average life

This year, I watched seven out of the ten nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture and I remember thinking how good the vast majority were.  The King’s Speech was fantastic, The Social Network was masterfully done, and even Inception was a huge achievement.  (Don’t even get me started on True Grit.)  But, for this post, I’m going to focus on some less than stellar films.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of bad movies in my day.  Maybe not as many as Niki Lemley, but I still think I can conclusively say that “Mormon movies” and “queer cinema” are, by far, the movie genres with the lowest mean quality level in all of filmdom.  I’m even counting horror because, while there are plenty of awful horror movies out there, there are some that are so great that one day Brooke is going to show up at my door with a Blu-Ray of The Orphanage and watch it with me just so I will shut up about it already.  (You should totally watch it.  It’s on Netflix streaming and everything.)  The best gay and Mormon movies, however, are only tolerable enough for me to have on in the background while I’m ironing clothes.  The worst, I’ve lasted only a couple of minutes.  That’s right, not even past the titles.

But, while their content is vastly different, they are actually terrible for similar reasons.

(Disclaimer: I do not recommend that anyone, anyone, watch the movies that I’m going to discuss in this post.  For the love of everything good in this world, don’t watch these movies.)

(Oh and when I mean “gay movies”, I’m referring specifically to gay men.  ‘Cause I don’t know jack about lesbian cinema.)

They Pander To Their Audience
Both Mormon and gay films only have a couple of core values.  For gay movies, it’s sex and “being true to oneself”.  For Mormon movies, it’s black and white morality and family friendliness.  It is extremely rare for either genre to betray its core values, even if all other aspects of the movie suffers as a result.

Mormon movie offender: The Singles Ward (2002).
I used the DVD cover for two reasons: 1) There isn’t a decent screenshot on the Internet from this movie and 2) I wanted to have proof of that tag line.  You see it up there?  See what it says?  “The road to eternal marriage has never been longer.”

Sigh.

This film is probably one of the most well known of the Mormon movies.  In it, stand-up comedian (no, really) Johnathan Jordan returns to the singles congregation (the titular “singles ward”) after divorcing his ex-wife who left the Church.  (We know she’s no longer practicing Mormonism because she’s holding a beer in that one scene.  Because, you know, you leave the Church, you start drinking.  Or vice-versa.  Whatever.)  So, anyway, he returns to the single’s ward, immediately sees a woman he’s interested in.  She’s not interested in him.  Eighty-something minutes later, they’re together.  In that eighty minutes, Love Interest loses interest (for about five minutes) after she attends one of his bitter comedy routines where he disses the Church, in the most absolutely benign way possible.

Since the movie doesn’t allow anyone to do anything actually bad – the worst being Mr. Jordan’s offensively unoffensive rant, there characters don’t ever change or learn anything.  They do, of course, but it feels as though they only learned the lesson because the script told them to.

Gay media offender: “Queer as Folk” (US 2000-2005)
True, this was a TV show, not a movie, but the Showtime series (based off of a BBC show) is one of the better examples of pandering to the gay audience, simply because show is merely sex scenes surrounded by flimsy dialog in order to set up the situations for those sex scenes.  Hey, we don’t really even need that.  Maybe just the sex scenes.  We’ll work out the dialog later.  Oh yeah, and gay pride.

I recognize that premium cable apparently has a minimum number of sex scenes per season that they have to portray, but geez, it’s like the writers of “Queer as Folk” weren’t even trying.  The series really wants you to root for the main couple, the underage Justin and the well-overage Brian, because, you know, Justin is better off with the drug using, philandering Brian than with his parents, homophobic as they may be.  Because accepting oneself = promiscuous sex = the gay ideal.  Always.

They Exploit Their One Interesting Story
They know it, too. For Mormon movies, it’s the missionary experience.  True, it’s usually man vs. himself, but at least there’s conflict(ish) and somewhat of a struggle.  These movies say, “hey, remember when you went on a mission?  Remember all those crazy emotions?  Well, this movie is about missionaries.  Be prepared to feel those emotions again.  Not from the plot, of course, but simply the memories that they trigger.”

Offending Mormon movies: The Best Two Years (2003), God’s Army (2000), Money or Mission (2006)

Gay movies have a similar exploitable experience: the coming-out story.  “Hey, remember when it was really hard telling everyone you were gay and some people didn’t take it too well?  Remember how disappointing that was, but how it got better and in the end you felt much better for having come out?  Well, this movie has a kid coming out, so you’ll remember all that and it’ll trick you into thinking this was a good movie.”

Offending gay movies: Summer Storm (2004), Shelter (2007), Were the World Mine (2008) – To be fair, I only lasted 2 minutes in this last one; there was singing.

They Have an Unnatural Obsession With Vampires

(I’ll let you figure out which is Mormon and which is gay.)