories of his previous film Fahrenheit 9/11. That was a very divisive film and since Moore’s call to change is directed at all Americans he would be wise to avoid dredging those issues up. Although the President’s approval rating has dropped to around 30%, one must remember that approximately half of voters chose to vote for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

If Moore wants to create a consensus on health care he must court the roughly 15-20% of the voters who helped to elect Bush but now think that his performance is unsatisfactory. By dredging up allegations about faulty pre-war intelligence, election stealing, and other controversial issues Moore polarizes his audience just when he needs to bring them together.

Moore’s greatest gift as a filmmaker is his ability to make movies that deal with complicated issues in an entertaining and easy to understand way. Although this leads his opponents to accuse him of oversimplification, is provides him with a powerful tool for changing people’s perceptions. However, his ability to convince those on the other side of the aisle is dramatically weakened when he plays into the popular caricature of himself as a radical troublemaker.

In this way, Sicko is a mixed success for Moore. He has created an intelligent movie about a complex dilemma that is appealing to many people because of its sentimentality and humor. Unfortunately, this film also serves as a slap in the face to a significant portion of Americans who supported Bush in the past but who may regret that decision now. In order to become the genuine populist that he presents himself as, Moore must learn to stop taking cheap shots at the moderate Republicans he needs to create a force large enough to truly affect national policy.


Now you know what it feels like to be one of my professors. Exciting, no?

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe: The title is surprisingly literal

One day future documentarian Errol Morris told famed documentarian (and feature film director) Werner Herzog about a movie he'd like to make. Herzog told Morris to stop talking about it and actually make the project happen, promising to eat his shoe if Morris followed through. This challenge resulted in two things: First, Morris produced the wonderfully bizarre documentary Gates of Heaven. Second, Herzog ate his shoe. An act that was documented in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank who had previously filmed Herzog as his subject in Burden of Dreams.

I know this is starting to sound like a documentary circle-jerk but there was some impressive work done here. Morris got his career off to a great start with Gates of Heaven which chronicled the lives of pet cemetery proprietors and their clients. But I'm not here to review that film, so I'll just say that it's fascinating and well worth checking out. Oh, and Morris went on win an Oscar for directing The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, which is also great.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is a lesser work but at a brief 20 minutes I don't think it was meant to be a great piece of art. It plays more like a home video. That doesn't mean that it's boring or amateurish, far from it. This doc has a light conversational tone, as if you were friends with those involved and along for the ride. Herzog discusses the meaning of the stunt and how he plans on cooking his shoe to a semi-edible state but he also takes time to discuss art and the importance of following your dreams.

It's not the kind of movie I'd recommend to just anyone. But if you're interested enough in filmmaking (and Herzog in particular) to rent the Burden of Dreams DVD, which includes it as a special feature, it's worth checking out this little film.

Burden of Dreams: Don't take Klaus Kinski into the jungle with you. Just don't.

Werner Herzog made a film called Fitzcarraldo about a deranged man who moves an entire boat over a mountain in the middle of the jungle by using indigenous people. In order to achieve this effect Herzog moved a boat over a mountain in the middle of the Amazon by hiring Indians. Burden of Dreams documents this remarkable event.

Herzog spends a lot of time on the commentary track for Fitzcarraldo trying to convince the listeners that he's not actually insane. After seeing this, I can see why he felt that was necessary. This film has scenes where Herzog delivers creepy monologues about the jungle, like this:

Nature here is vile and base . . . The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country . . . It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape . . . It's a land that God, if he exists has created in anger . . . Taking a close look at what's around us there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder . . . But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it . . . But I love it against my better judgment.

Yikes,! When you start channeling Colonel Kurtz, it's time to get out of the jungle.

Also, this doc gives intriguing lines but doesn't always put them in context. For instance at one point when Herzog is talking about how important this project is to him he mentions that people have been killed while working on the film. Herzog is careful to point out in the commentaries for Fitzcarraldo and this documentary that the deaths were through no fault of his own (a couple of the extras attempted to steal a canoe in the middle of the night and drowned and there was also a crash involving a private plane). These claims come off as credible but they also sound a lot like someone who's trying to convince future investors that he actually is responsible.

Of course, we all know that the real lunatic in the jungle is temperamental actor Klaus Kinski. Kinski's outbursts were so upsetting to the indigenous actors that their chief approached Herzog and offered to have the actor killed. I've heard that Kinski also plotted to have Herzog murdered but I don't remember if that was in the documentary, one of the commentaries or just something I read online. Oddly, the only Kinski tantrum caught on film wasn't used it the final project. However, Herzog did use the footage when he made his own documentary about Kinski, My Best Fiend (no, that's not a typo).

Fitzcarraldo is a good film but it is a movie that's backstory is more interesting than the final film. Fortunately, Les Blank was there to film the behind-the-scenes drama and Herzog is still around to defend himself. Kinski died in '91, so there's nobody around to stick-up for him but that's probably just as well. He'd only make himself look worse.


A documentary about Werner Herzog? That's so Meta.

Champion: Who said there are no second acts in American lives? Oh, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald? Well, fuck that guy.

Champion is a documentary about Danny Trejo, my favorite Hispanic character actor (sorry, Luis Guzmán). His fascinating life and oversized personality make for a thoroughly watchable film and are great at showcasing Trejo's awesomeness. But what surprised me the most is how it also serves as a critique of the American penal system. There are a lot of intimate moments where Trejo confesses what kind of a person he had to become in order to survive prison. Even more interesting are the moments when he talks about his struggle to escape from his jail persona once he was released.

Even if you don't have a fixation for Chicano bit-players I still think you can really enjoy this movie. It's the story of one man's journey from an, admittedly, insane criminal to a minor celebrity who uses his down-time between filming to serve as a motivational speaker for troubled youths. You'd have to be pretty heartless not to be moved by that.


This guy was a drug counselor . . . after he got out of prison.