Reel Thoughts Interview: Carter Country

Lynda Carter may live outside of our nation’s capitol, but Arizona is never far from her heart. The Arcadia High School alum grew up in Globe and Phoenix, and started her career as a singer. Touring the state in a band before she was fifteen, the statuesque beauty gained national attention when she was crowned Miss World USA in 1972. Just four years later, she beat out scores of other actress in Hollywood to become TV’s Wonder Woman, the role that made her a household name and inspired many a schoolboy (and schoolgirl) crush. Carter was honored to be asked to be the Celebrity Grand Marshall of the 2011 Phoenix Pride parade, and she will be signing CDs and autographs in a VIP booth at the festival, which takes place today.

Not even a power outage in her Potomac, Maryland home could keep Carter from giving me an exclusive interview about her music and her strong views about equality. When asked if a lot of gay men (like myself) tell her she was a boyhood crush, she laughed. “I don’t actually. I hear a lot of “I wanted to be you.” But not so much that they had a crush on me. That’s unusual and extra special. Maybe you didn’t know why you (really) had a crush on me,” she laughed.

Before talking about her music, Carter was thrilled to discuss the news that President Obama had directed the Justice Department not to defend DOMA. “Okay, enough already,” she said, voicing Obama’s thought process. “Let me figure out how I can do this without having to go through all the crap of the legal fights, the Congressional fights... I’ll just work my way around this and it’ll be done. Don’t fight it. It will be done.”

She is also happy to see DADT relegated to history. “At the time it was enacted by Clinton in his first week in office, there was such savagery, it was so homophobic, there was no restraint,” she recalled. “Just getting used to the idea of (the issue being about) human beings, it took people a long time. The generation that came after had much more understanding, or if not understanding, at least it was 'What do I care?' People in their twenties think it’s outrageous that it’s a law.”

“It’s kind of like Women’s Rights. When I did Wonder Woman, there was not a single person on the set in any capacity that was a female. There wasn’t a single woman on television who had her own show except Carol Burnett, or other comedy or music shows. Sometimes the process you have to go through (for equality), unfair as it is, takes steps to occur. Under the Constitution, women still don’t have equal rights. The Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified by the states.”

She is hopeful about the future, however. “As children grow up and they have the internet with so much more exposure to information,” she said, the issues of inequality will diminish. “I just think that a lot of people think their acting as God, and everyone else is demonized. You can’t argue with them because they aren’t interested in what you have to say. It isn’t about strong faith; I have mine. But I have never had a single person ask me what I believe in, because they don’t want to hear you. They want to tell you. That’s what bigotry and homophobia is about. I get mad at injustice.”

“I love Gay Pride,” Carter exclaimed, noting that it is great to be invited back to where she grew up. “I’m there all the time, I just don’t do it publicly.” Her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews still live here, so she tries to get back at least a few times a year. “I’m an Arizona girl through and through.”

“I think it is about the archetype of the secret self and the hero inside you,” Carter responded, when asked why she thinks her Wonder Woman persona struck such a chord with GLBT audiences. “The good person with this hidden ability to fight those injustices that you see. I’ve never understood why people stand by, why teachers stood by for so many years for bullying, whenever someone is different. It’s hard enough being a teenager and coming to grips with all these impulses.”

Carter was so eloquent about her beliefs about equality, it was almost difficult to get her to talk about her love of music. In addition to her popular cabaret show, Carter played the intimidating Mama Morton in the London production of Chicago in 2005. She definitely prefers her cabaret work. “I want to sing all the songs in my own show,” she laughed. She is very grateful for her GLBT fans, and is thrilled that her popularity extends to men and women in the community. “I’m a crossover icon,” she joked. “I am like an iPod Shuffle,” Carter said, explaining that her musical tastes run across most genres except, surprisingly, Broadway show tunes. “I sing what I want to sing, I don’t want to sing all one genre.” She is excited for her fans to hear her upcoming CD, Crazy Little Things, which will have her “iPod Shuffle” of eclectic song choices. She admits that about half of her audiences are GLBT and considers them a key to her post-Wonder Woman success.

I asked Carter how she became such a passionate supporter of GLBT rights. She responded that the Religious Right needs to open their pea brains and accept that civil rights belong to everyone. “If you believe in God, then you have to believe that he intended to make people the way that they are. It’s not just about gay people. This is about all of us. Worry about our behavior and worry about our own marriages. Work on what we need to do. It’s about equality. It’s about simple, simple rights. Period.”

Interview by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reel Thoughts: Not a Scream But a Whimper

Did you ever have a dish with all the right ingredients that still came out tasting awful? It’s either a bad recipe or a bad cook that’s responsible, and the same maladies bring down Scream 4. Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson have every cast member who lived through Screams 1 through 3, the same sets, the same Ghostface mask and the same sensibilities as the previous Scream movies... namely a knowing wink at the slasher movie genre. That’s the main problem; with so much sameness, including a really cobbled-together, by-the-numbers script by openly gay Williamson, Scream 4 feels like a nightmare you might have after falling asleep watching the original films, one in which people don’t act like real people, hospitals are completely empty of staff, and families of murder victims still live in the house where their loved ones were slaughtered.

The opening of Scream 4 is the best part, in which an oddly self-aware couple of sisters begin getting crank calls from a familiar prankster. There will be blood spilled, but whose blood, I won’t say. Suffice it to say that Kirsten Bell and Anna Paquin figure into the puzzle before the main feature begins. Williamson is still great with dialogue, having one nubile lass gag at the thought of watching “torture porn” like the Saw movies.

As the film settles in, we’re back in Woodsboro, where Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is ending her book tour for her self-help guide, "Out of Darkness". Gale and Dewey (Courtney Cox and David Arquette) are not-so-happily married; he’s the Sheriff and she is a creatively-blocked writer unable to escape the shadow of her True Crime books based on the events of Scream. Sidney’s Aunt Kate and Cousin Jill (Mary McDonnell and Emma Roberts) inexplicably live in the Prescott family murder house, but welcome Cousin Sidney back with wary arms, once bodies begin piling up. Jill’s pal even calls Sidney the Angel of Death. Much like Antonia on Top Chef, anyone around Sidney ends up on the chopping block.

Despite more clever dialogue, Scream 4 goes through its very familiar motions, including a new generation of Woodsboro teens clearly handpicked to echo previous victims like Jamie Kennedy’s film geek and Rose McGowan’s garage door-averse sexpot. The twisty ending holds together, but depends on too much implausibility to earn your respect. “The only way to survive a horror movie today is by being gay” is one of the new rules, spoken by someone who has clearly forgotten Single White Female and Copycat. I wish Scream 4 was better; all of the cast members are game (even when sent grocery shopping while a killer is loose) but they don’t behave like actual people. Why should we care? Especially when actual soulless killers from the 9/11 terrorists to Tucson shooter Jared Loughner have shown us what real evil looks like.

UPDATE: Scream 4 is now available on DVD and Blu-rayfrom Amazon.com.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Toon Talk: That’s Incredible

Seven years later, and Pixar’s superhero epic The Incredibles is still, well, pretty incredible. Now released, for the first time this week, on a high definition Disney Blu-ray, the Academy Award-winning adventure still ranks as one of the best of its genre, even with such newer entrants as The Dark Knight and Iron Man in the mix...

Click here to continue reading my Toon Talk review of The Incredibles Blu-ray at LaughingPlace.com.

Reverend's Preview: Bollywood Meets Hollywood

The 9th annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) opens tonight, with red carpet festivities and five days of screenings taking place at the ArcLight in Hollywood. Among the films being shown are the Los Angeles premiere of the award-winning I Am Kalam and the closing world premiere Sunday of Disney's first Hindi-language production, Zokkomon.

In disappointing news for GLBT filmgoers of all nationalities, the controversial 2010 gay drama Dunno Y? Na Jaane Kyun is not included in the line up. It has been described as "India's answer to Brokeback Mountain" and reportedly includes the first gay kiss in Indian cinema's history. On the plus side, though, two other excellent GLBT-themed films will be shown during IFFLA.

One is the feature-length documentary I Am, which is not to be confused with the similarly-titled I Am... that is also screening during the fest. In Sonali Gulati's searching, partly autobiographical film, 21 GLBT individuals and their families are interviewed about their experiences dealing with homosexuality in conservative Indian society. While parents telling their openly GLBT children "You have shamed us" is a depressingly common refrain, a handful of courageous mothers and fathers have lovingly embraced their often ostracized offspring. As one father wisely asks, "If I don't accept my (gay) son, will that make him any more of a (heterosexual) man?"

Among those featured in the doc are Prince Manvendra, a former member of one of India's royal families who was publicly disowned and disinherited by his parents after he came out as a gay man. Never mind that he had already suffered a nervous breakdown after his heterosexual marriage failed because of his desire for men. Today, though, Manvendra is one of a slowly growing number of happy and respected public faces of homosexuality in India.

In a society where homosexual relations have historically been criminalized, doctors tout homeopathic "cures" for homosexuality, and most heterosexual marriages are still arranged, there is all the more pressure on GLBT people to conform. Gulati frames I Am with her own personal story, which includes coming out on an Indian TV talk show and her attempts to reconcile her relationship with her now-deceased mother. She navigates a lot of sexual, emotional and geographic territory in her 75-minute documentary and does so spectacularly.

IFFLA will also present the provocative and very well-made short film Beholder. Set in a frighteningly believable United States of the not-too-distant-future where the map has been re-drawn into conservative and liberal political halves, a pregnant woman married to a right-wing politician is informed that their unborn child will be homosexual. Since homosexuality has been outlawed in "Red Estates," the mother-to-be is legally required to receive a gene-modifying injection that will make the baby straight. If she doesn't, she and her baby will be banished to the liberal states, where life is described in horrific terms.

She finds this an unexpectedly difficult dilemma, and wrestles with it for the short's 25 minutes. Both support and opposition are found coming from surprising sources. Directed by the talented Nisha Ganatra, Beholder is an intelligent, unsettling vision of how literally-divisive an issue we Americans threaten to allow homosexuality to become.

For additional information on the 2011 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and the films being shows, please visit the fest's official website.

Preview by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.