Mark Marchillo | The Curse of the Un-Kissable Kid / 2013

i’m just wild about harry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Marchillo (screenwriter, based on a story by him and Matt Marr, and director) The Curse of the Un-Kissable Kid / 2013 (13 minutes)

 

Marchillo’s message, aimed at younger kids in The Curse of the Un-Kissable Kid is far more charming and, in the end I believe, helpful in permitting seemingly unloved gay boys come to terms with childhood dilemmas than is Adam Baran's Jackpot, another one of the films connected in gay magic.

      It begins with the school bully Ryder (Joseph Haag), on the very last day of school, searching through the men’s room to find and torture the young boy Josh (William Leon). Josh, meanwhile, is hiding out in the women’s bathroom, but even when he finally escapes from his hideout there he still meets with the bully who throws him to the ground, spits on him, and throws dirt and grass on his face.

      A meeting with an obviously queer Principal (Drew Droege) does nothing to improve the situation since he is obviously more interested in completing his crossword puzzle than in meting out any fair punishment to the attacker, arguing to Josh that he simply needs to learn to fend for himself, obviously sharing the viewpoint of director Adam Baran.

     At home after the event, as Josh hides out in his locked room, we perceive that his father (Brady Matthews) is no better than the school administrator in actually communicating with his son, suggesting that everything is okay even if he doesn’t want to open the door and talk to him and his wife. Every choice for them seems to be based on whatever least troubles their son; so empty are their attempts in communication that while his father speaks, Josh opens his bedroom window and escapes.

      He rides his bike immediately over to the town fair, meeting up with his best friend Caitlyn (Liv Southard) who is out strolling with a friend whom she introduces to Josh as “just Clark” (Christopher Bones) who she is apparently using as a carrier for stuffed animals she’s won, candy cotton, popcorn and whatever else one accumulates at such county and town fairs. She met Clark, so she tells Josh, at day camp, leaning closer to whisper to her friend, “He’s rich.”

     But almost immediately Josh spots his nemesis once more, and again is on the run, with Caitlyn screaming after, “I seriously think you’re helpless without me, helpless.”

      With no place else to go, Josh slips in the back of a small tent announcing that there is a “gypsy inside.”

     In the dark, Josh is suddenly accosted by the gypsy (Lee Meriwether) who declares: “I’ve been waiting for you. Quite a long time.”

      “I have to go see my friends,” he insists, to which the gypsy answers, “No, you have no friends.”

      And like all such county fair gypsies, when he begs to know how much it’s going to cost she asks him to close his eyes.

      We are, of course, getting near to the territory of another great adult children’s tale, The Wizard of Oz, and like the male gypsy in that work, she finds out a great deal about him from simply by riffling through his pockets, pulling out a five-dollar bill, and offering him something that she is certain will work for him, a special potion which she insists will make all of his problems disappear. She hands it to him as he stares at her in vague wonderment, she snapping him back to reality by demanding ten bucks!

     Outside the tent again, he opens the elixir and drinks without even reading the label. When he finally reads the fine print he discovers: “Congratulations, after drinking this you will disappear within 24 hours unless you experience true love’s kiss.” A rather astounding demand to suddenly put on a 12- or 13-year-old who clearly also has other problems to face. “Good luck with that,” the bottle’s fine print message concludes.

      By the next morning while he sits in a garage with Caitlyn who is apparently attempting to sell encyclopedias, he explains his situation, putting his hand out to reveal that already it has begun to fade. “What am I going to do?”

      “Well, I guess you’re just going to have to kiss around a bit.”

      For a moment he looks back at her, an unspoken pleading in his eyes to which she reacts: “What? Oh no you don’t” Clearly she’s not the true lover he’s seeking. Yet he still tries, complimenting her on her looks, and remarking on their long friendship; but the moment they move together to possibly kiss, her mother appears, shocked and ranting against even the possibility of her baby being kissed my a boy: “My God. You know what happens to little girls....they grow up and become hookers.” Clearly, her mother, like Josh’s Dad, does not offer successful parenting skills.

      Josh is on the run once more. And his whole torso is now beginning to fade in and out. He attempts to rush up to several women, who quickly rebuff his attempted kisses. When he tries to kiss a baby, the mother hurries off with the child in the carriage. Even a dog runs off. When he attempts to pay a young hooker, she grabs the money, shakes her head, and walks away.

      Back at the fair, Josh mans a “kissing booth,” with Caitlyn trying to sell tickets in support of “ugly orphan babies.” “Maybe you should change your hair,” she suggests, trying also to reassure him, “It will be okay.” Finally, she leans quickly forward and plants a kiss on his lips. For an instant they both think maybe...until he looks down to see his legs have left his pants.

     Suddenly someone comes up to the booth to buy a ticket. It’s just Clark, who kisses Josh on the lips giving Josh immediate new life, Caitlyn nodding to the camera, “I knew it.”

      Looking down to see that his legs have returned, Josh says, “Thanks Clark,” to which the other boy replies, “It’s actually Harry. Caitlyn just doesn’t like it.”

      A few second later the boys go into a rousing dance number of “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and Caitlyn suggests the bully, Ryker, take a drink from the still half-full bottle that Josh bought from the gypsy. Assuming it’s alcohol, he complies.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Adam Baran | Jackpot / 2012

real magic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Baran (screenwriter and director) Jackpot / 2012 (9.38 minutes)

 

Adam Baran’s Jackpot is not outwardly about magic or potions which might transfer a straight boy to become a potential gay lover. Besides, the frustrated young man of this story Jack Hoffman

(Ethan Novarro) is only 14 and, accordingly, too young in most US states to even have sex with another human being. But Jack can’t even find any good “wanking” material. Like me in the mid-1950s he has only pictures cut out of newspapers and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue of men in pajamas or underwear to create a jack-off fantasy. I even found a cute bare-chested volunteer for The Peace Corps in my family’s set of encyclopedias that helped meet my needs.

     The film is set in 1994, when there were plenty of juicy gay magazines available, but not if your parents watched your every move and regularly checked out the contents of your bedroom, as we can only suspect is Jack’s situation.

     He also lives, quite apparently, in a small town where if he were to enter a store selling any kind of gay porno he’d be noticed. In fact, at the moment this film begins, he is even afraid of leaving the house for fear that he may be beaten up by the town bully, Billy Hook (Ryan DeLuca) and his friends, determined to make life impossible for anyone they describe as a “fag.”

     Interrupted in his frustrating attempts to masturbate by a phone call, Jack is told by his best friend Sammy (George DeNoto) that he and has friends, while obviously dumpster diving, found a huge stash of porn magazines, which after quickly perusing, they were forced to leave behind, Sammy preventing his friend from burning them.

     Suddenly Jack is motivated to leave the house, riding his bicycle as quickly as possible to the designated dumpster, diving in, and finally retrieving the pile of gay magazines. He quickly begins stuffing them into a plastic bag to speed them off to a secret shrine in his bedroom when, quite  magically, one of the cover porn artists, Ricky Swayze (Adam Fleming) appears to him in real life, insisting that Jack leave the rest and stuff the magazine in which he appears in six different roles into his back pocket.

      But Jack refuses, insisting quite forcibly that he wants “it” all, hungry clearly for having waited so long for just such a treasure.

      But before he can even begin stuffing them in the bag, Billy and his gang appear—now realizing that Jack truly is a “fag”—eager to, as he puts it, to make him “die.” Even while Jack is talking to Billy, Swayze appears again, this time as a cop, correcting Jack’s lie about intending to burn the material: “You know you going to take this magazine home to jack-off to me!” which, as in so many films where figures attempt to talk to phantoms and real human beings simultaneously (think of Blithe Spirit, 1945 and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1947) things quickly grow out of hand.

     Swayze tells Jack to “deck him,” but Jack is none too sure that he can “take this guy” as the gay model suggests, and almost immediately goes on the run.

     As Jack sprints into the woods he again meets up with Swayze, now dressed in football quarterback gear, who asks why he didn’t believe that he could have “decked” Billy and his bozos. Out of breath, Jack gasps back, “You’re not real.” to which Swayze argues, “If I’m not real what do you call 4 covers of Mandate, 3 specs in Torso....”  and a gig in The Pizza Boy Delivers.

     Running even further into the woods, Jack finally trips on a log and falls face forward, exhausted and out of breath. He lifts his head up to the sky only to see Swayze as a cowboy looming over him. “Dead, aren’t I.” “Could be better,” the porn star retorts. “But I’ve seen guys packed into tighter spaces come out on top!”

     Jack pulls out the magazine from his hip pocket throws it down and bends down preparing to masturbate, Swayze asking him what he’s doing. “What does it look like I’m doing? If I’m going to die I’m going to least enjoy my last moments on earth.”

     But Swayze talks him out of it, arguing “It’s too bad you won’t fight back. Pathetic actually.”

     Jack rises, “You think I’m pathetic, what about you? You’re just some loser gay porn star in bunch of cheesy costumes.”

     It’s not about me, the porn star reacts. “Gettin’ beaten up doesn’t mean you don’t win. Especially if you get want you want. Meaning me.”

     The last frames show Jack with several dark bruises and a shiner, lying on his bed staring at the magazine with his friend on the cover, front and back.

     Evidently Baran’s simplistic theme is that you have to take the blows as a young gay boy to get your just desserts. As he wrote about his film, “I really made the film because I loved teen movies and never really saw one for gay kids that both addressed their sexuality in the way that straight movies like Weird Science or American Pie or Superbad did, and let them get what they want. Jack in my film learns that he has to fight back for what he wants, even if it means he has to take a couple of licks. I think that’s a resonant message for gay kids everywhere.”

     I can’t say his message is very profound or that I perceive violence as a necessary passage through gay youth. I don’t think it made me any better for having endured a couple of just such  beatings. If anything, it forced me to stay at arm’s and mind’s length from my peers through my school years until I escaped to Europe in my senior year. And, unfortunately, one such beating does always satisfy those fearful of that frightening magic you hold in your desire. Surely Swayze won’t get him through the difficult times ahead anymore that the ghostly talking porn stars helped solve the problems of Michael Waters and Scott Favor in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Douglas Messerli | Gay Magic [Introduction]

gay magic

by Douglas Messerli

Throughout most of history LGBTQ forms of love and sexual activity seemed to the majority of the population exceptional and abnormal to the degree that it became something almost incomprehensible and accordingly dangerous and magical, an inexplicable form of love that one might associate with witchery and the devil, becoming ultimately something evil and illegal to be destroyed and wiped out, creating what today we describe as homophobia and its most common manifestation of the threats of the gay bullies and bashers.

     This relationship with magic, in fact, continues throughout gay and heterosexual literature and is retained in so many numerous popular songs of inexplicable or unexplainable love that sometimes love itself—both heterosexual and homosexual—comes to be aligned with magic and witchcraft. What else do dozens songs such as “That Old Devil Moon,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and “It’s Witchcraft” suggest?

      LGBTQ cinema has had a great many films that involved witchcraft and magic, as early as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray we see an artist so spellbound by his obviously beautiful narcissist subject that he argues the process of painting itself felt like magic, as if something had possessed his brush. And, of course, the painting is magical, allowing the true variations of Gray’s evil life to be hidden from his living human visage.

      And as in Wilde’s work the mirror image of the young student of Prague (in Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s film of that name) held his double, a trope stolen from Edgar Allen Poe’s story “William Wilson.”

     The secret seed of Sidney Drew’s A Florida Enchantment (1914) could change one’s sexuality to lesbian, bisexuality, or transgender. And the Frankenstein family’s monstrous creations and the various Dracula myths were represented as obvious examples of toying with magic and the occult that provided evidence of a love that lay not only outside of normal human culture but outside of life itself?

     The uninvited ghosts of lesbian love were conjured up in Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited (1944) and a whole household of crazy queers were caught boiling up poison potions, murdering, and torturing others in Arsenic and Old Lace of the same year, enough to make the youngest born, sibling Mortimer wonder about his ability to offer a normal sexual relationship to his new bride, marriage itself having been previously constitutionally against his principles.

     And it is this affiliation with LGBTQ sexuality to magic or witchery that led me to argue that the seeming heterosexual comedy Book, Bell, and Candle (1958) is actually a highly coded LGBTQ story, about, once again, an entire family of outsiders, secretly witches, meaning that they are involved in a queer world with its own nightclubs, underground network of friends, magic talismans and potions, forcing one to do all sorts of things you might never imagined, including falling suddenly in love.

     Is it any wonder that even in the 21st century we still find LGBTQ films that employ just such tropes?

     The five films below US director Adam Baran’s Jackpot (2012), Marc Marchillo’s The Curse of the Un-Kissable Kid (2013), Brazilian director Octabo Chamorro’s Floozy Suzy (2015), Columbian-born Juan Sebastián Valencia’s Magico (2019), and Mexican director Axel Barranco’s Wish (2020) represent just of few of queer films dealing with magic in various manifestations, some actually with wands and potions, others simply with spells, but all ending in love.

Los Angeles, July 20, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2021).

Anthony Hickling | Little Gay Boy, chrisT is Dead / 2012

savage christ

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Hickling and Amaury Grisel (screenplay), Anthony Hickling (director) Little Gay Boy, chrisT is Dead / 2012 [30 minutes]

 

This is now the third time I have watched Little Gay Boy, chrisT is Dead, not to mention a couple of its scenes which have been posted on porn sites. The first two times I saw it, I perhaps interpreted it as most viewers had, as a slightly homophobic work that portrayed a young boy treated so abusively by the society around him that he himself has become a BDSM performer, ending up the film in basement sex in gay bar in a sling with a belt around his neck while being brutally fucked.

     After all, the poor cutie Jean Christophe (Gaëtan Vettier) has hardly begun his day when on his way to his job on the metro a man sitting nearby suddenly describes him as a faggot and a “fucking puff,” gets up and verbally abuses him before slapping his face. It appears that incident might even have ended in the boy getting an erection.

     At work as a cleaning boy in a moderne furniture shop filled with outrageous crap, he encounters a boss who is at first somewhat friendly, before a few minutes later, as Jean Christophe is cleaning the toilet, enters, dunks his end into the toilet bowl and pisses on him while screaming out that the boy is a queer who probably likes it.

      Jean Christophe has dreams of possibly becoming a fashion model. But the first photographer he visits (François Brunet), while at first seeming to be interested in having the boy model different outfits, quickly asks him to keep his shirt off, then take off his jeans, pull down his underpants a bit lower, and finally to pose naked.

  He forlornly returns home only to be confronted by his grossly overweight English mother (Amanda Dawson) who works as a prostitute, demanding he massage her feet, while managing to display her vagina and trying to encourage him to explore it with his fingers. When he refuses and storms out, she too disgustedly names her own son as a poof.

     As he exits his building he accidently crashes into a transvestite, who outraged that he has made her drop her newspaper in the collision, demands he pick it up. Soon after, whether in reality or simply in his head, we see her whipping the boy as she plays the role as dominatrix.

     The second “fashion” photographer he visits (Alvaro Lombard) is far worse than the first, who by the time we see them together has not only demanded that the boy be completely naked but is instructing him in how to spread his legs and reveal his bare butt. Insisting that he put on a pair of skimpy pink shorts, he demands he get down on all fours and reveal his ass to the camera.

      Between each of these indignities, performance actors and dancers play out the internal hurts with, in one case, a dancer (Biño Sauitzvy), covered in white chalk growing more and more bloody as events accrue.

      Several others are tied up and bound BDSM style as they swing in space. While the second photographer touches and arranges his ass one actor plays out a fist fucking scene. Others stick needles into their chests as the blood slowly drips down their bodies.

     By the time day is almost over, Jean Christophe returns home despondently, ending up in the bathtub with his mamma who simply holds him, as tear runs down his cheek.

     At night, he visits the gay bar I already mentioned, downs a half-pint of beer and heads toward the basement sex den. Is it any wonder in a world of such hatred that boy should have come to associate pain with love?

     As if to prove their point, director Anthony Hickling and his co-writer Amaury Grisel eventually portray their hero as a kind of savage Christ. Not the Christ the Holy Bible, but an alternative Christ of outsiderness, of gore and blood.

     But that is perhaps to take all of this far too seriously. And I now realize that was why I kept turning away from this nonetheless fascinating film. It was simply too painful to watch, let alone to speak of it objectively.

      I have finally come to see this work, however, as a kind of comedy. The clue came in observing the cover of the original DVD. In the image the words make clear that the title also serves as a kind of anagram, spelling out that the LGBT, like Christ, is dead.

   And suddenly, I realized that this is more of a comedy than a tragedy. No young gay boy could possibly suffer, even if he sought it out, so much abuse in a single day. This film, rather, stands as an almost comic fantasy of the abuses still facing queer individuals despite all the supposed gains made by the Rainbow community. And it serves as a sort of underground comic vision that is no more or less fantastical than the LGBTQ approved scenarios such as the Doritos ad of only year earlier (2011) that fantasized that even a straight neighbor might be interested in the cute gay boys next door or, later works such Love, Simon (2018) in which everyone in his high school is desperate to help Simon find his gay love. Even more recently, the fantasies have multiplied, such as the more recent Heartstopper (2022-2014, a fourth season recently announced) where the openly gay boy Charlie not only wins over the bullies, finds love with the head of the ruby team, but befriends two young lesbians, one white and black, while his nerdy Asian friend falls in love with a black transexual girl, and his overweight friend, his face always buried in a book, happily discovers he’s Ace or asexual. Everyone here lives in world that can’t possibly exist but which is firmly approved, the film having checked off all the proper boxes of sexual representation, by the LGBTQ community. So too is the fantasy of Red, White, & Royal Blue (2023) in which the son of the female President of the USA falls madly in love with the future King of England pure hogwash, yet gushed over by the LGBTQ community in general.

      Hickling simply takes an alternate view, creating a fantasy of cruelty, an exaggeration of the issues which the LGBTQ community seems to have forgotten in it is demands for disparate representation. Both versions, the positive and negative, are mirror fantasies of sorts, although I believe Hickling takes himself less seriously, and, in fact, may be closer to the truth. What happened to sex in the Rainbow world? Hickling grabs us by the balls or the cunts and demands we feel something again about our sexual organs.

      Of course, there is a middle ground. One can take joy and pleasure in the Rainbow fantasies of the now hundreds of works such as Heartstopper and still work as an activist for real change in the actual homophobic world, one that over the next four years, with Donald Trump once more as president, will surely grow even more unfriendly to our sexual differences. Hickling, in 2012, could perhaps not even imagine just how right he was in his fantasy of a world that had retreated into a hate of queers. In his film, even the transsexuals hate “them.” Only time will tell whether the original goals of the LGBTQ community have been lost or rediscovered, whether it is moribund anagram or still shows signs of meaningful life. Will all those now happy married queer couples, living basically heterosexual lives, come to its rescue? That is a question I have had to ask even of myself.                                                                                                                                               

Los Angeles, December 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Jessie Lee Mills and Brian Sutow | Fall to Fame / 2020

melancholia

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ashlee Curtis, Jacob Seidman, and Brian Sutow (screenplay), Jessie Lee Mills and Brian Sutow (directors) Fall to Fame / 2020

 

After several hit musical albums, young gay singer Will (Antonio Marziale), now nominated for a Grammy Award, has been through a long, tough day of interviews, when suddenly he comes face to face in his last interview with his former lover, Brandon (Jacob Seidman).

     Will’s producer/manager/agent Danny (Blake Boyd), now Will’s financé for whom he left Brandon, attempts to stop the interview, but Will insists that he can handle it, although we have seen him nearly fall into a near-comatose reverie in the previous interview.

     Danny’s first question concerns the increasing melancholia of Will’s music, to which Will answers that as he grows older he becomes more self-reflective and perceives his own failures. So far so good.

   Danny then proceeds to suggest that some may speak about the inappropriateness of his long relationship with an older man who also serves as his producer and manager, and again Will seems to answer the question successfully, noting that such people to do not truly understand their full relationship in which they have so very much in common, most notably that they both know how to get what they want out of life.

     But the final question goes unanswered, although through a series of momentary flashbacks we already know the answer: “Are you happy?”

     It’s clear that Will has traded personal happiness and love for a career, the story of so very many artists. And the sadness that goes with that often helps to enrich they artistry, but leaves them with a great sense of emptiness and unfulfillment. One need only look, for example, at the career of Judy Garland, or even more to the point of gay fulfillment, the several times someone like Cary Grant was forced to give up his love affair with Randolph Scott for the sake of his career.

     But these are merely associative possibilities. As IMDb commentator (under the moniker Cinema Surf) observes: “…the film is way too short to do justice to a storyline that hints at complexity. I found that what we finished up with here is just a bit too incomplete and bitty for me.”

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Unknown filmmaker | The French Exchange — Renault Clio: Thirty Years in the Making / 2019

women in love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Unknown filmmaker The French Exchange — Renault Clio: Thirty Years in the Making / 2019 [2 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

In 2019 Renault Clio made an ad aimed at lesbians, what might almost be described as a lesbian melodrama. It begins with a British mother driving a young unhappy and somewhat frightened girl in her Renault Clio to the bus which takes her to a exchange summer in France.

    There she meets up with a girl of her age and they become close, and by the time they return  home have become close friends, sleepy heads against each other’s shoulders, and a hug as they leave one another’s company at the shuttle.

      In the next scene they have grown into teenagers, and still have a close relationship, going for a swim together in the ocean and kissing one another in a rather steamy teenage love scene. 

        Every time they meet up, of course, they travel by Renault Clios, each time in a different color.

      But finally, there seems to be a confrontation between one of the girls and her father (one article explains he has read one of the love letters exchanged with her girlfriend), and in the next frame she is being married to a man, with her English friend in attendance, as the bride sadly looks back over her shoulder at her former close friend.

    In the next frame, she is packing up her things, obviously leaving her husband, filling up the truck of her Clio and driving off to the shuttle which takes her back to her English girlfriend, the two hugging and driving off in a brand new red Clio.

    In the last scene, they return to as an adult couple with girls of their own to visit the British girl’s parents.

    The musical accompaniment here is a piano version of Oasis' "Wonderwall," with a female vocal. And although the director is unnamed, the film was made by the Publicus-Poke advertising firm.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).