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.

To celebrate the release of the live-action Chipmunks movie starring Jason Lee and irritating kids everywhere, Paramount has decided to release two old Chipmunks DVDs from the 90s. One is called Alvin and the Chipmunks Go To The Movies, where the three chipmunks do Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Back To The Future, and Big. The other is called Chipmunk Adventure, where the chipmunks compete against girl chipmunks in a hot-air balloon race around the world. By the way, why are the guy chipmunks called The Chipmunks, and the girl chipmunks are called The Chippettes? I did a quick wikipedia search here - the correct name for female chipmunks is “female chipmunks”. These shows are basically sitcoms, with irritating characters and obnoxious father figures. The Chipmunks, much like every other cartoon in the 80s, were a rock band. Somehow these songs made it onto CDs in the 80s, despite the fact that they sucked and were more unintelligible than Stevie Nicks.

How can you watch a show where you can’t understand a word the characters are saying? The Chipmunks are three young cartoons who talk as though they are premanently crammed full of helium, but would likely have problems with pronunciation and diction even if they had normal voices. Sit-coms sucked enough already in the 80s, why would the world have forced this crap on kids? The Chipmunks talk incredibly slowly. There appears to be only about eleven lines of dialogue in each 22-minute episode, and yet you still can’t understand them. I watched 66 minutes worth, squirming angrily, and then I shut it off. Now the kids are here, and I am going to be forced to watch the new movie. Oh no.

OK. Watched the new movie. It is better than the incredibly bad old episodes, but that isn’t saying too much. Jason Lee, you see, is a struggling, go-nowhere musician and songwriter, who is still somehow able to own a big, wonderful house in the suburbs. The chipmunks, Alvin Simon and Theodore, through a series of bizarre occurences, end up in his house. These chipmunks are kind of like a girl, who comes to your house on the first date, and within three hours believes she has moved in there, and that she is your girlfriend, and then never leaves because if she did you might change your locks. They take over the house, and when he lets them stay, they immediately start calling themselves a “family”, which understandably freaks him out. Why does Jason Lee keep taking these roles? He does My Name Is Earl, and he was great in all of those Kevin Smith movies, but now he’s doing this, and Underdog. Maybe it’s that these roles require almost not acting at all, and he certainly doesn’t look as though he’s trying here.

And what’s with cartoon characters not wearing pants? They’re freaky because they’re naked, decides their producer, David Cross. So…they get SHIRTS knitted. They are still pantsless! Cross does add a nice touch to this movie, which is pretty well a by-the numbers kids’ film. It even has that requisite scene where someone gives the chipmunks - oh my go - COFFEE! And they go NUTS, bouncing off the walls…this is the most cliched and obnoxious scene in all kids movies now. It should be banned altogether. The best thing about the movie over the episodes is that you can understand what the chipmunks are saying without straining yourself. Except during the songs. Which are as awful as ever. Generic, mindless kids’ entertainment, but at least some people are trying a little bit. More than I can say for most kids’ movies, this gets a five.