AGLIFF 2014: BOY MEETS GIRL

Ricky (Michelle Hendley) in Boy Meets Girl. 

Gender fender 

By Don Simpson

Being born with male genitalia did not stop Ricky (Michelle Hendley) from evolving into a strong and beautiful young woman; but despite her courageousness, living a transgendered life in a quaint, backwoods Virginian town, Ricky still lacks the confidence to enter the dating scene as an unabashed woman. Ricky’s best friend, Robby (Michael Welch), remains faithfully at her side, as she flounders around aimlessly. Anyone who meets Ricky and Robby immediately suspects that Robby is just observing from the sidelines, in the hopes that Ricky will one day be ready to date him. Meanwhile, Ricky sees fashion school in New York City as her one key to escaping the mind-numbing monotony of small town life. At the very least, New York City is certain to have a more open-minded dating pool for Ricky to peruse.

Enter Francesca (Alexandra Turshen), the fiancé of a socially conservative Marine and daughter of wealthy Tea Partying parents. Ricky and Francesca are both taken aback by the magnetic chemistry they unexpectedly share. Since Ricky still has a functioning penis, they are able to enjoy heterosexual intercourse, but everything else about their relationship seems as if they are two women hopelessly smitten with each other. Needless to say, it is a confusing relationship for everyone — including Ricky and Francesca — to understand. When it comes down to it, their connection is in no way related to their respective genders. It might sound a bit cheesy, but Ricky and Francesca are trying to listen to their hearts and nothing else.

Writer-director Eric Schaeffer’s Boy Meets Girl is about developing enough self-confidence to not care about what anyone else thinks; to be one’s true self and not what everyone wants you to be; to feel accepted and loved despite any perceived eccentricities or warts. Eschewing the crippling term “normal” and admirably avoiding presenting Ricky as an “Other,” Schaeffer’s film speaks to the importance of tossing aside the labels that inherently alienate human beings.

A rare feat for an outsider, Schaeffer seems to capture the life of a transgender woman with profound authenticity and positivity. Hendley masters the role of Ricky as if it was her own story. One can only assume that Hendley and other transgender women collaborated in the development of the script, as many moments seem far too honest to have been penned by someone who did not experience these situations firsthand.

But Boy Meets Girl is not strictly a transgender or LGBTQA film, it is a film about understanding and acceptance, universal themes that clearly transcend gender and sexual orientation. Deeply exploring issues of shame, judgment and hatred in the context of the ever-blurring lines of gender, Schaeffer still finds a way to make a film that is significantly more lighthearted and funny than his films Fall and After Fall, Winter. Not to be confused with Leos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl, which operates in sharp tonal contrast to the lighthearted rom-com genre that the title suggests, Schaeffer fully embraces the tone and structure of the rom-com genre to make his intellectually intuitive plot all the more digestible. Essentially a teen chick flick with balls (mind the pun), Schaeffer’s film is infinitely more thoughtful than most (all) other films in the genre.

AGLIFF 2014: APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

Shirin (Desiree Akhavan) in Appropriate Behavior.

Sex (I am)

By Don Simpson

When Shirin (Desiree Akhavan) is dumped by her girlfriend, Maxine (Rebecca Henderson), she finds herself lost and confused. In her own head, Shirin may have identified herself as Maxine’s partner, but she was never able to actually “come out” as a lesbian, especially not to her socially-conservative, Iranian-American family. Whether or not Shirin’s family were ever keen enough to catch on to the fact that Maxine was more than just her roommate is totally beside the point; they ignored the obvious signs and assumed that Shirin would eventually settle down and marry a man.

Now that she is single, Shirin has the opportunity to start anew by reevaluating her sexual and cultural identities in the hopes of coming up with a definition of herself with which she feels more comfortable. 

Taking a cue from Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior utilizes flashbacks as Shirin contemplates the highs and lows of her relationship with Maxine. In the present, Shirin halfheartedly flounders away with her own life, moving into an artist loft in Bushwick and starting a new job teaching an after-school filmmaking program.

Channeling the simplicity of the post-Mumblecore set (which means this film will be probably compared to Lena Dunham’s work), Akhavan presents a very realistic portrayal of a young woman struggling to balance her sexuality with her ethnicity in the “anything goes” atmosphere of Brooklyn. In Appropriate Behavior, “coming out” is not as simple as just stating your sexuality; for people of some ethnic and religious backgrounds, it can be a much more complicated statement to make. 

Then again, the whole idea of people needing to proclaim their sexuality is sort of ridiculous. (Says the straight, white male.) I sense that could be why Appropriate Behavior focuses on the comedic absurdity of Shirin’s efforts to find herself. Not only is it ridiculous that Shirin thinks that she will have an answer by the end of the film’s timeline, but it is silly that she even has to go through this whole rigamarole. While it is understandable that a lack of sexual identity could be frustrating (and scary) for a romantic partner, why does it even matter otherwise, especially to her family? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.)

LAFF 2013: ALL OF ME

A scene from All of Me.

The weight of the girls

By Miranda Inganni

Director-producer Alexandra Lescaze’s documentary film, All of Me, chronicles the trials and tribulations of a group of friends as they struggle with weight loss. But this is no small feat – the majority of the women in this film are morbidly obese.

Zsalynn, Judy and Dawn and the rest of the “Girls” rely on their Austin, Texas-based group of BBW, or Big Beautiful Women, for support and friendship. Most of the women have tried traditional diets, pills and other measures to reduce their sizes, yet to no avail. While some of the gals are comfortable with their size and appearance, they are all tired of the stigma and “fat shaming.” The obese women in All of Me want to find “normal” men to date and hopefully marry, only to end up with men who fetishize obese women. And, most importantly, the women want to live long, healthy lives. That is when some of them turn to surgery. Be it gastric bypass or gastric-band surgery, the ladies strive to lose hundreds of pounds. But there is no quick fix and surgery, when available as an option, is not a guarantee. With the failures and successes come some unexpected psychological ramifications. While some of the women may gain confidence as they lose weight, confidences are broken as the group’s numbers dwindle.

Over 200,000 Americans have weight loss surgery every year often at a great financial and psychological cost. All of Me does not try to tackle why so many Americans are overweight, nor does it delve into the mental anguish with which this group of women all seemingly struggle. While it touches on some of the ladies’ backgrounds on why they are obese, it mostly reports the weight loss surgeries that Judy and Dawn go through and Zsalynn’s effort to find the balance between what she wants and what is attainable. All of Me sensitively shines the light on one group of overweight women and how they try to adjust not only their bodies, but their self-images as well.


All of Me screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival, today, 4:40 p.m., Regal Cinemas. For more information: All of Me at LAFF 2013.

SXSW 2011: BETTER THIS WORLD

Bradley Crowder and David McKay in Better This World.

Tangling with the Texas Two

By Don Simpson

David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder -- a.k.a. the “Texas Two” -- became household names during the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota when they were arrested on domestic terrorism charges. First, the St. Paul police, without a warrant, seized homemade riot gear from a trailer belonging to McKay and Crowder’s "organization" (for lack of a better term). Then they were accused of an alleged plot to throw Molotov cocktails at empty police cars parked in a parking lot.

But let us rewind. McKay and Crowder are childhood friends hailing from the Christian conservative lands of Midland, Texas. They discussed politics, but never really acted upon any of their beliefs until they met an infamous radical, Brandon Darby, in Austin. Darby brought McKay and Crowder under his wings, teaching them everything he knew.

The three amigos, along with a few other comrades in arms, drove to the 2008 RNC to protest against the Republican presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin. After eight long years under George W. Bush’s reign, the three were beyond frustrated with the tyrannical state of the union. Their plan was to move the attention from McCain and Palin to their own causes. McKay, Crowder and Darby packed a U-Haul trailer full of homemade riot gear but, from the best I can surmise, they really did not have much of a plan other than that.

A couple of days into the convention, McKay and Crowder were arrested and the FBI seemed confident that they had an impeccably strong case against McKay and Crowder because of a key informant. Crowder accepted a plea bargain, but McKay opted to bring his trial to court with the defense that he was the subject of entrapment by a controversial FBI informant.

Co-directors Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway tell an amazing story of idealism, loyalty, lies and betrayal. In constructing their narrative, de la Vega and Galloway must first re-create for the audience what happened prior to the commencement of their production. So they rely on archival footage and talking head interviews recollecting the events. De la Vega and Galloway allow everyone, including the FBI, to tell their version of the story and, surprisingly enough, they all seem to be on the same page (or at least the same chapter), except for the actions of the FBI informant.

The unfolding of the events is riveting. Better This World represents how conservative America’s post-9/11 "War on Terror" went terribly awry, ripping away the civil liberties of American citizens and instantly squashing any form of political dissent. The line between protesters and terrorists was blurred as was the definition of terrorism. (I am using the past tense, but I would argue that this is still true in the present tense as well.) The question remains: should the FBI be permitted to punish “radicals” (or “protesters” or “terrorists”) who were recruited and trained by FBI informants?

Speaking of conservative America, BigGovernment.com recently alerted its readership: “[Better This World] depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, ‘set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.’ In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.”

(Of course if McKay and Crowder were targeting abortion doctors or Democrats who supported the healthcare bill, the tone of this conservative rhetoric would probably be a lot different.)

I have absolutely no doubt that other conservatives (most without ever watching Better This World) will line up to write-off de la Vega and Galloway as propagandists working for America’s so-called leftist liberal media. But, as I see it, Better This World lays out a lot of undeniable evidence that -- as part of the "War on Terror" -- at least one FBI informant has overstepped his or her bounds and personal freedoms for American citizens has been lessened.