Turn Me On, Dammit!
by Josh Bostic
A 15-year old Norwegian girl desperately wants to figure out her sexuality, but life in a small town can complicate that.
I once thought growing up as a teenage boy in America was difficult. After watching “Turn Me On, Dammit!” I apparently don’t know what that word means. Alma is a 15-year old girl trying to figure out her own sexuality. She lives in a small Norwegian town with her single mother and fantasizes – quite literally – about having sex with practically every person in her life. She spends the rest of her time smoking cigarettes and drinking beer with her two best friends Ingrid and Saralou. She spends afternoons with her crush, Artur. He seems to like her as well.
One night at a party, Artur decides to whip out the ol’ meat stick and pokes her in the hip with it. Despite her frequently titillating fantasies and her conversations with Stig, the phone sex operator, she’s still just a little girl at heart and is stunned by this sudden hardship. She has no idea how to react and just stares, bewildered. Artur puts away his trouser snake and walks off. Moments later, as she tells Ingrid and Saralou about her encounter with Artur’s kidney scraper, he denies it and the girls take his side. News travels fast and Alma is the social outcast of the moment, earning the nickname “Dick-Alma”. Ouch.
I can’t help but be reminded of “American Teen”, a documentary about high school drama in America, and Hannah Bailey’s hasty fall to social deviant. They say fiction mirrors reality (or maybe it’s the other way around) and this is true in “Turn Me On, Dammit!”. Alma’s label as the school pervert rings true to life as her friends abandon her to be cool. They avoid her and treat her like the plague. Meanwhile, Alma still doesn’t know who she is. Her fantasies are often brash with hilariously awkward sexuality but what I found interesting is how they displayed her fantasies with Artur. They are tasteful, sweet, and reflect more of her romantic feelings for this boy. In contrast, she daydreams about her friend’s father, who talks about all of the things he wishes to do to her as she works in his store. It’s also interesting that none of her fantasies involve explicit sex – clearly because she has never actually experienced it and has no frame of reference for what it may be like.
This isn’t a movie about 50 Shades of Grey, it’s a movie about a girl who thinks like that book reads. What propels this movie forward, and into new territory, is how the story goes from here. Alma doesn’t just find a guy to sleep with and get pregnant. She doesn’t slut it up on the town and get raped. Instead, she looks to her hero, Saralou’s big sister Marie, who goes to school in Oslo. She’s a grown woman that has life and sex figured out, and Alma admires her for this. This is a comedy, and it’s funny, but Alma learns important lessons. She has no father to guide and protect her and her mother doesn’t seem to know how to handle her daughter’s newfound sexuality. She only needs someone to tell her that how she is feeling is normal. And that’s the central question of “Turn Me On, Dammit!”
This film is in stark contrast to the raunchy coming-of-age comedies that we produce in America. It isn’t handled with an all-too-sweet ending; instead, we get a realistic ending that provides an answer to Alma’s life question. She not only gets what she wants, but what she needs. Her arc is real and believable. I won’t guess as to the writer’s intentions, but I will say that I learned more about female sexuality from watching this. Thanks to this funny, insightful, and real film, stigma be gone? Or maybe it’s too late, thanks to 50 Shades.
Vivaciously – Watch this film expecting to learn more about teenage coming-of-age sexuality, from the female perspective. Oh, and don’t watch this with your mom!
Lola Versus
by Josh Bostic
Lola is a typical late-20s female living idyllically in Manhattan. She’s in love and about to get married until he decides he’s better off without. This is a compelling premise for what could be a great story and was setup beautifully – instead of Luke, her fiancé, telling her that he can’t continue, we get a shot of him looking empty, followed by a title sequence, followed by Lola crying on the toilet. Nice.
Next, we embark on a journey with Lola and her friends Alice and Henry as she attempts to recover from love lost. Alice wants her to get back out there and start having sex, medicine that her slightly off-kilter parents support, and she decides that sleeping with Henry, whom Alice houses a not-so-secret crush for, is the best choice. Don’t worry – she’ll screw this up too by sleeping with “Monster Dick Nick”. When Henry discovers this, Lola sums herself up in one line: “I’m slutty, but I’m a good person!” I think that Lola is a good person, and Greta Gershwin makes her unbelievably likable from the first frame.
Quirks for the sake of quirks never make for a good film, and this story walks that line like a tightrope artist that skipped a few training sessions. Alice is a borderline wit-firing machine and Lola’s “black friend”, played by Jay Pharaoh, is an inversely-flat character – shame, his talent is really wasted here. Most of the other characters are believable and real, and we can understand why and how Lola interacts with them.
Lola eventually has a dead heat brawl with Luke, Alice and Henry and effectively ruins her relationship with each of them at a party. This is followed by a lonely night of drunken revelry, with zero consequences for her bizarre actions, and an immediate and unexplained reversal of her previous attitude of blaming others for her feelings. This is where Lola Versus completely falls apart and loses all credibility – nothing allows for Lola to change, she just does. If only any of my exes would have the same instantaneous change of heart, the world would be a much brighter place.
Silence is a key theme to the dissertation that Lola writes. It is introduced in a way that makes us believe this will be a key thematic element to the story, yet it is never taken advantage of. Still, I found myself laughing at times and enjoying the journey that Lola takes on. Perhaps, in part, because I can understand her character and I know what it is like to suffer through the loss of a relationship previously thought permanent and invincible. She makes some crazy decisions, but somehow they are all believable. I only wish that I could understand what made her get out of her funk. It wasn’t the silence, but it should have been.
Eventually: Check this out when you’re game for some light fare that still leaves you somewhat satisfied
Adverb the Noun 