Reviews

This movie is a little slice of choreographic genius.

Shot in Guy Maddin's black and white faux early-film style, it's a six-minute dance of, well, sissy boys slapping each other. They slap, they cry, they giggle, and you laugh. It's set up, timed, and concluded flawlessly. There are jungle rhythms, beautiful boys, builds and climaxes, and one-of-a-kind cinematography. If you appreciate Guy Maddin at all, if you like camp, or if you think the title "Sissy Boy Slap Party" is funny, there's no reason not to own this and stick in your DVD player whenever you need a quick pick-me-up. Sofa guests seem to love it, too.

This movie makes a mockery of the attacks on Sept. 11 by squishing them into the most tired, toothless disaster-movie/family-values framework available to mankind. It is not about the attacks in any sense other than that the planes in NY serve as the movie's premise. The movie itself is simply a (long) longing for heroic spirit: every single character is as pure and un-nuanced as the most unimaginative American mind could possibly make them. It is a hymn to the ever-yearned-for triumph of the human spirit, marriage and, apparently, to Christianity, as only Jesus, a wife, and at least two children appear to be worth living for in this world. Oliver Stone is not half, not even a tenth of the man he used to be: this is a shameful, simple-minded work.

"Invisible Adversaries" requires patience, but it's worth it. Only after I realized that the box cover was wrong (it's NOT an alien invasion movie) did I begin to see it as the moving story of a woman who sees the collapse of her intimate relationship in everything around her--the emptiness of the people she sees, the fighting in the world at large. She's also a photographer, and what she does as an artist is mirrored by the filmic technique itself--the film is full of doubling, re-takes, delays, and some stunning images (in one sequence shown as if it were being projected over her bed as she's sleeping, she walks across the town in ice skates).

I found myself comparing it to Surrealist films (especially Maya Deren) and sometimes, for brief moments, even Godard. It's not always an easy movie to take: the lighting seems deliberately un-beautiful, and you won't escape without some bracing intimate moments. It is aesthetically distinctly un-French in its ugliness, but marvelous all the same.