The late Richard Benner’s 1977 “Outrageous!” blazed trails as both a hit Canadian export and positive screen depiction of gay life, two relative rarities at the time. Even then, some gay viewers found the funny-sad friendship between a hairdresser/professional drag queen and a young schizophrenic woman a bit old-fashioned. But everybody was won over by Craig Russell’s stage impersonations of Hollywood stars — schmaltz and camp being a reliable combination for gay cinema with crossover ambitions.
That formula has scarcely altered 43 years later for “Stage Mother.” It’s the latest from Thom Fitzgerald, whose 1997 “The Hanging Garden” was also shot in Nova Scotia, and helped herald a new, perhaps more politically bold and artistically adventuresome generation of gay Canadian filmmakers. His more recent work has fitted into a time-tested mould of sentimental seriocomedy, however. This tale of a small-town Texas matron who inherits her estranged son’s San Francisco drag bar offers up smiles,...
That formula has scarcely altered 43 years later for “Stage Mother.” It’s the latest from Thom Fitzgerald, whose 1997 “The Hanging Garden” was also shot in Nova Scotia, and helped herald a new, perhaps more politically bold and artistically adventuresome generation of gay Canadian filmmakers. His more recent work has fitted into a time-tested mould of sentimental seriocomedy, however. This tale of a small-town Texas matron who inherits her estranged son’s San Francisco drag bar offers up smiles,...
- 7/2/2020
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
Austrian born G.W. Pabst remains one of the most celebrated figures of German language cinema in the Weimar Republic, his enduring works featuring Louise Brooks enjoying continual circulation, while Criterion recently resurrected notable works Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (1931). But before emigrating to the United States like contemporaries such as Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch or Fritz Lang, Pabst was detained in 1938 France, forced to return to Nazi Germany, where he would make two films at Ufa for Goebbels’ propaganda machine, the second of which would be the obscured Paracelsus (1943), a biopic on Swiss born alchemist/physician/philosopher Theophrastus von Hohenheim, revered as the ‘father of toxicology’ during the German Renaissance.…...
- 6/30/2020
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.