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Just four of the tremendous queer themed classics released between 2000-2009
film from a queer perspective
Overview
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Roundup:
The Decade in Queer Movies
Expanded Edition of 1-6-10 KATM Windy City Times Column
By Richard Knight, Jr.
The Decade in Queer Movies
Expanded Edition of 1-6-10 KATM Windy City Times Column
By Richard Knight, Jr.
| The 1990s saw the unofficial birth of queer cinema, a trend which started in the underground, slowly made its way to the mainstream and expanded exponentially throughout the last decade. Though there still aren’t nearly enough LGBT themed movies breaking through to mainstream audiences (let alone queer ones) to suit me, the last ten years have seen a steady upward momentum in terms of quantity, quality and most importantly, visibility for Our People at the Cineplex. Now that the Aughts are behind us as we enter the Tens here’s a look back at some of the highlights of the past decade in queer movies. The millennium opened with Big Eden, Before Night Falls and Best in Show – three movies that helped define the years ahead in queer cinema. Big Eden, the charming debut of out writer-director Thomas Bezucha remains my favorite gay themed romance with its always potent message of love conquering all while Before the Night Falls gave audiences the double bonus of the compelling portrait of queer writer Reinaldo Arenas and an instant star in Javier Bardem who played him. Christopher Guest’s improv comedy Best in Show lovingly and hilariously gave us comedic portraits of both a gay and lesbian couple and the movie also gave out actor Jane Lynch her breakout role. 2001 saw the arrival of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, his searing, moving and razor sharp portrait of a transgendered rock singer along with the darling lesbian comedy Kissing Jessica Stein. Other highlights of the year included Tilda Swinton as a mother determined to protect her gay son from a blackmailer in The Deep End, The Fluffer from Wash West and Richard Glatzer (creative and life partners), the story of obsessive love set in the gay porn industry, and Altman’s Gosford Park in which audiences got to savor Ryan Phillippe as a very accommodating bisexual actor and Jeremy Northam playing British gay icon Ivor Novello, the erudite composer-performer-actor. The next three years saw an increasing number of LGBT related movies – good and bad – with some terrific highlights that included out director Rob Marshall’s Chicago which won the 2002 Oscar for Best Picture and single handedly brought back musicals to the movies. Nicole Kidman took the Oscar the same year playing bisexual writer Virginia Woolf in the adaptation of gay author Michael Cunningham's The Hours (Meryl Streep played a lesbian character in the film, garnering another of her 2,000 nominations). New queer cinema director Todd Haynes’ masterful homage to the 50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Far From Heaven with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid as her closeted gay husband arrived in 2003 along with a batch of offbeat LGBT themed fare – Die! Mommie! Die!, Girls will be Girls, Latter Days, Monster, Normal, and Party Monster among them. Mysterious Skin from Gregg Araki, another of the original nucleus of queer directors, A Home at the End of the World and Alexander – both which featured Colin Farrell playing bisexual characters, Bill Condon’s Kinsey, Jonathan Caouette’s autobiographical documentary Tarnation, Brian Dannelly’s Saved! (gay directors all), and Hellbent, the first queer slasher flick – were some of the LGBT film highlights of 2004. Then came 2005 in which gay movies went to the Oscars headed by Brokeback Mountain, the critically lauded financial hit which found Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two lonely cowboys romantically involved, enthralling audiences worldwide (Ledger’s final film, Terry Gilliam’s gorgeous looking but thin fantasia The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus with Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt filling in Ledger’s unfinished scenes opens this Friday at the Music Box Theatre). Capote star Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor Oscar playing the gay icon/author Truman Capote and Felicity Huffman won a Best Actress nomination playing a transgendered woman in out writer-director Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica. Brokeback was edged out of the Best Picture Oscar, however by Crash, an oversight which in retrospect perfectly justifies the protests by Our People over the slight. The loss presaged a relative dry spell in queer cinema in 2006 and 2007 – though Imagine Me & You, Hate Crime, Infamous, Quinceanera, Running with Scissors, Notes on a Scandal, V for Vendetta, The History Boys, Gay Sex in the 70s, The Quiet, Time to Leave, Kinky Boots, Two Drifters, Save Me, For the Bible Tells Me So, Zoo, The Man of My Life, and especially the return of John Cameron Mitchell with the sexually explicit and rousing (pun intended) Shortbus helped keep LGBT themed cinema alive. 2008 was also on the sparse side with regard to gay movies (and forget about lesbian and transgendered films) though again, there were some decided exceptions to the rule – Brideshead Revisited, The Witnesses, Shelter, Chris & Don: A Love Story, Black, White + Gray, The Life of Riley, and both Mamma Mia! and Wall-E, two of the year’s biggest box office hits had gay characters or subtext (I’m convinced little Wall-E the robot is gay and Eve is his gal pal). 2008 was also the year that we got big screen versions of Sex and the City and its gay African American doppelganger Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom. The highlight of 2008, of course, was Milk, queer director Gus Van Sant’s tremendous biopic of slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk which won a well deserved Oscar for Sean Penn and scriptwriter Dustin Lance Black, whose impassioned acceptance speeches helped to momentarily heal wounds after the backlash of California’s Prop 8. The final year of the decade brought us another batch of award worthy contenders – with A Single Man and Precious sure to be Oscar nominated along with Valentino: The Last Emperor as a possible Documentary Oscar nominee. There were several other notable LGBT themed films in 2009 – Outrage, Taking Woodstock, Bruno, Hannah Free, Little Ashes, among them – for queer film enthusiasts to trumpet and which give Our People much to anticipate at the movies in the decade ahead. |
| Note: Reviews of the majority of the films listed from 2004-2009 are listed in the ARCHIVES for their respective years or can be accessed via a title search by using the Search Box |
