Search Results for: ren jender

‘Laggies’ and the Perils of Success

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great ‘Humpday’ and the equally delightful ‘Your Sister’s Sister’ stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘”‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occured to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, ‘Laggies,’ (which opens this Friday, Oct. 24) I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and let Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

‘Dear White People’: Satire, But Serious

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded ‘Dear White People’, which has its US release (and real distribution) this Friday, Oct. 17, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris, whom at first I didn’t recognize in modern hair, dress and light contacts: she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The Complicated Women of ‘Please Like Me’

This realism seeps into the portrayal of women characters. They’re not the fantasy women whom straight men put in their shows, nor do we see the evil matriarchs of some popular cable series who seem more a manifestation of show creators working out their issues with their own mothers than portraits of women any of us have known.

‘The Skeleton Twins’: Suicidal Siblings

The recommended treatment for attempted suicide in this film seems to be, “Give up your apartment and move across the country to live with a family member you haven’t spoken to for ten years. And whatever you do, don’t get any therapy!” Of course if these characters were introduced to a good therapist, just as when one particularly troubled character in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ was, we wouldn’t have a movie–which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Female Friendship: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Female Friendship Theme Week here.

‘Walking and Talking’ With Non-Toxic Women Friends

A short clip at the beginning of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s first film, 1996’s ‘Walking and Talking,’ lets us know that Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche) have been friends since adolescence. Both are in their 30s and living in New York City–Laura with her boyfriend Frank, and Amelia alone in the sort of sunlit airy apartment someone with her job, even in a pre-gentrified New York (which, like many films from then and now is also mysteriously bereft of people of color), would never be able to afford.

‘Mission Blue’: “No Ocean, No Us”

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films, they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film ‘The World Is Not Enough.’ Audiences have to look to documentaries like ‘Particle Fever’ (released earlier this year) about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The new Netflix documentary ‘Mission Blue’ focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

‘Pride’: A Fun “Feel Good” Movie About A Very “Feel Bad” Time

Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working class (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the U.S. but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat, rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one village’s striking Welsh miners and their families.

On Not Giving Women Filmmakers A “Free Pass”: ‘Kelly & Cal’

Many actresses, especially those in their 30s and older, find themselves relegated to playing “the mother” for much of their careers. Most of these films (like the recent indie hit ‘Boyhood’) seem to go out of their way to tell stories from anyone but the mother’s point of view. For a short time Jen McGowan’s ‘Kelly & Cal’ (also written by a woman: Amy Lowe Starbin) seems like it will be a welcome contrast to this norm.

After The Brat Pack: Ally Sheedy in ‘High Art’

Although a few who had fallen under the brat pack sobriquet (like Demi Moore) continued in mainstream star-vehicles well into the 90s (and Rob Lowe, dismissed as another pretty face in the ’80s, was able to sustain a TV career into the present), most had faded from the public view by then, including Ally Sheedy (after starring in 1987’s ‘Maid to Order,’ her own ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’) –though earlier in her career she, of the whole “Pack,” received some of the best reviews for her work. Sheedy went on to reinvent herself–and make good on her earlier promise–in a series of meaty roles in independent films in the late 90s: the most well known one (for which she won several awards) was Lucy Berliner in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 feature debut ‘High Art.’

What’s Happening Now in Ferguson and ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975’

A film that does seem eerily relevant right now is ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,’ a collection of vintage, montage documentary footage (shot by a Swedish television crew: the film is directed by contemporary Swedish filmmaker Göran Olsson) of the Black Panthers and other Black activists plus interviews conducted with other people, some prominent, some not, from the Black community in the 60s and 70s. Audio that plays underneath some of these clips includes insightful commentary about the events of the time (and sometimes about the footage itself) from Ahmir Questlove Thompson (of The Roots and the Jimmy Fallon show), Erykah Badu, Robin Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, Abiodun Oyewole (of The Last Poets) and Talib Kweli among others as well as surviving Black activists from the 60s like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver.