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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Agent Linker

W Magazine Rooney Mara loves the sex scene from Rust & Bone. Who knew?
Decider Joe Reid reminds you to catch up with the Golden Globe and Critics Choice winning Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 
Guardian wonders who historically accurate The Big Short is... this is such a predictable part of awards season, yes?
Guardian after a bit of rights shuffling the Little House on the Prairie movie is back on 
Coming Soon Spider-Man (2017) set for IMAX so you can see Tom Holland real big like when he swings and flips and supers around

EW Matt Smith and Zosia Mamet are going to star in a Robert Mapplethorpe biopic. This is not, as far as we can tell, an adaptation of Patti Smith's Just Kids book, that was supposedly going to be adapted. So perhaps there are competing projects? 
Awards Daily on why she thinks The Big Short is going to win Best Picture - short answer: PGA hasn't been wrong yet in this short "preferential ballot" era
MNPP have you heard about the bizarre sounding post 9/11 Michael Jackson/Elizabeth Taylor/Marlon Brando movie to star Joseph Fiennes, Stockard Channing, and Brian Cox respectively. It sounds too strange to be true but it is in fact true. Meanwhile...
Pajiba ... has been on a tear about the casting and shares a funny quote from Orlando Jones pitching Angela Bassett as Liz Taylor. YES PLEASE.
Pajiba on the joys (thus far) of Agent Carter Season 2 

Finally...
Ear Candy! The Motion Picture Sound Editing "Golden Reel" Nominations were announced today. No film really led the nominations since Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant and Star Wars: The Force Awakens all received the same amount of nominations (3). They are all up for both Sound categories at the Oscars, too. Bridge of Spies which was Oscar nominated for Sound Mixing received 1 nomination  and Sicario which was nominated for Sound Editing received 2. On the television side, Game of Thrones is the nomination champ. Here's one category I thought was fun to know about:

Feature Film — Music in a Musical
“Love & Mercy” (Nicholas Renbeck)
“Pitch Perfect 2” (Amanda Goodpaster)
“Straight Outta Compton” (Jason Ruder)

And in case you missed the Film Bitch Awards in the sound categories, announced a while back, they are located here.

Interview: Patti Smith Doesn't Want Her Own Biopic!

What becomes a legend most? Not the biopics we see each year at the movies, Patti Smith suggests to me. We were meeting to talk about her first Original Song for a film, "Mercy Is" from this spring's $100 million hit Noah when the conversation veered into her own status as a showbiz legend, the godmother of punk. She shudders when I wonder aloud if anyone will make ever make a movie of her best-selling memoir "Just Kids" which recounts her storied relationship with fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Though she's undoubtedly been interviewed thousands of times by now in her forty years of stardom, and she questions (indirectly) the whole point of the star profile and the interviewing process  -- 'if you really want to know me, it's all there in the work' -- she is a patient and warm interview. She instantly recalls the old massive paraphenalia that journalists used to bring into the room to record with when she sees my tiny electronic device and she's eager to talk Noah, a project she felt immediately taken with when Darren Aronofsky first told her about his plans for it at the Venice Film Festival years ago. 

Patti Smith at a recent concert in Iceland

NATHANIEL: Movies aren’t something you've spent a lot of time with in your legendary career. Did you know Aronofsky’s work well before writing the song for Noah?

PATTI SMITH: Yes. I love the one with Rachel Weisz, The Fountain. And Pi. I saw Black Swan a couple of times and we talked about Black Swan as a metaphor for the artist process and things like that. But it was not so much Darren as the subject.

Nathaniel: But you’ve been asked about religion before in your career and you’ve called it ‘man-made dogma’ so why do a Biblical film?

PATTI SMITH: Well, I love the Bible. Just because I’ve extricated myself from religion doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It’s a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry - the Songs of Solomon and the Psalms. I studied the Bible seriously until I was young teenager. It was always part of our home education: talking about the Bible, arguing about the Bible, interpreting it. So I don’t connect prayer or scriptures with any particular religion so it’s not a contradiction in my life. [more...]

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