Small Town Gay Bar
Genre: Documentary
Director: Malcolm Ingram
Release: (2006)
Apparently not the direct-to-DVD sequel to The Dukes of Hazzard movie, about Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville buying The Boar’s Nest and chasing the dream, this 2006 release by director Malcolm Ingram turns out to actually be a documentary about the odd and challenging existence of running a hole-in-the-wall gay bar in the deep, rural south. But, I had already rented it, so I watched it anyway.
What initially sounds like an original piece of material with the potential to be a fascinating human drama, turns out to be an unevenly delivered and truly contrived work of uneffectively transparent manipulation. Beginning with a significant investment in introducing and getting to know the owner, staff, and patrons of a rickety, little bar in northeast Mississippi called Rumors (portrayed initially as the lone beacon of light for all of the forced-into-the-closet gay and lesbian patrons living in Bible-thumping small towns from hundreds of miles around), Ingram then proceeds to bang a hard left for no apparent reason, abandon the entire cast of characters from Rumors for about half the movie, and try to squeeze in about half a dozen other loosely associated storylines. Following a very tenuously associated connection to Rumors (the friend of a bartender’s ex-childhood baseball coach’s nephew’s neighbor from three towns over, or something like that), Ingram zigs hastily into the, admittedly, tragic and heart-wrenching story of a gay teenager brutally murdered by three intolerant classmates in another part of the state. From there he zags into the story of another rural gay bar somewhere else in the state (perhaps making it purposefully unclear how far away it actually is to avoid smudging his carefully painted picture of that oasis in the desert that is Rumors), and then zugs ridiculously out of bounds for a last minute desperation swing at stirring up a religious hornets’ nest, which he was obviously disappointed not to find already swarming around the original sites of his story. Ingram takes his camera and sets off to solicit the opinions one Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church.
**********WARNING: MAY CONTAIN LANGUAGE OFFENSIVE TO EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD WITH HALF AN OUNCE OF HUMANITY**********
Anyone who has followed the news with more than just a passing glance over the past few years has probably heard of the Reverend Fred Phelps and his controversial, media-whoring Westboro Baptist Church. The Reverend and the Westboro Baptist Church are the founders of movements and slogans such as, (these are their actual, sanctioned movements and slogans - not one joke or exaggeration of mine) “God Hates Fags”, “God Hates Fag Enablers.” Yet their scope is also vast enough to encompass entire nation states, as they have declared that God hates numerous countries including the United States, Sweden, Canada, and Mexico among others. But there are more slogans and movements from Reverend Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, such as the puzzling “God Hates You”, and “God Hates Your Tears.” However, the Westboro Baptist Church is probably best known/infamous for their recent attempts to protest at the funerals of soldiers, who have lost their lives in Iraq, with messages that literally defame and degrade the dead soldiers.
(Excuse me for a moment now while I go vomit out every orifice of my head, punch a hole in a wall, and then scrub my eyes, fingertips and all portions of my brain accessible through the ears and nose with an industrial strength-bleaching agent.)
**********END OF VOMIT-INDUCING HATE SPEECH**********
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