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.

Thanksgabbing Day

Werth: Happy Thanksgiving, Wise!

Wise: Happy Thanksgiving, Werth! I take it you chowed down on platters and platters of edible delights.

Werth: Chowed and chowed. Did you create one of your infamous Wise Family spreads?

Wise: Did I ever: three kinds of pie, sweet potato gratin, roasted corn and red peppers, buttermilk mashed potatoes, and a turkey that almost made me weep with gluttonous joy. 

Werth: You know, in between the courses of white and red wine, I thought to myself how thankful I am.

Wise: Friends, family and food on our tables are good reasons for thanks.

Werth: I meant thankful for some of the movies I've seen this year.

Wise: But I thought Adam Sandler only made one film this year. 

Werth: There was a lot to be thankful for—Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011), Bette Davis in a black wig in Beyond the Forest (1949), Olivia de Haviland playing twins with name tag necklaces so you can tell them apart in Dark Mirror (1946)—

Wise: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011), a finale that was thrilling, yet deeply tender; the salute to fashion photographer icon Bill Cunningham New York (2011); and Tangled (2010), Disney's return to making fairy tales that are both gorgeous and full of spunk. 

Werth: But the film I saw this year that I was most thankful for was Tim Burton's 2003 grown-up fantasy, Big Fish.

Wise: Fish for Thanksgiving. Interesting...  

Werth: Based on Daniel Wallace's 1998 novel of the same name, Big Fish basically tells the story of a storyteller. Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) comes home to visit his ailing father Ed (Albert Finney) after years of estrangement. Ed is a habitual yarn-spinner of epic proportion who can't even tell the truth about what happened the day his son was born. 

He ignores the fact that he was in Wichita selling one of his Handi-matic gadgets, blows by exaggeration and heads straight for a tall-tale about wrestling with a legendary giant fish.  

 Wise: Wallace has written several well-received novels that playfully reconsider Southern traditions and storytelling.  

Werth: The film goes back and forth between the present and the imagined past of Ed's tales with Ewan McGregor filling in as the irresistibly charming younger Albert Finney. Burton has always been an expert at creating odd, macabre childhood visions, but what he does here is unique even for him. The delightful circus, neighborhood soothsaying witch and barefoot town trapped in a folk-sy past aren't viewed from the perspective of a child, but from that of an adult. 

In Big Fish, Burton takes a step away from his kiddie-flick roots and melds a touching father-son melodrama with a celebration of artists who create imaginative stories, larger-than-life characters and captivating places—in short, directors like himself.  

Wise: It certainly was a departure from his usual carnival funhouse and an embrace of a more mature, though no less wondrous, vision.  

Werth: Packed with gorgeous visuals, intimate un-Burton-like close-ups and a cast of greats including Finney, McGregor, Jessica Lange, Marion Cotillard, Helena Bonham Carter and Robert Guillaume, Big Fish did not make a splash with critics (only garnering one Oscar nom for Danny Elfman's soundtrack), but this Film Gabber was boo-hoo'ing like a baby by the end—and as far as I'm concerned, that makes Big Fish a must-see.  

Wise: Although I can't say I had the same reaction to Big Fish, I do agree that the films I'm most thankful for are the ones that affect us most personally.  For me, that film this year was Weekend (2011), written, directed and edited by Andrew Haigh.  The film follows Russell (Tom Cullen), a shy, circumspect  man who exists at the fringes of his friends' lives.  Slipping away from a house party one night, he wends his way to a bar where he meets Glen (Chris New), and, after a few spectacularly awkward flirtations, they end up spending the night together.  

Werth: I have a couple stories that wind-up like that...  

Wise: I think almost everyone does, but the unusual thing about Russell and Glen is that they can't seem to allow their night of drunken fumbling to fade into the past. A few hours turns into an entire weekend as they battle preconceived ideas, pry open each others' deepest secrets, and eventually forge new selves.  

Werth: Sounds like a weekend-long love hangover.  

Wise: It's actually the exact opposite of a hangover.  At the start of the movie, neither man believes in love—Russell because he doesn't trust himself; Glen because he doesn't trust others—but by the end, each has surrendered himself to the other.  

Werth: Are you sure this isn't one of the Twilight movies? 

Wise: Weekend doesn't offer the glib melodramatics of adolescent infatuation.  Instead it addresses anxieties, loneliness, and the possibility of finding happiness with another person through work, vulnerability and luck.  

Werth: It sounds like it's a movie that made you very thankful. 

Wise: Almost as thankful as I am that I'll still be eating turkey leftovers during next week's Film Gab. 

Werth: Happy Thanksgiving Film Gabbers!