Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Author: Cranky Lesbian Page 13 of 54

Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.

Golden Girls Programming Note & Other Loose Ends

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On August 17, 2022

In Housekeeping

Provisions.

The next Golden Girls recap is long overdue and will be posted within the next day or two. Initially the delay was due to medical appointments, but then there was a technical issue pertaining to the Friends of Dorothy Z. page. That’s temporarily resolved for now but might require more fiddling in the future.

[UPDATE: Here’s the recap.]

While dealing with that situation, I did other behind-the-scenes tasks, including image optimization and finally redoing the screen caps on some older reviews. Ebbie, My First Love and Just Between Friends are among the pages that were fixed, all from a period where I had two computer failures in quick succession that left me without decent images for those films.

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Shut Up and Deal

By

On August 12, 2022

In Oh No!

I was high as a kite on morphine when Dan Quayle walked into the room during my strangest childhood hospitalization. It was a campaign stop in the waning weeks of the Vice President’s failed 1992 bid for reelection, and through some misfortune I’d been selected as one of the sick kids he’d visit. I wasn’t capable of having a coherent conversation then, but was vaguely aware of the nursing staff’s excitement and my parents’ pride at being photographed with him. My only specific memory of our encounter was that he drummed his fingers (boredly? anxiously?) on my bedside railing while awaiting the camera’s flash.

A package later arrived containing two copies of the photo, one autographed, and a tiny basketball bearing a stamp with his name on it (or was it his wife’s?). It fit perfectly atop the empty bottom-half of a pink Bubble Tape container, where it sat on my childhood desk until I couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. There were other curiosities in my collection of hospital ephemera: the pillow I clutched to my stomach when I coughed and sneezed post-surgery; the “fun,” brightly colored breathing toy the respiratory therapist taught me to use. None annoyed me as much as the ball or ghoulish photo.

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Heaven Must’ve Sent Lamont Dozier

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On August 9, 2022

In Obituaries

Click for Bonnie Pointer’s “Heaven Must Have Sent You” performance on YouTube (opens new tab).

I don’t write much about my Motown fanaticism, but my music library tells the tale. And much of that magic was supplied by the brilliant songwriting team known as “HDH,” Holland-Dozier-Holland. Dozier’s son announced his death on Instagram today.

If you’re a fan of The Four Tops in particular (I’ll resist making jokes, just this once), you’re a fan of HDH. If you love the Coen Brothers, you’re likely also an admirer of Dozier’s—it’s hard to imagine Blood Simple without “It’s the Same Old Song.”

Dozier published a book a few years ago, How Sweet It Is: A Songwriter’s Reflections on Music, Motown and the Mystery of the Muse. Super-fans who’ve not yet read it should head to the library today. His music is ours to love forever, no “guessing” about it.

RELATED: Lamont Dozier, Motown Songwriter Behind Countless Classics, Dead at 81

Before and After: Patty Duke’s Diet Mania

By

On August 8, 2022

In TV Movies

“I am so f*cking sick of salad.”

If you’ve ever longed to watch Patty Duke eat depressing amounts of cottage cheese and engage in comic pratfalls while exercising, rejoice! (Hey, it’s preferable to the child abuse in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.) Before and After, a 1979 telefilm about a woman who had the audacity to gain 20 pounds, delivers all that and more. First, you’ll want to prepare yourself mentally—I found it helpful to take a deep breath and contemplate how much worse it might’ve been if not written and directed by women.

Once you’ve done that (and perhaps hidden any sharp objects that normally rest nearby), grab a cake pop, as I did, and gather ’round the TV. If you’re open to the experience, you might laugh as Duke pays homage to Rocky by training in gray sweats and punching dead chickens. You may cry as her mother sabotages her progress and her smarmy husband calls her fat. And you’ll definitely check your pulse to make sure you haven’t died when special guest star Betty White heaps scorn and humiliation on underperforming weight-loss group participants.

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Poison Ivy: Cheap Lesbian Thrills in (Mostly) Straight Packaging

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On August 5, 2022

In '90s Films

Drew Barrymore is a teenage femme fatale in Poison Ivy.

If you were a young lesbian in the mid-’90s and your parents had cable, you were most likely aware of Poison Ivy. It was the perfect tawdry late-night fare, with a little something for everyone. Your more lascivious straight guys were there, of course, for the lurid sexual content featuring a jailbait antagonist. For everyone else, you had Drew Barrymore’s delightfully perverse machinations and Cheryl Ladd as an emphysema patient dying an unusually glamorous death.

Lesbian overtones (and lip locks) shared by Barrymore and Sara Gilbert were an added bonus for gay adolescents like myself. It wasn’t as titillating as the Aerosmith video with Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler (back then, few things were), or romantic like Fried Green Tomatoes. But its legend was burnished by two simple things: Gilbert, we already sensed, was one of us. And Barrymore was widely rumored to be bisexual. In that prehistoric pre-“Puppy Episode” era, you had to take what you could get.

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A Brief Conversational Detour About Sheree North’s Face

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On August 3, 2022

In Oh No!

Sheree North and Ed Asner on The Mary Tyler Moore Show

This is a detour from the Golden Girls: “Transplant” recap. (Sheree North guest stars as Blanche’s sister in that episode.) It’s about the time I got a little too Lou Grant-ish while unwittingly close to death.

Sheree North is one of those actors, like John Schuck, who lingers in my memory for medical reasons. On a Sunday morning only eight days into 2017, I was sitting on the couch with my wife (then-fiancée), watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was one of the episodes in which North appeared as Charlene, Lou Grant’s lounge singer girlfriend.

Normally I would’ve been alone for most of a Sunday, so it was fortuitous that my wife noticed something was ‘off’ about me and chose to stay nearby. This was during a time when it took some effort to keep me out of the hospital. I was having a Crohn’s flare and my hapless doctor, who was soon to be replaced by someone more competent, was in over her head. My potassium kept falling into the twos.

All I remember about that MTM episode, whichever one it was, was that I simply couldn’t keep up with it. I had no idea what was happening and couldn’t quite focus on North’s face. That was odd, because I normally had a bit of a crush on her wisecracking Charlene. Several times, my wife looked at me and asked if I was OK. Several times, I stubbornly insisted I was fine. She didn’t believe me.

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The Golden Girls: “Transplant” Episode Recap

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On August 1, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

It’s fair to say The Golden Girls was more a celebration of chosen-family sisterhood than its nuclear-family counterpart. Every last one of the girls had a contentious relationship with a sister, from Dorothy and Gloria sparring over Sophia and Stan, to Sophia’s long-running, nonsensical feud with Angela. (The less said about Angela, the better. Nancy Walker’s so hammy in the role that she belonged in a supermarket deli.)

Rose’s moment came in “Little Sister” (S4E21), when the admittedly annoying Holly (Inga Swenson) paid a visit. “God, I hate this woman!” Rose exclaimed when she arrived. Her enmity toward Holly is hard to forget during “Transplant” (S1E4), which establishes Blanche’s rivalry with younger sister Virginia (Sheree North). The episode begins with Blanche obsessively tidying an already clean house. “God, I wish she wasn’t coming. I just hate her,” she complains to an incredulous Rose.

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Just the Way You Are: A Different Kind of Comedy

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On July 29, 2022

In '80s Movies

Kristy McNichol disguises her handicap in Just the Way You Are.

“Don’t you sometimes wish you could just meet someone who’d carry you off and take care of you?” Susan Berlanger (Kristy McNichol) asks her friend Lisa (Kaki Hunter) in the opening moments of Just the Way You Are (1984). It’s a funny sentiment coming from a character so ambivalent about all the amorous attention she attracts wherever she goes.

Susan, a flautist about to embark on her first recital tour in Europe, is catnip to men. Her quick wit, adversarial posturing, dazzling smile and structurally complex hair even win admirers over the phone. Jack (Lance Guest of Please Mom, Don’t Hit Me), an answering service operator, is so smitten that he knocks on her door in a gorilla suit. He scampers away just as quickly after noticing her leg brace.

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The Golden Girls: “Rose the Prude” Episode Recap

By

On July 27, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

Betty White in a scene from “Rose the Prude.”

“Rose the Prude” (S1E03) is a bit of a clunky effort, beginning with its not entirely accurate title. (Rose is less prudish than reserved.) Not only do Dorothy and Blanche steal the spotlight in what is ostensibly the first Rose-centric episode of the series, the St. Olaf native treads similar thematic ground to more humorous effect just 12 episodes later, in “In a Bed of Rose’s” (S1E15). The subject matter is sex, which Rose hasn’t had since her husband, Charlie, died.

As the episode begins, Blanche is looking for help in salvaging a double-date. “Thanks for asking, but I don’t think so. I’m not that interested in dating anymore,” Rose tells her. Blanche isn’t buying it: “Now you know that’s not true, honey, or you’d let your hair go natural.” Rose looks annoyed in response and muses, “You know what my problem really is? I’m spoiled. I had a long and wonderful marriage with a perfect man. Everyone seems so ordinary after Charlie.”

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Celebrating A Smoky Mountain (Lesbian) Christmas

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On July 25, 2022

In TV Movies

Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain wig is a precious gift to viewers.

Note: This review was written for a subset of gay Parton fans who will understand its jokes. If you don’t belong to that group and take any of this seriously enough to leave bigoted comments — which curiously wasn’t a problem in 2022 or 2023 but has been in late 2024 — they’ll be automatically deleted.

“A film that defies both description and sobriety, you either understand its brilliance or you don’t—it’s the El Topo of made-for-TV movies.” That’s how I described A Smoky Mountain Christmas when Bo Hopkins died earlier this year. But I left out another, more controversial opinion: It’s also a psychosexual lesbian Christmas drama for the whole family.

The peanut butter to Kenny Rogers’ Six Pack jelly, this Henry Winkler-directed 1986 made-for-TV musical holiday fantasy begins with Parton’s voice-over narration. “Once upon a time, and not too long ago, a princess lived in a beautiful castle, built upon a grassy green hill. People thought she had everything. They envied her talent, her fame and fortune—and her special relationship with longtime gal pal Judy Ogle. And they said her spirit could light up the darkest corners of any heart.”

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