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Tired old queen at the movies

review

Separate Tables

n all star cast brings to life Terrance Rattigan's story of lonely people living off-season in a boarding house on the coast of England in Delbert Mann's Separate Tables (1958).

Taken from the Broadway hit, the film stars Burt Lancaster, who also produced the film, Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, David Niven and Wendy Hiller. David Niven and Wendy Hiller both won Oscars. Rounding out the cast are such venerable British character actors as Dame Gladys Cooper as a domineering mother, Cathleen Nesbit as an officer's widow, Felix Aylmer as a lonely ex-professor and wonderful May Hallet from the original cast as a spinster with a practical mind and an eye for "the horses".

Dealing with subjects, which up 'til then had been taboo for the screen, Separate Tables, in its quiet way, runs the gamut from smothering motherhood to sexual repression, abuse, sexual perversion, pre-marital sex, and frigidity. The drama emerges from the Rattigan sense of Upper British decorum being shattered when it runs head on into any of these subjects.
Separate Tables is a first class production, with a pitch perfect cast providing top-flight entertainment.

Steve Hayes

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Love me outside the walls

Don't miss this lovely short, Omar, about a popular student who sneaks away from football with his friends to write poetry with the boy he loves. Better still, it doesn't end in the way you fear it might do...

In a false quarrel there is no true valour

3 white bears

A white jock

A white twink

A white French guy

A redhead

A blond

A hot Latino...

And one black guy.

Well strike me down if it ain't exactly like a United Colors of Benetton ad. ~~All the colours of the rainbow~~ on Attitude magazine's Sex Issue cover. Ya gotta love the gay press.

Title quote: "In a false quarrel there is no true valour."

William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright, 1564-1616.

When we are born, we cry that we are come, to this great stage of fools

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There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

review

3-Day Weekend
Redwoods

riting a negative review is so much more fun than one heaping praise on a production. But I try to hold back the poison darts for deserving targets - everyone should know what hate-monger James Earl Hardy is about - and 3-Day Weekend is begging for a slating. Consider this review a community service announcement: I want to help you to avoid wasting 90 minutes of your life on this unmitigated trash.

It's 90 minutes you'll never, ever get back. Don't do it!

Where to start? Is it the dreary indie music drowning out every clumsy, wooden scene? Actors who stand awkwardly about waiting for the next guy to say his line? The endless, plodding monologues on "issues"?

Maybe it's the weird casting. The supposedly red hot male hooker, lusted after by everyone, looks like Ellen Degeneres in 20 years time (and after a bad crystal meth addiction).

The acting is strictly amatuer dramatics, like a bunch of queens prised out of some backwater suburban gay bar. God knows what the talent behind the camera was like. I might say 3-Day Weekend gives gay cinema a bad name - except it gives cinema a bad name - period.

Embarrassingly, one of the characters remarks upon how gay cinema is so disappointing these days - a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. Worse still, director Rob Williams then has another character namecheck one of his own movies (Long-Term Relationship). Wow - really? Seriously - REALLY?!

It's bad. Not even Dante's Cove bad: that, at least, skips nimbly into the so-bad-it's-good category. 3-Day Weekend, is just frustrating, aggravating, ugly, and worst of all, boring. A total waste of time.

avid Lewis' Redwoods, on the other hand, is a very still, handsome postcard from rural America. Poignant and romantic, it features characters you'll actually like (unlike 3-Day Weekend's cast of ghouls) and a world away from the contrived histrionics of the above picture.

Leads Brendan Bradley and Matthew Montgomery also make a cute couple, with some palpable chemistry. This picture has a soul, and its heart is in the right place. Redwoods won't set the world on fire, but it's a gentle, charming slow-burner ideal for a wet Sunday afternoon.

Title quote: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

William Shakespeare, English playwright, 1564-1616.

Praising what is lost, makes the remembrance dear

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The Young Ones

Raz B has made fresh allegations about what went on during his time in B2K. But the real story is what this episode tells us about America's sinister obsession with youth.

emember that Noah's Arc digisode, where Noah has a confession? Noah, Ricky, Alex and Chance have been talking about hot men in hip-hop, and a shamefaced Noah pipes up, "You know what I'm kind of embarrassed to admit?" The guys look warily at him - is Noah going to admit he's a closet snow queen? But - phew! - no, it's not that (anything but that): "I'm starting to feel the young ones, like Omarion."

If Raz B is to be believed, Noah wasn't the only one feeling "the young ones". B2K manager Chris Stokes was feeling them too - Raz B alleges - and all of the boys in B2K were feeling each other.

Allegations of sex abuse in B2K (formed in 2001, and disbanded in 2004) first exploded onto the Net over Christmas in 2007, and Raz B's descriptions of what went on have only become more graphic: "Me and Boog was in a room together. Chris Stokes put us in a room together and made us do stuff together." And if you were wondering just what they were doing, Raz spells it out in no uncertain terms: "My truth is the fact that Chris Stokes had me and Jarrell Houston [J Boog] in a room sucking each other's dicks."

Were Raz B and his bandmates molested? Were they the victims of a paedophile? Or just teens experimenting, as sexually active teenage boys are wont to do? If Chris Stokes did manipulate the boys, putting them in rooms and making them do things with each other, could it be that he was just doing what everyone who watched those B2K music videos wanted to do?

B2K's Gots Ta Be video has a 16-year-old Raz-B seductively caressing his baby smooth chest. It's saying, "You want this. Come and get get. Come and take it." By what definition is it right to put a commercially sexualised 16-year-old boy on the world stage for the greedy consumption of a global audience; not just of fellow teens, but adults too?

America is in the thrall of youth, more than any other Western nation. And in America, youth equals sex, and the younger, the closer to barely legal, the better. The guys in that Noah's Arc webisode recoil at Noah's confession (they actually all get up and leave) because it's all a bit near the knuckle: Noah's admitting America's dirty little secret, that, in fact, it's all about "the young ones". But who decides when "the young ones" go from being cute kids to sex objects?

From their debut video, Uh Huh in 2001 (when the boys were 15), B2K were marketed as sexual playthings, ostensibly for teenage girls, but with a sly wink to a much older audience. Adults too could privately fantasise about the pretty young things. B2K: sexy, sexually ripe, barely legal boy toys for the mass market! What a hoot!

A close friend recently remarked upon the extreme fetishisation of high school in America; for Americans, it seems to be the absolute defining life experience, or so pop culture would have it. Look at Glee - wholesome, supposedly - but chock full of attractive, sexy kids; it's producers are saying to us, "Look, but don't touch! That would be so wrong - but hot!"

Is American pop culture merely legitimised, socially acceptable paedophilia for the masses? B2K, the kids in Glee, and Britney Spears in her school uniform are all portrayed - and marketed - essentially as sexually desirable children. And here's the rub: mainstream America condemns homosexuality, linking it to paedophilia at every opportunity, but the truth is its condemnation is merely a smokescreen for the wider American public's own obsession with "the young ones".

The public can't wait for that moment when the child star transforms - seemingly overnight - into an intoxicating, lust-crazed sex bomb (Britney, Bow Wow, Lil Romeo). Willow Smith's mentors must be ticking the days off the calendar for when they can get away with selling the fantasy of taking her virginity - if the current marketing doesn't already do that. I've heard a few critics call her Whip Your Hair video a "paedophile's delight".

The question of what happened in B2K remains, but one thing is clear: the music industry, and the boy's families, took four young boys and prostituted them for big bucks. There's a name for that: child abuse.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges

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Tired old queen at the movies

review

Midnight

he comedy is light, breezy and definitely screwball as gold digger Claudette Colbert gets stranded in Paris with nothing but an empty purse, an evening gown and a plan to snag a rich husband in Mitchell Leisen's Midnight (1939).

Based on a screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, this zany comedy also stars a delightful Don Ameche as an erstwhile cab driver in love with Claudette, John Barrymore as a jilted husband who uses her to get his wife back, played by Mary Astor and Rex O'Malley as the fussy Gay extra man with all the best lines. The epitome of the "Sophisticated Comedy", Midnight is simply too good to miss.

Steve Hayes