Oscar's Foreign Race Pt 6 - Stats, Genres, and Queer Cinema

by Nathaniel R

"And Suddenly the Dawn" is the longest film hoping for a foreign Oscar nomination this year at 3 hours and 15 minutes

We've been digging into the 87 films that are up for the Academy Award in Foreign Language Film. So far we've watched the trailers, talked about female directors, first time filmmakers, and international hunks. Today a collection of scattered trivia regarding the list as well as the LGBTQ films in the running. 

LONGEST & SHORTEST
Running times are, we admit, a peculiar TFE obsession but it is what it is. The longest submission this year is Chile's And Suddenly the Dawn at 195 minutes. It's a sprawling fictional biography of a writer returning home after a long absence and takes place in three different time periods of his life: childhood in the 1940s, adulthood in the 1960s/70s, and present day old age. Did their win last season embolden Chile the way directors often get more longwinded the more famous they get? Germany's Never Look Away (just reviewed) and Turkey's The Wild Pear Tree are the only other absurdly long films, each over 3 hours (188 minutes each to be exact). The shortest entries are Costa Rica's university student pregnancy drama Medea (70 minutes) and Lithuania's sports documentary Wonderful Losers (71 minutes) but there are actually quite a few entries that are hovering just below the perfect movie length of 90 minute. In other words, a lot of international filmmakers kept it tight.

Thailand's Malila: The Farewell Flower

Queer cinema, double-category contenders, and more after the jump...

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10th Anniversary: Milk (2008) is Aging Beautifully

by Eric Blume

This month marked the tenth anniversary of the release of Gus Van Sant’s semi-biopic Milk, chronicling the last eight years of the life of gay politician Harvey Milk.  If you’ve never seen Milk, get ye post haste to it, if for no other reason than to be fully immersed in this crucial window of history.  If you saw Milk when it was released a decade ago and haven’t seen it since (which was true for me), watch it again:  it’s aging beautifully.

Olympic diver Tom Daley’s husband, Dustin Lance Black, won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for this movie, and the trophy was richly deserved.  Black not only manages to avoid almost every biopic cliché, he captures the beginning of the gay rights movement with precision, pain, and most importantly, humor.  Black’s script starts when Harvey Milk turns forty, had been mostly closeted, and was not politically aware. He chronicles his consciousness-raising without a hint of clumsiness or fake nobility.  And while Black keeps his focus squarely on Milk, his real achievement is in casting a wider net: he gives Milk’s real-life contemporaries a vivid presence, and shows us a full community within the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco.  This script manages to be both macro and micro, and throughout you can see Black’s gigantic heart and passion for this story...

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Interview: Ofir Raul Grazier on his Oscar hopeful "The Cakemaker"

An abridged version of this interview was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Ofir Raul GrazierThe Oscars are coming and with them, renewed attention for some of the year’s most memorable films. One of this past summer’s sleeper hits was The Cakemaker, an LGBT drama that’s just been released on DVD / Blu-Ray. The tiny but prolific distributor Strand Releasing, who have released many gay favorites, have been in business for almost 30 years now and, if you don’t adjust for inflation, The Cakemaker quietly turned into their biggest box office hit ever this summer. The drama about a grieving gay German man who seeks out the widow of his lover (who was unaware of her husband’s affair) earned nearly a million at arthouse box offices across the U.S!

After winning Best Picture at the Ophir Awards in Israel, it became the country's submission for Oscar’s Best Foreign Language Film category. We recently caught up with its director Ofir Raul Grazier. Our interview follows, edited for clarity and length.

NATHANIEL: The Cakemaker is your feature debut. Was that terrifying for you or totally natural on set? 

OFIR RAUL GRAIZER: It was a bit scary, of course, because the amount of responsibility is huge. The producers,  the crew, the actors --  I was thinking about all of that more than the film itself. But once the camera was rolling it felt quite natural. I love to do this. This is my passion. I managed to enjoy shooting. Everything between the shots was a nightmare [Laughs]...

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Podcast: Bohemian Rhapsody and the Best Actor Race

Nathaniel R, Murtada Elfadl and Chris Feil talk new films and the Oscar race

Index (65 minutes)
00:01 Bryan Singer's Bohemian Rhapsody, homophobic storytelling, and cat reaction shots
10:25 Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, the limits and strengths of the performance
14:08 The Best Actor race: Bradley, Ethan, Viggo, Willem, and Rami? Plus floundering campaigns for First Man and The Front Runner and the default possibilities of Vice? 
35:00 Lucas Hedges in both Ben is Back and Boy Erased
37:30 Boy Erased in general, Nicole & Russell's fine parental performances, and a bit of The Miseducation of Cameron Post on the side 
50:30 Recent DVDs: Mamma Mia 2, Leave No Trace, Skate Kitchen, and Sorry to Bother You
55:55 Return trips to both A Star is Born and BlacKkKlansman
01:02:00 Can You Ever Forgive Me? afterglow and Wildlife fade?

References / Further Reading
• Nathaniel's review of Bohemian Rhapsody
• Best Actor Chart 
• Murtada on Carey Mulligan
• Jorge's Mamma Mia obsession

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Bohemian Erased

Review: Bohemian Rhapsody

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

‘C’mon Gay Shame!’ That’s what we imagine the movies are shouting at us right now, spirits ablaze and fingers snapping. Though it’s surely a coincidence, the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (‘yaaas, Queen’?) and the gay conversion therapy drama Boy Erased have arrived simultaneously. This accidental double feature is a double closeted whammy. 

It’d be wonderful to report that they’re both worth seeing, but only one might rock you. And it isn’t the one with the famous “we will we will rock you” chorus. But more on Boy Erased later since it’s just beginning a platform run on 5 screens and will be expanding as awards season heats up. Bohemian Rhapsody, on the other hand, is opening wide on 4,000 screens and hoping to fill them like Queen filled stadiums…

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