Self-portrait of the suicidal trans youth of a hopeless city, with sober narration from a coffin.
The director cast Camilo in his gay ghost dystopia film, but Camilo died, and half his friends followed, real ghosts in an actual dystopia.
Tag: transgender
I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun)
Much larger in scope than Jane’s previous movie – even though it’s still just two lead characters who spend their nights looking at screens. Two awkward students bond over a TV show named after a Cocteau Twins album, a Buffy/X-Files-ish thing with deep lore. They try watching it together but they’re both afraid of their stepdads and settle for trading VHS tapes. They attend Void High School “VHS,” home of the Vultures, and lead dude Owen (Justice Smith of that recent Dungeons & Dragons movie) starts talking to us, so the movie’s never going for naturalism.
The stars of the show-in-the-show are Helena “Madeline” Howard and Snail Mail. Also, a suspicious mention of Michael Stipe right before a TV episode about where the ice cream man goes in wintertime.
The older girl with a later bedtime is Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine, a daughter in Bill & Ted 3), and she twice offers to take him away from it all. She runs away from home but he freaks out and doesn’t join her, then his mom dies and the TV show is canceled. Eight years later Maddie reappears and says she’s been living inside the show after having herself buried alive in Phoenix (haha), and says they need to (re)bury themselves now to save their TV avatars, but he pushes her down and runs. Twenty years later, he’s alone, has made no career progress, and has a Videodrome TV inside his body.
Good, mysterious movie, evoking thoughts on nostalgia and (super)fandom and friendship and risks not taken, even though the creator has said that it’s just about being trans.
Ice Cream Man in early season of The Pink Opaque, played by Albert Birney:
Nightbreed guy in the unreleased post-final season:
Not the biggest World’s Fair fan, I held off on watching this until I saw that pd187 approved of it.
Good Sam Adams article here despite the “ending explained” hook.
To Die Like a Man (2009, João Pedro Rodrigues)
Tonia wants an operation to become a real woman. Meanwhile her life is falling apart and everyone is being extremely mean to her. Her army son shoots a coworker and runs, her junkie thief boyfriend kills the fish and sets the dog on fire, her employer says she’s gotten too old for her job. The boyfriend sobers up and settles back into his dressmaking work for the drag shows, and in a bit of good luck, they get lost and stumble across the couple who buried the son’s victim as “the unknown soldier,” so the body was never found by the authorities. In less-good luck, Tonia’s leaking breast implants have to be removed, and now she’s de-transitioning and dying.
The Wild Boys (2017, Bertrand Mandico)
Switches between sharp black and white, and hazy 16mm color – stylishly artificial looking, almost Maddinesque. Five bad kids try to impress their lit teacher, finally sexually assult and murder her, blaming it on the icon of their evil selves, TREVOR.
TREVOR:
A sea captain claims he can make the boys obedient, takes them on his ship to a pleasure island with living plants, where they eat hairy fruit that turns them into girls.
The captain (Sam Louwyck of Ex Drummer) reconnects with his associate Dr. Séverine (Elina Löwensohn, who I watched yesterday in Let The Corpses Tan), is then murdered by the kids when he tries to remove them from the island.
Mandico is obviously a talent, and has a bunch of shorts I should dig up.
Nick Pinkerton in Reverse Shot:
The Wild Boys… is a supremely assured piece of craftsmanship, evincing an active creative engagement and ample imagination in every minute of its nearly two-hour runtime … A maximalist to the core, Mandico has a natural enmity towards both an inactive camera and empty screen space, and when he isn’t stuffing the frame to bursting with whorls of fog, fleecy feathers, thickets of exotic foliage, bits of rigging, and the glisten of paillettes, seawater spray, or paralyzing sap, he takes pleasure in setting images within images: a fist glittering with jewelry clenching a revolver, for example, framed by the outline of the mountainous Île des Robes.
Slack Bay (2016, Bruno Dumont)
Dumont goes even wackier than Lil Quinquin, though this one seemed more coherent, story-wise. I thought it’d be hard to top Quinquin‘s twitchy detective and dullard assistant, but now he’s dressed his lead detectives like Laurel & Hardy, the head cop (the fat one) rolling himself down hills when he’s too tired to walk, and simply inflating and floating away at the end.
Just like Quinquin was named after the lead rapscallion from a poor, possibly criminal family, the French title of this movie was Ma Loute – the nickname of the young man from the only family that seems to live in this picturesque rural town. I suppose they fish, though when a wealthy family arrives at their palatial summer home, we discover what else they do; they kidnap, murder, and eat the rich. The richies are so ludicrously over-the-top (and inbred, it turns out) that it’s tempting to root for the local brutes, except the richies also have ringers in Juliette Binoche and a beautiful/mysterious transgender girl who has a short-lived romance with Ma Loute. Also they’re just too damned silly to wish death upon.
Sicinski describes the richies:
Descending upon the bay for the summer are upper-class cityfolk, bizarre caricatures of humanity sprung from some Gallic division of Monty Python. The Van Peteghems are “led” by spastic, bumbling André (Fabrice Luchini), his prim, lachrymose wife Isabelle (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), brother / cousin Christian (Jean-Luc Vincent), a sort of lacquered descendent of brain-addled mystic Johannes from Dreyer’s Ordet; and eventually, Aunt Aude (Juliette Binoche), a wailing, flailing hysteric whose behavior resembles that of a regional dinner theatre actress on nitrous oxide.
I never would’ve guessed that the richie paterfamilias had been in Rohmer films, but there you go: he played the lead in Perceval. Tedeschi is lately known as a director, was also in Nenette & Boni and Saint Laurent. Vincent and Binoche costarred in Dumont’s much more serious Camille Claudel 1915. Ma Loute, his dad The Eternal, his mom, his almost-girlfriend Raph and the two cops just came out of nowhere.