And we hear she finds 'Blu-Ray' too suggestive of a certain sex act

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05/07/2010

by Jeremy Hooper

When reviewing Casino Royale, she included this bizarrely offensive accusation:

"Well, I gotta say, there is something icky in Casino Royale that feels very much like what we could call "the homosexual gaze." The women in the film, first of all, spend much of the film very ioconically [sic] made up - shall we say, like Liza Minelli or a Marilyn impersonator? Then, the women all end up as victims of sick and/or violent acts. All three are tortured or threatened with torture. Can we say the disdain of women is part of the homosexual "culture," even unofficially? (Cause I have seen it first hand, and I'm not in a mood to deny my own experience today.) Anyway, I don't recall women being tortured as part of the traditional Bond canon." [Source]

On Milk, she said all this:

"Ugggggggggggggggggggggggggh. I mean, ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww to the 87th power.
...
I'm not even going to write what the storyline of this movie is, because I wouldn't want any of you to think that has too much to do with the actual true story of the seriously tragic and macabre character who was Harvey Milk. The movie story might have gone into the twisted soul who over the course of his life drove four of his five lovers to commit suicide. I mean come on - THAT'S A STORY! (The only other man in history whom I have ever heard of who had that many suicides in his close inner circle was Hitler....I'm just saying...)

The film fails basically because there just isn't any material in the biography to convincingly transform the radically narcissist, sex-obsessed community organizer, Milk into Ghandi. They had to work so hard to sanitize this creepy dude, that they ended up stripping the movie of any potential interest. It's a bore.

But it's a bore the way Triumph of the Will is ultimately a bore. (Although, Leni Reifenstahl was a much more talented film maker than Van Sant.) Propaganda is always a bore because it is innately insulting to the intelligence.

Theme: Homosexuality is a tragic and disordered behavior that retards human maturity and spiritual development. (Cough...Yeah, just kidding....) Can't say what the theme is. It is the nearly irresistible downfall of biopic makers to disregard the need to establish a universal theme. They always think the person they are in love with at the center of the story will be fascinating enough. But valentines are tedious to anyone but the person to whom they are intended. And so, in Milk the audience doesn't care.

Performances: Contrary to what every critic is blathering, I thought this was some of Penn's most banal work. He played a homosexual man with a New York Jewish accent using every cliche about all those descriptors that one could have. What makes a great performance is not the ability to imitate glaring traits like the limp-wristed gay flourish or the harsh Brooklyn slur, but rather subtle contradictions in character. There was none of that here. Penn's Milk is all one note - wide-eyed and full of self-righteous passion with moments of giddiness bordering on silly.

James Franco just looked awkward and embarrassed. I read an interview in which he said Penn had to pressure him into having extended kisses and love scenes. No doubt.

Other notes: This one is just icky. The sodomy-as-love scenes are creepy in the way that they always must be. You can tell us that they are the same as heterosexual love scenes, but they're not."
... [Source]

On Brokeback, there was these takeaways:

"If there was anything propagandistic about the film, it was the way in which every straight male character in the film was a total jack-ass. But again, this just goes to the idea that same-sex attraction comes from people getting dropped on their head, not from God having made them that way."
...
"I can't really recommend the film. It isn't good enough to justify getting the images in your head of men doing their twisted enemas-as-act of love thing"

So where do these kinds of over-the-top assessments (Hitler comparisons? Really?) get Hollywood-focused evangelical Barbara Nicolosi? Well, if you work at Focus on the Family, you give Ms. Nicolosi the prime "Friday Five" slot, where the House that Dobson built dedicates space and time to someone who they see as making an impact:

So how does Hollywood affect policy? I think Hollywood normalizes lifestyles that are probably not normal. And it does it because entertainment is built around “better than the real.” The real being what everyone is living is not entertaining. It’s not different enough. So Hollywood looks for things that are different and then puts them on the screen 25 feet high or in television week after week after week.
Friday Five: Barbara Nicolosi [Citizenlink]

Can you even imagine if this person had accused any other male population as holding "disdain for women" as part of their culture? Or if she were comparing any other civil rights figure to Hitler, or directly likening any other respected film revolving in large part around a certain community's struggle over adversity to a Nazi propaganda picture (that's what Triumph of the Will is, for those who don't know)? Groups like Focus on the Family would never consider fostering that person's work. Or if they did, the outrage would be deafening.

But since these are gay people we're talking about and the majority of evangelical groups are still allowed to demean that population as having a "retard[ed] human maturity and spiritual development" just as long as they promise to go to church on Sunday, such an "expert" gets a red-carpeted platform to tell us all about morality and art and what is and is not "normal." Two thumbs are certainly not the fingers we'd used to gauge this kind of society-weakening, people-shunning mindset!

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*RELATED:

*Pretty sure not RELATED: "Ex-gay" researcher Joseph Nicolosi

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