"The Core":Has Something No Other Disaster Movie Has

We're running low on post-Apocalyptic zombie movies for our "Stay Inside" film festival, so last night we went with The Core (2003) instead.  Wow, what a bomb: ludicrous, silly, and immensely boring. But it had one thing that most disaster movies don't have, that most Hollywood movies of any sort don't have, that makes it worth a watch (or at least a fast-forward). I'm going to go through it scene by scene for the first 15minutes, and then fast-forward.

Scene 1: A fair, with rights, clowns, kids, the works.  Obviously this is going to be...no, we move into the building next door, where suit-and-tie Dave (Christopher Shyer)  tells his coworkers, "Let's go make $30,000,000!"

He must be the protagonist!

Nope, he goes into the board room and drops dead.

Scene 2: Ludicrous Indiana-Jones-style swashbuckling geophysics professor Josh (Aaron Eckhart, above) is teaching his class, when government suits sweep him away to a facility to look at some corpses.  He runs into his old boyfriend, famous geologist Serge (Tcheky Karyo).  Seriously,they do everything but French kiss.  Serge has to mention his wife and kids back home every five seconds, to keep audiences from reading them as a gay couple.

Turns out that everyone with a pacemaker in a 10 block radius of the fair dropped dead. Pacemaker malfunction.  But don't worry, that never happens again.

Scene 3:  Trafalgar Square.  Dad (Bart Anderson) is filming his wife and kid amid the pigeons at the Nelson Monument.  Suddenly the birds start flying into buildings, cars, people, as if their internal nagavation system has gone haywire.  In the resulting chaos, Dad and company run into a building to hide.

Surely they will be important later?  Nope, they never appear again, and the birds never attack again.

Scene 4:   On a space shuttle, newbie astronaut Beck (Hilary Swank) begins her first descent.  Then the navigation system goes haywire, and she has to negotiate a crash landing in the L.A. River.

Ok, she must be The Girl, with whom swashbuckler Josh will fall in love. It happens in every disaster movie, without fail.

Fast Forward: Josh approaches ultra-effete, gay-stereotyped,, cigarette-in-holder, coat-draped-on-shoulders, "do you know who I am?"  celebrity geophysicst Zimsky (Stanley Tucci).  Together they figure out that the Earth's core has stopped rotating.  Huh?

This will result in electromagnetic disturbances, and within a year, the microwaving of all life on Earth.  Huh?

Fortunately, some controlled nuclear explosions at the Earth's core will get it moving again. Huh?

And Josh knows a crank living in the desert (Delroy Lindo, left) who is working on a ship capable of burrowing down that far.  It's built from a new experimental alloy called...get this...unobtanium.  Huh?

To avoid mass hysteria, they hire celebrity hacker/comic relief Rat (DJ Quals, one of my favorite actors) to delete any document on the internet that mentions the coming catastropheor the burrowing expedition.

Is that really necessary?  Lots of scientists have been telling us that the human race will soon go extinct due to global warming, and no one is hysterical. 

Regardless of how critical the situation is, every disaster movie -- well, basically every Hollywood movie -- always takes the time to ensure that male characters demonstrate that they are heterosexual by mentioning wives and girlfriends, double-taking at hot girls, and so on.  Here, nothing.  No one except Serge says or does anything. Rat says that he would like to have sex before the world ends, but doesn't specify with whom.  Completely lacking in heteronormativity!

Then...Beck joins the team, and has a standard "you're arrogant!"  pre-romance combat.with Josh.  I know where this is headed....

And they're off to the center of the Earth. The rest of the movie is set on a small, shaking ship zooming through magma.  Various gobbledegook technical problems arise: "we've lost the containment valve on the back oscillator, and it will flood the iodes with beta particles!".  The crew members heroically sacrifice themselves one by one, leading to long, sobbing eulogies. (Josh is particularly heartbroken over the death of his ex-boyfriend Serge).

Guess which two survive long enough to detonate the bombs and make it back to the surface, where they are located through whale calls?

Right -- Beck and Josh, sort of cuddling in an escape pod.

But they don't kiss, or ask each other out on a date, or anything heteronormative.  Beck does ask Josh to come work for NASA,but he refuses.  He likes being a professor.

Last scene:  Rat hacking into every computer in the world to reveal the truth about the expedition and its crew.

No fade out kiss!  No boy and girl gazing into each other's eyes forever!  This was a great movie!

Drake and Josh and Craig and Eric

Drake and Josh (2004-2007) was a Nickelodeon teencom about two high school stepbrothers.

The scheming underachiever, Drake (Drake Bell).

And the shy intellectual, Josh (Josh Peck).  He only started getting buff in the last season.

Like The Wizards of Waverly Place and The Suite of Life of Zack and Cody, the program was not shy about subtexts.  While both dated girls, Drake and Josh shared a physicality, an emotional connection, and an exclusivity that would elsewhere mark them definitively as romantic partners.

And there was an even more overt gay couple.

Network censorship forbade the nerds Craig and Eric (Alec Medlock, Scott Halberstadt) from being explicitly identified as a gay couple -- not on a program aimed at a teenage audience -- but they were as open as they could be without actually Wearing a Sign.

They danced together at a wedding.
They went on a double date with a heterosexual couple.
They bemoaned the loss of their pictures taken at Niagara Falls (a stereotypic honeymoon destination).
They broke up, realized how much they care for each other, and reconciled (while Drake sang “Beautiful Dreamer").
 In the series finale, the tv-movie Merry Christmas, Drake and Josh (2008), they were shown holding hands.

In a 2007 episode, Drake comes very close to saying the word "gay."   In a feeble, half-hearted attempt to Be Discreet, Eric tells Drake, “Girls are nothing but trouble.  That’s why we don’t have girlfriends.”

Drake stares at him for a long moment, a curious self-satisfied grin on his face.  He is obviously dying to Say  the Word.  The studio audience goes crazy with excitement.  Will they finally hear it spoken aloud?

It looks for all the world like the actor is trying to decide whether he should stick to the script or say something like "You don't have girlfriends because you're gay," and risk a reshoot.

But, in the end, he sticks to the script:  “There are a lot of reasons why you two don’t have girlfriends,” leaving the viewer the option of pretending not to know what those reasons are.

Juvenile tv programs are often loaded down with hints and innuendos -- Even Stevens, Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, and The Wizards of Waverly Place come to mind.

But we're still waiting for a program aimed at teenagers or children to break the silence.