The Screengrab : Daniel Day Lewis

Trailer Review: Nine

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

These days, it seems like most of the musicals that Hollywood makes are designed as Oscar bait, made with an eye to raking in Academy Awards in various technical categories if nothing else. So it’s kind of odd watching the trailer for Nine, which boasts a cast as prestigious as any musical ever produced (that’s six Oscar winners in the cast, for those playing along at home), and realizing how little it trumpets its pedigree. If nothing else, I admire this spot for not trying to cover up the fact that it’s a musical, with lots of dancing on display and Fergie belting out a song in the background. Still, the Rob Marshall factor gives me pause. Chicago was a good-looking (and good-sounding) movie, but the jackhammer editing became oppressive long before the end, and the whole enterprise felt fairly impersonal to me, like a reverse-engineered machine designed to rack up awards. But I’m holding out judgment on this project for now, at least until the first full-length trailer, in which one hopes we’ll finally hear Daniel Day-Lewis singing.

The Hype Report: The X File on Winona Ryder

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

[Being the latest in an infrequent series devoted to movie-related puff pieces so over the top that they're a show all by themselves..]

So it turns out that Winona Ryder is in the new Star Trek movie, where she plays the Vulcan ambassador Sarek's baby mama, and Vanessa Thorpe's profile of Ryder and the current state of her career has kind of science-fiction vibe to it itself. Did you know that Ryder was once "acclaimed as the most promising, most beautiful and most fashionable star of her generation - the generation, that is, that had become known as 'X'?" It's news to me, and I think I'm of the generation that had become known as 'X' myself, so long as we're all committed to writing in the style that has become known as "funny-looking'." Thorpe must have worried that we'd think it was just her, so she cites a back-up source: Ryder's father, who says that twenty or so years ago, his daughter and Johnny Depp were "the hottest couple in the United States." All together now--ewwwwww!! Is it possible that when all those folks at the red carpet premieres leaned across the police barricades and screamed, "You're the most promising, most beautiful, and most fashionable star of your generation," they were talking to Johnny? Thorpe herself undercuts her argument by describing Ryder's features as "elfin", a term I've always associated more with the likes of Michael J. Pollard or the guy on Two and a Half Men who isn't Charlie Sheen than anyone who might qualify as the most beautiful anything. It's possible that Cate Blanchett and Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings have forever rewritten the rule book on this one, but not in my apartment.

The thing is, I've always thought that Ryder was beautiful, and that's why I never tortured myself a lot--a little, but not a lot--wondering why she had a career. It was easy for men, including men as smart and weird as Depp and Tim Burton, to have high hopes for her in her Beetlejuice days: she was, one more time, a very beautiful, very young girl who liked to tell interviewers that was reading Ian McEwan and do guest spots in Mojo Nixon videos. You could probably hear the puddles forming from all those geeks' hearts melting across the country. Thorpe seems to take it on faith that there's a general agreement that she was just dazzling in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence--where, to show her commitment to her craft, she allowed the makeup people to do her best to homely her up--and in the Gillian Armstrong production of Little Woman, which is indeed probably the best movie that has her close to its center. But it's also true that in both these movies, which we made when she was in her early twenties, she comes across as, emotionally, about twelve years old. When she was engaged in real life to Johnny Depp, who was eight years her senior, it was reported that no less an expert on grown-up behavior than Cher had warned her that she wasn't ready for such a leap. in the movies, seeing her married off to either Daniel Day Lewis or Gabriel Byrne was creepy, in ways the filmmakers could not have intended.

Ryder's last big-deal role was probably in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, a movie that wound up belonging her co-star, Angelina Jolie (who won an Oscar for it), and with good reason. Thorpe does her best to characterize Ryder's fallen star sound the result of some combination of a conspiracy and a perfect storm of "bad creative decisions, or perhaps just bad luck, which gradually began to edge Ryder deeper into a kind of Hollywood twilight." Yes, there was the shoplifting incident, which fed into other stories, like the one about her flaking out on the set of The Godfather III, gave her a reputation for being a troublesome fruitcake. But the fact is that Ryder's demons are small-time compared to those of Robert Downey, Jr., and there was always somebody willing to work with him while waiting for him to prove himself insurable again. Ryder was much in demand when she was barely an adult because she was beautiful and unusual and willing to work, and a number of people who got their foot in the door of the industry that way learned to act as they went along. Ryder never did. A lot of these people were discarded by the industry as their looks faded; what's most special about Ryder, who at 37 is still very easy on the eyes, is that her looks held up just fine and still Hollywood was eager to discard her, because she showed no sign of ever learning to act a lick. She and Downey were both in Richard Linklater's rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly, and the amazing thing was how much of him came through even as a cartoon, while her improved-upon screen image had the same hollow shell behind it that it always had.

Maybe Ryder will get her comeback: stranger things have happened, and if it does, good for her. But it's annoying to see writers present her career as a story of a major talent that's been neglected or gone to waste, because such talk amounts to a slight of other, genuine talents. So many really gifted actresses have to fight harder for parts as they grow older, and some of them never really win a round. Given that, how is it anything but simple justice that Ryder should have trouble getting good roles when the salient fact of her career has been her failure to seem to grow up? All she had to offer the camera was her face, and if the general feeling in Hollywood is that that's not enough to compensate for the trouble she's apt to cause, keep in mind that she's less trouble than a lot of people who manage to keep themselves in work. And then there's the wildy gifted people who don't stay in the race at all. "If Ryder's artistic rehabilitation works out over the summer," Thorpe writes breathlessly, "she will have re-emerged at the age of 37 as one of the most impressive veterans of a 1980s Hollywood bratpack scene that has seen many casualties. An emblem of troubled, talented youth, Ryder was a sort of female equivalent to River Phoenix, but unlike him she has survived." If I read this correctly, in the comparison between Phoenix, whose career included some indelible performances before it was cut short, and Ryder, whose career doesn't and wasn't, Ryder wins because, for reasons connected to a fluke of mortality and blind luck, she's the one who's still employable. Seriously, does anyone really want to go there?

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Nick's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Scott's Take

Screengrab Presents: Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER in JACKIE BROWN (1997)

I suppose this one doesn’t entirely count as a comeback, since the former blaxploitation star of urban classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown has yet to land another starring role as meaty as Jackie Brown, the drug-mule stewardess who outsmarts both her murderous boss (Samuel Jackson) and the feds on her tail before riding off into the sunset with a suitcase of cash in Quentin Tarantino’s underrated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. Then again, hardly any actresses (especially those of, ahem, a certain age) get to star in major motion pictures as realistically smart, complex, vulnerable women like Jackie, who succeed not with machine guns or sex (although there’s plenty of that simmering just under the surface in Grier’s palpable chemistry with Robert Forster, as bail bondsman Max Cherry, Jackie’s reluctant partner in crime -- one of the great screen couples of all time), but rather through believably human ingenuity and courage. Yet, at the very least, Grier finally earned some overdue respect as an actress from those who’d previously looked down on her B-movie roots, and though she didn’t win an Oscar for her Oscar-worthy career best performance, she at least caught a second wind in her career as a character actress, with relatively high-profile gigs like Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and The L Word...though, come to think of it, maybe it's time for yet another Pam Grier comeback so those of us without Showtime can maybe see her a little more often.

ROBERT ALTMAN, THE PLAYER (1992)

The rise and fall and rise of Robert Altman is well-known to movie geeks, but no list of great cinematic comebacks would be complete without a nod to the director who rose to prominence during the anything goes, lunatics-running-the-asylum ‘70s era of American filmmaking, when Uncle Bob churned out a head-spinning number of modern day classics like M*A*S*H and Nashville before biting the Hollywood hand that fed him one too many times and getting banished to the wilderness, only to raise his career from the dead once again by chomping down even harder on that very same Hollywood hand. After foolishly viewing film as a creative means of expression (rather than the branding mechanism and product placement delivery system we now know it to be), Altman was kicked to the curb by the powers-that-be once the Suits reasserted corporate control of the studios in the early eighties. Not only was Altman an idealistic pothead who wouldn’t know a high-concept Eddie Murphy vehicle if it bit him in the ass, but he was OLD, a condition the New Hollywood power elite feared might be contagious. Yet even in exile, Altman found a way to keep on keepin' on: he was an early adapter of cheap, indie video technology, which he used to keep his director-fu sharp with adaptations of stage plays like Secret Honor and prescient experiments like the political fictumentary Tanner ’88, all of which helped him to eventually reboot his career thanks to an independent film about Hollywood full of cameos by old friends and (at least according to Wikipedia) unpaid stars who just happened to show up at the L.A. locations where Altman was shooting and agreed to improvise some lines. The Player, a critical and financial success, was nominated for an “all-is-forgiven” Oscar that gave Altman the clout to work fairly steadily for the remainder of his life, generating both hits (Short Cuts, Gosford Park) and misses (Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City)...any one of which remains far more interesting and unique today than all the Transformers in Toy Town.

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS in GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, Daniel Day-Lewis developed a reputation as one of the world's finest and most versatile actors, due in no small part to the exhaustive amount of work he put into his characterizations. Eventually, the work began to take its toll, and following 1997's The Boxer, Day-Lewis took an extended sabbatical from acting. After five years pursuing various interests (like spending time with his family, not to mention those strange rumors about an apprenticeship with an Italian cobbler) Day-Lewis was finally lured back into the business by his onetime collaborator, Martin Scorsese. Once on board, Day-Lewis threw himself completely into the role of Bill "The Butcher" Cutting as he had with his other great performances, going so far as to speak in the character's voice even when he wasn't on the set. The result was a Day-Lewis performance completely unlike any he'd given before, making Bill a ferocious villain who rules the city by virtue of being the most ruthless monster to prowl the streets. Yet what makes the performance truly scary is his unpredictability, whether he's menacing his former lover with a set of throwing knives ("whoopsie-daisy!"), tap-tap-tapping a dagger against his glass eye, or standing over the body of a man he's just killed with a look-at-what-I-just-did smirk on his face. Day-Lewis has often spoken about how each performance makes him feel uneasy about whether he'll ever act again, and with such single-minded devotion to his craft it's little wonder that he feels that way. Yet it's also this devotion, coupled with Day-Lewis' genius, that makes each of his performances feel like a gift, and we undoubtedly have Scorsese to thank for making his subsequent performances -- including his towering turn as Daniel "Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaainage!" Plainview- possible. And you say his next movie is a musical? We can't wait.

ALEC BALDWIN in THE COOLER (2003)

When Alec Baldwin turned up in a supporting role in the 2003 Mike Myers vehicle The Cat in the Hat, reviewer David Edelstein wrote that, "The movie's grim subtext is the wreck of Baldwin's career — how puffy he looks, and how he never manages to rise above his material." One week later, The Cooler opened, and Baldwin was on his way to Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his smooth, multilayered performance as a Las Vegas casino operator who, to his surprise and despair, discovers that he does actually have a heart. Baldwin had always been something of an odd man out among Hollywood A-listers, a classic example of a character actor in a leading man's body: he seemed a little dull trying to play the action hero (The Hunt for Red October, The Shadow) or lover boy (Prelude to a Kiss) but seemed happily liberated whenever he got a crack at playing psychos (Miami Blues, The Juror) or scumbags (State and Main). His role in The Cooler was a personal breakthrough because it gave him the chance to play a scumbag (with psycho tendencies) who had the depth to find himself conflicted, and also to show off both his comic and dramatic chops to a new degree, leading indirectly to his full-blown career renaissance on TV's 30 Rock.

MARTIN LANDAU in TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988)

Landau, whose attention-getting performance as the assistant baddie in North by Northwest was followed by several seasons as the master of disguise on TV's Mission: Impossible, never flew as high in his early movie career as some of the names on this list, but he managed to fall farther than just about any of the others anyway. After leaving Mission: Impossible in a contract dispute and taking his wife and co-star Barbara Bain with him, Landau spent fifteen or so years adrift in horror and sci-fi pictures barely worthy of the name, as well as such august TV productions as The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island and The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. Somehow, Coppola decided to throw him a lifeline when he was casting his long-deferred dream project about the car designer Preston Tucker, and Landau's performance -- a shaft of cranky warmth cutting like a light saber through a hollow movie, coming from an actor with a semi-familiar name but with a face so changed since the last time most viewers had seen him that he was all but unrecognizable -- is the only thing fondly remembered from that picture. Landau got an Oscar nomination and a leading role in Woody Allen's 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors. He eventually did win an Oscar, for playing the washed-up, half-crazed Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994). Speaking about that performance later, he was quick to give credit to his own years in the show business wilderness; they'd given him a pretty good idea of what Lugosi had gone through.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

MALCOLM X (1992)

There was an Oscar ceremony one year where Denzel Washington and Spike Lee were the co-presenters of some category or tribute, and while I may be misremembering the whole thing, it seemed very much like the two of them were pissed, huddled together, leaning over the podium and glaring at the sea of rich white faces before them as they bit through their teleprompter lines in tones of obvious displeasure. While I’m shaky on the particulars, in my mind, I like to imagine the two of them were reacting to the fact that Lee’s masterful, sweeping adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X only received one major Oscar nomination (for Best Actor)...and, adding insult to injury, Washington’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role somehow lost out to Al Pacino’s “hoo-hah” Scent of a Woman nonsense. I’m not always on Lee’s side when he cries racism (as in his recent dust-up with Clint Eastwood), but it’s hard to think of any other reason for such an obvious snub of the kind of period epic the Academy usually rewards (or at least frickin’ nominates). True, Malcolm X was and remains a controversial figure, but as cinema, Lee’s production is a stylistic masterpiece, capturing the shifting tides of his protagonist’s life as he evolves from Zoot-suited hustler to civil rights icon in a film as indelible and essential as Alex Haley’s canonical source material.

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (1996)

Vincent D'Onofrio probably has the best role of his career as Robert E. Howard, the pulp writer and mama's boy (with Ann Wedgeworth as his mama) who created Conan the Barbarian and other musclebound action icons, while spending his whole adult life marooned in the nowheresville of small-town Texas in the 1930s. A mannered Renee Zellweger plays the young budding schoolteacher and writer who makes a tentative stab at befriending him without ever knowing quite what to make of the tortured fellow. This small, affecting film is in some ways a subversive comment on the whole life-of-a-young-American-writer (or "I, John-Boy") genre, because it captures the quiet, rural life that movies so often depict as being an essential part of the back story of healthy, homegrown creative types, and then shows why anyone who had the imagination to be any kind of writer but found themselves physically trapped there would end up wanting to blow their brains out.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Make no mistake: Jim Sheridan's biography of Christy Brown is a rich and scabrous work, full of fury at both the horror of being born into Irish poverty and a body that won't do what you want it to, and the power of Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as a romantic artist with cerebral palsy is in no way compromised or embarrassed by the fact that it won an Academy Award, as if the voters thought this was some Rain Man shit. Sure, for a lot of actors, a role like this would amount to a chance to be applauded and praised for how well they could shake. For Day-Lewis, mastering the physical tremors and folding his body into a pretzel just amounted to laying down the floorboards before he could really go to work.

SERPICO (1973)

When watching Serpico, it's easy to get distracted from the biopic factor. There is the classic man-against-the-machine plot line, the shots of vintage New York...then there is the sense that Al Pacino often seems to be playing Al Pacino, no matter who he is supposed to portray -- though you cannot deny it is interesting to watch him plumb the depths of his own murky psyche. But let's not get lost here: Officer Frank Serpico, was, and is, a real character -- slightly nutty as portrayed by a deliciously young and wounded-looking Pacino, and judging by Serpico's website (hey, go Google it!), quite possibly a few sandwiches short of a picnic in real life. He was of course, a young police officer who went to battle against corruption in the NYPD, for which he paid in health and sanity. Watching Serpico raises some questions: why couldn't Al Pacino be young and beautiful forever? Whatever happened to bringing down the system at all costs? Will people start sticking it to the Man again, now that the economy is in free fall? Will short dark cops start sporting beards and love beads? If American Gangster came out in 2007, does that mean we will have to wait another 34 years for another movie with a similar plot? Who knows...until then, enjoy Al Pacino in a beard.

32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

Biopics are episodic practically by definition, since it's practically impossible to encompass an entire life without boiling that life down into vignettes. Francois Girard's film about concert pianist Glenn Gould (played by Colm Feore) is probably the most extreme example of this idea. Taking his cue from Bach's thirty-two Goldberg Variations (perhaps Gould's most famous recording), Girard recreates a series of incidents from Gould's life -- from his youth to his concert career, to his later experiments with recording and radio -- with almost nothing in the way of transitional material. In doing so, the film avoids many of the traps of standard-issue biopics, especially the rise-and-fall structure and easy psychoanalysis most filmmakers tend to impose onto the stories of historical figures. There are no subplots about Gould's domestic life, no crisis or obstacle for him to overcome, and scarcely a mention of his relationships or sex life. Girard replaces the convenient formula with a genuine curiosity about who Gould was, what made him tick, and why exactly he retired from public performance at the height of his popularity to devote himself solely to recordings, a moment that feels as offhand here as it allegedly was to Gould himself. What makes the film and its subject all the more fascinating is that Girard doesn't pretend to know the answers, and rather than trying to nail them down, he simply shows us key scenes from Gould's life and encourages us to figure the answers out for ourselves. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is the polar opposite of an Oscar-bait biopic, and is that rarest of cinematic creatures -- a completely accessible movie that encourages, and rewards, real thought and reflection. Could this be why it's currently out of print on R1 DVD?

Click Here For Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Paul Clark

Tony Stark (i.e., Robert Downey, Jr.) to Bruce Wayne: "I Got Your Dark Knight Right Here, Pal!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Downey, Jr., America's scamp, has tasted what the other guys are selling and found it lacking. Downey, whose star vehicle Iron Man got the summer movie season of 2008 off to a bang back when it opened several hundred years ago, has given an interview to moviehole.com in which he found it impossible to discourse on what made his movie so special, and what will make its sequel (which reunites him with director Jon Favreau and Tropic Thunder co-writer Justin Theroux, who's working on the script) so special, without talking about what makes it different from The Dark Knight. Whereas Iron Man is "a very simple movie", Downey says of the Batman blockbuster, "It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.' I loved [Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan's] The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight. Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so f--king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? F-ck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

The first thing to be said about this is that if anyone finds that their college education helps them to better understand why Jim Gordon didn't dispatch a SWAT team to surround that boat that the Joker was aboard after Eric Roberts tipped him off, then that lucky viewer must have gone to a hell of a school. (Personally, my college education wasn't even enough to keep me from pissing away eleven dollars on a ticket to Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) Of course, Downey's harsh words for DC Comics will set off little tremors in the minds of comics geeks who remember bitter wars of words on the playground between self-styled DC fanboys and Marvel zombies. However much he means it, it's fun when these companies' star employees pretend to be infected with the virus, as anyone who ever saw Alan Moore take custody of the microphone at a comics convention in the 1980s, before he adopted a "plague on both their houses" attitude. It's kind of like professional wrestling without the folding chairs. Downey himself seems to get a giggle out of his bad-boy act. "You know, you're never too old to burn your bridges because I believe I have offended everyone," he said. "I think I've got a couple more.

On the subject of his other summer hit, Tropic Thunder, Downey has one thing he wants to make very clear: he is not Kirk Lazarus, the looney, Oscar-festooned Method actor he plays, who vows to remain in character until he's recorded the picture's DVD commentary. Speaking of the character, Downey says that "I think his fatal flaw is pretty much any and everyone's who's in entertainment, which is, on a certain level: 'Oh if they believe they're a fraud and that's creating this neurotic state,' when the truth is, you are a fraud because you've gone too far into buying into your own hype and now you're, literally crazy. I think Kirk Lazarus is nuts." Discussing his decision to make Kirk Australian, Downey adds, "I just think that the Australian phenomenon reminds me more of American as with the British invasion from the '60s. But when I was thinking about Kirk Lazarus I was thinking about Colin Farrell, about Daniel Day Lewis and about Russell Crowe and whoever was the most effective tool for whatever my thing was, I would use." When it was pointed out to him that a lot of viewers sure do see a lot of Crowe in there, Downey permitted himself a smile. "Now do you think he would see it as the highest form of flattery or do you think that he would be less than pleased?"

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s Gay Pride Month, the 10th Annual Provincetown Film Festival kicks off this weekend and George “Mr. Sulu” Takei and Ellen DeGeneres are getting married (though not to each other, of course) in California (hooray California! And what’s taking you so long, New York and Vermont and Washington and Hawaii and Illinois and...y’know, all the rest of the country?)...

...so, anyway, to help celebrate, we here at the Screengrab thought it would be a good time to salute some of the highpoints in gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender) cinema with our very own rainbow collection of Queer Nation classics (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003)

"Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute!" the purists among you may cry. “I thought this was a list of Gay Pride films, not TV shows!” Well, for starters, Mike Nichols’ all-star, six-hour, multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winning adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning rumination on homosexuality, homophobia and the better angels of human nature wasn’t TV...it was HBO. But more importantly, in a media landscape of generally low ambitions, lowered expectations and lowest common denominator multiplex landfill, it’s hard to ignore a six-hour celluloid phantasmagoria of staggering audacity, master class filmmaking, sharp dialogue, potent visuals, timely thematic resonance and knockout performances (including a multi-tasking Meryl Streep, future Weeds costars Justin Kirk and Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Patrick Wilson, Emma Thompson, James Cromwell, Ben Shenkman and Al Pacino, using his late-career bluster to good effect as prototypical self-hating conservative closet case Roy Cohn). Sure, it gets a little silly sometimes, but who would've thought a movie about the AIDS pandemic (as depicted through intertwining tales of two infected men haunted by ghosts and other celestial messengers) would find time for so much humor, imagination and hope...and, as opposed to, say, a certain lengthy, operatic, sometimes silly (but Oscar-winning) big-screen multi-part epic about heroic bravery in the face of faceless evil, lethal apathy and looming death, the cultural and political battles depicted in Angels in America are no fantasy, and continue to rage on and on and on...

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

The most original film musical of the decade began as a drag act at Squeezebox!, a weekly gay performance event in mid-90s New York City. Performer and creator John Cameron Mitchell based his iconic character Hedwig on details from his own life: his childhood in East Berlin, his idenitification with queer rock stars, his struggles with being the gay son of a military general. The crux of Hedwig's character is both a fiction and a metaphorical truth: she is the victim of a botched sex change operation, leaving her a little bit male and a little bit female. Fueled by the anti-showtunes of Stephen Trask and Mitchell's gender-bending charisma, the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a glam-rock spirit quest: Hedwig begins as a self-loathing wannabe rock star looking to complete herself through sex, and by the end of the story, she is walking naked into the world, stripped of makeup and bitterness, finally learning to love herself. If that's not pride, then what is?

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)

Though he’d established himself since Poison, his first major feature, as the most talented director to come out of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the 1990s, it wasn’t until Far From Heaven that Todd Haynes' talents were recognized by the mainstream media. His previous films had been too controversial, too oblique, too postmodern; but with this 1950s period piece, Haynes finally gained widespread acceptance and, with it, four Oscar nominations. Ironically for one of the most original filmmakers in Hollywood, the movie that gained him this recognition was a pure throwback. With its high melodrama, ginger treatment of interracial relations, and gorgeous color palette, it was unmistakably reminiscent of the films of the melodrama king of the fifties, Douglas Sirk; and with its highly stylized acting, uncomfortable emotional weight and unapologetic addressing of gay sexual desire, it likewise conjured the films of Sirk’s most famous devotee, Ranier Werner Fassbinder. In a way that blends the fantastic, romantic sensibilities of Sirk and the gritty, rich realism of Fassbinder – and with a freedom to frankly address issues of racism and homosexuality that were denied to them both – Haynes manages to make a film that’s both moving and incredibly frustrating. Always able to coax winning performances out of his actors, he also gets Dennis Quaid to deliver an exceptionally sensitive performance in a role where both understatement and overreaching could have been a disaster.

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

For obvious reasons, European cinema was several decades ahead of the curve when it came to addressing homosexuality (or, for that matter, any sexuality) on screen. It’s impossible to even conceive of an American film in 1985 – let alone one with the relative high profile of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette – being as frank, and as frankly erotic, about a gay couple. Like Far From Heaven, it succeeded largely by not making its focus too narrow; the story of young Pakistani Omar and his white lover, a former skinhead played with verve by a young Daniel Day Lewis, is made especially lively and vital by placing it within the context of a broader story of the British immigrant experience at the peak of Thatcherism. Deftly blending issues of race, class, culture and economics with a star-crossed romance, My Beautiful Laundrette owes much to a top-shelf script by Hanif Kureishi; but what shouldn’t be overlooked is its intensely erotic scenes, which were among the first in mainstream film to illustrate that gay sex on the big screen could pack as much power as its heterosexual counterpart. Gordon Warnecke as Omar is a real find in his big screen debut, and Daniel Day Lewis, in only his third film, already shows signs of being the titanic actor he would eventually become.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus van Sant has always specialized, at least in his personal films (that he finances with tripe like the Psycho remake and Good Will Hunting), in convincingly portraying the sad, proud lives of lowlifes, drifters and people with no real home to go to, whether by choice or by circumstance. He also has a particular talent for showing us characters who desperately need the love of someone, but who are none too wise in selecting who that someone should be. Those two themes come together with audacity and depth in My Own Private Idaho, the story of two hustlers – the poverty-stricken, vulnerable, narcoleptic Mike Waters (played by the late River Phoenix) and the slumming, proud, arrogant Scott Favor (played by Keanu Reeves who, God bless him, at least seems to be trying). For a movie so charged with homosexual love, it’s strangely lacking in sex, and not in the self-denying, passionless way that’s required from most gay characters on the big screen: rather, sex for the two of them is a largely joyless professional operation reserved for the making of money or the killing of time. This doesn’t mean they don’t need love, though, and therein lies the movie’s great tragedy: Mike wants the love of only Steve, and Steve wants the love of only his estranged, wealthy father. All of this plays out with an aesthetic derived not from Warhol’s cool surface gayness, or Fassbinder’s melodramatic near-camp: it’s given a thick sheen of the classics, drawing directly from Shakespeare. This can be both its damnation (several of the openly Shakespearian scenes come across as contrived and hokey) and its salvation (framing the entire struggle in the trappings of real tragedy gives it dramatic depth and resonance it might otherwise lack), but it’s a movie that certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition, and whatever its flaws, it’s a worthy step forward in the mainstreaming of gay characters in American cinema.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Gwynne Watkins, Leonard Pierce