Queer Beacon

Juno (2007) - LightShed 6

Juno is excellent. In the movie, Ellen Page (remember her from Hard Candy?) is 16 and she is carrying Michael Cera's baby.  Too young to deal with it all and unwilling to do an abortion, Page decides to give her baby away to Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman, who play one of those perfect suburban couples.

The movie is a joyride despite the seriousness of the subject (teenage pregnancy). The soundtrack is full of first-rate alternative rock songs and the acting is really solid. Page certainly deserves the attention she is getting for her performance in Juno, but she is not alone. Olivia Thirlby, who plays Page's best friend (an unlikely friendship between a cheerleader and Juno, the screw-up goof-ball);  Allison Janney, who plays Juno's step-mom; J.K. Simmons, who plays the father, and Cera and Garner are all excellent.

We also have gay content, not all good though. In our first gay tidbit, Juno says that, ideally, she would give her baby away to be adopted by a nice lesbian couple. That is super nice. But then, later in the movie, when Garner is wondering about baby names, she suggests a name that Juno thinks is gay (I think the name was Marianne or sth like that).  Juno  said "gay" as though it was not necessarily a bad thing, there's no hate in her voice, but still we'd be better off if people didn't use " gay" to mean sth uncool (remember this post about whether it's okay to say "gay"?). Then, finally, Juno is just walking around in this mall with her best friend Thirlby when they bump into Garner, who was also shopping in the mall with her " girlfriends."  When Thirlby hears that, she asks whether Garner is gay. Of course, Thirlby just got it wrong, as Garner was referring to girls who are her friends, not actual girlfriends. That was pretty neutral.

You should definitely see this one on the big screen.

Jackass: Number 2 (2006) - LightShed 10

Wow, what have we come too?  Jackass: Number 2 opened this weekend to (much) better reviews than All The King's Men, one of the most anticipated movies for this fall season.  It was also the number one movie of the weekend.  You can find a bunch of reviews for Jackass here, and for All The King's Men here.

In Jackass: Number 2, Johnny Knoxville and his posse continue to create the craziest, dumbest skits just to hurt themselves, and entertain us.  And that they deliver.  It's all a big, entertaining, bruise fest.  You can't look away.

I think that of the super-straight oriented shows, Jackass is the one I like the most, and it's nice of Johnny Knoxville to acknowledge the many gay Jackass fans.  On Conan O'Brien (is Conan a little homophobic?  I really like him, but I'll keep my eyes open) Johnny talked about his cover shoot for Out magazine, and said that with the amount of naked guys on his skits, it would be impossible not to have gay fans.  Go Johnny.

Pretty much every single skit involves someone's ass or penis.  Steve-o drinks beer with his ass (a full bottle), Johnny takes a speeding metal dildo up there, one of the cast wears a pubic hair beard...the list is long.

John Waters makes an appearance too, that's gay.

Jackass is the ultimate guy movie.  The theater I went to was packed with male teenagers. The opening weekend's audience was 66% male, and 71% under 25.  And they didn't hear one homophobic slur or remark, even with the many chances for that, given the amount of male-on-male intimacy going on throughout the movie.  I guess there might have been one or two "cocksuckers" (barely) uttered, but I couldn't really tell because the theater was laughing so hard, and loud. 

Granted, the skits, with their varying degrees of gayness, were all meant for a laugh, but I didn't think the laugh were really at us gays.  The joke was on them, jackasses, literally.

And if there is ever any doubt that these jackasses are gay friendly, remember what one of them (Steve-o) said on September 8 on The Howard Stern Show: "With Jackass we're not trying to act homosexual -- what we're trying to do is rid the world of homophobia.  Homophobics are the creepiest of the creeps." As reported on the October 10 issue of The Advocate, page 24.

Love you Johnny, Love you Steve-o.  Keep up the jackassness going, and don't kill yourselves for us. 

I included lots of Johnny after the jump (including a shower scene of course).

Just Like Heaven (2005) - Shipwreck 4

Mediocre movie.  See the mediocre trailer here.

Here, Mark Ruffalo moves into an apartment previously inhabited by Reese Witherspoon.  Reese's spirit haunts the crap out of him.  Jon Heder is a psychic who tries to help Mark.

I love Reese, she's been one of my girls since Election.  I like Ruffalo since Eternal Sunshine, where we see a lot of him in underwear.  I think Jon Heder's Napoleon Dynamite was one of the funniest characters ever.  Even so, Just Like Heaven just didn't work.  It couldn't.  The premise was all bogus.  The movie was bogus.

Now to our gay movie review.  Ivana Milicevic (that's her on the right) plays Ruffalo's hot neighbor.  She is hot indeed.  In one scene, she is all over Ruffalo on the couch and she wonders what is wrong with the single guys in San Francisco.  Seriously, bitch needs a clue.  She says that whenever she sees a handsome guy in San Francisco, it turns out it's really a lesbian.  It is not clear to me whether her problem with San Francisco guys is really positive or negative for the gays.  In cases like these, I would normally go for a positive light (when in doubt I'm trying to stay positive), but in this case I'm going negative because we had another suggestion the movie was not good for the gays.

Early in the movie, when Mark Ruffalo is looking for an apartment, his real estate agent tells him that the couple who lives in the place they are about to visit are always in Palm Springs (that's gay enough, right?).  Once Ruffalo and the realtor are inside the house, Mark Ruffalo stares at the butt of two or more of those male Roman statues and he kinda of nods in disapproval and decides not to give the place a try.  Like renting a gay apartment is out of the question.  Whatever Mark. 

I was a bit mad at that scene and I was actually even more upset that everything was only very thinly suggested, almost like the type of veiled homophobia in the Dodge Caliber ad.  There is no hard evidence that homophobia was at play in either the realtor scene or the hot Ivana scene, mentioned above. 

Sadly, I suspect the type of homophobia displayed by Mark's character in the realtor scene is quite common.  You don't need to explain why you are not renting or buying or hiring, you can just find some excuse to mask your real prejudices. 

A San Francisco movie without gays is just sad.  To me it's like an African movie without black people, or an Israeli movie without Jews. 

Jarhead (2005) - Shipwreck 2

The movie tells us the story of Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, a soldier who bored us to a near death experience in a movie portraying a war in Iraq.  The 'frontal' nude scene would have needed a far, far, greater candor to keep us awake (you can catch a glimpse of his booty here). Having said that, the movie was actually ok, once you buy into the fact that the point of the movie was precisely to show us the boredom involved in that war. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance was quite decent.

Being a U.S. army movie, you expect nothing but homophobia and narrow mindedness, and Jarhead delivers just that. There were a few homophobic remarks (“you fucking faggot” type). Very cliché. Very offensive.

Shame on the movie.