Body Double (1984)

Body Double is a surreal, occasionally sexy, but rather bizarre neo-noir. I think the real problem for me was that there was absolutely zero mystery in this film. I knew who the villain was immediately, and the film doesn't do much of a job trying to hide it. The only thing I was trying to figure out was what was real and what was a movie – turns out it's all a movie? I don't know. 

On the Power of Names

I shared this post with my friends Jaime and Sarah today and then we had the subsequent conversation about names.

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A post shared by Julian Sheridan (@julesesestv)

Jai: Suzie! 😍 A warm bath lol love him

My friend at work is changing her last name to her dad’s after 20 years of wanting to do it and she said it’s the most powerful thing she’s ever experienced.

Aaron: I love this for her!

Sarah: After I saw Leaving Las Vegas I wished my name was spelled Sera. It seemed more interesting. I feel like I’m def a Sarah, but the normal spellings are so boring

Jai: This is so interesting. Because I honestly don't feel like a Jaime lol. I figured everyone felt that way 🤔

Aaron: It’s so interesting how we don’t really name ourselves but names have such magic that we feel we can’t change them.

Trans people are, in fact, teaching us so much. Can we wield the magic power of naming ourselves?

Jai: I love that you call it magic 😆 because that's so what it is! How much more powerful can it get then naming ourselves. In occult teachings a lot of demons and other entities won't even give you their name because you would then hold too much power over them.

Aaron: Right! And we know this also very intimately because of the way our middle names are used.

Like if mom says your middle name.

Jai: 🤣

Aaron: I’m serious though!

Jai: I totally get it! I'm 100% with you on this. And even like sometimes my husband will say "Jaime" and it makes me stop and pause in a very real way because of how often we don't usually do that you know?

Aaron: Sarah was saying this the other day. That when you text each other you don’t usually say the person’s name.

I’ve started to use it sometimes when I text her.

Jai: So interesting

Aaron: I love what you said about demons not giving away their true names.

The magic of names fascinates me, and I've considered changing mine, but now I think we've been through so much together. I don't feel like my name represents me in any real way – in other words I don't think it's a version of me or gets something about me, really. But my name does stand in for me, especially in published material of course. It's funny, though, because hearing the name under which I publish (with the middle initial) said out loud by someone is a weird feeling. It's like I'm not really gonna live up to that name. That name seems way bigger than me.

Meteor!

Meteor should be a solid 1970s disaster movie. Instead, it's horribly scripted and doesn't do any of the things a good disaster movie does – we should be following at least a dozen characters simultaneously and learning about their relationships as we go along. The eponymous disaster in this disaster movie is a series of meteor fragments that strike northern Canada, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and New York. Cool cool. But none of this happens until near to the end of the film, so we don't get much good disaster stuff at all. Instead, we spend most of the movie inside a bunker watching the Soviets and the Americans disagree with one another before they agree to blow up the meteor. In other words, Meteor fails to live up to its generic expectations, and so it is, unfortunately, boring.

You Will Die at Twenty (2019)

You Will Die at Twenty (ستموت في العشرين) is a stunning Sudanese film from Amju Abu Alala, and I was enraptured by it from its very first shot. It has some really amazing moments in it, and it's visually wonderful. Unfortunately, the film's last act, which should have felt triumphant and wonderful, portrayed an act of rape, representing the old trope of raping a woman as a way to become a man. Of course, the film doesn't ask us to look at this act of rape as if it's rape, which makes the ending of the film all the more troubling. It's a shame, too, because Alala is obviously a wonderful talent, and the film is really quite extraordinary.

Oh! and I'm not including this movie on the Cinema Q list because You Will Die at Twenty is not about queerness at all, but there is a very interesting moment when a sheikh's assistant attempts to seduce our main character. It's a very strange, quite sexy moment, and although we immediately move on, it's very intriguing.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is garbage except for a great performance by a young Dennis Hopper and an attempt at something (but a fail) by the genius Kirk Douglas. Oh I like John Ireland too, as always. But this is just nonsense through and through. Its politics are actually insane. It’s edited well and shot beautifully, but the art direction is a mess. More important is the propaganda this film is selling – which is some kind of pro-police thing, even though it is very clear throughout the whole film that the police are out of control, that Wyatt Earp has severely overreached his own jurisdiction, and is even overreaching in his own jurisdiction. He imprisons a woman playing cards – which everyone agrees is perfectly legal – because a woman playing cards might cause more women to play cards. He calls this disturbing the peace. But seriously. Why are these guys with guns better than those guys with guns? And why do these ones deserve to die and the others don’t? The film actually doesn't do a very good job of making any of it make sense.

I suppose there is an interesting reading of this film as a love relationship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, and the film is definitely invested in their affection for one another, but I don't even think homosexuality could make this better.

Criminal Passion (1994)

I was excited about Donna Deitch's Criminal Passion, but although it's a very sexy film, it's not a very good film. The whole thing feels like it was made for television, like a kind of sexy episode of Matlock. I did like the incredibly hot main characters, and I loved that there was a sort of gay best friend figure, but this was fairly ridiculous.

Sundown (1941)

This is British colonial war propaganda made during WWII. It has a cool vibe for a while, honestly, and it's a sort of exciting spy-adventure-mystery film with an intriguing tension and mood – not Five Graves to Cairo level, but approaching it. Sundown also stars Gene Tierney, looking lovely in orientalist clothes by Walter Plunkett.

Where Sundown fails is when it becomes explicitly propagandistic at the film's end. For some reason, the film thinks it can accomplish this using a character whom we've hated for the entire running time. He dies at the end, and he pityingly says out of nowhere that war is just like church. He then gives this whole speech about church and religion and fighting the Axis Powers. It makes no actual sense and has nothing, really, to do with the film, which is about fighting Nazis in British-colonized Kenya, but is absolutely not about religion. Worse yet, in many ways, this character (played in usual withering style by George Sanders) is hateful. He makes numerous bad decisions as soon as he arrives – and they're shown to be bad decisions immediately – and he is a racist jerk to Gene Tierney's character for being mixed race, yet another trait that is shown to be terrible and awful immediately. After George Sanders gives his church speech, we fast forward to England and are suddenly in a bombed-out church in London, where Sanders' bishop father gives yet another speech to his entire congregation about how fighting in the war and sending your sons off to war (these men never want to go themselves) is a pure and wonderful sacrifice. We also find out – in another insane plot leap – that the bishop has officiated a wedding between Gene Tierney and Bruce Cabot, who sit in the congregation and repeat the bishop's words before (presumably) heading back to the British East Africa Protectorate to fight the Nazis.

Ok, but it is good and mysterious and intriguing for a while, even if it is colonial propaganda.

Man of Conquest (1939)

I'm annoyed with myself because I've seen two classic Hollywood stinkers in a row. Last night was Man of Conquest, which is a hagiographic faux-western about Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson. As you might imagine, it is insane and full of ridiculous inaccuracies. Now, Sam Houston's life was also insane and absurd, so perhaps that all makes sense, but trying to make this guy into some kind of amazing, freedom-loving war hero is just nuts, although he did negotiate on behalf of the Cherokee nation. Sam Houston's life would make an interesting biopic, of course, but this one was invested mostly in convincing us all that "Andy" Jackson was one of the best presidents and best Americans ever to have lived (!) and that rebellion in Texas against México was somehow justified because the settler colonial state allowed individuals to own guns and México did not. Actually, this does make sense. These filmmakers probably believe that the South's secession was also justified and laudable. This is as much a bit of pro-gun propaganda and a redefinition of the second amendment as it is a pro-genocide Andrew Jackson film. No thanks.

Kentucky (1938)

There's a lot I don't understand about this ridiculous movie. In the first place, it's called Kentucky as if it's an old-school western film like In Old Arizona or something. But this isn't an old western - despite it opening with a shot of a weird map of the North American continent that doesn't have the United States carved out – only the state of Kentucky.

Then this movie begins in 1861 – Kentucky secedes from the Union, but a really terrible Union soldier steals a bunch of horses from a racing stable and kills a man. It's war, but it's awfully stupid. They're racehorses, so it's not like they can really help in the Civil War. Either way, the entire point of this sequence is to set up a family feud, but it's done so by making the Confederacy the good guys and the Union the evil, horse-thieving murderers.

Then all of a sudden it's 1938? Weirdly we jump ahead three-quarters of a century and now this movie is about the same two feuding families except of course the young man from one family and the young woman from the other are going to fall in love. This is now a horseracing melodrama set in 1938. And if you didn't believe Rebecca Schneider when she told us in Performing Remains that the Civil War is still happening, this movie is here to tell you that Rebecca Schneider was correct.

This is a bunch of Old South nonsense dressed up as melodrama. Two more gripes: first, there is only one horserace in this entire film – it takes place in the movie's final 15 minutes. Even the apparently very exciting race that takes place before the final Kentucky Derby race is narrated by an announcer as our main characters don't even watch the race. They're in the saloon, betting on their horse, and they listen to the race instead of enjoying it. We listen too. My second gripe is that Walter Brennan just yells through this whole movie. And he won an acting Oscar for all of this yelling. It's absurd. He's terrible in this movie. Kentucky is a melodrama, sure, and he's an old crotchety grandad in it (despite being in his early forties when they filmed it), but he just yells the whole time. It's so obnoxious. (Apparently, Brennan won because extras were allowed to vote back in the 1930s, and he was very popular with that contingent, since he worked as an extra for so many year.) 

Either way, this movie is dumb.

Identification Marks: None (1965)

Jerzy Skolimowski's Rysopis (Identification Marks: None) is an astounding 1960s film about malaise in contemporary Poland. This movie was released in Poland in 1964/1965 and the U.S. in 1968. I think what's so fascinating is that I just saw Ivan Ostrochovský's 2020 film Servants – a film that's also about 1960s Poland (and includes a scene in front of a military board that cites Skolimowski's film specifically) – but Identification Marks: None is so, so, so much better, despite being obviously made on a shoestring budget and without a cameraman half the time. This is a really stunning film. I have known nothing about Skolimowski until 2022's Io, but now (thankfully) every streaming service I get is showing Skolimowski movies, so I can watch a few.

Identification Marks: None is showing exclusively on MUBI.

Servants (2020)

Ivan Ostrochovský's Služobníci (Servants) is a gorgeously shot film about Catholic schoolboys resisting totalitarianism in 1980s Czechoslovakia. I don't know if it's because I (incorrectly) thought this was going to be a gay story, or because I really do not care about religious convictions, but I was bored. Sure, Ostrochovský's film is clearly inspired by the gorgeous spareness of Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida, and of course I adored that movie, but this film is all beautiful pictures without anything really to say. Central to this muddle is Servants' focus on the Communist operative who is killing the young men who are in the right, here. Why should the film focus on this character so much, examining his inner life? (He is played by Romanian film star Vlad Ivanov, and I'm glad they got such a great actor for this role, but... he's playing a terrible person, and the film isn't actually about him. This whole business is a confused mess. 

Servants was released in the U.S. in February of 2022, and it's currently playing on MUBI.

Blithe Spirit (1945)

You know, I never really liked Blithe Spirit on the page, maybe because I thought the ending really wasn't that funny, even if the first act of the play is hilarious. Well, I quite honestly laughed my ass off watching Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, and the rest of the cast of the 1945 David Lean–Ronald Neame–Noel Coward film of this play. It's delightful!

I've been watching films from the 1947 awards season, and I'd been postponing this one, but the Queer Cinema Archive posted about this recently as a bit of queer coding – the implication is that Margaret Rutherford's Madame Arcati character is coded as a lesbian – so I figured I'd catch Blithe Spirit tonight. Well, I've watched the film now, and I can't say I saw any such coding. However, a the end of the film there is some explicit queerness:

Elvira, the main character’s late wife, has been pestering him about her flirtations with a Captain Bracegirdle while she was alive. She had, apparently, been unfaithful to her husband with old Captain Bracegirdle, whom she tells us was very attractive. Well, at the very end of the movie, Rex Harrison has a monologue about how he’s always been picked on by women who have bossed him around. Harridans, he calls them. Then he says, “You were very silly, Elvira, if you think I didn’t know all about you and Captain Bracegirdle. I did. And what you didn’t realize is that I was extremely attached to Paul Westlake at the time!”

Incidentally, the poster, which is very sexy, doesn't have a thing to do with the movie, which isn't remotely sexy. Kay Hammond, the eponymous blithe spirit, doesn't wear anything approximating the sexy outfit of the woman on the poster, and her haircut looks nothing like this either. Honestly, I don't know who this is even supposed to be. In any case, although it is not at all sexy, Blithe Spirit is a very funny film, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

55 Days at Peking (1963)

55 Days at Peking begins as a kind of epic colonial war–melodrama in yellowface starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven (none of these three actors is in yellowface, but Flora Robson, Leo Genn, and Robert Helpmann are). It's exciting enough for a time in its orientalist way, and John Ireland is excellent. By this film's end, though, 55 Days at Peking has become laughably absurd. The rescue sequence that comes at the film's 11 o'clock hour is nearly hilarious it's so stupid. And I fail to understand why we are supposed to be rooting for these eleven imperialist countries who are in China for their own profit.

There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

There's Always Tomorrow is a beautifully shot (in sparkling black and white) Douglas Sirk film that explores a man's mid-life crisis. Fred MacMurray is married to Joan Bennett, and he has three obnoxious children who take all of her attention – so much so that even when he is trying to communicate his deep existential crisis to her she cannot be bothered to give him any time or even acknowledge that he is in crisis. Into this void steps Barbara Stanwyck, a gorgeous fashion designer from New York who was an old flame and who still loves him. 

You know how this ends. It's 1956. I loved this melodrama because it's Douglas Sirk and it's gorgeously made, but it does a very bad job of selling us all on the idea that MacMurray makes the right choice by going back to the ungrateful group of assholes he calls a family. At the film's end, although MacMurray seems satisfied that he's done the right thing, even for his own happiness, I felt trapped, and I felt that he was trapped in this unhappy situation.

Stanwyck is incredible in this. She gives a cracking good performance that steals every scene she's in. It's a brilliant role and she's amazing.

Charly (1968)

Charly is a 1968 film based on the story Flowers for Algernon, and it's a very 1960s film. It does these split-screen double shots seemingly for no reason at all other than because it can, and when it should use them near the end for emotional payoff, it chooses not to. It's also sometimes filmed rather like a horror film – or perhaps I should say rather like a Frank Perry film. This definitely has the vibe of a film made by the Perrys – constantly telling a story that isn't scary as if it's terrifying. Charly's ethics, too, are suspect, and it approaches its central character with a gaze I found frequently hostile. Charly won Best Actor in 1969 for Cliff Robertson, and this was the very last of the 1968 Oscar nominees I needed to see. Well, I've seen it now. Meh.