Bollywood’s More Gay-Friendly Than Ever — So Where Are All the Queer Women?
I think you all know by now how big Bollywood is. Not only is the movie industry huge in India, but Bollywood movies are also screened, bought, and viewed in Indian and non-Indian communities all over the world. Even Netflix is exponentially increasing its Bollywood selection to appeal to Western audiences. (For those in the know, I realize that India’s movie industry is diverse and varied and stuffed full of languages and cultures. For the purposes of this article, when I say Bollywood, I mean any movie produced and funded in India, regardless of language. Most of the movies I reference are in Hindi, but some are not. If there are any that I missed, please comment below!)
There are obviously good and bad results of Bollywood fever, like the growing appropriation of South Asian culture in the West and the increasingly sexualized objectification of South Asian women. But I’m not here to talk to you about that. Not today, anyway.
Today I’m here to talk about queer women in Bollywood. Or rather, more precisely, the lack of queer women in Bollywood. (I am talking about queer ciswomen’s representation. Trans* representation in Bollywood is far more popular, but also so, so, so problematic. I will tackle this in a future post. Promise.)
Shabana Azmi as Radha and Nandita Das as Sita in Fire
via Hamilton Mehta
There was Fire, the slow-paced family drama that attracted explosive violence in India. There was Chutney Popcorn, I Can’t Think Straight and The World Unseen. These are all British, American and Canadian films, directed by female directors based in the West and targeted toward primarily English-speaking audiences. The only thing Bollywood about these films is that they feature actresses of South Asian descent. Most of these films were not even screened in India the way that Bollywood films are screened (that is to say, in mainstream theaters to massive audiences in both rural and urban locales).
A few weeks ago, Onir wrote on DNA India about the need for more queer cinema in Bollywood. All the examples he uses, however, are male. Maybe it’s the fact that the Bollywood film industry is overwhelmingly male dominated. Or maybe it’s that the misogynist and patriarchal elements of Indian culture. Or maybe those two reasons are really just the same thing. Whatever the case, the focus in queer Bollywood has been on gay men.
In 2005, Onir released My Brother… Nikhil, set in the AIDS era about a gay man in India who tests positive for HIV, and the resulting heartache of his life.
Sanjay Suri as Nikhil and Purab Kohli as Nigel in My Brother…Nikhil
via Pozor
Page 3, a mainstream Bollywood film released in the same year, features one of the first explicitly gay male characters in Indian cinema. And when I say “features,” I mean the female protagonist finds out her boyfriend is gay and sleeping with her best friend.
The 2007 film Life in a Metro also has a female character finding out that her love interest is gay.
In 2008, the Bollywood box office hit Dostana featured a gay-deception storyline where two straight men pretend to be a couple in order to sublet an apartment with a woman. Both men eventually fall in love with said woman. I Am and Bombay Talkies both tell stories of gay male violence.
Abhishek Bachchan as Sameer, John Abraham as Kunal, and Priyanka Chopra as Neha in Dostana
via GlamSham.com
That’s six films in seven years dealing with gay men. Mostly the sad, depressing stuff of Well of Loneliness, but also raising important questions about the struggle of gay men. Where are the queer women, you ask?
The 1983 film Mandi hinted at a close relationship between the female protagonist, the madam of a brothel, and one of her prostitutes. Razia Sultan, an Urdu film released in the same year, also hinted at a lesbian coupling.
Shabana Azmi as Rukmini and Smita Patil as Zeenat in Mandi
via India Times
After a long stint of silence on the topic of queer women, Bollywood tried to take on lesbianism in the sensational film Girlfriend, released in 2004. Though controversial, the film passed the Indian Censor Board — perhaps due to its portrayal of lesbianism as male fantasy instead of a legitimate sexuality divorced from the male gaze. The phrase “male gaze” is not enough to accurately describe the thinly veiled lesbian male fantasy of the film. Tanya and Sapna are roommates and old friends from college. They are inseparable until Tanya leaves town for work. The male hero Rahul pursues Sapna and the two fall in love. Tanya returns, and jealous lesbian rage ensues as she tries to get Sapna back from Rahul’s hetero clutches. Not only does the film cast childhood sexual abuse as a cause for lesbianism, but it also features a delightfully psychotic killer “butch” who is obsessed with her object of affection. Add in the made-for-men raunch and you get a flop of a film that garnered criticism for its portrayal of lesbians.
Isha Koppikar as Tanya and Amrita Arora as Sapna in Girlfriend
via Sulekha
Another iffy attempt at portraying lesbianism head on, the 2006 release Men Not Allowed features protagonists Tanya and Urmila, both of whom are fed up with men. Tanya is an advertising exec from a wealthy family. Tanya’s lesbianism is attributed to her disillusionment with the womanizing men around her (her father and boyfriend). Urmila is a model who is assigned to Tanya’s ad agency. Her lesbianism is attributed to repeated childhood sexual trauma perpetrated by an uncle (who she lived with after her drug-dealer father and addict mother die), and later by men at the orphanage that takes her in. The two become lovers and raunchy skin scenes ensue for the delight of the male audience.
Payal Rohatgi as Tanya and Tina Mazumdar as Urmila in Men Not Allowed
via Sulekha
The 2011 thriller Shaitan featured an on-screen lesbian kiss between two of its leading ladies, one of whom is again named Tanya (don’t ask, because I don’t know). The murder film Monica, released in the same year, has homosexual overtones surrounding the female protagonist and subject.
Kalki Koechlin as Amy and Kirti Kulhari as Tanya in Shaitan
via India Times
After the flop of Girlfriend and Men Not Allowed, the next film to explicitly tackle lesbian relationships came in 2012. 3 Kanya, a.k.a. Teen Kanya, is a Bengali psychological thriller that shows a lesbian flirtation (sort of) between two of its three female protagonists. It has the potential for a solid film, and none of the characters is named Tanya. Unfortunately, the plot line spins out of control, and the lesbian angle comes off as a sloppy attempt at sensationalism, or maybe just at making the story make sense, which it doesn’t. One of the women in the lesbian coupling has some sort of dissociative disorder (portrayed in a cliched, non-nuanced way), and ends up killing a bunch of people. The other half of the couple, an officer in the Indian Police Service, is super glam to a point of unbelievability.
Rituparna Sengupta as Aparna and Unnati Davara as Damini in 3 Kanya
via New Bengala Movie Online
Bollywood is known for being a little campy and kitschy, though often non-ironically. These are all reasons why we love the genre. Not to mention the songs, the exotic costumes, and the dance sequences that are now taught to white people in absurdly expensive classes at local yoga studios everywhere. But when it comes to queerness, and queer women in particular, the male-dominated industry sweeps aside the real stories of queer women in favor of sensational lesbian male fantasies and 1950s-lesbian-pulp-fiction-esque tropes of psychotic murderers and sexually traumatized queer roots.
One of the critiques leveled at calls for better portrayals of queer people in Indian film is the idea that queerness is a Western invention. While queerness has a recorded and folk history in South Asia, history and culture taught in schools is washed clean of all queer content thanks to the British colonialist values that founded and continue to guide most of India’s education system. For more information, check out Giti Thandi’s Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India.
We can do better than this. I love Bollywood (or at least, I used to love it) too much to accept that this is as good as it gets. After India’s landmark 2009 decision to decriminalize homosexuality under its Section 377 Penal Code, the Indian Censor Board has less legal backing to shoot down queer stories. Queer rights visibility is on the rise in South Asia. The time is ripe for some fresh, realistic portrayals of queerness in Bollywood. And while we have plenty of men in the business to give some better perspective and humanization to gay men, getting more women into Bollywood (especially into non-acting roles) is an essential step in better lesbian representation.
Check Out Bitch Flick’s Open Call for LGBTQI Submissions!
Jamie’s Team Pick:
If you Google “lesbian films,” the first link Google will hand you is this list of the Greatest Lesbian Movies. #1 on the list is this rom com:
Look at all this romance..
What films would top your list? Would “Imagine Me & You” make it at all? Bitch Flicks has put out an open call for LGBTQI submissions welcoming all proposals examining LGBTQI themes in film and television should you be motivated to share your opinions on queer representation in film, rank your favorite queer television characters or create your own list of lesbian films.
In case you aren’t familiar, Bitch Flicks is:
…a website devoted to reviewing films through a feminist lens. We’re interested in conversation about movies—good and bad—and the roles that women play in them. We strongly believe that movies both shape and reflect social values, and that the post-feminist leanings of many women today are misguided.
Troian Bellisario Plays a Teenaged Lesbian in “Unspoken,” Your Spencer Fantasies Come True
Did you know that before she became Spencer Hastings, Troian Bellisario was just another actress in Los Angeles taking roles in USC student films, like this 14-minute short about two teenage girlfriends who um, go to school and smoke weed in the junkyard? I didn’t either! Then I stumbled upon Girl’s View, a collection of (mediocre) lesbian short films and was oh-so-surprised to see Spencer’s face on the cover!
Bellisario, who plays 16-year-old Spencer Hastings in Pretty Little Liars, is 28 in real life and comes from a Hollywood family and grew up in Los Angeles. Thus she began acting as a kid, doing stuff like an episode of Quantum Leap written by her Dad. As a very small child, she was besties with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson and now calls Shane Coffey, who plays Holden on Pretty Little Liars, her best friend. She was an undergraduate at University of Southern California when she returned to the “screen” in 2006 as “Jani” in Unspoken, directed by Fie-Fie Wang. According to imdb, the movie’s topic is as follows: “two high-school, lesbian girlfriends deal with the intrusion of two teenage boys, jealousy, betrayal and drugs.”
However, the synopsis doesn’t mention that Gabby, Jani’s girlfriend, has a shit-ton of glitter on her face and should dial it down a notch. Fun fact: The woman who plays Spencer’s Mom in the movie, Deborah Pratt, is actually Troian’s Mom in real life!
I find it excruciatingly painful to watch most lesbian films, let alone a lesbian-themed short film that I’ve never heard of, because most lesbian films are terrible. Really, they are. (These don’t suck though, and neither do these.) But I was so intrigued by the “Spencer Hastings with a girlfriend” situation that I made it through the entire thing without stabbing my eyes out! I’m not saying it’s good, or anything, but you know — well. See for yourself:
“Mädchen in Uniform”: Girl-on-Girl Culture Circa 1931
Once upon a time in Hollywood and Berlin, there was a New Woman running around.
Sometimes she looked like a flapper, like Lousie Brooks, and sometimes she looked like sex bomb Marlene Dietrich.
Whatever she looked like, she was inspired by movies and gender nonconformity, just like you. And like the two actors pictured above, a lot of New Women would have gone for you in a big way.
Yes, they were the sewing circle queers of classic cinema who acted in movies with titles like Pandora’s Box with little to no irony. Today, we celebrate them; the ghosts of gay girls past whose imaginations and feelings were once rendered cinematically.
To kick off this sweet history lesson of queer proportions, I’m going to be talking about Mädchen in Uniform (1931). It’s not the first girl-on-girl kiss of cinema (Marlene Dietrich snagged that one in Morocco in 1930) and it’s not the first time the idea of a real life lesbian had been portrayed (see aforementioned Pandora’s Box, 1929) But it WAS the first time something this lesbian graced the silver screen. Seriously you guys this movie is called Girls In Uniform and it’s not a porno.
Spolier alert: From here on out i’m going to be breaking down this early German film like it was an episode of Pretty Little Liars. I’m not trying to ruin things for you, but like the sun to a creamsicle I might spoil a bit of the fun. Tbh, it’s nearly impossible to get a good print of the film anyway because when the Nazis came to power, they banned the film and attempted to burn all existing copies… so this recap might be the closest you can get. Has anyone seen it?
Anyway, it stars (regretfully straight, but oh so cute in a tie) Heitha Thiela as Manuela, and the unknown sexual preferences of many other school girls.
Though probs because they pass love notes we can assume some of them are totes super gay.
Unfortunately for The Rules and luckily for Manuela, one of the Professors, Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorthea Wieck), is a total babe.
While Manuela is surprisingly upfront about her feelings, Fräulein von Bernburg is rocking out to Katty Perry’s “Hot and Cold.” One minute she’s gifting Manuela her blouse, the next she’s saying things like “the other girls will be jealous”.
No duh, von Bernburg, no duh.
While there is sexual tension throughout the film and shadows of doubt as to whether Manuela’s feelings are requited, we learn pretty early on that von Bernburg doesn’t quite kiss the other girls goodnight like this:
Though she does kiss the other girls goodnight, too.
The truth about Manuela’s big lesbian crush gets out after she drunkenly proclaims her feelings from a balcony dressed as a man (as we tend to do). Granted, she was only in drag because of the school play, but to be fair, the school play was only there as a device to get her into drag.
I can’t find a picture, of the outfit she wore, but I remember it looking a lot like this: 
It was cute. And you should probably check out this blog anyway because I think you could like it. Oh and look, I just found a picture for you. I was close.
Anyway, they quickly send her to the infirmary because she is suffering from a hangover and “emotionalism”. Emotionalism is what happens when you realize you’re a lesbian. It’s pretty sinful and definitely against Rules so the all-powerful headmistress quarantines her from the world.
Things don’t exactly end happily for Manuela, but depending on which version you watch (there are two), at least they don’t end tragically. Just as she’s about to end it all by throwing herself from the top of the stairs, all of her Prussian girl friends including her hot mentor damn The Rules and come to her rescue and tell her it get’s better / they don’t five a f*ck. More or less.
Leontine Sagan directed Mädchen in Uniform and Christa Winsloe wrote the book it was based on. The book itself was based off of Christa’s real life lesbian feelings for Dorothy Thompson. Yes, all three women loved the ladies.
You didn’t think old school cinema was this adorbs, but it is.
The sad thing is, a lot of the literature about this film doesn’t like to delve into how lesbian it is. They speak of it in the background, saying that The Real meaning “expresses the devastating effects of Prussianism upon a sensitive young girl” (Siegfried Kracauer, I’m looking at you). And while I’m sure there’s bound to be a good dose of Higher Meaning in there somewhere because these women seem pretty intelligent to me, that doesn’t negate the fact that they don’t also have hours of footage of girls in nightgowns holding hands and talking about their hearts and feelings. You know what I mean? Just embrace it.
The movie went on to win at the Venice Film Festival and was a big hit in Berlin’s gay scene. It also inspired a “stockings and kissing” cult in Romania. So, that happened.
For more enlightenment:
ALSO apparently there’s a really hot 1950s German remake I haven’t seen but would love to project.
Where’s my Autostraddle film club at?
The Vagina Lady From ‘The Real L Word’ Wants You
Jess’s Team Pick
Remember this amazing individual? The one who refereed the Creamed Corn Wrestling Match of 2010 on Showtime’s The Real L Word dressed in costume as a lifesize vagina, totally baffling Rosie O’Donnell? Well! Turns out she’s got some other items on her resume and is actually a Cuban-American filmmaker named Anna Margarita Albelo (aka Anna LaChocha) looking to raise funds to produce her first feature fiction project, Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf, set to shoot later this year.
Inspired by her lifelong passion for the classic, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Albelo’s semi-autobiographical film centers on the day after a filmmaker’s (Albelo, playing herself) 40th birthday, realizing she’s sacrificed her love life for her film career, decides to embark on an all-female adaptation of the classic.
What’s in it for you:
The film was written by Michael Urban, screenwriter of the modern classic Saved! and stars a slew of celesbians you likely know and love, including: Tammy Lynn Michaels, Whitney Mixter, Bridget McManus, and Guinevere Turner.
Albelo is hoping to raise $25,000 by Saturday, July 23 (as of today she’s at $8,000). SO! If you’d like to see the film making the rounds at the LGBT film festivals this time next year, be a giver and donate a few bucks to make the vagina lady’s dream come true.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9GuCnzpMnE’]
LGBT Film Festival Season 2011: A Guide to Movies You’ll Want to See
It’s that time of year — when gay & lesbian filmmakers begin touring the big, bad world in hopes of finding an audience for the labor of love they poured their creative energy into over the last 12 months. Many of these films are self-financed or funded through generous donations by friends, family and fans without whom these stories would never make it off the written page.
Much like Sundance and the Tribeca Film Festival, LGBT film festivals such as San Francisco’s Frameline, LA’s Outfest and New York City’s Newfest include features, shorts, panels & special events in cities all over US. Even if you can’t make it to your city’s festival this summer/fall, be sure to save these films to your Netflix queue as they will surely be released on DVD later in the year.
Upcoming 2011 LGBT Film Festivals:
Los Angeles Outfest: July 7-17
Philadelpha Q Fest: July 7-18
New York City Newfest: July 21-28
Vancouver: August 11-21
North Carolina: August 11-14
Austin: September 6-12
Portland: September 30-October 8
Tampa: October 6-16
Seattle: October 14-23
Films to look out for:
We Have to Stop Now: The Movie
Longtime Auto-friends Jill Bennett and Cathy DeBuono are back as married, lesbian therapists in the second season of We Have to Stop Now, this time reborn as a full length feature film. Interwoven with hilarious vignettes from client sessions, the story follows the couple as they go on a Sweet cruise to promote their book, How to Succeed in Marriage Without Even Trying, and are forced to re-evaluate the complications within their own relationship with help from their own marriage therapist, played by Suzanne Westenhoefer. Meredith Baxter, John W. McLaughlin and genius series writer Ann Noble co-star.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWxt4z5Ko4s’]
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
Originally premiering at Sundance to great word of mouth, this sci-fi comedy lovingly parodies the black-and-white B-movies from back in the day, complete with cheesy special effects, (intentional) stiff acting and government paranoia. It tells the story of codependent Barr (Cynthia Kaplan), promiscuous Zylar (comedian Jackie Monahan), and sweet Zoinx (Susan Ziegler), three shiny-headed space aliens on a mission of heartbreak. The story follows the adventures of lesbian space aliens on the planet Earth, and the story of the romance between Jane, a shy greeting card store employee, and Zoinx, the woman Jane does not realize is from outer-space.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecILvyLG4hc’]
Hit So Hard
Though Courtney Love was Hole’s chaotic and thereby recognizable front woman, Patty Schemel was its true innovator: a female rock drummer, openly gay woman, and recovering addict once on the brink of homelessness. P. David Ebersole’s documentary debut weaves through the most difficult and celebrated moments of Schemel’s life at the height of the grunge era. Hit So Hard features members of Hole, Veruca Salt, The Go-Go’s, Faith No More, and The Bangles and includes never-before-seen home video capturing intimate family life with Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and an infant Francis Bean.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4ANYA3nvKE’]
Jamie and Jessie Are Not Together
Pitched as Show Me Love meets 500 Days of Summer (read: dyke drama+random musical numbers), the story follows Jamie (Jacqui Jackson) moving from Chicago to New York to become a Broadway actress. Her best friend Jessica (Jessica London-Shields) is bummed because she’s secretly in love with Jamie and begins trying to make Jamie jealous by dating other girls as moving day gets closer. Examining the co-dependent, loyal friendship between these two women, writer/director Wendy Jo Carlton (Hannah Free) was inspired to make the lesbian version of indie faves like Garden State and Lost in Translation based on the universal experience of falling in love with your best friend.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSbtthe98A4′]
Wish Me Away
Bet ya never imagined Cinco de Gayo would churn out a feature length film, eh? This intensely personal documentary chronicles the heart-wrenching decision country star Chely Wright makes to come out of the closet despite the potentially crushing response from the industry and her fans. The doc is receiving rave reviews and won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival this month.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrC-nw1Oc3M’]
Circumstance
This dramatic love story between two liberated 16-year-old girls (Nikohl Boosheri & Sarah Kazemy) in Tehran is potentially incendiary stuff in a country where their relationship could mean the death penalty. The film goes deep into Persian culture, dealing with very real youth and family issues in Iran. If unable to catch it at your city’s film fest, Circumstance will be released nationwide in the US on August 19th.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD7wieh-m-0′]
Leave it on the Floor
Set in the ballroom world originally memorialized by the documentary Paris Is Burning, this is an original big, gay musical set in the scene in Los Angeles 2011. Essentially Glee meets RENT meets Dreamgirls, Leave it on the Floor is pulsing with energy, joy, and some of the catchiest and queerest dance songs ever.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkuuHX1iebE’]
Love Is All You Need?
This film by Auto-friends Rachel Diana and K. Rocco Shields of Wingspan Pictures challenges our current conceptions of the phrases “gay” and “straight” by switching, not only their meanings, but also the culturally instigated conditions that are commonly paired with the phrases; like suicide in response to bullying. Love Is All You Need? tells the story of Ashley, a young teen who is raised in the ‘picture perfect all-American family’ – with two moms, two grandpas, two uncles, and a little brother. But Ashley has a problem – she has a crush on a boy at school, which is against everything this world has ever taught her. This undeniable attraction to the opposite sex causes her to be the constant target of verbal and physical abuse until she is driven to a tragic end.
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2OmY_0Ojsc’]
The Perfect Family
This dramedy co-written by Paula Goldberg (Out at the Wedding) revolves around a devoutly Catholic wife and mother (played by Kathleen Turner) who has been nominated for “Catholic Woman of the Year.” Emily Deschanel plays her daughter, a successful lawyer who is five months pregnant and about to marry her girlfriend played by Angelique Cabral. As Deschanel’s character struggles to come out to her mom, the son (Jason Ritter) has just left his wife for an older woman while her husband is a recovering alcoholic. Through all this, Turner goes about trying to prove she has the “perfect” family for the board’s final approval.
I Don’t Like Movies
I used to really like movies. I wanted to make movies. I went to a lot of movies, talked about movies, thought about movies, spent money going to movies, felt affected and defined by movies, particularly movies about girls, which there were always plenty of, including the ’90s movies that probably made you gay, these girl team movies and about twenty queer girl films. I worked annually at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in exchange for free admission, saw everything that rolled through the art house theater and loved New York City because every independent film I wanted to see came to New York.
But for the last six years or so I’ve not been to many movies. I’ve blamed myself for this lapse in dedication. I’ve been too busy starting my own business or going insane, I haven’t been able to carve out two hours to sit and watch a thing — but lately, I’ve been taking steps to insert more “leisure time” into my life.
“I need to go see more movies,” is a thing I say to myself. “I never go to the movies. I miss movies.”
Sometimes I say it out loud to a romantic companion: “We should go to a movie” or “we should see a movie.”
I’ll think, “I haven’t seen a movie in so long, I’m sure there are hundreds of movies to catch up on!”
Then we peruse the movie listings of our local cinema and/or the options available for rental or viewing on any number of online movie-playing situations.
And I cannot find.
One.
Thing.
I Want.
To See.
I’ve been hearing this a lot lately, and duly noted that, like me, my friends blame their decreased attention span for their reduced moviegoing habits.
The media is constantly telling us that the media is ruining our attention span, it’s almost an inevitable self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. But we’ll sit through television-on-DVD marathons, watch documentaries all afternoon, play video games for hours and watch Fight Club 26 times. Many of you might even read this 3,000-word article all the way through. Listen: if Memento, Almost Famous, Traffic, High Fidelity and Bring it On (all 2000 theatrical releases) came out tomorrow, you bet I’d make time.
I endeavor to suggest that it’s not us, it’s them — we’ve skipped the movies for five years because recent theatrical releases just haven’t been worth making time for. I mean, look no further than Julie & Brandy, our in-house movie-reviewing team, which so far has hated every movie they’ve seen besides The Runaways.
What WILL we make time for? Last year, I made (on-demand) time for The Runaways, Howl, For Colored Girls, Black Swan, The Kids Are All Right, and The Social Network. Many people I’ve talked to found the latter two didn’t live up to the hype, why so much hype about those two movies? They were good, but not fantastic.
True enough, but it had been such a long time since I’d seen a new movie about people. In a year clogged by massive computer-enhanced IMAX 3-D movies and giant historical epics, those two movies were primarily about how people got along with other people, in love or at work — and that’s very rare these days.
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Why Don’t I Like Movies Anymore?
Based on a completely unscientific poll of my own thoughts, feelings and preferences, I’ve surveyed the evidence, done the research, and have the following reasons why:
1. No movies about women.
2. Movie studios/mainstream audiences favor lots of big-budget effects-laden megablowout thrillers over movies about people.
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When Did I Stop Liking Movies?
But you’re an adult now! You must be thinking. You’re not moviegoing because you’re too busy/poor! But if I was too busy/poor, I’d still WANT to see movies, I just wouldn’t actually do it because of aforementioned business and poverty.
Yes, the younger you are, the stupider and more bored you are, and therefore the more willing you are to give up two hours of your life to the possibility of Batman Forever. As you age, you refine your taste and plan moviegoing accordingly.
I’m sure I watched ten thousand movies a year in my youth and therefore this graph, which I’ve constructed in order to pin down when precisely movies started to suck, begins in 1999, the year I turned 18.
Something changed in 2005, in which I saw only two films in the theater — Rent and Me and You And Everyone We Know. In 2006, I saw Dreamgirls, Borat, Short Bus, and, because my lovely friend Haviland made me; The Break-up. 2007 — just Juno. In 2008 I had a ticket for the midnight showing of The Sex & the City movie, cried my eyes out at Milk, and took my then-girlfriend Alex on a date to Rachel Getting Married. I didn’t see any movies in 2009. For Alex’s birthday in 2010, we got high and saw Alice in Wonderland. In June, Crystal made us all go see Twilight. That’s my half-decade in film.
Now that I’ve Netflixed or downloaded The Social Network, Black Swan, Up in the Air, The Runaways, Whip It! and The Kids Are All Right, I feel pretty much caught up on the past five years. Oh, we tried to watch Inception but fell asleep, it seemed like a demo reel for a very talented special effects guy.
Past half-decades weren’t like this!
Were I to attempt to recap 1995-2000, I’d beat my cumulative 2005-2010 viewings in 1995 alone — Clueless, Boys on the Side, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Mallrats, Now and Then, How to Make an American Quilt, Hackers, Too Wong Foo Thanks For Everything Julie Newmar, Kids, The Basketball Diaries, Toy Story, Apollo 13, Dangerous Minds — jesus. I could go on. ALL IN 1995! (Empire Records came out that year too).
Even solid movies like 2010’s The King’s Speech, which win awards and are universally appreciated, remind me of this quote from Run Lola Run director Tom Tyker: “You are seeing films that are so perfect you don’t even connect to them anymore.”
I miss movies that feel, no matter how large the room or the audience, like they were made just for me. Does anyone else feel this way?
Over the last five years, Hollywood has successfully and increasingly employed digital backlots, photo-realistic CGI humans, 3-D vision, performance capture animation, image-based facial animation, sub-surface scattering, instant motion-capture-to-CG and filmed entire movies in front of green screens, filled in later by CGI effects. Who needs character development when you can turn Sigourney Weaver into a blue computer person?!
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A Brief History of Movies
Before I continue — a teachable moment. A long long time ago, most movies sucked. Many tend to judge the cinematic past by its few surviving relics, but really history filtered out the crap for us. When the invention of the teevee enabled Americans to watch as much crap as they wanted to right at home, weekly movie attendance plummeted, from 84 million during World War II to its all-time bottom of 17 million in the 70s.
Then, something fantastic happened! The 60s and 70s were an era of unprecedented social upheaval, and that, along with other factors like ‘the invention of film school’ contributed to film taking on a new, equally viable, role in American life:
It was a “perfect storm” of circumstances combining to produce one of the most creatively fertile periods in American commercial movie-making: a new breed of production chiefs trying to save their faltering studios by gambling on an incoming generation of artistically ambitious talent, and a receptive audience hungry for the dramatically provocative, thematically relevant, and stylistically daring, all happening within the context of a society gripped in a painful period of self-questioning and re-examination.
In other words, film became an art as well as a significant element of youth culture.
Then. In 1975, the blowout success of Jaws offered a glimpse of the future — a future in which one film could have universal appeal and make ten gazillion dollars internationally. The 1977 Star Wars trilogy confirmed Jaws was not a “nonrecurring phenomenon.” Back then, however, one blockbuster had the whole summer to itself. Over the next few decades, studios restructured financially and marketing people started gaining more decision-making power than the creatives.
Which brings us to today.
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1. The Blockbuster Problem
Various evils assembled to create today‘s perfect storm, including but not limited to the rise of the MPAA’s power/censorship, an increasing focus on international markets, pressure on DVD sales and merchandising tie-ins, the recession, a “lack of ideas,” soaring marketing prices and a ridiculous focus on opening-weekend numbers.
This is very problematic for me specifically because as you’ve probably picked up, I’m one of an apparent minority of moviegoers who skip thriller/suspense/action films. I hate violence and I find special effects distracting.
Aside from the big-budget blowouts and the franchise films (Twilight, Harry Potter), movie listings lately have been chock full of action/suspense/thriller movies with names that mean nothing to me and posters that all look the same. Scanning some lists from the last few years I see piles of meaningless words: Red. Iron Man 2. Unthinkable. Death Race. Punisher. Transporter. Outlander. The Righteous Kill. Rampage. The Warrior’s Way. Tracker. Dead Snow. Insidious.
What the hell? These movies are like houseplants to me. I literally don’t see them. My eyes do not bother to register their existence. Thus my houseplants always die and I never go to the movies.
Predictably enough, the genre I’m most endeared towards is independent films, which is more or less the opposite of the blockbuster. I basically moved to New York City in 2000 and 2001 to see these movies — movies like George Washington, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Run Lola Run, Being John Malkovich, The Opposite of Sex, Buffalo ’66, All Over Me, Bully, Lost In Translation, Short Cuts and anything starring Parker Posey. Independent film, however, is one of many casualties of the recession and the Blockbuster Explosion and so are the theaters that used to show them.
That being said, I wasn’t mad at the blockbusters of yesteryear — I too loved Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Titanic, Forrest Gump – in How the Blockbuster Ruined Hollywood, Bil Mesce explains the financial impetus for the increasingly powerful blockbuster model, and its reliance on the “thriller” genre:
The life-sized, resonant thrillers of the 1960s/1970s have been replaced with a steady output of live-action comic books, drowned in the fantastic if not outright fantasy, and their richly shaded life-sized heroes replaced by pure-of-heart superheroes or similarly larger-than-life protagonists. With their breathless pace and non-stop action, there is little room for character, texture, or layered plotting. In fact, such hyper-energized constructs force plotting and characterization toward easily and quickly digestible clichés and predictable forms. Commitment to projects is based not on a passion for the material, but on a calculation of how many toys might it sell; how well it might play in Japan; how easily it can be condensed into a catchy 30-second TV ad. The cinema of ideas…Is long dead and gone.
The price of making these movies is astronomical. I couldn’t sit through Avatar because thinking about its budget w/r/t world hunger made me so angry.
But it appeals to apparently the only demographic of interest, as BitchBuzz recently noted:
“[Hollywood moguls seem unable] to see women as anything but window dressing for the male audience, that mythic demographic that’s supposed to guarantee success. Hollywood has pinned its hopes on that 18-36 male group and aimed most of its fare toward them.”
Which Brings me to…
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#2: Female Trouble
It was the conversation around Anna Faris‘s What’s Your Number and the just-released comedy Bridesmaids that got me thinking about writing this article. Namely, two specific quotes I read (in print) a few weeks ago:
1. Kristen Wiig, Entertainment Weekly:
“I’ll be happy when the day comes when people don’t think it’s such a big deal to have a movie with a lot of women in it.”
2. Tad Friend, author of Funny Like a Guy: Anna Faris and Hollywood’s woman Problem (in which Faris is called “Hollywood’s Most Original Comic” and apparently is the woman upon which the future of our species depends):
“[Faris’s next film] is an R-rated comedy that’s ‘female-driven,’ meaning that it’s told from a woman’s point of view, and that’s always been a tough sell. Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.”
Really? A woman’s point of view? A tough sell? Since when?
I had my intern make this graphic for you:
Oh! 2005, I guess. I mean, it’s a TOUGHER sell, sure, but are my retrospective nostalgia-tinted glasses playing tricks on me, ’cause I’m worried that “the time when it wasn’t a big deal to have a movie with a lot of women in it” is easier located in our past than our future.
As is extensively detailed in Ann Hornaday’s 2009 article from the Washington Post, Women & Film, it wasn’t always like this. It’s never been good, but it’s rarely ever been this bad.
In her article, Hornaday goes into some of the logistical reasons for this transformation: when studios became subsidiaries of multi-corporations responsible for contributing to quarterly bottom lines, there was a new/different pressure on studios and thus we no longer see “1970s/1980s/1990s stars like Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Sally Field and Goldie Hawn… making movies in a diverse number of genres.”
A quick perusal of the top 250 films on the imdb list cemented my hypothesis — in 1999, 56 of the top 250 films included female leads. In 2009 — 34.
Would you like a graphic? OF COURSE YOU WOULD!!
These are 1999’s most popular movies with female stars in primary/secondary roles:
…and these are 2009’s most popular movies with female stars in primary/secondary roles:
At some point in the mid-00s, women got ditched and then told that it has always been so. This became ‘official’ in 2007 when Warner Brothers President of Production Jeff Robinov allegedly made a new decree that “we are no longer doing movies with women in the lead.”
This is especially bad news for queers — of the 38 highest grossing LGBT films produced between 2000 and 2009, only TWO were produced post-2005, and they were guy movies — Brokeback Mountain and Milk. Also the best lesbian film ever, The Nicest Thing, hasn’t yet been done, girl.
In The New York Times‘ “Women in Hollywood 2009,” Manhola Dargis points out that Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Amy Pascal, Hollywood’s sole female film studio chair, was making movies “like “Little Women” and “A League of Their Own” [in the 90’s]. In recent years, however, Sony has become a boy’s club for superheroes like Spider-Man and funnymen like Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow.”
Dargis later told Jezebel that she finds it “depressing” that Apatow “has taken and repurposed one of the few genres historically made for women… [romantic comedies are] supposed to be about] a relationship between a man and a woman, but they’re really buddy flicks.”
Speaking of, I used to never think about gender when picking a movie — I didn’t really HAVE to, because even male-centric films appealed to me — from comedies like Ace Ventura, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dazed & Confused, The Big Lebowski and Wayne’s World to classics like Good Will Hunting, Dead Poet’s Society or Saving Private Ryan. I loved Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Robin Williams, Johnny Depp, Young Leonardo DiCaprio, Ed Norton — and I loved anything made by Robert Altman, Spike Lee or Woody Allen. These days, it’s tough to muster up more enthusiasm for Michael Cera/Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s emo feelings or Vince Vaughn‘s hyper-male hijinks.
This week, Bridesmaids comes out, and it’s positioned as “a referendum on the viability of women in Hollywood comedy.”
I guess these just didn’t cut it?
This weekend, Bridesmaids earned a “better-than-expected debut with $24.4 million” — second, of course, to Thor. Fucking Thor!
The Future
In the 90s there was so much to see I’d sometimes see two in one day, and because I liked weird indie films nobody else wanted to see, that usually meant I was going alone.
But also — I remember dashing madly through Times Square on our lunch break from The Olive Garden, cigarettes furiously fuming into the crowded greasy air, running up the eight sets of escalators in the AMC just to catch 75% of The Anniversary Party before the dinner shift started up. I remember walking to Harlem late at night to see Girl Interrupted because crying at home was getting depressing.
My favorite part of the Sex and the City movie is that it was the first time in years I’d participated in a “mass coordination of friends to see the same film” situation. I used to like that a lot. I liked it enough to almost enjoy Twilight: Eclipse, just ’cause I was there with my friends and it was a thing.
In 1999, Entertainment Weekly boldly declared that “1999 will be etched on a microchip as the first real year of 21st-century filmmaking.” It’s a fantastic article, full of hope/dreams about a “new age of cinema” and “really exciting young artists who have their own voices.” Thanks to films like Being John Malkovich and Pi, agents aren’t afraid anymore to send “that odd, quirky type of material” to film studios! Stars like Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise aren’t afraid to take bets on movies like Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club and Magnolia!
At the article’s end, director Bennett Miller counters the pieces’s thesis with a pretty adequate prediction:
“I think there’s going to be this wonderful, explosive glut of mediocrity. It’s going to be horrible. You know, big ideas without a lot of preparation. The technology invites a certain carelessness, because it’s easy to let your guard down and not be disciplined.”
And so it is.
Yes, it was exciting to suddenly garner laptop access to a bajillion movies, and it was very exciting to be able to live our entire lives on a tiny Blackberry phone, but those innovations have been around just long enough that I, for one, am over the novelty of it. Movies are best enjoyed in theaters, period.
These days when I stare at a screen, it’s for a television show or a documentary — I’m doing True Blood right now.
I’m not staying home because I’m lazy, distracted by technology or under-appreciative of the group-movie-watching experience, or even because movie tickets are expensive.
I’m staying home ’cause the stuff showing on my laptop is just so much better than the stuff showing on your screen.
Gaga, Glee’s Reality Show & Uh Huh Her: It’s a Very Gay Pop Monday
GAGA:
Well, “Judas” has finally won me over. I initially wrote it off as an over-produced headache-inducing mess but Gaga be damned, you cannot argue with that chorus. She debuted her first live performance of the track on Ellen and I’m relieved to say the “Judas” choreography is STELLAR. Sidenote, you must also check out 11 year-old Jeffrey Sewell’s cover of “Born This Way” at Joe’s Pub in NYC last week.
UH HUH HER / LEISHA HAILEY:
Remember that adorable rainbow star tattoo that mysteriously disappeared from Alice Piescezi’s bicep in later seasons of The L Word? On her decision to have it removed several years ago, Leisha Hailey says:
“Well I got it when I was 23 or 24 and um, I never intended it to be a gay rainbow. I really loved stars at the time and I really loved color. I still love color. I wanted it to be the most colorful tattoo that ever existed. And the tattoo artist went over it twice, so it was really inked on there. After a while, I couldn’t stand that it was an armband more than anything. I felt like Nick Lachey.”
Meanwhile, check out the video for the first single off Uh Huh Her‘s new album, “Black and Blue.” You won’t find any random unicorns, but they can’t all be that special.
THE GLEE PROJECT:
I guess that Glee reality show is happening after all? Entertainment Weekly has the first look at the Oxygen network’s competition among 12 actor/singers looking to land a 7-episode arc on Season 3. Ryan Murphy mentioned during the Paley festival that if a guy is chosen, he will likely be cast as Mercedes boyfriend.
Over 10 episodes, the contestants will be pared down through a series of “homework assignments” orchestrated by the Glee creators that will assess their singing, dancing, and acting. Those from the Glee team who will make the final decision on the winner include Murphy, casting director Robert Ulrich, and choreographer/co-producer Zach Woodlee. The stars of the series will also make appearances as guest mentors in each episode, with Darren Criss (Blaine) showing up in the premiere episode.
The Glee Project premieres June 12 on Oxygen. Are you into it?
NEW LESBIAN FILM ON DVD:
The lesbian film Bloomington, flew a bit under the radar last year but is absolutely worth a look on DVD. In contrast to the melodrama that often weighs down lesbian stories, Bloomington offers a quirky, fun take on a student/teacher romance. Written and directed by America’s Next Top Model (and Real L Word) editor Fernanda Cardoso, Bloomington stars Sarah Stouffer and Allison McAtee and is out on DVD this week.
Black Lesbian Movie Earns Sundance Acclaim. Will “Pariah” Change the World?
A few weeks back, we told you about Pariah: The Movie‘s Kickstarter campaign, the film’s effort to get the money they needed to wrap up music clearances and sound mixing as well as to send the cast & crew to Sundance for its big premiere.
They met their goal, and made it to Sundance — and on opening night, January 20th, 2011, they earned the festival’s first standing ovation. (Oh, and also, half of every dollar rasied in excess of their $10K goal was donated to support The Ali Forney Center, which works to provide safe, nurturing environments for homeless LGBT kids in the New York City area.)
opening night of "Pariah: The Movie"
Why is this a big deal? Well, let’s start with the film’s description:
At the club, the music thumps, go-go dancers twirl, shorties gyrate on the dance floor while studs play it cool, and adorably naive 17-year-old Alike takes in the scene with her jaw dropped in amazement. Meanwhile, her buddy Laura, in between macking the ladies and flexing her butch bravado, is trying to help Alike get her cherry popped. This is Alike’s first world. Her second world is calling on her cell to remind her of her curfew. On the bus ride home to Brooklyn, Alike sheds her baseball cap and polo shirt, puts her earrings back in, and tries to look like the feminine, obedient girl her conservative family expects. With a spectacular sense of atmosphere and authenticity, Pariah takes us deep and strong into the world of an intelligent butch teenager trying to find her way into her own. Debut director Dee Rees leads a splendid cast and crafts a pitch-perfect portrait that stands unparalleled in American cinema.
So what we have here is a movie about (and written/directed by):
1) African-Americans
2) Women
3) LGBTQs
4) Women with “masculine-of-center” gender presentations including women who present/identify as “butch” and “stud” or not even as “women” at all, as well as women who don’t feel an affinity towards any specific gender label/presentation.
WOW! Just ONE of those demographic groups is enough to earn one hundred slammed doors in Hollywood — but with a critical reception like this, there must be hope, right?
“Striding in with hard-won confidence to depict a culture hidden from outsiders, Rees has made a movie of exceptional, raw honesty. There’s no mincing of words, deeds, or feelings among these believable young women. The film pulses with color and the sexy sounds of club music.”
“…feels like an incidental rebuke of the festivals long-standing suggestion that the sexuality of young white boys is the center of the universe.”
“..feels authentic and warm…funny scenes… nicely observed comic moments.”
“exhibits a sensitivity to the nuances of class and style among city-dwelling blacks that is not evident anywhere else in recent American cinema…”
Of course not everybody is so optimistic.
The Wrap: “..the movie is too long, and probably too blacklesbianandcomingofage to find a wide audience.”
Dewey from Detroit: “Although all of the other Sundance reviews will praise it’s honesty, rawness and ability to tell it’s own story, the reality is it’s too long, too grim, too black lesbian-coming-of-age and way, way TMI. Do you really need to see a teenage girl’s first experience with a strap-on? I think not… Pariah’s supporters will say Hollywood is just not ready for serious gay films. More to the point, they’re not ready for seriously bad gay films.”
Aside from the fact that yes indeed we do need to see a teenage girl’s first experience with a strap-on, because there are still plenty of people (many teenage girls included) who don’t think such a thing exists or think that they’re the only people in the entire world who have ever imagined it – it’s possible that things are changing. At Hitfix, Gregory Ellwood takes into account the success of The Kids Are Alright and the reception of Pariah: “After almost a decade of disappointing and at times embarrassingly bad feature films that consistently descended into stereotypical cliches, independent gay cinema may be on something of an upswing.”
We’re as weary as anyone else of generalizing an upswing based on the success of two examples, but when it comes to film, two examples is just about all you need. Around 500 or 600 films get released in theaters each year, and only about 150 major studio releases.
So we’ll end with another blog post from The LA Times:
The director acknowledged her movie doesn’t have the most commercial premise. “You say, ‘black’ — ‘Oh no,'” she said recounting a (hypothetical?) meeting with financiers. “You say, ‘lesbian’ — ‘Oh no.’ You say, ‘coming of age,’ they’re like, ‘Next meeting.'”
Given the reception Thursday night, though, it’s hard to imagine people in Hollywood — including the numerous agents who had turned out to scout Rees — skipping many meetings with her.
What do you think? IS AMERICA READY FOR STORIES THAT AREN’T ABOUT DOUCHEBAGS OR CAR EXPLOSIONS OR SKINNY WHITE GIRLS? Or at least a small audience of hyperintellectual critics at an elite film festival? Is this the future yet?
You’re Welcome for the Lesbian Thanksgiving RomComs & Evangelical Rappers
Today in “America,” it’s Thanksgiving and many Americans are celebrating by eating a lot of food and watching television, often with friends and/or family or frenimies. If you are one of these people I want you to think long and hard before you bite into that turkey drumstick today. I want you to ask yourself: “Would it be okay for Adam Lambert suck on this drumstick during morning television?” Your answer is your business, just think about it. Is all I’m asking.
We have some treats for you in any event, and I’m not just talking about mashed potatoes. Firstly, for all the smarties we have Viewing Turkey Day Through Academic Prism: There is, in fact, a surprising amount of scholarship on the subject of Thanksgiving, a uniquely American celebration marked by rituals that lend themselves to a wide range of interpretations. (@miller-mccune)
THANKSGIVING: Look girls! I bet you didn’t know about this movie What’s Cooking which features a lesbian storyline during Thanksgiving, ’cause I think possibly it sucked. But look, it’s not easy finding a lesbian-themed film or teevee scene for the autostraddle show, which I blame mostly on Ilene Chaiken’s ignorance of the seasons, which I have lamented many times before, as I have only wanted to see Angelica’s face light up on Christmas morning since the day she was born eight years ago or whenever. Well this lesbo-storylined film is called What’s Cooking with Kyra Sedgewick and Juliana Margulies and that woman who always plays the Jewish Mom. She’s so good. Out of central casting, that one.
A scene from before the couple meets all the family:
Trailer:
EVANGELICAL GLORY: “Gimme that Christian Side Hug”
Oh, abstinence-only evangelists. Only you could bring us this gem of a video. Luckily, Feministing is here
REALITY CHECK: Hey fun fact turkey-eaters! “[At The] Pine Ridge Reservation somewhere between 13,000 and 40,000 Oglala Sioux [are] spread across an area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Unemployment is 89 percent, the few jobs in the tribal bureaucracy or the Prarie Winds Casino. The youth suicide rate is ten times the national average. One in three women is a victim of rape. Life expectancy is roughly equivalent to Somalia’s. Plagues of alcohol, drugs, domestic and gang violence … to grow up here is to be forever aware of what was lost, or to bludgeon onself into forgetfulness.” The full article of “Ghosts of Wounded Knee” is in Harper’s December issue, or online for subscribers only.
THANKS BUT NO THANKS: “If you’re not already at the airport trying to smash your way to the front of a ticket line, you’re probably not visiting relatives this Thanksgiving. You need an excuse besides “they are annoying.” The AP has a bunch!” (@gawker)
GENDER: Sinclair Sexsmith talks about Femme Invisibility – “One of the bottom-line issues about femme in/visibility, for me, is that it is a form of gender discrimination. When someone refuses to recognize a femme as queer, that person is saying, straight women are feminine, dykes are not, therefore your gender presentation trumps anything that might come out of your mouth about how you identify or who you are, and I am more right than you are about your identity.” (@sugarbutch)
PHOTOFINISH: Here’s a new one: bad retouching is now being blamed on the economy. (@models.com)
UNEMPLOYMENT: Hey-o! You’re not the only one! Turn that frown upside down and see how much we’re all alike with this handy unemployment map: the geography of a recession. (@american observer)
NUDITY: Bare breasts don’t result in big box office sales. Really we need a study to show us this? We can see bare breasts wherever we want, obvs, and sex is all over the damn place. We go to the movies to see um … good movies? Or to be entertained? What do you think — does the promise of a steamy sex scene get you in the seat? I think a good sex scene that works within the story can make a great movie even greater, but for sex alone, there’s um, sex.