From the Ledge

Just for the record, as someone who has been a long-standing, proudly goldstar stamp-bearing, laminated card-carrying member of the homo brigade, gay life isn’t all about getting laid at every lamppost (or on a king-size bed with 300 thread-count Frette sheets for some of us).  You’d never think otherwise, though, given the continuous mass media attention, bordering on sensationalism, on the sexual aspects of being gay– from the highly-eroticized, fetishistic male pairings in Lady Gaga’s Madonna rehash of a video, “Alejandro”, to the crackling, butch-loving intensity between vampire Bill and werewolf Sam in that Arkansas hotel room in the season opener of True Blood, to the flurry of blog twitters about Inception breakout star (and Goodman Theater headliner) Tom Hardy’s admission about his “fluid” sexual history – for example, here’s The Huffington Post’s headline:  “Inception Star Tom Hardy:  I’m An Actor, Of Course I’ve Had Gay Sex.”  Classy.   I am very ambivalent about all this so-called “mainstream acceptance” – all of this was almost unthinkable ten years ago (Will and Grace was pretty neutered, as many have observed), so I’m glad we’ve shown some progress in portraying and disseminating gay-themed material, but there is so much more to being gay than having sex.  Gay people, just like, uhmmm, straight people, struggle with relationships, face disappointments and failures, secondguess ourselves, aspire to create and nurture families as best as we can.  This whole dichotomy was pretty apparent in my previous weekend’s arts and culture activities:  one night, I was at Bailiwick Chicago’s F**king Men, a contemporary, all-male version of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, written by recent Tony winner (for Memphis) Joe Di Pietro; the next day I saw the exquisitely honest Lisa Cholodenko-helmed film The Kids Are All Right, possibly the best film I’ve seen so far this year.  F**king Men, despite a solid staging, sadly reinforces gay sexual stereotypes;  The Kids Are All Right goes beyond the gay sex (there is hardly any in it too, which is refreshing) and beautifully paints truthful, compelling 21^st century lives.

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Tags: Bailiwick Chicago

As some of you know, Oscar-watching is one of my main, almost irrational, obsessions, right up there with cashmere, fried food, spa getaways, theater marathons, diva-offs, and anything involving Ryan Gosling.  So this is a pretty big weekend for me, as the 82^nd annual Academy Awards are announced on Sunday, March 7.  For the second straight year, I am posting my predictions for all 24 categories, with detailed, sometimes erudite, sometimes catty, but overall insightful (if I may say so, ahem) commentary for the top six categories of Picture, Director, Lead Actor, Lead Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress.  And yes, I have seen close to 98% of the nominated films (I just couldn’t get myself to pay money to see Megan Fox wreck Transformers:  Revenge of the Fallen, nominated for Sound Mixing)

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So everyone who has been reading From the Ledge for the past couple of years know that my usual blogging diet of theater, opera, art, world cinema and other more erudite artistic pursuits is supplanted by Oscar frenzy come February and March of the year.  Albee and O’Neill and Puccini and Wong Kar-wai are put out to temporary pasture while I obsess about…uhmmm, Sandra Bullock and Anne Hathaway, and everyone in between.  Speaking of Anne Hathaway, she will be bright up and early in Los Angeles tomorrow morning, February 2^nd, to announce the nominations for the 82^nd Annual Academy Awards (together with Academy President Tom Sherak) at 5:35 am Pacific time, so I think it’s apropros to unveil in today’s post my third annual fearless Oscar nominations predictions.  Although there are some pretty sure things (Mo’Nique should have started looking at couture swatches weeks ago), I think there’ll be some surprises, and hopefully some genuine jawdroppers, in tomorrow’s nominations announcement.

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Tags: Academy Awards

If  I’m on a date and the guy I’m with doesn’t get, doesn’t love, or even worse, has not heard of, Michael Haneke’s brilliant Cache, certainly top of the list among the best films of the ‘noughts, then I’m probably not seeing him after we’ve gone Dutch on the check that night.   I know, I know, it sounds so snobbish and condescending, but hey, I’m a guy who thinks you are the type of films you see (and if there’s any mention at all of Judd Apatow, or yes, Na’vis, in the course of the date, I’d be surreptitiously calling for my cab home while he’s in the bathroom).  Cache, the story of a French family who keeps on receiving videotapes of themselves under surveillance from an unknown source, is one of the most intellectually challenging, psychologically provocative, and artistically impressive films I’ve ever seen, with a perfect Gordian knot of a screenplay that allows its themes to linger, disturb and provoke you days, no, even months, after you’ve seen it.  I didn’t think Haneke could ever top Cache, but he comes quite close to doing so with his latest film, The White Ribbon, the deserving winner of many, many film prizes including the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or last May, the European Film Awards Best Picture last December, and the Golden Globes Best Foreign Language Film last weekend (and the pleasure of seeing Haneke, truly one of our times’ great directors, humbly, somewhat bewilderedly, accept his prize, more than makes up for the sight of  James Cameron winning the Best Director award for that Wii video game masquerading as cinema, Avatar).  Sure, The White Ribbon is infuriating, chilly, dense, and slow-moving at times (some of the reasons which keep it, in my opinion, from surpassing Cache as Haneke’s personal best), but more importantly it’s also powerful, intelligent, sophisticated, and visually stunning all the time. 

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Tags: Michael Haneke

For most of my professional life, I have traveled regularly, sometimes gruelingly, for work, first in Asia, when I was right out of university in the Philippines, and then within the domestic US for the past ten years or so.   Business travel is quite different from leisure travel:  you’re usually stuck working 12-14 hour days in some nowheresville location (King of Prussia, PA?  Dubuque, IA?  Tulsa, OK? Just some of my glamorous markers over the past decade of being on the road for work), staying in nondescript, generic chain hotels with bad instant coffee beside the coffeemaker in the bathroom, stuck in nondescript, generic airports waiting out a snowstorm, a thunderstorm, or general airline wackiness such as delayed flight crews and missing airplanes (which happened to me recently- I mean an airplane should either be at the hangar or at the gate, right? I was flabbergasted that American Airlines delayed my flight for two hours because no one seemed to know where the plane was parked at!).  People who’ve never traveled frequently for their job would never understand the bone-weariness, the loneliness, the sublimated gnawing that there should be a life beyond airport security lines and boarding passes that “road warriors” experience.  Or that almost irrational need to accumulate airline miles and hotel points, almost as if getting that United 1K frequent flier status or that Starwood Hotels’ Platinum Preferred Guest elite level can make up for the significant amount of personal and home time that you’ve given up.   So I’m blown away by Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, currently being buzzed about as a strong Oscar Best Picture contender.  At the risk of sounding clichéd, it’s like the film held up a piercing mirror to the lifestyle I’ve led.  Many scenes seemed to have been picked out of my and many of my friends’ recent worklives. And although I continue to admire Precious and The Hurt Locker, the two other anointed Oscar frontrunners, and consider them significant cinematic achievements, I have to say Up In the Air is more resonant, more emotionally-satisfying, and definitely, my hands-down pick for the Best Film of 2009 so far.

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Tags: Up In the Air

The name “Lars von Trier” evokes as much dread in me as the words “H1N1″, “chicken feet”, and “I’m staying over tonight.”   After suffering through The Idiots, Dancer In the Dark (and who, other than this oft-accused misogynistic director would make ethereal, eternal cinematic icon Catherine Deneuve carry a plate of spaghetti while singing “My Favorite Things”?  Please, some things are sacred cows!) and parts of The Kingdom, I said I’d rather have my eyes poked out than sit through another one of his films.  So no Breaking the Waves, Dogville, or Manderlay for me.   However, after hearing and reading all the buzz, both heated denouncement and rapturous praise, I wouldn’t be true to my self-proclaimed cineaste status if I didn’t go to see his latest opus, Antichrist, the notorious sensation of the global film festival circuit this year (actually I was just more curious than anything else).  Now on a commercial run after its sold-out screening at the recently concluded Chicago International Film Festival, I must say the film is ridiculous, overblown, and a whole lot of sheep dung for significant parts of it, but it is also undeniably hypnotic, impressively infuriating, and ultimately, for better or for worse, memorable.   And it’s probably the funniest film I’ve seen all year (yes, it’s funnier than Bruno!), hilarious in its self-absorption and pretension, like an eccentric, middling artist at a pseudo-hipster gallery opening.

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Tags: Chicago International Film Festival, Lars von Trier