John Hawkes’s performance in The Sessions is being described as reminiscent of Daniel Day-Lewis’ Christy Brown in the classic 1989 film My Left Foot. Playing the Irish writer who was born with cerebral palsy that prevented him from using any body part but his left foot, Day-Lewis won an Oscar (as did Brenda Fricker playing…
Turner Classic Movies, Sunday, Nov. 25, 1:30 a.m. On my list of movies that every gay man should see, Funny Girl is what transformed Barbra Streisand from a Broadway star into a movie star. Playing the great Vaudeville comedienne Fanny Brice from her girlhood to international fame, Streisand does everything from comedy to drama, owning…
Normally, I balk when I’m confronted with film characters who are mentally ill, have odd neurological ticks or are addicted to some sort of chemical. Partly, this is because I spend so much time in the real world with such people, and the fictional versions are rarely convincing. For every virtuoso performance like Joaquin Phoenix’s…
also playing The last time Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner collaborated was Munich, the taut, emotionally devastating thriller about the Israeli agents who hunted down the perpetrators of the kidnapping and massacre of Israeli Olympians in 1972. So, I had high hopes for their latest. Lincoln stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, Sally Field…
Turner Classic Movies Since it’s one of those weird gay movies from before Stonewall that I haven’t seen, I’m DVRing Reflections in a Golden Eye, a movie about repressed homosexual (and heterosexual) desire starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor and directed by the great John Huston. Not considered Huston’s best movie by far (that would…
A great deal was made out of the fact that Brave is the first Pixar movie with a female protagonist. Since Disney has had female protagonists from the beginning – Snow White was released in 1939 – Pixar isn’t exactly breaking new ground. If anything, Brave is the first major American animated film with a…
Scene Out BY KIM RESCATE AND ANA PINES We drove up to Los Angeles for the New Beverly Cinema’s 5th annual All-Night Horror Show. We didn’t know what to expect. We managed to make it through virtually all of the six movies. There were breaks in between and prior to the features; trailers of other…
Whoever was behind the marketing for Magic Mike decided that they were not even going to mention the great, Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, let alone promote him; they were going to hide the fact that the movie is actually really, really good. They were going to focus the ads on a shirtless, occasionally pants-less Channing…
I was not a fan of the Academy Award-winning Precious, because it took Murphy’s Law to beyond what seemed possible: Precious’ suffering was never-ending, always worsening, and virtually meaningless. Director Lee Daniels never flinched from showing us the worst of the worst of the everyday physical and emotional violence suffered by the obese, abused, HIV+…
thursday, oct. 18 Temple, Palace, Mosque: Southern Asian and Persian Art In this new exhibition, the works are organized according to the types of architectural spaces with which they are associated. The first space presents arts associated with Southern Asian temples be they Buddhist, Hindu, or Jain, from Afghanistan to Southeast Asia. Works of art…
