Vincent Gagliostro was an ideal person to ask my pop-quiz question during the second Frameline press day on June 23, 2017. The question was why arts are important in the age of Trump, and Gagliostro, whose film, AFTER LOUIE is the festival’s closing night film, is a man who has worked in many media, some… Read More »
THE FABULOUS ALLAN CARR — Jeffrey Schwarz Interview
Jeffrey Schwarz loves the tell the story of a showman. Hence, bringing up William Castle, the subject of one of his earlier docs, seemed like the obvious place to start when I talked with him by phone on June 5, 2017 about his latest, THE FABULOUS ALLAN CARR. Both were larger than life, and both… Read More »
PUSHING DEAD with Tom E. Brown
One of the first things I established with Tom E. Brown when I spoke with him on June 17, 2016 was that his debut feature film, PUSHING DEAD, was not autobiographical. It does, however, reflect his mordant sense of humor about living with HIV+ status, and it includes an interlude where a character is pelted… Read More »
THE HOURS
THE HOURS begins with a suicide, a famous one at that. Virginia Woolf with a fierce deliberateness puts a heavy stone in her pocket and walks into a river. We see her head duck silently into the water and then her body floating delicately away, pulled by the current with a gentle urgency. By the… Read More »
EYES OF TAMMY FAYE, THE
Well, there is just no getting around it. Tammy Faye Bakker Messner’s name recognition is off the charts. And the one thing that everyone knows for sure about her are those eyelashes. Long, thick, seemingly prehensile, they frame eyes that have wept more than everyone on your block combined, and for more TV cameras than… Read More »
HELL HOUSE – DVD
HELL HOUSE is one of the scariest documentaries you will ever see. In it, fundamentalists with what they consider to be the purest of motives, put on a Halloween house in which scenarios are staged depicting violence that is intensely disturbing both emotionally and graphically. Its all meant to convert the unsaved by demonstrating a… Read More »
LOVE! VALOR! COMPASSION
LOVE! VALOR! COMPASSION! is a romantic comedy, full of great one-liners, that, nonetheless is not shy about taking on serious subjects, such as the human heart. Forget space, this is the real final frontier. Nothing else has such an infinite capacity to delight, destroy, and surprise. The story takes place over three holiday weekends during which a… Read More »
George Ratliff Guides Us Through HELL HOUSE
George Ratliff’s documentary, HELL HOUSE, chronicles the building of a Halloween house that doesn’t purvey ghouls, werewolves, or vampires. Instead, this brainchild of the sincere folks of Trinity Church in Texas use the concept of a Halloween fright fest to convert the unsaved to their brand of fundamentalism. A fundamentalism in which abortion, raves, and Harry Potter are presented as… Read More »
James Cromwell on ANGELS IN AMERICA
I could talk a lot about the HBO presentation of ANGELS IN AMERICA adapted by Tony Kushner from his play and directed by Mike Nichols, a director who has proven has proven his chops with incisive dissections of the moral and political state of the nation with films such as CARNAL KNOWLEDGE and THE GRADUATE.… Read More »