Saturday, November 30, 2013
"The Armstrong Lie": detailed biography of how the famed cyclist's career and charity came down with "The Cheating Culture"
“The Armstrong Lie”
is a somewhat bloated and detailed biography of Lance Armstrong (Lance
Edward Gunderson), running slightly over two hours. It takes a position that sounds like a
necessary paradox. The public became big
fans or Lance and of competitive cycling, which became so extreme that doping
under the tables became accepted.
“Everybody did it.’ That was part of "The Cheating Culture" as described in the 2004 book by David Callahan (books blog, March 28, 2006). But Lance
insisted on perpetuating the lies, and bullied those who threatened him, since
he had deeper pockets. The film starts
with this interview with Oprah Winfrey on OWN, where he told all.
I have tweeted before that “Lance Armstrong shaved his legs
for nothing.” In fact, his career, until
he was “caught”, seemed to exemplify a certain kind of manly virtue. The film shows that he became an aggressive
bike competitor while a teen in Plano, Texas (I would have been living in
Dallas at the time). After initial
successes, he rather suddenly became ill in 1996, coughing up blood, and was
found to have advanced testicular cancer, which Lance in the film explains
moves up through the abdomen to the lungs and brain. Amazingly, he survived the brain surgery, and
a newer form of chemotherapy prevented permanent damage to his lungs, enabling
him to resume competitive cycling (starting out in his home Austin TX
neighborhood on a mountain bike). There
was controversy when Betsy Andreu reportedly overheard Lance admit at Indian
University Hospital that he had doped (Washington Post story here ) and that doing so could have provoked the cancer.
Lance would found his LiveStrong charity, and promote the idea
of emotional commitment to people recovering from cancer, which often results
in physical changes to people (hence the “Be Brave and Shave”
fundraisers). Likewise, cycling (as does
swimming) allows the idea that the male body is altered to eliminate wind
resistance (which is met with more in meets by riders staying together), and
that manliness is strictly a matter of performance. This has always sounded striking to me.
Of interest, too, is the way the publication (only in
French, in 2004) of the book “L. A. Confidentiel” by Pierre Ballester and David
Walsh. Armstrong litigated heavily
against the authors and publishers, and wound up stopping publication in
English and in the United States. The
book is still on Amazon only in French, but there is a 2007 book “From Lance to
Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy and the Tour de France”.
The film does offer some spectacular scenery of the mountain
routes in Italy and France.
The official site (Sony Pictures Classics) is here.
I saw the film at the AMC Shirlington in Arlington on Saturday
afternoon. The presentation had a
problem with sporadic dropout of some channels of the stereo sound, resulting
in erratic volume.
Labels:
biography,
cycling,
indie documentary,
sports
Friday, November 29, 2013
"A Second Knock on the Door: A Documentary of Friendly Fire": the military stalls on admitting its mistakes during the fog of war
“A Second Knock at the Door: A Documentary of Friendly Fire”
(2012), a documentary by Christopher Grimes, takes a close look at the deaths
of three soldiers in Iraq though interviews with family members, and also gives
a thorough history of the problem.
The film opens with the story of Jesse Ryan Buryj, from
Canton Ohio, a military policemen first said to be killed in a Humvee “accident”;
only later did the Army admit he had died of a gunshot wound accidentally
inflicted by friendly Polish forces. The
Army feared offended an ally in George W. Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing”. The film moves on to give the history of
native American Lee Todacheene (from New Mexico) and finally Pvt. Dave Sharrett
(Va), who died in a desert winter after his commanding lieutenant was
apparently lackadaisical in getting him rescued. Tom Jackman has a detailed account of the
Sharrett case and some additional video at the Washington Post site here.
The film traces the history of the way families were
notified of the deaths of men (and women) in battle, back to WWI. Until WWII, cases of friendly fire were often
discovered only when other members of a soldier’s unit handwrote letters to the
families.
The film gives a chilling account of a friendly fire
incident in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, where the brass was
nonchalant. Only about 12 of the 31
cases during that war have been fully investigated, and the government held up
notifying next-of-kin about friendly fire until the same time.
The film also shows a lot of chilling footage from the
Sharrett incident, which would rival that of Bradley Manning’s leak of an
incident in the 40 minute film known as “Collateral Murder” (My “cf” blog,
April 7. 2010).
The official site (Cinema Libre) is here.
The documentary mentions the 1979 television film for ABC, “Friendly
Fire”, with Carol Burnett (directed by David Greene), which I believe I saw
while living in Dallas.
It’s worthy here to mention the 1992 Imax film “Fires of
Kuwait”, directed by David Douglas, about Saddam Hussein’s torching the oil
fields in Kuwait as he retreated after losing the war.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
"Philomena": British film explores journalistic ethics, delving into the sexual mores of the past, with tragedies on two continents
The new small-looking British dramedy film “Philomena”
really covers a lot of territory, and the sneak previews and screenings and
comments from the film festivals really didn’t convey the reach of this film,
by Stephen Frears (“The Queen”). The
film is based on the non-fiction book “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee” by
Martin Sixsmith.
As the film opens, Martin (Peter Coogan(, a former foreign
correspondent and British government communications director, is looking for
work after being “resigned” after a complicated “9/11 email scandal” involving
Jo Moore. The details are messy and are explained on Wikipedia here. The film does not explain these very well –
and that would seem to be a missed opportunity to make a point about online
reputation. The details, involving internal British politics, are so
convoluted, however, that they would be hard to convey in a cinematic
backstory.
Through social connections, Martin picks up a freelance
story about an elderly Irish woman Philomena (Judy Dench) looking for her son
who (born after an “accident”) was taken a half century before when she was
indentured in a convent. Sixsmith eventually
traces the story to the US, and to the possibility that the Roscrea convent was
making money selling babies for adoption.
Ultimately he tracks down the man, who he finds was a gay man working as
a counselor in the homophobic Republican Party who died of AIDS in 1995. There is a confrontation scene with the
ex-lover Peter Olson (Peter Hermann), living well in northern Virginia. Sixsmith learns that the man, renamed Michael
Hess (Sean Mahon) had visited Ireland before his death, trying to discover his
roots. The embedded film clips show Hess
as ill, with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his face. His lover, however, looks well eight years
later (the film is set in 2003), as if to suggest that, had he been infected, the effective modern
medications (protease inhibitors) just didn’t arrive quite in time to save
Michael. The film makes a political point that Reagan and the GOP inhibited
AIDS funding (a point that is questionable historically) because they blamed
male homosexual conduct for amplifying the argument, a common and dangerous
argument from the religious right in the 1980s (it almost resulted in a very
draconian anti-gay law being passed in Texas in 1983, when I was living in
Dallas). (I know of several cases of male couples where one would die of AIDS and the other would survive by years, even living today. In a few cases, the other couple never became infected, and in a few cases it seems like people did not progress or, in later years, simply responded very well to newer medications.)
There is a scene near the end, when the film returns to the
convent, where an elderly supervisory nun articulates her moralistic views
about chastity and abstinence (but this was in the heterosexual world), and
then the camera moves to the best visuals in the movie, a wonderful shot of the
estate and cemetery after an ice storm, with stunning shimmering landscapes
covered by rime ice.
The film is shot in regular l.85:1 ratio, which allows more closeups in indoor scenes, and may make transfer to television easier.
During the end credits, the film shows some 8mm reels from
the life that Hess led, which appears to have included Civil Rights work in the
deep South.
The link for the film is here. In the US, it is distributed by the Weinstein
Company, and appears to be distributed also by 20th Century Fox and
Magnolia. Even relatively small films
these days often use the resources of several major studios and distributors,
including also BBC (for television) and Pathe. The film was a hit at Venice and Toronto film
festivals.
Labels:
indie drama,
LGBT,
Magnolia Pictures,
public health,
religion,
Toronto,
TWC
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
"Sisters of Selma" depicts the Selma-Montgomery voting rights marches of 1965 in visual detail
The PBS film “Sisters of Selma: Bearing Witness to Change”
(2006, one hour), by Jaysari Hart, is one of the most detailed accounts of the
civil rights marches in 1965 in Alabama ever available.
The sisters felt particularly motivated by the voting rights
controversy. Only about one percent of
blacks could vote then, because poll rules allowed examiners to ask voters
civics questions that they could not answer.
The rules would change with the Voting Rights Act passed later in 1965,
although some issues remained for the Supreme Court even in 2013. A number of
activists (named in the film) were attacked and killed (before Dr. Martin
Luther King in April; Dr. King speaks in Alabama in the film.
The sisters mention the ecumenical directions of Pope John
XXIII, to become more involved in human rights.
It would seem that their actions fit the ideals of Pope Francis today
even more closely.
There would be three marches, on March 7 and 9 (met by heavy
and bullying police tactics) and a final march, from Selma to Montgomery, AL on
March 16, under National Guard protection.
The film shows a lot of black-and-white footage from the
Selma marches that is surprisingly crisp and of good technical quality. There are some interesting pictures of the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, both then and today.
The film also shows political operations in Selma in 2005,
where African Americans are a majority of voters and have many seats on the
city council. It's rather interesting me that Selma is the seat of Dallas County, Alabama. As the film started. it wasn't immediately clear that they weren't talking about Texas.
There is a compelling scene where a policeman harasses a
black demonstrator in Selma, and the activist asks the policeman to pray with
him. The policeman barks that he can’t be made to love anyone he doesn’t want
to love, and then uses the “n” word.
Demonstrators were told not to march unless they could
remain non-violent, even when attacked or harassed. They couldn’t “hit back”.
The ITVS site for the film is here
Wikipedia attribution link for original 1965 “Bloody Sunday”
confrontation at Pettus Bridge.
See also "March to Justice", Feb. 6, 2013.
See also "March to Justice", Feb. 6, 2013.
Labels:
indie documentary,
PBS-related,
race relations
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
"Jerusalem": new Imax 3D film from NatGeo simulates a real trip
The 45-minute National Geographic Imax 3-D film “Jerusalem”
gives the viewer a chance to make a virtual trip to the city, at little expense
and risk.
The film, by Daniel Ferguson, pays little heed to the
political control of the city, which has changed (particularly after the 1967
war), but it does show the co-existence of Christian, Jewish and Muslim culture
and religion, even within the walled Old City, which houses the Temple Mount
and Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Dome of the Rock
and al-Asqa Mosque.
The film, narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, often places us
on the narrow crowded streets, talking to archeology students of varied faith.
The film sometimes shows the entire city, on top of a
plateau at 2500 feet, from a distance, and ventures into surrounding areas,
showing the Sea of Galilee, and old Roman settlements on the Mediterranean,
Massada, and a Christian monastery built into many levels in a canyon wall. (This monastery may be St. Catherine's, shown in Christiane Amanpour's CNN series "Back to the Beginning".
The film also reconstructs what the previous Temple Mount
before the birth of Christ looked like.
Jerusalem, over its history, underwent many sieges and
destructions and was even abandoned, even forgotten, during some of the period
of Babylonian captivity.
The official site is here.
Wikipedia attribution link for Old City picture, link.
Anthony Bourdain, in his "Parts Unknown" series for CNN, had reported on Jerusalem (and the endire Gaza and West Bank problem), reviewed on the TV blog Sept. 15, 2013.
On December 3, 2013, the Washington Post ran a story by William Booth and Ruth Eglash, "At Temple Mount, dreams of prayer raise fears of violence", link here. Online, the story title is "Jewish activists want to pray on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, raising fears in the Muslim World". You have to click on the "graphic" embedded in the article, and then you can zoom on the artwork and see the details of the construction on the Temple Mount, along with all the history, matching that in the film.
For another "short film", see my main blog today for "Why Care About the NSA" by Brian Knappenberger of the New York Times.
Labels:
3-D,
IMAX,
indie documentary,
museum films,
NatGeo
Monday, November 25, 2013
"The Hunger Games: Catching Fire": it's the stuff of dreams (and other movies)
I actually dreamed, at least vague, about my expectations
for “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”. The tributes were to go through two
stages of initiation in the dream, with the second stage testing “worthiness”. It was a Spartan exercise, one of “taking one
for the team”. I had forgotten enough of
the first film to dismiss the idea that the tributes have to form temporary
alliances (or teams) to survive temporarily, only to turn on one another so
that there is only one last person standing.
My own setting, in one of my screenplay drafts, expresses the idea that
the “captive” gets to decide which of his “captors” are really angels and will
live forever. There can be more than
one.
That’s not Suzanne Collin’s premise, though. I thought that the film was somewhat a
retread of the furst one, with some more ideas.
The bullet train seems like the only transportation going, and it rather
resembles Dagney Taggart’s creation in “Atlas Shrugged”. With the districts ground down by so much fascism, there are few “roadside
attractions”. The 75th
anniversary games, celebrating the control of the state, pits all the previous
winners against one another. Only one can survive.
The film has some good ideas, borrowed from other
films. There is the “Dome”, which gets
blown open (I don’t know if that happens in Stephen King’s novel), and there
are “The Birds”. But all the monsters
(including the orangutans) and “will of the wisp”, and the boils they create –
all of these are holograms. Of, a bridal
gown translates into a “Black Swan” outfit. So are the fires that gladiators
wear on their armor. There are no burns,
no scarring.
In an early scene, President Snow (Donald Sutherland)
explains to Katriss (Jennifer Lawrence) how appearances of power and heroism
have to be maintained to manipulate the proletariat, lest it rebel. Katriss asks, doesn’t your fear of rebellion
show that you are weak? Authoritarian
leaders don’t see things that way.
There’s also a lot of talk about family members sacrificing
themselves, and of the candidates having to “protect” their families and
elders.
Josh Hutcherson, as Peeta, is likable and sincere as a “husband”,
but looks underwhelming for the role. Liam Hemsworth is more robust as Gale,
and Sam Clafkin is appropriately foppish as Odair. It’s a treat to see both Toby Jones and
Philip Seymour Hoffman in the same film (it’s easy to confuse them), and Woody
Harrelson, as Abernathy, comes right out of the world of Oliver Stone. Stanley
Tucci comes across as a caricature of Bert Parks.
The film was released in “4-D”, with odors and quakes, in a
few theaters. Does that include 3-D?
Directed by Francis Lawrence, this film is the second in
Lionsgate’s biggest franchise ever (or set of biggest films ever). Nobody calls this simply "The Hunger Games II" (except me).
The official site is here.
I saw this on a Monday night before a 2/3 full large
auditorium at the Angelika Mosaic in Merrifield VA. When I arrived the elevator
didn’t work and the escalator went the wrong way. It’s about thirty steps.
Yes, the pictures are mine (not from the film). Guess where I took them.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
"Second Glance": It is indeed a wonderful life, if you;re an angel
“Second Glance”, by Rich Christiano, showed up in my Netflix
queue. The 1992 Christian film looks dated (no cell phones, no Internet, a
little bit dusky) but it at least has some interesting points bordering on
sci-fi.
Dan Burgess (David White) is a nice 16 year old teen growing
up in an evangelical home. He actually
studies for a literature test – and it’s hard to remember what high school
teachers used to ask about Hawthorne or Mark Twain novels now in junior
English. The teacher even says it’s a mix
of things, some essay, some multiple choice.
Dan picks up a piece of paper off the floor thoughtlessly during a test,
and the teacher accuses him of cheating.
The circumstances are such that the viewer believes he isn’t guilty.
His life unravels. He
doesn’t have the friends he wants. He
carelessly says he wishes he hadn’t been ‘saved”. The next morning, his parents
have left the house a mess and given him the run of the place to do what he
wants. A middle aged man appears and
claims to be an angel. In a brief retread of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, Dan will
learn what his world would have been life if he had never lived, or had never
been saved.
Now I like the idea that angels can be real (that maybe a
premise of “Smallville”), but I think there is more to be done with the idea
that transportation to an alternate universe for a day. Maybe this move could be called “second
chance”. One person can make a lot of
difference, but it’s hard to believe everyone else, including his parents,
would have become so catty (and divorced, and not given him a little sister) if
he hadn’t been saved. Faith is a lot more subtle, and shouldn’t need
proselytizing.
The angel does give the abstinence speech, and puts it in
self-interest terms, but it’s the sort of thing that works only if everybody
agrees to the same rules, sexuality only in marriage. But then, what about LGBT people, who don’t create
any risk of unwanted pregnancy (well, except Will Horton in “Days of our Lives”)?
The official site is here.
I did wonder if Christian clubs could meet in public
schools.
One time a student thought I had cheated on a government
test in high school when I hadn’t, because I predicted that the term “institutionalism”
would be on the quiz. I really did guess
the question in advance. Call it
convergent thinking.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
"Nebraska" is directly below "South Dakota"; why the black-and-white? Is dementia a suitable subject for comedy?
“Nebraska”, the latest regional comedy film by Alexander
Payne (based on his own home state), written by Bob Nelson, does play a bit
like a screenwriting class exercise. The
lines among the various family members and townspeople, during this “road
comedy”, sound so metaphoric and forceful that they might have been designed
for a table reading. Is dementia (maybe
outright Alzheimer’s) associated with aging in country folk a suitable subject
for comedy. The large (nearly sold out)
audience at the Angelika Mosaic in Merrifield VA laughed with the characters in
their situation comedy, as I did. But
this is certainly not something I could have written, and I’ve been through an
eldercare episode of my own in recent years.
Dementia, for those who have to deal with it, is not funny.
Bruce Dern plays the gullible Woody Grant, who, as the film
opens, is trying to walk from Billings, MT to Lincoln NB to claim his
sweepstakes prize. He doesn’t understand
that he needs to have the winning numbers on his coupon. His wife (June Squibb) is appropriately
folksy and thinks, if he really wins the million lotto, she can put him in a
nursing home. The son David (Will Forte)
plays the dutiful son, always calling him “Dad”, and takes him on the thousand
mile drive, through Wyoming and South Dakota first.
As the film progresses, some real "50s sitcom" situations develop, over “owed
money” and a missing compressor, which more or less fulfills the comic function
of a Duplass “Puffy Chair”.
Paramount released this film under its indie “Vantage” subsidiary,
which it doesn’t use often; but it introduced the black-and-white film as “A
Paramount Release” to make it look old fashioned. I wondered about the artistic decision to
film in black and white, given the gorgeous outdoor scenery, truthfully on location.
The official site is here.
Wikipedia attribution link for Lincoln skyline. My only visit was in 1982.
Labels:
Alexander Payne,
black and white,
Cannes,
eldercare,
family issues,
indie comedy
Friday, November 22, 2013
"Geography Club": a gentle comedy about LGBT students coming of age in high school, in a sheltering setting
"Geography Club" certainly offers a far gentler experience
than the "Dallas Buyers". Director Gary
Entin (with writer Edmund), Huffington Films and distributor Breaking Glass
Pictures give us a gentle gay coming of age drama.
In fact, the word “Geography” (however ineffective when it
came up in Donald Trump’s “Apprentice”) is a euphemism for an informal support
group for LGBT students at a Valley high school somewhere in LA. Eventually, it will become publicly known as
a “gay-straight alliance”.
The protagonist is an articulate, somewhat charismatic high
school senior Russell (Cameron Deane Stewart), whose parents want him to get
into Yale (where else?) and carry on their family. (At one point, he tells a pal that his dad
will want him to “have a wife”, as if a spouse is something you have rather
than love). The camera quickly makes us
believe in Russ as the all-American boy, with a gentle machismo that rather
recalls the short film character “Reid Rainbow”. Early in the film, the students go on a
camping field trip for a science class.
They have to collect and identify biological fossils, live together in a
typical campsite barracks-style dorm, and even go kayaking. (To do that, you have to be able to swim and
to turn the boat over (something I failed at when I tried it, as I explain in
my main blog, Oct. 9, 2007). On the trip, Kevin (Justin Deeley) asks him for
academic help, and then falls for him.
One of the girls sees it, which explains how Russ gets
invited to geography club. But the
straight kids keep testing him, including Trish (Meaghan Martin) who confronts
him in the front seat of a car, with a homeless tramp staring at them. Another
gay kid is an accomplished cellist, and plays a theme from the Tchaikovsky
Piano Concerto in one scene, before he is the object of a forcible
cross-dressing and lipstick party, in which Russ participates willingly.
The health class (taught by Ana Gastayer as Mrs. Toles)
makes the kids learn child care with robotic dolls, which I saw in use one time
on a substitute teaching assignment.
The idea is that all kids will learn child care and parenting
skills. Russ builds a friendship with
another straight kid, Gunnar (Andrew Caldwell) with whom he will perform the
“modern family” or “Days of our Lives” Will-and-Sonny act sharing fake child
care as two daddies.
On top of this, Russ has his one night of fame as a football
star, accidentally, when he runs in a 50 yard touchdown to win a game after a
beefier teammate throws a key block and removes the last defender. I think baseball (with a homerun, or with a
no-hit pitching performance) would have been a more credible sport for Russ.
The official site is here. The film rents on Amazon, and, being shot
2.35:1, doesn’t quite fill the screen vertically. Some of the shots allowed the characters to
remain out of focus a bit too long, so I question some of the camera work.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
"65_RedRoses" is a biography of a young woman with cystic fibrosis
“65_RedRoses” is a user name, but it is also a film biography
and medical journey of a young woman with cystic fibrosis. The film takes the viewer through daily life,
which ranges from some normal activity to horrific coughing and suffocation
spells, through lung transplant surgery, about a year of normal and active
life, and then the downslide of organ rejection.
The film also explores the online friendships of the young
British Columbia woman, Eva Markvoort, whose family lives in New Westminster,
near Vancouver. I believe that I stayed
one night in that town when on a Christmas vacation trip with some graduate students
in December 1966.
I was surprised at her online access in the hospital. I’ve
been led to believe that cell phone service and Internet access is normally not
available to someone in the hospital, although it should be if paid for.
The film shows the surgery graphically, and describes the
new lungs as slightly discolored from pollution and perhaps cigarette
smoking. They are not perfect. There occurs a moral question about whether
people have a moral obligation to take care of themselves well enough so that
their organs are reusable. Of course,
gay men are still banned from donating, and that point has been made into a “moral”
argument in Russia.
The film, from Four Force, is directed by Philip Lyall and
Nimisha Mukerji.
The best link to give is the live journal from Eva, here..The film is listed as released in 2009
but the Netflix video covers her passing in March 2010. Her final decline was very quick.
Wikipedia attribution link for Vancouver picture.
Update: Nov. 28
ABC News reported on the lung transplant for Lindsey McLaughlin here. The donor was a young man who died in a freak but tragic fall in a subway station in NYC.
ABC News reported on the lung transplant for Lindsey McLaughlin here. The donor was a young man who died in a freak but tragic fall in a subway station in NYC.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
"The Broken Circle Breakdown": an eclectic, asynchronous tragedy, where Flanders looks like Texas
“The Broken Circle Breakdown”, by Felix von Groeningen, is a
curious film from Belgium, tragic and comic at the same time, and an homage to
some other eclectic films usually viewed as belonging to other genres. These other films might include “The Tree of
Life”, “Judas Kiss”, “Mr. Nobody”, and, on the other hand, “Sweet Home Alabama”.
Sometimes, especially in the outdoor
farm scenes involving images like black birds flying into windows and dropping,
or dogs chasing roosters, I wondered if this were flat, low-country Flanders,
or if it were Texas ranch country instead, especially with all the country
music the married couple sings.
The couple is Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) and Elise (Verle
Baetens). Didier (“Monroe”) is the
romantic atheist and cowboy, who, toward the end of the film, gives a speech
decrying religion, slamming George W. Bush his faith-based denial of stem-cell
research (with the speech about a decent society’s crossing moral lines, with
allusion to the Holocaust), to which he attributes the tragedy that befalls the
couple’s young daughter, despite Europe’s more liberal stand on the
matter. Elise (“Alabama”) is religious,
but one could not guess that from the plethora of tattoos all over her
body. There’s even one scene where,
working as a tattoo artist, she decorates the outer forearm of a man, which
would have been shaved for the procedure.
The couple is quite passionate, complete with female screams
of ecstasy. This is the world of heterosexual
marital sex as in the Song of Solomon. Yet, Didier is well aware that others are
different, and in his speech condemns homophobia. The couple also shows plenty of bad
habits. “Alabama” smokes, and did so
during her pregnancy, but she blames her husband’s drinking for the
tragedy. That gave him temporary
jaundice, she says, and resulted somehow in her withdrawing breast feeding for
their daughter.
The story is told out of sequence, as is common in
existential science fiction films like a couple of those above – and this movie
barely borders on sci-fi, at least in spirit.
The tragedy of the daughter’s leukemia, the chemotherapy and side
effects, and the bone marrow transplant, and then the final sudden end, come
back and forth, mediating the tone of the film.
This could have been a strictly medical drama, but it is never allowed
to become that. Instead, it loops back
to grief, and to the couple itself.
There will be one more round of tragedy, which is not fair to give away.
There is one sequence of an encapsulated account of the 9/11
attacks and of Bush’s speaking about them at the end of the first day.
The official site (from Tribeca) is here.
Wikipedia attribution link for Belgium picture here. I was in the area once, in May 2001.
I saw this before a fair crowd Tuesday night at Landmark E
Street in downtown Washington DC.
Labels:
foreign language,
indie drama,
Magnolia Pictures,
Tribeca
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
"Codebreaker": A strong biography of Alan Turing, and the tragedy of his end
The British Channel 4 documentary “Codebreaker” (directed by
Claire Beavan and Nic Stacey), a biography of Alan Turing, has been expanded to
feature length and is available on DVD from Transit Media. I see that I mentioned this DVD when
reviewing a related short film here on Oct. 17, 2012. It is a bit pricey and not yet available from
Amazon; the company told me that selling it exclusively for a while makes it
easier to earn back money for investors.
In time, I expect to see it on Amazon and Netflix (where it can be “saved”).
The format of the film is that of “docudrama”. Much of the screenplay shows Alan Turing,
nattily dressed and handsome (played by Ed Stoppard) doing talk therapy with
psychiatrist Franz Greenbaum (Henry Goodman).
Alan challenges Greenbaum to face the idea that Greenbaum himself was a
German Jew who escaped the Nazis, the enemy whom Turing’s efforts were so
singularly important in defeating. The film has brief interviews with other
people including Alan’s nephew, Dermot and Steve Wozniak from Apple.
Alan tells his story in the sessions with Greenbaum, as Paul
McGann supplements with a detailed documentary narrative. The film balances an explanation of Turing’s
innovations in computing (he originally saw a computer as a person) and
presents many of his published papers, along with illustrations of how his
machines worked. Gradually, the
narrative shifts to the horrific tragedy of how his life ended.
Turing explains his platonic love affair with a boyhood
classmate, Christopher Morcom (his real-life nephew plays the part in the film). He explains how feeling in love changed his
perspective, as if all of life had been leading up to a relationship. But
Christopher died of tuberculosis, leaving him alone. He describes his capacity to love as limited
to the area of upward affiliation.
While working at Bletchley Park, he had a platonic
relationship with a female mathematician, to whom he proposed marriage; but
told her that he was homosexual and would not be likely to want to be
intimate. The film repeatedly says he
was totally honest and naïve about the social inconsistencies in his own
society, which eventually would reflect some of the values it had gone to war
over.
Turing tells the story of how a household trick led to a
minor burglary of his home, with the stealing of a family watch and chain. He was naïve about admitting even any physical
intimacy in the privacy of his own home with adult men to police. In 1952, “gross indecency” even in private
was very much against the law in Britain (as in most of the US) and would
sometimes be prosecuted. He was
arrested, and forced to undergo chemical castration with shiboestrol, a form of
estrogen, as an alternative to prison.
The drug causes loss of libido and for the body to become feminized,
with growth of breasts and loss of the beard and of other body hair. The treatment was said to be reversible,
although that seems like a dubious claim. I used, as a boy, to think of
potentially shaving a male body as a way to inflict shame (a reason to “feel
feminine”), as it was sometimes done in college hazing ceremonies (I wrote
about the practice at William and Mary in 1961 – I skipped out on these “Tribunals”).
Turing would also find that his house
was being watched. This was the
beginning of the Cold War and, in the US, McCarthyism, where homosexuals were seen,
by some curious circular reasoning, a security threat.
It's important to note that Turing is always shown as male, lean, and attractive (particularly in one underwear scene) as an adult. The film does not show how he would have looked after chemical castration. This is in line with treating the psychiatric session as like a stage play. The film does have many flashbacks with live footage in black and white apparently from the 1930s.
The narration describes the suicide by cyanide, and his being found by a housekeeper, just before the closing epilogue. How much more quickly would computers have advanced in the 1950s had Turing lived? Again, the world was a more evil place, even at home, than he understood. The British government formally apologized to his family in 2009.
For all his logical brilliance and honesty and contributions, Turing wound up being punished, made into a shameful example, essentially for turning away from offering the world any of himself in "normal" family intimacy.
For all his logical brilliance and honesty and contributions, Turing wound up being punished, made into a shameful example, essentially for turning away from offering the world any of himself in "normal" family intimacy.
The site for the film is here. The production companies include Story Center
and Furnace.
Another important film to mention here is “Enigma” by
Michael Apted (Manhattan Pictures).
Labels:
biography,
indie documentary,
LGBT,
reel affirmations,
Turing
Monday, November 18, 2013
"Death by China" looks at our dangerous dependence on imports from China and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, a corporate addiction for short-term profits
“Death by China” (2012, 78 minutes), by Peter Navarro,
certainly lays out the case of how dangerous it has become for Americans to
become dependent on goods manufactured by low-cost, sometimes almost slave,
labor in China.
One idea that seems striking at first was that the Communist
Chinese, more than any other power, made so much of making everyone have the
experience of becoming a peasant with the “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s. Americans
do not want to do these kinds of jobs at low wages but want the high standard
of living that the manual labor of others can provide. The film opens with a crowd of shoppers
storming into a Best Buy at midnight on a “Black Friday”.
One of the issues explained in the film is Chinese currency
manipulation, which makes their goods appear even cheaper. But China is also one of the larger holders
of US Treasury debt, an observation not lost in the debt ceiling debate. The trade deficit with China might arguably
undermine the idea of the U.S. dollar as being the world’s fiat “reserve
currency”.
President Clinton was instrumental in getting China admitted
into the WTO (World Trade Organization) in the 1990s, in conjunction with his
support of NAFTA and GATT, which much of organized labor opposed.
Small manufacturers in the US can’t compete with larger
companies that outsource the manufacturing to China and don’t have the lobbying
strength in Congress.
The film reports that the Chinese stole the engineering of
Google and used it to build their own engine, Baidu, after banning Google.
fmilitary hardware to countries like Iran. It also discusses the safety issue of
depending on products made in China (such as plumbing contaminated by lead).
Senator Chris Smith (R-NJ) open speaks in the film.
The current system in China is a curious mixture of formal
communism and statist capitalism, as in the Discovery series “The People’s
Republic of Capitalism” (TV Blog, July 9, 2008), by Ted Koppel. There is no
freedom of the press and no ability for people to organize or redress abuses of
the system. It is a kind of servitude. China’s system is still one which predicated
on “disciplining” the individual into conformity for the supposed “common good”.
The official site is here.
The soundtrack has a song by the director by the same name, as well as another song, "Death by Chinese Junk".
The film (from Virgil) can be rented on YouTube for $3.99 or
watched in Netflix Instant Play.
Can boycotts do any good?
I doubt it. We’re addicted to the
easy life.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
"The Book Thief" gives a look at civilian life in Nazi Germany, and as to what made people tick
“The Book Thief”, by Brian Perival, based on the novel by Markus
Zusak (and Australian who seems quite young for such subject matter), renders a
close up look at what it was like to live as a Gentile in Nazi Germany before
and during World War II, and it gives some insight into why people thought and
behaved the way they did.
A young girl Liesel (Sophe Nelisse), adopted with her
brother by a kindly shoemaker Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and his wife in the mid
1930s, helps shelter (after “Crystal
Night”) a very appealing young Jewish man Max (Bem Schnetzer), who seems sickly
at first but gradually regains strength after a couple of close calls. The Nazi establishment gradually lowers the
boom on private citizens, making them attend patriotic rallies outdoors in the
town square and then inspecting homes and basements.
One gets the impression that the people
really believed that they had to hang together to survive and then prosper in a
world of “enemies”. Yet, Hans and his
family (with Emily Watson) quickly realize there is something that doesn’t make
sense about the rampant anti-Semitism.
The patriotic songs are telling. One is the song of “National
Socialism”, and another is based on the slow movement of one of Joseph Haydn’s
string quartets.
Liesel has learned to read from her adoptive father, who has
written part of a dictionary on the basement wall. Max enhances her love of learning, saying
that what distinguishes a living from an inert thing is just a word. Today, we
would say that is DNA. Liesel takes to “stealing”
books from a local burger’s home. Maybe
there’s no public library, where “it’s free”.
Eventually, war comes to their town, which is bombed and
destroyed, leaving the people to rebuild their lives like everyone else after
liberation by the Allies.
The film, from Baselberg Studios, is released under the regular
20th Century Fox trademark than Searchlight, which is more commonly
used for overseas-sourced films. Nevertheless, this first weekend, the film is
showing mostly in “arthouses”. I saw it
at the Angelika Mosaic in Merrifield, VA before an almost sold-out Sunday
afternoon crowd in a big auditorium.
The official site is here.
The rather gentled original music score is by John
Williams. The narrator is Roger Allam,
and the film opens and closes with images clouds from above.
The theater also showed a 3-minute short, "Porsche", about making a model of the car from ice.
The theater also showed a 3-minute short, "Porsche", about making a model of the car from ice.
Labels:
Holocaust,
inside Nazi Germany,
pre-Nazi values
Saturday, November 16, 2013
"Holocaust: The Untold Story" at the Newseum in Washington DC
The Newseum in Washington DC now offers a 56-minute
documentary film made in 2001, “Holocaust: The Untold Story”, narrated by Peter
Thomas.
The main thrust of the film is that for most of World War
II, major newspapers, especially the New York Times, tended to bury reports of
the concentration camps with small, unillustrated back page stories that did
not attract much public notice. For a long
time, the stories did not acknowledge that Jews were usually the targets of
Nazi roundups. The NYT’s publisher,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, wanted to please Franklin Roosevelt, who at first
resisted the idea that Jews were persecuted and should be encouraged to come to
the United States. I recall seeing the film "Voyage of the Damned" by Stuart Rosenberg in New York City in 1976 when I lived there, at a big Upper East Side theater,
The film, toward the end, shows some of the most graphic
still photos of concentration camp victims ever, even more graphic that what is
seen in the Holocaust Museum nearby. The
bodies are unbelievably emaciated and peculiarly hairless. The film shows some of the mechanical details
of the notorious gas chambers and crematoriums.
Various speakers and journalists (including Andy Rooney) say
that the press should have done more.
But it was not deliberately negligent.
The downplaying of the Holocaust was the result of the way the whole
industry worked. Newspapers dominated
the world, television did not exist yet, and not everyone had radio.
Is reporting on something itself "doing enough"?
Is reporting on something itself "doing enough"?
Anna Blech gives a lecture on the subject of this film on “Ted
Talks”.
There are other sidebars in the film, such as the idea that
people got jobs writing “propaganda” for the Allies. That would not make much sense in the
Internet age.
The Newseum also shows a diorama movie (extreme widescreen) on the fifth floor "The Thousand Days" about JFK's administration (30 min., including Cuban Missile Crisis) and various Kennedy family 8mm or 16mm home movies in exhibits on the sixth floor (the assassination) and ground floor (about the Camelot family), mostly color, many on the White House lawn .
The Newseum also shows a diorama movie (extreme widescreen) on the fifth floor "The Thousand Days" about JFK's administration (30 min., including Cuban Missile Crisis) and various Kennedy family 8mm or 16mm home movies in exhibits on the sixth floor (the assassination) and ground floor (about the Camelot family), mostly color, many on the White House lawn .
Friday, November 15, 2013
"Diana": Princess Di's romantic life the last two years of her life, and her desire to help others and "show it"
The film “Diana” (2013, by Oliver Birschbeigel) shows the
last two years of Princess Diana’s life (with Naomi Watts), centered around her
secret love affair with Pakastani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan (Naveen
Andrews), followed by a fing with Dodi Fayed (Cas Anvar).
The film does not show or recreate the actual crash in the
Paris tunnel shortly after midnight Paris time on Aug. 31, 1997. But it starts
on that date, and creates a sense of foreboding with sound and music effects,
as in a Stephen King film. Then it tells the story of the last two years of the
Princess of Wales’s life.
I recall the weekend that she died. I was moving from the DC area to Minneapolis
that Labor Day weekend. On Friday night, I stayed with an aunt in an apartment
building in Oberlin, Ohio. I heard about
the accident in the elevator.
There’s a scene where Princess Di dons scrubs and watches
Khan do a coronary bypass surgery. He says that the patient would have died in
a day or two. Now he gets ten more years.
My own mother had coronary bypass surgery two years later, in 1999, at
age 85. She got eleven more years. But there is a question as to whether society
can continue these forever without a cohesive enough family. See the review of “Money and Medicine, Nov.
5). Here we could get into discussions about Medicare and Obamacare (US) or the
National Health System (Britain).
Princess Di devotes a lot of time to helping people,
personally, visiting the sick, and she says (to an intrusive paparazzi photographer
she wants to “show it” – with privacy..
Later, she travels to Angola, and walks night (really day) infiltration
through a former land mine.
The official site (E-one and Ecosse) is here.
Picture: Oberlin, Ohio (mine), 2010
Thursday, November 14, 2013
"Puerto Vallarta Squeeze": An interesting CIA-related adventure
“Puerto Vallarta Squeeze” at first glance looks like another
stereotyped adventure thriller set in Latin America, but it turns out to be
quite interesting, for me at least. The
2004 film is directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman and is based on the 1990 novel
by Robert James Waller, supposedly based on a word-of-mouth tale from his wife
(so maybe reality-based), with the subtitle “The Run for El Norte”. It’s a bit like a Cormac McCarthy story and
movie, played straight out as a thriller – but it could have been done in
Hitchcock or Coen Brothers style and made funny. The film gets its title from a resort town on
Mexico’s Pacific, a long way from any border.
Really, the movie tells two interlocking stories. Danny (Craig Wasson) is a former American
journalist with a local girl friend Maria (Giovanna Zacarias). They witness a street murder, which seems to
be a complicated hit with international ramifications. Pretty soon, they are accosted by Clayton
Price (a sinewy, scarred Scott Glenn) and practically compelled to let him
hitch a ride with him to the Rio Grande, that on a map would be many hundreds
of miles away. The movie tells us about
Price through his dreams, particularly of accidents and grotesque crimes happening
on circus high wires. Slowly, the movie
fills in a puzzle of his background, a former Marine badly let down behind
lines in Vietnam, who has become a mercenary, perhaps on the underground
payroll of the CIA, perhaps looking for cartel drug dealers. There are misadventures, like an accident
where the car goes over a bank and stays upright and landing on a road
below. In one town, Price encounters
some thugs and sets the chest of one of them on fire after throwing lighter
fluid on his T-shirt and igniting it. I
don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of bodily “attack” before in the
movies. They encounter the poverty of
village life, including animal trading opportunists. Price is upset by a man who keeps a beautiful
serval in a cage and wants to pay the man to let it go free (anticipating
Richard Parker in “Pi”).
The other story concerns another veteran CIA agent Walter
McGrane (Harvey Keitel), who is training a young covert military intelligence
officer Neil (Jonathan Brandis) to track down Price for him. Apparently the US government (either Clinton
or Bush) wants to get rid of Price to cover something up. Neil, slender and clean-cut, is quite
attractive, and there are some hints that he might be gay. It’s not clear whether he is still formally
in the Armed Forces. (Did he leave the
uniform and join a civilian service because of DADT?) Throw into the brew the element of corrupt
local Mexican police, and you have the ingredients for a showdown and a
surprise ending (and relationship).
In my own novel manuscript (“Angel’s Brother”), there is a
fortyish CIA agent, masquerading as a history teacher and leading a
conventional family life in Dallas, paired up with a gay college student about
to graduate with an ROTC commission (maybe), but recruited by the intelligence
services for unusual abilities to solve unusual problems (a bizarre epidemic
with elements of alien or extraterrestrial origin). With all the military background, in my own
book, there is little use of guns – no battles and very little actual violence
(the one attack is actually a way to deliver intelligence).
The film was produced by Art in Motion and released on DVD
in 2006 by New Line. But I seem to
recall a short theatrical release then (maybe early in the year), maybe at the
Courthouse here in Arlington. But I
missed it then, and watched the Netflix DVD. This is a long film, listed as 118
minutes. But the DVD ran up to about 123
minutes before reverting back to minute 114 to start the end credits, so I’ve
never seen that done before. Vikki Carr sings a very familiar number (disco?)
in the end credits.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
"The Case for Israel: Democracy's Outpost" with Alan Dershowitz
“The Case for Israel: Democracy’s Outpost” (2009), by Michael
Yohay, from Doc-Emet, features Alan Dershowitz speaking at Brandeis University near
Boston, giving at first his personal reasons for supporting Israel, which
includes mention of gay rights. He
quickly takes issue with Jimmy Carter’s 2007 book “Palestine: Peace, not
Apartheid”, which I got for Christmas from my mother in 2007.
Dershowitz recounts many opportunities for Palestinians to
have their own state, going back to the 1930’s.
He says that every time the Palestinians refused, if that meant
accepting the existence and presence of Israel.
He also says that the land taken to make settlements on the West Bank
was purchased from absentee Palestinian landowners legally, and the people
evicted were tenants, not homeowners.
That would certainly seem to contradict what George Meek (from the Ecumenical
Accompaniment Program) has been saying at some church-sponsored meetings in
northern Virginia (see International Issues blog, May 20, 2013 and Dec. 23,
2012).
The film notes that the security fence in the West Bank is
often near the major north-south highway in Israel.
Toward the end of the film there is discussion of the
possible dire consequences of Iran’s getting nuclear weapons. This could eventually include being able to
reach the eastern US with missiles, or more likely, giving them to terrorists
to launch dirty bomb or EMP attacks.
The film says that radical Islam, whether of the Shiite or
Sunni variety, is hostile to the idea of democracy.
The link for the film is here.
The film can be watched in Netflix instant play.
Labels:
indie documentary,
Israel,
Israel-Palestine conflict
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
"Schooled: The Price of College Sports": should college athletes be paid or share the enormous profits of NCAA sports?
“Schooled: The Price of College Sports”, a new documentary
by Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin and Jonathan Paley, and narrated by Sam Rockwell
(whose voice resembles that of Morgan Spurlock), examines the issue of the “amateurism”
doctrine for intercollegiate sports, as enforced by the gatekeeper, the NCAA
(National Collegiate Athletic Association) in Indianapolis.
The doctrine means that college athletes cannot be paid for
playing, while the coaches and universities make big money, while under
tax-exempt, non-profit status. The film
starts out at UCLA (memories of a basketball game I attended there in December
1969 before a job interview) and shows the math: students get scholarships that
fall a few thousand dollars short a year of what it costs to go to school
there, so they still get in the hole.
And the schools own the players.
Does this amount to indentured servitude? After all, other college students get paid, for working in the bookstore, for grading papers, for becoming assistant instructors.
There is, right now, a class action lawsuit fighting this
out in court. And none of the schools or
the NCAA would comment in the film.
There is also the issue of academic fraud, or at least “looking
the other way”. In some schools, college
athletes take “paper” classes where the only requirement is to turn in one
paper for a full three credit hours.
The film points out that many college athletes, especially
in football, come from low income areas and some grew up in gang cultures. Some have very poor academic skills when
entering college.
I wonder if this was a factor when I was an assistant
instructor in mathematics at the University of Kansas from 1966-1968. Actually, I was “relieved” of my duties after
too many students were getting down slips and failing “remedial” algebra at mid
term. Was I being a “bad a—“sending
young men to the military draft that I had escaped, or was I stepping on the
toes of the athletic system and perhaps threatening it?
On the other hand, it’s wrong to characterize all or most
college athletes as academically inferior.
Some are excellent students and go on to other things besides pro
football, like medicine. There are young
men (the film did not get into women’s sports, which provides another political
issue) with seemingly diverse or almost contradictory talents, capable of
playing sports at the professional level (like hockey or baseball) or perhaps
singing as a pro. A few times such men have
been gay – another controversy not explored.
There is also the issue of safety. Malcolm Gladwell (Issues blog, July 21, 2013),
remember, has said that college football (and therefore pro football) is
morally problematic, because of the concussion risk – a big controversy now in
the NFL (as well as dementia in some retired NFL Players). Recently, a high school player in Arizona died after a hard tackle hit.
I remember the one time my parents tried to get me to play football, at around age 9. It was traumatic. But was that kind of risking take to be expected of every boy?
The DVD from Strand Releasing appears Nov. 19. The
production company was Makuhari Media. It was also distributed by Epix (site ). I reviewed the film from a Vimeo screener by
Strand.
Picture, mine, from the University of Kansas, 2006.
Monday, November 11, 2013
"Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil": a routine thriller about the very real threat posed by North Korea; mystery mushroom explosion there in 2004 explained?
“Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil” (2006), a film by
James Dodson for Fox, seems like a B-film potboiler (as a sequel to the first “Behind
Enemy Lines” film in 2001 with Owen Wilson as a fighter pilot in Bosnia), but
it certain exploits an important theme: the danger to the world posed by North
Korea, which became big news again in early 2013.
I vaguely remember the crisis in 1994 mentioned at the
beginning of the film, when we could have gone to war with North Korea. This was a couple years after the Persian
Gulf War, and this kind of war would have been much more costly.
A team of Navy Seals is dispatched to destroy a North Korean
missile strike, after intelligence suggests that it could go active and
actually hit the western United States with ICBM’s. George Tenet had warned of such a possibility
back in 2002.
International politics comes into the picture. In time,
things escalate to the point that the US generals, to the consternation of the
president (Peter Coyote) recommend an all out regime change. South Korea fears that the US is acting
unnecessarily, and that obliteration of North Korea would send refugees into
the South. (Some of this had started to
happen in Vietnam in the 1960s). Or it
could be much worse. South Korea could
take millions of civilian casualties.
But they live with this all the time.
The taxi-rickshaw crash near the missile site late in the
film reminds one of the stage wrecks in old westerns. The handglider concept as a means of entry
from the mountains is interesting.
The film ends with the mushroom cloud that appeared on Sept. 9, 2004, which provoked several different explanations from both the Bush administration and from South Korea. The short "Decision and Perception": on the DVD explains how the fictional story, of a Seal behind enemy lines, could have triggered a small nuclear explosion to disarm the base; his apprehension would have created a national geopolitical crisis (although in 2004, North Korea wasn't on the radar screen the way Iraq and Al Qaeda were).
The film ends with the mushroom cloud that appeared on Sept. 9, 2004, which provoked several different explanations from both the Bush administration and from South Korea. The short "Decision and Perception": on the DVD explains how the fictional story, of a Seal behind enemy lines, could have triggered a small nuclear explosion to disarm the base; his apprehension would have created a national geopolitical crisis (although in 2004, North Korea wasn't on the radar screen the way Iraq and Al Qaeda were).
During most of the 1990’s, North Korea was probably viewed
as a more dangerous threat than Al Qaeda, about whom we heard very little until
1998.
"Die Another Day" (2002), the twentieth Bond film, with Pierce Brosnan, showed Bond as having operated behind the scenes and getting captured in North Korea. I recall seeing this in Minneapolis.
"Die Another Day" (2002), the twentieth Bond film, with Pierce Brosnan, showed Bond as having operated behind the scenes and getting captured in North Korea. I recall seeing this in Minneapolis.
The Fox DVD has copies of the film on both sides, with different extras.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
"Head On": a rather explicit Australian film about older gay teen rebellion
The 1997 Australian film “Head On” (the title is a bit of a
pun), by Ana Kokkinos, certainly explores the idea of teenage rebellion. Somewhere around Melboune, 19-year-old Ari
(Alex Dimitriades) is discovering his identity, with considerable resistance
from his Greek immigrant parents. He
shouldn’t explore this gay thing until he has a job and his own money and,
well, a wife and kids (contradiction).
That used to be a belief: you really weren’t on your own as an adult
until you were married.
Ari goes on a 24-hour trip, with multiple partners and,
unfortunately, snorting. Things get out
of hand as he and some friends (including heterosexual females) are arrested
for drug possession. But Ari, depicted
on film as not quite old enough for chest hair, meets a slightly older man Sean
(Julian Garner) who may indeed rescue him, in the disco scene. Their final encounter, at Sean’s apartment,
is quite energetic (and well filmed), but Ari is all too determined to take one
liberty too many.
The film, available from Netfix, has DVD distribution by
Strand. This film is quite explicit in a few spots, in both straight and gay encounters, and it doesn't seem very tied to the Australian setting.
Saturday, November 09, 2013
"Dallas Buyers Club" recalls my own iving in Dallas in the 1980s
“Dallas Buyers Club” (directed by Jean –Marc Vallee) takes
place in the mid and late 1980s, when I was living in Dallas and dealing with
the tragic practical aspect (friends dying) and political (some draconian
anti-gay state laws proposed by vitriolic right wing elements like the “Dallas
Doctors Against AIDS”. I volunteered as
a “buddy” (more like an assistant buddy) with the Oak Lawn Counseling
Center. I heard about alternative
treatments in the many information forums and sessions, but I never saw
anything like what is shown in this film.
Matthew McConaughey reportedly shed forty pounds to play the
electrician and rodeo rider Ron Woodruf, who looks emaciated as the film begins
(with a workplace accident). Apparently
he was infected by heterosexual promiscuity, and is quite vociferous in his use
of anti-gay slurs in the hospital. But when he can’t get AZT even though he has
the money without going through a protocol that he doesn’t have time for, he
allies with another patient, a drag queen Rayon (Jared Leto), and sets up an
import “buyers club” to get alternative medications from Mexico, which he
distributes from an old garden Oak Cliff apartment.
Both actors had to transform their bodies. Leto (“Nemo Nobody”) is shaved even down to the underarms, and
McConaughey looks waxed just by the disease.
There is a scene where Rayon gives Ron a massage on the very bald calf
for a cramp. It is not erotic.
Although Ron appears to have pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in
many scenes, he is physically up and down, sometimes showing surprising energy in his good
days, enough to continue his assertive and physically confrontational
manner. One of the PWA’s I assisted
looked like Ron, and had surprising energy at times despite his ghost-like
appearance. I didn't believe it when the doctor told Ron that he had just 30 days to live. Doctors didn't do that with people who were ambulatory.
The film was actually shot in New Orleans. Downtown Dallas is shown as a backdrop, but
then there are inaccuracies. There are
no oil wells right in Dallas, and no high western mountains for at least 400
miles to the west.
The official site is here (for Focus Features, Truth, and Voltage).
The film points out that Woodruf survived seven years,
largely on alternative medications like Peptide T. The film mentions some fictitious
papers; the “New York Citizen” of the
film was actually Charles Ortleb’s “The New York Native”, to which I subscribed
by mail. Ortleb was big on alternate
therapies and other virus and conspiracy theories, like ASFV.
I saw this film at the Angelika Mosaic in Merrifield VA before a moderate Saturday afternoon crowd.
I started hearing about AIDS while living in Dallas in
1982. I remember meeting Dr. James
Curran from the CDC at an information forum and I corresponded with him by mail
in the hostile political climate. By
1983, there was a lot of publicity. In
the workplace, there were lots of gay men and no one contracted the disease at
work for several years. Yet, I recall
going into the restroom and another worker would say, “Bill, let me use your
toothbrush. Oh, don’t worry, you won’t
give me AIDS”. Yes, in those days,
people actually said things like that, and you needed a thick skin.
Labels:
indie drama,
Jared Leto,
LGBT,
medical ethics
Friday, November 08, 2013
"Birthday Cake" (the feature following the short "Groom's Cake") really does show us a "modern family"
The long short “Groom’s Cake” (40 minutes) followed by the
feature “Birthday Cake” (80 minutes), both by Chad Darnell, tell us, mostly in
mockumentary style – somewhat exaggerated from “Modern Family” – the story of
two gay men who, in the last days of California’s Proposition 8, decide to
adopt a baby, and then a year later, give the child her first birthday party. Of
course, they have to tell their families that they’re going to “have” a baby
first.
The short is more “documentary” in style than the
feature. The humor in the characters –
the macho, lean and muscular actor Steve
James (Rib Hillis) and his lover Daniel Ferguson, a bit softer and smoother in
appearance, played by Chad himself. Chad has a tendency toward a nervous
stomach in this sequence. I’ve known married men with that issue They get
interviewed by a social worker (Sarah Beth Basak) and make mincemeat of it –
all three of them. They’ll name the kid
Sam, but practicality forced Chad to use a girl for the followup film. So, call her Sami (like in “Days of our
Lives”).
The feature brings together a whole slew of extended family, workers and friends for dinners and gatherings in the couple’s Valley home (it seems to be near the “Traffic Jam” intersection of the 405 and 101). There are lots of verbal jabs; at one point, Steve’s mother says to him that if he is going to be gay, at least he could pick a visibly more manly lover. But soon the clowns are hired and the Valley toddlers show up for the birthday party. There is the abuse of an energy drink which can spice up a punch, and then the kids and adults go wild. Things happen, with the various outputs of body orifices (including at least one afterbirth). In the end, the kids still are all right, and the two lovers give us an epilogue. Brian Nolan looks a little bit young to be a practicing pediatrician.
The feature brings together a whole slew of extended family, workers and friends for dinners and gatherings in the couple’s Valley home (it seems to be near the “Traffic Jam” intersection of the 405 and 101). There are lots of verbal jabs; at one point, Steve’s mother says to him that if he is going to be gay, at least he could pick a visibly more manly lover. But soon the clowns are hired and the Valley toddlers show up for the birthday party. There is the abuse of an energy drink which can spice up a punch, and then the kids and adults go wild. Things happen, with the various outputs of body orifices (including at least one afterbirth). In the end, the kids still are all right, and the two lovers give us an epilogue. Brian Nolan looks a little bit young to be a practicing pediatrician.
The script makes some odd references to other movies (even “The
Box”), and there is a chocolate birthday cake made in the form of a baby that
recalls to me “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”. The cake becomes the butt of literal jokes,
mildly racy, with references to what some people are missing. There’s reference to an obscure TV series
called “The Cliff”.
I attended a screening sponsored by Reel Affirmations at the
Jewish Community Center in Washington
DC. The director Chad was present for a
QA, and there was a champagne reception.
The official site is here.
Chad says that the feature was not selected for Outfest but was for most other
LGBT film festivals. It will be distributed by Artizical.
Labels:
indie comedy,
LGBT,
mockumentary,
Outfest,
reel affirmations
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)