Pride Month Doc Corner: 'No Dress Code Required'

We have been looking at LGBTIQ-themed documentaries for Pride Month. We conclude this mini-series with No Dress Code Required, which just played the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Right off the bat, director Cristina Herrera Borquez has a leg-up on other LGBTIQ civil rights documentaries by focusing on a (presumably) little-known fight for marriage equality in the Mexican state of Baja California. Queer stories from this region are not surprisingly few and far between. In No Dress Code Required we follow a gay couple – Victor Fernando Urias Amparo and Victor Manuel Aguirre Espinoza (“The Victors”) – who are withheld from marrying in spite of Mexican law.

What starts as Borquez simply documenting the seemingly minor court case, eventually leads to her having a front row seat in a national media frenzy that shines a necessary light on the dynamics of Mexico’s complicated relationship with the gay rights movement...

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"Dante's Lunch" Dives Into The World of Pixar's Coco

New Pixar shorts are always a cause for celebration – especially after Piper’s Best Animated Short win at this year’s Academy Awards – but their most recent iteration is closer to Ratatouille’s first look of rat-induced restaurant mayhem than a tiny standalone film. Fresh off the heels from their teaser trailer, Dante’s Lunch is a vibrant, bite-sized taste of the world of Coco. It was developed early in the process for Pixar’s newest feature film, which is co-directed by Toy Story 3's Lee Unkrich and first-time director Adrian Molina. Pulsing with color, texture, and streamers of papel picado, the slapstick-laden short explores the Mexico streets we’ll experience later this year in full view but from the perspective of Dante the lucha libre mask-wearing dog, namely his salivated chase through cacti, autumn leaves, and mouth-watering corn with mayonnaise, chili powder and cheese.

Until Coco hits theaters on November 22nd... What’s your favorite Pixar short, teaser trailer or otherwise?

Doc Corner Goes to Slamdance

by Glenn Dunks

Okay, so if we had really gone to Slamdance I feel like you would have noticed with some extra coverage given that it runs at the same time and in the same city as Sundance. So despite not travelling to the snowy surrounds of Park City, I was still nonetheless lucky enough to get a peek at Slamdance’s documentary slate. And here we are telling you about FIVE of the titles in this super-sized edition of Doc Corner. Those five include outback savages, musical amateurs and geniuses and more that should be coming to festivals and VOD over the next year...

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Reviews: "Desierto" and "Under the Shadow"

by Nathaniel R

Jeffrey Dean Morgan & Gael García Bernal in "Desierto"

Two more Oscar submissions are now in limited release in the US: Mexico's Desierto and the UK's Tehran set film Under the Shadows. Both are what you might call horror films though one suspects only the latter would accept the label. 

Desierto
We'll go anywhere with Gael García Bernal, who has blessed us with a number of fine road trip / travel movies in his career like Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Motorcycle Diaries , and The Loneliest Planet. In short, he's the perfect choice as a protagonist if you want us to sign up for a gruelling journey...

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NYFF: Everything Else

Manuel reporting from NYFF on an Adriana Barraza star vehicle.

Everything Else
Natalia Almada's Everything Else (Todo lo demás) is a portrait of a woman in the most literal sense. The movie, which runs 98 minutes, has very little plot and is focused instead on observing (keenly, empathetically, near-obsessively) the life of Doña Flor. A no nonsense government worker by day with very little life outside the desk she occupies daily and the apartment she shares with her cat, Doña Flor (played by Babel's Oscar nominated Adriana Barraza) is not lonely, per se. But she does seem disconnected from the life around her; in Barraza's face you can see the weariness of her life without the contempt stories about childless spinsters usually inspire. Almada gives Barraza no more than 50 lines in the entire film, plunging us for stretches at a time in a silence that rattles for the very comfort it depends on. She's interested in watching Doña Flor and, in doing so, sketches out a woman perhaps like many others and yet entirely herself.

That the quiet peeks at her life are punctuated by news reports (often out of frame and unintelligible) about violence against women and close ups of the women she encounters on the train, across her desk, and at the public pool she visits, make clear that Almada's near dialogue-free project wants to think about the state of Mexican women today without doing anything more than showing (there is so little telling).

The effect is hypnotizing though whether you follow along for the ride depends on your patience for such a small scale story with such a self-consciously deployed structure. And yet, every time Barraza is on screen, you're reminded why she remains such an underutilized actress; she doesn't carry the film as much as she inhabits it, losing herself in the mundane life depicted, another face in the crowd.