How did Holly Hunter win the Best Actress Oscar over Angela Bassett in 1993? It’s not that I’m surprised the Academy made the wrong decision, because the Academy makes the wrong decisions all the time. It’s more that I’m surprised they’d collectively risk pissing Bassett off. Because, well, look at those arms. One shot of her in a skimpy dress in What’s Love Got to Do With It tells the story, and the story is this: Angela Bassett is unlike Chuck Norris in that she’s a gifted actor, but very much like Chuck Norris in that she could kill you with her bare hands.
(And, frankly, I wouldn’t mind her killing me with her bare hands, but that’s a private matter I’d rather not discuss in front of any strangers who might find this while Googling some horrible combination of either Holly Hunter or Angela Bassett and “fucking” and Chuck Norris. The Internet is full of freaks, and I’ll have enough of those to contend with next week when I get together with my family for Hanukkah.)
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:
Rock Hudson and his lesbian wife, Phyllis, laugh at the stupidity of the public.
On the heels of last week’s New York Times article about gay actors finding work in Hollywood comes this piece by MSNBC contributor Michael Ventre, who declares the “days of Rock Hudson-style facades over” while acknowledging that discrimination remains an issue for entertainers seeking an audience of millions. The latter part we’re in agreement about; when it comes to the former, I don’t know what the heck he’s talking about.
Unquestionably, there has been a shift over the last few years in how closeted Hollywood celebrities conduct themselves in the media. Rather than going through the elaborate charade of cooking up fake heterosexual relationships for public consumption (not that those things don’t still happen as well), more celebrities seem to be adopting the “my private life is off-limits” approach their British counterparts have long taken, an efficient way of avoiding both coming out and being actively closeted.
However, the American way of doing it sometimes seems to miss the point. You’re not preserving your personal integrity when you tell reporters your private life is off-limits and then proceed to spend 20 minutes yakking about your children, all the while failing to mention the fact that you had them with a partner — the same partner who was probably making sure they did their homework while you were off on a press junket pretending to be a single parent. What that ultimately exposes is an astonishing lack of integrity, made only slightly more palatable by the fact that a phony heterosexual love interest wasn’t dragged into the mix.
That more gay celebrities seem resistant to the idea of entering into sham relationships is certainly encouraging, but I question how much of it can be directly attributed to that optimistic, familiar standby that society is evolving. When it comes to the public embracing openly gay entertainers, that evolution can only happen as quickly as famous gay people allow it to. They have to keep coming out if we’re ever going to get anywhere, and when you compare the number of gay Hollywood types to the number of out Hollywood types, it’s clear there is still a great deal of progress to be made. And it’s only natural to wonder how many recent comings-out have been completely organic and how many have been the function of an increasingly invasive, ‘open 24/7 on the Internet’ tabloid media.
Are celebrities rejecting the Rock Hudson facade on their own, or is Perez Hilton rejecting it for them? I think the two are inextricably linked, but I’m also cynical enough to believe that the significant challenge of being a public figure and remaining closeted in the year 2008 has led to more recent outings than any newly unearthed altruistic impulses on the part of gay celebrities. Which leads us to another point of Ventre’s that I have to disagree with:
When gays and lesbians in the entertainment industry come out these days, they’d probably be advised to throw lavish coming-out parties to ensure that attention will be paid. In the year 2008, when tolerance levels appear to be at an all-time high — not ideal by any means, and with lots of room for improvement — such an announcement is often quickly consumed by the 24-hour news cycle, and digested by a more enlightened populace.
How many lavish coming-out parties has Hollywood ever held? More often than not, at least in recent memory, a short statement is released, or a matter-of-fact acknowledgment is made in an interview, and the blogosphere takes it from there. Heather Matarazzo, Sarah Paulson, Cynthia Nixon, T.R. Knight, David Hyde Pierce, Neil Patrick Harris — none of them were looking for a media circus when they came out, and few had the stature to warrant one, though the “Same Sex and the City” headline opportunities presented by the Nixon story were too great for most newspapers to resist.
Clay Aiken bucked the trend last week with his double whammy People cover and Good Morning America appearance, but most celebrity outings remain relatively low-key affairs — and are likely to stay that way when the majority of those electing to come out are faded pop stars or actors who work primarily on stage or in television.
When Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic meet tonight at Arthur Ashe, will they be clad in neon spandex and trailed by an entourage of menacing, mullet-sporting goons as WWE music plays in the background? We’ll find out soon enough, but in the meantime I just wasted a good five minutes looking for a picture of a wrestler holding a tennis racket. Didn’t turn up anything useful, FYI, and I wasn’t even directed to a bunch of adult-oriented websites featuring “straight” college jocks experimenting with each other. It’s like the Internet is broken today.
March, 2024 updates (yes, I’m updating an update’s updates) below.
Leggings, sash, a pince-nez… Could Mayor McCheese be any gayer?
03/18/24: A new review is coming tomorrow, with Patty Duke in a role that didn’t require crash dieting or child-beating. Apologies for not sharing an update here sooner; time got away from me a bit. The good news is that I wasn’t incarcerated or involuntarily committed, but the bad news is that Nancy McKeon’s Firefighter was next on the agenda and I’ve run into a problem — the print currently on Tubi has some sort of copyright protection that prevents screenshot captures.
My commitment to these retrospectives is such that I even tried my luck with a manufactured-on-demand DVD copy of the film. That, too, is locked down like Fort Knox. While I understand that piracy is a problem and agree that studios have to protect their investments, I question the wisdom of guarding a forgotten TV movie from 1986 more fiercely than popular new releases.
This leaves me with a couple options, should I proceed with the review: I can commission Crankenstein to doodle McKeon fighting fires or I can attempt to take photos of my screen. If I go the latter route it’ll probably be the gayest thing I’ve ever done, and I say that as both a woman with a wife and as someone who recently paged through Eve Arden and Arlene Dahl paper doll booklets.
David Lee Roth or Siegfried of Siegfried and Roy? You be the judge.
First there was the sickening “lesbian vampires” murder case. (Who would have guessed that lesbian vampires existed outside of late-night Cinemax movies?) Then there was the woman who made a sex tape with two underage girls. Now here’s the story of Roslyn Moore, an Australian psychologist who has been accused of having a short-lived affair with a female client. Because that isn’t quite sleazy enough on its own, it has also been alleged that Moore “offered reduced fees and used inappropriate treatment methods to ‘cure’ the woman of her homosexuality.”
Yet the strangest part of the whole story just might be reports that Moore is obsessed with the rock band Van Halen. No word on whether the disgraced psychologist is currently sporting a mullet, but I’m betting if she doesn’t have one now we can surely find one somewhere in her past.
Kristin Scott Thomas stares at an employee’s ass (seriously, that’s what she’s doing) in Tell No One
Or is he just easily swayed by subtitles? As I read his ecstatic review of Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One this morning (ecstatic might be something of an understatement; Holden practically orgasms as he raves about the film), I was reminded of his over-the-top praise for Marion Cotillard’s performance in La Vie en Rose, and again I was slightly baffled.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Tell No One (which I first saw last year when it came out on DVD in the UK — behold the power of the region-free DVD player), is a bad movie, because it isn’t. It’s as well-crafted and absorbing as any recent thriller I can think of. It just isn’t something you mention in the same breath as Vertigo or The Big Sleep.
Its plot is so rambling and nonsensical that I don’t dare try to describe it here, other than to say it’s about a doctor named Alex (played by François Cluzet, who is morphing into a Parisian Dustin Hoffman as he ages), whose wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze of The Barbarian Invasions) was murdered eight years ago. Or was she? Alex, who has never emerged from the fog created by her death, starts to have doubts when he logs onto Yahoo! one day to find mysterious messages — somewhat miraculously, they have nothing to do with pills that cure erectile dysfunction — suggesting she might still be alive.
As the mystery deepens, the story gets increasingly (and eventually egregiously) preposterous. And it is modern technology, the very thing that gives Alex a reason to search for answers, that ends up being one of the chief reasons the plot doesn’t work. Tell No One, which was based on a novel by the American writer Harlan Coben (himself no Raymond Chandler) is ultimately the kind of movie that works best in a foreign language; the French scenery and subtitles distract from an endless stream of contrivances that would seem more glaring in, say, a Michael Mann production of the same material.
What sets it apart from other, similar movies is actor Guillaume Canet’s confident and sensitive direction. The characters in Tell No One might be a little slow on the uptake, but they’re presented as real people, not simply pawns in elaborate conspiracies, and are always afforded their dignity.
Minor quibbles include some odd casting decisions and the loud, mournful soundtrack. Yes, Jeff Buckley’s version of “Lilac Wine” is excellent. No, it doesn’t need to star in its own three-minute segment in a movie. As for the use of U2’s “With or Without You,” it had the unfortunate effect of making me burst into laughter, which isn’t quite what Canet was aiming for.
The casting of Cluzet, who is in his early fifties, and the thirtysomething Croze as childhood sweethearts is a head-scratcher, but Cluzet’s Cesar-winning performance is possibly the best of his career. There’s a similar age difference between Marina Hands, who plays Alex’s equestrian sister, and Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays her long-term partner (and Alex’s only confidante); that Scott Thomas and Cluzet are peers makes their characters’ relationship particularly believable, and the actors have an easy rapport that makes their scenes together some of the movie’s best.
Tell No One is now playing in limited release in U.S. theaters, presumably with a DVD release to follow. Suspense fans will find it a welcome summertime treat, and for all you fiendish lesbians who just want the cold, hard facts about the extent of its girl-girl action, I’ll have you know there’s just a brief kiss or two (gratuitous screen grab below) and a few domestic scenes between Hands and Scott Thomas.
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As the state of California prepares to start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples next week, a piece in today’s New York Times examines “the egalitarian nature” of same-sex relationships.
When asked to comment on whether they think it’s true that same-sex couples “fight more fairly” and are better at dividing household chores than their heterosexual counterparts, my parents got into a vicious argument that started with my father saying “There’s no such thing as a fair fight with your mother,” and continued with my mom snapping, “Your father would have to know what chores are before he tried doing any.”
Realizing that thirty years’ worth of grievances were about to be rehashed in clinical detail for the 3,758th time, I hightailed it out of there without asking any follow-up questions. Good times!
The new Weezer CD comes out today. I am sad about the cover, which is pictured above. I am slightly sad about the first single, “Pork and Beans.” (The buzzsaw guitars are cool, though.) This is all in addition to a profound lingering sadness over the travesty that was Make Believe, of course.
And yet, I can’t help myself. My love for The Blue Album, and especially Pinkerton, is so great, so all-consuming, that I will end up buying The Red Album. The deluxe edition, probably. If you want to line up to smack me or something, go ahead, but I know for a fact that several of you own Spice Girls CDs. Think about that before you pass judgment. And think about Rivers Cuomo moaning “If everyone’s a little queer / Why can’t she be a little straight?” in “Pink Triangle,” his song about a straight man’s unrequited crush on a lesbian. How can you not love him, even in that ridiculous cowboy hat?
