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.”

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.

The Cold Civil War

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

My dear friend Phil Hoskins is a lawyer who specializes in estate planning for Gheys, a somewhat more complex legal situation for those of us who are denied the same rights of inheritance and whatnot.  Over a protein shake in Weho the other day, Phil said, “DOMA is the most pernicious piece of legislation since slavery.”

Who else?

President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage this week was monumental, of course, quite possibly more so than even the gay community at large seems to realize.  I went out for a celebratory drink at Gym Bar on Wednesday after a meeting, raised my glass and bellowed out a toast to the President.  I was met with absolute indifference.  It’s probably because they were engrossed in urgent gossip, and because most Gheys have a blinkered view about marriage; many are unlikely to take this most hetero-normative of steps with our relationships in our lifetimes.  We’re men: few of us daydream about ideal weddings, or make it any kind of priority, not with so many other possibilities out there.  We’re thrilled if a relationship lasts six weeks past the first encounter.

Darling, You Look Marvel-ous

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW | REVIEW

by Eric J Baker

So I’m sitting there for the first hour of The Avengers thinking, “Where the fuck is Patrick Macnee?” Then the Incredible Hulk showed up and I was like, “Ah… it’s those Avengers.” I ought to pay closer attention to the marketing for these things.

Hemsworth and Evans: Let the slash fiction begin.

Director Joss Whedon’s all-star, $220-million superhero mash-up opened this weekend to surprisingly good reviews for a summer popcorn movie, and has shattered all records with a $200-million-plus opening weekend to bring its global cume to close to $650 million in only twelve days.  In other words, it’ll be profitable, but never officially—Disney’s previous bomb John Carter will see to that.

Too Cool for School?

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

I had a brief email exchange over the weekend with our contributor Eric Baker in which he brought to my attention that our colleagues in the entertainment biz never leave comments on this blog, but rather send them to us in private emails.  Sometimes I might get a “like” or a quick note when I post a link to a PFC piece on Facebook, but that’s still considered private.  “It’s like being in a high school exclusively made up of cool kids,” I explained in my reply to Baker.

The 17-year-old star of "Life of Pi" is just how I imagined him from the book.

James Tuttle has similar experiences.  For example, in a wee incident last year, he was taken to task by a friend of his, an Oscar-nominated actress, for using the word ‘retarded.’  She protested that he was too intelligent and articulate to need to resort to adjectives that disparaged mentally disabled people; a child of a friend of hers was one such person, etcetera.  Even though I pointed out in a post of my own that the definition and etymology of ‘retarded’ was broad enough to excuse Tuttle’s use of it, the actress’ point was legitimate in light of where we are culturally with the bullying issue.

Girls Gone Mild

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

I was only briefly a fan of Sex and the City, during its first season, and then only by osmosis.  I had something of a crush on my female writing partner, photographer Amy Peck, and she was trying to get us away from feature films into TV, but I was stubbornly, stupidly resistant.  Yet she was equally stubborn so we compromised and I wrote a spec script each for episodes of SATC and Will and Grace.  That’s about as far as our foray into TV got; Amy went off and had a second child, and I slipped back into the torpor of indie filmmaking.

We're not huge fans of celebs posing naked while pregnant, but Victoria's Secret model Alessandra Ambosio took it to new levels with this pic on her Facebook page.

The reason we chose SATC and WAG is because they are both shows about gay men  and the women who need them (the female characters in SATC are basically gay men in drag), which was our relationship in a nutshell: Amy and I were Will and Grace, as are many gay man/straight woman relationships.

Desperately Seeking Relevance

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

As an aspiring narcissist, I’m not one for watching sports unless it’s something I’ve practiced myself, which limits me to swimming and boxing.  I am glued to the TV when the Olympics roll around for the former, and will watch the latter on the rare occasions I’m in a sports bar and it happens to be on.  The third sport I’ve participated in from time to time and play reasonably well is a good ol’ film industry smackdown, and none was more amusing to watch than the epistolary dustup between Mel Gibson and writer Joe Eszterhas this week.

It's not just because he works out at our gym, or because he bowed out of Tarantino's "Django Unchained." Gordon-Levitt stars in "Loopers," which from the trailer looks badass.

What happened is the highly overrated, long-standing joke Eszterhas—the screenwriter behind Basic Instinct, Flashdance and, most notoriously, Showgirls—mouthed off in a nine-page tell-all email to Gibson after Eszterhas’ script for The Untitled Maccabee Project was rejected by Warner Brothers.  Of course, he leaked the email to the press, most notably to The Wrap, an industry website that appears to have taken his side, presumably in the hope of getting all of those “exclusives” from Eszterhas, which kept popping up as alerts on my BlackBerry as the whole silly saga unfolded.

Trick or Tweet

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

My good friend Shawn Riegsecker, whose unique brand of seductive enthusiasm should be patented, set a goal for me three months ago: I should have one quarter of the amount of comedian Rob Delaney’s followers on Twitter by the end of the year.  After he fixed that target and I set up my Twitter account, he actually looked up how many followers Delaney has: three hundred thousand, which makes seventy-five thousand for me by 2013.  “Hah!” Shawn said.  “You’re fucked!”

Real men use BlackBerry.

I am currently at seventy-five followers, three zeros short.  It will probably drop to seventy-four by the end of today once Twitter’s algorithmic bots sweep through and find out that @CoastalOptometry isn’t so enthralled by surreal, esoteric quips about atheism that it has followed me, but is in fact a spammer. This means I have to increase my base by over one hundred thousand percent in eight months, if my primary-school math still holds.

It’s Raiding Men

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW | REVIEW

by James Killough

When a movie you’ve never heard of—starring actors you’ve never heard of, either, whose names suggest they might be speaking a language many time zones removed from English—is playing on four screens at the Arclight Hollywood, the best movie theater in the world, damn it, then it gets my attention.

Uwais isn't as handsome as Bruce Lee, but he's still kick-ass.

When this same film, The Raid: Redemption, has an eight-point-five rating on the IMDb and a whopping ninety-four percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes, then it is time to book my favorite seat, C 22, in the middle of the handicapped section without reading another word about it, not even a synopsis.

‘Hunger’ Strikes

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW | REVIEW

by James Killough

The last time I went to a midnight screening of a movie was last century when David Lynch’s Dune opened.  I’d been a huge fan of the books since about twelve, so I had to get in line to see this.  But it wasn’t even a midnight screening, it was at midday, and the movie was such a mess that they had to tack an intro on the beginning and hand out a glossary of terms at the screening.

Unlike his fellow handsome hobbit, Tom Cruise, Hunger Games' Hutcherson has believable range of emotion and depth of performance.

This is not the case with The Hunger Games, which your faithful movie bitch caught last night at the Arclight Hollywood, where it was playing on all fourteen screens, plus the Cinerama Dome, and all were mostly sold out.  Still, I managed to get one of my favorite seats in the middle of the handicapped section so that I could not only stretch my legs out, I could cross them like a proper intellectual reviewer on a PBS program or something.