Michael Fassbender

REVIEW: Philosophy at the Border in ‘The Counselor’

Here’s a testament as to what a misfire full of promise Ridley Scott’s The Counselor is: I actually had a dream last night after seeing it that I was in the editing suite with the director working on another cut of the film. He already had a second version on hand that followed a proper thriller format, but I still insisted on twenty minutes being shaved. “Hurry!” I yelled. “It’s too late for North America, but we can still save it for Europe and the Rest of the World.”

Steve McQueen

REVIEW: ‘12 Years a Slave’ Turns Real Events Surreal

Midway through Steve McQueen’s masterpiece 12 Years a Slave, I began consoling myself that at least I am descended from the good whites in the north. I don’t have a drop of southern blood in me, unless you count my Australian mother, but in that case I too am descended from slaves, in a sense. What the founders of Australia endured just in the transportation from Britain to the colonies Down Under, often for the pettiest of crimes (if they were guilty of them in the first place), was as arduous as and far longer than the journey from Africa.

After seeing Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) in London, my maternal grandmother stood up and shouted at the audience, “You see what you did, you pommy bastards?”

Trailer Trashing

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

If I had gone by the trailer alone, I would never have seen The Avengers, just as I never saw Thor or Captain America.  These films aren’t made with me in mind, so why should I shell out sixteen bucks even for my favorite seat, C-22 in the middle of the handicapped section at the Arclight Hollywood?  Much as I love movies, that would be the definition of dysfunctional behavior.

Michael Fassbender: Android perfection. Photo: Sebastian Kim 

I was just going to let Eric Baker review The Avengers until it became clear almost two weeks ago that it was a juggernaut that was going to make film history, and that suddenly turned it from an ordinary early summer blockbuster into an event this blog had to cover.

Hair on the Palm of His Hand

KIMBALL VS KILLOUGH | REVIEW starring Tyler Kimball and James Killough Today Tyler Kimball is in the hot seat getting run over by Killough as they slash their way through Steve McQueen's Shame.  Killough makes it all personal, as usual. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2pIMM17ZbA&w=480&h=360] Kimball rates Shame: Killough rates it:...

Does This Corset Make My Ass Look Queer?

Ask any red-blooded baboon: as repressed as the Victorians were, the bustle was a flagrant invitation to do nasty things from behind.

I miss the Victorian Era.  It’s not just that I miss the high-waisted trousers and the frock coats, and the prospect of reading Dickens serialized in the paper every week.  I am probably one of the few men in the modern era who can say he had two frock coats hanging in his closet at one point, made for me by my tailor in Delhi to my amateur designer’s specifications, based on yet another Yohji Yamamoto frock coat I brought in for him to copy.  It’s not that thinking about the Victorian Era makes me miss when I had hair, either, which I usually wore long and curly on top and shortish on the sides, with my sideburns always down to my jawline.  No, the real reason I miss the Victorian Era most is because had I lived then I would have been straight.

As every gay man knows, while inwardly guffawing at those misguided conservative poodles who incessantly yip that ours is a “lifestyle choice,” only an extreme masochist with a major reactionary streak would ever choose to be gay over being straight.  Most of us believe we would make great straight men.  We’d be wonderful fathers, we would seriously pay attention to our woman’s appearance, we’d never even tire of clothes shopping with her.

The reason a Ghey like me would have been straight back then is I would likely have gotten married, had kids, and nobody would have been the wiser.  My wife would have been so repressed and confined by the rigid corset of social mores that she wouldn’t have admitted even to herself that I wasn’t banging her, much less to anyone else.  She would have ignored the stable full of handsome young stable hands, who would have walked funny after I’d spent an afternoon “grooming my horse.”  In the unlikely event of a complaint from her, I would have just yanked a lace in the back of her dress like a yo-yo string and she would have passed right out on the parlor floor like a rag doll, after being cut off from what little air she was getting to begin with.

The Victorian Era was basically when Western culture turned Japanese for a hundred years.  It was graceful, fraught with fascinating social intricacies and niceties, but was, all kidding aside, clearly a real pain in the ass.