It's not for nothing that we viewers get a serious kick out of porn, often especially porn featuring performers only recently of age. There's something quite thrilling in the exhibition of a young person only newly aware of a particular practice, skill or ability, yet brazenly unabashed and remarkably mature; this thrill only amplified when it's accompanied by the added taboo of homosexuality. It's in this understanding of the gay male attitude toward sex and sexual expression that King Cobra finds its fuel, though Justin Kelly sadly insists upon fuelling a regressive exercise in shallow salacity and sensationalization, contributing to the problematic character of that attitude both from the society without and the society within. Willing neither to explore psychological depth nor to expose genuine physical titillation in the pursuit of meaningful arousal, Kelly crafts King Cobra as a vacuous appropriation of style and a muddled attempt at provoking scandal. Though engaging and enjoyable, the film's stylistic motifs never truly coalesce, too inauthentic in their concept and too sporadic in their application; with an unambitious approach to narrative and character development, most everything herein is eventually overcome with either familiarity and/or banality. Occasional spurts of bizarre black humour seem to signify a will to turn King Cobra into an instant cult classic, perhaps like a gay Showgirls (as if it isn't already gay enough); these fail, since what worked for Paul Verhoeven then was directly due to his being in possession of genuine artistic impulses, of which Kelly is largely lacking. Comedy is provided from other sources, though, including a winning performance by Keegan Allen (the less said about James Franco's involvement, however, the better). But King Cobra thus only supplies us viewers with our kicks here and there, and with no lasting impact.
James Franco, you can get a brief, temporary pass if King Cobra is actually good, and if you're actually good in it. Otherwise, of course I'm here for a true story film about murder in the gay porn industry. And lead Garrett Clayton is perfectly cast as underage performer Brent Corrigan, not least because I'd rather watch his porn than Brent's. Out in the US on the 21st of October, after a screening in the London Film Festival. brb, just need to go to the bathroom for a bit...
A giant leap for Werner Herzog, disguised as a small step. Exotic historical epics are the kind of project his career was built upon, yet they always possessed a fierce, angular, unhinged contrariness, as if born out of the fires of blazing creation, new and unformed. Queen of the Desert is calm and smooth, born out of a simmering smoulder, contrary only to one's expectations of what Herzog might concoct out of such a promising premise. It's an exercise in cultural excavation, though whereas our protagonist Gertrude Bell sought to understand the cultures of the Middle East's native tribes, Herzog seeks to understand that of a landscape equally foreign to him - Hollywood. This is a straight-up recreation of a classic Hollywood epic, albeit shot through with an occasional jolt of Herzogian weirdness, weirdly sporadic. In this, one senses our director's inquisitiveness, inspired and informed by Bell's inquisitiveness; it's buried beneath layers of glossy period design, and it's intellectually shallow, but it exists all the same, and does so to give Queen of the Desert an identifiable purpose. Alas, otherwise this film is in rather desperate need of depth, struck down by too many technical distractions. Herzog is still seeking to understand by the end, I feel, never truly settling on his subject to display any real insight. The dialogue leaves much to be desired - ditto performances from James Franco and Robert Pattinson - though excerpts from Bell's diaries read in voiceover by Nicole Kidman provide poetic relief, and contribute notably toward the timbre of this undeniably artful period piece. Between the expansive visuals and the immersive sound, one appreciates the detail which has been put into this recreation, in its partially successful attempt at meaningful, memorable cultural excavation.
Everything is not fine - sorry, but it was asking for that - in Wim Wenders' stilted soap opera, which aims for some vague, unformed sense of literariness and little else, apparently failing to grasp that the prestigious written word it attempts to emulate only acquires such prestige through a sharpness and an eloquence, both of which almost wholly evade this dreary drama. Every Thing Will Be Fine is a curio, a film whose achievements are considerable yet inconsequential, and whose failings sit in stark opposition, themselves banal yet of disastrous effect. Technically, there's much to admire in Benoit Debie's luminescent 3D cinematography and Alexandre Desplat's luscious, Grieg-inspired score (the screenplay is by Norwegian Bjorn Olaf Johannessen, and the Canadian setting could have easily replaced his homeland at some point during production); these elements are attractive, though not without fault - objectively, neither contributes anything particularly profound or even relevant to this tale of modern morality in the artistic male. Yes, that's roughly what Every Thing Will Be Fine is actually about, and the level of philosophical inquiry and broader cultural awareness that such a summation may suggest (a decidedly low level) is quite present. It's the sort of film you'd imagine James Franco directing on a whim over a two-week period - fitting, then, that he's this film's lead, as aloof and half-asleep as ever, and neatly matched as such by the film. Alongside Desplat's score, standouts include a chilling moment of tragedy early on and a sensitive performance from Charlotte Gainsbourg (when is she ever not?); on the flipside, there's barely one line of dialogue or plot point that strikes as sincere, and the film concludes in a sequence of thoroughly nauseating shots, whose sheer ugliness must be seen to be understood.
