Going to the Movies

[mishalak]

I wonder when there will be the first movie with a gay lead who isn't doing a romance/coming out gay story. I bet the first one will be low budget as Hollywood isn't daring, they don't do cutting edge things. I think, much more than all the dramas focusing on trouble being gay, that we will have finally made it when this happens.

I'm thinking about this because they're talking about the first black action sort of film, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song on NPR. The one that opened to door for all the later black exploitation films like Shaft, allowed them to go mainstream.

In some ways gays have made it already, but not really. We're accepted by the Hollywood elite, but we've not really broken into the mainstream where the action star, the science hero, the sword carrying warrior can be a guy who is gay.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm talking about a movie that isn't telling the "gay life is so hard" story with another twist. My thought was just that we'll have "made it" when there is a movie that is mainly about telling the action story rather than being a drama about gay life with other elements added.

Comments

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

Was watching some Buffy episode on DVD with commentary turned on two nights ago. At one point two straight frat boys hassle Willow and Amy in the Bronze. Willow and Amy zap them into go-go dance cages, wearing nothing but gold lame tighties, forcing them to dance, dance, dance.

The writer said he initially wanted Willow to zap them into kissing each other enthusiastically. Josh Wheedon vetoed this, saying that he didn't want to give the impression that 1) you could change someone's sexual preference using magic, on a whim and 2) that boys enjoying kissing boys should not be viewed as "punishment" for being nasty to girls.

Just thought it was interesting.

But yeah, gays are now the media darlings but that's always a dangerous place to be.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I don't know about media darlings. We're just intersting to them because we sell stuff and we buy stuff. The media doesn't care about anything except getting the eyeballs. We're only going to be interesting as long as gay is still shocking or whatever to the mass public.

[rvrjoe775.livejournal.com]

It might not be the most gay-positive film, but I think The Talented Mr. Ripley qualifies. Brendan Fraser just signed on for Gay Secret Agent. Troy should have been that film but of course they wimped on that one. (He's my cousin...yeah really...why?)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I must admit that I had not thought of The Talented Mr. Ripley,
though it does sort of qualify for what I'm talking about. The thing that
would lead me to discount it a bit is not the negative portrayal, but the
fact that it dwells upon his homosexuality. Not totally, but it still has
one foot in the "Gay Life Is So Hard" genre of films. Also when did that
come out, 1999? It has been quite some time since then so I don't feel
totally unjustified in calling that a flash in the pan rather than a movie
that opened up the possibility of a gay leading character for others.

The initial reports I've heard about Gay Secret Agent is that beyond
gay or straight the script is terrible. Lame jokes and a plot stupid even
by screwball comedy standards. I'll be happy if these reports are wrong,
but I suspect that it will be the "proof" that Hollywood is looking for to
say, "See gay still doesn't sell to mainstream audiences." When of course
it badly written movies that don't sell. Plus just the premise sounds more
laughing at than laughing with.

So to clarify, I'm talking about is a movie where the point isn't that he's
gay (or she, a lesbian lead would totally qualify too), but that he's the
hero. So that like being black, Catholic, or whatever being gay is just a
detail about him to make him a more complete character.

[defconqueso.livejournal.com]

I'm usually not one to go for eye candy over a good story when spending $10 and watching 45 minutes of commercials in the theatre...

...But for Brendan Fraser, the internal struggle begins.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I takes a really, really good movie to get me into a first run theater these days. The last one I went to was Hellboy. I might go see the latest Harry Potter at some point. Maybe. I've heard but that Century Theaters does not have the TV comercials at least. But I have not checked yet in person.

It is being written by a bunch of Saturday Night Live people. It's going to be turn your brain off humor and I doubt they'll even have on on screen kiss. So control yourself.

[defconqueso.livejournal.com]

Forgive my testicular fortitude on the subject.

Given this new information, I reserve all enthusiasm, past and future, for a movie which is written neither by a solitary Wayans sibling, nor Harvard-dwelling dipwad.

What's your take on Fahrenheit 9/11?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

In my opinion Fahrenheit 9/11 is for people who are the Democrat equivalent of the Republicans who went out to get Clinton at any cost. Deluded true believers in the mold of the Limbaugh Dittoheads or people so partisan that they think any sort of torture of the truth is justified as long as they can get rid of "that man".

Moore isn't a documentary maker; he's a freelance propaganda minister, just the same as all those idiots on the right. He freely uses every trick there is to "let people draw their own conclusions" without actually saying things he cannot prove. This is exactly the same sort of bull that the Bush Administration pulled to convince people that Sadam had something to do with 9/11 without outright saying something that isn't true.

What, me opinionated?

[defconqueso.livejournal.com]

*gasp!* *grin*

It's worth seeing, I think, whatever your leanings. At times it gets hokey, other times blatantly manipulative. There is good footage, some Bush clips that I couldn't believe, minimal (thankfully) but awesome material about the 2000 election, and some *unsettling* coverage of Iraq. It gives perspective, but doesn't really put enough substance in (I found myself at times aching for more to back up his narration).

I didn't need a documentary to tell me that Bush is a rich-bitch idiot, robbing us blind and sanctioning mass murder overseas (along with Enron ties, etc etc, I won't repeat it here), but it's nice that there's something, far-reaching, that stands to indict him instead of kiss his ass.

Moore, without a doubt, knows how to be persuasive and heavy-handed.

You've got the dittohead thing spot on. I think the Left at large feels so threatened by the current political climate that "playing dirty" seems like the only option. As they say, he's an extremist, but he's our extremist!

It's almost impossible to be heard in a reasonable speaking voice, because someone will come along and scream in your face in disagreement. Before you know it, the boom mic is hanging directly over that person's face, and you look like a fool trying to get a word in edgewise. It's about who can scream the loudest to get their point across.

It's stooping "to their level", but in a true show of humanity, the Anti-Bush crowd will nonchalantly overlook that, because it's "for our cause".

Desperation? Yes.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

The version of Alexander the Great starring Colin Farrell isn't whitewashing his bisexuality, from the reports I've heard. And the Cole Porter biopic coming out doesn't subtract his same-sex relationships from his life history, either. Now, I'll grant, the latter film is a bit of a romance, but he and his wife were very passionate about each other. Kind of hard to avoid.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I had heard that they were going full on with Alexander and Cassander, but
we don't know what will actually reach the screen and what will be left on
the cutting room floor until it gets to the theaters. (Yeah I know I write
things like that a lot, but I'm often right. Anyone else remember all the
talk that they'd have a gay character on Next Gen? DS9? Voyager? All the
time there is the excited talk that this will finally be it, but it does not
ultimately materialize.)

[bcp.livejournal.com]

The closest they ever got in Trek was species with no sex, a third sex, could change sex, or that just confused our notions of sex, like the Trills... Paramount were wise enough not to risk their multibillion-dollar franchise on the possibility that people wouldn't boycott the show in a media storm...

Then again, there is John de Lance's portrayal of Q :D

Still, Enterprise I think is the first Trek to actually feature sex and intimacy on camera?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That was the problem with Trek, it became a franchise and so lost all the edginess of the first one. I mean black woman and a white man kissing? Heck black woman on the bridge?

[bcp.livejournal.com]

Or naked green Orion slave kittens just on camera?

I'll always remember an Oprah interview with Whoopi Goldburg, where Goldburg recounted sitting watching TV as a little kid and getting up and going "Mommy mommy there's a black lady on the Enterprise and she's not cleaning" or something.

interesting

[branfionn.livejournal.com]

i have a suggestion. i see some california actors (whom i greatly enjoy and who rarely get mainstream movie offers - some, not all, there are big names also...) doing this. form a gay pruduction company and write your own scripts. make your own movies.

have thousands of gay characters. baffle them with the variety.

gay people are just people like anyone else. good, bad, indifferent and all the mistures imaginable.

i'd love to see "clue" where everyone was gay! what a hoot that would be!

or casablanca with same-sex couples...

or king kong clutching some nubile young stud...

my imagination knows no bounds...

hehe

lucky me


p.s. what i am imaging is awesome "emsemble" pieces...

and i cry whenever i think of michael jeter. man!!! he played some awesome characters! my absolute favorite was set here in cleveland, not long before he died of aids. him - standing in the first and last scene makes me cry with sheer enjoyment and deep missing him... whatta guy!

another natural for gay folk could be animation with fascinating voices and characters.

queer eye for the straight guy almost made gay mainstream - not quite bot a lot of straight people really, really liked that show...

i do go on...sorry...again...

don't bring up any more interesting points, ok?

Re: interesting

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I think I need to edit my post to make it more clear that I'm talking about an ordinary gay guy in a lead. Where the point of the movie isn't that he's gay, but to be entertaining.

Doing a remake of some other movie with gay characters would miss the whole point. It would be like remaking Superman just to put a black man in the lead.

Re: interesting

[bcp.livejournal.com]

To rephrase things even more clearly: an action film where the lead just happens, by coincidence, to be gay/lesbian. (So after Vin Diesel and Collin Farrell defuse the nuclear bomb the terrorist have planted in A Major US City, they turn and snog each other for a few minutes? Perhaps we shouldn't be encouraging Hollywood down this path after all...)

Re: interesting

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Huh? Coincidence? I cannot parse that sentence.

I'm just saying that if there are ever going to be gay character in a leading position he's going to have to be a person who fits that sort of position. Hetros are not going to go see a 90 minutes movie where 60 minutes of it is whining about how tough gay life is. Heck, I probably wouldn't either. I certainly don't go to the art house films where the percentages are the same or worse.

I'm saying that it would be nice to have a gay character that doesn't beat us over the head every few minutes with, "Hey I'm gay. Really, really, gay. Still gay." He's out there doing the superhero or whatever things, and flirting with they guys. Or as you say with the big payoff of him kissing the romantic interest at the end. Aside from James Bond there aren't really many action leads that are snogging ever five minutes.

Re: interesting

[bcp.livejournal.com]

Oh well, I guess I wasn't explaining it clearly. But I understand what you mean Mish.. :)

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Do you mean a gay lead character, or an openly gay lead actor?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Actually either one would be monumental for an action type film.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Do you know, I was about to type, "You mean like an Alexander the Great movie...?", when I remembered. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346491/) If Luhrmann had gotten his version made, I'd be guardedly optimistic- but given the shrieking caricture of Joe Pesci's character in JFK, I'm rather hoping Stone gives the anything-but-straight as an arrow thing a miss.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I had heard that Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Cassander would still be Alexander's lover. But I'm waiting to see the movie before I get excited. Trust but veryify and all that.

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree with you, but how did you want them to work it in? I think that at least part of the reason we don't see more openly gay figures in movies is that the screenwriters feel like they have to "contrive" those relationships in a way that they don't have to for straight ones.

Everyone's willing to accept and enjoy James Bond's fling(s) with his "girls," but do you really think that there wouldn't be protests (from several different camps) if he were having them with cabana boys instead?

Plus, a lot of actors might have problems portraying "normal" gay characters, for whatever reasons.

Personally, I'd rather see less of anyone's love life in movies that aren't romances, but that's just me, and I agree with you that if it's going to be there, we should see more than just the one kind. (I think "Pearl Harbour" would have worked wonderfully as a polyamory movie.)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Sure there would be protests, that's why I say that it will have to come from outside Hollywood since they avoid controversy until it proves to be a money maker. The minute anyone can show a big enough profit Hollywood will be casting for gay charcters left and right.

The movie I mentioned in my post was made for $1 million and made over $15 million. Hollywood's reaction was to revamp a movie in the works to have a black lead, it came to be called Shaft.

I'm saying that though we get art films and deeply important films we won't have really "made it" until we break into the mainstream. For all the right's talk of Hollywood being in our corner, they're not really. Not until we stop being the subjects of art house films that make about the same amount of money and back up characters everywhere else.

[defconqueso.livejournal.com]

All in all, we haven't really been validated in society until Hollywood co-opts us?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

We've already been co-opted by Hollywood. They use us all the time as jokes, as a way to attract controversy when it serves their purpose, and to get a built in audience whenever they do a "daring" art house type film.

It will be a sign that we've truly made it into the mainstream when a gay character can lead in a big Hollywood action or adventure type movie. Until then we're fooling ourselves if we think that Hollywood is on "our side".

[defconqueso.livejournal.com]

Understood.

One thing that's always bothered me, regardless, is how we ache to be recognized by advertisers and mainstream media - two of the most loathsome institutions we've got. I guess I don't always remember that we tend to stay connected as a nation through Los Angeles (as scary a thought as that is to me).

There'll always be a place in my heart for Revenge of the Nerds' Lamar. He was the gayest character ever. Wasn't a mean bone in his body either.