Comments

1

entertaining review, thanks matt

2

Blaming a Black gay man for nuking Hiroshima is America 2021 AF

3

I have not seen this movie yet, so won't comment on this particular gay character.

I will say that I'm getting really tired of token gay characters in some big blockbuster movies. Like when they made Sulu gay in the last Star Trek movie. I was kind of excited when I read about it before hand, and the idea of it being a bit of an homage to George Takei. But it was a total let down. So brief, and mostly background, blink and you miss it. You wouldn't notice it at all if you weren't looking for it. It was completely unnecessary and irrelevant to the movie. Why bother? It didn't make me cheer seeing Sulu as gay. It just annoyed me to see it so trivialized and nearly invisible. Same with the lesbian characters in Rise of Skywalker. You wouldn't even notice if you weren't clued it, and it was obviously cut out for foreign release. Cowards.

I'm getting to the point where I'm more demanding of meaningful representation, not just a couple of throwaway seconds. I'm no longer satisfied with a barely-hinted-at scene that isn't relevant to the story.

5

@3 I think, as Matt mentions, they keep the gay stuff to a minimum so it can easily be edited out for release in, say, China.
for example, I have read that games and movies backed by Chinese company tencent have restrictions on the content they can show. also China has an age limit and curfew for when you can and can't play video games. sorry, this derailed into me shitting on China for not liking video game freedom, I guess.

6

Good movie review - and the kind of content that makes The Stranger so different than most sites. Thank you Matt, well done.

7

Oh come on, Matt… you’re smarter than this! You can’t piss and moan about having to figure out/keep track of the members of this (largely unknown) superhero team, while waxing rhapsodic about the at-least-as-unwieldy and certainly-dumber-and-more-freakish Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s silly to make an oblique reference to Kumail Nanjiani’s newly buff bod and hot guns, while ignoring the smoking hotness of Richard Madden. And it’s an insult to your readers’ intelligence to assume they don’t know the fate of the Icarus of Greek mythology… and thus why Ikaris might choose to end his existence the way he did, after realizing he could no longer be a part of the family and the world he’d known for thousands of years.

8

We live in a puritanical society and these films are produced for corporate profits, so any gay or transgender sexual relationships will be downplayed or merely alluded to, in the interest of pleasing shareholders and avoiding potential controversy.

Also, no one wants to offend the Chinese market, and the film has to be easily editable, as another poster mentioned, so what you wind up with is a bunch of corned beef hash.

The idea of protecting the planet from giant electronic monsters is enticing, and the cast sounds attractive, so this sounds like a good popcorn-muncher, but don’t look for any heavy insights into human sexuality as it has evolved into the 21st century.

There is a long tradition of watering-down gayness in Hollywood films.

Hitchcock’s 1948 “Rope” involves a gay love triangle between Jimmy Stewart, Farley Granger and John Dall, although you would never know it unless you read an analysis by Roger Ebert or Vincent Canby.

If there ever was any intimacy between these star-crossed lovers, it must have hit the editing room floor.

Again, in spite of these compromises, “Rope” is an excellent film with groundbreaking staging, and just plain fascinating.

Another overly-cautious film was William Wyler’s “The Children’s Hour” with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Allegedly there is a lesbian love affair buried in there somewhere, but early sixties puritanism put the kibosh on any direct exposition of the topic, which remains controversial in some quarters to this day.

Needless to mention, these are important films that had crucial sexual elements excised to conform to pedestrian tastes, nevertheless they are important works of art and provide period commentary.

William Wyler is the genius who directed “Best Years of our Lives” in 1946 with Harold Russell (a real army veteran with a very real combat disability) and Myrna Loy.


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