Florida Film Festival 3 of 5: The Strange Ones

Finally I saw a movie at the FFF that I loved.

Pettyfer & Freedson-Jackson

Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein's The Strange Ones is not a strange film, really, but the people in it certainly have done (and are doing) something strange. The Strange Ones is a mystery. A boy – 13 or so, I'd say – and a grown man in his late thirties are seemingly on a road trip or running from the law or something. We don't really know what is happening or what has happened, and it is unclear what the two men's relationship actually is. They keep saying that they are brothers, but it is sort of clear from the beginning of the film that they are not.

The Strange Ones is expertly crafted and rewards close watching. Its mysteriousness is captivating, and if most of the time I was wondering what was going on, I also sincerely enjoyed this bafflement. The characters in The Strange Ones are compelling and fascinating; I wanted to know what was going on with them. This has everything to do with the excellent central performances, by James Freedson-Jackson and Alex Pettyfer, as well as the superb scripting and filmmaking by Radcliff and Wolkstein, who adopt just the kind of David Gordon Green / Daniel Patrick Carbone style and pace that I love (lush, rural, humid). More than anything else, The Strange Ones is a fascinating homage to Deliverance, visually quoting the film several times and updating and modifying its themes in clever, sensitive ways.

I am not going to say anymore because I don't want to give it away, but if you're interested in puzzles, you'll be interested in The Strange Ones.

By the end of the movie I was pretty sure what had occurred, but after it was over my companion and I could not agree on what we had just seen. He was wrong and I was right, of course, but the viewer must watch very very carefully. The Strange Ones is beautiful.

Lost River

I got the DVD of Ryan Gosling's debut feature Lost River in June. (I still get the DVDs because I am old and they have a better selection). I was excited about Lost River. I like Ryan Gosling: I think he makes good choices, and although I haven't always enjoyed the movies that the directors whose muse he is (Derek Cianfrance and Nicolas Winding Refn) have made with him, I always think Gosling is interesting to watch in these films, even when the films don't work for me.

In any case, I was predisposed to like Lost River. And so I started watching it in early June.

I got about ten minutes in – a ten minutes that played like a riff on a David Gordon Green movie – and then the movie changed tone starkly. The film's star Christina Hendricks was now in a bank office populated by absolutely no one until Ben Mendelsohn enters doing a kind of bizarrely menacing David Lynch kind of thing. This section of the movie is a kind of absurd exposition sequence, in which the main character is introduced to us as in a complete financial bind because of her own ignorance, and (it is immediately obvious) will now be forced to do a series of things that she doesn't want to do but that the film will enjoy watching her do.

I took the DVD out and went to sleep instead. This was already too contrived for my taste.

And then I didn't put the DVD back into my player until last night, when I convinced myself – finally – simply to finish this movie so that I could move on with my movie-watching existence.

Well, I was right when I took it out the first time in June. Lost River is derivative of lots of other filmmakers, which is, I suppose, fine as far as it goes, but Lost River also can't decide which of these guys it likes best. David Lynch is an obvious influence, with his grotesquely vicious worlds and characters who behave without motivation of any kind, but the movie also insists on numerous shots lit by a single source of brightly saturated neon light (pink, red, sometimes green) just like Refn's (awful) Ryan Gosling movie Only God Forgives.

Let me just stop right here: Avoid this thing at all costs. It is slow and ponderous and absurdly self important. And it is insanely, almost sadistically boring. Eva Mendes is a charming bright spot in this dour universe, but there isn't much else of interest and there's no one to root for in Lost River. Stay away.

Some 2014 Gay Movies Now on DVD

Let's start with a movie that isn't gay at all: Daniel Patrick Carbone's Hide Your Smiling Faces. This movie is a kind of old-school David Gordon Green picture – semi-rural life with kids trying to figure out who they are. The two brothers in the movie are coming to grips with the death of a young friend of theirs, and this movie is gorgeous. It tells its story in abstract, poetic ways, and it doesn't bother with the classic Hollywood narratives that might find the boys figuring out how to heal or finding solace in a new friend. Instead, it explores the frustration and terror of being a boy, of trying to fit in with other boys, of the impossibility at this age of understanding anything that one's parents have to say.

I want to say, too, that one of the reasons I love films like Hide Your Smiling Faces – and DGG's George Washington and Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kings of Summer from last year and Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild – is that they really are about childhood (pace Richard Linklater). These films are not movies about the experience of parenthood masquerading as films about childhood. They attempt to capture the lost, bizarre, truly difficult feelings that children experience, and they sort of refuse to make a kind of sense of those feelings.

* * *

I really liked Pride, as well, and I was surprised about this. Matthew Warchus's film is a rather straightforward account of a group of gay activists in 1980s London who begin to fight to raise money to support the National Union of Mineworkers' strike. I thought this was going to be a feel-good drama that repeated well-worn platitudes about the LGBT community and capitulated to the kind of capitalist-supporting identity politics practiced in the U.S. to which I object so much. But it isn't this at all! Pride is unabashed in its fight against fascism in the UK, and its message is not "acceptance" or "self-love" or even the "pride" in its title, but rather one that embraces radicalism, and understands that struggles to fight fascism can actually be won through unity. What's so fascinating about this is that the movie is not interested in identity between the miners and the queers; it is interested, rather, in coalition. One doesn't have to recognize one's self in other oppressed groups: one simply needs to fight.

Pride is, in this way, also a beautiful and moving tribute to the work of gay activists who attempted to enact real change in the world. Ben Schnetzer, the movie's lead actor, is great, and the film's supporting cast (Karina Fernandez, Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine, Jessica Gunning and Imelda Staunton) are mostly familiar faces who are all excellent.

* * *

Love Is Strange is just as cinematically conventional as Pride in many ways, except that this is a quirky comedy-drama about a gay male couple who gets married once marriage is legalized in New York. The man supporting the family financially through his job at a Catholic school where he teaches music, however, loses his job once he gets married. The Catholic school fires him for being gay.

The men (instead of leaving the city) move into other people's apartments – separate other people. Love Is Strange becomes a film about people's foibles, about the limits of love for our relatives, neighbors, and friends. Of course, the reason that the men are in this situation is fundamentally homophobia, but this is a movie about family dynamics, and the struggles of living with people we love very very much but don't actually want to live with.

Love Is Strange is presumably a riff on Leo McCarey's 1937 film Make Way for Tomorrow, so its conventionality has its roots, but I didn't find this movie very interesting, to be honest. The performances in it are lovely, but it is a little too dependent on narrative for my taste, and it often felt directionless. But then... the movie's ending is something else altogether. Ira Sachs' movie all of a sudden becomes an art film, representing loss and grief through images of sunlight and the trees and a skateboarding teenager. The end of Love Is Strange really does justify its title, and if it doesn't quite redeem the film in its entirety, it helped me to realize that hidden within this conventional film was an art film, secreted away and hiding. I expect Ira Sachs' next picture to be much more intriguing.

* * *

Finally, I must tell you about Arvin Chen's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (明天記得愛上我), a beautiful, whimsical, and very smart Chinese film about a man in his late 30s with a wife and a young son who has a kind of gay re-awakening. The film stars Richie Jen and (the excellent) Mavis Fan, and this is, more than anything else, a romantic comedy with themes similar to something like This Is 40 – about reaching a place in one's life that one no longer understands, seeing one's self in a new light as one reaches a scary age.

Mavis Fan is amazing as the jilted wife, and Stephen Wong Ka Lok is the most beautiful love interest.

But it's the way that the film works that is so good. Early in the picture, Richie Jen's manager floats away with an umbrella, and this signals a kind of child's world or fantasy realm, even though we are definitely dealing with real-world problems. Late in the film, when a drunken karaoke version of The Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" becomes a beautifully produced musical number, Arvin Chen's movie has earned the right to play with reality in this way. This is a lovely, lovely film.

Because I Am Procrastinating...

I am supposed to be re-reading Hamlet so that I can teach it next week. But I don't really feel like working, and tomorrow is a day off... at least until rehearsal at 6:00p.

Anyway, a few movies that I have watched recently but not yet written about:

I had been missing Bette Davis. I have seen a ton of her movies (by which I mean twenty-two), and since I usually only rent films I haven't seen before, Bette is generally on my backburner. Still, there are a couple of classics I haven't seen and since I hadn't seen Edmund Goulding's The Great Lie (1941) or Anatole Litvak's All This, and Heaven Too (1940), I rented them and had a mini-Bette Davis fest at my house. Both films are quite enjoyable. The Great Lie is a kind of high society soap opera with a husband who "dies" in a plane crash and a baby who Bette passes off as her own. Mary Astor won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the "other woman" in the scenario. The film is cute and funny, but Bette's character isn't all that much fun. She's earnest and sweet and always tries to do the right thing. Still, it's a good movie. The leading man is George Brent, and he's appropriately dapper. All This, and Heaven Too is much better. It (of course) is also a soapy melodrama, but All This takes place in France, where Bette is a governess to four children who love her dearly. They are the children of a duke and duchess in France (Charles Boyer [so gorgeous] and Barbara O'Neil [over the top.]) Anyway, Charles begins to fall in love with Bette (he isn't in love with the wife anymore, because she's a total nutjob), but they never act on anything and are always above board and proper about things. Of course, all this is doomed to end in tragedy. The thing is, the tragedy in ll This, and Heaven Too really works. I found it sweet and rather moving. Boyer and Davis are both very good in the film, and the story succeeds on its own merits. I liked it rather a lot, and I think it's worth the rental. Not as good, perhaps as The Letter, from the same year, but still quite good.

Dans Paris (Inside Paris) is a Christophe Honoré film (the guy who brought us Ma Mère). Dans Paris, however, is much more engaging than Ma Mère, and I liked it quite a bit. It's a small film, with not too much to say, but it says what little it has to say with panache and verve. It stars Romain Duris and Louis Garrel as brothers who live with their father and are trying to solve the problems of Duris's depression (which mostly has to do with how much he loves his ex-wife. It's an interesting little story about sadness and parenting and brotherhood. Worth the rental if you're into off-beat French stuff with fairly greasy young men (like I obviously am.)


Michael Apted's Gorillas in the Mist: the Story of Dian Fossey was appropriately dry, melodramatic and rooted in 1980s politics. I was mostly bored but I didn't hate it. It's a serviceable kind of thing that runs out of steam and has nowhere to go. I've seen worse.

Also from 1988, today I saw Beaches. I had never seen it. It's a big movie in gay culture, right? I'm not quite sure why it's such a big movie in gay culture, but I liked it a lot. The direction is absolutely terrible (Garry Marshall wasn't good in the 80s either, turns out) but Beaches is a surefire tearjerker. Let's be honest about things. I was crying way before we got to the end.

I think the reason I was so sensitive to Garry Marshall's inadequacies as a filmmaker while I was watching Beaches was that Ryan and I watched Zabou Breitman's The Man of My Life (L'Homme de Sa Vie) this afternoon and it's just lovely. It's a very showy film in terms of movie-maker's tricks, but also very beautiful. L'Homme de Sa Vie is the story of Frédéric, a man with a wife and little son who is on vacation in Provençe (or somewhere) for the summer but has a long conversation one night with his gay next-door neighbor, and the neighbor just gets under his skin. A bit like that Éric Rohmer film Ma Nuit Chez Maud. But The Man of My Life tells the story sort of backwards. We never see the whole conversation between the men. Instead, we move forward with the story and then as Fred thinks about his life, etc, he remembers the conversation in little bits and pieces. It's quite interesting and I recommend it to anyone who likes showy movies... or pretty movies.

One more flick. After seeing his brilliant George Washington, I rented David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls, and I want to move it to my list of all-time favorites. It's ponderous and sweet. I have been feeling affectionate toward love stories of late and All the Real Girls is a really nice one: very cute but never cloying. And I am totally in love with Paul Schneider. I want him to marry me.

Auto Insurance Drama, Spiderwick & George Washington

So I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to figure out some auto insurance. Turns out, if you let your auto insurance lapse, you have to pay a penalty (what they mendaciously call a surcharge) even if you go with a new company. That is dumb. Anyway, I changed auto insurance providers yesterday. I was with GEICO, but I am going to save $115 every six months with AAA, so I am changing. It's the exact same coverage for so much cheaper! I am all about it. I am having the laziest week! When the most exhausting thing you do all day is change auto insurance providers, you are definitely living the high life in Talla-classy. Today I am going to Costco. That might be the most exciting thing I do all day.

Two movies:
I finally saw David Gordon Green's 2000 feature George Washington and it is flat-out brilliant. I completely, totally loved it. If you haven't seen it, it's a poetic meditation on a small, impoverished town in the South, following five kids as they poke around during a summer. The film also features Paul Schneider (who I loved so much in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Lars and the Real Girl). The film has one real gasp-worthy moment that works brilliantly, but mostly its just a slow, poetic piece of cinema that I was completely in love with after the first ten minutes. Not to be missed, if you haven't seen it. Green's next feature, All the Real Girls is on its way to me right now, so I will review that one soon.

I was cool with The Spiderwick Chronicles for most of its length. It's an unpresuming kid's film intended to scare and be sweet, starring Freddie Highmore, Sarah Bolger and Mary-Louise Parker, with Nick Nolte, Seth Rogan, David Strathairn, Joan Plowright (!), and Martin Short. It's a cute story about goblins and fairies and a magic book and all of this business that we are all very used to. The trouble with Spiderwick is that it does not play by its own rules. This didn't bug me at all until the film's last three minutes, when Joan Plowright turns into a little girl and walks off with her dad to fairyland. It was a sweet moment, but completely impossible in the world of the film. One of my companions said "But it's a Nickolodeon movie! There are fairies and goblins. And you won't accept that she turns into a little kid?" My answer to that was that I will accept a film on its own terms. In the world of Spiderwick there are fairies and pig-demons that eat birds and griffins and salt has magic powers and all that. I buy into all of that, but when a film tells me that there is no time travel and that certain things cannot happen because there is no time travel and then someone goes back in time without explanation, I cry foul. The trouble is that once I start thinking about something that makes no sense in a movie, I start thinking about other things that make no sense in the movie. And then I start to get bugged by the movie's shoddy storytelling. All this to say that Spiderwick is not that great, really.

P.S. I still like Freddie Highmore a lot. I haven't really liked many of his movies, but I still like him.