More Queer Movie Blogging: Ten Favorites

Notice I'm not calling this the ten best lesbian/gay films. I have no idea what the ten best queer films of all time are. I probably haven't even seen them. These are my ten FAVORITE gay movies, period. In absolutely no particular order:

1. Times Square

This is a terrible, horrible movie. Really.  It was taken away from its director, de-lesbianized, cut to pieces, and marketed as nothing more than a vehicle for its soundtrack which is, by the way, as good as the movie is bad.

I don't give a shit how bad this movie is, I loved it when it came out in 1980, and I love it now. It's the completely unrealistic, semi-incoherent story of two teenaged girls who meet in the loony bin, run away, fall in love, and hide out in an abandoned warehouse in New York City. Pammie is the depressed daughter of a politician and Nikki is a street kid with some serious emotional problems and, let's just say, anger management issues. They dub themselves the Sleaze Sisters and encourage other teenaged girls to dress up in garbage bags and throw their TVs out the window, with the help of a creepy radio DJ played by Tim Curry.

The soundtrack of their romance is Patti Smith's "Pissing in a River," the song that played over and over and over and over in my own teenaged bedroom while my heart was breaking over my own first love ... although unfortunately, while Pammie gets herself together enough to stand there watching while Nikki throws herself off the roof, I plunged right after mine. But I digress. It's tragic, schlocky, and a bloody mess, but a lot of  good stuff still shines through. The DVD has commentary by the film maker and sheds a lot of light on the film that was supposed to be.

2. Beautiful Thing

Now the boys' turn, and this one is all sweetness and light. In fact, this may be the sweetest gay love story ever told, although it has its dark moments. The music is Mama Cass (and trust me, you  never fully GET "Make Your Own Kind of Music" until you've seen two teenaged boys making out in the park at night with it playing in the background. So romantic). This is a British film, with that typical un-self-conscious British acting style, and GOOD acting from everyone. Sometimes the accents are a bit thick, so listen carefully.

3. The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love

Maybe I never grew up, I didn't realize how many of these were about teenagers. This isn't as good as Beautiful Thing but it's pretty good, and doesn't remind me of my own life at all. Randy is a butch little outsider who works in a gas station, being raised by her lesbian aunt. She is having an affair with an older married woman, but falls in love with an upper middle class African-American girl in her school, Evie, who pulls into the gas station in her Range Rover one day. Wildly romantic, sexy, and sweet, this is a great date movie. Love conquers all. You go girls.

4. The Times of Harvey Milk

Made by a friend of mine and set in the city where I grew up, about people I knew ... this documentary is so fucking good and so fucking true that I still rarely go a year without watching it. I was away at college for the assassinations themselves, but I was back for the riot when Dan White got his widdle wrist slapped for killing Harvey Milk and George Moscone. Were we pissed off? Well, while in general I don't think demonstrations accomplish anything, I do think that burning a few police cars and the basement of City Hall did get their attention for a few minutes, and convinced the world that maybe sissies and dykes were a tad scarier than previously believed. I was young, I thought it was cool. OK, I still do. I told you I never grew up.

The Times of Harvey Milk covers not just the murders and their aftermath, but the growth of gay political identity and power in San Francisco that led up to them. And given it won an Academy Award two and a half decades before Brokeback showed the Academy queers are cool, you have to believe it probably really is as good as I think it is.

5. Desert Hearts

I wasn't really sure whether or not to put this lesbian classic here, as it's only a favorite because a movie'd have to be AWFULLY BAD to counteract the effect Patricia Charbonneau had on me. Has. Whatever. (Fanning self.) Great date movie. Great cowgirls.

6. Priest

Extremely depressing, pretty sexy, who knows why I like this one? It's English, about a gay Catholic priest and his crises of conscience.

7. Go Fish

I grew to loathe director Rose Troche for making the execrable pilot to The L Word, but when I first saw this at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, I was crazy about it. Don't get me wrong, the acting sucks, it's in black and white and not to good effect, it's really not that great, but especially with a dyke film festival crowd, its world of lesbian in-jokes and familiar characters made it work. Like I said, these are movies I like, not movies I think are good.

9. Common Threads

Another documentary made by friends of mine, another one set in San Francisco, another one that tells a story I lived through. I saw the rough cut of this on a day when a friend died, and cried from the beginning to the end. I went to the Oscars with the directors when they won for best documentary in 1989. I'm biased, but this is one of the best documentaries ever, and one of the best gay films.

10. My Beautiful Laundrette

Daniel Day-Lewis was just amazing in this, as a working class English guy in love with a Pakistani guy he went to school with. This is probably the best feature film on my list, with a supporting cast as good as the leads, a story as good as the acting, and even a strange sort of happy ending. "I'll stay with him and work it out." Sure you will, hon .... or at least, it's sweet that you think so. And Day-Lewis dribbling champagne into his lover's mouth from his own was the best sex scene I'd ever seen until I watched Queer as Folk, which had about forty better ones in the first three episodes. After that it just gets boring, doesn't it?

Oh shit, I'm at ten already? Let me just honorably mention two semi-gay films, Rent and Four Weddings and  a Funeral.

At first glance, two movies couldn't be more unlike each other and in both of them, the main couple is straight. But also in both of them, the "index couple," the one that everyone else uses as their measure of true love, is a same sex couple. And while I'm allergic to romance in my own life, I do like seeing it in movies, at least, in these two movies.

Rent is a rock opera loosely based on La Boheme, about a bunch of starving artists living in New York's alphabet city in 1989, many of whom have HIV. Four Weddings and a Funeral is a big-budget English romantic comedy about a group of upper crust British friends and their ultimately successful search for love, starring Hugh Grant, of all people. I usually hate him, but I thought he was wonderful in this. He must have thought so too, because he plays this same character in every other film he ever made. But I just ignore those. I watch Four Weddings a lot when I'm sick, because it always makes me happy. I have yet to watch Rent without crying myself sick. Semi-gay or fully-gay, two of my favorite films of all time.

Comments

[Gil.]

What, you don't love "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert"?

Tsk, tsk!

(g)

[nancy]

I would have pegged you for a Hegwig and the Angry Inch fan.-:))Nancy

[Elizabeth McClung]

What? Where is "Show Me Love" or "Tipping the Velvet"? Alas. Only one on the list I don't own is Times Square so will have to get that. Also, you didn't put your answer to the great Desert Hearts Debate - was the ending sad or glad - did she get off at the next stop and they part ways or did they get together?

[Jenni Olson]

Times Square is also my number one favorite! And if you love that, you will also love By Hook Or By Crook!