Great Performances That Didn't

Even Get a Stinking Oscar Nomination

BEST ACTRESS

Laura Dern in Citizen Ruth
Reese Witherspoon in Election
Lili Taylor in I Shot Andy Warhol
Shelley Duvall in The Shining
Sissy Spacek in 3 Women
Kathy Bates in Dolores Claiborne
Kerry Fox in An Angel at My Table
Nicole Kidman in To Die For
CCH Pounder & Marianne Sägerbrecht in Bagdad Café
Alicia Silverstone in Clueless
Mira Sorvino in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion
Bjork in Dancer in the Dark
Gena Rowlands in Opening Night
Pam Greer in Jackie Brown
Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight
Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom
Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest
Julianne Moore in Safe
Kirsten Dunst in Drop Dead Gorgeous
Ana Torrent in The Spirit of the Beehive
Amy Sedaris in Strangers With Candy


BEST ACTOR

Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas
Matthew Broderick in Election
Robert DeNiro in The King of Comedy
John Turturro in Barton Fink
Cillian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto
John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Toby Jones in Infamous
Divine in Pink Flamingos
Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Woody Allen in Zelig
Paul Giamatti in Sideways

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Carly Shroeder in Mean Creek
Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas
Sandra Oh in Sideways
Practically the entire female ensemble in The Dead Girl, especially Mary Beth Hurt
Dolly Parton in 9 to 5
Rosanna Arquette in After Hours
Linda Fiorentino in After Hours
Sandra Bernhard in The King of Comedy
Hope Davis in American Splendor
Geneviève Lemon in Sweetie
Illeana Douglas in Ghost World
Mary Kay Place in just about anything

Nancy Allen in Blow Out

Lisa Kudrow in The Opposite of Sex
Janeane Garafalo in Romy and Michele
Beth Grant in Donnie Darko
Christina Ricci in Addams Family Values
Jane Adams in Happiness
Sigourney Weaver in The Ice Storm
Mink Stole in Female Trouble
Karen Black in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
Allison Janney in Drop Dead Gorgeous

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Hunter Carson in Paris, Texas
Matt Dillon in To Die For
Bob Balaban in Midnight Cowboy
Steve Buscemi in Ghost World
Samuel L. Jackson in Jungle Fever
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Happiness
Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart

Please let me know who you'd like to see on the list!

Trash Time!

On a good day the $10 Radio Shack antenna on my roof picks up four local stations - and for the most part the reception is fuzzier than a recently licked lollipop in a pile of cat fur. Even though I've caught up with The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Carnivale, Weeds, The L Word and other shows on DVD, modern cable TV programming remains a complete mystery to me. As a hot-blooded gay man I sometimes wish I had access to the queer networks Logo and here!, but as a film critic for a gay and lesbian magazine I figure I get to see most noteworthy American and international queer filmmaking anyway.

While browsing the DVD selection at Amazon the other day I came across a majorly slutty looking here! production called Dante's Cove. As you can tell from the photo I've posted, this is a show where clothing is optional, and all the actors look like they've been sprayed to death with PAM cooking spray so that their bodies glisten, and so they can perform Slip & Slide daredevil acts when they're humping. Needless to say my Prurience Meter redlined, and I headed straight to the video store to pick up season one.

Five words sum up my reaction. OH MY DEAR SWEET LORD. This show is a major train wreck filled with craptastic acting, totally cliched dialogue and oodles of soft porn scenes that - despite the hotness of the men and women involved - are quite boring because the characters are so lame that they fail to allure with their six-pack abdomens and perfectly sculpted ass checks.

What saves Dante's Cove from being completely unwatchable is its outrageous and playful supernatural premise. The show's prologue gives a glimpse of the island's lurid history. It's 1840, and an insanely jealous witch named Grace sentences her fiance Ambrosius to eternity in a torture chamber when she discovers him in flagrante delicto with another dude. She can't help but feel for him a little bit, so she throws in a provision that he will be released and restored to his youthful studliness if he's ever discovered and kissed by another man.

Flash forward to the present, where our dipshit hero, Kevin, flees his oppressive parents to go live with his boyfriend, Toby, on Dante's Cove. Kevin meets all of Toby's oversexed friends, including some lesbians, a guy who seems to be closeted and a straight couple who loves to get it on beneath white mosquito netting while gay guys check out their pioneering bumping and grinding techniques.

At the end of the first episode - and this is as far as I've gotten and perhaps as far as I'll ever get - Kevin goes to the basement of the Hotel Dante (where they all live and where all the crazy voodoo witchcraft shit happened in the past) to get some beer. A voice calls his name from beneath a padlocked trapdoor. He manages to open it (it helps that the padlock isn't actually locked) and find the old and decrepit Ambrosius, who forces a lip lock on Kevin, thus bringing back all the youthful Goth vigor that makes his 1840 lifestyle so fiendishly singular. Some bloodletting and mayhem ensues, but I won't give away all the details in case you want to experience this masterwork of shallow and "sexy" queer horror on your own.

Knowing me and my love for Showgirls, I'll be completely hooked after a few more episodes.

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Alfred A. Knopf, $25

Michael Ondaatje is best known for The English Patient -the Booker Prize winning novel that made an Oscar-winning leap to the big screen in 1996. I've never gotten around to reading it, even though several friends have told me that Anthony Minghella's film doesn't do justice to Ondaatje's lapidary prose or his complex psychological insights.

I did read In the Skin of the Lion, and passages from Anil's Ghost. In both cases Ondaatje's beautiful writing floored me to a point but ultimately left me cold. The recent publication of Divisadero made a big splash in the literary world, however, and I decided to give it a whirl.

Set over the course of about a century in locations such as Northern California and rural France, Divisadero is consistently engaging and - as we've come to expect from Ondaatje - meticulously crafted. The first half of the novel explores the vast repercussions of an illicit affair between a teenage girl named Anna and an older, orphaned young man named Cooper who works on Anna's father's farm. Anna and Cooper flee, separately, to reinvent themselves elsewhere, while Anna's adopted sister, Claire, maintains a connection with the father.

Ondaatje takes us on a tour of Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas, where Cooper becomes a master card shark. Anna's journey paves the way for the rather forced transition to the book's second half. She grows up to be a French literature scholar, and travels to a French hamlet to live in the home of a celebrated writer named Lucien Segura. At this point the narrative goes back in time to chronicle Lucien's life and - surprise, surprise - all the things his life has in common with the makeshift family in 1970s California.

It would be futile to dispute the sheer beauty of the language, but Divisadero left me quite unsatisfied. It felt like Ondaatje had two separate novels in mind at some point and crammed them together for some mad creative writing/science experiment. The two plots do not reflect one another in a provocative manner, leaving me wishing that he had just published two novellas instead. And there's no escaping the fact that sometimes Ondaatje crosses the line from poetry to pretension, particularly in the passage where Anna's first person narration sounds more like Walt Whitman than a modern day American woman in her late 30s - no matter how educated she is.

In case you're wondering, the title has two meanings that I know of. First, it refers to Divisadero Street in San Francisco, where Claire lives as an adult. Secondly it recalls the Spanish word "divisar," which means to gaze at something from a distance.

Now on DVD (and still kicking around in some indie theaters):

Broken English

I've been a big Parker Posey fan ever since she unleashed her giddy and bitchy star power in mid-1990s films like Party Girl, Waiting for Guffman and The House of Yes. In 2002 I even got to interview her in conjunction with the release of her Sundance Film Festival hit Personal Velocity. True, she's been in some pretty bad films over the past few years (Adam & Steve, Superman Returns and The Oh in Ohio, to name a few). But until tonight I've always stuck with her till the final credits rolled.

Broken English is the debut effort from writer director Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of pioneering indie director John Cassavetes and powerhouse actress Gena Rowlands. In a word, it sucks. It's a "romantic" "comedy" so riddled with cliches and bad craftsmanship that I couldn't stand to watch it past the thirty minute mark. At first I thought the whole enterprise would be buoyed by the good cast even if the story lacked spark. Apart from Ms. Posey, the ensemble includes Gena Rowlands, Justin Theroux, Peter Bogdanovich and Drea de Matteo from The Sopranos. No such luck. Ms. Cassavetes's lack of experience (and talent) is evident in a brain-numbing stream of boring and graceless scenes. Obviously she's trying to emulate the naturalistic techniques of her father, but couldn't her production team have sprung for an extra light bulb or two for the dim rooms where most of the scenes take place?

Next up for Parker? Hopefully she'll hit her stride again in 2008 with The Eye - a remake of a Hong Kong horror movie - and Spring Breakdown, a comedy in which she'll share the screen with Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler, Jane Lynch and other funny ladies.

Coming Soon to Theatres:

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Grade: B+

For many kids in the 1980s, drinking Slurpees while playing a gazillion games of Ms. Pac Man was a thrilling rite of passage that caused untold amounts of brain damage. Seth Gordon’s gripping and sometimes hilarious documentary studies a subculture of adults who never outgrew this phase, focusing on two men vying for the Donkey Kong world record. The seemingly trivial subject matter churns up unexpectedly profound insights into America’s unhealthy obsession with competition. But even at 80 minutes the film feels overstretched by the final reel.

Now on DVD:

The Lookout

Grade: C

This directing debut from screenwriter Scott Frank (Out of Sight) opened earlier this year to terrific reviews, and became an early favorite in the Oscar race at movie buzz websites. Despite all the good press the flick raked in a measly $4.5M at the box office, and it vanished quickly from theaters. The DVD came out today, and I rented it under the presumption that an overlooked gem awaited me. But to my mind The Lookout is a major dud, and the praise bewilders me. Joseph Gordon-Levitt - who was terrific in Mysterious Skin - plays a young man who sustains a severe brain injury in a reckless driving incident. In the voice-over narration he reminds himself to wake up every day, to take a shower with soap, to ... wait, didn't we see this already in Memento? We sure did, only Christopher Nolan's 2000 stunner was a true original, while Frank's whole film is derivative of Memento and other superior film noirs about people who are fucked in the head. You can see all the plot twists coming a mile away, and Gordon-Levitt's final showdown with a bunch of bully bank robbers plays like late night action TV tripe. And apart from Jeff Daniel's competent but unremarkable turn as a horny blind guy, the supporting cast is thoroughly dreadful.

Coming Soon:

Rocket Science
Grade: A

Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound) won top directing honors at Sundance for this dark coming-of-age comedy about a stuttering teenager cast adrift in the fast-talking world of high school debate competitions. Like Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, the film delivers a razor sharp screenplay and a breakthrough performance by an unknown teen actor. The charmingly gawky Reece Thompson evokes all the humiliation, heartaches and transient joy that adolescence has to offer. Fargo fans can rejoice that Steve Park of Mike Yanagita fame has a hilarious supporting role.

Introducing Otik

The other day my partner Drew dug up a tree root that looked so oddly human that I couldn't resist dolling it up and naming it Otik (after the surreal Czech film Little Otik, a modern day folk tale about a childless couple who raise a tree root that turns out to have murderous intentions). I used Wellbutrin and Klonopin tablets for the eyes, a coffee bean for the nose (painted with green nail polish) and a lipstick-smothered pistachio shell for the mouth. I topped off his ensemble with a red rag diaper and a cap made of wallpaper and a silver satin ribbon.

The Bourne Ultimatum
Grade: B-

Yeah, the latest installment in the Jason Bourne saga raked in $70 mil at the box office last weekend and, yeah, it boasts a formidable 94% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. But I'm going to step in for a second and ask, "What's the big whoop?" I dig the international scenery and the chase scenes as much as anyone, and I thought the nervy supporting performances from Joan Allen and David Stathairn made up for Matt Damon's tedious stoicism and Julia Stiles complete lack of dramatic acting ability. But in the end Ultimatum left me cold because I felt like I'd seen it all before (if not in the previous Bourne movies, then The French Connection), and I had hoped that talented director Paul Greengrass would put a new spin on these tired old spy games.

Sunshine

Grade: B-

Nothing is more frustrating than a perfectly satisfying movie that takes a disastrous wrong turn, becoming so awful in the home stretch that you can barely remember its virtues by the time you stumble out of the theater in a brain-dead stupor. Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King is one of those films, if memory serves, and James Cameron's The Abyss is another promising movie that ends, well, abysmally.

The latest offender is Danny Boyle's current release, Sunshine. Rising star Cillian Murphy (a great drag queen in Breakfast on Pluto) plays a physicist aboard a do-or-die mission to re-ignite the dying sun before the human race dies out. Despite the cool concept, a solid cast and beautiful special effects, Sunshine inexplicably morphs from an intriguing character study to a stupid monster movie that miserably fails to emulate classic deep space thrillers like Alien.