paclar

If this is truly supposed to be an adaptation of the Bobbie Gentry song, it makes utterly NO sense. I'm gay, so I'm usually sensitized toward picking gay references out of pop culture, but to make Billy Joe in the film struggle with his sexuality is fairly ridiculous.

If you read the lyrics to Bobbie Gentry's song, it seems pretty darn obvious that what the narrator and Billie Joe are throwing off the Tallahatchee Bridge is their out-of-wedlock baby.

Just Google search the lyrics, listen to the song, and see if that interpretation doesn't make much more sense than how the movie presents the story.

The film is okay at best. McDowall and Sarandon are over-the-top but good, the kids all basically stink.

What I wanted to comment on is "Fright Night"'s place as one of the gayest non-gay films of all time, and a film so sexual you wonder how it got past the Hollywood censors.

You know the films I'm talking about: "X-Men 2." "Chariots of Fire." They have absolutely nothing to do with gay or lesbian issues, but at the same time they are, unintentionally, almost completely gay films. Same with "Fright Night."

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: Stephen Geoffrey goes on to a gay/bi porn career and Amanda Bearse comes out of the closet during her time on "Married...with Children." Here they're just bad actors.

The only-slightly-less obvious: Sarandon has a magnetic sexual hold on everyone else in the film. His right hand man is also his lover, and it's obvious from the very first scene to anyone who's not dense to such things. While his sexual relations with Bearse are portrayed on camera, Sarandon also takes Geoffreys, it's just done in a haze of smoke and mist and cut away cameras. Even Ragsdale is practically salivating over the guy, totally ignoring Bearse throughout much of the film.

As to over-the-top sexuality, people who get up-in-arms about intergenerational relationships seem to have missed the molestation overtones in "Fright Night," both Sarandon's seduction of Bearse and his seduction of Geoffreys. Censors in the '80s missed so much...

"Celluloid Closet" is extremely well-made, but one hesitation must be registered. If you haven't read the book of the same name by the late film historian and critic Vito Russo, you are missing out. The film does not really engage -- perhaps it was impossible for it to engage -- in the wide-ranging commentary about the Hollywood scene that Russo is able to. It is punchy, funny, devastating at times. But the book is all that and more. Take the time to search out a copy of the 1987 expanded edition, which has been reprinted several times since.

Also, is there any irony in the fact that Lily Tomlin, who at the time had always refused to clearly and unambiguously come out of the closet, delivers the narration? Read Russo's book, and realize that he would be spinning in his grave at this turn of events. "Celluloid Closet" the book sounds a clarion call for the necessity of members of the Hollywood community to come out and claim the movies as their own. "Celluloid Closet" the movie cops out on this point.

9/10.