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.