Duralde places "Chuck and Larry" on a continuum with such ground-breaking films as "Philadephia" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" as well as other consciousness-raising comedies like "Tootsie," where Dustin Hoffman plays a man impersonating a woman, and "Soul Man," where C. Thomas Howell plays someone white passing for black.
I was right with you, Alonso, till you got to "Soul Man"...
This approach can be tricky, of course – feminists didn't complain about Hoffman playing a woman, but many people were up in arms over the idea of Howell donning "blackface," even if it was with the best of intentions.
Well, yeah. I think you also have to allow for the fact that "Tootsie," although it's got one or two plotholes big enough for a basketball player to walk through, is a very good movie. Whereas "Soul Man" was a bush league comedy trying to pass as important.
But then again, Duralde sends me spiraling into the corner grappling my own depression, with the final paragraph of his review of the movie.
...movies that are this stupid about gay life, made by straight people, exist as object lessons of why it's so very important that queer artists tell our own stories from our own point of view. Because if we leave it to the heterosexuals, obviously, they're going to get it all wrong.
Obviously.
3 comments:
What a pompous ass. It really irks me when members of any picked-on group tries to claim that they are more picked-on than any other group out there, and nobody could POSSIBLY understand them. Get over yourselves.
-A'mee
I would like to remind all that your story does not hinge on the fact that your characters are gay, it hinges on the usual emotions that are experienced in any relationship.
That's kind of what I mean, too. A lot of people allow the fact that they have some difference to completely define them and everything about them boils down to nothing more than "I am gay" or "I am black" or "I am ... whatever." Don't get me wrong, it's good to be proud of our differences, but when these same folks get so wrapped up in these differences and then have the nerve to lecture others about us "all being human underneath" I get really irritated. And the joy of writing from another's perspective, whether they be female, gay, or whatever is probably the discovery of all the similarities that all of us share, and highlighting those so that all of the readers can experience some one else's life that we may not live. And if we only wrote from our own life experiences, several genres (such as fantasy) would not even exist!
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