Ren Jender – Page 6 – Bitch Flicks

Reality TV’s Antecedents: PBS, ‘POV,’ and Barbara Kopple

A channel that has been delivering a less tempered version of “reality” TV for many decades is PBS, most consistently and interestingly for over 25 years on ‘POV,’ which showcases independent documentaries with limited theatrical runs (and many of those films are available online to watch as well). In its history POV has put its spotlight on trans* and queer people, people of color, and people with disabilities often in work directed by people who are from those communities (which is not usually the case in other “reality” programming).

This post by Ren Jender is part of our theme week on Reality TV and includes part 2 of an interview with documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple.

Those of us who generally avoid reality TV programming would be wise to remember the genre attracts audiences for legitimate reasons. So many movies and television are based on lies: even those supposedly “based-on-fact” are riddled with enough revision and omission to make their stories unrecognizable–Slate has taken to posting a semi-regular column on how far the latest bio-pic diverges from reality. Audiences hungering for more genuine programming shouldn’t be a surprise.

When audiences tune into reality TV they are also often looking for images they don’t see onscreen otherwise–women who use wheelchairs going about their business without “uplifting” music crescendoing in the background, Black families hanging out together at home without a laugh track, women who aren’t a size 2 with sex lives that aren’t a punch line.

The problem with most reality TV is that much of it isn’t very satisfying, like eating a bag of potato chips when what one really craves is a full meal. In spite of its name, reality TV still has a lot of fakery in it: scenes edited together to create the illusion of tension where none exists, scripts that the “stars” know to follow whether they are part of “reality” or not and women with glamorous hair and makeup when their real-life counterparts bear little resemblance to women on magazine covers.

POV featured "Living With AIDS" directed by Tina Tina DiFeliciantonio — In 1988 *POV* featured “Living With AIDS” directed by Tina DiFeliciantonio

A channel that has been delivering a less tempered version of “reality” TV for many decades is PBS, most consistently and interestingly for over 25 years on POV, which showcases independent documentaries with limited theatrical runs (and many of those films are available online to watch as well). In its history POV has put its spotlight on trans* and queer people, people of color, and people with disabilities often in work directed by people who are from those communities (which is not usually the case in other “reality” programming). For many years POV was one of the only places on TV to see nuanced portraits of these people, especially before cable TV (and platforms like Netflix and Amazon) started to produce their own content.

POV and documentaries in general have, historically, a far more proportionate share of women directors than the rest of the film and television industry. Barbara Kopple has been directing documentaries since the 1970s, has won two Oscars and her work has been featured, among many other places, on PBS. In part 2 of an interview I conducted with her (part 1 is here) she talks about how she began her career and the challenges through the years of making films about real people living their lives.

(This interview was edited for concision and clarity.)

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering about your own beginnings as a filmmaker. You worked in a collective at first and with the Maysles brothers. That was the early ’70s and there were hardly any women in filmmaking then. Did you always see yourself going into directing?

Barbara Kopple: I think I did. Because I started learning everything I could possibly learn. This woman who became one of my best friends, Barbara Jarvis, who is now passed away– I’m her daughter’s godmother– I started at Maysles and she would leave me work to do at night, so I’d do the assistant editor’s work, which is what she was, at night, so I would learn. And then I got a job with this guy who was an editor and he would say to me, “OK, I’m going out to lunch and I want you to edit this piece down from 20 minutes to five minutes by the time I get back.” I started to learn storytelling. And also doing Winter Soldier, being part of that wonderful collective. I just loved talking to people. I had this incredible curiosity. Then Harlan County came up and I was able to get a loan of $12,000 to start doing it.

BF: So that was a personal loan that you got? It wasn’t from a foundation or anything?

Kopple: It was just from a producer named Tom Brandon, now passed away. I was searching everywhere to try to find money and he gave me $12,000 and I paid him back.

BF: How long did it take you?

Kopple:: Until the film was finished, and then I got a very small advance and I paid all my debts with him.

From "Harlan County, USA" — From *Harlan County, USA*

BF: That’s amazing. I know that you lived among and followed the people in Harlan County, USA for a long time to get the film that you made.

Kopple: In Harlan County we were machine-gunned. A miner was killed by a foreman, the picket lines… I mean, every day something was happening. You couldn’t miss a moment.

BF: I realize you’ve directed a wide range of things. Have you always felt free in filming people?

Kopple: Yeah. The Dixie Chicks let us sit in on all their intimate moments…And Gregory Peck and all of them.

BF: So nobody has said, “I feel like this scene shows me in a really unflattering light, like in a big way.”

From "American Dream" — From *American Dream*

Kopple: Someone would close the door in our face in American Dream before we would go in. I would just open it, and sometimes, you know, when things were really tough and people were upset, they’d make me say why I wanted to film them, and then I’d get up in front of the room and say why and then they would vote and they would say, “OK.” I’d only been there months and months and months.

BF: Was that in a union setting?

Kopple: Yeah.

BF: But that’s still really amazing because quite a few people, even those who are interested in filming others would be like, “Wait a minute.”

Kopple: Then they wouldn’t do it! All these people wanted to do it. These people said, “Yes.” And if you want to do it, maybe you don’t understand what that means at the beginning…

BF: But eventually you do.

Kopple: Absolutely

BF: Now more and more women are making films, but the problem is: many have short careers, even if their films win awards, even if they really want to direct and they’re really trying to continue their careers as directors. And I’m wondering if you can think of specific things–because you’ve had a really long career–that have helped you to go from project to project. Because, correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like you haven’t taken much of a break.

Kopple: No. I probably should! I don’t know. I guess that I just…somebody will call me and say, “How would you like to do a film on…” and I’m a girl who can’t say no. I do it. I mean, I’m finishing a film now on The Nation magazine; they’re about to have their 150th anniversary in 2015, and we’re finished shooting a film on Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings. And we’re doing a very short piece on homeless veterans. I love working. I love the curiosity of it, I love learning about people and being out there. [It’s made] my life so rich and so full. Of course I don’t do it for the money, because I can hardly keep my head above water most of the time. I do it because I love it. It doesn’t seem like so many years. Each film is just very magical and exciting and different, and it gives you energy rather than taking it away, so I really just consider it an honor to be doing what I’m doing.

BF: If you could give advice to women who are making films now, what do you think it would be?

Kopple: I think it would be that you’re not alone that there’s tons of people out there who will help you. And only care about the story. Don’t… some people get hung up in, like, the technical, and that’s not what the story is about. It’s about the people. If you feel passionate about something, that passion’s going to flow to a lot of other people and you’re going to be able to do it. [It’s not] easy. You have your ups and your downs. I have my ups and my downs all the time.

BF: Even now?

Barbara Kopple: Yeah! I mean some things get really small budgets and I really want to make these films, so I don’t care about the money, and then I don’t know where to get it to keep paying electricity, to keep the place (her production company) going, but I just figure the films in the end are what’s going to matter. You want to put it out there. I used to dream that some white knight on a horse would come and say, “Here, do whatever you want.” Cinderella wants her lover and I want somebody to care about these films.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

A ‘Wild’ Woman Alone

The reviews of Wild, the new film based on the bestselling memoir by Cheryl Strayed, make me think most men shouldn’t be allowed to review films based on women’s memoirs. Because more than one male critic has likened Cheryl Strayed and her grief-stricken, hardscrabble book about making her way up the Pacific Crest Trail to Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s account of living a life of luxury in various spots around the globe and indulging in a little cultural appropriation along the way. I’m sure these same critics would never dream of arguing that Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, and Michael Palin are basically the same person because they’re all men who also wrote about travel.

I went into the screening of Wild prepared to love it. I’m a big fan of Strayed, whose work I was first exposed to when she had an online advice column (which she started writing anonymously) “Dear Sugar,” in which she gave answers to readers’ questions that read more like selections from Best American Essays than “Dear Abby,” while still managing to offer solid guidance and empathy. The book that collected the columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, like Wild, was a bestseller. Strayed has done a lot of good with the fame and money Wild and “Sugar” have brought her, including using her name to publicize and raise funds for VIDA, the group that lobbies for more women to be published (and their books to be reviewed) in literary publications. I also wanted to be able to champion the film because of the male critics who have dismissed it; one of whom (thankfully now retired) took time in his review to comment on the real-life Strayed’s body, a supreme irony when, elsewhere Strayed has described men who disparage women’s bodies as not “worth fucking.”

Films don’t have to necessarily be very much like the books they’re based on to be good, even when those books have received a lot of critical acclaim and have sold a lot of copies. But the film version of Wild often leaves out or glosses over precisely the things that make Strayed’s story–and writing–so striking. A comparison of the film’s scenes to those that make up the original essay Strayed expanded into Wild or any of her writing in Tiny Beautiful Things (Strayed returns many times to her mother’s death and its aftermath, always detailing different, but still vivid memories), shows that Strayed’s version of events are not only more compelling on the page, but also leave us with more lasting visual images than the same or similar scenes in the film do.

The filmmakers (director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby) profess to be fans of Strayed’s work, but they were apparently so busy patting themselves on the back for not making this story of a woman alone into some kind of boy-meets-girl rom-com that they forgot to include everything else that makes the book distinctive. The mother’s death (Strayed tells a therapist in the film, “My mother was the love of my life”), the hook-up sex, the family violence that Strayed (played by Reese Witherspoon, who also produced the film) thinks back on as she hikes up the West Coast could have been cut and pasted from any other film. The staging for these scenes isn’t incompetent, but generic enough to leave us unmoved.

Hornby and Vallée also omit that some of Strayed’s hook-ups were with women (which makes Vallée two for two in erasing the queerness of his main characters: his previous film, Dallas Buyers Club, made its protagonist a straight homophobe, when in real-life he was an out bisexual). They cut out the sexual abuse Strayed endured as a very young child from her father’s father–as if this abuse had a minimal effect on her or her life.

Wild-LauraDern — Laura Dern plays Strayed’s mother, Bobbi

Witherspoon is significantly older than Strayed was when the events of the book take place, but physically embodies the role in a believable way. Though Laura Dern, who plays Strayed’s mother (she’s excellent–in her brief scenes we can see why her loss would affect her daughter so deeply) is less than a decade older than Witherspoon, their scenes together work, though again, Strayed in her book and other writing depicts their relationship much more compellingly.

In Wild, Witherspoon as Strayed can’t seem to summon the youthful energy that she had in movies like Freeway, when she was closer to the age she is supposed to be in Wild. This story is definitely a 20-something’s–thinking a three-month hike in the wilderness alone, thousands of miles away from home, will turn one’s life around is the sort of half-assed hypothesis a 30-something would never come up with–though in Strayed’s case, the miracle was this “cure” for her broken life worked.

Witherspoon’s Strayed also doesn’t have the recklessness or the inevitable shame that follows that recklessness the Strayed of the book had. When, in the film, a fellow hiker tells her that she seems like someone who beats herself up a lot, the observation comes as a complete surprise to the audience.

I skipped Dallas Buyers Club, in spite of its many awards, because of its straight-washing–the buyers clubs that the film depicts were a movement of queer people with AIDS, not the work of one “straight” homophobe– as well as its transphobia and general cluelessness about the issues the film is supposed to address (the makeup team when accepting their Oscar referred to “AIDS victims” when the preferred term, coined by those who have the disease more than 30 years ago, is “people with AIDS“). But in spite of my wariness, I didn’t expect Vallée to be the hack director he is here. Not just the flashback scenes but also the wilderness scenes in this film are nothing special–panoramas that should take our breath away look like faded, crappy postcards. Both Boyhood (a film I thought was otherwise vastly overrated) and Under The Skin (which I also had major qualms about) capture the beauty of nature (and in Skin the danger for a woman alone in it) on a level that Vallée seems incapable of–and those two films are in the “wild” for a relatively brief period of their runtimes.

I should probably add that Strayed herself has said that she is satisfied with the film and was allowed a lot of access to the film’s set; her daughter, Bobbi Strayed Lindstrom, even plays her as a young girl in flashback scenes. But Wild being better than most of the films in the multiplex doesn’t mean it’s nearly good enough. Maybe only when we have women writing the screenplays that adapt great books by women and women directing those films will we get the movies we deserve.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn2-GSqPyl0″]

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“Crazy” Women Run in the Family in ‘Rocks in My Pockets’

We have had few if any first-person accounts from “crazy” women filmmakers about how they see their own lives and minds. Animator and artist Signe Baumane’s first feature, ‘Rocks in My Pockets,’ seeks to change that situation. Baumane focuses on five women’s stories of mental illness in two different generations of her Latvian family: her grandmother, Anna; and three of her cousins–Miranda, the artist; beautiful, studious Linda; music teacher Irbe; and finally, Baumane herself.

The “crazy” woman character has been a staple of literature going as far back as Jane Eyre and a staple of films going as far back as Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit. Not coincidentally, “crazy” is the adjective most often used to dismiss a woman who disagrees with the opinions or the recounting of events of a man or group of men either online or elsewhere (the second most popular term of dismissal is “angry”). In recent years women writers like Kay Redfield Jamison have documented their own struggles with diagnosed mental illness, and an Australian TV series (on Pivot in the US), Please Like Me, has used the experience of the star and creator, Josh Thomas’s, own mother as a model for the sympathetic and nuanced portrait of the “Josh” character’s mother on the show: she has attempted suicide more than once and spent much of the last season as an inpatient at a mental hospital.

We have had few if any first-person accounts from “crazy” women filmmakers about how they see their own lives and minds. Animator and artist Signe Baumane’s first feature, Rocks in My Pockets, seeks to change that situation. Baumane (who also wrote the screenplay) focuses on five women’s stories of mental illness in two different generations of her Latvian family: her grandmother, Anna; and three of her cousins–Miranda, the artist; beautiful, studious Linda; music teacher Irbe; and finally, Baumane herself.

Early in the film, Baumane alludes to a longer history of mental illness in the family than the one she details. Her grandmother marries an older man who divorces his first wife so he can have another larger family (he wants 10 more children but ends up with eight) so more little Latvians can inherit what he thinks are his superior qualities. The grandfather’s ego was far greater than his accomplishments; his children in some scenes momentarily transform into DNA double helixes to remind us of how he sees them. But Baumane tells us he didn’t take into account his new wife’s family history, never asking about the members of her family who “died early” and “didn’t live up to their potential.”

AnnaKidsCowsRocks — Anna and her children

Anna’s depression doesn’t manifest until after she starts having children, one after another, in an isolated town with a jealous husband who makes sure his young, pretty wife is far from any male neighbors. The family live on top of a sandy hill, so they cannot dig a well for water. Instead Anna has to travel back and forth up the hill to bring water in buckets from the river below, not just for the family, but also for the two cows and a horse. The animals alone needed 40 buckets every day.

The family goes through much hardship as the country is first annexed by the Soviets and then by the Nazis and then the Soviets again. During her many trips to the river Anna sees in the water a creature that looks like a cross between an oversized teddy bear and a sea monster beckoning her to come in. One day she does, but a poacher spots and rescues her. She had forgotten to put rocks in her pockets to sink.

Anna later sends her children to boarding school, since she can barely provide for them (her husband continues to live at home but we see him literally turn his back on the rest of the family). Sometime after he dies, she overdoses on Valium, the go-to drug of the country’s Soviet era, prescribed for everything from heart problems to the “mental deficiency” the regime considered mental illness to be.

MirandaHusbandRocks — Miranda and her husband

Baumane’s slightly older cousin Miranda has no desire to get married, but a nice man pursues her and she relents. As she gathers wild orchids with a 16-year-old Baumane she tells her that this will be her last summer. Baumane thinks that Miranda means her last summer as a single woman and urges her to cancel the wedding. Miranda tells her she feels obligated to do the things that make the people who love her happy, and marries and has a child within the year. After her son is born, she tries to strangle herself, but her husband comes home early and saves her. “She never forgave him,” Baumane tells us. After spending much time in Soviet-era mental hospitals under heavy medication Miranda succeeds in killing herself when her children are older.

“You can’t learn from anyone else’s mistakes,” Baumane narrates. “You have to make your own.” Because Baumane becomes pregnant, her parents pressure her, when she is still young, to marry a man who seems to be descending into alcoholism. After her son is born she visits a psychiatrist and then she too is sent to a mental hospital, but is somewhat reassured when, just before she goes, she looks in a mirror and sees Miranda, who tells her to just drink a lot of water to dilute the medication she is forced to take. After Baumane is discharged from the hospital and divorces her husband, Baumane’s mother decides she is unfit to take care of her own son and raises him herself instead.

Baumane combines traditional hand-drawn animation (she at one time worked with Bill Plympton and some of the film evokes his distinctive style) with sets and some other elements made of paper maché. The exaggerated expressions of the human characters (who are sometimes hard to tell apart), along with Baumane’s narration–which at times, sounds a bit too much like an adult reading a story to a child–can be jarring. Waltz With Bashir and Sita Sings The Blues are two films that had better success in combining conventional animation with complex stories meant for grown-ups (which, like Baumane’s, have elements of autobiography), probably because both had tighter scripts than Baumane does. Baumane’s family history starts with her grandmother’s early suicide attempt in the river, backtracks to Baumane’s own suicidal ideation (she’d make sure to rub with soap the rope she’d hang herself with, so it wouldn’t catch on any edges and would wear adult diapers, so whoever found her wouldn’t have to clean up any urine and feces expelled from her dying body), then goes to the very beginning of the grandmother’s story, a runaround that both exhausts and confuses the audience.

But a lot of the imagery Baumane uses, in both the paper maché (the misshapen human characters and the houses with eyes are standouts) and the animation that has the look of illustrations for children’s books (work that Baumane has also done) like the teddy bear/sea monster, huge bottles of pills invaded by equally huge, long tongues and the psychiatrist’s giant legs bursting from under her desk under her immobile, sedated face, are unforgettable.

The creature who embodies mental illness in all of the women’s lives doesn’t look threatening. In fact, the creature is kind of a solace to several of the women–it dances with a delusional Linda while she wears a wedding dress for a groom who doesn’t exist. The creature’s appearance fits how the women see it themselves; Irbe describes the voices she hears as comforting, because they once warned her off a road before a vehicle came crashing through it.

Baumane, like some mental health activists who have been diagnosed themselves, doesn’t see medication as the answer (at least two of the women in her family were taking prescribed medication when they committed suicide). Her solution: to not withdraw into herself and her own pain when it threatens to overtake her and instead spend time in the company of others, waiting out her worst suicidal impulses seems like an anticlimax. But the method has apparently worked for her–keeping her alive and well long enough to make this vivid and beautiful film she labels a “quest for sanity.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJcVnFripdc”]

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‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’: An Incomplete Portrait of The Women’s Movement

When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, many women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.

The following is a slightly modified repost.

But looking at contemporary movies and television series (especially those written by men) that take place in the 1960s and early 70s when “the women’s movement,” as it was then called, flourished, one would be hard-pressed to see any evidence of feminist thought, protest or even the untenable circumstances that led women of the era to become feminists. On Mad Men, two women in the late 1960s work in top positions in a not particularly progressive advertising firm. Sexual harassment there is barely a factor: Joan’s “date” with the guy from Jaguar was just a one-time thing–and she became a partner because of it, so in this alternate universe of the 1960s powerful men exploiting the women they work with for sex is unusual and for the women, choosing to acquiesce is a really great career move. Also women in these positions get substantial raises without even asking for them, when in reality women had to sue (or threaten legal action) both to be able to work in a “man’s job” and then to take home anything that resembled a man’s salary (women’s salaries for the same work are lower, even to this day).

Mary Dore’s Kickstarter-funded She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry looks to correct this revisionist history in one of the first documentaries (along with PBS’s Makers which aired last year) to try to offer a comprehensive view of the early days of the women’s movement using archival footage and interviewing the women who were on the frontlines. We don’t see Gloria Steinem, but we do see and hear from an array of (mostly white) other women with varying degrees of fame, from Kate Millett (who along with Steinem was all over the media as a spokesperson for feminism in the early 70s) to less well-known names like Village Voice writer Ellen Willis, former SNCC organizer Fran Beal and early reproductive rights activist Heather Booth. Seeing footage of the women from 40 years ago and then seeing them comment today (or sometime in the 2000s as Willis does, since she died in 2006), we see that the women have, in some ways, broken away from the strict feminist hard-line (which they may never have fully subscribed to, but was very much at the forefront of the early 70s feminism) of no makeup, no hair dye, and no plastic surgery. At least one of the talking heads (Against Our Will writer Susan Brownmiller) has written at length about these personal choices (remember: one of the catchphrases of the movement was “The personal is political”) and the film could use more women talking about themselves and their ideologies shifting through the years, underneath their identity as principled feminists.

We hear very little, beyond the familiar narrative of how-I-discovered-I-needed-feminism, of the ways in which the women’s goals and ideals have changed from their 20s to their 60s or 70s (and beyond), when those of us (especially activists) who are no longer in our 20s know such change is, for most people, inevitable. The closest the film comes to exploring these issues is when Willis tells us that without the feminist movement she doesn’t think she would have been able to both have her career (which, from an early age, she was determined to make happen) and her daughter–and she considers choosing to be a parent one of the best decisions of her life.

Although it’s similar in its conventional structure (the film makes a few passes at experimentalism–actresses reciting feminist writing in front of archival backdrops–which fall flat), Angry is more thorough and less forgettable than Makers (just a few months after seeing it, the only image from the PBS series that sticks with me is a woman in a construction hat), but still seems to put the same, big happy-face sticker–perfectly acceptable to the most middle-of-the-road feminists of today–on what was, like The Black Power Movement, The Young Lords, AIM, and the original Stonewall uprising a revolutionary movement. Popular feminist writers of the time like Shulamith Firestone (whom we see and hear briefly in archival footage) weren’t early prototypes of Sheryl Sandberg offering tips on how to combine a corporate career with raising a family, but true radicals, who called for the destruction of both the nuclear family and capitalism.

The aftermath, when the revolution didn’t come (as it also didn’t for Black, Latino, Indian, and queer radicals), left many activists devastated and depressed: women in feminist groups turned to “trashing” each other (a phenomenon briefly touched on in the film, but more thoroughly explored in this essay by Susan Faludi) and less well-known activists denounced (and even forcibly ejected) some of the early feminist “leaders” (like the Occupy movement, feminism was supposed to be “leaderless”).

While some women, like Marilyn Webb, are philosophical about being “trashed,” Shulamith Firestone (and undoubtedly many other less well-known women) never recovered from her “sisters'” betrayal. Firestone didn’t participate in feminist activism again (though she lived to be in her 60s), eventually developed severe mental illness, spent much time in psychiatric hospitals (documented in her novel Airless Spaces) and died alone and, for many days, undiscovered, in her cluttered apartment.

Angry makes us think that, except for a few isolated incidents like the one that Webb describes, and generational differences (which are mentioned only in passing), along with the tensions between queer women and straight ones in the movement (queer, white feminist activists Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown narrate that conflict), feminism was one, big, happy family. In fact, even straight, white women who were bestselling superstars like Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) (though she is mainly known today as a transphobe, Greer was, at one time, a fascinating and provocative writer and thinker) had conflicts both in personality (dishily recorded in Greer’s later writing) and in their approach to feminism. In the film’s archival footage of the infamous Town Hall debate with literary blowhard and unrepentant anti-feminist Norman Mailer, Greer gets a laugh when, asked about “the sexual revolution,” she references the quote Gandhi gave when asked his thoughts on Western civilization: “‘I think it would be a good idea’.”

Also largely unexplored are tensions between women of color and white women in the movement, even though (or maybe because) those tensions still exist today. Although a few women of color are interviewed and featured in archival footage in Angry, their inclusion seems perfunctory. In the Q and A after the screening I attended the filmmakers were careful to emphasize that they could tell only so much of the story of early days of feminism (and that they wanted to mostly focus on the work of organizers), but the film seems to go out of its way not to mention prominent women of color of the time: Shirley Chisholm, the first woman, Black or white, to seek the Democratic nomination for US presidency (in 1972, right in the middle of other actions noted in the film); Angela Davis, then a leader in the Black Power movement; Dolores Huerta, leader (and organizer) of the mostly Latino farm workers union; and Alice Walker, one of the first women (of any color) to write bestselling and acclaimed works of fiction that were unapologetically womanist/feminist. Even if the filmmakers were trying to avoid material more thoroughly covered in other documentaries, the omission of these women–along with that of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer at the beginning, when white women speak about their own experiences in the civil rights movement and how “inspiring” they found the Black women within it–risks flinging this film into irrelevance. Keeping these women out of the discussion is as careless and puzzling as omitting mention of bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and even Beyoncé in an overview of feminism today.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry won an audience award for “Best Documentary” at The Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw it), but for the standing ovation I kept my butt in the seat. Although I see the importance of the film, and understand that we need many more films about second-wave feminism (what we really need is a detailed and multi-part series which covers these events, like the great Eyes on the Prize covered the civil rights movement), I was also a little bored and sleepy in parts, even though I’m interested–to the point of obsession–in the subject matter. The filmmakers said in the Q and A that they wanted to show, among other things, how to organize around issues, but we could learn as much about activism and organizing from the failures of the women’s movement as we can from its successes: a film with a less sunny outlook would have been a better one. “This is what a feminist looks like,” a crowd chants as we see examples of many different kinds of feminists in a present-day march. Next to those women, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’s portrait of “This is what feminism looked like,” seems lacking.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry opened in New York on Dec.5, will open in Los Angeles on Dec. 12 and will be open in other US cities from the rest of December through March. See http://www.shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com/findascreening/ for more info.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJYXmyrjlac”]

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Black Actresses Are the Best Thing About ‘Get On Up’

I read film reviews, so I wasn’t expecting great art out of ‘Get On Up,’ but I also wasn’t expecting a film that frequently had me asking myself why it had been made. I know all the good reasons for making a James Brown bio-pic. He was a musical genius (I don’t use that word lightly) whose innovations, for a less talented (or less business-savvy) artist, would have led to a nice little corner of the avant-garde. Instead, Brown and his band produced chart-making hits for 30 years (in itself an unprecedented accomplishment: his career lasted for 50 years) that lured people onto the dance floor who sat out every other song (and his work is sampled in many other artists’ hits as well). He also had a dramatic personal life: he was in prison both before he was famous and after the peak of his fame had passed, had many children by many different women (some of whom he married, some he did not) and, through the years, had a slew of domestic violence charges filed against him. They, of course, were not the reason he went to prison.

Awards season is here, which means overrated films like Boyhood and Ida are starting to collect lauds. And even those of us in groups that give out very minor awards are starting to receive “for your consideration” screeners. I saw a fun trailer for Get On Up, the James Brown bio-pic, at the Roxbury International Film Festival in the summer and then didn’t hear much about it until last month when I received in the mail a heavy promotional packet from its distributor, with a large, glossy, brightly colored book of stills from the film filled with big-font blurbs from critics and, hilariously, no sign of a DVD–or info about accessing the film online–inside. I was trying to think what the studio’s motivation was, that someone in their marketing department thought I would flip through the film’s book of photos and think, “This looks fabulous,” and immediately vote for it as “Best Picture.” The studio, Universal, Fedexed the DVD to all of us later. Marketing for this film might have been better off with the strategy I had originally imagined.

I read film reviews, so I wasn’t expecting great art out of Get On Up, but I also wasn’t expecting a film that frequently had me asking myself why it had been made. I know all the good reasons for making a James Brown bio-pic. He was a musical genius (I don’t use that word lightly) whose innovations, for a less talented (or less business-savvy) artist, would have led to a nice little corner of the avant-garde. Instead, Brown and his band produced chart-making hits for 30 years (in itself an unprecedented accomplishment: his career lasted for 50 years) that lured people onto the dance floor who sat out every other song (and his work is sampled in many other artists’ hits as well). He also had a dramatic personal life; he was in prison both before he was famous and after the peak of his fame had passed, had many children by many different women (some of whom he married, some he did not) and, through the years, had a slew of domestic violence charges filed against him. They, of course, were not the reason he went to prison.

BosemanGetOnUp — Chadwick Boseman as James Brown

But why would anyone make a film of this terrible script (by British screenwriters Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth)? The previous film of director, Tate Taylor, The Help, gave him some experience with awful scripts about Black characters, but the main motivation for making the dull, sloppy, overlong Get On Up seems to be “We got the funding!” I’m not a fan of Taylor Hackford’s (award-winning) Ray, but at least that film, also about a musical icon and Black man who was, to put it mildly, not easy to get along with, had the bones of a better movie within it–a study of how a trusting and good-natured young person, after being repeatedly taken advantage of and discriminated against, becomes a suspicious asshole as he becomes older, even to those who mean him no harm. In Get On Up we see Brown, from the start in flashbacks from both 1988, when he was arrested after a high speed chase with the police, and in the 1960s when he toured Vietnam (the film jumps around in time for no discernible reason) as a crazed, dictatorial chatterbox. After the plane the band is in gets hit by mortar fire, Brown lectures a white army minder, “You want to go down in history as the man who killed the funk?”

The lead actor, Chadwick Boseman, doesn’t look like Brown (though as Brown ages, the incompetent makeup team try to make a resemblance out of rubber, leaving Boseman to try to act his way through the layers), but he does capture Brown’s distinctive voice and presence: smiling at first with joy and then a moment later letting paranoia and menace settle into his face. When Boseman, as Brown, dances on television during a performance before the Rolling Stones (in their first trip to America) I was reminded of an interview with Tina Turner in which she said that Mick Jagger didn’t dance when he sang with the Stones until after they’d toured with her. In archival footage, Jagger’s ’60s dance moves also seem to owe a lot to the early James Brown (who upstaged the Stones in their joint TV appearance), but Jagger is one of the film’s producers, so we don’t see the legacy of white performers “borrowing” from Black ones.

AunjanueGetOnUp — Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis) and Vicki Anderson (Aunjanue Ellis)

Like Ray, the best thing about Get On Up are the Black actresses in it. Even though many of them are just called on to flirt and smile, we still see more of of them than we do in the litany of movies that pretend Black women don’t exist. Octavia Spencer has a nice couple of moments as “Aunt Honey” the no-nonsense woman who reluctantly takes in young James after his father abandons him. She tells James, “Your mama’s a no-account fool. Your daddy too. But you ain’t gonna be.” But the standout is Viola Davis, as the mother who walks out on both father and son, and lets us see, in a late scene with Boseman, the humiliation she feels under her good-time persona. Earlier we witness a very simplified, sped-up pattern of abuse between Brown’s parents. His father (Lennie James) strikes Davis and then immediately demands sex, which she also seems eager for. Brown plays out the same scenario with his second wife (played by Jill Scott). This distortion of what happens in abusive relationships makes the violence we see seem like a fetish, an insult to all survivors of domestic abuse.

Like Ray’s Kerry Washington before her, Davis has found a role on television in a Shonda-Rhimes-produced series that gives her the chance to show off the full range of her talent, and maybe sometime in the future we’ll see a series that does the same for Aunjanue Ellis, who, in Get On Up, looks great, in ’60s outfits and hairstyles and gives the world’s most piercing side-eye as Vicki Anderson, a backup singer in Brown’s band who later marries his best friend and band mate–he shared lead vocals with Brown and co-wrote the song “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”)–Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis). But Taura Cherne, Jacinte Blankenship, and Cariella Smith also leave indelible impressions during their brief time on camera. Whenever producers weakly say they couldn’t find good Black actresses for roles that usually end up going to white women, I can’t help thinking of all the talented Black women going to waste in films like this one.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guOS6ev6hQ0″]

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“The Demon” in ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’

‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,’ a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of The Terror of Little Girls Theme Week.

I used to not understand why so many queer people disliked coming out stories in films, literature, and TV, but now I do. Because, as important as coming out stories are to the community, they are not the only stories–not even along with their flip-side: queer-bashing stories–the community has to tell, a fact casual observers wouldn’t realize watching most queer characters in movies and on television. The omission isn’t because real-life queer people haven’t led interesting lives, but because screenwriters, when adapting real-life queer people’s stories, have cut the queer right out of the script. This phenomenon is not a relic of the distant past: last year’s film about the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, had no mention of her long-term relationship with a woman. This year’s much anticipated bio-pic about WWII codebreaker Alan Turing who was arrested, tried and convicted for the crime of “homosexuality” and was then forced to undergo “chemical castration” as punishment–and went on to kill himself as a result–includes little enough of his identity as a gay man that even straight critics have noticed.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.

The TV film, directed by Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), and scored by Rachel Portman (who has composed for many films, Belle is one of the most recent), captures a world of women. Jess’s mother is one of several middle-aged and older “ladies” in unfashionable 1950s-style suits and hats (the action starts around 1968) who are the backbone of the church. The pastor is the only man of note in nearly three hours of run-time: Jess’s father is present throughout her childhood, but he’s either sleeping (he works the night shift) or looking on with raised eyebrows but no other comment while Jess’s mother embarks on her latest project (equipping the house with an indoor toilet, painting all the house interiors, traveling to another town to minister to the sick or gathering Jess’s books to burn them). The father is so hesitant to speak that in a scene toward the end several of the characters are startled to hear him say a quiet “Amen.”

The terror in Oranges is the terror of the family. Children don’t have any choice in who raises them and until they leave home they are, to some degree, at the mercy of their parents. Fruit also exposes the terror of religious fanaticism. Jess’s mother sees sin and evil everywhere except in the church and with “the redeemed”–which is why she keeps her daughter out of school until she’s 7. The pastor takes the idea of hellfire so literally that he keeps a fire extinguisher in the van he uses to preach in other towns. They see The Devil in everything different from their own insular world, the church and their beliefs. Their perception of “a demon” in the teenaged Jess seems inevitable.

But Fruit frames fanaticism and not religious belief as the problem. Jess is close to an 80-something church lady, Elsie, (Margery Withers) who shows her many kindnesses. And the church and Jess’s sincere beliefs (which shine through Coleman’s radiant face when she talks about Jesus) gives her (and author Winterson, who published the book when she was 24) a confidence that is rare for women and girl characters in films and TV. When the pastor brings Jess and her girlfriend, Melanie (whom she converted!) in front of the congregation and tells them to repent for their “unnatural” passion, Melanie (Cathryn Bradshaw) bursts into tears and collapses on the floor but Jess, who is starting to preach herself, faces the pastor and quotes the Bible back to him, arguing that their love isn’t “unnatural” at all.

Her courage in standing up to the pastor would be rewarded in a lesser film (or one that was less autobiographical) but instead, as she struggles and shouts, she is tied up and gagged on the floor in a private parlor and “prayed over” for three days, without relent, until “the demon” is exorcised from her. Like most people who “confess” or “recant” during torture, Jess does so only to escape further harm. Right after she’s let go, she secretly meets up with the closeted queer member of the church-lady group, Miss Jewsbury (Celia Imrie) to give her a love letter to deliver to Melanie. Jess even continues to preach but eventually acquires another girlfriend (whom she also converts!) which permanently separates her from the church–and her home. She goes to live and work with her mother’s one acquaintance outside the church, the friendly, local undertaker, Cissy (Barbara Hicks), and at the end comes to a kind of peace with her past.

The pastor, Jess and her mother — The pastor, Jess, and her mother

Although the film doesn’t shy away from the damage the church and her mother’s fanaticism does (at one point Jess, as a child, is kept from medical treatment because the congregation believe she is experiencing a “miracle” instead of a raging infection) the audience comes to almost the point of admiration for Jess’s mother: as much as we can muster for someone who is wrong about everything. Her determination and exuberance (Winterson’s real adoptive mother wasn’t nearly as jaunty, which Winterson documents in the nonfiction Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) is like the wind in the sails of a ship and propels the action forward. McEwan later played another religious fanatic who was cruel to young women in The Magdalene Sisters, but here she’s no cardboard villain. She’s sometimes very funny, though often unwittingly so, playing church hymns on an organ which has an added disco beat or melodramatically wondering what the neighbors will think if she’s dragged away to prison for keeping Jess out of school. Jess, who has already absorbed large chunks of The Bible, then mentions that one of the saints spent time in prison to which her mother replies, “I know that, but the neighbors don’t!”

Charlotte Coleman (a former child TV star in Britain–whom many might remember as Scarlett from Four Weddings and a Funeral–she died at age 33) is a more than worthy foil to McEwan, a persuasive and joyful preacher on and off the pulpit and also a girl giddy with love, especially when she’s with her first girlfriend, Melanie. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the two of them in a tender love scene together: their small, slender bodies signaling to us their youth and the wide eyes they make at each other showing the depth of their feelings. Without an explicit scene I don’t think we would have absorbed that Jess’s faith in love is as strong–and eventually stronger–than her faith in God. For so many of us who came out in the decades before homophobia became unfashionable, we followed love (and sexual desire) the same way the devout are supposed to follow God, without question and without fear–in spite of all the terrible things we were told about queer people and their lives. When Jess meets up with Miss Jewsbury she tells her that during the time she was prayed over she saw, or maybe hallucinated, the demon the group was trying to exorcise from her, “It was orange,” she says, the color of her hair. “It looked like me.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-D-CkBvSc0″]

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Mariel Hemingway: ‘Running From Crazy’

Most of us, to some extent, want to get away from the families we grew up in, to not be reminded of the people we were at 5, 10, or 15. Actress Mariel Hemingway had more reason than most: not only did her famous grandfather, Ernest, kill himself in his home, not too far from the house where she grew up, but her parents had their own problems, spending their nights drinking in the kitchen, then fighting, sometimes breaking glass and drawing blood, which Mariel, when she was still a child, would clean up.

Read ahead for an interview with the director, Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple.

In the documentary Running From Crazy, we see Hemingway reminisce about her growing up and also witness her current life, speaking to groups about suicide (her sister, the model and sometime actress, Margaux, also killed herself, and Mariel begins one talk with, “I come from seven suicides, perhaps more”), exercising with her partner Bobby, and spreading the word about holistic ways of staying physically and mentally healthy.

Thanks to archival footage the director, two-time Oscar winner (for Best Documentary feature) Barbara Kopple, discovered, we also see Margaux, in film shot for her own documentary (which you can see on Youtube) 30 years before, which retraces the steps of Ernest Hemingway, but also captures Margaux’s interaction with the rest of her family, including her parents (who are both now dead) and her other sister Joan (also known as Muffet) who, after a lifetime struggle with mental illness, is now, we see later, in assisted living (after Mariel’s grown daughter chides her into visiting).

The Margaux we see in the kitchen of the old family home (which Mariel later tells us was torn down after her parents’ deaths) seems nothing like the woman with the blonde hair and big smile we see in a white 70s jumpsuit, singing alongside a piano, in archival tape from “The Mike Douglas” show (the host declares her a “star”). Instead, she seems to physically shrink in the presence of her mother and father and even her sister, whose manner reminded me of girls I knew in high school: fun to have at a party but with personas that were a cover for troubled lives. She even has the same hairstyle.

Mariel later reveals that her father sexually abused her sisters (she would share a bed with her mother to stay safe), and the family dynamic then seems to make more sense, especially to those of us who have stood by a partner who tried to make nice with abusive family members–and seen all the old roles come into play.

Kopple combines the vintage footage with gorgeous current shots of Mariel hiking in the wilds near her hometown. She says of her childhood, “I knew if I didn’t get outside I’d just want to cry.” We also see her in other wilderness, climbing steep cliffs (after fighting with her partner) and dipping herself in a river, all of which, along with her public speaking and outreach, seems like a catharsis to break with the past.

In one of the many scenes in which she speaks to the camera (some of which are a little too much like one-sided therapy sessions), Mariel says, “We were good WASPs, you know. You don’t speak about your problems,” but she does seem to be breaking the cycle as she tries to involve her adult daughters in this work and talk to them about the family’s history of mental illness (which the daughters have, to a lesser degree, also grappled with). She tells us, “They say in spirituality you’re done with something when it doesn’t affect you anymore. I’m not there yet.”

Interview With The Director, Barbara Kopple

I was able to talk by phone to the director Barbara Kopple (who not only has won two Academy Awards but has had a career that started in the ’70s and hasn’t stopped since) about the film a couple of weeks ago. We started by discussing the footage of Margaux. (The following was edited for concision and clarity.)

Barbara Kopple: She (Mariel) didn’t even know it existed.

Bitch Flicks: So how did you find that then?

Barbara Kopple: It was really pretty wild. We not only found the documentary which was an hour, we found 43 hours of Margaux material. I never told Mariel that we had it because I didn’t want her to feel, “My God, what do they have?” I wanted her to be free to really talk. She never knew it (documentary footage of Margaux, Joan and her parents) existed.

The way we found out about it is the sound person named Alan Barker whom I’ve known for years was in Ketchum for our first shoot. And he said, “You know Barbara when I first (started out) I was a camera person and I did some filming here in Ketchum with Margaux.”

I said (about the documentary), “Where is it?” He didn’t know. I said, “Did it ever come out?'”

He said, “I think they had a little hour thing. But if four people saw it, that was a lot. It was called Winner Take Nothing.”

We finally found some footage at an archival house in Minnesota the footage had been given to. When we called them they said, “My God, we have tons of it but nobody has ever asked for it. We’ll have to go and blow the dust off for you.”

We said,”We will pay anything to get a screening copy made.”

“Well that’s going to take a really long time” he said

(Well) when you do some, just send them to us,” so they sent it to us little by little and we would get these Fedex packages that would be like Christmas. (We were) so excited to see what was on them. I just knew that the film would have sort of a richer context because we had that. From that we were really able to step inside the Hemingway family. Otherwise it would be Mariel’s reflections which were extraordinary, but this way you saw. You saw Margaux with her father, interviewing him. You saw how she was treated. You saw how she played tennis with Joan. We thought that all of these wonderful, extraordinary things that made, for me at least, the piece so intimate and so real. And when I showed it to Mariel, I still hadn’t told her until we were in final cut, we were just about to lock it, and I just wanted to have her look at it, so she wouldn’t have any surprises.

(About the part of the film in which Margaux appears) Mariel just sat straight up in her seat, she was like, “Oh my God, this is the first time I’ve seen my parents on film. And I didn’t know if the kitchen was really yellow and blue. I didn’t know. I was just trying to remember. And there’s my mother sitting on the sink, exactly as I described it.”She said, “This is going to be so amazing for my girls to see.” And it was just, it was just wonderful…She didn’t even know it existed.

Bitch Flicks: The documentary does have in it, if the rest of us were having documentaries made about our lives, things we wouldn’t want included–when Mariel was fighting with her partner and the scene where her daughter scolds her a little bit about Muffet (Joan) and tells her she should visit. And I’m wondering if you and Mariel talked at all about those scenes afterward or even during…

Barbara Kopple: No.

Bitch Flicks: So basically she just let you film whatever.

Barbara Kopple: She agreed. Yes. She just let me do the film, no holds barred. That was the deal. I mean she wanted to talk. She never said, “Don’t use that.”

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering if there have ever been times in your long career when people have said, “Don’t film that,” or “don’t show that” and what has been your policy about that?

Barbara Kopple: It’s happened, but things have been so little and so inconsequential to the story of the film. (She gave a couple of off-the-record examples which seemed really trivial, things that no one else watching would have any objection to or would even notice.) I think that little things that don’t hurt your story or do anything, of course you’ll take them out.

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering how much time you spent with Mariel and her family; was it in short spurts or an extended period?

Barbara Kopple: Short spurts. I wasn’t there every single day because every single day she was living her life, doing yoga or going for a walk or watching the sun rise. There’s only so many shots…

Bitch Flicks: I’m very interested in this framework that the film has, that Mariel said, “Just film me.”

Barbara Kopple: How it all happened was a really good friend of Mariel’s who worked at the OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) who said, “Hey Mariel, I think we should do a film about your life.”

Mariel said, “Let’s just make a reality series.”

And her friend said…”I have an idea. I want you to talk to this woman, Barbara Kopple.”

And I guess Mariel had heard my name and she said, “Well, OK, alright.”

I said, “I’d love to,” and then Mariel and I got together and we talked about three hours or more and she just promised that she would tell me whatever I needed to know. She said whatever I asked her she would answer to the best of her ability and not hold anything back. Because she felt that it was important to sort of see the light of day, the bad things in her life. She just did it and kept her promise.

Bitch Flicks: Were you surprised that Mariel’s daughters have never read Hemingway?

Barbara Kopple:. No, because I don’t think Mariel read very much of it until she got married to Steve (her daughters’ father). I mean, it was a family that never really talked. They didn’t talk about books. They (Margaux and Mariel) were bullied because they went to the Hemingway school that was named after him. He had committed suicide. That was something that you just didn’t talk about. I wasn’t, but probably the audience who sees it (are surprised). It’s just who they were. People in the house were very dysfunctional–fights all the time. There wasn’t much time for fuzzy, cozy stuff. Her mother had cancer and Mariel took care of her mother. If you wanted to get close to the father you went fly-fishing or hunting with him.

Bitch Flicks: Is there anything else that you really would like to add?

Barbara Kopple: I guess if there was anything else I wanted to say, it was that I learned a lot. I learned that, in a sense, all of us are touched by mental illness, or by suicide, or we know somebody that is and it’s really important to talk about it. And that it’s really important to help each other and in the end I think what we really need to have is more love and more compassion for each other and that’s hugely important. I think that this film, if by getting out there, can convince people that they’re not alone and that there are people out there who love them and care about them and will help them, then we’ve done something very special.

Running From Crazy will be on Netflix starting on Nov. 25. For more information go to Facebook.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfGYqdTAxEk”]

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Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a Superstar in ‘Beyond The Lights’

I thought of Beyoncé often while watching writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s (‘Love and Basketball’) new film ‘Beyond The Lights.’ The main character, pop star Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is supposed to remind us of Beyoncé, as well as Rihanna, with bits of Nicki Minaj, Lauren Hill, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan thrown in. In early scenes we see her in elaborate videos wearing hardly any clothes, her skimpy outfits often incorporating glittering chains. She has first blonde, then purple, long flowing hair.

About a decade ago, the powers that be were trying to make Beyoncé a movie star in films like Dreamgirls and that Austin Powers sequel where she wore a huge afro. But instead of going the way of Diana Ross (Beyoncé’s part in Dreamgirls was based on her life) with a film career fizzling after she was cast in roles that used fewer and fewer of the qualities that made her so compelling in her Lady Sings the Blues debut, Beyoncé abruptly cut back on film roles to concentrate on her music career. Her videos and award show performances have become increasingly cinematic–culminating in the stunning black and white video for “Drunk in Love” and her performance at the Video Music awards lit from behind with huge blazing letters that spelled out “Feminist.” She didn’t need to be cast in some white guy’s film to be a star in front of the camera.

I thought of Beyoncé often while watching writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s (Love and Basketball) new film Beyond The Lights. The main character, pop star Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is supposed to remind us of Beyoncé, as well as Rihanna, with bits of Nicki Minaj, Lauren Hill, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan thrown in. In early scenes we see her in elaborate videos wearing hardly any clothes, her skimpy outfits often incorporating glittering chains. She has first blonde, then purple, long flowing hair. We see her sing alongside a tattooed white rapper, Kid Culprit (Richard Colson Baker aka Machine Gun Kelly, who is like a taller, more current version of Eminem) while she wears shoes with heels so high it’s a marvel that she–or anyone–can walk in them, let alone dance. She wins an award and chugs champagne as she passes screaming, adoring crowds on the way to her limo. She tells the paid detail cop, Kaz (Nate Parker), outside of her hotel room not to let anyone disturb her, so he shuts out two of her hangers-on but relents to let in her controlling mother, Macy (Minnie Driver). When he hears Macy scream, he goes into the room himself where he sees that Noni is seated on the railing of her hotel balcony, many stories up, ready to jump.

This film is the second one this year in which a Black woman director (with a script from a Black woman screenwriter) has cast Mbatha-Raw as the essential center of a film (the art house hit Belle was the first), and she rewards their faith by giving her all. In contrast to the Jane-Austen-like romantic intrigue in Belle, in Lights she’s a powerhouse, utterly convincing as Noni (if she had faltered for even a moment the film would devolve into camp) whether she’s dancing in a tightly choreographed award show performance, singing (Mbatha-Raw’s voice is the one we hear during all of Noni’s songs: the film has been billed as a love story but doubles as a musical), interacting with other characters, or doing all three: during the award show appearance we see her expressive face send clear messages to both Kaz, who is in the wings and Kid Culprit, who is performing onstage with her. Prince-Bythewood also seamlessly and sometimes wittily incorporates into the film the modern media landscape: music videos, award shows, talk shows (we see two appearances from famous chastiser of his fellow Black people, Don Lemon), Youtube and Twitter, which perhaps shouldn’t be an unusual achievement, but is.

After a summer marked by the incidents in which white police officers killed unarmed Black people, having a Black police officer as the hero may not be the best fit. But Parker is believable and likeable in the role–and like Mbatha-Raw embodies the character with touching sincerity. He does so even in scenes like the one in which he wraps Noni’s cut hand in the shirt off his back, a flimsy excuse for us to ogle his flawlessly muscled chest, abs, and arms. When this moment came the audience I saw the film with laughed–so did I–but none of us did so in a derisive way.

BeyondTheLightsNoniKaz1 — Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Kaz (Nate Parker)

Minnie Driver as Macy, Noni’s hard-driving manager-mother gets a big speech near the end (the big speeches in this film, like contractions in labor come closer together as it speeds toward its conclusion) in which she explains the desperation behind her ambition for her daughter, but we in the audience never manage to see that desperation ourselves, just the steely mask of Driver’s face. She never really softens, not even in a scene when she asks Noni, “When did you ever tell me that you didn’t want this?”

And Noni answers, “When I was on that balcony.”

While watching most films and TV shows–especially those that take place in Los Angeles and New York–I’ve wondered if anyone associated with the production ever looked up and noticed they were surrounded by Black and brown people–who were neither homeless nor worked in cleaning or wait staff positions. Beyond The Lights is one of the few recent films I’ve seen (besides Dear White People) which takes for granted that Black people, especially Black women, are everywhere; they’re not just entertainers but also political consultants and hairdressers. When Kaz is saving Noni he chants, “I see you. I see you. I see you.” Apparently a Black woman director is one of the few people who can see all the Black women in real life who aren’t “the help.”

I should confess that I dislike most mainstream films. I hated The Devil Wears Prada, which marks the last time I ever believed critics’ raving about a multiplex hit with a woman protagonist. But at Beyond The Lights, I had almost as much fun as I did watching Snowpiercer. Lights reminded me of the old ’80s TV series Dynasty (although the story has a somewhat different setting) with better acting and a bigger budget: a compilation of confrontations between beautiful people in (and out of) beautiful clothes: the film even has a scene in which one woman slaps another, echoing Dynasty’s famous fights between women. Parker and Mbatha-Raw have great chemistry together, shown most memorably in a love scene that has Beyoncé’s “Drunk In Love” playing on the soundtrack. Beyond The Lights gives the audience many other simple pleasures and, at least for its duration, makes us wonder what else we could ever want from the movies.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfcfZn8nq3w”]

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‘The Theory of Everything’: A “Great Man” From The First Wife’s Point of View

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had ‘Frida’ a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like ‘Frida,’ directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too: they make the “supporting” category a literal one. ‘The Theory of Everything,’ the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

Like a lot of women, I’m impatient with the “great man” films that invade theaters every year just in time for Oscar consideration. The main character is always a man whose name we all know, played by an actor who really wants an Academy Award. We see his earliest struggles then later, his triumphs. The addition of some failures never succeeds in making the film more interesting, just longer.

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had Frida a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like Frida, directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too; they make the “supporting” category a literal one. The Theory of Everything, the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking, seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

But the movie begins by focusing on him (Eddie Redmayne) not her, as he rides a bike, attends classes as a Ph.D. student in the early 1960s at Cambridge and acts as a coxswain (complete with megaphone) for the crew rowing on the river. Hawking meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a student mixer and they become a couple. Hawking’s physical awkwardness could pass for that of any geeky man who considers his body merely a container for his brain, but we know what’s coming before the characters do when we see scenes in which Hawking trips and falls in a train station or his hand folds in on itself as he writes equations on a blackboard. When he has a fall in the yard he receives his diagnosis, ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), along with the news “Life expectancy is two years.”

At first he avoids Jane and holes up in his room, but after she finds out from his friends about his illness, in a scene we’ve all watched in countless other films, she marches into his room and declares, “I want us to be together for as long as we’ve got.” Stephen resumes his studies and for his thesis topic chooses “time.” He and Jane get married and start to have children soon after.

What follows is a portrait of a marriage that combines all the elements of pre-second-wave feminism at once: Jane has to set aside her studies not just to care for her very young children, to make all the meals and clean the house, but also to care for her husband, whose mobility is rapidly deteriorating, even though he’s still a relatively young adult. At the point where he can walk only with the assistance of two canes and can maneuver the stairs in his house only by lying flat on his back and grasping with his few remaining functional fingers the railing to pull himself up or down, we see Stephen hand in a typed dissertation with a barely legible shaky signature; I couldn’t help wondering if the person who typed it was Jane, since he seems unlikely to have been able to do so himself–and so many wives in that era were also their husbands’ de facto secretaries. We’re also seeing an era in which care for disabled family members was often left to a wife or mother (as opposed to paid staff, unless the family was very wealthy), and no one, not Hawking’s family nor Jane’s, ever thinks of taking over his care for even a few hours at a time to give Jane some respite. On the drive back from a dinner at his family’s hillside cottage in the country, a teary Jane tells Hawking she needs help, but he cuts off any further discussion.

TheoryBed — Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking

Later Jane’s mother can see how stressed she is and (instead of offering to help) suggests she join a church choir (Jane is a regular churchgoer, a contrast to her outspoken, atheist husband). She then meets the handsome choirmaster, Jonathan (Charlie Cox) who becomes a family friend and also helps with Stephen’s care. Stephen seems to see the spark between his wife and Jonathan from the beginning and lets her know in an indirect way that she is free to pursue the relationship. Here the film is at its most interesting: too many “great man” films seem to sum up the wife or girlfriend character struggle of living with the great man as “she was a saint” without considering that she might have needs of her own. Jane’s situation also parallels many others of the 50s and 60s when women got married in their early 20s and found in their 30s and 40s their marriages did not fulfill their own expectations and ambitions. Jane remains devoted to Stephen but is at her happiest when she spends time with Jonathan. The closeness of their relationship invites the scrutiny of others at the christening of her third child, when her mother-in-law follows her into the kitchen and declares the family has a “right to know” whether the child is Jonathan’s. Jane replies that the child’s father could not be anyone but Stephen.

When Stephen has the health crisis that robs him of the ability to talk without assistance, Jonathan steps back and nurses come into the home to help Stephen, along with a man who designs a device through which Stephen can talk again, by slowly “typing” (actually clicking a monitor to choose letters and phrases) and having an electronic voice read the words. Stephen becomes very close to one nurse in particular, Elaine (Maxine Peake), who even helps him to look through the copies of Penthouse that come to his office. He eventually leaves Jane for her. An end title tells us that Jane eventually got her Ph.D., married Jonathan, and that she and Stephen are still friends.

EverythingSpeaks — Jane watches Stephen “speak” through a device while the woman who will be his second wife looks on.

What the film leaves out are the most interesting parts of the story–not just Hawking’s scientific work (we get explanations that are so oversimplified they don’t make much sense), but also that the nurse Stephen lived with (and eventually married and divorced) was the wife of the man who created his speaking device–and that she was also investigated after other caregivers alleged she physically abused Stephen (during their relationship he had unexplained bruises, broken bones and burns). When Jane did publicity for a previous movie based on her and Stephen’s relationship, she said she couldn’t comment on Elaine (who was still married to Stephen then) for legal reasons. She did admit during interviews that she was friends with Stephen mainly for the sake of the children. And she and Stephen weren’t a couple when he was diagnosed, their romance blossomed afterward, which Jane described as being in keeping with the great optimism of the early 1960s that ran parallel with the belief that nuclear war between the super powers could, at any moment, wipe out the world.

Redmayne does a credible job as Hawking (whose character in the film is much more sympathetic than Jane and news sources have portrayed him; this Hawking never runs over anyone’s toes “accidentally” with his electric wheelchair), especially in the later scenes where we see a certain impishness in his face (very like the real-life Hawking’s), while most of his features remain immobile. Jones as Jane does a serviceable job too, but I wish she had been allowed to look and dress less like Jean Shrimpton (the British supermodel popular in the era when the film begins). At least Redmayne (who is also more conventionally pretty than the person he plays) gets to mess up his hair and wear unflattering glasses; Jones, for much of the film, until she starts wearing a crappy short wig and half-assed “aging” makeup, looks like she could have stepped out of a stodgy, British clothing catalogue, even when Jane has three kids and a disabled husband to take care of, and, as Jane points out in her book, and is briefly referenced in the film, very little money. The filmmakers (screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh) didn’t seem to think any of these details were worth including. The Theory of Everything is a good, if very conventional, film, but the real story it’s based on could have been made into a great one.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8QYUgO-tZo”]

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‘War Zone’ Shows How Little Street Harassment Has Changed

In the late 1990s, a white woman director, Maggie Hadleigh-West, spent five weeks walking along the streets of New York–but she also filmed other women (and at least one girl) on the streets–together they were a small but diverse group: some in New York, one in San Francisco, two in New Orleans and one in Chicago. Hadleigh-West wore a tight but fairly modest, sleeveless summer outfit (always the same one, as if she were in a science experiment) and 1,050 men harassed her. Her excellent feature-length documentary ‘War Zone’ (which streams for free on Snag Films) expertly edits together 53 of these men on camera –and doesn’t just show the harassment but also shows the interviews Hadleigh-West conducts with these men right after they catcall her.

“I don’t have to watch a video to know women are harassed on the street” was my official reason for never looking at the “viral” Hollaback clip of a white model filmed by a hidden camera (she knew about the camera; passers-by did not) as she walked in New York City, getting catcalled everywhere. Although the film had the “Hollaback” name on it, a man directed it (he runs an ad agency) and “for whatever reason” edited out all the white men who harassed the model. The director, of course, is a white guy himself.

In the late 1990s, a white woman director, Maggie Hadleigh-West, spent five weeks walking along the streets of New York–but she also filmed other women (and at least one girl) on the streets. Together they were a small but diverse group: some in New York , one in San Francisco, two in New Orleans, and one in Chicago. Hadleigh-West wore a tight but fairly modest, sleeveless summer outfit (always the same one, as if she were in a science experiment) and 1,050 men harassed her. Her excellent, feature-length documentary War Zone (which streams for free on Snag Films) expertly edits together 53 of these men on camera–and doesn’t just show the harassment but also shows the interviews Hadleigh-West conducts with these men right after they catcall her. Sometimes they don’t need to make a sound. She’ll just turn around and focus her camera on a man as she says, “I just noticed when I was walking by, that you looked at my breasts.”

Hadleigh-West explains in a voice-over at the beginning how she came to make the film: “I bought this Super 8 camera at a yard sale with no idea what I was going to do with it…I realized I actually had a weapon, a weapon to take back the power that was being taken from me every time I stepped out of my house, a weapon I could turn on men the same way they turn their aggression on me.”

As a saxophone plays on the soundtrack, Maggie walks and we hear comments at the same time she does, at which point she turns around and gets a closeup of the man as she questions him. Her approach is friendly and polite, but we see the surprise and uneasiness on the men’s faces as she confronts them. She asks one Black man who is surrounded by male friends, “”You didn’t say, ‘Hey beautiful’?”

He’s not a very young man but he seems almost like a kid when he says, “No!”

She smiles to say, “Now why would you lie about something like that?”

warzone2guys — Maggie interviews two men who catcalled her

Her interactions with men of color–less than 50 years after Emmett Till was lynched for flirting with a white woman–have a lot in them to parse. We also see a class element as many of the men in the film are blue-collar workers, like a group of movers inside a truck. She asks one (who is also Black), “So why were you whistling at me?”

He answers, “Excuse me, I’m working, please.”

She counters, “Excuse me, I was walking, please.”

Some of the more sexually aggressive men also seem to have mental illness or substance abuse issues. Some might be homeless. All the men feel aggrieved; why can’t they say what they want to a woman walking down the street? This film was made years before Hollaback or any sort of organized anti-street-harassment organizations–or public service announcements–existed. Like the men commenting on the viral street harassment video, the men on the street claim they don’t know that they’re doing wrong.

When Hadleigh-West talks to a young white man on a park bench and tells him she’s making a film about sexual harassment he says, “Well, I’ll be the star…I don’t say nothing. I just look at them. I’m not bothering them… I can look at anything…freedom of sight!”

WarZoneMaggieBackMen — Maggie looks back at the men who look at her

When she asks follow-up questions, many of the men dislike having to explain themselves. They don’t want to be imposed upon, the way they impose themselves on the women who pass them. In some ways Hadleigh-West seems to call their bluff as the men claim they just want to “say hello” or that they’ve actually hooked up with women after harassing them on the street. But when this woman tries to talk to them, they get angry at her. Many of the white men in the film (often in ties and button-down shirts) start verbally abusing Hadleigh-West, saying, “Fuck you,” telling her she’s ugly (a familiar tactic to any woman who talks back to street harassment), commanding her to put her camera down, sometimes forcibly trying to strike it down themselves, walking away, turning around and then mooning the camera or trying to run away from the lens on subway escalators and stairways. I don’t think the white men being (as a group) the least willing to engage Hadleigh-West is a coincidence. These men are the ones who have historically owned the streets–and want to exercise power over any woman who walks by.

Even the few white guys who do talk to her– without telling her to fuck off–reveal this mindset. Hadleigh-West asks one, “What’s the message you’re trying to give to women when you check them out?”

He makes a face and asks “The message?”

She presses him, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how am I doing?”

After hemming and hawing he says, “You look…nice. You’re a 5.” He is hardly a paragon of attractiveness himself.

The film’s interviews with women and girls of color are even more incisive. One Asian American woman breaks down the different types of catcalls she receives from men by race. She admits to Hadleigh-West that while she pretends the harassment doesn’t bother her, it does.

We meet one pair, the mother an immigrant from the West Indies, the daughter raised in the US, who talk about their different reactions to street harassment. The daughter, who is a queer woman (she looks to be about college age, though she could be younger), hates it, but the mother says she met her long-term boyfriend after he catcalled her on the street. The women look directly into the camera together, a Diane Arbus photo come to life (the stills from this film would have made a great coffee table book) during a long silence, the mother starting to look alarmed, the daughter visibly bristling. The daughter finally says she’d rather not talk about her relationship with her mother’s boyfriend. Although fear of rape is a reason Hadleigh-West gives for her own loathing of street harassment, this part of the film, along with the scene in which a mixed race woman from New Orleans says she fears some of the men in her own family, seems to touch on how sexual assault and abuse can come from inside the home as well (the logical extension of the ideology behind catcalling). Hadleigh-West also seems to refute the idea that efforts from the police will solve this problem when she confronts a man in a sheriff’s office uniform. She asks, “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting women on the streets, not making them feel threatened?”

One of the most compelling parts of the film are the scenes with a 14-year-old Black girl from New Orleans. At first, when she is in closeup we don’t know how young she is, as she details the kind of harassment she’s received on the streets, but then we see her walking by storefronts, her school uniform skirt exposing her thin legs in ankle socks. She is at least a full head shorter than anyone who passes her and looks even younger than 14. But grizzled old men still leer at her. That “girl” would be about 30 now. I can’t help feeling sad at how little seems to have changed.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIW9iRMSqY”]

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The Strangeness of (Surrogate) Motherhood in ‘The Innocents’

Part of what makes the excellent 1961 film ‘The Innocents’ different is the main character, the governess, Miss Giddens (played by Deborah Kerr), is thrust into a parental role suddenly. We see her at the beginning in an interview with the children’s uncle, a handsome playboy (played by Michael Redgrave, Vanessa’s father) who tells her he spends much of his time traveling and the rest in his home in London. When he offers her the job at his country estate, he takes her hand (a bold move for the Victorian era, when the film takes place) and asks if she is ready to take full responsibility for the children, because he doesn’t want to be disturbed during his adventures in London and abroad.

This post by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

I’m reluctant to tell people that I love a good horror film for many reasons, not the least of which is most horror films seem determined to insult the intelligence of their audiences. In the sub-genre of the “evil or possessed child” horror movie we again and again see parent characters who figure out the true nature of their children at least an hour after the audience has in The Omen, The Bad Seed, and The Exorcist. Parents in horror films go to ridiculous lengths to dismiss the strange goings-on they observe–and often pay a steep price for doing so.

Part of what makes the excellent 1961 film The Innocents different is the main character, the governess, Miss Giddens (played by Deborah Kerr), is thrust into a parental role suddenly. We see her at the beginning in an interview with the children’s uncle, a handsome playboy (played by Michael Redgrave, Vanessa’s father) who tells her he spends much of his time traveling and the rest in his home in London. When he offers her the job at his country estate, he takes her hand (a bold move for the Victorian era, when the film takes place) and asks if she is ready to take full responsibility for the children, because he doesn’t want to be disturbed during his adventures in London and abroad. The uncle’s “proposal” is an only slightly more extreme version of the “proposal” most women accepted both in the time when the film takes place and when it was filmed: that their children will be financed by the man of the house in exchange for the children’s care and upbringing to be the “woman’s work.” Miss Giddens accepts without hesitation.

The Innocents has an unusual pedigree for a horror film. It was directed by Jack Clayton (whose previous film, Room At The Top, won an Academy Award for Simone Signoret) and written by William Archibald (based on his stage play, which in turn was based on a Henry James novel, The Turn of the Screw) with help from Truman Capote (author of In Cold Blood) and John Mortimer (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey) . The velvety black and white cinematography is by Freddie Francis (who went on to work with David Lynch).

InnocentsFloraGiddensMiles — Miss Giddens, Miles, and Flora

Most of the film has a Gothic setting: a big, creaky, isolated house and its shadowy garden full of statues (including a cherub hidden under overgrown bushes from whose mouth we see, in closeup, a beetle emerge). But the children, Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), are realistically children, not obvious incarnations of evil. They’re talkative and charming with Miss Giddens. They elicit her suspicion only gradually and with typical children’s behavior: pretending not to hear the questions they don’t wish to answer (or saying “I don’t remember”) and staring off into the distance for no reason. They whisper to each other and laugh as the adults look on. They’re unknowingly cruel as when Flora sticks her pet tortoise in the pond and nearly drowns the poor animal. Like the children from Edward Gorey illustrations they’re fascinated with the morbid: Flora watches a spider eat a butterfly and Miles recites a poem about a return from the grave. They can be strangely unaffected by what is happening around them as when Miles, while we hear his sister screaming in another room, warms his hands in front of the fire and smiles sweetly at Miss Giddens. He’s also unexpectedly observant as when he surmises that Miss Giddens was hired so their uncle wouldn’t have to be bothered with raising him and his sister.

When the film was first released, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote that the ghosts in The Innocents were the best she’d seen in a movie. We spot Miss Jessel, the children’s old governess (who was particularly close to Flora) several times, always dressed in black–walking along a dark hallway, standing in the distant reeds near the pond in which she drowned, and sobbing at the schoolroom desk, but we never get a good look at her face. Quint, Miss Jessel’s abusive lover, who was also Miles’ companion, first appears from a distance among the cooing doves on top of a tower, the combination of fog and sun making him difficult for Miss Giddens to discern. She sees his face clearly only after she has found his picture in the music box (which plays the song the film opens with, the melody of which Flora also hums as Miss Jessel’s ghost looks on). Miss Giddens, at first not realizing she has seen a ghost describes him to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins) who asks, “Would you say he was very handsome?”

Miss Giddens answers, “Yes, yes, handsome, handsome but obscene.” When she finds out he died, she presses Mrs. Grose to tell her all the details of the relationship of Miss Jessel and Quint, including the sexual ones, and the exact circumstances of each of their deaths.

Searching for the truth, Kerr, in huge skirts with tight, high-necked bodices, floats along the halls and grounds. Her Miss Giddens is at turns intimidating and anxious, the type of woman men label either “overemotional” or “repressed.” This role suits Kerr’s presence like few others did–as years later a similar lead role in The Others would suit Nicole Kidman–and makes me wonder if Meryl Streep has ever considered starring in a horror movie. Kerr at that time had been a movie star for 20 years–when Mrs. Grose refers to her as “young” I wanted to correct her–but the child actors are the scene stealers here: Pamela Franklin (who would later play opposite Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) makes Flora’s descent into screaming, raging fits–which begins with the common childhood chant, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you,” all the more disturbing by the contrast of her sunny, dreamy friendliness in the first part of the film. Martin Stephens (who was also in Village of the Damned) with his wide apart eyes and heart shaped face resembles the then-first-lady Jackie Kennedy and plays Miles with just the right mix of a child’s vulnerability and an adult’s knowingness. When he finds out all the servants have left the house he brings great timing to his line to Miss Giddens, “Well, you’re afraid, and perhaps you made them so.”

InnocentsMilesGiddens — Miles and Miss Giddens

Though Miles is a pre-pubescent boy, he and Miss Giddens’ relationship has, from the beginning, flirtatious overtones; when they first meet he gives her flowers and tells her she is too pretty to be a governess. This bond echoes that between some mothers and sons, especially those mothers who don’t get much attention from adults. Later the relationship begins to turn creepy. Miss Giddens is taken aback when Miles gives her a long, inappropriate kiss goodnight (which inspired the Kate Bush song, “The Infant Kiss“) but opts to stay with him–alone–in order to “save” him. Miles also gives off a “queer kid” vibe, because of his closeness to Miss Giddens and his sister, as well as his line about being “different from the other boys” at the boarding school which expelled him.

In a climactic scene, Miss Giddens tells Miles, “My father taught me to love people and help them. Help them even if they refused my help. Even if it hurt them sometimes,” which could also be a mother’s pledge to a child. But is Miss Giddens helping? She believes the spirits of Miss Jessel and Quint are communing through the children. Both Flora and Miles do have shockingly adult outbursts. Miles calls Miss Giddens, “A damned hussy, a damned dirty-minded hag” to show how little has changed in denouncing women: now the slurs would be “fucking slut” and “ugly bitch” but the meaning is the same. Still, all children at one time or another surprise their parents with what comes out of their mouths (even when, like Miles, they express regret afterward). When Miss Giddens eggs on the children to tell her they see the ghosts they tell her she’s insane: that she’s the only one who can see them. In horror movies women are often a sobbing mess for much of the film, but Kerr soldiers through the scares, clear-eyed, until the end when her tears (like that of Kidman in The Others) are truly earned.

Enjoy this cheese-tastic trailer for the film from 1961 but know that it has only a passing resemblance to the film itself.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiW89dreaew”]

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‘Laggies’ and the Perils of Success

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great ‘Humpday’ and the equally delightful ‘Your Sister’s Sister’ stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘”‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occured to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, ‘Laggies,’ (which opens this Friday, Oct. 24) I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and let Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Years ago, when Ingrid Bergman first went to work in Hollywood (after a successful career in Sweden), she was wary of how American movie studios had changed the appearance of other European actresses once they were under contract. The Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo who appeared in films stateside looked very different from the actresses of the same name who were in European films a few years before. Bergman opted to keep her own eyebrows and resisted pressure to lose weight. She also wore more natural makeup than was the rule for other actresses working in Hollywood at the time. Her toned-down but still radiant look, along with her talent, may be why Bergman’s presence in films connected with audiences: she stood out among the crowd of Max-Factored, Hollywood actresses with deep hollows under sharp cheekbones.

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great Humpday and the equally delightful Your Sister’s Sister stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘“‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occurred to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, Laggies, I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and letting Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Laggies has a traditional script (in every respect) by Andrea Seigel and names familiar from the multiplex in the lead roles: Keira Knightley as Megan, an underachieving 20-something, Chloë Grace Moretz as Annika, the high school student she befriends and Sam Rockwell as Annika’s single Dad, Craig, who works as a divorce lawyer.

At the very beginning of the film we see Megan after her own prom hanging out with her best high school girlfriends in terribly framed and shot “home video.” We can barely see their faces: a clever and effective solution to the movie quandary of showing characters over a decade younger than they appear in the rest of the film. Unlike most people, who move on from their high school friends during college or in other parts of young adulthood, Megan is still hanging out with the same clique and we see from the beginning that they have grown apart. During the small, private, bachelorette party for her friend Allison (Ellie Kemper, playing a snide variation of the same character she played in Bridesmaids) we see her friends snip at her for everything from her working for her father, holding a sign pointing to his business, to touching the chest of a huge, tacky, gold-painted statue at the Chinese restaurant where the party takes place. Perpetually irritated Allison asks, “Why would you tweak the nipples? That’s Buddha.” (actually it’s Budai the so-called “laughing Buddha,” but I don’t expect the characters to know the difference).

Megan has a nice-guy, live-in boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), also a relic from high school, who proposes to her at Allison’s wedding reception. Megan’s reaction when she sees him start to get down on one knee is to gasp and say, “No, no, whoa! Get up!”

Megan first meets Annika outside a liquor store when the teen approaches her with a flimsy story about her and her obviously underage friends that culminates in the question: could Megan buy liquor for them? Megan says, “Someone did this for me when I was your age. It’s like a rite of passage.”

Annika says, “I had a good feeling about you.”

Megan cracks, “That makes one of us.”

That night, Megan hangs out with and gets very drunk with the teens and through a series of contrivances ends up staying at Annika’s home for a week–accompanying her to teen parties, the mall and taking part in a sleepover with Annika’s best friend Misty (Caitlyn Dever from last year’s Short Term 12). Shelton still has a great touch with actors and Knightley here reminds us that the movie in which she first received acclaim, Bend It Like Beckham, was a comedy. In Laggies, she’s at her best the times she gets to use her long skinny body for comic effect, as when she dons headphones to undulate along a busy road while she holds the sign pointing to her father’s business or folds herself against the ground into a turtle-like posture to feed Annika’s pet tortoise.

The film also has a refreshing lack of hysteria about the activities of contemporary, suburban teens. Moretz’s character is a teenager who seems more like the peers I had in high school than the stereotypes that populate most movies. Husky-voiced Annika is an unapologetic “partier” who regularly lies to her father about where she’s going and what she’s doing–and unlike similar girl characters in mainstream films we’re not cued to see her as a sociopath or an alcoholic.

The film also shows empathy for Sam Rockwell’s put-upon Dad. Rockwell has good chemistry with Knightley and a great touch with lines like the one he gets when he first sees Megan in Annika’s room, “Wow, high school students are looking rougher and rougher these days.” His Craig is a mixture of equal parts of love and exasperation he feels toward his daughter with some “embarrassing” Dad behavior thrown in. The film also refrains from completely vilifying Annika’s absentee mother, played briefly and poignantly by Gretchen Mol.

But the film’s central premise of Megan regressing to her high school days falls flat. Knightley’s Megan seems too sensible and grounded to be the kind of screwed-up (but sometimes fun) adult who hangs out with teenagers. And although Rockwell’s character briefly questions Megan’s intentions, no one else does, or comes to the conclusion that many of us would if we saw an adult spending lots of time with a high school student (including sleeping over): that the two are having sex or headed in that direction.

In this film queer people seem not to exist, a disappointment because Shelton is an out bisexual woman who created a complex and memorable title queer woman character (beautifully played by Rosemarie DeWitt) in Your Sister’s Sister and played a small, but memorable role as a queer woman herself in Humpday. Laggies, like the other mainstream American movies that assume everyone is heterosexual, is in danger of seeming outdated, especially compared to recent television shows like Please Like Me and How To Get Away With Murder, which nonchalantly depict every aspect of their queer characters’ lives–and feature them as leads.

The movie intermittently focuses on Megan’s lack of direction (she has dropped out of graduate school, where she was studying to be a therapist), but the ending, like that of a screwball comedy from the 1930s, seems to suggest her whole life is resolved by choosing the right man. This mainstream rom-com directed by Lynn Shelton is better and more nuanced than any other choice at the multiplex, but I still miss the wilder, funnier, earlier Shelton films shown at art houses–and the more complicated lives of the women–and men–at their centers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xep7s36qZL0″]

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