Thursday Movie Picks - Friendship

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

"Friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship
When other friendships are soon forgot, ours will still be hot!"

Yes, our theme on this week's episode of Thursday Movie Picks is Friendship. An apropos topic for me this week, as I just returned from a long weekend vacation with friends in Provincetown, MA. For those of you who don't know, P-Town is the very last city on the very tip of Cape Cod, and has long been a destination especially for gay men. It may have been the weekend before the "season" officially kicks off, but we all had a blast, and I had a lot of fun going on my first true friends-only vacation. So in honor of my friends, I have chosen the following movies about gay friend groups this week.

The Boys in the Band (William Friedkin, 1970) Gay culture pretty much started here, didn't it? The original gaggle of gay friends, Michael, Donald, Emory, Hank, Larry, Bernard, and Harold, are the quintessential catty group of gay BFFs. But in 1968, when the story takes place, one year before the Stonewall riots, LGBT people were still not "out". At least, not in the way we would think of as being "out". A lot of gay men I know find this to be VERY dated, but I still see it as an important piece of queer history: This is very much a time capsule of a specific group of people in a specific time and place, and it has a lot of value as such. But it still encapsulates how a LOT of gay men feel - full of joy and pride, but also confusion and pain.

Love! Valour! Compassion! (Joe Mantello, 1997) Very nearly an update of Boys in the Band to the mid-90s, this adaptation of Terrence McNally's play follows eight friends as they make visits to Fire Island during one summer. It's funny and affecting in equal measure, and a lot more good-natured than its '70s predecessor. But then, it takes place in a world where gay men were becoming more accepted, and where they had less reason to stay hidden. Of all three films I've picked today, this one is the least remembered, and I think that's not quite as it should be. It's a lovely film, with a great cast and a gorgeous script adapted by McNally himself.

The Broken Hearts Club (Greg Berlanti, 2000) A bit dated now thanks to its reliance on the trend-obsessed West Hollywood culture of the late '90s, Broken Hearts Club is fun, formulaic... and a little bit offensive to gay men, even though it's written and directed by a gay man and is about gay men! The characters' oft-stated ideal is to be as straight-acting as possible. Which... I mean, most of the main cast members are straight (including Dean Cain, Zach Braff, Timothy Olyphant, and Ben Weber), and are completely unafraid of playing up the more femme qualities some gay men have. But still, I have a huge soft spot for this movie, and for swoon-worthy Timothy Olyphant in it.

Thursday Movie Picks - Middle Eastern Language Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through The Shelves. Come join the motley crew of regulars by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a little bit about them!

This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're off on a journey to the Middle East!

I'll be honest. I haven't seen that many movies from this area of the world. HOWEVER! I have seen enough to make all three picks this week!

...and there was much rejoicing.

Late Marriage (Dover Kosashvili, 2001) Not quite as light-hearted as the trailer would have you believe, Late Marriage is about a Georgian Jew (Lior Ashkenazi, in a stunning performance) whose very traditional parents want him to just marry already! To the point where they're trying to arrange a marriage for him. But he's secretly dating a divorcée, which would be a big no-no. Late Marriage was Israel's submission for the Academy Awards that year, and I can't believe it wasn't nominated. It's really great.

Eyes Wide Open (Haim Tabakman, 2009) Short and sweet, Eyes Wide Open is as important as it is beautiful. The story takes place in the Orthodox world of rabbinical students, where two men find they share a mutual attraction. Unfortunately, homosexuality is forbidden. The film is as humble as the buildings in which most of its scenes take place, and the simplicity (and borderline austerity) works very much in the film's favor, especially as the relationship between the leads deepens. An underseen gem. 

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011) I almost never do this, but if you haven't seen A Separation yet, stop reading this and go watch it RIGHT NOW. No, seriously. RIGHT NOW. I'll wait. Asghar Farhadi's crystalline, prismatic portrait of present-day Iran is a flat-out, no-holds-barred masterpiece that couldn't possibly be better on any level - performance, editing, scoring, framing, it's all absolutely perfect. As a woman tries to get a divorce from her husband so that she can take their daughter and make a better life for themselves elsewhere, he hires a very religious woman to help care for his ailing father. There is an argument one day when the old man is left unattended, and from there things spiral outward. It's very nearly chaos, but Farhadi has the control of a master storyteller, detailing each scene and character in such a way that we can see all sides at once. It's a perfect scenario, one that plays out with the inexorable pull of classic Greek tragedy - the end was writ from the beginning, we just didn't know it.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

There were Technicolor pictures made before Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and there were Technicolor pictures made after it, but I don't think there is one that is MORE of a Technicolor picture than this one.

I MEAN. Have you ever seen such red? Even Dorothy's ruby slippers don't come close to this. And Hawks (and DP Harry J. Wild) knows just the best ways to make sure the colors of costume designer Travilla's glorious costumes really pop:

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Trevor

Goddammit.

This is easily the hardest episode of Hit Me With Your Best Shot I've ever participated in, and I'm including in that the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon episode, which I didn't participate in because despite trying three times, I found myself unable to remember that I was supposed to be looking for a best shot, so caught up was I in Ang Lee's deft, magical storytelling.

It's not just that Trevor is a very, VERY good short film, and that I could very honestly pick pretty much any shot from it and come up with a justification for why it's the Best. It's that I had never seen the short that birthed The Trevor Project before, and I didn't put two and two together and realize that this lovely short was even related to that SUPER important organization before watching it, and was thus totally unprepared for what I was about to watch.

I LOVE the little Harold & Maude phase Trevor goes through at the beginning

End-of-Year Glut (Non-Awards Edition) Part One

Every year in the fall, all the good movies open.

I hate to say it, but it's true. From September through December so many more films I'm interested in seeing come to theaters and it's so difficult to see them all. So it's taken a while for me to see all the films I wanted to see. I wanted to get them all in before the Oscar nominations, so I could be appropriately appalled when such-and-such film wasn't nominated in such-and-such category, but that didn't QUITE happen. These are the ones I managed to get in before that point that ended up not factoring into the awards conversation, in rough order from most to least recent viewing.

Tangerine - The trans hooker comedy shot entirely on an iPhone that by now I'm sure you've all heard about, Sean Baker's film demands to be seen. Tangerine is raucous, riotous fun, but also a bit shrill. It immerses itself in a pocket of culture that operates in a register so high-pitched that it's a wonder it isn't only audible to dogs, but plays into it - and against it - perfectly. The undercurrent of loneliness and melancholy (slight but still present) grounds the film and improves it immeasurably. The performers are so natural that it almost feels like a documentary at moments. Ultimately slight, but punk in a way that feels vibrant and necessary - this is completely unlike anything else you're likely to see this year or next. Mya Taylor deserved a slot in that godforsaken Best Supporting Actress category.

Ballet 422 - The thing is, this is basically my jam. A fly-on-the-wall look at the creation of a new ballet for the New York City Ballet choreographed by one of its own dancers. This is so up my alley, how could I not love it? Justin Peck is a brilliant choreographer and a member of the NYCB corps de ballet (or ensemble or chorus or whatever you want to call it), and Jody Lee Lipes had unprecedented access to him and the NYCB during the creation of his first ballet, the 422nd piece of repertory in the company's history. The lack of context for just about everything may make this a bit confusing for non-dancers/arts professionals, but as a (beautifully shot) fly-on-the-wall-style documentary, it just about can't be beat. However, there is a real lack of tension that lets it down a bit, and the lack of interviews leads to a poorly-illuminated creative process. The very last scene, though, brings the difficult life of artists in general, and dancers in particular, to light in a beautiful way.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief - As with most Alex Gibney documentaries, you pretty much know going in if this is going to be for you or not. So again, I was sort of predisposed to like this one. It is a bit didactic, perhaps, but it's also illuminating on several levels. Gibney gets to the heart of not only what Scientology's roots are, and what it is currently, but why someone would be drawn in, and why they would leave, which makes for some pretty fascinating viewing in spots. He is of course helped by utterly believable interview subjects and unbelievably, ridiculously crazy/scary footage of the church's big annual gathering. I'm almost surprised this didn't make the Best Documentary nominee list. Almost.

I'll See You In My Dreams - Blythe Danner's lovely performance has gone completely overlooked this awards season, and that is a damn crying shame. Few dramas are this clear-eyed and modest in ambition yet so perfectly executed in that vein - and even less about senior citizens. There's not a thing I didn't like about this engaging, quietly affecting little gem of a film. Even while sort-of half-watching it, it pulled me in and accumulated poignancy all the way through, leaving me misty-eyed and smiling. It's also a damn crying shame that the title song, which fits in so perfectly well with the rest of the movie, at a key moment, isn't an Oscar nominee. That category is always screwed up, but still.

Tom at the Farm - Strange, insinuating little thriller that, despite wearing its influences on its sleeve, constantly goes in surprising directions. The basic story is this: Tom, a city boy in every way, goes to the country for his partner's funeral, only to find that the family doesn't know their dearly departed was gay. Except for his brother, who goes to great lengths to keep up a fantasy for his mother and forces Tom to play along. The brilliance of Xavier Dolan's film adaptation of the stage play by Michael Marc Bouchard is to make the inner dialogue of many gay men external through a menacing force. I have a feeling it would make an interesting double feature with Stranger by the Lake for that reason. It's slightly unsatisfying as a whole - probably because it doesn't really end well - but it's a good ride.

Crimson Peak - How on earth Guillermo del Toro's gorgeous gothic romance didn't get included in the Oscar nominations for Production Design and Costume Design is beyond me. That said, they're pretty much the only things worth seeing Crimson Peak for. Though the film goes to great lengths to remind us that this is a "story with a ghost in it" as opposed to a ghost story, it doesn't ever go far enough with even its most basic conceits for me. I kept wanting more of just about everything the film was giving me, which is sometimes a compliment but not in this case. The idea of a house so old and precarious that it sometimes functions like a living thing is brilliant, and almost nothing is done with it (we don't even get to the title house until the halfway point of the film). The florid camerawork and design elements are certainly worth seeing, but ultimately this did nothing for me, and coming from this creative team, that was disappointing.

Trainwreck - This was my family's choice for pre-Thanksgiving viewing (I tried to get them to watch Inside Out, but the resistance to "cartoons" is strong in some people), and it plays perfectly fine at home, which is totally unsurprising coming from Judd Apatow. Amy Schumer is now a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood, and good for her because she's a funny, funny lady. HOWEVER. This was a perfectly average rom-com in every way. Just because you have a guy doing the chasing doesn't mean you've done something unique or even praise-worthy (it's been done before, and better). I laughed, sure, but most of these jokes have been told before and the sense of diminishing returns was all over this. Needed approximately 72% more Tilda, an absolute hoot as Amy's men's mag boss.

An Open Letter

Dear Matt Damon,

PLEASE. SHUT. UP.

I have liked you as an actor ever since School Ties. And I'm sure you're a good guy. But recently, it seems as though every time you open your mouth your Straight White Male Privilege comes flooding out and it is EMBARRASSING.

I can't really speak to the whole Project Greenlight diversity issue, but this most recent slip-up, I most definitely can. "Actors are more effective when they're a mystery," huh? So by that yardstick, you must be a pretty damn ineffective actor, since everyone knows a whole lot about you - we know your best friend is Ben Affleck because you told us when doing the rounds for the film you wrote  together (Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite films), we even know who your wife is because you bring her to premieres with you and thank her in award acceptance speeches. And because of that, we know (GASP) what your sexuality is!

Yet somehow, we still believed you (and your co-star Michael Douglas, aka Mr. Catherine Zeta-Jones) as a gay man in Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra. And we buy it when you fall in love and have sex with women other than your wife in other films. Because acting is ALL ABOUT making people forget that you are who you are in real life and making them believe you are whatever character you are playing. For example: We all knew Christopher Lee was not a vampire, but we were still scared shitless of him as Dracula anyway! "Mystery" doesn't ever enter the picture. The only time it might lend a helping hand is when the actor is BAD, when they're not doing their job to make the character believable. That's when we rely on our good old-fashioned intuition to help fill in holes.

Because let's face it: 99% of the time when you see someone, you assume they are straight. Even if it's only subconsciously. Because, let's face it, most people in the world are straight. And since that's the case, people are straight until proven gay. That just is how it is, and that's okay. It does, however, put the onus on gay people of all stripes to "come out" (a phrase I detest) and let people know. That's slightly unfair (more so in parts of the world where being gay is a crime or otherwise punishable offense in the eyes of other people) but it is what it is.

So at best, Matt, by saying this you are showing that you are completely ignorant of how your own craft works, and at worst you are saying something extremely damaging to gay people. It's not exactly homophobic per se, but it promotes homophobia by suggesting that gay people should not say anything about their homosexuality at the same time as you and countless others flaunt your heterosexuality around the world without giving it a second thought.

And no matter which one it is, your statements make me think less of you. And they make me less likely to see your new film, which looks like it might be really good and which I probably would have seen otherwise (and which, by your own logic, no one will see - or believe you in if they do - because there's no mystery to the fact that you are not an astronaut with world-class smarts). Because now when I look at you, all I can see is a smug straight white man who doesn't have the ability to see past the end of his nose. And why would I want to support the career of someone like that?

Sincerely,

Dancin' Dan