Drinks and Bound, With a Guest!

This week we are bringing in our good friend Audrey! She is a pretty cool person/poet, as you can see for yourself at her blog: audreykuo.wordpress.com. She also has discerning alcohol taste, so I thought instead of making food we'd mix some drinks—impress your date by doing more than showing you know how to use a waiter's key!

This video is a little longer than the others, but I challenge you to edit three alcohol-fueled and digression-prone people down to five minutes and keep any fun and cohesiveness.

The drinks:

Dark and Stormy

1 shot rum (of the darker variety)

6 oz. ginger beer (Ginger ale is ok, but less gingery.)

dash of lime juice

serve over ice

There are fancy detailed recipes out there, but this quick-and-dirty method is plenty satisfying. 

Off-label penicillin:
2 oz whiskey or scotch
1.5 oz honey-ginger syrup
1.5 oz lemon juice

(Penicillins are typically topped off with Laphroig. If you’re on a budget, generic-brand meds should cure what ails you just as well.)

Make the honey-ginger syrup before you want to drink. Mix one part honey with less than one part water. Boil with sliced fresh ginger, and let it cool in some kind of jar-like apparatus. For the drink: put those things together. Shake with ice. Decant. Imbibe.

Title: Bound (1996)

Written and Directed by: Lana and Andy Wachowski

Trailer

Hi! So I’m not Syd or Lorena, and I also made a drink, not dinner, but I hope that doesn’t make you less inclined to read my recap. I feel like I should post a disclaimer that I am anti-spoiler, and I feel bad about including any details in here. Maybe you should pause here and go watch the film, and then we can discuss it together. I'll wait here.

Ready? "Bound" is about two ladies. Corky, "a tough female ex con," is butch-esque, in that she has tats and fixes things. We open with Corky riding in an elevator. Violet, who we read as feminine, in that she is wearing lady clothes and sleeps with dudes, is also in the elevator. Violet elevator eyes Corky, then decides to seduce her. 

Corky fixes some things in the apartment next door to Violet. Violet seduces Corky by bringing by a cup of coffee and saying mad flirty things. When she decides that’s too subtle, she drops an earring down her sink to lure Corky over and tell her, "Hey, I'm seducing you."

Sexy time ensues. Turns out, Violet is only with her mob boyfriend Caesar because that’s how she makes her money. She's into ladies. She thinks Corky should help her steal $2 million from the mob. Violence ensues. 

OK, that's enough plot. "Bound" is cinematically beautiful; there are some fantastic scenes contrasting patches of vivid color against a relatively grayscale everything else. There’s some excellent acting bits, even though most of the dudes are a bunch of stereotypical mob characters. 

I think the most interesting part of the conversation Syd, Lorena, and I had, though, was about whether "Bound" is a queer movie. There isn’t a ton of dialogue around what the relationship means, or consideration of what their place is within society. On the one hand, you miss out on typically lesbian movie dialogue, but I enjoy that the couple is actually queer (as opposed to one lesbian + straight girl with crush).  Also, during sexy time, there’s an extended shot of Violet topping Corky, and I love that subversion of expectations, that the film queers the idea of butch/femme and the viewer’s expectation that Corky will do the seducing and give pleasure. I actually enjoy that the film isn’t about coming out or dealing with lesbian couple as lesbian couple -- they just get to be characters caught up in an action film who happen to be queer, instead of having to be characters placed in the film as queer. 

All that said, though, I think my major critique of “Bound” is that Violet and Corky both feel underdeveloped, and you don’t get a strong sense of why their relationship works, other than the sexy time. It feels like we get rushed into all of the action and suspense, at the expense of richer character development.

Overall Rating:
Lorena & Audrey: 7 out of 10 shots.
Syd: 6.5 shots

Queer Rating:
Audrey: 7* shots
Lorena: 8 shots
Syd: 5 shots

Hope you'll enjoy or have enjoyed this classic. How queer do you think it is? Does Violet's voice sound like a higher-pitched version of Batman to you? Make your opinion known in the comments!