Homo Media Roundup + Charlie & the Chocolate Factory Bonus

Given my social distance here (self imposed or not, whatever), I’ve been spending alot of time watching movies & reading books. Shocker here, alot of them are gay oriented. So, here’s a review of some of them, in no particular order.

• Movies
  • Before Stonewall–A documentary produced in 1984. I know alot about homo history, for someone my age, who hasn’t taken any actual classes on it or anything. It intrigues me that so few people know what the stonewall riots were. Well educated homo-friendly people. Well, this one talks about a nonverbal language of the repressed. It talks about military service before people understood that you could come out of the closet. The relatively freewheeling 20’s. The war years. The repressive 50’s. The rebellious 60’s. And a brief moment on stonewall. And it’s all personal stories. A semi-famous person or two (famous enough to show up in the Rent “La Vie Boheme” litany) get interviewed too. It talks about the mattachine society in some detail.

    And seeing it just brings up a keen mourning for the years I lost to guilt, despair, desperate self-loathing, and a feeling of being alone in the universe. I had those years several years after this movie came out. There’s some anger in there, but not nearly as much anger as loss.

  • Yossi and Jagger–A military gay love story/tragedy from Israel from 2002. In Hebrew, I guess. Definitely not english. The subtitling on the version I have is awful. Clearly done by someone who doesn’t know english very well. But it’s a touching story. Short (about an hour) and very simple but not badly done for all of it. It has a video that has this dude that I swear looks like singing in hebrew. I knew he was living a double life from the heartland men’s chorus thing, but I had no idea he was a pop star in a different country.
  • Rites of Passage–A gay thriller/family drama from 1999. Some of the stereotypes are a bit grating. Excessively butch dad with a burst of rage (which happens sometimes, see also the what was it, three year old that was recently beaten to death by his father?). Sulky, rebellious, athletically disinclined (yet still buff!) gay son, with strong artistic ability even as a kid. But, on the upside, it is a movie with major gay themes where the central conflicts don’t revolve around AIDS or broad social acceptance issues. It’s not terribly well done. And, as in most thriller movies, they killed off one of the characters I liked the most (for a thriller, it has a low body count, but it has a small cast, too). The character in question is kinda likeable, and rather unconventionally cute.
  • Bear Cub–A pure family drama from Spain from 2004. The subtitles on this one ZOOM by. Often way too fast to catch. That’s a problem; it makes it impossible to keep up with both the acting and the dialogue, unless one is a native speaker of spanish. But that having been said, it’s a pretty good movie. Not dramatic, not a rollercoaster, but good. Everyone’s human and understandable. A widowed, aging, hippy mother and her boyfriend leave her son with the bear gay uncle for “just 15 days” while she travels to India. The 15 days are dramatically extended. The kid’s paternal grandmother shows up, and she’s a stone cold bitch about wanting to see her grandson, who wants nothing to do with her. The story flows naturally, the characters are solid and believable. It’s one of the most realistic gay movies I’ve ever seen. I really like the son, who is, perhaps, a little too perfect a kid, but so it goes.
  • Sordid Lives–A mockery of southern living. It’s worth noting how this ties into an nytimes article I was reading on the subject of a movie about the south and about movies of that class in general. This is a caricature of the south. As such, it has a number of features that are real and true, and distorted out of perspective in relation to the rest. The story is about a funeral for a woman who died under less than respectable circumstances, her family dealing with it, and the many outcasts coming home (specifically the old drag queen, and the same beautiful gay actor son living in LA archetype from Rites of Passage, Latter Days, and god alone knows how many other fictional representations). It’s a mean little comedy, good for a laugh, but the yankees in the crowd (like myself) should not take it seriously.
• Books (is there an internet book database other than amazon?)
  • Out of the Bishop’s Closet–After watching Latter Days for the first time, I wanted to get the book. So, on that same trip to washington (where I saw Sordid Lives, I think) I headed off to Lambda Rising. They were out of that one. But the guy behind the desk (who, tells me is the owner of the establishment, and a bit of a community figure) recommended this one to me. It’s the memoirs of a gay ex-mormon Bishop (approximate equivalent of ‘priest’ in the catholic church) who had climbed fairly high into the administrative ranks of the church before coming out. Alot of the book is theology and somewhat annoying to me. But there are alot of people I’d recommend it to. It is about a search for meaning. And the author is earnest*, in spades. It was interesting to me as an introduction to the mormon church’s workings and history, a story of the 80’s as a gay man, as well as a story of one man’s inner struggle with himself and search for meaning. It’s a good book if you (like me) are into that sort of thing.
  • All American Boy–A fiction piece that is like the dark version of Sordid Lives. It’s much more detailed. It talks about intergenerational sexual contact as not the worst thing ever. It talks about the small town spot, and its local geography, but never what state or part of the country it’s in. (it does have swamps, though, so that kind of narrows it down). It only ever refers to the city as “The City”, never by any name. This one has HIV, a suicide or two, a possible murder, several tragic deaths (mostly in the past), lots of retrospective sequences, the same quasi-successful-gay-boy-actor-in-big-city archetype, an older man sent to prison for molesting a gay kid (now gay-stereotype-man, our protagonist) who approached him in the first place. A big part of it is about gay-stereotype-man feeling angst about his past. It was pretty well written, but the material of it didn’t engage me too much.

I saw Charlie & the Chocolate Factory with & on thursday. It was good. I don’t have the sentimental attachment to it that I do to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The stories are quite similar, but also quite noticably different. The real difference those is the tonality. C&tCF is very burton-esque and Depp does “maladjusted creepy” well. W&tCF has a much more upbeat feel to it. I like them both for different reasons. I probably prefer W&tCF. Look, ma. No spoilers. =)

*=”earnest” has developed a special meaning for me, which I’ll get to in a later post.