A weekend of sexual transgressions (something new and different)

Sadly, despite my doubtlessly compelling title for this post, I've been up to no such things. Would that I weren't so single, so new in town... So, yeah, pretty much, I spent all weekend watching movies with titles that the big lesbian check-out girl at the video store didn't want to read aloud.

First up, I Am A Sex Addict. I didn't know anything about this movie when I picked it up but I'm hopelessly in love with it. It's autobiographical-- and about the director/star's life story. He's this scrawny, rodent-y looking little guy-- totally unassuming and soft-spoken-- who composed this piece, ostensibly part of step 12, about his fetish for getting blowjobs from prostitutes. I found this movie funny and touching and wrenching and relatable in ways I don't want to talk about too much on a blog (dammit, we all have vices that border on addiction, right? Right?)... So, um, I'm just gonna say that it's well worth the rental and move on.

I also rented Lonesome Jim, Steve Buscemi's directorial debut. I'd wanted to see this one for a while, mostly because Steve Buscemi is a weird little bug-eyed Hollywood anomaly, now, isn't he? But, then, well, I had a week of new job ennui/typical insomnia, and I fell asleep about 20 minutes from the end. Yeah, I was bored through most of what I saw. Garden State did it better. The Moonlight Mile did it better--I definitely think Ellen Pompeo is sexier than Liv Tyler. And a million other comedies about loser guys who return home to have nervous breakdowns have done just as well if not better. I say that, mind you, without having gone to the trouble of rewinding to see what I missed at the end-- but like I said, I was bored. Why re-bore myself? Oh, and, it's one more movie in which I question the taste of a female character. Casey Affleck is a dork and a loser and is totally boring when he isn't being spiteful. Liv Tyler's character is at least cute and sweet-- and she keeps insisting that she thinks he's "great??!!!" What's wrong with her? Oh, yeah, that's right! She was written by some guy who is not likely to see such fantasies come to life unless he writes them and hires an Elf Queen to act it out. It's old, old, old. And tired! Don't make me bring up all the reasons I hated Sideways...

Then, The Libertine. What's to say? This movie got bad reviews. It's not THAT bad. But it's not particularly memorable, either. The woman who plays Johnny Depp's wife is great. Oh, and this: I've arrived, because of this movie, at the conclusion that both Freddie Kruger and Anya (in demon guise) from the Buffy TV show, had syphilis. I have deduced this because whoever did Johnny's make-up during the nose-rotting-away scenes must've modeled the look on those two. Who knew? Hmmm... I've never sat thru one of those Freddie Kruger movies, but I imagine it might cast a new light on his character if we suddenly all understood that he's nothing but a misunderstood STD carrier.

And now I come to Mysterious Skin, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I've praised (though not enough) in my post about Brick back in August, takes his blouse off a lot (as my friend Jason put it). I would like to throw this one up on a wall in comparison to The Heart is deceitful Above all Things. Here's movie in which a couple of kids are raped and fondled when they're eight years old and the course of their entire lives are determined by those events. One becomes completely asexual and is, like, scared to death of his own dick. The other, the blouseless JG-L, becomes a gay prostitute. JG-L is magnetic and lusty. One character (the bloomingly beautiful Michelle Trachtenburg (two Buffy references in one post?)) says something to the effect that "where most people have a heart Neil (JG-L) has a big black hole that will suck you in." I would argue that this isn't entirely accurate, as he proves himself to be remarkably sensitive-- and the only person with even the slightest power to heal the other boy. But he is a person with a gravitational pull all his own. He is called a "planet" at another point. How interesting that a character should be so frequently described in the vocabulary of the celestial sphere that even I should fall into such diction!

But, as I was going to say, I think this story shows a logical progression of events and consequences that makes sense to me in the way that the endless stream of equally-weighted atrocities that befall the kid in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things begins to ring false. I mean, it makes sense to me that a kid who is sexually transgressed against-- by a man on whom he has a crush, by the way-- by a man who makes him feel singled out and elevated-- would go on to lead a life in which he seeks out replications of such feelings again and again. But a story in which a kid is simply an object upon whom tragedy is exacted with great frequency by an assortment of delinquent adults? Well, at what point does he begin to grow up and acquire some agency-- some ability to continue or resist the pattern? I mean, I wouldn't care which way he went-- whether he attempted to transcend or sought out further destructive behaviors, as does the character in Mysterious Skin, but to posit a child as nothing but a punching bag, varying only the angle to the punch? What's compelling about that?

And also, I don't want to feel uptight about stuff like this but some part of the filming of a movie like The Heart is Deceitful is real and that means that a real little kid actor had to watch all the stuff going on around him. I mean, I've seen some movies in which the treatment of the kid actors is a little troubling lately-- I mean, in a movie like Lovely and Amazing, the other characters talk about how the child is ugly and whatnot. And Little Miss Sunshine did some of the same things. But when an adult actress berates and insults a little kid on screen, well, doesn't he actually have to be hearing it in real life? Not to mention his watching her shoot up and have sex with an assortment of unpleasant fellows... And, I suppose, this is something else that Mysterious Skin does right. In all of the scenes wherein sexual acts are transpiring between kids and grown-ups, it's all done w/ tight shots on the characters' faces-- in other words, you know that no kids were present when the molesting baseball coach was the making faces that would accompany his ostensibly being fisted by two eight-year-olds. What I'm saying is that it's just as easy to effectively convey the information necessary w/o having to subject kids to subject matter that they lack the tools to process fully... hence the message of the movie, anyway, right?



I think I've been having so much fun not having to consult with anyone else at the video store that I haven't been reading anything--unless you count things that do not exceed a 6th grade reading level-- and I miss books. Perhaps that's how I'll spend next weekend? I do not anticipate any more rapturous sorts of company... *sigh*.