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.
As a group, Torchwood‘s characters are almost as queer as the B-52’s.
The first season of Torchwood, the Dr. Who spin-off and brainchild of Queer as Folk creator Russell T. Davies, comes to DVD this week in a 7-set disc set. The series stars openly gay actor John Barrowman and is notable for its bisexual storylines.
More Tuesday releases of note:
The kind souls at the Criterion Collection have done their part to make this week’s new DVD releases more exciting than last week’s fare — in addition to Alf Sjöberg’s 1950 adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Lindsay Anderson’s British New Wave classic This Sporting Life, they’re offering 4 by Agnes Varda, a collection that bundles their previous Varda releases (Vagabond and Cleo from 5 to 7) with La Pointe Courte and Le Bonheur.
Felicity Jones and Henry Tilney star in the new Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, from a script by Andrew Davies, the prolific screenwriter who adapted Tipping the Velvet for the BBC.
Dr. Kerry Weaver marks her first full season as a lesbian who knows she’s a lesbian in the eighth season of ER.
And finally, 20th Century Fox has assembled an attractively priced but redundant package of five of their Best Picture winners. The selections include How Green Was My Valley, Gentleman’s Agreement, The French Connection, All About Eve, andThe Sound of Music. As a bonus, because I neglected you over the weekend, here’s a bizarre YouTube clip that turns The Sound of Music‘s infamous “cunt face”-sounding line into a Tourette’s-like outburst.
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.
Stephen Fry, the brilliant actor, comic, writer, and all-around hot piece of ass, wants to know why the media lauds straight actors for playing gay roles. In an interview with the BBC’s Radio Times, he noted that gay actors are never told, “How brave of you to kiss that woman, that must have been very difficult for you.”
“It wouldn’t be that difficult for me to kiss a woman,” Fry continued. “I’ll kiss a frog if you like. It’s difficult to ride bareback backwards while unicycling, but to kiss someone isn’t difficult.” Perhaps we could start a collection to fly Stephen to Los Angeles, so he could explain this to the American media. Brokeback Mountain came out two years ago and I still have a headache from all the stupid questions that were asked of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Given the opportunity, you don’t ask those two if it was hard to kiss. You ask them to apologize for The Four Feathers and Bubble Boy.
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.
