No one's favorite movie

Flickchart is a very large place.

One of the things that always fascinates me about the movie dueling site is how many users it has, considering that I don't usually hear people talk about it outside of the actual Flickchart groups I participate in on Facebook. I assume a lot of people tried it once and maybe a sizeable percentage never went back, leaving the account created and contributing to the site's stats, but with no new activity in a dozen years. I also assume that the diehards like me, still ranking nearly 15 years after first discovering the site, are comparatively few.

But just how many actually tried it at one point is still pretty astonishing.

I don't have the actual numbers, but I can make general determinations of size through the circumstantial evidence of how many people have a particular movie as their #1.

On each Flickchart movie page, it shows how many users have this movie ranked #1. There are some really weird results. Recently I was adding 80 for Brady, and I noticed that one user had the movie as their #1 of all time. I later discovered that this person had only 20 movies, all 2023 releases, and 80 for Brady was actually their #5.

So there may be some glitching going on here. But for the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that most of the stats I'm about to give you are legit. 

On Friday I was really bored at work -- it was really slow -- and I decided to see how far I had to go on my own personal chart before I found a film that no other Flickcharters had ranked #1. It took me longer than I thought, all the way down at #51.

Here are my top 50, with the number of Flickchart users who have the movie as their #1 listed afterwards in parenthesis:

1. Raising Arizona (49)
2. Back to the Future (2140)
3. Pulp Fiction (3227)
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (2121)
5. Citizen Kane (521)
6. Star Wars (3478)
7. Toy Story (1328)
8. Fargo (900)
9. This is Spinal Tap (55)
10. The Iron Giant (66)
11. The Princess Bride (1372)
12. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1357)
13. Goodfellas (1612)
14. Tangled (62)
15. Jesus Christ Superstar (1)
16. The Cable Guy (14)
17. Children of Men (203)
18. Say Anything ... (20)
19. Bound (5)
20. Do the Right Thing (32)
21. Run Lola Run (108)
22. WarGames (11)
23. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (50)
24. Donnie Darko (885)
25. Unforgiven (205)
26. When Harry Met Sally (73)
27. The Shawshank Redemption (3382)
28. Defending Your Life (3)
29. Time Bandits (5)
30. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1023)
31. A Fish Called Wanda (26)
32. Ghost (24)
33. Big (190)
34. Vanilla Sky (111)
35. Four Weddings and a Funeral (13)
36. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (10)
37. Die Hard (1038)
38. Lost in Translation (691)
39. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (1647)
40. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1025)
41. The Empire Strikes Back (3748)
42. Adaptation (108)
43. Galaxy Quest (47)
44. The Exorcist (511)
45. Elf (244)
46. Dumb and Dumber (583)
47. Election (16)
48. Starship Troopers (321)
49. Schindler's List (959)
50. Rabbit Hole (2)

And finally ...

51. Flirting With Disaster (0)

I did not continue to see when I'd get the next zero.

In case you weren't doing the math, that's the #1s of 35,622 Flickchart users crammed just into my personal top 50.

And this isn't even considering all the Flickcharters who have beloved films like Casablanca, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Wizard of Oz, Sunset Boulevard, Gone With the Wind and countless others as their #1. (Two of these come shortly after the top 50 on my chart. The rest are farther down.)

Simply put, there are a lot of Flickchart users out there. 

Now I know I have some popular choices in my top 50. Thirteen of these movies appear as the #1 movie for more than one thousand Flickcharters. But this top 50 is not just chalk. Bound, for example, is nothing like a household name, yet a full five Flickcharters consider it their favorite movie of all time.

Why no love for Flirting With Disaster, when so much other love is being spread around?

Helpfully, the page for each movie shows how many users have it in their top 20, and there are 18 of those for David O. Russell's 1996 film. (I mean, who am I to complain -- they have it higher than I do.)

But it's just interesting that when so many different movies are someone's favorite -- even 80 for Brady, or so it would appear to someone who wasn't investigating too closely -- that any movie as good as Flirting With Disaster would have no ultimate champion out there in the Flickchart community.

I don't know what point I really have with this post or the observations within. I think I was just bored on a slow Friday. 

R.I.P. to the comedy MVP of 1996

I've missed memorializing some great film stars recently -- not a word on here about either Christopher Plummer or Yaphet Kotto, unfortunately -- but I've awakened from my slumber to honor a man most would only consider a minor film star.

George Segal had a special place in my heart, though, as a result of his two great supporting roles in comedies I cherish from exactly 25 years ago.

Segal was better known for other things, to be sure. He was nominated for an Oscar in Who's Afraid of Virigina Woolf? He was a regular in the sitcom Just Shoot Me. A show called The Goldbergs, which I am somehow not familiar with, was name-checked in the headline of the story that alerted me to his passing in Variety.

For me, though, George Segal was never better than in Flirting With Disaster and The Cable Guy, my #2 and #4 movies of 1996, the very first year I kept a ranked list of my favorite films of the year. 

His was a significant supporting role in the David O. Russell film, as he played Ed Coplin, the neurotic adopted father of Ben Stiller's Mel, who spent the entire movie searching for his birth parents. His comic rapport with his wife, played by Mary Tyler Moore, is one of Flirting With Disaster's true highlights.

His character didn't actually get a name in The Cable Guy. On IMDB he is credited only as "Steven's father." But indeed, his appearance midway through as the father of that film's main character, played by Matthew Broderick, kicks the comedy memorably if briefly into a new gear.

Both films showcased what Segal did best, which was to play an affable but flustered everyman. And both films have a line or dialogue sequence that I love quoting, even to this day, which perfectly illustrates his ability to play clueless and confused with an abundance of charm.

There are actually two lines in The Cable Guy, which is impressive considering that he has maybe seven minutes of screen time in the movie. The first is when Steven gets arrested, and his father comes to bail him out. Concerned over an arrest he can't comprehend, his father asks Steven "Are you taking the pot?" It's an adorable moment, as it demonstrates both that he's too square to understand how to talk about drugs using the correct terminology, and also that he believes marijuana makes people do things that lead directly to their arrest.

Later, in a game of Porno Password instigated by the thorn in Steven's side (Jim Carrey's Chip Douglas), this uptight man and the rest of his family get unexpectedly caught up in the ribald moment, contrary to their apparent squareness. When Steven, seemingly playing the game at gunpoint, gives a winning clue that makes the whole room (except Steven) crack up in hysterics, his dad shouts out "I would have said schlong!" 

Maybe you had to be there. Fortunately, I was.

He's got much more to do in Flirting With Disaster, where he appears in about three different parts of the movie and is knee deep in guilt-tripping his son over Mel's quest for his birth parents. These lead to a lot of little funny moments by Segal, but none funnier than this. 

When he hears Mel is going to San Diego to find his parents, he tries to instill fear in Mel about the "dangers" of that comically sunny and safe city. His story concludes with "They have a big car-jacking problem in San Diego. They bump you, and when you pull over, they mutilate you and take your car. It's how they got Art Sackheim."

Patricia Arquette rejoins "Art Sackheim is dead?"

Segal: "Who said anything about dead? They stole his car."

Arquette: "You said 'mutilate.'"

Segal: "Please."

There's something great about that "please," in part as it is almost lost when his wife immediately tramples over it with another flow of insecure objections. I just love how well he sells this moment, as if he's already forgotten what word he just used 30 seconds earlier, and his daughter-in-law is absurd for suggesting such a thing.

These moments probably don't seem like an excuse to elevate Segal over other recent luminaries we have lost, at least in terms of this blog's "in memoriam" priorities. But the thing is, they were my moments. They are some of my favorite moments from two seminal comedies, each of which I have watched more than a half-dozen times. And these are the types of moments I will still remember when I'm an old man on my own death bed, lucky if I get as many as the 87 years Segal got.

Rest in peace, you loveable neurotic. 

Ben Stiller's unlikely coterie of 1996 collaborators

It seems impossible to believe that I have only tagged The Cable Guy once on this blog. It has to have come up more than once, but only once did I consider that the discussion merited giving it a "label" (the tags appearing at the bottom of the post), which enables you to search the blog by subject matter. And in that post, I didn't even use its poster, so according to my own rules for never using the same poster art twice on the blog, its poster still remains available for use in this here post today.

This lack of Cable Guy love on my blog surprises me because the movie is in my top 20 all time on Flickchart. It doesn't just barely eke into the top 20, either. It is my full-on #12 movie of all time, so it's closer to my top 10 than my 20-30.

It is by far the most surprising choice in my top 20. I won't go on at length about how it scaled these heights in my personal film rankings, nor will I apologize for it or feel guilty about it. On what was probably my tenth viewing of it on Thursday night -- I only have the last three recorded, so that's just an estimate -- I still loved it. Just to give you some explanation, I first saw it under the absolute perfect circumstances to appreciate it, and it became a minor religion for a couple friends and me for years afterward, as we would quote it incessantly. In fact, the reason for my viewing on Thursday, my first in six years, was having a phone call with one of those friends, and still being able to quote lines to each other like we'd just seen it last week rather than 24 years ago.

So while The Cable Guy undoubtedly deserves some post where I plumb the controversial depths of its brilliance -- I'm reminded, from recently exposing it to other film fans in a monthly project to watch each others' highest ranked films, that few people like it as much as I do -- today I am instead going to focus on something I gleaned from the movie for the first time on my tenth viewing.

The Cable Guy and Flirting With Disaster were in close proximity on my 1996 year-end rankings, the first such one I ever did, coming in at #4 and #2, respectively. (For the record, Fargo, which is now ahead of them both, was my #3, and Looking for Richard, which I have only seen once, was my #1.) But I have never actually watched them in close proximity until now, as my most recent Flirting viewing was just at the end of May.

The thing these two films have in common, other than their release year and being squirm-inducing comedies that focus on socially awkward scenarios, is Ben Stiller. So, pretty great year for Ben Stiller, at least in my corner of the world. He's the star of Flirting With Disaster and the director of The Cable Guy. (Didn't know that, did you?) He also appears in a small role, or actually a small dual role, in The Cable Guy, as twin child actors Sam and Stan Sweet, the one of whom grew up to murder the other, whose trial is a running bit throughout the movie. One of the movie's many sharp satires of the tabloid entertainment machine of the mid-1990s.

But Stiller is not the only thing the movies have in common, and as I was watching on Thursday night, I kept noticing them.

The first one I have always known, which is that comic actor George Segal appears in both. In both films he plays the father, Stiller's adopted father in Flirting, and the biological father of the character Stiller would have played had he starred in The Cable Guy rather than directing it, which is instead played by Matthew Broderick. (I would never switch out Broderick for Stiller, since Broderick's performance is one of the reasons this movie is so good.) Checking on Wikipedia just now, I am pleased to see that Segal is still alive. For some reason I thought he had died.

Here's George from The Cable Guy. You know him:

But you may not know Shawn Michael Howard, who has not had quite the career Segal's had, though he's been busy enough over the years. Here's Shawn from around that same time, though I can't find any pictures of him from either movie, since his role is so small:

Only on this viewing did I realize that the guy who attempts to "car-jack" Stiller and company in Fliriting -- who is actually a member of a church group trying to return Stiller's lost jacket -- is the same guy who appears in the basketball scene in The Cable Guy, where Jim Carrey shatters the backboard after a monstrous dunk.

Neither film's Wikipedia page reveals when the movies were shot, and I can't be bothered to dig deeper on the internet to find out. But if we are to assume that they had the same delays between shooting and release as each other, and Flirting was released three months before The Cable Guy, I can see Stiller working with Howard on Flirting and then offering him a role in The Cable Guy.

The same basic timeframe and sequence of events could apply to Cynthia LaMontagne, whom you also probably don't know, but whose picture I could find in one of the films, in this case, Fliriting. Here is Cynthia:

She's the one on the left.

Her role in Flirting is memorable enough, as she has maybe five to ten lines of dialogue in a five-minute scene, where she's one of the potential biological sisters of Stiller's Mel Copeland, though of course the adoption agency made an error. Her presence in The Cable Guy may have been the real forehead-smacking find on this viewing, as it's really of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it variety. She plays the restaurant hostess seen for just a couple seconds when Leslie Mann goes on her date with Owen Wilson.

Alas, as women are never allowed to stick around Hollywood as long as men, she hasn't had a role in anything in 12 years.

The interesting thing is that their collaborations with Stiller were indeed limited to that year. LaMontagne didn't appear in another Stiller film, though she did work with Judd Apatow, the Cable Guy producer, again in her final role, as a bartender in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (I noticed that IMDB lists her as "Female Bartender," which should go without saying -- why do you need to clarify the gender?) And though Howard is still working, I don't see any other credit in his IMDB that relates to Stiller, though he did appear on an episode of Mr. Show, which features Cable Guy cameos David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, before they were famous enough to be considered cameos. (Interesting to note that when you search Howard on IMDB, the brief description that clarifies who he is says "Actor, The Cable Guy (1996)." I'm not even sure he has a line of dialogue.)

With Segal, the one most likely to have worked with Stiller again, I could not find anything that had even a couple degrees of Kevin Bacon separation from Stiller.

I'm wondering whether Stiller would have worked with these three again if The Cable Guy had not been such a massive flop, and if he were not so eager to purge anything and everything about it from his memory. Too bad. I always planned to tell Stiller, if I met him, how much I loved The Cable Guy, but I chickened out on my lone opportunity, when he and I were both in the same bathroom during intermission for a play.

I'm sure these sightings are not nearly as interesting to you as they are to me, but I think I also might be one of the only people who could even make them in the first place. Who else out there happens not only to love these movies enough, but watch them enough, to make the connection?

Ben Stiller's parents, maybe. (Rest in peace, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.)

A portrait of my mother in five actresses

I think three is the right amount of anything before it starts to become tedious and people start to become sick of reading it. I don't mean to suggest that you are callous and would not read more than three tributes to my mom. But I posted thrice about my mom on Facebook, and that felt right, and now this will be my third and final post on The Audient as I reflect on her in the days since her passing.

Today I'm reflecting on the fact that I regularly saw my mom in famous actresses on screen.

It's sort of unique to my mom, at least among my parents. I don't regularly see my dad on screen, which I suppose could have something to do with his bushy moustache, which is an increasingly irregular look for any actor to wear. He reminds me a little bit of Wilford Brimley, if you want to know, though I would probably hesitate to tell him that as most people would probably not construe that as a compliment.

But my mom was different. Maybe she had more classic movie star looks, but I felt like there were always actresses in whom I saw her.

You'll be glad to know that none of these actresses were actresses I had a crush on. Although it's icky to even bring that up, I did want to clarify just to ward your mind off going to those places.

In each case there is a physical similarity with my mom, and in some cases a personality similarity. But each time one of these actresses comes on screen, I see her. And now, those experiences will make me smile just a bit more.

The picture I've chosen above is the one we selected for her obituary, and it's obviously closer to her age at the time of her death than the one I included in Saturday's post. I didn't choose it for how much it makes her a doppelganger to any of the actresses below, because she wasn't. But each of them suggests something about her to me.

Forthwith:

1. Mary Tyler Moore

I'll start with Moore because she gives the single on-screen performance, in Flirting With Disaster, that reminds me most of my mother. That would probably not be construed as a compliment either. But when she was in her younger years, before she became such a mellow elder, my mom carried a fair bit of anxiety and neuroses around with her, just as Moore's Pearl Copeland does. Moore performs this personality type with such precision that I can't help see my mom every time I see this movie (most recently two weekends ago), even though it is certainly an exaggerated version of those traits I saw in my mom. There's this one particular moment that is my favorite. In a hurt rant to her adopted son (Ben Stiller) about why he's seeking out his biological parents, she says "Why are you doing this?" -- and in the same breath applies lip balm to her suddenly chapped lips, expanded them in that way that allows you better access to their entire surface area. It's the combination of a highly emotional moment with a mundane act of personal maintenance that makes me laugh, and reminds me of something my mom would have done. I note this one with a special sense of wistfulness, as Moore is the only one on this list who is no longer with us.

2. Mary McDonnell

I swear it's just a coincidence that the first two actresses on this list are named Mary and so was my mother -- Mary Ann, actually, but close enough. I don't have a signature role for Mary McDonnell that reminds me of my mother, like I did for Mary Tyler Moore, and that is sort of how the rest of my choices will go. But I've chosen a picture from one of my favorite McDonnell films, Grand Canyon, as it may have been the first time I met McDonnell where she was a modern-day character, rather than, say, a woman raised among the Lakota in the 19th century (Dances With Wolves). (She's of course also wonderful in a film that's in my top 20 of all time, Donnie Darko.) I think of this one particular scene -- it may actually be the one from this photo -- where her world is spiraling into chaos, and if I remember correctly, Los Angeles is shaken by an earthquake. (It's been at least two decades since I saw this, so forgive the gaps in my memory.) She's just busy checking to see if everyone is okay, and then, in an unrelated event, her neighbor collapses. She picks up the phone to call 9-1-1, and I remember the way she tries to convey what's happening with this sort of thousand-yard stare on her face. "Heart attack?" she offers. Life comes at us all at once sometimes. The scene doesn't specifically remind me of my mom, but it's a moment that always sticks with me from that movie.

3. Jane Fonda 

Although Fonda began her movie career before anyone else on this list (a year before Moore), I've only seen nine of her films, and no character she played reminded me of my mom in particular. So I'm going to include a picture from one film and discuss another. The picture is from Klute, which I don't really remember, because the young Jane Fonda reminds me a bit more of the pictures of my mother as a young woman than the current version of Fonda (going very strong at 82) reminds me of the version of my mother in the last years of her life. But the film I'll actually talk about is one of Fonda's most recent roles, This is Where I Leave You. There's a bit of Moore from Flirting With Disaster in this role, though I hesitate to say that as I don't want to create this impression of my mother as a neurotic, emotional woman. The movie is actually about sitting shiva for her husband, who has just died -- an occasion which collects her three children in one place, leading to drama related to their collective unresolved issues. There's a commitment to doing things properly that my mother would have supported in her younger years, before she relaxed into a contented retirement. But I think the reason this role reminds me of my mother is that Fonda's character announces to her children during this shiva that she's in love with a woman and that her husband supported it before he died. That doesn't describe my mother either, but a readiness to accept others -- regardless of their skin color or background or sexual preference -- does.

4. Sigourney Weaver

I first determined a physical similarity between my mom and Sigourney Weaver before I saw any of the Alien movies -- Ghostbusters, maybe. But this still from Aliens is undoubtedly the right one to include in this portrait, not only for the physical similarity (my mom actually had her hair cut pretty much like this at one point) but for the symbolic value of it. There may be no better cinematic embodiment of motherhood than Ellen Ripley, even as she fights another mother (in a badass mech suit). Ripley would have done anything and everything to keep her charge safe, just as my mother would have -- she fought for my sister and me countless times, though of course, rarely in the life-or-death scenarios you see depicted on your typical movie screen. The similarity between my mother's mothering and Ripley's goes one further, though. As you know, Newt was not Ripley's biological daughter, which just makes the mothering instinct all the more pure as it is not informed by self-interest. After my sister and I graduated high school, my mother started a job as a regional coordinator for young Europeans and South Americans coming to work as au pairs in the Boston area. I know she was a mother to them when their own mothers were far away. In a very real way, she kept them safe. (As a side note, I got to see Weaver on screen just two nights before I learned of my mother's passing, in Galaxy Quest, when I already knew the end was probably a matter of days rather than weeks or months.)

5. Susan Sarandon

The four others came quickly to mind, but I had to stretch a bit to round out this list to an even five. And I don't love the fact that Susan Sarandon has lately gone off her rocker, politically. But when I googled "actresses who look like Sigourney Weaver" just to help me out a bit, I found that the internet thinks Sarandon looks like Weaver -- a thought I had honestly never had. I had, however, noted the similarity previously between my mom and Sarandon, lesser than these others though it may be, so I've included her here at #5. Again, I don't have a signature Sarandon role that reminds me of my mom -- the photo I've chosen is from Elizabethtown, even though I don't like that movie, just because I thought the physical similarity to be better than some of the others I've considered. But something Sarandon has done in almost all of her roles -- saving, maybe, The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- is to project a sense of strength, of composure, of confidence that I feel is a good fit for my mother. Oh sure, she had the neuroses I've alluded to a couple times in this post. But when it counted, my mom was strong. She could have the seriousness of purpose embedded into that look we all know when Sarandon looks you straight in the eyes to tell you something. On the flip side of things, Sarandon could also have a playfulness that was my mom's bread and butter. Current politics aside, Sarandon does both sides of the coin the way my mom could.

This is my last tribute to you on my blog, Mom, but it is not goodbye. You will be with me always, on screen and in my heart.

Richard Jenkins double feature

We made it an evening of favorite comedies on Saturday night. We'd already queued up Step Brothers, noting it had been a while since we'd last seen it (2015), and then had time for another short one afterwards. Turns out, it had been a lot longer since we'd last seen Flirting With Disaster: 2009.

The choice of the second movie was certainly influenced by the first. As I was going through the folder of DVDs I brought with me from America, I landed on Flirting because a) we wanted to keep the comedy vibe going, and b) it would allow for a double feature of movies featuring the great comedic actor Richard Jenkins. Or, Richard E. Jenkins, as he was once credited.

Not only did this make a great 1-2 punch of exasperation and perfect line deliveries, it also made an unexpected two-movie exploration of families constructed, reconstructed and deconstructed in unusual ways.

In Step Brothers, of course, you've got a new family unit that is composed of two sixtysomething adults (Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen) and their two adult children who still live with them (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly). The parents are both successes in their respective fields and the kids have no fields at all, yet we are invited to try to see the similarities between them that would make them legitimately related. Ferrell's gentler nature mirrors that of his mother, whom he describes as a saint, though not his asshole brother (Adam Scott), who must have taken more after their dad. Meanwhile, we finally see the relationship between Reilly and Jenkins bear fruit at the end, when Jenkins explains that he always wanted to be a dinosaur, even in his late teenage years. It explains some of the fantasy focus of the adult Reilly.

In Flirting With Disaster, we've got Ben Stiller's character desperately seeking to belong to biological parents, to see in them traits that he has. With each misstep they make on their journey, it takes usually less than an hour to determine the person he's meeting is not actually related to him, but by that point he has already identified apparent physical and behavioral similarities to the people he's meeting -- kind of like how you can read yourself into any horoscope if you squint hard enough. His potentially rivalrous relationship with his own previously unknown brother (Glenn Fitzgerald) is explored, and we see Stiller in all manner of possible family dynamics. Then of course there is also the unconventional family of Jenkins' character with his husband, played by Josh Brolin.

The common factor is Jenkins, but I'm not going to posit any kind of match between actor and subject matter. It's surely just a coincidence.

What isn't a coincidence is how great Jenkins is in both films. Neither part is a lead role, though he does have plenty of screen time. But he's got the presence and the comic instincts to steal scenes from those he does appear alongside. His apoplectic rage at the step brothers is comic gold, and his reaction to getting dosed with acid after eating the wrong quail in Flirting With Disaster is legendary. "Is this a musical table?" "Good night Tina!"

His delivery is, of course, first rate, as he can put a cynical spin on a line of dialogue with the best of them. But this time around I took particular note of the work he does with his face. His look of absolute adoration as he takes in the bullshit slung by his new stepson, the asshole brother Derek, is just hilarious. He's a sixtysomething man glowing with a school girl crush. It's a variation on that same look that is so great when he wishes Tina good night in the middle of his acid trip. This is a first-time experience as well, and for this moment at least, it's a good one.

As Jenkins is now 73 and hasn't appeared in a film since The Shape of Water, I worry that there will be a paucity of future Jenkins roles for me to appreciate the way I appreciate these two. Then again, he's in two 2020 movies that have yet to release. Miranda July's Kajillionaire, at least, seems like it has the potential for Jenkins to again wrestle with the absurdities of life the way only he can.

My top five gay romances in film

It was a good day in Australia yesterday.

Although marriage equality was not passed, the results of a non-binding postal vote were indeed read. And that vote told the politicians, who would actually have the power to legalize gay marriage in Australia, that the citizens themselves are not opposed to the idea.

Sixty-one percent of those who responded to the vote, in fact, felt this way. After Brexit and Trump, someone finally stuck it to the right wing.

Having missed various landmark moments in the U.S. fight to legalize gay marriage, I've decided to use this symbolic moment instead to post my top five gay romances in film.

Unfortunately, given the traditionally straight-leaning tendencies of cinematic history and my own viewing patterns -- there's plenty of queer cinema out there, but I only actively seek out the most prominent examples -- some of my choices may seem like fairly flimsy examples of compelling gay relationships. Either they are not central to the movie, or they are not the first thing you notice about that particular movie. And there may be some obvious examples I am excluding, either because I thought they were too obvious or because they just don't happen to hit my personal sweet spot. (Much as I like it, Brokeback Mountain is kind of an example of both.)

But this is what I've chosen, and I hope some of these qualify as personal sweet spots for you as well.

Listed alphabetically by title of the movie:

1) But I'm a Cheerleader (2000, Jamie Babbitt) - Megan & Graham

I had occasion to praise this film only a few weeks back on this blog when I revisited it for the first time in a decade. It was my most obvious candidate for this list, as it tells the story of lesbian-in-denial Megan (Natasha Lyonne) and lesbian-in-full-flower Graham (Clea Duvall), who discover their love for each other at a camp intended to cure them of their homosexuality. Not only is the development of their relationships sweet and disarmingly free from cynicism, but it culminates (spoiler alert!) in my favorite homosexual variation on that scene at the end of most romances where the guy completes a grand gesture in order to win the girl back. As it turns out, a girl and a girl can do this too.

2) Confetti (2006, Debbie Isitt) - Archie & Gregory

This mockumentary about a reality show in which people compete to stage the most original themed wedding would seem to focus on the three heterosexual couples competing on the show. But at the true center of the film is the two men helping plan all three weddings, who are also romantic partners. Vincent Franklin and Jason Watkins each play the character Christopher Guest would have played if he'd made this movie, but roles that seem to have been written as comic relief take on real heft as the film becomes sneakily emotional. As the two wedding planners succumb to stress and the emotional toll of the task they're involved in, the strength of their own relationship is emphasized amid the revelation that the others in question don't have nearly their solid foundation.

3) Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, Mike Newell) - Gareth & Matthew

My second straight choice in which the gay couple is tellingly looking in from the outside on multiple weddings. Only after Gareth (Simon Callow) has died at one of these weddings do the characters in his social group, who had previously thought themselves all hopelessly single, acknowledge that Gareth and Matthew (John Hannah) were for all intents and purposes married. They modestly yield the spotlight to others, but when it's time to honor his passed partner, Matthew takes the moment and delivers one of the most heartfelt and memorable poetic eulogies in film. It's because I love this movie so much that I can nearly recite W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues."

4) Love is Strange (2014, Ira Sachs) - Ben & George

Ben (Alfred Molina) and George (John Lithgow) are the one couple on my list who do get to marry -- and it ruins them. The pictures of his wedding on social media cause Ben to lose his teaching job at an uptight private school, which had been keeping the couple afloat in their expensive New York apartment. Once they must sell and look for other arrangements, they are forced apart by the prejudices of society and the realities of finance, though their love and affection for one another never wavers. Theirs is a mature love that insists on focusing on the positive and proceeding forward without regret, as these two old souls seem to exchange glances that say, unmistakably, "This is the way the world goes."

5) Philadelphia (1993, Jonathan Demme) - Andy & Miguel

We don't get to see Andy Beckett (Tom Hanks) and his lover Miguel (Antonio Banderas) together all that often in this movie, as the focus of the movie is (rightly) Andy's legal battle to retain his job and his relationship with the lawyer (Denzel Washington) he hires to represent him. But their few scenes together are powerhouses, demonstrating the type of unconditional love of which most straight couples could only dream. Even though it was Andy cheating on Miguel that infected him with AIDS, and that that infidelity could have even infected Miguel with the virus, Miguel is fiercely loyal toward his lover and at his bedside, literally and figuratively, during every stage of his decline. If they don't have the "in sickness and in health" part of marriage down, I don't know who does.

Honorable mentions:

1) Kissing Jessica Stein (2002, Charles Herman-Wurmfeld) - Jessica & Helen

I felt bad having only one female couple on here, but Jessica couldn't quite crack my top five for the slight problem that its title character is really a heterosexual experimenting with homosexuality. But I love this movie and the relationship between these characters is sweet and honest.

2) Flirting With Disaster (1996, David O. Russell) - Paul & Tony

Got to get a straight (to use the word loosely) comedy on here. You wouldn't at first think this movie contains the most forward portrayal of a gay relationship, but there's something so easy and comfortable about the relationship of the two buttoned-up ATF agents who join the wacky road trip at the center of this movie.

As gay marriage moves closer to being the law of the land everywhere in the world -- though it may take some countries another century to get there -- I hope that searching my list of favorite films won't produce so relatively few contenders for a list like this. But it stands to reason that the more it's accepted, the more we'll see more movies featuring both central and side gay relationships ... as many as possible of which will end in marriage.

A silver lining

The surest way to jinx your plans? Give voice to them.

In Wednesday's post, I announced my likelihood of being able to attend a 1:50 3D showing of Life of Pi. Then I didn't make it in time.

But really, is it a jinx if something was simply never realistic in the first place? First off, I was getting off work at 1:30, and you never leave at the exact minute you're supposed to clock out. Secondly, the drive to the theater would have taken the better part of 15 minutes even in normal traffic. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is most decidedly not normal traffic, and you should probably at least double your expected travel times. But even if it had taken only slightly longer than normal to drive there, there's still a parking garage you have to navigate, and a walk of three minutes or so to the theater, even if you are moving quickly. Never mind the fact that a large popcorn was going to be my lunch, and there's always at least one person ahead of you in the snack bar line.

Fortunately, it wasn't one of those situations where I was close enough to even chance it, making me commit a lot of time and energy to a fool's errand. At 1:48, when I was still more than a mile from the theater, I pulled over and jumped on my phone's web browser to figure out other options. I knew there were no more Pi showings that were at a convenient time, so now I was looking for something else.

And so, the silver lining to missing Life of Pi? Silver Linings Playbook.

Which was playing at 2:35 in downtown Culver City, about three miles from the theater where I meant to see Pi. 

I love the work of director David O. Russell, but until now, that had been based primarily on the strength of three movies that were all released in the 1990s: Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings. I hated I Heart Huckabees and ended up thinking The Fighter was good but not great.

Suffice it to say that Silver Linings Playbook had me wondering if it might rank up there with his two masterpieces, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings.

The interesting thing about Russell as a filmmaker isn't that he consistently breaks new ground or blows your mind with some kind of unique technique. After his debut, which you could say was pretty unusual as it dealt with mother-son incest and featured a euphemism for masturbation as its title, I'd argue that Russell has mostly just been giving us really fresh takes on genres we're familiar with. Flirting with Disaster was a fresh take on a screwball comedy, while Three Kings was a fresh take on the war movie (albeit with some genuinely innovative camera and narrative techniques). Has there been a genre that's been more worked over throughout the history of cinema than the boxing movie? Yet most people felt that The Fighter was a really fresh take on that genre.

You could say that the only time Russell really gets himself into trouble is when he tries to indulge his more off-the-wall impulses. Enter I Heart Huckabees, a disaster that was much more than flirted with. A satire about commercialism featuring a pair of existential detectives, Huckabees was a misstep from minute one. It may be no coincidence that this shoot featured the short-fused director's most famous blow-up, a verbal scrum with Lily Tomlin that developed a life of its own on the internet. (He also reportedly nearly or actually came to blows with George Clooney on Three Kings, though that didn't hamper the brilliance of that film one bit.)

In fact, I considered calling this post (and wouldn't it have been clever) "Burning Bridges Playbook," because I realized that the director rarely works with the same actor twice. But then I recalled that not only was Huckabees his second (and obviously last) collaboration with Tomlin, after Flirting with Disaster, but Mark Wahlberg has worked with him three times: Three Kings, Huckabees and The Fighter. The last two were the important ones for this discussion, because Wahlberg continued on with him even after the famous Tomlin incident and his weakest film on a relatively short resume.

Besides, I didn't want to concentrate on the negative in a post about a film I liked as much as I liked this one.

Silver Linings Playbook finds Russell returning again to his success with reinvigorated genre films. In fact, as I was watching this movie, I was reminded most of last year's Crazy, Stupid, Love. Like that film, Playbook reminds us that a romantic comedy can really stick with you just by being cast and written well. And it doesn't even need to do anything particularly unconventional.

The difference is that Russell is a much better (or at least more established) filmmaker than Crazy's Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, and he brings elements of his best work into elevating his own script for Playbook. Watching the film, I was also reminded how well the director does chaotic scenes with multiple people arguing, which have been prominent components of especially Disaster and The Fighter. And the arguers have been cast perfectly here. Bradley Cooper won't get an Oscar nomination, but should -- Robert DeNiro and Jennifer Lawrence probably will, and Lawrence might even win. They're all that good. Heck, even Chris Tucker is really good in a small part. Cooper and Lawrence also succeed at something you rarely see these days -- a smoldering, undeniable chemistry.

But I have to wonder if part of what makes Silver Linings Playbook so satisfying is that it may be Russell's most personal film. At least in terms of what we've already discussed about him. A guy with bipolar disorder given to fits of rage and occasional violence? That could probably describe Russell himself just as well as it could describe Cooper's Pat Solitano. Which means Russell is uniquely qualified to dramatize that fugue that takes over during a panic attack, where sounds fade to the background and a ringing of the ears surfaces to the front.

What's amazing is that Russell tackles such serious issues and gives us several scenes that are intense to the point of disturbing, while still keeping the movie essentially light and "feel good" (in the best sense of that phrase).

Only the guy who brought us Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings, right?

Here's hoping that the director has found his own silver lining in a sometimes troubled career, and the plays he draws up in the future will be more masterpieces like this one.

Don't judge the book

Now that 13 years have passed since David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster was released, I think it's safe to say -- without hyperbole -- that it is one of the funniest comedies of the 1990s.

It may not have the household name recognition of some of the decade's other hits, but most of those who've seen it tend to break out in a grin upon hearing the title. And, frequently, quote some of the great lines from it. "You said mutilated!" "Please."

If you haven't seen this screwball comedy/road trip in which a neurotic adopted New Yorker (Ben Stiller) is driven to find his birth parents before he can name the baby his wife (Patricia Arquette) has just delivered, which turns into an epic multi-city journey involving an ever-growing party of fellow travelers (Tea Leoni, Josh Brolin, Richard Jenkins), then you need to go do that as soon as possible.

But please don't judge the video by its cover.

As we were watching my copy of Flirting With Disaster this past weekend while out of town with friends, I couldn't help but notice how ridiculously cheesy the DVD cover is -- and how poorly it advertises the product you're truly getting here. (See Exhibit A above).

Seeming more like a video cover from the late 1980s than the late 1990s, the Flirting With Disaster DVD cover seems fixated on making this movie primarily about extramarital temptation, when that's only one of the myriad funny things going on here. Other ways this cover is hilariously simplistic: 1) The characters are literally cut out from the space in which they were photographed, then pasted on a white background, while none of the poses they strike here are actually in the movie; 2) Tea Leoni's character is made to appear like some vampish femme fatale, when she's really just a flustered divorcee in over her head, trying to document the reunion between a grown adopted child and his birth parents as part of a study she's conducting. Another thing: I don't have any idea when that picture of Ben Stiller was taken, but it seems at least five years younger than how Stiller actually looks in the movie.

You flip over the DVD and it doesn't get much better. The pictures are better -- they're at least actual scenes from the movie. Stiller tries to get a video camera unhooked from Leoni's dress, revealing stockings and some thigh; Stiller is attacked by one mistaken birth father (David Patrick Kelly); Mary Tyler Moore lifts her shirt to reveal the perkiness of her sixtysomething breasts (concealed by a bra, naturally). But the two pictures featuring female undergarments seem designed primarily to support this ridiculous "critigasm" in the upper quadrant: "A sexy, laugh riot!" - PBS Flicks. Not only do I not think that's a particularly apt way to summarize the movie -- while it's very funny, its sexiness quotient is not as high as advertised -- but I also quibble with the grammar. If you are going to call something a "laugh riot" -- a dubious phrase if there ever was one -- the least you can do is treat it as a compound noun. Therefore, it would be "a sexy laugh riot" rather than "a sexy, laugh riot." You see, "sexy" tells us what kind of laugh riot it is, not what kind of riot it is.

Anyway.

I suppose Flirting With Disaster is not materially different from any number of movies that use advertising to trick you into expecting a different movie than you actually get. I discussed one of the most criminal cases of that here. And I suppose getting a product that's better than advertised is a lot better than getting a product that's worse than advertised.

But there was just something about that cheesy cover that made me have to write about it ...