Browse: Home / SIFF Day 17: The Masks We Wear

Menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login

The-SoluteLogo

A Film Site By Lovers of Film

Menu

Skip to content
  • Features
  • Reviews
  • Long Reviews
  • News
  • Articles and Opinions
  • Other Media
  • Guest Review: James Williams on JOHN WICK: CHAPTER FOUR
  • Film on the Internet: COLD IN JULY
  • New on DVD and Blu-Ray
  • Local 32-Year-Old Man Successfully Expands His Taste In Music
  • Celebrating the Living: Kirk R. Thatcher

SIFF Day 17: The Masks We Wear

Posted By Julius Kassendorf on June 3, 2015 in Features | Leave a response

Fourth Man Out is a new comedy about coming out in a middle-class environment to your group of mostly hetero friends. Adam (Evan Todd) has a group of three really good friends to whom he comes out on his 24th birthday. In the new milieu of 21st century acceptance, they feel weirded out by it at first, but come around to accepting his new status as gay while still getting over their own hangups of a dude loving the cock. Meanwhile, Adam finds himself on the dating scene again, only this time with dudes.

The purpose of Fourth Man Out is clear: what if you wrote a hetero sex comedy but replaced one guy with a gay dude. It’s a propagandist piece aimed at middle America to say that not all gays are of that type. Adam is a tall, hairy mechanic with a permanent five o’clock shadow. He has naturally curly hair, a great smile, and exudes naturalistic masculinity. At one point in the movie, Adam goes on a date with a bunch of “those” types of gays – effeminate, eccentric, arty, outcast – shunning them all as inappropriate. Which brings us to a similar point of Do I Sound Gay? in that Fourth Man Out is all about bringing homosexuality closer to heteronormativity.

Both Evan Todd (Adam) and director Andrew Nackman are gay (Edit: Andrew Nackman is not gay, as per the pubicist, which further exacerbates the problems found within the film. We apologize for the mistake), some of the producers are gay and others are women. But, the screenwriter Aaron Dancik and the remainder of the cast are hetero. At the following Q&A, Dancik stated he wrote the screenplay as a “what if” scenario of “what if one of my friends came out as gay?” Inadvertently, through many typical screenwriting cliches, Dancik and Nackman fell into a pile of issues dealing with the gay identity, a topic that has been brewing underneath the marriage debate for years. Are the artistic or flaming gay types less worthy of respect because they aren’t manly men? The ideal match for Adam is a dude with two kayaks permanently affixed to his car and a cheesy Save The Whales bumper sticker: the outdoorsy gay who goes camping and is sporty. I’ve no problem with Dancik exploring the idea of one of his friends coming out as gay, but the way he fell into the bramble of gay as identity feels short sighted at best, even if the movie is quite funny.

At the other end of the spectrum, Very Semi-Serious does absolutely nothing to dispel the idea that The New Yorker cartoons are written by mildly eccentric white people for effete white people. Very Semi-Serious is a new advertisement-as-documentary about The New Yorker and its cartoon editor Robert Mankoff. He has to work through thousands of cartoons every week to whittle down the selections to 15. At one point, Mankoff has to bring a bunch of selections to David Remnick for further editing, and an assistant comments, “I’ve been trying to get David to hire more women, to increase the diversity of voices.” As the camera following Mankoff follows, a black woman is seen in the doorway trying to hide from the camera. This is about the only person of color in the whole movie. Otherwise, Very Semi-Serious is a sea of white people talking about what is considered funny to other white people.

The main problem with Very Semi-Serious is that it never interrogates the status of The New Yorker as a stalwart defender of northern white intellectual elitism who see themselves in a semi-ironic light. Instead, it’s merely a commercial for Mankoff and The New Yorker to remind you that it still exists, and there are still cartoons (you like cartoons). Sure, it may be dominated by white people, but do you see how many white people submit? Just because you have two old white men as the gatekeepers of taste, it in no way reflects the cultural debate. Even Mankoff’s assistant is a young white dude, but look at the perfect caption he selected from a sea of hundreds of entries. *sigh* In other words, Very Semi-Serious is an insufferable work of bland propaganda. Unless you’re completely in the bag for The New Yorker and don’t mind that these questions aren’t asked, in which case it’s a wonderful and witty documentary about the cartoons.

Similarly full of white upper-middle class white people is Josh Lawson’s The Little Death, an Australian dark comedy about five couples with marital woes and a sex offender. Lawson’s comedy opens with a woman asking her long-term boyfriend to rape her, and he tells her that she’s five stars, a 10 out of 10, and totally amazing in his book. This breakdown of communication, confusing sex with love, is The Little Death in miniature. Each of Lawson’s five couples have to translate their thoughts and passions in order to liven up their sex life. But, nobody is listening to what the other is actually communicating.

One woman discovers she is turned on when her husband cries. Another couple are turned on by sexual role play, that is by being somebody they aren’t. Yet another is a deaf man calling in to a video relay chat to try to get the female translator to call a sex line. It’s all dealing with communication breakdown impeding their efforts for sex and love. Meanwhile, the sex offender brings homemade cookies in the shape of Golliwogs (yes, the racist caricature rag dolls) in order to tell his neighbors that he’s a sex offender.

Lawson isn’t here to berate a sex positive culture. His statement is that our current focus on sex as the cure-all for relationships may actually be impeding our ability to communicate with anything other than our private parts. His casting, and the use of golliwogs, seems also to be that this is largely the problem of upper-middle class white people who have little else to focus on so they put their own roadblocks between them and happiness. Fortunately for us, he also isn’t afraid to go full on pitch black with his humor to make his point.

Unfortunately, Next Time I’ll Aim For The Heart doesn’t have as strong a commitment to its own irony as it should. Next Time is a true crime French movie that proclaims it is about the strangest serial killer case in France. If this is the strangest serial killer in France, then they truly are lucky. Franck Neuhart is a serial killer who is also a gendarme (a county policeman) investigating his own case. This is not a spoiler, as the plot is established in the first reel. Unfortunately, Cedric Anger can’t figure out a tone for the movie, and leaves it a bland mushy rehash resembling any number of Zodiac killer movies.

There really isn’t much to say about Next Time I’ll Aim For The Heart. It’s almost offensively bland, minus a couple of laugh-worthy scenes. Could it be a pitch black comedy? Maybe. There are some scenes where the police think Neuhart might be a homosexual and investigate the local cruising grounds. Other scenes where they get humor out of the irony of investigating your own crimes. There is plenty of irony to go around lending credence that this might be as sneakily hilarious as Harold Ramis’ The Ice Harvest. Do I really want to give it a second chance?

Next Entry: Communism, race, and class.

Posted in Features | Tagged Andrew Nackman, Cedric Anger, Fourth Man Out, Josh Lawson, Leah Wolchok, Next Time I'll Aim For The Heart, Seattle, Seattle International Film Festival, SIFF, SIFF 2015, The Little Death, Very Semi-Serious

About the Author

Julius Kassendorf

Julius Kassendorf is the founder of The-Solute, and previously founded The Other FIlms and Project Runaways in 2013. There, he dabbled in form within reviews to better textualize thought processes about the medium of film.

Previously, he has blogged at other, now-defunct, websites that you probably haven’t heard of, and had a boyfriend in Canada for many years. Julius resides in Seattle, where he enjoys the full life of the Seattle Film Community.

Julius’ commanding rule about film: Don’t Be Common. He believes the worst thing in the world is for a film to be like every other film, with a secondary crime of being a film with little to no ambition.

Related Posts

Film on the Disc: A KID LIKE JAKE→

THE BOOKSHOP→

Film on the Disc: SCORCHY→

SIFF Dispatches: GOING TO BRAZIL→

  • Comments
  • Popular
  • Most Recent
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleWonderful piece, Sam. It's made…
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleFellow heretic here. I've never…
  • n***********@gmail.com'
    Ruck Cohlchez on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEI wouldn't have called it…
  • j***********@gmail.com'
    Son of Griff on LIFE ITSELFGlad to hear back from…
  • n*********@gmail.com'
    Jake Gittes on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEThis is the single most…
  • “The End” of SAVAGES

    33895 views / Posted November 10, 2014
  • What the fuck did I just watch? SPHERE

    27464 views / Posted March 19, 2015
  • The Untalented Mr. Ripley: The Craft of Standup Comedy and the Non-Comedy of TOM MYERS

    25093 views / Posted June 26, 2018
  • Scenic Routes: SHOWGIRLS (1995)

    20110 views / Posted November 20, 2014
  • Yvonne, or: CASABLANCA In One Character and Three Scenes

    11152 views / Posted August 21, 2014
  • Guest Review: James Williams on JOHN WICK: CHAPTER FOUR

    March 29, 2023 / Sam "Burgundy Suit" Scott
  • Film on the Internet: COLD IN JULY

    March 29, 2023 / ZoeZ
  • New on DVD and Blu-Ray

    March 28, 2023 / Greta Taylor
  • Local 32-Year-Old Man Successfully Expands His Taste In Music

    March 27, 2023 / Tristan "Drunk Napoleon" Nankervis
  • Today, in "images you can hear"

    Celebrating the Living: Kirk R. Thatcher

    March 26, 2023 / Gillianren

Last Tweets

  • Guest Review: James Williams on JOHN WICK: CHAPTER FOUR - https://t.co/luSXZmy1EQ, 33 mins ago
  • Film on the Internet: COLD IN JULY - https://t.co/jXq2wsmCy5, 4 hours ago
  • New on DVD and Blu-Ray - https://t.co/eTSlUOrMxP, Mar 28

©2014 - 2016 The-Solute | Hosted, Developed and Maintained by Bellingham WP LogoBellinghamWP.com.

Menu

  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login
Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!