Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      How Elvis Measured His Success: With Watches

      by

      The legend’s hips weren’t the only things keeping time, says Catherine Martin, the production designer for Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic.Of all the swagger and style that defined Elvis Presley — the gyrating hips, the clothes, the cars, the smirk of all smirks, that hair! — his collection of watches probably didn’t elicit giddy screaming across teen-dom in the late 1950s.But “Elvis,” a new biopic of the singer’s life, celebrates it all. Directed by Baz Luhrmann (with, one assumes, the same panache that all but turned the music and the dancing into characters in films like “Moulin Rouge!” and “Strictly Ballroom”), the movie is said to be a homage to a humble man whose love of collecting and trading watches was often overlooked during his all-too-brief 42 years.Elvis Presley in 1968. “He would swap watches with strangers whose watches he admired,” said Catherine Martin, the costume and production designer for Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” biopic.Getty Images“Watches were a symbol of his success and a big part of his story, and he gathered more valuable watches as his career developed,” said Catherine Martin, the four-time-Oscar-winning costume and production designer for the film, in a phone interview from her home in her native Australia. “They were a status symbol, and yet Elvis traded and gave watches away. He would swap watches with strangers whose watches he admired. It was crazy.”Ms. Martin, who also is a producer on the film and is married to Mr. Luhrmann, said she saw Presley’s love of watches as essential to telling his story: The way he wore and collected and traded watches reflects the image he created for himself as “the King,” but blended with his folksy roots.“Elvis was an absolutely iconoclastic dresser, and he was always accessorizing watches,” Ms. Martin said. “He reinvented himself constantly throughout his career. We don’t think of him as shocking now, but in the ’50s it was like he was a member of the Sex Pistols.”That radical transformation of Presley, played by Austin Butler in the film, provides much of the story line for “Elvis,” including his tumultuous relationship with his manager, Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who discovered the singer in 1955.Watches are an ever-present, if not obvious, element in many of the film’s scenes, Ms. Martin said, particularly because Presley always put a great deal of thought into how he wore and accessorized timepieces.“Even in the 1968 TV special, in his black leather outfit, he had a custom leather wristband made for a Bulova Accutron Astronaut,” she said, referring to Presley’s famous televised comeback concert. “A lot of the watches he wore were about technological style advances. He was always interested in what the latest watches were.”The watch that started it all was one he owned just as he was hitting it big: the triangular Hamilton Ventura, created by the American industrial designer Robert Arbib and known as the world’s first battery-powered watch. It became a signature for Presley — showing up in a gold version in his 1961 film “Blue Hawaii” — and for the watch company, which reintroduced the “Elvis watch” in 2015 to mark what would have been his 80th birthday. (It also was seen in all four “Men in Black” movies.)The “Elvis” director Baz Luhrmann with the Oscar-winning costume and production designer Catherine Martin, who is his wife, at the Met Gala in May. Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“It just happened that we didn’t end up with the ‘Elvis watch’ because it’s such an iconic watch and so well known that we didn’t want it to be a main part of the story,” Ms. Martin said. “There is so much more to tell over 40 years. I don’t want to deny that this watch was super important in the Elvis story, but watches were in general.”One example would be the Omega Constellation he wore while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960. Made of pink gold with a black “sniper” dial, it was one of the originals in the Constellation line. Presley later gave it to Charlie Hodge, a friend and fellow musician.Antiquorum auctioned the timepiece in June 2012, expecting it to fetch $10,000 to $20,000; it sold for $52,500.And there was a second Omega Constellation, given to Presley in 1961 by his record company, RCA. The 33-millimeter white gold watch has a silver dial, with 44 round diamonds accenting the bezel, and a case back that is engraved, “To Elvis, 75 Million Records, RCA Victor, 12-25-60.” Lettering beneath the Omega logo shows that RCA purchased the watch from Tiffany & Company.Legend has it that Presley swapped it for a fan’s watch, and the fan’s nephew put the watch up for auction with Phillips in 2018. It sold for 1.8 million Swiss francs (about $1.87 million today), making it at the time the most expensive Omega ever sold. The highest bidder: Omega itself, which added the watch to its museum collection in Bienne, Switzerland.“The character arc of Elvis is fascinating, as is the fact that he was an extraordinary stylist who created his own look,” said Ms. Martin, who oversaw Mr. Butler’s watches in the new film. “He became super famous super fast, and watches were important to him to show that he had made it.”Warner Bros.One watch that was prominent late in Elvis’s career was the Rolex King Midas, which has an asymmetrical case with a wide integrated bracelet and was designed by Gerald Genta, the name behind such legendary watches as the Royal Oak and the Nautilus. Concert promoters gave the Midas to Presley in 1970 for performing six days of sold-out concerts, and it is now on permanent display at Graceland, Presley’s home in Memphis, where he died in 1977.“The King Midas is a very unusual shape, and Baz happens to own one, so Austin Butler wore that in the movie,” Ms. Martin said. “Some watches were borrowed or purchased online. Some were so valuable that it was impossible to have them on set, so we had duplicates made.”The subject of the film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month, certainly falls into the larger-than-life category that Mr. Luhrmann and Ms. Martin seem drawn to in filmmaking (like their 2013 version of “The Great Gatsby”).“The character arc of Elvis is fascinating, as is the fact that he was an extraordinary stylist who created his own look,” Ms. Martin said. “He became super famous super fast, and watches were important to him to show that he had made it.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      You Need a Horror Movie Friend for a More Frightening, Less Lonely Life

      by

      You can’t undo what is terrible about the universe, but you can stand against it together.I was in graduate school when I realized the importance of having a Designated Horror Friend. I spent a lot of time in creative-writing workshops, moderating my tone to sound “productive” while offering my peers feedback on their work. We were all careful with one another, but a layer of brutality ran just below the surface, an implicit understanding that sometimes calling a classmate’s story “interesting” meant you actually thought it was trash. Our politeness kept the program from descending into violence, but it sometimes left me craving a more honest, instinctual response.One thing that helped keep me sane was horror cinema. Horror is a natural companion to the experimental fiction that I love — Clarice Lispector, Renata Adler, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce — in the sense of its belief that beneath ordinary reality lies a second and darker layer of existence. In these films, mood is not subservient to message: The mood is the message, working to disperse the sedative haze of the everyday. Not everyone in the program was receptive to this point of view.Horror deniers often claim there’s nothing emotionally valuable in the experience of being frightened. I disagree.So it meant something to me when a classmate named Angie suggested that we meet up to see “Let the Right One In” at the second-run movie theater in town. It wasn’t a natural pick for a friend date: huddling together in the dark and watching the story of a child-size vampire ensnaring a young boy into emotional slavery. Even the theater was strange, its lobby full of humming, buzzing, life-size animatronics you had to walk past to get to the box office.But Angie seemed excited, and I said yes, trying not to let myself hope that this would be more than a one-time thing. After getting our tickets, we settled in with cheap popcorn and soda, and as the lights dimmed in the theater, Angie leaned over and whispered in my ear about a “Twin Peaks”-themed Halloween party they were planning to throw and a classic slasher movie we should watch together soon. I saw the future unspool before me: more frightening, less lonely.A lot of people hate horror movies, but I don’t. In fact, I frequently find myself strong-arming my friends and loved ones into watching something scarier than they would prefer, just for the company. It’s a difference of philosophy as much as a difference in taste. Horror deniers often claim there’s nothing emotionally valuable in the experience of being frightened. I disagree. When I first watched “The Last Unicorn” (a horror movie masquerading as a children’s cartoon) at age 8, the image of a naked harpy devouring a witch was burned into my brain, but so was the realization that the conditions that created the harpy also allowed for the unicorn. The existence of horror is inevitably proximate to the existence of wondrous possibility.Meeting another person who loves horror as much as I do, then, is like meeting a fellow traveler from my home country while stuck somewhere distant and strange. There is a shiver of recognition, a sense of immediate union. Of course, I can watch horror movies by myself — and I frequently do, because my husband doesn’t like them — but choosing to be scared with another person means choosing to be vulnerable together, which creates a bond that can’t be replicated any other way.Angie and I built our friendship on horror cinema of all types and quality, from David Cronenberg to David Lynch to every installment of “The Purge.” We cringed at the body horror in “Goodnight Mommy” (lips sealed with superglue; a cockroach crawling into someone’s mouth) and celebrated when Florence Pugh’s bad boyfriend in “Midsommar” was burned alive inside a bear. But it wasn’t just the movies that we loved. It was the fact that when we watched them together, our mutual appreciation amplified their strength. Horror movies articulate that the world is horrible and that the most horrible thing of all is simply that we are alive and fragile and bound for death. There is no protection from this, no other way out of this life. People you love will get sick — maybe you will. Violence will be done by charismatic strangers and, worse still, by lovers and friends. But sharing that understanding with someone makes the world, perhaps paradoxically, less scary. You can’t undo what is terrible about the universe, but you can stand against it together.Recently I was outside exercising when my dog started barking by the back gate. I looked up and saw a man in a black ski mask standing in my backyard, by my bicycle — an image simultaneously so legible (man, mask) and incomprehensible (stranger; why?) that my mind went blank. The man noticed me staring and gave a casual wave before strolling to the fence and jumping over.There are places in the world where reality bends: dark alleys, calls from unknown numbers, a sudden face where a face should not be. These are tropes in horror fiction for a reason, and one of them had just appeared in my yard. I was vulnerable, and never had this fact been clearer to me. But strange to say, I found it as exhilarating as scary. Perhaps because I’d been preparing for this moment my whole life, and because I knew that I was not alone; because someone had been preparing with me.I ran inside, and after my husband and I called the police, I called Angie.Adrienne Celt is the author of “The Daughters,” “Invitation to a Bonfire” and, most recently, “End of the World House.” More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Lost Illusions’ Review: The Sweet Smell of Success

      by

      Xavier Giannoli’s headlong adaptation of a Balzac novel paints a timely picture of literary ambition and media corruption in 19th-century France.A young person from the provinces sets out for the big city, seeking fortune and fame and finding temptation, corruption and ruin. It’s a story that never gets old — there’s usually plenty of lust, ambition and greed to keep the narrative engine humming — and variations pop up in the literature of nearly every nation and era. “Lost Illusions,” Honoré de Balzac’s novel of Parisian literary life, stands as a stellar example in its period and now, thanks to Xavier Giannoli’s invigorating screen adaptation, in ours as well.Balzac, writing in the early 1840s, reached back a few decades to the Bourbon Restoration, a post-Napoleonic moment of high decadence and low scruple, but what he uncovered were some of the perennial principles of modern life. Principles, though, are exactly what his moderns lack. The pistons that keep their world humming along are cynicism and hypocrisy, and brazen amorality winds through every institution they inhabit, from politics to publishing to theater.Into this hive of striving and backstabbing comes Lucien Chardon (Benjamin Voisin), a 20-year-old poet we first meet in his hometown, Angoulême, in Southwestern France. There, he scribbles passionate verses in a sun-dappled meadow and earns his living working in a printing shop. Not that his life is defined entirely by pastoral innocence and honest toil. His hobby is vigorous adultery with Mme. de Bargeton (Cécile de France), a married aristocrat who invites him to read his poetry at artistic gatherings in her chateau.Lucien has aristocratic pretensions of his own. He signs his poems — and, later, his scabrous articles in the Parisian press — Lucien de Rubempré, using his highborn mother’s maiden name. (Lucien’s father, M. Chardon, was a pharmacist.) When Madame’s husband discovers the affair, she takes off for Paris with Lucien and another would-be lover, the Baron du Châtelet (André Marcon), who will eventually be caricatured in the newspapers as an impotent turkey.Lucien has pouty good looks and ostensible literary talent. The baron and Mme. de Bargeton have connections to the Marquise d’Espard (Jeanne Balibar), a powerful figure in royalist circles. What seemed like a lark in Angoulême goes sour in a hurry. Cast out of his protectors’ company — his bumbling naïveté, so sexy in the countryside, is embarrassing in the big city — Lucien finds his way onto the staff of an anti-royalist scandal sheet, where he makes a splash writing criticism, using de Rubempré as his byline.As we follow this rake’s progress onscreen — through editorial offices full of hashish smoke, and on to bistros, bawdy houses and music halls — a narrator lays out how it all works. Balzac, one of the fathers of literary realism, was a pioneer of what a later century would call the systems novel, and his explanatory zeal, far from didactic, is almost always delightful.And so it is in Giannoli’s version. “Lost Illusions” is in some ways a very old-fashioned, supremely French movie, full of costumes and quill pens, sex and speechifying, and stylish acting even in the smallest roles. (The Quebecois actor and filmmaker Xavier Dolan, as Lucien’s well-connected rival, is particularly charismatic.) The novel was turned into a mini-series for French television in 1966, but the breathless sprawl of a longish feature film may serve it better. Balzac was a prodigious coffee drinker, and the movie, though its characters run on champagne and schadenfreude, is nothing if not caffeinated.It is also earnest in its portrayal of cynicism, without being overly moralistic. Lucien’s career is launched when he delivers an impromptu takedown of a book he hasn’t read for an audience of scribblers presided over by a powerful publisher (Gérard Depardieu). Reviews, positive and negative, are bought and paid for through a complex circuit of bribery and extortion. Audiences flock to theaters on a street called “the boulevard of crime” for its sensational offerings. Ovations and boos are purchased from an unctuous fixer named Singali (Jean-François Stévenin).Lucien, egged on by his dirtbag editor (Vincent Lacoste), starts making good money. What he doesn’t lose at the gambling tables he spends on an actress named Coralie (the heart-tuggingly sincere Salomé Dewaels), who becomes his muse, his mistress and the film’s emotional center of gravity. Lucien’s love for her is the only pure thing about him — that and the faith in literature that occasionally flickers amid the hackery.The narrator signals early on that the plot is heading toward tragedy, and further summary would no more spoil “Lost Illusions” than a citation of the law of gravity would spoil a roller-coaster ride. The busy, headlong story, in any case, is a whirring machine for the delivery of piquant ideas about human behavior, and about the workings of a society obsessed with reputation, status and appearance as well as money.It’s a familiar enough spectacle, and if there’s any justice this movie will become a touchstone and cult object among the grasping, scheming denizens of the current media jungle. Giannoli illuminates the dank frenzy of the 19th-century attention economy with an eye on our own post-truth era. “Lost Illusions” is sensational. Nobody paid me to say that. Well, actually, The New York Times did, but you should believe me anyway.Lost IllusionsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 29 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘The Twilight World,’ by Werner Herzog

      by

      In “The Twilight World,” the filmmaker Werner Herzog vividly reconstructs the personal war of Hiroo Onoda, who stayed in the jungle for years after World War II ended.THE TWILIGHT WORLD, by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael HofmannTwenty-five years ago in Tokyo, where he had come to direct the world premiere of the opera “Chushingura,” the German filmmaker Werner Herzog received an enviable invitation. At a dinner of the cast and crew, the opera’s composer greeted Herzog with the thrilling news that the emperor of Japan would welcome a private audience with him. “My goodness, I have no idea what I would talk about with the emperor,” Herzog responded. The room froze. “I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up,” Herzog recalls dramatically in his first novel, “The Twilight World” — a book in which, his epigraph explains, “most details are factually correct; some are not.” When a guest broke the silence to ask if there was anyone in Japan he would, in fact, like to meet, Herzog answered: “Onoda.” He elaborated: “Hiroo Onoda.”Unless you are a World War II buff with a passion for the Pacific theater, you may ask: Who? Hiroo Onoda was the Imperial Japanese Army lieutenant who landed on the Philippine island of Lubang late in the war, as Japanese forces were retreating, and hid in its jungles until 1974, refusing to believe the war had ended. Camouflaging his clothing and weapons with clay, leaves and bark, he emerged sporadically from the trees like “an ambulating piece of the jungle” to attack perceived foes. In December 1944, Onoda’s commanding officer, Maj. Yoshimi Taniguchi, had ordered him to “hold the island until the Imperial Army’s return” and to “defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs.” Onoda obeyed. “Your base of operations will be the jungle,” the major said. He added: “You will be like a ghost, elusive, a continuing nightmare to the enemy.” Onoda fulfilled that superhuman assignment.These details and quoted words come from encounters Herzog had with Onoda in Japan after he turned down the emperor’s invitation. Herzog understood the thrall that the jungle holds on a man who has entwined a fanatical mission with that treacherous terrain. Fifty years ago, Herzog entered the Amazonian rainforests of Peru to film masterworks about monomaniacal dreamers. First came “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” (1972), a historical fiction about a 16th-century explorer who led a doomed expedition to find a fabled city of gold. Next came “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), a drama about an opera-mad entrepreneur who hauled a steamship over a mountain to finance the construction of an opera house in the Amazon. In the early 1890s, the real Carlos Fitzcarrald transported a boat that weighed some 30 tons over a mountain in pieces. Herzog (and his cast and crew) magnified that feat beyond reason (and safety), hauling a steamship that weighed 10 times more — intact — over that same mountain to achieve Herzog’s cinematic vision.In “Burden of Dreams” (1982), a documentary on the making of “Fitzcarraldo,” Herzog mused on the “articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity” of the jungle. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain,” he said, continuing, “We are cursed with what we are doing here.” And yet, he affirmed, he loved the jungle, “against my better judgment.” With Onoda, he was able to share what Joseph Conrad called “the peculiar blackness of that experience.” In “The Twilight World,” Herzog explains, “I had worked under difficult conditions in the jungle myself and could ask him questions that no one else asked him.” This long-steeped book distills their conversations into a potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war.In the jungles of Lubang, first with other Imperial Army holdouts, later on his own, Onoda subsisted on stolen rice, scavenged fruit and, on occasion, water buffalo meat (smoked under cover of fog). When a leaflet landed on the forest floor in the fall of 1945, announcing the war’s end, Onoda took it as forgery, “the work of American agents.” When one of his band, Yuichi Akatsu, surrendered to the Philippine Army in 1950, loudspeakers appeared on a mountaintop, playing a recording of Akatsu assuring Onoda that he was being treated well. Onoda decided that the voice was a simulation or that, if genuine, Akatsu had been tortured to produce it.As days melted into months, decades, Herzog writes, time slowed, congealed, evaporated: “A night bird shrieks and a year passes. A fat drop of water on the waxy leaf of a banana plant glistens briefly in the sun and another year is gone.” Michael Hofmann’s resonant translation conveys the portentous shimmer of Herzog’s voice. Sometimes, Herzog writes, Onoda had doubts; not of his duty but of the reality of his experience. “Is it possible that I am dreaming this war?” he asked himself. “Could it be that I’m wounded in some hospital and will finally come out of a coma years later, and someone will tell me it was all a dream? Is the jungle, the rain — everything here — a dream?”But more than a quarter-century into his campaign, when a plane looped above the island, broadcasting a direct appeal to Onoda from President Ferdinand Marcos, assuring him of amnesty, he suspected a trap. And when his own brother recorded a message that echoed across the treetops for weeks, begging “Hiroo, my brother” to come out of hiding, Onoda’s self-deluding mind recast it as a cryptic hint that the Imperial Army was about to retake the island.It was not until February 1974 that a hippie Onoda stan, Norio Suzuki, flushed the soldier out. Spotting Suzuki, Onoda leaped at him and pointed a gun at his chest. “How could I be an American agent?” Suzuki protested. “I’m only 22.” Many men in mufti had tried to take him before, Onoda responded. “I have survived 111 ambushes,” he said, adding: “Every human being on this island is my enemy.” Suzuki had to promise to fly in a commanding officer from 1944 before he would stand down.When Major Taniguchi arrived on Lubang two weeks later and told Onoda, face-to-face, “Lieutenant, your war is over,” Onoda still hoped it might be an elaborate ruse, a loyalty test. He handed over his rifle to a Filipino general nonetheless, and then his family sword, which he had preserved from rust with palm oil he had made himself. The general handed it back. “The true samurai keeps his sword,” he told Onoda. Later, Herzog writes, “he will admit that inside everything in him was bawling.”Onoda, who died in 2014 at age 91, lived in the jungle for almost 30 years; Herzog arguably has never left it. Only a few years back, he returned to the Amazon to induct four dozen budding filmmakers into his mythic practice. He told them, “It is the job of the filmmaker to jump out of the window into the boat even if he has no confidence there is water beneath it.” Onoda surely would have agreed. In “The Twilight World,” Herzog presents a kind of dual libretto to the operas both men conducted in their different jungles. They worked on different continents, in different eras and to different ends, but they served the same inexorable impulse: to lead a life of archetype in the modern day, outside of time, eternal.Liesl Schillinger is a critic and translator and teaches journalism at the New School in New York City. Her translation of the novel “Stella,” by Takis Würger, came out in paperback this year.THE TWILIGHT WORLD, by Werner Herzog. Translated by Michael Hofmann. | Penguin Press | 144 pp. | $25 More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      A Queer-Film Historian Discusses Movies That Provoke

      by

      Elizabeth Purchell, who has programmed a series on the documentaries of Rosa von Praunheim, sees Pride Month as a chance to discover, and uncover, the past.Elizabeth Purchell isn’t afraid of “Transexual Menace,” even though she is a transgender woman and the film sounds like the kind of hateful propaganda you’d find for sale at a convention of conspiracy nuts.But “Transexual Menace” is a cornerstone of documentary filmmaking about transgender people — a 1996 time capsule made by the maverick and prolific queer German director Rosa von Praunheim. And Purchell, 32, is a historian of queer film who has a soft spot for movies that provoke, arouse, tickle and otherwise stir the queer cinema pot.“It’s great that we have queer rom-coms, but I want to be challenged,” said Purchell during a phone interview from her home in Austin, Texas. “I don’t want to see the 200th coming out film.”“Transexual Menace” is one of six documentaries in “Revolt of the Perverts,” a new von Praunheim retrospective that Purchell put together for Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater, where the series continues through June 27. Purchell will be in town at the end of the month to introduce some of the films in person.The series is one of the latest queer movie endeavors from Purchell. Her work as an archivist, historian and curator includes a podcast, Instagram account and experimental documentary about gay adult cinema history — all named Ask Any Buddy. She also recently recorded audio commentaries on new restorations of films by the gay adult film directors Fred Halsted and Arthur J. Bressan Jr.On Being Transgender in AmericaGenerational Shift: The number of young people who identify as transgender in the United States has nearly doubled in recent years, according to a new report.Phalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.For custodians of queer film history, Purchell is a standard-bearer.“Elizabeth is doing amazing curatorial work in identifying significant and lesser-known things that deserve to be elevated,” said Jenni Olson, a queer film historian and archivist. “Sometimes I’m not sure how she finds things.”Purchell, who came out as a transgender woman just last November, recently talked about the state of queer cinema and what under-the-radar movie she’d recommend watching for Pride. The interview has been edited and condensed.What’s your goal as a queer-film historian?To get people excited about history and look beyond the surface of queer cinema. I think people want to see more queer films, not just the same five movies over and over. They want to see performances, actors and personalities they’ve maybe never seen before, like Holly Woodlawn and Taylor Mead.In what shape is queer cinema now?It’s remarkable that queer cinema has grown into this gigantic ecosystem of filmmaking. But I want more. I want trans filmmakers to make the films they want to make. I want to see filmmakers push boundaries. Queer cinema should be more than just X film but make it gay — thriller but make it gay or horror film but make it gay. I want to see what’s next.Anna Cobb in “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.”UtopiaIs there a queer film out now that does that?“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” It’s about trans issues, but other people might not pick up on that. It’s undoubtedly a queer film that isn’t textually queer. I find that exciting.How did you first become interested in gay pornography?A few years ago, my partner and I went to a screening of “Bijou,” and Wakefield Poole, the director, was there to introduce it. It opened my eyes to this entire world I didn’t know about. I thought, if this one film exists, what else is out there? So I watched “Thundercrack!” and “L.A. Plays Itself” and it made me want to see more.What did you learn about the connection between pornography and mainstream gay cinema?I don’t think people realize there’s this hidden history of queer filmmaking contained in adult films. People tend to think queer cinema began with New Queer Cinema, but adult films laid the groundwork. The films were made for very little money, but the theaters they played at were safe social spaces for people to watch movies, cruise and meet other people.The other thing that struck me was how connected these films and filmmakers were to mainstream gay culture. If you look at old issues of The Advocate from the ’70s, you see stills from gay porn and reviews of the films. The genre was a crucial vehicle for gay ideas and imagery to make their way across the country.You came out as transgender pretty recently. How has that experience been?People have been very kind to me personally. Growing up in Tampa in the ’90s, there was no way for me to know what trans people were or what it was like to be trans or who could be trans. I settled on I’m a gay man and did that for about a decade. I was working on the Fred Halsted Blu-ray, and I slowly started to realize I was trans. “Sextool” is a Halsted film with a trans woman in it. She’s not in the sex scenes, but her presence got me researching all these trans people and trans history. It just suddenly began to click.Gerald Grant and Claire Wilbur in the Radley Metzger film “Score.”Audubon FilmsIs there an under-the-radar movie you’d recommend people watch during Pride?Radley Metzger’s “Score.” It’s an adaptation of the play by the great Jerry Douglas, a pioneering gay playwright, filmmaker and incredibly important historian. Jerry passed away last year. It’s one of my favorite movies. It’s about this swinging couple who have this game to see who can make it first with someone of the same sex from another couple. It’s a wonderful example of how sex and cinema can combine to create something honest.What is it like to be a transgender person working in queer cinema in Texas these days?You think of Austin as this big liberal bastion, but you’re still in Texas. You drive a mile outside the city and you see the pro-life billboards. I run a queer film series through the Austin Film Society. What I’ve been trying to do is build a community and give people a safe space to explore film. Our screening of “Cruising” sold out. People were in full gear.Full gear?There was a furry bear wearing nothing but a leather jock. It was really wonderful. More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      In a First for Broadway, a Theater Will Be Renamed for Lena Horne

      by

      Horne, a renowned singer and activist, will be the first Black woman to have a theater named after her once the Brooks Atkinson is renamed.One of Broadway’s biggest landlords said Thursday that it would rename a theater after the performer and activist Lena Horne, who would then become the first Black woman to win such recognition.The Nederlander Organization, which operates nine of the 41 Broadway theaters, said it would rename the Brooks Atkinson Theater in Horne’s honor. The Atkinson is a 1,031-seat venue on West 47th Street; it was built in 1926 and is currently home to the hit musical “Six.”The change brings the Nederlander Organization into compliance with an agreement reached last year between Broadway leaders and the advocacy organization Black Theater United, under which all three major Broadway landlords pledged that at least one of their theaters would be named for a Black artist. Jujamcyn Theaters already had a theater named for the playwright August Wilson, and the Shubert Organization announced in March that it would rename the Cort Theater after the actor James Earl Jones.Horne, who died in 2010, was an actor and singer who performed in nightclubs, in Hollywood, on television and onstage. She was also a longtime civil rights activist, outspoken on behalf of Black soldiers, and a frequent participant in protests and marches. She supported anti-lynching legislation, and fought against racism in the entertainment industry.She appeared in five Broadway shows, including the long-running “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which in the early 1980s had a 346-performance run at the Nederlander Theater, followed by a tour. In 1958 she became the first African American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award for best actress in a musical, for her work in “Jamaica”; in 1981 she was granted a special Tony Award for “The Lady and Her Music.”James L. Nederlander, the president of the Nederlander Organization, said he remembered as a young man watching Horne perform — she would often make gentle fun of his father, who produced her Broadway show, from the stage — and coming to think of her as a friend. “She’s such a legend, and her time is overdue,” he said. “This felt really right.”Horne’s granddaughter, Jenny Lumet, a television showrunner and producer, said the family is delighted with the plan. “I’m really proud that people might find a spark of creativity in a space that has her name on it — that’s all you can ask for,” she said in an interview. “And it means something that there will be a theater, in the mecca of theater, named after a Black female artist. I couldn’t be prouder.”The theater has since 1960 been named for Brooks Atkinson, an influential longtime theater critic for The New York Times. The Nederlanders said the name change should take place this fall, but that the exact date will depend on when the new marquee signage is ready. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Ariana DeBose on Hosting the Tonys: ‘Whatever We Do Is Going to Be Fun’

      by

      The Broadway ensemble member turned Oscar winner vows that the ceremony will celebrate the often unsung actors who have stepped in so often during the pandemic.A decade ago, Ariana DeBose made her Broadway debut as an understudy in the musical adaptation of “Bring It On.”This weekend she’s hosting the Tony Awards.DeBose’s rise to prominence, due in large part to her Oscar-winning performance in Steven Spielberg’s movie remake of “West Side Story,” has been hard-won. She was an understudy, an ensemble member, and struggled before breaking through; in 2018 she was nominated for a Tony Award as one of three actresses playing Donna Summer in “Summer,” and since then she has had multiple film and television projects, including “The Prom” and “Schmigadoon!”This year she became the first Afro Latina and first openly queer woman of color to win an Academy Award. Next, she will be featured in the action film “Argylle,” the superhero film “Kraven the Hunter” and the space thriller “I.S.S.”DeBose, 31, is now rehearsing the three-hour broadcast portion of the Tony Awards ceremony, which starts on Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS. (An earlier hour, starting at 7 p.m., will be streamed on Paramount+.)In an interview this week, DeBose talked about her determination to honor Broadway’s unsung heroes and her desire to return to the stage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The 2022 Tony AwardsThis year’s awards, the first to recognize shows that opened after a long Broadway shutdown during the pandemic, will be given out on June 12.Ruth Negga: The actress, who is nominated for her role as Lady Macbeth in Sam Gold’s staging of the play, infuses the character with intensity, urgency and vitality.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.A New Star: Myles Frost is drawing ovations nightly on Broadway with his performance in “MJ,” a musical about Michael Jackson’s creative process.Choreography: Musicals like “MJ” and “Paradise Square” take on dances of the past but miss some opportunities to elevate the dancing; “For Colored Girls” effectively weaves language and motion.What are your goals for Sunday night?This is the first time we’re back at Radio City. The community is still coming out of what has been an extremely challenging time. I do look at this as an opportunity to try and provide a real moment of celebration, because I think it’s a gosh-darn feat and a triumph to have been able to make work at all and get to this moment in time.You’re new to this. Are you nervous?I would like to throw up, if I’m honest. But I love a challenge. And I just feel like whatever we do is going to be fun.You’ve talked a lot about your identity. Tell me what you hope that prompts for people watching you?If I do my job right, it will be a reminder to young people out there watching that there is a place for us. And, to be perfectly frank, Broadway was the place that gave me freedom to explore my identity, freedom to explore my artistry. It was the place of love and acceptance that helped create the woman that you see now.There’s been a lot of discussion this season about the role of understudies and standbys, who kept many shows going when other performers tested positive for the coronavirus. Can you talk about what your intention is for Sunday on that front?In three of my six Broadway shows, I was an understudy. And I began in this industry in the ensemble. There’s no way in the world that a host like me is going to let this moment go by without acknowledging swings and understudies, but also the myriad groups of people that put in the work to keep this industry going, and that includes stage managers, dance captains, associates, hair and makeup departments, musicians. There’s not a version of the world where I don’t have something up my sleeve. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but what I am going to tell you is if it doesn’t happen, you can hold me accountable.One of the other important developments this season was the death of Stephen Sondheim. Should we expect to see that acknowledged?Well, we wouldn’t have the American theater as we know it without him. So while I will not tell you what we are doing, there will be a beautiful moment for the man that is Stephen Sondheim.Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘I’m Charlie Walker’ Review: More Wink Than Wallop

      by

      The actor Mike Colter imbues Charlie with cool savvy in this movie about a Black trucker in the ’70s who goes up against the white establishment.In January 1971, two tankers collided in the waters beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, leaking 800,000 gallons of oil. The disaster is remembered for having spurred an environmental movement.Less known is how a Black trucker named Charlie Walker played a pivotal role in the cleanup campaign during a time when the white trucking unions and their political allies were freezing out Black workers in the Bay Area. The director and writer Patrick Gilles sets out to right the narrative with the movie “I’m Charlie Walker,” plying the overly broad gestures of ’70s blaxploitation films to mixed effect.The actor Mike Colter (“Luke Cage”) does his part, imbuing Charlie with cool savvy, though his style is more wink than wallop. As the Black owner of a trucking company, he has to be shrewd to contend with the unrefined racism of white truckers and the self-anointed superiority of oil executives.When a foreman grudgingly gives Walker a stretch of beach in Marin County with a nearly inaccessible road to clear, he catches a break. Currents redirect the crude oil away from the tourist spots where white truckers are waiting. Soon Charlie is marshaling hippie volunteers and hiring truckers keen for a paycheck — both Black and white — for the massive cleanup operation. (Along the way, Bay Area notables Boots Riley and Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor, make cameos.)Dylan Baker plays the unctuous executive who is sure he can control Walker and the narrative. But it’s Charlie’s wife, Ann (Safiya Fredericks), who provides the movie’s voice-over. Her account has a mythmaking undercurrent but is also the film’s deft way of celebrating Black love and family. Charlie Walker might not be John Shaft, but Ann — and the filmmaker — want you to know that he’s still a bad mother (shut your mouth).I’m Charlie WalkerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More