Blue (1993)

Blue is stunning. It is also very hard to watch. But maybe it’s not meant for watching? You miss nothing if you look away, and yet the film is noting how so many are looking away. From AIDS, from death, from the war in Bosnia. But also, quite specifically, from those who are dying. This is on Criterion until the end of the month.

War Requiem (1989)

After adoring Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, I was disappointed to find myself less patient with his War Requiem, a feature-length film without dialogue set to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. Honestly, in theory this is a cool idea. I've loved similar concepts on occasion, including an incredible version of The Passion of Joan of Arc set to Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light which I was grateful to be able to hear performed live by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park back when I lived in Orlando. But anyway... Jarman's film is hyper theatrical in ways I didn't totally understand, and because there's no dialogue it often felt indulgent and distant. There is a very smart interpretation of the sacrifice of Abraham – but it's in the original Britten text, so it was a kind of literalization of the music. I don't know. This is cool in parts, but it left me rather cold.

Caravaggio (1986)

Whoa whoa whoa. I loved Caravaggio. It feels like an extraordinary step from Sebastiane to this, but Caravaggio is brilliant. Its art direction and mood feel like the Pasolini of The Decameron and Arabian Nights, but it’s also modern in interesting ways and the acting is really wonderful.

Sebastiane (1976)

Derek Jarman's Sebastiane has lots of slow-motion naked men in water. It is less clear what this has to say, but I’m not mad about it. And I’m gonna watch another 3 or 4 Jarman movies this month, so I will see what else he has in store for me. Also, this whole movie is in Latin... which made it hard to identify with these guys. Oh, I hated the opening to this, with its references to Fellini-Satyricon, but the rest is much better.

Also, it's been ages since I've seen Claire Denis's Beau Travail, but surely that movie is based on Sebastiane. I will need to look that up.

The Garden (1990)

The Garden is a psychedelic dream-trip of a film that uses the mythology of the life of Jesus Christ to talk about homophobia and to mourn for the loss of life caused by the HIV/AIDS crisis and the criminally lethargic response from the US and UK governments to the health crisis. I'm not into Christian imagery, so much of this felt heavy handed to me, but this has some very good moments, and every time the central couple appeared onscreen, I felt great. To be honest, though, they're not in it very much...

One image that will really stick with me from The Garden, though, is a small boy on a table spinning a globe, appearing to teach a group of very old male students, none of whom is listening. The old men–students are all banging these wooden rods on the table in unison, making stupid noises. It's a great image of role-reversal: old male hysteria masquerading as reasonable adult behavior. This is, of course, exactly what does happen in the world, although our newsmedia and governments pretend that their hysteria is normal and that other people are the crazies.

I watched The Garden as part of a series of queer films on the Criterion Channel.

Give Me the Satus Quo or Give Me Death!

The Twentieth Century: the Epic of Mackenzie King as Recounted in Ten Chapters is a brilliant comedy about early 20th-century Canadian politics. It's a wonderful satire inspired by Guy Maddin and Derek Jarman, but the genius is all Matthew Rankin. It's a hilarious, fabulously confident film. (Incidentally, all of the reviews that compare this to Monty Python are out of their minds.)

I watched this with my movie club. It was a Dave Rodriguez pick, and the entire group loved it.

Revengers Travesty

Alex Cox's updated version of Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (or is it Thomas Middleton's?) is a big huge mess. It stands on the shoulders of other adaptations of English Renaissance plays, of course. Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991) comes to mind, as well as Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), but Revengers Tragedy (the definite article and the apostrophe are both jettisoned for the new title) isn't as good as any of its predecessors.

Christopher Eccleston is fine as the aggrieved Vindici, but Derek Jacobi's Duke is imagined as an early modern Karl Lagerfeld with dark purple lipstick. It's a bizarre film that doesn't seem to be about much of anything, and lacks depth of any kind. There are strange (and misplaced) references to Princess Diana, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a near-useless pastiche without focus or a clear narrative, and a moral landscape that defies sense altogether. Skip it absolutely.

I should also mention that last night we (most of the MAs) all went to see Florida State's production of Lanford Wilson's A Sense of Place. I don't want to say anything about the production itself, because the production doesn't matter at all. The play should never have been chosen to open this or anyone's season. It is a truly useless play with nothing to recommend it. Why it is opening our season, and utilizing the time of some of our best designers is completely beyond me.

Five Movies for Hump Day

Roomie and I went to see Jesus Camp this evening at the Student Life Building. Jesus Camp is a documentary about an Evangelical youth ministry, and specifically one youth pastor named Becky Fischer, who wants to train children to be militant about Jesus. The film posits it as a fiercely political movement aimed squarely behind the Christian president George W. Bush and directed against global warming (!) and a woman's right to choose. The film is very problematic. It can't hep but totally deride these Christian people who have let them into their homes and the camera feels a little exploitative. This is especially true when the children are being interviewed. They are, of course, terribly indoctrinated and impressionable young people, but they appear really sweet and one ten-year-old girl really tugged at my heart with her story about how she wanted to run a nail shop and just tell people about Jesus while they got their nails done. What's fascinating in the film--the filmmakers make no point of this--is that the film has no reference to anything in the Bible. These people who purport themselves to be Christians and want the world to be Christian have no relationship to Christianity's holy texts, probably haven't even read them. It's extraordinary. They have this twelve-year-old child up onstage preaching to them, but the child wrote his sermon without looking at any scripture whatsoever. This is what terrifies me the most about the people in this film and the Christian Right in general: becaue their faith is grounded in nothing at all, not the words of Christ, not the words of the prophets, not Judaeic teachings, their speech is completely, totally rhetorical. This fascinates me. I'm not even sure why they believe what they believe. Believing I have god's word in my hands and reading it and spending my life learning what it says is one thing. Yelling about bringing Jesus back into our schools is just empty rhetoric without any basis in Christianity.
Anyway, the film reminded me of my childhood a lot, but I didn't really enjoy the picture, and it's shot for television and not the cinema, so if you do feel like watching it, rent it, because it will look better on your tv than it did in the giant theatre I saw it in.

Derek Jarman's Edward II is a quasi-modern, very gay adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. It was an important film in 1991 when it came out and there was much brouhaha over it. Tilda Swinton stars (and is incredibly overdone.) I didn't like it at all, I have to confess. And maybe that makes me a bad gay man, but, though the costumes are always intriguing, the film has no structure at all. A still bigger problem is that the gay characters are unlikeable and (unfortunately) also uncomplicated. Skip this unless you want a history lesson in gay cinema or really like Marlowe.

I LOVED The Last King of Scotland. I know everyone's been talking about Forest Whitaker all season, but why has no one mentioned how brilliant Kevin Macdonald's film is? It's one of the best of the year, and boasts a second excellent lead performance from James McAvoy. This is a movie about struggles in Africa and a psychotic dictator, but also a film about white privilege and (I felt) recalled Rachel Corrie's story in a few key ways. By this I mean that The Last King of Scotland seems unafraid to explore the feeling of invincibility that white people seem to feel when they are abroad. It's a superb thriller with some breathtaking action sequences and moments of sheer terror while also being a sensitive, intelligent inquiry of race relations in post-colonial Africa. I loved it.

Letters from Iwo Jima was not as good as Flags of Our Fathers for me. Everyone likes Letters better than Flags, so I am clearly in the minority on this one, but though I thought Letters was a sturdy, committed picture, it lacked a lot of things I needed it to have. There was, for instance, no rooting interest in the film. The Japanese are all going to die on that island. This is a given from the very beginning and yet the film is still about the fighting of the war. I'm not going to trash the movie too much, but I was bored and everything in the film is so dark (they're in those caves) and for so long. The film also praises the Japanese soldiers who aren't traditionally Japanese and approach the war from a more American point of view. It's more interesting than that, and Eastwood complicates the American soldiers, too, but the whole thing felt vaguely colonialist. The acting is excellent, though. Ken Watanabe and Kazunari Ninomiya are wonderful in their twin lead roles and my favorite performance comes from Tsuyoshi Ihara as a horse-loving former Olympian.

And I saw The Good Shepherd which is painfully, horribly bad. I moved it to the very bottom of my list for '06. I haven't been that bored in a film since Pirates of the Caribbean 2. It's totally plotless, completely lacking in stakes of any kind and boasts about twenty well-known actors saying and doing absolutely nothing. This list includes Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, Barton Fink John Turturro, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lee Pace, and many more that you would recognize immediately--which just makes the whole thing so much worse! Angelina Jolie is quite good in the film, doing unexpectedly good work with terrible material. This film is terrible. It's this year's Alexander. Avoid at all costs.