Ok, first off, I will be merciless in my banning if you get out of line in Talk Back, or hateful or intolerant... Tommy Terror here is coming in with a big dose of what is up in the air with the gay film scene. He's gay, and he's happy too. Tommy is politically incorrect and some may find him quite offensive, but... you know what? I have warned you. Leave now. Don't come complaining to me about it. Tommy also got a look at THE PHANTOM MENACE, through a rather... ummmm... compromising fashion, and he comments on it as well. And he loved it. So, be cool, be tolerant and get ready cause Tommy Terror is back with a full on run of info...
TOMMY TERROR's queer take on nine new gay films, oh yeah, and THE PHANTOM MENACE.
Hey there, Homo Sapiens!
I - I - I whored myself for Star Wars!!!! (hmmm, that could make a cool T-shirt - or maybe simplified as "STAR WARS WHORE" - plastered on my chest like some scandalous scarlet letter). And y'all think you're so devoted waiting in line, buying all those Jedi boy toys, scouring the web in an obsessive Force-fucking frenzy… Well, I'm such a desperate geek that I actually promised a blowjob as a joke to a big reviewer (BIG reviewer) if he could get me on the list for the press screening, and lo and be-ho'd he eagerly came through so to speak. Just how low would you go for a sneak peak AT HISTORY? I had to go down on the dude… and for what? What could really be worth all the lame shame, the gravity of depravity, the acidity of his flaccidity? THE PHANTOM MENACE is what, I woulda taken it up the butt from Jabba the Hutt (and I'm a pitcher, not a catcher). And you know what? THIS - MOVIE - IS - A - GLORIOUS - EXHILARATING - TRIUMPH!!!! - and well-worth sucking up all the negative press.
Butt first, here’s nine more fag or fag-friendly flicks for the hetero-apocalypse - another wave of gay that could make the sacrificed martyr cum twice. Release dates are always slippery, take 'em with a heaping handful of KY Jelly (KY? Because we like you!). So let's have a lookie-loo at what's on the gay agenda for spring:
HEAD ON - (August 13 Release in NY & LA)
The best of the new batch - this is a raw, gritty, well-acted film following Ari, a fucked-up Greek stud as he gets fucked and fucked up. Perhaps the best scenes are all familial - Greek culture has never seemed so completely, passionately, perfectly portrayed. Ari's controlling father is from the old-school and the abyss between their lifestyles is a simple catastrophe that's illuminated rather than exploited by director Ana Kokkinos. I couldn't believe afterwards that a woman directed this script about a sleazy gay guy's drug use and anonymous encounters and massive identity complex. If it sounds too dark and intimidating, it's not - there's little nudity and the drug use is just a symptomatic fact of life here, rather than glamorized coolness or a moral lesson. HEAD ON captures that crunch you feel when your very being clashes with your family's values.
TRICK - (July 23 Release)
The worst piece of spewed wretch - this is an amateurish, annoying gaysploitation flick that glibly pays lip-synch service to the worst fag film festival culture has to offer. (I din't like it.) Opening with terribly recorded, cheesy, affected piano bar music and sentimental shots of Manhattan at dawn with those tacky orange skies like a tourist postcard, TRICK is promoted like a queer AFTER HOURS with 2 fags encountering all sorts of adventures as they search for a simple place to fuck for the night, but the only excitement this depthless pruritanical propraganda can muster is hearing fag-hag Tori Spelling say the word "motherfucker", which is admittedly a slight thrill. This film is definitely geared to the puppy-love crowd with it's delusional brand of gay romanticism. The problem largely lies with the lead pretty boy who offers nothing in the way of an inner life except freaky neuroses and obviously pink frosted lips with mascara. He's so effete he'd make Audrey Hepburn look butch. And we’re supposed to blindly identify with this bland white bread protagonist and laugh at the supposed weirdness of the guys who try to pick him up at a gay bar: one dude has a boyfriend at home and is looking for a threeway (can you say ‘freak’!), another is an ex-gogo dancer who’s born-again (Omigod!?), and yet another is… middle-aged (ewwww - the nerve!!!) His new relationship with a muscled gogo boy is completely implausible, and they've only got scripted chemistry between them. The supposed proof of the gogo stud's true affection is that (SPOILER) he really did give this nancy priss-ass his real phone number, discovered in the last shot when nancy priss-ass calls his machine and hangs up as it beeps, singing and skipping into the horizon. They might try to call that love, but I call it stalking. The singing, by the way, is repeated throughout the film - a pugnacious, repellant ditty called "Enter You" that is sung in all musical theater earnestness so many times that it rang hellishly in my head for days. It was so painful I just wanted to punch everyone I saw in the face as I left the theater, and I'm not normally aggressive because, well, I'm so very weak. Talk about films promoting violence.
JEANNE AND THE PERFECT GUY - (June Release, but already pushed back 5 times!)
Perfect fodder for french-bashers, this is an ungodly mutation of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG with XANADU and maybe a little MELROSE PLACE for that definitive je ne sais quoi. This is a french musical about a promiscuous Parisian girl who falls in love with her presumed perfect guy after meeting him and instantly having sex on the subway. Ooh la la, sounds serious. The girl's a cute Hello Kitty-type vixen played by Virginie Ledoyen who's currently shooting THE BEACH with Leonardo DiCaprio. The story gets pretty heavy with gay guys singing about losing lovers to AIDS, an ACTUP march, and a not-so-surprising dark secret that the perfect guy has to hide, but throughout goofy musical numbers keep popping up unexpectedly bearing all the weight of laundry detergent commercials. I musta played the first scene of my screener copy about 30 times already for any friend that stops by - it is HILARIOUS. Janitors appear from nowhere and sing about the economy while dancing like Jerry Lewis with an itchy ass all set to the frothiest French pop imaginable - indescribably silly. And as bad as it gets, it is soooo infectious. When I was in college I had a neighbor who sang godawful nasal opera all day long which drove me crazy, so I got the worst music I could think of - XANADU - and blasted it into the bathroom shaft at full volume as psychological warfare. Within a few days I was so loving that album, and now I'm still somewhat of a glutton for shallow punishment. JEANNE is just worth the watch only to revel in the shocking travesty of it all.
THE ADVENTURES OF SEBASTIAN COLE - (July Release?)
Adrien Grenier has stepped off the pages of Seventeen to pose for you while dressed in 80's fashion, while riding his bike through school, while fighting with his transexual guardian, while bleeding profusely at the film's intro from some unknown adventure. The single thrill this film has to offer is that its lead is so unbelievably attractive - his beauty is brainwashing and if I hadn't taken a bathroom break I might never have broken its spell. My sister, as it was, came away breathlessly moaning "He's sooo beautiful", overlooking the lack of sense, or storyline, or significance. Wounded and wandering in the desert, Sebastian flashes back to the preceding events which meander aimlessly around an 18-year-old's psychological wasteland. Well, duh - wasted youth, been there, done that. We want blood! All we get is teen model.
BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE - (Soon Release)
This lesbian confection is a bit precious, and, uh, that's about it. Pretty forgettable, but likable enough. Oh, a kinda conservative and closeted lesbo with a MASSIVE dildo collection falls in love with a tomboy sketch artist the day that her recently single overbearing mother and curious brother arrive to live with her. If you can deal with the transexual who stammers like some speed-infested Saturday Night Live sketch, but whose Cabaret song "I Am Not A Fucking Drag Queen" is rather droll, then you can deal with the drama of another goddam homosexual coming out story. This one's lighter than most, if that's a good thing for you.
FINDING NORTH - (June 4 Release)
A wholly contrived plot concerning a Brooklyn bank teller who sees a suicidal naked guy on a bridge who loses his shoe that she brings to a wake at his apartment after he shows up at her bank and she mistakes him for a stripper who she hires out of desperation for her 30th birthday that provokes her to fall in love with the suicidal guy who starts receiving audio cassettes in the mail from his dead boyfriend who instructs him to go to Texas, and, you know, she goes along for protection. And that's just the beginning. Oy, luckily the lead actors are really great and make the misdirected material manageable. Wendy Makkena (SISTER ACT) takes her THE NANNY stereotype character and works wonders with throwaways, and John Benjamin Hickey (LOVE, VALOUR, COMPASSION!) is compellingly charismatic for such a mensch. The script runs out of steam, but it'll make a nice demo tape edited down. The side characters are out of control, but the WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE mom, an invasive waiter, and a set of waitress twins named Ethel and Bethel are hilarious.
THE KING OF MASKS (BIAN LIAN) - (May 21 Release)
THE KING OF MASKS is a Chinese film about three misfits who are bound together by gender-bending politics of the 1930's. Old Wang, an uptight travelling performer who performs AMAZING split-second transformations in the art of mask magic, is sought after for his stage secrets by the lonely, effeminate Master Liang, a popular transvestite opera performer worshipped as the Living Bodhisattva. But Wang refuses, the tradition is solely reserved for a male heir. Along comes Doggie, an excitable young boy encountered amongst all the unwanted girls up for sale by desperate parents in dark alleys. Everything Wang could want in an apprentice - everything except dick for this boy is really a girl, sending Wang into a penis frenzy. Though the film's a little presentational at times, the lead performances are fairly heart rending and the scenes of Chinese fireworks and river life and cross-dressed culture are pretty fantastic.
BESEIGED (L'ASSEDIO) - (May 21 Release)
Bernardo Bertolucci's latest is an affected and ambivalent affair about three characters in Italy, with Thandie Newton (BELOVED) as a housemaid whose husband has been arrested by African militia, David Thewliss (NAKED) as an eccentric pianist who falls in love with her, and Claudio Santamaria as Thandie's sexy gay best friend who's really just there as the token cliché-du-jour. The Italian master has forgone the profundity of early works like THE CONFORMIST for a meditated lyricism in his last few films and though his craftwork is stunning, the peaceful attempts reek of impotence and easy chairs. You practically choke on his peace. You strain for a visual Heimlech. This film in particular plods along until the final few frames' twists which are pretty effective.
TREYF (May 17 Sundance Channel)
This is a pretty cool documentary feature about Jewish lesbians airing on the Sundance channel, with insightful anecdotes and interviews, a trip to the Holy land and undercover footage from a Chassidic synagogue in Brooklyn, all set to the grooviest music - picture Hava Nagila set to surf punk as tacky Hebrew trotsky's fill the screen. If you can get past the annoying monotone drone voice-overs of the filmmakers, there's a lotta memorable moments in this prodigal hodge-podge. 'Treyf' is a yiddish word referring to all that's not kosher, applied to shellfish and lesbians. I knew there was a connection…
STAR WARS: EPISODE ONE
If you're a homophobe and you made it this far, congrats. You're well on your gay way and you've helped me score fairy points with the homosexual secret society. But since you probably just scrolled past all the purple propoganda, here's the queer truth about...
THE PHANTOM MENACE
Fuck the critics, this STAR WARS episode fulfills the hype despite its flaws and starts the myth out on an deliriously epic scale. This fantastic voyage feels like the biggest surprise birthday party ever, you're deliriously happy even though somewhere in the back of your head you're compulsively counting who didn't show -- in this case Mr. Plot, M. Dialogue, and Ms. Acting. Notable presences certainly, but hell, you're spinning upside-down on a roller coaster in the theme park of the future -- anymore forward motion and you'd hurl. And besides, just ask any Tarot master - a picture speaks a thousand words. Throughout one gets the sense that this is a civilization that has reached its peak, with gorgeous courtyards, towering skyscrapers, orderly droids and bureaucracy everywhere. Like a tree in full bloom, the bough's about to break.
Though everyone speaks platitudes in lieu of conversation, they are an alien race after all and the stiffness and formality of their protocol is appropriately offset by the spontaneity of Anakin the slave, and the organic Rasta funkiness of the Gungans. JarJar Binks comes across like a tall, hairless Ewok with the soul of a femmy, dreadlocked African-American flamer stuck in the body of a Gungan who talks like a Cajun Teletubby - he's an annoying character, certainly, but luckily because he's just background noise he's totally endearing. While lil' morphin' Ani comes across EXACTLY like the child actor who played Mike Teevee in WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY with the same grating whine towards the end and tediously impulsive bravado. The kid's got true charm though, a sparkle in his eyes and when he isn't chewing his lips waiting for the next line, he's a good kid with whom every youngster will easily identify, and since he's destined to become the personification of pure evil it will likely inspire an entire generation of psychotic monsters here on Earth - all wearing lesbian hairdos, buzzed and braided like Ewan MacGregor's likable Obi Wan. Watching pros Ewan and Liam work together sets a standard however that the other actors can't hope to attain. Hopefully Ewan will be allowed to cut loose and give us some real Jedi drama in the next installment.
Liam Neeson carries the movie and it's his finest work ever. Ok, he's not one of my favorite actors, but here he's phenomenal - he embodies the virtues and qualities not only of the Jedi but of the world that is soon to be sacrificed by dark forces from the depths of the unknown. They say a true master doesn't preach but shows by example, by embodying the Truth. This is how Neeson plays his Qui-Gon Jinn and perhaps this is Lucas' greatest achievement here as well
- While the exposition is sloppy and stilted, there is another story being told beyond the words, a genuine mythical adventure for the spirit, the feeling you get when you look at a Master's work of art in any museum. Lucas has successfully transported us into the midst of his fantasy. The colors, the edits, the sets, the geography, the details, the effects… wow. Although it takes place on three planets, it feels like a hundred. It really is like taking a tour through some sci-fi Louvre, and besides all the technical achievements I wouldn't be surprised to to see PHANTOM MENACE snag Oscars for Best Art, Costume, and Make-up as well. The Queen's wardrobe alone rivals anything I've ever seen. Natalie Portman, by the way, is going to be a goddess and I can't wait to see her character deepen in the upcoming chapters. Speaking of upcoming chapters, this movie sets up some hefty promises with that whole Moses/Christ freeing the slaves trip. The Christian religious allegory is a little heavy-handed, though dependably dramatic. The final conflict - a hot tag team saber slamming session - even resembles a dance with the devil set to a chilling heavenly choir. Oh yeah, Academy Award for Best Score too.
I'd rate THE PHANTOM MENACE much better than RETURN OF THE JEDI, and personally I think it's better than A NEW HOPE but I'm a slut for art direction. The relationships, the ideas, the suspense, and the psychology of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK made that film an unforgettable, indelible experience for me, but the visuals here tell a strange story and it's a cosmic doozy. As a kid after seeing ESB I became feverish and obsessed, lying on my bed hugging my heart too lovesick with escapist fantasies to function. Today an hour lapsed by as I lay curled up in a fetal position clutching my chest on the sofa lost in thought and pining for adventure, and I'm an adult for God's sake. Driving down the streets I was changed, I saw landspeeders whizzing by me, alien creatures wherever I turned. THE PHANTOM MENACE is that rare work that gives you new eyes, and the world is forever changed whether you like it or not.
Later gaze,
TOMMY TERROR
