Doc Corner: Fyre Festival, Jean-Luc Godard and Eureka in First-Quarter Round-Up

By Glenn Dunks

We sometimes get so carried away with Oscar and all things award season adjacent that we forget there are very real movies being released in those first couple of months of the year. After last week's very topical Leaving Neverland review, we're going to back back into January and February and pluck out a few titles we have seen: Fyre, The Image Book, and The Gospel According to Eureka. 

FYRE 
It's not very often that Shoah comes up in conversation at a party, but there we were when somebody asked me about Fyre, the new documentary from the director of American Movie, Chris Smith. I had said I would rather watch all nine and a half hours of Holocaust testimonials than I would watch another 90 minutes of Fyre (including the adjacent Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud that I have no endured). I may have been several margaritas down and it may come off as unnecessary flippant, and yet here I am weeks later and it is a sentiment I would stand by...

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"We Are the Champions" (on LGBT Representation at the Oscars)

by Deborah Lipp

2019 was a very LGBT Oscars. (Well, at least LGB.) And it was not merely the presence of LGB characters, although this was staggering in numbers. It was also that many were presented in a new way.

Consider Can You Ever Forgive Me? Melissa McCarthy was not nominated for playing a lesbian. She was nominated for playing a famous writer—a famous lesbian writer. I’m not particularly a fan of the “happens to be” formation—I think it erases the struggle and complexity of arriving at a queer identity. Let’s face it, no one “happens to be” queer. We get there through a process that is sometimes difficult, or even agonizing, sometimes complex and winding. There’s always a road to be taken, always an arrival that may or may not require yet more journeying. Despite that, our stories should be about more than how we got there...

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'Can You Ever Forgive' everyone ignoring Marielle Heller?

by Nathaniel R

Marielle Heller is, we suspect, a real deal cinematic treasure. Her debut film, the sexually charged, inventively imagined Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) showed a ton of promise. Her second feature Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), while more modest at first glance, was yet more complex and successful.

We think she ought to have been one of the Best Director nominees with Oscar this year, which is why she's in our Film Bitch Awards Best Director lineup...

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Interview: Richard E Grant on lucky breaks, film diaries, and "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"

by Nathaniel R

Richard E Grant's timing was impeccable during my own journey into cinephilia. I was in the process of falling madly deeply in love with movies when he made his debut in the cult classic With Nail and I (1987) and as I became more invested in not just movie stars but the crucial contributions of character actors to rich movies, he was everyone in so many movies I loved: Henry & June (1990), L.A. Story (1991), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993). I bought his first book "With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant" in hardcover right when it was published and later bought it again in paperback. I bring up this chronological personal fandom so that'll you'll understand that I was surely as visibly thrilled to sit down with Richard E Grant as he has appeared to be for the entirety of this awards season. We're both giddy about the Oscar nomination for his incredible performance as the slippery but loveable Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

But we began by discussing the book. I'd read it too often to begin anywhere else...

[The interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

One of the funniest film books you'll ever read. A must-have for fans of 1990s cinemaNATHANIEL R: Do you still do film diaries or did you do it only for your book 'With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant"?

RICHARD E GRANT: I've kept diaries since I was 11 years old, since I saw my mother shagging my father’s best friend on the front seat of a car, by accident. I tried religion, got no reply, couldn’t tell my friends, certainly couldn’t tell my parents what I’d seen, so I kept a diary to keep sane, and it has kept me relatively sane all these years. I was on the ill-fated  Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter) movie for Robert Altman, and a newspaper in England asked me if I would write a diary, so I did, and they published it...

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Berlinale 2019: Three queer selections, a doc from the Sudan, and one walkout

Hallo! Seán here reporting from the 2019 Berlinale. It's the first big European film festival of the year, where new work premieres, deals get made, parties go on (and on) and where cinephiles prove their love of film by standing around in the freezing cold. I'm doing my best "Berlinale business bear" I'm here in an offical capacity: getting a first look at the queer TEDDY titles (which we'll talk about after the jump) and the short films for festivals in London and Dublin, but aside from that I'm also here to enjoy the film festival experience i.e. standing in the wrong line and walking in completely cold to something truly bizarre and extraordinary.

The Berlinale has many distinct and diverse sections, each with their own different forms and appeal. As someone who (a year later) is only a year later beginning to figure this out, allow me to impart my knowledge on the sections before we jump into the queer selection...

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