Opening ThisWeek
Before You Know It
Runs Fri., June 6–Thurs., June 12 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 110 minutes.
If you were, say, 36 in 1995, the peak year of AIDS deaths in the U.S., you’d be at the upper edge of the first generation to come out in the epidemic’s shadow, the first to spend their entire adult lives aware of its devastation. And this year you’d just now be eligible for an apartment in Rainbow Vista, Gresham, Oregon’s home for LGBT retirees. It’s a godsend for Dennis, 76, a former racquetball champ, Air Force serviceman, and longtime cross-dresser who’s one of the three subjects of PJ Raval’s doc.
The swath AIDS cut is only one of the issues clouding Dennis’ sunset years—and those of Ty, a Harlem resident and activist with SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders); and those of Robert, whose Galveston Island drag bar, he claims, is the oldest in Texas. There’s also the loneliness endemic to men who likely don’t have traditional spouse-plus-children families, or even sympathetic relatives, to lean on. They have to build their own support networks—in Robert’s case, the queens who star in his bar’s bawdy floor shows and one ne’er-do-well nephew. And gay culture’s notorious preoccupation with youth and beauty doesn’t ease the sting of aging. (Though I wonder: Is that a gay thing or a guy thing? Do straight men treat elderly women any better?)
However, Raval only just glances at these underlying causes. Ambling and easygoing, Before You Know It is the furthest thing from polemic; it’s simply an affectionate portrait of these three men. I know I shouldn’t, but I’m tempted to say merely an affectionate portrait; untainted by even a hint of data, the film presents no illuminating context. How typical are these men’s experiences? Surely the ranks of 55-plus out gay men are growing—aren’t they? By how much do singles in this age bracket outnumber committed couples? How many Rainbow Vistas are available to cushion the fall? You have to admire Raval’s intent to stand clear and let these three tell their stories—but would a pinch of anger, just for spice, have hurt? It’s clear these men aren’t particularly happy, and Raval leaves you wondering: Are we supposed to do something about it? Or what?
Still, I suppose the fact that today progress can be made on the gay-advocacy front without requiring Larry Kramer-like levels of indignation is itself a sign of progress. For example, one new problem gay men never had to face before is depicted here, both triumphantly and troublingly: Now that we can wed, what happens if you and your elderly life partner suddenly find you’re not of the same mind on the subject? Gavin Borchert
Edge of Tomorrow
Opens Fri., June 6 at TK theaters. Rated PG-13. 113 minutes.
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Subsequent graphs in body 1. Subsequent graphs in body 1. Robert Horton
For No Good Reason
Opens Fri., June 6 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated R. 89 minutes.
Johnny Depp obviously revered Hunter S. Thompson. He’s made two adaptations of the late writer’s work (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary), and was also a friend who attended Thompson’s 2005 memorial, when the ashes were scattered in a fireworks display. Depp narrated Alex Gibney’s 2008 doc Gonzo, and he provides the same service for this selective profile of Ralph Steadman, who famously illustrated Fear and Loathing and other Thompson works. I say selective because Steadman is mostly seen through the narrow lens of Thompson and their collaborations from the ’70s onward. Depp visits the artist in his country home and studio (no family is seen or mentioned), asks a few questions, and mostly nods in agreement. Steadman’s prior career during the ’60s is cursorily sketched, and we watch him signing prints in recent years—never selling the originals—for a Thompson-enamored public to buy. He’s evidently made a nice income, and still is, off the association; nothing he says here hints at any discord.
Made by the English team of Charlie and Lucy Paul, For No Good Reason has been tailored for the American market, meaning the Thompson market. Back in the UK, Steadman spelled out his discontents in a 2006 autobiography, Bruised Memories, in which he wrote, “Quite by chance I became a part of this man’s life, more as an infection than a friend. I fooled myself that there was something in me that he found important.” The Pauls do make good use of archival footage in which we see some of the Thompson/Steadman rivalry, each feeling he deserves credit for their shared success, but such resentments are left dormant here. It’s more profitable to remain silent.
Is Steadman an enduring artist or just a talented, satirical illustrator who “by chance” gained such iconic status for boomers? The Pauls, and certainly not Depp, don’t solicit opinions beyond the fan and magazine worlds. (Steadman’s later hand-altered Polaroids are a party trick; his 1283 I, Leonardo, a first-person tribute to da Vinci, seems a stretch.) Jann Wenner, Richard E. Grant, and Terry Gilliam offer their tributes, but everyone here—the Pauls included—still seems to be feeding off Thompson’s corpse. Brian Miller
Gore Vidal: The United
States of Amnesia
Opens Fri., June 6 at TK Varsity. Not rated. 89 minutes.
When Gore Vidal died two years ago, he got the long obituaries he deserved in The New York Times and elsewhere. But who reads such obituaries today, or the Times, or remembers Vidal? It’s a dwindling group of paleoliberals shaped by FDR and World War II, who opposed the Vietnam War, who’ve been pushed to the political sidelines for the past 40 years. Director Nicholas Wrathall began his new tribute documentary in 2005, and it includes some new interviews made before Vidal’s decline. If Vidal was, in his last decade, bitter about being marginalized and old, he doesn’t show it here. He’s more rueful, and ever quotable, as he prepares to leave his stunning cliffside home in Ravello, Italy, his partner of 50 years having predeceased him. He’s pushed in a wheelchair to various speaking engagements—in a sense being pushed to the grave.
I don’t mean to suggest this film is entirely sad. Rather, and this probably isn’t Wrathall’s intention, it conveys how Vidal outlived his time and relevance, how the progressive East Coast wing of the WASP establishment would be rendered obsolete during his long lifetime (1925–2012). After his failed 1960 run for Congress, after JFK and Camelot, Vidal would become a permanent, often cranky critic of the new power structure he despised, an outsider. (Myra Breckinridge, Burr, and other historical novels helped pay the bills.)
Fortunately, there are plenty of stills and clips here of Vidal in his prime: hobnobbing with his cousin Jackie Kennedy and her husband; debating William F. Buckley in 1968; slamming Jerry Brown during their 1982 contest for the Senate; dropping by Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett to deliver acid apercus. More recently, a dying Christopher Hitchens offers his praise, as do a few random friends (Sting, Tim Robbins, etc.). There aren’t any dissenting voices, only fans and fellow travelers.
If Vidal had one great theme, on which he wrote so many elegantly vituperative variations, it was the corruption of power, the government tendency to declare endless wars and infringe on our civil liberties. Vidal is nothing if not prescient when discussing the Patriot Act. “Now we have a totalitarian government,” he says. “They listen to our private conversations. We are totally policed.” And that, of course, was before Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. Even if he didn’t use a computer, Vidal would’ve loved to write about that. Brian Miller
Ping Pong Summer
Runs Fri., June 6–Thurs., June 12 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated. 92 minutes.
I get my 1980s nostalgia pure and firsthand, it being a formative decade for me. I don’t need those years presented as kitsch or in air quotes, and Michael Tully—born in 1974—takes an entirely straight, non-ironic approach to the summer of 1985. His hero Radford “Rad” Miracle (Marcello Conte) wears zippered red Michael Jackson-style moon pants and practices beat-boxing in the shower. (This his mother, played by ’80s icon Lea Thompson, mistakes for jerking off.) He’s an earnest, friendly, presexual dork who’s taken with his family to the Delaware shore for the Miracles’ annual summer holiday. (The sister’s a Goth, the father’s a cop with an unexplained Scottish accent—played by John Hannah of Four Weddings and a Funeral.) According to ’80s formula—and Ping Pong Summer is scrupulously formulaic and layered in period detail—this vacation will provide Rad with a new best friend, his first crush, an unexpected mentor (Susan Sarandon), and a sneering villain to defeat in the table-tennis finale.
Tully, a former online film critic, is finicky about this ersatz recreation, shot in vintage super-16 mm format, as some ’80s cheapies were, too. This is the place and time of his youth, so the era’s Air Jordans, besloganed T-shirts, guys in crop-tops, feathered hair, and blue eyeshadow all feel authentic. In his press notes, Tully writes, “I didn’t want to make a ‘throwback’ or ‘ode’ to ’80s movies. I wanted to make an actual ’80s movie.”He’s succeeded in that strict regard, but therein lies the film’s literalistic limitation. It doesn’t wink at the audience—unlike, say, Napoleon Dynamite—for easy laughs. It doesn’t update any Reagan-era conventions. It samples a few radio hits (anyone remember John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band’s “Tough All Over”?), but even the score is meticulously constructed to sound 30 years old.
To anyone born in the past 30 years, Ping Pong Summer will seem unfunny, flat, and uninflected, the antithesis of the knowingly 1981-set Wet Hot American Summer (released in 2001, with a sequel presently being discussed). To anyone who, like Tully, remembers 1985 in such detail, the whole project becomes a weird simulacrum—not conceptual art, but some sort of invented memory. When Gus Van Sant did his shot-for-shot Psycho redo, there was maybe a point—a commentary on a great movie, to see if it could survive updating for a new generation. Ping Pong Summer isn’t so meta as that; it simply plays like some dumb, corny movie you didn’t see in the ’80s, but a movie you plausibly might’ve seen. Rad it is not. Brian Miller
Words and Pictures
Opens Fri., June 6 at TK Theaters. Rated PG-13. 116 minutes.
This is a pretty hip high school. Not only do they employ a once-promising, now boozy, crushingly charismatic author as an English teacher, they’ve just hired an acclaimed painter—also loaded with charisma—whose career has been derailed by rheumatoid arthritis. Because of a trumped-up antipathy between these reluctant academics, this private school is about to witness a battle between, as the title puts it, Words and Pictures. If the writer can stay sober long enough, he’ll teach the kids about the power of prose, and if the painter can stifle her bitterness, she’ll espouse the primacy of the image. It’s elbow patches vs. stained smock, plus a countdown to the first shag between these two spectacularly good-looking people.
Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche play wordsmith and picture-maker, respectively. The casting is a source of both appeal and disappointment in this one-note movie; the roles are large, but the material thin. Owen’s character, Jack Marcus, is about to get tossed from the faculty for his hungover manners and his declining commitment. Dina Delsanto (Binoche) is soured by her illness and suffering from creative block. That’s about it for those two, and the idea of the schoolkids choosing sides in the words-versus-pictures debate is also sketchily handled. Screenwriter Gerald Di Pego is all about the inspirational message-making, but without any new wrinkles in this well-worn fare.
That the film moves at all is due to veteran Aussie director Fred Schepisi’s ability to get a flow going. The arc of his career has been puzzling—traveling from The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith to Six Degrees of Separation, with a healthy dose of rom-coms along the way—but he’s long been a master at filling the widescreen frame and building momentum. With a painter as subject (Binoche created her own canvases), Schepisi is able to make the movie look good, and the interiors are always interesting. But all this effort is in the service of ideas that just feel so, so tired. Good people like Amy Brenneman and Bruce Davison are visibly shriveled by their stock supporting roles, and the two top-drawer stars can’t make the formula work. Binoche is unsteady with the Hollywood idiom, despite coming up with a few unpredictable moments. Owen’s corduroy voice sounds awesome even when he’s adopting an American accent, and he seems unusually committed to this role. Over the years, Owen’s occasional flings at flexing action-movie muscles have yielded mixed results—but cast him as a disenchanted intellectual, and the guy is a knockout. Robert Horton
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