GRIMTERTAINMENT

When Drew and I handed our tickets for United 93 to the multiplex usher, it seemed a little weird when she perkily said, "Enjoy the show!" Like we were going to see The Little Mermaid , not a devastating acccount of 9/11. Of course the gut-wrenching film proved to be anything but enjoyable, and Drew and I sobbed in the rear row of the theater when the final credits rolled. The filmmaking is excellent and the images of captives uniting to fight their oppressors are extremely powerful. But by all means stay away if you look to movies exclusively for escapism.

Our entertainment outing on Friday night also proved to be disturbing. We saw Artists Repertory Theatre's production of Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins. From John Wilkes Booth to Squeaky Fromme, the show spotlights all the men and women who killed - or attempted to kill - a U.S. President. Generous doses of humor and upbeat music offset the heavy subject matter, but the frequent discharges of incredibly loud blank bullets made me feel unhinged for the rest of the evening.

Luckily Portland's been blessed with some incredible weather lately, and we took advantage of it today by taking a long, cramp-inducing walk through an old-growth forest. Very calming indeed.

In keeping with today's Amy Sedaris theme, I thought I'd tag on this photo of me dressed as Jerri Blank for Halloween '04. Drew shot the photo and my friend Susan tramped me up with Dollar Tree makeup. I picked out the severely uncomfortable gold lamé turtleneck.

HELLO STRANGER!

I've been in love with Amy Sedaris ever since I saw my first episode of Strangers with Candy. On that Comedy Central TV show she played Jerri Blank, an ex-con bisexual junky whore who returns to high school at the age of 46. If you've never seen Jerri's extremely un-PC antics, I highly recommend that you hightail it to the video store (or your Netflix cue) and rent the DVDs.
Recently my Amy Sedaris fixes have been limited to her occasional manic appearances on the Letterman show. Last night Drew and I even stooped to watching the crappy Disney movie Chicken Little just to hear Amy voice the character Foxy Loxy.
Now I'm thrilled that much bigger servings of Ms. S await me on my dinner plate. In late June Think Film releases the long-delayed Strangers with Candy movie in major cities, and it should be playing all over the country by the end of July. Dispatches from last year's Sundance Film Festival said that the first half hour is hilarious, but apparently a stupid storyline takes over after that. I'm counting on cast members Stephen Colbert, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Allison Janney and, of course, Amy to make up for the plot's shortcomings.

Then in the fall Amy publishes I Like You, summed up by Warner Books in the following press release blurb:

The inspiration for I LIKE YOU comes from Sedaris's own domestic expertise. A notorious baker and cook, her famous cheese balls can be bought at Gourmet Garage and her cupcakes at Joe Coffee in New York City. Sedaris covers all aspects of home entertaining. Sample chapters include: A Greek Dinner Date; Grieving; Entertaining Children; A Rich Uncle Comes to Visit; Baby Shower; The Elderly; Cooking for Oneself; Picnic; and a variety of courtships, such as dating a hunter, a dieter, or an alcoholic. All chapters contain tips, hits and misses, and end with a critical evaluation of the event or a letter from a guest.

Martha Stewart must be shaking in her boots.

STINKY BOOTS

Kinky Boots
Grade: C

The new British comedy Kinky Boots desperately wants to take you for a walk on the wild side. But these boots are not made for walking. Well, not to anyplace interesting, anyway.
Granted there’s some fun cross-dressing action in a queer cabaret and on a fashion runway, and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) delivers a playful and soulful performance as a drag queen named Lola. But these good bits are squandered by a script that lacks the wit and insight that made drag queen classics like Torch Song Trilogy and Some Like It Hot so memorable.
In the tradition of The Fully Monty and Calendar Girls, this is a story about quaint British folk who go out on a naughty limb to make money. Like Calendar Girls, it’s based on real events.
Charlie Price is a emotionally reserved young man who plans to move to London with his fiancée. His father dies, however, leaving him in charge of a struggling shoe factory in a drab industrial town. The dismal situation starts looking up when Charlie meets a sassy drag queen (Ejiofor) who inspires him to manufacture outrageous stiletto-heeled boots that are strong enough to support big and brawny male transvestites. This just may be the niche market that will save the factory.
Much of the predictable plot centers on the conflict between Lola and Charlie, who’s embarrassed to be seen in public with a drag queen. Charlie is a well-mannered and generally kind bloke, but like some of his piggish male employees he believes that one can’t possibly be a real man and dress in a frock at the same time.
A series of interminable and awkwardly staged scenes proves – surprise, surprise- that Lola has more masculinity in her heavily glossed lips than Charlie has in his whole uptight body.
Movies about transvestite footwear don’t strut our way everyday. It’s a shame that director Julian Jarrold and company couldn’t find a way to convert this bizarre and endearing premise into a rollicking good time.

Plaid Lady in My Andy Warhol Superman Journal

(mixed media, 1996)

NOTES ON OATES

You'd think that a bunch of tenth grade honors English students would be diehard readers, sprinting home every afternoon to kick back with a frosty Yoo-Hoo and some Kerouac. But this was not the case with Mrs. Martha Johnson's charges at Rockville High during the 1989 to 1990 school year.

Of course Brian Walsh, Kris Dhandaphani, Karen Potter and the rest of these honor roll slaves read A Tale of Two Cities, Julius Caesar, Hirsoshima and everything else that Mrs. Johnson assigned. But you got the feeling that most of them would rather French kiss a rattlesnake than read a book of their own volition.

For me extracurricular reading dated back to elementary school, when I read Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume tomes when my teachers weren't looking. By my sophomore year in high school my trusty paperback companions included Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. My classmates teased me about my bookishness, and Mrs. Johnson at once vindicated and humiliated me one day by telling them to shut their illiterate pieholes.

Sometimes she asked me to stay after class, and recommended books and authors she thought I might like. I have fond memories of our conversations in that dimly lit classroom, but I sometimes regret the day she planted Joyce Carol Oates in my consciousness.

Without explaining exactly why, Mrs. Johnson said Oates was right up my alley. I started off by reading her then-current novel Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart. I felt fascinated and repelled by her violent and feverish prose, and couldn't wait to get my hands on more of her stuff. At the mall bookstore I gawked at her massive oeuvre, buying as many titles as my paycheck from Fabian Drugs allowed. Within a couple of years I burned through You Must Remember This, American Appetites and Black Water, but her sprawling American Gothic novels like Bellefleur left me cold.

Let it be known that I have my share of obsessive tendencies, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Whether we're talking Joni Mitchell CDs or bubble tea, when I like something I have to have as much of that thing as possible. Even at the height of my enthrallment I knew that Joyce Carol Oates was a potentially dangerous addiction because her grotesque subject matter disturbed me for days on end. Of course my compulsions overruled my common sense and I continued to read her neverending output at a breakneck pace. One of my favorites was her 1993 novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.

Then the Golden Age of Oates melted. Starting with 1996's overrated We Were the Mulvaneys and continuing through the late 1990s, her books became so dark and gratuitously violent that I couldn't bare to finish them. Like my friend Rachel said, reading Oates can feel like someone's probing a part of you that's already dead. I mean, who the hell would curl up with her recent book Rape: A Love Story?

Needless to say I put my obsession to rest and moved on to brighter pastures. But I still think of her fondly sometimes because when she's good she's SO good.

On Saturday, April 22 Oates appeared at a Portland literary festival called Wordstock. At first I thought I'd skip it because - like I said- I feel like my passport to Oates Country has expired. But in the end I couldn't resist the opportunity to see this bizarre force of nature read to a crowd of about 300 at the convention center. She took to the stage in feisty fashion, complaining about the lack of intimacy in the huge room and some crappy jazz music that made it hard for her to concentrate.

Watching her I remembered why I used to be so taken with her. First she spoke eloquently about her writing process. Then, true to form, she read the beautifully constructed but incredibly disturbing story "Heat," which details the murder of two young girls.

After hearing this woeful tale it felt downright criminal to walk outside into a sunny day topped by a perfectly blue sky.

THE HUNG & THE RESTLESS

If you're crazy or perpetually high on paint fumes, the upcoming Spanish film 20 Centimeters will make perfect sense to you. The rest of you are on your own.

Cinematically speaking, this is the dawning of the age of transsexuals.
Transamerica garnered rave reviews for its insightful depiction of a male-to-female transsexual.
Now the sassy Spanish film 20 Centimeters offers a decidedly crazier spin on this formerly taboo theme. Like the films of bad boy auteur Pedro Almodóvar, it’s subversive, raunchy and visually dazzling. In terms of quality it has nothing on, say, All About My Mother. But writer and director Ramón Salazar one-ups Almodóvar’s antics by adding catchy and bizarre musical vignettes.
Three women sing Madonna's “True Blue” while scantily clad hunks simulate oral sex with barbecue foods. A lady vampire gets struck by lightening as she levitates. People sing and dance in the operating room before a sexual reassignment surgery.
Marieta, the main character, has a couple of big problems on her hands. For starters, she packs a 20 centimeter (that’s over 8 inches) penis that she wants to get rid of, but she can’t afford the surgery. She also has narcolepsy, causing her to fall asleep at inopportune times and drift into musical reveries.
As she serves out her sentence in gender limbo, she has the good fortune to fall for a gorgeous guy who happens to love sucking cock and taking it up the ass. But therein lies the rub: Marieta wants to be loved for her vagina-to-be, not the prodigious peter she doesn’t even want.
Marieta is not a particularly likable character, and the picture falls flat at times because it becomes increasingly difficult to give a damn about her fate. It’s unclear what – other than sex and MTV – goes on in her mind. Perhaps this is Salazar’s intention, but it makes for pretty unrewarding viewing in the long run.
Interestingly, the heart of the movie beats in the supporting characters, the misfits and malcontents who surround Marieta. Almodóvar veteran Rossy de Palma brings a welcome sense of melancholy to the film when she discusses the downside of transsexuality, and there’s a heartbreaking dwarf character who can’t play the cello because he’s not big enough.
In 20 Centimeters, there’s just no escaping the cliché that size really does matter.

READ THIS!

I took a few minutes today to devise a reading list. If history repeats itself - and I'm sure it will - I'll barrel through a few of these buggers and leave the rest to clog up my bookshelf like long hair in a bathtub drain. Here are the contenders:

MARCH, GERALDINE BROOKS

This very recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction speculates what happens to Mr. March (the patriarch of the Louisa May Alcott's Little Women clan) during the Civil War.

THE AMALGAMATION POLKA, STEPHEN WRIGHT

Yet another Civil War yarn. Critics say it's stylistically reminiscent of Voltaire's Candide. If nothing else, it has a fabulous title.

THE CANTOR'S DAUGHTER, SCOTT NADELSON

This is a new collection of short stories by Portland author and all-around good guy Scott Nadelson. Scott's previous collection, Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, was an award winning knockout. The Cantor's Daughter won't be in bookstores till June, but you can fetch yourself a copy now at www.hawthornebooks.com.

ABOUT GRACE, ANTHONY DOERR

Doerr graduated a year ahead of me at Bowdoin, but I never met him. I love The Shell Collector, his debut book that contains the O. Henry Award-winning story "The Hunter's Wife." About Grace is his first novel, and it's rumored to be slow-moving but gorgeously written.

DORA: AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA, SIGMUND FREUD

Judging by the recent cover story on Freud in Newsweek, there's some kind of psychoanalytic renaissance going on that I didn't know about. I've decided to hop aboard the train and read Dora, a study in aberrant female behavior that my friend Liza really dug when she read it for a college seminar called Unspeakable Sexualities.

KATE THE GREAT



I saw a man with a yellow guitar
Standing by the side of the road
Through the steam coming off the tar
Posing like some delta ghost
The sun was rising
It was shining
Halfway to Memphis
Halfway to Tupelo

-K.Campbell, "Yellow Guitar"





I first heard Kate Campbell's music when her press kit landed on my desk in early 2003. Listening to her CD Monuments, I was floored by her seamless shifts between folk, blues, gospel and rock styles. Her voice was soulful, soothing and just twangy enough to reflect her Southern roots.
You've probably never heard of Kate, even though her formidable talents put her on a par with Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris (Emmylou, by the way, sings backup for Kate on the Visions of Plenty CD). She's influenced by legendary women writers such as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Zora Neale Hurston, and her lyrics have a rare literary quality. She's an ace storyteller, pure and simple.
If I've piqued your curiosity and you're in a mood to flesh out ye old music collection, I recommend that you start with Monuments or Rosaryville. I'm also partial to Twang on a Wire, a collection of cover songs on which she rips "Harper Valley P.T.A." a new A-hole.
Also visit www.katecampbell.com, where you can listen to some song samples and see if she's ever touring in your neck of the woods.

C.R.A.Z.Y. 4 U

Recently the French-Canadian film C.R.A.Z.Y. swept the Genies, Canada's equivalent to the Academy Awards. I'm not sure when it's coming out in the States, but do see it if you get a chance. I reviewed it during the Portland International Film Festival in February:

C.R.A.Z.Y.
Grade: A-

At first glance C.R.A.Z.Y. is a fairly straightforward drama about a Quebec family, but writer and director Jean-Marc Vallée combines vivid fantasy sequences, dynamic camera work and flashy editing to elevate the material from a soap opera to a visceral cinematic experience.
The film opens with the birth of the main character, Zac, on Christmas Day in 1960. This establishes a Christ parallel that becomes more obvious (and heavy-handed) when it later turns out that Zac has the power to ease the pain of colicky babies and burn victims.
Zac appears to be a gifted child that any parent would die for, and his mother loves him unconditionally. But when he starts dressing up like a girl, his conventional father fears he has a sissy on his hands. His discomfort with Zac’s incipient fagginess creates a virtually insurmountable rift between father and son.
As a teenager, Zac’s sexual identity crisis sometimes gets overshadowed by his older brother’s losing battle with drug addiction. He eventually seeks asylum from his father in Jerusalem, but a family tragedy unexpectedly plants the seeds of reconciliation between Zac and Pops.
There’s nothing revolutionary about C.R.A.Z.Y. Thankfully, coming out stories are not a rarity. As for Christ figures, they’re as old as, well, Christ - even if this one happens to be a cute gay kid who grooves to "Space Oddity."
Still, there’s no denying that this is bravura filmmaking. And Vallée has an uncanny knack for making all of his characters compelling.
And the soundtrack is just plain awesome. Classics by David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane provide an electrifying backdrop to scenes that span from the 1960s to the 1980s. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” is the title track.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

Today I had the good fortune to see an advanced screening of Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, which opens in theaters in June.

I'm a huge Altman fan, particularly Nashville, Short Cuts and 3 Women. But I've never been very fond of the Prairie Home Companion guru Garrison Keillor. He's very talented, yes, and I admire his commitment to keeping old-fashioned storytelling alive. It's just that his monotone delivery practically puts me in a coma.

So I went into the movie with mixed expectations, and left with a mixed - but mostly positive - reaction. Without giving too much away, the film chronicles a group of musicians who perform their longstanding live variety show for the last time (a corporate bigwig from out of town has bought them out). Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are fantastic as a singing sister act, and there are fun performances from Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson and Virginia Madsen. And to my surprise I actually liked the desert-dry witted Mr. Keillor, who plays the grand pooh-bah on the program.

There's not a lot of substance to sink your teeth into, and a supernatural subplot feels a bit incongruous to the main event. But the show's fun while it lasts. But if you don't like old-time and country music you might find yourself asking Calgon to take you away.

SIX FEET UNDER & ME

The first time I rented Six Feet Under I struggled to make it through one episode. A drama about an L.A. family that runs a funeral home seemed like a fascinating prospect. But like Ruth Fisher, the control freak matriarch of the family, most of the characters were insufferably self-involved or downright hostile. Six Feet Under is the brainchild of Alan Ball, and it struck me that the show was just as smug and trite as his American Beauty screenplay (my apologies to all you American Beauty fans out there).
I thought I would instantly gravitate to the show because I have some considerable funeral home heritage of my own. Most of my maternal relatives dwelled in a western Massachusetts town called Easthampton. My great Aunt Antone owned and operated The O'Brien Funeral Home (which still exists today thanks to the entrepreneurial efforts of my cousin Michael).
On weekends my folks often drove my sister, Patty, and I up to Easthampton, where we visited all of our aunts and uncles before settling down for a barbecue or a leathery kielbasa social at my grandfather's house. Aunt Antone's place was my favorite pitstop for several reasons, which are listed below in no particular order:

#1. She often made sugar cookies enhanced by colorful specks of M&Ms.
#2. She had huge boxes of musty old comic books that my sister and I raided - mostly sweet and innocent comics of the Archie/Veronica/Marmaduke variety.
#3. She didn't mind it when Patty and I (and my cousin Jaimie if she was around) headed downstairs to the funeral parlor to climb into coffins that were for sale. On especially intrepid missions my co-conspirators tried to peek in on an embalming proceedure. We never succeeded.
#4. Finally, it was pretty cool to see the black hearses in the driveway. I was simultaneously horrified and impressed to learn that my parents were so strapped for cash when they got married that they took a hearse to church instead of a standard issue limo. *

Well, I think I've worn out enough shoe leather strolling down Memory Lane. But considering my near veteran status in the world of funeral homes wouldn't you think Six Feet Under would be the perfect show for me? It turns out that it is. At the urging of some friends, I kept on watching and gradually came to love the characters, warts and all. The show reminds me that we're all deeply flawed, but that we're all capable of righting our wrongs. That's about as much comfort as we're ever going to get, I suppose, in a world marred by betrayal,cruelty, illness and death.
There's only so much misery a poor guy can take, though. Once I've finished watching the final season (and I only have four episodes left) maybe I'll rent the Police Academy movies and kick back with a bag of pork rinds and a six pack of PBR.

*After reading this my mother e-mailed me to let me know that she and my father actually went to their wedding in Antone's limo, not one of her hearses. But I swear that my father told me it was a death wagon...

PHOTOSHOP PHLUNKY

My big plan today was to post one of the few drawings I've ever done that doesn't look like the product of a three year old in the midst of a seizure. Alas, my cruel mistress Photoshop thwarted my attempts to enlarge the image so y'all could see it in its full glory. Lacking a Plan B for today's posting, I hastily logged on to my computer painting program and created the peerless vision of beauty that graces the top of this page. I like to think of it as primitivism at its finest.

To divert you from my graffiti train wreck I'll leave you with some Laura Nyro lyrics that have been buzzing around my brain all day:

I'm young enough
I'm old enough
to paint a smile
I tasted heaven and hell
heaven stay a while

a good friend
is a rare find
Their straight talk
can ease your mind
a good pimp's
gonna rob you blind
-from "Money"

PAGE 2 SCREEN

Way back in October 2002 I interviewed hotshot writer Jonathan Safran Foer, who had just published his debut novel, Everything is Illuminated. I decided that the recent DVD release of the film adaptation was as good a reason as any to dust off this old article, which I originally published in the Portland Tribune.
Just for kicks I'm tagging on my recent review of the film adaptation.
If you're hungry for more Foer, check out his 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's the flawed but highly engaging story of a precocious young boy named Oskar who seeks information about his father, a victim of the 2001 terrorist attacks.


A BOOK WITH A LIFE OF ITS OWN
First novel exploring family’s past is not your basic historical fiction

When he was 19, writer Jonathan Safran Foer traveled to Ukraine in the former Soviet Union. He hoped to find and meet the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis in the 1940s, but his efforts were unsuccessful.
Though he was in Ukraine for only three days, his visit sparked a writing project that has resulted in one of this year’s most acclaimed debut novels. Everything Is Illuminated, a fictionalized account of Foer’s trip and his Ukrainian heritage, has been praised by such literary heavyweights as Joyce Carol Oates and Russell Banks. Published last spring by Houghton Mifflin (which outbid 12 other publishing houses for the rights), the book peaked at No. 15 on the New York Times best-seller list.
In an interview, Foer, who is just 25, offers a no-nonsense account of his writing process. “I didn’t know I was going to write a book,” he says. “It started taking on a life of its own.”
The result is a novel filled with folk tales and vivid accounts of historical events such as the mass execution of Jews in Ukraine during World War II.
Foer says he didn’t consult history books while he wrote. “I did no research on Ukraine or village life there,” he says. “It was OK for me to make factual errors if it led to emotional accuracy. I was trying to write from the heart.”
The novel weaves together three narrative threads. Parts are told in the voice of Alexander Perchov, a young Ukrainian who translates for an American named Jonathan Safran Foer. Perchov speaks an ambitious but clunky English, introducing himself in the first chapter by saying, “But first I am burdened to recite my good appearance.”
The character Foer, a college student, has come to Ukraine to find Trachimbrod, the village where his relatives lived. In several chapters, he gives a third-person account of Trachimbrod’s history, focusing on the tempestuous love lives of its inhabitants.
Finally, Perchov writes letters to Foer, critiquing his history of the village. Compared to the irreverent sections narrated by Perchov, the lengthy historical digressions are plodding. And yet for the most part, “Everything Is Illuminated” moves at a brisk clip, and the author deftly balances the story’s comic and tragic elements.
Foer cites Franz Kafka, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy as influences. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Italo Calvino are some of his favorite modern writers. A visual arts enthusiast, he’s now working on a novel set in a museum. Keeping to his taciturn ways, he won’t elaborate about the project. “I feel like I’m just getting a grasp on it,” he says.


FILM REVIEW

Everything is Illuminated
Grade: A-

Actor Liev Schreiber (The Manchurian Candidate) wrote and directed this flawed but highly engaging adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s celebrated 2002 novel. Elijah Wood, formerly known as Frodo, plays a bookish American Jew who teams up with a blind tour guide and a rambunctious translator to search Ukraine for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. To avoid getting tangled up in Foer’s folktales and historical digressions, Schreiber leaves out some of the novel’s most colorful scenes. But the footage onscreen is handled so well that you can’t help but forgive the dodgy screenwriting.

CAT SCRATCH FEVER

I don't have much to report today, so I'm letting my cutsey cats do the talking. From left to right we have Confetta, Rupert and Chicklet. After a week of finicky dining, they're finally chomping down the raw food diet that the vet recommended.

Oh, I did go see the high school film noir movie Brick. I hated it, but the upside is that a false fire alarm went off in the middle of the show and Drew and I scored 2 free tickets from the management.

It's time to cap off the day with episodes of Entourage and Six Feet Under.

STINKERVILLE

Here are some new DVD releases that leave a lot to be desired. Paint your kitchen walls! Trim your nose hairs! Write to someone on Death Row! Just don't waste your time with this crap.

Bee Season
Grade: C
How do you spell “tedium”? After seeing this mishandled adaptation of Myla Goldberg’s excellent novel, you’ll have to fight the urge to say “B-E-E S-E-A-S-O-N.” The film, which stars Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, faithfully follows the book’s plotline about an 11-year-old spelling wiz and her seemingly perfect but highly dysfunctional family. But co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (who fared far better with The Deep End) get the tone all wrong. Goldberg’s book is dark, but it has a comic edge. Here, the proceedings are humorless, and the wannabe weighty religious themes come across as mystical mumbo jumbo.

Ellie Parker
Grade: C
This uneven and overlong comedy about a struggling Hollywood actress looks like it was filmed in one day on a budget of $50. Naomi Watts does her damndest to keep the episodic plot chugging along, and at times her performance recalls her brilliant portrayal of an ambitious actress in Mulholland Dr. But the premise is so limited that the jokes dry up long before the final credits roll.

Fun with Dick and Jane
Grade: C+
Are we having fun yet? Not really. Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni replace George Segal and Jane Fonda in this uneven update of the 1977 comedy about an upwardly mobile couple that turns to crime when the hubby loses his posh job. The remake gets off to a strong start with a sharp satire of an Enron-like corporation that suddenly folds and leaves its employees with incredibly shrinking pension plans. But when it comes to the couple’s slapstick robbery sprees, there are multiple misfired jokes for every genuine chuckle.

Shopgirl
Grade: C
You won’t have to shop around much to find a better movie than this vapid adaptation of Steve Martin’s bestselling novella. Martin, who wrote and produced the film, stars as a fiftysomething, emotionally detached millionaire who wins a trophy girlfriend in the form of a young Saks retail babe (Claire Danes). Despite a heartfelt performance from our so-called heroine, the doomed romance is totally unconvincing. Instead of zippy dialogue and character development, we get lots of pointlessly pretty shots of perfume counters and L.A. skylines. A dippy, irrelevant subplot with Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman doesn’t help matters.

TEEN TROUBLE

This was one of my favorite books of 2005. I'll be an uncle soon, and I can only hope that my sister won't ever drop a time bomb like Tiffany on my doorstep.

Breakfast with Tiffany by Edwin John Wintle
(Miramax Books, $24.95 Hardcover)

*Note to penny pinchers: The paperback edition will be available for $13.95 starting June 14th.

Leave it to a queen to name his memoir after an Audrey Hepburn movie. Though it would have cost him a wistful “Moon River” reference, Edwin John Wintle could just as easily have borrowed another famous title and called his book The Odd Couple.
Either way, this is a touching and hilarious book for all you parents out there, or for folks who are crazy enough to even think of dipping their toes into the choppy waters of child rearing.
Breakfast with Tiffany chronicles a year in the life of Wintle and his thirteen-year niece, called Tiffany in the book for privacy issues. Wintle, a former actor and lawyer, has settled into his 40s with a successful career negotiating book deals for an unnamed film company. No longer the oversexed party boy he used to be, he stashes away his porn collection and opens his Greenwich Village apartment to his niece for the 2002-2003 school year.
Tiffany, you see, is a bit of a wild child. Though she’s very intelligent and a talented singer, she has dead-end friends and she flunks most of her classes. Her mother, asks Wintle to be a strict-but-lovable role model for a year, in hopes that Tiff will excel in academics and the arts, and learn some civilized manners to boot.
Wintle, who used to get along swimmingly with his niece, must accept the sad fact that he can’t be Tiffany’s best friend and a conscientious guardian at the same time: “I knew that most of the time she saw me as her adversary. Gone was the uncle she’d once idolized, replaced now by this uptight, controlling man whose mission in life was to deprive her of everything that makes her happy.”
Disappointingly, Breakfast with Tiffany is windy and sappy in the last 50 pages or so. And for perplexing reasons, Wintle does not disclose significant details about his personal life until the final chapters.
But overall this is a very satisfying memoir that invites comparisons to the addictive escapades of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs.

ALTERED STATES

Due to some good old tightening of the purse strings I haven't bought much new music lately. But a friend of mine at my Gladstone Coffee Shop hangout convinced me to give Sufjan Stevens a listen ( his first name is pronounced Soof-yan).

In case you haven't heard of him, Stevens is a 30-year-old Detroit native who has embarked on a rather massive musical undertaking. His goal? To live in each of the 50 U.S. states for a spell and then make an album about each state. First he tackled his home turf on a CD called Greetings from Michigan, playing (and this is just the tip of the orchestra) oboe, banjo, acoustic & electric guitars, glockenspiel and sleigh bells.

Greetings from Michigan is a decent album, but it's nothing compared to the wonderful 2005 follow-up, Illinoise. With his soft, dreamy vocals and his often ethereal arrangements, Stevens serves up 22 tracks based on Illinois themes. He doesn't win a lot of points for succinct song titles, though. My favorite track goes by the long-winded moniker "Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition/Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In a Dream."

Watch out for the song about clown-faced serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr. It will freeze your blood if you listen closely enough.

Rumor has it that Oregon is the next entry in Sufjan's travelogue. Hopefully he can squeeze in an ode to Tanya Harding. He could call it, "Meditations on an Ice Ballerina Marred by Allegations of Unsportsmanlike Conduct Part I."

TUCKERED OUT

The low budget film Transamerica, due out on DVD in May, tells the story of a preoperative transexual woman (Felicity Huffman) who travels cross-country with her newly discovered son. A few months before he walked the red carpet at the Oscars with dream date Dolly Parton, writer/director Duncan Tucker discussed the movie with me during the 2005 Portland Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

Me: How did Transamerica come about?

Duncan Tucker: A woman I knew in Los Angeles told me while I was thinking of the idea for this movie that she was transgendered. She told me what was under her skirt and I had no idea. But the funny thing is, that isn’t the genesis for the movie. What’s subversive about this movie is that although the main character happens to be a transsexual woman, it’s not a movie about transsexuality. It’s a celebration of a life. It’s about family and connection. It’s about what it feels like to be different and alone and the journey towards self-acceptance. It’s also a kind of coming-of-age movie. And, I hope, it’s a lot of fun and surprising.
Nobody wanted to finance this movie. They thought it was too risky and uncastable and everybody thought it should be a guy in a dress. If you’ve met trans women after they’ve been on hormone therapy for a few years - not to mention if they’ve had facial feminization surgery- they don’t look like guys in dresses. I always knew I had to honor where this character was going and not anchor her in what she was leaving behind by casting a guy. But people didn’t believe that was doable. Felicity was just amazing.

Me: What kind of research did you do for the film?

DT: I read tons of books. I had some difficulty meeting with women and men in the transsexual community. Many - especially those who can pass so well that nobody knows they used to be of a different sex – were very difficult to meet because they’re self-protective with a reason. They can lose friends, they’ve lost families, they can lose jobs, and they can be physically in danger. Slowly through networking and grapevining I started meeting some really brave women who shared their stories with me.
There were certainly some who were more politicized and suspicious, but I think in the end all of them came to respect the project. Before we shot I actually had Riki Wilchins, the executive director of the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, read the script. It passed muster I’m happy to say.

Me: Are there any autobiographical aspects to the story?

DT: There’s one character in the movie, only one, who is based on a real life human being. And that’s Fionnula Flanagan’s character, who is my mother. My mom has seen the movie and she’s so proud. She says “That’s me!”

Me: Do you think of Transamerica as a comedy or a drama?

DT: Some people occasionally see it and think it’s so sad. I’m flattered by this because they’re with the characters emotionally. But ultimately I think of it as a comedy because it’s joyous. Maybe it doesn’t end up with everyone living happily ever after, but they might be one day.
It’s a celebration of life. To survive Bree has had to wall off her heart like so many of us who’ve been hurt in life. We construct these defenses and remove ourselves from emotion in some ways.
Bree is very intelligent but in terms of emotional intelligence and her ability to relate to people she scores practically a zero on the IQ scale. She just doesn’t know. She’s never been good at that before. But I think she’s going to learn.

NIPS WITH LIPS

I read and reviewed this book last summer. This week I remembered how much fun it is when I heard Drew giggling his way through it at the coffee shop.

The Secret Fruit of Peter Paddington by Brian Francis
(Harper Perennial, $12.95)

Peter Paddington is not a pervert. But he does have some peculiar habits.
The 13-year-old overweight outcast dresses in drag when he’s home alone, dancing to Olivia Newton-John hits. When he’s not fantasizing about seducing a handsome married gentleman on his paper route, he seeks spiritual counsel from the image of the Virgin Mary he finds on his bedroom wall.
Oh, and one more thing. He makes constant trips to the convenience store to buy tape to cover the red, puffy nipples that spring from his puberty-stricken body. His nipples talk to him, you see, and he wants them to shut up.
“‘Maybe if you were normal , we’d be normal , too,’” they say.
This may sound like a ridiculous, gimmicky premise, but Canadian author Brian Francis makes it work in this hilarious and poignant novel, set in the 1980s. The book was simply called Fruit when it was published last year in Canada. For its south of the border release, the U.S. publisher lengthened the title and Americanized some cultural references (in this version, for instance, Peter says the “Pledge of Allegiance” at school instead of singing “O Canada!”).
Like Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t or Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Secret Fruit documents the embarrassments and the frustrations of teen life with whimsy, humor and wisdom. And like a Blame novel, it’s fast and fun without ever compromising its street smarts. Adult readers may feel themselves sucked right back to middle school days, when it felt like certain death to stand apart from the crowd – even if that only meant wearing the wrong style of sneakers to gym class.
While he’s perfecting his masturbatory techniques with a shower nozzle, Peter drums up sexual fantasies about male schoolteachers, neighbors and, every now and then, a kid his own age. On a less saucy note, he also pictures himself befriending the luminescent girl who plays Maria in a local high school production of The Sound of Music.
For the most part, Francis smoothly navigates back and forth between the realms of reality and fantasy. But some of the transitions are choppy, resulting in rough, disorienting landings to otherwise smooth flights of fancy.

SLITHER ME TIMBERS!

Slither
Grade: A

I love the new comic horror movie Slither, writer/director James Gunn's B-movie extraordinaire about leech-like parasites from outer space that turn small town hicks into flesh craving monsters. I highly recommend it if:

1. You are a fan of Night of the Living Dead, The Blob, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Slither playfully borrows plot elements and sight gags from these cult favorites).


2. You think you can endure the sight of a slimy, dentally deranged squid man tearing someone in half with one of his razor sharp tentacles.

3. You don't mind it when Air Supply songs accompany images of cannibalism.

STEPHEN ON STEPHEN

Prior to the release of his latest film, Mrs. Henderson Presents, I interviewed maverick British director Stephen Frears at the Governor Hotel in Portland. He looked as haggard as hell and he couldn't wait to get to the airport to fly home for the holidays. Still, he graciously answered all my queries. Here's an edited version of our conversation:

You never know what to expect from Stephen Frears. The Oscar nominated British director has brought us a vicious costume drama (Dangerous Liaisons), a Freudian film noir (The Grifters) and the occasional bomb (Mary Reilly). No stranger to gay storylines, he helmed Prick Up Your Ears, the biopic of queer British playwright Joe Orton. And in 1985 he made the landmark film My Beautiful Laundrette, which depicts the romance between a young Pakistani man and a wayward bloke played by Daniel Day-Lewis (CQ).
His latest - the Oscar nominated Mrs. Henderson Presents- concerns an outspoken widow who lures audiences to her musical theater with live female nudity, the slight but entertaining film stars Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins and gay singer Will Young, who launched his career on the UK equivalent of American Idol.

Me: In one scene Will Young’s character announces to Mrs. Henderson that he’s gay. She’s bigoted in many areas, so why do you suppose she’s so titillated by this?

Stephen Frears: People are wise in unexpected ways. Although she’s such an outrageous woman, she’s always rather humane, isn’t she? Embracing.

Me: How did you make the cast feel comfortable during all the nude scenes?

SF: You just have to be very very straight with people. Just say “If you don’t want to do it, don’t take the job. It’s not going to go away.” It’s the underhandedness they don’t like, someone trying to get some advantage over them.

Me: The film is set in the 1930s. How is it relevant to modern audiences?

SF: I don’t know that I think of it in those terms. It’s meant to be entertaining. It makes you cry. If I were to try to claim a sort of relevance it would be false.

Me: Everyone’s talking about Brokeback Mountain as a revolutionary gay film. My Beautiful Laundrette also strikes me as revolutionary.

SF: Well it was. When Laundrette became as big a success as it did, you could see that it somehow caught some spirit of defiance. It got absolutely sensational reviews. They said, “This just changes everything.” Homosexuality wasn’t presented as some kind of terrible illness. Some sort of problem.

Me: Do you have any dream projects on your mind?

SF: No. Absolutely not. I don’t work like that. I like the surprise. I like people sort of ringing me up. I like opening a script and going into a new world. If I knew what the world was it would be much less interesting. I would like NOT to know about the next film I make.
This is very hard work. The responsibility gets greater, and it becomes quite oppressive. It’s given me a very very interesting life. Much more interesting than I ever expected. So I’m very very grateful to it, and also I get enormous pleasure from it.