‘Tickled’ is no laughing matter

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

David Starr and David Farrier in Tickled

Whether you admit it or not, whether you did it deliberately, you’ve watched some odd sexual stuff on the Internet. Because as the song goes, “The Internet is for porn.” Some fetish videos aren’t surprising, whether it’s feet or leather or women’s panties. But some are, or at least they’re surprising to most people. When David Farrier, a journalist in New Zealand, saw a video of “competitive tickling,” in which strapping young men were held or strapped down and mercilessly tickled by other strapping young men, he thought, well, that’s a story! It was rather funny and odd and perfect for his brand of journalism, which focused on quirky pop culture. But when he sent inquiries to the company, known as Jane O’Brien Media, he received not a polite refusal, but a homophobic screed personally attacking Farrier, who is gay, and threatening lawsuits if he continues with any sort of story. Being the good journalist he is, Farrier was now more interested and more determined, because clearly these tickling videos weren’t just a wacky lark but the project of a weird and somewhat disturbed individual or set of individuals. So, Farrier and his friend Dylan Reeve decided to make a documentary.

The tagline for the film is “It’s not what you think.” This is pretty accurate, because when you hear that the film is about online tickling videos, you might raise an eyebrow and giggle, but that whimsy lasts all of five minutes in the film. Because the threats from Jane O’Brien Media are so creepy, and the story that follows – which include stories of extreme harassment, destroyed lives, criminal fraud, psychopathologies and a creepy-as-hell villain – isn’t funny except in the few moments when people are being tickled and actually seem to enjoy it. Other times, they’re not enjoying it at all, and you realize the tickle videos are actually videos of sadomasochism and torture.

Tickled is structured as a narrative of Farrier and Reeve’s investigation into the videos, Jane O’Brien, the videos’ down-on-their luck actors, the seedy world of fetish videos and the unhinged person who is actually Jane O’Brien. Reminiscent of Nick Broom’s gonzo documentaries Kurt and Courtney and Biggie and Tupac,Tickled feels like it’s just the result of what happened when Farrier and Reeve found a weird topic and bought some cameras. But like Broom’s movies, Tickled is carefully constructed to seem much less professional than it is. The film is built as a thriller and edited – rather strategically – to make sure the villain is villainous and everyone around him either a victim, a lackey or an innocent bystander. I don’t think the various people involved are as naïve or innocent as depicted. But after seeing the film and reading some of the mountains of press about the film, I have been quite convinced the bad guy is pretty bad. He’s been showing up at screenings and bizarrely confronting the filmmakers, stating that Reeve should fear for his children, that both he and Farrier will go to jail. (Unlikely.)

This all makes for good press, but for me, it begs a few questions. Why is the villain so villainous? Why is he so focused on tickling? How is he getting away with it? These questions are asked but never really answered in a satisfying way. The psychological insight into the villain is brief and seemingly tacked on, while the insight into the popularity of tickling videos doesn’t exist. The bait-and-switch of turning a film about tickling into a psychological thriller does create an entertaining experience, but it also left me wondering about the tickling. I mean, that’s pretty weird.

Tickled

Written and directed by David Farrier and Dylan Reeve

Featuring David Farrier, Richard Ivey and David Starr

Rated R

Opens July 1 at Landmark Ken

| Queers

A quite disturbing dystopian satire

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

John C. Reilly, Colin Farrell and Ben Whishaw in The Lobster

The ads running for The Lobster have been using quotes from reviews describing the film as “hilariously frightening” and “wickedly funny” between quickly edited scenes, giving you the feeling that it’s a bit slapstick. I hate this kind of bait and switch sort of marketing. The movie is much, much more disturbing than it is funny, and often it’s funny simply because it’s so creepy and disturbing; nervous laughter is almost a gut reaction. I expected a wacky romp, but after the screen faded following the final, devastating scene of the film – maybe the most disturbing final scene of a film I have seen in a long time – I just sighed and said, “Well, that was f—ked up.” But just because its marketing is a lie doesn’t mean the movie isn’t a work of art, a haunting, unsettling, gorgeously filmed dystopian satire.

Colin Farrell is David, a schlubby man whose wife of 12 years has just died. In his world, you cannot be single. He arrives at a resort – where he is de facto imprisoned – and given two months to fall in love and partner up or be turned into an animal. He arrives with a dog, who we discover is his brother who failed to find a wife a couple of years before. The hotel’s manager (Olivia Colman) asks him what animal he’d like to become. “A lobster,” he says. “Why a lobster,” she asks. “Because lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives. I also like the sea very much.” She approves:

“I must congratulate you. The first thing most people think of is a dog, which is why the world is full of dogs. Very few people choose an unusual animal which is why they’re endangered. A lobster is an excellent choice.”

David is sad, mostly passive, and quietly desperate; a lisping man (John C. Reilly) is dopily uncritical of his situation; a limping man (Ben Whishaw) is as cynical and dishonest as a mercenary; the beautiful woman (Angeliki Papoulia) they’re all initially intrigued with is a heartless sociopath. They eat in banquet halls, play tennis, golf, go swimming, and hunt down “loners” in the woods, shooting them with tranquilizer darts. As time goes on, people fail – becoming ponies, camels, peacocks – and those in danger of failing get more anxious and begin looking for the flimsiest reasons to fall in love, or pretend to.

After David’s attempt at surviving as a human ends in spectacular, horrid disaster, he runs into the forest and joins the loners. While they are free from the confines of their repressive society, they aren’t any nicer. You must be alone, or else. Flirting is punished with torture. One of the loners is played by Rachel Weisz, and she is one of the few characters in the film with some love for the world, an easy smile, and hope. David is smitten. But the loners’ leader, who Léa Seydoux plays with seething evil, is keen to enforce the rules.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ film is shot with clear inspirations from Stanley Kubrick, using perspective, symmetries, and slowed movement to create a stark visual poetry perfect for the film’s themes. His and Efthymis Filippou’s screenplay, which is wholly original, terrifying, and yet romantic, never goes where you’d expect. I’m sure this made marketing difficult, since it made viewing difficult. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it though. The scathing critique of the social pressure to pair up, of the conflicting selfish desires to cave in and to run away, got under my skin. Because I’m single. It’s not very funny.

The Lobster

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and Léa Seydoux

Rated R

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

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