Movies, second half of April
Prayers for Bobby [2009]. The youngest son of a religious family comes out to his family, runs up against his mother's faith, and eventually commits suicide. The suicide foreshadows the film, but we quickly return to a happier time when the family was whole and Bobby (a doe-eyed Ryan Kelley) hadn't yet come out. It makes the throwaway comments of family members about gay people all the more poignant, since you know what torment it will eventually cause the boy. He knows he shouldn't be gay, that it's a sin, that the Bible is against it, but at the same time he knows how much he's already tried to deny it without any success in altering himself. Eventually his self-torment overtakes him and he confides in his brother and soon the secret is out to the whole family. The mother (Sigourney Weaver) does not take the news well, but rather than be a storm of hatred, she's a gust of misguided support: through the Bible, and later through therapy and church groups, they can turn him away from sin and get him back on the good road. The acting and writing here is particularly good, with the mother's love so evident, which foments the son's torment at wanting to be good but knowing that what the mother asks is impossible. The real quality of these interactions and their fleshed out incarnations no doubt are due to the fact that the movie is based on the true story of Mary Griffith (who supervised the film) and her son, Bobby. The intolerance is one born out of a desire to help, and the hurt gets spread evenly when they encounter an impasse.
Bobby eventually moves to Portland and lives with his cousin Jeanette, a refreshing breath of new perspective in his life. He goes to gay clubs and shakes the stifling guilt he had experienced during his first time in a gay club alone a few months earlier. He meets a guy, they become boyfriends and he even meets his accepting parents. For a time, Bobby's happy, but the lack of resolution with his family weighs heavily on his heart. For someone who was so intensely close to his family, you can only imagine how painful and lonely the severance would be.
The film is not a sob story, however, since it does not end with the tragedy of Bobby's suicide. Instead it stays with the family, particularly the mother, and sees how they grieve. The mother is particularly stricken, since she cannot resolve the goodness of her son and the supposed badness of his sins, homosexuality and suicide. After opening to some new external voices (but not without a reflexive, trained resistance using Bible citations), she begins exploring whether her beliefs may have been misguided. The transformation is stunning: questioning a few assumptions and hearing plausible responses opens the floodgates towards resolution. The ending gets a bit rushed, but her initial courting of another perspective, importantly, gets a solid and respectful treatment. In these final scenes especially, the film belies its made-for-TV origins, but other than some obvious breaks for commercials, it's surprisingly well-written and well-acted for the medium. More often than not, it feels like a modest and well-intentioned production with an impassioned message. That message gets conveyed clearly: the price of intolerance can often be quite dear. 8/10.
Salon Kitty [1976]. In Nazi Germany, a brothel owner is forced by a manipulative general to elicit secrets from her girls' clients. Kitty Kellerman (an over-the-hill, plastic, Swedish star Ingrid Thulin) had owned a brothel before, but with the Nazi rise to power it is closed. That is, until an ambitious Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger) offers to relocate the brothel to a wooded hotel in the countryside, where Nazi soldiers could enjoy themselves and have their post-coital confessions secretly recorded. The film appears to be a much more explicit version of The Damned, which also starred Thulin and Berger in another Nazi sexual adventure; not having seen The Damned (yet), I can't judge the similarities. So I'll just have to treat it as a unique creature.
In the revamped Salon Kitty, the new prostitutes are selected to have pure Aryan traits and come from all different social classes and backgrounds, from faithful bourgeoisie housewife to poor, virginal teen. They all must profess an utter willingness to do anything anything for the Führer. To prove their worth, they first have an athletic public orgy with some boned up soldiers from the front; later tests prove to be more perverse as the women are individually paired with certain "undesirables". After all this "training", the film finally meanders into a plot, but even this drama is fairly haphazard. The brothel's star is the innocent Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy), hand cultivated by Kitty into a pouty sex kitten. Margherita falls in love with a soldier that she has sex with over the course of two weeks. He's disillusioned and confesses his desire to defect. Margherita becomes disillusioned with her fiercely ideological Nazism and decides to scheme against Wallenberg. These decisions develop quickly once the movie reaches this point. More precisely, once each step is decided upon, the action is quick, but the time between decisions is long and aimless.
I think I expected this movie to be an exploitative, explicit version of Cabaret. The sexual elements certainly were there (literally every substantive character, down to minor players like the gay manservant or Wallenburg's wife, shows his or her privates). But much of it is not erotic and despite the copious nudity, the military/Nazi/perversion fetishes aren't exploited enough to make the scenes hot. Yet the ideas should have made the scenes hot all by themselves, like the inexperienced women having their initiation by a squadron of horny, obedient soldiers. It's an erotic mix of order and chaos on paper, but in execution the director, Tinto Brass, careens between aspirations of high art and pornography, never achieving either but vacillating between the two. The redeeming part of the film for me was its extensive depiction of cabaret culture: the casual omnisexuality, where the audience watches singing, dancing and comedy that features nudity of both sexes and even some casual homosexual elements. As in Cabaret, there's a kind of refreshing lack of macho hangups in pre-WWII Berlin. Though the two films differ quite a bit in what occurs when Nazis come to power: in Cabaret the party's over and an (always threatened) hypermasculinity takes control, while in Salon Kitty, Brass thinks the Nazism adds just another degree of perversion in terms of sadism. At times, you think he may be making a point, like with the disturbing early scene at the pig butcher's, but you quickly realize that Brass is just making overtures and has no real intent to use the sexuality for political commentary. This is nowhere near as political as Pasolini's Salo. The movie falls short on titillating exploitation, but it also falls short on having a message, hence it's just a bit of a bore. 5/10.
Marquis [1989]. The Marquis de Sade's time in prison, where his only companion is Colin, his penis. For a movie where one of the major characters is a penis, it's surprisingly unerotic. More accurately, the film is a grotesque: live actors wear rubbery, exaggerated masks over their heads, so that all the characters are bulging caricatures of animals, like dogs, cows, pigs, and roosters. The Marquis' penis is an animatronic puppet who has a mind of his own and appears at the slightest arousal. However, he's not a huffy, puffy horndog, but rather conducts cerebral conversations with the Marquis about whether 'tis nobler to fuck than to write. He also tenderly asks the Marquis to read him bedtime stories which, this being the Marquis, are quite salacious. None of this is the least bit erotic, though it is at times a bit comic. Most of the time, however, it borders on the grotesque. This, I suppose, is kind of the point with the Marquis de Sade: titillation mixed with disgust.
The plot, or what passes for one, is that the Marquis has been imprisoned in the Bastille. The guard lusts after him. A female prisoner had been raped by the king and when she threatened to tell the public that she was bearing his child, he threw her in the Bastille. The warden and the priest of the Bastille plot to clear the king's name by faking the paternacy of the unborn child. Meanwhile, two other prisoners, the former police chief and another official, plot their escape and foment revolution. Things happen and people die (the French Revolution was a bloody time after all), but none of it feels consequential in this telling. It already crossed the line into fantasy by having the characters be animalistic caricatures, so when bad things happen, you don't much care. The storytelling also doesn't help, since the Marquis often just sighs with the weight of the world on his shoulders, equally despondent whether someone he loves dies or he's run out of plumes to write with. Too uninvolving and the animated penis gimmick wears off quickly. 5/10.
No Skin Off My Ass [1993]. A gay hairdresser (Bruce LaBruce) encounters a skinhead in the park and decides to take him home with him. The skinhead says nothing as the hairdresser gives him a bath, then the hairdresser locks him in the spare bedroom, but the skinhead sneaks out in the morning through a window. He heads over to his sister's apartment where she's shooting screen tests for her lesbian revolution movie and then he returns to the hairdresser's apartment. The movie is apparently a "remake" of That Cold Day in the Park, whose opening scene is shown at the start of that movie. I haven't seen that Robert Altman film, so I can't say what effect that reference has on the experience, so my judgment rests on just seeing the film cold.
There's a lot of nudity (thankfully), and no violence (thankfully), though piercings, bootlicking, scalplicking, etc. are pretty heavy thematic elements (eh...) I expected this film to be somewhere in between Bruce LaBruce's other efforts: the pseudo-revolutionary proclamations of The Raspberry Reich, coupled with the raw 8mm amateur camera footage of his Warhol spoof Super 8½. It does have some of the dry, post-dubbed narration of the latter, speckled with the same skewering turns of phrase (a self-important, "artistic" film director pointlessly reframes her actresses' heads, chanting: "Work with me, not against me!"). It's too bad these lines aren't more frequent, or that the film wasn't more honed. In short, it suffers because the director hasn't pulled together his style yet and his editing and direction carelessly includes some "art" shots that only delay the heart of the project. It's a nice curiosity for seeing LaBruce's craft at an early stage, but it's not all that rewarding. 5/10.
Bobby eventually moves to Portland and lives with his cousin Jeanette, a refreshing breath of new perspective in his life. He goes to gay clubs and shakes the stifling guilt he had experienced during his first time in a gay club alone a few months earlier. He meets a guy, they become boyfriends and he even meets his accepting parents. For a time, Bobby's happy, but the lack of resolution with his family weighs heavily on his heart. For someone who was so intensely close to his family, you can only imagine how painful and lonely the severance would be.
The film is not a sob story, however, since it does not end with the tragedy of Bobby's suicide. Instead it stays with the family, particularly the mother, and sees how they grieve. The mother is particularly stricken, since she cannot resolve the goodness of her son and the supposed badness of his sins, homosexuality and suicide. After opening to some new external voices (but not without a reflexive, trained resistance using Bible citations), she begins exploring whether her beliefs may have been misguided. The transformation is stunning: questioning a few assumptions and hearing plausible responses opens the floodgates towards resolution. The ending gets a bit rushed, but her initial courting of another perspective, importantly, gets a solid and respectful treatment. In these final scenes especially, the film belies its made-for-TV origins, but other than some obvious breaks for commercials, it's surprisingly well-written and well-acted for the medium. More often than not, it feels like a modest and well-intentioned production with an impassioned message. That message gets conveyed clearly: the price of intolerance can often be quite dear. 8/10.
Salon Kitty [1976]. In Nazi Germany, a brothel owner is forced by a manipulative general to elicit secrets from her girls' clients. Kitty Kellerman (an over-the-hill, plastic, Swedish star Ingrid Thulin) had owned a brothel before, but with the Nazi rise to power it is closed. That is, until an ambitious Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger) offers to relocate the brothel to a wooded hotel in the countryside, where Nazi soldiers could enjoy themselves and have their post-coital confessions secretly recorded. The film appears to be a much more explicit version of The Damned, which also starred Thulin and Berger in another Nazi sexual adventure; not having seen The Damned (yet), I can't judge the similarities. So I'll just have to treat it as a unique creature.
In the revamped Salon Kitty, the new prostitutes are selected to have pure Aryan traits and come from all different social classes and backgrounds, from faithful bourgeoisie housewife to poor, virginal teen. They all must profess an utter willingness to do anything anything for the Führer. To prove their worth, they first have an athletic public orgy with some boned up soldiers from the front; later tests prove to be more perverse as the women are individually paired with certain "undesirables". After all this "training", the film finally meanders into a plot, but even this drama is fairly haphazard. The brothel's star is the innocent Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy), hand cultivated by Kitty into a pouty sex kitten. Margherita falls in love with a soldier that she has sex with over the course of two weeks. He's disillusioned and confesses his desire to defect. Margherita becomes disillusioned with her fiercely ideological Nazism and decides to scheme against Wallenberg. These decisions develop quickly once the movie reaches this point. More precisely, once each step is decided upon, the action is quick, but the time between decisions is long and aimless.
I think I expected this movie to be an exploitative, explicit version of Cabaret. The sexual elements certainly were there (literally every substantive character, down to minor players like the gay manservant or Wallenburg's wife, shows his or her privates). But much of it is not erotic and despite the copious nudity, the military/Nazi/perversion fetishes aren't exploited enough to make the scenes hot. Yet the ideas should have made the scenes hot all by themselves, like the inexperienced women having their initiation by a squadron of horny, obedient soldiers. It's an erotic mix of order and chaos on paper, but in execution the director, Tinto Brass, careens between aspirations of high art and pornography, never achieving either but vacillating between the two. The redeeming part of the film for me was its extensive depiction of cabaret culture: the casual omnisexuality, where the audience watches singing, dancing and comedy that features nudity of both sexes and even some casual homosexual elements. As in Cabaret, there's a kind of refreshing lack of macho hangups in pre-WWII Berlin. Though the two films differ quite a bit in what occurs when Nazis come to power: in Cabaret the party's over and an (always threatened) hypermasculinity takes control, while in Salon Kitty, Brass thinks the Nazism adds just another degree of perversion in terms of sadism. At times, you think he may be making a point, like with the disturbing early scene at the pig butcher's, but you quickly realize that Brass is just making overtures and has no real intent to use the sexuality for political commentary. This is nowhere near as political as Pasolini's Salo. The movie falls short on titillating exploitation, but it also falls short on having a message, hence it's just a bit of a bore. 5/10.
Marquis [1989]. The Marquis de Sade's time in prison, where his only companion is Colin, his penis. For a movie where one of the major characters is a penis, it's surprisingly unerotic. More accurately, the film is a grotesque: live actors wear rubbery, exaggerated masks over their heads, so that all the characters are bulging caricatures of animals, like dogs, cows, pigs, and roosters. The Marquis' penis is an animatronic puppet who has a mind of his own and appears at the slightest arousal. However, he's not a huffy, puffy horndog, but rather conducts cerebral conversations with the Marquis about whether 'tis nobler to fuck than to write. He also tenderly asks the Marquis to read him bedtime stories which, this being the Marquis, are quite salacious. None of this is the least bit erotic, though it is at times a bit comic. Most of the time, however, it borders on the grotesque. This, I suppose, is kind of the point with the Marquis de Sade: titillation mixed with disgust.
The plot, or what passes for one, is that the Marquis has been imprisoned in the Bastille. The guard lusts after him. A female prisoner had been raped by the king and when she threatened to tell the public that she was bearing his child, he threw her in the Bastille. The warden and the priest of the Bastille plot to clear the king's name by faking the paternacy of the unborn child. Meanwhile, two other prisoners, the former police chief and another official, plot their escape and foment revolution. Things happen and people die (the French Revolution was a bloody time after all), but none of it feels consequential in this telling. It already crossed the line into fantasy by having the characters be animalistic caricatures, so when bad things happen, you don't much care. The storytelling also doesn't help, since the Marquis often just sighs with the weight of the world on his shoulders, equally despondent whether someone he loves dies or he's run out of plumes to write with. Too uninvolving and the animated penis gimmick wears off quickly. 5/10.
No Skin Off My Ass [1993]. A gay hairdresser (Bruce LaBruce) encounters a skinhead in the park and decides to take him home with him. The skinhead says nothing as the hairdresser gives him a bath, then the hairdresser locks him in the spare bedroom, but the skinhead sneaks out in the morning through a window. He heads over to his sister's apartment where she's shooting screen tests for her lesbian revolution movie and then he returns to the hairdresser's apartment. The movie is apparently a "remake" of That Cold Day in the Park, whose opening scene is shown at the start of that movie. I haven't seen that Robert Altman film, so I can't say what effect that reference has on the experience, so my judgment rests on just seeing the film cold.
There's a lot of nudity (thankfully), and no violence (thankfully), though piercings, bootlicking, scalplicking, etc. are pretty heavy thematic elements (eh...) I expected this film to be somewhere in between Bruce LaBruce's other efforts: the pseudo-revolutionary proclamations of The Raspberry Reich, coupled with the raw 8mm amateur camera footage of his Warhol spoof Super 8½. It does have some of the dry, post-dubbed narration of the latter, speckled with the same skewering turns of phrase (a self-important, "artistic" film director pointlessly reframes her actresses' heads, chanting: "Work with me, not against me!"). It's too bad these lines aren't more frequent, or that the film wasn't more honed. In short, it suffers because the director hasn't pulled together his style yet and his editing and direction carelessly includes some "art" shots that only delay the heart of the project. It's a nice curiosity for seeing LaBruce's craft at an early stage, but it's not all that rewarding. 5/10.