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May '06
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Oeuvre uber alles
By: Michael Bronski
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The independent contemporary gay film scene has a range of smart, inventive bright-spots-- Noam Gornick's 2001
Hey, Happy, C. Jay Cox's 2003 Latter
Days-- as well as its share of clunkers-- fill in your own list of personal worsts. |
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Apr '06
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What's Old's New
By: Michael Bronski
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It'd be wonderful to say that Laurence Dunmore's
The Libertine is the first really terrific film of 2006. But even though it had a national release on March 10th,
The Libertine was completed in 2004 and premiered in selected US cities last November, as well as appearing at several major festivals. Even with Johnny Depp and Sarah Morton in the leads, the advance
word on The Libertine was so negative that Depp's
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Corpse
Bride got released first. |
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Mar '06
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Pass/Fail
By: Michael Bronski
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Woody Allen hasn't enjoyed this much positive buzz in years.
Match Point opened this past December to rave reviews, and won for Allen a number of "Ten Best" awards, as well as
an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. |
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Feb '06
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Reader Beware:
By: Michael Bronski
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Now that Brokeback Mountain has opened across the country-- garnering mostly positive reviews and enormous good will-- it is clear that those people who pay attention to "gay
movies" have been gripped by Brokeback fever. |
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Jan '06
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Man or Sheep?
By: Michael Bronski
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All right, it's true I haven't seen Brokeback
Mountain yet-- it doesn't open in my "selected theater" until tomorrow-- and I'm sure it's as well done as all of Ang Lee's films are, is the "breakthrough" queer film that the gay press (and the studio press-people) keep
insisting it is. Even in our Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy and Will and Grace culture, a feature film with a gay love story at its center is still an anomaly. |
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Dec '05
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Mirror, Mirror...
By: Michael Bronski
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The politics of representation are probably as old as writing and drawing. We know there were Greeks who thought that playwright Euripides was giving a bad image of their culture-- after all, Medea is hardly a good role model for young mothers and wives, the first of a long line
of "Desperate Housewives." |
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Nov '05
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King Metrosex I
By: Michael Bronski
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There's a scene in the beginning of Rebel Without a
Cause in which James Dean howls in pain and fear at his bickering parents, "Stop it! You are tearing me apart!" His grief, loneliness, and torment are palpable. |
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Oct '05
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More than French Farce
By: Michael Bronski
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Franco-German films that sing, dance, and row your boat |
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Sep '05
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Love Thy Bro
By: Michael Bronski
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These days it's hard to find a film that will take your breath away, or make you so anxious that you feel physically and emotionally uncomfortable. Sure, you may flinch at some "shock
scene" in Hide and Seek or Skeleton
Key, but that isn't anxiety-- just nervous reaction. |
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Sep '05
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Demonized Skin
By: Michael Amico
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Soon-to-be-released on video, Gregg Araki's new film
Mysterious Skin-- adapted from Scott Heim's eponymous1995 novel-- is the latest instance of intelligence-failure in the way
pop-culture-- even the gayish variety-- fails to address the sex lives of gay youth. Araki-- the film's director, writer, and editor-- demonizes gay sex, gay cruising, gay men, and inter-age
sex with the latter presented as leading to sexlessness or erotic depravity. Where's the safe, believable, and fun middle-ground? |
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Aug '05
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Summer Love
By: Michael Bronski
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June has been the customary month of gay film festivals, which means that queer-themed films often find theatrical release soon after, filling independent theaters with gay summer
fare. |
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Jul '05
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Flogging
By: Michael Bronski
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Don't get me wrong. I like a good fag joke as much as the next guy. In fact most of the fags I know tell fag jokes. That's the funny thing about fag
jokes-- depending on context they can serve two purposes. There is the old-fashioned sort of fag joke that makes fun of fags. Context: think high school locker room.
But there is another sort of fag joke that has been perfected by men within the gay community which, while it may look and sound like a fag joke, actually ends
up making fun of heterosexual norms of masculinity. Context: think of the endless jokes that gay comics tell about how much smarter and wittier fags are then
bullish, stupid heterosexual men. |
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Jun '05
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Steamy Retro
By: Michael Bronski
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It's best to come right out and say it: the new DVD collections of American Model Guild (AMG) films from the 1950s to the 1970s that are being released by the newly invigorated AMG
(and distributed by Colt) are the best thing to happen to gay history in years. With the exception of a few VHS tapes of some of AMG's 1950s soft-core, posing-strap eight-millimeter films,
the enormous output of the famed American Model Guild factory-- over 3,000 short films and nearly a million still photographs-- has been unavailable. |
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May '05
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P. Pan's Père
By: Michael Bronski
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Peter Pan, the boy who refuses to grow old, is also the story that re-fuses to stop being told. James M. Barrie's play
Peter Pan has been filmed and staged endlessly since its debut in 1905. Many people know the famed Mary Martin 1955 Broadway version (filmed for television
in 1960) and the 1954 Disney cartoon version-- which is horrible beyond description. But there are other screen versions-- including a lovely silent film with Ernest Torrance as Captain Hook and Anna Mae Wong as Tiger Lily-- and several television renditions as well. |
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Apr '05
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Adolph & Matthew
By: Michael Bronski
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The release of Oliver Hirschbiegel's magnificent film
Downfall-- Der Untergang, in the original German-- has caused a flurry of praise mixed with stupid, critical hand-wringing. About what? Well, the humanity of Hitler. |
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Mar '05
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Much Ado About...
By: Michael Bronski
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The time-line of popular culture moves both far too quickly and far too slowly. Five years ago "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" would have been unthinkable as a TV show. Ten years ago it would've been a joke on "Saturday Night Live." And now it is hot, with several spin-offs.
The fact that it's still a stupid, mostly boring show is beside the point-- but the reality is that substantive cultural change would look like something quite different. |
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Feb '05
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Left Cut
By: Michael Bronski
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There is a great tradition of perversity in movies from the Lumiere Brothers' early film
A Trip to the Moon (clearly made on some form of acid) to the great films by Luis Bunuel, such as
The Exterminating Angel and
Viridianna (informed by both surrealism and blasphemy),
to Igmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Lars von Trier's
Dogville, and even today, in Hollywood movies as diverse as
Dude, Where's My Car and Freddie Got
Fingered. |
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Jan '05
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Make Lemonade
By: Michael Bronski
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Watching Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation is disconcerting. Caouette's audiovisual style is a flashy mix of quick cross-cutting and repetition that overwhelms and disorients. The crush of explosive material here also exceeds the capacities of a single viewing. |
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Dec '04
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A Trifle Profound
By: Michael Bronski
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It's been a long time since we've seen a real, out-and-out gay theater film. Not some campy retread like
Camp (which was fun, despite itself) or a ghoulish
theater-cum-movie freakshow like Charles Busch's
Die, Mommie, Die, but an authentic, fully-developed,
beautifully-acted manifestation of gay sensibility that's as moving as it's charming, as witty as it's passionate. |
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Nov '04
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Oldies
By: Michael Bronski
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There've been a slew of quite wonderful DVDs released in the past few weeks, all of which are worth watching, and even watching again. |
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Oct '04
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Top Bottom
By: Michael Bronski
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The furor over Mel Gibson's religious curiosity piece
The Passion of the Christ buzzed before and during its theatrical release. The home-video version, out now, has rekindled the debate, mostly centering on how (or whether-- not that there's really any question)
Gibson resurrects and exalts the traditional Christian view that the Jews were guilty of deicide. |
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Sep '04
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Ties that Bind
By: Michael Bronski
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In the midst of the season's junk movies, the queer summer standouts are Spike Lee's
She Hate Me and Michael Mayer's
Home at the End of the World. Both films have been slammed-- universally, for the former, and considerably for the latter. But don't
be dissuaded-- it's a case of the movies being smarter than their critics.
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Aug '04
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Killer Gay Flicks
By: Michael Bronski
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It's almost a relief that two of the most publicized queer movies of the past few months-- now just out on DVD-- were about gay and lesbian murderers. Finally, you might think, some queer characters with intrinsic dramatic interest. But, alas, neither
Monster, with its Academy Award nominations and overly-praised performance by Charlize Theron, nor
Party Monster deliver on the promise of their premises. |
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Jul '04
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Newish Jewish
By: Michael Bronski
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Yossi and Jagger, which made the rounds of both the queer and the Jewish film festivals last year, has just been released on DVD and video, and is not-to-be-missed. |
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Jun '04
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Ein Klassiker
By: Michael Bronski
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Few filmmakers leave behind a body of work that can exist in the present without drawing sustenance from the twin evils of nostalgia and parody. Sure, there are great directors whose
work still stands up after decades-- Fellini, Ford, Hawkes, Murnau, DeSica, Griffith, Sturgis, Bergman-- although each made clunkers and in the case of Fellini and even Hawkes, some of their
most lauded work, although technically wonderful, is starting to fail time's test. |
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May '04
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Best Gay Films Just in the Past?
By: Michael Bronski
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Gay audiences often complain about how dumbed-down queer movies
are. But lots of Hollywood films don't have an idea in their heads.
Some of them-- say,
Runaway Jury or The Bourne Identity never intend to; they're the
slick, stupid thrillers that they are. Other films intend to say
something profound; often they don't. |
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Apr '04
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Queer Eye
By: Michael Bronski
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Along with Stonewall and Halloween, the Academy Awards are an annual holiday in Gaydom. For decades queens have gathered in front of their televisions to watch, with baited breath--
no matter how intense the tedium-- the yearly masturbatory PR gambit that the film industry produces for itself. Sure it's fun, and even when not, it has the fascination of a car wreck. |
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Mar '04
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Piping Hot
By: Michael Bronski
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In the Western canon, boys symbolize lots of things. There's winged Cupid, with his quiver of arrows, who stands for love's sting and arbitrariness. |
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Feb '04
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Scenic Views
By: Michael Bronski
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The contemplation and cataloging of the year's best, or worst, queer films is often an exercise in masochism, or at least melancholia. 2003's queer movies were probably no better or worse than recent years'. |
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Jan '04
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Gunboys
By: Michael Bronski
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It's no secret that America has a continuing romance with violence. |
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