Hellions: (dir: Bruce McDonald) The latest from the Canadian director of Pontypool is an interesting horror film in which a Halloween home invasion by demonic children in masks acts as direct metaphor for the invasion of a teenager's body by an unwanted pregnancy. As soon as the craziness starts, the whole world turns soft pink, and remains so for much of the film. The children chant, "blood for baby," as the girl feels her own body turning against her to feed the alien invader. The best horror films work not only on symbolic levels but for straight spooks as well, and this one only works metaphorically, so it's of limited interest. Norayr Kasper gives it some great photography, though, some fantastic framing.
the Keeping Room: (dir: Daniel Barber) The Civil War is limping to a close, "Uncle Billy" Sherman and his monstrous ravagers are berserking across the South, and three forgotten women fight to survive in the empty shell of a once-lovely home. It's as if Barber took the Yankee-on-the-staircase scene from Gone With the Wind, stripped away the glamor, and expanded it to explore the experiences of women. Barber's skills are apparent from the beginning in a thunderously good opening involving a woman and a vicious dog barking one another down, the introduction of the Yankee marauders, and a stagecoach set aflame and running at full speed. As the morality play continues, his characters resist (albeit just barely, sometimes) the temptation to compress themselves into allegorical flatness.
A "keeping room", by the way, is an informal, secondary living room, usually near the kitchen. On this farm, it's separate from the main house, and it's where they do most of their living: cooking, eating, getting drunk, and the telling of truths. They go back to the main house, which feels like a grand, neglected museum, woefully vulnerable to invasion, only for sleeping.
Magic Mike XXL: (dir: Gregory Jacobs) This sequel to the 2012 Soderbergh-helmed, male-stripper extravaganza is frustrating and extraordinary in equal measure. It's essentially a road-trip movie, with the boys reunited (minus Matthew McConaughey, who has an Oscar on the mantel and perhaps no further time for such playthings) and looking for one last, explosive farewell before they put the semi-glamorous life on the pole behind them and fade into ordinary existence. It feels largely improvised, most successfully when Channing Tatum and Amber Heard are in charge (although Heard is too skinny now. Is Johnny Depp making her live in France or something?), and it often feels like a meandering excuse for these guys to Just Hang Out.
The extraordinary thing is its attitude towards women. Never have I seen a Boy Road-Movie (and this is, make no mistake, unabashedly that, complete with overuse of fist-bumping and "bro"-speak) with such care taken towards women. These men are not mere exhibitionists; they have a calling to make women feel beautiful and sexy. There is no discrimination against the portly or the aged, even in private amongst themselves. So, in a sense, it feels like a feminist tract: it's the best part of the sex industry, in which you sometimes meet men who are there because they do, gloriously and fully, love Woman as archetype and individual women as Her vice-regents, or, as this movie terms us, Her Queens.
On the other hand, because it exists entirely within the realm of Adult Entertainment, it becomes an example of that weirdly Freudian phenomenon, a world which is utterly sexualized in every respect. And the dances these caring gentlemen do (and they really are caring, and gentlemen) wind up being creepily invasive, with the woman who is being "adored", as they put it, forced to surrender herself completely into limpness and let her stripper-guy strap her spreadeagled and faux-fuck her, or hold her upside-down while he dry-fucks her face, etc. Obviously I have boundary issues, but this kind of thing, particularly in a room filled with hundreds of my howling peers, would seem more like hell than love to me.
My point is that this movie is a definite step in the right direction, and that in itself is a vaguely discouraging thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment