It’s easy to take for granted how far gay-straight relations have come in the past 30 years. It’s so easy, in fact, that David Carr published a piece in the New York Times last week wondering “What if Gawker tried to out an anchor at Fox News and no one cared?”—the implication being that the culture had "moved on" from caring about someone's sexual orientation.
Since its debut earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Abdellatif Kechiche's eventual Palm d'or-winning Blue Is the Warmest Color has been one of the most discussed movies of the year. The three-hour French-language film features about 10 minutes of explicit lesbian sex over three scenes (including one that stretches on for almost seven minutes). Blue's sex caused it to be banned in Idaho, as well as unrest among its lead actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. (Seydoux told New York magazine that she was asked to do things in the movie that made her feel "like a prostitute.")
After Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave made its Toronto Film Festival debut last month, Vulture's Kyle Buchanan proclaimed, in a headline accompanying a gushing review, “Your Best Picture Winner Will Be 12 Years a Slave." I read that and wondered why a writer would set expectations so high for something he loved (beyond the click-bait potential of such grand pronouncements).
On the surface, Don Jon is the finest straight drag show since Bosom Buddies.
I still felt Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity in my body the day after I saw it last week.
It's rare to watch a stoner comedy and think that its director will make a great interview. But Newlyweeds, writer-director Shaka King's independent comedy/drama (opening today at New York's Film Forum), is a rare kind of movie, one that depicts lives and relationships you see infrequently (if at all, on film), and there's an urgency to King's voice underneath the weedy, mellow vibe.
Blue Caprice (opening this week in New York) is not a biopic. It's based on the events leading up to the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, and takes its title from the car the real-life killers used, but—director Alexandre Moors warned me when I talked to him and star Isaiah Washington earlier this week—it's really an interpretation, and not a faithful recreation.
You know that scene from The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa ride through one of those carnival haunted-house rides and it turns out to be really busted? It’s lacking anything scary. Or anything at all for that matter. A scream greets them; they hear they squeal of a tape rewinding; and the scream repeats. A coffin opens to reveal only a spring, as a canned “I vahnt your blood” sounds. A skeleton drops from the ceiling accompanied by the sound of a donkey braying. Lisa side-eyes Bart and says, “That was just confusing.” James Wan’s Insidious Chapter 2 is the cinematic equivalent of that ride, the Screamatorium of Dr. Frightmarestein. It's not very scary. It's just confusing.
The young men of the boy band One Direction like playing with their fame. Throughout their Morgan Spurlock-directed 3D concert movie/behind-the-scenes doc, One Direction: This Is Us, we see them conducting the applause they receive as though the crowds of adoring fans are instruments. They run to and from ledges of buildings their admirers have gathered around, manipulating the roar of adulation. They use hand signals to amplify and decrease the screams and squeals. At one point, one member is being interviewed alone about how great his fans are. As evidence, he gets up from his chair and walks a few yards to the window behind him that he stands in front of and throws open, unleashing an appreciative sonic boom.
Here are two ways to look at director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett's new intensely bloody home-invasion horror flick You're Next:
"Sometimes I just think, Are you serious that I'm saying this right now, that I have to talk about what is going on in America today?" director Lee Daniels told Indiewire earlier this week about his new film The Butler. Indeed, his film's survey of major events in the struggle for black civil rights in America feels simplified, if not dumbed-down—if not outright condescending.
I saw Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s biopic Lovelace about a month ago, and I still haven't figured out its purpose. We don't really need another retelling of Linda Lovelace’s story, especially one like this: bereft of nuance and determined to make a one-dimensional victim out of a woman who was fascinating, complex, contradictory, and revolutionary.
Elysium, the titular utopia of District 9 writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s second film, looks like the ritziest parts of Los Angeles. Maybe it will remind you of the Hamptons or St. Tropez (does St. Tropez look like that?), but it was an L.A. ringer to me. It is home to sprawling McMansions, intensely green yards, tanned bodies lying in blissful inertia, elegant dinner parties. It's a beautiful place where no one grows old, and where healing whatever ails you is as simple as lying on a slab and pushing a button.
Everybody loves The Conjuring.
James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now practically marches up and announces to you that it’s going to serve a refreshingly multi-dimensional portrayal of teens and their problems. Upon meeting his love interest when he wakes up on her lawn after a drunken blackout, our protagonist Sutter (Miles Teller) asks her, “So, what’s your thing?” “I like to think there’s more about a person than one thing,” replies Amy (Shailene Woodley).
Writer/director Maggie Carey’s The To Do List is so sex-positive, it borders on propaganda. At the very least, it functions as a sort of Ethical Slut 101, an instruction on the hilarity of sex and the joys of portraying exploratory women onscreen. “Let’s get to work, vagina!” says protagonist Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) when setting out on the journey. A virgin who hasn’t so much as kissed a guy in years, Brandy is determined to conquer sex during the summer before her freshman year in college. She creates a list of various acts she wants to experience – “makeout,” “fingerbang,” “dry hump,” "orgasm" – and ticks them off one by one, employing friends and coworkers as lab partners in the experiment. The Irina Dunn-quoting Brandy so clinical about the project that it drives the boys crazy. "You gave me a handjob. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?" sniffs one aspiring suitor. "No," she responds. "It’s a handjob."
I could hardly believe how easy director Brian De Palma was to talk to when I spoke to him in advance of the release of his 29th feature film, Passion (out on VOD August 1 and in select theaters August 30). He was generous with his time and refeshing with his candor. He was relaxed, open to critique, and surprisingly humble for someone who's directed bonafide classics (Carrie, The Untouchables and Scarface) and cult favorites (Body Double, Dressed To Kill, Femme Fatale), alike. He was willing to discuss subjects that might make other directors bristle—the possibility of unintentional comedy in his work, or the idea that his films are "camp." He even came come close to admitting that at 72, he's most likely peaked as a director.
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite recently told the New York Times that she approached her documentary Blackfish as a journalist with an open mind. The resulting film, which is about killer whales in captivity (specifically at SeaWorld and focusing on the 32-year-old orca Tilikum, who's killed three people), is nonetheless damning enough that it reads like animal liberation propaganda. We hear numerous testimonials from former SeaWorld trainers on the negative effects of keeping these giant, sensitive creatures penned. We see hidden-camera footage of SeaWorld guides feeding park guests incorrect information about orcas' lifespans and fins — the dorsal fins of captive killer routinely collapse, or flop to the side, which is rare in the wild. We see footage of brutal whale-on-human attacks. We hear nothing from SeaWorld itself.
In the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009, a 22-year-old unarmed black man named Oscar Grant was shot by a Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department police officer in Oakland's Fruitvale train station. Dozens of people witnessed this and several of them recorded the incident on their cell phones. Footage uploaded to YouTube went viral almost immediately. Johannes Mehserle, the officer who shot and killed Grant, was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter, sentenced to two years in jail and served less than a year's worth of time.
