Goodbye, 2023...

by Cláudio Alves

SUPERSTAR is my favorite new-to-me film of 2023. What's yours?

As the year draws to a close, it's time for reflection and hopes for the year to come. All over film publications, lists dominate, cataloging the best pictures of 2023, rushing to proclaim their champions before the ball drops. Here, however, let's do another exercise. Looking back at the past twelve months, I like to think about my favorite first-time watches of years gone by, classics and other sorts that were new to me, even if they were well known to everybody else. 

I think of Brian De Palma's Body Double, a perverse predilection I discovered on my travails through Erotic Thrillers. Then, there was Labyrinth of Cinema, Nobuhiko Obayashi's swan song, and a wild counterpoint to Nolan's Oppenheimer. While I wrote about those two, I have yet to mention my affection for Jafar Panahi's rebellious Offside or how Jan Svankmajer's Food seemed to synthesize its auteur's visceral cinema in one bite-sized grotesque. However, no flick inspired as much adoration as Todd Haynes' long-banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. In the year when Barbie reigned supreme, his was still the superior plastic picture, nightmarish and moving, a song on biopic limitations and truth at 24 frames per second.

New or old, may 2024 bring more cinema triumphs. Happy New Year!

Richard Glatzer, Co-Director of Still Alice (1952-2015)

Wash Westmoreland & Richard Glatzer. I believe this photo is from around the time of The Fluffer (2001)

Just two minutes after the last post, coincidentally about Still Alice but meant to be a random amusement, I read that Richard Glatzer the co-writer and co-director had died. He had been struggling with ALS for the past few years. If you'll excuse me getting a little sentimental, I'd like to tell you my personal story about him as a way of working through my sadness today.

I can't recall the exact circumstances of our meeting but just after I had moved to New York City in 1999, we began to talk over e-mail. He was quite literally my first online friend who was actually working in movies and television around the time I was trying to launch The Film Experience. If I remember correctly our online friendship was prompted by an interview I had done with Jackie Beat, my all time favorite drag queen, for my print zine (before the website). She had worked with Richard on his first film, the underseen gay indie dramedy Grief (1993). More...

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