Getting Tagged, Treading Water - Completed!

From my conscious mind all the way down to my wee mitochondria, I am struggling to acclimate to the accelerated pace of the academic quarter system. The voice I hear in my head is Judy Davis' from Husbands and Wives: "Metabolically, it just isn't my rhythm." I feel like the term just started, and we're already racing to the finish? Have I even taught anybody anything yet? How have I read so many books in so little time, and how do I still have so much to catch up on? Sorry that posting has been light, especially after that energetic spurt at the beginning of last week. More to come soon, including a full rundown of capsule reviews of all those Fall 2006 releases for which I haven't yet explained my grades, from the delicious Departed and Old Joy to the underseen A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints to the overhyped The Queen to the god-awful Little Children. (Kate, Jackie, Jennifer, it isn't your fault, but Mr. Field, you are officially dead to me.)

Also, the elections are tomorrow, and you know I can barely handle the stomach-churning nerves. (Edited to add: YAAAAYYYYY!!!)

For now, just to register a reassuring blip on the cardiogram of this blog, I'm responding to a tag from Nathaniel, who apparently didn't have a great day. It won't help that I just dogged Little Children, but then, part of how cineastes show love is to gently bait each other, as Little Mr. Anti-Frances well knows. Here, according to his own meme, are some other things that Nathaniel probably knows about me, but which you might not:

1. Popcorn or candy? Neither. I'm all about soda, which in the last couple of years, I've started buying at the cinema instead of sneaking it in. I figure, hey, the multiplex owners have to eat, too, and maybe I can forestall the inevitable (i.e., the total evanescence of the cinema as a form, i.e., the end of life as I know it) by drinking way too much Coke (no ice!) out of waxy, oversized pails adorned with confetti, corporate insignias, and/or animated characters.

I will say that in Hartford, CT, about 200 yards away from the big 18-plex was a shop called the Tas-tease that sold tiny, two-inch-wide donuts in a deranging array of flavors and colors. Sure, you can guess the familiars, but pineapple? Blueberry? PB&J? Heath bar? They cost 50¢ apiece, and at that price, who could resist? Nathaniel can back me up here, as these doll-sized donuts helped us work our way out of a post-Flightplan funk pretty handily.

2. Name a movie you've been meaning to see forever I'll give you four: on my annually revised but never fulfilled list of New Year's viewing resolutions, I seem to be dallying in particular on Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, David Cronenberg's Fast Company, and Sam Fuller's The Steel Helmet, despite every encouragement that they'll be terrific (or, at least in the case of Cronenberg's early paycheck effort, kind of interesting).

3. You are given the power to recall one Oscar: Who loses theirs and to whom? Later, I will want to change this answer, but I'll have to go with my first response: send Art Carney back to the bullpen and call up Gene Hackman for The Conversation, who didn't even get nominated for my favorite male performance of an incredible decade of American film, give or take Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Even more galling than Carney's win is that Hackman got squeezed out of the nominees' circle by Albert Finney, who, as StinkyLulu has recently rediscovered, is just awful in the elephantine Murder on the Orient Express.

4. Steal one costume from a movie for your wardrobe. Which will it be? I have actually already done this. For $11, I bought a cotton-polyester, bright orange hoodie that is straight up Clementine Kruczynski. Even more embarrassing than how often I wear it is how fully I imagine I am communing with Kate Winslet while wearing it. (Though, obviously, I need to wear it even more often and commune even more intensely to save her from the kind of sicko double-whammy of disappointing movies she's had this fall.)

5. Your favorite film franchise is... The Alien series, no question, especially the middle two. But even when the whole thing gets certifiably nuts with Alien: Resurrection, I'm so impressed by the producers' willingness to gamble on a truly interesting director with a spectacularly bold conception every single time out of the gate. I was about to ask 'Why won't more franchises do this?' but then I remembered the box-office grosses for Alien³ and Resurrection.

6. Invite five movie people over for dinner. Who are they? Why'd you invite them? What do you feed them? I was going to say, I would invite Shohreh Aghdashloo, Patricia Clarkson, Marcia Gay Harden, Holly Hunter, and Titus Andronicus, and, with a mad assist from my pal Titus, I would feed them Renée Zellweger. I assume this narrative requires no explanation, but perhaps an answer that isn't a joke or a compound felony is a bit more comme il faut. So, I will crack the lid on an actual, 100% dream scenario and invite Angela Bassett, Alfre Woodard, Julie Dash, Amy Vincent, and Christine Vachon to dinner, to give a project pitch on my screenplay adaptation of Gayl Jones' novel The Healing. Over a meal of whatever the hell these people wanted, I would try to entice Angela to play Joan Savage, the multilingual, volatile, perpetually touring rock singer; Alfre as her more superficially centered but mysterious and potentially duplicitous manager-assistant, Harlan Jane Eagleton; Julie Dash to direct the joint, because even though I've had the gumption to write it, I do think a black woman should direct it; Amy Vincent to photograph it, because in Eve's Bayou and Hustle & Flow, she actually thought about how to light black actors on screen, and made two terrific-looking pictures in the process; and Christine Vachon to produce it, because she'd make us do everything for scale but she'd make the movie we wanted.

Now, having admitted this in the semi-public of this blog, don't be stealing my idea, y'all. I will get you, and when a fan of Gayl Jones' fiction says something like that, you might want to worry about what exactly I'd have in mind.

7. What is the appropriate punishment for people who answer cell phones in the movie theater? Clearly, they should die seven days later, amidst terrorizing visions and fronds of wet black hair.

Honestly, though: why don't we have ushers anymore? The answer, obviously, is that the theater industry literally can't afford to turn away or alienate a single customer, even the awful ones who ruin things for other patrons. But, if I ever owned a cinema, I would pay someone to hang out in the back or in the aisle and remove the talkers, phone-callers, and other rowdykins. Call me a schoolmarm. Go ahead, do it.

8. Choose a female bodyguard: Ripley from Aliens. Mystique from X-Men. Sarah Connor from Terminator 2. The Bride from Kill Bill. Mace from Strange Days. My answer to #6 has already neutralized the surprise factor here, but Mace all the way. Memories might be meant to fade, they might even be designed that way for a reason, but as a famous black lesbian once said, she don't fade. Angela Bassett puts me in touch with my own inner black lesbian. Doesn't she you?

Plus, I don't really like the alternatives. Ripley is amazing but too ornery for me, unless we're counting that spunky, funky, half-alien Ripley from Resurrection, who seemed pretty up for a good time. I'm too chatty for Mystique, and I'm too actressexual to hang out with Linda Hamilton or Uma Thurman, who just aren't interesting or accomplished enough performers to sidle up to me. (Sorry, boys.) Bodyguarding, in the case of this question, is clearly less a question of having my life saved than of being entertained and awed into hero-worship, though let's not undersell Mace's fierce bodyguarding skills. She does have that kicking bulletproof limo, plus those pistols in her garter belt. What's a Hattori Hanzo when you've got (it like) that?

9. What's the scariest thing you've ever seen in a movie? Unless you count the entirety of An Inconvenient Truth, which you should, the only cinematic vision that ever truly wormed its way into the nightmare factory in my mind was Zelda, the scoliotic sister who so deeply disturbs the female lead in Pet Sematary. She freaked out my brother and me for a good long while. Rrrraaachelllllll...

10. Your favorite genre (excluding comedy and drama) is? Why are we excluding drama? So few are made anymore, especially contemporary ones, and compared to the number of comedy, horror, musical, and action fans out there, I think dramas need all the fans they can muster. I'd rather watch Jessica Lange save her farm or Josh Waitzkin learn chess or Mary McDonnell get her groove back or Emma and her mommy reconnect with each other than watch horny American teenagers get julienned abroad or watch Fred and Ginger dance. I avoid bad musicals and bad action films and most bad horror films (though not all), but I often go to dramas that I know will be bad.

11. You are given the power to greenlight movies at a major studio for one year. How do you wield this power? Movies made by and about women, employing female directors, writers, cinematographers, editors, actors, composers, production designers... and, especially, offering full creative license, adequate funds, and marketing that isn't braindead so that women who really dazzled us with their early breakout successes but have no Coppola or Miller royal bloodlines get the second, third, or fourth chances they deserve but usually get denied. And so that interesting and prodigiously talented women who still have to fight for every project wouldn't have such an uphill climb for at least a year.

12. Bonnie or Clyde? Bonnie. Sorry, Nat. It's the clothes.

13. Who are you tagging to answer this survey? Tim, Ali, and Goatdog.

Hooray to finishing what one starts, even when it takes a week!

Images © 2004 Focus Features; © 1974 Paramount Pictures/American Zoetrope; © 1997 20th Century Fox; © 1995 20th Century Fox; © 1989 Paramount Pictures; and © 1999 Milan Records

Picked Flick #35: Illusions

If Boyz N the Hood, one notch down on this list, represents a high-water mark but also a truncated possibility within the black commercial cinema, Julie Dash's Illusions survives as a gleaming nugget of underexplored, almost esoteric potential in the black art cinema, and the feminist cinema, and the formalist cinema, and the cinema of satire, and all of the other cinemas that Illusions embodies, upbraids, and smartly reassesses. Dash would eventually achieve greater notoriety as the director of Daughters of the Dust, a shimmering and polyvocal fable about the non-asssimilated Geechee cultures off the Carolina coast, and a complex and idiosyncratic miracle of markedly independent, culturally embedded filmmaking. A major foundation of Daughters' enduring mystique, not to mention a doleful fact about American movie culture, is that no feature film directed by an African-American woman had ever circulated in stateside commercial release until Daughters—a full year after causing a stir and winning an award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival—finally bowed in select American cities in 1992. Even without its consequent status as a cultural benchmark, the syncretic and oracular view of history in Daughters, simultaneously anthropological and mythological, as well as the detailed mise-en-scène and the ravishing manipulations of light and montage are the cornerstones of the film's success.

Illusions, though it lacks any trace of Daughters' dazzling visual palette, and though it concentrates on a smaller and simpler cast of characters, clearly prefigures the pliable and critical perspectives on history that would characterize the director's justly famous feature. Indeed, part of what makes Illusions so cogent and transfixing, despite a muddy sound mix and the other technical vicissitudes of a film-school project, is that its deceptively straightforward scenario is so rife with contradictions and diverse implications that a half-hour film about a handful of people can reverberate in so many directions. Illusions' central figure is Mignon Duprée (Lonette McKee), a mid-level producer and project supervisor on a fictional Hollywood lot called National Studios in 1942. Few if any women of that time would have occupied a position like Mignon's, but her intelligence, diplomacy, and stern persistence quickly impress, and the wartime context—we see rows and rows of female telephone operators and office workers, many of them charmed by the military officers who are "advising" the studio's output—furnishes its own alibi for Mignon's unlikely post. The present day's task requires Mignon to oversee the re-looping of a musical whose soundtrack was poorly synchronized, and whose female lead isn't much of a singer anyway. Mignon, brusquely managing the technicians in the soundbooth, is calmed and then engrossed by Ester Jeeter (Rosanne Katon), the young, gregarious, and unsophisticated session singer whom the studio has hired to salvage the number. Ester sings beautifully, utterly unconcerned with the political frissons surrounding her recruitment as an invisible black vocalist to redeem an all-white film. Meanwhile, Mignon's behavior grows erratic and her comportment unsettled in response to Ester's singing, leading to the revelation that Mignon herself is passing as white in her professional life. Her intuitive connection to Ester and their logical alliance within the ideological hierarchies of America's dream factory are nonetheless dangerous to Mignon's own security, not just in her job but in her very skin.

Illusions proceeds through some deft and subtle sleights of hand, building toward an emotional climax that may or may not qualify as "empowering," and demonstrating considerable resolve in leaving so many of its key questions unanswered. What is the nature or future of Mignon's acquaintance with Ester? How long has Mignon been working at National Studios, and how long will she remain there? Has she actively dissembled about her racial identity or has she simply (if "simply" is the right word) allowed her colleagues to naturalize or ignore the signs of her own otherness? These are all examples of the narrative riddles that Illusions elects not to resolve, but even more fascinating to me is the complexity, if not the inscrutability, of the film's politics. Is Mignon's labor, even her very presence in the flowchart of power at National Studios, a progressive achievement in itself, or must she use her position on someone else's behalf—and how or for whom is she to do this? What to make of the fact that the film's discourses on gender and race grow both richer and narrower as it continues, and Mignon's personal traits and circumstances subsume our earlier perspectives on other women, other races, other battlegrounds, literal and political? What to make of Dash's technical gamesmanship, using a vocal track of Ella Fitzgerald to dub Rosanne Katon in the role of Ester, such that the "real" singer isn't "really" singing, and thus refusing a clichéd linkage of blackness to authenticity? Illusions has been considered and critiqued from a multitude of positions in the decades since Dash made it, but rarely among more than academic audiences, and seldom with a full account of the movie's countless and enigmatic significations. Like Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, another monument within black women's moviemaking, Illusions resists the diminishment of black women within documented history and within Hollywood scenography, not by excavating a true-life tale of improbable heroism but by fabulating a scenario that never exactly happened, tugging at our gullibility while nonetheless stating a powerful case for the necessity of invented archives, origin myths, interbraided politics, and historical revisionism. Illusions might speak most powerfully to and from the standpoints of black women's experience, but in one way or another, as we make our way through this nifty hall of mirrors, we're all liable to catch some wisp of our own reflections. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1983 American Film Institute