queer film

Blown Away: The Aussie Magic of Body Blow

One of the main reasons that I love going to BIFAN every year is that, like clockwork, I meet One of My Kind. And if that sounds weird or like I’m some kind of alien being, so be it.

The bottom line is that when I’m at home (whether it was LA-home or my current Seoul-home), it’s very difficult to meet people who you click with. Especially when you’re a film addict like me.

I got REALLY lucky this year. I feel like I won the damn lottery. Not only did I meet several people who were Just My Type but they were also filmmakers! So OMG. EVEN BETTER. The people who I jammed with on these levels were creative and making things I could enjoy??? How did I get so lucky??

BIFAN is truly the epicenter of my happiness in Korea. As a genre film junkie, it gives me all the things I need in people, cinema and fun. And this year- the 30th Anniversary- was no different. Dinners full of laughter and film geek chatting, drinks until the late night/early morning, discussions about everything cinema and media culture…It’s really heaven on earth.

So one night I went to this party. And it was hot so I was just really happy about the air conditioning. But I also noticed this very stylish man with great hair and glittery long shorts who was truly holding court with everyone he met. I thought: “I would like to meet him at some point” but I also was ensconced in beer and conversation with the people at my table.

The night wore on and lo and behold…the amazing woman that I spent a great deal of my time with this year, Elizabeth, decided that he and I HAD TO MEET so she brought him over. And the rest (as they say) is history.

THERE WAS 노래방 / KARAOKE MADNESS until the sun came up. I loved his energy and his thoughts and attitude towards cinema and the world and I hadn’t even seen his film yet.

WHEN I SAW IT? I was floored. Welcome to the incredible Dean Francis, a brilliant queer Aussie filmmaker who truly knows what’s up. Our conversations were dynamic and political, funny and important. His outlook towards the world is unique and I adore it. He is 100% punk rock in the true meaning of Punk Rock.

So what is this incredibly enticing piece of film that Dean has created? Let me just show you a picture first. The thing about his film is that it is SO VISUAL and beautifully stylized that it’s practically impossible to just tell you about. I just want everyone to see it. It’s worth watching for a cadre of reasons. To start with, its pictorial elegance, while stylized and opulent, also edges towards the deliciously sleazy and sordid. It drips with both vice and victory in its depictions of sex and violence. So obviously it was MY kind of film. Rarely do I get the privilege of watching a film that so effortlessly slides in and out of seediness simply through optics. It was SO FUN.

Its director, Dean Francis, who I will continue to celebrate and praise, had this to say about the way the film was shot:

Visually, I wanted to speak in the language of De Palma’s moving camera and
strong colours, Billy Wilder’s noir shadows, John Waters’ camp, and Greg
Araki’s nihilistic danger. I wanted to keep the seams of the film showing —
grainy textures, front-projection car scenes, under-lit rooms — like a film
forgotten in someone’s closet.

Just look at one of these shots….

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that this film was a simple crime film or just a neo-noir. Because that’s just not how Body Blow works. It’s so much smarter than that. When Dean and I met, he told me it was an homage to 90s erotic thrillers. Which…if you don’t have an appreciation for, why are you reading my blog? They have such a great love for the complexity of women and y’all know that’s my jam!
So when I got the chance to see this film…OH HOLY SHIT DID I CRY WITH JOY! We really need more films like this. It’s all good and well to rewatch Sharon Stone and Glenn Close make that screen explode over and over with the classics, but I genuinely think it is possible to bring this genre into a new age and that Dean Francis has been able to do it. He does his film and the erotic thriller genre so much justice in his words. Check it:

I grew up in the ’90s, and it felt like movie characters defined how we
thought about ourselves and who we wanted to be. In those hyper-masculine
film worlds, the rules were the same: the man wins, the woman is the prize,
and their kiss is the final stamp of validation. As much as I loved
everything about those ’90s erotic thrillers, my growing awareness of my
gayness meant I always watched them as an outsider.
BODY BLOW was conceived as a way to explore these ideas and reclaim the
erotic thriller from a queer perspective. I craved the seductive, dangerous
pleasures of Body Heat, Basic Instinct, and Crimes of Passion, but wanted to
create gay anti-heroes we could all idolise and lust after.


To me, this film also reflects everything that I enjoy about a good crime or noir film- a heist, a “wrong man” scenario, a femme fatale (in this case a homme fatale), an deeply tortured/conflicted lead character and a deep questioning of authority and right/wrong… Body Blow blatantly revels in the glorious narrative textures and complex discussions that caused me to fall deeply and desperately in love with films like The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) and Where The Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950). Of course, this is not a classic noir by any means. Those three films I mentioned are certainly part of Body Blow‘s cinematic cloth, but the film is far more than that. I hate being this hyperbolic about something, but after my conversations with Dean about the queer scene in Australia and the birth of this piece, I was so struck by the revolutionary-ness of Body Blow.

What’s unfortunate is that people don’t seem to know a whole lot about Australia, Australian film or what’s going on in Australia. Sure, loads of people have seen Muriel’s Wedding or Pricilla, Queen of the Desert (both great) but Australia has this wild and fascinating genre-bound film history and many of those films center on being an outsider or being isolated, much like Body Blow. Even the non-genre films tell stories of ostracism. A few of my favorite examples are Angel Baby (Michael Rymer, 1995), Stone (Sandy Harbutt, 1974), and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)- still one of the most terrifying films I have EVER SEEN. But I think the most relevant films are films like Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017) or The Sum of Us (Geoff Burton and Kevin Dowling, 1994), two films that truly focus on the trauma that exists (and builds) as a member of an oppressed community- one aboriginal, one queer.

Queer films are, and always have been, revolutionary…Body Blow is “an act of resistance” as Dean has written of his film. That is their nature. But the background on this is exceptionally important and while going into it without prior knowledge is fine (I’m one of those people who likes to go in that way), I think knowing the history and continued issues going on in Australia are not only important but rather shocking.

When I met Dean, we spoke of many things regarding the film but one of the things we focused on was the police angle and what that meant within the queer world, the Australian queer world and larger concepts of force and authority. Being from Los Angeles, I obviously have my own feelings about the police, their presence at Pride, and more. But apparently the current situation in Australia is not very progressive. There are bar raids, hate crimes and more. By the police. So using the police to question positions of power and flipping the situation completely, making it a queer police squad…is so smart and so very brutal at the same time.

It would be a dire mistake to see Body Blow as a film that supports or is somehow “pro” police. That is so far from the truth it’s not even funny. If that is what you see, I beg you to examine this work further. It’s a really goddamn smart film. It would be sooooo easy to make a good guy/bad guy movie where the police (who are *supposed* to work for good) are your “winners.” And sure- Francis made a point of not killing the queer heroes. But THAT’S a choice too. Go into Body Blow understanding that it’s not only a meticulously created piece, but complex and smart. Don’t take everything at face value. That would undervalue this piece.

Context is essential when it comes to Body Blow and I want to place this film in the correct context so that you, my reader, can understand how critical the narratives of power, authority and “official conduct” are when it comes to this brilliantly layered neo-noir queer film.

When I spoke to Dean, we talked about his formative years and what it was like to be gay in Australia. This is a very personal film for him, and I think that needs to appreciated. We look at genre films in a way that separates them from the author because they are “genre” but the truth is that many genre works are deeply personal. Body Blow is no exception.

In a recent conversation, Dean had this to say:

When I first started going to gay bars I was underage and I was an actor on TV. It was a few years after the Tasty raid – in which around 450 people were strip searched by cops in a gay bar. So as if the lingering fear of HIV wasn’t enough at the time, closeted boys like me lived with the constant fear of being raided, outed, fired, humiliated. My formative sexual experience happened in this environment of fear. So themes of power / control / permission / submission in the film probably come from that. It was more subconscious at first in developing the film, but I’m honing in on it a bit more…

Things are not very progressive in Australia at the moment – or ever. This is despite there being a general mentality in Australia that we are the lucky country, worlds apart from the sort of facism we’re seeing in the US or Europe. We have a Labor Government and many independent members of Parliament. The “right wing” of politics is pretty crippled. Australians just don’t open their eyes. Anything to deny we’re living in a colonial police state…
We held a rally in Hyde Park, just like we did after the June 10 raids and after a serving police officer allegedly murdered two gay men in their beds a couple years ago (he’s about to go on trial). But history keeps repeating. 

The same history in which gay men were thrown off the cliff face at Marks Park near Bondi Beach and, despite being found dead with hair that was not their own under their fingernails, classified as suicides for decades by the cops. That was the 90s. There was an inquest a few years ago that achieved next to nothing because the police basically refused to cooperate. 

So now they just get away with it. Like when they beat a teenager half to death at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras a decade ago. Then harassed elderly members of the 78ers, the very people who were beaten and arrested and publicly shamed by cops in the first parade in 1978. Just this year they were back at it again. They do it every year. And everyone in Australia just seems to think it’s normal. 

Body Blow is an important film. It is important for a number of reasons. It’s critical that it’s Australian. That it’s queer. That it’s celebrating erotic thriller culture. It’s important that it literally asks the audience to critically examine power structures and authority figures. This is a different and wonderful film. I see it as a crime/noir cousin to Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974), subverting every socially acceptable norm and not just subverting them but rejecting them and undoing them for significant reasons. Female Trouble fiercely attacked heteronormativity using camp tactics. Body Blow actually goes a bit further (not to undermine Saint John of the Waters) and utilizes anger, frustration and cinema passion to underscore revolutionary statements.

If I have filled your head with too much serious shit, please let me release you from that bond. You are free from that cock cage (in Body Blow terminology). While I am always someone who wants to investigate ideas of gender, sexuality and subversion (my holy trinity), let me reassure you that this film is easy to just enjoy.
The story is good, the performances are hot, and it’s a solid piece of queer neo-noir.
I was stunned by the way it held up and didn’t rely on its stylization (because it’s highly stylized).

And while it certainly bears the Stamp of Camp (not a detractor), it gives space for so much exploration. And that’s what a proper crime film will do.

This film makes you think. This film is layered. And, most importantly, this film is enjoyable.

The characters are well developed and unusual. The story is well-constructed and the experience of Body Blow is like nothing else you will ever have.

Go see it or rent it. You won’t have any regrets.

For a viewing near you (or one that you SHOULD travel to) go here.

For AWESOME merchandise? Same link, but I’ll link it again….here

Also, please let me show you some of the merch designed for this amazing piece of cinema. I feel so lucky to have gotten these cards!!!

The Importance of Outfest and Writing the Don Roos Way

My godfather is a writer. Thus, like many of the writers I know, he is full of quotes about writing.

During one of our many conversations about how much I Iove it, how much peace it gives me, how triumphant it makes me feel, how engaging it is to me, as a woman and as an intelligent human being, I remember us debating over the Dorothy Parker quote:

“I hate writing. I love having written.”

I, myself, am not this way in the least. I love the process of putting a piece together. Much like the three witches in Macbeth, I take great pleasure in my cauldron and my word “soup,” I love the way that I am allowed to make things “flowery” if I wish or casual and quirky if that is my intended goal. I love putting my voice in there because writing is my chosen artistic expression.

My little brother is a DJ up in San Francisco (and a very good one, she adds, with devoted sisterly pride). The sweat that pours off the dancers and enthusiastic fans that flock to his booth and to him is inspirational. I can only hope that my writings can inspire that kind of excitement in a reader someday. I say a reader because as a teenage HIV/AIDS educator, I was taught one very important lesson that, 22 years later, I have kept with me and remember daily, if not hourly: if you reach at least ONE person, your work is done.

This is a very difficult thing to remember in a world such as ours where we are dead set on the monetization of artforms and we are in positions where instead of reveling in our positions as writers/creators/film critics, we must choose situations that are exhausting and do not leave us enough time or energy to realize the WHY of our work, only the how  and the when-does-this-need-to-be-in-by.

Last night I accompanied my godfather to the Writers Guild of America, West for an event presented by their Gay & Lesbian Writers Committee. There were many reasons that I wanted to go. For one thing, it was focused on participants from the OUTFEST Film Festival, a film engagement that I passionately believe in and have enjoyed works from consistently over the years.timthumbAdditionally, it was looking at several aspects of Outfest beyond the film festival itself: the writers, participation and development of the Outfest Screenwriting Lab, and indie filmmaking in the queer community. Furthermore, it was moderated by Alonso Duralde, someone who is not only someone I personally think is fantastic, but highly admire in a professional context.

AlonsoDuralde-2

Alonso Duralde, Senior Programmer of Outfest, Senior Film Critic at The Wrap, co-host for Linoleum Knife podcast and regular on What the Flick?! (Young Turks Network)

The program gave me more than what I bargained for and is partially why I am sitting here. But I will get to that later. First, a few issues came up that not only fascinated me but made perfect (if tragic) sense. To lay it out best and relate what I feel are the most critical points of my experience last night, as a writer, as an archivist, and as a woman, I am going to catalog it using sections.

Marginalization Within Marginalization

There was a fascinating discussion about the idea of “whiteness” in the queer moving image community and whether certain writers were working to change that and how. Doug Spearman (Hot Guys with Guns) spoke to this issue, while he mentioned his TV work on Noah’s Arc, what I found particularly important was the mention of breaking boundaries and representations of realities that were not single-ethnicity-ed. Spearman mentioned interracial relationships as part of work he had been involved with and that extending those ideas could only extend diverse concepts of the queer world thusly giving a far more realistic view of the world that we live in.  Listening to this, it was hard. It’s unfortunate to consider that many of our filmic materials, whether queer or straight narratives, seem to stay well within the lines of ethnic and cultural groups “sticking to their own.” It reinforces ideologies and tropes that we should breaking free from.

Adelina Anthony‘s perspective was wonderful in this perspective. She spoke of the usefulness of the theater community and the stage when the moving image world was, to be perfectly frank, trying to pack her wonderfully expansive ideas into their small cages. She spoke of being told to make things “less Latina” or being asked to “tone down the Lesbianism” and other situations requiring her to completely remove her identity from her creative work. Anthony said that the stage and her work with theater has never required her to do so. While she is preparing to move back into moving image/filmic realms, she also mentioned her significant pride in being able to maintain her own identity the whole way through. And the fact that Genevieve Turner (another panelist)’s movie Go Fish was an inspiration to her own coming out story (I have to say- that part was really adorable!).

Outfest as a Writerly Tool and Growing Force

The panel discussed the Outfest Screenwriting Lab, which various people had participated in as mentors (some, as Guinevere Turner quipped, referring to herself, for many years) and others had as “mentees.” The process was laid out clearly and while it was reminiscent to me of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and it had crucial differences. One of the differences was laid out in the first few minutes of the panel when each filmmaker was talking about their early experiences of queer cinema. Issues such as first viewings of William Friedkin’s Boys in the Band (1970) and panelist Barry Sandler’s pioneering Making Love (1982). What was vital in this instance was not only the experience of seeing queer representation on a screen that had been either underrepresenting or poorly representing the LGBT community for its entire history being able to carry that experience over into future creative endeavors. While the Sundance Screenwriters Lab has a focus on independent cinema, and I have some certainty that the participants may have had life-changing experiences with independent films that also deal with marginalized groups, when I sat there last night…I felt the importance of Outfest itself and this lab.

There is a saying that someone told me when I was a kid and doing all my peer education work. I have no idea how to source the quote – all the information I can find on it seems iffy at best – but someone nice told me it. And it’s a good saying: “Each one reach on, each one teach one.” To me, this seems to be the ethos of Outfest, especially how it was displayed on that panel.

During the question and answer section part of the evening, a young man stood up and asked a question. He was from Outset, the youth filmmaking division of Outfest. It struck me at that point that not only was Outfest a festival where one could find entertainment and access to marginalized images on the big screen, it is, for many film professionals, a centralized agent of personal entry to the larger media world.  For a community that has never had that before, being able to start from the ground (teens), move upwards (young professionals) and possibly make to the silver screen is pretty exciting. Unlike Hollywood on the whole, what I noticed on this panel, when discussing people’s experiences with the Lab or the applause for the young man from Outset or sharing of information about what works/doesn’t work for crowdsourcing a film, was support and positive reinforcement.

It was inspirational to hear June Diane Raphael talk about not completely giving up on her project when it was delayed for two years or when folks in Hollywood told her that horrific thing that I have heard many times before: well, women will follow a male narrative, but men will very rarely follow a female narrative,  and there’s really no market for that so…you may want to rethink things. The men and women on this panel were not only experienced and informative but smart and clearly cared about the work. To me, there is nothing more beautiful. So many people seem to make things that they clearly don’t care about. In a perfect Ariel World, we would all be able to get paid to make these amazing works that are full of the passion and determination that has been with us since we were children. Damn the box office! The box office is not a gauge of film calibre! Then again, I also wish to live in the Shangri-La of Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon most days too, so…ya know…

The queer film community needs Outfest and Outfest is growing. This can only be good. The effect that they have on queer youth and creative people in the LGBT community through their various projects can only help and from what I was able to grasp last night and see in the way people engaged each other on the panel, this structure is one that can only flourish. I believe this will do the entire film festival community a hellovalotta good. Outfest puts out work for everyone and work everyone should be seeing, queer, straight, asexual, pink-polkadotted fetishes, who cares.

Writing the Don Roos Way

One of the many times I went to go see John Waters do his speaking engagements, he described his writing ritual. He gets up every morning, puts on a particular set of comfortable clothes, goes and sits at his computer (might’ve been a typewriter, but I think computer…I think I’m wishing it was a typewriter. More romantic!), and writes for a few hours. Then he shuts it down, and begins his day. EVERY DAY.

I said to myself: WOW. I should totally try to do that. Write at least a little bit every day. A journal entry. Something. Just ritualize it, make it happen, just do it. But make it part of my chores. Because then I’ll have at least accomplished something. Plus…going back to the Dorothy Parker quote, I love the hell outta writing. So, however many months later it is now, and…I have not made this part of my ritual.

SURE, I have had graduate school and I had a regular weekly column where I was writing a ton (which both counted in their own ways) but I was not writing every day. Nor was I reading every day. But that’s another entry. Tomorrow?

Skip forward to the last question of the evening last night, put forth by Kristen Pepe (KP), director of programming at Outfest. She inquired of the panel about their writing processes. The discussion had shifted from filmmaking and screenwriting and begun to focus quite a bit on monetary issues and KP brought up a very salient point: without the talents and writing skills of each of the individuals on the panel, they would not be in a position to go ask for monies for their films or attempt the projects in the first place. How did each of them write?

Everyone had different answers and different methods that worked for them, many of which were small edits on things I had heard before. However, when Don Roos discussed his writing process, something clicked and I liked it. A lot. He stated that as writers, one of the hardest things that we deal with is being able to feel good, feel accomplished, feel 100% on top of the world on a regular basis. He gave the example of a dry-cleaner. As a writer, it’s not like we have anything concrete that we can do/look at/see at the end of the day and say, “man! I finished dry-cleaning all those shirts! I’ve had a great day!” Our successes are far more infrequent, far-between, personal and amorphous.

OH MY GOD. Hello, 80,000 lightbulbs dinging above my head. Don, you are speaking my language!!

He went on to say that in order to combat this, you really DO  have to write every day. [Well, now that you put it that way…]

He said that he puts a timer on and for an hour he has two things up on his computer: whatever project he’s working on and a “journal/blank page.” And he writes. For an hour. No phone, no internet, no interruptions. That blank page could be filled with stuff like “I hate writing, screw today, ugh this is dumb, I don’t want to go grocery shopping, I’m pissed of at so-and-so” or whatever. But eventually, he says, he gets so tired of writing over there that he returns to the project page and gets work done.

The other panelists had some variations on this process, but the one thing that almost all of them agreed on was writing every day. While I don’t want to be a filmmaker or Hollywood successful, I would be happy to be a better writer. I think it would do my head good too. So this is my first day of Writing The Don Roos Way. I have been writing since 11:08am. It is now 2:00pm.

I’d say it works. It also works because I also was able to get my thoughts out about a great experience I had last night and document them properly. As many of you know, I am a soon-to-be-graduated moving image archivist, so documentation is of the utmost importance to me. Listening to Don’s words had significant value to me as far as the documentation of my life or historical events are concerned. In this virtual/weblog world, we now have the capacity to do multimedia documentation. Writing every day also means collecting images and doing research.

It may become a challenge for me to keep it down to an hour. But perhaps that is my challenge. And as anyone who knows me well knows, I’m always up for a challenge!