Stylish and grotesque David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a straightforward (though not entirely faithful) adaptation of Stieg Larsson's massive worldwide bestselling book by the same name. Daniel Craig, getting back to serious acting after fighting Bond villains and aliens, plays disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist. After loosing a very public court case that costs him his life's saving and freedom Blomkvist is man without a plan. He is contacted by a lawyer on behalf of aging industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to write his memoirs. After being summoned the Vanger family compound on a remote island 4-hours from his posh digs in Stockholm, Blomkvist learns the real reason he's there. Henrik wants him to solve the 40 year-old disappearance of his favorite niece Harriet. This embroils Blomkvist into the dark, nefarious and often depraved entrails of the Vanger family empire. A group of "Thieves, misers and bullies. A detestable collection of people. My family." as Henrik describes his own kin.
Meanwhile back in the capital we met Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the girl with said dragon tattoo. A glass fragile waif who is a super-genius but super violent and super introverted by equal measure, who is driven mad by years of emotional and institutional abuse; works as a researcher for a security firm. She has a photographic memory and can break into any computer system. She has been forced into adult supervision as a ward of the state and after the kind man she has known as her guardian has a stroke she is forced into the hands of a rapist who brutally sexually assaults her time and time again. The most talked about scene of the movie will be when she takes her revenge on the molester that includes a taser, metal dildo and a tattoo gun. Extrapolate from there. It is both satisfyiing and disturbing to watch. Eventually Salander and Blomkvist meet and the hunt for a killer of women begins.
Fincher (The Social Network & Fight Club) is a director that can break down complicated story lines into interesting, if not easy to follow narratives. This was very much the case in this film. I would even say too much so. The movie follows the book in a linear and somewhat boring fashion. The violence and brazenness of his other works are somewhat muted here. There are many dark and brooding elements as well as the Fincher whimsy with his choice of score and the opening credits, which look more like a 007 movie sequence than a drama. He usually has a hands-off approach to his actors which can sometimes lead to melodrama as in Aliens 3, but in this case it worked. Robin Wright and Stellan Skarsgård gave heft to their supporting performances. The movie didn't feel so much like an Americanized version of Niels Arden Oplev's Swedish original. It felt more like a companion. This version still had very scandinavian touches with its spartan bleached woods, pristine snow covered forests and fluid ideals on bed-hopping and religion. I do think this version lacks some of the heat and perversion of the Swedish film and can come across as somewhat of a cold procedural rather than the flagrant roller coaster it was advertised to be. Once we realize that Bllomkvist and Salander are not just trying to solve a decades old mystery but track a serial killer that has been at work all across Sweden for over 60 years the movie revs up to a high paced gallop. The finish is totally not expected and extremely unsettling.
Daniel Craig is grizzled and sexy and Rooney Mara is both vulnerable and monstrous and they have great (not explosive) chemistry. Fans of the book or the earlier adaptation may take offense to Fincher and writer Steven Zallian's (Schlindler's List and American Gangster) very liberal choices especially post climax but we warm blooded Americans need some emotional payoff. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a solid film and a must see if you liked the books. Like a tattoo this movie will stay with you for sometime.
Dealing with my mother's dementia/ Alzheimer's is like being at the bottom of a well on a dark night. I look up and only see an oval of velvety sky. But instead of stars I see swirling faces. Angry ungrateful faces. Pointing fingers at me telling me how bad of a son I am. Telling me that I am selfish for not wanting to take this monumental task of giving care to a terminally ill person, especially my mother, with nothing but exhausting pain and deterioration to come. These imaginary faces mix with the real ones of people I know, giving me advice on how to handle "the situation." They console me by telling me they know how I feel. But, really, they do not.
For many people, terminal illness is an abstract concept. It's frightening and inexplicable but ultimately detachable. They see the illness from a far, akin to watching a remote disaster on television. Your heart goes out to the victims of 9/11 and 7/7, or the survivors of the tsunami, an earthquake, a mudslide or Katrina. But, ultimately, you can turn off your TV. You can leave those visceral images of decaying bodies and bloodied children behind. They will become the fodder of our lunch time discussions at work or our missionary meetings at church. We'll email digital sympathy cards signed by the thousands. We'll text relief aid to a five-digit number after witnessing planes crash into buildings and giant waves wash over unsuspecting tourists on YouTube. But it's still not your pain. You can log-off and sign-out, call the kids to dinner or hit up your friends to come over and play cards. However, you will never know the hurt locker certain of us must go through everyday.
When I was a small child my older cousin, Wilma, was the victim of a stalker (long before stalking became such a widespread term). I remember the tragedy as if it were yesterday: The perpetrator was her ex-boyfriend whom she left due to his being abusive. She was smart, gorgeous and tall with a demure sexy nature--similar to Audrey Hepburn and Pam Grier rolled into one. At the time she was studying cosmetology and had ambitions of modeling or acting. She lived in Rock Hill, South Carolina and wanted to eventually go north to New York or D.C. She had a nice, new beau and a new job at a mall in Charlotte. This new boyfriend came to pick her up at the end of her shift in his fine 1976 Buick. Stalking nearby was the abusive ex. A barrage of shots suddenly rang out, shattering the windshield. The new boyfriend dived to protect my cousin but was hit in the leg in the process. Wilma was hit too; a single bullet cleaved her spine and, in an instant, my beautiful 19 year-old cousin became a quadriplegic for the rest of her life.
I remember going to South Carolina with my parents to visit my father's family. Sitting in the room was Wilma as her machines wheezed and bleeped and hissed. To my young eyes as a child, she seemed alien, bizarre, freakish. She was mostly jovial, however. I remember her mother shooing us out of the room so she could be changed. Wilma eventually was unhooked from the machines and was allowed to leave the house. Her older brother Everett would lift her up out of the car and place her lovingly in her wheelchair. My mother used to say that the strain of carrying her around would kill him and that Everett should be afforded a "normal" life. He shouldn't have to totally give up his life to help his sister. My father would say it could've been God's retribution because Wilma was vain, spoiled and had too-often argued with her parents. The images of my cousin would haunt me. They would remain on my mind like a funky treasure--something I wanted to hide, yet something I needed to share. Of course, like most youth, when dealing with the incomprehensible such as paralysis, those feelings were fleeting. They would last just until we passed that famous Red Dot Liquor Store on the way out of town. By the time we crossed the Catawba River Bridge my mind would return to Legos or my Rock-em-Sock-em Robots--completely oblivious to Wilma's and her care-taking brother's reality.
Life is a brutal thing. It can mete out great and wonderful fortune to some while cascading untold horrors to others. As I now begin that long good-bye with my mother I find that I am being consumed by the disease as well. Everyday more and more of my time is devoted to my mother's caretaking. No decision can be made without weighing the consequences that could either positively or negatively affect her well-being. My life too has been snatched from me just as surely as hers has. And in those dark and secret moments I feel anger and pity for myself because I have been caught in the melee of this disease. Each step, closer to pain and loss. Each decision made, more challenging than the next. But this time I cannot go away. I cannot turn off her dementia. I can't grab Legos with the sweet bliss of knowing "somebody else" is there taking care of her.
About a month ago my mother told me that she wanted her favorite bible verse inscribed on her headstone: "Be still, and know that I am God" -- Psalms 46:10.
Admittedly, I'm not usually a religiously minded person. But when she said this a peace came over me that was so sublime I cannot adequately describe it in words. So I just became still. For the first time in my life I actually listened. Listened for those little whispers that everybody hears (except for me, usually). At that moment I did absolutely nothing. And by doing nothing the waters became still and I was clear in my thinking. Maybe now I could see in those crystal waters what I could not before.
Wilma went on to actually become a model and win a beauty contest. She was crowned Miss South Carolina Wheelchair 1981. She even moved out on her own and had her own apartment. She finished college and even got another boyfriend, all without the use of any of her limbs. Everett married. His wife was even a home care attendant for Wilma once and they now have several grandchildren. This stillness brought into perspective that which is truly important in life: your family, your friends and each of the ones you love. Realizing this, the choice becomes more palatable--just as I'm sure it did with Everett who devoted so many years of his life lifting his sister in and out of that wheelchair. Maybe this illness, this brain-eating, soul-sucking illness is, in some odd way, a blessing; that this diagnosis doesn't have to define my mother or me. That we should make this long good-bye as wonderful and as rich as it can possibly be because, in reality, it's not about how you die---it's about how you live.
This was an impossibly nitwitted film filled with Jack Black's signature kinetic mania, bathroom humor and sad unclever satire. Heading into this hot mess of tired flatulence and urine jokes I knew it was going to just be Jack Black's usual flailing arms and motormouth bulldozing that has become his trademark. But the notes he hits here are so dull and whittled-down its hard to even imagine him in inspired performances like School of Rock, Kung Fu Panda and especially the brilliance of Tenacious D (the folk metal comedy routine he does with Kyle Gass not the awful Pick of Destiny movie). The movie starts with Gulliver being a sad sack loser mail room clerk who is goaded into asking his reporter boss Darcy (Amanda Peet) for a writing assignment. She sends him to the Bermuda Triangle and the hilarity is suppose to immediately ensue. Unfortunately for the viewer nothing but tedious trite movie drivel commenced. Gulliver's boat (aptly named the No Sail) is caught in a whirlpool that takes him to the land of Lilliput. A kingdom with people only a few inches tall. They at first imprison him out of fear then end worshiping him after he rescues the king from a fire by relieving himself on the burning castle. Filming at its finest. There's a silly subplot where Horatio (Jason Segel) is coached by Gulliver to awkwardly woo the Princess (Emily Blunt) in in turn is promised to General Edward Edwardian (Chris O'Dowd). The punchlines are all to familiar even the visual are pretty impressive. The comic power of Billy Connolly (King Theodore) and Catherine Tate (Queen Isabelle) are completely wasted on this script which was both pompous and puerile by equal measure. The director Rob Letterman continually delivers movies that seem half-finished as in Monsters vs. Aliens and Shark Tale. Somehow Darcy shows up in Lilliput just in time to see Gulliver fight the giant robot created by the hated Blefuscusians, a fight that ends with a giant mechanical wedgey. This was not the journey Jonathan Swift envisioned. Obviously it was a kids movie but the Teletubbies had more wit and charm than this disaster. My advice: don't travel with Gulliver on this failed adventure.
Green Lantern is the type of bad movie making that should be stopped. Over-produced and over-hyped this film was obviously gunning for a franchise. Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is an arrogant test pilot that we're suppose to sympathize with because his daddy was blown up in an experimental plane. But instead of empathy as the viewer I felt ambivalence. He was rich, had a gorgeous girlfriend (Blake Lively) and killer abs. When Jordan rescues a dying alien who is a member of the Green Lantern Corps (basically cosmic cops in spandex) he is given the dying aliens ring of power. To forever become a defender of the universe. The ring's/ lantern's energy is powered by the will of all living beings. Jordan is taken to Oa the home planet of the Guardians (little men who look a lot like blue versions of the swelled-headed vein-popping telekinetic aliens from that Star Trek episode entitled The Menagerie.) We're tricked into believing Jordan is angst ridden and frightened and that this ring will find something in him that he didn't know he had.
Reynolds' jovial nature made the movie mildly watchable but Lively is given basically a paper doll thin character by the 5 writers (you know when that many names are credited it's going to be a bad script.) The story jumped from sci-fi wizardry to forced and fake moments of tenderness. There was no clear direction either and a set of bad guys so week and tired they made Casanova Frankenstein (Mystery Men) seem scary. The only real threat was this giant amorphous skull-creature-thingy named Parallax (a rouge Guardian turned baddie) that Green Lantern suckered into flying into the sun. Really? An immortal entity that can consume planets is going to let Ryan Reynolds lead it to burn itself up in the corona of the sun. Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Homicide: Life on the Streets) brought no edge or sex appeal as the director of this cumbersome mess. Green Lantern had neither the gravitas and exuberance of Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Mans nor the cunning and tension of Christopher Nolan's Batman reboots. The heavy hitting support players (Tim Robbins, Mark Strong, Peter Sarsgaard and Angela Basset) were wasted on dumb dialogue and callow back stories. Green Lantern was always a second string character in the DC comic universe and it pains me to see this guy get a big budget movie and I'm still waiting on a good Wonder Woman. The bottom line is that this movie should have never received a green light.
Excuse the graphic nature of the following sentence. The other day I got out of the shower and caught a glimpse of my naked body in the the bathroom mirror. I was shocked. I wondered who was the middle-aged man staring back at me. What cruel funhouse mirror was swapped for the one in my bathroom? This person with a soft waistline and gray chest hairs was not me. Where did he come from; or better question, when did he arrive? Gone was that beautiful face with youthful intensity, temerity and arrogance. When was it replaced by this haggard weapon looking back at me now? The collateral damage of time creasing my cheeks with not very subtle lines.
I just read an article in the The Economist that finds the age of 46 the year with the highest cases of worry and depression. We who are in this age group of mid-lifers are literally stuck in middle age. Bookend between the calamities of raising teenagers and aging ever more needy parents creates a tsunami like effect on our emotions as they pour over the shores of our mind. Coupled with a bad economy we are indeed clogged in the bottom of a pipe with little hope of immediately relief. What happened to us? We are suppose to the be trendsetters. The story makers. We are the X-Generation. We were suppose to just Do It! I was never suppose to punch a clock or fall into a lock-step with any company's dogma. But here I find myself dancing to a corporate master's whip crunched into the small crevices of middle-management, the very cliché my peers and I put down and ridiculed back in college.
Mid-Career Workers Squeezed Off of the Street blared loudly at me from the screen of my computer. I learned reading this piece on Fins website that the down turn in the economy where "middle-aged, mid-career workers have borne an inordinate share of layoffs and cuts by attrition". As if we didn't already have enough on our plates. So now we're fired not because of the high-level of expertise or tons of experience (or lack thereof) we bring to the table, but because businesses can make bigger profits with younger, less smart and willing to do anything for less workers. We are out of work longer and once we do find a job its usually at salaries significantly reduced from what we were making with very little benefits. Reading these abysmal statistics I was at first disconnected from them. Those poor people I thought before realizing they were talking about me. Aren't we suppose to be living in a post-generational time period. An epoch where liver spot removal and midnight runs to Duane Reade to pick up a box of Just for Men (have to look bright and young for that management meeting in the morning) was no longer necessary.
To a certain extent I enjoy the aging process. Though the boldness of that young gamblers spirit may be gone, I've realized great risks can be taken as long as they are armored with clear strategies. Sex grows better because I am now at ease with my body. I've long passed the point fear motivated me to the gym. Now I workout for myself. At this certain age you understand that you will always be too-something. Too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too light, too dark. So therefore you accept the skin you reside in and that opens the doors to amazing exploration. Things you would now do you deemed too kinky or too contrived when you were 25. Your focus becomes razor sharp. Gone or ignored are the distractions that used to tatter your time and days. Like a Times Square card shark we can move the pieces of our lives in and out of view rapidly trying to trick life into finding the wrong card in our reductive game of monty.
But all too often as those cards which symbolize the itinerant pieces of our lives grow larger or multiply into many more parts and we start to spend the vast majority of our time maneuvering things. Moving things from one shelf so we can dust only to put them back into an ever more crowded space. Our lives lose their fluidity as the cogs grind and connect and the viscosity of youth and dreams dry up; leaving us commanding a lumbering machine that only moves forward from its on momentum rather than from the true locomotion of passions or ambition. Gravity seems to pull us closer to the bottom of that u-bend.
As I gradually look more like my parents and less like my nieces and nephews a pall sometimes comes over me. I think I can deal with the frenzy of gray hair or the list (which is getting longer by the day) of foods I can no longer eat without repercussion; being called "Daddy" by horny twenty-somethings hitting on me or even the slower pace of my step. My biggest grief with middle-age is what I feel is a loss of options. Responsibility chokes my life. An endless Sargasso Sea of good intentions and doing-the-right things. Even now the simplest decisions must be weighed against dire consequences. When I was 25 I could thumb my nose at work. Who cared? The sun and the pier called my name. But now the notion of missing work causes paroxysms that spread through my soul from an epicenter of doom in my brain filling in the gaps of my end of times imagination. I can't miss work. I need that paid time off to go to North Carolina to see my in-firmed mother. What if I don't get paid for the day? How will I pay my rent? I need the overtime and I won't get it if I don't go in. My life's course is not a multi-lane super highway with on/ off ramps galore. It is a tight narrow black top flowing straight into the horizon with no exits in sight. My life has become a slow turning thumbscrew of banality.
Now without soundling like a complete whining asshole there are somethings middle-agers can do. We can take this huge amount of experiential life we've amassed and put it to good use. If I'm going to be under-employed let that time off benefit others. I've started volunteering at an LGBT homeless shelter. I'm going to move my mother to NYC and hopefully make her happy in her declining years. I'm going back to film school to finally follow that dream I abandoned so many years ago that it now seems unforgiving. I am going to continue to write my novels and short stories with the hope that one day somebody will actually read them. That there will be one day that the clog in the bottom of the u-bend will not be me.
Lush and dramatic cinematography gives gravitas to the most basic of human stories. A man's love and determination to keep his family together. Rudy Youngblood plays Jaguar Paw a swaggering hunter who was the best in his village. He was brash, handsome and arrogant. He was soon humbled when taken into captivity by a band of marauding soldiers pillaging villages looking for human sacrifices to Kukulcan the Mayan sun god. Secreting his pregnant wife and their young son down a pit he promises to do whatever it takes to return and rescue them from the hole. He, along with his fellow villagers are dragged through the Yucatan jungle to the mighty city of temples. Opulent, decadent and blood-thirsty the great masses of thousands shout with trance-like frenzy as a high priest gruesomely vivisects hundres of captives while the royal family looks on with dispassion. At the very moment Jaguar Paw is to be sacrificed a total eclipse blights the sun and throws the ritual into darkness just as the Omens had foretold. Jaguar Paw is spared and given his freedom. But when he kills the son of the general he is pursued relentlessly through the jungle as he rushes to return to his beloved.
The acting was strong in this movie and the make-up never hindered but actually aided in the performances. Youngblood was able to push through a very physical role and show us severe heartache coupled with defiant exuberance at each obstacle he faced and overcame. Raoul Trujillo who plays the general Zero Wolfe is a powerful adversary that leads his men into harms way to avenge his son's death. Dalia Hernández as Seven the pregnant wife gives a beautiful determined yet bitterweet performance. Mel Gibson's direction wasn't as heavy handed as it was in The Passion of the Christ. He allowed us to be first be overwhelmed by the scale and spectacle of this film before bringing us back to a human-sized storyline. When the standard chase begins in the movie's third act we are completely engaged and running with the jaguars like a native. The ominous ending was unexpected and a bit ironic when Jaguar Paw is yet spared again when his chasers are caught off guard by the arrival of Spanish conquistadors. He finally rescues his wife along with his newborn son but we are haunted with lingering idea that as violent and reprobate as the Mayan civilization appeared to be, what was coming ashore from those ships was going to be infinitely worse for his family, his people and ultimately his way of life.
From the creators of Glee and Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story is a slick and twisted amalgam of the subversive satire of the cartoon version of the Addams Family and the fun inducing gore of the first—and still the best—Scream movie.
Chills and scares come at you rapid fire from the Pez-disperser like script. Spitting out incongruously humorous, touching, sexy and often demented moments by equal measure usually at the same time. Unlike the slow methodical cancerous descent into fear of Stanley Kubrik's The Shinning, AHS is filled with paroxysms that jolt you on to a razor's edge of anticipation. Witty dialogue and innovative kookery coupled with bizarro characters surrounding a seemingly ordinary family who are themselves rife with dark secrets make for a joyously frightening psychosexual hoot.
American Horror Story gets off to a shocking start by breaking one of the few taboos left in entertainment: infanticide. The first five minutes slap you in the face with a young girl with Down Syndrome trying to stop two little boys, who are obviously the neighborhood roughs, from entering the derelict Victorian mansion that becomes the central character of the show. What the identical twins find in the basement are dismembered baby parts floating in formaldehyde and a mysterious entity that decidedly doesn't like children or rather likes to cause them terrible physical pain and death. As we quickly and squeamishly find out.
Fast-forward some years later and a family trying to buy a new life in Los Angeles has purchased the beautifully restored home. A devastated mother coping with both the stillbirth of her youngest child and her husband's infidelity along with their morose daughter move from the east coast to sunny southern California hoping it will repair their damaged family. Quickly finding out why the massive home was so cheap (it was the scene of the gruesome murder-suicide of its previous owners) the Harmon family unpacks and settles into some very strange WTF occurrences; including finding what looks like a dissection lab in the basement and a secret sadomasochist dungeon.
Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton) is the heart of the family and around whom the story unfolds. Played straightforwardly without pretense Ms. Britton’s understatedness allows the zaniness of the supporting players to shine through. She is hurt and aggrieved by both her horrible miscarriage and catching her husband having sex with one of his 20 year-old students. Now almost a year later she’s taxed with the loss of her child, marriage and libido all the while her husband wants to reconcile in a more biblical sense. Dylan McDermott plays her lumbering psychiatrist husband Dr. Ben Harmon. Mr. McDermott toggling between shouting rants and pouting earnestness makes for a disjointed performance that reminds me of his affected acting from The Practice, but he’s most believable when playing the family patriarch as a creepy, narcissistic horn dog. Taissa Farmiga (Vera’s younger sister) effectively brings an almost gothic gloominess to her role as misunderstood tween Violet (she’s a cutter) that would make Wynona Ryder’s original mournful teenager from Beetlejuice proud.
But what makes this show hum however, is the cabal of aberrant nuts that roam the Southland’s landscape. Frances Conroy (Six Feet Under) can bring bucket loads of crazy to a role like no other. Her housekeeper Moira sets just the right tone of mystery as she tries to seduce Dr. Harmon. Of course he doesn’t see the milky-eyed harridan that Moira is today but instead he sees her as her former young hottie self (Alexandra Breckenridge) in a French maid outfit that plays up to his philandering. Evan Peters plays Tate, a patient of Dr. Harmon’s who likens himself to a serial killer. He falls in love with the daughter. Violet and Tate’s most tender (and weirdest) moments come when they both share their equal fondness for self-mutilation and fantasizing about how to kill the other teenagers at their school. Dennis O’Hare (True Blood) is at it again with his succulent lunacy. As the burned and disfigured Larry, yet another former owner of the house, his character uses gasoline instead of fangs to kill people this time by burning his wife and two children to death. Rubber Man is a mysterious walking neoprene suit that shows up randomly and has sex with Vivien proving that Latex can be both sexy and scary at the same time. And then there’s Jessica Lange as Constance. Ripping through the scenery with her southern belle maliciousness she is the repository of the long and evil history of the house and is the mother of the aforementioned little girl with Down Syndrome. She percolates while on camera and delivers the episodes best lines. When housekeeper Moira finds her stealing Vivien’s diamond earrings Constance quips with her lilting, yet menacing drawl “Why is it that its always the old whores who acts the part of a moralistic prude.” Tacking on “When anything goes missing they always blame the maid. And don’t make me kill you again.”
Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy have crafted a naughty but ingenious show that doesn’t lack subtlety but also delivers on its promise of being both sexy and scary at the same time. With offbeat characters played with joy and just the right amount of inscrutability American Horror Story promises to be a good old-fashioned watch through your fingers fright fest. With copious amounts sweaty undulating flesh and gushing blood thrown in for good measure. This little bit of fright is exactly what we need after True Blood came completely off the rails this past season. FX may provide me with my supernatural fix for the fall.
“Diets don't work. It's those jelly donuts. They call to me in the middle of the night. Hollywood, Hollywood, come and get me Hollywooood.” Meshach Taylor bemoaned operatically, hitting notes only Leontyne Price could hope for and looking an awful lot like her while doing it. So rose the sassy star employee of department store window dresser, Hollywood Montrose, in 1987’s movie Mannequin. Taylor’s gay black character was sissifying his way into stealing the movie right out from under star Andrew McCarthy with one-line zingers and sequined likability. Scorching and burning the scenery like a roided-out version of André Leon Talley with his big shoulder-padded, über-fashionable caricature and looking fabulous in radiant eyewear, Hollywood Montrose brought homosexuality to a national audience and made it palatable. Note, I said homosexuality and not homo sex—There is a difference. Though his boyfriend, Albert, was often mentioned (as in “Albert left me! That bitch!”), he was never seen making you wonder how much ‘wood’ Hollywood was actually getting.
If you haven’t seen the fantastic documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995) and had grown up in my generation—i.e., the pre-Will & Grace, pre-Queer Eye, pre-Equal Marriage-Prop 8, pre- flamboyant hair battles, pre-Birkin bag-toting gay best friend in 5-inch pumps generation—you probably would not have seen very many openly gay characters on television or on film. Of course, there were varying shades of purple stretching back to the beginnings of cinema:there ranged faint hues of pink like the sexually flirtatious relationship between would-be murderers Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train (1951), to deeper, more saturated lavender as in the infamous (and once banned/ deleted) “snails and oysters” scene where an elder General Crassus (Sir Lawrence Olivier) tried to seduce the younger doe-eyed, pouty-lipped Antoninus (Tony Curtis) in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). Not until movies like Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)—where Army major Marlon Brando falls in love with a recruit, and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)—the story of a mother wanting to lobotomize her niece for telling the truth about how her gay son was murdered trying to pick up men—did the notion of man-on-man sex materialize. This film, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve and Cleopatra), written for the screen by Gore Vidal, based on a play by Tennessee Williams, and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, was so queerly pedigreed it became a cathedral of gay iconography like no other movie in Hollywood history. Although films of that time that dealt with gays typically ended in the tragic death of said homosexual (suicide in the former Reflections; murder in the latter Summer), at least their stories were beginning to be told. But just as I challenged in my previous blog about black women’s sexuality in Hollywood, so too will I ask the question now: where were the black gay characters? And if they did appear were they just pretty asexual dolls to be played as camp effect or shame then summarily discarded?
“The Sissy made everyone feel more manly or more womanly by occupying the space in between. He didn't seemed to have a sexuality, so Hollywood allowed him to thrive.”—The Celluloid Closet.
Some may think thriving is a contradiction to the tragic endings I spoke about. But the characterization of the fem man was allowed to live on in film after film. As long as the gay man was a dandy and a fool, he could survive. But once he threatened the status quo of gender rules death was very near. So the sashaying, jelly donut-eating Hollywood Montrose, despite presumably pounding snails and licking oysters, was acceptable because he was a sissy.
Interestingly, a recent study by psychologists at the University of Toronto revealed that when compared side-by-side, men (both gay and straight, both black and white) were assessed for their likability by women and a small group of other men. It was determined that black gay men are the most ‘likable’ and, therefore, most approachable of them all. Read this great post by Prince-Toddy English as he deconstructs the shadows this survey casts. He suggests that straight black men sexuality conjures Birth of a Nation fears in the women participating in the survey. But because gay black men don’t want vagina they’re perceived safe to play with. So, if finding viable films with a fair and balanced account of black male sexuality is a challenge, finding one with queer-identified black men is like trying to get the cast members of Jersey Shore to believe Chekhov's The Seagull is not a bar on the strip in Seaside Heights, NJ.
The first time I saw a gay black man on television I was sixteen watching a Saturday afternoon movie. I had just come in from mowing the lawn and was waiting for Star Trek when I came across a rerun of the 1976 movie Norman, is That You?Based on the Broadway play (the characters were originally Jewish), I was both mesmerized and shocked at the two men—one black, one white—lying in bed together. It was a vehicle for Redd Foxx and Pearl Bailey about a divorcing couple dealing with their son (Michael Warren) who was not only coming out, but was also in love with a white man. Think Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? but with an extra side of sausage. I was slapped back to reality when my stepfather, the Good Deacon, decried when he looked up from his newspaper “They ain’t faggots is they?” Maybe he wouldn’t have been so harsh if, instead of leather harnesses, they were wearing feather boas.
Ironically, in 1989, just two short years after Mr. Taylor’s Hollywood's screaming Mimi propelled a mediocre movie into box office gold, the British director, Isaac Julien, released Looking for Langston, a 42-minute short film combining archival footage of the Harlem Renaissance and scripted scenes with black actors Ben Ellison and Matthew Baidoo. The visuals of two black men entwined in passionate heat was viscerally explosive to me, helping to make the Harlem Renaissance, with its seeds of sexual unrest and free thought, the most brilliantly actualized time period for African American culture ever. That same year Emmy award-winning director Marlon T. Riggs released his seminal work Tongues Untied. Then came the often lauded but later maligned (and always controversial) Paris is Burning. Though powerful pieces on the unique experiences of gay black culture, these were still semi-documentary in nature. Where was the fictional fire white gays had expressed on film for years as in such movies as Boys in the Band and Making Love? Hell, even Al Pacino had a piece, albeit trannified, of manflesh in Dog Day Afternoon.
Then came Punks in 2000. Patrik-Ian Polk’s groundbreaking and well-received debut film followed the lives of four friends navigating the harsh waters of the gay Los Angeles social scene. With one night stands gone wrong, hot boyfriends, cheeky dialogue and steamy boy-to-boy action, this movie unfurled the reality of gay black men as something other than comedic props. Now, some may have a problem digesting the notion of effeminate or soft men being submissive bottoms or the whole gay-man-in-love-with-a-straight-man thing, but at the very least there were naked black men on screen and no triple-X rating to be found anywhere. The Harlem Renaissance was revisited in 2004 in Rodney Evans’ film Brother to Brother (with early film work by Anthony Mackie and Daniel Sunjata). And in 2006, African filmmaker Adaora Nwandu brought the beautiful love story of Raymond and Tagbo (Daniel Parsons and Adedamola Adelaja) to the screen in her movie Rag Tag. This small poignant film built a powerful story of taboo love in the context of homophobic West Indian and Nigerian cultures in London while also including the complexities of modern day class warfare (one young man was rich, the other poor). The film presented a star-crossed love story of Shakespearean proportions.
Since those times, being young and gay has blossomed, to a certain extent, on the small screen, setting aside the apparent white washing of Queer as Folk (read my post on that here). For a few years now, cable television has begun to showcase stories of gay black sexuality, from the series Noah’s Arc to the DL Chronicles; the movie Ski Trip to characters Omar Little on The Wire and Omar on Single Ladies; and independent shorts like Slow by Darius Clark Monroe. Now there is always a need for more representation. In comparison to the more established white gay community there is tons more work needing to be offered but with the Internet there a greater opportunity such as the web series Drama Queenz to take hold. And, yes, Hollywood Montrose is still alive (but not eating jelly donuts; think of the all those carbs), in the form of Lafayette Reynolds on the hit HBO series True Blood. With Covergirl eyelashes and a tongue so sharp it can cut steel, Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) cuts a mighty figure as Bon Temps local Satyr. He is in full command of his sexuality. Giving off a humidity that viewers can feel, he has become the show's most popular character and thank God he (nor the writers/ creators/ producers of the show) are afraid of sex. In season 4 of the series he even gets a loving boyfriend. And though Lafayette stabed poor Jesus to death while possessed by Harry Potter's demented aunt in the season 4 finale; we still have hope that there'll be another cute boy for Mr. Reynolds' enjoyment next season. Being a medium Lafayette can maybe channel the ghosts of Barca and Pietros—the gay gladiatorial beast and his companion who died in Spartcus: Blood and Sand. Thankfully this time around none of their deaths had anything to do with their life-styles. Which gives us some optimism that one day soon, black gay men will never have to hear another jelly donut call his name.
adaptation of Stieg Larsson's massive worldwide bestselling book by the same name. Daniel Craig, getting back to serious acting after fighting Bond villains and aliens, plays disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist. After loosing a very public court case that costs him his life's saving and freedom Blomkvist is man without a plan. He is contacted by a lawyer on behalf of aging industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to write his memoirs. After being summoned the Vanger family compound on a remote island 4-hours from his posh digs in Stockholm, Blomkvist learns the real reason he's there. Henrik wants him to solve the 40 year-old disappearance of his favorite niece Harriet. This embroils Blomkvist into the dark, nefarious and often depraved entrails of the Vanger family empire. A group of "Thieves, misers and bullies. A detestable collection of people. My family." as Henrik describes his own kin.
