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Media Whore
Away for the Holidays
I'm spending Christmas and the New Year in New York this year. Yes, Christmas is a special time, a time for togetherness, a time to solidify and renew family ties. If I could only convince my own family of all that, I would gladly spend the holidays at my mother's knee, doting upon her every word (even the painfully repetitive ones, even the ones painting gruesome details of the illnesses and impending deaths of persons I've never met). But instead, rat bastard that I am, I'm spending the holidays holed up in a fabulous Gramercy Park apartment with a college fuck buddy and his tremendously successful restauranteur boyfriend. If all goes well an unholy trinity may be in the works.
I've ostensibly already celebrated Christmas with my family. We had long been planning to celebrate Christmas this past weekend since I will be out of town for the big day. And to be sure, many of the trappings of a traditional (for us) celebration were in evidence. There was overcooked pot roast, evergreen-scented bathroom deodorizer, and headache-sweet sugar cookies with food dye smears from the harsh chemical reaction that occurs when decorative cookie sprinkles meet apparently toxic powdered sugar frosting. My parents' 2-year old rottweiler even wore festive jingle bells on his collar. This last touch was especially welcome since the folks haven't yet shown an aptitude for dog-training. The jingle bells levelled the playing field just a little by alerting visitors that they were about to be knocked over.
The only thing that was missing from an otherwise Rockwellian affair was a reciprocity of spirit. It seems that I had remembered to shop for and wrap all of my family gifts while they had not. Only my mother admitted to having a few gifts stowed away in what used to be my bedroom, but she found herself in a pickle about wrapping them. Big ol' nancy queer that I am, I generally do all of her wrapping for her and indeed I was to be put to work later that night. But she said that it just didn't seem right to have me wrapping gifts to myself. So how did January 8 sound for a new gift exchange date? (The rest of the family, all of whom were present that night, would exchange gifts on December 25.)
Gift exchanges notwithstanding (much to the chagrin of my 14-year old niece), the whole family was together. What could we do but play several rousing games of Uno Attack and trot out the same family folklore we relive year after year?
Dad reminisced about the time he came home from work and found me buried to my neck (by my older brother Dave) in the front yard. "That Dave was a son of a gun, I tell ya!" (Riotous laughter.) Sister Gail sputtered, "Yeah, Mom thought she was going to have to throw those clothes away, they were so dirty!"
And then there was the night Dave burned a 6-foot cross on the lawn. (Riotous laughter.) Mom was talking on the phone in the bedroom and all of a sudden the front yard just went up in flames! (Even more riotous laughter.) This picqued the attention of my niece who was understandably confused. "You mean like the Ku Klux Klan?"
"Yes," I told her quietly. "Except we were a white, middle class, protestant household, a demographic seldom targeted by the Klan."
"You should have seen Mom when she came running out to hose it down!" Dave roared.
I sighed a bit too loudly, calling unnecesary attention to myself. Dave snapped his neck in my direction and looked me up and down. "So faggot, when're you gonna stop fucking around and get yourself a bitch?"
As much as I would love to roast chestnuts by a roaring hearth, I've decided that I don't need to do so with these particular people this holiday season. I can't hear about the time such and such did something or another to such and such one more time. I need some new stories, even if they don't belong to me. It is for this reason that I've taken the time to compile a small list of holiday entertainments which represent, for better or for worse, new stories, just when we thought Hollywood had run out of ideas (and we knew our families had).
Fresh from having snared four awards--including Best Picture--from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the the most welcome surprise of the season. Ang Lee's incredible body of work includes Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Ride with the Devil, each film a faceted jewel bearing little or no resemblance to Lee's prior work. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a magical realism martial arts extravaganza with Matrix-era effects, marks the first time a foreign language film (subtitled Mandarin) has taken the top award from the L.A. Critics.
Less successful but perhaps even more unexpected is Holiday Heart, the story of a drag queen and the mother and daughter he tries to rescue from heroin addiction and prostitution. Ving Rhames plays title character Holiday, a disco diva with a heart of gold. Holiday meets and develops a deep affinity for Niki, a young girl whose mother (Alfre Woodard) is such a hapless addict that she attempts to prostitute her daughter to score some smack. Holiday rescues Niki and her mother from the street and establishes an alternative family with the two women for a time...but lasting solutions don't come easily. Don't expect much sweetness and light from this Showtime downer--it's a dark one. Cheryl West adapted Holiday Heart from her own play and I'm guessing that the director added a layer or two of grit that wasn't there in the stage version. But I still have to give it props for its original take on the classic theme of Christmas redemption.
Finding Forrester promises a return to form for Gus Van Sant (after his head-scratching decision to remake Psycho frame for frame). The dramatic chamber piece concerns a misanthropic author (Sean Connery) who writes the great American novel then retreats from public life (shades of J.D. Salinger), only to develop a career affirming bond with a talented young writer (Rob Brown) whom he meets under unexpected circumstances. Since the action takes place almost entirely in Forrester's dark, cluttered apartment, it falls to the two men at the core of the story to engage the audience--and engage they do. Variety calls Connery's work a "career summation" while also noting that Brown, in his screen debut, more than holds his own in a quietly restrained, strong performance. It's rare that a film about writing is so arresting that it makes one want to leave the theater and read a book; you may leave Finding Forrester wanting to go home and write one.
And finally, it's about time someone saw the inherent parallels between hair piece marketing and religious/political strife in Ireland! Barry Levinson's An Everlasting Piece is in fact a satire about the Irish troubles. It concerns Catholic and Protestant hair piece salesmen, the overweaning English concern (Wigs of Wimbledon) that pits competing groups against one another for control of the territory, and the loss of moral compass that results when those involved can no longer see the forest for the trees (or the head for the hair, as it were). Deep and meaningful? Nah. But it is an interesting diversion from standard holiday fare, and the city of Belfast has never looked more craggy and Dickensian than it does through Levinson's lens.
Those films, along with the odd holiday rerun or two, ought to be enough to divert our collective attention from this year's advertising juggernaught The Family Man. But by all means, if you really think you need an update of It's a Wonderful Life--with Nick Cage and Tea Leoni no less--go for it. Just be sure to take your mom so that one of you can get something out of it. The other big studio push seems to be for Cast Away, which I've heard nothing but praise about so far. There's certainly nothing new about the idea of a high-powered executive being forced to adjust and adapt to a new set of circumstances, even if those circumstances involve being stranded for four years on a desert island. But I'm given to understand that the film skillfully makes use of its narrative forms and sports a denouement that is anything but standard Hollywood fare.
That's all for now. I'll see you in the New Year.
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