Movies, notes the New York Times, “rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Christ or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema, such matters are best left to Monty Python.”

Don Brown’s tenacious bestseller The Da Vinci Code juggled just such issues in a brisk, entertaining way, the perfect “airplane book,” with all the strengths and weaknesses of the form: breezily (and at times sloppily) written but with a pop-song-like hook that kept you turning the pages, unlocking one puzzle after another, with a few authentic shocks and unexpected twists to its credit. (more…)

Ah, to be a pole dancer in a strip club! (like Elizabeth Berkley in the fabled pussy extravaganza Showgirls, at right)

That is the simple wish of so many of us! — including a chubby young lady who comes on stage in Jerry Springer — The Opera and tells Jerry that all she ever wanted to be was a whorey stripper swirling around a pole in a glitter G-string.

“I don’t give a fuck no more,” she tells the onstage Springer audience, who are trying to shout her down with chants of “Loser! Loser!” “I’m tired of laughing and I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of feeling and I’m tired of always trying. I want to do some living because I’ve done enough of dying. I just want to dance, I just want to …fucking dance!”

The longing that Alison Jiear expresses in the song is quite touching and one of the opera’s suite of showstoppers (which also includes “Chick with a Dick” and a wife-stealing tranny shaking her stuff in wifey’s face as she brings down the house with “Talk to the Hand, Bitch.”)

Jerry Springer — The Opera comes from — where else, other than Japan, would they get this loopy over American junk TV? — England, home of Masterpiece Theater! The opus is set to land on our Puritan shores any minute now, but if you can’t wait and don’t want to shell out the big bucks for an import CD, staring David Soul (from Starsky and Hutch, yet!) as a very convincing Jerry, then… (more…)

“That’s Hattie McDaniel,” the Indian woman working the counter at the Post Office told me when she showed me my choice of stamps. “George Clooney mentioned her last night at the Oscars. She was the first black woman to …”

Yes, I knew — to get the Oscar. And I knew also what Clooney hadn’t mentioned:

When McDaniel picked up her award for Best Supporting Actress, she was the first black woman to ever set foot in the Coconut Grove who wasn’t behind a serving tray and that even in progressive, Jewish-humanitarian Hollywood, Hattie had to make her long walk to stage from the darkest, farthest, most removed part of the restaurant, the very back, practically the coat-check room. (more…)

We promised ourselves: No more Jack and Ennis. No more “can’t quit you.” No more crying in our beer over what might have been.

But then we found this lovely little tearjerker of a video online and just lost it all over again. (more…)

The tension is mounting, as they say on Oscar eve. And there’s one movie everybody keeps talking about. Brokeback Mountain has become a tourist trap for gay writers: Everyone goes there, everyone says the same thing. It’s like a ride in Disneyland: all the dolls nod at the same time and in the same place.

So Nightcharm asked some of our favorite writers, artists and Charmed Life subjects to tell us something we haven’t heard about the film.

And dammit, they did! (more…)

Brokeback Mountain wasn’t made for me and that’s okay.

My Brokeback Mountain was called Making Love, a 1982 gay classic starring Harry Hamlin, Kate Jackson and Michael Ontkean (at right).

The following year, cable television finally pioneered its way into my ultra-conservative hometown of Piedmont, South Carolina. My fundamentalist Christian parents subscribed to cable without fully realizing what they were getting.

On several occasions, I would sneak into the living room in the early hours of the morning to watch Making Love. Had my parents known the impact that The Movie Channel was having on their 15-year-old son, they would have canceled cable, thrown out the VCR and no doubt locked me in my room until I turned 30! (more…)

Judy Garland came back to life again last night. Judy Davis channeled the slurring, unsteady-in-heels Judy she had created in the Garland biop, Me and My Shadows, and made her slush around again in an outrageous Mommie Dearest style performance.

At times screaming and breaking the furniture, at others all stricken tones and fake sincerity, Davis played real-life con-artist Sante Kimes who, with her son, exploded all over the tabloids in the late 90’s when she was convicted of strangling her socialite landlady.

The Lifetime-channel film, A Little Thing Called Murder, details the life and crimes (including three if not more murders) of Kimes and her youngest son, the two of then entangled in a sort of mental incest which the murders weirdly consummated. If the son had been gay, all this could have been worked out with a career in fashion design or runway modeling. Unfortunately, Kenny Kimes was straight, so it was guns, knives and snapped necks. By all accounts, the son was a charmer; and the mother, a busty, bubbly woman who turned heads in her plunging, cleavage-proud dresses. Both sit in prison now with no possibility of parole. (more…)

The Suck, as you surely know by now, is what Marines called Iraq during the Desert Storm campaign of 1990. What sucked in Gulf War I was not any ass-backward strategy of the Pentagon but the monotonous absence of bloodshed — at least from the point of view of the Marines. (more…)