Cult of the Kuchars: This month -- apart from our
legendary LGBT film festival – the action for film buffs will be at 2575
Bancroft Way, home to the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Film Archive where
from June 10 through the 29th they’ll have dueling retrospectives to
American film icons George and Mike Kuchar and the late Hollywood iconoclast
Arthur Penn. My Kuchar coverage is based on a one hour phone chat with George
from his vacation HQ’s in El Reno, Okalahoma (the heart of Tornado Alley) where
he indulges his fascination for extreme weather. Info:
George Kuchar Selects: Burlesk King: George
explains his love for Filipino director Mel Chionglo’s melodrama on his
country’s adult entertainers. “This candy colored and body greased soap opera
of male strippers, street hookers, family values, and a bit of urban crime
makes one also want to hit the streets.” (6-11)
The Devil’s Cleavage: George’s homage to Douglas Sirk
features the late Curt McDowell trapped in a tacky Oklahoma motel, peopled with
sexy tramps and no-accounts. “Curt and I would trade actors for our films at
the Art Institute. Eventually we had an affair all the while we’re making
movies like mad. These characters had this terrible angst – they were afraid to
wake up because they were going to be miserable. I would write this florid
dialogue and the only way it would play was for me to put this sappy music
behind it.” (6-11)
Weather Diary 1: “I was very interested in weather as
a kid and I used to read books by Eric Sloan – he was an artist who drew clouds
with sort of an aesthetic of the sky – but why just read books, so I flew to
Oklahoma City and checked in at the Y and watched the clouds and the storms
moving in.”
Lamble: It’s May, 1986 and you’re in this cheap
motel: kids are playing out doors in the water and there’s “Runt” the dog you
feed, and neighbors you like and you’re surviving on Dinty Moore Stew. It
captures a moment.
Kuchar: That place was razed and the people who owned
it are dead. The kid grew up to be a big burly guy on a motorcycle.
Lamble: You do this wonderful direct address to us,
with snap shots of the lives of working class Oklahomans including Tornado
pictures taken by the local weather guy.
Kuchar: I’m getting away from my life here and since
I don’t have cable TV I get to watch a lot of cable TV.
Lamble: I love your ad lib about “beating your meat”
before bedtime. Did you find any tricks?
Kuchar: Once I was picked up by this ex-military guy
and he drove outside of town where I got a blowjob. Sorry to be so graphic. I
have had moments when I’m walking along the highway and somebody will call out
from the bushes, “Hey, you!” I don’t usually talk this way in public but in the
video diaries I become this other character.
(6-23)
Hold Me While I’m Naked: “My most popular picture
really put me on the map. It was my first 16mm sound picture – it was all my
voice because by the time I shot it I was too tired to dub the other actors’
voices. So I played my mother and all the guys in the picture. It was going to
be a lurid drama about a mother and daughter vying for the same man but my star
got ill so I turned the picture onto myself about a filmmaker not being able to
make a movie.” (6-15)
A Liberal Helping: Arthur Penn: This tribute
to a passionate lefty demonstrates the stage/TV trained Penn’s unique ability
to bring out the best in his eclectic ensembles and how even the shakiest of
his films contributed to the culture of intelligent truthful cinema.
Alice’s Restaurant: This immensely entertaining
travesty gets so much wrong about a clan of rambunctious hippies raising hell
in 1969 Stockbridge, Mass. that perversely it becomes a moving comic elegy to a
social movement that rocked this nutty country. Penn was a fan of Arlo
Guthrie’s spunky talking blues ballad Alice’s Restaurant and decided to
use it for a film that would salute the anti-war movement. While Penn
completely misunderstood the hippies – injecting melodramatic fictional tropes
to make them more palatable to a mainstream audience – his ability to unleash
Guthrie’s sly, sexy, and completely subversive mojo preserves the sense of what
it was like to stand naked among your peers for an military induction physical.
Four decades later Guthrie’s witty insolence, fashion sense and no bullshit
panache remind one of how wonderful it was for emerging queer boys to observe
sexy, long haired straight boys. Implicitly there are clues to the popularity
of Giants’ ace Timmy “the freak” Lincecum. (6-18)
Night Moves: This latter day noir showcases the
ferociously misguided, homophobic, ex-jock LA private eye Harry Moseby – a gem
from Gene Hackman – as he attempts to rescue a frisky sex kitten (a teenage
Melanie Griffith) from a posse of predatory adults. Harry gets the ultimate
blow to his wounded masculinity when he observes his wife betraying him at an
Eric Rohmer movie. The sting of hearing Harry rip into her “faggot friend,”
reminds us of how when queers first got overt attention from Hollywood it
merely made explicit the once subtle subtext directed against America’s
lavender menace. Griffith’s debut along side a young James Woods prepares us
for their glorious 1998 reunion in Larry Clark’s Another Day in Paradise.(6-26)
Little Big Man: Dustin Hoffman’s brazenly cheeky
performance as the oldest survivor of Custer’s last stand gives a Bob Hope
worthy comic tone to this uneven if brave satire on the fate of Native peoples
in America. (6-26)
The Missouri Breaks: Marlon Brando
delivers a self-consciously over-the-top portrait as a cross-dressing bounty
hunter who sadistically assassinates a gang of incompetent horse rustlers led
by a sassy Jack Nicholson. This totally unhinged romp – with moments as
pleasurable as anything in Butch Cassidy or Unforgiven -- anticipates
the Coen Brothers’ sardonic oaters: No Country for Old Men and True
Grit. (6-29)
The Left Handed Gun: This cockeyed version of the
Billy the Kid myth (based on Gore Vidal’s play) demonstrates the debt Paul
Newman owed to the early death of James Dean.
(6-10)
Bonnie and Clyde: It smashed American film
taboos about sex and violence while demonstrating a young Warren Beatty’s
unique power as actor/producer. We also can thank Beatty for cutting allusions
to Clyde’s bi-side.
(6-18)