Thanks for hanging in there while I’ve been busy with a family situation. Next week I’ll return with some new reviews.
We live in an increasingly digital world, but one of my enduring traditions is to set aside a little cash each month so I can splurge on physical media, particularly DVDs and Blu-rays, during holiday sales. Here’s my 2022 haul, which was split between Kino Lorber Classics and Vinegar Syndrome.
With the exception of Patty Hearst, the Vinegar Syndrome titles generally aren’t the sort I’ll rewatch, unlike the Kino Lorber releases. But I’m pleased to help support the preservation of forgotten and overlooked gay and lesbian cinema in some small way. And I was particularly tickled to find Halsted represented. An iconoclastic gay pornographer and enthusiastic sadist, his pioneering early works were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. After viewing one of his films, Salvador Dalí allegedly muttered “new information for me,” a commentary I hope to one day echo in a review of a Lifetime movie.
I have no connection to Kino Lorber or Vinegar Syndrome and earn no commissions from purchases made at either site. Prices are higher now, post-sale, but if you monitor Kino Lorber’s website you can periodically score great films for $10 (or less) apiece.
Julie Depardieu tends to Quentin Dubuis in A Secret
I don’t recommend you seek out Claude Miller’s Holocaust drama A Secret for its lesbian content, which is virtually nil, or for any other reason. The story of François, a young French boy who was born to Jewish parents in the 1940s and spent his childhood convinced he was competing against a “phantom brother,” it’s a handsomely made film that shows little interest in most of its characters (when Ludivine Sagnier hardly registers as a presence in a film, you know something isn’t right) or, ultimately, anything that happened to them. (It also skips between the ’40s and ’50s and the 1980s somewhat hokily; the black and white scenes with Mathieu Amalric as the adult François are nice to look—until they take on the appearance of perfume ads, with matching emotional depth.)
But one of its characters is a lesbian, which I hadn’t seen mentioned in any of the reviews I read prior to renting it, so I thought I’d mention it here for those of you who keep tabs on these things. That character, Louise (played winningly by Julie Depardieu), a massage therapist and long-time friend of François’ family, is in some ways the emotional heart of the film: It is Louise, not his mother, who François runs to for comfort in times of distress, and it is Louise who eventually answers his questions about the past.
Not much is made of her orientation, which is first hinted at when a 7-year-old François asks why she doesn’t have a husband and her response suggests she’d simply have no use for one; in a later scene that serves no purpose other than to illustrate that she does have a personal life, she greets a smiling female acquaintance on the street and leads her into her apartment. (She also, in a minor but noticeable touch, sometimes wears pants while the women around her are in dresses.) Louise’s defining moment comes during a heated exchange with Esther, a character who believes the husband of a woman who was taken away by the Germans is cheating on his absent wife:
Esther: Doesn’t it make you sick?
Louise: I’ve seen worse.
Esther: You say that because you also…
Louise: Go on, say it. I also think Tania’s desirable? It’s true. She’s beautiful and desirable.
Esther: So you excuse them?
Louise: No, I just don’t judge them.
Louise is able to calm Esther; her gentleness and pragmatism has that effect on everyone. She is an interesting supporting character who would have been even more interesting in a better movie.
How is it possible that Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, which first came out on DVD in the U.S. 10 years ago, hasn’t been re-released with an anamorphically enhanced transfer? When I’m watching glam rockers played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor paw at each other, it should go without saying that I want to see it in all its widescreen glory, dammit!
I felt cheated when I rented Goldmine last night (having wrongly assumed the DVD had been upgraded somewhere along the line) and was treated to such a shoddy transfer. Miramax would never neglect a Kevin Smith movie like this, and Kevin Smith movies tend to majorly suck. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you, and I’d call shenanigans if I knew shenanigans’ phone number.
Woody Allen and Tony Roberts never filmed a scene like this.
Shame on you, Allan Stewart Konigsberg, for being so stingy with the Scarlett Johansson/Penélope Cruz scenes in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Don’t get me wrong, the movie was good, your best since Sweet and Lowdown. It’s just that a lot of us are still upset about Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream, and you could have tried a little harder to make it up to us.
Reunited: The stars of Double Indemnity, minus Edward G. Robinson
Criterion will release a 2-disc edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession tomorrow, which is all well and good (it’s been years since Criterion released All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind), but when is somebody — anybody — going to release There’s Always Tomorrow on DVD? It’s a Sirk film I’ve read wonderful things about but have never been able to see, and some of its posters (not the one pictured above, obviously) bore the tagline: “The dangerous years are those married years…When love is taken for granted!” How can you not release a movie with a tagline like that on DVD? Especially when it stars Barbara Stanwyck! That’s just criminal.
BTW, for anyone who finds this while searching the internet for information about a There’s Always Tomorrow DVD release, the film is currently available as part of Sirk collections that can be purchased from stores in France or Germany. But before you go looking either of them up on Amazon.fr or Amazon.de, make sure the discs are compatible with your viewing equipment. And note that neither comes with attractive artwork, which is just a slap in the face when you consider the cost of each set in U.S. dollars.
Eva Mendes silently wonders, “What did Meg do to her face?!”
OK, so the movie isn’t particularly good. But it isn’t as bad as many critics made it out to be, mostly because Annette Bening and Jada Pinkett Smith can make anything watchable. It isn’t something I’d recommend to everybody, but for a certain segment of its potential audience (and by certain I mean lecherous), well, I think the screen grab speaks for itself.
The best new DVD release of the week is only slightly new, but it’s so good that it’s worth pointing out to anyone who missed it the first time around: Warner Brothers has re-bundled their two-year-old Val Lewton Collection with the new documentary Martin Scorsese Presents Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, which recently debuted on TCM and will also be available separately.
For those of you with one-track minds, lesbian subtext found its way into several Lewton movies (he was Alla Nazimova’s nephew, after all), most memorably 1943’s The Seventh Victim, but what makes this set so remarkable is that it gives fans an opportunity to appreciate the scope of Lewton’s visionary ability to recognize directorial talent and emphasize psychological horror in response to budget constraints. Also, Simone Simon was the hottest “cat woman” ever, until Michelle Pfeiffer came along.
If you think my eyes are distracting, wait until you hear my accent.
Also new on DVD:
Glenn Close fans can gorge themselves on 500+ minutes of her new FX series, Damages, as the complete first season makes its way to DVD. Rose Byrne, Ted Danson and Tate Donovan costar.
Sophia Loren is reliably gorgeous in El Cid, which gets the 2-Disc Deluxe Edition treatment, but you’ll also have to sit through two hours of Charlton Heston.
If you’re so inclined, you can relive Groundhog Day over and over (and over) again, this time with a Special 15th Anniversary Edition release.
Spellbound documentarian Jeffrey Blitz focuses on nerdy kids again, this time in an acclaimed fictional film, Rocket Science.
Mary McCormack, who played Nia Long’s partner in The Broken Hearts Club, stars in Right at Your Door, a thriller about dirty bombs in Los Angeles that is bound to make you queasy.
This week’s new DVD releases don’t quite rival last week’s offerings in the lesbian interest department, but then January is usually a weak month for DVDs in general. My top pick, less for its not so considerable gay content than for its historical importance, is She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s first feature-length film.
Controversial upon its 1986 release for its matter-of-fact treatment of female protagonist Nola’s healthy sex life—she spends the movie juggling three (male) lovers—She’s Gotta Have It launched Lee’s career into the stratosphere and made his fictional alter-ego, Mars Blackmon, a pop culture icon. Through the supporting character of Opal Gilstrap (yes, strap), a somewhat predatory friend of Nola’s played by Raye Dowell, it also provided an early insight into Lee’s views on lesbianism, views that were made abundantly clear 18 years later in She Hate Me.
More Tuesday releases of note:
“I wonder if Randy remembered to turn off the stove.”
Fox triple-dips with the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr weeper An Affair to Remember, this time commemorated in a 50th Anniversary Edition, while MGM goes for the double-dip with Norman Jewison’s Sidney Poitier/Rod Steiger classic In the Heat of the Night, which gets the 40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition treatment.
Fingersmith star Sally Hawkins stars in a Masterpiece Theatre production of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Wanda Sykes makes the occasional guest appearance on the first season of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine.
Alex Haley’s “Queen“, the 1993 miniseries that starred Halle Berry and has an excellent supporting cast too large to mention here, joins Roots on DVD.
Mariel Hemingway prepares for a long career of playing lesbian characters.
Get your Netflix queues in order, because a landmark lesbian movie finally makes it to DVD tomorrow as Warner Brothers releases Robert Towne’s Personal Best.Starring Mariel Hemingway as Chris Cahill, a young Olympic hopeful who becomes involved with a fellow athlete played by real-life track star Patrice Donnelly, the film was celebrated by Pauline Kael at the time of its release in a manner normally reserved for works by Altman, Bertolucci and De Palma.Of Towne’s accomplishment, she marveled:
When he shows Chris and the other heroine arm-wrestling, he concentrates on their throbbing veins and their sinews and how the muscles play off one another. He breaks down athletic events into specific details; you watch the athletes’ calves or some other part of them, and you get an exact sense of how their bodies work—it’s sensual and sexual, and it’s informative, too. The film celebrates women’s bodies without turning them into objects; it turns them into bodies. There’s an undercurrent of flabbergasted awe. Everything in the movie is physically charged.
pauline kael, personal best review
Her gushing lasts a full four pages, ending with something I could have told her by the time I was twelve:
Watching this movie, you feel that you really can learn something essential about girls from looking at their thighs.
While Personal Best attained cult status, it made only $5.6 million at the box office in 1982, the same year another groundbreaking gay movie, the Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin romance Making Love, grossed $11.8 million.More than 25 years later, both films can be found on Box Office Mojo’s list of the 100 highest-grossing gay movies since 1980, a sad reminder that LGBT films have yet to enter the mainstream at American movie theaters.
The DVD, which currently has a pre-order price of $13.99 at Amazon, will include an audio commentary by Robert Towne and actor Scott Glenn. You can read Roger Ebert’s original four-star review at his website.
More Tuesday releases of note:
“Well, I was known for doing a certain thing that many of the other girls wouldn’t do.”
Jane Lynch, one of the greatest lesbians in the history of the world (pictured above in A Mighty Wind), appears in Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face, a comedy starring Anna Faris. As an added bonus, here’s a clip of Lynch performing the Guatemalan love song from The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Holland Taylor and honorary gay Jon Cryer (don’t try to argue, you know Duckie was a lesbian) star in the second season of Two and a Half Men, a sitcom I’m largely unfamiliar with, though I know it features Melanie Lynskey of Heavenly Creatures in a supporting role.
Ellen Corby and Will Geer do the Ma and Pa Kettle thing in the sixth season of The Waltons.
Eddie Izzard, everyone’s favorite transvestite comedian, stars in the first season of The Riches, an FX series that costars Minnie Driver.
“Why does everyone think we’re gay?” a despondent Cary Grant asks Katharine Hepburn.
Republic Pictures has assembled an underwhelming Cary Grant box set that collects Indiscreet, Operation Petticoat, The Grass is Greener, and That Touch of Mink. Operation Petticoat, directed by Blake Edwards, is notable for pairing Grant with Tony Curtis, who mimicked him a year later in Some Like It Hot. That Touch of Mink, a romance with Doris Day, contains a dated, allegedly comic subplot with Gig Young, who is mistaken for homosexual.
Russell Crowe, the Oscar-winning actor, concierge-hating karate master, and noted Jodie Foster hag, stars in 3:10 to Yuma, James Mangold’s acclaimed remake of the Delmar Daves western classic. American Psycho alum turned Dark Knight Christian Bale costars.
For the Jake Gyllenhaal fans who will inevitably stumble upon this page while scouring the Internet for evidence of his lesbianism, Paramount double-dips with a Zodiac 2-Disc Director’s Cut. I’m not easily scared by movies—that’s what happens when your brother forces you to endure repeated viewing of Jerry Lewis flicks as a child—but will admit that I was jumpy for a good two days after seeing Zodiac. If you ever want me to kick you in the crotch, just sneak up on me while playing “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”
Finally, for the size queens among us, the same company that’s releasing the Beverly Hillbillies set has put together a Milton Berle collection. I’m not bothering with a link because Milton Berle was rude to RuPaul. If he didn’t like a 6’7″ drag queen, he wouldn’t like the rest of us either.
