Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

Features:

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein: A classic and with good reason. I laughed aloud in this movie, something modern comedies don’t often get me to do. Seeing this on the big screen with a willing and affable crowd was a genuine treat, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is why we have places like the Carolina.

Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula: A really interesting idea for a movie with some genuinely great moments and some inspired scenes. It does suffer from some low points and there isn’t nearly enough of the “vs. Dracula” part – and what there is doesn’t really make much sense – but when it hits, it hits. The leads portraying Bonnie & Clyde give really genuinely magnificent performances and the movie strikes a lot of its best notes when it emphasizes that those two characters are psychopaths in their own right. It also features the single best vampire-bites-victim scene I’ve ever seen in any movie. It has problems, make no mistake, but its peaks are some of the highest I’ve ever seen in a vampire movie. I would genuinely love to see the same people make a straight-up Bonnie & Clyde story because all of those parts are seriously fine work.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator: For decades this was the single best Lovecraft adaptation on film and even though it takes broad, broad liberties with Lovecraft’s original short story it still focuses on the same themes. Jeffrey Combs delivers what’s probably his finest performance in a Lovecraft adaptation – he’s been in a million of them – and the whole movie is basically non-stop awesome. I hadn’t seen it since, I don’t know, 8th or 9th grade, something like that, and I loved it. I noted afterwards, when talking about it with The Boyf and Mr. Pink Eyes, that I’ve never seen Re-Animator 2. I looked it up online out of curiosity only to find that a third movie, House of Re-Animator, has been announced for production this year and again it stars… Jeffrey Combs. How freaking rad is that?

Shorts program They’re Coming To Get You Barbara!:

Shapes: A nicely thematic little short that was well-made but didn’t necessarily break any new ground.

The Ugly File: Quite frankly, lousy. I liked the idea behind it but the execution lacked energy and resources to the point of distraction. I kept finding myself studying the decorating choices of the houses where it was shot and not the movie itself.

Monstrous Nature: Extremely well-executed and genuinely scary, even though I stayed ahead of it by a couple of minutes at any given point. The effects were particularly startling given that it tries to be more of a psychological story for the first 90% of the film.

Pigeon: Impossible: A very clever and genuinely funny animated short, well worth watching. I don’t really get how it wound up at a horror festival, but I’m glad I saw it.

Hector Corp.: A genuinely funny and slightly freaky short. Imagine the love-child of Office Space and Gremlins and I think you’re probably on the right track. Well made and gleefully delivered.

Snuggle Time: Another animated selection that is genuinely warm and funny in its delivery of a pretty straight-forward story. Any child could watch this and love it.

Dead Walkers: A really ambitious attempt at a wild west zombie story that suffers from never being quite sure what kind of movie it wants to be and a “twist” ending that is so ham fisted, by the book and yet simultaneously out of left field that it soured the whole experience. A box of good ideas that’s been shaken too hard. Great production values, though, and a net-positive experience in terms of pure entertainment.

Dead Creek: Extremely well-shot and with a genuinely compelling question at its core of whether it’s going to be a revenge movie or a monster movie, but one of the leads is so teeth-grindingly bad in her role that she drags the rest of it down with her. When the character finally turned up dead I honestly thought, well, at least something good happens in this movie.

I’ve seen one full-length movie and one collection of three shorts. Here are my thoughts so far:

Strigoi: Easily one of the most creative vampire films I’ve seen in years. Everyone is comparing it to Let The Right One In and for good reason: what that film achieves by mixing winter, loneliness and childhood together with vampirism, Strigoi does by mixing the end of Romanian Communism, small town life, the humor of practical matters in the face of fear and the annoyance of family ties with that same supernatural element. Beautifully shot and full of great performances, the only problem is that the sound is marginal in places. It’s filmed in English, but the accents are thick and the dialogue tramples itself sometimes. Subtitles would be most welcome.

AM1200 & Other Shorts:

Sinkhole: A great little short that does its thing and then calls it quits to good effect. The real estate agent is portrayed all too believably, perfect for bringing the real world into the movie with us, and the crazy old coot whose land he’s trying to buy has one of the better monologues I’ve seen in a horror movie. Lovely, big round of applause by the audience at the end.

Shrove Tuesday: “Very artistic” was the best I could do afterward. Interestingly filmed in places and interestingly animated in others, it never could quite figure out whether it wanted to be a cautionary tale, a dream sequence or a splatter flick. I could get behind a lot of individual parts of this movie but not the movie as a whole.

As always, the balcony had assholes in it and they seemed to find this movie hilarious at all the wrong times. For real, would it be too much to ask to have a house manager stop in upstairs once in a while? I can only move so many times in one movie. Ah, well, they shut up for the important bit, AM1200.

AM1200: An exquisite film with lush production, beautiful photography, sharply minimalist writing and incredible performances that focuses on creepy rather than jump-out-and-go-boo. This is a movie to which the term horror most definitely applies. Lovecraft could easily have written this and I mean that in the very best way. A guilty conscience leads the main character from one bad choice to another until everything spirals out of control and the entire time the audience sits there silently pleading with him to turn around, go back, look over his shoulder, lock the doors, anything but what he’s doing at the moment. When three or four hundred people simultaneously cry out in protest or shock and then stifle themselves, it’s like a low moan doing the wave across the theatre and it happened several times. Otherwise, almost utter silence throughout the cinema as everyone was captivated. Worth canceling other plans to go see this 40-minute film. It was the last thing I thought about last night and the first thing I thought about this morning.

You do know that the 2010 Nevermore Film Festival is this weekend, right? Lord, but it’s snuck up on me. I am not at all ready, but I am going to get ready tonight when Pants Wilder and I sit down with a schedule and talk interesting movies.

And let me assure you, there are a lot of interesting movies.

On my extended short list:

• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
• AM1200, which has Ray Wise (aka Leland Fucking Palmer)
• Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula, which would be on the bubble were it not for Drac
• Dawning, which looks fantastic
• Evil Angel, though I’m not really sure what it has to say about gender
• The shorts collection Four Minutes ‘Til Sunrise is required.
• Re-Animator, which is honest to (old) gods one of the best Lovecraft adaptations on film.
• Strigoi, for that Soviet Bloc vampire flavor.
• The shorts collection They’re Coming To Get You, Barbara!, which remains one of my favorite shorts titles evar.
• Witchboard, which is also kind of on the bubble but does remind me of some great times in junior high so, y’know, yeah. I’m there.

Like I said, that’s the extended list. I’m going to watch most of those, though, so if you’re in the area and see something on the list that you’d like to watch with someone virtually guaranteed to be more nelly than you, give me a shout.

Not only is it Guy Fawkes Night, and thus important to anyone who loved V for Vendetta (and hates seeing wingnuts who get their rocks off on authoritarian bullshit try to claim that book as a metaphor for their own rage bone), it’s also the day the flux capacitor was invented.

And seriously, Sandman is twenty years old? Nearly twenty one? Good grief.

I liked it very much.

That said, I kind of feel like I’m losing the ability to watch and enjoy new horror movies. By the end I just wanted everyone to be OK. I didn’t want anymore surprises. I audibly cried out and/or screamed more than once during the movie. I got emotionally invested. I found myself watching with my hand over my mouth so it wouldn’t have far to go to get to my eyes.

I have to do something to undo this.

We went to see District 9 last night and loved it. Highly recommended. I daren’t say more.

My final thought about NCGLFF is to share one of the best things in any film. In Weak Species there’s a character who is the resident beautiful monster of his high school. He’s decided that as an ongoing piece of performance art he’s going to have sex with every other gay guy in his school and then make them feel terrible about themselves. He’s not a nice kid. At one point we see him working on a sketch and the camera angle shifts to reveal that instead of sketching something he’s written the following:

MY FUTURE:

OPTIONS:

• ART
• THERAPY
• MAKE ENEMIES

I can’t begin to tell you how hard I laughed. It’s every kid who was too smart for school, ever.

Is it me, or is it about time the Carolina’s film festivals started giving out awards? Oh, I know, I’ve been saying it for years, but I honestly do think that a small jury and a short ballot attached to each 10-pass could give out awards without overwhelming the organizers with more work to do. The films we see at NCGLFF, NEVERMORE and ESCAPISM are winning awards everywhere else and I don’t think it would do them or the Carolina any harm to see the Carolina’s awards listed on their posters.

Were it up to me I’d have to go with:

Funniest line in any film: “I’m from outer space and I want to be in dirty pictures.” (Twoyoungmen, UT)

Funniest Overall: The 24ish episode of Chico’s Angels, which also features that rarest of gifts, a hot guy playing a character who might as well be named Hot Guy yet can act and be genuinely funny.

Most surreal moment: The cheerleader using a urinal in Girl Parts! or, possibly, the sudden intersection of Prodigal Sons and F for Fake. Both blew my mind. Loved them.

Most dreadful: Q-Case, hands down. To quote Opus, but Lord it wasn’t good.

Tried Hardest and Failed Anyway: Ogles with Goggles, which is also pretty dreadful.

Creepiest: Easily a tie between Steam and Weak Species. Yeesh. Both excellent, but still, yeesh. Pretty much anything in the There’ll Still Be Rain collection could win that, though.

Most Sincerely Touching: I can’t possibly name one. Prodigal Sons is just such a lovingly-told story about how hard it can be to love someone. Redwoods is awash in the chemistry of the leads and the sweetness of its story. Get Happy is so warm and funny and was exactly what I needed to see at the moment I saw it. I couldn’t possibly pick.

This was an excellent year for programming and the crowds were talking about that. Here and there were films that I felt fell way short of the mark set by the others but overall these were some of the best films I’ve seen at the festival. Ever. Mad kudos to the programming committee, because they did a fantastic job.

It was also an excellent year for protesters. They were there Friday night and Saturday morning but Saturday afternoon a guy showed up with a “FREE HUGS” sign and gave hugs to anyone who wanted one. This defused the situation and it also just confused the hell out of the protesters. They were shut down for a good 10 minutes while they tried to figure out how to react. The completely sincere FREE HUGS guy, I’m sad to say, took some direct verbal abuse from the bigots but kept it up and when I got back from lunch on Saturday I found that the protesters had packed it in and given up before the festival was even half over. They never came back. Good riddance.

Maybe next year they’ll stay home.

Sunday I saw two films and one short, all really great. Sundays tend to be a good day for movies in general at the festival and this year was no exception.

Redwoods – This was a really sweet, touching, sincere and most of all low-key romantic drama about two guys meeting while one of them is in a deeply dull but responsibility-laden relationship. The acting is quite good, the chemistry between the two leads is palpable and the story is surprisingly universal. Part of what impressed me about the movie is that it asks some of the expected romantic drama questions – what defines happiness and is it worth the costs – but it doesn’t rely on a queer couple for some unique positive or negative trait. It’s another example of what I noticed overall, that queer films at the festival this year seemed to be open to being about regular life without being about being about regular life. It also stars a Durham native who was fantastic, both in this and in the extremely dark and creepy short Weak Species.

Twoyoungmen, UT – This played right before Redwoods and is a simply magnificent short film. It’s about two guys meeting when one goes out to a gay bar for the first time. It refuses to conform to one’s automatic expectations of what that means, though, and proved to be both tremendously subtle – in presentation, direction and performances – and deeply touching. Between the honesty of the characters’ fears and the slightly surreal tinge, this film felt like being 17 and scared. I loved it.

Little Ashes – This film presents a version of the youthful relationship between the Spanish poet and playwright Garcia Lorca and the painter Salvador Dali that may or may not be historically accurate. I’ve read that it is “an imagining” of that relationship, but the closing title card notes that late-in-life recollections by Dali “inspired” the film. I don’t particularly care how accurate it is or is not because either way it is beautiful and affecting. The performances are great and the times presented – the end of one era of Spanish politics, the yearning for something new, the collapse of hope in the face of Fascism – will feel just a little familiar to any Generation Xer who was once young and wreckless and invincible. Gorgeously shot, tremendous production value and the guy who plays sparklepire Edward Cullen plays Dali.

Little Ashes is well worth seeing and is being held over at the Carolina for at least the next couple of nights.

This afternoon I had the extreme good fortune to catch On the Edge of Happiness, which is kind of a movie and kind of simply a TV show. It’s film length but it’s shot as five episodes of a soap opera that doesn’t exist outside of these five episodes. The writer/director/producer was there and I hope to see him again tomorrow because I really want to tell him how much I loved this piece.

On the Edge of Happiness is set in a fictional Mississippi county, near the border with Tennessee, and features an intricately plotted and entertainingly delivered storyline. There are questions of paternity, unfaithful spouses, a wedding, intra-familial blackmail, betrayals of trust, land-grabbing schemes, ham-fisted acting, contradictory details, questionable timelines and a mysterious shooting and that’s just the first episode. The title card features blood-spattered roses, a biscuit and a beer tab.

The piece itself, taken as a whole, is half parody and half sincerely loving homage to the soap opera form. It got enthusiastic applause and I would dearly love to see five more episodes next year. It’s available online, though he takes it down when it’s being presented in theaters so it’s currently not able to be viewed.

I was also going to watch Hollywood, je t’aime, but twenty or thirty minutes in I got pulled out by work (I’m on-call this weekend, of course). Since I can’t fairly offer an opinion of the whole work, I’ll simply note that it had great production value and the star is a complete hottie. It also seemed not to think a hot star would make a good substitute for the character having an emotional life.

The title credits indicated that it likewise stars Chad Allen and I endorse pretty much anything involving him, even the “Tommy Westphall Universe” theory.

Just watched the “Ain’t Nothin’ Dirty Going On” collection of shorts. It was a decidedly mixed bag. I’m sorry, but the unfunny Seussian short “Ogles With Goggles” doesn’t really get off the ground, lingering as it does over reinforcing conventional standards of beauty and pretending a strikingly handsome guy is ugly just because he’s in a bowtie. It feels like a movie that would like to challenge the established gay caste system but is scared to pull the trigger. That said, “Boycrazy” is a fun and funny musical with a phalanx of hot guys in it, well worth seeing. More than anything, though, the short documentary “Get Happy” is an amazingly sweet, funny and positive film about a child drag queen.

It occurred to me after that none of the movies I’ve seen this year are about queer characters being solely the victim. We can make films about being happy, we can make films about being disappointed, we can make films about being abused, but we don’t have to exploit ourselves to tell the story.

This weekend is the 14th annual NC Gay & Lesbian Film Festival at the Carolina Theatre of Durham. Tonight I saw one film and two collections of short films. Pre-film-reaction notes: the OnlyBurger truck is at the festival and serving up famously good burgers and fries. (Also, the absurdly hot staff are not at all above flirting for good tips.) The annual half-dozen protesters are there and they’ve got their big, wooden cross. Once again, Durham’s Finest showed up to make sure they stayed off theatre property and out of everyone’s way and it felt damned good to know I live in a town where the power is on my side.

Now, movie thoughts!

First I saw Prodigal Sons, an absolutely breathtaking documentary. This is probably the most intense film I’ve seen since Audition and it’s made even more gripping by virtue of being completely true. The narrator and filmmaker, Kim, grew up as the football star in her tiny town, went away after high school, became a woman, then returned for her twenty year high school reunion. Reading the synopsis, I thought this was going to be a film about her old friends having trouble coming to grips with her new identity, but no, that is not what it’s about. At every turn it avoids predictability and schmaltz. Instead of being about the trials of trying to rebuild old friendships, it’s a documentary almost entirely about her ongoing efforts to rebuild a relationship with her adopted brother, now mentally ill and facing his own identity crises. Stunning. Absolutely magnificent from start to finish. I think she went into it expecting this to be about people thinking she’s a freak and instead, I hope, she came out realizing how together her psyche is and how wonderful she is. Absolutely the best documentary I’ve seen in years. If this plays a festival near you, or sees a theatrical release, do whatever is necessary to see this film.

Next: Chico’s Angels. Last year during a comedy shorts program I saw a short film called Cooking with Kay about a drag queen named Kay Sedia. Say it aloud and you’re almost certain to almost smirk. I thought parts of last year’s short were well done but that it was, frankly, not that great. Chico’s Angels, though, was actually very funny. The lesson learned is that ensembles are way funnier than anything that gets carried around on the back of one particular performer. Each of the roles in each Chico’s Angels “episode” gets in at least one good solid laugh, usually several, and each brings a different kind of funny to the table. They complement one another extremely well.

The first short is an episode of Chico’s Angels about the team having to save the little lost chihuahua of a lady from the neighborhood. It sets the CA standard of slapstick mixed with comedy of errors and it just works. Between episodes 1 and 2 of Chico’s Angels is Martini: the Movie, a reasonably cute piece about a bitchy old has-been star named Martini Glass. I’m pretty sure it’s funnier if you’re, you know, a friend of Martini Glass, but it still had some good laughs and an excellent musical number. Martini also does a really disturbingly hilarious impression of Kate Hepburn that’s worth the price of admission. The second Chico’s Angels episode is, frankly, a little incoherent but it’s got some great laughs. The other inbetweener short film, dividing episodes 2 and 3 of Chico’s Angels, is an absolutely mind-destroyingly dull thing called Q-Case. It tries to parody X-Files but mainly it just fumbles around in the dark. There’s one good laugh and they take way, way too long getting to it. Sorry, but there it is. I managed to sit through it for the final Chico’s Angels and am extremely glad I did so because the last thing in the collection is an absolutely pitch-perfect parody of 24 called 24ish. I shouted with laughter during it.

Happily, I sat in the back and wound up next to the filmmaker for Chico’s Angels so I got to display my appreciation by my laugh-shout. I had the misfortune of being in front of a guy who felt the need to mutter his enthusiasm every time a hottie walked in front of the camera, but hey, it’s festival. The party atmosphere pervades. Two years ago it was a tiny queen who squealed, “oh my GAWD!” every time anything surprising happened during a horror movie. So it goes.

Last, I caught the 11:15 showing of the dark drama shorts collection, There’ll Still Be Rain. All of the films were excellent, especially Steamroom, which I described to Brian A. by saying it starts out physical and then gets metaphysical and that it’s a tense, lusty, 10-minute version of The Fog. I noted that it is wicked hot and also extremely creepy. Also, hot. Also, creepy. Everything in that collection was extremely well done, though, and any one of them could have carried an otherwise lackluster program. To have them all in one collection is an extraordinary treat.

Tomorrow: too many things to count.

Saturday night The Boyf and I went to the Carolina Theatre of Durham to catch one night of a three-day run of West Side Story. He had never seen it, another entry in the years-long game of him confessing to never having seen something and me expressing shock entirely out of proportion to that. The print was just unbelievably gorgeous. It was like seeing the movie new. It was in every bit as good shape as the brand new, never-shown print of Wrath of Khan the Carolina showed at Escapism! a few years ago. The crowd was middling but wrapt. When the credits rolled we all sat in silence and just watched, absorbed in those closing moments. I get goosebumps thinking about it, honest to the gods. I love that movie.

Of course, it’s proven to bear special value to me as a Twin Peaks fanatic, since two of the male leads were in that show. It’s pretty amazing to see them so young. The sight of Riff doing back-flips through a crowd as they dance around him is made even more impressive when one realizes that’s Dr. Jacoby.

Almost the whole rest of the weekend was spent installing Ubuntu on my work laptop, getting AFS and Samba and vpnc and everything else set up and working, then trying a new video driver that hosed my system completely, then starting over from scratch. It’s all done, though, and today I’ve worked in Ubuntu all day without issue and am currently, in another window, installing XP on a 20GB slice in VMware for the sole purpose of doing my timesheets (yes, really) and the occasional Visio diagram. How sweet is that? It’s a complete reversal from Friday, when I was running Ubuntu in a VMware slice on my Windows laptop so I could test-drive the alternative installer’s option to set up an encrypted file system.

Some dozen-plus years ago I briefly had a Unix workstation as my day-to-day work machine and I’ve basically been waiting to get back to that state of affairs ever since. For years upon years I have gazed longingly at Bascha’s work laptop, which runs Linux, and thought to myself that someday I would get to a place where I could do the same.

Now that I’m back in an academic environment, and one short on budget at that, my request to run an OS other than Windows was met with more than acquiescence; my boss commented that of course I could, he had decided to do the same thing himself.

Nice. It makes for a pretty decent start to the week.

Of the high-larious, WoW-related sort.

“Is he asking for drugs?”

The Boyf and I went to see Terminator: Salvation this weekend with Katastrophes, Mr. Pink Eyes, Mr. Saturday and Pants Wilder. I have always been a fan of that setting for its uniqueness within sci-fi: while man vs. machine may be well-trod territory, the Terminator movies never actually fix the future. Each one simply delays the war. No movie claims to prevent it. I find that fascinating, that it’s a story about different forces struggling over the timing of an otherwise inevitable tragedy. That puts an interesting spin on the usual fight-the-big-bad-to-save-the-world finale of people vs. robots.

Prior to the jump, which will be used to prevent accidental spoilers, I will simply say that there were a lot of things I liked about it and the things I didn’t like could have been a lot worse.

Below the jump are spoilers galore. Be warned!

(more…)

Friday night I went to see Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D and, immediately after, Frankenstein. Two classics were exactly the right way to start the weekend. It is worth noting that there is a reason Creature is so often held up as the example of its kind of movie – the ’50s monster flick – and it is that Creature is actually a very good movie. Pants Wilder went straight to the first time we see the creature swooning over Kay and pointed out that the scene is really creepy because that’s not CGI. The athleticism displayed by Ricou Browning is just stunning. No special effect can accomplish something that cool. That said, guess what? Nobody watches 3-D movies anymore so nobody knows which way to wear the glasses. A tip for future 3-D film experiences at the Carolina: give a tutorial before the movie starts. Someone as well-known and well-regarded as Phil Lee should not have to spend two hours wondering when the hell the 3-D will start because he’s got his glasses on backwards.

Frankenstein is also a genuinely great film – a narrative that wastes not a single second, lavish sets, a genuine sense of glimpsing another time – and watching it I was struck how not just some scenes were iconic but every scene was something I’d seen copied in later work. Gods, what a great movie.

That said – and I say this as one of the Retrofantasma people – can the Retrofantasma people who come to the headline movie on the Friday of NEVERMORE just shut the fuck up already? For fuck’s sake, people, I did not buy a 10-pass so I could listen to you run your fucking mouths. Do not fucking MST3K the movie outside your own home.

Saturday I went to see The Disappeared which was really, really good. In fact, it was so effective that I had to get up and go out into the hall and just take a break from it in the middle. The movie features supernatural elements but they’re not the real story. In fact, I’d argue that the supposed main narrative – the main mystery driving the plot – is handled fairly ham-fistedly. I didn’t care, though, because that wasn’t what interested me. The movie is a ghost story, yes, but it’s not about that. It’s about what it’s like to be powerless in the face of grief and what we do to cope with that. It’s about what it’s like to be disadvantaged and surrounded by personal relationships taut with the tension between poisonous suspicion and a desperate need to trust someone. Very touching. So touching, in fact, that I barely even noticed the twist ending happening because the emotions of the story were much more interesting than the events.

Finally, I caught the comedy shorts. The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon was every bit as good the second time around. Things that were new to me included the gleefully sadistic and extremely funny Treevenge and the genuinely surprisingly well-done and extremely fun and funny The Auburn Hills Breakdown, about which I can only say – without spoiling it – that the concept was sufficiently simple that it could either be done really badly or really well and the makers definitely land on the really well end of things. If you have the chance to catch any of these in person, do so.

It’s worth noting that a few seats away from us during the shorts collection was a woman who was having a really, really good time. I don’t know if she was just wicked high or what but she giggled endlessly, such that more than once the crowd was laughing at her as much as at the movies. I’m not complaining, though; she made the whole thing more fun. That’s the difference between someone who’s really into the movie and someone who’s trying to make the experience be about themselves: she was sharing and improving the experience with/for everyone around her. The blabbermouths on Friday were just pissing me off.