This Gaudy Gilded Stage

While we were in Philadelphia, PJ and I saw Stephen Frears’s The Queen starring Helen Mirren. I’ve loved Helen Mirren at least since I saw her in Where Angels Fear to Tread. She is also great in Prime Suspect 3, The Madness of King George, Gosford Park, and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Mirren’s performance in The Queen is no exception: she’s brilliant.

The Queen explores the royal family’s response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, a response predicated on tradition and decorum, and juxtaposes it with that of the country’s new prime minister, Tony Blair, played by Michael Sheen, who has been elected to “modernize” the country. Filling out the primary cast of characters are James Cromwell as Prince Philip, Sylvia Syms as the Queen Mother, Alex Jennings as Prince Charles, and Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair.

A Granada production, the movie seems a little made-for-tv at times. The film’s point and its depiction of some of the royals stand out as good examples of this. First, over the course of the movie, Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth must learn to surrender some of her WWII-era notions of the sovereign’s duties, and Sheen’s Blair (and his Labour ministers) must learn to respect the traditional role of the monarchy. While this might be oversimplifying the movie’s point just a bit, it’s only just a bit. I was expecting something a little more complex.

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Weekend posts are clearly going to be about entertainment.

Today PJ and I saw Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a dazzlingly beautiful tribute to Versailles, eighteenth-century French fashion (especially shoes), and cake. Kirsten Dunst is quite good in it, as is Jason Swartzmann. I also thought that the modernized soundtrack worked well.

On the downside, the film’s obsession with these visual and aural elements ultimately seem to substitute for any particular point of view. We are given a sympathetic vision of Marie Antoinette but one can’t help but wonder why. Why give us this portrait now? Likewise, the film doesn’t seem as interested in historical events as it does in showing us Marie Antoinette’s good humor, fondness for cake, and loneliness. The less informed audience members (like me) find it difficult to follow the film’s leaps through time. On the one hand, the actors show little sign of aging. On the other hand, the film covers some 20 years in Marie Antoinette’s life.

On the whole, this is an entertaining, if somewhat empty tribute to the style, protocols, and excesses of the Bourbon court. It is a feast for the eyes, but I would have liked it better if it had also aspired to move or educate me.

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Tonight we watched a Spanish film we rented from netflix, El Mar. Excuse my French, but I just have to say that this film is fucked up — and not in a good way.

The movie starts during the Spanish Civil War. Three children, two boys and a girl, witness a series of violent acts, which leaves them emotionally scarred. We meet up with them again a decade later. One of the boys has become a prostitute, one has become a religious zealot who uses the rituals of his faith to sublimate his desire for the male prostitute, and the girl has become a nun. (She too seems to be in love with the slutty one.)

The cinematography is excellent. And the religious zealot/gay boy is kind of cute. But apart from those two qualities, this movie is just fucked up. At first I thought it might be using tuberculosis as a metaphor for AIDS or something, which might have been interesting. But I don’t think that’s what it was really doing. Then I thought that it might be a critique of Catholicism’s sexual repressiveness. But that didn’t seem right either. By the film’s penultimate scene, a climactic confrontation between the two young men, I just didn’t care anymore what it was trying to do.

And I won’t even discuss the gratuitous and rather graphic violence against a cat, which is almost impossible to watch if you like animals at all. The film passes this violence off as little more than a plot point; the perpetrator is immediately forgiven and the act is dismissed as just one more example of his violent anger, but this anger doesn’t seem meant to turn the audience against him. Instead, the film doesn’t seem to know what we’re supposed to think about most of what happens in it.

One critic maintains that

The message is clear: Children learn the ways of the world early. They take the horrors they see in childhood with them into adulthood and express them in their own new horrific ways. It’s a depressing concept, but it makes for interesting stories.

Horrific, yes. Depressing, maybe. Interesting, not really. I’ll take sweet German coming out films over horrific Spanish ones any day!

Again, here’s the trailer:

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PJ and I wanted to see Marie Antoinette this evening, but the sound wasn’t working correctly in the theater, and so everyone was told to come back another time. So, we ended up getting a refund and coming home to watch one of the movies we have from netflix, a German film entitled Summer Storm.

In many ways, this movie is a very typical, paint by numbers high school coming out film, but I thought that it was kind of touching, even if simplistic. It’s about the captain of a Bavarian crew team, named Tobi, who is in love with his best friend. The two go off to summer camp with their team, where Tobi and his teammates interact with another team comprised of gay boys. This of course brings everything out in the open: his teammates’ homophobia, his sexuality, and his unrequited love for his friend.

Tobi’s sexual awakening is rather sweet, but I’m a sucker for coming out movies so I’m probably being a little too easy on it. It’s kind of a combination of Get Real, Nico and Dani, and one scene from Y tu mama tambien, all movies that I really like. The conflicts are resolved a little too quickly and ultimately it doesn’t really do anything new or even very special with its subject matter, but overall I can’t help but like it. Maybe I just wish I had been part of a German crew team when I was 17 or so and had fallen in with another high school team of queer boys!

Here’s the trailer, which is appropriately cheesy:

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Yesterday PJ and I drove up to Columbus to see Shortbus, John Cameron Mitchell’s new movie. A couple of my favorite undergraduates had mentioned that they were going to go see it, and we were going to meet them there and watch it together. PJ and I ended up going earlier than I had thought we would (so we could also get in a little shopping), and so we didn’t end up seeing them there. But I owe them for spurring us to drive up yesterday, because Shortbus is a wonderful film.

The plot of the film revolves around a group of characters who are all emotionally wounded and who live rather hollow lives: a “couple’s counselor” who’s never had an orgasm, her husband who can’t tell her that he needs to be spanked (and spanked hard), a dominatrix who can’t step outside this role, a gay man who’s nearly debilitated by depression, his shallow boyfriend of five years who desperately needs to “love everybody,” and a younger generation of gay men who obsess so much over what they think is this couple’s perfect relationship that they aren’t able to create relationships of their own.

While the film is getting a lot of press for its sexual explicitness (and it is sexually explicit!), the key word here is “relationships.” The sex in the film is a metaphor for the characters’ failed attempts at connecting with one another. The therapist who’s never achieved orgasm also can’t talk to her husband about sex or their relationship without the safety of psychobabble covering over all of their real feelings and frustrations. The gay couple invites a younger man to join them for a threesome but this serves the same function as the straight couple’s comic scene of “safe” language (though the awkwardness of the three men getting to know one another as they wait to start the sex is touching and it is in the combination of these awkward moments and the subsequent sex, which is bizarrely hilarious, that the characters begin to find what they’re looking for).

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Today I’m taking a break from reflecting on my place in the profession (and from writing long posts). Instead, I’d like to inaugurate a series of posts I’ll call “What I’m Watching.”

I’m currently in love with the 2004 movie, House of Flying Daggers. This movie was directed by Yimou Zhang and stars Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, and Ziyi Zhang. I love, love, love it! The plot’s a little thin — it’s basically boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl set in Imperial China during the T’ang Dynasty — but it’s a visual treat (cinematography, special effects, lots of flying daggers, etc.), very romantic, and Takeshi Kaneshiro is hot, hot, hot!

I also love the music for this movie. Here’s the video for the movie’s theme song, “Lovers,” sung by Kathleen Battle. It also gives a little taste of the movie:

In future posts, I hope to share my thoughts on other movies, and I’ll discuss/review what I’m reading and what I’m listening to. I also plan on posting about my favorite museums and other random things. In other words, I want to flesh out other aspects of my life as an academic beyond teaching and research. (I think it’s important to prove that I’m not just contemplating “the profession” all the time, which brings to mind Darth Vader in his mediation chamber in The Empire Strikes Back, though I love, love, love Darth Vader too!)

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