Tag / Film

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The Real Thing, Or: Love is Strangled

[I wrote this some time ago, but it didn’t seem to be published at the time]

 

Love is Strange (Ira Sachs, 2014)
Gay movies always seem to be about death. Well, maybe that’s an over statement but male gay narratives partake of a gothic that seems out of statistical probability. If it’s not HIV related, it’s suicide or a violent end. One reaches for the Kleenex far too often and not in a happy ending way. Living happily ever after is a fantasy too far, it often seems, although – I know, I know – for drama to happen bad things have to happen to good people. (But see Der Kreis)

File Love is Strange under bittersweet. Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) have lived together for thirty-nine years, one a talented if unsuccessful artist, the other a talented music teacher for a catholic school. But the marriage means that the school can no longer turn a blind eye to George’s sexuality and he is fired – meaning that they can’t afford the mortgage on their appointment. Whilst there is the option of moving to Poughkeepsie, the two stay in spare rooms (or spare bunkbeds/sofas) of friends and relatives whilst they sort themselves out.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Molina – he was Kenneth Halliwell in Prick Up Your Ears Stephen Frears, 1987), was a hoot as a habitual liar in Trust Me (Tony Dow, 1992) and is in the film of The Normal Heart (Ryan Murphy, 2014) – and Lithgow I first saw as transgendered Roberta in The World According to Garp (George Roy Hill, 1982). The relationship is absolutely beautiful, utterly credible, with a real sense of a shared history between them. The awkwardness of being put up – which rapidly turns in being put up with – is convincing, although I think Kate (Marisa Tomei) is given a bit of a thankless rôle as overly keen host and self-centered if put upon writer. The direction is leisurely, braving the chance to hold a shot for ten seconds longer than comfortable. It feels – not to be critical – that it wanted to be a theatre play. Unlike most New York comedy dramas or sitcoms this is a multiethnic New York.

At the same time as the leisurely pace we are left wanting to know more – one family crisis seems unresolved, George’s letter to the school parents is more political speechifying than plot development, a positive twist is too far in the fairy tale wish-fulfilment territory and the resolution mechanics seem unfocused. The epilogue is positive, a story arc pays off, diversity seems to thrive. But it is a sunset.

Meanwhile, I recognised John Corbett from Northern Exposure, and the face I knew but couldn’t name belongs to Ed (Darren E. Burrows) from the same programme. Game of Thrones gets a product placement, and I’m not sure I’ve seen a Dungeons and Dragons consultant credited before on a film.

All of this is certainly worth a look, although I noted this is another example of how every five years “Hollywood” notes that there is a mature audience as well as teenagers of all ages.

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Sub Text

Fifty Shades of Grey (Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2015)

“Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own beating.”

The curious thing about the film Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s got this subtext of vampirism. I mean, you can read it two ways – in Marxist terms and in feminist terms. Not party politically, and not in that shock-horror women get horny too, or the somehow already all too lacking in agency somehow get turned on by giving up agency being all about reclaiming power … this is clearly no more a BDSM manual than it’s a guide to business management.

Our virginal hero, Anaesthesia Steel is substituted for the manflu suffering flat mate to interview communications guru Christian Grey for a student newspaper prior to graduation. Having bagged a parking space right outside the sky scraping phallus that is Grey Mansions, Anaphylactic trips and and falls at Grey’s feet as the first point in a ten sequence of cringe. For all that journalist seems to have become an acceptable job for a female character post-Lane, maybe sleeping with your subject is not smart (see also Iron Man and Superman, sorta). Grey turns the tables on Anatomy and asks her what first turned her on to literature – Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë or Thomas Hardy. She says hardy, and she’s already demonstrated her Tess pure woman wet blanket qualities whilst he is not yet Alec D’Urberville. He had figured on Austen, no doubt casting himself as Colin Firth/Mr Darcy; I suspect he really should be citing Emily as he’s more Heathcliff than Rochester.

Christian offers her all manner of beautiful things – accommodation, a car, flights in helicopters and gliders, alcohol whilst telling her to abstain, in fact an aspirant upper middle class married lifestyle. (The glider was maybe a little over the top – the footage reminding me of those videos shown in laser video jukeboxes in takeaways in the 1990s.) All she has to do in return is give up free will and sign here. It’s maybe more extreme than the standard terms of employment or the Book of Common Prayer marriage service but, still…* It’s mettafa. SKY TV, live football, telephone calls, broadband? Put up with Page 3.

The interesting sequences start when she plays hard to get – but I fear the tale of Little Orphan Christian and his redemption will take prominence. Anastasia will make her peace with him as with capitalism.

Dakota Johnson seems fair enough as Anastasia, although if you want real kink watch or rewatch her grandmother in Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964); the film is set on the wrong coast but it channels her mother’s Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988) although it lacks a Sigourney Weaver figure. Jamie Dornan is really the character from The Fall, hiding from Gillian Anderson and switching accents to put her off the scent.** (I fell off this series after episode one of season two, so obviously this isn’t a spoiler.) If this film really were radical – and dealing in subjects recently banned on streaming online video in the 2014 amendment to the Communications Act (2003) – we’d get Dornan full frontal, instead he is barely semi. He’s pretty enough and has a Firth look.

The sex could be a whole lot worse. It’s nowhere near as objectifying as usual Hollywood fare. I’m reminded of Alexander Walker’s line (regarding Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)) that he didn’t know it was possible to be bored and have an erection at the same time. Not that it was arousing. I note from the credits that the film has three editors. Perhaps this explains the antiseptic feel?

Nearly twenty years ago I taught with Mike Sanders, Xavier Mendik and Charlie Blake a popular culture module that included Mills and Boon and Black Lace novels. It’s clear from the reception of such books – all too easily dismissed as formulaic in part because of their audience – that there is a complex connoisseurship and a nuanced set of uses and gratifications for the texts, ranging from erotica to comic relief. I’m pretty sure that Sam Taylor-Johnson – Turner Prize nominated – doesn’t want us to avoid ironised readings. But, having read one Mills and Boon novel that was meta fictive in scope, this needn’t be because a Proper Artist filmed it. But I do suspect it’d be less dull if Grey really were a vampire.

ETA: further thoughts on this film and a British film with a faintly similar theme,   The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014).

* Compare Helen and Rob in The Archers.

** I’m told the way to get through The Fall is to imagine it as a French and Saunders parody, with Jennifer Saunders as Anderson and Dawn French as Dornan. Curiously the same casting works as Steel and Grey.

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Keep the Wensleydale Flying

Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, 2015)

“But just at that moment, as though at a signal, all the sheep burst out into a tremendous bleating.”

I guess there are spoilers here.

Deep into the end credits of this film, the producers acknowledge their appropriation of Silence of the Lambs – not the property of Thomas Harris or even Jonathan Demme, but of MGM. The pastiche itself – which should fall under the fair use provision for purposes of parody – came at precisely the point that it occurred to me that this was a much thinner film than Chicken Run (Pete Lord and Nick Park, 2000) or Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit (Nick Park and Steve Box, 2005). Both of those were stuffed full with movie references, whereas this is more cautious in its appropriations. Ownership is respected.

It’s a familiar enough reactionary fable: on the farm the sheep are alienated from the product of their labours, the days ticking by in Sisyphean toil. A dog, lackey of the system, helps the farmer in his exploitation, blind to the ways in which he too is a cog in the system. The very name of the farm – Mossy Bottom – shows its position within society and the stasis of such society.

Come the day of the revolution – masterminded by Shaun – the dog is restrained by a turncoat dog and the farmer is driven into exile. The sheep briefly take over the farmhouse and briefly enjoy the fruits, but the opportunist pigs rapidly take their place in the second part of the June Revolution. Unable to function without a master, the sheep face starvation and follow the similarly interpellated dog into the Big City. In perhaps the most interesting ideological move of the film, the wider system becomes apparent – the dog substitutes for a surgeon and the farmer for a barber. Note how the farmer/barber receives but a fraction of the payment for his work, his excess labour swelling the surplus value of the salon. In a sneaky use of a dual time frame, the farmer becomes gains the status of a commodity whilst the animals remain in Aristotelian time. Meanwhile there is social satire in a restaurant worthy of Buñuel.

As a parable for children, however, the urge is for restoration. Dorothy may get out of Kansas, but she knows there’s no place like home. The Bakhtinian carnival of the central section of the film is but licensed escape and the Animal Containment officer’s encagement of the sheep as strays in the city disguises the cage of Mossy Bottom farm in an appropriately Foucauldian manner. The gate must be kept shut at all times. We prefer it that way.

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What Goes Around

Der Kreis (The Circle, Stefan Haupt, 2014)

A minute or so into Der Kreis, a film I knew nothing about beyond that it was being shown as part of LGBT History Month, it struck me that the main two interviewees were coming across like an old married couple. This is not the world’s greatest observation, since Ernst Ostertag and Röbi Rapp are married. Doh. It’s still not something you see that often on film.

Zurich, 1956, and not-yet-certified schoolteacher and semi-closeted Ostertag (Matthias Hungerbühler) is visiting the editorial offices of Der Kreis, a homoerotic magazine in three languages that is tolerated by the authorities. Through this he learns of the balls the magazine organises and at one of these he meets and falls in love with Rapp (Sven Schelker), who he at first mistakes for a woman. As the relationship between the two develops, a number of murders within the Swiss gay community leads to a crackdown on the magazine, the balls and the gay bars and Ostertag risks all by becoming more involved in the magazine.

I was a little torn, watching this, as I gladly would have watched more of the interviews with the surviving participants, and I gladly would have watched more of the dramatisations. The traditional disclaimer at the end of the film notes that some characters have been invented or tweaked, and I did wonder at a couple of moments how we knew X had happened or why we didn’t see Y.  At the same time, there’s a risk of tin bath nostalgia — an abortion scene in a Nottingham Playhouse production of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1964) was spoilt for me by the person behind me noting that they had that sort of bath once. If the mix of Der Kreis wasn’t quite right, I’m not sure what I would have sacrificed.

Like Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman, 1992), this is a testament to real lives that seem both a long way from now and all too familiar. The shift in attitudes in Switzerland show how easily public opinion and legal toleration can change. The cast is excellent, the talking heads instructive, and a little piece of history is preserved.

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The Gun Over the Fireplace in Act One

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

Film has three kinds of meta – the film about the film, which attempts to bite the hand that feeds it without ever really drawing blood (think The Player (Robert Altman, 1992), the film about TV, which is about how inauthentic and cynical that medium is (Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)), and the film about theatre, which is about a huge cultural cringe and the superior authenticity of the stage. There’s a cameo role on Birdman for Lindsay Duncan, a fine actor, who steals the film as Tabitha Dickinson, theatre critic, in a film full of more acting per square centimetre than is entirely comfortable; she gets to tell Riggan Tomson, former star of three superhero movies, about how awful it is that such folk are taking up space in Broadway Theatreland and that they can’t act for toffee. Ah, one on the chin. A palpable hit.

Tomson is played by Michael Keaton, who was in the first two Batman movies back in the day, and a few movies since but hardly any you could name without looking them up (Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1998), Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998), Jack Frost (Troy Miller, 1998) and others, and a lot of voice work, it turns out). Tomson’s long-cherished dream is to repay a debt to unwitting mentor, Raymond Carver, by writing, directing and starring in a Broadway adaptation of a Carver story. The previews are not going well, and there is strife with a male costar Ralph, Jeremy Shamos, who is (un)fortunately knocked out by a falling spotlight. A new actor is brought in, Mike Shiner, played by Edward Norton – who was in the semi successful The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier, 2008). Meanwhile, there are potshots at Robert Downey Jr. (Ironman (Jon Favreau (2008, 2010, Shane Black, 2013) and George Clooney (who killed the 1990s run of Batman films with Batman and Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997)) and a Man of Steel poster on the skyline. (It’s a neat touch that the theatre chosen is opposite one playing The Phantom of the Opera.) It’s a close-run thing whether any of the actors will make it to opening night, let alone that the play will open.

There’s the ex-wife (Amy Ryan), in town for the premiere, the druggie daughter (Emma Stone), looking for redemption, an ex-girlfriend (Naomi Watts) uncertain of her place, a female costar (Andrea Riseborough) who’s in a relationship with Shine and a best friend/lawyer/agent/producer (Zach Galifianakis) trying to hold it together. Fairly soon, you are ready to concede that Duncan’s critic has a point. Who cares about these people?

What ratchetts up the tension is that Tomson is either going through a major nervous breakdown or has both a Sekrit Identity and super-powers. Todorov eat your heart out. Has he? Hasn’t he? Was the accident with the spotlight an accident? Why can’t he control them better? There’s a sense that this is bordering on horror – I misheard Riggan as Regan (as in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)) at first and the endless tracking shots down theatre corridors began to echo The Overlook Hotel. Redrum! Redrum!

Oh yes, the film is composed of endless tracking shots, pursuing characters from room to room, picking up conversations and actions, kicking sand in Hitchcock’s face for pitiful ten minute takes in Rope. I guess there’s a sense of claustrophobia and being trapped and basically the director can. The director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki, seems to think that this is the first time anyone has done this. Oh dear. The Player is one example, although it abandons the conceits after the first shot.

And then there’s a highly telegraphed climax where the film really has its cake and eats it, parts of which are visible from the first act and most of which is not as clever as it thinks it is. It’s a wonder that everyone doesn’t wake up and realise it’s all a dream. Or maybe everyone else did but me. I have to say I was reminded of the elegance of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing (1982), which folded real life into play into other people’s materials with an eleganc this lacked.

Oh, and in a year where there were complaints about the music soundtrack drowning out the dialogue in Interstellar (Chris Nolan, 2014), we appear to have the soundtrack from Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014) or the longest drum solo in recorded history.

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A Plague on Both Your Tin Mines

The Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling, 1966)

The first zombie movie was released in 1968 – this must be true, as I heard this on the radio several times last year (and an article doesn’t quite say it ). So clearly I hallucinated this DVD of a 1966 film I encountered as I work my way through the Ultimate Hammer Boxset. (Although, let it be said, that this boxset is far from ultimate as boxsets go.)

There is a reasonably familiar horror/Hammer narrative. People from London travel to remote village full of suspicious locals and disturbing events. Rather than the bloodsucking vampires of the Dracula films, we have blooddraining zombie masters, and the incomers are a London-based doctor (André Morell) and his daughter (Diane Clare), responding to a letter from a local GP (Brook Williams) about a mysterious plague. Rather than a mittel-European village, surrounded by not even trying day-for-night filming, there’s a Cornish village. They are worried about incomers, just not necessarily about the right incomers.

The vampire narrative is easy to read in Marxist terms, indeed, Marx explicitly writes about capitalists sucking blood and surplus labour/profit being undead. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” he writes in Capital, elsewhere he discusses “British industry, which, vampire like, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too.” Engels adds, “But here, too, necessity will force the working-men to abandon the remnants of a belief which, as they will more and more clearly perceive, serves only to make them weak and resigned to their fate, obedient and faithful to the vampire property-holding class.“

In Plague we have peasants being turned into zombified labourers through the manipulation of blood. Perhaps to maintain heteronormativity, it’s female rather than male blood being drained. The peasants as zombified slaves are counterparted by drummers from the Caribbean, with the kind of casual racism of Hammer’s She (Robert Day, 1965).

If the real villains of the piece are the squire (John Carson) and the huntsmen, the peasants seem disturbingly disposable – it’s the professional middle classes we’re meant to be concerned for. Indeed, just like Jonathan Harker in the original Dracula, although the doctor Sir James Forbes is closer in class to Dr Seward. We’re not even that bothered about the good local doctor’s wife, Alice Mary Tompson (Jacqueline Pearce), as we know she’s going to turn into Servalan.

It perhaps should be objected that if you want an efficient workforce in your tin mine, than a zombie workforce may not be the best choice. Such has struck me before – in the various cyberslave armies in new Doctor Who somewhat ad nauseam, although that itself possibly begins with the robomen in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (21 November 1964–26 December 1964).

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Deus-ed Up, Or: All the Deus-Bros.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)

Here be spoilers, although not really until paragraph eight onwards (nine if this is one). I’ve tried not to give the ending away. 

There’s a reading of Harrison Ford’s rather plank-like performance in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982 etc) as Rick Deckard that suggests it is in fact a rather nuanced representation of a replicant. It doesn’t make sense as a reading, but there you go (he can’t be one of the six escapees because…).

I got the same feeling about Domhnall Gleeson about ten minutes into Ex Machina. It doesn’t make sense as a reading, but then again, what does? I was also reaching for Bluebeard and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), neither of which end well.

Bluebeard is the one when a duke invites his bride to stay in his castle whilst he goes off on a jolly, leaving her with the keys to all the rooms but instructions not to unlock the seventh door. Obviously she does, just as Eve ate the fruit and Pandora opened the box. It’s Story.

So Caleb (Caleb Williams, son of Jephunneh or son of Hezron, a villain in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a computer game character who is a gunslinger) is a computer jockey who wins the golden ticket and gets to go to the chocolate factory the CEO of Bluebeard Bluebook’s secret lair. Before you it, know he’s flying across a landscape straight out of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) to the secret lair. If Gleeson has a look of both Nathan/Justin from Queer as Folk, Oscar Isaac’s Nathan is more bearish, pummeling a punchbag, swigging a beer from a bottle and being furry under a vest. Apparently he is a genius. (Nathan — son of David, Nathan Fillion played Caleb…)

Caleb, before he goes any further in his bonding over beer, vodka and sushi with Nathan, has to sign all kind of non-disclosure agreements to make sure we feel uneasy.

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Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

The short version: it’s very pretty, so who cares about the flaws.

The longer version: remember that recent film that kills off a major character only for him to come back to the protagonist – except it’s all a hallucination due to oxygen starvation? Imagine waiting an hour, hoping it’s all a dream.

The even longer version:
We are haunted by 2001, A Space Odyssey. Like it or not, it has become the yardstick of the serious sf movie, the sf art film. It travels at the kind of pace that we rarely see in Hollywood film these days and when we do, I often find it self indulgent rather than joyous. Alternatively, given the action takes a couple of million years and travels to infinity and beyond – sorry, beyond infinity – that’s somewhat speedy as an average. The apes take a while and the stargate sequence really frustrates my students, but there is a joy in the miniatures and the classical music that has rarely been bettered. Hal 9000 created a new stereotype, the evil shipboard computer, to such an extent that I never trust a computer to run a ship.

And so comes along Interstellar, another pretender to the tradition, weighing in at 2hr 49 mins, nine minutes longer than its daddy, minus overture and intermission, or indeed Strauss, Ligetti and Wagner on the soundtrack. Nolan’s done interesting movies – I’ve a soft spot for Falling, a disappear up its own fundament psychological thriller, I enjoyed Memento, despite our not knowing much more at the end than the beginning and The Prestige is an interesting take of Priest’s novel, unfortunately shorn of its present day framing device. I eventually caught up with the Dicklite Inception on DVD and it has its moments, but too many of them seem to being situating women as less good than men. He did some comic book franchise, too, set in a dystopia where almost all women had died out.

So we have Interstellar, a film which I had singularly failed to find three hours to see prior to Saturday, and which I saw in one of the smallest cinemas in existence. We have nostalgic talking heads, telling us how things now have changed, We have Matthew McConaughy as Coop, an actor I last saw in Reign of Fire alongside Christian Bale, and the facial resemblance here suggests that so kind of synthespian shenanigans have been going on. We have a future in which the crops are failing one by one – Death of Grass anyone? – and the solution to this is to ruin the soil even more by growing the same crop in the same fields. Me, I’d be exploring hydroponics and such like. This is a world that needs more farmers and fewer engineers (although in guessing there’s a wriggle out of this) and where there’s a Sekrit Plan to evacuate Earth run by Michael Caine. But that is to get ahead of ourselves because there a Sekrit Messages being sent to Coop’s daughter, Murphy, including binary or Morse code coordinates for the Sekrit Rendezvous (because poltergeists, like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, know where Greenwich Meridian Line is. Before you know it, Coop has met Dr Brand and her father, Michael Caine, who turns out to be an old friend and clearly marked for death in tragic circumstances at the three quarters point if the movie.

Look away now. Spoilers.

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