Bastardpiece Theatre

My Cinema Devotional

[bastardkeith]

As much enjoyment as I take in wildly over-the-top action spectacle (and it’s a lot), there’s something to be said for a movie that barely breaks a sweat and has no purpose on its mind but delight.

For a movie with a healthy amount of shoot-outs and punch-ups, The Nice Guys sure takes it easy. The results are delectable. If this had been made in the 1970s, it would have starred Burt Reynolds and it would have been a quintessential summer movie. Breezy, boisterous and running less on action than on good cheer. The sort of thing that stars grown-ups and gets its laughs by letting those grown-ups enjoy each other on camera.

Watching The Nice Guys is an exercise in chilling the fuck out. There isn’t a single scene that doesn’t move the narrative forward, but plot points are often relayed off-handedly. Long night-time car rides put the wind in your hair. People only run when they have to. There’s a lot of ambling around and talking for the sake of talking because when Shane Black (whose wonderful, underseen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was both a celebration and a deconstruction of this kind of movie) writes your dialogue, talking is FUN. I felt myself loosening up as the movie went along. It’s a picture you hang out with.

Black may be hosting the party, but the guest list is tops. Despite playing colossal fuck-ups...actually, no, BECAUSE they play colossal fuck-ups, Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling have never been more charming. Crowe in particular is hugely endearing, like a sad, sleepy bear who could take your face off with a single swipe (but would rather just chug Yoo-hoo and be left alone). Gosling, meanwhile, executes sophisticated sequences of physical and verbal comedy with such ease that it’s easy to miss how complex they are. Plus, he does a Lou Costello impression. Bonus. They work together with the timing and mutual pleasure of a married couple.

I mean, shit, look at those character posters. Every face is just right, and every actor has at least one or two indelible scenes. Yaya Dacosta shows up for what could in a lesser film be a purely functional character, but Black gives her a moment of sleight-of-hand just on the edge of the frame that made me sit up and smile.

I won’t get into the story, largely because I’d like you to just see it cold and enjoy its surprises (of which there are many). But I will say that it never exactly plays as you’d expect. A seeming moralist streak about porn turns into a  recognition that no business could be as corrupt and depraved as the automotive industry. What looks at first like a jokey, cavalier disregard for human life reveals itself as something more troubled and merciful. At first Black seems to be satirizing self-righteous hippies, but the hippies, in this case, are right. Long stretches of slapstick go horrific. Urgent matters get lost in loop-de-loops of petty, hilarious backchat. Seemingly irrelevant babbling houses major notions about character and theme.

It’s all funny until it's dead serious. And then it’s funnier.

And it all looks so EASY.

These days, no-sweat is so out of fashion that The Nice Guys couldn’t even muster a third of the business of Angry Birds, a movie based on a game commuters play on their phones. It deserves better. Hell, audiences deserve better. The Nice Guys may be dopey and silly as often as it’s smart and pointed, but it thinks well of its audience. I don’t want to oversell it, but in an era of megabudget franchises that can feel like homework, it’s a low-key shindig that flatters us with an invitation.

Isn’t that nice?

[bastardkeith]

Nah, it wasn't about Star Wars. I just like being randomly creepy to people. :)

I can see why you’d like staying anonymous.

What you sent was a really mean, pointlessly ugly thing.

This blog is about love.

Get with it or move along.

[bastardkeith]

Hell yeah, Asian Cult Cinema.

Fucking A, dude.

[bastardkeith]

as your mother neglectful? Did you never get ice cream as a child? Did someone fumigate your soul? Did you look in the mirror one day and feel dissatisfied at the lack of horns on your head? Are you scared that if you stop stepping on dead people the graveyard you live in will get smaller? Or is it that other people's lives feel threatening to yours? Please enlighten me. I'd appreciate it.

Is...is this about Star Wars?

[bastardkeith]

*THERE ARE NO SPOILERS HEREIN*

It’s only a movie, after all.

I’m trying to imagine what would have happened if Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens had been released on May 19,1999. Trying to imagine how different the last 16 years would have looked from a cultural point of view.

Of course, that’s pointless. The prequels, perhaps the most eagerly awaited pop event in recent history, came and went and they were, after all, just movies. They had their detractors (harsh and slightly aggrieved) and they had their defenders (vehement and slightly aggrieved). But after the frenzy that accompanied the release of The Phantom Menace, after all that camping out and speculating and poring over the trailer and deciding that it was going to be either THE MOST AMAZING GODDAMN THING EVER or THE WORST PIECE OF SHIT IN HISTORY AND HOW DARE GEORGE LUCAS HOW DARE HE, audiences got mere minutes into the actual movie and realized that this wasn’t going to solve hunger, bring peace to the world or raise the dead. It was a sometimes thrilling, sometimes clumsy piece of filmmaking from a guy who hadn’t directed in decades and who’d decided to mostly please himself.

That inclination led to two more films and a pattern that repeated twice. The first wave of reviews for Attack of the Clones basically amounted to, “OH MY GOD THANK FUCK THERE’S A SHIT TON OF ACTION BEST SINCE EMPIRE 5 STARS” followed by a wave of annoyed grumbling over the romance and the plot and the acting and basically everything but the action. The overwhelming praise for Revenge of the Sith felt even sweatier and more compensatory. “BEST SINCE NEW HOPE OH MAN THIS WHOLE THING WAS WORTH IT THANK FUCK THANK FUCK THANK FUCK” was soon followed by....well, not much of consequence. The main legacy of the prequels isn’t the movies themselves, but an extended and slightly ridiculous argument that rages on in comment sections and forums all over the internet dot com.

And really, the prequels were worth it, just not for the reasons most people wanted. They basically changed the visual palate of mainstream filmmaking, though there is debate as to whether it was for better or for worse. By Episode III, Lucas had swung what was once a bluntly classical style into something nearly abstract, snatching and rearranging elements with the Hand of God to create his fussy, stunning tableaus. Much as Akira Kurosawa seemed, by the end of his career, capable of directing the weather, Lucas created an infinite sandbox in which he could just MAKE weather. At times this feels airless. At times it feels so liberated from anything resembling reality that you feel like you’re watching the birth of a new kind of visual storytelling. As, you know, STORY storytelling, they’re equal parts utter failure and startling, brilliant recontextualization. We knew going in that watching the genesis of Darth Vader would only end in the darkest of victories. And, like, think about that. That’s fucking WILD. Three big-budget sci-fi action movies leading up to the saddest possible ending. Jesus, we all knew Lord of the Rings couldn’t end with Frodo getting up to the edge of Mount Doom and going “Nah, fuck it,” but Peter Jackson wrung some suspense from the situation. Here, though, the writing was on the wall. The entirety of Episode III was basically a death march. And while it was often grimly compelling, it felt (to me) bit perfunctory. Yes, yes, here’s Order 66, okay, here’s the saber battle you’ve been waiting for, here’s the family tragedy that kicks off the movies you’ve already seen, yep, remember this ship from Episode IV?, yep, yes.

The acting and the dialogue were...variable. Let’s just say that. Even within the same performance. Even within the same scene. Clunks were heard.

I’m glad the prequels exist, and I throw them on from time to time. There’s some terrific action and some really gorgeous filmmaking in there, sequences that remind you exactly what tradition Lucas came up in. He was one of the film brats, after all. He hung with Coppola, De Palma, Spielberg, Scorsese. He knows what he’s doing and when he doesn’t, the sheer foolhardy ambition with which he hurtles into the wall can go splat or it can knock down the wall. I like tension and meta-narrative in my art. I like watching artists work. And the prequel trilogy was essentially George Lucas using the everyone’s favorite movies as a springboard to learn on the go. That’s the kind of irresponsibility I can get behind.

So, like, okay, that happened.

And now this is happening.

Now J.J. Abrams, a pop culture figure who has become as instantly divisive as George Lucas among a certain subset of internet people, has been entrusted to deliver the long-awaited Episode VII.

I do not have the vantage point of years to talk about The Force Awakens. I’m talking about it from the wise, considered distance of a couple of hours. I can’t really talk about what it means in a larger sense.

What I can tell you is this: The Force Awakens is absolutely fucking wonderful. Not “wonderful for Star Wars,” just wonderful. It’s the first film since the original trilogy to capture the sense that up there, in the stars, there’s a wild-ass adventure waiting for you, yes, YOU, and you’d better hop to it. It’s designed to pin you to your seat until you can’t stand it anymore and just go goddamn bananas. And it does just that.

It’s a work of art made with love. It loves the history and iconography of Star Wars, and it loves the audience. So much of The Force Awakens feels like an embrace with an old friend who’s grown in rich and beautiful ways. When you see familiar faces in The Force Awakens, it’s nothing so simple as fan service (though anything this ridiculously pleasing could be called fan service). It’s showing you what a few decades and a lot of heartbreak can do to someone. The lines on their face. The twinkle in their eye. The melancholy in their smile.

Along with all that, it has a terrifically reckless youthfulness coursing through it. It’s full of people thinking on their feet, doing ludicrous, foolhardy things because they’re in a scrape and they don’t have the luxury of time. The whole movie, though it’s marvelously controlled, has that energy. It’s a kind of debonair velocity, almost like it’s performing parkour, gathering momentum with every potential stumble. It’s all forward motion, go go go, until it stops and takes a breath and you remember that holy shit, you CARE about the characters in a Star Wars movie again. And then it’s off to the races once more.

And good fucking lord that last light saber duel. It remembers that scale is fine, but what makes a great action scene is full-blooded FEELING.

I’d intended to really dig into the plot (which is a joyous remix and recombination of a million elements of classic Wars) and the characters, old and new, but The Force Awakens inspires in me something sort of childlike and silly: I don’t want to ruin it for you. I want you to see it and I want to TALK to you about it. I’m DYING to. I’m practically bursting to talk about this stuff with someone, to discuss the whiplash plot twists, the complications of parentage that haunt these characters, the million tiny details that feel at once dusted-off and fresh-popped. I watch the prequels like a bystander to something fascinating. The Force Awakens reminds me that I’m still a fan.

Look, it’s REALLY hard for me to analyze this film. My reaction to it comes from an almost disturbingly primal place. There are plenty of movies that hit my pleasure centers with reasonable accuracy, but few that ever feel like I dreamed them.

And it’s not like there’s nothing to analyze! An interracial lead couple in a Star Wars movie! A backstory for the Black lead that’s essentially about escaping slavery! The fact that Lupita Nyong’o’s character (who is one of the film’s highlights and scored its biggest, lustiest laugh from me) isn’t some weird gross caricature of African-ness, as had been feared! The fact that, well, it’s a Star Wars film that seems to have had some thought put into the racial elements at all! The fact that the female lead doesn’t need saving and also isn’t some ludicrous warrior-princess cipher, but a fully formed character! Hell, the movie even passes the Bechdel Test!

FUUUUUUCK.

I tried to keep it together, but I couldn’t.

Fuck it. Everything works. I’m just so happy. Seeing it made me happy. Remembering it is making me happy. Not even happy - grateful. Never has a title been more apt; something truly has been reawakened with this, some collective myth-pop dream, something that binds all of us fans and welcomes in the new blood.

Ah, calm down, Keith. 

It’s only a movie, after all.

Only a big, beautiful, thrilling, touching, wonderful movie.

[bastardkeith]

Barely released in America but doing surprisingly good business in its home country, Ek Paheli Leela is the kind of B-grade cinema I’d like to see more of. It’s almost laughably mercenary (it’s basically an excuse to throw Sunny Leone into a succession of absurdly revealing outfits and steamy situations), but without meaning to be, it might be the great statement on Being Sunny Leone. Or any actress whose physical attractiveness is exploited for ticket sales, really. It’s also an accidentally subversive go-fuck-yourself to years of the “drippy nice guy gets the girl because hey why not am I right” trope.

The plot is hilariously overcooked: Meera (who I’ll just call Sunny Leone from here on out) is a gorgeous fashion model who apparently, in a past life, was the lover of Nice Guy and the muse of Sinister Sculptor. In the present, she’s taken to Rajasthan to do a shoot for Gay Stereotype and Sassy Photographer, whereupon she falls in love with Burly Bearded Prince. Meanwhile, Shitty Indie Musician has listened to a haunted record and thus unlocked a window into HIS past life, which was apparently shared with Sunny. While he sorts through his memories and pursues Sunny, Burly Bearded Prince’s brother, Evil Mustache Guy, tries to seduce Sunny. Shitty Indie Musician believes that HE is fated to end up with Sunny, because in the past, he was Nice Guy and Burly Bearded Prince was Sinister Sculptor. After an extended flashback, Shitty, Burly and Evil all converge on Sunny and all is revealed in a series of SHOCKING TWISTS.

I know; it’s almost too simple. Actually, it’s almost too 70s. This is a masala plot straight out of the So Bad It’s Good Old Days.

Is Ek Paheli Leela a good movie? Like....no. NO. Oh man, it’s garbage. But it’s HOT garbage. The story moves at a whiplash-inducing pace, the design is absolutely retina-vaporizing, it’s packed with gaudy, senseless musical numbers, every performer has the dial set to “I WANT THAT PAYCHECK BAD” and it gives us what we all paid to see: Sunny.

Oh, Sunny. Sunny, whose first appearance is dancing in a Victoria’s Secret Angels pastiche. Sunny, who attacks every scene, however juvenile or ridiculous, with unstoppable gusto. Sunny, who eye-fucks the camera and all of her co-stars with jawdropping intensity. This is a performance without shame in a movie during which lesser actors would spend their screen time apologizing. And funny thing: while her delivery in the early going is a little stilted, once we hit the Wayback Machine and see her past self, she’s natural, warm, and endearing. Like, she’s REALLY GOOD. Or if she’s not good, there’s something charmingly indefatigable about her that made me love her. And...I mean, isn’t that the same thing as a good performance?

And while the movie around her was transparently designed as a Sunny’s Boobs Delivery System (clothed, mind you, this is Bollywood), it also delivers a tale ABOUT a woman surrounded by men who can never understand her as anything but an object of desire. Sassy and Gay treat her like an asset to be shuttled around and ogled. Burly treats her well (he listens to her; he dotes on her; he flirts with her in his magnificent library, which mysteriously has a very visible copy of Paul Reiser’s autobiography), but Shitty just figures that because he had a dream, he’s supposed to end up with her and she should be okay with that. And forget about Evil, who makes menacing advances and has the opportunity to utter the immortal line, “I need someone to dance at my secret hideout.” Nice is nice, and Ancient Sunny likes him a lot, but he’s almost comically chill about Sinister’s designs on her. In fact, he more or less abandons her in need and only returns to fail at helping her.

Everyone Wants Sunny. But there’s a severe shortage of people who want to be there for her or listen to what she has to say. And the makers of the movie are no better. Ek Paheli Leela is a hack skin show with an underwritten and often passive heroine. Their exploitation of Sunny is only interesting because it’s about exploitation, which is both super-entertaining and wildly hypocritical.

But they totally undercut themselves in the most DELICIOUS way possible, a way that would seem to be a surprising feminist statement if it wasn’t obvious that they only threw it in because a melodrama has to have a steady supply of twists.

I’m going to spoil this, so if you’re interested in watching it without knowing, just go to iTunes because this movie seriously has it all.

Okay?

*SPOILERS*

It looks, for a big chunk of the movie, like Shitty Indie Musician is right and will end up with Sunny for no reason other than “waaaah whimper whine I’m the nice one.” After all, in the flashbacks, he’s Nice Guy and Burly Bearded Prince is Sinister Sculptor. EXCEPT NO DICE, DING DONG. In a shocking reversal, it turns out that Shitty was Sinister in the past! And Burly was Nice! All that pining and passive-aggressive romancing was fucking bullshit because a) it was based in nothing but entitlement ANYWAY but b) he was the villain without ever knowing it!

Basically, the movie lets Sunny have the guy she chose, they guy she likes, while Shitty Indie Musician must live the rest of his days trying to reform and maybe do a little self-examination. Maybe some therapy. Maybe have a conversation with a woman where he lets her talk and he doesn’t drone on and on about his TOTALLY AMAZING shitty indie rock.

*END SPOILERS*

I know the guys who made this movie only did it that way because TWISTAROONIE but it completely sealed the deal for me. Up til that point, Ek Paheli Leela was a delectable but guilty pleasure. After that, I knew I would have to watch it again. It’s a movie that indicts itself for objectifying Sunny even as it objectifies her. But it gives her the ending she deserves. All of the surface pleasures (and there are so, so many) would mean nothing if the ending displayed contempt for the woman who basically made this movie worth watching in the first place. As it is, exploitation films don’t come more likeable.

[bastardkeith]

So the other night I got assaulted onstage.

I'm okay. But bear with me.

I frequently do audience participation, and usually everything is just hunky dory, but on Saturday night, a man I brought up onstage thought it would be a funny bit to put me in a chokehold. Like an arm-around-my-neck, squeezing until I couldn't breathe and my face started to go red, unyielding, terrifying chokehold.

I panicked. He let go, but not immediately. It took a minute. It hadn't occurred to him that this was a dangerous thing to do.

I went into task mode. I finished the bit and got on with the rest of the show.

But every moment I wasn't onstage, I was shaking. I had to rub my hands together and take deep breaths to avoid this feeling that my throat was going to close up and my head was going to cave in and the world was going to melt. I dissociated. Basically, I did what people who've had some trauma do.

I've been assaulted at shows before, and worse. One guy actually DID try to choke me out and only stopped because his wife was so embarrassed at the spectacle he was making.

I learned how to cope by, essentially, not coping. By just screwing my head on tighter, plowing ahead and doing the job. This makes perfect sense professionally and is almost ridiculously dangerous emotionally. It is one of my greatest assets as an artist (there is almost no reason I'll miss a show; I once walked away from a car crash with a concussion to get to a performance) and one of the main reasons people close to me worry about me. They're right to do so.

When I got home after the show on Saturday, I was a nervous, anxious wreck. But because I'd put myself on lockdown, the steam I'd built up inside had no exit valve. I was all but firing off springs. I didn't know what to do. My dog was worried.

One of the things that's always unlocked my emotions is a really big, beautiful musical number. As much by habit as anything else, I started obsessively watching great musical numbers from Hindi and Telugu film. And little by little, the pressure eased and I started to feel myself again. I cried and reeled, but I wasn't shaking and I wasn't anxious. I felt like I could breathe and swallow and think.

Cinema may sometimes be comfort food, but it's in comfort that we often feel most ourselves. That night, if I hadn't delved into my collection and found those keys to my buried self, I might have stayed buried for a while.

The number posted above is one of the songs that got me breathing again. It's "Mourya Re" from Don: The Chase Begins. It's a huge, jubilant, cathartic blast of movement and music and the kinetic splendor of it brought tears to my eyes. I'm grateful for it.

[bastardkeith]

Might be a little pedantic but I think it's important to the film. In 'It Follows', she doesn't lose her virginity when she gets the curse. She says later how she slept with the guy across the street when she was in high school. Important I think because the film isn't about 'the first time'.

Quite right! Thank you for the correction.

[bastardkeith]

I had the unsettling pleasure of seeing David Robert Mitchell's It Follows at Lincoln Center tonight with the great Clay Chapman. The house was thick with horn-rimmed glasses, tweed and flannel. The film is another in the current wave of horror cinema directly influenced by John Carpenter's early works. Ti West's excellent House of the Devil jumpstarted the movement, which has seen the welcome return of long, languid takes, droning Casios, serious violence and painterly composition.

It Follows is one of the best examples of the current revival (though one does wonder how it would have been received if Carpenter had done such homage/karaoke to the horror films of HIS youth). It's got a dreadfully effective hook: a young woman (the excellent Maika Monroe) loses her virginity to a scruffy suitor, only to learn that she has now been passed a curse. A nameless, shape-shifting, murderous ghoul will stalk her until she sexually transmits the curse to someone else. No one can see it but her and her fellow infected.

The ghoul doesn't run, doesn't shriek, doesn't swoop. It just walks.

It is, to be clear, extremely fucking scary.

Mitchell makes smart choices, starting with an excellent eye for casting and a perfect sense of mood. The rules of the game are set early on and then explored in a string of organically unpleasant revelations. The whole thing is drenched in paranoia, but it's etched with a poetic, almost Malickian eye for decayed Americana. It doesn't overstay its welcome and it never overplays its hand. It ends precisely when it needs to.

More than one sequence had me shrieking aloud; the first sighting of the ghoul, accompanied by a breathless explanation, is nauseatingly anxious, and the protracted, pool-set climax is one of the most effectively nerve-shredding set-pieces I've seen in any horror movie.

I won't spoil any of the film's increasingly nasty surprises. What I can say is that it avoids easy categorization as an AIDS metaphor or abstinence parable. After the film, Mitchell gave a Q&A in which he gave an illuminating reading of his own film: sure, we catch the curse by having sex, but sex and love are ways in which we stave off isolation, fear and death.

What a very sad, resonant thing to base your horror movie around. And how very true. The only thing more terrifying than death is being alone as you watch it creeping ever closer, step by step, inch by inch.

Year by year.

[bastardkeith]

I was ten years old when my parents took me to see Do the Right Thing and I can still remember my reactions to it vividly. I was rattled, disturbed, upset. I was also full of wonder.

It had never occurred to me, the larger implications of the behavior I witnessed on the playground, in the cafeteria, even in class under the noses of our teachers. I witnessed hateful behavior towards students of color. More than a few instances of outright hate speech and physical violence. I stood separate from that, never feeling it involved me or that it was indicative of a larger social problem. I just understood, at 10, that there were certain places I wasn't supposed to sit. My parents never reinforced this, mind you. They were outspoken white lefties, my father a Jewish progressive and my mother a Connecticut Episcopalian who had spent years in Uganda with the Peace Corps. Their rhetoric was solidly on the side of equality and fair treatment. But they were in the "real" world, where racism may be overt but is often coded. There's a (laughable) plausible deniability. Among children, in the microcosmos of school, the programming is painfully obvious.

My big takeaway from Do the Right Thing was that I didn't get to claim a lack of involvement. Once you live in a society, if you benefit from the best of it (as most whites do), you have to accept your share of responsibility for the worst parts of it. Though I wouldn't understand privilege as a concept for many years to come, I knew guys like Sal, whose unexamined attitudes could, once they faced any kind of opposition, erupt in irrational rage. And I realized that if I wasn't examining my own attitudes about race, I was part of the problem. What if I had that same capacity for violence in me? Did I have hate in my heart? That's heavy for a 10 year-old.

The violence in the film was terrifying. For some reason this was more real to me than a newscast. I couldn't maintain distance from it. You must understand that the Rodney King video had by this point become the stuff of punchlines in popular culture. People quoted "Can't we all just get along?" for a cheap laugh on talk shows, sketch shows, radio, the schoolyard. It makes me sad to think of it now. So while that was weirdly abstract to me as a child, the death of Radio Raheem haunted my dreams. Do the Right Thing made violence so distressingly immediate that the idea of committing it made me feel physically sick.

The wonder came because I was still learning how to watch movies and Spike Lee was obviously working on a different level from anything else I'd seen. It's an incredible work of art; every frame, every performance, every line, every sound works in perfect harmony. Watching it now, it's amazing to reflect how much Lee's style worked in the vernacular of comic books; all those dutch angles and colorful, hyper-real design elements. It's a wholesale rejection of the idea that tragedy must be presented as a glum documentary. This was a blazingly alive and jolting piece of pop art. It got under my skin. And even as its themes upset me, I was obsessed with watching it as often as I could once it arrived on video.

People talked about Do the Right Thing as an angry film, much as they speak of Lee as an angry filmmaker. But I never got that. The opening dance to "Fight the Power" didn't play as a "fuck you" to me. It was his overture, proud and defiant and full of life and it hit like a shot of adrenaline. There's so much tenderness and humor and sweetness and sorrow in it. When Mookie throws that trash can through Sal's window, it's as raw and human a moment as anything. If you really think you're watching an incitement to violence, you're not watching the movie Lee made. 

He belongs on any list of the greatest American filmmakers.

My parents may not have intended me to see all that I saw that night at the age of 10 (and I was ill-equipped to process a lot of it right away), but by taking me to that movie, they did the right thing. I'm grateful for it, and for Spike Lee. He pried open a part of my mind and soul that I might not have otherwise.

This must all read slightly naive. Well, I'm recalling a very naive time in my life. And I wonder if it's possible to be white in this country, whether young or old, and NOT be naive on some level.

[bastardkeith]

This is a short film that I shot in December with Rosebud.

Galapagos Art Space had been our home for some time leading up to its closing. The announcement that they were moving to Detroit came as a surprise to many. And we knew that we needed to capture something of it, however possible.

The day before it closed up for good, we snuck in and shot this in an hour. Some of it is perfectly lush, some jagged and imperfect. But that's fine. It's a tribute to a place we cared about more than we could express in words.

When Rosebud kisses the stage, it's not an empty gesture. It's a farewell.

[bastardkeith]

50 Shades of Grey: Are You Kidding Me? - the Urban Dater

Bastard Keith and Betty Mars talk 50 Shades of Grey: the bad, the worse, and the just plain perplexing. WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!

This has been up for a couple of days, but I'm terribly proud of it. Myself and the magnificent Betty Mars rip Fifty Shades of Grey to pieces.

I got blazed and watched that movie for you. FOR YOU. Enjoy the fruits of my labor.

[bastardkeith]

When I couldn’t sleep one cold night alone in upstate New York, I decided to see what was on cable. Ender’s Game, long since consigned to the failed YA-adaptation scrap heap, was halfway done on HBO and I decided to have a look. I had one of my favorite movie-watching feelings: THIS LARGELY DISMISSED FILM IS ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD. As soon as it was over, I went to the On Demand channel and started it from the beginning.

Ender’s Game is, indeed, a worthwhile, haunting piece of work. The trailers were the main reason I avoided it in theaters and in highlighting the space battle aspects, they failed utterly to sell what the film was up to: it’s a really freaky, sorrowful portrayal of a potentially proto-fascist youth. It’s Starship Troopers without the smirk.

Orson Scott Card would, no doubt, say that Ender is a hero. His focus is intention over impact. As far as he’s concerned Ender’s hands and soul are clean after committing acts of escalating atrocity. Gavin Hood, the director of the film version, seems rather more ambivalent about that. It’s a better approach and one that, even as it streamlines and simplifies the book’s plot, pokes at its more troubling undercurrents. Most YA adaptions take a pretty simplistic hero’s journey approach: authority is bad, freedom is good, love is rebellion. Ender locates something richer and more awful in its now-standard tropes. What if authority is right? At what point can we no longer bring commonly held morality to bear on our actions? Assuming only children are pliable enough to turn into perfect warriors, do we even deserve to survive the war? Can we forgive the bringers of destruction if they don't know they're bringing it? Should we? There are no solid answers, and Hood is in no rush to make us feel better about that.

The film is made with more care and craft than a lot of the movies it was meant to compete with, its pacing furious and its visuals geometric and precise. The performances are all suitable and sometimes more; Asa Butterfield is a superbly unnerving Ender and Harrison Ford goes deeper and queasier than he has in a long time. It distinguishes itself not through spectacle or action (though there are plenty of both), but through a tight, disciplined thematic focus. Ender’s Game may have pissed off the purists and been ignored by the rest, but it’s uncommonly grave and absorbing. If you enjoy filmed sci-fi you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.

I found myself quiet and thoughtful afterwards. Plenty of people, I’m sure, do not like to feel that way after a movie. I really do.

[bastardkeith]

Kingsman: The Secret Service is one of those movies where every few minutes you feel like looking around and asking the rest of the audience, “DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT?!” It’s such a headspinning orgy of jokes (subtle and less so) and violence (not subtle in the slightest) that I’m astonished it made it past the ratings board in this condition. This is the culmination of everything Matthew Vaughan has achieved in his career thus far: the London tang of Layer Cake, the pure fantasy of Stardust, the madcap brutality of Kick Ass and the superhero myth-making of X Men: First Class.

It is a joy to watch.

The story is boy’s own adventure at its most distilled. Delinquent youth Eggsy (Taron Egerton, an absolute natural) finds a way out of his impoverished lot when he’s dragged into training for potential membership in a top secret non-government spy organization. There are girls, gadgets, cars, a bit with a dog, and a pretty bonkers villain (Samuel L. Jackson, who does us the favor of having an indecent amount of fun). We also learn how to make a decent martini.

The acting is aces all around, but Colin Firth can safely include this on his Lifetime Achievement reel. If you ever wanted to see Mr. Darcy waste a fuckton of goons with maximum style, here you go. Firth gives a performance of rare suavity, wryness and physicality. Without him, the entire enterprise might veer a little too close to parody. His every moment on screen is a giddy celebration of that most British of creatures: the gentleman spy. Kingsman is too smart to rest its ambitions purely on Bond pastiche, though. It’s no mistake that Firth looks exactly like Harry Palmer (and the presence of Michael Caine makes it overt).

Vaughan still has his rough edges (his use of CGI has always been a little obvious and patchy), but one senses that the rough edges are what makes his work his own. A more disciplined director wouldn’t let his fight scenes spiral out of control the way Vaughan does here, but then we wouldn’t have one of the most audaciously funny-scary setpieces in recent action: an endless, chaotic bloodbath in a Westboro-style church that encompasses nearly every single kind of dismemberment. That scene is hardly the only one that draws a line in the sand. Kingsman seems designed as a series of escalating dares, Vaughan smirking behind the camera, as amazed as we are that he’s allowed to get away with this.

What he’s getting away with is a little bit slippery, because the film’s politics are as tricky as anything. The villain’s plot is a cartoon lefty conspiracy, but the film argues that climate change is real (and any right-winger laughing their heads off at Barack Obama being in on the plan should find themselves indicted and sickened at the church sequence). It’s all very white and male and luxury-porny, but the film actively sneers at plutocracy and its continued insistence that poor people just lack the will to succeed. The two notable characters of color are both villains, but they’re incredibly cool, their motivations are pretty understandable, and *SPOILER* when Jackson bites it, the film allows him to enjoy it *END SPOILER*. The gender dynamics could be read as simple unthinking sexism or as a wild caricature of James Bond-ian misogyny. Maybe the distinction doesn’t matter; when Eggsy cheekily demands a kiss in return for freeing an imprisoned woman, she enthusiastically suggests that if he saves the world, they should “do it in the asshole.”

Perhaps puzzling out what it all means is a mug’s game. Vaughan appears to have simply taken several decades of spy tropes, mashed them into a t-shirt cannon and blasted away. Kingsman has a heedless pace, bravura action direction, bottomless reserves of energy and cheer, an understanding of the importance of good scotch and tailoring, a nasty way with a joke, a climactic disco fight with leg swords, and something to offend just about everyone.

Jolly good.

[bastardkeith]

I have writer's block today.

I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today. I have writer's block today.

That's all you get.

[bastardkeith]

The Music Man fucking rules. It's like shooting up between your toes with unicorn jizz and fucking candy corn. It's awesome.

Tonight and tomorrow I go up in front of several hundred people in a town not my own (information here), and every time I do it, I think of Professor Harold Hill, the silvertongued fiend and romantic. When it comes to show business, after all, romance is an act of salesmanship, and selling is an act of romance. My job isn't to amuse you; it's to charm you so hard that you don't even notice that what we're engaged in is a transaction.

When audiences talk about getting their money's worth, I always think it a bit of a shame. I've done it, too. It reduces our experience to quantifiable enjoyment units per dollar. A really great entertainment experience erases the thought of transaction entirely. You're just there, levitating. It's a lie, but it's a really beautiful one.

The best thing about Harold Hill is that his con, in the end, isn't a con. Even if he's full of shit, he brings people joy, excitement and a touch of the sublime. That's a pretty good deal.

Anyway, attached is a video of Robert Preston charming your fucking dicks off.

[bastardkeith]

I do love a good car chase. And there are few car chases as utterly pleasurable as the one that climaxes The Blues Brothers.

I'm in Chicago for Valentines weekend, hosting the Big Sexy Show for the great Michelle L'Amour (you can get tickets here). Whenever I'm here, I think of John Landis' spectacularly grimy vision of the place. It feels almost dystopian.

The music is amazing, the performances iconic, and the mayhem almost ludicrously enormous. But most important of all is the cold pulse of Sweet Home Chicago. That's where it all starts.