Drag Gab

Wise: Hiya, Werth.

Werth: Hello, Wise.  I assume you've been ogling over the Oscar noms this week.

Wise: I was pleased to see that my fellow alum Glenn Close scored a sixth nom for her work in Albert Nobbs.  Her chances at taking home the gold seem pretty good.  Even The Huffington Post was excited enough to publish a piece about other women who have taken on trouser roles. 

Werth: I love Glenn Close, but there's no way she'll be taking home the statuette this year. It's all about the Meryl... or the Viola... or the Michelle. 

But speaking of cross-dressing roles that earned Oscar noms, the king/queen of drag films has to be 1982's Tootise. With ten nominations and one win, Tootsie stars Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey, a frustrated, struggling character actor who knows how to play a part, but doesn't know how to be himself. He really creates an identity crisis when he decides to prove to his agent he is castable by auditioning for a part in soap opera Southwest General... as a woman.

Wise: Is that how Katherine Heigl booked Grey's Anatomy? 

Werth: Dorsey gets the part, but finds that playing the role of hospital administrator Emily Kimberly is nothing compared to playing the role of his drag-ego Dorothy Michaels. What starts off as a satire of the acting world turns into a heartfelt romantic comedy with lots of love angles. 

Dorsey falls in love with castmate Julie (Jessica Lange) whose father Les (Charles Durning) falls in love with Dorothy, who has to make sure that Sandy (Teri Garr), who is in love with Michael doesn't find out that Michael is Dorothy while Dorothy avoids the advances of soap-star John Van Horn (George Gaynes).

Wise: I got whiplash just from reading that.

Werth: While Hoffman is not necessarily known for his comedy, what he instinctively understands is character. Dorothy's lilting, no nonsense Southern voice is the perfect core for the strong-willed, semi-dowdy Dorothy. Hoffman's make-up and costume aren't flashy, and his physicality isn't campy. Hoffman doesn't pretend to be a woman, he becomes one. 

Dorothy's reveal scene where she/he sheds the character live on the set of Southwest General is one of the most memorable moments on film, not just for the situation, but for how brilliantly Hoffman navigates between two seemingly real people.

Wise: If only he'd coached the Wayans Brothers before they made White Chicks. 

Werth: Tootsie's script by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal is airtight and full of the kind of lines comic actors kill for—and boy is the cast full of killers. Bill Murray is hysterical as Michael's morose playwright roommate Jeff (it is said that he improvised his lines). Garr is a riot as the perkily neurotic Sandy. 

Lange earned an Oscar for playing Julie as a jaded-but-vulnerable soap-stress. Durning, Gaynes, Dabney Coleman, Geena Davis, and Doris Belack show how good character acting can elevate even the smallest of roles. 

And Sydney Pollack not only seamlessly directed this awesome cast, but put in a stellar performance himself as beleaugured agent George Fields who believes, "A tomato doesn't have logic!"



Wise: Although this tomato had a penis.

Werth: And with fantastic NYC location shots and an 80's soundtrack with enough saxophone to choke Kenny G, Tootsie is one of those must-see classics that will have you laughing your wig off.

Wise: Wig-wearing is beside the point in the gleefully absurd Girls Will Be Girls (2003).  Starring drag queens Evie Harris (Jack Potnick), Miss Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp) and Varla Jean Merman (Jeffery Roberson), the film never acknowledges that these are men in drag.

Werth: I won't even acknowledge that this is a real film.

Wise: All three characters existed long before the movie was made, and that process of honing these personalities through performance—Evie as the drunk has-been; Coco as the girl with big dreams and bad luck; Varla as the small-town girl determined to make it—lends each of them a certain verisimilitude.  I mean, no one is going to mistake any of them for some Disney Channel 'tween queen—

Werth: Although Venessa Hudgens has been looking a little burly lately.  

Wise: The plot is nonsense—the script cribs from all manner of classic Hollywood camp—but writer/director Richard Day (who cut his teeth producing for Ellen, The Drew Carey Show and Arrested Development) keeps the jokes and dramatic twists at a cheerful clip, never letting the action get bogged down.  

Werth: It's like an evening at Lucky Cheng's—without the two drink minimum.

Wise: It's certainly not a great movie, but it does have a cheerful panache that stems, I think, from the actors' refusal to wink knowingly at the audience.  And while I have trouble believing that genuine camp can be created rather than found, these ladies exert themselves manfully in maintaining the illusion that they're just as real as any Hollywood star.  

Werth: Well, at least as real as any star in Wigstock: the Movie (1995).   

Wise: Just as long as you keep it real and meet us back here next week for more Film Gab.  

Young Werth practicing for his future Film Gab.

Gabbers Aweigh!

Wise: Ahoy, Werth!  

Werth: Um, hi, Wise.  What's with the yachtsman's cap?  

Wise: I went sailing with my parents last week and I've been feeling pretty nautical ever since.  

Werth: Does this mean that you've been making tuna noodle casserole for dinner?  

Wise: No, but it does mean that I'm itching for cinematic adventures on the high seas.  

Werth: Ooh! Set sail, Cap'n Wise! Set sail!  

Wise: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) emerged from Wes Anderson's deep affection for Jacques Cousteau's oceanic travelogues, and it follows the title character's (Bill Murray) faltering career as an undersea documentarian and the comic misadventures that unfold as he pursues both a relationship with the son he abandoned (Owen Wilson) years before and revenge upon the fabled jaguar shark that made a fricassee of his best friend.  

Werth: Is the jaguar shark part fish, part cat? 

Wise: The Life Aquatic is perhaps Anderson's most whimsical film.  Always a writer/director with a very specific point of view, Anderson allows his boyhood fancies to drive this film closer to fantasy than any of his other work.  Of course his usual preoccupations are on full display—strong mothers and absent fathers, the dreamer battered by experience, densely layered set and character design—and they mix with the outlandish elements with varying degrees of success.  

There's a marvelous image of Anjelica Huston lying dreaming in an underwater observation pod, while the final encounter with the elusive jaguar shark seems freighted with undecipherable meaning.  

Werth: It's totally undecipherable. How would a jaguar be able to hold its breath long enough to mate with a shark to make jaguar shark babies?

Wise: I have to admit that Aquatic isn't my favorite Anderson film, although it does reward repeated viewings.  It's always interesting to watch a filmmaker reach beyond his usual concerns, plus the shaggy nature of the movie allows for for some standout performances, including Cate Blanchett as the kind of tough-talking yet vulnerable girl reporter Katherine Hepburn might have played, and Michael Gambon as Zissou's silver-tongued producer on the lam.  

Also of note is the gorgeous undersea menagerie designed and animated by Henry Selick.  But it's the central performances from Murray and Wilson as the mountebank and his guileless offspring that really makes this movie set sail.  

Werth: Now that you've gotten me obsessed with sharks, I can't help but talk about the best shark/sailing movie ever, Jaws (1975).

Wise: If only The Poseidon Adventure had starred a Great White. 

Werth: Based on Peter Benchley's hit book, Steven Spielberg's Jaws swam into theaters June 20, 1975, and officially originated the Hollywood Summer Blockbuster. With nothing but a couple small films and TV under his belt, Speilberg created a national sensation with this movie about a lone shark rampage in the waters off sleepy Amity Island on Fourth of July Weekend. 

People all over the country mimicked John Williams' Oscar-winning, iconic main title and, "You'll never go into the water again," became a national catchphrase that caused as much H2O aversion as Hitchcock's shower scene in Psycho.

Wise: I haven't showered within sight of the shoreline since I could press "Play" on the Betamax. 

Werth: While its terror factor is off the charts, Jaws is also, at its heart, a male, sail-bonding adventure. Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), Sam Quint (Robert Shaw) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) hunt the killer shark in Quint's small boat, The Orca, and work together on the empty to ocean to destroy this awesome beast. It is through this shipboard interaction that their layered characters emerge—most profoundly with Quint's mesmerizing "USS Indinapolis" monologue. 

These scenes of camaraderie on the ocean make what could have been just a fishy monster film a much richer dramatic experience. It was a methodology that Spielberg would utilize on successive films to make popular movies and a boatload of money.

Wise: I wouldn't mind setting sail in just a dinghy full of cash from Spielberg's boatload.

Werth: Well, sailor, in the meantime you and our readers should just hoist the misenmast on the S.S. Film Gab!

Happy Gab-entine’s Day!

Werth: What up, Wise?

Wise: What up, Werth?

Werth: I’m just  putting the finishing touches on my Quaker Oats tub turned Valentine’s Day Card Box.

Wise: I like your use of red felt, crepe paper and pipe cleaners. Are you planning on spending Valentine’s Day in the second grade?

Werth: No. I just like getting back in touch with those special schoolyard feelings we all had about Valentine’s Day and love in general.

Wise: Do I smell a schoolyard romance edition of Film Gab?

Werth: The smeller’s the feller! Love was in the air—and at no time did it smell as sweet as when we were young, impressionable and trapped in high school. I think the cinematic high school love story that had the biggest impact on my youth was the 1988 cult classic Heathers.

Wise: I love Heathers—but would you call it a teen romance flick?

Werth: I would. I mean, sure it’s about the dog-kill-dog world of high school popularity, but at its core Heathers is a love story. Veronica (Winona Ryder) is the only non-Heather member of the dominant chick clique at Westerberg High. As the uber-bitchy girls devour the self-esteem of the bottom-feeders in the cafeteria through lunchtime polls and vicious note-passing, Veronica has second thoughts about belonging to such a Machiavellian girl’s club. Enter James Dean meets Jack Nicholson bad boy, Jason Dean (Christian Slater). J.D. turns Veronica’s dark-curled head with acts of heroism like standing up to jock bullies Ram and Kurt who serve-up homophobia like a bad dessert on a plastic lunchtray.

Wise: Bad dessert is such a disappointment.

Werth: Steady, Wise. So romance blooms between V & J.D.—despite the fact that J.D. already shows a predisposition towards violence. After “jokingly” poisoning head Heather, Heather Chandler (played with beautiful bitchery by the late Kim Walker) with a bottle of drain cleaner, J.D. convinces Veronica that it was an accident—but an accident with a happy ending.

Wise: Ding dong the Heather’s dead.

Werth: Right. Except that Shannon Doherty as Heather Duke quickly steps in to fill the queen bee void. J.D. arranges another “they deserve it” prank on Kurt and Ram, using an issue of Stud Puppy Magazine, a Joan Crawford postcard and a tell-tale bottle of mineral water to insinuate that they share more than just a bromance.

Wise: Sometimes it’s best to keep the Pellegrino wrapped in brown paper.

Werth: It’s all fun and games until the “stun bullets” that Veronica and J.D. shoot Kurt & Ram with turn out to be real, and Veronica now realizes that J.D.’s sense of social justice might be a tad extreme.

Wise: Now she realizes?

Werth: Like many good romantic heroines she’s torn between the thrill and fulfillment of what at first appeared to be true love, and doing the right thing. The right thing in this case being to thwart  J.D.’s ultimate plan to make a social statement by blowing up the gym during a pep rally. Heathers is masterful in its handling of adolescent angst about society and love not by depicting it realistically, but by dressing it in an 80’s palette of shoulder pads, hair scrunchies and stylized one-liners like “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.” Heathers is a dark Valentine’s card, but Veronica and J.D. spoke so much more eloquently to me about the possibility of true love going horribly awry than Molly Ringwald and any of her suitors ever did. And trust me. With my dating history, I needed to know more about true love going horribly awry.

Wise: My movie about high school canoodling has a much lower bodycount: Wes Anderson’s Rushmore from 1998.

 Werth: Awwww, private school romance.

Wise: And there’s plenty, although it’s generally not of the boy meets girl variety.  Jason Schwartzman plays Max Fisher, a sophomore at prestigious Rushmore Academy who is so in love with attending high school that he spends more time founding clubs and participating in extracurricular activities than he spends in the classroom.  Things begin to change for Max when he strikes up a friendship with Herman Bloom, the father of a pair of thuggish twin classmates.  Played by Bill Murray with a droll mournfulness, Herman helps Max to begin to see the world beyond Rushmore. 

Unfortunately, they both catch sight of recently widowed Rosemary Cross (a glowing Olivia Williams), and their friendship turns acrimonious as they battle for her affections.  

Werth: Promise me we’ll never let a woman come between us.  

Wise: I don’t see how that’s possible, unless its Joan Crawford.  Anyway, Max gets expelled, Herman falls into depression, and the whole movie falls into chaos—

Werth: —all to the tune of Rushmore’s charmingly eclectic soundtrack.  

Wise: The whole movie is about obsession and in particular the kind of overwhelming single-mindedness of adolescent love.  Max isn’t really in love with Miss Cross, but he is in love with the feelings he gets while indulging in unrequited passions.  The same goes for his affair with Rushmore itself.  The school can’t return his affections, but Max is determined to express his feelings in the most dramatic ways possible.  Rushmore, in many ways, is about the passions that teenagers succumb to as they approach adulthood.  

Werth: Teenagers and Williamsburg hipsters.  

Wise: I know Wes Anderson has become sort of a darling of the hipster set, but I don’t think that’s fair to his talent.  Of course he’s stylized and occasionally ironic, but focusing on those two things misses the point because he uses them as a tart exterior to shield the extreme tenderness that lies just beneath the surface.

 Werth: Kind of like the tinfoil I’ve wrapped my Valentine’s Box with.

Wise: Alright, Craftmaster! I’ll put a Valentine’s card in your box.

Werth: I knew you would. Join us next week when Film Gab writes more love notes to great movies!