artsavant

Smoothly evolving geometrically shaped dancers covered in evolving patterns segue into different combinations to Charlie Hart's jazzy, Afro-Latin beat. Oddly erotic in an androgynous way that disturbed several of the preppy jocks in the audience enough to make them walk out grumbling, these hand-animated nude figures are indicated only by brush-stroke highlights and air-brush fills in a deco/cubist/social-realist style that gracefully plays with fluid morphing through mirroring, layering, and interplay between ground and figure.

From years of enjoying the annual Spike and Mike touring animation in our local repertory theater only this and the German short Balance come immediately to mind. Like all art, what we saw describes ourselves rather than the piece, but if I were trying to define art briefly, I'd begin with this memorably singular beauty.

So before this review devolves further into ludicrous art-show catalogue mumbo, which I will claim is due to the 10- line requirement for reviews, why not check out the artist, Erica Russell, on YouTube, where you will find this short as well as a later, Oscar-nominated work with slightly more representational figures dancing in a narrative called Triangle (posted as Triangulo). You can also buy Feet of Song on Amazon in a collection named Great Animation Vol. 3, which looks like a repackaging of the Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation 1 that is not available.

I watched this in 2 parts on YouTube's queerflix and came right away to IMDb, excitedly hoping to learn more.

First, if you've watched numerous crappy commercial gay movies that people excuse for being low budget (or for a pandering full frontal), seeing this short film gives lie to the idea that low-budget is ever any excuse for crap or that an exposed willy is the ultimate measure of cinema.

Second, investing your thought and imagination into appreciating anything will return those gifts, just as political dogma and snide cynicism will return only that.

>>What some saw as a non-Grammy performance of O Beautiful, I heard as an attempt to block out the anxiety of awkward regret and shame. Or, like his speaking Spanish, it might just be Andy's way of trying to establish trust. Whatever, isn't it better to think than scoff?

>>What some misunderstood as pica, I felt as eating dirt to scrub a bad taste out of his mouth. Or maybe Jay was anticipating an earlier degradation to forfend what he feared was a return attack.

>>What some derided as an extra-legal transfer of property, I took for naive adolescent impulse aimed at making amends with abject sincerity.

>>What some saw as seduction I know as the suspension of responsibility afforded by playing at hypnosis. See also, "boy, was I drunk last night."

>>And what some don't get is that in thrall to a small cornfield town you can have sex every weekend for the last 2 years of high school and still not realize that you're gay and he's your boyfriend.

Whether you understood them or not, you've got to admit the director's choices stayed with you enough to make it worth a comment. I also found that the two affecting performances in this movie make it hard to forget. Being gay or experiencing gay bashing is not necessary to finding something worthwhile in this movie, anymore than being a straight MMA fighter is necessary to appreciating Warrior.

Definitely worth tracking down and experiencing for yourself.

My final take on the title is that a Lucky Bastard is one never to have met and become entangled with a crack addict. The manipulation of educated, successful Rusty, which comes by every single word out of Denny the drug addict's mouth, seems to be remembered verbatim. Rusty's susceptibility comes in part from his being a decent guy who does not expect others to lie. Al Green sang about a kind-hearted woman who revives a poor half-frozen snake. When the snake bites her in return, he brushes aside her betrayal by reminding her that she knew what he was when she warmed him to her bosom.

Life's too short to watch bad movies, and this is one I found myself compelled to watch completely. The actors are all capable and believable in the many layers they must weave. The production values won't make you cringe, and the script manages to show a lot in a brief time, without wasting any. The music is unusually good, which is why I'm on line to find out more about it (found it as Amazon mp3 downloads). You don't need to suspend disbelief to enjoy this film. Instead, let this film lead you out of whatever naiveté insists we'd never misstep in the path of an addicted conman without conscience. Here's where you can glimpse how fallible such a belief makes you.

As with Streetcar Named Desire, I've seen this twice now, and still can't say I'd recommend it, except for James Michael Bobby (the Cowboy) as its seductive, off-kilter Blanche Dubois. Whether he's pursuing his fate by lolling, cavorting, or chopping wood in desert heat, the Cowboy is an odd, heartfelt portrayal of a tender, lost boy on the edge of crazy, especially in scenes with Elyse Mirto as the crazy, lost Mrs. who's still tender, despite being crazed by Gregory Christian as her manipulative, cowardly, deceitful Hubby (imagine Jeff Goldblum without charm).

Still, the second time I watched it I rewound the last 5 minutes and finally figured out that this is a fairy tale right from the opening scene, where a hustler lets us know that money can't buy him. Since the entire show could be put on under a big tree in the back yard, the words matter most here, so that the performances have characters to inhabit in telling their story. But the story settles for the tinsel of a fairy tale rather than their timeless truths, sometimes dark, that make the great ones memorable.

Dialogue develops the role of the Mrs. as a woman who's been cruelly convinced it's her fault she's been denied even affection for the last year, doing her best to set things right. Her fantasy is that things ever were. The script is good in showing that Hubby, who calls her a bitch at her least expression of frustration, does so as a cruel excuse for his stunted humanity. Hubby's fantasy is that he can stuff married respectability down his wife's throat and still have a piece of its expected decency to tempt the Cowboy. But rather than tempt, taunt, and twist, as Hubby is clearly born to do, he's rushed by the author's fantasy into surrendering to the Cowboy, who's wish for a fateful, fairy tale romance is at least granted in a fairy tale's traditional trickster manner.

Too bad this surrender to tinsel rather than truth slams the door on the potential dynamics for tragic tension, leaving a melodrama limply collapsed like the deflated bosom of a disheveled belle in a dim parlor, teasing her damp wrist with a letter opener.

Three life-long pals stage a gag at a bank and run into some criminals planning to rob the bank. The criminal boss is Rourke a creepy psychopath exploiting his gunsel, Baldwin, the piteously warped product of a prison upbringing. The pals have Arquette as their ring leader, who's escaping the rage and numbness his parents model. To Jason London these guys are brothers, his surrogate family. Blechman, the lowly little guy, hero worships Arquette, who in his crazy way is his mentor. (If these guys seem gay to you, get well so maybe you can have a friend someday.) The two gangs get mixed up and separated at the bank, then Rourke makes a bad situation desperate and, for Baldwin, tragic. When Sheryl Lee shows up the power balance goes seismic in the best noir style. Rourke controls with intimidating innuendo that shocks by turning the tables on us and our usual voyeuristic experience of some cliché villain leering while he cuts a bra away. To say you'll be the one who feels discomfort doesn't begin to describe the debasement and violation he exerts with his cold games. (Those who find these any kind of erotic need to get well also.) The acting, direction, and writing go beyond the now familiar story of a botched bank heist to explore how the hunger to be with others spares from danger only the least human.

Gee whiz, I thought the stick up my butt was just as firmly planted as the next guy. Apparently not. Too bad this comment will fall into line after all the haters. But I had to write because it's so funny for different reasons.

Before Airplane! started its string of spoofs as farces, spoofs had another form, as parody. Mel Brooks gave us Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, big-budget parodies of horror and western flicks, played as if serious. Think of the synchronized swim nuns in History of the World or the crazy 40's dance number at the end of Blazing Saddles.

The Meet spoof of Stomp the Yard gave me a big smile just because the excellent talent in Meet perfectly matched Yard in an absurd as Spartans vs Persians context. Spoof as parody instead of farce is not new, it may just be a unfamiliar to some of the reviewers.

The 300 movie was so beautifully art directed and shot, the story a genuine epic, and the film heroic and moving. Meet the Spartans plays on this with big chunks of entertainment that I can appreciate.

You won't get a production like Tvatzy singing "I'm Tired of Men" from the excellent Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker spoofs. But you'll find one even funnier if you know who Marlene Dietrich is. Not all spoof forms are what you're used to. After all, comedy was born way before we were.

If you're an adult or older teen you'll want to see this movie, especially if you've already seen "Capote." I almost didn't because "Capote" disappointed by being rote and monochrome despite the emotionally affecting performance of Clifton Collins, Jr, (Little Chenier) as Perry Smith, one of the accused, afraid to trust but hoping for a miracle.

What a happy antidote to discover in "Infamous" that Toby Jones got the same assignment and got it right. Although I didn't know of him the rest of cast put him in fantastic company. Where "Capote" is a f-il-m, "Infamous" is a movie. We aren't constantly regarding the effort of acting perhaps because Jones is more effortlessly winning as Capote than ever the writer was. We're left free to engage with the story and let our minds regard possibilities.

"Infamous" imagines and arranges the story as the real Capote did with his "fictional non-fiction." Speculation about the relationship between Hickcock and Smith or Smith and Capote is part of this. In both situations I had it as more about trading between the weaker Smith and the stronger Hickcock and Capote than about sex. A useful tool in assessing speculations about their transactions is to remember the nature of a hustler, always an outsider who trades acquiescence for advantage with insiders who trade patronage for gratification. Smith and, in his own world, Capote, each were outsiders, hustling for gain. Sincerity is fatal on either side of such trade. Presumably the vulnerable Smith learned this, as Capote was later to learn the corollary: that strength is equally fatal by its presumption of an equal footing with the people who brought you fame.

I wish that "Infamous" would have come out first and that I'd seen it first. With his 3 previous gay roles Philip Seymour Hoffman got to practice for impersonating a well-documented public figure in "Capote." This got him an Oscar despite the surpassing unique work in "Brokeback Mountain" that year and the dissonance of a big fellow imitating tiny Truman. An earlier "Infamous" would have taken some of the hot air out of those sails and gotten Toby Jones more widely appreciated along with the rest of this cast: the sublime Isabella Rossellini, quietly impressive Daniel Craig, the successively improving Sandra Bullock, and always apt Gwyneth Paltrow. For its creative cheekiness and enjoyable performances, "Infamous" has to get at least 2 points more than "Capote" in my estimation.

As a final note, you might want to catch Sandra Bullock in another good performance "Crash" and be surprised, perhaps, by Daniel Craig as the self-destructive lover of dark genius, artist Frances Bacon, in "Love is the Devil."

Because first you've got some memorable actors in

>> Steve Zahn ("Joy Ride," "Hamlet"),

>> Illeana Douglas, (Action, "Next Best Thing"), and

>> Ally Walker (Tell Me You Love Me, My Wonderful Life),

and in addition to that trait, the extra polish of

>> Jeremy Northram (The Tudors, "Payback," "An Ideal Husband"),

>> William H. Macy ("Fargo," "Thank You for Smoking"), and

>> Ron Perlman ("Hellboy," "City of Lost Children").

Like "Old School," this is a movie for adults and older teens to enjoy, but unlike that movie, this one suits couples, too. You won't get the belly laughs of "Old School," but you'll look forward to seeing this little pleaser for the same reason people enjoy remakes of Shakespeare's comedies (John Boorman's "Where the Heart Is") or Jane Austin (Amy Heckler's "Clueless"): it's not only fun seeing updates on those confused identities, dawning insights, and unfamiliar settings, but it's fun too appreciating what different actors make of these. Plus these guys are always good, and Steve Zahn is inspired crazy.

Northram and Zahn are odd-couple convicts on the run and con men on the make. Zahn, all crank and id, seems to have the harder task pretending to be a gay pageant director enduring the horror of all those sweet little girls, but it's soon clearly a draw as his pretend boyfriend, Northram, smart and smooth, fends off suspicions and a gay suitor. Both men are also suffering from scam-induced blue balls from the off-limits affections of what would otherwise be their love interests.

The attraction of this movie for me is not only these amusing classic tensions, but the original way it resolves these. There's something touching in the determination of Zahn's character to work through the situation that's not like the poignancy of Macy's character or the sensitivity Northram's exhibits. But none of these guys is a wuss either, all the actors have attractive but distinctly different personalities, anyone of which can make you smile.

If you do, check out all of the movies above and then kick it up a notch by seeing "Rosecranz and Guildenstern are Dead" together with Mel Gibson's "Hamlet," or Kenneth Branagh's, or his "Henry V" or him with Emma Thompson in "Much Ado about Nothing" or her in "Sense and Sensibility" or "Gweneth Paltrow in "Emma" or "Shakespeare in Love."