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Breakfast with Scot and Starrbooty
Apr. 3rd, 2008 12:15 amThese will have to be brief because it is already very late and I have to get things done in the morning.
Which is a shame because Breakfast with Scot is my favourite movie of the festival so far and not just because its director Laurie Lynd is quasi-family, being the man who has been trying to make a film of Geoff Ryman's Woz for years. Simply, it is a movie about straight-acting gays learning to loosen up - Eric and Sam find themselves temporarily in charge of Scot, the 11 year-old son of an ex-girlfriend of Sam's obnoxious brother. Scot is unselfconsciously the campest kid you ever met - he is young enough that it is largely irrelevant whether he will grow up gay, straight, bi or trans - but he wears makeup and jewels, cries at sad stories, loves musicals, models his new clothes and even when he skates, twirls.
The point is that he has no problem - the person with a problem is Eric, ex-sports star turned broadcaster, who suffers from the sad delusion that nobody knows he is gay. This is a really really good version of that old chestnut about the adopted child that teaches a crusty old relative to live and love again - except that Eric is not even old, just a bit of a dickhead. It is funny and sentimental and the various kids in it are utterly wonderful. It even made me see the point of ice hockey...
There is a borderland between porn, blaxploitation and drag queen home movies - lots of cocksucking and lots of jokes about female body parts and a lot of frocks. RuPaul's Starrbooty totally inhabits that space and it would be churlish to complain about its trashiness, because trash is its aesthetic. RuPaul and Candis Cayne are fab in it, as are various male pornstars - not especially my movie, but some people had a whale of a time making it, and others a whale of a time watching it. It is vaguely misogynistic, but only in the way that a souffle might be.
Which is a shame because Breakfast with Scot is my favourite movie of the festival so far and not just because its director Laurie Lynd is quasi-family, being the man who has been trying to make a film of Geoff Ryman's Woz for years. Simply, it is a movie about straight-acting gays learning to loosen up - Eric and Sam find themselves temporarily in charge of Scot, the 11 year-old son of an ex-girlfriend of Sam's obnoxious brother. Scot is unselfconsciously the campest kid you ever met - he is young enough that it is largely irrelevant whether he will grow up gay, straight, bi or trans - but he wears makeup and jewels, cries at sad stories, loves musicals, models his new clothes and even when he skates, twirls.
The point is that he has no problem - the person with a problem is Eric, ex-sports star turned broadcaster, who suffers from the sad delusion that nobody knows he is gay. This is a really really good version of that old chestnut about the adopted child that teaches a crusty old relative to live and love again - except that Eric is not even old, just a bit of a dickhead. It is funny and sentimental and the various kids in it are utterly wonderful. It even made me see the point of ice hockey...
There is a borderland between porn, blaxploitation and drag queen home movies - lots of cocksucking and lots of jokes about female body parts and a lot of frocks. RuPaul's Starrbooty totally inhabits that space and it would be churlish to complain about its trashiness, because trash is its aesthetic. RuPaul and Candis Cayne are fab in it, as are various male pornstars - not especially my movie, but some people had a whale of a time making it, and others a whale of a time watching it. It is vaguely misogynistic, but only in the way that a souffle might be.
