FAQs

Attempting to examine queer activism in the 21st century with his latest film FAQs, director Everett Lewis paints a liberated and multi-cultural portrait of idealism and self-respect in which drag queens brandish pistols while patrolling the streets for fag bashers and queer kids who have been victimized by homophobia become guerilla activists. India (the adorable Joe Lia) is a gay teen living on the hardened streets of Los Angeles who -- after almost getting killed by two thugs with bats -- takes up with a gun-toting drag queen named Destiny (Allan Louis) and her young butch-dyke protégée Lester (Minerva Vier) and forms a pansexual family fueled by politics and activism. Destiny -- who spends her evenings trying to keep the streets of West Hollywood free from hate and violence -- teaches her clan (which soon grows to include graffiti artist Spencer and fag-basher-turned-queer Guy) to love their bodies by spending two hours a day naked, use condoms when having sex, and take self-defense classes so they can be ready for "those people" (read: straights). And therein lies the film's biggest problem: such heavy-handed "us against them" sentiments may have been revolutionary 10 years ago or so, but today they seem rather dated and juvenile. In fact, Lewis' directorial style is fueled by an inherent immaturity, with dialogue informed by overwrought melodrama ("I want to kill all the straight fucking assholes," India defiantly exclaims after being stiffed by a sleazy porn director) and acting that resembles something one might see in a first-year dramatics class. The lone exception to this would be Louis, whose poised performance as den mother Destiny is thankfully free from the histrionics of his cast mates. While it's certainly nice to see Lewis tackle a different kind of queer story, one can't help but wish that he -- like many other gay filmmakers stuck in a pattern of self-righteous victimization -- would take a break from all the heavy-handed theatrics found in Gay Utopia and make a movie that speaks to the real world. --Ken Knox

Fateless

Holocaust narratives, like coming out stories, are legion -- there are millions of them, each differentiated by details of personality, place, and storyteller temperament. But those specifics are vastly important. If they aren't unique, the narrative risks falling into recognizable clichés. Fateless, directed by cinematographer Lajos Koltai (Malena, Mephisto), is The Compleat Holocaust -- familiar to us from films as different as Schindler's List and Au Revoir les Enfants, to name only two.

Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy), an average teen, is taken from Budapest to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald. The Hungarian sections -- prior to Gyuri's deportation -- are understated and wrought. The first 30 minutes of Fateless concern Gyuri's family's last day together, before his father is shipped to a work camp. These domestic scenes are underplayed and harrowing. Yet once Gyuri is taken from a public bus and loaded onto a train with other Hungarian Jews, Fateless plays -- too slowly -- like a compendium of other, better films.

Fateless is shot on desaturated stock. Though elegantly framed, this absence of color -- of vitality -- might work if the earlier scenes in Budapest were not also drained, and if the same technique hadn't also been used in Spielberg's Schindler's List. (I kept waiting for the girl in the red coat to wander by.) Koltai ends sections with fade outs -- at first, they seem organic, until they're used to finish every scene. This affectation robs the film of its accretion of horrific details. Each fade out compartmentalizes what has come before; the narrative disconnects, becomes anecdotal.

And Marcell Nagy's Gyuri is disaffected from the start. He seems much the same at the beginning as at the end: thinner, certainly, but still the same sullen teenager. What he's gone through is awful. But the film isn't fateless, it's listless, and it robs Gyuri's story of its power. --Dan Loughry

A Good Woman

This cinematic adaptation of Oscar Wilde's first produced play, Lady Windermere's Fan, certainly has its charms -- namely the Irish raconteur's stinging epigrams and sardonic critiques of English high society. But the film is noteworthy mostly for being a rather straightforward, pedestrian adaptation of a play that was an instant hit on the London stage upon its premiere but is rarely produced today.

Director Mike Barker and screenwriter Howard Himelstein transport the action from Victorian England to the 1930s Italian Riviera. This allows Barker to linger over the sweeping vistas of the gorgeous Amalfi Coast. If only he had spent more time better capturing the buoyancy of Wilde's snappy wit and eliminating some of the stilted line readings that plague the film.

Starring Helen Hunt, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Wilkinson, A Good Woman centers on a gaggle of vacationing aristocrats who entangle themselves in a web of deceit and misunderstanding -- all brought on by the upper crust's penchant for maintaining surface appearances, while simultaneously obsessing over what's happening behind closed doors. "My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's," riffs a character delivering one of Wilde's more giggle-inducing bon mots.

Penniless and reeling from another failed affair, the aging seductress Mrs. Erlynne (Hunt) arrives in Italy on the prowl for a new "patron." Instead, she stirs up a chorus of clucking busybodies who scorn her trampy ways. Despite the gossip-mongers, the amiable Lord Augustus (Wilkinson) falls under her spell. Mrs. Erlynne, though, seems to have set her sights on the wealthy American businessman, Robert Windermere (Mark Umbers), whose faithful wife, Meg (Johanssan), is busy planning her birthday celebration and fending off the wily advances of raffish playboy, Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell-Moore).

The film flaunts an appropriately breezy, insouciant quality, and the costumes and sets project the right amount of lush opulence. As for the bird-like Hunt, I must admit I'm not a fan. But she manages to bring a surprising warmth and poignant vulnerability to Mrs. Erlynne's selflessness later on in the film, even if her believability as a cunning siren bogs down the early half. Meanwhile, Johansson deftly navigates Meg's emotional roller coaster of a journey. But the pitch-perfect Wilkinson gives the film's stand-out performance as the kind-hearted, self-deprecating "Tuppy." --Christopher Wallenberg