Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Halston'

By Glenn Dunks

Once again, The Film Experience and Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week is Halston, a fashion bio-doc about the famed American designer.

He was arguably the most famous out homosexual in America; feted by magazines and talk-shows, lauded in name by celebrities from coast to coast. A man of a certain time who emerged timeless; a pillar of an industry that had remained strikingly insular until his brand helped bring it to the American masses. Roy Halston Frowick left his impressionable mark on history early on, designing First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s iconic pillbox hat and translated that mark of destiny through a career that weaved down runways, across discotheques and into department stores.

His life is given an appropriately razzle-dazzle treatment in Halston from director Frédérick Tcheng. Told through the unusual narrative device of a fictional, unknown woman researching his life through video tapes, Halston is one of the more formally interesting examples of the fashion bio-doc genre and is infused with an atmosphere that is as slinky as one of his bias-cut dresses while also embracing his extravagant Manhattan lifestyle of chic glass offices, limousines and cocaine that evoke an era of lavish and queer excess.

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The New Classics - Happy-Go-Lucky

Michael Cusumano here to discuss a scene I find myself thinking about all the time.

 

Scene: Scott's meltdown
When you pause to consider how mundane the actual events of Mike Leigh’s films usually are, it’s funny to think how many moments from them lodge permanently in the memory.  Barely a weekend goes by that I don’t see some kind of world-ending cataclysm portrayed in expansively budgeted detail and what does my brain return to over and over again? Lesley Manville in Another Year retreating to her glass of white wine or David Thewlis in Naked stalking a security guard through the dark to harangue him about the meaning of life.

The famous Mike Leigh technique of crafting screenplays from extensive improvisations yields scenes that unfold with the convinction of real life...

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Honorary Oscars to... Davis, Lynch, Studi, and Wertmuller

by Nathaniel R

Just this weekend we loved you all anew for that robust conversation about worthy Honorary Oscar recipients. News broke yesterday that the Board of Governors has named the four 2019 recipients. Honorary Oscars will go to the actor Wes Studi (who many thought should have been nominated for Last of the Mohicans in 1992, his starmaking role), and two previously nominated directors, David Lynch (who we've been campaigning for) and Lina Wertmüller who was famously the first woman ever nominated for the directing Oscar for her total masterpiece Seven Beauties. In addition to those three artists, the actress Geena Davis will receive this year's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. That's a special subdivision of the Honorary that's not actually about the movies but your "outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes"...

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Best LGBT Movies?

by Nathaniel R

For Pride month you may have heard that Rotten Tomatoes has expanded and updated their list of the greatest LGBT films ever to a full 200 movies wide.

Given that they've just done this, we thought it might be a good idea to share multiple "best lgbt films list" to give you lots of rental ideas for Gay Pride month. We've also listed the pros and cons of a few of the key lists out there. Do you feel like you've seen your share of queer classics perusing these or do you have endless hours of screenings ahead to catch up?

The Rotten Tomatoes list and 4 additional lists are after the jump. Which lists is friendliest to your tastes?

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Yes No Maybe So: "The Goldfinch"

by Ilich Mejía

Before you ask, five times. Five times I've tried to get past the first half of this book. Five times I've had to put it down to rewatch that one extra-good episode Bojack Horseman drops every season and then forgotten to pick it back up. To seem cultured, I will lie and say I was in the middle of a sixth try when the trailer for the movie dropped. Naturally, I've neglected to pick it back up since because I've been busy picking the trailer apart to decide how I feel about it. Join me in deciding, fellow philistines!

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