Reel Girly

Note: Monsters will see you at the Sephora so beware. 

This action film has such high saturation advertising that if you know about it, you probably already know if you care to see it. Which is just as well because I’m not writing this review to help you make a sound financial investment: I’m a film critic, not a stock broker. However as the work of the film critic has slowly devolved from “cultural commentator” to “box office investment advisor ” most every review has become commentary to aid a financial proposition: “Spend $10 here” or “don’t waste your money.” This is part of why film criticism is slowly damaging the tiny movie. So, I’m hoping to offer some tiny criticism for this massive movie that likes to look small.

An aside about the blog: There’s a tricky thing that happens when you review indie films or documentaries. The tiny filmmaker may or may not get many reviews to put in his press kit and in many instances, the number of reviews amount to the number of records of screening. Which is to say, if you don’t have reviews, it’s almost like your film hasn’t screened, and nearly like it doesn’t exist. My favorite film of 2007 was Jessica Yu’s Protagonist. One of the most brilliant pieces of art I’ve maybe ever seen, and it had a medium sized opening (for a doc) and ridiculously few saw it. My second favorite film was Heddy Honigmann’s Forever. I dare you to hit the street and find someone who’s even heard of it. Maybe you see where I’m going. Cloverfield directed by Matt Reeves and produced by J.J. Abrams (fellow Sarah Lawrence Alum) is going to be reviewed so extensively, this one bad review can hardly do damage. This doesn’t mean we should launch all out assaults on blockbusters and molly coddle the little films, not at all, but these market factors can’t help but influence the ultimate outcome of our involvements with the films. So, this is why I’m starting the blog again.

At my day Job at Rottentomatoes.com, we often have to limit our scope of film coverage to the biggest box office films. The idea is that people in Mythic Middle America, film fans who would likely go out to see something like Forever if they only could, have no access. As a result it’s almost alienating to tell them all about how great it is. As journalists, we all struggle to create balance. On the one hand we have to speak to our audience, on the other hand if we talk about Protagonist maybe, just maybe, theatre owners will get requests and maybe, it’ll play in Omaha. At work, I’ve begun creating these little alliances with doc makers. They send me photos and screeners and it’s occurred to me recently, that I can do something with this alliance. So I will. There’s lots we can do in this world. But this is about Cloverfield, which will likely play all over Omaha, and won’t suffer terribly from this bit of monster-movie indigestion.

Cloverfield strikes me as a non-event, however, it will be historical for one contribution: It is the death knell of first person spectator handheld. It was great in Blair Witch, enlightening in Peter Watkins’ The War Game and it’s had its bright spots in other films too, but here, it was fundamentally done to death. The gimmick in Cloverfield is that the end of the world, well, technically, the end of Manhattan, comes at the hands of a beast of unknown origin, best documented by this posthumously found video of a going away party gone grisly. The brightest spot of the film in its entirety is the fellow behind the camera. TJ Miller  like the rest of the film’s cast is still categorically “unknown” which will change soon, I think. However, not because of his part in Cloverfield. Miller plays gawky oddball Marmaduke on Bruce McCulloch’s (of Kids in the Hall Fame) new sitcom Carpoolers and he’s got magnificent, dry delivery. It’s a big credit to Miller that he’s so memorable given his character (Hud, the cameraman) is so infrequently on camera he could just as soon be credited as a voice actor.

The other characters in the film are sort of ridiculous. They’re supposed to be bourgie 20 somethings in their parents’ apartments. The notion that our record of the disaster comes from the recent grads of Gossip Girl sounds a bit too fortunate. Like if I had the occasion to psychically channel a character from the French Revolution and was lucky enough to tap into Josephine’s handmaiden. It’s just kinda…dumb. There are tons of working class people in New York, plenty of them with dv cams…before the looting started.

There are certain ways the film could stand apart as a monster/disaster flick. The ending is pretty beautiful – a little predictable – but worthy nonetheless, and possible political readings (Lady Liberty’s head flattens nest of baby Neo-Cons) could be taken in worthy directions. If J.J. Abrams is still feeling his highly argumentative Sarah Lawrence Oats, there’ll be something from lefty field to read in this one. So though it is a worthy thing to do with your time and money, (note: sacred few films aren’t) it’s still tragically hollow – even for a film that critics foresee as the big iPod download for summer. You know what they say, merchandise, merchandise, merchandise. However else will the culture machine go on?

I’ve been working PT for Rottentomatoes.com! Best job ever!

Most of my time there has been dedicated to learning the programs, adding reviews and editing older entries (they work so hard there!) but Thursday I got to contribute my first news item! I’m really looking forward to more writing on the horizon!!! We’re discussing an interview with the godly brit Danny Boyle! I couldn’t possibly be more excited about that! The production blog is exciting! Though I suppose I should see Sunshine before I get too emotional. It’s at 82% but the critics are all over the place! What do us critics know? Some hype was meant to be succumbed to.

The Curiosity of Chance is a high-school coming of age comedy that also takes from the traditions of New Queer Cinema. Chance is Russell Marleau’s directorial debut. After a few years working in TV, Marleau sold a script to Sony that was produced and released under the title Three Way (Gina Gershon, Dwight Yokum and Dominic Purcell). Marleau is well read and charming: two decidedly winning traits for a man responsible for a film that sweetly, and intelligently plums the depths of teen comedy and queer-core simultaneously.

You can see The Curiosity of Chance June 23, at the Castro ($9 member/$10 general) as part of Frameline 31 Film Festival.

Which was your priority to represent: teen comedy or queer-core?
Initially teen comedy. I always wanted a gay lead so I started with that conceit and those conventions and as I was writing it the conventions of coming of age films and queer films in general kind of came into play but first and foremost I wrote it as a genre teen comedy with a gay lead. Chance is gay but I wanted his story to be universal and I definitely did not want to do a coming out story. They’ve been done well and to death and I felt I had nothing new to add.

Where does Superman factor in? Chance has a flamboyant secret identity, his friends are like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson…
That’s interesting and you’re actually the first to bring that up. Everything is a costume to Chance: it’s Halloween every day. But costume changes are part of him and also part of the teen experience. You’re looking for your identity and you try on different things. Part of that is your clothing and style – you try to create a personal style but also borrow from other places. I think of Chance as an old soul who doesn’t just take from current fashion but from everywhere. I never thought of him as super-hero like.

He’s even got a little swoop of hair in the front.
Well now you say that, I think Tad (Hilgenbrinck) even auditioned for the Jimmy Olson character in Superman Returns. It’s funny.

Your story takes place in the 80’s and at an international school. When you ask an audience to make a leap like that it makes the characters that much easier to identify with. So, why Belgium, and why the 80’s?
It was a condition of our financing. I was working with Bigfoot Entertainment, the company that made this film and the executive producer on another script I’d been hired to write. Working with Michael (Gleissner) he mentioned he wanted to do a gay script. He was living in Belgium at the time and he said, “I want to shoot a film here in Belgium.” I told him I wrote this script and it’s something I want to direct, and the company liked it. The original script was set in Northern California and Michaels said he’d be willing to have the company make this movie but ‘you have to make it in Belgium’. I thought about it and tried to figure out how that would work and in every draft, Chance’s father had been in the military and that kind of made sense he’d be traveling around a lot. I had gone to an international school for a while and I had some experience with that. So I thought “this could work.” The script didn’t change a lot with that shift and I think it enhanced the fish-out-of-water aspect of the film. As far as setting it in the 80’s, there were two reasons for that. First, I wanted to use a lot of Journey songs to touch upon Chance’s journey.

That’s like taking the kitsch sincerely.
Yeah and the songs are emotional and the teen angst in those songs – when you look back at the angst you’re like ‘that wasn’t a big deal’ but when you’re a teenager it’s a big deal. Journey’s music hammered that home but I felt like with all that Journey music in the movie, it’d be better if the music were current to the movie you were watching. Also, I felt that if Chance is an out gay student that it was harder to be like that in the 80’s and the persecution would be heightened and more believable - not that it wouldn’t be believable in this day and age but - I had the liberty to push it and still make it believable. You know, people who read the script liked the idea that it was in the 80’s. People also said we could make it current - which I agree with – and for money reasons we only ended up using one Journey song.

I wanted to ask about music licensing. Your film is packed with 80’s hits.
Right now we have festival license and we’ll see what we can keep when we go for distribution. All the songs that are performed on screen and the drag performances we have license for. I had a really good music supervisor [Cathy Duncan] and we had a really great time picking out just the right song for each scene.

I was really impressed with the way you managed the ambiguity of identity in the story. You have a happy, healthy conclusion but at the same time, certain major issues that seemed to cause a lot of tension stay with only a modicum of resolution.
I agree and I guess I was just trying to find the right emotional ending for a film with that sort of emotional conflict. I also wanted to communicate that you haven’t seen all of Chance’s story yet. He’s got a lot more to go through and all those characters too and that’s high school – there’s so much more to come. With Chance, there’s the added thing he’s out and he still has a lot of work on that issue. I’d hoped that came through but I also hope that when people watch the movie they feel like they had a good emotional resolution and could walk away feeling satisfied.

I was also impressed you dealt with fantasy because that’s important to the character of Chance and his phase in life. It also seems like a nod to films of the period and the tendency popular in that time frame to dissect classic films with a queer lens. I feel like you were using fantasies as a convention to deal with identity. The kiss, for example –
That was tough. I intentionally wrote and shot the kiss in a way that I could make it seem either an unambiguous fantasy, an obvious reality or somewhere in the middle. It was interesting working with Brett Chukerman who played Levi and Tad who played Chance and we talked a lot about that scene because they came to it with questions. And they needed to know everything behind it in order to play it. When we finally put it all together I didn’t want to go into a total fantasy. I felt like this was going to be a nice moment and people will want it or not know they want it until they see it and I felt playing it as a complete fantasy, would be a cop out. But I also didn’t want to present Levi as this straight character and then not be true to who he is. I thought the best way to deal with that was to make it ambiguous and plant the question in the audience that Levi might turn or maybe he’s giving it to Chance because Chance deserved it and they’re friends, but I like there to be different interpretations for it. It was a tricky thing and it’s been interesting to see the response. The first scene where you see Levi stripping is obviously a fantasy and the issue of Chance’s fantasy life and what’s real is a line you have to walk because people have to finally invest in these characters.

Photo by Mark Schieron - Set

You also gave a good bit of time to the management of fantasy and the management of reality that made me feel like you were consciously not presenting one as an escape from the other. That became really valid in the scenes when he enters drag – he’s not doing it as a life long commitment.
My original idea was that drag was going to be huge but as I wrote more and these other characters came in and Chance had to go through more, the drag became less and less. But then it became a centerpiece for the Brad (Maxim Maes) story. I always felt like Chance would ultimately be a professional drag queen but he’s trying things on and he has that curiosity so I think drag ultimately has the right amount of weight in the final story.

Director Alex Orr said, “If you’re making something for anybody, you’re making nothing for nobody.” Though his feature Blood Car, playing at SF Hole Head tonight at 9:30 (Roxie, 6/7), is uncompromising Orr and his compadres were far from abrasive. They were warm and made it quickly clear that their film was not the work of one depraved lunatic, rather the concerted effort of many who shared the deluded vision.

These guys gave a lot away in our recorded conversation - they’re fearless I tell you - so when spoilers were present in the text, I included a link to the podcast.

Blood Car could easily be confused for a spoof made by slumming Hwd bad boys. The low video quality is quickly overcome because of the film’s brilliant/fucked up, but incredibly well managed premise.

An intensely collaborative event, Blood Car is the accomplishment of a clutch of filmmakers from Atlanta. In hiatus from their “day jobs” making commercials, Alex Orr (director/writer/producer), Adam Pinney (DP/editor/writer/producer), Tony Holley (producer/1st AD), Katie Rowlett (plays Denise) and Mike Brune (plays Archie), came all the way from Georgia just to watch San Jose love up their subversive master stroke. If the value of their journey could be judged against audience response, they could have walked from Atlanta to San Jose and it still would have been worth the trip.

Where did the premise come from?
Alex Orr: We were doing what filmmakers do, working in the film industry, shooting carpet commercials and things that aren’t as much fun and we were complaining about wanting to go out and shoot our first feature. Hugh Braselton (not present), Adam Pinney and myself were riding around in the car, talking about a horror movie and what would be fun or funny and somebody said “a car that runs on blood” and we ran with that. Adam and I wrote the script fairly quickly: our only rule was it needed to be pretty retarded. You know, really silly; push the envelope. We jammed out the script and ran to production as fast as we could.

It’s interesting that when you introduce or describe your film, you never use the words “satire” or “politics.”
AO: Those words don’t make people think they’re about to go laugh.
Adam Pinney: It’s really a movie about a guy who kills people to go have sex with a girl. Overall. And the politics are there as a tongue in cheek thing. To end the movie as ridiculously as we did (spoiler available in the podcast) –it is a joke and that’s the whole point. We made it political at the end and maybe people are thinking “they’re taking this and themselves seriously” but we’re not.

I see what you’re saying but what I thought you guys were going to talk about… how did you describe it? ‘The FBI fuck-tard whose monologue should have been like Ned Beatty’s diatribe from Network?’
AO: You know the blood for oil thing is there and towards the end we come out and say it, but instead of giving you the grand speech about the evil government we like to give more jokes and nonsense.
AP: We don’t want to browbeat people with political purpose, it’s an underlying tone but it doesn’t drive the film at all, the fact that the government is evil -
Mike Brune: Blood drives the film…Heh?! Funny?!

Oh, come on, not just blood: blood and cum. That was the goopiest movie I’ve seen in a while and I’ve seen a lot!
Tony Holley: (sheepishly) Can we say cum?

I think we should be able to.
TH: Cum!
(pause)
AO: And there are some things that need to happen in that sort of movie. The main character needs to be conflicted about whether to keep killing for sex or quit and what better thing to persuade him than a giant wet spot? He should eventually get together with Loraine, the audience should expect the good girl to finally get in there, but for no other reason than to not do what is expected, we (spoiler available in podcast). We all watch a lot of movies. We’re movie geeks so whenever we’d talk about doing something, one of us would say, “No, because they did that in this.” And we’d say, “What else we got?” We didn’t want anyone to watch the movie and feel like, “Here comes A, B, and C and soon they’ll tie up that other thing.” We definitely wanted to keep people on their toes. Originally we wanted the bed to talk, to be like a vagina.
Katie Rowlett: A talking vagina. The set guy said he could do it.
AO: We were gonna do it with the computer but someone said it was a little too Cronenberg. It was disgusting! Wonderful!

You just referenced your influences and before I asked about your respective influences –
AP: You said Tokaishi Miike, Scorcese
AO: Scorcese, Allen.

Hitchcock…the shower bit.
AP: I’m obsessed with that scene.
AO: He is! Adam Pinney likes to kill women and be in a bathroom.
AP: I’ve killed three women in bathrooms, or injured them greatly. In my three films, I’ve made two short films: a girl dies in a bathroom in one of them and in another she dry heaves and is a wreck, and in this one she (spoiler available in the podcast).
AO: He loves bathrooms, how they’re small and difficult.

You talked about pushing the envelope.
TH: There’s no other way to go for us.

The way of violence on children?
TH: Yeah. But they’re all jokes and people laugh at them because they don’t expect it to go that far. And I know that’s really going to hinder us when we go out for –
MB: -Lots of filmmakers want to go for that but they have this block that says they can’t get this scene by this audience. So they never even consider the possibility past that first spark. Whereas we just said, “Fuck it.”
AO: If you’re making something for anybody, you’re making nothing for nobody.
AP: It’s catching on now. Several people have said it’s very Borat-esque just because in a movie like that they take jokes just a little too far. Based on the response it works and I hope more people do stuff like that. Every joke that was going too far people were shocked but they were clapping, they were like “Yes, you did this!”
AO: We’re not all like this. We make other films, but we don’t want to pride ourselves on something someone already did – no one wants to make the next Karate Kid.

Exceptional choice of films to mimic!
TH: Are you kidding? Get that out of my face! (Under breath) Three?!