Friday, August 18, 2006
Coming This Fall, A Hilarious Farce About the Blood Libel
So, there's a movie coming out called Say Uncle (trailer here). The movie stars Peter Paige, late of Queer as Folk, as a gay man who likes playing with children, and Kathy Najimy, as the mother who becomes extremely paranoid of said gay man and launches a campaign-- first among the neighborhood, but eventually expanding to the local press-- to slander him as a pedophile.
Oh. And it's a comedy.
Like Dorian, who first pointed me to this exercise in bad taste, I fail to see the humor in a film in which a gay man is alienated and harrassed because a straight woman thinks he might be a pedophile, especially given the current climate. We have polticians and preachers claiming that we prey on children-- often, our very gayness is equated with pedophilia. We have judges who claim that we aren't "right" for children, that they'd be better in the hands of married straight couples.
Maybe I'm just misjudging from the trailer. But when The Opposite of Sex, which was a nice nasty film in its own right, did the whole "panic over older gay male possibly seducing younger male" thing, they had the proper sense of ironic distance, with the accusations and "man on the street" reactions being nice and ridiculous. There's no such sense of proportion here. There is, very simply, a plain illustration of the steps that one who actually buys into this crap might take to make a suburban gay man's life a living hell.
I'm not laughing.
Oh. And it's a comedy.
Like Dorian, who first pointed me to this exercise in bad taste, I fail to see the humor in a film in which a gay man is alienated and harrassed because a straight woman thinks he might be a pedophile, especially given the current climate. We have polticians and preachers claiming that we prey on children-- often, our very gayness is equated with pedophilia. We have judges who claim that we aren't "right" for children, that they'd be better in the hands of married straight couples.
Maybe I'm just misjudging from the trailer. But when The Opposite of Sex, which was a nice nasty film in its own right, did the whole "panic over older gay male possibly seducing younger male" thing, they had the proper sense of ironic distance, with the accusations and "man on the street" reactions being nice and ridiculous. There's no such sense of proportion here. There is, very simply, a plain illustration of the steps that one who actually buys into this crap might take to make a suburban gay man's life a living hell.
I'm not laughing.
