Bad Manners (Jonathan Kaufer, 1997)
Watch out for that “placid surface.” Movies based on plays don’t always fare well in the transition. There’s a double danger here: slavishly recreating the “stage experience” in its often[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)
The supreme masterpiece of the poetic documentary form Three recent views of Cuba: the repressive, fragmented, poverty-stricken last gasp of modern Communism offered by the U.S. media; the wonderland of[…]
Thanhouser Classics: Long-Lost Pleasures from the Dawn of Cinema
Thanhouser produced 1,000+ titles between 1909 and 1917, but less than 200 survive. Silent cinema is often written off, even by cinephiles who pride themselves on their intimate knowledge of[…]
LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Visual Artists
Devoutly Elusive: Love Is the Devil (John Maybury, 1998)
Timid top George Dyer meets pushy bottom Francis Bacon, with art and death the inevitable result In a typical moment in this artful biopic of Francis Bacon, the ultra-queer painter[…]
Comedy · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Primal Gross-out: Pink Flamingos Restored
The seminal trash classic all dressed up with somewhere to go Cinema, like any art form, has its milestones — the first “story film” in The Great Train Robbery (1903),[…]
Words and Music: An Unsung Masterpiece?
Forgotten biopic offers a baker’s dozen of delights Is Words and Music, MGM’s 1948 “and then they wrote” biopic of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, a masterpiece? Although long[…]
Jules and Jim: An Amorous Cyclone
Sex, art, and romance — some notes on the sources of Truffaut’s famous film It is 1935. (Theodore) Adorno writes to Walter Benjamin, “With regard to your remark on fashion,[…]
Actors & Personalities · LGBT & Queer
The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema
Shed a tear for that shimmering, noble, lost creature of the cinema — the sissy! What’s wrong with Hollywood? Nowadays you hear everyone asking that. This very morning, I heard[…]
Horror · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Queer Horror: Decoding Universal’s Monsters
Monsters and drag queens and dykes — oh my! After decades of being devalued by lousy prints on video and television, Universal’s classic ’30s horror films have been resurrected, refurbished,[…]
Goosing Mother Goose: The Fairy Tales of Tex Avery
“Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further.” –[…]
The Spirit Moves: The World of Kenji Mizoguchi
The roots of artistry are often sought in autobiography, and for filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, this seems an especially appropriate place to start. Mizoguchi, with Ozu and Kurosawa one of the three undisputed masters from[…]
A Quickie Look at the Life & Career of Tex Avery
As if radically rethinking the Hollywood cartoon weren’t enough, our boy Tex can also be thanked for inventing or perfecting Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and perhaps the greatest character in[…]
Oscar Fischinger’s Visual Music: Ten Short Films by the Master Animator on DVD
Film historians have made much, and rightly so, of the enormous influence of 1930s German and Austrian émigrés on the American film scene and by extension on American culture in[…]
Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden
The ultimate in queenly revenge as an obese ugly duckling becomes a sleek, sophisticated homo The fairy tale about the ugly duckling who turns into a swan gets the gay[…]
Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss
Again Hollywood cheats on the issue of two men kissing – when are they going to get it right? In the past few years, two distinct trends have dominated gay[…]
Pre-“Felliniesque”: Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria
“Fellini’s structuring of his heroine’s story as a series of incidents rather than a linear plot was innovative at the time, doubly so because examples of a woman at the[…]
Brought Low by Life: Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu
Nobody suffers like Oharu The first time I went to see Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, I asked a friend who was familiar with the film to come with me. Although[…]
Book review: Sing Out! by Boze Hadleigh
Sing Out! Gays and Lesbians in the Music World by Boze Hadleigh. New York: Barricade Books. $21.95 ($30.75 Cdn), ISBN 1-56980-116-9, 328pp. To order, call 1-800-59-BOOKS or e-mail [email protected]. America’s prisons[…]
Book reviews: VideoHound’s Soundtracks; VideoHound’s Independent Film Guide
VideoHound’s Soundtracks: Music from the Movies, Broadway and Television, ed. by Didier C. Deutsch. Detroit: Visible Ink Press. 1998. $24.95. ISBN: 1-57859-025-6. 1,024pp. To order, call 1-800-776-6265, or try your local[…]
Book review: Vamps, by Pam Keesey
Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale, by Pam Keesey, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997. $21.95. ISBN: 1-57344-026-4. Trade paperback, 171pp. To order, call the publisher at 800-780-2279, e-mail[…]
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