Stranger By The Lake

You used to have to go to dodgy little back street cinemas to see films like tonight’s offering. Nowadays it seems even good old respectable Broadway has such fodder on offer. ‘Stranger by the Lake’ (L'inconnu du lac) is basically a full-on dose of gay pornography and perhaps the perfect antidote to last night’s Lego extravaganza or maybe not. It’s so explicit that I doubt even Nymphomaniac can compete, not that we’ve been there yet.

The film takes us on location, to one location, a gay cruising spot by a pretty lake somewhere in France. Everything in the film happens by this lake. Everyday everyone arrives at the beach, park their cars in the same place, lay their towels out in the same place and then tan their equipment in the same place. Before later retiring to the woods for the main course.

By the end of the film I was so familiar with the layout of the area that I could have drawn a map of it. This repetition succeeds in building the tension because you know there’s going to be more to the film than this (surely).

The main character is Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a man on a mission, for a shag. Well he’s come to right spot you would think but he’s initially frustrated. The object of his desire, Michel (Christophe Paou), isn’t available. That is until Franck sees Michel drown his current boyfriend. Now Franck doesn’t think oh shit I ought to report this to the authorities, he only thinks that goody, Michel is now available.

To be fair to Franck he’s not the only one who does nothing, nobody else does anything either. Even when the dead man’s car remains on the car park and his towel lies on the beach in the same place for days on end no one bats an eyelid.

Instead Franck hooks up with Michel and covers for him when the police come investigating. Franck is so blindly in love that he even goes swimming with him. FFS. Yet, despite his puppy dog devotion Michel refuses point blank to have any sort of relationship with Franck beyond the boundaries of the beach. Which is good for the director I suppose, taking the film to another location would clearly have blown his mind, and probably ours too.

What we have here is a gay twist on the old chestnut about the young girl in love with the bad lad from the wrong sides of the tracks; the one that’ll be no good for her but her love is so blinkered that she can’t see past the rippling muscles of his chest. Only with a lot more sex. If you already suspect that this isn’t going to have a happy ending, then you’d be right.

It’s educational I suppose, I learnt a lot about how cruising in the homosexual world operates (if this is typical).

 

It’s not a bad film but the endless naked flesh is a bit off putting. I’m also not really sure who the stranger on the beach was supposed to be. Michel? Franck himself? or the self-pitying non-gay Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), who turns up on the beach everyday for no other reason that he’s on holiday and has nothing better to do.

Henri to his credit is the only clothed man in the film, apart from the police inspector (Jérôme Chappatte), and there’s not a woman in sight.

Personally I’m still waiting for the first body to wash up on the beach.

Lego Movie

Our hero is a little Lego figurine called Emmet (Chris Pratt), a slightly dim construction worker. He’s a smiley chap though because, well, everything is awesome thanks to President Business (Will Ferrell) who provides everyone with instructions on how to live their life by.

However Emmet’s little world is uprooted when he accidentally comes cross an unfamiliar object that’s not out of the Lego box. This, which sticks to his back, is the ‘Piece of Resistance’ and it comes with a prophecy that he who finds it must be the ‘Special’ one with extraordinary master builder skills.

It can’t be hopeless old Emmet surely but before he gets chance to deny it he’s been struck dumb by the foxiest assembly of Lego bricks he's ever seen. 

This is Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a member of a resistance movement determined to end the rule of President Business. To them he is just a dictator who can’t bear anything out of place and who is determined to glue everything together permanently.

Emmet, promptly declared an enemy of the state, runs off with Wyldstyle. Who immediately quells his ardour by declaring that her boyfriend is Batman. Yeah, they all say that when they’re not interested but then when she introduces him to Wonder Woman, you realise this is no ordinary bunch of revolutionaries.

Their world is a world where random creativity rules no matter what the printed instructions say. Their band of misfits is lead by the wizard Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) but up against them are Business and his two faced policeman Good Cop/Bad Cop (Liam Neeson).

It's all done with computer animation that is designed to look like real Lego. Actually doing it with Lego would have been great but probably not practical. The jobs a good un though. Everything here is Lego, right down to the water they shower in and the water the sail their ship over. Personally I always struggled to make a wall that was all one colour let alone a whole ocean. President Business would not have approved but I guess the revolutionaries would have.

At times it all descends into total chaos. Everything happens so fast that it’s not only hard to follow at times but also doesn’t give you enough time to decide whether the constant stream of in-jokes are funny or not. The film takes a well aimed dig at all sorts of parts of culture from overpriced coffee to cheesy music and equally cheesy television shows. A bit ironic really coming from what is basically an extended advert for little coloured building bricks dressed up as a blockbuster movie.

Things slow down in the final act, where everything turns out to be a bit more profound than what you would think as a little kid challenges his father to just let him run with his own imagination.

Quite who the target audience for all this is I’m not sure. There was only one child in the showing I saw of about 30 people and the majority of the film would have sailed well over the head of your average child.

I leave the cinema with a nagging a feeling that it was probably a lot better than it seemed at the time and it left me with such nagging philosophical questions. Such as... who the hell are these people that who are gluing Lego together?

Oh and I don't think I'm spoiling it too much by revealing that naturally, as ever, the guy gets his girl in the end. Foxy bricks dumps Batman and once more for Emmet everything is poised to be awesome.

Dallas Buyers Club

The Dallas Buyers Club is based on a true story.

Dallas is rodeo country and winding back to 1985 we meet Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaugnhey). A bit of a cowboy, a homophobic drug addicted alcoholic chain smoking womanising cowboy that is.

After getting accidentally electrocuted at his job, Woodruff awakes up in hospital to be told bluntly that he is HIV+. Oh and that he’ll be dead in around thirty days.

At first he doesn't believe the doctors because after all HIV is a virus that only homosexuals get and he certainly isn’t one of them. He's outraged that they seem to be branding him as one. That homophobia gets played back at him when his equally unenlightened friends find out he has the disease.

When he calms down a tad he learns more about the disease and manages to illegally procure the drug AZT which is currently on trial. Then when his supply dries up he travels to Mexico in an attempt to get more. Once there a local physician Dr. Vass (Griffin Dunne) warns against AZT and instead tells him to stay healthy, take vitamins and recommends alternative drugs which are unapproved in the United States by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).

Once his own quality of life improves, he starts importing the drugs and sets up a business supplying them to other victims of the virus. He is assisted by a fellow HIV suffer he meets in hospital, Rayon (Jared Leto), a transgender male. Rayon initially disgusts Woodruff but through his disease he learns to have an open mind and they become good friends. 

The FDA is not impressed by their antics and tries to stop them. They only want to foist AZT on the world. So Woodruff ends up fighting the system and the big pharmaceutical companies. He quickly moves from being a man simply trying to survive, through realising he can make money from the situation to finally ending up on a moral crusade against the system. He even learns to sympathize with gay men, at least in regards to healthcare.

It’s all rather excellent. McConaugnhey is great, sporting one of the scariest body transformations you’ll ever see. Leto is good too as is Jennifer Garner as Woodruff's Doctor.

As for barely having a month to live, Woodruff ends up surviving nearly eight years.

Twelve Years A Slave

It’s 1841 and Solomon Northop (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free black man living with his family in Saratoga, New York. He is portrayed as the model of upmarket respectability, so it’s quite baffling that he suddenly accepts an offer to do a short our as fiddler with two white men he’s just met, without even seeming to tell his wife where he's going.

This takes him to Washington, where one night whilst socialising with his new colleagues, he is suddenly taken ill and wakes up in chains.

He has been sold to slave traders, renamed as Platt and is on his way to Louisiana where he will spend the next twelve years working for different owners. All of this happens pretty much within the first fifteen minutes which is a shame. The director seems over keen to get us to the beatings and whippings that are to come, of which there are many.

Once in Louisiana you only need to know one thing. That all black slaves are good folk and all the white owners are evil people, end of story. This goes for the woman as well, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) is a nasty chap but his missus (Sarah Paulson) is arguably worse.

Solomon’s first owner Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) does show compassion for a while but even this doesn’t last. 

Of course there has to be one token good white guy and Brad Pitt (naturally) saves the day by getting word back to Solomon's family and subsequently in 1853, Solomon is rescued. The mechanics of this are also glossed over.

The long bit in the middle, the slavery bit, goes on forever and is nothing we haven’t seen before. We all know that slavery was a horrible dark chapter in American history but all this has been done to death before. The uniqueness of Solomon's situation, his kidnapping and later release are mostly absent here.

At least he got out and got to write a book about his ‘experience’, most of the rest of the slaves were in it for keeps. Perhaps this is why I don’t feel anything much for him throughout the film.

I was hoping for more from the film.