In many ways, the film is quite old-fashioned. With a different cast and a different director, it could have been a companion piece to 1952s The Greatest Show on Earth, a circus movie considered among the weakest films to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture.
Waterfor Elephants suffers from the older film’s flaws. It’s too long, and the characters are two-dimensional. A few times, August is shown to feel regret, but nothing ever is explained about why he’s such a murderous bully. We’re offered back stories for Jacob and Marlena, but they don’t really explain or deepen their characters.
Worse, Pattinson and Witherspoon have less chemistry with each other than Pattinson does with the elephant playing Rosie. When she tickles him with her trunk, the glee on Pattinson’s face is the only true, the only infectious emotion in the entire movie.
I also wrote a queer summer movie preview. I’m excited about Beginners, The Perfect Host, X-Men: First Class, and Bad Teacher. Oh, and Thor. Which I saw last week. It was awesome. Not the least because of the scene from which the photo the left was taken. Here’s how the story begins:
While the actual season we call summer doesn’t begin until June 21 and the traditional kick-off for summer doesn’t happen until Memorial Day Weekend, the summer movie season starts the first weekend of May. This year it all begins with Thor, one of the half-dozen big budget superhero flicks out over the next four months.
The summer is usually when studios, big or small, do not like to distribute their more difficult movies – like the gay ones. So, as usual, queer characters and storylines are nearly absent in this summer’s deluge of movies.
Several movies, while not technically gay, feature so much same-sex tension and subtext that you have to call them, to borrow a term from our nerdy queer theorist friends, homosocial. And, of course, there is a bunch that you might want to see, if only because the actors and actresses are so damn hot.
The 30 Day Song Challenge is a Facebook meme in which you post a song — or rather, a video of a song — every day for a month, with each song falling into a set category for that day. Day 1, for example is “your favorite song.” The rules are posted here. I know that this was meant to be done on Facebook, but video posts have such limited captioning. So, I’m going to do it on my blog. This also means that my non-Facebooked family and friends can play along. (And you’re still not on Facebook? Really?)
When I posted this on Facebook yesterday, I wrote, “WTF? Who has only one favorite song? This is the one that popped into my head.” But then I realized, this is my favorite song. It’s perfect. Not only is it one of the greatest written pop songs ever, and it’s probably even the best thing Prince has written, which is really saying something, but Sinéad O’Connor’s performance of it is both gut-wrenching and beautiful. It’s gorgeous heartbreak. Also, dude, the video. It’s iconic. It’s epic. That tear. OMG.
Here’s my latest review. The edited version is here, but there are some edits that, um, don’t work, so I’ve past my version here:
“Scream for them to stop”
Scream 4 (aka Scre4m)
Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Kevin Williamson
Starring Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
I’ve never liked horror movies or slasher films. As a genre, they’re usually exploitative; they go for the basest emotions, the simplest reactions, using buckets of blood to gross you out, gratuitous sex to get a rise out of you, and the lamest of surprises to get you jump out of your seat. The villains are usually cartoonish boogey men in masks, actually scary only to children or people who haven’t discovered that the true terror is in the collapsing world economy, the security of former Soviet nuclear arms, or the popularity of torture porn like Saw. These movies are all id, and it’s rare to find in them any art, emotion, or lasting resonance. For every brilliantly terrifying movie like Psycho,28 Days Later, or The Descent, there are five movies like Hostel, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Final Destination, and the never-ending string of their sequels.
That’s why the original Scream, now 15 years old, was such a breath of fresh air, or, rather, a whiff of fresh blood. Sure, it’s a high-body-count slasher film, but it’s also, and more importantly, a hilarious, almost high-brow commentary on slasher films. In his script, Kevin Williamson (gay and out) had his characters dissecting the misogynistic gender politics and silly genre conventions of movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street, which was directed by Scream’s director, Wes Craven. But Scream was more than a critique. Williamson and Craven refused to play to the audience’s expectations, and in doing so redefined and rebooted the genre.
Scream’s gender politics were progressive; the female heroes played by Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox weren’t virgins, they kicked ass, and they survived. The male hero, played by David Arquette, was a bumbling, nervous cop who often needed to be saved by a woman. Ghostface, the killer, was not an evil demon like Freddy or a violent halfwit like Jason; he was a smart, bitchy sociopath with a real grudge. While Williamson and Craven embraced some of the conventions of the genre – it was a slasher film, after all – you never knew which ones they’d keep and which they were going to turn on their head. That’s what made it so thrilling.
And that’s why Scream 4 isn’t thrilling. After two sequels that tried to do the same thing as the first film, to be witty and bloody at the same time, everything is expected. After Drew Barrymore’s star-remaking slaughter in the opening of the first film, quick and bloody cameos by famous actresses are predictable, and in 4, we have, uh, four: Aimee Teegarden, Shenae Grimes, Anna Paquin, and Kristen Bell. After seeing Campbell, Cox, and Arquette survive every massacre, you know they’ll survive this new Ghostface rampage. After three previous “And the killer is…!” revelations, you should see a pattern. Who’s the least expected? Oh, the killer, that’s who.
After Jamie Kennedy’s high geek monologues about the slasher genre in the original movie, you can only wait for the requisite film school commentary, this time coming from Erik Knudsen, Rory Culkin, and Hayden Panettiere. This time, they’re talking about reboots and sequels. But unlike in the first film, they aren’t merciless. If they were, they’d point out the desperation of reboots and sequels, that they’re done for the money. Neve Campbell hasn’t had a hit film since Scream 3 ten years ago, and while Courtney Cox is in a successful sitcom (Cougar Town), her soon-to-be-ex-husband David Arquette is hardly a sought-after commodity. Craven can sit on his laurels, but Williamson peaked at the same time as Campbell. The Scream franchise has become everything that was mocked in the first movie.
Okay, they’re not paying me very much, but still it’s enough to justify declaring myself self-employed and deducting from my taxes movie tickets, cable TV, and my Entertainment Weekly subscription. Among other things.
Anyway, I’ve muttered a few things here and there on the social media sites about this, but I haven’t — as promised — been posting on the Giddy Bib about it. So here it is: I’m the movie critic for LGBT Weekly, a new weekly news magazine for San Diego queer community run by Stampp Corbin. I’ve been doing it since January, and I now have enough reviews under my belt to apply for membership to the San Diego Film Critics Society. I’ve always wanted to be a member of one of those organizations that doles out year-end awards, and if I can get more folks caring about the Golden Teddy Awards, maybe I’ll get them written up on time. (BTW: I’m almost done with those. I hope I can finish before the last of the previous year’s awards, the Pulitzers, come out.)
This week, I reviewed the best movie I’ve seen this year that came out this year (since I saw a lot of movies that came out last year this year because of the whole released-for-Oscar-consideration thing). My published review of Hanna is here, but the last few paragraphs got cut for space (grrr!) so, I’m going to post my writer’s cut here:
Children can be badasses, too.
Hanna
Directed by Joe Wright
Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr
Starring Saoirse Rowan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
About two-thirds of the way through Hanna, Marissa, the CIA agent hunting the film’s title character, says, “Sometimes children are bad people, too.”
You already know that Hanna isn’t bad, just badass – a 13-year-old superhuman fighting machine Marissa created and now wants to kill. You feel for the naïve Hanna and hate the sociopathic Marissa, but Cate Blanchett delivers Marissa’s line with such southern-accented smarm that you have to giggle while loathing her.
These juxtaposing emotions continue throughout watching Hanna. You’ll love Hanna’s naiveté and genius, but you’ll be shocked and scared by her violence. You’ll be thrilled by the fast-paced chase scenes and beautifully choreographed fights, but you’ll wish you could watch it all in slow motion because the cinematography, art direction and lighting are all so crazy beautiful. You’ll want Erik, Hanna’s father played by Eric Bana, to hurry it up and save his daughter or kill Marissa, but you’ll also want to him to stand still in wet underwear a little longer, because, damn, Eric Bana has a hot body.
Hanna, the best movie I’ve seen this year, is a big surprise. Joe Wright made his name directing two excellent period dramas, Pride & Prejudice and Atonement. Both are smart, beautiful literary adaptations about British domestic drama, so Wright is not the person probably anyone would think about first when looking for a director for a movie about a teenage super soldier on a mission to kill the woman who killed her mother after experimenting on her embryo. It turns out that Wright may be as versatile as fellow Englishman Danny Boyle, who transitions easily from epic to intimate, whose visual and sonic style Wright’s Hanna most closely resembles.
Wright’s bold and beautiful colors (reds, blues, whites and greens in particular), his unexpected camera angles, and a pulsing techno soundtrack from the Chemical Brothers all reminded me, at times, of Boyle’s work on Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire.
But Boyle never had Saoirse Ronan or Cate Blanchett to work with. Wright used the almost translucently pale Ronan with skill in Atonement; her character’s childish ignorance costs her sister everything, and Ronan was brilliantly believable as the jealous and confused girl.
In Hanna, Ronan is a full-fledged teenager. Hanna has until now been living in the woods with her father, and she knows nothing of music or television until she decides to go after Marissa. Hanna is growing up, discovering the violence of herself in the violence of the world, and discovering secrets, veering towards an early adulthood.
In order to do that, she must destroy the malicious woman who loomed over her childhood. She must kill Marissa, who is a combination of the Queen in Snow White and the Wolf in Red Riding Hood. Fairy tale symbolism is central to the film’s imagery, and Blanchett’s regal beauty and effortless, efficient communication of evil (with a dash of angst) make Marissa more than just an archetype. While the psychological damage that caused her evil is only hinted at, Blanchett makes the most of it, creating a character and a performance that makes me hope she’ll be cast as another villain sometime very soon.
Anyhoo, that’s that. Visit the site, link to my reviews, and comment on them. Yay.
Here’s the second of my five Golden Teddy posts. I’ve done my Most Excellence in Music post, and to come are Most Excellence in Stuff, Most Excellence in Writing, and Most Excellence in Film. The second will probably come in late January, because most of the good movies from 2010 haven’t played here yet. I’ll do Stuff and Writing today or tomorrow. (I changed Most Excellence in Books to Most Excellence in Writing, because I haven’t read that many books this year, and I seem to have short-shrifted stories, articles, and poems in the past.)
Anyway, here’s the TV!
And please note: I watch a lot of TV, but I don’t watch a lot of what’s on. So, I don’t have an opinion about a lot of things — like The Real Housewives of [Insert City Here],The A List, CSI: [Insert City Here], or anything animated, because while I almost always like The Simpsons, I almost never like Family Guy or Southpark — and thus, they won’t win any awards.
Most Excellence in Being Exactly What You Are and Nothing Else
Tie!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmC77zrxkjg]Smallville. I’ve watched almost every episode of Smallville, and I’ve been watching since its premiere ten years ago. I stopped for a bit somewhere in the middle, when it got really silly and strangely focused on Lana Lang’s occult powers, but I returned three years ago when other DC ‘verse folk showed up. It got geekier, more myth-y, campier, and simply more fun. Now, in its last year, Smallville is all about Clark and Lois and their destiny. It’s all going somewhere, and it’s doing it as if the show were a filmed comic book. It’s one of the shows that I’m most excited to see on the list of stuff the TiVo has recorded. I love this fan-made promo video for the final season.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJk6b3kAvME]True Blood. The first season was awesome in its shocking blood, sex, and astronomical production values, and the second season was pulpy but unsatisfying and sorta, well, bad. But this past season, the third, True Blood went back to being great at being what it is: blood, sex, astronomical production values, and a coherent, engrossing through-line that made you want to keep watching. And there are two reasons: Joe Manganiello, who was so hot that it was hard to sit still watching him on screen, and Denis O’Hare, whose uber-baddy was camptastically evil.
Most Excellence in Filthy, Gorgeous Camp … and Sadness
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQT4yvkNR_U]Spartacus: Blood and Sand. I have no problem admitting that I started watching Spartacus because I’d heard there were lots of naked gladiators in it. And there are. But it was also insanely entertaining, in 300 meets Rome kind of way: So much blood, so much sex, so many shots of Lucy Lawless’s breasts, so many discussions about honor, so very little subtlety. And Andy Whitfield, who played the titular character, is such an amazingly hot and fierce (in the gay and traditional definitions) action hero. It is deeply awful that promptly after becoming world famous for this role he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and blarg, the role has been recast with some guy who will never be as awesome.
Most Excellence in Scaring the Living Poo Out of Me
The Walking Dead. Like vampires, zombies have gone high-brow in the last decade. Danny Boyle started it with 28 Days Later, and now we have a high-art cable show on the same network as Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The pilot of The Walking Dead is easily one of the scariest and creepiest 90 minutes of televisual entertainment I’ve ever encountered. I’ve heard complaints that after the first couple episodes, the show got boring. As far as I can tell, “boring” means that the show didn’t focus solely on blowing the heads off of zombies but rather on the human emotional upheaval of the apocalypse, which The Walking Dead does much better than Battlestar Galatica ever could. The acting and writing are as good as anything else on the air right now, and the action — of which there is a lot — is intense and often brilliantly directed. As you can see from the clip here.
Most Excellence in Wrongness (Comedy)
Raising Hope. I liked My Name Is Earl, but there was something a bit mean-spirited about it; the characters, despite Earl’s desire to do the right thing, were deep-down not very good people. Raising Hope, which has the same creator and which is set in the same town, uses white trash humor a bit more humanely and lovingly. At the heart of the show is family, love, and responsibility. And it’s crazy, crazy funny.
Most Excellence in Wrongness (Drama)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RB8t0CCZB4]Breaking Bad. Since the premise of show is watching when, how, and why people “break bad” — become criminals, do terrible things, compromise their ethics and morals — I shouldn’t be surprised by the number of times I screech “Oh, no!” when I’m watching Breaking Bad. The one here is the most epic. Lawd. It’s really hard to watch. I’m not even sure if it’s entertaining. But it’s damn good drama. That said, I’m probably only watching it because my dissertation is about meth, and so is this show.
Most Excellent Endings
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEqcMPsUqQ8]Lost. While no series finale can touch the last episode of Six Feet Under — which I think should be used as the definition of “sublime” — the finale of Lost is one of the few that actually both ends a story and does it in a satisfying, emotionally rewarding way. It took me a while to comprehend it fully how it worked, but the ingenious duel storylines of the last season, one of which only in hindsight took place in a sort of Purgatory, allowed a mysterious build-up of catharsis that I had only experienced while reading great novels. I wept in the same way I did after reading the last page of Atonement.
Most Excellently Awful, Sharp-Jumping, Are-You-Fucking-Kidding-Me?! Ending
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qesx7T6s6_o]Project Runway. After three months of watching Mondo make exquisite, artful, original and deeply personal women’s clothes and also watching Gretchen making dreadful clothes inspired by Joni Mitchell album covers from the late 70s, it was, to say the least, appalling to watch Gretchen win Project Runway. It was one of the best seasons in a while: drama, drama, drama, and some cool clothes, too. But in Mondo being robbed, it was the first time that someone truly, truly undeserving won.
Most Excellence in Being Dreadfully Awful
Fox News. What’s that sound? It’s all 73 of my readers saying “duh.” All you need to know about how evil of this station is in the survey that showed that its viewers are the most misinformed compared to viewers of MSNBC and CNN. And how did Fox’s spokesperson respond? By attacking the authors of the study because they’re researchers at the University of Maryland. Cuz it’s a party school! As if that has anything to do with whether the methods of the researchers are valid. If the researchers were from Harvard? Liberal! If they were from Oxford? European! If they were from Bob Jones University? Silence. Based on the amount of partisanship, cynicism, anger, and discursive evil it has wrought, Fox News is the single worst thing to happen to the American polity since Watergate.
Most Excellence in Pointing Out How Dreadfully Awful Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC Are
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JnDY2Gv5YQ]Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And I don’t even watch their shows; I just watch the clips when they’re posted on Facebook. Sadly, as good as Stewart and Colbert are at shredding into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces the falsities and cynicism of Fox News, nothing changes. Everyone with a clue knows that Fox News is not news, but rather hateful, dishonest propaganda. And everyone who wants to hear only what makes uneducated white Christians feel good about themselves will happily watch Fox and believe whatever they’re told.
Most Excellent Topic of Argument for Pop Culture-Minded Grad Students (that isn’t Black Swan)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTnwv2NN-DI]Glee. Some people love it, some people hate it, a lot of people thought this season isn’t as good or consistent as last season (as if it was ever consistent), and I love how it makes people fight about art, drama, and the representation of gays and lesbians on TV. Queeny and manipulative and damaged and funny, Kurt is all sorts of problematic, and so are his storylines, and I love when people get all indignant about Kurt, pro or con. Also: It’s fun to watch people trash Glee in total and thoughtlessly expose their either external or internal homophobia. And by “fun,” I mean “depressing and useful.” Also: This clip shows the cutest, gayest, and most subversive thing I’ve seen on network TV in a long time.
Most Excellence in Continued Excellence (Drama)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkCzGBK3aWY]Mad Men. I don’t think there’s any debate about this being the best season since the first. I can quibble about some odd dramatic transitions, or lack thereof, particularly in the moment when Don decided to stop, or curtail, his drinking, for that scene was never shown. And I found his journaling a tad weird. But “The Suitcase” was the best episode of the entire series, and the drama of Anna’s death, Don’s quick and weird engagement with his toothy secretary, Roger’s disastrous lies, and Peggy being Peggy created an emotional roller coaster for both Don and the audience. You get why he drinks.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGnjj6pbU9E]The Good Wife. There are two shows that when I see them in my TiVo list, I get excited: Smallville and The Good Wife. Clearly, I like a lot of TV, but when it comes to pure entertainment, The Good Wife does it without being shocking, depressing, or challenging. These are all qualities that I like in a show, but sometimes you just want a procedural/soap opera that is well-acted, well-written, and not insulting to your intelligence (unlike every other legal procedural on network television.)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGoI1eW9zvs]Fringe. While there’s not too much competition right now, even if there were some competition, it’s still the best sci-fi on TV. And it got so much better this year for three reasons: 1) Taking the drama to the parallel universe, which is so Crisis on Infinite Earths; 2) Giving us Walternate and Fauxlivia, roles that give two of our heroes the opportunity to play slightly different versions of one character, which leads to some superheroic acting; 2) Joshua Jackson being all Joshua Jacksony — Yum.
Most Excellence in Continued Excellence (Comedy)
30 Rock. It’s beginning to have that not-so-fresh feeling, but the satire is still genius. Explaining comedy is hard. Here’s a clip.
Modern Family. For the same reason as last year: incredibly funny and not mean. 1/2 Arrested Development, 1/4 All in the Family, and 1/4 Leave it to Beaver. And we have a clip to prove it.
Parks & Recreation. It’s almost as good as The Office was when that show was at its best. I’m worried about the new presence of Rob Lowe, who I’ve always found to be incredibly unctuous, but Parks & Rec wonderfully uncynical, openhearted, and silly. Clip!
So, I reviewed Water For Elephants. It was relentlessly mediocre. Here’s the money quote:
I also wrote a queer summer movie preview. I’m excited about Beginners, The Perfect Host, X-Men: First Class, and Bad Teacher. Oh, and Thor. Which I saw last week. It was awesome. Not the least because of the scene from which the photo the left was taken. Here’s how the story begins:
