I have to admit that I really disliked Fox’s previous film, Yossi & Jagger, from 2002. That film was disappointing in so many ways, but I especially didn’t like the way it ended. I wasn’t in the mood for a film about missed opportunity in the Israeli army.
Because I disliked Yossi & Jagger, I almost didn’t watch Walk on Water. The U.S. Open is happening right now, and so I was going to watch that instead. But there was a lull between matches, so I thought I’d give the movie a chance when PJ started watching. I’m glad I did, because I really liked it.
Walk on Water is kind of the gay version of Munich. It stars Lior Ashkenazi as Eyal, an agent in the Mossad. As we see in the movie’s opening scene, he is very effective in his job, eliminating Palestinian agents. His career is thrown for a loop, however, when his wife commits suicide while he’s on assignment in Istanbul. When he refuses to seek therapy afterwards, the government deems him unfit for continued assignments.
This past weekend I saw Julian Jarrold‘s Becoming Jane, a fictionalized retelling of Jane Austen’s becoming a novelist. Here’s the trailer:
The movie stars Anne Hathaway as Austen and James McAvoy as the penniless man she falls in love with but, due to his penury, cannot marry. McAvoy’s Tom LeFroy is dependent on his uncle for an allowance. When his uncle demands that he marry well, LeFroy’s hope of marrying his true love, whom he’s recently met after being banished by said uncle to the deep countryside in punishment for his libertine activities in London, becomes impossible.
Meanwhile, every man in the country seems to fall in love with Jane, including the heir to Lady Gresham’s estate, Mr. Wisley, played by Laurence Fox. Lady Gresham is played by the incomparable Maggie Smith. Poor Jane must decide which beau to marry: the penniless LeFroy, the heir, or one of her other suitors.
The film also shows us Austen’s home life. Her impoverished parents, played by James Cromwell and Julie Walters, debate the roles of love and money in marriage while trying to make sure that their daughter marries as happily as possible. Her sister, Cassandra, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, is happily engaged to her fiance, who must make one last voyage abroad before he’s able to marry her. And the Austens’ cousin, Eliza De Feuillide, played by Lucy Cohu, a widowed emigrant from Revolutionary France, has the money to marry the man of her choice, which turns out to be the Austen’s younger son, Henry, played by the very handsome Joe Anderson.
I have to admit that I didn’t care much for this film. Julian Jarrold also directed Kinky Boots, a movie that I really enjoyed. So, I’m disappointed that I disliked this movie so much. But in this case, I think his direction was rather pedestrian. I didn’t feel like I was seeing anything new or even terribly interesting in this movie. The film that kept coming to mind as a comparison was Pride and Prejudice (2005) directed by Joe Wright. I especially liked Wright’s direction of that movie. A scene that stands out is when Elizabeth and Darcy are dancing together and all of the other dancers disappear, reflecting the couple’s amorous focus on one another. This movie could have used a little more of that romance.
PJ and I just finished watching Boy Culture, a movie about “X,” a gay prostitute in love with one of his roommates. Here’s the trailer:
The movie stars Derek Magyar as X. X is very successful in his work. He’s twenty-five, ruggedly handsome, and very good at his job. While he limits the number of his clientele to just twelve men, they pay him well. For tax purposes, he has taken on two roommates. The youngest is Joey, played by Jonathon Trent, an eighteen-year-old partier who, though he takes full advantage of his youthful attractiveness, still can’t seduce the man he wants most, X.
Andrew, played by Darryl Stephens, is the other roommate. As X relates early in the film, the movie is really all about Andrew. X is in love with him but is too afraid of rejection to fully open himself to the possibility of love. Hence, the plot of the film: Will X and Andrew overcome their differences and get together or will their respective issues stand in their way?
Boy Culture is based on a novel of the same name by Matthew Rettenmund. I read the novel last year and really liked it. In fact, I had thought seriously about teaching it in my Lesbian & Gay Literature class this past time (but ended up teaching Hard by Wayne Hoffman instead).
What I like most about the novel, however, is what’s missing from the movie. Rettenmund’s book avoids sentimentality even while telling a love story. It also contains quite a bit of sex, much of it somewhat graphically related. The movie, however, revels in sentimentality — surprisingly so for a film about a hustler. It also pretty much avoids sex — except for a comic montage of X’s clients, a little shirtlessness every now and then, and lots of talk about sex, the movie is down right staid compared to something like Queer as Folk (British or American version) or Dante’s Cove.
I just got back from seeing Superbad, starring Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. It is by far the funniest movie I’ve seen this year. Here’s the trailer:
The movie is directed by Greg Mottola and was written by Seth Rogen, who also appears in the film, and Evan Goldberg. As a lot of the advance press has noted, Rogen and Goldberg started writing the screenplay when they were 14. Rogen is perhaps most famous right now for starring in Knocked Up.
Superbad is very much a genre picture — three high school friends about to graduate conclude that the last party before summer is their perfect shot at losing their virginities and gaining sexual experience before going off to college. But it takes the genre in a whole new direction by easily being the most hilarious high-school-buddies-losing-their-virginities-movie ever made.
Hill, who had small roles in Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, among other films, and Cera, who shined as George-Michael Bluth in “Arrested Development,” are great as the film’s two leading buddies. Hill is wonderful as the blundering idiot with a heart of gold, and Cera has the part of the awkward good guy who doesn’t just want sex with the girl of his dreams down pat — he wants to respect her too. But the film really belongs to Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who plays the nerdy pal who is getting a fake ID just in time to buy alcohol for the party. When the three guys show up at the liquor store, a wild ride ensues as they get separated, come back together, and get separated again. One gets befriended by the cops who should be arresting him; one ends up with menstrual blood on his pants after dirty dancing with a woman at a party; and one learns that he can run like the wind.
Yesterday, I saw Paris, Je T’aime, in which twenty filmmakers use Paris as a backdrop for short stories about various kinds of love and relationships. Here’s the trailer:
Some of the episodes are less successful than others, but on the whole I really liked this movie. I was a little worried going into it that I wouldn’t like the short format of the individual episodes. But I found the short form interesting, since it allows you to compare the different directors’ styles as well as the different stories’ plots and statements about love. There’s a little bit of everything here: whimsy, sentiment, violence, heartbreak, exuberance, humor, despair. It was also great to see many of the places that we had just visited included in the film. As an experiment in film making, it definitely succeeds.
Four of the arrondissements stood out as my favorites; I’ll briefly explain why I liked them in particular in the order they appear in the movie. Loin du 16e (XVIe arrondissement) was written and directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas and stars Catalina Sandino Moreno as woman who must leave her infant in (what appears to be) subpar daycare in order to commute across the city to her job as nanny for a wealthy family’s infant. It’s heartbreaking in its subtle simplicity as we see the sacrifice she makes to support herself and her baby. We also see the contrast between how she loves her own child and merely cares for her employer’s infant. It’s a great episode.
Over the weekend, PJ and I saw the new bio-pic about the life and music of Edith Piaf, La vie en Rose. Here’s the trailer:
Piaf is, of course, the great French singer who rose to fame in the 1930s and became an international sensation after World War II. She lived an incredibly difficult and sometimes tortured life, but, like Judy Garland in America, she rose above her difficult childhood and tragic love affairs to become a great vocal artist. (Does that sound too prosaic?!)
While we were in Paris earlier this month, we visited her grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, which is also the resting place for Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein (and Alice B. Toklas), Jim Morrison, Moliere, Maria Callas, Richard Wright, Abelard and Heloise, Marcel Proust, Colette, Balzac, Delacroix, Gericault, Louis David, among many others. (While it’s weird to me that a cemetery would be a tourist attraction, I highly recommend a visit to this one if you have the time while you’re in Paris. It’s certainly a good reminder of our own mortality.)
This picture of her grave is from Wikipedia, which claims that it is one of the most visited graves in the cemetery. It is certainly well tended and someone had left flowers on it when we were there.
When we left to go see the movie, PJ admitted that he was a little hesitant to suggest we see it, since he worried that I would almost certainly become an Edith Piaf queen afterwards. It turns out he was right. I loved the movie and immediately came home and bought a two-disk set of her music.
But before I write about her music, let’s get back to the movie. I have to admit that I found it hard going for the first 20 to 30 minutes. In this early section, the film cuts back and forth between her childhood and various points in her adult life. This cutting creates (for me, at least) a coherent view of her early life, but I couldn’t get a handle on the adult stuff — I couldn’t keep track of when each scene was happening in relation to the other scenes of her later life. I also couldn’t keep track of who the other characters were. Consequently, I got a little irritated.
But then I had an epiphany: the movie isn’t really concerned with the minute details of Piaf’s life — it’s not that kind of bio-pic. If you want the dates and chronology, etc. you can certainly go back and watch the movie a second (or third) time and probably get all of that, but on a first viewing this film is more of an impressionistic biography. It wants to recreate the spirit, energy, and artistry of Piaf’s life and music. By giving us these disjointed scenes of her life in a seemingly random order, the film forces us to experience that energy and artistry rather than pay attention to her age or where she is or who she’s talking to.
East is East is a 1999 film about an interracial family set in Salford, England, in 1971. Some two decades before the start of the film, George Khan, played by Om Puri moved to England seeking better prospects and married an Englishwoman, Ella, played by Linda Bassett, who had a part in Kinky Boots, an English film I liked a lot. This movie is about Khan’s relationship with his family now that his seven children are growing up.
The movie begins with the oldest son’s marriage, a ceremony that goes awry when the groom refuses to go through with it and runs out of the building. As this comedy’s plot unfolds, we learn that George is attempting to force his family into observing increasingly strict Muslim religious practices. Most of the children resist.
This picture of six of the Khan children and two of their girlfriends says it all: these children are British, not Pakistani. They wear English clothing, refuse to learn Urdu or study the Koran, and date English girls rather than Pakistani ones.
At the heart of this movie is George’s hypocrisy: he expects his sons to marry according to Islamic traditions, which include arranged marriages with women the sons have never met, despite the fact that he left Pakistan and found love with an Englishwoman. Members of the Anglo-Pakistani community now judge him for his family’s westernization, and he increasingly attempts to force them to adopt the traditions that they find foreign and antiquated.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been teaching Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. It’s not a novel that I ever thought that I would teach. I embarrassingly admit that I hated it when I was in graduate school — I’m much more of a Richardson fan; I like the more traditional realist novel. But when I was creating the syllabus for my HTC class, I decided that it was about time I teach one of the great mid-century novels that I had never taught before. It was either Tristram or Tom Jones. I obviously picked the former.
On the whole, I’m glad I taught it. It’s certainly one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read, much less taught. (Why do I keep hearing the punchline, “Read it? I haven’t even taught it yet!” in my head?!) We spent two weeks on the novel. Even though this is an honors class, that was really pushing it, I think. On the one hand, my students had to read a lot of difficult material in a relatively short time. On the other hand, at least they don’t have to spend any more time on it if they didn’t like it!
We read the first five volumes of the novel the first week. I also brought in excerpts from Melvin New’s Laurence Sterne as Satirist (1969) to illustrate one of the foundational readings of the novel. His emphasis on the text as satire helped us link it back to Pope and Swift, who we had just read the week before. We finished the book for week two, watched the 2005 movie adaptation, I presented them with excerpts from Dennis Allen’s “Sexuality/Textuality in Tristram Shandy,” published in Studies in English Literature in 1985, and they each wrote a 5-page essay on it. I used Allen’s article to illustrate more recent trends in criticism and it certainly does — lots of gender and sexual stuff. (My students have stopped being surprised that the eighteenth century is so bawdy!) I also got to explain signs, signifiers, and signifieds, which is always fun!
I can’t claim to have any great insight into Tristram Shandy, and I’m pretty sure I don’t understand much of it. But it is a great work, and I’ve decided to give it a go in my regular eighteenth-century lit class. I’m not at all confident that it’s going to go well, but I want to keep teaching it until I feel like I have some sort of handle on it. (I realize that I might retire first, though!) Tristram is a novel that teaches its readers to read differently — it defies linear reading practices and the expectations of a typical realist novel.
Several of my students wrote reviews of the movie for their tutorial paper last week. Here’s the trailer:
I first saw this movie in Montreal. At the time, I didn’t really care much for it, since I thought it could have followed the novel more closely. But, since we were reading it, I figured it would be good to show it to my students and let them decide for themselves whether it was a good adaptation or not.
Un amour à taire is a 2005 French film that was originally made for television. Here’s the trailer for the film (it’s not of very good quality, but it’s the best I could find with subtitles):
A Love to Hide is billed as a gay love story set during the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1942. Sara, a Jew, has just witnessed the deaths of her parents and sister. With no where else to go, she asks her childhood friend, Jean, for help. Although she’s been in love with Jean since they were children, she soon discovers that he is gay and in a four-year relationship with Phillipe. When Jean’s brother, Jacques, is released from prison, his jealousy over Sara’s continued love for his brother leads him to commit a rash act, one that eventually destroys their lives.
I’ll start with what I didn’t like about this film: it’s entirely predictable. Once you realize that this isn’t a love-conquers-all kind of film, you know exactly what’s going to happen. From Jacques’s reappearance from jail, you know he’s trouble, despite his claims to love his brother no matter what. A little before each twist and turn in the story occurs, PJ and I definitely saw around each corner. It’s certainly not a subtle film.
But it’s not trying to be subtle. A Love to Hide is an unabashedly sentimental film — much like Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby — and it uses that sentiment to make us care for these characters so that we feel the horror as their lives and loves are destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators. That we see each blow before it falls only makes this sentimentalism all the more powerful. By the end, we (or perhaps the original French television audience) is meant to mourn for the inhumanity inflicted by the Nazis, for the institutionalized gay bashing that so many of the French were willing to aid and abet, just as they aided and abetted the systematic genocide of Europe’s Jews.
Volver is about three generations of women. Raimunda, played by Cruz, lives in Madrid with her drunk and lazy husband and their daughter, Paula, played by Yohana Cobo. After their aunt dies, Raimunda’s sister, Sole, played by Lola Dueñas, miraculously encounters their mother, who died in a fire along with their father when the two sisters were children. After a violent act disrupts Raimunda’s marriage, she takes over a nearby diner and slowly begins to learn the truth about what really happened to her parents years before.
![IMG_8341[1]](https://live.staticflickr.com/8644/27753735444_2ca20d29d0_s.jpg "IMG_8341[1]")
This Gaudy Gilded Stage 