High Museum of Art: Films

In preparation for Pride weekend, the High will host a Pre-Pride Party featuring Q100’s Melissa Carter, a big 80s soundtrack, half-price admission and food and drink for purchase. Tickets include admission to both Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius and John Portman: Art and Architecture. Thursday, October 29, 5 to 8 p.m. Learn more >>

Now, Eleanor Ringel Cater spotlights Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter and Ian McKellen:

The notion of gay and lesbian actors is certainly more widely accepted these days. We’re still at a place where whisper campaigns and “outing” are considered attacks, so to speak, not support. And too recently, even playing gay on screen was seen as a career-ender.

 So here’s to actors who’ve been more confident and open. Sadly, not everyone lived long enough to get there.

 Like Anthony Perkins. branded forever (for better or worse) by his tour-de-force in “Psycho,” the tall, thin, handsome actor made over 50 movies before his death in 1992.

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Johan Harper knows more about B movies than anyone I know. He’s the go-to guy for everything from obscure Asian martial arts to southern gothic schlock. I met him through the High where he works as a security officer.

Linda Dubler: Though I know I should be open to everything, there are certain genres that I just don’t watch – I stay away from slasher movies and contemporary horror for example. What about you?

Johan Harper

Johan Harper: I love movies. I love everything about movies and movie theatres. I’ll watch just about anything. I married the manager of a movie theatre. (She has since found a better job.) I started dating my wife partially because she would let me in to see movies for free. I have forced myself to sit through movies that I could not stand. I have bought movie tickets just to get some air conditioning when it was hot outside. I never understood people who would walk out of a movie they paid for before it finishes. The only movie I have never been able to bring myself to finish was Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000.  I don’t  have a particularly good memory, but somehow I remember details about movies far longer than most other things.

LD: My first “wow” movie moment was seeing Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments on a huge screen with my mother. Would you share an early, memorable movie experience?

JH: I watched Flight of the Navigator all by myself in a big old spooky movie theatre in Monroe, Louisiana. It is hard to believe that it was more than twenty years ago. It wasn’t a particularly good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but to watch it alone, in a huge, old fashioned theatre was fantastic! I was just a young boy, but I felt so grown up and independent having the whole theatre all to myself! I remember the popcorn, the soda, and the red Twizzlers. I kept looking around expecting other people to show up or someone to come and tell me that I was either too young to be alone in the theatre or that the management had decided to cancel the showing because they had only sold the one ticket. But nothing happened and I was swept up in the Disney story of a boy my age who discovered a magic spaceship and traveled through time and space. I can’t recommend Flight of the Navigator to discerning audiences, but I wish that everyone could have the happy surprise of experiencing a movie theatre all to themselves.

LD: Is there a movie that changed your life?

JH: When I was an aimless teenager,  John McTeirman’s Die Hard demonstrated to me concepts that until then had been only words. Important things like loyalty, fealty, and sacrifice. Now as a grown man I know there are better movies, and better ways to learn morality, but I still can’t separate those learning experiences from Die Hard. To me, it’s much more than just the quintessential 1980’s action movie — it’s . . . it’s a male romance movie. I have owned it on VHS, on DVD, and now again on BluRay disk. (And no, you cannot have my DVD copy. I need it as a back up in case something happens to my BluRay.) I watch it a least once a year and I cry each time.

I first saw it during the first week of its release in a packed theater with my whole family. Everbody liked  it, even my mother, who despises movies that use violence as cheap entertainment. She saw a man making deep, painful sacrifices to redeem himself in his wife’s eyes. I saw a great cowboy western set in an L.A. office building. The whole theater saw a great movie and stood up and applauded while the credits rolled.

Die Hard is the thinking, feeling man’s action movie. (If you haven’t watched it, please do not settle for the bbutchered, edited for TV version.) It’s fresh even after twenty years. The movie is rated R and it is supposed to be that way. It’s visceral, tense, funny, and everything that every other 1980’s action movie wasn’t.

LD: With all the new technology, people are watching movies on computers, phones, at home on the couch. Why go out to the movies?

JH: There’s nothing like being part of a movie audience. Lots of younger Atlantans didn’t have a chance to go to the movies at the CNN Center Downtown. Nobody ever stayed quiet during movies there. I loved going on Friday or Saturday nights and watching shlock horror movies with large crowds. They would laugh and talk over the whole thing. I remember watching the first Child’s Play there. When that cute little doll got up and started walking around and cursing half the theatre leapt to their feet and started screaming and talking back to the screen. It was a really great place to take a date on the weekend.

Child's Play

LD: Why look back to film history when there are so many new movies coming out every week?

JH: There probably would not have been a movie like ZombieLand if there was not first a movie like Shawn of the Dead.  But there would not have been a Shawn of the Dead if Dan O’Bannon had not invented the Zombie Comedy with his classic Return of the Living Dead. ( I wonder what it says about me that I like that movie so much?) If you are nervous about horror comedy but want to test the waters Return of the Living Dead Part 2 directed by Ken Wiederhorn is a light hearted remake of the first Return of the Living Dead with much less horor and an infamous Michael Jackson parody near the end. But Dan O’Bannon, like everyone else in the motion picture industry owes a debt to the late, great Vincent Price who made the best horror comedies, like The Abominable Mr. Phibes and Bloodbath at the House of Death.  Bloodbath is especially hilarious. But even further back, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein is the oldest horror comedy I have ever seen even if there isn’t much horror to it. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr. together in the same movie reprising the same horror roles that made them immortal stars of the silver screen.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes

This new series will introduce readers to some of the people who keep Atlanta’s film community such a lively, smart, entertaining, and vibrant.  Not all will be professional film writers or filmmakers, but all with have something new to bring to our way of thinking about the movies.

Felicia Feaster is an Atlanta based writer who specializes in film and art criticism. Her witty, insightful, wonderfully written reviews have appeared in Creative Loafing, Playboy, Film Quarterly, and other publications. She currently works as a senior editor at The Atlantan magazine.

Is there a movie that changed your life?

FF: I took a film course when I was an undergrad at the University of Florida and the instructor showed several Eisenstein films.  I was especially captivated by Battleship Potemkin.  Eisenstein’s films were incredibly kinetic, visually astounding, but also conceptually remarkable because of the social and political agenda the director was able to weave into them in both form and content. After seeing them, I discovered that people studied film in the same way that they studied literature (I had been an English major previously). I ended up combining my fascination with this regional cinema with my interest in Eastern Europe and wrote my thesis on Polish cinema (which involved a trip to Poland). I met my husband during a summer internship at a New York film distributor that released silent and classic films (including several of Eisenstein’s). I eventually studied film in graduate school at Emory, briefly contemplated going into academia and later began to write about film for Creative Loafing, Film Quarterly, Playboy and other venues before landing at my present job as a senior editor at The Atlantan where I still try to write about film as often as I can.  So you could say Eisenstein changed my life.

What’s the first film you remember seeing?

FF: I went to a lot of children’s matinees and remember quite vividly the strange, mildly unsettling experience of watching Ray Harryhausen films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and the dinosaur/Raquel Welch movie  One Million Years B.C. The combination of monsters and fighting with really sexy women, was just jolting and made a huge impression on me. I remember the rhythm of those films as being very odd too: the dinosaurs or the Cyclops with that stop motion animation moving in such a bizarre, halting way.  It was a sort of premature introduction to some adult moviemakers’ fixations –sex and fantasy and violence — and as much as I enjoyed the films, they also left me feeling slightly uneasy.

Cavewoman/tempress Raquel Welch

Most underrated director of the past decade?

FF: There are quite a few really strong female directors who have made amazing films that haven’t always caught on, often because they are fairly subtle in their treatment of relationships and because small films just get lost in the shuffle. I love Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art and Laurel Canyon, which deal with women discovering something hidden and rebellious within themselves. She has a new one coming out in 2010, The Kids Are Alright. I think Rebecca Miller (playwright Arthur Miller’s daughter, Daniel Day-Lewis’s wife and an accomplished writer and director) made an exceptionally smart film in 2005 callede The Ballad of Jack and Rose that few people have even heard of. What I love about her work is the radical but ordinary fact that when women write and direct they deal respectfully and complexly with female characters, bringing authenticity and heart to women’s lives.  Also underrated: Catherine Hardwicke and Nicole Holofcener.

Favorite reviewers/critics/blogs/movie resources?

FF: I’m drawn more to the alternative press where critics are allowed to have their own voices, and to really bring all the relevant factors—class, race, politics, culture, gender—to bear on their reviews. They are just saltier, more interesting, with better taste in movies. In general, film criticism today seems remarkably bland and uninspiring and these hold-outs keep it relevant. The smarter critics don’t see film as occurring in a vacuum, but as part of the cultural discourse. I am a huge fan of two Village Voice critics,  J. Hoberman  and  Ella Taylor, (formerly of L.A. Weekly). I often don’t agree, but I enjoy reading David Denby at the New Yorker. Manohla Dargis adds a necessary dose of sass to the New York Times; she came from the alternative press, so she just has an idiosyncratic take on things.  Jezebel.com isn’t strictly a film site, but I appreciate their snarky views on culture, as well as the film criticism and general anarchical spirit of The Onion. Overall, there is a great deal of boring, joy-sucking piety in film reviewing and a great dearth of attitude and passion. It’s too bad, because film is an incredibly populist, accessible art form that almost everyone is interested in.

Five movies that Films at the High audience members should see this year?

Bright Star, which just opened in Atlanta is Jane Campion’s (The Piano) latest, a gorgeous, tragic romance (in the best, non-drippy sense of the word) of the love affair between the sickly Romantic poet John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne. You can find my review here.

Bright Star's Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw)

I think the Austrian director Michael Haneke is one of the most important filmmakers of our time and I would recommend his devastating, profound films Code Unknown and Caché as good introductions.  His films show how deeply war, media violence, racism and economic disparity collude to create the fractured, alienating, unstable world we live in. I am very excited about his new film, The White Ribbon, which opens later this year.

An overlooked film from 2008 that’s quite engaging is the documentary Surfwise. It  radically challenges our ideas of family, child-rearing and success by exploring the life of an incredibly accomplished California doctor who dropped out of the rat race in the Seventies to become a surfer, raising his nine children in a very small camper while touring America.

It’s rare to see filmmakers treat the subject of marginal women and girls with sensitivity and respect, so I’m looking forward to seeing Precious which opens November 6 in Atlanta. I think film is a powerful, rich art form that connects us to the point of view of others and in its best moments engages and enlarges our humanity; Precious appears to be the kind of film which does that.

The glancing interactions and criss-crossing paths of a handful of residents of Santiago, Chile, cohere into a melancholy portrait in Andres Wood’s ironic and unsparing 5th feature, The Good Life, showing on Friday, October 9th in the Rich Theatre. More understated and less fantastical than Andrea Martin’s Insignificant Things, which opened the High’s Latin American Film Festival, it shares with that film a similar urban setting and an interest in how class shapes individual destinies.

The film takes place over the course of three days, though the amount of time that separates those 24 hour cycles isn’t clear. Wood seems to measure intervals not by minutes or days or weeks, but  by the urgency of his characters’ needs and by the changes that transform their lives. We meet (among others) Teresa, a public health worker who yearns for true communication; Edmundo, a 40-year-old beautician who still lives with his mother and who struggles for autonomy; and Mario, a classically trained clarinetist stuck playing in a police band, for whom expression and recognition are paramount. Each has his or her own constellation of friends, lovers, and antagonists; only a penniless young mother is nameless and alone. All make their conflicted way through an alienating city of traffic choked streets, crowded sidewalks, and anonymous buildings, where a fallen woman is treated as just another piece of litter.

The Good Life isn’t an angry film, though anger seeps into the lives of many we see on screen. And while the director finds in his surroundings a vein of cynicism and indifference, a hollow patriotism and a culture of cronyism and cosmetic coverups, Wood is too compassionate and too interested in the capacity we humans have for surprising ourselves and others to embrace nihilism. So many of Wood’s filmmaking peers take refuge in a miserablist aestetic that reduces everything to a wail of despair. The Good Life is nuanced and penetrating, keenly observed, and redeemed by the belief in the potential for good in us that from time to time is actually realized.

Visit The Good Life official website. 

Linda Dubler

Director Andres Wood

Teresa and her daughter in "The Good Life"