aGLIFF 2010 Daily Dispatch: Day Four, or Jane Austen Transploitation Night

Why yes, we're all having a lot of fun writing the headlines for the aGLIFF entries this year. Normally I disapprove of lengthy headlines, but I'm willing to make exceptions when we're having so much fun writing about a film festival. I'm starting to wish I'd assigned myself to every day of the fest ... hmm, food for thought for next year.

Last night, I planned a rather jarring double-feature for myself at aGLIFF, and admittedly I was slightly worried that the two movies wouldn't quite go together. True, they had nothing in common, but they were both so much fun, and both audiences had such a good time watching them that it didn't matter.

I started the evening with The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, a BBC production about a real-life woman in nineteenth-century Yorkshire whose diaries were found and decoded 150 years after her death. Turns out Anne Lister was an extremely independent woman who decided she didn't want a husband ... she wanted a wife. Of course, she says "female companion," which made it all reasonably acceptable at the time as long as no one looked behind closed doors.

Set in the 1820s, the costume drama comes off nicely as Jane Austen With Lesbians. In fact, the movie includes many standard shots and scenes you'd find in recent BBC Austen adaptations: sheep running across an estate, young women running across lush fields, older female relatives fussing over young women needing husbands.  However, Austen heroines normally don't say, "Bugger!" and their friends don't drink too much at the dinner table. What Emma and Harriet may have done when walking alone through the woods, however, is something we can only speculate upon.

One thing I like about aGLIFF is that the audiences are more responsive than in many other movies I see with a crowd, while still being respectful of the films. The sold-out, mostly female audience for The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister tended to snicker at many of the coy double-entendres that Lister often utters, and seemed to get a kick out of the movie overall.

After the film ended, I hurried to get in the line for the next movie I wanted to see: Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives. That's right, I went from a pastoral drama about Edwardian British lesbians to a homage to the 70s exploitation genre featuring transgendered women. I love that kind of double-feature combination. The film was shot in Dallas, which just goes to show you that all the Austin stereotypes of Dallas are often entirely wrong.

Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives could have been a remake of an exploitation flick starring Pam Grier and Jeannie Bell, and might have worked as well with a Weird Wednesday crowd at Alamo as it did with the aGLIFF audience. These characters have at least one thing that most exploitation heroines do not, however. They all work in a drag show, led by the amazing Pinky La'Trimm. Bubbles, the sweet and least outrageously dressed performer, runs into trouble with a guy who was unpleasantly surprised to find out she was not quite what she seemed, and suddenly she and all her friends are in peril.

The movie uses the same "tricks" that the two Grindhouse films did to indicates its exploitation-film roots: fake scratches on the print, and a lot of reel skipping at just the right moment. I actually feel that these gimmicks work better for Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives than they did with the 2007 Tarantino-Rodriguez effort -- possibly because this really is a low-budget film. The climactic scenes of the film were a little intense for me, and went on a little longer than I would have liked ... but frankly, that's still right in line with the original flicks on which it is modeled.

The movie generated a great number of laughs and applause. Afterward, the theater turned a little more serious for a discussion about the film. Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives has generated some controversy for its depiction of transgendered women in combination with its violence and stereotyping. Writer/director Israel Luna and producer Toni Miller discussed the movie with representatives from the Transgender Education Network of Texas (which sponsored the screening), and fielded some questions from the audience.

After the discussion, I talked with Luna briefly and found out that Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives will be available on DVD in the next couple of months. We're hoping to review the DVD here at Slackerwood -- Jenn and I are fighting over which one of us will get to do it, we liked the film so much -- so keep an eye out.

If you haven't headed over to aGLIFF today, you're missing a full day of a variety of exciting films. The Centerpiece Film tonight is Howl, starring James Franco and written/directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. aGLIFF is showing this film on two screens so you have a good chance of getting in. And of course, there's a party after the film, over at Frank downtown. Jenn has been hinting about some fabulous thing happening at the party that she can't tell me about, and I can't wait to find out what it is.