I want Bernie to be my friend

I laughed. And laughed.

Bernie is based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 1998 article in Texas Monthly titled “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.” It was so titled because of its similarity to John Berendt’s massive bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: a picturesque small town, a weird murder, bizarre and hilarious supporting characters, and a protagonist who is as gay as he is loved by the town’s little old ladies. But Bernie is quite unlike Clint Eastwood’s film based on Midnight; it’s good. Fascinating, odd, and very, very funny, it’s my favorite Linklater film (he also made Dazed and Confused and Before Sunset, among others), and it is without a doubt the performance of Jack Black’s career. Continue…

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Not very weird, or fun

I wish they’d tried a little harder.

I have never seen an episode of Dark Shadows, the gothic supernatural soap opera that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971 on which Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s new movie is based. Based on what I’ve read about it, however, I’m pretty sure I’d like it: Vampires. Secrets. Magic. Melodrama. High Camp. These are a few of my favorite things. The guys who gave us Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Sweeney Todd should be able to make the most of that material, I thought. You’d think. But as I sat through the screening of the moviefied Dark Shadows, I realized that Burton and Depp hadn’t tried to make another weird and smart and daring movie like Ed Wood. Instead, they had tried for a summer blockbuster. And I’d be surprised if this occasionally amusing but mostly incoherent mishmash of gothic horror, domestic comedy, and fantasy action connects with audiences beyond those who are easily bamboozled by the studio’s relentless, omnipresent marketing of the movie. Continue…

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An avenging assemblage of superheroes

Despite the enraging experience of having to see the film a promotional screening — at which they tagged and bagged my phone out of the absurd fear that I would use it to record the whole movie and then sell it, even though the movie has been out in international markets for a week — I loved The Avengers.

I just saw a headline online that asked, “Is The Avengers the greatest comic book movie ever?” It’s the one of the click-here-and-argue-in-the comments sort of headlines that websites love because it gets readers to stick around and earn the site advertising revenue. I don’t know what the writer’s answer was, since I do my best not to read reviews before I write mine. But I know what my response to the question would be: No, it’s not the greatest comic book movie ever. I think there’s a case for The Dark Knight and possibly the original Superman; those are profound films that are also fabulous popcorn movies. The Avengers is about as deep as its superfluous 3-D effects, but it is the most entertaining, and most expertly made, big-budget action movie of the year. It’s a great way to start the summer movie season. Continue…

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Don’t get married

I kind of loathed The Five-Year Engagement. My review will run in LGBT Weekly next week, but it’s open now, so here’s a preview.

I’m currently getting divorced, so filmed engagements have started to irk me, and as I watched the opening scenes of The Five-Year Engagement, in which Tom (Jason Segel) fumbles through his proposal to Violet (Emily Blunt), I thought, “This is going to end in tears, you nitwits.” Sometimes a movie hits a little too close to home, and it’s hard to react to it as a critic when you’re so busy reacting to it as yourself. Of course, all criticism is personal, just as taste is, and all critics are idiosyncratic about what they like and what the hate. And so, I had a terrible time watching The Five-Year Engagement. I am fed up with the character Jason Segel has typecast himself as, and I found the script both absurd and retrograde, complete with offensive stock supporting characters and a subtly anti-feminist message. Continue…

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Whit Stillman, wordy WASP

I miss the early 90s. Sort of. Of maybe I miss the days when I thought it would be cool to live in a Whit Stillman movie. Here’s the link to my review, which is also here.

There was a period in the early 1990s when Whit Stillman was going to be the WASP Woody Allen. With Metropolitan and Barcelona, Stillman had made hyper-verbal, hyper-intellectual, and hyper-ironic comedies about privileged white people from the Northeast, been nominated for an Oscar for the former and lauded by critics for the latter. But 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, about the “urban haute bourgeoisie” trying to make sense of disco, didn’t work; it was stilted, a bit dull and not very funny. And then Stillman disappeared for 13 years. I adored his first two movies, so I was thrilled that he had a new one; I was primed to love Damsels in Distress. As Violet says in the film, “The past is over, so why not romanticize it?” But Violet, as it turns out, is somewhat of a dolt. Damsels in Distress reminded me of what I loved about Manhattan and Barcelona; I laughed and laughed. But it also revealed that Stillman has not gotten any better at directing movies or controlling his own wit. Continue…

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