writers gone wild! |
O Captain! My Captain! There is a queer theory for everything. And if there isn't, there should be. My queer theory for Master and Commander is this: Dr. Stephen Maturin is queer for Captain Jack Aubrey.1 That's about it, really. There's nothing I can say or do to slow down this blockbuster, which isn't bad, if you have a hankering to revisit the good old days when every man-jack and jack-tar was happy to give up his balls for dear old England. The gags in Master and Commander make the one-liners in Friends look recherché, but the packed house I saw the film with roared at every one.2 If there were any nay-sayers in the crowd, they kept it sotto voce.
But enough with the witticisms! If you're in the mood for Star Trek in a fo'c's'le, get on down to the multiplex. Or would you have Old Bony humping the Queen and your children singing La Marseillaise5? Notes 1. "Are you in the mood for something more aggressive?" Doc asks Jack as they start fiddling around below decks at the beginning of the picture. 2. The guy sitting behind me laughed louder than the actors on the screen, and they were getting paid to laugh.
4. High school! Fucking high school! We never fucking graduate! 5. Contrarians like me can't help pulling for the French in this picture. Captain Jack seems to think he defeated Napoleon all by himself. In fact, if Old Bony hadn't been such an asshole as to invade Russia, the Brits never would have won. But busybodies never last. November 2003 | Issue 42 ALSO: Check out other fine articles and reviews by the author. |
New book from the
editor and writers of
Bright Lights Film Journal
Action! Interviews with Directors
from Classical Hollywood to
Contemporary Iran
(Anthem Art and Culture),
by Gary Morris (Editor),
Bert Cardullo (Introduction),
Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword).
London and New York:
Anthem Press, 2009.
"I dare anyone to squeeze between
two covers a more varied, useful and
flat out entertaining sampling of
the personalities that make the
seventh art the liveliest."
David Hudson, IFC.com
Interviews
Robert Bresson
Roger Corman (with Bruce Dern
and David Carradine)
Allan Dwan
Clint Eastwood
Douglas Sirk
Robert Wise
Mania Akbari
Lars von Trier
Michael Haneke
Allie Light
Melvin and Mario van Peebles
Otto Muehl
The Brothers Quay
Barbara Kopple
Federico Fellini
Abbas Kiarostami
François Truffaut
Caveh Zahedi
Peter Bogdanovich and
Joseph McBride
on Orson Welles