Good Laughs in "Gayby"

Because of time constraints and interview availability I ended up having to watch the new comedy Gayby, which opened this weekend in NYC, alone a week or so ago. Though comedies are much funnier with crowds, I still laughed out loud. So it was a joy to interview the writer/director Jonathan Lisecki for Towleroad. He also co-stars in the movie as one of the central couple's best friends, "Nelson". He was smart enough to keep some of the best lines for himself.

Here's two bits about his actors that I couldn't fit into the published interview. 

NATHANIEL R: I noticed you're cross-pollinating with HBO's Girls with your casting. 

JONATHAN LISECKI: Some people ask if I cast Alex Karpovsky and Adam Driver because they’re both in Girls – there was no Girls last year. I love Lena. She’s awesome. My short played with Tiny Furniture on the festival circuit. Once upon a time when we were out to lunch she said 'You should be in your own movie you’re so funny.' I was like 'Well, I’m going to take your advice Lena Dunham!'  

She was shooting Girls the same time I was shooting the movie.

NR: I just saw Jenn Harris, your lead, in Silence! the Musical Off Broadway as Clarice Starling.

JL: Oh god she' s amazing in that, isn’t she?

Jenn Harris as Clarice Starling in "Silence! The Musical" and Jenn Harris as Jenn in "Gayby"

NR: Just hilarious. She wasn't just spoofing the movie and Jodie. I swear to god she was also totally sending up actors who are tired of being in the shows they're in. 

JL: I saw it two weeks ago and she really was! [Laughter] She’s so funny. She's such a gifted comedic actor. Especially on stage. One of the reasons why I wanted her to be the lead of the movie is that I’ve been onstage with her and she's one of the few people in the world who has ever made me crack up onstage and lose character. She'll do anything in the moment. Comedy is important to her and it’s an art. She'll go that extra mile which not everyone will do and she's willing to look goofy to get a laugh.

Read the Full Interview @ Towleroad

P.S. I'd love to send you to see "Silence! the Musical" but Jenn recently left the show after a long run so I can't vouch for the new cast members. But I can send you to see 'Gayby'! It's in NYC now and Los Angeles in a couple of weeks. 

Time Out's "100 Best Horror Films"

I am fascinated by the horror genre. From afar. As in: I am not at all fascinated by the horror genre but am endlessly curious about why it provokes so much feverish fandom in others. So I find myself reading about the horror genre a lot in an intermittent effort to understand it. From afar. Time Out London just came out with a poll of horror biggies and horror enthusiasts to form an eclectic list of the 100 best horror films. Some of them that I love I hadn't really thought of as "horror" (though on second thought they clearly are) like Dead Ringers, The Night of the Hunter and Ken Russell's The Devils. 

I knew my three all time favorites would rank high though my fourth favorite horror film (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) did not make the list.

Nathaniel's Horror Trinity: CARRIE, ROSEMARY'S BABY, and PSYCHO

The films on the list that prompted the most nightmares were The Silence of the Lambs (which I weirdly dreamt up constantly before seeing it) and The Omen which I saw on television by myself (after my parents had gone to bed) as a kid. It was probably severely edited but I was so terrified that Damien shared my birthday (June 6th) that I raced to the bathroom mirrors afterwards to check my head for a 666 mark -- no joke! I was so scared I had nightmares for a full week afterwards and vowed to never watch another scary movie.  

As an adult the films I was most terrified of while I was watching them were: Halloween which I didn't see until the early 90s on VHS when a friend would not let me be until I watched it; The Descent which I saw in a completely empty theater... like one big dark cave, The Blair Witch Project's last ten minutes in which I basically thought I would die (though that experience seems unrepeatable); Audition because... holy hell; and The Shining which I saw for the first time in basically .... wait for it... a cabin in the woods.

In the interest of full disclosure and to illustrate my scaredy-cat nature I have seen but 32% of the 100 wide list which I've included in a visual after the jump if you must mock me. How many have you seen? And which 10 do you think should be mandatory viewing? 

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National Film Registry. Have You Seen These Titles?

Porgy & Bess, in which Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge both lipsynched is one of the 25 inductees.The film is rarely screened, not all that well and regarded but badly in need of restoration. Is that what did it?Each year I read the press release list of the films admitted to the National Film Registry and promptly forget them. I guess I've never absorbed just what this does for the films beyond being an obviously prestigious honor. So this year rather than doing the usual read the titles and forget, I stopped, actually took a breath (a rarity on the web), wondered, and googled a bit. I stopped being lazy about it so you don't have to be either. I didn't just list titles below but actual information!

However I am still a bit confused as what the honor actually means beyond admittance into the Library of Congress. If this meant government funding to restore or preserve the films or if it meant an automatic transfer to each new medium that surfaces (VHS to DVD to Blu Ray to whatever is next) so that that film in question never disappears it would be a truly astounding honor. But it doesn't mean this.  The National Film Preservation Board which is connected to the National Film Registry  does not own the rights and can thus not distribute the films. The honor is also no guarantee of preservation. Film preservation is still a privately funded matter. Hollywood as a whole is fairly disinterested in its own history (except to mine it for remakes) and US politics has always been depressingly anti-arts funding. (Thank the Right Wing of the country for that.)

Here are the 25 new inductees in chronological order of creation. I am ashamed at how few of the I've seen. Should we watch them together?

• The Cry Of The Children (George Nichols, 1912) a short film about child labor
• A Cure for Pokeritis (Laurence Trimble, 1912) a short slapstick comedy
• The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921) another Chaplin film for the Registry
• The Iron Horse (1924) a long western starring George O'Brien of Sunrise fame.
• Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies (1930s and 1940s) I assume this is the famous tap dancers?

The Nicholas Brothers

Beloved orphan fawns, globally famous serial killers, and remarkable actress faces, and more after the jump... How many have you seen?

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Oscar Horrors: Jonathan Demme, Silence'd

Editor's Note: in this new series we're exploring Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions to the horror genre to get you in the right mood for Halloween. For this edition I've invited first time contributor Mayukh Sen, to offer up his provocative thoughts on an Oscar winner -Nathaniel.

Here lies... Jonathan Demme's early career. There was a time when he was the most promising young American director of his time.  But we lost all his potential the minute he won his Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Demme was a humanist in an era that desperately needed one.  He loved people, and he possessed grace, sensitivity, and a lack of condescension toward his working-class characters.  Kind of like McCarey or Renoir, he had a way of illuminating human flaws and virtues without passing judgment and was capable of expressing patience -- talents many directors lack.  Demme's universe seemed unhinged by the good-evil binary that pervades how many artists render America's lower- middle class. He refused to make human idiosyncrasies seem foolish or naive.

Around the time of Lambs, though, Demme lost one of his salient characteristics – lightness of touch.  Demme seems conscious of the fact that he is directing a “thriller”, and thus that he must downplay his sometimes offbeat, pop art-influenced aesthetic impulses for us to digest the narrative’s direness.  And, though he does still demonstrate considerable compassion for his characters, Demme seems more interested in asserting Clarice Starling's singular heroism than probing the moral ambiguities of the other characters.

This may seem like a petty complaint, but watch some of his earlier works – Caged Heat, Last Embrace – and you’ll understand what exactly we're missing from the old Demme.  Pauline Kael, one of Demme's earliest champions, said it best when she criticized Lambs for treating pulp as art.  She was right -- there’s nothing urgent or passionate about it.

This has happened with many directors. Post-Last Tango, Bertolucci never achieved the sensuality that characterized Before the Revolution or The Conformist.  Success brought upon more ambition, and the intimacy of his earlier work was lost.  

A part of me will always remember Lambs as the point at which Demme jumped the shark. Though Lambs is effective and, at times, fascinating, it doesn't have the charge of early Demme.  At best, his subsequent films function on the level of interesting failures.  I’m afraid that Demme's school of satiric humanism is unlike anything we'll ever see from him again, and I attribute this to his acceptance at the hands of the Hollywood elite.

16 More Oscar Horrors
From The Exorcist through the Fly and on to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane...

Take Three: Brooke Smith

Craig here (from Dark Eye Socket) with Take Three. Today: Brooke Smith

Take One: Series 7: The Contenders (2001)
Smith's performance as Dawn “Bloody mama” Lagarto in Daniel Minahan’s Series 7: The Contenders is a goldmine of maternal aggression. Dawn is a risk-taking, self-serving, take-no-prisoners single pregnant woman with a gun and a hit list of new Contenders to wipe out. It's as far from life-affirming as it gets making Dawn the kind of caustically fantastic role that most A-list actresses would give their right arm... to steer clear of. Thank the gods of indie cinema that they gave us Brooke Smith, then. We first see her enter a convenience store to shoot an old guy in the back. “You got any bean dip?” she asks the cashier. The humour is black and she dishes it dry. In one of the film’s sickest/funniest TV-montage parodies we see Dawn slit someone’s throat in a lift, kick a guy downstairs, drown someone else in a toilet and strangle a woman in a car à la Halloween’s Michael Myers, all whilst with a bun in the oven. This is not a rom-com.

Smith exudes confidence as an actress and is completely believable even within the outre satiric prophecies of Series 7. I’d like to see her trade fiery, meaty dialogue with some of today’s cinematic greats; this may not have happened yet because she may somewhat show them up. With its sly undercurrent of political commentary, Series 7 (and, to a lesser extent, its closest imitator, 2005’s Live!) is the kind of film that prods the dark funny bone of anyone who finds the ongoing fad for “reality” TV (now more hatefully extreme then ever) dispiriting and ripe for incisive satire. Ten years on the film retains its grim, acidic bite. In my view, Smith’s performance is one of 2001's very best. Shame Oscar wouldn’t go near it with a barge pole.

Take Two: Melinda and Melinda (2005)
In Woody Allen’s double-plotted Melinda and Melinda Smith gives a supporting turn as friend and confidant of both lead Radha Mitchell’s Melinda and Chloë Sevigny’s Laurel. (She was at it again earlier this year in Fair Game, where she had one group dinner scene and a brief chat with Naomi Watts and was still the best thing about it.) Smith played pregnant Cassie, the only female role (barring bit parts) without her own (sub)plotline. This is a shame as there are mild hints (thanks to Smith) that Cassie has a sly, playful side that would’ve dazzled in a fun, stand-alone narrative strand. Sevigny and Mitchell, both ordinarily very good actresses, give strained, overdramatic performances. That left Smith to bring the goods.

More on Melinda² and, you guessed it, "The Girl in the Pit" after the jump.

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