‘Amour,’ a Wrenching Love Story, Wins at Cannes

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: May 27, 2012
The New York Times

CANNES, France — Heavy rain dampened the final day of the 65th Cannes Film Festival, but it mattered not at all when the Palme d’Or was awarded to “Amour.” Brilliantly directed with an atypically tender touch by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, this story about an octogenarian husband and wife facing their mortality — beautifully played by the French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva — had left audiences stunned with its artistry and depth of feeling.

…

To judge by the unusually sustained standing ovation that greeted the announcement of the Palme, “Amour” seemed like the only possible choice. In accepting the award, Mr. Haneke shared the stage with the movie’s two actors, who both were accompanied to the stage. Ms. Riva, born in 1927, was last at Cannes officially in 1959 with that classic of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Both Ms. Riva and Mr. Trintignant spoke briefly after Mr. Haneke did. The visibly frail Mr. Trintignant (born in 1930), whose astonishing career includes some of the most famous European films of the past half-century — “A Man and a Woman,” “Z,” “My Night at Maud’s,” “The Conformist” — said that, for him, Mr. Haneke was the greatest director working today.

Read entire article here.
Hat tip to my friend Gloria.

Glee: S3

Glee broke a lot of barriers on network television.  It ushered in a new era of easy-going diversity that’s craved every week in suburban households across America and I suppose even around the world.  Ryan Murphy and team burst the glass ceiling not only making a show about high school choir hip, but infusing it with interracial coupling, gay male and lesbian couples, a bisexual female, really cool Christian kids, Asian and Irish characters and during season 3 introducing a teenage transgender character.  There’s not much else to say other than Wow!  Glee already garnered a place in television history after finishing season 1.  By season 3 it’s cemented.  All that said, as an adult I found this season strained, not quite as natural and fresh as the first two.  Perhaps the gimmick is wearing thin?  Perhaps the cast and crew know what they are now?  The innocence does feel like it’s gone.  That’s not a bad thing.  It’s just that sometimes someone can be sexier when they don’t know it if you know what I mean.  I’m still all for giving kudos to this remarkable show.  But I’m downgrading my rating to a 4 out of 5 for S3.  A 3.5 if I could.  I liked the Michael Jackson episode and the Saturday Night Fever episode, but a lot of the plots really dragged or didn’t dig deep enough.  I felt like there were too many characters and several people got lost in nearly every episode.  I realize it’s ensemble and that’s the nature of it.  Certain people just seemed to disappear (Blaine and Kurt for instance).  I’m still thrilled to have witnessed this sweet, progressive show.  On Fox no less!  The final episode this season made me cry, especially Kurt and his Dad, and Kurt covering Madonna’s I Remember.  Glee was the original.  Now Smash and other shows follow and imitate.  I’m probably going to let go of Glee as of this season.  I wish it well in its Season 4 incarnation.

The Outs (web series)

Love these new web series.  The latest find is The Outs from Brooklyn filmmaker Adam Goldman. So far he’s released 2 episodes with the 3rd coming this summer and 3 more scheduled for the fall.  The Outs is an angst-ridden, funny, heart-felt take on young gay male life in New York City right now.  Production values are high, the writing’s great.  Each episode is less than 15 minutes, so it won’t take long for you to figure out if you can’t live without it.  Thought the first 2 episodes were great.   Already I’m interested in storylines, so I’m giving this a 4 out of 5.

Adam’s Kickstarter profile is located here.

United States of Tara: S1 (take 2)

Dancing Queen (Emmett Honeycutt)

And now to get your summer weekend started right, I present the one, the only, Peter Paige as Emmett Honeycutt from Queer as Folk in a montage of dancing segments from the show’s five seasons.  Love the Emmett/George clips!  Summertime is the perfect time to get dancing!

Flight of the Cardinal

Hmmm.  Another bad indy marketed to gay men.  Of course the first sex scene is hetero.  Never really sure what that means?  Are they hoping other people will watch these films, or what?  In any event, this can be thrown in the pile of “next.”  Gave it the 20 minute rule, but honestly only made it to 16.  Better luck next time.  I do keep trying because every so often I find a gem that’s worth reporting.  Meanwhile Flight of the Cardinal is a 2 out of 5.

The Big Queer Film Festival List

Someone had the brilliant idea to create a calendar of all the LGBT film festivals around the world.  His name is Mel Pritchard.  He calls it The Big Queer Film Festival List.  Plan your vacations accordingly!  Thank you Mel.

Frameline celebrates 20 years of New Queer Cinema in 2012

Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 Queer Cinema classic, The Watermelon Woman

San Francisco’s International LGBT Film Festival, Frameline celebrates the 20th anniversary of New Queer Cinema with a perfect quartet of retrospective films from the 1990′s:

All Over Me (1997)
Head On (1998)
The Living End (1992)
The Watermelon Woman (1996)

Did your favorite make it in their line-up?  What films would you add?  From Frameline’s site,

LGBT film history tracks with virtually the entirety of film history itself, offering myriad visions of queer life, imagination and sensibility. Rarely, however, has any tributary within this history fused real-life struggles with artistic innovation as urgently and memorably as in the case of “New Queer Cinema.” Now a concept twenty-years-old—term was coined in 1992 by B. Ruby Rich—it is still a watchword in discussions of LGBT media. The distinction might merely be thought of as an ingenious act of branding, if the case were not so compelling that it identified something worth naming, experiencing and remembering.

Criterion releases Weekend

The amazing British gay male indy film, Weekend is being distributed by Criterion.  Release date for both the DVD and Blu-ray version is set for August 21, 2012.  From Criterion’s website,

It’s an emotionally naked film that’s both an invaluable snapshot of the complexities of contemporary gay living and a universally identifiable portrait of a love affair.

I’m so excited to see this perfect film again for the second time, to digest it, to question it, to marvel at it.  We’re probably going to show this in October at our LGBTQ film series on campus.  It’s not showing up for sale yet on Wolfe or TLA, but Criterion‘s website has a listing for it as well as Amazon.  Mark your calendars and fall in love with Weekend all over again.

Shame (2011)

Steve McQueen (U.K. artist and filmmaker) struck gold on his maiden voyage into film making with Hunger (2008).  The film also catapulted Michael Fassbender into the superstar he is today.  Hunger‘s brilliance amazed me and like many I became obsessed with Fassbender’s career.  I’ve watched him in nearly every film he’s made.  So of course I was more than a little excited when McQueen and Fassbender reunited last year for Shame, the story of a successful man living in NYC caught in the grip of sexual addiction.  I was prepared for the nudity.  I figured an NC-17 rating meant they decided to show too much dick and too much graphic sex.  Pussy only rates an R.  Truth be told there wasn’t all that much dick and what there was of it was shadowy.  There were some raw scenes that could be classified as art porn, but honestly, when you compare violence and sex in movies, I never quite understand why the sex gets the kookier rating.  But hey, that’s just me and my make love, not war persona.  The reality of Shame is not that its too much, it’s unfortunately not enough.  McQueen never goes far enough in my opinion to prove Fassbender’s character has an addiction.  It seemed like a little work hard, play hard mentality combined with issues of intimacy.  And hey, doesn’t that describe about half of the men in Manhattan?  At least the ones I’ve met.  I didn’t buy that the character had a sex addiction.  I didn’t understand why he was such a dick to his sister.  I didn’t understand why their relationship teetered on being incestuous.  None of it made sense.  And the score was so heavy-handed (in manipulating your emotions), I laughed out loud a few times at the ridiculousness of the mood it was trying to invoke.  It’s fine to say someone has a problem with using sex inappropriately.  Or even that they’ve crossed a line in their lives.  But you can’t just present a lot of sex and assume we’re all going to think it’s bad.  I’m giving Shame a 3 out of 5 because we made it through the entire film, but not without having a discussion about whether we should finish it or not.  Hopefully McQueen will get back on track with this next film, Twelve Years a Slave in production now.