I wonder how familiar Julian Schnabel is with Sunday in the Park with George . He’s a New Yorker and an artist so the chances I think are pretty high. It is one of Stephen Sondheim’s perhaps underrated musicals but a favourite of mine and just about everyone else who has seen it. It is about a painter, Georges Seurat, and his obsession with finishing his great masterpiece while also about a cynical modern descendant reckoning with that work. It is a very compelling premise that invites new consideration of not only the legacy of an artist but an interrogation of artistry itself. And Schnabel is certainly interested in those themes, having explored them in his two movies about complicated artists, Basquiat and At Eternity’s Gate . In the Hand of Dante is not like those films. Really, it’s not like any film, at least in the details. But it does feel like a culmination of sorts for Schnabel, who has been working on it in some capacity or another for fifteen years -since it was being dev...
Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a very gay play. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , the 1958 movie adaptation by Richard Brooks tries the best it can not to be that. And yet… the gay text has a way of seeping through. In some of the context and material, there’s no way that it couldn’t. Not that it assuaged Williams very much, a gay man himself, who hated this adaptation of arguably his second most famous play in spite of its other aspects that remain loyal -such as its staging and a few of its cast members. But it was indisputably toned down in spite of what material it kept, and you wonder if it wouldn’t have been had it been made even just a few years later -this being very much one of the last movies notably touched by the Hays Code, in some respects. Certainly one might guess the censors were a touch prickled by one of the movie's signature selling points: the sex appeal of Elizabeth Taylor, emphasized in the film poster and promotional stills. It made for an enduring ima...