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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 17, 2006)
46 lUStjOUt FEBRUARY 17. 2006 Come see us at the YARD, GARDEN & PATIO SHOW February 24th, 25th & 26th 1'ri and Sat 10am - 9pm and Sun 10am - 6pm Oregon Convention Center WINERY AND TASTING ROOM OPEN DAILY 11AM-6PM www.hipchicksdowine.com (see our website for directions & events) 4510 SE 23rd Ave. Portland • 503-234-3790 World Beat Rock Soul Women’s Oldies Jazz Folk Gospel Cajun Country New Age Bluegrass Soundtracks Musicals Lounge Big Band Comedy Reggae Spoken Word and more... I- EAST PORTLAND • 32nd & E Burnside St. • 231-8926 NW PORTLAND • 23rd & NW Johnson • 248-0163 Turning up the heat in 2006 Starting in March: Monthly Black’jfiHit’s (3rd Saturday of every month) ■V . J/O Night (Hosted group J/O every Sunday night) A v The Pink Carpet In anticipation of the queerest Oscars ever, Just Out bestows some awards you won't be seeing March 5 ’d like to thank the academy. No, I’m not preparing for the Oscar speech I’ll deliver someday. (That’s been written already, honey.) I’m just expressing gratitude to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for making this year’s Oscars the queerest awards show since, well, the Tonys. It already seems a foregone conclusion that Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain will walk away March 5 with statues for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. That alone is cause for giddy queers to run out in the streets and tip over a few Vespas. (This is our Super Bowl, after all.) Here is a gay love story, messing with America’s precious cowhoy iconography, directed hy a Taiwanese heterosexual, that has become the front runner for the top Oscars. Pinch me. On top of that, we could be looking at a queer clean sweep among the thespians: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) for Best Actor, Felicity Huffman (Transamerica) for Best Ad tress and Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) in rhe supporting categories. But enough about them. Here’s my annual list of 2OO5’s less flashy, and more dubious, achievements in queer cinema. playing an HIV-positive drifter estranged from his preacher papa. Peter Sarsgaard, fresh off his pivotal supporting role in Kinsey, did it again with The Dying Gaul, a Hollywood melodrama about a strug gling screenwriter who screws around with a married producer while engaging in cyberchats with a per son claiming to be the spirit of his deceased partner. When he snaps upon learning the user’s true identi ty, it’s one of the juiciest meltdowns since the Wicked Witch of the West. THE MIDAS TOUCH 2005 was a great year for Portland gay filmmaker Gus Van Sant—or rather any one who worked with him in the past. Matt Dillon LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (Drugstore Cowboy) earned The late John Ritter the first Oscar nod of his 25- was rhe butt of countless year film career with a brave politically incorrect jokes turn as a racist cop in Crash. on Three’s Company. Keanu Reeves (My Own Following in his father’s Private Idaho) returned from fairy footsteps, Jason Neo-land as a goofy New- Ritter starred in Happy Age orthodontist in the Endings as a homo Locally filmed Thumbsucker. seduced by a gold-digging Joaquin Phoenix (To Die woman who’s dating his For) transformed himself dad. physically and vocally into Johnny Cash for the biopic James Marsden (top) and Jesse Bradford THE TWO JAKES Walk the Line. Even Vince kept their affair secret in Heights. Jake Gyllenhaal dis Vaughn (Psycho) was on played hjs range of talent by portraying the extremes top, scoring the year’s biggest comedy, Wedding of masculinity in 2005. In Jarhead, he was a tight- Crashers— not to mention scoring with freshly lipped Marine who made homophobic jokes while divorced Jennifer Aniston. enduring the long wait for rhe first Gulf War to begin. LAST PLACE In Brokeback Mountain, he was an open-hearted cowboy who made homoerotic love while enduring Too bad Van Sant’s luck didn’t rub off on him the long wait for his boyfriend to leave his wife. self. The tedious Last Days offered little insight into Kurt Cobain’s suicide—although I did leave the PIN-UP THUMBS-UP theater feeling very, very depressed. The Brokeback boys weren’t the only hotties swapping spit on the hig screen. The ensemble dra TITLES WITH GREATEST GAY PORN POTENTIAL (BESIDES BAREBACK MOUNTAIN) ma Heights featured James Marsden (X-Men) as a sexually conflicted lawyer who locks lips with Jesse Fun with Dick; King Schlong; The Cumscrubber; Bradford (Swimfan) on a Manhattan rooftop. The Chronicles of Barneys: The Lyin’ Bitch and the Wardrobe; Good Night, and Good Fuck. GAY FOR PAY Discount Room Day (Every Monday, all day & night) www.steamportland.com Portland just got a whole lot sexier. Casting directors, take note: Several straight actors have been turning in consistently queerific performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who saved the otherwise dreadful Flawless as an aging drag queen, gave the performance of a lifetime as manip ulative, self-absorbed author Capote. Kip Pardue, so cute as a closet queen in But Ptn a Cheerleader, proved he can handle heavy drama in Loggerheads, ! TITLES THAT ALREADY SOUND KINKY Down to the Bone; Must Love Dogs; Steamboy; Grizzly Man; Cinderella Man; Ladies in Lavender; The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; Melinda and Melinda. © Arts and Culture Editor J im RADOSTA needs your feedback. Write to jim@justout.com.