YoungSoulRebel Reviews

Bam Bam and Celeste (2005)

I really wanted to like this one....

[6 November 2011]

Maybe I'm just too strange myself to really need Cho's constant message of self-love and self-empowerment, but I tired of it quickly as an adult, yet still harbour this quasi-nostalgic fondness that I had for Cho in my teens, even though I now find her incredibly boring, at best and, as an effete gay man of FTM history, I more often find her disgustingly offensive and hackneyed in her potential for appeal. She's best when she's lampooning the "child of immigrants" experience, even as one who was raised by non-assimilating English immigrant/Blitz-refugee grandparents, on some level I can relate to the ineffable strangeness of being reared in such close proximity with "the old country" and find it funny when it is; even so, she's been telling that joke, and all her others, for twenty years, and she seldom expands on it any more than she ever has.

I can see what Cho was trying to do here. At the heart of this film, she's clearly attempting to unite her message of self-love with the low-budget camp and highly exaggerated character of a classic John Waters film from the 1970s. In that sense, I can respect her goals, but the Waters classics had something, likely many things that this film seriously lacks. One of those things is the on-screen sincerity of the characters and the chemistry they have with other characters. For as ridiculous as Waters characters like dawn Davenport, Aunt Ida, Crackers, Connie & Raymond Marbles and all the others are, every single actor in those films managed to put every fibre of their essence into those characters to make you believe them, and you simply don't get that in BAM-BAM & CELESTE, except perhaps with Hendrix. Furthermore, your classic John Waters character is less a one-sided stereotype and more something so bizarre its out of a fairy-tale. Cho's goth-punk Celeste is pretty much the stereotype of the self-hating fat girl who falls into that scene to distract from her own self-perceived ugliness. Daniels' effete and promiscuous gay boy is the same vapid, shallow caricature that you'd expect. The stereotyped "Midwesterners" they encounter on the road-trip are less like any "Midwesterner stereotypes" I've actually met (what with living here for twenty years) and more like what somebody from one of the coasts might imagine, making it possibly the most offensive aspect of the entire thing.

Furthermore, Cho's message of self-love and implications of freak solidarity is completely lost when the once punky girl who justifiably hated everybody in that tiny town doesn't decide she's beautiful until she's transformed into something worlds more normal. The message that becomes clear is "you can't believe you're beautiful until everybody else believes you are".

I really wanted to like this, really wanted to believe that there was something else decent to come out of Cho since Notorious and before she decided to stop being an ally to the TS/TG in the GBLT community, but I guess my nostalgia is either simply doomed to be disappointed, or simply was unfounded in the first place. This isn't the worst film ever, but it's certainly unfunny and generally forgettable if not for every offense to the community she so desperately wants to stand in solidarity with.

Gigantic (2008)

Promising, but kind of stupid

[5/10 · 11 September 2010]

This film had a promising premise, a dry-comedy examination of relationships through two quirky hipsters and their eccentric families. That's what I went in expecting, cos that's really all the copy on the back of the DVD box says.

The film introduces Brian, and it's established that his father was in his fifties when the 28-year-old Brian was born, and Brian is hoping to adopt a baby. Then there's a bizarre scene wherein Brian is beaten pretty badly by The Hobo as he's heading toward a ferry. Then we meet Al Lolly, who's apparently wealthy enough to buy a $14K mattress from Brian, and who is just kind of used to saying whatever pops into his head, even if he knows it's offensive. After "ribbing" his ostensibly gay assistant, Al reserves the mattress and mentions that he'll be sending down "his girl" to pay for it, speaking as if she's some kind of secretary. When his girl, who identifies herself as Al's daughter, Harriet a.k.a. "Happy", arrives, she's almost inaudibly soft-spoken and implied to have less of a verbal filter than her father (though in her own way) and soon falls asleep on the mattress; when she wakes up, over two hours later, they arrange to have the mattress delivered, but the next day, the delivery driver calls in sick and Brian is assigned to go deliver, and is then almost immediately suckered in to driving Al, who is laying down on the hardwood floor, to his back specialist cos Harriet "can't drive in NYC". Brian and Harriet make the most emotionless small- talk since some of Burt I Gordon's stinkers in the clinic's waiting room, then Harriet emotionlessly propositions Brian for sex, and then they immediately duck back out to the parking garage for a quickie while Al is told that his back problem is stress-related.

Brian's father is equally quirky and it's implied all over the place that his brothers are self-made millionaires. In fact, save for The Hobo, who inexplicably beats down Brian four times in the film, with no established pattern as to why, there's not a single character in this film who isn't incredibly privileged; even Brian's prospective adoption is of a Chinese baby, and absolutely no reason is ever divulged as to why a single and apparently heterosexual young man is so hell-bent on adopting a baby other than an anecdote from Brian's father that, on Brian's eighth birthday, his parents got him some toy or another, and Brian retreated to his room, crying, because "he wanted us to get him a baby, a Chinese baby".

Wow. Just wow. And when he finally does get his baby (after ample strings pulled by a friend of his with the agency), his entire family treat the poor little girl like a Pomeranian puppy, Brian's father commenting to his mother "we gotta get one of these".

One of the only two scenes with realistic emotion are when Harriet attempts to break up with Brian, for some vague reason I've already forgotten, and Brian is broken-hearted about it. When he leaves the Lollys' apartment afterward, he's encountered by his Hobo for the fourth and final time, and stabs the guy in self-defense. When Brian staggers up from the body, the shot of the alley from a distance reveals no body, which is either a technical goof, or an implication that there never was a Hobo -- in which case, why is Brian sporting bruises almost consistently from the first beating onward? I have absolutely no idea what this character was supposed to be representing, if anything, though his regular appearances which include an implication that he's followed Brian from NYC to somewhere upstate, my money is on "figment of the imagination" -- in which case, FIGHT CLUB did that kind of imaginary- abuser/friend-gone-wild thing twenty times better; there was some consistency to Tyler Durden, there is none with GIGANTIC's Hobo. The second with real emotion is when Brian's mother talks Harriet out of a panic episode and explains that "nothing's normal".

Apparently the scriptwriters are "from literary backgrounds" and thought they were writing a film like a novel, forgetting that novels (like FIGHT CLUB) are typically better than the films that are made from them simply because of the time that is taken to carefully explain certain things; there is little to no explanation of anything in GIGANTIC; while it seems to aim for a character-driven rather than plot-driven film, the end result is that it just kind of meanders about without much to really endear the characters to, much less make one care about what happens to them. By the time Brian finally got his baby, I was more annoyed that yet another privileged, upper-middle-class white boy has scored a seat on the Trendy Foreign Baby bandwagon and, like so many before him, is content to treat the kid like an accessory rather than a person.

It has kind of an absurd charm in places, but in the end, its grasps at straws of pseudo-existentialism ends up with those moments just petering out as kind of stupid. It's a promising idea, but obviously the writing failed this idea; the direction seemed fine, cos there's only so much you can do with some of these lines.

I'm giving it 5/10 cos like I said, it has a decent premise, and the direction is fine; the actors do well, all of them, really, but there was only so much that could have been done with the apparent script that I have to blame the film's problems on writing alone. I usually like these quirky little character pieces, but this simply didn't deliver on such promises; the leads, who are the focus of the film, are ultimately kind of bland, and their families seem like caricatures of eccentricity.

Absolute Beginners (1986)

Not for fans of the novel

[3/10 · 6 June 2009]

If you've read the original novel, as I did, you will probably hate this thing.

The film version of _Absolute Beginners_ is a nightmarish conglomerate of 1980s anachronisms attempting to create a "period piece" set in the late 1950s and failing to re-create or even pay homage to that period -- the US monstrosity of _Dirty Dancing_ does similar to 1963, except that film proved financially successful despite having equally amateurish screen writing. In addition to suffering from "looking too 1980s", the characters have been changed, re-arranged, and downplayed to the point that the only characteristics they have in common with those of the novel are the slightest superficial looks and, of course, their names: Suze is transformed from the narrator's flighty ex-girlfriend and promiscuous negrophile who willingly plans to marry a closeted old queen for money (at her own admittance in the first few pages) into a hapless and naive "Eve"-archetype seduced by fame and glamour, exploited and somehow scammed into a sham marriage by her boss, who surprisingly wasn't given a Van Dyke and pointy hairstyle. She and the narrator, re-named "Colin" (after the book's author, Colin MacInnes) for the film, are also in a relationship.

Big Jill's character, a lesbian seemingly butch yet "fop like" in her mid-20s who acts as pimp to a cadre of young and bubble-headed lesbians, and one of the narrator's closest friends, dispensing frank wisdom to the narrator, is reduced to a sort of "named extra" with only a few throw-away lines, and tonnes of comical outfits.

The Fabulous Hoplite, a gay young man and another close friend of the narrator in the novel, is also reduced to the point of being pointless in the film, camped-up and all but ignored.

The narrator's father in the novel is a sort of sad minor character but in the film, he's played to come off as optimistic and oddly spirited despite the squalid neighbourhood, and the disarray of his marriage to the narrator's mum seems, for all practical purposes, ignored.

In its favour, the music (for what it is) is well-composed, and you have to give the production and writing crews credit for actually taking a line from the book ("...some days, they'll write musicals about the 1950s...") as their inspiration to write a musical, but in the world of bad camped-up musicals, this is among the most poorly executed in the bunch. Unlike _Shock Treatment_ or _Starstruck_ crucial plot elements are treated as afterthoughts. Unlike _The Apple_, there is a choppy and uneven flow between musical numbers and spoken dialogue.

You really can't blame it's "too 1980s" feel on the fact that it was created in the 1980s. The film version of _Annie_ released in 1981, pays a wonderfully well-executed tribute to the look and feel of New York City in the 1930s, and _Napolean Dynamite_ manages to capture a gritty sort of look and feel of the 1980s despite being made on a low budget in 2003 (though it's not explicitly set in the 1980s, those who lived through the decade cannot deny that the film "feels very 1980s"). Obviously, it was _possible_ to make something good out of this, especially considering the iconic status that the source novel has in the UK, but it fails most apparently in the look and feel, and also in its treatment of the source material, which is downright disrespectful.

Perhaps if you haven't read and have no intentions of reading the novel, you could enjoy this campy 1980s anachronism giving a shameful parody of late-1950s Soho London's modernist jazz set. I can definitely see what the writing team were attempting, but they definitely could have done better. With Boy George as a household name and mixed-race musicians and bands on the charts in 1986 UK, they definitely did _not_ need to bowdlerise the characters in the ways that they ended up doing. In fact, I'd go so far as saying that the writers wound up doing what both the book and film criticised harshly -- it ended up having a bunch of adults cranking out crap and treating its targeted teen-aged audience like two-bit idiots to make a quick buck off of.

Lisztomania (1975)

Two Words: Nazi Franken-Wagner

[8/10 · 14 July 2007]

This was one of those films I saw simply because I wanted to see the lead actor without his shirt on. I don't even remember if somebody recommended it to me first. I usually describe this one to people as "a typical Ken Russell crap-fest with penis all over it." Many commentators imply or state outright that this film has some really deep commentary on pop-culture -- but I know what's really going on: there is seriously penis all over this film.

The costumes and sets are more opulent than Tommy, and the plot is one part "life of Franz Liszt through metaphor" and two parts allegory about how pop will eat itself or something. Honestly, the plot in Zardoz is easier to follow and the allegory doesn't get lost in a veritable redwood forest of penis, either.

The real reason to watch this film is for the three or four minutes of Nazi Franken-Wagner near the end. Seriously. The first time around when I saw that, I LOL'd in my pants and had to rewind it just to see it again and make sure that's what was really going on.

This is quite possibly the goofiest thing to come out of the mid-1970s and, honestly, it surprises me that it's not yet available on DVD, considering some of the truly lousy films that end up on DVD uncut special editions. This is a must-see for fans of 1970s opulence and suckers for truly strange films that only appeal to a handful of people. While I see the points other users have commented on, I think the metaphor and social commentary gets lost, as I said, in all the penis. (It opens with a penis joke, ends with something phallic-like in the visuals, and there is a twelve-foot plaster doodle jutting from Roger Daltry's crotch and straddled by George Sand during a musical number, not to mention all the penis everywhere else in the film.) If you can see past the penis and art-film pretentiousness, several good and relevant points are made throughout the film. Social commentary aside, it's visually impressive with an amazing soundtrack. For many reasons, I'm proud to have this one as a part of my collection of rare VHS tapes.