‘Life of Pi’ towers, ‘Lincoln’ sets us free and ‘Anna’ gets hung up on artifice ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor When it comes to movies, the period from just before Thanksgiving to Christmas Day is nearly as rampant with releases as the summer. The big difference? Films are concerned with generating acclaim as [...]
007 takes a fascinating gay turn in ‘Skyfall,’ a stellar entry in the Bond series ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor Other than the perfunctory opening credits shout-out to Ian Fleming at the top of each 007 movie, no one ever talks about the writers of a Bond film. And why would they? It’s not [...]
New DVD collections offer a selection of Halloween-themed thrills and chills American Horror Story: The Complete First Season. No series in recent memory has as many creepy twists, terrifying boos or half-naked backside shots of Dylan McDermott as the Ryan Murphy miniseries that transformed Jessica Lange into an Emmy-winning psychopath. FX’s horror hit, in its [...]
In turns dark and funny, ‘Blues for Willadean’ packs a punch It is, perhaps, in poor taste to say a movie about wife-beating packs a punch, but that’s the kind of wincing irony that would probably tickle Del Shores. Shores, our foremost chronicler of the tragedy of white-trash Texas (and how to make it trashier), [...]
Beautiful and thought-provoking, ‘Cloud Atlas’ is a thinking man’s epic ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor I don’t envy the folks in the Warner Bros. press office, tasked with marketing Cloud Atlas for general consumption. Based on one of those “unfilmable” novels (another, The Life of Pi, comes out next month — so much [...]
‘Keep the Lights On’ joins ‘Weekend’ and ‘Shame’ in the pantheon of new films making honest statements about sex and longing in the modern age ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor Serious gay cinema has gone through a lot of changes since the days of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends (1975) and [...]
The cojones it took CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) to march into Tehran at the height of the Islamic Revolution and march out with six American embassy workers should put him in the Testicle Hall of Fame, though the true story of Argo was classified until about 15 years ago. Affleck pulls double duty as [...]
Dark sexual longing adds weight to the evocative mystery of ‘The Paperboy’ ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor The mark of a successful period piece can be how tactilely evocative the setting feels, even if you haven’t been there. Tom Tykwer did it masterfully in Perfume, conjuring the aromas of 18th century France, and Stephen [...]
‘How to Survive a Plague’ documents heroes (and villains) of the AIDS crisis ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor Ask someone in the gay community what activism looks like these days, and you’ll likely get an answer related to marriage equality, or the right to serve openly in the military, or police brutality and sensitivity [...]
Gay author Stephen Chbosky finally adapts queer teen novel for the screen Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower touched many queer readers’ hearts with its positive, honest depiction of Patrick, a charismatic gay teenager. The book’s profound messages — of acceptance, the benefits of being different and overcoming emotional [...]
