When I was coming out and learning about the various LGBT people who came before me, one of the images I saw repeated the most was the last shot of the absurdist tennis match called the Battle of the Sexes, when then-closeted Billie Jean King backhanded the ball past chauvinist huckster Bobby Riggs’s right and…
I remember first reading about the strange case of John du Pont, the extremely odd heir to the du Pont fortune who was murderously obsessed with Olympic wrestlers, in an article in a gay newspaper 20 years ago. The supposition at the time was that no one could be as obsessed with wrestling as to…
dvd of the week Nat Faxon and Jim Rash won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Alexander Payner for The Descendants, and the The Way, Way Back is the first feature written and directed only by them. A coming-of-age comedy set in a summer beach town and its local water park, it is…
Last year, when Nat Faxon and Jim Rash accepted the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Alexander Payner for The Descendants, a bunch of people watching the show said, “Wait, those guys?” Faxon is a dopey-faced blond who has appeared in countless TV sitcoms and B-movies, and bald and awkward; Rash plays the hapless…
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World When I’m under the weather – when I’m home with a cold or just filled with ennui – I like to watch romantic comedies. However, there are a few things I can’t take in a romantic comedy. Don’t bring me down. I don’t want disease, death…
dvd of the week One of the better movies of the summer was also its most under-watched. Crazy, Stupid, Love is about the divorce of Steve Carell and Julianne Moore; Carell’s friendship with an expert lothario played by Ryan Gosling and Gosling surprisingly falling in love with Emma Stone. It’s quite funny and enormously insightful…
