Of course not. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have anything against Canadians per se. I just don’t see why they have to be all up in my face about how they like to eat bacon.
Or were you talking about the gay thing? Well yeah, that too. Based on your and Hamish’s arguments, I’ve gone from “it’s wrong and sad” to “eh. Different strokes. So to speak.” I’m not going to be renting anything just because one or more of the characters happen to be homo, but then, I can’t deny that the only reason I’ve got Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in my queue is because it’s set in Savannah. Would be hypocritical to say that watching a movie only for the gay is bad, but watching a movie only for a city is fine.
Maybe I’d have a different opinion of “Gay Cinema” if I’d actually seen anything that was of any value to me. All I’ve seen falls into one of three groups: 1) Long, tedious, horrible stories of gay people having miserable lives with terrible stuff happening to them; 2) Long, tedious displays of camp and lame double entendres as if they were the pinnacle of humor; or 3) Long, tedious displays of navel-gazing and dialogue ripped straight from the pages of Livejournal, with watery-eyed B-list actors delivering audition-level monologues about the trials of growing up having to hide yourself. For example:
Hell, I couldn’t sit through it without squirming quite a bit. I despise that show.
If I’d ever seen any characters in any movie or TV series that I could relate to at all, it might’ve not taken me so long to clue in and come out. But then again, I don’t think a two-hour-long movie about gay nerds who go to work and then go home to the internet, is something anyone would want to see.
That’s funny. While I was working a clerk job, I came up with stories that could be considered the “gay clerks,” except drawn from my own clerking experiences. Ran into the problem that I can draw to save my life, but I still think I might try it someday when I actually have time.
Okay. I am NOT a PoliticalFag, as a cursory reading of my posts will reveal. But I am still ooged out by the classification of whole films as “Gay” because there is one “homosexual” element to them, such as the movie “Go” which I loved and had totally forgotten had a gay couple in it until this thread.
But speaking to the OP, I get the impression the Gay thing is so significant to some that any film with any gay people has to be specially categorized, so that the Anti-Gay crowd can specifically avoid it. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I’ve had this impression ever since I saw a local Blockbuster store group “The Crying Game” with “Tootsie” (both are favorite movies of mine, for totally different reasons) – I felt that to the Blockbuster customer, those films naturally went together because they both had “men” dressing and acting as “women,” as though that were the main point of either film. I cannot imagine a more shallow analysis.
If a film is really about a gay romance, fine; group it in the Gay section. But if a film has a single gay character, or even a pretend-gay character, or a crossdresser of any stripe, does that really mean the film must be in the genre “Gay”? To me, that’s like putting every movie with even one African-American actor in the “Black” genre. It’s not-so-vaguely insulting.
The difference I think is between a B&M video store and an online rental service. An online rental service can much more easily cross-file titles, so Go would appear in the Gay listing, the Drama listing, etc. Whereas a B&M store isn’t going to be able to locate the same title physically in different stacks absent multiple copies, which would make little sense from a space planning perspective.
The B&M store I rent from most often divides the titles physically into broad categories like “Drama,” “Comedy,” “Silent,” “TV,” “Foreign” and so on, but also keep web listings and paper listings by additional categories including “Gay.” They also list titles by director.
I think it gets back to a point I tried to make earlier, that some of the issue depends on what the intent of the categorizer is. Do they intend to segregate the titles or simply alert consumers to titles which may be of interest?
Yah, I guess you’re right; there’s a difference between placing a film in the “Gay” section, or the “Comedy” section for that matter, in a bricks-and-mortar store; and tagging a film with the "Gay’ class in some database, for the purpose of online searches.
In my Blockbuster case, it was one of those “If you liked This, you’ll love That” displays, where I perceived the local management drew an automatic connection between “Tootsie” and “The Crying Game” because they both invovled (oh, horrors!) men-as-women. They would have placed “Some Like It Hot” in the same category, if they had ever heard of it.
There are two movies I can think of off-hand that I really enjoyed yet didn’t know were “gay movies” went I first saw them. Big Eden, and Red Dirt.
Both Blockbuster.com & Netflix have “Gay & Lesbian” catagories, but when I searched for these movies on Blockbuster, Big Eden came up as Comedy, Drama. Red dirt came up under Drama, Gay & Lesbian.
At Netflix, both movies came up only under Gay & Lesbian.
Now I’m almost wondering if Netflix is providing a service for rural gays & lesbians who might not otherwise come across these movies, or if they’re segragating them so that, as masonite suggests, the anti-gay crowd can more easily avoid them.
I am reminded of a novel I read some years back that had won an award for “best new work by a GLBT author”. It was hideously bad; the plot was trite and the author’s words seemed more tortured than crafted. As far as I can tell, this novel’s only redeeming quality is that its author was a lesbian. Now, there are definitely quality lesbian authors; Joanna Russ immediately comes to mind. However, this individual’s work was not fit for publication, but it got published anyway. Stuff doesn’t get published unless there’s a buyer for it (or it’s published by a vanity press, but this wasn’t a vanity publication). I am led to conclude that there are people who will buy total crap as long as it has a rainbow sticker on it – and they don’t care how badly it stinks.