Thursday, 10/16
It's Dorothy
This says more about me than it does about anything else in the world, but I still have some moderate amount of guilt that I was once late to a T-ball practice in 1985 because I had my dad take me to see Return to Oz for a second time and we didn't tell the coach that's why I was late. It wasn't even the first time I'd seen it! And we knew we'd be late! Simply shameful.
But while I grew up in Kansas, and Wizard of Oz references are, of course, unavoidable (basically, you tell people you're from Kansas and they ask about The Wizard of Oz first and then they ask if people in Kansas actually ride cows in the street, or at least this is what happened to me at a baseball game in Cleveland one time) I've never had much connection to the 1939 film, which I acknowledge is glorious but which I've never felt any emotional attachment to. I have my own young children now, so maybe this will change, but then again, maybe not.
(For what it's worth, Return to Oz is a different story, I've loved it and been terrified by it since 1985, and watching it as an adult I kind of can't believe I took to it so well, it's truly frightening and I was not exactly a bold kid with a robust courage.)
As if it needs to be said, though, a lot of people do have a deep connection to The Wizard of Oz and Judy Garland in her ruby slippers, and to Diana Ross in The Wiz (which, frankly, I also remember better from my childhood), and Jeffrey McHale's documentary tries to tease out exactly what's so enchanting and captivating about it all. He lands on Dorothy, as a character, as the overarching factor that pulls us all in, or at least Dorothy's experience and what it says to all of us about our own places in a sometimes strange and unforgiving world. McHale presents us with a number of different actors who've played Dorothy in various adaptations (films, Broadways productions of both The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz, even Muppet movies), each talking about who Dorothy is and how she spoke to each of their lives. And while we hear the voices of quite a few others— scholars, artists, descendants of L. Frank Baum's— the Dorothys are the only faces we actually see interviewed on screen. Not a bad touch.
There's a whole lot of archival footage, of course, which is necessary given how much attention is devoted to Judy Garland, and we're most absorbed when the movie turns to Garland and her life and struggles and place in cultural and social history, and the film sometimes sags a bit when we hear from some of the others. This is hardly their fault, of course— few other people are going to seem as compelling when we could be hearing more about Judy Garland. Outside of Garland, we do at least get some examination of The Wiz and its rather tepid reception from the largely white critical community, although I'd be interested to see a sharper take on all of that (not a place this movie was ever going to go).
I'm not completely sold that the film makes its case as well as it would have liked to, but I'm also probably not the one it's making its case to— Dorothy does mean a lot to a lot of people and the film has the best of intentions, which can take you a long way.
(It's Dorothy plays tonight beginning at 7:30 and 8:00, both screenings at Boulevard Theatres in Old Town.)
F*cktoys
Before watching this, I happened to read yet another article with some joker insisting AI is going to make real filmmakers and artists obsolete, and the main thing that ran through my head while the movie played was this:
AI could never.
This is true both of the good things and the bad things about F*cktoys (the title doesn't actually have an asterisk in it, for what that's worth, but we'll keep this post PG-13, although I recently discovered you can actually say that word more than once in a PG-13 movie now, which surprised me and which also kind of neutralizes a pretty good joke in John Waters' Cry-Baby), but as someone who values film as art, even when it's (intentionally) trash art, I find it thrilling when you can clearly tell this is exactly the movie the filmmakers wanted to make, even when parts of the movie aren't, themselves, all that thrilling.
Annapurna Sriram wrote, directed, and stars in the movie, which opens with her character being told by a psychic that she has a curse on her, and that's why bad things have been happening to her, she's been getting progressively sicker, her hair is falling out, that sort of thing (she seems fine, but for this movie, that's also fine). Getting the curse lifted will cost her a cool grand, so she gets a second opinion, and then another couple opinions, and yeah, pretty much everything thinks she's cursed. C'est la vie. She's a sex worker who specializes in... well... it seems like she specializes in something, but it's really not clear what that might be, her clients are all over the map. She reunites with an old friend, the two take off on adventures (sort of), and if there's a really strong narrative it either doesn't really matter or gets a little bit lost, but it's hardly the point anyway. The movie's shot with a handheld camera and enough lens flares to make J.J. Abrams drool, there are occasionally people in hazmat suits (some of whom have water coolers on their heads?) cleaning something at the side of the frame, there's chaos and silliness and grotesquerie galore, and while it doesn't all hit, it's a heck of a lot of fun to see someone just let the firehouse of their imagination spew out whatever it can.
The movie's momentum also drops, hard, about a third of the way in and it never recovers. Things do, also, eventually get far more serious, and this might be part of why we slow down so much, but it does become a problem. Without giving anything away, by the end we wonder a bit why we've spent all this time doing all this, especially as even the movie itself seems to have an ironic detachment in its most deadly serious parts.
But— and this is important— these are flaws created by human beings. These are human ideas that simply aren't perfectly executed, but we can have no doubt that a person was behind them. There's passion and creation, there's a spark of life and strangeness and surprise that we know can only come from that certain thing inside us that makes us human. Come on, that's why we love the movies.
(F*cktoys plays tonight at 10:15 at Boulevard Theatres in Old Town.)
