![]() ![]() "Straight men were drawn like iron filings to her female personas, and she had all those years of Hollywood club performances to draw on to keep them in her power. It was hilarious, eye-popping and beautiful!īy the time Jack Be Nimble was launched at Cannes, Arquette was appearing as a blond woman, in high heels, tight white jeans and a red blouse. "Alexis evaded preconceptions and publicists' trite summaries of who she was. "You could see the jaws of the potential distributors dropping," Maxwell comments. ![]() By the time the movie was launched at Cannes, months after shooting, Arquette was appearing as a blond woman, in high heels, tight white jeans and a red blouse. In the era of #MeToo and Trans Lives Matter, I'm so thrilled to get these aspects acknowledged by its re-release and its inclusion in the upcoming 'Horror and Gender' section of the Museum of Modern Art summer festival."Īrquette, who portrayed a young male with mixed strengths and vulnerabilities in the film, was also involved with gender transformation in a more personal way. The plot hinges on female characters wrestling fiercely for power – they are the spine of the plot, the good and the bad. "Jack allows for mutability, self-determination, and bizarre pagan transformations. "The film is in synch with people seeking self-fulfilment outside of constricted official options," he continues more seriously. We always go back for more," comments Maxwell, "but is Jack a horror movie? Perhaps it's more a spiral of increasingly outlandish tableaux – and there's an appalling pleasure in being taken off the rails like this." "There is a special thrill in being scared, when your heart is in your mouth. "Since the beginnings of cinema," pointed out David Overby in a review of Jack Be Nimble, "the best horror films have been a way to approach and explain the terror of life, pushing it back a bit but allowing us to look it full in the face." The movie's shots have been composed to have maximum impact on the psyche. "To me, it was a change of direction, shrugging-off previous identities: a convergence of art and life, a rejection, a return, a seizing of control, a bringing together of what I had learned and read and seen and been perversely drawn to," Maxwell explains. It is a movie about myth, about repression and release – and it finds some measure of resolution, though not quite the one we expect. Meanwhile, Dora has begun to have extra-sensory experiences… When Jack finally rebels against his brutalised life, he goes in search of his own real sister while being hunted by his adoptive siblings like terrifying harpies out for retribution. Jack, however, goes off to live with a sinister rural couple and four older stepsisters. At times it is a dark fable of revenge but with a final transcendent redemption, set in a Kiwi landscape that veers from rugged back-block farms to manicured suburbia in an image-potent plot.ĭora is chosen from the orphanage by a nurturing family. Jack Be Nimble has all the elements of a contemporary fairy tale-turned-Gothic horror. One chance."Īrquette and Smuts-Kennedy were cast as Jack and Dora, two siblings orphaned as toddlers who attempt to reunite in later life. "Making Jack was an act of survival," Maxwell remarks of the circumstances of creating his first full-length movie. ![]() Now, an acclaimed rediscovery means it is headlining a festival screening at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and is available on Blu-ray DVD for the first time. It is a summation of Maxwell's own approach to life, creativity, and, in particular, his long struggle for acknowledgement of a New Zealand movie that originally premiered at Cannes in 1993.ĭespite Jack Be Nimble being hailed by the New York Times as having "hallucinatory power and psychological refinement", its purchase and a botched global release by an overseas company meant a total disappearance from the world's screens for nearly 30 years. Photo / Suppliedĭavid Herkt talks to Garth Maxwell about his 'all or nothing' film Jack Be Nimble, starring transgender actor Alexis Arquette and NZ's Bruno Lawrence in his final role.Īsk film director Garth Maxwell what his movie Jack Be Nimble is about and he is succinct: "Working out what matters and fighting for it." Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, in the "lost" New Zealand gender-horror film Jack Be Nimble, directed by Garth Maxwell. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |