Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

Studio One Forever review – affectionate look back at LA’s legendary gay club

Frequented by those looking for a refuge from homophobia, this documentary charts the history of the venue and the effort to save its cultural legacy

‘It used to be paradise. Now it’s a straight club.” The dismay is obvious when a bunch of former regulars at Studio One, the legendary West Hollywood gay club, take a tour of the venue in 2019. From 1974 until 1993, 9pm to 2am, seven nights a week, men packed the dancefloor of Studio One. “It was the happiest place on Earth,” remembers one. Looking at the photographs you can almost smell the sweat. One ex employee says that so many guys were taking poppers you could get a head-rush high simply by breathing in on the dance floor.

The story of Studio One is told in this affectionate, nostalgic documentary. Film-maker Marc Saltarelli interviews men who were there and follows a campaign in 2019 to save the Studio One building – a former factory – from demolition. When it opened in 1974, homophobia was rife outside. Studio One was a place where you could go to feel safe and loved. Though really, that only applied to white men; the racist door policy at Studio One was so well known the LA Times ran a front-page story about it.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/oIctK6D
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton