Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Other gay-themed movies
x-man:
I notice that someone has recommended the UK film Maurice. Rupert Graves as Alec Scudder, the young stablehand, does not even show up until the last third of the movie, but from there on the movie is his--and he provides the happy ending we want, but are afraid we aren't going to get.
YouTube has the full movie, and for the more jaded among us, someone has kindly made a 2-part video of the Rupert Graves section. He was/is a terrific actor, and in those days he was very beautiful and hot. I didn't realize that male full-frontal nudity was allowed in UK films in 1987, but there he is.
Watch both parts of the Scudder videos. Five million people have watched the first part, but only a quarter of a million have watched the second. They don't know what they are missing.
Go to <YouTube Maurice the complete movie> and to <rupert graves as alec scudder in maurice (1/2> and same citing for (2/2). Enjoy.
CellarDweller:
I have a decent collection of DVDs that are gay-themed.
8: The Mormon Proposition
Bear City
Big Eden
Billy Elliot
Boys In The Band
Brokeback Mountain
Handsome Harry
The Laramie Project
Latter Days
Maurice
Milk
My Beautiful Launderette
Out of the Past
Prom Queen
Shelter
Small Town Gay Bar
Sordid Lives
Stonewall Uprising
The Times of Harvey Milk
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
Trans America
Were The World Mine
x-man:
BETWEEN LOVE AND GOODBYE, tla releasing, 2009
Has anyone else seen this movie? It is so bizarre I wonder how others have reacted to it, My first time through I kept asking myself if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing.
The plot centres around Kyle and Marcel, a young couple in NY who are trying to make their relationship work and to con Immigration into letting Marcel stay in the US. The Menace here is Kyle's super-bitch sister who will stop at absolutely nothing to break them up and get the apartment for herself.
The film take itself deadly seriously but the blurb on the box talks of "operatic excesses of melodrama." That is the understatement of the century. The two young men are hopelessly clued-out about everything, especially about the sister who is straight from hell. Why Marcel would want to stay in the middle of the whole mess is inexplicable, except that he is so stupid. The plotline and characterization are as subtle as a punch in the face. You don't feel for the characters as much as shake your head in disbelief.
If you take the movie seriously, you will be disappointed. If, however, you see it as a way-over-the-top parody, you will have a good time. If you find it on the sale table in your video store or can rent it, and you feel like a little fun, pick it up. I'm not sure I would go to the trouble of ordering it from Amazon.
x-man:
I didn't know where else to post this, so it's here.
We have gay Shakespeare, gay plays, gay movies--Why not gay operas? (Yes I know about Billy Budd, but that is so forbidding and inaccessible to call out for something else.) Shawn Kirchner could do it, even Rufus Wainwright, and others.
Then too, existing operas are crying out to be adapted. Imagine La Traviata: Hunky, naive, young artist finds slightly older, HIV positive party-boy in a dance club. After a summer of spectacularly hot, continuous sex, the artist's father steps in and it is downhill from there. Carmen would be easy: Hunky, naive, young soldier falls for slightly older, sophisticated, veritable sex machine, civilian mechanic on the military base. They go AWOL to San Francisco, and after a summer of spectacularly hot, continuous sex, the mechanic tires of the soldier and hooks up with a professional athlete, and it's downhill from there. Madam Butterfly: Hunky, naive, young Japanese twink meets godlike bear American naval officer. After a summer of spectacularly hot, continuous sex...Well a pattern seems to be developing here. Anyway, why not gay operas? Their time has come.
milomorris:
--- Quote from: x-man on September 14, 2013, 12:19:30 pm ---Shawn Kirchner could do it, even Rufus Wainwright, and others.
--- End quote ---
They are very good composers in their own genres, but opera is a whole different beast musically. And so is the operatic voice. Also, opera composers either need to know how to write for a full orchestra, or work with an orchestrator.
--- Quote from: x-man on September 14, 2013, 12:19:30 pm ---Then too, existing operas are crying out to be adapted. Imagine La Traviata: Hunky, naive, young artist finds slightly older, HIV positive party-boy in a dance club. After a summer of spectacularly hot, continuous sex, the artist's father steps in and it is downhill from there. Carmen would be easy: Hunky, naive, young soldier falls for slightly older, sophisticated, veritable sex machine, civilian mechanic on the military base. They go AWOL to San Francisco, and after a summer of spectacularly hot, continuous sex, the mechanic tires of the soldier and hooks up with a professional athlete, and it's downhill from there. Madam Butterfly: Hunky, naive, young Japanese twink meets godlike bear American naval officer. After a summer of spectacularly hot, continuous sex...Well a pattern seems to be developing here. Anyway, why not gay operas? Their time has come.
--- End quote ---
- I don't see much a market for it. Sure, there may be an initial novelty following for such adaptations, but--much like the practice of realizing standard operas in contemporary settings--it grows tiresome pretty quickly, and only a few directors would be able to pull it off well.
- There are plot problems. The libretti (especially for the operas you mention) would need to be altered to suit the alternative situations you describe. Swapping out the original words with words that fit your scenarios could have disastrous effects on the music and rhyme scheme. For example, Traviata opens with a party at Violetta's house. The libretto uses "festa" for party. The Italian word for nightclub is "discoteca." The latter would require fitting 4 syllables to music written for 2 syllables.
- Then there are gender problems. The female characters you mention think like women, express themselves like women, and the music written by the composers is optimized to relay that to the listener. Moreover, female voices do not behave identically to male voices. This is why there is idiomatically typical soprano music, versus say, idiomatically typical tenor music. And that doesn't even address the need for transposition into new keys...which is a huge "no-no" in the world of opera. The key an aria is written in is part and parcel of the overall mood and affect of a scene. Transposing an aria (or a role) destroys the overall harmonic structure of the opera.
I think that we should leave the standard operatic repertoire alone. It would be better to do what Charles Wuorinen and Annie Proulx are doing in Madrid: take a story about two homosexual men, and write a new opera based on that story. I am reminded of the opera Margaret Garner. Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison collaborated to create an opera based on her book Beloved about a real-life slave woman. The result was an opera that told an actual story about the American experience. As sexual minorities, I think we deserve to have our stories told via the operatic art. We don't need to "gay-up" operas that already exist.
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