Snapshot thoughts

Dream Boy

I liked it more than I thought I might. I am a dedicated fan of the novelist, Jim Grimsley, but I loathed one of the director’s previous films, Eban and Charley, an apologia for child sexual abuse (not because the character in that film is a teenager, but because he’s clearly mentally unready to make sexual decisions with a teacher). But I admired the way this film was unpolished and simple, awkward even. The obvious flaws of the film are visible—the constant, overbearing score, the obviousness of the costumes (the boy is clearly wearing Urban Outfitters plaid longsleeves)—but it felt to me welcoming, a film made by an intentional amateur, about characters who don’t “fit in” in the same way his film wouldn’t with mainstream filmmaking. The boys are attractive, but not models. The film is independent, but not in the hip way. It may be clumsy, but it’s genuine: You have sympathy for it as you have sympathy for its characters. I admired the way the film showed uneducated, poor, marginalized (and decent) Southerners without shying away from their awkwardness, while at the same time not casting judgment on them for their situation. Too often the hip cinephile middle-class will extend their sensitivity overseas while viewing the poor in their own country as objects of ridicule. The homosexual aspect of the film rings true; it reminded me of my own Canadian prairie childhood, where hushed homosexuality often found itself being expressed during periods of emotional turmoil and in households with strange relationships between parents and children. As for the magic realist finale, I think it was handled more poetically in the novel—the director is too much of a literalist realist to have much talent for poetic license—but it still fit in with the ramshackle setting of the film; churchgoing; uneducated; ghost stories.

Love Object

This is such a devious little thriller I’m amazed it’s not a cult favorite. Its ingenious plot concerns a bizarre love story between a man and his sex doll, until things go awry—at one point the film seems to be going through Hollywood finale clichés, but it has a cynical little twist at the end that makes it just right. I’m surprised I didn’t take offence to the objectification of the man’s female coworker, or the way she’s treated in the end, but I think the tone of comic nastiness strikes just the right balance. Desmond Harrington is beautiful, and the German Expressionist score adds a zany, creepy quality to the picture.

Nomi Song

Klaus Nomi comes off like a character in a Fassbinder movie—beneath his robotic David Bowie-cum-Gary Numan appearance, he’s a tiny, kind, weird little man with a penchant for baking and singing in operatic falsetto. He’s also a tragic figure in hindsight. He was a man out of time; although he was lucky enough to come in the wake of Bowie, and was able to incorporate krautrock and electro futurism into his pop albums, he wasn’t able to really pursue true opera. That’s not exactly a failing, but you wonder if his electro-diva niche would have otherwise been his first choice. He died of AIDS, which seems like an ending too cruel for someone who comes off like a shy, nice emigree who was given happiness by singing and sharing homecooked pies with his friends. But lucky for us his legacy lives on. In my mind he makes a fine pair with Sylvester in operating on the margins of pop, and in many ways anticipating and allowing the more extreme musicians of the past 25 years: Boy George, Antony Hegarty, Baby Dee, etc.

Postcards

Apparently Mark Rappaport had been bored one day and set about Googling his own name, and when he did he came across a forum posting about his films, with various commentators speculating as to what he’s doing now. He replied that he had moved to Paris and is no longer making films, with the suggestion it was final. It’s an understandable decision. He had already been making independent, personal films for over thirty years and that isn’t always easy. He writes about film on a semi-regular basis for Criterion and Rouge, among other places (which, when taken into consideration with his later films that add commentary to Hollywood, could be sustaining as an artistic outlet in and of itself). And while his films were respected in some quarters—and probably considered too amateurish in others—they were generally little-seen. My impression is that with the exception of his GLBT-themed video essays (Rock Hudson’s  Home Movies, The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender, and From the Journals of Jean Seberg) his work remains out of print and may stay that way, as he sometimes took poetic license with intellectual property (borrowing songs without the rights, etc).

That makes it all the more sadder to come across one of his films, in this case Postcards. It’s a short video narrative (under thirty minutes) conceptually about a couple writing long-distance postcards to one another. Rappaport’s tone is flat and deadpan—the camera is mostly static, the props stylized and dated, the foreground a set with actors, the background a green-screen of giant, exotic postcards. But the actual feel of the film belies the ostensible ironic approach. Rappaport isn’t making jokes at the expense of this couple—he’s not laughing at how they write to each other every few days to exchange thoughts and questions. In his bizarre setting and stylization, which is something like the nostalgia and sadness of Edward Hopper and the color and melodrama of Douglas Sirk, he looks at the situation in a way that forces us to pay attention without getting lost in dramatic theater. And yet the points he’s making are visible on the surface—we see how they write to one another, missing each other, lusting for each other, listening to records and eating alone in diners and sitting at bars crafted with Rappaport’s chintzy set design. And then we hear the word here or there that sparks a reaction in the other, a dissatisfaction with the situation, a hostility brought about by their separation. We listen to their words of dedication as they begin to meet new people, and see how the fantasy and ideal that exists in the letters, and in their minds, is hopelessly at odds with their behavior and the reality of life.

Good Hair

Chris Rock takes an underexamined part of black society and uses it as a subject for one of his latest forays into film. His interactions with other members of the black community relay a camaraderie that’s a pleasure to watch, although his “I’m a reporter” stance—particularly in a trip to India—often goes for the simple joke at the expense of the filmed participant, as was the case with Bill Maher’s Religulous. The social aspect of the subject, the ramifications of black hair—on practicality, on how some black men prefer white women for their looseness of hair, the excessive price, the idea of “wearing oppression” on your head and denying your identity—are well-suited to Rock’s observational humor, though the film is far less extreme than his best stand-up work. It’s a genial, mostly good-natured documentary that suggests topics without fully analyzing them. Al Sharpton’s relative thoughtfulness is often set aside in favor of his sense of humor, which is considerable.

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