Quick quips.

Haven't blogged in a few days, but did get to press screenings (at last)! Saw "The Blood of My Brother" (which i missed at Tribeca) and "The Motel" (which i missed last year at the Asian-American Film Festival). Feel like i'm playing catch-up, but glad i got to see those movies. Michael Giltz is back on his blog, Dave Kehr has a whole exchange about Westerns (i have to thank Dave for alerting me about the DVDs of Varlerio Zurlini from No Shame, and for the DVDs of Janie Geiser and Lewis Klahr; his NY Times column is really essential, and i loved his comments on Charlie Chan this week, i happen to agree, though it's pointed out that manyof the characters are racist, the Chan character is not a put-down, because he always reveals his intelligence and his superior reasoning). So many movies i've seen in the past two years or so have opened, such as "El Perro" or "Russian Dolls" or "La Moustache" or "Only Human" or "The Hidden Blade". Am glad that "The Road to Guantanamo" opened, thought it was very effective. So there's always a lot of good movies opening. Plus there's the Benoit Jacquot retrospective at the Walter Reade. Larry and i got to see a lot of his movies because one year, one of the festivals we went to had a retrospective of his films.

Some questions: since when did Bryan Singer become gay? The Bryan Singer i knew (the kind-of-creepy kid who did "Public Access" which Larry Maxwell was in)... if he was gay, he certainly was closeted. Larry M. (of course) had a lot of experience working with gay people: me, Charles Ludlum, Todd Haynes. So if Bryan Singer was gay (at that time) it wouldn't have fazed Larry M. But he never mentioned that Bryan Singer was gay. But the creepy feeling came because, after "Public Access", Bryan Singer was trying to raise money for his next movie. It was another collaboration with the same writer, Christopher MacQuarrie. And in order to raise money, they shot a few scenes on video, with the actors from "Public Access". But what happened was that the project soon got the attention of an actor who wanted to produce (Gabriel Byrne, if i'm not mistaken) and then....

As usual with these type of projects, it got away from the original intent, and it became a much glossier production, and the original cast was replaced with various people who had been on the peripheries of Hollywood (Byrne, Kevin Spacey, Benicio Del Toro, etc.). This is something that is par for the course (it happened with "Safe", which went through various permutations before the eventual result with Julianne Moore), but Bryan Singer didn't handle it with any sort of finesse.

What was so funny was that, on the set of "Apt Pupil", there'd been the scandal about the underage boys and a shower scene. At that time, it was supposedly ridiculous, because Bryan Singer was straight.... Anyway, the case was settled out of court.

Then he directed "X-Men" and then there were the stories about his being gay. So i often wondered how that happened, and whether this was just some sort of p.r. stunt to appeal to the "specialized" market.

It's going to be Gay Pride weekend. It's funny: Bill Jones wrote that the Pride parade happened in L.A. and he hadn't realized it. As he put it, when did he lose his membership? I think that Larry feels the same way. So do i.