BuggBlog

Movie magic

Over at Metro Weekly this week, we're all about the movies. Namely, the 25 Gay Movies Everyone Should See. This was not a particularly easy list to come up with, given that our initial, off-the-top-of-the-head list was about a hundred films, many worthy (some not). Compromises, of course, had to be made. For myself, if I had to pick just three of the final 25, based on pure artistic achievement, I'd go with Brokeback Mountain, Mysterious Skin and Walk on Water -- a trio that probably says as much about my own sensibilities as it does about gay cinema.

Of course, Brokeback remains the gay film for much of America -- Milk is certainly a worthy addition to the canon, but it hasn't grabbed the national consciousness in the way Ang Lee's film did. But while I love Brokeback Mountain as a film, I've generally been puzzled by the overall reaction of gay men toward the film, in particular the desire to claim the film as some sort of first major Hollywood gay romance on screen. It's actually one of the least romantic films I've ever seen.

Yes, the bucolic section where Ennis and Jack meet and fall in love over the course of a summer is rich with innocence and romance. But the film is really about how the closet will always prevent any true romance or relationship -- in fact, the film is all about how the closet destroys everything it touches. The key moment in the film, for me, is when Ennis' wife, Alma, explodes with her knowledge of the truth of her failed marriage -- it's simply heartbreaking to understand how much she tried to have and how much she lost, just the same as Ennis. The closet took a price from everyone in Brokeback, not just the cowboys. That makes for a truly depressing and wrenching film.

But, hey, people can take what they want from a movie.

What I'm glad of is the basic change we've seen in how gays are portrayed in film. The biggest argument I engaged in on the 25 Gay Movies list was the duo of films by William Friedkin, The Boys in the Band and Cruising -- two films that I hate with a burning passion. The self-hatred that drips from every frame of Boys makes me cringe. I know that a lot gay men of a generation of two before me adored the film, and the bitchy, lacerating repartee with which its parade of stereotypes battles each other. If I had been as deprived of gay images in all media as those generations were, perhaps I'd have a different perspective -- I'm sure some of the films I adore now will be reevaluated as oppressive trash by some future gay generation. But that doesn't lessen the horrible messages at the core of Boys in the Band, and I hold no brief for the argument that it should retain its prominence because it's a window on history.

Birth of a Nation can tell you a lot about the horrible history African-Americans have had to go through in this country, but I wouldn't put it on a list of must-see films for young black kids.

As for Cruising, it pretty explicitly argues that hanging out with S&M gays can make you a serial killer, so I'm not so hip to it, either. Strangely enough, I think Stephen King nailed the aesthetic of the film years ago in Danse Macabre: "I wasn't able to have any fun with Friedkin's more recent film, Cruising, although it fascinated me because I suspect it indicates the wave of the future for the bad film which has a big budget; it has a sparkly look that is still somehow cheesy—it's like a dead rat in a Lucite block."

But, I'm not upset that they made our list -- even if, in the imaginary world ruled by the whims of Sean Bugg, they would have been cut -- because they illustrate the point that movies are to be savored and and promoted and criticized and loved and hated, sometimes all at once. I know you have some films you think should be on the list -- or some you think should be deleted. We have an open thread up at our web site, so stop by and tell us what you think.

I got the movies in me

As I was settling down a few days ago to begin writing my reviews of some of the films from this year's Reel Affirmations GLBT film festival, I suddenly did the math: If Reel Affirmations is celebrating 18 years of showing queer cinema and I have been reviewing those films for Metro Weekly from Reel Affirmations 4 onward, then I have reviewed 15 years worth of gay films.

More math: Every year, I review a ballpark average of 8 to 12 films, so even compensating for a lower annual number in the earlier years of the festival, it probably works out to about 10 film reviews a year for a rough total of 150 reviews. Take it further and count each short film I've thumbed up or down, and I could probably double that. 

Like the thousands of books I've read and TV shows I've watched, most of these fade from memory, only to be recalled (if ever) at odd moments where a snippet of dialog or an arresting image snaps into memory due to some trigger. A handful stay more prominently -- I still harbor a crush on "Crush," one of the most deft shorts I've ever reviewed. 

My reviews for this year are up at Metro Weekly, along with reviews from all of our writers of every program at the festival. The two standouts for me are Half-Life and Parting Glances. The latter had an edge up with me, given that it had such a huge impact on me as a young closeted gay teen in the '80s, a time when role models were few and far between. And Half-Life is, simply put, an amazing and engrossing experience. Do yourself a favor and get out to see both films -- and as many others as you can. It's a particularly strong year for Reel Affirmations, with quality films abounding.

The chair up there

I wanted to do something romantic with Cavin on Sunday afternoon, given that we had made such progress cleaning the house the day before. So I asked him to go out with me to shop for a new office chair.

Such is the life of gay, married* suburbia.

Although it did have it's romantic moments -- I suppose that's what you would call Cavin spinning me like office-supply dervish in a faux-leather executive chair -- the trip ended up more of an odyssey. To start, I trekked over to the local Office Depot, where I spent about 40 minutes or so carefully perusing the selection, comparing prices and determining exactly how comfortable my ass would be if ensconced in one for hours on end. I ultimately chose one of the most expensive models that, while ugly as a deformed pig, offered some seriously superior comfort. The plastic-envelope that contained the price tag bristled with tickets to be taken to the register for purchase. Satisfied, I snatched one and headed to the front.

Where after some confusing back-and-forth on the store radio, the cashier informed me that the chair I desired was not in stock. And how was I, a simple-minded customer, supposed to determine that the chair was not in stock when it was essentially plastered with "buy this chair!" tickets?

"Um, we don't have that chair in stock."

Okey dokey. Time to go to Staples, where I found a near perfect replica of the brown leather Jean Luc Picard chair that I used at the magazine office. Was it in stock? Of course not.

So, off to a different Staples where the Picard chairs were in stock. At least, that's what the computer said. How could that be wrong? Was the chair in stock? The nice Staples employee -- I mean nice in the non-ironic sense, given that this guy was the friendliest person I'd met all day, Cavin included -- couldn't find the boxed chair in the store room.

"What about the four of them sitting up front?" I asked about the floor models I'd seen when entering the store.

"Oh, those are for sale pre-assembled."

Finally, a breakthrough. Plus a challenge: Getting a pre-assembled, high-back office chair into the back seat of a 3-Series BMW is akin to one of those challenges on The Amazing Race that often augur the end of a relationship. But we persevered, and now I sit in my home office, occasionally spinning around and declaring "Make it so!"

I may even get some work done soon.

*Cavin and I aren't married in the legal sense, as we live in Virginia. However, we had our own Buddhist/agnostic ceremony with our families out here in Falls Church, and that's good enough for me to say I'm married. It's not like the Virginia police can send a SWAT team to break us up. Yet.

A man who made the world

I haven't been blogging much, in part because I've found myself swamped with actual paying work and in part because I felt I was getting too wrapped up in the ongoing campaign to be president of Pennsylvania.

But the news yesterday of the death of Arthur C. Clarke saddened me. As a pre-teen, science-fiction geek bookworm, I naturally read a lot of his stuff -- as an adult I didn't keep up, aside from the Rama series. But 2001, Rendezvous with Rama and short stories such as "The Nine Billion Names of God" left a huge impression on me. People who dismiss science fiction as mere genre are unfortunate in what they miss -- good science fiction, particularly the "hard" science fiction of Clarke and the writers he inspired, grows not only the imagination, but the sense of wonder and sense of reason.

It was just a few weeks ago that I introduced Cavin to the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. His verdict: "It's slow." True enough. But it contains indelible moments from our shared culture, the kind of things that most artists and writers only dream of creating.

To live 90 years and create a body of work that will likely live another 200, if not more -- that inspires a sense of wonder.

Right here!, right now?

So, between sudden bouts of allergies, the standard crushing deadlines and increasingly frantic attempts to procure an outdoor wedding tent on eBay, I'm totally behind the curve on the the here!TV hissy fit over not being included for consideration for GLAAD's annual media awards. Apparently, tons of people are shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that this large, corporately financed communications company that targets gay folks with such intellectually illuminating programs as Dante's Cove now finds itself bereft of opportunity at being recognized with a piece of attractively shaped acrylic.

Of course, this has been going on for years, long before the gay mediascape became a stomping ground for  the Leviathan known as Viacom. What dinners are to the Human Rights Campaign, awards ceremonies are to GLAAD. GLAAD raises money by hosting awards ceremonies in large, media-centric cities, handing out honors to television shows and movies that are brave and forward-thinking enough to talk about gay issues that the rest of the country moved beyond five years prior. Oh, fine, I'm exaggerating. Three years prior. Back in those long-ago days when the gay media world was made up of a lot of weekly and biweekly newspapers and magazines -- when Out was still a relatively new thing and "the Internet" still meant fighting to get in the queue for AOL's "dcm4m" chat room -- no one seemed to care much that GLAAD focused on recognizing Mr. Man instead of the community itself.

Fair enough. Just don't expect me to get exercised now on behalf of some suits who are surprised they won't be getting some dubious trophies for their corporate display shelves.

I kill a forest and behave totally selfishly

Although my Christmas shopping is woefully behind, that doesn't preclude some self-centered shopping. A Friday night stop at Barnes & Noble went fairly predictably, in so far as I bought yet more books to pile up around the house. This was particularly daunting pile, however. First off, I found the new 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. I've been trying to get friends, family or anyone else I know to read the David Foster Wallace opus for years now, to no success. I understand that a giant, footnoted novel can be intimidating. But I can't stress enough how much the effort pays off -- it's one of the funniest, saddest and most moving things I've ever read. So, somebody, anybody, in my circle of friends and family needs to read it and love it, so everyone won't just think I'm crazy for having read the cinderblock of a book three times already.

After grabbing that tome, I stumbled across a "new translation" of War and Peace, and given that I'm in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov, it seemed right to pick it up and continue my efforts to complete some of the giant Russian novels I should have read, but haven't. Up to now, my big Russian forays have been Anna Karenina and Gogol's Dead Souls. Nothing to sneeze at there, and I recall enjoying Gogol's novel for reasons other than that it was short. But that's not really enough to make me feel all smart and stuff, so War and Peace goes onto the nightstand.

Add in the new Cormac McCarthy and the Japanese novel Ring -- yeah, what the movie came from -- and it was a big spending night at the old B&N. Just FYI, if you get the copy of Infinite Jest from me for Christmas, know that I did spend a few minutes reading the new introduction by Dave Eggers. I hope it doesn't bother you that some of the pages are pre-read. I only ask, because I know it would me.

So, after contributing to the deforestation of the planet in the pursuit of Russian literature, on Saturday I finally found my mom's Christmas present. Along the way, I stopped at Best Buy "just to look." Ooo, there's the Final Fantasy XII guide -- maybe that'll get me past the dungeon I'm stuck in so I can finish the game and consign my Playstation 2 to the great closet of videogame systems past. See, there's a practical reason for it, so I have to get it. Then I spotted the wireless headset for my XBox 360, which would eliminate the last unsightly wire tangle associated with that console. Again, practicality.

Right below that was the new HD-DVD add-on for the XBox 360 and, well, I do have the big HDTV I invested in last year. And it's such a shame to have to watch standard definition DVDs when the option for eye-searing color and clarity is so readily and relatively cheaply available. I'd be wasting money not to get it. Right?

Right or wrong, I got it. Plus a couple movies. Best Buy frickin' owns me. Arrgh. The worst part? I still have to go out this week and finish my Christmas shopping, plus do a small something for the Le-Bugg  fourth anniversary tomorrow, Dec. 19. Flowers -- they'll just die when we leave for the holiday. Chocolates -- he doesn't like 'em. Something expensive -- he'll say it's a waste of money.

Ah, romance.

I said that?

Checking out the new advertisement for the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s in the print edition of Metro Weekly, I saw that my fairly positive review of the film had been quoted. So, what did I think of the film?

"Unrestrained joy!" says Metro Weekly, according to the ad.

Wow, was I that effusive? I had to go back and check my review -- turns out what I wrote was this:

"And that's the tragedy of the '70s. It's incredibly easy to get caught up in the unrestrained joy of people living their lives freely and openly for the first time, and believing there were no limits. It makes it all the harder to hear the stories of what happened when those limits were found."

I'm not complaining, particularly since I happened to like the film -- just in a completely different way than the ad implies. I just think it's kind of funny that my pointing out the tragic undercurrent of '70s celebrations ended up being the "go see this film" blurb.

Randomized

Everything's finally back up and running after Typepad crashed for a full frickin' day. Not that it helps all that much, as I'm just about to embark on a full-scale Christmas panic in which I will try to buy all gifts, bake all cookies, address all cards and finalize all travel plans over the course of this weekend, in between playing league tennis and having Cavin's nieces over for spaghetti and Disney movies. The cards are the easy part, I think -- it's the shopping I most dread. So much for getting ahead this year.

Anyway, given the schedule, all I can do is skim over a few things:

--Watched A History of Violence on Thursday night. I generally like Cronenberg films -- I even liked Existenz -- and although Violence was part of the apparent trend away from his earlier works, the clinical detachment with which he approaches his subjects still creeps me out. And I love that. One observation: William Hurt is totally morphing into Dennis Hopper, and I don't really mean that in a good way.

--This is my favorite lede thus far in a story about Brokeback Mountain. Generally, I stay away from any gay movie that gives off the vibe that I have to see it in order to be a socially responsible gay man, but it is an Ang Lee film, so in that case I have no choice. I'm scheduled for Monday -- here's hoping my high hopes aren't dashed.

--Speaking of Brokeback, out of all the stupid posts and comments I've seen about the movie, this one from Jeff Gannon has to be the stupidest. Then check out his dismissal of Ron Reagan Jr. as a "nancy boy" and "Twinkle-toes." Project much? Yes, this is the guy that one paper claims needs to heard by the gay and lesbian community.

--Microsoft finally makes a product that I actually want to own (as opposed to being forced to use by monopolistic ubiquity), and they can't make/ship/supply enough of them for me to buy one. Nice work, Microsoft! I'm so glad they managed to have all those units available for a failed Japanese launch. Slate has an interesting take as well on the economics of the Xbox 360. But academic theories be damned -- I just want to play some frickin' Project Gotham Racing 3, dammit.

Tongues untied, and then some

I'm having the feeling that I may need to review my taste in movies, given that in the past three weeks I've seen two film characters graphically cut out their own tongues. I'm talking Asian cinema here, so dismemberment and tongue slicing seem pretty par for the course. The lesser of the two hostile-to-tastebuds films is a Japanese manga-based flick from a few years back, Ichi the Killer. Didn't much care for it, although the blood-and-guts ultraviolence is pretty indicative of the influences that led to Tarantino's Kill Bill (which I loved -- both parts -- despite my general dislike of Tarantino's self-created persona). While I thought Ichi just dragged between occasional moments of depravity and hilarity -- and those moments are generally distinct from each other, against all likely intentions -- I'll give it this: Even with all the porn I've seen in my life, this was the first time I've seen a film where the title card rises out of a pool of fresh ejaculate. I'm a much bigger fan of director Takashi Miike's earlier dating/second-marriage horror film, Audition, which will justly creep you out.

Anyway, last night I finally had a chance to catch the Korean sensation Oldboy, which got some stellar reviews here in the U.S., including a big rave from Stephen Hunter at the Washington Post. Hunter makes a big deal of the violence, to the point of overplaying it. Yeah, it's not the high-flying wire-fu that's equally overplayed, but it's still not a particularly believable kind of violence, as rooted in realistic brutality as it may be. Watching Oh Dae-Su -- a Kafkaesque antihero who seeks vengeance for being imprisoned in a pseudo-hotel room with no human contact for 15 years for reasons unknown -- fight off a horde of bad guys in a hallway with a claw hammer requires about as much suspension of disbelief as your average Jet Li spin-kick.

The central question of the movie -- who kidnapped Dae-Su and why -- isn't something you can figure out by watching. You'll know when he knows -- and that doesn't make the whole thing any less fantastical, with a convoluted plot that crossed bloody Asian-style cinema vengeance with Hitchcockian psycho-sexual shenanigans (by way of dePalma). Sound like fun? It is, in a twisted way. But while a lot of scenes are powerful and/or disturbing -- a dream/memory sequence that spins into an Escher-esque pursuit, or Dae-Su munching on a live octopus -- everything becomes so absurdly operatic by the end that its difficult to take as seriously as it's obviously meant to be. That said, Min-sik Choi's performance is amazing, particularly when the extent of the plot become horribly clear.

Oh, yeah, and a tongue gets cut out, not to mention a hand and whole bunch of teeth.

But the best movie I saw over the weekend, and probably the best martial arts action flick I've seen in a long time, was Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, a no-wires flight that regains so much of the intensity that's been lost in the rush to the overly choreographed wire ballets that dominate so much action these days. Tony Jaa plays Ting, a young rural Thai who's charged by his village to travel to Bangkok and recover the head of the Buddha that was stolen from their temple. Skilled in the muay thai martial arts, he ends up fighting what seems to be every gangster and lowlife in the city. Jaa is amazing to watch, with a grace and flexibility that's jaw dropping.

The story itself is light yet uplifting -- although I was wondering to myself if I would have responded with such easy good feelings had it been a film about a young Christian man fighting to return a revered crucifix to his local parish or something. We'll just have to see if Mel Gibson gets around to making that one -- otherwise, I'll just have to keep an eye on my cultural biases. Not that I'm going to rush out and see Left Behind or anything. Anyway, back to my point, which is that if you have even a small liking for martial arts films, you should move Ong-Bak to the top of your Netflix queue. Great action, little blood, and not one tongue is loosed from a mouth. It feels strangely old-fashioned. But I love it anyway. If I gave out stars, it would get them all.