<rant>
I go into every movie with a natural optimism that perhaps only small children have when they enter a toy store. I have a Pavlovian response to the lights going down, the initial blurps and roars that come out of the speakers as the projection and sound systems power on and adjust to levels of electricity that could power your house for a week if it were shunted away from a two hour movie. I always smile automatically, and my stomach does a small leap as I am sucked down into the vortex of another world. Therefore, when I have been betrayed by a film, and I don't mean disappointed (a word I will forever hear in Kevin Kline's voice), I mean the movie moves from being not good to being so bad that it seems the creators are trying to piss me and everyone else in audience off on purpose - I don't take it lightly. I emerge from the theatre a scorned and bitter person. The real world is reduced to that sepia-toned washed out look that's so dejiour in cinematography here at the beginning of the 21st century, and nothing tastes quite right as if the world of food had been finally completely corrupted with that generic teriyaki flavor packet that all insto-meals come with. I stay that way for a while.
I'm still torqued off about the two movies that sucked about four hours out of my life, so much so that I write this in effort to redeem those wasted hours by alerting anyone reading this to either avoid these movies, or at least to notice the wreckage of expectations strewn around the experiential speed bumps these two movies represent, and therefore ease their own psyches over them with care and foreknowledge.
What movies are these you might wonder, with some exasperation, by now? They are "Boys Don't Cry" and "Shadow of the Vampire." What I find interesting is that the reasons these two movies suck are complementary opposites to one another. Each represents the yin or the yang of what can go terribly, desperately wrong with a movie.
"Shadow of the Vampire" has a wonderful script, a good cast (with the exception of the always annoying, thus appropriately cast in this film, John Malkovich), a great premise, and Willem Defoe batting (ha, ha) one out of the park. However, the direction destroys this movie shot by shot. It is unwatchable. You will find yourself finally motivated to take on those tedious chores around your house that you tend to avoid, like dusting or emptying trash. Lord help those who saw this in a theatre.
"Boys Don't Cry's" direction is artistic, thoughtful and exquisitely composed. However, everything else, particularly the story (which is based on true events) and the underlying "politically correct" indictment of society, is wretched. Even Hilary Swank who plays Tina Brandon, a woman who presented herself to the world as a man, doesn't really pull the part off as well as you would think, considering that she won the Oscar for the role. The first time that she appears on screen as a man, and frankly every subsequent time, I thought she really looked like a woman trying to look masculine. Let me put it this way, I was more convinced by Barbara Streisand's boy costume in "Yentl" than I was by the man costume in "Boys Don't Cry."
Before I go on, allow me to deal with the concept "Boys Don't Cry" is trying to foist upon you. It's simply this: Teena Brandon was killed because she was a woman pretending to be a man, and therefore it was a hate crime, and we the audience should be appalled. However, that's a lot like claiming Hitler created the concentration camps out of an altruistic intention to rid the world of people he considered inferior. Even though that's how the Nazis of the day would describe their behavior and perhaps some of them even believed it, it doesn't disguise the fact that in truth they were torturing and killing people out of sheer monstrosity. The truth of the Teena Brandon story is that she was a criminal, a car thief and the committer of other lovely illegal activities, ran around with other criminals who themselves were between prison terms, and was killed because she stole the girlfriend of one of the meanest SOB's in her little criminal clique. She even went so far as to fake sex with the teen age (read "underage") girl by using a strap-on penis without the girl's knowledge. Talk about underhanded, lying, evil behavior. The movie presents these realities, but it tries really hard to gloss over them and present Teena Brandon as this sweet, optimistic kid with big eyes who was just a victim of circumstance. The fact that it achieves this air-brushing to an extent goes back the skill of the director, may she have a long career - provided she avoids making any more BS propaganda films like this one. Now, it is tragic that Teena Brandon was murdered, as all murder is tragic, but it angers me that the true causes and motivations behind her murder are twisted in this film in order to make a (false) commentary which tries to place the blame on "bigoted society" rather than accurately portraying the fact that this woman was a bad person amongst bad people. While her death wasn't inevitable, it certainly was always a present danger in the circles she traveled, therefore she was always at risk, regardless of her sexual identity issues. More simply stated, her lying about her gender contributed to her demise, but it was not the primary or sole cause of it. The film tries to get you to believe the lie that she was killed because she pretended to be a man.
Sadly, that is not the worst problem with "Boys Don't Cry." Towards the end, when the murders are occurring, a toddler is present in the actual shot (film shot, not gun shot) when one of the actresses is "killed." The child is standing there crying, clearly beyond just the unhappy crying that most kids do. This child is freaked out. Children do not cry like that unless they are in intense pain or are scared out of their wits. (It's hard to even type this without getting sad and angry.) And this is when the scene starts. The actress is then "shot" - she lurches backwards grabbing her chest, then flops down "dead" on the floor. The baby's reaction to this is heartrending. She jumps when the shot goes off, probably from the sound of the "squib" used to make it look like the bullet hitting the actress, and when the actress hits the ground, the baby spins around to her, holds out her little arms, and just screams. You can tell the child is absolutely terrified. Now, there are laws to prevent cruelty to animals in the making of a film. How in the hell is it legal or justifiable to terrorize a little baby just to get one shot in a movie? It's ironic that the film is trying to moralize at you about the horrors of intolerance and yet commits such a completely unnecessary immoral act on a baby just to get one scene on film.
"Boys" however is directed beautifully. Some of the narrative choices are simply brilliant. For instance, the scene when Teena is exposed (literally), she is dragged into the bathroom and two guys pull her pants down to see what's there or not. Teena herself, as "Brandon" the boy, is shown observing the scene with the rest on the onlookers in the hall, as unconcerned as they are. Nice touch. It's just too bad the story's theme is so wrong. And that not one character is one we can care about. As with other mind garbage movies with no story but beautiful images (for instance "The Cell"), you begin to yearn for the final credits so you can hit the exit to go get the bad taste out of your mouth.
But, a good story filled with great characters is seemingly subject to the success of the directing effort. "Shadow" contains one of the best performances by an actor I've seen in a while. Willem Defoe manages to make it completely believable that a real vampire was cast in the first vampire film ever, while managing to play the humor convincingly as well. A weird, funny scene where he sits down with a couple of the crew to shoot the breeze and suck back some whiskey is note perfect. And the premise - a real vampire played "himself" in the first vampire movie - is fabulous. You can even detect greatness in the script, but it is so obscured by the leaden directing that you almost have to close your eyes and listen to the words without the visuals messing things up to hear how good this movie could have been. I hope the director of this film never directs again.
Oh! A perfect analogy just occurred to me: watching the directing in "Shadow of the Vampire" is like watching someone club a cute, fluffy baby seal to death, particularly when they don't know how to do it and so the baby seal struggles and cries a long time before the fatal blow is dealt. This clubbed baby seal of a picture doesn't die until the credits roll, if you make it that far in the movie. I only finished it out of sheer spite.
So, "Boys" tells a terrible story within a wonderfully made film, and "Shadow" ruins a great story through an abysmal production. Avoid both of these films. Please. For your own peace of mind.
</rant>
