![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopWith Meg's encouragement I'm finally starting to make it to more film festival stuff— I really have no excuse not to, since there are so many theaters here. Last year I guess we saw three or four things at Frameline (my favorite being Winter Journey; I hope that gets a US release soon), this year we're doing six.
Peace of Mind, like the person it's about, was all over the map in a way that's both frustrating and fruitful. Ultimately that person— the filmmaker, community organizer, and non-profit administrator Flo McGarrell— remains kind of a cipher despite his deep emotional impact on the people being interviewed; you get very little about his life prior to the last few years that he spent in Haiti, which gives the impression of someone who sprang from the womb as a fully-formed professional outsider. But that turns out to be a pretty interesting way to frame a portrait of the several communities that he was both a mentor and an outsider to. The contrast between the relatively straightforward interview segments and the impressionistic monologue sequences by Cary Cronenwett was so jarring that it seemed to have been made by multiple directors, but based on what I've seen of Cronenwett's other work I think that was intentional.
Seed Money: the Chuck Holmes Story, about the meteoric rise of the eponymous gay porn impresario and his effect on both the porn industry and the LGBT rights movement (the latter in terms of not only his financial support, but, as the film argues, the cultural impact of providing large quantities of cheerful smut in a mainstream style(*) to lots of people who hadn't had it before). It's a solid historical piece, mostly unadventurous in style (there's a lot of of slickly animated motion-graphic presentation of old magazine ads and so on, which I always find a little bit annoying but I think it's pretty standard these days)— except that the lack of any 1970s footage of the man himself led the filmmakers to repurpose a lot of clips from his films as if they were actually telling his story, which is an interesting effect, as if Holmes (who never acted and didn't seem to think of himself as having any kind of artistic vision) had accidentally documented himself in the guise of a series of young porn stars.
(* The film notes Holmes's somewhat obsessive taste for models who seemed to have stepped right out of the L.L. Bean catalog; it got a big laugh for a clip that introduced three guys heading for a presumed threesome, each of whom was even blonder than the last.)
Those People, a cross between Brideshead Revisited, Whit Stillman, and Woody Allen, with a certain amount of first-film-itis in the form of unintentionally cryptic bits of dialogue and undeveloped secondary characters, but with really strong performances from Jonathan Gordon and Haaz Sleiman, a good feel for what it's like to be in love with a friend who's a hostile creep, and an overall level of craft that bodes well for the future. Inevitably, the Q&A hit a sour note with someone "asking" how the director could justify showing a thoughtless rich kid doing a thoughtless-rich-kid thing (in this case, wearing a tacky "Indian" costume for Halloween) without explicitly denouncing it, but most of the audience seemed to get that that was silly(*). Also, it's always a good sign when the audience is able to enjoy a comic note in the middle of a lot of intense personal stuff without losing interest in the latter, and in this case that happened when Max Jenkins hilariously stole a scene as "nice guy who sort of notices that these two people he doesn't know are having a savage emotional meltdown, but still hopes that maybe he can have sex with one or both of them."
(* I mean, I get that it's a very fine line to walk when you've got characters casually doing offensive stuff that's not commented on in any way. But the movie, in my opinion, makes it pretty clear early on that that's who these people are and that's how this is going to work; they're privileged people who are just not going to have to deal with anyone outside of their circle if they don't want to, and their idea of good behavior starts and ends with personal loyalty. In that same scene, one of the main characters directs a childish ethnic slur at the other one's love interest, and his friends react like he's being a dick, but they don't mention his choice of words... which unfortunately I think is pretty realistic. Interestingly, the angry Q&A guy didn't mention that part at all.)
Peace of Mind, like the person it's about, was all over the map in a way that's both frustrating and fruitful. Ultimately that person— the filmmaker, community organizer, and non-profit administrator Flo McGarrell— remains kind of a cipher despite his deep emotional impact on the people being interviewed; you get very little about his life prior to the last few years that he spent in Haiti, which gives the impression of someone who sprang from the womb as a fully-formed professional outsider. But that turns out to be a pretty interesting way to frame a portrait of the several communities that he was both a mentor and an outsider to. The contrast between the relatively straightforward interview segments and the impressionistic monologue sequences by Cary Cronenwett was so jarring that it seemed to have been made by multiple directors, but based on what I've seen of Cronenwett's other work I think that was intentional.
Seed Money: the Chuck Holmes Story, about the meteoric rise of the eponymous gay porn impresario and his effect on both the porn industry and the LGBT rights movement (the latter in terms of not only his financial support, but, as the film argues, the cultural impact of providing large quantities of cheerful smut in a mainstream style(*) to lots of people who hadn't had it before). It's a solid historical piece, mostly unadventurous in style (there's a lot of of slickly animated motion-graphic presentation of old magazine ads and so on, which I always find a little bit annoying but I think it's pretty standard these days)— except that the lack of any 1970s footage of the man himself led the filmmakers to repurpose a lot of clips from his films as if they were actually telling his story, which is an interesting effect, as if Holmes (who never acted and didn't seem to think of himself as having any kind of artistic vision) had accidentally documented himself in the guise of a series of young porn stars.
(* The film notes Holmes's somewhat obsessive taste for models who seemed to have stepped right out of the L.L. Bean catalog; it got a big laugh for a clip that introduced three guys heading for a presumed threesome, each of whom was even blonder than the last.)
Those People, a cross between Brideshead Revisited, Whit Stillman, and Woody Allen, with a certain amount of first-film-itis in the form of unintentionally cryptic bits of dialogue and undeveloped secondary characters, but with really strong performances from Jonathan Gordon and Haaz Sleiman, a good feel for what it's like to be in love with a friend who's a hostile creep, and an overall level of craft that bodes well for the future. Inevitably, the Q&A hit a sour note with someone "asking" how the director could justify showing a thoughtless rich kid doing a thoughtless-rich-kid thing (in this case, wearing a tacky "Indian" costume for Halloween) without explicitly denouncing it, but most of the audience seemed to get that that was silly(*). Also, it's always a good sign when the audience is able to enjoy a comic note in the middle of a lot of intense personal stuff without losing interest in the latter, and in this case that happened when Max Jenkins hilariously stole a scene as "nice guy who sort of notices that these two people he doesn't know are having a savage emotional meltdown, but still hopes that maybe he can have sex with one or both of them."
(* I mean, I get that it's a very fine line to walk when you've got characters casually doing offensive stuff that's not commented on in any way. But the movie, in my opinion, makes it pretty clear early on that that's who these people are and that's how this is going to work; they're privileged people who are just not going to have to deal with anyone outside of their circle if they don't want to, and their idea of good behavior starts and ends with personal loyalty. In that same scene, one of the main characters directs a childish ethnic slur at the other one's love interest, and his friends react like he's being a dick, but they don't mention his choice of words... which unfortunately I think is pretty realistic. Interestingly, the angry Q&A guy didn't mention that part at all.)
