Good Morning, World

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There is probably very little reason to remember the 1988 erotic-thriller Masquerade that starred Rob Lowe, Meg Tilly, Kim Catrall and Doug Savant here, besides the fact that that might be the most 1988 cast ever typed. (Sidenote: I always forget Kim Catrall did a lot of movies in the 80s -- I re-watched the first Police Academy movie last week on Netflix, for The Gute natch, and there she was!) And yet here I am remembering Masquerade. As it turns out...

... there are a couple of reasons to remember the movie, and they are (unsurprisingly, given the person typing these words you are reading) Rob Lowe and Doug Savant. Lowe in the 80s is a given (and I've posted a couple of shots of him in this movie here & here) but Savant, Savant I only really knew as the homosexual Matt Fielding on Melrose Place, and I spent the entire run of that show wishing another actor had been given the gay role. (Also that they'd had a clue what to do with a gay, which they never did.) But now...

... looking back at Doug strutting around in his tighty-whities as Rob Lowe watches with, it must be said, a great deal of interest, well now I think I shall entirely blame the people making Melrose Place for not knowing what to do with Doug Savant. Because he clearly could've brought something if he'd been allowed to. See more of that something right on after the jump...

There's Music in the Way That We Kiss

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Jason approves!!! pic.twitter.com/5Y3qsoJVLq

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) June 6, 2019

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All four of Shout Factory's "Gay Pride" releases this year are out on blu-ray as of today -- last week both Boom and To Wong Foo hit (as an aside I should add here that it somehow escaped me that the Boom blu-ray has a commentary track from John fucking Waters!) and today comes Jeffrey and the pièce de résistance Can't Stop the Music, the astonishingly over-the-top Village People musical starring Steve Guttenberg and Steve Guttenberg's tight pants, among others. 

This movie has been a bit of a pain in the ass to see for a long time, and it is so so worth seeing -- see it. Oh and there's also the rainbow-colored special edition of The Babadook that they put out, which leans into the entertainingly ridiculous internet meme. And a percentage of the proceeds go to a good cause, so get yer gay on.

Gay Just Got Like, Way Gayer

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A big year for Gay Pride (Stonewall is celebrating its 50th anniversary at the end of June) just got even bigger for a certain subset of us gays and likeminded camp movie lovers -- Shout Factory! is releasing four particular glittery extravaganzas onto blu-ray for their very first time including yes indeed the tremendous and psychotic Village People musical Can't Stop the Music, which has been basically out of print for decades. This is a real thrill -- the film's been tough to see for far too long. I'd seen shitty quality copies previously, but then I got to see it in the theater a few years back and holy hell you have to see this thing cleaned up, it's something. SO MUCH SOMETHINGS. 

The other three films they're dropping are the terrific 1995 rom-com Jeffrey with Steven Weber and Michael T. Weiss (and a fabulous cameo from Sigourney Weaver) and the drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything Julie Newmar, also from 1995 (Beth Grant forever!), and then there's Boom!, the explosively hilariously awful Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton film from 1968 that is truly a camp spectacle to behold.

That and Wong Foo hit first on May 28th, while the other two hit June 11th. While I go see if anybody has any hot pants I can borrow, y'all should hit the jump to see all of the special features included on these discs...

Good Morning, World

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Good morning, everyone! I'm currently a little confounded that a quick search here on the site turns up nada zilch zippo on Bigger, the forthcoming bio-pic of the Weider brothers, the so-called "grandfathers of the fitness craze." I didn't even mention it this past Tuesday when I did the big gratuitous Aneurin Barnard post and he plays one of the brothers! I am terrible, Muriel. The other brother is played by Tyler Hoechlin, seen above in the movie's first official picture (good choice) with Julianne Hough, who's playing his wife. Also in the cast: Steve Guttenberg, who I think is playing their father, and Colton Haynes, who's playing fitness legend Jack Lalanne. One reason why I'm so surprised...

... I haven't posted anything before is I knew I had this batch of pictures of Tyler in a speedo on the set ages ago and how in the ever-loving heck did I never end up posting them? What the hell, me? Oh well we're making up for it today, hit the jump for a couple dozen such speedo-clad things...

Can't Stop the Cocaine

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The film-maker Jeffrey Schwartz, the documentarian who's focused his recent career on telling the gayest of gay stories -- he made Tab Hunter Confidential, I Am Divine, Vito (the doc on Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo), and Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon (the doc on porn star Jack Wrangler), amongst others -- has two projects coming up. He is making a doc on Showgirls (!!!) and he is making a doc about Allan Carr, the flamingly camp producer of Grease and Can't Stop the Music who crashed and burned on a turbulent sea of caftans and cocaine in the late 70s and early 80s. Here's an interview with Schwartz on the doc, which is already screening at fests around the country. (via)

I've been telling people for years that they need to read Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr, the biography of Mr. Carr, it is an insane spectacle of Hollywood excess - well now's your chance. Buy your copy now before it goes out of stock like the book Feud was based on did.

The doc is titled The Fabulous Allan Carr and if anybody earned that gay title tis he. Anyway when I went looking up this project I also stumbled upon this fun story told by Steve Guttenberg in his own biography about the auditioning process for Can't Stop the Music gig:

“Allan, 350 pounds of cynicism and creativity, sat on a couch in a caftan, a flowing one-piece tent that covered almost all of his body….I tried not to notice that he wasn’t wearing underwear. ” ‘Turn around. Let me see your tush.’ I did. Is this what I have to do to get a job? ” ‘Do you have any aversion to wearing a sock in your pants? Enough.’ He clapped his hands like a sultan and his yes-men ushered me out.” Well, Allan must have liked what he saw, because Guttenberg got the job–but not without a warning. The actor’s agent urged him, “Whatever you do, don’t be alone with Allan. He’s a grabber!”

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10 Off My Head: Siri Says 1985

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This morning when I asked my digital mistress Siri to give me a number between 1 and 100 so we can play our weekly movie game she coughed up one number and then another that we'd previously used - only on our third try did I get "85" out of her, but I'm glad I stuck around because The Movies of 1985 make for a fun year. 

My first pass through the films I managed to edit my faves down to a Top 5, but it didn't feel right -- it was all serious grown-up movies, without any of the movies that 9 year-old me loved at the time, so I just decided to go with a Top 10. Because I do what I want, dammit. If the President of the United States can spill confidential secrets to the Russians in the Oval Office and get a limp shrug from Congress then I can damn well do this much. (Chaos reigns, y'all.)

My 10 Favorite Movies of 1985

Back to the Future

(dir. Robert Zemeckis)

-- released on July 3rd, 1985 --

The Color Purple

(dir. Steven Spielberg)

-- released on December 16th, 1985 --

Brazil

(dir. Terry Gilliam)

-- released on December 18th, 1985 --

Witness

(dir. Peter Weir)

-- released on February 8th, 1985 --

Pee-wee's Big Adventure

(dir. Tim Burton)

-- released on August 9th, 1985 --

After Hours

(dir. Martin Scorsese)

-- released on October 11th, 1985 --

My Beautiful Laundrette

(dir. Stephen Frears)

-- released on November 16th, 1985 -- 

The Goonies

(dir. Richard Donner)

-- released on June 7th, 1985 -- 

The Purple Rose of Cairo

(dir. Woody Allen)

-- released on April 19th, 1985 --

A Room With a View

(dir. James Ivory)

-- released on December 13th, 1985 --

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Runners-up:  The Breakfast Club (dir. John Hughes), Cocoon (dir. Ron Howard), Lifeforce (dir. Tobe Hooper), Commando (dir. Mark Lester), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (dir. George Miller), Return to Oz (dir. Walter Murch), Day of the Dead (dir. George Romero), Clue (dir. Jonathan Lynn)...

... Once Bitten (dir. Howard Storm), Desperately Seeking Susan (dir. Susan Seidelman), The Legend of Billie Jean (dir. Matthew Robbins), Smooth Talk (dir. Joyce Chopra), Re-Animator (dir. Stuart Gordon), Red Sonja (dir. Richard Fleischer), Rocky IV (dir. Stallone), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (dir. Paul Schrader), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (dir. Jack Sholder)

Never seen: Kiss of the Spider Woman (dir. Hector Babenco), Come and See (dir. Elem Klimov),  Crimewave (dir. Sam Raimi), Flesh + Blood (dir. Paul Verhoeven), Ladyhawke (dir. Richard Donner), Ran (dir. Kurosawa), Lust in the Dust (dir. Paul Bartel)

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What are your favorite movies of 1985?

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Good Morning, World

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Congratulations to Isabelle Huppert on her first (yeah, we know) Oscar nomination this morning (see all of the nominations over at The Film Experience) for Paul Verhoeven's masterful film Elle. (Elle missed the Foreign Film race but we're trying to stay positive right now, so stop it.) The more times I watch Elle the darker and more biting the film gets and obviously it owes a hefty chunk of that to Huppert, who I think is in every scene of the film? If she's not name the scene she's not in in the comments. 

Anyway these pictures are of a young Izzy with Steve Guttenberg and his sexy 80s self in the terrific and underrated 1987 thriller The Bedroom Window. (You can see more shirtless Steve in that movie right here because of course we got that covered.) I hope where ever Huppert is celebrating there's some fuzzy man-chest not far out of reach. (It's not a celebration without it.)

Good Morning, Bubba & The Gute

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It is Steve "The Gute" Guttenberg's 58th birthday today so let's all pretend we are the rapey shadow looming over him in bed this morning, okay? Okay! 

Get ready for your birthday spanking, Stevie! In all seriousness though, this scene - like so much of the entire strange Police Academy series of movies - is so thick with homoeroticism one can barely breathe from the stench of lube and regret. There's also a weird race thing going on, which is also  a deeply prevalent theme in these films...

... for it is none other than the NFL's own strapping 6-foot 7-inches of beef called Bubba Smith hovering over the Gute's prostrate bedded and vulnerable form. He is too much man for you, Gute!

It's actually all a sweet little solicitation from Bubba though - he's never learned how to drive and he is asking for a lesson. And the Gute, ever pliable, is willing.

Of course they have to end the scene with 

a rather, let's call it "loaded," visual...

I thought about putting some of this post after the jump since it goes on and on a bit but I really wanted everybody to see these last couple of notes that the film strikes in this scene. It is of course a recurring joke over the entire series how much the "White Man Stroking His Gun" named Tackleberry (I mean, these names) loves his guns. But it is still clearly a beat that feeds into both Gay Panic and a sort of Race Panic as well.

And then there is the car...

... that Bubba & The Gute (I so would've watched a TV series called Bubba & The Gute) which... well it has a Confederate Flag license plate. They stole this car from one of the other cadets that is villainous, so it's a bad guy's car, at least? Anyway the joke of this scene is it becomes a car-chase with a great big black guy chased by cops while driving a car plastered with the symbol of his oppression, so laugh it up!

 That'll show them racists!
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It should be noted here that these two blunderers are the same two who earlier got "tricked" into going to a gay bar and at least half of them (the more explicitly racist half) liked it...
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There have been papers written on these movies, right? 

Do me right, Film Studies students.!

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Two Snowballs & a Ding Dong

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"Anyone who could swallow two Snowballs and a Ding Dong 

shouldn't have any trouble with pride." 

Well said, Steve Guttenberg!

I realized while seeing the legendary 1980 Village People musical Can't Stop the Music on the big screen this past weekend that if I started doing "Life Lessons" posts for the film I would never be able to stop. It is chockablock with wisdom. I mean...

"Housework is like bad sex. Every time I do it I swear 

I will never do it again. Until the next time company comes." 

Ya see what I mean? Smarts! And I have to stop myself because I am ruining future post possibilities. But on the subject of the film, I also learned one extra thing watching it this time that I had missed (well besides the extraneous little person handing out apples on the street in one scene, wtf) -- during the end credits they revealed that they published a book to coincide with its release! Cut to me standing outside the movie theater ordering the book off of Amazon before I even made it to the subway. And voila in the mail last night...

If you know me in the real world then there's a good chance that you will be getting this book as a gift from me at some point in the future. Christmas, birthday, bat mitzvah, or just tossed in the incinerator with your corpse, I will be pushing this shit on everybody. I wish I had brought it to work with me today so I could've shared some behind-the-scenes pictures, but I didn't so that will have to wait -- and hell that gives me an excuse for another Can't Stop the Music post in the near future, so no harm no foul, friends. Until then let us entertain ourselves with this query...

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Today's Mood

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Good Morning, Guttenberg

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It's the 57th birthday of Steve Guttenberg - I kinda don't understand how August 24th hasn't been declared a holiday at this point. Gute Day! Every year we all wear fur patches on our chests and chant "Gute Gute Gute!" everywhere we go, oh what a time it will be. I guess we're still too close to the wonder of The Gute, and we need some space to divorce ourselves before we can really appreciate him enough to understand the need for a yearly celebration? Well let's start the petition today! Gute Gute Gute! (See more of him being typically sexy-adorkable and shirtless in Cocoon in this video.)