MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: JAMES FRANCO'S HOME MOVIES

To hear directors James Franco and Travis Matthews tell it - and oh, how much you get to hear Franco tell it, over and over, across the movie's achingly long 60 minutes - the purpose of Interior. Leather Bar. is to interrogate the comfort level of the viewer and performer alike surrounding explicit gay sex in cinema, in art, and in real life. But around the five minute mark, the film shares its actual purpose, in the foggy phrasing of actor Val Lauren, the anchor of Franco's experiment:

"I don't personally like this project, personally. It doesn't, I don't, nothing artistic in it, right now. Maybe it's 'cause of my lack of understanding of what it is, doesn't respond to it. What I do respond to, and always have is his mission [points to Franco]. I like James's mission, I don't always understand it, but I like it. I like it. I like what he's doing, even when I don't understand it, and I'm into supporting it and being a part of it."

Let's summarise, to clean up the talky, inarticulate stumbling over language, which is itself a key part of Interior. Leather Bar.'s aesthetic: "this idea is dumb, confusing, and underthought, but if James Franco wants to do it, then let's go ahead and do it".

Interior. Leather Bar. is a categorically difficult little beastie, taking the form of a documentary but obviously scripted, and yet the thing it purports to document is actually being documented, though not depicted. Let me start over again. Interior. Leather Bar. finds Franco and Matthews deciding to re-imagine 40 minutes of gay sex supposedly cut from William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising (about five seconds of practical thought makes it pretty obvious that no such footage could imaginably have been shot, if for no other reason than the implausibility of Cruising having been conceived as a film that was two-fifths gay sex; it's not clear if Franco and Matthews, at any level of fictional or nonfictional remove, indulged in that five seconds). In the role of the character originally played by Al Pacino, they cast one of Franco's current favorite meat puppets in his weird art projects, Val Lauren. The film consists of Franco enthusiastically talking about how boldly his project is confronting reflexive heternormative values and representations, while Lauren wonders if it's a violation of ethics, taste, or his personal sexual comfort levels for him to watch as other people have sex in front of a camera.

The film doesn't try very hard to keep up the pretense that it has anything to do with Cruising, a dull potboiler whose latter-day recovery by a certain strain of queer theorists hasn't managed to address the fact that even if it has some interesting representations, it's still pretty crummy at basic thriller mechanics. From the evidence of how they frame (and frame, and frame) their arguments, their images, and their performances, it's entirely possible that neither Franco nor Matthews hasn't even seen Cruising. Instead, it is a platform to allow Franco, playing a modulated, scripted version of himself (Matthews is the film's credited writer), to launch into a series of painful exploratory discussions about what this whole experiment means in the grander scheme of society, and how daring he is for asking these intensely bold questions about what we are and are not comfortable with, and why. Questions that are mind-numbingly juvenile, and cannot possibly come across as new or probing to any of the very self-selecting audience for an experimental psuedo-documentary full of explicit man-on-man blowjobs.

Mostly, Interior. Leather Bar. is massively fascinated with and impressed by James Franco, self-challenging heterosexual visionary whose desire to break down the limitations of labeling and normalising things results in this film about filming the making of a film based on another film. It is possible, and indeed pleasurable, to imagine a version of this film as filtered through the mind of Christopher Guest, where the mingling of documentary and mockumentary would serve to poke fun at the rambling pretension of the actor/scholar/director/author who surrounds himself with people too cowed by his power over all of them (just several weeks after this film's debut at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Franco appeared as the lead in Disney's ungainly Oz the Great and Powerful, a fact observed here multiple times) to call him on his aimless verbal splattering, too directionless to work even as provocation. Even Lauren's film-long reiterations of his feeling that the film is a bad idea that makes no sense and makes him feel uncomfortable as an actor is constantly framed in terms of his admiration for Franco, and his conviction that it must be in the service of some greater social purpose, or it wouldn't be happening.

At times, almost exclusively in the second half (when the action moves to the film set, and away from Franco's head), there are flashes of the film that Interior. Leather Bar. could have been in the hands of someone with a stronger head for filmmaking, queer theory, or both, than this film evinces (Matthews is an award-winning director of documentary films about the gay male experience, so I am compelled to assume and hope that he's capable of more thoughtful filmmaking than the mish-mash on display here). The best sequence, by far, starts with the recreated footage of two men engaged in oral sex, with pulsing lights and music, cutting suddenly and harshly to the filmmakers shooting their act from multiple cameras, a stark and dare I say it, witty depiction of the distinctly anti-sexy ways in which onscreen sex is filmed, a matter of angles and lighting and choreography. It's a moment that feels like it actually has something to say, and keen insights into its subject matter; other moments like this are peppered in the last half-hour, though it is a chore to find them.

Having something to say, though, is not typically high on the film's agenda. Having something to ask is, but the film so joylessly over-enunciates all of its questions in bluntly literal ways that it leaves the viewer with nothing to engage with, no work to do ourselves. The film could just as easily function as a series of tweets, and even then, it would tend to reveal more about the author's lack of experience with social issues that have been debated well into the past, and on more interesting, sophisticated battlegrounds than Interior. Leather Bar.. Franco, or "Franco", at several points confesses that he's making this project mostly to see whatever happens: that approach can yield surprising, unmediated insights, but as this film proves, it's far likelier for it to end in frivolous tedium.

4/10

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: SLASHER PARODIES

Camp is one of the hardest things in pop cultural discourse: hard to quite grasp which of a dozen almost identical but in some crucial way contradictory definition cuts to the heart of what it is; hard to explain it once you've seen it, and demonstrate how and why it works the way it does; and on the creative end, hard to execute it well enough to actually be campy, rather than any of the many things that are what camp exists specifically to comment on and refract. If you are camp's master, you can make Female Trouble. But get camp wrong even a little bit, and...

The very concept of camp makes it impossible to use value judgments of "good" and "bad", for it is an inherent part of camp that it resides more within the spectator than in the work of art itself. So with that conceded, I don't actually suppose it means much of anything for me to say that I found Psycho Beach Party to be a completely dismal movie. It is camp run amok, camp that has grown sentient and self-aware and become damnably smug about its own superiority and cleverness. It violates one of the few truly absolute rules I have come up with in all my years of watching movies: no parody is any good unless it comes from a place of love for the object being parodied. Parody that instead perches itself at a level above its target and pitches all of its jokes in the tone of "haha, let's laugh at how shitty this thing is that we're smarter than" is grating tedium, mired in self-congratulation of the worst kind. So perhaps Psycho Beach Party isn't even really camp, for camp is based in affection and love, however unconventionally defined. And while the film is aware of its satiric targets (primarily the American beach movies of the 1960s, secondarily the entire corpus of psycho killer movies), to an admirably exhaustive level of detail and precision, I never once felt even a whisper of love for the genre being parodied or the culture that produced it. Only a deeply satisfied sense that because we have a more sexually sophisticated pop culture than they did around 1959, we are obviously better people than they were.

The 2000 film was adapted by Charles Busch from his own 1987 off-off-Broadway play; a critical 13 years, maybe, which found the mainstream absorbing the aesthetic sensibility of camp and, in the process, defanging it a little bit (if nothing else, a Psycho Beach Party that followed The Brady Bunch Movie to theaters by a full five years couldn't possibly feel as subversive as it probably did when the material was new). There are other, probably more damning problems involved in the stage-to-film transition; I'll return to those. For now, let's crack open the film's plot, which functions as an unexpectedly literal, at times scene-for-scene remake of 1959's Gidget, with a murder mystery sprinkled on top. 1960s SoCal teenager Florence Forrest (Lauren Ambrose) doesn't understand why she's not as interested in sex as her impossibly horny peers seem to be; instead, she finds herself gravitating towards the local surf scene, to the mocking disgust of the surfer Starcat (Nicholas Brendon), who suggests that she's not even a real chick, but a mere "Chicklet", which quickly becomes her nickname. She takes lessons with the surfing sage Kanaka (Thomas Gibson), and starts to feel really peculiar feelings towards Starcat. And all the while, she always seems to be right around when violent murders take place, always during her weird blackouts. Those blackouts also happening to coincide with the emergence of an alternate personality, Ann Bowman, an angry, lewd bondage enthusiast who makes Kanaka her eagerly submissive slave.

Around the edges, we find knowing send-ups of '50s and '60s stock types: Bettina Barnes (Kimberley Davies), a squeaky-voiced movie sexpot with a sensitive, innocent inner life; Berdine (Danni Wheeler), Florence's nerdy best friend and an inconsistently-coded closeted lesbian; Yo Yo (Nick Cornish) and Provoloney (Andrew Levitas), meathead surfers prone to engaging in exaggerated displays of subconscious homoeroticism; and Florence's mother Ruth (Beth Broderick), glassy and glacial in her insistence on putting forth the right June Cleaverish facade, but prone to hitting on the happy, goofy Swedish exchange student Lars (Matt Keeslar) living in her house. I will say this for Psycho Beach Party: it knows its target. Every single performance by its game cast - also including Kathleen Robertson and a pre-stardom Amy Adams, who could be justified in considering this to be an embarrassing skeleton in her closet (she has a partially nude scene) - is absolutely perfect at evoking the ditzy, broad sensibility of the '60s movies being targeted, and Ambrose's ability to switch from a confused but determined Sandra Dee carbon copy to a snarling dominatrix is unimprovable (her third personality, the sassy African-American girl Tylene, is technically accomplished, but suffers from the deeply questionable screenwriting that has a parody of that character type in a movie without any actual black people in it). Robert Lee King's direction reproduces the exact rhythm of the old beach movies, with their flat staging punctuated by flourishes in the scene transitions. The production design and costume design are committed enough that if not for the film stock, it would be visually impossible to tell that this wasn't actually made in the early' 60s.

So in respect of achieving its goals, Psycho Beach Party is absolutely flawless. But I don't know that I can bring myself to say that those goal were worthy of achievement. Setting for oneself as easy a target as the beach movies of the 1960s doesn't mean it's okay to indulge in equally easy jokes, whether it's offensively obvious double-entendres or simplistic "oh, you know this thing was then? Now it's the exact opposite" subversive gags. The homoerotic surf culture the worst in this regard: it's clear by the end of the first scene with the surfers that the joke is that shirtless, muscled young men wrestling each other on the beach reads differently now than it did in the buttoned-up '50s, and this is the only joke that the film thinks it needs to bother with as far as those characters are concerned, and so it repeats that joke every single time they appear, adjusting it only to reiterate it in ever more leaden, literal ways. But it's not fair to pick on one element: damn near every joke telegraphs itself and showcases very little with other than making junior high-level sexual puns. As for the incorporation of the murder mystery, it's not even there to be parodied, only to add a wrinkle to the Gidget framework; though the joke that I thought worked best in the whole film was a visual gag about one of the victim's decapitated head, perhaps an exaggerated version of the "let's show gore!" impulse that has always gone hand-in-hand with psycho killer movies.

I have no idea what Busch changed in transferring his play into cinematic form, though I'd be very surprised if this didn't work better onstage. Watching a movie, the audience is observing the characters; watching theater, the audience is engaging with actors, and this concept seems like it would thrive on that kind of interaction. The wheezing corniness of the jokes and the heightened performances would both, I suspect, land much better in live theater, where the necessary vaudeville or burlesque environment would be more automatically attained just by virtue of having the audience feel like they were in on the joke, not just watching the joke happen.

Also, in the original production, Busch himself played Florence, which would change the energy of the piece so much that I'm at a loss to imagine why it was altered for the movie. Busch felt he was too old to play the part, which is probably fair: he instead took on the part of police captain Monica Stark, a role that makes no sense at the level of anything. She's a parody of the hard-boiled noir detective, except not a single one of those characters was ever a woman, making the parody value muddled at best. As drag, the filmmakers betray the very concept by replacing Busch with a female body double for a sex scene. Meanwhile, having Florence played by a male actor, with her two personalities representing two equally unrealistic extremes of pop cultural feminine psychology, seems so sensible and so central to the way that Psycho Beach Party was conceived as camp that I wish they'd gone ahead with it, still letting Busch play Stark, and just deal with having two cross-dressed roles in one movie.

The entire movie is one long misfire: immaculate execution in every detail of one poor conception after another. I can't call it a failure, because it does everything right except exist. But mean-spirited spoofing at the broadest level possible isn't remotely edifying. The year after this came out, another film came out parodying an already self-parodying comedy genre: Wet Hot American Summer. The only camp thing about that film is its setting, but it's everything that Psycho Beach Party most conspicuously fails to be: an accurate recreation of a terrible form that mocks it from a place of warm familiarity and affection, that stands as an inventive, clever comedy on its own merits. If you want to watch a goofy send-up of goofy teen fare from generations ago, stick with that: its success calls attention to everything about Psycho Beach Party that's uninspired, arrogant, and lazy.

Body Count: 5, depending on what you want to do with the ending.

Read More

IT ALL STARTED WITH A MOUSE...

Escape from Tomorrow is worse than bad: it's a soul-crushing disappointment. This film grew from the kind of idea that is only going to work one time - shooting an entire feature film, surreptitiously, on the property of Walt Disney Company theme parks - and it's goddamn criminal that the best thing that writer-director Randy Moore could make out of this ballsy and even radical notion was a threadbare David Cronenberg knockoff anchored by a screechy family drama in which any meaningful insights are drowned out by the noise of the some relentlessly terrible acting even by the standards of micro-budget on-the-fly independent filmmaking.

The film depicts the final day of a Disney vacation for the most generic possible family: dad Jim (Roy Abramsohn), mom Emily (Elena Schuber), 6-years-or-thereabouts son Elliot (Jack Dalton), and 4-or-so daughter Sara (Katelynn Rodriguez). It begins the worst way possible for Jim, who receives a barbarically passive-aggressive firing from his boss, right before Elliot locks him out on the balcony of their hotel over looking the Magic Kingdom; things get worse from here. Before the very long day is out, Jim will have begun hallucinating demonic figurines on the it's a small world ride (hallucinating, or seeing things as they really are?), hearing rumors of a strange "cat flu" running rampant through the park and attempted to combat the inevitability of his shrill, shrieking family by chasing a pair of nubile French teen girls from place to place.

Presumably, this is meant to be a great searing indictment of Disney's theme parks, or the edifice of American vacation culture, or nuclear families, or whatever the hell. Practically, it's the kind of film that only has anything real to say if you already agree completely with its precepts and can connect all the dots and fill in the blanks that the film itself leaves empty. And even then, there's plenty of reason to find the whole thing too dubious for words. Most urgently, Jim is a completely failed protagonist: no kind of remotely effective satire would start by hanging the Everyman sign on a character whose entire arc kicks off because he can't keep his eyes off of a modestly-dressed 15-year-old girl, and if Moore's argument is that Walt Disney World is a difficult place for ephebophiles, he's probably right; also, why build an entire feature film to further that argument.

The fact is, there's a potentially great scenario right inside Escape from Tomorrow: a man with a not-terribly-happy marriage and kids he finds kind of annoying finds out that he's been fired right before heading out into a park where everything costs a fucking shit-ton of money, and being cheerful and untroubled is a job requirement of each and every tourist. Boom, there's your movie. A great fucking movie. A movie that, potentially, genuinely investigates the corporatisation of happiness and the presentation of totally artificially physical realities as normal. A movie that doesn't rely on the mildewy, self-consciously controversial sexual perversion that animates so much of Escape from Tomorrow, or the bargain-basement surrealism that aspires to David Lynch and misses out badly. The deeper into the plot the film goes, the more it becomes clear that there aren't any real ideas behind it; just ineffective stabs at psychological horror given a little extra oomph given that they're positioned against the backdrop of the world's most famous tourist trap. That's a fine idea - I have for some time maintained that the film I'd like to see set at a Disney theme park would have to be an R-rated murder mystery - but it's executed without any kind of inspiration or even really any skill here. I'm impressed that Moore and director of photography Lucas Lee Graham figured out a way to capture the footage that they did, but there's a lot of overlighting and the use of glossy black-and-white is clearly a stopgap measure designed to cover up sins in the footage, not an aesthetic choice that pays off terrible well. Basically, once you get past the novelty of seeing recognisable Disney landmarks as the backdrop for a slightly kinky exploration of one man's not very interesting psychosis - for me, that point hit about 12 minutes in, following the admittedly very awesome it's a small world sequence - the film has absolutely nothing else to offer.

Compounding all of its other sins, the acting is abysmal throughout: Schuber is the easy worst in show, presenting a caricatured harpy of marital discord that becomes impossible to watch long before we come across our first French teen slut or explosion of blood or deranged canted angle pointed at a big goofy animal. But there's not a single reasonable performance in the entire feature, from any of the leads (we do not expect child actors to be terribly convincing, but Christ, is Dalton ever chomping on his lines), nor from any of the side characters present for just a scene or two (one of them trotting out a gloriously campy French/German accent that seems to be the only point at which the movie seems to realise that there are other ways for it to be successfully over-the-top than the ones it has elected to pursue).

It's absolutely easy to respect what the film is, as an object: shooting it must have been a hell of a problem to solve (and a fun one, I bet, or I don't know from filmmakers), and the fact that it cuts together at all is a legitimate triumph, whatever problems of fuzzy sound, bad greenscreen, and washed-out exteriors all but inevitably crop up along the way. And this no doubt explains much of the problem with the acting, too. Simply existing isn't enough, though - something, anything has to be done with that, and Escape from Tomorrow is too much a titanic failure of drama and imagery to use its once-in-a-lifetime setting to any remotely interesting ends. Disney's failure to sue the filmmakers is entirely reasonable, not for ethical or legal reasons, but because it's in their best interest not to give the film free publicity: this is too fucking boring to survive without the added boost of controversy. Nothing this potentially dangerous should be this tedious to sit through.

3/10

Read More