sundries

Three 2017 Movies with Awesome Fat Female Characters (and one from 2012 because why not)

Admittedly, I haven’t been great about keeping up with the Monthly Roundup feature.  I like having an overview of the fat characters I’m exposed to as part of my regular moviegoing, but something about its current format doesn’t feel quite right, and I’ve decided to shelve it until I’m more confident about what I’m doing with it.  However, I’m pleased to report that in the space of one short month (admittedly not a calendar month, but still), I have seen no less than four films with kickass fat female characters.  Most amazingly, I only sought out one of the four because I knew in advance that it had a fat female character; the others were complete surprises.  Check these out if you’re able.

Deidre and Laney Rob a Train (2017, dir. Sydney Freeland)

It’s not uncommon for a socially awkward protagonist high school girl to have a frenemy, someone in her social circle who is overly assertive and selfish, but gets away with it because of her social capital and ability to be manipulative. (Mean Girls. If it’s not patently obvious, I’m referencing Mean Girls.)  In a subplot, Laney (Rachel Crow) is strong-armed into auditioning for a beauty pageant by Claire (Brooke Markham), a Lady Macbeth-in-training who is determined to become Miss Iowa and wants Laney to make her look better by comparison.  Claire is ruthless, ambitious, struts around with a cute boy on her arm, and the film never so much as comments on the fact that she’s bigger than the other girls in the competition.  I don’t automatically cotton to fat female antagonists for merely existing, but considering that Claire’s threat to Laney is fueled by her confidence, social prowess, and beauty, it’s heartening that the role was given to a larger-bodied actress.

GLOW: The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012, dir. Brett Whitcomb)

A compelling documentary about the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, a short-lived tv phenomenon in the late 80s that helped legitimize women in the world of professional wrestling.  The film basically opens with footage from the tv show of two fat women, Mountain Fiji (Emily Dole) and Matilda the Hun (Dee Booher) throwing down in the ring. Although the other GLOW members featured in the documentary are thin and conventionally good-looking, Mt. Fiji and Matilda also stand out for their dedication to their craft.  The other women talk about their time with GLOW as a fun adventure they had in their youth, mostly sending them on to other careers.  As Matilda the Hun, a “glamazon” heel, Booehr views wrestling as her vocation, having struggled to wrestle in male-dominated venues long before being hired by GLOW, and continuing to wrestle long after it ends.  Dole, a former Olympic-level shot putter, doesn’t have a story quite as happy as the others– the present-day segments show her struggling with health problems– but her reunion with the rest of the GLOW cast shows that not only was she one of the main faces on the show, but that her castmates truly looked up to her as the heart of the phenomenon.

A scripted series based on GLOW is releasing this summer on Netflix… we’ll see if they fuck it up, I guess!

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2017, dir. Dash Shaw)

I went into the theater thinking that the title was metaphorical, and I was dead wrong. Daria meets The Poseidon Adventure, with an inventive visual style along the lines of of Belladonna of Sadness.  Dash (Jason Schwartzman), our protagonist, is a self-centered sophomore who sees himself as the star journalist of the school’s newspaper.  He makes several comments about his best friend Assaf (Reggie Watts) being fat, but Assaf’s character design isn’t markedly different from the other not-fat characters.  Lunchlady Lorraine (Susan Sarandon), however, is drawn fatter than the other characters, and her size belies remarkable strength and ability.

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Patti Cake$ (2017, dir. Geremy Jasper)

An underdog story about Patricia “Killa P” Dumbrowski (Danielle Macdonald),  a young woman from a working class town in northeast New Jersey who dreams of making it as a rapper.  Her best friend Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay) encourages her to share her talent with the world, but she feels held back by a host of reasons, including her peers who deride her for her size.  Fatphobia isn’t the only problem she faces, though, and she channels her feelings her body– both anger at her haters and defiant pride in herself– into her lyrics.

Deidre and Laney Rob a Train and GLOW: the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling are on Netflix, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is currently in theaters, and Patti Cake$ is due for a wide release in July (I got to see it early thanks to the Chicago Critics Film Festival).

 

 

Roundup: the 52nd Annual Chicago International Film Festival

It sucks that film criticism is a dwindling profession (and that I didn’t make life choices to result in it being my career), because I could live at film festivals.  I don’t do conventions, but I imagine that I like film fests for the same reason– it’s comforting to be in a space where everyone is excited for the same dorky reason that, in the harsh wilderness of the outside world, you feel relief if someone from the general population even knows what the heck you’re talking about.  And when there’s the opportunity to be in that space for two solid weeks?

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Well, that hasn’t been my experience yet, partially because I haven’t had the vacation time or the money for tickets, and partially because the first weekend of the Chicago International Film Festival (ChiFilmFest) is always the same weekend as the Music Box of Horrors.  But this year, finally, I had the opportunity to spend two solid days and then some at ChiFilmFest.  I skipped over the high profile entries that are going to be in theaters soon anyway (although I am looking forward to MoonlightLa La Land, The Handmaiden, and Arrival) and instead went for stuff that I’m not sure I’ll be able to see a second time, let alone in a theater: locally made indies, foreign films, shorts.  I don’t think I caught the breakout film of next year; the movies I saw ranged from underwhelming to pretty damn good.  I caught some interesting director Q&As, was part of the first audience in the US to see Andrzej Wajda’s final film, and got an obscene amount of free refills from the soda fountain at the concession stand.  The list of all the films I saw at ChiFilmFest are here.

The characters I saw were in wide variety, from an irrepressible Tibetan goatherd in Soul on a String to a closeted Quebecois track runner in 1:54.  There weren’t many instances where I was specifically impressed with representation of historically marginalized groups– notable exceptions were Pushing Dead‘s depiction of a person living with HIV/AIDS; the nuanced meditation on a young woman’s sexual agency in The View from Tall (cn: sexual harassment); and the rediscovery of black country blues artists during the 60s folk revival and its parallel to the civil rights movement in Two Trains Runnin’. And while there were some fat characters included in the 13 films I saw, none really stood out as anything different than the kind of representation I’ve grown accustomed to, unfortunately.  Here’s a quick rundown of them.

(CN: discussion of sexual assault)

“Superbia” (dir. Luca Toth)

An animated short that could be most simplistically described as a surreal world made up of two warring societies of men and women.  I’m not going to pretend that I understood what the film is trying to say, but it was cool to see characters drawn in a variety of sizes and shapes.

Night of 1000 Hours (dir. Virgil Widrich)

A magical realist murder mystery and allegory about historical responsibility, in which one Austrian family’s entire history comes to visit on the same night.  A notable fat character is a blowhard World War I-era police chief who is more concerned with maintaining rule of law than he is with bringing about justice.

Afterimage (dir. Andrzej Wajda)

A biopic of the final years in the life of Polish abstract painter Władysław Strzemiński and his losing struggle against the government-mandated rise of socialist realism in art in post-WWII Poland. There was another line-towing fat police officer, a relatively small part.

Imperfections (dir. David Singer)

Cute, funny heist movie that, not unlike a Coen Brothers film, has a lot of quirky bit parts embodied by fat people, including an obnoxious department store manager, a mob heavy who asks the guy he’s trying to intimidate if he can use his bathroom, and a socially awkward guy who just wants to buy some drugs.

Middle Man (dir. Ned Crowley)

A black comedy that reminded me a bit of last year’s submission Entertainment, this film stars Jim O’Heir (Jerry from Parks and Recreation) as an overly-optimistic square headed to Las Vegas to fulfill his dreams of being a standup comic, but gets waylaid when he makes a bloody pact with a mysterious stranger.  (O’Heir joked during the Q&A afterwords that he would have been off the project if they were able to cast Jonah Hill.)  He’s the only fat character on the screen, but another fat historical figure is invoked.  And as temptation is a big theme in this movie, I want to tell you how I avoided what could have been the most obnoxious “well, actually” moment of my life thus far:

At the screening, writer/director Ned Crowley and Jim O’Heir were in attendance to do a q&a. There’s a scene in the film where a character has a speech that uses a historical anecdote to illustrate a point. The anecdote in question was the story of Fatty Arbuckle raping a woman at a party with a champagne bottle so severely that she died from the resulting injuries.

Now, I don’t have a time machine, but I do know that contemporary film historians largely agree that Fatty Arbuckle was not guilty of this crime and unjustly crucified by the media and resulting moral panic. And one of the reasons I know this is because I’ve read the essay “Roscoe Arbuckle and the Scandal of Fatness” by Neda Ulaby, which is included in the essay collection Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco), which I happened to have brought with me to the theater to read in between films. Plus I was sitting in the front section of the theater, so I both literally and figuratively could have thrown the book at the screenwriter. But I’m too classy (or is it spineless?) to do such a thing.

The Ghosts of Roundups Past, Present, and Future

Hi folks, I know it’s been a while since my last article.  I’ve been stretched a bit thin lately, but I have managed to do a bit of film writing.  Check out my recent article for BitchFlicks on bisexuality in Jennifer’s Body.  I’ve also recorded a small audio essay that is going to be included on FilmJive‘s upcoming episode on music in horror films, also on Jennifer’s Body.  Why was I so invested in examining a film where Megan Fox makes out with a bespectacled geeky chick with messy hair?  The world may never know.

I also wanted to talk a bit about my Monthly Roundup feature.  I just started doing it last year without really explaining why.  At my most prolific (read: unemployed), I write two articles a month for this blog, usually tackling one or two films per article.   However, I see way more films than what I write about, usually at least two a week.  Not all of them have fat characters, not all have fat characters worth writing about, and not all of them can fit in the amount of time I devote to writing CPBS.  But while my articles take a close look at one or two films, I also want this blog to function as a reminder of the overall experience of what it’s like to be a fat person with a deep emotional investment in movies, how I see myself reflected in that respect on a macro level.  So if the Roundup articles seem like weird, arbitrary inventories, I ask that you think of them more like month-sized montages of my personal cinephilic journey as is chronicled here, a condensed onslaught of trite physical jokes, incompetent flunkies, ‘Murrikans, and characters who are coded as fat but who you probably wouldn’t think of as such if you saw them on the checkout line at Target.  (And if you’re at all interested in my hot takes on all of the movies that I see, you can check me out on Letterboxd).

This October, I’m very excited to have two spectacular movie binges on my schedule.  This upcoming weekend, I’ll be at the Music Box of Horrors with my partner Patrick, a 24-hour horror movie marathon hosted by Chicago’s own Music Box Theater.  In addition to my annual write-up of fat characters at the Music Box of Horrors, I’ll be doing the same for the selections I see at the Chicago International Film Festival the following weekend.  One film at the Music Box of Horror this year has already been featured on CPBS:  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  As far as #ChiFilmFest, I’m mostly not sure what I’m getting into, but Middle Man does star Jim O’Heir, aka Jerry Gergich from Parks and Recreation.

That being said, I did see several films in September and August that featured fat characters:

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016, dir. Taika Waititi)

I saw this film at the Chicago Critics Film Fest earlier this year, and I liked it so damn much that I took advantage of its theatrical release coinciding with my birthday to see it on the big screen a second time.  Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) is a great fat character, and he deserves his own article.  Just watch the damn movie.

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Amadeus (1984, dir. Milos Forman)

A fictionalized account of Mozart’s (Tom Hulce) life and death in Vienna from the perspective of his rival Salieri (F. Murray Abraham).  Like any good period drama, the social scheming is as intricate as the music.  The court of powerful Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones) includes the syncophantic, and fat, Kappelmeister (Patrick Hines).

Miller’s Crossing (1990, dir. Joel Coen)

While a more serious neo-noir from the Coen brothers about chaos breaking out between two organized crime syndicates over a sleazy bookie (John Tuturro), the film does of course include some outlandish supporting characters.  In this case, it’s Johnny Caspar (the late, great Joe Polito), a fat mob boss with a comparably fat wife (Jeanette Kontomitras) and bratty son (Louis Charles Mounicou III).

Burke & Hare (2010, dir. John Landis)

This dark comedy is loosely based on the careers of real-life Victorian grave robbers William Burke (Simon Pegg) and William Hare (Andy Serkis), who begin to murder people when their natural supply of corpses that they sell to medical schools runs low.  One murder includes the stalking of a fat man (Tom Urie) through the foggy night streets of Edinburgh.  Burke and Hare manage to frighten him into having a heart attack.  Shortly after, on an exam table in a medical school lecture hall, the professor grabs the man’s belly and dramatically declares his cause of death to be gluttony.

The Big Lebowski (1998, dir. Joel Coen)

It feels downright patronizing to summarize The Big Lebowski on a blog aimed at film geeks.  But to summarize: Joe Polito has a small part as a private eye, the wealthy and short-tempered Mr. Lebowski (David Huddleston) is also a fat character, as is potential car-thief Larry (Jesse Flanagan).  And, of course: Walter Sobchak.  John Goodman’s magnum opus?  Only history will tell.

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Roundup: July 2016

A monthly rundown of the fat characters in films I saw this past month, but haven’t written articles about.

The Italian Job (2003, dir. F. Gary Gray)

Part of this heist caper includes the main gang of thieves getting detonation materials from a low-level crime boss ironically named Skinny Pete (Gawtti).  The transaction includes Left Ear (Mos Def) awkwardly trying not to stare at him.

Wiener-Dog (2016, dir. Todd Solondz)

Four short vignettes threaded together by one Dachshund.  One chapter focuses on a disconsolate film professor/screenwriter Dave (Danny DeVito) who is despised by his students and ignored by his agents.  One scene includes a visit to his (off-screen) doctor who orders him to lose weight and exercise, to which Dave repeatedly and forlornly insists, “I can’t.”

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Hudson Hawk (1991, dir. Michael Lehmann)

A caper that plays like a live action cartoon, starring Bruce Willis as the titular Hawk, a cat burglar who gets wrapped up in a scheme that defies explanation.  Hawk’s friend Five-Tone (Danny Aiello) is the butt of a few fat jokes over the course of the film, as are a few fat security guards that Hawk has to outsmart during his jobs.

Roundup: June 2016

I didn’t watch as many films as I usually do this past month, as I’ve spent a lot of my leisure time, um, seeing if there are any fat characters in Skyrim.  But a few fat characters did crop up in the films I did see.  The films are from different countries and 40 years apart, but both characters are coincidentally minor antagonists:

Zero Motivation (2015, Tayla Lavie)

Think MASH meets Broad City.  A comedy focusing on two slacker soldiers Zohar (Dana Ivgy) and Daffi (Nelly Tagar) who work in an administrative office on an isolated Israeli Army base.  Their supervisor Rama (Shani Klein) is bigger-bodied than the other female soldiers; while her frustrations evoke some sympathy, she is positioned as the somewhat-incompetent minor bureaucrat unsuccessfully trying to suck the fun out of the protagonists’ lives.

Yojimbo (1961, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

This classic about a clever samurai Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) who manipulates two warring gangs features some truly bizarre characters, including a fat, dim-witted gang lieutenant (read: syncophant) named Inokichi (Daisuke Kato), “The Wild Pig.”

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May 2016 Roundup

A monthly rundown of the fat characters in films I saw this past month, but haven’t written articles about.

The Conjuring (2013, dir. James Wan)

Based on a true story, a family seeks the help of America’s foremost ghost-hunting couple when they discover their house is– spoiler alert– haunted.  One of the ghosts is a little boy who befriends the youngest daughter in the family, it is discovered that his mother was possessed by an evil presence and murdered him. Clairvoyant Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) has a vision of the boy’s mother, a fat woman, holding his corpse.

Inside Man (2006, dir. Spike Lee)

This intricate and engaging police procedural/bank heist/hostage situation movie has the enormous, diverse cast befitting a story that takes place in NYC.  My eye was caught by  Ashlie Atkinson, a fat character actress I like, as Mobile Command Officer Berk.  She was smart and professional, and fit in well with the rest of her team.

Best in Show (2000, dir. Christopher Guest)

One of my all-time favorite comedies.  Everyone in the cast is an idiot in their own special way, among them Harlan’s friend (Will Sasso), who can’t seem to wrap his mind around the fact that Harlan (Christopher Guest) and his bloodhound Hubert aren’t doing any fishing at the dog show.

The Seventh Seal (1957, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

This classic film looks at the range of human reactions when faced with the prospect of our own mortality, especially in times of crisis like the Black Plague.  Most famous, of course, is the knight Antonious Block (Max von Sydow) playing chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot) to buy himself some time.  A scene in an inn features a fat merchant (Benkt-Åke Benktsson) sitting with some friends, who conclude that the best way to confront the idea that they’re living in the end times is to “eat, drink, and be merry.”

 

April 2016 Roundup

I’ve had a busy week, but better late than never!  Here’s a summary of fat characters in films I saw over the past month but didn’t write about.

The Lady Eve (1941, dir. Preston Sturges)

Classic screwball romantic comedy in which con artist Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) tries to swindle wealthy nerd Charles (Henry Fonda) and loses her heart in the process.  Two father figures in the movie are fat men: the Colonel (Charles Coburn), Jean’s partner in crime who pretends to be her father, is debonair yet heartless;  Horace (Eugene Palette), Charles’ tycoon father, is a blustering blue-collar type who made a fortune by brewing the Ale that Won for Yale.

Midnight Special (2016, dir. Jeff Nichols)

In this moody sci-fi drama about a Kid with Powers, there’s a small role of a child psychologist (Dana Gourrier) who is a competent, serious professional who does her job in an intense, high-security military setting and just happens to be fat.  And that’s it.  Which is fine by me.

Faces (1968, dir. John Cassavetes)

Dang, this is a good movie.  A cinema verite look at a crumbling marriage over the course of a night, as Richard (John Marley) spends the night with Jeannie (Gena Rowlands) a sex worker he frequently patronizes, while his wife Maria (Lynn Carlin) picks up Chet (Seymour Cassel) a playboy she and her friends meet at a club.  Although all the characters in the film are portrayed as lonely people desperate for some way to remedy the emptiness of their lives, a few fat minor characters come across as particularly pathetic.  Maria’s friend Florence (Dorothy Gulliver) practically begs Chet to pay attention to her, while two of Jeannie’s other clients (Fred Draper and Val Avery) become angry to the point of aggression when threatened by Richard’s presence in Jeannie’s home.

Ma Vie en Rose (1997, dir. Alain Berliner)

This is a sweet film about Ludo (Georges du Fresne), a transgender 7 year old who wants to be accepted as a girl.  Unsurprisingly, this is easier said than done, as her family and community react to her love of dresses and dolls with confusion and disapproval.  The repercussions of transphobia on her family as a whole largely come from Albert (Daniel Hanssens), a fat man who is Ludo’s father’s boss. He is rather conservative, and is scandalized when Ludo holds a play-wedding wherein she “marries” his son Jerome (Julien Riviere), putting her father’s job in jeopardy.

Roundup: March 2016

A summary of fat characters in films I saw over the last month but didn’t write about.

Take This Waltz (2011, dir. Sarah Polley)

This romantic drama follows Margot (Michelle Williams), a writer who finds herself torn between her loving, stable marriage to chef Lou (Seth Rogen) and her prickly, burgeoning crush on their rickshaw-driving artist neighbor, Daniel (Luke Kirby).  I was hesitant to include this because Rogen is thinner in this film than most of his work (he made this film around the same time as Green Hornet), but I decided to go with it as the film juxtaposes him with Daniel, who is very athletic (literally spending his days running around Toronto).

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Orgazmo (1997, dir. Trey Parker)

A self-consciously B comedy that is a sendup of low-budget action films, the porn industry, and (of course) Mormons, Orgazmo pits kung fu fighting Latter Day Saint Joe (Parker) against evil porn producer Maxxx Orbison (Michael Dean Jacobs).  Maxxx is fat, as are some of his cronies/actors Jizzmaster Zero (Ron Jeremy) and his dimwitted bodyguard whose name I didn’t write down (mea culpa, unsung hero).  But another notable scene pairs Joe with a fat porn actress called T-Rex (Ruby Hart, credited on IMDB as “The Fat Lady Stripper”), and touches on a number of tropes:  the ground shakes when T-Rex approaches, she is masculinized (her lines are dubbed with Parker doing a voiceover), she is crass and sexually voracious, Joe is terrified of her, and the onlookers are disgusted, with the exception of weirdo Dave the Lighting Guy (Matt Stone).  The scene can be found here (NSFW; typical Parker/Stone humor).

The Ladykillers (2004, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

A remake of a  1955 heist film that pits a group of thieves against an elderly Christian woman (Irma P. Hall) who unknowingly rents a room in her house to their grandiloquent ringleader (Tom Hanks).  In true Coen fashion, the film is peppered with idiosyncratic fat characters: a sweaty, easily-bribed boss (Stephen Root); a security guard who is constantly laughing and surrounded by food wrappers (Walter K. Jordan); a deputy sheriff who frequently naps at his desk (John McConnell).

The Incredibles (2004, dir. Brad Bird)

One of Pixar’s best, in a world… where superheroes are forced into hiding as normal people, Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) struggles to ignore his and his family’s special abilities.  Having to live as insurance agent Bob Parr, he gains weight and is referred to as fat at least a few times, but is still able to fight well enough to defeat a massive killbot single-handed.  Once he has the opportunity to put his super-strength to use again, an exercise montage helps him get back his trimmer physique.

Meet the Fokkens/Ouwehoeren (2012, dir. Rob Schröder, Gabriëlle Provaas)

I usually don’t include fat people in documentaries that I see; in most cases, a subject being fat is happenstance.  That is the case here– a profile of Louise and Martine Fokken, Dutch twin sisters who were sex workers in Amsterdam’s red light district for over 50 years, and just happen to be fat (although photos show that they were slimmer in their youth).  Although fatness isn’t explicitly discussed, they are contrasted with their slimmer, younger colleagues and laughed at by some passerby.  The idea of older, fatter women being sexually active, as well as objects of desire, is unthinkable to many people; making it the subject of a full-length documentary is a necessary subversion of assumptions about who sex workers are.

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Roundup: February 2016

A summary of fat characters in films I saw over the last month but didn’t write about.

This is Spinal Tap (1984, dir. Rob Reiner)

Reiner inserts himself in this classic mockumentary as documentarian Marty diBergi, both a dorky outsider to the world of rock and the frequent reminder of the real world outside the band’s bubble where they aren’t the hallowed rock gods they position themselves as.  Other fat characters include the band’s creepy keyboardist Viv Savage (David Kaff).

Groundhog Day (1993, dir. Harold Ramis)

Buster Green (Brian Doyle Murray) is the master of ceremonies for the Groundhog Day ceremony who becomes part of Phil’s time loop routine when he chokes on a piece of steak and must be saved via the Heimlich maneuver (presumably many, many times).  Gus (Rick Ducommun) is a blue collar townie with whom Phil gets drunk (also, presumably many, many times).

Hail, Caesar! (2016, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

A fair number of fat characters are in this sprawling cast, from a beleaguered bartender in the sailor dance number “No Dames!”(E.E. Bell) to a nefarious extra (Wayne Knight) to professional person Joseph Silverman (Jonah Hill).

Toy Story 2 (1999, dir. John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich, Ash Brannon)

Al (Wayne Knight) is the main antagonist of the film.  Although he owns a toy store, he hates children, is greedy (stealing Woody from the yard sale even after Andy’s mom insists he isn’t for sale), lazy (complaining about having to drive to work that is literally across the street from his building), and represents a misguided approach to toys (wanting to preserve them in pristine condition instead of loving and playing with them).  The Prospector/Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammar) is also an antagonist, wanting to go along with Al’s plan to sell the toys to a museum in Japan because he’s never been taken out of the box.  Keeping toys in the box is positioned as wrong or sad in the film, but for the Prospector, it’s the best option.

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Drag Me to Hell (2009, dir. Sam Raimi)

Christine (Alison Lohman) is the typical thin, blonde protagonist of a horror film. Although the plot focuses on her struggling against a demon summoned to stalk her by a curse, her defining character trait is attempting to reinvent herself and run from her past as a fat girl who grew up on a farm in the South.

On the Waterfront (1954, dir. Elia Kazan)

This classic film follows the struggle of dock workers under the thumb of a mobbed-up union boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), one of whose thugs is a fat man.

Casablanca (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz)

Fat characters include Carl (S.Z. Sakall), a good-natured waiter at Rick’s cafe, and Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet), who runs the black market in Casablanca and has access to highly desirable exit visas.

 

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Roundup: December 2015

Happy New Year!  This past month was largely focused on catching up with 2015 releases for my end of year list. (Minus the first week of January grace period I’m affording myself on account of not having the time for and access to 2015 releases that a full-time professional film writer would, you’ll just have to wait a month for those.)

Mistress America (2015, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Tracy (Lola Kirke), a college freshman and aspiring writer who is new to NYC, attempts to navigate her new surroundings by reaching out to her hipster-by-Auntie-Mame stepsister-to-be, Brooke (Greta Gerwig).  One of the funniest films I’ve seen this year, due to the clever script and just-madcap-enough characters who bounce off each other delightfully.  Not least among these is Brooke’s former fiancee Dylan (Michael Chernus), a fat guy who lives in the affluent suburbs of southwest Connecticut and almost matches Brooke in terms of grandiloquence and fear of adulthood.

People, Places, Things (2015, James C. Strouse)

An indie dramedy that is pretty unremarkable, with the exception of Jermaine Clement’s performance.  Following the breakup between Will (Clement) and Charlie (Stephanie Allynne) that begins with Will walking in on Charlie having sex with Gary (apparent supporting role powerhouse Michael Chernus). Part of Will’s inability to move on over the course of the film deals with resentment towards Gary.  Despite both men being nerdy hipster Brooklynites, larger Gary is portrayed as the more milquetoast of the two.  Will is a graphic novelist, an art form that is characterized as under-appreciated and misunderstood, while Gary is a monologist, whose artistic pursuit exists in the film as material for insults. Another fat character is an unnamed student in Will’s graphic novel class, who does a piece for class about how he learned to masturbate.  His work is used as a punchline– how inappropriate!  like the rest of Will’s class, save Kat (Jessica Williams), this kid doesn’t get it!– but the joke comes across as misinformed.  It doesn’t take much scratching of the surface of establish underground comics to find confrontationally personal autobiographical accounts

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Michael Chernus and Stephanie Allynne hide their shame in People, Places, Things.

Spotlight (2015, dir. Tom McCarthy)

It’s more likely to see fat characters in films that strive for realism, like Spotlight.  However, as  Spotlight has a large cast, fast-paced, complex plot, and required quite a bit of emotional processing as someone who was raised Catholic, I’m sure that I wouldn’t be able to remember everyone.  Certainly none of the main characters are fat.  There are fat characters, but the only one who comes to mind at this point is a reporter from a rival newspaper with whom Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) trades snarky comments during his trip to Springfield.

Star Wars: the Force Awakens (2015, JJ Abrams)

Larger bodied characters tend to be aliens in small roles who are sketchy/dangerous or whose bodies are part of the exotic, otherworldly scenery, such as the hulking junk trader on Jakku (Simon Pegg) to whom Rey sells her scavenged findings, or wide, intimidating-looking aliens in Maz Kanata’s (Lupita N’yongo) hideout.  In addition to them, however, there is a rather dashing X-Wing pilot for the Resistance:

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Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron in Star Wars: the Force Awakens.

No, not him, the other dashing X-Wing pilot:

 

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Portraying X-Wing pilot Snap Wexley, JJ Abrams’ lifelong friend and hunk Greg Grunberg.

Yeeaaahhhhh.

Attack the Block (2011, dir. Joe Cornish)

Sci-fi/action/comedy about a group of inner-city London youth who fight monstrous invading aliens.  It’s a really smart depiction of a disaster where the only people who are working to contain the problem are the people who nobody trusts or listens to.  Frequently compared to Edgar Wright’s work, it unfortunately never manages to hit the humor or emotional notes that Wright can.  Case in point: Nick Frost’s role as Ron, a weed dealer.  Where the Cornetto Trilogy has Frost in dynamic, funny, endearing roles, Ron isn’t given much of anything to do in Attack the Block.  Shame.

Buzzard (2015, dir. Joel Potrykus)

Grungy, uncomfortable (in a good way) indie comedy about Marty (Josh Burges), a slacker who lives to game the system.  One of his cons includes “returning” stolen office supplies to a retail store for cash, which he is able to do through the grace of a fat cashier (Michael Cunningham) who takes a lax approach to store policy.

Experimenter (2015, dir. Michael Almeyreda)

A fourth-wall demolishing, imagined memoir of the work of experimental psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard, in my favorite leading man performance of 2015), starting with and always coming back to his controversial 1961 experiment on subjects’ willingness to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to another person.  Jim Gaffigan, whose standup includes bits on being fat, plays James McDonough, a man Milgram hired to be the “victim” of the experiment’s situation, pretending to receive the administered shocks and begging for the experiment to stop.  When not acting as a man in distress, McDonough is an affable goof.  65% of the experiment subjects complied with all orders to shock McDonough, despite hearing him say that he had a heart condition and even after he became unresponsive.  Most of the depictions of subject experiments show these compliant people, but two depictions are of subjects who refused to comply, including a fat man who tells the researcher saying he has no choice: “In Russia, maybe, but this is America!”

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Experimenter: No comedians were harmed in the making of this film.