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ivyficIt occurs to me that I haven't babbled about the movies I've seen lately, so here goes.
Get Down
I think I prefer the alternate title to this film: Treed Murray. I rented this one for David Hewlett. I admit it. The premise is David Hewlett is an advertising exec on his way home from work. He gets jumped by thugs and to avoid them, climbs a tree in the middle of the park. The hoodlums stand at the bottom and taunt him.
That's the whole movie.
I spent most of the movie looking at the timer on the DVD player thinking, "they can't possibly spin this out for ninety minutes," but they managed it, somehow. All of the thugs get their little soliloquys, Hewlett's character gets to whine, and bitch and maybe have a moment of self-realization; it's all very high school theater production, complete with the ambiguously uplifting ending.
My main problem was that the thugs don't seem to have any plan of what they're going to do with this guy in the tree. Hewlett seems to think they'll kill him, but they're all relatively non-threatening teenagers, and their leader ("Shark") only talks about how he wants to "win." By "win" I think all he means is wait until Hewlett climbs out of the tree. But then what? They'll kick the snot out of him, he'll go home, and they'll all get arrested? It really doesn't make that much sense.
The surprise of the film was that it co-stars Shawn "Bobby the Ice-Man" Ashmore (listed in the credits as Aaron Ashmore, which is enough to confuse the snot out of imdb).
If this keeps up, I'm going to have a collection of obscure low-budget Canadian Cinema.
Brokeback Mountain
Saw this from the second row of the theater, so close-ups were a little overwhelming. Oh look! There's Jake Gyllenhaal's left eye! I could even see the grain of the film. From this close, the sex scenes were really odd, let me tell you. And the male equivalent of the "relationship" conversation - these guys were together twenty years, and I think the some total of how much they talked about their feelings was maybe six lines.
This was an interesting film to watch as a slasher. For the first half of the film, I was thinking, yeah, I've read this fic. Two guys all alone have to share a tent for warmth? Yeah, read that. The not queer conversation? Read that. The ambiguous tackling that could be fighting, could be foreplay? Read that.
Slash deals with homosexuality in a surprisingly diverse number of ways, and certainly not all slash fics are happy. But one thing I was glad of while watching this was that in slash, for the most part the homophobia is in the minds of the characters involved, something that they fear that turns out not to be an issue. It's very rare that I've seen a fic where someone else reacts with the intense hatred towards the gay couple that you see in this film. And that's something I'm glad of.
Slash is a romantic genre - our couples almost always overcome the obstacles in their path. It's (dear god) not meant to be realistic, so most writers don't try too hard to delve into the issues raised by certain characters being gay. I enjoyed watching a movie that showed how a forbidden love affair directed the course of both these men's lives, but it left me awfully depressed.
I was the most depressed by the fact that Jack was really the only person who knew Ennis. Once Jack died, there's no one left who really knows who this guy is. That made me unspeakably sad.
I also walked out of the theater with a Western twang. Did anyone else notice that Jack Twist's accent changed from Wyoming to Texas over the course of the film? I thought that was a nice touch.
Get Down
I think I prefer the alternate title to this film: Treed Murray. I rented this one for David Hewlett. I admit it. The premise is David Hewlett is an advertising exec on his way home from work. He gets jumped by thugs and to avoid them, climbs a tree in the middle of the park. The hoodlums stand at the bottom and taunt him.
That's the whole movie.
I spent most of the movie looking at the timer on the DVD player thinking, "they can't possibly spin this out for ninety minutes," but they managed it, somehow. All of the thugs get their little soliloquys, Hewlett's character gets to whine, and bitch and maybe have a moment of self-realization; it's all very high school theater production, complete with the ambiguously uplifting ending.
My main problem was that the thugs don't seem to have any plan of what they're going to do with this guy in the tree. Hewlett seems to think they'll kill him, but they're all relatively non-threatening teenagers, and their leader ("Shark") only talks about how he wants to "win." By "win" I think all he means is wait until Hewlett climbs out of the tree. But then what? They'll kick the snot out of him, he'll go home, and they'll all get arrested? It really doesn't make that much sense.
The surprise of the film was that it co-stars Shawn "Bobby the Ice-Man" Ashmore (listed in the credits as Aaron Ashmore, which is enough to confuse the snot out of imdb).
If this keeps up, I'm going to have a collection of obscure low-budget Canadian Cinema.
Brokeback Mountain
Saw this from the second row of the theater, so close-ups were a little overwhelming. Oh look! There's Jake Gyllenhaal's left eye! I could even see the grain of the film. From this close, the sex scenes were really odd, let me tell you. And the male equivalent of the "relationship" conversation - these guys were together twenty years, and I think the some total of how much they talked about their feelings was maybe six lines.
This was an interesting film to watch as a slasher. For the first half of the film, I was thinking, yeah, I've read this fic. Two guys all alone have to share a tent for warmth? Yeah, read that. The not queer conversation? Read that. The ambiguous tackling that could be fighting, could be foreplay? Read that.
Slash deals with homosexuality in a surprisingly diverse number of ways, and certainly not all slash fics are happy. But one thing I was glad of while watching this was that in slash, for the most part the homophobia is in the minds of the characters involved, something that they fear that turns out not to be an issue. It's very rare that I've seen a fic where someone else reacts with the intense hatred towards the gay couple that you see in this film. And that's something I'm glad of.
Slash is a romantic genre - our couples almost always overcome the obstacles in their path. It's (dear god) not meant to be realistic, so most writers don't try too hard to delve into the issues raised by certain characters being gay. I enjoyed watching a movie that showed how a forbidden love affair directed the course of both these men's lives, but it left me awfully depressed.
I was the most depressed by the fact that Jack was really the only person who knew Ennis. Once Jack died, there's no one left who really knows who this guy is. That made me unspeakably sad.
I also walked out of the theater with a Western twang. Did anyone else notice that Jack Twist's accent changed from Wyoming to Texas over the course of the film? I thought that was a nice touch.