Yet another terrific week at The Stranger: "In our 2003 Queer Issue, gay and lesbian writers are asking that you straight people - no, insisting that you straight people - start taking the bad along with the good of gay culture." So, for example, Mary Martone is hoping straights will take lesbian film and literature off her hands:

We have to be careful, though. These are people who are not used to having to work to stomach a movie. You might be able to sneak in Personal Best as a sports thing ("Ya-Ya Sisterhood meets Prefontaine!") or Entre Nous as just another inexplicable foreign film, but you can't gut-punch them with some Claire of the Moon/Bar Girls double feature.

Meanwhile, over at indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez says, but seriously, folks, and surveys the "State of Queer Cinema."

The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov tells an eerie story and then exchanges email with Danny and Oxide Pang.

His Short Cuts paint a bit of background on the news that Renée Zellweger will be portraying Janis Joplin in the forthcoming biopic, and then, he points to the new site for Secondhand Lions, a film that had just wrapped shooting somewhere out there in central Texas when Robert Duvall presented Assassination Tango at SXSW. So I watched that trailer. Oh, dear. As for Michael Caine's accent, well, it's hard to tell since the editor seems to have cut away each time he opens his mouth, but... I dunno, I dunno. Then again, he probably thought the same thing about Renée Zellweger playing a Brit.

Then Shawn Badgley's got a shake-yer-head story about the Drunk Film Fest. Not a series of films about alcoholics. No, that would be too easy. This is Austin, remember. This is about getting drunk before making the movies.

Reviewing the Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film series in the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell makes an interesting point: "What Heroine and Swordswoman demonstrate entrancingly and, oddly, with poignancy, is that silent films - like animation - offer the truest manifestation of a national artistic personality."

And in the LA Times today, first, a piece that'll have you humming a certain line from The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Susan King on "Musclemen heroes of Italian cinema." And John Anderson, wrapping up the Seattle International Film Festival.

David Poland has begun sorting out Matrix Reloaded (parts 1 and 2) and reveals that Andy Klein will be taking on the same daunting task for Salon. If it's going to be anything like their analysis of Mulholland Drive, that'll definitely be something to look forward to.

A last online viewing tip. Looks like we've got an exchange going on with Signal Station, where Michael points us to a review of Juon at Midnight Eye - and the trailer.



Posted by dwhudson at June 27, 2003 9:29 AM