Begin the Beguine

Beginners is my favorite movie of the year so far. Here’s the link to my review, or you can read it all here:

Beginners
Written and directed by Mike Mills
Starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and Mélanie Laurent
Inexplicably rated R
Opens June 17

The relationship between a gay son and his straight father is about as fraught and awkward as any, and this is reflected in the history of queer cinema, which has mined this conflict like it was a ten-mile-deep cache of diamonds: The Sum of Us, La Mission, Beautiful Thing, etc.

For obvious reasons, the opposite story – a gay father and his straight son – hasn’t found its way into too many movies. This is only one of the things that makes Beginners, Mike Mills’ exquisite new film starring Ewan McGregor as the straight son and Christopher Plummer as his newly out father, different.

The other things – a non-linear story structure and a smart, funny and moving voice-over – are seamlessly combined with the kind of acting you expect from late-fall movies released as Oscar bait. I assume Beginners will be re-released at the end of the year just for that purpose, if for anything Plummer’s performance, arguably the best of his extremely long career.

McGregor plays Oliver, a 38-year-old art director, whose father Hal (Plummer) has recently died, four years after coming out following the death of his wife. The film follows Oliver’s grieving and burgeoning relationship with Anna (Mélanie Laurent from Inglourious Basterds), a French actress, while flashing back to Hal’s coming out, his relationship with an awkward and much younger man (ER’s Goran Visnjic) and his fight with cancer.

Both Oliver and Hal are dealing with beginnings and endings; thus the rather on-point title of the film. For the back story on why these starts and finishes are so hard and so meaningful, Mills includes flashbacks of conversations between a very young Oliver (Keegan Boos) and his funny and frustrated mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller), as well as carefully curated historical images of the world Hal and Georgia experienced as children and young adults.

Added to the mix are Oliver’s artful and hilarious drawings of “the history of sadness” and Hal’s, then Oliver’s, Jack Russell terrier Arthur, whose subtitled lines are extraordinarily wise.

Yes, there’s a lot going on in Beginners. But Mills and his editor Olivier Bugge Coutté splice the present day of the film with flashbacks, voice-overs and archival imagery with such careful skill that the complex, emotional through-line is totally clear.

Mills, who wrote the film from his own experience with his father, is examining the quest for love and the power of fear and sadness to get in the way. The pastiche-like style of the film and its witty, sly humor – particularly in the form of Arthur – prevent it all from getting too heavy.

But the trio of McGregor, Plummer and Laurent provide such authentic emotion to the film, I found it impossible not to cry. Laurent communicates as much with her mischievous, haunting eyes as she does with her lines (which may be because she’s somewhat underwritten).

McGregor, as always, is the perfect straight man (as it were), providing a non-showy but deeply empathic performance that rarely is rewarded in the way that Plummer’s will be. The star of The Sound of Music, among others, is charmingly giddy as a man who waited his whole life to be who he felt inside and his quiet raging against the dying of the light provides some of the best sick-bed scenes since Terms of Endearment.

While another gay movie that both begins and ends with the death of the gay character is perhaps more than one too many, Beginners celebrates both him and his gayness while also celebrating the universal struggle to love and be loved.

Note: There’s no really good reason for why I titled my review in LGBT Weekly “Begin the Begin” other than the word “Begin.” Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” makes more sense. And REM’s awesome song of the similar name has just about nothing in common with the movie. Or it does. Who can tell? The lyrics are pretty opaque.

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Paris, je t’aime

I adored Woody Allen’s latest, Midnight in Paris. Here’s my review, which can also be found on the LGBT Weekly website.

Midnight in Paris
Written and directed by Woody Allen
Starring Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, and Rachel McAdams
Rated PG-13
Opens May 27
At Landmark Hillcrest and La Jolla

For the first 25 years of his career, Woody Allen couldn’t make a bad movie. In fact, he made several inarguable masterpieces like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Then about 15 years ago – shortly after he left Mia Farrow for Farrow’s adopted daughter and was then accused of molesting his own daughter – Allen’s work became inconsistent. He made some great movies, like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and some pretty lame ones, like Celebrity, Scoop, and Melinda and Melinda.

I am happy to say that his latest film, Midnight in Paris, is one of the good ones, a delightful, fantastical comedy about what happens when one of your greatest dreams comes true.

As in most of Allen’s comedies, if Allen isn’t the star, the lead actor is usually a stand-in for Allen. In Midnight in Paris, this time that stand-in is Gil, played to wide-eyed, neurotic, self-flagellating perfection by Owen Wilson. He is a successful screenwriter of terrible Hollywood hits, but he really wants to be a serious novelist, and the book he’s working on takes place in a nostalgia shop.

One night, after drinking with and being irritated by his family and friends, Gil decides to go for a midnight stroll through the city. After he gets lost, an old car rolls up and the Parisians inside beckon him with liquor and laughter. Gil gets in the car and ends up in the 1920s, when and where he encounters and befriends his literary and artistic idols, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali and Gertrude Stein, who agrees to critique Gil’s novel.

And he meets Adriana, Pablo Picasso’s girlfriend, who Gil quickly becomes infatuated with, a task not terribly surprising since she is played by slinky, stunning Marion Cotillard. Once Gil discovers that he can go back to the wondrous 1920s every night, his unsatisfying 2011 life becomes rather complicated, and those complexities make for classic comedic fodder.

Except when he was infatuated with a mediocre blonde actress like Mia Farrow or Scarlett Johansson, Allen has always cast his films perfectly, and every actor in Midnight in Paris makes the most of Allen’s trademark quick, pungent lines.

Wilson is perhaps the most fun to watch. He’s a limited actor; he never does anything much different from Wilson himself. But he’s never had the sort of material to work with that he does here, and as the film’s endearing, wry and amazed tour guide to post-war Paris, he does the best work of his career.

Every other role is comparatively small, but Rachel McAdams and Cotillard make the most of being Allen’s archetypes, respectively, of a harpy and an angel. Michael Sheen gets a laugh from his pretentious, “pedantic” character’s every ostentatious display of intelligence, and as Hemingway, Corey Stoll provides a parody of the great writer’s clipped diction and distinct bravado that is pitch perfect and more than a little sexy.

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You’d need to be still drunk to like The Hangover Part 2

This review is not going to appear in LGBT Weekly until next week, but I was so angry at the movie, I wanted to get it out there now. Also, I wanted to get out the uncut version, since it’s probably too long for the paper. Here it is:

The Hangover, Part 2
Directed by Todd Phillips
Written by Craig Mazin & Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
Starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis
Very, very rated R
At your local multiplex

A few weeks ago, I wrote a summer movie preview in these pages that expressed excitement about The Hangover Part 2 because The Hangover put its characters into some “pretty homosexually awkward situations” and Part 2 would probably only up the ante. And it did. Oh, boy, did it. My prescience should not be rewarded, because by upping the ante, Part 2 bypassed “more titillating” and landed squarely at “shocking and offensive.” While the casual racism, homophobia, and misogyny of the three leads in Part 1 were nearly irrelevant to a story that revolved around violent slapstick and silly sight gags, in Part 2, both the jokes and the plot are structured by a 21st century version of yellow peril, from vapid Asian stereotypes to the fear of Thai transsexuals.

The plot of Part 2 is basically the same as Part 1: Phil the ass (Bradley Cooper), Stu the nerd (Ed Helms), and Alan the nut (Zach Galifianakis) wake up from a night of pre-wedding debauchery, remember nothing, and cannot find the fourth person in their party. Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), an oddly effeminate crime lord with a thick Chinese accent and a penchant for hip-hop slang, is again at the center of the problem, and he’s again buck naked and crazy.

The main differences in Part 2 are that Las Vegas has been swapped for Bangkok, the baby Alan carried in Part 1 has been replaced with a smoking and drug-dealing monkey, and the person missing is not the groom but Teddy (Mason Lee), the brother of the bride. This time, Stu is the groom, and his bride-to-be is a beautiful Thai woman whose father thinks that Stu is the human equivalent of mushy rice. When Teddy is lost, Stu is convinced that he will lose his bride. (I’m not naming her or the actress, because like all of other women in The Hangover Part 2 and director Todd Phillips’s movies, she’s only relevant as a plot device.)

The bulk of the film focuses on Phil, Stu, and Alan’s quest to find Teddy, which takes them to a Buddhist monastery, a tattoo parlor, breakfast with Paul Giamatti, and on a physically improbable car chase. When the movie is using Jeong’s high-pitched one-liners, Galifianakis’s dead-pan non-sequiturs, and Helms’s almost acrobatic freak-outs as the sources for laughter, Part 2 earns its laughs. But too often the actors are reacting to the writers’ violent and mean-spirited plotting that is all explained by blaming Bangkok, as if the ancient, bustling Thai city and not the childish behavior of three jerks from the US caused the riot, amputation, and mistaken identity that are central to the story. I found myself laughing less at the movie’s humor than at my own nervous outrage.

SPOILER ALERT! For example, the trio ends up at a night club where, the night before, Stu had met and had sex with one of the dancers. When it is revealed that the dancer is a pre-op transsexual and had topped Stu, the dancer’s penis becomes Part 2’s equivalent of There’s Something About Mary’s hair gel. This is the centerpiece joke of the film, the one meant to be talked about the next day and the week to come. And it is based on the fear of gay sex, of transsexuals, of the mysterious, shifty Asian culture.

But wait, it gets worse. The second to last image in the film is Phil and Mr. Chow recreating, as a joke, the iconic, horrific Eddie Adams photo of a South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a shot to the head. To say this is offensive is an understatement; it’s simply despicable.

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Everything Must Go, but you should stay at home

Most of the time, I love Will Ferrell. I think Anchorman and Talladega Nights are two of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. I want him to do well, and I wanted Everything Must Go to be good. But it was not. Here’s the opener of my review:

The world is supposed to care about Everything Must Go because it stars Will Ferrell in a dramatic role. He’s trying to be taken seriously as a serious actor, to follow the route of great comedians who became great actors, guys like Tom Hanks and Robin Williams. Jim Carey tried to do it, and while he gave two stunningly great dramatic performances, in The Truman Show and Man in the Moon, he’s nevertheless been relegated to his trademark Jerry-Lewis-on-crack shtick.

Ferrell refuses to succumb to Carey-itis, even after the box office failures of his dramatic turns in Stranger Than Fiction and Winter Passing. He continues to try to convince audiences that he can do more than make them laugh playing arrogant buffoons like Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby and George W. Bush.

I’m not convinced.

Read the rest of the review on the LGBT Weekly website or pick up a print edition anywhere gays are served.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 8: A Song I Know All the Words To

I saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Jane Street Theater on the last night John Cameron Mitchell performed it live on stage (until he did it again later in the run) with my roommates Liz and Jason on the 4th of July weekend of 1998. I think it is the great rock musical, and I also believe that it’s one of the greatest commentaries on gender and sexuality of the last 20 years. It changed my life, and not just because I ended up dating the show’s original producer for three and half years, and not just because I used the song “The Origin of Love” in my toast at Liz and Jason’s wedding. It’s just… amazing. I know all of the words to a bunch of the songs in the show, but “Wig in the Box” is the most fun. Here’s the song from the most excellent film version, which was directed by Mitchell.

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