Soundtracking: "Love, Simon"

by Chris Feil

Love, Simon is chasing the ghost of John Hughes, a brand of uplift where teen woes are packaged conventionally and without condescension for maximum warm fuzzies. Naturally that package must include an anthemic sound, music that connects with the generation it depicts and becomes part of the fabric of what we remember about the film. But if Love, Simon is supposed to be a gay alternative on Hughesian comedy, does the sound also have its gay twist?

Simon’s signature sound comes from Jack Antonoff and his band Bleachers, bookending the film. Instead of the singular force of Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” as Hughes employed in The Breakfast Club, it’s more like the film uses Antonoff as the artist to hang its headphones on instead of one song. He’s a straight musician, but Bleachers is fairly embraced by the queer teen set - at least the kind that the film depicts. Though in an age where Troye Sivan can produce hit bops about bottoming, is that really enough for the film to define itself musically?

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Soundtracking: "The Bodyguard"

Whitney: Can I Be Me debuts this Friday on Showtime. Chris Feil takes a look at the icon's biggest soundtrack...

The Bodyguard doesn’t deserve its iconic mega-selling soundtrack. Granted, most of us have never pretended that that the film was even a whiff as good as all that glorious vocal dexterity Whitney Houston lays into her six tracks. But rest assured: the movie itself is even worse than you remember.

Among its many sins, the most egregious is how it ignores its own musical assets. The Bodyguard exists in a world where you can enter someone’s home and just happen upon an extended dance sequence being shot for a music video - but it also presents a world where that isn’t anywhere near as fun as it sounds. It spends the first act under the illusion that we give a crap about five or six things more than we do about Whitney’s voice. Why go to the creative effort to cast one of the biggest music acts of the era (and in a quasi-musical!) if you don’t know how to use her?

No sweat for Whitney, even if her acting performance netted her some harsh reviews. As ever, her musical contribution remains untouchable...

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The Winner of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 9 Is...

Chris here. The ninth season of RuPaul's Drag Race came to a close last night with the series's most dramatic conclusion ever. At last week's reunion, Mama Ru teased that a sudden death lipsync battle would crown America's Next Drag Superstar from our beloved top four. This curveball was another shakeup from the show's formula, and feels like how the winner should have been chosen all along. While past seasons' crownings have been dull slogs to awarding an obvious winner, this kept the competition alive until the very second - and gave us two all-time great lipsync performances from the ultimate champion.

Trinity Taylor was the randomly selected first queen and chose Peppermint as her opponent, pitting a potential frontrunner against underdog lipsync assassin. But that meant leaving besties Sasha Velour and Shea Couleé to duke it out...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Whitney: Can I Be Me'

This month for Pride Month we're looking at four documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week it is Whitney: Can I Be Me, the latest in a long line of musical documentaries.

There is no need to introduce Whitney Houston; we all know her and her songs. I also have no doubt that people reading this know her story of soaring talent and troubled downfall due to drugs. Hers was an arc that is rooted in the blueprint of great cinematic tragedies, a story that we have seen play out plenty of times before (in life as well as in in the movies), that it would be easy to roll our eyes at how cliched it was if it weren’t so painfully true.

If it feels somewhat curious then that director Nick Broomfield has turned his documentary eye to her story then that’s because it is. Unlike his earlier music doco Kurt & Courtney (or even his pair of Aileen Wuornos docs in which he takes an antagonistic role with his subject), there isn't an antagonist to go after. Whitney: Can I Be Me’s central conflict is predominantly between Whitney and herself. The title, “Can I Be Me”, was a phrase used often by Whitney – at times in the backstage footage, her team are even seen joking about it – as a means of apologising for being herself rather than the perfect pop creation crafted by Clive Davis and her mother.

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OTD: Babs, Shirley, and "Cool" from West Side Story

On this very gay day (4/24) in history as it relates to showbiz...

1873 Silent film director Robert Wiene, best known for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) born in Breslau (Note: other online sources disagree with the IMDb on this birthdate but it's always fun to think about Caligari)

1927 Oscar winning cinematographer Pasqualino de Santis born in Italy. Classics include Romeo and Juliet, The Damned, Death in Venice, and L'Argent

1930 Richard Donner, superstar director/producer of the 1980s, behind films like The Goonies, Lethal Weapon, and the first two Supermans. Apparently retired after 16 Blocks (2006) with Bruce Willis

1931 The Public Enemy starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow was enjoying its opening weekend at movie theaters. It was a big hit, ending in the top ten of its year. Variety claimed it was "low brow material" attempting to be high brow by its craftsmanship. If only critics knew in the moment -- they almost never do even now -- that "low brow" genres regularly produce classics.

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