Well, it could be funny. Different characters in a different story with more wit and insight might have done the trick. But Boat Trip requires its heroes to be so unobservant that it takes them hours to even figure out it’s a gay cruise. And then they go into heterosexual panic mode, until the profoundly conventional screenplay supplies the only possible outcome: The sidekick discovers that he’s gay, and the hero discovers a sexy woman on board and falls in love with her.
Her name is Gabriella (Roselyn Sanchez), and despite the fact that she’s the choreographer on a gay cruise, she knows so little about gay men that she falls for Jerry’s strategy: He will pretend to be gay, so that he can get close to her and then dramatically unveil his identity, or something. Uh, huh. Even Hector, the cross-dressing queen in the next stateroom, knows a straight when he sees one: “You want to convince people you are gay, and you don’t know the words to ‘I Will Survive’?”
The gays protesting the movie say it deals in stereotypes. So it does, but then again, so does the annual gay parade, and so do many gay nightclubs, where role-playing is part of the scene. Yes, there are transvestites and leather guys and muscle boys on the cruise, but there are also more conventional types, like Nick’s poker-playing buddies. The one ray of wit in the entire film is provided by Roger Moore, as a homosexual man who calmly wanders through the plot dispensing sanity, as when, at the bar, he listens to the music and sighs, “Why do they always play Liza?”
One of the movie’s problems is a disconnect between various levels of reality. Some of the scenes play as if they are intended to be realistic. Then Jerry or Nick goes into hysterics of overacting. Then Jerry attempts to signal a helicopter to rescue him, and shoots it down with a flare gun. Then it turns out to be carrying the Swedish Sun-Tanning Team on its way to the Hawaiian Tropic finals. Then Jerry asks Gabriela to describe her oral sex technique, which she does with the accuracy and detail of a porn film, and then Jerry—but that pathetic moment you will have to witness for yourself. Or maybe you will not.
Note: The credit cookies weren’t very funny, either, but at least they kept me in the theater long enough to notice the credits for the film’s Greek Support Team.
Bootmen
(DIRECTED BY DEIN PERRY; STARRING ADAM GARCIA, SAM WORTHINGTON; 2000)
Bootmen is the story of a young dancer and his friends who revisit the clichés of countless other dance movies in order to bring forth a dance performance of clanging unloveliness. Screwing metal plates to the soles of their work boots, they stomp in unison on flat steel surfaces while banging on things. Imagine Fred Astaire as a punch-press operator.
The movie has been adapted by director Dein Perry from his own performance piece, which he might have been better advised to make into a concert film. It takes place in Australia, where Sean (Adam Garcia) dreams of becoming a dancer. His salt-of-the earth father, a steelworker, opposes the plan. Sean cannot face life without dance in Newcastle, a steel town, despite the charms of the fragrant Linda (Sophie Lee), a hairdresser who has given him to understand that he might someday, but not yet, enjoy her favors. He flees to Sydney to pursue his career, leaving behind his brother Mitchell, who basks in the old man’s favor by adopting a reasonable occupation and stealing cars for their parts.
In Sydney, Sean encounters a hard-nosed choreographer (William Zappa), a staple of dance movies, who is not easy to impress. Sean is too talented to be dismissed, but at rehearsals he angers the star (Dein Perry himself) because the star’s girlfriend likes his looks, and Sean gets fired. It is one of the oddities of this movie about dance that almost everyone in it is not merely straight but ferociously macho; it’s as if the Village People really did work eight hours a day as linemen, Indian chiefs, etc. I am not suggesting that all, or most, or many dancers are gay, but surely one has heard that some are?
Sean returns disillusioned but undefeated to Newcastle, where Mitchell meanwhile has gotten the lonely Linda drunk, plied her with morose theories about Sean’s long absence, and bedded her during an alcoholic lapse of judgment on her part (Mitchell has no judgment). Sean arrives in the morning, discovers that Mitchell and Linda have sailed into waters that Linda had assured him would remain uncharted pending their own maiden voyage, and becomes so depressed that we realize we have reached the Preliminary Crisis as defined in elementary screenwriting outlines.
Now what? It remains only for the steel mills to close so that Sean can realize that the millworkers should be retrained as computer experts. But there are no computers. Why not have a benefit? Sean gathers his friends and says, in other words, “Say, gang! Let’s rent the old steel mill, and put on a show!” He trains his buddies in the art of synchronized stomping so that the town can turn out to watch them clang and bang. Judging by the crowd they attract, and estimating $10 a ticket, they raise enough money for approximately two computers, but never mind; cruel fate will quickly turn these recycled steelworkers into unemployed dot-com workers, so the fewer, the better.
Is there a scene near the end of the performance where the once-bitter dad enters, sees that his son is indeed talented, and forgives all? Is Linda pardoned for her lapse of faithfulness? Do Mitchell and Sean realize that even though Mitchell may have slept with the woman Sean loves it was because Mitchell had too much to drink, something that could happen in any family? Do the townspeople of Newcastle give a lusty ovation to the performance? Is there an encore? Veteran moviegoers will walk into the theater already possessing the answers to these and many other questions.
Bride of the Wind
(DIRECTED BY BRUCE BERESFORD; STARRING SARAH WYNTER, JONATHAN PRYCE; 2001)
I’m not just any widow! I’m Mahler’s widow! —ALMA MAHLER
She must have been a monster. The Alma Mahler depicted in is a woman who prowls restlessly through the beds of the famous, making them miserable while displaying no charm of her own. Whether this was the case with the real woman I do not know. But if she was anything like the woman in this movie, then Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Frank Werfel should have fled from her on sight.
Bride of the Wind, which tells her story, is one of the worst biopics I have ever seen, a leaden march through a chronology of Alma’s affairs, clicking them off with the passion of an encyclopedia entry. The movie has three tones: overwrought, boring, laughable. Sarah Wynter, who plays Alma, does not perform the dialogue but recites it. She lacks any conviction as a seductress, seems stiff and awkward, and should have been told that great women in turn-of-the-century Vienna didn’t slouch.
We first meet her going to a ball her father has forbidden her to attend. He is stern with her when she returns. So much for her adolescence. We move on to a dinner party where she flirts with the artist Klimt (August Schmolzer), who labors over one-liners like, “Mahler’s music is much better than it sounds.” She insults Mahler (Jonathan Pryce) at dinner, offending and fascinating him, and soon the older man marries her.
She has affairs throughout their marriage. She cheats with the architect Gropius (Simon Verhoeven), who unwisely writes a love letter to Alma but absentmindedly addresses it to Gustav—or so he says. “You drove me to him,” she pouts to her husband. Mahler is always going on about his music, you see, and thinks himself a genius. Well, so does Gropius. The screenplay shows the egos of the men by putting big, clanging chunks of information in the dialogue. Sample: