Happily Ever After: Happy Endings' Gay Fairy Tale

I can hardly describe how it felt when Max Blum finally kissed a boy onscreen. I know a lot of well-meaning people are patting themselves on the back for not making a big deal out of this, but how often do you see two men romantically kiss on television? It’s not a big deal for being ground-breaking, and it’s not not a big deal because we’re all comfortable with homosexuality. It’s almost a big deal just because more boys need to be kissing more boys on television, but Happy Endings has never felt gay-shy. No, this is a big deal just for being a beautiful piece of television.

Conan the Barbarian: Spartacus and Fitch

It’s not often cinema presents monomania in such flattering terms as Jason Momoa’s voluptuous physique and amused attitude, but these are the terms of Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian, a dramatization of what a life of violence will do to you: make you sexually irresistible, physically invincible, and supernaturally charming. But Conan the Barbarian is not about monomania any more than it’s about violence or feudalism or a killer ab regimen. It takes some time abandoning these pretenses, and even then it’s less a film than a sequence of literally unwatchable fight scenes strung together by the weakest of pretexts (happening upon a slave camp that needs liberating, happening upon some foreign soldier programmed only to fight like an Age of Empires warrior, happening upon a crime against fashion), but in a season of shallow salvation vehicles like The Help, at last there’s a film happy living down to itself.

J. Edgar: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

If I compared The I Run Lady to J. Edgar, it’s only superficially, the way Abi Morgan and Dustin Lance Black frame their political icons in piles of latex and creaky accents because just telling a coherent story is somehow beneath them, or the way Phyllida Lloyd and Clint Eastwood desaturate the shit out of their images because all this gnarly dementia and camp self-loathing is very stately, you see, or the way Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio just totally miss the mark, she constantly peeking through the husk of Margaret Thatcher to reveal Oscar Winner Meryl Streep and he transforming this iconic epicenter into a performance that’s so much smaller than life you need to be on muscle relaxants to follow. But The Iron Lady makes J. Edgar look like Young Mr. Lincoln, or at least Mommie Dearest.

The Iron Lady: What Ever Happened to Maggie Thatcher?

If not for that lengthy montage-parade-cum-subplot about becoming Prime Minister and battling labor and going to war over the Falkland Islands, The Iron Lady might have been a sly take on dementia-acting or perhaps some kind of dark comedy about the haunting of western politics. Alas. At least it earns that Best Makeup nod. As with Madonna’s WE, an equally inspired British period piece, over half the film takes place in the present day or so, with Meryl sleep-walking through the senile thing she’s been dying to do ever since playing the lead of the genderblind King Lear in college. Or so I assume. To be honest, I’m not very interested in the facts, and neither is Phyllida Lloyd, so let’s just skip all this nonsense and get to the crazy stuff.

Housekeeping: Write Something Every Day Month

Legal says I can’t call this a blog without some measure of confessionalism, however fictional, so let’s talk about life, man. I don’t get why people are so resistant to New Year’s resolutions, like the very idea of scheduled self-improvement is an affront to their comically conformist notions of nonconformity. Well, do what you want, but I discovered a couple of years ago that I’m pretty good about arbitrarily forcing myself to do things on a dime, like give up regular soda and stop hating people just because they think Community is the Second Coming and can't believe there are atheists in the world. Which is why I’m here to announce February is my Write Something Every Day Month.