“Maybe Michael couldn’t commit to this marriage, so he created a delusion… produced an unconscious, psychosomatic manifestation of… I’m better with food. Okay? You’re Michael. You’re in a fancy French restaurant. You order crème brûlée for dessert. It’s beautiful, it’s sweet, it’s irritatingly perfect. Suddenly, Michael realizes he doesn’t want crème brûlée. He wants something else…”

“What does he want?”

“Jell-O.”

“Jell-O? Why does he want Jell-O?”

“Because he’s comfortable with Jell-O!”

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the union of a pretty woman and a talented filmmaker. If anyone can show just cause why they should not be joined — well, that’s too bad! It happened in 1997.

In honor of wedding season, our hosts share their childhood visions of holy matrimony before revisiting two nuptial-themed films by Aussie auteur P.J. Hogan. First, we say “I do” to 1994’s Muriel’s Wedding, a quirky drama that’s not nearly as terrible as Muriel herself, starring Toni Collette. Then,  we attend My Best Friend’s Wedding, a unconventional rom-com that has our hosts thoroughly divided.

Is Rupert Everett’s scene-stealing George a dated stereotype, or a monumental achievement in queer representation in summer blockbusters? Is Julia Roberts playing a heinous sociopath, or… a lovably heinous sociopath? Most importantly: will Jell-O always be bested by crème brûlée?

Say a little prayer for us, because contrary to rom-com tradition, happy endings are not guaranteed on this podcast. Listen here and subscribe here.

MURIEL’S WEDDING

Release Date: March 10, 1995
Budget: $9 million
Opening Weekend: $244,969
Domestic Total Gross: $15.1 million
Worldwide: $15.5 million
Metacritic: 63

I missed Muriel’s Wedding when it came out, though I remember seeing trailers at the beginning of other VHS tapes and posters in my local video store. It always looked quirky and fun, though it was probably a tad too adult for me upon its initial release. Mostly, I remember Abba’s “Waterloo,” a song I was unfamiliar with but found insanely catchy. (I did not yet know about Abba’s dangerous earworms.)

Muriel’s Wedding feels absolutely Australian. It is a dramedy with a tone all its own, and only loosely follows a coherent narrative arc. Few romantic comedy heroines steal from family members as a major plot point. Few comic relief sidekicks get a tumor and lose the ability to walk over the course of the story. One can imagine a much broader version of this story, focusing more on Muriel’s engagement to a hunky South African swimmer. Muriel’s Wedding isn’t any of the movies a Hollywood screenwriter would have turned it into, and on some levels that’s frustrating, because there’s definitely more comedic potential to be mined from these situations. As great as Toni Collette’s performance is, I never truly got the sense that I really knew Muriel.

What I do appreciate about Muriel’s Wedding is the way it makes a young(ish) woman’s fetishization of weddings tragic, and then lets her overcome this tragedy. Like many single women her age, Muriel dreams of a perfect wedding to a perfect groom as the tonic that will cure her imperfect, aimless life. It’s her friendship with Rhonda (a delightful Rachel Griffiths) that most promisingly elevates her self-esteem and status in the world, but insecurity with being an independent woman threatens this friendship as Muriel pursues a sham marriage instead. What seems like a one-note joke at first, however, blossoms into a truly interesting romance (sort of), as David the hunky swimmer (Daniel Lapane) finds some genuine affection for Muriel, and she realizes this isn’t the kind of love she needs in her life after all.

Do I wish Muriel’s Wedding had taken more time to explore some of its deeper, darker themes? I do. For me, Muriel’s Wedding is really about three movies in one, and I only get a little bit of each of them. I want more about Muriel and Rhonda taking on the “mean girls” (a la Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion, I guess), and more between Muriel and David. (And maybe one more scene where Muriel’s sister tells she’s “terrible.”) That doesn’t really diminish my enjoyment of the film as it is, though on the whole, I find it somewhat less than satisfying.

MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING

Release Date: June 20, 1997
Budget: $38 million
Opening Weekend: $7.4 million
Domestic Total Gross: $127.1 million
Worldwide: $299.3 million
Metacritic: 50

My Best Friend’s Wedding is probably my personal favorite romantic comedy of all time, and undoubtedly my favorite rom-com of the 90s. The 70s have Annie Hall, the 80s have When Harry Met Sally, and… okay, I know a lot of people would not rank My Best Friend’s Wedding up there with those titles. It’s definitely aiming for a different vibe. In one sense, it harkens back to the great screwball rom-coms of the 1930s and 40s, with a broad plot that works best when held at some distance from reality. In another, it maintains a fraction of the stubborn Australian shagginess P.J. Hogan delivered in full force in Muriel’s Wedding. Both films are about not-so-admirable women who invent fake weddings to further their own agendas, engaging in rather questionable behavior along the way.

What I love about My Best Friend’s Wedding is that it doesn’t do this as a quirky Aussie import, but in the guise of a big, splashy Hollywood rom-com starring Julia Roberts. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I love the way it snuck into movie theaters in 1997 and took moviegoers who’d gone to see Julia get the guy (again) by surprise. My Best Friend’s Wedding satisfies all the requirements of a romantic comedy while defying everything we’ve come to expect from one. The heroine does not get her man, nor does she find a suitable replacement. There’s no real silver lining for Jules in this film — a nice dance with George, sure, but we also believe it’s possible that she really did let the love of her life get away, and will perhaps never find anyone she loves more deeply. What other romantic comedy better informs the women (and men) in the audience that it’s okay to be alone? That “winning” the love of the girl or guy you want isn’t the most important thing? That, in the end, it’s better to do the right thing and be able to live with yourself than lie, cheat, and trick your way into romance?

I don’t want to rail against the entire genre, but there are plenty of fucked up messages validated by Hollywood romances. In my eyes, My Best Friend’s Wedding is the lone corrective to them all. In the 20 years since its release, I don’t think any other rom-com has been quite as daring, particularly not a big studio movie with a major leading lady. Ronald Bass’ script allows Jules to be near-sociopathic in her cruelty to Michael and Kimmy, but Roberts’ starry performance keeps us along for the ride. There’s a deep moral quandary that emerges about halfway through this movie, as it begins to dawn on the audience — we don’t actually want Jules to break Michael and Kimmy up, or to see her end up with this guy. We’re conditioned to think that it’s definitely going to happen, because what Julia Roberts rom-com would end with Julia Roberts alone? We root against the tropes of the entire romantic comedy genre, and it creates genuine suspense. Not only is “Will she get the guy?” a real question in this movie, which it isn’t in virtually every other romantic comedy ever made, but so is: “Do I even want her to?”

I don’t remember many other studio movies that have made me feel so torn between my loyalties to a protagonist and my own moral fiber, let alone romantic comedies. My Best Friend’s Wedding actively participates in the romantic comedy genre while stealthily deconstructing it from within, and you don’t know what it’s really up to until the end. This is my preferred mode of entertainment — which should surprise no one who knows my appreciation of Scream and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. My Best Friend’s Wedding is, in ways, the Scream of the romantic comedy genre, and ultimately takes a very favorable attitude toward women. So many screenwriters would position rich, blonde, beautiful Kimmy as a vapid bitch — but as played by Cameron Diaz, she’s neither. She’s depicted as naive and privileged, but we also see that there’s a real person underneath, and by the end of the film we wish her well. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, it’s okay to be either the traditional blushing bride or the spinster cynic. In most rom-coms, the endings are already prescribed. My Best Friend’s Wedding forces its characters to actually work for their respective endings, be they happy or bittersweet.

Of course, there’s one other factor that makes My Best Friend’s Wedding a landmark of 90s cinema, and that’s Rupert Everett as George. He wasn’t the first gay best friend to appear in a romantic comedy, and was far from the last — after My Best Friend’s Wedding, sassy gay sidekicks became the cliche, to the extent that gay people had to fight against being seen as mere window dressing in lesser films.

But George is the highlight of the movie, in addition to being the voice of reason. Instead of feeling like he exists merely to help Jules through her romantic foibles, George constantly seems like he’s putting his more refined, sophisticated life on pause, deigning to help his hapless girlfriend. Yes, George is the “magical gay” in the tradition of the problematic “magical Negro.” As far as we can tell, he’s flawless, and we get the sense that he’d fix everyone’s problems in five minutes if they all just listened to him. Everett’s performance is so lively, though, that I can’t help but see George as a fully developed, fully realized person whose backstory is perhaps as colorful as Everett’s own personal history. He’s definitely gay — he leads a Dionne Warwick sing-along! — but it’s still rare to see a gay male treated with this much respect in a studio endeavor. None of the comedy surrounding George comes at his expense or panders to cheap stereotypes. Nor does the character overcorrect for his sexuality by being overly hetero-acting. He has more charm and charisma than almost any other supporting character I can think of — it’s a shame he didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it.

As I describe in the podcast, George is also perhaps the first gay character I saw growing up who wasn’t somehow tragic. In the 80s and 90s, most depictions of gay characters I’d seen dealt with bullying, drugs, AIDS — or all of the above. My Best Friend’s Wedding doesn’t have time to deal with George’s actual sexuality, perhaps in part because it might have been polarizing to do so in this movie at that moment. But you know what? I actually greatly prefer that George seem asexual than to have some tossed-off crack about his promiscuity, which is what we usually get with George-like gay sidekicks.

Back in 1997, for me, George was merely a really fun character in a movie I liked quite a lot, but looking back I think it was probably helpful to see a confident, handsome, hilarious gay man (who did not have AIDS) on the big screen in a major studio’s summer blockbuster comedy. Rupert Everett became a legitimate sex symbol after playing George, the guy women knew was gay but still found sexy. That’s an important milestone on the way to Will & Grace, which is basically just a sitcom version of the Jules-and-George relationship, and where we are now, when a mostly hopeful, only-sort-of-tragic gay drama just won Best Picture. To the extent that gay characters appear in studio movies these days, it’s almost always as sidekicks, and none feel as fresh or vital as George in My Best Friend’s Wedding did in 1997.

I find My Best Friend’s Wedding so bold, original, and admirable in so many ways. It’s definitely a broad comedy that stretches plausibility in its plotting, but what rom-com isn’t? I think it’s wonderful that TriStar let Bass and Hogan let Jules be “pond scum” and conclude the movie dancing with a dashing gay dude, which on its own terms serves as a truly happy ending. I can’t think of any other major romantic comedy that took this kind of risk, before or since. Twenty years later, I find My Best Friend’s Wedding just as revolutionary as it was in 1997, which says a lot for P.J. and Ronald and Rupert and Julia and not a lot for the studio comedies made since.

Forever and ever it’ll stay in my heart.

*

“You remind me of the babe.”

“What babe?”

“Babe with the power.”

“What power?

“Power of voodoo.”

“Who do?”

“You do.”

“Do what?

“Remind me of the babe.”

I don’t have all that much to say about The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth that I didn’t say on the podcast. I have fond memories of Jim Henson’s work from my youth, but never saw The Dark Crystal (until just before the podcast) and I’ve always seen Labyrinth as more of a quirky curiosity than a cherished childhood classic. In the case of the latter, it turns out that digging into the fairly complex themes and nuances of the story is, for me, more pleasurable than watching the film itself.

THE DARK CRYSTAL

Release Date: December 17, 1982
Opening Weekend: $4.7 million
Budget: $15 million
Worldwide Box Office: $40.6 million

“Most surprising is the lack of either humor or wit, especially in the designs for the mythical creatures. More than anything else, they seem inefficient, as if no order of evolution could ever have thrown them up, even in an off millennium. Miss Piggy would not be kind to The Dark Crystal.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Both films are a wonderful display of Henson’s singular talents — and, like many visually sumptuous stories, I wish as much craft had been put into the storytelling as the puppetry. Both movies are a little too straightforward and on the nose, though they’re stuffed to the gills with charming characters and brilliant ideas. The Dark Crystal is fascinating to behold with nary a human on screen, but it’s also very remote. It all feels like it’s happening in a faraway land, long ago, without real emotional resonance. I was happy to see the characters move as they did, but the story could have been about anything.

Labyrinth is a much more accessible film, one that deals with universal subject matter like the awkward teenage years between childhood and adulthood. (This, more than anything else, probably, is what we tend to cover on the podcast.) The ways Labyrinth expresses those universal themes is totally bonkers, however, involving a gender-bending David Bowie and an omnipresent, eye-catching mound in his “perve pants.”

Even moreso than The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth is bursting with imagination and a lovable puppet supporting cast, giving us more to hang onto than we got in The Dark Crystal. (It also helps that this one has a sense of humor.) I personally loved Sarah’s distraction as she struggles to put away her literal childhood things, with the Junk Lady trying to remind her of each item’s sentimental value in order to stop her from reaching her goal.

The limbo between youth and adulthood can stretch out infinitely (like a labyrinth!), and when growing up gets particularly tough it is tempting to stop moving forward and act like a kid again. Sarah accomplishes a grown-up goal — saving her baby brother — while managing not to succumb to the Goblin King’s bulging charms. In the end, she gets to keep her fairyland friends a while, holding onto some innocence even while learning a lesson about being selfless.  Alas, getting to this point across requires making Jennifer Connolly act as petulant as possible — it feels like her character should perhaps be a year or two younger than she is, with her love of make-believe. Connolly is also saddled with a lot of tricky dialogue, a good deal of which is spoken to herself or no one in particular.

And then there’s David Bowie — who is magnificent, of course, in the campiest, cheesiest way an actor can be. I can’t remember how old I was when I first viewed Labyrinth, but I know the hair, makeup, and costuming definitely set off the alarms of abnormality even then. This was probably before I’d ever seen a man taking on feminine characteristics as something that was supposed to be — well, I still don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Sexy? Scary? Cool? A little of all of these?

I’m not sure anything about the Goblin King makes a lick of sense. Does he want the baby, or does he want Sarah? What would he even do with that baby, when he got tired of singing to it? If he wants the baby, why give Sarah a chance to rescue him? If he wants Sarah… well, ew. Sarah must learn that the glam rock star monarch has no power over her, and refuse his offer to be her master/slave. It’s sort of unclear whether staying in this kingdom represents childhood or adulthood — she’d live in a world of fantasy and make-believe forever, but she’d also be responsible for keeping that codpiece satisfied. When she returns home, she’s become less the bratty sister and more of a nurturing mother figure to Toby, and of course she’s going to grow up. But she also made David Bowie keep his anaconda out of her labyrinth, so innocence is not lost.

It’s rare to be so mystified by the lesson a children’s film is trying to impart, but at least it’s an intriguing enigma. There never was and never will be another movie quite like Labyrinth, that’s for sure.

LABYRINTH

Release Date: June 27, 1986
Opening Weekend: $3.5 million
Budget: $25 million (approximate)
Worldwide Box Office: $12.7 million
Metacritic: 60

“With their technical astonishments, Director Henson and Executive Producer Lucas have been faithful to the pioneering Disney spirit. In suggesting the thrilling dilemmas that await a wise child, they have flown worlds beyond Walt.” – Richard Corliss, Time

“Jim Henson knows what he`s doing with his Muppet characters on TV and in the movies. But he’s completely at sea when he tries to create more mature entertainment in the form of such adventure films as The Dark Crystal and now Labyrinth. Both films are really quite awful, sharing a much too complicated plot and visually ugly style. What an enormous waste of talent and money is Labyrinth.” — Gene Siskel

“Your gun is digging into my hip.”

Somebody stop us! In Episode 21, When We Were Young says “alrighty, then!” to a trip back to 1994, when Jim Carrey soared to superstar status in three back-to-back blockbusters — Dumb & Dumber, The Mask, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

We’re not just talking out of our asses here. Clearly, Carrey was one of the most bankable stars of our youth… but how do his rubber-faced hijinks hold up when viewed for the first time as adults? Are these comedies still sssmokin’, or do misogyny and homophobia end up making everyone involved look like a LOOOO-HOOOOO-SER?

It’s the most eye-popping, jaw-dropping, fourth-wall-breaking, 90s-catchphrase-spewing, Cameron Diaz-introducing episode of the podcast yet! So fire up your ’84 sheep dog, kill a couple pretty birds, and prepare to hear the most annoying sound on Earth, because we’re about to spend an entire year with Jim Carrey!

(Seriously… won’t somebody stop us??)

Listen here.

Subscribe here.

This was a particularly fun episode of the podcast for me, because I got to rediscover three significant films from 1994 that I hadn’t seen since at least 1995. Classmates spewing catchphrases from these films stuck out to me more than anything about these films themselves. None of these movies were particular favorites of mine as a child (hence, I never watched them again), so I had very little idea what to expect in taking another look.

ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE
February 4, 1994

Budget: $15 million
Opening Weekend: $12.1 million
Domestic Total Gross: $72.7 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $107.2 million
Metacritic Score: 37

“Jim Carrey stoops to new highs in low comedy: Actually he bends over, flaps his cheeks and introduces the world to butt ventriloquism in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. A riot from start to finish, Carrey’s first feature comedy is as cheerfully bawdy as it is idiotically inventive.” – Rita Kempley, Washington Post

“The movie basically has one joke, which is Ace Ventura’s weird nerdy strangeness. If you laugh at this joke, chances are you laugh at Jerry Lewis, too, and I can sympathize with you even if I can’t understand you. I found the movie a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. Kids might like it. Real little kids.” – Roger Ebert

Having not seen this film since its initial home video release, I remembered next to nothing about it, except that the storyline somehow involved the Miami Dolphins and spawned oh-so-many ubiquitous mid-90s catchphrases. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is a film everyone remembers but is rarely referenced or discussed, at least in my presence. I expected to have very little to say about it.

And boy, oh boy is there a lot to say about Ace Ventura.I wasn’t expecting to like the movie now, given that I didn’t even particularly like it when I was ten years old. At this point in my life, most of Ace Ventura‘s comedy was already too juvenile for me. But I had completely forgotten the movie’s central twist: that Sean Young’s Lieutenant Einhorn turns out to be the male villain in disguise, resulting in Ace Ventura violently stripping her in front of the police before he beats her. This is some Boys Don’t Cry level transphobia, and the fact that it’s played for laughs makes it all the more disturbing. It’s amazing that this movie got away with that in 1994, and that most people didn’t even think about how wrong it was. Hooray for progress?

A cleverer script might have found a way to mock the ways Silence Of The Lambs and The Crying Game portrayed its gender-bending characters. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is not at all clever. Aside from its jokey, backward attitude toward non-gender conformity, which might be forgiven in context of the times, the movie seems completely oblivious about its central promise, never establishing what a “pet detective” does, or why Ace Ventura is one. A broad studio comedy like this doesn’t necessarily need much in the way of establishing a character, but Ace Ventura doesn’t know what it’s parodying, or why its central premise is supposed to be funny. Football, pets, police work, a surprise gender-flip — none of this fits together in a single story without some guiding comedic force behind it. The film’s only “joke” seems to be that Ace Ventura is super obnoxious. That’s it. I can’t think of another movie that so fully squanders such a no-brainer premise.

(For the record, in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the character actually makes sense in comparison, even if it’s not exactly a masterpiece.)

THE MASK
July 29, 1994

Budget: $23 million
Opening Weekend: $23.1 million
Domestic Total Gross: $119.9 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $351.6 million
Metacritic Score: 56

“The Mask underscores the shrinking importance of conventional storytelling in special effects-minded movies… Far more energy has gone into stretching Mr. Carrey’s face, twirling his legs and conceiving animation-style gags for him to exploit than into creating a single interesting character or memorable line. Even more egregiously than most of this summer’s blockbusters, The Mask tells a story that wouldn’t be worth telling without tricks.” – Janet Maslin, New York Times

“It is said that one of the indispensable qualities of an actor is an ability to communicate the joy he takes in his performance. You could say The Mask was founded on that.” – Roger Ebert

The Mask is the film that provided the biggest question mark for me, going into the podcast. I knew enough about Ace Ventura and Dumb And Dumberer to know that they weren’t stealth sophisticated comedies that had been unfairly dismissed over the years. I knew what audiences these films were aiming for, and that that audience wasn’t me.

The Mask had a bit more of an X-factor in my mind, given that it was based on a comic book character and had a bit more style to it. It was also the biggest hit of these three films and introduced the world to a very ravishing Cameron Diaz. Our podcast on Roger Rabbit informed that I’m not always up for zany, cartoon-like characters interacting with a hyper-stylized “real world.”But you know what? Sometimes I am, and The Mask gets it right in that respect. Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, a mild-mannered banker who wishes he had the confidence to “get the girl.” (Any girl will do, really.) Then he finds the titular mask, and becomes the titular Mask, unleashing his bonkers id, which owes a lot of its best ideas to Tex Avery.

In its funniest moments, The Mask is basically a live-action cartoon with the perfect star, Jim Carrey. His inner horndog reminds us of Pepe Le Pew, inner rage reminds us of Elmer Fudd, his unstoppable energy reminds us of the Tasmanian Devil. Carrey and the screenplay rely on some rather overdone impressions and film references, but a lot of it is truly entertaining, such as Carrey’s sassy salsa to “Cuban Pete,” which has the police dancing and singing along. (A much better use of the police than Ace Ventura’s groaning and vomiting transphobic cops.)

The crime plot wears out its welcome in the end, with a villain far too tepid to carry the third act of this film. (Luckily, we get Stanley’s dog wearing the mask for a while to liven things up.) The Mask is a film that knows what it’s trying to do and does it pretty well, containing at least a few moments to make you smile, if not laugh aloud. It’s also still one of the best showcases for Carrey as a performer, since he truly brings the character to life underneath all the prosthetics and makeup. (Easier said than done, if you ask the villains from Marvel movies.) I appreciated the film’s knowingly lame Gotham City proxy, Edge City, with Landfill Park being the most romantic spot in town. I also enjoyed the dash of darkness retained from the comic books that let Carrey play the role as a truly dangerous maniac, something he’s turned out to be pretty good at. The Mask isn’t a forgotten gem, but I was glad to revisit it.

DUMB AND DUMBER
December 16, 1994

Budget: $17 million
Opening Weekend: $16.4 million
Domestic Total Gross: $247.3 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $247.3 million
Metacritic Score: 41

Dumb And Dumber isn’t my thing. It just isn’t. I knew that when it was released, and I knew it before watching it for the podcast.

I can laugh at stupidity, but it usually needs to be couched in some cleverness. Ace Ventura is an idiot in a world full of idiots (who are either slightly smarter, or slightly dumber, than he is, with no rhyme or reason). The Mask is ridiculous and silly, but pretty crafty. Pure idiocy doesn’t amuse me much — I gravitate toward characters who are more clueless than incompetent. See: Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion, The Brady Bunch Movies, and (duh) Clueless. This highlights a crucial difference in comedies: when women are stupid in movies, they’re often stupid in a driven way. Romy and Michele decide to claim they invented Post-Its at their high school reunion, but we know what they want to accomplish with this, and they at least think through some of the details before the big lie. Regina George in Mean Girls is dumb enough to eat a bunch of high-calorie protein bars to “lose weight,” but she’s an evil genius about the best ways to undermine and sabotage her frenemies. Dumb And Dumber’s Harry and Lloyd, on the other hand, are wholly incompetent human beings. How did they even get jobs? Should they really be driving? Cher Horowitz and Marcia Brady never make us wonder if they need to be institutionalized, but I questioned this constantly during Dumb And Dumber.

Dumb And Dumber lives up to its title with amiably stupid humor, though the Farrelly brothers aren’t witless. The way Harry and Lloyd’s dumb comments are set up is often pretty clever. A few gags are legitimately funny, even if the script overall is pretty inconsistent about exactly how dumb these guys can be. I appreciated Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ performances, which play off each other well. Jeff Daniels plays Harry as different enough from Lloyd that the manic energy doesn’t get too tiresome. Dumb And Dumber is a passable comedy, though I wish it committed more to the subversive dark comedy that peers in around the edges (particularly in the Unrated edition).

*

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is not really a movie.

Technically, yes, it is a movie, but the experience I have watching it is something different. Upon viewing Lars Von Trier’s Dogville in theaters, I felt like I’d just seen a very intimate and powerful stage production, not a film. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was a little like that, too — the fact that time really is unfolding over the years for these actors, along with their characters, wipes the usual artifice of cinema away.

A Ghost Story is the latest such film. I liken seeing it to going to an artist’s exhibition — the scenes are like individual pieces. You stop there for a minute or two, think about what you’re seeing, what it makes you feel… and then move on.

Despite the word appearing in its title, A Ghost Story isn’t a “story,” exactly. The characters are broadly sketched, stand-ins for humanity at large. Casey Affleck stars as “C,” the titular ghost, performing under a white sheet with eye holes — the kind that might be a cheap, last-minute Halloween costume (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone dressed up like that). Rooney Mara plays “M,” his left-behind girlfriend (maybe wife?). Following his death, C’s ghost stalks out of the morgue and heads back home to his girlfriend, observing as she mourns. As in most ghost stories, he can’t communicate with her or touch her, and she has no idea he’s there. Occasionally, he is capable of some poltergeist-style mischief, but only when he’s very upset, it seems.

You might find the fact that Casey Affleck is delivering most of his performance under a bedsheet ridiculous. It is ridiculous, in the abstract, though it’s surprising how rarely A Ghost Story finds humor in this. (Only two brief scenes featuring subtitles really highlight the absurdity of the situation.) Somehow, this blank white nothing manages to make us feel for him all the more.

On paper, A Ghost Story sounds like the setup for a Ghost-like tale of a man trying to reach out to his beloved from the beyond. You could see it that way. The way I experienced the film, though, it’s not so much about death, but about time… and grief, but not the kind of grief you’d expect.(I suggest experiencing the film for yourself, if you’re interested in doing so, before reading on.)

A Ghost Story is primarily concerned with memory — specifically, the sentimentality we attach to where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and who we’ve been with. Losing a lover in an unexpected accident is, perhaps, the most extreme kind of breakup,but the grief C and M feel in this film could easily be about a much simpler parting of ways, or any form of painful moving on in life. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara’s characters haunt each other after they’re separated. The ghost literally haunts M’s house, while C declines to “go to the light” because he prefers to dwell in the comfort of the past. A flashback tells us more about his reluctance to accept change — M wants to leave their house, and C doesn’t. (He gets his wish… and so does she.)

The argument highlights two different approaches to holding onto the past. M chooses to let go and move on, but that doesn’t mean the ghosts of her past don’t linger. C chooses to stay with what’s familiar. There doesn’t seem to be anything physically binding him to the house, but he doesn’t follow her when she goes out. When she leaves, he waits for her to come back. When she moves, he stays.

It’s not really M herself that C wants or needs. M’s life goes on, and C has no interest in learning where she’ll go from here. All he wants is his experience of her, the memory of what they shared together. For C, clinging to the nostalgia of the past is preferable to looking into the future, and risking it not being as good. (That’s true before he’s dead, too, which is why a more literal version of this story is imaginable — in which C is still alive and makes the same choice… to stay in the house when she leaves him.)A Ghost Story intentionally lacks specificity, because it doesn’t ultimately matter why C feels a connection to this house, and whatever good times they had there. The house stands in for anything we feel nostalgia for, an object or a person or an era. Our pasts are haunted by things no one else can see, no one knows are there.

That’s what memories are. Objects, places, moments and people are important to us, and the “ghosts” of what they mean imbue them with a sense of meaning. Tenants attach deeply personal feeling to a house, but then they leave, and the next tenant sees none of what was there before. They make their own memories, which have nothing to do with what happened there before. C’s ghost represents that sentiment, something intangible no one else could ever observe. Ghosts like C are littered throughout our pasts. No one else will ever see them, or know what they mean to us. That experience is ours alone.

In another flashback, C shares a piece of music he’s produced. M listens patiently, but doesn’t seem moved. She doesn’t feel what he feels. Later, after his death, she listens to the song again, and she does feel something… but what she feels is different than what he felt, or maybe the same thing but too late. The emotions that feel so real are not real to anyone but us. Sometimes, two people seem to share the same thing — love — but do they? Is it really the same thing? Is this a shared experience, or are both parties experiencing it in entirely different ways? There’s no way to ever know.

Time passes very differently in A Ghost Story than any other movie I can think of — sometimes excruciatingly slowly, and sometimes in a blur. The more time that passes after C’s death, the less power he has to “haunt” anyone, or anything. Eventually, the ghost — representing C’s impression upon the world around him while he was alive — becomes obsolete. (Another character briefly enters the story to deliver a monologue about this, which might sum the film’s themes up a bit too neatly.)A Ghost Story takes a radical, jarring turn in its third act, becoming weightier and more portentous than before (somehow). C’s ghost witnesses an event from the distant past. More than anything else in this unusual film, this threw me for a loop… if the ghost is meant to be C’s memories, or the memories other have of him, or his impression on the mortal coil… well, how could that exist before he was even here? Perhaps the point is that as much weight as we give our own grief, there is a history that came before us that is equally raw and wrenching; eventually, we all get swept up into the past, the forgotten sadness of what came before.

There’s nothing special or unique about this particular ghost.

The above is personal interpretation of the film. David Lowery’s offbeat film is open to plenty of other discourse, although it does occasionally narrow its focus (like in that monologue). I don’t know if we’re supposed to believe in A Ghost Story as a literal ghost story, or if it’s looking to cohesively “make sense” from start to finish. For me, the various scenes are ruminations on connected themes.

A Ghost Story isn’t what I’d call an entertaining film. As I mentioned, it’s barely a film at all. Rather, it’s an experience that will reward viewers who sit and have a dialogue with it, who don’t feel the need to grasp every beat of the “story.” It is also best for those willing to be bummed out for 90 minutes, losing themselves in deep thoughts about mortality, memory, and the cosmic pointlessness of human lives.

Before the credits rolled, I had the thought that this could be the most interesting movie I’ve ever seen. Almost two days later, I still can’t think of anything that offers an equivalent experience.

Did I like it? I don’t know.

“Are you crying?”

Did a baseball diamond used to be your playground? If so, you’re probably one of the fans who made the Rockford Peaches stars of the most successful baseball movie of all time. Penny Marshall’s World War II-era dramedy is a who’s who of major league 90s names, from Geena Davis to Rosie O’Donnell to Tom Hanks to Madonna. (And Marla Hooch!)

There’s no denying that the film is a feminist feat: a rare sports drama directed by and starring women. A League of Their Own paved the way for so many stories about female athletes to follow, like… uhh… has anyone seen my new red hat?

In honor of the film’s 25th anniversary, the When We Were Young hosts drug their chaperones and trade oven mitts for baseball mitts, debating whether Betty Spaghetti & co. knock it out of the park or drop the ball. And all without letting our noses get shiny!

Listen here.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
July 1, 1992

Budget: $40 million
Opening Weekend: $13.7 million
Domestic Total Gross: $107.5 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $132.4 million
Metacritic Score: 67

I don’t have a particularly storied history with A League Of Their Own, nor a particularly “hot take” on it now. The movie has aged very well. The bookends feel pretty cheesy, but the period stuff is fresh and nuanced, and its female characters are terrific across the board. I’m not sure Dottie’s story is as punchy as I’d like it to be, which I talk about plenty on the podcast. I suspect there’s a more resonant drama hiding somewhere in there, but the one we get works well enough. It’s entertaining from start to finish, with wonderful comedic performances from Madonna, Tom Hanks, Megan Cavanaugh, and Rosie O’Donnell. It’s also the highest-grossing baseball movie ever made! (Yes, that includes the ones about men.)

The terrible sitcom highlights how broad and stereotypical the film could have been, and it’s a tribute to the writers and Penny Marshall that the film never makes any concessions because it’s about women. Obviously, the sexism of the league’s owners and managers and the media play a large part in the story, like that hilarious newsreel. But the story itself is as sports-focused and serious as you’d expect a comparable film about men to be. Dottie and Kit’s sibling rivalry is the same kind we’ve seen in stories about male athletes. If anything, the movie takes winning and losing less seriously, because for these women, it’s a boon just to play the game.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do replicants dream of unicorns? Does Sean Young dream of being in a movie where she isn’t inappropriately manhandled by a major movie star?

In Episode 25 of When We Were Young, the lines between man and machine are blurred as we discuss Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Daryl Hannah, in advance of the Ryan Gosling-starring sequel Blade Runner 2049.

First, the gang shares childhood visions of Things To Come, and wonders why there are so many dystopias in the fictional future (and so few utopias). Then, we dive into the year 2019 (by way of 1982, in 2017) to revisit the darkest, wettest, most neon-geisha-filled depiction of Los Angeles ever. We all agree that Blade Runner has amazing parking meters and fierce eye makeup, but is the story itself worth the film’s cult classic status? Opinions may differ!

In a special bonus segment for superfans at episode’s end, the gang celebrates a full year of podcasting. We share the pop culture revisit that surprised us most, our favorite funny moments (that are all about Becky), and the resurrection of Playtime, in which a Death Match determines once and for all what movie, album, or TV show held up the best over the years. (Hint: it’s not Roger Rabbit, Kevin Smith, or Buffy.)

Listen here and subscribe here for our episode on Blade Runner.

BLADE RUNNER
June 25, 1982

Budget: $28 million
Opening Weekend: $6.2 million
Domestic Total Gross: $27.6 million
Lifetime Gross: $32.9 million
Metacritic Score: 72

At first glance, it may strike you as odd that Blade Runner has the reputation it does. It is one of the landmark sci-fi films, with a die-hard fan base that will passionately debate the film’s central mysteries and pore over various cuts of the movie. It’s hard for any film to live up to that kind of legend, and Blade Runner in a particular is a strange case. Certain themes and narratives feel disjointed to anyone who isn’t familiar with the source material or the storied history of the film’s creation. Most audiences in 1982 didn’t “get” Blade Runner upon first viewing, and even now, that initial visit to Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles of 2019 is rife with frustration and confusion. Very little about this futuristic world is explained explicitly, and a lot of what is explained is fairly obscure. A more straightforward film would have shown us a lot of what we’re told. (Blade Runner might look more like that movie, if not for its budget troubles.) Most questions go unanswered — and not just the ones about Deckard being a replicant. I have a hard time imagining anyone sitting through Blade Runner just once and feeling they fully understood everything. As we’re seeing now with Aronofsky’s mother!, audiences tend to resent films that challenge them. Blade Runner was initially seen as a disappointment.

I never saw Blade Runner when I was young. I first viewed it a few years ago. Like audiences in 1982, I was impressed by the production design and murky about some plot points. I remembered the film’s aesthetics better than I remembered its story. I could tell you that Daryl Hannah’s character had some killer makeup, but couldn’t remember the actual function of her character, or whether she was a hero or a villain.Ultimately, the whole point of Blade Runner is that Pris is neither a hero nor a villain — nobody is. We’re not used to that kind of ambiguity in big budget sci-fi films, which might be why the film has been hard to connect to for audiences just looking for a good time. We don’t typically watch something with the budget and star power of Blade Runner expecting complex moral questions and ambiguous themes. A normal studio movie might make us question whether blade runners killing replicants was necessary or a gross injustice, but then they would answer that question. In Blade Runner, Deckard is neither heroic nor corrupt, as far as we can tell. Ford’s performance doesn’t indicate one way or another whether we’re supposed to like this guy. We think we’re supposed to be on his side because he’s the protagonist of the story… but honestly, aside from that, what stake do we have in this guy?

Similarly, the replicants are more dynamic characters — child-like Pris, the “pleasure model”; the tragically intelligent Roy Batty; sassy snake-dancing stripper Zhora; and innocent young Rachael, as she undergoes the existential crisis of realizing she’s synthetic. Supposedly, replicants are dangerous because they lack empathy. But we don’t get a lot of empathy from humans, either. Rachael cries when she realizes she’s an android. Pris seems to get some genuine joy out of her friendship with J.F. Sebastian, however self-serving it is in the end. Batty spares Deckard’s life for unknown reasons. Maybe the replicants are manufacturing their empathy — but then again, maybe we all are, on some level. Deckard gives a complicated test meant to detect empathy in humans and differentiate them from androids, but can empathy be legitimately measured? Who’s to say whether replicants do or don’t have it? There’s no proof in Blade Runner to draw a solid conclusion.This is a powerful allegory for our times (or any times, really). Through various twists of fate, some classes of human beings have decided they’re more valid than others. They’ve taken it upon themselves to decide how the “lesser” race or class should live, and often, when they should live. American slavery and Nazism are two towering examples, but there’s still plenty of arbitrary judgment about who should live, and how they should live, going around. Blade Runner barely even broaches the subject in its text — rather, the film’s moral murkiness requires viewers to grapple with it on their own (or not). That’s a key reason why the film has been reexamined so many times, has never exactly felt “finished” — because it necessitates thinking, research, and discussion outside the text to even make sense of it. That’s not everybody’s cinematic bag. (Again, see Mother.)

Of course, I’m not sure all this ambiguity was intentional. From draft to draft, and from script to screen, Blade Runner lost key visuals, dialogue, and plot points that would almost certainly have made it stronger from a narrative perspective. Add to this the disparate thematic and character ideas of the director, writers, actors, and crew — it seems this group was rarely on the exact same page with who was doing what, why, and what it meant to the story overall. The result is more like a dazzling art project than a coherent motion picture — which is interesting, now that we’re about to get the sequel Blade Runner 2049 from Denis Villeneuve. It’s hard to imagine that this sequel won’t be at least a little more straightforward than its 1982 predecessor.

Blade Runner is endlessly open to interpretation, because there’s no one answer to any challenge it poses. It was perfectly timed to be owned and dissected by cinephiles with the rise of home video in the 1980s, and lives on now because it’s also a great movie to pore over on the internet. I come away from it fascinated as much by what isn’t in the movie as what is. It’s a very unique film.

*

I hate to react too quickly to any movie, because opinions settle over time. I often see a movie and have a negative reaction, only to find that it sits better over time. Sometimes, I leave a film satisfied, but gradually find reasons to like it less.

But it’s been less than an hour since I walked out of Blade Runner 2049 and I’m already comfortable calling it one of the best science fiction films of all time, and quite possibly the greatest sequel ever made.

I dove deep into Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner for the When We Were Young podcast, reading both Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and Future Noir, a comprehensive recounting of the making of the film. Both texts gave me a greater appreciation for the film itself, which contains many obscure references to themes from Dick’s story that easily go over most audiences’ heads during their initial viewing. It is difficult to fully piece Blade Runner‘s plot together as a casual viewer. Crucial details are mentioned but not shown. This exposition often feels off-the-cuff and half-told — there’s no indication that these are important facts the audience should hold onto, yet the movie makes little sense without them.

Blade Runner is a fascinating and unique piece of cinema, but it doesn’t always come together as a fully realized story. Learning more about scenes that were never shot or didn’t make the final cut (in any of the many versions), one discovers plenty of intentions that might have made for a more coherent and more powerful story. (Screenwriter Hampton Fancher’s original ending was beautiful.) I don’t begrudge anyone who thinks the original Blade Runner is a bona fide masterpiece, but I also have no beef with anyone saying it isn’t. I appreciate the film’s look and sound and the individual creative contributions of many players, while also wishing certain elements of the story had been developed better.

Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, is more or less a perfect film, both entertaining and soulful. The story makes sense from beginning to end, yet its beats are frequently surprising. It is not in any sense a “reboot” of the original, but rather a very direct sequel, in that it couldn’t possibly exist without the first film. (In fact, I wonder if anyone who hasn’t seen the original could fully appreciate it.) And it might be the best sequel ever made.

A handful of films are probably popping into your head as possible counterpoints. The Empire Strikes Back? The Godfather Part II? Aliens? The Dark Knight? Batman Returns? Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Those are all great sequels, on par with the first film — and in some cases, better — but none of them really make the original better. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, feels made in part to fix the shortcomings of the original. It has subtle and not-so-subtle homages to Dick’s novel and Scott’s film (including my favorite nod, an origami sheep). It’s not a retread, nor does it abandon the elements that made its 35-year-old predecessor so distinct. Set 30 years after the original’s 2019 placement, director Denis Villeneuve’s vision of 2049 feels like a natural progression from the future we glimpsed in Blade Runner. It doesn’t just revisit the themes and story elements from the first film — it pushes them in intriguing, unexpected, but completely consistent directions. Has any sequel made such a strong argument for the original film’s mere existence?

Like Blade Runner, 2049 shows us a vision of the future that’s not quite like any other film we’ve seen before. (Not even Blade Runner.) The original film shaped the collective cinematic vision of dystopias over the past three decades — it’s a marvel Blade Runner 2049 found any new ideas to play with, given how popular the subgenre has been. No film I can think of so honors its predecessor while feeling so fresh simultaneously. Blade Runner 2049 not only expands on certain murky story beats from the original — what we learn in Blade Runner 2049 makes the original film stronger and more satisfying. It’s hard to fathom how a sequel to Blade Runner could be any better.(I’ll keep my synopsis vague and spoiler free, as it works best to know as little as possible going in.) In the film, Ryan Gosling plays K, a blade runner who is both similar to and very different from Harrison Ford’s Deckard. Like Deckard, he’s an isolated bachelor who puts his work first. In the opening scene, a routine assignment goes in an unexpected direction, sending K on a crucial mission that, as his boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) puts it, “breaks the world” if it fails.

The marketing has made no secret of the fact that this quest eventually leads K to meet Deckard. Other key players include replicant manufacturer Liandel Wallace (Jared Leto), his dutiful employee Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), and Joi (Ana De Armas), an A.I. who is best described as the 2049 version of Amazon’s Alexa. Three other women, played by Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, and Hiam Abbass, also have important roles, not to mention the thematic importance of a female character from the original Blade Runner. Refreshingly, Blade Runner 2049 is bursting at the seams with compelling female characters. In fact, with the exception of K and Deckard, almost every pivotal character in the film is a woman. (Leto’s Wallace is a compelling figure, but he’s more the puppet master than a direct player.) I can’t remember the last time a big budget studio film was so peppered with great roles for women… quite possibly because the answer is “never.”

Blade Runner set the scene for some interesting debates. Blade Runner 2049 is a loving correction of the original’s sins. The story makes perfect sense, and also makes more sense out of the original. Both are hauntingly beautiful aesthetically, but Blade Runner never drums up much sympathy for Deckard, which may or may not be intentional. (A little of both, I think.) The most emotional readings of the original film take place outside the text of the movie. If Deckard is a replicant, his dirty work takes on an added layer of ironic sadness… but the film only hints at this, giving viewers little reason to even consider the possibility (unless they do some additional reading and view alternate cuts of the film). Either way, Deckard is a miserable son of a bitch. He shoots a fleeing (replicant) female in the back, kills Daryl Hannah’s Pris in equally brutal fashion, and forces himself upon Rachael in ways that call her consent into question. (Maybe they didn’t so much in 1982, but it wouldn’t fly in 2017.) The female characters in Scott’s original are, in many ways, the highlight of the film. Dangerous but child-like Pris is somehow the most relatable character, while Sean Young’s Rachael also earns our sympathy. But these women are also violently abused by our supposed “hero.”

Blade Runner seems rather indifferent about how we should feel about Deckard’s actions. We aren’t given much evidence that replicants really deserve to be so violently offed — yes, they’ve been known to kill humans, but did that start before or after humans started exterminating them? History has taught us that human beings aren’t always right when they declare themselves superior to a different kind of person. American slavery was justified with the notion that black people were savages, intellectually and morally inferior to white men. Some slaves did, then, behave rather savagely — but that’s just a consequence of treating people like savages.

Scott’s Blade Runner half-poses many fascinating questions, then never answers them. Ambiguity can be a powerful tool in storytelling, but only when we it’s intended. Some of the ambiguity in Scott’s film comes instead from budgetary restrictions, too many cooks, and lots of rewriting. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, never loses its way for a second. Every scene and shot are painstakingly thought through. We can tell. It doesn’t just revisit the troubling moral questions the original asks. It asks them again, with new story beats that make them even more impossible to answer.One love story in Blade Runner 2049 adds layers of complexity onto the original model — the Deckard-Rachael romance. At first, this is pretty par for the course in a sci-fi dystopia, but it ends up adding real heartbreak to the film. How capable are replicants of empathy? Of love? Blade Runner 2049 keeps this open ended. Many characters are on screen for just a few minutes, but each is fascinating and full of life (whether or not they are “alive”). You could make a fascinating film about any character in this movie. Clocking in at nearly 3 hours, Blade Runner 2049 is long enough, yet plenty that goes unresolved, and several characters we could stand to learn more about. The conclusion of this film makes it difficult to imagine a direct sequel — and also difficult to imagine that there won’t be one.

Science fiction films in which androids or artificial intelligence take on human characteristics certainly aren’t rare these days — take, for example, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Her, and Ex Machina, to name a few very good ones. Both Blade Runner films are less explicit than most, implying moral dilemmas but rarely voicing them. Where Blade Runner 2049 triumphs over its predecessor is in empathy, of all things. Gosling’s K is a more defined character than Ford’s Deckard ever was. He undergoes an enthralling emotional journey over the course of the film, and it’s clear what kind of journey it is. Blade Runner‘s vision of the future was so dreary, it was hard to care if any humans or replicants survived to return to their dark, damp, joyless existence. Blade Runner 2049‘s vision of the further future is about as bleak as Blade Runner‘s 2019, but there’s enough soul and verve in these characters to make it worth the investment. This is not an entirely hopeless world, as frightening as so much of it is. The sequel also adds biblical undertones that make it easier to grasp the stakes in this narrative. Blade Runner 2049 touched me in ways the original never did… in ways studio films rarely attempt.

I’m not exactly surprised at how great Blade Runner 2049, both as a sequel and a standalone cinematic experience. It is directed by Denis Villeneuve, after all, who made my Top Ten thrice in the past three years with Enemy, Sicario, and Arrival. (In case you can’t tell from this effusive review, he’s on deck for a fourth.) The film was shot by the legendary Roger Deakins, who’s been nominated thirteen times for an Academy Award, and curiously never won. (I expect this to change in the very near future.) On an artistic level, Blade Runner 2049 is anything but a failure.

The film’s box office take thus far has fallen short of expectations. Fittingly, so did the original Blade Runner. But so what? There’s a good chance Blade Runner 2049 will have staying power in one way or another, just as the original did. It has Oscar potential in numerous categories, provided the Academy is willing to consider a genre sequel through an artistic lens. Costume design, visual effects, and cinematography are all superb. It just might be a Best Picture nominee as well, unless Star Wars: The Last Jedi is several cuts above The Force Awakens and steals Blade Runner‘s thunder. (That’s plausible enough, considering it was directed by Rian Johnson, who made a near-masterpiece original sci-fi film of his own with Looper.) Blade Runner 2049 could be too adult and ponderous to cross the $100 million mark in the United States, which will unfairly categorize it as a flop; then again, I’m already frothing to see it again in theaters, and I’ll bet you I’m not the only one.

Blade Runner 2049 is already one of my favorite science fiction films of all time. It deserves to be held up as a classic of the genre, right alongside the first Blade Runner. In spirit, both Blade Runners share so much — they’re morally complex, visually dazzling, and somewhat disturbing. With a few excisions, Blade Runner 2049 could have been an original sci-fi story, but both films are made better with the existence of the other.

You might even call Blade Runner 2049 a replicant of Blade Runner. Common sense tells us that the original is inherently superior, because Blade Runner 2049 wouldn’t even exist without Blade Runner. Sequels are meant to be vapid, functional carbon copies of something better — but in the Blade Runner films, the replicants end up having more life to them, more personality. Such is the case with Blade Runner 2049.

This film is a masterpiece.*

“Now, repeat after me: ‘Yo!'”

“Yo!”

“Hot damn!”

“Hot damn!”

“What a fabulous window treatment!”

“What a fabulou—”

“That was a trick!”

Come one, come all, and come out already for When We Were Young’s most same-sex-loving episode yet! In honor of Coming Out Day on October 11, Episode 26 takes a furtive glance back at the gay 90s, which marked a sea change in pop culture’s depictions of people who are — yep! — gay.

First, our hosts coop up in The Birdcage, Mike Nichols’ 1996 comedy that pushes Robin Williams and Nathan Lane back in the closet to appease Ally McBeal’s right-wing parents. Next, we touch on Ellen DeGeneres’ game-changing “Puppy Episode,” the coming out party heard ’round the world. And finally, we celebrate the 20th out-iversary of In & Out, starring Kevin Kline as a small-town teacher outed at the Oscars, and Joan Cusack as his increasingly desperate bride-to-be.

Plenty of social progress has been made in the days since Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and DOMA, so how do these mid-90s gay characters hold up in 2017? Practice your John Wayne walk, book some therapy with Oprah, and stop dancing to “I Will Survive,” because our hosts’ opinions of these films are definitely not homogeneous.

THE BIRDCAGE
March 8, 1996

Budget: $31 million
Opening Weekend: $18.3 million
Domestic Total Gross: $124.1 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $185.3 million
Metacritic Score: 72

Prior to The Birdcage, the biggest gay-centric films of the 90s included 1993’s Philadelphia, 1994’s The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, and 1995’s Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. Angels In America debuted in the early 90s, too.

That was essentially what gay life was to most moviegoers — either a fabulous, feminine party, filled with bright colors and outrageous costumes and plenty of cross-dressing, or bleak and tragic, haunted by the spectre of certain death.

Obviously, AIDS was on a lot of people’s minds at this time, a fresh wound and a looming threat. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense Of Marriage Act were the government’s response to gay efforts for equal rights. Gay people were to be pitied or ridiculed — maybe not cruelly, but the joke always seemed to be at how silly it was to see men dressed as women. This was just about the only way audiences could see gay people in mainstream entertainment — dressed as women, or dying. There wasn’t much nuance.

The Birdcage was a massive hit and signaled that there was an appetite for stories that fell somewhere in between — even if it still has one foot in the drag queen’s closet. Director Mike Nichols does make room for tender scenes between Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, as well as plenty of lively banter. The dialogue is sharp and the performances are incredibly fun, and it all works pretty well if you don’t think too hard about it.This time around, though, The Birdcage rubbed me the wrong way in a few critical areas. My main concern is that the plot doesn’t make a bit of sense. Gene Hackman’s conservative senator gets caught up in a scandal involving an underage black prostitute, but it’s not his scandal. It’s his newly deceased colleague’s. It’s easy enough to imagine how that might put Senator Keeley in some hot water; it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine that the media would be sated by Keeley’s 19-year-old daughter getting married, no matter who it’s with. It’s just plain ridiculous that the media follows Keeley to Miami… for what reason, exactly? As far as they know, there isn’t even a story. (They also zoom in on a videotape to hear it better. Um, that’s not how anything works.)

The media subplot is dumb. Fine. Whatever. That would be fine as long as the principle characters’ actions made some sense… but do they? Val and Barbara lie to the Keeleys, both about Val’s Jewishness and his parents’ queerness. They even lie about his last name. Is Barbara keeping her maiden name? Are we supposed to believe that the Keeleys will never stumble upon this information? None of these questions are even asked.

Val wants Armand to pretend to be straight, and Albert to disappear while they meet the parents. That’s great… but there is going to be a wedding, right? Armand and Albert are entrenched in Miami’s decadent gay drag scene, so none of their friends will be at the wedding. Armand might pull off his straight man act, and fool the Keeleys into thinking he’s still with Katherine. And then what? They’re just never going to get together again, for the rest of their lives? What if they have kids?

Val and Barbara’s foresight is lacking, and their plan is stupid. They’re not the main characters, though. It would be nice if Armand was smart enough to bring up some of these points, and maybe find clever solutions to them. Instead, the screenplay just sweeps them under the rug. Even that might be forgivable if what actually happened followed any sense of logic. But what the hell is Albert doing in this movie? He’s hurt that Armand and Val are ashamed of him… so he dresses as a woman and poses as Val’s biological mother. What is he trying to accomplish? It’s unclear how Albert thinks this will solve any of these problems. Clearly, it’s just adding to the mess.

If you can buy that Albert would be so selfish and reckless to potentially ruin Val’s engagement with his theatrics, then the point where Armand calls the ruse off comes out of nowhere, and we see very little of the Keeleys’ reaction. Instead, the bad media plot resurfaces, forcing the Keeleys to dress in drag and sneak their way out of the club. Why? Because if the media sees them associating with gay people, it will make them look bad. Next scene? A huge wedding, with lots of flamboyant gay attendees. The secret’s out. Yes, the secret that the entire plot of the movie bent over backward to contain is apparently just… not important anymore? What the fuck, Mike Nichols?

The Birdcage lacks a resolution of any of the conflicts it has addressed. We have no reason to believe that Keeley would suddenly accept Armand and Albert’s “lifestyle,” let alone embrace it. We’ve been told that Keeley being seen with Albert and Armand will ruin his political career… so, uhh, does it? The Birdcage has asked me to follow a handful of characters who do everything in their power not to let Keeley be associated with the outrageous gays from Miami, and then in its final scene, asks me to just… not care anymore, I guess? From a story perspective, that’s pretty wretched screenwriting.

I don’t begrudge anyone who enjoys The Birdcage. I enjoy it too, to an extent. The actors have incredible comic timing, and they’re given fun, snappy dialogue. But the only characters who make any sense are the Keeleys, and even that’s a stretch. Armand should think ahead about his son’s lame plan and come up with something better. Albert should have a reason why he thinks dressing in drag for the Keeleys is the best solution to Val’s problem. Val and Barbara should probably just not get married. No one here is acting with any remotely plausible intentions.

Comedy has to be grounded in some reality to be really funny. Nonsense wackiness doesn’t cut it. To an extent, this is a matter of taste — but The Birdcage wouldn’t have had to do that much work to come up with a coherent twist on this story. It’s just too lazy.

The Birdcage is practically a shot-for-shot remake of La Cage Aux Folles, a French farce from 1979, complete with the same plot beats and punchlines and everything. The Birdcage made zero attempt to update its views of gay life for 1996, and I find that sad. Albert behaves like a child throughout the entire film, throwing tantrums and overreacting. This might be interesting, if the film had something to say about why some gay men infantilize themselves this way, why they disappear into a diva persona as an escape from reality. (To be clear, I’m not suggesting that cross-dressing or doing drag is inherently infantilizing. But that seems to be the case with Albert.) And it all ends with the concerns of these gay characters unresolved, but all’s well that ends with a heterosexual union.

I can’t connect to The Birdcage, as no one in it acts like a sensible human being whose actions are actually going to take them where they want to go. (That’s probably its French roots, in large part.) It feels a bit too much like a minstrel show — straight (or, in 1996, presumably straight) men dressed up in “silly” costumes, acting ridiculous for a mostly straight audience. The Birdcage could be a lot worse, in this way — its depiction of gay men doesn’t bother me, I just wish there were a little more to it. I knew I was in trouble when the film began on the most obvious choice for an opening musical number — “We Are Family.”

The Birdcage is the reason a movie like My Best Friend’s Wedding was retroactively important to me. Rupert Everett’s George was a joyful scene-stealer, like Nathan Lane’s Albert — but no one needed to teach him how to walk, or dress, or put butter on toast. He’s a grownup.

There’s nothing wrong with gay men (or straight men, for that matter) dressing as women, but by 1996, I was pretty sick of that… without even knowing it. Get AIDS or dress as a woman… these were essentially the two options mainstream pop culture was offering gay people. George in My Best Friend’s Wedding was a supporting character, but he was something different, someone who said that gay men can be suave, confident, hilarious, the life of the party… even when dressed as men! The movie was a hit, and George was what everyone was talking about, even though he’s not one of the three primary characters.

A few months earlier, Ellen DeGeneres did this in an event more visible way — her “Yep, I’m Gay!” Time magazine cover wasn’t exactly subtle. But most gay people don’t actually want their coming out to be headline-worthy. It was everybody else who thought it was their business… and in 2017, still does, too often.

Of being gay, Ellen said in her infamous interview: “I ignored it because I didn’t really know what it was until I was 18 years old. I dated guys. I liked guys. But I knew that I liked girls too. I just didn’t know what to do with that. I thought, “If I were a guy I’d go out with her.” And then I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to be a guy, really.’ So I went, ‘Oh, well,’ and just went on with my life.”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t read that at the time, but if I had, it might have sounded familiar. I didn’t want to dress like a woman, and I didn’t want AIDS, and I liked girls well enough, and that was enough evidence for me to believe that I was straight. Pop culture didn’t give me anything to aspire to — at least, not anywhere I looked. That started to shift in 1997, first with Ellen’s “The Puppy Episode,” which aired on April 30. I was still several years away from realizing it had anything to do with me, but I appreciated it as a momentous media event, and it’s a great episode. The public and the media was clamoring for that “one moment” when Ellen finally tells us she’s gay, as if we have a right to that information. There is such a moment — accidentally blurted into an intercom at the airport. (That’s exactly how coming out feels, by the way. Like you have literally announced something private and uncomfortable to the whole world… which DeGeneres really did.)

But “The Puppy Episode” is also peppered with slow and steady revelations. Ellen first realizes she’s gay when she most staunchly denies it, upon her attraction to Laura Dern’s wonderful Susan. Here, she won’t even come out to herself. Then she allows herself that realization, and tells one trusted confidante — who just happens to be Oprah. (Life would be a lot easier if every gay man and woman could test it out with Oprah first.) Then Ellen tells Susan, and her friends, and her parents, and her boss… it’s a long process that takes us to the end of the season.

IN & OUT
September 19, 1997

Budget: $35 million
Opening Weekend: $15 million
Domestic Total Gross: $63.9 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $63.9. million
Metacritic Score: 70

Like both The Birdcage and Ellen‘s “Puppy Episode,” I saw Frank Oz’s In & Out just once, in the comfort of my own home, and I don’t remember finding it applicable to my own life in any way. (If anything, the scenes about the Academy Awards resonated most.) What I appreciate about the film now is that it also deals with coming out in steps, a series of revelations. It should go without saying, not all gay people have the same coming out experience. Some know that they’re gay early on, almost before they know everything else. For them, coming out is more about “when” and “how,” and less about “if.” (Albert was almost certainly one such case.) Then, there are characters like Ellen Morgan and Howard Brackett, involved in heterosexual romances that are adequate enough. It hasn’t really hit them yet. And then… bam. Everything changes.

That’s a lot more similar to my personal experience, and maybe why I find “The Puppy Episode” and In & Out so satisfying now. The very notion of “coming out” was new to most audiences in 1997, and it was new to these characters. We got to go on that journey with them. Now, these long, deliberate coming out stories are mostly besides the point — we’ve seen so many, let’s see something else. Still, it was refreshing to rewatch two stories that dwelled on a difficult, confusing, and often very painful process, without skipping through it. Coming out in 2017 is easier than it was in 1997, for some, but not for everyone. It still takes the kind of courage Ellen DeGeneres displayed in 1997, to risk flipping your whole world upside down. It’s a bigger shakeup for some than others.

Aside from its witty dialogue and great comedic performances, I was happy to leave characters like Nathan Lane’s Albert in the dust for a while, and examine characters who didn’t have to become brassy women just to be palatable to the mainstream. But my cohosts found plenty to love in Albert, and that’s the point. We now have enough gay characters that most people can find the one that speaks to them. It might be a drag queen, but it might not be. We have that choice.

Oh, and another thing about In & Out — it’s fucking funny. Paul Rudnick’s script is full of great gay one-liners, but the story examines the perspectives of many characters. Howard’s parents are thrown for a loop, but soon his mother (the divine Debbie Reynolds) uses his big revelation as a springboard for her own confessions, and her old lady gal pals follow suit. Howard’s students have to take a decisive stand on how they feel about an issue most of them had never confronted before. Howard’s straight buddies at his bachelor party show that they accept him by breaking out some Barba Streisand movies — womp womp! That’s an easy joke, except In & Out twists it by having these dudes legitimately argue about which films holds up best. (Sound familiar?) Turns out, they love Babs as much as the gay guy. And of course, there’s Joan Cusack’s Oscar-nominated turn as his would-be wife, who also has to confront some sad truths about herself. She “comes out” as desperate, forced to admit that she’s settling for Howard because she never believed anyone could really love her. What’s nifty about In & Out is that Howard’s coming out is just the catalyst for everyone in this town to come out of their shell, one way or another.

In & Out has more going for it than its satiric look at coming out in a small town. It also lampoons Hollywood, and it’s dead on in that respect. (I will happily watch the entire four hour fictional telecast, if it it’s available.) As with The Birdcage, In & Out plays it pretty safe in terms of what is shown, and how much gay sexuality is expressed (almost zero). But we’ve had two decades to make for that. Almost exactly twenty years after Ellen came out, an intimate and briefly erotic film about a closeted gay man won Best Picture. (And thank God it was better than the fake gay movie that wins an Oscar in In & Out.)

It’s hard to know what kind of influence these coming out stories (or, in The Birdcage’s case, “going back in” story) had on what came after. It’s hard to deny that Ellen’s outing was probably the most significant pop culture event in terms of making gays mainstream. In 1998, Will & Grace premiered and dealt much more explicitly (though still quite cartoonishly) with gay life. And then we were just kind of on a roll.

That isn’t to say we don’t have a ways to go. We’re just now getting around to female and black superheroes, after all — it’ll be a spell before Disney grows enough balls for, say, The Beast And The Other Beast. If ever. But change has come pretty quickly, overall, and it’s been fascinating to witness it. We have it pretty good these days, even if we still have to promise that “it gets better.” Thank you to all those who fought to get their stories told when it wasn’t so easy.

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