Revolution To Revelation: The John Demetry Archive Of Criticism (2000-2007)

You Are Not Alone

2011-03-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

You Are Not Alone.

Liz is with Dick, MJ, and Monty now.

What is your favorite Liz Taylor movie? Mine is A Place In The Sun. "Tell Mama all...": certainly in the upper echelons of Hollywood romances and an erotic summit. An expose of American greed and class, at its heart it is a movie about the mysteries of attraction and the depths of love. She's so beautiful in it that, though shot in exquisitely textured black-and-white, her violet eyes still pop. There's many more, of course, from Clarence Brown's mighty National Velvet to her definitive representations of gay empathy in Suddenly Last Summer and Reflections in a Golden Eye to her erotic breakthroughs in The Sandpiper and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to her mythic portrayal of the American daughter in Father of the Bride.

We are not alone.

Love The Way You Megan Fox

2010-08-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

Notes On Love The Way You Lie
by John Demetry

The new Eminem/Rihanna music video--Love The Way You Lie--features the year’s casting coup. Director Joseph Kahn reveals the spiritual outrage of domestic violence by casting Megan Fox as the abused partner in a codependent relationship. Through Megan Fox’s exploited humanity and expressive beauty, Kahn exposes Eminem’s misogynist violence and Rihanna’s glamorization of victimization. The casting of Hollywood’s hottest--and most unfairly maligned--starlet enables Kahn to expand the video’s cross-cutting to a social-spiritual vision. Kahn reveals the media-hipster animosity toward Fox as result of male insecurity--as acted out by Em’s doppelganger Dominic Monaghan and as narrated by Em’s queasy rapping style. Kahn stages Em’s rap in a field of wheat/grass. The gendered negative space is worthy of Wyeth, conveying male impotence/despair in the midst of feminine allure/mystery. Female jealousy and inadequacy and ambition targets Fox, as well, as represented by Rihanna’s signification of female insensitivity (Kahn notably places her in a setting that highlights the song’s bizarre/gross reversal of the Burning Bed teledrama and appropriation of David Rothenberg). Powerfully, Kahn visualizes Fox’s psychic energy--spiritual worth and signifying power--as pyrokinesis--holding fire in her hands while in a meditative or prayer pose. That’s the human spark Eminem/Rihanna attempt to pervert into violence, pathology, authority (a Kahn trope that signifies grace and makes his performers' humanity sensually tactile: he haloes them all with lens flare--but only Megan Fox GENERATES light). Because she embodies the desire that domestic violence and media exploitation perverts, Megan Fox’s indestructible significance reduces Eminem/Rihanna’s marketable lies to ash.

Coming Soon . . .

2010-05-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

For more information, please visit The Community of Desire website.

The Community of Desire

Selected Works of Criticism (2001-2007)

by John Demetry

CONTENTS

From A.I. to American Ideal Foreward by Ben Kessler

On Love and the Hipster Problem Preface by John Demetry

2001

01: Where Dreams Are Born A.I. - Artificial Intelligence

02: Loving Everyone Intimacy

03: Inside Out Mulholland Drive

04: Happy Trails The Adventures of Felix

05: "M" For "Might-Have-Been" Gosford Park

06: God In The Movie Image Werckmeister Harmonies

07: Thanksgiving Jurassic Park III

2002

08: The State We're In Storytelling

09: Believe E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial

10: Kubrick's Olympian Wit 2001: A Space Odyssey

11: Once Is Not Enough Lola

12: Compassion on the Dance Floor Circuit

13: Snowflakes On The Moon CQ

14: Can You See? Minority Report

15: Visionary Lawrence of Arabia

16: Highbrow/Lowbrow The Professor's Daughter (play)

17: The Significance Of Thandie Newton The Truth About Charlie

18: Tale-Chasing Femme Fatale

19: To See With Love Catch Me If You Can

20: fait accompli All or Nothing

21: Pinball Wizard Tommy

2003

22: Horseplay The Weight of Water
23: Slippin' and Slidin' Justified (album)
24: Wake-Up Call Phone Booth
25: The Myth of Pascal Greggory Confusion of Genders

26: Metaphorical Metamorphosis X2: X-Men United

27: The Slow Curve The Lizzie Maguire Movie

28: Pop's Operation: Freedom "Flicker" (song)

29: Awakening To New Dreams Model Shop

30: A Sublime Gesture Together

31: What Brown University Didn't Teach Todd Haynes Gigli

32: Saving Jean-Luc Godard In Praise of Love

33: Shooting the Elephant Elephant

34: Post-Rodney King Romance Intolerable Cruelty

35: P.J. Hogan's Thimbology Peter Pan

36: The Worst KKK Apologia Ever Cold Mountain

2004

37: Racing Past Hegemony with BEAUTY Torque and Toxic

38: Choose Dogma The Passion of the Christ

39: The Least Gnostic Movie Ever Made Son frere

40: Folk Truth Goes Pop The Ladykillers

41: A New Ritual You are the Quarry

42: The Infinite Significance Of The Kiss The Terminal

43: No Borders Hero

44: Vera Icon Vera Drake

45: The Broken Hearts Club: Movies 2004

2005

46: Just Can't Say Goodbye Last Days and "Just Can't Say Goodbye" (song)

47: To BrotherLove Three Dancing Slaves

48: What Would Vermeer Do? Mysterious Skin

49: Breaking Bread With the Movie Club

50: The Sceptic to The Apostles Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

2006

51: No Limitation Mo Gik: The Promise

52: Chaos Theory vs. Chaos Tamara and "Lightning Strikes Twice" (song)

53: Let Us Now Praise Hot Men London

54: Loop-The-Loop Final Destination 3

55: War of the Word Sorry (single)

56: The Influence of Stars Running Scared

57: Sand In My Hands You Have Killed Me (single), Ask the Dust, She's the Man, and Eight Below

58: ZAM Zap Fascism Scary Movie 4

59: Look Back In Ardor How Green Was My Valley and Gentleman's Agreement

60: Present Tensions World Trade Center

61: Sticky Fingers The Covenant

62: Br'er Gibson's Boner Apocalypto

2007

63: "We're All In This Together" High School Musical

64: Izzy or Isn't He? Jump In!

65: Rhetoric of Love Amazing Grace

Your Arsenal Annotated Selected Bibliography

For more information, please visit The Community of Desire website.

25 Favourite Movies of All Time

2010-04-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

25 Favourite Movies of All Time
(one film per director / listed preferentially)

1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
2. Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)
3. The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)
4. A.I. - Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
5. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
6. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
7. L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)
8. No Greater Glory (Frank Borzage, 1934)
9. Last Tango In Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973)
10. Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
11. Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1962)
12. Made in USA (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
13. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
14. A Day In The Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
15. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
16. Lola (Jacques Demy, 1962)

17. The Love Eterne (Han Hsiang Li, 1963)
18. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
19. Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927)
20. The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1993)
21. The Fury (Brian De Palma, 1978)
22. Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981)
23. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944)
24. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)
25. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Click HERE for illustrated list!

25 Favourite Albums of All Time

2010-04-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

The 25 Best/Favourite Albums of All Time
(one album per artist / listed preferentially)

1. Tusk (1979), Fleetwood Mac
2. Siren (1975), Roxy Music
3. Rubber Soul (1965), The Beatles
4. Bad Girls (1979), Donna Summer
5. Remain In Light (1980), Talking Heads
6. Very (1993), Pet Shop Boys
7. Fear of a Black Planet (1990), Public Enemy
8. Cupid & Psyche 85 (1985), Scritti Politti
9. You Are The Quarry (2004), Morrissey
10. Sticky Fingers (1971), The Rolling Stones
11. Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk (1991), Son of Bazerk
12. Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols (1977), Sex Pistols
13. Perhaps (1985), The Associates
14. Strangeways, Here We Come (1987), The Smiths
15. Hounds of Love (1985), Kate Bush
16. Armed Forces (1979), Elvis Costello
17. Raise the Pressure (1996), Electronic
18. O(+> (1992), Prince
19. Blood on the Dance Floor (1997), Michael Jackson
20. You're All I Need (1968), Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
21. Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), Bruce Springsteen
22. Playing With a Different Sex (1981), Au Pairs
23. Brotherhood (1986), New Order
24. Take It Off (1981), Chic
25. Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band (1976), Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band

Click HERE for illustrated list!

Movies, Music in 2009 / 2000s . . . According to John Demetry

2010-01-21T17:40:00.000-08:00

Tethering Post

by John Demetry

By far the best new movie I saw in '09, Julian Hernandez's Raging Sun, Raging Sky also rightfully owns the number 3 spot on the Best of ‘00s list. However, the film distribution-and-critical hegemony keeps the movie from reaching the audience it deserves. Hernandez seemingly recognizes his circumstance in the film-cult machine: the era's best new filmmaker relegated to the cinema's gay ghetto (currently his RSRS is available only for festival rentals). Yet, his work does not fit any "gay movie" conventions (lazy critics compare him to the early 1990s New Queer Cinema when Antonioni and Ophuls would be more apt). So in a subversive modernist twist--a relatively minor detail in the film's teeming nexus--Hernandez decorates a porn theater box office with promo stills from his own short Bramadero (an erotic meditation on death). Significantly: "bramadero" means "tethering post." Although restricted by film-cult hegemony (effectively: censorship), Hernandez's unabashed gay erotic content ties him to a deeper (resistance) gay/art legacy.

Let's break down the multivalent significance of the self-referential use of Bramadero stills in Raging Sun, Raging Sky:

1. Hernandez's frank treatment of sexuality addresses the Desire (sexual/spiritual) exploited by grindhouse cinema, while also recognizing that it provides a space for the social expression of Desire by members of a marginalized group
2. Hernandez does not see his films as "above" grindhouse movies, but as part of a particular, sub-cultural history of art-cinema distribution and exhibition
3. Hernandez highlights and subverts the ghetto-ized nature of his own films (relegated to specialty audiences, yet actually expansive in their treatment of the human condition)

It begs the question: To what tethering post is NYC's gaggle of gay film critics chained? (Raise your hand if you were at the lone NYC festival screening of Raging Sun, Raging Sky.)

The following lists one person's genuine appraisal of time spent at the movies and exploring the pop landscape. In the spirit of Hernandez's audacious proposition of the movie theater as the site where love is found (and compassion developed)--I give Raging Sun, Raging Sky its place on the decade list. Should the U.S. be blessed by its official release in 2010, it will rule that year and set the standard for the next decade as well.

(originally published by Senses of Cinema)

MOVIES LISTS

Ten Best Movies of 2009 (U.S. Releases Only)

1. This Is It (Kenny Ortega)
2. Everlasting Moments (Jan Troell)
3. Brothers (Jim Sheridan)
4. You, The Living (Roy Andersson)
5. Next Day Air (Benny Boom)
6. Bandslam (Todd Graff)
7. Of Time and the City (Terence Davies)
8. Gentlemen Broncos (Jared Hess)
9. The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock)
10. Revanche (Gotz Spielmann)

Ten Best Movies of 2000s
(one film per director)

1. A.I. - Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
2. Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)
3. Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Julian Hernandez, 2009)
4. Together (Chen Kaige, 2003)
5. Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2004)
6. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)
7. The Witnesses (Andre Techine, 2008)
8. Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004)
9. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2005)
10. 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2005)
(tie)
10. Son frere (Patrice Chereau, 2004)

MUSIC LISTS

Ten Best Albums of 2009
(U.S. releases only)

1. Years of Refusal, Morrissey
2. Never Cry Another Tear, Bad Lieutenant
3. Yes, Pet Shop Boys
4. The Boy Who Knew Too Much, Mika
5. Mr. Lucky, Chris Isaak
6-8. The-Dream/Tricky Stewart Trilogy
(tie) Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, Mariah Carey
(tie) Love vs. Money, The-Dream
(tie) How To Be A Lady: Vol. 1, Electrik Red
9. The Latest, Cheap Trick
10. Shock Value II, Timbaland

Ten Best Singles of 2009
(U.S. releases only)

1. Did You See Me Coming?, Pet Shop Boys
2. Empire State of Mind, Jay-Z
3. Sink or Swim, Bad Lieutenant
4. Love etc., Pet Shop Boys
5. It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas (Christmas EP), Pet Shop Boys
6. I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris, Morrissey
7. We Let Her Down, Chris Isaak
8. Beautiful People, Pet Shop Boys
9. Halo, Beyonce
10. The-Dream/Tricky Stewart Trilogy
(tie) Walkin' on the Moon, The-Dream
(tie) So Good, Electrik Red
(tie) I Want To Know What Love Is, Mariah Carey

25 Best Albums of the 00s
(one album per artist; U.S. releases only)

1. You Are the Quarry (2004), Morrissey
2. The Man Who (2000), Travis
3. Twisted Tenderness (2000), Electronic
4. Never Cry Another Tear (2009), Bad Lieutenant*
5. Yes (2009), Pet Shop Boys*
6. Waiting for the Sirens' Call (2005), New Order*
7. White Bread Black Beer (2006), Scritti Politti
8. Say You Will (2003), Fleetwood Mac
9. Frantic (2002), Bryan Ferry
10. Disco Volante (2000), Cinerama
11. 2 Worlds Collide (2004), David Morales
12. Lifeline (2004), Iris DeMent
13. Invincible (2001), Michael Jackson
14. The Best of Both Worlds (2002), R. Kelly & Jay-Z
15. FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006), Justin Timberlake
16. The Blueprint (2001), Jay-Z
17. Life in Cartoon Motion (2007), Mika
18. Gift of Screws (2008), Lindsey Buckingham
19. Timbaland Presents: Shock Value (2007), Timbaland
20. Tales From Turnpike House (2006), Saint Etienne
21. Magic (2007), Bruce Springsteen
22. Aaliyah (2001), Aaliyah
23. An Pierlé & White Velvet (2006), An Pierlé & White Velvet
24. Under Construction (2003), Missy Elliott
25. I Am... Sasha Fierce (2008), Beyoncé

*--4-6: currently that order is interchangeable: How would YOU rank them?!

Armond White Remembers Michael Jackson and Keeps the Motown Discourse Moving!

2009-12-18T17:35:00.000-08:00

Resistance Works, WDC presents:

ARMOND WHITE'S PRESENTATION AT NYU'S 'REMEMBERING MICHAEL JACKSON' PANEL, SEPTEMBER 17, 2009
(pictures of the event below)

"What is the problem with Michael Jackson?" asked an Iraqi insurgent in the process of torturing Marky Mark Wahlberg (of all people) in the 1999 film Three Kings.

Answer: It is the Motown Problem: The devaluing of popular art—as when POTUS belittled Jackson as merely "an entertainer." But Jackson was an artist—with all the seriousness that appellation implies.

The Motown Problem is that black artistry (complicated human artistry) is casually disrespected as something glib, or trying-to-be-white artistry. It’s a class and status problem that even exists today.

Let’s briefly look back at how Michael Jackson exemplified Motown artistry in the substance of his earliest Motown hits:

I Want You Back—A kid’s moan expressively imitates an older person’s heartache, but in its closing strains, heartache and joy combined.

ABC—Bubble-gum pop, yet it’s ecstatic.

The Love You Save—Enunciates the discourse of loving, of personal recovery, or intimate and social communion. The mention Isaac Newton, Benjamin Frankliln, Alexander Graham Bell, Christopher Columbus—acknowledges school lessons, facts of kids receiving Western indoctrination/education and applying it to their personal lives. A crucial tenet of Motown’s Civil Rights Era progressive, upwardly mobile agenda.

I’ll Be There—Bring salvation back. Togetherness, it’s all I’m after.

Never Can Say Goodbye—Older regret and longing in kiddie voice ("piercing me right through the core"). It’s powerful. Whether or not the 12-year-old knows what it means, every listener does.

More than any other Motown artist, it was Michael who most successfully translated Motown’s integrationist ethic. The company’s motto: "The Sound of Young America" sounds like what Jay-Z, in the post-WWII, post Brown vs. Board of Education era, would call a "hustle." But it had a purpose—not a hustle, a mission: How to speak to America by enjoining it and becoming it. Claiming it.

Motown was not a gut bucket, deep-south sound—and the ‘60s designation of "Soul Music" was not detached from the genuine, personal expression one hears in Motown. Motown was a sound with the colors of Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration series in it. That means it had down home rhythm and twang, but Northern pronunciation, vocabulary and diction. It achieves a great American articulation. For the generations who stressed education and advancement, this Motown language and Motown ethic was success itself. Apart from whatever monetary benefits accrued.

In "The Love You Save" Michael demonstrated that he could command the eternal entreaties of pop discourse—terms that are interchangeable whether discussing love or politics. These are terms pop artists must learn to master. And for R&B artists particularly, the Love/Save terms must also describe spiritual aspiration.

This Motown idiom became Michael Jackson’s language—especially as it matured into the complicated expression of his adult pop songs recorded to address a fractious political and cultural era. It’s at the heart of "Black or White" in the assertions of fearlessness and brotherhood that should not have surprised any Motown adept but should have echoed the Civil Rights Era ethics.

Yet, MJ’s most complex enunciations occurred in the stressful hiphop era, when ideas of Blackness had been tortured into rancor and stereotype. I detail this in the Keep Moving chapter on the Black or White music video:

Raised in the Motown ethic of assimilate-and-accommodate, Michael Jackson means it when he preaches brotherhood in "Black or White." Integration and racial unity are indispensable tenets for his philosophy for showbiz success partly because of the practical need for Black artist to work with white musicians, technicians, and buisness people, partly because Jackson, no doubt, believes in it. Jackson ain’t just whislin’ Dixie, to use an old phrase—in fact, he gives racial unity a modern emphasis, adding a new, shocking sincerity, to the politics of crossover.

To misunderstand MJ’s "problem" meant misunderstanding Motown because in so many inarguable ways—statistical, artistic and emotional—he had become its greatest ambassador, its greatest success story. His success spread out from obvious global recognition to a more universal acceptance of black artistry—black feelings and anxieties and aspiration.

In the very personal music that MJ made after leaving Motown the complications of translating African American experience into universal thought and language were ever-present. Now, the Michael Jackson problem is: Who is willing to see it? Who is willing to appreciate it?

--Armond White

NEW ARMOND WHITE BOOK!!!!! -- only $10.00!!!

2009-08-25T04:21:00.000-07:00

KEEP MOVING
The Michael Jackson Chronicles
_____________
ARMOND WHITE

ABOUT THE BOOK
“Has there been a more compelling show-biz/arts figure than Michael Jackson?”

In this collection, controversial critic Armond White chronicles the career of Michael Jackson. Written throughout his quarter-century as a critic, these essays focus on the workMichael Jackson produced AFTER the record-breaking commercial success of the Thrilleralbum. He examines the impact of Michael Jackson as a cultural phenomenon, aesthetic/music force and dance icon/show-biz influence. Armond White uncovers the deep meaning in Michael Jackson’s art—especially the songs and music videos created and associated with the Bad, Dangerous, HIStory, and Blood On The Dance Floor albums.

TO ORDER OR FOR MORE INFORMATION

resistanceworkswdc@yahoo.com

20 Best Movies of 2008

2008-12-26T17:40:00.000-08:00

20 Best Movies of 2008 -- A movie year too abundant in good and great films (46 you should definately see!) for just a top 10.

1. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
2. The Witnesses (Andre Techine)
3. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
4. CJ7 (Stephen Chow)
5. My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai)
6. Romance of Astree and Celadon (Eric Rohmer)
7. Gunnin' For That #1 Spot (Adam Yauch)
8. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg)
9. Chaos Theory (Marcos Siega)
10. The Wedding Director (Marco Bellocchio)
11. Burn After Reading (The Coen Brothers)
12. Never Back Down (Jeff Wadlow)
13. Transporter 3 (Olivier Megaton)
14. Cadillac Records (Darnell Martin)
15. Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke)
16. Battle For Haditha (Nick Broomfield)
17. My Brother Is An Only Child (Daniele Luchetti)
18. Death Race (Paul W.S. Anderson)
19. Roman De Gare (Claude Lelouch)
20. W. (Oliver Stone)

Runners Up (Alphabetical) (10):

Aleksandra (Aleksandr Sokurov), Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry), First Sunday (David E. Talbert), Frontrunners (Caroline Suh), Hamlet 2 (Andrew Fleming), Meet Dave (Brian Robbins), Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom (Patrik-Ian Polk), Rocknrolla (Guy Ritchie), Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols), The Wackness (Jonathan Levine)

Good! - Reasons To Go To The Movies (Alphabetical) (16):

Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot), Bedtime Stories (Adam Shankman), Bonneville (Christopher N. Rowley), Chris & Don: A Love Story (Tina Mascara / Guido Santi), Dark Matter (Shi-Zheng Chen), Flawless (Michael Radford), The Foot Fist Way (Jody Hill), Forbidden Kingdom (Rob Minkoff), How She Move (Ian Iqbal Rashid), Max Payne (John Moore), My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin), Role Models (David Wain), Swing Vote (Joshua Michael Stern), Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller), War, Inc. (Joshua Seftel), What Happens In Vegas (Tom Vaughan)

Well-Meaning / Has Redeeming Value (Alphabetical) (12):

10,000 BC (Roland Emmerich), Derek (Isaac Julien), The Family That Preys (Tyler Perry), Forever Strong (Ryan Little), Get Smart (Peter Segal), House Bunny (Fred Wolf), The Life Before Her Eyes (Vadim Perelman), Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd), Shelter (Jonah Markowitz), U2 3D (Catherine Owens / Mark Pellington), Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (Malcolm D. Lee), You Don't Mess With The Zohan (Dennis Dugan)

Bad (Alphabetical) (6):

Frontier(s) (Xavier Gens), The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat), Sex & The City (Michael Patrick King), The Spiderwick Chronicles (Mark Waters), Step Up 2: The Streets (Jon Chu), Stop-Loss (Kimberly Pierce)

Atrocities (Worst to Least Worst) (10)

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
(tie)
1. Wall-E (Andrew Stanton)
2. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
(tie)
2. Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov)
5. Savage Grace (Tom Kalin)
6. Mister Lonely (Harmony Korine)
7. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
8. Snow Angels (David Gordon Green)
9. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hsiao-hsien Hou)
10. Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild (Todd Stephens)

Armond White on Michael Jackson!

2008-01-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

Fascinating new blog called "The Wow Jones Report" features this MUST-read interview with Armond White on Michael Jackson:

INTERVIEW: Critic Armond White on Michael Jackson Lincoln Center Tribute

The interview concerns an upcoming event on which Wow Jones also reports here:

"King Of Pop" Michael Jackson To Be Honored at Lincoln Center In New York City

For more information on this event, the highlight of every year:

FRIDAY JAN 18th, 2008 Walter Reade Theater 6:15PM
Video Artists and Hollywood Influence (Michael Jackson)
Series: Dance on Camera Festival 2008
Director: Armond White, Country: USA, Runtime: 90
Co-presented by Scanners: The New York Video Festival.

Ten Best Singles of 2007

2008-01-01T19:05:00.000-08:00

Ten Best Singles of 2007

1. "What Goes Around... Comes Around," Justin Timberlake
2. "LoveStoned," Justin Timberlake
3. "Rehab" / "Rehab" Remix (feat. Jay-Z), Amy Winehouse
4. "Girls In Their Summer Clothes," Bruce Springsteen
5. "The Way I Are" (feat. Keri Hilson and D.O.E.), Timbaland
6. "Grace Kelly," Mika
7. "Until The End Of Time" (Duet with Beyonce), Justin Timberlake
8. "Apologize" (feat. One Republic), Timbaland
9. "Because Of You," Ne-Yo
10. "Give It to Me" (feat. Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake), Timbaland

Originally published at rateyourmusic.com
01/01/08

Ten Best Albums of 2007

2008-01-01T07:18:00.000-08:00

Ten Best Albums of 2007

1. Life in Cartoon Motion, Mika
2. Timbaland Presents: Shock Value, Timbaland
3. Magic, Bruce Springsteen
4. Double Up, R. Kelly
5. Back to Black, Amy Winehouse
6. Growing Pains, Mary J. Blige
7. Dylanesque, Bryan Ferry
8. Chrome Dreams II, Neil Young
9. Because of You, Ne-Yo
10. Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates, Kenny Chesney

Originally published at rateyourmusic.com
01/01/08

Ten Best Movies of 2007

2008-01-01T07:01:00.001-08:00

Ten Best Movies of 2007

1. Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright)
2. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson)
3. The Brave One (Neil Jordan)
4. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (Dennis Dugan)
5. Amazing Grace (Michael Apted)
6. Black Book, (Paul Verhoeven)
7. Lions For Lambs (Robert Redford)
8. Private Fears In Public Places (Alain Resnais)
9. The Bubble (Eytan Fox)
10. Boy Culture (Q. Allan Brocka)

Runners-Up (Preferential): No Country For Old Men (The Coen Brothers), The Italian (Andrei Kravchuk), Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog), Angel-A (Luc Besson), Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? (Tyler Perry), The Man Of My Life (Zabou Breitman), War (Philip G. Atwell), The Nanny Diaries (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini), Norbit (Brian Robbins), Because I Said So (Michael Lehmann)

Hip-Hop Goes To Rehab

2007-12-15T18:46:00.000-08:00

Rehab (Remix) (feat. Jay-Z)
Single Review by John Demetry

Jay-Z's production brings this already-wonderful song up a notch. "Rehab" now dazzles. Then, his rap deepens the meaning of the song (which is, of course, about dealing with heartbreak): "It’s just til these tears have dried." Hov extends its central symbol to include celebrity-culture voyeurism (the serendipitous occassion for the song's success):

My heroin flows more lethal than Marilyn's nose
I'm gonna OD till I'm in peace like Anna Nicole, HOV!

Ultimately, he relates it to the need to express (ergo, back to personal heartbreak):

Oh look he's relapsin'
Just look how’s he's rappin'
Every time I try to get out it pulls me back in

It validates and stands as the best exemplar of this fascinating trend of rap interludes spicing up current hits. Hip-hop is dead. But it's found a home in pop. Jay-Z: "Grace Kelly" is calling!

Originally published at RateYourMusic.com

Talking Heads (but not Talking Heads)

2007-12-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
DVD Review by John Demetry

Peter Bogdanovich serves up maybe the most visually eclectic doc -- mildly Oliver-Stoned -- in the Behind the Music mold; in four hours, it's a breeze. While his subject, Tom Petty, proves himself to be a charismatic figure and wry storyteller whose experiences mow through a swath of rock history, Bogdanovich reserves judgement for Petty's sometimes ruthless ambition. Instead, Bogdanovich highlights Petty's considerable catalogue of hits (it justifies anything, right?) as evidence that he beat the system. But did he? With an only superficially Howard-Hawks-like dictum -- "Don't bore us / Get to the chorus" -- it's easy for Bogdanovich (and the doc's praisers) to mistake Tom Petty as the rock-n-roll exemplar of the auteur theory. Petty's knack for pop jingles shouldn't be confused for the peers with whom he's here lumped -- Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols, and even the Clash. At pop's peak, those artists vivified consciousness (and not about banalities like the corruption of record companies and radio); that's the political affect of the auteur. Conclusion: 4 hours spent on Tom Petty is ultimately worth the 30-or-so seconds of Stevie Nicks (she's a genius, but her taste stinks).

Originally published at RateYourMusic.com

Desire's Complexity

2007-12-15T18:36:00.000-08:00

I Could Fall In Love With You, Erasure
CD Single Review by John Demetry

"I Could Fall In Love With You" song typifies late Erasure's no-frills (sometimes, I miss the frills) access to the essence of love ("I won't let you / Fall into a space that's empty"). Check out these lyrics, in which Erasure once again tap into one's basic innocence ("Like a child"), an astonishing gay expression of faith ("And you held me tight to keep believing") in the midst of desire's complexity ("Don't upset me"):

I was dreaming
We were sleeping
And you held me tight to keep believing
Don't upset me
I won't let you
Fall into a space that's empty

There are times when I could fall in love with you
There are times when I would scream till I was blue

Don't get me wrong
I can be strong
When I would fall in love with you
Don't let me down
Take me to test
When I could fall in love with you
Like a child
Like a child

Originally published at RateYourMusic.com

"Me" Of Many Voices

2007-12-15T18:25:00.000-08:00

Song: "Oh Daddy"
Songwriter: Christine McVie
Album: Rumours (1977) by Fleetwood Mac
Review by John Demetry

Why are you right when I'm so wrong
I'm so weak but you're so strong
Everything you do is just alright
And I can't walk away from you, baby
If I tried

This works so beautifully on so many levels. It should make one skeptical of Robert Christgau's claim: "The cute-voiced woman [Stevie Nicks] writes and sings the tough lyrics and the husky-voiced woman [Christine McVie] the vulnerable ones." Christine is the tough one. (And I mean this as no offense to Stevie, whose extreme sensitivity speaks to my own.) "Oh Daddy" shows this magnificently because she -- anticipating Erasure's take on love struggles -- recognizes her own fault in the "Drama!" The song is an integral part of Rumours -- and I believe it to be Christine's masterpiece.

It's a great blues song, whose autobiographical meaning is timed musically: to the exquisite beating of Fleetwood's drum. Rumours have it that he is the literal "Daddy" of the title, keeping the group together (as signified by the swirling harmonies that dance around Fleetwood's drumming, anticipating the Christine Tusk tracks). Even if he's not, it's the legend told to keep the group intact (in honor of ex-husband John McVie, the bassist who put the "Mac" in Fleetwood Mac). This insistance on putting the group and the Truth above her "fool"ishness is how one perseveres. Christine seeks out signs that validate this faith. She finds them (Daddy's smile). Her blues vocalizations reveal the heartache from which this consiousness was constructed. McVie's honey voice turns the word "know" into a sweet moan, spiking the listener's own consciousness (i.e., "know"ledge):

Oh daddy
You soothe me with your smile
You're letting me know-ow-ow
You're the best thing in my life

The tune plays out like a big tease (think "Go Your Own Way" without the chorus), so the closest thing to an orgasmic delivery is the big harmonizing on "me" at the end with the repeating of the line: "It's got to be me." I find that so moving and strangely fulfilling: "me" with many voices. It bears the burden of responsibility while recognizing shared heartbreak. It's an off-kilter song (what with Mick's "fancy" playing on the offbeat. . . "Oh Daddy," indeed). As such, it's an interesting example of Christine's synthesis of pop and blues structure, making the song available to Lindsey Buckingham's avant-garde soundscapes and the Mac's autobiographical mythologizing.

Originally posted at Heroes Are Hard To Find.

Back To Class

2007-12-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

High School Musical 2
Television Review by John Demetry

In the made-for-tv High School Musical, Zac Efron (as Troy Bolton) embodied the gallantry projected onto every secret jock crush. A demographic swooned.

A year behind, this month's Rolling Stone cover crowns Zac Efron: "The New American Heart Throb." He's reduced to a product, the centerpiece of Disney's major franchise. The Rolling Stonecover unveils Zac's new, hilarious look: coiffed and colored hair, (fake) golden tan, chiseled bod, and flirtation with androgyny. The white-on-white image reminds of Britney Spears in the Toxic video. He's a comical vision of conspicuous consumption.

Satirizing and -- reveling in -- luxe, High School Musical 2 achieves dazzlement. So, the new Zac Efron embodies Troy's dilemma in High School Musical 2. Just ask Troy's Latina girlfriend and singing partner, Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Anne Hudgens). She breaks up with him by saying, "It doesn't just seem like new stuff. It seems like a new Troy." She returns his "T" charm necklace, a symbol of his "promise" to her. Does the new Zac Efron, like Troy, also break his "promise" to his fans?

In High School Musical 2, Troy, along with his school buddies, works at a summer job at a country club. There, Troy strains his friendships. He succumbs to the lures -- Italian shoes, etc. -- of rich-girl diva Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale). Sharpay lists Troy (the "versatile" star of the school at the end of the first musical) among the commodities she covets in the song, "Fabulous." Because her father owns the country club, Troy promises to partner with her for the course's summer talent show.

When Troy finds out that the ambitious Sharpay pulled strings to keep the other employees out of the show, he makes a difficult choice between his friends and his "future." As if marking the difference, Troy's father gives advice to his troubled son by showing him a picture of Troy in the Wildcats basketball uniform (from the first HSM): "Looks a lot like you. I'm absolutely sure he's going to figure out the right thing to do."

In his solo song "Bet On It," Zac sings: "It's no good at all to see yourself / And not recognize your face." Usually director Kenny Ortega dresses Zac in blue so his eyes to pop. However, for "Bet On It" -- Troy's Hamlet moment -- Ortega dressses Zac in sleek black (corresponding with his newly-darkened locks) to highlight his dancing. Ortega choreographs Zac's/Troy's moral purpose as graphically, physically striking -- and sexy. Now, that's entertainment!

The baseball-dance battle between biracial jock Chad (Corbin Bleu) and (gay) musical-theater geek Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) establishes the grounds for this alluring sense of brotherhood. "I'll show you how I swing!" Chad teases Ryan. Their simpatico steps in that number, "I Don't Dance," invite Ryan into the social fold and encourage Chad to benefit the group in the talent show. As Troy apologizes to his friends: "Brothers fight but they're still brothers."

That's also the lesson Sharpay must learn. When her entourage asks her to name the theme of the summer's talent show, Sharpay answers: "Redemption." She doesn't understand the meaning of the word.

In High School Musical 2, Zac Efron brings sexy back to "redemption."

The Battle of the Bushes

2007-12-15T06:58:00.000-08:00

Love and Anger
Music Video Review by John Demetry

Armond White’s annual presentation of the best in recent music video art lived up to its paradoxical-poetic title: "Music to My Eyes." He closed the evening – the year’s peak for art-discovery – with a video from the past to exemplify the themes and achievements of music videos present (and Movies 2005, in general). That work of art: the 1990 music video – Love and Anger – directed by (and featuring the song by) Kate Bush.

Only the divisive bugaboo constructed – through the exploitation of contemporary Anger and stifled need to Love – around another Bush (George W.) stands in the way of feeling and applying the achievement of this video and song. Kate Bush and her images sing directly to the pain prevalent in the contemporary culture. She fulfills the duty of the poet.

To quote Paul Murray, OP, in his essay "The Fourth Friend: Poetry in a Time of Affliction" in the latest issue of Logos:

"By naming, through poems and stories, the black stone of affliction – the stone that had no name, perhaps, but that weighed heavily on our hearts – the weight of the stone is somehow lifted. We are touched by God’s grace, and healing begins."

Murray suggests the social-spiritual genesis of the great pop hope that Bush miraculously realizes with Love and Anger. (I think it might be the greatest music video I’ve ever seen.)

Love and Anger addresses the audience with the healing – transmogrifying, redemptive, and revolutionary – force of pop experience. The video ends with Bush on stage with her rollicking band. She throws glitter into the camera. It constitutes a baptism – danceclubs! disco! punk! glam! rock concerts! youth rebellion! sexual experimentation! gender-bending! – inducting the audience into a new social potential, a pop community. It turns out to be the definitive post-postmodern gesture. (Music to my eyes, indeed.)

Post-postmodern: Following the liberation of the "sign" in the postmodern era came the profoundly expressed need to redefine community and spirituality, to revitalize the "sign" through a radical conception of faith. The media curtails this evolution (occurring at the vital base of the culture) from entering into the mainstream (and academia).

Fearlessly, Bush offers the blessing of glitter and dance: vernacular means of celebration (and photogenic, no less). Love and Anger begins with Bush isolated. A spotlight defines the limits of her space – a circle of light etched on the stage. This staging illuminates the means of her physical expression, her face and body – dressed in a black leotard. In the pose of prayer – contemplation and humility – a shower of glitter falls on Bush as she sings/intones/moves:

"It lay buried here / It lay deep inside me / It's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it"

That glitter signifies so much – and it falls upon pop (music, film, music video) artists 2005 like Peter Pan’s fairy dust (pace the national/pop-cultural quest Bush outlined in her song "In Search of Peter Pan"). The glitter crystalizes the central theme and challenge of movie-going 2005 (self-definition through capacity for empathy, for aesthetic engagement):

1. It gives form to the dazzling light of an individual, of a soul.

2. That spiritual core – the essence of personality, of humanity – is witnessed in relation to the social and the cosmic.

3. The spiritual reveals itself in relief to essential innocence and the experience of grace.

4. The presence of grace is understood through shared expression – a delight in beauty upon which community is formed and through which healing is performed.

Without the profound humility Bush displays here, one cannot get outside oneself to see oneself. As she sings variations on the following chorus, Bush expands the space (and the tropes) to include troupes performing Western and Eastern forms of dance:

"Two strings speak in sympathy / What would we do without you? / Take away the love and the anger / And a little piece of hope holding us together"

During the early renditions of this refrain, Bush displays the Sovereign Scepter and Orb – the historical-religious symbols of her beloved "Lionheart," England. In a powerfully generous (and liberating) gesture, Bush extends across the frame these totems of royalty (a sentiment later enlarged in the offering, from the stage, to the spectator at the end of the video). Bush relinquishes these symbols – from faith to faith – to the dancers: "A little piece of hope holding us together." This moment in Love and Anger proves as awesome as the compassionate gesture (society’s neglected - an artist - confronts the floating head from John Boorman’s Zardoz) in Justin Pandolfino’s music video: Dreams. (I’ll say it again: "The Land and the King are one" – Excalibur.)

Consequently, Bush opens those wide eyes of experience and hope (mirrored across time to Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning – agape – in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds). She revs up to an energetic dance – what White compares to Pentecostal ecstasy. Further expanding the multi-cultural sources of her pop expression, an inspired Bush takes to the stage with her band. Bush executes another extension of space (a philosophical leap), from individual to communal celebration. Bush takes advantage of music video’s pop base (the song!) to make this meta shift in the mis-en-scene. The literal process of music-making becomes, itself, another metaphor. Doing so, she concretizes the process behind the sonic element of the call-and-response ("Two strings speak in harmony"). The dancers dramatized the support of an East-West beloved community during the chorus.

Glitter is everywhere.

Check out the significance of these dance steps:

1. Individual pain is defined by the spotlight and Bush’s movement – and then recognized by that distinctive voice (note the song’s move from "I" to the universal, yet intimate, "you").

2. The symbols that reveal and ameliorate that pain are identified within the individual’s heritage (the scepter and orb): embraced and shared (metaphorical gestures).

3. The universal expression of dance reveals the process of healing, the revelation of beauty, as a cross-cultural one, communal and artistic (political and religious).

4. Bush’s wild festivity on-stage with her bandmates leads spectator savvy to a pop revelation – baptizing the audience in glittered possibility.

Through the sensitivity engendered by personal torment, Bush celebrates the presence of grace in pop:

"Don't ever think that you can't change the past and the future / You might not, not think so now, / But just you wait and see – someone will come to help you"

In the context of the video, that "someone"represents the artist – specifically the pop artist – drawing upon resonant rituals of perseverance and unifying symbols. Thus, "someone" represents the cultures of the world that offer the surprise of continuity in experiences, striving through creativity. Such discovery inspires the artistic (curious, openhearted) mind. "Someone" can also refer to a "friend" who provides compassion and sympathy – "a deeper understanding." God – the great "someone" – inspires "artist" and "friend" alike: that is the truth revealed by the phenomenon (undeniable!) of shared understanding. Bush defines the post-postmodern by inspiring audiences to take the imaginative trek through the end of contemporary sophistication to pop faith.

The other day, I saw a t-shirt worn by a New Yorker. It featured a picture of President George W. Bush. The caption read: "The reason I will never vote again." It signifies phony "liberty": the appropriation of the symbolic figurehead of the nation (the President) to justify a cynical dismissal of ritual participation. It amounts to one’s willing exploitation. The relinquishment of citizenship, a betrayal of the democratic dream, represented by that t-shirt establishes "power" as the basis of value. What is citizenship but the enactment of one’s spiritual potential? George W. Bush, Fox News, The New York Times, and The Village Voice benefit equally from the culture’s abandonment of faith.

Every person experiences the truth of grace in the existential quandaries of life, in the desire for intimate relations. Only Kate Bush’s pop baptism of glitter, however, can inspire the audience to extrapolate the truth of that experience into a relationship with art, politics, and Love. Reflecting the light of Bush’s glitter, Movies 2005 attempt to restore our lost faith. Through these artworks, one repeats Bush’s philosophical – post-coital! – affirmation at the end of Love and Anger: "Yeah!"

Experience that special joy with the film reviewed in a piece coming soon: Gael Morel’s beyond magnificent Le clan (a.k.a. Three Dancing Slaves).

Originally published by Cinedrama.de
Letter From New York: Fourth Issue

The Infinite Significance Of The Kiss

2007-12-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

The Terminal
Film Review by John Demetry

A kiss that means nothing is like a terrorist attack. It undermines faith. With his latest film, the most healing post-9/11 gesture any filmmaker has offered, Steven Spielberg vivifies the value of human communication and connection. Spielberg's The Terminal returns meaning - infinite significance - to that essential movie moment: The Kiss.

There are five kisses in The Terminal. The first one is delivered by Tom Hanks, playing Viktor Navorsky. Viktor finds himself stranded in New York's JFK airport international terminal after a revolution in his country (the imaginary Krakozhia) marks his status "Unacceptable."

Viktor, frantically trying to get information from news reports on the airport monitors regarding the tumult in his fictitious (read: metaphorical, universal) homeland, reinforces the experience of all "unacceptable" (read: marginalized) people.

Viktor can neither return home, nor enter the United States. He arrived in the United States with a mysterious duty to fulfill in New York City. It has something to do with a can of Planters Peanuts. What's in it? "Jazz," Viktor enigmatically responds.

Like a jazz artist, Viktor survives his nine months in the terminal through improvisation, imaginative use of the materials in his environment, and by challenging those around him - those who toil at the airport - to reinvent their lives. Every kiss is made of "jazz" in The Terminal (like composer John Williams' emotive, culturally eclectic riffs on the airport muzak).

The first kiss: Viktor kisses the can of Planters his first night in the terminal, followed by his forming the sign of the cross over his chest. An intense light punctuates these gestures: is it a sign of grace, authorities on the prowl, or an airplane passing by the window?

"Nobody reads the sign in America," says Gupta (Kumar Pallana), a part of the airport janitorial staff, who gets his kicks watching patrons slip on the recently mopped floors.

That line defines Spielberg's semiotic slapstick (like Hanks running into the women's bathroom - shriek! - or a surveillance camera personified with expressive emotion). A bounty of signs (literally and figuratively), Janusz Kaminski's ingeniously lit soundstage provides the space for his camera to ceaselessly scan for - and to discover - illuminating truth, a revelation in each shot. The Terminal is simply one of the most astonishingly imaginative visual achievements of American cinema in the sound era.

Viktor attempts to read the meaning behind the two kisses Catherine Zeta-Jones, as flight attendant Amelia Warren, shares with her (married) lover Max (Michael Nouri). Viktor discovers her pain. He falls in love with her.

Staying in the terminal for nine months, Viktor answers Amelia's query - "What are you waiting for?" - with this reply: "For you." His response links up with the conjecture of paranoid Gupta, who suspects that Viktor is a spy: "This guy is here for a reason. And I think that reason is us."

So it is!

The final two kisses in The Terminal punctuate the ritual gift exchange between Zeta-Jones' delicately wrought Amelia and Hanks' sensitively portrayed Viktor (genius actor: note how and when Hanks, whose character only slowly learns to speak English, places his hand over his mouth as a form of universal communication). The kiss knows no borders of language.

Inspired by Amelia's obsession with Napoleon and Josephine (another couple whose love affair came to symbolize a new vision of nation), Viktor gives her a gift (which I won't unveil) that reflects light. Baptized in that fountain of light, they kiss.

Hail, hail Spielberg and Kaminski: This is a how a kiss should be filmed. It is radiant, glittering, ethereal (yet earthbound). This kiss, this gesture, reflects the characters' act of faith, while also resonating with the significance their love affair holds for the "Friends" - a word that Viktor learns from an advertisement for the television show - Viktor makes during his stay in the terminal. It validates a shared sensitivity between two disempowered people and within a community of survivors. Thus, Spielberg queers the hetero codes of cinema.

"History is Truth!" Viktor supports Amelia's mental record of historical trivia (a recognizable, yet unique quirk for dealing with individual stress - to sustain spiritual connection). Three employees of the airport witness this display of love. In addition, an act of compassion (history) becomes legend (truth): proof spread through the photocopy of Hanks' hand and Gupta's relaying of the story.

The development of new signs and codes to unite against oppression is not isolated (Viktor's existential declaration - "I'll wait!" - spoken to Stanley Tucci's richly embattled Homeland Security officer through a surveillance monitor, much to the pleasure of Tucci's beleaguered staff). The antithesis to the New Age Gnosticism sweeping the Da Vinci Code culture, The Terminal dramatizes and revitalizes how communities form and individuals persevere.

It ain't easy. The fifth and final kiss in the film, witnessed by one lover from a distance, signifies a sacrifice. I won't reveal how, but perhaps this film's critical and popular dismissal -- the cultural disaster of my lifetime -- is due to the fact that it gets explicitly racial: "Jazz!" Understanding the sacrifice by one of the characters hinges on that recognition. It requires an awareness of the culture and the Love that get you through. A debt must be paid. "Destiny!" Zeta-Jones declares, her exploited life finally made worthwhile.

Notably: this is the most dazzling, most needed, multi-culti cast since Alex Cox's Straight to Hell (which challenged the Reagan Rules the same way Spielberg undermines Bush, Jr.-era divisiveness). Re-title The Terminal: "Straight to Heaven".

Mexican food-cart driver Enrique Cruz (Diego Luna, making amends for the reactionary "Y tu mama tambien") spies African-American Delores Torres (Zoe Saldana) smiling - and I mean: SMILING - in response to Viktor's determination and democratic faith ("50/50!") to pass through the gates. The revelation of that smile marks the moment when Enrique falls in love with Delores, a love nurtured and blessed by Viktor (a spiritual ambassador).

By the end, Viktor is ready to return home and mend his broken country/heart. That is also Spielberg's challenge to the audience leaving The Terminal. Even a kiss that means something can begin the healing.

Originally published by GayToday.com
July 12, 2004

Freedom And Faith

2007-12-15T06:11:00.000-08:00

Morrissey, You are the Quarry
CD Review by John Demetry

Part One

Your leg came to rest against mine
Then you lounged with knees up and apart
And me and my heart, we knew
We just knew
For evermore
--- "Come Back To Camden," Morrissey, You are the Quarry

Now, Morrissey's heart is overflowing. You are the Quarry, Morrissey's masterpiece, constitutes a full-scope social landscape (charting the culture's pain, desires, and hopes), while also providing a complete portrait of the artist.

You are the Quarry remains rigorous - an aesthetic tour de force - by riffing upon and fleshing out (humorously, poignantly - imaginatively! - all at once) the theme that binds artist and civilization. Morrissey reinvigorates the miracle of human interaction through expressive language, shared symbols, and - most miraculously - physical intimacy.

Like this year's film masterwork, Patrice Chereau's Son frere, You Are the Quarry catalogues the gestures that transform emotion into the physical, the expressive. This liberation, shared by everyone, is multiplied by the queered insight of Chereau and Morrissey.

The lyrics quoted above from the emotional odyssey of "Come Back to Camden" display Morrissey's uncanny sensual memory - a Proustian elan made resonant through the album's dazzling, lush-with-feeling production. That moment - "And me and my heart, we knew" - is the moment of gay people's lives. It marks the revelation - expansive through metaphorical language and personification - of one's desires.

Who reading this doesn't know exactly what Morrissey is singing about?

The miracle: It manifests itself in sub-cultural codes of recognition - "Your leg came to rest against mine." It's the moment a gay person realizes: I'm not alone. This truth is repeated when Morrissey takes on the persona of a lesbian discovering her sexuality on the satirical-to-sublime "All the Lazy Dykes":

Touch me, Squeeze me, Hold me too tightly
And when you look at me you actually see me
And I've, Never felt so alive
In the whole of my life, In the whole of my life

On the track "Come Back to Camden," this essential communication of sexual/romantic longing and connection is linked with the need for a concept of "home" - a yearning to be a part of something larger through shared modes of communication. Morrissey parlays this as both a return to and, through the marginalized (home-less) experience recognizable to gay people, a radicalization of "home."

You are the Quarry attests that for the clearest look at a culture, for its essential aspects, one must look from inside the outside. The experience and knowledge of Morrissey as a pop star without a home ("America Is Not the World," "Irish Blood, English Heart") proves the need to extend his previous, masterful tracing of social discord and isolation (romantic, social) in The Smiths oeuvre and on such solo albums as Viva Hate, Your Arsenal, and Maladjusted. Now, he achieves complete engagement - a post-9/11 necessity to re-evaluate one's values (the album's ass imagery - You know where you can shove your hamburger - answers the toppling of a phallic symbol).

My heart is open to you, Morrissey ends the song "Let Me Kiss You." The following stanza encapsulates Morrissey's current condition as an Englishman in America, sustaining the meaning of attempts at connection but spiking disappointment with gay wit (the heart - the strength and the love - that is open):

I've zig-zagged all over America
And I cannot find a safety haven
Say, would you let me cry
On your shoulder
I've heard that you'll try anything twice

This wit might assuage heartache but it also affirms a bulwark against hegemony. With the infectious, quip-hop beat of "I Like You," Morrissey expresses the connection between oppressed people. He raps:

Forces of containment
They shove their fat faces into mine
You and I just smile
Because we're thinking the same lines

The gesture of a shared smile signifies a connection deeper than that which the "forces of containment" can suppress - though "the same lines" remain unspoken. The smile is a spiritual communication and confirmation. Morrissey celebrates the empathic gesture and expresses his emotions unabashedly:

You're not right in the head and nor am I
And this why
This is why I like you

In his review of Steven Spielberg's A.I. - Artificial Intelligence (the twin towering achievement of the era), critic Armond White wrote the following:

"Still, Spielberg restores cinema's essence: keeping one's eyes startled and mind open. It's inconceivable that people could look at David's quest to communicate - the most nuanced images of physical and emotional touching since 'Jules and Jim' - and remain unmoved."

Morrissey restores pop music's essence: keeping one's ears and heart open. And the imagery of "physical and emotional touching" on You are the Quarry is equally expansive and exhaustive ("Your leg came to rest against mine") - and the sound is grand.

On one of the sensational tracks on the album - full of the rich shifts in emotional tones of a Spielberg film - "The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores," Morrissey creates a Spielbergian metaphor to express his anxiety over the way the world is "designed for crashing bores" and the realization that Those who wish to hurt you / Work within the law. He seeks transcendence:

What really lies
Beyond the constraints of my mind
Could it be the sea
With fate mooning back at me?

The image of a full moon above a sea expresses an existential dilemma and the power of the subversive gesture ("mooning"). That awe responds to his plea, the most genuine of an earnest artist's career, on "Crashing Bores":

You don't understand
And yet you can
Take me in your arms and love me

The metaphor creates understanding. Its expansiveness is an embrace. The vocalization on the variations of the repeated refrain - This world is full of (ooooh ooooh) crashing bores - is an act of defiance and of love. Morrissey decries the compromises of other pop stars and bears the responsibility:

No it's just more lock jawed pop stars
Thicker than pig shit
Nothing to convey
They're so scared to show intelligence
It might smear their lovely career

Methods of conveying thoughts and feelings are what bind a people. The need to communicate and connect, achieved in the sustaining gestures, codes, and signs of marginalized and oppressed people testify to human capability. If healing is to be achieved, it is by returning to this unrecognized "home" - the bedrock of Morrissey's American experiment - that it will be done.

Morrissey mines this vitality for truths and signs of life - "YOU are the Quarry" - and justifies these exploited lives - "YOU are the Quarry". (The full title on the album art reads, Morrissey, You are the Quarry - a move from the personal to the communal.) A continuing examination of You are the Quarry will reveal that Morrissey goes beyond pop's essence to its potential. It offers a new political hope: of freedom and of faith.

Originally published by GayToday.com
June 14, 2004

You Won't Bleed Me

2007-12-15T06:06:00.000-08:00

Baadasssss!
Film Review by John Demetry

According to the new narrative film Baadasssss!, on a Halloween day in the early 1970s, the ambitious Black filmmaker Melvin van Peebles (played by his son Mario van Peebles) had a vision. Shown looking into his mirror, Melvin sees the blessed community (neighbors, children made up for Halloween) reflected back at him.

As he enters the image in the reflection, the film stock changes from vibrating color to slow-motion black and white. He vows that his new script will "star the community" - "All the faces Norman Rockwell never painted." And he ends his vision meditating on the appearance of a Black boy dressed as an angel, jumping on a trampoline - an image of social-spiritual aspiration.

That Angel of the community will continue to haunt - and inspire - Melvin until he releases the groundbreaking 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. It proved hugely successful (popularly and artistically) and influential (the aesthetics advanced in it created a new genre of Blaxploitation films and basically ushered in a Renaissance of Hollywood filmmaking in the 1970s while also paving the way for hiphop's development in the late 1970s).

While the Angel provides hope and perspective (shot sitting upside-down on the ceiling), Mario van Peebles also plays a Devil, tempting Melvin to give up his potentially-ruinous artistic gamble (a folk-culture motif recently vivified in the agit-rock-opera Greendale by Neil Young). Shot in split-screen effects so that the doubles appear on-screen simultaneously, it proves an eye-bending humility. Film gimmickry used for consciousness-heightening - an irreverent, truthful, essential, pop felicity.

As this Angel-Devil motif conveys, Baadasssss! constitutes one of the rare great representations of the artistic process (imaginative, wily, political) in movies. In its visionary staging, Mario van Peebles (who also wrote and directed Baadasssss!) dramatizes how his father Melvin drew the sources for his film's forceful symbolism from the vernacular (sub-cult, community) base. Open to being touched by (graced with) the community's vitality, Melvin van Peebles made a vital film.

The source of this verve reverberates during the writing. Mario van Peebles details the script's development in Civil-Rights-era sonic montage, finding the coherency in Martin Luther King's dream and Malcolm X's recognition of nightmare and the hope in "Wade in the Water" gospel. There's a flip-side to inspiration. After wallpapering his blue room with the yellow pages of the Sweet Sweetback script, Melvin returns to the mirror and attaches a final piece of paper that reads:

MONEY

This graphically piquant image (it has graffiti sincerity and temerity) sets up the story, which tracks Melvin's struggle to finance and then create Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. As the new film's original title suggests, How to the Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass, this structure means to be instructive. With each experience Melvin has while meeting potential investors, Mario van Peebles elucidates the anxieties and inequities confronted by Black artists - and the audacity of Melvin to address the social conflicts in his art.

On the set of a Western (complete with bad guy in black and a Steppin Fetchit Hollywood-minstrel throwback), Melvin walks out of a meeting with producers and his agent, vowing to make his own "ghetto western." The sun shines bright! So brightly that the film stock during desert scenes of inspiration - "Shut up and listen!" Melvin instructs the young Mario, played with sensitive attentiveness by Khleo Thomas - appear over-exposed, overly rich.

Enlisting the aid of a hippie with connections, Melvin rebukes commune fantasy (privileged fancy) and business-as-usual ("The unions are lily white. Fuck 'em!"). He will attract a community of porn-film technicians, progressive filmmakers and non-Union actors to create his film. Promised money by a white drug dealer, Melvin is told this for the money-man's reasoning: "He wants to be loved but he'll settle for attention." James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were as incisive about race-based psychological motivations.

When a gay Hollywood producer (played by Adam West) makes the moves on Melvin, Melvin jets. But note the open-hearted sexuality in the title of his eventual masterpiece. It revolutionized screen sensuality - as elaborated by film critic Armond White in the recent documentary Baadasssss Cinema.

White's insight into the 1971 film's appeal should have transformed gay director Isaac Julien's approach to the genre in the documentary. In Julien's (thrilling) follow-up reverie on Blaxploitation tropes, the triple-screen gallery installation Baltimore, Melvin van Peebles responds to one of the most liberating visuals of movies last year (a Black woman/alien-from-space taking flight in the lobby of a library) with an upturned eyebrow and eye movement of sardonic worldliness and bemusement.

Mario van Peebles, likewise, proves his chops - notably showing off his sweet sweetback in Badassssss! The challenge to (white and Black) masculinity in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song proves infectiously risky and necessary. Baadasssss! reveals why and how.

Responding to his daughter's call, Melvin will become "the first nigger that hung himself" (oh! the blues wit that sustained the artist and distinguished a masterwork) when he shows up a white producer in a rope(!)-climbing contest in front of their children. Note the new film's nature-nurture razzing in the casting (Mario van Peebles as Melvin; Melvin van Peebles' contemporary in Black filmmaking, Ossie Davis, as Melvin's father) or in the tagline for the poster art: "A Father. A Son. A Revolution."

Not only to establish the film story's context of revolutionary filmmaking and revolutionary political movements (the Black Panthers supported Sweet Sweetback upon its release), this tag-line also signifies the imaginative revolution of life experience into art and living. In Baadasssss!, the audience experiences the genesis of the symbolism in Sweet Sweetback: a male-female striptease, a white woman's seduction, street kids offering to wash a car, an exploding automobile, a collapse in the desert, dogs chasing a wanted Black man, a scene of police brutality and righteous action.

This gallery synchs with English expatriate Morrissey's outsider rundown of his own pop-idol/artistic travails through the imagery of racial injustice in his adopted home of America on the new song "How Could Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel":

I have been dragged in, 15 miles of shit. . .
Because you wear a uniform, A smelly uniform, And so you think you can be
rude to me . . .
I would never be you

The expressive, imaginative gesture: that's how anybody can break free of the handcuffs of authority/hegemony and achieve understanding. Morrissey and van Peebles share this hard-won knowledge.

Like Melvin van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (and Mario van Peebles' visionary 1995 film Panther), Baadasssss! - being similarly serious and joyful - serves as a political guide and a spiritual bulwark. Lost sight and transforming vision are used metaphorically in the new film. It's most moving moment comes when young Mario begs his father to see a doctor about his failing eyesight.

The film conceives of History from numerous points of view, with mock-documentary talking-heads (first as played by the actors in the movie, then replaced in the credits by the actual people) for insight, humor, and narrative fleetness. The motif culminates in the narrative proper with a God's-eye point-of- view of a ticket line and a freeze-frame of son sitting on father's lap in a packed movie theater.

Sweet Sweetback's song (set to the music of Earth, Wind & Fire) goes like this:

You bled my momma, you bled my pappa, but you won't bleed me!

Sweet Sweetback is Melvin van Peebles' song. Baadasssss! is Mario van Peebles'.

The final shot/beat of the film - Mario van Peebles besting Norman Rockwell for recognizable American truth - reveals the paternal pride and experience in the real Melvin van Peebles' glance.

He sees his son soar.

Originally published by GayToday.com
May 31, 2004

Reinvigorating Symbols

2007-12-15T03:13:00.000-08:00

Irish Blood, English Heart
CD-Single Review by John Demetry

The new single "Irish Blood, English Heart" heralds the return of legendary pop star Morrissey. Through the conundrum described in the title of "Irish Blood, English Heart," Morrissey dreams everyone's freedom.

Morrissey croons:

Irish Blood, English Heart
This I'm made of
There is no one on Earth I'm afraid of
And I will die with both of my hands untied

Tongue untied (dig it - 21st Century Moz sounds better than ever), Morrissey declares license in Difference (racial, sexual) to denounce a divisive history while reinvigorating the shared symbols of a culture.

The single consists of four songs: the title single track, followed by three bonus tracks that do not appear on the new Morrissey album, You are the Quarry (released two weeks after the single). It provides an apt (rapt) introduction to the main release (which is, quite simply, a towering achievement - more on that. . . coming).

In 1992, Morrissey released the album Your Arsenal (until You are the Quarry, his greatest achievement post-The Smiths) and unleashed his most trenchant political anthem/challenge with the track National Front Disco.

That song provided cross-section, class-conscious, outsider empathy to the political problem/reality of fascism (and, through its formal strategy - fidelity to rock-'n-roll codes - identified its manifestation in popular culture). Now, the single Irish Blood, English Heart responds to the earlier song's call of despair. . . with hope.

That defines the new single's particular post-9/11 consciousness. The song's title amounts to bold heresy: linking "Irish Blood" and the "English Heart" that pumps it. This perverse wit - and vision - dismantles hegemony, while providing a necessary, radical re-conception of national identity, patriotism, political engagement. These are the concerns that now, with new urgency, bind the culture - while putting individual stability under duress.

In a stealthy 2-minutes-37-seconds - opening with a mind/heart-quickening drum rap on the symbols - Morrissey charts the process from outsider political skepticism to inclusive democratic faith:

To be standing by the flag, not feeling shameful, Racist, or partial.

Such directness goes beyond didacticism to undeniable - infectious, rockin' - audacity.

Always questioning rock-'n-roll (hetero hegemony) with richly felt ambivalence, Morrissey now reinvents it, along with national consciousness. He ends the song:

I've been dreaming of a time when
The English are sick to death of Labour, And Tories
And spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell
And denounce this royal line that still salute him
And will salute him
FOREVER. . .

Morrissey queers punk bluntness - and liberating subversiveness - in that final line. It has a double-meaning, referring to the royal line that salutes Oliver Cromwell, while also, through the parallel structure of the stanza, meaning: "I've been dreaming of a time when The English. . . will salute Him forever."

The ambiguity of the object ("him"/"Him") and the reclaiming of the gesture ("salute") act out - with verbal, artistic felicity - Morrissey's dream. A dream fulfilled by the band's ecstatic rock coda - rising to a synth "emotional whirl" (pace "All the Lazy Dykes" from You are the Quarry) - Irish Blood, English Heart invites the listener to share in revitalizing democracy through faith.

The three "B-sides" provide the context for this dream (as fully as the multiple perspectives of National Front Disco for its nightmare). The tracks delineate the sexual-spiritual desires to which the political imagination must respond. With these four tracks, Irish Blood, English Heart adds up to a profound political proposition.

Morrissey always disarms expectations with the surprise of feeling. Following Irish Blood, English Heart, It's Hard to Walk Tall When You're Small wittily - not cruelly - details its first-person subject's pain. Read literally, the song concerns the plight of a gay Latino dwarf with a small penis, a discipline fetish, a premature ejaculation problem ("Success is just a mess, Oh!"), and an obsession with Ringo Starr (the earnest Beatle). Oh! - and he's a top too: "I attack from the back - because it's easy!"

Such sub-cultural wit (and sexual individuality) attests to methods of survival and coping amidst indifference:

I can scare with a stare

Morrissey celebrates this sanity-preserving impulse but then reveals what's beneath it. The song ends with the protagonist's plea for sympathy:

So compadre please do this for me
Compadre please weep for me

Through a dizzying amalgam of Otherness (open to interpretation), Morrissey conveys the need for universal communication and spiritual communion; that is, for understanding.

We miss them
Every night we kiss them
Their faces fixed in our heads

Morrissey yearns for such understanding on Munich Air Disaster 1958. A parade march to the grave, the track contrasts a single person's loneliness and emotional isolation (at night, he is not missed, nor kissed) with the development of a national mythology.

Note the song's shifting perspective: from "We" to "I." The desire to be part of something larger (and to be loved) is misapplied/displaced:

I wish I'd gone down, gone down with them
To where mother nature makes their bed

Morrissey ends the single with heartbreaking autobiography. Bridging the distance between himself and his subjects (nation, Other, isolation/myth), he works out a melodic sex-art metaphor:

Reflecting from my death bed . . .
All I can see are the never-layed
That's the never-played symphonies

On The Never-Played Symphonies, Morrissey comes to terms with his own pop-star objectification. He accounts for the effects of his isolation (he infamously swore celibacy; his music often expresses loneliness in terms recognizable to gay experience): "Black sky in the daytime / And I don't much mind dying." And he comes to terms with his regrets (sexual, then artistic, then sexual again):

You were one, you were meant to be one
And you jumped into my face
And laughed and kissed me on the cheek
And then were gone
Forever not quite

Morrissey's return to that fleeting gesture (like a CD on repeat) constitutes the album's revelation. Proclaiming his humanity, grasping at his personal experience, Morrissey transforms it into expansive metaphor, to artistic healing:

You were one you knew you were one
And you slid right through my fingers
No not literally but metaphorically and,
Now you're all I see
As the light fades

Play the Irish Blood, English Heart CD-single on repeat. Marvel at how the "light fades" to the radical dream of the title track. With Irish Blood, English Heart, Morrissey lays to rest the Myth of Morrissey.

With You Are The Quarry, he will achieve transcendence. Morrissey - and popular culture - resurrected.

Pinch me!

Originally published by GayToday.com
May 24, 2004

Health And Defficiency

2007-12-15T03:08:00.000-08:00

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Film Review by John Demetry

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the latest collaboration between director Michel Gondry and celebrity screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, distills the obsessions of the two auteurs to an essential concern: romantic love.

Gondry and Kaufman, who collaborated on last year's underrated Human Nature, share a fascination with mise-en-abyme structures (stories within stories) as a way of accessing the narrative modes of disconnect, isolation, and potential truth. Their subject is the audience's heightened sophistication - as a sign of health and deficiency - now streamlined in the (still) elaborate story of Eternal Sunshine (which leaps through time, memories, and fantasies).

Jim Carrey plays Joel Barrish, who begins the film as a shy, almost socially retarded, loser who meets Kate Winslet's Clementine during a uncharacteristically spontaneous trip to the ocean-side, to which he's strangely drawn. He asks himself as he spies on Clementine in a diner, defining his character's loneliness and helplessness: "Why do I fall in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention?"

"Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime," a cover by Beck (yuck) of the classic song, plays on the soundtrack during the film's opening credit sequence (which takes place after Joel and Clementine have broken up). Joel throws the tape playing the Beck track out of his car window - a healthy disregard for second-rate appropriation or a harbinger of acquiescence to pop deficiency? That is the question.

Joel succumbs to the promise of a new procedure that erases unwanted memories. After Clementine, herself, has Joel removed from her mind (as a "lark," one character explains), Joel decides to eradicate her from his own past.

Instructed to bring in every memento of their relationship together, Joel's brain responses are mapped by the team at Lacuna, Inc. For a "better emotional read," Joel is told to "refrain from verbal response to the items." This is what the worst movies (and pop songs, etc.) tell the audience: reject catharsis by failing to articulate feelings (in defense, Joel paints surreal pictures of Clementine).

During a night of sleep, the team works to erase those target spots of gray matter. Somewhere in the night, Joel will go off the map. "Just this one," he begs in his sleep, hoping to hold onto one resplendent memory: early morning sunlight beaming through a comforter as Joel and Clementine frolic underneath. "I could die right now," he says, "I'm just happy." And it slips away. At their best, Gondry-Kaufman visualize emotions and the pain/pleasure of pop experience.

The story provides many opportunities for such cinematic renderings. The film follows Joel's attempts to hide Clementine within the recesses of his memory. He returns to such primal experiences as the comfort given him by a grade-school crush when his peers beat him up (a grown Jim Carrey still gets whooped by one of the boys). The memory of a house gets boarded up and turns to ether: an unforgettable, piquant image.

In such moments, Gondry-Kaufman elucidate the connection between adult attraction and the experiences that form identity. Joel also recasts his earliest memory of sexual attraction (for a friend of his mother's) with Clementine. When she lifts her mini-skirt ("My crotch is still here, just as you remembered"), Carrey groans: "Yuck!"

Male insecurity proves the heart of the matter. When Joel gets dumped by Clementine, he runs after her down the street and her insult to him is distorted. "Faggot!" she screams and a car soars through the air, crashing against a fence. In response, Joel boasts that Clementine is being removed from his memory: but the anxiety remains.

"I thought you were going to save me," Joel pines to Clementine, showing that she, too, is trapped by male insecurity. Even as a part of his imagination, Clementine insists on her freedom, on her existence. Joel and Clementine fight for their sovereignty in the face of their pain's commodification. As a receptionist at Lacuna, Kirsten Dunst (quoting Nietzsche to impress her boss: "Blessed are the forgetful") extends Joel and Clementine's struggle into an ethical - political and social - challenge.

On the Cinerama album Torino, David Gedge closed his plunge into pop fetishism/edification, self-reflection, and romantic dismay with "Health and Efficiency" - a return to early sexual experience through mature perspective, book-ended by the live sounds of (Chicago?) urban living and man-on-the-street nostalgia. He achieved the poignant epic - the surprise of social breadth - that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind never really accomplishes.

What it does manage to do is remind the audience what really matters: it expresses the idea without the grand feeling (the private made publicly shared) an artist like Gedge engenders. Eternal Sunshine sharpens the audience's sophistication, but fails to transform it. Eternal Sunshine does a good thing. As the song goes, "Everybody's gotta learn sometime." But I'd still throw Beck out of the window.

The "F" Word

2007-12-15T02:20:00.000-08:00

Stuck On You
Film Review by John Demetry

"Fag."

For the Farrelly Brothers, those contemporary masters of gross-out comedy, this loaded word - "fag" - proves their most unsettling punch line. "I don't know how I feel about that," has been the understandable response of some of my friends - and, initially, of myself.

Bob (Matt Damon) hurls the word at his brother Walt (Greg Kinnear) to ease the discomfort of their meeting after a long separation - a disconnection made literal by the surgery that divides these two conjoined twins. Bob uses the word, "fag," to lessen the sentimentality of Walt's gesture.

Dramatizing the (recognizable) emotional situation in this way (with visual metaphors, an archetypal family scene, and the airing of a word carrying cultural intensity), The Farrelly Brothers deepen their established comic technique. The Farrelly Brothers always raise insight into the class/milieu-specific social rituals of male bonding and the slow maturation of male sensitivity into hilariously excessive gags, both visual and verbal.

Intent on throwing the audience for a loop, the Farrelly Brothers here spin gross-out expectations topsy-turvy, a necessary response to the spectator sophistication they helped fertilize in modern near-classic comedies like Dumb & Dumber and Me, Myself & Irene. (Stuck On You is a classic.)

The Farrelly Brothers have been emotional before (as in the poignant return home in the epic white-trash bowling Odyssey Kingpin - a masterpiece). That alone does not mark progress (until the undeniable - awesome - climactic musical number).

Instead, the pejorative - "fag" - tests audience responses and qualifies the nature of the humor prior (in the film and in the Farrelly oeuvre as a whole). Some may laugh, some may cringe, some may gasp in awe (my own response). Any response is OK, the truth validated by the Farrelly Brothers' subversion of political correctness. However, one must then think about their responses.

The Farrelly Brothers visualize this moral challenge when the separated Walt chums up to a statue - a man thinking - a park bench, bemoaning his hopes to become a star in Hollywood after the surgery because he can't "act" without his brother.

The Farrelly Brothers punctuate the jolt - "fag" - with Walt humping a juke box, which skips records to play: "It's Raining Men." Hallelujah! The Farrelly Brothers sew the breach through a common sophistication: the audience's and the brothers' knowledge of gay camp culture, of which "It's Raining Men" is a post-disco staple. There is something beautifully democratic about the audience's shared appreciation - and in the individualizing split that preluded it.

One's thoughts should return over the course of the film - all that had lead up to the use of the word "fag." The opening sequence of the film kidded audience sophistication. In it, the brothers, conjoined at the hip, are shown waking up in the morning. The fragmented images - two pairs of male legs stretching out of the bed onto the floor, side-by-side one-handed pull-ups - don't reveal the conjoined nature of the brothers' relationships, thus reading as that of a gay relationship.

The audience laughs not because it thinks they are gay, but because of how easily movie codes create false meaning. Bob's striking use of the word "fag," however, locates the kernel of truth in the falsity - the truth usually disguised by movie codes of sexual preference and behavior. (While Walt shoots a television show with Cher, the camera fails to disguise Bob's presence.)

Later, the brothers hide their conjoined status from Bob's internet girlfriend May (Wen Yann Shih) when they finally meet in person in Los Angeles (to which Bob and Walt have moved in order for Walt to pursue his acting dreams and for Bob to pursue May). However, when May catches them in bed together, she thinks they are gay. This is precise social observation: flashing across May's face (an Asian woman dating, but not sleeping with, a white man) you can practically read her thoughts: "Not again!"

Back home, at the beginning of the film, Walt performs an annual one-man show (always with Bob shying away from the spotlight, sweating out a panic attack). The play? Tru: the one-man show about Truman Capote! In Los Angeles, Walt wears a Teddy Bear costume in bed with Bob (again, to trick May).

The image of conjoined brothers is an ingenious visual metaphor. Both a screen fetish and overt symbol of the "Other", it also signifies the ties that literally bind. During a punching fight, Walt warns Bob: "You better run!" Conjoined or not, you can never run. And you can never run from the way that familial relationships participate in the quest for love and Love, participation and creation.

As April, the babe-alicious love interest for Will (played by the hot hot hot and very talented Eva Mendes), encourages : "Don't deny! deny! deny! Embrace!!" That defines the healing nature of the gesture at the very end of Stuck On You.

It's an ecstatic celebration of art and love (and features Meryl Streep's most generous performance) after the hurtful, fraternal, dividing use of the word "fag" - a sexuality that can't be repressed. The ending of Stuck On You is a total embrace - and it's undeniable.

Originally published by GayToday.com
January 19, 2004

Everybody Rise!

2007-12-15T02:06:00.000-08:00

Camp
DVD Review by John Demetry

During the summer covered in Todd Graff's Camp, a blond-haired white kid with boy-band appeal shows up at Camp Ovation to stir things up. He is a living, breathing, toned-chest-heaving deus ex machina: a theatrical device brought to earth and made stirringly human.

His name is Vlad. He is played in Camp by Daniel Letterle.

Vlad is straight.

As written by Graff, Vlad catalyzes the elements of the story. The other central characters who take center stage amidst the misfits at the Summer theater camp are plain—in a theatrical way—Jewish fag hag Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat) and gay (or bisexual) Latino Michael (Robin de Jesus). Both of them develop crushes on Vlad. Through their relationships with him, they come of age.

Vlad's poster-boy Caucasian good looks and pronounced heterosexuality does not represent a capitulation to pop conventions. As played by Letterle (a real discovery), Vlad also catalyzes the film's essential irony (where the director's sweet story and mostly non-analytical visuals do not).

The irony is that so many outsiders (gays, geeks, various ethnic groups) turn to theater as a form of expression and community. Classically, the form depicts hetero narratives, to attract as wide an audience as possible onto which the diverse audience can project and perceive its own intimacies and truths (just as the characters do with Vlad, who wants to be loved by everyone). Yet, the modes of communication—communal tragedies and comedies acted out in social interaction—for (especially) gays, Blacks, Latinos, and Jews constitute the form of theater in America.

That is "camp" and it is at Camp Ovation that these kids learn this lesson. By offering an escape, the camp also offers the tools and toughening experiences to participate in the world at large. Everything is doubled. Art reflects modes of living and levels of feeling. That is the facts of the life at which Graff's conception for Camp hints.

The opening sequence of the movie conveys Graff's understanding. A musical number is performed that stands completely outside of the narrative, but resides in the head of one of the characters (Michael). The later numbers, while often heightening the drama and emotion off-stage, are clearly defined as part of the Summer camp's regiment.

It's revealing for Graff to open with a number from Gospel at Colonus, the musical that combined Greek Tragedy (Sophocles) with Black American gospel traditions. It gauges the cultural sophistication and awareness to which these kids must catch up (as when two Black brothers rail against color-blind casting of Fiddler on the Roof which results in the piquant color-blind casting of Dreamgirls) while also conveying Michael’s need for release and community.

The Gospel at Colonus montage introduces the three main characters before they come to camp: Ellen's loneliness, Michael's gay daring and trauma, and Vlad's big-dick desire to please. The Gospel number then embraces a shirtless (exposed) Michael—it's his dream while suffering a gay-bashing for attending the high school prom in drag. Gospel-and-Sophocles catharsis and healing offered by a band of outsiders (what gays refer to as "family").

Though sweet, beguiling, and observant (in-jokes galore for fans of theater and camp), Camp also raises in-joke to Colonus daring when Michael collapses into West Side Story during a performance of Romeo and Juliet (whoah!). The songs written for the movie not only approximate certain strains of Broadway, they earn beauty through the expressive faces performing them and Letterle's evocation of moral dilemma as Vlad. Letterle conveys a burgeoning understanding of the connection between showmanship and the moral quandaries dramatized in both the teen sex roundelay (flirtation, first-times, infidelity, insecurity) and the restorative hero worship that becomes one of Vlad's quests.

Despite the pain that Vlad causes and attempts to ameliorate, he never exhibits teen-movie cruel intentions (satirized in a vicious performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch”). Instead, Vlad discovers the moral weight placed upon him by the specialness that Michael and Ellen see in him. It is the film's failing that Graff gives Vlad no chance to put this ethical knowledge into theatrical action or musical release.

Bravo! Letterle isn't just a pretty boy. He is Theater: the proscenium where innocence and sophistication dance, where projection and compassion sing.

After skinny-dipping, he pulls his pants up: "Do you forgive me?" In such moments, Letterle transforms theatrical pleasure into moral challenge. Pace “The Ladies Who Lunch”: Everybody rise!

Originally published by GayToday.com
December 29, 2003

Heroic

2007-12-15T02:00:00.000-08:00

PopArt - Pet Shop Boys The Hits
CD Review by John Demetry

Tender is the night that one first hears that beautiful noise. The sound carries the often-closeted gay social codes out onto the open currents of air. It resonates with pangs of recognition and the pains of stifled articulation. Their music is liberation. You can dance to it. And joy to it and cry to it. I am the Pet Shop Boys.

The Pets delineate the intimate sources of the self-consciousness that informs contemporary social-political-spiritual existence. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe always consider the ways that desire - sexual and spiritual longing - manifest themselves in reality: economics, politics, art and romance. Their latest collection of hit singles, PopArt - Pet Shop Boys The Hits, exemplifies their special form of fun: moral and democratic, witty and devastating.

PopArt is being released as a double-disc and, also, a boxed triple-disc with the limited edition "PopArtMix", which includes a third CD of re-mixes. PopArt is no mere chronological collection of the Pets singles that ranked in the British Top 20. Instead, the Pets ingeniously reorganize the 35 songs (2 of which are new), providing the tracks with fresh intensity: they've never sounded better.

PopArt proves the ideal introduction to, what is for me, the catalogue that forms the standard for Queer art as well as, for those already familiar with the Pets, the perfect opportunity for reflection upon an undeniable summit. Simply: pop art gets no better.

The two discs separate the songs according to these themes: "Pop" (the title of the first disc) and "Art" (the title of the second). To investigate the significance of this division, one might marvel at the two new tracks. "Miracles" is Track 9 on "Pop". "Flamboyant" is Track 3 on "Art".

"Miracles" is aptly titled because the Pets infuse an out gay sensibility and worldliness into explicitly pop forms (synth and techno dance music). That is one of the genuine miracles of pop culture.

Of course, "Miracles" deals with the most prevalent subject of pop music: romantic love. To express that great phenomenon, The Pets run through a catalogue of miracles:

Thunder is silent before you
Roses bloom to adore you, too
Miracles happen when you're around

They propose romantic love as an avenue for increased sensitivity, the impetus for metaphorical thinking. Tennant sings,

The sunset is deeper and longer
The scent of the jasmine is stronger

By pairing down the elements of the love song to their metaphorical elements, the Pets encourage the listener to reevaluate pop. This is the nature of their art, but it serves a pop purpose.

"Miracles" is necessarily book-ended by "Heart" - an account of the physical responses to sex attraction - and "Love Comes Quickly" - an existential spin on love.

"Miracles" is a rapturous dance track: a communal celebration of the shared emotion of love. The dance beats are kicked off by the most overtly religious image in "Miracles." It validates love, metaphor and faith:

Being with you
No matter where
Sunlight breaks through

"Miracles" gains specific political urgency within its context on PopArt as an anti-homophobia argument. Homophobia as faithlessness.

On "Art", the Pets position "Flamboyant", the greatest strutting-down-the-street song since the Pets' own "Sexy Northerner", as the epitome of their sophistication. It's a dry satire of and valentine to gay flamboyance and excess:

Everyday all the public must know
Where you are what you do
Cuz your life is a show
And you're so flamboyant

Exhibiting the expanse of their art and its challenge, Tennant breaks 4 love:

Every actor needs an audience
Every action is a performance
It all takes courage you know
When just crossing the street
Well, it's almost heroic
You're so flamboyant

The infectious cleverness of the kind critique on "Flamboyant" transitions into the heartbreaking opus of contemporary (gay-lib, AIDS-era) gay existence, "Being Boring." Playwright Benjamin Kessler calls the move from "Flamboyant" to "Being Boring": "a kick in the head."

"Pop" externalizes the emotions of its collective audience in metaphor. "Art" is an ethical challenge: to provide as rich and challenging a context for those emotions. Pop, meet Art. PopArt opens with "Go West" (from The Village People) and closes with "Somewhere" (from West Side Story) - two masterpiece covers that reveal two artists' constant engagement and benevolence. PopArt is transcendent. Feeling every beat: "We're the Pet Shop Boys."

Originally published by GayToday.com
December 22, 2003

Lump Of Coal

2007-12-15T01:56:00.000-08:00

Bad Santa
Film Review by John Demetry

Bad Santa is all about butt-fucking. OK -- not ONLY about butt-fucking, but there's more butt-fucking and talk of butt-fucking in Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa than any other Hollywood movie I can think of. As stocking stuffers go, Bad Santa turns out to be a lump of coal.

Zwigoff's candidness about butt-fucking might be honest and funny: a convention of hetero sex, usually kept under cover, now on the big screen for all to see. However, Zwigoff's constant references to butt-fucking means to shock the audience into laughter. Unfortunately, the overt hipsterism behind Zwigoff's anal-sex humor represents the totality of his world-view; it's easy to "get," but do you want it?

Note how Zwigoff separates the circles from the squares. The late, lovable John Ritter plays department store manager Bob Chipeska who hires Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) to be the store Santa. Later, Bob spies on a woman taking Willie up the ass in a dressing room, located in the pleasantly-plump department. It proves a recipe for hilarity: the combination of the suggestive framing (enabled by the truncated reach of the dressing room door, revealing the legs -- Santa pants around the ankles -- and position of butt-fucker and butt-fuckee), the woman's cries of pleasure on the soundtrack, and Ritter's characteristic (and characteristically hilarious) double-takes.

In the following sequence, Bob reports the incident to the head of security, Gin (played with menacing, slow-burn cool by Bernie Mac). As interpreted by Ritter, Bob replays the woman's cries, but he otherwise chokes on propriety and political-correctness. Mac don't bat an eye.

Dead-pan Zwigoff reduces anal sex to a punchline. This is how Zwigoff establishes the last-ditch integrity of Willie's disturbed mind. If you get it, you're "in;" if you don't get it, you're "out."

Zwigoff neglects the pleasure of anal sex, the flipside to anal-sex anxiety. Zwigoff proves that exploiting this anxiety is the extent of his interest when Ajay Naidu (of Office Space fame) threatens to anally rape Willie until he's saved by chubby, snot-nosed The Kid played by Brett Kelly. It's no coincidence, then, that Zwigoff rejects the pleasure of art.

The theme of Bad Santa, a butt-fucking thief in Santa drag who finds redemption on Christmas Eve, certainly lends itself to a visual consideration of Christmas iconography. Instead, symbolically loaded moments have no intensity: Willie having a breakdown amidst plaster reindeer and a crowd of children, The Kid's sliced palm while carving a wood pickle Christmas present, and the over-the-top gundown at the end. Such moments feel (and look) depressingly unfocused -- a blurry dismissal of the pain on display.

Zwigoff fails to plumb commercialized Christmas iconography for its sexual implications and signification of spiritual want. When Zwigoff adapted the comic book "Ghost World", he crudely recreated the look of a comic book (solid blocks of color, boxed-in framing), but never visually investigated the political and social codes that attract grunge adolescents (young and old) to comics. Zwigoff marks cinema's regression to the reactionary shock-tactic comics of R. Crumb, which Zwigoff idealized as an (inadequate) response to familial disarray and cultural confusion (fears of Blacks and women) in his highly-acclaimed documentary, Crumb.

Bad Santa denies the liberating allure of movie artistry that subverts conventional ideology through expression or excess (of beauty, of sexuality, of ideas, that is: of feeling). Failing to activate thought or sensitivity through his editing, Zwigoff turns ellipses of action into jokes. The Kid gets assaulted by a group of skaters outside of the mall; cut to: The Kid stepping up to Willie, the department store Santa, with his underwear jacked up to his chest. Such jokes disguise the way that sutures (the connecting of images) instill or convey conventional ideology -- with all the slippery authority of a post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc (if this, then that) argument.

The movie concludes by announcing Willie's good fortune in a letter to The Kid from prison, the selective salvation Zwigoff's heroes (R. Crumb, Thora Birch's Enid in Ghost World) always achieve. Meanwhile, Bernie Mac's Gin, the double-dealing Black man, and Tony Cox's Marcus, the double-crossing Black midget, get their punishments.

In the letter, Willie makes reference to his arrest -- Santa shot in the back by trigger-happy police -- as being more embarrassing to the force than Rodney King. This just makes obvious what the rest of Bad Santa takes for granted. People now go to movies to repress the truth -- exposed and exploded in the public realm -- that racism and capitulation to authority formulate movie spectatorship, the very cognitive tools of pleasure.

The Kid acts out his lesson in manliness from Willie (and, by extension, the culture) at the end of the movie. He kicks his nemesis in the balls -- a crowd-pleasing gesture, a validation of the penis and what it means to have one.

Shockingly, Bad Santa was produced by the Coen Brothers, who made that great Rodney-King-corrective Intolerable Cruelty. Bad Santa is truly an intolerable cruelty. I, for one, would rather get fucked up the ass.

Originally published by GayToday.com
December 08, 2003

A Special Affects Movie

2007-12-15T01:48:00.000-08:00

The Cat In the Hat
Film Review by John Demetry

In The Cat In the Hat, Mike Myers plays Dr. Seuss's title character as a friend of Dorothy's. Not to say that Myers plays the hat-wearing Cat as gay. Rather, Myers interprets the role by mimicking the voice and gestures of Bert Lahr's vaudeville-style Cowardly Lion in the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

The veracity of the impersonation and the vitality inherent in this decision marks The Cat In the Hat as Myers' best-yet screen performance. It exhibits an insight into the imagination of youngsters—making him a kindred fantasist to Dr. Seuss.

Myers' repeated "harumph," feline-hiss laugh (always proud of his own cleverness or disguising his inadequacies), and the waggle of his tail/tale remind of Lahr's great performance. In addition, Myers shares Lahr's overt showmanship; he's a comedian who, at one point, turns into Carmen Miranda during a musical number.

The Cat represents an explosive/expulsive manifestation of two children's fears and desires concerning responsibility, loneliness and family (Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin play the daughter and son of a single mother). These unexpressed emotions take shape in The Cat: a showbiz huckster. In one scene, The Cat works out an elaborate routine about bureaucracy surrounding the signing of a contract.

Myers' approach makes perfect sense. The children—under assault from media omnipresence, yet hip to media tomfoolery—project their confusions onto a creature who, in part, is characterized by the gestures associated with a figure from a film that, for many in the audience, represented the first time they began to connect showbiz styles, American culture, family dynamics and childhood dreams/nightmares.

True that The Wizard of Oz constitutes a shared pop memory: the first experience of a work of pop culture that introduced more varied options for masculinity and male behavior through the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. The cross-gender appeal of Dorothy/Judy Garland allowed her to represent of youthful adventure and insecurities for all children. Myers returns to this cross-generational source of shared values, fears, and hopes—"There's no place like home"—even as his character brings the family's home in The Cat In the Hat crashing down.

Myers expounds on The Wizard of Oz resonance through his skill at mimicry. In one scene, he plays the racial and sexual other: snapping his fingers like a stereotypical African-American woman or gay man, but talking with the voice of his Coffee Talk Jewess. Also significantly, Myers reflects childhood confusions through constant castration-anxiety jokes. Not only does he accidentally cut off his tail (while doing split-screen double-duty as host and hostile guest on a mock infomercial), he also includes a bit about being neutered in one of his musical numbers.

The good thinking and feeling behind Myers' performance gives credence to the film's only seemingly simplistic moral: balancing responsibility and fun in a consumerist society.

The movie's thesis earns its heart in the performance given by the extraordinary Fanning (who also played the Beatles-loving daughter in I Am Sam and the little girl messiah in the Steven Spielberg-produced television mini-series Taken). The Cat pegs her character, Sally, as a "control freak," one who dutifully follows her electronic pocket organizer, tattles on her brother, and brown noses to grownups. (Alec Baldwin reveals the way grownups condescend to children, playing the suitor to the kids' mother and snarling at Fanning: "Nobody likes a suck up.")

Like Haley Joel Osment, the robot who loves in A.I.—Artificial Intelligence, Fanning's wide-eyed awareness always signifies special Difference. The cost of that Difference is dramatized in a touchingly surreal scene in which Sally spies through the window at a birthday party for which all of her peers have been invited, but she has been snubbed.

Her loneliness gives birth to The Cat (who accepts her scapegoat pain, becoming an unwilling piñata at the birthday party). The Cat also comes from Sally's rule-breaking brother Conrad (Breslin), who is heartbroken during a painfully recognizable exchange between son and Mom (played by Kelly Preston):

Conrad: I wish I had a different mom.

Mom: Sometimes I wish the same thing.

Feature-debut director Bo Welch, who was the art director on the visionary Batman Returns, creates an elaborately designed pastel world. This is primal pastiche. The Cat in the Hat reveals the psychological source of consumerist excess—filling the undernourished soul with toys—and the risk of its crass exploitation. Welch's fish-bowl depth of field and distorted set designs externalize the inevitable chaos.

The film's most unexpected, eye-bending special effect features Baldwin falling through a screen that looks like the "normal" world and plummeting through the surreal abysm it disguises. Welch defines domesticity: "The mother of all messes." Then Welch heals the rupture. When Fanning takes Breslin's hand into hers, promising to share blame for the mess they have made, Welch accomplishes a genuinely special affect.

Originally published by GayToday.com
December 01, 2003

The Boy That Took Me

2007-12-15T01:17:00.001-08:00

"The Radio One Sessions Vol. 2 1984-1985" by Associates
CD Review by John Demetry

As The Associates, Billy Mackenzie (baby-faced masculine with a peacock-proud androgynous voice) and Alan Rankine (a sultry dark-haired and pale-skinned genius) were the sexiest queer 80s pop-rock duo. Most rock critics prefer the cataclysmic sonic barrage of the Mackenzie-Rankine material ("The Affectionate Punch", "Fourth Drawer Down", and "Sulk", generally, but incorrectly, considered the Associates masterpiece) to the Mackenzie-lead Associates releases after their split in 1982.

The sublime burst of creativity of "Perhaps" in 1985, the pop majesty of "Wild and Lonely" in 1990, and the cabaret-and-soul gorgeousness of "The Glamour Chase" made available in 2002 are among the most powerful artistic testaments and emotional catalogues of queer experience.

Be sure: "The Radio One Sessions Vol. 2 1984-1985" is not just for die-hard fans. It also proves an excellent introduction to the uninitiated.

Mackenzie's astonishing vocalizations and octave range - a richly expressive instrument - resonate to the essence of experience. In addition, his evocative, idiosyncratic lyrics, his taste in covers, and his knowledge of musical styles convey the open emotional and social range of Mackenzie's pop heritage.

"The Radio One Sessions Vol. 2 1984-1985" offers the chance to examine and enjoy Mackenzie's artistic maturation - the development of his soulful style - after he split ways with Associates collaborator Alan Rankine ("Vol. 1", released earlier in 2003, details their joint efforts). Marking the shift in focus from Rankine's elaborate soundscape experimentation to Mackenzie's exploration of the possibilities promised by his vocal range and expressiveness, "Vol. 2" is also an emotionally and musically exciting 2003 release.

It was on his later, post-Rankine material that Mackenzie most fully voiced his need for love in a newly open fashion. "Obsession Magnificent" bravely announces, "It makes no difference" in Mackenzie's repeated call to be "Together." There's rich ambivalence (and musical appreciation) in Mackenzie's explanation of love's (im)possibilities on "Perhaps" (which appeared on the 1985 "Perhaps" album): "Oh no it's either black or white / . . . / Somewhere my love they might let me meet you / Perhaps." However, on this disc's rocking version of "Give" (later reworked as splendid pop with "Something's Got to Give" on the 1990 "Wild and Lonely" album) Mackenzie defends the role of complex sexuality ("Love your face") in romantic longing ("Walk into sin for a heavenly cause").

Furthermore, as critic Armond White noted, Mackenzie also relinquished the anxiety of influence of glam-rock predecessor David Bowie. Mackenzie's artistic lesser, Bowie offered the inspiration of sexual ambiguity and egocentric posing, but also the conceit of detached disaffection. Mackenzie's vocals could now deliver a truly affectionate punch. Mackenzie flowered without the limitations of Bowie's example. From bud to bloom, "The Radio One Sessions Vol. 2 1984-1985" displays a Mackenzie reaching deeper, climbing higher into the psychosexual core and spiritual desire of his life and art.

In his quest to understand and convey emotional phenomenon, Mackenzie takes the listener to the moon. Mackenzie details the process from romance to heartache on his transformative cover of "The Crying Game": "First there are kisses / Then there are sighs / And then before you know where you are / You're saying 'Goodbye'." But his vocalizations, drawn-out emotional purity on the phrases "he'll explain" and "love disappears," sustain the healing power of moon as metaphor: "One day soon I'm going to ask the Moon / About the crying game / And if he knows maybe he'll explain / Why there are heartaches / Why there are tears / And what to do to stop feeling blue / When love disappears."

Mackenzie questions the role of symbolism and ritual by returning to its primal source. The chilly despair of the Bowie-inflected, Rankine-style avant-garde "Gloomy Sunday" on "Sulk" now reveals itself, through an unfettered vocal rendition, to be a devastating response to the human need for catharsis in the face of death and mortality. Mackenzie bemoans the insufficiency of funeral rites: "None the less little white flowers will / Never awaken you." He contemplates suicide - literal death - as the only way to contact a passed loved one: "Death is no dream for in death I'm / Caressing you with the last breath / Of my soul I'll be blessing you." Amazingly, he comes out of the dream with new faith, validated by his genuine love and imaginative healing: "Darling I hope that my / Dream never haunted you / My heart is telling you / How much I wanted you / Gloomy Sunday." (Such understanding is not easily put into practice. Mackenzie himself succumbed to depression and despair, apparently, over his mother's death six months prior to Billy's suicide.)
Fans will also recognize a significant difference in the Radio One version of "Take Me to the Girl" (available in its conventional form on the singles-collection disc "Popera" and the 2002 unveiling of the previously unreleased "The Glamour Chase"). A paired-down production, this earlier version of "Take Me to the Girl" marks the transition from jazz to pop - majestic in either form. He opens "Take Me to the Girl" on the new album by addressing the audience, distinguishing it as a live recording: "Well, ladies and gentlemen you'll have to go now. It's been very, very nice." The soaring pop singing on the proper release of the song here reveals its genesis in Mackenzie's subtle swinging vocalizations - each syllable inflected with the freshness of birth, the immediacy of life.

"Take Me to the Girl" offers an Oedipal interpretation of the phenomenon of love -- and then transcends it. Mackenzie invokes language's role to define the Other: "Ich liebe 'was ist das' / . . . / My French [flesh?] was always weak / And my tango was less than chic." Via his jazzy delivery, Mackenzie extends language's meaning through metaphorical "car" as vehicle in which to search for love: "Are you my only friend? / Temptation drives me 'round the bend." Mackenzie recognizes in love the yearning to restore a primal togetherness, a dream manifested and resolved in social structures ("Geneva is the city of our love"), spiritual conceptions ("All these voices calling from above"), and sexual desire ("Now no one can ever take her place / No one in the whole wide human race").

"I've been looking for her everywhere," Mackenzie sings on "Take Me to the Girl" - the subconscious impulse behind his ambisexual compassion, through which he witnesses and appreciates human folly. With "Even Dogs In the Wild," Mackenzie makes a humane plea for the care of neglected children: "Even dogs will protect and will care for / Whatever means most to them." In his live cover of "Heart of Glass" (later available in a streamlined studio cut on "Popera" and "The Glamour Chase"), Mackenzie distinguishes himself from the Blondie version with an opening moan that communicates the transparency and delicacy of male sensitivity. The raging "Helicopter Helicopter" (originally on "Perhaps") reveals that even from an on-high vantage point, Mackenzie is above neither jealousy nor sexual embarrassment: "Go on, go ahead look at him / Look at him I said / Is that you up in that bedroom again?"

The new context (both "live" and "past") for appreciating Mackenzie's art provided by "The Radio One Sessions Vol. 2 1984-1985" revitalizes the already undeniable, unutterably swoonderful "Breakfast" (from "Perhaps" and "Popera"). The slightly less polished version of "Breakfast" here compliments the artificial remove of the song's strange milieu. "The morning after" as stage spectacle, breakfast as recognizable ritual: "She gave herself / They took her to their hearts / Clapped their hands till sore." Through the artifice - through the "soul" - Mackenzie exposes a soul too fragile for the burden of his intensity of feelings and of the voice that shared them with fans. "Talk to me I'll stay these vagabond nights / Walk with me someone is waiting in light," he calls to his audience, to his mother, to his lovers with an octave-peaking audacity wild and lonely enough for anyone's pain.

Billy, it was really something.

Originally published by GayToday.com
November 10, 2003

Nobody's Perfect

2007-12-14T04:45:00.000-08:00

Some Thoughts On Armond White And His Influence On My Writing
by John Demetry

(In response to an e-mail I received that referred to Armond White as "cruel.")

I don't see any cruelty in Armond White's work. Unless, of course, you mean "cruel" in the Artaudian sense. Or even in the Tom Green sense. Green did a man-on-the-street interview skit, rubbing dogshit on the end of the microphone - challenging the "men on the street" to finally act out, defend their sovereignty, against the media shitstorm (all this via playwright Ben Kessler's insights). Armond similarly demands reaction -- hopefully to encourage an awakening, reflection. White's use of the word "whore" in his XXX review refers to VD's whoring of his panracial, pansexual significance. Race and sex are, as always with White, central to his review of "XXX". Do not overlook the Tarantino asides in the piece. White does not descend to shock tactics - mere jolts - but moves the reader through resonance. One's response to his call is a matter for reflection.

My admiration and gratitude for Armond White's work comes from the recognition that I am not, myself, immune to his challenges. I remember a comment White made about "Brown Sugar" in one of his reviews. He described its simplistic, selfish view of romantic love and then castigated audience gullibility. I have good reason to believe that he included me in that bunch (he had read my "Brown Sugar" review before writing the particular essay in which he made these comments). I cannot deny that, yes, sometimes I am gullible and unreflective. Nobody's perfect. And I'm thankful to be "called on it" because, I think, I share Armond White's values (what he defines in his review of "demonlover" as the "need for foundation") - and I'm eager to learn, to grow. How many readers will understand White's gracious desire to "snap out" of the Gnosticism prevailing in contemporary culture? (That trend epitomized by "Far From Heaven", ignoring/rejecting/denying the great philosophical strides at the Birth of Postmodernism by 1950s artists such as those represented by Flannery O'Connor, who connected pornography's exploitative, limiting significance with Gnosticism's binary valuing of spirit over flesh.)

Check how clearly White makes the argument (without, BLESS HIM, using big words like Gnosticism): "Both directors manipulated time and characters' consciousness to illustrate their search for moral foundation-De Palma daringly used the thrall of sexual intrigue and movie iconography to subvert pop culture's pornographic and immoral potential. Unfortunately, no matter how riveting the technique, his proposal was as unhip as celluloid."

"moral foundation"

"sexual intrigue"/"movie iconography"

"pornographic"/"immoral"

"unhip"

These phrases lay out the scene with enthralling precision: clearly structured, philosophically coherent, linguistically accessible. Don't I ever wish I could write like that! As for the values behind such expression: With Armond, it's all love.

My point in referring to Armond White's and Pauline Kael's expansive interrogation of the cultural context for films (and often zeroing in on the film culture, specifically) was that I, as a writer and thinker, am just not very good at doing what they do. But the desire to sound as smart and knowing as the intelligence represented by the work of those two, without myself being that, is what kills so many writers. . . i.e. every Paulette. That's why I'm trying VERY HARD to focus on the individual artwork, to termite through the aesthetic strategies and to see how it reflects more general aspects of society, human endeavor and human desire.
If I were to have any negative concern about Armond White's work, it would be to question how successful is his strategy, because of reactions such as yours. It's not a matter of agreeing with him, but of understanding him. But, then, I remember the uncanny crossroads at which his work and my life have intersected (these are stories for another time). In other words, I've learned more from his work than any other film critic's (including Bazin and Kael and Solman and DeMott, who fill out the group of the critics -- aesthetic philosophers -- that I most admire, learn from, and refer to). The degree to which I'm a credible film spectator (if not critic) is due in large part to Armond White's inspiration - an inspiration to be true to myself. . . which means reflecting on even the painful aspects of who I am and of my actions. I consider it one of the truest fortunes of my life to be able to call Armond my friend.

I'll cease in my praise of love. Onto In Praise of Love. . .

Originally sent: 09/19/03

Burnett's Blues

2007-12-13T20:05:00.000-08:00

Warming by the Devil's Fire
Television Review by John Demetry

There are so many miraculous moments in Charles Burnett's television movie Warming by the Devil's Fire. One, however, in particular, epitomizes Burnett's radical narrative technique -- the most exciting development in American cinema so far this year (even though it's a digital production for television).

An eleven-year-old California boy named Junior visits his Uncles' back South in the Summer of 1956 whose Summer of 1956, forming the loose story of Warming by the Devil's Fire. Junior, wandering to his Uncles' back porch, discovers a string instrument made out of a wire, the porch itself, and other knickknacks. He plucks the wire and, then, through his searching strums, he figures out how to change the chord.

It's a rapturous discovery -- with subtle fascination evoked by close-ups, performance, the sound of the wire. So it is a profound surprise when Burnett cuts from the dramatic action of Junior's playing to archival footage of Blues artist Sister Rosetta Tharouce making sweet music - "Up Above My Head" - with her guitar and gospel-trained voice. Wow!

There's good reason the overused hyperbole "miraculous" fits to describe this startling suture. It signifies a young boy's discovery of his participation in a culture and history beyond himself -- up above his head. The folk culture behind that makeshift instrument will give the boy the tools to draw upon the eternal and to deal with the present.

As evidence of such imaginative perseverance, look no further than Charles Burnett, himself. One of the great contemporary American filmmakers (see Killer of Sheep, To Sleep With Anger, The Glass Shield), Burnett has spent most of the last ten years making movies for television -- most notably for Disney (Nightjohn, Selma, Lord, Selma). The lesson of that chord inspires him to tackle a historical subject for PBS's series on The Blues in highly personal terms. (Note: the grown-up Junior, narrating the movie, says he finishes his Uncle Charlie's book about The Blues in his own way.)

Is it not proof of the miraculous that each autobiographical vignette resonates not only to an artform's history, but also to the soul of anyone who has grown up and struggled to communicate, struggled to survive? That's what The Blues is all about.

As common as are the essential aspects of the experiences dramatized in Warming by the Devil's Fire, Burnett's uprooting of a neglected heritage burnishes each moment with splendor and mystery. Each moment illuminates truths forgotten or rarely expressed. That's why the boy's every incremental step toward self-definition elicits a blast from The Blues past. Burnett reveals that the sound of a wire being strummed resonates to experiences outside of one's own life.

Another such narrative-archival suture occurs when Junior falls asleep on his Uncle Charlie's bed. The shot of Junior is followed by the found footage of a little boy doing a proto-breakdance cum Sambo routine to the accompaniment of homemade instruments. Burnett manipulates the image with slow-motion to convey the dreamy collective unconsciousness tapped in the boy by his introduction to The Blues. Junior was sent by his mother back South to be saved. Uncle Charlie's Blues will provide him with another kind of baptism.

Junior is introduced in black-and-white, but a burst of sunlight through an open door in a train station brings color to the narrative portion of Warming by the Devil's Fire. Burnett uses color to activate spectator enchantment. Burnett coordinates subtle hues of color in wardrobe and setting or sunlit interiors with gold-struck skin tones. Every primal scene remains in the memory of the audience.

Burnett heightens his unusual graphic intensity -- rare in video productions -- with striking compositions. The Blues are always attentive to intimate details, while transforming them through playful, generously rich language into uncanny metaphors. This also describes Burnett's camera -- searching for the perfect chords.

Burnett composes a shot of Junior dancing with an older woman -- who calls him "Sugar Stick" -- in the foreground while his sinner Uncle Charlie (the good Uncle is busy preaching at church while Junior is under Charlie's care) dances with another woman in the background. The narrator remembers: "I was slipping further. I was between Heaven and Hell." Burnett's camera then pans to the record player. Burnett recognizes the role of The Blues as sexual expression and sexual salvation. "Why do you do bad things?" Junior asks. Uncle Charly's response: "You'd be surprised who you find in Heaven and who you find in Hell."

This exchange reveals that the development embarked upon by Junior is both sexual and spiritual in nature -- notably expressed through a return to his roots. This is what The Blues accomplish. The experience of oppression - in which body and spirit are under cruel duress -- demand art's healing expressiveness.

Uncle Charlie tutors Junior in matters of sexuality, emphasizing the worth of macho "shitkickers" like the cowboy movie Shane in order to be, as he lisps it, "mens." As grossly patriarchal as this might seem, Charlie also intends to stress the toughness a young Black boy in America must develop. The Blues art that Uncle Charlie introduces to Junior also encourages a special appreciation for diverse experiences, as when Junior becomes aware of the lesbian themes in some female Blues singers' music -- "I learned a lot about body parts."

Junior explains how his Uncle's example taught him to read The Blues and to maneuver through a racial and sexual world: "Everything my uncle told to me had two sides to it." Every shot and edit in Warming by the Devil's Fire has two sides to it, as well.

Burnett looks afresh at his past and his people's history. In so doing, he achieves a spectacle that baptizes the physical in the spiritual, the immediate in the eternal. However, Warming by the Devil's Fire proves the truth of continued oppression. The movies have finally caught up with the history of The Blues -- but only on television.

Originally published by GayToday.com
October 13, 2003

Indestructible Signifier

2007-12-13T20:01:00.000-08:00

The Rundown
Film Review By John Demetry

The Rock refuses to be pinned down. I'm not just referring to his aptitude in the wrestling ring. Director Peter Berg's develops his new film - The Rundown - around the broad appeal and indestructible reality of The Rock.

The opening sequence of The Rundown presents The Rock's character, Beck, who forces those indebted to the mob to pay up when he's not taking notes on cuisine in hopes of one day opening his own restaurant. In the film's opening set in a nightclub, The Rock takes on "the entire offensive line" of a football team. Berg presents each of the players with their NFL stats, including position, and a montage of macho-extreme wreckage - buildings toppling, cars crashing, football plays.

Between the fight scene's bone-crunching blows, Berg splices in bystander reactions, from shock to salivating awe, equating B-boy thuggery to spectator sports - fodder for audience flava 4 mayhem. Completing the analogy, Berg also subtly subverts it (as when Arnold Schwarzenegger exits the club and passes The Rock, sneering: "Have fun"). When The Rock stands in spin-stopping triumph, Beck's stats appear on the screen to introduce the world's latest action hero, including his position: "Retrieval Expert." Oh, Rock! I didn't know you cared!! (Imagine batting eyelashes.)

Even the performer's name, The Rock, is a double-entendre (as in "hard as a. . ."). The Rock represents unusual crossover (from professional wrestling to movie) iconography. The Rock's bodacious bod (a massive, sculpted form) frames his pretty, delicate face (almond eyes, cheek bones like chiseled stone, and enthusiastically expressive smiles, grimaces, and frowns) that signify his Black ethnicity.

This racial difference is particularly striking given The Rock's role as "The People's Champion" in the world of professional wrestling, conventionally regarded as an arena for the fantasies of working-class white boys (just as action movies' problematic popularity extends to young urban audiences, a relationship improved by the semiotics-sophisticated super-heroics in The Rundown). The Rock phenomenon parallels the ascension of hiphop and rap's status with adolescent whites (a development dramatized in the sexually insecure banter between The Rock and Seann William Scott).

The Rock's popularity signifies a combination of conventional idolization of physical strength with something else - something, frankly, special (explaining his work, Beck says, "I grew up in a very rough place"). The Rock's sensitivity - literalized in The Rundown through his character's embattled sense of moral/political responsibility - and his showbiz pizzazz corresponds to his audience's subconscious cross-racial, pansexual sympathy. At one point in The Rundown, Beck is challenged for his lack of compassion: "Haven't you ever made a mistake?" It is also a challenge to the audience.

The Rock is like the golden statue, a buried treasure, in The Rundown. He means different things to different people. The film's literal plot serves as a template for turning The Rock's many meanings into liberating cinematic fun - a treasure-hunt jamboree tracing an indestructible signifier.

Beck, promised the money needed to open his restaurant, goes to South America to bring back the runaway, treasure-hunting son (Scott) of a gangster. They both are both attracted to Marianna (Rosario Dawson), a "bartender by day and freedom fighter by night." She needs the treasure to liberate her people ("For us it is hope"), who are enslaved by goldmine owner Hatcher (Christopher Walken) via sharecropper techniques familiar from post-Civil War United States. Beck will have to choose between his dreams (exploited by gangsters back home) and recognizing his responsibility to aid the oppressed.

The plot, like The Rock's giddy fall (without a scratch) down the side of a jungle mountain, is too fantastical to believe. Both plot and action cue audiences to the more interesting and conflicted narrative - written in film space - about The Rock's persona. The story's crux, boldly rooted in the choice The Rock makes, mimics the participatory relationship between spectator and movie.

Berg often uses slow-motion in the action sequences to heighten the sense of The Rock's body moving through space. He's either being kicked in mid-air - butterfly-bee style - by Brazilian rebels in a DNA ballet ("It's gotta stay up!"); with said rebels, The Rock later bonds over Muhammad Ali (and a shared African lineage). Or, more likely, The Rock manipulates that space to his own ends with dancer-like grace ("You've got the moves; I'll give you that!").

Have fun! Maneuver through the movie's mise-en-scene. When Beck/Rock meets tough, sexy Marianna/Dawson, the screen smolders. The prominence within the frame of the performers' racial signification (dark skin, ethnic features) and sexual ambiguity ("I'm looking for a man" / "What's your type?") is highlighted by the appearance of escaping white boy (Scott) spied in the mirror behind the bar. The scene sets up a multiculti, bisexual three-way consummated only through movie action and dramatic gestures of generosity. (Director Berg notably starred in the unforgettable family saga Crooked Hearts, a film uncannily perceptive of how people express intimacy.)

The Rock is so hot his appeal crosses lines of race, gender, sexuality, and even species. A running gag features teeth-baring monkeys with a penchant for humping The Rock - satirizing responses to movie sex/violence. (It's a joke that links up to a gangster's open expression of racism, referring to The Rock's "monkey friends.")

Under Berg's direction, Walken does not allow distance from his psychologically surreal portrait of racism and capitalism embodied in one man's, Hatcher's, neuroses. Narrating over a horrifying, humbling overhead shot of Brazilian mine workers reduced to ants in an ant farm, Hatcher identifies the exploitation of these workers as the source for hiphop-era, post-Reagan bling-bling. At the end, surrounded by those workers, on even ground, Walken reveals Hatcher's imperialistic delusion: "I am the heart IN the darkness!"

Even he will succumb to The Rock's intensity. At the movies, The Rock really is "The People's Champion."

Originally published by GayToday.com
October 06, 2003

Still Waiting For The Loveboat

2007-12-13T19:55:00.000-08:00

Pop Matters: Music in the Era of AIDS
by John Demetry

Pop matters! Not that you can tell from the PopMatters website's recent list of 100 Best Songs 1977 - 2003.

Any list that names Nirvana's overrated, nihilistic "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the best song of anything, much less of all songs released between 1977 (the year of my birth) and 2003, simply does not MATTER. However, this pitiful (depressing) list, like its number one song, serves not as a resource for pop insight or surprise, but as a reflection of the current rewriting of pop's history. Smells like hegemony!

It's official. The fact of that project - to erase the significance of the pop music that reflected and inspired changes in the culture - is evidenced by the introduction to this list:

"Everyone of these songs is a 'classic' in some fashion, and therefore deserving an entry into our hallowed list."

One ought to exercise healthy skepticism toward terms like "classic" and "hallowed." This isn't a question of taste (many of the songs on the list are worthy). It's a question of why pop matters. That's a standard the list and its contributors fail to establish even as they allege authority.

Steve Hyden, in his write-up of U2's "One" (ranked #29), shrugs, "'One' is not a song that you analyze." This is a willful evasion. To analyze "One" is to contend with the way the song gains meaning through the context of the work of the late gay photographer David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS - via the cover art for the single and the little-seen/rarely-aired first music video. Of course, hetero lust (and U2 lead Bono's narcissism) is the subject of the most played, and turgidly conventional, video promo for the song (while another unpopular video featured the band in drag and a father distanced from his gay son).

The only song on the list to deal with AIDS? Its meaning is intentionally slippery and vague. That's why it makes the list. Hyden fails to recognize the song's signification of gayness (which would mean he'd have to, as Hyden lazily refers to it, "wax intellectual"), thus denying that gay experience can provide a source for a song that, as Hyden describes in his mini-critique, "touches on feelings that can't be articulated or relinquished." Like the rest of the list, Hyden chooses to deny the reality of contemporary life, the social context addressed by pop that matters.

Bono grimly intones the wittiest flirtation with a gay reading on "One": "Did I disappoint you / Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?" It cannot bear comparison to Morrissey's family-AIDS revelation (i.e., complex expression and empathic catharsis) on "(I'm) The End of the Family Line" from the 1991 album "Kill Uncle". Morrissey sings: "Our family tree hacked into decline / And I'm spared the pain / Of ever saying / ("Goodbye")."

Morrissey's devastating irony offers poetically clear and compound insight into the relationship of mortality and immortality in gay life during the era of AIDS. It also marks the auspicious pop achievement of communicating a truth never before, to my knowledge, expressed in any artform. You know that didn't make the list! Hyden, failing to "wax intellectual" or to "analyze," responds to U2's opportunistic elusion of meaning. "One" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I disclaim it.

Instead of U2's jangle-pomp pity, I refer readers/listeners to the pop-art empathy exhibited by ten-and-a-half songs - including "(I'm) The End of the Family Line" - that confront the reality of AIDS. The following songs, hardly exhaustive, substantiate what the PopMatters list would suppress: the impact AIDS has had on music, music culture, the culture at large, and the universal pop province of attraction, romance, and love. As evidence of pop, political, and personal perseverance in the age of AIDS, they are undeniable.

With 1985's "Perhaps", Billy Mackenzie's The Associates released "Waiting for the Love Boat." The track's gloriously danceable synth percussion and keyboard backs Mackenzie's multivalent, brass-horny, vocalizations. He's a rocker who always draws upon unhip (read: fey) modes of pop (here, disco) for inspiration.

Mackenzie dramatizes social customs (specifically gay yet universally recognizable) involved with "going out." These include, courageously, the impression of AIDS and stds on those rituals: "Test proved negative / I was positively pleased / . . . / Libido in a go slow / If I was you I'd hide." Then, the song's chorus insists upon the deep need evidenced in contemporary sexual license: "Waiting for the love boat / Knowing what you want and taking full advantage / Waiting for the love boat."

Morrissey and The Smiths measure the toll of that license in the back-to-back pairing of "Death of a Disco Dancer" and "Girlfriend in a Coma" on their greatest (and final) album proper: the 1987 "Strangeways, Here We Come".

These two songs, cumulatively, track the political and spiritual effect of AIDS on gay people. The weariness of "Disco Dancer" - "The death of a disco dancer / well, it happens a lot 'round here" - gets expanded into a political challenge: "Well, I'd rather not get involved / I never talk to my neighbour."

The masking of "boyfriend" with "girlfriend" on the generously infectious "Girlfriend in a Coma" invites the mainstream audience into gay people's collective introduction to the gravity of pop, love, and death: "Let me whisper my last goodbyes / I know - IT'S SERIOUS" (emphasis Morrissey's). If guitarist Johnny Marr's extended riff-response to Morrissey's call ("Love, peace, and harmony? / . . . / Maybe in the next world") expresses faith, then "Girlfriend in a Coma" explains where it comes from - and shares the revelation with the popular audience.

That is hardly indicative of artists who front the "solipsistic conviction" that Matt Gonzales (ac)claims as "their inauguration into the canon of rock and roll" in his rundown of The Smiths' "This Charming Man" (#96). Gonzalez explicitly prefers this song to the (less successful) in-your-face fag-'tude of The Smiths' very first single, "Hand In Glove".

Furthermore, the Smiths catalogue contradicts David Medsker's assertion of what "How Soon Is Now?" (#10) represents: Morrissey "steps up with the first ounce of nerve he's ever shown and righteously declares, 'I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does." Wrong. It was neither the first, nor the last ounce of nerve Morrissey has wasted on solipsistic listeners - who believe that their self-contained realities are the only reality to which pop relates.

That's why good songs (like "This Charming Man" and "How Soon Is Now?") can co-exist on the list with dreck (like "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "One," and "Stan").

The otherwise erudite and insightful critic/academic Chris Sieving mistakes homophobe Eminem's offensively self-absorbed simple-mindedness in the song "Stan" (#41) as significant because it isn't just about media hype (it concerns a rapper and his psychotic fan) - it also became the subject of media hype.

Note Sieving's emphasis on the song's reception: "Much ink and countless pixels have already been employed in analyzing the links between Stan's deeds, Slim Shady's words, and Eminem's responsibilities as a commercial artist (and in deciphering Marshall Mathers' ability to separate the three)."

Meanwhile, rapper duo Outkast hiphop over Eminem to dizzying, vertigo-heights on their balls-and-Word masterpiece, "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)," from the 2000 album "Stankonia". "Stan" can't touch the richness of "B.O.B.", in which Outkast connects sex/drugs responsibility ("Cure for cancer, cure for AIDS") with the responsibility of Black artists to the community ("Make a nigga wanna stay on tour for days" ) and the responsibility of a nation to its Black soldiers, and their communities, returning from the Bush, Sr. Gulf War ("Get back home, things are wrong"). Outkast drops "Bombs Over Baghdad" as a sexual, artistic, and geopolitical (home and abroad) metaphor. Outkast's ecstatic - "thoughts at a thousand miles per hour" - aesthetics certify their climactic declaration of AIDS-era hope: "Pop-cult, Music, Electric, Revival!"

Such a "Revival" is what Chuck D had in mind on Public Enemy's explosive "Fear of a Black Planet" (1990). With the album's epic spin through a multi-media maelstrom, "Welcome to the Terrordome", Chuck D conveyed a conviction and courted a controversy that would make Eminem change colors (from yeller to pink) when he rapped: "Crucifixion ain't no fiction."

Chuck D's faith proves essential to the way he seeks out Truth and transformation through his art. It's dramatized in the opening of the song: "I got so much trouble on my mind / Refuse to lose / . . . / Then slapped the Mac(Intosh) / Now I'm ready to mike it." D and the Bomb Squad ("Never be a brother like me to go solo") consequently craft an exhilaratingly comprehensive musical "journey" through the era's contemporary socio-poli-economic confusions.

Chuck D admits a private source of confusion (and rude comprehension) on "Meet the G That Killed Me," the addendum that immediately follows "Welcome to the Terrordome" (linked to that song by the startling sampling of media and the shared concern with urban dis-ease). Chuck D raps about "the chemical and biological warfare" of AIDS: "Man to man / I don't know if they can / From what I know / The parts don't fit / (Ahh shit)"!

Prince begins his own Reagan/Bush-era survey with a moan, "Oh yeah. . . ." That's how Prince prepares himself to bear the burdens of the age on the 1987 "Sign 'O' the Times," from same-named album (and the concert film that vivifies the signs of the time on a stage of deliriously abstract race-and-sex codes). Then he proceeds to describe one of those burdens: "In France a skinny man / died of a big disease with a little name / By chance his girlfriend came across a needle / And soon she did the same."

Prince catalogues a series of modern-day horrors, like AIDS, with such expressive emoting and direct language. Introduced in that opening moan (the 'O' in the song's title), Prince creatively transforms the Challenger explosion into a symbol of the era's reckless greed and ambition: "It's silly, no? / When a rocket ship explodes / And everybody still wants 2 fly." Despite signs of nuclear-age, AIDS-era doom, Prince finds salvation in the blues.

Prince's blues-style reclamation of language and observation of behavior - and even Chuck D's confusion, and desire to educate/communicate - is preferable to "PopMatters" critic Scott Thill's boys-club generalizations that uphold rock-cric cred. Thill uses Public Enemy's 1989 "Fight the Power" (#8) as the opportunity to fortify received wisdom: "Pop music had no heart at that point; it was filled with metal lite -- just like now -- bubblegum pop -- just like now -- and major label swill -- just like now." Such lies, etched into cyber-stone, represent the power Public Enemy wants its audience to fight.

Did Thill not hear the beating "heart" of gay pop acts like Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys? Erasure (with "Blue Savannah," "Save Me Darling," "When Will I See You Again?" and more!) and the Pets (with "West End Girls," "Discoteca," "Your Funny Uncle," "Being Boring," "My October Symphony," "Decadence," and more!) are the two groups who have most consistently brought the significance of AIDS into the popular dance-club and radio forums. Significantly, neither Erasure nor The Pets received a single nod from the PopMatters collective.

In 1988, Erasure released an EP called "Crackers International" with the highlight track being "Stop!" It's as major a record as any by Public Enemy, which means it's as good as music gets. The song dazzlingly mounts in synth-assertiveness, propelling the fey background moans and almost-military force of the chorus.

On first listen, "Stop!" reveals itself to be a brilliant game of semantics, turning homophobic language back on itself. Gay lovers told to "Stop!" turn back that "Stop!" on their attackers, thus identifying homophobia as the true perversion of love:

"...Nobody ain't never / Gonna disconnect us or ever separate us / Or say to us you've got to / Stop! / Stand there where you are / Before you go too far / Before you make a fool out of love."

This rich, empowering reversal of dominant ideology validates Erasure's self-conscious camp. Against the odds of homophobia and AIDS, they bear no cynicism. Erasure confirms gay emotion. They do so by proclaiming faith in the age of AIDS:

"We'll be together again! / I've been waiting for a long time / We're gonna be we're gonna be / Together again"

Erasure recognizes, celebrates and demonstrates the perseverance of human imagination. They apply the Truth of myth/narrative/ritual/metaphysical benevolence (faith) and manipulate the codes of doctrine/"common sense"/hegemony (homophobia). Erasure rightly commands the listener to "Stop!" in the face of undeniable - real - Love.

If the PopMatters critics had stopped to think or to care about the opportunity such a list provided, they might have fulfilled the Pet Shop Boys' dream expressed in the heartrending reverie of "Dreaming of the Queen," from their magnificent 1993 album "Very".

In it, the Pets express the need for a nation - and a culture - to recognize and to mourn the losses incurred by AIDS. The "desolate" dreamer of the song imagines Princess Di singing:

"That there are no more lovers left alive / No one has survived / So there are no more lovers left alive / And that's why love has died / . . . / Diana dried her eyes."

The song's elicitation of feeling promises collective catharsis.

On "Very", The Pets, themselves, traced the significance of AIDS on gay culture and the culture-at-large with their cover of the Village People's "Go West." The musical sources for the Pets version of "Go West" range from gospel to jazz, disco to techno.

The combination of these impulses and genres create an anthem for gay political/philosophical evolution from gay-lib to gay-faith. The gay reclaiming - and redefining - of Western/American ideals and mythology ("Go West / Life is peaceful there / Go West / In the open air") establishes the foundation for the Pets' achieved transcendence.

The Pets affirm the necessary belief in an eternity - after so much loss - to liberate the infinite possibilities of existence. The song's exquisite polyrhythms restore the dancefloor to hallowed ground. It's in that space that pop music's history will always be written.

Originally published by GayToday.com
September 29, 2003

Redeeming The Western

2007-12-13T19:47:00.000-08:00

Open Range
Film Review by John Demetry

You know what they say about pictures. "They say they're worth a thousand words," cowboy Charlie Waite (Kevin Costner) jokes to Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall). This kind of humor sets the tone for how one should appreciate the images - pictures - in director-star Costner's Open Range.

One should read the "pictures" self-consciously, with awakened awareness to the open range of cinematic meanings in a frame. With this film, Costner returns to an unpopular genre - the Western - in order to restore a sense of morality to movie and political rituals.

Take the loaded moment when Costner's Charlie kicks Diego Luna as Button into a creek. Button is a teenager, who was saved from squalor by Charlie, while Charlie is a wearied, hard-to-read cowboy with a sense of prairie etiquette. Charlie punishes Button for throwing a bratty hissy-fit and for cheating at cards. The images signify more than just the narrative action. It conveys a sense of their relationship.

The dynamic of their relationship plays out against the mythic terrain of the Old West. The Old West is represented, here, as a contrast between low-horizon shots of green prairie with a sheltering blue sky and that of the dusty town run by the tyrannical Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon).

In that space, Costner addresses contemporary experience. Casting Luna as Button is significant. When Costner displays paternal toughness and warmth toward Luna, it also signifies his mature, moral understanding of the youthful folly - the amorality and political simplicity - Luna carries with him from his best-known role as the star of the Mexican film Y tu mama tambien.

Charlie's love interest, Sue Barlow (Annette Bening) lives outside of town, symbolically in the domestic hearth between city corruption and prairie anarchy. Charlie will try to acclimate himself to domesticity. Failing to hold onto the tiny handle of a teacup, he'll buy Sue a new tea set. Sue, with Bening's glowing attentiveness, defines the kind of (in)sight, combining complexity with simplicity, Costner expects from the audience. She explains her devotion to Charlie: "I've seen who you are. It might be little bits, but it's enough for a woman who looks."

Significantly, Sue's home is the place Button will go to heal after an attack by a posse of hired thugs. When Costner's character says, "While he fights for his life, we will too," it also conveys Costner's own artistic morality.

That is why Robert Duvall is also cast for iconographic purposes. A brilliant actor, he plays Boss Spearman as mentor to Charlie, passing along American wisdom in vernacular language: "One man telling another where he can or can't go: sticks in my craw!"

Duvall also represents the filmmaking tutelage of the American Renaissance films of the 1970s. Duvall was in the first two The Godfather films, and Costner similarly reinvents genre for the purpose of addressing modern, self-conscious audiences. Costner honors Duvall/Boss, while gauging the circumstances of postmodern genre, in this exchange: "Old Boss sure can cowboy can't he?" / "They broke the mold after him."

Costner embraces genre without any cynicism. The rituals - courtship, shootouts, rides across the prairie expanse - are treated as recognizable modes of instructing in morality. Through movie ritual, Costner putts morality into social practice.

When Costner and Duvall ride their horses with a low-hanging full moon as a backdrop, it links up with the famous bike-ride to the moon in "E.T.". Costner recognizes it as a memento of the era's most astonishing moment of collective catharsis-genre's greatest promise.

Charlie confesses to Sue: "I'm trying to put some bad times behind me, but they don't seem to want to stay put." Sue responds compassionately, revealing the importance of ritual: "Sometimes it's best to let them breathe a little, rather than bury them."

Costner dramatizes this process of memory and myth in a beautiful series of two shots. The first shot is a close-up of Costner's face, slowly pulling back to reveal the river water behind him glistening in fuzzy shallow focus. He's lying down, so his eyes are staring up at the sky and into his soul. He begins to make a confession to Boss: "When I was a kid. . . ." He continues to recount his own history of violence when he was "put to work for men like Baxter."

"Not a day goes by without thinking of who I am and what I lived on," he concludes. And the second shot shows us the sky he's been pondering upon: a collection of stars, myths thrown up into the zodiac.

Although not a critique of Westerns, Costner still shows an uncanny memory in his sense for correcting historical whitewashing: from the KKK to AIDS. The image of villains, hired thugs working at the whim of the powerful, garbed in white hoods at night gives historical prescience to the film's basic moral/political dilemma. The historical fact of vigilante (in)justice - whether Boss and Charlie's vengeance, Baxter's greedy iron grip - contrasts with the struggle to consecrate moral truths in objective law.

Boss gives a speech in a saloon, exposing the enemy's "tin star - bought and paid for" as an enemy to the basic "right to protect property and life." But he still claims, taking the law into his own hands, that he's "holding a grudge against the man upstairs."

At the end of the credits of Open Range, Costner includes a dedication to the memory of late character actor Michael Jeter, who had AIDS and recently passed away. Jeter's funny and deftly drawn small role in the film plays an important role in the final shoot-out, in which every clearly delineated action conveys moral decision. He comes out to help the side of righteousness. In a movie about memory, history and community, this is a major token of good will, like the gifts Sue and Charlie exchange. Costner's vision of the open ranges of America's past is shared in a cinema with an open heart.

Originally published by GayToday.com
September 08, 2003

What Money Can't Buy

2007-12-13T19:42:00.000-08:00

The Good Thief
DVD Review by John Demetry

The Good Thief is a blessed oxymoron. The movie is a good fake. There's not a moment in the film that isn't divisible by some cultural totem: from film noir to Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur (which the movie remakes) to Picasso ("the greatest thief that ever lived") to Christian iconography (giving the film its title). Every shot is "1000 Kisses Deep" (the title of the recurring, luridly romantic Leonard Cohen song on the soundtrack).

Down-on-his-luck gambler and "good thief" Bob (Nick Nolte) learns the age of Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze), a young hostess at a seedy club from Russia. She's 17 years old. "A primary number," Bob exhales with the star's signature - weary - granite-gargling growl. A primary number is divisible only by itself and the number: 1. It's a heady recognition. Is he stirred by the discovery of purity or by the heroin he's been injecting into his bloodstream?

Or both? Such complexity conveys writer-director Neil Jordan's poignant truth. Reflecting that truth, Bob retains faith in Jesus' promise on the cross to "the good thief" that there's "a place in Heaven for a thief." With characters and culture alike, Jordan slices through the simulacra - the infinitely divisible signs and codes of contemporary culture - to recognize a (primary) spiritual essence.

This represents the most miraculous development in the art. At this point in the summer-movie black-out, the standard can only be established by the DVD release of the early-2003 film The Good Thief. Anne might be speaking for the international movie audience when she bemoans: "Everybody wants a piece of me."

The Good Thief recognizes the most basic spiritual hopes of junky low-life Bob - who is also paradoxically Anne's "knight in shining armor" - and the band of international outsiders that intersect with his plan to rob the art collection in a Monte Carlo casino. As Bob tells Anne: "We're both lost souls." Jordan challenges the rules of cinematic identification. The spectators' fantasy projections take the form of - simultaneously - the best and the worst inherent in themselves: souls, lost and found. As if addressing the audience, Bob taunts his nemesis, the police officer on his trail: "We're both hooked." Pointedly ironic, it's also a statement of profound understanding.

Jordan conveys that understanding by fulfilling those most "good" aspirations of his characters - and audience - with a cinematic/narrative beneficence. "Give me the moon," Anne requests of a suitor. Jordan responds to that desire stylistically - philosophy made concrete with every brushstroke of the camera. Jordan infuses the movie-dream landscape in which the characters enact their spiritual struggle with the ecstatic tactility of van Gogh's Starry Night - the Holy Grail that Bob will never steal.

With his fluid movement through time and space, Jordan, like Bob, maneuvers through the irony. Emir Kusturica, as one of Bob's cohorts, winks into a spy camera (a rigged pen - a literal "camera stylo" - in his shirt pocket). He winks directly at the movie audience of The Good Thief. In this sense, the character's dramatized self-consciousness mirrors audience sophistication. However, Jordan does not exploit sophistication as an end in itself.

Jordan introduces Kusturica as he performs a riff on Jimi Hendrix's famous jazz-impulse re-contextualization of the U.S. national anthem. The heist-film plot of The Good Thief serves a similar purpose. The Good Thief is a self-conscious breakdown of cultural myths done in a style to stimulate and challenge the audience. These myths are, necessarily in the age of globalization, viewed internationally via the context of French appropriation of Hollywood genre. Anne complains of one of her suitors: "He doesn't live up to my ideal of manhood." She wants to go "back to Bogie Street" (pace Cohen again).

The Good Thief is not about committing a heist. Jordan uses the heist as a structure to reveal the existential conundrum of personal confusions and heartaches and desires cut by the force of Divine Providence. "Isn't beauty always mysterious?" Anne reflects.

Jordan's Picasso-inspired cubist montage at the end divides the heist into three cross-cut sections, a beautiful evocation of mysteries: sex (a transgendered thief's post-op fear of spiders), perception ("We could be triplets" says a young thief to his identical-twin colleagues), and faith (the payoff to Bob, Nolte's, and Jordan's metaphysical gamble). Jordan always reconsiders his art and pop obsessions to express his personal curiosity and compassion for human dilemma.

Doing so, Jordan reveals the pain exploited by escapism injected with narcotic ideology - a culture of cynicism, of simulated emotions and lies-as-truths. Ralph Fiennes (who starred in Jordan's sublime "End of the Affair") shows up in a cameo to explicate the contemporary malaise. His character, a black-market art dealer, is smart enough to deconstruct a Picasso painting. As if the process of deconstruction erased art's spiritual value, he appraises it, ultimately, only for its monetary value. Bob, however, "wants what money can't buy."

Fiennes defines the depths of modern cynicism when he threatens to mutilate Bob and Anne. He could be talking about the bogus conceits of Memento or Pulp Fiction or Far From Heaven. Dig the twist on hipster industry speak when he describes his plan of torture as the "new cubism - a new aesthetic without anesthetic."

Jordan's art always means to ease the pain. Remember: he's the director of The Crying Game. Jordan returns to cinema the desire for redemption fundamental to cultural myths and metaphysical truths. By deconstructing the culture's collective fictions, Jordan restores faith in a reality full of meaning. Jordan is a good thief. He steals the moon.

Originally published by GayToday.com
August 25, 2003

Let's NOT Do It

2007-12-13T19:40:00.000-08:00

Swimming Pool
Film Review by John Demetry

"Let's Do It." That's the sexually-provocative Euro-trash disco track that French gay filmmaker Francois Ozon uses to get his English star Charlotte Rampling to dance in his latest film: Swimming Pool.

Rampling, as a middle-aged English mystery writer named Sarah Morton, has been invited to dance with the nubile French Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and a hunky local waiter. Sarah's been eyeing the waiter while enjoying a getaway to write her latest novel.

The getaway is at the summer home in France owned by Julie's father, an English publisher played by Charles Dance. As played by Dance, his condescendingly understanding tone when suggesting that Sarah, whose both his client and his lover, try something different with her next novel actually conceals a patriarchal power mania to limit female expression (as revealed in later plot developments -such as the introduction of Julie, the daughter about whom Sarah didn't know).

Julie and her friend's drunken and stoned swaying movements contrast with Sarah's discomfort and desperate need to impress. She wants to seduce the young man away from Julie. Rampling's Sarah displays awkward, clipped, embarrassing movements - hopping like a bunny, doing "the robot" with her stiff arms and neck.

The sequence of Rampling dancing illustrates at least three levels of significance in Swimming Pool. Consider these as layers in Ozon's reflective narratives-within-narratives.

First of all, the sequence fulfills a key point in what appears to be the film's "plot." The dance establishes Sarah's jealousy of the sexier younger woman played by the delicious Sagnier. It defines the waiter as the pawn or trophy in their conflict. Later in the night, he will be murdered.

Before joining the dance, Rampling is framed sitting in the foreground left facing the camera. Ozon stages Julie and the waiter in the background right of the screen. While Rampling does not see the action behind her, she turns her head to the left and back, briefly. This cues the movie spectator to connect it to her perception, meanwhile associating her perception with movie spectatorship.

Nearly every shot in the film establishes Sarah and/or other characters as spectators - voyeurs either watching or listening. In many shots, prosceniums (windows, doorways, a balcony, the swimming pool, shifting shallow lens focus) distinguish layers of film space, through which characters or the camera itself moves.

Finally, the climax of the film will call into question every previous moment - revealing the story proper as a narrative manifested out of Sarah's sexual/artistic fears and desires.

Therefore, Swimming Pool concerns not only how Sarah's unconscious impulses take narrative form, but also the film audience's own relationship to cinema. Ozon proposes cinema as reflection (mirror-upon-mirror) of each spectator's own sublimated fears and desires. This is explicit in all Ozon films (whereas most movies merely exploit those fears and desires). This sophistication is what makes his films fun. Here, however, the approach proves flattering instead of challenging.

An ultimate - omega and meta - layer of significance in this elaborate mise-en-scene is the reality on display. The audience witnesses Ozon's camera recording the actors as they perform. Specifically, Ozon records Rampling not seeing what's behind her and, then, Rampling's joining them to dance and, finally, Rampling dancing alone with the hunky younger man, forcing Sagnier out of the frame.

In many ways, the subject of Swimming Pool is Rampling - the actress and the star - who was also the lead in Under the Sand, which was, until now, both Ozon's most highly-acclaimed and least resonant film. There's a problem. Rampling can't dance.

Rampling fails to achieve what the role demands of her: to express the unexpressed. She never brings out in creative, beautiful, empathic details the sublimated desires of her character - which has always been the liberating achievement of great female artists in any medium (from fiction-writing to acting). Instead, Ozon uses Rampling as an iconographic figure. She's the perfect "frigid" woman.

Sarah's icy presence thaws as she finds her sexuality/creativity. But that's the most comfortable cliché of artsy-fartsy pseudo-feminist movies. It sure gets a better reception than Ozon's earlier not-p.c. examinations of masculine identity and homoerotic desire: Criminal Lovers, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, and the magisterially sexy short masterpiece A Summer Dress. Instead, conforming to the hetero-male rules of attraction, the fetching Sagnier/Julie is the film's object of desire, signifying the sensuality Sarah reclaims.

Whatever the fate of the character, Rampling never liberates herself. Rampling wears the same glib smile when she's eagerly writing her latest novel as she does when gluttonously devouring a pastry. She devours the events surrounding - and/or emanating from - her. Both Swimming Pool and Rampling confuse conspicuous consumption with art-making and engagement with the world.

Note the film's class bias. Sarah and Julie collaborate to cover up the murder of the waiter ("I did it for your book," Julie claims). These privileged women (one the daughter of a rich publisher, the other a popular writer of mystery novels) exact vengeance on Julie's father (by honoring Julie's deceased mother with the completed novel).

They achieve liberation only through the dehumanization of the waiter. He is equated with the villa's gardener, who Rampling later seduces to distract from a tell-tale clue. Both waiter and gardener are purveyors of the dreaded "male gaze" - as dramatized in mirroring, lingering shots of Sagnier and Rampling, respectively, being watched while sunning by the pool.

The identity-bending finale completes the film's search for truth beneath the surface of images. The climactic montage puts "feeling" above plot as an ostensible deconstruction of male-enforced narrative. However, this surrealist maneuver is an art-house adornment ("I get it!" one might proudly proclaim). The terrifying revelations - resonating like half-remembered nightmares - about masculine fear of female sexuality at the end of Ozon's short films Truth or Dare and, his other masterpiece, See the Sea did not congratulate the spectator; they annihilated cozy preconceptions about sexuality.

With Swimming Pool, Ozon now swims safely in the shallow end. Many critics claim that, in Rampling, Ozon has found his muse (as Sarah may have found in Julie). It's as if that Queer satyr Ozon were now dancing to a tune titled: "Let's Not Do It."

Originally published by GayToday.com
August 18, 2003

The Light In A Stranger's Eyes

2007-12-13T19:30:00.001-08:00

Loveboat
CD Review by John Demetry

Finally! Erasure's Loveboat is being distributed in the United States. In 2000, Erasure released the best of their (now) five post-Pop! albums. That album, Loveboat, was their only release not to be distributed in the U.S. It has thus far only been available in the States through expensive import editions.

Erasure's brand of camp gay pop has lost favor in the contemporary, sophisticated dandy-Warhol market favoring pseudo-punk, "alternative," techno, hip-hop, and remixes of TRL-faves. (Okay, I dig the Dandy Warhols just fine, but they're no Erasure.)

None of the Erasure albums since the epochal Pop! collection in 1993 are as likely as Loveboat to regain the attention of old fans or to encourage new listeners to explore the singular catalogue of one of the great pop acts of all time. To reference the title of one of the Loveboat tracks: "Perchance to Dream. . ."

Erasure has always devised delirious dreamscapes, not for escape but for revealing the desires that fuel their, as the song goes, "drive into the wall of sound." Their expressive, emotional use of unashamedly pop forms is made special by their special difference. As Andy Bell sings on "Perchance to Dream": gay desire turns "my world upside down."

Erasure's camp turns pop upside down, distilling its emotional essence while expanding its romantic codes beyond the hetero norm. On "Alien", Erasure develops the perfect pop metaphor for the genesis of gay desire - "Love's young dream could be alien" - and the resultant effect on one's consciousness: the birth of an aesthetic. The song starts by describing the mode of all of Erasure's expressions (through, ironically, self-reflexive movie jargon):

"Cuts to the quick / Pure emotion a trip."

That explains Erasure's relentless ebullience (on Loveboat and on all of their albums). Out of Vince Clarke's consistent bass beat emanates a joyful electronic and (here) acoustic dance polyrhythm; plus "Loveboat" features a dirty sound, like static or beamed-in messages from the ether. As in the track "Alien": "Tuning love like a radio." Bell's "ardent and lithe" (pace "Alien" again) vocalizations take up the challenge: turning every emotion and thought into a flamboyant call.

Erasure pays its debt of gratitude to pop history. The title of the album probably refers to the brave Associates song from the 1980s called "Waiting for the Loveboat," which tracked romantic desperation in the age of AIDS ("Test proved negative / I was positively pleased").

In 1997, Billy Mackenzie, the only stalwart member of the Associates, killed himself. There was no greater artist in my lifetime. In the eclectic selection of songs on Loveboat, Erasure updates and honors Mackenzie's insight to encourage a new hope.

Erasure recognizes romantic despair in the context of a world changed by AIDS. On the last track, "Surreal", Erasure warns:

"Surreal / Precious time is slipping away / Revealed / Don't go wishing your life away"

The "Surreal" revealed: the world moves to the beat of individual disappointments. So much so that the infidelity in "Where in the World" is devastating:

"You leave me desolate in soul / Go and fight in someone else's war / And so you put us both to shame / Don't come near me / Won't you make it go away."

Erasure's art helps ease the pain. On "Crying In the Rain," Bell bemoans the difficulty to express feelings, and to make connections:

"Can you make it all right? / Can you make it okay? / When the talk don't come out right / You're moving further away."

But then Erasure puts heartbreak into humbling perspective:

"Now I feel no pain / I do my crying in the rain."

Bell even finds torch-song hope for lonely souls in shared fantasy projection on "Mad As We Are":

"Lines across / My silver screen / . . . / Speed of light / Hope flickering / Like moths / In the night"

David Bowie was never so androgynously inventive as Bell and Clarke's guitar-strumming "Love Is the Rage". Check out the opening:

"Woman / If I were a woman / I would be man enough / To keep you warm / And boy / If I were a man / I would be strong enough / To hold you tight."

If love is the solution, then it also ain't easy. Here Erasure catalogues the cultural and personal obstacles to expressing love, but there's Love in this kind of imagination.

There are multivalent, dance-to-your-own-beat signs of Love when that imagination manifests itself on the disco floor. Four tracks on Loveboat are boogie-down delicious:

"Here In My Heart", "Catch 22", "Moon and the Sky", and the anthem-worthy opening track "Freedom". They provide new ways of seeing signs of Love.

On "Here In My Heart", Bell sings:

"I can see / In your eyes / My desire."

This benevolent narcissism is psychologically rich, but it's also gives way to the philosophically profound. Bell is liberated from a "Catch 22":

"We close our eyes / And chase away the sorry things / You make it easy for me / Life is but a dream."

The world manifests itself from a shared desire, from connection and love.

Finally able to express emotions, Erasure transforms the world into metaphor - reflection to connection - just as the dance beats create an existential space for listener transformation on "Moon and the Sky":

"See how the moon / She cries / Cool how the tears / Fill up the sky as snow".

This is spiritually expansive. Check out this vision of "Freedom":

"Cherish the union / The light in a stranger's eyes / Your guardian angel / Who will make all the wrongs thing right."

It necessarily expands the meaning of Mackenzie's metaphor. It's how you recognize those waiting for loveboat. But then what do you do? Erasure invites us all on their trip. Erasure finds faith - "Freedom" - through gaydar.

Originally published by GayToday.com
August 04, 2003

Hollywood Hegemony Wants Moore

2007-12-13T18:56:00.000-08:00

How to Deal
Film Review by John Demetry

Many probably know how Halley Martin (Mandy Moore) feels in How to Deal. It's hard to deal with the experiences growing up that seem to prove that love is doomed. For high school student Halley, those experiences include her parents' divorce, the sudden death of her best friend's boyfriend, her sister's impending marriage to a snooty stick-in-the-ass, and her own romance with an insensitive hottie (loner Macon, played by Trent Ford).

No surprise: Halley learns "how to deal" during the course of the film. Although I share Halley's confusion - and I think many people do - How to Deal only half-succeeds at helping the audience to bare the burden of love's - and commercial cinema's - disappointments.

Defensive Halley: "I'm not falling love with him [Macon]. I just like kissing him." The way pop-singer cum movie-star Moore delivers this line, it's like she's kissing you too. If you've had the pleasure of seeing her in last year's underrated A Walk to Remember, you might have fallen in love with a star reborn.

Sure enough, it's Mandy Moore who provides most of the catharsis in How to Deal. Through her, every familiar adolescent emotion seems reborn. Don't miss her interpretations of Halley's surprise over catching her best friend having sex, her pleasure while dry-humping with Macon on her coach, or her shamed escape from a party after a truncated make-out session.

Moore's inventive, photogenic expressions of emotions bring a new perspective onto recognizable adolescent moments. Moore projects a sense of interior thoughts and shifts in emotion with her doe eyes, pug face, pouty lips, and adjustments in posture. It's a signature moment when she unexpectedly steals a bud from a fern tree - and tastes it.

Director Clare Kilner can't top Moore's wonderment, curiosity and generosity of response. Kilner also tries to provide new perspectives on a girl's adolescent life. The film opens with one of Kilner's signature oblique camera angles: low-angle shot of the sky - with the sun beaming through tree branches and clouds - that rotates down to a masked cut into Halley's bedroom with Moore standing on her head. Kilner's topsy-turvy view of the sky reflects an upside-down capitulation to mainstream narrative.

Despite the religious connotation of this shot - and many - in How to Deal, the film does not have the overt, and refreshing, Christian sentiments of A Walk to Remember. Still, Mandy Moore, as a star, signifies a person of faith from her work in that previous film and even her music (the track "Saturate Me" on her 2001 self-titled album is a memorable teeny-bop baptism).

A Walk to Remember was a nonstop tear-fest that offered a complex moment of release. During a school play, a musical about gangsters, Moore sings "Only Hope" - and her troubled costar falls in love with her. The levels at work here are awesome.

To be reductive: 1. The scene recognizes generic tropes - gangsters/romance - as abstractions for genuine emotion. 2. The secular milieu sets the pop stage for an expression of faith, busting through narrative containment in the form of a musical number. 3. Two students communicate through their interaction on stage in character, climaxing with a tell-tale kiss. 4. The scene breaks down the illusion of the film proper by capitalizing on the pop-star persona of Mandy Moore, simultaneously turning the sequence into a reverie on the moral potential in the relationship between pop star and audience.

Wow! That's how you bring The Word to the MTV generation. All of this is conveyed through the sustained presentation of Moore's talent. It's allowed to resonate.

But in Kilner's direction of this latest Moore vehicle, she offers only the idea of complex emotional expression in such compositions as Moore walking in slow motion amidst the sprays of a sprinkler or an overhead shot of Moore after a funeral, embracing the rainfall while the other characters exit the shot (the funeral's program featuring a picture of the deceased act as "Foreign Correspondent" umbrellas). The shots never linger, never go wild.

How to Deal is too inured in teen-movie conventions. A song in the film's score - one of those obnoxious pop-punk songs - claims its generation as too cool for school, goofing on Romeo & Juliet. Moore's early cynicism about love is contrasted with a box-office poster advertising Casablanca. Too hip to be square, it retains the hetero-sappiness of Casablanca while dissing the profundity of Shakespeare.

Only, again, Moore's talent transcends the limitations of the plot, of Hollywood simplifications, and of Kilner's style. At the end, Halley criticizes her boyfriend: "I hate the way your hair falls into your face. I hate the way you bite your lip when you're nervous. I hate the way your eyebrow goes like that [raising her eyebrow into an upside-down 'V']." Mandy Moore is an icon of her generation: sophisticated to the commercial codes of romantic ideals, but also innocently susceptible to them.

Moore shows why her audience deserves redemption. Now, it's time for Mandy Moore to figure out how to deal with Hollywood hegemony.

Originally published by GayToday.com
July 28, 2003

Contexts of Love

2007-12-13T18:38:00.000-08:00

Love Reinvented
DVD Review by John Demetry

Each exquisite short film that makes up Love Reinvented lives up to the collection's title. However, one in particular provides the series with that proud banner.

In La mouette, director Nils Tavernier slowly tightens a close-up on an HIV-positive lesbian while she listens to a tape-recorded message given to her by her heretofore hesitant lover. The declaration of devotion concludes: "We'll reinvent love."

It's an extraordinary moment. The quick montage of La mouette, following the tumultuous emotional currents of its questioning siren, gives way to an enveloping ebb. The increasing intimacy of the camera pulls the viewer into the emotional epiphany of, not the primary character, but the receiver of her love. And her tears are devastatingly joyous.

The narrative efficiency represented by the device of the tape recording is not as hokey as it seems. As methods of communication change, Tavernier expresses the sincerity that remains. As the contexts of love (AIDS, overt queerness, sexual questioning, boundaries to intimacy) change, the spiritual essence of love (connection, faith) continues eternal.

Love Reinvented delivers one "close-up" cathartic moment after another. Sure it's not cinema reinvented, but it is - oh so gloriously and pleasurably - cinema reinvigorated.

What reinvigorates this most expansive of popular mediums is the contemporary experience of a neglected group. Think about it. The gay experience, like the experience of all oppressed people, is often defined by the specifics and universalities of the struggle for self-definition amidst adversity: the search for love as the highest pursuit.

Queer cinema has the potential to aid in that process, through the joy of combating the filmic status quo. Drawing upon gay experience, the best gay art enriches it through imagination.

I make the jump from gay film to gay art in general because the structure of Love Reinvented, a collection of twelve mostly French short films by twelve different directors, reflects developments in popular music and in theatre - revived in film - during the era of AIDS. It is the reality of AIDS that connects the twelve diverse short films in Love Reinvented.

In that sense, the series shares the didactic, yet expansive and dramatic, urgency of AIDS-based theatrical drama. Françoise Decaux-Thomelet's Enceinte ou lesbienne explicitly utilizes theatrical techniques, opening the red curtains onto a surreal scenario. In this brief space and time, the parental reactions to the title question "Pregnant or lesbian?" swiftly move from anger to accusation, acceptance to revelation.

The nature of that revelation relates explicitly to questions about gayness and (im)mortality (literally "Pregnant or lesbian?") that AIDS brought home to the gay community: historically and on deeply intimate, personal levels. In clarifying those two ramifications of AIDS, the shorts of Love Reinvented ingeniously confront the questions posed by the ambiguous ending of Enceinte ou lesbienne.

François Dupeyron's dynamically composed images in Et alors, a sumptuous night-set first date, presents two people at the beginning of a relationship grappling to find the strength to pull together. The clichéd defensiveness of one who is HIV-positive - "I don't need your pity" - gives way to the other's surprising honesty: "I'm scared." The final tableau is heartbreaking and healing.

Meanwhile, the humorous, sunlit gorgeousness of Merzak Allouache's Dans la decapotable features to-die-for actors Julien Lambroschini and Guillaume Depardieu as lovers dealing with matters of fidelity. They do so in necessarily fresh ways, highlighted by the short's overt (but giddy-witty) "message" about safe sex.

Each short exhibits the condensed, vividly evocative approach to a variety of reflections on AIDS and its imprint on gay experience shared by the best gay pop songs. Such songs deal with mourning and the yearning for transcendence in deeply creative manners.

Notably the final film in the collection, Stephen Jones' Cherish offers existing gay culture (specifically, the party scene) as an avenue to "dance away the pain" (as het Bryan Ferry with Roxy Music once, prophetically, discoed). The Eden of Black male physique and relations in Paul Vecchiali's Les larmes du sida equates desire with innocence, mortality with knowledge. The ghostly point of view that structures the film turns every glancing camera move over Jean-Michel Monroc's body into a validation of life through longing (evocatively shared by the spectator).

Also filmed from the p.o.v. of an unseen character, Pierre Salvadori's Un moment. . . challenges audience desire in the context of AIDS during a one-nighter. That film's climax proves unshakably intimate, as do the depictions of loneliness in Marion Vernoux's Ded@ns and Anne Fontaine's Tapid du sour. In each, the gay male leads act out in order to ameliorate their isolation: in one, by videotaping his fantasy life; in the other, by playing at being a street hustler.

Philippe Faucon's Tout n'est pas en noir and, probably my favorite of the shorts, Franck Demules' Une nuit ordinaire actually dramatize the creativity - the imagination - nurtured by gay life. "I think I'm pregnant," the hunky half of a gay male couple declares, asking his lover to buy him black caviar in Tout n'est pas en noir. It's a fantasy quest that becomes a metaphor for their own precious, delicious love.

"Interesting! / Pleasant!" exclaim two witnesses to a man in Une nuit ordinaire singing a tune while riding his bike to stay with his hospitalized lover. Demules directs in the style of agit-pop duo Martineau-Ducastel's musical-esque The Adventures of Felix and post-musical Jeanne and the Perfect Guy. The entire world seems to dance, in a wistfully naturalistic choreography, as the lover sings: "The only home that's worth a prayer."

Now available for home viewing on DVD, Love Reinvented answers the prayers of gay movie audiences.

Originally published by GayToday.com
June 16, 2003

Pop's Operation: Freedom

2007-12-12T19:33:00.000-08:00

On "Flicker" from Twisted Tenderness by Electronic
by John Demetry

In 1999, the song "Flicker" by Electronic anticipated the shock-and-awe media tactics bringing Operation: Iraqi Freedom into American homes. On the track, singer/songwriter Bernard Sumner (also of New Order) walks the wild road of world events, moving from familiar confusion to compassion to contention.

Challenging television simplifications of political reality, Sumner projects an impressionistic montage of contemporary disaffection ("Misguided youth are mixing juice with alcohol") and political chaos ("Politicians want to share their point of view / United Nations are demanding / Foreign troops have made a landing"). Backed by the zealous guitar of Johnny Marr (formerly of The Smiths), every catalogued newsbyte - transformed by Sumner into poetry - reverberates with a shared sensitivity. Consequently, the duo invites listener engagement:

"I walk this wild road / Can you tell me, will I reach the end? / This endless night goes on / But I still can't find my way home"

The promise of "home" is the repeated mantra on Twisted Tenderness, the album that "Flicker" closes - bringing the disc's meditations on romantic and spiritual longing into political focus. Electronic expands the meaning of "home" through new global consciousness.

Taking it all in, Sumner almost surrenders to Iraqi oppression and U.S. ideological imperialism: "It's always the same it's not gonna change / When we go to school with Saddam Hussein." Soaring above hawk-and-dove divisions, Electronic reiterates the political theme of great pop: "But still I carry on."

Electronic follows that declaration with the song's layered percussion and guitar refrain. It seems to encourage Sumner to persevere. He releases a sweet moan resounding with the human stakes of politics:

"I'd cry all night if I could change it / Ask Jesus Christ could he arrange it / Is there anyone out there who cares / If a child can run free / Can a girl walk the street / Will United get beat"

Sumner demands feeling and illustrates action with his drawn-out vowel inflections, inventing a rhyme out of "night" and "Christ."

Then, Marr's guitar climbs to a drum-driven crescendo - crossing the border of language to the state of ecstasy. Marr answers Sumner's call to sentient minds and a higher power. "Flicker" promises pop's own Operation: Freedom.

Originally published by First of the Month
June 1, 2003

Too Wonderful To Realize

2007-12-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

Our Town
Television Review by John Demetry

Just as one character in Our Town pines to visit Paris before dying and another fulfilled her dream to see the Atlantic Ocean, Showtime gives a wide audience the chance to see what they're missing. The cable channel Showtime makes available to a wide popular audience the current Tony-nominated Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. It provides the opportunity to savor more than just Paul Newman's Tony-nominated turn as the Stage Manager, but also an estimable production of one of the great American texts.

Thus, Showtime allows the beyond-Broadway audience to participate in a dialogue about the state of the culture. Really, that's the finest achievement of the televisual direction of James Naughton, who also directed the production on Broadway. Each shot signifies the erudition of the cable audience. That makes it impossible to condescend to the play's secluded turn-of-the-century small-town setting of Grovers Corners, New Hampshire. And that makes the characters' barely recognized desire for a part in something greater than themselves both undeniably shared and unequivocally achieved.

Somehow, in the 00's it's become hip to diss Our Town. Therefore, each time a Showtime viewing of the play inspires an honest tear or an imaginative thought, not only is the bulwark strengthened against received cynicism but the play's own unfashionable themes are validated, proven timelessly true.

Thornton Wilder's masterpiece of earnest theatricality embarrasses current notions about people's relationship to art, love, culture, and - this is the biggie - death.

"I am interested in how big things like that get started," says the Stage Manager to introduce a flashback before the second act ("Love & Marriage") union between Emily Webb (Maggie Lacey) and George Gibbs (Ben Fox). The entire play - set at the turn of the century, a distant world even when the play was first produced in 1938 - represents the act of "remembering," dramatized.

The "big thing" of Our Town gets started with Act I: "The Daily Life", chronicling some of the events in Grovers Corners on a single, seemingly randomly chosen day when Emily and George are youngsters still in school. In the first act, the Stage Manager introduces the major characters: Emily and George, their siblings and parents, the town drunk, the newspaper delivery boy, the sheriff, and others (including the town historian who gives a magnificent speech about the layers of rock that, after millions of years of development, form the foundation for Grovers Corners).

The act climaxes with the play's first overt epiphany: "Isn't the moon terrible!" exclaims Emily, looking out of her window. The town illuminated by moonlight - a sublime lighting effect even on television - most of the characters pause to bask in it (Jayne Atkinson, in a lunar-brilliant rendition of George's mother, attempts to hide her blushing response to the moon's intensity).

The entire act, upon poignant reflection, is full of epiphanies worth basking in: George's flirtation through algebra with Emily, the town drunk Simon Stimson's (Stephen Spinella) shamed response to a neighbor's kindness. Simon's tombstone in Act III is engraved with musical notes that nobody can decipher. In all art, there are no more devastatingly decipherable depictions of family relations than the father-son talk about house chores or the following mother-daughter exchange: "Mom, am I pretty?" / "You're pretty enough for all normal purposes." It's through such remarkable - "terrible!" - details that their town becomes Our Town.

Before the wedding in Act II, the Stage Manager ("In this play, I take the role of the minister") provides a "sacrament" ("I don't know what that means, but I can guess"). He delivers a reverie on love and sex ("Every time a child is born, it's nature trying to make the perfect human being"). Remember, sex is not exclusively about procreation, but procreation - the cycle of life and death - is nothing if not sex. The Stage Manager honors the ritual of marriage, by recognizing the witnesses, living and dead: "Millions of 'em. They set out to live two by two."

To dramatize the passing on of culture, George asks for advice about marriage from Emily's father (Jeffrey DeMunn). At one moment he defends the common sense behind wedding superstitions ("Don't be the first one to fly in the face of custom!"), the next he relinquishes ideas about marriage inherited from his father ("So I took the opposite of his advice and I've been happy ever since"). The expanded significance of the ritual, made evocatively palpable by Wilder, causes Emily to beg before the wedding: "Why can't I stay for awhile just as I am?"

In some ways, that despair underlies the recent disfavor greeting the revival of Our Town. In the forever-profound final act, the deceased Emily returns to relive a single day in her life (she chooses her twelfth birthday). She is warned: "You not only live it. You watch yourself living it." This reveals the purpose of Wilder's explicit theatricality: the out-of-time narration, the "Stage Manager," and the limited sets ("for those who feel like they need scenery"). Wilder connects the fleeting experience of spectatorship and identification of theatre with the reality of death. "We don't have time to look at one another," Emily moans.

Yet, the best in theatre vivifies one's sense of life and the infinite. "Oh Earth, you're too wonderful to realize. Do any humans realize?" Emily's spirit asks. The Stage Manager answers: "Saints and poets, maybe, they do so." Do not miss this opportunity to share in a contemporary troupe's attempt to look with the eyes of saint-and-poet Wilder. You might share Emily's sex-and-art, life-and-death exaltation: "I can't look at it hard enough!"

Originally published by GayToday.com
June 09, 2003

To Bottom Or Not To Bottom? That Is The Question

2007-12-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

Querelle
DVD Review by John Demetry

You know the movie's a masterpiece when a character's internal deliberation between top and bottom sexual positions reveals unuttered philosophical implications. In Querelle, a sexual act carries with it the burden of culture and the longings of the soul.

"It's a game without weight," boasts married brothel owner Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) of his gay trysts. Rainer Werner Fassbinder proves just how weighty the stakes of gay desire really are in his final film, the 1982 Querelle.

The DVD release of Querelle restores an unacknowledged cinema truth. Querelle is the Citizen Kane of Queer Cinema. In it, the radical German avant-garde filmmaker extends gay camp self-consciousness to a still-revolutionary awareness of suppressed gay desire in cinematic codes and sociopolitical reality. Too weighty? Fassbinder helps carry the burden by creating a film of overwhelming erotic force. Querelle combats pop indoctrination by distilling, heightening, and expanding pop's pleasures and pangs.

Every single frame of Querelle lets loose "strange revelations." That's the phrase Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero) uses to describe his self-discovery as he recognizes his attraction to the sailors he commands - especially distant, narcissistic Querelle (Brad Davis). Seblon intones in his tape recorder: "My love makes me softer;" "I am glowing and melting."

Querelle is a sailor and a peddler of opium. But Querelle - with Davis' movie-icon physique - is the real fix in the port city of Brest. He manipulates the desires of others to instigate a psychologically complex plot of seduction, murder, revenge, and self-destruction.

Querelle is a screen reflecting the projections not only of Seblon, but also of Robert (Hanno Poschl), Querelle's admiring/jealous brother; Nono, a married Black pimp who trades in sex at the roll of the dice; Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), Nono's aging wife and whore and Robert's lover; Gil (Poschl again!), a tall, dark cowardly closet-case; and Roger (Laurent Malet), the beautiful effeminate boy pining for Gil. As Lysiane sings: "Each man kills the thing he loves." Querelle represents for each what they want to crush and to covet.

In Querelle, Fassbinder's images glow - and melt hetero movie mythology. He shoots within the labyrinthine walls, studded with penis-shaped edifices, of a highly artificial backlot set - decorated with vulgar graffiti and graphic Kama-Sutra-style etchings of sex acts. Such tactics, like the voice-over narration, the fade-to-white inter-titles, the Jean Genet epigraph, distance the spectator. Fassbinder harkens back to German Expressionist filmmaking and Brechtian Epic Theatre to bare the oppressive ideology determining narrative structures.

Introducing a scene, the narrator exposes its artificiality as: "A transposition of the event in which Querelle revealed himself to us." In the ensuing sequence, Querelle murders a fellow sailor, who has disrobed. Querelle slits the sailor's throat - resulting in a fount of blood and a death kick that almost knocks over a fake tree. Querelle kisses the murdered sailor and washes the blood off his hands in a reflective pool. "It is comparable to the Visitation," the narrator intones. Fassbinder reveals Querelle's essence as objectified "monster" and fictional character. Yet: the sensuality of the sequence signifies a yearning to be cleansed, to obtain grace for both Querelle and the movie's spectator.

The intellectual romance and the open eroticism of Querelle are so lush they are intoxicating. Using layers of discourse and narration, Fassbinder's narrative efficiency frees him to make softer (and harder!) his lavish inquisition on the social construction of identity - a Surrealistic strategy.

The glam lighting's vivid complementary colors (blue in the foreground, red-orange in the background) and the male chorus chanting on the soundtrack keep each image pulsing. The hallucinatory soft-focus photography connotes a tactile appreciation of male forms, a very explicitly gay imagining of movie's subconscious allure.

Visions of men - men and more men - posing or in stylized movement within the frame designate a world constructed out of the mystery of masculinity. "Masculinity": a myth undercut by its own covert homoeroticism and femininity, mirrored and distorted in homo codes. That is the psychic "weight" forming each suture and resonating in the portraitures in the gallery of male types (and actress Moreau) of Querelle.

Fassbinder develops his formalism - his "perfect unity" - around the split-consciousness caused by oppressive, homophobic ideology. He expresses psychological mystery by casting Poschl to play both Querelle's brother and Querelle's first love, by accenting the feminine beauty of Roger (who, we are told, looks like his sister: "You got the same eyes. You got the same chops"), by allowing Moreau to declare the revelatory recognition of difference: "I'm too fat!" Querelle, himself, is torn between his humanity and his objectification.

By taking a century of pop and high art advances out of the closet, Fassbinder brings a culture's repression to the light reflected back from the screen - a "painful glow." Fassbinder graciously gives Moreau the definitive words (spoken to Querelle): "You've destroyed me. You have mystical powers. They multiply infinitely." You cannot look away.

Originally published by GayToday.com
May 05, 2003

Dual Consciousness

2007-12-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

Disco 3
CD Review by John Demetry

Of all the Pet Shop Boys' "Disco" albums, Disco 3 is the most welcome. Their last album, the wonderful Release, featured a different sound for the group: mellower, blues-ier, guitar-driven. The "Disco" discs, collections of new and remixed dance songs, are heavy with a decidedly techno, rather than pop, bent.

The most moving song on Release was the ode to gay families, "Here," in which Tennant invited his audience into his home (though the richest songs have since proven to be "Birthday Boy" and "London"). On the original "Here," a simple bass beat was surrounded by an embracing soundscape of synth swirls and a holy chorus. The Pets' melancholy, utterly devastating, sound played up bittersweet irony: "We all have a dream of a place we belong / . . . / But sometimes we don't notice when the dream has come true."

Has any song ever cried out more for a dance remix? This dream comes true on "Disco 3". The techno introduction to "Here (PSB new extended mix)" overlays one beat track after another, establishing the song's foundations. While the Release version presented "home" as welcoming bedrock, granted often a painfully elusive one, the Disco 3 remix of "Home" offers the dancefloor pleasure of creating one's own home, one's own place in the sound space. Choose your beats - and move!

The remix of "Here" connects to the dazzling dance version of "Home and dry (Blank and Jones remix)": re-defining "home" as a domestic relationship between two men. The synthesized whisper in the Release version of "Home and Dry"- "We're going home" - now becomes the introduction to the dance mix's killer - killer! - reconfiguration of the song's essential beats: an existential challenge turned into a euphoric rave-up. The song's "we" re-imagines "home" as a space for infinite dance responses.

The Pets do something different than only creating gay pop that introduces straights to gay emotions and, finally, gives gays a pop home of their own. They often utilize their razor sharp wit to scrutinize gay culture.

"The only crime is irrelevance," sings Tennant on the wicked "If looks could kill." A been-there-done-that pop tune about the failure to overcome romantic heartbreak, it cuts deep into nightclub self-absorption. "Sexy Northerner (Superchumbo mix)" doesn't have the hilariously rousing "They're not all football fags!" cheer that helped make the original a satirical blast. The remix's restriction to the refrain "How does he do it?" suggests neurotic shallowness even as the song entices listeners to perform their own sexy strut.

The Disco 3 Neil-Tennant sung version of "Positive Role Model" (originally the climactic song from their brilliant musical soundtrack "Closer to Heaven"), decries "Advocate"-style hypocrisy and conveys disappointment in gay culture's failure to live up to the promise of AIDS-era (note the triple-meaning of the word "positive") activism and philosophy. The new lyrics are stinging: "So much for making it day by day / Back on everything / Instead of taking it another way / We're back on everything." Get into the groove: the Pets musically breakdown the phrase "positive role model" and its multi-significance to gay culture - as capitulation to het values or as individual fulfillment.

The Pets open Disco 3 with a primer on social-aesthetic theory, the new song "Time on my hands." The song addresses the dangers of leisure time - having too much time on your hands - by equating this contemporary concern with the music artist's work in a temporal medium. Disco 3 gives idle minds (and feet) plenty of good, fun, imaginative work.

The Pets teach by example. They take the gorgeously plaintive "London" - about the experience of refugees in England - from Release and deconstruct it on two tracks. The first redux, "London (Thee Radikal Blaklite Edit)," restricts the vocals to the synthesizer background from the original, while elongating and embroidering that song's sudden upbeat tempo. It's the musical equivalent of the song proper's refrain: "Let's do it - let's break the law!"

Meanwhile closing track "London (Genuine Piano mix)" singles out one of Tennant's most expressive vocals against a piano orchestration of the song. Tennant's halting enunciations - "Te-ell it li-ike it i-is" - are as analytical as the techno mix's polythrythms. While the polyrhythms challenge the audience to move to unexpected - outsider - beats, Tennant's vocals illustrate the beauty of such understanding. The greatness of "London" is its amazing examination of a specific political circumstance from numerous (musical and ideological) perspectives. Thus, the three independent yet interconnected versions convey an incredible worldview.

No song on Disco 3 better conveys that expansive vision than "Try it (I'm in love with a married man)." The Pets cover the Bobby Orlando-scribed song originally performed by the girl duo Oh Romeo. By turning the character of "the other woman" into "the other man," Tennant acts out the dual consciousness of gay experience in a hetero society - and expands that insight to include women and men (gay, straight and on the d.l.).

He sings: "Do you think about me, darling / When you make love to your wife? / ... / Are you lonely when you're with her? / Do you ever long for me?" That dual consciousness is acted out as domestic fantasy. The song doubles every expression of longing: equally humorous and touching. Each beat on Disco 3 resonates with such complexity of emotions. To dance is liberation.

Originally published by GayToday.com
April 21, 2003

Heads or Tails

2007-12-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

8 Women
DVD Review by John Demetry

Far from heaven, Francois Ozon's 8 Women is all we've got to show up the great pretenders of avant-gay cinema in 2002. Fortunately, Ozon, the always-a-bridesmaid gay French auteur, never panders to the elitism that probably attracts (American) audiences to his movies. He whips out his wicked humor, campy panache, and unexpected heart.

Ozon's sympathy for the eight women of the title is something to behold. He casts eight exceptional French actresses, some of them among the biggest stars in international cinema. It would be too cruel (and 8 Women is pretty cruel) for Ozon to exploit audience fascination for these actresses: Catherine Deneuve! Emmanuelle Beart! Fanny Ardant! Isabelle Huppert! Ozon genuinely invites the audience into a reverie.

A bejeweled curtain across which the film's title appears references the jewels falling in slow-motion at the beginning of Douglas Sirk's 1959 Imitation of Life. The Sirk film, the height of its genre, made racially-loaded melodrama out of the conflicting will and subjugation of four women. If that film was an imitation of life, then 8 Women is an imitation of movies.

Following the title, Ozon displays the names of each of the eight female stars over a shot of a flower. He photographs the actresses in a similar manner: as when Beart's bleached 'do is accented by green wallpaper or when Ardant blooms under a spotlight to unveil the red lining to her black coat. He gives the flowers, isolated from their natural context, the fetishistic voluptuousness of Georgia O'Keeffe paintings or Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. Imbuing the flowers with that kind of meaning is not unlike the process of projection and fantasy imposed upon movie stars.

Movie-watching projection and fantasy play out on the stage that Ozon next introduces. First, he pans across an obviously artificial snowbound estate - linking sexual fantasy to class desire, the components of movie deception. Then, he cuts to the interior, introducing Virginie Ledoyen (the story's not-so-virginal ingénue), who wears a red 1950s dress that sets off the red wallpaper in the background. Every image is pregnant with such overabundance and wit - recognizing how 1950s pop often flipped the era's official psychology ("Frigid? Is that a new word?" "Lesbian? You need treatment!").

8 Women is a mystery. The master of the film's colorific manse - the husband, father, lover, brother, employer of the eight women - is stabbed in the back. . . in bed. Each of the eight women is a suspect. The opening moments, detailed here, provide clues to solving the deeper mysteries of 8 Women - without giving away its surprises.

In order to prove their innocence, all eight women must reveal their deepest secrets (conveniently conducive to their alibis). It's an ingenious structure, in which each character is stripped from one "type-casting" to another. "I'm a failed bourgeoisie. You're a failed whore," says Ardant to sister-in-law Deneuve.

"Everyone should stay in their proper place," argues Beart, as the maid who eroticizes her class exploitation, sexually servicing the house's patriarch out of amorous devotion to the matriarch. Always improper, Ozon allows seeds of guilt to blossom with complexity, disrupting the mystery plot mechanisms. 8 Women is a real "Ice-woman Cometh" - exploding with hidden urges.

The first of the delightful musical sequences performed by each of the actresses, an overt breach with genre convention, gives the finger to Daddy. Later, Ozon breaks down movie manipulation when a brawl between two of the women (too delicious to reveal which ones here!) gradually turns into a make-out session. Ozon's smartest contribution to feature films has been his ability to identify and upset the construction of audience expectations - revealing movies' manipulation of deeply-ingrained beliefs.

Ozon tantalizes with suggestions of individual mysteries within movie projection - "Every sensation: heads or tails," sings Beart. Ozon's heads-or-tails sensitivity is conveyed in this dialogue between mother Deneuve and daughter Ledoyen:

Ledoyen: "Who is my father?"

Deneuve: "A man I loved. Having you so close to me brings me both joy and sorrow."

After this exchange, Ozon cuts to an eavesdropping Ardant crying behind a curtain - a piquant portrait of audience identification. The joy and sorrow resonating in pop culture is the film's subject; specifically, here, Ozon's gay-male longing mirrored in "women's- picture" melodrama. However, pop culture is also revealed to be an extension of patriarchal anxieties - "It's awful when a daddy cries!"

Those anxieties trap the characters, destined to perpetuate the fantasy into reality. The disturbing, unexpected, irony of Ozon's fatalistic conclusion - "There is no happy love" - is that it serves to excuse his own acquiescence to hetero movie conventions. Ozon will only find the freedom he denies his characters when he liberates his own gay desires at the movies (as he once did in the mega-hot short A Summer Dress). If only Ozon had the balls to make a movie called: "8 Men". That would be closer to heaven.

Originally published by GayToday.com
March 10, 2003

"Wide awake but still dreaming"

2007-12-11T04:31:00.000-08:00

Other People's Songs
CD Review by John Demetry

Other People's Songs makes explicit the truth behind Erasure's entire catalogue of campy gay pop songs. Every song on the new cover album resonates with pop inspiration transformed into action. Not for nothing does Erasure include a take on The Korgis' "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime." "Change your heart / It will astound you," promises singer Andy Bell.

Of course, that is the great challenge of pop. It ain't easy. Knowing that - feeling it! - Erasure, best known for their '80s hits, consistently makes perfect pop music to keep you sailing (as on an "Ebb Tide") through a culture of daily drudgery, political perplexity, and soul-sucking cynicism.

Erasure's Vince Clarke and Bell discover the ideal phrase to describe their art in the Cliff Eberhardt-scribed "Goodnight":

"Wide awake but still dreaming"

Wide awake, Erasure relates to and expands pop emotion by connecting it to gay experience. But still dreaming, Erasure does this without irony.

They aim higher for absolute emotional sincerity without commoditization (as satirized on the last track, a clover cover of "Video Killed the Radio Star"). The lullaby-cum-prayer of "Goodnight" is offered by one lover to another, who is absent.

The gesture extends to a singer addressing his audience - a spiritual suture as
AIDS-era poignant as it is philosophically pithy. "Goodnight" exemplifies Bell's high-resolution androgynous voice. On that track, his torch-song vocalization recalls the husky-voiced Alison Moyet (Clarke's Yaz partner) - revealing and reveling in pop complexity.

On others, Bell's voice signifies a variety of life experience, yet always distinctly gay. Instead of the trenchant irony Morrissey brings to Elvis rock heritage, Bell's earnest emotionalism transforms "Can't Help Falling In Love" into a common-sense anti-homophobia declaration.

He recognizes pop tutelage, and reveals gay maturity, on matters of heartbreak in the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" - doing both Brothers' parts suggests a lonely sing-along. On the slowed-down "True Love Ways," Bell does what he always does best, expressing emotional wonder:

"Sometimes we'll sigh / Sometimes we'll cry."

Mostly, Bell smiles. And I defy anyone to do differently during the vivacious cover of Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel's "Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile)" - the best glam rock song this side of Roxy Music. The track, with Clarke and producer Gareth Jones' witty sonic abstractions and teasing pauses, carries the weight of a heavy word: "Semiotics" - the study of cultural signs.

Check out the title (also the song's refrain): The distinctly sexual physical response ("Come Up") to stimuli ("See Me") results in blessed emotion ("Make Me Smile").

Because Erasure validates gay feelings - engendered by pop and by life - the most striking line in the song gains new significance:

"I know what faith is and what it's worth."

The sentiment is mirrored in the cover of The Righteous Brothers' "Ebb Tide":

"I can tell / I can feel / You are love / You are real."

With Bell's wildly unencumbered camp wail, the song has a tidal pull that draws the listener to the dance floor.

"Ebb Tide" catalogues physical gestures between lovers. In recognizing the genuine emotions behind them, the song describes these intimacies in terms of a sustained metaphor: "So I rush to your side / Like the on. . . coming tide."

Continuing the techno experiments of post-"Pop!" Erasure, Clarke and Jones break down, by boogying down, the original's Phil-Spector wall of sound, allowing infinite points of imaginative recognition and dance responses - just like lovemaking.

This marks a definite political act on the part of Erasure. Note how the gay artists liberate hetero pop by deftly playing the pronoun game. On "Everyday," Bell's love for a "her" comes "faster than a rollercoaster" - a vernacular (pop) metaphor if there ever was one.

Bell's description of the perfect "him" on the undeniably infectious "Walking In the Rain" is backed up by a girl-group chorus - a pop convention that can support anyone's love ideal.

Erasure glories in the ever-ambiguous pop "you" on "When Will I See You Again?" Adapting The Three Degrees smooth soul classic, Erasure shares a precious moment. On the track, AIDS-era coping and faith speaks to universal desires:

"Will I have to wait forever? Will I have to suffer and cry the whole night through?"

To answer those eternal questions, Erasure puts a gospel groove on Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill" - the album's first single, a spiritually joyful must-own record.

Erasure's cover defiantly dances through intense imagery of dehumanization and transcendence:

"I was feeling part of the scenery / I walked right out of the machinery / My heart going boom boom boom."

Erasure finds hope in the miraculous connection with pop. "Turning water into wine," they make other people's songs into their own.

Originally published by GayToday.com
March 3, 2003

The Insignificance Of Oscar

2007-12-11T04:21:00.000-08:00

Catching Up with the Oscar Contenders: Nicholas Nickleby, The Hours, Talk To Her, Adaptation, Max, and The Pianist
Film Reviews by John Demetry

It's that time of year for movie fans to catch up with the Oscar contenders. I did so myself, recently taking in six buzzed-about movies. I know it seems silly, but it can also make for a fun way of taking account of the state of movies.

The frustrating truth is that the Academy Awards are important for two reasons. First, for those who don't live in major metropolitan areas, sometimes the only art-house (independent and foreign) films that become or remain available are those that get Oscar validation.

Second, many a young movie enthusiast first explores the terrain of classic and even contemporary cinema with the Oscars as a guide.

If the Academy members voting for the Oscars had a clue, they'd be sure to highlight, for moviegoers present and future, Douglas McGrath's splendid adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. The star of the British Queer as Folk, Charlie Hunnam, makes a smashing, sexy Nicholas - conveying both goodness and pride with every matinee-idol twinkle. There's an almost queer sensitivity he shares with Jamie Bell's abused, orphaned Smike, one of the most moving characterizations of the year.

To contrast the virtuous, McGrath casts such actors as Christopher Plummer, Jim Broadbent, and Juliet Stevenson to give definitive portraits of Dickensian evil, always wrought with a sense of understanding for the squalor that deadens their hearts.

Although necessarily shearing Dickens' novel, McGrath sustains the sprawling connections between Industrial Revolution horrors and character motivation, still spiked by Dickens' engrossing plot twists and coincidences. That social-economic narrative rigor - originating in Dickens' mass-produced serial style - allows McGrath to honor the development of lower-class culture as in the contrasting productions of "Romeo and Juliet", the paper dolls of the title sequence, and the traveling-troupe stylization of the movie itself.

In addition, the extended family formed by Nicholas - as noted by Nathan Lane's drama-queen narration - links to the contemporary phenomenon of gay families. In adapting Dickens, McGrath recognizes the ongoing struggle to balance personal loss with perseverance.

That's everything director Stephen Daldry fails to do with The Hours. Instead of recognizing a century of gay, feminist and popular culture, Daldry drapes the experience of three women in tony drabness. No vivacity! No ingenuity! Daldry allows Nicole Kidman to play Virginia Woolf, struggling through mental illness to write Mrs. Dalloway, as a petulant sadsack, not an anguished, vibrantly intelligent artist. That makes it easier to lie about the influence of the undeniable Mrs. Dalloway, focusing on the book's relationship to the lives of two lesbians played by Julianne Moore in 1951 and Meryl Streep in 2001.

Scored to Philip Glass' tinker-toy music, Daldry crosscuts between the three characters as if arranging flowers in a vase. The Hours shows the experience of art, sexuality, and AIDS, not as imparting compassion or in coping with oppression or examining states of consciousness, but as an avenue to phony psychobabble liberation allowed by economic security. The year's most despicable Oscar-baiting screen moment: Ed Harris, as a gay poet suffering with AIDS, throws himself out of a window so that friend Streep can get over her neurotic hang-ups.

No wonder a gay filmmaker as joyfully subversive a lover of pop culture as Pedro Almodovar seems to feel that in order to be taken seriously he also has to be dull. The use of modern dance in Talk to Her introduces the film's theme of male adoration and female subjugation. That and the (lame) silent film aside (featuring an incredibly shrinking man climbing inside of a giant vagina) reveal an artist no longer reveling in the hidden sexual codes within pop forms. The closest he gets are shots of dreamy Dario Grandinetti crying. However, even his tears are incited by conventional standards of "beauty," while Almodovar locates the source of his emotions in typical hetero anxiety.

There's more hetero anxiety in the totally unpleasant Adaptation. Reuniting the director (Spike Jonze) and screenwriter (Charlie Kaufman) of the inventive and insightful "Being John Malkovich", Adaptation is endlessly self-referential.

The plot of Adaptation concerns the efforts of Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) to write Adaptation. Doing so, he overcomes his insufficient social skills with women, yet Jonze's visual style lacks any kind of erotic relationship to its subjects (maybe that would be too Hollywood). Meanwhile, Charlie learns to balance Hollywood conventions with his own artsy self-consciousness. The problem: Artsy self-consciousness IS a Hollywood convention.

Former Spielberg collaborator Menno Mejyes knows it. That's the almost-salvaging grace of his directorial debut, Max. Publicists courting Oscar voters started the rumor that the Weimar-era Max is supposed to "humanize" Adolf Hitler. As played by Noah Taylor, a humanized Hitler is surely not a monster, but a loud-mouthed, unlikable, pathetic, unimaginative, vulgar son-of-a-bitch (whodathunk?). Luckily, Taylor and John Cusack (as fictional art dealer Max Rothman) are in on Meyjes' elaborate joke.

The conceit of Max is that Hitler's kitsch politics instigated the postmodern age. Meyjes uses the spectator's knowledge of what is to come to position every moment of the film, mixing low-brow humor (puns) with the modernist-era Expressionist visuals that connote the time (perhaps it holds the secret of history). Investigating the relationship of contemporary audiences to art and history, Meyjes settles on moral platitudes. Is it kitsch? "Modernism"? Or postmodernism? Who cares?

Roman Polanski also sets his artistic inquiry amidst the historical fact of the Holocaust in the The Pianist. Polanski's, however, is a spellbinding, clear-eyed vision. Awesome images of pianist Wlaydslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) dwarfed by a blasted out Warsaw or of atrocities (and resistance) from Szpilman's point of view exemplify Polanski's existential perversity - and maybe reveal the source of his unique perspective.

The much-misread final (credits) sequence is one of the most hypnotic screen moments: those hands, elaborating on the variants in the music, resonate with experience. It signifies life-sustaining ingenuity. It would be a shame if the Oscars (and history) deemed the ingenuity made spectacularly felt in McGrath's adaptation of Dickens to be insignificant.

Originally published by GayToday.com
February 10, 2003

Making History Dance

2007-12-11T04:15:00.000-08:00

Terminal Bar
Movie Review by John Demetry

"Blowjob? Who gives a shit?" That was Terminal Bar manager and bartender Sheldon Nadelman's way of reacting to his customers' occasional indiscretions. In the new documentary Terminal Bar by his son Stefan Nadelman, Sheldon here is describing a customer who bar-owner (and Sheldon's father-in-law) Murray Goldman would have preferred to be banned from the Terminal Bar after the customer was caught giving a blowjob in the bathroom. Sheldon's reasoning, however, was: "If you're funny, I'll put up with you."

The story is illustrated, like so many others, with a photo of the customer that was taken by Sheldon. Sheldon's collection of black-and-white photographs makes up the bulk of the visual wonders in Terminal Bar. The photos prove: Everyone has a history.

Stefan's approach to the history of the Terminal Bar, which closed in 1982, is as open-hearted as his father's principles and pictures. Inspired, no doubt, by his family legacy, Stefan engages the viewer with an exciting perspective on the Terminal Bar, the history of which wouldn't earn a footnote in a History textbook. Stefan finds expansive history in what is, essentially, his own story. Even at a fleet 22 minutes, Terminal Bar is a deeply humbling experience.

Learning about the changes undergone by the Terminal Bar, located at Eighth and 41st Street, one gets a larger sense of a changing New York City and American urban culture. Originally serving an Irish-American clientele when Goldman acquired it in 1958, the eventual dwindling of business invited a "new wave" of people seeking solace from urban despair and loneliness.

While Sheldon worked at the Terminal Bar from 1972 to 1982, it was a bar frequented by Black gay men. Such customers are the subjects of most of Stefan's photographs (along with the old-timers who didn't notice or didn't mind the changes). Through those photos and Sheldon's recollections, "Terminal Bar" becomes an expose on a specific subculture.

However, because it's so personal, Terminal Bar renders history through compassion. The direct stare into the camera that typifies most of Sheldon's portraitures acknowledges the relationship between subject and photographer. Here, it's not an artistic conceit: it conveys the truth about the social forces that brought them together. The Terminal Bar depended on its clients, and its clients needed the bar. Terminal Bar proposes a new way of thinking about how history works.

In many ways, history itself is the subject of Terminal Bar. Stefan quotes, visually and through voice-over narration by Tom Clifford, two news articles about the Terminal Bar: The Roughest Bar In Town by Orde Coombs, published in 1980; and Terminal Bar, Eighth Avenue: The End Is Near by Peter Genovese, published in 1982. Those are examples of "official" history, juxtaposed by Stefan's video documentary with the personal approaches of Sheldon's photography and oral reminiscences.

Stefan's use of the photographs (with video) in Terminal Bar not only repeats Sheldon's record of history. It also represents a son and a citizen trying to understand his own legacy. In that sense, Terminal Bar is also a history of a family. The profound social vision Stefan evidences goes even further. The spectator of Terminal Bar thrills to Stefan's discovery, while recognizing his/her own relationship to that history.

To express his story and to challenge the video audience to rethink its relationship to history, Stefan develops an impressive - exhilarating - technique. He uses the flexibility of digital video technology to make every photograph resonate even as he forces the spectator to adjust his/her vision to the speedy delivery of information.
Often the photographs vibrate with life as they form geometric designs (squares, rectangles, zigzags) across the screen. Stefan deconstructs or animates the images, always heightening and improving perception. He succeeds in conveying the feeling of history and life as both eternal (photographs) and fleeting (video's temporal manipulations). That is why I call "Terminal Bar" a "humbling experience."

Ah, but Terminal Bar also dances! The techno beats orchestrated by Dick Zved, Steve Rossiter, and Michael Reid bring the choreography of the images directly into the spectator's space. Stefan intends to provoke communal response. The final image of Terminal Bar promises: "To be continued. . ." On the screen? Hopefully. In life, too? That is up to all of us.

Originally published by GayToday.com
January 27, 2003

Teen Lesbians Blow Horn

2007-12-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

t.A.T.u: 200 KM/H In the Wrong Lane
CD Review by John Demetry

200 KM/H In the Wrong Lane sends out an alert to Gay Dance Club DJ's: t.A.T.u.'s brand of girl power rocks the house. t.A.T.u. is a Russian teen Europop girl duo with Lesbian overtones. There's nothing subtle in such lyrics as: "I long for you to hold me / Like your boyfriend . . . does" on the track "Malchik Gay." The girls, sure to be household names as the album only now begins cutting high into American radio charts, are blonde Lena Katina and short-cropped, dark-haired Yulia Volkova.

Their 'tude might be pretentious -- being deliberately, yet pleasurably, produced and pre-packaged by Martin Kierszenbaum, Robert Orton, and former Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood collaborator Trevor Horn. However, the Queer core of the teen angst in their slammin' ("Not Gonna Get Us") to sappy ("30 Minutes") songs rings truer than the "It sucks to be a pop star, so adore me" whininess of Britney, Pink, and hate-monger Eminem.

But can t.A.T.u. handle the epochal gay angst of "How Soon Is Now?" - everybody's favorite song by The Smiths? I couldn't believe my ears either! But, sure enough, t.A.T.u charms its way through the album's cover of the song.

The original Smiths track featured Morrissey on vocals detailing, with exquisite anguish and sustaining wit, the often painful dating rites of the gay club scene. Backed up by the monumental guitar of Johnny Marr and a momentous orchestration, the original "How Soon Is Now?" gave grand, enveloping imminence to gay experience.

At half the length (but with the exact same lyrics), t.A.T.u.'s poppy cover can't do that. Katina and Volkova, singing together, don't suffer Morrissey's loneliness. Their teenybopper chirps can't carry the weight of such lyrics:

"When you say it's gonna happen now / What exactly do you mean? / See I've already waited too long / And all my hope is gone"

But who in their teenage years didn't feel this way? The pop pleasure of t.A.T.u.'s "How Is Now?" recognizes a shared gay history and culture to help get you through - whether it be teen frustration or adult torment. The song still addresses this pop right: "I am human and I need to be loved / Just like everybody else does."

As with "How Soon Is Now?", t.A.T.u. pull off a neat bit of pop star self-consciousness in the song "Clowns." It's repeated call - "Can you see me now?" - inspires a dance response in the affirmative: "Don't you hide your eyes from me / Open them and see me now." The title - "Clowns" - might be in reference to the innuendo and masking through which closeted pop engages gay-cult audiences.

Although hardly groundbreaking, t.A.T.u.'s openness is welcome. When t.A.T.u. puts lesbianism in perspective to pop culture - "Clowns all around you / It's a cross I need to bear" - the cross need not be endured alone.

That's also the message of the expansive "Stars." "Are we in space? Do we belong? / Someplace where no one calls it wrong," sing t.A.T.u. while the music transforms from a slow-groove to a Russian folk sound leading into a Russian-language sorta-rap. Playing on the double-meaning of "stars" - galactic and celebrity - t.A.T.u. also doubles pop emotion in the "crying"/"flying" refrain: "And for the first time in my life / I'm crying / ... / I'm flying." Not up to the standards of genius gay pop like The Smiths, The Pets, or Erasure, t.A.T.u. still celebrate pop's complex simplicity.

On the track "Show Me Love", t.A.T.u. simultaneously admits and honors what is probably the genesis of the group's novelty: the Swedish mega-blockbuster "Show Me Love" (a.k.a. "Fucking Amal"), a teen lesbian romance. To this day, I've never seen a movie elicit such rambunctious responses from its audience as the three times I saw it in theatres - a sure sign of both the need for pop that addresses gay audiences and the universal appeal of gay pop.

Fans will catch the references to the movie: the tentative telephone conversation that opens the song; and lyrics like "Show me love / 'Til you open the door." The entirety of 200 KM/H In the Wrong Lane catches up to that movie's infectious charm.

The quintessential t.A.T.u. track is the first single off the album: the Horn-produced "All the Things She Said." It's a blast: rocking through sexual confusion and first crushes, shame and joy. The video, available for viewing on the computer on the CD, takes it a step further by being overtly political. Through the ominous image of a barbed-wire fence, it links world-wide homophobia to a national legacy of oppression. It gives new weight to t.A.T.u.'s repeated: "This is not enough!" Amidst the homogenous pop of our current culture, Trevor Horn gives t.A.T.u. the sound to knock the wall down.

American Icon

2007-12-10T18:01:00.000-08:00

About Schmidt
Film Review by John Demetry

"Abe Lincoln?" asks a mobile-home acquaintance. "Who's that?" jokes Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson). He's very proud of his cleverness, oblivious to the political connotations of his joke.

About Schmidt, the new film directed by Alexander Payne and co-written by Jim Taylor, is about the way the mythology of American history and politics participates in each American's life. As with this incisive - and very funny - exchange, the creators of About Schmidt take a good look at a man rich with such associations.

Schmidt retires from the insurance business at the beginning of the film. At his retirement party, a colleague and friend offers this convoluted toast:

"What really means something is the knowledge that you devoted your life to something meaningful."

Schmidt will spend the rest of the movie trying to unravel the "means-something" and "something-meaningful" of his life. As the friend concludes his toast, Payne's camera remains unrelenting on Nicholson's desperately searching face: "Take a good look at a very rich man."

Schmidt has devoted his life to being a practical businessman, to being a provider to his wife and daughter, and to being able to enjoy his retirement at the age of 66. However, at the time of that retirement, he feels very poor, indeed. The retired Schmidt's way of dilly-dallying is getting a smoothie and listening on his car radio to Rush Limbaugh warning of Liberals "putting a dark lining on a silver cloud."

Payne and Taylor convey the disappointments, and attempts to cope with those disappointments, of a commonplace silent-majority Republican. It takes guts and talent to use an unorthodox, maybe even unappealing, subject like Schmidt to tell a larger story about American life. It turns out to be a necessary artistic decision. Payne and Taylor challenge the audience to reflect on the culture it shares with Schmidt.

Needing "something meaningful" in his life, Schmidt writes letters to a boy he sponsors in Africa. In one letter - his own American narrative - he indulges in a fantasy about how his life might have been had he realized his All-American dream of success and acclaim in business. Payne visualizes this fantasy with mock Fortune magazine covers featuring Schmidt. Aren't magazine covers, after all, one of the ways that history gets written, that values are set?

Schmidt attempts to understand his relationship to American values. But what's deeply funny about About Schmidt is how little Schmidt's reality - and his real pain - gets addressed by the very history and history-making he turns to for that elusive silver lining.

During his mobile-home trip after attending - and failing to stop - his daughter's wedding to a long-haired salesman, Schmidt visits a wax museum erected in honor of the pioneers who settled the West. Payne frames a shot so that Schmidt disappears into the fake setting. "Only the strong survive," reads (warns?) a placard. On his way to the wedding, Schmidt talks to a Native American and he realizes: "They got a raw deal." As if to emphasize changing consciousness, he repeats: "A raw deal."

During Schmidt's roadtrip, Payne subtly creates visual humor out of hallowed wide country expanse and small-city congestion. Vertical rhymes in wide horizontal compositions, edits to different angles of both business buildings and country crossroads turn an inquiring eye on Americana. In one shot, a bug goes "splat" against the movie-screen-shaped windshield of Schmidt's mobile home. Here's bug in your eye! Payne and Taylor investigate American icons.

The character of Schmidt could not have the same meaning without Jack Nicholson - the icon and the actor - in the role. With Nicholson as their focus, Payne and Taylor run "history" counter to pop history.

The character of Schmidt suffers embarrassments: his uselessness after retirement, his daughter's marriage into a family of which he disapproves, the discovery - through letters, a history he didn't know was his own - that his late wife committed adultery with his friend and colleague.

As a performer, Nicholson can't rely on the explosive virility he used to express masculine pain in the Nixon-era 1970s: Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Last Detail. Through Nicholson, the defeats Schmidt suffers become extra-funny - and extra-intimate.

Once the abandoned son, Nicholson now plays the defeated father. With that irony, Payne and Taylor make a movie about some guy named Schmidt into a movie about the audience's relationship to Nicholson. At the end, Nicholson sheds Schmidt's tears for him.

Originally published by GayToday.com

Corinthian View

2007-12-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

Finisterre by Saint Etienne
CD Review by John Demetry

Don't miss how the best original song of the year - "New Thing" - begins. "Our Father who art in Heaven, please stay there." So announces the official-sounding male voice that intros and/or closes the tracks on Saint Etienne's delicious and delicate edifice: Finisterre. To mistake the "New Thing" intro for flippancy misunderstands the degree of Saint Etienne's seriousness.

Flirting with blasphemy, the two-boys-and-a-girl Britpop group actually traces the spiritual continuum running through consumer culture. Based on the plastic-mold repetition of the phrase "New Thing," the track makes the giggly connection between romantic flings and consumption.

Spritely sexy singer Sarah Cracknell coos: "New Thing / It's such a new thing / You've got me where you want me / You've got me where you want me / Oooh yeah. . ." The repeated refrain seems, at first, merely to reflect consumerism: the way that advertising bludgeons and molds consumers.

Cracknell ends the refrain with the vocalization: "Oooh yeah." Buried within that pop expression is a longing deeper than that for the "new thing." The command of pop forms to express individuality is Saint Etienne's answer to official ("Our Father who art. . .") definitions. (Cracknell later defies rock-cult common sense: "I believe in Donovan over Dylan.")

It signifies the search for truth amidst an ever-changing culture. There's no doubting the sincere, uncontainable, ache behind Cracknell's singing in the song's second refrain: "Could it be we'll stay together? / Will I ever know? / If this night could last forever / Maybe then I'll know." It's an incredible high - an affirmation - to hear so succinctly articulated the desire for eternity and for knowledge despite a culture of the fleeting, the one-nighters.

Cracknell's plaintive refrain gets synthesized - another kind of vocalization that fulfills Saint Etienne's information-age metaphysics. A computer declares Cracknell's basic human dreams. Words - meaning - are formed through the listener's imaginative participation with the music. The audience shares Cracknell's hopes with every dance response - an allegiance that connects both artist and audience to the elusive eternal.

That perspective is defined by songwriters Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs in "Amateur": "Get a Corinthian view!" It conflates pop marketing (Corinthian leather), the album's architectural metaphor (Corinthian order), and the pop group's dissemination of spiritual ideas (St. Paul's Corinthian letters). This on-high view of contemporary culture is Olympian and dizzying in its complexity. That also describes the group's polyrhythmic sound. It grooves and it moves - finding faith in fun and vice-versa.

Through lead vocalist Cracknell, Stanley and Wiggs topple cultural power structures. On the hiphop track "Soft Like Me," Saint Etienne eradicates Eminem's 8 Mile lie with an effervescent liberation from gender-based socialization: "Baby, I'll encourage you to be expressive not aggressive" and "If I never got no hugs when I fell down in the play-ground / Maybe it would be different now."

Such quotidian details (of motherhood and childhood) genuinely link Saint Etienne to the best hiphop, like Jay-Z's am-bi-guous "Diamond Is Forever": "But I was born in the city where the skinny niggaz die." You can't find much more different experiences than those of Cracknell's British lass and Jay-Z's B-boy, yet what these artists rap about actually overlaps in the mystery of their individual identities. That is pop truth.

It's also pop politics. Saint Etienne spells it out in "B92": "This is our wall of sound / Hate and fear are taking over this city / But they'll never get through when the records are sounding so pretty." The song's beautiful noise - channeled from the ether - recognizes Phil Spector, disco, hiphop, Gary Numan, and techno as modes available to express perseverance in the now and the always.

On the exquisite "Stop and Think It Over," Stanley and Wiggs indulge Cracknell's - our - doo-wop romantic confusion ("Could he be a lover? / Could he be a friend?"). Saint Etienne looks to The Supremes and pop history for clarity - simultaneously cross-referencing gay camp culture. The elongated techno soundscape of "The Way We Live Now" introduces Cracknell's declaration: "This time I'm gonna say / What's been building up for days." Saint Etienne is, rightly, in awe of emotional expression in all its forms, meeting new requirements.

"Have you ever been to a harvester before?" asks the narrator, kicking off the album's first track: "Action." The narrator's question poses communal ritual as the potential location for disseminating - ala the band's namesake - emotional Revelations. Cracknell's " Saturday-night/Sunday-morning call: "I've been searching for / All the people I used to talk to / And all the people who knew the answers / Let's get the feeling again."

On "Summerisle", Saint Etienne meditates on baptism as a return to roots: "Return to the river again / To live by the water again." Meanwhile, the disco beats of "Shower Scene" provide fluid contexts for the listener/dancer to "Call my name" - declaring the singer's identity and lovability.

Also, the title track begins with a memory - "I loved to draw the world when I was a little girl." Then, the beats multiply - "It helped me see the world as I wanted it to be." The dance beats underscore the freedom of Saint Etiennes' "perfect-city" dream.

Saint Etienne's concentration on the essence of culture and identity (roots, love, childhood) ironically - perfectly - leads up to "my message, really": "Finisterre / To tear it down and start again / Think about the Love / Inside." The complexity of Saint Etienne's art fulfills its blessed simplicity.

As Cracknell intones: "Feelings start to grow / The more you know." Saint Etienne's 2002 album, Finisterre, engages new feelings - or old ones in new ways. It's not just another "new thing."

Originally published by GayToday.com

Jinxed

2007-12-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

Die Another Day
Film Review by John Demetry

The Clash's "London Calling" blazes on the soundtrack - out of nowhere and nothing - as the arch-villain of this new Bond flick parachutes from a plane - held aloft by a British flag. It's a pretty awesome sound/image moment - but it begs the question: what the fuck is Madonna doing in this movie?

Director Lee Tamahori's punk gesture clashes with the capitulation inherent in casting Madonna. She delivers such wink-wink, nudge-nudge dialogue as: "I don't like cock fights." Tamahori takes advantage of pomo sophistication, ultimately making nothing more than a joke out of pathetic movie-watching rituals. He teases the audience with the possibility of reconsidering the Bond series through a post-Imperialist, post-Feminist perspective. Instead, Die Another Day is just another cock fight.

Madonna tosses out references to Freud in her title sequence song Die Another Day, challenging Freud to "analyze this!" If Tamahori really intended a self-referential critique - analysis! - he'd have had Robbie Williams do the title song. Instead, like Madonna, Tamahori is just a whore.

Just as Madonna exploits her sub-cult following, Tamahori came to Hollywood from New Zealand, surfing - Bond-style - on the genuine waves created by the great Once Were Warriors. Missed it in 1995? Rent it now! That film broke down the effects of colonial and machismo legacies on a Maori family. Tamahori executed emotional and physical wallops with an arresting graphic style.

That just goes to show that Tamahori knows what he's doing; or, really, that he should know better. Like the Asian villain in Die Another Day, Tamahori majored in Western hypocrisy. Apparently, he graduated with honors. It might take a secret agent to infiltrate and melt down his ice castle.

Tamahori offers some of the visual splendor and humor that's been missing from the Bond films since Sean Connery exited in Irvin Kershner's 1983 Never Say Never Again. He works in some visual puns, as when Bond is literally "saved by the bell." Such play needs to go deeper.

There's a telling shot of a road sign warning of minefields. It should alert audiences about Die Another Day and its semiotic booby traps. While Bond (Pierce Brosnan) and Jinx (Halle Berry) have sex, Tamahori's camera pans over to a crystal dish set - reducing the film to a merchandise catalogue.

The film's prize dish might be Berry (though my vote actually goes for the disfigured villains played by Toby Stephens and Rick Yune - whose chemistry suggests homoerotic bonds). Jinx/Berry enters the film in classic Bond-girl style - a slo-mo, hip-swiveling, two-piece-swim-suit reference to Ursula Andress in Dr. No.

The significance of Black Berry taking the place of white Andress suggests progress. It's phony progress. Andress' classic entrance - like Connery's still-breathless sexual conquests - brought a new era of sexual frankness and license to the screen - from the French New Wave to popular pulp. Berry's Oscar proves her image has already been co-opted by the mainstream - easily palpable to Bond's/our viewing. It's a total copout from the director who recognized the androgynous beauty of Rena Owen in Once Were Warriors.

Berry's knife-in-the-heart attack on an enemy anticipates such criticisms: "Read this, bitch!" The book she's referring to, funny enough, is the The Art of War. Don't read too deeply in to Die Another Day, Berry warns.

If the spectator does the work of reading Tamahori's images, all the fun of this stylish violence will reveal itself to be a call for war - as a "Freudian" amelioration of the fragile male ego. Such covert ideology means gold (or diamonds) at the post-9/11 box office. Jinx/Berry coldly sums up Tamahori and company's cynicism: "I think I broke her heart."

Die Another Day really is heartbreaking when Tamahori hedges on the promise of actor Toby Stephens' portrayal of the most potentially radical villain characterization in the Bond films. Stephens even inverts previous villain's fey demeanor, suggesting viral homo potential. The white Stephens plays an Asian man after he's had plastic surgery, creating a persona named Gustav Graves that mimics 007's white masculinity and "heroism" - like parachuting with a British flag - to gain popular acceptance and to cover up his criminal activities.

Gustav Graves also trades in Bond-style quips - which he hilariously describes as substitutes for "inadequacy." Tamahori might have portrayed the Western male ideal as a pathology that Bond himself must rise above. Instead, it's the villain's fascination and insufficiency that is pathological. He's a mere darkie - JINXED from birth. Only good old-fashioned action-movie violence - Freudian inevitability - can vanquish evil.

Graves lives his dreams because he does not sleep. At the end, poor old Money Penny enjoys the movie-like virtual reality of her fantasies - mirroring the audience's own relation to the Bond mythology. It reveals the villain's pathology as only a distortion of the truth about movie fantasies.

Oppression extends into waking dreams - movies used as an escape, while indoctrinating spectators with grotesque ideology. That grasp of oppression on the imagination lives to die another day.

Originally published by GayToday.com

The Stuff Of Legend

2007-12-10T17:37:00.000-08:00

Urbania
DVD Review by John Demetry

"We'd be the stuff of legend," moans Charlie (Dan Futterman) during the emotional climax of John Shear's Urbania. I almost couldn't believe my eyes and ears. Finally articulated in an American movie: my secret dream - and of how many other gay people?

Shear's adaptation of Daniel Reitz's play slipped through the cracks in 2000. But it can - and should - be regained on DVD. Shear and Reitz's theatricality - their Pet-Shop-Boys-esqueness - deepens the "urban legends" hook. They end up revealing clandestine wishes and civic hopes - a humanist coup.

At first, the film parlays a number of urban legends - a dog in the microwave, the black market kidney industry - as they intersect with the, as yet, undefined travails of Charlie. Charlie - seen in flash-forward - opens the film with a tease: "Just give me a second to figure out the ending." That is, "the ending" of his own urban legend in the making. Urbania has a daylight-saving's metaphysic.

In the beginning of the film, the spectator sees Charlie lying in bed - not yet knowing that the off-screen space signifies an absence. He says to his lover in a flashback: "If I sleep in your space you'll be in my dreams." The film's space is that urban dreamland. ("Is it you?" Charlie pleads in random phone calls throughout the film - a modern, desperate attempt at connection with the beyond.)

That's why the film's theatricality is so cinematic. Negative film space is filled with illumination - through editing, camera movement, or staging - like spotlights on stage. Each of the urban legends or terrors that creep into Charlie's dreamland is a drama played out in his mind.

Tortured faces, gay cruisers in the shadows, the humping sounds of neighbors, mocking heterosexual dalliances - those taken-for-granted public displays of affection - enter into the emptied space. The urban landscape recalls renderings of the Stations of the Cross.

Charlie's legend is a self-realizing crucifixion. His split-second decision is whether it will be a tale of salvation or damnation. Shear links the drama of human spiritual history to the contemporary narrative of Queer Rage. Urbania reaches outside of the solipsism this description may suggest, just as one hopes Charlie will see beyond potentially disastrous subjectivity that could be his ruin.

Flashbacks reveal a Gay Eden - life with Charlie's lover Chris (Matt Keeslar) and a birthday party with a penis cake. Enter the temptation of Forbidden Fruit: Dean (Samuel Ball), a serpent-tattooed thug who draws Charlie's attention - expressed in point-of-view shots - away from Chris.

This expresses the ubiquitous attraction of hetero-standards of masculinity. It's the same ideology that sends Charlie out on his quest for glory. "Total eye for an eye - it was positively Biblical," Charlie gloats - his soul in torment.

During this quest, he finds his unexpected mirror in Dean. In fact, this world built out of Charlie's fantasies, fears, and memories begins to encompass those of Dean and even other characters. It's Shear's "remote-mentality" perspective of city life.

As if surfing through the culture, Urbania also connects with artworks by gay pop music artists - the best way to gauge the Queer movie crop. And Urbania is certainly one of the best of the last two years.

The most trenchant song on the Pet Shop Boys album Release, titled "Birthday Boy," bestowed Christian compassion onto both Matthew Shepard and his murderers. The climactic moral channel-flipping of Urbania is equally open - and just as cathartic. The film's repeated mantra: "No objections to human needs."

At once psychological and social, realistic and surrealistic, theatrical and cinematic, Urbania might be taking place entirely in that Charlie-Chris dream space even as it embraces the entire city. "I'm gonna lie here and tell myself stories," Charlie suggests. The entire film's running time elicits the very imaginative process from the spectator that Charlie must learn - forgiveness and mourning.

"He Cried" from Maladjusted, Morrissey's last release, similarly evinced the spiritual truth in the spectacle of genuine emotion. One could set the words of Charlie's declaration to Morrissey's Gethsemane-staged faith in human feeling:

"We'd be the stuff of legend / Almost worthwhile / I want it out of me / I want you in me"

Futterman's soulful - theatrical, almost musical - line-readings display an actor's dramatic keenness in total empathy with his character's tragedy. He performs in the space where theatre and reality blend, where the gay experience becomes universal experience. Futterman cried. That is the stuff of legend.

Originally published by GayToday.com
December 02, 2002

Mounting Marivaux

2007-12-10T17:33:00.000-08:00

Triumph of Love
DVD Review by John Demetry

Triumph of Love is a radically sexy film. Through the image of actor Jay Rodan's hot ass, director Clare Peploe and writer/producer Bernardo Bertolucci deconstruct love to its essence.

Seen from the spying point-of-view of The Princess (Mira Sorvino), Rodan's Agis (true heir to The Princess' throne) rises from his bath in the woods, exposing his bare butt for The Princess' (and our!) viewing pleasure. This shot of Rodan's behind, framed through tree leaves and sun rays, repeats in hypnotic slow-motion.

It is The Princess' primal moment. She recognizes Otherness, and with it the attendant desire for connection. And it's also a symbol of the historical wrong that she must make right (her father usurped the throne from Agis' father). The Princess feels "a sense of justice as well as some strange inspiration."

Despite the Oedipal overtones, Peploe complicates hetero-conventions. Rodan's ass makes for a lusciously pansexual fetish - no strange delight to Bertolucci's queered sensibility. Even when his handsome, tanned face is revealed, Rodan's cleft-chin reminds of that dimpled derriere. No wonder The Princess disguises herself as a boy named Phocion to gain Agis' affection. Rodan's must be the most significant buttocks in the history of cinema!

An image so swoonderful in its boundless implications, it sends The Princess reeling onto her archetypal journey of self-definition. Peploe conveys The Princess' sexual awakening through a ravishing aesthetic realism.

For the entirety of Triumph of Love, Peploe sustains the erotic rapture of the vision that is Rodan's booty. The jump-cuts and the frenetic 16mm camera create a world of selected, then isolated, beauty. Sex is palpable everywhere. But it does not infect the world. Rather, the sensual shimmer of Fabio Cianchetti's cinematography cleanses the universe.

This intoxicating immediacy is the perfect way to adapt - or, really, to mount - Marivaux's 1732 comedy with film. ("Now!" is the film's first utterance.) The oscillation of theatrical artifice and film reality in every shot is as exhilarating as the way Peploe's careening camera disrupts the perfect Age-of-Reason symmetry of the garden and of the villa. (Or the way David Gilmour's guitar-emotions jazz the precision of the classical music score.)

The positive-negative sparks crackle when The Princess first dresses as the boy Phocion, then impersonates a female enemy of The Princess (yes, herself) called Aspasie. The Princess brings sexual desire into the rational world of Hermocrates (Ben Kinglsey), a philosopher who raises Agis to hate the Princess and all women (again connecting social-political systems with sexual repression).

The Princess brings out the desires of Hermocrates and his sister Leontine (Fiona Shaw) in a series of love proclamations that are as beguiling as pop songs. Sorvino generates an electric screen presence. So caught up in the sexual surges she unleashes - the sexiness of being desired as a boy or girl - she barely dissipates the pain caused by her deception, conducted through private sorrow and shame. ("I'm losing track of my own plot, I'm afraid," The Princess' classic summation of anybody's romantic travails.)

Even more complicated are the scenes with Agis. Sorvino and Rodan uncover the ineffable erotic quality of male bonding: as elaborate in its clandestine manipulation by pop as that perpetrated by The Princess. Agis teaches Phocion to shoot arrows at a target made up like The Princess, with her heart as bull's eye.

It's so sensual that The Princess really does seem more herself as Phocion. Her many masks are stripped away, like a portrait in a locket that opens further to reveal another (bare-assed!) portrait. Agis announces the name of "the only woman I ever loved: Phocion!"

This gender-bending links the play right up to the pop present: genders, sexualities as easily available as flipping the radio dial. Peploe hits the bull's-eye. She relates this modern phenomenon to Marivaux's own transformation of comedia d'el arte tropes into a singular style called "marivaudge." It's a highly stylized representation of human folly and growth, of the essences of experience. Those are the truths pop usually exploits and simplifies.

Peploe, with her own sense of justice and strange inspiration, footnotes husband-collaborator Bertolucci's definitive Last Tango in Paris. It's an eternal endeavor. As Pauline Kael concluded her famous review of "Last Tango": "The biology that is the basis of the 'tango' remains."

From the marivaudge to the Bertolucci-esque, Triumph of Love dramatizes the richness of sexual and romantic attraction. At the revelation of The Princess'/Phocion's true sex, Leontine - who hallucinates an audience to this farce, who invents an electrical generator - collapses to the ground and cries out: "I am going out of my mind!" Sex and love in a PoMo world is like that!

Peploe appreciates the potential of pop rituals, as assuredly as Marivaux did that of comedia d'el arte. Thus the Bringing Up Baby screwball shenanigans, the group musical number at the end, and the actors giving their bow in modern clothes. Peploe clarifies, not simplifies, the culture's confusion of signs through ritual.

That is the triumph of cinema, of theatre, of love. Triumph of Love is almost as exquisite and profound as Betty Everett's classic pop song "It's in His Kiss." (Think about it!) Even after the ritual is over, the physics that is the basis of the comedia d'el arte remains.

Originally published by GayToday.com

"I Draw Dead People"

2007-12-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

The Ring
Film Review by John Demetry

A mother flashbacks to the moment when she discovered her daughter's body. She pulls back the closet door to reveal a corpse crouched in the corner. It appears that the daughter has been scared to death (literally).

And, yes, that shot -- a cheap shock cut -- nearly scared me to death (figuratively). It's the first time I've turned away from the screen out of fear/disgust as a post-adolescent horror movie fan. This brief image, with the girl's grayed, distorted countenance, brought back childhood memories of Stephen Gammell's More Scary Stories illustrations that still haunt my vision at night.

I think the nod to Gammell is intentional. The most enticing quality of Gore (Mouse Hunt) Verbinski's direction is the storybook visual renderings, the characters' psychic projections: horses on an enchanted hillside, the sun turning tree leaves to fire, an endless ladder suspended in air, a dollhouse bedroom/prison.

The Ring puts genre horror in a proper perspective: childhood imaginings, storytelling, playacting, and dreams. Of course, as my reaction to the corpse in the closet suggests, childhood fantasies and fears aren't really very far from the surface of adult psyche.

Chatters have been filling up Internet bulletin boards poking holes into the plot of The Ring, but they don't know that horror films have little to do with plots or explanations (those are never satisfying anyway, are they?). Horror films induce a surreal fascination. For better or for worse.

An urban legend about a videotape, the viewer of which will die seven days after watching it, proves true when the niece of Rachel (Naomi Watts), a reporter, ends up dead. Rachel will do anything to protect to her son Aidan (David Dorfman) from the videotape's curse.

This simple description of the story reveals the basic elements that Verbinski raises from spectator subconscious. The desensitizing effects of the modern media and the profound bond of mother and child constitute the film's intertwined themes - a kind of vicious circle, a ring.

The characters decipher the symbols in the video and recognize them when they manifest themselves in reality - a deathtrap or salvation or both? In the same way, the audience of The Ring must identify the film's bewildering profusion of psychically-loaded imagery, and then dig deeper still.

Perhaps the film's true significance begins with the actors, especially Watts and Dorfman. Watts brings to The Ring the good graces bestowed upon her by her revolutionary characterization in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive -- in which she established a deep well of actor/spectator empathy.

Watts plays Rachel as almost obscenely cool and skeptical throughout the beginning of her investigation (instigated by the mysterious death of her niece that opens the film). By the time she screams, to a harbinger of death on the other end of a telephone conversation, for her son's life, her depth of feeling is scarily - recognizably - single-minded.

The object of her affections, son Aidan, has the contradictory significance of a horror movie monster. An independent, intelligent, creative child with apparently psychic powers, he inspires fascination and repulsion. (He not only sees dead people - he draws them before they die!) Key moment: In the rain on the sidewalk before school, Aidan runs into his estranged father Noah (Martin Henderson) and Dorfman executes a cold, grave stare. Naomi Watts is reporter Rachel Keller

Out of this dysfunctional mother-son relationship is borne a horror story, an urban legend, a fairy tale, and a videotape that reflects the severity of their own bond. Just as a photograph of teenagers in front of a cabin and a drawing of a house become actual exterior shots, so Rachel's/Aidan's fantasy -- killing all who come between mother and son - comes crawling out of the television screen.

Discovering the secret of avoiding -- while continuing -- the curse of The Ring, Rachel puts the pieces of an elaborate puzzle together. Verbinski visualizes her thoughts in a montage sequence of earlier moments in the film.

The spectator should enact his/her own memory montage. Recall Rachel watching the denizens of an apartment complex -- all watching television -- pitilessly subject to the media's assault on sensitivity. Don't forget the shot from Aidan's point of view from the backseat of a car in which he sees his mother and father hold hands. Finally, remember Rachel -- via Watts' incredible simulation of empathy -- freeing an angry ghost from its burial; but note the way Verbinski cynically reverses the meaning of that empathic exchange in the film's final twist.

This kind of moral ugliness - in which emotions are not real, in which social consciousness is negligible to selfish love - is often confused for "Truth." The Ring is an infantile and corrupt horror film for an infantile and corrupt culture.

Originally published by GayToday.com

Buddy Beats The Wood

2007-12-09T16:35:00.000-08:00

Brown Sugar
Film Review by John Demetry

"When did you first fall in love with Hip-Hop?" asks journalist Sidney Shaw (Sannaa Lathan) of her interview subjects. Evidencing that love, the film begins with a triple- and quadruple-screen collage of Sidney's Hip-Hop artifacts (like De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising album).

Following this credits sequence, director Rick Famuyiwa poses Sidney's question to a group of old-school (pre-Gangsta) Hip-Hop artists. Among them: Russell Simmons, Slick Rick, Doug E. Fresh, and De La Soul. Summarizing their recollections: "It was freedom."

One hopes for freedom in Famuyiwa's approach to the romantic comedy genre - beginning with this collage and documentary prologue. Imagine "When Harry Met Sally. . ." with social context, liberated from hegemony's free-floating neuroticism. Unfortunately, that freedom is more suggestive than successful, making Brown Sugar both bitter and sweet.

Famuyiwa puts the social context of Brown Sugar into personal perspective. He keeps returning - like the characters - to the day Sidney fell in love with Hip-Hop. July 18, 1984. Breakdancing, basketball, rapping. The young Sidney and a young Andre "Dre" Ellis lock eyes across a sparring Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick. They share their enthusiasm for a new sound during a walk home - and for the rest of their lives. Those were the days.

Sidney becomes a successful critic and editor, covering the Hip-Hop scene. Dre (played by Taye Diggs) works for a Hip-Hop record label. Growing up with Hip-Hop and each other (as platonic friends), they eventually face the buppy demon: selling out. The pile of blue boxes at the Brown Sugar bridal shower is the flipside to the Sweet Home Alabama proposal at Tiffany's.

Remembering the time when they both fell in love with Hip-Hop, Sidney and Dre - oh so predictably - realize that they had also fallen in love with each other. After making needed changes in their lives, they're ready to brush off former engagements (her fiancé, his wife). Sidney writes a personal valentine to Hip-Hop; Dre starts his own label to back Hip-Hop artists he actually enjoys - representing Mos Def instead of a Dalmatian-spotted Black and white rap duo called Ren and Ten.

As in the superior The Wood, Famuyiwa reflects on the present by remembering the past. Editing flashbacks into Dre's point of view, Famuyiwa locates Dre's existential moment, the past informing present decisions.

When two kids repeat the Sidney-Dre eye-lock during the radio rotation of the first single from Dre's label, Famuyiwa underscores the responsibility inherent in everyone's actions. That's the existential condition the best Hip-Hop enlivens.

By that standard, Brown Sugar is almost "delacratic" - De La Soul's term for the availability of all signals in the pop cult atmosphere for personal expression, individual routes to freedom. ("I could wave my hand in my air," De La Soul raps.) The word "delacratic" instructs in more than just method - it's also about style. Like Dre and Sidney's five-minute (ten-minute?) tryst, Brown Sugar doesn't work up delacratic potency.

The Wood, with its cross-cutting between adolescent and adult male anxiety, recalled De La Soul's accumulation of uncannily evocative details. Brown Sugar, by being more explicit, reveals Famuyiwa as a shallow thinker discarding the sensitivity of his intuitive pop art.

The narration taken from Sidney's book, an unfortunate "valentine" instead of the rigorous critical approach Hip-Hop should inspire, bemoans the "union of Hip-Hop to the mainstream" - a generalized complaint. That generality is necessary, since the romantic comedy conventions of Brown Sugar signify that union. It's as bogus as blaming Hip-Hop's disappointments on cross-over novelty acts like Ren and Ten.

Famuyiwa responds to the Hollywood demands of genre by downplaying glamour. But he isn't keepin' it real. The plot's hetero conventionality undercuts this pretense of grittiness. Note the dim lighting of the performers. It ain't easy to make someone as phoiiine as Diggs look this bad. The dank lighting highlights Famuyiwa's capitulation to a dread Hip-Hop and Hollywood tradition.

Diggs and Mos Def's characters male bond through the use of many forms - noun, verb, and adjective - of the homophobic euphemism: "punk." By denying Diggs his beauty and allure, the style of the film validates such homophobia - and, by extension, corroborates Hollywood racism.

In contrast, Mark Brown made last year's hyper-glamorous Two Can Play That Game, extending the racial-sexual standards of pop beauty - so that nobody could deny that Morris Chestnut is the hottest American movie star right now.

Diggs and Mos Def even rap a gay reading of Casblanca (the paradigm of white-hetero filmmaking!), citing its use of glamour ("fog") as evidence. To really return to and scrutinize the roots of Hip-Hop and romance, maybe the platonic-to-romantic arc of Brown Sugar should have traced a gay love story set in the world of Hip-Hop -- where E. Lynn Harris fears to tread! No chance. The fog of pop culture -- the process of socialization and ideological indoctrination -- is too thick for Famuyiwa to illuminate.

Yet the best Hip-Hop artists do just that. Despite the debt paid to De La Soul, Famuyiwa forgets the delacratic challenge of their homophobia-busting, "Buddy." To answer Famuyiwa's/Sidney's question: That 3 Feet High and Rising track marked the time I first fell in love with Hip-Hop.

Originally published by GayToday.com

The Symbolic Space of Black Manhood

2007-12-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

Undisputed
Film Review by John Demetry

A scene - and a specific shot - resonates after experiencing Walter Hill's spectacular new film, Undisputed. It's an encounter between the heavyweight champ imprisoned for rape, "Iceman" (Ving Rhames), and his opponent in an upcoming prison match, the lifer Monroe (Wesley Snipes). Both are undefeated in their respective rings.

Hill sets the scene in the prison showers: the Genet-like realm of sexual one-upmanship. Hill frames the actors from chest up. He edits the dialogue in shot-reverse-shot, isolating the actors and keeping the background veiled in steam. The off-screen space erects the culture's racial-sexual mythology. As Monroe/Snipes raps: "First comes a smile, then a cheap shot."

Hill disrupts the shot-reverse-shot framing and editing with the wider shot of "Iceman"/Rhames exiting the showers. Glimpses of the other prisoners on the edges of the screen eventually bring the spectator's attention to a prisoner in the center of the middleground. This movie extra, a Black man, looks directly into the camera and conceals his penis - his facial expression suggests shock/embarrassment at being exposed to the camera.

That symbolic space and that spectacle of Black manhood have just been given human dimensions. However accidental this detail might be, it defines the spirited challenge of Hill's art and, especially, of Undisputed.

Hill's "once upon a time in prison" isn't an example of Hollywood's fairy tales that glamorize social norms into a mythology. His cinematics perform a K.O. on such accepted myths. He takes myth's most exemplary power - to instruct in empathy - and turns it on its head.

Hill frames much of the action through barriers - bars, cages, doorways, television screens - evoking the physical containment of characters, and the ideological (racial, gender, sexual) jail in which all of us are imprisoned. Characters are introduced with biographical stats, but Hill never reduces them to statistics. The transitions between scenes dissolve jail blueprints (hiphop-savvy Hill's reference to Jay-Z's masterpiece album "The Blueprint") over the regimented lives of the prisoners.

"I live inside my head," explains Monroe. Hill uses black-and-white flashbacks to get "inside" the heads of some of the prisoners. Hill utilizes both dramatic and documentary footage (of old boxing matches, remembered by the Jewish gangster played by Peter Falk, who orchestrates the match between "Iceman" and Monroe). This is a common trope in Hill, referencing and subverting, by intertwining with the present, media codes of the past. In Undisputed, the racial and moral significance has never been clearer; Hill destabilizes notions regarded as black and white.

Yet, in the black and white (and red/read all over) world of criticism, this estimation of Hill and of Undisputed is, well, disputed. Most critics follow the lead of Miramax, which shelved the film for many months and has since claimed not to know how to properly market it. These critics reduce the film's significance to that of a failed or moderately successful genre film. The reader must recognize the ideological regimentation that critics and film distributors enforce: the layout of the ring and the stakes of the match.

What pisses people off about Hill is his conviction that pop art can be - and should be and, in his hands, is - a site/sight of freedom. Hill calls for individual sovereignty. Thus, he receives the defensive responses of those who benefit from the system of "incarceration" - and, yes, by extension, real incarceration.

The much disparaged, by film critics, climactic match between "Iceman" and Monroe superimposes the lives of the two boxers and the spectators with the forces that exploit and judge those lives. Radically, Hill replaces conventional - escapist - suspense with moral and social distress.

This is why critics revile Hill: he finds that distress in the movie theatre. Shooting much of the match through the cage surrounding the ring, Hill pointedly relates the spectacle of Black men fighting each other with movies. He extends it to all media representations by introducing the fight with rapper Master P's rendition of the National Anthem and a series of dissolves showing prisoners joining in as a chorus.

Hill constructs a polyrhythmic social vision with each percussive blow, syncopated edit, and graphically composed movement. The sequence is a masterpiece of expressive staging: so that the decisive left strike, composed at a diagonal, carries an emotional wallop. The final knockout, instant-replayed ala Hill in black-and-white, swings the match into a moral and philosophical abstraction.

The look on Snipes' face, before raising his hand in victory, is devastating. Unlike the extra covering himself in the shower, Snipes and Rhames openly display their (emotional) prowess. In one slow-motion shot, framed by the doorway of solitary confinement, Snipes stares into the camera, baring the weight of the murder of Monroe's woman's lover. In another dramatic highpoint, Rhames, frustrated, says, "I'm trying to explain to him how to survive," then wearily lifts his handcuffed fists.

These subtly performed and accented moments are, like every strike and counterstrike in the climactic match, the film's revelations. Hill and his actors dismantle masculine-racial ideology and media exploitation. The homophobic defensiveness, certified by celebrity, of the claim "Iceman" makes - "What have I got to rape someone for? I ain't no punk ass bitch" - crumbles in the expressive face of individual pain - and the actor's empathy. (Not insignificantly, this is Rhames' best performance and Snipes' best in years; displaying the talent squandered in racist Hollywood.)

The final shot is one of the most complicated screen moments of recent memory. Snipes'/Monroe's Zen dispassion breaks into a cocky smile as the prisoners pronounce him as their champion. The black-and-white image concludes with the sides of the screen closing in on him. Only by resolving that image's conflicted significance will the audience be free.

Originally published by GayToday.com

Contextualizing The Music

2007-12-09T15:44:00.001-08:00

24 Hour Party People
Film Review by John Demetry

"Next time we knock ourselves out let's do it for something close to our hearts. . . like music." -- Anthony Wilson, 24 Hour Party People soundtrack liner notes.

The above quote was taken from the liner notes of the soundtrack, in which Anthony Wilson describes the impulse behind the movie's making. The movie he's talking about is one made by Michael Winterbottom and cohorts. And it's about Wilson, himself, and the the creation of his influential Manchester record label, Factory Records, that initiated post-punk, and his club, La Hacienda, that the movie claims gave birth to the rave scene.

The harlequin postmodernism of 24 Hour Party People is damn near dizzying - and defiantly elating. It's what Wilson might describe as: "a physical legal high." The love shows.

In describing the soundtrack album, Wilson probably provides the most accurate analysis of the movie: "They are the songs which shape the film and they are the songs which shaped a few lives." Because the "film" and filmmakers so fully submit to the music's meaning and allure, the movie brings the music becomes close to spectators' hearts, too.

24 Hour Party People not only goes behind the scenes of the making of the music and the Factory label, it subverts the very presumptions about "behind-the-scenes" documentary the same way that the post-punk artists subverted rock ideology.

Shot by cinematographer Robby Muller, 24 Hour Party People toys with the presumed documentary realism of the digital video image. In the movie, Wilson exalts the technique: "Free play of signs and signifiers!"

With the impending DV turnover, this is incredibly potent stuff - a wake-up call not unlike that of Joy Division, satirically named after a Nazi rape squad. Joy Division, later to meta-morph into New Order, is the band that highlights the first chapter of the movie. (The "second act" announced by Wilson focuses on The Happy Mondays, the band whose raging good-time song provides the movie's title, and their reign at La Hacienda in the early '90s.)

With cameos by God, a UFO, and real-life participants in the enacted dramatic situations, 24 Hour Party People commits self-conscious mythmaking. "God created man in his own image," reminds Wilson after meeting his double-from-above, who chastises him for not signing Morrissey and Johnny Marr's The Smiths when he had chance.

When video killed the radio star, post-punk ushered in artists like Morrissey who took advantage of the opportunity to subvert the images that create pop mythos and sustain society's dominant ideology. (Think: Elvis. Now, think: The Smiths' "Shoplifters of the World.")

One amazingly poignant pop memory conjured by 24 Hour Party People is the genius of Ian Curtis, the frontman for Joy Division. His automaton stage movements - inspired by his epilepsy and his empathic art and social consciousness - are enthrallingly recreated by Sean Harris, an actor inspired. Quote Wilson in the movie: "The dangers and wonders of semiotics that is the musical equivalent of Che Guevara."

Even the expressionist funeral march following Curtis' suicide in 1980 is a genuine postmodern spectacle: critiquing pop stardom while being scored to the unshakably moving "Atmosphere."

The atmosphere - the air of reminiscence - surrounding Curtis in the movie highlights the role of Wilson - and, especially, Steve Coogan's characterization of Wilson. It's a star-making comic performance. Wilson - a visionary, self-destructive businessman - didn't just bandy about concepts like postmodernism and situationalism, he understood them . Coogan similarly understands and personifies the moviemakers' best intentions.

Coogan does more than any "behind-the-scenes" documentary could do to convey the hedonistic, intelligent excitement of participating in three daredevil (note the movie's Icarus prologue) pop epochs: punk, post-punk, and the rave scene. Making witty asides to the camera, Coogan not only exposes the artifice of the medium, he invites the movie audience to join in the radical fun.

The self-conscious mythmaking - that's the fun - had by Coogan, Winterbottom, and Curtis, however, is best when expanding to inscribe a sense of responsibility as spectators/participants.

The most powerful montage in 24 Hour Party People counterpoints a recreated Joy Division performance of "Radio Transmission" with contemporaneous television news footage of the fascist National Front strikes. Questioning ideas about history and History, this sequence marks "24 Hour Party People" as the most profound use of DV in a narrative movie that I know.

In another mockumentary sequence, Winterbottom quickly elucidates the connection between the popularity of The Happy Mondays' proto-rave music at La Hacienda with the proliferation of the drug trade - and drug violence.

This daring sociological footnote honors the "beautification of the beat" and the audience "applauding the medium" - as Coogan's Wilson defines it - that rave culture instigated in contrast to the pop-star effigy of the post-punks. Through Winterbottom's own challenging and fresh use of the digital medium, the spectator must constantly locate the context of the music - and of themselves as movie watchers. "Dance, dance, dance" to the digital transmission.

A helicopter shot of a benighted Manchester is accompanied by The Happy Mondays' "Hallelujah!" 24 Hour Party People recognizes pop as both socio-economic "double helix" (one trend replacing the next) as well as spiritually double-edged (blissed-out to the criminal undercurrent of party life, the failure of extravagant economic experimentation). That's the dangers and wonders of pop.

Originally published by GayToday.com

Jump Cuts

2007-12-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

Harvard Man
Film Review by John Demetry

I'm only two years out of undergraduate school. Despite its specific focus and milieu, James Toback's perceptive new film brings back that recent past like an acid flashback. Harvard Man seriously attempts to put the sexual, chemical, and social experimentation of privileged (white, hetero) male development into cultural and philosophical perspective.

It's ironic that Toback's coming-of-age film feels like the confused, yet exciting, work of a first-time filmmaker. However, Toback came of age - and into his artistic own - after over a decade of filmmaking with the 1998 Two Girls and a Guy and 2000 Black & White.

Toback's own filmmaking maturation disproves the simplifications of Harvard Man - especially the ending. It lacks the often unnerving honesty that took Toback beyond the naval of his own void in Two Girls and a Guy and Black & White.

Certainly, Harvard Man marks a development in Toback's unique style - but the reverse in terms of substance.

Like his earlier films - The Pick-Up Artist being a fave - Toback's sexual and ethnic fascinations, and the resulting raunchy dialogue, keep Harvard Man vibrating.

"How many of your students have you fucked?" Harvard basketball player, played by Adrian Grenier, gets off asking his philosophy professor, played by Joey Lauren Adams in a giddy bit of casting. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Grenier's mafia-daughter girlfriend. She delivers a few choice lines too: "I didn't know black people could swim" and "Suck my dick."

This two-girls-and-a-guy setup reveals the problems with the casting of Grenier. In Two Girls and a Guy, Toback gave Robert Downey, Jr. the freedom to expose his troubled psyche. Toback saw his own reflection in Downey, Jr.'s actor bombast and masculine dread. That's the revelation that makes Two Girls and a Guy a near-masterpiece of the era still rocking from the sexual revolution. Grenier, here, is only serviceable.

In Harvard Man, Toback continues his existential swirling camera that began with Two Girls and a Guy, his first collaboration with amber-lighting cinematographer David M. Ferrara. Not only keeping the characters' position tentative, demanding definitive vectors of action, the moving camera also signifies a director in search of the existential truth that the actor will provide. Either Grenier isn't up to it or he's never given a chance.

Unlike with Downey, Jr., however, Toback locates Grenier amidst a cops-and-robbers milieu. That connects Harvard Man to the sprawling hiphop epic Black & White. In Black & White, Toback didn't rely on any central character to anchor the volatile class, race, and sexual cross-section. Toback anchored Black & White himself. Its diagram of the body politic was actually a mind-heart-cock-&-soul self-portrait.

Harvard Man fails to be that incisive. Still, Toback hypothesizes on the psychosexual basis for the FBI. Grenier states it baldly to agents played by Eric Stolz and Rebecca Gayheart, who have a taste for three-or-more-somes: "How does it feel to have a guy in a position of authority getting off by doing you in for your transgressions?"

What about the psychosexual genesis of the movie director? In a bit of near-autobiography, Toback connects the crime Grenier commits with the drugs-and-sex limits he also pursues. (Note Grenier's tendency to listen to classical music and rock at the same time - accounting for the film's own Bach-'n-roll soundtrack.)

Grenier pretentiously endeavors to break down the edifice of "I." To express this, Toback uses the jump-cutting and crosscutting he premiered in Black & White. Now, he adds another dimension to the space-time-shifting. Toback actually shows a decision being made crosscut with the results of that decision being acted out. The technique posits Hollywood-style narrative as another bogus edifice.

Toback develops an ingenious stylistic and narrative advance - but he puts it to the service of an obvious foreshadowing of his own artistic career. (Jump-cuts are like the photographs Grenier takes at the end.) It's as if Toback believes that art frees him from scrutiny.

The best artworks by hetero white men are the new albums by Bryan Ferry (Frantic) and David Gedge's Cinerama (Torino). Toback would do well to take a listen. Frantic and Torino represent works that raise self-reflection and cultural observation to philosophical heights. That's what Toback wants to do - which is more than you can say for most American filmmakers.

Ferry (inspired by Oscar Wilde) and Gedge (recalling Marcel Proust) always have their ears on the prize: the aesthetic invention, humor, and fun of pop while also scrutinizing their own relationship to pop culture and sexual mores. Listen no further than Ferry's cover of The Drifters' "One Way Love" or Gedge's "Close Up." These songs are so emotionally rich and idiosyncratic that the artists open themselves to - and acknowledge - queer projection.

Toback almost recognized this process through Downey, Jr.'s gay-gay turn in Black & White and, maybe, achieved it through Downey, Jr.'s mother-loving fear in Two Girls and a Guy. Unfortunately, in Harvard Man, the concluding freeze-frame close-up on Grenier's eyes doesn't account for the expansive, challenging vision of Two Girls and a Guy and Black & White. It's just naval gazing.

Originally published by GayToday.com

Who's Afraid of Oscar Wilde?

2007-12-09T15:25:00.000-08:00

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)
DVD Review by John Demetry

Who's Afraid of Oscar Wilde? That's an essential question. To help you answer, please consider The Criterion Collection DVD release of Anthony Asquith's 1952 film adaptation of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. It makes a valuable addition to any DVD collection; it invites repeated enjoyment.

Criterion should be commended for its perfect timing. Oliver Parker's 2002 film remakes Wilde's play into an abomination - one of the most hurtful movie experiences I've ever known. In the 1952 Earnest, each line of dialogue gets funnier - produces vibrations. There's very little music in the 2002 film, which only gets increasingly sinister.

It is Parker's insidious project with the 2002 film to destroy culture, history, art, and humanity. The Criterion DVD restores those values so integral to Wilde's visionary perspective on identity.

To suggest the import of the 1952 Earnest as both cultural object and entertainment, let me relay a friend's reminiscence concerning the movie:

"As for the original Importance of Being Earnest, years ago, I had a college professor who recommended it to the whole class (only a few years after Stonewall) for the Technicolor brilliance of Michael Redgrave's eyes. (Only years later did I value that professor's frankness - and good taste.)"

That anecdote sums up everything wonderful about the 1952 Earnest. It describes the film's liberating sexiness, cinematics, and humor. It also puts those qualities in a historical context, drawing a line from Wilde to Stonewall and beyond. The new film erases such pleasures, along with the resulting sense of history.

Fortunately, it is regained each time Redgrave, as Jack (the Lad!), punctuates his witty repartee by widening his blue eyes - sending stardust across the television screen. (Criterion's restoration of the Technicolor is gorgeous, dreamy!)

After Jack (in the guise of Ernest) proposes to her, Gwendolyn exclaims: "What wonderfully blue eyes you have, Ernest! They are quite, quite blue. I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present." Only cinema could put us in the eternal presence of Redgrave's brilliant blues.

Redgrave and the rest of the players assembled for the 1952 Earnest must be the dream cast for Wilde's play. This needed to be preserved - like a valise in a bell jar. Especially in the face of the 2002 film's "some-of-my-best-friends-are-homos" cast.

In addition to his baby blues, Redgrave delivers each line with a sparkling enunciation - bouncing from the offensive to the defensive, from wooer to warrior. That kindles the incredible chemistry he shares with sultry Joan Greenwood as Gwendolyn, purring some of Wilde's finest dialogue. You have got to hear the way she pronounces "cake" when her feelings have been hurt!

That moment occurs during the cultivated catfight between Gwendolyn and Cecily (Dorothy Tutin). Cecily is Jack's ward and the fiancé of Algernon - also pretending to be Jack's imaginary brother Ernest.

As Algernon, Michael Denison might be plucked from the gallery of Hitchock homos - a significant pop archetype. Denison's perverse sophisticate melts before Tutin - all wide-eyed hedonism in her film debut. She is very fond of being looked at, and it is a joy to look at her.

Cecily and Gwendolyn believe they are both engaged to the same Ernest. (Hilarity ensues.) Sample dialogue:

Gwendolyn: Do you allude to me, Miss Cardew, as an entanglement? You are presumptuous. On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Cecily: Do you suggest, Miss Fairfax, that I entrapped Ernest into an engagement? How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.

Gwendolyn: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Tea is served! Note the way class satire and themes of social performance are so effortlessly intertwined into dialogue that any actor would kill to deliver. (The 2002 cast kills Wilde in the process.) Few could give readings as pleasurably - and yes, morally - as Asquith's 1952 cast. The pleasure of performance is Wilde's morality; artifice is his road to truth. "That is what fiction means." Asquith knows it - instinctively.

The interaction of this foursome - made sensual by Asquith's color-coded costumes and flirtatious two-shots - suggests ways of living (and loving) that are still radical. As Lady Bracknell, Dame Edith Evans is the ideal antagonist and obstacle - a delicious, eyes-rolling, trumpet-throated satirical portrait. She doesn't go to the camera - like a spectator with binoculars at a play, the camera comes to her!

In the new film, boring Judi Dench - with her climactic shit-faced grin, capitulating to cynicism - can't carry Dame Evans' jockstrap! The 2002 film merely trades in sitcom sarcasm. Following a "gay scare" joke, Parker turns the final revelation of Jack's history - that Ernest is his real name - into a lie.

"It's only a movie," right? No way! Parker's alteration in the 2002 film represents a calculated, reactionary assault on the freedom promised by Wilde's dream of a gay avant-garde and on a century of gay activism and art. For all the artifice in representations of romance, Desire is real. The delight signified by the artifce is genuine: it signals that Desire has a place in social structures. Wilde validates gay people's claim to it.

With the curtain's fall at the end of the 1952 film - completing Wilde's perfect geometry - director Asquith restores that freedom to the spectator. Asquith - unlike Parker and those who acclaim his film in 2002 - understands that the importance of being earnest is vital. There is good reason for some to be afraid of Oscar Wilde. Check out the Criterion DVD to find out why.

Originally published by GayToday.com

How Perverse!

2007-12-09T15:08:00.001-08:00

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Film Review by John Demetry

In Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the fey droid C3PO exclaims: "Machines building machines? How perverse!" It's the funniest, truest bit of dialogue in George Lucas' latest Star Wars movie. The line also describes how I feel about Attack of the Clones.

C3PO reveals the fascinating subtext that actually bemoans Lucas' massive postmodern folly. The film's concern with cloning and technological simulacra acts as a surface-level critique of capitalism. This inspires two near-striking visual sequences in Attack of the Clones.

In the first, Lucas details the production of Jango Fett clones. In purely visual language, the sequence moves the plot forward. Simultaneously, Lucas exposes the process of capitalism's assembly-line dehumanization. This conveyer-belt logic takes capitalism to its ultimate, horrible conclusion.

At the end of the sequence, the Triumph of the Will choreography of cloned Storm Troopers makes this point clear. Lucas mixes sci-fi and mythic archetypes with history, politics, and the perversion of cinema.

Shamefully, Lucas himself reduces Maori actor Temuera Morrison, as Jango Fett, to a mere clone. Lucas removes the racial-cultural significance that Morrison carries over from Once Were Warriors, a powerful movie about oppression and familial violence.

The visual punch-line to C3PO's classic line hints at a witty extension of the clone theme. Caught in a conveyer belt building androids, C3PO ends up with his head attached to the body of a soldier android, his body attached to the head of a soldier. The highlight of the resulting, and otherwise drudging, battle sequence features the dual C3PO droids conflicted between impulses.

C3PO's man-made uniqueness engages in an interior battle with the soldier droid's programming. Amidst the abstract -- well, incoherent -- staging of the battle between the Jedi and the droids, it almost achieves Dada depth. Lucas might have challenged the audience to question its participation as spectators. However, it raises only one question: Is Lucas' head screwed on right?

Even these, the most thought-out moments in Attack of the Clones, lack necessary moral shading, moral substance. Attack of the Clones is the first film shot in Cinealta, a high-definition format. Lucas sacrifices meaning (and humanity) to digital technology -- enacting in grand scale the conflict and capitulation of the Hollywood artist and businessman.

Each shot in the movie attacks the eyes, the windows to the imagination. Lucas loads nearly every image -- especially long or medium shots -- with fuzzy, unsubstantial black shadows. This lighting technique clearly means to disguise the way that the digital format reduces any real performer or object to digital blurs when projected onto a movie screen.

The murky visuals replace moral ambiguity. By removing coherence and urgency from the moral downfall of Anakin Skywalker, Lucas actually deflects moral scrutiny from his own artistic sell-out.

Lucas succumbs to the Dark Side. So, now, Attack of the Clones completely relinquishes the promising qualities of Episode I: Phantom Menace (the only Star Wars film aside from Empire Strikes Back that I recommend).

In "Episode I", the camera move that identified the phantom menace as government corruption and the cross-cut multiple climaxes borrowed tropes from The Godfather series. Doing so, Lucas promised a sci-fi epic exposing the popular culture to its own corruption. However, the video-game-ready digital action sequences in Attack of Clones are fully downloadable for violent interactivity and moral passivity.

The much-despised performance of Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker in Phantom Menace exhibited Lucas' Godfather-style daring by featuring the most ambivalent child protagonist in cinema history. Hayden Christensen now takes over as Anakin. Imagine Michael Corleone of The Godfather as played by a Backstreet Boy.

There's no real moral crisis for Anakin. The move from youthful petulance to genocidal maniac is a mere sub-plot away -- totally removed from any developed psychosocial motivation or conflict. Rather than raising audience awareness of pop culture's corruption, Christensen's Anakin simply reflects the narcissism of a corrupt culture.

In one scene, Anakin uses the Jedi definition of "compassion" as "unconditional love" as a pick-up line. Later, he expresses his bloodlust as an alternative means of seduction. Lucas never dramatizes or visualizes either emotion - they're just come-ons for him, too.

That results in an unmemorable, unbearable movie experience. The Oedipal possibilities introduced in the Irvin Kershner-directed The Empire Strikes Back with its "Luke, I am your father" revelation unleashed imagery straight from the zeitgeist's subconscious. Phantom Menace similarly invested imagination-piquing visions to a series of cross-cultural confrontations.

Meanwhile, in Attack of the Clones, Lucas stages the death of Anakin's mother as an inverted pieta, but the digital imagery lacks the archetype's ecstasy and eroticism. Then, an iris dissolves Anakin's retribution like some horrible, cynical wink at the audience.

Lucas shows no compassion for victim, victimizer, or audience. Attack of the Clones provides the spectacle of DV technology transforming the popular film audience into machines. How perverse!

Originally published by GayToday.com

Gay Tales Promise Universal Catharsis

2007-12-09T15:00:00.000-08:00

Release by the Pet Shop Boys
CD Review by John Demetry

"Play the sad songs / Sing the blues / You don't fall in love by chance / You choose"

So ends the new Pet Shop Boys album, Release. That last track, "You Choose", is a typically pristine conclusion. It represents the distinctly gay perspective on art ("Play the sad songs / Sing the blues") and romance ("You don't fall in love by chance / You choose") that the rest of Release extends into an enveloping, erudite worldview.

In many ways, Release is a "blues" album. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe locate personal pain and communicate it in their idiosyncratic language. Release places that voice amidst exquisite bass-lines, electronica, and guitar hooks.

Johnny Marr is featured on guitar in seven of the Release tracks. The collaboration between the Pets and Marr marks an auspicious event. Marr was the former co-songwriter of The Smiths, the great '80s band that queered rock-'n-roll history. Marr -- whose guitar riffs repeated and responded to Morrissey's call "I am human and I need to be loved" on the sublime "How Soon Is Now?" -- brings his avant-pop-rock scrutiny to the Pets' sophisticated pop investigations.

The Pets step away from the synth-dance milieu that once defined both their art and their homo-cult club audience. The songs on Release -- like the flower album art -- form a lovely, melancholy pop bouquet.

The sound reminds of their slower songs of the past: the pang of young sexual experience in "Nervous" from "Behavior" or the pain of adult gay romantic rituals in "To Speak Is a Sin" from "Very". An atypical pop catalogue, Release confronts romantic disappointment and possibility.

In "I Get Along," Tennant gooses pop cliché with his ambivalent vocalizations. The repetition of the chorus ("I get along, get along / without you very well / I get along very well") seems both defiant and neurotic. Those cheeky Pets make a joke on how pop ubiquity mirrors romantic delusion.

This neuroticism is even more explicit in the wrenching "Love Is a Catastrophe": "No concentration / just rerunning conversation / Trying to understand / how I fell into this quicksand." Check out how Marr's guitar bridge empathizes with and challenges Tennant's call: "Never been lonelier in my life."

Such ambiguity -- such art -- reveals itself as knowledge earned from the travails of gay love. Release also features happier and hopeful songs like the refreshingly mature "Home and Dry" and the up-to-date "E-mail." They exhibit the hard work -- the imagination -- needed to climb out of love's quicksand.

"Home and Dry" is probably the first single ever released about a middle-aged, domestic gay male couple. It's a delightful track -- and it's about time!

The trance beat of "The Samurai in Autumn" tackles the age issue head-on. "It's not as easy as it was / or as difficult as it could be / for the Samurai in autumn," repeats the haiku on the state of the Pets' art. With the imperial effortlessness and maturity of its gently grooving soundscape, "The Samurai in Autumn" essays the still-expanding aesthetic of the Pet Shop Boys.

On Release the Pets again apply the political and personal experience of gay love to wider sociological concerns with "London" -- the wit and up-tempo diversity of which bests jangle-pop artists like Natalie Merchant. "Birthday Boy" goes even further. It reveals the album's title, Release, as a sexual-cum-spiritual metaphor. The gay tales of Release promise universal, revelatory catharsis.

Two tracks completely fulfill that promise: "The Night I Fell In Love" and "Here." They're the greatest, most powerful Pets songs since "Dreaming of the Queen" and "Go West" on 1993's "Very" tackled the cultural/spiritual repercussions of AIDS. "The Night I Fell In Love" and "Here" show these two samurai kicking ass -- upping-the-ante on Queer art and all pop expression in the autumn of their careers.

Both tracks explore and deepen the relationship of pop artist to audience. That's most obvious in "The Night I Fell In Love." It's about a young, gay fan and his one-night affair with Eminem, the rap artist often accused of homophobia, misogyny, and general irresponsibility. The song goes beyond mere delicious topicality and tabloid juiciness -- peeking into the Hip Hop closet -- to be a most ingenious response to Eminem.

"The Night I Fell In Love" is the Pets' most infectious, ear-to-ear grin-inducing dramatization of an adolescent gay crush. Listen to how they make these lyrics rhyme(!):

"He had a video camera / I was so nervous / I had to try hard not to stammer-ah." The Pets' graciousness to Eminem is equally amazing -- an extension of the self-discovery embarked upon by the song's protagonist.

Dr. Dre, Eminem's mentor, once responded to charges of homophobia: "I don't really care about those people." "The Night I Fell In Love" proves that a real artist cares about everyone.

That's the political lesson of gay life and love the Pets hope to drive home in "Here." The floating malleability of Pete Gleadall's production is like "a dream of a place we belong." It shows how the human process of building an identity, a home, and a community is heightened by the Queer experience:

"And if you ever feel / the pain is far too big a deal / I say with pride / I'll be on your side."

For the Pets, "pride" is more than a slogan.

Whatever the fads, "Here" recognizes everyone's pop dreams:

"You've got a home here / Call it what you want / You've got a home here."

Release feels like home to me.

Originally published by GayToday.com

Spinning Webs

2007-12-09T14:52:00.000-08:00

Spiderman
Review by John Demetry

"Don't believe the hype!" the great Hip Hop group Public Enemy warned its audience.

An entertainment reporter on FoxNews called Sam Raimi's big-screen version of the comic book, Spider-Man,a "great" film. In fact, he continued to claim: "MOST critics think it's great!" With that emphasis on "most," he identified himself as a critic! If you can't trust a word on TV news about "Spider-Man", don't believe what you hear and see about "The War on Terror."

It's all hype.

Spider-Man, Spider-Man does whatever a politician can. That is: he's a master at spinning webs.

The media blitz has been unbreakable. The rotten cherry on the record-breaking sundae: an 84% "Fresh" rating from critics polled at Rottentomatoes.com. Critical acclaim gives the movie, a mere cog in the hype machine, respectability and validity -- maybe not as movie art, but at least as entertainment.

The achievement? Supposedly the degree to which Raimi succeeds at adapting the "graphic novel" form to film. Ridiculous! And this comes from a former adolescent comic book fanatic. One ought to critique the comic-book-to-celluloid movie on the basis of how well it transcends the genre.

Evil Dead auteur Raimi might have brought his liberating/exhausting sophomoric visual wit -- a post-modern-Three-Stooges-free-for-all sensibility - to Spider-Man. He doesn't.

Danny Elfman's score sounds derivative of Danny Elfman scores for Tim Burton. The action sequences - particularly those between Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) and his arch-nemesis, the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) - are derivative of both Japanese Godzilla-style cheapies and The Matrix. A goofy mix? Perhaps. But to what end?

The split screens and over-lapping images when Peter Parker draws alternative Spider-Man costumes signifies less identity-forming imagination than the very media packaging that the assault of "Spider-Man" represents.

This ad-art sensibility infuses the storytelling. There's a point in the movie where each of the major characters gets together for Thanksgiving dinner. I had to whisper in my friend's ear: "Does the Green Goblin know who Spider-Man is? Does Spider-Man know who the Green Goblin is? What is going on?" My friend didn't know either. I should have asked: "Who cares?"

The characters in Spider-Man are so insipidly selfish that the narrative connecting them never connects. As actors, they seem to exist in their own little bubbles - wearing masks to their own personal Halloween parties.

There's a telling, supposedly comic, moment when the lovelorn Peter Parker pretends to seduce Dunst's Mary Jane from a distance. That distance exists in every interaction in the film.

I'm not sure I buy that Maguire is much of an actor -- an Edward Norton wannabe with acne. He's never made a good movie (Woody Allen's scabrous Deconstructing Harry, a possible exception - but who remembers him in it?). Why would cutie Kirsten Dunst fall for this nerd?

Just out of high school, isn't Peter Parker too old for adolescent angst? Ah, but that's the mindset of the intended audience - the adolescent comic-book reader in everyone.

That's why the super-power metaphor works doubly. For Peter Parker/Spider-Man, it's a metaphor for the growing pains of adolescence into maturity and responsibility. For Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, it represents the corruptions of adulthood.

However, Peter Parker's supposed moral awakening comes when his uncle is murdered by a burglar that Peter selfishly let escape in an earlier encounter. That encourages him to begin to use his powers to fight crime. . . but isn't it just as selfish that this realization could only happen because someone he knew and loved died? It's the emotional basis for Spider-Man's vigilante war on terror - rather than on oppression.

Norman Osborn - suffering from split personality - receives messages from his evil self that emanate from African masks that adorn his mansion. His own Green Goblin mask marks a visual echo - evil as signified by racial, Third-World other. (More post-9/11 hoopla: New Yorkers coming to Spider-Man's aid declare: "You mess with Spider-Man, you mess with New York!")

After Peter Parker makes a Casablanca-style sacrifice, Spider-Man swings on a pole that holds the flowing American flag. The imperialism of images is not freedom. It's time for a war on hype.

Befitting its adolescent take on political awakening, I'd call Spider-Man a Rudy Giuliani wet dream. In the famous words of Stan Lee, creator of the original Spider-Man comic books: "'Nuff said."

Originally published by GayToday.com

No Place Like Home

2007-12-09T14:51:00.001-08:00

Oz: The First Season
DVD/Video Review by John Demetry

"There's no fucking place like home," narrator, commentator, and inmate Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau) concludes the first season of HBO's prison drama Oz -- now available on DVD and VHS. The camera trucks back to reveal Augustus inside a levitating cell surrounded by darkness. It's "home" as floating signifier.

Oz writer-creator Tom Fontana challenges the concept of "home" by bringing that challenge into homes - through the medium of television, the modern hearth. Surely, it's not "for" the whole family. Rather, it is about the extended American family that locked doors and TV sets usually block out - however tendentiously.

Fontana's first-season balls-out gambit uses the 8 hours (in 8 episodes) to detail the escalation of sexual, racial, ethnic, religious, social, and class conflicts into a full-blown prison riot in the Emerald City ward of a prison called Oz. It reveals the explicit historical inspiration for the series: the infamous Attica riots and the resulting massacre. That's an ingenious creative coup - genuine pulp friction.

For Fontana, Attica exposed the unjust - volatile - American system outside of prison. Like good drama -- like Oz -- Attica compressed and exploded social schisms. The result: the kind of real-life mystery that, maybe, only art can begin to provide necessary perspective.

About Attica, I remember reading in a James Baldwin essay that white, male prison guards offered sex to black, male inmates/rioters in exchange for mercy. That anecdote -- for me -- sums up the horror of the United States. A history I have only begun to investigate, a legacy from which all that I am has grown.

Fontana's similar quest for understanding is the key to his dramatic strategy. He encourages the viewer, "safe" at "home," to empathize with the various inmates (as well as guards, prison staff, prisoner's family, and survivors alike). Spectators recognize an unequivocal bond to society's outcasts.

That understanding extends to the self in extreme. "After a big bad event you only become more of the person you already were," explains Hill in a particularly trenchant - though, as usual, redundant - bit of narration.

This insight refers to white-collar criminal Tobias Beecher. As Beecher, Lee Tergesen anchors the first season. Tergesen details Beecher's evolution from a Neo-Nazi's "prag" (or "bitch") to PCP-crazed fury -- "I shit all over a man. That's not normal." These incremental psychological shifts parallel the methodical gears that engine the riot. Oz turns typical white-liberal TV identification inside-out.

Oz stretches "home" from house-and-TV to the channel-surfing elusiveness of society and identity. That's the key to the intensity of feeling Oz generates. Let's fast-forward to some of the most powerful moments of hardboiled melodrama:

A montage memory of blood violence - replacing an unfair justice system - leads to Black drug-runner Jefferson Keane's admittance and plea to Muslim leader Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker): "I do feel the fire. Save me."

That fire breeds homophobia -- a lazy pretense toward righteousness. But even that is challenged -- as is spectator condescension -- when Keane's gay brother, Billie, braids Keane's hair in his death-row cell: "I'm sorry I'm not who you want me to be. I like being Queer."

Following this, Keane defends his brother against their father's claim: "He's become a fag. When he leaves, what's Billie ever gonna be?" Facing death, Keane's answer sanctifies the end of the family line: "Your son. My brother. Forever." That's feeling the fire that saves.

When Italian-American Dino Ortolani, the perpetrator of a homophobic hate crime in the prison, gives a two-fingered tap on a glass screen, a "Goodbye" to his wife, Ortolani earns viewer tears and self-recognition. It prepares for Ortolani's grisly death by fire that vengeance demands.

That revenge contrasts with a scene of forgiveness. The Black mother of a murdered prison guard confronts the white killer (and cannibal) on death row: "You are my neighbor and I forgive you with all my heart." Spectators' feeling marks the beginning of understanding. It responds to Attica's echo of an epochal call.

Oz puts the desire to improve self and society - through faith and politics - in frustrating counterpoint with the impulse to sustain social structures along racial and sexual lines. The emotional amplitude of the above -- and other -- dramatic tête-à-têtes in Oz signify these conflicts.

Less effective: the Brechtian, agit-prop conceit of Hill/Perrineau's narrations. Those, often annoying, simplifications may help guide less sophisticated viewers, but the heady mix of melodrama, exploitation tropes, and the self-referential proves far more affecting.

Characters get introduced with flashbacks of their crimes -- presented in different styles. Those extreme actions become inseparable from the characters, with whom viewers invest an emotional attachment. It's established visually - and with PoMo complexity.

Encouraging simple visual literacy, the video tape of a set-up orchestrated by prison guards confirms Rodney-King-era corruption. Complicating TV spectatorship: an execution layers lethal-injection crucifixion, witnesses behind glass, and a graphic match of the eyes of the condemned and of a prison administrator.

After accepting his new-born son as his responsibility, Hispanic prisoner Miguel Alvarez's chance at salvation seems crushed when the baby dies. That leads to the following exchange with the prison's Asian Catholic priest, Father Ray Mukada:

Alvarez: "Hey Father, where was God when my son died?" Father: "Same place He was when His own died."

The TV-as-prison analogy of Oz puts viewer judgment on trial.

Originally published by GayToday.com

Relationship Propoganda

2007-12-09T14:47:00.001-08:00

The Sweetest Thing and High Crimes
Film Review by John Demetry

"The crap we feed our children!" Those were a friend's words to prepare me for The Sweetest Thing. Such words also apply - in less fun-spiritedness - to High Crimes.

These two new Hollywood releases deserve film culture-digestive system analogies. To get as scatological as The Sweetest Thing and its gross-out humor, call The Sweetest Thing and High Crimes: cultural stool samples. Where does this crap come from? And where is it going?

The totally famished expectations of the current movie audience allow such trite as these two films to pass quickly. Pause the process. One could make some interesting "comparisons and contrasts" (as high school English teachers would say). The experience of The Sweetest Thing and High Crimes need not be a total waste.

I expected little from director Roger Kumble's The Sweetest Thing. His previous film, an adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses called Cruel Intentions, was an unaccountable abhorrence. With The Sweetest Thing, Kumble again fails to credibly portray modern romantic rituals -- even licentiously, much less with moral scrutiny.

On the other hand, I always have high hopes for High Crimes director Carl Franklin. The director of the 1992 cable mini-series Laurel Avenue -- a masterpiece -- proved him capable of great things, of an open-hearted awareness of modern sexual, familial, and political turmoil. In High Crimes, he replaces such insight with his undeniable craft. Stars Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman, and James Caviezel have never looked better.

Perhaps I enjoyed Kumble's craft-less The Sweetest Thing because it's the more honest of the two films. It provides a suggestive metaphor. Cameron Diaz, as heartbreaker Christina Walters, disses her friend's dating self-help book by calling it "relationship propaganda." It turns out that The Sweetest Thing actually is relationship propaganda - and so, in a way, is High Crimes.

The Sweetest Thing barely makes sense. Each event careens into the next like bumper cars. It's more like a kiddy-ride at the amusement park - never reaching those delirious peaks and loop-da-loops of the most subversive comedies. Kumble locates genuine dating fears and travails, but he fails to reveal anything about them. With his perverse inability to tell a story or bring a comic situation to pay off, Kumble doesn't analyze social context.

That describes the crime of High Crimes. Its silly analogy: a lawyer (Judd) knows as little about her husband's hidden past as she does about her country's own secret history. High Crimes links the two as a self-help guide to self-fulfillment (read: self-involvement). The movie lets Judd off the hook from the responsibility that the discovery about the United States' clandestine involvement in South American politics ought to impart.

Similarly, Diaz's character in The Sweetest Thing is more femme facile than fatale - she fears "commitment." One of her friends, played by Selma Blair (so incisive in Storytelling this year), however, endures enough embarrassment to scare anyone from the dating scene. A near-classic sequence involves her bringing a cum-stained dress to the dry-cleaners. The sequence never achieves climax; it never penetrates accepted cultural norms.

Both films ultimately revel in hegemony-endorsed red herrings. In The Sweetest Thing, that red herring is homosexuality. In High Crimes it's the racial other.

Again, I think The Sweetest Thing is the more honest of the two films. Diaz gets poked in the eye when spying through a men's room glory hole. The third of Kumble's Angels, played by a game Christina Applegate, causes a motorcycle accident when she pretends to be enjoying some driver's seat cunnilingus action from Diaz. Both scenes, and others in a similar vein, are very funny.

Fear and fascination with homosexual subcultures aptly - honestly - reflects the anxiety of sexual license in modern dating - hetero or otherwise. Here, at least, it's played for laughs -- an airing out of recognizable, shared discomfort - rather than the menace of homo prurience in Cruel Intentions.

In High Crimes, Judd projects her anxieties, best aimed at scrutinizing her husband and country or herself, onto an alcoholic, African-American lawyer played by Freeman. To Black filmmaker Franklin's credit, the audience is aware of Judd's mistake -- but Franklin manipulates it for mere suspense mechanics.

The crime committed by Judd's husband -- a massacre of innocents in a small El Salvador village -- gets brushed off as the work of a madman. Franklin isolates the bad seed in the military and husband pool -- with no sense of the fruit that bore it. Franklin never explores Judd's and the country's racism -- merely using it for narrative convenience.

The "propaganda" of these movies is not dangerous and will not influence viewers. Rather, the removing of character motivations from social context evidences the way people treat movies and their place in the world. That's what puts the culture in the proverbial crapper: the fear of commitment to the art -- and to life.

Originally published by GayToday.com