Bi Focus
Brand new on PlanetOut!
News, views, and a little bit of dish! Tune in each month as Michael
Szymanski looks at movies, TV, stage, music, and books from a bi
perspective.
I promised you some upcoming movie titles with a few wisps of bisexuality in them. Lately they haven't been so tough to find.
To start with, don't miss that more-than-just-friends kiss between Winona Ryder and her fellow mental institution gal-pal Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted.Although we don't see this kiss go any farther, it's evident that Winona's just as attracted to Jolie's full fat lips as she is to her doe-eyed long-haired boyfriend.
Then there's that odd and painful coming-out scene by the tough-as-nails father next door in American Beauty.And don't tell me the Jude Law character in The Talented Mr. Ripleyhasn't crossed sexual boundaries a bit here and there. Even his fiancee, Gwyneth Paltrow, warns Matt Damon that Dickie's attentions are drawn from one
boy or girl to the next. Matt's character seems to sway very easily from girls to guys (he charms them all), but nothing is as steamy as that seduction scene in the tub, when Matt's fingers skim the water and he nearly jumps in with Jude.
Some of the bi stuff is pretty nonchalant. Take Antonio Banderas in Play it to the Bone casually mentioning to his girlfriend and his best boxing buddy (Woody Harrelson) that he had an affair with a man for a few years. "It was no big deal, and I don't regret it," says Banderas (who's no stranger to gay and bi roles). The macho boxer
doesn't discuss specifics, but he gets defensive when Woody gets down on him for going down.
(I once asked Banderas about the bi-erotic quality of
his scene with Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire. He leaned into me, uncomfortably close, and whispered, "I don't see these vampires as gay; there's a different kind of sexuality for them." He put his hand gently around my throat, the tape recorder still running: "But there
is a romance; the act of love, the act of killing, is different.")
Other indie films with bi themes coming up are Full Frontal, about a bisexual porn director; Dating, starring comic Jason Stuart about a bi man looking for love; and About Adam, opening at Sundance, about
a guy who seduces a waitress, her two sisters, and her brother.
Jodie Foster's Waking the Dead, coming out this month, has a tiny cameo with Ed Harris as a disgraced Chicago politician forced to resign and apologize to his wife and two children for putting his
male lover on the payroll at his congressional office.
In Topsy-Turvy, an actress, during the staging of The Mikado, begins flirting and feeling up one of her female colleagues, who seems to into it despite her hetero orientation.
We launch into space in Pitch Black -- a scary
jump-out-of-your-seat potboiler (with a Boys Don't Cryscenario) about a ship that crashes on a planet with three suns, making it unbearable by day and deadlier at night. Not to be a spoiler, but things are not what
they seem in the gender department, and one of the characters -- already very cute as one sex -- suddenly comes out as the other.
In the stylized Titus, two handsome and wicked brothers hump and feign blow jobs with each other before ravaging women. (Be warned, this most bloody of Shakespeare's plays is brutal.)
The famously bisexual artist Frieda Kahlo is shown dancing sexily in the background with a woman while her lover Diego Rivera paints in The Cradle Will Rock, and a woman joins a punk band to explore her sexuality with bisexual bohemian abandon in When Love Comes.
I'm personally looking forward to the captivatingly beautiful French actress Isabelle Huppert playing a 40-something fashion designer who falls for a bisexual gigolo twenty years her junior in L'Ecole de
la Chair (The School of Flesh).
Other movies to watch out for are Sex Monster, Three, Speedway Junky, the Brit kid flick Human Traffic, the German triad The Trio and the hysterically colorful But I'm a Cheerleader, featuring
RuPaul and Cathy Moriarty as heads of a camp where they teach teens to shake off their same-sex attractions. (Making the hormone-heated youths more even more confused.)
And finally, remember that "Let's get Mikey!" Life
cereal commercial? Well, it's coming back to TV, with exactly the same dialogue, this time with adults.
A man and woman in their pajamas are sitting at the
breakfast table talking to each other while watching the now-older Mikey
getting ready to go to work. The ambiguousness of the relationship doesn't seem to worry Quaker execs. In fact, they're happy to encourage speculation. "It's a good question," one veep told the New York Times, "but
the spot is about Life, not the people and their relationship." We're left to wonder just what their "Life" is like.
The commercial was the bane of my childhood -- and the childhood of every other guy named Mike. But now I wonder if I'd have been more in tune with my sexuality if I'd grown up with this version.
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