So Unsexy It Hurts

Movies: Elles

Elles is a French film about a journalist, Anne (the lovely Juliette Binoche), who is working on an article about two young women who have sex for money. Anne, who is experiencing commonplace problems at home (ornery teen son, husband who works all the time, etc), becomes fascinated by these young ladies and their ability to sleep with men double and triple their ages who treat them like..er...whores...without losing all dignity.

Elles doesn't take a clear stance on anything that happens in it. The thesis seems to be: Marriage can be good, but also sometimes it's hard. And prostitution can be bad and scary, but not all the time and you make a lot of money doing it.

Mind. Blown.

Seriously, Elles seemed, to me, to say nothing new or interesting about women and men, sexuality, marriage, or sex as a commodity. And perhaps that drifting sort of ambivalence is exactly the point of the film...which is fine, except that it doesn't make for a very compelling movie-going experience.

Instead of an intriguing look at prostitution or marriage or whatever, Elles was an unpleasant 96 minutes of nothing much at all. In the grand tradition of NC-17 movies, it was terribly unsexy--at least to me. Again, maybe that's the point. The men that the two girls (Charlotte and Alicja) service are old, not very attractive, and like to do things you can't show in an R-rated movie. But none of that offended or shocked me. What did elicit a response from me were the men who were genuine predators and sadists. The man who interviews Alicja as a potential renter of his apartment asks, in the middle of the interview, to see her breasts. When she reacts with shock, he raises his eyebrows and says "Do you know how expensive apartments in Paris are?" UGH. Then there's the client who performs a sex act on Charlotte that she specifically forbids, against her will, and causes her to cry.

Not too pleasant. It takes a lot to offend me, but I really have trouble with sexual violence against women in movies--especially when it's treated like no big thang*. Hey man, what's a little anal rape between friends, right? After all, that chick's a whore, so she's asking for it, right? UGH.

I do have to credit Elles for having the guts to not take a cliched and easy stance on prostitution. This is no "hooker with a heart of gold finds redemption" movie. Neither is it a "all sex work is empowering all the time" movie. But just because Elles doesn't have a typical prostitution narrative doesn't mean it says anything unique or thought-provoking.

I don't know what the director intended to say with Elles. All I know is that the movie was boring and unpleasant. An unpleasant or challenging movie can be worth seeing if it is interesting, and a pleasant but boring film can be nice, brainless entertainment. But a boring AND unpleasant movie? Non merci! 


2.5 out of 5 stars

*Just to be clear: Boys Don't Cry, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Kill Bill, and any number of other movies do treat violence against women as if it's a big thang--something evil and disgusting and worth punishing. I would rather watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which features a brutal rape scene--but also Lisbeth Salander's revenge--than Elles, which feature a "milder" rape scene, but has zero commentary on that rape. Plus, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is boss.

Hold on to Your Butts!

Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park

This Memorial Day weekend, I revisited one of my first PG-13 movies and finally saw a childhood classic that I somehow missed seeing while growing up.

Raiders of the Lost Ark


Although I have distinct memories of the dinner table scene (monkey brains!) in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as well as the "walk of faith" Indy takes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I have no memories of the first in Indiana Jones series--Raiders of the Lost Ark. This oversight was remedied this weekend, when I had the chance to see a beautiful print of Raiders, complete with 5.1 surround sound.


Raiders is, in many ways, the perfect action-adventure movie. It's family-friendly, but still exciting and, at times, violent. The film combines history, mythology, and various eclectic locations (Nepal, Cairo, etc). Indiana Jones and his love interest, Marion Ravenwood, are well-rounded heroes--getting out of scrapes using strength, wit, intellect, drinking ability, weapons, and the ability to rely on and help each other. The film features something for everyone as well as something you don't see too often in action movies today: morality. While amoral anti-heroes are de rigueur in movies and television today (Walter White, anyone?), in Raiders of the Lost Ark, greed and evil are soundly punished (two words: face. melting.) while courage and perseverance are rewarded.

Despite good guys/bad guys dichotomy, Raiders of the Lost Ark is far from being fuddy-duddy or simple. It's an old-fashioned film in the sense of being a throwback to exciting action films of the 30's and 40's, but it honors those films while still remaining a unique experience in its own right. That, and it's just plain fun. While the movie didn't freak me out the way Indy's escape from the disgusting bug-infested booby-trap did in Temple of Doom, I felt that I was not too old to appreciate Raiders of the Lost Ark with childlike excitement.

4 out of 5 stars

Jurassic Park


The same day I saw Raiders, I was able to revisit a movie that I vividly remember watching as a kid. Jurassic Park was one of the first PG-13 movies I saw and it scared the hell out of me--especially the infamous Raptor scene.

I watched Jurassic Park in a sold-out theatre at midnight and, damn, was it a great movie-going experience. Unlike Raiders, the theatre had a vintage (read: crappy) print of Jurassic Park that actually broke twice, abruptly stopping the film twice. Instead of reacting with annoyance and anger, the audience chatted and laughed until the movie came back on. There was a sense of camaraderie and fun. The audience cheered at T-Rex attacks and booed when one of the best lines in the film got cut short: when Samuel L. Jackson famously says at one point "Hold on to your butts!" A previous owner of the film decided to clip out "butts" for themselves, causing Jackson to say "Hold on to your...". Luckily, the audience was clued in beforehand, and was well prepared to yell out, in unison, "BUTTS!" to help Jackson complete his line.


Surprisingly, I found myself still terrified at certain points during the movie: particularly during the first T-Rex attack--you know, the one where the T-Rex eats the guy while he's sitting on a toilet. Scary stuff. I was also surprised that the special effects still looked pretty fresh. Jurassic Park is almost 20 years old, but the dinosaurs still look very modern and realistic (as realistic as one could expect resurrected dinos to look). I still got a kick out of Jeff Goldblum's affected, cool guy performance. He reminded me a lot of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark (or, well, as Robert Downey Jr. himself).

While I may not have been interested in revisiting Jurassic Park on my own tiny TV by myself, seeing it on the big screen with a group of enthusiastic midnight movie-goers was awesome and well worth it. My only two regrets are that I had to leave early (I was getting sleepy and was afraid of nodding off while driving) and that I did not get to hear Mr. Jackson say, loud and proud, "butts!"

4 out of 5 stars

Love in the Time Before Antidepressants

Movies: The Deep Blue Sea

The last thing you want in a movie about a forbidden love affair is for that affair to lack mutual passion. The second to last thing you want in a movie about a forbidden love affair is for your main characters to be unsympathetic, cruel, and weak. Terrance Davies' The Deep Blue Sea unfortunately hits both of these benchmarks.

The Deep Blue Sea takes place in post-WWII England. Rachel Weisz plays Hester, a glamorous woman married to a much older man. Hester becomes involved with Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), a young, handsome Royal Air Force pilot whose glory days are behind him and who now spends his time playing golf and carousing in bars.


Unlike in Brief Encounter and The End of the Affair--two other tales of extramarital affairs in post-WWII Britain--The Deep Blue Sea's lovers are very mismatched emotionally. Hester is obsessed with Freddie in a self-destructive way, whereas Freddie is just having a bit of fun. Normally, one would sympathize with Hester, who is potentially throwing more away by shacking up with Freddie and is in a position of weakness and vulnerability in both her marriage and her affair. But Hester, who is suicidal (no spoiler here--her suicide attempt takes place in the first scene of the movie), is difficult to sympathize with. She looks to Freddie, a man she knows will never love her as she loves him, to fill a gaping void in her life. She turns to melodrama in order to get Freddie's attention, which pushes him away all the more. She is dismissive of her husband who, although older than her and bit of a bore, seems like a decent man.

One could argue that this isn't a film about a love affair at all, but about the lack of choices people (women especially) had in 1950's England. Reputations mattered back then in a way they do not matter now. If Hester had been born a few decades later, she could fill the void in her life with work, travel, sex, etc. Another option Hester would have if she were a 21st century woman is modern medicine. It's hard not to look at Hester's depression and suicide attempts through a modern lens: some Zoloft and talk therapy would do wonders for this woman.

But this is the 1950's and Hester must find other ways to alleviate the hollowness in her soul. Unfortunately, she picks a cad and clings to him for dear life. And of course, he has no interest in playing her savior.

The Deep Blue Sea has some powerful moments--namely, a flashback to a group of Londoners crowded together in a subway station while bombs blast away outside. One man sings a traditional song, "Molly Malone", in a beautiful voice, as the camera scans the scared faces of all the strangers who have come together in the face of violence and war. That 5 minute scene contains more beauty and emotion than the rest of the film put together. The Deep Blue Sea has the potential to be a melancholy meditation of adultery; instead it was a very slow and boring film with characters I didn't care about or actively disliked.

2.5 out of 5 stars

A Smorgasbord of Movies

Movies: Take Shelter, The French Connection, The Avengers, Yellow Submarine, The Wicker Man, The Devil Rides Out, The Vampire Lovers, Possession

The time has come again where I've watched more movies than I am able to review in a timely manner. Below, I provide short synopses of the movies I've watched in the past couple weeks, including the best and worst aspects of each one.

Take Shelter


Plot: A blue collar family man (Michael Shannon) in rural Ohio has recurring nightmares about a devastating storm. He becomes obsessed with building a storm shelter in his backyard. But is he really having premonitions, or is he exhibiting signs of serious mental illness? And will his obsessions drive his family and friends away from him?

Best aspects: Michael Shannon's performance as Curtis, who is haunted by genuinely terrifying dreams, is astounding. The film is extremely tense and verges on horror, which I did not expect. This is a movie where you are guaranteed to be on the edge of your seat.


Worst aspects: Even though the ambiguous ending provides a pleasurable mystery, it's also frustrating. We're never given a definite answer to the mysteries of the film.

Verdict: An excellent drama/thriller with wonderful performances all around. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

The French Connection


Plot: Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider play a pair of cops who work for the Narcotics Bureau in New York City. The pair "go rogue" in an effort to bust a group of drug smugglers who receive a shipment of heroin from France.

Best aspects: The car chase sequences, particularly the one where Hackman races a hijacked train, are as thrilling as I had heard. Hackman's performance as the amoral Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle is classic.

Worst aspects: The plot was occasionally difficult to follow (especially the parts about the French criminals). Cop and action movies aren't my favorite genre, but I'm glad I saw this one on the big screen. If I saw it on TV, I would not have enjoyed it nearly as much.

Verdict: A gritty, heart-pounding cop movie with one of the greatest chase sequences ever filmed. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

The Avengers


Plot: A group of superheroes, including Iron Man, Captain America, and the Hulk, come together to fight Loki--a god from another planet who aims to steal an incredibly powerful energy source called the Tesseract.

Best aspects: Tony "Snark" Stark and the Hulk provide a lot of comic relief. The plot is relatively easy to follow even though I know almost nothing about the Marvel superheroes and their universe.

Worst aspects: Loki's background isn't explained very well, and I had pretty much no idea what the Tesseract was. It would have been helpful if I saw some of the superhero movies leading up to this one, particularly Thor.

Verdict: An enjoyable superhero film that I liked, but not nearly as much as X-Men: First Class or The Dark Night. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Yellow Submarine


Plot: An animated movie featuring the music of The Beatles. A man must save Pepperland from The Blue Meanies. He does so by traveling in a yellow submarine and picking up The Beatles for help.

Best aspects: The music (duh), especially "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds",  and "Eleanor Rigby".

Worst aspects: I'm not a fan of psychedelia, and the trippy animation just wasn't my thing. Also, it sucks that The Beatles didn't actually do the voices of their animated counterparts.

Verdict: As far as Beatles movies go, I'm more of A Hard Day's Night girl. My feelings about Yellow Submarine were similar to 2007's Across the Universe: great music, interesting visuals, but not a movie I'd watch over and over. 3 out of 5 stars.

The Wicker Man


Plot: A cop (Nicolas Cage) travels to a remote island to find a missing child. He ends up sucked into the ancient rites of the strange inhabitants of the island.

Best aspects: Making fun of Nic Cage's overwrought performance and the awful script.

Worst aspects: The entire movie. I have no idea how the actors were able to film this movie without dissolving into laughter at the terrible lines and wacky plot. Also, because I saw this on TV, they cut out the best scene: the bee helmet! "Not the bees! NOT THE BEES!!!"

Verdict: It's as bad as you've heard, but fun to mock. 2 out of 5 stars.

The Devil Rides Out


Plot: Christopher Lee plays an older man whose young friend, Simon, gets sucked into a devil worshipping cult led by Mocata, a man who uses mind control to attract followers.

Best aspects: The whole devil worshipping plot line is both scary and intellectual--the film is genuinely interesting in a Dan Brown kind of way. Also, Charles Gray (best known as the Narrator from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) plays the bad guy and is freakin' great at it.

Worst aspects: The awful makeup and special effects, including a giant tarantula sent to terrify Lee's character and his friends and a man in cheesy goat makeup representing Satan.

Verdict: A fun, kitschy horror movie that is surprisingly intriguing. 4 out of 5 stars.

The Vampire Lovers


Plot: A centuries old female vampire insinuates herself into the lives and homes of nubile young women and slowly drains their life force until they die.

Best aspects: I'm a straight girl, but I still have an appreciation for female beauty. The women in this movie are drop dead gorgeous (no pun intended), and the lesbian aspects of the movie give it a (tasteful) erotic kick.

Worst aspects: The lack of scares and bare bones plot (lesbian vampire kisses and kills young girls) makes the movie a lot less interesting than it could have been. As is, it amounts to soft-core porn.

Verdict: What you see is what you get: sexy young girls and their generous bosoms. Oh, and some vampire stuff too. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Possession


Plot: No, this isn't the Gwenyth Paltrow movie about the academics who fall in love. This Possession is a bizarre cult film about a marriage that falls apart and the horror and insanity that follow. It is a weird freaking movie that is (presumably) so personal to the filmmaker, that it is nearly impossible to find any meaning in it.

Best aspects: The scene where Isabelle Adjani freaks out in a subway station is pretty effective at visualizing the depths of despair and insanity. The absolutely no-holds-barred insanity of the movie is liberating in a way. You almost feel as if you, the viewer, are going crazy while watching it.


Worst aspects: Seeing Possession is one of the most unpleasant movie going experiences I've ever had. Not because the film is "bad" in the way that The Wicker Man is bad, but because it's so insane and unwatchable, with little to no ties to reality, that I didn't really get anything out of the movie. I just wanted it to be over.

Verdict: If you like weird/experimental/cult/batshit crazy movies, you might get something out of Possession. I have a high tolerance for weird, but I think I've found my limit in this film. I can't recommend it. 1.5 out of 5 stars.

Donuts, Dancing, and Damsels

Movie: Damsels in Distress

Damsels in Distress--director Whit Stillman's first film over a decade--is a delightfully odd film that struck me as a mixture of Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Jane Austen's Emma. The story takes place at the fictional liberal arts university "Seven Oaks", where three friends try to better their social and intellectual inferiors through "youth outreach" (attending frat parties to support the "morons" who reside there) and prevent student depression and suicide by providing coffee, donuts, soap, and dance lessons. The three girls, Violet, Heather, and Rose, speak in stilted, affected language. For example, Rose refers to slick men as "operators" instead of players. Their large vocabularies and quasi-philosophical discussions disguise a fair amount of social retardation and cluelessness. When the girls take transfer student Lily under their wing, they find themselves challenged by her normal way of looking at the world.

To me, the message of this movie is that underneath Violet, Rose, and Heather's (especially Violet, who is at the center of the story) lip service to charity and Christian kindness and generosity, these girls are run-of-the-mill self-absorbed, boy-obsessed college students. Violet claims to prefer to date homely, stupid men (and boy howdy, her boyfriend Frank is just about as dumb as a rock) because rather than aim for someone better than yourself and fail, it's wiser to aim for someone inferior to you and build them up to your level. This sounds incredibly narcissistic, yet when Frank cheats on Violet, she is heartbroken and lovelorn. Underneath that pretentious facade is a vulnerable young woman who, like many college-age young people, is in love with an idiot and in love with the drama of her own life. Or, as my boyfriend pointed out, Violet, Rose, and Heather like to date idiots because they are idiots, despite their verbose discussions.

Damsels in Distress is enjoyable for its weird and rambling humor, not for its plot or character development. In fact, there isn't much plot or character development at all. The film merely allows the viewer to drop in on these characters' lives for about a month or so: they gossip, date around a bit, and (very literally) tap dance their blues away. The end. The movie seems to be beyond any definite classification: it's quirky, but not in the overly self-aware way so many films are these days. It's not a teen sex comedy, a la American Pie, or a college movie like Animal House. It's about as far as you can get from a romantic comedy or love story. It's not really a drama either. It just exists on a plane all of its own. Hell, I'd go so far as to say that Damsels in Distress is a more unique movie-going experience than Tree of Life. And for this, I award the movie...

4 out of 5 stars

Creepy Crawlies

Movies: Spider Baby

A few years ago, I bought a used book titled Incredibly Strange Films, which collected interviews with directors of exploitation cinema and detailed plot outlines of movies featuring drug use, gore, and sexuality. One of the movies in the book was Spider Baby, so named for one of the characters in the movie: a young girl who is obsessed with spiders and likes to "play spider" by capturing and tying up her victims before stabbing them to death. I finally got to see this cult film and it is as bizarre as I thought it would be.

Spider Baby was directed by Jack Hill, a prolific filmmaker who also directed the Pam Grier vehicles Foxy Brown and Coffy, as well as the classic "women in prison" exploitation movies The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. This guy was no amateur and, despite the film's exploitative and ridiculous content, it has good production value and is actually very funny and entertaining.


Spider Baby is about the Merrye family, who suffer from a rare genetic disorder in which the victim begins to regress to a state of "pre-human savagery and cannibalism" as he or she ages. The Merrye patriarch is dead, leaving behind the three Merrye children: haughty Elizabeth, spider-obsessed Virginia, and childlike Ralph (played by horror veteran Sid Haig). All three are in various stages of regression. Their caretaker is the loyal family chauffeur, Bruno (played by Lon Chaney Jr.).

Bruno and the children's simple life of collecting bugs and murdering random mailmen is interrupted by a visit from some distant cousins of the Merrye family who have come to see if they can get a piece of the Merrye estate. Obviously, things don't end too well for the visitors. The movie climaxes during a darkly comic dinner scene in which roasted cat, mixed weeds, and slimy insects are served to the disbelieving guests.

Spider Baby is a gothic horror-comedy that is both inventive and silly. It manages to be in turns disturbing and cheesy. In other words, a perfect cult exploitation movie.

4 out of 5 stars

Love, Cuban Style

Movies: Chico and Rita

 Chico and Rita is a lovely little animated film for adults (there's sex, so don't take the kiddies) about two musicians who fall in love in pre-Revolution Cuba. Anyone who saw and enjoyed Julian Schnabel's wonderful film Before Night Falls, about the life of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, will probably see some similarities in Chico and Rita: star-crossed love, the difficulty and rewards of dedicating your life to art, and the tightrope walk of trying to make it in America after escaping a Communist regime.

One of the most poignant moments of Chico and Rita is when Rita, who becomes a successful singer in the United States (before the Civil Rights Movement), has a breakdown on stage while performing at a hotel. She tells the audience that although she is allowed to sing on stage, she is not allowed to stay at the hotel because of the color of her skin.


Despite the ever-present political commentary of the film, Chico and Rita is, at heart, a love story between two people brought together through music and kept apart by circumstance. That Chico and Rita's love lasts a lifetime, despite their decades of separation, was a little hard for me to buy, but the beauty of their ultimate reunion was worth suspending my disbelief.

3 out of 5 stars