Queer Beacon

Hancock (2008) - Shipwreck 2

So, we have a homophobic superhero.  Really, really upsetting. 

Let me first give you the good news. Hancock is a good action movie.  This is an interesting story of a homeless guy who happens to be a superhero, he recklessly rescues people and prevents crimes --  after each rescue or intervention, the city is left with millions in unnecessary and usually easily avoidable damages.  Hancock is a drunkard and is constantly grumpy.

Things start to change when he saves the live of major cutie Jason Bateman.  Jason is into public relations and offers to change the image of our super hero.

Now the bad stuff.  The first homophobic content comes right on the first scene. When Hancock is busting these three criminals, he breaks into their car and says something to the effect that he was not even judging the fact that there were three dudes in the car.  He said it in a way that conveys his disgust with the all-dude situation. Bad.  Then, later, Jason is trying to help him choose a super hero outfit by showing the cover of a few comic books.  To every single one of the outfits Will Smith reacts: "homo", "homo in red", "Scandinavian homo" and so forth.  Again, really bad.

I concede that in those two scenes, Hancock had not been "saved" and he was still the baddass idiot; nasty and in bad behavior. But we are clearly made to be on his side at all times and we never forget that this is Will Smith, whose shit is not supposed to stink even when he's playing an idiot.  Also, to be a baddass, do you need to be homophobic?

Eastern Promises (2007) - Shipwreck 2

Cronenberg's superb A History of Violence left me with high expectations for his next movie, and that is, in a way, unfair to Eastern Promises.  EP is a great movie, but it is not even in the same category with A History of Violence.  The building blocks of EP's plot are quite interesting, but the execution, the details (especially the ancillary dialogs) are lame; distracting at best (like the cheesy-ass attempts at comedy from Naomi's racist uncle).

In Eastern Promises, Naomi Watts is a nurse who helps out a teenage mother.  The teenage girls dies during labor and Naomi feels like she needs to find out the whereabouts of the girl's family so that the baby can be sent them.  In her quest for information, she becomes entangled with the Russian mafia.  We have Armin Mueller-Stahl as the big boss, Vincent Cassel as his son, and Viggo Mortensen as the family's, uh, driver.  That's all you need to know.

In Eastern Promises you get the gory violence Cronenberg is famous for right in the first few minutes.  There are other gory scenes, one of which is quite original.  Viggo fights two guys -- totally naked.  The two guys are not naked but Viggo is, which, I think, adds a very interesting layer of risk to the fight.  We see Viggo's parts swinging left and right, dodging the blades and small knifes.  Superb.

Eastern Promises packs quite a bit of gay content, but my discussion of the homo scenes will ruin the part of the plot.

Code Name: The Cleaner (2007) - Shipwreck 2

In Code Name: The Cleaner, Cedric the Entertainer is a janitor who loses his memory and is duped into believing he is actually a secret agent.  Nicollette Sheridan pretends to be married to him in order to gain his trust and some valuable information about a computer chip.  Cedric is further duped by Lucy Liu, who pretends to be his real girlfriend.  Corrupt agents from the FBI and CIA are also on the loose.  You can see the trailer here.

The good news is that the movie boasts nice shots from the two most beautiful cities in the world: Seattle and Vancouver (the movie takes place in Seattle, but we can see that a lot was actually shot in Vancouver).  We have two actresses I like: Nicollette and Lucy.  Also, the few short scenes with comedian DeRay Davis, who plays one of Cedric's co-workers, are pretty funny; and, best of all, we have Niecy Nash in a character called Jacuzzi! I think Niecy is one of the funniest girls around and her short cameo in this movie is hilarious -- she plays one of Cedric's flings.  Oh, and the movie is only 91 minutes long; if you do decide to see Code Name against my advice you will be thankful for that...which brings us to the bad news.

The movie is bad, kinda watchable, but bad; and we have five scenes with negative-leaning gay content.

Our first scene with gay content is the opening scene of the movie.  Cedric wakes up in a hotel room next to a guy, and without knowing he is next to a guy, Cedric gropes him, only to be utterly disgusted a few seconds later when he finds out he was groping a dude.  His reaction was actually not so bad given that Cedric could have been repulsed by the fact that he groped a dead guy.

In the second gay scene, Nicollette takes Cedric to her house to try to convince him that they are married, and Cedric finds a pink thong in his bathroom, and he is all "oh this is so wrong." Again, not so homophobic, but not nice either.

Then, Cedric is waiting for someone in his car and a guy who is sitting in a car accross from him stares at Cedric, getting Cedric to go talk to him.  Cedric thinks the guy in that other car will have some sort of intel for his case (Cedric thinks he is a secret agent, not a janitor, remember?), and when Cedric approaches the car we learn the guy in the car is a gay guy who had arranged a meeting on the Internet.  Again, Cedric is repulsed by the idea of male intimacy and his reaction was pretty bad.  Again, gays are used for a cheap laugh.

Then, in a scene that was actually pretty funny, comedian DeRay Davis (who plays a janitor and rapper wannabe) is about to get shot while cleaning the bathroom.  To our surprise, the janitor actually invites the shot because in his reasoning the shot will validate him as a rapper: "if I die I'm Tupac, if I survive I'm 50 cent."  He asks the guy who is about to shoot him to aim at his ass, he turns around and starts screaming "give it to me in the ass," like a crazy person, the guy who is about to shoot him freaks out and leaves our funny janitor screaming "I wanna it bad in the ass" and a janitor friend walks in at that moment, of course.  I think that in the old days, the janitor friend would have had a very bad reaction and called him all sorts of names, but in Code Name he just said something like "I don't even know you anymore."  So this was the only sort of neutral light for us gays, but in the end, that scene too used the gays for ridicule.  Again, not nice.

The worst scene with gay content happens at the end.  I will talk about it after the jump because it will ruin a bit of the plot, but since you will probably not see this movie when it opens tomorrow, read on...

[SPOILER AHEAD]

Crank (2006) - Shipwreck 2

Hello folks!  I'm back.  My Ph.D. program started and it's been crazy already.  Sorry for the lack of posts this week ;-)

To make matters worse, my first post in a few days is about an awful movie.  Barely watchable, even with all the skin and wood Jason Statham gave us.

In Crank, Jason Statham is a hit man who kills a big shot kingpin.  The revenge he gets is pretty nasty, he gets injected with some drug that will kill him if his heartbeat falls below a certain rate, so he tries to keep the adrenaline up, running around, beating people up, drinking Red Bull, wreaking havoc...I hated it all.

I had noted in a previous post that Pedro played a tranny.

The portrayal of the tranny was not so bad.  Jason's character had her as a trusted friend (she was a criminal, but so was everybody else in the movie).  However, Jason uses homophobic slurs all the time, he teases a few gangsters by calling them faggots, that sort of stuff.  Nasty.  Having a tranny friend does not give him the right to slur, right?

At least we got lots of wood from Jason.  At one point he gets a shot that is supposed to help him out with his hearbeat rate, and that shot ends up giving him wood.  Like this one:

I had posted that picture before, and wondered whether that was an actual bulge...it turns out, it was a bulge.  We also got a little of his butt, but not nearly enough to keep you really interested in this piece of crap. 

Winter Passing (2005) - Shipwreck 2

Excellent movie.  It makes me really sad to see that a movie this good has a bad homophobic line.  Shame on Adam Rapp, the writer, for letting that line stay.

In Winter Passing, Zooey Deschanel is the daughter of a famous writer, played by Ed Harris.  She lives in New York -- she is trying to act; her dad lives in Michigan and still suffers from her mother's death.  Zooey goes to Michigan.  Everybody is excellent.  Zooey became one of my favorites immediately, Will Ferrel proved once more that he can really act (he did it before in Woody Allen's Melinda & Melinda).

Our bad content happens when Zooey tries to kiss Will Ferrel in this awkward scene.  Will Ferrell kind of pushes her away and she delivers: "You faggot!  You fucking faggot!"  That broke my heart.  The movie was excellent, but I was going to give it a Shipwreck 1.  I only added one more point because she sort of apologizes to Will Ferrell later, she says sorry, and that the incident was weird.  But she does not really apologize for the hateful homophobic slurs, so, she could be apologizing for the awkward almost kiss for all I care.  And don't give me the, "oh, she was a wreck" crap.  We have seen train wrecks who managed to pull out a great LightShed.  Look no further than Lisa Hamilton in Nine Lives.

And you wanna know how bad this type of name calling is?  My better half had forgotten about it right after the movie.  I concede that, maybe, my hubby is not as anal retentive and fired up as I am and that he can let things go and he is the one preventing me from pulling a Courtney Love on people's ass all the time, but I do believe that even when we forget a homophobic incident, it sticks to our unconscious.  Dangerously.  A lot of internalized homophobia comes from there, especially when served to us in such an excellent movie.  Even the soundtrack was great :-(

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.

Clerks (1994) - Shipwreck 2

The movie stars nobody and nobody in the role of clerks at this joint in the middle of nowhere. Ok, the movie was made in 1994 and perhaps there was a little less homophobia awareness, but this movie was awful. I could not believe it. The movie was sprinkled with homophobia, I could not believe it.

One of the worst cases happened when nobody 1 tells nobody 2 that his ex-girlfriend had "half-cheated" on him. What happened was, his girlfriend wanted to cheat on him at this party with some guy, who would have supposedly been waiting for her in a dark bedroom, but nobody 1 was the actual guy in that bedroom, and the girlfriend only found out she was actually having sex with her own boyfriend after she groaned the wrong name and lights were on, and she was shocked. In the other dark bedroom, the guy who was supposedly going to hook up with the cheater-girlfriend, ended up hooking up with another guy, and nobody 1 says the two guys were now living somewhere, raising sheep (or goats).  Later on, while recounting that half-cheating story, nobody 2 says that the ex-girlfriend lead the guy who she was supposed to have sex with, into a “deviant lifestyle.” 

I gotta give it up for Kevin Smith though (the writer/director).  The story and most of the other little sub-plots in the movie were pretty ingenious.  That actually turns this movie into a worse case of a shipwreck -- you know, a movie that is otherwise good and likable is used to spread homophobia, or worse, use the gays for a cheap laugh.

There were various other homophobic slurs uttered throughout the movie (you know, the usual…faggot, bla bla bla).  Shame on you Smith! No wonder GLAAD was all over your ass in 2001. 

And you think that having an openly gay older brother would help stop the homophobia?  Think again.  Kevin has an openly gay older brother, Donald Smith.