It was a long wet Sunday. What better a way to spend it than indoors. I went to the Film Forum to see The Boys in the Band. I really enjoyed it, stereotypes and all. I won't bore you with a long review. But I enjoyed it for two reasons. First, I loved seeing a gay movie about gay life in the late 1960s filmed in that period, as opposed to retrospect. The camera catches zeitgeist and landscape in a way recreations just can't. Second, I have only seen it once before: in 1979 on the Channel 5 Movie Club, late on a Saturday night. I don't recall being nervous about watching it while Mom and Dad were downstairs. I had one of those childhoods where I was left with 1.5 friends by the time i left high school. I spent a lot of time teaching myself foreign languages, and watching movies and soap operas on TV.
It wasn't until I went to college that I really became a movie fanatic. I took a film class and was hooked instantly. Frankly, it changed my life. I have had a lot of trouble watching movies on TV ever since. I prefer the big screen, and I prefer to be what Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard) called, "Those wonderful people out there in the dark."
So this time, while I watched The Boys in the Band, I was one of them. Laughing along with a lot of it, and pondering away a lot also, wondering what my life might have been like had I been born in 1943 instead of 1963. I wonder if I would have been a deep closet case or a radical fairy. I wonder also, with my deep libidinal streak, if I would still be alive now. I wonder if it might be worth it -- to be dead now if I had had the chance to have lived through that era as an adult. But I wonder that for just an instant. Despite 12 years of Reagan and Bush, I am still quite happy to be alive and 35, despite the flip-floppery of President Clinton. (Gore Vidal for President, please!)
So in 1999 I was once again one of those people out there in the dark, whereas twenty years earlier, I was simply in the dark. Just 30 miles away from Greenwich Village but still light years away from reality. They don't even mention the word HOMOSEXUAL in sex ed; you're left to wonder about it on your own. You get to learn a lot of stuff on the streets, and I am want to thank the Academy for making sure the streets were kind to me, overall. Things could have been a lot worse.
After the movie I went to Tony's for the Oscars, as opposed to Oscar's for the TONY's. Tony made his famous five-way Cincinnati Chili and we watched the most puerile Oscar show yet, full of fifth-grade penis jokes and innuendo of the most basic kind. I have not watched an Oscar show all the way through for many years now, and I cannot say it's gotten any better. In fact, it was the worst one yet. Just awful. At least Bill Condon won the best adaptation award for Gods and Monsters. I don't feel like commenting too much award-by-award, but I have to say that as enjoyable as Shakespeare in Love was, it was not worthy of all those awards. Judi Dench is a great actress but even her eight minutes of screen time, great as they were, were no better than Lynn Redgrave's performance. It's a bloody buggery outrage.
Speaking of outrages: Elia Kazan. It was a sad and sorry thing to see this doddering but unrepentant fink up there on stage. I wasn't sure if he was turning to his wife or nurse when he asked, "Is there anything else I should say?" I think that's what he said four-plus decades ago to whomever encouraged him to rat out his friends. It's a horror that he, a communist party member once himself, turned in his friends and deprived those of us out here in the dark from seeing other potential great works of the silver screen. It would have been nice if he had, on reflection, if he had said something along the lines of, "It was a different time and I would do it differently if I could." But earlier in the week, I read an article in which his wife said, "We not going to ___________ apologize."
It's pretty clear that the blank is basically the Kazans giving everyone the finger, and seeing Scorcese and De Niro propping him up was just shameful, especially when you recall that De Niro was in the movie -- Guilty By Suspicion -- which was about the topic of the Hollywood blacklistings.
But, I still love the movies. The lights go down, the phi phenomenon begins, and for $9.50 at 24-frames-per-second, you get to share in a dream, or a nightmare. It all depends on how much you can suspend your disbelief. In a world with so much bad news and necessary vigilance, it's nice to disengage a bit now and then, and be one of those people out there in the dark, watching. All you have to do is sit back, and watch.
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