Tag Archives: LGBTQ+ movies

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Barbarian at the Gates of Hell

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She Is Conann

by Hope Madden

What did I just watch?

It’s called She Is Conann, and it defies simple summarization.

French filmmaking provocateur Bertrand Mandico would like to take you on a strange journey. Conann, played throughout this experimental epic by six different actors (Claire Duburcq, Christa Théret, Sandra Parfait, Agata Buzek, Nathalie Richard and Françoise Brion) is no ordinary barbarian. But is she the most barbaric of all barbarians? At her death, her life is recounted to the Queen of Hell to make that determination.

Who is telling the tale? Rainer, a dog man (played by a woman, Elina Löwensohn) who’d been Conann’s near-constant companion since her earliest days of barbarism. They are, ahem, close.

This weird fever dream is told mostly in black and white with filth and sparkles, which makes the seemingly random pops of giallo-esque color more striking. We meet Conann at 15 in what is closest to the barbarian concept of the Schwarzenegger series that gives Mandico’s film its name. All swords and mud and conquest, the stage is set for vengeance to grip the orphan’s mind and set her on a path to rule all.

But her first real foe turns out to be herself, as she is forever murdered when visited by the version of Conann from one decade hence. This allows Mandico to leapfrog around time, creating bizarre and intoxicatingly staged eras that mix queer iconography with punk and disco, then symbols of conquest from the Roman Empire to Nazi Germany.

Rainer is always there, flashing photos as both witness and artist, one of dozens of ways the film links art with consumerism, artist with consumption. (Indeed, eventually the link is quite literal.)

Easter eggs to Naked Lunch, Blade Runner and many more, while fun, also embellish each era’s aesthetic. The result is morbid and macabre, grotesque and cynical and of course, strangely beautiful.

She Is Conann drags a bit, feeling every second of its 105-minute running time. Some eras grow more tedious than others, but a fresh and entirely bizarre surprise is around every bend. This is not a film you leave thinking, Oh, I saw that coming. The result is more of a bewildering if absolutely entertaining WTF?

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Bad Touch

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You Can Live Forever

by Cat McAlpine

When Jaime’s (Anwen O’Driscoll, delivering a memorable performance of youth in crisis) father dies, her unstable mother sends her to stay with family in Quebec. Jaime is left in a strange new place to navigate her grief, sexuality, and attempted indoctrination by Jehova’s Witnesses.

Writer/Director team Sarah Watts and Mark Slutsky construct a taut canvas for their characters’ longing, repression, and resentment to build upon. You Can Live Forever is shot with lingering, even dreamlike takes, in direct opposition to the ever-mounting tension. With a relatively unknown cast and a focus on the interconnected lives of a small community, Watts and Slutsky deliver a sweet and painful coming-of-age tale. The resulting film immediately feels claustrophobic and grounded.

Everything about Jaime’s world shrinks and isolates throughout the film. Several new friends worry that she doesn’t speak French, and will struggle to get along in Quebec. She drops her walkman in a river, losing one of her favorite forms of escapism. Her aunt and uncle, while seemingly understanding that she is not “in the truth,” continually urge her to attend meetings with them at church.

Though the Jehovah’s Witness community is welcoming and warm, there’s a cold truth to their world. Birthdays are not to be celebrated. Appropriate behavior must be supervised. Defectors are not to be acknowledged.

Jaime becomes entranced by another young member of the church, Marike (June Laporte, in a sweet, wide-eyed performance). When Jamie asks what happened to her mom, Marike responds, “She’s not in the truth anymore…we’re supposed to imagine that she’s dead.”

The girls grow close at a lightning pace. Sleepovers with a misplaced hand or arm rapidly blossom into stolen kisses in dark alleyways. Jaime teeters between two selves. She smokes cigarettes and plays video games with Nathan (Hasani Freeman, charming) and she pretends to proselytize so she can spend more time with Marike.

Marike knows that Jamie doesn’t believe, but she doesn’t lose her faith as she discovers her own sexuality. “I can believe enough for the both of us,” pleads Marike. Jamie is challenged to choose between a delayed love that may never come (in an uncertain afterlife) and happiness in her life now.

When all the growing tension comes to a head, the religious community does what they do best: deny, divert, and convert. None of the tension is truly relieved, and everyone is left to continue grinding their teeth until they die.

That lingering tension and guilt stays with you, just like societal shame, religious trauma, and all the other oppressive forces in our lives. And the lack of resolution, the lingering touches and sidelong glances, are what keep You Can Live Forever on the mind once the screen fades to black.

Uncategorized

Solo Act

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Chrissy Judy

by Christie Robb

Judy (Todd Flaherty) and his partner Chrissy (Wyatt Fenner) are co-stars of an underwhelming New York drag act. Then, Chrissy up and quits and moves to the hinterlands of Philadelphia to make a go of it with his on-again-off-again long-distance boyfriend Shawn, leaving behind the remains of a humdrum double act.

Judy, still ambitious, but now 30 and feeling out of step with the young, struggles to choreograph the next act in their life.

Judy is obsessed with nostalgia and the vintage glamor of old Hollywood, so it’s fitting that the film itself is beautifully shot in black and white and scored in a mix of old standards and jazz. The dialogue often harkens back to the fast-talking banter of old screwball comedies, updated with modern slang, a lot more cursing, and the occasional references to douching.

Written, directed, edited, produced by AND starting Flaherty, there’s a real emotional depth to this one. Flaherty and Fenner manage to convey the complex layers of a long-term and somewhat complicated friendship.

Avoiding the heteronormative tropes of typical romantic movies, this one feels like part rom-com, part coming-of age while offering a novel take on a love story.

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Semper Fi

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The Inspection

by Hope Madden

We’ve seen it so many times, often very effectively. A sloppy recruit, someone with nothing to lose but himself, does just that during boot camp. Maybe it ends in ambivalence and horror (Full Metal Jacket), maybe it ends in heroism and an unwitting invasion of Czechoslovakia (Stripes), maybe it ends in romance (An Officer and a Gentleman).

While the story that writer/director Elegance Bratton (Pier Kids) tells with The Inspection follows those familiar beats, it’s messier, more frustrating, more honest and more human than all the others together. As it should be, since it is his own story.

Jeremy Pope delivers an astonishing, raw performance as Ellis French, a 25-year-old homeless gay Black man. His mother Inez (Gabrielle Union in the finest performance of her career) cast him out at 16. We meet Ellis on the day he enlists in the Marines.

And you thought Bill Murray was going to have a tough time.

While the steps in the screenplay are familiar – the recruit has much to escape in his day-to-day; he joins and gets to know a group of men of different backgrounds, each of whom will be tested alongside him; he comes out the other side a different man. But Ellis French’s stakes are higher, his difficulties are more dangerous, and the lessons learned along the way probably affect those around him more profoundly than they affect him.

Bratton also pulls away from audience expectation by avoiding the cliché of one-dimensional recruit characters. There’s good and bad, heroism and cowardice, in everyone on the screen. In this way Bratton allows a certain moral ambiguity to seep into the film. That gray area becomes the space for forgiveness to take shape.

What Bratton brings to this well-worn story is an idea perfectly realized by Pope. The Inspection is a showcase for the idea that resilience comes from a balance of strength and forgiveness. French finds ways to forgive what to most would be unforgivable. This is how he perseveres. It’s a beautiful, difficult lesson to learn, even for a viewer. But thanks to that resilience, we have this exceptional film.

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Pretty in Pink

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Anything’s Possible

by Hope Madden

On the surface, Billy Porter’s directorial debut—the coming-of-age rom-com Anything’s Possible—is pretty traditional fare. High school can be tolerable with good friends, boys complicate everything, being different is the worst, just hold on until you can start it all again at college.

That does describe this film. The only thing differentiating this story from dozens of other high school dramedies littering cinematic history is that our lead, our Gen Z Molly Ringwald, is a beautiful trans girl named Kelsa.

Kelsa (Eva Reign) is starting her senior year and counting the days until she can leave Pittsburgh for her dream school, UCLA. She spends all her time with her two besties, Em (Courtnee Carter) and Chris (Kelly Lamor Wilson), but their balance is thrown out of whack when Em announces she likes Khaled (Abubakr Ali), Kelsa’s secret crush.

Porter and screenwriter Ximena García Lecuona lean hard on formula. The one difference here is that Kelsa is juggling more than most high school seniors, even if she’s determined to convince herself that she is not.

Porter’s sly direction follows Kelsa’s lead. As she’s ready to complicate the narrative by considering how the world is reacting to her not as a teen but as a trans teen, the film redirects its attention. The simplicity of the movie’s structure, its plot, even its performances often work in its favor.

Many viewers will, for the first time ever, see themselves in this comforting adolescent formula. For countless other viewers, normalizing Kelsa’s high school anxieties demystifies and creates empathy.

But is it entertaining? Sure! Reign is a charmer, as is Ali. Support work, especially from the always impressive Renée Elise Goldsberry, as well as a clearly loving look at PittsburgH, give the film a welcome sense of joy. And while there is one extremely ugly comment, on the whole Anything’s Possible never wallows in trauma.

That’s not to say that Anything’s Possible or Kelsa manages to sidestep all the dangers and indignities that face trans teens. But it’s not the focus.

Rather than making a film about the day-to-day oppression, trauma, bigotry and danger facing a trans teen,  Porter and García Lecuona turn our attention to the universal dramas of being a teenager in Pittsburgh. That may not feel groundbreaking or even necessary, but it absolutely is.

New In Theaters, Shudder Premiere, Uncategorized

Scream Queen

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All About Evil

by Hope Madden

Creepy twins! Librarians! Drag queens! These are a few of my favorite things…

The long-lost 2010 cult-film-in-the-making All About Evil brings all this and more to its Shudder debut this week. What’s it about?

The business of show!

Natasha Lyonne is Deborah Tennis, anxious librarian. Deb inherits her dad’s beloved single-screen San Francisco theater and vows to keep it afloat, no matter how. Her plan of action: make grisly, hyper-realistic horror shorts with literary puns for titles.

You’d be surprised how well it works.

Writer/director Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ, who co-stars) surrounds Lyonne with some underground heavy-hitters including Mink Stole and Cassandra Peterson. Between that and the Herschel Gordon Lewis love, All About Evil is a mash note to camp.

Performances and writing fall right in line. It’s community theater bad, but in the best way. Lyonne is in her element, hamming her arc from mousy literary type to vampy directress with Gloria Swanson skill. She’s even more fun when she’s directing her fine crew (Jack Donner, Noah Segan, and Nikita and Jade Ramsey – all so fun).

The underlying story that we need to stop assuming every troubled, white high school boy is a danger to society has not aged well. But Grannell also hits on timeless lessons about cell phone use during a movie (never OK!) and Elvira’s hotness (eternal!).

All About Evil offers clever midnight-movie fun from start to finish. The filmmaker is clearly a devotee of cult and kitsch, a love that brightens every frame of the film. Plus, the film memorabilia! Come for the movie posters, stay for more movie posters, enjoy some madcap campy mayhem in between.