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We Get It, Tegan and Sara Are Lesbians

On February 15, 2008

Lesbians or twinks from a Gus Van Sant film? You make the call.

The Sun, a wildly popular British tabloid (which is no small feat when you consider that there are approximately 800,000 different widely read British tabloids, because sometimes you get bored with Dickens and Austen and need to read about footballers and prostitutes), published an interview with musicians Tegan and Sara today. You can read it here, if you must, but this is all you really need to know. Near the end of the interview, reporter Jacqui Swift, having covered all the obligatory questions about the challenges of collaborating with your twin and seeking success outside of Canada, asks this:

AS twins and lesbians, does it annoy you when people focus on this?

To which they offer a very reasonable, measured response:

Tegan: I think the media and our labels in the past have tried to turn it into something gimmicky.

But I think we’ve grown out of that. I think we’ve also proved we’re genuine songwriters who are talented and have the support of many great people and a legion of lovely devoted fans and so I think that period of our life is over.

We’re happy and proud to be out and known as queer artists and we are also happy that people pay much more attention to the music these days.

Sara: I think there have been times when journalists have treated it in a gimmicky way.

Perhaps from a lack of awareness or education about homophobia or sexism.

I know most people don’t intend to be cruel or ignorant. I’ve become more patient but it is upsetting when it feels like the music is lost behind a headline.

Here’s the money shot: the article’s headline is a big fat “Lesbian Twins Coming to UK.” You can’t convince me that was just someone behind the scenes having a laugh. The people who work at The Sun aren’t smart or funny enough for that. There’s also that pesky tradition they have of being homophobic morons to take into account.

This Week on DVD: February 12th Edition

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 12, 2008

In Uncategorized

Is this not an incredibly attractive box set?

Forget about Warner Brothers and their dopey Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan re-releases, the Criterion Collection is where it’s at this Valentine’s Day as they release a highly anticipated set of four early, classic musicals by the master director Ernst Lubitsch as part of their Eclipse series. The titles include The Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant (which stars Claudette Colbert), One Hour with You and Monte Carlo. As Dave Kehr put it in a review published today, the set is “indispensable.” It also has, in my opinion, the most attractive packaging of any Eclipse offering so far. I’m so getting it.

Before she lost her marbles, Joan Crawford was seriously hot.

Also in the classic movies department, Warners is dipping into the Joan Crawford vault (and why shouldn’t they, when everyone else did?) with The Joan Crawford Collection: Volume 2. In terms of content — it features A Woman’s Face, Flamingo Road, Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo and Torch Song — it’s more interesting than the first Crawford collection, but I don’t like this new Warner trend of putting the discs in a fold-out case and not making the films available individually. That one must also purchase Dragon Seed and Without Love to own Katharine Hepburn’s Sylvia Scarlett is a criminal offense, and one that consumers should not tolerate.

More new releases:

Spencer Tracy: “This screenplay is giving me indigestion.”

Has anyone else ever watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and found themselves hoping that Sidney Poitier or Katharine Houghton would get fed up with Spencer Tracy and yell, “How can you pass judgment on our relationship when you’ve been with a giant lez for the last thirty years?” I ask you these questions because, well, if I asked my Hepburn and Tracy myth-loving grandma, she’d pretend she didn’t hear me and comment on the weather. (It’s icy and overcast here today, if you were wondering.) Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner wasn’t all that great when it came out in ’67 and it isn’t all that great now, but people have been told it’s a classic and they accept without question what studio marketing schmoes and the dashing Robert Osborne tell them. Being an enormous Hepburn fan, I guess I can live with that. It’s when people revere Neil Simon schlock because they think they’re supposed to that I draw the line. Anyway, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was out-of-print for a short while and now Columbia has brought it back, on its own with a new 40th Anniversary Edition and as part of the new Stanley Kramer collection.

Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone, is worth checking out for its gritty depiction of Boston and a fantastic performance by Amy Ryan, a Best Supporting Actress nominee.

Jane Austen’s life was not remotely like the pap that’s presented in Becoming Jane, but since when does historical accuracy count for anything in the movies? If you like Anne Hathaway, chances are you’ll like this movie. Of course, if you like Anne Hathaway, you’re used to mediocrity.

Romance & Cigarettes, the John Turturro musical that stars James Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon, easily wins the award for the most bizarre release of the week. It’s also the release you most need to rent if you’re sick of the same old cinema.

Photos like this don’t require stupid captions.

I have mixed feelings about this Mark Wahlberg guy, who was perfect in The Departed but kind of seems like a dick. However, Joaquin Phoenix is cool and Eva Mendes is friggin’ foxy, so We Own the Night is in my Netflix rental queue. It’s about nightclubs, drugs, organized crime, brothers on opposite sides of the law (or are they?), blah, blah, blah. Did I mention that Eva Mendes is foxy?

HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me is pretty queer behind the scenes, but what you actually see on the show is rather heterosexual. And kind of boring, though anything that provides work for Jane Alexander is all right with me.

Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?, released today by Lionsgate, poses a perfectly reasonable question, though I can’t see the title without wanting to respond, “You didn’t.”

Amy Heckerling directed I Could Never Be Your Woman, which stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd. Never heard of it? That’s because the Weinstein Company sent it straight to DVD. Heckerling going direct to DVD isn’t going to raise any eyebrows post-Loser, but anyone who starred in The Fabulous Baker Boys and Batman Returns deserves a little more respect.

Lesbians Denied Both Puppies and Clea Duvall

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 11, 2008

In Uncategorized

What kind of sick bastard wouldn’t let them buy a puppy?

A kennel owner in Sweden refused to sell a woman a puppy after learning she was gay. To which I say: WTF? The situation has been rectified, since an appeals court in Stockholm has ruled that you can’t be denied canine companionship on the basis of your sexuality, but I find this story very confusing. When I hear about asshole-ish business owners turning away gay customers, I think of America. More specifically, I think of Texas, but that’s neither here nor there. (Please, Texans, don’t go all Walker, Texas Ranger on my ass. I’m a weakling. An admitted weakling. Attacking me would be like attacking Linda Hunt, and only a complete jack-off would attack Linda Hunt.)

What didn’t compute for me when I first read this story is that homophobia exists in Sweden. Which is stupid, I know, because homophobia exists everywhere. (Well, everywhere except in kittens and the hearts of children. Unless the kittens and children belong to Shirley Phelps-Furley. Yes, I said Furley. Because, let’s face it, Mr. Roper was a ‘phobe but Mr. Furley had an IQ of 80, tops, which means his intelligence was roughly equal to Shirley’s.) But c’mon: Sweden.

I’m a big Ingmar Bergman fan, so I was under the impression that Swedes spent all their time in mental anguish over the absence of God, mutilating their genitals with jagged pieces of glass and playing chess, or at least backgammon, with the Grim Reaper to pass the time. And remember all those reviews of Fucking Åmål (better known in English-speaking countries under its sanitized name, Show Me Love) that mentioned it beat Titanic at the Swedish box office when it was first released? I guess the homophobic kennel owner isn’t a Lukas Moodysson fan.

Other reading:

GayWired ran a puff piece on Itty Bitty Titty Committee (which, if you survey its credits on IMDB, kind of looks like the lesbian version of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World) with this sentence that caught my eye:

Lesbian luminaries Guinevere Turner and Jenny Shimizu, along with long-time friends to the gay gals, Clea Duvall and Melanie Lynskey, join a smoking cast of relative newcomers to start the next big feminist movement.

Clea Duvall is a “long-time friend to the gay gals?” I think what Tracy E. Gilchrist and L. A. Vess meant was long-time friend with benefits, no? And, uh, what about Melanie Mayron while we’re at it? Why does she get to fly under the radar?

Finally, can’t get enough of the lurid Seth Tobias story? New York magazine’s Stephen Rodrick has written a very long article about it.

Cotillard Bitch-Slaps Christie at the BAFTAs

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 11, 2008

In Uncategorized

“For my next trick, I will star in a Zelda Rubinstein biopic.”

Or, rather, BAFTA voters bitch-slapped Julie Christie by giving the Best Actress award most British journalists assumed was hers to Marion Cotillard for her work in La Vie en Rose. Cotillard’s performance was indeed remarkable, more so than Christie’s (the best acting in Away from Her belonged to Gordon Pinsent, and the lack of attention he received this award season has been regrettable to say the least), but that doesn’t change the fact that I struggled to finish La Vie en Rose the way Paris Hilton struggles to finish Green Eggs and Ham.

By the fifty-minute mark, it seemed that Cotillard’s greatest triumph wasn’t becoming Édith Piaf — and doing so in a way that caused an excitable Stephen Holden to write that her “feral portrait of the French singer Édith Piaf as a captive wild animal hurling herself at the bars of her cage is the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another I’ve ever encountered in a film” — but rather having the single-minded determination to slog all the way through director Olivier Dahan and Isabelle Sobelman’s excruciatingly tedious screenplay.

Which isn’t to say that La Vie en Rose was not without its finer points, like wonderful supporting performances by Emmanuelle Seigner, who almost walked off with the film in its first twenty minutes, and the always dependable Sylvie Testud (a brilliant, relatively unknown actress who has quietly made a career of playing sexually unconventional, and often queer, characters) as Mômone, Piaf’s cross-dressing lesbian BFF. Just don’t expect me to revisit it unless I need help falling asleep.

Three Cheers for Woody Allen

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 7, 2008

In Uncategorized

Penelope Cruz with another blonde in Head in the Clouds.

It’s tough, sometimes, being a Woody Allen fan. You’re not just constantly put in the incredibly awkward position of being expected to defend the indefensible (see: marrying your girlfriend’s daughter), you’re also asked to defend films like Hollywood Ending and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. That’s why I was happy to read this shamelessly publicisty blurb in today’s Page Six:

SCARLETT Johansson has a steamy lesbian sex scene with Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s upcoming “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” A source tells us: “It is also extremely erotic. People will be blown away and even shocked. Penelope and Scarlett go at it in a red-tinted photography dark room, and it will leave the audience gasping.”

Okay, so audiences would have to actually show up for a Woody Allen movie — or a Penelope Cruz movie, or a Scarlett Johansson movie, for that matter — in order to gasp. Chances are, that isn’t happening. And while it’s true that Match Point was a bit sexier than Michael Caine boffing his sister-in-law in Hannah and Her Sisters, it’s rather doubtful the former Allen Stewart Konigsberg will achieve a David Lynchian hypnotic, audience-silencing Mulholland Drive effect here. Still, what’s not to like about this?

Of course, I say that as someone who is so dedicated to supporting Penelope Cruz’s on-screen lesbian antics that I watched Head in the Clouds in its entirety. Even worse, I endured the interminable Don’t Tempt Me just to see her butchified and leering at Victoria Abril. Curiously, she didn’t seem all that different than she does on The Late Show.

Shelby Knows She Can’t Sell “Preacher Man”

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 7, 2008

In Music

Dusty and Martha look a bit distracted, don’t they?

If Google Analytics has taught me one thing over the last few weeks, it’s that idle web surfers like looking up the words “Shelby Lynne” and “lesbian” together. With that in mind, I bring you this exchange from a recent Lynne interview with IGN‘s Todd Gilchrist. Mind you, there’s nothing overtly gay about it, but I wanted to post something here today and it was either this or a picture of Ernest Borgnine in a sailor’s cap.

IGN: When you’re putting your albums together, do you think about putting different kinds of songs together, to sort of have something for everyone, or is it as you say a matter of what’s going on in your life?
Lynne: It has to be having to do with my life, because I’m not big fan of bullsh*t, so it has to have everything to do with what I’m doing. I mean, I chose these tunes because I can relate to them, and for no particular reason. I mean, I think about Dusty in all of them, but every song I cut has something to with what I’ve either felt or I’m feeling or I’m going to feel or I’ve gone through with someone else who’s feeling it. So it’s not really that complicated, it just needs to be honest and real. For instance, I can’t imagine singing “Son of a Preacher Man,” not only because it was Dusty’s song and I would never do it, but because I can’t imagine doing those words.
IGN: Why is that?
Lynne: Because I can’t relate. You go back and hear that song and you think of me and you’ll go, hmm, okay.

And, you know, she might act like a dithering idiot when asked about her personal life, but Shelby isn’t incorrect here. I’ll even take it a step further and say that while I, like everyone else on the face of the earth, love Dusty’s version of “Son of a Preacher Man,” I’ve often felt it sounds a bit dishonest coming from her as well.

Had it been about, say, the granddaughter of a minister (cough, Martha Reeves if you’re wondering), maybe it would have sounded more authentic. She still wouldn’t have convinced me there was “only one” person who could ever reach her, not with a voice like that, and I’d still have trouble believing that Springfield wasn’t the one who suggested they go walkin’, but it would have been a start.

Short Cuts: Leonard Bernstein & Charlotte Rampling Edition

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 5, 2008

In Uncategorized

“‘I Feel Pretty’ is really Riff and Bernardo’s song.”

“To write a great Broadway musical, you have to be either Jewish or gay. And I’m both.” That’s according to Leonard Bernstein, from Rodney Greenberg’s new Jewish Quarterly profile of the composer. For the record, I’m also both, and if I tried to write a Broadway musical the results would be more disastrous than Taboo. I feel so cheated.

Of Bernstein’s sexuality, Greenberg writes:

Bernstein’s complex personality created havoc at times, particularly when his homosexuality led him to leave Felicia and live for a while with a music researcher, Tom Cothran. Jamie Bernstein, his daughter, said her father needed to know he could also come back home — to his ‘quiet place’. Not long afterwards, Felicia died of cancer. He was consumed by remorse, and never properly recovered. In a scene reminiscent of a Verdi opera plot, she had cursed him: ‘You are going to die a bitter and lonely old man.’

That’s rather depressing, isn’t it?

“I can kill a man in two seconds with a withering glance. My agent timed me.”

Charlotte Rampling, one of the most gorgeous and consistently fascinating actresses in the history of movies (and, along with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, my favorite François Ozon muse), turns 62 today. If you missed this remarkably personal Guardian interview she gave while promoting Swimming Pool in 2003 and have a few minutes to spare, now is the perfect time to check it out.

Joe Eszterhas Supports John McCain

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 5, 2008

In Politics

Does this mean the beloved hack screenwriter doesn’t support Cristal and Nomi’s right to marry? The news, while not surprising (Eszterhas contributed to McCain’s campaign in 2000), is almost as disillusioning as the failure of film critics to recognize Jade as one of the towering achievements in 1995 cinema, alongside Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas and Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Rouge. Or something.

And before someone emails me to point out that McCain once referred to a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage as “unnecessary” and “un-Republican,” let me remind you that he happily supported banning gay marriage in his home state of Arizona the very next year. In short, he is more ethically challenged than your average Eszterhas character. They make a fine pair.

This Week on DVD: February 5th Edition

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 4, 2008

In Uncategorized

“This poster is going to cause me a real headache with bitchy queens.”

Finally, the bleak DVD month of January is over and February’s first batch of new releases is primed to more than make up for it.

First, in the gay interest department, there is Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, starring the world’s most famous quasi-closeted actress, Jodie Foster. The Brave One is not a gay movie — it’s another of those films that finds Foster out for blood when something happens to her straight family — but the heterosexual Jordan’s work, from Mona Lisa to The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto, is often queer-inclusive, and Will & Grace producer Cynthia Mort’s name on the screenplay bolsters its gay credentials.

For those of you so eager to see Foster kick ass and take names that you can’t bear a 10-minute drive to the video store, Warner Brothers has made the download available for pre-order through Amazon Unbox for $14.99, which makes it cheaper than the DVD.

More new releases:

Robert Ford: “You were real pretty in Thelma & Louise.”

Also available for download is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the brooding Andrew Dominik western with gay undertones to spare. The cast includes Brad Pitt, Mary-Louise Parker, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, Paul Schneider and the Oscar-nominated Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, who casts many a meaningful glance in Pitt’s direction.

“Is that Irène Jacob selling flowers over there?”

Julie Delpy writes, directs, stars in, contributes music to and probably hand-carved the furniture that appears in 2 Days in Paris, which costars Adam Goldberg — who, despite being 37 and decidedly male, comes off as something of an ingénue here. A scruffy, nervous, foul-mouthed ingénue, but we can’t all be Audrey Hepburn. It’s a lovely, oddball directorial debut (though the manic last few minutes disrupt its easygoing charm), and one that establishes Delpy as a filmmaker to watch.

Julie Taymor’s Beatles-inspired musical Across the Universe, starring Evan Rachel Wood — she who kissed Mischa Barton on Once & Again and Nikki Reed in Thirteen — and Jim Sturgess, gets the 2-Disc Special Edition treatment from Sony. Actress T.V. Carpio plays Prudence, a lesbian character who sings “I Want to Hold Your Hand” about a fellow cheerleader.

MGM pays another visit to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, bringing it a few supplementary features this time around.

Cate Blanchett and director Shekhar Kapur re-team for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, to middling results, though the cast, which includes Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen and Samantha Morton, is uniformly excellent.

Feast of Love, which has Selma Blair in a lesbian subplot that even director Robert Benton admits is undercooked, comes to DVD from MGM, if anyone cares. Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Greg Kinnear and High Art’s Radha Mitchell star.

In need of a Diane Lane fix but unwilling to spend $10 on Untraceable? You can try Griffin Dunne’s Fierce People, an odd little number that gathered dust on Lionsgate’s shelves for two years before receiving a limited theatrical release in 2007. It has Donald Sutherland, Anton Yelchin, Kristen Stewart, Chris Evans, drug addiction, sodomy— your grandparents are sure to love it.

Kino has collected Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Color of Pomegranates, The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib in The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, a new box set. The titles are also available separately.

A Gallipoli that wasn’t directed by Peter Weir and doesn’t star Mel “Sugar Tits” Gibson is being released by Cinema Epoch. This documentary about the famous 1915 battle is narrated by Jeremy Irons and Sam Neill, who, as far as I know, don’t blame any of the bloodshed on the Jews.

Imitation of Life, both the 1934 original starring Claudette Colbert and the 1959 Douglas Sirk remake starring Lana Turner, gets the Universal Legacy Series treatment in this handsome double-feature.

Four lesser-known Jean-Luc Godard films (Passion, First Name: Carmen, The Detective and Oh Woe is Me) are being released together by Lionsgate, but it’s the upcoming Criterion release of Pierrot le Fou that everyone is really excited about.

David Grubin’s absorbing documentary The Jewish Americans, which recently aired on PBS, gets a speedy double-disc release. Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner is one of the interview subjects; video clips and lesson plans for teachers are available online.

You can be honest, lecherous lesbians. Before her face melted off, you watched NBC’s Third Watch for Tia Texada. And I won’t judge you for that, because I watched it every now and then for Nia Long. Neither appeared in the first season of the show, which finally debuts on DVD, but Bobby Cannavale did. That should count for something, I guess.

A cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman falls for Jessica Lange in Tootsie

Tootsie turns 25 with an Anniversary Edition from Columbia. Watch as Dustin Hoffman transforms himself into a woman who looks frighteningly like my great-aunt! Watch as his saucy soap actress Dorothy Michaels falls for comely costar Jessica Lange! Watch as Bill Murray acts very droll and Teri Garr very ditzy! The peppy score might make you want to kill Dave Grusin, but Sydney Pollack’s film holds up spectacularly well.

If ever a movie didn’t deserve a deluxe edition, it’s You’ve Got Mail, but Warner Brothers knows you get lonely and sentimental around Valentine’s Day and they’re not above squeezing another $12 from your wallet with this second release of the film. If you have to buy something to get all sappy to on the 14th, you’re much better off investing in The Shop Around the Corner. I tell you this as someone who cares: You can’t go wrong with Ernst Lubitsch and Margaret Sullavan.

Samantha Fox’s Lesbian Wife Swap – Updated

By Cranky Lesbian

On February 3, 2008

In Uncategorized

Fox: “Can anyone help me? I seem to have misplaced my career.”

Samantha Fox’s episode of Wife Swap, in which she goes to live with the widely loathed comedian Freddie Starr while Starr’s put-upon wife shacks up with Fox’s partner, Myra Stratton, is getting bad reviews! Who would have guessed? You can watch a rather long, uncomfortable interview with Samantha and Freddie on ITV’s This Morning below by clicking here.