"CARRIE: I knew he didn't want to find the skull with me. I pushed him and pushed him. I knew he'd already found the skull with two other women. I'm so stupid. And now I'm all alone in this waterfall in the sky inhabited by Aztecs." Excerpts from Sex and the City and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
"And remember the time Clint (Clint Ritchie) was knocked unconscious and time-traveled to the Wild West? Carlivati will riff on that plot, too. "Bo (Robert S. Woods) and Rex (John-Paul Lavoisier) are hit by lightning and wake up in 1968 — the same year OLTL hit the air," Carlivati says." My old bread-and-butter, One Life to Live is revisiting some of its most famous plots to celebrate the show's 40th anniversary.
HIL-arious. Sunset Blvd. is, like most marginally employed screenwriters without a car in L.A., one of my favorite movies ever. And who better to play Norma, than -- oh, just watch it. I mean, it's really really mean, but oh-so-awesome.
I had a chance to catch Tarsem's (The Cell, R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" video) new self-financed film, The Fall at the HAMMER Museum a couple of weeks ago. It's a dazzling grown-up fantasy about Alexandria, a young immigrant girl (CatincaUntaru, destined for Haley Joel Osmet-ish adoration) who is told a fairy tale story by Roy Walker, a suicidal paraplegic stuntman (Pushing DaisiesLee Pace) in an early 20th C. California hospital.
One woman at the QnA gushed to Tarsem that the film was an arrival on the order of the Beatles coming to America and while the film is fantastic, it's not that good. Still, it's a visual feast for the eyes, having been shot on location in over 24 countries. Tarsem said that he kept shooting until continuing would have meant selling the house, at which point he said "we're finished". The result is my favorite kind of story: a story about storytelling. Roy, awash in self-pity makes a terribly unreliable narrator and Alexandria's youth makes her a sometimes maddeningly confused listener. This explains such wonderful turns like Alexandria's vision of an Indian being a grand warrior of the subcontinent, while Roy goes on about how he has "had many squaws".
Interesting side note is that Tarsem's sort of evil. Since the film was shot before Pace's lead turn on Pushing Daises, he was an unknown (his most notable role was as transexual Calpernia Adams in Soldier's Boy) and the director told his cast and crew that Pace really had no use of his legs. One wheelchair-bound crewmember refuses still to speak to Tarsem, but he stands by his decision, saying that it "changed the whole tone of the set in a way that made the film work".
I'm one of like three people in the world who hated Pan's Labyrinth, a movie this film will draw inevitable comparisons to. But while both films feature young headstrong girls living in both a thrilling fantasy world and a dark everyday reality, The Fall's Alexandra has a plucky gumption that you root for. She's not content to be seduced by her imagination. She wrestles with it, with Roy's adult self-pity and without embracing sentimentality (the film is rated, rather unfairly, an R in the States, while Germany for instance, gave it their equivalent of a G rating) the film manages a life-affirming tone. It's a beautiful film that wisely gives the audience enough breathing room that really can get lost in the fantasy.
Here's some of what I've been working on this week:
An interview with Arthur Dong, director of Hollywood Chinese, a fantastic documentary about the Chinese-American experience in Tinseltown. I could have talked to Arthur for hours-- a really funny, fascinating and thoughtful guy. (The Advocate)
A QnA with photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Sort of got me thinking about how the media's job is to define and label things (this is a trend, it is about these kinds of people, it fits into this category) and fine artists are all about introducing ambiguity and challenging the nature of the boxes we stuff things into. Not that any of that shows up in the piece. (Popnography)
The 400 pound gorilla this week is my big feature story on "The Boys of Buzznet", Jeffree Star, Clint Catalyst and Matthew Lush. I'll probably write another blog soley about the backstory to this piece. For the moment, I'll just say I'm pretty proud of it and really thankful for my editor, Shana. (Out.com)
A pretty awful trailer for the movie adaptation of one of my favorite books, Blindness. Still, the film has an amazing cast (Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia-Bernal) and the story-- a chilling, almost Orwellian tale of what happens when an epidemic of "white blindness" grips an unamed country, makes me hope for the best. In the meantime, consider Jose Saramago's book as a great summer read.
A fantastic video of a panel discussion on Britney, but especially on the difference between the regular media and bloggers. Perez haters will enjoy this, the rest of you will find it interesting. I love that the NYU School of Journalism is having serious conversations about the journalistic ethics of the paparazzi and the "parasites" who "steal" stories. The interesting thing for me as someone with a foot in both traditional media and blogging is that a real distinction is made between reporting, which involves gathering, researching and verifying a story and blogging, which is almost exclusively commenting on the work of others.
As you may have recently noticed, I have recently consumed your milkshake. I wanted to take a moment to explain this further, as I feel there may have been some small degree of miscommunication in my intent. Perhaps your first thought, after seeing that your glass was no longer a font of frosty dairy-goodness, but rather a playa of desiccated pink lipids, that someone had mistook your milkshake for their own. "An honest, though regrettable mistake!", you told yourself. Let me be plain: I saw your milkshake. I knew it was yours and it was for this reason alone that I consumed it. Had it been a bottle of anti-freeze, I would have drank it all the same knowing it was yours. That it was a delectable frozen dairy concoction was incidental, though certainly a bonus. The pleasure, however, was not some schoolboy's sugar-rush, it was the pure adult joy of knowing that shortly you would find your milkshake, gone, departed to my stomach, where even now, my lactose intolerance is causing me physical discomfort. That I will be spending the next six hours on the crapper is small penance for the thrill of seeing your lower lip protrude in a pout of loss, knowing full well it will not be covered in a coating of milk, eggs and flavoring any time in the near future.
Take a closer look at the glass, friend. You'll notice I left none for you. This is actually no easy feat. The malt shoppe glass is designed for the retention of liquid and does not give up the last vestiges of shake from its lower paraboloid without a fight. I will not recount the various methodologies employed to remove the last of your shake; let's just say a very large straw was required. My straw is big, dammit! Huge!
Bowling, anyone?
There Will Be Blood, the best frikkin' movie of last year, is out on DVD tomorrow.
Everything that's amazing about the Irish is right here in John Ford's fight sequence from The Quiet Man. John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara (her look after she says "I'll have the supper ready for you" is the funniest, sexiest thing I've ever seen) and of course, the indomitable Victor McLaglen. This is my mother's favorite movie and this sequence is probably the funniest brawl ever put to celluloid. Ford, mostly known for Westerns, was famous for his love of his Irish heritage and the way he treated his cast and crew like one big family. Both are on display here. Happy St. Patrick's Day!
You can't blame CNN for cutting to audience shots all night long at the Dem Debate in Hollywood tonight: Barack and Hillary were too busy being substantive and friendly to provide much in the way of fireworks. And the DNC packed the house with celebs-- Leo, Spielberg, Diane Keaton, Bradley Whitford, Jason Alexander, but I have a question for you readers; a genuine non-rhetorical one. Is this too much celebrity to have at a DNC debate? Watching the show, I couldn't help but wonder if the Kodak Theatre has a "If you haven't received a gift bag in the last year, don't bother" admissions policy. We all know that for the most-part, Hollywood loves the Dems, but is the image of the two nominees performing for such an elite crowd really the one the party wants to send to America? Or do you think voters respond positively when they see that the Dems are the party that can make Stevie Wonder get up and cheer?
Anyone who's seen Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House knows that the whole play turns on Nora's decision to leave at the end of the play. It was called "the door slam heard round the world" by contemporary audiences. Yet, to appease sensibilities, Victorian productions often had Nora walking back through the door minutes later to return to her husband and life, essentially reversing Ibsen's intent to please the audience.
The same thing happens, more or less in the movie adaptation of The Golden Compass. In trying to excise the political and religious meaning of Pullman's novel, the movie winds up having no reason to exist. It's a gorgeously realized world filed with characters laden with exposition, but wandering around without any greater purpose. Truthfully, I had though that Hollywood had finally licked the "box office bomb" syndrome for films of this caliber, but I'm proven wrong. Having ripped the essential story that drives His Dark Materials out, for fear of offense, the film staggers through a lifeless series of CGI action scenes. Who are these witches? Remember the dreaded goblins, the ostensible villains of the film? Blink your eyes and you'll miss them. Why are those giant Russian men attacking the children? Don't care. Had the producers of this film kept its heretical message intact, it may have done just as poorly as I'm certain it will do, but at least it would be interesting. At the very least, they could have focused on one story and told it well. Instead, The Golden Compass is an infuriating exercise in futility, unable to even offer up a satisfactory resolution on its own terms.
For what its worth, there's a rumble between talking armored polar bears that's pretty awesome, but if the point was to dazzle us with great effects, they should have extended those brief 30 seconds to fill the whole picture. I don't know why this film was made. Obviously someone though there was a successful franchise here, but the popularity of the books is not about the fantasy elements, it's about the deeper themes at work. The thing that makes stories like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Wizard of Oz is not the dragons, wizards and witches; it's the universal truths those stories express. In divorcing The Golden Compass from its meaning, Hollywood has rendered it as lifeless as a daemon without its human.
The Writer's Guild of America is on strike. There are actually really good reasons for the writer's to strike-- basically most guild members spend their career making no money, then a lucky few wind up making a ton of money for-- if they're lucky 7-8 years and then often, never work again. And those are the successful ones. Writer's are like the Olympic gymnasts of the entertainment world, only significantly less attractive. They train and work and burn out, never to be heard from again. So, while it looks like they make enormous salaries, in reality-- they don't and most survive off of residuals that derive from their creative contribution. And the studios have basically smacked down the WGA for the past decade over reality TV, digital media-- anywhere they could cut writers out. So, it's an important strike, really.
But this is the last time I'm going to be serious about it, because c'mon- writers on strike is HI-larious. Don't believe me? You'll see.
Frequent tMR readers know I have an inexplicable obsession with Bob Fosse's choreography for "The Rich Man's Frug" from Sweet Charity. At karaoke on Monday, they played Beyonce's "Get Me Bodied" video and I sort of went off on my pal Kyle about my "Rich Man's Frug" love, which he obviously had no interest in, but he's nice enough to humor me. So, not knowing when to stop, I planned on sending him both videos for comparison, only to find that somebody's gone and made a mash-up video, already. Check it out. It's sweet.
A film as utterly goofy and fatally serious as the decade it chronicles, Julie Taymor's Across the Universerevives the acid musical genre (think Tommy & Jesus Christ Superstar) for the 9-11 generation. Take the Beatles catalog, a paper-thin plot performed by pretty, but pretty forgettable young actors, throw in cameos by Bono, Joe Cocker and Salma Hayek and throw in as many puppets, video filters and veiled references to the Fab 4's own history as possible. It sounds like an Odyssey of the Mind challenge and at times that's what this movie feels like: a bloated exercise in whistle-and-bell creativity that never coalesces into anything meaningful. The thing is, I wasn't bored for a second.
I saw the film by myself on Friday night to a sold out crowd of teenagers and young college kids that made me acutely aware that I'm not part of the 18-25 demo anymore. For one thing, nobody laughed when an old Liverpudian tells the film's romantic hero, Jude that he hopes to be happy "when he's 64". Other gags include a girl from Dayton Ohio coming in through the bathroom window and a character named Max at one point picks up his hammer and bangs a bent fan back into shape. I wondered if for many in the theatre, this would be their first exposure to most of these songs. Most critics seem to think the film is squarely aimed at Boomers, but if anything the film seems more a film by Boomers for their kids. "This is what we were about!", the film screams -- leaving the "so what the hell are you about, kids?" mostly unstated, save one scene where Lucy, Jude's blond-haired activist girlfriend shouts at him in West Village laundromat, "What is ity going to take for people to wake up? Do we have to wait for bombs to start exploding here for people to demand change?" Touche, hippies.
The film is so utterly innocent and uncynical that you could take pot shots at it all day. Bono, sporting a handlebar mustache, sings "I'm the Walrus" on the roof of what I can only presume is Ken Kesey's bus with a bunch of kids on acid. Which is as bizarre as it sounds, but c'mon-- who wouldn't want to see that? Same goes for Joe Cocker singing "Come Together" as a homeless dude--and a pimp---and I think a pot dealer. Hell, any movie with Joe Cocker singing anything is worth the price of admission.
There are darker notes as well. "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" is transformed into a terrifying G.I Joe draft-initiation scene--and when you see the new recruits, clad in Jockey shorts and boxers carrying the Statue of Liberty like waify Atlas's, moaning "she's so heavy", the nostalgia clears the room and you're in 2007 again. The same goes for a sequence that pairs a young (white) soldier's death with the Detroit riots set to a gospel rendition of "Let It Be."
I'm not sure how embarrassing this movie will be for people who lived through the 60s-- it seems the Boomer's have spent every last second of their adult lives trying to forget what happened in that decade (which seems to account for much of our current troubles, if you ask me), but for a younger generation looking to create a world of peace, kindness and meaning, Taymor's film, which is far better than it ought to be, says "All You Need is Love", a statement as impossible, but true as it was when it was first sung.
I got a little carried away on this one with the graphics, but I was trying to find a way to make a phone interview visual. Let me know what you think.
For more information on the A Mormon Presidentgo here. Christing hopes to release the film at the beginning of next year.
Cruising, the 1980 Al Pacino flick where he plays a cop searching for a killer in New York's underground gay S&M scene is playing until the end of this week on the big screen at the Mann's Chinese 6 in Hollywood. When the film came out it was loudly denounced by gay groups, but hey, it's got Pacino getting slapped by a black cowboy in a jockstrap, so it can't be all that bad. The film, directed by William Friedken, will be released on DVD Sept. 18th.
Sony Pictures presents a re-issue of the 1986 filmLabyrinth, showing through Aug. 2 at Landmark's Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles. Special guests will be featured tonight at the 7:30pm show: Brian Froud, conceptual designer of the film, joined by his wife, Wendy Froud, a puppet designer for the film, and the Frouds' son, Toby, who played baby Toby in the film.
Labyrinth will show at Landmark's Nuart Theatre, through Thursday, August 2 for a one-week engagement. Showtimes are 5:00, 7:30 & 10:00 daily; plus Fri - Sun at 12:00 & 2:30. Landmark's Nuart Theatre is at 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of the 405 Freeway, in West Los Angeles.
Another year, another Outfest Opening Night Party. Oh wait, this year it's 25! To misquote Exodus: "What makes this Outfest different from every other Outfest"? The short list of last night's highlights:
Bill Condon's acceptance speech for his Lifetime Achievement Award was articulate and thoughtful. Though the clips of his body of work were kind of repetitive. He's only made five films and one of those is Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh.
Perez Hilton got into a fight with an Outfest volunteer. Yawn.
The fight happened in front of Tori Spelling. Since both she and Perez are shooting reality shows, this meant the two crews were filming each other as well as Perez's hissy fit.
Save Me is a weird choice for an Opening Night movie. Kyle explains what it's about here. It's a quiet film and while Judith Light is a-mazing in it, it's sort of a downer. It does bring up the tantalizing possibility that gay men could be brothers to each other instead of you know, being overwhelmed by their own abandonment/ sense of entitlement. Instead of Lost Boys, we could be a community bound to each other by shared pain, experience and love. You know, the 'whole responsibility to the living', thing.
Much better party than last year. More food, more bars, an aerialist for entertainment.
Apparently, I look like Crispin Glover and/or Jeff Daniels. I am so getting a haircut.
Birdplay is a short (~12-15 minutes) documentary on the birdplay scene here in Los Angeles. Much like puppy play or horseplay, birdplay is a unique subculture-- even more unique, in fact--since I totally made it up. To be clear, this is a short film about people who like to dress up as birds for sexual gratification.
Happy MLK Day all. I was trolling through the Prelinger Archives, a public domain collection of films from the 50s and 60s and found something you have to see. I'm actually using some of the films from the archive to fix my music video: 'Fix It'. It was asked to be in the London Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and I'm using this as an opportunity to improve a video that was nominated on some dude's blog as 'Worst of 2006' (though in it's defense, not a single person voted for/against it). But I've always wanted to make a better video-- and now I can.
And now that the advertisement is over, here's what I found: Boys Beware is a short film made in 1961 about the "homosexual menace". It's message seems to be: "Avoid men dressed in tuxedo's who want to play basketball with you." It's amazing to see how far we've come and, if you look at the comments people have written about the film, how far we have to go. My pal John Krokidas directed a film that I only now realize is a parody of this film. It's called Shame No More and is also worth a look-see.
Anyone who's seen Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House knows that the whole play turns on Nora's decision to leave at the end of the play. It was called "the door slam heard round the world" by contemporary audiences. Yet, to appease sensibilities, Victorian productions often had Nora walking back through the door minutes later to return to her husband and life, essentially reversing Ibsen's intent to please the audience.
Another year, another Outfest Opening Night Party. Oh wait, this year it's 25! To misquote Exodus: "What makes this Outfest different from every other Outfest"? The short list of last night's highlights:
Want to shoot the birds? 
Happy MLK Day all. I was trolling through the Prelinger Archives, a public domain collection of films from the 50s and 60s and found something you have to see. I'm actually using some of the films from the archive to fix my music video: 'Fix It'. It was asked to be in the London Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and I'm using this as an opportunity to improve a video that was nominated on some dude's blog as 'Worst of 2006' (though in it's defense, not a single person voted for/against it). But I've always wanted to make a better video-- and now I can.
