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thedullwoodexperiment

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Tag Archives: Homophobia

Apron Strings (2008)

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Community, Drama, Estrangement, Homophobia, Indian cuisine, Indian culture, Jennifer Ludlam, Laila Rouass, Leela Patel, Nathan Whitaker, New Zealand, Racism, Review, Scott Wills, Sisters, Vaele Sima Urale

Apron Strings

D: Vaele Sima Urale / 90m

Cast: Laila Rouass, Scott Wills, Jennifer Ludlam, Nathan Whitaker, Leela Patel, Jodie Rimmer, Kate Harcourt, Peter Elliott, Gary Young

Michael (Whitaker) is a young Indian student whose mother, Anita (Rouass) is estranged from her sister, Tara (Patel).  On the pretext of doing a college project, he visits his aunt at the restaurant she runs, while keeping his visit a secret from Anita.  He and Tara hit it off and he visits more often until she offers him a job there.  Anita, meanwhile, is at odds with the producers of the TV cookery programme she hosts: about the content, about the recipes, and about the costumes she’s asked to wear.

One of Tara’s regular customers is Barry (Wills).  He’s a middle-aged man still living at home with his mother, Lorna (Ludlam) and his Nan (Harcourt).  Barry is drifting through life looking for one get-rich-quick scheme to pay off after another, and he sponges off his mother – who runs a cake shop – with unvarying results: the money is always wasted.  Lorna’s attempts at tough love are undermined by her soft-hearted nature, even when Barry gets into debt through his attempts to get local baker Minh (Young) to buy out his mother’s business.

As Michael gets to know his aunt, and the family history, he begins to pull away from his mother.  This only adds to the anger she feels over her cookery programme, and their relationship suffers even further.  Michael spends more time at Tara’s restaurant until, suspicious of what her son has been doing, Anita follows him there.  Meanwhile, Lorna also has to deal with the return of her daughter, Virginia (Rimmer), several months pregnant and refusing to take on her mother’s ideas of conformity.  With passions running high in both families, each member has to look at themselves before they can make peace with each other.  But can they?

MCDAPST EC005

A subtly ambitious tale that takes in themes of racism, community, homophobia – Michael is gay – injured pride, personal responsibility and motherhood, Apron Strings is a small-scale drama that tells its various stories with simple precision throughout.  Both main stories involve mothers who have become distant from their sons, and who no longer understand them.  The blame for this seems squarely laid at the doors of Anita and Lorna, but it’s offset by their unswerving love for their children, as both women strive to ensure their children are happy.  The movie shows how difficult it can be to be both supportive and unsupportive depending on the situation, and how walking such a tightrope can backfire on the mother.

The movie also shows us how striking out on their own can undermine the best intentions of the two sons.  Michael aims to reunite Anita and Tara but he’s unprepared for the emotions that learning about his aunt and his mother’s fractured relationship are awakened in him.  He finds it difficult to reconcile the image he has of his mother with that of the proud young woman who made a difficult choice in her youth and has fought hard not to let that decision define her.  With Michael so sure of his racial identity, and having such a strong sense of family, that his mother has turned her back on all that, proves too much of a shock.  And yet, by being gay, he runs the risk of his own community rejecting him, making his own need to make a decision about his future all the more important.

Alternately, Barry is a lazy conniver, a wastrel who thinks being rich will solve all his problems, and the problems he perceives his mother has.  He’s the classic underachiever who thinks he’ll make his mother proud by hitting the jackpot, but he fails to recognise that she loves him all the same, and would do even if he was working at a mundane nine-to-five job, and as long as he was content.  But Barry is restless, with no chance of getting a job, or beginning a relationship, and with no pride in his appearance.  He struggles with himself and rebels against his mother’s hopes for him, failing time after time and never learning from the experience.

As the two mothers trying hard to connect with their sons, Rouass and Ludlam both turn in polished performances that make the audience waver in their sympathies for them, as each woman is allowed to appear strong and determined and yet flawed at the same time.  Rouass is at her best when railing against the constraints Anita believes her cultural background have placed on her, and she simmers with an anger that clearly has deep-seated roots.  It’s an impressive performance, a precise, detailed characterisation that is at once charming and distressing in its emotional candour.  Ludlam is equally good, Lorna’s tired efforts to rein in her best intentions and play the hard line blunted continually by what she sees as the need to be a caring, though accommodating mother.  She too is suffused with anger, but it’s an anger that has been compromised over time and it no longer carries the emotional weight that would enable Lorna to overcome the inadequacies she feels in dealing with her son (and her daughter).

Apron Strings - scene2

With two such strong, committed performances, it’s reassuring that under the equally strong and committed direction of Urale – making her feature film debut – the other performances aren’t overwhelmed in the process.  Wills plays Barry as a sad, desperate individual with few redeeming qualities but who is strangely sympathetic as well, a neat trick given the levels of perfidy that Barry will stoop to.  Patel provides the cultural and racial grounding that informs the audience, and paints a moving portrait of a woman whose sense of family obligation has paved the way for her own happiness and sense of purpose in life.  And Michael’s sense of confusion and anger over what he perceives is his mother’s betrayal of her heritage is neatly handled by Whitaker, as well as his conflicted emotions.

Each of these performances wouldn’t be quite so good if it wasn’t for the carefully constructed and multi-layered screenplay by Shuchi Kothari.  Her only feature length screenplay to date, it contains – and maintains – a level of detail that makes it easy for Urale to deliver an affecting, quietly moving piece that looks at the generational divide evident in today’s society, and which does its best to show that bridges can be built when the willingness is there on both sides.

Rating: 8/10 – a moving portrait of two families struggling to deal with the emotional fallout from unfulfilled dreams and desires, Apron Strings is a finely tuned drama that deserves a wider audience; and the scenes of Indian food being prepared are as mouth-watering as you’d expect.

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Geography Club (2013)

17 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Andrew Caldwell, Bullying, Cameron Deane Stewart, Gary Entin, Gay, High School, Homophobia, Homosexual, Lesbian, Review, Support group, Teenagers

Geography Club

D: Gary Entin / 80m

Cast: Cameron Deane Stewart, Justin Deeley, Andrew Caldwell, Meaghan Martin, Allie Gonino, Ally Maki, Nikki Blonsky, Alex Newell, Teo Olivares, Ana Gasteyer, Marin Hinkle, Scott Bakula

It’s a sad fact that even today, with society supposedly more tolerant, and understanding, of different sexual orientations that a movie such as Geography Club can still be relevant in addressing the issue of homophobia.  Set in Goodkind High School – a misnomer if ever there was one – the movie begins with Russell arranging to meet a guy he’s met online.  He’s nervous, and unsure of his sexuality, but the meet is mainly a test of his feelings.  At the park he bumps into fellow high schooler Kevin (Deeley), and when Kevin walks away after an awkward conversation, Russell realises it was Kevin he was due to meet.

Later, on a school field trip, Russell and Kevin get to know each other better and one night they kiss.  The kiss is witnessed by Min (Maki), a fellow student.  Back at Goodkind, Min leaves Russell a message to meet her in one of the classrooms after school the next day.  Worried that she plans to blackmail him and Kevin, Russell goes to the classroom, and finds not only Min, but also Terese (Blonsky), Min’s partner, and Ike (Newell).  All three are gay and have formed the Geography Club in order to provide support for each other.  Min wants Russell to join them, but at first he refuses.  However, he goes back the next day, and in time becomes a member of the club.

Running parallel to all this are the efforts of his best friend Gunnar (Caldwell) to go out with Kimberly (Gonino), the object of Gunnar’s not inconsiderable lust.  While Russell tries to maintain a clandestine relationship with Kevin (who’s the star player on the school football team), his friendship with Gunnar threatens to fragment altogether, culminating in a disastrous weekend trip to Kimberly’s folks’ summer place.  With Gunnar counting on Russell’s support, his unwillingness to pair off with Kimberly’s friend Trish (Martin) leads to Russell being outed at school.  Determined not to let himself be categorised so unfairly, he feels it’s time for the Geography Club to go public.

Geography Club - scene

As an expose of what it’s like to be a teenager and either gay or lesbian, Geography Club falls a little short in its intentions, taking a serious subject – from the bestselling book by Brent Hartinger – and often undercutting that seriousness by placing the emphasis on humour, or by adopting a superficial approach to the material.  While the movie looks at ostracism, peer pressure, sexism, bullying, parental expectations, personal freedoms, teenage sexuality and its potential pitfalls, the perils of someone trying to find their place in the world, and the difficulty in being true to yourself (if you’re even sure what that means), this is all perhaps too much for Geography Club to address properly and with the right amount of attention for each issue.

Russell’s struggle is initially with his uncertainty about being gay, even after he and Kevin kiss.  But Min’s “intervention” has the effect of deciding the issue for him, and the rest of the movie settles for the inevitable how-long-will-it-be-before-the-main-character-is-honest-with-everyone? approach so prevalent in this type of movie.  As a result, Russell is forced to hide his true feelings for fear of being found out; he also takes part in bullying another student, Brian (Olivares), and with barely a moment’s hesitation (it’s a scene that involves Brian being humiliated in front of everyone in the school cafeteria, and yet Russell and his “friends” from the football team get away with it completely; there’s no punishment for their behaviour at all, one of the weirder instances that pop up throughout the movie).  And Russell would rather upset his best friend instead of trusting Gunnar with the knowledge that he’s gay.  With the movie changing focus so often, it’s hard to work out if there’s a main point trying to be made – be nice to gay people? bullying is an awful thing to do? friendships should be more important than emotional self-doubt?

The relationships in the movie range from the non-existent (Russell’s father is referred to but never seen, as if the family dynamic that would need to be addressed by his being gay was one issue too many for the filmmakers) to the predictable (Gunnar accepts Russell’s being gay without batting an eyelid).  Kevin is the jock who won’t commit to being homosexual because it would ruin his need to be “normal” (but he still wants to see Russell at the same time); Min and Terese appear more like lipstick lesbians than a real couple; Trish’s predatory attempts at making out with Russell are badly handled – and misconceived – considering her apparent experience with other guys; and Brian readily forgives Russell for his involvement in the cafeteria incident (but only after Russell is outed).

With the characters behaving either too predictably, or in ways that serve to advance the script rather than giving them some much-needed depth, the cast are constantly in danger of having their performances derailed by Edmund Entin’s lightweight script and Gary Entin’s overstretched direction.  Blonsky is wasted in a role that either has her playing the guitar or looking cynically at everyone else, while Martin is saddled with a one-note character and no chance of making Trish any or more interesting.  Deeley has less to do than most but what he does have to do is repetitive, and Kevin is so selfish and callow you hope he and Russell don’t end up together.  With a humorous turn from Gasteyer as an oddball teacher, and Caldwell stealing the movie as a desperate virgin (he’s like a young Jack Black at times), it’s left to Stewart to keep the audience’s attention and provide the sympathetic character the audience needs to make it through.  Fortunately he does just enough to engage our sympathies, but it’s a close run thing, and as expected, once Russell is outed, he becomes less annoying as well.

Rating: 6/10 – not quite as involving as was hoped for, perhaps, but still a pleasant enough way to spend eighty minutes, provided you have a tolerance for less than convincing character motivation; a decent enough effort, and a worthy subject matter, but too lacking in real drama to make much of an impact.

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Mini-Review: Filth (2013)

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Black comedy, Drama, Drug addiction, Eddie Marsan, Homophobia, Irvine Welsh, James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, John Sessions, Jon S. Baird, Racism, Review, Sex addiction, Sexism

Filth

D: Jon S. Baird / 97m

Cast: James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Eddie Marsan, Martin Compston, Imogen Poots, John Sessions, Shirley Henderson, Gary Lewis, Kate Dickie, Joanne Froggatt, Jim Broadbent, Emun Elliott

Freewheeling, offensive, scabrous adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel that pushes so many boundaries it’s hard to keep track of them all. No politically incorrect aspect is ignored: homophobia, sexism, racism, substance abuse – all indulged in to within an inch of the script’s life. McAvoy is Detective-Sergeant Bruce Robertson, angling for promotion to Detective-Inspector, but saddled with the small matter of the murder of a Japanese tourist to deal with first. Add to that the manoeuvrings of his fellow Detecive-Sergeants – Poots, Lewis, Bell and Elliott – as well as a subplot involving his wife (Shauna Macdonald), and the mystery of who is making obscene phone calls to fellow lodge member Bladesey’s wife (a panting Henderson), and Bruce has got his work cut out for him. It’s a shame then he has such a dependency for drugs, booze and illicit sex. As the pressure on him builds and he becomes ever more desperate to secure his promotion, Bruce’s world slowly but surely falls apart, and in the process, he starts to see things that aren’t there: from his younger brother Davey, killed in a childhood accident, to increasingly bizarre sequences involving his doctor (Broadbent).

Filth - scene

This is a potent adaptation, with plenty of energy and ‘they-didn’t-did-they?” moments of humour. McAvoy continues to cement his reputation as one of our finest young actors (okay, so he is 34), while amongst the supporting cast, both Marsan (as Bladesey) and Sessions (as Robertson’s boss) shine in their respective roles (it’s particularly good to see Sessions back on the big screen, and in a comic role as well). Baird directs with confidence and integrates the fantasy sequences with aplomb; he also manages the cast effectively and with a firm eye for avoiding caricature. There are times when the movie isn’t for the faint-hearted (“Have you started yet, baby cock?”), but anyone with a fondness for the novel or a penchant for politically incorrect humour will have a ball, especially when it comes to the photocopier game. Much better than you might expect and driven by a powerhouse performance by McAvoy, Filth is a breath of often rancid air that is all the better for not pulling its punches.

Rating: 8/10 – with a title that is far from ironic, Filth lives up to its name but is often searingly funny; a descent into one man’s nightmare that isn’t afraid to look into the abyss and then tell it to f**k off.

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