2006-07-21 - 11:48 p.m.
It�s depressing to count the days and realize that I am now in the second half of the summer schedule, which means the summer is already half over (although summer weather will continue at least a month longer after we restart school). It doesn�t seem I�ve really done anything fun�not that I haven�t done anything fun, it�s just that my mind wasn�t completely free and easy like it should have been, due to all the overwhelming work. It just gets worse year after year, never better. I now can see why people retire (and I am of the age where I now have contemporaries who have retired)�they just simply get worked to death until they finally can�t tolerate it anymore and take a good look at their finances and realize that they don�t have to put up with this shit anymore. Even I am beginning to see the possibilities of that, although not quite yet.
I did go to Outfest, and it was a good one, although I have begun to contemplate the wisdom of doing this festival like I do. Twelve days of absolutely non-stop film viewing, it just eats up and overwhelms so much of the limited summer. And although we can leave the office at 2:30 in the summer and we have Fridays off, every day but the days of Outfest, I have been leaving work only when the night cleaning crew kicks me out and then I�ve brought the work home and worked some more. The days of the film festival were the only ones in which I did not work until dark and work all weekend�and even then, if there were a couple of hours between films, I�d go back home and work some more, instead of lounging on the Director�s Guild patio and discussing film with some cutie or brilliant artist. After a while, I began to resent these pressures, which slowed my productivity down to an energy-sapped crawl. If this eats into my vacation, I will turn violent.
People asked me how many films I saw, so I totaled it all up:
14 full-length films
55 shorts
1 panel discussion
1 multi-media presentation by New York comedian/performance artist Penny Arcade (�Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!�), which was really very, very good.
Despite how many films I saw, I only saw about a tenth of what was offered�and I was a person who filled his viewing schedule to the max.
The films I saw were from all over the world�Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, France, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina�but most of them were American films. Let me see, my absolute favorite one was American (�Wild Tigers I Have Known�), my next two favorites were French (�Time to Leave�) and Canadian (�Whole New Thing�), followed (for third choice) by another American film (�Loving Annabelle�), a film from the Philippines (�The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros�), and one from Mexico (�Broken Sky�). There were also a German short (�Sugar In The Blood�) and an American horror short (�Bugcrush�) that I really liked, as well. I mention these titles in the event that anyone reading this hears of them playing in a movie theater in the upcoming months, they might want to investigate them. The American short, �Bugcrush�, is not apt to be shown in a movie theater, but it might show up on a cable channel such as IFC.
For quite a few years, now, my personal �theme� or subjects that I have been interested in fall in the category of �generativity,� which relates to helping, guiding, mentoring, sharing what you know, or at least being concerned about the lives of the upcoming younger generation. But since this is the year my mother died, my theme has altered somewhat to include �legacy,� and so I realized that so many of the films I saw and liked fit into the theme of �generativity and legacy�. Certainly Time to Leave fits squarely in there�it�s about a young, handsome, successful, but shallow and egotistical Parisian fashion photographer who learns that he has a cancer that has metastasized and although chemotheraphy might help, the odds of survival are slim (about 5%). He decides to not treat the disease, which means that he has approximately three more months to live. How is he going to make his life have meaning in the time that he has left? I thought this film was extremely beautifully done and it was definitely on almost everybody else's "favorite" list.
There were three �emerging gay youth� movies, �The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros�, �Wild Tigers I Have Known,� and �Whole New Thing�. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, a film from the Philippines, was a surprise and shows some of the things you can learn from seeing foreign films. The thirteen-year-old boy, Maxi, was completely feminine and yet was fully accepted by his parents, brothers, and community, even though his family were tough crooks, like a local �Mafia�, and the community was an economically poor one. But according to the filmmaker who was present at Outfest (and also Filippinos who chimed in on the subject on the Internet Movie Database), homosexuality is almost perfectly accepted in the Philippines, but ONLY if the homosexual is a �fem�. �Macho� gay guys do not make any sense to them and are considered suspicious, underhanded, and perverted. But female-acting gays are okay.
Fem or not, Maxi is a strong, appealing, extremely likeable person and, in a way, since the mother died, he seemed to have taken on the �female� position in the family. He cooked and cleaned and sewed, and in exchange his father and brothers were very protective of him and also completely affectionate.
The conflict in the story arrives in the form of a new cop on the beat�a handsome stud to whom Maxi immediately develops a crush. The cop easily befriends Maxi, who has fantasies of �marrying� the cop, but as the cop is a macho man, it is unlikely that he has any sexual interest in Maxi. Instead, his mission is to arrest and imprison Maxi�s brothers and father for their various crimes! Well, that which doesn�t kill you makes you stronger, right?
While Maxi had a loving family and a street full of other gay boys to help him along, Logan, the thirteen-year-old boy in Wild Tigers I Have Known has absolutely no role models or any out-pictured example to support what it is that he wants or can guide him in how to obtain it. He�s an ostracized, socially outcast boy in middle school who has only one friend (a boy who has social problems of his own), but Logan is developing a sexual attraction for one of the cool kids, a boy who is secure enough to be nice to him.
I am thankful for Outfest and for all the films I have seen there over the years that I am able to understand, enjoy, and appreciate an experimental, �non-narrative� art film like �Wild Tigers I Have Known�, which was not only fascinating and mysterious in its story, but so beautiful in cinematography and ingenious in its soundscapes, that I just didn�t want it to end.
I saw it at the REDCAT, downtown, which stands for �Roy and Edna Disney Cal-Arts Theater� and is an art gallery and experimental film and performance space underneath the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. Many of my best experiences with Outfest have been there in that venue, and this year was no exception.
The third �coming of age film�, Whole New Thing, features Emerson who is, you guessed it, another 13-year-old boy, this time a precocious, talented, androgenous (and very beautiful) boy who lives way up north in Nova Scotia with his ecologically-oriented, free-spirited and liberal parents. They let him drink alcohol at their parties and smoke pot and the family spends a lot of easily-comfortable naked time together in the sauna before going outside to roll in the snow like the Finns.
All Emerson�s life he has been home-schooled, but his learning has become unbalanced and although intellectually ahead in years, he�s socially na�ve. So, his mother thinks it would now be better for him to go to public school to round out his education.
It so happens that the English teacher is a gay man (who had broken up with his lover and now pays frequent visits to a highway rest stop men�s room) and Emerson is immediately attracted to him. As for the teacher, he is pleased to have such an interested and talented student in his class (Emerson�s influence actually reconfigures the teacher�s whole curriculum) and is willing to read and critique Emerson�s creative writing. However, when Emerson writes a love poem to him, the teacher does everything he can to deflect Emerson�s attention (which attention has become so obvious that it is picked up by a female teacher who is also attracted to the English teacher, and she starts to make frightening threats). But Emerson is unaware that there is anything wrong with what he wants, it makes perfect sense to him, and he pursues the desperate teacher with even more fervor.
The movie is very funny in parts, but it�s not entirely funny, for one realizes that teachers are vulnerable to this kind of thing all the time. They have in their class students whose sexuality is emerging, students who may be looking for a sexual �teacher�, and who fulfills that role better than someone standing there at the front of the classroom? And such a student has absolutely nothing to lose in such a pursuit, whereas the teacher can lose everything. In case how this works isn't clear, both heterosexual youth and homosexual youth may be looking for sexual guidance or understanding from an adult (but very rarely are they wanting an actual sexual experience with the teacher, just "friendship" and "counseling"). However, as it is a heterosexual society, heterosexual students can find instruction and guidance any and everywhere, starting with their very parents, of course, and moving on from there. Gay youth, on the other hand, have next to nothing in this regard, their parents probably hate the whole idea of it and there are organized forces in society working very hard to make sure that gay youth have no resources at all. So if there is a gay teacher around, a youth's radar is probably going to pick that up and then view that teacher as the ONLY other person in the whole world who can help them. The teacher could represent to the student the very survival of the student's psyche. However, if the teacher is even seen talking to the student outside of the classroom, suspicions are that the teacher is somehow the manipulator of this situation and may even be blamed for "the student thinking he is gay". Few parents, I believe, would "appreciate" the efforts of such a teacher. So even though such a teacher may desire to help such a student, and is possibly well-qualified to do so, this is just about the last thing the teacher feels safe doing. So it's a real conflict.
The theme of the danger to the teacher was enhanced in another of the movies that I liked a lot, Loving Annabelle, in which a rebellious teenage girl, the daughter of a powerful senator, has been expelled from two schools and now is being sent to a secluded, exclusive, private Catholic girl�s school, where she becomes attracted to her closeted lesbian English teacher. In a real reversal of what most everyone (straight people, anyway) assume and expect, the student is the �predator�, and since she is secure in her sexuality and knows what she wants, she is in a position to become the "teacher" to the teacher, who is insecure in her desires, afraid, and not progressing in her life.
It�s a lush, lovingly filmed movie and had the best music of any film I saw at Outfest this year. It was a hugely screaming crowd-pleaser in a room full of lesbian film-goers. However, I, one of three males in the audience, had the chance to praise in person the director and the two lead performers. Also, the film itself and the actress playing the teacher won the Outfest equivalent of �Oscars� at the award ceremony, so I�d say that this movie was a success.
Tomorrow I�m going on the day cruise to Catalina on the restored World War II Merchant Marine ship, the S.S. Lane Victory that I mentioned in a previous entry, so I better go to bed. I hope to write more about Outfest later. But for now, I want to get a good night�s sleep before it�s �ships ahoy�!
Aye, aye, Cap�n!
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