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.

The Executioner’s Song was a book written by Norman Mailer that ranks with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in terms of true-crime novels. Both books are exhaustively researched novels about true-life criminal figures. Capote’s book was about Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, two lowlifes who slaughtered an entire family on a farm in Kansas. And Mailer’s book was about Gary Gilmore, a murderer who became famous in the late 1970s after he insisted upon being executed. He was the first person killed by the state in America after the re-instatement of the death penalty by the U.S. in 1976.

The film The Executioner’s Song, is a 1982 Lawrence Schiller made-for-TV true crime movie that ranks with Richard Brooks’ 1967 film In Cold Blood. And it’s being released on DVD for the first time Tuesday, August 5th, by Paramount Home Entertainment. Tommy Lee Jones plays Gilmore, and delivers a very good performance as a man who has no clue how to fit into society after being released from prison. He has spent 12 years in jail, and upon his release he goes to live with his cousin. He hooks up with a teenage divorcee, played by Rosanna Arquette, and makes a half-hearted attempt to go straight. But soon his inability to contain his natural tendency toward violence comes out, and he gets busted for murder and sent away.

The second half of the movie deals with Gilmore and his desire to be executed. Lawyers and family members carry on appeals on his behalf, against his wishes. And soon, we believe that perhaps he is right. He really does need to be put to death. His toxic, evil personality continues to do damage even while he is away in prison. The Executioner’s Song originally aired as a 157-minute two-part made for TV movie, and was later pared down to 97 minutes for a theatrical release. The version available on this DVD is somewhere in the middle. At 135 minutes, this “Director’s Cut” is just the right length. It’s more than long enough to create a powerful film experience, and Tommy Lee Jones is so good in the lead role that this movie is deservedly known as a classic.