Video Girl (2011): The Formula of Faith

Video Girl (2011)
dir: Ty Hodges

Chick Tracts were once a common part of the Baptist experience. They told formulaic stories of people losing themselves and finding salvation in Christ. The formulas were passed down through the annals of time, and constantly updated to reflect the changing times.

One of the most common ones was a person from the small town going to the big city and losing themselves in sin before finding salvation back at home. This formula has been adapted through the ages, including Valley of the Dolls, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Mahogany, and now Video Girl. All of these movies are adaptations of the same basic formula through the ages, and only one is a satire.

The title character is Lorie, a young adult girl from Small Town Anywhere. Lorie is a mousy fragile student who works in an antique shop and is besties with Jason, a young handsome man who wants to make it to the NBA, despite not getting a college scholarship. Lorie has taken a break from college following a car accident that happened one party night. The car accident shattered her knee and her dreams of being a ballet dancer.

While out dancing with her sister, Lorie finds the attraction of the music video director, Shark (no, I'm not kidding), and is personally invited to be in the video he is shooting the next day. At the behest of her outgoing sister, she goes to the set and becomes a featured "video girl," as in the model who stands next to the rapper and does nothing but gyrate, getting paid $800 for the effort.

Shark then invites Lorie out to LA to be his girlfriend and personal video girl, but doesn't want her to have a career outside his own, making her a kept woman. After interactions with other more independent video girls, Lorie develops a coke habit, fights for her own dependence, becomes a wreck on the set, becomes just another video girl and has an encounter with the "director's couch" before ultimately ending up drugged and passed out next to a dumpster. After a stay at the hospital, Lorie returns home to find Jesus and peace with her mind.

Just to hammer home the idea that video girls are all shallow pieces of crap that need to be saved, Ty Hodges finishes the film with a during credits reel of interviews with other video girls who start to comment on other girls and how they're better than everybody else. You know, because a video girl may watch this, and be saved to find peace back home among family. Never you mind any of their back stories.

What this movie has in adapting for the times, it lacks in subtlety and quality. While Ty Hodges fills the frame with beautiful people, including Haylie Duff (sister of Hilary) and Dolce & Gabbana model Adam Senn, they're all merely competent as actors. The acting is the quality of a small community church play warning about the evils of the big city. Coming off worse is the central actress Meagan Good, whose transition from innocent fearful broken girl to coke-addicted ego-driven delusional semi-success is wracked with overacting that doesn't even go over the top enough for hilarity.

The problem with writing about Video Girl is that it is like kicking a puppy when it's down, except when you realize just how corrupt the vision in this movie is. Video Girl warns that Los Angeles will eat most small town girls alive, and that it will turn you into your most immoral self if you don't have a penis. Not one of the success stories in Video Girl is a woman. And, women can't help themselves. They will be turned into party girls by their friends.

Men, however, can be rappers or directors or producers or basketball stars (Jason eventually lands a position with the LA Clippers), and they will not kowtow to the corrupting nature of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the only successful woman is Nana, the hardworking teacher in a small town who has no ambitions to be anything bigger than a teacher. She doesn't dream anything but for her grandchildren, after their mother died somehow. Lorie's sister dies for her boyfriend's sins. Lorie becomes a drug-addicted broken woman who can be saved. The video girls are all shallow objects. And, even the radio host is a corrupting force who objectifies Lorie before she falls prey to the nature of LA.

The other moral that this movie doesn't want you to notice is that there are people who are successful in Los Angeles who aren't completely horrible terrible people. You don't actually have to fall prey to all of the various temptations that the new Babylon holds for good small town Christians like the viewers. But, we're supposed to think that Shark is an evil person because he hangs with a girl that he hung with when Lorie first met him 90 minutes earlier (though he spends the rest of the movie bashing her and her reputation). We're supposed to think all of LA is like the rapist producer who will slip you GHB just to get into your pants, and everybody there is corrupt. Unless you're a basketball star, because they're always honorable.

Video Girl is a deceptive film that is meant to be soothing to those who believe it. It is preaching to the choir, but it's low budget trappings (such as an over-dependence on handheld) and bad acting undermine any impact the movie actually has to the people who aren't already pre-disposed to hate on Los Angeles. It's totally judgey, really sexist, and overly silly. But, there aren't enough transgressively hilarious moments for Video Girl to stand up next to the likes of Mahogany. Not to mention, unlike Mahogany, Video Girl doesn't give Lorie any success to look up to, and instead says the best a black girl can attain is kept woman or an all-too-low-paid schoolteacher (they do need to be paid more). Which is a really really sad statement.

Violet & Daisy (2011): The Art of Stealing

Violet & Daisy (2011)
dir:  Geoffrey Fletcher

Violet & Daisy can be summed up in one sentence. Violet and Daisy is what happens when a gay black man makes a female-driven version of a Quentin Tarantino film on a low budget. And, it's not terrible.

Geoffrey Fletcher is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" By Sapphire, and is also the writer and director of Violet and Daisy, a throwback movie to the post-Pulp Fiction '90s and the pulp noir atmosphere that Pulp Fiction threw itself back to. He, apparently, decided that the time was right to attempt a reconstruction of one of the most iconic films on even less of a budget.

Violet and Daisy are a pair of young female contract killers who are contracted to kill Michael (James Gandolfini), who stole a truck from their boss. And, when they get there, Michael wants to be killed and that turns the whole movie on its head.

This is no ordinary post-Tarantino film, however. Fletcher is knowingly recalling Tarantino's Pulp Fiction steps, as he crafted Violet & Daisy by cutting Pulp Fiction to shreds and reconstructing it in some sort of nouveau pastiche. For what effort, I'm not sure as Violet & Daisy seems to be wanting to talk to Pulp Fiction but without knowing what it wants to say.

Fletcher opens his movie with Violet and Daisy dressed in nun costumes telling a bestiality joke while walking to a door. Then, they knock on the door, shoot up the place, then finish their conversation about the joke as they change clothes and walk past the cops. Its a scene that echoes the second scene of Pulp Fiction where Vincent and Jules have conversations about foot massages, Vincent Marsallis's wife, and McDonald's menus in foreign countries. But, what is unclear is why Fletcher lifts such an iconic scene wholesale, other than to suggest that this is the way he would prefer Pulp Fiction to be played out.

Perhaps that is what Fletcher is trying to accomplish with Violet & Daisy. Maybe he really doesn't like the emptiness of Pulp Fiction and is constantly critiquing it by being emptier than it, and also setting scenes right.

Another technique that Fletcher lifts from Tarantino (and also Clerks) are chapter divides. He numbered sections of the film 1-10, giving each section its own cute title, like Violet's Odyssey or Death's Door. The numbers are straightforward 1-10, like chapters in a novel. But, why Fletcher steals this from the same director is unclear.

Fletcher plays with time and information, like Reservoir Dogs constantly recalling things from the past, or even giving more details to scenes that he purposefully cut short not 10 minutes earlier. But, Fletcher's cutting around of scenes are without purpose other than to emphasize how purposeless this technique is to him. One such example is when they run out of bullets because Michael had moved from his chair when they emptied their guns into where they thought he would be. Violet goes to get bullets from the hardware store, but then the store is held up and the clerk shot dead...end scene. Later, we find out that Violet confused the robbers until the cops got there and it all ended in a bloodbath. Why? We don't care. It's just another part of the story.

Fletcher even steals Tarantino's obsessions with his fictional celebrity creations (K-Billy, Jungle Julie) by creating Barbie Sunday, some sort of pop singer that also has a clothing line for Violet and Daisy to obsess over. The creation of Barbie Sunday, as well as the shallowness of the name do nothing but emphasize how empty Fletcher thinks Tarantino's creations are.

By making Tarantino's testosterone-laden hitmen into young teenage girls, Fletcher is also making a comment on not only the frivolousness of Tarantino's characters, but also their masculinity. Fletcher allows Violet and Daisy to remain young girls throughout, and shows them enjoying cookies (made by Michael), playing patty cake, and desiring dresses and fixing elements of the past. In a more surreal moment, they also do things like jump on dead bodies in order to make the blood come out.

So, is Violet & Daisy merely Fletcher doing a really good read on Quentin Tarantino? Or, is he merely stealing whole heartedly? It's really unclear. At times, Violet & Daisy seems like a critique like the above, and at other times, it delves into surreal Precious fantasy moments, and at others, it seems like a genuine movie. The rapidly shifting tonality of Violet & Daisy either points to Fletcher not knowing his own material, or possible not thinking past the film as more than just a critique.

The problem with Violet & Daisy, for me at least, is that I'm not sure what Violet & Daisy without prior knowledge of Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction is a film that is in the American consciousness in a way most movies aren't. And, I can't wrap my head around Violet & Daisy without also including Pulp Fiction in the scenario. Would it stand up on its own? Probably not. It's shallow and silly full of digressive scenes that lead nowhere and have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. One of the best things about Pulp Fiction was that everything tied into everything else. All the digressions led to something important. Violet & Daisy just has the digressions be digressive.

Regardless (or because) of its rip off nature, Violet & Daisy can be a strangely entertaining movie attempting to make a Pulp Fiction for females. I can't say if you're sick of formula movies, try this one because it's like something you've seen before, but it is different than what normally is sold. It's only worth a watch if you really like the post-Pulp Fiction knockoff genre.

General Orders No 9 (2011): A General Lament

Actual V.O.: My buns are vexed, and my soul is pure trouble.

General Orders No 9 (2011)
dir: Robert Persons

"This is some pretentious shit here." - Robert Persons

Take the -Qatsi trilogy. Now remove Philip Glass, and replace him with looooong droning chords. Now remove the global view and localize it to Georgia.  Add in some ruin porn and After Effects filters. And add in a really basic gravelly voice over that acts like a depressed lament for the past, present, and future by a semi-coherent luddite (think Terrance Malick but stupid). Now you have an idea of what General Order No 9 is as an experience.

General Order No 9 is a semi-gorgeous documentary about the progress in Georgia, and how terrible it is for everything. Not that anything was perfect before. There had been war and fires. Generally, progress sucks. Why can't we just live in our log cabins and forget that anybody else exists? Why can't we get back to nature? Look at these random objects I found. Like a railroad tie. Or a fly. Or a plastic die. Yes, I know the plastic die is the result of progress. Yes, I know it wouldn't have existed without cities. But, you're missing the point. Everything is shit.

Look at this nature. This used to be a deer trail. Then it became an Indian trail (dude...Native Americans, please). Then it became a county road. Man, it was good when it was a deer trail. And then there's this house which looks like it burned down. And there's a library full of books that never got cleaned up. This must have been awesome. Maybe it was Sherman that burned down this random-ass building in the middle of the forest. Or, perhaps by accident.

But, look at this small town. It used to be the center of it all. By "it all," of course, I mean Georgia. Because, really, isn't Georgia the center of the universe? There was a bell tower and a weather vane. There were perfect roads that went in cardinal directions. Everything was built around it. Wasn't that great? No cows ever escaped the farms. Too bad it turned to shit.

Progress really screwed things over. Look at these soulless buildings. Man, it really sucks here. Why can't we all spread out and return to nature? Why are we all so sprawling. I mean, it can't be because people keep having multiple kids can it? We don't need to put them anywhere, do we? Bah. Anyways, there's a freeway now too. But, it was made to bypass nature. Here's a Waffle House. Don't those places suck?

The present sucks. It's too crowded and we forgot who we are. But, the past sucked too. When we pushed out the Native Americans. I think that sucked. Well, at least it sucked for them. But, let's not dwell on them too much lest we get even more depressed that we took the land over from them. And then there was war. People burned down our shit. Yeah, sure, we started the war and it was about owning people, but look at what it did to the nature. You fuckers!

I guess I'm just depressed. I don't know what I want. Maybe I just want to go off the grid. But, I like progress too much. Aren't movie theaters soulless now? Why am I making movies? Maybe I'm a bit shiftless myself. I always have been. But, I don't know what to do. I don't want to work in a boring office building of droning CGI white walls. That would suck. It's not an exit.

What do I do? How do I end this? I guess it's over. Fin.

Night Vision (2011): Crazy Canadian Women

Night Vision (2011)
dir: Nathaniel Warsh

"This has the bacony stink of Canada all over it." - Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Final Sacrifice

This is one of those amateur terrible films that is so much less compelling that you expect. It's a low-budget film from writer and director Nataniel Warsh about a reality-show tv producer who ends up being kidnapped by a crazy woman for a reality web series by his jealous friend. The main purported thrust of the film is "don't be an asshole." But, by the end, it's "crazy bitches are crazy."

Spencer is the womanizing hotshot tv producer who is an asshole to his friends and everybody else. How do we know he's an asshole? His greasy, shoulder-length hair. Oh, and he ignores his friend who is trying to pitch him a new television show idea, and won't take No for an answer. Oh, and he lets women molest him in his limo.

One night, Spencer finds a strange woman in his driveway, and invites her in for a round of videotaped hot fucking before unceremoniously kicking her out into the night. But, she somehow takes the tape without him noticing, works her way back into the house, and ties him up before exposing him as the asshole he is. Later, we all find out that this is under the guise of a stupid web reality series focusing on destroying people from the earlier friend. The girl had been phone fucking Spencer, causing Spencer to change his number, before she was hired by the friend to be the psychotic kidnapper. In the end, the girl actually is crazy, kidnapping Spencer and also murdering his friend.

The movie could have been some sort of transgressive screed against the media, if only it were good. Or not nearly as regressive as it actually is. Night Vision could have been in the satirical vein of Series 7: The Contenders, but it takes itself far too seriously, and with no actual returns. The cinematography is soap opera awful, the lighting is soap opera bright, the acting is community theater, the writing is perversely obvious, the continuity problems are LEGION, and the movie is, overall, a chauvinistic exercise in stupidity.

I could go on about how the post-sex cleaning process - where Spencer puts his hair up in a ponytail, brushes his teeth, THEN decides to take a shower - is representative of the ineptitude of the movie. Or, about the post-sex sequence where Spencer's shirt constantly goes from wide-open unbuttoned to 3 buttons up. Or, the his hair magically going from shoulder length and greasy to up in a pony tail on his way from the kitchen to the bathroom. But, that would be shallow and petty.

Instead, it is deeper to talk about Nathaniel Warsh's obvious hatred of women in this movie that doesn't have enough sex or wit to qualify for a Skinemax softcore porno. Warsh has an obvious problem with women and men who have egos. In Night Vision, he created a beta-male fantasy in which he uses the crazy women of his nightmares to exact revenge on the egotistical assholes of his realities. Alison is a crazy deceptive manipulative woman who gets her way with everybody she encounters. She finds sadistic pleasure in torturing Spencer while he's tied up and has severe emotional problems.

I think Warsh thinks he's creating some sort of subversive horror movie where men are the victim, and women get to be the psycho, but the woman is so obviously crazy in such a cliched way that the whole movie comes off as a brotastic bitches b crazy style movie. Instead of subverting the usual cliches that surround the kidnapping horror genre, Warsh falls into every trap that has ever existed for the psycho woman genre.

If the whole purpose of this movie was to show that Warsh could get a job on the set of Days of our Lives, perhaps the movie is a success as its never sub-80s awful. It's merely just terrible. But, the woman hating nature of Night Vision would lead me to be very very cautious about hiring Nathaniel Warsh for any job. It is kind of gross.

Weekend (2011): Normalization of Homosexuality

Weekend (2011)
dir: Andrew Haigh

And so, it's come to this...

This is exactly the type of movie I have been resistant to including in this blog. The only reason to include Weekend is because it is about the homosexual lifestyle. In the most normal, boring, manner that pervades heterosexual movies, Weekend makes a movie about two gay dudes who fall in love over the course of 2 days before one goes off to Oregon for a couple of years.

If this set up sounds familiar, it's because it is the type of time-sensitive plot that has been happening in hetero movies for ages, most obviously in Richard Linklater's Before Midnight.

These two gay guys come together over a weekend, fuck, talk, fuck, talk, go out, do drugs, fuck. They both have their own issues. One is an artist who makes taped recordings of all his conquests as an "art project" though its almost a way to distance himself from his conquests. The other writes about the dudes on his laptop as a way to prove he's living. They both have feelings about coming out and gay marriage and the normalization of gay culture.

And, blah blah blah.

This is a movie for people who like to watch people who act like people do things they could be doing themselves. There isn't any real exploration of relationships here. The comments of the world seem to be a sort of How To Be Gay 101, for people who haven't learned how to work that into their lives yet. Maybe it is made for straight people, in order to shove gay sex romance into their faces and see how they respond. But, as the artist says in the movie, gay people just want to see dick (Tom Cullen never shows his), straight people don't care about gays. And, so, it's just two normal-ish people doing normal things for 12 hours.

I remember when Kids came out, and everybody was all "ZOMG." I saw it, and was like "yeah yeah, blah blah blah. Why wasn't I doing this while watching this movie?" Same for Weekend. My whole feeling coming out of it is "This movie reflects life well enough, but why am I watching it instead of actually going out and hooking up myself?"

I wish it didn't feel so much like Gay Basics class, where the two characters are overexplaining every aspect of gay life. As a gay man, that sort of thing is already covered, and has already been covered, by the coming out genre in the 90s and early 00s. Especially with Beautiful Thing and Get Real, or any number of other gay movies that have come out since then. I have been wanting gay movies about gay lives that aren't so squeaky clean and honest. Weekend doesn't fill that need.

Is it good?  Sure, it's subjectively good. It's well paced, it's gorgeously shot, it has 2 beautiful men having sex, its an honest story, it's well acted. It has a lot going for it. It's just not what I want.

We Were Here (2011): AIDS epidemic, in the personal

We Were Here (2011)
dir: David Weissman

In 1987, Randy Shilts published the landmark book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Shilts' book documented the first five years of the AIDS epidemic in excruciating detail, taking care to make it as personal as it was political, and as intimate as it was broad. And, while Shilts' book has some problems with it, it is as angry, moving, emotional and personal as an AIDS document needs to be.

Since the release of And the Band Played On, there have been AIDS documentaries, and almost every gay documentary about the 80s have dealt with AIDS due to its significance. We Were Here retells the story of And the Band Played On, but on an even more personal level with more of a focus on San Francisco and the Castro district. David Weissman conducts a series of interviews with five survivors, rewinds a little bit, then fires the emotional cannon through the 90s.

Weissman's interviews are well chosen. A nurse who was conducting some of the first clinical trials, an artist who had been leading through community efforts and was one of the first to find out he was poz, a florist, a high profile political activist, and a guy who became an emotional support volunteer. They present the various efforts that came together at the time. Volunteers, community activists, national activists, medical, and the support. The only person missing is the lesbian activist, since they have been the undertold story of support and deserve to have their story interweaved with the gay male story. Alas, they just get lip service in the course of the interviews.

Weissman edits together the interviews in a streaming tale, and includes footage and photos from the 80s and 90s. This ranges from news reports about Kaposi's Sarcoma to showing the pages of the issue of Bay Area Reporter where they dedicated a whole section to just images of the people that were lost to AIDS that year to home videos to the AIDS quilt and candle light vigils.

What makes We Were Here successful is that it consciously walks the same line as Shilts' novel, balancing between the political, the occupational, and the personal. At one point, the interviewees could be talking about the community efforts in San Francisco, and the next struggling to hold it together when they remember the month where one guy lost a good friend, his partner, and then his best friend. The footage used reminds us that this happened to people outside these interviews, and the scale at which it happened.

AIDS hasn't gone away. But, in the media, AIDS has been reduced to "gay diabetes" as one wag reductively put it. Wake up, take a pill cocktail and you're fine. And, the rates of infection are climbing again. The CDC reported that from 2008 to 2010, rates of new infection among homosexual men increased by 12%, from 26,700 to 29,800. New infections. Per year. And, that the majority are among the youth who have seen the effectiveness of the chemical cocktail and have taken less precautions than the older generation who survived with it.

In the past year or so, PrEP has taken hold of the community. So, the uninfected community takes a new drug to prevent infection, akin to women taking birth control. This is a new development, which came around after We Were Here was released. The effectiveness or moral or pharmaceutical implications of this development are not going to be argued here. This is a film review, ostensibly. But, it is a part of the story that is still marching forward.

And, I guess this hits a little close to home this money. Last month, I spent some time in Palm Springs, where I spoke with a guy who had lived through the crisis, and seemed to be haunted by it, and maybe even a little self-destructive still. He's not the only one who has seemed haunted by the AIDS epidemic. In this haunted way, we need to retell the youth about the stories. The initiatives. The action. But, more importantly, the heartache and the loss. While this is just a chapter of the gay community, it continues to reverb 30+ years after it started.

While We Were Here in no way supplants And the Band Played On, it feels like both a Cliffsnotes edition, and a sociological addendum to the book. It feels like the footnotes that should not be dismissed or forgotten. And, since most youth will not read a 650+ page dense as hell book that is almost exclusively loss and rage about disease, We Were Here elevates to new required viewing, even if it doesn't pack the wallop as some of the emotions have been dulled by time.

Required Viewing.

The Moth Diaries (2011): Goes great with black lipstick

The Moth Diaries (2011)
dir: Mary Harron

Remember that girl in high school who shopped at Hot Topic?  The one who wore leggings with bats on them, and used face powder to whiten her skin, with black lipstick to emphasize the depth of her pain. Usually, she's described as mall goth, or kiddie goth.  Her favorite band was Evanescence.  That girl would love the shit out of this movie.

For everybody else, the movie is a crap shoot.

But, really, who else would love a mostly-female retelling of Dracula? Especially one that changes the setting to a girls boarding school and features a bit of girl-on-girl vampire action, as well as male teacher-on-girl action?  The Moth Diaries is such a specific movie with such a specific tonality that it can't help but have a very targeted audience.  If you like wallowing in your broody darkness, this is the movie for you.

The Moth Diaries centers around Rebecca, a girl who lost her father to a wrist-cutting suicide at least two years ago. She returns to her boarding school with her group of friends, which is disrupted by the introduction of a new student, Ernessa.  As the year progresses, Rebecca's friends start getting expelled or dying, and her best friend, Lucy, seems to be falling in love with Ernessa.

Rebecca becomes the lonely outcast in school with a deep fixation on Ernessa, thinking she was a vampire, especially after reading the story Carmilla, which the hottie male English teacher assigned. As she starts getting more desperate and nobody listens to her, it starts almost seeming as if Ernessa barely exists outside her circle of friends.

The Moth Diaries obviously has several parallels to Dracula instead of Carmilla.  But, it does nothing much with any of these parallels.  Everything seems to exist to emphasize the brooding and loneliness that Rebecca feels as she loses her friends.  In emphasizing the broodiness of teenage girls, Mary Harron has created a seemingly compelling painting of the gothiness of some teenage girls. But, other than these heightened emotions, Harron isn't saying anything of substance.

If you just want a mood piece of Dracula gone lesbian, this is made just for you.  If you're looking for anything more than gothic broodiness with little depth, then you'll find The Moth Diaries severely lacking.

The Skin I Live In (2011) and Victim (2010): Adaptations and tonalities

The Skin I Live In (2011)
dir: Pedro Almodovar

Victim (2010)
dir: Matt Eskandari; Michael A. Pierce

One of the challenges of being both a cinephile and a reader is watching an adaptation of a book that you have read.  Some adaptations take the base material as a starting point, and change the plot points at random for what the director would consider a better or more honest experience..  Some adaptations are completely faithful and get the book just right.  Some miss whole points of the book because the book was overstuffed, or the points didn't fit.  Just as there are many way to read a book, there are infinitely more ways to adapt a book.

On Wednesday, I looked at how Mary Harron's adaptation (and promotion) of American Psycho could have missed the underlying points of Bret Easton Ellis' novel, but then wrote about how maybe it didn't due to thematic clues.  There were choices that she made that were antithetical to what a reader may have wanted, especially with the elimination of the extremely violent scenes in order to focus more on the dark humor and social satire of the novel.  In doing so, she may have also been attempting to make it easier to read the layers, if she knew it was there.

Today, I want to look at one book, and how it was adapted by two different filmmakers.  The first film is a Spanish film from acclaimed director Pedro Almodovar, who uses the source material as a starting point to make a very Almodovar film, while also staying true to the messages of the book.  The second film is a low-budget American film which strips the source material to the bone, changes it just enough to not have to pay for rights to the author, and creates a stripped down, streamlined horror film.

The book in question? Thierry Jonquet's Mygale, a very short French novel whose title translates to Tarantula.  The book is a sado-masochistic horror noir thriller black comedy.  It tells a dual story that comes together in the end.  The first story is the sado-masochistic story of Richard, a successful plastic surgeon who has a beautiful mistress, Eve, with whom he resides in a country mansion.  They seem to have a relationship fully based in animosity, and most evenings he takes her out for escorting on severe sado-masochistic adventure, in which she seems totally complicit. Richard also visits his daughter in an asylum who self-mutilates and is on a suicide watch.  The second story is about Alex, a petty thief who wants to get plastic surgery because his face has been recognized.  Alex sets upon kidnapping Eve in order to force Richard into giving him plastic surgery.  Alex is also looking for an old thief pal of his, Vincent, who has been missing for years.  These threads are tied together by a late book reveal of Vincent having raped Richard's daughter, he is kidnapped by Richard and turned into Eve, with full on descriptions of the prolonged torture and transformation process.

Essentially, the novel is a rape-revenge novel (the revenge committed by the family of the victim, in the tradition of The Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left).  Almost all of the horror is committed on a woman who used to be a man who violated a woman.  And, the rest of the horror is on the man who is becoming a woman.  It is a novel completely steeped in gender issues which also makes it clear that everybody is damaged in some form.

The tonality of the book waffles between horror and comedy and drama and Marquis de Sade sex farce. Given the complexity of this novel, and the variety of tonalities that it waffles between, it is easy to see how this book could be adapted wildly, without even completely changing around the elements to make a story of your own.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

While The Skin I Live In was released in 2011, the movie had been announced in 2002 by Almodovar.  This was a passion project of his, who had read the book in the 90s.  It didn't get released stateside until 2004, and then only by a pulp distributor (mind you it is a fantastic novel that I highly highly recommend), so it isn't exactly a widely known novel stateside.  By announcing his film first, and by actually buying the rights to the novel, Almodovar had full license to the book, and was able to keep the elements he wanted, change the elements he needed, and make everything his own.

One of the things one notices when comparing The Skin I Live In to Mygale is that Almodovar completely changes the tonality of the story, while still keeping some of the themes and adding in that flavor of Spanish-fried soap opera melodrama that he has done so well since All About My Mother.  It is just as interesting to note what he throws out and tones down as what he keeps in.

The first thing one notices that Almodovar completely throws out is the sado-masochistic relationship between Vera (Almodovar's Eve) and Robert (the surgeon).  Unlike Mygale, we're introduced to Vera as a forlorn woman in a body suit, who is not specifically trying to piss off everybody.  And, she is kept in her mansion instead of being taken out for abusive sex setups.

Almodovar makes Vera much more of a deeply fragile but tough person. Not somebody who is pointedly resentful of her situation, but is passively playing the long game.  He makes Vera far more feminine than Eve, and even has Vera played by an actress instead of an actor in drag.  Almodovar also has Vincente played by an actor, instead of the same actress as Vera, and also has Vincente possess a bit more femininity in his scenes as Vincente than the other male characters in The Skin I Live In. Almodovar's Vincente is also no longer a thief.  He is a regular missing teenager who had once worked in his mother's dress shop.

Almodovar also severely remade Alex.  Alex becomes Zeca, who is still a thief who needs to have plastic surgery.  Zeca, however is no longer looking for his partner Vincente.  Instead, he is actually the son of Marilla, Richard's maid.  And, Zeca is also Robert's half-brother, though neither of them know that.  Zeca also had an affari with Robert's wife who had been off to be with Zeca when she got into a car wreck killing her.  Didn't I say that Almodovar had wanted his melodramatic elements?

Almodovar spends the opening and closing 40 minutes in the post-surgery present, using the reveal of the history of Vincente's rape and his transformation into Vera for the centerpiece section of the film.  He also plays down the initial torture and brainwashing period required to feminize Vincente in order to focus more on the relationship dramatics of the central "family" of Robert, Vera, and Marilla.  Even Zeca's rape of Vera, and subsequent murder, is mainly an impetus to draw Robert, Vera and Marilla into more honest and intimate relations.

Almodovar's main themes transformed from basic rape/revenge and Stockholm syndrome black pulp into being about change and family ties that bind and strangle.  Marilla is tied to Zeca, even though she doesn't want to be.  She lets him in, but can't kill him.  In turn, he ties her up and gives himself permission to run rampant through the house.  Marilla's ex lover, Zeca's father, was a crazy servant she hasn't seen since the affair.  Robert is completely devoted to both his daughter and wife though they're long gone.  He's also devoted to Marilla who is essentially the only family he has left.

Almodovar is also about change.  Robert changes skin to make it more flame retardant after his experiences with his wife's firey car accident.  Robert has already changed from family man to violent vengeance seeker. Vincente changes into Vera. Robert's daughter changes from socially inept into traumatized victim. Everybody and everything in Almodovar's film is based on what you see and what isn't there and what is changing.  People are watching people change.  Everybody has windows into everybody else's room. The basement operating rooms are defined with glass and clear plastic hangings.  Yet, for all this supposed transparency, secrets are abound, and as people are changing if you can watch close enough.

However, Almodovar also kept the horror of the story.  It utilizes three of the most violating experiences one could survive.  One is the rape of a woman.  Another is the realization that what you did was rape when it seemed to start out as mutual longing.  And the third is the removal of the most basic identity one has: their gender.  But, he buries all this horror in the Almodovar family drama, without losing the themes of gender identity, violation of women, and deep protection and revenge by a father for his daughter.  Using the horrific, but not contentious, elements of Mygale, Almodovar crafted something completely different, and yet based in the same story.  While it is completely unfaithful, in tone, to the novel, it is completely faithful to Almodovar and should be viewed as a separate entity.

Victim (2010)

Except that somebody trainspotted Mygale the year before and made a completely low budget rip-off called Victim, which stripped out 2/3 of the book to focus on the torture and transformation process for 70 minutes.  Victim is a horror movie straight up. It starts with a video rape of a cute girl, then switches to the kidnapping and torture of a dude in LA.  The dude is kept in a basement dungeon, where he is beat, brainwashed, and feminized (to the point of getting a genital transplant, but not breast implants) by a plastic surgeon and his dumb man servant.

Victim completely focuses on the torture while also saving the rape/revenge reveal for the finale.  It eliminates the mistress portion of the novel.  It eliminates the Vincente searching story, and replaces it with a half-assed cop search story.  The novel is completely stripped away to explore the torture of brainwashing and forced gender changes.  It also adds in the weirdness of the brainwashing the rapist to pretending he is the daughter of the surgeon.

What Victim adds in is a replication of the original rape/murder.  The climax of Victim has the surgeon watching the violation of his daughter, while the rapist is actively raped by the man-servant in a replication of the hotel room of the original violation. The surgeon wanted to make the rapist experience exactly what he had experienced when he was the rapist in the beginning.

While it is a different movie in terms of tone, Victim feels like the movie that Almodovar stripped out of The Skin I Live In.  Watching the two as a back-to-back double-feature feels like you're watching the missing segments that were simply too icky for the first.  Victim is rougher, more brutal, and generally raw.  It has a stream-lined simplicity that makes Victim a sleek bullet of ugliness, especially if you ignore any of the cop scenes which seem to be completely superfluous to the movie as well.

Weirdly, both movies are at their strongest in a double feature with each other.  Victim is a fascinatingly bitter movie, which focuses on the torture of a man, and never loses sight of that.  It's a more straight-forward feministic rape-revenge.  While, The Skin I Live In is far more oblique and dramatic.  Together, they form a complex morality that is a potent duality.

Butter (2011): When liberal politics go wrong

Butter (2011)

dir: Jim Field Smith

"None of this would have happened if Mr. McAllister hadn't meddled the way he did. He should have just accepted things as they are instead of trying to interfere with destiny. You see, you can't interfere with destiny, that's why it's destiny. And if you try to interfere, the same thing's just going to happen anyway, and you'll just suffer." - Tracy Flick, Election

Reading the liberal blogs and websites, one gets the idea that conservatives are unfunny jerks while liberals are hilarity incarnate. They use examples of formerly funny directors losing their edge on conservative films like David Zucker did with An American Carol. But, liberals are prone to being unfunny assholes as well, and Butter is the star-studded proof.

Star-studded? Wait...isn't this that movie that pretty much went straight to streaming that Netflix has been promoting the fuck out of by putting it in the top row of the comedy section for like four months straight that nobody ever heard of except for that posting and this review? Yes. Yes it is. It's a blacklist screenplay from 2008 that got picked up by Jennifer Garner for her first outing then released by those Weinstein fuckers. As such, they were able to blackmail 2/3 of Hollywood to try to save think stinking piece of crap. Obviously, Jennifer Garner saved the starring role for herself, but then she got Hugh Jackmam, Olivia Munn, Rob Corddry, Ty Burrell, and they even dug up Alicia Silverstone. And that's just the juicier roles.

You know with a cast like this, it's either going to be awesome or its going to shit the bed. And, really, it kind of does the latter

Butter is trying to be the updated Election, where modern day politics are parodied through small town competitions. It opens with a woman winning Iowan governor, and then backtracks to be nothing about that race. It's really about a butter sculpting competition. Isn't that hilarious? FOOLED YOU!! It's this level of hilarity that marks Butter as being high brow entertainment. 

Butter is really about how a trophy wife's loss to a ten-year-old girl, named Destiny, in a butter sculpting competition caused her to run for governor. But, the butter competition is the climax of the movie, and the politics are whisked away as unimportant to the movie. Instead of doing a clever mirror politics story, where the woman uses the same bullying techniques to no avail in the butter competition but succeeds in politics, we're stuck with a full 90 minutes of butter.

Everything about this movie is tangential. The trophy wife's husband being a former butter sculpting king? Impetus at best. The stripper he picks up on a lonely night? Tangential. Sum total of her purpose: buying the 10 year old a set of knives. The car dealer the trophy wife fucks who tries to cheat the game? Tangential.

Everything about this movie is about the inevitable fate, even if it refuses to acknowledge it. It's like the authors took Tracy Flick's words of wisdom at the beginning of Election as a challenge. No, people who mess with destiny don't get hurt, they become governor!

What the movie is trying to be is a cynical, world-weary look at how politics is just a competition of little consequence, with players who are too petty to lose. It's trying to say that in butter competitions the good people win, but in politics...not so much. Perhaps it's even trying to say that the Iowa straw poll victors are the better people, even if they lose (Iowa has only picked 2 out of the past 6 Republican nominees since 1979. But, what it is saying is that Republican politicians are nuts.

Iowa straw polls are for Republican candidates only. This isn't a criticism of Democratic politics. This is only directly analogous to Republicans. And, it's saying that, unless you're a 10-year-old little black girl, you're a fucked up backwoods hick Republican who has affairs and cheats in order to get to the top. And, it's all very obvious. Zomg is it obvious.

But, worse than that, it's blatantly misogynistic. The lead character, a stand in for every Republican female ever mocked (Michele Bachmann, Christine O'Donnell, but namely Sarah Palin, etc) is a cold woman who married to make herself look like a winner. And she'll lie, cheat, and fuck her way to the top. Then, there's the stripper who seems to want to destroy people for money. The only good female adults are either the judge of the competition (arguable in her case) or the adoptive mother, both of who play back seats to the rampant female leads.

In the end, it's not funny, biting, insightful, honest, or even incisive. This is a heavy handed pseudo metaphor attack aimed at Republican armed with the dullest of instruments. This isn't a must watch, a warning siren, or a clarion call. It's a "fuck you" to conservative politics in general, without anything specific to say. 

The Woman (2011): Text vs Subtext

The Woman (2011)

dir: Lucky McKee

The problem with indulging in the text as you're condemning in the subtext, is that sometimes the condemnation message is lost in the actual commentary.  Spring Breakers suffers from that a little.  Natural Born Killers suffered from the rampant indulgence in lurid violence while trying to condemn it.  And, then, there's The Woman.

Given that the majority of movie goers, especially horror watchers, will rarely indulge in seeking out the back history of a writer or director of certain movies, it is necessary to take movies out of their authorial context, and analyze it on its own merits.  Lucky McKee is a writer and director of many movies that have affinities for women.  May, for instance, is a movie about a girl who is strange, and can't deal with the friends who have masks. If we lean on McKee's strong feminist tendencies, then we have an obvious answer about what the movie is trying to say, but it still requires parsing out whether the subtext of the condemnation supercedes the actual text of the movie.

The title character of The Woman is a feral girl who is found in the woods by Chris Cleek, a family man and lawyer, who is also very controlling and demanding of his family of 2 daughters and a son.  Cleek sets up his backyard cellar to hold The Woman hostage, under the auspices of "civilizing" her.  As per this formula, Cleek sets upon destroying The Woman to try to bring her to his idea of womanhood, which is passive towards men and everybody.

From the outset, Cleek is a raging misogynist, while his wife and teenage daughter are living in mental prisons of passivity.  His littlest daughter is still in the formulation stage, and his tween/teen son has already picked up Dad's bad habits towards humanity.  

And, as we watch the movie, we watch Chris chain The Woman, shoot her, strip her, power wash her, rape her, and otherwise abuse her.  Later, we see the aftermath of his son torturing The Woman with a pair of needlenose pliers while pleasuring himself.  We also see Chris beat women left and right, and his son do petty pains against girls for little reason.  Textually, The Woman is a movie that consistently indulges in men beating or raping girls or women.  It's always presented in a "horrific" tone, but it does little to diminish that almost all of the abuse and violence, except for the final scene of the climax, was perpetuated by a man.

Above, I put two videos of what happened at a Sundance screening in 2011.  I had not heard this before I watched the movie, but watched the movie because I find Lucky McKee fascinating as a filmmaker.  The first video has an introduction by Lucky McKee, an audience member bursting into a rage after the movie ended, and then parts of the Q&A after the outbursting man had been escorted out. The second video is the conversation that happened with the upset man after he had been escorted out of the theater, and he further explains his views to an disinterested third party. Other walkouts had happened during the movie, but this was the most captured and commented on.

The man's visceral reaction to the movie, especially at the end, was based exclusively on the text of this movie.  This man's reaction was all about how the movie was nothing but a vehicle for the steady and systematic abuse of women to be enjoyed by an audience.  And, to a point, he's not wrong.  On the surface, this movie only has two strong women, The Woman and the teacher of the teenage daughter, and even the teacher is destroyed by the masculine forces in the movie.

The subtext is what we're supposed to be reading into it.  The subtext is that men can be, or are, raging misogynists and that this is not OK, and that is why it is a horror movie instead of a comedy.  It is showing us that men can be completely evil, and exposes the masking that people wear to pass through life.  This isn't exactly a new concept.  It almost reminds me of the story of Jaycee Lee Dugard, a girl who had been kidnapped for 18 years, and even worked at the print shop of her kidnapper.  This man was a raging misogynistic control freak, and it was definitely a horror to her.  And, his wife had either been passively accepting of the kidnapping or actively involved in it.

In the subtext, this is a radical feminist film about the evils men do to women, especially since the only two male characters are the ones doing evil and providing the horrors.  This is a film that punishes women for existing.  The teacher is an aggressive but polite woman, and she is punished.  The wife is a passive woman, and she is punished.  The Woman is punished for being an aggressive woman, though at least she survives.  The daughter is the only one who has been spared any punishment, except for the pregnancy she has which may or may not be due to incest.

So, what does this actually say, beyond "men are assholes?"  I can't tell.  It revels too much in the torturing of women, especially since it was written by two men and directed by one of them, in order to make a clear case for its feminist trappings.  It does make a stronger case for a meditation on civility vs feral.  But, it's point, other than to shock, seems to have been lost even on the filmmaker.

In the end, The Woman is a grotesque and offensive film which is well made.  If you're watching to have your stomach churned and your morality challenged, this is a movie that was made for your night.  But, if you want to watch and have an understanding of its commentary, you may be in for more of a challenge.