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A Teacher (2020)
At least they put the "Hot For Teacher" trope to death
The New Yorker reviewer said this series was "emotionally empty" and I have to agree. It started out fairly watchable, with a new, young teacher starting out at a Texas high school and a likeable enough teen protagonist, who takes his SATs, aspires to get into U-Texas Austin, but also parents his two younger sibs at home in his father's absence. But we're given next to no backstory about either of them and are never really encouraged to empathize, as she's a remote and unemotional teacher of English, and he's "Joe College," with his frat buds, before he even gets admitted. They're hot and heavy for each other by the end of the first episode, sleeping together soon thereafter, and blowing their cover by taking stupid, reckless risks by four or so episodes in. It doesn't just stop with their consummation or with their getting caught, but jumps into his first year in college as a means of avoiding depicting the year she spends in jail. We watch them try to pick up the respective pieces of their lives in the aftermath, live down the infamy their illustrious affair has left them with, and regain any semblance of real, normal character in a drama that is just emotionally bankrupt and without any compelling reason to a give a damn what happens ultimately to either of them. I have the tenth episode to go and I'll watch it, just to finish the series out, but this as sexy as one of the films they show you about STIs in health class, and about that emotionally engaging an effort: with one more episode, frankly, I just want it to end.
The trope of the teen who's hot for teacher, and the teacher who returns the affections, deserved some skewering, and it's a tired old theme and a plot hole, played for coolness, in many dramas and sit coms. This one is careful to explore the power dynamics and not to let anyone off easy as at least an accomplice, if not an underage victim, who all along knows what he's doing. We watch them suffer through the aftermath, sense that deep down these are damaged beings, but they're kept at such a distance, their emotional hang ups so underplayed, it's difficult to care if they recover, and too easy to shake our heads and conclude: you just should have thought of that, baby, before you slept together.
I am a university professor, and I've watched with some bemusement as office- and classroom romances have sparked, then fizzled around me, almost always with more emotional investment in these doomed affairs than this show depicts. It's actually sad that we cannot think of any other plots to subject our teacher figures to, and that we project our own, residual adolescent frustrations onto the professors and instructors who happened to be trying to reach us at that time in our lives. Teaching is hard, demanding, relentless work, guys and dolls, and your teachers were probably so wrapped up in their classroom struggles at the time, they never gave a thought to jumping in the sack with students, whom they would then have had to teach, both in classrooms and in sexual techniques. Let's just grow up and lay that fantasy to rest and dream up something else for our professors and instructors to do when these storylines go astray. We've managed to kill the hot-for-teacher trope. Now let's invest more energy and more emotion in tropes that actually pay their respects for teachers as parts of the bargains.
Best Day Ever (2014)
They could have picked up the pace, but that was the whole point
'Best Day Ever' entertains you without ever really moving you, explores gay men's feelings without ever actually feeling real, and slows to the routine pace of midlife, more so than a 90-minute movie ever should. The pacing is in fact leaden, the scenes much too long, and the brooding about the main character's fiftieth birthday so prolonged as to be maudlin. Worse, the film is so centered on him, so unrelenting in its focus, it just starts to feel like the writer-director's vanity project, where none of the supporting characters have anything better to do than join him wallowing in his personal misery. The eventual love-interest seems forced, and though they have some cute moments of accidentally bumping one another their first time going to bed, the new bf is so obviously there to cure the protagonist's loneliness, it's hard to see this relationship naturally, quirkily taking its own course.
Gay indie projects of the 2010s manage things the major studios with their superhero manias aren't yet willing to try, and this one has much better acting, and more individually golden moments, than a lot of these smaller-scale, less ambitious projects can manage. It bothers me to write this, but Best Day Ever could have used some big-studio pacing, some expensive effects, enabling it to achieve as close as 2010s gay indies can come to a Hollywood ending.
The Good Liar (2019)
Start with Mirren & McKellan brawling, invent a movie backward from there
This was engaging an subtle, entertaining film making, which kept me watching and kept me guessing throughout. Two obvious faults would seem to be: they obviously hatched the idea of having these two senior Hollywood greats brawling as a great cinematic spectacle, and thought, okay, how do we invent a storyline that could culminate in that fight? That and, you think you're watching a delicious comedy about dueling deceivers, something along the lines of "Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels." But it takes dark turns into Nazi-era Berlin and sexual assault trauma, murdering all of that possible movie fun along the way, leaving Mirren's character as a bitter assault victim for decades and decades, and painting her in the end, rather unconvincingly and desperately, as a loving and happy grandma after all. This movie's greatest deception, out of a whole host of them, is passing itself off as a liar's comedy, when dark, irredeemable rape histories await us instead.
Mckellan's character is ostensibly an Englishman, meeting women via online dating sites in order to plunder their fortunes, with some help from a gang of goons who pretend to be his banker, his business partners, or his foreign national stooges, also falling for his ruses. Mirren's Betty seems to be his gullible, willing rich victim, but there are ever present clues (and a lot of cinematic precedent) for suspecting she's swindling him as much as he's swindling her, if not more so. Russell Tovey is Mirren's skeptical grandson, voicing viewers' doubts as the only apparent remaining member of Mirren's character's former family.
As the onionskin layers start to fall away, though, both characters have double identities as Germans, with McKellan's character stealing an army buddy's name and identity after the buddy dies in a fight (taking a page from "Mad Men"); and with Mirren's character turning out to be McKellan's sexual assault victim from a pre-teen, Berlin-set rape scene, rather tastelessly conveyed in flashback sequences. Some of the connections get very threadbare in their improbability, as the timelines don't seem right, as Mirren very easily finds decades-old evidence of the assault in her old home, and as McKellan is apparently so obsessed with swindling Mirren, he fails to recognize his victim after all of these years.
He loses what could have been a cunning, evil-genius charisma and just becomes a schmuck we're waiting to see get his comeuppance. But she's the one who gets cheated out of character depth here, as it turns out she's felt trapped in his clutches, as forever his assault victim, for decades and decades--indeed, for most of her natural life. A dreamy final sequence tries to show us she's a contented grand dam with generations of a happy family surrounding her. But she's evidently spent decades bitterly tracking McKellan's character down, and almost dying from the effort of finding him and avenging him. I wasn't convinced in the movie's closing moments that she had truly recovered from his trauma, nor that it was worth everything she had risked to get revenge on him after so many decades. I also wondered what had happened to the comedy of deception that I thought I had tuned into an hour and a half earlier. McKellan and Mirren's greatest feat of fooling is on the viewers, swiping more laughs than pounds Sterling in their post-Nazi brawl.
Beach Rats (2017)
Get a job already
Hulu is heavily advertizing Beach Rats as an LGBT film, and I'm afraid it's a sign of how far we're reaching for meek queer content in the early 2020s. It's sensitive and subtle but ultimately aimless, as its hero loses a coming of age, coming out narrative in drug abuse, stultifying friends, an unsupportive family life, and a dead-end part of Brooklyn. He cruises, he hooks up, he fakes it with a girlfriend, he stays closetted for a posse of knucklehead friends. Yawn, yawn, and oh yeah, yawn.
It's never really explored why he isn't getting a job, working toward some goal in his life. He never goes to a community center, rides the trains to a gay bar, or meets anyone for anything other than weed or sex. This was filmed in 2017, and yet no one in the film has a cell phone, no one ever references gay marriage, and the hookup site the hero uses like it's from circa 2006. A real guy in this situation would have had more options than this, and those of us who managed to come out in much bleaker situations, much more remotely than Brooklyn, just start to see him as pathetic rather than inspiring. Just get a job and a boyfriend already, and consign queer urban melodrama to past generations' angst.
3 Generations (2015)
Not the trans movie they've been waiting for
So, as a forysomething cis gay prof who sometimes teaches gender studies to college students, I'm watching movie portrayals of trans family experiences, and searching for a trans protagonist whom a majority of those communities could find honestly, acceptably portrayed. If such a character even exists in film, at least when played by a cis person, this film's central figure, Ray, just isn't him.
3 Generations disseminates the melodrama unevenly among grandma Susan Sarandon and partner, mother Naomi Watts and the two brothers she vaguely dated 16 years earlier, and son Ray, who transitions but needs both rents' signatures on a form for gender dysphoria treatment. We spend most of the film waiting for the form to be signed, and the melodrama derives from a grandmother who doesn't understand why Ray can't be cis lesbian instead, a mother who has to go find the paramour whom we're led to believe abandoned girlfriend and child years before, and the long lost father, who's gone on to form a second, more perfect family in the meantime. If you've got all that, you're only beginning to follow this movie's overdetermined, forced, and unfelt twists and turns. Without a real emotional center for all viewers to relate to, we were intended, one supposes, to follow whatever avatar fits with your generation as a viewer. What results is a lot of trans and old-school lgbt sturm and drang, but not a movie that will change many minds, offer any new angles on a struggling middle-age and single mom at the center of what could be a rom-com, or come close to pleasing many in trans communities (as referenced in other reviews). Even the last dinner in the film's final scene feels forced and Hollywood, as none of these characters has viewers anticipating good cheer and camaraderie at this point, especially with this knot of twisted family relationships. 3 Generations was going for something significent, but in my search for transcending trans protagonists, I'll just have to go on looking.
The War of the Roses (1989)
Revisited, 30 years later
War of the Roses just passed its 30 year mark, and we watched it again, for the first time since the movie's debut back in '89. This film has not aged well, as it has remained one of the blackest divorce comedies (about white people) ever.
Kathleen Turner and Mike Douglass are supposed to have lived 18 years together by the film's present day setting of their divorce battles. But the scenes of their courtship and early marriage never play out in recognizable sixties or seventies style; it's always a lavish, late eighties wonderland. The real eighties got us from Kramer Vs Kramer to this divorce-themed doozie, but there's very little context in the movie to help us understand the meaning of marriage and separation from the perspective of 30 years on.
Both characters get irrationally, unlikeably obsessed with getting the house out of the divorce settlement, and yet we're never really set up to see the house as this family's slice of heaven, nor to know how loving a family they were before divorce just seems to catch Barbara's fancy out of nowhere, some 18 years into the relationship. And so, it's not Kramer Vs Kramer, but 'Schmuck vs. Shrew,' as two equally unlikeable spouses battle it out and eventually do one another in. I really didn't care who won, nor ever found myself wishing they would reunite, making their 'war' one unpleasant spectacle after another.
This time, I just waited for it to be over. This time, it struck me as one long saga about rich, white people's problems, with zero consideration for people with less money and lower social status, who find the means to make their marriages work, anyway. It ironically leaves Dan Castellanetta, who would become one of television history's best voice actors, with a non-speaking part. Okay, so, it's a high water mark for black comedies. It's also one this viewer will never take the trouble to watch ever again.
The Cakemaker (2017)
Bisexuality, beautifully lost in translation
This was a subtle but tremendous, well-acted and intercultural drama, but you might need the footnotes, or friends who are native German and Hebrew speakers, to fully understand what's going on here. We like to erase bisexuality, especially in men, and we fail to appreciate how much bi- and homosexuality vary between cultures. This one has two, at least nominally bisexual characters, two distinct national cultures, and much of this, already getting lost in translation. If you can tough it out, noticing subtle detail in seemingly mundane moments, and reading expressions in uber stoic faces, it's a rewarding drama to watch.
One man has his wife and son in Jerusalem, his male partner on the side--so far on the side, he only sees him while on trips to Berlin. We find out the lover gets off while asking about, and hearing about, the husband's sex with the wife. The husband dies suddenly, tragically, and the grieving lover goes to Israel, slowly ingratiating himself in the widow's restaurant, meeting his lover's son, mother, and a very touchy brother-in-law who is seemingly the only one concerned with keeping the cafe kosher. The lover and widow barely have a lingua franca for understanding each other, but learn about one another through the language of cooking and baking instead. She gradually figures out his relationship with her ex, getting him kicked out of Israel, but joining him in Berlin in the last scene.
Much depends upon knowing details of kosher eateries, understanding that the lover, Tomas, can't understand the Hebrew that the widow, Anat, speaks, and slowly realizing the mother and the brother intuit their family member's bisexuality, while even the wife and mother of his child does not--not yet, at least. The plot also has major holes in it, such as how Tomas can afford to leave his shop and go to Israel, and how Amat's family can afford such a beautiful apartment for him. But if you suspend your disbelief, you get a subtle, well acted film about people who literally don't have the words to express their grief and love. They're almost a menage a trois after the fact, they succeed in breaking with kosher family tradition, and they're tender enough to know that male couples often wear one another's clothes as tokens of affection. The actor playing Tomas is so often mute, expressionless, stoic, that the moment he finally weeps just makes the entire film, for this viewer, at least. Get out of your cultural and sexual comfort zones, get ready to watch very closely, and indeed, you'll enjoy.
Girl (2018)
Hard to watch, in a great many ways
Girl mostly succeeds in dramatizing one trans experiece for general and international audiences. It establishes much about the main character through subtle cues you have to be patient for, and the scenes that seem boring are actually being careful to cover trans experience subtly and sensitively. That said, we spend what feels hours watching her dancing, then cringing and trying to look away during the final, supposedly climatic moment. It's a supremely difficult movie to watch, but that might just mean it's succeeding in getting audiences to understand her discomfort.
They never explained what happened to Lara's mother, and it seemed to me she had a quasi romantic relationship going with her father, in which she functioned as housewife, tried to out-girl the cis girls on the dance floor, and acted as a mother to her younger brother. That was an interesting family dynamic to explore, but we're left guessing as to Lara's overall motivations in transitioning. And, as with Black Swan, I just can't accept ballet as a normative performance of femininity: it's so ridiculously overblown, and demands so much of performers, it's unrelatable femininity on steroids. No one can be the perfect ballerina she was striving for, so it was difficult to continue caring, that she even kept trying.
So, if we spent less time watching her dance, more time understanding what makes her tick, we would have a better film, though it might lose some of its emotional power that way, as well. It isn't just mouthing perfunctory trans orthodoxy, either, but letting one trans person's story unfold subtly and honestly before us. Perhaps its restraint, its refusal to force an interpretation on us, or on Lara, is its great highlight overall.
Boy Meets Girl (2014)
The trans love story that big studios are afraid to make
This is the small, independent-film love story that the big studios are afraid to make. Luckily, it succeeds as only a small-budget, small-town affair can.
A very well-acted foursome explores trans romance in an small Kentucky town, and the whole thing looks to have been filmed in someone's back yard, with four or five sets, total, but with the acting ability and excellent story line of a poignant and beautiful story. We meet Michelle as a 21-year-old aspiring designer, and only gradually learn of her past as a boy and her transgender journey as a teenager. Jimmy is seemingly her best, straight friend, her buddy and bro, until he realizes he's jealous of Michelle's affection for Francesca. Francesca herself is the daughter of a politician, fiancée of a soldier in Afghanistan, and one-time lover, almost in spite of herself, of Michelle. The soldier, in one surprise, returns from the middle east to marry Francesca, but, in a second surprise, turns out already to have his own secretive past with Michelle.
All of this unfolds with bravery and beauty, without a false note and with an affecting ending that never preaches, as it teaches, southern, small-town tolerance. It even has one brief scene of pro-operative, transgender nudity, answering some viewers' questions about the actress, as it lovingly respects the trans* folks among us. It's ultimately too bad more people won't see this amazing little film--it's the kind of picture the big-budget studios _should_ be doing more of.
The Falls (2012)
As unassuming as it is amazing
This is unassuming and yet amazing film making. Two young men are companions together on their spiritual mission-work as Mormons, assigned to spend day and night together as they attempt to spread the Mormon faith, and several copies of The Book of Mormon, through the small-town Pacific northwest. Honestly, if one were not told this was a gay and lesbian film, their eventual relationship would come as an unheralded surprise, it's handled so subtly and sensitively. It follows their admittedly dull days as missionaries, lets a slow tenderness develop between them, and doesn't ruin any of its own surprises as their understated love develops. We only find out as they tell each other, almost halfway through the film, that their reticence and silence all along have cloaked same-sex affections within the not-at-all-accepting Church of Latter-day Saints. Their relationship is one of the subtlest gay love stories in modern queer film, their depicted lives are as as uneventful as actual afternoons of missionary-preaching would be, and neither man is any more articulate than you expect of repressed, closeted, anguished gay youth. One has to give this slowly building, lazily paced, ultimately unexpressive story its own time to unfold, without giving away any of its secrets. Once one appreciates that, even this movie's reticence can be seen to strike exactly the right note.
Other here have faulted the two leads for not showing chemistry with one another, but I think we look for chemistry in a screen-couple in heterosexist ways, and we get this couple's chemistry wrong in the same way people missed the chemistry between the leads in _Brokeback Mountain_. These men in their repressed environment couldn't _show_ open, chemical affection for one another. That mainstream audiences can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there among gay male couples. It means they're succeeding in hiding it, for the other, homophobic missionaries within the story, and even for audiences who aren't attuned to it as they watch the film. If you've never had to hide your own affection for a same-sex amour, perhaps you don't appreciate the lengths people go to to hide chemistry from others, and even to hide it from less perceptive viewers of this film.
Give this film a chance, and perhaps have more patience with its plodding development than you would with blockbusters, or even with more conventional gay and lesbian films. Its subtlety is actually its strongest suit. The wait for its eventual revelations is the sweetest part of this under-appreciated film.
The Happy Sad (2013)
Interesting as a failed experiment
This sincere, quiet, and apparently low-budget indie _tries_ to explore experiences outside of the strictly monogamous and outside of the strictly heterosexual, and it deserves some props for not taking the easy way out of these issues--but neither is it all that well-made, well-acted, or 100% sure of itself and what it wants to be as an alternative, counter-culture film. It's probably worth watching, but don't prepare yourself to be amazed or blown away.
We meet Marcus and Aaron, an NYC gay-male couple who may or may not be interracial (it's honestly hard to tell and the plot never derives anything out of Marcus's darker, and Aaron's lighter, complexions). After six years together, they're deciding to move toward opening up their relationship without sacrificing their love for one another. We also meet Annie, a rather ditsy twenty-something elementary-school teacher, whose boyfriend, Stan, hooks up with Marcus in what is apparently Stan's first same-sex experience. Stan hasn't admitted to Annie that he's interested in seeing guys sexually. Annie hasn't admitted to Stan that she's also having her own same-sex fling with a fellow teacher named Mandy. And in turn, Marcus isn't admitting it to Aaron that he's falling in love with Stan, despite Marcus's sincere intentions to stay living with and passionately loving Aaron. Further complications, improbably but still rather predictably, ensue.
Everybody reads everybody else's private emails to their paramours. Every scene that should be light and sexy and poignant seems heavy-handed and forced. New Yorkers who could log onto Grindr or Craig's List and have multiple partners within minutes instead encounter the same knot of confused people in what ends up feeling like a very limited, almost claustrophobic version of New York City. One honestly just gives up trying to find believability in repeated, "miraculous" meetings between the same people within a city of millions, in people who _say_ they want an open relationship and then cannot handle the consequences, and in blurred lines between gay and straight that leave one character, Stan, just calling himself "curious." Maybe so, but all of these half-hearted complexities leave viewers less and less curious in this film as it goes on.
The later scenes between Marcus and Aaron seem especially poorly acted, just when we need to understand them and their motivations the most. Mandi's character is subjected to such bizarre hardships as finding out her dying father's arms are getting amputated, just because the writer doesn't seem to know what else to do with her character. Characters keep suggesting they share partners and try threesomes, and if threesomes had actually happened, they probably would have been more interesting, and less strained, than what this movie presents instead.
It deserves props, finally, for not insisting that the heterosexual couples are any happier than the homosexual ones, for not demanding its characters ultimately settle down from their experimental bisexuality, and for not preaching that one can only reach "happily ever after" via conventional monogamy. Its deviations from conventional morality make it an interesting experiment in indie film-making. Better acting, characters whom we know better and care about more, and more of a commitment to actually realizing the non-monogamy these characters think they long for, _would_ have made the experiment more of a success.
House of Cards (2013)
review from a captive audience
Help! My partner is making us watch this show episode by episode, and he can tell I actually spend most of the hour looking away from the screen and scowling. I just wait for it to be over from the second he presses play.
It's just not healthy for me to keep watching a show when I wish terrorists would break in and kill the protagonist at every moment. I don't want Frank Underwood to succeed. I don't want to know what he's up to next. I don't want any of his friends to support him. I would hate to think anyone in actual government is like this man. Where is Brutus when you need him? Seriously, someone please stab Kevin Spacey's character to death sometime soon, so this travesty won't have to continue.
This show leaves me with no one to root for, and no outcome to events that I actually want to see come about. It forces us to listen to Kevin Spacey periodically talking to the audience, when we've long since ceased giving a damn what he's thinking or how he'll justify his next move. One wants to take a shower after every episode, and were it not for my partner's insistence, I would have stopped watching this after the first three or so episodes. There are no spoiler alerts here because I just don't care anymore how it turns out. I wish I had the freedom to stop watching it. Don't waste as much mental energy as I have wasted in hating this character and everyone involved in bringing him to our television sets!
The Men Next Door (2012)
what happens when we try for an original, gay romantic comedy
This effort was trying its best to be a gay-only romantic comedy and failing. . . interestingly. The pace was leaden, the plot contrived, the dialog iffy, and the fag-hag friend, who never did spontaneity well, never really seemed to add anything to this movie (funny that it's the token straight woman who did the least to move this story along. . . ). We're asked to believe in a threesome, when two of the men are father and son, giving the third man ample time to make up his mind while continuing to date them both. The film never really treated the moment of "ick, you've had sex with my father!" that even the most liberal threesome would have experienced. It never really explained why the son character would keep dating the man who was also seeing his dad--THAT's a degree of devotion we would need to see, more than this film ever shows it, to suspend our disbelief. Once you realize, about half an hour into this film, that real people would never really act this way, you either turn it off or continue to engage with it as farce or light-hearted, not terribly successful comedy.
It deserves some props, though, as a gay effort at film-making. This story just would not translate to the heterosexual milieu (I'm not sure it even works in the gay world). This would only make sense in the male-only world of open relationships and casual sex (a woman couldn't have the sexual history the main character of this film has, without getting called every insult in the book). This makes a concerted effort to be a unique and original sex comedy, with the sexy scenes and the off-color banter a mainstream romantic comedy would have had. That it doesn't work, and that many of us keep watching it anyway, despite its obvious flaws, suggests if we keep trying and keep failing just as interestingly, a uniquely gay romantic comedy genre might one-day be at hand.
Identity Thief (2013)
repulsive monster meets trite cliché for a road movie, of course
I had high hopes for Jason Bateman, and reason to believe Melissa McCarthy would deliver a fair level of hilarity, but this dog of a movie only veered between vaguely watchable and totally cringe-worthy. I wasted an afternoon watching it, and spent the last hour on the verge of walking out. It was that bad.
In a world in which no one has ever heard of identity theft, Jason Bateman's character becomes a victim of the crime, thanks to the oddly feminine first name Sandy--and even that "joke" is told five or six times more than it is actually funny for. In a world in which identity theft victims don't immediately call their credit card companies, dispute all charges, and cancel all accounts, Sandy decides he must go across the country to confront the thief who stole his identity directly. In a world in which it's possible to trace and find an identify thief almost instantaneously, she turns out to be a violent, ruthless, and repulsive madwoman, whom he eventually subdues and talks into driving with him back to his home in Denver. It turns out that other victims of her crimes are similarly stalking her and that Sandy can also be talked into fighting against his own corporate overlords, which eventually makes him stoop to her level as some kind of Information-Age Bonny and Clyde.
But, most people _cared_ about Bonnie and Clyde. McCarthy's character is such an extreme monster, and Bateman's is such a tired cliché, that when it turns into a road movie and we're actually supposed to watch them bond with one another, the results are just unwatchable. Neither of them have any redeeming features with which they could be humanized. None of their antagonists ever rise above the level of caricature. None of the fantastic accidents they endure, from car crashes to snake bites to evading police, is the least bit believable, and no viewer of this film is going to spend five seconds giving a damn if either character ever gets out of this alive. Yawn. Check your watch. Is this over yet? Yawn again. You get the picture.
Parts of this movie didn't suck as badly as other parts did, and that's about the best I can say about it. I laughed out loud once, and it wasn't in response to anything the two leads said. Save your money, avoid any subsequent train-wrecks in Melissa McCarthy's career, and give this movie a pass.
The Green (2011)
Interesting couple in a mess of a movie
"The Green" takes up with a gay male couple who has moved from NYC to southern Connecticut. One, Michael, played by Jason Butler Harner, is a history teacher in the town that's built around the green of the movie's title; the other, Daniel, portrayed by Cheyenne Jackson, works as a caterer but seems less committed to keeping away from NYC. We learn they're renovating a classic old home, that they've been a couple for years but haven't yet taken advantage of the new right to marry, and that Michael seems to be devoting a suspicious amount of time to one of his pupils, Jason Williams. Through a series of misunderstandings, Michael is accused of molesting Jason, and much of the movie revolves around Michael and Daniel, coping as a couple with the accusation of molestation, the town's rejection of them, and what it means for them as men, and as men who love one another.
If their relationship as a couple is meant to be the main story line in this movie, "The Green" dramatizes their dynamics sensitively and engagingly: Michael has never told Daniel about a previous arrest he once had as a result of a Manhattan police officer's entrapment in a men's room. Daniel drags in previously unspoken resentment at Michael's insistence they leave New York. They both work with a lesbian lawyer, played by Julia Ormond, whose tough but sensitive counsel gets them through the ordeal. We come to understand them in terms of why a gay-male couple might stay together without marrying, even when they could tie the knot. We see them, as seen by the rest of the town, assumed to be guilty as soon as the accusation is made. We want them to get back together when they seem less able as a couple to deal with the pressures that the town, and all of their friends there, begin to apply.
The storyline that dramatizes their couple-hood, though, never really holds up or makes any logical sense. The story never explores Jason's motivations in accusing Michael, disappearing without pressing any charges for several days, and then resurfacing, to reveal in macabre ways that a man who is either his stepfather or his mother's boyfriend is the true, physical abuser. The school acts as though Michael is already convicted, though they have no evidence against him to prove the accusation. The character of Michael never really explains or justifies his interest in Jason as to why a busy history teacher would have so much extracurricular attention left over for Jason in the first place. If the couple's individual dynamics have us cheering them on, the story they're trapped in the middle of just leaves us scratching our heads.
It all plays out in a denouement that suddenly and rather improbably reverses all of the blame for the boy's troubles onto his stepfather's shoulders instead. Michael seems just as quickly exonerated, and we're left to believe he and Daniel reconcile and continue as a couple, probably somewhere other than in this no-longer bucolic or ideal town. A freak rainstorm during the climactic moments is just uncanny in its excellent timing, as though the film makers didn't know the pathetic fallacy is the oldest trope in the book. Jason has all of six or seven lines to speak in the entire production, and his mute air of adolescent angst doesn't invite curiosity into what makes him tick, nor explain what Michael could possibly see in him to make him risk so much of his career for his sake. The story's coherence seems sacrificed for the sake of a deeper understanding of Michael and Daniel's personalities, and the denouement and resolution seem laughably quick, given how much time we've spent building this story and getting to know these characters.
"The Green" does steer clear of gay clichés as it sensitively treats two believable gay men and the differences that legal troubles and the possibility of marrying make in their shared lives. Too bad the storyline never matched the impressive depth of character here; if it had, queer teachers (like me) might have had a better, more culturally valuable, movie on our hands.
The Sessions (2012)
Beautiful, but only in Berkeley
Quick background: when I found out a disabled man I know, who's confined to a wheelchair, was marrying an able-bodied woman, I just had to push the thought of them having sex out of my mind. As liberal and open-minded and comfortable with the body as I am, the thought gave me the heebeejeebies. So, I gave the couple the blessings I could, while looking the other way.
"The Sessions," then, got me to face and feel comfortable with disabled bodies and fully functioning sex drives, sex surrogates and perfectly healthy sexuality, all in a moving, entertaining movie that never got bogged down and never made me realize I was confronting my own heebeejeebies, even as I was in fact overcoming them. By the time William H. Macy is telling the patient, "go for it," as in, go ahead and have a sexual relationship with the surrogate, I was saying the same thing, as I was perfectly willing to go along for the ride, as it were.
Helen Hunt's acting seems strong here, and it seems a long way from the regrettable films she made during the last years of her time of overexposure about a decade ago (why, btw, was this character so overly committed to blue eye shadow, especially when it was the only thing she had on??). Adam Arkin and Rhea Perlman barely show up, but offer command performances when they do, and it seems the show just broached enough topics about bodies, disabilities, hang-ups, and beautiful, if frankly portrayed and pragmatic sexuality, for viewers to talk about them to one another after the film--not so much as to force something upon us, or to take it to extremes that would have been hard to watch on the screen.
Watching this from the conservative Midwest, as a former, temporary Californian, one watched the casual liberalness of all of these characters, including the priest himself, and thought to one's self, only in California. Perhaps, even, only in Berkeley. Macy as the spiritual adviser says the man has a free pass from God to fornicate in his special case, and Macy even shows up at his house with a celebratory six-pack, unlike any other Catholic priest I've ever known. In all, it's a sensitive film about a sometimes uncomfortable topic, but it could only unfold this beautifully in Berkeley.
Argo (2012)
suspenseful but self-congratulatory and smug
I didn't know Ben Affleck had it in him, and I thoroughly enjoyed this film--with a few reservations, of course.
Ben as a government operative, John Goodman as a 70s B-movie director, and Alan Arkin as an aging producer in the same tarnished golden age of movies, engineer a fake movie as a cover-story for getting six Americans out of Tehran in the middle of the 1979-1980 Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis. The film has some great laughs at Hollywood's expense, and maintains a successful, suspenseful storyline as Affleck tries to outsmart trigger-happy revolutionaries and get six reluctant, terrified bureaucrats to safety. It's down to the wire as the entire sequence of the disguised Americans getting through Tehran airport security has you biting your nails: you know they get out alive anyway, but you feel the tension of their escape, and as much as we hate airport security, our hearts were beating as fast and anxiously as were those of the escapees. A true-to-life story that stayed classified for 17 years emerges as an entertaining, politically sensitive drama, and I bet a lot of viewers were like me, doubting that Affleck had it in him, but engaged, all the same.
My hesitations involved some of the politics of this film and the way the Americans frame themselves as the undeserved good-guys, and follow a narrower, less ambiguous story, amid the much more complicated Islamic Revolution under way around it. The film's brief, voice-over narration at the beginning gives the history lesson of the original Shahs, the democratic secularist whom the people elected, and the ruler (Khomeni's predecessor) whom America and Britain installed in the democratic ruler's place. But no one so much as wrung their hands over the course of the rest of the film over America's helping to create the strife in Iran in the first place, when all eyes were focused on getting six Americans to safety instead. One is glad they're eventually free, and one can see Affleck's character as a hero this way, but I thought it was much too easy to congratulate ourselves for freeing six innocents, when our nation's hands are dirty in bringing suffering, oppression, and death to thousands. A more complicated, more ambiguous movie could have explored American involvement from a greater array of angles, but I think the resulting film would have been less self-congratulatory and smug about the ways American interests have backfired overseas.
Hell House (2001)
this Heathen liked it
I found this to be effective filmmaking: a straight forward documentary about the families and youth ministers who put together a haunted house meant to reinforce Christian dogma and scare people into repenting of their supposed moral lapses. We follow one family, several youth leaders, and multiple actors and directors of the Hell House show, as the film makers refrain from open or ironic commentary, and mostly just watch as one October's casting, planning, and performing of the "Hell House" unfolds.
I was impressed that the documentary could reveal so much about this particular sect and its annual show, without going out of its way to cast a particular light on their production: the youth group's own attitudes and occasional extremes speak for themselves. I was also moved by the length they went to to humanize these individuals: the father of four, who's raising a baby with cerebral palsy and who recently separated from his wife, seemed to me an especially sympathetic figure. I could understand what the church did for him and his family, and empathize with his and his daughters' struggles, and even wanted, albeit briefly, for them to get what they wanted out of the Hell House.
That said, the show totally revealed this denomination's recruitment moves as scare tactics, frightening vulnerable children, out on Halloween, into accepting denominational dogma. It showed that their little scenes in the Hell House admitted of no shades of gray, but culminated in someone dying and going to hell in each case, with spectators eventually seeing them suffering in hell, supposedly for good measure. The crowds going through the show all looked appropriately spooked; I kept waiting for someone in one of the tour groups to burst out laughing. It's what I would have done.
They interviewed a young woman who had played a rape victim during a previous year's production, and they had her say that her real-life rapist had been in the audience as she's acted the scene. It was a powerful and poignant moment for her, but she said over the course of it, that she had forgiven her rapist. Then, we watch another young woman cast into the current year's date-rape scene, and see her character kill herself and (guess what?) go to hell, when it seems Jesus had abandoned her. Both of these scenes bothered me in that they seemed to show Pentecostal Christan tradition blaming the victim: the first woman actually forgave her rapist?? The second kills herself because she's inconsolable after a gang rape, and she's supposed to burn in hell for that? Why weren't we told her _rapists_ were in hell? Why wouldn't someone say rape victims do sometimes, understandably, choose suicide? A Christian tendency to blame the victim in sexual matters, and come down especially hard on women, came through for me in these especially troubling scenes.
. . . But then, I cared a great deal about these kids and the production they were undertaking, more so than I would have without seeing this powerful film. I never plan to set foot in such a church in my life, I have not accepted any fairy-tale figure as my savior, and I'll never spend Halloween at Hell House. Still, I have a clearer idea of what goes on in such places, thanks to brave film making like this.
Bully (2011)
a brave beginning, but it could have done more . . .
This is brave and honest film making, and it goes to other places, and other rural pockets middle America, than most film makers are willing to go. Parent after parent, and kid after kid, tell stories of enduring bullying in small-town schools, and honestly, one spends half of this movie wishing one could reach through the movie screen and comfort a crying kid, or worse, a grieving parent. Two of the kids have committed suicide, and we follow the parents' reconstruction of their kids' teasing and torment, as well as their efforts to prevent the same things from happening to other kids. We watch administrators shrug off the concerns of parents who say the schools have an obligation to protect the kids, parents saying the wrong things to kids who risk assuming the roles of punching bags for their peers, and kids plucky enough to fancy themselves a one-woman force for change in backwoods, Oklahoma. It's important to see it, it's poignant and affecting filmmaking, and it's a shame the MPAA ever considered giving this an "R" rating: doing so would have ensured this film never reached the people who need to see it the most.
The filmmakers allow parents and students to tell their own stories, with acoustic guitar accompaniment and minimal intervention, but I felt it presented a myopic view, even when those myopic eyes weren't crying heart-felt tears of sympathy. All of the sufferers of bullying hailed from backwoods and Bible Belt America, as if bullying isn't also an urban and northern phenomenon. All of the instances of bullying are treated as stories in themselves and causes in themselves, when I wondered if states cutting school district budgets to the bone, economic conditions worsening in former manufacturing towns, and biases against small-town living in the first place, weren't contributing factors to multiple, local causes, alongside the bullying. Finally, all of these bullying victims tell their stories, as if no one's ever raised a child before, and as if no one's ever professionally studied the phenomenon of bullying. Interviewing a child psychiatrist as to why people become bullies, asking a psychologist how people have responded to bullying productively, and even finding someone who grew up being bullied, but became a positive force for change, all would have evened out this documentary's presentation.
It's worth watching, and powerful for just letting people explore the instances of bullying in their own ways and their own words, but these filmmakers had other resources at their disposal--experts, psychiatrists, success stories, urban schools, guidance counselors--that could have added to, and this enhanced, this affecting portrait of families overshadowed by bullies.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
well-acted, tough to watch, questions left open
We Need to Talk About Kevin is very well-acted and unfolds in stunning cinematography, such that the cold beauty of the film almost distracts you from the unlikeable characters and the emotionally wrenching conflict they're caught up in. Tilda Swinton, who's even better here than in "Michael Clayton," copes with life before, during, and after her son has gone on a killing spree (all three time-frames overlap and partake of flash-backs and flash-forwards). Once we understand what is going on (and that takes a while: the opening sequence is deliberately disorienting), we understand that Tilda's character is picking up the pieces of her life and moving on, while also repeatedly asking herself where she went wrong as a parent, if she is to blame for her son's psychopathic maladjustment, and if the other parents in her community are in some sense right, to blame her for her son's murders. The tone rings true, in that the movie realizes parents' worst nightmares, and in that most parents give second-thoughts to their missteps and petty negligence as their kids grow up. They wonder at times how much of their kids' behavior comes from the parent's influence, and how much misbehaving is the fault of the child alone. Though we understand the character's self-doubt, we would also have slapped the kid to Thailand and back for mouthing off as this kid does; we understand her regrets at parenting too hard, or too soft, but we probably conclude that most parents, at one time or another, are as frustrated with children as Tilda's character is with Kevin.
Petty complaints for me include two things: the director's trope of using an ironic soundtrack worked for about the first two-thirds of the movie, until we learned the trick, and the jig was up. Just as the soundtrack played a boisterous and up-beat major tune, the character coped with setbacks and accidents contrasting with the tune, as if setting off the fun she was supposed to be having (the music) with the misfortune she was actually experiencing (her son's vengeful character). But by the end, we dreaded the beginning of the music for each new scene, feeling the irony had just become cruel. Secondly, we're never shown Kevin interacting with the classmates whom he eventually murders, and he seems to carry the greatest grudge toward his mother, though he ends up killing everyone in his family except the mother character (I warned you there were spoilers!). This left the final action of the mass killings inexplicable in terms of Kevin's targets: why kill the classmates, when it's the family he hates, and why leave the mother alive, when he's been siding with everyone else against her all along? Killing sprees are, by definition, senseless, but lack of context and emotional explanation of relationships other than Kevin and Eva (the mother) left a blank we needed filled in.
It's not easy to watch, but it's Oscar caliber for Swinton, and it takes you places most films wouldn't be willing to take you. Just be prepared for that ride and those destinations, for the film is so well-conducted and calculated, it's not going to leave you alone or outside of Eva's emotionally wrought experiences.