The Fat Lady has sung. The last dog has died.

And still she hangs on, clutching her barely-there 2-percentage-point victory in Indiana. From her cold, dead hands, children. From her cold, dead hands.

What I will miss most about my Hillary — for yes I am a supporter and yes I would vote for her again and yes, yes, I know, she is sooo cooked — is the way she would look at Barack Obama during the debates. That frozen glare behind the frosted smile. The slight up tilt of the forehead. God, that was priceless!

There would be ol’ Barry sawing away and saying nothing, all misty uplift about change and hope and the American people, slipping ever so carefully into just the palest of black preacher cadences, something for the home team, no Reverend Wright, of course; more Miss Diahann Carroll in an Oleg Cassini gown glossing her way through Aretha: R. E. S. P. E. C. T., ladies and gentlemen. That’s what y’all mean to me.

And there would be my Hillary in all her late-blooming, newly blondized, Georgette Klinger radiance, the robot who suddenly grew a heart and look ma, she’s even warm to the touch! All red-carpet razzle dazzle beside the dour law professor, with his down-turned lips and his solemn — here I risk a racist word — dignity.

Yes, white people have dignity too, just not so much of it, not like our new sprung Baracks and Michelles who are rising ever higher. Ah, Barack and his stylish wife (Howard Stern calls her “Blackie-O”) with her own set of dour, down-turned lips — there is all the marble dignity in this couple of the nine Supreme Court Justices with the Supreme Court steps and the History of Jurisprudence frieze thrown in.

Now my girl Hillary, she has no dignity. She’s shameless, She’s ruthless. She’s Hermione Granger, waving her hand at the front of the class, with all the answers in her head. You couldn’t possibly insult her. Swift boat Hillary Clinton? Been there, done that. Let us count the ways:

Lesbian. Murderess. Wiccan. Shyster Lawyer. Whitewater Profiteer. Lady Pimp for Bill’s Bordello of Bimbos — these are just the most glistening bones left on the shore, skeletons of broken anti-Hillary slime campaigns past, funded at first by crackpots but soon by savvy Republican strategists who could see far up ahead to the Oval Office. (more…)

Beware Nightcharmers!

The evil bunnyman is back to haunt our Easter morning dreams.

Not one thing or another, he appears as a sort of manthing, a creature with buff body and hellish costume head.

How many men have been led astray by this sinister hallucination, who comes always during the nighttime of the soul, chatting James Stewart out of his mind in Harvey or opening a portal into yet another mad world for Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko?

It was the bunnyman, was it not, cinema scholars, who sent Jack Nicholson right around that final bend in The Shining when the spooky cottontail was spied out of the corner of the eye, sitting eerily on a hotel bed in full head-to-toe rabbit suit, about to give a blow job.

Oh, evil is the evil bunnyman. How evil? Just ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall. (more…)

I have been haunted – too haunted to write about it — for the past few weeks by a spread that appears in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

It is a photo tribute in which present-day movie stars have been inserted into instantly recognizable stills from Alfred Hitchcock movies — movies I grew up on and whose hypnotic power still grabs hold of me today, even after a lifetime of multiple viewings.

This photo of Jodi Foster impersonating Tippi Hedren in The Birds, for instance, conveys the blasphemous charm of these recreated stills, disquieting, in their own way, as much for the things they get “wrong” as for the things they get “right.” (The entire spread, which is not on the Vanity Fair site, can be seen here.) (more…)

Brokeback Mountain gave Heath Ledger his promise for greatness.

Or maybe it was that Heath gave his all to Brokeback Mountain. Regardless, with that film a heartthrob died and a formidable actor — a star was born.

Not to say Ledger didn’t have meatier rolls (I haven’t seen the heroin-laced Candy yet), but Brokeback was that magic moment in an actor’s career where the Gods deign to flash hints about how one might find the footpath to Olympus (aka: the Hollywood Walk of Fame.) And now Heath’s gone there.

I watched Brokeback the other night on HBO and was rattled once again during the now-classic “I wish I knew how to quit you” scene. That moment where the two lovers, now years older, get together at the mountain and Ennis tells Jack that they won’t be able to reconnect until later in the year — in November — when his job permits. One insult leads to another and before you know it the two go swinging at each other but end up on their knees where Ennis crumbles into Jack’s chest mumbling “I can’t stand this anymore.”

Christ! Every time. The space behind my eyes blooms and I’m teary in a trice. It’s one of those gut punch occasions in a movie where, seconds after the scene, you ‘come to’ and you’re spookily wowed by an actor’s ability to ring out the very core and soul of their character. That scene never fails to make me cry. (more…)

A killer physique. A physique killer…

Few genres can boast the instant familiarity and immediate gratification of the Slasher Film: flat-as-cardboard characters, depthless locales where phones and car engines never function at pivotal moments, masked killers with impossibly convoluted modus operandi and the ability to be in multiple places at once.

It’s a world that thrives on its predictability. Rarely is the formula turned on its head and even less frequently is it even asked to.

The latest variation: hot, ripped bodybuilders in mortal peril.

It’s the inspired premise for Sceamkings.com’s Beef: You Are What You Eat.

The independent studio — known for its focus on young men as predators and prey — dispenses with standard-issue sorority girls and cheerleaders who utter lines like “A job at a summer camp plagued by a history of murders where no one can possibly hear me scream? Where do I sign up?!” and “We’ll never get our comeuppance for that prank we played on that emotionally fragile freshmen!”.

Here the victims are statuesque musclemen short of clothes and on the make for their big breaks. Gone are the slumber parties, prom nights and dorms that drip blood in favor of the amateur bodybuilder arena and aspiring fitness model meatrack.

Even the movie’s resident maniac is neither a masked boogeyman nor a spindly twerp, but a collegiately-handsome (if non-anabolically enhanced) head case hacking his way through an assortment of doomed hard bodies, his identity unconcealed by Whodunit? red herrings.

That scantily-clad male models and a murder motivation that centers around frustrated bodybuilding dreams play integral roles in the plot are enough to propel this low-budget wonder into the narrow Queer Horror niche. (more…)

What maketh a gay cult classic?

The formula’s as combustible as a redneck meth lab: overheated stylishness, a cutting sense of parody, campy sexiness, endlessly quotable dialog, a genuine love for the grotesque and the likelihood that all of the above will be either unfairly misunderstood or unjustly maligned in their own time by the mainstream.

This is what separates the bad in terms of being unruly and naughty from the merely disastrous, the Trash Classics from the Box Office Bombs.

It’s a given that there’s a multiplex in Hell playing a triple feature of Gigli, Glitter and From Justin To Kelly ad infinitum; they are true Children of The Gorgon, too hideous and wretched for even their own makers to defend.

Yet somewhere in that hazy limbo between the Oscars and the Razzies dwell the immortals called Myra Breckinridge, Can’t Stop The Music and Mommie Dearest, ghettoized by the many but beloved by the few.

Rarely can the rigid and straight-leaning Science Fiction genre be said to give rise to a veritable gay free-for-all, but if the rules have ever been broken, then 1980’s lavishly out-of-this-world Flash Gordon is guilty of being a kitsch pleasure.

With flamboyant Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, camp scribe Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and a galaxy of slumming international talent at this rocket’s helm, you know it’s time to strap yourself in and gird your loins for zero gravity.

You don’t have to be gay to love Flash Gordon, but it helps. (more…)

Attention Fictional Characters Everywhere!

Who will be next?

Now that Dumbledore has come out, now that Potter scholars are popping up everywhere saying they knew it all along, including one who counted off the wizard’s seven clues of gayness, not least of which was the lighthearted observation that “Albus Dumbledore” is an anagram for ‘Male bods rule, bud…”

Now in these heady, happy days of full-disclosure, Nightcharm wishes to urge other fictional characters to come out finally and share the love. And so we have composed Our Open Letters to the biggest Closet Cases in Films and Fiction: (more…)

Outing. It’s not just for politicians, celebrities, pro athletes, and your dad anymore. You don’t even have to be three dimensional to have people wondering which way you swing.

Cartoon characters are facing the same laser intensity of gaydar as anyone else in the public eye.

What was the deal with Snagglepuss? Did little Jonny Quest have two daddies? Were Vanity and Hefty the gayest of the already queer manly commune known as the Smurfs?

And didn’t The Peanuts‘ Peppermint Patty and Marcie seem different than the frillier girl members of the Charlie Brown posse? On some level we’ve always suspected that the tastes of Scooby-Doo ’s Velma Dinkley leaned more toward Josie & The Pussycats than Thundarr The Barbarian.

Few characters elicit the amount of near-unanimous speculation as the Reagan Era phenom He-Man does. For grade schoolers in the 80s more taken with Dick than Jane, He-Man & The Masters of The Universe was weekly catnip. Years later we’re sure the series meant to present us with a robust action hero who could teach us valuable life lessons. What we really appreciate it for are the curvaceous bodies- rotoscoped over actual bodybuilder models- swaggering toward the camera, the brazen flexing, rippling limbs grappling in combat, and shots being framed from the back between clenched asses and gigantic thighs. (more…)