Favorite Characters: George (A Single Man)

Oh my goodness gracious, how much do I love George?  This is just a beautifully written character (and, in the movie, stunningly performed,) one of the most poignantly-drawn portraits I’ve seen of someone grieving.  Rich, raw, and so, so real.  Amazing.

It strikes me that we never meet the actual George.  Although there are remembrances of the past, some of which the movie depicts as flashbacks, the George who takes us through the story is eight months on the wrong side of a sudden, life-altering tragedy:  the unexpected death of his partner of sixteen years.  He’s no longer the man he once was.  Instead, he’s an emotionally-battered ghost of himself who “becomes George” every morning, putting on his personality like a disguise so he can drag his shell through another day.  There’s something so exposed about that, the private grief of someone who pretends he’s all right.  In an instant, the lens through which George viewed the world shattered, and now the house he and Jim used to share is a minefield of painful memories strong enough to incapacitate him, but he mildly goes to work, the bank, the gym, the liquor store, and to visit friends, carrying all that heartbreak on his own.

His neighbors don’t even know that Jim is dead.  A few maybe wonder why he’s never returned from the trip he took eight months ago, but no one is really interested enough to pursue it, and George isn’t about to tell them.  Here, you see the ways in which George is a mouthpiece for Christopher Isherwood’s thoughts on homophobia.  It’s not that it’s too painful for George to talk about or that he doesn’t want their pity – it’s that he knows they honestly won’t care.  A generic platitude here and there, but when it comes down to it, they’d think it’s just as well, that maybe now George can find “real” love instead of just thinking he’s found it with a substitute.  They won’t understand George’s grief at the loss of his lover, because they can’t equate George’s relationship with the ones they have.  They view it as something lesser, a pale, deficient imitation of the real thing, and if George’s love wasn’t real, they can’t see his grief as being real, either.

And while, yes, it’s horrifically sad that he’s so alone in this and that he can’t tell the people he passes every day, it’s also a shred of agency for George in the midst of his mourning.  It’s like he won’t let them know the truth about Jim because they don’t deserve it; he won’t let them stain his grief with their apathy.  In this way, it almost serves as a judgment.  I love this side of George.  In his day-to-day life, he’s muted and not quite there, but his mind is so sharp and probing.  While he’s uncompromising in his reproach of a lot of things (from university thinking to freeway construction,) his most penetrating insights are always those concerning the inequality faced by his people.  I like that George doesn’t have to be an activist to have these thoughts.  He’s just an ordinary man who notices overt hostility and microagression alike, and he doesn’t often stand against it, but he also doesn’t just swallow it meekly.  Even if he only denounces it in his head, it takes strength to face the pervasive prejudice ingrained in his society.

I wonder if this fervor is what allows him to hang onto the pieces of himself that scattered when Jim died.  Anger can be just as consuming as grief and, if given free reign, it can do a lot of damage in a life, but George’s indignation is aimed at injustice that seeks to diminish his personhood, and I think it might act as a sort of tether that anchors him in the here and now.  If he stopped getting angry at his second-class-citizen status, I think his anguish would overwhelm him even more than it already is, and I don’t know if he could get out from under it.

A Few Words on the Words in Buster Keaton’s Movies

To state the obvious, no one watches a Buster Keaton movie for the dialogue.  I’d wager that no one watches any silent movie for the dialogue (I know that, in the earliest days of Hollywood, a number of Shakespeare adaptations were made; it’d be interesting to see a few, just to know what on earth they’re like.)  This is as it should be, since Buster’s films are packed with so much awesome there’s hardly any room for dialogue.  However, I’d like to take a moment to examine this unsung element of his work.

(Full disclosure:  Buster’s work and the shorts he made with Fatty Arbuckle make up 90+% of the silent movies I’ve seen, so it’s entirely possible that my observations are typical of the whole silent catalogue and I just don’t realize it.  That’s okay – I’ll talk Buster, since he’s what I know.)

First, I love the elegant brevity of silent storytelling.  It’s something that many people don’t seem to get about this era.  If you see a modern parody of a silent film, most of the time, you’ll either get a lot of wild mute pantomime or an intertitle every time someone moves their lips.  But that’s not how Buster works.  People in his movies talk plenty, and yet we’re not hit with intertitles every three seconds; the fact of the matter is, there’s only so much we really need to be privy to.

As an example, take Our Hospitality.  Early in the film, Willie runs into one of the Canfields, who, because of the feud, immediately wants to kill him.  He frantically tries to procure a gun (while Willie, naturally, is oblivious to his mortal danger.)  The Canfield’s first “Quick!  Do you have a gun I can borrow?” exchange with a minor character is given the full dialogue treatment, and we know precisely what’s being said.  After all, though, we get what he’s asking and why, so there’s no need to read the same general words again.  Canfield and his assorted screen partners keep talking, but instead of slapping up more intertitles, the film simply trusts that we follow what’s going on and focuses on the visual humor.  Similarly, the parson spends a long time saying grace during dinner at the Canfields, but there’s no reason we need to know a word of it.  The important takeaway from the scene isn’t the prayer – it’s the sight gag of Willie and the Canfield men secretly taking peeks in the middle of it to keep surreptitious eyes on each other.

I mentioned it in my original review, but Seven Chances is the real winner on this front.  Here’s a silent comedy adapted from a stage farce (ie, dialogue up the yin yang,) and at least a fourth of it is Jimmie proposing marriage to various women.  But that’s the thing; after the first couple of times, we know exactly what he’s saying, and we can tell from the women’s reactions what their answers are.  The movie is able to drop the intertitles and just move on with it, mining its humor, not from quippy jokes, but from the visual medium.  I mean, watching a startled woman drive her car halfway up a tree is a way better reaction than any permutation of “No,” would be, right?

Which isn’t to say that all of Buster’s dialogue is purely utilitarian and without flair.  Not so – despite the lack of sound, he has no fear of alliteration or puns (“Damfino” – oh, Buster…), and there are a good number of amusing jokes to be had.  In addition to having some of Buster’s funniest silent acting, the jail scene in Steamboat Bill Jr. also has some of his most off-the-wall fun dialogue (in context, anyway – it may be one of those scenes that has to be seen to be appreciated.)  After numerous watches, “I know what it is, you’re ashamed of my baking,” still cracks me up, and I love, “That must have happened when the dough fell in the tool chest.”

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: LGBTQ Inclusion in Doctor Who – The Good

I may look at Torchwood later, but for now, we’re strictly talking about the mother ship.  When it comes to Who, there’s a lot of inclusion to talk about, which is a good thing in and of itself.  But of course, an important step in representation for a marginalized group is when there’s enough inclusion that simply existing no longer cuts it, and people start talking about quality.  I’m hoping that, as I write the next few Sunday Who Reviews, the good outweighs the other two.

First, we do have the simple fact that there’s a fair amount of representation to discuss.  It’s true that our only major queer characters, Jack, Vastra, and Jenny, are recurring, and I don’t see that changing – I can’t see them indisputably writing the Doctor as anything other than vaguely ace-ish and varying levels of heteroromantic, and with the show’s need for the main companion to be a sort of Everywoman to all viewers, it tends to avoid character wrinkles that make her stand out.  However, all three of those recurring characters have gotten some good play over the seasons, and there has been a fair amount of sexual diversity among one-shot characters.  The RTD era in particular has a nice practice of casual inclusion.

And for me, that’s one of the best things about Who’s LGBTQ track record.  Jack is a pretty revolutionary character and I adore him, and I love that Vastra and Jenny exist, but some battles are fought on smaller ground, and Who has excelled here.  I really like the Cassinis, the pair of little old married ladies from “Gridlock,” and William Shakespeare flirting with both Martha and the Doctor; I also enjoy Canton, the ex-FBI agent from the Silence two-part at the start of series 6.  Sometimes it’s just a nod or a throwaway line or two men dancing in the background at Donna’s wedding reception – tiny references that don’t have to be a Big Deal, because it’s just life.  It’s a big universe with plenty of room in it for queer people, and the show recognizes that they (mostly on the LGB front, let’s be honest) can be incorporated into the fabric of a story without it being some sort of crusade.

Not that all minor references to orientation are offhand.  Particularly during episodes set in the past, the show has addressed social discrimination and hardships faced by queer people.  Mentions of Roger’s secret relationship with Davenport the footman in “The Unicorn and the Wasp” are initially light and winking, but when confronted with the struggles of the closet, Donna comments, “1926 – it’s more like the Dark Ages.”  Additionally, though Tommy from “The Idiot’s Lantern” is never explicitly identified as gay, I find a strong ring of homophobia and gendered expectations in his fraught relationship with his old-guard father.  The talk about Tommy being a mama’s boy feels coded to me, and the discussion of “beating it out of him” is especially chilling.

Trans representation is admittedly thinner on the ground – the only clear character references are in “The End of the World,” when Cassandra mentions having been a little boy, and Susan the horse in “A Town Called Mercy.”  That said, there are a few instances where, in the future, it’s evident that people account for genders outside the traditional binary.  It’s usually when a crowd is being addressed, as in, “ladies, gentlemen, multisex, undecided, or robot” (“The Long Game”) or “ladies and gentlemen and variations thereupon (“Midnight.”)  I like that – having actual trans characters would obviously be better, but I like the acknowledgement that times change and society’s definition of “normal” thankfully changes with it.

Relationship Spotlight: Jude Jacob & Connor Stevens (The Fosters)

Hearing about Jude and his storyline was, honestly, one of the reasons I finally checked out The Fosters.  While, like most things on the show, Jude’s relationship with Connor can be written a bit haphazardly (more often, it feels, this season,) it’s one of the series’ more consistent ongoing arcs, and I enjoy it immensely.  (Relationship-related spoilers.)

With Connor and Jude, one of their plot’s best qualities is also its most maddening:  the slow pace at which it unrolls.  A lot of stories on The Fosters careen around at breakneck speed, which can make them feel inauthentic.  However, since the actors playing Jude and Connor are young enough to be constrained by child labor laws, their screentime, and thus their story’s momentum, is limited by necessity.  This can be great, because it allows this gentle story of a friendship that might be blossoming into first love to play out more naturally.  Jude/Connor doesn’t have a ton of improbably drama piled on top of it to up the ante every week, because there’s drama enough in the plot unfolding.  At the same time, though, weeks go by where all we get of their plot is tantalizing scraps.  So, it’s a conundrum – I want the series to take its time with them and give me a top-shelf story, but I also just want more Jude/Connor!

Jude and Connor intrigue me from their earliest interactions.  Jude is new in school, but, due to his penchant for painting his nails, has already been labeled “the gay kid.”  Connor, by contrast, is what would stereotypically be called more “all-American.”  He’s into sports and videogames (though Jude likes videogames as well, other kids are quick to reduce him to a single trait,) and he’s big enough that he wouldn’t make anyone’s easy target.  With all this going for him, I suppose one could argue that, when he paints his nails in solidarity with his new friend, he comes at it from a place of relative privilege.  I don’t care – that is a ballsy move for a 12-year-old boy, and whether he’s doing it out of friendship or maybe-like-like, it’s a magnificent gesture.

As their plot moves forward, we start to see the first tentative steps toward a deeper relationship between the boys.  Jude is startled by his feelings of jealousy when Connor expresses interest in a girl, and Connor continues to see Jude in secret after his dad forbids their friendship, assuming Jude to be afflicted with “teh gay” and not wanting Connor to “catch it.”  They make shy advances toward each other, physical contact that’s at first easily “explainable,” like jocular tussling, but soon gets bolder, like moving to sit closer to one another for no evident reason.  Their first overtly romantic gesture – holding pinkies at the movie theater while ostensibly on a double date – feels like something out of a Jane Austen novel, a tiny physical connection that, in such a repressed environment, is positively charged with unspoken attraction.

And although it’s hard, because I like both boys but especially Jude and want nothing but the best for him, I like that it takes them a long time to figure out exactly what their relationship is and where it’s heading.  It’s tough for them, inspiring confusion in both, fear in Connor, and insecurity in Jude, but it feels real.  I like that they dance around the idea of a “them” and struggle with what they mean to each other, but by the same token, I love it when Jude realizes things can’t keep going the way they are and confronts Connor about it.  For a sensitive boy, Jude can be pretty daring, and it’s so gratifying to see him finally stop accepting the on-off, behind-closed-doors relationship that Connor is apparently so okay with, and tell the boy he likes that he needs more than that.

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

I haven’t seen this movie in ages, not since I was young enough to be freaked out by Maleficent and not entirely sure of all that was going on.  I’ve rewatched some Disney classics as an adult, but not this one, so, it was high on the list for my periodic tour of Disney’s past and present.

Not too much need for a synopsis, right?  At her birth, the blessings Princess Aurora receives from three good fairies are overshadowed by the curse bestowed by the wicked Maleficent (because…?  The only reason given is that she wasn’t invited to the new baby’s birthday bash, but really, she just seems to get off on horrifying people.)  She dooms the princess to death-by-poisoned-spindle before her 16^th birthday, and while the good fairies can’t undo it, they can add a few caveats – they amend it from death to a sleeping curse, and they allow for True Love’s Kiss to break it.  Still, the royal family doesn’t intend to take any risks.  Every spinning wheel in the land is destroyed (I guess all their cloth is imported for 16 years?  Hey, maybe Maleficent is just a really dedicated Big Textile lobbyist from a foreign kingdom!), and the fairies take the baby to be raised in hiding in a woodland cottage.  Nothing can go wrong, right?

In general, I’d say it’s decent.  Despite its datedness, there’s not a lot to seriously rankle me.  There’s the fairytale-love-at-first-sight thing, of course, and Aurora isn’t a terribly strong heroine.  The movie doesn’t give her much a chance to be anything – most of her experiences are exerted on her by outside forces, and the nature of the spell means she can’t really have agency in her own rescue.  Personality-wise, she’s mainly just soft and pleasant.  However, I anticipated this going in, and it feels par-for-the-course for the times.  In context, not hugely objectionable.

For the positives, I enjoy the connection made between Aurora and Prince Phillip.  Even though they skip tons of steps between meeting and true love, “Once upon a Dream,” their song, puts a more mythic spin on the relationship; Phillip’s arrival feels like Aurora’s dreams coming to fruition.  I also like that Phillip is drawn to Aurora before he even sees her (by her singing voice) and that, upon meeting, neither realizes they’ve actually been betrothed since Aurora was born, allowing them to approach each other without baggage.  And it helps that, by my recollection, Phillip is the first Disney prince to have an actual personality.  He’s ardent and a little cheeky, and he has to bribe his horse to get it to do what he wants.  In short, he’s entertaining, and it seems reasonable that a teenage girl who’s been raised in seclusion would get hung up on him.

It goes without saying that, nonexistent motives or not, Maleficent is an excellent villain.  I mean, come on – the woman can turn into a dragon!  How cool is that?  The fairies are mostly fun, and I like that, living incognito (ie, without magic,) they’re a little bumbling and disaster-prone.  I like the trope of powerful beings having to slum it like us mortals.  Since Aurora doesn’t get to be very hands-on, it’s good that they’re fighting in her corner and it’s not just the prince coming to her rescue.  The fairies have a lot to do, including contributions to the action sequences.  Lastly, there are bits of sly humor that I didn’t expect at all; I laughed out loud when Phillip entreats his father to stop living in the past, reminding him, “It’s the 14^th century!”

Warnings

Some scary (Maleficent-related) moments.

Breakfast on Pluto (2005, R)

This is a movie I’ve always found interesting.  Unfortunately, though, I’ve also always found it to be less than it could have been.  There’s a lot of potential here, but the film on a whole doesn’t manage to come together.  In my view, that’s chiefly down to the depiction of its leading lady.

Kitten Braden is a young transwoman growing up in Ireland in the 1970s.  Imaginative, ribald Kitten was a foundling, and she divides her time mainly between scandalizing the people of her small parish and dreaming about her birth mother.  Eventually, the latter takes precedent and, armed with the scant lead that her mom went to London years ago, Kitten embarks on a journey to find the family she’s been missing.  Along the way, she meets all sorts of scruffy misfits, falls in and out of love, gets in lots of trouble, and makes the transphobes squirm.

I love the story.  Rather than being about a transwoman, in the end, it’s about a woman, who’s trans, searching for her mother.  It takes its time and goes on plenty of detours, and Kitten’s gender identity is always a big part of the proceedings, but the core of the story is Kitten’s search.  It’s part whirlwind coming-of-age, part meandering mystery, part outrageous comedy, and it’s all set against the backdrop of political unrest from the Troubles spilling down into Ireland and reaching all the way to London.  There’s so much going on here, which, in my experience, is almost ludicrously rare in trans-related media made by cis people.

Not to mention the topnotch supporting cast.  From Ireland and Northern Ireland, there’s Liam Neeson, Ruth Negga (Raina on Agents of SHIELD,) Stephen Rea, Brendon Gleeson (MadEye Moody!), and the wonderful Liam Cunningham.  And then, just for an extra treat, we also get Dominic Cooper (young Howard Stark and former History Boy) and Ian Hart (another Harry Potter alum, though he doesn’t share any films with Gleeson – he played Professor Quirrell.)

Where, for me, the film unfortunately lets its unique narrative down, is in Cillian Murphy’s performance as Kitten.  I like Murphy, but he doesn’t work for me here, and worse still, it’s all at the surface level.  I can’t even get into whether or not he does justice to Kitten’s provocativeness or emotional journey, because I’m so distracted by his breathy, affected voice and campy screen presence.  In his hands, Kitten doesn’t feel like a woman – she feels like someone playing at being a woman.  If nothing else, it would be exhausting for her to act so unnaturally all the time, and given that this is her life, not a pantomime, it seems disrespectful to her experiences.  And honestly, if the film had done something with it, there may have been a story in Murphy’s portrayal.  One could argue that Kitten, probably feeling very alone as a transgirl in a small, conservative parish, tries to assert her identity by behaving how she thinks a woman is meant to act instead of just being herself.  She seems to have used the artificial sexpots from old movies as a template, which obviously isn’t going to help.  There could have been a thread of Kitten realizing she can settle into her gender and doesn’t have to put on a show of it, but the movie doesn’t seem to view the performance as forced or problematic.  And that’s where it loses me.

Warnings

Language (including homo- and transphobic slurs,) sexual content, violence, drinking, smoking, drug use, and thematic elements.

Pitch Perfect 2 (2015, PG-13)

Given what I felt were the main detractors in the original Pitch Perfect – it takes the Bellas a long time to find their sound, the bonding is told more than shown, and there can be a bit too much cattiness between Bellas – I figured the sequel would be past these issues and be all the better for it.  Unfortunately, Pitch Perfect 2 has some sequel-itis problems and generally isn’t as tight as its predecessor.  On the plus side, seeing its missteps gives me greater appreciation for the original.

Three years after the end of the first movie, the Bellas are at the top of their game when a high-profile onstage catastrophe earns them notoriety.  They’re booted from the collegiate a cappella competition circuit, and their only hope of being reinstated is to take home the top prize at the world a cappella championships.  Their problems are, mainly, a) no American team has ever won, b) their fiercest competition, the incredible German group Das Sound Machine, shakes their confidence in their own style, and c) unbeknownst to the others, group leader Beca has scored a record-label internship, seriously reducing the time she can devote to Bella duties.

The Bellas find their sound over the course of the first movie, but early in this one, they lose sight of it again.  They’re intimidated by Das Sound Machine’s well-oiled, avant-garde, concentrated-wall-of-music style, and they become convinced that the only way to beat the Germans is to emulate them.  This means they spend a big chunk of the film floundering in a technique that doesn’t suit them, so I still don’t get nearly as much awesome a cappella ladies as I want.  (Das Sound Machine, though, is fantastic.  I love it every time they’re onscreen.)

Beyond that, the story is a little more unfocused, the jokes are a little lazier, and the broadest elements of the original film get a little too much use.  I was excited when I realized that Hailee Steinfeld (Mattie Ross in the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit) was joining the cast, but her rather bland character feels out-of-place amongst the other girls.  In a way, the film suffers from the same problem as the Bellas themselves:  it’s grown less sure of who it is, and in its desire to please, it tries to force stuff that feels less authentic.

That said, it’s not a write-off.  There are still some great music performances; I already mentioned the wonderful (and hilarious) Das Sound Machine, and a number of groups, including the Bellas, make a fabulous showing at an underground a cappella-off.  Bonus points for including songs by Muse and MIKA, both of which delighted me immensely.  I also feel the connection between the Bellas more strongly here.  I enjoy the female bonding, and even when they fight or fall out, their affection for one another gives it more weight.  Additionally, Beca’s internship scenes are a lot of fun, chiefly due to her boss’s hysterical tirades and one-liners (Keegan-Michael Key is amazing,) and I like that the main romance is just kind of chill, present and sweet without monopolizing Beca’s story or screentime.

Warnings

Swearing, sexual content (including masturbation references,) drinking, and some gross-out humor.