Steven Soderbergh has pushed against the limits of Hollywood’s sexual mores his entire career. His debut, sex, lies, and videotape, was a study in voyeurism and sexual dysfunction. He blurred the line dividing the feature film and porn video worlds with The Girlfriend Experience, which starred adult actress Sasha Grey. His last film, Magic Mike, subverted the male gaze by turning all eyes, male and female, on the rock-hard and very hairless abs of dude-strippers. Yet even Soderbergh has had trouble financing his next and rumored-to-be-last project, Behind the Candelabra, a biopic of Liberace starring Michael Douglas as the flamboyant pianist and Matt Damon as his significantly younger live-in lover.
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Introspective masculinity, women on top, cross-dressing PSAs, gay undertones — the James Bond franchise has come a long way in 50 years, most notably during the current era built around Daniel Craig’s serious Blond Bond with the icy blue eyes. Behind the scenes, producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson set the record straight on recent Idris Elba-as-Bond rumors and pointed to the post-9/11 shift that spurred them to take Bond from the slick reign of Pierce Brosnan to the morally-complex brand of progressive contemporary heroism embodied in this week’s Skyfall.
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How do you stir up controversy for a pay-cable TV series about a guy who's been dead since 1519? If he's Leonardo Da Vinci, who a number of biographers have concluded was gay, and you're the Starz pay cable network, you depict Tom Riley, who plays young Leonardo with a British accent, having what appears to be sex with a masked woman in the trailer for Da Vinci's Demons, the "historical fantasy" created by The Dark Knight franchise screenwriter, David S. Goyer. more »
Bond isn't bi. At least that's what I took away from Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem's separate but equally vague responses to the erotically charged scene they share in Skyfall. On Monday, the actors took part in separate press conferences to promote the latest installment of the Bond franchise and, in both cases, questions about sexuality arose. more »
Director Sam Mendes and screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have done a very wily thing for James Bond's 50th anniversary: They've given 007 a midlife crisis. The trauma takes root during the white-knuckle opening of Skyfall, the best film so far of Daniel Craig's run as Ian Fleming's suave super spy and one of the best of the Bond franchise. more »
Earlier this week, John Hughes muse (and recent Reddit queen) Molly Ringwald set the record straight with Out.com on the sexuality of her Pretty in Pink character Andie's lovesick BFF, Duckie: "“Duckie doesn’t know he’s gay. I think he loves Andie in the way that [my gay best friend] always loved me." To which the world breathed a knowing sigh. "Of course Duckie is gay!" Thought everyone. Well, everyone except for, you know, Jon Cryer.
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Preparing for a battle to the death in which the odds are most definitely not in her favor, Jennifer Lawrence’s Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen feels utterly alone, trapped within the deceptively cushy confines of the Capitol. Thankfully, she has at least one key ally on her side: Her stylist Cinna, played gracefully by rock star-turned-actor Lenny Kravitz, who discovered only after being cast that he’d be sharing the screen with one of his daughter’s close friends. “I asked, ‘Who’s playing Katniss?’” Kravitz recalled to Movieline. “‘It’s Jennifer Lawrence.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, she was just in my house cooking breakfast!’”
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Oh, great. Just when we thought Armie Hammer's kiss with Leonardo DiCaprio in Clint Eastwood's upcoming J. Edgar Hoover biopic was going to be explosive, Eastwood himself is confirming that he's leaving the first FBI director's sexual orientation "open to interpretation." I know a certain TV personality who might have damning evidence to the contrary.
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