Filed under: gay, movies | Tags: a single man, julianne moore, pandering to the gays, the gays, tom ford
(Or, Matthew watched another movie.)
In theory, I hate A Single Man. I hate it because it’s just further proof Hollywood won’t make a movie about gay people unless it’s completely fucking costumey. The film is set in 1962, which we know because it looks like 1962 and has cars from 1962 and people dress like it’s 1962 and read Aldous Huxley and Truman Capote like it’s 1962 and talk to each other with the formality of 1962 and also the perfect American family lives next door like it’s 1962. (Of course, even though we only see them very briefly, we learn that the marriage next door is completely loveless, because that is the secret behind all married couples in movies set in 1962.) When a voice on the radio starts talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, you kind of want to start yelling at the screen. “What kind of movie are you trying to make here, Tom Ford? Forrest Gump 2?” That is what you want to yell.
Maybe it pisses me off because movies about gay people that aren’t treated as period dramas–this one, say–end up in distribution limbo for years while studios fight about whether or not people can stomach well-known Hollywood actors kissing on-screen. And maybe it pisses me off because when A Single Man came out, Julianne Moore’s character was pushed in previews as a lead who shares a bedpillow with Colin Firth’s homo English professor, when in the film they’re on separate throw pillows in the living room and actually she’s not even in the movie a whole lot.
But.
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Last night, on a whim, I rented Terribly Happy, the new-to-DVD Danish thriller starring Jakob Cedergren as Robert, a Copenhagen cop who suddenly finds himself in a creepy rural town where the locals don’t take kindly to strangers. People in the (I think) unnamed town vanish a lot, but folks don’t seem to think that mysterious disappearances are the business of outsiders. In fact, the only person who warms up to Robert is Ingelise, a pretty blonde loner who probably has the most secrets of anybody. If the premise sounds a little bit like The Wicker Man, that’s because it is, sort of. But it’s also a dark thriller about small towns, and about the consequences of female sexuality in a backwoods town.
Director Henrik Ruben Genz takes most of his thematic cues from David Lynch and the Coen Brothers. Leading man Robert is, like all Coen Brothers anti-heroes, a little dopey, a little over his head and a little too eager to resort to violence. Ingelise is reminiscent of Isabella Rosselini’s character in Blue Velvet, and her roughneck cowboy husband could have stepped out of Wild At Heart or Mulholland Drive. (Obviously not everyone makes it through the film alive.)
I love this song. Shelley Duvall sings it about Robin Williams’ title character in Robert Altman’s Popeye, but I didn’t remember the song until it reappeared over twenty years later in Punch-Drunk Love, the misunderstood, depressing drama by Altman aficionado Paul Thomas Anderson.
But that’s not why I love Shelley Duvall. For that we need to go back.
I’m nine years old and watching the Disney Channel, and the most AMAZING movie ever comes on. It stars Debbie Harry, Cyndi Lauper, Cheech Marin, Bobby Brown, Ben Vereen, Howie Mandel, Pia Zadora, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Teri Garr, Katey Segal, Woody Harrelson, and Charlie from Empty Nest, among others. It is really weird! It’s called Mother Goose Rock and Rhyme, and it is truly a thing to behold. I taped it off the television and watched it constantly. The Disney Channel original movie was put together by Duvall, who turns sixty-one today and who played Little Bo Peep in the film.
Filed under: art, books, gay, heterosexuals, movies, music, tv | Tags: blondes, cookie crisp, evelyn everlady, fashion, film critics, henning mankell, idaho, israel, kylie minogue, latvia, michelle tea, moscow, negroni season, pigpiles, pride, pro-life, sex and the city 2, sugar
Hundreds of blonde Latvian women are marching through Riga in order to boost national morale. No, really.
For the first time, gay activists staged a Pride event in Moscow that was free of police intervention.
The new Kylie Minogue video is a little too silly for my taste — as is the song, although that could always change — but what I really want to see is the outtakes where people fall from the pile and dancers accidentally whack each other in the face.
An Idaho strawberry farmer and father of fifteen has legally changed his name to Pro-Life and now he is running for governor.
Henning Mankell, the Swedish mystery novelist I was told I’d love but who I’ve yet to really get into, isn’t appearing at the Hay literary festival in Wales right now because he’s being detained by Israelis.
One cherry lemonade from Auntie Anne’s has as much sugar as 11 bowls of Cookie Crisp. Articles about calories and sugar never really mean much to me, but holy crap, that’s a lot of sugar.
If I had more time I’d write an essay about male and female film critics and their seemingly universal hatred of women over forty having sex drives. Also their need to constantly refer to the characters in this franchise as gay men. This is but one of approximately 10,000 such articles written in the past week and a half.
Michelle Tea is fashion blogging?!?!
Finally, nothing has made me happier this week than this story about how Negroni Season is a concept that only a boozehound whore would come up with.
[image: Patti Smith, from Michelle Tea's essay on Just Kids and Ann DeMeulemeester.]
Filed under: hookers, movies, music, not hot, tv | Tags: batman, hip-hop, jean boullet, lost, macgruber, maria mosterd, mtv, porn, rj berger, the netherlands, viral campaigns
Maria Mosterd, the Dutch teen who wrote the book about being forced into prostitution at the age of twelve, may have made the whole thing up, after someone questioned why the girl and her mother would sue the girl’s school but not anybody else.
The MacGruber movie opened this week, preceded by the “leak” of some “modeling photos” that show the character with a poorly Photoshopped micropenis. Because male bodies are automatically hilarious, especially if they’re hairy!
A brief history of Batman-themed porn movies.
MTV’s new comedy series about big-dicked teen RJ Berger got written up in the Times this week.
Every single shirtless scene on Lost, which is not that many?
The fifty greatest samples in hip-hop history. I’ve had this open in my browser for weeks now.
[Image: Jean Boullet (1921-1970), via Les Ombres Part Deux]
Filed under: art, books, gay, heterosexuals, in praise of athletic beauty, magazines, movies, music | Tags: bears, Boston, cool bear, country music, diesel washington, edgar awards, forget it it's a mystery, interracial porn, levi johnston, movies, playgirl, the gays, twitter
The first openly gay country singer? Maybe Billboard should try fact-checking?
A graphical guide to bear types.
This Levi Johnston porn trailer–which is not exactly new, but I’m not actually that up on current gay porn right now–looks okay enough, but the trailer is really worth watching for the words “I think I’m gonna give you something to Twitter about.”
Porn star Diesel Washington has a problem with porn being advertised as “interracial.” I’d like to know more about that.
The Edgar Awards were recently given out this week.
Larry King’s kids’ baseball coach–the one his wife was sleeping with–wants to be in Playgirl. This is not news, but I thought I’d mention it because he’s actually maybe kinda photogenic?
The Boston LGBT Film Festival‘s going on right now.
[painting by Alessio, via Cool Bear]
Filed under: art, heterosexuals, in praise of athletic beauty, movies, porn, tv | Tags: 10 rillington place, ashley dupre, cristiano ronaldo, jon gosselin, kick-ass, playboy, playgirl, prostution, roger ebert, serial killers, size queens
The Mirror on the first serial sex killer, which was apparently only half a century ago.
Is this month’s Playboy more feminist than usual? No, of course not, but one HuffPo writer points out the difference between women getting paid to be in the magazine and women not getting paid for having their pictures unwillingly passed all over the internet.
A so-called “fat girl” was hired to sleep with soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo and then talk about it. And she did. The Frisky points out that she’s not actually fat and also that this is a weird thing.
This is apparently my week for getting news from editorial warehouses that I never read. Here’s someone at Gather making fun of Roger Ebert for not liking Kick-Ass.
In another one of those “people pretending that an offer to do soft porn is a news story” items, Daniel Nardicio has offered Jon Gosselin $20K to do Playgirl, which is a lot less than he offered Levi Johnston. Nardicio said in a statement that Gosselin’s not very attractive and probably won’t do it, so of course people are pretending it’s a story.
Speaking of Jon Gosselin (for probably the only time ever on this blog), Hailey Whateverthehell posted a photo of a 2-inch penis on Twitter the other day, claiming it was his, because she is a classy person and that is what classy people do. I would like to point out that, no matter how small Gosselin’s penis is, he still managed to father eight children.
[image: Terry Fincher, Rillington Place, 1966, via Britmovie.co.uk]
Filed under: art, books, gay, movies, music, porn | Tags: ao scott, blur, bottle girls, cartoonists, criticism, cruising, david bowie, jens lekman, killjoy, ladies, magazines, malaysia, new york, pinups, record store day, service records, sex toys, sex work, the gays, united russia
New York‘s bottle girl feature is long, but it’s also… something.
I feel like there’s a lot of backstory you need to know before reading this story about sex toys being illicitly sold by Malaysian students. But it’s also a pretty good read even if you don’t, in the way that foreign news items often are, though partly because the writers repeatedly uses the word “gadgets” to talk about the toys.
Amazing photos of New York’s cruisy piers, circa 1982.
Service Records–home of Le Sport and the Embassy, among others–is streaming their entire catalog online. I’m not sure how long they’ve been doing that for, but I just found out the other day.
Next week Blur release their first single in seven years, in honor of Record Store Day.
If you’re looking to read some lady cartoonists, there’s two lists in this interview that are so lengthy your head will surely start spinning in confusion about where to start.
After reading approximately 20,000 articles about the supposed death of criticism, it’s nice to hear someone–in this case New York Times film critic AO Scott–bring up the counterpoint that everyone else is wrong.
David Bowie featured in a nine-story ad asking why ballet dancers and gays were supporting Putin? Sort of, actually.
Porny gay blogs you might want to read: Killjoy.
Finally, a new interview with Christopher Schulz from Pinups magazine.
Filed under: hookers, movies | Tags: amanda seyfried, call girls, chloe, julianne moore, liam neeson, people who live in glass houses
Toronto gynecologist Catherine deals with sex all day. She explains to her patients that orgasms are just simple muscle contractions, watches her husband flirt with waitresses, sits through dinners with a gropy colleagues getting moony with his much younger girlfriend, endures a game of “spot the hooker,” and wakes up in the morning to the sight of a girl in her underwear sneaking out of her son’s bedroom.
She’s surrounded by sex. But she’s not actually having any of it herself. She’s been married for twenty-five years, and she and her husband have lost what they once had. Her husband David, a musicologist played by Liam Neeson, lectures an auditorium of mostly female students about Don Juan, and in return they ask him out to dinner. He receives suggestive text messages, misses flights and hits the F11 key to hide IM chats with co-eds whenever his wife walks in the room. She gets suspicious.
Filed under: gay, heterosexuals, hookers, hot, internet, magazines, movies, music, people from rhode island, Uncategorized | Tags: "guys", airports, anomie, billy miller, brown sex week, brown university, child porn, craziness, critics, full-body scanners, hookers, julianne moore, music videos, patrick kennedy, personal freedom, providence, sexting, stock photos, straight to hell, ted kennedy, twitter, xiu xiu
You should not hire a hooker to tease your husband and see if he is going to sleep with her. This is a fact because Julianne Moore says so and she is brilliant and also has amazing hair.
People are finally willing to admit that sexting is not the same as child porn. Surprisingly, it was Floridians that decided we maybe shouldn’t be treating teenagers as lifetime sex offenders.
Full-body airport scanners have been in UK airports for a month and already airport employees are being reprimanded for misusing them. There’s a lot going on here–the idea that airport scans are sexual is sort of insane to begin with, but it’s also odd that the public is subjected to them without question and an airport employee snapped going through one feels so violated that she can’t return to work.
I somehow missed that there’s an interview with Billy Miller in the new-ish issue of Unzipped. Billy’s the editor of Straight To Hell, and he also did No Milk Today and When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, all of which are really cool publications. I’ve actually met him briefly a couple of times now and he seems pretty nice, too, although I don’t think he ended up using the filthy story I sent him for Straight To Hell that one time (hmmph).
The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity–the website with the tagline Ideas Without Labels–has discovered Brown’s Sex Week and decided to behave like Bill O’Reilly about it. A little further probing reveals that the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity is mostly just one angry Brown grad who attends a lot of events at Brown and then complains about them afterwards. Still, there’s some kind of “advisory board” which includes Providence’s current Republican candidate for mayor, so, I don’t know, make of that what you will.
Imagine if every essay about Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video was about a different video instead? Like the new Cate Le Bon video with the horse skull wrapped in bacon? Or maybe the one for Xiu Xiu’s “Dear God, I Hate Myself,” where Angela Seo throws up a lot and Jamie Stewart manages to come off as even more of a hateful prat than usual?
Providence is the third-craziest metropolitan area in the US, and this Providence Journal writer would like to do his part to demonstrate that. (Dude. Calm down. East Providence is part of the Providence metropolitan area.)
Rhode Island representative Patrick Kennedy left a note on his dad Ted Kennedy’s grave saying “Dad, the business is done.” At first I thought that meant maybe he had somebody killed and thrown in a river, because that’s what phrases like “the business is done” sound like to me, but I guess he was talking about the health care bill. Whoops!
This article about Twitter and Yelp and the death of criticism makes me wonder once again whether anyone realizes that people have always trusted the opinions of their friends. And that if you’re in a new city and looking for somewhere to eat, of course you’re going to ask the internet rather than dredging up old newspaper reviews. And people that read what critics thought before are still reading what critics think; they just have a choice of critics to choose from.
Are we lost in personal freedom with no norms to cling to or rebel against? I’m inclined to say no, that makes no sense, but this is sort of worth reading, anyway, maybe.
