Jenni Olsen’s The Joy of Life
If you loved By Hook or By Crook as much as I did, this will excite you.
Jenni Olsen’s first feature, The Joy of Life (in which Harriet “Harry” Dodge narrates), shares two stories of San Francisco with us – one of a butch searching for love and the other of the history of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge as a suicide landmark.
From PlanetOut:
The Susie Bright-like opening tale (originally “Fuck Diary”) confronts the rock and the hard place between gender, identity and desire. “The veiled misogyny of my butchness, of not wanting to be a girl. I like it when fags think I’m cute, have a crush on me, treat me like one of the guys, yet this kind of psychological passing makes me even more aware of some element of self-loathing.”
The second part — the History Channel part — ties an astute deconstruction of Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” to a tone poem on the Golden Gate Bridge’s role as the number-one destination for would be suicides. Olson links the way Doe’s makers wrote their way out of their hero’s original self-inflicted demise to the story of how her best friend, film exhibitor Mark Finch, took his own life from the bridge in 1995.
The Joy of Life will play at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre July 11-14th. The rest of us get to wait. It’s not fair.
thanks for posting info about my movie! hope you’ll get to see it very soon — and i promise it will be worth the wait. check my website for updated listings of screening dates and find out when it will be coming to your town.
Hey Jenni!
Can’t wait to see it. Someone was just telling me the other day how amazed they were by the movie.
Thanks for stopping by!
~ Maria
*Grumble* and here I was beginning to think Richmond was progressive. Maybe I can make it up to PA for it – thanks for putting this on my radar, Maria!