Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Tag: This Week on DVD

The Boys in the Band Comes to DVD

By

On November 9, 2008

In Uncategorized

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.

This Week on DVD: The Who Cares? Edition

By

On February 27, 2008

In Uncategorized


This week’s new DVD offerings are pretty dismal. The only absolute must-see is Criterion’s 4-disc set of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (and even that doesn’t have me as weak-kneed and googly-eyed as last week’s Pierrot le Fou release), and the only genuine should-see is Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, which Netflix told me would arrive today. Guess what? Netflix lied. Netflix is, as Al Franken might say, a lying liar. If I could get all Say Anything for a moment, I’d like to strum an acoustic guitar and sing the following: “Netflix lies, Netflix lies, Netflix lies, when he cries.” (Thanks, everyone, and remember to tip your waitress.)

Now, where were we? If you like Robert Zemeckis, or if you want to see a digitized and naked Angelina Jolie, you might consider checking out Beowulf. If you want to see a non-digitized and naked Angelina Jolie, you should check out — oh, who am I kidding? Every last one of you already owns a copy of Gia. If you’ve ever wondered what became of Danielle Brisebois, you might enjoy Life After Tomorrow, a documentary about dozens of former child actresses who played the title role in productions of Annie. And if you’re a fan of Tom “The ‘Stache” Selleck, he stars in Sea Change, the fourth made-for-TV installment in Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series.

Depressing, isn’t it?

This Week on DVD: February 12th Edition

By

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.

This Week on DVD: February 5th Edition

By

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.

This Week on DVD: January 22nd Edition

By

On January 21, 2008

In Uncategorized

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.

Oscar: “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

Felix Unger and Oscar Madison continue to fight their mutual attraction in The Odd Couple: The Complete Third Season.

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, and The 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 on DVD: January 8th Edition

By

On January 7, 2008

In Home Video

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.

Nancy Kulp devotees take note: some company I’ve never heard of is releasing a Beverly Hillbillies collection.

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.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén