Girls, Interrupted

Year: 2018

Director: Sebastián Lelio

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola 

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As a gay person, you get pretty used to any major motion picture with gay protagonists being arty awards bait that shows you how Important and Tragic your life is. The straights of the world can see themselves in blockbusters ranging from Titanic to Indiana Jones to Bee Movie, but we're stuck with stuff like Milk (dead gay guy), Brokeback Mountain (dead gay guy featuring sad closeted gay guy), Moonlight (sad closeted gay guy). Sure you get your Priscilla, Queen of the Deserts and your To Wong Foos and whatnot, but let's just say gay movies with happy endings don't have a lot of crossover with worldwide audiences.

It's even worse for lesbians. Because women are so rarely protagonists in mainstream movies, the percentage of gay ones is even lower. But the truly crappy thing is that these movies rarely even commit. Because lesbianism is only important to mainstream culture as it relates to men's interest in it, almost every big lesbian movie has its main character sleep with a man, either primarily or sometimes even exclusively. This might be a shock to you, but this is not how lesbians work. (This is not to discount that there are bisexual people and characters out there - but I dare you to find a single known movie where a lesbian actually only sleeps with women)

Disobedience was always going to be about what it's like to be gay in a straight world. It was never going to be a fun romp about two Rachels cavorting through a field of flowers. But it's maybe the worst example of a straight person (in this case, director and co-writer Sebastián Lelio) making a queer story I've ever seen.

But more on that later, after we've finished spitting into each other's mouths. You know, like lesbians do.

Disobedience wants to have its cake and eat it too, so in addition to being a lesbian movie, it is also an orthodox Jewish movie. When her father, a beloved London rabbi, passes away, Ronit (Rachel Weisz) returns to her childhood home for the first time in over a decade. While she's there, she discovers that her two best friends got married without telling her: Esti (Rachel McAdams) is a schoolteacher and David (Alessandro Nivola, who we just saw in 1999's Mansfield Park) is a rabbi protege of her father's.

Over the course of her stay, the ladies ignite a physical passion that has lain dormant for many years, while Esti chafes against the rules and expectations of her culture. They make out sometimes, but mostly they walk together, heels clicking against the pavement in front of grey, dreary skies. Yadda yadda, Oscar stuff.

This screenshot and the previous one are like an hour apart.

So yes, both characters sleep with men (even the unmarried one, in a scene that has so little to do with the rest of the film that even the soundtrack is intrusively different) in this film, but that's just the tip of the faux-prestige lesbian iceberg. Of course, there's also the complete misunderstanding of lesbian sex that I alluded to earlier, compounded with completely inscrutable shooting and editing that obliterates any hope of eroticism. But let me ask you this: Do you think a lesbian filmmaker would give the film's most crucial narrative arc to Alessandro Nivola?

Look, I can admit the dude looks sexy serving orthodox bearded realness, and he is certainly allowed to have a fleshed-out, rounded character, but the movie almost exclusively traffics in how he's feeling about everything. Esti's role is too subdued and frequently offscreen to draw any real impact from, and Ronit is flat as a board, trapped playing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl part in her own film. She's somehow both the lead and the character who dips in to shake things up and learn nothing from experience. 

I'm honestly surprised THEY didn't sleep together at any point.

Disobedience fails as a lesbian movie, but it also fails as a movie in general, so I guess at least that's fair. Nearly every element competes for the title of Worst Thing in the Movie: The cinematography is drab and oppressively grey, an effect it was certainly going for, but one that in no way fits well with the intense tedium of the story (the Rachels don't have a moment alone together until maybe the hour mark). Then you have the production design, which presents us with interiors as varied and rich as a porno, and the score, which attempts to channel the orchestral grandeur of a John Williams with some supremely ill-timed flute trills that triumphantly clash with every scene they appear in.

Hmmm... This is usually the part in a negative review where I say something nice. I suppose I don't dislike any of the actors, but none of them have the strength to claw out from the deep well of milquetoast drudgery the film has tossed them into. And that spitting scene is certainly thrillingly bonkers, much like the peach sequence in last year's similarly dull prestige queer drama Call Me By Your Name. And there's a scene that uses my favorite Terrible Movie trope to predictably delightful effect (this being the fact that nobody in any movie ever gives the speech they were meant to give, and devolves into a monologue about the lessons they've learned that makes sense to the viewer but must be powerfully perplexing to anyone actually in the audience for the speech).

In short, Disobedience is a massive waste of a grossly extended amount of time. It doesn't breach the two hour mark thankfully, but it sure feels like it does. I'd call it boring as sin, but I wouldn't want to be respectful to Sin, which is something this movie should be full of and is sorely lacking.

TL;DR: Disobedience is a dreary, deeply unerotic slog.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1000

Claw of Desire

Year: 2016

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Lobster is a preposterously divisive movie. The two movie review blogs I follow religiously gave it a 10/10 and a 0/10 respectively. The patrons at the theater I work at either walk out halfway through or come back for second and third helpings. It’s like – for lack of a better comparison – seafood. Some people despise the taste, but others can’t get enough. So with all this debate raging, of course I had to dive in there for myself and see what all the hubbub was about. 

Did I enjoy The Lobster? No. Do I regret it? Well, mostly.

I’m not allergic to shellfish, but I might be allergic to art films.

In The Lobster, love is mandated by law. Newly single people in The City are sent to The Hotel, where they must find a mate within 45 days or else they are turned into an animal. They also must hunt single refugees known as Loners who live in The Woods. If my disdain for all these oh-so futuristic capital letters isn’t already palpable, let me make it clear that the only thing stopping me from vomiting all over my keyboard right now is the fact that I really don’t feel like cleaning it.

One of these single people is David (Colin Farrell), a schlubby man whose wife has left him. While he struggles to find someone with whom he shares a Defining Characteristic, he ends up desperately pairing with a psychopath (Angeliki Papoulia) before escaping to The Woods and striking up a furtive courtship with Short-Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), igniting the ire of the strictly anti-partnership Loner Leader (Léa Seydoux).

Another thing I absolutely adore is movies that don’t give their characters proper names. More, please!

I see what The Lobster is doing. I really do.  A society that focuses so fundamentally and grotesquely on pair-bonding is shallow and conformist, with no wiggle room to be an individual. In terms of achieving the film’s intended effect of muting all personality from its characters and design, it’s a masterpiece of intention. The ensemble is perfectly cast, especially Colin Farrell, who intimately understands the mechanics of his severely isolated role and knows how best to wring comedy from the character when he can.

The world-building of this incredibly unique setting is likewise terrific, dumping you in with no context and allowing you to uncover the depths of detail as the movie progresses. It’s not quite as rich in history as the production design of a Mad Max: Fury Road, but it gets the job done with ethereal efficiency. And the beginning is an absolute winner, slamming you into the story with a gonzo, out-of-context image that leaves you slavering for more (although, the more you learn about this film’s world, the less sense this scene makes).

So while I see the point of The Lobster and understand the polished mechanics that make it tick, that doesn’t mean I see why anybody would find themselves entertained by this droning didacticism.

Ooh, burn! This Lobster is getting BOILED!

The Lobster is so subdued that it practically fades out of existence. It’s like absurdism on tranquilizers, the monotonous performances and color scheme relentlessly pounding your brain with a sledgehammer of boredom. It’s got the pace of a Kubrick film, the flatly literal dialogue of Invention of Lying, and the music of a murder mystery, the atonal shrieks only highlighting how uninteresting everything you’re watching actually is.

For the entire film, it feels like you’re in a doctor’s waiting room, wondering if they’ve forgotten about you. Then as soon as there’s a knock on the door and you perk up, the film ends. After all, they can’t let us get too excited, or else we’ll start to think this is a fun movie. As much as The Lobster claims to be a black comedy, it does everything in its power to stile any and all joy. The scattered chuckles that escape are almost incidental, owing to the fact that there really is a great concept at the heart of this story. Only one singular moment made me laugh out loud, and I get the sense that the movie actively lamented my enjoyment, because it immediately doubled down on ponderous contemplation and a liberal slathering of slow motion.

Seriously, entire scenes of The Lobster are slomo. Not just key action moments (ha! Like it has any), but full minutes. Minutes upon minutes of pretentious napalm, obliterating the pacing and tearing the storyline to shreds. Watching The Lobster is like being trapped in a nightmare. Your feet move like molasses as you run toward an exit that glides further and further away. And anytime something even microscopically interesting happens, it’s immediately chucked from the film like so much dead weight. The biggest conflict in the movie (between the Loners and The Hotel) is never resolved. Even though we see the two sides briefly clash, these scenes are immediately forgotten and never followed up on.

It’s like listening to your grandfather tell a story.

The most extravagantly frustrating thing about The Lobster is that every now and then it shows flashes of asthmatic brilliance. It never exerts itself too much, but the occasional brutality nestled in this world of soft apathy is jarring and gut-wrenching in a magnificent way. One scene depicting the crowd’s blasé reaction to a particularly maudlin act of self-harm is coldly stunning, like an ice-chilled scalpel slicing down your spine. And then of course the film returns to flatly droning about how to properly launder a stain or the comparative weight of different sports equipment.

I GET IT. I do. But The Lobster really needs to take a chill pill. It’s so far up its own ass that it can see daylight. Everything good about the film (and there really is a lot of potential here) is quietly smothered with a scratchy, off-white pillow. I can see why this movie appeals to the Lonely Heart cinephiles of the world, but care as little about The Lobster as it does about me, or any of humanity for that matter.

TL;DR: The Lobster is a monotonous ordeal that stifles a pretty excellent absurdist premise.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1055

Popcorn Kernels: I'm A Classic Man

In which a weekend of classic film viewing is deconstructed with a set of mini reviews.

Rashômon

Year: 1950

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The murder of a samurai is depicted through the wildly varied perspectives of four witnesses.

I was very excited to watch Rashômon. As a film school graduate, I’m always happy to fill in the gaps of my classic cinema education, and this was an egregious one. Before Rashômon, I had ever seen a film by celebrated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Now that I have seen one… Either I made the wrong choice or I’m just not a fan of Kurosawa.

Now, I understand what Rashômon is doing. It’s a parable on the truth, and how we all experience reality from different perspectives that we may ever be able to synthesize into one coherent fact. As I digested the film, I began to develop an appreciation for how this idea was presented (in the trial during which the 3 perspectives on the story were told, we never see the judge The witnesses speak directly to the camera because we, the audience, are meant to be the ultimate judge). It is and will always be an interesting message, but that doesn’t mean it’s an interesting film.

It can’t help its profoundly boxy aspect ratio, but its capacity to be cinematic is severely stunted, warding off the delicate imagery that Kurosawa is reportedly known for. It also can’t help the tenets and morals of feudal Japan, the time period in which this story takes place. However, the systematic sexism with which the film treats its sole female character is deplorable, and the fact the she is either punished for being raped or submits wholeheartedly to her attacker makes me want to scrub my skin with steel wool.

I understand that, as a modern critic, these complaints lack the context of Japanese culture and film technology in 1950 and as such are somewhat invalid. But you know what isn’t invalid? Rashômon is kind of a snoozefest. We’re treated to a stroll through the woods that lasts what feels like a half hour, and the endlessly repeated stories might differ wildly in the details, but the follow the same, plodding, over-formal structure, endlessly repeating it into oblivion.

Again, I recognize the qualities that helped make Rashômon a respected classic. Some of the stylized imagery is dazzling (a half-destroyed temple and the clawed hands of a murdered man stand out particularly) and a scene of a medium channeling the victim’s spirit to get is testimony is certainly disconcerting. I also love Toshiro Mifune’s acting choice to five his criminal a tic of rubbing his neck to imply that he is flea-bitten and mangy. However, the presentation is stultifying, constantly shifting back and forth between three superfluous layers of storytelling and constantly recycling itself, unspooling more and more officious narrative rigidity as it goes along.

Rating: 6/10

The Constant Gardener

Year: 2005

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé

Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A timid diplomat uncovers a vast conspiracy that links the British government to illegal African drug testing while investigating his wife’s murder.

Good thing it’s chic to disapprove of Oscar nominations now, because otherwise I think this blog might get me lynched. Let’s throw more kindling on that rage fire, shall we? The Constant Gardener, sitting pretty at four nominations and one win, is a monumentally obnoxious motion picture. It doesn’t reflect well on film critics to toss around dismissive, subjective words like “pretentious,” but The Constant Gardener is a film that strains very hard to impress its audience with visual acrobatics rather than actually compelling content.

It’s an arid, emotionally vacant film that underplays each and every beat of an interesting if not action-packed storyline in favor of a wholly disingenuous third world misery porn scenario. Every single aching moment of this didactic white guilt extravaganza grinds your face into its Important Message, liberally slathering the frame with overexposed whites to remind you that this is Art. It’s so insecure that it feels the need to restate its themes in a mortifyingly on-the-nose wrap-up speech, actively defying its misguided impulse to tell its story in non-chronological order, filling in details only on a need to know basis.

Of course, by this point the film is already hopelessly muddled. I’d say The Constant Gardener loses track of its own storyline about once every twenty minutes, requiring it to send us through another kaleidoscopic barrage of weak metaphors before it gets back on tis feet. But enough complaining. There are enough annoying arthouse films out there to fill an encyclopedia, and this is hardly the worst of them.

There are several points where The Constant Gardener does actually succeed. It manages to pull the rug out from under you several times during Fiennes’ investigation, although it never manages to convince you these characters are worth caring about. And during the third act, there are some excellent visual representations of all-consuming paranoia, especially during a scene with a motorcycle in Germany. The Constant Gardener might be a haphazard affair, yet it does have at least a dollop of verve. But it’s not the sharp political thriller it thinks it is. It’s a self-consciously artsy film that strives for aesthetic greatness but mostly just ends up cutting off Ralph Fiennes at the hairline.

Rating: 5/10

Year: 2007

Director: Sean McNamara

Cast: Skyler Shaye, Janel Parrish, Logan Browning

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The Bratz must maintain their friendship despite a clique-obsessed class president’s attempts to separate them.

What makes any movie a masterpiece can vary wildly across cultures, mindsets, and time periods. Critics hated The Shining when it came out, but now it’s hailed as a classic film. Ditto Citizen Kane. Ditto John Carpenter’s The Thing. No film is set in stone. So, keeping that in mind, please allow me to submit Bratz: The Movie as a bona fide masterpiece of world cinema. A stakes-lite wish-fulfillment teen movie based on a popular line of skanky dolls, Bratz might not be an obvious candidate for this title, but let me assure you. In terms of pure, unintentionally comedic, hyper-earnest, mind-boggling insanity, no movie even comes close to Bratz. The film is a glittering absurdist prank against art that challenges everything we know about the craft of cinema.

You don’t watch Bratz. You experience it. It’s a pastiche of high school movies that tosses every established tenet of narrative filmmaking out the window, so there is literally no way to predict what may be coming around the corner. This makes Bratz a careening adventure through a vision of human life as interpreted by an outsider. I don’t know whether the film was made by Martians or just people who had never interacted with teens, Hispanics, principals, cheerleaders, nerds, or girls before, but it presents a fascinating, demented way to view the world.

This is a universe where Hispanic households have mariachi bands practicing in their living room. Where high school bears prison-like signs reading “OBEY,” “SUBMIT,” and “NO LITTERING.” Where that same high school has a principal who 1) receives a grotesquely enormous salary, and 2) is played by Jon Voight. I could go on and on, and in fact my notes on this movie last a good five pages, but I’ll be brief.

Bratz is obviously not a good movie. The four Bratz are defined only by their race, and the de facto protagonist – Hispanic Brat Yasmin – is by far the weakest performer. Also, Bratz strains to convince us she can sing despite clear evidence to the contrary. But the movie shifts gears as often as its soundtrack (which contains, by my count, 29 distinct songs, from sub-Simple Plan moperock to straight-up opera, and that’s a rate of one song at least every four minutes), lending the film a whirlwind pace to the effect that you never spend too much down time with the Bratz. It’s difficult to hate them, because they’re always sprinting on to the next cotton candy coated activity, whether it be an alarmingly violent food fight or a rundown of school cliques that includes – mysteriously – “disco dorks” and a set of mimes.

At every turn, Bratz so eagerly defies logic with random cutaways, inscrutable production design choices, and over-the-top teen mayhem that it overrides the system, something that only the very best bad movies can do. I’m forced by my formula to assign a numerical score to this film, but I urge you to ignore it and seek out Bratz, even if you must go to the ends of the Earth to find a copy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1467