The Perfect Storm, while technically dazzling, takes two perfectly easy-to-look-at actors in the persons of Marky Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney and lets their hair absolutely go to hell before wardrobe slams foamy-fronted, mesh-backed baseball caps down on their unwitting crowns. And Wahlberg never takes his shirt off. Not once! That aside, I just can't take seriously any character who purports to love deep-sea fishing.

X-Men is a decent movie when considered against a sea of summer vapidity, especially given the quintessential numminess of Aussie newcomer Hugh Jackman, but a great scene is lost when director Bryan Singer fails to explore the sexual tension between Xavier and Magneto (Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan, respectively). I anxiously await the spin-off title.

The Patriot stars Mel Gibson and is therefore even less appealing than your standard rah-rah American epic.

And not even my lesbian roommate is interested in the blue-collar-glam, spunky-girl mentality of Coyote Ugly.

So it is with some chagrin that I am watching far more television than is healthy for me, engaging with gusto in the summer of television verité and being shamelessly sucked into five-hour VH1 marathons with titles like The 100 Greatest Moments in Rock and Roll History on Television and The 100 Most-Influential Women in Rock and Roll.

Of course, while my roommate and I have several television sets, one for every room we tend to inhabit for longer than 15 minutes at a stretch, we have cable service on only one of them. There is consequently some compromise that must go on if we are both to enjoy an evening of televised entertainment.

So my roommate and I are gamely watching Intimate Portrait: The Tammy Faye Bakker Story on Lifetime: Television for Women. ("Television for Women" is a misnomer if ever I've heard one. Any channel that relentlessly shows reruns of Designing Women and Golden Girls back to back is clearly aiming at a gay male demographic.) As the hour draws to a close and we're brought up to date on Tammy Faye's doings since the Bakker scandal and her subsequent divorce and remarriage (hyphenating her name to the mellifluous Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner), I'm distracted by a momentary twinge of sympathy for the Jesus diva. The distraction lasts just long enough for Lifetime to launch into a yarn called The Truth About Jane.

I reach for the remote and my roommate pipes up, "Oh, wait, let's give this a chance. It got a really nice review in the paper."

"This?" I say, pointing in disbelief at the TV set.

"Yes. Stockard Channing is in it. She said she wanted to do this movie because she thinks it's important. It's the first time Lifetime has ever produced a movie with a lesbian theme."

"You don't think Stockard Channing did it because she likes to get paid?" I ask.

"No," she says, standing firm with Stockard beyond my reproach. "She's on West Wing now. She doesn't have to do anything she doesn't want to do."

"OK," I say with resignation. "But I'm not doing this one without a drink. Do you want anything?"

"No. I'm still getting over my cold," she says, then sniffs as if to underscore her point.

I mix myself an Absolut Mandarin Tonic and plop down on the couch, ready for a heaping helping of dross.

Lifetime's approach to their first lesbian-themed movie ever is akin to an after-school special for moms. Channing portrays a storybook mother who at one point tells her daughter Jane (whom she strongly favors over her son) that whatever false career trajectories have distracted her in the past, motherhood has always been her one true calling.

Storybook mothers be damned, something is amiss with Jane. She's always been a rather dour child, but now she claims that she doesn't even want a sweet-sixteen party. "But every girl wants a sweet-sixteen party," Mom whines at her lunch companions—a frumpy older woman and RuPaul in boy drag.

Wait. RuPaul is in this! RuPaul was in that other awful lesbian movie my roommate dragged me to—But I'm a Cheerleader. Has RuPaul been sentenced to lesbian community service by some twisted feminist judge taking umbrage at his clownish portrayal of feminine aesthetic?

No, RuPaul is in this movie to show that Mom is enlightened enough to have a gay friend, but that it's "different" when it's in the family. RuPaul, in fact, is occasion for the best lines in the film. When Jane asks her mother how she can be a friend of Jimmy's (RuPaul) and not accept her own daughter, Mom grits her teeth and spits, "Because Jimmy's not my daughter!" Indeed not!

And when Jane shows up on Jimmy's doorstep complaining that the whole world hates her, Jimmy pipes up with, "Honey, I'm black and gay. They hate me way more than they hate you!" Any chump with a pencil and paper can write a story, but it takes talent to write dialogue like that.

Jane reaches a point of self-acceptance, aided and abetted by her homeroom teacher, who seems to materialize from vapor whenever Jane needs crisis intervention. The teacher herself later comes out to Jane, proving conclusively that lesbians can be well-adjusted and pert.

But Mom is still having trouble, despite the fact that even Dad (James Naughton) is learning to adopt the attitude, "Well, shucks, Jane is still our daughter after all." So Mom goes to a PFLAG meeting with Jane and then starts going to PFLAG meetings all by herself, which is way beyond where my mother is at eight years after I came out to her! But Mom's inability to announce "…and my daughter is a lesbian" as part of her PFLAG introduction portends a smoldering issue.

The movie ends with Jane bookended between her dad, her brother, and Jimmy on one side, and her homeroom teacher and the teacher's lover on the other…at a Gay Pride parade! The creative team behind The Truth About Jane, whatever else they have failed to communicate, have unwittingly given shape to my concept of the ninth ring of hell—standing with my dad and my brother, both of whom love deep-sea fishing incidentally, at a Gay Pride parade.

But Mom is nowhere to be seen. "It'll just take some time," the homeroom teacher notes. But I happen to know that all Lifetime movies run exactly two hours, meaning that whatever resolution is in store for Jane and her mother must happen in the remaining four minutes. Just then Mom appears, as if out of the mist, with a queasy look on her face, and Jane spews some platitude about her mother becoming the person she was always meant to be. And that's your movie.

"That wasn't good," I say to my roommate as the credits roll.

"No, it really wasn't," she admits. "But we had fun, didn't we?"

I inform her in advance that I will not be engaging in the following evening's presentation, Intimate Portrait: The Mackenzie Phillips Story, which is advertised immediately following our movie.

"Fine," she says. "But we're not watching Biography's Doris Day piece either."

We'll see about that. And perhaps a movie or two will be released in the coming month that will actually be worth talking about. 

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