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The Lady Has Left the Building

“Two tears in a bucket… motherfuck it.” Isn’t it the way that Lady Chablis, the true star of one of the few un-loathsome Eastwood films–one I watched again and again just for her–died on a day when many of my colleagues and I tore the director a new arsehole. You just know she would’ve appreciated the irony. Heck, she probably engineered it. She was 59, which is not bad for a transwoman who lived through AIDS, but still far too young. (Here’s to the day when transgendered people of color regularly live to a ripe old age.) Rest in power and pretty peace, you doll, you grand empress, you hip-shaking, sooth-saying, stone-cold fox.

The Family Trance, ‘The 9th Life of Louis Drax’

September 5, 2016 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

“The 9th Life of Louis Drax” is appropriately titled, not only because it went through many incarnations before its arrival in theaters but because it seems to contain the ghosts of many films within its 108 minutes. Released first as a 2004 novel by Liz Jensen, this story of a profoundly accident-prone boy was greeted with high if occasionally confounded praise. The late director/writer/producer/genius Anthony Minghella immediately bought the rights but died before he could complete an adaptation. His son, the moody-broody actor Max Minghella, eventually took over the project, and wrote a screenplay that has been directed and produced by French horror director Alexandre Aja.

That death and horror that surround this film’s inception extends to its content, for we meet the titular Louis (Aiden Longworth) when he’s already fallen into a coma after falling off a cliff. That the child is unconscious does not curtail his natural chattiness, however, and so we learn about the mysterious circumstances surrounding his accident. Continue Reading →