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There’s more to “The Maybe” than simply Tilda Swinton sleeping in a box.

It’s a curious experience to visit Tilda Swinton’s art installation “The Maybe” in its current incarnation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Previously exhibited in 1995 at The Serpentine Gallery in London, Swinton – an Academy Award winning actress for the George Clooney vehicle Michael Clayton (2007), and one of the world’s most recognisable cross-over faces between the arthouse and mainstream worlds – has probably risked cynical jabs of “pretentious!” and “boring!” to present “The Maybe”, a piece that sees the blonde-quiffed actress lay more or less motionless in a glass box that shifts from room to room depending on the day. When I saw it on 19 April she was sleeping in her glass cage in a space at the top of the stairs on the third floor, a thoroughfare for museum patrons. Before that she was found in an inauspicious corner of level two, and before that I think I saw images of the box appearing in the general lobby. You just never know.

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(Note: these official images were taken on the actual day I was there, 19 April 2013)

 I stayed and watched Ms Swinton in her glass box for around 20 minutes and definitely think there is more to it than simply Tilda Swinton sleeping in a box. In fact, I think the fact that it’s Tilda Swinton sleeping in a box is entirely beyond the point. She could have been juggling in a Perspex tub or performing yoga in a hollowed out refrigerator and the effect would have been the same. The seemingly ridiculous concept of Tilda Swinton sleeping in a box is the catalyst for the art itself, which I think is actually all in the receiver’s mind. The art isn’t Tilda Swinton sleeping in a box – even if the museum plaque calls it “The Maybe – Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water, and spectacles” (thank you MoMA for using the Oxford Comma!) – but what our minds can concoct when presented with the thought of it. The concept is right there in the name: “The Maybe”. She decides when she will show up or not and, thus, forces people to contemplate art. Not only what it could mean, but right down to the very notion of “what is art”. It’s a reading that works long after the viewer as left the museum. It’s been weeks since I saw Ms Swinton in her glass box and I’m still thinking, stirring, and contemplating it. The abstract nature of “The Maybe” begins before we see it and continues long after. And I suspect the very idea of people debating the nature of art, whether they believe “The Maybe” is art or not, is at least partially what Swinton intended.

Of course, depending on how long one stands and looks as Tilda’s exhibit a whole extra dimension begins to form. There is very little to the physical presence of “The Maybe”. Looking at any motionless body for any extended period of time isn’t particularly thrilling, and so Swinton is forcing her audience to focus on the things around her. Whether its noting the white splotch of paint on her dark-hued corduroy pants, the scuffed blue and green sneakers, the tailoring of her crisp white blouse, or the pattern of oxygen bubbles in her triangular jug. What is art? Are all these elements art or is art very deliberate in its intentions?

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Furthermore, my eyes drifted around the room and began to notice the other people viewing the exhibit. There are some like myself that spent more than a passing glance in the room, while others walked in – perhaps even my accident on their way to another exhibit – looked at the central installation and then moved on within the span of a minute. I noticed the people who were taking “The Maybe” very seriously and those that were treating it as a joke. I was noticing the way some viewers were worried for her well-being, while others were… not. It became a curious act of people watching – Tilda and everyone else. Again, finding art in Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass box isn’t so much the core of “The Maybe”, but the way we react and assess and discuss. She was, after all, doing little else but sleeping. Apart from doing so in a glass box in the middle of the day in a very public setting, what about it is entirely strange? Viewers thrusting their own interpretations, much like I have here, is I think where the true intentions of Swinton’s work lies.

“The Maybe” runs indefinitely whenever Ms Swinton chooses at MoMA.

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Music icon Malcolm McLaren (he died in 2010) was an integral early element in multiple counter cultures and upcoming genres throughout his career. In the late 1980s he helped spearhead the mainstream knowledge of the New York drag ball scene with his song “Deep in Vogue” that came out a year before Madonna recorded her own ode to the highly flamboyant freestyle dance concept. He was even an early figure in modern fusion of pop and opera (“popera”?) with his album Fans, and turned the rhythmic beats of street chants into vibrant and electric dance music with tracks such as “Double Dutch”, “Buffalo Gals”, and “Something’s Jumpin’ In Your Shirt”. Personal preferences aside (“Deep in Vogue”, “Double Dutch”, and “Madame Butterfly” are rather astonishing feats of divine pop), this obviously all takes a back seat to his most famous addition to global counter culture: punk.

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The punk movement acted as a shot of revolution to the British youth population and an early seed to several different alternative cultures around the globe. Along with Vivian Westwood, his girlfriend at the time and now a famed couture fashion designer frequently worn by Helena Bonham Carter and seen in TV and movies like Sex and the City, the two turned offensive slogans and imagery into high art fashion that simultaneously enraged and engaged. The fashions that they sold in their boutique SEX on Chelsea’s King’s Road revelled in imagery of nudity and the power of language. Clothes were frequently emblazoned with images of naked men and one of the most famous, named “Tits”, is simple an image of a pair of breasts on a plain white tee. Others use words like “sex” and “rape” to evoke shock and outwardly express a generation’s contempt at an oppressive society.

All of these and more are part of the new Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibit currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Quite apt that this particular museum sits on the west side of Fifth Avenue, infringing upon the boundaries of the elegantly constructed and designed Central Park since that is exactly what the punk movement did to the fashion and societal establishment in the 1970s. It infringed on a world that was so carefully designed to the idea of perfection. Depending on where you stand in the park, the museum’s architecture rises out from the leafy surrounds like a sore thumb, catching the eye of anybody walking by. It’s out of place and doesn’t belong, just like punk once did. Also like the museum, punk was eventually accepted and is now a permanent fixture and now with this exhibit is officially respected as an artistically and culturally important moment in history.

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Entering the exhibit and you’re instantly confronted with a recreation of the dirty, muck-strewn bathroom of famous New York punk club CBGBs. It’s certainly a mood setter if ever there was one and I instantly recalled Adrian Brody’s character in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999) who performs at CBGB’s rather than the more fashionably popular discotheques and how his newfound punk persona and radicalised hairstyle is seen as a symbol of evil. A circular runway of famous McLaren/Westwood designs as well as another set recreation – this time of their SEX shop – and detailed history of their work and its cultural significance before diverting into some of the more high end interpretations of the punk aesthetic. Designers like Michael Kors, Dior, Calvin Klein, Burberry, Balenciaga, and even Chanel are present with designs that incorporate distressed materials, leather, safety pins, spikes, clips, and hooks alongside more traditional silhouettes and shapes. Westwood’s designs are clearly the more dangerous and risqué, but there’s an almost equal element of high-end danger in the runway interpretations.

The exhibition then continues along the same lines looking at how designers have taken the principals of punk and applied them to fashion that is both accessible and red carpet ready as well as experimental and avant garde (such as the garbage bag designs of Gareth Pugh).

Special mention must be made of the installation’s production design that uses grungy brick aesthetics with a stylish, slick black colour scheme. It’s a real visual treat that is in stark contrast with similar exhibits that I have seen both here and back home in Australia. The exhibition producer must be applauded for giving the display a polished, up-class look when it could have very easily been dismissed with simple white walls. More attention could have been applied to the actual music that went so hand in hand with the fashion movement, and was the reason for its rapid ascension. A few small screens playing some sort of indecipherable video wasn’t enough for my liking, nor was the lack of information and context regarding the high fashion punk looks that make up the majority of the exhibit. Minor complaints, possibly, but given the strength of everything else they are frustrating and easily fixed. Still an otherwise fabulous ode to a misunderstood and underestimated segment of history.

Punk: Chaos to Couture runs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until August 14.

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The summer season brings with it many traditions and seasonal changes: beer gardens suddenly open up their canopy decking, gin and tonics are suddenly being ordered by far more bar patrons than usual, people feel the need to dress for summer no matter if the weather actually calls for it, and homebodies like myself start to feel a bit miserable that we can’t just stay on the couch and watch a movie on DVD or Netflix with the excuse of “it’s raining!” or “it’s too cold!” because, gee, the weather is so nice we have to utilise it (apparently). Gah!

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However, the prolificity of outdoor cinema venues such as parks, botanical gardens, open screens (think the free screenings held in Melbourne’s Federation Square), and rooftop theatres has at least helped merge the two ideals together. Rooftop Cinema – the organisation, not the concept – have brought about a wonderful collection of films and venues to their ongoing series of films. I have been lucky to visit three times (and hopefully a few more over the next few, warm months – last week I even ended up providing impromptu volunteer work post-film) and while the festival has had to play chicken with the weather on more than one of those occasions, each time has been a delight. Even if I became a sort of communal grump and didn’t like one of the films in the face of a room of instant fans.

In fact, the one film I didn’t care for – Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ The Kings of Summer (reviewed at Quickflix) – was one that succumbed to the whims of Mother Nature and had to screen at the alternate downstairs indoor screening hall. The other two, which managed to screen upstairs on the roof without any major hitches, were rather fabulous. And one of them was even a mighty surprise given I had never even heard of it before. I sense a pattern.

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The first feature was Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, the director’s second collaboration with Greta Gerwig after Greenberg. The Lower East Side screening location at New Design High School couldn’t have been a more appropriate setting for their tale of twentysomething arrested development. While the seats are not the most comfortable, given I’ve been to cafés that make people sit on milk crates (hipsters won’t be done until we’re drinking out of rusty tin cans, won’t they?) I think we can make do. The visually spectacular graffiti designs that cover the rooftop walls match perfectly with the falling sunset that falls over the city in colours of purple, pink, and orange. It’s a gorgeous setting and the cool breeze that frequently blows throw is just the  cherry on top.

As for Frances Ha, the film is a delightfully spry vacation into the life of a woman who doesn’t really deserve the affectionate film around her. She’s an exceptionally frustrating woman to spend 85 minutes with, but it is to the credit of screenwriters Baumbach and Gerwig that the film itself isn’t frustrating along with it. If the film has one problem it is that’s the end doesn’t quite feel as deserved as it thinks it does, as if it suffered from that most saddening of independent film symptoms – the ending that ran out of cash (worst of the worst: Pieces of April, which literally ends mid-scene with a polaroid montage). It wraps up a little too quickly and a little too neatly for my liking just as things were getting interesting. It’s as if they had the bows, but not the wrapping paper and they just went “voila!” and let it go out half-dressed. Meanwhile, that was a bunch of mixed metaphors that I don’t even know.

The film is gloriously photographed by Sam Levy who shot in colour and altered it to black and white in post-production. It lends the film a crisp look that is entirely bewitching. Whether they deliberately wanted to evoke Woody Allen’s 1979 masterpiece Manhattan (my personal favourite Allen film) or not I’m not sure, but the film’s beguiling monochrome vision of New York – Manhattan and Brooklyn for the most part, plus it was nice to see Washington Heights get a piece of the pie – does just that. Jennifer Lame’s brisk, tightly-executed editing certainly helps things immaculately. And, of course, Gerwig is a breath of fresh air as she inevitably always is, reminding me of other steadfastly indie queens Chloe Sevigny and Parker Posey, but with the awkward wit of a Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

The Dirties a few weeks later was a pleasant surprise. “Pleasant” in the ways that a film about a school shooting can be, I suppose. Despite the prickly subject matter, Matthew Johnson’s debut feature is an energetically made and comically tense navigation into the motivations and building scale behind a school shooting. It’s fresh and original and utilises the popular trend of mockumentaries to watch a horror unfold in an entirely different and unique way. If the film wasn’t such a DIY effort from the production team then I might have been worried that the screenplay was suggesting a link between film and the enacting of violence, but I think the filmmakers do a very good job of suggesting that the lead character of Matt (as played by the director) was clearly unstable before any of this was set into motion. “Movies don’t create psychos, movie just make psychos more creative”, as one famous movie once hypothesised (that movie was another high school massacre movie, but one of a decidedly different nature, Wes Craven’s Scream.)

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What the film isn’t shy about, however, is its linking of teen bullying to acts of violence. Whereas Gus Van Sant’s Elephant tried to skirt the issue and present it in very black and white terms (although suggesting everything from bullying to homophobia to video games to incessant piano concertos), Johnson makes no qualms about suggesting that school corridor bullying is to blame. That the end throws an ambiguous, atypical curve ball is a credit to the director and adds another layer of teen mythos to the oft told story of gun-toting boys that has been examined in films Polytechnique (another Canadian production), 2:37 (the Australian film that blatantly ripped off Elephant) and Home Room.

I admired the film for inserting a sense of humour to the project, without which the film surely would have suffocated under the dire low budget aesthetic. It doesn’t make jokes about school massacres, but merely has funny characters at its centre. It’s actually refreshing to see core characters of a story such as this not represented in the typical fashion. Like so many bullied children, Matt and Owen try to make their rather miserable existences as bearable as possible by wrapping themselves up in a world of laughter. And while Matt’s sexuality (or, non-sexuality as it actually seems) isn’t directly brought up, it’s quite obvious that he’s a homosexual (the film is set in 2001 and he has posters of The OC‘s male cast hanging on his wall) and I found that just another bonus layer of intrigue in this fine film.

While the sold out audience that greeted Frances Ha was hardly surprising (especially so with Baumbach and Gerwig in appearance for a decidedly awkward Q&A afterwards), it was wonderful to see the seats packed for The Dirties, too. The lively Q&A was a delight too, and kudos to whoever at Rooftop Cinema is in charge of hiring the pre-film music accompaniment since the bands selected have been top notch. Brazos at Frances Ha, Bird Courage at The Kings of Summer, and Hani Zahra at The Dirties. Not only that, but they typically fit quite well with the films they preceded. And if music and a movie in a wonderful location weren’t enough (there are multiple locations across the boroughs, but I haven’t had the chance to experience them yet), there is always an after party at a bar around the corner called Fontanas where, if you’re lucky, you can score three or four free beers. Pretty good for less than the price of a movie ticket at AMC.

Rooftop Cinema have some excellent product coming up soon including screenings of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Central Park Five (a free event on Tuesday the 18th), Crystal Fairy, Towheads, and a selection of short programs that are heavily focused on New York City, as well as a highlights package from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A full look at their schedule can be found at their website.

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Just because the area of Central Park north of Jackie Onassis Reservoir may not be as famous or well-traversed – it’s certainly not for filmmakers – doesn’t mean it wants for a beauty all its own compared to the southern region and The Ramble, more popular with city-dwellers and tourists alike.

Beginning at 110th Street, Central Park’s northern tip is instantly striking. The flat lawns to the left make way for the rise of its mountainous walking trails that are famous for birdwatching. A sign informs me that over 200 species of bird either make the area their home or use it is a migrational stop (the rest of the park works in much the same way, but in less of a compacted fashion). When trekking this rocky segment of the park it is easy to forget that Central Park isn’t just an escape from the clichéd hustle and bustle of the city (why you would move here if you don’t like the aforementioned hustle and bustle is beyond me), but an escape from everything. If it weren’t for a news helicopter flying overhead you’d be forgiven for forgetting that you’re right in the middle of an island with three million occupants.

It’s easy to find a spot anywhere in this section of the park that is ideal for quiet, even contemplative relaxation. The constant chirping, whistling, and cooing trills of the wildlife mix perfectly with the beautiful surrounds that come in multiple shades of green. I found a rocky resting place on The Cliff outside the oldest building in the park – the Blockhouse, built in 1814 – which can be seen here.

From there one can head to a spot known as The Great Hill. Described by the Central Park Conservatory as “open hilltop meadow” that was once used as a viewing point for carriage riders to view the Hudson River that had eventually vanished due to tree growth. The area has had a remarkable transformation from its lowest point in the 1980s when it had been deserted and dilapidated, but which now hosts picnics, joggers, outdoor theatre and cinema events, as well as art workshops. The large expanse of space on the early-afternoon time that I visited was occupied by little more than a few lounging workers on a lunch break (the suit jacket over the back of a bench would at least imply that), book-reading sunbakers, and one attention-grabbing tourist couple who decided to throw around a frisbee in the barest minimum of clothing allowed in a public place frequented by families.

From there the region is a series of tree-lined paths. There’s a curious amount of joy that comes with discovering a tucked away cubbyhole that looks as undiscovered as you’re likely to find in a place such as this. On this warm 26-degree day (that’s a fraction under 80 degrees Fahrenheit) it remained quiet and gorgeous.

The true ace in the hole of Central Park’s north, however, is a blissfully tranquil and stunningly gorgeous area known as The Pool. Surely the most under-utilised gem of Central Park’s mass design. The trick is to find your own little nook and indulge in the splendour of the grass (so to speak). I found a smooth rocky formation on the edge of the pond mere metres away from the ducks gliding on the surface, the willow tree dragging its limbs across the rippling water, and even a romancing couple sharing a glass of afternoon wine.

It’s like a scene from The Wind in the Willows if you ignore the group of cyclists, football-throwing college students, and the menagerie of accents that populate an areas such as this in a city like New York. It proves that there’s always much

“In order to be successful, you either have to create a desire, or fulfil a need”, says Continental bath owner Steve Ostrow in writer/director Malcolm Ingram’s third homo-centric documentary Continental (after Small Town Gay Bar and Bear Nation). “In this case, it was doing both.” The latest in a recently extended line of documentaries examining less mainstream elements of gay culture history – I Am Divine and Before You Know It are two others to came out of this year’s SXSW festival – Continental is a conventionally assembled, but briskly entertaining recounting of how what is now considered a hush-hush underground aspect of gay life was at one time an open secret and hive of activity. It gave birth to the fame of Bette Midler and Barry Manilow alongside allowing New York gay men an outlet for their sexuality that society was determined to supress.

The Continental Baths being what they are (homosexuality was illegal when they first opened), very little video footage exists and so Ingram relies more on still images, generic pornography footage, and New York stock footage with old film reel filters overlayed – one specific piece of vision that is frequently used initially looks like it could have been filmed in the 1970s, but actually has the new World Trade Center in its sight. It doesn’t necessarily work against the film per se, but it does mean the film has to fall back on less interesting documentary tropes like recurring talking heads and reoccurring footage of the hotel that housed the baths.

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As a result, the film works best when simply recounting its sordid tales in refreshingly frank openness (we can thank Michael Musto a lot for that). Its examination of the bath scene of the ‘70s is illuminating and results in a film that is probably as close as we’ll ever get to looking at this period in great, specific detail. It should certainly be a must see for anybody interested in queer history. Whether you’re a gay man who supports these places or not (I’ve personally never been, but gay men have so many more avenues nowadays for obvious reasons), they played a large part in the story of gay culture’s blending with the the mainstream lifestyle of the time. At least in New York City, anyway. Ostrow and his former employees recount some wickedly entertaining stories from the day, including the mafia, the disco, and most importantly the Continental’s brief period as a celebrity go-to location. Apart from homosexual celebrities Andy Warhol, even Johnny Carson and Alfred Hitchcock went there (not together, obviously)!

Famous for Ostrow’s championing of disco and opera, as well as their elaborate cabaret shows that introducing Bette Midler and Barry Manilow to mass pop culture, and on through to their part in the spread of AIDS (the Continental itself, however, closed down several years before the crisis struck New York in the 1980s), which was a specific plot point in excellent 1993 TV movie And the Band Played On, Continental remains an interesting study. Ostrow, permanently wrapped in a scarf, is an entertaining personality to pivot a documentary around and it could have been interesting to have investigated more into his personal life (although an operatic coda at film’s end is a nice way of bringing things full circle).

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Much like the baths, disco music had itself a brief heyday during the 1970s when sexual liberation was the next frontier. Jamie Kastner’s documentary The Secret Disco Revolution aims to reposition the conversation of disco music and its legacy into its rightful place: that of a revolutionary and exciting time full of brilliant talent producing music that is – just like pop music today – criminally underrated. However, as well-intentioned as this movie is, it is not as well made nor as well-assembled as Continental. Ingram’s documentary was wise to focus on the one location and not any of the other baths that were prevalent at the time (The Meatrack and The Anvil for example), but The Secret Disco Revolution takes a far too broad look at its subject and inevitably comes out looking less than comprehensive.

While there is plenty of interest in Kastner’s documentary, anybody with more than a passing knowledge the disco era will know most of it already. Especially as it pertains to personalities such as Donna Summer (sexually exploited by her years as one of Casablanca Records’ golden goose) and The Village People (some of who still don’t see the incredibly homosexual undertones of their music). The latter group with their flamboyant costumes and catchy disco pop hooks were, as the film shows, somewhat unwitting pawns in their producer’s desire to inject a post-Stonewall homosexual sensibility to mainstream heteronormative culture. Furthermore, the film is more interesting when navigating the tricky critical and cultural reception to disco music, including the famous album burning events at sport stadiums, which personify a sort of homophobic intolerance to what disco music was doing to masculine radio stations across the country.

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Interspersed with rather embarrassing sideshow of three disco revolutionaries (I don’t even know) and a disappointing lack of extended time capsule footage (there’s plenty of it, but only in mini glimpses), The Secret Disco Revolution sadly doesn’t do enough with its subject to succeed. Disco is such a glamorous and exciting era of music and it deserves better treatment than this only fleeting entertaining documentary. It’s a film for disco die-hards only, and they will presumably be as ho-hum about the affair as I am. Compared especially to Continental, The Secret Disco Revolution only makes the former look more impressive. Continental: B; The Secret Disco Revolution: C-

Continental plays BAMcinemafest tonight in Brooklyn.
The Secret Disco Revolution is on VOD and in cinemas on 28/06/13

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If one is to view Paul McCarthy’s latest large-scale exhibit at the Paul Avenue Armory as a treatise on the mass corporatisation of Disney then, well, he must hold them pretty low esteem. With “WS”, the 67-year-old Californian artist has combined long-form video, intricate interactive sets, and lifelike model work into a sort of hardcore phantasmagoria that defies explanation. McCarthy’s installation has set up shop in the massive former drill hall on Park Avenue and is made up for two wide-length cinema screens, multiple sideshow rooms, extra viewing platforms, school desks for seating, as well as the set on which the over 7 hours of film was staged. Amongst the set is a house that all but reeks of rotting food and sexual depravity – art directed to within an inch of its life, no doubt – and an excessively fake forest illuminated by green, red, blue, and yellow spotlights.

McCarthy has taken the story of Snow White and the seven dwarves and morphed it into something akin to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers. Filled with perverse sexual acts and pornographic representations of pop culture idols, it’s certainly an unconventional way to spend several hours. The scale of the piece would require at least two full days to take it all in. I spent roughly four hours attempting to take in McCarthy’s warped vision and that still feels extravagant. The video portions of the piece are repetitive and numbing in their oddness. I appreciated some, couldn’t comprehend others.

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McCarthy himself plays a character called ‘Walt Paul’, which could only be misinterpreted by squirrels. He wields a sadomasochistic knife over the proceedings like a maniacal puppet master. “Neither daughter, sister, no friend”, he tells White Snow. “You shall be no more than my slave.” You can see where this is going. While the story follows that of the 1937 to a degree, it eventually descents into a free-flowing near plotless collection of fetish fulfilments. White Snow, played by Elyse Poppers – she has a small acting career with video game voice work and short films credited on IMDb – covers her face and body with food (Walt soon joins in), experiments sexually with all sorts of acts and fluids, and desecrates the famous red, blue and yellow costume that is White’s signature. Meanwhile, the dwarves with their comically bulbous artificial noses, who, from what I could tell, were not all played by short-statured actors, hi ho hi ho their way off to work during the day wearing sweatshirts of UCLA and Yale, before coming home to a sty of filth and depravity.

The video sideshows take place in inter-connected rooms off to the side of the Armory’s main stage. They feature more food-related video, but most predominantly feature a sub-video called “The Prince Comes” in which three male porn actors masturbate in the forest before having sex with a lifelike body form (a prop which is displayed in a glass cabinet outside). It’s incredibly odd, and only fleetingly arousing, especially since the high-pitched snow motion soundscape from next door bleeds into it.

The set of the Armory is decorated in carpets sourced from Disneyland hotels with ornate patterns that only occasionally intersect, which I guess is a good metaphor for the show in the way it only fleetingly intersects with the original source material. As a highly sexualised take on the material – upon entering the building there are multiple signs signally its adults only nature – I guess it works as a kin to the gloomy Snow White and the Huntsman and the cartoonish Mirror Mirror. It’s a take that certainly just as valid as those two recent cinematic interpretations, although I found it just as successful as the former (I am actually a very big fan of Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror). That McCarthy wanted to subvert the material is obvious, but the execution is frequently frustrating and unfocused. Perhaps a tighter reign could have made it more successful, but I certainly can’t picture many people finding the stamina to stay for the entire opening hours.

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The show features many of the hallmarks of being pretentious and those who struggle with more outré art will not only find much to dislike, but outright hate. Many will be disgusted and will find its bombardment of sexual imagery, especially when it utilises just famous child-friendly property like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, off-putting. I can’t disagree with them, although I did find myself eager to try and seek out a meaning beyond the obvious. I’m not sure I came across one, but it certainly provoked a lot of thought from me so perhaps McCarthy succeeded if his mission was to merely confound and make people consider the way we ingest mass culture. One could call it a nightmare vision, but that would imply that anybody other than McCarthy could have come up with visions such as these awake or not.

Throughout I recalled the likes of Andy Warhol, David Lynch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle, and Guy Maddin’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. If one cared to partake in seven hours of the project then it’d be recommended they alternate between the main feature and the side shows. The various viewing platforms also aid in making the repetitive footage more palatable over the longterm. I admired its scope and its ambition and I definitely recommend the show to anybody who wants to experience something very much out of the ordinary, but it’s also not entirely wrongheaded to wish this time-consuming has something a bit more substantial to offer. If little else, one likely won’t look at cheese slices the same.

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Television has long been fascinated with telling the life tales of famous personalities. These personalities that lead lifestyles with a mixture of fabulous and tragic tend to fascinate with the excess and the desire and the wish fulfilment, while also hinging on the fact that they tend to die either young, or tragically, or frequently both and, well, that life in suburbia doesn’t look quite so bad when you figure that. Still, it’s curious that two of these larger than life personalities should not only get granted made-for-television biopics within weeks of each other, but that they’re both made by directors with considering talent and clout. It’s a shame then that only one rises above its kitsch trappings.

Steven Soderbergh’s supposed final feature project (but who can tell, really?) is Behind the Candelabra about closeted piano player Liberace. Despite the presence of Soderbergh behind the camera and Richard LaGravenese behind the page, Candelabra is a surprisingly straight-forward biopic. While Soderbergh grants the film a lush, shiny surface on which to hang the drama, it’s a shame that he and laGravenese kept the material so rote. The first hour is incredibly entertaining, full of vivid character portrayals and fulls of sets and costumes that sparkle both literally and figuratively. It’s sad then that it becomes so fixed into A-to-B-to-C style structure that it begins to suffocate. Its final passages, as well acted as they are, lose potency and, thus, the intimate power that Soderbergh was obviously striving for. At least it remains a keen, sly sense of humour. I suspect I’ll be chuckling about Rob Lowe and the absurdity of Liberace wanting his younger lover to get plastic surgery to look more like him long after the credits rolled.

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Behind the Candelabra was screened in competition as this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will also be released theatrically in some international territories (Australia, for instance, next week). I would have liked to have seen it presented on the big screen because I suspect many of Soderbergh’s images (he again has enlisted himself as cinematographer, credited as “Peter Andrews”) would look divine on the big screen as devoted to mirrors, silver, and rhinestones as he is. Still, perhaps knowing that the project was first and foremost a HBO television movie curbed his creativity. There were visual and editing decisions made in the opening and closing minutes that reminded me very much so of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, but little else.

One of his strengths is in the way he subverts traditional narratives and finds interesting moments that other directors wouldn’t think twice about. He finds that here with the stunning near-silent performance of Cheyanne Jackson (Soderbergh has always been a master of the background actor) and the opening sequence inside a gay bar to the pulsating beat of Donna Summer’s gay anthem “I Feel Love”. But the second half feels bereft, like it’s going through the motions of what a television biopic should be. I’m hesitant to call it rushed, but it certainly feels more like he knew he had to cover certain moments above anything else, knowing he had to fit his film comfortably within a two hour time slot on a Sunday night. Consider Erin Brockovich and the way it covers a very traditional narrative by also finding moment smaller moments with its characters that help build into a more dynamic whole. I found that missing with Candelabra’s second half and it hampered my overall enjoyment of the film.

That’s a shame considering there really is a lot here worth celebrating. If nothing else, it’s nice to see Soderbergh embrace the material and not dumb down the sexuality or the flamboyance of its characters. Unlike some high profile films about gay characters (hi Philadelphia!), the two men at the centre of Behind the Candelabra are very open about their sexuality and their desires (even if they can’t be on the stage). There’s no mistaking it, and Michael Douglas and Matt Damon do a wonderful job in making their unconventional romance, with all the excessive Las Vegas sheen that it’s dipped in, feel true and genuine. When the two share a hottub or lie in bed, Soderbergh’s camera watches it and truly allows their bodies to be seen and identified as together. That’s a side of Soderbergh I’d never seen before. He’s shown characters be sexual before, sure, but the way these two men are portrayed is different. There’s a simplicity, a matter of fact frankness, to it that I liked. Much was made of the film’s Australian MA15+ rating (it has since been downgraded to an M) and I can’t help but suspect it was because these two characters are sexual and enjoy it. And even in the face of the AIDS disease that eventually claimed Liberace’s life, there’s no regret in what they shared.

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Elsewhere the performances from the likes of Rob Lowe as a wonky-faced plastic surgeon, the aforementioned Cheyanne Jackson as a jaded protégée, Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother (how’s that for casting!), and Bruce Ramsay as a sexualised houseboy fill a typically sublime Soderbergh ensemble that also includes Dan Aykroyd, Scott Bakula (with one helluva moustache), Nicky Katt, and Paul Reiser. Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes are spectacular from Liberace’s elaborate stage outfits to the humorously slothful robes and caftans of his home wardobe, as is Howard Cummings production design with its ability to be at once ornate and vacuous.

I would have liked further examination of Liberace’s relationship with the public since it was such a defining part of his life. There’s a wonderful exchange early on between Damon and Scott Bakula who are attending a Liberace show when the two share their shock at audience’s not being aware that the piano-man is a big ol’ queen, only to have an old lady in front turn around and scold them with her eyes. Given the events that dominate the film’s second half – the relationship divorce, AIDS scandal that they didn’t want to admit – were so because of Liberace’s desire to not be known as a homosexual, I thought it was one aspect that could have been heightened and given the drama an added edge.

If Soderbergh’s Candelabra can’t keep its larger-than-TV ambitions going for the entirety of its runtime, then Mary Harron’s Anna Nicole never even attempts it. It’s a deflating experience to be sure given Harron is responsible for one of the greatest films of the ‘00s and had at once stage looked like she was set to become a defining name of the American independent cinema scene. Sadly, like so many female directors of her era (see also Patty Jenkins and Kimberley Pierce) the strange career that has befell her (I couldn’t even finish her vampiric YA adaptation The Moth Diaries) now sees her direct this lifeless biopic of Anna Nicole Smith. While the subject matter is actually a very interesting one, and something that would suit Harron perfectly given her history of looking at maligned figures in a clear-eyed fashion, she has unfortunately been laboured with a disappointing screenplay that does little to turn Anna’s life into anything but a string of typical tragic rags-to-riches clichés. There’s the deadbeat mother, the babies, the drink, the romance, the court-wrangling. No matter what Harron may or may not think about Anna Nicole, the screenplay by Joe Batteer and John Rice doesn’t see her life as noting but a cliché.

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I have little down that Harron could have worked the material into something unique if she wasn’t beholden to the usual tropes of a “TV movie”. There’s no personal stamp whatsoever on this project and if I hadn’t have known she’d directed it I wouldn’t have had any reason to believe the director of American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol was behind it. To be perfectly honest, given the great strides that television has made in usurping cinema as the go-to moving image artform, it’s even more disappointing that nobody would let her do it. The subject matter will pull in the curious gravewatchers no matter what, so why not allow her to go somewhat less traditional? Unless, of course, they did and then Anna Nicole is a sadder state of affairs than I initially feared. Harron tries what she can to inject the material with energy where she can, whether it’s in the colour of her costumes, the oddness of a scene clad in clown make-up, a surprising camera angle here or there, or with Agnus Bruckner’s committed performance, but the material (and the Lifetime home) just doesn’t permit her enough of a home to do so.

Where Harron and the film does succeed, however, is in treating its subject with due respect. The film seems obvious worth in Anna Nicole’s climb out of lower class squalor and it is never not on side with her, treating her like the trash that so many around her did. If anything, it takes the stance of her octogenarian husband played here by an affective Martin Landau of sympathetic admirer. It’s just a crying shame that a film about a person with so much lust for life isn’t itself as vibrant. To some, Anna Nicole Smith was a breath of fresh air, a bombshell who was smart enough to know what she needed to do to get ahead, but the film is stale and shows none of the ambition that was so important to its subject.

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I consider myself fortunate to have been able to see six films as a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent Allan Dwan retrospective, “Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios”. Naturally, in retrospect I wish I had seen more, but given I was initially not planning on seeing any of the films I’m glad I got to see any at all. It was, in fact, a visiting friend of mine who convinced me to see one, the 1927 silent drama East Side, West Side, and I enjoyed it so much - so much! - that I stayed for the second Dwan feature that evening. I’d intended to see more, like Tennessee’s Partner, The Woman They Almost Lynched, The River’s Edge, and Sands of Iwo Jima, but various things got in the way.

Considering the six films that I did manage to catch, it actually appears to be quite a fair representation of his career. Of course, given he made over 400 films (and you think Woody Allen is prolific), six rather a pitiful number, but when the Canadian director who was nearly 100 when he died in 1981 is seemingly never mentioned by anybody anywhere, I think six is probably more than most people can claim. Well, except the MoMA regulars who I often heard boasting of having seen them all. I got to see some of his vibrant and visually arresting silents, his attempts at Hollywood epic, a decidedly B-grade attempt at the popular western genre, and the two oddball final films that provide an almost sad coda to his career as someone who Hollywood appeared to have given up on. I’ve got a perspective on the man and with his name now on my radar I can only hope that I get to see more of his work.

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The first and the best was East Side, West Side, a 1927 silent drama that Dwan also wrote based off of a novel by Felix Reisenberg. It’s curious that this film isn’t cited for often as a definitive “New York movie”. Not only does it so beautifully capture the city – the MoMA notes even hail his “excellent use of New York locations” – but it tells a rags-to-riches tale that is so indicative of the NYC spirit. The city in the 1920s is spectacularly rendered (although certain dramatic events suggest it may in fact be set in 1912) on screen by Dwan and cinematographers Teddy Pahle and George Webber, helped by what I think was actual real location work, that I was captivated from the get go. Its first ten minutes set along the Manhattan waterfront are truly some of the most visually arresting images I’ve yet seen projected. That they feature the exceptionally handsome George O’Brien (better known for Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans) certainly helps, but the images of a sleeping New York as a barge makes its way down the foggy East River under the stars of a skyscraper skyline would be enthralling anyway.

O’Brien’s immense physical presence certainly makes the ensuing drama understandable. Once washing up onto the shore and attempting to avoid getting embroiled in a street fight, O’Brien’s John Breen himself in the company of a lower class family of the Lower East Side and later becoming the surprising protégée of a wealthy west side architect. The nondescript nature of his name, John, means it fits into both; the working class and the upper class and his likeable persona certainly means he finds friends fast. He begins working in the tailoring and suit shop of his east side adopted family and eventually puts his hulking frame to use as a boxer. He’s soon enough swept up in the lifestyle of a man who believes himself to be John’s father and begins to get involved with the man’s daughter (which, yes, implies incest that the film curiously doesn’t broach the top of). Extra note: you wouldn’t want to fall asleep during this movie, especially as the film takes a very strange detour in recreating the sinking of the Titanic at the start of the third act. One could find themselves very confused. The (shall we say fabulous) German (below) and Spanish marketing campaigns even went so far as to retitle the film as Titanic even though that focus boat is never actually mentioned by name and the sequence comes maybe an hour into a story that previously completely sidestepped the Titanic. The more you know!

I adored the film from a visual stand point, with its breathtaking images and smart use of framing. Where Dwan’s film really surprised me was in the very modern vibe of the picture. None of the actors are guilty of hammy over-dramatised stylisation that silent films can sometimes suffer from – everybody here feels very natural, which helps it connect more emotionally than as just a visual pleasure. The use of real locations also keeps it grounded, and connected to a world that very much still exists today. The hurried rush of the LES is still very much alive and thriving albeit as a more gentrified entity, as is the more luxurious qualities of the Upper West Side. East Side, West Side is very much a movie about, as the poster states, “New York today with its loves, passions and hates.” I suspect many people who feel they can’t engage with silent pictures would certainly appreciate this one. If little else, they can certainly admire the scenery.

The scenery in Stage Struck is the one and only Gloria Swanson. A film of delicate humour that had be frequently laughing out loud, but which never descends into outright slapstick. Again, for a film made in 1925, Stage Struck feels decidedly modern. It’s paced exactly right and its cast have keen timing. Dwan isn’t a particularly fussy director and nowhere is that more suited that here. The material does all the work necessary and many contemporary directors of comedy could take a lesson or two from the way works a joke and then moves along to the next one rather than hovering around like a vulture. Fun fact: Stage Struck was at least partly filmed at the Kaufman Studios in Astoria, NY, which is literally about five blocks from my apartment.

With Stage Struck I saw that Dwan was a perfectly fine director, but figured maybe it’s the projects with bigger scopes that see him bring out the directorial bells and whistles like what I’d seen in the sprawling character study of East Side, West Side. These two faces of Dwan were on display, I felt, with the next two features of his that I watched. The 1938 African-set epic Suez and the 1954 western Silver Lode.

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The former tells the story of the building of the Suez Canal with Tyrone Power as Ferdinand de Lesseps. All the hallmarks of Hollywood epic are there – the love triangle, the exotic locale, the dramatic setpieces, the grand history of it all – and when given the chance to do so shows Dwan as a very strong director. Nominated for three Academy Awards – I’m not sure of many Dwan films that can claim that - Suez is rich and grand, with a centrepiece sequence involving a highly destructive sandstorm making a great impression. He’s unafraid to shun sentimentality for the all too real circumstances of death, especially involving one character whose exit is unexpected and emotionally quite affecting.

However, Suez is the first of the films I saw that had Dwan actively trying to keep up. This was surely an epic for him, but it’s still a rather small picture. Dwan’s direction is impressive and he has utilised whatever budget he had well, but I can sense the almost blue collar sensibility in him at work. Whereas his silent work felt new and bold and vibrant, Suez appears to find the director working harder than ever to impress and making the type of film that was dictated by the times. He was never a director that would have had his pick of major motion pictures, but when given the chance to work on something such as this he could be guaranteed at providing a winner.

By the time Silver Lode came along, however, nearly 20 years later Dwan was into his fifth decade as a director and in very much the twilight phase of his career. One can forgive the man for perhaps going soft of the pedal and Silver Lode is a perfect example of the sort of solid entertainment, not quite A-list films that he was churning out. I’d initially not responded all that well to Silver Lode, considering it solid but unremarkable. And while I still don’t consider the film, an 81-minute western set on July 4th Independence Day, to be all the best of what I have seen from him, I’ve found myself thinking about it more than any of his other works. 

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I appreciated the film’s screenplay more than anything, to be honest. While there are lapses in logic – those townspeople, oy! – I appreciated its single day structure, the protest to McCarthyism, its surprisingly adept female roles, and the no fuss way it goes about its business. It’s lean and more than a little mean, if you catch my drift. I actually think the actors are more or less fabulous, with particular notice going to Dolores Moran and Lizabeth Scott as two very different small town women. Cinematographer John Alton had won the Academy Award some years earlier for An American in Paris, and while the film doesn’t often allow him to really do much with the frame, there’s at least one shoot-out sequence, done all in one take as Payne’s falsely accused gunman criss-crosses across down hiding behind any objects he comes across, that is superb, stunning work. It’s a moment of alchemy between the camera and the set and really highlights the film’s excellent formal work all around.

Silver Lode is like comfort cinema of a sort. It has so many ingredients that make for an entertaining film that it’s almost impossible to not get at least some enjoyment out of it. It’s lazy Sunday afternoon fare, the type that one could come across on the ABC (Australia, not USA) one day and there’s something really sweet and old-fashioned about that. I’d certainly leave it on if I ever spotted it while channel surfing.

There’s definitely a streak of paranoia running through Silver Lode, which makes it an intriguing property to look back on. What I had initially thought was a fob off from Dwan turned out to be a film very much keeping in with subjects he liked to tell. He made other westerns, including one with Ronald Reagan that I unfortunately had to bypass, but I’m not sure any of them would have such an overt reference to the McCarthy communist hunt. The villain of Silver Lode isn’t called Ned McCarty for nothin’, you know.

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This political edge would extend on through to The Most Dangerous Man in the World seven years later. What would prove to be his last film – he simply retired, having presumably exhausted himself making so many films one right after the after – this 1961 curiosity is a fairly standard B-movie about the dangers of nuclear war that is fairly typical of the era. By this time cinema had well and truly moved on and Dwan was making the type of movies that would be the el cheapo second film in a double feature. The Most Dangerous Man in the World lacks almost all the finesse and beauty of the earlier films I had seen, but at least the man still knew how to adapt. He doesn’t disguise his films as anything that they’re not. This is cheap science fiction, and there isn’t necessarily anything bad about that.

The last film I saw from the retrospective was actually the second last feature he made. From 1958, Enchanted Island is easily the weakest of the six. The only film of his that I saw that I would say is actively bad, it’s a poorly-acted desert island flick that suffers from production values that run from average to poor and performances by the likes of Dana Andrews and Jane Powell that lack charisma. The tropical locales look divine, but that’s window-dressing for a film that’s otherwise casual with its racism (a white actor portrays a tribe leader who’s obviously meant to be of Polynesian descent) and misogyny (“hahaha!” laughs Andrews’ jungle seaman as he throws a fishing net over his exotic girl-wifey, to which the woman’s father responds “He can keep what he caught!” before she gets slung over the brute’s shoulder and shipped off to the jungle). 

“He dared to love a cannibal princess!” reads the poster, which is ridiculous. The film’s cannibal subplot only ever briefly flirts with being interesting, and then is mostly discarded as a humorous misunderstanding between cultures. This is the bad kind of fluff, shamelessly glowering at a culture different from our own, but dressing it up in pretty colours to mask any off-putting sentiments that audiences may accidentally pick up on. At least Allan Dwan got to make one more film after this – curiously three years later, the biggest gap between any two Dwan features – but this was a decidedly off-colour end to my first experience with Dwan.

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I can definitely see why MoMA decided to do the retrospective. He’s a director that typifies a lot of what Hollywood was doing in its first half-a-century of existence. He is an example of somebody that perhaps never quite had the goods to go all the way to being hailed as a filmmaking legend, but who worked with what he had perhaps more than anybody else. If the initial promise of his early years (and, to be fair, even by 1925 of Stage Struck he had already made over a hundred films beginning in 1911) didn’t quite continue on through the decades, then he’d hardly be the first director to do so. A consummate professional who tried to do his best with whatever he was given even when it included shrinking budgets and an industry that was in the early stages of moving away from the types of films he was best at, and who made movies clearly because he loved cinema above all. Viewing these films was illuminating and eye-opening and I’m grateful I got to see them. I’d be willing for the retrospective to keep going more months on end just to give me the chance to see them all.

“It’s about time”, said Barbra Streisand at the 2010 Academy Awards before announcing “…Kathryn Bigelow” as the first female winner of the prestigious best director prize for The Hurt Locker. Given the then 67-year-old multi-hyphenate’s own chequered history with gender inequality with the notoriously lady-shy director’s branch, she’s surprisingly not bitter. Her lack of a nomination for Yentl in 1984 was met with heated debate and even protest for its perceived sexism, and furthermore in 1991 when her film The Prince of Tides found itself in the unlucky position of being a best picture nominee minus its director to which host Billy Crystal famously quipped, “did this film direct itself?” Despite that, and despite her own famed vanity (lest we forget The Mirror Has Two Faces), she’s always been pro-gender equality and I adore what she said at the 65th Academy Awards in 1993 before announcing that most manly of men, Clint Eastwood, the winner:

“Tonight the Academy honours ‘Women and the Movies’. That’s very nice, but I look forward to the time when tributes like this will no longer be necessary. It won’t be necessary because women will have the same opportunities as men in all fields. And will be honoured without regard to gender, but simply for the excellence of their work. A time when there couldn’t possibly year a ‘Year of the Woman’ because there will be so many in prominent positions.”

It’s inarguable that women still face tremendous uphill battles in the “biz” of film and television, with the latter definitely showing vast improvement in recent years both here and abroad (so many fabulous women on TV that the Emmy categories are literally overflowing). Newly released data out of England states that only 7.8% of British cinema was directed by women last year. That’s a diminishing of 50% and a startling figure. Similarly in America, the oft-cited statistic is that women make up 50% of all film school graduates, and yet make up a paltry sub 20% of directing positions. Depending on where you look, the figures tossed out look at one female director for every 15 male directors, 5% of the top 250 grossers, and so on.

And not just directors, but nearly every other position of filmmaking ranging from acting to screenwriting to cinematography. The only fields in which women traditionally dominate are “crafty” fields such as costume design and make-up. The only women to win Academy awards in gender non-specific categories at this year’s Academy awards were the nominees for, lo and behold, costume (Anna Karenina‘s Jacqueline Durran), make-up and hairstyling (Les Miserables‘ Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell), original song (Adele for “Skyfall”) and Andrea Nix Fine for her documentary short. Granted, much like I have long argued with direct attention to the director category, the Academy can only reward what Hollywood gives them, but it’s interesting nonetheless and you’re free to take the information as you will.

When the issue comes to the Australian industry?

I don’t know.

I don’t claim to know.

I shouldn’t have to know because there shouldn’t be an issue. But there is. There always is.

The conversation about female representation within the film industry frequently raises its ugly head. It did so most recently upon the release of FilmInk‘s “2o Most Powerful People in Australian Film” issue and the ensuing drama it created on Twitter and beyond. I’m not here to critique the well known magazine’s standards since I understand what their intentions were, however curious it is that a man such as Justin Kurzel can make it on to the list with only one finished film credit to his name, while plenty of incredible female directors with more could not. Still, as I said, that’s not why we’re here.

I’ve long believed that my home country’s industry was a bit more progressive than America’s. For instance, our homegrown annual awards formerly known as the Australian Film Institute Awards recognised their first female director winner way back in 1979 with Gillian Armstrong for the classic My Brilliant Career (which I felt made an apt banner image up top, don’t you think?) A further seven have won in the years since from 28 nominations. While I didn’t tally the exact figures, there is a similar representation in screenwriting categories, too.

And yet still it’s an issue. There’s little denying that women’s place in the local industry is marginally better than it is in America, but there’s obviously still a ways to go. For instance, as much as I’d love to assume Elissa Down has been developing a masterpiece since her breakthrough in 2008 with The Black Balloon, two episodes of Offspring seems an awfully slim follow through for an AFI-winning director and writer. Likewise Cate Shortland who took eight years to follow up Somersault with Lore in 2012 (for which she won numerous awards around the globe and decent-sized USA box office returns). Meanwhile Jocelyn Moorhouse has been faced with development hells on projects, and the aforementioned Gillian Armstrong has reverted to predominantly documentary work. Funding and development isn’t just a female director problem, obviously, but I wonder if they’re being as encouraged as, say, Morgan O’Neill who directed Solo and Drift and has been given the reins of a $15mil production based on the life of legendary writer Banjo Paterson.

Nevertheless, I didn’t want to write this piece to add another 1000 empty words of woe onto an industry that has seemingly seen the roof cave in these past six months (2013 will not go down as a great year for Australian film, but 2014 is looking up, up, up!) Instead, I wanted to highlight some names within the Australian film and television industry who have not only “made a name for themselves” (a silly term, but we’ll run with it), but who also have a very proven history of getting. shit. done. I doubt if you combined one of the producers below with one of the directors that a funding body would reject it, but I guess you never know. Getting greenlit is tricky business.

It was all relatively simple, actually. All I did was peruse the last few years of AFI/AACTA nominees (and added a few extras that I thought deserved mention) and came up with these 25 women who are shining examples of what can be achieved by women. I think it’s important to know names like these because oh so often I read an article bemoaning the lack of women in the industry without having taken the time to give prominent praise to those that are there doing their job day in day out. By all means, I don’t mean this to sweep the issue under the rug, but instead I mean it to be a positive beacon, a shining of lights onto people who get easily forgotten in the rush to be as negative as possible (as well as some very famous ones). These names are in alphabetical order and we’re not looking at people involved in organisations like Screen Australia or Film Victoria. Just producers, directors, actors, and writers who work hard to get their product on the screen and with the diminishing of quality between cinema and television, is there any shame in working in one medium over the other any longer? I don’t think so!

Deborah Mailman | Liz Watts | Daina Reid | Jan Chapman

Imogen Banks (producer, writer)
Imogen Banks only has four series to her credit, but they are Dangerous, Tangle, Offspring, and Puberty Blues. She is very clearly a name to watch. She also wrote episodes of the latter three, and the acclaimed Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo.

Cate Blanchett (actor)
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish Cate Blanchett would make a film back home again – her last was Little Fish in 2005 for which she won an AFI Award – and, hey, maybe there’s an adaptation or two to be made from her years behind the Sydney Theatre Company. Still, she routinely flies the banner for Australia, returning frequently to present at local award shows and to help open events. Her Oscar (for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator), just by the way, is able to be seen at the permanent “Screen Worlds” exhibit at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

Rosemary Blight (producer)
FilmInk’s piece saw fit to include Rosemary Blight at no. 16 based on her heading of Goalpost Pictures. They were the primary producers behind hit The Sapphires, as well as Clubland, and she was also involved in Teesh & Trude, Panic and Rock Island, the Lockie Leonard television adaptation, and Matthew Saville’s upcoming Felony, perhaps my most anticipated Aussie film on the schedule.

Mimi Butler (producer)
Blue Water High, Rush, Howzat!: Kerry Packer’s War, Paper Giants: Magazine Wars. Yeah, I’d say Mimi Butler is on a role in bringing successful projects to the screen.

Jane Campion (director, writer, producer)
An international career that hops between Australia (she brought Bright Star to local shores as a co-production with many locals on board), New Zealand (recent miniseries Top of the Lake was originally an Australian production until ABC backed out due to creative differences), the USA, and the UK. Apart from her high-profile works she was also a part of Soft Fruit, worked on the Aurora screenwriting committee that helped bring Somersault to the screen, and helped push Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty to Cannes and beyond.

Michelle Carey (festival director)
As the artistic director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, Michelle Carey is responsible for the biggest and the oldest film festival in Australia. Pretty impressive, no? Also impressive is that MIFF, now over 60 years old and currently on right as I type, also features a film development fund, a female CEO and board chairperson not to mention a staff roster with many other female positions including operations, programming, marketing, publicity, and industry.

Jan Chapman (producer)
Jan Chapman has long been associated with Jane Campion on The Piano and Bright Star, and Cate Shortland with Somersault and The Silence. Has also helped produce Lantana, Suburban Mayhem, Griff the Invisible, and has the upcoming The Babadook, which is (ding ding ding) directed by a woman, Jennifer Kent.

Penny Chapman (producer)
Penny Chapman is not only associated with Blue Murder and Police Rescue, but has also worked on The Slap (which sold big internationally, I believe), The Straits, and My Place.

Kirsty Fisher (writer)
Kirsty Fisher has written for Dance Academy, H20: Just Add Water, House Husbands, Winners and Losers, and Laid, for which she is also a producer.

Emma Freeman (director)
One of the most acclaimed and respected directors, Emma Freeman has steered clear of feature films, but made a name for herself on series The Secret Life of Us, Puberty Blues, Tangle, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Rush, Love My Way, and Hawke, for which she won an AFI Award.

Claire Henderson (producer)
As executive producer on The Saddle Club, Claire Henderson helped produce a show that sold big time (TV and DVD) to basically any continent that has horses. So that’d be… all of them? At the ABC she’s also responsible for Blue Water High, Round the Twist, and The Ferals at one time or another.

Anita Jacoby (producer)
The ABC’s Wednesday night line up was enviable for a while to even the three big networks. Anita Jacoby worked on several of them including the Gruen franchise and Hungry Beast. Has predominantly worked for Andrew Denton’s former company, I believe, on projects like Can of Worms, God On My Side, and one of the world’s first crowd-funded films, The Tunnel.

Claudia Karvan (actor, producer, writer)
Predominantly known as an actress – she’s my personal favourite local TV actor – on such seminal programs as The Secret Life of Us, and Love My Way, Claudia Karvan also spearheaded the latter as a writer and producer as well as Spirited on which she also wrote and produced. A highly respected actor, she’s currently appearing in Puberty Blues and The Time of Our Lives.

Asher Keddie (actor)
A fellow film critic friend has said that he reckons Asher Keddie is the only Australian actor who could get people to go and see a local film purely on their selling power. And, yes, she has the Gold Logie to prove it. Given the giant success of Offspring and Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo it’s hard not to agree. She’s also been on Love My Way, Rush, Hawke, Curtin, and even smuggled out a role in Wolverine.

Robyn Kershaw (producer)
Originally a casting director on Children of the Revolution and Looking for Alibrandi, producer Robyn Kershaw’s work as producer straddles film and television. She has been involved with Kath & Kim and The Shark Net on TV and Bran Nue Dae, Looking for Alibrandi (as a producer alongside casting), and Save Your Legs! on the big screen.

Nicole Kidman (actor)
Much like Cate Blanchett, yes Nicole Kidman is seen predominantly as an American star now, but lest we forget she does show support for the industry and made Australia even in the face of that screenplay to prove it. I would love to see her use her production house, Blossom Films, which produced Rabbit Hole, maybe make a film to two in Australia. Maybe if she reads this (nudge wink, you’re a goddess) she might she inspired. She returns with The Railway Man this year, an Australian-UK co-production, which has been given a plum spot on the release schedule.

Deborah Mailman (actor)
Australian acting royalty, and perhaps the most popular and respected indigenous actor (give or take a David Gulpilil) of all time. Seems to win award nominations for everything she does - The Secret Life of Us (who didn’t fall in love with her as Kelly Lewis on that groundbreaking series?) Radiance, Bran Nue Dae, The Sapphires (currently an arthouse hit in America), Offspring, Mabo, Mental and so on – and with a staunch desire to tell indigenous tales on screen like Rabbit-Proof Fence, Redfern Now, and Black Chicks Talking. She’s a force in the industry without a doubt. I’d be curious to find out if she has ever been offered the solo lead in a series. I think she’s popular enough to make it a hit, but I also like having her in films so maybe not.

Natalie Miller (distributor, exhibitor)
A fixture of the Melbourne cinema scene, Natalie Miller is the originator and leader of Sharmill Films (a company that most recently released Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing) and was first the first independent female distributor in Australia. She is also the co-founder of Cinema Nova in Carlton, arguably the premiere destination for exclusive arthouse releases in the state. For what it’s worth, the Cinema Nova were the only cinema to play Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring.

Cherie Nowlan (director)
After breaking out with the Brenda Blethyn-starring Clubland (aka Introducing the Dwights in America), Cherie Nowlan moved predominantly into TV in Australia and then America. All Saints, Packed to the Rafters, Dance Academy, and Underbelly are the biggies, and then Gossip Girl, 90210, and new 2013 series Mistresses in the Hollywood. Now there’s a name that many wouldn’t know about and yet should have a photo up in filmmaking school around the country. What Aussie director wouldn’t want those gigs? If they say “no” then they’re probably in it for the wrong reasons.

Jacqueline Perske (producer, writer)
Having developed a strong working relationship with previously mentioned Claudia Karvan, Jacqueline Perske has worked on Love My Way and Spirited as a writer and producer, The Secret Life of Us as a writer, and even received AFI, IF, and Film Critics Circle nominations for her screenplay to Little Fish, which starred Cate Blanchett.

Daina Reid (director, actor)
This lady right here seems to have a monopoly on all the really big TV series, movies and miniseries, doesn’t she? The Secret Life of Us, MDA, All Saints, Satisfaction, Very Small Business, City Homicide, Bed of Roses, both Paper Giants films, Offspring, Rush, Howzat!: Kerry Packer’s War, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and upcoming Nowhere Boys. Not to mention feature film I Love You Too, and a very accomplished career as a comedian and actress on Full Frontal, Jimoin, The Micallef Program, Kath & Kim, and Welcher and Welcher. Yeah, I’d say Daina Reid’s going pretty darn well and shouldn’t be in any danger of losing out on jobs any time soon.

Julie Ryan (producer)
While Julie Ryan’s credits on Red Dog and 100 Bloody Acres (already on screen and VOD in America) are keeping her going at the moment, what I find most impressive is her roster of Rolf de Heer films. Having worked as producer on most of his titles since The Old Man Who Read Love Stories in 2001 (arguably his hardest production) and an ability to pluck funds out of thin air for Dr Plonk and Ten Canoes shows determination and skill. I’d want her on my team. Plus, she has Tracks premiering at the upcoming Venice Film Festival with Mia Wasikowska and Adam Driver (Girls).

Liz Watts (producer)
She could argue her position on any list such as this (or FilmInk’s on which she was ranked no. 15) based on one film: Animal Kingdom. She steered that film to instant Aussie classic status, which spun into an unlikely but well-deserved Oscar nomination for star Jacki Weaver. Other than that, she has TV series Laid, and other features Lore, The Hunter, Walking on Water (a very touching AIDS drama), The Home Song Stories, and David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom follow-up, The Rover starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson. Yes, yes. Deserves big thumbs up for getting Michôd to stay in Australia for his sophomore effort.

Joanna Werner (producer)
As a producer on H2O: Just Add Water and Dance Academy (on which she’s also a writer and co-creator), Joanna Werner has been involved in two programs that have found sales and cult followings in America, which is money. There was talk of a H2O movie, but I haven’t heard anything about that in quite some time, sadly.

Kate Woods (director)
See also Cherie Nowlan. After winning an AFI Award for directing Looking for Alibrandi one could mistake Woods for having fallen out of the industry. She actually went into television, directing the Changi miniseries in 2001 and moving to America to director episodes of Without a Trace, Law & Order: SVU, and Private Practice. Lately she’s working more than ever on NCIS: Los Angeles, House, Bones, Castle, Hawaii Five-O, Suits, and was most recently given the big honour of directing an NBC pilot (Aussie-made, US-set Camp with another big Aussie female name, Rachel Griffiths).

And then there are people like Catherine Martin, Mandy Walker, Jill Billcock, Cappi Ireland, Melinda Doring, Veronika Jenet, Sarah Bortignon, and so many, many more who work in fields like sound and design that have no problems getting work. Although Walker does work in a field that’s notoriously man-centric (that’d be cinematography). Martin has the potential to become Australia’s most successful Oscar winner with her work on husband Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.

So, there you go. 25 names (and then some) of Australian women in the film and television business that deserve not just credit for their achievements, but actual prominent recognition. We’ll never get anywhere if those who are out there making the stuff we watch aren’t celebrated and cheered on. Not in a patronising “you go, girl!” kind of way, but in a professional, respectful way. I so frequently hear that women tend to give up ambitions of working in this industry because they so rarely see role models, but maybe lists like this and any others people would care to write can show that it’s very much possible to work in this industry and be a woman and do it successfully, too. Otherwise we’ll just keep getting op-eds about what a “cockforest” (term courtesy of one of this list’s inspirations, critic friend Mel Campbell, via Ben Law at the ABC) it all is and it’ll be little more than a vicious circle of sexism.

And if you’re also interested in female film critics? Again, they aren’t as many as there are male critics, but there are many great ones. How about the aforementioned Mel Campbell (The Thousands), Tara Judah (The Saturday Magazine, Plato’s Cave), Cerise Howard (Smart Arts, Senses of Cinema), Lesley Chow (Bright Lights), Jess Lomas (Quickflix), Alice Tynan (all sorts), Philippa Hawker (The Age), Rebecca Harkins-Cross (The Big Issue), and so on.

I know I and many others would appreciate your assistance in spreading this list around and, by all means, adding to it. These were just 25 I found; I know there are more.

And, yes, I do hope you’re singing the title of this blog to the song from The Sound of Music. Even if I’m not a fan of the movie.

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This review contains some spoilers to The Conjuring.

James Wan’s The Conjuring is the Ultimate Fighting Champion of haunting movies. It is all of the movies. Every single one. Coming to the film several weeks after its phenomenal box office, I was at least somewhat viewing it in a way where I was trying to seek out what it was about this movie that had attracted so much. These type of movies are a dime a dozen – the coming attractions beforehand can show you that – hell, the director has another one of his one, Insidious: Chapter 2, out in just a couple of months! But most of all, as a fan of the genre, I just wanted to see something scary and fun. Watching it though was like experiencing a crash course in haunted houses. As these movies go, it’s an epic.

First of all, for a horror movie, The Conjuring has a positively sprawling ensemble. The family has a mother, a father, and not just one or two children, but five. The paranormal detectives have a daughter and a grandmother and an assistant and there’s even a police detective for some reason that isn’t explained. There’s even The Pope by the end. And can we talk about the dead? There are so many ghosts in this movie they need their own union – the Screen Actors Ghoul, perhaps? There are spirits and demons and witches and possessed dolls. There’s “found footage” scenes and opening text and CSI-style technology and flashbacks. There’s even a flashback to scenes we saw two minutes ago. There’s a swarm of a birds, a  prophetic dog, an exorcism, multiple possessions, witchcraft, a kidnapping, murders, a suicide, ancient curses, the Catholic church, secret passageways, piano-playing demons, creaking doors, slamming doors, flickering lights, falling pictureframes, clocks that stop, bodyparts flailing, sheets flapping in the wind, and even ghost-hunting celebrities with ties to the Vatican. It spans multiple locations and multiple families as characters float, fly, crawl, walk, fall, slip, slide, swim, swing, and shout. The only thing missing is the (possessed, natch) kitchen sink.

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Think The Conjuring is missing something? It’s not. No zombies? Oh, but wait, there’s a song by The Zombies on the soundtrack. No séance? Well, there’s even one of those in the end credits. It’s just so much. The surprising thing is that a lot of it works, although I do find myself preferring the more boutique play box chills of Wan’s other haunted house horror, Insidious. Where that film was criticised for going too small in its final act (I wouldn’t argue with that; its third act looks like they ran out of money), I found The Conjuring to go a bit too bombastic in its closing with multiple threads collapsing upon one another before ending in a swell of music from the ever-reliable Joseph Bishara.

So it’s easy to see why the film has struck such a chord. There’s pretty much everything anybody could want from a movie like this, except maybe a consistent tone. Too long stretches go by that sap the film of momentum before Wan ramps up the frights again. Essentially anything involving the Warrens’ – played here by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga – home life is of little interest. We already have one family in peril, do we really need another? And did we really need two scenes of this couple teaching a crowd of believers? And furthermore, the way the screenplay by Carey and Chad Hayes ramped up the pro-family aspect, the power of religious connectivity with Farmiga’s Lorraine sticking by her man in the hour of need, was off-putting and unnecessary.

But still, I liked the film. When it’s in scary mode it more or less works. Of course, the mileage one gets out of it depends entirely on your disposition towards these kind of scares. Are you more likely to find doors squeaking open in the middle of the night scarier than bodies being carved up by serial killers? Then this is a film for you. The scares are easy – camera pans revealing a corpse-like body, a ghostly figure emerging out of the shadows, a body being flung across the room by an invisible force – but they’re effective. But, then again, I think the Paranormal Activity movies are effective and work harder with much less, so perhaps my thoughts on what constitutes a scary ghost movie is up for debate.

I like the way the film was designed. It’s not over-designed and cluttered with “look! we’re in the ’70s” knick-knacks, but rather authentically rustic with subtle costuming and a collection of grisly but not over-the-top make-up effects. Perhaps more impressive are the special effects. They look practical and tangible to the real world. One scene for instance, late in the film shows a chair begin to levitate off the ground and there looks to be actual weight to it as if there’s an actual struggle with gravity. Given Wan’s style I suspect this one close-up shot at least wasn’t reliant on computer graphics, but even when it very clearly does it lacks the plastic nature of more effects-reliant films.

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I don’t believe in ghosts, but I like films that do and treat the subject seriously. I could have done with the frequent lapses into slasher tropes – man hears noise outside, goes to investigate only the realise the terror was inside all along – and I believe Lorraine and Ed Warren were phonies (how about The Con-job-ering?), but I’ll go with it for a film that’s at least actively trying to provoke a reaction from audiences rather than idly assuming they’ll find any slight paranormal activity scary (speaking of the franchise, that’d be Paranormal Activity 4‘s biggest problem). Their presence lends the film a unique freshness that turns the material into detective story territory that is fun. It’s like Zelda Rubenstein showing up in the first act of Poltergeist rather than the third.

It helps that there were strong performances for the material, especially from Lily Taylor (your penance for The Haunting is about done, Ms Taylor) and Farmiga working on a higher plain that the genre usually allows in mainstream fare. Wan has proven himself to be such a star of this kind of low-key, high-thrills films that I guess The Conjuring was inevitable. A haunted house movie that wants to the definitive haunted house movie. The one people will compare all others to. I prefer it a bit more small scale, but the final product here is impressive and its success is a testament to Wan’s desire to turn the screw on popular horror entertainment towards a more home-spun aesthetic. It doesn’t always work, and genuine GOL (gasp out loud) moments are few and far between, but it conjures up enough hits amongst its roll call of chills and thrills to warrant its success.

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Is Interior. Leather Bar a documentary? Is it a docu-drama? Is it a mockumentary? It will probably tickle director James Franco pink to see his film cause such a bout of frustration amongst viewers, but this vague ambiguity takes away from the issues that he and co-director Travis Mathews are attempting to explore. Is the entire film scripted? One scene towards the end suggests that yes it has been, and if that’s the case then they’ve certainly succeeded in blurring the lines between fact and fiction perhaps better than anybody else before them. But in doing so and by misrepresenting the film (and the film’s supposed raison d’etre) as a recreation of 40 “lost” minutes of William Friedkin’s Cruising is just going to blunt their message behind a gaggle of needless directorial frou frou. The message of Interior. Leather Bar is an important one, but as a film it wants to have its cake and fuck it, too.

Friedkin’s 1980 homo-thriller Cruising is a fascinating movie. It really is. Set and released just one year before the virus known as HIV/AIDS was diagnosed, it represented a world that wasn’t long for the world. Condemned and met with protests from gay audiences that feared the film would portray homosexuality in a bad light, it’s actually very easy to look at Cruising today as an entirely radical film and one that wasn’t just ahead of its time, but entirely out of the time. A film like Cruising seems about as likely today as it did in 1980, but nowadays in a time when gay cinema is as unvital as ever and audiences as unlikely to go see it in a cinema, the concept of watching Al Pacino voluntarily get hog-tied and have anal sex on screen is something entirely exciting. Far from being homophobic, it takes very meticulous aim at representing its world with honesty and sincerity. I guess it’s hard for some in the gay community to accept that the acts portrayed in the film (both simulated and otherwise) exist, but so much of what I find fascinating about Cruising is that it explores this world that while still in existence today, has morphed into something else. It’s a time capsule of a time when the likes of Friedkin and Pacino could make a movie together about gay BDSM more or less in the mainstream and not treat it as a joke. It’s a messy movie, but a slickly made one and gets much mileage out of its bravura swagger.

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Sadly, Interior. Leather Bar doesn’t look at Cruising in any critical light. This isn’t a documentary about Cruising per se, so I guess I shouldn’t complain about that, but in choosing to make a film about the footage Friedkin was forced to cut due to ratings issues and yet still skirt the topic of the film itself I’m not sure where Franco and Mathews’ heads were at. Scenes play out predominantly with star Val Lauren as he discusses his discomfort with the part with various people: his wife, his agent (who uses terms like “Franco faggot project”, which certainly seems like something a writer would make up), his “co-stars”, and Franco himself. Lauren has been cast as the character that Al Pacino once played, a character who was new the S&M scene as a means of undercover police work. He discusses how he’s unsure of what Franco and Mathews’ intentions are with the project and how he’s doing it more out of respect for Franco and the vision that he can’t quite wrap his head around. Perhaps these scripted moments are just Mathews own manifestation of confusion with the project.

Franco, for that matter, is articulate in his reasons for wanting to recreate the 40 lost minutes of Cruising as a way of confronting the societal norms of being raised to believe sex between heterosexuals – more specifically, one man and one woman – is “normal”. This, however, probably wasn’t the best way to go about it. At only 60 minutes long – and many of those minutes filled with Val Lauren looking off into the mass of naked bodies or simply into the distance – I’m not sure why they didn’t just go the whole way and do what the film posits them as having set out to do. There’s barely five minutes of recreated Cruising footage and it’s all rather bad to be honest. And it’s not just the lack of grungy 1980s film stock having been replaced by ugly digital, but the staged phoniness of it all. The behind the scenes sequences feature repeated shots of Franco and Lauren, both repeatedly-confessed heterosexuals, leering at the unsimulated sexuality on display including one scene of open-mouthed shock that I certainly hope was played for laughs because that’s what it elicits. It’s not like Franco is unaware of his reputation – many of the blowjob related jokes in This is the End make sure of that – but in this type of setting it’s hard to believe his reaction. Especially since Cruising actually features acts far more down and dirty than anything in this film. I mean, there aren’t too many non-pornographic movies that feature the act of “fist-fucking” arthouse or not, you know what I mean? Nothing here is going to shock any audience who goes into the film aware of what they’re getting themselves into.

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If Franco and Mathews really wanted to confront society with the hypocrisy of sexuality then they actually could have simply remade Cruising in its entirety with Franco in the Al Pacino role. As it stands, barely anybody beyond a queer film festival audiences is ever going to see Interior. Leather Bar and their message will drift more or less into the ether. I don’t think anybody would particularly begrudge a remake of Friedkin’s film – there’s certainly much that could be improved by a filmmaker willing to go there. And at least maybe that way more people would see it and consume its message outside of a room of gay men who will likely feel somewhat duped by the whole affair. Or is he all talk and no action (pun intended)? As The Hollywood Reporter states, it’s for queer-theory students and Francomaniacs”, when Franco could be using his recent fondness for fabulous in far more mainstream-baiting ways.

Interior. Leather Bar is the second feature of Travis Mathews that I have watched this month after I Want Your Love. Again, only 70-minutes in length (Mathews at least doesn’t pad his stories, that’s for sure) and focused around exploring gay sex but this one with a far more conventional narrative. That narrative doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting, and much like Interior. Leather Bar that scattershot form of storytelling disables some of the more interesting themes that are dealt with in less depth that one would hope.

Now notorious, at least in Australian circles, for being banned from screening at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival due to its excessive unsimulated sex scenes, watching I Want Your Love with that in mind is entirely absurd. I guess we audiences can go on and on about how sex is a part of everyone’s lives in some capacity (we have it, we crave it, we watch it) and that cinematic representations of it can say a lot about the characters in the film as well as the viewer in a way far beyond the barbaric over-the-top violence of, say, Only God Forgives does. But they just don’t listen. Blood > Sex in today’s world. Won’t somebody think of the (sexually active) children? The sex scenes in I Want Your Love are, for the most part, explicit and yet tame. Well, I guess to a man who’s had sex with another man they’re tame, but probably not to the prudes on rating boards. Still, while the sex is real they don’t titillate all that much outside of the fairly standard rush of hormones one would – should – get from such a sight.

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What the banning effectively ignores is how the film uses them to reveal truths about the characters and the audience. There aren’t many films that have so realistically portrayed the side of “gay sex” that this one does. The intimate side, the problematic side, the funny side. It’s probably no coincidence that a lot of people, homophobic or not, think of two men having sex and think of the images that Cruising relished in presenting: drug-fucked orgies of leather and sweat. Hardly, you know? The characters here fumble and laugh, climax and, well, don’t climax. Different races and body shapes are on display in the sort of way that actual pornography does not. If I Want Your Love was the type of film the Australian censors thought it was then I’d expect less imperfections and more rippling, oiled muscles.

So it’s a shame then that the film doesn’t do all that much with the promise of this more honest material. The story of a thirty-something gay man having a crisis of identity and career is certainly identifiable, but the film ultimately falls into a repetitive cycle of sex and sequences of dull conversation of little point. That it started out as a short film doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I do wish Travis Mathews – here working sans James Franco – had used the expanded runtime to really navigate tricky homosexual territories. While it’s certainly not this film or any other’s job to “say” anything – and it certainly never approaches the topical transparency of Andrew Haigh’s superb Weekend - the film all too often flops about with little or no point other than to eventually link to another sex scene. The main disappointment with I Want Your Love is that while its characters are want love, the screenplay is ironically too pre-occupied with sex to give it to them.

Interior. Leather Bar screens at Newfest this September and will be released by Strand Released late 2013/early 2014
I Want Your Love  is available for purchase at its official website.

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The sight of Rutger Hauer in Il Futuro is a far cry from the European beauty he displayed back in 1982 with Blade Runner. He looks tired and overweight, sheathed in a silk bathrobe of oriental origin, held upright with the use of a walking cane, and his wrinkled face belying both the image of Hauer himself as well as that of the character, a former Mr Universe who still to this day works out despite having lost his sight. The role of Maciste is one designed for an actor like Hauer who, much like Mickey Rourke in Darren Aronosky’s The Wrestler, is willing to use his face and body and the audience’s history with it the benefit of the role and the film that encompasses it. It’s very believable that Hauer could have once been a Mr Universe of ambiguous origin – “he is kind of English or Australian”, says one character – who has since become a recluse in his Italian mansion. A man whose mythology is more creative than the reality. And if there was to be just one thing that Alicia Scherson’s adaptation of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s 2002 Una Novelita Lumpen is remembered for then it will be the performance of Hauer who proves that if given a film with the zeitgeist-hitting strength of the aforementioned The Wrestler did then his career could hit a more respectable twilight that doesn’t have to include mention of the likes of execrable Hobo with a Shotgun. I would love to see the 69-year-old actor cited for an Academy Award for this performance, but that’s never going to happen. The great film and performance will have to be its own reward.

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Il Futuro (stylised in its foreign language due to conflict with Miranda July’s equally non-futuristic The Future) actually takes its time before arriving at the trump card that is Hauer. Scherson, who wrote and directed this production in her home country of Chile despite its Italian setting, focuses her story instead on Bianca (Manuela Martelli), recently orphaned along with her younger brother, Tomas (Luigi Ciardo). Old enough to avoid foster homes, but not old enough to have a firm grasp of life’s harsh realities, Bianca takes up a job as a hairdresser assistant as a means of keeping Tomas in school and their highrise apartment in order to keep social services at bay. However, Tomas’ joining of a local gym and subsequent befriending of two older brutes leads them down a path of crime, sex, and betrayal.

Filmed in lush, rustic yellow tones by cinematographer Ricardo DeAngelis that occasionally approaches a bleached, sun-fried quality, this is a very untraditional way of presenting such grim material. Once the story merges from that of two orphaned children attempting to carry on after their parents’ death into that of Bianca’s ethically uneasy relationship with the burly Maciste, it refuses to let the ugliness of the situation take control of the visual narrative. The burgeoning relationship between the 19-year-old Bianca and the much older Maciste is frequently framed in sensual ways that makes Bianca’s unconventional emotions all the more believable. Their bodies, frequently naked, are smashed together in much a similar way to the way their characters have been thrust together against their initial wills and better judgements. It’s also a way for Bianca to form a relationship with a man that provides a paternal element that she still clearly misses and craves. A retaliation to the adulthood she had no intention of acquiring so soon. A form of rebellion that allows Bianca to continue to feel like she’s still just a regular teenager who is, if not innocent, then at least isn’t entirely accountable for her actions. An opening prologue suggests her more fantastical attitude to life as filtered through the prism of Hollywood, a theme that extends to her treatment of Maciste and the revelation that he used to make cheesy Z-grade action movies about muscle men and the women who loved them.

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The damage that these two people have experienced is palpable and it’s a credit to the performance not just of Hauer, whose grisly voice hangs over the second half like a mournful siren, but also Martelli. Barely a scene goes by without her presence and her look, reminiscent of Noomi Rapace, as well as her confidence in spite of trepidation is key to making the second act’s shift into heist territory believable. Bianca’s evolving relationship with Maciste is fascinating and gives a refreshing kick up the arse to the tired formula of older man/younger woman fantasy. Their cinematic duet of sorts is captivating very much because of the story’s more outrageous elements. It’s unique and its conflicts tangible. As Bianca questions her morals and the deeds she has done, the way she has used her body, and how she found herself in the predicament she’s in, director Scherson never loses sight of the story’s more flavourful, surreal, impressionistic, and artful elements.

Alongside other recent releases The Lifeguard, Adore, and A Teacher (all three of which are also in cinemas or VOD now), it presents a surprisingly mature examination of inter-generational sexuality. Unlike those films , however, the illegal element with Bianca is not of a sexual nature, which significantly alters the way the relationship unfolds on screen. Less time is taken with this part and allows more attention to be granted to the way Scherson so effectively integrates cinema into lives of these individuals, the reasons behind who we lie to and why and how, and the way people cope with events that seem so out of character whether its the loss of parents when still a child or the deterioration of a body when your entire life has been built around it. I was greatly moved by Il Futuro and found its style and unexpected story engaging. It has a really unique point of view that puts it on par with some of the most adventurous South American cinema of recent years. B+

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**this review is reprinted from 2012 when I saw Jayne Mansfield’s Car at the Melbourne International Film Festival**

War is hell, duh. Sadly, Billy Bob Thornton’s first time behind the camera in some 11 years (Daddy and Them, unreleased in Australia as far as I am aware) isn’t able to muster many more ideas for Jayne Mansfield’s Car, a 1969-set southern drama that looks at the effects of three wars on three different generations of one family. Surely attempting to be “sprawling”, the impressively cast ensemble try hard to find tender nuances amongst Thornton and Tom Epperson’s screenplay, but an unfocused structure that leaves many characters with nothing to do for long stretches (and sometimes, in Frances O’Connor’s case, disappearing from the narrative entirely) makes for an ultimately disjointed affair. The title is a doozy, a reference to the piece of pop culture memorabilia that found itself in a touring macabre sideshow of celebrity worship, but is perhaps too evocative and colourful a name for a film that is so concerned with the more tight-knit confines of family.

The developments that bring the Bedford family – John Hurt, Ray Stevenson, and O’Connor – from their home in England all the way to Alabama certainly pique initial interest. As Hurt and the ex-husband of his now deceased wife, played with typical externalised gruff by Robert Duvall, duke out their own decades-old argument, his children and grandchildren all have their own heavy stuff to deal with. Thornton’s Skip is deeply wounded (both mentally and physically) from his time in WWII, the same war that has turned Kevin Bacon’s Carroll into a peace-loving hippy. The third brother, Robert Patrick’s Jimbo, didn’t go to any war and yet carries scars all of his own. Bacon has perhaps the most interesting of the film’s many characters, having to deal with the shame he puts upon his decorated WWI hero father’s image as well as a son who, quite tellingly, thinks enlisting for the Vietnam War would be a “rock and roll” thing to do. What they would all think of soldiers lip syncing to Carly Rae Jespen’s “Call Me Maybe” on YouTube is never broached.

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Thornton imbues his film with the same rustic, southern gothic sensibility that he gave his debut, Sling Blade, in 1995. Perhaps Jayne Mansfield’s Car was his attempt to return to safer territory after the much-noted debacle of All the Pretty Horses in 2000. Sadly, this more expansive tale never reaches any of the lofty heights it is clearly aiming for. It looks lovely, and and an electric twang-heavy score plus references to era-defining moments in time mean there’s usually something to be paying attention to, but for a film that appears to be trying to say so much it never really gets above that initial statement of “war is hell”.

The fingerprints of a scissor-happy editor are there on screen as well as off. O’Connor’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” reciting step-sister seemingly vanishes for a couple of days with nary a mention of her name to remind audiences of her whereabouts. She’s the highlight of the film – “It’s like Gone with the Wind!” – and her vanishing act is truly a mystery. Meanwhile, the film’s Wikipedia page (which humorously implies Duvall, Bacon and Thornton play the three central brothers) cites Tippi Hedren as the wife who fled Alabama for the UK, and yet she never once appears on screen. I can’t imagine the bulk of the tiresome “old man takes LSD, LOL!” segment was more important, but there you go. Even the collage-style poster appears to feature images that didn’t make the final product.

War is hell, duh. That’s still all I can figure Thornton’s film amounts to. Perhaps if he’d focused on one of the story lines over this more mosaic structure he could have truly buried deeper. As it ends – quite bizarrely might I add – it feels like Thornton hasn’t used the themes and the setting in any particularly unique way, with little idea of how to maximise the potential of his big moments. It’s deep-fried Americana, but all a bit tasteless. C+

It’s perhaps appropriate that Stacie Passon titled her debut feature Concussion. It’s a film that deals with the workings of the brain in bruising ways that many in the recently expanding lexicon of LGBT cinema don’t even attempt. Much like recent film festival smash Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie’s examination of gay male cruising culture, or Christina Voros’ BDSM pornography-themed documentary Kink, Concussion looks at the way sex plays a very natural place in our lives and the way we so often embrace potentially dangerous sub-cultures in the search for pure therapeutic release in a way that “making love” never can.  The decisions that Abby, the married with children woman at the centre of Passon’s wonderful film, are those deemed wrong by wider society, but for all of her struggles she can’t deny the positive changing effect they have on her.

An engagement with a prostitute leads Abby into the world of upper-class sex work. Using the (very handsome, yes) male friend with whom she flips Manhattan apartment spaces as a go between with the enigmatic pimp madam “The Girl”, Abby starts seeing clients in the city away from her divorce attorney wife and the stale, virtually non-existent sex life that they have cultivated in the suburbs. Initially taking on younger clients including an overweight 23-year-old virgin and an academic student, she eventually starts seeing older women. The acts performed amongst these women is never explicit and Abby in fact goes to great lengths to make the situation feel as less like a sex for hire situation and more like the sort of “care free” online hook-ups that have infiltrated the world of gay male sex.

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As Abby, the film rests on the shoulders of Robin Weigart’s sensual performance. Known to audiences mostly through her television work on Deadwood, for which she was Emmy and SAG nominated, Sons of Anarchy, and Private Practice, she gives a fabulous performance here. Her deep, soothing voice and strong, feminine appearance proving a captivating presence. Her eagerness in early sex scenes as well as in her interactions with The Girl add dimension to the angst-ridden malaise that slinks throughout the rest of her. The entire predominantly female ensemble, as well as Johnathan Tchaikovsky as Abby’s sorta-pimp, are all fantastic, grounding the movie in an earnest reality that allows the frankness of its subject matter to never veer into exploitative or outlandish territory.

Its handling of the prostitution material is where Concussion works best of all. Thanks to Passon’s heartfelt screenplay, Abby nor the sex-working profession are ever vilified. Much like any other sexual expression that isn’t procreative missionary sex with the lights off, it’s easy to take prostitution into a place that is shameful and damning when it’s just as legitimate a profession as anything else. It’s not the oldest profession in the world, so they so, for no reason. Just like the BDSM of Kink, the au naturel cruising scene of Stranger by the Lake, the porno addiction of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, or even the inter-generational love affairs of Anne Fontaine’s Adore, it keenly observes the way the thrill of danger can alter our perceptions and our actions, the way we perceive ourselves sexually, and the way sex is a fluid, fluctuating entity that is always mobile and rarely the same thing for two different people. The way this danger can become all-consuming and how it can devour people whole and even result in something more true than the vanilla world promoted by the masses. Concussion is a remarkably sex-positive film and for that it should be commended. And furthermore, that it’s done so in a film involving female-on-female sexuality makes it a rare chance to dive head first into a subject that is rarely represented on screen consciously or not.

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However, I have to talk about my screening of the film. I attended a special advance screening at a gay community centre here in New York. The second largest in the country after Los Angeles for what it’s worth. As annoying as the smartphones that were illuminating around me left and right throughout were, it was the two gay men sitting behind me that made my blood boil most of all. Given this was a screening of a lesbian drama at an LGBT center with what I presume was a largely gay female crowd only made it worse.

Their constant narration through the first act of the film was bad enough: repeating dialogue and actions, predicting what was about to happen, and making unfunny quips about some of the images on screen. I wanted to stand up and punch them when one joked, “there’s a reason for that”, upon the admission from the young, overweight woman that she’s never had sex or even been kissed. The scene was an emotional one that starkly pushes the less-discussed themes of lesbian superficiality (a topic usually left to the gym-toned chorus of gay men) to the forefront and they thought it was an appropriate moment to make what I presume they thought was a sassy quip. Not only were they being rude to the audience and the filmmakers who were at the screening, but they were pushing their own ugliness onto the film. That they were ridiculing a character for not fitting into their miserable concept of beauty was also sad, unfunny and cruel made me speak up.

It’s a good thing that the movie was good, yeah? B+

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In the annals of cinema, Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 hip-hop docu-drama Wild Style is hardly as revered as it ought to be. It won no awards, rarely features on any lists niche or otherwise, and seemingly receives no credit for its fusion of documentary and fiction. Well, certainly none that I have ever seen and that’s a damn shame. Thankfully upon its 30th anniversary the film has received a new digital make-over, a small-scale theatrical re-release and a home entertainment release that finally gives this monumental and historic film the due that has been deserved for decades.

Anybody with ears can tell that the immensely popular hip-hop genre of music has swung and truly towards the direction of pop. Pop artists have been experimenting with the artform since Debbie Harry and her Blondie bandmates introduced “Rapture” upon audiences and has continued on through Mariah Carey’s groundbreaking use of hip-hop artists – and those as controversial as Ol’ Dirty Bastard – into her summertime pop melodies and on to the likes of Miley Cyrus today whose latest album, the appropriately titled Bangerz, merges so many genres together that it all but makes a justified stand for the tearing down of genre barriers that keep artists in tailor-made boxes. Meanwhile, hip-hop artists have found themselves more and more utilising pop and electronic music, a clear sign of the genre’s hook-obsessed debt to the mainstream pop charts. We’ve come a long way from Madonna and Tupac recording a duet and it not appearing on an album (that’d be “I’d Rather Be Your Lover”, of which there are bootlegs all over the internet), that’s for sure.

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Of course, what few people seem to admit is that hip-hop, long before it got divided by coast and became about the flash that the predominantly black artists were hoping to achieve, is that the genre was once a spin-off of disco. From its inception, hip-hop was about the issues facing the African American communities that were cultivating the sound, but in doing so they were utilising scraps of disco and pop music as the base for their lyrical freestyling and captivating beats. Chic’s “Good Times” is sampled heavily in a track from Wild Style, and even Notorious B.I.G. was taking Diana Ross’ famous gay anthem, “I’m Coming Out” and using it as the crux of his “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems” over a decade later. Furthermore, artists like Jurassic 5, Common,  Cyprus Hill, NaS, and A Tribe Called Quest have all referenced or directly sampled the film and its music in their own work years later. That some 30 years after Wild Style the genre as well and truly come full circle not only makes me, a huge fan of old-school hip-hop, pleased as punch, but should also make Wild Style as essential now as it was in 1983.

Wild Style is quite literally like watching the dawn of a new era. Hip-hop was underground, but making its way into the popular consciousness. For that reason alone Ahearn’s movie is a must see. Graffiti artists were not only beginning to find their work appreciated and in demand from business like the nightclub featured prominently in the film, but they were also being courted by the art world keen to find the next big thing. The rap battles that were common place within African American communities now had one foot in the Bronx and the other in Manhattan. Alongside Beat Street from 1984, it’s a bold and exciting artist’s utopia; a time when creativity was fostered and uninhibited with endless possibilities and a culture was beginning to exhibit the elements that would eventually allow it to become the music industry’s most dominant genre.

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Make no mistake, Wild Style is appallingly acted and Ahearn’s direction is relatively lacklustre as these things go - Beat Street is Gone with the Wind by comparison – and yet I’d still consider it better than roughly 95% of the new release movies I see in any given year. The 80-odd minutes that Wild Style surrounded me in the small cinema at the IFC Centre near W 4th street (with, it must be noted, only six others, all of whom were white) were more invigorating, exhilarating, heart-pounding and flat out entertaining than anything I’ve seen in 2013, that’s for sure. Even through all of its flaws and jagged edges, the film’s message of community, perseverance, and the enduring power of music and art soar above what count as modern masterpieces to most audiences. Looking at the film purely from a filmmaking sense then, sure, it’s pretty darn crummy, but the energy that the director gets in those musical sequences with a budget of what I can only assume was gas fumes and breadcrumbs is surely unmistakable., and from the up close view of a then closed off world more than makes up for any technical shortcomings. I guess it depends on what you go to the movies for, but for me Wild Style is a classic and a remarkable example of what the medium can do to an audience.

Blending the documentary of the musical sequences (in many senses it works as a concert film) with the fictional tale of a reporter (Patti Astor as Virginia) scoping out the local scene, it features real graffiti artists (Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink) and rap, DJ, and emcee musicians (Busy Bee, Fab 5 Freddy, Rock Steady Crew, Queen Lisa Lee, Grandmaster Flash) in real Bronx and Manhattan locations. This gives the film the authentic quality of Cinéma vérité that is loose and works within a freestyle form that is absolutely at one with the musical world in inhabits. As actors none of them are any good, but their performance enthusiasm and skill with a can of spray paint is second to none. Meanwhile, it’s hard not to appreciate the way Patti Astor has been made up to look exactly like the one and only Deborah Harry. Her character is even introduced to the beat of Blondie’s “Pretty Baby”, while the aforementioned “Rapture” plays during an extended sequence at a Manhattan art-world party. As documented extensively including in Celine Danhier’s 2010 doco Blank City about the no-wave art movement of New York in the ’80s, Harry was heavily into this alternative scene and it’s no surprise her presence lingers over Wild Style‘s entire being.

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Thanks to the down and dirty cinematography of Clive Davidson and John Foster, the film has a look that is entirely unique. Cheap it most certainly is, but Davidson and Foster clearly made strong attempts at finding captivating images. The way the camera is framed equally around the meticulously designed graffiti arts as it is around the characters gives the film a more raw and palpable sense of atmosphere than that of, say, The Warriors from a few years prior. The digital upgrade has also made the Manhattan sequences look far more vibrant than I recall experiencing with the original DVD release that I had seen. The dusk establishing views of Manhattan with its purple skies and rows of fluorescent-dotted skylines are curiously beguiling. Street sequences recall other more derelict examples of New York City decay from the ’7os and ’80s (not Taxi Driver, then) like TV crime drama The Equalizer and a less skuzzy version of Maniac that only film could capture. It has remarkable warmth to its hues and the blacks look deep.

In many ways, Wild Style is one of the most perfect and precise examples of independent filmmaking I can imagine. It’s singularity makes it memorable; its capturing of a time and a place of such significance makes its important. It’s a work of art that has rightfully attained a cult status amongst those who not only have a weakness for this era, but who also consider cinema to not always be about the things we’re so often told cinema ought to be about. It generally lacks narrative and is even a little feral, but it’s always engaging and bold and even if none of that strikes you then the musical sequences bristle with energy and rhythm. The fact that it’s an imperfect film only makes me think more fondly of it. Charlie Ahearn so desperately wanted to document this moment in time for the world to discover and if takes them 30 years to do so then so be it. The film remains a powerful testament to their vision and to the people that quite literally changed the entertainment medium one twisted, rhyming phrase at a time. It deserves to be hailed not must a New York classic, or a hip-hop icon, but a down the line masterpiece of art as cinema. Long live the Wild Style. A

Wild Style‘s 30th anniversary edition is out now on DVD and digital platforms now, and also playing select cinemas including the IFC Center in Manhattan for one more night, Pittsburgh (10th of October at the Hollywood Theatre) and Baltimore (4th of November at the Charles Theatre).

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For a film that goes out of its way time and time again to tell the audience that its protagonist was a pioneering wunderkind who helped revolutionise an artform and thought outside the box, John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings is awfully staid. Coming on the heels of Walter Salles’ On the Road adaptation and with another Kerouac novel adaptation, Big Sur, on the way, Krokidas’ film was perfectly positioned to take advantage of not only the resurgent interest in the beat generation, but also the cinematic openness regarding homosexuality. While Kill Your Darlings is refreshingly frank about the sexuality at its core – even if the much ballyhooed Daniel Radcliffe sex scene amounts to little in the overall narrative arc – it lacks the throbbing energy of the 1950s beat scene of which Alan Ginsberg was such a pivotal figure.

Focusing on Ginsberg’s years at Columbia University in New York City and his friendship with Lucien Carr, Kill Your Darlings is certainly a handsomely made film and its cast are a decidedly good looking bunch (for people with liberal definitions of hygiene they sure do all have great teeth and skin). Populated as it is with other recognisable faces, all of whom have been better elsewhere, Radcliffe as the bespectacled Ginsberg and the rising talent of Dane DeHaan as Carr are more or less burdened with hoisting the film on their shoulders. They do an adequate job with DeHaan equating himself to the material far better than Radcliffe, but at least he doesn’t embarrass himself like might have been feared. Ben Foster, who just recently gave one of the best performances I have ever seen from him with Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, reverts have to his default mode of doing whatever over-the-top thing he wishes and is rather terrible as William Burroughs. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the likes of Kyra Sedgwick as Lucien’s put upon mother, Jennifer Jason Leigh and David Cross as Ginsberg’s parents, plus Elizabeth Olsen as Kerouac’s wife are hardly given ample opportunity to make any impression whatsoever. However, in spite of that, in a neat reversal from Sam Riley’s bland performance in On the Road, Jack Huston as Kerouac is the film’s sole spark of genuine acting life.

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Krokidas seems unable to truly determine what he wants the film to be about. Is it a courtroom murder drama? Is it a biopic? Is it a literary adaptation? It tries to be all of these and more and never quite succeeds at either. The murder subplot in which Lucien Carr murders an elder suitor and claims the 1950s version of a “gay panic” defence lacks suspense and tension. The narrative flits about between too many characters to work as a definitive biopic of Ginsberg. It flirts with a madcap as much as it does tragedy.

There’s style in a narrow kind of way that only breaks out when allowed to indulge in drug-fuelled dementia. Compare this to Howl from directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman who turned Ginsberg’s book of poetry into a swirling docu-fantasia with animation and a flirtation between style and form. Flawed as it was, it felt like a film keeping in spirit with the material it was working with. Kill Your Darlings appears to be aimed more at stately prestige than anything close to resembling the messy flow of the revolutionary material at its core.

There’s a scene early on where Ginsberg, in a university poetry class, complains about the conventions and classical rules of poetry. It ultimately proves to be a scene of all too prophetic nature. Even if one doesn’t know the story of Alan Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, the film never hints that it will go anywhere you wouldn’t expect which seems to be a crime of filmmaking. It constantly tries to infer what this period was all about with its Lower East Side walk-ups, booze-fuelled late-night escapades, oversized woolen jackets, and messy mops of flopping hair, but you’d be forgiven for not quite getting what all the fuss is about. Say what you will about Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby or Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, but for as messy and flawed as they clearly are they remain artistic visions of periods long gone. They try to tap into an energy for an era that can at times feel has become stale through repetition. Kill Your Darlings didn’t exactly need a hip-hop score or psychedelic imagery to succeed, nor does any film if they are engaging enough. Sadly, Kill Your Darlings is decidedly average down to its DNA that it’s impossible not to see the film as a missed opportunity to really get inside Alan Ginsberg’s state of mind that he must have been in as he was turning this most misunderstood artform on its head. The court transcripts that formed the bases of Howl told us that poetry can’t be translated into prose, and sadly Krokidas’ film suggests it can’t be turned into a compellingly fresh narrative either. C

True story: I once came up with an idea to make a documentary on Divine simply because I thought the title Shit-Eating Grin was too good to pass up. Naturally, my complete and utter inability to do anything related to actually making a film sort of stopped that idea before it even got off the ground. I was happy then when I discovered a documentary was indeed being made about John Waters’ bad, mad actor muse and ‘80s HI-NRG super diva Divine, albeit a little bit disappointed that my – let’s face it – brilliant title never saw the light of day. Can you imagine that poster?

What we have instead is I Am Divine from director Jeffrey Schwarz who, judging from his IMDb profile, is known predominantly for making DVD supplemental material (13 Ghosts: The Magic of Illusion-O and Blonde Poison: The Making of Basic Instinct being my favourite titles from the long list of possibilities). I Am Divine is certainly a step in the right direction and fans of the portly performer born as Harris Glenn Milstead will likely revel in the documentary’s all-encompassing career overview. While it lacks the scrappy vivaciousness of a John Waters production, it’s a classy assemblage of clips and interviews with both Divine and his collaborators and family. I could have done without the cheap animation segues that are occasionally slotted in for no good reason, but Divine was such a flamboyantly entertaining figure, as were most of the people that surrounded him which is good news for viewers, that they’re forgivable in the larger context.

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It was a good decision on Schwarz’s behalf to punctuate the film with an interview that Milstead did out of costume and make-up not too soon before his untimely death in 1988 three weeks after the release of arguably his most acclaimed performance as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. It grounds the film in rich pathos of a man whose entire life in the public eye had been as somebody else, reminding his fans and newcomers alike that there was indeed a real person under the crooked eye make-up, frightening hairline and confronting fashion choices. The soft-spoken and sweet-natured Milstead discusses (with whom, however, I can’t recall the film mentioning)  his personal and family life alongside his career that gives clarity to many of the more outrageous stunts performed over his near two-decade career in front of the camera.

Beginning with John Waters’ shorts that saw Divine do everything from roll around in a pig sty to get raped by a giant prop lobster, the film quickly shifts to the film that put him on the map of all things filth: Pink Flamingos. There are plenty of other retrospective looks at the films of Waters so Schwartz’s film wisely keeps the attention focused squarely on Divine and his input into the movies. Waters makes a deliciously wicked interview subject, continuing to follow his own advice from 1987 rib-buster non-fiction book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters and accepting every possibly job that gets offered. He is by far the most illuminating and entertaining the documentary’s many talking head interview subjects. When discussing Pink Flamingos’ infamous denouement he humorously recalls asking, “What can we do that isn’t against the law… yet?” The film is richer for his involvement and without it there would be little point.

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Elsewhere, Divine’s mother Frances appears and at least does a better job at giving familial context to Divine’s life than the mother of John Wojtowicz in The Dog. Meanwhile a rollcall of former co-stars pop in to provide an anecdote or two including Tab Hunter discussing the relative ease with which he entered Polyester’s unconventional love affair, and Ricki Lake discusses Divine’s initial dislike of her on the set of Hairspray due to her having the larger part.

There’s likely little in I Am Divine that longtime devotees of The Dreamlanders won’t already know, although newcomers – perhaps those who only discovered him thanks to the Broadway and cinematic adaptations of Hairspray or through a casual late night cult screening – will surely find the film a wonderful jumping off point. I wished the film had more of an adventurous spirit in its form, and perhaps more attention could have been paid to her even more illustrious side-career as pop star who appeared on Good Morning America in the US, Top of the Pops in the UK and Countdown in Australia. Nevertheless, I Am Divine will make audiences fall right back in lust (in the dust?) with the ravenous and unlikely movie star no matter what and Schwartz has made a film that would impress Divine’s biggest fan: himself. It’s all about Divine, darling and don’t you forget it. I Am Divine ultimately provides a definitive declaration of Divine’s impact as a radical and essential figure in film, his long-standing effect on popular culture, and, ultimately, his undeniably raw, fascinating talent. Simply, I Am Divine is just that: divine. B+

It’s somewhat fitting that I saw Finding Vivian Maier and Levitated Mass together. While both deal with the world of art, it’s the fine print that makes them somewhat ideal twins. Both are finely told tales, one all about the mystery and the other all about the reveal, but when paired together the films have some rather startling things to say about the art world and the grey area that is populated with people asking “what is art”. John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s Finding Vivian Maier was an accident; Doug Pray’s Levitated Mass a very deliberate, well-thought out piece of work. Is that the difference? Can art be so simply boiled down? It’s a question neither film answers, but is likely a topic of perhaps endless discussion by viewers.

The story of Finding Vivian Maier is just as likely to be a discovery for audiences as it was to its filmmakers. A story that takes them from the suburbs – and Phil Donahue’s house! – to art galleries around the world upon the discovery of box after box after box of photographs (and even more and more boxes of undeveloped film) taken by an unknown woman. As the secrets begin to be revealed so too does the talent and the extraordinary story behind them. A nanny of many a child, all of which remember her years later, who’s heretofore undiscovered gift for the art of street photography would see her hailed a master after her death. Maloof and Siskel’s well-intentioned film navigates her history, whatever pieces can be put together by personal testimony that is, and tries to work out why Maier never thought to show anybody her work and potentially change the circumstances with which she inevitably found herself.

Amongst all the stunning photography on display is an anecdote that the Museum of Modern Art wouldn’t accept her photography for an exhibit. A revelation of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, but it calls into light that very question of “what is art” that has plagued people for so long. If an institution such as MoMA don’t believe Vivian Maier’s photography is good enough then are the rest of us fooling ourselves? Looking at the work – and the film is filled with shot after shot, but there is a seeming avalanche of other photos that the film simply doesn’t have time for – and it strikes me, an untrained eye, as some of the finest photography I have ever seen. The atmospheric compositions, the plays with shade and light, the capturing of timeless moments caught in the blink of an eye. For a fan of photography it’s certainly looks and feels like a goldmine. Why didn’t MoMA bite? Did they see something that I and all of Maier’s subsequent fans did not?

The question was only heightened by a viewing of Levitated Mass. A stirring and wonderfully put together film that poses an even bigger “what is art” conundrum on its audience. This time the director even sets out to ask that very question, although the answers vary. In detailing the conception and eventual grand production (and it is a production with an audience and all) of Michael Heizer’s controversial “Levitated Mass” artwork at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art it seriously asks its audience to question everything they know and consider about what is indeed art. Is a giant piece of Earth rock, virtually untouched by an artist, placed precariously over a walkway considered art? I’ve always leant towards the “if there’s intent, there’s art” side of the argument and the film certainly paints a vivid picture of the effect his work has on people, art aficionados and regular Joe’s alike.

The long sequence that details the rock’s movement from a quarry to its permanent site at LACMA is actually a very touching sequence. I found myself quite moved, surprisingly so. With the elaborate performance resembling something akin to a religious procession with worshippers greeting it upon every turn, it’s impossible to truly reproduce the awe that many of these spectators must have felt upon witnessing the giant rock transported through their neighbourhood, but director Doug Pray gives these passages a dramatic weight that is real and palpable. These moments make the film what it is because the artist, Michael Heizer, certainly isn’t doing anything. It would be curious to know what he thought of these people camping out for hours at night just to watch his rock roll through town, but he’s not the type to give insight into his works and I doubt he was going to start now for a part of his work that wasn’t even technically part of the art.

On one hand I wish I could look at the two films separately, but the way I viewed them was together and so they are seemingly eternally stitched together in my mind. That they navigate similar territory certainly helps, but that they both raise genuine issues of artistic subjectivity makes them even closer bedfellows. Levitated Mass is the more cinematic film (Vivian for what it’s worth resembled a lot of what I had seen of her story first on a show like 60 Minutes or Dateline, but I cannot remember which), but both have virtues that will likely make art fans respond to. Depending on your own interpretation of art, the mileage you get out of one film or another will likely vary, but each are accomplished achievements that are enjoyable, thought-provoking and will likely prove to be important pieces of the puzzle for their respective subjects.

Finding Vivian Maier screens at DOC NYC on Nov 17 at 7pm
Levitated Mass screens at DOC NYC on Nov 17 at 9.30pm and Nov 20 at 2.15pm

It’s rare that a fan of LGBT cinema has a bounty of options that allows someone such as myself to say “skip this and see that.” Pickings are usually so slim at any given time that gay audiences especially who want to see “their” stories on screen just have to grin and bear it with what’s on offer. Any other time of the year and in any other city than New York I would likely be warning of Kill Your Darlings‘ faults, but recommending it anyway because it’s so rare to see portrayals of gay sex and longing on screen. And even more so with recognisable faces and supporting them is important. However, for whatever reason, distributors with LGBT titles decided that October and November was a perfectly rational time of the year to release all of their product upon audiences at once. Kill Your Darlings now isn’t a noble title for audiences interested in experiencing gay stories on screens, but rather a disappointing effort, its weaknesses only highlighted by the other films on offer.

These distributors apparently have no qualms or worries about cannibalising their audiences by releasing – on my unofficial count – no less than 13 gay-centric films over the course of roughly seven weeks from the end of September to the middle of November. Some of these films are good, even great, several are bad. Some are large-scale for the niche, others minuscule by any measurement. Most have at least something to say and would likely be worthy of your time. Two of the best I have already reviewed – they would be Stacie Passon’s lesbian call girl drama Concussion (how’s that for a log line?), and Jeffrey Schwarz’s impassioned biographical documentary I Am Divine. Here, for the sake of completion, are truncated thoughts on the rest.

Blue is the Warmest Colour is arguable the most high profile of the recent string of LGBT cinema, which is funny considering it is a three-hour French drama. Somewhat ironic, too, given writer/director Abdellatif Kechiche doesn’t seem particularly interested in homosexuality. Or even women, for that matter. As I wrote in my review for Quickflix, such directorial traits are a shame since he has been gifted with two marvellous actors who give rather brilliant performances. Especially Adèle Exarchopoulos of whom I have been a fan since I first noticed her in Rose Bosch’s WWII drama The Round-Up (for which I have been trying to snag “first!” dibs on her). As far as I am aware nobody else seemed to notice her all that much, and I’m unaware of there being an American release, but I firmly remember her expressive face - those lips! those eyes! – and the power she lent her minimal number of scenes. It’s a power, and expressiveness that he utilises to full effect in Kechiche’s film.

At a press conference following the film’s press screening at the New York Film Festival, Kechiche was asked a very valid question by a fellow film critic, about where he sees his film in the realm of queer cinema to which he gave an elliptical response about having watched Ben-Hur. That certainly seems to typify his stance on homosexual issues given the film doesn’t explore them. Much has been made of the male gaze that Blue wades in, and such arguments are likely unavoidable for any film with such graphic sex scenes between women that have been directed by a man, but it is that very frankness that gives Kechiche’s film so much of its lifeforce. These characters – and by extension, the film – are open books in both the sex and the drama. Without the sex scenes there would be little context for the tumultuous end to the relationship between Adele and Emma. Adele is a young woman who has experienced her first love – at least in the way that many young people equate sex, particularly great, passionate, heated sex, with love – and is unwilling to let it go. B+

Further proving the lopsided nature of gay filmmaking, only three of the films featured here focus on women. Concussion and Blue is the Warmest Colour are clearly the superior of the two whereas Bruno Barreto’s Reaching for the Moon sadly slumps into a rather dreary box of well-intentioned, but ho-hum prestige. I saw this Elizabeth Bishop biopic all the way back in April at the Tribeca Film Festival and then it played recently at the Paris theatre on the south east corner of Central Park right next to the Plaza Hotel. I include those morsels of informations because they give a hint to the sort of film that Reaching for the Moon actually is. Stately, prim, upward. A film about lesbians that Manhattan women in furs can go and watch. If there was graphic sex in there then I certainly don’t remember. Don’t let that infer that the film shies away from its sexuality like it’s trapped in a closet. No, no, it is open and frank about the romance that Bishop shared with her Brazilian architect lover, Lota de Macedo Soares (portrayed here by Miranda Otto and Gloria Pires respectively), but whereas Blue is the Warmest Colour thrived off of the youthful exuberance of its cast and characters, the mood here is decidedly more reserved.

For some this will be a refreshing change of pace given the acceptance of homosexuality by audiences has in turn meant filmmakers now attempt games of sexual one-upmanship (just wait until Stranger by the Lake is released for Americans in January), but I found the story of these two lovers to be not especially involving and hardly fresh or new. “That’s the oldest story in the book”, some people say when presented with a story that wrings false because it’s so typical. That’s quite the case with Reaching for the Moon. We’ve seen this relationship play out many times before, albeit perhaps not between two women, but that doesn’t necessarily make it worth the time. The screenplay by Matthew Chapman and Julie Sayres certainly does it no favours, having its very intellectual characters recite the sort of dialogue that may sound hopelessly romantic on the page, but when spoken sounds kind of trite. The title alone reeks of trying to hard prestige fare. Elizabeth Bishop – and to a lesser extent Soares – is an interesting person and the locale of her story should have lent the film a lush, (yes) poetic beauty, but it lacks an energy to make its tale feel necessary to tell. C

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum is Geography Club, which I wrote about for The Film Experience when I saw it at Newfest in September. In retrospect I was likely too kind to Gary Entin’s film because it was gentle and sweet and wasn’t entirely terrible, unlike the other Newfest title I had seen that day (the dire Who’s Afraid of Vagina Woolf – genuinely one of the worst movies I have ever seen). It’s perhaps not at all surprising that the film has been released predominantly through streaming and VOD since that is its likeliest home for most viewers. A film like this doesn’t get people to spend $14 at the cinema anymore, but is actually a perfect fit for a Friday or Saturday night in with some friends and some drinks. That way audiences can laugh as obnoxiously at the terribly cheesy jokes and can coo at the screen for the two attractive leads (Cameron Deane Stewart and Justin Deeley) as madly and as loudly as they like whilst checking their Grindr profiles at the same time. Compared to the likes of the Eating Out or Another Gay Movie franchises, Geography Club is positively glowing. Thankfully it has a fun lively cast and I am not ashamed to admit I openly guffawed several times. B-

I guffawed openly several times at James Franco’s Sal, too. Unfortunately for the prolific multi-hyphenate Franco, it was for presumably reasons he didn’t quite wish for. This is actually a 2011 film, his first as director, that audiences have only just been able to witness for themselves this November. What’s most surprising is that it has gotten a release at all after this length of time. Although, I guess, boutique distributors need to strike while the iron is hot and if your definition of “hot” is based entirely on notoriety and blog inches then, sure, he’s pretty hot right now. What’s even more peculiar about the release of Sal over two years since its Venice premiere is that it reaches cinemas and VOD a mere two weeks before Aleksandr Sokurov’s Faust, which won the film festival. They make for curious bedfellows of long-delayed Venice titles from 2011. I wasn’t as keen on Faust as Darren Aronofsky’s jury clearly was, but it is by far the better title of the two and I don’t know why it took so long for that one to get a general release.

If it feels like I am doing everything in my effort to avoid discussing Sal then you’re right. I am. That’s because it is, quite frank(co)ly, terrible. I’ve had to go back through text messages that I sent to a friend expressing as much as a means of remembering even slight details. The film attempts to show the final day of Sal Mineo’s life. The gay actor was in the throws of a hopeful comeback ten years after his beefed up Who Killed Teddy Bear? fell into camp flop status. Perhaps replicating that film’s famous sleazy gym work-out sequence, Sal begins with Sal (Val Lauren who we saw in Franco’s meta-doc Interior. Leather Bar at Newfest) pumping iron for about five minutes. Then it moves on to a lunch meeting, which also goes on for about five minutes. Turns out Sal Mineo’s final day wasn’t particularly interesting.

I assume by filming the movie in either extreme close-up (the aforementioned lunch sequence never cuts from tight shots of the actors’ faces) and other odd angles, Franco was attempting to mask his film’s lack of period detail. He was probably right to do so since there are moments where he pulls away from these shots that feel remarkably modern. Still, that doesn’t make entire stretches of film in close-up any more stylistically interesting. Nor are cameras strapped to the boot of a car and looking inwards as Sal drives through West Hollywood visually arresting enough to warrant five minutes of it. Then there is, of course, the scene where Sal describes in very authentic detail the force and sound of a man’s ejaculation as witnessed by himself after cruising a pot-smoker on the streets of Hollywood. I genuinely laughed, but once again not for reasons that benefit the film in any way. Franco himself pops up late in the film as a stage director in charge of a play that Mineo was to star in and had invited a gaggle of celebrity friends (has anybody confirmed that Cher was planning on going like this film suggests?) Filmed like M Night Shyamalan’s much-maligned cameo in The Village, it’s a nauseatingly filmed sequence that goes on and on and on. It shines little light on Mineo’s life, certainly nothing that fans of his or of queer cinema history don’t already know while scene after scene plays out as if Franco has watched one too many Gus Van Sant movies and figured that’s how you make an Important Movie. Elephant and its ambiguous, repetitious moments of teen emptiness were a likely inspiration. Having seen some of his follow-ups, Franco has certainly improved, but, really, there was nowhere for him to go but up. D-

For as prolific as Franco has become in the queer landscape, none of his films have yet created quite as big of a fuss amongst gay viewers as Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club. Of course, if people were actually going out and watching all these other queer (“queer”) films then I doubt as much attention would be put on Vallée’s AIDS drama, but since they’re not and this one stars big Hollywood names, is staring down the barrel of multiple Academy Award nominations, and has the prestige element it has become a lightning rod for vitriol on both sides of the debate. In true agnostic fashion, I fall somewhere in the middle. I’m that person in the Big Brother house who can see both sides of the argument and makes for awfully boring TV.

The story of a heterosexual bigot contracting AIDS and proceeding to “save” the gays with his Dallas Buyer’s Club (an illegal adjacent organisation that sells memberships with drug supplies to HIV sufferers) while attempting to bring down the lucrative drug company’s golden goose, AZT, was also going to be a tough sell to gay filmgoers, especially those who prefer their films to be a bit more pro-active. It has been 20 years since Tom Hanks’ asexual role in Philadelphia after all.

Personally, I’d have preferred it to just be more distinctive. Bolder. Scarier. Uglier. Queerer. I can see why it’s not, though, which is probably more upsetting. I’d have been more willing to forgive some of its more curious politics if it had been more rigid in its structure or just go wildly out on limbs of style and fleets of fancy. I would have appreciated it to be less scattershot with its screenplay that flutters about getting distracted constantly. Visually unremarkable – certainly must less so than some of Vallée’s last film, Cafe de Flore - it’s filmed in such a way that sense of place is almost non-existent. That’s certainly disappointing since the gay underground of 1980s Texas is surely a unique footnote in gay (and AIDS, which we all know wasn’t gay-exclusive) history that I’d be keen to see examined by a director who wasn’t as interested in cutting from one person dying of AIDS to an Ocean’s 11 style international drug caper. That scene, for all of its power on one half, kind of flies in the face of acceptability with the other. The way one character dies suggests “dignity”, when in reality it would have been terribly messy, an adjective that the film actively skirts time and time again. Dallas Buyers Club is so intent on not being ugly that the true story of a man who died of AIDS doesn’t actually even end with him dying of AIDS. Certainly, if the character played by Matthew McConaughey didn’t keep reminding the audience that he and many others had AIDS I may have forgotten since almost everybody in this movie looks remarkably good for a group of people who don’t have the best access to medication. One young character who gets sent away for not having enough money eventually returns months (years?) later with the money and looks as healthy as the day. Just another curious storytelling choice in a film full of curious storytelling choices. I was affected by Dallas Buyers Club, of course. It feels almost impossible not to as a gay man who is thankful to not have had an entire circle of friends decimated by the disease, but as a piece of filmmaking the subject matter cannot carry it all the way. C+

In the way that Jean-Marc Vallée has told the story, there’s still room to move on the subject. I wouldn’t say no to a documentary on the topic to be perfectly honest, and one that takes us over this story and its wider network of topics from beginning to end. Two rather excellent gay-focused documentaries that have come out recently are Roger Ross Williams’ God Loves Uganda and Marta Cunningham’s Valentine Road, the latter of which only came out for the shortest amount of time possible to allow for Academy Award consideration. It did, however, screen on HBO and it’s a subject matter that captivated many.

In fact, both deal with the indoctrination of homophobic beliefs, which makes them ideally paired. Both are impressive in their arcs, but its Williams’ missionaries-in-Africa film that surprises the most. The frankness with which the director’s subjects open up about the intentions and their beliefs is as alarming as the charm they turn on to win over the faith-starved locals. It does, however, leave its finest moment to last as the white bread Americans speak to one lady as she sits on her threaded, dusty rug and she looks up with mortified confusion. I actually wish the film had investigated that angle further given so much of the runtime is taken up by showing the gullible Africans and their domino attitude to western religion. B I anticipate catching up with the thematically similar Call Me Kuchu.

Valentine Road is very similar. It has its story of horrific homophobia and the barbaric actions in can result in, but this one takes it from an angle much closer to home. The story is tragic and its told with minimal flare. It’s a fascinating story that will likely get tears out of many viewers, but at least they feel justified. It’s an important story, but its scope is kept almost entirely to the issue at hand. TV is probably is best home. B

If they’re not the most imaginatively assembled documentaries, then at least they’re never dull. And they’re certainly never embarrassing like another queer-themed doc, Bridegroom, which I saw at Tribeca and recently screened on OWN. If Valentine Road was ultimately best for TV then Bridegroom is ultimately best for the bin. The story its telling is emotional, sure, but oh dear god this is one of the most amateur films I can recall seeing. Cheap and positively dripping in saccharine nonsense. The music score is treacly, its subjects are nauseating in their sweetness and all speak of the issue at hand like they speaking to children. Furthermore, its central figure is just about the most annoying person you’ll find fronting a documentary. Naturally, he kept video of seemingly everything he ever said and did and its assembled like a high school video presentation. I was laughing when I was meant to be weeping. If I had given money to this production on Kickstarter I would demand my money back. This isn’t a professional production. It’s amateur hour at the LGBT community centre. Dire of the highest order. F

And because I want to end on a positive, can we discuss two foreign titles that impressed me very much? Out in the Dark is an Israeli film that tells an almost identical story to recent NYFF title Omar, which screened at the New York Film Festival. Out in the Dark follows a “Romeo and Juliet” structure of two people from opposing factions – this time Israel and Palestine – whose relationship takes a dramatic turn for the worst. Israel has actually proven to be a remarkably consistent source of quality modern LGBT cinema, and while I enjoyed this one quite a bit it was the ending that struck me as the most impressive. Ambiguous, but with the limited number of possibilities for these two lovers suggests the worst. B

Perhaps the best of the lot, however, is Malgorzata Szumowska’s In the Name. A rather damning indictment of the not only the lengths “the church” will go to cover up its paedophile members, but also the damning effects that the church organisation’s homophobia can have on its subjects. I liked the way Szumowksa, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Michal Englert, constantly playing with expectations by allowing the focus to frequently shift between the various characters that populate the life of Andrzej Chyra’s priest character.

Chyra, it must be said, is excellent in the lead role. It’s easy to cite his breakdown sequence towards the film’s end as the stand out, and I guess it is, the entire performance is a wonder of subtlety. When paired with another Polish film from this year about tragic gay romance, Floating Skyscrapers, the two make for a fascinating look at the country. Films that may have looked rote and cliched at the start of the year now, in hindsight, look vital and act as powerful statements about the damning and long-lasting effects of society’s homophobia in countries like this. In the Name Of is yet another example of excellent gay cinema that, while perhaps dealing with subject matter that is bleak and that has probably been seen before, still feels necessary. I can only hope that others follow suit and give it, and others, the time of day. B+