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Brandon, Chuck and Jesse are transvestites - and members of NATAG, as
in Not All Transvestites Are Gay ... and they are the only three members.
But while for Chuck and Jesse the group is just something they want to
belong to to talk with others who share their predilections, for Brandon,
founder of the group it is more, it's a forum to promote homophobia and
give his weird views on homosexuality some legitimacy. This film
provides us with backgrounds on all three NATAG-members:
- Chuck has only recently come out as a transvestite, and his fashion
sense is, to put it politely, less than developed. He's also less than
great on makeup and could do with a little shave. And his wife Amy of
quite a few years doesn't really approve once he finally musters up
the nerve to tell her - she even asks for a divorce. Curiously that
doesn't hit Chuck half as much as the death of his favourite cat ...
- Jesse grew up a strict catholic, which might have triggered his
crossdressing (in church, he liked the priest dressed in a gown, he
says). Despite his rather rotund figure though he has become a
crossdressing model.
- Brandon goes on GOD TV dressed as a woman, to give his views on
crossdressing - but mainly to utter insults at gays. And he eventually
even makes the reactionary pastor/host (Rick Reger, reprising his role
from Holy Shit) lose his cool. All through
Brandon's life, his crossdressing was always supported by his mother.
Within NATAG, Brandon has become more and more of a diva, which is why
Chuck only invited Jesse and not him to his cat's funeral - where things
finally come to a head when a furious Brandon shows up nevertheless and
throws the box containing the dead cat to the ground in a fit of rage. He
later throws Chuck and Jesse out of NATAG, too.
In an ironic twist of events Chuck and Jesse later got married to each
other and lived happily ever after, while Brandon recreated NATAG from the
ground as a gay hate group (funded by the church, of course), became
notorious for organizing anti-gay rallies and the like, and was ironically
killed by NATAG-members confusing him for a gay ...
Done documentary style and framed by two ultra-conservative PSAs from
the 1950's or 60's, this film tells the story of three weird transvestites
in a charming (if sometimes pretty offensive) way. Point here is that the
film does show compassion for its characters rather than using their
predilections as dashes of colour and source of cheap jokes - and yet the
film is full of (dark) humour, but that's more derived from the story that
the fact that we see unshaven men in drag. But even more enchanting (in an
odd sort of way) is the style of the movie, which consciously over-uses
over-saturated colours that often don't match one another, and invariably
goes for the camp and ugly - which makes the film very much reminiscent of
underground and arthouse flicks from the 1960'S and 70's. Which in turn
goes totally hand in hand with the film's topic.
In all, an extremely entertaining movie. Recommended.
To get your copy of the film, go to http://www.scumbagmovies.com
- but be quick, limited availability!
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amazon.com
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