C.R.A.Z.Y.: A Review Friday, Feb 2 2007 

C.R.A.Z.Y. is a French-Canadian film that follows Zac from his birth on December 25, 1960 to the early 1980s, tracing his evolution toward acceptance of his sexual identity. Born in a family of devout Catholics, he learns from an early age to hide and reject his difference. His life takes many unexpected turns, the sum of which ultimately allows him to accept and love himself. Eventually, this self-acceptance leads his conservative, homophobic father to love him for who he really is rather for who he–the father–wants him to be.

Here’s a clip of the film’s star, Marc-Andre Grondin, who plays Zac for most of the film, talking about the movie. It also features a few brief scenes from the film that give a sense of its plot, look, and feel.

This is an interesting, slightly bizarre, and worthwhile film. Marc-Andre Grondin is especially good in the leading role. He brings an everyman quality to the part of Zac without losing touch with what makes Zac an individual character. His portrayal of Zac as a teenager and young adult is sensitive and very well done. And he’s gorgeous! Several websites I glanced at describe Grondin as the Canadian Gael Garcia Bernal. I can see why. He immerses himself in this role. And, like Bernal, has an innate sexiness that adds complexity and realism to his character.

I also really like the film’s emphasis on historical detail. The wardrobe, set design, hairstyling, etc. all work together to create a realistic portrayal of the 1960s and 1970s. The makeup in the film is also amazing — Marc-Andre Grondin plays Zac from the age of 15 to 21; the use of makeup to make him younger and then older is very well done.

I should also say that his film is a little bizarre in at least one way: it includes a few fantasy sequences that are meant to show Zac’s internal yearnings but ultimately serve to disrupt the film’s flow. Most of these sequences also involve religious imagery, which makes sense since the film is very much interested in the ways in which religion in general and Catholicism in particular affects people’s (in)ability to accept themselves and their loved ones for who they are.

Overall, this is a very good film about one kid’s coming of age and struggle to come out. In contrast to other coming out films, this one feels more realistic and emotionally true, even when it departs from reality or takes a somewhat surprising excursion to Israel. I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it.

Last King of Scotland: A Review Saturday, Jan 27 2007 

We just got back from seeing The Last King of Scotland, Kevin MacDonald’s film about a Scotsman, played by James McAvoy, who becomes the personal doctor of Idi Amin, the president of Uganda, played by Forest Whitaker, in 1971. Here’s the trailer, which does a great job of giving a sense of the film’s suspenseful action and political themes:

The film is based on a novel by Giles Foden. Many of the political events depicted in the film are true, but the main character, McAvoy’s Nicholas Garrigan, is fictional. Garrigan is based, in part, on a British soldier who became a key advisor to Amin.

I really liked this film. Recent articles have compared this movie to The Queen and Forest Whitaker’s performance to Helen Mirren‘s — both purport to show us the private lives of public rulers during historically accurate events in their lives. In fact, though, I found this movie to be much better than The Queen. I still hope Mirren wins the Oscar, but The Last King of Scotland doesn’t feel like a made-for-t.v. movie like The Queen does. This film is both sweeping in its depiction of Amin’s brutality and the violence of his dictatorship and an intimate portrayal of one man’s interactions with him.

Whitaker certainly deserves all of the accolades that he is receiving for this role. He manages first to humanize Amin and then slowly to show us this man’s inhumanity and mental instability. It’s a towering performance, which explains why Whitaker is up for Best Actor when in fact his role is a supporting one. He will certainly be robbed if he doesn’t win.

James McAvoyThe lead actor in this film is actually McAvoy, pictured here in a promotion shot for the Toronto Film Festival. He is the heart and soul of this story, and McAvoy does an excellent job showing us how and why his character can become involved with Amin and then slowly realize all of his mistakes in doing so. He manages to embody his character with an idealism that seems genuine, especially as we come to see it as based, at least in part, on a fundamental racism. He wants to “make a difference” in Africa, but he knows nothing about the continent or the nation of Uganda. His idealism is ultimately exposed as naivete.

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Curse of the Golden Flower: A Review Saturday, Jan 13 2007 

Today PJ and I saw Curse of the Golden Flower, the latest film from Zhang Yimou, the director of House of Flying Daggers, one of my favorite movies. It stars Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li as the emperor and empress of China. Here’s the plot summary from IMDb:

China, Later Tang Dynasty, 10th Century. On the eve of the Chong Yang Festival, golden flowers fill the Imperial Palace. The Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) returns unexpectedly with his second son, Prince Jai (Jay Chou). His pretext is to celebrate the holiday with his family, but given the chilled relations between the Emperor and the ailing Empress (Gong Li), this seems disingenuous. For many years, the Empress and Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye), her stepson, have had an illicit liaison. Feeling trapped, Prince Wan dreams of escaping the palace with his secret love Chan (Li Man), the Imperial Doctor’s daughter. Meanwhile, Prince Jai, the faithful son, grows worried over the Empress’s health and her obsession with golden chrysanthemums. Could she be headed down an ominous path? The Emperor harbors equally clandestine plans; the Imperial Doctor (Ni Dahong) is the only one privy to his machinations. When the Emperor senses a looming threat, he relocates the doctor’s family from the Palace to a remote area. While they are en route, mysterious assassins attack them. Chan and her mother, Jiang Shi (Chen Jin) are forced back to the palace. Their return sets off a tumultuous sequence of dark surprises. Amid the glamour and grandeur of the festival, ugly secrets are revealed. As the Imperial Family continues its elaborate charade in a palatial setting, thousands of golden armored warriors charge the palace. Who is behind this brutal rebellion? Where do Prince Jai’s loyalties lie? Between love and desire, is there a final winner? Against a moonlit night, thousands of chrysanthemum blossoms are trampled as blood spills across the Imperial Palace.

I should admit up front that I love Yimou’s movies and martial arts films set in Medieval China. Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragondirected by Ang Lee, are wonderful films. I was less impressed with Hero — ultimately it seemed too intricately plotted for its own good. Curse of the Golden Flower shares some of the stengths of these earlier movies as well as some of their weaknesses.  

Like House of Flying Daggers, this is a beautiful film. The cinematography, art direction, and costumes are all excellent. One review that I read complains that the characters spend a lot of time walking through beautiful hallways. With hallways as beautiful as these, who could resist walking through them as much as possible? I also really like Gong Li’s performance. She is amazing. Her role calls for her to alternate between vulnerability and fierce strength. She fulfills this difficult task well. By the end, hers is the side we’re most on, I think, even if we’re not sure if the film really wants us to support her cause. (more…)

The Graffiti Artist: A Review Tuesday, Jan 9 2007 

Since my last few posts have been about academic and professional interests, I thought I would post a movie review today. PJ and I watched James Bolton’s The Graffiti Artist (2004) over the weekend. The movie’s webpage has a link to trailers and images from the film, if you want to check them out.

The Graffiti Artist The movie is about a kid named Nick, played by Ruben Bansie-Snellman (pictured here), who is a homeless graffiti artist in Portland, Oregon. In the larger sense, the movie traces the effects of the city’s efforts to cut down on such graffiti by arresting the artists and charging them with a felony. Nick is arrested early in the film and decides to skip town in order to avoid the fine and community service. He goes to Seattle, where he runs into Jesse, played by Pepper Fajans, another artist who’s from a middle class family. Where Nick has made a life for himself by stealing food and sleeping in alleys, Jesse pays for everything he wants and has his own small apartment. Nick believes in graffiti art for graffiti art’s sake; Jesse sells pictures of his art to magazines.

Despite these differences, the two boys become friends. Their friendship is tested, however, when it becomes physically intimate and the lines between friendship and romance begin to break down.

I really like how quiet this film is. There’s a kind of emotional intimacy cultivated between the characters and the audience that I found very effective. In part, this sense of quiet is literal — the score doesn’t overwhelm the film and is often quite muted and there is often little or no dialogue in the film. Indeed, it is several minutes into the film before Nick speaks his first lines. I thought this worked really well.

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The Line of Beauty: A Review Saturday, Dec 30 2006 

This past week, PJ and I watched the BBC miniseries, The Line of Beauty, adapted from Alan Hollingshurst’s novel of the same name. I haven’t read the novel (yet), but I liked the miniseries quite a lot.

Beginning in 1983, it follows Nick, played by Dan Stevens, a recent graduate of Oxford, as he moves in with the family of one of his college friends, Toby Fedden, played by Oliver Coleman (pictured on the left below). Toby’s family is wealthy and politically well connected, especially since Toby father, Gerald, played by Tim McInnerny, is a Tory MP. The plot takes place over four years, a period bookmarked by two elections, both of which return Margaret Thatcher to the government.

Nick (pictured in the middle above) is a working-class aesthete. His father is an antiques dealer, and Nick has absorbed his knowledge of art, furniture, and aesthetics, and then studied literature at the university, all of which helps him find a place among the wealthy politicos of his new environment. Nick is also gay, a fact that is conveniently ignored by most of his new found family and their friends.

Since Toby is beautiful but straight and soon engaged to be married, Nick is forced to turn his sexual interest elsewhere. At the urging of Toby’s manic-depressive sister, Catherine, Nick answers a personal ad and meets up with Leo. Toby’s hobnobbing with England’s conservative elite stands in marked contrast to his furtive sex with Leo, who is black and working class. Not surprisingly, their relationship doesn’t last long.

But its demise leaves Nick in a precarious situation: how to find sexual partners among his wealthy friends in an age in which AIDS is increasingly threatening the gay male population. The tensions between Nick’s sexuality, the AIDS crisis, the Fedden family’s personal and professional indiscretions, and the Thatcher government’s policies comes to a head in the third act, when the consequences of being in the closet, political corruption, and private scandal all collide in one cataclysmic event.

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Dreamgirls: A Review Friday, Dec 29 2006 

Yesterday, PJ and I went to Columbus to do some shopping. While we were there, we saw Dreamgirls, one of the most talked about films of the year. I had heard the original soundtrack album before and was generally familiar with the overall plot, but I really had little preconceived idea about what to expect. While the movie has received a lot of positive press, it hasn’t been universally acclaimed. So, I was looking forward to forming my own opinion. Since I’m a gay man who loves Black women and musicals, I guess it isn’t surprising that I think Dreamgirls is one of the year’s best and most entertaining films.

Here’s the trailer from Youtube:

As just about everyone probably already knows, Dreamgirls is loosely based on the story of the Supremes: a Detroit girl group called the Dreamettes is struggling to make it when a car salesman cum music producer, Curtis Taylor, Jr., played by Jamie Foxx, decides to give them a break as background singers for a popular R&B star, James Early, played by Eddie Murphy. When Early’s sound remains too “black” for popular tastes (i.e., whites), Curtis decides to remake the Dreamettes into the Dreams, moving one of the background singers, Beyonce Knowles‘s Deena Jones, into the lead since her voice is weaker and therefore more pop-friendly than that of the previous lead singer, Effie, played by Jennifer Hudson. Needless to say, this change is the beginning of the end for the original Dreamettes, as jealousy, changes in music, and romantic triangles begin to tear them apart.

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Infamous: A Review Tuesday, Dec 19 2006 

Last night, PJ and I saw Infamous, the latest film about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Like Capote last year, Infamous recounts how Capote came to write this book and how it affected his life and career. It stars Toby Jones, who seems to have been born to play Capote, and a large star-filled cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, Sandra Bullock, and the new James Bond, Daniel Craig.

Here’s the trailer, which gives you a glimpse at these and other members of the cast:

I really admired Capote last year. I thought Philip Seymour Hoffman and Clifton Collins, Jr. were both excellent as Capote and his prized murderer, Perry Smith. The look and feel of the film was also great — I thought that it really caught the historical moment of the early 1960s. Of the five films nominated for best picture at the Oscars earlier this year, I thought Capote was the most deserving of the win.

Since I liked Capote so much, I’m kind of surprised to report that I loved Infamous! Infamous isn’t simply a retread of the previous movie. Jones is great as Capote — he brings a humor to the role that I don’t think Hoffman did. Also, where Hoffman’s was a performance, Jones’s is an embodiment, every gesture perfectly conveys Capote’s inner life. Sandra Bullock is also excellent as Harper Lee. While I thought Crash‘s win at the Oscars was indeed a homophobic rejection of Brokeback Mountain, Bullock was great in Crash; combined with this role, she is becoming quite an actress.

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Guys and Balls: A Review Sunday, Dec 10 2006 

PJ and I just finished watching Guys and Balls, a German movie about a soccer goalie who gets kicked off his local team because he’s gay. When his teammates harrass him about his sexuality, he ends up betting them he can beat them with a new, all gay team in four weeks.

Here’s the preview:

Guys and Balls is a fairly predictable, but nevertheless somewhat enjoyable queer sports movie. The main character, Ecki, played by Maximilian Bruckner, is likeable enough but suffers from the usual movie coming out issues: his dad is too distant and thinks his son is now too girlie and he can’t hold his new boyfriend’s hand in public. And a lot of movie is based on stereotypes: Ecki’s new teammates are mostly stereotypes of one sort or another: leathermen, the flamer, the Beckham fanatic, even the straight man pretending to be gay in order to get close to the girl, Ecki’s sister. All of the plot’s conflicts are also resolved a little too easily for a movie that’s only 106 minutes long.

There’s also another problem with the film: a gay sports should always include a significant number of lockerroom scenes (and the attendant activities that occur in lockerrooms). Otherwise, why make a queer sports movie in the first place? Athletes dressing and undressing, walking around naked, taking showers — is that the point of a gay sports movie?! Guys and Balls delivers a couple of lockerroom scenes, but they’re even more tame than the lockerroom shots during the first season of Footballers Wives. (The first season’s scenes were great — excuse me while I pause to remember some of the scenes featuring Gary Lucy, who played Kyle ….)

Despite these problems, Guys and Balls is a fun little popcorn and vodka tonic kind of movie. You can’t take it seriously, and it’s not a laugh a minute, but it’s as good or better than a lot of gay movies.

Third Man Out: A Review Saturday, Dec 9 2006 

This week PJ and I watched Third Man Out, a gay detective movie originally made for TV. It stars Chad Allen, who was relatively famous as a child actor and who later made headlines when he came out, as Donald Strachey, a gumshoe who refuses to help a gay client because of the client’s method of outing famous people against their will, only to find out that the client was subsquently murdered. He therefore resolves to find out who did it.

Here’s the preview:

This is a surprisingly good little movie. It’s sexy — there’s a bit of male hotness here and there. It’s fun — there’s humor and the director, Ron Oliver, has a good time checking off all of the cliches of the genre. It’s romantic — Chad Allen and Sebastian Spence are the gay Jonathan and Jennifer Hart. It’s a little predictable, but it nevertheless manages to have a few suprizes.

It’s great to see a romantic gay couple at the center of a movie. It’s even better that a significant number of people involved in the film, including the director and lead actor, are openly gay. I, for one, am tired of watching gay movies only to see actor after actor reaffirm their heterosexuality in the special features. I definitely enjoy a movie more when I know it features gay men in the cast and gay people behind the scenes.

I also enjoyed seeing Jack Wetherall, who played Vic on Queer as Folk, again. I found it difficult to see him as the jerk John Rutka in this movie — I just kept seeing Uncle Vic with long hair. Porn star Matthew Rush also has a small part — he’s becoming quite the routine performer in independent gay movies; his cameo in Another Gay Movie was hilarious.

Third Man Out isn’t the best movie ever, but it is better than the run-of-the-mill gay production. I look forward to seeing the sequel.

The History Boys: A Review Wednesday, Dec 6 2006 

Nicholas Hytner’s The History Boys was named one of the year’s ten best films by the National Board of Review. PJ and I missed our opportunity to see Alan Bennett’s play when we were in London in 2004 — couldn’t get tickets — so we were not going to miss our opportunity to see the movie while we were in New York last week. A bit of an Angophile, I’m a sucker for English movies — such as Billy Elliott, Kinky Boots, Beautiful Thing, Get Real, Priest, Howards End, and Maurice — and movies about England — Notting Hill and Gosford Park, for example. So, it’s not surprising that I really liked The History Boys. I agree with the NBR — it’s one of the year’s best.

Here’s the trailer:

The History Boys is about a group of sixth-form boys in the early 1980s in a town in the North of England preparing for the Oxbridge entrance examinations, which means that they are attempting to gain entrance into one of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge. These boys are randy, athletic, and ambitious, as are their teachers. The headmaster is only concerned with results and, seeing this as an opportunity to put his school on the map, hires a special tutor, Irwin, to help the boys with their history. Irwin, who is played by the dashing Stephen Campbell Moore (Bright Young Things), happens to be only a little older than the boys themselves, a fact that, along with his teaching to the test — he teaches the boys that style is more important than substance, that presentation is more important than truth, because style and presentation will help them make an impression — complicates his relationship with them.

Also complicated is the boys’ relationship to another teacher, Mr. Hector, played by Richard Griffiths. Hector believes in knowledge for knowledge’s sake and teaches the boys a wide range of topics: World War One era poetry, song lyrics to old Rogers and Hart songs, entire scenes from Brief Encounter, and improvisation in French where the improvisation takes place in a brothel. The common theme to most of these academic pursuits is their underlying homoeroticism, which is further reflected in Hector’s tendency to grope the genitals of the straight boys while giving them rides home on his motorcycle. Despite this groping, the boys generally like Hector until this admiration is challenged by their need to ace the entrance exams and by the vision of the world taught by Irwin.

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