Cynical Cinema

Paramount Home Entertainment just sent me all five DVD seasons of The L Word. Five seasons. Of hot lesbians having hot lesbian sex. And something else too. Plot maybe? Dialogue? I don’t really remember. I remember Mia Kirshner, and Jennifer Beals, and Katherine Moennig, Leisha Hailey, Karina Lombard, Marlee Matlin, Annabella Sciorra and Kristanna Loken. And all the other gorgeous women who get naked and have sex with each other. The actual story arc of the first five seasons escapes me. And I get it. This series was created to appeal to the largest possible audience. Lesbian women who like lesbians, straight women who like soap opera drama and girl talk, gay men who like TV about gay culture, and straight men who like watching naked lesbians. But I feel as though a substantial amount of potential for the series is sacrificed in favour of showing incredibly hot naked women sleeping together.

The story arcs I would have liked to see a little more developed are those that deal with the discrimination faced by gay people. In the fifth season, which is being released October 28th by Paramount, there are a few moments that deal with this. There is a character, Tasha, who is being outed as a lesbian and being kicked out of the military. There is another character who reacts to homophobic statements made by a basketball player by outing him as a homosexual. But there is not enough of this stuff, which I find compelling. The rest of the series, and the season, involves lesbian women living in their own, seemingly exclusive, lesbian world, where there are no ugly lesbians, very few butch ones, and virtually no straight people at all. Now, I know a lot of lesbians, and they are, proportionately, about the same as the rest of the world. In that ten percent of them are hot, twenty percent are ugly, and seventy percent are somewhere in the middle.

So to create a world of lesbians in which only the hottest of the hot is one of two things. Either it’s pandering to the heterosexual males who enjoy watching lesbian sex, or it’s just television, where only hot people get roles. Breaking this mold, at least a little, are Cybill Shepherd and Pam Grier, who are not exactly ugly, but they are in their late fifties.

The fifth season is similar to the other four, in that there are soap opera-style relationship troubles, and a lot of hot naked women having sex. In this imaginary lesbian world, it seems that everyone is willing to have sex with just about anyone else. Which means that if you have watched the entire five seasons, you are have seen almost every character on the show hook up with almost every other character, at one point or another. Just about every fantasy men have about two women together is played out, including VIP room threesomes, “promiscuous, debauched lesbians” (in the words of Cybill Shepherd) and even prison sex. Mia Kirschner (Jenny) is still the hottest girl on the show, but now she is also the most irritating. She has written a book, and it’s being made into a movie, and Jenny is the director. She becomes self-involved, and cartoonish with her Hollywood giant ego. Every time she’s on the screen in this season, she isn’t acting so much as purposely setting out to irritate the viewers.

And so, it all comes back to the hot chicks who get naked and sleep with each other. In this season, there are some new ones joining the cast. Elizabeth Keener, as the owner of a new lesbian bar in town, and Alicia Leigh Willis, a gorgeous actress who plays Keener’s lover. The best scenes are between Kirschner and Kate French, who plays the star actress in Jenny’s movie, including a truly bonkers oil wrestling match. There is a heated rivalry between Pam Grier’s bar and the one owned by Keener. The movie becomes a big central part of the season as well. Other than that, I can’t remember if anything else happened. There was too much lesbian sex going on.

Jennifer Love Hewitt is darn hot.  She has two great boobies, a beautiful face, a sensational bum and adequate acting skills.  After that, The Ghost Whisperer has very little going for it.  Jay Mohr is one of my favourite comedic actors in the world.  But on this series he isn’t funny.  Or interesting.  His character is badly written.  I like Camryn Manheim as well.  But again, on this series, her character is badly written and given very little to do.  I assume Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character is badly written as well.  But I can’t pay much attention to the words she’s saying because of her boobs.  But even if she were given some incredibly scintillating, brilliant and hilarious dialogue, this show would still be pretty weak.

You see, Jennifer Love Hewitt sees ghosts.  Like that kid in the Sixth Sense.  And these ghosts are trying to tell her something so she can fix whatever is bothering them.  In Season Three, out tomorrow from Paramount Home Entertainment, many of these ghosts are her own family.  You see, where this show used to be stand-alone episodes (cheesy, boring episodes, but at least they have a beginning and an end), it no longer follows that pattern.  Although most of Season Three is episodes that wrap up in a fairly satisfactory way, there is also a thread that runs through the series about her lost father and her mother and this big secret…

You remember when the X-Files started to suck?  When it got away from the mutant inbreds that lived out on farms and the creepy stretchy guys who live under escalators and started to do that Alien Conspiracy crap?  Where if you missed one episode you were lost?  Well, that is Season Three of The Ghost Whisperer.  Except more cheesy.  And more lame (they actually do an episode on that Bloody Mary game).  But at least it still has Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Anthony Hopkins should feel good about his new movie Slipstream. He directed the film, as well as starring in it, and I am going to go ahead and assume that it turned out exactly the way he wanted it to turn out. That is, weird. I respect the fact that as long as his movie fit his vision, he didn’t care at all whether the rest of us got it or not, and even may not have cared if we enjoyed it or not. Slipstream seems to be about a movie script-writer whose mind is going, and who lives half in reality, half in his mind. Somehow, when I watched the trailers, I got the sense that this movie was about time travel. Maybe it was supposed to be about time travel, and I just didn’t get it. Hey, for all I know, this film could have been about a rabbit and a butterfly. Frankly, there’s no good way to tell. I have the sense that if I watched this film five or six times, I would be able to figure out what’s going on. But I don’t feel like doing that. Frankly, I don’t feel like watching it twice. I also have the sense that if David Lynch was allowed to make an entire movie while on PCP, it would look something like this one.

It’s OK to make a movie that doesn’t make perfect sense. Look at Lynch - Mulholland Drive, for example. And some of the greatest films are almost as bonkers as this one. Like, Weekend, for example, or Fellini’s stuff. But you have to either go all out, or wrap things up in some way. Slipstream starts out with a bunch of scenes that don’t fit together, a series of weird moments, one after another, slight changes in scenes that seem to indicate there is something bigger going on…and all of a sudden we’ve hit the 40 minute mark. And we still have no idea what’s happening. At all. Then things start making a little more sense. But by then, no one cares. We’ve completely given up on trying to make sense of anything, and when stuff sort of starts coming together, we just want it to wrap up and the movie be over. And this one never really comes together at all. Individually, each scene is likely compelling. Hopkins is quite good at creating a memorable image, or phrase, or moment. But taken collectively, this is just too much for your average viewer. Or your sub-par viewer, or your above-average, gifted viewer. Any viewer.

There are some great performances in here. Hopkins is terrific, and John Turturro is awesome fun as a maniac movie producer. The film also stars Camryn Manheim, Christian Slater, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jeffrey Tambor, and in the most bizarre cameo of the year, Kevin McCarthy as himself. For some reason, Slipstream continually refers to the 1956 classic horror film Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers. And Kevin McCarthy, who was the star of that film, shows up as himself, now at age 84, in order to sit in a car with Hopkins. Since the movie ended, I have been trying very hard to understand the references to Bodysnatchers, but I have yet to figure it out. And I’m not willing to watch it again to help me understand. Slipstream is a ballsy film to make, it’s as experimental and avant-garde (if that’s even a real term) as anything made this year, but it doesn’t work. When it was over, I suspected that it was a movie designed specifically to confuse me, rather than to make me think. It’s like having one of those magic-eye pictures, the ones you stare at for a long time until you see a sailboat or a tiger or whatever. Only, this one has no underlying picture. So you can stare at it for as long as you like, but you’ll never see anything. And you will be frustrated and angry.