I’ve never watched an episode of Drag Race or Dragula, but I’ve watched a zillion YouTube videos of Drag Race alums Trixie Mattel, Katya Zamolodchikova and Jaymes Mansfield. So I couldn’t resist doing a week of drag movies.
Trailers: The Apartment, Seven-Year Itch
All I could think of watching this movie this time was how a 1980s comedy would deal with this same material. Jerry would be way more creepy and would be “punished” for it by being stuck with Osgood, and their relationship would be merely the butt of a joke. I mean, on the surface, that’s what it *looks* like here, but it’s handled so cleverly and with a surprising amount sensitivity considering when it was made. Marilyn Monroe is at her absolute sexiest in this movie, and it’s at least partly due to Orry-Kelly’s costumes. And oh honey, that ending. Perfection.
Trailers: S.O.B., 10
Blake Edwards made some surprisingly thoughtful movies about human sexuality and relationships (see also 10, which I just saw for the first time recently and which is FAR better/smarter than I thought it would be). I don’t know that I like the end of Victoria’s character arc, even if it gives a happy ending to her romance with King, but the rest of the movie is seriously great and, like SOME LIKE IT HOT, dramatically ahead of its time in terms of how it handles queer characters and issues of gender identity. Julie Andrews is fantastic as always, but Robert Preston is the MVP. His early exchange with Lesley Anne Warren is one for the ages.
Trailers: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Muriel’s Wedding
I should not have been surprised at what a lovely woman Guy Pearce makes. He and Hugo Weaving play drag queens, while Terence Stamp rather problematically plays a transgender woman. The three of them are on a trip across the wild deserts of Australia to a gig in Alice Springs. I’ve seen enough movies set in the Australian outback to feel that, when their bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, that I would not survive in that situation. So maybe I thought these girls were in more danger than they were. But the way this movie uses the landscape as a stage is incredible, particularly in a scene where the characters climb Kings Canyon in full drag. This is a great character piece, with lots of great ABBA music.
Trailers: New Jack City, Road House
I remember seeing this in the theater when it first came out and the audience went bananas for it. The marketing played up both Snipes’s and Swayze’s tough guy resumes, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of the seeming incongruity of these guys as drag queens, but it never makes the characters a joke. These are real characters, with distinct personalities and motivations, and the movie wouldn’t work if they weren’t. This has aged surprisingly well, given how much the vocabulary around LGBTQIA people has changed since 1995 (the only truly dated terminology in the movie is “transsexual”). And the only thing that really makes me cringe now is the Latin stuff at Chi-Chi’s expense. Despite that quibble, though, I love this movie a lot.
Trailers: Mrs. Doubtfire, La Cage aux Folles
Based on the 1973 play “La Cage aux Folles,” adapted by none other than Elaine May, and directed by the great Mike Nichols, this is another movie that on the surface looks like an “ain’t those gays hilarious” farce. But of course if you’ve seen this, you know the *real* joke is the uber-conservative senator who’s fleeing from a scandal-by-proxy and runs headlong and unknowingly into his worst nightmare. It always moves me (and makes me incredibly sad) how much Armand and Albert are willing to do — at the expense of their own identities and hard-won self-dignity — to help their son be happy. I was particularly irritated with Val this rewatch, and his heel-turn is basically the whole purpose of the movie. Though the greatest moment will always be Robin Williams’s HYSTERICAL “history of dance” moment (“but you keep it all inside”).
Trailers: St. Elmo’s Fire, Stardust
I did not like this very much. Philip Seymour Hoffman is great, as he always was, and his scenes with Robert DeNiro are the heart of the movie. But the rest of the movie feels like an afterthought. I couldn’t follow who was who and most of the time everything was so underlit that I couldn’t see what was even happening. (What was with the late 90s/early 00s trend of barely lighting scenes and keeping the audience literally in the dark?) I did appreciate that Hoffman’s character was not some perfect angel and was willing to do some not great things to protect his own self interest. It made him a lot more real and relatable.
Trailers: The Full Monty, Billy Elliott
Fun but fairly formulaic British working class underdog story. Chiwetel Ejiofor is lovely, but the real surprise here for me was Joel Edgerton, who I did not realize until this movie was not American. Nick Frost, fresh off SHAUN OF THE DEAD, was another standout in the standard “misogynist asshole who comes around a bit too quickly and conveniently” role. Even if it was predictable, I did love the runway climax and how Charlie’s embarrassing moment ends up looking like it’s part of the show. I’ve never seen the musical but this movie makes me curious to check it out, especially with Billy Porter as Lola.
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