Bros (Nicholas Stoller, 2022); Fire Island (Andrew Ahn, 2022)

Bros may be "the first romantic comedy from a major studio about two gay men maybe, possibly, probably stumbling towards love," to quote Universal Pictures' proud press release. But Universal never seemed to wonder who in 2022 cares about gay content coming from a major studio. TikTok and Onlyfans and the Big Streamers shove more gay content down our throats than we can swallow. So while I always want the best for the talented, screamingly camp co-writer and star of Bros Billy Eichner, I wasn't sad when his project failed to set the box office on fire. 

A bigger problem is the "possibly, probably stumbling towards love" part of the equation, i.e., wedging gay characters into the quintessentially heterosexual rom-com formula. As a child growing up in the 1970s and 1980s with a relative paucity of gay representation, I always wanted a genre film with characters who just happen to be gay, say, a Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) where Arnold Schwarzenegger has the hots for Michael Ironside instead of Sharon Stone, no big whoop. Then I saw D.E.B.S. (Angels Robinson, 2004), a sort of lesbian Charlie's Angels, and realized that you cannot make a gay film with the master's tools. For the most part, you wind up with what Kristen Warner calls "plastic representation." To this end, the most perceptive critique of Bros I've encountered is SNL's trailer for Megan 2.0 in which they announce that "It's like Bros, but for gays." So while Bros is cute and funny and as gay as can be within the rom-com formula, the formula itself deadens the film's import.

Fire Island comes off as a critique of Bros avant la lettre, having been released a few months prior. It corrects for Bros' concentration on white characters with a gay/Asian director and a gay/Asian screenwriter and star, Joel Kim Booster. But structurally, the two films are de facto clones of one another. Fire Island even has a further structural burden in that it's inspired by Pride and Prejudice. Cute and funny too but so damn well-behaved in its adherence to formulae that it forestalls any obsessive reception.

Bros: B+

Fire Island: B+

Monthly Top Ten: May 2022

1. Chunky. Now I know why various internet dorks were ripping on me for preferring to read comic books on pdf. I had been unzipping my cbz/cbr files and scratching my head about what to do with the resulting jpgs, often opting to turn them into pdfs. So Chunky, an app for reading comic books on cbz/cbr, has been a revelation. It's reacquainted me with old favorites like Julie Doucet's eternal Dirty Plotte (can you imagine what Muratova or Żuławski could have accomplished in adapting her work?!?) and introduced me to some new favorites such as...

2. Yuichi Yokoyama: Iceland (Retrofit, 2017). Retrofit calls Yokoyama "the creator of neo manga" which here means a slice of indigestible avant-garderie. At 92 pages, the story is no such thing, a sci-fi-I-guess concatenation of disconnected narrative beats. Gawky close-ups and jagged lines flatten the space into one long scream. It seems like a found thing, a energy pulse from the future awaiting a consumption that may never come. 

3. Blutch: Peplum (New York Review Comics, 2016). In his helpful introduction to this reissue of the 1998 Cornélius French original, Edward Gauvin likens Peplum to a remix of Fellini's Satyricon, itself a remix of Petronius' Satyricon. Blutch (né Christian Hincker) follows a group of bandits as they drag a cumbersome frozen woman around the Roman Empire. Tony Shakespearean dialogue (including a straight-forward retelling of the murder of Julius Caesar near the beginning) clashes with coarse outbursts ("Will you shut up?!"). The picaresque narrative throws up a never-ending supply of barely explained dangers. In a sense, Peplum is all clash, with characters, all of whom seem either dead or on the brink of dying, fucking and fighting one another in splotchy environs. An extremely disturbing epilogue does nothing to tie up loose ends. The authorial voice mimics an infant's inability to transition between tones, laughing or bawling within a moment's notice. But a fever-ridden infant. And one with a working knowledge of Roman culture.

4. The Big Gay Comic Book: Volumes 1 and  2 (Bluewater, 2014). Quite the opposite of the two titles above, The Big Gay Comic Book recalls the infamous Rock 'N' Roll Comics from the late 1980s/early 1990s - cheesy pre-Wikipedia biographies of popular musical icons. Here Madonna, Tom Daley, Kathy Griffin, Anderson Cooper, RuPaul, Keith Haring, Lady Gaga, etc. get the same treatment. Poking through the cheese are some bizarre moments as when Robbie Williams breaks the fourth wall in the Kylie Minogue entry or when the Cher title begins with what one presumes to be a stalker claiming intimate knowledge of Cher only to be revealed at the end as Chaz Bono (!). 

5. Vanessa Bayer and Jane Treacy’s Must Haves (QVC, 2022). Do watch Showtime's choking-on-your-tongue hilarious I Love That For You, a half-hour comedy about Joanna Gold (Vanessa Bayer), a woman who fakes a cancer diagnosis and becomes a star on a home shopping network. After you've downed a few episodes, there's a mind-bendingly meta treat for you streaming on QVC. In order to promote the show she co-created, Bayer occupied QVC for an hour with longtime host Treacy selling clothes and jewelry including a herringbone bracelet with a lobster clasp which plays a key role on I Love That For You. You find yourself laughing at nothing in particular, just the crazy fact that this exists. The most disorienting instance of the contradictory pleasures of capitalism since the Oil of Olay musical The Road to Glow.

6. Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977). The incomparable Gena Rowlands (92 in a few days!) stars as Myrtle Gordon, an actress who changes the play in which she's starring because she sees no hope in the fiftysomething main character, a situation that may reflect her own life as a feted professional of a certain age. As a portrait of the difficulty women experience in controlling their own destinies, Opening Night is peerless. And even on a strictly narrative level, where Cassavetes is supposedly deficient, the film keeps you on the edge as you fear opening night may never happen. But Cassavetes clearly didn't know what to do with Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell, 47 years out from her film debut, one year away from her role in Grease, and two years away from her Christmas 1979 death), the playwright whose words Gordon changes. One presumes this is because as an even older woman, Goode has accepted her lot and internalized whatever disappointments have come her way. But that is a truth worth telling too, one we glean in fits and starts from previous rehearsals of her play, and her apparent acceptance of Gordon's changes at the very end of the film feels false. Then again, applying standards of realism to Cassavetes is always a fool's game, no matter how raw his films come across. Instead, it'd prove more fruitful to put Opening Night in conversation with two subsequent films, (the first awful, the other one of the finest films of this century), it may have influenced - Noises Off (Peter Bogdanovich [who shows up in a brief cameo at the end of Opening Night], 1992) and Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2000).

7. A Night in Heaven (John G. Avildsen, 1983). A good movie is lurking somewhere within this Joan Tewkesbury-penned mess about a community college professor (Lesley Ann Warren) who discovers a student (Christopher Atkins, angelic) she flunked in Public Speaking is a stripper. But it was clearly mangled on the way to theatres. At times, it feels like you're watching the sui generis omnibus train wreck Night Train to Terror (Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, 1985). Several scenes lead into narrative dead ends. Basic story information is either needlessly elaborated or given little air. One crucial conversation plays out in a master shot as if no coverage was available or the editor neglected to use any of it. Still, like the "Special Fan Edition" of Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995), the phantom good movie within would be less fascinating than the tattered corpse before us here. At the very least, it's an excellent teaching tool to convey the difficulty of telling even the simplest story with cinema. 

 8. Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986). Criminally boring. Upped a notch for not just the too-short volleyball scene but for Maverick deciding that jeans would be appropriate attire for beach sports. D-minus. Just for the record. 

 9. U.S. Marines Pride Month tweet. Hi, gay! Happy Pride Month! Astonishingly tone-deaf in the wake of the murders in Uvalde (and Buffalo and...), the U.S. Marines have color coded six bullets to resemble the rainbow flag for this most gay of months. Someone somewhere must be proud, probably Adorno in his Super Egotistical way. 

10. The criticism of Kieran Press-Reynolds. You couldn't ask for a better tour guide through what we'll (and he'll) call internet music - the fly-by sounds you hear on TikTok, Roblox, YouTube, Soundcloud, the like. Hyper, long-winded, pockmarked with links, chuffed to create new genres, his essays replicate the amped-up one moment, luded-out the next tenor of the Euphoria generation. His newest piece is on Swedish collective Drain Gang and their de facto pope Bladee whose music "has become constitutional for a rising swarm of offbeat internet artists shooting off in a plethora of directions and shaping the future of music, even if some washed purists whine that it all sounds like liquid ass." You don't want to be one of those people, now do you? So read up. Here's hoping he avoids the path of his daddy Simon who lost his pioneering spirit once he turned 40 and/or had a baby. 

Beam Me Up, Scotty

In 1946, a handsome former marine named Scotty Bowers was working at a gas station in Los Angeles when he was propositioned by Walter Pidgeon. Bowers took him up on the offer and, as word got around about his talents, rather quickly found himself the de facto pimp to the Hollywood stars (and lesser known industry personnel). He could hook up anyone but his clientele was mainly Tinseltown's closeted firmament. Now pushing 90, he's recently come forward with a tell-all called Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. And like clockwork, the dreary question of the verifiability of his accounts has moved to the center of discussion.

Naturally, David Ehrenstein makes it plain that "there's no question it's all true" in Film Comment while The Democratic Republic of Amazon Comments (I won't even link there) has deemed Bowers an unethical liar. It's the fate of most queer historiography no matter where your book lands on the scale between well-researched scholarship and pure trash. William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, summed up the dilemma in the New York Times: “Some of the pushback is going to be homophobia...But there will also be people who say he’s making it up to sell books and others who say why can’t you let these people rest in peace.”

But, of course, both the latter claims exhibit homophobia too in all their "the personal is NOT political" glory. Shipwrecked in the quest for truth and ethics, queer historiography becomes, well, queer - always a half-measure no matter how shiny the evidence or dusty the archive. So the most fascinating aspect of Full Service is not the saucy recreations of sex with the stars (which get numbing a third of the way through) but rather its unexpected glimpse into the policing of history.

In the late 1970s, writer Hector Arce approached Bowers for confirmation on rumors that Tyrone Power, a former client, was into scat. Bowers convinced Arce that the stories were untrue and thus they did not appear in Arce's 1979 biography The Secret Life of Tyrone Power. Upon publication, however, Bowers admitted to Arce that the stories were, in fact, true providing the following rationale: "It was too soon after Ty's death [in 1958] to be shattering the myth of one of Hollywood's golden boys. Twenty years after his death Ty was still looked upon as an idol. It was right for us to protect his fans from any disappointment or disgust they may have felt after reading about his odd sexual habits. Much time has passed and, as we know, time heals everything. Perhaps Ty's followers are more ready for the truth now than they were thirty years ago when the book was first published" (206). Perhaps, Scotty, perhaps. But what if they're not? Might they be soothed by a federal law stating that fifty years after the death of a celebrity must pass before an author can write about their odd sexual habits? And what counts as disgust? Shouldn't there be some sort of measurement for it the way homosexuality must be constantly verified else it winds up in the dustbins of silence? Does silence have dustbins?

Oh well. There's a least one classic line in the book (concerning Charles Laughton): "Jesus, why did he even take the trouble to wash the fucking lettuce and tomatoes?" (204)

He's a Cockeyed Wonder

In honor of TCM Star of the Month Mickey Rooney, here's the poster for He's a Cockeyed Wonder, a gay story of a sad sack who becomes a hero.