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Dec '03
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Death by Stereotype
By: Michael Bronski
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Nine Dead Gay Guys revels in big-dicked blacks, money-grubbing Jews, and shower-shy Pakistanis. |
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Nov '03
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Candles Aflame
By: Michael Bronski
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Sure, if you want to go see a new gay movie see
Party Monster, the club-scene, murder-comedy, drama about New York's fast lane in the slow early 1990s. But then that would be, pretty much, a waste of time as the movie is,
pretty much, awful. |
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Oct '03
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Drama Cubs
By: Michael Bronski
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Sometimes films are so enjoyable, so much fun, so emotionally elevating, that it doesn't matter how bad they are. The visceral enjoyment of not-very-good film is one of the great pleasures of going to the movies. (No one ever says-- "Oh, we went to the opera to see the
new production of Rossini's La Gazza Ladra, and it was so bad it was great!") |
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Sep '03
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Sweet, Inept, Earnest
By: Michael Bronski
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There is a dearth of "gay movies"-- whatever they are-- this summer.
Capturing the Friedmans exposes the hysteria around man-boy relationships and is a
great film, but not especially gay. American
Wedding has some good gay jokes. Camp has some great gay kids.
Pirates of the Caribbean has some great gay makeup
on Johnny Depp. And Sinbad: Legend of the Seven
Seas has some weird gay sensibility, with Brad Pitt's voice sounding faggier than usual. But none are really
gay movies. |
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Aug '03
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Poolside Homicide
By: Michael Bronski
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François Ozon's emergence as a major force in contemporary cinema has been more sneak attack then direct ascent. Many of his early short films went essentially unnoticed in the late 1990s, until
See the Sea and The Dress were paired together and appeared at some US
queer festivals. |
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Jul '03
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Film Flam
By: Michael Bronski
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Gay film festivals have, over the last decade, garnered the reputation for being less than electrifying. That's why the scramble at the Castro theater on June 14th during the showing of the Israeli film
Yossi and Jagger (directed by Eytan Fox) must have added some real
excitement to the evening. |
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Jun '03
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Queer Subtext
By: Michael Bronski
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What is it about Adam Sandler that makes him such an (almost) unerringly popular screen idol? Sure, last summer's
Mr. Deeds was not the blockbuster hit it was intended to be, and
the Christmas-time release of Eight Crazy
Nights, Sandler's animated Hanukkah feature, were less than raves. But in the onslaught of an incredibly productive career these are small
hesitations. |
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May '03
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Sex Gestapo Aftermath
By: Michael Bronski
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There have been many documentaries that startle and move:
Harlen County, Shoah, and The Sorrow and the
Pity come to mind; and they are great films as well as important
social documents. But it's rare that a documentary can not only startle us emotionally but dazzle us with its filmmaking and make us rethink how we watch movies. |
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Apr '03
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Degaying of the Oscars
By: Michael Bronski
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It used to be that the Academy Awards were one of the great gay holidays: parties in bars, endless chatter about who would and wouldn't win what, and the speculation on who was gay
and who should be. |
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Mar '03
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Nuancectomy
By: Michael Bronski
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Stephen Daldry's The Hours, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, is one of those odd movie quirks-- an art film that goes big-time commercial. |
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Feb '03
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Sleeping Beauties
By: Michael Bronski
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How will Pedro Almodovar surprise us next? From the beginning he showed an original vision driven by a queer sensibility as engaging as it was quirky remember his 1984
What Have I done to Deserve This? and Pepi, Luci, Bom
(filmed in 1980, but released in the US in 1992). His 1987
Law of Desire bright a healthy dose of gay sex and trangenderism into his work, and
the release of Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown in 1988 gained him world recognition as a major artist. |
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Jan '03
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Celestially Suburban
By: Michael Bronski
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Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven is both an incredible film and a minor disappointment. It's a meticulous re-creation of the sensibility, style, and politics of the great 1950s films of Douglas Sirk
All that Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, Written on the
Wind. As homage it is word- and picture-perfect. But Haynes's re-creation somehow lacks the power and emotional drive that made Sirk's films so resonant. |
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Dec '02
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Homo Novus
By: Michael Bronski
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Punch-Drunk Love the new Adam Sandler movie has become a semi-surprise hit in the US. Its highly-touted premiere at Cannes was no surprise the French are always at
the forefront of film fashions, even those they create themselves (as they usually do). But in America, the film had a major obstacle to overcome: Adam Sandler. |
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Nov '02
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Hauntingly Fruity
By: Michael Bronski
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To say that François Ozon's Eight
Women is a giddy cross between Stanley Donan's
Funny Face and Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Van
Kant (with large dollops of The Women and
Clue tossed in) is-- while certainly capturing its eccentricities-- to underestimate the juxtaposition of its sheer likableness with its profound, troubling darkness. |
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Oct '02
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Honor a Fireman
By: Michael Bronski
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Everybody likes to hear people talk dirty. And when women talk dirty it's even funnier. Of course to be really funny when talking dirty you actually have to be talking about
something else. |
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Sep '02
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Fluffer Nutter
By: Michael Bronski
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Everyone loves porn movies, even as they say that they're not very well made. But like with jockstraps and mayonnaise, some are made better then others. And while the ultimate requirement for a porn film is that it gets us hard and keeps us hard-enough to get off, movies
about porn are a different matter. |
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Aug '02
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Acid-Tongued
By: Michael Bronski
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Watching The Cockettes-- the incredibly great documentary about the notoriously famous San Francisco drag theater troupe of the late 1960s-- both exhilarates and depresses. |
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Jul '02
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Wit Dried & Crushed
By: Michael Bronski
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How The Importance of Being Earnest becomes an object lesson in
The Importance of Not Botching Genius |
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Jun '02
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Not Quite Julio y Jaime
By: Michael Bronski
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There are so many self-consciously ingratiating things about
Y Tu Mamá También ("And Your Mother, Too," or "So's Your Mother") that it isn't long before its minimal charm begins
to wear very thin. As written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón whose AIDS comedy
Solo Con Tu Pareja was both surprising and lovely
Y Tu Mamá También is a Mexican
adolescent-boy-road-movie that is filled with sex and hijinks, that ultimately betrays itself with a sentimental ending. |
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May '02
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Tinsel Town Overcomes?
By: Michael Bronski
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Yes, everyone agreed: Hollywood has finally overcome its racist past and has now moved into a new era. With both Halle Berry and Denzel Washington winning the top acting Oscars this year, the media is acting as through
the motion picture industry has just gone through its own version of Brown v. Board of Education. No more separate-but-equal, no more back of the bus, no more white-only water fountains in tinsel town. |
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Apr '02
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Identity Blues
By: Michael Bronski
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For several years now it looked as though American films both Hollywood and independent about queerness had no original place to go. The litany of second-rate gay or lesbian themes movies grew longer with
each month's list of new films. |
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Mar '02
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The Tragedy of Camp
By: Michael Bronski
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The Brotherhood of the
Wolf (Le Pacte des
Loups) is a bizarre French
semi-horror, sort of political intrigue,
buddy, kick-boxing, historical, action,
faux werewolf movie. |
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Feb '02
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Dreaded Happy Families
By: Michael Bronski
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Every happy family is alike" wrote Tolstoy in
Anna Karenina "and every unhappy family..." well, take it from there. The problem with Hollywood movies about families is that they are-- happy or unhappy-- all alike. That is
to say, mostly heterosexual and most rather dull. |
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Jan '02
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Beyond Wizards
By: Michael Bronski
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Now that the holidays are over and you've had your fill of wizards, elves, hobbits, and the dirty little secrets of British boarding schools, it may be time for more adult movies. You know, films that reflect seriously upon the
reality of everyday life and help us grapple with the myriad, complicated problems we all face in a world that's too quickly falling apart. |
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Dec '01
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Queers as Jews
By: Michael Bronski
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Hollywood has never been much good at social issues, especially when it pats itself on the back for dealing with them. |
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Nov '01
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Funny Drag Queen
By: Michael Bronski
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Watching Funny Girl is like watching a drag queen
do Barbra doing Barbra-- it is what the French post-structuralists would call hyper-reality, or the simulacra-- a copy of a copy. |
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Oct '01
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You Fag You
By: Michael Bronski
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One would have thought that GLAAD-- Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation-- would have had better things to do than to attack Kevin Smith's new film
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back as being homophobic.
Even queers who might have agreed with GLAAD's strong-arm tactics on Eminem and Dr. Laura-- and there were plenty who didn't-- would probably admit that
Jay and Silent Bob was pretty innocuous and not the threat
that GLAAD imagined and proclaimed. |
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Sep '01
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Hedwig's Apologia
By: Michael Bronski
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A clash of chords begins the film, and suddenly we're faced with a towering, insanely coifed, manic, transsexual, glam-rock diva-- Hedwig-- who dominates the screen. |
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Aug '01
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Teen Angst
By: Michael Bronski
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It's difficult to imagine a film more unlikable than Larry Clark's
Bully. Its cheap exploitation of serious themes would be welcomed as summer-movie trash-- after all, some form of exploitation
is at the heart of all movies; that's why we get off on them. But
Bully is mendacious and pretentious, while posing as a serious journey into the heart of what's wrong with American society. |
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Jul '01
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Love Among Cannibals
By: Michael Bronski
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Homosexuals get accused often of antisocial behaviors, but cannibalism isn't among them. Anthropologist, writer, raconteur, and homosexual, Tobias Schneebaum is one of the few New Yorkers to have confessed to engaging
in the practice (well, just once). |
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