Boy

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER

A film about a boy looking for another boy, Auraeus Solito’s self-explanatorily titled Boy poses the burning question: “Have you ever had someone jack off while they look at you?” If you, like me, must answer in the negative, than this filmmaking experience will take you down the back alleys of Manila in bargain basement fashion.

For this production is as seedy as it is ludicrous. To begin with, one must accept that an adolescent’s allowance in the Philippines is enough to buy sex with. Then the script by Solito and Jimmy Flores would have you believe that an adolescent is emotionally experienced enough to recognize love, although we are shown that being in love is the same thing as being sexually aroused. Solito’s direction vaguely equates multi-lingualism with multi-sexuality. Be that as it may, the young seeker of the title just can’t wait to get it on, so he cruises Gay Bars.

It might go without saying that this pedophilic tale expects us to assume a lot, although it is educational (the uses a rubber band can be put to). We also learn from tacky female impersonators (“His name is really Robert”), who sing about equal rights, what a Table Male is, as we watch the merchandise work up a sweat. As if to remind us that what we are watching is fiction, male strippers strip for empty houses, while the young boy of the title throws money at them, as if he were a counterfeiter. An infatuation with fish passes for character development, and reminds us to take a pass the next time a youth asks you if you want to see his aquarium. The script informs us in passing that male homosexuals are social revolutionaries, and that prostitution can be blamed on poverty and a lack of education, despite its prevalence in affluent societies.

Technically, the production is impoverished, with editing done primarily via dissolves. The production design is garish, if colorful, and the soundtrack by Isha treats commercial sex with hilarity as if it were an easy listening experience. The script does, uncharacteristically, ring clinically true by having the protagonist be the product of a home with an absentee father.

As the effeminate Boy, who faints in his lover’s arms before vomiting, Aeious Asin grabs a handful of woody and recites what passes for poetry (“I get a hard on for boys with hard ons!”). As if we needed convincing, he falls for the “Mr. Aries” of Aries Pena, who launders men’s underwear when he isn’t onstage or earning his money. Boy even brings his purchase home to a….shall we say, understanding….Mom.

What is most toxic about this film is the spin it puts on adolescent behavior, placing the onus on them for emotions they, in reality, don’t fully understand. The Boy becomes a predator in looking for love and excuses himself by glibly opining that he is a girl inside a boy’s body, playing upon an audience’s psychiatric ignorance by pretending that he “was born that way,” and washing his hands of responsibility for his behavior.

It is distributed by New American Vision.

FROM THE VAULT:

The Kid

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER

The Kid (1920) was arguably the greatest triumph of Charles Chaplin’s long career. A huge success, it was the second highest grossing film of 1921.

Chaplin’s direction of the film was painstaking (working at a 53-1 shooting ratio), and comes to life in a memorable scene wherein his alter ego, the Tramp, pursues welfare workers and in the emotional reunion that follows. Freely quoting from D. W. Griffith, Chaplin mythologizes that sentimental Victorian prototype, the Lost Kid. His direction draws its strength from the subliminal truth that the Kid and The Tramp both represent the same psychological entity, and powerfully translates Chaplin’s personal pain (the death of his first born infant son just prior to production) into this creative outlet, resulting in genuinely close and touching interaction between the on screen Tramp and the Kid.

Chaplin’s script, on the surface, paints picturesque father/son adventures by castoffs from the Industrial Revolution, but behind the scheming and scamming, which optimistically portrays Griminess as next to Godliness, with the disinherited inheriting the earth, lies a, perhaps subconscious, but no less direct, feral autobiographical thread whereby Chaplin’s forcible removal from the care of his mother in his youth metamorphicizes into the cruelty of the fictional welfare workers that is depicted.

But most revealingly, by making the Kid’s mother a successful opera singer, Chaplin justifies his fictional low lives by bestowing them with an implied class, which betrays Chaplin’s desire to be High Brow, and exposes the yearning for upward mobility to be the core element of Chaplin’s fictitious world of hardship, rather than any true socialist sympathy, as his contemporaries erroneously presumed.

Technically, the film is hallmarked by the outstanding art direction of Charles Hall, which transforms the Red Light district of Chinatown and Olvera Street into Industrial London, and the cinematography of Roland Totheroth, which Romanticizes the gritty.

The film is sustained by the remarkable performance of emotional depth and commitment from Jackie Coogan as the title character, the Tramp’s adopted son and sidekick. Edna Purviance appears as a nameless woman, and Chaplin’s future wife, Lita Grey, appears, appropriately, as a tempting angel.

The film had a tortured post production: in an attempt to shield the production from divorce litigation by his then wife, Mildred Harris, the rushes were smuggled to Salt Lake City and edited in a hotel room.

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