Sibel Kekilli tries to stop Birol Ünel’s bleeding in Head On
I could take this opportunity to mention that, being a consummate fuddy-duddy, I’ve never understood why people get so excited about ringing in the new year — they do realize that nothing has changed and they’re all still going to die, don’t they? — but instead I’ll just be nice and brief and wish you all a happy New Year and remind you not to drink and drive.
Oh, and none of you plan on wearing ridiculous party hats and holding noisemakers like you’re little kids at a backyard birthday party tonight, do you? You’re adults now; it’s time to worry a little less about being loud and having fun and a little more about nuclear proliferation and global water shortages and Israel’s uncertain future.
My greatest New Year’s Eve to date was spent watching Fatih Akin’s Head On, a Turkish-German movie that makes you want to kill yourself (in the best possible way, of course) for two hours. It leaves you as bruised and battered and emotionally depleted as its lonely, displaced protagonists, and when it’s over you’ll feel more like jamming your hands in your pockets and going for a long walk by yourself than clanging pots and pans and setting off fireworks. I wish my neighbors would watch it tonight; maybe then they wouldn’t be so goddamn annoying at the stroke of midnight.
How did Holly Hunter win the Best Actress Oscar over Angela Bassett in 1993? It’s not that I’m surprised the Academy made the wrong decision, because the Academy makes the wrong decisions all the time. It’s more that I’m surprised they’d collectively risk pissing Bassett off. Because, well, look at those arms. One shot of her in a skimpy dress in What’s Love Got to Do With It tells the story, and the story is this: Angela Bassett is unlike Chuck Norris in that she’s a gifted actor, but very much like Chuck Norris in that she could kill you with her bare hands.
(And, frankly, I wouldn’t mind her killing me with her bare hands, but that’s a private matter I’d rather not discuss in front of any strangers who might find this while Googling some horrible combination of either Holly Hunter or Angela Bassett and “fucking” and Chuck Norris. The Internet is full of freaks, and I’ll have enough of those to contend with next week when I get together with my family for Hanukkah.)
The title of this post is, of course, a quote from Hamlet. I think the whole thing goes:
Parades or killer fetuses, that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The murderous unborn in films produced by Roger Corman,
Or to watch a giant inflatable Snoopy take over the streets of New York
Both are almost equally pointless, and will make you want to die, to sleep.
william crankspeare
(That last part might be off by a few words. It’s been a while since I last read Hamlet.)
Yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the United States, and it’s a day that’s always been “meh” for me, perhaps because I don’t like turkey or football — or maybe because I don’t need to be reminded to be thankful for all the good things in my life.
For me, Thanksgiving means there are marathons of horrible shows on cable all day and there’s no mail service. Is that really worth celebrating? Then there’s the family togetherness concept, which always sounds so warm and fuzzy in theory and ends up being more like a bad Fassbinder film in practice, but without the very things that make bad Fassbinder films bearable: English subtitles and sodomy. (Oh, and without the Hanna Schygulla. Can’t forget the Hanna Schygulla.)
My Pacino cop of choice — one who doesn’t kill gay people.
I threw in the “sorta” because, let’s be honest, a lot of this brief interview Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir conducted with Boys in the Band director William Friedkin is simply O’Hehir (also known as O’Hewho, because Stephanie Zacharek is the only Salon critic anyone reads now that Charles Taylor is gone) kissing Friedkin’s ass.
O’Hehir, I’ll admit, lost me before the interview even started, when he referred to Cruising, Friedkin’s second cinematic run-in with the gays, as a “powerful, intriguing and unfairly demonized picture.” Once he gets going with Friedkin, he adds, “Cruising is also out on DVD now, and also ripe for reappraisal.”
Except for the part where there’s nothing to reappraise. Cruising, which presents gayness as a deadly virus that is sexually transmitted from one cock-crazed leather enthusiast to another (Ed Gonzalez called it “an AIDS metaphor ahead of its time, except in this heterosexual fantasy of the gay world, every gay man gets it”), is a movie that only Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson could love.
That Friedkin is a skilled director does not make Cruising any less vile now than it was 28 years ago, and to call it unfairly demonized is a bit like suggesting that Gordon Willis’ Windows — the one about the psychotic lesbian who, lacking a penis of her own, hires a man to rape the woman she’s obsessed with — was misunderstood and deserves a second, more open-minded look. As the gay critic David Ehrenstein opined in a 1995 article aboutCruising: “This is a horror film. And we are the monster.” Time has not, and cannot, change that.
Now, had O’Hehir called Jade unfairly maligned and questioned whether it might be a classic on par with The French Connection and The Exorcist, that would’ve been a whole different kettle of fish…
Because I feel bad about not posting anything today (in addition to not posting anything of substance yesterday, or practically any day since starting this blog), here’s a picture of a monkey crashing a party in the old Warner Brothers comedy Lady Killer.
Isn’t that awesome? The movie, one of five starring James Cagney to be released in 1933, would be pretty humdrum if not for the monkeys gone wild scene (in which Cagney adds a little too much life to Margaret Lindsay’s birthday bash with the help of a barrelful of monkeys) and the blink-and-you-miss-it kiss a naughty Cagney plants on Mae Clarke’s breast.
Part of the problem is the lack of chemistry between Cagney and Lindsay, who’d have made a more believable pair as platonic friends whose heads were both turned by Clarke. What I’m trying to say — read this next part in the voice of that office slut character Cheri Oteri played on Saturday Night Live — what I’m trying to say is that Margaret Lindsay was a giant lesbian. Like Cagney and Lacey rolled into one, if you’re looking to quantify it. I’ll grant you she wore a dress better than Hope Emerson or Marjorie Main, but she couldn’t have seemed less interested in James Cagney in Lady Killer if he’d been wearing a giant sign that said “Get Your Herpes Here.”
“Tell Godard I’d love to work with him but I have a prior engagement.”
From a Haaretz interview with actress Jeanne Moreau in support of her latest film, One Day You’ll Understand, a partial list of directors she has worked with in the almost 60 years she has been making movies:Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Louis Malle, Jacques Demy, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Amos Gitai.
No Michael Bays (though she has worked with Luc Besson) or Ron Howards or anything of the sort. It’s enough to send a thrill up your leg, as Chris Matthews might say.
Movie buffs, it’s time to get this week’s Netflix queue in order if you haven’t already, because Paramount will release William Friedkin’s gay “classic” (in quotes because your mileage may vary) The Boys in the Band on DVD Tuesday.
Love it or hate it — and I know a few of you hate it — it’s a milestone movie, it’s a part of our history, and it should have been released on DVD, complete with documentaries and audio commentaries, years ago.
I’m not much of a Mart Crowley fan, but I look forward to seeing if Paramount was able to clean up the film’s image quality and checking out all the special features. Until the Criterion edition of Chungking Express comes out later this month, it’s the most exciting DVD arrival of November.
For a blast from the past, you can read what the Times had to say about The Boys in the Band in March of 1970.
So I was minding my business, lifting some lead off the roof of the Holy Name church* looking for information about an old Sidney Lumet film at IMDb (I know how to have fun on a Friday night), when I decided to skim today’s WENN offerings. That’s how I came across this odd little blurb about Elizabeth Banks banning her in-laws from seeing her latest movie:
Elizabeth Banks has banned her husband’s parents from watching her strip in saucy new movie Zack And Miri Make A Porno.
The actress jumps into bed with pal Seth Rogen to make a sex tape for cash in the Kevin Smith comedy.
And Banks hates the idea of her in-laws watching her have sex with anyone other than her spouse of five years, Max Handelman.
Am I going crazy or is that last sentence rather disturbing? The piece goes on to quote Banks in a way that kind of explains the wording, but that doesn’t mean my face hasn’t been frozen in horror for the last five minutes anyway.
* Damn that Morrissey. Once he gets in your head he’s there all day.
Dennis Lim talks to one of my favorite actors, Elliott Gould, in today’s New York Times, and reading the article made me not-so-cranky for a few minutes. Then I remembered that Robert Altman and Ingmar Bergman are dead, that most teenagers couldn’t pick Elliott Gould out of a lineup, and that Little Murders and California Split are currently out-of-print on DVD.
Little Murders isn’t a movie you have to see before you die, but California Split is essential viewing for anyone who loves Gould, who loves Altman, who loves George Segal, who loves not being someone who hasn’t seen California Split, and so on. Just like that, the crankiness started to return. I might have to re-read J. Hoberman’s 2007 profile of Gould later to keep from feeling too despondent.
“Why didn’t we read the screenplay before we signed the contract?”
A hundred thousand years ago, when I was a half-closeted high school student, I went to the bookstore with my dad and saw a copy of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet wedged on a shelf in the movie section.
The store didn’t have the greatest selection of books about movies: there were a lot of those short, fat video guides with entries that are only a sentence or two long; slender volumes that promised to help you become the next Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez (one written by Rodriguez himself); the obligatory Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert collections, and that was about it.* I’d heard of The Celluloid Closet, mostly because of the documentary it inspired, and the book’s cover image of Louise Brooks and Alice Roberts dancing in Pandora’s Box called to me. I knew I had to read it.
It took a few months, but I finally acquired a copy off the Internet, and when it arrived I pored over it like a Talmudic scholar. Many of the movies Russo, an activist and film historian who died in 1990, savaged in the book weren’t available at my local video store. The ones he hated were the ones I wanted to see the most, just to know if they were really that bad.
The picture that accompanied a vitriolic description of a 1982 comedy called Partners was especially intriguing — it showed Ryan O’Neal and John Hurt bickering in the aisle of a grocery store. As far as images go, it was fairly benign. Could Partners really be that bad? Sure, O’Neal looked a bit ridiculous in his super-tight clothes, but there were countless stills in The Celluloid Closet that were more offensive: Ray Walston’s garish transvestite killer from Caprice, Michael Greer in The Gay Deceivers and a prison rape from Fortune and Men’s Eyes come to mind.
The text told a different story. Russo referred to the film as “insensitive to the point of slander” and drew quotes from a seemingly endless supply of negative reviews. (Rex Reed called it a “crime against humanity,” which he’d know a thing or two about following his involvement in Myra Breckinridge.) He was particularly fond of this assessment from Inquiry magazine critic Stephen Harvey:
“Picture this: A lot of Jews have been murdered and a gentile cop is teamed up with a Jewish cop who’s fixed his nose and changed his name and they go into this mysterious Jewish community and every Jew they find is pushy, foul-mouthed, vulgar, greasy, aggressive and a gold digger.”
When I read that Legend Films, in conjunction with Paramount, was set to release Partners on DVD last week, I couldn’t believe it. (The American DVD market is the damnedest thing: Only rarely can you find the Jacques Rivette or Shohei Imamura films you’re looking for, but a special anniversary edition of something like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is always just around the bend.) I’d managed to track down VHS copies of tripe ranging from By Design to A Different Story to the Gordon Willis freak show Windows, but I’d never nabbed a copy of Partners. It went straight to the top of my rental queue, and I finally watched it the other night.
Credited to La Cage aux Folles screenwriter Francis Veber, Partners had a sitcom-thin premise befitting its director, TV legend James Burrows (who, perhaps out of guilt, went on to direct all 194 episodes of Will & Grace). Hunky gay muscle models are being murdered in Los Angeles, and the police department dispatches two of their own, a womanizing sergeant (Ryan O’Neal) and a meek, closeted records clerk (John Hurt), to infiltrate the gay community in order to find the killer.
They’re given a purple Volkswagen Beetle and instructions to pose as a couple, an idea that repulses O’Neal but gradually appeals to Hurt, who enjoys his role as happy homemaker — he cooks, he cleans, he irons O’Neal’s underwear — even though his partner uses the word “faggot” so freely he makes Archie Bunker look like the executive director of GLAAD. O’Neal’s character is portrayed as a boor, but one we’re supposed to laugh at and root for.
Even after the obligatory scene of him experiencing homophobia at the hands of a fellow cop, he insults gay characters without giving it a second thought; it’s the kind of unfettered nastiness that strips the handful of scenes that feature O’Neal enjoying a life of quiet domesticity with Hurt of any charm they might have possessed. The Hurt character (or, as Russo put it, “John Hurt’s doe-eyed timid faggot”) is just as one-dimensional. Not only does he huff and brood when O’Neal’s girlfriends drop by, he’s depicted as too nelly to hold a gun without dropping it. Hurt does what he can to bring a measure of dignity to the role, but there’s no room for dignity in Partners.
After watching the film, I reread what Russo wrote about it more than 20 years ago. Back then, he called Partners, along with Making Love, Personal Best and Victor/Victoria,”too straight for gay audiences and much too gay for conservative straights.” I wonder if that would hold true today. If you remade Partners with Adam Sandler or Vince Vaughn in the O’Neal role, and Kevin James or Ben Stiller in Hurt’s, you might be looking at a $30 million opening weekend.
* There was also, if I might go completely off-topic for a moment, a single copy of Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies, a magisterially thick tome that listed for $35 and was out of my price range. Still, in my heart, that book belonged to me.
Each time we went shopping I’d check to see if it was still there, noting with disapproval every new spot of wear that appeared on its cover and spine, until one day it was gone and I rued the purchase of every $5 detective novel I bought that could’ve brought me that much closer to enjoying sentences like this favorite, from a review of Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein:
“The title may sound like a Jewish detergent, but nothing gets washed away in this unsatisfying French quasi-thriller, set in Paris in 1942, during the Occupation.” Oh, Pauline. You were such a fucking idiot sometimes when you reviewed gay-themed movies, but you always made it up to us when you really hated, or truly loved, something.
