Reading List: The Lammy Winners

by Nathaniel R

Looking for summer reading to occupy your non-movie theater / beach time? The 31st Annual Lambda Literary Awards were held this monday for the best in LGBTQ writing. NYC performance icon MX Justin Vivian Bond (Can You Ever Forgive Me, Shortbus, Kiki & Herb) was the MC and we've listed the winners of their 24 regular categories after the jump. If you've read any of these books do tell if they'd make intriguing movies... 

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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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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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Review: "Rocketman" blasts off

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Pop stardom is a notoriously fickle thing. For every “legacy” artist out there, there are thousands of one-hit wonders, and hundreds of sort-of famous B listers. One imagines that anyone in the center of the hurricane of New Fame imagines it will last forever. If you find yourself engineering your own biopic in your golden years, congratulations, it did. Which brings us to Reginald Dwight… better known as Elton John.

In the first frames of Rocketman, Elton John (Taron Egerton) strolls into focus, cheekily dressed as a horned devil to confront his own demons in a therapy session framing device...

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"The Garden Left Behind" is a Must-See Festival Hit

Part 3 of 3 by Nathaniel R

"The Garden Left Behind" is a festival hit

The 5th annual Bentonville Film Festival deserved more than three posts but we do what we can with our time (ICYMI - parts one and two). At any rate we will have an opportunity to revisit a few of the films when they arrive in movie theaters. But herewith the wrap up via our "Best of Fest" winner. Don't miss it when it hits a festival near you (it'll be on the circuit for at least a few more months) or your local arthouse movie theater a bit later.

THE GARDEN LEFT BEHIND
This first time feature, a trans drama from gay Brazilian director Flavio Alves, picked up its second festival Audience Award at Bentonville. The first was at SXSW. Alves is still talking with distributors and the film has sparked interest but at this writing nothing is quite nailed down yet. Given that trans stories are increasingly popular with audiences, someone really ought to bite, as there's surely an arthouse market for it...

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