Why do you Liberal Dems hate Christmas, families, and Charlie Brown?

Yes, every year the crusade to put the Christ back in Christmas commences, and even though none of us actively signed up for duty or even give a fuck, apparently we’re on the front lines of the battle any way.

It’s a veritable Nutcracker Suite of self-branded, self-styled victimhood for the God Wads this year: The American Family Association and other nuisance groups have issued sundry fatwas against the Gap, Best Buy, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond for being corporately-operated witch covens; Glenn Beck’s tear-jerking (or jerk-tearing) The Christmas Sweater simulcast has reportedly been tanking in regions where jaded urbanites reject Jesus by loving quality entertainment; and the House of Representatives heard the angels calling and felt compelled to vote on a resolution to federally validate Christmas in a nation full of secularists — wearing our slutty Santa costumes — bent on decrucifying our zombie Savior. (read the full article)

“What I am, Michael, is a 32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy. And if it takes me a while to pull myself together, and if I can smoke a little grass before I get nerve to show this face to the world, it’s nobody’s goddamn business but my own.”

The cutting words of The Boys In The Band’s sharp-tongued Harold aren’t just one of the most hyper-aware self-assessments in the history of filmdom — they’re a fitting tagline for a landmark movie that’s as many simultaneous things as Harold, its birthday boy is.

At once a social document, wry sexploitation flick, hissing bitchfest, repository for immortal camp dialogue, midnight movie, urban character study, bleak outsider period piece, and parlor drama run amuck, The Boys In The Band has managed to endear and repel, engage and repulse, disarm and dismay its viewers in equal measure, and as it nears the big 4-0, it’s apt that as the film reaches midlife crisis time, its target audience finds itself at a heady vantage point of not only looking back at a turbulent past, but looking forward to as precarious a future.

By now, scribe Mart Crowley’s watershed 1968 Off-Broadway production that inspired the film has become a part of New York history and Big Apple mythology beyond. (read the full article)

On June 10, 2006, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland appeared on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen.

Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice.

We need only hear her tearful call of Toto! Toto! as her terrier is being bicycled away in the clutches of Miss Gulch to get that old chill, the heartachy twang of childhood injustice. (read the full article)

What is this? What does it mean? We don’t know. We don’t really care.

As one commonsensical Youtube commenter put it: “remove your underwear please…… it’s time for a strip search.”

“…unfortunately he was in the six-nine position — so this dude’s ass was in Eminem’s face or mouth area.”

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…?”