As I’ve learned over 16+ years in recovery, I only have the ability to change anything when I accept a person, institution or situation for exactly what it is, so with that in mind: 2023 felt like the year when my remaining illusions – fantasies, really – about Hollywood, America, the world, and my place in them all fell by the wayside. This might sound like a bummer, but in an ironic twist that I shoulda seen coming (my life since I got sober is peppered with one paradox after another), this radical acceptance freed me up to make a childhood dream come true. My mantra for 2023 became a nothing-to-lose “Fuck It.”
After almost two and a half years of trying to get the film financed that I created this very website to promote, I was fed up, worn down, and just this side of cynical. I didn’t want to do any more unsuccessful crowdfunding, spend any more time jerking off the budget, make any more edits to the pitch deck, or sit in any more “thanks, but what else ya got?” meetings with production companies – I wanted to make a fucking movie. In May, I sat down and hammered out a script that could be shot with two actors, minimal crew and one location. I dumped all my frustration with myself, this particular “journey,” and every person I’d met in the course of it out onto the page. I told my lead producer – a no-bullshit New Yorker with the style of a society matron and the mouth of a trucker – that I was giving us til mid-July to raise the rest of the money for our original project. Otherwise, I was making my micro-budget movie at the end of August, one way or another. Shocker: the funds didn’t materialize, so I pulled out the micro-budget script.
I hit up potential collaborators: the DP who was on tap to shoot the bigger movie, an editor I clicked with at first sight like brothers from another mother, two fearlessly game actors, and my hubby, who’d just come off his first short film as a producer. Armed with a mid-strike SAG agreement (the union coulda given a shit about a movie this “small,” as long as there was no nudity; the agreement was silent on whether they cared about its members engaging in depictions of graphic violence), and with everyone working for basically nothing but whatever meals I could provide, we trucked out to a house in the middle of nowhere (or the Yucca Valley), and …made a fucking movie.
Remaining post-production work notwithstanding, hopefully you will be able to see our film, BLEED LIKE ME, at a festival near you in 2024. Upon my second viewing of the director’s cut, I realized that, if I hadn’t made it myself, BLEED LIKE ME would be one of my favorite movies of the year: I’d made the movie I always wanted to see. I wasn’t bitching about the gay characters I wanted other screenwriters to write; I wrote them. I wasn’t moaning about the ideas I wanted other gay filmmakers to discuss; I discussed them. Budget be damned, I’d done something I wanted to do since I was five years old, and the world felt different. I felt different. The stuff that used to seem like markers of success – approval from establishment gatekeepers in particular – didn’t matter anymore.
Expectations are different from hopes, and the only hope I have for BLEED LIKE ME is that anyone who needs a movie like this gets a chance to see it. My only response to people who don’t appreciate the film would be a shrug; there are plenty of other movies for them to see. And although the two characters are gay men, I’m not even sure LGBTQ people are the film’s primary target audience. (I’ve never been shy about expressing my impatience with most mainstream gay culture in my work, and BLEED LIKE ME is no exception.) A road movie without the road, BLEED LIKE ME is for anyone who started out with a bunch of big, idealistic dreams, and found themselves, many years, false starts and near misses later, wondering “What Am I Doing Here?” The idea came to me one day while I was listening to the namesake Garbage album; I thought, “I want to make a movie that feels like this.” And so, to the best of our abilities, that’s exactly what we did.
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As a corollary to my Big Disillusionment 2023, the artistic works that most got my attention this year were the ones that themselves directly addressed the shattering of illusions.
On TV, we got Steven Yeun and Ali Wong in BEEF, demonstrating just how willing those of us in the rapidly vanishing middle class are willing to blame each other – even within already marginalized groups – for our frustrated ambitions, while smiling and swallowing as the elite serve us shit sandwiches made from the crumbs off their plates. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER and A MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD found respective creators Mike Flanagan and Brit Marling more self-righteously angry than I’ve ever seen them, railing against the havoc cutthroat capitalists wreak on the planet while spinning lies about how their endeavors are for our benefit rather than their own enrichment. THE BEAR’s Feast of the Seven Fishes episode is already a classic, but for me, the key to the series was the episode when King Fuck-Up “cousin” Richie turned himself into a gentleman (albeit one who still slings the F word with abandon) just by showing up, shutting up, listening, and then taking new action. THE OTHER TWO ended on a bittersweet note, not just with Drew Tarver’s Cary Dubec rediscovering the person he'd lost while on the Hollywood hamster wheel, but behind the scenes, with the show’s creators allegedly turning into the exact monsters they’d been satirizing for three seasons. Proof-positive that grace is all any of us should be striving for.
Two books I read this year – Maureen Ryan’s BURN IT DOWN and Peter Biskind’s PANDORA’S BOX – performed scorched-earth autopsies on a Hollywood overrun by greed, abuse and short-sighted decisions to arrive at the moment we’re in now, where trust is in shorter supply than ever before and actual creatives get screwed left and right. (True to Ryan’s title, both seem to think the only way to fix the industry is to start over from scratch. Good luck with that, since Hollywood loves nothing more than to double down and throw money at what isn’t working.) Writing from the other coast, Naomi Klein used DOPPELGANGER to observe life in a country that’s experiencing an identity crisis, split personality, PTSD, and a total nervous breakdown all at the same time. (If you’ve ever wondered how some of your family members, friends, or celebrities you used to admire seem to have been taken over by pod people in the last few years, this is the book for you.) Meanwhile, gay icons Britney Spears and Barbra Streisand both published memoirs. My takeaway: You can smile and make nice to get along, and find yourself left for dead in the process (Britney); or you can serve as your own best advocate, take no one’s crap, and dictate the terms of working with you from the very beginning (Barbra). If other people are making money off your efforts, you’re gonna get labeled a diva, difficult or crazy either way, so which would you rather choose?
On the podcast front, film-geek goddess Karina Longworth’s YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: “Erotic 90s” dove deep into screwed-up sexual politics as demonstrated in movies, celebrity lives, and media reaction to both in the 1990s, rehabbing some subversive masterpieces unappreciated in their time (SHOWGIRLS, EYES WIDE SHUT, LOST HIGHWAY, CRASH). Even more eye-opening: journalist Sonari Glinton’s SHATTERING THE SYSTEM examined the whole Ed Buck scandal/travesty/tragedy from multiple angles, offering a frank look at privilege and racism in the LGBTQ community. The jewel in this series’ crown is the Episode 10 roundtable between Glinton and several Black, queer West Hollywood residents; their experiences prove that this alleged LGBTQ mecca may not be quite as tolerant or progressive as advertised. Glinton calls bullshit on a heaping amount of it here.
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Speaking of calling bullshit on certain smug factions of the LGBTQ community, I can’t ignore that the most high-profile, expensive LGBTQ project released in 2023, the limited series FELLOW TRAVELERS, was, for this gay viewer, an exasperating experience, and not just as a matter of personal taste. Ostensibly chronicling the decades-long, doomed love affair between Matt Bomer’s closeted government stooge Hawk and Jonathan Bailey’s politically awakened, out-and-proud Tim, FELLOW TRAVELERS left me alternating between feeling bored, depressed, or guilty that I didn’t enjoy what should be a landmark dramatization of LGBTQ American history. The victim porn; the too-easy caricatures in supporting roles; the showily choreographed sex scenes; the fetishization of six-packed, high-cheek-boned, no-body-fat-allowed male beauty, whatever the color of skin – so far, so business as usual. No, where FELLOW TRAVELERS separates itself from the pack is the level of gaslighting required to convince us its lead protagonist isn’t a reprehensible garbage person.
I know it’s a buzzkill to the sweeping romance, but let’s not forget: Hawk informs on his lover to the government, getting Tim dismissed from public service for life and completely altering his trajectory; lies to his wife and family at every turn; refuses to get tested for HIV (and lies about that) while still screwing around; sells out numerous other gay men – notably ones he used as sex toys – to the government; and ships his own brother-in-law off to shock therapy, all to save his own ass. (He also tries to strangle his one-dimensional Fire Island fuck-boy – seconds after being inside him – but that dude is, like, a total bitch, so it’s cool.) Think the writers would call Hawk on his misdeeds at any point? Nope. None of Hawk’s crimes against other gay men are ever mentioned again; masochistic Tim forgives and reunites with him many, many times before Tim dies; and we are left with the tasteless image of Hawk weeping at the AIDS quilt in what the show’s creators clearly believe is a moving moment of catharsis for both character and audience. Why, exactly, is Hawk worthy of empathy and redemption, but Roy Cohn, the series’ primary villain, is not? My guess is that Hawk looks like Matt Bomer, while Cohn is a short, balding, disfigured troll, which the writers waste no opportunity to underline as the source of his pathology. What, then, is the source of Hawk’s? And what happens to the men whose lives he's ruined? No one seems to care. If the show’s creators had cast the same critical eye on Hawk that they do on Cohn, they might’ve been onto something. Instead, the pretty, WASPy leading man gets a free pass.
We deserve and should demand much more complexity and self-examination from LGBTQ filmmakers and the images of us they reflect. High on its own perceived importance, FELLOW TRAVELERS is just more of the same slickly packaged baloney (see: BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, UNCOUPLED, RED WHITE & ROYAL BLUE, etc.) that always seems to get greenlit by straight studio executives at the expense of anything that might, you know, make us think. I see scads of Emmy nominations and a GLAAD award in its very near future.
On the positive side, Jonathan Bailey pulls off a minor miracle of a performance: Tim is a constantly evolving, fully present, conflicted human being, even while running back for more of Hawk’s emotional abuse. Bailey is what made me stick with this show when I was ready to throw my remote through the screen, and if FELLOW TRAVELERS ultimately does nothing more than announce his full-throttle talent to Hollywood, that’s money well spent by Paramount Global (or whatever it’s calling itself these days).
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Maybe it was my disillusionment ramming up against an industry that showed nothing but contempt for its creatives this year, but for some reason, several of my favorite movies got virtually ignored by year-end awards consideration, and several that critics and audiences gushed over left me cold or exiting the theater with a distinct “Meh.”
That said, there’s was plenty to enjoy and mull over this year: the first two hours of OPPENHEIMER, during which I found myself simmering, then boiling with anger at how meticulous yet cavalier these arrogant bomb-builders were in setting off their creation without knowing whether or not it was gonna, I don’t know, destroy the whole fucking planet; the third-act twist of A THOUSAND AND ONE; the narrator reveal in EL CONDE, totally inspired and oh-so-deserved; the presentation of marriage as best friendship in YOU HURT MY FEELINGS; the diner scene between Ben Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos, and the anything-but-gratuitous, single-take sex scene between Whishaw and Franz Rogowski in PASSAGES; Zac Efron proving he’s the real deal with THE IRON CLAW; Jacob Elordi as a very different Elvis than last year’s in PRISCILLA; the first fifteen minutes of THE ZONE OF INTEREST, which left me so rattled, I contemplated leaving the theater.
Here are the ten movies that most thrilled me as a fellow filmmaker in 2023:
10. SHOWING UP
The release of a new Kelly Reichardt movie is always cause for celebration; the reuniting of her and Michelle Williams even more so. But this one felt particularly personal, and I related to the uncomfortable depiction here of an artist struggling to get anyone to take her work as seriously as she does. The climactic scene, funny and cringe-y in equal measure, felt like every reading, performance or screening where I’ve found people who ask inane questions, offer unsolicited “feedback,” or are just there for the refreshments. Ugh. When Williams walks out of her own show, calling a truce with the fellow artist and sometime nemesis played by a reliably tart Hong Chau, I was like, “I hear ya, girl.”
9. THE HOLDOVERS
On this, the critics and I agree: Da’Vine Joy Randolph gives the finest supporting performance of the year, and for me, the most surprising. I first saw Randolph in the misbegotten GHOST: THE MUSICAL on Broadway, playing the Whoopi Goldberg part and the show’s lone bright spot. I then saw her in an Off-Broadway production whose title escapes me, starring with Chris Bauer as disgruntled office mates (or something). The plays weren’t great, but she sure was, and subsequent film and TV work mostly channeled her firecracker energy into rote Sassy Black Lady-type roles. But as a grieving mother and school cook for overprivileged white boys, Randolph turned down the volume if not the vitality to give us the perfect complement to Paul Giamatti, doing the Paul Giamatti thing as an intellectually frustrated professor. The movie itself is a lovely, minor-key pastiche of 70’s character studies I love like FIVE EASY PIECES and DRIVE, HE SAID, and Randolph is a grounded, still-waters wonder.
8. THE STROLL
My favorite documentary I saw this year provided the strongest argument yet for giving filmmakers from historically marginalized groups the opportunity to tell their own stories. The thoroughly engaging Kristen Lovell, who directs with Zackary Drucker, tracks down the women she worked with on The Stroll, their nickname for the area of New York’s meatpacking district where transgender sex workers used to earn a living. What I remember most from the film is the laughter and sisterhood among the participants, as well as the infuriating double-bind America puts its trans citizens in: after being refused traditional forms of employment via anti-trans discrimination, sex work becomes the only viable option, which leaves the women vulnerable to police harassment and violence, not to mention the gentrification that swallowed the area whole. LGBTQ resilience is a cliché as a movie theme, but THE STROLL somehow felt like a revelation to me, a story I’d never heard before from one who lived it.
7. EILEEN
A trio of throat-grabbing performances by Thomasin Mackenzie, Anne Hathaway, and one-scene-wonder Marin Ireland is just the bonus of William Oldroyd’s masterful old-school noir loaded with contemporary weirdness and a queer subtext just barely below the surface. The real star is Ari Wegner’s bourbon-soaked cinematography; you can feel the cold coming off the Massachusetts cape, the grime in the run-down locations, the dirt under this movie’s fingernails. Hathaway, who I always prefer in the Catwoman mode she inhabits here, announces herself as every inch the movie star, but for the first half, I kept thinking, “I’m not sure Mackenzie is carrying this film.” Then, a hard-left plot twist occurs, and boy, does she prove me wrong. I won’t spoil it for you, but if, like me, you find noir to be the most honest of all film genres, this black-hearted, oddball gem does the job and then some.
6. MONSTER
Winner of the screenplay prize at Cannes, Kore-eda Hirokau’s sneaky triumph serves as an alternate take on Lukas Dhont’s equally gorgeous CLOSE. While I’m not sure the RASHOMON-like structural conceit employed here is necessary – I assume it conveys something about how little adults understand the children in their lives – who cares when you’re reduced to a puddle by the end of the movie? (Any remaining tears will be dragged out of you by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final score.) MONSTER was the purest, most affecting love story I saw all year, and among a list of films full of killer final scenes, this one may be my favorite.
5. ANATOMY OF A FALL
I read a hilarious review of Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winner by Adam Nayman on Reverse Shot that sniffed it was just BASIC INSTINCT for the arthouse crowd, and you know what? A) He’s not wrong; and B) That ain’t a bad thing. Aside from Sandra Huller’s enigmatic performance as a bisexual writer whose husband ends up dead, just like in one of her books – paging Sharon Stone! – the dynamics of the French legal system is the most jaw-dropping item on display here; I kept wondering how this chaotic free-for-all might play out in American courtrooms. The setup may be pure pulp, but the question of whether Huller’s character is guilty of murder is far less intriguing – or relevant – than the slippery idea of truth. It all comes down to prejudice and perspective, and the fact that two audience members can watch the exact same scene at any point in this movie and come up with two totally different interpretations proves Triet is a filmmaker to reckon with. Bonus points for young Milo Machado Graner, who, if I had my way, would be clutching a Supporting Actor Oscar next year.
4. AFIRE
Christian Petzold’s simple setup – a few rando friends/strangers sharing a house by the sea – proved the exact kind of movie I’ve wanted to make, and bore more than a passing resemblance to what I attempted with BLEED LIKE ME, even though I saw it months after we completed shooting. For me, the highest drama is always going to come from emotionally walled-off people breaking down those walls by bumping against the rough edges of others, and AFIRE brought this to life once again. Very few bells and whistles here, just terrific acting; a probing, compassionate screenplay; an unshowy mix of races, sexualities and genders; and a devastating, transcendent, well-earned finale. What more do you need?
3. SALTBURN
I missed pretty much the whole first half of SALTBURN’s dialogue, so hypnotized was I by the visual style and palette laid down by writer-director Emerald Fennell. I always judge how much I like a movie by the amount of time I spend, whether in a theater or on my couch, leaning forward in my seat, and I spent pretty much the entire duration of SALTBURN right on that edge, studying every tightly composed shot, every performance’s silent film-level physicality, every oversaturated color. I’m confounded by the number of people who write SALTBURN off as a TALENTED MR. RIPLEY clone, since what I saw was the over-the-top, anything-goes sensuality of Ken Russell, Pasolini, and CALIGULA. This was 2023’s sexiest and harshest rebuke of soulless Western culture, and I loved every second of it.
2. ALL OF US STRANGERS
There’s a pivotal moment – amongst many pivotal moments – in Andrew Haigh’s new film when Andrew Scott’s Adam attempts to deflect his mother’s passive-aggressive homophobia by asserting that his loneliness isn’t related to his being gay. He then chases that with the qualifier “Not really.” He also argues that things have changed for gay people since he was a kid, yet the halting look in Scott’s eyes indicates he doesn’t quite believe his own protestations. Maybe, as the films of Andrew Haigh have always suggested, it’s more complicated than that. I once read a piece by a gay critic that claimed the reason Haigh’s HBO series LOOKING failed to keep an audience is because ambivalence doesn’t make for compelling drama. Maybe not for a series, but that realistic ambivalence is all over his breakthrough film (and a major touchstone for my own work) WEEKEND, and it’s this ambivalence that I find so validating here. Haigh’s characters, unlike the walking agendas found in 99% of movies about gay men, reassure me that it’s okay if I feel alienated; it’s okay if I don’t have a gaggle of gays to go to brunch with; it’s okay if I don’t have a perfect body or exhaust myself in pursuit of one; it’s okay if I’m just “muddling through” without being wildly successful; and it’s okay if I don’t walk around with a fucking Pride Flag strapped to my ass 24/7. The next time someone tells me that my gay characters are “too angry,” I’m going to tell that person to watch this movie, and then I will tell them – as respectfully as possible – to go fuck themselves.
1. FAIR PLAY
Every year there’s at least one movie that I think deserves far more credit than it gets as a conversation-starter. FAIR PLAY was the movie of 2023 for me, a scathing, take-no-prisoners study of how true connection and equality between men and women is impossible until systemic misogyny gasps its last breath. FAIR PLAY was this year’s GONE GIRL and, like that movie, much closer to my idea of Barbie & Ken undergoing an existential crisis. (I wish I could’ve been in the room for the chemistry read between Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich.) Writer-director Chloe Domont dealt head-on with an inconvenient truth that BARBIE and POOR THINGS, in their supreme self-satisfaction, failed to acknowledge: that simply turning the tables on our oppressors and treating them as horribly as they’ve treated us is just a lateral move. No one wins in such a scenario, exemplified by everything from the battle of the sexes to partisan political chaos to ceaseless wars all over the planet. FAIR PLAY made these zero-sum games brutally, bloodily clear.
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Perhaps the most unexpected paradox of my 2023 movie-going, movie-making year was the one in which my single favorite performance was featured in a movie I didn’t like all that much: Natalie Portman’s in MAY DECEMBER. (Director Todd Haynes can usually do no wrong, but I kept waiting for this one to pick a tone, central perspective or point of view.) As an actress shadowing the woman she’d end up playing in a tacky true-crime movie, Portman here hearkens back to the performance I would cite as my favorite of the 1990’s: Nicole Kidman’s in TO DIE FOR. Portman’s Elizabeth is punching way up in class, as Addison DeWitt said of Eve Harrington, an ugly American blissfully ignorant of the fact that she isn’t nearly as smart or talented as she thinks she is. She’s constantly performing, exhibiting no discernable personality of her own, every word she says seemingly pulled from someone else’s fake-as-fuck script.
Unlike FELLOW TRAVELERS, MAY DECEMBER at least isn’t blind to the possibility that its lead character is a self-centered piece of shit, and Portman’s obvious glee in playing her is pretty endearing, even as we can only shake our heads at Elizabeth’s behavior. In a year when the powers-that-be all seemed like they had no idea what the hell they were doing, I could relate to a showbiz lifer like Portman, an artist with nothing to prove who let any scrap of pretense, fantasy or illusion about her industry fall straight to the cutting room floor.