Open and Shut

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

The problem with wishing for something in a movie is that once you get it, you start wishing for more. Some people--me, for instance--are never satisfied.

I'm hard pressed to think of another movie that's as sensitive to the diversity of bodies and expressions of sexuality or lived experiences than Open (2010, directed by Jake Yuzna). More than that, it doesn't punish its characters for their bodies or sexualities, either, though it does complicate their lives in ways that are inextricably linked to body and sexuality. At a very basic level, this is a movie about longing for love and not finding it, or about finding love only to find it fleeting. I think these are universal themes, even if the characters experiencing these are probably alien to a hetero and or cis audience. I think this is a good thing. This is something I long to see in movies about trans or non-cis people but never really get. That it confronts the audience with sometimes alien expressions of love and intimacy is even sweeter.

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Top and Bottom

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

Nobody in movies knows anything, if you believe William Goldman. For instance, no one in their right mind would have predicted that the highest grossing movie in the history of Korean cinema would be a queer-themed historical drama. And yet, that's what happened. The King and the Clown (2005, directed by Jun-ik Lee), an unassuming "small" movie, somehow tickled the Korean popular imagination and became that blockbuster.

The story follows the friendship of two itinerant "clowns," though "clown" is an English descriptor. They are more like traveling acrobats and actors, whose plays are ribald. These are the rough and tumble Jang-sang, the frontman, and the androgynous Gong-gil, who specializes in playing women. When the film opens, their manager finds that he can make more money by pimping Gong-gil to the local aristocrat than he can from the play. This infuriates Jang-sang, who rescues a not-exactly unwilling Gong-gil from being sold for the night. The two escape from their troupe after killing the manager and head to Seoul, where pickings for traveling players are slim. The king has driven out huge chunks of the population to increase his hunting grounds, and there is no longer a show district where Jang-sang and Gong-gil can ply their trade. They're basically for the street, where they fall in with a rival company and stage a play mocking the current king. They make a lot of money, but the run is short.  They're arrested for treason. In the course of being punished, Jang-sang challenges their jailors that the king himself should judge them. If he laughs, they're off the hook. If not, heads roll. Miraculously, they make him laugh, but then things get hairy, because the king has cast his eye on Gong-gil. So, too, has his consort. Meanwhile, the king's ministers begin using the troupe as pawns in the intrigues of court...

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My Big Queer June

It's Pride Month in the civilized world (and here where I live in Missouri, too) so I'll be participating in a couple of LGBT blogathons in the coming weeks. One of them is the LGBT Blogathon sponsored by YAM Magazine. The other is the Queer Film Blogathon held by Caroline over at the awesome Garbo Laughs. They run one right after another, so that'll be two weeks' worth of delicious queerness (and a bunch of crabby bitching about trans depictions in film, I'm sure). With any kind of luck, I'll be able to find some queer subtext in Prometheus or Brave, too, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll still write about them, though.