“Tell Godard I’d love to work with him but I have a prior engagement.”
From a Haaretz interview with actress Jeanne Moreau in support of her latest film, One Day You’ll Understand, a partial list of directors she has worked with in the almost 60 years she has been making movies:Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Louis Malle, Jacques Demy, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Amos Gitai.
No Michael Bays (though she has worked with Luc Besson) or Ron Howards or anything of the sort. It’s enough to send a thrill up your leg, as Chris Matthews might say.
Are we sure The Terminator wasn’t influenced by Cruising?
Would it kill Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured above at his favorite leather bar) to stick with a position on gay marriage? As this Los Angeles Times article so neatly lays out:
In past statements, he has said he personally believes marriage should be between a man and a woman and has rejected legislation authorizing same-sex marriage. Yet he has also said he would not care if same-sex marriage were legal, saying he believed that such an important societal issue should be determined by the voters or the courts.
Following that position, he publicly opposed Proposition 8, which amends the state Constitution to declare that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. “I learned that you should never ever give up. . . . They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done.”
It’s nice that Governor Schwarzenegger, the star of such cinematic masterpieces as Red Sonja and Junior (oh, the side-splitting hilarity of a pregnant man! It was almost as funny as casting Schwarzenegger as a scientist), has decided that gays and lesbians are deserving of civil rights after all.
It’s also nice that he’s encouraging us to keep fighting for equal treatment under the law.
What isn’t nice is that he didn’t keep his promise to fight Proposition 8. Instead, he chose over and over again to remain mostly quiet on the issue in the crucial weeks leading up to the vote.
Maybe a guy who has blemishes like Raw Deal and Jingle All the Way on his résumé isn’t overly concerned with his legacy, but Schwarzenegger’s failure to stand up to the Yes on 8 crowd will not be forgotten. And he owes us all — not just Californians, but everyone around the country who supported No on Proposition 8 — an apology.
Movie buffs, it’s time to get this week’s Netflix queue in order if you haven’t already, because Paramount will release William Friedkin’s gay “classic” (in quotes because your mileage may vary) The Boys in the Band on DVD Tuesday.
Love it or hate it — and I know a few of you hate it — it’s a milestone movie, it’s a part of our history, and it should have been released on DVD, complete with documentaries and audio commentaries, years ago.
I’m not much of a Mart Crowley fan, but I look forward to seeing if Paramount was able to clean up the film’s image quality and checking out all the special features. Until the Criterion edition of Chungking Express comes out later this month, it’s the most exciting DVD arrival of November.
For a blast from the past, you can read what the Times had to say about The Boys in the Band in March of 1970.
Normally I dig around British websites every weekend for odd, lesbian-related tidbits to lazily exploit here. You might recall this one about Subarus, or the one about bisexuality being “reserved for 15-year-old goths and Abi Titmuss, you stupid lesbian,” or the field day I recently had with a lesbian sex diary that included strange mentions of sex toys and squirrels.
Tonight I come to you with nothing about lesbians. Honestly, I get lesbian fatigue sometimes. Anytime I’m around more than three lesbians who are under the age of 30 for longer than five minutes and it becomes apparent they all have histories with each other, I start rubbing my right temple in misery and despondently think to myself, “I could be watching Turner Classic Movies right now…”
So I was minding my business, lifting some lead off the roof of the Holy Name church* looking for information about an old Sidney Lumet film at IMDb (I know how to have fun on a Friday night), when I decided to skim today’s WENN offerings. That’s how I came across this odd little blurb about Elizabeth Banks banning her in-laws from seeing her latest movie:
Elizabeth Banks has banned her husband’s parents from watching her strip in saucy new movie Zack And Miri Make A Porno.
The actress jumps into bed with pal Seth Rogen to make a sex tape for cash in the Kevin Smith comedy.
And Banks hates the idea of her in-laws watching her have sex with anyone other than her spouse of five years, Max Handelman.
Am I going crazy or is that last sentence rather disturbing? The piece goes on to quote Banks in a way that kind of explains the wording, but that doesn’t mean my face hasn’t been frozen in horror for the last five minutes anyway.
* Damn that Morrissey. Once he gets in your head he’s there all day.
But most importantly, John McCain is not in the White House. And Sarah Palin is back in Alaska, where she can only harm 683,478 people instead of 305,603,000. Ah, Alaska. As its ever-chipper governor might say, in between “you betchas” and winks, Alaska’s reward is in heaven.
Throughout history, British women have been total players.
Every goddamn week, it seems, British lesbians want to sleep with a new celebrity. I know this because I receive e-mail alerts about it. Why it’s considered newsworthy that anyone wants to have sex with Maria Sharapova, I really couldn’t tell you, but then there are a lot of things about Britain I don’t understand.
Jodie Marsh and Kerry Katona immediately come to mind — can anyone explain those two to me? And then there’s that troubling national obsession with truly awful cover songs, often of tunes that were terrible the first time around, performed by hacky boy bands and girl bands that seem like they were assembled by comedy writers who have nothing but contempt for the public.
I’ve been careless in keeping track of all the famous women these very social British lesbians have set their sights this year, so I’m sure I’m missing the results of a poll or twelve. Still, this should give you an idea of what I’m talking about:
That’s what Erica Hahn said to her kind-of girlfriend Callie Torres at the end of what was reportedly actress Brooke Smith’s final episode of Grey’s Anatomy. After learning of some all-time rule-breaking involving a misappropriated donor heart that had gone on at the hospital, Hahn told Callie off about right and wrong, black and white, gay and not gay kind of matters, and stalked off.
In other words, nothing was resolved. And we’ve been led to believe that Smith is officially out the door. That ABC wanted her gone faster than that Heather Graham sitcom that was practically canceled before its first commercial break had ended. “Forget about finishing the goddamn Cadillac storyline, or whatever those Internet freaks call it” the network suits presumably said. “Get her out!”
So she’s out. But how does “Callica” end? The preview for next week’s episode, which dramatic voice over narration guy warned is trauma-heavy, included a shot of all the doctors standing around either an operating table or a gurney, looking somber, with Callie apparently sobbing. So, yeah, my guess would be there is no gray area here. Just a large, vast area (yes, I get that that’s redundant) of unmitigated suckiness.
We’ll see.
To cheer up any depressed Hahn fans who might be reading this, I’ve posted a picture of Penelope Cruz looking really dykey and grabbing Salma Hayek’s ass. I know that always makes me feel better when I’m upset about something.
CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric recently took a few minutes off from practicing gotcha journalism (sample questions: “What’s your name?” and “How do you spell cat?”) to point out that while Barack Obama’s Tuesday victory is being celebrated as a “triumph for civil rights in America,” we’re still a pretty hateful country, as evidenced by the fact that gays and lesbians were viciously bitch-slapped by millions of bigoted voters in no less than three states on the day Obama was swept into office.
After noting the Chicago race riots of the 1960s and the progress the civil rights movement has made since then, Couric concluded: “In 1969, there was another riot called Stonewall. Thirty years later, gays and lesbians hope for their moment to return to the streets and cheer.” Thirty years?! Did she get that number from a sad old queen dressed entirely in Abercrombie garb?
Another day, another opinion about Grey’s Anatomy trying to straighten itself out like a Saturday Night Fever star hooked up to an E-meter. This time it’s Vancouver Sun blogger Shelley Fralic who caught my attention, mostly because I’m not entirely sure what she’s talking about:
Sometimes, even in television, relationships just don’t work out, lesbians and otherwise. And you have to wonder why the ABC executives would be skittish about a gay storyline. It’s not like this one was breaking any new ground: gay relationships are now almost standard fare on TV, and no one much bats an eye over them any more, whether they’re on daytime soaps or on primetime chart-toppers like Will & Grace and Brothers & Sisters.
That, of course, is incorrect. Eyes are still batted, and they’d be batted even more if network television bothered paying attention to lesbians, which they don’t. At all.
