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Films & Television | Neglected Masterpieces | Entertainment

Boy's Life 4

Now in its fourth installment, the "Boys Life" series from Strand Releasing unites a group of gay-themed shorts into a feature-length passage. While previous editions have had six or seven short films, Boys Life 4: Four Play, which opens today in Manhattan, requires only four titles for its 87-minute running time, a sign of how much more substantial and ambitious work in the field has become.
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Love With the Proper Stranger

From Natasha, the Biography of Natalie Wood by Suzanne Finstad

The only rainbow over the horizon for Natalie was a script called Love With the Proper Stranger, for which she rejected Charade, typically forming a bond with the character, in this case an endearingly plucky Macy's salesgirl from a close Italian-American family who falls in love backward, by first getting pregnant and then being courted. The storyline … was controversial for 1963, but Natalie recognized the intelligence of the script and the dimensions of Angie, the brave, scrappy salesgirl from Little Italy struggling to break away from her overprotective family, unwilling to settle for anything less than romance that was real.

It appealed to Natalie that Angie was an ordinary girl, that she was 'real,' saying later that she drew on 'the healthier parts' of herself to play her, meeting with the screenwriter, Arnold Schulman, so that he could use aspects of her in Angie, proud of the fact that Angie was her 'least neurotic role.' The film was even shot in naturalistic black and white, part of the French New Wave, then in vogue.

Natalie and [Warren] Beatty had already broken up several times before she arrived in New York … to start [the film]. …Natalie's costars … were Edie Adams, stage actor Tom Bosley [Happy Days] and a sexy Steve McQueen, playing Angie's hipster musician boyfriend who is averse to marriage.

Natalie would remember Love with the Proper Stranger as 'the most rewarding experience I had in films, all the way around … my personal life was quite meager then, and the picture was it.'

Natalie's chemistry with McQueen, her affinity for Angie, and her camaraderie with her costars contributed to one of her best, most natural performances, leading to a third Academy Award nomination the following winter.

Edie Adams, who was a friend of Marilyn Monroe’s, noticed a similar quality in Natalie as an actress to Monroe. 'She had this way of communicating her innermost thoughts and feelings as if it were just for you, and the camera was the person watching. Everybody in the movie theater thought, My God, she’s doing that just for me.' Adams also noticed that Natalie, like Monroe, 'didn’t really realize how good she was. She would take you through every thought she had, without saying words, as Marilyn did.'

Giano says "All the performances in this fine flick are memorable. It's a treat to watch."

It's My Party

It's My Party is gentle, and very sad, the story of a man who discovers that he has a short time to live, and throws a party for family and friends, so that he can say goodbye before committing suicide. The story is not so concerned with his disease or his decision as with recording the emotional tones that surround it, and watching the film is uncannily like going through the illness, death and memorial service of a loved one.
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As a result, there are times when the film feels like a bittersweet countdown -- Nick's last morning, his last meal, his last sunset. There's no lecturing or sermonizing here; It's My Party is a straightforward narrative that gets the message across through its drama.
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Giano says "This is the one to see when you need a good weeping session"

I Think I Do

I Think I Do is a sweetly subversive romantic comedy. It tells the story of Bob and Brendan, students at George Washington University who are roommates in a group house. Bob comes out as Gay and admits that he has a crush on Brendan, but it's a painful case of unrequited love for a guy who appears to be straight. Flash forward five years, to when the gang has graduated and dispersed, but reassembles in Washington for the wedding of former housemates Matt and Carol. Bob is Carol's maid of honor; he brings his boyfriend, Sterling, who is a soap opera star. Brendan, meanwhile, has realized that he is Gay after all, and the fun begins.
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There are some wonderful lines and performances, mostly from Tuc Watkins and Patricia Mauceri (the control-freak mother of the bride). Not surprisingly, these two actors have a lot of experience from One Life to Live, which also featured Josh Weinstein, the main character in the director/writer Brian Sloan's Pool Days.
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"One Wedding No Funerals"
I Think I Do is a screwball comedy with a modern twist. Two college roommates' wedding, and the sparks start to fly as the ex-roommates try to navigate their new romance. Starring Alexis Arquette (The Wedding Singer, Wigstock), Tuc Watkins (Beggars & Choosers, The Mummy) Guillermo Diaz (Stonewall, Just One Time) and Lauren Velez (OZ, I Like It Like That). This feature film is the brain child of director Brian Sloan, who also directed Pool Days from the original Boys Life.

"Finally someone has made the gay BIG CHILL, without the politics, or maybe the gay FOUR WEDDINGS & A FUNERAL, but with only one wedding. Or maybe it's what Brian Sloan, the writer and director, says he set out to make: a gay 1930's style screwball comedy. Whatever I THINK I DO is the gay version of, it's hysterically funny, very smart. This is his feature-film directing debut and an impressive one. More, please."

Anita Gates, The NY Times

Giano says Mauceri (Mother of the Bride) is Carlotta on One Life to Live. Very recognizable here as there are similarities in the characters. Mr. Watkins has comic gifts. Lauren Velez is a personal favorite and a great lady. Check her out in I Like It Like That.

The Fortune of OZ: Fortune & Men's Eyes vs. OZ

As Herbert himself has stated about the play's plea for the acceptance of human diversity, "I do not believe that any community can learn to live with the many societies of the world unless it first learns to live with the many factions within itself." Following rejections by George Luscombe, artistic director of Toronto Workshop Productions, and Canadian director George McCowan, Herbert submitted an early version of Fortune to Douglas Campbell at the Stratford Festival. Campbell accepted the play for the Festival's 1965 young actors' workshop and assigned Bruno Gerussi to direct the play. Richard Monette, the current Stratford artistic director, was cast as the androgynous "Mona" and Ken Pogue as the Guard. But because of the play's homosexual subject matter, the Stratford Board of Directors forbade the single planned public performance of Fortune so that the play was only performed in private for the Stratford actors. Herbert also sent a copy of the play to Nathan Cohen who felt that no theatre in Canada would stage a public performance.
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Shot in The Heart

In the week prior to Gary's (Elias Koteas) execution, the endlessly contentious Gilmores wage one last, bitter battle. Gary's wishes notwithstanding, his mother, Bessie (Amy Madigan), wants to keep her son alive, using a law allowing family members to petition the court independently. Too ill to travel, she sends sons Frank (Lee Tergeson) and Mikal (Giovanni Ribisi) to sign off on the paperwork.
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The Sum of Us

The Sum of Us is delightful, by turns droll and serious. Yet even during its most dramatic moments, it retains a lighthearted tone that keeps things from becoming too grim. There's always a joke right around the corner, and none of the humor seems ill-suited to the situation. Writer David Stevens has a near-perfect sense of his characters, and they're the sort of people it's a pleasure to get to know.
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Nurse Betty

Betty is a part-time housewife/part-time waitress living in a small, dead-end Kansas town. She's sweet, oblivious, and innocent, and allows herself to be taken advantage of by everyone around her, especially her philandering husband, Del (Aaron Eckhart). Because her own life is so empty, Betty is a fervent fan of the soap opera A Reason To Love, where her favorite character is Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear). However, aside from getting her daily soap fix, making dinner for her husband, and serving coffee to regulars like the local sheriff (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and the town's only reporter (Crispin Glover), Betty doesn't have much to do.
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Your Friends and Neighbors

LaBute's "Your Friends and Neighbors" is to "In the Company of Men" as Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" was to "Reservoir Dogs." In both cases, the second film reveals the full scope of the talent, and the director, given greater resources, paints what he earlier sketched. In LaBute's world, the characters are deeply wounded and resentful, they are locked onto their own egos, they are like infants for which everything is either me! or mine! Sometimes this can be very funny--for the audience, not for them.
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Punks

Breaking ground doesn't always have to be difficult. In fact, it can be a whole lot of fun! Just watch Patrik-Ian Folk's Punks. It's filled with an ensemble of memorable characters, catty exchanges, outrageous drag numbers, sexy fireworks and even Diana Ross's Mahogany (not to mention a cameo by Kevin Aviance).

A former MTV Films executive and model, Polk was working for Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds and Tracey Edmonds' entertainment company when he decided to write a script that featured gay black men in ways they were rarely depicted in film: dignified, sophisticated, well-to-do and romantic. When he presented the idea to his employers for an opinion, and perhaps financing for a short film version, they decided to executive produce the full feature.
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The Talented Mr. Ripley

As the title character in the luxurious, homoerotic new movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon is obsessed with trying on a rich friend's clothing, looking for the right well-tailored suit to reflect his evolving view of himself. Ever since the Boston buddy picture Good Will Hunting won him a screen writing Oscar and established him as a movie star two years ago, the actor has been redefining his own identity too.
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I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody: The line may belong to Matt Damon in his creepy new film The Talented Mr. Ripley, but it's a desire so universal it might as well be the other American Dream—the one where we try to reinvent ourselves as someone better. It's the reason why plastic surgery is a $10 billion-a-year business. It's the reason nobodies like Demetria Guynes and Thomas Mapother IV rechristen themselves with the marquee-ready names Demi Moore and Tom Cruise. It's both the green light shining from the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby and it's what made Sammy run.
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Inside The Dreamboat Factory

With the Great Dreamboat Deception, Hollywood appeased one of America’s waves of conservatism by constructing an American mythology that modeled a tamed young adult male, a randier version of the pre-war Andy Hardy good boy, adding some military assertiveness to pose a deliberate alternative to rebellious bad boys like Marlon Brando and James Dean. Embodying the buttoned-down prejudices and repressions of the McCarthy era (upheld by closeted gay figures like Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover, now seen as traitors to their sexuality), the charade played out a dream of middle-class “normality,” depicting only hetero-normal sex among white people, and even that almost entirely offscreen.
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Neglected Masterpieces

Rebuilding Brian Wilson's 'Smile'

But "Smile" turned into a nightmare for Mr. Wilson, who was spiraling toward a nervous breakdown and struggling with drugs and with personal demons that would envelop him for decades. The other members of the Beach Boys had grown dubious about the commercial prospects of the increasingly complex music and lyrics. There was rancor from Mr. Wilson's father, Murry, a frustrated musician who had beaten him during his childhood, and there were legal battles with the Beach Boys' label, Capitol Records. Mr. Wilson had grown reclusive and increasingly bizarre: he ordered eight truckloads of beach sand dumped around his piano at home so he could wiggle his toes in it for inspiration.
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Floy Joy - The Supremes

For this new Supremes album, producer Smokey Robinson has not only adapted himself to the group's lighter than air style but perfected it, whipping up a batch of songs that you can tumble into like a cloud of cotton candy: pastel fluff, pure sugar, yet rarely sticky … there is little substance here but who expects cotton candy to be anything but sweet?
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Jackie DeShannon

The Jerry Wexler-Tom Dowd-Arif Mardin production team keeps getting better and better. Remember when they applied their magic touch to Dusty Springfield and came up with the stunning Dusty In Memphis? Now the recipient is the long underrated Jackie DeShannon and the result one of the most soul-satisfying slickies of the year. Again the sound is Memphis, a pop-country-soul blend that comes about as close as you can get to defining the mainstream in contemporary music. The wonder of it is that while Wexler-Dowd-Mardin keep expanding the scope of their musical base, adding instruments and refining textures, they never lose touch with the original sound that is their trademark: it simply becomes more listenable at more levels.
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Entertainment

Madeline Kahn 1942 - 1999

The voice of Madeline Khan, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 57 on Dec. 3, was a singular sensation. It could soar musically (check out the 1978 cast recording from Broadway's On the 20th Century) and, in her non-singing roles, turn modern anxieties into arias that wavered, warbled, and quivered their way toward utter panic. She could deliver a Rorschach on a character with a single word; by the end of the sentence, you had the complete biography.
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