Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Film Review: STUD LIFE by Campbell X

“Stud Life” was one of three opening films (May 3 at Cambridge’s Brattle Theater) for the 2013 Boston LGBT Film Festival.

In one of her podcasts, the handsome butch JJ places two dildos in front of the camera. One is playfully multi-colored, nearly disguising the fact that it is an artificial cock, and the other is black with an angry red head and strong veins on the shaft. While JJ can’t get her head around the one with a spectrum of crayon colors, she also cannot understand why black dildos seem to only come in size gigantic. “Short and wide” would work better.

The ground-breaking feature “Stud Life” by the UK filmmaker Campbell X takes place in a contemporary East London scene where fine-looking young queers are trying to sort out the place of love and sex in their lives. The film uses laugh-out-loud wit and stark emotional honesty to take a generous view of the complications of romantic commitment. The characters bring a burst of eye candy and empathy to the story. This is a film that gallops along, up and down the emotional spectrum, drawing you into the lives of wildly attractive, good-hearted friends.

I followed the making of this film on Facebook where the filmmaker Campbell X (photo at left), whom I have met several times in London and many times on FB, documented the demanding process of making an independent film by and about young queers. In an email interview, Campbell X told me, "The mainstreaming of queer movies means that we generally see images of lesbians who are feminine and white. Stud Life puts a dark-skinned masculine woman who is sexy and desirable at the centre of the frame – in a way in which people of all genders and sexualities can relate to her story."

JJ’s best friend and partner in her photography business is a white gay guy named Seb. When JJ meets the lovely Elle in a club and they get together, jealousy between Seb and Elle rules. Seb thinks Elle just isn’t right for JJ, but JJ questions his qualifications to judge considering that Seb is always trolling the internet for a spot of rough – that is, for anonymous sexual encounters with hyper-masculine types. Seb rejects the attentions of a doting long-haired drug-dealing college student.

The first time we see them in bed together, Elle is naked, but JJ is wearing boxers and a T-shirt. . JJ is a stone butch, which means that she does not like to be touched. She is unable to open herself up and let herself go enough to let another woman make love to her. Beautiful Elle asks her, “So I can never fuck you? Can I touch you here?” She lays her hand on JJ’s chest, which earlier JJ bound with an Ace bandage, squashing her breasts flat. “But I like licking labia,” the sensuous femme insists with a smile. “Can’t blame me for trying.” Contrary to the visual expectation, the femme takes a lot more sexual initiative than her butch.

Elle tempts JJ into increasingly kinky scenes, taking JJ’s hand and slapping her own face with it. JJ is taken aback, discombobulated, and we realize that in many ways she is an innocent. Her fierceness is mitigated by a kind of naiveté. Another time Elle creates a powerful scene of restraint that has the unexpected appeal of sexual power for JJ, and pushes Elle into tearful gratification.

Spoiler Alert! -- As handsome and full of swagger as JJ is, she is unprepared emotionally to learn that Elle makes her living as a professional Dominatrix. JJ tries to keep up with the variety and intensity of Elle’s desires, but she is unable to handle the news of her lover’s profession and leaves her – for awhile.

Later, in her podcast, JJ wonders why all women seem to want cock: “Either they want it in them or they want it on them.” She recognizes that, “It takes all kinds of sex to make a lesbian nation.” Campbell X explained her approach to Stud Life to me this way: “It would be so tempting to make a film that was mono-sexual – boys with boys, girls with girls – or mono-cultural. But my stories reflect London life, where it is possible for a white gay man to be bff with a stud. Where white LBGT people chat patois fluently though they have never stepped foot in Jamaica. Its mixed up and messy, but fun and sexy.”

So as we follow JJ’s work photographing queer weddings, we meet that rainbow of possibilities. A tall black cross-dressing bride, glamorously outfitted, towers over her new adoring older white husband. Her family refused to attend and he hasn’t heard from his grown children lately.

A lesbian couple who have been together for 25 years bring their lovers to their marriage ceremony. The femme kisses her girlfriend and the butch embraces her lover, a balding man who insists, “I’ve only been involved for about three months. I’m just along for the ride.” He turns out to be a transman. Seb is blown away. “Twenty five years,” he says, “It’s a different generation, innit? We just throw things out and get a new one.”

Not everything is rainbows and hormones. Real life, in the form of violent homophobic lads prowling the neighborhood, intervenes. The demands of earning an income need to come before romantic compromise. The filmmaker does not avoid facing the complexities of sex, the challenges of knowing our own needs and desires, or the dangers faced by butches on the street. Rather, she draws us into a reality that, as distant from our own lives as it might be, has the irresistible appeal of bold honesty and human truth. “Stud Life” is just what a film should be: funny, moving, full of wisdom, and gorgeous to watch.

The 29th annual Boston LGBT Film Festival will continue screening over 120 films at six venues in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge until May 12.

Film Review: The Company You Keep

I admit I was concerned about how Robert Redford would present the politics of The Weathermen and the life of the lefties who went underground in the 70s in his film The Company You Keep. But with the impressive cast he had assembled, I figured that I’d go for the acting.

Redford directs this flawed film – which he has built to focus excessively on his own character, Jim Grant. In fact, Redford hogs this film and if he could act that might be okay. But in fact he is wooden and stilted and he fails to stir sympathy, let alone empathy. He uses the cast’s many big stars as props for himself, when he is by far the least talented actor among them. Each new star in their cameo has a more or less interesting but very temporary part to play.

Beyond a superficial and clichéd approach to Weatherman politics, there are three glaring problems. First, Redford fails to connect emotionally or intellectually with anyone. Second, his physical presence is excruciatingly awkward and the scenes of him jogging all stiff of body and limp of arm made me cringe. And third, the various story lines are never pursued, leaving copious holes in the narrative.

A radical collective robbed a bank. A guard was killed and one collective member did time for that, while others went underground for decades, not all of them guilty. All, except the persistently radical Julie Christie, built bourgeois home lives and careers. As Mimi Lurie, Christie plays the only character who has maintained a grain of the rebel. 

Susan Sarandon opens the film. Her character’s decision to turn herself in is crucial to the story but once arrested we see her just one more time, when she decides she is only willing to talk to the reporter Ben Shepard, played by Shia LaBeouf in the manner of a young, junior Robert Redford – say of Watergate ilk. This character is Redford’s co-star, and the camera is much kinder to LaBeouf. When she is pouring out her story to this kid (we never know why she picked him), the police, apparently out of jealousy that she is talking to him not them (although they are listening in and watching through the two-way mirror) stop the interview and we never see her again.

Same with Nick Nolte and Stanley Tucci and Richard Jenkins and Sam Elliott: they turn up long enough to interact with Redford a bit and to reinforce Redford’s incapacity to connect emotionally with anyone. Then they evaporate from the film. As the head FBI agent, Terrence Howard has a continuing but uninteresting role.

Here’re some bothersome details, many pointed out to me by my companion at the film. Everyone has perfect cell and internet connectivity, even way out in the woods. Laptops load instantly. The ages of the characters don’t match the story line. Redford has a big Reebok symbol on his jacket. Product placement in a film about the Weathermen?!

In the end, almost every single important narrative line is left unresolved. I can’t point to them without giving away too much, but this lack of clarity makes it impossible to understand anyone’s motivation – starting with Susan Sarandon turning herself in. “The kids were old enough,” really doesn’t cut it. Children, in fact, are supposedly oh so important to these characters, but there isn’t a spark of affection in the bunch. Forming a nuclear family is held up as a sign of having grown up – that is to say, of having given up (immature) activism.

Redford couldn’t decide whether he was making an action film, a political film, or a vanity film. In the end, except for Redford’s character we don’t get to know anyone well enough to care about them – and he is gracelessly unlovable.

Here's a trailer:

 

Film Review: Anna Karenina

I long to see a flick that I will love, but Anna Karenina wasn’t it. The film was gorgeous, but thin. Despite having Tolstoy’s remarkable novel to work with, Tom Stoppard’s condensed screenplay and Joe Wright’s emphasis on place and space at the expense of character development didn’t work. Some reviewers objected to the film’s voluptuous semi-magical staging, but I actually thought that aspect of the movie was wonderful. The blurring of the boundary between stage and screen surged seamlessly.  I even enjoyed the grace of the made-up fantastical dancing at the ball.

The biggest problems were the wooden, unsympathetic characters – one and all. And in particular, Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina. Knightley is too much of a lightweight, too superficial in her performances, too skin deep, to be cast in the role of Anna. We need Liz Taylor. Penelope Cruz. Or Tatiana Samoilova (see photo), who starred in the 1967 Russian version. We need someone in whom the awakening of sexual desire is so ardent that it forces a 19th century woman of her class to risk everything for lust. Instead we have an actress whose most overused skill is the welling of the eyes and whose additional facial expressions range from a twisted upper lip to, ah, I’ll get back to you on that.

Her husband, played by Jude Law with all the pompous morality due Karenin, has a rather cramped arc of emotion in comparison with Trotsky’s Karenin, and her lover Vronksy, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a pretty boy, speaks very little and says next to nothing when he does. No one seethes. No one sizzles.

I am a 19th century lit girl and have read this novel many times. It clutches your crotch and clutches your heart and drags you up and down a bumpy emotional terrain. This film version has a most intricate, exquisite terrain, indeed, but little substantial or convincing emotion. The characters are like stick figures stuck onto an otherworldly canvas, ruining its potential and taking an awful long time – more than two dragging hours – to do so.

Very disappointing.

Here’s the trailer:
 

Film Review: Lincoln

And the most boring film of the century? Lincoln! No, not of the century, as that’s much too short. Let’s just say, the most boring film since the day I was born. Let’s add some adjectives: would “excruciatingly ponderous” be too much of an understatement?

Frankly, I didn’t know there were so many look-alike white men in the world of cinema. All droning on and on in an historical drama that was bereft of drama and, I suspect, lacking in a bit of historical accuracy as well.

Black people were “allowed” to sandwich this dreary film – as if they had played just the smallest bit part in achieving the 13th amendment. At the start, two African-American soldiers chat with Lincoln, establishing Lincoln as a sweetie; at the end, his black valet stares at his back as Lincoln sets out for an evening of getting killed. In between it is white men screaming at each other, hating on each other, manipulating each other in the legislature. I could have saved myself a few bob by staying home and turning on C-Span (live coverage of the Congress).

The music was dirge-like from start to finish, making the tedious experience feel even more sodden. Somehow it seemed like Lincoln was playing Daniel Day Lewis, not the other way around. In any case, Daniel Day Lewis appeared to be sporting a hump prosthesis. The press has already lauded him for being able to speak in Lincoln’s high squeaky voice: I was sorry he kept it up so well as the grating noise interrupted my nap. The only woman in the film who featured for more than a second or two was Lincoln’s wife. The role was given to Sally Field for her experience in crying for the camera and in looking bummed out.

What with all the big guns involved, you’d think we’d get at least a bit of entertainment instead of these ugly men fighting over the end of the civil war vs. the end of slavery. Steven Spielberg directed, but perhaps he was on Quaaludes or something; Tony Kushner based his monotonous screenplay on a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin; and the 5-Oscar winning composer John Williams honed “dreary” to perfection.

And now to defend myself. I had gone to the movie house with the intention of seeing Anna Karenina but the heat wasn’t working in that viewing room and Lincoln was starting in another room right at the same time. I saw it by accident – the kind of accident there isn’t insurance for. I am 65 years old and Spielberg wasted about four hours (counting travel) of my ever-shortening life. I’m not angry: I’m furious.

Film Review: Searching for Sugarman

Searching for Sugarman

This is a wonderful documentary with two giant holes in it.

First a synopsis: A mysterious superstar composer/singer named Rodriquez sells many hundreds of thousands of albums over 25 years in South Africa. His lyrics are insightful social observation and his melodies are gorgeous. Varied gory rumors about his suicide on stage at his last concert explain the fact that there are no new albums. A journalist and a record seller team up to try to find the truth about his death, only to discover him living in Detroit, a manual laborer, community activist, and father of three daughters. They bring him to South Africa for sell-out concerts.

Here are the two holes:

1) While Rodriquez is described as bigger than Elvis and much bigger than the Rolling Stones in South Africa, not once is it mentioned that they mean white South Africa. None of the South African talking heads in the film nor any of the tens of thousands of adoring fans – many of them young people of high school and college age – at the 1990s South African concerts resurrecting Rodriquez appear to be Black South African. (Time check: Mandela was released from prison in 1990.) Rodriquez was at his most popular during apartheid, of course, so there may be many explanations as to why he was unknown in the Black communities, but still, I found it bizarre this has gone unremarked in the film and in reviews.

Aside: I spoke to a South African friend who said, “But South Africa was a white country then.” She was from a privileged but progressive white South African family. But I couldn’t accept that. Perhaps that’s how she saw it from her perspective and experience in the bubble of power in belly of the beast. But even in high school in the early 60s in Pittsburgh, I had seen Miriam Makeba perform and I knew the dancing singing magic of mass anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa. I never in my life, from here, pictured South Africa as a “white country.” But that seems to be the image in the heads of the filmmakers when they reference the country.

2) Rodriquez is strangely absent from the film. He is apparently a “difficult interview,” but we don’t even get to hear him sing more than a few notes now (although he is touring, and this Fall sold out his London and Boston shows). The stupendous soundtrack is of his famous early albums. His daughters describe him as involved in justice struggles, even of running for office, but we don’t get to hear him speak of his concerns. We see him walking in the snow a lot and living in a hovel. His daughters speak about him in remarkable terms and his work buddies talk about their disbelief in the secret music life of this laborer who does the most unskilled of jobs. But we don’t get to know him today in his own words and voice.

As wonderful and weird a story this is, I’m left dissatisfied.

Here's the trailer:

 

And for a special treat, here's Miriam Makeba singing Pata Pata (1967):
 

Film Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild

I know I’m coming late to “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” so I’ll be brief. This film is quite special, so different from the usual fare. It does what any good story should do: it creates its own world and, despite whatever differences that world has from that of the viewers, it immerses you in it so deeply that the world of “The Bathtub” – the southern delta bayou community where it all takes place – seems only right and proper. The poverty, the alcoholism and the dirt are balanced by the tenderness of a profoundly diverse community and their ability to survive off the environment in the face of their great distance from the grid.

The interplay between Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), the 6-year-old at the heart of the film, and the light across the water that she believes is her late mother communicating with her makes for one of the most moving of “reunions” – imagination melded into actual emotion.

While there are fantastical elements to “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” even I, the most literal of viewers, felt that it all worked – with one exception. The final confrontation between Hushpuppy and her demons was, in fact, too literally done. Overall, I was moved by this pungent and kaleidoscopic film. Sometimes, to tears.

When I got home, wanting to understand some of what is behind this remarkable movie, I went to my favorite film commentator, Danny Miller, who writes for MSN.com. I found two relevant interviews you might be interested in.

• Here’s Danny Miller’s interview with the director, Benh Zeitlin.

• Here’s Danny Miller’s interview with the baker Dwight Henry who played “Wink, the harsh-but-loving father to Hushpuppy.”

Film Review: Hope Springs

While their marriage has made it to a 31st anniversary, Kay (Meryl Streep being frumpy) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones being Neanderthal) have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for some years. We see the rut that has become their lives, as Kay decides she needs nooky back in her life. She dolls herself up in makeup and negligee, but Arnold rejects her with a grumpy grunt or two. Kay breaks out of her disconcertingly passive wifey pattern and signs them up for an intensive therapeutic week in Maine with Dr Bernard Feld (Steve Carell in the blandest role he probably hopes he will ever have to play) in the town of Hope Springs.

Arnold resists, resists, resists. Kay suffers, suffers, suffers. There’s a bit of hope, but no, it ain’t gonna happen. But wait, big break-through (we’re talking on the level of actually sleeping in the same bed together), but no, it’s still not gonna happen. In the end, of course, everyone lives happily ever after.

One wonders how Kay so totally missed the 60s. She is an utterly stereotypical 50s housewife who puts up with her moody husband’s rudeness with smile after smile. Her patient subservience to his insufferable gruffness is boring. They can’t talk about sex and seem never to have had much. They can’t say sexual words, like they’ve just been released from a 1958 blush bubble. Apparently, even the sex therapist hasn’t heard about the discovery of the clit. (“Have you had an orgasm, vaginal or otherwise?” he asks Kay.) It is simply hard to believe that this is all taking place in the 21st century.

There are a couple of near-sex scenes that end in tears, but neither my companion nor I could figure out what actually goes wrong. The week away is about grappling with their lack of sex in a frank way, but we never find out how their attempts at grappling go: does he cum? does he lose his erection? Why does he keep storming away from their embrace? They are fully clothed at all times, including when he seems to mount her in the fancy hotel room, before he pulls away. Even when she masturbates (he claims not to masturbate!), she seems to do it by tentatively touching her breasts. And when she buys bananas to practice giving a blow job as described in a sex book their therapist suggests, she forgets what she’s doing and eats the fruit.

The question of maintaining passion in long-term relationships is of interest to everyone in long-term relationships. The issue of post-50 passion is on the minds of everyone over 50. But this movie is so vanilla, so repressed, and so devoid of real motivation and excitement, that one is resigned to Arnold suddenly becoming Mr. Touchy-Feely while Kay does what Kay does: smiles gratefully.

Here's the trailer

 

FILM REVIEW: Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling

So I’ve got two pieces of good news. First, my Facebook comrade JJ recommended this film and it truly is dynamite. And second, I saw it on the free film website SnagFilms he sent me to, where there is a wealth of amazing cinema available online, with only short commercial interruptions.

“Lipstick & Dynamite” is the story of the wrestling girls of the 40s and 50s – a story of the brutal obstacles to working class women trying to do sport, of independent women scrapping to get beyond the control of exploitative dickheads, of tough broads paying the price day after day of trying to make it on their own. They were wrestlers who wanted to perfect their skills, while being forced by promoters to throw bouts or win them – usually depending on whether or not they would put out sexually to get ahead.

Their wrestling style was raw and intense and frankly amazing, especially as they had to work despite injuries and sickness. In contrast to their chosen life as bad-asses, they were required to dress up, make up, and enter the rink in heels and lipstick. When outside in the world, if they wanted to stay in the game, they had to be glamorous and well-groomed at all times.

The women were used as a side-show, a freak show, a little sauce on the main events, even when it was obvious that they were the top draw. The promoters paid them a pittance compared to the male wrestlers and kept 50% of that pittance. It was not that the women weren’t fully aware of being sexually, financially and professionally exploited, it was that they lacked alternative ways to make a living as athletes. Gladys “Killem” Gillem, who couldn’t take the male bosses anymore, switched to wrestling lions, bears, and alligators.

The vintage footage combined with the reminiscences of these wrestling stars at a reunion all these decades later makes for riveting if maddening cinema. I grew up watching wrestling every week with my family, eating hotdogs at the card table in the living room. In fact, here is a tribute I wrote in 2008 when Killer Kowalski died.

In "Lipstick & Dynamite” the rivalries remain even as the girls are in their 80s, some of them poor and alone, others having found subsequent careers, and the selfish, ambitious Fabulous Moolah now the sole remaining bridge from the old days to the shiny mockery that today’s wrestling has become.

Film Review: Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same finally made it to Boston via the LGBT Film Festival and it is really the first queer comedy flick I’ve laughed aloud to in years. Apparently working with, shall we say, limited resources, writer/director Madeleine Olnek creates a race of bald-headed, over-emotional aliens who are sent to Earth to expend the excess emotions that are threatening their planet with overheating.

Stiff with candor, the alien Zoinx (Susan Ziegler) meets up with Jane (Lisa Haas), a shy, lonely stationary store clerk and the unlikely pair fall in love. In her own way, Jane too is able to be open with Zoinx, as they rub the hell out of each other’s noses in an alien sign of affection.

They do not realize that they are being stalked by two government agents, but in the end the aliens are called back to their planet and the lovers are in a quandary. They don’t want a bi-planet relationship now that they have finally found each other.

The 76 minute film is ripe with queer subtexts and in-jokes, but is I’m sure accessible to fun-lovers of any persuasion.

Madeleine Olnek ,who has only previously been involved in a few shorts, does a wonderful job of creating a shimmery spaceship and of utilizing the charms of New York City to frame her story. The acting is seamless, but Lisa Haas’ work is particularly endearing and nuanced. She seems to have few acting credits, but her portrayal of Jane is tone perfect. So too did Dennis Davis give a warm and winning performance as the frustrated senior agent.

Lately I just don’t want to see films full of violence and exploitation – there is just too much of it in real life. While I’m anything but a sci-fi fan, this was the perfect Saturday night bauble and I hope it gets greater exposure. It’s nice to know that lesbian culture is intergalactic.

Trailer: 

 

Bad Film Warning: Damsels in Distress

This movie has no plot, no action, no character development, no content, and absolutely no justification to exist. There's no eye candy or food for thought, no rhyme and certainly no reason.

I could just bemoan the loss of 2 precious hours of the twilight of my life, if I wasn't so infuriated by all the fine films by women, people of color, working class directors, and radicals that don't get funded and don't get distributed. The writer/director Whit Stillman, a pale male with a reputed film pedigree, must have downed a large steaming cup of bland while doing this one.

I went to see it with two friends at the noon showing for seniors (just $4, thank gawd) and afterwards we understood why we were the only patrons in the house.