Shortbus Review
[I'm assuming most of ya'll are reading this on Monday -- sorry for the late reviews. I'll post my Shortbus review now, and will save my thoughts on High Fidelity for Tuesday.]
Last Thursday night, some twenty-odd gay men in jeans and sports jackets pulled up to the Loews Boston Common theater in a short yellow bus. This happened three or four times, with some insisting to "Liz" -- the woman with the clipboard -- that they were "on the bus." A student from Emerson with a fake German accent pretended to look for the bathroom behind Liz three times before he gave up. Liz disappears and returns 10 minutes later with another gay man in jeans -- this one short, in a plain flannel shirt and a blue hoodie, without any hair product.
Quite a change for the man who sported a foot-tall blonde wig and sparkle-lipstick in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
And after John Cameron Mitchell (JCM) was shown into the theater, me and a dozen other fanboys and fangirls at the front of the line were let into the theater for the advanced screening of Shortbus, his new film that begins its Boston run on October 13th at Kendall.
If you haven't heard of the film, JCM's manifesto of sorts was to have actual, real sex on screen, to use "the language of sex" as JCM put it, to tell a story. While I was skeptical when I first heard this of being the basis for entire film, JCM's fascination with bodies is an apt followup to Hedwig, which explored the looseness of gender and identity with an
"anatomically incorrect" protagonist. Meditations on the body are familiar territories, then, for JCM, and this comes through vividly in Shortbus. At the center of the film is a salon of the same name (welcoming all of society's "gifted and challenged") where the characters go to get their underground film and music on (and cannabis popcorn, or "potcorn"), and to get in touch (so to speak) with their sexuality. As JCM described it in the Q&A followup Thursday night, it's a place where art, music, politics, food, and sex all exist with the same level of importance.
JCM brings the same sense of humor and humanity that he brought to Hedwig to his merry band of sexual players in Shortbus, which results in a fun and funny perspective on sex. It almost became easy to forget I was watching people actually have sex in front of me, until I realized the actors I was watching were so much more spontaneous and natural than any film I'd seen in a long time. Of course, the actors worked with each other for two and a half years, which helps, but that doesn't diminish the intimacy -- both emotional and physical -- that comes across in every single scene. And as you would expect, for me this made the characters more endearing, until the sex wasn't even conspicuous anymore. The film passed that ultimate test of presenting characters you would want to spend an evening with, even if you don't typically spend an evening at an art-fuck in lower Manhattan. (And who isn't spending most of their evenings like that nowadays.....)
It was fitting that JCM introduced the film by saying, "Yes, there's lots of tits, dick, and ass, but those are attached to other things, and we call those things 'people'."
Last Thursday night, some twenty-odd gay men in jeans and sports jackets pulled up to the Loews Boston Common theater in a short yellow bus. This happened three or four times, with some insisting to "Liz" -- the woman with the clipboard -- that they were "on the bus." A student from Emerson with a fake German accent pretended to look for the bathroom behind Liz three times before he gave up. Liz disappears and returns 10 minutes later with another gay man in jeans -- this one short, in a plain flannel shirt and a blue hoodie, without any hair product.
Quite a change for the man who sported a foot-tall blonde wig and sparkle-lipstick in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
And after John Cameron Mitchell (JCM) was shown into the theater, me and a dozen other fanboys and fangirls at the front of the line were let into the theater for the advanced screening of Shortbus, his new film that begins its Boston run on October 13th at Kendall.
If you haven't heard of the film, JCM's manifesto of sorts was to have actual, real sex on screen, to use "the language of sex" as JCM put it, to tell a story. While I was skeptical when I first heard this of being the basis for entire film, JCM's fascination with bodies is an apt followup to Hedwig, which explored the looseness of gender and identity with an
"anatomically incorrect" protagonist. Meditations on the body are familiar territories, then, for JCM, and this comes through vividly in Shortbus. At the center of the film is a salon of the same name (welcoming all of society's "gifted and challenged") where the characters go to get their underground film and music on (and cannabis popcorn, or "potcorn"), and to get in touch (so to speak) with their sexuality. As JCM described it in the Q&A followup Thursday night, it's a place where art, music, politics, food, and sex all exist with the same level of importance.
JCM brings the same sense of humor and humanity that he brought to Hedwig to his merry band of sexual players in Shortbus, which results in a fun and funny perspective on sex. It almost became easy to forget I was watching people actually have sex in front of me, until I realized the actors I was watching were so much more spontaneous and natural than any film I'd seen in a long time. Of course, the actors worked with each other for two and a half years, which helps, but that doesn't diminish the intimacy -- both emotional and physical -- that comes across in every single scene. And as you would expect, for me this made the characters more endearing, until the sex wasn't even conspicuous anymore. The film passed that ultimate test of presenting characters you would want to spend an evening with, even if you don't typically spend an evening at an art-fuck in lower Manhattan. (And who isn't spending most of their evenings like that nowadays.....)
It was fitting that JCM introduced the film by saying, "Yes, there's lots of tits, dick, and ass, but those are attached to other things, and we call those things 'people'."
posted by Ian at 10/01/2006 06:07:00 PM
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