Queer-A-Normal Activity: James Bond Edition

November, 1994:  I'm watching  Interview with the Vampire, probably for the third time.  If you've never seen it,  the movie is an adaptation of the novel by Anne Rice featuring vampires that are sensitive, tortured, and sexually ambiguous.  It stars Tom Cruise as the dashing vampire Lestat and Brad Pitt as his companion, Louis, who spends the movie being unhappy and looking like Linda Hamilton.  Toward the end of the movie, Brad Pitt has a scene with Antonio Banderas, who's character Armand has been pursuing him as his companion for the entire third act.  Louis finds out that Armand has was behind his "daughter" Claudia's murder and bids him farewell in a sexually charged scene in which he almost kisses him a couple of times.

Now, the 1994 audience is audibly uncomfortable with this scene.  I remember a woman even yelled out, "No!  Don't kiss him!"

Cut to 2012 and I am sitting in the theater watching Skyfall, Daniel Craig's third outing as the flamboyantly heterosexual superspy, James Bond.  In the first scene featuring the movie's villain, Silva, Bond is tied to a chair and interrogated.  Silva is played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem who has a gift for playing characters who are scary and bizarre, like his unforgettable hitman in No Country for Old Men. 

Toward the end of this interrogation Silva begins prodding and caressing bond and the two engage in some decidedly homosexual Bond innuendo.  Silva continues hitting on him, telling him, "There's a first time for everything," to which Bond replies. "What makes you think it's my first time?"

I'm not really interested in reading into that too much.  It's pretty clear that Silva is toying with him and trying to use homosexuality as a pressure point against Bond.  It's a tactic which fails, but is fun to watch.

I was more interested in the audience at this point.  I was watching the movie in a theater in the south suburbs of Chicago and I was waiting for groaning and catcalls but the audience actually seemed really entertained and engaged by the cat-and-mouse game.  There was a lot of appropriate and non-nervous laughter.

Now if James Bond can resist being homophobic while tied to a chair and caressed by a psychotic Walter Mercado look-a-like, then it shouldn't too hard for the average straight guy in an office setting.

The Cineaste

Fixing the GOP: Introduction

Full disclosure: I’m no Republican. I do, however, care deeply about America and our country, for better or worse, is one that is firmly locked in a system of two opposing political parties each and them has an enormous role in our democracy and for and for the system to work properly, America needs two great political parties. I’m sad to say that the Republican Party is not up to the job.

A dysfunctional Republican Party is bad for all Americans.  As the GOP  has become a rigidly idealogical right-wing party, we've seen a rise in hyperpartisal politics and gridlock.  Today's Republican Party has shown an inability to set aside the partisan politics in order to govern effectively.  While Democrats are certainly not immune from this sort of behavior, during the Obama administation, Republicans have shown themselves to be amazingly petty, spiteful, and immature.  Many in the party leadership have openly stated that their number one goal was to see that President Obama was not re-elected.  This is disgraceful behavior undernormal circumstances, but it is inexcusable during a time which we expect our elected officials to put the politics aside and deal with the great challenges that we face.

When the Republican Party stakes out the extreme right wing of the political spectrum, the Democratic Party also drifts right, depriving the Left of any serious role in the national discussion.  Today's mainstream Democrats are about as Liberal as yesterday's moderate Republicans.  For all the absurd talk of President Obama's "Socialist" agenda, his policies have been remarkably business-friendly.  His signature legislative achievement, Health Care Reform, is based on a 1990's era Republican plan pitched as an alternative to the European-style Single Payer plan that was advocated by Democrats.  As recently as 2008, this sort of market-based plan was so uncontroversial and so accepted by Republicans that Mitt Romney was able to run on his own version of it that he signed into law in Massachussetts.  The GOP has gotten so extreme and overheated that they can point to someone like President Obama, who-to the dismay of many Liberals-is clearly a pragmatic centrist politician and, with a straight face, call him a Socialist.
I’m part of what has been called Generation X and I came of age politically in the 1990’s. Never a Clinton fan, I sat out the 1996 election only to later witness the toxic spectacle of his impeachment. In 1999, I was denied the opportunity to vote for my preferred candidate, John McCain, only to experience the bitter aftermath of the 2000 election and eight years of grueling and dehumanizing politics under George W. Bush. I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, because, among other things, he ran as a reasonable and pragmatic centrist.

My experiences are not unique. In fact, people my age are often Democrats by Default, only because the Republican Party has presented such an unappealing package to younger voters over the last twenty years. For many of us, Republican politicians have been, at best, out-of-touch and incompetent and, at worst, rabid culture warriors who are committed to using the government to impose their values and "morality" on the rest of us.  Often, they have been all of the above.

However, one doesn’t have to look hard to find greatness in the Grand Old Party. It is, after all, the party of Lincoln, the greatest of Presidents. The first president Roosevelt was practically the embodiment of the American Spirit and a courageous reformer who fought tooth and nail for the American worker. And let’s not forget the wisdom and steady leadership of President Eisenhower. These men would scarcely recognize the Republican Party of today. Even Ronald Reagan, the beloved icon of modern conservatism would be driven out of the party as a tax-raising, amnesty-granting RINO (Republican In Name Only).

It has often been said that the Republican Party has an X problem. Let X equal any of the following: Women, African Americans, Latinos, Young Voters, etc. The truth is, the problem is much bigger than any one minority. The Republican Party has a Future Problem. It is increasingly out-of-synch with the rest of America and despite any short-term electoral victories, the Republican Party risks becoming a relic within the next twenty years.

While I certainly don't identify with today's Republican Party, I believe that it is in America's best interest to have at least two strong, functional, political parties that are clearly able to articulate opposing views for this country.  Our political discourse should be a marketplace for ideas and sadly, today's GOP is not selling anything useful.

Admissions

Humanoid

The nice thing is that most of the retro male illustrations on someecards actually look like Mitt Romney.

Is Prometheus Just A Classier Version of Alien Vs. Predator?

      

A wealthy industrialist named Weyland organizes an international mission to a remote location to explore humanity's connection to an alien civilization that may have visited Earth in the distant past. However, they soon learn that our alien benefactors have sinister plans for us.

Sound familiar?  If you recognize this as the plot of the much-talked about Ridley Scott movie Prometheus, then you are correct.  However, did you also know that it describes the 2004 movie Alien Vs Predator as well?  The similarities between the two films are especially ironic since Prometheus is meant to be a return to the Alien series’ roots after the two AVP movies, which are commonly considered a low point for the franchise.

Is it possible that despite its pretensions of depth and intelligence, Prometheus may just be Alien Vs Predator with a Philosophy degree from Greendale Community College?  Let's look at the evidence...

1.     Chariots of the Gods:  Both movies are inspired by the Ancient Alien theory that humanity has been visited and aided by alien visitors in its distant past.  In Prometheus, the Engineers seemingly seeded Earth with their DNA and were actively involved in human development until about 2000 years ago.  In AVP, the Predators had contact with human cultures all over the globe and apparently assisted in their development while accepting sacrifices in order to breed Aliens for their ritual hunts.  Both movies feature a similar sequence in which a high tech Power Point presentation is used to showcase the archeological "evidence" of alien intervention across disparate cultures. While this is an interesting subplot in AVP, it is close to the central theme of Scott’s movie.

2.    Temple of Doom:  Both movies feature human beings wandering through labyrinthine alien temple complexes seemingly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At The Mountains of Madness, in which an Antarctic expedition discovers an ancient seemingly abandoned alien city.  With its Antarctic location and giant subterranean temple, AVP seems to borrow directly from this source.  Filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro had been trying to make  a Mountains  adaptation for years and has publically claimed that Prometheus was so similar a concept to have put the final nail in the coffin of his troubled production.

Interestingly, this is also an abandoned idea from the original Alien movie, in which the derelict spacecraft was to have originally been a pyramid or temple.  It is, therefore, logical that it would show up in Scott's revisitation of the material. Also, given the deep level of fan-wankery in AVP it's not surprising that a rejected Alien plot point would make an appearance in a movie that is obsessed with honoring its predecessors.

3.    Weyland Family Values.  In a nod to the Weyland-Yutani company of the Alien series both movies feature a member of the Weyland family.  Ailing American industrialist Charles Bishop Weyland appears in AVP, set in 2004.  He leads a mission to the Antarctic to investigate a mysterious heat bloom and structure buried under the ice.  Set 80 years later, Prometheus features an aged British industrialist named Peter Weyland, who bankrolls and stows away on an expedition to seek out humanity's alien creators, with the hope that they might prolong his life.   Ancillary sources for Prometheus seem to deny a canonical connection between the two characters but they both fulfill similar roles in their respective movies.

4.    In Space, No One Can Hear Your Teamwork:  Both Prometheus and AVP feature the obligatory Motley International Team of Scientists.  The supporting casts for both movies are practically interchangeable and feature many of the same kinds of stock characters, including the Panicky Character found in every Alien movie.  I do have to say that the AVP team, is not quite as inept as the crew of Prometheus.  Both films also have a subplot in which two minor characters who started out on the wrong foot, end up getting separated from the main crew and bond before meeting their fates.

5.    Alien on Alien Action.  Both films culminate with some hardcore extra-terrestrial fighting, with humans caught between.  For those worried that the Aliens and Predators might find a way to talk things out, AVP delivers on the promise of its title.  Suprisingly, for all its Philosophy 101 prattle, Prometheus ends up with one of its marble-skinned Engineers rumbling with the giant facehugger thing.   In the end, the only Big Question left in the movie is “Can I put this Alien in you?”

6.    A New Life: Both films end in a remarkably similar way, in a short, quiet tag in which a hybrid xenomorph chest bursts its way from a dead alien host.  In AVP the Predalien pops out of the corpse of the fallen Predator.  If it had eyes, it would have winked at the camera.  In Prometheus, a weird proto-Alien erupts from the dead Engineer, in a scene that almost asks, “Am I late for the Alien movie?”

So, you see, despite its fancy pedigree, Prometheus actually borrows quite a bit from Alien Vs. Predator.  This may mean that either Prometheus is a dumber movie than you think, or that AVP is a smarter film than you think.  I enjoy both movies, AVP for unsophisticated entertainment value and the obvious amount of fan knowledge and love that went into it and Prometheus for its visuals, scope, and performances.

Patrick Garone is a writer, director, sketch comedian, and blogger. He is the author of

City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Follow him on Twitter for fun-sized ramblings on nerd culture and politics.