"According to Pernille Fischer Christensen, the director of A Soap, the break-down of definitions of gender and sexuality in cinema simply reflect the realities of today's world. 'In modern life, I as a woman, live and work very much like a man. Women have taken on things from men, which you have to do if you want to survive,' she says. 'In the same way, men have had to learn lots from women in order to survive emotionally. Traditional roles don't exist anymore.'"

Okay, okay, I'm basically with you, sort of. But unfortunately A Soap is a crap film. Plus, it's deals with gender roles mostly through the anticipation of one character's sex change, which I found less than compelling on its own. You feel like a woman, but you're a man. Can an operation make you a woman? Well, if you're a fish that feels like a bird, will a pair of wings and a stapled on beak do it? That's the situation in real life and this film just pushed me further in that direction.

Though it seems like ideologically I might be taking some personal exception here, I'm mostly not impressed with these boundary-pushers as films. They aren't written and directed with, "I want this to be a well-constructed story with engaging characters -- one of whom is also transsexual." I've gotten more of, "I definitely want this to be a movie about transsexuals -- and maybe some other things, I don't know yet." This would be excellent if film were merely a medium for peddling worldviews: unfortunately, there is an aesthetic consideration that comes first.

Making a story about gay cowboys is an interesting frontier (sorry) left mostly unexplored by Hollywood, which hasn't found a way to sell gay sex to its audience yet. Making the story compelling and casting gay crossover idols for your leading men makes it more interesting. But you still have to gloss over the sex itself. As the article laboriously points out, Hollywood is not yet Berlin.