Get Low

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

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

Steam

admin — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:57:00 +0000

Directed by Kyle Schickner

Wolfe

Steam is not a complicated film, in spite of the pseudo-complicated lives of its characters. It traces the trajectories of three female characters for a short while, seeming to span roughly six months, give or take a season. Laurie (Ally Sheedy), a divorced and bitter single mother; Doris (Ruby Dee), an elderly recent widow; and Elizabeth (Kate Siegel), a college student with a burgeoning lesbian sexual identity are brought together by chance to a sweaty respite: the steam room of their local health club.

Strangers to one another at first, they come to share small pieces of themselves as they bask in the heat, for those moments free to drop their burdens at the door and let their troubles pour out of them with their sweat. They are expunged, cleansed, baptized by the steam. The second time this flat visual metaphor is used, we were tired of it. By the fifteenth time, we were just plain annoyed. Steam from a sewer grate as Laurie shares what may be the first kiss since her divorce; steam from a bubbling pot as Doris prepares dinner for the new man in her life; steam from her cold breath mingling with her date’s lazy cigarette smoke as Elizabeth meets up with Niala (Reshma Shetty) on their first night together. Replace steam with a bottle of wine or a vibrator and Schickner may have been onto something more poetic.

Outside the steam room, we go deeper into each woman’s personal life through rotating vignettes that follow a predictable pattern. First we meet the characters as they are: disempowered and just existing, without agency. Things seem to improve for each for each of them, then quickly become much worse in sync, until each woman comes back around to find herself again at a new equilibrium. Ready to face the next challenge, they will overcome with their newly acquired storybook feminist outlook. The film narrowly imagines what a woman’s “drama” can be like, offering only tropes in the place of true complexity. To follow one character only and really develop her, or to condense the full length into a short piece would have generated the tension Schickner tries to create with overly broad strokes. The film should be driven by its narrative, but this contrived narrative is weak and can’t live up to its own expectations fully.

Steam puts forth some strong messages by way of its women: queer, sex-positive, and age-positive themes that are always welcome and so often lacking from today’s big budget blockbusters. Chelsea Handler holds what’s left of the film together by a thread with her bit supporting role, providing comic relief as the wise-cracking counterpart to Sheedy’s self-deprecating Laurie. Steam is like a sauna, nice at first but if you stay in too long you might start to get prickly and irritated, or just really tired.

Written by: Kelly Moritz, Nic Vetter, October 18th 2009

age positive

Get Low

Steam