Since I’m not a fan of Luc Besson any more than I am of Guy Ritchie, I’ve avoided the Transporter franchise from the start. Sure its star Jason Statham has a to-kill-for bod, but then that’s part of the action hero job description. And compared to hot he-men with a wicked, up-for-anything gleam in their eye like the Governator or The Rock or Daniel Craig, well, Statham’s just a little too bland for my taste. He’s someone you’d take home to mom for the holidays, not blow in an airplane bathroom along the way, having to dodge dirty looks at baggage claim upon landing. Never mind.

But after reading Chris Lee’s L.A. Times piece, in which director Louis Leterrier claims to have added a gay subtext to Statham’s character in Transporter 2, I knew I just had to take a peek. And surprisingly, for someone who can spot a gay subtext from as far away as David Beckham can score a goal, I couldn’t quite see what all the fuss was about. Statham’s gun-for-hire Frank Martin is too asexual to be homosexual; if he is gay he’s so far in the closet that even Alessandro Gassman’s sleazy, sexy villain Gianni Chellini (now that’s a name to scream in the heat of passion) couldn’t coax him out. Indeed, if there is anything queer about Transporter 2, it’s the character played by Italian stallion Gassman (a dirtier, XXX version of Antonio Banderas) who should be exposed.

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Attending the press conference for Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, I had a Eureka moment that revealed my own naivety. A woman had asked Van Sant about his creative casting decisions, not just in choosing straights to play all the major gay characters (including a stunning Sean Penn as the gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk), but also in selecting the talented and out Denis O’Hare to embody homophobe extraordinaire John Briggs (the face behind the Proposition 6/Briggs Initiative to kick gay and lesbian teachers out of California’s public schools). I waited anxiously for the director to expound upon what the press notes referred to as “sexual-preference-blind casting,” a subversive twist that relates to Milk’s own modus operandi of rejecting divisiveness regarding sexuality in favor of bringing people together (or as Milk protégé Danny Nicoletta puts it in the notes, “It doesn’t matter what side of the fence you fall on. In fact, just tear the fence down; we all live in the same world.”)

Instead I was taken aback by Van Sant’s candidness. The point wasn’t to use O’Hare in some sort of queer jujitsu to sidestep criticism from the likes of Harvey Fierstein (who’s compared the casting of straights in gay roles to blackface), but simply to get as many homos involved as possible. Thus he wasn’t casting O’Hare so much in a straight role as in a small role. Or as the director so delicately put it, no gay actors have the “box office stature” that was required to get the film made. O’Hare either played straight or he didn’t play at all.

In other words, one of the few industries left in which gay white men (actors) don’t make pay (i.e., wield power) equal to that of their hetero counterparts has churned out a movie about a gay white man who demanded equal rights. Which is ironic enough. And yet even while homo thespians don’t make the serious money in Hollywood some of the biggest box office draws have been allowed to play gay!

To wit:

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Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight.

To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between.

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Irony held center stage at the press conference for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s passionate biopic about the first openly gay man elected to higher office in the United States, that took place at The Regency Hotel in Manhattan a little more than two weeks after the passing of California’s (heavily financed by the Mormon Church) Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. It was Supervisor Harvey Milk himself who had been instrumental in the defeat of California’s Proposition 6 (a battle featured prominently in the film), which had been openly opposed by everyone from Governor Jerry Brown to Carter and Reagan. The victory over the measure that would have effectively banned homosexual teachers and their allies from the public school system occurred in the same (non-election) year Milk was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, exactly three decades ago this month. Since those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, it’s no surprise Harvey Milk is not a household name, not even to the many young actors starring in Milk, who became aware of him only upon receiving the script.

And this is something Van Sant, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who grew up gay and Mormon in California, and was the sole Mormon writer/producer on the Mormon-themed Big Love – yes, as I said, irony ruled the day!) and the panel of actors, including Sean Penn (Harvey Milk), James Franco (Milk’s lover Scott), Josh Brolin (assassin Dan White), Alison Pill (campaign manager Anne Kronenberg) and Emile Hirsch (Milk protégé/activist Cleve Jones) have set out to rectify. …Read more

JCVD opens wide this weekend, and it’s no secret that I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie. Still, the screening I attended in Toronto was thronged with college students, howling at every mention of Van Damme’s name, so it’s safe to say that the Muscles from Brussels still enjoys a lot of popularity. It’s just unfortunate that people think that translates to JCVD being a good film. It’s not. So to swing the scales in the other direction, here are five moments from Jean Claude Van Damme films that are a lot more fun than anything in JCVD.

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It looks like the pre-election battle over California’s Propositon 8 (which would render gay marriages illegal in the state) could provide the backdrop to a scene in Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming Borat follow-up. Cohen showed up at a Yes on 8 rally this weekend in character as Bruno, the gay Austrian fashion designer, and apparently initally blended into the crowd — camera crew and all — but was eventually recognized, at which point he fled the scene. The write-ups I’ve read don’t indicate that Bruno was doing/saying anything controversial or even contrary to the anti-gay marriage message of the rally, so one wonders what he was saying/doing. Can anyone make sense of that sign he’s holding above?

UPDATE: FilmDrunk says Baron was not dressed as Bruno at all, but as “his new character, Straight Dave.” The appearance at the rally suddenly makes more sense.

One of my earliest movie related memories – from the time I was six or seven – was of parading around the house, hips swishing and purring in my finest Mae West mimicry, “Why don’t ya come up and see me sometime?” I barely remember actually watching the B&W My Little Chickadee on the tube, so mesmerized was I by the platinum blonde goddess, a creature clad in ultra-femme garb but projecting an aggressively male body language and distinctly unfeminine voice – like no one I had ever seen on the screen. Years later I would realize it was my first encounter with a woman like me.

Miss West is my patron sinner/saint for many reasons, but mostly because today’s catchphrases like “genderqueer” and “boygirl” didn’t exist in her time – and she didn’t need them. She did what came naturally to her way down deep inside, no buzzwords required for self-knowledge. I intimately understand why she eschewed monogamy in favor of a fetish for bad boys, rough trade and Hercules musclemen – the ultimate physical embodiment of our 100% male insides, our souls made flesh-and-blood tangible. I know what it’s like to choose lovers you want both to be with and to be, to covertly use sex to sweep aside all awareness of the female form, to lose oneself in a tidal wave of testosterone. Miss West is my fellow undercover agent in the mainstream world, a gay man “passing” as a femme little chickadee, serving as my transgender guiding light.

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Are you a supporter of gay marriage?
“I know nothing about it. I don’t follow that.”
Why doesn’t it interest you?
“The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn’t seem to interest me.”

–From Questions for Gore Vidal in The New York Times Magazine, 6/15/08.

Amen, sister. One of the perks of being queer is that you’re not expected to engage in unnatural acts like high school proms and monogamy. So in honor of the hedonistic right to our own guilt-free, queer Mardi Gras, here are some subversive suggestions that will get you in the mood and take you back to that more innocent, less commercial “Over The Rainbow” time.
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At the Guardian, Andrew Pulver laments the fall Derek Jarman (and the personal, high-art cinema he made and represented) from cinephile fashion. He blames this in part on the revival of the commercial British film industry:

One problem is the seismic shift of the cinematic landscape since Jarman’s death in 1994, the same year that saw the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of Jarman’s main weapons had been that, in the Thatcher era, there was no one else putting out Britain-centred product so enthusiastically. His small-scale, personalised vision undoubtedly helped him survive the 1980s and, to some extent, prosper. But with the revival of the commercial end of the British film industry, the very people who most resented Jarman’s productivity regained the initiative. After his death, his cinematic influence virtually vanished.

The idea of Jarman as a “Britain-centred” filmmaker reminded me of one of the things I found most frustrating about Derek, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton’s collaborative, impressionist doc on their late friend, which I saw at Sundance last month (Pulver mentions both Julien and Swinton but not the film, although I have to imagine this post was in part motivated by Derek’s premiere this week in Berlin).

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• I can’t quite get it up to care about The Golden Compass. Apparently people are worried that it’s going to create godless youth? I’m pretty sure There Will Be Blood has a better chance of doing that than just about anything else, but in any case, Vulture says we have nothing to worry about. Perhaps the five minute clip Anne Thompson’s linking to will help you make up your own mind.
• “Be warned: if you let your children see Alvin & The Chipmunks they will eat their own shit.” That, and three other Awful Things The New Alvin & The Chipmunks Movie Is Responsible For, courtesy of The Hater.
• “I am perhaps not the best person to write about Control, and what follows is not a review.” Natalie Curtis, daughter of Ian Curtis, writes about watching Anton Corbijn’s biopic about her dad. Via The Underwire.
• Film critic Annette Insdorf has allegedly been edged out of the National Board of Review, who are coincidentally announcing their annual awards this week. Jeff Wells explains why this matters.
• “Yeah, I’m a lesbian. You wanna make somethin’ of it, or do you want me to help you hotwire that getaway car? That’s what I thought. Now step aside, little lady.” On the eve of Queen Latifah’s apparent coming out party, Defamer remembers one of her finest on-screen moments.
• Filmdrunk has taken to calling Ben Kingsley “Special K.” I think that made me laugh a little bit harder than it probably should have.

One of the things I’m most proud of is that I’ve managed to make almost all the way through my twenties knowing virtually nothing about Harry Potter. I don’t have children, and I just don’t buy that whole “It’s good for grown-ups, too!” bit. I know there’s a broad in the movies who looks kind of like the current editor of Gawker. That’s about it.

So this whole Dumbledore is gay thing means nothing to me. But I am really into imagining the unseen, offscreen lives of fictional characters, so I love Vulture’s list of Ten Other Fictional Characters Whose Outings Won’t Shock Us That Much, and Radar’s outing of childhood icons. I envision a parallel universe in which Blanche kicks the rest of the Golden Girls out of the house and invites Lilith, Jo March and Ramona Cleary to move down to Florida and live out the rest of their days as an ad-hoc openly gay family.

When Tammy Faye Messner made what was to be her final media appearance last week on Larry King Live, her physical appearance was so visibly devastated by the effects of inoperable cancer that a clip from the show (available on CNN’s website) knocked the wind out of even the most snarktastic bloggers. Best to remember Tammy Faye’s better times. Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s 2000 documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye painted the heavily-painted former Mrs. Bakker as a dotty but loveable spiritual friend to the gay community, a kind of surrogate grandmother with the aesthetics of a drag queen. That film cemented Messner’s status as a cult icon, long before she headlined for John Waters (yes, seriously) and bunked with Ron Jeremy (yes, seriously).

Here she is, giving a tour of her famous make-up kit. Dedicated Tammy Faye fans should also be sure to check out the World of Wonder blog, where Bailey and Barbato (who are also producers of Messner’s son’s reality show, One Punk Under God, as well as half of the guilty pleasures currently on cable TV) have launched a touching tribute to their friend.

The gay marriage debate seems to have been relegated to the back-burner of late (apparently, there’s a war going on). Could Adam Sandler help bring it back?

At AfterElton.com [via GreenCine Daily] Alonso Duralde says I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry “will probably do more for the national debate on gay marriage than every book written by conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan and every letter you’ve sent to your senator put together.” He goes on to explain that this is mostly because “average” Americans are apparently willing to pay money to see Adam Sandler do just about anything, regardless of whether or not the themes of his films jibe with their personal preferences or political beliefs. It seems like a valid point, even if Paul Thomas Anderson might disagree.

But at the Village Voice, Nathan Lee has much more fun nailing Chuck and Larry’s potential power; the openly gay critic boldly claims that the film is “as eloquent as Brokeback Mountain, and even more radical.” (Lee, it should be noted, famously defended Brokeback’s “middle-brow man-on-man masochistic romanticism” around the time of that film’s release.) The whole review is basically begging to be blockquoted, but here’s a choice excerpt:

This sodomite had a gay old time. The coup of the movie is that Sandlerites will, too. They’re the ones unmistakably addressed in the courtroom climax, the moment when Chuck and Larry confess their deceptions and assert their principles. Momentarily possessed by remarkable authenticity, Sandler seems to step out of character as he appeals to the crowd to stop using the word “faggot.” I’ve used it a lot myself in the past, he says in a manner less like a line reading than a mea culpa, but it hurts the same way it does if you called me a kike.

Meanwhile, Jeff Wells links to a clip of Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff promoting his boycott of Hairspray on The O’Reilly Factor. Naff says Scientology is anti-gay, and since John Travolta is a Scientologist, ergo, a film that began life as a Broadway musical based on a cult film starring a drag queen and written/directed by the most successful openly-gay filmmaker of the last thirty years is — wait for it — also anti-gay. “Gay people are not so desperate for entertainment that we should be lining the pockets of those who want to cure us,” Naff huffs. Adam Shankman, director of the new Hairspray, responded: “Everybody involved in Hairspray - all the creators - are gay…me, the writers, composer, John Waters - all gay.”

I guess the only question is this: how many gay pockets do you need to line to outweigh the damage done by putting cash in the pants of one Scientologist?

***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He tells The Hollywood Reporter: “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN, and I don’t mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn’t actually put photographers in with units that are this elite.”

***Variety’s Brain Lowry watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry so that you never, ever have to. And though he concedes that “Sandler’s fans should enjoy hearing him toss off lines about being ‘big-time fruits’ or having ‘boarded the dude train’,” ultimately “it will be slightly depressing if a barrage of schoolyard gay jokes passes for ‘edgy’ a quarter-century after Victor/Victoria.”

***After the massive critical success of her feature directorial debut Away From Her, Sarah Polley will return to the other side of the camera to star opposite Jared Leto in Mr. Nobody. It’s the first English-language feature for Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael, and THR’s Borys Kit says the script is “a multilayered love story inspired by the ‘butterfly effect, the chaos-theory notion that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.”