Random Acts of Observation

So, in the past few months, I’ve watched two films with similar stories and themes - The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and just the other night, Boy Erased. Both deal with a young queer person forced into the horrors of conversion therapy by parents who are determined to ‘make them straight.’ But they are rather different in tone.

In The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Cameron, the young woman at the heart of the story, is relatively unconflicted about her sexuality. No matter what her parents or the ‘counsellors’ at the Christian conversion camp think, she like girls, and she enjoys it. Though her belief in herself is temporarily shaken when she learns that her lover, Coley, has renounced her and their relationship, she manages to recover her sense of who she is despite the pressures around her. Her story is one of surviving the abusive bullshit dumped on her - which, sadly some other ‘participants’ don’t - until she manages, with some other proudly unrepentant teens, to escape and begin her own life.

The main character in Boy Erased, Jarod Eamons, has a more complicated road to travel. Again, a same-sex encounter that his parents discover results in his being placed into conversion therapy by his parents, but Jarod is more uncertain of his sexuality, wants to earn the love of his parents, and has been influenced by the profoundly Christian manner of his upbringing. As well, an early experience with another boy was, we learn later on, traumatic in a way that not only gives him reason to question his gayness, but also to be forced to confront massive trust issues with his parents, particularly his father.

The ‘therapy’ program is, like all these programs, abusive and carries the potential to deeply harm participants, even if they weren’t already struggling with sexuality and rejection by parents and family, church, and society.

Finally Jarod escapes, through the support of his mother, who has come to the realisation that if she must choose between her son and her church as she’s always believed in it, she chooses her son.

It’s a far more nuanced film, and one that shows not only Jarod’s coming to terms with himself and the trauma he experiences from multiple sources, but also a journey toward understanding for his mother, and even, at the end, a chance that his father can grow beyond his religious prejudices.

I’m glad to have seen both films, and hope that soon, no one will ever again have stories to tell about the abuses of gay conversion programs.

Around this time of year, I like to check out the lists of films that were nominated for Golden Globes and Oscars, and see if there are films I haven’t seen yet, but want to. This year, the two films that struck me as belonging in that category were Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri and The Shape of Water.

And I found both, in different ways, disappointing. I’m going to discuss why, and that will involve plenty of spoilers, so if you are spoiler averse and haven’t seen these films yet, you should probably stop reading.

First, Three Billboards. Yes, it was brilliantly acted. The performances of all the significant cast members were truly works of art. And the story was a profound expression of a woman’s rage, which was both timely and well handled for the most part, although it did wander between the genres of realism and black comedy, making the actions of some of the characters - particularly when the police station is firebombed - more than a little farcical. It’s as if a serious exploration of grief and rage kind of ran away from itself and went way over the top.

What did not sit well at all was the way that casual racism and ableism were presented as quirks that might give a character complexity but did not play into the evaluation of the character’s moral compass. We are led to believe that the sheriff is both wise and good, because he loves a good joke and is a decent father, husband and lover. Even though he allows, perhaps even encourages police brutality in his jurisdiction, and seems to play distinct favourites with who gets police service and who doesn’t. As the dying sage, he gets to appoint the next hero to be, and that would be the most racist and least competent cop on the force, who proudly acknowledges torturing “people of colour” and throws people he doesn’t like out the window. But the dead sheriff says he’s basically a good person, and so he must be.

And that’s what’s disappointing. Racism is not just a cute character flaw, it is a lack of empathy and a misalignment of one’s moral compass. Being cruel to other people - and even the protagonist is cruel, to the “town midget” played by the badly under-used Peter Dinklage - is the film’s short cut to signalling that these are real and complex people, but as long as their heart is in the right place, it doesn’t make them less heroic.

And next, The Shape of Water. While watching it, I had the odd feeling that I was actually switching back and forth between two very different films, which happened to have a few overlapping characters. One film was a romantic fairy take, about a poor girl who finds a special bond with a magical beast and turns out to be his princess, and a swan, to boot. The other was a grim and vicious dystopic look at toxic masculinity, aggression, and abuse of power, told in the form of a classic 1950s science fiction story, but from the perspective of the bug-eyed monster. One film had well-rounded snd realistic characters, the other, a cast of cartoon villains and cardboard supporting characters. I could have enjoyed either film immensely, but the fusion of the two was unsettling and distancing. It was as if two different films had been shot and edited together.

Imagine my surprise to find that del Toro has been accused of plagarism, of having taken most of the elements that fit into the fantasy romance from a 1969 play called Let Me Hear You Whisper, about a cleaning woman who saves a dolphin imprisoned in a too secret military research centre. Let me make this perfectly clear - I don’t think del Toro committed conscious plagarism, particukarly since one of the seeds that grew into this film apparently came from a lunch meeting with another writer, and del Toro optioned that ideas from him properly and legally. But I would not be surprised if one of the two men, somewhere, somehow, heard about the storyline of the play and it drifted in the back of their mind until it crystallised during this conversation. I’ve also read that once upon a time, del Toro pitched an idea about a film based on Creature of the Black Lagoon, but told from the perspective of the creature. And if you blend the two stories, what comes out is indeed The Shape of Water.

Maybe even recognising that they are two different stories, at some basic level, is why there are two strands, with two different tones (even the musical choices of the two storylines show a different aesthetic) and two different acting styles. Elisa, Giles and Zelda are realistic characters, while Strickland, his wife, The General, and even the Russian spies (with lovely if over-the-top performances, especially from Nigel Bennett) are caricatures, more like characters from Doctor Strangelove. The sleeper agent Hoffstetler is part caricature, part realistic. And the merman is all mythos.

Despite being somewhat distanced from it by these disjunctions, I loved the story. Or stories. Both had very real things to say about empathy and humanity, love and compassion, transcending boundaries through love, and the moral vacancy at the heart of militarism and toxic masculinity. A good film, but not a great one.

OK, I have finally seen Iron Man, and while there was certainly lots of cool comic book geekery and a pretty, if superficial message about greedy corporate merchants of death, I'm tempted to suggest that the movie should be subtitled "A white American hero's adventures in the land of swarthy threatening people."

There are a lot of swarthy threatening people in this movie. They seem to be living in caves somewhere in Afghanistan, and have international connections that allow them to obtain weapons from the afore mentioned greedy corporate merchants of death (specifically, our wastrel hero's business partner at Stark Industries, the biggest and sexiest purveyor of weapons of almost mass destruction around). I guess that means that they are Taliban fighters, or maybe Al-Queda, even though they seem to be a gang who use ten rings as a symbol, and there's some throwaway lines about them being nasty swarthy people from all over the world, not just from Muslim countries. Hey, maybe they're some of the warlords, who were well known for terrorising the people... oops, no I forgot, the remaining warlords are good guys now that they're in Karzai's government.

Basically, the point I'm trying to make here is that the situation in Afghanistan, the real country, is very complex, and pretending it's as simple as frightened villagers, swarthy frightening terrorists and noble heroic American soldiers really does a massive disservice to a tragic situation.

Anyway, whoever they are, the villains kidnap our soon-to-be great white hero Tony Stark who is in Afghanistan showing off his latest weapon of not quite mass destruction to the American army, who he wants to sell it to. And here's where the movie really annoyed me.

Because here is where we meet Yinsin, a character who apparently was East Asian in the comic books but who is portrayed as Central Asian and Muslim in the movie. In this relatively short sequence, we learn that Yinsin really has no plotline of his own. He is Tony Stark's fellow prisoner so that he can save Tony's life, help Tony communicate with his kidnappers, assist Tony in his escape (note to some extent it is Yinsin's method of preserving Tony's life that gives Tony the idea for the super-powered suit), and then nobly and courageously sacrifices his life for Tony, surviving just long enough to assuage Tony's fleeting moments of guilt by assuring Tony that he always knew the escape attempt would end in his death, and he was willing to do that, because Tony is a great man and all Yinsin wants to do is rejoin his family in Paradise.

Now I may be wrong, but doesn't Yinsin seem an awful lot like the Muslim cousin of the Magical Negro?

And I know that this movie has been praised for its stand against the arms trade, but I found myself thinking that for a movie that purports to be about how war is evil, it was very convenient for the conscience of the Western audience that it was only the nasty men hiding out in those caves who used weapons against helpless civilian villagers, and not, as has been the case far too often, the Western forces currently in Afghanistan.

So, yeah, the action sequences were cool and there's nothing like watching two CGI
Transformers fighting it out in the streets of LA, and the noble sacrifice of Yinsin made it possible for Robert Downey Jr. to skillfully portray Tony Stark's character development into a post-modern superhero with flaws and a suspect past as well as a conscience and a desire to do right (permit me, though, to express some doubts as to whether working with a shadowy organ of the American government that calls itself Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division is going to do the world as a whole all that much good).

But despite the frothy geeky goodness, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Seeing as it was the weekend before Hallowe’en, and we had a bunch of coupons for free or half-price movies from our local purveyor of movie rentals that are due to expire end of the month, we had ourselves a horror flick bash.

First thing you have to realise is that I’m a sucker for women who kick ass, especially when they’re kicking zombie ass, vampire ass, or other assorted nasty creepy ghoulie and ghostie ass. Even if they’re doing so in completely inappropriate clothing or high heels. As long as the obligatory sidekick goat-boys* don’t take up too much screen time, I can deal with chainmail/leather/spandex bikinis and non-sensible shoes.

So that mostly explains my choices of Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, in which Mila Jovovich kicks mutant zombie ass and soulless corporate mercenary butt all over the place, assisted by assorted goat-boys and, in the second movie, the equally kick-ass Sienna Guillory. I also enjoyed the implicit criticism of global capitalism.

Rise: Blood Hunter casts Lucy Liu as a reporter whose investigations of strange doings in the Goth scene lead to her gruesome transformation to a vampire and her quest to hunt down and kill the family of vampires responsible for her death. Liu kicks vampire ass superlatively. For the record, Michael Chicklis, who co-stars as an alcoholic cop searching for the same gang of blood-suckers for reasons of his own, may be Liu’s sidekick, but he is more than a goat-boy. This film got mixed reviews, but I enjoyed it a lot. I admit to a particular weakness for watching vampires try to be ethical about blood-sucking while they kick butt. I also admit to a weakness for Lucy Liu.

28 Weeks Later picks up some months after 28 days Later left off. England is almost completely depopulated, and the zombies, er, Rage Virus victims have all died of hunger. The rebuilding of London has commenced, with the assistance of the U.S. Army. Refugees from the continent are being repatriated. The countryside is being scoured for the few survivors. But unbeknownst to the reconstruction teams, the virus is still lurking…

( 'Ware serious spoilers, including how the movie ends )

The last flick of the weekend was 1408. A stylish ghost story about belief and self-delusion, with a bravura performance by John Cusack as a debunker of ghost stories who is writing a book about haunted hotel rooms, and insists on staying the night in Room 1408 at The Dolphin Hotel, where more than 50 people have died over the years from a variety of causes, and it is implied that even more have gone mad. The movie was visually very creepy, emotionally powerful in parts, but faded toward the end. The conclusion, I thought, wasn’t quite “big” enough to justify the intensity and complexity of what had gone before. My favourite part was actually the build-up, in which hotel manager Samuel L. Jackson tries to persuade Cusack’s character not to stay in the room by recounting all of the horrors that have happened there, part of which is a wonderful set-up for Jackson, well-known for playing action heroes with a bit of a twist, to explain why he avoids Room 1408 unless it’s that time of the month. I admit to a weakness for Samuel L. Jackson.

And that, Gentle Reader, was how I spent my weekend.



* I call ‘em goat-boys because they almost always seem to be sporting about a day and a half’s worth of unshaven facial hair, which gives them the appearance of being young goats. Also add puns on goatees, goat’s head soup, devil-may-care attitudes, and goatish behaviour as you wish.

Well, it didn't get any Academy Award nominations, but the other night I saw a really good movie: Saving Face. I understand it made somewhat of a name for itself at the Sundance and Toronto International Film Festivals, and deservedly so.

The focal characters are Wil, a single, Chinese-American woman who is a doctor and a closeted lesbian and her mother, a widow who has lived her life exclusively within the Chinese community. The film revolves around their relationships with each other, and with the members of their family and community - including an aspiring dancer, Vivien, who seems determined to get Wil out of the closet and into her life.

Delightful story with several quite unexpected plot developments, well acted, with several relative newcomers and the divine Joan Chen playing the part of Wil's mother, with powerful but subtle direction from Alice Wu, who also wrote the script. And lots of fun.