Cinéma vérité

What if the integrity required of art gallery curators, who program for the public, was required of screenwriters who pen the biopics that are presented to vastly larger publics? 

Recently I went enthusiastically to see Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game. It was interesting to see two approaches to filming a “biography,” back-to-back. I found Mr. Turner richly rewarding and masterfully done and The Imitation Game to be pretty much loathsome.

It all comes down to this: Do you understand the man at the end of the film? With Timothy Spalding’s portrayal of Mr. Turner, I think you can come away with a real true sense of the man and his commitment to art making. But at after watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Alan Turing, you come away as you do from most film biographies—as accurate as a renaissance portrait of its subject.

Mr. Turner is an artist and Mr. Turing is a mathematician. Both of them are obsessive masters—perfect topics for another genius film that mixes insight with a gossipy look at private peccadillos that humanize their subjects.

Mr. Turner says: This is what he was like and it is the finest representation of a visual artist’s process that I have ever seen on film. It’s about his soul, and there is little to quibble with in terms of its truth. The Imitation Game, however is more narrative, it’s more a race against time to win the war. It is full of tension I never felt. It is about a mind, not a soul. It opts for the cliché ah-ha unexplained “moment,” providing little actual insight into the man’s genius and it takes gross liberties with truth.

I can’t imagine going to see The Theory of Everything but I may go, just to see Eddie Redmayne’s performance. Ask yourself: If a movie were to be made about Stephen Hawking, a man of unbelievable medical and mental accomplishment, what story would you tell? Would it be about his love life?

Sadly, we glorify misinformation in cinema made for massive global audiences yet hold our curators, who program for tiny audiences, to the highest possible standards.

The Lavender Postscript: "The Imitation Game" is the latest installment in the zillion-long list of films about homosexuals who, in the end, wind up dead or crazy. Brokeback Mountain, of course, having one dead and one crazy at the end.

Montage magistrale

This short animated film is beautiful but it is the edits that humble me—they seriously impress me.

Watching Downton Abbey with my Boys Tonight

For Beth.

Mettre à jour

In two days, I am seeing a counsellor. I am not inclined to therapy, but I and others have noticed that there is anger in my voice and that concerned me so on Monday morning I was happy to be able to secure my Thursday appointment with a man I chose from a long list of professionals on the Counselling BC website. Then the shit hit the fan.

Nice shit, but shit is shit. With the new year came a perfect storm of issues to trigger an anxiety attack: First the probate documents for my ward, Rita, arrived and lawyers and bankers with conflicting advice were at me, as are the beneficiaries. And next week I have contracting meetings with the theatre with whom I have a complex relationship (writer, performer, designer) and with Out TV for a development contract for the screenplay I wrote for my partner, Warren (Uncle Gus' Monkey).

Those of you who have written screenplays about yourself will understand the complexities of copyrights, moral rights and life rights that come with the dramatization of a real life.

When I was fifteen my father got me a summer job in a logging camp. I had to share a cabin with Goldie who picked his hair out and chewed it every night and in the morning he always wanted to show me the chewed wad of hair. He had mental health issues I was too young to understand.

He was a kitchen helper and one day when he emerged with a large pan of ice cream in each hand for the room full of loggers, each of the eight tables started screaming at him to choose their table first and poor Goldie froze with fear and confusion. It seemed so cruel to me; you could see his upset in his eyes and on his face. He was a gentle fragile soul. So I got up, took the pans from him and gave them to two tables, thereby securing my outcast status for the rest of the summer.

I feel like Goldie right now with so many people wanting me to do this and that and so much of what is wanted involves understanding totally foreign experiences. Its very intense for a single person to experience so much alone. It produces a lot of tension so I am grateful that I made my appointment to see James, the counsellor, mere hours before the fan-bound material arrived.

Mathu Andersen

Mathu Andersen is a make-up artist and the creative producer for reality television program RuPaul's Drag Race. He is also RuPaul's long-time personal hair and make-up artist.

Downton et Into The Woods

 

Downton! Only one word: DIVINE. No, another word: DELICIOUS. All those plot balls in the air, spinning, sparkling - how does Julian Fellowes do it? One after another, launched aloft. Enchanting. Costumes, set, script, acting - all as good as can be.

That's my friend, Beth, speaking, and it is how I expected to feel. Instead, after less than five minutes, I turned it off and cancelled recording it. Even the music made me feel queasy. And I realized: I am so over Downton Abbey. With each sentence, I felt worse. I am sick of it. Sick of all the twists and the characters. It is time to move on. And the culprit is the seasonal structure of broadcasters that leaves too long a break between seasons. I just lost interest. I prefer the unfamiliar.

So, I watched Galavant, a tongue-in-cheek musical that I thought would be a total waste of time. But I got hooked on its silliness—the perfect antidote to all the stuffed shirts of Downton.

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All my passion got used up in Into the Woods. I bought the soundtrack (from Broadway, not the movie) and listening to it has allowed me further into its cleverness. Deprived of visuals, I listen better. 

First of all (on the soundtrack), Into the Woods opens with a narrator speaking. He says: "Once upon a time, in a far off kingdom…" That's eight words. And then the very first words in this musical are sung:  "I wish."  (They are also the very last two words sung in the show.)

Ten words and I wasn't just hooked, I was landed. First, because I love the device of having a narrator. Narrators are guides that make the journey easy for us and they make exposition comfortable. And second: Wishing is a fetish of mine.

I wrote this on my blog a couple of years ago. It is a favourite theme:

Wishing is done by people who have desire but who won't work to get what they want. People who wish are the opposite of me. I have never bought a lottery ticket and I never will. Wishing and dreaming stops you from doing.

Sondheim's choice to make wishing a central theme is the reason I was so quickly and easily seduced. He uses his wishers and shows us how they are changed by the knowledge that comes from their experience in the woods. 

Into the Woods has become my all time favourite musical. Good-bye Sweeny Todd.

In the movie I missed the magnificence of many of the delights in the sequence that begins with the song, "Our Little World." It is a poignant and moving look inside a parent's heart as she faces "letting go" of her child (written by a man who has no children). It's brilliance comes from Sondheim's genius decision to make the Wicked Witch (of Sleeping Beauty fame) the mother of Rapunzel. The mother (a Witch!) sings: "If what was growing was only her hair and not her—that I'd prefer."

It's poignant and yet Sondheim keeps it light with lines like "if she just wouldn't drool" and the delightful section about hair sung as the witch climbs Rapunzel's braid. And then the song segues into Red Riding hood singing about leaving home, the trail and losing her innocence.  Red sings: "Nice is different than good." And then, to close the act, Sondheim returns to the Witch and her daughter in the song "Stay With Me." Perfection! I need Kleenex.

There is so much that is insanely clever. This is a man at the top of his form, and so I completely dismiss those who are critical of the show's second act. There is so much right in this show, I find  it immoral and repugnant to voice any criticism—I know, I know this is anti-intellectual thinking, but such is my passion for this show and this man.  

Consider the men in the show: There's the innocence of Jack, the child. And there's the real man—the baker who is moral, troubled and human in every way. And then there are the princes and the wolves; two are ridiculous ideals (one after Rapunzel and the other after Cinderella) and the others are devourers of women. One wolf sings: "There's no possible way to describe what you feel, when you're talking to your meal."

And speaking of the baker…. He and his wife have a heartfelt discussion in a song about the morality of having trading six magic beans for poor Jack's cow that he is to sell at market so he and his mother can eat. It ends with this line: "The end justifies the beans." Oh my God!

Add to all this, add the voices. Jack and his mother, in particular, have voices so rich with feeling it is chilling. I can't see them, but they seduce me their absolute perfection for the stage. They have perfect diction and there is such character in their voices.

"Agony" is a musical comedy Hope Diamond. "Always ten steps behind, always ten steps below, and she's just out of reach." I am drooling. And "On the Steps on the Palace" is structurally and lyrically Olympian. And then, could there be a more perfect ending to act one than the narrator singing, "Ever After," with lines such as:

And it came to pass, all that seemed wrong


Was now right and those who deserved to


Were certain to live a long and happy life


Ever after, ever after

It was fun


But we were blind


Then we went into the woods


To get our wish and now we're really blind

Into the woods where nothing's clear


Where witches, ghosts and wolves appear


Into the woods and through the fear


You have to take the journey

And though you may lose your path


Though you may encounter wolves


You mustn't stop, you mustn't swerve


You mustn't ponder, you have to act

When you know your wish


If you want your wish


You can have your wish


But you can't just wish



Into the woods, then out of the woods

And happy ever after

And all this enthusiasm is just about Act One. And less than five minutes of Downton left me wanting out of the coffin.

I listen to Into the Woods every day. It's like praying.

Poor Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin's photo of his own footprint on the moon.

Jeanne Marie Laskas profiles the former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, including details about the depression and difficulties he struggled with after his historic journey:

After the moon, Buzz cracked up. There was nothing left to do. The media frenzy was worldwide; twenty-four countries in forty-five days—and that was just the beginning. NASA clearly had no further use for him in space; now he was just supposed to be some kind of NASA PR flack. He resigned from NASA in 1971 and returned to the Air Force. It didn’t seem like the Air Force knew what to do with someone who had been to the moon. He was an outsider, the egghead from academia who’d just tumbled off the speakers’ circuit. He drank a lot. His marriage to the mother of his three children fell apart, and he retired from the Air Force. He went to rehab. He got married again, but that lasted a year. He drank a lot more, fell in love a lot more. His Air Force pension wasn’t much. That was when he started at the Cadillac dealership. He sucked at selling cars. Rehab was the first time he ever really talked about feelings. It turned out he had so many feelings. An emptiness so deep. He discovered the melancholy of all things done.  

He was in his forties, a conqueror with nothing left to conquer but his own demons. The second man to walk on the moon. Number two.  

His father never accepted the fact that Buzz was not number one. Grasping, his father waged an unsuccessful one-man campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to change its Neil Armstrong “First Man on the Moon” commemorative stamp to one that said “First Men on the Moon” so it could include Buzz. As for Buzz’s mental breakdown, his depression and alcoholism, his father never accepted that, either. Or if he did, he blamed the moon, the absence of gravity, the unknown physical properties of space. The moon must have ruined Buzz.