Sundance,
Bloody Sundance
The annual Sundance Film Festival is home to horrible traffic, bitterly cold temperatures, rude film-industry people, and the kind of movies Britney Spears has been known to call 'weird' before walking out of them. But it's also a place where queer films get their chance to find homes with distributors, and the January 2004 bash will be no exception. Romeo's already reported on several of the films selected for this year's fest, such as Bright Young Things, Saved, and Home of Phobia. Joining those will be the gay-Canadian-Muslim-meets-Cary-Grant fantasy Touch of Pink, starring Kyle MacLachlan; Bruce La Bruce's sure-to-be-porny Raspberry Reich; and Julian Hernandez's A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky, which won this year's Berlin Film Festival's Teddy Award. There's also Christopher Munch's Harry and Max, a Star Is Born-ish story of a 20-something boy-band singer on the has-been descent and his relationship with a 16-year-old rising teen idol. Documentaries like Tarnation, about a gay man returning home to Texas to take care of his mentally ill mother; The Garden, about teenage Palestinian hustlers; and Everyday People, the Michael Stipe-produced film about neighborhood gentrification, will round it all out. Attendees, start shopping for new parkas!
Sabato Jr.'s Testosterone Level
Perhaps, like Romeo, you've spent a few sleepless nights wondering what happened to your all-time favorite underwear model, Antonio Sabato Jr. You wondered if he cared about you and your needs enough to come back into the public eye. Well, he does and he is, in a new film from director David Moreton (Edge of Seventeen), the queer-themed Testosterone. In a very loose adaptation by Moreton and novelist Dennis Hensley of late gay author James Robert Baker's novel, the film revolves around a graphic novelist (I'm With Her's equally yummy David Sutcliffe) who's obsessed with tracking down his boyfriend (Sabato, Jr.), who has suddenly disappeared. Kiss of the Spider Woman's Sonia Braga and Legally Blonde's Jennifer Coolidge co-star. And yes, Romeo has it on good authority that underwear will be shed.
Aisha Tyler Moore?
All Over the Guy's Dan Bucatinsky keeps cranking out the TV deals with producing partner Lisa Kudrow. Now the two have are setting up a comedy series at CBS, a workplace sitcom described as being like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Romeo loves it when people aim high) and set to star up-and-comer Aisha Tyler. What? You've never heard of her? Tyler's one of the many lovely, talented actors out there whose face is somewhat familiar but who's yet to become as ubiquitous as Jennifer Aniston. She played Mother Nature in Santa Clause 2, guested as 'Charlie' on a half-dozen Friends episodes, and hosted E! Talk Soup. So keep your eyes peeled next fall and see if she turns the world on with her smile—or not.
The Tortured Wait
Readers with good long-term memory will recall Romeo's 2001 report about Clive Barker's producing duties on the film Tortured Souls, a project based on his own line of grotesque action figures. Well, finally, that barge is moving a little farther down the river Styx, and there's now a script, as well as a director on board: Barker himself. It's been eight hellish years since Barker's last directorial effort, Lord of Illusions, and Romeo wonders if the man's been in private negotiations with himself all that time. The script will focus on a guy who trades in his wife for a demon, throwing the missus into a purgatory inhabited by monsters. She has to escape, and he has to figure out how to handle his new demonic life. Sounds like a coming-out story.
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