Thor Ragnarok Pride!

You guys Thor Ragnarok is celebrating Gay Pride with its new character posters. Thanks, Marvel. It's not quite enough to forgive you for trying to throw us off the Cappy/Bucky romance with that weird kiss your lover's niece thing in Civil War but noted and appreciated.

 Click on any of them to embiggen.

Okay, okay, nitpickers. This is probably just a celebration of the rainbow bridge to Asgard where Thor and family reside but we'll allow for the double meaning.

P.S. We did have to eject a poster of Anthony Hopkins to make this work but the designers made him so superfluous by repeating Loki's color and Hopkins is already filler in that Emmy race he's in so he'll sit this one out! 

Some Rami to Love

Look, it's the first image of Rami Malek as the iconic Freddie Mercury in the movie Bohemian Rhapsody. The film will be directed by Bryan Singer, who is stepping away from the mutants for once, unless you count Freddie Mercury's mutant lungs / range (four octaves -heeeyyy) which maybe you should. What'cha think?

It's quite a fine image, really. Rami's unique facial structure really plays up the Freddieness once you add that moustache. For what it's worth we are promised that this will not be a traditional biopic (it covers only the formation of the band in 1970 through their Live-Aid performance in 1985). There have been murmurs that the project might not do justice to Freddie's story, or his sexuality, because the surviving members of Queen are totally involved. That's always tricky with true stories when the actual people are involved in telling it.

With deep apologies to Queen, I'm now singing one of my favorite of their hits with new lyrics

All we hear is Rami oh ga ga
Rami oh goo goo
Rami oh ga ga
All we hear is Rami oh ga ga
Rami oh blah blah
Rami oh, what's new?
Rami oh, someone still loves you!

Link Runner 2017

Gurus of Gold pundits make some quick assessments as the new awards season begins
Paste Magazine why isn't Billy Eichner a sex symbol yet?
THR the new version of It is already causing real clowns to lose work
Advocate offers up 17 LGBT tropes that need to be retired from entertainment. This list is so wide-ranging they'll be no queer characters left on TV if they follow it!
/Film cool stuff: scratch off poster to track your viewing of 100 classic movies

The Daily collects obituaries and tributes to the acclaimed horror director Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre)
IndieWire Dunkirk arranges a special screening at Toronto to celebrate IMAX. Consider that Oscar campaign already ignited
Awards Daily new stills for Call Me By Your Name. These are more likely it. The first few were so underwhelming
Towleroad Heathers is getting a TV adaptation. Leslye Headland directs the pilot which has updates for the Heathers for themselves (one of them is genderqueer) 

Off Cinema
• The Cut good deep dive into Kathy Griffin's life post that T***p photo that got her into so much trouble
• Vox winners and losers of MTV Video Music Awards
• ET literal winners of the MTV Video Music Awards (though, like the Gramys, it's not an awards show that's actually about awards)
• AV Club Jason Segel is having a tall person small door problem. Cute
• Playbill the 29 biggest grossing Broadway shows of all time from the Cabaret revival with Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming ($119 million) to Disney's The Lion King $1.3 billion). Hamilton is already at #18 ($242 million) and it's only been open two years! (It should be noted that these are just their Broadway grosses, not touring companies and the like. 

Exit Video
Seems like there's going to be a few short films about the Blade Runner world before Blade Runner 2049 opens. Here's the first one...

Review: Must-see Sundance hit "Beach Rats"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. It is reprinted here with their permission.

‘I can’t see you,’ potential hook-ups keep telling him as he cruises them online from his dark room. Could he turn on a light? Frankie, this Brooklyn teenager in the dark, begrudingly obliges still trying to shield himself with a baseball cap. He takes endless torso and body-part selfies. They’re revealing but only of his flesh, depersonalized thirst traps for the older men he cruises. Some people don’t want to seen.

Or aren’t ready to be...

Click to read more ...

I Saw the Signs - "Cruising" for Prime Beef Cuts

Shove a professional sign or any diegetic text or hand-scrawled message in front of the camera and we go all bookworm eyes. Are they subliminal subtitles? That's surely up to the set decorator, prop man, production designer and director. In this new visual series (we previously did Silence of the Lambs - don't read anything into two queer serial killler pictures in a row, erp!) we'll share textual images from a film that use unspoken words to tell the story... or are merely fun period details. 

This week's victim is the infamous homophobic serial killer movie Cruising (1980). Here are 28 photos of signs and messages and letters and whatnot from the film with a few notes on actual NYC history and a few asides to other pop culture wonders ...

Click to read more ...