“Or why I’m standing here trying to answer your bullshit questions. I guess it means that I lack the character to say no. But fuck it…I’ll answer a few of these stupid questions and then I’m outta here. What else?”

Actual Lancaster quote: “I don’t know why we’re carrying on this nonsense ”

Roughly 35 minutes into Tar Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar sardonically describes herself as a “U-Haul lesbian.” I chuckled when I heard it despite not knowing what it meant. Please forgive my deplorable ignorance.

The term stems from the bonding nature of lesbians, who, unlike significant numbers of gay guys, don’t tend to fuck like rabbits. Lesbians tend to have about the same number of sexual partners as heterosexual women, which is relatively few.

Boomer women have had an average of 7.4 partners, while boomer males have enjoyed 12.9. GenX asnd Millennial omen have averaged about 10 lovers.

Lesbians, in short, are like other women in craving the security of a relationship; they may even be more anxious to be in a relationship than straight women. Hence this Urban Dictionary definition:

“Who died and made you the great pumpkin? Please put drugs in my candy, and no Elvis costumes.”

“This is the life philosophy of Zillennials. Things that are interesting might also contain something that could cause a moment of discomfort so ban it all. It’s not your fault, kids. Your parents ruined you by over-protecting you, and now you’re these assholes.”

“Doomstruck,” posted on 10.5.22.

My Policeman (Amazon Prime, 11.4) is a tepid and morose gay tragedy, set in late 1950s England. And Harry Styles‘ rote performance as Tom Burgess, a sexually repressed gay policeman, is not a burnisher. Ditto David Dawson‘s as Patrick Hazlewood, a museum curator who becomes Tom’s lover and a rival for his affections in the matter of Emma Corrin‘s prim and proper Marion, who Tom marries because he needs a beard, which is a shitty thing to do.

But Marion evens the score down the road. Shittily, I mean.

Give Styles credit for bravely and energetically committing to some fairly graphic sex scenes with Hazlewood (kiss-slurping, panting, blowing, ass-fucking) but as I said in an earlier post, Styles is hot but Hazlewood isn’t, or at least not hot enough for me.

There are some pretty guys whom straight guys can at least imagine having some kind of vague intimate contact with. Mick Jagger in Performance was one. In True Romance Christian Slater‘s Clarence Worley says that he could’ve fucked the young Elvis Presley. But one look at Hazlewood and I went “nope.” Cold eyes, dorky haircut, emotionally needy and greedy.

I had a good laugh, however, when Dawson/Hazlewood hooks up with some anonymous guy and they decide to get down in an alleyway. They’re busted by a pair of bobbies before anything happens, but just before Dawson is about to drop to his knees the recipient drops a magazine on the damp pavement so Dawson won’t chafe his knees and his trousers won’t get wet. Thoughtful.

To be perfectly honest, My Policeman struck me as a stacked deck — basically a gay agenda film by way of an indictment of straight British society and the cruel repressions of the immediate post-war era.

It basically says that while being gay in 1957 Brighton was often a lonely and miserable thing, it was infinitely preferable to holding down a dull civil service job (Styles is a bobbie) while enduring a dull and regimented married life with a woman you don’t love and don’t really want to fuck either (the sex scenes between Styles and Corrin are grim and sad). And it absolutely revels in the joys of gay sex, over and over. Oh, the rapture, the ecstasy and the muscle tone!

It’s based on a year-old, same-titled book by Bethan Roberts. The Amazon copy reports that Roberts “reimagined the real-life relationship that the novelist E. M. Forster had with a policeman, Bob Buckingham, and his wife.”

Well, if it was good enough for Forster…

I was ready and willing to be engaged and transported, but less than five minutes in I was muttering “oh, shit” to myself. I knew this ploddingly pedestrian, dull-as-dishwater drama would be trouble during the opening credits, in fact. I can always smell trouble coming ‘round the bend.

While most of My Policeman is set in ’57 and ’58, about 35% or 40% is set in the late ’90s when Styles, Dawson and Corrin’s characters are in their mid to late 60s. They’re played, respectively, by Linus Roche, Rupert Everett and Gina McKee.

Honestly? McKee, who plays the least obliging and most clueless character, struck me as the most appealing. Her manner is gentle, her eyes are kind and she has a nice smile. Plus she doesn’t push it.

I was sitting in the third row in a nearly vacant theatre (two older women were sitting 10 or 12 rows behind me), and so I decided to keep my phone on and text my reactions to a friend as the film went along. Just watching it would have been unbearable. I had to fight back with my fingers and thoughts. Here are some of them:

“Watching Policeman. Totally tepid.

“The older guy who’s had the stroke (Everett) doesn’t look like either Styles or Dawson so who is he? Okay, fuck it — I’ll look it up on Wikipedia.

And an industry friendo agrees with Scott Mantz: “First half lame. Second half launches.”

…is better than outside the tent pissing in.

Posted on 4.25.15: An assortment of Los Angeles-based film bloggers and print journalists are presently enjoying a gratis, all-expenses-paid visit to the 2015 Riviera Maya Film Festival. The seven-day event is based in Playa del Carmen, the Yucatan beach town 30 miles south of Cancun and 200 miles north of Belize City.

I tried to offer my…uhm, “promotional” services to Sunshine Sachs publicist Brooke Blumberg, who did the inviting, but she decided to invite every name-brand columnist in town (Sasha Stone, David Poland, Scott Feinberg, et. al.) except me…thanks!

Brooke apparently doesn’t like me or suspects I’d be more trouble than I’m worth or something along these lines. Not true! I am perfectly willing to shill for any film festival that will fly me there and put me up, etc. I write really well and can give the same kind of handjobs that other journalists give when they visit places for free.

This morning I got a message from Stone, who’s down there now and staying at the Hotel Platinum Yucatan Princess, which offers the exact same kind of luxurious decor and feelings of well-tended splendor offered by every other luxury hotel in the world. (I stayed in a place almost precisely like this in Hoi An, Vietnam in 2013.)

May I ask something? What is the point of travelling to an exotic location if you’re going to stay in a place that’s a carbon-copy duplicate of every other luxury habitat around the world? It’s the Club Med approach to travel…the Kardashian way. Has anyone read Conde Nast Traveller lately? With slight variations every luxury hotel in the world looks exactly the same.

The body snatchers have branched out — they’re now designing hotels.