Let’s get this out of the way: Despite what you may have heard, read on Twitter, or seen ranted about on Facebook, The Imitation Game is a not a homophobic whitewash of Alan Turing, the gay British man who broke the Nazi codes during World War II and more or less invented the computer. Despite…
Wild Since Reese Witherspoon won an Oscar for playing June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, she has done very little to be proud of: doing bad movies, getting arrested and so on. But this year, the fruits of her renewed labor can be seen in Gone Girl, which she produced, and Wild, which she…
At the end of Catching Fire, the second film in The Hunger Games series, our hero Katniss Everdeen, played by Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, has managed to destroy the high-tech dome in which she and 23 other “tributes” from the 12 districts of the nation of Panem were fighting each other to death. The previous year,…
I remember first reading about the strange case of John du Pont, the extremely odd heir to the du Pont fortune who was murderously obsessed with Olympic wrestlers, in an article in a gay newspaper 20 years ago. The supposition at the time was that no one could be as obsessed with wrestling as to…
When you’ve seen as many LGBT-themed movies as I have, after a while the descriptor “gay coming of age” attached to a film makes me sigh. Really, another one? Part of my exhaustion with the genre is that they tend to have virtually identical plots, despite cultural or historic specifics, and another part of my…
Before I get into my review of Horns, I want to complain about a small part of the film that doesn’t have much of an effect on either the film’s plot or ultimately its quality. Two of the characters in the film, both childhood friends of the film’s hero Ig Parrish (Daniel Radcliffe), are secretly…
Sites like Gawker, papers like the National Enquirer and stations like HLN give it some serious competition, but local television news is still arguably the crassest, most cynical and often least ethical news medium in the United States. This has been the case for decades, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has become a cliché…
Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) One of the great lines – and there are many – in Birdman is spoken by Ed Norton’s lauded method-actor Mike Shiner to Michael Keaton’s blockbuster star Riggan Thomas, who wants to earn respect by appearing on Broadway: “Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.” The scene…
Whiplash It’s hard to imagine a teacher worse than Terrence Fletcher, the jazz band leader at fictional Shaffer Conservatory of Music in New York who J.K. Simmons plays with terrifying, unpredictable, sadistic joy. Fletcher, something like a cross between a Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket and Delores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order…
In the somewhat tired genre of British movies that focus on plucky working class folks winning contests and defying mores (The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, Brassed Off, etc.) the politics of class conflict are usually sublimated by the up-from-our-bootstraps plotlines. It’s actually kind of sinister how those films trivialize the experience of British coal miners,…
