life is beautiful

getting her act together. taking it on the road

"Bad things can happen but that doesn't mean that it's your fault."

Halle Berry just can't get it together.  Joss Whedon told the world that she was a shitty Storm (not kind).  She had to pretend to have sex with Billy Bob Thorton for an Oscar.  Angela Bassett is always breaking into her trailers and replacing her good, Malaysian hair with synthetics from the John Travolta collection (it's big in Mexico).  She just can't catch a break.

Not many of you may know that after her last domestic dispute (when the French guy from Unfaithful attacked her fiance on Thanksgiving), Ms Berry was so moved by the top-notch service of our nation's hard working call center employees that she, herself, got a job working as a 911 operator.  It was real hush-hush, she didn't even tell Oprah about it.

Much to everyone's surprise, she's really good at it.  Finally a role she can sink her teeth into!  From Catwoman to B.A.P.S, Halle learned a great deal about problem solving on her sets (we all know what a nightmare Alex Borstein can be) and she applies her wisdom to every call with relish.  At last, Halle found a career where she could really be appreciated - where her she can apply her practiced empathy and understanding of tactics and stakes to feel like a real woman for once in her life.  Working at the call center, Halle Berry interacts with people she'd never have the opportunity to encounter in Hollywood:  people in wheelchairs, people of color... Roma Mafia.

"Hey, Terrence.  How you doin?"

Watching her latest documentary, The Call, I learned the LAPD are not the ones who are going to take care of me in an emergency.  If I need shit done, I'm going to call Halle Berry direct!  Not only does she get completely invested in every call bu,t should the going get tough and a sociopath try to kidnap me at the Westside Pavillion, Halle Berry will actually get off the phone, throw on a sports bra and go after the maniac herself.  Talk about customer service!

The Call was directed by Session 9's Brad Anderson and it's pretty fantastic.   Both genuinely engaging and movie-of-the-week ludicrous, The Call is consistently fun - by far the best movie to be commissioned by the World Wrestling Federation yet.  As someone obsessed with his X-Men stories, I always sort of disliked Halle Berry for ruining Storm.  Watching The Call, however, I felt a lot of compassion for her.  She's obviously a good person and she's been through it.  She has shitty taste in men and, despite being one of the few True Beauties, Halle doesn't seem to value herself a whole lot. A movie where a strong, independent black woman saves the day?  Yes, thank you! Sign me up.    If you've ever wanted to see Oscar Winner Halle Berry recreate the ending of Silence of the Lambs in a crazy wig, this movie's for you.  I cried three times.

mondays

butterflies are free

Hi dolls.  I'm a day late and a dollar short in my Under the Dome recap this week.  Sorry.  It's just that watching that last episode made me unbearably anxious.  As someone who loves television, there's nothing worse than bad television.  Under the Dome is bad.  Everything about it is bad.  The show is poorly plotted, terribly lit and inconsistently shot.  Every actor is giving a hackneyed performance with no regard for tone or ensemble or consistent stakes.  I could go on, but I don't want to.  Despite the Bougie Contrarian that lives inside everyone who has a "blog," I like being positive.  I love to like things - Just ask Joe Seely!

So, while I could spend an hour coming up with catty things to say about Ginger Dursley and her dead husband, Nicky Arnstein's gambling problem, I would much rather take this opportunity NOT to discuss Under the Dome and, instead, explore some of the fantastic developments in "queer cinema" over the past couple years.  Strap yourself in, we're going off genre.

Andrew Haigh.

Andrew Haigh made a romance for the ages. Weekend deals with the complexities of two men trying to overcome their own baggage and make a genuine connection.  This movie was way ahead when it came out in 2011, influencing everything from Rihanna music videos to Lena Dunham's Girls.  Criterion even released their own edition of the film last year.  Andrew Haigh is directing and producing a new series for HBO about a group of gay besties living and loving in San Francisco.  If it's anything at all like Weekend, it looks like we all have something to look forward to this winter!

Travis Mathews.

Travis is the queer iconoclast who was hand-picked by performance artist James Franco to guide him into the gay consciousness.  Franco and Mathews collaborated on Interior: Leather Bar which pretended to recreate the mythical missing forty minutes excised from Cruising in order to explore how we deal with male sexuality and objectification, etc etc.  I'm much more interested in Travis' first feature, I Want Your Love.

I Want Your Love is based on Mathew's short film where two hipsters talk for a bit and then have graphic sex and kiss.  The feature version tracks an aimless twenty-something artist whose life plan isn't coming together the way he imagined.  We follow him through his last day in San Francisco before moving back to the mid-west with his parents.  Yes, the actors have real, on-camera sex but this movie isn't a porn.  I Want Your Love shows us something much more terrifying to the Million Mom brigade than sodomy - emotional intimacy.  Shocking!  This movie captures the transition from ennui to productivity, from just fucking around to actually wanting something more (or not).  I Want Your Love is great.

Adam Goldman.

Like Miss Vanessa Williams (second reference this week - point to Gryffindor!!!), I went and saved the best for last.  Adam Goldman's The Outs is perfect.  It's a perfect thing.  To call it a web-series is too limiting.  The Outs is aspirational.  Goldman proves that we can create the art we deserve.  Gay stories don't have to be about Coming-Out or about AIDS or about being shirtless whores with lemon faces(dotcom).   The Outs is about learning to love yourself enough to accept reciprocity. When my long-term relationship ended last winter, I watched this show repeatedly, as if I was trying to absorb it so I could somehow manifest a happily ever after of my own.  It worked.  That's the power of good art - in it we can see reflections of ourselves and our potential.  I cherish this series. More thoughtful than anything you'll ever find on Logo and better produced than most features, The Outs is the future.  

The next time you find yourself disheartened by lackluster, late-summer entertainment, know that there are alternatives (and we only have five more weeks until Glee is back up and running).  

Shame, Shame...

Take it from me, if you're not careful, being a gay man in your thirties can lead to some pretty reckless behavior.  One minute you're cancelling plans so you can lie on the sofa and catch up on the Betty Draper Chronicles, sitting there stone-faced, binge eating marshmallows and drinking Miller 64s (they delicious with just a spash of bloody mary mix - try it!) - the next minute, you're passed out with a black eye wearing a soiled, over-sized cashmere sweater in some stranger's bathtub.  Tricky.  Very tricky.

Sometimes, I feel out of control and reckless.  I'm starting to feel like the female protagonist in Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.  It wasn't very well publicized for fear of alienating Mr. Perry's audience base, but said film was actually a remake of Andrzej  Zulawski's Eastern European body-horror classic, Possession (1981).   

Possession and Tyler Perry’s Temptation are both histrionic explorations of the dissolution of a once happy marriage. Possession features a gorgeous actress, Isabelle Adjani, playing a woman in the final stages of a loveless marriage to the Antichrist (Sam Neill).  Temptation features a gorgeous actress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, playing a woman in the final stages of a listless marriage to a wholesome Christian pharmacist who wears sweaters that zip down the front.

"He gon' take you straight t'Hell."

To different ends, these films both brazenly assert that women have sexual urges for which they (obviously) must be punished.  Men are martyrs, victimized by women who no longer wish to be at their beck and call.  In Temptation, Jurnee is repeatedly chastised for not cooking for her husband, despite the fact that she works more hours than him in a much more demanding profession.  What a selfish bitch.

"I can't exist by myself because I'm afraid of myself.  I'm the maker of my own evil."

Tyler Perry repeatedly allows his lens to linger on two different muscular, and oftentimes shirtless, Black men.  As noted heterosexual directors are wont to do, Mr Perry makes sure they are adequately baby-oiled throughout.  Early on in Tyler Perry's Temptation, the leaner, richer of the two shirtless muscled black men unleashes the untold fury of racial oppression on an otherwise innocent white man in the park.  Similarly, in Possession, Sam Neill drowns his rival in a public toilet after showing us his bum; he grows facial hair and lacerates himself with an electric meat carver to indicate emotional distress.   In Temptation, shamed beauty-queen, Vanessa Williams wears a poodle wig and speaks in a fake-French accent like PePe LePew.

In Possession, we track our heroine's descent into madness, watching her bring men to her rented flat across town, vacant except for a soiled mattress where she kills and feeds the essence of her victims to a monster that lives in her closet.  In Temptation, Jurnee starts wearing heels and lipstick and getting blow-outs.  Isabelle Adjani keeps leftover body parts in her refrigerator.  Jurnee Smollett-Bell stops going to church.  

Jurnee's husband forgets her birthday and shames her for wanting to have sex with him in their kitchen so she takes a private plane to New Orleans with a richer, leaner black man.  In Possession, Isabelle miscarries a malevolent entity in an underground subway tunnel - screaming and thrashing about while leaking blood and demonic ooze out of multiple orifices.

Possession prominently features a tentacled Hell-Beast that can only be satiated when devouring man-flesh.  Temptation prominently features Kim Kardassian.  They’re basically the same movie.

In Possession, Isabelle has consensual sex with the tentacled Hell-Beast and their lust manifests a dark-mirror-version of Sam Neill.  In Temptation, Jurnee gets beaten and left for dead in a bathtub after catching AIDS from getting sexually assaulted against her will on a private plane.  Rest assured, she had it coming - she drank two sips of champagne!

Tyler did change a few things to make his reboot more appropriate for his median audience.  In Possession, Isabelle Adjani has a mirror-self which is Isabelle Adjani wearing contacts and a lighter wig.  Good Isabelle attends to her son and keeps Sam Neil company while Evil Isabelle is off across town living in sin.  

Since the only actor allowed to play multiple roles in a Tyler Perry joint is Tyler Perry, the double in Temptation is played by Brandy!  In Temptation, Brandy is the dark mirror to Jurnee's character - living in a filthy garret apartment with no furniture.  Brandy was once wanton in her sexuality.  She loved getting that fine muscle dick until she wound up with AIDS - now she works at a pharmacy with Nanny Fine's mother and wears a lot of earth tones.

"Thank you so much for sharing this story with me.  I'm gonna end this almost-affair and stay with my husband."

Anyone who has survived the dissolution of a primary care relationship knows that playing victim and placing blame is commonplace.  People and circumstances change over time - both parties contribute to the equation.   Breakups induce a chemical withdrawal that can leave us feeling more than a little unhinged.   Possession is a movie for adults; it doesn't presume to dictate right or wrong.   It dives headfirst into that mania and leaves us to pick up the pieces in the rubble.   Isabelle Adjani always has the upper hand, alternatively laughing and screaming at the concept of being possessed by a man. She is no man's property.

The same cannot be said for Jurnee in Temptation, a film that posits women who are dissatisfied with their relationships are clap-having harlots who must be punished.

Jurnee is cast out for trying to better herself.  She's publicly shamed for trying to grow and having the gall to aspire above her station.  Tyler Perry says that a woman who strives for greatness will end up alone and ugly with short hair and dark lipstick, doomed to suffer the further indignity of having to get her AIDS medicine from the pharmacy where her Good Christian ex-husband works now living happily ever after with his new, younger wife and children.  

"I hate fags who hate women."

-Madonna, Truth of Dare

My favorite moment in Tyler Perry's misguided epic, The Family that Preys, is when Miss Robin Givens - decked out as high powered executive named Abigail , says to Miss Sanaa Lathan, "It's sisters like you that give us all a bad name".  Correct.  That's exactly how I feel about Tyler Perry.  I, for one, don’t want to watch any more Tyler Perry movies anymore because, unlike Mr Perry, I don't hate myself.  Each of his "films" is more regressive than the last.  This man in a dress is actually dangerous to women.  His backwards moralizing and casual misogyny is deplorable and aggressive and could only come from the most hateful of hearts.  If you don't believe me, just check out Lindy West's brilliant piece on the subject over at Jezebel.  

Watch Possession because it's a riot.  It's the perfect Lovecraftian mash-up of Nicholas Roeg and David Cronenberg.  Find a copy and share it with your friends.   Sharing our favorite things and educating against intolerance is how we can show love and that will always win in the end.  Love is love.  So whether it’s taking a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday to eat a bag of marshmallows in front of the TV or fleeing a suffocating relationship, be sure to take good care of yourself.  No one else can tell you what’s right for you.  

Christmas in July

Everybody, be sure to send Birthday love to the queen of Hollywood, Phoebe Cates.  

She's fifty and fabulous! 

Please note: her Gremlins monologue got me into the BFA program at Emerson.

members only

This week on Under the Dome, Dorothy is busying herself with a wetlands charity when Rose becomes convinced that she may have contracted HIV from a blood transfusion and Sophia promptly labeled all the cups so she doesn't catch her AIDS.  No, that's not it.

"You're not better, you're just pretending."

My DVR cut off the "previously on" monologue, so we're already screwed.  Jesus, this month!  Is Mercury still in Retrograde?   The episode opens with Ginger Dursley in a state of mild concern because she's out of her dolls.  What sort of dolls they are is anyone's guess, but I bet money they're those Hair/Skin/Nail vitamins from Costco.  I'd be upset too.  Outside Ginger's house, people are throwing eggs at the wall and extras are shoving one another to get on camera.

The Hot Guy Who Locked Shelly the Waitress in the Bomb Shelter brings her a black prom dress.  So thoughtful!  He promptly teleports to his next scene at the hospital where everyone just so happens to be this week; everyone except for Shelly the Waitress who has that no-so-fresh feeling and, now that she's finally alone, takes to busting open a water pipe to freshen up.  Resourceful.

"Excuse me, I'm a physician."

The camp quotient is turned to eleven this week because Samantha Mathis is still wearing her prop glasses and now she's pretending to be a doctor.  She takes over the Little Hospital Under the Dome, hooking people up to those cute little EEG hats that Jill Zarin wore on season four of The Real Housewives of New York.  They even brought in the legendary Celia Westin in to play two scenes lying down in old-age lipstick before dying in front of the Latina Who Can't Act. My kind of theatre.

Samantha Mathis continues to go really hard on this "pretending to be a doctor" thing, doling out prescriptions and imaginary diagnosis, she even denies Celia Westin antibiotics for added artificial tension - it looks like someone's been watched The Impossible!

"I'm gonna get you something to eat and you're gonna eat it."

I like this Tide commercial with a dad playing cowboy with his toddler daughter who's dressed as a princess.  I wonder if his wife is dead or if she's just busy working to keep a roof over their heads since he's never been able to hold down a job.

The Hot Guy Who Locked Shelly the Waitress in the Bomb Shelter gives a monologue that has no linear logic, motivated by nothing, while a bunch of extras make some really good faces.  I think maybe that's the secret to Under the Dome - just watch the extras. Also, everyone is wearing pastel button downs this week.  There must have been a sale at Ross: Dress for Less.  Do they have those in Canada?

Ginger has put her hair in a pony to indicate sickness while The Goth Girl convinces the Epileptic Boy to make a sex tape.  Shelly the Waitress is upset because she doesn't know how to fix the pipe she broke.  Silly goose.  Somehow Ginger goes from running around the hospital to passing out in the cabin by the lake and Mike Vogel carries her away before telling her that her husband is dead.  Who says chivalry is dead?

"Are you stealing insulin?"

Are you invested yet? So, this week there was an outbreak of meningitis that was promptly cured by Samantha Mathis who gave everyone pills.  Whew!  The Latina Who Can't Act let her hair down and took off her silly police outfit.  The Old Guy in the Pleather Member's Only Jacket is no longer wearing his pleather Member's Only jacket.  Was this book this uneventful?