Don’t sleep on Orange Is The New Black
Do you miss The L Word? Oz? Both? Sure you do; we all do. Well, by the time you get around to reading this you’ll probably already be late-coming to Orange Is The New Black, the comedy/drama that bubbled up quietly and mostly under the radar but now has a home at Netflix. Created by Jenji Kohan (Weeds) and based on the memoir by Piper Kerman, Orange is the true story of what happened to the WASPy Kerman when she found herself doing time for being involved in a reckless relationship with a hot lesbian drug lord. Unlike the seemingly unscathed Martha Stewart, Kerman’s 15-month sentence became a lesson in everything she never knew she needed to know, including which all-female gang to roll with on the inside. The show stars Taylor Schilling (Atlas Shrugged), Jason Biggs, Kate Mulgrew (!), Laura Prepon, Lea Delaria, Natasha Lyonne and Taryn Manning — in other words, everyone great you always wished would be on a TV show full of lesbians. Get that Netflix subscription now and do your time.
Margaret Cho is In Transition
Margaret Cho has her own sitcom again, this time on the Internet. Like everyone else with eyes facing forward, the comic is bypassing the TV gatekeepers and taking her work directly to her audience. The show’s called In Transition; it’s about female ex-cons (including Cho) and it co-stars performer Selene Luna, Cho’s comrade from the reality series The Cho Show. The 13-episode series will be short-form and take place entirely on YouTube, marking another instance of that site’s own transition from the number one destination for bored employees searching for kitty and twerking videos to instant TV network with original scripted content. Debuting in July, you can bet that its creator will be keeping track of hits and making sure heads roll if numbers don’t blow up. That’s what all the big TV moguls do.
Blue lesbians to warm up America’s big screens
Filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche’s three-hour lesbian romance, Blue Is the Warmest Color, is coming to America, thanks to distributor IFC. The controversial film (called a
“voyeuristic exercise” by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis) stars young actresses Léa Seydoux and Adéle Exarchopoulos as they come of age and fall in love, and it recently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or. The intense love story, complete with lengthy sex scenes (reports are that the non-pornographic art film leaves nothing to the imagination, prompting New York magazine’s Vulture website to cheekily praise its “impressive scissoring”) found itself in the unique position of receiving the highest praise from the most prestigious film festival in the world at the same time that France was legalizing same-sex marriage equality and anti-gay protestors were busy taking to the streets in Paris to be angry about it all. Sounds almost like what would happen here, frankly. And this fall American art-house audiences will get their own chance to evaluate the merits of the 179-minute Blue, probably while another U.S. state tackles its own marriage equality legislation and One Million Moms goes ballistic about Target’s same-sex wedding registry. Vive le cinema!
Do I Sound Gay? asks new documentary
Hey gay dude, worried that your voice “sounds gay”? Well, you’ve never been alone on that one. Worse, you’ve probably been made to feel bad about it, especially from other gay people. And documentary filmmaker David Thorpe knows what you’re going through. In fact, he made a movie about it. The director’s Do I Sound Gay? has been selected for the Independent Filmmaker Project’s 2013 Documentary Lab mentorship program, which will help shepherd the film to completion. Still in production, it’s a long-overdue, humorous exploration of the origins of “gay voice” as well as the stigma attached to having that voice. It features interviews with and the contributions of Margaret Cho, Tim Gunn, Dan Savage, David Sedaris and George Takei, none of whom plan to change the way they speak any time soon. We’re here, we sound queer, get used to it.
Romeo San Vicente tried on a skirt once but there was no amount of tucking in the world to make it right. He can be reached care of this publication or at DeepInsideHollywood@
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