Équation à un inconnu AKA Equation to an Unknown (Francis Savel [as Dietrich de Velsa], 1980)

Yann Gonzalez's Un couteau dans le cœur AKA Knife+Heart (2018) is one of my favorite films of the teens. So when I learned he was behind the resurrection of an obscure French gay porn film, Équation à un inconnu, the only film by painter Francis Savel, it became the easiest sell of 2020. Savel was renowned enough that in 1964 Guy Gilles directed an 18-minute portrait of him called Le Journal d'un combat with narration by Alain Delon.

He was also owner and artistic director of La Grande Eugène, "the first transvestites' cabaret of Paris," according to a press release from Altered Innocence, the label that released the film on Blu-ray. It's a role that served him well in capacities on two late Joseph Losey films - director of the cabaret show in Mr. Klein (1976) and costume/musical consultant for Don Giovanni (1979), both under the name Frantz Salieri.

Savel's painterly disposition is evident in many gorgeous shots from Équation à un inconnu.

But the most compelling quality of the film lies in how much it owes to a cruising aesthetic than coherent narrative form. Containing almost no dialogue and peopled with bodies not characters, Équation à un inconnu observes the coldness with which young men engage with and then detach themselves from sexual encounters. At various points, older men play resigned witness to the ceaseless drift, granted just enough screen time to frame the sex with a palpable melancholy. 

Indifference is the key emotional register. Savel makes sure to show a man walking past a scene of unspecified intensity. A café worker breaks up a blow job in the café bathroom but then urinates in the toilet as if nothing just happened. The climax begins with a lineup of beautiful guys in a tableau vivant with one boy sulking in the corner. Even the sunnier end-credits sequence is off-putting as two boys seem to be whistling along with the non-diegetic score. 

The problem for more casual viewers is that these modernist moments are so fleeting (perhaps appropriately so) that it becomes difficult to recommend Équation à un inconnu on an art-film level. The film is more of a slog than the average porn film of the era and not all that pleasurable to watch (again, perhaps appropriately so). No doubt I'm overrating it a tad. But it's a deeply curious thing that invites viewers to engage with and detach from it. So don't watch it; cruise it.

Grade: A-minus

The Cheaters (Joseph Kane, 1945)

I was hoping for a minor classic on the order of my beloved The Holly and the Ivy (George More O'Ferrall, 1952). But both Joseph Kane (veteran of dozens of 60-minute oaters) and Republic are out of their element when it comes to screwball comedy. For one thing, The Cheaters stints on the screwball, trading in physical comedy for a talky screenplay. For another, it adds little beyond some attractive performances (especially from the always dependable Billie Burke) to the simple-folk-teach-the-rich-Lessons template of My Man Godfrey. And so much time is spent on the convoluted story that the climactic renunciations of upper-class greed appear too swiftly; wealthy scion Reggie (David Holt) comes to his expiation in only one unconvincing line (guess I'll have to provide a screen grab). As Joan Crawford once said, forgettable but pleasant.

Grade: B

Ellen Foley: Spirit of St. Louis (Epic/Cleveland International, 1981)

Ellen Foley: Spirit of St. Louis (Epic/Cleveland International, 1981)

I wonder how many Clash dorks have heard this album of Jones-Strummer copyrights and instrumental support from the band. If this is sides seven and eight of Sandinista! (as is often said), then there can no longer be any doubt concerning which Clash album is the worst. New wave, my ass! More like evening news bumps, stillborn artsong, music for an empty cabaret, the like. Foley Cannot Sing (well), the band are lost, and one song is called "The Death of the Psychoanalyst of Salvador Dali." Save your horrified, contemptuous laughter for this botch if you can make it through. 

Grade: C-minus 

Melissa Manchester: Hey Ricky (Arista, 1982)

Melissa Manchester: Hey Ricky (Arista, 1982)

There was probably room for only one Better Midler in the post-1960s rockscape and this album proves it. Not that it proves it uniquely; all of her releases evince the limited chart reach of the cabaret mode. I singled out this one simply because it leads with "You Should Hear How She Talks About You," her biggest hit and judged by Manchester at the time as a betrayal of Adult Contemporary destiny. A new wavey aerobics stomper that Peter Brown mopped for "Material Girl," it bests Charlie Dore's tepid original. But it's the only item salvageable on an album full of the usual overworked session men (Porcaro, McCracken, etc.) and hackwork from the likes of Carole Bayer Sager, Bernie Taupin, Eric Katz, and Allee Willis. The promising "Hey Ricky (You're A Low Down Heel)" is lost without its non-existent Broadway show. And the biggest crime is "Race to the End," a most unwelcome reminder that Jon Anderson appended lyrics to Vangelis' Chariots of Fire theme.
Grade: C

Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2020)

Why was this set in 1984? Why did Barbara Minerva become a cheetah per se? Was Max Lord really supposed to be stand-in for Trump and not just some generic evil capitalist? Is Wonder Woman really supposed to be so utterly charm-free or is that Gal Gadot's fault? Why do (so many) superheroes have to be so damn serious? Why did Gadot and Chris Pine generate less heat than a couple of wax figures? Why did Hans Zimmer's chesty, godawful score pound on almost non-stop for the last 45 minutes? Why did this have to be 151 minutes? Why was Kristen Wiig so wasted as Barbara Minerva?

I don't really care about the answers to these questions. They're just all I want to jot down before I evict this film from my memory. But I do know the answer to that last one. Comedy is a low genre. So Wiig should be honored to have appeared in such a, er, prestigious tentpole. But whatever life Wonder Woman 1984 has is due solely to her comedic talents in the early scenes before she transformed into a reject from Cats. An embarrassment, really. But, as I always say, hope the catering was good.

Grade: C

Nope!

Self-correction

Here's the end to Ed Yong's "How Science Beat the Virus And What it Lost in the Process," a terrific longread in The Atlantic: 

"The scientific community spent the pre-pandemic years designing faster ways of doing experiments, sharing data, and developing vaccines, allowing it to mobilize quickly when COVID‑19 emerged. Its goal now should be to address its many lingering weaknesses. Warped incentives, wasteful practices, overconfidence, inequality, a biomedical bias—COVID‑19 has exposed them all. And in doing so, it offers the world of science a chance to practice one of its most important qualities: self-correction."

I'd add only that worlds larger than science (say, America on the whole) need to practice self-correction. And humility. And the strength to admit that you're wrong. 

Mank (David Fincher, 2020)

The through line in many of the reviews of David Fincher's new film Mank, a biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-author with Orson Welles of the screenplay for Citizen Kane, is that we should not rely on Mank as a historical record, that it must be analyzed for its drama and not its accuracy. Fine. So then I'll try to make this short. 

Fincher locates the genesis of the Kane screenplay in Mankiewicz's despair over Upton Sinclair's loss in the 1934 gubernatorial election. In Fincher's telling, the campaign against Sinclair included newsreels produced by Irving Thalberg at MGM (where Mankiewicz was employed at the time) and funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz never forgave Hearst and thus jumped at the opportunity to lambaste him as Charles Foster Kane in Welles' film. 

The problem with this narrative gambit is that Fincher bit off more than he could chew. He flits back and forth between the 1934 election and the writing of Kane in 1940 in a hopeless attempt to emulate Kane's jumbled temporal structure and thus, he gives short shrift to dramatizing each event. For a good 45 minutes, the film isn't even all that comprehensible. And while I'll grant that these early scenes have a gulping energy (coupled with the attempts to make it feel like the viewer is watching a classical Hollywood film, e.g., echoing sound, cigarette burns at the top right of the frame, black-and-white photography, etc.), they come off more confusing than anything. The rhythms calm down some after that. But throw in a de facto Algonquin Room of writers (Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, etc.), a few parties at San Simeon, and some chats with Marion Davies and you have a mess.

Not a godawful one, mind. The two lengthy conversations between Mank (Gary Oldman) and Davies (Amanda Seyfried) evince rare moments of grace when the staircase wit stops and people converse with one another like adults. But those are balanced by an interminable, dramatically inert scene in which Mank harangues party goers at Hearst's estate with both Hearst and Louis B. Mayer improbably (oops - sorry for bringing accuracy in) sitting back and allowing him to ramble on (and puke on the floor for a coda). A decent film could have resulted from all of this in the hands of a director who approaches this kind of middlebrow peroject with a sense of economy, say, Stephen Frears. Instead, we get another bloated biopic on its way to Oscar glory.

And now if you'll excuse me, back to my Welles (and Josef Von Sternberg) Criterions (Criteria?). 

Grade: B-minus

Tongue (K.B., 1976)

Quasi (Al Poe) cannot talk but he has a nine-inch tongue. He lives in an apartment with a charcoal grill and a toilet tank full of beers. His only companions are a pet frog and an inner voice that taunts him mercilessly albeit bafflingly (two consecutive lines: "You are the biggest turkey in life. She loves your dirty drawers."). Quasi hooks up with Cherry (Brigitte Maier) whose apartment is a temple of black fetishism (poster of Jimi Hendrix, Jet cover with article about Black Panthers, racist cast-iron money bank). Cherry later throws an orgy but that's not Quasi's scene. So he wanders back home and reminisces about the murders he committed which may have led to his current state of muteness.

I could be wrong about that last part, though. One reviewer claims the murders are happening in the present. And I'm totally guessing about the muteness because I may have missed an explanation for it. Written, produced, starring (and possibly directed by?) Niva Ruschell, Tongue has much more important matters in mind than tight storytelling. Ruschell clearly had aspirations towards art cinema. Many shots are beautifully composed aquariums worthy of Fassbinder. The orgy begins with a confounding (360-degree?) pan filmed through a decorative mirror; its starting and ending points do not delineate a coherent narrative space. Quasi plays chess by the water just like the knight in The Seventh Seal. The music is ever-more brittle electronics and original funk songs. Incredibly, a soundtrack album was released and goes for $200 as of this writing. As usual with these cracked porn classics, you always feel as if you just walked into a theatre screening this film even though you've been dutifully watching it from the beginning. I was transfixed throughout.

Grade: A-minus

Sherlick Holmes (Victor Milt [as Tim McCoy], 1975)

Criminally unfunny comedy about Sherlick Holmes (Harry Reems) and Watson (Zebedy Colt) finding their way to contemporary New York City via time machine. The goal here seems to have been to blur the distinction between narrative and number by having the duo crack jokes throughout the sex scenes. It makes for a kind of manic energy augmented by the busy electronic score. But it quickly gets wearying and, and apart from a juicy scene with Annie Sprinkle, it's about as erotic as an evening in the Catskills. There is, however, a fun scene when you can hear the director feeding the actors lines. And several location shots attract large crowds. What a trip it would've been walking back from lunch only to encounter Reems, Colt, and Bobby Astyr hamming it up in pimp costumes.

Grade: C-plus

Butt Boy (Tyler Cornack, 2019)

If I asked my eight-year-old nephew to come up with an idea for a movie, I wouldn't be shocked if he offered something butt-related, say, a story about a man who sucks up large objects and a baby into his butt but the baby grows up in the butt and survives by eating poop and the man also sucks up a little kid and an adult in his butt, etc. And yet this is the very premise of Butt Boy, a film written and directed by verifiable adult Tyler Cornack who also stars as the titular antihero. It's a juvenile film, to say the least, right down to its unrepresentative title (Ass Man is more appropriate but doesn't scan as well and carries unrelated connotations besides). Much of it plays like a lame inverse of a superhero/fantasy movie. It's just a ring of a different kind and there are plenty explosions.

What's so intriguing about Butt Boy is that it forces a meditation on the relationship between form and content. One might imagine that a story such as this would be conveyed in the irreverent style of John Waters who named Butt Boy his favorite film of 2020 in Artforum. But Cornack has created a rather muted film and he gives a dour, unshowy performance as the appropriately named Chip Gutchell, a thirtysomething schlub in the requisite loveless marriage and dead-end job. Shades of Office Space seep into the film, especially Austin Lewis' hilarious turn as Chip's cheer-forcing boss. But the overall feel is of a grimy Michael Mann drama or Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice as told by your eight-year-old nephew. Everything from William Morean's cinematography (capturing rainy alleys and unnatural lighting) to the performances (including Tyler Rice as the grizzled, alcoholic detective hot on Chip's tail and Shelby Dash as Chip's distracted wife) to the changing-same synth score (by Cornack and producer/co-writer Ryan Koch) bespeaks commitment and a high level of maturity. 

So in the end the film it resembles most is I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978), a trashy, exploitative rape-revenge flick done up in art-cinema longueurs. Or, more precisely, it reminds me of the dislocations of so many great pop songs (which I wrote about here) in which the sass of the lyrics contrasts with the mournfulness of the music. It's difficult to position oneself with respect to these works since the style is asking the audience to take the material more seriously than it may deserve. But getting stranded in an itchy place is far more compelling than having a film tightly packaged for one's smooth consumption.

Grade: A-minus