Busch appears in full regalia in “Die Mommie Die!,” a spoof of ’60s
melodramas. He’s Angela Arden, a preening over-the-hill singer who takes out
her frustrations on her husband and kids. The latter’s feelings toward her are
undisguised by the title.
If you’ve never seen Busch perform live, this is the next best thing.
He/she makes a glamorous entrance in the opening scene, set in a cemetery.
Recognized by a fan, Angela turns slowly around, an apparition dressed
entirely in white.
Such obvious gender bending may have been a riot onstage, where “Mommie”
originated. (Busch, a prolific playwright, did the screen adaptation.) Kabuki-
like performances are accepted in theater, but work less well on film, which
demands some semblance of reality.
Busch is no Jaye Davidson of “Crying Game” fame, and you somehow expect
that someone in Angela’s household would have noticed how large and ungainly
Mommie is and what a deep voice she has.
An unusually strong supporting cast takes to the task of deliberately
overacting. Frances Conroy of “Six Feet Under” is great fun as a much put-upon
maid who becomes Angela’s nemesis, shouting at her, “I always knew you were
nothing but trash washed over the Canadian border.” The movie also brings out
the ham in the fine character actor Philip Baker Hall (“Magnolia”). As
Angela’s producer husband, he expresses with great glee, not once but twice,
his motto for making movies: “Make it big, give it class, leave them with a
message.”
“Kill Bill” and “Scary Movie 3″ have nothing over “Mommie” in terms of
referencing past movies. Busch channels Gloria Swanson in a re-enactment of
her surrendering to the police in “Sunset Boulevard.”
But “Mommie” is flat at moments that call for over-the-top campiness, such
as Angela’s LSD-induced trip down memory lane. With Busch’s presence in the
title role, no one will confuse his vehicle with “Far From Heaven,” a
melodramatic send up that asked to be taken seriously. So “Die Mommie Die!”
winds up neither hilarious nor a credible spoof of a genre intent on spoofing
itself.
Advisory: Sexually suggestive scenes and language.
– Ruthe Stein
‘THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER’
Opera. Music by John Adams. Libretto by Alice Goodman. Starring Sanford
Sylvan, Yvonne Howard, Christopher Maltman, Kamel Boutros. Directed by Penny
Woolcock. (Not rated. 120 minutes. At the Rafael Film Center, San Rafael).
The combination of artistic sophistication and moral obtuseness that has
characterized the opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” ever since its 1991
premiere is ratcheted up to new levels in this repulsive new film version,
made for British television by director Penny Woolcock.
Originally conceived by stage director Peter Sellars in one of his more
blind and antic moments, “Klinghoffer” treats the 1985 hijacking of the cruise
liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, who shot a wheelchair-using
Jewish American tourist and dumped his body into the ocean.
Even on the stage (the piece came to the San Francisco Opera, one of the co-
commissioners, in 1992) “Klinghoffer” was difficult to countenance, with its
arty posturing about the Middle East conflict and its willful insistence that
this tawdry, contemptible murder had a claim to some kind of moral standing.
But the realism of the screen makes matters far worse. Woolcock shoots the
action in almost documentary fashion, dashing with handheld camera among the
swaggering hijackers and cowering hostages (one of whom, for the sake of
gratuitous shock value, suffers an epileptic seizure). There are many
flashbacks to the Holocaust and to decades worth of struggles between
Palestinians and Israelis, the latter indistinguishable from the SS.
Sellars’ original staging was a stylized, almost pageant-like affair, which
allowed the creators to claim descent for the piece from Bach’s Passions.
Without that fig leaf, the ugliness at the heart of the work — its ghoulish
feasting on the blood of an innocent and luckless victim — becomes all the
more apparent, most heinously in the obscene footage of Klinghoffer’s bloody
corpse spinning gracefully through the water.
John Adams’ score, with its chugging, propulsive rhythms punctuated by
lyrical interludes of unearthly beauty, is as skillfully contrived as ever,
and the musical execution, with the composer leading the London Symphony
Orchestra, is depressingly expert. Sanford Sylvan and Yvonne Howard as the
Klinghoffers, Christopher Maltman as the naively idealistic captain, and Kamel
Boutros as the sensitive, poetic terrorist Mamoud — he suffers, you see, as
he engages in murder — sing with a beauty that seems appalling under the
circumstances.
– Joshua Kosman
‘THE GATEKEEPER’
Drama. Written and directed by John Carlos Frey. Starring Frey, Michelle
Agnew, Tricia O’Kelley. (R. 103 minutes. At the Opera Plaza.)
With all the immigration issues facing California voters and legislators,
there is need for a film like “The Gatekeeper,” a risky low-budget independent
feature about a racist half-Mexican border guard who gets trapped in illegal
immigrant hell while undercover.
Writer, director and star John Carlos Frey is ambitious, but the fact that
“The Gatekeeper” has won awards at several smaller film festivals is probably
due to its unflinching politics rather than its achievements in filmmaking.
It’s a movie you want to like, but its sometimes laughably bad execution makes
that difficult.
Frey is Adam Fields, a U.S. Border Patrol agent who treats the illegal
immigrants he catches brutally. To say that he is hate-filled is an
understatement; he is a member of an underground racist organization led by a
conservative radio talk-show host who warns of the breakdown of America, a
country turning Mexican to the point where we will soon be “eating beans and
tortillas for the rest of our lives.”
But — surprise — he turns out to be half-Mexican, the son of a Mexican
prostitute, his father a white customer he never knew. In a clumsy scene, we
see Adam visiting his dying mother, his disgust at his family and heritage
obvious. He has kept his family secret from his fiancee (Tricia O’Kelley), a
blond California girl with a stuffy, conservative family.
The racist society hatches a strange, illogical plan: Adam will drop down
into Tijuana and infiltrate a group of Mexicans intending to immigrate, sneak
across the border with them while wearing a homing device and then, apparently,
the secret society will kill them all. Instead, things go wrong when the
group is itself gunned down by the people paid to get the illegal immigrants
across the border. Suddenly, Adam, with no documentation, is trapped, forced
to make drugs in dangerous conditions by a criminal gang that enslaves the
immigrants.
As he begins to understand the plight of immigrants, he befriends a pretty
young woman (Michelle Agnew), who becomes the sex slave and housekeeper of the
head criminal, and her young son. Although the film would have been better had
they spoken Spanish with English subtitles, the dire circumstances of the
illegal aliens in these scenes is the strongest section of “The Gatekeeper.”
While it is logical that many children of mixed ethnicity will have
identity crises, Adam’s situation is most puzzling. Since he speaks Spanish
fluently, we can assume he was raised by his mother in a Hispanic community,
so surely he already has witnessed firsthand the plight of underprivileged
immigrants. And because he is half-Mexican, why would he be accepted by a lily
white racist organization?
These are questions that could be answered, but “The Gatekeeper” needs a
subtler, more thoughtful screenplay to provide those answers. Illegal
immigration is a tough problem from both sides, one that deserves a film that
will explore those issues intelligently. For that, the film standard is still
“El Norte,” Gregory Nava’s 20-year-old masterpiece.
– G. Allen Johnson
Advisory: This film contains many scenes of violence, a sex scene with
brief nudity, a rape scene that is uncomfortable but not graphic, and scenes
of drug-making.
