Future Imperfect: Sci-Fi’s Nationalist Narratives
The future’s no future, but that’s okay – your spaceship is almost ready! Science fiction is, inevitably, an American genre, its narratives – literary and cinematic – fueled by the[…]
Category: Genres
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Queer Voices: The 1997 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
The world’s biggest lesbian and gay filmfest shows the pleasures and pitfalls of gay auteurs caught between assimilation and opposition. Watch out for the “Stepford” homosexual! Gay culture is at[…]
Worshipping Delon: Queer Notes on Rene Clement’s Purple Noon
Noon isn’t the only thing that’s purple in this continental ode to Alain Delon’s crotch. Some “classics” earn that status from innovative mise en scene, others from memorable performances, still[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Queer Documentary: Gay USA (1978)
Queer activism circa 1978 showed a diverse optimistic community moving ever closer to unity — before the body blow of AIDS. Porn directors aren’t usually known for their political consciousness;[…]
Trans-itions: Richard Spence’s Different for Girls (1996)
In a cinema crowded with self-conscious transgressions, Kim offers the real article when she strips to show her straight boyfriend the thrilling secrets of the altered body. Transsexual imagery has typically[…]
PBS’s Queer Newsmagazine In the Life: June 1996
The theme of the latest edition of the acclaimed PBS queer newsmagazine is the queer body and the queer body politic under assault. The body as battleground is the tacit[…]
Asian · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Bending the Gender Till It Breaks: Hong Kong’s Who’s the Man? Series
Hong Kong’s gender-benders are the stuff of legend; director Patrick Chan adds two key works to the canon in these 1996 bookend satires of fame, pop music, and forbidden kisses.[…]
Blaxploitation: A Sketch
“America consistently countered the growing concepts of black pride and power with a virtual army of self-sacrificing mammy figures (both male and female), pimps, whores, ‘great black hopes,’ and the[…]
Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971)
“His Finzi-Continis, set in the years 1938 to 1943, is an autumnal work in two senses – the subject is the last golden flash of freedom before one of history’s major tragedies,[…]
Combat Autopsy: Raoul Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead
“What is most disturbing about all of this is the straight, uninflected manner in which Walsh visualizes the story.” Writers on film rarely discuss the combat genre and, when they do, they[…]
Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995)
“The Blade is the director’s paean to the muscular, exposed male body and a virtual catalog of ways to assault it – pummeling, whipping, biting, beating, and hacking . . .” Tsui Hark’s[…]
Patrick Leung’s Beyond Hypothermia (1996)
“Her mechanistic thinking precludes her from pursuing the noodle vendor in the usual ways; she can only see him after she has killed, and her sudden appearances and disappearances in[…]
African American · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Afro Promo: Jenni Olsen’s Survey of Black Cinema Trailers 1946-1976 on DVD
“America consistently countered the growing concepts of black pride and power with a virtual army of self-sacrificing mammy figures (both male and female), pimps, whores, ‘great black hopes,’ and the[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Synthetic Pleasures: Techno-Revolution or Just Another Dystopia?
After seeing this film that features everything from body and mind modifications to cryogenics to the fresh hell of cyberspace, you may want to go eat some dirt. At the[…]
The Church of Camp: San Francisco’s Castro Theatre
Every religion needs a church, and camp followers have worshipped regularly at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre for two decades. John Lennon’s famous quote that the Beatles were more popular than[…]
Directors · Interviews · Silents
Angel in Exile, Part II: Talking with Pioneering Director Allan Dwan
Outtakes from an Interview with Dwan, December 1980 * * * Fairbanks, Shirley Temple, Ronald Reagan, all the “pansies and poseurs of Hollywood” – no one was safe from the[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Slapstick Realist: The Cinema of Paul Morrissey
Junkies, queens, washed-up B-movie hags – these are the scintillating “family values” advocates that campmeister and right-wing Republican Morrissey serves up. * * * Much of the myth, if we[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Ollie’s Somersault: Thoughts on Oliver Hardy (and Stan Laurel)
(from Triste, Solitario y final (Sad, Alone, Final), a novel by Osvaldo Soriano, Einaudi Editore “Roll it!” Makeup had changed the fat man’s face into a clownish mask. He’s in an enormous[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Eternal Child: The Many Meanings of a Mask (on Stan Laurel)
Laurel’s mask – the goofy, sweet-natured grown-up child – had its roots in the classic commedia dell’arte. The reasons why Stan Laurel is always entered in film annals as an[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Stealing the Clown’s Clothes: Stan Laurel’s Relationship with Chaplin
Chaplin’s most famous “creation” was his little tramp – but Stan Laurel did it first, as Chaplin knew all too well. One of the most troubling aspects of Stan Laurel’s[…]
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