Taxi zum Klo

"You see, I like men. I'm thirty and a teacher by profession. Otherwise I'm your normal, jaded, neurotic, polymorphously perverse teacher. I radically separate my job from my private life and pleasures."

Frank Ripploh directs himself in Taxi zum Klo, a confessional autobiography.

It's like Half-Nelson if Half-Nelson was about sex not drugs, and if it'd been directed by the I Am Curious (Yellow) director.

The density of Ripploh's admissions -- the extent of his insight into himself -- creates cohesive and lush textures and vibrant emotions and

light, poetic details. It's like if Weekend had been made by the Little Fugitive people and this was one person.

This movie has most of my fav qualities, it's: earnest, candid, humorous, warm, curious, passionate, creative.

Lots of sex. Gay sex. Ripploh is a gay swinger -- I care about judging this lifestyle about as much as he does. Which is not at all. There's a no-limits feeling, like Ripploh is willing to expose every part of himself. This Is How I Am Human, without barriers. In America right now we have people like Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow who make movies that are admissions of normalcy, and I think they do the same kind of thing, except they tend to take me places I've already been. Their narratives are kind of boring I think. Their lives are kind of boring I guess, it doesn't seem like they try to enlarge one's perspective of the world, it seems like they accept the world as it is and try to be mellow and not piss anyone off. I don't know, maybe they should try to shake things up a bit some time, maybe, I don't know. Just saying I'd rather hang out with Ripploh.

 Just saying.

 The fact that he's a teacher doesn't scare me. All people are horrible and some of them have to be teachers also -- I don't think Ripploh is particularly horrible and I don't think he "corrupts" the children. If my nieces had a teacher like Ripploh they'd be cooler, probably. They're pretty cool I'm just saying.

Ripploh can kick it with people who don't share his lifestyle. He's comfortable being himself and lacks obvious insecurities about his character or his sexual orientation. That's cool.

Ripploh reminds me of Portland. He reminds me of infinite possibility. He reminds me there's no mold -- and reminds me that those who ignore the molds are most interesting. He reminds me to be myself as much as fucking possible. He, I guess, helps me with my memory. His art is the type that connects with my sense of self and encourages me to expand and be fearless and honest and adventurous.

Good movie :)

Aching Souls: Love Songs, Declaration of War, Tomboy

Christophe Honore's Love Songs is a dreamy light-kissed romantic musical tragic romance. Because it's French, you know the double-up on romance isn't an accident: when the movie begins Ismaël Bénoliel (Louis Garrel) is in a threesome relationship with two girls, Julie Pommeraye (Ludivine Sagnier) and Alice (Clotilde Hesme). Julie is his girlfriend, the threeway is their mutual desire.

I can't tell you what other French movie's middle-moment is similar to Love Song's without spoiling both movies, but I'll say this movie shares a desire with other movies to explore the emotional trajectory of a single character as the character's life passes through multiple events that could just as well be two or more separate movies.

Love Songs investigates, for example, the role of one's partner's family in one's life when one's no longer partnered with the family, i.e. one's ex's family. When in a relationship, one's partner's family may come close to feeling like one's own, but if one wants to put distance between oneself and an ex, it may be necessary to distance oneself from the family, which might hurt the feelings of the family. In Love Songs, Julie 's family thinks of Ismaël as family, but as his life extends beyond his relationship with Julie, he comes to think of them less. "I already have a mother and father," he tells Julie's sister.

Love Songs showcases emotional details with a graceful elegance that enriches feelings of romance.The narrative isn't flattened in order to untangle emotional complexities. Honoré is faithful to his characters, honors their complexities, and doesn't "fix" them, but simply follows and observes, with a dazzling and intelligent camera that helps sharpen their emotional experiences.

This narrative technique has always been a favorite of mine for the reason that I've never truly felt like I'm the leader of all my own life's circumstances, sometimes I feel the inflluence of forces like fate, chance, chaos, catastrophe, etc. The fact is, things occur in my life outside my ideal script.

Tell you the truth, before watching it, I thought Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War was a romance movie. It isn't. But it kind of is. It's a romance with realworld intrusions, and it's fair to say their story isn't the romance Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) and Juliet (Valérie Donzelli) anticipated upon meeting each other. Even those names, of course, refer to a terrific romance, but after the movie swiftly establishes their love affair, a child is born, and the child and his brain tumor are almost the center of the rest of the movie.

I say "almost the center" because the movie is still so much about the love affair between Romeo and Juliet, and one can often sense their love, behind a curtain of pain, even when many later scenes are set in the hospital (this makes the outdoors romance more romantic and lovely).


Donzelli depicts realities of existence and being human, and how one's quest for love and happiness is sometimes sabotaged by outside forces. She suggests dedicated love has an immense power (Romeo and Juliet's love for their son is something brave and big), and says part of our happiness comes from a choice made about one's interpretation of circumstances. 

Funny to think a lot of family movies are about kids struggling to like their parents or parents struggling to like their kids or otherwise many variations on unhealthy, damaged, dysfunctional, or broken families. But fatal sickness and hovering death can make these problems vanish, in life as in the movie. Or rather, the problems don't vanish, but there's no greater human problem than death.

Donzelli sneaks her trysts with cinema. As a smile can break a spell of sadness, so too the movie occasionally sparkles; because if the characters are not, cannot always be, sad and dull, it follows that sometimes the voice of cinema has to sing.

I'd seen and liked Céline Sciamma's previous movie Water Lilies, but I'd never seen or read about Sciamma herself. I was delighted to discover a person whom I felt I could relate to, by her age, a curious detail in her IMDb profile, and her no-bullshit and badass IMDb photo.

The underlined portion reads: "She is  totally afraid of dogs no matter their size," and she was born November 12, 1980.

It's interesting that, before I started this entry, I wouldn't have guessed Tomboy was the movie I'd have the hardest time selecting four choice screencaps to use (out of fairness to the other two movies that were given four). I don't think the camera does a great job of moving or breathing, and I don't think the aesthetics are eye-licking, but there's an intelligence to all of Sciamma's cinematic choices, sometimes subtle or subtextual.

The first photo seems important because it portrays Laure's ability to blend with boys (as Mickäel) at her age. The second photo express physical limitations, and the third captures her physical self-questioning.

It makes sense that visuals would be important to a movie about gender identity. Sciamma tends to compose a shot to frame the human elements, and this emphasis over the purely aesthetic grants her movie a lens of empathy.

I felt like Laure and her experience and private feelings were of paramount importance. She's in most shots, and when she's not in the shot she's being talked about.

During the movie I thought a lot about what looking at people means; it was interesting to see Laure observe boys to learn their mannerisms in order to imitate them. She had a special eye, different from everyone else. I thought about how one watches other people in order to learn how to be a person.

Common to each of these three French movies is the idea that characters as the center of movies creates opportunity for anything to happen, and then anything that happens is meaningful and important and relevant. If the story is the focus, character details can be off-topic and irrelevant, but if the movie is stories happening to a person, with an emphasis on the person, it seems like really and truly anything can count. It feels like the freedom of existence, rather than the rules of storytelling.

Sex and Death 101

Zach: You call this decadence?

A 'movie.' Consciously lit for 'production value,' people dressed 'nicely,' bachelor party 'set dressing:'

Stripper: Your fiance is lucky, she's got one of the good ones. I wish I was more into successful white dudes but uh (laugh), two broke Latin husbands -- (laugh). Jesus, stop me. Anyway man, gracias, seriously.

Made from a 'script,' by Daniel Waters, who also directed.

Sex and Death 101 benefits from a firsthand knowledge of the Hollywood business and cultural landscape. Waters is the loud and proud LA MOVIEMAKER type of movie maker. He says through self-awareness to 'deal with' the fact that it's a movie, and that beautiful and wealthy people are rulers of this kingdom.

News stand guy: This kind of stuff happens in the movies.

What Waters does, he does well. Think of Heathers, Batman Returns, and the first draft of Demolition Man. The dude who created Demolition Man knows it's a goddamn movie. He uses it to his advantage whenever he can. That's his art.

This movie arrived two years after fellow LA MOVIEMAKER Shane Black's directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, also about "presentable" men running amok in LA, told in a narrative employing self-awareness, parody, and satire. The two movies are stylistically near enough to exist in the same universe.

Their self-awareness is a type that rewards viewers familiar with movie tropes, especially it seems ones from late-night HBO*. Conventions are expertly amped and tweaked, for maximum enjoyment. Beautiful people are the protagonists, that's a law of glitzy LA, and the best movies have TONS of sexual energy, erotic deviance, light philosophy, cool tunes, cash, and chill vibes. 

So it's not all bad.

A sprinkling of the world from outside this perspective. Applied as harmlessly as possible.

The LA movie scenario is a millipede of potential. It's linked to a tradition of genre juggling, and includes movies like The Loved One, In a Lonely Place, The Terminator, Lady Killer ('33), Body Double, The Black Marble, Sunset Boulevard, Bad Influence, D.O.A. ('50), Die Hard, and Eating Raoul. LA makes a great 'movie world,' I love some of these movies, and would pit them against subversive and deliberately weird movies Monday through Sunday. But I find myself in disagreement about the opinion that fantasy is the 'top,' the pure form of a cinema that is 'meant to be' entertainment. Entertainment is not the only way to explore the charts of our imaginations or feelings or experiences as humans. Seems like a conservative and single-dimensional view of cinema from a place that's supposed to be crazy, anything-goes, batshit insane. One way for movies to be dangerous is for them to approach complex and difficult and unusual situations and moments, and to let reality puncture style.

Roderick: Trix, I'm sure there's some logical explanation for all of this. I'm not going to wait around for it. Keys.

Sex and Death 101 feels closed off by its perspective of cinema. As in, however good this movie is -- and this movie is very good and very very entertaining, and I'm sorry it's stuck in my cross-hairs at some points -- I have the same problem with it that I had with Pet Sematary 2, Guncrazy, and the movies of Edgar Wright: I can hear the movies tink against glass walls.

From The Kill Bill Diary: The Making of a Tarantino Classic as Seen Through the Eyes of a Screen Legend, the one by David Carradine:

(Steven = Spielberg.) I think what Carradine's saying is cool. He prefers a violent thing to come from a personal reality. Earlier Tarantino said he likes Spielberg, and I think Tarantino can learn about people through their violence. (Not sure why Carradine highlighted Spielberg's violence, guess because they'd just seen Minority Report.)

I think Waters understands his characters, but expresses his understanding in a movie language. Like the whole 'concept' of the movie about a guy receiving an e-mail of the 101 women he'll have sex with in his life -- the movie tells you it won't explain the 'why' of this, but explains multiple times that a) an explanation won't be given and b) well there is this "machine" and the building with the machine and the exposition that takes place in the building with the guys in suits well there is that.

But it's my problem that these movies aren't what I want them to be.

And props for the insanity that exists.

Waters packs his movies full,

 as full as he can.

Roderick: And a man would rather have another man's jealousy than another man's respect.

Some shit goes down. The title seems appropriate, it suggests that late-night HBO movies are of a genre called 'sex and death movies,' which seems fitting, and this does feel like a 101 course for sex and death movies. One has to have confidence in one's writing ability to write the textbook, and Waters is a king in his land. He expresses people as 'types,' but richly defines the type of person. He spins adventurous narrative webs. 

You can tell the movie is intended for you because the movie is addressed to 'you' in its copious voice over. 

*Its earnest passions I found endearing, and the way it portrayed the 'depth' of a character through their knowledge of and appreciation for books and movies and music.

Roderick: The end is coming; and coming, is the end.

Tell you the truth, everything being said, I don't think the inclusion of the materials I think are missing would make the movie better. They wouldn't fit into the movie. The movie is pretty great at what it is, and I think people who really like movies like this could do a better job of saying what's great. I can't enjoy it on the levels others can, like maybe (?) Waters couldn't enjoy Killer of Sheep on the levels I can. (Bet he could, actually. Movie people are good at enjoying movies.)

You don't go up to [professional basketball player] and tell him he should be playing tennis.

Sex and Death 101 challenged me, 'called me out' for liking these movies, in smart, funny ways. Waters adds some shades to the movie's ending and presents a kind of textured and slightly bitter non-teleological view of the events, emphasizing that no one should give a fuck about why things happen. People should be. Simple, like that -- be.

Since I'm being honest, I think Hollywood should retire the 'quick death for a laugh' gimmick. Especially if you already nailed it with Heathers.

Gillian De Raisx: I always liked that word. Oh, and 'depleted,' 'dissipated,' and 'spent.' Those are good ones. But 'exhaustion' sounds like what it is.

I'd never really noticed Simon Baker, who plays the lead character, in other movies before. Another way you can tell Waters is LA local is I've never heard of Baker but he's super handsome and charming and fits in his role. He's believable, if not an iron man. And the movie has plenty of attractive women showing their cleavage and expensive lingerie.

WINONA RYDER WRITES IN A JOURNAL WHILE SPEAKING IN V.O.

As for the photography, by Daryn Okada, it's a style I don't like. I kept thinking of this Boogie Nights conversation throughout the movie:

Kurt Longjohn: For the shoot - I wanna talk about the look. I wanted to see about getting this new zoom lens... 

Little Bill: Right. 

Kurt Longjohn: I wondered if we'd be able to look into getting some more lights, too, y'know... 

Little Bill: Jack wants a minimal-thing... 

Kurt Longjohn: Right, well, very often, minimal means a lot more photographically than I think, well... than I think most people understand... 

Little Bill: I understand. 

Kurt Longjohn: No, no. Hey. I know you understand, I was talking about some other people. 

Little Bill: Well, I think what Jack is talking about is minimal, not really "natural", but minimal... 

Kurt Longjohn: Okay... fine... I was just saying... 

Little Bill: I understand... 

Kurt Longjohn: - 'cause I'm trying to give each picture its own look... 

Little Bill: Can we talk about this later? 

Kurt Longjohn: Oh, yeah... you have to go somewhere... or...? 

Little Bill: Well, no, yeah... I mean... 

Kurt Longjohn: 'Cause I was hoping to, y'know, for the shoot tomorrow, we could send Rocky down and he could pick it up... 

Little Bill: Kurt. 

Kurt Longjohn: No. Hey. Gotcha. You've gotta go somewhere so - hey - what the fuck? It's only the fucking photography of the movie we're talking about. 

Little Bill: My fucking wife has an ass in her cock over in the driveway, alright? I'm sorry if my thoughts aren't with the photography of the film we're shooting tomorrow, Kurt, OK?

Not only is Okada successful in Hollywood, he was even the President of ASC from 2006 to 2009. Which fact I kind of love.

My love/hate saga with Hollywood continues.

Reform School Girl (1994)

Working Girls (1986)

Pre-viewing thoughts:

1 - Why hasn't Lizzie Borden directed a feature since 1992, is she a bad filmmaker? Working Girls won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 1987, is that a big deal? What were the films at Sundance like that year, what was her competition? I've recently seen Poison, Todd Haynes 1991, (for its 20 year anniversary, damn), a movie that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and while that movie is great in so many ways, in other ways I think it would be a better film if it were made today.

Conversely, is Lizzie Borden a great filmmaker? Will I discover a golden voice that's been lost for reasons outside filmmaking ability? What was the standard quality for production values in early American independent films, and are those standards more than superficial weaknesses, or are there more important, deeper flaws? How will the structure and subsurface of Working Girls compare with the structure subsurface of movies made today?

2 - Will the film be sexy? It was the title and the sexy cover that made me check the movie out on Netflix streaming. Not this original dvd cover:

but this First Run Features dvd cover:

Not sure I would've checked out the movie if I'd only seen the former cover. Seems unlikely. This five star review on Netflix further motivated me to watch the movie:

I actually worked in a Nevada brothel in 2006, and this film is ACCURATE. Girls lay a sheet OVER the bedding, a "trick sheet". The ONLY thing I noticed they did not include is when a man walks out without choosing any lady, you simply say he "walked". As in, "oh, that man walked". I had a male house manager who was obsessed with cleanliness and made us girls clean a lot too! And now they are REALLY strict on no drugs, at least the house I was at. I enjoyed this movie, it brought me back. The life of a 'working girl' isn't ALL bad. Many men tell you they REALLY like you. I would say it covers about 2/3 of brothel life and facts. There isn't too much storyline/plot, its more of a documentary, with erotic entertainment thrown in.

What does it mean that the film is accurate, and how erotic will the erotic entertainment be?

3 - What will I learn about the female perspective from a movie about prostitution made by a female? Will I learn about 'the' female perspective, is that possible? Seems like I'll learn about a female perspective. What will be the nature of my lesson, will it be emotional, moral, or environmental?

Post-viewing thoughts:

1 - The acting is like television acting. It often feels like watching a script. The dialogue is stiff and the readings are stilted. I don't feel like the director pushed the actors to break through their characters. I don't feel they were directed beyond playing roles. But the sequences often have nice rhythms, and these sequences accumulate in a nice way to make a fine, satisfying movie.

There are stylistic camera pans. There could have been more choreography between the camera and actors, i.e. more interesting blocking. The camera pans are mostly 'look here, now looook here' pans, but I liked them, and enjoyed their occasional replacement of shot-reverse-shots. The camera setups are varied enough that I didn't tire of being in a single location.

It was smart to make the time frame short, this helped me become familiar with the location and the routine minutia of the characters; surely primary objectives. The single location also focuses the movie, and doesn't feel 'cheap' like some single location movies do, because the single location has a reason and a purpose.

Lizzie Borden wrote, directed, produced, and edited Working Girls when she was 28. That's a terrific achievement. Judging by this movie she has talent that if nurtured could grow into something really special.

Working Girls moves at a nice, entertaining clip, but also has sincere, substantive interest in its characters and their lives. It's a job movie that happens to be about prostitution: it deals with the pressures and headaches of a controlling (and effective) boss and a demanding job, juggling work with an outside life, and wondering what your purpose is and whether or not you have the right job.

2 - I'm attracted to women and this movie is populated by strong female protagonists who are aware of their sexuality and often undress. But the film's tone is clinical and neutral because it doesn't want to sensationalize its topic, it wants to express a point about the mechanization of the sex act by its repetitive nature in prostitution. The sex acts are not conveyed in a sexy way, and overall the film isn't very sexy, except women in lingerie are sexy, they can't help it.

3 - Sensed the female filmmaker's desire to address exclusively female activities, like inserting diaphragms, exclusively female experiences, like straight sex with men, and exclusively female perspectives, which were different for each woman. Each character in Working Girls, male or female, is distinct from the others and interesting due to diversity and contributions to a larger perspective. Maybe sometimes Borden went too far to give her film perspective; it feels like a bloated day, and there's even a birthday celebration!

There are many insights into the lives of working girls. Funny how so many guys want to meet Molly 'on the outside,' like they each feel that they have a special, meaningful relationship with her. One man asks Molly to come during sex, and she says she never comes in this place, and he says "there's always a fist time." Feel like if a man says that to a woman he has little chance of making her come. I was touched when Molly gave the teacher dating advice, like how to put his arm around a girl and how to give the first kiss.

Found this conversation interesting:

Molly: Hey Gina, how's your boyfriend?
Gina: I'm not seeing him anymore.
Molly: No? Oh, I'm sorry.
Gina: It's okay, it's nothing.
Molly: What happened?
Gina: Well, you know, when our relationship first started I decided I had to be really straight about this job, and I told him look, if you really love me you should be able to deal with my working. And then I thought, if he really loved me, how could he? You know?
Molly: Yeah.
Gina: Does Diane know you work?
Molly: No, no. I decided not to tell her. I just don't want her imagining what I'm doing here.