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Post by llminnowpea on Sept 30, 2022 22:16:36 GMT
I have read that the rom-com movie "Bros" mentions TPOTD and BC specifically, but I haven't watched it yet and can't verify if it is a good mention or a not good mention. To put the movie Bros in context in case you have't heard about it - it appears to be a gay rom-com and is getting good reviews (it is written by and stars gay men, I guess).
(I read this somewhere on reddit, probably in the movie subreddit, but damned if I can find the exact comment now!)
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Post by sgev1977 on Sept 30, 2022 23:01:14 GMT
I haven't go deep but the very few bits I have seen suggests that it's about identitarian garbage. You know, straight actors should never play gay characters!!!
Anyway, I have read it received great reviews but that it's also just a conventional romantic comedy and, at least, two critics said that it probably was well received because well... identitarian reasons!
Jason Bailey, who can be very woke, said on Twitter that it was one of the genuinely bad movies he watched at TIFF so...
EDITED
Here is Bailey review. He is nicer in his reviews than on Twitter! Lol
Also I don't understand why people act like gay romantic comedies were something new. There were a LOT in the 1990s and early 2000s. I remember a joke in Will and Grace about how it was forbidden to openly admit they were really bad! (like straight romantic comedies TBF!)
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Post by mllemass on Oct 1, 2022 2:31:51 GMT
I have no plans to see Bros, mainly because I find Billy Eichner loud and irritating. But I’ve now seen him in several interviews about the movie, and he wants a big deal made over the fact that everyone in the movie is gay. Apparently, it’s the first time that’s ever happened. Every role, including the straight roles, are played by openly gay actors.
Maybe that’s a good reason to see the movie, but it doesn’t make him any less irritating!
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Post by sgev1977 on Oct 1, 2022 3:48:51 GMT
I don’t have idea who that guy is! I think I have see him in memes! Lol His name and movie has been in BC’s recent Google searches. I just tried to ignore it!
But yeah, he is promoting his film with identitarian stuff: “I’m gay so my movie is genuine! Not like the other much more intellectual films with straight people in them!” The problem is like Bailey said, he is doing a genre that’s not genuine by nature! It’s just pure aspirational fantasy full of comfortable cliches designed to not bother anyone with complex ideas. You know, the opposite of TPOTD, gay or straight!
I’m trying to think on a genuine romantic comedy with gay characters in the lead and the one that comes to mind is a small British film called Beautiful Things but that’s probably very far away of a Hollywood fantasy: it’s about working class teenagers discoveruping their sexuality and finding each other. There is also the wonderful My Beautiful Laundrette (yea, only the ones with “Beautiful”in the title!) But again, working class people and immigrants in very mundane realistic situations! Also one was directed by a woman and the other one had Daniel Day Lewis as a star so they weren’t “really” gay, right? By the way, the first time I watched Graham Norton in something was in a very “genuine” gay comedy movie with explicit sex in which he played, I kid you not!, a poop fetichist! It was also a very bad movie! But hey, Norton is gay in real life! As the producers behind that awful movie!
I think the best romantic comedies are by the French but I’m not thinking on the commercial ones but on Eric Rohmer and Truffaut. And again, they are very different to Hollywood stuff.
I also like Hollywood classical comedies but Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant were more screwball than romantic. Lubitsch and Wilder were also much more poignant than anything that was made after them. Woody Allen was also good but he was much more complex and cerebral than Nora Ephron (Sorry, I wasn’t a fan!) and she was considered the best!
EDITED Probably it’s a crime to say that Allen was better than Ephron nowadays! Lol But it’s clear she was a fan and influenced by him except that she wasn’t very edgy. That part of Allen influenced American indie cinema and that’s the issue with him: he is extremely influential but at the same time, some people want to act like he never existed or as if he wasn’t very relevant when the ADN of his work is in both indie and Hollywood films made in the USA.
And I was more a fan of the more macho stuff by Scorsese and Coppola when I discovered the 1970s American cinema than him so not necessarily a fan but I can see!
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Post by mllemass on Oct 1, 2022 12:54:22 GMT
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Post by sgev1977 on Oct 1, 2022 13:23:31 GMT
I can’t talk about this film because I haven’t watched it but yeah, the “I’m a pioneer” attitude of these kind of “artists” is very unnerving because it’s a huge lie and that’s one of the aspect I hate more about modern activism. They just ignore everything before them to make themselves look like some kind of heroes and doing that, they just erase true pioneers.
You don’t even have to talk about queer cinema and people like Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Derek Jarman, Rose Troche or Tom Kalin. Probably that’s too high brow or obscure for this guy! He is clearly trying to do something mainstream and easy accessible but still there were a lot of romantic gay comedies decades ago! He isn’t doing anything new and he certainly isn’t a pioneer! Why he wants to erase the history of the community he claims to defend (of evil straight people who play gay characters, apparently)?
Also there is this close minded and ignorance. I understand it is well-meaning but discriminating people because their sexuality, even if they are straight, is a terrible precedent that can easily backtrack: if you can only hire gay people and discriminate straight ones then an homophobic guy is in his right of hiring only straight people and happily announce it! It’s so idiotic and the only way it has logic is because, again, it’s about they looking good in the eyes of impressionable people and not about actual activism.
I actually have seen two recent examples of companies announcing initiatives about hiring only minorities just to quickly retract it when they are informed by their lawyers that well, that’s actually discrimination and illegal. They are doing what the old bad guys did!
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Post by sgev1977 on Oct 1, 2022 15:20:15 GMT
I think it’s because they want to fix past wrongdoings, in some cases, but they don’t think enough about it because it’s all about appearances.
In the case of straight actors playing gay characters what they don’t realize it’s that there were almost not out gay actors then and that it was sometimes a risk for even straight actors to play those parts! Again, some kids on Tumblr rewrote history and concluded that straight actors played those characters to win awards but most of them weren’t even nominated! It’s just that like that article said, they barely know gay film history!
Tom Cruise used to threat with lawsuits to people who suggested he was gay. The excuse was that it was a risk for his reputation and his career. He once threatened a critic who said he had a lot of gay fans! (and kids are claiming that he is a hero for gays because his pro-Reagan movie accidentally seemed kinda gay!). I remember people saying that Campbell Scott, the handsome son of George C. Scott, ruined his chance of being the next Tom Cruise because he played a gay character. He wasn’t nominated to the Oscar! Bruce Davison was so I guess you needed to be certain kind of actor: already established and respected. Certainly, not a pretty face. Also Davidson wasn’t the next Tom Cruise! Nor William Hurt! It wasn’t until Tom Hanks won the Oscar that a really film star achieved it and he was already a movie star before accepting the role. It seems to me, it’s just a complex history and not just straight actors stole that award from gays!
Also how the hell they know that those actors are straight? What if they aren’t? They have to be forced to come out to get those roles? It’s ridiculous and kinda homophobic, by the way. Why not work to better conditions for people to coming out? Why not impulse the career of really talented gay actors that could play anything anywhere without ridiculous and ignorant initiatives that aren’t well thought? Why not promote actual film history and real pioneers without trying to portrait yourself as a hero when the conditions are clearly much more easy today than ever in your very liberal country?
I also think it’s not a surprise that the actual brave actors who were openly gay when it was a much bigger problem then like Ian McKellen are against ignorant kids ideas that only gay should play gay.
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Post by llminnowpea on Oct 1, 2022 16:33:45 GMT
Bi-erasure is a huge problem - just because someone is married to someone of the opposite gender does not make them straight. And, they shouldn't have to come out to anyone unless they want to. And, likewise, just because someone sleeps with someone of the same gender doesn't mean they aren't also attracted to someone of a different gender. Those black and white assumptions hurt everyone.
I wonder if, when the actors and writers of that movie say that everyone is LGBT, if they mean the crew, too. Did the entire crew consent to being out? What if someone is OK with their coworkers/family/friends knowing, but might not feel comfortable with everyone in the world knowing? There is a huge difference there.
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Post by mllemass on Oct 1, 2022 17:04:08 GMT
Like the makers of the movie Pride said when they were criticized for not hiring only gay actors to play the gay roles: if they had done that, some of the gay actors would not have wanted to be in it. Whether it was because they weren’t out, or whether they thought it would hurt their career and limit their future roles, they didn’t want to be identified and labelled.
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Post by sgev1977 on Oct 1, 2022 17:25:06 GMT
There was a discussion when TPOTD was in the awards conversation between a newly declared gay activist (seriously he had just days out of the closet!) and some gay film critics about it. The very young man thought it was very offensive that straight actors played gay characters but was also extremely ignorant about film history. The gay critics listed a few recent examples of only gay casts and they were pretty mediocre already forgotten movies which only value was the political statement when a lot of unforgettable classics were starred by straights.
He was a big fan of Call Me By Your Name which apparently this new movie think it’s a straight film (even when the director is a gay man who called Americans who want gay characters played by straights, “provincials” by the way! The same with the script writer, a true pioneer called James Ivory and the author of the book is bisexual). He was sure the actors were gay and said it would be wrong if this and this hyper masculine action stars were the stars (I don’t remember who he named!). It was so hyperbolic and stupid but that’s social media: hyperbolic, uninformed and frivolous. They just want to destroy quality stuff with silly policial statements that doesn’t even make sense in the real world but surely help to avoid controversy if not even to shield against potential bad reviews.
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