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Un Chant d'Amour
Directed by Jean Genet. Starring Java, André Reybaz.
How to order The Films of Kenneth Anger
Includes: Fireworks, Eaux d'Artifice, Puce Moment, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
How to order Saturday Night at the Baths
Directed by David Buckley. With Ellen Sheppard, Robert Aberdeen, Don Scotti, and Caleb Stone.
How to order Alpha Dog
Directed by Nick Cassavetes.
Starring Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Justin Timberlake, Anton Yelchin, Sharon Stone, Bruce Willis, and Harry Dean Stanton.
How to order

The summer blockbuster season has started and is rife with disappointment. Spiderman 3 is a bust, and Pirates of the Caribbean's third and final installment, subtitled At World's End, should rally be At Wit's End. Even the generally sublime Johnny Depp looks bored in the trailers. Here's one of the most inventive, talented actors working today reduced to a place holder in a mishmash of warmed-over, cranked-out MGM-in-the-1950s swashbuckling genre junk. (If you go see it, Geoffrey Rush's over-the-top, histrionic performance is at least something to watch.) Not that much else is better-- Mr. Brooks is a dead-weight thriller that tries to be The Talented Mr. Ripley, but fails. Waitress, the darling indie film of the season, should receive no tips. And Knocked Up-- allegedly the adult, sexy comedy-- is as puerile as its oafish, dumb-ass protagonist.

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o what's a queen to do for summer viewing? Turn to the DVD rack for some new and newly-released gems. Among them-- perhaps unexpectedly-- is Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog, which got mixed reviews at Sundance and failed in commercial release. Some critics felt it was the end of the road for stupid-cool-kids-doing stupid-stuff movies, along the lines of Another Day in Paradise. Maybe critics were just burned out on fucked-up California kids or thought the film was too exploitative.

Alpha Dog is closely based on the real-life murder by one Jesse James Hollywood of San Fernando Valley 15-year-old Ben Markowitz over a drug debt. J.J. Hollywood was a wannabe drug lord and all around punk. The film is a super-smart, incisive look at boy-bonding and the sheer homoerotics of tangled, pent-up young male sexuality and power. Writer/director Cassavetes has corralled some big name older folks here-- Sharon Stone as the dead boy's mother, Bruce Willis as the drug-dealer's father, Harry Dean Stanton as a scummy family friend. With the exception of Justin Timberlake, the younger players are not well-known-- but incredibly effective. While not "gay" in any traditional way (although the boys call each other "cocksucker" and "faggot" all the time), the film teems with male-male sexual energy. Such young-male homoerotics shows up in everything from River's Edge to L.I.E. to United States of Leland-- after Alpha Dog you'll think that none of those films really gets to the fucked-up, heat-ridden heart of the sexual tensions among characters perched between being boys and men.

What Cassavetes is so good at-- and we saw it as well in his John Q-- is conveying unexpressed emotion. It's this constant digging and mining of the emotional labyrinths that yields his terrific results. By the end, Cassavetes brings a monumental nightmare of repressed emotions, sexual desire, longing, and young-male violence to a terrifying and piteous climax.

Blasts from the canon

Alpha Dog may become a gay classic (or alas, end up a popular midnight feature, a sort of Southern California Rocky Horror Picture Show)-- but it isn't yet. If you're in the mood for real queer classics-- films fundamental to what we now think of as "queer cinema"-- there are three that you can't miss that are new to DVD.

Jean Genet's 1950 Un Chant d'Amour is a masterpiece. Silent, black and white, and only 26 minutes, it tells the story of men who are in isolation in a French prison who make contact with one another. The DVD comes with a host of ancillary features, including a commentaries by the great underground film makers Jonas Mekas and Kenneth Anger, as well as two 1970s interviews with Genet. Watching Un Chant d'Amour now, and understanding that it was never widely distributed, it's amazing to see its influence on films such as Midnight Cowboy and Brokeback Mountain.

And speaking of Kenneth Anger, his films have been only spottily available on VHS, often taken from bad prints. Now volume one of The Films of Kenneth Anger is out, with five titles-- Fireworks, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Rabbit's Moon, Puce Moment, Eaux d'Artifice-- and it's reason for celebration.

Made in 1947, Fireworks is still extraordinary. The film set the model for a broad range of representations of sexualized violence in both queer and mainstream art. The prints here are great, and there are plenty of "extras," including commentary from Anger himself. One hopes that volume two comes quickly so we can re-watch the 1963 Scorpio Rising, a film that heralded a post-Stonewall sensibility six years avant la lettre. Along with Un Chant d'Amour, these Anger films are required viewing for queer cineastes.

David Buckley's small, independent Saturday Night at the Baths is far less momentous than these Genet and Anger offerings, but in its way as important. Made in 1975 on a small budget with non-famous actors-- Ellen Sheppard, Robert Aberdeen, Don Scotti, and Caleb Stone-- the film tells the story of a married musician of indecisive masculinity and sexuality who gets a job at the famed Continental Baths's nightclub and falls into a relationship with one of the men who works there. Today the plot doesn't seem so big a deal, but the film sparked tremendous controversy on release. The scenes shot inside the baths are invaluable gay documentation, and the story itself-- as in all 1970s indie films, nothing much happens-- is emblematic of the times. While not great filmmaking, Saturday Night at the Baths is consistently interesting and historically fascinating. For the past 30 years the film has been essentially completely unavailable, and should be welcomed back.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com