The Screengrab : Provincetown Film Festival

Screengrab Scoops Perez! (or...Gael Garcia Bernal: Baby Daddy)

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It has just recently come to our attention that PerezHilton.com posted the following badly-translated public announcement from the production company of a certain dreamy, diminutive Mexican heartthrob on August 14: "This statement is to say that, after so much speculation and comments, the actors Dolores Fonzi and Gael Garcia Bernal are indeed expecting a baby at the start of next year."

Then Mr. Hilton trumpeted, "We told you, our Perezcious readers, a few weeks ago that there was a baby on the way for the two."

And by "a few weeks ago," he meant August 6...more than SIX WEEKS after your intrepid friends here at the Screengrab SCOOPED his ass with Bernal's suspiciously proud-papa-to-be behavior at the Provincetown Film Festival (way back in June!) with OUR post: Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

But does Perez Hilton credit us with the scoop? Does he have the common decency to even know we exist? No and no, and then, to add insult to injury, he even titles his Gael Garcia post "Confirmed Spermination - We Told You First!"

The nerve!

Well, that tears it. On behalf of the 567 of you out there who were already bib-shopping for Gael and Dolores' little bundle of joy long before a certain more famous and successful blogger ever caught wind of the story, I intend to write a strongly worded e-mail to this Mr. Hilton (if that's even his real name) and declare WAR (after, y'know, explaining what the hell a "Screengrab" is)!

That'll show him.

(Oh, yeah, and congratulations from all of us here in Blogtopia to Gael and the Fonz on their upcoming production!)

Provincetown International Film Festival Review: The Wackness

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Here’s all I knew about The Wackness going in: it won the audience award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it starred Ben Kingsley as a kooky psychiatrist, Mary-Kate Olsen had a cameo making out with the aforementioned knight of the British Empire, it had something to do with New York wigger culture and it sounded unbelievably annoying.

Happily, though, writer/director Jonathan Levine’s coming-of-age story turns out to be much, much better than the sum of its awful-sounding parts. Much of the credit goes to Levine’s clever script and vivid evocation of 1994 Giuliani-era NYC (including a pretty fly-for-a-white guy soundtrack featuring The Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Biz Markie, etc. and a startling, throwaway shot of the Twin Towers), but Josh Peck’s shy, winning and completely relatable performance as dejected teenage pot dealer Luke Shapiro is so good it withstands comparisons to Dustin Hoffman’s breakthrough role as another smart, alienated young man in Mike Nichols’ 1967 existential angst classic, The Graduate (and Hoffman never had to deliver a line like “I’m mad depressed, yo” and somehow make it work).

Kingsley takes the Mrs. Robinson role here, chewing a fair amount of scenery as Peck's older foil, a pothead shrink who trades dimebags for 50-minute therapy sessions, urging Shapiro to seize the day, then turning hostile when he realizes the young man would rather seize his stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby).

Thirlby (Ellen Page’s BFF in Juno) is a wised-up, sexually precocious object of desire, and her chemistry with Peck is palpable as she urges Shapiro to quit focusing on the wackness of life and embrace the dopeness. For her part, Mary-Kate Olsen’s cameo as a stoned nympho hippie is relatively unobjectionable (and pretty funny in a meta way if you consider how recently she roamed the streets of the same but very different city as one of the squeaky-clean, family-friendly stars of the big stinky tweener bomb New York Minute). Famke Janssen, Method Man and Jane Adams also turn in reliably solid (if unexceptional) performances in minor roles.

Related Stories: Sundance Roundup: Day 3, Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

This past weekend, at the 10th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival’s Awards Ceremony, Jane Lynch and Gael Garcia Bernal received awards for career achievement in acting and Quentin Tarantino was honored with the festival’s 2008 Filmmaker on the Edge Award. At a presentation in the non-air-conditioned auditorium of Provincetown High School (attendees received complimentary church lady hand fans), the celebrity guests received trophies in the shape of P-Town’s famous, phallic Pilgrim Monument Tower and spoke about their respective careers in a series of casual sit-down interviews and audience Q&As, during which Lynch revealed the status of the next Christopher Guest movie, Bernal got emotional for reasons that were suspected but not confirmed and Quentin Tarantino broke some news about his long-awaited (and much delayed) Dirty Dozen homage, Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.

1. Just before receiving the Faith Hubley Memorial Award (named for the Academy Award winning animator who passed away in 2001), Jane Lynch was asked if she had any news about the next Christopher Guest improv all-starts project. The news was not good. According to Lynch, “It’s getting to be about the time we’d start talking about the next one,” but when she spoke with Guest recently, the actor/filmmaker/fake rock star revealed he has no current plans to create another ensemble comedy in the vein of Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind or the 2006 disappointment, For Your Consideration. On the plus side, he may adapt Guffman as a Broadway show (unless he was just pulling Lynch’s leg with some of that trademark deadpan humor of his).

2. Gael Garcia Bernal is an attractive little bastard. That part isn’t news, of course, but it’s worth mentioning: in person, he’s the sweetest, tiniest Mexican you’ve ever seen, with lips and eyes like Julia Roberts and a sultry accent capable of seducing straights, gays and maybe even the occasional lesbian. While accepting his P-Town Festival award for Excellence in Acting, Bernal got surprisingly choked up...surprising, that is, until he mentioned something about how the honor made him think about all the exciting things in his future and how “one person in the room knows what I mean.” Then he went back to his seat and embraced a beautiful lady who looked an awful lot like Bernal’s current squeeze, actress Dolores Fonzi, who, according to internet speculation (and Screengrab’s deductive reasoning), is almost certainly preggers. Congrats, Gael!

3. And then there was Quentin. Let me start by saying QT often comes across (especially in Jane Hamsher’s Hollywood tell-all Killer Instinct) as a pompous, annoying ass, and after all the pop-culture-spouting protagonists and stylized violence spawned in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (and after the underwhelming, unintentional self-parody of Death Proof), it’s easy to take the writer/director (and part-time actor) for granted. But seeing him in the flesh reminded me of an R.E.M. performance I witnessed at the all-day outdoor Austin City Limits music festival a few years ago. I haven’t bought a new R.E.M. album in years, it’s easy to mock Michael Stipe and I’d gotten out of the habit of thinking of the R.E.M.s as one of my favorite bands...that is, until they kicked my ass with a blow-your-face-off set of, like, a thousand songs I suddenly remembered I fucking loved. Same with Quentin: the man has given me far, far more enjoyment than grief over the years, and he’s a riot live...especially when being interviewed by fellow film geek raconteur John Waters, as he was on Saturday in P-Town. As it turns out, Tarantino and Waters are buddies and I could have watched their odd couple bantering for hours. (Seriously, IFC: get these two a weekly show!) After chatting amiably about topics ranging from the best gifts QT ever received from his fans (short answer: pussy, but the Pez dispensers shaped like Jules and Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction were nice, too) to the directors’ shared love of torture porn as one of the few true remaining forms of exploitation cinema, Tarantino revealed that 24 hours previously, he’d really, actually, finally finished the screenplay for Inglorious Bastards and was hoping to complete the film in time for Cannes 2009...so stay tuned!

Related stories: Chevolution, Provincetown Film Festival Review: The Wackness

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s Gay Pride Month, the 10th Annual Provincetown Film Festival kicks off this weekend and George “Mr. Sulu” Takei and Ellen DeGeneres are getting married (though not to each other, of course) in California (hooray California! And what’s taking you so long, New York and Vermont and Washington and Hawaii and Illinois and...y’know, all the rest of the country?)...

...so, anyway, to help celebrate, we here at the Screengrab thought it would be a good time to salute some of the highpoints in gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender) cinema with our very own rainbow collection of Queer Nation classics (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003)

"Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute!" the purists among you may cry. “I thought this was a list of Gay Pride films, not TV shows!” Well, for starters, Mike Nichols’ all-star, six-hour, multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winning adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning rumination on homosexuality, homophobia and the better angels of human nature wasn’t TV...it was HBO. But more importantly, in a media landscape of generally low ambitions, lowered expectations and lowest common denominator multiplex landfill, it’s hard to ignore a six-hour celluloid phantasmagoria of staggering audacity, master class filmmaking, sharp dialogue, potent visuals, timely thematic resonance and knockout performances (including a multi-tasking Meryl Streep, future Weeds costars Justin Kirk and Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Patrick Wilson, Emma Thompson, James Cromwell, Ben Shenkman and Al Pacino, using his late-career bluster to good effect as prototypical self-hating conservative closet case Roy Cohn). Sure, it gets a little silly sometimes, but who would've thought a movie about the AIDS pandemic (as depicted through intertwining tales of two infected men haunted by ghosts and other celestial messengers) would find time for so much humor, imagination and hope...and, as opposed to, say, a certain lengthy, operatic, sometimes silly (but Oscar-winning) big-screen multi-part epic about heroic bravery in the face of faceless evil, lethal apathy and looming death, the cultural and political battles depicted in Angels in America are no fantasy, and continue to rage on and on and on...

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

The most original film musical of the decade began as a drag act at Squeezebox!, a weekly gay performance event in mid-90s New York City. Performer and creator John Cameron Mitchell based his iconic character Hedwig on details from his own life: his childhood in East Berlin, his idenitification with queer rock stars, his struggles with being the gay son of a military general. The crux of Hedwig's character is both a fiction and a metaphorical truth: she is the victim of a botched sex change operation, leaving her a little bit male and a little bit female. Fueled by the anti-showtunes of Stephen Trask and Mitchell's gender-bending charisma, the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a glam-rock spirit quest: Hedwig begins as a self-loathing wannabe rock star looking to complete herself through sex, and by the end of the story, she is walking naked into the world, stripped of makeup and bitterness, finally learning to love herself. If that's not pride, then what is?

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)

Though he’d established himself since Poison, his first major feature, as the most talented director to come out of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the 1990s, it wasn’t until Far From Heaven that Todd Haynes' talents were recognized by the mainstream media. His previous films had been too controversial, too oblique, too postmodern; but with this 1950s period piece, Haynes finally gained widespread acceptance and, with it, four Oscar nominations. Ironically for one of the most original filmmakers in Hollywood, the movie that gained him this recognition was a pure throwback. With its high melodrama, ginger treatment of interracial relations, and gorgeous color palette, it was unmistakably reminiscent of the films of the melodrama king of the fifties, Douglas Sirk; and with its highly stylized acting, uncomfortable emotional weight and unapologetic addressing of gay sexual desire, it likewise conjured the films of Sirk’s most famous devotee, Ranier Werner Fassbinder. In a way that blends the fantastic, romantic sensibilities of Sirk and the gritty, rich realism of Fassbinder – and with a freedom to frankly address issues of racism and homosexuality that were denied to them both – Haynes manages to make a film that’s both moving and incredibly frustrating. Always able to coax winning performances out of his actors, he also gets Dennis Quaid to deliver an exceptionally sensitive performance in a role where both understatement and overreaching could have been a disaster.

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

For obvious reasons, European cinema was several decades ahead of the curve when it came to addressing homosexuality (or, for that matter, any sexuality) on screen. It’s impossible to even conceive of an American film in 1985 – let alone one with the relative high profile of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette – being as frank, and as frankly erotic, about a gay couple. Like Far From Heaven, it succeeded largely by not making its focus too narrow; the story of young Pakistani Omar and his white lover, a former skinhead played with verve by a young Daniel Day Lewis, is made especially lively and vital by placing it within the context of a broader story of the British immigrant experience at the peak of Thatcherism. Deftly blending issues of race, class, culture and economics with a star-crossed romance, My Beautiful Laundrette owes much to a top-shelf script by Hanif Kureishi; but what shouldn’t be overlooked is its intensely erotic scenes, which were among the first in mainstream film to illustrate that gay sex on the big screen could pack as much power as its heterosexual counterpart. Gordon Warnecke as Omar is a real find in his big screen debut, and Daniel Day Lewis, in only his third film, already shows signs of being the titanic actor he would eventually become.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus van Sant has always specialized, at least in his personal films (that he finances with tripe like the Psycho remake and Good Will Hunting), in convincingly portraying the sad, proud lives of lowlifes, drifters and people with no real home to go to, whether by choice or by circumstance. He also has a particular talent for showing us characters who desperately need the love of someone, but who are none too wise in selecting who that someone should be. Those two themes come together with audacity and depth in My Own Private Idaho, the story of two hustlers – the poverty-stricken, vulnerable, narcoleptic Mike Waters (played by the late River Phoenix) and the slumming, proud, arrogant Scott Favor (played by Keanu Reeves who, God bless him, at least seems to be trying). For a movie so charged with homosexual love, it’s strangely lacking in sex, and not in the self-denying, passionless way that’s required from most gay characters on the big screen: rather, sex for the two of them is a largely joyless professional operation reserved for the making of money or the killing of time. This doesn’t mean they don’t need love, though, and therein lies the movie’s great tragedy: Mike wants the love of only Steve, and Steve wants the love of only his estranged, wealthy father. All of this plays out with an aesthetic derived not from Warhol’s cool surface gayness, or Fassbinder’s melodramatic near-camp: it’s given a thick sheen of the classics, drawing directly from Shakespeare. This can be both its damnation (several of the openly Shakespearian scenes come across as contrived and hokey) and its salvation (framing the entire struggle in the trappings of real tragedy gives it dramatic depth and resonance it might otherwise lack), but it’s a movie that certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition, and whatever its flaws, it’s a worthy step forward in the mainstreaming of gay characters in American cinema.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Gwynne Watkins, Leonard Pierce