i love you phillip morris

I loved I Love You Phillip Morris (we caught the sneak preview last night). It was a brilliantly made movie. And I laughed as much as I did during Sherlock Holmes! Or more, maybe. A lot both times, though. Anyway, I mean, I knew it was Jim Carrey in a romantic comedy, but they talked about, you know, the romance aspect so much in the press for it that I thought it would be one of his more serious roles! Which, I don't know, I mean, he wasn't doing his - typical Jim Carrey slapstick stuff, really, so perhaps you could say it was. But still, it wasn't remotely heavy.

Although as for They're Not An Issue Movie They Just Love Each Other syndrome, I definitely left the theater with a strong sense of ( WTF, Texas criminal justice system? with a side order of WTF, Finnish criminal justice system. )

The poster they're using for it in Finland is



AWESOME, but different from most of the ones we were able to find with Google this morning. Which is a shame, because most of the other posters are not as awesome:





1. Scottish?; 2. De-gayed; 3. Japanese; 4. free picture that comes when you buy a picture frame style?; 5. Sundance poster from '09

I remember the movies where Ewan is brash and/or kind of an asshole very clearly, so it was kind of surprising how disarming (and convincing!) his baby bunny eyes were when playing a gracefully aging twink. And weirdly - my wife agrees, although she is not American nor from the South so this may not carry much weight if you don't know how awesome she is at accents - his American accent was not as agonizing as it has been in the past! Big Fish for example - same accent, much more agonizing. The general wrongness was still there but the sprinkling of glaring actual slip-ups were absent, sort of.

A thought about gay ILU Phillip Morris audience demographics

Apparently thinking somewhat like the distributors who didn't pick the movie up in America for more than a year, the local theater showed the sneak preview of I Love You Phillip Morris in one of the smaller rooms, and when we ordered our tickets 2 days in advance it was already nearly sold out.

The audience distribution was interesting too: a bunch of het people on dates, as well as bigger groups of friends. A few gay couples spottable, definitely more than usual, at least, but not actually all that many. The last people to come in were some lesbians - older ones than us, maybe late thirties, early forties? - who stood confusedly in the front of the room for a couple of minutes squinting at their tickets. Maybe they hadn't been to the movies there before and didn't know how to find their row. One of them was little and round and had veryvery short hair, and the other one had a blunt bob and bangs and a pissy expression. Frisson of recognition!

It reminded me of a post I read at The Hathor Legacy about the lack of willingness to use female protagonists in Hollywood:

There’s a question that comes up every time I tell my story about how I slowly realized that Hollywood didn’t want movies/shows for, by or about women to profit. To sum up that story, what tipped me off was that whenever film students pointed out how movies/shows for, by or about women had indeed profited, film professionals wouldn’t hear it. Those movies/shows were exceptions! Or it was really the alien/Terminator/Hannibal Lechter people wanted to see, not Ripley, Connor or Starling. Etc. It couldn’t be that people were actually happy to see movies/shows for, by or about women, because that was impossible – end of argument.

Why discriminate if it doesn't profit?

plebefic headers: Sorry. I didn’t want to kill him. I really didn’t.

1. A/N: Sorry. I didn’t want to kill him. I really didn’t.



2. Word count: quick and painless; 1255



3. Characters/Pairings: Pete, Patrick (meant to be Peterick)



4. Disclaimer: They aren’t mine, just at my dream….



5. A/N: Just a bit of random that had been written in 6 hours out of random.

green and yellow sneakers of the day

top: 1. Converse All-Star Specialty Ox in green ("specialty" refers to the seasonal colors of AS, which are produced for 6 months at a time only usually) 2. Saucony Originals Jazz in green
bottom: 3. Saucony Originals Jazz Low Pro in lime/navy 4. Skechers Girlfriend in grey/yellow

 

ewan on "they're not gay, they just love each other"

You may have noticed that "They're not gay, they just love each other" is one of the most enraging political pet peeves that ever enraged me. torachan linked to this post where izzardwizzard posted scans of a new OUT interview where Ewan had this cheer-worthy sentiment about it in the context of I Love You Phillip Morris:

"I'm very keen that it's a gay movie," McGregor insists. "There was quite a lot of talk at Sundance that 'Well, it's not a gay movie. It's a film about guys who happen to be gay.' And I was thinking, it's nothing but a gay movie. It's about a gay couple, about a man's sexuality, and he comes out. It's not the point of the film, but let's not pretend it's not a gay film."