It’s the end of the world, and I don’t feel fine

Not my idea of a good time. Here’s the LGBT Weekly link.

When I’m under the weather – when I’m home with a cold or just filled with ennui – I like to watch romantic comedies. However, there are a few things I can’t take in a romantic comedy. Don’t bring me down. I don’t want disease, death or injustice. I can take the lovers not ending up together, but I can’t take killing them. Not in acomedy.

So, for Pete’s sake, don’t end the world in a romantic comedy.

But this is the entire premise of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Lorene Scafaria’s new movie starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightly. I’m not sure what would give her the idea to set her movie in the last three weeks before an asteroid arrives and destroys all of humanity; and I’m not sure why she’d set a romantic comedy then; and I’m really not sure why a studio would produce such a movie. Continue…

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A whole bunch of movies every queer boy should see

Last weekend, I was hanging out with a sweet young faglet, and it became clear that many of my boyfriend and my film references were flying over his head. I take my queer culture and queer acculturation seriously, so while we were all watching Victor Victoria, I set out to write a list of a movies that every queer boy should see. It got long.

Almost 20 years ago, an older gay man made a similarly themed, though much shorter, list when I said that I had never seen All About Eve. This was after he had recited the entire opening monologue from memory. He had just used it in a promo he’d written for WGBH, where he wrote, among other things, Vincent Price’s banter for Mystery. He was what was called a “non-resident tutor” at my college residence house, and he came to dinner a couple times a month and sat with the gay resident tutor and told stories. Oh, the stories!

I’ve always found exceptional value in the words, wisdom, wit, and stories of older gay men. Queers are rarely raised by other queers, so when we come out, we have no culture. We have to learn it. And gay culture is rich, weird, and intensely important. It’s also, contrary to Andrew Sullivan and Daniel Harris, not remotely dead. Continue…

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I Wanna Rock!

It’s not the worst movie ever made. In fact, it’s kind of fun. But, yes, it’s bad. (Here’s the LGBT Weekly link.)

In the first few minutes of 1980s-set pop-rock musical Rock of Ages, Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough) climbs onto a bus to Los Angeles, flips through her collection of power pop rock albums, rereads a good luck note from her grandmother, sighs hopefully and starts singing – along with the entire bus – Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian,” one of the greatest bad songs of all time. And I laughed out loud. And then I was confused; was I supposed to find this funny? The answer was yes; but it took me too long to decide. Continue…

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“I want to go on adventures, I think.”

I think I may love Moonrise Kingdom more than any other Wes Anderson film.

Sam Shakusky, the hero of Moonrise Kingdom, is an awkward 12-year-old boy. An orphan living in a foster home for troubled boys in 1965, he is the only one who doesn’t look like an extra in Rebel Without A Cause. Tough guys, the other boys are all in white T-shirts and blue jeans and their hair is greased into a perfect sheen. But Sam has a mop of black curls and a tiny frame and is as weird and precocious as the other boys are conforming. He’s the sort of kid who, when asked what he wants to do when he grows up, says, “I want to go on adventures, I think.” This makes him endearing to me, but to others he’s just off; when Sam’s scout leader calls the foster home to say that he’s run away from camp, Sam’s foster father says that he doesn’t want Sam to return.

In the incredibly arch Moonrise Kingdom, where writer-director Wes Anderson laces most intense emotions with irony, this moment is so awful, the audience laughs in discomfort, but the three adults listening to the foster father – Scoutmaster Randy Ward (Ed Norton), local cop Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), and the phone operator – are visibly, indelibly saddened. Like in Roald Dahl’s children’s stories, in Moonrise Kingdom both humor and pain, and irony and sincerity exist side-by-side. The result is a profoundly entertaining and also profound film that matches and perhaps surpasses Anderson’s best achievements, which include the minor classics Rushmore, The Royal Tanenbaums, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was based on a Dahl story. Continue…

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“I was calling it the feather duster.”

I find it rather delightful that someone made an entertaining romantic comedy based on the feminist critique of the “hysteria” diagnosis and the invention of the vibrator. The quote above is what Rupert Everett’s character, Edmund St. John-Smythe, says when the first woman they test the contraption asks him what the machine is named. Heh.

Perhaps you remember that in old movies, a woman would be screaming and crying in rage or anguish, and oftentimes, a nearby man would say, “She’s hysterical!” And he might slap her, or, if it were available, inject her with a sedative. Hysteria used to be a medical diagnosis, and it was thought that the only cure for the women who suffered its most extreme forms was a full hysterectomy – the surgical removal of the uterus. What hysteria actually was a diagnosis for was not terribly exact, but it was terribly sexist. In the words of Charlotte Dalrymple – Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character in the charming period comedy about the invention of the vibrator Hysteria – hysteria is “a catch-all diagnosis for women without opportunity forced to spend their lives tending to domestic chores and selfish, prudish husbands who are unwilling or unable to make love to them properly or often enough.” Continue…

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