Thoughts on Fox and His Friends
-Fox and His Friends? More like Fassbinder and His Friends! BAZING!-I'm done. I'll stop.
-Fassbinder directs and stars as a working class carnival worker. When his boyfriend, the guy who runs his show, gets arrested, he finds himself out of work and soon entangled in the persnickety world of the upper-class homosexual. You know what that means! Martinis and mustaches and squaredance-dating and thievery and heartbreak and misery and luxurious vacations and prostitutes played by Ali (fear has not yet eaten his soul, the dear) and betrayel and more misery and death and credits and DVD menu and special features and, ah...
-So, right, we're here now. The cast is almost entirely made up of Fassbinder's usual players (hence my god-awful punning above), that eclectic mix of friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and acquantiances. This cast-with-your-cock approach adds even more realism to his already brutally honest, if not fantastically made, films.
-That's not fair, Fassbinder was kind of an amazing director. I just hate the look of them. They're ugly, but not on purpose, they look cheep. Cheap and grimy and pointing out the contours of a person's face in all the terrible ways one could, accompanied by often hideous characters (this, I'm sure, was on purpose) doing hideous things to one another. Somehow, they all redeem such bone-deep ugliness through ironic humor and the power of the Woobie. And a wardrobe of skinny jeans that rivals King Jareth's.
-Right. To point, this is, I believe, one of Fassy's (not to be confused with Michael Fassbender, who is also Fassy, but I'm tired of typing Fassbi/ender) better films. Another 'and then this terrible thing happened' narrative, not boasting the best of performances from any of it's actors, but surely, that's not the point.
