Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker play elderly lesbians in love

Brenda Fricker — who you may remember as Central Park Pigeon Lady from the much-lauded Home Alone 2 — and Olympia Dukakis are set to star in the forthcoming film Cloudburst, about a lesbian couple that decides to bust out of a nursing home to take a road trip to Canada.

Cloudburst is being billed as a comedy, but there's a poignant undertone: The women, who have been together for 30 years, plot their escape and subsequent trip to Canada because they want to be married before either of them dies.

See how I'm already weeping? There's no way I'll be able to sit through this movie.

Well played on the gender-bender tux, Brenda Fricker. Congratulations, you're ready to play a dyke!

On their way to Canada, the women pick up a young hitchhiker, which of course make me thing the alternate title of Cloudburst could be Thelma and Louise: What If They Survived The Fall?

I'm kidding about Home Alone, by the way. She was Central Park Pigeon Lady, but both Fricker and Dukakis are celebrated, Academy Award-winning actresses.

Fricker won her Oscar in 1989 for her role as Christy Brown's mother in My Left Foot. Dukakis won her Academy Award (and Golden Globe and BAFTA) in 1987 for Moonstruck.

Black leather over a black t-shirt? Ms. Dukakis, you're ready for your lesbian close-up too!

Production for the Cloudburst starts this month in Novia Scotia. Some industry commenters are calling it post-Prop. 8 Oscar-bait. Others think that a movie about mature lesbians will flop if it ever makes it to the box office — the implication being, of course, that an on-screen lesbian couple can only succeed if it appeals to a straight, male audience.

To both of those assumptions, I'd like to play the Brokeback Mountain card. Pre-production, no one thought Brokeback would ever play to a money-making demo. Post-production, "Oscar-bait" followed it everywhere it went. But it won a gazillion awards and did wonderful things for gay visibility.

A commenter over at Gawker supplied an excellent tag line for Cloudburst:

Two old lesbians, sitting in a tree.

K - I - S - S - I - N - G.

First comes love, then comes marriage

Oh, wait...

We'll keep you posted on the film's progress. Does Cloudburst sounds like something you'd be into watching?