Film Fest Marathon

Saturday, I decided to watch four films in a row. This was the last day of Reel Affirmations, a bad name, in my opinion, for a film festival. But it's in its fifteenth year, so they have to continue with the name.

At 2 PM, I saw 50 Ways To Say Fabulous. If there's one adjective that describes films out of Australia or New Zealand, it's quirky. And this one is too. Set in the 1970s, it tells the story of Billy, who's overweight, and not much good at rugby (his dad is into rugby), and his best friend and cousin, Lou, who's a tomboy. He sounds like a girl. She looks like a boy. Both are about twelve years old. Already, we're hitting gender bending issues.

New kid, Roy, is the awkward kid that comes to the small kiwi town that Billy lives in, and begins to fall for Billy. Billy's conflicted. He's not sure Roy's his type. When Jamie, a farmhand in search of a job, decides to live with Billy's family, Billy falls for Jamie, who's about 18 or so, and is another in the Brad Pitt type.

If anything, this film shares something of the sensibility of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. It depicts an idyllic New Zealand setting, with gay characters that resort to fantasies. In this case, Billy idolizes a female character in a science fiction TV series that resembles Lost in Space. The female character appears to be played by him, wearing a wig. The acting is a bit odd too. It isn't particularly naturalistic. Billy smiles a bit readily, almost in this antiseptic view of the 50s that's parodied nowadays.

The film doesn't even head to where you think it will go. In particular, you think Billy and Roy will get together. They don't make the perfect couple by any stretch. He's dealing with weight issues. Roy's just gawky. To the film's credit, none of the three leads are particularly photogenic, or even particularly likeable. The depiction of live in New Zealand resembles, I'd imagine, the kind of life in Welcome to the Dollhouse, where kids are particularly cruel to one another, even friends.

Setting the film in the past, and making it somewhat fantastical. makes dealing with the difficult subject matter of sexuality in early teens a bit less intense.

An interesting movie that doesn't quite end up where I thought it would.

Then, I watched a series of shorts. Some were awful. There was a short about three transvestives. One has bought a dress. She wants to meet a guy named Henri who dumped her, so he falls for her again, and she dumps him. She thinks the dress will work magic. Meanwhile, one of her roommates wants the dress, so she wears it, and her third roommate dumps ketchup all over it. There's not much more to it except some hijinks.

The next short was rather peculiar. It involves some guy who seems to have an internal monologue we can hear. He's looking for some photographer. He's drunk and drugged, and meets up with friends of sorts. It seems like a video from the early 80s, and frankly, made little sense to me. The best one, in my mind, was one about two brothers, who were close as kids. One brother was athletic, and always impressed dad. The other was less so, and always let dad down. To illustrate their relationship, the short opens with the two brothers in a swimming pool. One swims to the side, while the other is drowning, and dad is yelling at him to swim. The athletic brother jumps back in and helps his brother, thus setting the tone that the athletic brother helps his less athletic brother.

This theme has been explored in films like Gattaca, down to the swimming idea. In this case, once the kids have become teens, the shy brother kisses the elder, and eventually the two fall in love. To escape dad's wrath (dad is played by John Wesley Shipp who played the Flash in a short-lived series), the two run away. Then, it goes into Thelma and Louise. Deciding that they can't live without each other (the dad has sent the police to track them down), they decide
to dive in a pool, handcuff themselves to the ladder, embrace, and die drowning.

Shorts like this don't try to explain relationships. They generally don't have time. They set a mood and emotion, and to that extent it succeeds. I suppose it doesn't hurt that they make both brothers hot, though that always seems to be the way to deal with issues like incest. It certainly doesn't explain why incest happens, at least, nothing meaningful. I also found this film to be similar to Dead Ringers, also about two brothers, one successful and outgoing, and the other not so, and their strange closeness.

The next one was good, but hard to follow. It follows a guy who has sex with men in restrooms. There are images of dolls. It uses text printed on the screen to indicate what's going on. Done very much like an REM music video, it reminded me a lot of a darker, weirder, Peter Greenaway film. In particular, using text on the screen to convey information. There's some scene of a guy who loses control of his car, and kills a woman, and wants to hide her death. I couldn't quite recall if it was the kid's dad or what. It had a spooky feel that, say, MirrorMask didn't quite achieve.

There was also another film that was about an artist going blind, and a boy toy he has who paints for him. He doesn't particularly care for it. He has a lover that used to sleep with the artist, and tells him to kill the artist so he can be free of him and have his place. In the end, the guy can't do it, because he's essentially a good guy. I suppose it's trying to talk about art, and relationships between old and young, between those who can do art, and those who can't. Again, it's mostly an emotional piece, that doesn't try to explain how they got into this situation.

Then, I saw "The D Word". There was a a short prior to this, about some bookish lesbian, who wants to be involved in a wilder relationship. This eventually takes her to meet up with an ex into S and M. For some reason, probably due to dance numbers, it reminded me a little bit of Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, though Maddin films in a style suited to the 1920s. Then, there was a series of episodes of The D Word. I've never seen The L Word, so I can't tell you how it compares.

From what the director/writer says, The L Word is pretty white. Her version is more diverse. It follows several stories. There's the basketball player who's basically closeted, and falls for a cheerleader type. There's the girlfriend of a guy, who finds it more exciting to be with the African American owner of a local bar. There's the two happy women trying to find a sperm donor to have kids. There's the dykish gal who can't remember who she's slept with, and has nice nails. There's the transsexual who looks like a teen, and sings. There's the cop lady. It seemed pretty funny, but more suited for a television series, than a film.

Finally, I watched Loggerheads. I expected this drama, about a woman finding her kid. But, instead, it was a slow-paced story, told in three sections. One part is Bonnie Hunt, playing a woman who now lives with her mother, and wants to find her son, who she gave up for adoption 17 years earlier. The other story is about a minister and his wife, who is the family that adopted the son, but he was gay, and ran away from home. The third is about the son, who is trying to save loggerhead turtles, and falls for a guy who owns a hotel on the North Carolina coast.

The story is basically told in pairs. Bonnie Hunt's character is trying to deal with the guilt of giving up her son, which her mother did, because she thought it was best for her daughter. The daughter hasn't had much of a life since then, having odd jobs, and once thinking of killing herself. The son seems like he's modelled a bit after Timothy Treadwell, who is featured in Grizzly Man, but really, it never goes to the same depths to show his love for saving turtles. Treadwell literally found more comfort with bears than people.

The heart of this Southern drama is really about the minister and his wife. They lead a pretty quiet life, trying to be good Christians. As time passes, the wife realizes that they didn't do enough to keep their son. They let him run away. The film is pretty even-handed about religion. The minister seems like a good man, who listens to his wife. Chris Sarandon does a good job of underplaying this role and never seems like a demon, even though he can't accept his gay adopted son. The son, too, isn't resentful of his mother, either one, and says he was a good kid.

The film tries to avoid too many stereotypes about the South, about how gay relations can be, and about religion. If anything, Loggerheads doesn't really tread any new ground, other than to deal with things in a deliberate pace, and to be fair to Southerners that often get stereotyped. If anything, the film lacks a strong payoff, but there's a sense that it's better this way. Lives aren't always about the excesses of emotion. The gay relationship isn't particularly strong, and is more of a friendship, than anything else, and tries to convey the sense that the South can accept gays, at least, to some degree.

In the Q&A, an audience member asked about similar films about the south, including Junebug. The director knows the director of Junebug well, and he says the two, having grown up in the South, want to depict the South more realistically, rather than dealing in stereotypes. Another person questioned whether the minister, when getting his haircut at the local barber, sees a teenage kid, and gets lost in thought. Is he thinking of the kid as his own son? Is he a child molester, and that's why his kid ran away? The director said he left that scene deliberately vague, though he didn't want it interpreted that the minister was a child molester. He says that was an unfortunate side effect of news related to Catholic priests.

The director felt the movie resonates because it's really more about adoption and for a mother wanting to find her child. However, I believe the other themes are important. The reason for having a gay son and religious parents is to point out the importance of religion in the South, and how the South tries to reconcile the two, even though they can be at odds. Ultimately, it says the answer is family and love, that this is more important in religion than deciding who is viewed as a sinner in God's eyes.

So, the parts I liked about Loggerheads. A fair treatment of life in the South. A relationship that's built slowly, and isn't particularly torrid. Oddly enough, I found the story of a woman seeking her own son less compelling. It's really about the decisions we make in our lives, and how we choose to deal with them. Both mothers made decisions that caused the loss of the son they shared. If anything, they might have played up more about the son's desire to save the turtles as a way to find meaning in his life, but already, the film had two strong stories it was trying to tell. Having his story be strong, may have made too many competing parts.

I expected to be exhaused after eight hours of watching films, but it wasn't all that bad. Of the films I watched, I suppose I would place Loggerheads and Race You To The Bottom at the top of the list. 50 Ways To Say Fabulous has a few too many odd pieces that don't fit, even though it's weirdness resonates in a way. I admire it more for its casting choices, which avoid picking cute moppets for its leads, and for dealing with difficult subject matter of growing up gay and gawky.

Since this is a genre festival (as much as gay and lesbian is a genre), the quality of film is expected to be somewhat lower than for a general film festival. Gay and lesbian films still focus a lot on certain popular themes. It may show a sign of maturity when it can move past making and remaking certain films (coming out films, in particular), and perhaps fusing with other genre pictures, such as spy films, science fiction, westerns, and so forth.

I wish film festivals could be watched more conveniently at home. Don't get me wrong. The Lincoln Theater is a really nice venue to watch films (except its screen is too tiny). Even so, having to make a trek to go out to watch is a pain, and knowing that the film only shows once also makes it tough to see the film I want to see.

Still, after all that, the big film people are still anticipating is Brokeback Mountain, and that film, while this festival would have loved to show it, couldn't nab something that big.