This has been quite a year for me. In addition to everything the nation has been going through, I moved from Georgia to North Carolina during a pandemic. Among other things, this pulled me from one theatre community to another, both of them closed down for the time being. I haven’t been in a movie theatre since February, but, oddly, I’ve probably seen more movies than I would have without the quarantine. I’ve only done three blogs, and only one of them was posted since my move. And although some multiplexes near my new home are open, I can’t quite bring myself to risk it. As a result, I’ve had a very hard time keeping up with more recent releases, even though a good many of them are streaming through services to which I subscribe. That hasn’t stopped me from writing about movies. I’ve written short reviews of everything I’ve seen, no matter how inconsequential, and posted them on my Facebook page and in whatever groups I felt were appropriate. So, here’s a sampling of the best and the worst of what I’ve written about this year. The bests are a decidedly eclectic group. The worsts are all horror films, because I just can’t keep myself from trolling the depths of that genre in hopes of finding hidden gems.
THE TEN BEST FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR
1. TOTALLY F***ED UP (1993)
If John Hughes and Jean-Luc Godard had a gay kid, it would be Gregg Araki’s amazing fourth feature. This portrait of disaffected gay and lesbian youth in Los Angeles is one of the liveliest depictions of nihilism I’ve ever seen. The characters are struggling to grow up gay in the face of homophobia, bashing and AIDS. No wonder it all seems hopeless much of the time. Yet the focus is on resilience, as the lesbian couple tries to get pregnant and the young men keep reaching out for relationship. Their cynicism is really just a game, a wall against a world that seems out to get them. It helps greatly that the most cynical of the bunch is played by James Duval, who positively radiates star quality. Araki combines filmed footage — often in long, static takes reminiscent of both Godard and Yasujiro Ozu — with video shot by one of the characters, whose habit of recording everything in his life leads to one of the plot’s mini-crises. Told in 15 movements interspersed with titles and character interviews, the picture is like a series of variations on the futility of everything, even futility itself.
2. BPM (2017)
If you want to give your tear ducts a good workout, try this feature from Robin Campillo. Set in the Paris ACT UP chapter in the 1990s, the film paints a gay landscape of sex, partying and protest, all of which come together in the cathartic final montage. It raises a lot of issues about personal responsibility and the politicization of health care (sound familiar?) while following the relationship of Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), a couple who meet in the group and whose relationship progresses as Sean's health declines. Campillo made an effort to cast gay actors to play the gay characters, and it pays off with deeply authentic performances, particularly from Biscayart, who helps make Sean a fiercely political and painful presence. Watching all those beautiful young men fight for their lives in the streets, in board rooms and even in bed, is intensely moving. I didn't find it erotic. I just wanted to take care of them (and get them to quit smoking). Oddly, this film elicited more negative comments than almost anything I posted about on Facebook. Some people seemed to take offense that a French filmmaker chose to make a film about the Paris division of ACT UP rather than the American divisions in which their friends had taken part. I guess it a sign of how deep feelings about the AIDS crisis still run.
3. PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019)
Exquisitely shot by Claire Mathon, with painterly compositions that fit its storyline, This) is a slow, lovingly detailed account of the brief affair between a painter (Noemie Merlant) and the woman (Adele Haenel) whose wedding portrait she’s been hired to paint in late 18th-century Brittany. This is a film of many joys — a peasant bonfire suddenly enlivened when the women start singing, the way the two women and their housemaid create an egalitarian society as soon as mother has gone off on business, the final, long closeup of Haenel as she reacts to a performance of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” Writer-director Celine Sciamma has put in one or two too many visual iterations of the title, but that’s more than made up for by the film’s subtle comments on class and gender and the delicacy with which the attraction between the two women develops. There’s also a lovely use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that pays off powerfully toward the end and is well worth waiting for. This is streaming on Hulu and can also be rented at various locations. If you choose Hulu, pay to see it without commercials. You don’t’ want anything interfering with the film’s powerful cumulative effect. From the few negative responses I got on Facebook, I’d also point out that this film is not for all tastes. You have to be prepared for a slower pace than we’ve become accustomed to in gay films made for the mall audience.
4. ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959)
One of the most seamless blends of old Hollywood and the new generation of actors to arrive in the 1950s, Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama effectively melds James Stewart (in my personal favorite of all his performances) and Eve Arden with such relative newcomers as Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick and George C. Scott, not to mention an array of great character actors (who can forget Floyd the barber explaining the legal criteria for rape?). It’s still shocking to see the prosecution try to blame Remick’s character for her own attack, but probably more shocking to realize their attitudes are still held by many today. The film was based on a real case fictionalized in John D. Voelker’s novel. It was shot (very effectively by Sam Leavitt) near the places in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where it happened. Preminger keeps the camera moving during the first half of the film, mostly following Stewart around so we’re drawn into the character visually even as the actor is creating one of his most compelling characterizations. Once the trial starts, the camera is more still as Preminger focuses on the courtroom fireworks between Stewart and Scott, presided over by the hero of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Joseph N. Welch, who gets most of the best lines. The others go to Arden, who not only gets to crack wise as only she can but also does some effective listening and even has a nice dramatic scene as Stewart’s legal team awaits the verdict. Duke Ellington composed the jazz score and appears briefly at a local tavern. Can anybody envision Lana Turner in Remick’s role? Can you do it without snickering?
5. THE MORE THE MERRIER (1943)
George Stevens’ best comedy is an extended negotiation over space — the rooms in Connie Milligan's apartment and a place in her heart. Jean Arthur stars as the buttoned-down office worker who rents out half her apartment to eccentric billionaire Charles Coburn during World War II's Washington housing shortage. Seeing how sterile her love life is, he rents his portion of the apartment to Joel McCrea, who's waiting to ship out for military service (as was Stevens at the time). You know where this is leading, don't you? The surprise is how skillfully everyone involved keeps the whole thing afloat. It's a delight from beginning to end. Arthur subtly plays her growing attraction to McCrea from the moment she meets him, so none of Coburn's manipulations feel smarmy. And McCrea is so attractive and such an adept light comedian you can't help rooting for him to win her heart. The dialogue is thoroughly pixilated, and the pace is much quicker than you'd expect from Stevens' later work (sadly, it was his last comedy; filming the liberation of Dachau left him a much more sober artist, and he gradually forgot the lessons he'd learned during his apprenticeship with Hal Roach). Grady Sutton has a sweet bit as a waiter, and if you’re really good, you’ll spot Ann Savage.
6. THE BEGGAR’S OPERA (1953)
Peter Brook’s film-directing debut was way ahead of its time in its combination of cinematic conventions with 18th-century theatrics. He stages the classic ballad opera with a sense of artifice. He keeps finding ways to frame the image so it seems as if you were watching some scenes live on stage. Laurence Olivier plays the role of the womanizing highwayman MacHeath to the hilt. He seems to be having so much fun juggling women and buckling his swash it’s almost like watching a different actor, a matinee idol in the tradition of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn. And his singing is surprisingly good. Only he and Stanley Holloway — as Mr. Lockit, the jailer— do their own singing. The rest are dubbed quite effectively, and Sir Arthur Bliss has arranged the music with an eye for variety. In adapting the play to film, Brook and his writers (Denis Cannan and Christopher Fry) create a framing device, starting the piece in a prison where the real MacHeath meets a beggar (Hugh Griffith) who’s written an opera about him. From there the piece opens up to some lovely Technicolor shots of the English countryside. They also expand the role of Mrs. Trapes, the gambling hall proprietor, and Athene Seyler shows why she was an authority on comic acting (she even wrote one of the best books on the subject, ON THE CRAFT OF COMEDY). The film ends with a pair of dazzling crowd scenes. In the opera, MacHeath jauntily rides the tumbril to the gallows as the crowd around him responds as if it were some kind of carnival. In the real world, he escapes, too, and the other convicts run rampant through the prison in a scene that presages Brooks’ legendary stage and film productions of MARAT/SADE (1967).
7. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)
Although derided on its initial release, Georges Franju’s horror art film has more recently been hailed as an exercise in cinematic poetry. Pauline Kael called it “austerely elegant” after seeing the butchered, badly dubbed version initially released in the U.S. as THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUSTUS. Fortunately, Criterion has a restored print that occasionally airs on TCM. The tale of a doctor (Pierre Brasseur) kidnapping young women to transplant their faces to his daughter, hideously scarred after an accident he caused, is similar to dozens of B movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s and inspired a spate of horrid imitations by the likes of Spain’s Jesus Franco (Can we ever forgive Orson Welles for hailing him as his protégé?). It’s also a deeply subversive film. Instead of the mad scientist father, the film focuses on his daughter (Edith Scob), who wanders through his villa in Givenchy gowns and a featureless white mask. She’s the only one who can quiet the pack of wild dogs on which her father experiments, and that and her scarred face fit the archetype of the monstrous-feminine. Yet she’s ultimately the force for good in the film. In contrast, her well-dressed, socially acceptable father and his chic assistant (Alida Valli, who can make dumping a body in a river look glamorous) commit atrocities in an immaculately decorated salon. As in many of the great horror films, EYES WITHOUT A FACE renders the concept of monstrosity queer (you knew I had to get that word in somewhere), by questioning our most basic assumptions about the horrible.
8. BAY OF ANGELS (1963)
Jacques Demy’s second feature is almost a lightweight retread of themes from his first, LOLA (1961, q.v.). Once again, a feckless young man (Claude Mann) finds his life altered by a chance encounter with a mercurial woman (Jeanne Moreau). The film’s plotting seems to demonstrate how the idolization of the female is a form of misogyny. Moreau’s character could easily be seen as a mere device for changing the man’s character. What raises the film above its sketchy plot is Moreau’s performance as Jackie, a compulsive gambler who’s sacrificed everything — husband, child, jewelry — to her addiction. Jackie is a multi-faceted character so adept at posing she’s not always sure who she is, and somehow Moreau manages to dig through the layers of artifice to turn her into a compelling human being. And when she’s on a high, she’s almost painfully glamorous. During the gambling scenes, Demy’s cutting and Michel Legrand’s Mozartian score capture the thrill of staking your life on chance. It’s little wonder Mann gets swept up in Moreau’s folly. Were she a drug, she’d be the most addictive on the planet.
9. LOLA (1961)
Jacques Demy’s first feature is gently haunted by the past. The film is set in Demy’s childhood home, Nantes, and Raoul Coutard’s camera virtually makes love to the coastal city. The central characters, cabaret singer Lola (Anouk Aimee) and unemployed Roland (Marc Michel), are still stuck on their first loves, hers for the mysterious Michel who deserted her while she was pregnant, his for Lola, whom he knew as a child named Cecile. Even in the present, events echo the past. Lola tells of a blissful 14th birthday spent at a fair with a sailor she met by chance, and then another Cecile visits the fair with a sailor on her 14th birthday. Demy’s approach to all this is a kind of measured joy. He takes delight in the encounters that almost happen as characters just miss running into each other. Yet there’s also a sense of the pain in those missed connections and the way Roland yearns for Lola just as the older women he meets yearn for him. Although her character’s name and occupation are references to Marlene Dietrich’s Lola in THE BLUE ANGEL (1930), Aimee’s breathless, mercurial performance seems more an echo of another legendary blonde, Marilyn Monroe, at the same time as it points to Diane Keaton’s fast-talking quirkiness in ANNIE HALL (1975). All that referentiality seems natural for a Demy film. In a sense, LOLA is not a single film, but rather the birth of a cinematic universe. Aimee will return as Lola in his MODEL SHOP (1969), while Michel’s Roland will become the successful businessman who marries the pregnant Catherine Deneuve in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964). In that film, he even sings of his lost love, Lola, with a melody that first appears in Michel Legrand’s score for this film.
10. NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)
Jules Dassin’s last Hollywood assignment before he was blacklisted is one of the great film noirs, a cynical view of the underbelly of post-war London. Richard Widmark never stops running as Harry Fabian, a nightclub tout so crooked his cons have cons. When he’s not dodging creditors, he’s feverishly trying to raise the money to set himself up to challenge the city’s wrestling kingpin (Herbert Lom). The only decent people he encounters are his abused girlfriend (Gene Tierney) , a flower seller (Ada Reeve) and a smuggler (Maureen Delaney). The rest are an assortment of crooks and cheats, all of whom seem to have it in for him. Most notable are Francis L. Sullivan and Googie Withers as clip joint owners trapped in the marriage from hell. Jo Eisinger’s script has the characters turning on an emotional dime, and the photography by Max Greene frames them against the night sky and cluttered, dirty rooms. Dassin stages a great impromptu wrestling bout between one-time world champ Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki. Unjustly derided by critics in 1950, the film found its audience more recently with the rise of interest in film noir.
THE TWO BEST 2020 FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR
(lots more to come, I hope)
MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM (2020)
The wonder of the latest August Wilson adaptation is that almost everything done to open the play up cinematically adds to the meanings of the original. The film starts with a musical montage showing Ma Rainey in performance, first in a rural tent show and then in a Chicago theatre. It’s an electric sequence that makes it clear how completely Viola Davis has immersed herself in the role while also setting up her conflict with Levee (Chadwick Boseman). Although the play is shortened to just over 90 minutes, all the main points are there, and director George C. Wolfe keeps the camera moving during the longer, beautifully written discussions of African-American identity. He’s also assembled a sterling ensemble, including Colman Domingo, Glynn Turman, Michael Potts, Dusan Brown and Taylor Paige. Turman is so relaxed as Toledo he hardly seems to be acting. And Davis and Boseman, in his last film, capture the different kinds of totally justified anger driving their characters. The film is a fitting successor to Denzel Washington’s FENCES (2016) and has me very excited for the other film versions of The Pittsburgh Cycle.
LA LLORONA (2020)
The images in Jayro Bustamente’s hypnotic thriller are austere. With the exception of a few cases in which feverish action— the verdict in a controversial trial, a nightmare of racist oppression, a right-wing family’s attempt to get through a crowd of protestors — triggers frantic, jittery camera work, Bustamente and cinematographer Nicolas Wong use long takes with almost imperceptible moves in or out. Were this a conventional horror film, which its status as a “Shudder Original” suggests, it wouldn’t work. But this is really a political thriller with elements of magical realism. Guatemalan General Monteverde (Julio Diaz) has just been convicted of genocide of the country’s Mayan population, only to have the conviction annulled by a corrupt government. He and his family are prisoners in their own home as it’s surrounded by protestors whose chants and music provide most of the score. Almost all the servants have already quit because of the General’s erratic behavior. When the mysterious Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy) arrives in response to a call for help from the housekeeper (who’s also the General’s illegitimate daughter). the stresses tearing the family apart get stronger and stranger. Diaz hears the sound of a crying woman and fantasizes the house filled with water. His wife, Carmen (a terrific Margarita Kenefic), has nightmares in which she’s a Mayan woman tormented by the military. The political ramifications are overwhelming. In courtroom testimony, a woman delivers a speech emotionally in Kaqchikel while her translator dispassionately repeats her tale of rape and murder. Carmen blindly repeats her husband’s justifications that the men killed were Communist terrorists and the rape survivors all prostitutes. Later, when her husband is accused of sexually harassing Alma, she acknowledges his lifelong womanizing but blames it on the women for exciting him and orders Alma to wear looser clothing. It’s a kind of poetic justice that she’s the one who experiences the genocide firsthand in her nightmares. This is Bustamente’s third feature, and he’s quite a find.
FIVE OF THE WORST FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR (BECAUSE POSTING TEN WAS JUST TOO DEPRESSING)
5. DEVIL’S PATH (2018)
There are some wonderful independent gay films available for streaming. This, alas, is not one of them. Two men meet in a gay cruising section in the forest. After misreading lines to each other, they decide they want different things. Then they have to work together to elude two gay bashers — if that’s what’s happening. The dialogue as they’re on the run is ludicrous psychodrama, as if the writers were in love with Albee and O’Neill but had no idea why. At one point, the more promiscuous of the two dismisses love as a chemical reaction, which made me wonder how the film would work as a Cole Porter musical. If the singing and dancing were on the same level as the acting, presenting such a film in public could be considered a capital offense.
4. MAUSOLEUM (1983)
We open with a rather unappealing child actress grieving in a cemetery after her mother’s funeral, though her acting is so bad you only know she’s grieving from the dialogue. She runs from the grave into a nearby mausoleum, where her eyes start to glow green, which provides her most expressive moment. She grows up to become professional scream queen Bobbie Bresee, who has two problems. She’s married to Marjoe Gortner, and she’s lusted after by some of Southern California’s less talented actors. Oh, she’s also possessed by a dyslexic demon named Nomed. The good news is he forces her to kill some of the bad actors. Even better, when he’s in full control her role is taken over by a stunt double and we’re spared her non-acting (another horror film where the leading lady is so bad you can’t tell when she’s in a trance and when she isn’t). There’s also a cameo by LaWanda Page as the housekeeper who saves her life by running off when shit gets weird with a cry of “No more grievin’; I’m leavin’!” I’m assuming there’s a semicolon because she’s in too much of a hurry for a period. With lyrics like “We’ve reached the end. Let’s hope we never look again,” the song over the closing credits seems like a review of the picture.
3. CAMERA PHONE (2012)
TANGERINE (2015) showed that you can shoot a really good film on a cell phone if you have the talent. Unfortunately, the people who made this waste of bandwidth didn’t. It’s not entirely shot on cell phone. Some of it purports to be police surveillance footage. Anyway, eight tiresome social influencers are invited to a party to further their careers. Then they start dying. You never see what’s doing it, but by the time they start kicking it, they’re so stupid that, like Kristianists attending mega-church services during quarantine, you figure it’s just Darwin at work. One fault with a lot of found-footage films is that the characters go on filming long after anyone else would have dropped the camera and run. In this film, after the power goes out, they wander around in the dark while pointing the light from their phones at themselves, the better to blind themselves with, my dear. There’s a sequel, but frankly, I’d rather set my hair on fire.
2. HOTEL OF THE DAMNED (2016)
When did telling a story in chronological order become uncool? I’ve been watching the new adaptation of THE STAND, and for some reasons they’ve jumbled the timeline, leading to flashbacks within flashback for no discernible reason beyond confusion. HOTEL OF THE DAMNED, which I’d hoped would be a horror film about Trump Tower, does much the same with even less purpose. The film opens by cutting between a woman racing from something in the forest and a car driving down the road. It’s so dark you can hardly see the people in the car, and the woman’s face is never seen. She dashes in front of the car, which swerves over an embankment and crashes as an ugly bald man kills the fleeing woman. Cut to an animated werewolf, which isn’t part of the plot; it’s the film company’s logo. Was this all a pre-credits sequence? Was it part of the logo? And who opens a film like this anyway? After the credits, we see a man (one of the less attractive Mandylors) getting out of a Romanian prison and meeting an old friend? Were these the people in the car? You don’t find out until they actually get in the car 20 minutes later and repeat the badly shot scenes we’ve already suffered through at the start. The ex-con kidnaps his daughter after beating up her new boyfriend. Why? We only find out later, in another flashback, that the boyfriend’s a junkie planning to take her to Italy so he can pimp her out to pay for his habit. Anyway, after the accident, they seek shelter in what looks like an abandoned hotel only to discover it’s the headquarters for a group of cannibals who are now chowing down on the woman from the opening. Remember her? At one point, after they’ve discovered the cannibal’s nest, they hear music, so of course they try to find the source without getting caught by the cannibals. They find a radio in a room with a window looking out on the hotel’s utility room. The door has no lock. There’s a trap door in the floor. And there’s clearly another doorway covered by just a curtain. So, daddy says, “Let’s hide here. It’s safe.” The picture is filled with howlers like that. You also get junkie-pimp-i-cide and lots of men running around shirtless who should not be allowed in public wearing less than three layers. At least I got some knitting done.
1. THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE (2019)
How could anything be worse than the previous nine films? Just wait. Picking up on an interview in which Sharon Tate spoke of a nightmare with similarities to her murder a year later, writer-director Daniel Farrands (writer of HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, the worst of the HALLOWEEN movies, and that’s pretty damned bad) gives Tate multiple premonitions of her death in an effort to raise the horror stakes. Hillary Duff turns Tate into a whining bore, and why include photos of the real Tate that only point up how little the two actresses resemble each other. Jonathan Bennett plays Jay Sebring, and as an actor he makes a good Food Network host. It’s all bad in so many wrong ways — including an “it was all a dream” ending that mirrors the much better ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) —you can’t even laugh at it.
