Could The ‘Bully’ Controversy Help Avoid Future Movie Rating Debacles?

Posted on April 2, 2012 by queerlefty

It’s easy to say you hate censorship in any, or at least most, forms. I don’t think anyone, except the most strident social moralists would explicitly endorse systematic censorship, if only because it is so very hard to agree on what the standard of the common good is. I’m not trying to make a hierarchy and say that censorship of artistic expressions is in any way worse than censoring political speech (both forms are unacceptable), but what particularly enrages and by extension frightens me, is when censorship becomes arbitrary. Continue reading →

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“We were supposed to be heroes”

Posted on March 15, 2012 by queerlefty

A special thanks to Bryan, who has helped shape and sharpen my views on this movie.

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Initially, the plan was to write something on Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me on the occasion of its 25th anniversary last year. It’s nothing new that posts on this blog take a long time to materialize, but in the case of Stand By Me, it became increasingly hard to find the right words for it as the year progressed. I used the months between March and June to watch it something like six or seven times, and in the process I fell so unconditionally in love with it that I felt like I needed some time and distance from it in order to write about it. During that cooling off period, things happened that made me try to avoid any movie that might make me feel sad or nostalgic. As I shall explain later, Stand By Me does both. So, here we are, way into the movie’s 26th year, and maybe it is finally time to give the movie its due. (This essay contains major spoilers.) Continue reading →

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“Would I dick you?”

Posted on March 7, 2012 by queerlefty

I think I’ve always queered, understood as looking for some homosocial or homoerotic subtext to anything I’ve watched or listened to. Before I became aware of what gay meant, I looked for the strong male bonding among the boys I longed to be in the movies I saw. When it became clear to me what gay meant, I started looking for a gay subtext in anything I saw, and although I still didn’t connect that desire for any recognition of the existence of gayness with what it meant for me personally, I took pride in it everywhere I could find it. And finally, after I started self-identifying as gay, I started queering things in two ways. First, by noting the hetero-centric nature of almost everything I watched: Why was there never a gay character in these high school comedies or television shows? Continue reading →

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At The Heart Of ‘Talk to Her’

Posted on March 2, 2012 by queerlefty

Last week, I finally saw for myself what cinephiles all over the world have known for ten years already; that Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her is a true masterpiece. I’ve never been a huge fan of the more outre early Almodovar – to the extent that I’ve seen his movies from the eighties and nineties – mostly for their hyperactivity and perceived lack of warmth. The later Almodovar – in All About My Mother (1999), definitely, but never more so than in Talk to Her (2002) – makes up for this, with interest. Thankfully, the latter movie is also one of his most immediately accessible. I don’t say this because I detest a cinema that is idiosyncratic or challenging, but because it’s immediacy probably will have meant that more people have seen it. I should have done so years ago myself. Continue reading →

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Random Thoughts On The Oscars

Posted on February 24, 2012 by queerlefty

When I counted them up today, I realized I have actually seen something like 28 movies that are nominated for Oscars this coming Sunday. Sure, this includes a crappy movie like Transformers: Dark of the Moon (nominated for a couple of technical awards), and I’ve also counted Rio, even though it’s only nominated in the Best Original Song category. But I’m kind of a completist, so of course I’m not satisfied. There are movies on the list, even ones with several nods that I don’t think I would have wanted to see even if I could (think Albert Nobbs, up for both Best Actress, Supporting Actress and Best Best Make-Up), but what annoys me are the ones in central categories that I’ve been unable to see simply because they aren’t yet available in Norway. Continue reading →

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“I’m honoured to be in their dreams”

Posted on February 18, 2012 by queerlefty

I’ve returned time and again to praising Daniel Radcliffe for his seeming comfort with gay questions. It must be exhausting for a straight celebrity to have to dispel implied and explicit gay rumors over and over, but what really lifts the former Harry Potter star above the more defensively “straight and nothing against gays“ crowd, is that he has used his position to argue, forcefully and repeatedly for equal rights. Others might have feared that taking such a public stand on a controversial issue could not only alienate his fan base but also add fuel to those persistent gay rumors, but Radcliffe doesn’t seem to care about any of that. Continue reading →

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I Think I Came Out Early Online

Posted on February 4, 2012 by queerlefty

To some degree, there’s always been a certain internal inconsistency to the ramblings on this blog. On the one hand I have occasionally insisted that I would hate to live up to gay stereotypes, and even that I don’t want readers to believe that this is some sort of introspective effort on my part. I suppose that mission statement was starting to fade away as the blog’s subtitle changed to “Introspection masked as culture criticism“, and the Sexiest Males List and Early Gay Crushes definitely betrayed a willingness to engage with what kind of a gay I am, on both a shallow and a deeper level, or at least in a longer view. By now, when I even have a subcategory on the blog named The Gay I Am, I guess it’s time to discard any pretense that this is not first and foremost a forum for introspection. Continue reading →

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July 22, Six Months On

Posted on January 22, 2012 by queerlefty

I’ve been trying to write this for months now, and wanting to do so for even longer. But today – the sixth-month-anniversary of the horrific acts of July 22, 2011 – seemed like the right time. We all have our individual stories of what we did that dark day, and since I was not there but lost a great friend that day, my experiences pale in comparison to those of survivors and relatives of the people who were so brutally torn away from us. And still, the grief is always there, for ever and no matter our experiences. So what to say on a day like today? Continue reading →

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My Favorite Movies of 2011: Chasing Imperfection

Posted on January 21, 2012 by queerlefty

Was 2011 a good year for movies? For me, there are to ways to answer this question. The short answer is I don’t know yet. As always, the expected Oscar contenders mostly have not premiered in Norway yet, and assuming that at least some of them (Hugo, maybe, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or The Descendants) will be worth waiting for, the following list of favorite movies of 2011 should be considered little more than a working draft. The other side of that coin, however, is that 2011 gave me a more complete view of the glorious movie year that was 2010. If my 2011 list feels even more stale and safe than unusual it is probably due to the fact that it contains several great movies which premiered in the US a long time ago. It may also say something about a more meager harvest from the festival crop than in recent years. Continue reading →

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Anderson Cooper Saves CNN From Itself

Posted on January 8, 2012 by queerlefty

It’s been 2012 for a week already and this blog has roundup duties to take care of, but I just gott sneak this in before the Republican presidential freakshow exhibit moves on from New Hampshire and thus renders the results from Iowa even less significant: Is there a better reason to watch election night coverage than to see the elegant and sensible Anderson Cooper make fun of the inanity of his CNN colleagues’ so-called “analysis” (oh, the sanctimoniousness of self-described centrists!), and the network’s grating hangup on slick-looking but ultimately useless digital data-collection tools? Well, no. (Fortunately, Wolf Blitzer doesn’t invoke the phrase the best political team on television nearly as often as he did four years ago. Good on him, since the core of that team still is David Gergen, probably the dullest and most risk-averse pundit in the history of televised punditry.) Continue reading →

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