Jason Gould | Inside Out / 1997

catharsis

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Gould (writer and director) Inside Out / 1997

 

Aaron Gould (Jason Gould) is cute, charming, and clever—almost everything you might want in a gay man in his 20s. Yet is has a few serious problems. He finds it difficult to meet new men, and more importantly to stay in longer relationships with them. Even the “smart, successful” date “with gorgeous hair and nice teeth” (Steven Flynn) who his best friend Adam (Alexis Arquette) hooks  him up with decides upon their second meeting that the two are just not right for one another, despite Aaron being, as he puts it, “smart and funny,” “a real nice guy.”

     Furthermore, he has a problem with his stepbrother, Simon (Sam Gould) who keeps getting arrested for streaking, as in running nude in public. In California “streaking” is a sex crime, Aaron explains to his date, “Three streaks and you’re out.”

     Also it appears that wherever Aaron goes people are seeking to help him find a better life—which given the comfortable bungalow in which he lives, the lovely meal we see him cook, and the beautiful vase of flowers in brings to that dinner table appears to be quite fine without their help. His therapist (the joke that everyone in California has a therapist is a truism in this case) wants him to go on antidepressants, but his father doesn’t approve of drugs although he was certainly known for taking them when he was young. His father would like him to meet a powerful manager Phylis (Anne De Salvo)—perhaps to kickstart Aaron’s flagging acting career—but which Aaron suspects will lead to a pressured invitation to join Scientology, which is precisely what happens, Adam troubled by his friend’s passive patience with their attempts to convince him that he needs their help, for a very steep price. And then there’s a high school friend, Susan (Katie Asner) who wants Adam to come to “Group” with her run by Christina Crawford—yes, that Christina Crawford, author of Mommie Dearest. One session, in which he’s asked “are you biological,” is enough to convince him that the “group” not for him.

     Moreover, there’s that tabloid headline: “Superstar’s Son Marries Male Model” which understandably irks him since, although he is openly gay, he has not married anyone, let alone a male model. Along with the photographer waiting outside in his car to shoot an entire role of film whenever Aaron might decide to leave his house, it’s been a difficult few days to say the least.

      If you haven’t guessed by this time, Aaron’s biggest problem is that, like the actor portraying this character, is the son of Elliott Gould (who plays his father in this short film as well) and Barbara Streisand. Aaron, this semi-autobiographical work’s nom de plume for Jason, previously appeared as her son in Streisand’s movie The Prince of Tides, so it seems fair play that Elliott should appear in his son’s picture.

     Alexis Arquette—the transsexual actor whose grandfather was comedian Charley Weaver and whose sisters and brother are actors Rosanna, Patricia, and David—was Jason’s real-life friend, whom he commandeered to play the male role of Adam in this film; Arquette died of AIDS in 2016. And Katie Asner, obviously, is the daughter of actor Ed Asner, and has herself appeared in several popular TV comedy shows. Christina Crawford also makes an appearance in Gould’s work, conducting her real-life “Children of Celebrities” group. Jordan Ladd, granddaughter of actor Alan Ladd and daughter of Cheryl Ladd plays a minor role in Gould’s piece.

     And finally, this film’s director, who is gay, really was falsely reported in the tabloids as having married a male model. "It was shocking because it's so untrue," Gould says. "It was just so grotesque to me that they could make up a story like that and claim they had seen pictures of my wedding to a man. And then print this story even though I deny it." It’s quite clear that Gould did not have to roove too far “out” of his California life experiences to find meaty satiric material.

     Although he never was actually stalked by a photographer, he obviously experienced the endless snap of the camera whenever he appeared in public with his mother. In this case the beefy photographer (Sam Polito), who later spies his victim skating on the Venice Boardwalk and, jumping into his car goes on a chase for his photographic prey.

      Hiding out in a portable potty in a nearby parking lot, Aaron—totally worn out by just trying to live a normal life—finally comes out from hiding, shifting into a hilarious strip-tease in which one-by-one he pulls off his knee guards and his shirt, throwing them at his spell-bound stalker, as he skates around him in a stripper’s bump and grind, before he pulls off his undershirt, turns around, and moons the man.

      It felt so cathartic, he admits, quipping, now I know what my step-brother sees in streaking. So absurd has his life become that he walks off with the would-be photographer as if he were a new-found friend, ridiculously confiding that he did in fact marry his long-time secret lover—in a dress.

      When this work was finished, Gould moved to New York, where he admittedly is no longer hounded by people for being a product, so to speak, of the “industry,” and is able to better meet and make real friends. Yet Inside Out, is such an affable comedy that one wishes he would act and direct further works in the future. But as he admits early in this work, he doesn’t like to see himself on the screen, presumably neither inside or out.

 

Los Angeles, January 1, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021). 

 

Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton | Steamboat Bill, Jr. / 1928

unsettled. wet and cloudy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Harbaugh and Buster Keaton (uncredited) (screenplay), Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton (uncredited) (directors) Steamboat Bill, Jr. / 1928

Although the stated director of Steamboat Bill, Jr. is Charles Reisner and the writer is credited as Carl Harbaugh, the movie is clearly Buster Keaton’s affair, and it is his remarkable acting and his comically athletic pratfalls that make for some of the very best scenes of American silent film.

     The story, a rather frail one, involves a war between two southern entities, William “Steamboat Bill” Canfield (Ernest Torrence) and a kind-of small town Donald Trump in the form of John James King (Tom McGuire), who owns most the city and has just launched a huge new Mississippi paddle ship which will surely destroy the local business of Canfield, who runs a dilapidated vessel that is later declared “unsafe.”

      Into this cauldron, Canfield’s son, William (Keaton), returns after years away in Boston schools and, on the same day, King’s beloved daughter Kitty (Marion Byron), home on vacation. 

      From his years in Boston, evidently the son of a divorced mother, young William has grown up rather effete—at least in his father’s thinking—and is now completely unsuited to take over as “Steamboat Bill Jr.” Throughout the earliest part of the film, the Keaton figure undergoes a series of flabbergasting events with his impatient father and concerning his basic clumsiness around all things having to do with the boat’s instruments and maneuvers.     

      On top of this, it turns out that the “sissified” William is in love with Kitty, and she with him, which exacerbates a further series of battles between Canfield and King. One of the best skits of the film—and unfortunately, we can describe them as a series of “skits”—involves William’s attempt to trick his father about his desires as he escapes one night onto King’s boat to see his loving Kitty. He succeeds after nearly drowning and tossing many another of King’s associates into the river, before leaping into the waters himself.

      But the great scenes of this film follow, with the sudden jailing of William’s father, when his son attempts to sneak filing tools into his cell within a loaf of bread, and the entirely unexpected arrival of a cyclone (the daily weather report declaring the day as “Unsettled. Wet and Cloudy.”) that almost totally destroys the town, blowing down houses around William, who by this time has been taken in custody to the local hospital, and sending the prison wherein his father remains locked up and is now drowning, into the river. 

      Suddenly, of course, young Bill storms into life, able to leap up several stories of the boat to steer into the prison in order to save his father, able to leap down to save his drowning Kitty, and, finally, amazingly, diving into the “muddy waters” once again to save a local minister. The weak little pansy becomes a hero that can make any macho father proud. And in that sense, Keaton's film bears some comparison with Harry Schenck, Edward Warren, and Alice Guy Blaché's 1912 film, Algie the Miner. His return to the workaday world of the steamboat helps convert him from his queerness (in this case meaning odd) into heterosexual normativity.  

      The amazing scene where an entire house falls down around Keaton might, had he been just a few inches off cue, have killed him. But the actor, brilliant deadpan he was always, seems hardly to be aware of the dangers, which cannot but further delight us with his comedic talents. His position in the whole scene was simply noted with a nail in the ground, a mark which allowed him to remain standing within the frame of a blown-out window. Seldom before, and certainly not in later Hollywood, would an actor be even allowed to take so many chances with his life as Keaton undertakes in order to create this film.      

       Inexplicably, this great comic work was not a success at the box office, and saw the dissolution of his own company. His last original movie would be the 1928 MGM film, The Cameraman.

       Steamboat Bill, Jr., however, has been recognized since by most film critics as a masterpiece of the silent film cinema.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2016).

Christian Schwarz | Bring Mich Nach Hause (Take Me Home) / 2025

boys on bikes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manuel Hagen and Christian Schwarz (screenplay), Christian Schwarz (director) Bring Mich Nach Hause (Take Me Home) / 2025 [22 minutes]

 

Fourteen year-old Elias Winterfeld (Aurel Huber) lives with his father in a beautiful, but absolutely cold modernist home, fixing most meals for himself and basically living alone as his father Thomas (Michael Dieerenberger) runs off for meetings in Hamburg and elsewhere, even on the weekend of Elias’ birthday. He lacks no money, and has learned to live capably on his own, but as a young boy he is lonely and lost in the beautiful but nearly always empty suburban house. Even his classmates notice his quiet separation, one of them, Raphael Bergmann (Jonathan Utz) feeling some sympathy for his fellow student’s quietude.

    But seemingly all of Raphi’s attempts to even communicate with Elias are rebuffed with sharp phrases and a clear disinclination for any attempt at a relationship. But Ralphi is, as Elias puts it, an annoying would-be friend, who can make even Elias laugh, a kind of miracle given the new boy’s constant attempt to distance himself.

   Yet within a short walk home the two boy’s find a great deal to talk about, as Ralphi worm’s is way into the empty house presumably for a simple glass of water. Suddenly Ralphi realizes that Elias lives all alone in a grand house, without much light. The first few moments of entering the house speak truths that the young boy cannot himself express.

    Ralphi is overwhelmed the luxury of the house, making it clear that his parents, who work hard in a small shop by the school they attend, often even require his own sacrifice of time, affecting his grades.

   Elias vaguely talks about his father as being involved in real estate, which, of course, explains a great deal about the suburban palace in which he exists. His mother is even a vaguer figure, who has moved away with her boyfriend.

    Elias explains what has already become quite obvious, that his parents don’t really care much about him, his father not only ignoring this birthday, but his last as well. “A big house doesn’t really mean much when no one’s there.”

    Predictably perhaps, Ralphi invites his new friend to come help out in his parent’s store, if for no other reason that to take his mind off things.

     For the first time, the next morning, we see our lone prince change outfits just to look good for his new consort. But perhaps we are getting ahead of this slightly obvious story of gay love.

     The two boys do not bicycle off to Elias’ parent’s shop but travel through the country, representing the boys-on-bikes saga which general predicates growing teenage love.

    When they do finally reach the family shop, Ralphi’s mother (Stephanie Schreyvogl) is a dream, winking at her son’s new friendship as if she already knows that the boys are perfect for one another.

     The teens get on quite nicely as they work in the store side-by-side, Elias wondering does Ralphi just stock the shelves all day, to which his friend replies, “no, also the fridge.” Before you know it, the two boys are shoving one another, pushing bananas into one another’s face, and basically showing a great deal of the playful affection we knew was coming.

     At the end of the day, Elias takes his new-found friend on a trip to show him yet another private world, a quiet place by a pool of water, what boys do to show their love. By the end of the day, he is sad when Ralphi won’t join him in his empty house, having promised his mamma to be home early. Elias returns to the darkness and emptiness of the house.

     The next morning, quite early, the doorbell is already ringing, as Ralphi comes to take Elias on yet a new bicycle adventure. Returning to Ralphi’s parent’s shop, Elias is asked to close his eyes as his friend takes him home for a birthday celebration with his mother and his grandparents.

     All Elias can do is hug his friend and express his gratification. Is this love, a gay romance? No, simply a friendship that transcends anything the lonely Elias has even before experienced.

     This film does not enter new territory, but mines the comfort of a familiar relationship that Elias has never before experienced, and whether he is gay or not, will define his relationship with others for the rest of his life.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).

Greg Pritikin and Gary Rosen | Totally Confused / 1998

the gay celibate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Greg Pritikin and Gary Rosen (screenwriters and directors) Totally Confused / 1998

 

It’s hard to imagine that in the same year that saw the first popular new movie versions of the gay “coming out” genre Get Real and Edge of Seventeen, with young handsome boys that made everyone wish they young again even if they might have to undergo the throes of gay self-identification all over; that brought us the smart and edgy queer group-family film Relax…It’s Just Sex; the multi-sexual musical extravaganza Velvet Goldmine; the sophisticated French art-based drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train; and the Swedish lesbian romantic comedy Show Me Love—to name only a few examples of the brave new gay cinema that was unfolding—would also feature a muddied Chicago-based gay comedy funneling a second-rate version of Woody Allen humor and impersonation. Woody Allen as an even more nervous gay man is not precisely what I look for when I attend a movie, no matter how open-minded I am to new LGBTQ perspectives.

      The Woody Allen figure in this case is a tormented young gay celibate, Wiley (Gary Rosen) who’s so uncertain of his own sexuality that he collects not only piles of gay porn but heterosexual magazines as well, leafing through the pages of both collections of sexual imagery simply to try to figure out to which he’s more attracted. He works in a used bookstore where he ogles a customer Stephan (Patrick LoSasso) and reads far too much, including the anti-homosexual literature of the 1950s. Indeed, Wiley is so angst-ridden that we’re not even sure he has time between his worries for masturbation.

      Wiley’s best friend, Johnny (Greg Pritikin) is a would-be rocker who is so deluded that he makes Wiley look like a model of sanity. Johnny’s agent Murray (Duane Sharp) has convinced him that the new demo, copies of which Johnny has paid to publish, will surely bring him a commercial label and a national tour. And somehow this liar (which some would argue is another word for “agent”) keeps him believing that the passing weeks of silence is normal considering contractual adjustments; moreover, he has found distribution in Europe—Greenland to be specific!

      So thrilled is Johnny about his new possibilities that he invites his girlfriend, Annie, to move in with him in the apartment he shares with a constantly arguing heterosexual couple, Cindy (Heather Donaldson) and Alistair (Darek Hasenstab) who Wiley dubs their personal George and Martha after Edward Albee’s battling duo in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?   

      Wiley warns him that a sure way for a couple to break is to move in together, but the delusional Johnny is a true believer.

       That is until Annie begins to crack through Johnny’s blind allegiance to Murray, noting that he keeps cancelling meetings and weeks have gone by since the original jubilation. Moreover, we discover Johnny can’t really play the guitar or sing that well. The inevitable breakup between Annie and Johnny occurs after he declares her jealous, accidently kills her pet bird, and basically ignores her as he focuses on the illusion of his career.

       Meanwhile, Wiley, growing even more paranoid about his presumed homosexuality—while, as the reviewer from Variety describes it, “snobbishly decrying gay culture as little more than the intersection between Village People and Judy Garland” and taking out his “frustration by waxing jealous about the duo’s straight coupledom”—goes into an even deeper funk when he discovers through a do-or-dare-like guessing game that Johnny has actually had sex with another boy years before. His best friend, in short, not only bests him with relations with women but with boys as well, a high school chum known to both of them, Sal Minos.

       Confused over what believe about his agent, his love-life with Annie, and his own talent, Johnny attempts to make it up to Wiley at least by proving his friendship and, after Wiley for the first time in his life actually makes a sexual advance as the two lay together in bed, beginning to wonder whether or not he’s more interested in boys than girls.

       At first repulsed by Wiley’s touch on the chest, Johnny returns to give Wiley a boost of real sex, which his friend turns into a somewhat regular occurrence. When Annie moves back in again, it is clear that trouble is ahead, particularly since Wiley is now convinced that he and Johnny have a real sexual relationship. When Annie discovers what’s been happening and Wiley learns that it’s all been a pretense at the very moment when Johnny finally wakes up to learn that Murray suffers from bipolar behavior, resulting in the belief that he can achieve anything he promises—he is left with no one and nothing in his life left but rage.

       He and Wiley fight what might be a dual to the death were it not that Annie intervenes and, at that very moment, Cindy bops Alistair over the head with a frying pan that almost kills him. Alistair survives, and, strangely enough, so does the friendship between these obvious losers who are so argumentative that they can’t even decide in which restaurant they might share a meal in order to celebrate their survival as friends.

       This might have made a wonderful TV sit-com of the day, but as serious LGBTQ comedy, it sucks, Wiley remaining at the end surrounded by heterosexuals without having a clue of how to even imagine entering a gay bar, let alone asking someone home for sex. At film’s end we’re not even sure whether having sex with your straight best friend entails “coming out.”

      It’s interesting, one must admit, to finally see a gay man who wasn’t born beautiful, and the film might have more seriously explored the ramifications of what that means in the gay world. But evidently co-writer and director Rosen himself didn’t have a clue what to do with his character except to continue to kvetch.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Trevor Anderson | The Man That Got Away / 2012

good luck

by Douglas Messerli

 

Trevor Anderson (screenwriter and director) The Man That Got Away / 2012 [25 minutes]

 

Whatever do the Canadians put in that maple syrup for which they’re so very famous? Perhaps all would-be experimental and gay Canadian filmmakers are required to first study the great Canadian mad surrealist dramatist and sound poet Claude Gauvreau. How else to explain the existence of John Greyson, Patricia Rozema, Mike Hoolboom, Nik Sheehan, Lèa Pool, Xavier Dolan, Chelsea McMullan, Wrik Mead, Guy Maddin, Trevor Anderson, and many other gay and lesbian filmmakers who seem so far more free-wheeling than their US counterparts?

      Greyson, Mead, Maddin (not gay, but who is receptive to gay themes), Sheehan, Anderson, Hoolboom, and several others, in particular, love to combine various genres—documentary, musical comedy, noir drama, gay politics, biography, opera, and family history—into a single film in a manner that I’ve noticed elsewhere only in New Zealand. Certainly, there ought to be a serious study of this manifestation. If nothing else, it proves that all these Canadians read their Northrup Frye.

      I was absolutely delighted, accordingly, to discover the other day Trevor Anderson’s The Man That Got Away, a documentary about Trevor’s great-uncle Jimmy that explored its subject primarily through the tropes of musical comedy (music by Bruce Kulak, lyrics by Anderson) and dance played out in a spiral parking garage. I couldn’t have asked for a better Sunday afternoon entertainment.

 

     Jimmy, Trevor tells us, grew up on a farm in the Canadian prairie in the Alberta Rosebud Valley during the Great Depression. Unlike his brothers who were natural mechanics and outfield baseball players, Jimmy was Georgie Kemp’s star pupil in tap dance. All of which occasions a delightful musical number with a child version of Jimmy (Aryn McConnell) singing and dancing with his mechanic and baseball-playing brothers (Mat Busy, Matthew Lindholm, Ryde McLenon, and Jason Morris) the memorable number: “I gotta get the frick / out this god damn craphole / before I lose my frigging mind.”              

     By the time World War II came along, Jimmy (Bryce Kulak) had joined the Merchant Marines, and went off with his new sailor mates in matching outfits to shower with his friends (Jason Hardwick and Eric Wigston), with whom he sings, “Let no one back home doubt this, we give a helping hand…,” “We’ll man each-other’s stations, our flags will fly erect.”  It’s their “do-wattin, dootilywatten duty to leave home.”

 

      Jimmy survives the war and, inevitably ends up on a Broadway chorus line, the musical forgotten evidently by family members. What the family does know is that New York “was an afterhours club with no last call.” Jimmy sings about becoming addicted, not only to his nightlife friends (Matthew Akplu, Ambeer Borostik, Jamie Cavanagh, Nicola Elbro, Peter Ferandes, Kristine Nutting, Kristen Padavs, Jeff Rivet, and Melissa Thingelstad), but to the booze and pills.

      Tired of his empty life, Jimmy checks himself into an institution to get the “fresh start,” of which the doctors and nurses (Clinton Carew, Kendra Connor, Tom Edwards, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, and Amy van Keeken) sing, a song suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a new clinic guest also seeking to get clear of drugs. You guessed it, Judy Garland (nicely performed by Connie Champagne), who arrives in her chauffeured car, singing “It really is a pleasure to meet me,” as she pleasantly greets her “loyal strangers,” with whom her visions of “myself” don’t really rhyme.

     Who else can she buddy up but the male chorus member, right? Immediately they hit it off with “Old blood,” a song which testifies to their perverse life styles which put them in the “nut house.”

 

Judy writes a note to Jimmy and signs it with a kiss which he keeps in his billfold for the rest of his life.

       “Cured,” Jimmy returns home where he joins a construction crew, “up north,” building roads where, as he sings, he’s “bluffin’ and shufflin’ through feeling nothin’.”

        Jimmy starts “using” again, writes some bad checks, and does time in the Drumheller Penitentiary, located ironically near the town best known as dinosaur heaven. “I’m longing for a party, I’m longing for a spree, and no one longs for me.”

        Freed from prison, Jimmy returns to Vancouver, where he shipped as a sailor. But the dance this Jimmy (Noam Gagnon) plays out makes Gene Kelly’s melancholy “A Day in New York” in On the Town (1949) seem like cakewalk. Drugged out of his mind, Gagnon takes his Jimmy up against the wall and almost over the barrier as he agonizingly suffers the silent dance of death.

 

     Anderson adds an odd afterthought almost in lieu of an obituary outside of the movie he’s made: “If a man dies on the street, somebody goes through his wallet, a cop, a nurse, some thief. You find a note, a note from Judy Garland. You don’t throw that away. You keep it. Or you sell it. Where’s that note, today?”

     That note apparently read: “Dear Jimmy, Good luck on the outside. Love, Judy Garland.”

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).