Two convicts make love though a hole in the wall, a hole so tiny that the only object that can pass through it is a straw and the only love that can be made is one convict blowing smoke into the other’s mouth.

This is the most famous scene in the dank and languid Un Chant d’Amour (A Song of Love), an underground film made in the year 1950 — an antique prehistoric moment before the emergence of a forthright gay sensibility — by Jean Genet, France’s most acclaimed thief, pornographer and poet of perversity. (You can watch the complete 25-minute film below, after the break.)

And when I say perversity, I’m not being flip or using an egregious code word for “homosexual” favored by haters of gay people. No, Genet had — or perhaps, for the sake of his art, for the “beauty of the gesture,” affected to have — a most Satanic taste for true perversity: he once wrote that the greatest act of love was for one lover to betray the other to the Gestapo, while the accused looked on. (read the full article)

When unlimited amounts of explicit, well-produced pornographic material are available across the Internet, under the counter in bookstores and in a reasonable number of video stores, why is it that fleeting naked shots in movies still catch us?

From James Franco’s rear-shot swimming pool scene in Milk, to Gael Garcia Bernal’s bathtub fiasco in The Science of Sleep, to Emile Hirsch’s floating river shot in Into the Wild, brief nude shots often turn out to be the most memorable scenes from movies — not for artistic or cinematic value, but because they’re hot.

The 2007 Seth Rogan film Knocked Up featured a group of deadbeat roommates with an ambitious business plan to launch a website listing the timestamps on movie scenes with nudity. The idea is that a list of scenes with a famous actress’ nipple or bush is still of interest in a world of easy porn, and people would pay to access the site. Fleshofthestars.com was a fictional enterprise, but there’s no doubt that there’s truth beneath its concept and Hollywood producers allow those brief titillating scenes hoping it will increase a film’s popularity and earnings.

Perhaps it’s that porn stars are depersonalized and distant; we see them in the most intimate of settings but know nothing of their minds — and the ease of access desensitizes us and eliminates novelty. (read the full article)

“Guys…guys — what’s happening…?”

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. (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

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.) (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)