Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (September 28, 2007)

300 AND WILD HOGS WERE SO ROBBED!
I'm not sure how I missed this one, but at the recent Venice Film Festival the inaugural "Queer Lion" Award was handed out to the film that most accurately depicts or deals with homosexual themes.

Okay, that's not really the award the cowardly lion is getting. This is a picture of it and it appears to be a certificate, not unlike what you might get in the sixth grade for winning — er, or maybe just participating in — the best safety poster contest.

Daniel Casagrande, the competition's director and the originator of the idea, spent four years negotiating with festival about creating the award. This isn't the first such award. The Berlin International Film Festival has handed out the Teddy Award for twenty-one years.

This year's QL award went to Edward Radtke's The Speed of Life, the story of a young boy who steals video cameras from tourists in New York City so he can escape his life by watching their memories. And who can blame him? Have you seen ticket prices for Wicked and Monty Python's Spamalot?

According to InsideGuy, who tipped me off about the award, there is a little bit of controversy about the movies considered for the award this year as they aren't all that gay. Speed of Life for instance apparently doesn't have an explicitly gay storyline, but instead is about the close friendship between 13-year-old Slammer and his friend Duke.

Also in the running was Brad Pitt's new film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which again isn't really gay but involves a possible homoerotic attraction between Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) who is obsessed with Jesse James. Well, that certainly beats the creepy gay subtext in 3:10 to Yuma.

According to Robert Koehler of Variety, Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth starring Michael Caine and Jude Law at least involves an overt — if weird — game of sexual come-on between the two heterosexual characters. If nothing else, that at least sounds like something I haven't seen before.

But here's hoping that next year's Queer Lion can go to a flick with a little more actual gay content.