Tuesday, July 29, 2014

She Has Her Mother's Eyes

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I'm not really the person to sort out if this movie would work for someone not familiar with Rosemary's Baby - heck I'm not the person to sort out if this movie would work for someone who's only so familiar with Rosemary's Baby that they only quote it on a weekly, not daily, basis - seeing as how I've digitally tattooed Roman Polanski's 1968 film and all of its even most randomly associated ephemera onto the inside of my eyelids and I'm slightly, ever so slightly, biased. (Just ask the recent TV miniseries remake.) But as a modern riff on all of forty-six-ish years of My Favorite Movie, Lyle is shockingly gangbusters.

For starters it's a really nice time for those of us who enjoy what Gaby Hoffmann is selling these days. Obvious Child and Girls have both exploited her brand of hirsute crazy beautifully but it all shoots straight back (imagine two gigantic eyebrows as your furry guiding arrows) to her revelatory work in Crystal Fairy. And while there's a whiff of Crystal here (methinks Crystal's scent lingers) as Gaby's paranoia-stricken mom-to-be slips into the inflatable birthing tub, Lyle gives us a brand new angle on this patchouli present tense and Gaby's more than up to the task of finding brand new nooks and crannies of cotton-blended cave diving.

What sparks most is a modern feminist lesbian spin on the ultimate victim of patriarchal pregnanacy scams - how ripe this story is after all for some fun re-imagining! Would you have ever thought you'd hear this tone from me after that NBC debacle? What Lyle smartly does is forgo any kind of straightforward remaking - it flits around the original lightly, jabbing with good humor and great love at it. It never feels ponderous with slavish devotion to the original - it lets in air and light and good to great humor. A Skype session from Hell leads to a website of exploding baby graphics, and the next door neighbor's making her nipples drip for the UPS guy. And don't even get me started on the ending, which you might see coming but is just so fun in its, well, deliverance, you wanna jump and cheer.

I saw Lyle last evening thanks to NewFest, the annual LGBT festival here in New York; here's a picture of the director Stewart Thorndike and two members of the cast giving good Q&A after. The film is being released for free on its website on August 4th, I definitely recommend you check it out. Thorndike says this is the first in a trilogy of thematically-linked genre films she plans on making and she's hoping that people will watch Lyle for free and then follow the links from the site to the Kickstarter campaign she'll be kicking off to fund the next parts. I want it all! Make it happen!
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3 comments:

will h said...

Oooh. Long may the Gabyssaince reign.

MrJeffery said...

thanks for putting this on my radar. i am a HUGE fan of what hoffmann has been doing as of late.

sissyinhwd said...

It's Crystal Hairy