June 2014 - Page 2 of 2 - Mary Dalton On Media

Murder in the First

June 11, 2014

Steven Bochco is back.

Best known as the creative force behind NYPD Blue, LA Law, and Hill Street Blues (I like those) as well as Doogie Howser, M.D. (which I did not really watch) and other, sometimes experimental, television series, Bochco’s latest show premiered on TNT last night.

Similarly to the 1995-97 series Murder One (some critical success but it didn’t catch on), Murder in the First follows a single case over ten episodes starting with detectives played by Taye Diggs and Kathleen Robertson launching a murder investigation.

I like it enough to keep watching for now. It’s nice to have a new show that is interesting enough to follow and see if it takes off.

Harry Potter fans may enjoy seeing Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) as a tech start-up wunderkind. He’s mean, but is he a murderer?

Time will tell…

Inside Out

June 11, 2014

Why did it take me so long to write about the 2014 Toronto Inside Out LGBT Film Festival?

I don’t know except that the whole experience was so uniformly pleasant that it was a little overwhelming. That’s great…and it doesn’t happen very often.

I was in Toronto for the first four days of the festival. It was a long weekend filled with seeing terrific films, making new friends, and going to lots of parties.

Saga Becker (Something Must Break) and I became fast friends from the time we met at the airport. She is wonderful in her film debut playing a transgender character riding the emotional rollercoaster of young love. She is smart and funny and beautiful, and I wondered from time to time if hanging out with me might have cramped her style since I’m a bit of a mother figure for my students and other people Saga’s age (she’s within two years of my own son). I think we’ll see more from her…what a talent.

Films I particularly enjoyed include the opening night film The Way He Looks. It is tender, sweet, charming, and I highly recommend that you seek out this Brazilian film about a blind teenager coming of age and seeking independence and love. Some may call this a “safe” film, but that means that it will appeal to a wide audience.

The Normal Heart was previewed at the festival, and you can check this film out now on HBO. A bit stagey at times (the film is an adaptation of Larry Kramer’s Tony Award-winning play), Mark Ruffalo is excellent (when isn’t he?) as an AIDS activist in the early days of the plague, and Matt Bomer (who was at the festival) is very good in the role of his lover.

The screening of Living in the Overlap, which I co-directed with Cindy Hill, exceeded my expectations. Actually, I try not to have expectations because it’s best just to experience things and see what happens, but it can be hard to tamp down latent hopes. It started with a stroll down the pink carpet (trust me, the carpet underneath my feet is pink!), and meeting Alison Duke (pictured below), a member of the Inside Out Board of Directors who introduced the film and moderated the Q & A.

The response from the audience was overwhelming and affirming. I can’t tell you how many times I heard “Thank you for your film” and “You have told our story” over the next two days. Learning at the end of the festival that Living in the Overlap won the Audience Award for Best Short Film (an award voted on by viewers who fill out ballots) is a huge honor. I’m smiling just writing those words.

I enjoyed seeing the Canadian premiere of Tru Love, a film by Kate Johnston and Shauna MacDonald (who also stars in the film). The film is unexpectedly soft visually – not in terms of literal focus but in terms of its lushness – which is appealing and imbues the film with a tenderness that spills over into the overall emotional tone even when characters face disappointment, complex entanglements, and loss. It’s always good to see older characters find passion and love; this is an underrepresented area in film along with lesbian love stories. Tru Love is clearly a passion project for the filmmakers, one that also resonates with viewers because it won the Audience Award for Best Feature Film at the festival.

I had a blast hanging out with J.C. Calciano (see previous post about his film The 10 Year Plan, which is coming to OUT at the Movies Winston-Salem later this week) at the filmmakers brunch and at a small dinner with festival staff and Judy and Dennis Shephard, who were attending to promote the documentary Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine. It was at that dinner that I got to know the Festival Executive Director Scott Ferguson better. What a lovely, lovely man.

I can’t overstate the wonderfulness of the festival staff, and Guest Relations Coordinator Lou Pellegrino treated filmmakers like royalty.

Another highlight of the festival was seeing the re-launch of Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives, a classic Canadian documentary from 1992 that has been remastered in HD and is now available on DVD from the National Film Board of Canada. The panel after the screening included co-director Lynne Fernie (who had directed me to a good yarn store shortly after I arrived in Toronto) and writer B. Ruby Rich. Wow.

I wish I could have seen all of the films. Some are available for you to see now or soon – the superb documentary The Case Against 8, which screened at RiverRun, is coming up on HBO – but others may be more difficult to find. This serves as a reminder why it’s so important to support your local film festival: to see good films that won’t be available otherwise.

Next up for Living in the Overlap: Frameline38 on May 22 in San Francisco and the Provincetown International Film Festival in Massachusetts on May 18 and 21.

If you are interested in seeing a trailer for the film, check out www.lennieandpearl.com , we post regular updates on the Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/livingintheoverlap , and you can follow us on Twitter @LITO_themovie .

Also, I’ll keep you posted here occasionally!

Thank you, again, for letting us come into your lives Lennie Gerber and Pearl Berlin. Your powerful story of love matters to a great many people.

CHEF

June 10, 2014

Chef is a film I can take my mother to see, and we both enjoy the experience. There aren’t so many of those in the marketplace, fewer than there should be, so this is a recommendation.

Sometimes, you just want to see a pleasant, little, well-crafted film. No razzle dazzle. No unconventional story structure. Not too much emotional engagement. Really, sometimes a little escapism of the ordinary sort is just the ticket.

Jon Favreau writes, directs, and stars in this film about a chef, Carl Casper, who loses his way in a fancy LA restaurant and finds it again on a food truck. He finds a few other important things there, too.

Chef boasts a good cast (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Dustin Hoffman, Scarlett Johansson, Sophia Vergara, Oliver Platt, Robert Downey, Jr., and the adorable Emjay Anthony as Carl’s son).

Make that an especially good cast. And, the performances go a long way toward propelling a film that might otherwise be a bit slight.

Although, is there anything sexier than a man who knows his way around the kitchen and exhibits (eventually) a passion for life?

Maybe my next boyfriend will be a chef? Nah, I don’t think I could handle the hours…though there could be other fringe benefits…I do love watching Carl Casper cook in this film.

You might, too.

I Know…

June 10, 2014

…I need to write about The Fault In Our Stars, but I’m still parsing inside my head what I want to say. I’ll get there…

MALEFICENT

June 9, 2014

The thing I love most about Maleficent is not that Angelina Jolie was born to play this role (she was), that the production design and effects are spectacular (they are), or that the story is fresh (it is), but that the film shows a balance of masculine and feminine that shows a clear way forward to resolve some of the tensions of the “battle between the sexes” that continue to drag us down.

Ostensibly a re-visioning of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale from the perspective of the villain, Maleficent is much smarter and more nuanced than that. We see Maleficent as a girl and learn why she puts the curse on baby Aurora that she will prick her finger on the needle of a spinning wheel and die on her 16th birthday. Frankly, we sympathize with her.

By presenting Maleficent’s back-story, complete with two horrific sequences of male violence with unavoidable parallels to rape culture, the character is multi-layered in a way that is seldom seen in popular culture. She fully embraces both her feminine and masculine traits in a way that contrasts markedly with the oppressive and corrupt patriarchy that tries to destroy her.

The key to understanding why Maleficent appeals to me so much is not that it is a feminist tale, though it can be read that way, but that the eponymous character finds a balance between the masculine and the feminine. Even her name carries both traits in equal syllables (my friend Karen who went with me to see the movie pointed this out).

Maleficent is gentle and maternal and loving and trusting and fearless and strong and vengeful and athletic and smart and playful and more. She can also be cruel but not for very long. With the exception of cruelty and vengeance, which is best avoided by all sexes (yes, I said all instead of both to account for intersexes), why can’t each of us be all of those things if we want to and it feels natural?

We don’t need a patriarchy or a matriarchy but a balance of masculine and feminine energy. When the patriarchy tries to contain the extraordinary energy that is Maleficent and she repeatedly overcomes the butchery and the burning snares, it is thrilling to see her soar.

I want to see it again…

THE 10 YEAR PLAN

June 9, 2014

I had the opportunity to hang out with writer-director J. C. Calciano (eCupid and Is It Just Me?) at Inside Out LGBT Film Festival in Toronto last month where his latest feature, The 10 Year Plan, was screened. It’s the story of best friends who make a pact to get together if they are both single in ten year’s time.

Despite his lack of enthusiasm for my knitting (which came up in conversation at a social gathering), we became friends and had the opportunity to chat several times. He’s funny, passionate about making his own films, and manages to make independent features in an extremely competitive environment.

J.C. has a penchant for the romantic comedy. Are they formulaic? Rare is the romantic comedy that is not, but he tells contemporary love stories gay men looking for love, which is a bit of an inversion of the typical storyline.

In advance of the screening of The 10 Year Plan on Saturday, June 14 at 6 p.m. at UNCSA’s ACE Theatre Complex in the OUT at the Movies of Winston-Salem series, I decided to ask J.C. a few questions.

1. Your films suggest that you believe in true love. Would you describe yourself as an incurable romantic?

Yes, I’d consider myself a romantic. I believe that loving yourself is essential in finding happiness. There is a lot of pain and difficulty in the world. Being happy with who you are, having great supportive friends, and if you are fortunate enough, a partner to love (who loves you back) are wonderful gifts.

2. The film business is brutal. What have been your biggest challenges as an independent filmmaker in getting your three features made and distributed?

The biggest challenge I’ve faced is money. With online piracy, people aren’t paying for the movies. I don’t think people realize that by sharing a film online, the community suffers. With no revenue going to filmmakers and their distributors then LGBT films can’t be made and our stories can’t be told. People want to see gay movies, but without buying or renting these films, they will cease to exist. Filmmakers like me have to make movies for practically no money – that’s our biggest challenge.

3. Your films tend to feature the young and gorgeous in leading roles. Any plans to mix it up in future projects, or should we expect a heavy diet of eye candy?

Yes, I have quite a few storylines about older characters and I definitely plan on making films about different types of men. So far, my films have been about young love, hence the actors in the twenties/early thirties, but I am working on several stories about guys in their 40s and above. As far as the actors being “gorgeous”… when I cast a film, I look for the best actors I could find. Talent always comes first – looks second.

4. What question didn’t I ask you that you wish I would have posed?

I want to talk about the secret to making a good film. I think the success of a film belongs to two people: the screenwriter and the talent. The story is the most important part of the film. Second is the believably of the actors. An audience will forgive bad camera-work, poor sound and shoddy lighting, but if you give them a thin storyline that is poorly acted, they will hate your movie.

PALO ALTO

June 5, 2014

There are very few films that evoke the intense emotions of teenage life with as much authenticity as Gia Coppola’s debut film, Palo Alto.

Watching it, I thought of films like Elephant, Paranoid Park, Thirteen, and The Perks of Being A Wallflower. Each of these movies creates an adolescent world filled with all the things we remember when we try hard enough – fears, raging hormones, boredom, the feeling of not being quite good enough in a myriad of ways, the sense that things could be or might become better if something falls into place or enough time passes, and every now and then glimmers of joy.

Coppola (niece of Sophia and granddaughter of Francis) adapted the screenplay from several short stories included in James Franco’s 2010 collection of the same name. Franco chose Coppola to make the film because he thought a younger vision (the writer-director is 27) would bring a fresh perspective and attract a new audience to his work.

To prepare for the project, she watched a lot of teenage stories. “More recent teenage fare, whether it’s TV or movies, features what is clearly 25-year-old actors with perfect hair, skin, makeup and clothes who aren’t styled in a way actual teenagers dress,” Coppola explains in press materials. “I wanted to see a movie that felt real to me featuring teenagers who are 17 and whose costumes consist of their own clothes, or clothes borrowed from friends. I wanted Palo Alto to feel both modern and timeless.”

Coppola hits the mark.

The film has five main characters, four high school students and a teacher. Emma Roberts is the emotional center of the film, and she gives a performance as a quiet, smart, yet popular student, April, a performance that slowly draws the viewer into the film then repeatedly raises the stakes. She transcends all of the stereotypes common to teenage films and is a bookish and athletic introvert.

April is drawn to Teddy (Jack Kilmer – son of Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley in his debut acting role), a sweet artist who always seems on the edge of trouble, much of it because of his unpredictable and destructive friend Fred (Nat Wolff), who gives an explosive performance. Seeing Fred hook up with Chrissy (Olivia Orocicchia), the girl in their school who uses sex to try to connect emotionally with boys, would feel clichéd if less skillfully rendered in the film.

A portion of my scholarly writing (The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies and Teacher TV: Sixty Years of Teachers on Television, the latter co-authored with Laura R. Linder) has been devoted to representations of teachers in popular culture. Seeing James Franco as Mr. B, a soccer coach, teacher, and single dad who manipulates the high school students who play on his team and babysit for him, gives me something new to write about in this vein: the predatory teacher. Palo Alto is rich territory for me in its depiction of this “bad” teacher and the social landscape of high school.

For these reasons, I think Palo Alto is an important film, but it’s also a satisfying film for viewers without my specialized interests. In turn tender and terrifying, the movie is never predictable and doesn’t strike a false note.

I relish its leisurely pacing as an unfolding that reminds me how I marked time back in high school with more than a touch of hurry up and wait embedded into each day with classes and homework and extracurricular activities interrupted occasionally by a conversation with a cute boy or even a date. The episodic nature of the scenes featuring the various characters is joined nicely by a plot that brings everything together by the end of the film in as much of a resolution as high school can really offer without dissolving into formula, and we would not want that.

This is an auspicious debut for Gia Coppola, a promising new talent.

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

June 5, 2014

I just wanted it to be funnier. More jokes. A bit smarter. A little faster pace. That would have improved A Million Ways To Die In The West.

There have been headlines here and there about the perils of a vanity picture and Seth MacFarlane’s lack of appeal as a leading man. That all sounds a little snippy to me.

I find MacFarlane appealing enough as a cowardly sheep farmer who falls for a gunslinger’s wife (Charlize Theron) and eventually has to stand up to the bad buy (Liam Neeson) on the dusty street in the type of scene common to the genre.

As a Western parody, those types of situations are essentially a requirement.

The funniest parts of the movie belong to Sarah Silverman who plays a prostitute servicing up to 15 men a day who doesn’t have sex with boyfriend, Giovanni Ribisi, because they aren’t married. They are terrific together.

Amanda Seyfried and Neil Patrick Harris also have some good moments as the girl MacFarlane thinks he wants back and the shallow and annoying man she substitutes for the farmer. Why are moustaches so funny? I don’t know, but they certainly can be.

We all know Neeson can play the strong, craggy, flawed man, and here he gets to go a bit further into the territory of the truly unlikeable. It works.

The best thing in the film, by far, is Charlize Theron. More than a luminous beauty, she is a rare talent. And, the scenes she plays with MacFarlane have a sweet playfulness that blows up into something approaching chemistry.

But, it needs more jokes…

BELLE

June 5, 2014

We wanted to like it. The preview trailers had seemed promising. So much was right with the equation: period passion, actors with long track records, and social justice.

Why did it have to be so plodding?

The logline for Belle sums it up: “An illegitimate mixed race daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral is raised by her aristocratic great-uncle.” There is a little more…but there should have been so very much more…or less. The story should have been more robust within the same amount of time, or perhaps trimming twenty or thirty minutes of the film would have revitalized it.

It’s always a joy to see Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, and Penelope Wilton, and the younger set of actors offer some compelling screen moments, too, but my friend Allison and I couldn’t help but share one unlikely but sort of funny take away.

In some weird way, Belle reminds me of the most recent season of the ABC series Scandal (and Allison didn’t disagree). Just as this season used an endless series of closeups of Olivia (Kerry Washington) looking mostly sad or bemused or wistful to mask her advancing pregnancy, Belle offers a series of closeups of Gugu Mbatha-Raw looking equally vulnerable.

What is it with these eponymous characters who are each contextually bold and bright if not fearless but visually defenseless? Talk about a scenario that promotes cognitive dissonance! And, the result despite their principled stands, smarts, and degrees of privilege is to render both women impotent on some level.

Not to mention that the static images, in these two cases, can make for plodding narratives. Maybe things will pick up next season on Scandal, but that’s not an option for Belle. If you’re a sucker for English period drama, then you will enjoy the costumes and locations, but be prepared for pacing problems quite separate from the period.

The Bechdel Test Rules

June 5, 2014

Do you know about The Bechdel Test? I talk about it in my media studies classes a great deal. It’s a handy (and disturbing) measure of how many (and, actually, how few) movies feature women characters in substantive roles.

This is a great post that will give you some background on The Bechdel Test and a rationale for why it is so relevant.

Charlie Jane Anders on the importance of The Bechdel Test.

Aren’t you glad you read that?