I am really starting to feel bad for Sienna Miller. She is a seemingly talented actress who just keeps ending up in bad movies. I actually really loved her performance in Factory Girl, though the movie left much to be desired. She is back at Sundance this year with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a loose adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel of the same name. I've heard a lot of grumbling the past few months over the fact that so many liberties were going to be taken on this adaptation, however I have never read the book and was prepared to let the movie stand on its own merit. Sadly, it did not. The film never really had much of a point and I found it tedious. The main character is played by the incredibly sexy Jon Foster, who I have to say made it possible for me to sit through it. I was waiting with baited breath for him to take off his clothes and finally he did. And of course the film is a bisexual love triangle, so I was waiting for him to get it on with Peter Sarsgaard, which eventually he did (Peter seemingly riding straddle?). I hate to reduce the film to pornography but I was grasping.
One filmmaker who walks the fine line between pornography and filmmaking is Bruce LaBruce. His latest film Otto; Or, Up With Dead People premiered at Sundance this week. The film is about a gay zombie, but as LaBruce described at the public screening I attended, it is more about how young people today feel dead inside and that capitalistic culture is killing the souls of its youth. The film is clever and imaginative, and perhaps the glossiest LaBruce film to date. It also seemed to me the least sexually explicit film of his I had seen and I found myself waiting restlessly for the next scene of hardcore action. I also found that when we finally did see, say, a 10-man blood orgy, I felt relieved in the same way as when pornographic storylines finally pay off. This is not to say that LaBruce makes pornography, but rather that he is capable of making a film with elements of it and have it, it my view, in no way detract from his goal. In fact, it is the goal—gay men have sex, and as Derek Jarman reminded me just one night prior, sometimes there is an inherent violence in gay sex. In all, I want to commend LaBruce for still carrying the torch for explicit sexuality but also for continuing to have something to say beyond that.
I also had a chance to catch Sunshine Cleaning today, which I loved, as well as Phoebe in Wonderland—which is heavy-handed at times, but I also allowed myself to become emotionally swept up in it. In Wonderland, Felicity Huffman gives yet another powerhouse performance of a woman that seems just steps from a nervous breakdown. I am reminded, as I always am when it comes to Huffman, of her short-lived but amazing Showtime series Out of Order. In this case, Huffman is playing a woman trying to raise a daughter she thinks is just creative, but who is really suffering from the beginning stages of Tourette's Syndrome. Playing her daughter is the next in line for the title of most precocious actor, Elle Fanning (Dakota's sister), who is remarkable in the film.
Another interesting moment in Wonderland is when a young boy, who is allowed to play the role of the Queen of Hearts in his school's production of Alice In Wonderland, finds that his red cape has the word "Fagot" written on it (the children are only 10 and cannot spell). The drama teacher, played impeccably by Patricia Clarkson, gets out a dictionary and asks the kids to look up what the word means (bundle of sticks). She tells them that if they are going to use a word they should know what it means. Which made me recall Alan Cumming and GLAAD's crusade to eliminate the word "Faggot" from our vernacular, which they announced the day before. Clearly it isn't the word's fault, and I think we could all do with a little more education and a little less eradication of anything these days.
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