I Shot Andy Warhol.

Review #2519: I Shot Andy Warhol.

Cast: 

Lili Taylor (Valerie Solanas), Jared Harris (Andy Warhol), Stephen Dorff (Candy Darling), Martha Plimpton (Stevie), Lothaire Bluteau (Maurice Girodias), Anna Levine (Iris), Peter Friedman (Alan Burke), Tahnee Welch (Viva), Jamie Harrold (Jackie Curtis), Donovan Leitch (Gerard Malanga), Jim Lyons (Billy Name), Michael Imperioli (Ondine), and Reg Rogers (Paul Morrissey) Directed by Mary Harron (#1984 - American Psycho)

Review: 

"I was amazed, because, apart from saying that she shot him and she was crazy, nobody had ever talked about Valerie Solanas. So I had this idea for an anti-documentary. It was never going to be conventional. My thinking was, what if you took the most obscure person in this glamorous circle, and that most obscure, most despised pariah turned out to be the most interesting person of them all? What if you did a kind of reverse hagiography, where you take this person in the shadows and put them in the center? Now, how I was going to do that, I didn’t know. I just had this burning desire to make a film about her."

I suppose this is the best way to dip the toes into the world of Andy Warhol. Once upon a time, Mary Harron was in the punk scene and into The Velvet Underground, the rock band with a distinct influence within the underground scene that mixed right in with Warhol being their manager from 1966 to 1967. In college, Harron had written a piece about Warhol and his work for a university magazine and even spent time looking upon his movies. When she became a music writer, she was fortunate enough to have a brief interview with Warhol around his studio of The Factory (he subsequently died in 1987). A couple of years later, when working in television, she did research for a Warhol documentary and happened to come across the SCUM Manifesto (self-published in 1967 before becoming commercially published in 1968 through Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press) in a store that interested her because for all the footage and interviews one knew of Warhol and the Factory, one name never really came up with Valerie Solanas. Her interest in doing a documentary happened to crisscross with Tom Kalin and Christine Vachon in doing something...as a film. Harron co-wrote the film with Daniel Minahan (with research by Diane Tucker along with having certain dialogue come from Jeremiah Newton's edited compilation The Letters and Diaries of Candy Darling) and the movie had funding from a variety of companies such as Killer Films and Goldwyn Films International. John Cale of the Underground wrote the music score for the film despite disagreements with Lou Reed. The movie made a bit of money and was enough of a hit with its screening at Sundance that the offer to do the script for American Psycho came right afterwards. The years that followed the release of the movie is fairly interesting. The movie was released by a company that soon went bankrupt and the rights were in murky limbo for a time to where it was barely available on DVD and it apparently was once only available online through a rip on YouTube. Solanas had crafted a play called Up Your Ass that she had given a copy to Warhol that was accidentally misplaced - in 1999, it was rediscovered and produced in 2000 in San Francisco by George Coates Performance Works*. Further information about Solanas came around with the 2014 biography Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)*.

You might wonder what Solanas (a graduate of University of Maryland, College Park) has to offer in terms of a manifesto. Well, its opening declaration [with one word difference depending on the edition] states that women should "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate [destroy] the men" (incidentally, there are a few moments in black-and-white that depict stuff from the manifesto being read). She sold copies in bookstores and on the streets of Greenwich Village for $1 (unless you were a guy, then it was $2) and even appeared in one Warhol film with I, a Man (1967). One person associated with Warhol once stated that life around the sphere of Warhol ended up making them "all captives of Andy's magnetism and his outlaw culture". Amidst all of that, Solanas might as well be an imp to these self-obsessed people that can't quite get the recognition they believe they deserve,and Taylor carries the film to fascinating levels of curiosity. It isn't a lament of a "tortured genius" or just a "craven nut" but instead something that teeters in the irony that comes in so many contradictions that can be tragic along with being fascinating. There is a burning, acerbic spirit to her that you can't exactly shoo away as an irrational being because damn it, there are plenty of irrational people to go around anyway, even if most don't go around shooting people and getting their own spin of a bio-drama.  Harris pulls in well with shades of vulnerability and elusiveness (without being a caricature to poke with) that you can't easily grab upon beyond the obvious that might as well reflect how one views Warhol and his art, for better or worse.  The real Solanas spent time in a prison ward and periods of evaluation over her mental state (mainly the paranoid schizophrenia) before she essentially faded into obscurity by the late 1970s and died in San Francisco in 1988 at just the age of 52. Regardless of how one might view Solanas and her view of men (as represented by, say, this exchange here or this one), there is something quite fascinating about what Herron has captured here about someone who lived by their contradictions. As such, this is a worthwhile debut in its capture of a misfit that doesn't judge or defend but instead lets the images and words speak for themselves in entertaining fashion that is a strange little gem.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day

*Apparently, Warhol was quoted in a book in the 1980s that he apparently glanced at the play and was more concerned with wondering if she was actually an undercover cop. By the way, that gunshot was brutal: he got shot in a way that had damage to his lungs, esophagus, liver, spleen, and stomach.

*For one thing, Solanas actually had children at a young age but had to give them away. 

*honestly, the fact that there was an anarchic group named "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" in the 1960s shouldn't surprise me.

Safe (1995).

Review #2340: Safe.

Cast: 

Julianne Moore (Carol White), Peter Friedman (Peter Dunning), Xander Berkeley (Greg White), James LeGros (Chris), Martha Velez (Fulvia), Susan Norman (Linda), Kate McGregor-Stewart (Claire), Mary Carver (Nell), Steven Gilborn (Dr. Hubbard), and Peter Crombie (Dr. Reynolds) Written and Directed by Todd Haynes.

Review: 

"There’s a history of inexplicable illnesses, that established medicine can’t confirm as absolutely physiological, that have affected women. I think they are diseases of identity that force you to see that identity is a fragile and basically an imaginary construct that we pretend to carry around. The more unexamined it is, the more vulnerable you are."

Admittedly, it took a few years to get to a director who actually started his career with a movie involving Barbie dolls. Born in Los Angeles, Todd Haynes studied art and semiotics at Brown University and yet had been influenced by his high school teacher, who taught him a lesson about reality "can't be a criterion of judging the success or failure of a film or its effect on you". Haynes made his first short film in 1978 but it was his work on a short in 1987 while studying at Bard College that garnered considerable attention in more ways than one: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) was a chronicle (43 minutes) of the life of the pop singer but with Barbie dolls as actors (with, well, one being chipped away gradually to reflect anorexia) to make for an "experimental film" to go along with archive and stop motion footage that had music from The Carpenters...which generated controversy from Richard Carpenter because the music was not licensed for the film. The result is that one can only see the film in bootleg form. Haynes' feature debut with the sci-fi drama horror movie Poison (1991) had its own brand of scrutiny, because its partial funding by the National Endowment of the Arts stoked controversy because of certain moments in the film ("explicit porno" is an actual phrase used by the babies who complained at the time). Haynes wrote the script for Safe fairly quickly after Poison but it took time to raise money ($1 million) for the film, which among other inspirations, found interest in "environmental illness". In over three decades, Haynes has directed eleven films (and one TV miniseries), which has included such movies as Far from Heaven (2002), Carol (2015), and his most recent movie, May December (2023).

It is interesting to hear "The Yellow Wallpaper" mentioned. As one might know from say, high school reading, that short story was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. That's the short story where a husband imposes a "rest cure" to his wife because she is afflicted with something after giving birth (okay, the disease in that story is basically what people know now as postpartum depression but stay with me), with Gilman being influenced by her own experiences of having been in a "rest cure" Think how that woman is gradually revealed to, well, have various descriptions of the wallpaper of the room that basically imprisons her. Now think about a movie that took inspiration from Louise Hay's self-help books that once had a quote saying that "almost anything can be healed" if one is willing to do the mental work for a narrative (set in 1987, at the height of a certain disease that obviously led to plenty of questions about therapy and recovery treatments, gay person or not) that involves a married woman with a family that finds something has afflicted her. The film starts in a place where one really sees the bare minimum of nature and manages to burrow further in that basically serves as facsimile of the conventional movie. It strikes to the core with a lead character that Haynes once described as having "the most vulnerable part of identity, the most uncertain and fragile part of myself." Time has seemingly made the movie seem even more prescient when it comes to that weird thing that arises in modern society when it comes to what "safe" really is in a land of hollow people that repress themselves (this especially leans politically, where I am reminded of how many people seem to believe things were just better in the old pictures/movies they seem to revere as gospel). Whether it involves psychotherapy, or New-Age mumbo jumbo, people just use something to strike at being "alone". Moore pretty much plays the role with a weightless type of quality in voice and approach that basically dominates the movie in a way that is beautifully horrific, as if she was a ripped wallpaper trying to get back to some sort of wall. Her vulnerability at the uncertain grasp that comes with identity and community is one that leaves you at a curious distance that has us examine ourselves for what we think about when it comes to the cycle of illness and what we think about in "recovery" through the lens of burden or strength. We see the sick, but do we actually hear them? Whether by circumstances of their own control or through the cruel nature of the unknown, the world we live in makes for a very strange process to see people and communities. It's interesting to see the contrast between her interactions with Berkeley (totally staid for the hollow-men, as one sees from the sex scene from above) as compared to Friedman and his ideal persona of feel-goodness. It is a slow burn of unsettling strangeness that leaves one at the very least unsettled at what has been sprung on them for its climax in terms of defining love in the eyes of oneself. In the end, we all yearn to be "safe" from something, where we wrap ourselves in a bubble and just believe in that decision in the face of all things. Whether taken as melodrama or horror, what we have here is a well-done film in the art of isolation and the delusions that come with misplaced beliefs and burdens that all come to roost at some point in our very lives.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.

Sunday night: be ready and Go Bills.

The Savages.

Review #1660: The Savages.

Cast: 

Laura Linney (Wendy Savage), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Jon Savage), Philip Bosco (Lenny Savage), Peter Friedman (Larry), Guy Boyd (Bill Lachman), Debra Monk (Nancy Lachman), Margo Martindale (Roz), Rosemary Murphy (Doris Metzger), David Zayas (Eduardo), and Gbenga Akinnagbe (Jimmy) Written and Directed by Tamara Jenkins.

Review: 

“It was something that was happening all around me and at first I was scared to write about it. It’s an intimidating subject, but ultimately, I think The Savages is a story that is not just about confronting death but really also about seizing upon your life, even in the smallest of ways.”

Sometimes you just have to laugh with the pain. Tamara Jenkins was born in Philadelphia but was raised in California by her divorced father, and some of those experiences would take root in her first feature film with Slums of Beverly Hills (1998). At any rate, Jenkins first studied film with the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University after moving to the state to perform in various productions in the theater. Fugitive Love (1991) was her first short film, which received some buzz on the festival circuit (such as Sundance), and further work followed within public television (including a Guggenheim grant) alongside subsequent short films before getting the chance to make a feature. Nine years followed from her debut film, owing to her attempts at a failed screenplay and time spent with minor theater work; Jenkins would hone the script for the film over the course of a few years, for which it came out of one initial scene that she came up with involving a phone conversation between the two main characters that dealt with their divide as siblings - she has described the first draft as being 200 pages, with honing down coming in the subsequent stages. For the script, Jenkins utilized her experiences spent with her father and grandmother, who each had dementia and lived in nursing homes (it is not, however, a "strict memoir", as she put it). The film was shot in New York and Arizona over the course of 30 days and turned out to be a fair success for all involved, with Jenkins and Linney at the forefront of attention.

Undeniably, it isn't the easiest film to get into, probably because of the inexcusable fact that there is a certain type of people who just won't want to see folks that look like harsh husks of people in their personal lives deal with the inescapability of handling someone close to them die. But one can't escape the immeasurable talent provided by Linney and Hoffman to these roles that seem like yin and yang, and one cannot escape Jenkins in her accomplishment of a black comedy-drama about two folks that have to come together of what the past made them in the present in their issues that make for a tenderly human tale - imperfect, but aware enough to prove worthwhile to wince through. It is a film that takes its microscope to the human experience in a path we all have to face: growing old and seeing what we have become to those around us (and vice versa), whether that means as someone with emotional damage packed with them or with other characteristics that don't fit the usual mold that come from film involving death in its own way. It seemed fairly familiar to me, since my father had to deal with being cared for by others after having problems with both his hip and subsequently his leg and speech (which sticks with me even now, nearly nine years later). We all deal with care-taking and grief differently, but it is the fact that we have to deal with it at all that makes us human, and it just isn't something that can be solved so easily, modern sensibilities be damned (whether that means mediocre jobs, flings or whatever floats the boat of coping with dysfunction). It will prove rewarding for those who buy into what it says about the bonds of family within a bit of laughter in pain, for which I found it to be a pretty good one to sit for 113 minutes, right down to its stark contrasts that range from Sun City to Buffalo in terms of settings to see these people interact with (no guesses for which I might prefer to visit one day). Of the main duo, it is Linney we gravitate to in terms of seeing a person in turmoil, stuck in a middling rut that Linney pays wonderfully, mostly because she taps into the guilt and self-absorption that we can see in oneself without any mistimed notes or any tries at maudlin moments. Hoffman proves just as adept in a task in playing the flaws to what one can expect from an actor who specialized in distinct performances and never makes it seem like a copy, and the banter he shares with Linney in adjustment within life/death hit that delicate line of curiosity in tender mercy. Bosco had a mix of roles in television, stage, and film from 1953 to 2010, and this was his best-known and last film role prior to his death in 2018. Acting as the curmudgeon that shaped Linney and Hoffman in the family trio, he does pretty well with the material, managing to not waver in the balance of short temper and rapid descent in health without becoming an object of pity or simple scorn, reflecting the film's interest in character-driven drama with complexity that have no simple solutions or easy goodbyes (the best scene with the three of them, naturally, is the one where he berates them when they meekly ask him about arrangements for death). Friedman accompanies Linney at times with casual offbeat favor that makes for a few chuckles while Akinnagbe ends up being the last little key of interest with a bit of insight that connects with Linney for a time. Ultimately, we have a film of responsibility and obligation, where working on one's flaws are no easy feat to go alongside the most inevitable quality of all: getting older and confronting how one was shaped by the past around them, which generally results in a wincing chuckle that will prove rewarding enough for those who care for that sort of thing.

Next Time: Near the homestretch, it's time for Hustlers (2019).

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.