IN & OUT (38)

Directed by: Frank Oz

Starring: Kevin Kline, Joan Cusack, Matt Dillon, Tom Selleck

The Pitch: An apparently heterosexual high-school teacher is outed in an Oscar acceptance speech by a former student, days before he's due to get married.

Theo Sez: A Jay Leno monologue - or perhaps a Libby Gelman-Waxner column - with pretensions to satire, even (God help us) social comment. Some clever jokes, some bracingly silly ones (laughed out loud during the "Explore Your Masculinity" sequence), but far too many of them depend on a kind of inbred, vaguely obnoxious name-dropping - jokes about keep-fit gurus and celebrity lawyers, or about Steven Seagal getting an Oscar nomination for a film called "Snowball in Hell" (geddit?). The whole film feels like it's been made for (and by) the kind of people who read "Movieline" for the gossip and think of Tibet as that place Richard Gere's always going on about : it's showbiz to the core, airbrushing pain - in the guise of Cusack's jilted bride - into harmless farce, ending with a parody of the climax from SPARTACUS (or, more directly comparable, DEAD POETS SOCIETY), and of course basing gay men's behaviour on the well-worn comic stereotype familiar from countless limp-wristed incarnations (most recently THE BIRDCAGE, where however - in the context of an old-fashioned farce - it was less annoying). It's a trade-off - the gay hero gives the superficial jokes substance, the glitzy worldview makes him non-threatening - but, even if you can accept the premise (that a man can grow to adulthood remaining oblivious to his sexual orientation), the film's terms of reference are so shallow as to make it meaningless. "Gay" means Barbra Streisand movies here ; "macho" means Arnold Schwarzenegger movies ; and "tolerance" means, presumably, liking both kinds of movies. Simple, no?