Reverend's Report from Outfest: Awards Night

Drag queen Momma, wannabe drag queen Janice Dickinson, and out actors T.R. Knight, Craig Chester and Rex Lee were on hand in Los Angeles last night to present the "Outie" Awards at the official conclusion of Outfest 2008. Here are the winners:

Audience Awards:

• Outstanding US Dramatic Feature: Hamlet 2 (directed and co-written by Andrew Fleming)
• Outstanding Documentary Feature: A Place to Live (directed by Carolyn Coal)
• Outstanding First US Dramatic Feature: Watercolors (directed and written by David Oliveras)
• Outstanding Soundtrack: Hamlet 2 (Rock Me, Sexy Jesus!)
• Outstanding Narrative Short: I'm Jin-Young (directed by Lee Sung Eun)
• Outstanding Documentary Short: La Corona (directed by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega)

Grand Jury Awards:

• "Heineken Red Star" Award: Were the World Mine (directed by Thomas Gustafson) -- See review below.
• Outstanding International Documentary Feature: Sex Positive (directed by Daryl Wein)
• Outstanding International Dramatic Feature: XXY (directed and written by Lucia Puenzo)
• Outstanding Narrative Short Film: Countertransference (directed by Madeleine Olnek)
• Outstanding Documentary Short Film: La Corona
• Outstanding Actor in a Feature Film: Tye Olson in Watercolors
• Outstanding Actress in a Feature Film: Nicole Bilderback in The New Twenty
• Outstanding Screenwriting: James Bolton for Dream Boy

Special Programming Awards:

• For Freedom: Football Under Cover (directed by Ayat Najafi and David Assmann)
• For Artistic Achievement: Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (directed by Matt Wolf)
• For Emerging Talent: Dave O'Brien, director of Equality U

The awards presentation was immediately followed by the Los Angeles premiere of Were the World Mine. This gay musical riff on all things Shakespeare, but especially A Midsummer Night's Dream, is imperfect but enjoyable. Director/co-writer (with Cory James Krueckeberg) Gustafson actually expanded his previous short film Fairies into this feature. I think the short is the better movie, as the feature becomes heavy-handed in its literalism. But Gustafson assembled a talented young cast -- including Tanner Cohen and Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams -- for the feature and, with a larger budget to play with, made it visually ravishing. (Watch the trailer here.)

Outfest will conclude tonight with the Los Angeles premiere of Tru Loved, a new film by Stewart Wade (Coffee Date). It's a hot ticket and ... I couldn't get one, so this concludes my day-by-day coverage of Outfest 2008. However, many more movies and filmmakers made an impression during the fest than one can adequately survey in a mere week and a half. I'll continue to post reviews and interviews in the weeks and months to come.

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.

Cinematic Crush: David Duchovny

Crush object: David Duchovny, actor/writer/director.

- He first gained attention as a transvestite DEA agent in the cult TV classic Twin Peaks, but was soon world famous as an FBI agent in another cult TV classic, The X-Files. His portrayal of Fox "Spooky" Mulder earned him two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe. He has also played Mulder in episodes of The Simpsons and The Lone Gunmen and the feature film The X-Files: Fight the Future.

- Other television roles include a man-crushing version of himself on The Larry Sanders Show, the host of the soft core Red Shoe Diaries, and star of the current Showtime series Californication, which nabbed him his second Golden Globe earlier this year. Guest appearances include Millennium, Life with Bonnie and Sex and the City.

- Branching out from acting, he wrote and/or directed eight episodes of The X-Files and the feature film House of D.

- More movie roles include Kalifornia, Playing God, Return to Me, Evolution, Zoolander, Full Frontal, Connie and Carla and Things We Lost in the Fire.

- He returns as Agent Mulder once more in this week's big screen sequel The X-Files: I Want to Believe, opening Friday.

The Blonde Leaving the "Blonde"

Laura Bell Bundy, who received a Tony Award nomination for creating the role of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde: The Musical, performed her last "bend and snap" on Broadway yesterday. Bundy had been with the production since its early workshop days back in 2005.

Replacing Bundy in the role is the winner of the MTV talent/reality show Legally Blonde The Musical: The Search for Elle Woods, who will not only be revealed on tonight's final episode, but will also make her Broadway debut in the hit tuner Wednesday night. Of the three finalists -- Bailey Hanks, Rhiannon Hansen and Autumn Hurlbert -- Autumn is the fan fave in a current Playbill.com poll, with over 50% of the vote, while Bailey is the frontrunner on the show's official website.

The winner will also see her recording of the Blonde song "So Much Better" released as a single and download on Amazonand iTunes – Over 2 million songs and growingthis Tuesday.

UPDATE: And the new Elle Woods is ... click here to find out, and click here to see her "So Much Better" music video.

Reverend's Report from Outfest: Another Gay Sequel

There are only three movies during the course of my lifetime that I've deemed so wretched I walked out of the theater before they ended. The first was Message from Space, a Japanese Star Wars rip-off from 1978. I was only ten years old, but I knew it was crap. The next was The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking in 1988, which I labeled celluloid child abuse.

I just saw the third movie, as much of it as I could bear anyway, last night at Outfest. It is Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild. I made it through most of the movie but had enough when it reached the climactic "Gays Gone Wild" competition orgy, which is no more than an excuse to show people having sex. My partner had bailed from the screening ten minutes earlier, and a number of other attendees departed prematurely with us.

The film is written and directed by the not-untalented Todd Stephens, who made the very good Edge of Seventeen and Gypsy 83 as well as this disaster's predecessor, Another Gay Movie. While I enjoyed the original, a clever GLBT riff on straight teen comedies like Porky's and American Pie, it hardly demanded a sequel.

It was such a hit, though, that every gay business currently in existence seemingly funded the sequel. An additional orgy of product placement runs throughout the movie, with video companies, lubes, condoms, websites, underwear and travel agencies all prominently displayed.

Stephens was on hand to introduce the Outfest screening. To be fair, he told the packed house up front that the film wasn't yet finished, and the need for additional editing and color-correction was evident while watching it. However, the only way Another Gay Sequel could yet end up a good movie would be to destroy the negative/digital master, re-think and re-write the script, re-cast the movie (Stephens should especially reduce blogger Perez Hilton's supporting role into a one-scene cameo, if he is to participate at all), and create something that doesn't offend the same audience it is pandering to.

It isn't just that the film is outrageously graphic in its depiction of sex, bodily functions and even violence. It's that it isn't really a spoof or good-natured satire like Another Gay Movie was, and instead becomes a derogatory depiction of the GLBT community. The sequel features distorted and either heavy-handed or not-very-funny-to-begin-with takes on reality TV competitions, venereal disease, fetishes, Catholicism, penis size, sexual positions and incest. It also claims to endorse monogamous GLBT relationships while simultaneously indulging in three-ways, bathhouse sex and anonymous encounters.

The funniest moment in the film is actually its smartest: a brief, barbed comment that RuPaul (who looks good and manages to emerge from the wreckage around him unscathed) makes about gay people taking over historically black neighborhoods. Oh, how I wish the script had more such moments tinged with truth rather than dominated by caricature.

I don't offend easily but I was offended, obviously, by Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild. If this represents the current high point of GLBT cinema in terms of artistic response to a predecessor's success, the number of companies endorsing it and the wide theatrical release (relatively speaking, for an GLBT film) it will receive later this summer, then it is a definite setback.

UPDATE: Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild is now available on DVDfrom Amazon.com.

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.

Texting? Hold Up

Picture it: you are sitting enraptured in the latest big screen exploit of Batman, Harry Potter or Carrie Bradshaw when you see it, glaringly, out of the corner of your eye: a little blue square of light. Attached to that little blue square of light is a hunched-over figure rapidly keying in nonsensical drivel with ossified stumps that once were thumbs, obviously not watching -- or caring about -- what they paid a ticket price to see. Even worse, they are obliviously encroaching upon your enjoyment of what you paid a ticket price to see. Such is the newest cinematic annoyance rearing its ugly head in movie theaters everywhere: text messaging.

The widespread popularity of this yet-another-way to stay connected in this yet-ever-more-disconnected society we now live in baffles me. Wouldn't it be easier to just, you know, talk to each other? And who, really, seriously, needs to be that connected to every single person they know all the time?

As for those who text at the movies, can't they take a break from this high tech foolishness for the running time of your average movie, if not for their rapidly failing eyesight and arthritic fingers, then at least for the sake of their fellow filmgoers? Or has common courtesy gone the way of rotary phones and hand-written correspondence?

And it is not just in movie theaters either. As Playbill.com recently noted, it is happening in Broadway theaters as well. Moreover, with ticket prices on the Great White Way ten times (at least) as much as at your local multiplex, the question remains: what are these people thinking?

Hilariously, triumphantly, Playbill's own Seth Rudetsky recounts in his latest column how Patti LuPone -- Miss Patti LuPone, the Tony Award winning Broadway legend, supreme diva and star of the current revival of Gypsy -- refused to go on for the second act of the show unless the fingering philistine sitting in the front row (the front row!) who had been texting non-stop through the whole first act was ejected from the theater in shame. As Seth himself would say, "Brava, diva, brava!"

Text messaging is rapidly equaling the long-standing bane of any true movie fans' film going existence, the ringing cell phone. I remember the first time a cell phone rang while I was watching a movie (the jerk actually answered it ... and proceeded to have a conversation). The movie in question? Driving Miss Daisy ... in 1989. Yup, we have been putting up with one form of distracting, irritating, rude in-theater behavior for almost twenty years, and now we have to deal with another one?

In closing, I direct any and all offenders of this, or any other felonious phone faux pas, to take heed of the fact that July is "National Cell Phone Courtesy Month". So watch out: we're on to you and, like Miss Patti LuPone, we're not going to take it anymore.

Terminator's Salvation

If you were wondering (hoping) that some good ol' fashioned beefcake would be injected into the fourth installment of the Terminator series, Terminator Salvation, then your prayers have been answered (although it does seem a bit odd that we are still hearing about cast additions to the film when we've already seen a teaser trailer).

Nevertheless, Austrian bodybuilder-turned actor Roland Kickinger has been tapped to play a "younger" version of the cyborg assassin immortalized in the first movie by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is not the first time Kickinger (who some may recognize from the Baywatch spoof Son of the Beach from a few years back) has followed in Arnie's footsteps; he played the Pumping Iron era Schwarzenegger in the TV movie biopic See Arnold Run.

Terminator Salvation, which stars Christian Bale, Helena Bonham Carter, Bryce Dallas Howard and Anton Yelchin under the direction of Charlie's Angels' McG, is scheduled to open May 22.

Ready for Their Close-Up

Lachey assays Sharpays.
The High School Musical juggernaut continues. Following two hit Disney Channel movies, a concert tour, a legitimate stage production, theme park attractions, a documentary and even an ice show, it's only natural that the next step would be an American Idol-ized talent-slash-reality show. Right?

Titled High School Musical: Get in the Picture and hosted by former boy bander-slash-Newlywed Nick Lachey, the series will follow a group of hopeful Zac Efrons and Vanessa Hudgenses as they compete for the big prize: a chance to star in a music video for the franchise's feature film threequel, High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much, so Disney recently sweetened the deal to include a couple singles and a possible network gig.

HSM: GITP starts tomorrow night on ABC with the first of a two-part premiere, to conclude on Monday. Here's a sneak peek.