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Reviews
When Dream Worlds Collide (2009)
When Deams Become Nightmares
Moving from funny to disturbing to heartbreaking to bizarre, "When Dread Worlds Collide" is a freshly honest look into the increasingly obsessive world of Disney collectors and fanatics and how they came to be. Having been repulsed by the adult world of demanding responsibilities and constant global turmoil, a growing number of adults are attempting to make the fantasy world of Disney their constant state of mind, some even going so far as to visit Disneyland every single day.
While some devotees dedicate almost all of their time and energy toward collecting Disney memorabilia, others sex lives have been shaped almost exclusively by the brand (Disney's Robin Hood was the catalyst for the "furry" movement). The film covers how multifaceted and wide spread this phenomenon is while chronicling the ultimate dysfunction and breakdown of relationships, families, finances, and mental health that result from completely leaving reality behind in favor of consumerist obsession and regressive fantasy.
Some of the interviews have to be seen to be believed; one man's comments regarding wives & daughters vs. Disney will never leave your memory. Some profiles are sad and others terrifying, but there's plenty of genuinely funny footage to balance out the experience (one interviewee declaring his awareness while a fantastical backdrop crumbles behind him is priceless). With a final montage that brought many in the audience to tears, the film is not a vehicle to make fun of people's delusions but rather an inquiry as to how our society has become so dark that people are inadvertently destroying their lives in order to escape it.
I originally saw this at the Palm Springs Film Festival but hope for a DVD release soon since this original, entertaining, and seriously relevant film deserves much wider exposure and contemplation!
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (2016)
A Peerless Gift
Samantha Bee's Full Frontal is one of the few things keeping me halfway sane during the humiliating and unfunny nightmare that is the Trump presidency. Reading and watching the news has become so infuriating and dispiriting that the opportunity to receive a version of it that's infused with appropriately scathing humor, well-researched and entertaining exposés, and hearty compassion all delivered in a fast, laugh-out-loud fusillade is either priceless or at least worth thousands of dollars in life-saving therapy.
The grumpy dullards who hate this show and are giving it one star reviews might want to research the actual meaning behind terms like "hatred" and "mean-spirited" and "misandry" so as not to continue embarrassing themselves publicly with their misguided exercises in catachresis.
For the rest of us who are terrified of what is happening to our country and have actual empathy for other marginalized human beings but also need for some endorphins to kick into our brains like they did before November of 2016, Samantha Bee and her crew are here and I'm so appreciative I could almost cry!
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
An Eye-Rolling Insult To Sweeney Todd
Goddammit Tim, must you ruin *everything* that's good? The original Broadway production and score of Sweeney Todd are brilliant and nuanced, balancing subtle notes of humor and horror, tenderness and savagery, lightness and dark, often within singular characters. Burton just suffocates it all in black tar and stage blood with all the sophistication and discernment of a 13-year-old suburbanite giggling at slasher comics in his basement.
It is clear that Burton didn't really want to make a musical in the first place and thus all the numbers come off as reluctant obligations rather than the vital organs of the film. Additionally, if you are going to make a musical, it is important that your actors can actually bloody SING! Depp employs a bad alt-rock whine while Helena Bonham Carter deadpans/talks her way through what are supposed to be giddy, effervescent, and funny songs with the bored resignation of a corpse bride waiting for her paycheck. Considering the heartbreaking beauty, dynamism, and texture of the original score, this rendering comes across as merely a self-serving insult to its source.
It is thus difficult to call Burton's Sweeney an "interpretation" when it is such a tone-deaf butchering on so many levels. As suggested earlier, Mrs. Lovett was originally written as a goofy, overeager, dim-witted bubble of a woman who counterbalances Sweeney's brooding menace. Here, Carter squelches her into the iron bodice of her austere ennui and creates just an equally brooding bedhead who glibly tosses Mrs. Lovett's $100 lines into the toilet as though the whole point of her character and the script were boring her to death. Depp's performance seriously lacks depth as well, coming across as Mr. Mean Looney-Pants the entire time rather than a suffering man with a deadly secret who has any real vengeance to seek. The sailor, who is supposed to be an embodiment of virile safety and valor, was for some unidentifiable reason cast as a twelve year old-looking boy rather than a capable man who could actually "steal" Johanna away. Plus, his and Johanna's songs together were cut, neutering their relationship and the urgency of their union. Johanna sits and sings her liberation-desire song while sewing and looking bored. The judge is rendered Mr. EvilEVilEVIL rather than the cluelessly gross man who actually thinks his adopted daughter would willfully marry him. Nearly every decision made, casting and otherwise, was amateurishly wrong and undermined the integrity and effectiveness of the story.
If you want REAL Sweeney Todd, see the Angela Lansbury production on DVD and listen to the original cast recording (or find a capable live production, such as the excellent one currently at Barrow Street Theater in New York) and let this dumb, ham-fisted, kiddie-goth misfire rot in the dollar bin where it belongs.
Beautiful Noise (2014)
"Noise" Annoys
I was ridiculously excited for this documentary, which features some of my all-time favorite bands. I bought the blu-ray (as I didn't know how else to see it) and turned it on feeling giddy as a fervert young chappy. And very soon it became disappointingly clear that this was not the documentary I'd been waiting for.
If you are familiar with these bands you will learn nothing new and most of the interviews are cheek-slappingly banal. And even if they weren't, the cinematography is distractingly subpar: bad lighting, often out of focus, low definition. Why in the heavens is there a blu-ray edition if nothing was shot on HD!? Crappy SD footage will not look better on a blu-ray, but it sure costs more to the excited fans/suckers!
I essentially felt that I would have derived a richer experience surfing YouTube watching old interviews and live performances of the bands, as I'm sure I could find higher quality and more interesting clips that weren't either far too brief or featured for way too long.
And for a documentary about the shoegaze movement, the word "shoegaze" is never uttered, just "this period" and "these bands." I essentially felt more informed than the filmmakers.
I feel that the shoegaze movement was one of the most fascinating periods of music history and deeply deserves a fresh, beautiful, illuminating documentary. Sadly, this is not it.
Irréversible (2002)
Homophobic Torture Porn Thinly Disguised as an "Art Film"
Irreversible is possibly the most blatantly homophobic and pretentious wad of straight male torture porn disguised as an art film I've ever made myself endure. Thesis of the story? Sodomy destroys everything! Even innocent, beautiful women in wonderfully fertile relationships are raped by those evil, drug sniffing homos (of course! Gay men are always anally raping beautiful, braless heterosexual women, those immoral swine!) before they go off to their depraved sodomy underworld to have random, animalistic S&M sex before getting their heads righteously bashed in (while all those evil fags just idly stare on in lurid/detached fascination) by a fire extinguisher (put out those destructive, flaming queens!) wielded by a righteous straight man whose beautifully idealized, biologically reproductive relationship was ruined ruined ruined by the anal-obsessed fag demons who crawl around a raunchy club called The Rectum! Pump your fists in the air, straight men, your directionless and testosterone-poisoned anger now has a focus!
The director didn't even try to veil his vehement and bigoted chauvinism and then attempted to make the film envelope-pushing simply by resorting to banal shock-value intensity (just bash his head in again and again! Just keep the camera still for 10 minutes while this evil fag tortures this poor screaming woman so all the sadistic straight men can covertly get their kinky kicks while pretending to really contemplate the raw experience of a real rape. Wow! Gritty!) and attempted to make it arty by reversing what is actually a very conventional and hackneyed narrative (You killed my beautiful girlfriend and now I must GET REVENGE! Just like in The Crow! Wasn't that a time-tested work of art?) and also by simply spinning the camera to disorient the viewer in a manner that never ceases to be cinematographically ostentatious and annoying. Conventional narrative? Just reverse it (even though this lets all the steam out of it in the beginning, making the second half even more dull and predictable)! Need art-film innovation? Just swing the camera around! How arty! And of course, it will be easy to gain empathetic investment from the audience by morally indicting the feces-covered rectum rapers that are the bane of all reputable societies- those haters of the holy life-affirming vagina: the male gays! "We hate them too!" the audience all chants in cathartic, mind-blown unison.
Cheers all around. What an innovative, intense, emotionally gripping cinematic tour-de-force for Nazi Republicans with a penchant for sadistic violence, pseudo-complicated pretense, and the much needed hyper-glorification of the moral superiority of heterosexual intercourse. Easy A for a talent-starved director with no real or decent convictions. Fin.