Strike a Pose

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on Strike a Pose.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Strike a Pose with Madonna: Truth or Dare. After all, that now iconic documentary is really on a league of its own. Then again, this newer doc, which focuses on the male dancers from that 1991 film (and from the Material Girl’s Blond Ambition Tour) cannot help but drum up the comparisons. As a pseudo-sequel to Truth or Dare, Strike a Pose is perhaps less enthralling—no Warren Beatty or Antonio Banderas here—but just as entertaining. And while the first twenty or so minutes of the film do indeed feel like a sequel in spirit if not in name (we get to revisit the tour and the doc in ways that show us how much these dancers kept to themselves even as they seemingly opened up their lives for Madge and the camera), this documentary soon reveals itself to be something much rarer.

In profiling these men 25 years after the fact, Strike a Pose becomes a rare portrait of the middle-aged dancer, a figure that we’re not often offered on screen. It’s often hard to hear what these guys went through—you’ll be surprised to hear candid talks about AIDS that even Truth or Dare, despite its activist zeal given its time,couldn’t and didn’t breach—and it’s even more heartening to see their resilience. It was hard, many of them note, to have always lived with the, for better or for worse, “Madonna dancer” label especially given how their relationships to the Queen of Pop frayed soon after (addiction, rehab, and lawsuits didn’t help). By the time we see all of them reunite for the first time in decades and see them playing the infamous game of “Truth or Dare” again, you cannot help but feel a kinship to these people some of us have felt we’ve known for just as long. For Madonna fans, this is an unmissable film. But where directors Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan succeed is in producing a touching portrait of ageing, of finding the inspiration and the drive to keep going even when the promise of youth (and the promise you had in your own youth) threatens to disappear.

Grade: B+

Doc Corner: Nostalgia for the (Cinema) Light

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we're highlighting Nostalgia for the Light.

Nostalgia seeps through Peter Flynn’s sophomore film, The Dying of the Light. For good reason one might say. Like many of a certain generation who were too young to appreciate the glory of the mechanics of film projection when it was as common as day and night, I sometimes sound like a fetishist when it comes to talking about the flicker of celluloid as it whirs through its paces on its way to being projected onto the big screen.

Flynn, it would appear, is the same. His first film, Blazing the Trail: The O’Kalems in Ireland, was about people behind the camera in the 1910s, but his newest film is about the people behind the projector – the men and (infrequently) women who were in charge of spinning and threading the celluloid from reel to reel of film through projectors and onto cinema screens. (more after the jump)

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HBO’s LGBT History: Larry Kramer in Love and Anger (2015)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week we looked at the recent doc Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures which works as a nice primer on the famed photographer and, as is par for the course for films on gay icons from a certain era, as a portrait of a man working tirelessly to make the most of his ever winnowing time: Mapplethorpe died at age 42 of AIDS complications. We’re not going too far afield this week, as we’re focusing on a documentary on “America’s angriest AIDS activist” in Jean Carlomusto’s Larry Kramer in Love and Anger.

Kramer should be familiar to you. We’ve previously encountered him and talked about his righteous anger when we talked about The Normal Heart, and by that point he had already made HBO appearances in The Out List, Vito, and Outrage. That enough should be a reminder that there’s no way of talking about American gay rights activism of the last three decades without talking about Larry Kramer. Carlomusto’s film expediently moves through Kramer’s biography; from his time at Columbia Pictures, to Women in Love and Faggots, through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis group and The Normal Heart to ACT UP and his latest health scares and marriage...

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Doc Corner: IMAX in the Age of VOD

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we take a look at IMAX and question why such a documentary-friendly medium hasn't taken advantage of the marketplace.

A funny thing happened in the arthouse cinemas across my home country of Australia this weekend: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark was re-released into theatres. It had been a hit in 2002, but it’s still odd to see a 14-year-old Russian art film pop up around the nation for no other reason than, I suspect, to throw some (very elegant and aristocratic) shade at the recently-released Victoria.

I bring this up because I recently visited my local IMAX. The proper IMAX with screens that stands as tall as multi-storey buildings, and not whatever fauxMAX imitations have popped up across American multiplexes. [more...]

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HBO’s LGBT History: Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week we talked about race in HBO’s LGBT properties while briefly discussing Dee Rees’s Bessie. If there’s one thing media in general (but gay media in particular) needs to work on is intersectionality: ay attempt, for example, at framing the gay rights movement as “the new civil rights” movement not only suggests the plight of black people in America has been “won” but it refuses to understand how they intersect in sometimes very troubling ways. This week we're jumping on HBO's most recent release, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, which aired just this past Monday and which I got to see last week in the big screen. Not only is the doc wonderful, featuring candid interviews with those who knew (and posed for!) him, but it dovetails nicely with these issues of sex and race that we keep discussing.

The film borrows its subtitle from the famous words Jesse Helms used during a congressional hearing about Mapplethorpe's "pornographic" pictures: "Look at the pictures!" he implored, arguing that one couldn't deny the fact that they were not art. Cannily, this HBO documentary lets us admire plenty of Mapplethorpe's pictures—I didn’t count but the doc is exhaustive, showing us hundreds of photographs, scanned and offered up to us for close inspection. 

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