Oscar Opens Bayou Doors

A Bridges to recognition: Hollywood's underrated Jeff gets Houston love

For the better part of three decades, Jeff Bridges was ranked among the most adventurously versatile and consistently impressive American film actors of his generation. And yet, despite his prodigious talent and prolific output, true superstardom eluded his grasp.

Indeed, he was so good, so often, that his accomplishments were more or less taken for granted. A cover blurb for a 1993 New York Times Magazine profile summed it up best: ''Jeff Bridges — Hollywood's Most Underrated Actor.''

But that was then, this is now: At age 60, Bridges finally is getting his due. He has spent the few months on a virtually nonstop victory lap, collecting all manner of prizes — including an overdue Academy Award — for his vividly detailed yet subtly nuanced and altogether terrific performance in Crazy Heart. He has attained sufficient stature — and, yes, radiates more than enough star power — to fill John Wayne’s boots in Joel and Ethan Coen’s upcoming remake of True Grit.

And he is inspiring both longtime fans and newly-won admirers to take second glances (or, in many if not most cases, first looks) at the films that represent his career highlights.

The secret of his success?

Well, consider what he told me during an interview shortly after that New York Times Magazine article appeared: ''I do the movies that are interesting to me, that I'd like to see. Or if I'm drawn to the challenge.''

In his view, nothing else mattered all that much. ''The classic movie star thing is, 'I'll make all these movies that Hollywood wants me to make, and then I'll get to do what I really want to do," Bridges said. "So I just skip the middle man, and do what I really want to do. That makes more sense to me.''

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Houston Film Critics Society have joined forces to showcase some of those “interesting” movies, and to celebrate a singular career, in an aptly titled retrospective -— We ♥ Jeff Bridges — that kicks off this weekend at MFA.

The first offerings in the nine-film series: Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (7 p.m. tonight), the 1971 drama featuring Bridges’ breakthrough performance as a callow young rowdy in a small Texas town; and Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (7 p.m. Saturday), a film noir-style thriller that has Bridges cast as a tarnished LA golden boy who may link a wealthy businessman to a brutal murder.

The latter film, it’s worth noting, has a significant H-Town connection. Originally known as Cutter and Bone, the title of the novel on which it’s based, it was a box-office flop when it opened with minimal hoopla in New York in early 1981. But some savvy folks at United Artists Classics opted to give the film a second chance by re-launching it — with a new title — at the WorldFest/Houston International Film festival, where it was cheered by audiences and hailed by critics.

Thanks largely to the publicity generated by the WorldFest/Houston exposure, Cutter’s Way was successfully released on the art-house circuit, attracted a sizeable cult following — and, not incidentally, helped establish UA Classics (which later released Diva, The Last Metro and The Night of the Shooting Stars) as a top-tier distributor of indie and foreign-language films.

Other titles in the We ♥ Jeff Bridges lineup: Tucker: The Man and His Dream (7 p.m. May 14), The Big Lebowski (7 p.m. May 15), The Fabulous Baker Boys (7 p.m. May 28), Starman (7 p.m. May 29), The Fisher King (7 p.m. June 11), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (7 p.m. June 18) — and, of course, Crazy Heart (7 p.m. June 25).

Each of the films will be introduced by a member of the Houston Film Critics Society — I’ll be doing the honors for Tucker — and all of them will be screened in the MFA’s Brown Auditorium Theater.

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Movie Review

Camp Miasma puts a comedic twist on the classic slasher movie

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing the slasher subgenre that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death — a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask — may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference — Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard — to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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