Since I'm Almost Done with School...

I've been watching some movies lately, along with going to recitals. There's about one every day this week and next, it seems.

So I added Robert Z. Leonard's The Divorcee with Norma Shearer to my queue recently. It's packaged as a "pre-code" Hollywood film, but it's from 1930 so, of course, it's incredibly tame by today's standards. The film follows Norma Shearer as she gets married and then divorces her husband because he's a philandering jackass. Well, first she cheats on him to settle the score and then he divorces her because he can't deal with his manhood being impugned. The film had me at this point. Norma Shearer calls her husband on his sexist double standards and then divorces his ass. Then she goes about town with numerous other men and tries to have a little fun. The movie winds down with her realizing that her life is empty (all that partying: so exhausting!) and meeting an old flame who still pines for her. She is planning on marrying him and moving to J-pan, but then his wife (who was tragically disfigured in act one) comes into the scene and Norma Shearer realizes what she really wants to do is not to marry the man who could make her happy, but find her husband (now living in Paris) and try to make a go of it with him again. The film ends happily (of course) with the sanctity of marriage being upheld, etc, etc. It's a lot like The Love Parade in this way--and similarly disappointing. Still, Norma Shearer is fabulous. If you've never seen her in anything, you're missing out. She won an Oscar for The Divorcee and it's because she played against type with this role and she's superb in it.

Today I continued my 1984 kick by watching Francis Ford Coppola's gangster-flick-slash-musical-revue film The Cotton Club. The movie stars Richard Gere, Gregory Hines and Diane Lane. As I said, it's a gangster film about the Cotton Club, so interspersed with the Godfather-style murders and meetings and kidnappings are musical numbers starring very light-skinned black people. It's a weird movie anyway, but it's treatment of race is a little odd, to say the least. Gregory Hines is second-billed in the movie, but the Hines plot and the Gere plot intersect only very rarely, and I began to wonder why we were following his story at all. Obviously, the film means to follow a white man and a black man as they navigate the politics and seamy underbelly of the Cotton Club, but the film is only truly committed to its white lead, and whenever the film turns its focus to its black lead it feels like an afterthought. This is so pronounced that The Cotton Club is really two movies, and because it divides its time between the two, the film never really gets off the ground. There is at least one really good scene in the picture, but it's mostly eye candy. The period is beautiful to look at and Milena Canonero's costumes are gorgeous. But that is pretty much all The Cotton Club has going for it.

I Received This Email Today:

The final clearance of your manuscript has been approved!



Congrats!

Jack Tyndall
Manuscript Clearance Advisor
Academic Program Specialist
Florida State University
Office of Graduate Studies

**
But I am in a bad mood nevertheless. We had convocation today in the School of Theatre, where they recognize the graduates for the year. I just couldn't get into it. I spent the whole time wanting to escape. I felt awkward and silly.

Ace in the Hole

I previously wondered aloud why Kirk Douglas wasn't nominated for the Best Actor Oscar in 1952 for his excellent work in William Wyler's film Detective Story, but I got my answer today.

That's because I finally watched his other film from the 1951 awards season: Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas clearly gave two of the best performances of 1951, because he is fucking brilliant in Ace in the Hole. The film also happens to be stellar: bold, unforgiving, beautifully filmed in a film noir style even though it follows a newspaper man, not the typical leading man for a noir film. Ace in the Hole is an extremely intelligent satire of media and reportage. Except that it isn't funny. Ever.

Instead it's pointed and smart, skewering sensationalist news media, their corrupt tactics, and the people who buy into their kind of journalism. The DVD of Ace in the Hole was only recently released by the Criterion Collection, so this gem of Billy Wilder's oeuvre has gone largely unseen. Now is the time to check it out. It's a great film with some great performances.

Integration?

Okay, I just got back from a conference on musical theatre, so I am feeling kind of updated on the scholarship and there's something I don't understand: What is all the brouhaha about integration about?

As the story goes, Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat is sort of integrated, but the true integration of songs and dialogue didn't happen for good until 1946 and Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, after which musicals all became integrated until the advent of the "concept" musical with Hair in the 1960s. Except, of course, that none of this is true. Oklahoma! did not mean the end of unintegrated musicals, nor was it the beginning of integrated musicals. With all of these scholars trying to pinpoint the precise origin of the integrated musical, it seems to me rather odd that none of the papers I heard at the conference concerned a form that I consider had been integrated much earlier than Oklahoma!: the movie musical.

Tonight I watched Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade from 1929, and I defy anyone to tell me that this is not an integrated musical. Each song comes out of the plot and furthers the plot. There are character songs, the obligatory love duet (this one is called "The Love Parade," but is actually rather unengaging) and even a couple of comedic numbers from the secondary characters. I don't get it. Rodgers and Hammerstein could not possibly have thought up this idea on their own. All they would have had to do was go to the cinema. Lubitsch was doing this stuff in late '20s!

Back to The Love Parade, though. This movie is occasionally cute and sometimes very funny, but it is mostly a sexist mess with a strange performance from Maurice Chevalier (who was inexplicably nominated for an Oscar). This flick is nowhere near as good as Harry Beaumont's The Broadway Melody from the same year. The Love Parade follows the romance of the queen of Sylvania (Jeanette MacDonald--I never really liked her) and Count Alfred of Sylvania (Chevalier). She is the queen and he is the prince consort, so he doesn't feel like much of a man. She orders him around and he is to love and obey her. It is a role-reversal film, where the woman rules the roost and commands him and he has to stay home and be bored all day. I thought at first that the whole thing was ironic and funny. How droll, I thought, that we're making fun of men's expectations for their wives by putting a man in that position and seeing how ludicrous it is to expect one partner to stay home all day and do nothing while the other partner goes about her day running the country. I soon figured out, however, that this movie was serious. There was no ironic comment. The Love Parade is about a woman learning her place. The film ends with the queen promising that Alfred shall be the king and run the affairs of state and boss her around as much as he wants. It's sort of bizarre, really. The songs aren't much either, I have to say, though The Love Parade is gorgeous to look at and the comic characters are very cute and have two very cool numbers.

So much

I haven't posted in a while and I apologize. I was in New York and when I got back to Tallahassee I returned to a whole ton of work that needs to be done by Monday morning at 9:00a.

First things first: New York was fabulous. I had never been and I completely loved it. I visited with my friend Joe and my old friend Kristen who I hadn't seen in four years. The conference was really fun too. I don't know much about musical theatre that is older than 1980 and the conversation was mostly situateed in the time period before that so I learned a lot. It made me want to commit much more to investigating musical theatre as I continue to write. My paper was very well received. It probably won't be published or anything, but it was cool to give a paper and get as much positive response as I did.

Theatre I saw while in New York: The Adding Machine, a musical version of the play by Elmer Rice. It was absolutely superb. I also saw Passing Strange, which is a kind of rock-concert/musical narrative about a black man's coming of age in Culver City, Amsterdam and then Berlin. It totally rocked and I loved it. And last but certainly not least, I saw a concert version of Paul Simon's musical The Capeman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The music from The Capeman is sensational, heavily influenced by Puerto Rican music and was performed by nineteen singers and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Paul Simon himself even came out to do a song and then again for the encore. It was awesome.

Now that I am back I am busy writing a paper that interrogates the notion of Latino "identity." It has to be standard length (15-20 pages), and it is due Monday morning. But there are lots of other things to do here, too. Our new play festival at FSU, New Horizons, is going up this weekend and I want to attend the various nights of that, and the Technical Directors have a huge party in the woods tonight which they call Meatfest. It's basically an enormous barbecue in the middle of the fucking forest. So I am trying to finish my paper, but I am a little more interested in having fun. Graduation is April 25th and I will be done with most of my work on the 15th. I want this semester to be over!

One more thing: I may be directing a Shakespeare show in Tallahassee this summer. A bunch of the students are getting together and planning it and I am meeting with them about it later today. So we shall see...

The Subject

I said before how one of the revisions I was asked to make in my thesis was to add a description of how I was using the concept of the "subject." I was initially quite irritated with having to do this, but I've finished that portion of my revisions, and what I wrote kind of made me happy. So it appears that this complaint was a blessing in disguise. To wit:

As mentioned above, popular discourse often conflates gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, transgendered, and other queer persons into a single identity. Images and representations of queer people are constantly being produced in various media and come from numerous sources, leading the philosopher Didier Eribon to state that “As Barry D. Adam comments, a gay man finds himself confronted with a ‘composite portrait’ of himself, proposed by a set of images, representations, and discourses, all providing him with a degrading or inferiorizing image of himself.” In Eribon’s narrative, Barry D. Adam is hailed by the representations of gay men in public discourse. Throughout this document, I refer to the “composite portrait” that interpellates Adam as “the queer subject.” The subject is created by discourse and exists as a discursive representation of an actual queer body. Characters in plays represent and stand in for actual queer lives, and these representations both exist within and shape discourse about queer people. The queer subject, then, is what Eribon calls a “contested space, a space of political and cultural conflict” (75). The queer subject is an object of discourse that has the power to shape popular (heteronormative) conceptions of actual queer lives, and the production of these images is, therefore, a crucially important site for exploration.

AND I don't really have to fix my citation method at all. I had to add a couple of words and delete some commas and that's it!

The Nilo Cruz Play

For years—since the play became hugely popular and everyone started doing it—I have been unable to remember the title of Anna in the Tropics. I always call it "the Nilo Cruz play" and then people tell me the play's title but I promptly forget it.

Anna in the Tropics won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2003, of course, and it is kind of ridiculous that I haven't read it, but it was assigned to me for class on Monday and now I've finally read the play. I doubt that will have any impact on me remembering the play's title, however.

I don't get this play. I don't get what happens in it; I don't get why everyone loves it so much; I don't get why it won the Pulitzer; I don't get Cruz's themes. Worse yet, I think the play is kinda sleepy, and by sleepy I mean boring.

I Guess Microsoft Word Must Have Hyphenated "Reichian The-rapist"

I defended my thesis this afternoon for my committee.

The document is entitled Violence and the Queer Subject in the Plays of David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill, and I passed my defense.

The committee talked to me for about two hours, and I talked back. We discussed the choices I made: the reasons I did certain things, omitted certain referents, ways in which I could improve, words I could define better, etc. They gave me seven notes that I need to address before they will sign off on the thesis. Well, actually, everyone but my advisor has signed off on it. After I address the notes then she will sign it and it can be approved by the university.

Some of the notes are big deals: one of my readers would like me to clarify my use of the term "subject." In fact, during my defense she asked me to define the term as I was using it in my thesis. I don't know why the term needs a definition, but she thought it was unclear. "A subject is an object," is what I told her. And then I quoted Althusser. While she was reading, I guess she kept thinking I was speaking about the characters in the plays as though they were Lacanian subjects. So now I need to define it in the thesis. No small task. How am I going to work something that clunky into my argument? "Let us pause for a moment and address what I mean by 'subject.'" Yikes.

Some of the notes are very minor: the committee, for instance, unanimously agreed that they want me to turn off Microsoft Word's automatic hyphenation function. Hahaha!

The committee also dislikes my citation method and they asked me what format I was using. Now, I knew from the start that this was going to be a problem but I like the way I am citing things and so I wanted to argue about it. "I got the format from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet," I said. "I copied the format directly from there."
We argued about this for a bit. Everyone still dislikes it, although I can't figure out why. I think it's very clear. And then came my most brilliant moment of the day:
Someone asked "Well, who published Epistemology of the Closet? What press was that?"
"I believe it was the University of California Press out of Berkeley," I said.
"I think it was Routledge," one of the guests offered.
"I'll look it up," another of the guests said. (She had her computer out during the entire defense. It was actually quite distracting.)

Now, there is no earthly reason for me to know who published Epistemology of the Closet, or for anyone else to know that information for that matter. But, sure enough: UC Press, Berkeley. I grinned to myself. Totally meaningless trivia, but I knew it anyway.

Netflix Drama

I have been having minor Netflix drama. Not really, it's just that the movies that I want to come to my house in this moment in time all seem to be unavailable to me. This was partially remedied today when Netflix told me that the next flick (see what I did there?) they are going to send me is Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade. About time! It has been #2 in my queue for, like, six weeks. Or so. The Man of My Life has been there even longer, and I have been patiently waiting, while the sixth movie in my queue kept getting sent to me. But all that is about to change, when The Love Parade comes my way.

This post is nuts. Sorry. Please notice how many gay-interest films are at the top of my queue, too, and don't be shocked. I have been feeling extra gay these last few weeks. Maybe it's all of that thesis-writing.

Why am I still awake?

Mary, Queen of Scots

I probably shouldn't have watched a movie this afternoon, but I'm done with a lot of my work and I felt like a break.

So I watched the Charles Jarrott film Mary, Queen of Scots. Jarrott had a huge hit previously with his film Anne of the Thousand Days, the story of Henry VIII of England and his lover (and later wife) Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I of England. Anne of the Thousand Days starred Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold. Now, it may be that I'm misremembering, but I recall it as a really great movie.

The reason I think I might be misremembering is that Mary, Queen of Scots is a sixteenth century soap opera that treats its lead women (Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I) as scheming, catty bitches. There is a lot of good acting in the movie: Glenda Jackson is Elizabeth and Vanessa Redgrave is Mary, but Mary jumps from bed to bed and is consistently outwitted. She comes off as a bit of an idiot and completely inept at ruling a country.

Even the film's tagline is reductive and sensational: They used every passion in their incredible duel... and every man in their deadly game of intrigue!
It's laughable.

I didn't completely dislike it, but this film is about as silly as Elizabeth: the Golden Age with Cate Blanchett. Still Redgrave and Jackson are good in Mary, Queen of Scots. I hadn't seen a Glenda Jackson movie in a long while, so that was nice. Redgrave was nominated for an Oscar for this performance, and Jackson was nominated in the same year for her performance in Sunday Bloody Sunday.

A Soldier's Story

Yesterday I finally watched Norman Jewison's film A Soldier's Story (1984), which is based on Charles Fuller's play A Soldier's Play. This is a really interesting film for many reasons. First off, I had forgotten all about Howard E. Rollins, Jr. He is the lead in this film and the guy on the poster.

Recognize him? He got an Oscar nomination for his role in Miloš Forman's Ragtime as Coalhouse Walker. He also played Virgil Tibbs in the long-running television series "In the Heat of the Night." That show was on when I was a kid and I don't really remember it, but evidently Rollins got kicked off the show after a couple of DUI incidents and other various disorderly conduct that got him in trouble with the law. As I was watching A Soldier's Story I kept wondering why I never see Rollins in films anymore. He was the iconic black actor of the early 1980s, starring as Medgar Evars in For Us, the Living on tv and in dozens of other tv movies, a presence on daytime soap "All My Children" and the star of two films nominated for Best Picture. Rollins obviously had many personal problems and his trouble with the law was a manifestation of that. He died in 1996 at the age of 46 (!) of complications from AIDS. I can't find anything out about his sexuality on the web, but that shouldn't come as a surprise.

A Soldier's Story was nominated for Best Picture, and it deserves its nomination. It's a total genre picture: military mystery film, but it's superbly directed by Norman Jewison. (Think In the Valley of Elah without the boredom.) It also boasts a great cast with some wonderful performances. Rollins wasn't nominated for an Oscar for this performance, but the mystery's dead man (Adolph Caesar) was. He's a scary, hateful old man, and it's an intriguing role. David Alan Grier, David Harris, William Allen Young and Denzel Washington (in one of his first films) are also in the cast. And Patti LaBelle stars as the owner of the local juke joint. And she sings. Twice! The music is by Herbie Hancock. My favorite performance is by Robert Townsend, who plays Rollins's driver throughout the movie. His excitement when he realizes the captain they sent down to investigate the murder is a black man is palpable and a lovely thing to watch. Townsend was the dad on the tv show "The Parent 'Hood" in the late 1990s. He's fantastic in this movie.

The film itself is a lot like Jewison's earlier In the Heat of the Night (1967) with Sidney Poitier and can't really escape comparison, but A Soldier's Story is further advanced than that movie, coming twenty years later. A Soldier's Story is about being black and how best to be black in the Army. The characters debate real issues of racism within the black community and systems of power that help some black people while keeping others down. It's fascinating and nuanced and makes for compelling drama. Recommended.

Le Sacre du Printemps

Went to hear the University Symphony Orchestra play Igor Stravinsky's seminal Rite of Spring tonight.

We stood and applauded. The audience went wild. It was amazing. I'd never heard it performed live before. The moment it was over I wanted to hear it again.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for 90 Minutes

For my first movie of 2008, I wound up seeing Bharat Nalluri's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which is a star vehicle for Amy Adams more than it is anything else. It's a silly little movie exactly like a dozen other movies just like it, mostly from the 1930s (and mostly directed by Frank Capra). Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a lot, in fact, like the movie inside Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. Still, I liked this champagne cocktail of a movie, and its two stars are very likable indeed. The movie also stars Ciarán Hinds, Lee Pace, Tom Payne and Shirley Henderson (love her).
It's about a down-on-her-luck English governess who gets fired by everyone and then lucks into working for an American club singer named Delysia LaFosse. Miss Pettigrew is transformed by Delysia into a new woman with a change of clothes and a bit of makeup. She then begins to help Delysia out in myriad ways, sorting out her complicated life and giving loads of relationship advice, also finding love herself along the way.

It's really homoerotic at times, too, which I thought was fun. And Shirley Henderson, who is sort-of the villainess of the piece, is great fun too. Actually, the whole thing is fun, heady nonsense. The boys in Delysia's life are pretty, the costumes are lovely. The films frantic quality is endearing, and I thought it was cute. It's nothing more than that, but it doesn't really wish to be either.

The Man I Love

One of the good things about Eytan Fox's film The Bubble is an extended sequence in a gay bar where Israeli pop star Ivri Lider sings the old Gershwin tune "The Man I Love." I keep trying to remember if I've heard the song sung by a male voice before, but if I have, I can't recall. Anyway, it's a really neat song for a guy to sing, and I'm a little in love with Ivri Lider doing it:

Someday he'll come along, the man I love
And he'll be big and strong, the man I love
And when he comes my way
I'll do my best to make him stay

He'll look at me and smile, I'll understand
And in a little while, he'll take my hand
And though it seems absurd
I know we both won't say a word

I know I shall meet him Sunday, 
Maybe Monday, maybe not
But still I'm sure I'll meet him someday
Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day

He'll build a little home just meant for two
From which I'll never roam. Who would? would you?
And so all else above
I'm waiting for
The man I love

Fun with Denim

I haven't purchased jeans since I moved across the country from Los Angeles to Talla-classy. And since then, two (count them, two) pairs of my jeans have worn out. I mean, all I wear is jeans anymore now that I am back in school. I never used to get to wear jeans and now I wear nothing else.

So I decided for one of my spring break events that I would go jeans shopping. Good jeans are impossible to find anyway, and I am on a (kind of) tight budget so I have to limit myself to the chains in the mall. I found two okay pairs of jeans at the Gap (ugh) and then I went to Express, where I found a very cute pair that I really liked.

They were $90.

So I asked the cashier if they were on sale. He says, "let's find out" and then rings them up. Sure enough: not on sale. I waffled for maybe a second and a half before he was like "What if I gave you a $30 gift certificate?"

"...um, that would be great," said I.

That's right. I'm cute. I mean, at least thirty dollars worth of cute.