korduroy Reviews

Sun Kissed (2006)

Two beautiful men fall in love...

[10/10 · 6 July 2006]

Gripping and grabbing from the start, this movie is (simplistically) about two young men, strangers who meet by a curious design. They then become your favorite fairy tale, and perhaps will carve a hunk of sex/love out of you, and hang it overhead and inside at the same time.

I'd give you a linear description of "Sun Kissed," but that's not possible; it exists rather in a spiral time/space frame--no need worrying WHERE and WHEN you are, but just give thanks that you're in a good and beautiful (and fine-smelling place, a aspect of attraction curiously neglected heretofore).It may be occasionally agonizing--but it's always very sexy. Written, directed and produced by Patrick McGuinn, the film puts the breathtaking Gregory Marcel (whose character defines this movie as James Dean defined "Rebel.." for example). Marcel is handsomely complemented by John Ort's needful-though-brilliant and erotically super-charged narrator. Gorgeous cinematography (without which there is never a real movie), in case you think I only care about how they look and smell. For those few of you who worry about love, and/or want to see lots of it, this is your late-summer early-autumn movie. It works really well when it's very cold, by the way. Think of Proust comtemplating a marble statue of St. Sebastian, if that might help.

Not for Lesbians, nor wannabe's thereof.

Shortbus (2006)

Life and love in the New York City universe of the ultra-cool

[10/10 · 26 May 2006]

Brilliant directing and writing by John Cameron Mitchell (he gave us "Hedwig"), and great acting from everyone, especially Justin Bond, Lindsay Beamish, Paul Dawson and PJ Deboy. Great musical numbers too! You'll laugh and cry, and come away wanting to see it again immediately. Much has been made of a few rather intimate and well-lit sex scenes, but if anyone over 16 can't handle them, he or she shouldn't be out at night.

It's all ultimately wondrous, and one of the great revelations of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where the audiences tend to be snotty and conspicuously unimpressed--but the screening of this movie was followed by parades and parties in the streets, with people carrying the stars on their shoulders, like they used to do with Verdi on opening nights in Milan. Lynne Cheney, sly pornographer that she is, will be eating her heart out that someone has gotten at last to the real g-spot of the cosmos, and it wasn't she what did it.

Love may be grim at times, kind of like Kansas, but Mitchell turns it into technicolor. Just like magic.

All About Eve (1950)

How dare you?

[10/10 · 1 September 2005]

This is certainly one of the greatest movies ever made. I think it's insulting to ask people to "vote" on it--might as well ask them to vote on Isaac Newton's IQ. Never mind the astonishing number of Oscars it won (6) and was nominated for (14), and most astonishingly that neither Bette Davis, Anne Baxter nor Thelma Ritter got "actress" Oscars, but Davis was up against Swanson (at that level, it's better that neither won, and that Judy Holliday did for "Born Yesterday", because both were cosmic performances; it just demonstrates the droopiness of the BEST category when it comes to history-making performances that happened in the same year). Can you imagine this being re-made? I'm sure most of those who love this movie cannot. It is the most perfectly literate and exquisitely directed movie from an era when Hollywood was the world's center of genius creativity in an art form that was less than 50 years old at the time. (Easy these days to make fun of Hollywood but think of THOSE days, weep, and rejoice that such masterpieces of drama and cinema were produced there.