Rontrigger Reviews

Hardball (1994– )

I remember the pilot being funny...

[5/10 · 11 June 2009]

In the pilot of this show, Coach Mike Widmer (played by Mike Starr) was openly gay. Note the "memorable quote" from this character in that section; there was another one in the pilot that I remember--Mike was very unhappy about something and someone gently suggested that perhaps he ought to get out of baseball. Mike then said: "And give up showering with men? Never!" O.K., it was over the top, but I think this was a "premise with promise." The coach of a baseball team, with an undeniably masculine persona, apparently accepted as homosexual without question by his players--it seemed almost revolutionary to me in 1994. And overall, I recall that the show had some good laughs. So I looked forward to the first regular episode.

Well, this was a prime example of just how much things can change between the pilot and that first regular episode. Whatever laughs were to be had in the pilot were clearly not there now, and--unbelievably--there was a comment to the previously gay coach about his wife and kids! The suits at the network obviously had stepped in and put a stop to one innovation that had certainly clicked with me. I seem to recall that I didn't even finish watching the show that night.

Why any network would even air the pilot at all, let alone as the first broadcast of the series and only a week before the first regular episode, when they had revamped the show so completely, is beyond me.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

My all-time favorite film

[10/10 · 8 August 2006]

Until this year, I had never seen a film in a theater more than once. By this summer, I had seen this film 33 times in different theaters and traveled a total of at least 1,700 miles to see it locally and in cities as far away as 180 miles. Even since it came out on DVD, "Brokeback Mountain" absolutely has not lost any of its power.

It's quite simply a kind of story I'd never seen before--a story of a love between two non-stereotypical, non-urban men. I relate to their environment to some extent, having grown up in a rural area and now living 20 miles away in a city. It was refreshing to see gay men in a way of life that so many--including many gay men!--see as totally foreign to them and an impossible occurrence in real life.

But it's not foreign and it's not impossible. Gay men really are everywhere--in Wyoming, in Texas, in the world of cowboys and rodeos, in the world of cattle and sheep ranching. If even one person has come to realize this, or changed his/her mind about how "normal" it is for someone to love someone of the same sex, because of "Brokeback Mountain," then this film was very much worth making.