the things i've been watching: april edition

Milk: (2008. dir: Gus Van Sant) The big hardship in filming biodrama is the temptation to work from an outline of facts and events, as in: "my audience must know that this happened, then this, and that my hero had this quality and said this then did this." You check off each thing or happening once it's filmed then tuck it into its chronological place on your Final Cut Pro, and when the checklist is all done, so is your movie. But what you end up with in a checklist movie is two hours of everyone saying exactly what they mean all the time (a thing that rarely happens in life) because your priority is in imparting clear information about your hero's life at the expense of both drama and entertainment.

It's tough, especially when the subject is recent enough that folks who knew him well are still alive and watching, ready to jump up and cry foul if you run astray from events as they happened or, more insidiously, from the party line. Point is, I understand the pressures and the difficulty. And what Van Sant has given us is not uninteresting, particularly as a chronicle of How They Lived during a pivotal decade in gay history. It's got compelling, sometimes breathtaking performances almost across the board. I'm particularly intrigued by James Franco, who seems to have relaxed into himself while I was looking elsewhere, offering up a turn so unobtrusive yet true that I wonder if he has not rounded a corner and embarked on that arduous stretch into the kind of greatness in which he can share a scene as gracefully as he can steal it.

The film is a timely one, and therefore greatly appreciated, but I think it will be remembered as a staid, successfully Oscar-worthy effort rather than a film to be enjoyed for its own inner vitality. In short, a film you admire, not one that you love. That spoken, I am fully willing to allow that if I were a gay man, I might be more passionate about it, and if I were a very young gay man, it might be life-altering.




Nobel Son: (2007. dir: Randall Miller) An obtrusive soundtrack further mars this dark and (damningly) unfunny hipster comedy from the "Lock Stock And Two Smoking We All Wish We Were Quentin And If We Were This Would Be A Great Film But We're Not Still The Studio Is Hoping One Of Us Will Be So Yay! I Got My Bad Movie Made" school of filmmaking. The crime is preposterous, the people are more flawed than not and in-fighting abounds; much of the unsuccessful humor centers around absurd mutilations, and it's all stultifyingly contrived.

And that's too bad, since the project offers up sizable roles with what ought to have been interesting things to do to old favorites Mary Steenburgen and Alan Rickman. It's not their fault the movie is bad. It's a house made of cleverness with nothing holding it together.




>SPOILERS, BUT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR TIME?<

The Godfather: (1972. dir: Francis Ford Coppola) I know, I know, no more ink needs to be spilled...

Except that it does! Because it amazes me, every time, this film. It's one of maybe ten in all of history that I PHYSICALLY CANNOT run across on TV without watching the rest of it, from any point, any scene. The endgame is so perfect that I begin to salivate for it, to physically crave it, the baptism and the preparations for battle, Michael Corleone saying that he does renounce Satan, he does renounce his works, and then hell breaks loose, but just for a moment, and the battle is won, all over the city, as Michael is winning the battle over the better angel of his conscience, and committing himself to his dark destiny. And then, and THEN! getting Carlo to confess and then Diane Keaton's best scene, maybe her best onscreen moment ever, when Michael concedes that he will, just this once, allow her to ask him about his business, and the way she says it, barely speaking it, her face twisted with pleading and dread, "Is it true?" And then that final shot, the camera following her into the other room and we see his soldiers gathering around Michael, acknowledging him as Don, and we see the darkness fall across her as the door closes and shuts her out forever.

It's not just the endgame that's perfect. This is a perfect movie. I'm dumbfounded by it every time. The effortlessness of it. There is not an element, not a moment that is out of tune or excessive, nor is there anything missing. Godfather II is also a work of genius, but in an affectionately erring, rambling, possibly greater but somehow more believable manner. This first film is so consummately marvellous that if I were ever to see Coppola in the flesh I would gaze at him slack-jawed, and, if I was drunk, maybe pinch him to see if he was really only human. I wonder if this is not at the root of our apparently collective mistrust of him as a director, like the one the British harbor toward David Beckham, because he's proved that he can work miracles and we resent him because he seems willful and malevolent in choosing not to do it every day.