love story

Timer

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:00:00 +0000

I love a romantic comedy. Throw in some magic realism–even better. Jac Schaeffer's Timer ticks both of those boxes, but, unfortunately for a film that explores people’s fears about missed opportunities, this film missed a few opportunities itself, and lost me as a fan in the process. (It bills itself as sci-fi but I say magic realism–there is new technology, but it’s never fully explained. I call that magic. More on this later, though.)

The concept is great: a company has created a wrist implant that counts down to the moment you will meet your soul mate–but only if that person has also bought an implant from the company. Obviously, this service is incredibly popular, leading to new phenomena in the dating world: some desperate types insisting every new person they date gets a timer implanted to make sure they’re "the one," others only dating those with timers in the first place, last-hurrah flings as the timer counts down its final days, and even technophobic hold-outs who don’t trust this newfangled stuff (with parallels to social networking). The consequences of having the timers could have been explored further though. Things were briefly touched upon-class issues, young love, bigger questions about fate and chance. The ideas all had loads of potential, but as I watched, I kept feeling like Schaeffer tried to go too far down each road, without taking the opportunity to wrap up every angle.

Because of all of the above, including my desire for more closure, I really wanted to like this film, and came very close to liking it. A few other things rankled, though. This may seem petty, but it struck a nerve with me: One of the opening shots of the film was of the logo of the company that created the timers–the silhouettes of a man and a woman, yet we briefly see later in the film that the company caters to couples of all sexualities. I don’t generally care what sexualities the main characters of a romantic comedy are, but it wouldn’t have taken much more effort to come up with a logo that was slightly less heteronormative. I mean, surely it would have been better advertising for the company itself within the confines of the film. Which brings me back to the world of the film. It was quite shallow–poke at it too hard and it was clear that there were a lot of unanswered questions: How did the technology work? How did the implants work? Why hadn’t anyone tried to hack the system? What if people’s bodies rejected the devices? Were they only available to wealthy westerners? Again, what made for a less than satisfying film could yet pave the way for a great series.

When it comes to the Bechdel Test, this film almost succeeds, but focuses just too hard on the guy-chasing and glosses over the other aspects of the relationship between the two main characters. Timer’s website purports to put across the message that you can escape your fate, but the message I got was these women needed to define themselves through their romantic relationships.

Great concept, but ultimately I was dissatisfied.

Written by: Chella Quint, August 18th 2010

Leading Ladies

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:58:00 +0000

Directed by Erika Randall Beahm, Daniel Beahm

It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story. It is simultaneously a dance musical, coming-of-age story, and coming-out narrative. The power of the film comes from its ability to maintain the generic conventions of the story while completely rejecting the hetero-normativity that is typically the narrative thrust of the genre. What’s perhaps even more amazing is that Leading Ladies succeeds at thwarting convention within a conventional structure while simultaneously being a whole lot of damn fun. Lesser films would sink under such weight.

Helmed by first-time directors Erika Randall Beahm and Daniel Beahm, this joyous film tells the story of the Campari women. The matriarch of the family is ballroom-dancing stage mom Sheri, played by Latin and Ballroom Champion Melanie LaPatin. Sheri has two daughters: like-minded drama queen and dancing champion Tasi (Shannon Lea Smith), and Toni (Laurel Vail), Tasi’s practice partner and the wallflower of the family. The film centers on Toni’s relationships, particularly with the emotionally volatile Tasi, and an unexpected romantic attachment to Mona (Nicole Dionne), a bubbly and outgoing woman Toni meets at a dance club. While LaPatin’s acting is a bit stiff, Smith’s neurotic and self-obsessed Tasi is played to high-pitched perfection. Vail might be the real star of this film, however, as she says more with her eyes than many actors can express with a word. She artfully plays the Ugly Duckling, the quiet witness to familial squabbles and the glue that keeps the Camparis together.

Leading Ladies has an ebb-and-flow, alternating between slow and quietly stirring scenes and vibrant, fast-paced dance numbers (most notably a hysterical and boisterous number set in a grocery store). The heart of this film beats loudly and quickly, and it leaves the viewer invigorated and deeply moved. To learn more about her hopes for the film, its generative process, and the ideological concerns that lead to its creation, I recently spoke with co-director Erika Randall Beahm.

Beahm co-wrote the film with Jennifer Bechtel, a friend and LGBT youth advocate in Champaign, Illinois, and Bechtel was struggling to find mainstream films that spoke to the young gay community. As Bechtel and Beahm perceived it, most gay and lesbian cinema tends towards violence or explicitness, while mainstream cinema features gay characters as “the sidekick.” Beahm and Bechtel thus sought to create a “family-centered gay and lesbian film for the mainstream market.” Their hope is that Leading Ladies provides gay youth with a positive portrayal of gay romantic love and thus “open a dialogue within themselves” and perhaps between gay youth and their families.

The film eschews aggressive and explicit representations of gay love for a romantic and “joyful falling in love which... straight kids get to experience in movies all the time.” Indeed, Leading Ladies treats its same-sex couple as any movie musicals’ heterosexual pairing: they meet, they dance, they fall in love. The romance is beautifully articulated through an artful juxtaposition of two dance sequences. Toni and Mona’s meeting is shot like a typical dance movie sequence—bright lights, loud music, and overhead shots looking down on the dancers. This film could be Dirty Dancing, if it weren’t for the same-sex couples dancing on stage and in the audience. Indeed, this is the goal of the film: to illustrate that dance (and by extension, romance and love) is the same for same-sex couples as it is for heterosexual partners. Toni leads Mona through a raucous, enthusiastic dance, and as convention dictates, the two find love while dancing. In a beautiful inversion of this sequence, we next find Toni in Mona’s lush apartment, where the more romantically experienced Mona takes the lead in the dance of romance. The lovers’ embrace is gorgeously shot in sensual blush tones and shadow.

For choreographer and dancer Beahm and youth musical programmer Bechtel, dance served as an obvious choice of backdrop for the love story. Beahm choreographed the film’s dances with Melanie LaPatin and Benji Schwimmer, the former So You Think You Can Dance! winner who also plays Toni’s best friend in the film. For Beahm, dance has an inherently transformative power: “There’s this kind of kinesthesia with dance that gets people to literally be moved on a physical level, and I believe also on an emotional and intellectual level.” The love scene between Mona and Toni, for example, is highly choreographed to match the non-diegetic music; Beahm suggests that this emphasis on “energy shifts… and the musicality” of the scene helps the spectator “lose sight of this being a gendered duet, and it just becomes two people moving together, falling in love.”

By emphasizing the movement and musicality of the scene, then, Beahm hopes to ease the fear of spectators who are uncomfortable with same-sex coupling and perhaps open a space for internal dialogue within the spectator: “For people who might have a hard time seeing two women... make out, it becomes this kind of transference of two bodies going through these really emotional and tender but also choreographed spaces, and so gender becomes less important.” By shifting the spectator’s focus from gender distinction to the movement of the body the film illustrates how little gender matters and how love—like dance—is a universal language. Thus the film utilizes dance to open up a space for shifting “people out of the fear they may feel if they’re watching from an outside perspective.”

Though the idea of dance as a catalyst to ideological and personal transformation may seem unusual, Beahm is quick to point out that dance has often added a “queer element” to the movie musical. In West Side Story, for example, the spectator sees groups of men “snapping and skipping” and yet the dance isn’t “sexualized, it’s charged and it’s activated.” Dancing is particularly subversive in moments of unison dancing, she suggests, when members of both sexes dance the same movements, suggesting a unity of the sexes and the democratization of the body. Leading Ladies takes this democratization one step further, rejecting the hetero-normative ballroom dance structure of male lead and female follow and replacing it with same-sex couplings. In doing so, Beahm simultaneously feeds off of the democratizing nature of dance while rejecting the rules of a dance form that reinforces gendered performance.

It is the inherent queerness in dance that Beahm finds so appealing and in tune with her views on feminism. For her, dance and feminism are “compatible” because they are both “hard to pin down” terms; their “slipperiness” as terms allows them to create spaces for dialogue and questioning. She likes her feminism to work “from the inside out,” enjoying the notion of becoming part of a system, and breaking it down from within. This is why her personal mantra is the cheeky suggestion to “wear pearls to the country club and then talk dirty.” Ultimately, Leading Ladies represents a filmic expression of this mantra—by placing non-conventional characters within a conventional generic structure, the film wears its pearls but then lets out a glorious, enthusiastic expletive as it sits down to dinner. Swearing has never been so much fun.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, July 15th 2010

Get Low

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Aaron Schneider

Sony Pictures Classics

Robert Duvall. Sissy Spacek. Bill Murray. If that’s not an easy sell, I’m not entirely sure what film would be. As expected, the acting in Get Low is phenomenal across the board. Even up and comer Lucas Black more than holds his own with these legends. The acting is the magic the movie tries so hard to make. Unfortunately, the allure of the fanciful southern folktale misses the mark. There are magic moments but Get Low fails to sustain itself consistently. Even so, it is a great pleasure to see these actors at work and tell this moral laden fable.

Robert Duvall plays an infamous town recluse, Felix Bush; Sissy Spacek plays his love of times gone by, and Bill Murray plays a funeral director. The premise is shockingly simple: the entire story centers on a funeral—only, it is for the still living Mr. Bush. If that were not strange enough, the funeral itself is no ordinary affair. In lieu of somber speeches and tears, there is an enormous party, with a raffle no less. But most surprising to me is that this film is based on a true story. A man by the name of Felix “Bush” Breazeale convinced counties of people to come to his “funeral party” by raffling off his property for next to nothing. The curiosity alone is appealing but the film presents a story the wider world needed to hear for its message on greed, love, and real life in the small town South.

Though all of these perspectives are intriguing, I somehow keep focusing on the fact that the film is couched as a folktale when really it is much more of an nontraditional love story. The intriguing part of this film is the dimension of older people in love. What would be so wrong with saying that? Is our world still that stuck in the traditional model of attractive, youthful happily ever after? Are we just not ready to think of the love lives of older people—beyond The Notebook in which we see their love mature from their youth? I think the answer to all those questions is yes.

The advertisers probably rightfully chose not to focus on this key aspect as for many audiences, it is not a major selling point. But as a feminist and someone critical of society’s scope of love, I think it is one of the most important reasons to go out and support this film.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, May 6th 2010

Silence Not, A Love Story

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:07:00 +0000

By Cynthia L. Cooper

Gihon River Press

Everyone loves a love story, especially one with a happy ending, and award-winning playwright and journalist Cynthia L. Cooper’s latest play, a forty-four-scene two-act, is a whopper. Silence Not, A Love Story tells the improbable tale—based on a true story—of Gisa Peiper, a young Jewish student stifled by religious Orthodoxy, and Paul Konopka, a Catholic craftsman, who met in late-1920s Germany while working with the anti-fascist International Socialist Combat League, known as the ISK. It was not love at first sight, but it was close, bolstered by each individual’s ironclad commitment to social justice and human rights.

Their organization, Cooper writes in the play’s Prologue, “was made up of pacifists and humanitarians. Politically, the group was strongly opposed to communism, but deeply committed to the labor movement… Members of the ISK studied political issues through group analyses and Socratic questioning, and they believed that action must follow understanding.” Members ran a school and published a newspaper; they were also encouraged to follow a vegetarian diet, avoid alcohol and spend time outdoors, hiking and enjoying the natural world. By all accounts the ISK was bold and members routinely put themselves in harm’s way. Peiper and Konopka were especially fearless and took incredible risks to publicize the danger posed by newly appointed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

From his first utterances as a national leader, Peiper and Konopka attempted to activate German citizens to oppose him and his fascist Nazi Party and Peiper’s reporting for the ISK press acknowledged the threat. People, she wrote, knew what Hitler and the Nazis stood for before they came to power. “Their terror tactics showed in street fights, in writings, in threats…The demeaning and torturing of anyone resisting them started immediately after January 1933. Fear pervaded the country. Everybody knew about the terror. It was also known outside of Germany.”

But breaking through angst is no easy feat and Silence Not, A Love Story includes riveting depictions of the general public’s go-along-to-get-along capitulation to Hitler’s demands. Not surprisingly, Konopka ended up on Nazi radar and, in short order, was forced to flee Germany and continue his underground agitation from France. Peiper eventually joined him, but not before being jailed for her pro-democracy efforts.

After the war, the pair moved to the United States. They married in 1941, 12 years after meeting, and remained together until Konopka’s death in 1976. Peiper became a social worker, writer and professor at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work and her long career as a youth advocate was dedicated to fostering human dignity. Her message was constant. We must never forget the millions of people whose lives were cut short by the Nazis. What's more, she served as a living rebuttal to Holocaust deniers and fascist apologists until her death in 2003.

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, in an introduction to Silence Not, puts Peiper and Konopka’s lives in context: “For Gisa Peiper, and for Rosa Parks and the civil rights activists, their very humanity lay in their acts of resisting evil. They could no more remain passive, removed, and quiescent than they could stop breathing… Without those who stand up for justice, where would the rest of us be?”

After this summer’s murder of Dr. George Tiller and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns, this question seems particularly resonant.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, September 24th 2009

Fear of Fighting

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:49:00 +0000

Stacey May Fowles, Marlena Zuber

Invisible Publishing

Fear of Fighting is a short novel about a woman living and working and looking for love. It reminds me, oddly, of Chuck Palahniuk's novels, though it's more comfortable with its queerness. It's got the same distasteful-yet-oddly-satisfying-in-their-rawness details and images (a half-boiled chicken's leg rotting in a refrigerator, filthy bathrooms, and all too much vomit), the same recklessly self-destructive and improbable obsessions and compulsions. It's got the same artful lists full of suspiciously quirky details, and the same intentionally, beautifully repetitive and sad images of emptiness and loneliness and the alienation of consumer-driven, urban American life.

But Stacey May Fowles balances her portrait of the grossness of human misery with beauty. There are adorable characters galore, plenty of non-gross sex, and lots of details that paint a stylish, hip mise-en-scène. The story is enriched by its characters' charmingly developed and sensitive relationships with animals. The art by Marlena Zuber is lovely and effective—and it adds a lot to the book, making it feel very much like an art piece and not just some novel. The prose is easy and elegantly spare, at times poetic. And at times Fowles' self-reflective musings and fancies work to great effect, as when—spoiler alert—the narrator illuminates the story of an abortion with great subtlety. When Marnie says in her diary-like voice, "To cope I used horrifying, shame-filled phrases like 'get it taken care of,'" she's not just explaining what she's doing or how it made her feel, but, more interestingly, is also revealing her feminist interpretation of her life.

This window into the complex inner life of a very real-feeling woman is refreshing. She lives an ordinary life that, when closely examined—like all ordinary lives—is extraordinary in its details. Similarly extraordinary-in-its-ordinariness is Fowles’ sweet little book; its honest and unassuming acknowledgments and author and printer profiles reveal a collaborative labor of love between independent creatives. The result is a a pleasure to see, to hold, and to read.

Written by: Ari Moore, March 17th 2009

Drifting Flowers

admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:34:00 +0000

Directed by Zero Chou

3rd Production Films

In the film Drifting Flowers, director Zero Chou brings together three stories of lesbian love and camaraderie. In the first, the audience is presented with May, a young girl who is confronted with the need to guide her blind older sister, Jing, while envying her sister's relationship with Diego.

The second story is a sharp turn from the youthful innocence of May to the addled mind of Lily. Lily married a gay friend, Yen, in her youth, and each lives their own life; now older, Yen has reentered her life. The two, who in the passage of years had been left by their lovers, come to provide support for each other as Lily descends into the dark of Alzheimer’s and Yen is afflicted by AIDS.

In another quick shift, the third segment tells Diego’s story at long last. Diego is by far the most interesting of the three studies. Beginning before Ying and May in Diego’s hometown, the segment and Diego are asked the thesis of the film: “Are you a boy or a girl?” Diego answers, “A girl.” Yet, she is uncertain of her answer. Unwilling to wear bras, binding her breasts, Diego is uncertain who she is, while being certain of what she wants.

Uncertainty is the dominant theme of this film, epitomized by the question of being female while not being traditionally feminine. Doubt in one’s self, doubt in one’s society, and an inability to accept what you know to be true are primal to this dilemma. Each of the women comes to seek her place in society, be it through feigned conformity, resignation, or flight; however, this is not a movie about social change.

As a result the segmentation only exacerbates the unrest, and then exacerbates the viewer, as an hour and a half begins to feel like three. The segmented and taciturn structure of the film is strung together by the accordion music which at times haunts and at times revives each narrative, and narrowly avoids giving its audience a collective migraine. Ultimately, Drifting Flowers is about how lives often explode too softly into the night, as the movie itself implodes in the light of day.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, March 12th 2009