Venus Boyz

So again it took me 10 years to see a pivotal acclaimed documentary. I watched Venus Boyz (Gabrielle Baur, 2001) at Elisa's urging, since she and Carol were much impressed with the characters in the film. Having done drag and a lot of performance in Chicago just before and after this was shot, it was a very familiar world to me. There were many interesting characters and it was a smart exposé. Dréd Gerestant and Hans impressed me in particular and I enjoyed hearing them talk about their experiences in the world. It was fun seeing Diane Torr- who I worked with on Mickey Mahoney's UNDERGRAD some years ago but had never seen in eye make-up and femmed out- do her thing. Venus Boyz got to the heart of what made drag king performance so important to wider cultural queer and gender development, not just the blurring of gender absolutes, but the confidence that an audience affords disempowered people.

Vendredi Soir on Saturday Night

Ugh. Carol pointed out that Friday Night (Claire Denis, 2002) would have been better as a 10 minute short and I couldn't agree more. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood to be patient and appreciative of this pacing, but it was not much fun. Major mind wandering. Even the portrayal of desire kinda grossed me out, I expected something more compelling and less gender-predictable from Claire Denis. Oh well.

L'heure d'été

I watched Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours as my last hurrah at G and Andy's, late at night. It opens up with soft emotionally tense music accompanying children playing outside a posh country home outside of Paris. The camera is constantly panning, moving from room to room, person to person, story to story. The palette is full of light summer colors and deep lively green. Each scene cuts immediately to the next, passing through time with no BS in between, just the important stuff. I kept waiting for something to really happen, but the film is simply a pretty and posh portrayal of the cycle of life, beginning with children playing outside and the death of a matriarch, ending with young people playing outside and the eldest grandchild talking about her future children. It's about the disconnectedness of modern life, disconnectedness from family, from roots, from one's motherland, about growing diaspora and globalization with a hint of personal isolation.

Fish Tank

Sara and Susan and I watched Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) in a small packed IFC theater. There was nothing wrong with this film- it is perfect. Fish Tank is an excellent portrayal of a young woman's complex hive of emotions, particularly frustration, rage, tenderness and desire. It's rare that you get to see this fragile time in a woman's life (Mia is 15) portrayed from her perspective and with such honesty, raw authenticity. Perhaps this is because Katie Jarvis who plays Mia is not a professional actress and was asked to audition for this part when she was found on a subway platform in a screaming argument with her boyfriend. Her little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) is hilarious and heart-breaking as a scratchy-voiced smart-mouth, and Michael Fassbender as her mother's boyfriend, Conner, is extremely attractive and complicated. The whole story is allowed to come together because of the perfect fit of all these characters. The film just never stops, it pushes through to the very end without a breath. I loved Arnold's previous film, Red Road, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

Trembling Before G-d

Ten years later, I finally watched Trembling Before G-d (Sandi Dubowski, 2001) and I see what all the hype was about. It was riveting! It's a great in-depth example of the way one part of one of the major world religions deals with homosexuality. The stories were fantastic, what was quelled from each of the participants. Just extraordinary editing, characters, etc. I was trying to go to bed and watched this just to get a taste of it, but I ended up watching the whole thing.

Varda's First

Agnès Varda made her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1955 with no prior film training and without having seen much film at all. A few years later, at the age of 30, she was hailed as an "Ancestor of the New Wave." Granted, Varda was working as a photographer at the time, and her photographic expertise is crucial to the beauty of this film. It's great! It's beautiful! It's amazing! Ahhhh...

I started watching this film on a bus from DC to New York and finished it on Giovanna and Andy's couch, so it was not an optimal viewing- I would prefer to see this in a theater on film. But it's pretty darn cool that I'm able to see it on DVD, thanks to the 2008 Criterion release of four of Varda's early films. Vagabond (1985) has long been one of my favorite films. And I loved Cleo from 9 to 5 (1962), though I didn't connect years ago when I watched it that Varda was its director. But it was hard to imagine as I started watching Pointe Courte that Varda could have made something this...old.

La Pointe Courte is from a time when films were deliberate, every shot carefully planned out. I know I know, they still are for the most part. But these shots are go gorgeous that every part of the frame seems created especially for the shot. The lighting, the movement, everything... I thought of Bergman, Fellini watching this, all the metaphors. There are also hilarious bits, such as when a woman speaking to a group of folks who, like her, are no longer young says, "We've already shit half our crap." I've had the good fortune of saying this a couple times this week about things I've seen, but...what a treat!

Good Dick

Per Nzingha's request, I just watched Marianna Palka's 2008 Sundance favorite, Good Dick. It wasn't bad, and it was certainly unique. That is, it's the only film about a porn-loving twenty-something woman I've ever seen. Actually, I really liked it, largely because the protaganists are so compelling. But it's not without its problems. Mostly, I wished that the main character (played by Palka, who also wrote the script) wasn't portrayed as so messed up, her affinity for porn due to her dealing with major childhood sexual abuse issues. But then I suppose she had to be, that is, something very significant had to explain her agoraphobia and odd prudishness. So while that story line (featuring a cameo by Tom Arnold as her father) seems contrived and disturbing, it also helps the whole film to make sense. (But does this woman really spend so much time looking at the same childhood photos of herself, particularly one prominently featuring her naked toddler-self ?)

While I was pondering this, I watched Mo'nique's Golden Globes acceptance speech for her role as the terribly abusive mother in "Precious." She said "I accept this for all you who have been touched... It's time to tell." That reminded me, once again, how important it is for childhood sexual abuse to be exposed, for people to tell their stories. But the way this film put these things together...makes me feel ookey. I mean, I too am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and as an adult I sometimes watch porn. Is there a correlation? How did Palka come to that in creating the story?

Jason Ritter's character is very likable as the boy who stubbornly works his way into the woman's life. He attempts to help her in overcoming her fear of touch and the outside world, despite her outright meanness toward him and constant flippant rape cries. He looks so much like his father John Ritter (especially in the eyes) and has some of his mannerisms too, that sometimes I felt like I was watching a film starring John Ritter and my friend Amahl, who sharply resembles Palka...

As in all quirky indie films, there are quirky indie details, like Polish references throughout, the main character sleeping in his car, and a running joke about Annie Sprinkle's "Zen Pussy." But there's something to this film that made me really like it. I think it's primarily the two main characters, their chemistry and the unconventionality of their relationship. And the acting is great. I tend to grade films like this on a different scale than others, it being a first film from director Palka and all low-budget and all. But even considering that, I think this will stick with me for a while, something that's always a sign of a very good film.

Dreamy Films

The connection between movies and dreams is a much studied topic. Artist Zoe Beloff has fun with this relationship in her exhibition "Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926-1972," which is on display at the Coney Island Museum through March. Like all of Beloff's work, the exhibition blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and to get the work we have to give up trying to figure out what's what and just enjoy it. Aside from some ephemera and found objects, the crux of this exhibition are several short films made by members of an "amateur psychoanalytic society" during the greater part of the middle of the last century. As the wall text of the exhibition points out, Freud visited Coney Island on his first and only trip to the US. These Coney Island inhabitants and followers of Freud sought to analyze their dreams through their filmic depictions of what they dreamt, as the "dream is always the disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish," according to Freud. With the dawn of the Cine Kodak movie camera and Kodak 16mm safety film in 1923, amateur filmmaking took off in the same year that the society was founded. According to Beloff, the society held a dream film competition every year and some of the winners are featured here. Among them are several films displayed on 3 digital monitors and 2 16mm films projected in a small screening room. They are varied and entertaining. And well worth the 99 cent admission to the museum!

Sheep Are Just Like Sheep

I'm not an animal person. I like animals on a case by case basis, but I don't look at an animal and immediately swell with adoration and affection. So Sweetgrass, a new doc about Montana sheep and their herders, would not have been my first choice for Friday night viewing. But Sara Varon was really excited about seeing it, and I was curious about the attention it has been getting, so we went to a packed screening at Film Forum tonight. And it was quite nice. I was worried at first that I was sitting in a theater full of animal fanatics who would coo and aww at each cute sheep face. But in the first shot a sheep who is chewing on some grass and minding her own business slowly turns her head to the camera and stops chewing as she realizes she's being observed. It was a moment I could appreciate in my anthropomorphic relation to animals and the rest of the audience seemed to be with me in this.

Sweetgrass is an entirely observational documentary, and the only time the filmmakers are even referred to is toward the end of the film when a herder comments when a herd dog almost treads on a camera. Considering it's just a film about sheep in pastures, perhaps it's remarkable that Sweetgrass is never boring and I never once thought, "When is this gonna be over?" I learned that sheep are really just such... sheep. I wondered about the men and women who tended to the sheep. I was mesmerized by the sheering, it was almost meditative. I was reminded of Brokeback Mountain. I thought of the Swiss Alps (filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbash seem to have both Swiss and Cal Arts connections) and where these sheep herding families came from. It reminded me how much I love Montana, made me want to go there and be in the mountains. But it did not make me want to work with sheep. The work looked grueling and thankless. I wondered about why this sheep ranch was closed a few years ago. Sweetgrass was contemplative and pleasant and left me with more questions than answers, which in this case is fine.

Indian Sneak Peak

With a thin offering of dark chocolate, I stopped in on my friend Mridu Chandra today as she was finishing up some grants to get them out on a tight deadline. She needed to test a DVD that she was sending off with a grant application, so I had the good fortune of getting to preview a rough cut of the first part of a documentary trilogy that she is working on about hidden aspects of Indian American life. Part I is called, "Indian Summer" and it's a funny, short observational doc about Hindu Heritage Summer Camp in Upstate New York. The teens featured in the doc cracked me up repeatedly with their, like, views and observations. It was an upbeat and well-crafted glimpse into a world that I didn't know existed and was delighted to learn about. I hope Mridu has great success with this project so that many many people will see it.