The Link Next Door
Sunday, August 5, 2018 at 11:00AM • Brain Pickings Marilyn Monroe's unpublished poems on the anniversary of her death
• Vulture Every Tom Cruise performance ranked. Interesting and sound choices mostly though I don't understand the #1 choice at all.
• TV Line The Americans wins big at the Television Critics Awards while Killing Eve is named best new series
• Salon has a piece on MoviePass troubles that is the most sane and balanced I've read. (I'm so sick of the disdain most articles have for a subscription that has meant so much to so many people and convinced them to see more movies - only a good thing!)
• Coming Soon Patrick Stewart to lead Star Trek again
• EW Lance Bass is buying the Brady Bunch house. Wha?
• Variety... spoke too soon. Lance Bass lost the house again. And it upset about the shady dealings!
Heated Discussion Point
As you may have heard by now Chloe Moretz has dissed the gay conversation camp drama Boy Erased sight unseen because the director isn't queer unlike her gay conversion camp drama The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Her reasoning is 'queer people should be making queer films'. As you may have guessed I have some feelings about this. A) Maybe people should wait until they see films before judging them and B) Maybe a straight woman taking a gay role when there are plenty of queer women who can act shouldn't be throwing such stones? and C) We should all be worrying about this emotionally and intellectually lazy epidemic of people demanding and assuming that artists stay in their lane and only do biographical work from here on out; Artists are capable of great leaps of imagination. Ang Lee is straight and made two great gay movies plus a smashingly good Austen adaptation and he definitely didn't grow up British and white and female in the 19th century. Spike Lee has made two terrific movies with non black leads (Summer of Sam and 25th Hour). White guy Hal Ashby made a fascinating movie about race (The Landlord). Todd Haynes and Pedro Almodovar tend to make amazing movies about women and only occasionally about gay men, though they are gay men. Steve McQueen's first two genius movies were about a white guy. Etcetera. Not everyone can or should be like Sofia Coppola and Woody Allen and just make movies about one specific kind of person or autobiographical milieu.
I don't want to discount the importance of minority voices telling their own stories. I just want there to be some balance in the discussion because imagination and artists who push themselves towards a wide range of expression are gifts to audiences. (All that said, Boy Erased might be terrible, who knows. But let's see it before we decide that.)
Finally...
Happy Centennial to Tom Drake. 100 years ago on this very day "The Boy Next Door" was born in Brooklyn.
Though he never became a household name, he worked steadily through the 1940s and 1950s in films like Meet Me In St Louis (1944), Mrs. Parkington (1944), Raintree County (1957), and Words and Music (1948) where he played Rodgers of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Rodgers & Hart musical fame. Some faces achieve immortality through proximity; Once you've heard Judy Garland yearn for him from him window and porch vantage point with "The Boy Next Door," you'll be ready to marry him on the spot, too.
Reader Comments (17)
Boy Erasd is based on a true story unlike Cameron Post. Chloe honey shut your straight ass up, no need to drag other movies if you want that oscar nom no one is going to give you in the first place.
Yes, it's an epidemic. These celebrities who demand "things to be as pure as possible" are falling into some kind of "there's no artistic freedom anymore". So full of good intentions but they are kinda poisoning artistic liberties... As a straight actor, for example, I can't play a LGBT character? I know I'm not part of the LGBT community, but some friends of mine are and now I'm not allowed to act and build a character that can be inspired by them? The same can be said about Ang Lee, like you said.
First, ScarJo for "Rub and Tug" and the project is dead. Now people are trashing about a movie yet to be released... Support minorities, yes please. But let's not forget artistic liberties, please
Meh, enough with the Tammy Cruise promotion.
I knew I never liked Chloe Moretz - overrated and awful. How could she think she could get away with saying this? This is almost as bad as Scarlett Johansson’s response to the trans casting drama.
When will people learn!
I saw 'Cameron Post' on Friday and personally found it very unimpressive. It sounds odd to say, but I thought it was a little unfair to the pro-ex-gay characters. Ehle's character in particular is an absolute monster. Of course I think that the ex-gay movement is horrible, but I suspect part of the allure in parents sending their kids to those camps is that it has a veneer of trying to build them up. From 'Cameron Post,' you'd think you were sending your kid to a concentration camp. The audience was legit laughing during the most terrible moments at how over the top the most 'righteous' characters were.
It may not be directed by a queer artist, but just from the trailer, Boy Erased seems to have a lot more nuance to it.
That Chloe Grace Moretz article had me seeing red on so many levels. First, she dismisses "Boy Erased" for being cast with "celebrities". Celebrities? More like two Oscar winners (Kidman & Crowe), an Oscar nominee (Ledge) and two enormously talented queer artists (Xavier Dolan and Troye Sivan). Second, why is it even necessary to attack another project with LGBT characters? Representation is so important right now with the alt-right trying to silence our voices. All this in-fighting in the queer community and attacking our straight allies is counterproductive.
Chloe Grace Moretz is a terribly untalented actress. The sneering and cursing was cute in the first KICK-ASS, but I’ve found her unwatachable in everything else (even CLOUDS OF SILS MARIAS). I almost told her this when I was in line behind her at Tender Greens in West Hollywood a couple of years ago, but I had an attack of conscience and couldn’t be so cruel...
jesus christ guys. the chloe hate around here is off the charts. she is just a kid
@Ryan Crowe- Im glad you witheld. else, you’d be the fuckwad
Yeah, that's a pretty good ranking of the Cruise performances - not that I agree with all of it (and as you say, #1 is a very unexpected choice), but I appreciate the reasoning behind it, and it made me think about a thing or two. Good piece.
Chloe’s heart is in the right place (maybe, could just be her pride/arrogance talking), but I think shes missing the point on a lot of levels. Whoever wrote that Cruise list is insane. Interview With A Vampire? Seriously?
I just saw the #1 movie on the Tom Cruise list earlier this year, and it made me consider what a great movie star he is, so I've been slowly returning to some of the gaps I've missed in his filmography. It wouldn't be my #1, but it is a riveting performance.
Best depiction of gay teen love I have seen is Isak & Even from the Norwegian series SKAM. And both actors are straight!
a) Moretz is 21.
b) Nathaniel's "B"
c) Jamie Clayton's comments on non-trans performers playing trans roles applies here, imo.
“woman of diversity”
Chloe Grace Moretz's heart is in the right place, let's not attack her (she's an ally even if this attack feels inappropriate coming from a straight woman, though she's a straight woman with two gay brothers who likely as a result feels her ally-ship as a core tenet of her personage). That said, Nathaniel's right-let's not attack a film that hasn't come out yet, and diversity shouldn't mean us all "staying in our own lanes."
Also, Interview with a Vampire as the #1 Tom Cruise performance?!? Really? I personally think it's Minority Report, but I can think of a dozen Cruise perfs that can knock the socks off of his Lestat, including all three of his Oscar-cited turns.
Arkaan -- which Jamie Clayton quote are you talking about?
John T -- i hope this didn't read as attacking her. I just have genuine concerns about what she said... i think had she thought it through she might not have said it (since she is a straight actor playing a gay role which kind of defeats her point).
hmmm minority report, eh? I think his best two performances are Jerry Maguire and Magnolia but maybe they read as to "obvious" as choices since they both won him so much acclaim.
I think Chloe has some ground to stand on here in that she does explain that Boy Erased has been
made and is inherently, to some degree, seen through the white male gaze/from that perspective, which is true. She didn't direct her film, and to hold the two positions (director and actor) as equal doesn't seem right.
I think what we miss so often in this debate about who gets to tell which stories is that we rarely see it go both ways. How many queer actors do we get to see in straight roles, and of those, how many of those queer actors came out after their career had already been established? We don't see big projects with queer people starring in queer roles because those actors aren't bankable enough to get the project made...wouldn't they perhaps be more bankable if they had the same shot at the breadth of roles that white het cis people do? The "stay in your lane" thing assumes everyone has the same freedom to move between lanes, and it doesn't work that way. It's more like a person in a minority has one key for one door, and a person in privilege has one key that opens a multitude of doors. Since we as consumers don't have the power to give everyone the key of multitudes, shouldn't we fight for everyone to stay in their lane until we see meaningful progress toward more diversity of representation in entertainment?