Wes Smoot 12/29/23 Wes Smoot 12/29/23

Master-stroke Maestro might be the most sophisticated portrait of bisexuality ever filmed Review by Arnold Wayne Jones

Master-stroke

Maestro might be the most sophisticated portrait of bisexuality ever filmed

Review by Arnold Wayne Jones

We all know that homosexuality didn’t exist until Uncle Miltie wore a dress, hippies started smoking weed and k.d. Lang won a Grammy. It’s caused by fluoridated water, Will & Grace marathons, gender-neutral pronouns and vegan options in public school cafeterias.

Yeah, right. Sadly, honest portrayals and discussions of sexual orientation have been suppressed for centuries – by the church, by society, by an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement by journalists and pop culture gatekeepers. Gay men were “confirmed bachelors;” lesbians “old maids;” queer love was “infatuation” or “sickness” … if acknowledged at all. The cascade effect of this imposed ignorance was more than to ignore, more to demonize – it was to make an entire subculture invisible. And when you can’t see evidence of a culture, even if you’re a member of it, you have no role models, no guideposts, no standards to live up to (or cautionary tales to avoid). That’s why most contemporary portrayals of gay life in America in the mid-20th century tend to focus on the covertness, the shame, or the dangers of being gay at certain times. Even good queer cinema (and period TV shows) like Brokeback Mountain, Fellow Traveler or Philadelphia tend toward emphasizing the tragedy. The pall over the protagonists’ lives go hand-in-glove with the genre itself.

On its surface, the new film Maestro looks like a traditional biopic about the great American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein – both his professional achievements and his personal tribulations, especially his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. But anyone who doesn’t walk away from Maestro with the understanding that it is a towering and multilayered portrait of an unapologetically bisexual icon has largely missed its point. This is a low-key instant classic of gay empowerment moviemaking.

As contemporary biopics go, Maestro is sweeping in its coverage. Starting from Bernstein’s first success as a last-minute substitute conducting the New York Philharmonic for a radio broadcast and becoming an instant darling of the glitterati, it tracks his long, impressive career as a conductor, composer, personality and husband and father. But all along, he was also happily bisexual. In many films, that would be a throwaway point, or entirely ignored (I’m lookin’ at you, Beautiful Mind!); here, it’s seamlessly integrated into the fabric of Bernstein’s life.

Its clarion point of view is evident as early as the second scene, when a young(ish) Bernstein receives the call that will launch his career. At the time, he’s in bed with his male lover and celebrates briefly by kissing the man on his posterior. If the lead actor (and director/co-screenwriter/producer) were a star less shimmering than Bradley Cooper, the casual sexuality of this scene, and many others throughout the film, would be omitted. But Cooper’s charisma, mojo and artistic boldness allow him the confidence to show Bernstein as a complete and complicated person – one who, despite having no template for how to be queer and in the public eye, managed to live his life, his way.

That’s admirable, but it certainly didn’t make it easy on his family. It wasn’t being bisexual that vexed his home life (though it was a part of it); it was the overwhelming Leonard Bernsteinness of him that did.

The film is called Maestro for a reason. It’s not merely that the term is the preferred honorific for an orchestra conductor, it’s that Bernstein was constitutionally incapable of being second chair to anymore. Friendships, colleagues, children, wife – they were all instruments to be orchestrated in service of his magnum opus: His own life.

Megalomaniac antiheroes are nothing new as biopics go, but few have come off as charming as Bernstein. The son of Ukrainian Jews who grew up in a Massachusetts mill town, Lenny reinvented himself as an urban sophisticate, graduating from Harvard and affecting a Mid Atlantic accent to seem as polished as New York society allowed. It was in this rarefied atmosphere that he met Felicia (Carey Mulligan), herself an immigrant who sounded as if she was exuded fully formed from the Upper West Side. Lenny never hid his bisexuality from Felicia (or, it seems, his friends and colleagues), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t create complications (serial infidelity will do that, no matter the orientation of the partner). All the while, Bernstein only begrudgingly admitted any culpability as he tried to charm his way around Felicia’s feelings. Different rules for geniuses.

And a genius he was. Maestro captures all the facets of Bernstein’s gifts, and Cooper embodies each brilliantly: The ease of his manner, the fearsomeness of his talent, the speed of his wit. The script (also by Cooper) sizzles with Old Hollywood glam.

Cooper’s performance is exceptional, but he’s largely matched by Mulligan’s simmering wife. There’s less for her to work with, but as they said about Ginger Rogers – she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels – Mulligan makes it a duel. The best scene in the movie is a confrontation between Lenny and Felicia on Thanksgiving Day. In a medium long shot with no cuts, the two argue passionately, twisting the corkscrews deeper and from different angles, until it’s a draw. The realism not merely of the dialogue but of the way the words cascade out of their mouths, folding over one another in an unending tapestry of ideas.

The heavy dialogue and emotional reality are Cooper’s best achievement as a director. His decision to film half in black and white and half in a faded approximation of Metrocolor seems a bit twee. This is also the second recent major film (following Saltburn) to shoot in academy ratio, which again comes off as an effort to suggest home movies that caught the actual events… so of course they become color once the 1960s arrive.

Interestingly, the film ends not with Lenny’s death (in 1990, at age 72) but soon after Felicia’s in 1978 – a choice that only underscores how the marriage of these two was the signature achievement of Bernstein’s existence. He wasn’t a gay man resigned to a marriage of convenience with a woman, but a true bisexual who contentedly straddled multiple worlds: Gay and straight, classical and pop cultures, orchestral music and Broadway, angel and devil. The film is as ambitious as the man himself.

Wes Smoot 6/21/23 Wes Smoot 6/21/23

Barry Good: Ezra Miller is the Secret Weapon (one of them) that sets The Flash Apart from the Confusing Trend of Multiverse Superhero Franchises

Review by Arnold Wayne Jones

The advent of “Cinematic Universes” is a blessing (mostly to the studios’ bottom lines) and a curse (mostly to folks who just like the fun escapism of comic books). When those CUs started delving into the concept of multiverses… well, it just confused me more. I confess that, when I saw Spider-Man: No Way Home, that was the first indication I had that the Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spideys all existed in parallel dimensions. This was news to me; I always assumed the casting changes were occasioned by studio whims and creative choices, not living elsewhere in the timeline. Frankly, none of it makes much sense. Did the recasting Bruce Banner (Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo) within the Marvel CU signal another universe… and if so, why was General Ross played by William Hurt in both the Norton and Ruffalo incarnations (a part soon to be played by Harrison Ford, occasioned by Hurt’s death). It’s the gymnastics associated with insisting on canon, while simultaneously allowing the reinvention of the franchise at will, that makes no sense. (I loathed No Way Home, and its companion film Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, for those and many more reasons.)

In my adulthood, live-action feature-film Batmen have included Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson – which of these are in the same world, if any? It simply isn’t worth the effort to figure it out.

The news, then, that the new Flash film would include time-travel initially set my teeth on edge. (Time travel always reminds me of the throwaway line in an episode of The Simpsons where guest voice Lucy Lawless says that anytime something in Xena didn’t make sense, “a wizard did it.” On the other hand, the animated series Rick & Morty is so crazy, it doesn't even try to maintain consistency; it’s brilliant.)

The Flash definitely has a lot of plot holes and related issues tied to its universe-hopping, but it’s also hugely entertaining in its own right. No other superhero film that plays so fast and loose with quantum mechanics is quite so satisfying as this.

The plot in its essence is: Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), who is secretly the super-speed hero known as The Flash, wants to help his dead get out of jail after being wrongfully accused of killing Barry’s mom. Barry figures out how to travel back in time in order to “correct” the injustice, but of course, timelines cannot be toyed with, and the repercussions are dire. (The original Star Trek series did basically the same thing in the class episode “City on the Edge of Forever.”) Barry meets his younger self and together they try to set things right – first finding Batman to enlist his help, then using Batman to track down Superman, who isn’t to be found.

One reason for the success, I suspect, is that The Flash makes only limited use of the current DC Extended Universe – there are references to Cyborg and Aquaman, but only Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Batman (Ben Affleck) make meaningful appearances. That allows the film to more or less stand on its own without too much clutter and focus on the character of Barry Allen.

And the secret weapon of The Flash isn’t speed…. it’s Ezra Miller. Miller’s personal life – use of they/them pronouns, occasional identity as queer (and then not), acts of violence and inappropriate conduct, mental health crises – have been widely documented, but honestly, it is easy to look past them to appreciate the extraordinary work Miller is doing here. They do twice the lifting of any other actors, playing (for the majority of the film) two separate Barry Allens, each of whom Miller makes distinct and individual. You might even call it three performances, when you add his sexy, ripped heroic mien as The Flash. As Older Barry, Miller is quirky and uptight and stressed out; as Younger Barry, he’s annoying and goofy. You’re never confused about who is whom; it might be the best dual performance I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The plot, despite its complications of logic, is incredibly well-structured within its constraints, so I hesitate to give away much of it, except to say that they majority of scenes with “Bruce Wayne” inject a wondrous nostalgia and set up a contrast to the current DCEU that really serves its legacy.

It’s not only the performances, though: The special effects and storytelling are superior to most DC films in this franchise, and the action sequences are staged to be well-lit and visually coherent in a way that often isn’t the case. It really delivers what you want in a summer blockbuster. The Flash gives you a rush.

Wes Smoot 3/29/23 Wes Smoot 3/29/23

The Wizard of A-Has: Dungeons & Dragons Breaks the Hasbro Curse Review

by Arnold Wayne Jones

There are names that, when I see them in the opening credits of a movie, instantly make me cringe, or at least give pause: “Directed by Michael Bay.” “Screenplay by Joe Eszterhaus.” “Casting supervised by Harvey Weinstein.” High on that list? “Based upon the property by Hasbro.” Eckk. I know people flock to the Transformers movies, but they are noisy nonsense in a visual dungheap of meaningless VFX; Battleship, Ouija, Jen & the Holograms, My Little Pony? Unwatchable. I’m not even a fan of the strained, unfunny cult classic Clue (yeah, well, sue me). Movies based on games?! When has that ever worked?

But there were two things that lured me into screening of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, despite its pedigree: First, the humane and intrigue dramatic success of The Last of Us on HBO, which showed video games could be the source of filmic creativity; and the second was its appealing trailer, which had a hip, subversive energy. I’d take a risk.

Only it didn’t turn out to be a risk at all. D&D: HAT is one of the most disarmingly enjoyable romps I’ve had in a theater in a while. It’s everything that the trailer promised and more: Funny, clever, exciting and even a little sexy.

One serious upside – which, I dunno, may be a downside for devotees of the game – is that it requires zero familiarity with its source material in order to get caught up in the story. Are the cinematic characters pulled from the game? Are locations celebrated and revisited? I have no clue, and don’t care. It stands on its own for entertainment.

The plot is fairly familiar: Two antiheroes, Edgin (Chris Pine) and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) are betrayed, captured, imprisoned, manage to escape, and go on a quest to achieve their original goal, only with more at stake. Along the way, they team up with lame sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith), shapeshifting druid Doric (Sophia Lillis) and dreamy Paladin Xenk (Rege-Jean Page). They battle the undead, master magic amulets, plan heists and best the fattest dragon in the world.

Yeah, a fat dragon. Who has flame-performance anxiety. And the villain’s wisecracks are more Noel Coward than Cowardly Lion. And did I mention dreamy Rege-Jean Page? (I might come back to him again.)

The inspiration for D&D seems less Game of Thrones or Conan or Lord of the Rings and more Princess Bride: sassy, buoyant, clever and wondrous without aiming for outright awe. The visual effects are excellent, but not the entire meal; the action sequences have the balletic humor of Jackie Chan; the plotting is smart and unexpected. For instance, when we first meet Edgin and Holga, he’s knitting and she’s beating the crap out of an ogre. Indeed, the main action set pieces all feature the women. It’s as if Everything Everywhere All At Once had big-budget backing.

Hugh Grant plays a charmingly evil Blofeld-like baddy, and Page (sigh!) plays it entirely straight as a sincere Westley-ish swashbuckler. Even Bradley Cooper shows up in a cameo as a milquetoast farmer. Co-writers and -directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein cast down the gauntlet to jokey actioners like Guardians of the Galaxy … and they win with an off-hand queer subtext (including the presences of Rodriguez and Smith) that delivers a tartness. This could be the start of a new Hasbromance.

Opens in theaters March 31.

Wes Smoot 3/11/23 Wes Smoot 3/11/23

A Whale of a Tale: A Small Movie Offers One of the Best Films in Ages

By Arnold Wayne Jones

There was a time, not too long ago, when the queer community desperately sought out and embraced gay content in mainstream movies … especially those blessed with Oscar validity: Remember panting over The Color Purple, Philadelphia, Longtime Companion and The Crying Game? All excellent, but few and far between.

My, how we’ve progressed in the intervening two decades, with the success of films like The Kids Are All Right, Moonlight and more. But this year? This year feels especially significant. There’s the queer daughter in Everything Everywhere All At Once (and, in one timeline, a touching romance between Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis); Cate Blanchett as an arrogant lesbian in Tar; gayness aplenty in Triangle of Sadness. But no nominated film this year is quite so profoundly meaningful and unexpected as The Whale.

Based on a play, almost all of the action takes place in a single set, and yet it doesn’t feel anticinematic at all; rather, it’s an incredibly intimate film that takes full advantage of the benefits of motion picture magic. The opening shot is a bold one: The camera tracks in on an immensely obese man (Brendan Fraser) watching gay porn on his laptop while jerking off. It’s simultaneously titillating, disgusting and invasive – one of the many cycle that the film constantly juggles. We learn the man is Charlie, a college writing professor who teaches online classes only with his camera turned off so his students can’t see his grotesque body.

Charlie was, until a decade ago, a seemingly straight father of a girl, married to a woman, when he met a male student and fell in love. He divorced and married his much younger paramour, only to be heartbroken when the young man dies, sending Charlie into a spiral of over-eating and self-destructive weight gain. He lives in a modest apartment, never venturing to the outside world except via his class Zoom calls and a dear friend, Liz (Hong Chau), who brings him food, nurses him and clucks about how he’s killing himself with food. Charlie seems fine with that, though.

You’d expect that we’re meant to be revolted by Charlie’s gross physical appearance and ravenous appetites, but that’s not the case; neither, however, do we outright pity him. Instead, we come to understand and sympathize with the sadness in his soul, the bottomless well of despair that comes from his broken heart.

This couldn’t have been accomplished without Fraser’s breathtakingly vivid and detailed performance. Charlie suspects – well, knows – that most people would judge and despise him on sight, but he never wallows in his own tragedy; if anything, he empathizes with their predictable reactions – self-awareness overpowers self-pity. He’s basically disgusted by himself, though content with it as well. There are several scenes where Charlie attacks food – pizza, sandwiches, etc. – with the voracious energy of a jungle cat feasting on a kill. He’s post-sex; calories are his passion. Eating is the replacement for human intimacy.

His life is thrown into additional chaos when a Mormon missionary enters his life, and he unexpectedly renews contact with his now-teenaged daughter. How all of these elements eventually coalesce around themes of love, redemption, betrayal and sacrifice is the greatest joy in discovering the film.

It might seem that, other than the brief porn at the top, Charlie being gay is incidental, or that you can’t otherwise peg this as “a gay movie,” but nothing could be further from the facts. The isolation, the body issues, the love, the identity issues, the guilt? It’s one of the most incisive portraits of queer anxiety ever committed to screen.

Whether it wins Fraser a well-deserved best actor Oscar this year I can’t predict with certainty. What I can be sure about is the loveliness and power of The Whale (even its title has layers). Its stellar performances, beautiful direction (by Darren Aronofsky), flawless makeup and multifaceted writing make this one of the best films in the past year.

Wes Smoot 2/1/23 Wes Smoot 2/1/23

I’m Lycan It: New Telefilm Teen Wolf: The Movie Has A Nice Bite To It ...

Review by Arnold Wayne Jones

Temps outside may be chilly, but over at the Paramount+ streaming service things are hot – downright steamy. That’s ever since the premiere of Teen Wolf: The Movie. Now. if you’re over 30, you’re probably thinking, “Teen Wolf was already a movie... back in the ’80s!” (You’re subscription to AARP Magazine is being rushed to you as you read this.) No, no, we’re talking about the movie following the Millennial angsty TV soaper Teen Wolf, which debuted on MTV (yeah, they don’t show music videos there either, old timer!) more than a decade back and ran for six seasons. The series was nothing like the excruciating low-budget Michael J. Fox comedy, which probably only got a release because Back to the Future was a smash a few months earlier.

What led series creator Jeff Davis to revisit that stale chestnut and rebrand it as a quasi Twilight rip-off is unfathomable, but hey, good for him... especially because the series bore so little similarity to its source material. Set in sleepy-yet-steamy Beacon Hills, the plot revolved around young Scott McCall (Tyler Posey), a dewey-eyed high school emo-hunk who, after being bitten by a werewolf, has to cope with puberty and lycanthropy. But he soon uncovered a host of supernatural shenanigans, including that his clique was populated by banshees, kitsune, hellhounds, werecoyotes (who knew?) and other mystical terrors. It was all brooding teen glances and PG flirtations.

Truth be told, I barely ever caught an episode when it was on. It fell in that netherworld of sincere adolescent dramas like Riverdale, Charmed, Smallville, Pleasant Landing, Supernatural, Supergirl, Gossip Girl and yada yada. They all ran together. (Don’t believe me? I made up one of those titles.)

I’ll say, though, I feel like I might have missed out on that one, because the reboot of the series as a two-hour-plus movie had me hooked, even without a deep understanding of the plot or characters. Most of the original cast returns to pick up where the series left off, with Scott’s dead ex-girlfriend seemingly resurrected by a terrifying creature with a devious plot, although nobody is quite sure what his plan is.

One of the few newcomers – and the only one who even comes close to qualifying as a teen as the title promises – is Eli Hale (Vince Mattis), son of ageing alpha Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin). Eli is born to be a werewolf, but in the lupine equivalent of not having his balls drop, has yet to undergo his hoped for transformation, making him crabby and unpleasant to be around – i.e., a typical teenager. (The metaphors do not run deep.) He’s roped by dad and Scott into helping out though, and you’ll never guess whose eyes burn yellow before the closing credits. Hey, predictability can be a comfort, especially in TV.

Teen Molf: The Movie feels like it could be the launching point for a new Teen Wolf series with a new, younger cast (though there’s already a related spin-off, Wolf Pack, airing on Paramount+), but it exists as more than an overstuffed pilot. The special effects are impressive. The scares, when they come, scary! The plotting twisty and surprising.

And then there’s the hotness quotient that I led off with. Tyler Posey has matured from dreamboat to tramp steamer – harder, beefier, sexier. His cohorts – male and female, older and younger, of assorted races and sexualities – mostly all smolder seductively. I can see why youngsters loved the show when it was originally on, but the movie/streaming service upgrade allows more foul language and outright sex (butts and pecs!).

Will this spawn another series? Who knows. But it certainly kept this older guy entertained on a cold winter’s night. Who doesn’t wanna snuggle up with a furry alpha to stay warm?

Now streaming on Paramount+

Wesley Smoot & Shelley Hennig at Teen Wolf: The Movie After Party

Wesley Smoot at Teen Wolf: The Movie Premiere Hollywood, California

Wes Smoot 6/10/22 Wes Smoot 6/10/22

Peacock Reboots a Gay Staple with Unexpected Success QUEER AF

By Arnold Wayne Jones

If you’re old enough (and gay enough) to remember watching when Russell T. Davies’ original British series Queer as Folk debuted more than 20 years ago – I, sadly, am – then you will never forget the adrenaline-rush of seeing sexually-active gay men engaged in realistic-seeming sex without AIDS, shame or suicide being the dramatic driving force. It was staggering in its radicalism. There was no marriage equality; it was still GLBT – the “A” hadn’t been added, the letters reversed, the Q codified. It was sexy, frivolous, and its politics was that of stentorian outrage at closet-cases, homophobia and hypocrisy. The original QAF – and its American remake, which ran on pay-cable for five seasons – was a kind of fantasy soap opera of bed-hopping, shade-throwing and melodramatic cliffhangers. (Question: Should we call a gay soap opera a “lube musical”? But I digress.)

We live in a new world now, although not always a better world. Gay weddings are now called “weddings,” Grindr gets joked about in primetime, COVID has replaced HIV as the virus of the moment, trans kids are… well, a thing. But there’s also the Pulse nightclub shooting, anti-trans legislation and the current SCOTUS membership. We’ve come far, but there’s still far to go.

Which is why, as I discovered slightly to my surprise, that we really needed a reboot of Queer as Folk. I needed convincing; I’m generally opposed to rehashing old properties simply because Hollywood is so bereft of courage or originality that it assumes audiences only want what they already know. (Unfortunately, they are often right.) Why revisit the same characters, or “new” characters regurgitating the same ideas, just for clicks and a 4.5 in the demo? The fact that this QAF was coming to NBC’s Peacock – the buggiest and boringest of the major streaming services from the most middle-brow of networks – gave me little hope.

Then I watched the first episode. And the second. And third. And it dawned on me that, of all retro series reboots out there, this may be the one that has the best chance to seem more relevant than the original.

In some ways, this is a critique of the American version. A dirty little secret: Most gays will concede that we often hate-watched that show. We wanted to see idealized versions of our own lives on screen (hard bodies glistening with perspiration in soft-core lighting), but these scenes were sandwiched between stereotypes, often painfully overwrought dialogue and predictable plotting. Most episodes left you with the same dissatisfaction as a Diet Coke: You asked for it, but the empty aftertaste left you wanting something better. The Peacock version needed to improve upon those feelings, and so far, it has.

The first amazement for me was the opening scene: A fairly explicit and rolicking anal sex scene that shows more ass and abs than I expected from NBC. The second amazement: Diversity. Another reason why the earlier incarnation was so disappointing was the total lack of color in the primary cast: Of the dozen or so regulars, every single one was as white as a Trump rally. There were token lesbians, a mix of tops and bottoms, twinks and doms but virtually no bears, no queens, and no POC. Not so this time out. The lesbian couple are mixed race – a butch black dyke and a thin lipstick transwoman; the local slut is mixed, the adopted son of white parents (including an almost unrecognizable Kim Cattrall, doing excellent character work) with a brother on the spectrum (Special star Ryan O’Connell); there are Latinos, gender-fluid teens, otters, a disabled guy and Juliette Lewis. (Sadly, no senior queers – hey, it’s still a gay fantasy.)

Another big difference is how the stakes seem contemporary and relevant. There’s less worrying about HIV (PrEP!) and molly overdoses and more mass shootings, social media awareness and criticism of faux allies. But there are still the cliches: Young gays having/wanting kids (heteronormative ideals are the flesh-eating viruses of most mainstream portrayals of gay culture); superficial conversations about overwrought emotions; secondary characters praising/apologizing for the anti-heroic stars; and so, so many pretty boys fucking wildly to fill in for plot (OK, I admit I like that part a lot). The trade off works, though.

I’ve enjoyed the acting (other than O’Connell, who is sweet but never convincing in his line delivery) and the mancandy helps the bad dialogue go down easier. I’ll definitely watch all eight episodes and probably wait for another season. And maybe two decades from now, another version will come along and rewrite the gay script over again for a future generation. And maybe it will be Queer AF too.