Will the Coming Wave of Gay Films Hold Up In Quality?

May I propose R.Lee Ermey ( Gunny Hartman in Full Metal Jacket ) as the Coach and Jean-Claud Van Damme as the athlete :wink:

I don't think so -- you are being facetious I hope!

Is Snakes on a Plane a particulrly gay movie?

I wouldn't think so but if there are homophobes aboard the flight, you could think that.

From Variety:






Posted: Thurs., Apr. 6, 2006, 10:00pm PT

Beyond 'Brokeback'
While gay cowboys make B.O. history, other homophilic fare also surfaces

By ADAM B. VARY

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In a year that saw arguably the most numerous and varied mainstreamed movies ever with lesbian, gay, bi and transgendered characters, the feature film nominees for this year's GLAAD Media Awards -- separated into wide and limited release -- also run the gamut of box office success.
At the top, of course, is "Brokeback Mountain," which surpassed "Philadelphia" as the highest-grossing gay-themed drama in domestic box office, with more than $82 million.

"The Family Stone" and "Capote" comfortably made back their budgets, while "Rent" and "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" disappointed with below-expected takes.

All five films received wide releases and financing backed by major studio muscle; starred established actors; and, for "Brokeback" and "Capote," enjoyed considerable awards season heat.

In fact, many scribes spilled inkink over the burgeoning financial future for mainstreamed gay-themed cinema in the afterglow of their successes.

But the five GLAAD nominees for limited release film --"Beautiful Boxer," "Mysterious Skin," "Saving Face," "Transamerica" and "Walk on Water" -- tell a different, more difficult and ambiguous story.

All independently financed, with edgier subject matter and mostly unknown casts, they made anywhere from around $8 million to less than $200,000 in domestic B.O.B.O.

And although 2005 may have overflowed with gay content in theaters, in many ways the struggle to get these kinds of films made is still as demanding as ever.

"I don't see that there's any huge surge in people rushing out to finance these queer-themed movies," says Gregg Araki, the writer-editor-producer-director of "Mysterious Skin," an adaptation of Scott Heim's novel about child abuse and gay hustling. "There's a very limited amount of resources out there and an exponentially increasing number of projects. Anything that is perceived of as difficult or challenging or dark or controversial -- those films are frequently difficult to finance."

It took first-time writer and director Alice Wu five years to find financing for "Saving Face," about an Asian-American lesbian and her mother, who gets pregnant out-of-wedlock.

"While I was trying to get the film financed," she says, "I had people pretty much say, 'You're never going to get that made. It's Asian-American, it's gay, you're just going to have to make it white or straight.' "

Fortunately for her, at a screenplay-award contest, she managed to catch the eye of one of the judges, Teddy ZeeTeddy Zee, Will SmithWill Smith's business partner. They both produced the film, and Sony Classics quickly snapped it up at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival.

"The moment it actually went to Toronto and got sold," Wu recalls, "everyone was like 'Oh, this is a no brainer! Of course this film would get distribution. It has this fresh view.' Suddenly all the adjectives went positive: It's not 'unusual' or 'niche.' It's 'fresh.' "

Duncan Tucker, who made his writing and directing debut with his genial road pic "Transamerica," went the max-credit-cards-and-borrow-from-family route to finance his film after a long struggle to get anyone in Hollywood interested in his script.

"We knocked on every single door -- it was just a total wash," he says. "I had no idea how difficult a mountain it was to climb, not only to make a movie but to sell a movie in which the main character happens to be a trans(gendered) woman.

"I always thought that would be such a cool advantage to a movie, because, wow, curiosity factor. It's interesting and original. But most marketers, most distribution companies and most sales agents thought it was an anchor around the movie's neck."

Even after the film got into the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, Tucker says he couldn't drag buyers to see it. "They were like, 'We're here to work. We're not going to come see your tranny movie,' " he recalls. The doors finally opened after a Variety review said the film had box office potential, and ultimately the Weinstein Co. made the film one of its first acquisitions.

"Transamerica" grossed almost $10 million, Tucker paid back his credit cards, and star Felicity Huffman (who took on the film before she went into production on "Desperate Housewives") was nominated for an Oscar.

And yet Tucker says that on Oscar night, "I had movie stars come up to me at the Vanity Fair party and say, 'Oh, I haven't seen your movie yet. I hear it's very dark.' They didn't hear anything. I think they just thought 'Boys Don't Cry.' "

In addition, releasing a gay-themed film into an increasingly crowded marketplace is, if anything, a more challenging endeavor now than 15 years ago.

"You used to be able to put a movie in a theater and let it grow and build an audience over a period of weeks," says Mark Reinhart, exec VP of distribution and acquisitions at Here! Films, which distributed "Beautiful Boxer," a Thai biopicbiopic of a boxer who fought to pay for a sex-change operation to become a woman. "Now if you don't perform in the first week of the release, you're gone."

Meyer Gottlieb, president of Samuel Goldwyn Pictures, concurs, comparing the difficulties releasing Israeli film "Walk on Water," about a Mossad agent and his gay grandson, with the success of "Longtime Companion," the 1990 Goldwyn film that dealt with the AIDS crisis.

"We were very, very successful (with "Companion") in great part because we had the landscape that would allow the picture to resonate with an audience and give it enough time to breathe," Gottlieb says. "We did end up staying in the same theaters 15, 16, 18 weeks. It's virtually impossible to do that today."

Although Reinhart admits he was disappointed by the B.O. of "Boxer," he stresses that both the film's DVD sales and on-demand pay TV service on Here! have done quite well. Last fall, in fact, the company attempted a day-and-date release of gay icon Margaret Cho's latest standup film "Notorious," to brisk DVD sales, albeit poor box office.

If there is a silver lining in the trials that face indie gay films, it's that actors are willing to play gay, in sharp contrast to the multiyear struggle to find the male leads for "Brokeback Mountain."

Tucker says newcomer Kevin Zegers actively campaigned for the male lead in "Transamerica," a hustler who thinks nothing of a truck-stop quickie to grab some easy cash.

Araki, too, says lead Joseph Gordon-LevittJoseph Gordon-Levitt (also playing a troubled gay hustler) was "fearless and uncompromising in terms of his dedication to that character. If anything, I think everyone's going to want to play these kinds of gay characters right now."

But, after a year of such varied gay cinema, are financiers rushing out to make more films like them?

"I don't know if distributors are necessarily looking at these films and saying, 'That's fantastic,' " says Wu, whose next project, like Araki and Tucker's, is not gay-themed. "I hope the reverse thing happens, where (gay) people become inspired by the fact that my film could get made, then they set off to try to do it."

Gay films are so gay.

Well, duh!

"The Family Stone" portrayed the gay son (bottom right of the group) and his African-American lover with great taste and understanding -- Sarah Jessica Parker's dinner table questions about the gay life went over like a fart in a space suit. Liked the second half of the film better than the first.



The Family Stone

FILM

Queer cinema for the het set
MICHAEL HARRIS

Special to The Globe and Mail

First came the Oscar nominations for Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Transamerica. Then in June, the MTV Movie Awards announced that two men, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, had won the coveted Best Kiss award for their Brokeback smooch (as voted by MTV's largely pubescent viewership).

Without a doubt, this is the year of the queer.

At the MTV awards, a blushing Gyllenhaal accepted his golden popcorn trophy by giving presenter Justin Timberlake the most pointedly platonic handshake in Hollywood's history, thus making something else clear: Queer cinema has never been more straight.

The cross-fertilization of edgy queer cinema and mainstream fare is equally apparent in the 18th annual Vancouver Queer Film Festival, which opened yesterday and runs to Aug. 27.

"When we began, the fact the festival existed at all was huge," Dennis says. "Before, you really had to dig for films. Now, our biggest problem is choosing. It's incredible how far we've come."

Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Transamerica each sought out -- and captured -- a larger audience than gay-, lesbian- and transgender-themed films ever have before. But it was television that set the trend. Producers of the TV show Queer as Folk found that its largest audience was straight women, Dennis notes. "The L-Word, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, these are all geared to appeal beyond the queer audience."

Vancouver's Queer Film Festival has followed suit. With 86 feature-length and short films in the mix, there's something for everyone, including the heterosexual.

The festival's centrepiece is Jan Dunn's Gypo (2005), the first work filmed in Britain using guidelines set by the Lars von Trier-led Dogme movement.

Vancouver's Eye of Newt ensemble will provide live accompaniment to A Song of Love (1950), the once banned (and only) film by Jean Genet. And the closing gala features 20 Centimetres (2005), Ramon Salazar's extraordinary Spanish musical about a narcoleptic transsexual, which draws from Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the early films of Pedro Almodovar.

Also from Spain, Queens is the story of five mothers whose gay sons are getting married at a mass wedding. It stars Almodovar muses Veronica Forque (Matador), Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) and Marisa Paredes (All About My Mother).

These may be queer films, but more to the point, they're great films.

But queer cinema, now bankable, has also become more formulaic. "The lines are blurring," Dennis says. "Younger people are defining their gender and sexuality more fluidly. There's a fear in the queer community that we'll lose a sense of ourselves -- but it's also about our community getting larger."

Could gay cinema lose its edgy identity? And, conversely, will Hollywood give up the vanilla blockbusters we've come to depend on?

In times of doubt, I turn to bona-fide movie stars for words of wisdom. Gyllenhaal, for one, doled out a kind of universal humanism when he accepted the Best Kiss award. To the pimply masses, he righteously exclaimed: "Thank you -- not just from me, but for all those people struggling with love, which is all of us."