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jsmithano
Reviews
Call Me Kate (2023)
Overly Familiar Material While Skirting Major Questions
Much of the material presented here is overly familiar: Hepburn's close-knit family, her older brother's suicide at 16, her Bryn Mawr education, her marriage, her struggles as a young actress, her comeback after being declared "box office poison," her love affair with Spencer Tracy.
I really wanted to know more about her relationship with Tracy. For years I've heard that both of them were gay and had scores of same-sex lovers and that the scandal of having an adulterous relationship was preferable to having the truth known. But the documentary does not address this issue at all. The most we get is one of her nephews speaking generally about her sexual orientation saying that some of it or all of it may have been true but she would have thought it was nobody's business.
She was a major movie star and a public figure. If her life was nobody's business why are we watching this documentary? Our interest isn't mere prurience, a need to hide one's sexual orientation shapes one's life.
The documentary has an actress reading from Hepburn's letters. She does not sound like Hepburn and it is distracting.
Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror (2022)
Unpersuasive and Overreaches in its Attempt to Apply Queer Theory
It's not persuasive. People just state opinions without backing them up. They're more interested in posturing than proving. For starters, there's no proof that queer themes present themselves in horror films more than in other genres, it's just assumed and the viewer is expected to accept that. Sometimes the speakers strain to apply the thesis.
The worst episode was the one in which Anthony Perkins was discussed. Norman Bates is not a gay or queer man: he's a mentally disturbed straight man who's looking for the love of a woman. That's established in Psycho and all the sequels and I assume the Robert Bloch book from which Psycho was adapted. Why would a gay man spy on an attractive, straight woman who's undressing, and it's implied, become aroused by the sight? AFAIK, Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for the Psycho book, was not queer. When Bates dons women's clothes, he's not engaging in a deliberate act of sexual or identity expression. He has dissociative personality disorder and literally thinks he's a woman in the moment. There's no act of transgression or transformation. How far is this interpretation of coded queerness supposed to extend? Are we to believe that every reclusive, unmarried character is a latent homosexual?
The treatment of Perkins' terrific performance as nothing more than a self-confession is profoundly insulting. He used some elements of his personal life, but so do all actors. But ultimately, he was an actor and an artist who made specific choices to interpret a role. He was NOT Norman Bates. He suffered because he was seen by so many as nothing but this character and it was assumed he was nothing but this character. Just yesterday, I saw an interview with Perkins as an older man who described the auditions for Psycho II. He was at the studio's office when unexpectedly he had to read with one of the actresses being considered for Mary. He talked about how he had to work to summon Norman Bates on short notice. Even his own son, Oz Perkins, jumps on the queer theory bandwagon and utters opinions that make no sense. I guess it's nice to feel like part of the club. But I was amazed by Perkins' son's statement that Marion Crane is wondering why Bates isn't trying to have sex with her. What? We've seen that she's in a serious relationship and she's just impulsively committed a crime that could land her in prison for several years. She's a bit preoccupied with how to fix her rather monumental problems. We see later that she hopes to return the money and pay back what she spent. She's an attractive woman who feels sorry for Bates, but the last thing on her mind is "Does he think I'm hot?"
It also was ridiculous for Oz Perkins to look at John Gavin's character, Sam Loomis, as similar to the characters Anthony Perkins had played in the past. Loomis is a traditional man who's comfortable in his own skin. In movies like "The Actress," "Friendly Persuasion," "The Lonely Man," "The Tin Star," "The Sea Wall," "Desire Under the Elms," "The Matchmaker," "Green Mansions," "Fear Strikes Out, "On the Beach" and "Tall Story," all of which I've seen, Perkins played intense, sensitive boy/men; they were nothing like Loomis. It's bizarre to claim that when Bates kills Loomis it's some kind of triumph over the roles Perkins played before Psycho.
One of the commentators notes that it was telling that Hitchcock cast suspected gay actors as villains in "Rope" and "Psycho" (Incidentally, I don't know that Hitchcock did know that Perkins was homosexual at the time.). But even if true, how many films did Hitchcock make in which the villain was a straight actor? Quite a few. The overwhelming majority. This is an example of how critically weak the series is and how it suffers from selection bias.
I have no problem with queer theory analyses when the work supports it in some way. I thought the documentary "The Celluloid Closet" was illuminating when it did not overreach. For example, such an interpretation is quite plausible in regard to a character like Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca. It's not in regard to Norman Bates and Psycho.
Remember My Name (1978)
90 Minutes of Sociopathy Gets Boring Quickly
Watching a sociopath manipulate, threaten, and attack people for 90 minutes is not very interesting. There is so much that is not explained.
What was Geraldine Chaplin's character like before she killed the woman with whom her husband (Anthony Perkins) was having an affair? (The film tries to make it ambiguous as to whether the death was deliberate or accidental but it seems pretty clear it was intentional.)
Although cheating on one's wife is wrong, why is it Perkins's character's fault that his wife murdered someone? Why does he feel compelled not only to leave town and move to the other side of the country, but to abandon his profession as an architect? Does he really need to do penance of that sort? What does it accomplish?
Good actors, even in small parts. But it doesn't add up to much. Many people praise the soundtrack. I found it obtrusive and at times obvious.
A Call to Spy (2019)
I Watched This Film at 1.5x Speed and It Still was Slow
Although this film has been compared to "Hidden Figures," that's not apt. "Hidden Figures" was about truly obscure women, while the names of Virginia Hall, Vera Atkins, and Noor Inayat Khan are known -- I've watched documentaries about them on the History Channel, some at least 20 years ago.
The piece reads like a vanity production for the researcher-screenwriter-producer, who plays Hall. It is extremely low on dramatic tension and it adds "Hollywood" plot changes and anachronistic acts of feminist gumption that don't enhance the story. This is not the the 1931 version of Mata Hari with Greta Garbo. About midway through, I couldn't take the glacial pace and so sped up the film to 1.5X speed, an option on Netflix. Not only was the increased speed not noticeable, it still was slow. But I forced myself to stick with it to the end, not that I was rewarded for my efforts.
The end note forces a triumphant tone. Its says that Hall became the first woman CIA agent, but Wikipedia tells us that she was discriminated against during her entire career there. I've always wondered about the elevation of Khan as a hero. Yes, she was kind and brave, but she wasn't competent (she used to do things like writing out her messages instead of destroying them immediately after transmitting them and agents who trained with her told her superiors not to send her) and it seems that fact, together with her lack of temperament for the job and not enough training killed her. Should we really be celebrating that? Her death also is not presented as it happened. She was executed with three other women.
It also bothers me when the actors in a film based on true life events aren't as attractive as their real-life counterparts. That's true of the actors who play Hall and Khan. The acting throughout was extremely uneven.
I recommend that anyone who wants to learn about these brave women seek out a good documentary or book on them.