Doc Corner: Tribeca Film Festival x4

By Glenn Dunks

The Tribeca Film Festival is sadly a no-go for 2020, but the teams behind some of the festival’s documentary selections have made their films available for press so we’re going to take a look at a few and hope that one day they make their way to screens for you in the future.

Let us start with a delight of a drag kiki in P.S. Burn This Letter Please, tracing an underground circuit of drag queens, female impersonators and gender illusionists in 1950s pre-Stonewall New York City. Prompted by the discovery of a box of letters all addressed to a mysterious man named Reno -- I won’t spoil the fun, but the recipient has ties to Michelle Pfeiffer! -- who kept them secret, and in doing so has kept alive a part of queer history that is too fabulous to stay hidden away. Through these letters and interviews with some of the surviving queens, directors Jennifer Tiexiera (an excellent editor of works such as Dragonslayer, one of my top documentaries of the decade, and 17 Blocks) and Michael Seligman (a producer on RuPaul’s Drag Race) untangle the insignificant dramas and life-changing moments of Daphne, Adrian, Claudia, Rita George and the rest of the gang.

Before Paris is Burning and even before The Queen, P.S. Burn This Letter Please offers insight where there has historically been so little. As one talking head explains, this is real gay history in black and white.

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The New Classics - Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Michael Cusumano's series on the great films of the 21st century through the lens of a single scene.

Scene: Wig in a Box
I distinctly remember the arrival of the poster for Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the art-house movie theater I worked at during the Summer of 2001.  The poster is dominated by the image of John Cameron Mitchell’s gender-defying punk rocker aggressively belting out a song, a swirl of glittering make-up and tendrils of blonde wig. More than attention-grabbing, it was attention demanding. I eagerly anticipated the film as I watched the trailer several dozen times during my shifts. As a straight, cisgender man from the suburbs with a lackluster wardrobe, I assumed that it was most definitely a movie Not. For. Me. but as an insatiable movie-devouring college student, I was nevertheless excited for what looked like a wildly inventive, low-budget extravaganza.

And while I was correct about the creativity on display, I was wrong about feeling excluded by the film. Despite sharing zero details with the protagonist’s turbulent life story, it hit me personally in a way I wasn’t ready for...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: Four restored queer classics in re-release!

by Glenn Dunks

The Film Experience and Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. In this final edition we're looking at four classic documentaries that have now been restored and are back in theaters (in select cities), waiting to be (re-)discovered: The Queen (1968), A Bigger Splash (1973), Before Stonewall (1984), and Paris is Burning (1990).

We will begin with the earliest and move forward through time. I was lucky enough to see The Queen on the big screen at a repertory screening in New York several years ago... 

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Stage Door: The musical adaptation of "Tootsie"

by Nathaniel R

“I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man.” So went the famous arc-completing line in Tootsie (1982) that resonates backwards through the movie, and carried you out of the theater, not just on a comic high but with zeitgeist capturing depth. Though it’s little remarked upon today in the now-now-now of popular culture, the early 80s were a cinematic time rife with the questioning of traditional gender roles just like our culture is today. Hit films like Victor/Victoria, Yentl, Mr. Mom,  and Tootsie all arrived in quick succession, though the then preferred vernacular was androgyny and gender-bending, as opposed to today’s non-binary and genderqueer designations.  It’s not surprising, then, to see Tootsie come round again to popular culture in 2019 in the form of a Tony-nominated musical comedy. What’s more surprising is that that resonant quotable capper is one of the few famous lines to be lifted directly from the movie.

As shocking as it is to type, they wrote new jokes!  This is, as you may have guessed given Broadway’s strange new role as a regurgitator of old movies, not the norm…. 

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Soundtracking: Dumplin'

by Chris Feil

Much to our surprise when Dumplin’ arrived on Netflix last month, the film is stealthily a Dolly Parton jukebox musical. The heartwarming film is a collection of Dolly songs old, new, and (crucially) reimagined, shot straight out of the heart of its heroine. Add in a few appearances by drag queens, and the film is the kind of unassumingly big-hearted self-love anthem to make the music legend proud.

And its no mere cashing in on a famous songbook either - Dolly’s music anchors the emotional backbone of the film...

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