Tuesday, April 3, 2018 at 11:00PM Seán here, full of the joys of spring and delighted to be helming the reboot of a franchise we all love here at the Film Experience... April Showers! Kicking off the month is a healthy dose of heavy-handed homoerotic horror, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge - what else!
Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 12:01PM Stepping in briefly from vacation to celebrate Love, Simon. This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad.
Vanilla is a delicious flavor. Especially if you’re in the right mood for it. Loving vanilla doesn’t mean you can’t love more daring or less common flavors. But you deserve a good scoop of vanilla on occasion. The best thing that can be said of Love, Simon — and this is stronger praise than it sounds — is that it’s very vanilla. Imagine a cross between classic rom-coms like Sleepless in Seattle and Never Been Kissed and then just flip it a teensy-tiny bit until it’s gay. Not queer, mind you; we’re going for vanilla.
Love, Simon, the new film directed by gay TV power-producer Greg Berlanti (Flash, Riverdale, Brothers & Sisters, etcetera), is based on the novel “Simon vs. The Homo-Sapiens Agenda”. Though the novel’s title (I haven’t read it) suggests something less pro-heteronormativity, the film version is quite happy with assimilation. The only thing about Simon (Jurassic World’s Nick Robinson) that “reads” as gay or at all discomfited by his suburban nuclear family life is his inner monologue in which he tells us about his “huge-ass secret”...
Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 3:20PM by Chris Feil
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars has brought one of its most embattled seasons to an appropriately controversial conclusion. This season has been rife with drama onscreen and off that has made championing the show come with several asterisks and addendums. The show has dug itself into a hole of too many twists, an overestimation of its need for drama to excite us, and a mounting disinterest in the art of drag itself. And yet it remains one of the biggest platforms to showcase the glorious breadth of the queer experience, blessed with an audience that demands it approaches its own shortcomings.
And this week’s finale brought a twist that may have broken the fandom’s resolve in how much they can accept: the final four would be whittled down to 2 by a deciding vote of a jury of the eliminated queens. Once again, subjectivity became the season’s foremost battleground and unsurprisingly this makes for frustrating television when a competition is involved. How would a consensus shake out when every queen has already shown a different perspective on what makes a competitor worthy of the crown?
Tuesday, March 13, 2018 at 11:30AM By Glenn Dunks
Down here in Melbourne where I live, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival is gearing up for its 28th year. It's got the best line-up I have ever seen for the festival, and in particular the documentary section is full of must see titles. I know The Film Experience readers like to hear about LGBTQI cinema so I thought I'd choose three that focus on the movies and pop culture worlds to look at that will hopefully make their way to cinemas and VOD soon: The Gospel According to Andre, Mansfield 66/67 and Queerama.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ANDRE
Shame on me, I suppose, for putting on The Gospel According to André and expecting a breezy 90 minutes of glam connoisseur André Leon Talley dishing cutting fashion commentary in caftans and calling everybody “darling” while rattling off designer names like he’s Edina in that Pet Shop Boys song about Absolutely Fabulous. Names! Names! Names!
Talley is, after all, a mainstay of fashion documentaries since his appearances in the classics Unzipped and Catwalk from 1995 on through the likes of The September Issue, The First Monday in May, Valentino: The Last Emperor and the recent House of Z about Zac Posen. What I did not expect from Kate Novack’s documentary was a film that takes the story of one of the American fashion world’s most iconic and recognisable names as a launching pad for an exploration of race and racism through history via the POV of a gay black man.
Sunday, March 11, 2018 at 3:44PM by Jorge Molina
Because of the backwards narrative style, the entire second season of American Crime Story has been one big origin story for Andrew Cunanan, his relationships, and the motives that eventually led to his string of murders. The seventh episode, titled “Ascent”, was the episode that we’ve been leading up to all along to fully get a changing point in Andrew’s life.
Last week’s episode (titled “Descent”, in parallels that were evident throughout) was about Andrew losing everything he built for himself. This week we get a peek into how he started putting it together...
