Who The Man, And Other Questions ‘I Love You, Man’ Doesn’t Really Ask

Posted on June 5, 2009 by queerlefty

I’ve been holding off writing about the Paul Rudd/Jason Segel-driven buddy comedy I Love You, Man for several days, in the ultimately fading hope that I would eventually end up liking it. Apart from disclosing that I in fact did not warm to it over time, this statement should tell you two things. First, that I really wanted to like it. It had great buzz, Paul Rudd and a decent premise, after all. And second, that I believe that there is no such thing as a totally unbiased way to watch a movie. My expectations when watching I Love You, Man unavoidably were colored by my previous experiences with buddy comedies, Paul Rudd etc. People who write about movies should not be so afraid to disclose these kinds of pre-judgments. Mine was that I knew going in that I wanted to like the movie. Now that you know, you should be better equipped to judge whether I gave the movie a fair shake.

(A third, more indirect takeaway from the initial statement: I dubbed the movie a buddy comedy for a reason. I chose that label because I desperately wanted to avoid calling it a bromance or (even worse) a dick flick, two patently absurd terms that have gained traction lately in describing movies about the awkwardness and absurdities of male-male friendships, of which Knocked Up is a prime (but wildly overrated) example. Of course, dick flick sounds vaguely like a joke about gay porn, which may sort of be the (mildly amusing) point, though I suspect the main point is far more obvious, creating a male counterpart to the chick flick. Anyway, one question begs to be asked; would you consider telling people that you were going to see that new Paul Rudd dick flick tonight? Didn’t think so.)

My problems with I Love You, Man are not with the plot, although it does feel a little convenient at times. It’s that I don’t really like neither Peter (Rudd), the groom-to-be, on the lookout for a close male friend, or Sydney (Segel), the guy he eventually connects with. Or at least I don’t like the person Peter becomes after he bonds with Sydney. I didn’t think I was able to say this about the instantly likeable Paul Rudd, but at times I felt like the the classic fratboy relationship between Peter and Sydney was established in a slightly cheap, excessively corner-cutting way. It seems like because the movie is channeling stereotypical views on how alpha males like Peter and Sydney interact (although in a gently mocking way), the work is moved from the writers to write some actual jokes, to us using our sense of those cliches to do the work for them. In saying this, I make myself vulnerable to charges that I either didn’t really understand the point of the movie – that their relationship is not supposed to be subtle, but rather to symbolize a fairly recognizable archetype of male-male friendship – or at least that I’m over-analyzing it to the point of taking all the fun out of it. And granted, there are several moments of genuine fun and even sweetness here (like the scene in which Sydney seemingly suggest that Peter’s girlfriend should give him oral sex more often, which is, oddly, both funny and somehow sweet, because you end up hoping he wouldn’t say just that), in which connecting with them becomes easier. Still, in the end, their fondness for irrational textbook masculinity – getting drunk, starting fights, connecting over rock music, etc. – falls predictably into the traditional romantic comedy narrative I sort of expected or at least hoped it would actually stray from.

This is where my main problem with the movie becomes apparent. I’ve got nothing against movies that make me think. The problem here is that I mostly thought about all the questions I Love You, Man didn’t ask, or at least failed to answer in a particularly interesting way. I didn’t feel like the movie had anything really new to say about how straight men negotiate their friendships, perhaps because I didn’t care all that much about the main characters in the first place. Sure, it’s kind of fun to see how almost everything two people say to each other is invariably interpreted through a gay-straight lens. But how fresh does it actually feel to see Peter practicing his lines before mustering the courage to set up a meeting with Sydney? To me, this does not qualify as turning the cliche (you see, it’s usually a guy and a girl) on its head. It simply feels lazy. And even though it’s a little cute how Peter starts to talk about Sydney in the same way he talks about his wife, did we really need a scene in which she accuses him of shutting her out and being more attentive to Sydney than to her? That scene, and the final scene (which I will not ‘spoil’), reluctantly convinced me that I Love You, Man is a lot less unconventional than it wants you to believe.

To me, Peter’s gay brother Robbie (played by the strangely attractive Andy Samberg, who looks like Jesse Eisenberg ten years from now, which probably explains the attractiveness thing right there) is another example of a potentially interesting character never fully conceived. I often criticize Hollywood for dealing in gay stereotypes, and thus it would perhaps seem ungrateful of me to accuse Samberg’s character of being ‘under-gayed’, but try to follow me on this. I loved how Robbie is portrayed as a gay man who, while not explicitly straight-acting, has no need for the tics and references generally associated with the Hollywood gay (I laughed really hard when he brushed off the fluffy Chocolat, here symbolizing the ultimate gay movie, as if he hadn’t even heard of it). I guess my criticism mostly has to do with how the movie doesn’t seem to realize the real potential in having Robbie as the against-type gay offering a contrast to the aforementioned unspoken codes of a straight male friendship, more than the character himself.

To somewhat forcedly paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go into production with the script you have, not the script others might have wanted you to have at a later time. While it would seem unfair to judge I Love You, Man based on the movie I would have most wanted it to be, I can’t free myself from a sense that a slightly reworked script could have helped the movie immensely. There are so many ‘what ifs’ to choose from: Had the many, many scenes in which Peter and Sydney goof around as cliched man-animals been better connected to the movie’s overall point. Had the jokes been a little bit sharper. Had the gay-straight dynamic been given more prominence. Had they not chosen to write the whole thing into a fairly predictable rom com framework. Etc, etc.   As it stands, to me I Love You, Man is that potentially great buddy comedy that wasn’t.

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Remembering ‘Jack & Bobby’

Posted on May 31, 2009 by queerlefty

Again, my thanks to Bryan for leaving the comment to which this piece is an extended reply. Read my initial response here.

Last week’s television Upfronts, where the five major broadcast networks unveiled their lineups for 2009-10, were short on surprises, although it could be worth noting that the CW will continue down the path to revived 90’s soaps, adding Melrose Place to a menu that already included 90210. Or we could make fun of NBC’s attempt to take late-night to primetime, serving Jay Leno five predictably dull hours per week. However, the Upfronts were even shorter on predicted new hits. If you cut the spin of the presentations and press releases, there were, as far as I can tell, not a single show that was expected to break out. Of course, CBS’ NCIS spin-off is unlikely to fail, and Fox comedy Glee garnered some positive buzz, but other than that, analysts and media journos held their predictions.

Which brings me to the real reason I’m writing about this. We could take our time being concerned about how a decline in real-time viewership (which means DVR technologies are excluded from the ratings), could eventually result in fewer good shows, because the profit margins of the television industry have gone down. Today, demographic scores seems to have taken on even greater importance, if only because there are no juggernauts anymore (except for, basically, American Idol, CSI, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Dancing With The Stars). This then, suggest that a modestly popular show like Fringe should be considered a hit, because of its standing with 18-49s. And there’s nothing wrong with that, except that if this current trend continues, and those aforementioned juggernauts continue to slide, we could end up with nothing in between. This is the backdrop for why people are tamping down expectations. Several shows will underperform anyway, and it becomes harder for every year to create a new hit show.

Or, I could let my mind wander back to May 2004, when television writers were trying to handicap that year’s Upfronts. Consensus seemed to form on singling out three shows as pretty safe bets for ratings- and critical acclaim come fall; ABC’s Lost, UPN’s Kenny Hill and the WB’s Jack & Bobby. Desperate Housewives was in the mix too, but according to Medialife magazine the female-driven soapy comedy had cooled a little when presented at the Upfronts. And here’s the point: We should not necessarily bemoan the lack of clear predictions about the 2009-10 slate, because high expectations tend to make it harder for a show to succeed. They get blamed for all the viewers they don’t draw, instead for being recognized for their actual viewership. Kenny Hill and Jack & Bobby, good shows both, thus failed not because their ratings were particularly poor compared to other UPN or WB shows, but because the bar had been set all too high.

To this day, I’m convinced that the WB (today’s CW was founded when UPN and the WB merged in 2005) was not the ideal platform on which to launch Jack & Bobby. Sure, it had its share of smart teen angst – far more, actually, than I remembered from watching it the first time around – but it was still basically a drama about what makes people go into politics. Formed as part 2004 coming-of-age story, and part 2048 documentary retrospective on the McCallister presidency, the show offered generous opportunities for semi-Freudian takes on how our backgrounds and environment shape our political beliefs, or for dissertations on the interconnectedness of destiny, determination and chance. The most surprising thing of all, however, was that it worked just as well as a political drama and as a drama about the dynamics of families and teenagers. Still, with that premise, it would probably have been better served by airing on the notoriously older-skewing, and more importantly, more patient, CBS. The schizophrenia, being a teen drama about politics, never lay in the show itself, but in how it clashed with the overall profile of the WB’s other programming.

I suppose what made me love Jack & Bobby (apart from its premise, a superb cast, and for introducing me to the by-now very handsome Logan Lerman), was how it dared to be optimistic to the verge of sentimentalism. In a way, taken together with the struggling liberal idealism of The West Wing‘s Jed Bartlett, Jack & Bobby could now be read as an early indication of the philosophical turnaround culminating in the election of Barack Obama. Sure, J&B‘s less-than-hagiographic portrayal of liberal academic/activist/feminist Grace, the highly imperfect matriarch of the McCallister family, would seem to make the show’s ideological leanings somewhat blurred. On the other hand, one could argue that Grace, a pot-smoking, at times self-absorbed history professor so intent on passing her values of independence, skepticism toward authorities and support of liberal orthodoxy onto her children that she’s often ended up standing in their way, was merely meant to provide Bobby with an interesting background on which to understand his moral compass. Whichever it was, the presidential retrospective portrayed Bobby as an unrepentant idealist, one who may have struggled with balancing what’s right with what’s politically possible, but you never doubt his intentions. If that makes this story of a Republican-turned-Independent president seem left-leaning, that probably has to do with how the post-Nixonian (with the possible exception of the first president Bush, the last influential (which excludes Ford) moderate Republican president) the GOP seems to have labeled idealism as equal parts ideological rigidity (cough, Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s first terms, cough) and just plain weakness. In 2004, the best moderate-to-liberal candidates in American politics were fictional. In 2008, Barack Obama was the real deal.

Apart from its unambiguous embrace of the hope that there exists some fundamental decency to the presidency, the most striking thing about the political perspective of Jack & Bobby was how it tried write to a new historical narrative. By looking back at our century from the middle of it, the writers used several contemporary hot-button issues to imagine how the U.S. might change in the future, both domestically and internationally. Here, again, cynics would probably balk at how much of that history(-making) is attributed directly to the words and actions of president McCallister, thus pushing a slightly hagiographic personal narrative, but in this particular context, that criticism is not very interesting. When someone has the nerve to dream up a whole (quite reasonable) new global world order, you do best just shut up and give it some thought .

We now turn to the teen drama angle. When it wasn’t busy looking for a governing philosophy in the everyday challenges a young Bobby faced, Jack & Bobby simultaneously managed to say something relevant both about the white lies and self-delusion that are sometimes a painful necessity in keeping a family together (I couldn’t illustrate this point without spoiling a major plotline in the first eight or so episodes), and about how teenagers interact with each other. Thus, Bobby playing chess with the university president, or how he instantly connects with girls much older than himself, could be interpreted both as a setup for showing how exceptionally intelligent, curious and mature he is, even from a young age, or simply as an example of geekiness. It’s interesting either way.

It was in observing competing expectations and social roles like these Jack & Bobby was at its very best. My favorite, and one that meant a lot to me as a not-yet-aware gay man, was the episode Lost Boys. in which Jack has to come to terms with the suicide of a gay friend, Matt, who had a crush on him. Jack is ridden with guilt, and the way he struggles to balance his personal insecurities with the attitude expected of a sports jock is actually almost as painfully poignant as Matt’s emotional desperation. That choice, to tell the story from both a gay and a straight viewpoint at the same time, gave an already serious storyline some added depth. I remember I was deeply moved by it, but I couldn’t quite figure what it had to do with me. I would love to watch it again.

No matter which angle you preferred, Jack & Bobby had enough nuance, charm and ambition for everyone. Being a nostalgic by nature, it might not be so bad after all that the show was cancelled after only one season. Its premise was never allowed to feel strained or clunky, and it still left enough room to imagine alternative outcomes. Even if have to honor the memory of Jack & Bobby by word of mouth alone, I’ll happily sign up. While I’m out doing that, I believe U.S. readers can access streamed episodes through the WB website.

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Obama Picks Sotomayor For SCOTUS: Some Thoughts On Gay Issues And Identity Politics

Posted on May 29, 2009 by queerlefty

Straying from our usual preoccupation with pop culture, the events of the week simply couldn’t keep me from writing a little bit about American politics. Both as a political junkie and as a gay man, this week has been really interesting. On Tuesday, President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to replace the retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court, and Wednesday the California Supreme Court, in a 6-1 vote, declared that Proposition 8, the amendment to the state constitution effectively banning gay marriage, was indeed constitutional. This post will almost entirely consider the political aspects of the Supreme Court nomination, while at the same time discussing identity politics, and touching briefly upon the judicial gay agenda. I might return to Prop 8 in a future post.

Some conservatives unconvincingly argue that Sotomayor could be to Obama what the obviously unqualified Harriet Miers was to the political capital of George W. Bush, but this should be discarded as a combination of conservative wishful thinking and simple hot-headedness. The Republican Party in shambles, they need to drum a fight – even a fight they’re near certain to lose – in order to energize the base around a common cause. The parallel breaks down on several points. Firstly, opposition to Miers came just as much from Republicans themselves as it came from Democrats. Judging from the roll-out of Sotomayor, she is very unlikely to face significant opposition from the president’s party. Second, in a sharp contrast to Harriet Miers, Sotomayor is obviously qualified. She has more judicial experience than other of the sitting justices had when they were confirmed to the High Court, she’s considered an intellectual heavy-hitter by everyone except GOP blowhards and 2012 contenders 0ut on a base-pleasing mission, and she has a voluminous record of narrow judicial opinions and moderate-to-liberal votes, making it hard for Republicans to accuse her of judicial activism. Barring a return to scorched-earth tactics of the Borkian past , she will be easily confirmed, possibly even by a wide margin, as some Republicans could be expected to defer to the President’s power to name justices.

The analysis of her voting record, of course, has left some liberal groups unsure about where Sotomayor stands on important issues. The nature of the lower courts means that they don’t get to weigh in on many of the hot-button issues of the culture wars, and her record on abortion and gay rights issues is thin. This could actually be one of the reasons why Obama picked her. A long trail of controversial votes could easily have derailed the debate, and the affirmative action case in Connecticut could prove controversial enough, even though it will probably not endanger her confirmation. I come from a political culture in which the judiciary holds far less power than it does in the United States, and thus I may sometimes find it difficult to accomodate to their law/politics discourse. As a leftist liberal (these terms are so toxic in American political discourse that they run the risk of becoming completely meaningless, but I’ll try to lay out my political philosophy if asked) I would ideally have hoped for Obama to nominate someone whose judicial philosophy would be more transformational, closer to Earl Warren than Stephen Breyer. Knowing that such a nominee would not be confirmed (what with the Democratic Party tent growing bigger and more politically diverse by every election cycle, housing everyone from the unabashedly liberal Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold to the fairly conservative Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska), I’ll simply have to hope that Sotomayor will be a reliable member of the four-member liberal block on the court, siding with Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer in most cases. In the weeks heading up to her confirmation hearings, we are likely get a fuller picture of her judicial views, eventually supplemented by her answering the questions of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This is where the whole thing turns a little unpleasant. I’m sure  President Obama would never nominate Sotomayor if he wasn’t reasonably sure that she would pursue a liberal voting record on issues important to him and his party’s constituencies, but on the other hand, one can never know for sure. The classic example in this regard of course is Justice Souter, who was appointed by the first President Bush, and opposed by Democratic activists because he wouldn’t make any definitive statements on his views on Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion ruling. Souter turned out to vote to uphold Roe, as did another Republican appointment, then-Justice Sandra O’Connor, making their Republican supporters absolutely furious. Theoretically, the same thing could happen with Sotomayor in the opposite direction, but when President Obama implicitly asks us to trust his judgment on this, it feels much easier to do so than it ever was when his ever-unreliable, notoriously truth-bending predecessor did.

Of course, you wouldn’t find any admission from elected Republicans that Sotomayor is basically a centrist. Hoping to advance the all-too-predictable judicial activist narrative, they have pounced on several of her previous statements. Obama’s statement that he considered empathy an important quality in a justice, combined with his own words when explaining why voted against confirming Justices John G. Roberts and Samuel Alito – that they were likely to vote in favor of the strong over the weak in those five percent of cases in which these qualities could be decisive – have proved somewhat unhelpful. Also, Sotomayor saying that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who has lived that life” didn’t exactly help things. As CNN’s Gloria Borger eloquently points out however, this hyperbolic quote was not only taken out of context; if read understandingly, she has a fairly obvious point. Sotomayor’s point was not to say that Latinas are by nature better than white males, nor was it to say that judges should let their personal experiences trump the principle of equality before the law, as some critics have claimed. In my opinion, she was just stating the obvious, that the application of law could not exist in a vacuum, and that it’s both naive and a little dangerous to believe that your background will never, at least implicitly, impact your decisions. Like Borger, I don’t see empathy and the ability to be open about on what grounds you reach decisions would make you less desirable as a Supreme Court justice. Which, I guess, places me right in line with the liberal judicial establishment (and that famed leftist David Brooks) former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson fulminates against in Washington Post:

In elite academic settings, it is commonly asserted that impartiality is not only a myth, but also a fraud perpetuated by the privileged. Since all legal standards, in this view, are subjective and culturally determined, the defenders of objectivity are merely disguising their exercise of power. And so the scales of justice — really the scales of power — need to be weighted by judges to favor the “weak” and the “powerless.”

Sotomayor’s awareness of how background could play a role in the application of law, could, theoretically, prove to be a boost for gay rights proponents. I’m not even close to suggesting that Sotomayor, or Carlos Moreno, the only judge to dissent when the California Supreme Court struck down the Prop 8 challenge this week, would vote on basis of their backgrounds rather than their broader judicial philosophies and the particular case, but it could be that a minority justice like Sotomayor would be more sympathetic to the claims for equality than some of the conservative, white males, for that very reason. This is pure speculation on my part, as we do not yet know Sotomayor’s views on gay rights issues. And as important as the ’empathy’ question may seem – it has been grossly overblown by Republicans searching for attack lines – the broader judicial philosophy will prove far more important still. Jeffrey Rosen, who came around to endorse Sotomayor this week, after having written a very critical piece about her in The New Republic earlier this month, highlights the different paths judicial liberalism could take, in an excellent essay for The New York Times Magazine this weekend. I’m not familiar enough with judicial thought to present his very interesting thoughts with the necessary nuance, I recommend you read it yourself. It also contains a illustrative example involving the approach to gay marriage.

If you’re still with me, I would like to thank you for delving into the areas of law and politics with me. We’ll be back on the pop culture carousel next time, I promise.

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Extending Winning Streak To Three Months Means May Sexiest Male Title Is Still A First For Emile Hirsch

Posted on May 21, 2009 by queerlefty

At first glance, this might seem like a rather uneventful month on the Sexiest Males Alive list, with the delayed Norwegian release of 17 Again postponing the inevitable Emile Hirsch/Zac Efron showdown t0 June, at the earliest. Also, the fact that Luke Pasquialino, by far the best takeaway from the seriously uneven third season of Skins, ran unopposed for Newcomer Of The Month, would seem to indicate that things have settled in some way. While that could be true, a couple of things disrupt that notion. The list of newcomers is short, but two previous friends of the SMA have suddenly re-emerged, much like Daniel Radcliffe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt have also done in recent months: Jay Brannan’s re-entry was the nearly inevitable consequence of my rewatching Shortbus and embracing his musical talents, but his #18 showing still is impressive. Even more so when you consider that he was kicked off the list way back in November. More surprisingly though, Jeremy Sumpter comes from absolutely nowhere to take #35. I guess true beauty just won’t be ignored, no matter the lack of exposure the former Peter Pan has suffered. They are both warmly welcomed back. Also, the fact that few new guys have moved in, doesn’t mean that people haven’t moved around.

Before we continue however, I owe Chris Lowell an apology. The reason he is marked with a (RE), is simply because he somehow fell off the list last month, although I didn’t mean for him to. He was included in an early draft, but for some reason, he never made it onto the list I eventually published, despite my initial intention. While he’s now back (at #37), the little slip could nevertheless suggest that he could face trouble getting the attention needed to climb in the coming months. Still, underexposure of course is no excuse for my mistake.

Speaking of lack of exposure, May looks the month when the fact that Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist still has no Norwegian distributor came back to punish Rafi Gavron, whose massive thirteen spot slide marks this month’s steepest decline. And in even less positive news, this is, at least for now, the end of the road for long-standing SMA-ers like Randy Harrison and Max Theriot, in addition to Daniel Agger and Rhys Wakefield.

As always, the changes on the list are usually caused by any particular guy being considered by me to be relatively more attractive than he was considered last month. That, however, of course doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the other people on this list have become markedly less attractive, only that they perhaps have not been as good at getting my attention lately. With that said, let’s break it down:

#1-10: First, we need to congratulate Emile Hirsch on becoming the first guy to hold the top spot for three consecutive months.Possibly lost in the Hirsch v. Efron rivalry however, is the small matter of Hunter Parrish. The man who was number one before any of them reportedly stars alongside Efron in 17 Again, making him a wild card for top honors once that film finally premieres. And of course, June will also see the fifth season premiere of Weeds, making it very likely that something equal in hotness to last season’s steamy nakedness will emerge. Elsewhere, I really should stop talking about the inherent stability and closeness of the top five or six spots on this list. While that holds true for the first four, David Gallagher placing fifth is his best position, and further proof that speculation would probably just foster another round of false prognostications. It happened when Raviv Ullman took #5 two months ago, and now it has happened again. Generally it has been a good month, with not only Gallagher but also Tyler Hoechlin scoring a personal best, courtesy of continuous 7th Heaven syndication. And still we haven’t mentioned that both Chris Egan (whose show Kings was dropped by NBC when the fall schedule was revealed this week), and Logan Lerman, whose new Gamer trailer and poster (although he’s hidden underneath the image of Gerard Butler) once and for all attests to his future heartthrob potential, also rise to previous unseen levels.

#11-20: Obviously, when I talked about stability I only referred to the lack of newcomers. The second tier is now one big volatile pool of cuteness, with last month’s climbers Ryan Sheckler and Gaspard Ulliel paying the price for Chris Egan’s and Tyler Hoechlin’s upward mobility. No less notable though, is Zac Hanson’s and Matt Prokop’s collective surge. Prokop may be profiting from his slight resemblance to our favorite drummer-songwriter, but if so, they both should extend their thanks to my loyal readers and friends Smilie and Bryan, whose persistent sales pitches for Zac have not only strengthened my longstanding relationship with the Tulsa treasure, but also convinced me of their impeccable tastes. This goes to show that while this list certainly is a barometer of my personal taste, that taste is subject to such rapid change that I’m definitely open to and appreciative of outside influence. In a way, I suppose the hugely impressive re-entry of Jay Brannan could be attributable to Bryan’s prodding as well. With his music career and all, Brannan may have enough strings to pull for this to be the restart of a long and beautiful friendship between him and the SMA.

This means that several of the old players, like Raviv Ullman, Charlie Hunnam and Alex Pettyfer, have gotten another challenge to fight. Ullman’s continued dive is somewhat worrisome, because it seems to suggest that Phil of the Future reruns will no longer be sufficient to keep him a Top Ten contender. I’m also a little surprised that Pettyfer is down even though new, less-than-clothed stills from Tormented came to my attention this month. Finally, Luke Pasqualino could be a keeper, despite the consistent mediocrity of this season of Skins and his relative lack of skin exposure. I don’t know exactly what it is I love about this guy, particularly since I have previously bemoaned the potential dullness of incredibly perfect-looking people like Chace Crawford (whom he holds no obvioua resemblance to, but whose easy-on-the-eye perfection should theoretically provoke a similar reaction), but apart from obsceneties, all the justification I can muster is a simple WOW! Capital letters and all. That has to mean something.

#21-30: With a more crowded second tier, the consequences are felt here. Jesse Eisenberg has always been bouncing between the high tens and the low twenties, and this month is no exception. He could of course easily bounce back when Adventureland crosses the Atlantic this summer. In the positive then, Jonathan Taylor Thomas joins the ranks of those never to be written off, while Mitch Firth is riding the wave of nostalgia afforded to Home and Away by my Early Gay Crushes installment on Chris Egan earlier this month . Matt Prokop already took the mantle as the best climber among last month’s newcomers, but William Moseley comes in an impressive second, advancing four spots, and in the process barely surpassing Shad Moss, to come in at #26 to his #28. I see no obvious reason why Sean Faris should suffer a six spot fall, but his decline coincides with similar slides for Jamie Bell and Ed Speleers. All three of them should of course be Top Twenty material, and they probably will be again soon enough. Adam Brody seems to have stabilized slightly below his high-point of late 2008/early 2009.

#31-40: Apart from the curious case of Chris Lowell, we have two positive stories to report. One is the sudden re-emergence of Sumpter, proving that once you’re in my memory bank you could go as high as anyone, if you’re only patient enough. His comeback has no outside explanation whatsoever, I just woke up one day (don’t ask) to realize that he’s actually far cuter than I give him credit for. The second story is about British footballer Andrew Carroll, making a seven spot jump to land at #40. In the long run however, it could potentially be very troublesome for him that his team, Newcastle United, looks like it’s going to be relegated from the Premiership, thus potentially limit his exposure for next season. The exposure thing of course would have been a challenge in the shorter run too, with the the campaign winding down this weekend. Another footballer, Cristiano Ronaldo, is going in the exactly opposite direction of Carroll, in every sense. Not only did his team, Manchester United, secure yet another Premiership title this month, but his trajectory on the SMA list contrasts Carroll’s as well. Once a Top Ten staple, maxing out as high as #5 last summer, he has now fallen another eight spots, to a decidedly unglamorous #31, and if his rumored move to Real Madrid pans out, he could even disappear from view.

Also sinking are Dev Patel, Leonardo DiCaprio and Aaron Carter. It could be that the mediocrity of the third season might prompt me to rewatch the first two seasons of Skins, but otherwise I can’t see any obvious way up for Patel. He’s definitely attractive, in a charmingly unconventional sort of way, but since he’s not one of those who will continue to demand my attention by the sheer force 0f star power, I’m a little unsure of his future on the SMA. For Carter and DiCaprio, these kinds of ups and downs are common, and probably no threat to their overall survival. Revolutionary Road‘s European DVD release next month could help lift Leo, while Carter will simply have to accept that there will always be an internal battle in my brain over how sexy he really is. Or, to put it more bluntly: How much of a jerk can you be and still be counted among the beautiful people? My guess is, my instincts will continue to win out, but that I’ll still move him around on the list, if only to make myself feel better about it.

#41-50: As you can see, Michael Pitt is actually the only one on the rise here, and that’s mainly because I recently wrote a Norwegian version of my Young Leonardos, and needed some visual assistance to motivate myself. That said, we know from experience that several of those who seem to be slipping now will probably bounce back somewhat next month. Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Levitt could easily benefit from my plan to rewatch Mysterious Skin (for something like the eight time) in the purpose of writing about it, and the latter also has a rather promising rom-com musical (!), 500 Days of Summer, set for a summer release. That said, there’s not getting around that the main tencency of this tier is a downward slide. I guess Chace Crawford’s slight resemblance to Zac Efron should help him, but still there’s something about his amazing well-sculptured dullness that keeps me from embracing him. Ryan Phillippe will never have that problem, but that makes his fall this month harder to explain. For Daniel Radcliffe, his upcoming Harry Potter movie should help reignite my fading interest in the blessedly gay-friendly, while Gareth Bale, like every other footballer on the list, could face a challenge couple of months now that the Premiership season is drawing to a close.

  1. Emile Hirsch (1)
  2. Zac Efron (2)
  3. Hunter Parrish (4)
  4. Jesse McCartney (3)
  5. David Gallagher (8)
  6. Nicholas Hoult (6)
  7. Chris Egan (11)
  8. Mitch Hewer (5)
  9. Logan Lerman (10)
  10. Tyler Hoechlin (13)
  11. Ryan Sheckler (9)
  12. Gaspard Ulliel (7)
  13. Zac Hanson (19)
  14. Luke Pasqualino (new)
  15. Matt Prokop (22)
  16. Raviv Ullman (14)
  17. Charlie Hunnam (12)
  18. Jay Brannan (RE)
  19. Alex Pettyfer (15)
  20. Ryan Donowho (19)
  21. Kevin Zegers (16)
  22. Jesse Eisenberg (17)
  23. Jonathan Taylor Thomas (25)
  24. Jamie Bell (20)
  25. Ed Speleers (21)
  26. William Moseley (31)
  27. Mitch Firth (30)
  28. Shad Moss (25)
  29. Adam Brody (29)
  30. Sean Faris (24)
  31. Cristiano Ronaldo (23)
  32. Aaron Carter (28)
  33. Dev Patel (27)
  34. Taylor Hanson (35)
  35. Jeremy Sumpter (RE)
  36. Leonardo DiCaprio (33)
  37. Chris Lowell (RE)
  38. Fernando Torres (34)
  39. Rafael Nadal (36)
  40. Andrew Carroll (47)
  41. Joe Jonas (41)
  42. Ryan Phillippe (37)
  43. Chace Crawford (40)
  44. Daniel Radcliffe (39)
  45. Rafi Gavron (32)
  46. Michael Pitt (50)
  47. Cody Linley (42)
  48. Brady Corbet (45)
  49. Gareth Bale (38)
  50. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (50)
Posted in Entertainment, gay | Tagged | 14 Comments

On Jay Brannan And Escaping ‘Gay-By-Association’

Posted on May 10, 2009 by queerlefty

My thanks to Bryan for inspiring me to write this piece.

While trying to write about the music of singer/songwriter/actor Jay Brannan, I realized that it would be harder than I thought. Not because I was unsure about what I actually think of it, or because his music is too complicated to be discussed in writing. Rather, I found that it was so new to me to listen to someone who writes and sings from a distinctly gay viewpoint that I wasn’t sure I would be able to frame it correctly. Apart from Rufus Wainwright, our culture has had no place for gay-themed pop music, and thus I also feel the general vocabulary of pop criticism wanting. One of the main reasons for this is the gay-by-association paradigm.

We’re talking about the knee-jerk reaction to every musical expression of camp. It doesn’t matter if the artist in question is gay or not. If their music is, or could be expected to be, embraced by gay people, be it for musical (dance music, synth pop), visual (cute guys, outrageous costumes, generally colorful appearance), cultural (the gay association with musical theater, showtunes) or some combination of all three reasons, it will immediately be perceived in a certain way by pop critics. By making their reception essential to the music itself,  sly Madonna electronica, Savage Garden’s synth pop and the boyish excesses of emo and postpunk, could all be framed as part of the same musical landscape. The music by association becomes gay, more than good or bad.

I’m simplifying slightly here, of course. I don’t mean to argue that music is never made with one eye on how it will play with certain audiences, or that it’s necessarily a bad thing that the gay community – whatever that is – has embraced certain artists as symbols of what it means to be gay. The gay embrace have a certain democratic potential, in the sense that it has made it more acceptable to like some kinds of music, like boybands or glam rock or its off-shoots. I like much of both, and I think it’s a good thing. Still, once a band or an artist runs victim of gay (or, perhaps better, camp-)-by-association, it gets much harder to discuss their quality, at least as compared with artists that are not considered GBA. Again emphasizing that I have nothing against gay fandom, my only point is that if, say, Backstreet Boys, a group with a large and fairly loyal gay following were to release an album that would have been considered good enough to gain widespread critical praise if it had been made by somebody else, I’m not sure it would have been getting it. My argument then is that part of the reason would be BSB’s implicit association with not particularly prestigious camp pop music. I’m not saying that the previous campness of the group would itself disqualify it, or that pop critics are consciously homophobic in doing this, but it would likely run the risk of being written off as a surprisingly good record from a group previously courting tweens and gay audiences, or something like that. More than anything, it would be considered good compared with their earlier work, and with similar groups, more than being assessed on its own terms.

It could be argued that is a somewhat overstated issue, or at least that GBA is only a small part of it. After all, like we discussed with respect to the critical reception of Leonardo DiCaprio recently, how do we know what critical skepticism is attributable to GBA and what is simply snobbery on the reviewer’s part? To hail a Backstreet Boys album will never be uncontroversial, and it could be that some reviewers would hold back on their praise, for fear of losing their good standing with other Guardians Of Good Taste. Still, I would say that this does not entirely take away the problematic aspects of GBA.

After this laughably verbose ouverture then, we’ve finally arrived at the point of this post. One thing is that GBA has a tendency to frame certain pop acts in ways that tend to block a reasonably independent assessment of their quality. Another, and in this instance more important matter, is whether that same pop criticism vocabulary is adequate when writing about an artist that’s not only GBA, but who makes his gayness an integral part of his pop act? I’m not out on making definitive statements on this, but my own thinking when listening to, and deeply enjoying, Jay Brannan’s debut album Goddamned (2008) suggests the answer is no.

The challenge that Brannan poses, is that while our point in criticizing the more or less uncritical application of GBA to artists who are not themselves gay, or to gay artists whose music does not make gayness a part of their appeal, this time we’ll have to handle music that has an (at least at times) distinct gay angle. We immediately run the risk of overemphasizing that very angle, and thus ending up making it more important to the music than it really is supposed to be, or even worse, to make it more important than the music itself. This again takes us back to a conflict we’ve discussed previously with regard to film: A political ‘reading’ of the material could prove interesting, but at the same time we risk reducing the material (here, the music) to something emotionless and technical. We should, as far as we can, avoid dragging politics into the musical arena, and particularly when it’s not intended that way by its creator. Also, we should honor that music and literature are two distinctively different art forms, and while lyrics are an essential part of the the musical experience, it can never be the whole experience.

That said, I cannot help but feeling that it’s kind of refreshing to hear Brannan’s dry gay humor sprinkled over the mostly sparse musical arrangements of his first long-player. Sure, Rufus Wainwright songs at times can be both gay-themed and funny, but his showtunesy style (which I like very much, I hasten to add) place him closer to GBA than Brannan’s stripped-down cynicism will ever be. With the same ability to come up with quoteable lines and create melodies that add a certain cheerfulness to even the most depressing lyric, often to comedic effect, Brannan reminds me ever so slightly of Ben Folds. Let’s take At First Sight as an example. Here, Brannan accompanied by a guitar and a playful piano, sings: ‘You liked the guy on your iPod not the guy in your bed/after the fan mail came anthrax/now you wish I were dead‘. The contrast between the music and the lyrics make it a very, very funny line, and with the feel of a great pop song. And Brannan is really good at those short aphorisms that stick in your head either because they’re funny or because they simply ring true, reminding you that you will never be quite as smart of funny as he is; ‘Why don’t the Gideons leave condoms in the drawer?/Bibles don’t save many people anymore’; ‘If this is my destiny, then why am I so bored?’; ‘I’ve got my laptop for pleasure/and my guitar for pain‘; ‘he tries hard to songwrite his way out of bed‘, the list could go on forever. With moments like these, I’ll forgive him for sometimes crossing the fine line between pointed misanthropy and just plain whining.

This is an important point. Returning to the issue of framing his music as gay, I’m starting to believe that this is more important to me than it would have been to a straight listener. Under the spell of heteronormativity we are all supposed to assume that any love song is by default about heterosexuals, but I might value the breaking of that rule in a different way than a straight guy would, both when it comes to the lyrics and the songs themselves. I’m not going to say that my interpretation is necessarily better, or that straight people cannot love Jay Brannan (-‘s music) as much as I do. Only that I think it’s really great to finally see an artist that’s self-consciously free of the constraints of gay-by-association, for the simple reason that he is, acts, and sings like, you know, an actual gay.er as it sounded in his as in his he

Posted in gay, music | Tagged | 19 Comments

Early Gay Crushes: Chris Egan

Posted on May 6, 2009 by queerlefty

First, if you don’t immediately recognize the name Chris Egan, I won’t hold that against you. Sure, close readers of this blog would know that he has been a Top Twenty staple on the Sexiest Males Alive list, and maybe even remember him from his brief cameo in this post about Eragon’s Ed Speleers a year ago. Generally, though, while he has landed credits in a couple of short-lived American television shows (in 2007 it was Fox’s Vanished, and this spring he has been seen in NBC’ dud Kings, alongside former Deadwood star Ian McShane), he is still best known for his role as the initially troubled heartthrob Nick Smith on the Australian soap Home and Away. This alone may prove the point that although American pop culture is usually assumed to hold something close to global hegemony, we are really talking about the absolute triumph of Anglo-American culture. Australia still holds deep formal and informal ties to Britain, and th guysis influence seems to have spilled over into the scheduling of Norwegian television networks.

This, then, is the reason why Home and Away may be a more common reference in Europe than it is in the U.S., but it’s not meant to underestimate the cultural influence the show has had on me personally. Singling out one actor for an EGA post on Home and Away would do grave injustice to that very long line of hot people that inhabited the fictional town of Summer Bay over the years I followed the show most closely (for some largely undefinable reason, I’m no longer following it regularly), so in this instance Chris Egan is more like a symbol of something much broader than himself. Apart from being the H&A guy I had the longest and most passionate crush on – I suppose I still do, in a way – he is chosen here because his post-H&A credentials are at least remotely impressive. He is the closest thing to a breakout star the show has ever come, not counting Ryan Kwanten, who went from playing Vinnie Patterson on H&A in the early 2000’s to the role of surfing manboy Jay in WB’s Summerland and currently HBO’s True Blood.

But Home & Away had, to borrow an Australian phrase, brought heaps of both guilt and pleasure long before the blond boy wonder Egan entered the Bay. I didn’t make too much of the kind-of-cute Zac Drayson, but almost immediately after I started watching the show at age 15, I made a mental note-to-self that young Ryan Clark was reason enough to keep tuning in. My gratitude toward him actually still is so great it secured him a spot on the SMA not that many months ago. And like I said when I wrote about the paradoxical hotness of the supposedly desexualized and family-oriented 7th Heaven a while ago; when you’ve struggled to find a more or less coherent and defensible reason for watching show, you eventually come to appreciate even the less-correct reasons for your interest. In Home & Away there were several over the years, from Drayson, Clarke and Daniel Collopy, to more fleetings acquaintances like Brett Hicks-Maitland, Steven Rooke and Sam Atwell.

If Ryan Clarke’s presence was important for getting me sold on the show to begin with, that interest was further consolidated when Cameron Welsh – later a director on the show – hit Norwegian television screens as Mitch McColl, circa 2001. When I’ve talked to my brother about him and other hallmark H&A hunks in retrospect, I’ve realized that we were both secretly drooling over this guy. We of course had more than enough with coming up with a rationale for how we were feeling privarely to ever admit anything of that sort at the time, but perhaps sensing that our common interest in the show ran a little deeper (a somewhat odd choice of words, considering it was, however secretly passionate, essentially shallow) than we dared to admit, we silently agreed never question our common interesting in an Australian soap.

By this time, at the age of 15 or 16, I was more than old enough to read all of this as clear signals of homosexual tendencies, had I only dared to. For some reason, though, and perhaps as a coping strategy, I insisted that there was no correlation between the fact that I had my first serious couple of gay crushes in school about that time, and the visual satisfaction I so eagerly took away from H&A every afternoon. But whether I accepted it or not, my list of H&A crushes just kept getting longer. The beautiful Beau Brady was a welcome addition, and when Chris Egan eventually teamed up with young Mitch Firth, playing the shyly sexy Seb Miller, it was almost too much. Egan may have been the more obvious heartthrob material of the two, but Firth, who just like Egan has been a regular on the SMA list, was a just as natural addition to my list of unconventional cuties. Also, it didn’t exactly hurt that the producers took every possible opportunity to make them stroll around shirtless. Over the course of their run on the show, which in Norway has always been several years behind the Australian schedule, I grew closer to the age of 20, but I still nurtured the homosexuality I still hadn’t brought myself to embrace personally, in the company of these two guys. When in a nostalgic mood, I still do, only without the shame and self-doubt.

Like I said, I have drifted away from H&A over the last couple of years, but that has very little to do with the guys still gracing the frames of the show. For someone with a relatively diverse taste in men, like me, it still has something to offer my every sensibility, from the tenderly adorable Rhys Wakefield and Geek Squad contender Jason Smith, to Mark Furze or Bob Morley. While it may sound cliched, bordering on cheap,  for a gayer to attribute part of his queer awakening to a soap opera (it feels almost like saying showtunes, or Madonna or David Beckham), it nevertheless is true. If I were looking for early signs of my homosexuality, my devotion to Home & Away in general, and Chris Egan in particular, would be a natural place to start. That I will be forever grateful for.

Posted in Entertainment, gay | Tagged | 16 Comments

In ‘Shortbus’, The Loneliness Of A Subsiding Orgasm

Posted on May 3, 2009 by queerlefty

Don’t you just hate the term sex comedy? One thing is that it comes with associations to several waves of mediocre teen movies (like Porky’s in the 1980’s, or American Pie in the 90’s and 00’s), another is that it’s usually just a cheap marketing trick meant to label something more daring or interesting than it really is (for instance, Emile Hirsch was the only even remotely sexy thing about Girl Next Door) . I often sense a slight condescension in many of these movies. Sure, I too am sometimes offended by how low the lowest common denominator can go, but more often I’m simply offended by how prudish these filmmakers assume their general audience to be. Every one of these films seem to get made in a vacuum, cutting themself off from thematically related films that have come before, and thus willfully oblivious to how the genre’s total body of work might have the contributed to changing the audience’s expectations and values over time. Not only does it ensure that the same cliches are trotted out over and over again; this palpable lack of self-confidence with regard to potential impact of an (admittedly loose) genre ensures the boundaries of the sex comedy are barely ever pushed. The main reason why the white heterosexual high school/college virgin comedy is now practically alone in the marketplace, seems to be because every new entry insists (ahistorically) on its own groundbreaking uniqueness.

Initially, this little rant about the sorry state of sex comedy was intended to render the whole genre useless, so as to assure that John Cameron Mitchell’s 2006  film Shortbus would not be labeled one. There are two problems with this though; the first being that the inclusion of Shortbus would signal the exact broadening of its ranks and sensibilities that I just advocated, and the other, more substantive problem being that Shortbus is not even necessarily a comedy. If I were – against film’s entire ethos – to try to box it in, I think I’d label it a feel-good queer drama. As the sex comedy subgenre has stood for quite some time now, associating Shortbus with it would risk drawing that film down.

Sex comedy or not, what’s most refreshing about Shortbus is how unabashedly sex-positive it is. All of the main characters have some sort of sexually oriented secret or challenge  in their lives, but their sexualities are never questioned or (implicitly) condemned, allowing them to be so much more than just sexual beings. Sure, the comedic potential of the subplot about the sex therapist who has never had an orgasm is not lost on Mitchell, but the emotional importance of her so desperately wanting to experience one, I suspect would have been outright ridiculed in a mainstream sex comedy. I would argue that in the mainstream sex comedy, we are first and foremost invited to laugh at the entire idea of sex(-uality) being important to (young) people, thus running the paradoxically counterproductive risk of making their sexual desires the only thing we know about them. I’m not saying there are not many things about young people’s oft-posited obsession with sex that have great comedic potential. What I’m instead trying to argue is that making us laugh at the thought of young sexuality itself is both dubious sexual politics, and also could be used as an excuse for screenwriters to not bother about creating some genuinely believable and relateable characters, instead assuming that the inherent edginess (oh no, not that!) of the topic itself will be enough to extract the necessary number of reluctant giggles from the audience.

Viewers more conservative than I might dispute my use of the term sex-positivism in at least two ways. First, they would probably point to the opening scene, in which we are introduced to the characters through how they have sex with themselves or each other, to argue that the movie is not so much sex-positive as it a self-conscious provocation. They would probably write it off as merely an attempt to shock the audience, something that would then disqualify it from being sex-positive, because sex is then used as an emotional vehicle by the filmmaker. Second, I would expect them to protest the term sex-positivism itself. Accepting the term (to many conservatives) would mean implicitly acknowledging that sexual frankness in film is not something that could or should always be avoided. Also, embracing sex-positivism at face value could be read as an endorsement of the diverse sexual practices depicted in the film, from extramarital experimentation, to orgies or (gasp!) gay sex.

But whether this a critique the conservative viewer would actually make or not, my point in stating her (somewhat plausible) case is this: Contrary to the conservative position, I would argue that the most refreshing thing about Shortbus‘ actually is its lack of cynicism. For instance, there is much more to the aforementioned opening scene than just the sex. Shortbus is unabashedly sex-positive in the sense that it takes a proudly non-judgmental position on how love or lust might manifest itself (be it between young and old, two or more people at once, people of the same sex etc.), but it’s definitely not blind to the loneliness inherent in using sex as a sort of escape. Once the orgasm subsides, both the domina Severin and gay couple Jamie and James suffer from an inability to express their true worries and feelings, leaving them with a numbing sense that sex is the most important thing they share. Here, in the least expected of all plot lines, Shortbus shows that it’s so much more than your average sex comedy.

This surprisingly subtle focus on breakdowns in communication (which some have read as an allegory over the anxiety caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks), make it all the more fitting that one of the most moving scenes comes when two implausible partners finally open up to each other. Hammering home the movie’s non-judgmental tone, the tenderly beautiful young gay Ceth (played, with effective restraint by the unbelievably good-looking singer/songwriter/actor Jay Brannan) talks to to an old man (played by Alan Mandell) who, it turns out, was once the mayor of New York, about his experience being a closeted gay political official at time when that was equal to career suicide. There is nothing bitter about the old man, but there is a great sense of sadness, as seen on Mandell’s exceptionally expressive face. I don’t know why, but to me, that scene captured what happens when there is an instant connection between two people just perfectly. There might not be love there, but still I did’t feel the least bit queasy when their little heart-to-heart ended in a kiss.

That said, this wouldn’t have been a John Cameron Mitchell project, if it weren’t also littered with campy humor. If he’s no cynic, at least he has a fine sense of that slightly uneasy giggle that most people use as a shield when confronted with sex on film. It’s precisely in such a moment that Jamie, in a particularly playful gay threesome scene leans over and asks Ceth: ‘This the first time someone sung the national anthem in your ass?‘. No matter how you spin it, that’s simply an absurdly funny line, and the audience I watched it with, laughed along with me. Likewise, not one to back off a chance to inject some over-the-top campness, the politics of the climactic scene near the film’s end, meant to symbolize liberation and a new beginning, is so deliciously, transparently naive that I can’t imagine that hadn’t been the intention all along.

What this means then, is that Shortbus practises what it preaches; genuine curiousity, sex-positivism and a shot at redemption. I wouldn’t be surprised if even those conservatives, so ashamed about having secretly enjoyed their sneak-peak at the wild side, could get in on the redemption thing.

Posted in movies | Tagged , | 4 Comments

What ‘The Dark Knight’ Could Mean For Ledger’s Legacy

Posted on April 30, 2009 by queerlefty

I’m not writing this piece because I want to diminish Heath Ledger enigmatic performance as Joker in The Dark Knight in any way. He brought a combination of cartoonish evilness and truly unpredictable darkness to Christopher Nolan’s wonderfully rich reboot of the traditional franchise, proving not only his own impressive range as an actor but also that it was obviously correct to restart it from scratch. His Academy Award was well-deserved, and there’s no doubt which of the two Jokers – Ledger’s or Jack Nicholson’s – will get the most attention when the history of the Hollywood blockbuster is written. While many superhero movies have enormous ambitions with regard to channeling the social and political anxieties of our day – see: Zack Snyder’s messy Watchmen – Ledger’s magnetic performance allowed Nolan to introduce moral dilemmas such as the use of torture and illegal wiretapping into a story that at the same time kept the pace and feel of a summer movie.

Still, my question is which Heath Ledger film historians and movie lovers will remember. Though his filmography spanned such diverse films as Monster’s Ball, 10 Things I Hate About You and The Patriot, it should be uncontroversial to say that The Dark Knight and Brokeback Mountain were his standouts. These two movies alone, along with the powerful mythology of the young Hollywood dead (think James Dean, or River Phoenix) should be enough to make his star shine through for years and years to come. But exactly how his legacy is viewed could depend on whether we will remember him first and foremost as the guy who did Joker in The Dark Knight or the guy who was Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. Depending on how powerful you consider Hollywood’s silent Council Of Guardians of Good Taste to be – be they critics, film historians or fellow film people – a case could be made that it would be best for Ledger’s long-term status if Brokeback won the right to define him.

Again, this has little to do with me thinking that it would be a bad thing in any way if Ledger was instead remembered for The Dark Knight. But whether you like it or not, genre movies, or blockbusters more broadly – The Dark Knight is both –  have never been a hit with those guarding good taste in Hollywood. This notion is based on nothing more than my personal sense of things, and I’m sure you could easily dig up a slew of examples to the contrary, but try to follow me halfway here: While I’m not saying that they’re equally good, it’s my definitive sense that since they both came out in the early nineties, psychological thriller (?) The Silence of the Lambs have had to fight very much harder to keep its recognition than (for example) the inspiring epic drama The Shawshank Redemption ever did. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easier for epics than genre movies. Titanic is pretty much the definition of an epic, complete with hugely impressive technical accomplishments and a fair amount of critical praise. But I nevertheless get the feeling that many influential people have, and have always had, problems fully embracing Titanic, both for its unambiguous romantic ambitions, and its extreme popularity. In the end, this of course comes down to a question of quality and taste, but I can’t help but suspect that the (relative) obscurity of (the great) There Will Be Blood made it easier for feinschmeckers to carry its water, since one could convincingly argue that it needed the recognition more than Titanic, a film that practically promoted itself, did. Provocatively speaking, the result could be that very popular films are faced with much tougher benchmarks for critical praise and inclusion in the canon of film history than films that doesn’t resonate with as broad an audience.

Staying with the Titanic example a little longer before returning to Heath Ledger, let me use Leonardo DiCaprio as an illustration of my theory. He was never nominated for an Oscar for Titanic, even though almost everyone agreed he made a fine performance. Instead, he had to struggle with a pretty-boy image that in many ways originated from the enormous popularity of that film. To this day, it’s my definitive impression that that image somehow frames his every performance, possibly making it harder for him to get recognized by critics, even though he has been nominated for an Academy Award for both The Aviator and Blood Diamond. You may disagree with me on exactly how much influence his Titanic past still holds over how he is perceived today, but my point is that if you want to rise to become a critical darling, you absolutely have to strike the right balance between popular acclaim (Titanic) and what we could imprecisely call arthouse credibility (these films don’t necessarily have to be small, but they should leave critics sure that they will not become huge hits. This is where I would place both The Aviator and Gangs of New York).

With respect to Heath Ledger, this distinction should suggest Brokeback‘s combination of epic ambition, controversy (the gay angle), and the way it challenged our perceptions of that essential American mythological figure, the cowboy, represents his best shot at getting canonized. From this perspective it could also be a plus that it was denied the Best Picture Oscar, courtesy of the long-since forgotten Crash, thus only furthering the ‘controversy’ narrative. If the slow march towards marriage rights just started in Iowa and Vermont, and soon expected to be extended to New York signals a broader trend, it could also be that Brokeback and Milk in the future will be attributed with making the gay issue less controversial in American cinema, thus playing up Brokeback‘s historical importance. On the other hand, if the threat from terrorism continues to be one of the defining conflict lines in political discourse in the coming years, the gloom of The Dark Knight could be considered every bit as relevant as the issues high-lighted in Brokeback.

Until now, I have gone to great lengths to emphasize that I mainly want to investigate how Ledger’s lasting legacy might change depending on which film is considering his hallmark achievement, and I’ve been careful not to pick a favorite between. I would of course have preferred if he were somehow acknowdledged for his whole body of work (there has to be a place somewhere for the irresistible charms of 10 Things), but if I had to choose, I’d go with Brokeback. It’s not just that I want to promote a milestone in gay cinema. Long term, I suspect both Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway will go on to make a great impact on this age in American cinema, which could by time, paradoxically, elevate the old-fashioned beauty of Brokeback into not only a portrait of America’s recent past, but also a snapshot of a new, golden Hollywood generation.

Posted in film | Tagged | 4 Comments

‘Beautiful People’, The Epitome of Fabulosity

Posted on April 26, 2009 by queerlefty

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that my answer to Tim Teeman’s nostalgia question (see below) was ‘yes’. The correct answer should have been ‘no’. The error has been corrected. Some minor language editing has been performed.

In his review of Jonathan Harvey’s (the man behind mid-90’s feelgood coming-out movie Beautiful Thing) British sitcom Beautiful People in The Times [of London], Tim Teeman asked whether it was still too early to feel nostalgic about 1997. It could be that you have to be of a certain young age to find reasons for nostalgia in a decade that most responsible adults would agree was not as uniformly peaceful and prosperous – witness the war in Rwanda and Kosovo for instance – as we’ve come to remember it in hindsight, and that slightly younger and less responsible people might not remember at all, because they were too busy exercising horizontal snobbery and otherwise keeping the ironical distance they read about in Douglas Coupland and Brett Easton Ellis novels. But my answer to Teeman’s question is  no, for reasons Beautiful People unabashedly touts.

My nostalgic sentiments, however, doesn’t only have to do with a knee-jerk sense of obligation to defend My Decade (and implicitly My Generation). It has just as much to do with my feeling that it’s time to dethrone the 1980’s. Time has come when nostalgic tales of being a youngster in the Reagan era must leave the stage to the Little Clintons and the Tony Blair Toddlers. A successful pushback against the misguided assumption that the nineties, bringing with it grunge rock, a unified Europe and American budget surpluses (!), should continue to sit quietly in the shadow of the eightie’s, represented by Reaganomics, synth pop music and Terms of Endearment, would help clear the way for all the deliciously camp nostalgia of Beautiful People. Not ready, you say? You better be. As Ani DiFranco once said: ‘Move over, Mr. Holiness/let the little people through’.

In Beautiful People, these little people are thirteen year olds Simon and Kyle (or Kylie, as he prefers to be called) the best friends we catch up with in ‘positively glumorous’ Reading in 1997, still years before they’ve grown into the ‘raging homosexualists’ one of their adored diva-teachers correctly assumes they’ll become.  Simon and Kylie seem acutely aware that they are different from their peers, but in a move that could be regarded as annoying by some but encouraging by others, Harvey decides to present this as an opportunity more than a life-altering challenge. Without ever feeling messagy or heavy-handed, Harvey wants to tell young people like Simon and Kylie that there is nothing wrong with them. The humor of the show comes from equal amounts of typically outrageous British sitcom characters (the doormat of a father, a part-time alcoholic loud-mouth mother, her blind and bitchy best friend (Simon: ‘1. Never wear nylon. 2. Never wear nylon bought by a blind person‘) and how we are invited to understand Simon’s actions and reactions as signs of something he’s still too young to fathom – that he’s gay. But what more than anything makes Beautiful People funny is how seamlessly it integrates references (Tamagotchi, anyone?) or events (Tony Blair’s election, Princess Diana’s death) we all know, and then turns them on their heads.

Take Victoria Beckham, for instance. Just when I thought I didn’t want to hear her name again for the rest of my life, Beautiful People takes us back to the heyday of Spice Girls and their vaguely anarchic Girl Power slogan. In a funny and somewhat moving twist, Simon takes up soccer because he hears that Posh is dating a footballer, and that determination saves him from getting beaten up in school for his other, less masculine traits. All the episodes are practically littered with such more or less subtle nods to its time, whether it’s people striking Leo’s ‘I’m the king of the world‘ pose from Titanic as a common romantic gesture, doing the Macarena in a line dance, dancing to Barbie Girl in the school’s talent show, taping (by VCR!) the newest Ally McBeal episode for their neighbors or the Chumbawamba, All Saints and Meredith Brooks tunes on the soundtrack. It’s all adding a little bit of flavor, eventually making it absolutely essential to the the genuinely 1997 experience Harvey wants to create.

While (re-)watching it, I was struck be a sense that this way exactly the kind of show I would have loved to watch when I was twelve or thirteen years old. I’m just now in the process of trying to reclaim some of the bands, films and phenomena that I denied any fondness for back then, for fear of the consequences. By never talking about homosexuality directly it avoids coming off as preachy, but its commitment to diversity and respect is nevertheless transparent enough to reach through. Attempting to speak to young people in this way, while at the same time giving nostalgic nods to older viewers could have been a disastrous overreach, but here it works. Sure, one could argue that Harvey’s decision to handle the gay question only indirectly would risk downplaying the challenges young effeminate guys like Simon face in school, or that his parents are understanding to the point of being annoyingly naive, but that seems to never have been Harvey’s ambition anyway.

What’s most impressive however, is the fact that the book this show is based upon, was actually set in the 1960’s. Without having read the book, I have to say Jonathan Harvey must have done an incredible job updating the entire framework for the nineties. To return to Tim Teeman’s generally positive review, there are plenty of reasons to be nostalgic about 1997, one being that back then, Britons could still muster untainted enthusiasm for Tony Blair’s vision of ‘Cool Britannia’. Beautiful People has convinced me that although one-time savior Blair himself soon got sidetracked as Bush’s poodle, the Britain he took to war was already a pretty cool place. That insight has me wondering whether in ten years time, we’ll be asking whether it’s too soon to feel nostalgic about that classic television show Beautiful People.

Posted in TV | Tagged | 20 Comments

Early Gay Crushes: Ethan Hawke

Posted on April 22, 2009 by queerlefty

He has always been there somewhere of course, but for some reason I had to see the totally Ethan Hawke-less The Empeor’s Club to get the guy back on my radar. The comparison might be obvious to the point of seeming almost lazy, but  in its portrayal of teacher/student dynamics, Michael Hoffman’s 2002 drama with Emile Hirsch has a thing or two in common with the film that introduced the world to Hawke, Peter Weir’s sentimentally inspirational Dead Poets Society. Most importantly in this particular instance, they both had young male leads who I fell for instantly.

But in our eagerness to find a plausible entrance into the world of Hawke, we nevertheless need to back up a little. Despite what the opening paragraph might seem to suggest, Dead Poets Society was by no means the film that made me fall for Hawke, although it did nothing to make me reconsider my crush. The honor of introduction instead went to Reality Bites, one of the very, very few Ben Stiller comedies I can still watch without instinctively wanting to kill myself. I watched it on television when I was about twelve or thirteen years old, and its romantic depictions of young adult life, coupled with a once fresh-seeming scruffy aesthetic proved absolutely irresistable to my young and impressionable mind. At the time, I would try to convince myself that the tingly feeling the movie left me with was courtesy of Winona Ryder, but of course the real cause was Ethan Hawke, taking his first trying steps toward mastering the young love earnestness of Before Sunset (1995).

Later, that very earnestness would ensure that my relationship with him transcended that of simply wanting to watch his movies. In 1999, at age fourteen, I read his debut novel The Hottest State, and was instantly blown away. This post has been in the making for about a year now, and when I re-read the book last year, planning to write something about its author, I was pleased to see that it hadn’t lost the unashamedly naked emotional drive that made me love it the first time around. The extra years may have made me a slightly more cynical reader, but in the greatest compliment I could think of, in a way it actually still made me want to be a little like its protagonist Vince, an actor, amateur poet and hopeless romantic. Back when I read it for the first time, not only did I feel that the book spoke directly to me. Even better, I felt like I was suddenly in on this exclusive secret, that Ethan Hawke, movie star, was also an accomplished writer. Also, it certainly didn’t hurt my reading experience that the novel’s cover was graced by a portrait of that same accomplished writer. It secured that my memories of reading it stayed with me long after I had turned the final page. (Partly because I wanted to protect my relatively favorable view of the book, I have yet to see Hawke’s own movie adaptation).

What I didn’t realize back then was that this was also to be the high point in my relationship with him, a culmination of what had been building for two years since I had gone to see Gattaca at least in part because I just wanted to see more of him. Our emotional bond wasn’t quite strong enough to survive the dreadful Training Day, and by the time he had redeemed himself with the excellent Before Sunset, my taste had simply changed. That said, my taste may actually have been broader back when I didn’t know that what I was feeling probably meant I was crushing on a guy. Today, my distaste for facial hair might have disqualified him straight out of the gate in Reality Bites. I’m glad I didn’t.

Posted in Entertainment, gay | Tagged | 6 Comments