BEFORE: Seth Meyers carries over from "I Don't Know How She Does It" and we're trying to be more inclusive here at the Movie Year, so I've programmed a gay rom-com, with the assumption that it will fall into place here, I mean a romance film is a romance film, right?
Here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", Day 19:
Best Foreign Language Film Nominees:
6:00 am "Woman in the Dunes" (1964)
8:30 am "The Shop on Main Street" (1965)
10:45 am "The Fireman's Ball" (1967)
12:00 pm "The Virgin Spring" (1960)
1:45 pm "The Last Metro" (1980)
4:00 pm "Mon Oncle" (1958)
6:00 pm "Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987)
Best Special Effects Winners:
8:00 pm "8 1/2" (1963)
10:30 pm "Babette's Feast" (1987)
12:30 am "Indochine" (1992)
3:15 am "Sundays and Cybele" (1962)
5:15 am "Closely Watched Trains" (1967)
Wow, another goose egg for me today - I probably should have watched some of these by now, like "8 1/2", a true classic - but I watched the English language remake, "9", but that doesn't count for much on today's tally. And "Babette's Feast" has been recommended to me, by an actor who was starring in a stage version of the same story, but as you may know, I don't take recommendations for my blog, except very rarely - in fact, somebody recommending a movie might make me LESS likely to want to watch it. But foreign films in general don't really fly with American audiences, so that kind of works the same way. By all means, if you don't want anybody watching your classic movies channel today, program a bunch of foreign language films. This brings me to 78 seen out of 217, down to 35.9%
THE PLOT: Two men with commitment problems attempt a relationship.
AFTER: Well, I sit here day after day, complaining about how THIS romance movie is almost exactly like THAT one, because they all have carnivals in them for the high-school kids to double-date at, and why can't somebody do something different? I sure got what I asked for today, in fact I got way more than I expected. I keep almost apologizing for movies made in 2003 or 2004 by saying, "Well, it was a different time..." and it was - because here's a movie that reflects how much has changed - it's full of gay men, but also features lesbian, bisexual and trans actors, in fact straight actors might be in the minority on this cast. So you have to think that dating and relationships have gotten much more complex, because nothing's as simple as generic rom-coms make them out to be, there's a whole wide spectrum of options out there, if you're young and into it. I'm not, but I try very hard not to be all judgy about it, I'm a bit fascinated by this world even though I'm not a part of it.
For starters, there's the whole pronouns thing - people wanted to be called by the pronouns they want, reflecting who they feel like on the inside and not be defined by their genetics or their body parts, so some people still go be "He/Him" and "She/Her" and that may not be the same pronouns they were assigned at birth, while other people want to be called "They/Them" and for the most part, people at large have been willing to accommodate. The whole English language changed so that people would feel better about themselves, and that's an amazing thing. Language is mutable, of course, so naturally it should change, to reflect the changing times and the changes in attitude. "Marriage" was once a word that had a very specific meaning, and that has changed, too, first because we put the word "gay" before it, and now you don't even have to do that any more, "marriage" now just means a commitment between any two people, then can be a man and a woman or two men or two women or some other combination. And despite the conservatives complaining about the "slippery slope", so far changing the definition of that word has not led to people marrying animals, and they warned us that would be the next illogical step.
"Thrupple" (or "throuple") is a commonplace word now, even though we already had "threesome", that word just wasn't doing the job, so a new one was coined. You probably know it's a couple that involves three people in a (somewhat) committed relationship - but other new words have come along, like "polyamorous" and the new words are always just a bit behind, by that I mean they reflect things that have been part of the culture for years, but we just weren't discussing them openly, maybe because we didn't have the right words yet, which help us gain some understanding maybe. But then even using words like "tops" and "bottoms" to help define and understand relationships maybe tells us just a little bit too much, but they're there now, so what was once a very private thing has become less so, but the words do help us understand a bit about what's going on behind closed doors - whether that's good or bad I don't really know.
We don't have specific words for a man who transitioned into a woman who still dates women, or the reverse, a women who transitions into a man and dates men, but I think over time as the situations become more normalized maybe there will be specific words for all the spaces in-between the traditional man-woman thing that everybody was so comfortable with for thousands of years. But again, all the new words and definitions are there to help us understand situations that have always been there, in some fashion, but we weren't talking about. All of this is really just my way of saying that I don't usually watch movies with so many gay male sex scenes, because that's not the world I frequent, but it is the world we all live in. OK?
I went into this thinking that it doesn't matter, gay or straight, a rom-com is a rom-com, but that's not the case at all, in fact the main message of the film debunks the standard "love is love is love" myth that it's all the same, no matter the orientation or gender or self-identification. So perhaps that's just what the cis people tell themselves to make it easier for them to accept gay and trans people. But there's now just a new language that's developed, there are new cultural norms, new practices, new ways of BEING when you let people decide for themselves who they want to be and who they want to love. The gay people from the 1970's and the 1990's would probably be completely blown away to see what's going down today, but that's human evolution for you. To be "conservative" and ignorant of what's happening in people's everyday lives therefore seems really short-sighted, and I'm saying this as a straight man. Very few of the people I work with who are in their 20's are completely straight, everyone's on the scale somewhere, and I have to respect that. To be on the safe side, I just assume all of my co-workers are gay or at least bi, and I'm usually right - I can claim to have well-functioning gaydar, at least.
Anyway, the details - Bobby is a 40-year old gay man who claims to have never been in love, or at least he's never found somebody to love exclusively. He frequents Grindr dates, where the small talk usually amounts to "Hey, what's up?" before they get naked, then he walks around the city for a while or hangs out with friends, and combined that's a romantic single life, if that can somehow not be a contradiction in terms. He meets Aaron in a club, of course, but Aaron keeps ditching him for hotter guys, Aaron's not on Grindr or any of the other apps, plus he's got a regular-hookup with a gay couple, so he doesn't get with Bobby right away, but the more time they spend together, the more they envision maybe getting over their commitment-phobias and slowly they unlock the secrets of hooking up with each other. It involves some pushing, shoving and slapping before they make out, but I'm trying hard not to judge what I don't really understand.
Meanwhile, Bobby gets an opportunity to work at NYC's first queer-based museum (I'm not sure if there really is one IRL, besides the Stonewall Inn, but I'm going to Google that) and he encounters difficulties working with the bi- and trans- people who are also the curators on some kind of board, because of course everyone has a different opinion on what should be in the museum, based on their own experiences. Even a proposed exhibit about whether Abraham Lincoln was gay is a matter of some controversy - some members feel that just because he was into wrestling and lived with several male roommates over the years, that's not enough proof to say he was gay or even bi.
Things progress between Bobby and Aaron, and they take a trip together to Provincetown, they have to work out whether they want to be monogamous or allow each other the freedom of an open relationship, and then when Aaron introduces Bobby to his parents, it's a bit of a disaster because Bobby is so outspoken about teaching a gay friendly curriculum in elementary schools, and Aaron's mom is a second grade teacher who disagrees, at least at first. Aaron makes the mistake of asking Bobby to "tone it down", which is maybe the worst thing you can ask a gay person to do, to not be themselves. Eventually, despite the interference of Debra Messing, they work something out, which is to have their own form of commitment, namely to stay together for the next three months and then re-assess things. Well, considering how complicated things in today's world, maybe something like that is the best you can hope for. Sure, gay marriage has been legal across the country for a while now, but that's not the end-all and be-all for all relationships, because if you have gay marriage then you also have to have gay divorce, and gay "almost getting married and somebody changing their mind right before the ceremony".
I really want to get to the film "Fire Island", too, because I worked at the big gala premiere of that film, Bowen Yang was there, John Cameron Mitchell was there (though I recognized him and my gay co-worker did not) and the line stretched down the block and around the corner. We filled up the large theater, had a screening, then filled up the large theater AGAIN for a second screening, which leads me to conclude that America is not only ready for movies like that, they are desperate for more of them, there's clearly an underserved portion of the populace where LGBTQ+ based movies are concerned. For years there were only a few art-house movies, like "The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love", "The Crying Game" and such. Then of course "Brokeback Mountain" came along, but when there's money to made, eventually Hollywood is going to figure out how to make gay movies mainstream without being all condescending about it, and "Bros" is a big step in that direction. The main complaint here seems to be that the film tried too hard to be relatable, and thus failed to do so.
Also starring Billy Eichner (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Luke Macfarlane (last seen in "Kinsey"), Guy Branum (last seen in "No Strings Attached"), Miss Lawrence (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holliday"), TS Madison (last seen in "Zola"), Dot-Marie Jones (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Jim Rash (last seen in "The Nines"), Eve Lindley, Monica Raymund (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Guillermo Diaz (last seen in "The Terminal"), Jai Rodriguez (last seen in "The New Guy"), Amanda Bearse, Debra Messing (last seen in "Irresistible"), Peter Kim, Justin Covington, Symone, Ryan Faucett, Becca Blackwell, D'Lo, Harvey Fierstein (last heard in "Mulan II"), Bowen Yang (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), Dahlia Rodriguez, Derrick Delgado (last seen in "Tick...Tick...BOOM!"), George Dvorsky, Jamyl Dobson, Brock Ciarlelli, Jillian Gottlieb, Everett Quinton (last seen in "Hello Again"), Thomas Vorsteg, Julia Scotti, Feliziano Flores, Ryan Daly, Brayden Morgan, William Popp, Joey Taranto, Courtney Bassett, Doug Trapp (last seen in "Irresistible"), Shannon O'Neill, Matthew Wilkas (last seen in "Top Five"), Chris Henry Coffey, Alexandra Lopez Galan (last seen in "West Side Story")
with cameos from Kenan Thompson (last seen in "Clifford the Big Red Dog"), Amy Schumer (last seen in "I Feel Pretty"), Kristin Chenoweth (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Ben Stiller (last seen in "Hubie Halloween") and archive footage of Meg Ryan (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "De Palma"), Brad Paisley.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Christmas films on the "HallHeart" channel with token gay characters.
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