The · second · draft · of · JC's · existence

INFEST WISELY
(Jim Munroe, Jon Sasaki, Kirby Ferguson, Craig MacNaughton, Rose Bianchini, Chris McCawley, Benny Zenga, 2007)

Jim's new movie has seven directors and one plot, divvying up the honors in a very interesting solution to the logistics of feature-film scale. Lousy sound is a more conventional approach to the dilemma. And the lack of collective visual emphasis means that eventually I found myself blanking on some plot elements. However, while the look is rough, it is also more or less unified, more than you'd expect - although I guess MacNaughton's supercompetence does stand out a bit and, to be honest, the punk-rock sequence looks like a salvage job. Pluses: The script is fun - I gave it a pitch-session designation of "Slacker meets Alphaville", and they liked that - the deadpan comic tone is very watchable esp. in Sasaki's opening, the evil-shmoo-bugs concept works, and the performers are great.

OUTRAGEOUS!
(Richard Benner, 1977)
Thankfully one of the producers was there at last night's Inside Out screening, so I got a chance to untangle some of the tendrils of this incredibly complicated movie built up around the unbelievable Craig Russell, whose performance and drag impersonations just stand on top of the thing. It is not told from the inside of the queer community. But in the white-guy-ends-apartheid role, they have mind-bogglingly put in a Crazy Woman. (this is firstly a function of Margaret Gibson's source story, which is told from the author's POV) At first you get squirmy and expect that the parallel this character articulates between her and drag queen Russell - "We're both crazy" - will be used as an excuse for the good old queer self-loathing, but in fact this is in a different tradition, that King-of-Hearts, madness-as-sentimental-symbol-for-nonconformity thing that was in vogue then. The problem is that Hollis McLaren plays this woman very theatrically - she actually STARES THROUGH HER FINGERS at one point - and in general she probably inspired Catherine O'Hara's turn in "We're Gonna Be All Right You Creep Leaving Home And All, Eh?" But even though wr/dir Richard Benner was apparently far more interested in this theme than in the gay scene, and even though Benner seriously does not know how to point a camera, this actually does end up giving a pretty good time capsule of Toronto's 70s gay scene - and not just the hairstyles! We're also presented with a scene that is tiny, remote and claustrophobic, with drag queens at the bottom of a rigid internal hierarchy, everyone's on the skids, and dykes are harpies from another planet. Financed with cash from friends, not Alliance or the CFDC, this movie has to take responsibility for its own neurosis, but it also must be credited with the brilliance of the impersonations, and nb: apparently Russell was Mae West's house boy, and the routines he does are all impersonations of MAE WEST'S impersonations! Like I said: complicated.

DIARY OF A LOST GIRL
(G. W. Pabst, 1929)
Yow, what is not to like about Louise Brooks. Seriously. This is the first of her too-few movies I've seen straight through and as Siue says she is The Most Beautiful Person In History; with her angular, boyish fashions and wry sideways smile to compliment her beaming grin, she also leaps out of her context like she got there by time machine. And unlike Craig Russell there's a hell of a movie built around her. The plastic is a meller about a fair maiden's victimization by a conniving pharmacist - in fact ALL the men in this film are either ogres or clods, and there's a bald headmaster who you will laugh at a lot once I whisper you the words "Stephen Harper". But Pabst, who knows his Brecht (he did the Threepenny movie), twists this stuff two ways. When he feels like it, he directs actors with a subtlety and precision I've never seen in a silent movie before: a lot of the narrative is told entirely with the actors' eyes. But at the same time, this film is not just witty, it's GOOFY, with broad comic scenes that skirt the ridiculous in a way that challenges you from left field - dare you laugh at a silent masterpiece when it presents a spoiled aristocrat failing to milk a cow, or a horny bastard (one of several) with a Kropotkinesque goatee mincing around the dance lesson like he's in a Dwain Esper movie? It's like, popular entertainment!!