Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Happy Together (1997)

by Nathaniel R 

I first saw Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together at an arthouse cinema in Utah where I went to college. Though enthralled by its saturated colors and amazing performances, it left me very depressed. I had only been out for a couple of years, was wildly inexperienced with relationships, and chafed a bit at "sad gays" in the movies. Mostly because they were the only kind of cinematic gays regularly on offer back then. Nevertheless I devoured the "New Queer Cinema" of the 1990s wherever I could find it (i.e. arthouse theaters or Blockbuster rentals). And this particular movie lingered. I thought about it often. Seeing it again in 2022, twenty-five years after its Cannes premiere, it felt brand new. It wasn't... but 25 years of life experience later, it was. It wasn't devoted to gay misery as I'd remembered but merely a fascinating emotionally precise account of a particular romance. Not that the title isn't wildly ironic.

"Starting over means different things to him," is one of the saddest lines ever spoken in a movie and it hits early...

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Review: Haley Lu Richardson and Owen Teague in 'Montana Story'

by Matt St Clair

I've never been to Montana, being more of a metro/suburb-type person, but the luscious scenery always captured onscreen makes it compelling enough to want to explore. The deserted roads, the wide open spaces, the mountains accompanied by clear blue skies can make any Montana-set movie compelling even if the story isn’t. Such is nearly the case with the aptly-titled Montana Story, from the filmmaking duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End, What Maisie Knew, Bee Season). 

The story itself is pretty simple. Two distant half-siblings Erin (Haley Lu Richardson) and Cal (Owen Teague) attempt to reconnect and heal their troubled past as they say goodbye to their dying father...

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Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: Happy Together (1997)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives Thursday night. Since the Cannes Film Festival is around the corner, it's focused on Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together, which screened at the Croisette 25 years ago. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry.

In film criticism, few expressions vex me more than the old "style over substance" adage. To presuppose the audiovisual stylings of any picture should be subordinate to its text, thus taking for granted that true depth exists only in narrative rather than form, is a fundamental misunderstanding of cinema as an art. Such matters come to mind because the works of Wong Kar Wai represent one of the best counterpoints to these erroneous wisdoms. The director's style is indissociable from whatever meaning, narrative, or emotion the viewer can take from his films. That is especially true of Happy Together, one of his masterpieces and one of my all-time favorite pictures…

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Link Stop

• Variety Spider-Man: No Way Home and Euphoria lead the MTV nominations. Happy about the nomination for Sydney Sweeney for Euphoria and Megan Stalter for Hacks
• Out Joel Kim Booster covers Out Traveler to promote Fire Island
• Deadline in unexpected news A Simple Favor is getting a sequel with original stars Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick. If you'll recall we truly really loved...
• TFE ...and it made our top ten list of 2018
• El Diario Pedro Almodóvar writes another diary. This one is about the Met Gala, Marilyn Monroe (he has seen the upcoming bio Blonde) and "feminized" men

More after the jump including a viral Broadway rant, a new Cronenberg, Sutton Foster on PBS, and a film that pairs Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway...

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Doc Corner: 'The Territory' at EarthX Festival in Dallas

By Glenn Dunks

The 2022 EarthX Film Festival is four days of film, music and interactive environmental programs and events set in the heart of Dallas Arts District, May 12-15. We were able to watch a couple of the titles including big ticket Sundance winner The Territory as well as Tigre Gente.

The first thing to notice in The Territory (tickets here) is its beauty. Filming within the Amazon rainforest will do that, of course. As will having a cinematographer for a director. But Alex Pritz’s first feature documentary as a director very quickly transcends whatever lush imagery is immediately front and center, bursting quite early with rage at the situation its Indigenous subjects are being forced to endure. New images emerge, those of burning and destruction and greed as those who live independently defiantly take protection of their block of land into their own hands.

This is an environmental film set within an increasingly small patch that—as the film begins—is the land of the Uru-eu-wau-wau people, provided under rights agreements with the Brazilian government. But the impending election threatens this life of serenity when anti-environmental rhetoric from Jair Bolsonaro threatens to bring chainsaws, bulldozers and forest burning to this idyllic slice of paradise.

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