Queer Beacon

I Love You, Man (2009) - LightShed 8

Finally another movie with Paul Rudd and good gay content. For all the gay buzz Paul Rudd gets, he has actually been in some pretty gay-bad movies (Knocked-Up and Role Models come to mind -- both of which have "faggot" slurs and other jabs at us gays).

Things went our way in I Love You, Man.  In the movie, Paul Rudd plays a recently engaged guy in a quest for a best man; Rudd is a girl's-guy and has no male friends. In his quest toward Jason Segel he meets Reno 911's Thomas Lennon, they go out to dinner. It turns out Lennon is gay and thought he was going on an actual date (as opposed to a man-date) with Paul Rudd...at the end of the date Thomas kisses Paul, he actually leads with the tongue (you can see that on the main theatrical trailer). Paul is surprised but takes it nicely. So, that's our first gay content.

A little later into the movie, we learn Paul Rudd has a gay brother (played by Andy Samberg).

The gay brother is a pretty butch personal trainer. Our gay is an actual guy's guy. The portrayal is very nice, the gay brother is Dad's best friend and even coaches Paul Rudd in the straight art of getting a wing-man.

 

You should see this one. The movie is funny even if Paul Rudd's constant attempt at creating fun catchphrases gets old early into the movie, but he drags on...

No Voice for 'Milk' in Brazil

Soon after the Oscars were announced, two pieces of news came out that reminded us about the homophobia all around us. In one, we found out that Asia blotted out the mention of "gay" in Oscar acceptance speeches (read about that at Towle). In the second, and this I haven't seen elsewhere on the English blogosphere, the guy who usually provides the voice for Sean Penn in Portuguese dubbing -- his name is Marco Ribeiro, refused to do his work because of the gay theme of the movie. The guy is an evangelical christian (ta dah! surprise!) who had no problem taking on other roles that went against is church's teachings (from Mike Myers in Austin Powers to Tom Hanks in The Da Vince Code...).

Good articles have been written about the issue in Portuguese, I think the best one is here.

[h/t Fabinho]

Oscar night - Got Milk?

I'm preemptively turned off from the ceremony this year. I just don't want to have my heartbroken again (Brokeback was the first time). I think Milk will get no love from the academy, and that shouldn't, but it does, hurt me and my gayness. The movie deserves a few major awards but won't get any,I don't think. Well, here's to the little part of me still hoping. Break a leg, Milk! Bring home at least one little golden guy.

Frost/Nixon (2008) - LightShed 5

Frost/Nixon is a great movie, but I don't think it deserved an Oscar nomination for best film.

In this movie, Michael Sheen plays David Frost, an entertainer who scores a major interview with Richard Nixon (played by Frank Langella) soon after his defenestration.

My major problem with the movie, and I hope I'm not giving too much away, is that I felt there was not enough time for Frost (who had been upstaged and beaten to death by Nixon's trickydickyness for 4 out of 5 interviewing sessions), to be able to pull a Rocky and defeat Nixon in the last round with no real or meaningful chasing-the-chicken moments. That was a bummer for me. The acting is awesome, though. Langella is fantastic, and so is Sheen.

The movie has gay content, at least I thought so.

It actually was something that kinda held the movie together in a sense.  When Nixon is trying to study his opponent before the interviews, he notices Frost is wearing loafers and there's a whole back-and-forth on the subject between Nixon and his adviser...Nixon's adviser, played by Kevin Bacon, suggests the shoes are too effeminate -- the homophobic innuendo was pretty clear to me. Nixon had liked the shoes, apparently was actually challenged by the notion that shoes could come with no laces, but is easily led to see the shoes for what they are: gay.  At one point Nixon mentions the shoes to Frost as being something effeminate -- this as a way to bully Frost; put in him in his place, Nixon's bitch.  But Frost doesn't bite the bait and at the end even gives Nixon a gift:  a gay shoe, and Nixon seems to like it. I was ambivalent about the whole thing, but I thought it all was neutral to positive in the end.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) - LightShed 7

I wish we lived in a wold where, if they couldn't come up with a movie like Benjamin Button, they just wouldn't make a movie at all; we would have the guarantee of being completely swept away to another world for the price of a movie ticket. Seriously, movie-making doesn't get any better than this; and, if you ask me, I don't think this movie was nominated for enough Oscars (but for one or two scenes here and there -- which we could have done away with -- the movie is perfect).

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt is a guy who is born old and grows younger with age. That superb circumstance allows the movie to portray the impossible and heartbreaking love story between our aging-challenged Brad Pitt and a person aging as we all do (played by Cate Blanchett). I started crying at the scene when a 7-year old Cate sees the old-looking Brad for the first time.

The acting is superb across the board (Cate easily deserved a nomination for her role here).

We had a tiny bit of gay content. In one scene, Cate Blanchett tells Brad that there are a few lesbians in her dance company and that one of them proposed sleeping with her, she seemed proud of that, she was very non-judgmental -- and so was Brad's character. Nice. Later on, when we see some of the people within her dance company, you could see some guys who could have been gay (ok, I'll say it: they looked pretty gay) -- but we don't really know that, so I'm leaving that out.

 

You absolutely must see this movie.

Harry Connick, Jr. + Beard = Must See Movie

I would never see a piece of shit of a movie like this if it weren't for this man and his beard:

Sign me up!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Trailer

Holy shit:

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) - No Gay Content

This wasn't bad. It's a pretty decent catastrophe movie.

In this remake of the 1951 movie, Keanu Reaves plays Klaatu, an alien sent to earth to destroy humans because they are destroying mother earth. Jennifer Connelly is a scientist that inadvertently helps him out.

I saw this on iMax, I mean sort of; they use the iMax screen but the projection is not really full iMax (a large part of the top and bottom are cut off). I think that is a problem that affects most wide release movies on iMax. It pisses me off but I keep coming back for more...

Jason Statham

I've been meaning to check out those Transporter movies; it appears the hero was originally going to be gay, but then, of course, they had to make him straight...this would've been our gay:

 

 

 

More here.

Four Christmases (2008) - Shipwreck 4

This was pretty bad, I went to see it with a couple of friends from Brazil (a straight couple-- they liked it and laughed quite a bit).

In Four Christmases, Vince Vaughan and Reese Witherspoon play a couple terrified of spending Christmas with their families -- they don' want to confront their ghosts. Their attempt spend Christmas away from their families in Fiji fails when all flights are grounded due to bad weather and they end up on TV (this after having lied to their families -- they had said they were going to Burma to save children or sth like that). Seeing them on TV, their families talk them into spending time with them.

We have a bit of gay content.  While visiting Reese's mom family, we learn that the husband of Reese's sister (played by Kristen Chenoweth) "has experienced with men" -- Kristen reveals the news as a way to tell Reese how much she knows about her husband (and, to a lesser extent, how forgiving she is); Reese, meanwhile, knows nothing about her boyfriend Vince. Kristen might have talked about the gay experience in a somewhat positive light, but I think it came off as being just for laughs, at our expense.

Later in the same visit, Reese`s mom shows Vince pictures of Reese's lesbian phase (she basically had a very butch friend growing up; but soon after we learn Reese didn't actually know her friend was a lesbian). Vince shows what appears to be his support and understanding of the "lesbian phase" and I did want to see the scene in a good light, but at the end, again, I think it was all really just for laughs, at our expense ("at us, not with us" king of thing).

I must say, though, that if this is the way that homophobia is going to be portrayed, we are probably on a good track as at least there seems to have been an effort to not just go all purely derogatory on us; as I pointed out, the light can even arguably be seen as neutral to positive.

Independently of the gay content, the movie is pretty bad -- a waste of Reese's (and ours) time.