A Girl & A Gun

Poison (1991), Todd Haynes

I've loved Haynes since Superstar, but never seen Poison, and I've got to admit I was slightly taken aback by Mark N's audacious choice of date movie.

It turned out to be a good thing, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it on an ad hoc date basis - check whether the person you're interested in likes Foucault first. The film's made up of three inter-cut stories - Horror, Homo and Hero, shot in three genre delirious styles - 1950s sci-fi, queer cinema and documentary, with Genet credited as co-writer. The film looks at sexual stigmatization, debasement and perverse desire (or maybe desire made perverse), but manages to be very funny, touching in places, as well as pretty repulsive. The closing scene to Homo - a technicoloured flashback to the protagonists memory of a gang rape reenacted in spit and rose petals - has got to be one of the most disturbing I've ever seen.

Norman Bryson, Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema (spoiler warning)

Notes on Haynes over at Senses of Cinema

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006), Steven Shainberg

Going into a Blockbuster store right now is a grim experience - I often come out without a DVD or the will to live.  So I was happy that Fusho & I managed to find Fur, Shainbergs follow up to Secretary, amongst the current swamp of dross last weekend.

The film tells a story of Arbus's transformation from 50's housewife working as her photographer husband 's stylist to a woman who can wave her freak flag pretty damn high.  Robert Downey Jr. does a decent job as the doomed la Bête; Nichole Kidman is great as the fairytale Belle who eventually takes up his furry throne. Best of all is Ty Burrell as Arbus's beard-competing, loving and puzzled husband: "I'm a normal guy. Now I have a hole in my ceiling and freaks are coming out of it!".

Zoom (2006), Peter Hewitt

Watched this with Fusho, Isis (8) and J (10) last weekend in Shrewsbury.

Judged within it’s own terms – lowish budget movies about kids with superhero powers – this film is way better than the really dire Sky High. However, I may well be in the minority with my mild appraisal of this one. Judging from the extreme emotion on display over at the IMDB comment boards (including “recycled, regurgitated crap from uninspired filmmakers”, “WHY DOES PETER HEWITT GET WORK, why??” “I took an 11 year old to see this movie, and he was actually sore at me”), many internet commentators have far higher expectations of Peter Hewitt than I do. All I ask is that there are no more tiny people freaking me out.

The kids that I watched this with loved it. They were jumping up and down in their seats with excitement (and no, we don’t lock them in the cellar and just let them out to watch movies). Why would any sane adult watch with them?

1. You can play spot the movie references. Much of the script is cobbled together from scraps of other scripts found by the writer in a dumpster. However, you need to have watched a ton of similar movies to get the references – the writers went for very literal parallels, for example Courtney Cox’s brainy but accident prone scientist has been snaffled wholesale from Dr Allison Reed, Julianne Moore’s brainy but accident prone scientist in Evolution

2. You can see whether there are 3 or 5 occasions when the boom mike is visible. Seriously! At a period in history that the cinema going public are gorged on CGI by control freak directors like they were digital pate producing geese, this movie is almost avent guard in its disregard for continuity.

3. You remember what Paul Verhoeven did with Starship Troopers? A parody of Fascist Imperialism that sinisterly morphed in to a full blown Neo-Con celebration of the exact same thing by the closing scenes? This film treads the same bitter path, albeit in a default kind of way, because the lazy ass script writers wouldn’t manage to sustain a critique of the wholesale slaughter of people with the letter C in their name for more than half a minute. Potentially containing some kind of message about how no good will come of a military willing to expose kids to enormous doses of radiation to exploit their superpowers, it’s reassuringly all ok by the end of the movie. 

Ghost Rider (2007), Mark Steven Johnson

The basic plot of Ghost Rider centers on trick motorcycle riding Carney Johnny Blaze (Matt Long/Nicholas Cage). Childhood sweetheart Roxanne Simpson (Raquel Alessi/Eva Mendes) is beautiful, smart and loyal. In order to avoid making any kind of commitment to her and get free motorbike upgrades Johnny agrees to work as the devils lackey and signs up to nightly transformation into a blazing skeleton, becoming the patron saint of unreliable gits everywhere. My yet to be heartbroken 13 yr old niece described it as “a love story”.

The film wasn’t as bad as I expected. While the plot isn’t exactly unpredictable and doesn’t make a huge amount of sense even within its own terms, it is at least fast paced. Director Mark Steven Johnson, who also had a hand in two of the worst comic book adaptations of the current decade (Daredevil and Electra) partly redeems himself by finally giving his actors the freedom to not take themselves too seriously. It’s comic book spoof with the spoof not handled entirely easily – nice light touches in some places (the rescued Goth chick), heavy-handed cack in others (you can play cliché bingo with a lot of the script).

Who looks forward to a new Nick Cage movie these days? Here he does what he can as best as he can, playing Johnny Blaze like Evel Knievel possessed by Vegas Elvis. Peter Fonda has some fun as the devil; the grave voiced Sam Elliot is a bit wasted as voice-over man and the not-that-mysterious Caretaker.