OH CINEMA, WHERE YOU GONNA RUN? Some very quick notes on a few of the movies I’ve watched demi-recently.

The Cockettes: You can find out why I wanted to watch this documentary about an avant-garde hippie-esque drag group here–the Geerdes quote is great. I think I tried to use it in the Weekly Standard once but they scrubbed it…. The movie is a labor of love, but if you weren’t there you probably don’t care about the ramshackle performances, and the era’s darker tints are either excused (constant stealing, preference for welfare over work, general self-centeredness) or treated much too glancingly (deaths, sex and parenting, the alleyways people ran down in the search for ecstasy). Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary, which I saw a bit later, did a generally better job of actually talking about punk (and s/m, and drugs, and probably other stuff I’m forgetting…) as part of a search for something beyond the self. Even Rise Above gave very little attention to that topic, obviously the angle most interesting to me. But I also just liked lead singer Lynn Breedlove a lot more than I liked any of the Cockettes; maybe it’s just her scraped-up, cadging, laughing, low-rent voice. I think Tribe 8 was the second concert I ever went to (the first was the Violent Femmes opening for the B-52s).

A Letter to Three Wives: Desperate Housewives of the 1950s. I mean that in a good way! A really well-done “women’s picture” about married life, with a surprising absence of children and an unusual, souffle-light mix of candor and utopianism about class.

The Lost Weekend: Sickly, and then sickly-sweet, melodrama. Was I just born too late for this? Only intermittently seemed to capture the shame and disintegration of addiction.

Silent Hill: Love the scabby, rancid color scheme of this movie. Love the idea that the deserted, fog-shrouded and frightening “daytime” Silent Hill is actually the happy version–it gets much worse! Found the last half-hour or so speechifying and boring. Another of the seemingly endless “evil comes from people who have been hurt! Fear the weak, not the powerful!” horror movies. I could really use fewer of those–obviously it isn’t entirely untrue, but when it’s pushed relentlessly as the only explanation for cruelty or, as it is in Silent Hill, used to reject the possibility of forgiveness and allow the audience to wallow in vengeance, then I find it really cheap.

28 Weeks Later: Starts out really powerfully, focusing on the horrible choices made during a zombie apocalypse and the need to come to terms with those choices somehow after the immediate crisis has passed. I was super invested in this “Where did they bury the survivors?” story and was disappointed that overall that isn’t the story this movie wants to tell. Still, it’s fast-paced and compelling, maybe more of a suspense flick than the misery-horror show I was hoping for.