EDGE 10.0: The Decade in Film

In celebration of our tenth anniversary, EDGE is proud to launch "EDGE 10.0: The Decade in," a retrospective series of features looking back on the past ten years of headlines, politics, personalities, trends, music, film, parties, etc... written by Editor in Chief Emeritus Steve Weinstein, and the current editorial staff at EDGE.

Just as EDGE has expanded its geographic base from New England to the entire nation, so, too, film coverage has exponentially expanded to include all major releases, New York and Los Angeles showcases, specialty and foreign films. LGBT films remain EDGE's forte and in the forefront of film coverage, including interviews with talent in front of and behind the camera.

In 2004, sequels were the top-grossing films - of "Shrek," "Harry Potter" and "Spider-Man." "Million Dollar Baby" took home major Oscars. But the 2004 film that may have the most resonance for EDGE readers was "Stage Beauty," a beautifully detailed period piece about theater during the Restoration in 17th century London.

Billy Crudup played an actor known for female roles when suddenly he finds himself competing with Clare Danes after women are allowed on stage as actresses. Like an "All About Eve" set in the time of Charles II, the film's theme, our critic wrote, "of gender identity and appropriation is unexpectedly universal."

The next year, the big box office winners were dominated by fantasy. Led by yet another in the "Harry Potter" and "Star Wars" franchises, the list included a "Narnia," a "King Kong" and a "Batman." But as far as EDGE's readers were concerned, there was only movie that really mattered in 2005.

An article on EDGE correctly predicted that "Brokeback Mountain" would face "an uphill trail for the Academy Awards, where a gay-themed film has never won top honors." Unfortunately, that proved all-too true, as the head-scratching winner, the aptly named "Crash," took Best Film. But "Brokeback" director Ang Lee did win an Oscar for Best Director, and it also won Best Screenplay.

Most importantly, the film was a trailblazer, an honest depiction of male-male love without compromise that succeeded as a major Hollywood release. As our reviewer wrote a year later, the film "didn't just touch a nerve, it sliced open a vein." Annie Proulx, who wrote the original story, and the screenwriters managed to "find a new format for the old-as-Shakespeare story of star-crossed lovers."

The next year, it was business as usual at the box office, with escapist fluff like a "Pirates of Caribbean" spin-off and the almost surreally silly "The Da Vinci Code" and cartoons, most animated but a few "live action," like "Night at the Museum." Oscar voters had better taste than the public, with the searingly etched portrayal of revenge "No Country for Old Men" taking major awards.

For show queens, the Oscars proved a disappointment, since "Dreamgirls" didn't major awards, except of course for a career-making performance by Jennifer Hudson. As EDGE's national arts & entertainment editor Robert Nesti, later wrote, "There was a collective gasp heard around the world (or at least from Boston's South End to West Hollywood) when 'Dreamgirls' was passed over for a Best Picture nomination this past year." The theatrical experience became just that when, Nesti noted, audiences literally stood up and cheered after JHud belted out "I'm Telling You I'm Not Going."

Gay wise, Hollywood reverted to the usual formula. EDGE Publisher David Foucher called "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" "seditious": Even though "an overwritten, badly cast mess," the film at least had Adam Sandler's young male fans confronting the realities gay men face every day.

A happier gay film event of 2007 had to be the film adaptation of the West End and Broadway hit play "The History Boys." Richard Griffiths' performance as the eccentric, caring and occasionally groping teacher who finds himself at odds with a careerist colleague who sees knowledge not as beautiful in itself but as a road to power.

In 2008, Heath Ledger finally got his Oscar, posthumously, for a Batman flick. EDGE reported on Ledger's shocking death at the beginning of the year in Downtown Manhattan. Robert Nesti's analysis probed how deeply the death of the "Brokeback" star moved us. Nesti compared Ledger to James Dean: "Brokeback" "showed," Nesti wrote, "that he was much more than just a pretty boy."

There was no mistaking what was the gay film of 2008. "Hope," wrote our reviewer, "may be defined as the realization that we cannot change the way people are, but we can always work to change the way they will be. That was the essential political message and legacy of Harvey Milk's life."

If "Brokeback" became the gay lyric poem, "Milk" was our epic. The film won Sean Penn a Best Acting Oscar for the lead role, and thrust Dustin Lance Black, who won Original Screenplay, into the spotlight as a living gay activist, a role he continues today. When the DVD came out, EDGE's reviewer took pains to praise a young actor named James Franco, "a visually appealing presence who hasn't exactly made an imprint in the acting department until now. "

If "Avatar" dominated the 2009 box office, and "The Hurt Locker" the Oscars, two small movies showed the progress that had been made in gay films.

When reviewing "I Love You, Phillip Morris," Killian Melloy thought that Ewan McGregor was fatally miscast as the lover of big-time con man Jim Carrey, and that the Carrey and his crew relied too heavily on the slapstick that made him a huge star. Audiences apparently agreed, because the film flopped. But after the DVD came out, another EDGE reviewer praised "Phillip Morris" as "a bold step for gay films and a watershed in the canon of Jim Carrey."

"A Single Man," by contrast, was a much smaller film in every way. But a brilliant performance by Colin Firth, as George, the too-careful anti-hero, and sensitive direction by fashion designer Tom Ford made this adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel a huge hit among gay audiences.

Calling it "one of the happiest surprises" of the year, Nesti praised "how effectively Ford captures George's alienation." "A Single Man," Nesti wrote, perfectly evoked "1962, the era of the closet and all its implications."

Firth would win a Best Actor Oscar, but the following year, for "The King's Speech." With - surprise! - fantasy like "Toy Story 3," "Alice in Wonderland" and the inevitable "Harry Potter" cash machine dominating the box office, LGBT audiences were mesmerized by another British actor's performance.

It took 47 years between becoming an international star in "The Sound of Music" and winning an Oscar playing an elderly man who late in life comes out of the closet. "The appeal of 'Beginners' is its seductive introspection," EDGE's DVD review began.

When the screenwriter and director of "Beginners," Mike Mills, sat down with Robert Nesti, he explained how his own dad came out at age 75 six months after his wife's death, not unlike the fictional character played by Plummer. The film acted as a catharsis for Mills to process the death of his own dad after his coming out brought them close together.

In the past few years, EDGE has been reviewing, analyzing, interviewing the talent and been just-plain busy with a slate of gay-themed films. In 2010, "The Kids Are All Right" brought two film veterans together to play a lesbian couple finding that the problems raising adolescents is the same whatever your gender.

In 2011, "J. Edgar" brought to the general public an awareness of the founder and long-time head of the FBI's penchant for cross-dressing and his live-in partner of many decades.

"Weekend" was a much more modest film but it captivated EDGE's reviewer: "'Weekend' is an unflinchingly honest look at gay relationships as they really are. Avoiding the clich�d themes of coming out, AIDS, or bullying, "Weekend" is simply about two guys who meet at a bar, spend a night together, and quickly find themselves drawn to one another."

In 2012, "How to Survive a Plague," the highly praised documentary about the salad years of ACT-UP, brought a new generation to heightened awareness of what activism really means when it's a life or death situations. The intensity of "Keep the Lights On," a cinema a clef about the filmmaker's real-life drug-addict lover, was equally shattering.

"Blue Is the Warmest Color" in 2013 became a huge sensation after winning major prizes and having lots of steamy girl-on-girl sex. "Dallas Buyers Club" and "Philomena" both looked back on the grim early years of the AIDS epidemic.
But perhaps a small documentary, made by that overlooked actor from "Milk," James Franco, provides the best way to end this survey. "Interior: Leather Bar" took a second look at the 1980 film "Cruising," a Hollywood studio's first (and thus far, last) look at the sexual underground of 1970s New York.

"Interior" attempts to recreate 40 minutes of footage the film's original distributor forced the director to cut before releasing the film. "Cruising," made just before it all came to a crashing halt with the advent of AIDS, sensationalized leather sex. Like other films of the 2010s, AIDS both informs it and gives us a perspective that comes only from history.