X-Men go from best to worst

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

Kodi Smit-McPhee, Sophie Turner, and Tye Sheridan in X-Men: Apocalypse

Bryan Singer directed the first two movies based on Marvel Comics’ mutant superhero team the X-Men. Brett Ratner directed the third film, The Last Stand, which is loathed by fans and critics alike. The franchise was then rebooted with Matthew Vaughn’s First Class, and Bryan Singer returned for the second film in this cycle, Days of Future Past, arguably the best of all of the X-Men movies. And now there’s X-Men: Apocalypse, which opens May 27. About a third of the way through Apocalypse, which takes place in 1983, Jean Gray (Sophie Turner), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Jubilee (Lana Condor) are walking out of Return of the Jedi when they start discussing whether it was better or worse than The Empire Strikes Back. Jean Gray eventually says, “At least we can all agree the third one is always the worst.”

I saw Apocalypse on the Fox Studios lot with a few hundred members of the press and various Fox employees, and there was an audible gasp before the nervous laughter. Maybe Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg don’t see Apocalypse as the third film after the reboot, though it is. Either way, they were begging the question. Apocalypse is easily the worst of the second trilogy and is debatably worse than The Last Stand. Singer and Kinberg’s hubris is galling in light of the ugly nonsense of the film’s plot, themes and production design.

The film begins 10 years after the end of Days of Future Past. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) has become a folk hero to young, rebellious mutants everywhere. Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) has become the head of a school for teenage mutants, who include Jean Gray and Cyclops. Mystique shows up with Nightcrawler and tells Xavier that Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who had gone into hiding, had resurfaced. He had been living in rural Poland, had married and had a daughter, and he was an iron worker who no one knew was the Master of Magnetism. But the locals figured it out and during his arrest they accidentally kill Magneto’s wife and daughter. So Magneto slaughters all of the police officers and sets off to kill some more people.

Magneto is not actually the worst of the world’s problems. From the ruins of a collapsed pyramid, a godlike mutant named Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) has emerged after a 4,000 year slumber, and he’s pissed. The world he once ruled is now a mess: the late Cold War, TV, rock music and nuclear weapons. He recruits his Four Horsemen to help him destroy the current human race so that he and mutants can rebuild and rule. His horsemen are an angry, grieving Magneto, weather controlling Storm (Alexandra Shipp), winged drunk Angel (Ben Hardy), and psychic knife wielding Psylocke (Olivia Mum). Aside from Magneto, it’s not explained why the others might want to end human civilization, but Apocalypse doesn’t have much of a motivation either. Other than being evil.

The good guys are clearer in their goals: save each other’s’ lives and save the world. How they do this with the interference of the U.S. government is a bit complicated, but after plot twists and some utterly implausible, even for superhero movies, events, the characters all end up in Egypt for a final, boring, incoherent battle between good and evil. Most of the action involves standing and posing or looking grim, and the results are predictable. What isn’t predictable is how the good guys forgive the surviving bad guys’ murder of several hundred thousand people.

I can’t forgive a number of things. The costumes and makeup, from Jean Gray’s hideous aquamarine shoulder padded blazer to Angel’s dreadful mullet, seem to be conceived for a parody of a ‘80s teen comedy. Apocalypse’s purple and gold armor makes him look a bit like Skeletor as dressed by Liberace. As it has been since First Class, Mystique’s red wig and blue skin are horribly done. The various sets, from Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters to Apocalypse’s gilded ancient kingdom to the rubble where the final battle takes place, are blandly undetailed.

It’s possible that Singer just wasn’t paying attention to what his staff was doing, though looking at the other work of the production and costume designers, only on X-Men does it look so bad. Singer also doesn’t seem to have been directing much of the action. So confusing and weird, the third act doesn’t seem to have been directed at all, let alone by the same guy who presided over X-Men United and The Usual Suspects. The action is impossible to track, and the actual shots are horribly composed. But considering how many characters were being thrown around, how weak their characterizations were, and how strangely unlike their comic versions they were, badly directed action sequences aren’t the worst thing about the film. That would be Singer and Kinberg noticing how much of a mess Apocalypse is.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Directed by Bryan Singer

Written by Simon Kinberg

Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence

Rated PG-13

This illusion of paradise has a dark side

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

Matthias Schoenaerts, Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson and Ralph Fiennes in A Bigger Splash

In one of the first scenes of Luca Guadagnino’s fantastic A Bigger Splash, Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) and her lover Paul de Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts) are relaxing on the rocky, sun-bleached beach of an Italian island in the Mediterranean. It seems idyllic; they’re beautiful, clearly in love, and the setting reeks of wealth. But then you notice that the sun is too bright, the blue sky not quite beautiful and there are flies buzzing everywhere, like they might over rotting garbage. A cell phone rings and Paul answers because Marianne can’t. She cannot speak because, we find out later, she’s on vocal rest after throat surgery. The caller is Marianne’s ex Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) and he speaks rapidly, almost maniacally, and is calling from an airplane, announcing he’s coming to visit them. A jet roars over Marianne and Paul: Harry’s already here.

If anything is foreshadowing how badly the visit will go it’s those flies. Paradise is festering. And paradise isn’t just the island in the Mediterranean, but Marianne and Paul, too. When Harry comes through the gate at the airport, he’s almost terrifying in his enthusiasm and his inappropriate familiarity with Marianne. The contrast between him and the lithe and silent Marianne and the laconic, measured, clearly un-thrilled Paul is stark.

Added to this weird trinity is the young, gorgeous Penelope (Dakota Johnson), who is introduced as Harry’s daughter, one he didn’t know he had until the past year. Immediately, we can tell Penelope’s a problem. She’s petulant, precocious and manipulative as she flirts with both Paul and, creepily, Harry. Whether she’s more of a danger than her father is unclear, but she’s clearly up to something. By the end of the film’s first act, the mostly unspoken tensions – romantic, aesthetic, historic – between these four past, present and future hedonists has become unnerving. And thrilling.

Having Swinton silent for most of the movie, with her only words coming as whispers, is just one of the ways that Guadagnino keeps the viewers off-kilter. Marianne cannot respond to Harry’s rapid-fire declarations (of opinion, love, lust), and she cannot properly state her desires. Harry talks too much, Marianne too little, while Paul and Penelope seem to be saying things that don’t appear to be honest, either emotionally or factually.

Fiennes, in one of the greatest performances of his career, is as explosive, in both hilarious and sinister ways, as Swinton is restrained. This is fascinating, as she usually gives the boldest performance in her movies. Her subtlety is, oddly, spectacular. Schoenaerts oozes sex and sadness. For the film to work, we need to fall in love with him, and it worked for me. As for Johnson, at first she seems to be doing a Lolita impression as Penelope. After all is revealed, the impression is impressive, not faulty.

All of this happens surrounded by beautiful landscapes, lush dinners, servants, quaint island traditions and fans idolizing Marianne. This makes the movie feel a bit like privilege porn – until we notice the flies are everywhere. Food is rotting. People are in poverty. In the background, migrants are being rescued from sinking ships and housed in fenced camps. They’re being used as scapegoats in the press and then by the film’s characters. Wealth and privilege make Harry, Marianne, Paul and Penelope seem sexy. Wealth and privilege are also what are savagely critiqued by the film’s deeply cynical ending.

MOVIE REVIEW

A Bigger Splash

Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Written by Dave Kajganich

Starring Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Ralph Fiennes

Rated R

Opens May 20 at Landmark Hillcrest

Finally, a truly comprehensive film on Robert Mapplethorpe

In April of 1990, the Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center opened its doors to Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of the famed photographer who just recently died from AIDS. I was 15 and had grown up in the Queen City, as it was called, and Dennis Barrie, the director of the CAC, and his family lived across the street. I babysat the kids, and my parents were close with the Barries. I had seen photocopies of the pictures in the exhibit at dinner one night. I grew up in a very liberal home, but these raised my eyebrows, partly because I knew I was gay and partly because some of the grainy, poorly reproduced pictures on the Barries’ dining room table depicted the kind of gay that scared me as a closeted teenager in the conservative Midwest at the height of AIDS.

When the exhibit was supposed to be shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., early that year, conservative Christians raised such a ruckus that the show was cancelled. Mapplethorpe was most famous to the general public for his iconic photographs of flowers and his sublimely printed portraits of celebrities. But he also took numerous pictures that some would call erotica and others would call pornography and Sen. Jesse Helms would call “morally reprehensible trash.” They included some relatively tame (by current standards) images of men showing affection while naked as well as some very explicit images of fisting, sounding and other sadomasochistic acts. Despite the content, the images are perfectly lit and composed, but people like Helms didn’t care (and probably didn’t understand). It’s obvious how vile they were: “Look at the pictures!” he said on the Senate floor railing against the National Endowment for the Arts for giving grants to him and other objectionable artists like Andres Serrano.

Look at the Pictures is the subtitle of Fenton Bailey’s and Randy Barbato’s nearly perfect documentary about Mapplethorpe that is available at HBOGO and premiered last month. Its release coincides with a massive retrospective of his work showing at both the Getty and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I was honestly shocked that such a film hadn’t already been made, considering how iconic Mapplethorpe was as an artist, a celebrity and a lightning rod. It was worth waiting for Bailey and Barbato, who also made Party Monster, The Eyes of Tammy Fay and Inside Deep Throat.

Mapplethorpe’s aged mother, his sister and his younger brother give extensive, insightful and not always flattering interviews about the artist’s almost pathological ambition, his perfectionism and hunger for fame. Interviews with some of his most famous models – from Ken Moody and Robert Sherman to Brooke Shields – describe his studio methods and idiosyncrasies. Various members of the 1970s and 1980s New York avant garde – from Debbie Harry to Fran Lebowitz – talk about his extensive, often strategic socializing. (Oddly, Patti Smith, who was Mapplethorpe’s best friend and lover in the early 1970s, is nowhere to be seen; a producer said that she “didn’t make that impossible” to be included.)

Bailey and Barbato’s access to interviewees and to Mapplethorpe’s entire archive (now housed at the Getty Center in Los Angeles) allowed them to make a truly comprehensive film, but their skill as interviewers, editors and historians is what makes Look at the Pictures not just deeply informative but also entertaining and moving. Despite Mapplethorpe’s careerism and narcissism, he was an immensely sensitive artist who pulled out incredible emotion from perfectly sculpted lights, darks, bodies and shapes. His photos of flowers were as sublime as his arguably most famous photo, that of a massive uncut black penis hanging out of a polyester suit.

I was particularly fascinated by that image as a teenager, more than all of the images I was also fascinated with. The photos awakened a great deal inside me, artistically, intellectually and sexually. I wrote a letter to the Cincinnati Enquirer arguing in favor of the exhibit after Dennis Barrie was indicted on obscenity charges for bringing the show to the city. I received seven death threats, including one that said “Drop dead! Go to hell! The devil could use you to shovel shit!” Barrie was acquitted. I became a writer, a critic and an AIDS researcher.

Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures

Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

Featuring Robert Mapplethorpe, Fran Lebowitz and Debbie Harry

On HBOGO (free month trial available at HBO.com)

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

| Cincinnati Fenton Bailey Queers Randy Barbato Recommended Ribert Mapplethorpe

Heretofore unmentioned movie reviews

I forgot to post these movie reviews, which all ran in LGBT Weekly over the last few months.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

I was unable to see the mega-hyped, mega-budget Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice before other critics ran their reviews. And because many of the reviewers were so dismissive or so hyperbolic in their criticism, the news of the film’s opening was overshadowed by the blood sport of Internet overkill. The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern called it “underdeveloped, overlong and stupendously dispiriting” and NPR’s Chris Klimek described the film as “a ponderous, smothering, over-pixelated zeppelin crash of a movie scored by a choir that sounds like it’s being drowned in lava.” A meme of Ben Affleck’s dejected facial expression in response to hearing about the reviews was shared by millions of people who weirdly find glee in the sadness of others. I found it impossible to avoid knowing that a lot of people thought the movie was terrible. But when I did see it, I was perplexed. While BvS is certainly not a masterpiece of the genre – neither as morally complex and smart as The Dark Knight nor as fun and thrilling as The Avengers – it is hardly a “zeppelin crash.” It’s pretentious and bombastic and it rewrites the central ethos of its main characters in ways that are disconcerting for some longtime fans. But it’s not an ineptly made film. [Read the rest.]

Hello, My Name Is Doris

At various times in my life, I’ve frequented nightclubs: loud music, overpriced drinks, spinning lights, smoke machines and usually young people dancing in outfits chosen to attract the gaze and attention of other, hopefully very attractive dancers. Occasionally, people would stick out. A guy who arrived in loafers and Dockers, a bachelorette dancing in a white veil and an older person in what someone might call “age-inappropriate clothing.” There’d be that one woman over 60 in a miniskirt, a glittery wig, chunky earrings and an original Sex Pistols concert T-shirt. I always loved this woman, not just because it takes a lot of guts to go dancing in a club full of kids younger than her children (if she had any), but also because I knew she had a story, a good story. Hello, My Name is Doris is one such story. Starring a brilliant Sally Field and co-written and directed by Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Showalter, the delightful Doris is both heartfelt and cringeworthy. [Read the rest.]

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of those movies that everyone likes. The seamless blend of ground-breaking martial arts action, two epic love stories, feminist character arcs, high art visuals, gorgeous music and the great director Ang Lee made the film beloved of everyone from teenage action fans to cineastes, men and women, boys and girls. More than once, I was told seeing it was like seeing Star Wars for the first time – revelatory. Even though the film is based on the fourth novel of The Crane-Iron pentology by Du Lu Wang, no one seriously suggested that Ang Lee make the prequels or a sequel. But the Weinstein Company is never one not to see branded opportunity, and 15 years later they decided to make a film based on the fifth of Wang’s books, Iron Knight, Silver Vase, and release it on Netflix and in theaters simultaneously. (Most theaters balked.) Despite hiring Woo-Ping Yuen to direct and convincing Michelle Yeoh to reprise her iconic role as Shu Lien, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny is forgettable, mostly pleasing as a reminder of a much, much better movie. [Read the rest.]

Deadpool

Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) reacts to Colossus’ (voiced by Stefan Kapicic) threats.

One of the problems with the takeover of popular culture by Marvel and DC superheroes is how seriously the stories take themselves, how easy the morality is and how family-friendly everything is. Monster-budget films likeThe Avengers and the upcoming Batman vs Superman, or network dramas like The Flash andAgents of SHIELD, aim to reach the broadest audience possible, which means no swearing, little irony and barely a hint of sex. (The Netflix shows Daredevil andJessica Jones are the exception, as they are niche shows.) Then there’sDeadpool, the raunchy, hyper and hilariously violent, anti-hero’s tale that exploded a dozen box office records last week. Based on one of the edgiest characters in the Marvel X-Men universe, the film both panders to the basest sensibilities of the young men who make up the lion’s share of comic book fans and mercilessly mocks superhero story conventions. [Read the rest.]

Hail, Caesar!

While I am a huge fan of the Coen brothers, I must acknowledge that they make some odd decisions that produce some ambiguous if not totally perplexing moments: The off-screen death of a major character in No Country for Old Men, the tornado that ends A Serious Man, the lack of any plot in Inside Llewyn Davis and pretty much all of The Big Lebowski. Usually, these weird scenes are aesthetically so interesting or so funny or, after some thought, thematically satisfying that the Coens get away with them, and they often end up being the most iconic parts of the films. But it doesn’t always work that way. Maybe I need a few months to think about Hail, Caesar! but right now, the over-stuffed incoherence and very odd political choices in the film don’t work. It’s rather unfortunate, too, because the Coens put together a fantastic cast and crafted a dozen or so near-genius scenes in Hail, Caesar! – including Channing Tatum in a nearly epic song-and-dance number – but it would have been nice to see they serve some purpose. [Read the rest.}

The Revenant

A great deal has been written, said and tweeted regarding how, for the second year in a row, each one of the 20 actors nominated for an Academy Award this year are white. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Academy is 94 percent white, 2 percent African American and less than 2 percent Latino. The median age is 62, and only 14 percent of the membership is under 50. And 77 percent of members are men.

Even if Hollywood as a whole is supposedly very liberal, old white men are in general not likely to support people of color – in whatever venue, whether film awards or politics.

The Revenant, a ruthless and bombastic tale of revenge in the cold western American frontier, is the kind of movie many men like. The Academy nominated it for 12 Oscars, more than any other this year, and the film is currently holding an 8.3 rating on IMDb, ranking it as the 124th greatest movie of all time. About 80,000 of the IMDb votes came from men, and 13,000 from women. I don’t want to say that men like The Revenant so much because no woman speaks in it, but of the two female characters, neither have audible lines in their few minutes on screen. (One is murdered, the other is raped.) According to the site’s stats, the women who saw the film rated it nearly as high as men, but any film executive will tell you that fewer women are drawn to films so violent, so depleted of female voices or faces, and so focused on themes of classic male heroism. [Read the rest.]

| Alejandro González Iñárritu Ang Lee Batman Ben Affleck Deadpool Leonardo DiCaprio Michelle Yeoh movie reviews Sally Field Superman The Coen Brothers Tom Hardy Yuen Woo-ping Zack Synder

‘Batman v Superman’ will make fans eager for the next chapter

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

I was unable to see the mega-hyped, mega-budget Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice before other critics ran their reviews. And because many of the reviewers were so dismissive or so hyperbolic in their criticism, the news of the film’s opening was overshadowed by the blood sport of Internet overkill. The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern called it “underdeveloped, overlong and stupendously dispiriting” and NPR’s Chris Klimek described the film as “a ponderous, smothering, over-pixelated zeppelin crash of a movie scored by a choir that sounds like it’s being drowned in lava.” A meme of Ben Affleck’s dejected facial expression in response to hearing about the reviews was shared by millions of people who weirdly find glee in the sadness of others. I found it impossible to avoid knowing that a lot of people thought the movie was terrible. But when I did see it, I was perplexed. While BvS is certainly not a masterpiece of the genre – neither as morally complex and smart as The Dark Knight nor as fun and thrilling as The Avengers – it is hardly a “zeppelin crash.” It’s pretentious and bombastic and it rewrites the central ethos of its main characters in ways that are disconcerting for some longtime fans. But it’s not an ineptly made film.

The main action of BvS takes place two years after the end of 2013’s Man of Steel, which was Warner Bros. and director Zack Snyder’s reboot of Superman and the creation of an interlinked DC Comics Universe. Man of Steel wasn’t terribly made either, but it had a huge and creepy problem: This new Superman (Henry Cavill) was not the ethically flawless hero portrayed in the older Christopher Reeves films and much of the character’s comic book history. He was tortured by darkness and doubt, and in his ultimate fight with General Zod, not only does he allow thousands of people to die in Metropolis during their sloppy slugfest, but he breaks Zod’s neck. Superman has never killed and never would have allowed innocents to die. It was a strange thing for Snyder to do.

But when the major plot points of BvS were announced, it started to make a little more sense. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), the Batman of Gotham City, loathes and fears Superman for just the reasons the end of Man of Steel was so disturbing. Superman is a dangerous killer, the man responsible for the deaths of many of Wayne Enterprise’s employees, and Bruce wants him destroyed. He says to his butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons): “He has the power to wipe out the entire human race and if we believe there is even a 1 percent chance that he’s our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty … And we have to destroy him.” This is the same bizarre justification Dick Cheney used to wage endless war in the Middle East. Yes, there’s some consistency to the plot now. But now Snyder has not only made Superman a killer, but Batman, too. In addition to planning the murder of Superman – through a rather convoluted espionage involving the kryptonite obtained by Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) – Batman kills countless random bad guys during the movie. Batman doesn’t kill. Well, he does now.

Will Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) kill, too? She doesn’t in BvS, but who knows if she will in her solo film, due next year. She is the most exciting thing in this movie, partly because Gadot seems to be having fun; the weight of the world is not on Wonder Woman, as it is on both Batman, determined to save the world, and Superman, who is unsure he is a hero, a savior or an accident.

All of the other characters, played by various A-list actors picking up paychecks (Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Diane Lane as Superman’s mother, Holly Hunter as a senator, and Scoot McNairy as one of the victims of the Superman-Zod battle), brood about and make various speeches about power, cynicism, heroism, good and evil. Some of these are great, some are less so, and, contrary to some of the critics, they do make sense. There are plot holes clearly created by editing a longer movie down to two and half hours, and there is one terrible, weirdly Oedipal pivotal scene that I’ll never forgive writers Chris Terrio and David Goyer for. But the film, in its lumbering, overstuffed, self-important way, does what it sets out to do: It creates a complex fictional universe by uniting its three greatest heroes, all of whom are played by actors doing great work. They have some great battles, say some good lines, and made a lot of fans eager for the next chapter.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Directed by Zack Snyder

Written by Chris Terrio and David Goyer

Starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill and Amy Adams

Rated PG-13

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