2023 Queer Film Challenge #24: a film directed by or featuring choreography by Kenny Ortega.
This absolute creampuff of a film is routinely called one of the worst movies ever made? What a shanda! We've got to stop letting straight reviewers near camp, because they will never understand it.
I want to tell you a story. A couple of years ago, I read an article in which music critic Joshua Kosman talked about the one time he ever booed at…
I enjoy a lot of different kinds of horror movies, from lurid giallos to surreal experiments, but nothing — no monster, no killer, no dilapidated mansion or unwanted bodily transformation — will ever scare me as much as the idea of doubting one's perception of reality. It's the core theme of my most vivid nightmares. The reason I watched mother! (and loved it) despite all the bad things I'd heard about it was because I'd had dreams about people I…
2023 Queer Film Challenge #18: a film starring Stephen Fry.
Oof, this was a rough one. I almost noped out about ten minutes in, after the one-two-three punch of a racist joke, a man-in-a-dress joke and a child-abuse joke. But I decided to stick it out and, well... it did get better in some ways, but arguably worse in others. For starters: the child-abuse joke doesn't matter, because nothing matters in this movie. If a guy can fall multiple stories and…
2023 Queer Film Challenge #12: a film starring Udo Kier with an average rating under 3.0.
Maybe it's just because I was a teenager at the time, but there's something very compelling to me about how the late 90s imagined the cyberpunk future. At the intersection of sensationalized fears about urban crime and the mainstreaming of various 80s subcultures lay the beautiful image of an oasis hidden amidst the ruins, violent and decadent, dangerous but free — a place where…
2021 Queer Film Challenge #17: a film by Silas Howard.
This is Americana. Not the mom and apple pie kind, not the eagles and guns kind, but an anarchist Americana of outsiders, like a queer John Dos Passos for the 21st century, or Gregg Araki on a budget of Ziploc bags full of quarters. I'm talking punk rock and minimalist country blues, neon signs and surveillance cameras, petty theft and gay bars. Here in the US a car represents freedom,…
2021 Queer Film Challenge #5: a documentary about a queer visual artist.
In her eye-opening book Whipping Girl, Julia Serano discusses how cis filmmakers implicitly frame trans women's femininity as "fake" by focusing on images of us putting our looks together — getting dressed, applying makeup, etc. Laerte-se does just that with its trans subject, coming back again and again to images of her shaving her legs, painting on her eyebrows, and trying on various outfits. The cis interviewer, Eliane…
