Archive | March, 2009

With Trailer, Ang Lee’s ‘Woodstock’ Takes Me By Surprise

31 Mar

You gotta give this to Ang Lee: He never does exactly what you expect him to do. More than many other Hollywood heavies with background in international cinema, Lee has insisted on and succeeded in building a career that lets him go back and forth between doing a broad array of American movies and still giving valuable contributions to the Asian cinema that  made his name in the first place. From the light touch of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman and the crafty elegance of Sense and Sensibility; over the suburban anxiety of The Ice Storm and the visual and narrative richness of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the understated humanism of Brokeback Mountain, Lee has proven himself an eminently capable and brave film-maker in pretty much every genre. The trailer for his upcoming film, Taking Woodstock, again looks nothing like anything he’s done before.

When there still is some doubt in my mind about it, it could quite probably be attributed to impossibly high expectations. I’ve secretly yearned for a Woodstock epic every since I first saw Mike Wadleigh’s superb 1970 documentary Woodstock five years ago, and to put that into perspective for you, that’s even longer than I’ve yearned for Emile Hirsch, who’s also in on the project. These two factors, combined with my great admiration for Lee (on a blog somewhere, someone said that if Ang Lee directed a sandwich he’d watch it. I second that), add up a probably inevitable sense of (slight) disappointment in the trailer that was released last week.

I don’t know if such a movie could ever be made, or even written, but Talking Woodstock doesn’t particularly look like an epic take on the cultural and social implication of the music festival and the movement of which it was a manifestation. Rather, it seems Lee has attempted to do a comedy about the hippie movement. It’s not that I have anything against comedies, or hippies for that matter, but at some moments in the trailer it feels like cliches are just around the corner.  Specifically, it will be absolutely crucial to the tone of the film that the hippie characters have a clear purpose, and that they are not included simply to symbolize free spirits and hostorical context. Ang Lee is not known to milk his audience for cheap laughs, but it certainly is a pitfall he’ll have to avoid, because the audience will come to the flim with a fixed impression of how hippies were.

When I keep returning to the fact that this actually looks like a fairly light-hearted comedy it’s not because that itself has to be a bad thing (Almost Famous, not exactly a gloom-pusher, ended up as one of the best recent movies about the seventies, as did Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused). Rather, it’s because there seems to be a certain disconnect between how the project was initially presented and how it’s sold through the trailer. Sure, the format demands a tight setup of the story, but I’m little surprised that the focus of the trailer is so firmly on the comedic elements, when it has been said that the movie would also include a gay storyline and take the broader cultural impact into focus.

On a more shallow note (was there ever another one?) I’m a little disturbed by the fact that Emile Hirsch, one of the main reasons I want to watch it, seems to have gotten one of the fairly predictable (judging by the trailer) hippie roles. And, despite surviving the horrendous hairdo in Milk looking better than ever, it turns out not even he becomes everything, after all. As regular readers would know, I’m no fan of facial hair, and that aversion runs deep enough to even hit Emile. I know, people actually looked like that back then, but then again, wouldn’t the contrarian thing to do be to make him a smooth prettyboy? Oh, it’s biographical, blah blah. But still?

Having gotten all my critical points out in the open, this seems like the right time to emphasize that if there is one director who could still pull this off, it’s Ang Lee. All his movies are more multilayered than they seem at first, and I’m  confident Taking Woodstock will be, too. My guess still is that we’ll all love it (need it, even) after a long summer of one-dimensional blockbusters. It’s what I think in August (or whenever it opens in Norway) that counts.

Disney, Dancing Are Things Of The Past As Zac Efron Ditches ‘Footloose’

24 Mar

I of course couldn’t care less about the suddenly unclear future of Paramount’s scheduled Footloose remake, but I do care about the fact that Zac Efron will no longer headline it. Some harsh voices have said that this should be considered the final blow to a project that didn’t sound all that promising to begin with, but for Efron it’s just another career move. A Footloose-less resume will not make or break him as he tries to enter the Hollywood A team as something more than a formerly choreographed cutie.

Some of the reports are saying that Efron wanted out of Footloose because he was afraid of getting typecast as a musical actor, if he was to follow up his lead role in no less than three High School Musical movies, and a prominent supporting role in (the magnificent) 2007 Hairspray remake with yet another round of singing and dancing. But judging from other Zac news over the last couple of weeks, the decision could also be considered part of a broader effort to reintroduce him to both the business and the audience. As I touched upon briefly when writing about Jonathan Taylor Thomas’s gay turn in a post late last year, this is pretty much a natural impulse for actors who have come to fame at a young age. What sets Zac apart from others in basically the same position then, like JTT and 7th Heaven‘s Jessica Biel, is that Efron’s effort has not yet been spelled out publicly.

Those looking for signs that he’s interested in projecting an image at least partially independent from the clean-cut Disney Dude responsibilities of HSM and Disney Channel guest appearances of yesteryear, need look no further than to the photo series accompanying an interview he did with none other than in-house favorite director Gus van Sant for the most recent issue of Interview Magazine. Disappointingly, the excerpt provided on the magazine’s homepage doesn’t reveal anything interesting, other perhaps than van Sant’s slight disinterest in his subject (either that, or he’s simply so polite he makes it look he doesn’t know anything about Zac’s current career, in order to give him a chance to tell it all himself). That said, if I could find it, I would of course have camped outside my local news agent’s just to get my hands on a copy.

But the real story here is the pictures. Those who have never seen what I (and millions more) see in the guy probably won’t become Efronites overnight just because he was photographed with mud on his face, since he retains a certain softness no matter how hard he tries to communicate masculine hunkiness. But I sincerely doubt that was ever the point anyway. I suspect that even more important than proving to gay and straight audiences that Zac could easily pass as an incredibly beautiful mine-worker or grave-digger or anything else that involves getting his pretty face dirty in his future all-grown-up movie career, he wants people to pay attention to what he has his hands around in that last picture. It’s a woman, you see, and even though she’s naked, Zac seems to be having a reasonably good time. Hence, he’s neither gay nor a prude. Post-Disney mission accomplished?

I know, I’m probably overstating things a little here, but I’m convinced that the photo shoot and Footloose move are meant to signal that Zac is now ready to show another side of himself. Of course, if it looks anythings like these Dirty Half-Dozen, I’ll be closer to cooing than complaining.

To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)

20 Mar

‘We learned more from a three-minute record, baby/than we ever learned in school’ (Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender)

With the end of the 2000′s fast approaching, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous in my opinion is still the best feel good movie of the decade. Every time I re-watch it however (I guess about once a year on average), I’m temporarily struck by a sense of guilt (then again, according to mentor and rock scribe Lester Bangs, eminently played by chameleon Phillip Seymour Hoffman, that’s probably a good thing, considering how much great rock music that feeling has fostered). I feel guilty, and Lester Bangs encourages me to embrace that guilt. But why, exactly, am I feeling guilty? Oh, it’s the same old fear of wasting my time on lesser activities. Why am I watching a movie in which Lester Bangs lectures me on the primacy of rock, when I could instead have listened to some music, trying to become as fat, ugly, knowledgeable and ruthlessly self-confident as he is? It’s an interesting paradox that Crowe via Bangs uses a movie to hammer home the point that all things considered, music is probably a superior art form anyway. It’s somewhat weird and I don’t know if it’s my inner wannabe rock scribe talking or if it’s simply because I so admire the sheer force of the argument, but for a moment I’m not sure if I’m supposed to like movies at all. Movies are not music, after all. But then, finally, I get it: I love movies (too), because Almost Famous always  makes me remember just how much I love music.

No doubt Almost Famous, about a young rock enthusiast who miraculously lands a writing gig for Rolling Stone Magazine that takes him on the road and up in the sky with the egomaniacs of fictitious 70′s rockers Stillwater, is Cameron Crowe’s masterpiece.  Sure, Say Anything was quite decent, Singles definitely had its moments, Jonathan Lipnicki saved Jerry Maguire from Cuba Gooding jr., and Vanilla Sky was marginally better than its admittedly lousy reputation (Elizabethtown, on the other hand, is every bit as bad as everybody says it is, and then some), but considering Almost Famous is his only really good film, the sense of it being the cornerstone of his filmography becomes even greater. Rumor has it the film is at least partly autobiographical, based on up-and-coming rock writer Crowe’s experiences with ambitious proggers Yes in the 70′s.  True or not, it offers one possible reason why the film feels so lovingly energetic. ‘Cause in the end, of course, it’s all about love; loving the music, even loving journalism. Most of all however, it’s about loving those who give journalists their mission, the musicians and their fans. And as with all true love, it can feel liberating and inspirational, but also painstakingly direct and embarrassing – all at once. There’s never any real distance between the worshipper and the worshipped, which means that Stillwater’s every ego trip is laid bare out there for all to see. At times it can actually be quite painful to watch, as in the constant rivalry between lead singer Jeff (Jason Lee) and guitarist Russell (Billy Crudup) over who should be in front at the press photos. But most of all it’s oddly human, I think. And hilarious. Because we’re never like that…are we?

This might sound a little odd, but what I like most about Almost Famous is that it never gives in to the natural desire to be a satire, with all the inherent cynicism that comes with something like that. Sure, all the regular caricatures are there; the cynical corporate manager; the lead singer who thinks he’s more important than the band; the cool-headed groupie, the overly independent rock writer (Lester Bangs); the protective who’s afraid that sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll might corrupt her son. But soon we realize that they’re all there because they’re necessary, and that they should be taken at least somewhat seriously. In the hands of a lesser actress than the consistently brilliant Frances MacDormand the concerned mother could easily have been reduced to a hapless caricature, but instead she comes off as the most complex character of all. In the end, this film is an appreciation of rock music, and a shout-out to all who saw it prosper. I suspect you have to be a rather ingrained cynic not to appreciate it.

How about backward-looking then, doesn’t it have to be backward-looking? I’d say not more than the average viewer. Much like I once in a while need some for someone to tell me that my film fascination is nothing to be ashamed of, I’m more than ready for anything or anyone who wants to remind me that rock music was once important, and that it should still be a force to reckon with. Almost Famous‘s broad 70′s nostalgia could  actually make people of my generation feel a certain connection with our parents, and also remind us that history repeats itself. Just like 70′s rock meant a lot to our parents when they were young, there were made some excellent records in Seattle in the early 90′s, and they meant a lot to me. This film gave me a chance to remember this period of my childhood and early adolescence, without ever feeling that it’s somehow too recent to feel nostalgic about. It gave us Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Singles, after all. Almost Famous opened my eyes. Again. That’s not looking backward. It’s about understanding yourself in the light of what has come before. I love it for that.

‘The Reader’, or Sexual Encounters Of The Third Reich

18 Mar

I suspect there’s something about the way I didn’t like Stephen Daldry’s unforgivably dull Holocaust drama The Reader that only serves to further underline all the problems I’m having with it. You’re just not supposed to badmouth a movie whose subject is as important as this one. What really annoys me, then, is that The Reader seems so aware of this more or less internalized viewer reaction that it completely ignores the need to speak to me as a viewer on something more than a gut level. It’s not that it doesn’t try to engage me, it’s more that it’s done with such heavy-handed symbolism and dubious moral claims that I’m left utterly frustrated and, worse still, bored. Some of its proponents claim that it’s an extraordinarily complex movie, but while I acknowledge that the moral dilemma at its core had the potential to be interesting, every little hint at complexity is eventually abandoned in favor of over-explained dialogues, sentimentalizing musical and visual tableaus and transcendent pleas for emotional investmest based on cliched assumptions about how an audience is supposed to react to a Holocaust movie. This is not to say that it doesn’t try to say something new, only that it seems so sure it will fail to convince us through the power of the story, that it instead regularly falls back on invoking knee-jerk reactions to the broader subject.

One of the central problems I’m having with it however, is more or less a moral one. While I’m initially sympathetic to the power of words, and I  do believe that reading will make you a wiser person, I remain unconvinced by The Reader‘s seemingly implicit claim that Hanna Schmitz’s (Kate Winslet) intellectual curiosity (represented by her love of the books being read to her), will somehow make her seem more human. Yes, I know this argument is never made in exactly that way in the movie (which means it is one of the very few things never explained down to such a completely demystified and airless level of clarity), but the central point that is made of the fact that Hanna asks the women of the concentration camp to read to her, makes it a plausible interpretation. While the mood of the movie is not outright apologetic toward Hanna, it at least prompts me to ask whether loving literature, or being illiterate should purge you of all or most of the personal responsibility that was ruled a basic principle through the Nuremberg trials? I’m simplifying here of course, and The Reader doesn’t necessarily come down on one side of the issue, but no matter how much it may try to hide behind complexity, I still think its politics is somewhat disturbing. The entire premise of this argument then also makes it harder for me to accept the sense of guilt that seemingly mars her young lover Michael Berg (David Kross/Ralph Fiennes) for the rest of his life.

Still, if Stephen Daldry had had a little more faith in his audience, at least the love story aspect of the movie could have worked. But instead of showing what initially had the potential to be an at least mildly interesting story about the often pathetic dynamics of relationships between young and old lovers, he hammers us over the head with not-at-all subtle hints at Hanna’s illiteracy (at times that even seems like a reason for her to wear every emotion on her sleeve), dealt with such a heavy hand that the most convincing sign Michael is actually in love with her is that he’s too into her to see what we viewers understand almost immediately. That said, it’s never a good thing to make your protagonist seem this slow.

Perhaps it’s not fair, but to me it’s a little disappointing that this was the film that should finally earn Kate Winslet her long-awaited and well-deserved Academy Award. Despite several scripted tricks to make Hanna seem more interesting than she really is, I’ve seen Winslet better in other movies, most notably in Revolutionary Road, for which she was scandalously snubbed this year. She fights bravely to tone down the excesses of the script, but she doesn’t always succeed (check out the scene early in the film where she has taken off with young David Kross, and is seemingly overwhelmed by the freedom. She’s all emotion, no nuance. It’s painful to watch, but apart from that, she’s doing good). David Kross certainly has the boyish charms to fill the type, but at the same time his acting in the heavier scenes (and there are lots of them) feels oddly disengaged. His dramatic range isn’t quite big enough for me, even though I know many would disagree. At least this sense of disengagement makes it eminently plausible that he would grow up to be as blandly dull as Ralph Fiennes.

In his review, Franz – who liked the movie a lot more than I did – rightly pointed out that the film suffers from all too many finales. In fact, I suspect my review wouldn’t have been nearly as harsh (but still nowhere near good) if it hadn’t been for one of these last ‘closure’ scenes, featuring Michael Berg and a relative of one of Hanna’s victims. Not wamting to spoil things for people who have yet to see it prevents me from being more specific, but leaving absolutely nothing up to the viewer, Daldry – again – spells out in every detail exactly what we’re seeing, how we should interpret it, and how it’s supposed to make us feel. Despite what you might think, I actually don’t revel in tearing this movie apart, but still I can’t find something to better sum up my feelings about it than to paraphrase The Magnetic Fields: Can you not stand me at all?/(…) I can’t take your perpetual whining.

Emile Hirsch Is The Man To Beat For March’s Sexiest Male

5 Mar

In a widely expected development, all-around gay Emile Hirsch of Milk has run with the Sexiest Male Alive title for March. People who inspire me to se a film twice in one week deserve to have that honor. Still, there were some less expected developments on this month’s list too: Youngster Logan Lerman regained his footing, climbing nine spots to share the Climber Of The Month mantle with drummer boy Zac Hanson. After an impressive January showing, however, Gossip guy Ed Westwick is again heading fast in the opposite direction, dropping a  massive eleven spots. Standing proud and pretty on the shoulders of Slumdog Millionaire, Dev Patel leads a pack of three newcomers at #21, while Daniel Radcliffe’s brains and Jody Latham’s, well, bloody good looks, secure both of them a welcome back into the fold. At the same time, we bid farewell for now to Jeremy Sumpter (who saw the writing on the wall when he fell twenty spots in January), Thomas Dekker, Charles Carver (it’s never easy being the new kid, particularly if you’re on a show I don’t even watch) and Daniel Agger.

As always, the changes on this list is generally caused by any particular guy being considered by me to be relatively more attractive than he was considered previously. That, however, of course doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the other people on this list have become markedly less attractive, only that they perhaps have not been as good at getting my attention lately. With that said, let’s break it down:

#1-10: That Emile Hirsch’s win had been in the waiting for some time, doesn’t mean he didn’t have serious competition. The hotness glowing from Nick Hoult’s shoot for Attitude‘s March Issue melted my heart nearly as definitely as Hirsch did in Milk, but he still has to wait to be number one (considering how frequently the title is changing hands, that shouldn’t necessarily take all that long). Zac Efron got a boost from the DVD release of the admittedly still enjoyable High School Musical 3, and Raviv Ullman’s appearance in Normal Adolescent Behavior, a teen drama that’s trying all too hard to be edgy, secures him a personal best at #5. Even though it’s a little risky to say this in a month in which Ullman broke into the Top Five, I’m not particularly concerned about the small slides of regular Top Three contenders Jesse McCartney, Hunter Parrish and Mitch Hewer, especially considering the stability of the lower end of the first tier.

#11-20: In recent months, no one has been better at keeping momentum than Zac Hanson, who wasn’t even on this list last summer, but by now I know better than to speculate about whether he has a roof.  Also worth positively noting is the seemingly out-of-nowhere rise of Tyler Hoechlin, and Logan Lerman’s aforementioned bounce back after his terrible January showing. Speaking of sweet revenge, Ed Speleers and Jamie Bell both reassure me that they are forces to be reckoned with, while Ryan Sheckler suffer one of the few setbacks of this tier. Kudos to Charlie Hunnam for keeping his impressive #13 spot for the third month in a row.

#21-30: With Dev Patel’s #21 debut, Skins seems to have taken over the position Home and Away once had as the best looking TV drama, but for the long haul, footballer Cristiano Ronaldo’s dramatic eight-spot fall might be real story. I admit the main reason for this is that his team, Manchester United, has been screwing up my beloved Liverpool’s chances at finally take the Premiership trophy to Merseyside, but who said all judgments always had to be rational? The question is what happens next. Elsewhere, Jesse Eisenberg’s position looks to have normalized at #23, while another repeat episode of House of Carters gave Aaron Charles an opportunity to prove that smarts doesn’t always outshine sexiness. Jonathan Taylor Thomas’ surprisingly steady rise continues, courtesy of yet another 8 Simple Rules rerun, while some of the shine of January have come off for Revolutionary Road‘s still elegant Leonardo DiCaprio. Our longstanding relationship will lift him again soon enough. Elsewhere, Adam Brody’s recent rise have seemingly come to a halt.

#31-40: In a month of relative stability among the 30′ers, Rafi Gavron of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is doing his best to shake things up, and his #33 arrival is quite remarkable, considering I have yet to see the film. Though in rather modest steps, Taylor Hanson and Joe Jonas continue to climb, and Jonas also should benefit from the upcoming Jonas Brothers concert movie, if and when I decide to see it. His Disney Channel colleague Cody Linley slides somewhat from last month, but at #39, he’s still very much in the running. Just over him, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers failed to capitalize on my watching Match Point for the first time recently, while Max Theriot seems determined to fight his way back, starting with taking four spots in March.

41-50: Tried and true Daniel Radcliffe’s Revenge of the Nerds-style comeback was forecast late last month, but Jody Latham’s return was far less expected. The final new face is Lucas Grabeel, the HSM fourth-wheel who needed Milk to have his break through. For Ed Westwick it looks more like a breakdown, reversing all the gains he made in January, while Joe Dempsie, Brady Corbet, Michael Pitt and Rhys Wakefield show that they are not simply going to go away, even though their positions on the list might suggest it’s inevitable.

  1. Emile Hirsch (Previous ranking: 2)
  2. Nicholas Hoult (6)
  3. Zac Efron (4)
  4. Jesse McCartney (1)
  5. Raviv Ullman (7)
  6. Hunter Parrish (3)
  7. Mitch Hewer (5)
  8. David Gallagher (8)
  9. Alex Pettyfer (9)
  10. Chris Egan (10)
  11. Tyler Hoechlin (15)
  12. Gaspard Ulliel (11)
  13. Charlie Hunnam (13)
  14. Logan Lerman (23)
  15. Zac Hanson (24)
  16. Ryan Sheckler (12)
  17. Ed Speleers (20)
  18. Ryan Donowho (18)
  19. Kevin Zegers (17)
  20. Jamie Bell (25)
  21. Dev Patel (new)
  22. Cristiano Ronaldo (14)
  23. Jesse Eisenberg (16)
  24. Aaron Carter (30)
  25. Jonathan Taylor Thomas (28)
  26. Sean Faris (21)
  27. Leonardo DiCaprio (19)
  28. Adam Brody (22)
  29. Rafael Nadal (31)
  30. Fernando Torres (29)
  31. Mitch Firth (27)
  32. Taylor Hanson (34)
  33. Rafi Gavron (new)
  34. Chace Crawford (32)
  35. Joe Jonas (36)
  36. Ryan Phillippe (37)
  37. Randy Harrison (33)
  38. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (39)
  39. Cody Linley (36)
  40. Maz Theriot (44)
  41. Gareth Bale (38)
  42. Daniel Radcliffe (RE)
  43. Brady Corbet (46)
  44. Jody Latham (RE)
  45. Michael Pitt (47)
  46. Ed Westwick (35)
  47. Chad Michael Murray (41)
  48. Rhys Wakefield (48)
  49. Lucas Grabeel (new)
  50. Joe Dempsie (49)

‘Destricted’ To Audience: ‘Feel Bad’

3 Mar

Every once in a while I need for something or someone to remind me that my passion for cinema is in some way worth it, and that I’m not a weirdo for devoting so much time to it. I usually find it, and then I keep my exploration going. But that doesn’t mean no one would think I’m weird for doing it. I like weird.  However flawed they may be, I tend to prefer movies that are told in an unconventional way, or that are more or less pressing on the boundaries of the expected and/or acceptable by using sex, violence, humor etc., as a means to provoke a reaction from the audience (I simplify). When successful, the thrill could be at least two-fold: One is to see how people around you react. It doesn’t matter if they are young or old, very many people are easily offended by such provocations, and they always seem to feel obliged to make clear why they are disgusted (if it’s an old person, they tend to say something like ‘Now it’s gone too far!’, and if it’s a young person it’s more like ‘Eww, that’s weird/gross/sick!)’. It’s always quite entertaining for those of us who don’t run screaming out of the cinema whenever people are being less than polite, or do something more than hold hands.

But the more important reason why I generally appreciate movies that dare to split its audience, is that at least it signals a will from the director to take some risks. Those risks might mean that half the audience end up loathing your movie, but if the other half had a great experience for that very reason, I’m sure the director would be more satisfied than the maker of a generally well-made movie that’s so conventional every single viewer ends up with exactly the same feeling of slightly disinterested comfort. Provocatively speaking, I’d rather see Larry Clark’s Ken Park twice, if that could erase from memory the small outbursts of intense boredom I felt when I saw A Beautiful Mind or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , even though the latter two probably are the ‘better’ movies in most aspects. The problem with Beautiful and BenjaBut are that they’re so mind-numbingly safe and predictable, whereas Ken Park seemingly don’t give a damn about the viewer’s expectations.

But because this is not supposed to be an article about my thirst for such provocative and risk-taking movies (it doesn’t have to be Larry Clark or Gregg Araki to feel sufficiently fresh and unconventional, think Burr Steer’s Igby Goes Down or simply the slightly claustrophobic middle-class dramas The Ice Storm and American Beauty), we’re going to leave this side of the argument to instead focus on the downside. The problem with using such a will to explore the boundaries of mainstream film-making and/or social norms to decide t what’s worth watching, is at least two-fold. The worst thing is that you can be fooled to watch even the most cynical drivel simply because the willingness to be cynical in itself qualify as unconventional, as is often the case with Destricted (2006), a compilation of short films we’ll return to in a moment.

The other reason why this can be a a bad way to choose what movies to see, or to judge their quality, is that the hunt for gold among all these often cynical and calculatedly provocative movies risk taking my time and attention away from great movies that express themselves more conventionally. No film poetics is flawless, and the problem with mine is that it doesn’t necessarily make room for all the movies that don’t fit into either the ‘provocative + risky = interesting‘ category (such different films – thematically and quality-wise – as Mysterious Skin (gay), Shortbus (sex), Imaginary Heroes (middle class cynicism), Human Traffic (drugs) etc.) or ‘well-played and safe = either predictable and boring, or good, but not good enough‘ (examples can be Cast Away, Atonement, The Hours etc.).

But isn’t this just a schematic way to summarize which types of movies I generally prefer, more than it actually influences what movies I watch? Yes and no. There are other factors that can play in (pop culture relevance, escapism, loyalty to a certain actor or director, etc), but that doesn’t mean my taste has not become more specific, and thus possibly less welcoming towards movies that don’t neatly fit that taste. It struck me when I spoke to a friend of mine about our common love for Billy Elliot, the recent classic about a guy who wants to quit boxing for ballet, that if it had been released today and I hadn’t known anything about it, I might have missed it, because its social realism make my alarm bells go off. That’s truly scary. It’s not that I never like social realism – quite the opposite, actually – but there’s something about that sub-genre’s how aura of importance that often keep me from seeing these films. I believe I know how they’ll be, and then I choose to feel bad about ignoring them over actually watching them on the merits. Then I wouldn’t have gotten to know that Billy Elliot actually is one of the best feel-good movies of this decade, or that there are always glimmers of hope even in Ken Loach’s movies, the best of whom are My Name is Joe (1998) and Land and Freedom (1995).

But to go back to the first point: The biggest problem about watching movies based on some vague sense of intellectual and visual courage, is all the movies that turn out to be simply calculated and cynical. Perhaps I should have realized from the premise of the short-film compilation Destricted (seven films from seven directors about sex and pornography) that it was an invitation to present completely de-eroticized misanthropy as some sort of artsy porn, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I never explicitly regret having watched a movie, but I’m still unsure what to make of  most of the contributions in this film anthology.

The project is called Destricted, but based on the short films that came out of it, it could as easily have been named Six Degrees of Masturbation. In some form or another, all the directors seem to share a somewhat cynical view of human sexuality and human interaction in general, and many of the films can be read as meditations over how the disengaging nature of pornography threatens to make sex something mechanistic and emotion-less. Several of the films also try to say something about how the values and aesthetics of pornography seem to seep into popular conscience and culture. However, this doesn’t mean that you can detect some distinct core the project. The problem probably is not (mainly) that the films are of varying quality. It is that taken as a total, they are so pessimistic that at one point they stop feeling relevant. We’ll return to the project at large later, but first a word on Larry Clark’s film Impaled, the reason why I heard about it in the first place.

As some of you might know by now, I’m not a big fan of his films, but I always find them interesting, because he’s so uncompromising. Impaled struggles with the same problem, but that doesn’t mean it cannot say anything interesting about its subject(s). At the beginning, it seems like Clark is aiming for a quite literal interpretation of the project; to say something about sex and pornography in today’s world. He interviews a whole bunch of young guys about their experiences with and feelings about porn, and then goes on to ask them how they feel about their bodies. Their answers to these questions are both interesting, revealing and often funny in themselves, but they take on greater significance because of how Clark’s camera captures the guys’ insecurities. These moments, when I so intensely wanted him to take the camera away, are the most interesting in the entire project, but that’s partly why they are so problematic. I can’t help but feel that the visible insecurity means that the interviewees are not really sure what they are up to, which made me feel like Clark was taking advantage of it for the good of his movie. I’m not sure who these guys are, and it could of course be that they are semi-professionals made to seem like regular guys, but that doesn’t make Clark’s choice any less disturbing.

Still, the second part of the film make the first one seem almost conventional. It turns out Clark’s project is for one of the guys to have sex with a porn star on camera. This is where Clark finally and definitely crosses the line between art and pornography. I’m not against porn, and I wouldn’t even rule out that Clark’s motive with the film is to shine a light on how expectations and reality clash in the porn industry, but I will insist that his means are wrongheaded. As it is, the point of the several minutes long sex scene seems to have been the provocation itself. There are some scenes in which it’s just fine to leave everything for the viewer to decide what to make of it. This is not one of them. Clark should have made his responsibility and authority as the director clear, and I don’t think the film would have been any less interesting if he had.

Generally, for a compilation of films about sex and pornography, it’s remarkable how completely de-eroticized every contribution feels. No less than four of them, Marco Brambilla’s Sync, Gaspar Noe’s We Fuck Alone, Richard Prince’s House Call, and Sam Taylor-Wood’s Death Valley more or less explicitly tackles the question of how the aesthetics of porn affect us, but only Noe’s film manages to say something that feels even remotely relevant. Brambillo’s film simply is two-minute collage of cliched porn images, shown at lightning speed, so as to remind us of the impersonal and generic aspect of porn consumption. While that’s not exactly a bad idea, it’s doesn’t say something new, and cut off from any context apart from its place in a compilations of shorts, it functions more like a clubbing over the head than an invitation to think things through. House Call and Death Valley looks like they could have come from two different decades of porn, the first being an unpleasantly long sex reminiscent of the celluloid shames of porn cinema, and the latter simply a (more glossy) male masturbation scene. Since neither are provided with any context at all, they remain simply expressions of sex, on a level so basic or so abstract (depends on how you look at it) it borders on meaningless, and thus uninteresting.

The intension of Gaspar Noe’s film are no less clear, but at least it is a wholly cinematic work. Essentially, it’s a twenty-minute film about a man who masturbates using a plastic doll while watching porn. What makes it even remotely interesting, is the the disturbing mood set by the use of a strobe, and with a beating heart at the center of the soundtrack. Very, very far from ever being arousing, it’s first and foremost an utterly exhausting experience. It goes on for so long you inevitably get drawn in and out of it, because it’s impossible to keep your concentration on something that monotonous for so long, but it seems the emotional distance to what’s on screen is the essence of each of the the four films. I guess that’s the only way you could be detached enough to coldly assess them. It’s a pity then, that the films all feel so cold that that I barely made it to the end. Luckily, Noe’s film at least offers it’s name as a key. It’s all about loneliness.

If Noe’s film (together with Brambillo’s) is the one that feels most like a film, Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Erotic Epic feels exactly opposite. Considering the generally pessimistic and introverted tone of all the other films, I want to give it a hand for its somewhat more light-hearted and absurd take, but anyway it feels more like an amateurish video lecture than an actual film. By the time the anecdotes about sexual superstition in the Balkans ended, I had stopped caring about whether that was the point or not. Finally, there is Matthew Barney’s Hoist, an artsy and genuinely weird film about a man who seeks pleasure in rubbing himself against a giant mechanical device. Barney’s film proves that even though good films are often weird, what’s weird isn’t always good.

I still think the premise of Destricted was a good one, but as it turned out, the way the directors involved took on the challenge wasn’t all that interesting. Because I believe many movie experiences are ruined if you know to much about the movie beforehand, I’ll probably continue to make missteps like this one in my search for the right balance between something both courageous and humane. Let’s just hope that search doesn’t stand in the way all the movies that are better at being either than the ones who miserably fail at being both.

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