Gay Best Friend: Brandon (Dan Byrd) in "Easy A" (2010)

a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope    

Where would gay boys be without their beards?Looking back in the past for this column, it can be very easy to think homophobia in mainstream pop culture is a thing of the 90s. Obviously, the news reflects a much more grim reality, especially when it comes to racism and transphobia. However, it wasn’t long ago that Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008, banning same sex marriage. Though it would be overturned, this gives a good barometer how LGBTQ+ people were far from the mainstream well into the millennium. Even in 2010, it wasn’t easy to be openly gay, no matter how many “It Gets Better” videos people watched or “No H8” photo shoots were done.

This fact is central to the inciting incident of the Will Gluck 2010 comedy Easy A. The high school comedy and sleeper hit launched the A-list career of Emma Stone. Yet it's actually Dan Bryd’s Brandon who sets the plot into motion...

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Last few days to stream these titles!

by Nathaniel R

Crazy Rich Asians is about to leave HBO

We've decided to do our streaming roulette feature a bit differently (and weekly) since streaming movies come and go so quickly. It's too overwelming to list everything and who's checking three weeks later anyway? We'll start on March 1st but since there's only four days left in February, here are some titles that you might want to watch now because they're leaving the services this weekend! As we do we've blind-frozen them at totally random places (no cheating) just to see what image/line comes up and sharing it with you...

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Showbiz History: Sophia's Proxy Wedding, Emma's "Easy A"

7 random things that happened on this day, September 17th, in showbiz history...

1931 Anna Maria Louisa Italiano born in The Bronx. She's goes on to become Anne Bancroft, one of the all time greats of stage and screen.

← 1957 Here's a truly odd bit of trivia. Sophia Loren was married by proxy on this day. Two male attorneys stood in for her and producer Carlo Ponti (who gave her stage name and groomed her public image -- they first met in 1950 when Sophia was only 16). Ponti was not legally divorced from his previous wife so the marriage was annulled to escape bigamy charges and then they married again in 1966, but legally this time; they remained married for the rest of his life! But how crazy, right?

1963 The Fugitive premieres on ABC...

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What's on your (cinematic) mind?

I was just thinking about Emma Stone because I spotted this great spoof sketch by Grant Gould of the Easy A poster through the Game of Thrones lens...

So fun! Which is coincidentally a word that doesn't fit Game of Thrones at all. It's too sober for fun. (Daenerys is just about my least favorite character in the Game of Thrones franchise because her story just never goes anywhere... Whatever, this post wasn't meant to be about GoT which I stopped watching a couple episodes ago, remembering how pissed the third book made me so why stick with it?) 

SO..... what were you just thinking about movie-wise before you clicking over to the Film Experience?

P.S. More posts coming to wrap up our Smash coverage, Cannes new, "Best Shot" and more. The past two days have been a little trying.