Notes on I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY

Writing has become so strange.  I've forgotten why people keep diaries or journals.  Why do I do it?  Is it for myself?  For others?  Or dubious posterity?  

The blog doesn't allow comments.  I don't want to engage in discussions.  I set out to create something that would exist outside of exchange.

When you have any idea of your audience, that changes everything.  If you write for a specific audience, you are selling something.  If you yourself solely are the audience, with your diary hidden away, that also changes everything and seems kind of pointless.  So I pretend I have it both ways.  

This is a blog that an audience may or may not spy upon, or stumble upon, or regularly read.  I don't know.  I may be curious, but I abstain from seeking this knowledge.  OK, so I am a narcissistic exhibitionist.  Don't remind me.

Thus (I think "thus" is applicable; maybe not), what appears in my own writing continuously surprises me.

Never mind.  I've been enjoying little dabbles in Derrida, finally, belatedly.  My nutshell of Derrida: Everything is text, but there is no underlying definition of that text, thus destroying that text.  One might finally say that the meanings are infinite. Contradictions, as even Whitman noted, are inevitable.  

I absorbed Barthes in the 1970s.  As a movie critic at the time, I found it great fun, taking movies and seeing through their cultural and social and psychological origins.  To apply Derrida -- if one accepts that I am capable of absorbing even a smattering of applicable understanding; superficiality of comprehension never bothered me; indeed, experts and the thoroughly schooled interpreters are rarely fun and not entirely to be trusted -- to apply Derrida would take movie reviews to a different plane entirely.  I know I repeated that phrase.  

Strangely, I imagine Derrida as making everything religious.  

Which brings me -- I don't know why -- to I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY, the summer dumb comedy that I had intended to stay far, far away from, since it superficially seems to mock gay people.  But my wife dragged me.  She thought it would be funny.  I was interested in what it was up to, what messages it was selling.

In the end, we both agreed that it wasn't very funny, but it was fascinating in its cultural expectations and depictions of both hetero- and homosexual behavior.

Adam Sandler plays such a randy fireman, sleeping with scores of buxom hooterettes, I found him unsexy and off-putting, especially since Sandler is reaching an age when he turns from young horny dumb guy to resembling hirsuite porn star Ron Jeremy.  Shudder.

The first half of the movie is spent establishing the extreme heterosexuality of the stars, but making that very heterosexuality entirely unsexy and unattractive at the same time. Maybe the American Pie set gets off on this, but the women are strictly pinups, for the most part.  Sandler sleeps with even the Polish cleaning lady, though.  He does anything...  except another guy.

When the gay club scene enters the picture, the outrageous and flamboyant gay-gay-gayness of the participants also seems unsexy and unattractive and unfunny.

Kevin James, the widower of a beloved wife to whom he remains faithful, father of two, has one scene in which he goes to the closet to look at his wife's clothes.  He fondles a skirt, paralleling the moving scene at the end of Brokeback Mountain, and at this point in the movie, it seems that all  relationships -- gay or straight -- really don't make any difference at all.  Committed relationships of any variety are preferable -- and sexier -- than the kind of whoredom that Sandler admits to living out.  (There were children in the theatre behind us; a father had brought his young kids; there was nothing in the gay stuff that unnerved me; but Sandler's calling himself a "whore" and grabbing breasts and so forth seemed beyond PG-13 to me, unsettling even if it was supposed to be unattractive in some sense).

The son of Kevin James is supposed to be gay.  He tap dances, does the splits, and sings selections from Annie Get Your Gun.  He's not very convincing; this is the first time I've seen a child who is supposed to be gay on screen who is obviously acting the stereotype role of a gay person.  I wonder what stage directions the director gave him.  "Act gay now?"

I do like the scene when Sandler shows the boy some straight porno, thinking it would be good for him.  He shrieks and runs from the room.  I know adult gay men who still respond in this manner.  They're not faking it either.  This could be a crucial scene in the movie, in that as repulsed as the firemen at the station and the two principles (who never kiss, even by the end) may be at the very thought of man-on-man action, it seems clear that gay people can have an equal and opposite reaction when confronted with the very thought of man-on-woman action.  

I think that's the point of the movie.  It's not to show sympathy or understanding at homosexuality through parody and drag.  At the final courtroom trial scene, however, when Sandler and James have to profess the validity of their domestic partnership, they actually and truthfully confess their love for one another.  But they can't kiss.  That would be too much.  

By this time, all the firemen have taken their Spartacus moment, come around, and declared their support.  And, in the final scene, there is another gay wedding, and the men do kiss, and everyone dances.

The movie is a mess, and rarely funny, but it is fascinating.  I had to admire Sandler and James and all involved.  It is crafted to a specific audience -- straight people who come to laugh at gay people -- and it doesn't work that way.

Even more slyly, notable gay actors show up on the screen.  Richard Chamberlain plays the judge at the film's end.  His own gayness was never actually announced, but slowly emerged and his presence here is sly and one of the funniest things about the movie.  Similarly, Lance Bass -- from one of those boy bands -- is the bandleader at the wedding party.  I think he came out gay, too.  Or was that the other boy band guy?  See, it doesn't matter.

And Ving Rhames, the big black tough guy who plays a closeted gay man.  Is he really gay off-screen?  I don't know, it doesn't matter, but I have to say, I enjoyed watching him dance naked in the shower.

The next night, to continue our efforts to escape the humidity, Lee and I went to the speedball propulsion of THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, which kept me cool and on the edge of my seat and did absolutely nothing to relieve my paranoia about the government.

OK this is a big mess.  Just notes.  Not a review.  But it doesn't matter.  

Also, the reason I don't like star ratings is because there is no way to give this movie a mere rating.  By what standard?  We enjoyed watching it and thinking about it, irrespective of its craft or quality.  I can't rate movies.

Sorry,