Change Your Image
youdontseeyouwant
Reviews
Snow Cake (2006)
good film marred by one false character/performance
I saw this as the "Opening Night Gala" at Windsor, Ontario's 2nd Annual Film Festival, and it's exactly the kind of film tailor made to open up a Canadian film festival. It has the virtue of being at least partially homegrown product, but it also has big stars Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver and Carrie-Anne Moss in it and is far more Hollywood/Awards-season ready than particularly weird or homespun. The people who only go to see this film and then call it a day, essentially, get to have their cake and eat it too, by supporting a small and locally made film that nevertheless hits many of the same feel-good buttons that they'd get from the multiplex. Rickman plays a depressed traveler en route to Winnipeg for reasons only eventually revealed who stops to pick up a cheerful young female hitchhiker. They bond, briefly, before the two are in a car accident that kills the girl. Rickman goes to her hometown to pay his respects to the girl's mother (Weaver), a "high functioning" autistic emotionally apathetic towards the loss. Rickman, feeling both guilty and compelled to grieve in the mother's place, ends up sticking around for the funeral and strikes up a relationship with a local woman (Moss).
Weaver is the big problem with the film, of course, not least of all because it is simply hard to accept one of our smartest actresses in the role. Mostly, though, she's cursed with having to play this character in a film that is not at all above using her to provide both cheap laughs and wisdom-of-the-innocent truisms. Needless to say, a far cry from Rain Man (or Mark Haddon's excellent novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, for that matter) on this topic, too often threatening to veer off into The Other Sister/I Am Sam/Radio territory.
Still, I have to admit that the film grew on me as it went on. The resolution of Rickman's issues are a little too neat, but he's excellent in the film, and I liked the early scenes between he and the hitchhiker enough that the appearance of Weaver's character wasn't quite enough to immediately kill all of the good will I had developed toward the film at that point. And while I remain suspicious of the film's motives in including the Weaver character, the film never manages to forget that it is really about Rickman and this young girl's death. I confess to being moved by the last third of the movie, particularly the funeral scenes, and the notion of mourning a random stranger in the place of someone who cannot properly do so is rather startlingly poignant. Quite uneven, but if this ever ends up getting wide release, you could do far, far worse for a night out at the movies.
Another Gay Movie (2006)
Not good, but encouraging.
It's kind of hard not to like Another Gay Movie just a little bit. The major difference between it and something like Date Movie certainly isn't one of ambition (while its pretty much impossible to get less ambitious than Date Movie, Another Gay Movie doesn't exactly shoot for the stars) or sophistication, but rather respect for the audience. The makers of Date Movie hate you and think you are stupid and think movies are stupid, which is why they make movies like Date Movie. Admittedly, Another Gay Movie is similarly a bi-product of the Scary Movie (originally a spoof of the already tongue-in-cheek Scream series) brand of comedy that mistakes quotation for satire, here replaying scenes from American Pie with a slight "gay" twist. Jason Biggs' awkward conversations with his bumbling father Eugene Levy are here replayed with our gay protagonist constantly being confronted with his father's (played by Kids in the Hall's Scott Thompson) inappropriate interest in his son's sexual development and, eventually, his latent homosexuality. The infamous "Stiffler's Mom" character is recast with a dead-celebrity-obsessed flamer hooking up with a friend's Liberace-esquire grandfather. Elsewhere, Carrie is replayed with the original's bucket of blood now replaced with a certain other bodily fluid, while another scene quotes Pedro Almadovar's Bad Education, of all things, pretty much verbatim and with no twist at all. As with most modern "spoofs," the filmmakers assume that their audience's ability to recognize these scenes from other films is what makes them funny, and while director Todd Stephens attempts to satirize gay coming-of-age dramas (even throwing in a dig at Edge of Seventeen, his own previous entry into the genre) by merging them with their hetero/mainstream counterparts (the American Pie genre)is witty and potentially subversive, his approach is generally so scattershot that it never quite coheres into anything that thoughtful.
But by the end, when each member of the gay distaff American Pie gang finally hooks up, it is largely free of any embarrassment or heavy-handedness on the part of the film. Embarrassment and heavy-handedness are generally the two approaches that North American film has taken to sex, at least in the post-AIDS era (that is, the 1980's and onward), with the former the domain of (usually teen) comedies like Porkys and American Pie and the latter typified by the brand of (usually adult) "sex=death" thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. Another Gay Movie has one character's sexual initiation coming in the form of hooking up with a man fifty years his senior, and another's via a double anal penetration, and there are various other sexual oddities throughout, but all of these are portrayed as being normal and perfectly acceptable potential experiences (just as with the film's eventual romantic hookup between two good friends) for gay men. As with John Cameron Mitchell's admittedly vastly superior Shortbus, it's not the frankness with which the sexuality is presented that's shocking, it's how unaccustomed we have become to seeing sex portrayed on screen as being actually pleasurable and exciting. This doesn't make Another Gay Movie a good film, but it does make it an interesting and possibly even healthy one.