Archive for the Live Action Category


GUNJO, by Nakamura Ching Getting a Movie on Netflix!

October 27th, 2020

Thanks to YNN Correspondent Mercedes for bring this to my attention early today. Nakamura Ching’s GUNJO is being made into a movie by Netflix. This true-crime style story follows the aftermath of a murder. A desperate woman has the woman who has loved her for years kill her abusive husband. The story happens as they run from the police. The Netflix movie will star Kiku Mizukara and Honami Sato.

Komatsu-san at Crunchyroll News has the details.

Volume 1 of GUNJO is available in English at Nakamura-sensei’s site, on a per-chapter basis. I was able to edit is, with Erin Subramanian doing a fantastic job on translation. I hope you’ll read it! With luck, we’ll get a collected e-book volume soon.





Wild Nights With Emily

October 25th, 2020

Wild Nights with Emily, streaming now on Amazon Prime, directed by Madeline Olnek, starring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson, was exceptionally silly. That is not a criticism.

Most of us encounter Emily Dickinson in High School, where we are taught her poetry in the way least likely to allow us to actually enjoy any of it. Using it as an example of meter and rhyme, we all end up singing “Because I could Not Stop For Death He Kindly Stopped For Me,” to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas, without really touching upon the commonalities of 19th century hymnal music that would give context to that fact.  I had an exceptionally terrible 10th grade American lit teacher, who we called Fifi, who managed to parrot the party line about Dickinson being a “recluse” and I was still able to guess that she was actually a dedicated writer who had no interest in taking care of someone’s household. What I did not know at the time was that she was gay af.

In 1998, it was discovered that mentions of Emily’s sister-in-law, Susan, had been physically erased from many of her letters and poems. The collection of her letters at Amherst have managed to put together some of their story, which you can find online at the Dickinson Electronic Archives.

Wild Nights With Emily begins from the perspective that given how passionate Emily and Susan’s relationship was…how did we get from there to the “aloof recluse” we were taught about in school? The agent of that new, less passionate, Emily is one Mabel Todd, the woman who published Dickinson’s poetry posthumously. The movie follows the life and loves of the Dickinsons, Emily and her brother Austin, sister Lavinia and their various entwinements with Mabel Todd.  Emily is portrayed as an amusingly snarky and intense person, Susan as the voice of reason who is wholly supportive of Emily. Pretty much everyone else comes across as ridiculous. Austin’s affair with Mabel Todd is tawdry, the men who nitpick Emily’s work are self-involved and mendacious. Todd herself take the brunt of seeming ridiculous, and the sound of her erasing Susan from Emily’s letters accompanies the final credits. We found ourselves barking with laughter, rather more often than we imagined we might.

The one genuine weak point was the acting. The first half of the movie felt like everyone was reading their lines, rather than performing them. It did settle down a little by the end, although Todd’s lines are excruciating throughout…on purpose, I presume, to make her look more foolish. The pace of the movie is frantic and non-linear, which worked fine to keep the story on point.

In the end, we found the movie to be a goofy, yet, effective way to address the enormity of the erasure of Emily’s passionate nature, and the devolution of a brilliant woman into a distant recluse whose poetry had to be shoehorned into more “acceptable” form to be received with any critical acclaim.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 6
Acting – 4
Story – 8
Characters – 8
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 7

This is not a masterpiece of movie-making. But it is a sharp-tongued commentary on Dickinson’s passionate love for her sister-in-law having been largely bowdlerized from her writings and biography.





Olivia, Directed by Jacqueline Audry

October 18th, 2020

Seventeen years before Radley Metzger directed the French school girl lesbian romance movie Therese and Isabelle, in 1951 Jacqueline Audry directed a wholly different movie about a lesbian affair in a girls’ school. Set in France, Olivia, which has been beautifully restored and is streaming on The Criterion Channel  or is available as  a BD with English subtitles.

IMDb sums up the story as “Olivia, an English teenager, arrives at a finishing school in France. The majority of the pupils in the school are divided into two camps: those that are devoted to the headmistress, Mlle Julie and those who follow Mlle Cara, an emotionally manipulative invalid who is obsessed with Mlle Julie.”

The drama is understated and subtle, but the emotions are apparent…to almost everyone in the school. Criterion themselves synopsize it this way, “Neglected for nearly seventy years, a singular landmark of lesbian cinema by one of France’s trailblazing women directors reemerges. Plunging the viewer—and the main character—into a lion’s den, Jacqueline Audry depicts a nineteenth-century boarding school for young girls, a house divided between its rival mistresses, Miss Julie (Edwige Feuillère) and Miss Cara (Simone Simon). As the two women compete for the affections of their students, they rouse passion, hatred, and unexpected reversals of fortune. Awash in spellbinding gothic atmosphere and a hothouse air of unspoken desire, OLIVIA is a daring feminist statement decades ahead of its time.”

I can’t really do better than that to set the scene, although I don’t think it’s gothic so much as wholly Belle Époque, fully idealized romanticism and richly festooned with superficial beauty and underlying decay; a movie version of a Renoir painting.

We learn almost nothing about Olivia’s circumstances, except that English schools are dire compared to French schools, but she is immediately liked by all the girls. It is the cook, Victoire who acts as Greek chorus for us, pointing out the factions of affection at the school.

The melodramatically unwell Mlle Cara welcomes Olivia, but the new girl is absolutely captivated by the cosmopolitan and elegant Mlle Julie. Mlle Cara sees this as a betrayal, and when Mlle Julie’s former favorite, Laura returns to the school it drives Cara into a hysterical fit.

Olivia has a single joyous day with the subject of her desire in Paris.  On the night of the holiday fête, Olivia lays in her room waiting for Mlle Julie to come to her as she said she would, but the headmistress is late and leaves almost immediately. A scream resounds and Mlle Julie finds Mlle Cara dead in her room. Whether her death is suicide or murder is never truly determined. Mlle Julie has lost everything, the woman she loves, all her money, her position and the love of the students and now, she must leave the school, as well.

Okay, so it’s not a happy ending, but wow what a lovely movie! It never once feels low-budget and sparse as There and Isabelle does. The girls’ school always is warm and welcoming, full of beauty and life. No echoing stone halls here, no miserly rations. Victoire serves up delicious food and prime commentary. The acting isn’t awkward at all. Everyone is very convincing and our feelings for the manipulative Cara are probably about the same as Mlle Julie’s, swinging rapidly from pity to exhaustion.

There are no sex scenes, but the few kisses and embraces are intimate and intense. Desire is not at all unspoken. It’s easy for us to understand the girls’ feelings and equally as difficult to sympathize with the adults. Mlle Julie for being inconstant to the only women, she says, she loved, Mlle Cara for being hysterical, Mlle Dubois for being clueless. Only Victoire and Frau Riesener, rise above this and it is Frau Riesener who inherits Cara’s estate and, presumably, Julie’s position.

I had no real expectation before watchingthis movie and I’m very glad I saw it after Therese and IsabelleOlivia was made ten years before The Children’s Hour and deserves at least as much a place in our history of lesbian media, as it has the double honor of being one of the first French films to show lesbian love, directed by an acclaimed female director. The end result is a take in which desire is made rawly visible without ever being made tawdry.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 8 
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Service – 3
Lesbian – 5

Overall- 8

Olivia is movie about the consequence of desire and its effect on the community, rather than one girl’s experience. It was worth a watch.





The Carmilla Movie

October 11th, 2020

Tough call today, I’m torn between reviewing this and A Lily Blooms in Another World, but this has been on my “to-review on Sunday” list for a long time, so I’m sticking with plan. Tune in tomorrow, because l have a lot to say about Ameco Kaeruda’s newest LN.

Today I am, at long last, revisiting the entertaining finish to the entertaining webseries, Carmilla. (Season 1 and Season 2  have been reviewed here on Okazu.) At the end of the webseries, creators took their spin on Sheridan LeFanu’s vampire novel Carmilla, soaked in H.P. Lovecraftian-style dread horror and sprinkled lightly with post-Buffy, the Vampire Slayer humor and shenanigans to the big screen for one last adventure.

In The Carmilla Movie, after defeating the ancient horror that lay below protagonist Laura’s college, formerly-immortal vampire Carmilla, is now once again human.  Only…something seems to be up with that. The movie will explore Carmilla’s past, and also dredge up the fears of Laura, Perry and La Fontaine and will, predictably give Carmilla some good, gothic self-loathing time to consider her evil past, as they race to help unsettled ghosts pass through the veil, defeat an obsessed victim of Carmilla’s and decide, ultimately, whether Carmilla ought to remain a human, or return to being a vampire, forever.

Outside the video-log format of the original webseries, the story flails a bit. Once the camera is off, we get to see the running around and shouting that was previously assumed in the webseries…and I’m not sure it makes the story better. This is not a series that needs a bigger budget, or a larger screen, but the movie held together well, without losing any of the qualities that made the webseries fun to watch. We still see all the characters as we’ve grown to know and admire them, with gloating baddies, arcane rituals and items, and a fresh hell for us all to face.  I especially liked that Carmilla‘s undead reclaim their gothic roots. There are no sparkly vamps here, just the diaphanous shifts of modern Victorian cosplay.

A perfect watch for grey and gloomy Sunday in October…which it just *happens* to be today here as I write. ^_^

Cinematography – 7
Story –  8 Creative, if not brilliant
Characters – 9
LGBTQ – 10
Service – Not really?

Overall – 9

Honestly….I think LeFanu would have loved this series.

There’s a clear lineage here:  LeFanu and  Stoker have a baby called Buffy. Lovecraft has a fey child called Nightvale, Nightvale and Buffy have a very queer child…Carmilla. ^_^

 





Therese and Isabelle

September 27th, 2020

Radley Metzger’s 1968 movie Therese and Isabelle is …well, it’s a relic of both its time and place; the kind artist softcore that filled arthouse movie theaters, the kind of movie that passed for “European,” without being at all original in content or artistic, but also manages to not be bad enough to be amusing. Of all the old movies I have ever referenced here, Therese and Isabelle is one that I am constantly surprised I haven’t yet reviewed.  If you have interest in mid-20th century movies about lesbian relationships, this is available on the Internet Archive, so now would be a good time to watch it.

As an adult, Therese visits her old school, College du Lys (this is me grinning broadly), a boarding school for girls. While touring the grounds, she looks back on her experiences there, and how she and another student, Isabelle, fell in love.

The plot is just about as predictable and trite as imaginable. Therese’s mother had remarried, so the girl is half abandoned at this new, strange place. She and Isabelle become friends, then something more. Sublimating her growing desire for Isabel, Therese loses her virginity to a “suave” guy who clearly does all the young girls at the school and who today would be considered a predatory creep, but to the men who made this movie, is merely an inevitability.

Therese and Isabelle eventually admit their feelings and consummate the relationship, almost immediately after which Isabelle disappears from the school, transferred Therese is told. The final words of the movie are “I never saw Isabelle again.” As little as we know about Isabelle, we know nothing more about Therese.  She arrives, she experiences nostalgia, she leaves. Who she is, where she comes from, we’ll never know. Therese is an awkward, unhappy girl, but we’ll never really know what she becomes as an adult.

The straight sex scene is not explicit, but you know what is happening. The lesbian sex is given more time, more languid nudity, and voiceover to explain what Therese is feeling, in very symbolic language. We’re left with no doubt that her physical relationship with Isabelle was far more fulfilling than with Marcel or Claude or Jean-Pierre or whatever his name was. The cinematography isn’t even all that bad, and as a black and white film, I find myself seeing scenes surprising clearly for what is pretty obscured lighting in some cases. The only downside is that tiresome artifact of 30 year olds playing 15 year olds.

This movie tidily fits into so many of our Yuri tropes – even so far as the school name – to feel very comfortable and ever so slightly boring. It’s a slow movie and very of its time. It ticks off no new boxes for us now, but when looked at in the scale of 1968, I’m sure it was super progressive and artsy. In fact, when you take a look at Nakamura Asumiko’s upcoming A White Rose in Bloom, keep this movie in mind.

 

Ratings:

Cinematography – 8
Story – A
Characters – 8
Service – Yes. Some nudity, sexual situations
LGBTQ – Nope. One person snarkily suggests that the two are “awfully close” than there are giggles. That’s it.
Yuri – 9

Overall – 7

Ultimately Therese and Isabel is a short memoir story masquerading as a 2-hour movie. “Story A” is timeless because it’s so thin and superficial. I can totally see a reboot of this being made, doing everything exactly the same with no changes getting praised even now.