Smile when you say figure skater — or Spartan

The movies, they are a changing
The movies themselves are shifting in small but real ways.  More or less gone are the days when a movie like the early ’80s comedy “Partners,” starring Ryan O’Neal and John Hurt, could ask you to sympathize and identify with a petulant pretty boy homophobe detective who’s being forced to go undercover as gay to catch a killer (think “Cruising” but played for laughs).

“Wild Hogs,” by virtue of its huge box-office take, gets away with this tone, but not without getting called on it by critics and gay viewers all over the country. And “Wild Hogs” would seem to be an exceptional case anyway. In the forthcoming R-rated, animated freak-out, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters” — a stoner-jam of a movie aimed at young, hetero males if ever one existed on a release schedule — a fat, orange alien with an Austrian accent spends most of his screen time making out with a male robot who calls himself The Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past. How’s that for post-concerned?

Meanwhile, on screens right now, a Morrissey T-shirt and short-shorts-wearing gay cop (Thomas Lennon) leads an inept police department in what turns out to be a mission of heroism in “Reno 911!: Miami.” A sales clerk in a department store comes on to Chris Rock in “I Think I Love My Wife” and not only is he not punished for his assertive behavior, but Rock’s character barely flinches.

And in “Reign Over Me,” Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler have a never-before-heard-in-a-mainstream-film, rules re-setting conversation about the public and private use of the F-word, one where the slur winds up, in context, weighing exactly the same as the word “poundcake.” It’s an exchange that distills lots of ideas about what a man is and is not allowed to say or be right now and, when written and shot, couldn’t have predicted Ann Coulter’s recent media-baiting or Isaiah Washington’s anger-control issues. Better yet, it’s informed by neither.

The “poundcake-ing” of the word (as in, “No, YOU’RE a poundcake”) is something that I, and lots of gay men I know, have lived with for quite a while. We’re kind of over being “types.” And we sort of sit around and wait for the world to catch up. It’s just a part of the reason why a movie like “Blades of Glory” gets the gold and why my friend Pete gets a verbal F-word pass. And it’s why when he buys the “300” DVD in a few months and watches it multiple times, I’ll question his commitment to his wife all over again.

Dave White is the film critic for Movies.com and the author of “Exile in Guyville.” He can be found at www.imdavewhite.com.

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