Reviews by Al

Horrifically bad film even with John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons.  My DVD player nearly broke with all the fast forwarding.

It won at Sundance and deservedly.  The writer/directors did a reasonable job banging out the very good script in a short amount of time because apparently they got the funding for the movie before they had a script.  I did enjoy the one gay storyline which is at least sensible and refreshingly non-tragic.

Dench is amazing here as the manipulative lesbian — I sometimes wish people would stop writing bad storylines about gays and lesbians.  She falls in love with the new young and married w/2 kids art teacher, Blanchett, who herself has fallen in love with a young 10th year (grade) student — a boy.  The story seems so wrong and unlikely with Dench’s character’s gaydar 180 degrees out of phase, but it’s like watching a spectacular accident happen.  Despite the terrible story, the acting is quite good.

A disjointed and confusing film.  If the purpose was to confuse so that you’ll buy the DVD, it might work, but I don’t think further viewings will help.  Anyway, Matt Damon is getting old, and his boyish face isn’t taking it too gracefully.  His dour portrayal of a supposed legend of American intelligence, Edward Wilson, seems a bit too understated.  Still you get an idea of a paranoid man with a constant poker face.  Matt hides his furtive smiles as best he can.  The movie goes on for quite awhile.  Angelina is a huge woman.  She even dwarfs the reasonably tall Matt here, but her  more passive role seems to not quite suit her.

Another movie with Josh Hartnett.  Hey 80 points right there.  But it’s also an adaptation of book by James Ellroy — the same guy who wrote L.A. Confidential.  Scarlett Johansson is also great here.  A long film, but nicely written and acted.  I loved the moment of ‘man-oh-man’ surprise where Hartnett’s character realizes he’s been deceived.  It retells of a true story of a gruesome murder in Hollywood the late 1940s.  Seemed much better than a similar recent movie, Hollywoodland. 

*Spoiler alert*  Gay interest: One character has his gayness hinted at.  But of course, he later dies.  This reminds me of LA Confidential where the gay cop, played by Kevin Spacey, gets killed (although before dying he provides the hint which nails the real villian).  Perhaps Ellroy has something against gay folks, eh?

Interesting points about games and television of today.  The common wisdom is that both are mindless and mind numbing.  In fact, quite the reverse is true posits the author.  Today’s games require quite a lot of thought and problem solving.  Goals and rules are vague and require probing to understand.  Players learn to deal with the unknown.  Reality television involves you in a world of complex social interactions, deceptions, and strategies.  In fact not just reality shows but, dramas today also have very complex social worlds with many characters.  Much is hidden and requires the audience to figure out.  With my lack of social ability, it finally makes sense why I don’t really take to the reality shows or dramas.  He claims even recent sitcoms such as Seinfeld and the Simpsons have grown more dense and sophisticated.  Meanwhile, the author says there is a place for reading too, it’s just that these other media aren’t as absolutely bad as you might think.

This book surveys all the world cultures for homosexuality.  For some reason the most fascinating culture for me was that of the ancient Greeks.  I guess because the open attitude and acceptance about sexuality seems so different from even our supposedly advanced American culture of today that it is difficult to comprehend.  Attraction to the same sex was openly practiced and viewed as a natural part of range of human behavior.  Heterosexuals experienced and understood same-sex beauty and attraction and didn’t force themselves to suppress it or deny feeling it; in fact, it seems almost encouraged or special effort was made to develop this ’skill’. 

Yet reading on, the idea of dominance did exist.  It was acceptable for a person of high position to be the ‘top’, but never the ‘bottom’.  This is an attitude which I think still exists in Latin America or the more chauvinistic parts of the world today.  Young males would take gifts and even money for the service to older males, and this is not unheard of today as well.   So this Greek way perhaps isn’t perhaps as completely revolutionary as it might seem.  But I still find it astounding to see pottery with the fairly explicit acts depicted.  But never have I seen Greek pottery with explicit heterosexual acts depicted.  This is either puzzling or I never noticed this more pedestrian pairing or ancient artists never bothered to paint it.  Or perhaps all the ancient artists were gay.

The book does mention that pairings of males of the same age were also known in ancient Greece.  So not all the gay activity was  between older males and younger males.

The subtitle of the book is: how height affects the health, happiness, and success of boys–and the men they become.  The author being about 5′6" himself seems a bit obsessed about how shortness has impacted his life.  Society is stacked against the short, especially the short male, he says.  They get bullied.  They earn less.  They get no attention from women — who are tallness obsessed it seems.  There are moments when I felt compassion.  And in a way, tall and short is a bit like beauty and ugliness.  You could almost write the same book about unattractive people.  It’s sad, but someone has to be ugly for someone else to be beautiful.  Someone has to be short for someone else to be tall.  (Almost like that movie "Unbreakable" by Shyamalan where someone has to be weak for someone else to be strong.)  But what was my point here.  The author makes some points for the obvious shallow nature of a society which still highly values height (pun intended) even while height confers no obvious true advantage except to see over the heads of others in a crowd and being closer to the hoop in basketball.  Still perhaps it’s an indication of good nutrition (wealth) and good genes.

But back to my earlier point: I wonder if you could make a similar argument to beauty.  Supposely beauty is due to symmetry which comes from good genes and strong immunity.  One might also suggest that beauty does confer obvious reproductive advantage to offspring assuming beauty can be inherited.

So just as the author points out that the short learn to make up for their… shortcoming through other means, I suppose the unattractive have to make up for their unattractiveness through other means.

The author makes the point at the end of the book that the tall are environmentally worse than the short.  They take up more calories.  But I was thinking this is also a genetic signal.  In the past, if a family can sustain the tall genes and the extra calories it requires it must be wealthy or at least have some success.  Unfortunately, height might be less of a viable signal today with all the cheap calories out there. (Today maybe we should replace height with thinness.)

The author also talks about early and late puberty and various confusing studies about this.  I read a different article or book about homosexuality being linked to early puberty.  The author does seem to say that being short can come from delayed puberty.  Combining the two ideas, does that mean that short guys tend not to be gay?  Hmmm, I don’t think that’s true.  Must be some counteracting factor there, because someone would have noticed if gays are all tall or average height.

It was eye opening to read some testimonials included by the author from his tall classmates indicating the advantages even as they saw them — in terms of confidence, attention from teachers, expectations, sports, etc.  Must be nice to be tall.

A film about a closeted doctor and his younger boyfriend and the doctor’s mother, Doña Herlinda.  She understands her son is gay and asks the younger man to live with her son in her house.  Still, she wants her son to get married to a woman (and have grandchildren).  This of course requires a major deception which the mother helps to maintain. It’s kind of a sweet love story in parts.  And really quite good for an 80’s film — in fact, it’s nice to see a film without the recent tiresome depictions of drugged out boy toys and flamboyant, excessive behavior.

Pretty awful films about a gay teenager and his terrible family life, and a real fictional protagonist about to be killed by his author’s pen.  What can I say but awful, awful, awful.