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Carol (2015)
Average
First my opinion of the movie without the lesbian theme.
Great cinematography. The reconstitution of the 50's was perfect. Splendid work.
The adaptation of the novel however was terrible. As another reviewer very aptly said, the novel lines that are in the mind of the director are rendered through long pauses and stares. You are supposed too guess the lines when that happens.
The directing makes it worse. Both lead actresses seem to play in different movies, answer to different people, react to different situations. You don't understand how the passion evolves from the movie only. The stages and pace of the relationship are not explained.
Now the lesbian theme.
I am surprised that it was unconditionally applauded by most LGBT reviewers. In fact it could be understood as as much homophobic as liberal. It revives the myth of the lesbian as a predator. Carol is a mature lady who seduces an inexperienced girl. Carol is a wealthy lady who seduces a poor employee. Also the acting by Cate Blanchett is explicitly predator- ish, and the acting by Rooney Mara explicitly victim-ish.
The exposition of the judicial trouble facing lesbians at the time is ambiguous as well. The husband and the lawyer are presented as very moderate. In fact you could almost root for them, in the context of the time.
Carol is not placed in an insane asylum, she will keep her wealth and have the good life. She does not really lose her daughter either, the daughter is not placed in an orphanage. And Carol will be able to see her all the time when the daughter is of age. Plus Carol is not shown as very determined to keep her daughter eventually.
The whole results in a dull and morally too cautious movie. No sides are taken, no passion is really dealt with. Very ambiguous.
Maybelle (2015)
A feat of storytelling
First something that I want to insist on because probably nobody else will: surprisingly enough, as in most lesbian series, the choice and acting of the male actors is excellent. Here the performances by Greg Standifer and John M. Keating are so spot on in all their psychological nuances that they are far, far, far above Hollywood mainstream.
I was of course expecting some great acting from Bridget McManus, whose talent I would describe as "powerful and versatile". Check, of course. Including her surprising and very professional capacity to tune down her acting presence in order to give room for other actors, which I had already noticed in Cowgirl Up.
I was also given hints before broadcast that the universe of the series would offer a great sense of location. I was not disappointed either. Not only you get a very accurate sense of the climate and socio-economic atmosphere of an American South small town, but also a sense of the difference between downtown, secret nature and remote suburb, and even a certain magic of home interiors. Even better, in such short episodes she managed to wonderfully and poetically include in the narration the distances by a meaningful contrast between walking and driving.
But I was not prepared to discover that the real subject of the series is not space, but time. Time not just as in good timing, but as the existential dimension of time.
So I won't spoil it for you, you have to discover by yourself the many plays and tricks with the time dimension across the episodes. It is really fascinating and reaches the literary level of a major classic novel.
On a side note you may also appreciate how the straight or homophobic worlds are not displayed as cardboard evil or "allies", but the relevant characters are given subtle nuances of family ties, age, delusion, painful tolerance, and personal history. And the homosexual world is not displayed as perfect either... which is really noble from all involved actresses.
The format of a short episodes web-series is so thoroughly mastered that Bridget McManus is from now on part of those who turned it into a major fictional genre.
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
How to make an unerotic erotic movie
I watched this because I was advised to by... feminist women, who found it great.
OK, first the sex scenes. They are rare and short, but more particularly they give the impression of having been edited by a puritan committee, which is totally awkward, because contradicting the intention to show kink. They stink, not of BDSM violence, but of such a hypocritical mixture of peeping and decency.
Then, the emotional build-up maybe? Because that would differentiate a mainstream movie from cheap porn, right? Well, the male lead shows the emotions of a real estate agent walking a client through posh apartments, while all the time doubting that the client can pay. And as far as the fascinating virility goes, it turns out he has Mummy issues. The female lead displays the emotions of a girl visiting a new sports club. And eventually she decides she's not interested anyway. Good thing the director made her bite her lips a few times, so we can notice she felt some kind of fear. But her eyes looked totally uninterested throughout. The guy too.
In the meanwhile, you have to sit through a lot of seemingly irrelevant scenes. In that respect they have achieved the feat of making those scenes feel both extremely long and extremely rushed. You constantly wonder if you might have missed something, that would explain where is the dramatic tension. Or even why the characters are there.
So, basically, a very unpleasant movie. The real phenomenon is why it attracted such crowds. Surely the trailer made it appear hot, that accounts for the male audience presumably, so congrats to the producers for the tease of the decade. But what about those who declared it fascinating even after having watched it? Apparently, exclusively women.
Here people like me are left in the role of a chemist during an experiment, seeing that something happens, and concluding that there must be a chemical element that has not been detected yet. The only element that I can assume is that the guy is immensely rich.
To conclude, I would say that this is a success, not at all a failure. It achieved exactly what it was meant to achieve: lots of bucks.
It will give lots of women an opportunity to complain about domestic abuse. Then lots of men will reply that a relationship where the woman says yes all the time, then finally says no and walks out free, is not domestic abuse. And altogether it will make a lot of tickets sold.
The L Word (2004)
A few good ideas, but eventually didn't work
I discovered this series as a coming out member of the pig gender community, i.e. straight men watching lesbian soft porn.
I couldn't make it past the first season though.
As far as the sex is concerned, past the shock value of the first episode you quickly realize that the sex scenes come too regularly, and that they are devoid of sensuality and tension.
After a while I started considering them as you watch the subway wagons passing : unavoidable, metallic, heavy, and filled with an industrial elegance.
The irredeemable flaw though was the Jenny character. Some reviewers described her as annoying, but I would say it's worse. Fiction-wise she didn't fit in the show. Her "literary talent" was in fact that of a very young girl raving nonsense in her diary. "Internal organs" blah blah blah come on... All the other characters were shown as having a normal intelligence, and they had to be dumbed down in order to accommodate Jenny, whose "devilish wiles" would have been detected miles away by any normal adult lesbian.
She just didn't fit. I suspect someone in the writing team had a grudge against a particular person in real life, and insisted on bolting that on the show with a big noisy hammer, and compulsive anger.
Plus, the actress playing Jenny was really excellent, but the coupling of a talented actress with an implausible character created a black hole which made the series worthless.
That was not the only flaw though. There were severe logic gaps. Sometimes within the same episode. Like when the two women wanting a child refuse a straight man because he demands direct impregnation, and then a few minutes later they actively arrange a threesome with another straight man for direct impregnation...
I didn't mind the soap aspects, I think it's OK for a show about relationships, but I couldn't help feeling the irony of a show that claimed to be innovative and different, and yet fell into all the clichés of the traditional straight housewife low-key series.
Overall I think it benefited from being the only show of its kind during that era. But neither the erotic aspect nor the writing were very good. I feel sorry for the actresses, because with better writers and direction they could have done a superb series.
I give three points because of the clever idea of including the external male watcher as a character inside the fiction.
The Real L Word (2010)
Very materialistic
I didn't even watch all the episodes of the first season.
Those women don't show a glimpse of wit, distanciation, humor, civic sense, culture, whatever : they seem to have no soul. They care about their own personal lives, frankly a bit bluntly.
And despite the good appearance they put on TV, you can sense they are ready for brutal insults, unfriendly behavior, and total lack of remorse in their real real life. Self-assertive, certainly, noble, not a bit.
The only one that seemed to me a good person was the one who sacrificed her private life to take care of the THREE children of another couple. And I felt sorry for her. But I would say the same of a straight couple : except when one of the parents is dead, it's not right to become the unpaid nanny like that.
Sad detail, the fat girl conveniently relegated to the role of the best friend who gives advice, but not allowed to talk about her own issues.
If you had the time to make statistics, you would probably find that the most screen time is attributed to the richest women.
Meh...
Girl/Girl Scene (2010)
Am I really a hipster doofus ?
I am a straight male and, like most straight males watching lesbian movies, I initially discovered this series looking for soft porn on the web. Thus you could say this is the review of another disgusting pig, and of course that has nothing to do with women producing lesbian movies, and consciously broadcasting them to men.
And that has nothing to do with Tucky Williams being a huge, huge tease... But in her case it is so superior and divine that I am not sure the term "tease" qualifies anymore. It is more like a yoga master tickling existential things in your spine that you didn't even know were there.
Well, guess what, it is not soft porn. You won't get the feminine curves under a soft light, you will get much less and much more than that.
But before describing the "serious stuff", let's examine a few minor aspects that you might miss if you concentrate on the lesbian aspect.
First, there is a poetry of the location. OK my English might not be sufficient here, but there is a "chant of belonging a peculiar place", the poetic transmission of the special atmosphere of Lexington, Kentucky. I don't know why, but the Middle West towns have often seemed to me to convey that sort of things better than the series shot in California, which strive to display a generic location that could be anywhere in the developed world.
Second, I want to thank the actors playing the baddies, the idiots or the straight. They were all excellent, and I must say superior to what Hollywood can offer at the moment. I admire them, it must not have been easy for them to play in a lesbian series, and they all did more than well.
Now, you want to know about the "serious" stuff ? You belong to the "pig gender community" too ? As I said it is not porn, because in graphic porn you only get the external aspects, and you don't get the "sexual tension between us", which, after watching this series, you will understand is all that truly matters.
It is the artistic representation of intense dating, of the anxiety and pleasure of surrendering to risky desire, of the pain of jealousy and potential loss, of the deeply human satisfaction of having true friends and raw communication. Of the solar strength and magnificence of fragile women in agony, and yet stronger than any man.
Yes, I admit it, those women emotionally raped me, and... I liked it and I am grateful for that, because they were in my life the revelation of the pathetic prospect of relying on the web for sexual gratification. They are like a coup d'état in the matrix, they reach for you, they knock at your mental door and make you understand there are real people with a real soul out there.
They even made me quit smoking. Yeah, they're that good. But I had to drink vodka to be able to watch the episodes till the end... I was like a little kid in awe.
Those women are actresses first, and lesbians second. They are superior artists. In every scene their eyes sparkle with wit, and the unexplainable joy of second-degree humor mixed with raw primeval desire. No wonder it is an indie series, the mainstream American audience would never have tolerated such a degree of natural intelligence and superior education.
Also, I admired the way the traditional aspects of soap were subverted in order to achieve very sharp and yet deadpan comedy. Like the Avery character, who sleeps with all the wrong people in order to create the most awkward situations. The writing in this series, let's face it, comes from a prodigious talent.
OK maybe I am being too nice here. So for good measure I will just "bitch around" the second season which I didn't like as much as the first one.
I viscerally didn't like the Bender character. I felt it was like "Hey, I am not an actress, but I am the president of the local lesbian committee, so I have the right to plant my little flag here". Sometimes I wonder if she even realized that there was a worldwide audience, and if she thought she was just playing a fun skit in her friends' private circle. This is particularly obvious if you compare her with the wonderful and very professional cold humor of the other new character Ling. I frankly wondered whether she had slept with someone in the crew to get the right to be on screen (oh.... hem wait... OK I didn't say that...). Or maybe deep inside I was jealous, her being the only true male character in the show... who knows... maybe I was hooked to that extent.
Another weak point of the second season is that there were two more assaulters, in addition to the one from the first season. And they both happened to be straight Christian males. Sincerely... I write from Europe... and straight Western males are really not the threat for lesbians at the moment.
Last, what can I say ? Because I am a male chauvinist pig I have a personal request. If you ever make another episode, I want to see Trista wearing a cowboy hat, and cooking for Susan. Yeah, you cannot make kinkier than that, can you ? Just joking, girls, just joking... But please...