QUEER

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Punk heart still beating.

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"Queer" searches for a story, but never finds one.

There's good reason that the producers left  William S. Burroughs' name off its title, considering that nothing lines up regarding Daniel Craig's rendering of Burroughs' character from his 1985 novella.

Daniel Craig's "William Lee" ("Bull Lee" in Kerouac's "On The Road") is so obsessed with screwing a handsome young man with all the personality of a mildewed hand towel, that Lee never once sits down to write.

A more boring sex addict/junkie you'll not find on the big screen.

David Cronenberg's filmic adaptation of "Naked Lunch" remains the best cinema adaptation of any Burroughs novel to date.

Most lacking is any chemistry (sexual or otherwise) between Daniel Craig and Drew Starky's Eugene character. Drew Allerton is a poker-faced ex-G.I. ex-pat with nothing but time on his hands.

"Queer" is an open-handed insult to its audience and to William S. Burroughs in particular.

By the time the movie gets around to its big fuck scene, it's too little too late. Not to mention Mr. Lee taking the top position.

Anyway, Jason Schwartzman steals the movie as Joe Guidry, an old Jewish queen who's part of Will Lee's '50s era social circle in Mexico City.

Will Lee's heroin addiction takes over his lost sex addition and all roads lead to a deeply unsatisfying audience experience.

It's cool that Daniel Craig goes full queer Queen but so what? It's just not that interesting to watch when there isn't a cogent storyline to hang the movie on.

Everything about "Queer" screams failed experiment. Luca Guadagnino has no natural instinct for narrative structure.

Guadagnino's cinema is a fake formal style without any foundation whatsoever, save for whatever depth Daniel Craig brings with a brave but limited performance.

Luca Guadagnino is a phony wannabe queer; is there anything worse?

Even Donald Trump sucks fake microphone cock — another phony wannabe queer.

Good sucking vs. bad sucking?

John Waters come back!

Rated R. 136 mins.

ZERO STARS

SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM — SHOCKTOBER!

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Pier Palo Pasolini's last film was the most ambitious of his career and remains the most misunderstood. Still banned in several countries, "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" (1975) is a haunting journey into the depths of hell on earth, as loosely based on the literary underpinnings of the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom."

Moreover it is one of the most trenchant satires about corporate dominated capitalist politics ever imagined.

Pasolini, the journeyman poet and editorialist, incorporates the three descending levels of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno" as the format for his treatise.

The filmmaker set the story in his Italian hometown of Salo, where his brother was killed during WWII, and where Nazi soldiers once arrested Pasolini himself.

Shockingly graphic yet formally composed, Salò is a fascinating film that employs the full stockpile of Pasolini's polemic and satiric tools.

Pasolini forges a poetic commentary on fascism — disguised as consumerist capitalism — as enforced by a complicit group of bourgeois dignitaries looking to enslave and defile a group of young people.

Four wealthy Mussolini fascist libertines prepare for their certain demise before the end of the war by kidnapping nine boys and nine girls, for the purpose of living out their most outlandish sexual fantasies within the confines of a private villa. The men employ the assistance of four experienced courtesans to fire their debauched imaginations with ribald parlor stories that inform the humiliating and brutal sex acts they will execute upon their naked nubile prisoners.

Dramatically feral and artistically fertile, "Salò" is a rigorous movie that dares to use the metaphor of torture as a device of utter physical and psychological annihilation for both the victim and the torturer. It is significant that such an intellectual filmmaker could so dynamically condense thick layers of social commentary into an artistically skeletal form that remains perfectly transparent upon reflection.

“Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” is a film that expands in meaning in the years since its creation to encompass every micro-degree of political and military corruption that history has acutely fulfilled — most recently, at the time of this writing, are the atrocious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

There is nothing exploitative about "Salo;" it is specifically directed dramaturgy in the service of editorial commentary. Very few filmmakers are able, willing, or focused enough to execute such a high-wire feat.

"Salo" is an uncompromising film that demands to be studied with the same degree of scrutiny that corporate, religious, and governmental industries should be subjected to for their enslaving the planet and humanity.

To quote Jim Carroll,

"I need a judgment day" And she said:
"I know there's more than one way
But I want my judgment day . . ."

Not Rated. 114 mins.

THE DAMNED — SHOCKTOBER!

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The first of Luchino Visconti's "German Trilogy" of films (which includes "Death in Venice" and "Ludwig") is set in high society Germany during the early '30s. The Essenbecks — an industrialist family modeled after the Krupp family's steel production company — are brought down and consolidated into the Nazi war machine after the infamous Reichstag fire in Berlin on February 27, 1933.

Hitler used the arsonist attack as an excuse to suspend civil liberties for the German people and assassinate his communist rivals. Liberties, such as habeas corpus, freedom of the press, and “secrecy of the post and telephone,” remained in place throughout Hitler’s reign, which ended in April of 1945.

Members of the SS murder the Essenbecks's anti-Nazi patriarch Baron Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals). Investigators photograph his bloody body resting on the opulent bed that once provided comfort. The political assassination sets into motion the collapse of the Essenbeck family, an aristocratic representation of an “old” Germany that Hitler sought to obliterate.

As with “The Leopard,” Visconti is fascinated with the trappings of aristocracy, and their impermanent nature under the threat of fascist ideologies. All riches are temporary.     

The company's like-minded vice president Herbert Thallmann (Umberto Orsini) is falsely indicted for Joachim’s murder before escaping from Gestapo forces that incarcerate his wife (Charlotte Rampling), and children at the Dachau concentration camp. It wasn’t only Jews who were sent to the camps. The family’s industrial empire slips into the cunning hands of Dirk Bogarde’s anti-hero Friedrich Bruckmann, a shortsighted opportunist mentored by SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Grien), himself a would-be thief looking to co-opt the Essenbeck fortune and status.

Visconti stylishly captures the frenzied debauchery and violence that the Nazis employed throughout the era, including the Night of the Long Knives wherein Hitler's execution squads massacred his political enemies — the paramilitary Brownshirts known as the SA.

Written by Visonti, with Enrico Medioli and Nicola Badalucco, "The Damned" is an incendiary precursor to Nazi-era films like Liliana Cavani's "The Night Porter" (1974), Tinto Brass's pornographic "Salon Kitty" (1976), and even the musical play and film "Cabaret."

By boldly confronting the psycho-sexual depravity of the Nazi mindset all the way through to is inevitable incestuous nature, Visconti creates a specific cinematic vernacular for viewing and discussing Hitler's manic ideology.

That Visconti's iconic vision became a cinematic touchstone for other influential filmmakers is a testament to the Italian director's lasting power as a storyteller and as an important conduit of historical information.   

Rated R. 156 mins.