But he has his excuses: He got ghosted shortly before the pandemic, and a tarot-card reader in Florida recently told him he shouldn’t get laid until June.
Add to that: He’s a fabulously talented and successful gay living in New York and working in what has to be one of its highest-gay-headcount industries, the musical (this particular musical attracted quite a few A-list producers, including RuPaul, Billy Porter, Jennifer Hudson, and Mindy Kaling). “You’re a young gay living in the big city!” Usher’s doctor scolds (when he admits, shyly, “I average one penetration a year”), which is essentially what I tell Jackson myself. A Strange Loop, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - “I was surprised that they made the right choice,” Jackson says - opens with the promise that “There will be butt-fucking!” And its young, fat, queer, Black theater-queen aspiring-playwright protagonist, Usher (yes, he works as an usher), who’s writing a musical (yes, called A Strange Loop), certainly wants to have gay sex and feels like something is wrong with him for not having it, but the promised butt-fucking, when it appears, is not something anybody wants. Obviously he’s hoping the ticket buyers for Broadway musicals, who trend white, heterosexual, and in from out of town, are at least … curious. “Where’s the counterculture? Where’s the danger? Where’s the excitement? Like, to say, ‘I’m gay. It’s just a few nights before his “Big Black Queer Ass American Broadway Show,” A Strange Loop, was to open across the street at the Lyceum Theater, and though the musical is maybe the gayest thing I’ve ever seen on Broadway, Jackson has clearly not spent much time lately on the gay nightlife circuit. Jackson asks me, picking at a bowl of unusually orange bang bang shrimp at the nearly deserted Bobby Van’s Steakhouse on 45th Street. “I’ve been having this ongoing debate with myself. Jackson on opening night of A Strange Loop.
Throw in Hugh Grant as a smarmy love-rat, Colin Firth as a bumbling gentleman and a script co-written by Richard Curtis, and you’ve got romcom royalty.Michael R. Zellweger’s performance – British accent and all – is just highly believable her Bridget is one of us (although how an assistant at a publishing house can afford to live alone in a one-bedroom flat in London Bridge requires a little suspension of disbelief). That being said, it remains a charming and deeply relatable film, thanks mostly to double-Oscar-winner Renée Zellweger, who injects a lovable charm into her portrayal of the almost perennially unlucky-in-love Bridget. ‘Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess, with a very bad man between her thighs…’īased on Helen Fielding’s newspaper-column-turned-bestselling-book about a loveable but perpetually single thirtysomething living in London, Bridget Jones’s Diary is very much a product of its time (hopefully today, we wouldn’t dare consider Bridget overweight or the fact that she’s single in her thirties a problem). ? The 100 best romantic films of all-time Written by Dave Calhoun, Cath Clarke, Tom Huddleston, Kate Lloyd, Andy Kryza, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj & Matthew Singer Love contains multitudes, and so do romantic comedies, and we considered it all when putting together this list of the best romcoms of all time.
Others are light and airy, or borderline fantastical. Others are dark and cynical, because, well, love often sucks. Some are sophisticated, drilling deep into the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Who hasn’t been in love, in one form or another? And honestly, what’s funnier than the things humans do while under love’s spell?īut the best romantic comedies don’t have to be straight-ahead farces to qualify – although, to be fair, many of them are. Frequently derided and dismissed as ‘chick flicks’, romcoms are, in truth, more broadly relatable than any other category of film.
No movie genre is more misunderstood than romantic comedy.