Every week there are movies I need to see that I know (forget “strongly suspect”) will be deflating to sit through. Especially during the March-April doldrums. Because this is a time in which films seem to take things from you rather than give. They sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Which is why it’s a good time for Blurays and DVDs of oldies and obscura and films like…say, Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row or Blurays of Buster Keaton‘s The General or Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Battle: LA represents one kind of ordeal (i.e., unrelenting shakycam + CG assault) and Carey Fukanaga‘s Jane Eyre surely represents the other end of the spectrum. (One glance at Mia Wasikowska in costume and I feel instantly weakened.) And then there’s the brownish-bleachy color in Dana Adam Shapiro‘s Monogamy, that sense of slowly bleeding to death while watching Abbas Kiarostami‘s Certified Copy and the casting issue (yet to be discussed) that gets in the way of Jonathan Hensleigh‘s Kill The Irishman. I don’t even want to think about even glancing at Red Riding Hood or Mars Needs Moms or Electra Luxx…forget it.

You know what isn’t half bad, even though it’s opening this Friday only in New York? Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, about the writing, performing and filming of Mart Crowley‘s The Boys In The Band. It seems to overemphasize here and there and could stand a little tightening, but it’s a very decent, above-average capturing of early to late ’60s gay culture and showbiz culture in New York and Los Angeles. It conveys what an enormous struggle it was for Crowley to write the play, and what a huge strike it was for everyone involved in the play and the film (or both), and how quickly it all evaporated after the Stonewall rebellion of ’69, and yet how Boys lives today in a historical sense and also a tragic one, given the fate of most of the original cast members.