‘True Blood’ Runs Thicker

TUTTLEMODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

Living in L.A., I get to do a lot of fun things that aren’t exactly common in many other cities around the world and going to premieres is near the top of that list.  First of all, they’re free.  And that goes for the popcorn and soft drinks, too.  Second, if you’ve taken a few minutes to fix your damn hair, the fans thronging the red carpet try to take your picture because they think you must be someone famous.  Finally, there’s a great party with an open bar and dinner after the screening to say, I guess, “thank you for coming to watch our movie…for free!”  How cool is that?

I remember my first big premiere at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, which is incidentally where the tradition originated in 1922 with Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, but the one I’m talking about was many years later.  I know I look young for my age but that would be pushing it.

The Evils of Seduction

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

An interesting discussion erupted today on a Facebook post by the British artist Matthew Stradling.  He put up a recent picture of David Bowie with the comment “We can’t be beautiful forever.”  To which I replied, “Looking more like Paul McCartney every day. But let’s face it, Bowie was never beautiful.”

The eternal duel of attraction. (Ph: Helmut Newton)

Of course, this prompted something of an uproar from people our age, who remember Bowie as the epitome of male pulchritude.  “Oh, c’mon,” I responded in a subsequent comment.  “He was interesting looking at best, way too thin. He was seductive, as was his singing. We were all hypnotized into thinking he was sex on wheels. I feel like the little girl in The Emperor’s New Clothes. But the fact he was joli laid, as the French say, doesn’t take away from the genius of his early music.”

There’s Something About Kristen

BAKER STREET | REVIEW

by Eric J Baker

Kristen Stewart’s critics aren’t wrong: When she isn’t being plain old bland, she’s being morose. She’s not an exotic beauty, nor is she the all-American girl next door. Yet still she manages to captivate us. Maybe it’s that half smile she gives up about an hour into every one of her stone-faced performances. It’s like we’ve been given a great, unexpected gift. And the occasional twinkle in her eye would be a full-frontal nude scene from another actress.

Stewart: There’s a happy girl in there somewhere. (Ph: W Magazine)

Stewart brings her weary good looks (imagine her in a movie with Ben Affleck called Pretty, Tired People) to the role of Snow White in Universal Picture’s Snow White and the Huntsman, which opened this weekend. This Tolkien-esque take on the familiar fairy tale involves a serial usurper named Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) who, like me, needs beautiful women around to feel young. However, whereas I am satisfied with a charitable smile or the occasional act of harmless flirtation, Ravenna sucks the life right out of these girls.

Queer as Comics

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

It’s understandable if you’re confused that Ryan Reynolds might have been outed by DC Comics this past week.  Or rather that the superhero character he played in the colossal 2011 flop, The Green Lantern (not to be confused with the similarly hued disaster Green Hornet), will be transformed into a Ghey when a new issue of the comic hits the stands next Wednesday.

If you’re gonna come out, this is how you do it. Yee-haw!

Don’t worry, girls, Reynolds isn’t being forced to pull a Brokeback retroactively.  The Green Lantern character he played, Hal Jordan, remains a resolute womanizer who could plausibly have landed Scarlett Johansson.  The character whose entire past history is being reinvented is Alan Scott, described by DC as “the leader of the team. He’s a Type-A personality and a successful businessman; he’s gallant, he’s brave, he’s all the things you’d want in a hero.”

Go Big or Go Home

TUTTLE MODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

As I was barreling somewhat recklessly down Olympic Boulevard toward American Idol’s finale at downtown L.A.’s Nokia Theatre last week, my friend Mary sat in the passenger seat, calmly applying her eye shadow.  “My Gaaad,” she said in her lovely Mid-western accent, “Jennifer Lopez has probably been in hair and makeup for three hours already.”

Brazilian idol: Sergio Bochert by Rick Day.

Within an hour, we were only a few feet away from La Lopez and it looked like Mary had called it pretty accurately.  Jennifer was stunning in long-sleeved beaded Blumarine, but Mary in her black strapless floor-length Rick Owens gown was no slouch, either, even if she did do her makeup in the car.

The Elusive Eunuch—Part Two

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | THE INDIA FILES

by James Killough

Please read Part One first.

Let me backpedal even further down memory lane to the very first time I first became interested in eunuchism; even though, like most men who have no transgender aspirations, I had an instinctive aversion to it and wanted at the very least to cross my legs when I thought about losing my genitals, or even better don a pair of titanium underpants to protect myself.  That first time coincided with my decision to abandon acting and become a filmmaker at the age of eighteen.

Stefano Dionisi as the castrato singer Farinelli.

I had an older gay mentor at the time, as many young Gheys do, a sort of nonsexual guru who instructed me in the Ways of Ghey—by ‘older,’ I mean he was twenty-four.  He was a classic of his kind: bitchy, funny, great taste, somewhat aristocratic, edgy, Italian.  He worked for a while as an assistant to a famous gay journalist for the Village Voice, and one day he threw me a book he’d stolen from his boss’s library called Memoirs of a Castrato by Henry Lyon Young.  (He threw things at me a lot, which is probably why we’re no longer in touch.)

What Would Arianny Do?

BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

A big PFC thank you to the hardworking law-enforcement officers of Clark County, Nevada for arresting UFC octagon girl Arianny Celeste on domestic battery charges this weekend. If not for that event, what the hell would we have for a lead image? Tommy Lee Jones cashing another paycheck?

Arianny Celeste, future dominatrix

The arrest might be a good career move for Ms. Celeste if Internet-user comments can be viewed as a legitimate tool for market research. It seems that millions of men out there are eager to pay top dollar for a savage beating at the hands of the former Playboy model. Ah, America, land of conservative values and Puritanism.

Camping Out

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

I rather like Nicole Kidman.  As an actress, I mean.  I’ve heard varying reports on what she’s like to work with.  I try to discount the Hollywood Personal Assistant Network, a.k.a. Nannywood, which naturally labels her a “bitch.”  But being hot gossip around Nannywood is rather like negative confirmation: if you’re not a bitch or “total weirdo/asshole” (for the guys) then they don’t talk about you, anyway.

Mcconaughey is the “Cannes revelation” because of his recent career-changing roles.

Indeed, there’s no point being nice to PAs because that won’t make them feel empowered when the network assembles to compare notes; they cannot feel they have the moral high ground over you, cannot one-up each other with who is more of an insider with the gods than whom.

But Ya Are, Blanche!

TUTTLE MODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

Last Saturday night, my dear friend Lisa and I had the honor of attending the opening night of Bitchslap! in West Hollywood, in which my friend C. Stephen Foster plays Bette Davis.  If that doesn’t sound gay enough, just keep reading.

And if THAT wasn’t gay enough, how’s this photo?  Pablo Hernandez by Thomas Synnamon.

The play traces the legendary rivalry between Davis and Joan Crawford, using gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as an entertaining intermediary, which culminates in the two actresses’ first collaboration on the film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

The Elusive Eunuch—Part One

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | THE INDIA FILES

by James Killough

At some point during Shoot Your Heroes Week here at PFC, I had an exchange with Eric Baker in our incestuous comments section that led me to remember the time I crossed the Rann of Kutch in a rickety van in search of the secret temple sacred to the hijras, the notorious eunuchs of India.

A hijra performing for the boys.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton became the one and only hero I’d ever had around page one hundred of Edward Rice’s superlative best-selling biography of him, which I read when it first came out in the early 90s.  This is the kind of man I would have tried to become had I been a Victorian with the sort of linguistic and scholarly brilliance with which he was blessed.  Burton was a character far more extraordinary than his contemporary Rudyard Kipling in many respects; he didn’t just dream of the Indian subcontinent and the British Raj in poems and novels, he lived it, playing the Great Game to the very edge of brinksmanship with a level of chutzpah I aspire to.