Jesus Camp (2006): Fear of the Other

Jesus Camp (2006)
dir: Rachel Grady, Heidi Ewing

In 2001, the horrifying documentary Hell House landed on the scene, showing how much the Evangelical system manipulated the emotions of damaged people. George Ratliff documented the making of a religious house of social horrors that was used as a recruiting tool. Ratliff took the time to go into the background of the adults and the teenage youth in the scene to humanize their worries and to try to find out what their fears actually were.

A lot changed in the ensuing 5 years. When Hell House was made, Bill Clinton was in office, and George W. Bush was campaigning to be president (he was elected by the time Hell House was released), and 9/11 wasn't even a thing. By the time Jesus Camp was made, George W. Bush won a re-election, 9/11 had united a nation then divided it, and the national dialogue was reaching a fevered pitch of desperation and anger with the only targets being the opposite ideological stance.

You can feel it in the different tonalities of the nation in these two movies. Jesus Camp, is a movie made to demonize the religious right. It's purely a rant that others an ideology that others an ideology. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Jesus Camp documents the lives of a couple homeschooled Evangelical Christian kids who are sent off to the Kids on Fire summer camp, where a hellfire and brimstone preacher lady trains them to be warriors of God. The home life that Grady and Ewing document is of the usual "science lies to you" brand that also has the regular factually questionable parroting of the usual right wing talking points. There's a minor sense of their back story, but Grady and Ewing cut out most of their humanity in favor of their fearful talking points, and also to give way too much time to some bullshit left-wing radio host and, in the movie's most ironic scene, a megachurch led by Ted Haggard.

It's obvious coming out of the gate that Grady and Ewing aren't here to understand the natives. They don't want to know what makes the evangelicals tick. They're obviously afraid of the natives. And the natives are just as afraid of what these documentarians stand for: that is the liberal left wing political parties. The choices that Grady and Ewing highlights in the lives of the evangelical families are quotes by the mothers like "Did you get to the part where science doesn't prove anything?" Or, they have little girl Rachael, on a bowling outing, try to convert an innocent young woman bowling in the alley next to her. And the camera lingers on the young woman to show her awkwardness from the interaction.

We're meant to relate to the young woman as the camera lingers. We're meant to think "these are freaks, and why would this girl invade my privacy like that?" After the interaction, Rachael says that God told her to try to convert the woman to save her. It was a feeling inside her.

All documentaries are built by their directors in post more so than even in the actual documenting. There are probably a million different ways one could build a documentary from the various footage. But, Grady and Ewing capture the freak nature of the families, Becky Fischer, who leads the camp, and the reverence of the kids that we're meant to be scared for American society and feel sad for the brainwashing the kids without understanding why anybody is the way they are.

Who is Becky Fischer? What makes her tick? Why is she the way she is? Does she truly believe her mission comes from a pure place? Was she always such a devout Christian? Did she come back to the flock and decide that she needed to preach to everybody? Is she really somebody who is uncomfortable with letting others live in the way they want to live? Did she come out of an abusive relationship with an agnostic or atheist?

These questions are left relatively unanswered. In fact, there is only one hint of a variety of lives left in the film. After Fischer preaches against Harry Potter, one boy says "My mom won't let me watch the films, so I watch them at my dad's house." Hinting that he comes from a broken home, and that his mom is an evangelical devout, while his father is not nearly as devout. There is no hint at the source of the problem that led to the divorce or anything.

Grady and Ewing mostly highlight the craziest parts of Fischer and the camp. They highlight Fischer praying to God that their sound system works before speaking in tongues. They highlight Fischer berating the kids that they have to work to reach divinity. They highlight the youth protesting somewhere against abortion with red tape over their mouth, a look that was adopted from the AIDS crisis and then from Rage Against the Machine's censorship. And, we're meant to be fearful of this oncoming warrior with a "Look what they're doing to their kids."

This is all accented by overly dramatic cinematography during the more evangelical scenes. Dutch angles, low angles of girls with tears in their eyes, or high angles of boys falling to the ground in religious ecstasy highlight just how distanced Grady and Ewing are from their subjects. They don't want to know these people. They just want to exploit them.

And then there is Ted Haggard. He, inexplicably, takes up the 10-15 minutes towards the end of the movie in order to preach about the evil of Homosexuals (LOLOLOL) and to point out the ubiquity of megachurches. They bring Levi to meet with Haggard, but it's all a silly endeavor that takes time away from any understanding of the people in the movie.

Ewing and Grady close out the film with a phone interview between the left wing radio host and Becky Fischer which hints at the host trumping Fischer with his questions. But, it isn't a discussion. It's two just two closed-minded blowhards who don't listen to each other. Maybe Ewing and Grady are hinting that neither the left nor the right are listen to each other, but it doesn't seem like it, especially with their editing. Instead, they set out to make a monster movie from a section of our culture, and never come to an understanding with the people they're exploiting.

Paprika (2006): A Tale of Two Cities, With a Little Bit of Spice

Paprika (2006)
Dir: Satoshi Kon

The final finished movie of the late, great, Satoshi Kon was 2006's Paprika, a film exploring the space between what are considered to be polar opposites: reality and dreams. It was a continuation of Kon's fascination of the spaces between, as well as what perception is to reality, as he previously explored in Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress. Kon, as always, is also fascinated with the exploration of film itself, and the storytelling devices within, including meta-filmmaking, and what it means to make a meta film.

The title character Paprika is a dream-world alternate persona created by the psychiatrist Dr. Chiba for use during dream sessions with her patients. Where Dr. Chiba is a serious woman with black hair and a stern, professional demeanor, Paprika is a redhead with bright clothing and a chipper demeanor. Using a new device called the DC Mini, Dr. Chiba is able to insert herself into her patients' dreams to analyze them and to create a deeper connection.

Somebody has stolen a few extra DC Minis, and is using them to start penetrating even the waking conscious of anybody who has used the DC Mini at any point to pull them into a singular dream world. That dream world is a chaotic parade of toys, technology, and symbols marching to...somewhere, absorbing and destroying any and all of the participants that it brings into its reality. Now, Dr. Chiba, her boss, and Dr Tokita, the inventor of the DC Mini, must figure out who stole the DC Minis, and stop them from taking over the minds of the world.

Of course, that description barely even scratches the surface of what Paprika does, which is float in between reality, dream world, the internet and cinema with a reckless abandon that is breathtakingly fluid. The relative straightforwardness of the plot is just a device on which Kon hangs his favorite obsessions. He opens the movie with a dream collage based in several different movies establishing a detective character and patient through his recurring nightmare. Then, it flows right into a dream-like reality opening credits sequence where Paprika breaks all the laws of reality as the credits are projected onto the reality of the buildings.

Kon's obsessions with where real life ends and our perception begins causes the worlds to beat and bash at each other throughout the movie, creating an almost hallucinatory sense of what is actually being put on screen. Which is exactly what the medium of animation should be used for: to create a fully integrated world where reality isn't what it could be. Like Spirited Away, the animation used in Paprika creates a fictional world where it feels like anything can happen.

Kon's intentions is purely to have fun and a nightmare world is part of that fun. If you're frightened, grossed out, offended...it's all part of the game that Kon plays with his audience. Those feelings are the opposite of the light-hearted, carefree feeling that much of the film creates. All of this adds to the themes of opposites - old vs young, new vs old, technology vs luddite, dreams vs reality, man vs woman, good vs evil, fat vs skinny, mental vs physical, life vs death, etc. - that Kon injects throughout Paprika. Even in the parade, old fashioned Japanese toys mix with robots, and refrigerators lead the dolls. Kon seems to be calling for the new Japanese culture that has been brewing since before the '00s to not completely reject the old Japanese culture it seems intent on ousting. What Kon wants is a culture that is based in the new but doesn't forget the old, and has a bit of a twist to it all in order to make things original.

Paprika is a movie to obsess over. There's a lot of information to process the first time through as you're being pulled in and out of the various worlds that Kon creates. It's a hell of a lot of fun too. It's only flaw is a single use of bizarre sexual violence to create a feeling of violation, but even that seems to be about emotional wreckage more than evil dudes just being evil. Leaving that little bit out, it is an excellent mind trip of a movie that remains Kon's most accomplished work.

Aachi & Ssipak (2006): Giving Crap to the Government

Aachi and Ssipak (2006)
dir: Jo-Beom Jim

Ed's Note: This review is based on the original Aachi and Ssipak, and not Mondo Media's 2014 English language rewrite and dub. Mondo Media did not put the original version of the film on either their blu-ray or their DVD. That version can be found through usual channels, as well as a website with a Y and a T in it.

The world of Aachi and Ssipak isn't that hard to imagine. A world where natural resources have run out. A world where electricity is harnessed from one renewable resource: feces. A world where the government runs the electric company and also demands people give their feces for the electricity. A world where they placate the masses by giving them a highly addictive drug for regularly pooping instead of, probably, selling feces on the black market as its own type of resource. And, a world where that drug has had the negative power to make people constipated, mutated, yet still addicted to the drug that requires the ability to poop.

Jo-Beom Jim has concocted a world which bends in on itself in some of the likeliest manners, given the two axioms of resources have run out and the world is now run on crap. He created a world where the lines between government and commercial entities blur, where the authority is just as destructive and violent as the criminals, where drugs and media create placid easily manipulated addicts, and bodily function and pleasure are married in intimate ways.

Needless to say, this movie gets very complicated very fast for a movie that merely appears to be about poop and porn. Let's try to unwind this movie.

Aachi and Ssipak opens with a scrawl giving the basic outlines of this dystopic future, then jumps in to its first of many action sequences. The diaper gang, a bunch of adorable and disposable blue mutants who are ripe to be stuffed creatures out of a Disney background character, is seeking to seize a shipment of Juicybars, the drug given to people for their fecal matter. The diaper gang have mutated in a way that they don't have the ability to poop, and now must subsist solely on Juicybars. This seizing is foiled by Geko, a renegade cyborg cop, whose goal is foil the gangs, but not necessarily to save the shipment. All of Geko's behaviors is monitored and dictated by a large headed woman who appears to be CEO and Dictator of the country.

Aachi and Ssipak, are two small-time criminals in one of the ghettos who both deal for Juicybars, and also hold up bathrooms to try to steal them for resale on the black market. Their primary dealings happen with an organized mob, who are out to get them for shortchanging the deal, and also stepping in territories that aren't theirs. They also have a friend, Jimmy the Freak, who is a wanna-be porn director who wants to make a porn movie about a woman who defecates strongly.

The way that the feces are actually distributed to people is by a ring placed in anuses at birth that also encode that person's identity into their ass. When a ring detects a successful bowel movement, it delivers a Juicybar to the bathroom of the defecator, and also the main government computer identifies the defecator by name.

When Jimmy the Freak tells the Diaper King about this, the Diaper King gets the idea to take out the identity rings from his Diaper Gang minions, and put them in the anus of a porn actress, Beautiful. Beautiful had already become the object of affection for Ssipak, who rescues her from Jimmy and the King only to find out she had already been implanted with all the rings and now gets mountains of Juicybars.

The above four paragraphs are all packed into the movie's first 30 mind-bending minutes. And, I haven't even mentioned the sequence where Aachi and Ssipak get Jimmy the Freak high as hell on Juicybars, then hypnotize him to go into the mob office to perform scenes from Basic Instinct and Misery. For all of Aachi and Ssipak's low brow humor and aims at base sensibilities, Jo-Beom Jim has created a scathing satire on all things government, consumer and media. The vast majority of the second and third acts are made up of cinematic action sequences upon action sequences taken from other films, most notably Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

For a movie whose first 45 minutes are packed with more cultural insight and impact than many movies do with 2 or 3 hours, it's hard not to be both disappointed and relieved that the spins didn't keep coming for the entirety of the movie. When you piece together everything, you're allowed to mindlessly sit back and watch the action unfold, which is also a scathing indictment of how cinema soothes people into complacency. You see all of this corruption through the use of drugs and government, but the happy ending is that Aachi and Ssipak rescued Beautiful and are able to become rich again. Not that the government corruption has ceased to exist, or that the people are done being drugged, but our heroes made out for themselves. It's a high note that's as intentionally hollow and flawed as anything the movie corrupts.

On the other hand, the movie is so well done. The sight of the diaper gang mutants being so chipperly evil is always hilarious, as is their frequent gory and brutal murders. They're the most precious victims of action movies. Jo-Beom Jim's action sequences are rapid paced and fast moving, and really well done. They don't obscure the action and are visually sumptuous.

Aachi and Ssipak's hyperkinetic nature, high-brow satirical intents, and mixture of medium-brow and low-brow humor makes this a movie that is simultaneously a must see and a movie that will be appreciated by few. The scatological and pornographic nature of the film will turn most people off, though Aachi and Ssipak shows no actual feces or sex in the film. Yet, because it attacks both the brain and the adrenaline, Aachi and Ssipak is a one-of-a-kind thrill ride of a weird type of intelligence, making this a required viewing.

Shortbus (2006): Bringing Sexy Back

Shortbus (2006)
dir: John Cameron Mitchell

Shortly after the failure of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, American cinema underwent a change to be more conservative in its sexuality. Queer movies started pulling back a little in their explorations of sexuality. Straight movies totally did. Between 2000 and 2005, only a handful of movies dealt with sexuality in an explicit enough nature to warrant an NC-17. Of those which received NC-17 ratings for explicit content, only 7 were American, and one of those was a documentary on a porn film from the 1970s.

Queer cinema, however, was starting to come into its own at that point, and had been making a bit of headway in sexuality with more explicit scenes in semi-mainstream foreign films like Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Pedro Alomodavar's Bad Education. With sexuality being repressed in both queer cinema and straight cinema, and the world still recovering from the worries of September 11th (5 years later), suddenly, it seemed right to get back to our roots. To our souls. To our genitalia.

John Cameron Mitchell made Shortbus to be released in 2006 as a way to say that sexuality is beautiful and should be in films other than pornographic films. He didn't care if you were gay, straight, poly, kinky, vanilla, oppressed, repressed, open and flowing...sexuality was an open topic for Shortbus. With it, Mitchell seems to have opened up the floodgates for a new wave of queer explicitness, an Equal Sex Film Movement, that is continuing today.

Shortbus isn't a porno, nor is it indulging in porno lite trashiness. Mitchell didn't make a movie that was sex for sex's sake. Instead, Shortbus was more like the kicking down of doors in human sexuality by celebrating sexuality in all of its weird and absurd forms, but also understanding it in a humanistic way that is more than just exploiting a bodily act. When people are in and out of love, they can have explicit relations, repress their own sexuality, tell things about each other, to each other, and everything just is complicated and messy just like life. Rarely is any of the sexuality actually bad.

There are 3 stories that Mitchell weaves together to interconnect and lead and follow and pulse and vibrate with each other. The central story is that of Sofia Lin, a couples counselor and sex therapist, who has never had an orgasm, even though her story is opened with wild aggressive jungle sex with her husband Rob. The second story is that of Jamie and James, a queer couple of 5 years. James is going through a serious depression, especially after having seen a man die in the hot tub at the gym where he hot tubs. The both believe that they can accomplish something by opening up their relationship. And, the final, somewhat tertiary story, is that of Severin, a dominatrix who also swings both ways and in severe need of human connection.

Jamie and James go to Sofia before they open up everything in order to learn about themselves and their own relationship, and through a wild act of unprofessionalism learn about Sofia's issue. So, they introduce her to a place called Shortbus, which is essentially wild loft/apartment created like an artistic hippy's heaven, where people go to connect, engage, and screw without judgement or abandon. The host of this slice of erotic heaven is Justin Bond, a queer transgendered performance artist who welcomes everybody with open arms. In Shortbus, there are hovels of lesbians, rooms of straight people, gay men, leathers, bears, and everybody else you could imagine all struggling to connect and find each other in the throbbing pool of humanity that is a big city.

Earlier I made mention that Shortbus kicked down the floodgates, but I would be remiss to say that it is a compassionate, embracing, and welcoming movie compared to a thematically similar NC-17 movie from 2004, John Waters' A Dirty Shame. John Waters created a movie about a woman who was once prudish, got conked on the head, and became embracing of the varying arrays of sexuality through the help of Johnny Knoxville's home to sex. Both are essentially saying that sexuality is a human right, and a beautiful thing, and that everybody should be accepting and embracing of everybody else even if it isn't quite your kick. But, where Mitchell is celebrating in far more generic terms, Waters was pointing out all of the weirdos and embracing them in his own fashion.Where Shortbus is all about a community helping one woman to orgasm, A Dirty Shame was about one woman trying to connect a divided community. And, Shortbus is committed to open and healthy conversations while A Dirty Shame is more like a snide punk trying to shock you by showing off its vast knowledge.

Shortbus also had more on its mind, by centering everything in New York City, and also making a big show of this being a post-disaster society. After all, NYC is where the Twin Towers fell, and that is the community that felt the disaster the most. There are direct references to this being an all-American rebellious celebration of sexuality, from the opening frame of a drawing of the Statue of Liberty to the rimjob threesome edition of the Star Spangled Banner to the Sex Not Bombs room in Shortbus, which is essentially a writing mass of naked humping flesh under a hanging A-bomb, showing the duality of life and death, and the celebration of freedom in the face of disaster.

Shortbus is simultaneously a preachy film and also a not preachy film. In methods very similar to Plato's The Symposium, Mitchell allows his characters to ramble on about their thoughts about life, love, the pursuit of happiness. Some of this is verbal rambling, and some of it is actually rambling through the actions of their plots. Some of it is right. Some of it is silly. Some perverse. Some erotic. Some drunken. And, some is just plain wrong. But, as long as it is welcoming and embracing without emotionally destroying other people, the theory is entertained in the house of Shortbus. There's a stalker/voyeur who follows James and Jamie, does a bad thing and a good thing in their lives. The bad thing is punished and the good thing rewarded.

Of course, this is all about emotions and feelings, but Mitchell also made a very very explicit movie that never dives into pornographic exploitation. Well, rarely. A boy has to flourish sometimes. But, Mitchell opens up Shortbus with a pan into James' bathroom where he's in the tub, and it pans out so you can see his semi-hard penis, which he then films his attempts at autofellatio. The wild monkey sex between Rob and Sofia? You see all of it. You also see Severin and her frequent trust fund baby client, who harasses her need for human contact in order to get more punishment out of her. This explicit and frankness has led to a newer era that is starting to have more mainstream frank explorations of sexuality be accepted.

Luckily, for all of us, Shortbus ended up being not only a barrier busting movie, but a GOOD barrier busting movie that was very carefully laid out to avoid the levels of exploitation that would surely be leveled at it. I'm sure some would call it one step too far, that open sexuality is a bad thing, that it doesn't explore the deterioration of the nuclear family. Etc etc etc. Tish tosh. In order to make a good home, one has to learn how to communicate, which is all this movie is. It's brilliant, and witty, sometimes a bit too obvious or on the nose, but otherwise thoroughly enjoyable.

Required Viewing.

Trapped Ashes (2006): When horror compendiums go wacky

Trapped Ashes (2006)
dir: Joe Dante, Ken Russell, Monte Hellman, John Gaeta, Sean S. Cunningham
wr: Dennis Bartok

This is one of the more peculiar passion projects that I think has ever existed. The movie has one writer, but five directors. And, that one writer was also a credited producer of this film.  The writer? Dennis Bartok. Uh...who?

Dennis Bartok is the son of LeAnn Bartok, who was a conceptual artist and avant-garde filmmaker, at least according to Dennis Bartok. Dennis Bartok is better known as being Head of Programming for the American Cinematheque in LA. He also occasionally appears on AMC's Behind the Scenes. I suspect he's one of those LA types who knows a lot of people and has a lot of stories to tell.

Trapped Ashes is Dennis Bartok's baby. He wrote a horror compendium, a la Tales From the Crypt, only centered everything about the trappings of Hollywood. Then, he hired an assortment of beloved filmmakers to direct each segment.

• Joe Dante, of Gremlins and The 'burbs, got the wraparound segments. 
• Ken Russell, Lisztomania, The Who's Tommy, and Gothic, got the first segment "The Girl with the Golden Breasts." 
• Sean S Cunningham, Friday the 13th, took up the second segment "Jibaku"
• Monte Hellman, Two-Lane Blacktop and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3, snagged the third segment, "Stanley's Girlfriend"
• John Gaeta, who had been the visual effects supervisor for The Matrix, wrapped it up with "My Twin, the Worm"

Each and every one of these films had a style that was as diverse as the directors were, even though they were written by the same hand. And, sadly, that hand was ultimately the problem with the movie.

Joe Dante really tries his best with the framing device. The story of the frame is that there is a group of people on a lot tour with Henry Gibson as the tour guide. They enter a haunted house, that has a bunch of movie set tricks, only to discover that they are trapped in the center room, where they must tell their stories to pass the time. And, while I love watching Joe Dante play, he just isn't given enough meat to make the wraparound interesting. Get them trapped and get to the stories.

Ken Russell seems to be having the most fun with his segment, which is totally up his perverse aisle. "The Girl with the Golden Breasts" is about a semi-hot girl who's too old to play young and too young to play old, and too flat to be considered for anything, according to casting agents and her self-esteem. So, she gets new fangled breast implants made of actual meat instead of bags of gel. They are meant to look natural. Only, the breast implants have a problem: they're vampiric. Yes, this is a story about vampiric tits. Really. And, Ken Russell is having as much fun as he's had in years, at least since 1988's The Lair of the White Worm. The lurid tale is told in equally grotesque visuals with effects of particular note. The writing also is less misogynistic than anti-plastic surgery, focusing on the breast implants being evil, but the woman who got them is not. This is, to me, the most fun of the segments.

Sean S Cunningham went the farthest he's ever gone, and the farthest this movie has gone, with his segment "Jibaku." This is a movie that pretends to be steeped in Japanese culture about a married couple, where the wife totally gets it on with a monk who dies and takes her to hell. The husband has to rescue her. The visuals are kind of striking, and the segment delves into necrophilia, but overall Jibaku is little more than shock value and an attempt to use the J-Horror trend that was still hitting hard in 2006 (just before the remake bug would be hitting full force).

Monte Hellman's segment, "Stanley's Girlfriend" is about two friends, split apart by a girl who is a ghost, or something. They used to meet for chess all the time, but then one friend disappears. Or, something. It's a movie that is fascinated with itself, and fascinated with Hollywood. Anybody who is so fascinated with Hollywood that they fetishize it will love this segment, but the rest of us are probably bored stiff.

The final segment by John Gaeta is just a strange mood piece about some girl who gestated while her mother had a tapeworm, and she formed an emotional and psychic bond to the tapeworm. When she was abused, the tapeworm got revenge. Yeah. It's as weird as you think, and as worthless. 

If a movie is only as good as its weakest link, Trapped Ashes is god awful. The stories aren't really scary, and Masters of Horror had already been producing great episodes giving free reign to their horror directors. Joe Dante had great segments both seasons, which were plenty meatier than this work for hire (and, honestly, meatier than his latest full film The Hole). The writing is mediocre at best, in general, and not scary at all.

While Bartok was trying to create a sort of warning about the types of people that Hollyweird attracts, he fails by also including the Japanese segment which has nothing whatsoever to do with LA, it seems. He's also trying to explore the different types of horror, but it doesn't work as well as letting the director's play by themselves, as displayed by the Masters of Horror series (which I cannot recommend enough). In the end, Trapped Ashes becomes a frequently awful trifle.

But, "The Girl with the Golden Breasts" is amazing, and should be a short separated completely from the other movies. Luckily, they placed it first so that you can leave as soon as it is over. Ken Russell showed us his wit one final time.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006): Boring the formula

Hey Token. You know you're going to die, right?

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)
dir: Jonathon Levine

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is another throwback to the 80s slasher genre. It's a bunch of teenagers who go to a ranch, and then are stalked and murdered. Any viewer who has seen a movie can tell who the killer is from the beginning of the movie, and Levine doesn't stray from what you expect. At all.

Levine opens All the Boys Love Mandy Lane with Mandy coming back to school now fully matured, and she turned into a major hottie. She is invited to a house party where she is sexually harassed, to be defended by her best friend Emmet, who also convinces the harasser to kill himself by doing an impossible jump from the roof. Whee.

At the end of the school year, Mandy has fallen in with the crowd and Emmet is now on the outs. Mandy and her crowd go to one of their friends' ranch to drink, do drugs, and fuck while the parents are out, and they're being kind of looked after by the help, a hunky ranch hand played by Anson Mount.

The friends are generic as all hell. You have the drug addicted mean girl who calls her friend fat. The slutty girl who wants to fuck everybody. The kind of stoner. The black guy. And the insecure harasser. They're obvious stereotypes and cliches, who serve as nothing but fodder characters to be killed like the cattle the ranch hand talked about killing.

There is very little to the death sequences, and one is left with a feeling of extreme boredom. The tension isn't in the order of who is getting killed (it is kind of expected) nor in the method of murder (guns, fireworks, etc). Which leads one to wonder, what is this movie? It doesn't do anything better than Friday the 13th, not exactly a high bar to set. Hell, even the kids play Truth or Dare instead of strip Monopoly.

The only thing that could be mildly interesting is the expected twist at the end. And, really, that's just to add on a bit of misogyny that the movie had only been hinting at before by making all the non-Mandy Lane characters into mean girl cliches.

Yet, oddly, the movie is intriguing on an academic level instead of an emotional level. What is a horror movie with no interesting kill scenes, no tension, and a killer you expect?  It's just a drama of sorts. The use of the formula into one of the dullest horror movies in awhile makes All the Boys Love Mandy Lane more interesting than an average use of the formula, as it questions what you're watching and why it isn't working.

But, it still doesn't work and probably will never work.

Red Without Blue (2006): Biological ties that bind and strangle

Red Without Blue (2006)

dir: Brooke Sebold

Benita Sills

Todd Sills

Transgenderism is still something that we haven't fully learned about. It is a state of being where one person feels, deep within themselves, that they were born with the wrong set of biological organs. Some have said that this is from a flaw in the Y chomosome where it has a little tail, but not enough to fully ignite the set of organs that the rest of the body feels it should have.  Or, that it is too much of a tail that it full ignited the set of organs where they shouldn't be. And, then there are the people who believe that it is a mentality.  Or hormones.  Or, something else.  The root causes are still not fully defined, but the effects that it has on the person and on the family can be seen.  

Red Without Blue looks at what the effects of growing up as identical twins, and what the effects are when one of those identical twins comes out as transgendered.

Alex and Mark Farley are a pair of deeply close identical twins who grew up in Missoula, MT.  Alex had come out as gay at a young age, and both were severely outcast as a result.  When their parents split up, and pursued other relationships, they were left to largely fend for themselves.  Even in current times, as Jennie Farley, the pair's mother, is saying that she held herself responsible, she just as easily dismisses it and says that she feels no connection to the two people who are her children.  They are just two people who she knows.

At one point as adolescents, the pair were doing a variety of drugs, including cocaine and marijuana.  They got in a relationship at the age of 12 with a gay teen DJ who was 5 years their elder.  The DJ raped a 10-year-old boy and also probably had relations with them as well. The drugs were part of that relationship, and also part of an escape from their real life.  Eventually, they made a histrionic suicide attempt by driving up to a bluff that overlooked Missoula and using a hose to connect the exhaust to the inside of the car and running it.  But, they kept shaking each other so that neither would die before the other.  And, finally, they gave up because they wouldn't die.

Eventually, they would both be sent to separate boarding schools for two years.  Upon return, Alex came out as transgendered and wanted to be identified as Claire.

I'm not saying that either the homosexuality or the transgenderism is related to the terrible parenting or bad adolescence that they experienced.  I'm also not suggesting that either are related to the drugs or to the possible molestation with the older DJ.  The movie hesitates to draw any lines as well, and addresses all of these things as unrelated events that built to the life that we see.  Jennie is the only one who sees the transgenderism as a slap in the face to her.  As a final grand fuck you to her as a parent.  Jennie sees the transgender identity of Claire as something Alex is playing with in order to piss her off.

The movie, in the present, shows Mark as struggling with his own identity.  At one point, he wants to be called Oliver instead of Mark.  At another, he is trying to fall in love with fellow gay art student David Suarez in San Francisco.  He is lamenting the loss of his twin Alex as Blue, who has moved to New York and is exploring her transgendered identity as Claire there.  Their father seems to be accepting of the new identity and helps with the surgeries.  Mom is still...well...mom.  She comes off as struggling the most in this film, but also as the one who has the most problems experiencing anything outside her own existence.

Red Without Blue has many issues it is dealing with in a small time frame and without tackling any of them head on.  What does it mean to be a transsexual?  How does it affect your family and friends?  How does one come to realize that they are transgendered?  Is it genetic?  Do you grow up trans?  How does your life affect your decisions?

Without being a clinical dissection of transgenderism, Red Without Blue manages to address all of these issues and not be preachy about any of it.  It doesn't draw any final conclusions, or resolutions.  It is as messy as life is.  It doesn't come out and judge the mother like I did above.  It doesn't come out and say that anybody is a bad person.  It allows everybody to have their say, regardless of how right or wrong it seems.  

While the primary strength of the film is to not judge the characters in the film, consequently one of the soft spots of Red Without Blue is the unwillingness to question some of the characters and their conclusions. When their grandmother comments that she has been living with a woman for years, but is definitely not as a lesbian - and, they have been sleeping in the same bed, but not as lovers - the movie doesn't really question her assertions.  It's almost too unbelievable to question.  When we learn that Alex came out as transgendered upon returning home from an academy after being separated from Mark for two years, the movie doesn't question whether the transgenderism in his case is the result of this separation, his being molested as a boy, absent parenting, or drug use.  Nor does it ask if it is biological either.

It is the lack of conclusion that makes me want to keep up with Claire and Mark.  Is Jennie actually right that Claire's decision to come out as a woman is just a phase?  Is it the result of her deeply problematic childhood?  Claire claims that she has always felt that she came out of the womb without a defined sex.  Is it transphobic to wonder if this specific case might be the result of severe childhood trauma?  What about Mark?  He gets lost in all of these movements, even though he goes to Prague to teach and to be near his boyfriend who subsequently dumps him.  These are questions that won't be resolved in three years.  These questions will take a lifetime to answer, instead of the three years Red Without Blue spends with this family.

These are people - needy, troubled, full of emotion - with a history that makes you sympathetic to their situations without demonizing any of them.  But, they're fleshed out people who aren't pushing an agenda, and these are two people I would love to catch up with in a 7 Up format.  In all, it is problematic because it doesn't question anybody.  It leaves those questions to the audience, who don't have a vehicle to question the subjects.  On the other hand, it does allow things to be without a political agenda.  I'm not sure which is more important, but these are issues that exist.