Nick's Flick Picks: The Blog

Stephen Cone is an actor-writer-director I'd be dying to meet if I didn't know him already. By living in the same city, haunting the same movie spots, and now teaching at the same institution, I've been fortunate to keep crossing Stephen's path, and he's such a warm, smart, interesting guy. This is just what you'd hope from seeing his films, which maintain a fundamental empathy with their characters even as the stories take risky turns and grapple with human complexity. I marveled at this quality of Stephen's work, compassionate without being dull or soft, cognizant of merit in very different people's positions, when I saw his debut feature The Wise Kids. Still my favorite movie about young contemporary characters navigating dilemmas of faith and sexuality—sometimes separately, sometimes together—The Wise Kids is a minor miracle in a modern culture where these subjects, among others, are so hard to broach in a non-polarizing way that retains mystery and respects variety.

Several aspects of story, tone, and style link Stephen's subsequent features together, but at the same time, there's almost nothing they all have in common. The Wise Kids, Black Box, and Henry Gamble's Birthday Party handle large ensembles with impressive balance, but This Afternoon constrains its canvas to just two characters and sees quite far into both of them, especially the woman played so shrewdly by Nikki Pierce. Black Box, which stars another actor-writer-director, Josephine Decker, takes a backstage plot of theater production to some impressively stark places. I hadn't fully expected this from someone who makes decency and human fellowship as textured and interesting as Stephen does in Wise Kids and Henry Gamble. That said, those movies take their own detours into coldness, cruelty, and sorrow, which are all the more bracing because they unfold against broader, appealing backdrops of kinship and camaraderie.

Whoever you are, if you haven't seen Stephen's movies, you should. Henry Gamble, brand new on DVD and streaming, is a gorgeous place to start. Meanwhile, as we learn so often at Cannes, where David Lynch's jury fell for the narratively controlled and stylistically cool Pianist and the mad, more-is-more, midnight-movie barker George Miller stumped for the stripped-down didacticism of Ken Loach, you can't necessarily predict filmmakers' tastes from the kinds of movies they make. I asked Stephen some questions inspired by his own work and my guesses about what might interest or inspire him. I also asked some that were more open-ended and, as with all my favorite film buddies, his answers surprised me as often as not.

ND: Fairly early at Cannes '96, Secrets & Lies, Fargo, and Breaking the Waves emerged as the three films to beat for the Palme. As I've asking all my interlocutors, had you been on the jury, divvying prizes among that trio, which would you have recommended for the Palme? What do you most love or admire about it?

SC: If I were the 35-year-old filmmaker/cinephile I am now, I likely would've championed Secrets & Lies, the beautiful, humanist ending of which I think about quite often. The whole film has a special, direct, emotional power that has come to be a staple of Leigh's work. He's one of my favorite filmmakers, but I consistently underrate or even forget about him. That could have something to do with his never being in fashion.

That said, 16-year-old aspiring actor/filmmaker Stephen would've given the prize to Fargo—which I still like now, though I'm not big on the Coens' 90s work in retrospect. It's not inexhaustible to me, like much of their recent work is. The unbelievable richness of their masterful No Country-through-Llewyn Davis stretch to me makes Fargo look like a middling Disney film. And I don't like von Trier at all now; Melancholia's okay, but that's it. I find him to be cartoonishly cynical and stupid, though he very much appealed to my sense of discovery in the late 90s and early 00s.

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Labels: Academia, Andre Techine, Arnaud Desplechin, Blog Buddies, Brenda Blethyn, Cannes, Cannes 96, Coens, Emily Watson, France, Frances McDormand, Interviews, LGBT, Mike Leigh

Liv LeMoyne, Mira Barkhammar, and Mira Grosin in the aptly titled We Are the Best!

After installments 1, 2, 3, and 4, we reach the final dozen partnerships I want to salute from the last year of ticket-buying and festival-hopping.  Please note that I hadn't seen Selma when I plotted out this series, or else I would have recognized its sprawling and sterling supporting ensemble of activists—Stephan James, André Holland, Wendell Pierce, Tessa Thompson, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Henry Sanders, Keith "Short Term" Stanfield, Niecy Nash, Oprah Winfrey, Colman Domingo, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and more. They convey so much with few if any King-like moments to seize the spotlight, evoking several historically august personages without pulling focus or acting "important." And I still haven't screened Leviathan, A Most Violent Year, Cake, The Good Lie, Top Five, Inherent Vice, American Sniper, or several other commercial releases that seem like viable plays for this type of recognition... to say nothing of the many, many festival titles I've missed.  But conceding all those necessary omissions, there's still so much to savor.

41. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive - Talk about directorial conceptions that would be hard to penetrate: Only Lovers is a mordant hipster globe-hopping comic romantic political vampire story about devotion over time, the dying world, the gutting of Detroit, dysfunctional relatives, and rad taste in guitars. It's funny, spooky, taciturn, and strange. As much as Tilda Swinton seems like an osmotic chameleon—capable of turning into anything she touches, the weirder the better—I refuse to believe it doesn't take work. Even though Tom Hiddleston joined the movie late, when Michael Fassbender had to bail, he seems like he's always been there: not just throughout pre-production, but for the last 2,000 years. One imagines that pretending to be in love with Swinton or Hiddleston would be easy, but wittily conveying several centuries of familiarity and un-gloopy admiration is surely a special skill. I was in the seeming minority in being spellbound by Jarmusch's Limits of Control a few years ago, which also featured Swinton and John Hurt, but that was unmistakably one man's weird vision; actors offered themselves as manipulable pawns. Only Lovers Left Alive is just as idiosyncratic, yet it feels co-authored by everyone in it, but especially by its leads, like a funky hallucination they had together. Pull up a popsicle and enter the dream.

42. The Miners and the Queers, Pride - Matthew Warchus directed one of the year's largest ensembles; there must be two-dozen actors with speaking parts and legible arcs in Pride. The clear mapping of everyone's journeys, both common and private, plays like an unpretentious miracle. More than most films in this feature, Collaboration is the explicit theme of Pride, and its ethos of empathetic mobilization is impossible to refuse. It's hard enough these days to drum up people's energies in solidarity of their own tribes, as evidenced by how little business Pride did compared to what it deserved. WTF, gays?? But it's even harder to mobilize people on behalf of folks who don't remind them of themselves, particularly across the urban-rural gulf. Even free-thinkers and anti-patriarchs like Xavier Dolan (Tom at the Farm) and Josephine Decker (Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) seem openly terrified of crossing that particular divide. So at risk of just effusing over this movie's blatant message and with all due respect to how expertly it pulls off its projects, the common cause hammered out within the story between the Welsh laborers and the lavender Londoners was one of the most transformative spectacles in a year of cinema. Extra points for the film's repeated attention, witty but pointed, to the vestiges of sexism among even the most emancipated or outwardly effeminate of men.

43. Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait - Have you ever painted a self-portrait? Have you ever done it with your paintbrush on one continent and your canvas on another?  And also while the canvas is on fire?  That's more or less what Mohammed and Bedirxan accomplish in the year's most bracing movie, and arguably its most urgent.  He's a renowned film artist who has expatriated to France to escape the burgeoning Holocaust at home, and also to safeguard and disseminate footage of that violence that has already been entrusted to him. She, a Kurdish activist more recently settled in Syria, is now a stalwart holdout. Intent on documenting the ravages and tending to the mostly-abandoned children of Homs, she is eager for an expert's advice about what to shoot and how to export the footage. These two never met until "their" film premiered at Cannes. What is indescribably horrifying to watch is also indescribably ennobling to behold: two swimmers caught in strong, bloody currents, clinging to each other across time zones, surviving the cataclysm, inciting us to action and inspiring us to realize our own potentials as witnesses and testifiers.

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Labels: Best of 2014, Collaborations 2014, Experimental, International, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Glazer, Laura Dern, LGBT, Marion, Middle Eastern Cinema, Music, Reese Witherspoon, Scandinavia, Tilda Swinton, UK

Ukrainians gathered on Independence Square in Maidan

(Catch up on Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and afterward, keep reading through the big finish.)

31. Claude Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein, The Last of the Unjust - Critics largely treated Unjust as though it were extra recommended reading attached to the prodigious syllabus that is Lanzmann's Shoah. But the projects are very different, and this is a prodigious event in itself. Murmelstein, once the Chief Rabbi of Vienna and later the appointed supervisor of the Jewish ghetto and concentration camp at Theresienstadt, remains for many people an emblematic face of Nazi collaboration, and he knows it.  So not only is he rare for being the unambiguous center of an epic-length Lanzmann documentary but he arrives to his interviews as Lanzmann's subjects seldom do: fully aware of the frameworks and biases that many, many people will apply to his testimonies, if they even listen at all.  He seems to have decided that all he can tell is the truth, his truth, and hope for some benefit of the doubt. The documentarian seizes on Murmelstein's candor and his amazing recall of salient details, including the horrible fates of prior Theresienstadt supervisors.  The narrative appeals to the part of Lanzmann that likes to complicate received narratives, even if Murmelstein isn't always prepared (who is?) for such astringent, indefatigable probing.  He tows a line of asking for understanding without begging for sympathy, with Lanzmann both helping him draw that line and repeatedly shoving him off it. As heavy as the film is, it's remarkable how invigorating it is to see a weighty conversation about an absolutely intractable circumstance get the screen-time and thorough contextualization it deserves, sustained by a vigorous inquirer and an impressively reflective subject.

32. Roger Ebert and Steve James, Life Itself - A lighter documentary, but far from insubstantial, particularly since neither Ebert nor James is interested in doting hagiography. Affection for Ebert flows across Life Itself and from multiple sources; anyone eager to honor his memory or his durable, capacious careers as journalist, critic, and media personality would do well to rent the film. But the scenes that stick are those where James wants to shoot something Ebert doesn't want filmed (like the excruciating suction of his esophagus), or where Roger and his wife Chaz are of different minds about how much to broadcast of his ongoing medical challenges or of bad news arriving in real time. Occasional conflicts like these help make Life Itself a Steve James film, not just a loose facsimile of Ebert's memoir or a straightforward extension of his self-perceptions. The same could be said of the fair hearing Gene Siskel gets in Life Itself, neither sidebarred nor sentimentalized nor set up as the obvious lesser of two equals.  Just as Jamesian is the prismatic view of complex professional pressures, the tough ligatures linking work to family or individual to community. It says plenty about Ebert that he wanted an actual filmmaker to document his life, not just a trusted friend, and that he'd want the movie to be good, not just fond.

33. Cheng Pei-Pei and Ben Whishaw, Lilting - It's difficult to play two characters who, beyond misunderstanding each other, have absolutely no context for grasping or reading each other.  It's even harder to do that without the actors suggesting that they themselves are out of sync, or without resorting to the kind of broad, superficial semaphores of impatience that suggest a clean, improbable rapprochement is just around the corner. Cheng Pei-Pei and Ben Whishaw clear all these obstacles in Hong Khaou's delicate film. They offer Lilting such a strong center that it survives the vaguer storytelling and characterizations all over its margins. Cheng is an elderly, unassimilated Chinese immigrant to the UK who has recently lost the son who placed her in an assisted living center. She does not realize he did so only temporarily, until he could screw up the courage to come out to her as gay and convince her to live with him and his boyfriend, whom Cheng's character already doesn't like. The son died before he could clarify anything, so now the mother and the boyfriend glare at each other across linguistic, cultural, and generational barriers, and across chasms of secrecy and grief, while also contending with other, private matters that add to their sorrow and anger. Much of this is communicated via silent expressions; even when they speak through a translator, all we need to know is written on the features of Cheng's and Whishaw's faces. The film is a tiny labor of love, kept aloft by the year's unlikeliest star pairing, and one of its most moving.

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Labels: Best of 2014, Collaborations 2014, Documentary, International, LGBT, Mike Leigh, Political Cinema

Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, and Lena Dunham in Happy Christmas

(Catch up on what I'm doing here and here. And yes, I recognize that these are getting longer.)

21. Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh, and Marietou Touré, Girlhood - The complaint writes itself and is practically rhetorical: "Why'd Boyhood get so much attention and Girlhood so little?" To be fair, Céline Sciamma's study of four Afro-French teenagers, and of one in particular, won't open in the U.S. until hopefully next year. At that point, many of my readers will have their best shot at nullifying this objection by buying lots of tickets and endlessly chatting up the movie.  Once that comes to pass, we can all admire first-timer Karidja Touré's artful projection of vibrancy and heartache in the lead role but also the sinuous rapport of all four actresses at the center of the film, playing characters who are often but not always lifelines for each other. The relations synthesize most gorgeously during their exuberant, full-length, indigo-lit sing-along to Rihanna's "Diamonds" but their spirit, as bruised and boisterous as the song, courses through the whole film. Sciamma taps into it deftly and created the context in which it could thrive, but she couldn't access it and we couldn't savor it if her actresses hadn't conjured it.

22. Everybody in Goodbye to All That - Maybe they really do make this kind of movie all the time in France, but it's nonetheless remarkable when an American filmmaker understands character this way: not just as a carefully sculpted centerpiece, dominating a table to which spectators and fellow actors dutifully pull up a seat, but as a porous environment, a weather system, a loosely bonded atomic cloud through which motives, desires, personalities, ideas, and situations pass and accumulate. That's how writer-director Angus MacLachlan approached Otto and how Paul Schneider plays him, with a relaxation and a sense of ongoing discovery rarely connoted by adjectives like "impeccable," which Schneider nonetheless deserves. So do the other members of the cast, most of whom are women. Melanie Lynskey's brave and angry wife, Ashley Hinshaw's friend with benefits, Anna Camp's hot-and-cold churchgirl, Heather Graham's simmering old flame, Audrey Scott's believably all-seeing daughter, and especially Heather Lawless's resilient free spirit: these are not just refractions of Otto, but permeable, evolving creations of their own, as Otto is, and at no cost to their dramatic coherence. Smaller parts rendered by Michael Chernus, Amy Sedaris, and national treasure Celia Weston are just as indelible. They don't just honor the personalities implied by the script.  They contribute to an idea about life that the script hopes to promulgate: that we're all making it up, co-creating, but hopefully not lying.  Men and women alike, they are all midwives to this insight, expert and utterly un-arrogant.

23. Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, and Lena Dunham, Happy Christmas - "He's only saying it because they're friends," some readers will grouse. "He's only saying it because we're friends," one particular person might be saying, with typical, self-effacing modesty. "Oh my god, for real," say actual spectators of Happy Christmas and Goodbye to All That, who know the truth. Lynskey is the only well-known actor I can also call a friend; the filming of Happy Christmas, not far from my home, was the occasion for finally spending real time with her.  But private sympathies aside, her project choices consistently incline toward ensemble pieces, and when we're all lucky, not just her, these are the effects. Happy Christmas gifts all its actors with roles that draw off past personas (Kendrick's chipper edge, Lynskey's dejection and carefully tended hope, Dunham's jovial listening and self-ironization) while nudging most of them into new territory (Kendrick's a mess, Lynskey's a mom, and I did say most of them).  For a certain kind of indie audience, this is an irresistible cast. The comfy scenes, including a hilarious post-credits stinger, where these three bat around ideas for the Lynskey character's next book have the punchy whiff of the actresses simultaneously creating and goofing off. But they aren't playing themselves, and this isn't all a joke: witness one of the film's best moments, where Kendrick's and Dunham's characters pose genuine queries to Lynskey's about motherhood; she is gratified but also made nervous by their too-quick glorification of her role and her choices.  Name the last movie where this many women asked this many rarely-broached questions and evoked such multi-dimensional investments and responses on all sides, spoken and not.

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Labels: Best of 2014, Collaborations 2014, Documentary, Festivals, Horror, International, LGBT, Melanie Lynskey, Viggo Mortensen, Women Directors

Kevin Allesee, Julian Walker, Nikki Jane, Gary LeRoi Gray, Wanita Woodgett, and Torrey Laamar in Blackbird.

"The thing that counts the most with me is the friendships, and the love, and the sheer joy we have shared making movies together. My friends."

If you don't know who said that and when, it is conceivable that you are reading the wrong blog, but that's okay.  It just means our lives are very different, which is fine.  The first reason these words linger in my mind today, even more than it does every day (no, seriously), is that during a month when everybody's making lists of the best single films and most outstanding individual accomplishments of the year in film, I realize how little we salute collaborations.  Outside of acceptance speeches or unbreakable ties on Ten Best lists, it's hard to pay tribute to the aspect of movielove that isn't about beholding solo artists' achievements but about relishing teamwork among filmmakers, or bonds between characters, or resonances across films.

The other reason is that New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are always occasions when I dwell on my own gratitude for the relationships that sustain my life and enable my good fortune.  This blog isn't the place to repay more private debts, but much of the thankfulness I feel is toward movie artists, for how they inspire, educate, and move me—often via their own visible camaraderie.  I genuinely feel happier in my life and better able to communicate, empathize, rebound from hardships, and admit my limitations because of the impressions of life, however reassuring or confronting, that I glean in the cinema.  So here are 52 occasions, one per week of the year, when the currents running between characters or the collaboration nourished among creative artists filled me with joy, admiration, humility, or insight.  I've limited myself to movies either released in 2014 or bowing at festivals in the last year, hopefully to arrive on screens near you in 2015.  I didn't love every movie, but that's the whole point: all of these relationships were gems to me, even the ones that were nestled in the rough.

1. Regina Hall and Kevin Hart, About Last Night - In their support of Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant and in their frisky, cantankerous rapport with each other, Hall and Hart generated the closest thing I saw in any 2014 romantic comedy to the vivid, spiky ensemble work that sustained the genre in the classic decades.  They don't play down to the genre, or defer to their co-stars.  Contemporary and frequently raunchy as they are, they act like they're in Libeled Lady, or a sexed-up, 21st-century Palm Beach Story.  As tasty as the whole film was, I wanted to keep watching their characters, even though you wouldn't necessarily want to be them or count on them in real life.  And with so many filmmakers giving Hart a long leash to improvise or ceding him his own unchallenged spotlight, which he's often very good at filling, it was great to see an actress go so fully toe-to-toe with him (among other bodily contacts).

2. Catherine Breillat and Isabelle Huppert, Abuse of Weakness - With typical flintiness, Breillat answered my question to her at TIFF '13 by saying that Huppert was the only professional actress she had any interest in working with.  As a piece of acting, Huppert's rendering of a palsied, embittered, undisguised surrogate for Breillat is often impressive but somewhat uneven, though less so than the film, which starts out strong, stagnates for a while, but sticks its pointed landing.  Setting all that somewhat aside, as an instance of making oneself a conduit for a forceful, sui generis filmmaker with something angry, complex, and somewhat inchoate to say about an extremely difficult time in her life, Huppert's work is exceedingly generous without being at all soft.

3. Alex and Ali, Alex & Ali - I hope more people get to see this documentary about a man from the U.S. South and a man from Iran who were friends and lovers a half-century ago, when the latter's family hosted the former as an exchange student, and who are now attempting to reconnect at a very different time, personally and politically.  The story is as harrowing as it is happy, and I won't reveal how they resolve their very difficult circumstances, but their willingness to be filmed at all was inspiring enough.  Their candor about thorny matters of head and heart, unfolding unpredictably in real time, is all the more so.  Sobering and valuable storytelling, straight from life.

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Labels: Best of 2014, Black Cinema, Collaborations 2014, Documentary, Happy New Year, International, LGBT

I've known since I moved here that I shared a spiritual link with the Chicago International Film Festival, and this year the case only gets stronger. On October 9, the festival will turn 50 on the same day I turn 37, and as happens every year, the programmers will whup even my relatives and loved ones in the competition for Best Gift.  Tickets go on sale to the public today, though one of the perks of joining Cinema/Chicago and supporting the organization is getting a two-day head start on those purchases.  I suspect I won't be the only patron who feels I am being showered with presents.

For their golden anniversary, the leadership has curated a selection that, according to Programming Director Mimi Plauché,"ties back to the history of the festival and also looks forward in so many ways." That commitment to its own heritage begins with the Opening Night selection of Liv Ullmann's Miss Julie, extending CIFF's streak of programming all of Ullmann's directorial efforts since her first in 1992 (including a new personal favorite of mine, Private Confessions, which won Pernilla August a richly deserved Best Actress award here in 1996).  Ullmann will be back to introduce the film and take questions, as will Hollywood directors and CIFF loyalists Oliver Stone and Taylor Hackford, who will screen some favorites among their own work: Natural Born Killers and the extended cut of Alexander in Stone's case, The Idolmaker and White Nights in Hackford's.  CIFF will also host the North American premiere of the newly restored Why Be Good?, released simultaneously as a silent and a talkie in 1929 and previously thought lost.  The star, Colleen Moore, plays a character named "Pert," which is all I need to know. She will be familiar to CIFF audiences as the inspiration for the Franju-esque graphic that CIFF has used as its logo since its inception, since she helped to found the whole institution.  Archival pleasures extend as well to a four-film cycle of Isabelle Huppert's greatest post-2000 hits, selected by the actress herself and screening all in 35mm at the Music Box: The Piano Teacher (blistering), Comedy of Power (diabolical), Copacabana (atypically comic), and White Material (unmissable).  Whether Huppert herself will alight for the occasion was not clear, but a girl can dream.

Miss Julie, despite being an Irish-set and substantially Irish-funded production, also commences in its way CIFF 2014's spotlight on Scandinavian cinema, which encompasses among many other films Ruben Östlund's festival smash Force Majeure, which I couldn't get into in Toronto; Norway's 1001 Grams, already submitted for Oscar consideration; Sweden's The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which at least gave Roy Andersson some competition in the race for memorable film titling; encore screenings of Breaking the Waves and Fanny and Alexander; a portmanteau of recent Nordic short films; and Iceland's Of Horses and Men, already a cult favorite, with an indelible poster and this IMDb logline: A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with immense consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception. You can bet I'm skipping the one-night-only screening of Birdman to be there.

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Labels: Chicago, Documentary, Festivals, International, Isabelle Huppert, LGBT, Liv Ullmann, Oliver Stone

This is the last stop for The Fifties. Thanks to everyone who read and commented, especially after I've been out of commission for so long, and don't be shy if you didn't! Thanks also to Tim Robey and Joe Reid who published their own versions of this feature in recent weeks. I haven't revisited their lists while I was posting my own, so as not to pilfer ideas, but they're great and distinctive run-downs.

Speaking of pilfering, I've decided to nick the Academy's new practice of having a flexible concertina for the number of Best Picture nominees, instilling the cutoff point where I feel it naturally falls, between 5 and 10. And so:



Best Picture
Beasts of the Southern Wild, for plunging into the kind of mythographic storytelling we celebrate in our novels but often deny our movies, and for absolutely nailing it;

Damsels in Distress, for returning from long absence and from diminishing returns of two prior movies with his warmest, most eccentric film, still very much his;

In the Family, for proving that low-budget regional films, the kind that get affirmative-actioned into lots of local festivals, can outrun much bigger dogs;

Magic Mike, for being not quite the movie advertised or expected, and being funnier, more incisive, more ambitious, and more heterogeneous than that one;

Miss Bala, for having the formal and technical wherewithal to tell a story of brute social machines with apt stylistic determinism, and for nailing it;

The Snowtown Murders, for being such a complete package I've cited it in every category, and for earning the immersion in sordidness that gives me qualms about it; and

The Turin Horse, for telling an overtly apocalyptic story, detailing a quotidian existence with uncommon texture, and asking if the latter entails the former.

Honorable mentions are honorable but don't feel mentionable: I graded A Simple Life the same as some of these nominees, but its staying power and degree of difficulty rank slightly below those of the movies I've listed; the same is even truer of Corpo Celeste. The only movie that's truly tempting to sub in here is 21 Jump Street, which only seems more eclectically, amiably, berzerkly accomplished on second viewing, and is such a welcome surprise inside such an empty-looking gift horse. Expect at least a re-grade.




Best Director
Justin Kurzel for The Snowtown Murders, for mastery of craft that still avoids an airless film-school feeling, and ratcheting up confrontational material without going for prurience;

Gerardo Naranjo for Miss Bala, for achieving deep, taut frames even as he plays menacingly with their borders, moves the camera brilliantly, and stays focused on the story;

Steven Soderbergh for Magic Mike, for his great, distinctive strength of immersing us in his characters while also subtly dramatizing his actors' relations to their characters;

Béla Tarr for The Turin Horse, for beating even Haneke at sustaining bleak preoccupations without just parodying himself, treating humanity seriously as a guttering flame; and

Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild, for having such temerity, working with kids and water and magical realism and a raw nerve of recent cultural memory, and making it all click.

Honorable mentions include Patrick Wang for In the Family, Whit Stillman for Damsels in Distress, Ann Hui for A Simple Life, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for 21 Jump Street, for all the reasons listed above. Benoît Jacquot and Tony Gilroy adroitly manage two forms of palace intrigue for two different eras, diffusing unease across memorable characters in Farewell, My Queen and The Bourne Legacy.  And Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) once again make me excited that they are alive and making tough, inimitable movies, even if I'll be more excited when they don't insert themselves quite so fussily between their images and their spectators.

Labels: Australia/NZ, Béla Tarr, Best Director, Best Picture, Fifties, International, LGBT, Mexico, Steven Soderbergh

I'm posting this entry as a place to leave comments about The Sacrifice, a film I suspect many of you have seen. My review is posted here, as is another review of Ménage (Tenue de soirée), a polyamorous French farce with lots of nasty edges. Michel Blanc scooped up half of the Best Actor gong for Ménage, and The Sacrifice made off with prizes from the Ecumenical Jury and the International Critics, a special citation for Sven Nykvist's majestic cinematography, and the Grand Jury Prize that is colloquially known as the runner-up prize for the Palme. These are key films for this year's festival, and whether or not you've seen the films recently, or even at all, I hope you'll enjoy the pieces and/or track down the movies. I'd love to hear what you think.

Enjoy the weekend, and with any luck, Tarkovsky aside, the world won't end yet! Though the ads for Zookeeper do make you wonder...

Labels: Andrei Tarkovsky, Cannes, Cannes 86, France, International, LGBT, Queer Cinema, Reviews, Russia/USSR

I'm not even sure if "Spirit Day" is the official name for today's outpouring of mourning for the five recent and highly publicized suicides by LGBT youth, all of them tormented by homophobic bullying and very public persecution. But somehow, in the lavender ether of the internet, I have gleaned that we are all meant to wear purple today, and tint our cyberimages purple, to let people know that we care. This, I am only too happy to do, but since fiddling with the "Color Balance" feature on a piece of graphics software so old you would laugh if I named it doesn't quite feel like enough, allow me just to add –

I am extremely fortunate to say that I was never bullied, much less violently, for any aspect of how people read my sex, gender, or sexuality, even though I know there were people reading me as gay before I did. Watching some of the testimonies on the "It Gets Better" Page on YouTube only reinforces how lucky I am in this respect. And I was hardly mainstreaming my gender or opting for deep cover during those years, not least because I wouldn't really have known what I was "covering." I effused about actresses as much then as I do now. I walked down the hallways of school belting Whitney like an idiot. I sucked at sports and wrote a lot of (bad) poetry. My groups of friends were almost exclusively female. A 9th-grade English teacher caught me craning my neck during That Scene of the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. You know, while he walks to the window. My 11th-grade English teacher gave me stern, somewhat bemused, but understanding looks whenever she saw me gazing like a fool at the back of the head of the very cute and charming guy who sat in front of me. That same year, in a high-school pageant for which I was voted to participate—catapulted unexpectedly into this popularity contest on a surge of Nerd Voting (nerds unite!), at the controversial expense of some of the jocks who actively campaigned for this annual event—I offered, for my talent portion, a full-on drag routine to Boy George singing "The Crying Game." The castle walls of heterosexuality did not exactly quake in the face of my routine. Sometimes we queers, especially the white, male, middle-class ones, can get a little precious about thinking that every sissy or saucy thing we ever did struck a giant blow for The Cause. Still, I wouldn't say it was the safe option. I wonder if anyone I went to high school with, including me, even knew what a drag show was in 1994, and I am baffled that I went ahead with it, not knowing at all how people would react. I just couldn't think of anything else to perform and thought it would be fun.

I have to say, at risk of flaunting my good fortune, all those varsity football guys and Prom King types I was suddenly thrust into company with were nothing but nice and jovial and back-slappy during our rehearsals, while I learned to walk in heels and they practiced whatever skits they'd worked up. (The only one I remember concerned sleeping with a girl and drinking a six-pack of beer, and I guarantee my 16-year-old self found his routine at least as alien as he probably found my wig and rhinestone clip-ons.) I add this detail for three reasons. One is that I sometimes want to reach out to the LGBT kids who actually enjoyed high school and say that that's okay, too—just recognize, as I did and do, your incredible good fortune! Another is to say that there are lots of kind people in the world, many of them wearing football jerseys and revering Animal House like a religious scroll. Struggling gay kids should know that it's not only from other LGBT folks that they'll eventually receive friendship and support, no matter what their present antagonists look like. Don't let the bullies or haters currently in your midst mislead you into forming your own sense of entire categories of people who are never to be trusted. Maybe I'm also addressing some other kids, too, with these comments: I know from experience that you can be the captain of the football team or voted Best Looking in the yearbook or be devout in your faith and even be uncomfortable with some of the things in your world without being a jerk, much less a hooligan or an oppressor. There are a million ways to be Homecoming Queen or Big Man on Campus or a hero to your buddies or a member of your church, just like there are a million ways to be gay. Let's everyone try to avoid the small fraction of ways to be any of these things that turn you into a bully or a snob or a bigot or a creep.

Most importantly, though, I'm trying to say this: as much as I marvel at all the LGBT role models and Gay-Straight Alliances and out activists and queer entertainment options and pre-college romantic relationships that exist for today's queer high schoolers—and which I absolutely didn't have, and of which people older than I am had even fewer—my heart sometimes goes out to today's LGBT youth for, ironically, these same reasons. The increased visibility of gays, lesbians, and transgenders, and the chance to identify yourself or identify others at very young ages within those terms, can have a really vicious kickback. I wonder if I would have had a harder time in high school if more of my peers had really been thinking all that much about homosexuality, and whether they were "for" or "against" it, and who in their vicinity might have stuck out as a tempting emblem, or a scapegoat. I'm speaking to my age bracket and older right here: sometimes it's easy for us 100-year-old queens to think today's young-duckling queers have got it made, at least by comparison. We need to remember how hard it is (and I'm reminding myself here, too) to come out and fit in even if you're not surrounded by overt aggression. And we also need to know that with all these new privileges have come lots of new pressures, and some people get swatted by the pressures without enjoying any access at all to the privileges.

I know of one other guy and one girl from my senior class who have come out since I graduated high school in 1995, in a cohort of nearly 400 students. There must be more, but since I don't go to reunions, I don't know. On both occasions I have learned about classmates who have come out (one of them a very good friend, with whom I'm barely now in touch), I have felt a huge wave of surprise, which is crazy. I should be surprised that I only know of two! But for me to be this taken aback, even now, only signals how not on the radar non-straight sexualities were for most of my high-school classmates. That probably caused some suffering for people who felt totally lonely, totally unrecognized, totally lacking in a vocabulary or a context for their own feelings. But at the same time, few people were walking around with a police-lamp looking for a gay kid or a butch or a flamer to antagonize. Whether because of the time or the place or the people, there just wasn't nearly as much of this happening as I gather there was and is in so many other high schools... though I don't mean to imply there was none. Our lesbian gym teacher, who was absent from school the day of a major LGBT Rights rally in nearby Washington, got hit with some gross epithets, sometimes to her face. A handsome guy and National Honor Society member whom I literally never met was transferred out of our school during sophomore year by his parents, because someone had written an article in an underground newspaper calling him a "cocksucker," and, from what I gather, offering highly ornate verbal portraits of him engaged in this felonious pastime.

But here I'm writing about myself and my experiences when I meant to write more directly to you, imaginary lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgendered reader—or to any imaginary reader, anyone who wants to know what you or someone you know might be feeling as they advance into a sense of sexuality that is awfully hard to know how to manage, at least at first, even without the additional and vicious threats of bullies and hate-mongers. And in that category, I am tempted to include anyone from teachers to parents to community leaders to school administrators to politicians who won't say or do anything about acts of violence or intimidation transpiring in their midst. Sometimes the bullying is internal, and I urge you so strongly against this: the last enemy anyone needs is themselves, not least because they're the hardest enemies to get away from. I am trying to be honest enough to say how strongly I empathize with you and how often I think about you even though I didn't exactly walk in the same shoes as all of you—not even when I was wearing high-heeled pumps and fishnets in front of the whole school and tossing my lollipop into the audience. I've been through plenty, have seen a lot more, and have read and heard about still more than that. I worked for three years as a hotline counselor. I can understand the feelings and the pressures, though if one of you bullied lesbians or transgenders or gay kids were to say to me, "You can't really know without having gone through what I go through," I would respect you enough to say yes, you are right, and ask you to tell me what it's like for you.

The official rallying cry this week has been "It Gets Better!" and I'm of two minds about this. Part of me wants to say, it does and it doesn't. Mostly it does, but it's not always a consistent upswing, and in general it really depends on almost everything that life always depends on. More LGBT visibility, politics, and action means more power and more peers and more love for you, which counts for a lot. But in some cases they unwittingly entail more pressures and more danger. As a certain image of homosexuality (often white, often male, almost always upper- or middle-class) becomes more "normal" anywhere in this country, there's usually some other group, even some populace within the LGBTQ umbrella, who gets stigmatized with new fervor as the bad queers, or the people it's safer to pick on, or to try to silence.

Some queers need hope, some need love, some need power, some need a job, some need medicine, some need basic acknowledgment from fellow queers. Lots of people need all of these things. I read last week that one in three black men who has sex with other men in Washington, DC, is statistically likely to be HIV-positive. If that's the community you're already in or growing into (and I wish we all felt it to be part of our whole community, to at least some broad degree), then that is a really, really tough row to hoe. You might not give a damn about Brokeback Mountain or the right to get married. My purple-tinted Profile Picture, or anyone's, is unlikely to count for anything, especially if you never see them.

I wonder what Tyler Clementi needed to hear after he found out what his roommate had done, found out in what way his privacy had been exposed to the world. I wonder if any of what I'm saying today, or what anyone is saying today, would have assuaged him in what was surely a moment of profound mortification. It's so crucial that we reach out to LGBTQ kids, but I hope we think of ways to reach out pre-emptively, too, to the people who are most at risk of becoming their antagonists and attackers. (Sadly, Rutgers was in the middle of trying to do just that, in the week that Tyler died.)

Then again, the fact that the media now reports these kinds of news, ideas, and terrible tragedies, and that I can openly post a blog entry about it, and I can expect sympathetic readers to take note of them and think about them and maybe even respond—that's huge. Life is tough, and it's tough in different ways—sometimes more difficult ways—if you're transgendered, or bisexual, or gay, or intersexed, or lesbian. But to have a partner, a circle of friends, a circle of co-workers every single one of whom knows I'm not straight, a Web-based network of people I read and admire, and a country that's as far along as it is in respecting its LGBTQ citizens, though not nearly far enough: all of that constitutes a tremendous gift in my life that I didn't know I would have when I was younger. I bitch plenty with my friends, gay and straight alike, about everything I just mentioned, but I've got the friends, and I've got the life. Clearly, a lot of LGBT kids need to hear that, and to know that it's much closer to being within their grasp than they might think. It's a climactic refrain in my and everybody's favorite gay play, Angels in America: "More life."

And there's the catch. There's the reason why, despite my concern that "It Gets Better!" could unwittingly conceal some of what might be tricky or hard about your burgeoning queer adulthood, I nonetheless enthusiastically agree: It does get better. Even if it was never that bad, it still gets better! I am so blessed that I never thought there was anything wrong with me for being bi or gay, and that even settling on one of those terms doesn't even feel important to me now, when I once thought my whole world hung in that very balance. I didn't assume I would be unhappy, but what I didn't know is that being gay (the easiest shorthand) would become one of the very sources of my happiness. Even at my most optimistic, near the end of high school or in college, even as I accepted that I wasn't straight and refused to give myself a hard time about that, I think I instinctively felt it would be a hardship I would manage—a fair burden for a life that frankly hadn't been saddled with all that many, like having a disability so slight that some people wouldn't even notice it, or having a latent health condition that wouldn't flare up if I were responsible about monitoring it. That's probably what I thought, and it's so off the mark of what has actually happened. Being queer is an absolute source of joy to me.

I thought when I was really young, that if I were gay, as I secretly secretly secretly suspected I might be, I would still be okay, but I might not ever meet another person like me. Do kids today, after Ellen and Will & Grace and Glee, still worry about that? Not only do I know more LGBTQ people than I can count, I find them to be, on the average, remarkably generous people, open-minded about all kinds of things. "We" are not any one way—I'm talking about a huge swath of people here, thank goodness—but on the whole, the kind of thoughtfulness, humor, compassion, self-reflection, and principled living I see among my LGBT friends and acquaintances sets a hugely high standard that I love aspiring to. Coming to grips with yourself is tough, especially if you're simultaneously dealing with hostility from the outside or the inside or both. However, it's also a way to find out who you are, and to grow up into an adult with a clear, sturdy self-identity. Like anything that's tough at the start, it eventually makes you stronger. Like anything you have to put some work into, the fruits of your labor get repaid twofold, at least.

If you're young and stigmatized, bullied, suspected, jeered, unprotected, or unloved, you probably feel a huge, huge weight on your shoulders, your back, your heart. It can feel like no one will ever take it off of you. And then you meet huge groups of people, and you really, finally, fully meet yourself, and with all of those people putting their two hands under the weight, it gets lightened, maybe even lifted off entirely. Sometimes this can even feel bizarrely easy, if only compared to what you might have expected. Though I spend a lot less time at the gym than some of The Gays (read: no time at all), I do understand the principle: working against a weight endows you with muscle. You have to break that muscle down in order to build it back up, stronger and tougher and more resilient than before. It gets bigger. It gets more flexible. It can more easily lend its power and support to someone else. It gets better.

Labels: LGBT, Soapbox

I've mostly been staying off the political soapbox on this blog, but on a day when one hugely exciting political breakthrough hits simultaneously with an announcement of yet another legal-political insult to gays, lesbians, and other queer-identified folks—reminding me of just how it felt last November when the nation's giant step forward in the Oval Office was accompanied and (understandably) overwhelmed in the news cycle by a statewide referendum against the legal personhood of LGBTs... I don't know that I have anything to say about it so much as I just feel like sighing. Publicly.

Once you've caught your breath and feel able to do something more productive than sighing, especially if you live in New York state and can fairly expect your legislators to listen to you, consider reading up on the Empire State Pride Agenda's efforts to pass marriage-equality statutes in New York, and think about donating just a little to the cause. Or, if you're a non-New Yorker, the Human Rights Campaign is still going strong with its national push on this issue, but they can always, of course, use your help. One dislikes the feeling of paying into a campaign for rights that should automatically, equally, and freely accrue to the full citizenry... but hey, one also dislikes sitting back and fuming at the computer without putting some money where your blog is. Scrape it together, people.

Labels: LGBT, Soapbox