Outfest 2007 - Tuesday
by Andre Soares
Daniel Karslake’s For the Bible Tells Me So is Outfest’s Tuesday highlight (8 p.m. at the Directors Guild in West Hollywood). Karslake’s documentary features interviews with a number of biblical scholars, in addition to five Christian families with gay or lesbian members. Will gays and lesbians (not to mention bisexuals, multisexuals, transsexuals, etc.) be allowed into heaven?
According to the Outfest catalogue synopsis, For the Bible Tells Me So questions the centuries-old interpretation of the Bible as being anti-gay, while confronting the frightening blurring of the line separating Church and State in current American politics.
July 18 Addendum: For the Bible Tells Me So barely deals with the role of Christianity in American politics. Its focus is on five families with gay (adult) children and on how one should interpret religious texts written millennia ago.
Another Tuesday highlight is Norman René’s 1990 AIDS drama Longtime Companion (9:30 p.m., at the DGA), which Craig Lucas adapted from his own play. Though not as great as its reputation would lead one to believe, Longtime Companion was an important movie at the time of its release as it was the first American feature film to deal head-on with the devastation wrecked by HIV among gay males in the United States. (René died of AIDS in 1996.)
Complaints that nearly all AIDS sufferers and non-sufferers in the film are white and upper middle-class missed the point that Longtime Companion was never intended to depict the AIDS epidemic among all ethnic, social, religious, etc. groups in the U.S. More to the mark were complaints that the film felt more than a tad sentimental at times.
In the generally first-rate cast: Campbell Scott, Dermot Mulroney, Patrick Cassidy, Mary-Louise Parker (who delivers one of the film’s best lines, comparing U.S. president Ronald Reagan to E.T.), and Academy Award-nominee Bruce Davison.
Nina’s Heavenly Delights, which I mentioned in the Outfest on Monday post, will screen at 7:00 p.m. at the Santa Monica Laemmle.
That will be followed at 9:30 p.m. by Karoly Esztergalyos’s Hungarian drama Férfiakt / Men in the Nude, about "Tibor, a middle-aged novelist whose dwindling professional success and stale marriage leave him restless and despondent. While his wife is abroad, he meets Zsolt, an impossibly sexy 19-year-old Russian hustler who seduces Tibor to escape his own banal life at home. Blackmail, erotic fixation and betrayal ensue, culminating in a surreal tableau of Kafkaesque proportions."
I haven’t seen Men in the Nude, but it does sound like great wholesome entertainment.
Screened Out: Gays and Lesbians on TCM
NYC NOIR: Film Noir in New York City
The Silent City: New York in the Movies, 1898-1928
David Bordwell on Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato
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