{"id":1627,"date":"2006-01-25T14:12:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-25T20:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1627"},"modified":"2006-01-25T14:12:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-25T20:12:00","slug":"movies-seen-recently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1627","title":{"rendered":"Movies seen recently"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, over the past month or so, I&#8217;ve seen a fair amount of film-related stuff.  1 homo movies, 1 transgender movie, 1 homo miniseries, 1 political fiction movie, and a comedy.  <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First the comedy:  <!--more The 40 year old virgin-->I saw the 40 year old virgin at a party, held by a friend, that ran in to over time.  It was funny and engaging, I was kinda surprised.  Some of the people watching swore that it was a mostly accurate portrayal of the single hetero male in his 20&#8217;s scene, and the life of people working in retail.\n<li>Next the political fiction movie:  Saw this one in the theater with Dennis.  Steven Gaghan, who did the screenplay for Traffic, also wrote and directed Syriana, and it shows.  Both movies cover an intensely political subject in recognizably similar ways.  Everything seems real, nothing makes sense, the scenarios are plausible, but no one seems to have a sense of the bigger picture, and almost no one is interested in it.  Those who are, lose.  Actually, pretty much everyone loses.  I think it&#8217;s probably a bit more cynical than the reality, but likely accurate in many ways.  Not easy to watch or follow.\n<li>Third, the homo miniseries:  I&#8217;ve been watching Angels in America on DVD at Dennis&#8217;s place basically since we started dating, and we just finished it last week.  I&#8217;m kind of iffy on it.  I love Mary-Louise Parker.  (actually, she looks a bit like WAA).  Meryl Streep was amazing.  And Al Pacino did an incredible job as someone I loved to hate, yet sympathized with.  The religion angle I wave my hand at; it seems like a random babble of nonsense, and it&#8217;s a major part of the series, but it seems so surreal and irrelevant.  I did like Ethel Rosenberg bit.  The acting was amazing, the characters were all strong and well developed, but the story just didn&#8217;t engage me that much.  And the politics of it, well, that was like a splinter rolled in salt, shoved somewhere non-essential: non-ignorable, irksome, but not overpowering.  It is a show where a straight marriage is fouled up by having a gay guy in it (BBM, anyone?)  I feel for both of the parties to that debacle.  Then there&#8217;s the required omnipresent AIDS theme.  The actor who played Mormon boy looked familiar, but I couldn&#8217;t recognize anything else he was in from his IMDB profile.  *shrug*\n<li>As per <lj user=deviantsaint>&#8216;s suggestion, I watched Soldier&#8217;s Girl. This recounts the story of Barry Winchell, a private who dated an ftm performer, Calpernia Addams in Tennessee.  It details his escalating conflict with his psycho (insecure) roommate (Fisher?), and an incoming trainee (Glover?) who Fisher goads into conflict with Winchell.  It alternates this with scenes of the developing relationship between Barry and Calpernia, and Barry&#8217;s training.  The voice over is not intrusive, it is told in Calpernia&#8217;s voice.  I knew what the ending would be, I knew it would be hard to watch.  I actually watched it right before my trip to the relatives, poor strategic timing, but oh well.  It&#8217;s well worth the watching (thanks for the recommendation, DS).  It&#8217;s all believable, and it&#8217;s pretty sick the way things unfold.  But I call this a transgender movie quite deliberately.  Not as an &#8220;us&#8221; v &#8220;them&#8221; move, we&#8217;re both gender deviants to alot of people, but because the issues are different, and I think it&#8217;s a distinction that ought to be made.  I like the masculinity of my body.  I&#8217;d like more of it, not less.  I looked up the background on the story, apparently it was carefully researched.  Calpernia said it was remarkably close to the truth on her website.  She also asks anyone who meets her to please NOT bring it up.  Very understandable.  But it added some punch to the story.  It&#8217;s very messed up.\n<li>And finally, I watched Heights.  This one tells a simple, but compelling story of a day in the life of several people.  An engaged couple (a photographer, and an executive of some sort), an aspiring actor, a successful and influential actress, and a writer interviewing models for an english photographer.  All of them tie together in various ways.  A gay or maybe bi man in a straight relationship fucks up the relationship, and probably his gay lover&#8217;s career in the process.  A theme I&#8217;ve seen alot of recently.  The theme attracts with truth, and repels with the pain it causes.  Not to imply that bi guys can&#8217;t have happy stable relationships with women, both monogamous and not, but I&#8217;ve seen it play out as a broken couple more often than as a happy couple.  As a sidenote, after seeing Elizabeth Banks in this one, her role in the 40yo Virgin was a bit jarring. =)\n<\/ul>\n<p>I liked them and would recommend them all, if they interest you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, over the past month or so, I&#8217;ve seen a fair amount of film-related stuff. 1 homo movies, 1 transgender movie, 1 homo miniseries, 1 political fiction movie, and a comedy. First the comedy:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}