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      in Music

      Conchita Wurst, a Eurovision Star, on the Past 10 Years

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      Since winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014, the bearded drag queen has been celebrated and condemned. For her creator, Tom Neuwirth, it has been a journey.Looking back at the last decade, Tom Neuwirth is amazed by how far his 2014 Eurovision win as the drag queen Conchita Wurst has reverberated.“I think this moment, the win, happened to all of us,” Neuwirth said in a recent interview at his team’s offices in Vienna. Dressed in pink corduroys, a black hoodie and white sneakers, he was charming and sweet, jokey one second and quietly reflective the next. “People will tell me where they were and how their life took a turn from then on,” he said. “There are always big stories and emotions.”That May, 10 years ago, 195 million people watched Conchita Wurst belt out the power ballad “Rise Like a Phoenix,” representing Austria in the finale of the Eurovision Song Contest. The annual show is Europe’s longest-running talent competition, in which singers representing their countries perform for a huge TV audience that votes for its favorite act.This year’s Eurovision final takes place in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday. The event, which has been referred to “the queer Olympics” or “gay Christmas,” has long been popular with L.G.B.T.Q. people. By 2014, the competition had already seen a number of gay, lesbian and bisexual participants, as well as several drag acts, and a trans winner as early as 1998.Yet none of those performers received as explosive a reception as Conchita Wurst, whose victory arrived amid widespread advancements in L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Western Europe that included a wave of legalization for same-sex marriage. The singer became a worldwide symbol of the divisions between liberals and conservatives, with some calling her performance a high-profile victory for queer representation, and others seeing it as a sign of the degradation of traditional Western values.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Pennsylvania School Board Reinstates Gay Author’s Speech Amid Backlash

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      The Cumberland Valley School Board reversed its decision to cancel Maulik Pancholy’s speech at a middle school next month after many community members said the actor had been discriminated against because of his sexuality.Less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania school board unanimously voted to cancel a gay author’s anti-bullying speech at a middle school, the board voted Wednesday night to reverse its decision and reinstate the event amid pressure from parents, students and administrators.The 5-to-4 vote by the Cumberland Valley School District’s board came in front of scores of community members who packed a high school auditorium and, for several hours, chastised the board for having canceled the event featuring the actor and author Maulik Pancholy over what they said were homophobic concerns.Bud Shaffner, a board member who had come under fire for introducing the motion at the April 15 meeting to cancel the speech, apologized for his comments about Mr. Pancholy’s “lifestyle.” He later introduced the motion to reinstate the speech and voted for it.“I will accept the blame because of the insensitive word I spoke on April 15,” he said at the beginning of Wednesday’s meeting. “I fully understand the interpretation of my poor word choice.”Many community members who spoke during the public comment period of Wednesday’s meeting rejected the contention by some board members that Mr. Pancholy’s speech had been canceled over concerns about what they called his “political activism.”“To claim that Maulik Pancholy is a political activist and use that as a justification to cancel his event is an excuse that the public sees through,” one person told the board.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Catfish,’ the TV Show That Predicted America’s Disorienting Digital Future

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      MTVThis is Danny. He fell in love with a woman he’d met online. When he saw her photo, he called it love at first sight.He and Rosa talked on the phone daily for months and exchanged reams of texts in Spanglish. They bonded over being Puerto Rican.“You’re so funny, Daddy,” she once texted him. “You’re so sexy, my love,” Danny replied. Though they’d never met, he was making big plans: marriage and family.When the red flags started to pile up, Danny contacted “Catfish,” on MTV, for help. The truth was far from what he’d hoped. Rosa was secretly Jose.The TV Show That Predicted America’s Lonely, Disorienting Digital FutureSince its first episode aired in 2012, “Catfish: The TV Show” has held up a mirror to our online lives, reflecting how we present ourselves and make sense of love, lust, trust, companionship and loneliness in an increasingly digital world. Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the host Nev Schulman summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryThe saga of Danny and Jose, which aired in 2017, is emblematic of the deception, dashed hopes and complicated situations regularly featured on the show.Danny contacted “Catfish” for help, believing Rosa had moved from Connecticut to Orlando, where he lived, but still would not meet him. Rosa had warned Danny that she had anger issues, in part because she had been molested as a child. When meeting with Schulman and his co-host Max Joseph, Danny said he wanted to help her by bringing more faith into her life. “I think I could make her a better person,” he said. “We plan to have a family.”In their research, Schulman and Joseph quickly discovered the so-called mask, meaning the unwitting person whose photos had been sent to Danny: a woman named Natalie. But Rosa’s real identity was harder to pin down. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Danny said when shown the evidence. “I never had anybody send me fake pictures.”Schulman called Rosa to inform her that Danny was now aware she’d lied about the photos. Though combative, she agreed to meet in Connecticut. It became clear that she had never moved.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Stress Positions’ Review: It’s Giving Pandemonium

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      The writer-director Theda Hammel’s biting, delirious quarantine comedy skewers white gay men in a world where fact, fiction and authentic experiences collide.For “Stress Positions,” the writer-director Theda Hammel shows her hand when a character says, in a world-weary voice-over, that the madness we’re about to witness “happened so long ago.”The movie is set in summer 2020.Karla (portrayed by Hammel) is a sardonic transgender massage therapist in New York, and the first of the film’s two narrators. Her opinion of white gay male privilege, especially that of her best friend Terry, who went from intern to husband of his boss, can be stinging.“Stress Positions” finds Terry (John Early) in lockdown in the brownstone of his soon-to-be ex-husband, Leo (John Roberts). Upstairs, Coco (Rebecca F. Wright), a tenant, puffs cigarettes and vaguely hews to Terry’s Covid safety protocols. Terry’s nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a Moroccan fashion model, is ensconced at the garden level. The 19-year-old Bahlul is the son of Terry’s estranged sister who converted to Islam. He has a broken leg, soft brown eyes and a small notebook. Is it a memoir? A novel? As he writes, he ruminates on his mother in a voice-over. We find out that Karla’s girlfriend, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), wrote a minor-hit novel with material filched from Karla’s life. Here, fact, fiction and authentic experience are all themes to be mined.Beyond skewering white gay male culture, the movie is also a dig at the pieties of the recently politicized. Terry, Karla and Vanessa don’t know where Morocco is, or Yemen or Kabul, for that matter. And Ronald, a food delivery guy (Faheem Ali), plays a telling role in exposing the hierarchy of lives that matter.If some of the points seem muddy, the filmmaking is expressive and deliberate. With shimmer, shadow and verve, “Stress Positions” — which recently closed the New Directors/New Films festival — captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.Stress PositionsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      Queer Women Behaving Badly: These Movies Scrap the Coming-Out Story

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      “Love Lies Bleeding,” “Bottoms” and “Drive-Away Dolls” are leading a wave of stories about lesbians living their lives, committing crimes along the way.To a queer woman going to the movies, it may seem as if there has been something in the ether for the past year. First, in August, there was “Bottoms.” Then “Drive-Away Dolls” arrived in February. “Love Lies Bleeding” joined the fray in March. This cluster of relatively mainstream films about queer women, deliciously frothy and fun to watch, feels unprecedented.It isn’t, of course — film always has a precedent. But the latest titles are different. These movies lean into camp: heightened realities, suspended disbelief, larger-than-life plots. What’s more, queer women had a significant hand in crafting each release, and none of the movies involve coming-out stories. Their protagonists are already out, living their lives, committing crimes along the way.“I don’t think that these three films, even taken individually, could have quite existed in the pretty mainstream public sphere even a few years ago,” said Clara Bradbury-Rance, a film scholar and the author of “Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory.” “At what point,” she added, “do you reach a sense that lesbians are represented enough to represent them in their badness and toxicity and irritation?”“Bottoms” follows two lesbian high school seniors, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who start a fight club (sorry, self-defense club) as a ruse to hook up with cheerleaders. “Drive-Away Dolls” is a crime caper about unsuspecting friends, Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who find a mysterious package in the trunk of their car during a road trip. And in “Love Lies Bleeding,” Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder, comes to town and falls for Lou (Kristen Stewart), a gym manager with a shadowy past.With their offbeat B-movie feel, these stories are “managing to mess with this dichotomy between the good representation and the bad representation,” Bradbury-Rance said, allowing us to think, “there are ways of finding pleasure in ambivalence and ambiguity and tension.”These films are part of a recent larger wave of lesbian stories that includes “Tár,” “Nyad,” “The Color Purple” and “Silver Haze,” and they stand in stark contrast to another recent cluster: the period dramas of the late 2010s. Think: “Carol,” “The Favourite,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Ammonite.” Andrea Torres, one of the programmers behind the recent Sapph-o-Rama series at Film Forum in Manhattan, referred to this as the “lesbian saints era.” It even had its own “Saturday Night Live” sketch: “Lesbian period drama,” went the tagline. “You get one a year — make the most of it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Theda Hammel’s Road to a Directorial Debut With ‘Stress Positions’

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      Theda Hammel is under no delusion that Covid is box-office gold.“I don’t think it’s going to draw people in, the idea of dwelling on that time,” she said last week at the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an herbal tea on a leather couch. “But I think it has value as a little bit of a time capsule.”Later this month, her debut film, “Stress Positions,” an ensemble comedy that showed at Sundance, will ask audiences to return to the early days of the pandemic, a time that many people would rather forget.And what about the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie thing? Was that some sort of canny strategy?No, just a function of circumstance.“I don’t know any straight people,” Ms. Hammel, 36, said. “I don’t know any.”The film is largely set within the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, where an anxious 30-something, played by the comedian John Early, tries to keep his potentially virus-carrying friends at bay as they clamor to meet his 19-year-old nephew, an injured Moroccan model he started caring for just as the world shut down.Masks dangle from chins, but the word “Covid” is uttered only once. That’s because Ms. Hammel is less interested in life during the pandemic than the way a certain set of bourgeois millennials responded to it. The preoccupation of her movie is privilege: the way it coddles, insulates, divides.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘It’s Only Life After All’ Review: Indigo Girls Documentary

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      The director Alexandria Bombach benefited from the musician Amy Ray’s archivist instincts in this warm, compelling new documentary.Indigo Girls have been going strong for over 40 years now, and maybe the key to their resilience is that they never were cool. Often, they got it worse: Even at their commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were routinely mocked for being too earnest, too poetic, too folky, too lesbian. Back then, being labeled a female, gay singer-songwriter was an artistic and commercial curse, as Ray recalls in “It’s Only Life After All,” a smart, compelling new documentary.The director, Alexandria Bombach, greatly benefited from Ray’s archivist instincts: The musician has held on to decades’ worth of artifacts and opened up her vault — 1981 rehearsals, recorded on cassette when Ray and Saliers were in their teens, are startlingly crisp documents of a budding chemistry, for example.From this clay Bombach has sculpted an affecting portrait of two women who have stuck to their beliefs and, just as important, their loyalty to each other. Existing fans will be mesmerized, but non-fans like me should also get a kick out of “It’s Only Life After All.” The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media — their dramatic, and very funny, reading of a withering 1989 review in The New York Times is a highlight — along with their personal struggles and steadfast political engagement for causes, including the Indigenous-led organization Honor the Earth.Now that the band is experiencing a cultural moment — its hit “Closer to Fine” was prominently featured in “Barbie,” and an indie jukebox musical movie set to their songs, “Glitter & Doom,” came out last month — it is delightful to see them have the last laugh.It’s Only Life After AllNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      Making Films About Outsiders, Increasingly in the Mainstream

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      Goran Stolevski, who is from North Macedonia and grew up partly in Australia, has made three features in three years, all teeming with unruly emotion.Periods of personal crisis have often yielded writing sprees for Goran Stolevski, a Macedonian filmmaker who has made three critically acclaimed features in three years.Although his recent spate of theatrical releases — all by Focus Features — could make it seem as if success has been quick to come by for the filmmaker, it has been proceeded by long seasons of debilitating professional uncertainty.Right after turning 30, Stolevski wrote four feature screenplays in a nine-month period he spent living in Bristol, England. Writing gave shape to his days as an unemployed artist who couldn’t get any of his projects off the ground. Two of those screenplays became his recent features “You Won’t Be Alone” and “Housekeeping for Beginners.”Then, after his 2017 short film “Would You Look at Her” won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Stolevski was out of work for another two years, and wrote four more screenplays.Stolevski, now 38, had written at least 10 scripts before making his 2022 feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone.” An evocative tale about a shape-shifting witch in a 19th-century Macedonian village, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His sophomore effort, the 1990s-set Australian gay romance “Of an Age,” opened in U.S. cinemas in early 2023.“I wouldn’t make every film I’ve written, but there are some I’m obsessed with; they need to exist outside of my head,” he said in a video call in January from this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival where his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” screened.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More