How Had I Never Seen... "But I'm a Cheerleader"?

by Cláudio Alves

To celebrate Pride Month, the Criterion Channel has chosen to highlight several works of queer cinema as well as various films featuring LGBTQIA+ characters. The selection is varied, spanning from Ettore Scola's Oscar-nominated A Special Day to the avant-garde work of Chantal Akerman and Cheryl Dunne. It's not all high-brow artistry -- there's space for kitschy entertainment, too. Such is the case of 1999's But I'm a Cheerleader directed by Jamie Babbit, a cult classic looking at gay conversion therapy through the prism of outrageous farcical humor. It's a movie I had never watched before, making it a great subject for this particular series…

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What are they reading?

Continue after the jump to discover.

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Doc Corner: Susanne Bartsch and Antonio Lopez Take the Center Stage

By Glenn Dunks

Almost as ubiquitous as biographies of famous musicians (several of those coming in the next month) are documentaries about party icons of queer history. We’ve already had the exploits of The Fabulous Allan Carr and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood in 2018 s, and now we can add two more titles: Susanne Bartsch: On Top and Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco.

Mother of the club kids, the nicknamed “Queen of the Night” and party planner extraordinaire, Susanne Bartsch is probably best known for her role in putting together the Love Ball in 1989. The AIDS fundraiser with people like Madonna in attendance (no doubt a formative moment in the creation of her single “Vogue”) was iconic in ways that likely gets forgotten about without films like this one to thrust it in their face and remind them. Footage from the ball is pivotal to On Top to contextualize her notoriety as more than just a famous-for-being-famous type of social queen, the likes of which flourished in the time after Warhol in New York City...

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Tweetweek: "Eighth Grade" Causes All the Feelings...

Let's begin with a perpetually relevant tweet

yes, keep going, maybe you can post the entire fucking plot of the movie before it opens on friday, I believe in you

— Danny Bowes (@bybowes) July 24, 2018

And don't you love it when one celebrity says something on twitter and another turns it into a funny joke with a reply?!

Ansel, I’ve been sitting in this restaurant for 45 minutes already.

— edgarwright (@edgarwright) July 26, 2018

AFTER THE JUMP sound advice from RuPaul, a funny joke about the Thor franchise, Jeff Goldblum statue, and much more in a curated sampling of good tweets for you that ends with a ton of thoughts on Eighth Grade because the movie is a modern miracle. Go see it!...

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Showbiz History: Robert Preston Centennial, Audra's Sixth and More

Happy Robert Preston Centennial! He was born on this day in 1918 and went on to  screen immortality via The Music Man (1962, Tony win for the stage version) and Victor / Victoria (1982, Oscar nomination). Other famous films include: Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), Mame (1974) and his last feature film The Last Starfighter (1984). We had planned a whole thing but this week has been bu-sy.

Here's what else was happening on this day in showbiz history...

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