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I Want Your Sex is Bold and Outrageous, But has a few Kinks to Work Out

The vibe that underscores I Want Your Sex hasn’t really been seen in a while and it perhaps does require some context to really appreciate. In the 1990s, there arose a movement on the American indie scene that has come to be known as the New Queer Cinema -born out of a wave of LGBTQ filmmakers coming into their own in tandem with a gradually more common social visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ themes, culture, politics, and people. Some of the creatives to burst forth from this movement managed to break into the mainstream, like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. Others, like Gregg Araki, remained largely in the underground. Watching Araki’s early films it is easy to see why -he has a rambunctious sensibility, a very camp style of satire, and a cavalier attitude around sex. Hollywood wasn’t quite going to embrace his art. And it still hasn’t, elder statesman of queer cinema though he has now become. He dialed back these proclivities on some of his later films (his last, White Bird in a B...
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The Criterion Channel Presents: Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Sergei Eisenstein made three sound films before his death in 1948 . Only one part of his duology Ivan the Terrible was released publicly in his lifetime -it’s second-half banned by Soviet censors. But his earlier film Alexander Nevsky from 1938 had no such issues -perhaps because while his take on Ivan was more complex, on Nevsky he aligned more strongly with the interests of Stalinist Russian propaganda -though this film was censored for a brief time during the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact due to its depictions of Germans. Most historical films of this era, especially those with a nationalist bent, were always more about the political climate they were made within rather than the setting much removed. Even by those standards though, Eisenstein is quite blunt in Alexander Nevsky . Not only are the somewhat anachronistic names of Russia (in lieu of Novgorod) and Germany (rather than the Holy Roman Empire) used, but the Germans are depicted with subtle swastikas in their apparel as are the ...

Futurama Reviews: S11E06 -"Late Bloomers"

As much as I love Futurama for its outrageous concepts and sense of humour, the episodes that have always resonated the most for me have been the sweet ones. Silly though they may be, I really love these characters and I like seeing them in contexts that are a little more earnest, revealing, that connect you more to their humanity -even the ones who aren’t human. “Late Bloomers” does that, specifically with two characters, and while it goes down a couple strange paths, it comes for the heart. And it makes you feel good. The episode is in fact a direct follow-up to two previous shows, starting with “Planet Espresso” . That episode ended with Hermes’s father reincarnated as a coffee bean plant, and here we see he is living with the Conrads -though only speaks to Hermes. Badrick as it turns out is dying from some plant disease, and Hermes not wanting to go through the death of his parent again, especially now that they are on better terms, is desperate to save him somehow. This leads int...

Why You Should Watch Star Trek

“Space… the Final Frontier.” It’s a provocative phrase, isn’t it? The Final Frontier, the last great mystery of exploration. In 1966, one of the most popular television genres was western adventure - Gunsmoke , Bonanza , Rawhide , episodic stories about life on this particular romanticized frontier were everywhere. What’s a competitive show to do but take it a step further? Where do you go once the west has been thoroughly demystified? How about a Wagon Train to the Stars? That was the phrase that one Gene Roddenberry used when pitching a series concept to Desilu Productions that would go on to be Star Trek , the basis of a sixty year television franchise (and occasionally film too ) , that would have one of the greatest out-sized impacts of a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. Desilu green-lit the idea (founder Lucille Ball specifically) and the rest is history. Three seasons that struggled in the ratings but gained an enormous fan following, a short-lived animated follow...

Flat Perseverance is Edged Out by Bleakness in The Dog Stars

About twenty minutes into The Dog Stars , Jacob Elordi’s Hig loses his beloved German Shepherd Jasper. And the movie never recovers. It is called The Dog Stars , based on the book by Peter Heller, and whatever reasoning for that title there actually is (the film never reveals it), one would expect the dog introduced as chief companion to the protagonist would have some major part to play. But even posthumously, Jasper isn’t particularly significant to this apocalypse story about struggling to go on and find reason to live amidst societal collapse. I’m broadly an agnostic where dogs in movies are concerned, but this one is markedly dimmer once the dog exits the picture. Director Ridley Scott however tuckers on just like his lead, yet fails to make the point that character and those who matter to him are meant to. It’s the nearest Scott has come to making a zombie film, and it bears more than a little passing resemblance to 28 Years Later , in both its hordes of nebulously-infected dehu...