Blogorama: Snowpocalypse Edition

We had another eight inches of snow dumped on us today, thus foiling my plans to see the new Park Chan-Wook film this afternoon. In the interim, I thought I'd do some housekeeping. First off: I've been nominated for a Lammy, without any campaigning on my part. Someone out there must like me, which makes me giddy. So if you are eligible to vote, take a look at my coverage of True/False and decide whether that deserves an award. Thank you for your support. For details, click the lamb:

Second: I haven't done a blogathon in a while, so it's high time I rectified that. I've got two of them coming up. The first one, coming in a little over a week, is the annual White Elephant movie exchange. I've got my movie. It's...not as merciful as my past films have been. Check back on April Fool's Day to find out how much pain I'm in for and take a look at White Elephant Central for other similarly buffaloed victims.

The other blogathon I have coming up is The Terrorthon, a look at classic, pre-1980s horror movies. This is right up my alley, and I've already picked the movies I'm going to write about. This one will run April 20th-24th. It's run by Page over at My Love of Old Hollywood. Check it out.

A Road Not Taken

Somewhere in the middle of Gun Hill Road (2011, directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green), my viewing companion commented: "No way she survives this movie." The scene we were watching involved a young transsexual girl who was buying black market hormones from an older trans woman. After the transaction, the older woman asked her if she'd like to be "pumped?" Both my friend and I flinched at that. "Pumping," for those who aren't immersed in trans culture, is the practice of injecting silicone into areas of the body in order to give them a more feminine shape, usually the ass and hips, but sometimes the breasts and face. This is a profoundly dangerous practice, since the silicone that is often used is not medical silicone. Sometimes, as in this film, it comes from a caulk gun. Seriously. A cisgender audience is likely to react with horror and disgust at such a practice, even if they succumb to the freakshow attraction of it. Why would someone do that? Both my friend and I are trans, though, and I think we both understand the desperation gender dysphoria instills in trans people. The desperation and the poverty and the pressure to conform to beauty norms. My reaction to this movie is largely personal, so you'll have to pardon me when I wonder what I might have done to myself had hormone therapy not reshaped my body to my satisfaction. Don't get me wrong: there's still horror. We've both seen the results of pumping gone wrong, but we're both reasonably educated and possessed of white privilege. The character in Gun Hill Road, though? She's from a completely different cultural paradigm.

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The Curse of Netflix Roulette: Starship Troopers 3

A friend of mine asked me when I was going to do another Netflix Roulette post. He seemed disappointed when I told him that I was likely going to retire the roulette posts. Not because I don't enjoy doing them--nothing of the sort. The problem is Netflix itself. Some time last year, they changed the interface on their streaming pages to a kind of infinite scroll, the kind so popular with social applications. This makes it kind of difficult to determine the range of numbers for the random number generator. Deliberately picking films from the streaming array seems like cheating. The randomness is the point. Somewhere along the line I had the bright idea of playing roulette with my Roku interface. That's a standard list of fifty movies per category. This is manageable. So this morning, I gave it a try. I used the science fiction and fantasy row rather than the horror row to reduce the chances that I'd get a result that I've already seen, and the randomizer gave me Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008, directed by Edward Neumeier). Oof.

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True/False 2013 Day Four: The Only Band that Matters

There's always an awareness of politics in the selections at True/False. Non-fiction filmmakers are practically the only muckrakers left in a media landscape dominated by corporate control or authoritarian hegemony, so any documentary festival is going to program its share of political fire bombs. The first film I saw at True/False this year was Dirty Wars, one such fire bomb. It seems only fitting to me that the final two films I saw were almost as incendiary.

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True/False 2013, Day Four: Punch Drunk Love

I missed my chance to see Cutie and the Boxer on Saturday. It was a late show and I needed to get home to let my dogs out. I was also exhausted. Self-care is important for getting through the grind of a film festival. So I skipped out on my scheduled showing and queued up for the Sunday showing. This did two things for me. First, it put me in much more comfortable seats. My scheduled viewing was at the venue with the most uncomfortable seats which sounds petty, but after sitting through fourteen movies at that point, this was not to be discounted. Second, it freed up some time for me to squeeze in one more movie than I had scheduled. I had heard some buzz from my festival friends about Cutie and the Boxer and it sounded more fun than the film I was scheduled to see. In retrospect, I'm glad I made the choice to see it. It was a charming, funny movie.

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True/False 2013, Day Four: Promises

The films I saw on day four of True/False this year were mostly political in one degree or another. Of the five, only one could be said to be apolitical. I suspect that True/False is thought of as a left-leaning festival, perhaps in the spirit of Stephen Colbert's famous pronouncement that "facts have a well-known liberal bias," but I don't think films are picked with that specifically in mind. Columbia is at the center of a very red state, after all.

Some subject matter attracts strong feelings. While it's uncommon for the films at True/False to attract demonstrators, it does happen once in a while. After Tiller, a big hit at Sundance, attracted the inevitable anti-choice demonstrators at True/False. I don't think anybody who lives here is surprised by that. Drive by Planned Parenthood on any given day and you'll see them there, too. They are persistent. For what it's worth, I didn't see After Tiller. I don't know whether or not the people handing out flyers at Pandora's Promise, a pro-nuclear power essay, could be categorized as demonstrators. They didn't have signs and they didn't shout at people, but they did want to make sure that their countervailing point of view was available to everyone entering the theater. I doubt these people share the same ideology as the protestors at After Tiller.

My last day of True/False this year was a frenzy to get as many films under my belt as I could. I think it's only physically possible to see five films on any given day of the festival, and I maxed that on Sunday. The first two films I saw were the aforementioned Pandora's Promise and Who Is Dayani Cristal?, two films that are similar to each other only in so far as they represent broken or unfulfilled promises.

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True/False 2013 Day 3: Standing in the Shadows

Day three of True/False was probably the most pleasant day of the festival for me. Part of this is because all of my screenings were at the Missouri Theater, an old-style movie palace that has been restored since the early days of True/False. It makes a huge difference when you see any movie in an audience as large as the Missouri Theater audiences. The Missouri seats 1200 people and it was absolutely packed all weekend. It also has the most comfortable seats of any True/False venue. This was not something to sneeze at, given the number of movies I was sitting through. My ass was thankful for the respite. My favorite place to sit in most theaters is in center of the second or third row. The nice thing about this is that most people don't like sitting so close, so I usually had my choice of seats if I got there in time.

The two other films I saw on Saturday were The Gatekeepers and Twenty Feet From Stardom, both of which are about people who work in the shadows.

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True/False 2013, Day 3: Fish and Chips

When I was writing about last year's True/False, I mentioned that the films here tend to rhyme each other. Themes emerge from groupings of films. Among this year's key themes are matters of the relationship between the people and power, between human beings and animals, and the potential of art to speak truth to power. Multiple films run along these axes. The films I saw on day three all resonated with other films. Blackfish, for instance, would make a fine double feature with Leviathan or The Moo Man, while The Gatekeepers covers some of the same issues as Sleepless Nights. This sort of thing happens every year. I used to think that this was an intentional result of how the festival is curated, but it's not. When I was screening films, those same kinds of thematic echoes emerged from the slush pile. It just happens. It's the zeitgeist.

My day three opened with two films that to my eye seem distantly related, but maybe only because of their proximity to each other at the festival:

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True/False 2013, Day Two: Crashing and Burning

One of the difficulties anyone who writes about True/False has is the practice of "Secret Screenings." These are films that, for one reason or another, cannot be publicized. Often, they are contracted to debut at other festivals. Sometimes, they are films that aren't quite ready for prime time for some other reason. Either way, the festival asks that attendees not write about or tweet or discuss these films on social media, and I'll honor that. The Secret Screenings are sometimes a crapshoot, anyway. This is the part of the fest with the highest likelihood of me not liking the movie, and, in truth, that has happened to me at every T/F I've attended where I saw Secret Screenings. I don't feel bad about not being able to write about these movies because contrary to what people often think about film writers, I don't actually enjoy slagging movies. I want the movies I see to be good. I want small films, especially, to succeed. Of course, many of them aren't good and don't succeed. The flip side of the Secret Screenings is when I hit a real gem of a movie. That happens, too, and I'd love to write about these and champion them. This is the dilemma I'm facing this weekend, unfortunately. If I had any brains at all, I'd skip the Secret Screenings all together and focus on movies I can actually write about.

In any event, Friday's viewings were a mixed bag.

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True/False 2013, Day One: Traveler's Tales

The True/False film festival especially values films that question the very nature of truth and fiction. It's right there in the name of the festival, of course, but you don't really begin to get a feel for this until you've sat through a couple of years of festivals. This predilection for films of and about epistemological murk is surely the reason that Sarah Polley's new film, a documentary about the nature of her family, was chosen to open the proceedings this year. Stories We Tell (2012) has an instinctive grasp of the shaky nature of truth. It's a film that embraces the Rashomon effect. And, it turns out, the filmmakers aren't to be trusted to tell the truth with the camera itself. At first, the film seems like a repurposing of Polley's home movies. There's a bunch of interview material with the various members of Polley's family and the form of the film takes a familiar shape: interviews plus archival materials. The subject of the interviews is Polley's mother and the circumstances of her parentage, which is perceived differently by her siblings, her father, and the people who knew her mother. But Polley is crafty here. The archival material, the footage that looks to be old 8mm home movies, is faked. Her mother is played in a lot of this footage by an actress. This is a film about film as much as it is about family secrets. The signature image is of Polley herself pointing a camera at the camera. There is no fourth wall here. The screen is permeable and the reality on the screen flows easily into the reality beyond the screen and vice versa.

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True/False 2013, Day Zero: Bring Up the Lights

I'm doing the True/False Film Festival again this year. This is the tenth year of True/False. I've attended all ten festivals in one degree or another. Last year was intense for me. I saw fifteen movies over four days last year. This year will be even more so. This year, for a change, I'm  involved with the festival. I was on the screening committee this year, a process that is as fun as it is frustrating. Fun, because I saw a TON of movies. This is the reason my blogging tailed off so drastically toward the end of last year. Festival screeners were squeezing out my ordinary movie viewing and I couldn't write about what I was seeing. I still can't legally or ethically write about most of what I saw, which is where the frustration comes in. The other piece of frustration comes from the fact that T/F had something like a thousand submissions this year and only forty something slots. I saw a bunch of films that would be terrific selections for somebody's film festival. They'd be terrific films for True/False in an alternate dimension. I've seen big name docs in past editions of  T/F that weren't as good as some of the films I saw. At the top level of films, it's almost random chance that gets you into the festival. There are too many worthy films and not enough slots. The guys making the final selections based on the films forwarded to them by the screeners surely had to kill a lot of their darlings. I don't envy them.

The upside for me is that I've seen several of the films playing the festival beforehand. Theoretically, this should have made scheduling the festival easier for me because there are blocks of films that I can ignore. In practice, that turned out not to be true, but that's fine. I'm sure what I'm signed up to see will be terrific. Meanwhile, I can tell you about three of the films at this year's fest as the curtain rises.

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Bitter Pills

If Steven Soderbergh's troubling new medical thriller, Side Effects (2013), is indeed his final feature film, then he's entering his retirement on an up note. No small feat given how few directors leave their profession with grace and dignity. I mean, just look at Vincente Minnelli's or Billy Wilder's last films if you want a cautionary tale about staying on the stage too long. Side Effects, by contrast, is one of Soderbergh's most assured films.

Note: here there be spoylers.

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...Lest Ye Be Judged

Low expectations are a wonderful thing. When I heard that there was going to be another film based on Judge Dredd, I cringed a little bit in my mind. Things didn't go so well the last time someone had a go at the character. By every yardstick you can imagine, the Stallone film from 1995 was a first class debacle. I'll admit, however, that I have a certain amount of fondness for it. It mistakes comics for cartooniness, but it goes so far over the top with that choice that it has a certain low comedy to it. But it doesn't have much in common with the hyperviolent comics on which the movie is based. The new movie, Dredd (2012, directed by Pete Travis) returns to Mega City One to check up on Judge Dredd. Much to my surprise, the character in this film is recognizably the same character from the comics. Color me shocked. The movie turns out to be surprisingly entertaining and surprisingly sophisticated.

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Odds and Ends: Muriels Edition

The Muriel Awards are upon us once again, and once again, the powers that be have foolishly allowed me to cast a ballot. I guess they needed to let at least a couple of girls into the boys' clubhouse to make things legit.

The awards are rolling out gradually this week, so check it out. I'll be posting my own ballot with some comments once the whole thing has posted next week. I'm a horrible list maker, and a few of my selections were disallowed for distribution reasons, but what the hell. I might want to refer to this sometime in the future.

Anyway, the Muriels site can be seen here.

I'll also be participating in the White Elephant Blogathon again this year. I thought about being cruel with my movie selection this year, but I went with something interesting instead.

Lukewarm

Warm Bodies (2013, directed by Jonathan Levine) is a perverse reworking of Romeo and Juliet in the idiom of the contemporary zombie romantic comedy. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence. The future is not what I expected it to be. These truly are the days of miracles and wonders. In truth, I'm not entirely opposed to adding legions of the living dead to Shakespeare. Certainly, this could work for Lear or Richard III. Hell, the living dead are already on stage in Hamlet and Macbeth. What bothers me about Warm Bodies is not the mash-up, but rather how warm and cuddly it has made the zombie. Still, I don't suppose it's entirely at fault for this. The process by which we have ended up here started decades ago.

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Broken Bones

People are messy. That's something that movies seldom understand. The mystery of why people behave the way that they do is something that eludes most films. Hell, the fact that there even IS a mystery is lost on most filmmakers, who are content with canned motivations and "turns out what happened was" back stories. People are sometimes broken and unpleasant and there's no solving that at the end of two hours. The characters in Rust and Bone (2012, directed by Jacques Audiard) are broken and unpleasant and human and inhabit a movie that refuses look away from this fact. It's a harrowing film.

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Flotsam and Jetsam

There's a dream sequence near the end of Juan Antonio Bayona's disaster film, The Impossible (2012) that's just about the most frightening thing I've seen in any movie ever. It's a callback to an interesting lacunae during the film's big set piece in the first act, in which the screen goes black for a bit when the 2004 Christmas tsunami sweeps into the resort where our protagonists are vacationing. That sequence is profoundly terrifying, too, and so well-conceived and executed that it temporarily paralyzes whatever cognitive function distinguishes fiction from fact, real life from make-believe. But the dream sequence at the end? that scene compounds that cognitive short circuit by adding a sense of existential terror and dread. We see Naomi Watts swept along by the wave from underwater. She's lacerated and pummeled by debris, surrounded by bodies swept along with her. Then, ever so briefly, the film slows down into something like the Matrix's bullet time, and the audience should reset their sense of reality because the movie is showing its hand as a movie, but I didn't make that leap. It's the bubble of air just escaping her lips as the film slows down. That bubble is the coup de grace. In that moment, I was entirely surrendered to the film. In retrospect, I can fault the film for privileging the narrative of movie star-attractive white people over the millions of Asians swept away by the same waves, I can cringe a little at the fact that the real Spanish family at the heart of the story has been whitewashed by the film, but in that moment those considerations were a million light years from my mind.

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Maternal Instincts

The ghost story is the most ritualized card in the horror tarot. The elements of a haunting almost always follow a set path that delves into the sins of the past. There's always a past, pieced together by the protagonists from old newspapers, mouldering town records, or unearthed diaries. Ghosts are most often avatars of past traumas, reliving some private inferno again and again until someone comes along to appease them. Or not. A friend of mine doesn't like ghost stories much. She thinks they're too much of a strait jacket. I dunno. I dig them. Once I accept that the theme is going to be the same as in every other ghost story out there, I can groove on the variations. Ghost stories have been enjoying a renaissance in the last fifteen years or so as filmmakers have wedged the tropes of the ghost story into modern, technological settings, fueled by the imagery of the J-horror boom and bust. The latest of these is Mama (2013, directed by Andrés Muschietti), and it's more or less of a piece with other similar movies like The Orphanage or The Possession. The contemporary ghost movie is a glum affair, and this is no different. What IS different with this movie is the way it codes its narrative. It also indulges in stylistic tricks derived from producer Gullermo Del Toro's cinematic legacy.

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Knocked for a Loop

I wish that all science fiction films were as packed with ideas as Looper (2012, directed by Rian Johnson). I wish Looper was more rigorous in its construction, but I won't fault it too much for that. Lots of filmmakers get lost in time travel plots. Looper is sloppier than most, though, maybe because it doesn't really care about it. That's fair, I guess. Looper is one of those New Wave-y science fictions that are descended from Philip K. Dick, and he didn't care too much about the mechanisms of his plots, either. It's the ideas that are important. The ideas here aren't derived specifically from the time travel premise, though I doubt they could be examined without the instrument of genre.

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Flash in the Pan

Parker (2012, directed by Taylor Hackford) is the seventh or eighth film based on Richard Stark's laconic master thief. It's the first film in which the character bears the name "Parker." During his lifetime, the late Donald Westlake (for whom, Stark was a pseudonymous secret sharer) denied the name to all cinematic interpreters. I like to think that he would have denied it to the makers of this film, too, because whatever similarities this film might bear to the character or to the novel, Flashfire, upon which it is based, it ain't Parker. Not even close. Ordinarily, I wouldn't care. I mean, I dig previous stabs at the character in Point Blank and Payback and The Outfit. But none of those films were titled "Parker." If this was titled "Flashfire" or something else entirely, then I wouldn't hold it to the standard of giving me the merciless badass one finds in the books. Unfortunately, the title of this film invites the comparison. It doesn't help that I'm a huge fangirl, or that I read Flashfire early last year so it's fresh in my mind.

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The Law is An Ass

I don't envy casting directors charged with making movie musicals. There's a balance to be struck: good actor or good singer? On stage, the choice is easy: go with the singer. The movie camera, unfortunately, is merciless. It will showcase every poor acting choice because it can get so close to the actor that you can pick out their individual pores. Obviously, you want both an actor and a singer, but sometimes, the imperatives of commercial filmmaking work against you. You can see this dilemma all over the film version of Les Misérables (2012, directed by Tom Hooper). None of names above the marquee are particularly strong singers, but this is a story that may not necessarily require it. The filmmakers have leaned toward actors for Les Miz, and that's the right choice. This is a film that ebbs and flows on tragedy and emotion, and the movies are better at doing that with images than they are with song. Given the choices this film makes along those lines, I found myself suggesting to my companion that this is a film that might actually work as a silent film. Not that anyone would stand for that. The stage play's mammoth fan base would certainly riot.

Note: I haven't seen the stage play, though I've seen previous screen versions and I tried reading the book when I was younger. I think I got 120 pages in before I gave up--the younger me was sometimes impatient with classics, particularly fifteen hundred page classics.

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Games, Must We?

One of the first movies my partner and I ever went to as a couple was Rear Window, which was playing as a fundraiser for our local art house. This was shown at the historic Missouri Theater in Columbia, Missouri, and its ostensible purpose was to buy the Ragtag Film people a 35mm film projector. This was fourteen years ago. Things come full circle. Last Friday night, fourteen years to the very day, the Ragtag bid a fond farewell to 35mm as their primary means of projection in that self-same Missouri Theater, which has since been wonderfully restored thanks to a central role in the cultural life of the city (and, not coincidentally, the True/False film festival). The film with which they chose to send 35mm into its great hereafter was, fittingly, another Hitchcock film. It was North by Northwest (1959), one of the movie-est movies ever made.

North by Northwest is, I think, the eighth Hitchock film I've seen in a theater. I never pass up the chance to see Hitchcock with an audience. There's an ineffable something about seeing a film with an audience that changes the way I perceive film. Hitchcock, for his part, was a master manipulator of crowds. Some of the director's films that lay flat on a TV screen come to miraculous life when you see them in a communal setting. If other people are having fun, you'll likely have fun, too. It's infectious. North by Northwest is one of the best crowd-pleasers ever made, stocked with just about everything that people go to movies for: action, romance, suspense, movie stars, sex.

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Black, White, and Red

As I was making my way out of the theater after seeing Django Unchained (2012, directed by Quentin Tarantino), I overheard a woman ask her companion: "Why did he shoot the sister?" Clearly, this was beyond the pale of chivalry in her mind, a gratuitous act of violence, perhaps even "reverse racism." I don't think I could have explained to her why Django might want to kill that character, why it might even be appropriate in context. I doubt she would understand me.

Django Unchained is a film I'm uncomfortable with. I don't know that I can write about it without stumbling over my own biases and privileges and cinematic appetites. I'll try, but I'm fallible and I'm probably going to screw it up. My apologies for this in advance.

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Help Keep Krelllabs on the Web

Update: While I'll still happily take donations (in exchange for art--I guess that's not really donation, but whatever), my immediate need has been met. Thank you, everyone who donated).

It's no secret that the economy has been shit for everyone. It's been shit for me, that's for sure. I lost my longtime graphic design gig at the end of 2011 and I've been subsisting on unemployment and the stray freelance gig for the past year. While the debate in congress was raging over the so-called "fiscal cliff", I started hording money in order to pay my mortgage on the very real chance that my UI benefits would expire at the end of the year. Fortunately, they were renewed, but unfortunately for me, I had to make a hard choice: mortgage or car payment. I chose my mortgage. My car was reposessed this morning. Now, I have the money to get it out once Toyota sends me a bill. But I don't have the repo fees, which will run to about $400. So I'm going to try to crowd source this. I'm soliciting donations.

Wait, you may be asking: how will this keep Krell Labs on the web? Two ways: first, it will let me pay the bill without having to short something else -- like my internet bill. Second: I rely on my vehicle to get to and from movies. The nearest movie house is 20 miles from my house and there's not public transportation between my flyspeck of a town and the larger city to the south.

So if you can and are willing to help, I've put a donation button below. Thank you in advance for your support.

As a bonus, anyone who donates will get a drawing or other piece of art from me.

You've Got the Silver...

There's a short conversation in Silver Linings Playbook (2012, directed by David O. Russel) when its protagonist, Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) meets Tiffany Miller (Jennifer Lawrence) in which they compare notes on their various experiences with medication. Both of these characters share a history of mental illness. I think this is the scene that really won me over to the movie, because in most "meet-cute" scenes in romantic comedies, you don't get truth. Here, you get truth naked for both characters to see. It struck a chord in me because whenever I meet other people with similar histories to my own history, you can be sure that the conversation will eventually turn to the minutiae of the medications we've taken: dosages, delivery methods, effects, drawbacks. The shock of recognition is powerful. The difference between a run of the mill romantic comedy and a really great romantic comedy is in the details and if you can make the lovers in such a movie real to me--as this film does--then you've gone a long way toward taking me willingly on whatever emotional journey you like.

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All The World's a Stage

Joe Wright's version of Anna Karenina (2012), the umpteenth version of that story, reunites Wright with his muse, Kiera Knightley. It's one of several pedigreed literary adaptations littering this year's awards season (others include Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights and Tom Hooper's Les Miserables), and like those films, this one attempts to breathe new life into the story with bold formal experiments. This is a film for which the word "stagebound" is not a pejorative so much as it's a blank description of what one sees on screen. Wright and his screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, have imagined Anna Karenina as a deranged stage production in which the theater serves as the world. It's a bold choice. It creates unexpected visual textures and unusual scene transitions. Whether or not this is the story for which this approach is appropriate is something that can be debated.

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I'm Packin' My Bags for the Misty Mountains...

After I got home from seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012, directed by Peter Jackson), I dug out my copy of The Hobbit to see how many pages of the book the movie actually represented. My copy, an old paperback from the 1970s, ends the "Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire" chapter on page 114. This is where the movie ends. The movie is 160 minutes long. There's an axiom in screenwriting that says one page equals one minute, so there's obviously more material on screen than is provided by the book. Critics of director Jackson's brand of "more is more" cinema will almost certainly view this as another example of how Jackson's movies tend toward bloat, and they wouldn't be wrong, exactly. An efficient movie adds more information to the screen to advance the plot or theme from shot to shot. Jackson sometimes adds material to show off his technology or his exuberance as a filmmaker. The result with this particular film and the two that will follow it is, perhaps, the first cinematic literary adaptation that takes longer to watch than it does to read.

But maybe I'm being unfair. In truth, I didn't notice that the film was bloated while I was watching it. In the moment, scene to scene, I was grooving on what I was seeing. In Jackson's defense, he's not just taking material from The Hobbit. He's also folded a lot of the back story of Middle Earth into The Hobbit, drawing from the appendices in The Return of the King and scattered material from The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales (particularly "The Quest for Erebor"). Most of it makes sense. Most of it is fused into the story more or less seamlessly. Jackson isn't inventing anything that isn't canonical from the books, even though it sometimes feels like it. Jackson and his partners have pored over the minutiae of Middle Earth and gleaned everything they can find that might make for a cool set piece or for heightened drama. What Jackson sees in Tolkien is a vast playground and he apparently wants to try out every swing and seesaw. I don't blame him, really. I grew up with Tolkien and were I in Jackson's position, I might do the same.

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Sibling Rivalry

For the first two acts of Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister (2012-ish), I was getting kind of impatient with it. Is this film going to show me anything that wasn't in the trailer? I wondered. This is a plague upon a blighted cinematic landscape: trailers want to make sure that the film is a known quantity, a safe quantity, in order to part you with your hard earned scratch, which means by the time you actually sit in the theater, you've seen the movie already. The rest is make-work. This is not Your Sister's Sister's fault. It is, rather, a fault with the economies of movie making. It turns out that there IS something in the first two acts of Your Sister's Sister that isn't in the trailer, and it's something that provides a key to a final act that managed to be a pleasant surprise. (Note, here there be spoilers).

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Mountains Out of Molehills

My partner and I have a recurring joke. Sometimes, when I'm in our living room watching a movie, she'll randomly chime in from somewhere else in the house: "So do you like Steel Magnolias yet?" "No," I'll answer. "The estrogen isn't working," she'll snipe. Hilarious, eh? Here's the thing about switching genders: it doesn't really change one's tastes a whole lot. If you like dumb action films before transitioning, you'll probably still like them afterward. You won't magically start liking chick flicks if you didn't like them to start unless you're hellbent on really "performing" your gender. I still watch a ridiculous number of horror films, after all. I had this go-around with my therapist once. She recommended that I start reading certain types of books to "socialize" me. I was kind of resistant to this idea because the first book she recommended was horrible. I didn't even bother with a second. My preferred beach reading is still hard boiled crime novels.

But that's not to say that there's not an influence. There is, and it's subtle.

One of the bitterly funny things about joining an oppressed minority is that things that didn't bother you before really start to bother you after, whether it's because you shed the blinders of privilege or you feel the pinch of overt aggressions from the dominant culture. It's a hard pill to swallow, sometimes. I didn't grow up as a queer feminist. I was a middle class white kid who barely knew what feminism even was. My awakening came once I discovered to my sorrow that all of that stuff you hear feminists complaining about is very, very real and applied to me directly. I'm not proud of this, but late to the party is better than not showing up at all.

I got to thinking about all of this while watching Clint Eastwood's 1975 mountain climbing thriller, The Eiger Sanction, which, to be charitable, is not among Eastwood's more laudable films. It's a horrible brew of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism, all packaged together in a way that would likely have resonated with a Men's Rights movement, had such a thing existed in 1975. Have you ever visited a comment thread when the topic was feminism? This film seems to have the same spirit of lashing out against the encroaching matriarchy feminism is obviously seeking to foist upon poor, put-upon, disenfranchised menfolk. But I'll get to all of this.

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The Worse Demons of Our Natures

I knew going into it that Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2012, directed by Timur Bekmambetov) was going to hurt my head. How could it not? With a title and high concept that ridiculous? A few years ago, some people made a movie called Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter, so this isn't even a novel idea. I thought that movie sucked, so I expected the pain from this one. I underestimated it.

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