As it turns out, 2011 was a really great year for independent queer cinema. I’ve mentioned multiple times over the last few months my love for Weekend, one of best gay movies ever made. And now San Diego is getting to see Pariah, one of the best lesbian films I’ve ever seen, which has won…
Usually, I do a little bit of research about a movie before I see it. At least, I’ll scan the entry on IMDb.com, just so that I have an idea about what I’m about to see – some plot threads, the resumé of the actors or director, and the like. Though I won’t read anyone…
Shame, Steve McQueen’s dystopian tale of compulsion and sibling conflict, is the most sexually explicit movie I’ve seen since John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus but it is not nearly as interesting, inventive or sexy as Mitchell’s movie. In fact, Shame is about as sexy as taking a cold shower, clothed, while your grandmother sits on the…
I may lose all credibility as a film critic by admitting that I am not much of a Martin Scorsese fan. Aside from The Departed, I’ve never actually enjoyed one of his films, even if I’ve respected them. There’s no doubt that he is a technical genius – his scene settings and camera work are…
To me, the funniest moment of The Muppets, Disney’s reboot of the beloved puppet franchise, comes about ten minutes before the end of the movie when Camilla and the other chickens do a rousing rendition of Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You.” They replace every lyric with “Bawk!” and are dressed like Vegas show girls. That…
There’s a kind of bait-and-switch going on with the tagline and title of Like Crazy: “I want you – I need you – I love you – I miss you – Like Crazy.” I got the impression, and I think this was the marketer’s goal, that the movie would be about an obsessive love affair…
Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar As 20th century American politicians go, J. Edgar Hoover is tied with Richard Nixon on the evil-o-meter. Only Joe McCarthy beats them. A megalomaniacal red-baiter who destroyed countless lives and probably made the United States no less secure for the trouble, McCarthy had no redeeming qualities. Hoover and Nixon –…
I didn’t plan it this way, but for the second week in a row I’m reviewing a movie that is oddly in tune with the Occupy Wall Street zeitgeist. While Margin Call, which I wrote about last week, is actually about Wall Street, In Time has a slightly more oblique connection; it uses a science…
Every once in a while, a movie is released at a particularly zeitgeisty moment. To wit, consider the release serendipity of movies such as Fahrenheit 9/11 at the height of the second war in Iraq, or Milk during the Prop. 8 campaign. Now, enter Margin Call, a fictionalized dramatization of something like the collapse of…
My initial reaction to The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, was: “That movie was crazy-pants.” This isn’t a particularly articulate response for a film critic, but occasionally there are times when movies are so jaw-dropping that words like “crazy-pants” seem to be the most adept at explaining the experience. Almodóvar has never…
