Safe Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The germs are coming! The germs are coming! Life pretty much took the lead this week in determining what would make a good double feature. For the first time in eons, I've been sidelined with a hellish cold, while some other friends suffer colds and fevers, and two tykes I know fight off pneumonia. This just hasn't been a healthy holiday season. So, in honor of colds, coughing, and other temporary maladies, I give you two films about dastardly killer germs. One is serious, one is goofy, and both should make you feel better about your present sickly condition. On the one hand, we've got a woman allergic to life in Safe, and on the other, a young cutie with no immunities with Bubble Boy. So, grab your popcorn and tissues, curl up, and let your body fight off the killer common cold while you watch these flicks.

Safe



The trailer certainly amps up the camp, but Todd Haynes' 1995 film is a smidge more serious than its retro trailer would have you believe. Julianne Moore stars as a soft-spoken California housewife, Carol White, who becomes increasingly ill. While her doctor finds nothing wrong, her symptoms get worse and she discovers that she's environmentally ill. Basically, everything about our chemical life is making her sick. Or, that is what she believes. In an attempt to get better, she moves to a New Age center housed in the desert for people like her.

Coming from Haynes, who also directed Moore in Far From Heaven, and is generating a lot of Oscar buzz with his Bob Dylan flick, I'm Not There, this isn't a germy thriller with a typical path and neatly wrapped-up ending. It's a movie of maybes and strangeness, with an eerie buzz to remind you that there's always something to make us sick out there.

A Barbie video introduction to the film by Todd Haynes.

Carol White chokes on all those darned toxins.

And for something a bit different...

Haynes' Barbie-riffic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story Pt. 1

Todd Haynes is one of the most intelligent filmmakers our country has to offer. The question remains, however, whether his intelligence allows for any emotion to come through in his films. I think it does, but it's not an obvious, worn-on-your-sleeve type of emotion; it's the type that takes a little self-analysis to discover. For example, his great film Safe (1995), which was voted the best film of the decade in the Village Voice poll of 1999, left me feeling queasy and unpleasant, and my initial reaction was to blame the film for it. But those were precisely the types of emotions I was supposed to be feeling after seeing a story about a sick woman. Haynes deliberately designed the film with a kind of emptiness -- and refused to answer the question as to whether or not his heroine was actually sick, and when the lead character joins the "cult" in the film's final stretch, Haynes does not invite us to go with her, so we're left in the lurch, so to speak.

Jean-Luc Godard, another intelligent filmmaker, once said that the best way to critique films was to make one. Haynes did precisely this with Far from Heaven (2002), which more or less used a Douglas Sirk framework to discuss Sirk's films as well as a more modern look at racism and homophobia. (The critics' group I am a member of, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, gave our 2002 Best Director award to Haynes.) Now Haynes does it again with his exceptional new I'm Not There, a deconstruction of the biopic as well as a fascinating look at the cult of celebrity, and, on a deeper level, the celebrity as a godlike being with answers to all our questions. Whereas most biopics are made solely for the purpose of providing a rich centerpiece role (and, hopefully, an Oscar) for an ambitious actor, Haynes deliberately subverts this by casting seven different actors -- of all different ages, races and even sexes -- to play Bob Dylan.