Tommy's Hollywood screen miss

Saw Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss tonight and it was...odd. I figured it would be another forgettable gay sex comedy in the Jeffrey/Kiss Me Guido/Ethan Greene/Bedrooms and Hallways tradition (lessee...neurotic gay man-child with romantic illusions and wacky rich friends stalks straight guy--nope, never seen that done before), but it seemed to be reaching for something more profound. I wanted to like its unanticipated choices, but it still has the visual look of a sex comedy (including out-and-out camp elements like drag queen sing-alongs) which cries out for over-the-top melodrama; instead, we get muted cynicism and understated soul-searching that falls flat on the floor and lies there.

"Wow, I'm impressed with the director," I told monshu. "Really?" "Yeah, he managed to make Sean Hayes boring!" I appreciated hearing a gay character declaim his love for Hüsker Du and The Clash, but that's completely undercut by the fact that we end up never hearing either of those bands or anything like them. Instead--getting back to those drag queens--we have loads of Petula Clark. Not that I have anything against her, mind you (and it was supercute to see monshu singing along sotto voce), but it drags us right back into the Camp. And then there's Parting Glances star Richard Ganoug in the middle of it all. On the one hand, it's lovely to see him getting film work again, but his presence (and the fact that's playing a character which could easily be Michael twenty years on) only serves to remind us of a far superior film, one that assuredly blended dramatic and comedic elements in a way that's beyond the meager talent of O'Haver.

He, by the way, seems to be doing his level best to avoid pigeonholing. After this, he went on to make a teen comedy, then a fairy tale for the Hannah Montana set, and after that? A new film adaptation of the gruesome Baniszewski case. Lead actress Catherine Keener has been quoting as saying of her role, "As a mother I said to myself, 'I can't do this.' Later, I thought: 'I'm a mother. I kind of should.'" Um, why exactly? I confess, I'm with wwidsith on this "current fad for books about horrible, abused childhoods". (O'Haver grew up in Indiana and has been fascinated with the case since childhood, but it's no coincidence that another adaptation was released just last year.) I mean, what do we really learn from them except that ordinary people are capable of horrible, depraved acts? Kinda knew that already, I did, what with being raised in a religion whose whole theology is predicated on that observation.