Reviewing

Year: 2016

Director: Andrew Haigh

Cast: Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez, Murray Bartlett

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

I have a love-hate relationship with Looking, HBO’s gay slice-of-life dramedy series. While the low key atmosphere of the show has provided some of the network’s best material (season 1’s episode-long date focusing on just two cast members and season 2’s funeral are two masterpiece-level half hours), the ensemble is plagued by obnoxious characters (Agustín passed the torch to Patrick after season 1, but he’s still such a Samantha) and long stretches of aimlessness. And then I actually got paid to recap the second season on The Backlot, which tipped the scales a little more toward love.

Anyway, Looking conked its head on its low ratings and swiftly perished, but here’s the thing. HBO actually made good on its promise to conclude the series with a movie, which was greenlit in record time. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that the show’s executive producer who signed on to direct was indie darling Andrew Haigh, of the iconic gay film Weekend and last year’s Oscar-nominated 45 Years. At any rate, we got our movie.

I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, and I’m still not convinced that it really exists.

In Looking: The Movie, our lead character Patrick Murray (Jonathan Groff) returns to San Francisco after nine months. He left abruptly because he decided he needed some space to grow up a little (read: a lot) following a disastrous romantic entanglement with his taken boss Kevin (Russell Tovey) that threw a wrench into his blossoming relationship with the long-suffering Richie (Raúl Castillo), a perfect angel cursed to walk this blasted Earth. He’s in town for his friend Agustín’s wedding to Eddie (Daniel Franzese of f**king Mean Girls), which reunites him with friends Dom (Murray Bartlett), now running a successful chicken window, and Doris (Lauren Weedman), the sassy token straight lady, as well as… Richie and his alcoholic Social Justice Boyfriend, Brady (Chris Perfetti).

Cue lots of contemplative staring as Patrick navigates the weekend, having conversations about life, love, and how not to end up like your parents with a revolving door of old friends and new people he meets along the way. He claims to have learned a lot during his time away, and that he’s no longer such a self-centered neurotic.

But, who are we kidding, we know this is what’s going through his head any time somebody else talks about themselves.

Let’s get one thing out of the way real quick. This is hardly a movie. It’s a triple length season finale, and it does nothing to hide that fact. It would be impossible for a new viewer to zap this onto their screen from HBO Go and understand a single shred of what’s happening. It would be like starting Lost in the middle of that season where the island started time traveling for some reason. But is it a solid series finale? Of course it is.

Appropriately sending off this show that shied away from hyperbole at every turn, Looking: The Movie is neither the best of what the series had to offer nor the worst, though it skews firmly toward the “best” side. Typically plot-lite, it makes the most of its brief resurrection in terms of once again depicting the human experience in all its messy, sexy, disgusting glory. This could easily have been just another drab mumblecore movie about finding oneself and celebrating Doing My Own Thing in a vague, self-satisfied way. I mean, it IS about that, but it finds the human characters trapped in the amber of that particular subgenre.

Like Jack Nicholson in The Bucket List, Looking does a lot of things before it passes on, hitting the wall with every strand of philosophical spaghetti in the pot. It covers such a vast array of thoughts and feelings from a thirtysomething gay man that it’s almost dizzying, but from its immense specificity is born a universal truth. Every single person watching it, be they gay, straight, bi, old, young, drunk, whatever, will find something to latch onto in Looking. It’s a film that holds up a mirror to a black part of life that we’d rather not think about, but treats it with immense warmth and tenderness.

And all this is tucked inside a story with a protagonist so unstable, the film could literally at any moment smash cut to him having sex with whatever man, woman, plant, etc. he’s sharing the frame with at the time.

This movie would be nothing without its cast, though the side characters make much more impression than our main three friends. Patrick is still a bland cypher, Dom is given next to nothing to work with, and Agustín pulls something good out of his wedding jitters, but he’s stuck with the unenviable task of being the focal point for his friends’ hang-ups about relationships. The show has always had problems balancing its leads, and while they’re played well, this plot belongs to whiny ol’ Patrick as he greedily guzzles up the run time.

The true MVP here is, as always, the massively undervalued Lauren Weedman. Typically ignored because her character is only there to flavor a stew with too many carrots, Weedman once again effortlessly delivers an irresistible prickly charm that’s almost Bill Murray-ish while letting her stunted emotions and deep fear of happiness peep through the cracks. She’s marvelous, and while I wish she was given more chance to explore the range I know she’s capable of, she’s a satisfying, grounding presence here. Newcomer Tyne Daly (of Hello, My Name is Doris) is also superb, transforming a stock character (a city hall wedding officiant who bestows some Old Person Relationship Wisdom) into a three-dimensional, thoroughly relatable presence.

This deep understanding of what makes people tick courses through the film in even the smallest characters (save Brady, who contorts into a leering, one-note villain so we can root for Patrick, who proved in season 2 that he’s far from a worthy choice for Richie). This is perhaps best exemplified by Russell Tovey. He returns for only one scene, but it’s a doozy. The most unequivocal “bad person” in the series, here he throws everything out of whack with a subtly emotional performance that’s by far his best Looking work, bar none.

It’s telling that this part of the review is only discussing character, because that’s pretty much all Looking: The Movie has to offer as a piece of cinema. It’s still shackled to the small scale of television, even with a feature length run time. That’s not to say it’s not well put together. Quite the opposite. A scene in a club set to Perfume Genius’ melancholy ode to doomed romance “Hood” is one of the most indelible images Andrew Haigh has ever crafted. But Looking’s low budget and lower expectations hobble it a bit, preventing it from being more than just a very good TV farewell.

TL;DR: Looking: The Movie is a decent, satisfying finale for a show that had its share of problems.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1187

Out Of The Closet, Into The Fire

Year: 2014

Director: Ryan Murphy

Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Julia Roberts

Run Time: 2 hours 12 minutes

When Sergio first told me about wanting to see the HBO film The Normal Heart I thought "Oh yippee, another dreary gay movie about AIDS." You see, as a gay man it is always nice to see movies about people who think like you, act like you, whatever, instead of the boring heteronormative poobah you get everyday. But the use of AIDS has become such a tired trope that it has become a running joke that you can't watch a movie with LGBT characters without it becoming a tragedy.

So I was understandably wary. Especially considering that director and executive producer Ryan Murphy has a history of headlining ambitious but messy productions *cough* Glee *cough*. But The Normal Heart, a story of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980's based on a play of the same name by Larry Kramer, despite being almost exactly what one might expect in terms of frothy period drama, is also one of the most harrowing portrayals of the disease put onscreen to date.

This ain't no "straight man learns to love the queers" story like The Dallas Buyers Club or Philadelphia, nor is it a quasi-romanticized Bohemian art piece like Rent. The Normal Heart is a straight up medical horror film, depicting the queasy reality of life for gay men in the early years of the decade as they were being cut down in record numbers by a disease that nobody understood and struggling to find anybody willing to help them.

It's gonna be pretty hard to be funny in the captions on this one.

Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) is a gay reporter/activist who, along with several of his close friends, begins the Gay Men's Health Crisis organization to try to spread awareness and promote AIDS research after the death of his friend Craig (Jonathan Groff). With the help of the scrappy wheelchair-bound Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), he and the board of the organization work tirelessly to right the wrongs committed by the American government, who seem to be content simply allowing the gays to die in record numbers.

As more and more of his friends and acquaintances end up dead, Ned's anger grows until he is constantly lashing out at the establishment on the air and in person, always shouting, never pulling a punch where he can help it. He can't stand the inequality of a world where a plague that is killing hundreds of people can simply be ignored by their own leaders because they don't want to get their hands dirty with LGBT policy. Perhaps his approach is tiresome and alienating, but it is the exact response a crisis of this level deserves.

When he falls in love with the debonair LA Times reporter Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), he begins to soften until the fateful day that Felix begins showing symptoms. The film turns into a race against the clock as Ned pushes harder and harder for adequate research, drug importing, and social recognition in a world where dead gay men are given no autopsy and stuffed into garbage bags. He's shouting into a void, trying vainly to save everybody he loves from near total annihilation in the face of a new plague.

If that doesn't sound like a horror film, then you clearly haven't seen as many as I have (which, in all likelihood, is probably the case even if you agree). An alienated man with friends and loved ones dying all around him while people in positions of authority are either helpless or unwilling to give aid (pun absolutely not intended)? That could be any slasher movie. That could be any number of haunted house pictures. That IS Jaws.

Two scenes in particular, a wild beach party on Fire Island where Craig's healthy exterior begins to falter and a subway ride where a symptomatic Matt Bomer sees the impact of his condition, literalize that horror undercurrent in a strikingly obvious and resolutely impactful way through jarring editing and stunning cinematography, two of the most (and some of the only) visually impactful moments in a film that derives most of its power from dialogue and performance rather than framing and color.

Unless you count skin tone.

Ned is met with opposition from both sides. Hey, you try telling an entire population of gay men who have fought their entire lives for the right to be physical with one another that maybe they should cool it on the whole "having sex" thing for a while while we wait for funding.

I rarely stick with movies over two hours long, especially ones that depict the political process in as much detail as this one, but The Normal Heart has an edge on those other films. It is an absolutely true story, a mind-blowing outrage that 1) Happened just barely over a decade before I was born - that's pretty modern if you ask me and 2) Has gotten nowhere near the amount of press that it deserved.

Sure, people will say that it's sensationalist, that there's two sides to every story. Maybe some straight people wanted to help. Whoop dee doo. They didn't. Not really. And it's hard to ignore the importance of the gay side of the story in the HIV epidemic, but that is exactly what has been happening for decades.

Which is clearly a mistake because: fabulous.

The film itself is haphazard, but strong. Ryan Murphy tips his hand somewhat with a lengthy series of bombastic and on-the-nose Awards Bait speeches and those surreptitious shifts in character that he is so known for. And the film, especially toward the end, has very little in terms of narrative thrust or momentum. The film can be aimless in terms of storytelling more often than it hits the mark. But man, can Mr. Murphy wield an emotional sledgehammer.

The sheer tortuous reality of The Normal Heart is an emotional wringer, operated by winning performances from A-list actors. Julia Roberts and The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons especially bring the film an emotional core that shakes your bones and keeps you thinking about the film, even days later. And Mark Ruffalo is a fine actor who turns in a terrific performance, but he pales in comparison to the actually gay actors bringing their all around every corner - most of them, like Parsons and Bomer, drawing upon recent coming out experiences to fuel their rage and alienation.

Even the minor characters bring it all to the table. In fact I'd argue that the little known Danielle Ferland, who doesn't even have a picture on her IMDb page, turns in the most harrowing and committed performance in a cast full of tremendous talents turning it up to 11. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was crying in the car the morning after thinking about her scene. And I'm emotionally sturdy enough to handle LA traffic every day on my way to work.

I really should be getting an award for that.

The Normal Heart is an utterly necessary film for our generation and it's lucky enough to have a wide array of stars that will hopefully draw in viewers from a much broader demographic than it might have. It's inelegant and at times overwrought, but there is no denying the tremendous importance of bringing history to life in the most tactile, emotionally raw format imaginable. And not just for gay people. For everybody.

Because this fight isn't over. HIV transmission in America is still at epidemic rates and climbing. It doesn't get the press that it used to once people chilled out about the gay panic and focus shifted to Africa, but everybody - gay and straight - is putting themselves at risk because of lack of awareness. Gay men are still at highest risk of transmission because they are naturally exposed to the top tier of risky behaviors by default, but this is happening everywhere. A quarter of new infections are contracted by heterosexuals yearly and the CDC estimates that, if we don't get more careful now, over half of college aged gay men will have HIV by the time they are 50 and the risk to straights isn't much less terrifying.

Maybe this isn't what The Normal Heart set out to do, but the bleak, terrifying depiction of real life events should spur a new generation to learn the risks and how to prevent them. Living in the sheltered 21st century, it's easy to reduce the impact of what history teaches us, but the film hits a nerve, bringing the horrors of the past to today like no other.

We need to see it, both to learn the true story of the AIDS crisis and to prevent another from striking. To win a war, you have to start one. And that, hopefully, is exactly what The Normal Heart is going to accomplish.

TL;DR: The Normal Heart can be clunky at times but it is a harrowing and utterly necessary film.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1509

Ice, Ice, Baby

Year: 2013

Director: Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee

Cast: Kristen Bell, Jonathan Groff, Idina Menzel

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Frozen is the 53rd release from Walt Disney Animation Studios. It is the eighth film to rely entirely on computerized 3D animation (five of which bombed miserably) and the third to be based on a fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Anderson (after 1989's The Little Mermaid - yes it was that long ago - and the "Steadfast Tin Soldier" segment of Fantasia 2000). 

The fairy tale in question is "The Snow Queen," from which nearly every element has been excised except for the fact that there is a snow queen (sort of), the power of love being able to melt a frozen heart, and that there is a reindeer. In typical Disney fashion, everything else is sloughed off to the sides especially the heavy Christian allegory and the broken shards of the magical troll mirror that haunt your eyeballs.

So bad news for fans of "The Snow Queen." But for Disney fans (and I imagine there are a lot more of them), Frozen is a breath of fresh air in the dire 3D animation Disney canon. In fact the only film of higher caliber among the other seven is Tangled, which had Alan Menken so we really can't blame this film for not quite measuring up.

It also doesn't help that the entire first act of the film is more or less the plot of Rapunzel.

Yeah I went there. Faced!

In the far-off land of Arendelle, young princess Elsa (Idina Menzel of Rent and Enchanted and being awesome) starts to develop uncontrollable ice powers that can only be contained by special gloves. She is locked away by her parents because if society found out she was a sorceress, they would... I dunno. Call her names or something.

Her sister Anna (Kristen Bell) has her memory wiped of all magic after a dangerous incident with her sister and the two grow apart, Elsa refusing to come out of her room. When their parents pass away in a tragic boating accident, Elsa's coronation day goes horribly awry and she flees to a nearby mountain and lets her powers flow free, plunging Arendelle into an eternal winter.

Enlisting the help of Kristoff (Jonathan Groff of Glee and Spring Awakening and isn't it great a Disney musical hired actual broadway singers?), a down on his luck ice salesman and his trusty reindeer Sven. To animate Sven, the filmmakers spent weeks studying the movements of actual reindeer. Which seems counterintuitive because in the storied tradition of adorable animal sidekicks, Sven acts exactly like a dog.

I can't say it doesn't work though.

Along the way they meet Olaf the Snowman (Josh Gad of The Book of Mormon), who in an even grander tradition of odious comic relief characters is a shrill and annoying little punk. But who am I to judge? The herd of children around me were laughing uproariously reminding me that I am no longer in the central demographic for these kinds of shenanigans.

And to be fair, Olaf quickly grew less grating as time went on and although he never warmed my heart, I ended up accepting his presence. Also, his biggest comic moments are centered around his desire for summer, which he doesn't know will, in fact, turn him into a puddle. It was somewhat unsettling that kids were rolling in the aisles at prospect of this snowman's imminent demise like evil little demigods.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

I laugh in the face of your mortality.

Did I mention it's a musical? And what a weird little hybrid it is, too. The songs are mostly bland and inconsequential, some of them combining modern slang and classical rhythms in an intriguingly anachronistic way, but few sticking in the memory past the end of the next scene. And one of them flat out stole the "finishing each other's sandwiches" line from Arrested Development. They didn't think I would notice but I did. I'm onto them.

They are enjoyable and simple, but you won't find me searching for the soundtrack. The obvious highlight is "Let It Go," Elsa's song about releasing herself and her powers from captivity. It's commonly referred to as her "Defying Gravity" and I don't disagree but it and every other time Idina Menzel opens her mouth is a sparkling moment of top notch musicality.

For some reason the velvet tongued Jonathan Groff isn't given a real chance to sing (unless you count a 20 second riff with a mandolin which I do not), and the disappointment is only made up for by the fact that Kristen Bell actually has a pretty good set of pipes. Which raises the question as to why the hell they put her in the Lady Gaga and The Muppets Holiday Spectacular and didn't let her sing a note.

Whatever. I'm over it.

For some reason, the whole musical conceit is pretty much dropped for the entire third act and by the end you kinda forget that it ever happened in the first place but the little ditties are cute and fun and mostly stay out of the way, occupying the space they fit into without feeling like they're wasting time.

Not that I could ever waste time when Jonathan Groff is around. Even in cartoon form.

All in all, Frozen doesn't quite deserve its massive reputation but it's a breath of icy fresh air in the barren wasteland that is Disney 3D animation. It's a quasi-feminist princessy satire that is too Disneyfied and sweet to be subversive, which they weren't really looking to be anyway.

There's a relatable villain and a very unique take on the "prince saving the day" stock situation. And any animated film that takes place in an environment as beautiful as the fjords deserves respect and the icy transformation sequences are top notch. 

Although some of the more emotional moments feel rushed and don't really land, Frozen is a lovable fluff ball - a good family film in a time where it's desperately needed. It won't change animation forever like some true Disney classics, but it's a fun and welcome presence in theaters that have seen a lot of grimness and decay over the course of the year.

TL;DR: Frozen is good holiday fun and one of the better Disney canon films in recent years, but mostly anonymous songs and shallow emotional beats drive it to the second tier.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, especially if you have kids. Or are one of the 100% of people who are fans of Disney animation.

Word Count: 1117