Gay Best Friend: Cleo (Queen Latifah) in "Set It Off" (1996)

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

Queen Latifah stood out in the ensemble thriller "Set It Off" as Cleo, a butch lesbian bank robber.Be gay, do crimes.

The film business was born with stories of outsiders committing crimes just to survive. The entire gangster genre is built on that premise. Bonnie & Clyde captured the zeitgeist by making robbing banks seem cool. F. Gary Gray’s 1996 thriller Set It Off gives us a very different view of the Bonnie & Clyde story. The film focuses on four inner-city black women each pushed to the brink by a financial system working against them. Rather than lay down and take it, they band together and start robbing banks just to get by. The cast, which includes Jada Pinkett (before Smith), Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise in her first role, is uniformly excellent, building a dynamic that believably has lasted decades.

For the purposes of Gay Best Friend, we’ll take a look at our butch firecracker, Cleo, played with great ferocity by Queen Latifah in the midst of her Living Single fame...

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"And then some!"

Goddess, how fun was that 2002 Smackdown / Podcast? I couldn't even pick a favourite part but some moments of perfection: Joel Kim Booster's anecdote about Family Video, Jazz Tangcay's "peak" Streep obsession, Ben Yahr's nomination strategies, Emily VanDerWerff's tale of weepy double features, and Matt Rogers imitating Nicolas Cage's agent.

If you didn't get a chance to listen to it yet, it's right here at the bottom of the post (again) or at itunes.

64 minutes
00:01 Introductions
03:00 Alexander Payne's About Schmidt and comedy performances as Oscar nominees. Was Kathy Bates the best choice that year?
10:11 Meryl Streep in Adaptation and Nicolas Cage's outre career moves
20:45 Joel's job at Family Video
22:00 Adaptation's Being John Malkovich's moments + Cameron Diaz
25:00 A tribute to Toni Collette, The Hours discussion
35:00 Nomination strategies
36:30 Moulin Rouge! vs Chicago 
37:40 Catherine Zeta-Jones on f***ing fire as Velma Kelly and careers nosediving after Oscar
45:29 Queen Latifah: star or actress? Cameron Diaz and Michelle Pfeiffer had buzz but didn't get nominated
52:00 Chicago has aged really well.
54:00 Recasting the actresses. Our traditional Smackdown game.
59:00 Goodbyes and final 2002 shout-outs: Crossroads, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Signs, About a Boy and more...

Smackdown 2002

Smackdown '02: Meryl, Julianne, CZJ, Queen Latifah "and" Kathy Bates

The Supporting Actress Smackdown series picks an Oscar vintage and explores.

THE NOMINEES Today's topic: 2002 which featured the movies Adaptation, The Hours, About Schmidt, and Best Picture champ Chicago.  This very starry field of much-beloved actresses (all but one are now Oscar winners) deliver a juicy collection of characters: a horny mother-of-the-groom, a suicidal 50s housewife, an opportunistic prison warden, a fictionalized non-fiction writer, and a jazzbaby murderess.

THE PANEL  Here to talk about these 2002 divas and their movies are comedian/writer Joel Kim Booster, comedian/writer Matt Rogers, Variety's Artisan's editor Jazz Tangcay, Vox's critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff, and lip sync assassin Ben Yahr. And, as ever, your host at The Film Experience, Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

2002
SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN + PODCAST  
The companion podcast can be downloaded at the bottom of this article or by visiting the iTunes page...

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Queen Latifah's "Bessie"

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes, when watching a particularly starry TV production, whether it's a movie or a miniseries, one wonders how it might have impacted the Oscar race if had been released on the big screen. Would Mike Nichols' epic Angels in America have made Jeffrey Wright an Oscar nominee back in 2003? Could Drew Barrymore have snagged Sandra Bullock's Oscar if Grey Gardens had gone to movie theaters? With the 2002 Supporting Actress Smackdown nearly upon us, I began to wonder how Academy Award nominee Queen Latifah might have figured in the 2015 Oscar race with her Bessie. After all, that HBO film is one of AMPAS's favorite types of buzzy titles, a famous musician's biopic with a cast full of prestigious names…

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Tweetweek

curated by Nathaniel R 

If you want to see the psychological impact of release dates and marketing campaigns on how critics perceive a film’s merits, these two movies boast a very similar premise, are pitched to the same audience, and are equally dismissive of the communities they claim to represent. pic.twitter.com/NA0fFSsgEe

— Robert S. Hamer (@robsolonhamer) February 22, 2019

 Aint that just the truth? I think tweet above is a very important thought that all critics and audience members and awards voters should keep in mind every damn year. And it works whether or not a movie is any good. A lot of people don't like these two movies mentioned above but it's even true of great great movies, perceived and received differently depending on the release dates. It's a real shame.

After the jump tweets on making movies "for the fans," ascendant gay icon must-haves, "Shallow" ear worm, Ruth E Carter's destiny, and a few leftover Oscar tweets...

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