By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Grain of the VOICE: film crickets put 2005 to bed
A prime highlight of the VOICE year-end movie crickets’ poll is when contributors hone their anti-bourgie cred and press gobbets of caffeinated contrarianism, sultry snobbery and juicy, injudicious phrasing into the mix. Bangkok-based expat Chuck Stephens, who has a naughty one I won’t quote, seldom disappoints. But here’s a personally triumphalist one from his East: “A History of Violence and Land of the Dead are a pair of potent reminders as to why I won’t live anywhere near North America anymore.” Other choice entries in this seventh edition: NYPress’ Armond White spearing the Squid and the Whale: “The almost unbelievably biased critical response in favor of the dreadful Squid and the Whale is proof of what happened when the educated and privileged classes moved into positions of power. They usurped cultural savvy as their own provenance the way they also gentrified neighborhoods—turning the movie theaters into cultural slums. A friend exclaimed that he wouldn’t want to live next door to the people in The Squid and the Whale let alone watch a movie about them.”
Philly City Paper’s Sam Adams on 2046: “More than a year after its Cannes debut, 2046 finally snuck into theaters. Everyone I know already owned the DVD, but many declined to watch it, an act of fetishistic denial perfectly in tune with Wong’s universe.” Plus, this from NYC freelancer Saul Austerlitz: “Caché was so diabolically effective in large part due to the production design. The couple’s apartment was a bourgeois intellectual’s idea of paradise, all modernist furniture, overstuffed bookshelves, and recessed lighting. You could practically hear critics salivating as they pictured their own dingy walk-ups.” Sweetly, concisely, Boston Globe’s Wesley Morris takes on one of the most cavalier of cavils against Brokeback Mountain: “Stonewall, Harvey Milk, Fire Island, Edmund White, John Waters, and Andy Warhol are all going on simultaneously with Ennis Del Mar’s loneliness. But gay culture can’t save him. Gay culture doesn’t know he exists. The idea of his “choosing” to live (and presumably die) alone in that closet of a trailer with two shirts in the middle of nowhere is tragic. It all hails from Annie Proulx, but Ennis is a man after Edith Wharton’s heart.” [My ballot is here.]