Wilderness Survival for Girls (2004)

Underrated is not a word I use often. Most of my favorite things are massively popular. Taylor Swift & Tom Petty, Harry Potter & ASOIAF... in terms of films, you might find a lot of cult classics but within their audience they're all regarded as unmitigated classics: Trick ' Treat, The House of the Devil, The Blair Witch Project...

Yet when it comes to Wilderness Survival for Girls, it doesn't receive half the praise it deserves. What a perfect film this is. Three girls go up to the woods to celebrate the end of high school. Smoke, drink, unwind. But things take a dark turn when a  stranger barges into their cabin in the middle of the night. Miles away from any civilization, what will they do? But this isn't your typical slasher story, so don't think that's the direction this is going in.

For starters, the woodsy 'cabin in the mountains' feel is beyond sublime, captured with utter perfection. It's guaranteed to always give me flashbacks of vacations in my youth, spent in cabins just like this one. A lot of scary movies try for this kind of setting but Wilderness Survival for Girls does it more effectively and more convincingly. This is partly because the filming is completely real: shot on location in the mountains, at an old cabin with a backstory similar to that of the setting in the film. Truly gorgeous mountain scenery. And this is also partly because the general feel of the cinematography and everything just oozes classic 90s thriller kind of feel. While the film is set in modern day (2004, when the movie was made), it works like a House of the Devil-style period piece. The cabin hadn't been much used in years before the girls arrive, so it still had all its 90s garb intact, and it looks perfectly like the kind of 90s fashion I remember from when I was a kid. That's part of why it resonates so much with me.

But the other part of why it does that, is of course the writing. I won't spoil any plot points for those who've yet to see it, but the dialogue is sincere and the twists are clever. It's a classic cat-and-mouse thriller as well as a bit of an atmospheric horror (with pitch perfection execution of the 'creepy cabin at night' motif in the early portion of the movie), and ultimately it becomes something of a dark coming of age film.

The back of the DVD box describes it as "teensploitation" so I was hesitant to jump in head first... But after viewing the director's commentary, it's clear that a lot of the content and scenarios from the film were inspired by director Kim Roberts' own childhood experiences. Without being precocious, preachy, or overstated, the film manages to ruminate thoughtfully on the culture of fear girls have to grow up with. And the relationships between all four main characters are incredibly real and remind me so much of my friends growing up -- almost embarrassingly, painfully so. It's not Bob Dylan-esque writing that you're going to want to quote but it's true to life and that can be worth a lot more.

Another little plus that makes the movie even better, as if it wasn't already one of my favorite films: it's got an unexpected gay angle with sincere build up and development, which doesn't come off at all as being there just to titillate.

I know I keep saying it, but I can't help it from being true: the movie is just executed perfectly. Movies this picturesque don't come around very often. So why isn't it very popular? Maybe it just never was able to reach the proper audience. It's one of those films that sometimes makes you wonder what market they had in mind... It's too uninhibited for Lifetime but it's not brutal enough for the general horror audience either. It does seem to have been promoted more as a bit of exploitation-genre fun and that was a pretty poor choice, since it lacks both the gore and the sex the genre is popular for. Wilderness Survival for Girls will obviously appeal more to young girls.

It's that perfect type of guilty pleasure for a young teen to stumble on, like the kind of movies I'd find on at 2am when I was 13 or 14. Unrepentant drug use, the foreboding threat of violence, even a little nudity, it's salacious enough to keep you enthralled. But ultimately it's a genuine, honest movie that resonates with the trials of being young without talking down to its audience or throwing a phony moral on top.

Wilderness Survival for Girls is available on Netflix Streaming and Amazon Prime and it comes in at a terse, smooth hour & 19 minutes, so you really have no excuse for not seeing it.

What happened to instant live shows?

I went to my first concert in 2002. And outside the show, they had an official booth where if you sign up and pay in advance, they'll send you a CD of the actual fricking concert you're about to see! You could also go online and buy any show from the tour. In fact, you can *still* go online and buy those shows. I thought I was living in 3030 AD.

I thought this was the future of concerts, I thought this was going to catch on. Eleven years later, it hasn't. And I couldn't be more pissed. And I don't understand why not.

Here's the fuckin' kicker, alright? It's simple as pie to record a live show, all you do is tap into the soundboard. The content is already being mixed, the sound is reasonably clear, this is how good bootlegs are made. In fact, recording live shows is so easy that most artists already record most of their shows, if not all of them. They record hundreds of shows in the off-hand chance that someday any given show will be useful in composing a live album or box set, etc.

So they already have these shows recorded. God forbid they sell them to fans for an exorbitant profit. The really stunning thing is... this isn't 2002 anymore. They don't have to spend 30 cents on blank CDs and print the damn things themselves anymore. They can charge fans $35 for a digital download that costs exactly nothing to make. They're already recording the shows, and they would cost zero dollars to sell... that's pure profit. And fans would pay! Either for the novelty of having the shows they personally attended, or for completists who want a thorough record of the tour, or for gigs that contain special performances such as exclusive duets or rare deep cuts.

But for whatever reasons, nobody bothers to do this.

I would gladly slam my face into a brick wall repeatedly for these performances to be available. I would do anything. Because I would swoon for years straight if I could have all five of my Tom Petty shows and compile a personal best of Tom Petty featuring performances I actually saw in the flesh. That's $175 that I am begging to give to Tom Petty, and I'm only one fan. I also would pay top dollar times ten to have my different Neil Young shows and be able to reevaluate them in today's light, as I was a novice Neil fan when I started seeing him.

But the real kicker is Taylor Swift. You know how dedicated her fans are. You know that out of the ballpark 3 million or so people who are going to see Taylor on this tour, you could recoup whatever negligible labor costs it would require to post 70 shows on iTunes a billion times over.

And on this tour she's doing something very, very special. On the last tour most gigs got a wild card song that was a cover by an artist from whatever region she was playing in at the time. That's cool and all but... covers, meh, that doesn't really interest me as I'm more into Taylor's originals than anything she'd be covering.

But this tour she's doing every fan's dream, and playing ubercool deep cuts. Shit she's never even played before. AND she's doing it solo-acoustiC!!! As an old school folk music fan from way back this blows my fucking mind more than a thousand hydrogen bombs. And I am clawing my eyes at over the prospect that I may never get to hear even five or six of these amazing songs. This is the kind of problem that for god's sake I wish I could throw money at. I would gladly pay so, so much just to have these songs in decent audio quality.

If we're lucky enough to get a Red Tour official album, it will most likely contain one or even a few of Taylor's wild card solo acoustic songs. But even a best case scenario, 3 out of the 20 or 30 different songs isn't remotely good enough. They'll probably pick some of the big hits instead of the jaw-dropping rarities and all the best stuff from this tour will fade away into obscurity, never to be heard.

For the life of me I don't know where to find Taylor Swift bootlegs. No sources have yeilded results. I know audio recordings are blase' in the era of shitty cellphone recordings posted to youtube, but there are literally tens of thousands of people at a Taylor Swift gig. All it would take is one bloke who's old school, one music geek who's my age, and in the internet age that's all it should take for the show to be readily available.

Alas, I'm at my wits end. If anyone might know where I could find audio recordings of Taylor's shows, I would be eternally grateful.

The Best Part of Breaking Up: Taylor Swift's Greatest Hits

Generally I like to make compilations of my *own* favorite songs from one of my favorite artists. But then, most of my favorite artists have been playing for 30 years and have 20 albums. At this point in Taylor's career I'm really more curious about what her actual greatest hits album will eventually look like, because her legacy is still in the process of being written. So I compiled one.

The Best Part of Breaking Up: Taylor Swift's Greatest Hits

1. Love Story

2. We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

3. Teardrops on My Guitar (Pop Version)

4. You Belong With Me

5. Mine

6. Today Was a Fairytale

7. I Knew You Were Trouble

8. Ours

9. Mean

10. Fifteen

11. Sparks Fly

12. Our Song 

13. White Horse

14. Begin Again

15. Back to December (Speak Now World Tour Live)

16. Should've Said No (Live in SoHo)

Deluxe Edition Bonus Disc

1. Highway Don't Care (Tim McGraw featuring Taylor Swift and Keith Urban)

2. Two Is Better Than One (Boys Like Girls featuring Taylor Swift)

3. Both of Us (B.o.B featuring Taylor Swift)

4. Fearless

5. Red

6. I Heart Question Mark

7. Eyes Open (Vh1 Storytellers)

8. Picture to Burn feat. Def Leppard (CMT Crossroads)

It's an interesting question. How do you approach an artist who already has so many important songs? How do you segregate the hits, when Taylor's entire albums chart? I'm not talking about on Billboard's Top 200 Albums, I'm talking about each track, individually!

Furthermore how do you mediate between Taylor's "country" side and her "pop" side? The songs that were hits on both sides of the aisle are easy, but then what do you do with songs that were #1 on the country chart, and only #65 on the Top 100? Or songs that were #15 on the 100, but didn't chart or underperformed in the country market?

I tried to be as objective as possible. The mitigating factors were sales, chart position, and longevity (thus far). And then I loaded up the bonus disc with interesting rarities while also using the opportunity to score a bunch of the biggest hits that hadn't been quite big enough to make the first cut.

It will actually be a lot easier to come up with an album like this in 10 or 15 years. A lot of midlevel songs that were genuine hits at the time, don't ultimately enter the cultural canon; and some songs that were minor hits upon release, end up becoming ubiquitous standards. Take Tom Petty for example, have you ever heard the song Jammin' Me? In 1987 that jaunty rocker was actually one of Tom's biggest hits. But it was left off of 1993's Greatest Hits and it has rarely (if ever) been played live after 1999. Meanwhile, believe it or not but American Girl didn't even chart in the US.

And that brings up another point: a greatest hits album wields influence. What's included and what's left off, can and will alter an artist's legacy. Hits left off the Best Of disc become deep cuts, and deep cuts that get included? Well, to new fans they're seen as hits. (See: Listen To Her Heart, Here Comes My Girl).

One issue that this really brings to light... Taylor is often accused of writing too many breakup songs. But here are all of her biggest hits, and most of them are love songs. Out of 24 songs here, only 8 of them could be considered breakup songs. That means 2/3rds of them *aren't* breakup songs.

Burning Red: Taylor Swift Returns to Heinz Field (An In-Depth Fanalysis)

The first time I saw Taylor Swift was not only the single best concert I've ever seen, it was one of the more magical nights of my life. So you can imagine how excited I was to see her descend upon Heinz Field once again to bring back the fury for 50,000-some good ole' country girls (and me). Can I say that this show was as good as the last one? No, but you know what they say, you never really get over your first. And one thing I can say is that Taylor impressed me in ways I certainly never expected her to.

In 2011 Taylor brought us the Speak Now tour. 2013 brings us the Red tour. While all of Taylor's releases run the traditional gamut from ballad to barn burner, so far every one of her full-length albums has had its own particular lean or mode. Self-titled was more country. Fearless was more soft-rock or folky. Speak Now was more rock. And Red, Red is more pop.

In proper form, everything here was predicated on Red. The sets and interludes were lavish like olde Hollywood, the classic conception of the idyllic mainstream. Even Taylor's look is more pop these days, foregoing her country curls for Gaga-esque straightness(though if you've seen Red's music videos, you already knew that). Even the old songs were duly Red-ified. Once-common banjos were relegated mostly to exile as Taylor trotted out a solo-acoustic rendition of Our Song and played the pop mix version of Love Story. She also gave us a bizarre burlesque sort of pop version for You Belong With Me, as opposed to its guitar-heavy original mix.

Of 17 songs performed, 12 were from Red. This is, of course, precisely as it should be. That's the most important part of an album tour. Us superfans will have decades to hear the greatest hits, but this could be one of very few chances to hear Red's glorious deepcuts in all their wanton obscurity. And Taylor saw fit to oblige us, bringing out the top 3 deep cuts from Red: a pumped up, electronified version of Holy Ground, a spot on performance of the meditative ballad called The Lucky One, and best of all a powerhouse, entrenchant rendition of Taylor's #1 best melancholic story-song to date, All Too Well.

The hits from Red also shined in rare form last night, with a balls out, dubstep-enhanced barn-burning performance of I Knew You Were Trouble,  and a startlingly spectacular take on the soft, enchanting Begin Again.

This was pretty much exactly the concert that Red deserved. And I'm grateful for that, because Red deserves a great concert. That being said, Red is not as good of an album as Speak Now, and so it isn't as good of a tour either. But to be fair, I'm more of a rock and folk fan, so naturally I lean towards Speak Now and Fearless over Red and self-titled.

The really surprising thing about the Red tour is that Taylor just throws the hitlist out the dang window, to my joyous chagrin. In 2011 I was only a little surprised that formidable midlevel hits like Teardrops on My Guitar and Today Was a Fairytale were left out of the set... in 2013 I was dumbfounded to find Taylor had jettisoned several of her all-time biggest hits. And it's not even like she's excluding hits strictly in favor of her new songs. She's pulling out album cuts like Sparks Fly, and then not playing EITHER of that same album's BIGGEST hits: Back to December and Mine. When I saw Taylor in '11 I specifically thought to myself "she'll probably play Fifteen at every show she ever does from this point on." I don't think she's played it once on this whole tour.

This just holy fucking what, speechless jibberish fjkjdlfjl. She's even pulling out deep cuts (on other dates of the tour) like Cold As You, Forever & Always, and bizarre cover songs, all the while ignoring half of her hit songs. Hits? What are those? Anyone who was under the impression that Taylor Swift was just a mindless pop sensation, you can put your dunce cap on now, consider yourself obliteratingly debunked. If The Beatles and Tom Petty haven't already convinced you that writing three minute love songs for 90% of your career is *not* incompatible with integrity as an artist, then you haven't been paying attention.

While I might not have preferred the songs Taylor picked for this particular concert (God what I would have given to hear Cold As You!!), this was still a jaw-dropping development for me because it has massively wide-reaching implications for the rest of Taylor's career. Think about it, Taylor Swift already has nearly enough hits to pack a 17 song setlist. If she felt beholden to her radio songs the way many artists do, after one more record we'd pretty much have Taylor's setlist written in stone for the rest of her life. Now we know it's not going to be that way, we know that Taylor has no qualms about dropping hits left and right in order to give an interesting and unpredictable show. I can't wait to find out what she'll play next!

Equally important, we also see that Taylor is not going to completely ignore her old album cuts until the proverbial 30th anniversary "classic albums in their entirety" tour(s). I may have missed the self-titled and Fearless tours, but there's a chance that someday I could still get to see my favorite deep cuts like A Place in This World, Hey Stephen, and The Way I Loved You! Now that I know this... God, next tour I'm going to have to go see her in Cleveland and possibly NYC as well!

As a nerd with a particular interest and appreciation for the construction of setlists and the consequences therein, I'm pretty impressed with Taylor's work in that area. The one way that I do think Taylor should change her approach to these setlists is: include some off-album tracks. Not only has Taylor had some pretty huge off-album hits (Ours, Today Was a Fairytale, Safe & Sound), but Red has its host of deluxe edition bonus tracks, and if she doesn't play any of them on this tour, will she ever play them?

The Red Tour has a slot that changes from night to night, it would be a good idea to include some off-album tracks into the rotation. Other than that though, I'm impressed with the picks for this slot. In particular, she did once played the song that she did with Tim McGraw, without Tim McGraw. Which should tell us she'd be open to playing Safe & Sound without The Civil Wars, and The Last Time without Gary Lightbody.

Long story short... It was a great show. Compelling, enthused, and certainly unpredictable. Nowhere near as good as last time, but even so, the extent to which I am genuinely impressed with Taylor Swift continues to surpass itself by exponents. She wields both willful confidence, and unmistakable talent. I am downright giddy to see where her career goes. I know we're 25 years early, but I feel like Taylor might be an artist to get even better in the twilight of her career. Being relieved of the duty to master the charts could empower her to become even bolder, as it did for Tom Petty.

Setlist

{7/6/13 at Heinz Field, Pittsburgh PA}

• 1. State of Grace 
  2. Holy Ground 
  3. Red 
  4. You Belong with Me 
  5. The Lucky One 
  6. Mean 
  7. Stay Stay Stay / Ho Hey 
  8. 22 
  9. Our Song (Solo-Acoustic)
  10. Everything Has Changed 
  11. Begin Again 
  12. Sparks Fly 
  13. I Knew You Were Trouble 
  14. All Too Well 
  15. Love Story 
  16. Treacherous 
  17. We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together 
      
      

50 Ways I'd Spend My Summer Vacation....

I woke up this afternoon at 3:30pm, the distant and persistent sound ringing in my ears of someone mowing their lawn a few houses down the street. I step into the bathroom and am immediately encased in its icy cool refrigerator stasis, air conditioning pumping more each moment. This is the first idyllic Summer day of 2013, at least atmospherically (technically it's not Summer yet...) And while Summer is far from the most tragic teenage missed connection which occasionally haunts my possible pasts, it'd certainly be one of the easiest to make use of.

See, the thing is, I was depressed for most of my life. No lust for life means no taste for trying things, no interests to tap, and no pleasure even when I tried. Luckily those days are long, long gone, but I ran out of summers long before I learned how to have fun. I can't help imagining all the great things I could have done with a solid season of free time, if just one.

I know how to have fun, now. My real life summers were more about trying to keep my head from falling off, than necessarily having fun. I languished in confusion. I made plans but never had the drive to follow through with them. But today I'm the opposite. I make plans habitually, plan out practically every weekend with special events and unique chances. Now that it's about the destination rather than the mere idea of it, I do exactly the kind of things that would have made a summer really successful and fun. So if I could have one more summer vacation, one more mammoth block of free time, hot sun, and endless possibility, what would I do?

Here are 50 of the things I'd do. In no particular order. Chronologically let's assume I'm still 25 year old me, I just happen to have a few months of guilt-free leisure time for no good reason.

1. Follow Neil Young & Crazy Horse on tour, just for a few shows.
2. Finally learn my way around this neighborhood, completely.
3. Become a regular at the local gay bars.
4. Become a regular at the local library.
5. Read every Julie Anne Peters novel.
6. Buy a region free DVD player, plus Noroi: The Curse and the Sugar Rush TV series.
7. Host an Atmosfear party with my high school friends.
8. Learn how to play the A Song of Ice and Fire themed board game and card game.
9. Write a properly sourced, academic paper about lesbian subtext in iCarly and/or Victorious.
10. Marathon Neon Genesis Evangelion.
11. Reconnect with the people I've lost touch with, from school, from work, from everywhere.
12. Make an effort to meet the people in this area who like good music, TV, movies, and books. Never met 'em but I know they must be out there somewhere.
13. Get completely drunk and regret it immediately.
14. Get a part-time job at a coffee shop.
15. In order to triumph over my general anxiety in this area, force myself to ask out 50 people before the end of summer.
16. Take a walk to somewhere that'll take me all day to walk there.
17. Stay up for a week straight, against all sound judgement.
18. Go see a concert by an artist I don't like, and see if my opinion changes any.
19. Try to find a drama or acting  class to take.
20. At least seriously consider attempting to film a found footage horror movie.
21. Write several strongly worded letters to the School Board encouraging them to put Annie On My Mind in the cirriculum.
22. Greyhound to NYC for a concert.
23. Take photos of the streets at night, it's always so atmospheric and beautfiul with the deserted landscape and the glimmering array of streetlights.
24. Start a podcast.
25. Submit amateur movie reviews to... oh, I don't know, wherever you submit amateur movie reviews to. Probably a lesbian lifestyle magazine.
26. Write a short story and submit it to aforementioned hypothetical lesbian lifestyle magazine.
27. Have an all-night horror marathon once a week, find some people who would be into this (already have a couple in mind)
28. Try to strike up a friendship with someone I meet while walking.
29. Try to strike up a friendship with a customer at work (in this case, at the coffee shop).
30. Try to strike up a friendship with someone at least 30 years older than me, and someone 8 to 10 years younger than me. Apply for Big Brothers/Big Sisters?
31. Watch every single movie in the "Gay & Lesbian Movies" category on Netflix.
32. Start playing guitar again, and learn songs by Ani Difranco and Taylor Swift.
33. Beat Prince of Persia on the Super Nintendo (so hard!)
34. Attend a Libertarian event, it's my political party after all (in name, anyway).
35. Babysit for friend(s) who have kids so that I'll have experience when I eventually have kids.
36. Regularly lift weights (like I used to).
37. Visit the Museum of Natural History, haven't been there since I was a kid.
38. Watch the old Disney Channel shows, see if they stand up to time.
39. See a movie at the theater dressed in an octopus costume. Just to mess with people.
40. Meet one of my favorite authors in person
41. Get a cellphone.
42. Invent a slang word.
43. Go back to ENP and work off the clock for as long as possible until someone kicks me out. 
44. Finish Switched at Birth, Life Unexpected, The Vampire Diaries, and Season 4 of The West Wing. 
45. Start Anyone But Me, Make it or Break it, Enlightened, Lip Service, H20 Just Add Water, Dance Academy, and Teen Wolf.
46. Watch Game of Thrones with someone who hasn't read the books. 
47. Sit out on a candle-lit porch all night just talking and discussing things.
48. Discover a good TV show through pure channel surfing.
49. Toss a Fox Tail around a park somewhere.
50. Admit something really embarassing to someone I think is uber cool.

You may ask.... hey doofus, how come you can't do all these things anyway? What kind of warped little stunted mind would only be capable of doing general leisure activities under the comforting cover of a summer vacation? Well, you could be right. I could be hiding behind a myth in order to alleviate the pressure of having to accomplish such a myriad of things.

But I don't think so. This isn't a bucket list, these aren't things I feel a need to accomplish before I die. These are just ways in which I would have made summer fun. Summer was always so existential for me because I never knew what to do with myself. These are agreeable, exciting activities that would have made for a perfect Summer. The point isn't that these are all things I desperately want to do, the point is how much better equipped to deal with free time I am today than I was back then.  While I still have my job to occupy most of time, it's simply not an issue. But still, maybe there are a few I ought to incorporate to my daily life. ;)

Ani Difranco

Time to tell you a little bit about my latest interest in music...

I've been familiar with Ani since I was a teenager but I never delved all that deeply into her catalogue because, to be perfectly honest, I was afraid of being perceived as a poseur. It was great music but it was tapped into some seriously haunted stuff, I felt like I had no right to empathize with what Ani had apparently been going through. Sure, I had struggled with intense suicidal depression since about the age of 7, but that's grunge pain, Nirvana pain, melancholy, imbalanced chemicals. Ani Difranco's music is like, god... abuse, persecution, what it feels like to be a pariah, the experience of living on your own.

To put it bluntly, I have trouble imagining that Kurt Cobain was ever actually 27 years old. Everything about him makes him seem like a teenager. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Ani feels like she was born 35, her music reeks of experience and the complex maturities inherent to dealing with the adult world. As a naive teenager I felt like listening to Ani might expose me for the mental infant I was, wholly unaware of what the real world was or how to form coherent, consequential responses to it.

Those days now long since obscured by the years, I've been lucky enough to grow up. I'm not that infant anymore, and now I can resonate sincerely and unashamedly with Ani's music. And while it's surely no surprise, I'm pleased to find her legendary status is most assuredly deserved.

Since we've already hit on the conceptual side, we can start into Ani's music from a musical standpoint. First, I want to say, I love acoustic music. But I'm not always fond of stereotypical acoustic music, that lite-rock, crooning stuff. Having a few ballads is bloody fantastic, but I would never listen extensively to an artist like James Taylor, where it's pretty much all ballads. It's just overkill, you need a balance for those things.

Ani's music is almost all acoustic, but it's not at all in the lite-rock crooning category. You can see in her the very best part of Neil Young's acoustic side. Not the "Heart of Gold," Harvest Moon, Comes a Time, Prairie Wind side, no. It's the "Will to Love," "Ambulance Blues," "Broken Arrow," "Last Trip To Tulsa" side, unhinged and biting, personal to an almost embarrassing extent. This is the incredibly unique wavelength Ani surfs on.

Ballads account for less than half of Ani's output, and even when she does ballads, they're not gooey romance tales, they're brooding 8 minute ruminations, psychotic and poignant. Hell, even her hit single, "32 Flavors," is lyrically abstract and 6 minutes long.

And then we get to the other side of the coin, the bulk of what she does, these acoustic songs that don't really fit any mold. First of all, she's a fucking amazing guitarist. The things she plays sound complex as living Hell, like that "Knock on Wood" song by Justin King. All kinds of harmonics flying everywhere and sliding hands and it just sounds like she's a virtuoso without even trying.

And then there's the incredible soulfulness of the grooves. Technical guitar playing tends to lack soul and groove, but Ani has mastered that as well. She controls her melodies almost like a talented metal band does, pulling down the tempo and fleshing out the nuances until it becomes a new melody. Some of her breakdowns would make Pantera jealous.

Basically Ani Difranco is unprecedentedly amazing. It's hard to imagine someone like her could exist all in one, with the acute emotional depth, the virtuosic playing, and even the good sense to control her own career two decades before that mode would become fashionable in the internet age.

Hannah Free

As a general rule I stay away from 'advanced age' romances. I can remember what it was like to be a teenager, and naturally I know what it's like to be an early adult, but I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to be old. Not yet. And besides, what's more powerful than first love? What's more exciting than that tumultuous period of first discovery, right?

I discovered how wrong I was when I watched If These Walls Could Talk 2, HBO's lesbian romance TV anthology film. The first segment was about two older ladies who had spent nearly their entire lives together. It had me wanting to rip my heart out of my chest from the very first moment, first from joy, and then from utter despair when one partner dies and the other is left, without the protections inherent to marriage, to deal with the callous, uncaring in-laws who barely knew the deceased and could not care less about whatever bond the two may have shared.

It was breathtakingly ingenious  one of the greatest and most heartbreaking things I've ever seen. So I immediately scrambled to find more advanced age romance movies and Hannah Free immediately popped up.

Hannah Free is billed as 'the lesbian Brokeback Mountain.' "An empty boast," I immediately told myself. Brokeback Mountain is a staggering achievement in film history, a flawless masterwork of sweeping bittersweet romance. Yet... to my unimaginable delight, Hannah Free may well be as good as Brokeback Mountain after all.

This film tells the story of a woman with the unlikely name of Hannah Free, whose wanderlust is as boundless as her last name entails. But the seasons in the sun are long gone, and now she fritters away in an old folks' home, confined to a hospital bed by injury. By her side always, is the one she loves... not physically, but incorporeal as a hallucination or ghost. It's dually heartwarming and heartbreaking to see her railing at a spirit who may not be there. The bond they share is so viscerally strong.

Hannah Free lacks the epic cinematography, the conceptual grandeur, the succinct directorial flourishes that allow Brokeback Mountain to blow minds and win awards. But the story it tells is every bit as good, if not better. The people and circumstances and dialogue it portrays are every bit as real, every bit as illuminatingly genuine. And this movie had me bawling as much as any movie I've ever seen.

That's certainly not to disparage Brokeback, one of my all-time favorite films. Brokeback Mountain plays with gender mores to lusciously paint an essential and enlightening point about the nature of love. Hannah Free never pushes the envelope, never strikes a chord intended to ring out in the annals of time. But the points it makes are subversive in their own way, and essential as well. It tells us that the Well of Loneliness is not the only end for one who "dares" to love one who is of their same gender. It tells that miracle love knows no gender bounds, and it tells us that love can transverse decades. The portrait it paints of elderly life is as shockingly unglamorous as Brokeback Mountain's tragic arc is shockingly glamorous (in cinematographic terms), and both visions have truth to them.

Admittedly. the soundtrack is generic. Like, I think they borrowed it from The Weather Channel. But in a way I don't mind, because the stark simplicity of the soundtrack sort of forces you to focus on the story. Lacking the powerful force of contemporary music makes the story seem a little more sincere. Despite the incredible melancholy of some of the content, it never feels contrived or maudlin because they're not using the typical tricks employed by the Oscar crowd.

What Hannah Free is, is pure unadulterated romance. It's the Annie On My Mind of films. Even though this and Annie have nothing remotely in common story-wise, they both hit the mark of perfect love. If you're looking for something accusatory, biting, tumultuous, this may not be the film for you. But if you're one who believes real love still exists, one who believes love is as pure and wide and unbreakable as a mountain, Hannah Free will resonate as deeply with you as it has with me.