Setbacks

Despite my grand intentions of writing about the films of Frameline 37 as the festival happened, my MacBook was stolen last night, which is going to make updating this blog something of a challenge. My apologies. I'll try to find a new solution. Otherwise, expect something in the near future.

Me and You and Frameline 37

For those of you in San Francisco, the 37th edition of Frameline, SF's Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, begins on Thursday, June 20th, at the Castro Theatre with Stacie Passon's debut feature Concussion, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and won the Teddy jury prize at the Berlinale. If you're planning on attending the festival this year, the chances are good that you'll run into me (or, at least, find yourself in the same theatre) over the course of those ten days. Naturally, I'll be in attendance for the June 23rd screening of Travis Mathews and James Franco's Interior. Leather Bar., which I am proud to say I worked on. The film screens with Mathews' excellent In Their Room: London, the third in a series of docs exploring gay male intimacy and sexuality.

Working for the festival this year, I've had a chance to see a sizable portion of the selection, so I thought I might direct your attention to a few of Frameline 37's notable screenings, in no particular order. I am in the process of writing a bit more extensively on a few of these. Winner of the Teddy for Best Feature Film at the Berlinale earlier this year, Małgorzata Szumowska's In the Name Of (W imię...), which stars Andrzej Chyra (Katyń) as a gay Catholic priest, is the fest's dramatic centerpiece, screening on 25 June.

A pair of solid documentaries about famous gay American authors, Daniel Young's Paul Bowles: The Cage Door Is Always Open and Nicholas Wrathall's Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, would have made for a great double-feature, had their screenings not fallen on different days. And then throw in Stephen Silha and Eric Slade's Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton (which I have yet to see) if docs about dead gay American artists are your thing.

Appealing to both the tranny doc lovers and performance art queers in your home, I would recommend both Charles Atlas's Turning, an exploration of the concert of the same name that Atlas staged with Antony Hegarty in Europe in 2006, and Tim Lienhard's One Zero One: The Story of Cybersissy & BayBjane (One Zero One - Die Geschichte von Cybersissy & BayBjane), a visually dazzling portrait of two drag artists which combines testimonials with performance piece interludes of the duo.

If sexy lesbians are more your speed, check out Marco Berger and Marcelo Monaco's Sexual Tension: Violetas (Tensión sexual, Volumen 2: Violetas), which substitutes the hunky Argentine men of its predecessor with lusty lipstick lezzies in six erotic shorts. Like Sexual Tension: Volatile (Tensión sexual, Volumen 1: Volátil), certain shorts are much stronger than the others; the highlight of this set is Berger's "Dormi conmigo," in which two girls cross paths at a youth hostel. I will definitely be attending Sexperimental, a retrospective of experimental video artists Texas Starr and Kadet Kuhne's films. With titles as alluring as Cunt Dykula, Girls Will Be Boys, Rave Porn, and Pussy Buffet, I'm expecting a good-ol'-time.

Not counting Interior. Leather Bar. and Concussion, there are four other US narrative features I can direct your attention toward (two of which I've seen, the other two I'm planning to see): Yen Tan's gays-in-small-town-Texas drama Pit Stop, which played in the NEXT section at Sundance this year and features a great performance from Amy Seimetz; Cory Krueckeberg's The Go Doc Project, a film I was surprised to have liked which concerns a lonely college student who schemes to make a documentary about gay clubbing in NYC as a ruse to meet the go-go boy of his Tumblr dreams; another Sundance leftover, Kyle Patrick Alvarez's C.O.G., which the director adapted from David Sedaris's work, starring Jonathan Groff and Dean Stockwell; and the screen adaptation of Michelle Tea's Valencia, an omnibus feature in eighteen segments from twenty directors with San Francisco ties, including Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), Silas Howard (By Hook or By Crook), Jill Soloway (Afternoon Delight), Michelle Lawler (Forever's Gonna Start Tonight), and Courtney Trouble (Fucking Different XXX).

And there's additional three international features about difficult love between good-looking gentlemen behind one-half of the amorous duo's girlfriends that you might consider: David Lambert's Beyond the Walls (Hors les murs), which premiered at the Semaine de la critique at Cannes in 2012 and stars Guillaume Gouix (Belle épine) and newcomer Matila Malliarakis; Stephen Lacant's Free Fall (Freier Fall), which premiered at the Berlinale and stars Hanno Koffler (If Not Us, Who?) and Max Riemelt (Before the Fall); and Antonio Hens's La partida, which chronicles an illicit affair between two Cuban teenagers.

And finally, assuming you haven't already watched it on Netflix, Marialy Rivas's feature debut Young and Wild (Joven y alocada), following her award-winning short Blokes, will screen at the Roxie Theater on 29 June. Hope to see you there!

After the Glitter Fades

Behind the Candelabra
2013, USA
Steven Soderbergh

There's a lot to be said about the hype surrounding Behind the Candelabra. Reportedly, this saga of the life of famed, closeted homosexual Liberace as seen through the eyes of his boytoy is to be Steven Soderbergh's last film. The director proclaimed that Hollywood found the project to be "too gay," which is ultimately how it fell into the lap of HBO, where it aired in the USA five days after premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie suffered a number of delays related to star Michael Douglas's bout with cancer, and yet Behind the Candelabra persevered. The fact that it took years for a biopic no one really asked for or seemed to want in the first place to make it to the (television) screen makes its existence even more puzzling.

Why was it necessary to bring the story of Liberace to the screen? The film never gets around to answering that question. It doesn't help that most of the key players–aside from Douglas whose performance is the only remarkable and consistent thing in the film–seem to be sleepwalking through the whole thing. The screenplay, adapted by Richard LaGravenese (who happily brought you the films Freedom Writers and P.S. I Love You) from the memoir of Liberace's young lover Scott Thorson, never rises above a half-cocked marital melodrama. Matt Damon, as Thorson, coasts through the film on autopilot, which is rather unfortunate considering he's given the most time onscreen. There's an especially rough moment at the beginning of the second act, where it looks as though the costume department has shoved a pillow under Damon's shirt to try to show the audience that he had "let himself go."

But it's really the involvement of Soderbergh, who has churned out five films over the past two years (for better or worse), that confounds me. Behind the Candelabra is about the most drab, unnecessary, and mediocre swan song that I can think of. It was by sheer coincidence that I watched Gray's Anatomy, Soderbergh's visually dynamic film adaptation of Spalding Gray's exceptional monologue, just weeks prior to Candelabra. In Gray's Anatomy, Soderbergh crafts several truly breathtaking images on the screen, both during Gray's performance as well as the gorgeous black-and-white talking head interviews with ordinary people discussing their personal ocular history. What we see in Candelabra, however, is a series of awkwardly framed shots (like one where at least two thirds of the screen is taken up by crumpled brown bed sheets in the foreground as Douglas and Damon pillow talk, naked bodies perfectly concealed, in the background) and amateurishly stylized drug sequences.

It would seem useless to bother complaining about the film's sexual prudishness, its embarrassing newspaper-headline exposition about the beginning of AIDS, or the strange comic tone that never quite works (as witnessed in all of Rob Lowe's scenes), since these are just minor oversights in a project as lifeless as this one. Contracts, as it seems, needed to be met, and the rhinestones must have already been paid for... What a curious career you etched out for yourself, Mr. Soderbergh.

With: Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, Dan Aykroyd, Rob Lowe, Debbie Reynolds, Scott Bakula, Nicky Katt, Boyd Holbrook, Paul Reiser, Cheyenne Jackson, Tom Papa, Bruce Ramsay, Mike O'Malley, Jane Morris, Garrett M. Brown

Cannes 2013: Winners

Who would have guessed that the gayest and most sexually explicit recipient of the Palme d'Or would be given by Steven Spielberg? Certainly not me, but that's exactly what transpired at the closing ceremony of the 66th annual Cannes Film Festival two Sundays ago when Spielberg and his jury–which consisted of Daniel Auteuil, actress Vidya Balan, filmmaker Naomi Kawase, Nicole Kidman, Ang Lee, Cristian Mungiu, Lynne Ramsay, and two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz–awarded Abdellatif Kechiche's La vie d'Adèle - Chapitre 1 et 2, or as it's known in English territories Blue Is the Warmest Color, the festival's top prize. In a surprising move, the jury also presented the film's two lead actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, with the Palme. This left the Best Actress prize to be awarded to another French thespian, Bérénice Bejo, in Asghar Farhadi's Le passé (The Past). Two American films walked away with honors; the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis took home the Grand Prix, and Bruce Dern claimed the Best Actor prize for Alexander Payne's Nebraska. Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante (Los bastardos, Sangre) was named Best Director for the film Heli. Jia Zhang-ke won the Best Screenplay prize for A Touch of Sin, and the jury prize went to Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father, Like Son.

It proved to be a rather strong year for queer films at Cannes, with Alain Guiraudie's L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake) beating the Palme d'Or winner for the Queer Palm award. FIlmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues (To Die Like a Man) was the head of that particular jury. Stranger by the Lake is the fourth film to have won the prize, following Gregg Araki's Kaboom in 2010, Oliver Hermanus' Skoonheid (Beauty) in 2011, and Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways in 2012. In addition to the Queer Palm, Alain Guiraudie was named Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section; the top prize went to Rithy Panh's L'image manquante (The Missing Image). The rest of the awards given this year are below.

Palme d'Or: La vie d'Adèle - Chapitre 1 et 2 (Blue Is the Warmest Color), d. Abdellatif Kechiche, France/Belgium/Spain
Grand prix: Inside Llewyn Davis, d. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, USA/France
Prix du jury: Like Father, Like Son, d. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan
Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director): Amat Escalante - Heli
Prix d'interprétation féminine (Best Actress): Bérénice Bejo - Le passé (The Past)
Prix d'interprétation masculine (Best Actor): Bruce Dern - Nebraska
Prix du scénario (Best Screenplay): Jia Zhang-ke - A Touch of Sin

Caméra d'Or: Ilo Ilo, d. Anthony Chen, Singapore

Prix Un Certain Regard: L'image manquante (The Missing Picture), d. Rithy Panh, Cambodia/France
- Prix du jury: Omar, d. Hany Abu-Assad, Palestine
- Prix de la mise en scène: Alain Guiraudie - L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake)
- Prix Un Talent Certain: The acting ensemble - La jaula de oro
- Prix de l'avenir: Ryan Coogler - Fruitvale Station

FIPRESCI Awards
- Competition: La vie d'Adèle - Chapitre 1 et 2 (Blue Is the Warmest Color), d. Abdellatif Kechiche, France/Belgium/Spain
- Un Certain Regard: Manuscripts Don't Burn, d. Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran
- Quinzaine des Réalisateurs: Blue Ruin, d. Jeremy Saulnier, USA

Semaine de la critique Grand Prix: Salvo, d. Fabio Grassadonia, Antonia Piazza, Italy/France

Queer Palm: L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake), d. Alain Guiraudie, France

Poster for Alain Guiraudie's L'inconnu du lac, premiering at Cannes.

With the Cannes Film Festival just a week away, I thought it might be fitting to post this incredible poster for the film I'm probably most excited to see at the festival this year, Alain Guiraudie's L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake). The film screens as part of the Un Certain Regard section and will be released theatrically in France on 12 June by Les Films du Losange. In years past, I've collected as many posters for the films at the festival as possible, but since then, others–like Adrian Curry with his Movie Poster of the Week–have picked up my slack. Though I won't be doing a poster round-up, I will be posting about Cannes later this week. Until then!

"Comic Strip"

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)
2010, France
Joann Sfar

That Joann Sfar’s Serge Gainsbourg film was originally planned to star the famed musician’s own daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, as her father makes it difficult to imagine that, when Charlotte dropped out, anything or anyone that could have successfully taken her place. Sure, the casting of a woman in the role of an iconic, enigmatic singer/songwriter had been done (successfully) in Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan pic I’m Not There., with Cate Blanchett, but the possibility of seeing Charlotte Gainsbourg in drag as her late father, seducing and romancing an actor playing her mother, would have been as decidedly pervy and enticing as Charlotte’s own teenage duet with daddy, “Lemon Incest.” So it came as a bit of a surprise (to me, at least) that Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque), sans Charlotte, is actually quite good.

Certainly Eric Elmosnino’s channeling of Monsieur Gainsbourg, which won him the Best Actor prize at the Césars, is impressive, but a solid impersonation does not a good film make. Instead, it’s the bolder choices made by Sfar, best known as a comic artist, in his first foray as a filmmaker that elevate Vie héroïque, which he adapted from his own graphic novel, beyond your factory-line Hollywood biopic. Sfar too won the César for Best First Film. Throughout the film, Serge–whether played as an adult by Elmosnino or as the child Lucien Ginsburg by Kacey Mottet Klein (of Ursula Meier’s Home)–is accompanied by a nightmarish, computer-animated version of himself, which serves as a visually exciting and narratively clever device.

 

Sfar also excels at one of the film’s more difficult tasks: introducing the many famed women of Gainsbourg’s life. It’s unfortunate that the two women who get the most screen time, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, are the least convincing performances in the film, despite both Laetitia Casta and Lucy Gordon’s strong physical resemblances to their respective characters. However, each of the women represented in the film enter the film explosively, almost the way I would imagine would befit the introduction of a series of recognized villains in a well-known comic book or video game. Villains these women, of course, are not, but they each provide their own individual challenges to our hero.

 

The more inspired performances come from Yolande Moreau as Fréhel, Sara Forestier as France Gall, Mylène Jampanoï as Bambou, and especially Anna Mouglalis as Juliette Gréco. Greco’s entrance is the most astonishing: a single shot of the opening her eyes to the sound of a thunder clap, as if she were waking from a hundred-year slumber. There’s also a funny, cartoonish cameo from Claude Chabrol (in his final appearance on the silver screen) as the record producer to whom Gainsbourg brings his new version of “Je t’aime, moi non plus” with Birkin filling in on vocals for Bardot. Again, it’s all about the eyes. Vie héroïque is probably the best biopic of Serge Gainsbourg that could have been made without Charlotte, and for that, Sfar should be commended.

With: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Doug Jones, Kacey Mottet Klein, Razvan Vasilescu, Dinara Droukarova, Anna Mouglalis, Mylène Jampanoï, Sara Forestier, Yolande Moreau, Philippe Katerine, Deborah Grall, Ophélia Kolb, Claude Chabrol, François Morel, Joann Sfar

Wild Hearts

Laurence Anyways
2012, Canada/France
Xavier Dolan

Keep the Lights On
2012, USA
Ira Sachs

Laurence Anyways is Xavier Dolan's third and certainly most ambitious film to date, notably so in the fact that he took himself out of the equation this time. In stepping away from the autobiographical, he examines an adult relationship between Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and Fred (Suzanne Clément) and the ways in which Laurence's desire to live life as a woman affects it. As an actor himself, Dolan has a knack for eliciting great performances, especially from Clément, who won a best actress prize from the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes last year, and the always reliable Nathalie Baye as Laurence's mother. While Dolan's characters have matured and his scope has broadened, he still employs some of his iffy stylized characteristics that were more forgivable when he used them for angsty young love in Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats).

Perhaps the biggest strikes against him are the misguided, clumsy bookends to the film. Someone should have advised him against every decision involved in the opening scene, a brooding montage set to Fever Ray's "If I Had a Heart." I'm not certain if fault should be given to Dolan for choosing a song any one of his fans would have already created so many associations with prior (note the spectacular, nightmarish music video by director Andreas Nilsson), but I am certain that the choice was wrong. It looks like a music video, creates a mood that the film never matches, and takes place in an fuzzy, uncertain time in Laurence and the film's timeline. This is a mistake that is repeated a few times during the film. The worst scene in Laurence Anyways could effectively be the best scene in a totally different movie, but as it stands, in this particular film, it feels wholly out-of-place. In what's possibly a fantasy sequence (possibly not), Fred puts on her sexiest gown and floats into a fancy ballroom, all cut to Visage's "Fade to Grey." These out-of-place music video montages don't advance the film in any way or tell the audience anything useful about the characters; instead, they're just mere reminders that Dolan has exceptionally good taste and unfortunate indications of the director's level of maturity as a filmmaker and his inability to self-edit. The film's final scene is a misfire as well, closing a long, vibrant journey on a humdrum note.

However, what Laurence Anyways does best is illustrating Laurence and Fred's explosive relationship. The film itself bares a number of similarities with another of 2012's notable queer films, Ira Sachs' Keep the Lights On (both won the top prize for queer cinema at the Berlinale (Teddy) and Cannes (Queer Palm)). Both films chronicle a turbulent relationship over the course of a decade in a fashion that feels almost fragmented and elliptical, though they're mostly told chronologically. Laurence Anyways effectively loses some of its power and intrigue when the narrative splits midway through the film. Keep the Lights On, on the other hand, restricts its perspective to one half of the couple, Erik (Thure Lindhardt), and we see the relationship between him and Paul (Zachary Booth) through Erik's eyes. The sort of dramatic strengths Dolan reaches in Laurence Anyways can best be chalked up to his decision to step away from autobiography, and on the flipside, clinging to autobiography is where Keep the Lights On seems to get lost. Basing the screenplay on his own long-term rocky relationship with a drug addict, Sachs fails to depict the sort of intensity and obsession that could possibly lead someone to carry on a relationship as destructive as Erik and Paul's. During a conversation Erik and Paul have near the end of the film, one of them smiles and says, "Well, we had some good times," to which a friend of mine leaned over to me during the screening and whispered, "Did we miss that part?"

Keep the Lights On has a few other problems, not least of which the flatness of the supporting characters played by Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, and Souleymane Sy Savane, but it does a commendable job creating and maintaining a mood and tone, beautifully lensed by Thimios Bakatakis (Dogtooth, Attenberg) and featuring just the right amount of Arthur Russell songs for the film's score. As I mentioned before, Laurence Anyways is all over the map visually and tonally, and its near-three-hour running time doesn't do Dolan any favors (though I'd never describe the film as boring). If only Laurence Anyways and Keep the Lights On could borrow each other's strengths and abandon their weaknesses, you'd have two spectacular films instead of two pretty messes.

Laurence Anyways
With: Melvil Poupaud, Suzanne Clément, Nathalie Baye, Monia Chokri, Yves Jacques, Catherine Bégin, Sophie Faucher, Guylaine Tremblay, Patricia Tulasne, Mario Geoffrey, Jacob Tierney, Susan Almgren, Magalie Lépine Blondeau, Emmanuel Schwartz, Jacques Lavallée, Perrette Souplex, David Savard, Monique Spaziani, Mylène Jampanoï, Gilles Renaud, Anne-Élisabeth Bossé, Anne Dorval, Pierre Chagnon, Éric Bruneau, Alexis Lefebvre, Denys Paris, Vincent Davy, Vincent Plouffe, Alexandre Goyette

Keep the Lights On
With: Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, Souleymane Sy Savane, Miguel del Toro, Justin Reinsilber, Sebastian La Cause, Maria Dizzia, Ed Vassallo, Chris Lenk

...Caligula Would Have Blushed

Caligula
Caligola
1979, Italy/USA
Tinto Brass, Bob Guccioni, Giancarlo Lui

Though I believe all perceived cinematic disasters should be revisited and reexamined through time, I regret the decision I made yesterday to give Caligula such treatment. Seeing it at an age when I actively sought out all things controversial and decadent, I possessed few feelings, one way or the other about the film, but following a strange impulse to give it another look, I'm surprised by my teenage ambivalence. Caligula is a trash heap of a movie, a singular achievement only in the fact that it managed to sour the combined efforts of so many talented individuals. Were those efforts collectively ruined by Penthouse founder Bob Guccione? Giving him any creative control or license was a mistake of course, but I'm pretty sure Caligula was beyond hope long before Guccione filmed those additional porn scenes.

Reading about the production nightmares of turning the roman emperor's debauched life into a motion picture, it's quite apparent that the various power struggles between screenwriter Gore Vidal, director Tinto Brass, art director Danilo Donati, producer Guccione, and star Malcolm McDowell were the source of the problem. And what's left is an unsurprisingly tasteless but surprisingly tiresome film that looks like a perverted child's version of Satyricon. I found myself cringing at every single aspect of Caligula, least of which its prurient affectations.

With: Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, Teresa Ann Savoy, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, Guido Mannari, Bruno Brive, Giancarlo Badessi, John Steiner, Donato Placido, Paolo Bonacelli, Leopoldo Trieste, Mirella D'Angelo, Anneka Di Lorenzo, Lori Wagner, Adriana Asti, Rick Parets

Best of 2012: Sophie Letourneur's Le marin masqué

 

Le marin masqué
2011, France
Sophie Letourneur

Similar to António da Silva's Julian, another of my favorite new films of 2012 follows the same set-up: someone returning home for a weekend visit with a friend in tow. In Le marin masqué, two young women, Laetitia and Sophie, take a road trip to Laetitia's home town of Quimper, in the northwest of France. The weekend consists of cute interactions with Laetitia's father, crêpe-hunting, and a night at the local disco where they run into one of Laetitia's girlhood crushes "le marin masqué" (or, the masked sailor, played by Johan Libéreau).

Made for around €150 and shot in black-and-white on HD video, Le marin masqué fills a similar cinematic void that Sofia Coppola did ten or so years ago, that void being films which combined youthful charm with intelligence and, most importantly, a feminine eye. Watching Laetitia and Sophie chat endlessly with one another, I was reminded of how few films exist that could be accurately referred to as "girly" without condescension. Le marin masqué premiered at the 2011 Locarno Film Festival, and Letourneur's festival-going experience became the inspiration for her latest feature Les coquillettes, about three young women cruising a film festival for available men, which subsequently made its world premiere at Locarno 2012.

With: Laetitia Goffi, Sophie Letourneur, Johan Libéreau, Thomas Salaun, Dominique Salaun, Emmanuelle Fitamant, Bertrand Boulogne

Best of 2012: António da Silva's Julian

 

Julian
2012, Portugal/UK
António da Silva

The best short I saw in 2012 was a ten-minute long, super 8 chronicle of a romantic fling/weekend-getaway to Portugal. The titular figure is a ginger-bearded, Swiss horticulturist/dreamboat who accompanies the filmmaker on a nature-seeking road trip around Portugal and Lisbon. Certainly aided by the super-8 film, the look of Julian conjures a particular nostalgia that's perfectly matched with the film's narration, which sounds like a recollection of an exquisite, faded memory. To me, Julian felt like "Heartbeats" by The Knife by way of Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, though it's much more approachable than either of those two. To see the film, you can make a donation via António da Silva's Tumblr. Short excerpt below.

 
JULIAN (film excerpt) from Antonio da Silva Films on Vimeo.

Best of 2012: 12 Singles

 

Though I like to consider myself an album kinda guy, I'm pretty sure the structure of the music industry as it is right now has seeped into the minds of musicians young and old, subconsciously nudging the faithful album creators into single territory (even if it's ever so slightly). I could be wrong, but I just wanted a valid excuse for why I'm not making a "best albums of 2012" list and why I've decided to dedicate a post to twelve songs from the past calendar year that left a significant mark on my life. I've already written about a song (Bat for Lashes' "Laura") and a music video (Grimes' "Oblivion"), and this will conclude the Best of 2012 music posts. Are these the twelve (er, fourteen) best songs of 2012? Probably not. They are, instead, an excellent sampler for the soundtrack of my past year... at least, in terms of new music. The tracks are not ordered, though if I had to pick the best of the lot (not counting "Laura"), I would probably opt for Light Asylum's "Shallow Tears." Off the Brooklyn-based duo of Shannon Funchess and Bruno Coviello's self-titled debut LP, "Shallow Tears" gives a new reference point to the moderately overused phrase, "hauntingly beautiful," with its hypnotic synth percussion and Funchess' exciting vocals, here sounding like a heavenly cross between Grace Jones, Q Lazzarus, and Alison Moyet of Yaz. On an even more exciting note, Funchess will be featured on my most hotly anticipated album of 2013, Shaking the Habitual from The Knife, due out in April.

Two additional notes about the songs listed below. Firstly, the Animal Collective track "New Town Burnout," off their LP Centipede Hz, perfectly transitions into the next song, "Monkey Riches," on the album, so maybe you could consider listening to it as part of the full album or via this live YouTube video of them performing the two songs in Vancouver. And finally, be sure to check out the unofficial video below for Róisín Murphy's "Simulation," directed by fellow San Franciscan Aron Kantor and featuring one of our fair city's finest drag artists, Ambrosia Salad. The video uses a four-minute edit of the eleven-minute song, which was the best dance track of 2012 that I heard. Enjoy.

• Absolutely Free - "UFO"
• Animal Collective - "New Town Burnout"
• Antony and the Johnsons - "Cut the World"
• Cassie - "King of Hearts"
• Grizzly Bear - "Yet Again"
• iamamiwhoami - "idle talk"
• Light Asylum - "Shallow Tears"
• Liars - "No. 1 Against the Rush"
• Lower Dens - "Brains"
• Paradis - "Je m'ennuie"
• Róisín Murphy - "Simulation"
• Wild Nothing - "Shadow"

Simulation - Roisin Murphy - ft. Ambrosia Salad from Dirtyglitter on Vimeo.

Acting a Fool

The Fighter
2010, USA
David O. Russell

Biopics of athletes sit about as far down on my list of filmic interests as anything I can think of at the moment, so describing David O. Russell's The Fighter as "watchable" might sound like a recommendation coming from me. The film got quite a bit of attention a year or so ago for its performances, winning Academy Awards for Christian Bale and Melissa Leo in the supporting categories. The performances failed to impress me, however, and I think this is a large scaled reflection of the essential problem I have with the film as a whole. The Fighter is competent on nearly every level one could come up with to judge it. The cinematography is nice to look at. The screenplay is solid and mostly absent of sports-biopic clichés. The sound mix is professional. The direction is engaging. The pace is consistent. The actors all act their hearts out. Competent is great for award hand-outs and ideal for thoughtless viewings on HBO while you're nursing a cold. Unfortunately though, when competent is the only thing going for a film, it almost always cancels out interesting.

By noticing the individual competency levels of those dissected elements of this insipidly-titled film, I've already lost the illusion, which is absolutely essential to a sports biopic. The film crew creates the illusion of reality in order to convey morals, lessons, truths about life and the human existence. And yet the element for which The Fighter has received the most praise and accolades is the one that causes the most harm in abating the illusion. In the four central roles, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo all do what they're supposed to: inhabit their characters. All four have proven themselves respectable thespians throughout their careers, but the artifice of their performances was on constant display here. There's never a moment when it isn't blindingly clear that you're watching "acting." The gold statues now on Bale and Leo's mantles don't correctly lead to the conclusion that Bale and Leo were better than Wahlberg or Adams; in fact, they seem merely indicative of the "volume" at which these actors did their job, which also seemed to have been determined by the juiciness of their respective characters' sketches.

 

Wahlberg's acting was easily the quietest of the quartet; I mean, there's not a lot of meat to a character who's a "nice guy" who loves his brother, his mother, and his girlfriend and simply wants to do well in his chosen career. Wahlberg wasn't nominated for an Oscar (as an actor). Adams was, considering the fact that she had a few more bells and whistles at her disposal. She donned an accent, looked "unglamorous," and played a character with a few more than Wahlberg's. Adams' character is kind of a tomboy, dropped out of college in a town where the option of such a thing is close to unheard of, admits to having a slight drinking problem that may have been the reason she stopped her education, and becomes the target of severe verbal and physical animosity from Wahlberg's seven sisters. Effectively, she lost out to Leo, who is on the highest factory setting the entire film. Her character is an overbearing mother of nine, who chain smokes, has a tacky haircut and matching wardrobe, and suffers from a bad case of denial about many things in her life, not least of which being the fact that she may not love her younger son (Wahlberg) as much as she does his older brother (Bale). In a move that's become the actor's unofficial signature, Bale literally embodies his character, dramatically altering his physical appearance in the service of his craft. And he gets the juiciest of all the characters: the golden child of a small town whose glory is in rapid decline thanks to an addiction to crack, something which slides down to negatively affect his other roles as father to a toddler and trainer to his younger brother.

The "volume" of Bale's performance – loudest of the four – unintentionally silences whatever emotional truths the film tries to reveal... what those might have been, I haven't a guess since I was too distracted by craft and didn't especially care much in the first place. The illusion vanishes, and what's left is a person pretending to have a conversation with another person using sentences that were written by yet another person, who was giving words and thoughts to a pretend version of an actual person who lived. If The Fighter had emotional truths or life lessons to be discerned from its narrative, they were spoken to these deaf ears and shown to these eyes that couldn't stop looking at the man behind the curtain... doing his job.

With: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Jack McGee, Frank Renzulli, Mickey O'Keefe, Erica McDermott, Sugar Ray Leonard, Caitlin Dwyer, Alison Folland, José Antonio Rivera, Anthony Molinari

Best of 2012: Leos Carax's Holy Motors

Holy Motors
2012, France/Germany
Leos Carax

A lot of people have a lot of things to say about Leos Carax's Holy Motors, his first feature film in thirteen years following Pola X. I strangely do not. It was my most anticipated film of 2012, and it probably couldn't have ever lived up to my impossible expectations of it... but it's still quite good and certainly one of the notable films of 2012. It also continues the dynamic partnership between Carax and his cinematic proxy, Denis Lavant, which was rekindled in the short Carax made for the omnibus film Tôkyô! They were also both seen onscreen in Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely.

 

As always, Lavant is mesmerizing through each episode and character, and he's given fine support by Édith Scob as his chauffeuse (the Eyes Without a Face nod was appreciated), Kylie Minogue as his sullen ex-flame (light years -- pun not intended -- past her ill-fated cinematic endeavors of the 1990s), Eva Mendes as a supermodel held captive by M. Merde, the troll-ish figure from Tôkyô!, Elisa Lhomeau as one of Lavant's scene partners, and Jeanne Disson (from Tomboy) as his angsty teenage daughter.

With: Denis Lavant, Édith Scob, Kylie Minogue, Eva Mendes, Elise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson, Michel Piccoli, Leos Carax