Fashion, Hollywood and Homosexuality in Gillian Armstong's WOMEN HE'S UNDRESSED

If the name Orry-Kelly means nothing to you, you're either young, straight, or simply uninterested in the heyday of Hollywood and its famous fashion designers. TrustMovies has never been all that interested in fashion (he often quite literally loathes it), but he is bi- and has had a hard-on for Hollywood since around the age of two (when he ran away from home and off to a "picture show," as he then called the movies). Although he didn't realize it until he saw the film under consideration here, he's also been a huge fan of Orry-Kelly's work. Those memorable gowns from Les Girls, above, are in fact long-time favorites of his (the movie may be second-rate, but its fashions are absolutely first-).

The new documentary about Orry-Kelly, WOMEN HE'S UNDRESSED has been directed by Gillian Armstrong (shown above, at right, with multi-Oscar-winning costume designer Catherine Martin) and written by Katherine Thomson, both of them Australian, as was Orry-Kelly himself (who, for purposes of space and repetition, will henceforth be referred to as O-K). What these two have given us is really a kind of celebration of O-K: his life, work, sexuality and in particular his ability to live a relatively uncloseted life in tinseltown long before many other gay men cared to and/or were able to do anything like this.

Incredible as it seems, O-K costumed some 301 movies between the years of 1930 and 1963. And many of these were amazing, pivotal works whose costumes were vital to the films, and, as one of the many fascinating interviewees points out, they look as good, and almost as "modern," today as they did back then. O-K clothed some of Hollywood biggest stars -- from Bette Davis and Rosalind Russell to Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine -- and most of them loved him and his work. One of the joys of this lovely documentary is how well it makes us understand what and how the designer was doing, why it was important and especially why it worked so well. You'll come away from the movie with a new (maybe renewed) sense of the importance of fashion to films.

The movie also captures this Hollywood era in spades, with particular emphasis on what it was like to be gay in Hollywood from the 30s into the 50s and early 60s (O-K died in 1964). We get a good sense of the man's history, and the filmmakers choose to do this via some charming and intelligent re-enactments using actors in the roles of O-K (a sly, sweet job by Darren Gilshenan, above, as the adult O-K, and Louis Alexander, below, as the younger version),  his mother (Deborah Kennedy), and even briefly his first and perhaps greatest love, a fellow named Archie Leach (known to you all as Cary Grant and played in this film by Nathaniel Middleton).

Based in good part on O-K's unpublished memoirs -- which, according to Wikipedia, were discovered in the care of a relative after the man's death -- the film does full justice to the designer's humor, panache, style and wit, regarding both his work and his attitudes. I suspect he would be pretty damned pleased with this funny and charming documentary -- in which some very good and still-living costume designers, along with actors like Jane Fonda, who worked with the man a few times in her early career, talk about him fondly and with great appreciation.

Ms Armstrong, whom many of you still remember for My Brilliant Career) does a fine job of keeping all this moving and snappy so that interest does not lag for a moment. And her interweaving of the reenactments with historical footage and scenes from various film makes her documentary non-stop eye-opening and appealing.

The movie is a fine appreciation of a man and his time in a town that was anything but welcoming of his kind -- and yet in which he managed to make a place and a name for himself. This is a wonderful story, and -- despite a couple of odd fact mistakes -- I am so glad we are now able to see it. (That's a photo of the real Orry-Kelly, at left.)

From Wolf Releasing and running 99 minutes, Women He's Undressed opens tomorrow, Friday, July 29, in Los Angeles at the Arena Cinema for a week's run, after which it hits home video on Tuesday, August 9 -- for purchase or rental.

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Australian film, costume design, documentaries, GLBT films, Hollywood, Hollywood nostalgia, Homosexuality, Orry-Kelly, WOMEN HE'S UNDRESSED,

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Todd Solondz is back with WIENER-DOG, his own brand of sequel to Welcome/Dollhouse

I'm not at all sure I agree with so many critics who claim that the movies of Todd Solondz are misanthropic. The guy has a dark view of humanity, all right, and of life as it's lived by so many of us on this maybe-soon-to-be-uninhabitable earth. Yet the feeling I am left with, time and again after viewing his films, is one of sadness more than anger or hatred at our "miserable selves." (That his films are leavened with a lot of humor, black as it often is, also adds to their enjoyment level.) I'd call Solondz an angry humanist.

The filmmaker's latest outing into the land of the lousy is WIENER-DOG, which doubles as a kind of sequel to his first real indie hit, Welcome to the Dollhouse, which, among other things, put actress Heather Matarazzo on the map. But Solondz being Solondz (the filmmaker is shown at right), the film is very different from almost any sequel you'll have seen because its star, and the "link" that joins each of its segments, is an adorable little dachshund, the wiener-dog of the title. Functioning as a kind of all-purpose object upon which the humans that surround it can heap whatever nonsense they like (think maybe Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, but -- heresy, I know -- Wiener-dog is the better movie), this little dog is something else.

Yes, we do encounter a grown-up version of Dawn Wiener (the character played in the original by Ms Matarazzo), and here she is performed by none other than the new indie queen (though now somewhat mainstream), Greta Gerwig, who becomes, as Ms Gerwig always manages to do with each new role, this character to an absolute T.

But we only spend a little time with the new Dawn, as in fact we do with all the characters that act as satellites to our Wiener-dog, who moves from owner to owner -- the first of which we is Solondz's typical suburban family ripe for rot. In this case that includes mom (Julie Delpy, below), dad (Tracy Letts) and little son (a lovely job by Keaton Nigel Cooke, above). Entitled, self-serving, lying, hypocritical and seriously deluded, mom and dad manage to just about decimate their sickly son's little dog.

From its nuclear (holocaust) family through Dawn and a traveling Mariachi Band (shown at bottom), then to a pair of young marrieds with Down Syndrome, our Wiener moves from person to person, place to place. Solondz doesn't always let us see or even learn how these folk are connected, nor does he need to. By now we've seen enough movies to know the "connection" ropes. And he is a skilled enough filmmaker to have each scene grab us with immediacy, force and often fun.

The filmmaker even provides his 90-minute movie with its own short but smart intermission, during which there's not enough time to go get popcorn but at least we hear a terrific little song during the break. And then we're back to business as our Weenie rests in the hands of a NY film school professor and would-be screenwriter (played with delightful manic perseverance but noticeably declining gusto by Danny DeVito). Solondz uses this section to make sweet and nasty fun of independent film, auteurs, education, Hollywood and more -- and for the one sublimely hilarious scene alone, in which DeVito and the school's head interview a prospective student, this movie is worth seeing.

Then our dog is whisked away to the lap of Ellen Burstyn (above), doing another of her recently fine round-ups of aging matriarchs (House of Cards, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You), on whom her granddaughter (Zosia Mamet, below) pays a call with her artist boyfriend (Michael Shaw) in tow. From each new owner, Wiener gets a new name but soldiers on, as ever. How our doggie becomes immortalized is, as they say, one for the books. But not, I think, for PETA people.

The movie is dark, ugly, sad, hugely comic and full of wonderful performances -- as you'd expect from a cast this good. Crowd-pleasing it ain't, but Mr. Solondz knows exactly what he is doing. Long may he grow angry, hold up that mirror to our foibles, and keep on filming them.

From IFC Films and Amazon Studios, Wiener-dog hit theaters last weekend in New York and L.A. and will opens here and there around the country this coming Friday, July 1. In South Florida, you can see it in Miami at the Bill Cosford Cinema and Miami Beach Cinematheque. Then on Friday, July 8, it opens in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters.

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dark comedy, dog movies, film schools, films about film, Hollywood, movies about art, satire, Todd Solondz, WIENER-DOG,

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The "feel-good" film as a kind of pornography: exploring CHEF and MY STRAIGHT SON

One recent evening immediately after we finished watching CHEF -- probably the most popular would-be "independent" film of the current year and a movie that everyone I know who goes to movies seemed to enjoy -- my spouse declared, "Feel-good movies are like pornography." "What do you mean?" I immediately asked him. He shrugged and answered, "I just feel that way about them." I mulled over his statement -- which all of a sudden seemed to make very good sense. "Are you saying," I enquired, "that watching pornography gives you inflated -- and mostly wrong -- notions about sex and how it should be, in the same way as feel-good movies give you inflated -- and mostly wrong -- notions about life and how it should be?"

"Yes," spouse replied. "That's it." Now, we both had enjoyed Chef, which is very cleverly written, acted and directed. But because everything -- and I mean every single thing in the movie -- works out as needed to leave everyone getting exactly what they want and as happy as clams, the aura of feel-good hangs over this film so heavily that it ought to make it difficult for a thinking person to embrace the movie fully. Interestingly, the fact that it is so very well-made (it's written and directed by Jon Favreau, pictured above) is an irony that actually adds to its burden. If it weren't so damn clever and enjoyble, you could see through it more quickly and keenly.

AZUL Y NO TAN ROSA (Blue and Not Quite Pink, in the English translation), which is being released to DVD with the simpler but not nearly as smart title, My Straight Son, is much less glossy and expertly finished yet is by far the stronger film. More melodramatic than it needs to be, and biting off such a huge chunk of "life" that you just know it won't be able to digest it all, the movie (written and directed by Miguel Ferrari, shown at right) turns out to offer us nothing less than the coming-of-age of an entire country, Venezuela -- from individuals and family to police, priests and the media. The subject, around which the movie circles and about which the populace is educated, concerns the rights of  "the other," with particular emphaiss on the GLBT population.

While Chef busies itself with the plight of the entitled to keep doing what it wants and what will bring it greater fortune and fame, Azul-Rosa/Straight Son cuts a swath through Venezuelan society that takes in various classes and cultures. Both films are quite entertaining, but what makes Chef so pornographically feel-good -- its characters getting everything they want without real life once intruding -- is what does not occur, and thus saves the Venezuelan film from that morally smarmy and skeevey overlay.

The protagonists here are the gay dad, fashion photographer Diego (Guillermo García, above, right), and his straight teenage son, Armondo (Ignacio Montes, above, left). The two have not seen each other for some years, and now Armondo, who lives in Spain with his mom, has come for an enforced and extended visit with a dad at whom he is very angry, and who is about to start a new life with his lover, a successful and kindly gynecologist named Fabrizio (Sócrates Serrano, below).

For his part Armondo becomes involved with a young girl on the Internet, and romance -- via the tango -- begins to stir. In the course of the story, which takes a few unexpected turns, the major characters must come to terms with death and rejection -- hardly staples of the feel-good genre -- while the supporting players, particularly the transgendered entertainer, Delirio (Hilda Abrahamz, below, left), and Perla Marina, Diego's assistant at work (Carolina Torres), are faced with their own issues of finding one's place in the world and spousal abuse.

By the end of this rich and rewarding movie, progress has made made on all fronts. But it's progress, not massive achievement, which again sets the film apart from its feel-good companions. How the son's relationship with his tango-loving girlfriend, below, comes to its conclusion provides yet another road that the feel-good film would never travel.

Especially fine is the manner in which the movie handles a popular Venezuelan TV show and its anything-for-ratings hostess (Beatriz Valdés, below). This is absolutely plum, and the short speech given by Delirio at movie's end, which in other circumstances might be heavy-handed, here seems just about perfect.

This TV show is watched by, it would seem, the entire Venezuelan populace, including Diego's parents (shown below), and his father's reactions to the the hostess, to his son's homosexuality, and to the priest who appear on the show to speak against gays and gay marriage, are interestingly contradictory and seem absolutely real.

For all its minor faults and occasional melodrama, on balance Blue and Not Quite Pink achieves a state of grace by virtue of its ability to confront its country's prejudices and hatreds and then help lift both its characters and the country out of the swamp of stupid consumerist culture into something approaching a little wisdom.

Both films have recently made their DVD debuts and interestingly enough have the same running time of 114 minutes. While Chef -- from Univeral Pictures -- has probably been viewed by one hundred times the audience that will see My Straight Son, I urge you to check out the latter, from TLA Releasing, and available now for both sale and rental. 

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AZUL Y NO TAN ROSA, CHEF, cooking, feel-good films, GLBT movies, Hollywood, MY STRAIGHT SON, Venezuelan films,

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