Doc Corner: It's Child's Play and 'Living with Chucky'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

No space within movie fandom feels more like a genuine community like the space taken up by horror. Not to get too Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious franchise, but for many, horror is a family that ties and binds people together. Even more so for queer lovers of the horror genre. Horror is particularly amenable to subtextual readings as well as straight-up camp and gay storytelling for many reasons, but that bond comes at least partly because horror (as a broad concept) and LGBTQ+ people have so much in common. Not that you need me to tell you any of that.

These narrative strands come together in Kyra Elise Gardner’s Living with Chucky. Ostensibly a documentary about the killer doll franchise that began as Child’s Play and has morphed more famously into The House of Chucky. It is also a telling of how this franchise was able to do what it did and remain relevant three decades later. Gardner is the daughter of one of the visual effects and puppeteer masters who’s brought Chucky to life over the years, so you could say she has particular insight.

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Pfeiffer Pfriday takes on "The Fabulous Baker Boys"

by Nathaniel R

Have you been listening to the podcast "Pfeiffer Pfridays"? Each week Jerry and Michael revisit, or screen for the pfirst time, a Pfeiffer movie. Sometimes they have guests in tow. They're not going in chronological order but hopping around. This weekend marks their 30th episode so they're making whoopie and covering one of the greatest pfilms of the 1980s: The Fabulous Baker Boys. Guest starring... me!

We get into it, not just the Pfeiffer ascendance into the pantheon of it all, but the Bridges brothers character arcs, Jennifer Tilly's hilarious supporting role, the movie's Old Hollywood glamour, the screenplay, the cinematography, and the 1989 Oscar race.

Streaming Revisit: "Bound" is 25

Please welcome guest contributor Brent Calderwood... 

by Brent Calderwood

I first saw Bound in 2000 at a special screening at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, four years after its initial release. The audience was rapt, cowering in their seats or nervously laughing in all the right places. Back then, my college friends and I were so desperate for LGBTQ content that we’d hold house parties to watch pirated VHS tapes of the original ten-episode British series Queer As Folk, converted from imported PAL-format tapes by a friend of a friend in our school’s AV department. Given the dearth of queer representation, we convinced ourselves that we loved everything we saw no matter what, down to the neutered gay characters serving up puns on Will & Grace. Fast forward to 2021—would Bound live up to my memory and expectations?

I was nervous about how Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s debut would hold up 25 years after it was first released, but as it turns out I didn’t need to worry. The 1996 noir, which just began streaming on Hulu, remains as fresh and edgy as ever...  

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Showbiz History: CinemaScope, Recycled Comedy, and Jennifer Tilly

9 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history...

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1936: Henry Fonda (then 31 years old and a fresh new face at the movies) marries his second wife, socialite Francis Ford Seymour (then 28). Their marriage will be unhappy and end tragically in 1950 (with her suicide), but their union will produce one of the great inventions of the 20th century: Jane Fonda. 

1953: Biblical epic The Robe starring Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, world premieres in New York. It's the first movie shot in CinemaScope, "the new dimensional photographic marvel you can see without glasses"...

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Would you rather?

We haven't looked at Instagram in ages. Let's play the game. Would you rather...

...go to the movies with Glen Powell?
...hike Topanga with Richard Madden?
...california dream' with Jennifer Tilly?
...get ready for summer with Beanie Feldstein?
...wrangle puppies with Olivia Newton-John?
...kiss a pig with Miles Heizer?
...get a headcast with Harry Shum Jr?
...read a new novel with Natalie Portman?
...or travel incognito with Octavia Spencer?

The photos are after the jump to help you decide...

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