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Screengrab Review: "Outrage"

Nick Schager — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

There’s a second-hand quality to Outrage that stems, in large part, from director Kirby Dick’s decision to not place himself front and center as he did in his prior non-fiction exposé, This Film Is Not Yet Rated. In examining – and outing – closeted gay politicians who support anti-same-sex legislation, Dick relies primarily on the investigative work of others, whether it be Blogactive’s Michael Rogers, who was reportedly instrumental in bringing to light the story of Senator Larry Craig’s failed public bathroom stall pick-up, or satellite radio talk-show host Michelangelo Signorelli, who years prior publicized deceased Malcolm Forbes’ carefully concealed homosexuality. By letting others do the heavy lifting, the filmmaker comes off as more than a little reticent, a quality in tune with the overall tone of his latest – which repeatedly justifies its modus operandi of outing closeted pols by cogently arguing that hypocrisy can’t be tolerated in public officials – and one that prevents it from generating the type of horrified, righteous indignation implied by its title.

Outrage focuses on a handful of high-profile cases to reinforce its central argument that there’s a vast conspiracy afoot to legally persecute the country’s millions of gay men and women. Any such grand scheme is never dragged into the light of day by Dick, however, as his documentary makes a strong case not for a collusive plot orchestrated by shadowy forces, but for a more predictable pattern of behavior followed by individuals interested in attaining positions of power at any cost. Whether it be Jim McGreevey, who speaks openly about his outing, or Florida governor/2012 presidential hopeful/long-time bachelor Charlie Crist, who for years has been dogged by rumors about his sexuality, the explanation remains largely similar: desperate to not alienate any portion of the voting population, aspiring Capital Hill bigwigs hide their sexual identity behind hetero facades, and then, once elected, embrace an anti-gay platform as a means of reinforcing their own ruse (and, also, censuring the very thing they dislike about themselves). The hypocrisy is, unsurprisingly, quite galling, and though Dick’s statistics could use a bit more clarification (his anti-gay voting record percentages remain vaguely defined), the thrust of his argument is forceful.

Which is why, alas, Outrage is so frustrating. Rather than pursuing someone like Crist himself, Dick mainly relies on talking heads and third-party news footage and interviews to make his case, which drains the film of immediacy and leaves one craving more concrete confirmation of the accusations being leveled. Just as problematic are the doc’s diversions, most notably one in which Fox News anchor Shepard Smith is outed by a speaker who claims that the newsman once hit on him, an aside that’s meant to reinforce the idea that many in and around politics are concealing their sexual preferences in order to climb the professional ladder, but mostly seems like tabloid gossiping only speciously related to the primary point about political two-facedness. Even more than such inconsequential diversions, however, Outrage suffers from a lack of surprise or complexity, its revelations already well-known – unless some have yet to hear that former New York City mayor Ed Koch liked men – and its contentions so straightforward and clearly expressed that, after twenty minutes, the film has conclusively made its case, and thus proceeds to merely spin its wheels.

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Watch it for Free: This Film is Not Yet Rated

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Ever wondered who those people in the MPAA are, and what kind of criteria they're using to distinguish between a PG-13 and an R? Well guess what -- nobody knows. That's because the MPAA is, quite literally, a secret organization, whose members are anonymous and whose voting methods are entirely arbitrary. But if you want to know more, Kirby Dick has uncovered as much as humanly possible in his anti-censorship documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.

Dick's film combines director interviews, MPAA-censored clips and private investigator footage, all with the goal of showing how the MPAA is stifling the filmmaking industry. The film would have been stronger if Dick had scored more face time with big-name directors; their first-hand stories of ratings warfare are just unbelievable. (What the MPAA deemed obscene in Boys Don't Cry -- not the violence, but the close-up of Chloe Sevigny's face during an orgasm -- is extremely telling.) Equally effective is the montage that juxtaposes identically shot sex scenes, one gay and one straight, while contrasting the films' ratings. Although the private eye scenes are less compelling, the PI's eventual discoveries about MPAA members' identities are sobering; in short, everything the MPAA has said about its members is a lie, and their appeals board seems jury-rigged against edgy and independent filmmakers.

Stream or download the whole film here.