How will Chris Columbus show the male-male kisses in RENT? — Page 9

Didn't Emcee warn us about this?

*files nails*

If you think people are dumb, ignore them. You're only worsening things and driving your blood pressure up over what some moron online thinks.

Chita33,

You are like an oasis in a desert. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and insight.

The trailer got me thinking that the RENT movie is going to be yet another example of Hollywood's obliteration of gay male love. Waiting until the movie comes out is a reactive measure. I'm far more interested in prevention.

Be aware of the bottomless bag of tricks that Hollywood will use to keep gay male love out of the mainstream. Never underestimate Hollywood's willingness to tamper with historical fact in the name of homophobia.

I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. Maybe he'll write letters to a gay publication and start a campaign to make people aware of the double standards which exist in hollywood. Or maybe nothing. Maybe just bitching and complaining is his small way of saying he's tired of being a second class citizen. I'll take his rantings about a supposed act of homophobia that he's not sure has occured anytime over your silly remarks which really are insulting to gay men.

And read your post. Until he does what?

Updated On: 8/23/05 at 06:00 AM

Just what in the hell are you preventing, art?

People not going to see a movie that has been anticipated since it first opened on B'way?

Art, you're a minority in this. Three or four people think like you, (God help them) but there are more folks who find your rants outragous. Seriously, you are not accomplishing anything.

And judging from your posts, i will say that you have not seen the show. Because if you had, you would have been complaining that Roger and Mimi have more affection time than Angel and Collins.

---

you would have been complaining that Roger and Mimi have more affection time than Angel and Collins.

Well, I probably wouldn't refer to it as "affection time," but I would agree that in the stage version Collins and Angel are the most chaste of the main couples. While Mimi and Roger and Maureen and Joanne actually have some spark, the Collins and Angel romance always played a little drippy and dull to me.

---

"If this movie messes with the gay male love in the stage production, it's game on."

I'm sure all of Hollywood now lives in fear. Considering the nature of the show, the success of the Broadway production, and the success of gay films and shows such as Queer as Folk and Angels in America, I doubt that a couple of quick kisses between Angel and Tom (the only male-male kisses in the show) will be removed. In fact, I only remember there being one kiss just before I'll Cover You in the first act. Was there another one in Without You?

---

drippy and dull because they're the only couple on the stage (or in the movie) who love each other no matter what and don't fight all the time?

Well, not exactly, but perhaps yes, to some degree. There's no heat there. It may just be the fact that Collins and Angel are woefully underwritten characters. I just don't see much depth to them.

---

Exactly. How the hell is repeatedly bitching about something (that may or may not happen in a movie that isn't out yet) on various messageboards going to "prevent" anything?

---

It's only a trailer. The trailer for "Chicago" didn't even indicate that it was a musical. I don't think they would specifically target the trailer at a straight audience, considering they pretty much know who the real target audience is.

We can't discuss the depiction of homosexual love in the movie RENT, because there is no such product yet. Discussing it in hypothetical in an attempt to change the way the movie is made is ridiculous, no one will change the film based on the objections of some freaks on a Broadway themed message board whose total membership is likely less than 200 people.

True enough, though these threads have caused me to look back at Rent (the stage version) and wonder if perhaps Larson did give homosexuals the shaft. I'm not questioning his intentions, but when you look at it as a whole, there are things that are unsettling.

Sarah Schulman (who maintains that Larson ripped off her book "People in Trouble") states that "the actual message is that in the gay male couple, the guy dies. The lesbian couple--all they ever do is bicker. The only people who have true love are the straight people. [Also], the gay people with AIDS die, and the straight people with AIDS live. So you end up with a story of the AIDS crisis in which the central, most heroic figures are straight. Believe me, I have lived through the AIDS crisis and I know that that is the opposite of the truth."

If a problem with the gay characters permeates the film, it may stem from the source. Again, I don't think Larson had any malicious intent, but it's also a widely noted fact that he originally had Maureen returning to Mark at the end. Granted, that was dropped, but it does sort of indicate that Larson didn't really have much of handle on writing gay characters, and I think that comes through in the finished product.

Don't get me wrong. I still enjoy Rent and look forward to the movie, but I do think that it presents a lot of mixed messages.
Schulman Interview

---

All your points are well taken, smartpenguin78, though I don't agree with you on all of them.

the piece does do an excellent job of introducing positive gay characters and integrating them without stereotype in a larger piece.

I'm not sure that Angel isn't a stereotype. Or perhaps she's an archetype (the name alone. Oy). She's the sassy Latin Boy in a dress (see To Wong Foo). She's unlike any drag queen I've ever met in my life. She's so ... preposterously good and holy that I still to this day can't fathom how she contracted HIV to begin with. Perhaps she was administering a needle-exchange program and accidentally got pricked?

I think that Angel and Collins are the least interesting characters in the show. There's nothing below their surface, except that by the end, Collins is advocating outright thievery (again with the mixed messages!).

And I can see the joke about anti-homosexual bias, but still, I think Schulman does raise some points that have to be considered. Yes, April (a character we never see) dies. But it's a suicide. The suicide may have been provoked by her diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, but AIDS is not what killed her. Of four positive main characters, only a gay one dies.

And finally, I don't know that we're led to believe Roger and Mimi will die. The show's biggest misstep, in my opinion, is bringing Angel back on at the end of the finale, before the show is actually over. I've never quite figured out what we're supposed to make of that.

EDITED and Mini-Spoiler: Granted, Angel does drive a dog off a terrace, but she does it via drumming, and once we discover the dog was Benny's, we feel she is justified. Even her cruelty to animals becomes sanctimonious.

---

Updated On: 8/23/05 at 05:34 PM