Latest news with #queerfilm
Gizmodo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
George Romero's Daughter Made a Gay Zombie Movie, With Her Father's Blessing
With Queens of the Dead, Tina Romero, daughter of the legendary filmmaker George A. Romero, is set to make her first directorial outing, premiering the feature at the Tribeca Film Festival June 7. The filmmaker recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly and reflected on her father's influence. 'I am his kid. There's no denying it. And he has influenced me greatly.' Romero said. Queens of the Dead will feature Easter eggs to honor her father's legacy. 'And this is his monster, this is his genre. I had fun doing my little Romero nods throughout the film, and we have some good ones,' she shared, including appearances by notable figures such as makeup artist and actor Tom Savini and Dawn of the Dead star Gaylen Ross. 'The zombie apocalypse is such a rich sandbox to play in when it comes to social commentary. I can't be my dad's daughter without making an attempt at saying something with zombies,' Romero told the magazine. 'I did want this to be a film in which I am paying homage to the world and the monster he created, but I'm also introducing my own voice. It's very much not a film he would make, but it is using his vocabulary and is playing by his rules. As far as the queer element, on one hand, I just feel like the gays need a zombie film. It's time that we get to have a big gay zombie movie.' 'I didn't want to touch the genre unless it felt authentic to me,' Romero emphasized. Queens of the Dead revolves around a night in the queer party scene when the nightlife vibes at a warehouse drag show get interrupted by the zombie apocalypse. The inspiration came from intense conflict on social media among party promoters during her stint as a DJ. Romero recounted, 'The original promoter posted this manifesto begging the question, 'When will the queer community stop devouring its own?' And it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was like, 'Oh my God! This would be how I want to explore the zombie genre in this world of queer nightlife.'' The Mandalorian baddie Katy O'Brien plays the fictionalized promoter who leads the film; Romero noted that there's a special thanks to Tom Cruise in the credits for letting them take the time off their Mission: Impossible shoot to film the horror flick. Romero hopes the film will shine a light on the hunger for more genre films that represent an intersection of gay scream queens with that familiar flair for horror and dark comedy from her father's roots. The legendary filmmaker didn't get to see a completed script but mentored his daughter during the development process. Romero shared, 'He said, 'I love it! Run with it. Go for it.' Unfortunately, he never got to read the completed script because it took me about seven years to get this developed… but I did have this blessing.'
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘People raised hell': why shouldn't Scarlett Johansson and James Franco play queer characters?
Justin Kelly and I first met in 2008 when I was sent to Los Angeles to interview Gus Van Sant. I breezed into the screening room where Van Sant was viewing a rough cut of his film Milk, and promptly tripped over the film-maker's Australian shepherd Milo, who was snoozing in the dark. Kelly was minding the dog that morning, so in some small but unshakable way I will always blame him for my spectacular stumble. Kelly was the editorial assistant on Milk, which starred Sean Penn as the assassinated San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, and James Franco as his lover. Kelly then went on to direct Franco on two occasions as gay characters based on real people: activist Michael Glatze, who renounces his former life after finding religion in I Am Michael; and the escort, porn producer and convicted murderer Joe Kerekes in King Cobra. Consequently, Kelly has had a ringside seat for the whole 'queerbait' argument over whether straight or apparently straight actors should play LGBTQ+ roles. 'I never saw James's performances as him 'pretending' to be gay,' he tells me from among the jaunty cushions in his mother's guest bedroom in Prescott, Arizona, where he has stopped off during a road trip. 'I just saw him as being interested in playing all kinds of characters. He knew he could help these cool queer movies get made and give someone like me a chance to direct. When we were doing press, journalists would throw him some shade, and I'd be like, 'He's bringing these incredible queer stories to the screen, so what's the problem?'' The term 'queerbaiting' wasn't in circulation when I Am Michael opened in 2015. 'Once it started floating around, I became very irritated by it,' Kelly says. 'I think it's fucking bullshit. Since before Stonewall, gay people have been asking the straight world to accept us and not treat us differently. And now we finally have these huge names – actors, musicians – telling the world that not only should you not be homophobic but that maybe it's fucking cool to be gay … and people are mad? I'm like, 'What is wrong with you?'' He is laughing and spluttering. 'That's what we've been asking for all this time!' Such complaints may be guided partly by the misapprehension that work is being snatched away from LGBTQ+ talent. 'Dare I veer into a controversial example?' asks Kelly. 'Scarlett Johansson was going to play a trans character, then people raised hell, so she dropped out.' He is referring to the still unmade Rub & Tug, for which Johansson was cast as the real-life trans male gangster Dante 'Tex' Gill, before she stepped down from the film in 2018. 'It would have been a great story to get out there. Who knows how many people it would have inspired? But it fell apart. And now that movie is gone. I think queer people should feel bummed about that. I mean, imagine ScarJo at the Oscars for playing a trans man: that would've been major. The important thing to remember is – guess what? – famous actors get indie queer films financed. And we need visibility.' After twice working with Franco, who spent more than a decade teasing the world that he might be gay, Kelly directed Kristen Stewart in JT LeRoy, about a notorious real-life literary hoax. Until Stewart came along – and came out – no other modern performer of comparable calibre and status had expressed queer sexuality so emphatically through their choices of roles. In JT LeRoy, she stars as Savannah Knoop, a non-binary artist who agreed to pose as the (male) author of a brace of queer novels that were in fact the work of Knoop's older sister-in-law. Stewart has also been revelatory as a diffident night-school teacher pined over by a timid student in Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women, and as a queer, steroid-pushing gym boss in Rose Glass's lurid B-movie-style romp Love Lies Bleeding. Much of the frisson in her two films with Olivier Assayas – Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper – derives from the effect of her being not quite tangible, or just out of reach. In both, Stewart is a peripheral or ephemeral figure: a curious position for one of the world's most photographed faces. Personal Shopper, JT LeRoy and Spencer, in which she plays Princess Diana, all provide Stewart with fastidious scenes of dressing and undressing that hint at the divestiture or cultivation of layers, defences and secrets. The sense is that the actor is exposing some unseen inner dimension, expressing her own queerness through a series of masks. Attaching Stewart to JT LeRoy was nothing short of a coup. She came out publicly on Saturday Night Live in 2017, being greeted with cheers after describing herself as 'like, so gay'. Kelly had met her a few years earlier to discuss the script, which he and Knoop adapted from Knoop's book Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy. 'Kristen made it clear that she'd brought her girlfriend with her,' he says, 'and I remember thinking, 'Ooh, I know she's gay and no one else does!'' It took several years to secure financing. So why did Stewart hang on? 'She was very connected to the material. I brought it up one time when we were shooting in Winnipeg. We would go to this small-town gay bar where everyone would stare and send over drinks. I told Kristen, 'Part of me was wondering if you were gonna get 5,000 other great offers and bail.' And she said, 'I would have done this movie at any point. I was afraid it might never happen because it's such a cool story that it could have been too cool for people to put money into, or to understand.'' The timing couldn't have been better. 'Since she wasn't officially out when she signed up, she jumped at the opportunity to play Sav, who was not just a lesbian but a queer woman who now identifies as non-binary – but at that time did not. There are already non-binary aspects to the character in the movie, though, in all the going back-and-forth between being a boy and a girl.' Stewart worked closely with Knoop. 'Kristen and Sav really hit it off. Sav's a true artist: their whole style, their clothing. They wear the weirdest shit, it's fucking incredible. Kristen was so into them as a person. One of the things she brought, I think, came from not being out at that point. Sav, the character, was pretending to be JT while also in the closet about being potentially trans and potentially non-binary, and not knowing how to put that out into the world. And Kristen was going through a similar thing: at that level of fame, you're potentially gonna get attacked or ostracised for coming out. That idea of hiding part of one's identity was something she wove into the character so beautifully in these very quiet ways. You can see in a lot of her roles that she's dealing with identity. As Princess Diana, she's trying to figure out who she is as someone who doesn't want to be that famous.' Her performance in Love Lies Bleeding, though, is the one that Kelly maintains is the closest to the Kristen Stewart he knows. 'In JT LeRoy, she was playing someone so different from herself, even though there was that connection of both having a secret. Whereas I saw more of Kristen in Love Lies Bleeding, more of the real person in terms of being a badass bitch. I think it was a chance for her to do so many things she's always wanted to do. To play a version of herself and to be super-fucking-gay. To have those sex scenes, the stuff about fingering, the 'I wanna spread you' line, licking the protein shake that spills on her girlfriend's body, taking men down. All things that I believe she was dying to put out there.' Looked at from this distance, I Am Michael and JT LeRoy play like cracked mirror images of each other. Both are inspired by real-life identity crises and capitalise on the actors' off-screen baggage. Just as Stewart's experience of being in the spotlight while hiding parts of herself informed JT LeRoy, so Franco's teasing about his own sexuality enhanced I Am Michael, a film that hinges on the sincerity or otherwise of his character's conversion. A formerly gay man trying to convince the world he is now straight was being played by a straight actor who had long hinted that he might be gay. 'I don't think I was conscious of it at the time,' says Kelly. 'But now you bring it up, it probably did help. We're watching this guy question his sexuality. It might also have helped him play the character as well. I don't know whether James is gay or not.' He smiles. 'I mean, everyone's a little bit gay, so …' This is an edited extract from It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema by Ryan Gilbey, published on 5 June by Faber. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. Ryan Gilbey will be in conversation with Dorian Lynskey at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London, on 4 June, and with Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar at the Cinema Museum, London, 15 June.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Pillion' Review: Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling Are Magnificent in a Wildly Explicit and Strangely Sweet BDSM Romance
Dick-sucking, boot-licking, and ball-gagging are de rigueur for a movie like writer/director Harry Lighton's wildly graphic and strangely moving BDSM romance, 'Pillion.' But for a British queer film that puts the particulars of a gay dominant-submissive affair (or arrangement, better yet) up front and up close, actors Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling find the sweet center of a story marked by clamps, cages, and assless unitards. No doubt comparisons will arise to another A24 movie, 'Babygirl,' which last year put Nicole Kidman on all fours, crying out to Harris Dickinson that 'I'm gonna pee!' when actually she was just having an orgasm with another person for the first time. Lighton, adapting Adam Mars-Jones' book 'Box Hill,' really does take us there in the delightful 'Pillion,' with Skarsgård getting more emotionally naked than ever and almost physically more than he ever got as Eric Northman on TV's 'True Blood.' But not without, at first, this leather-clad biker, who seeks a submissive with seemingly disinterested vibes, radiating aloof energy when he first meets barbershop quartet singer Colin (Melling, in a truly special and wonderful breakout performance). A parking garage attendant by day and dandied-up singer by night who's just a bit too old to still be living with his parents — though his mum (Lesley Sharp) is dying of cancer, which in part keeps him home — Colin isn't so much looking for love or companionship or sex as much as he finally happens to fall into it when on Christmas Eve he's asked for a date, of sorts, by Ray (Skarsgård, who looks and sounds more and more like his father with each day). More from IndieWire Jodie Foster: 'Silence of the Lambs' Filmmaker Jonathan Demme Is My 'Favorite Feminist Director' LA Mayor Karen Bass Wants to Cut the Red Tape Required to Get a Movie Made in Hollywood Ray is an enigma and a mystery, a man who zips into town on a motorbike like a phantom and could just as easily evaporate at any minute. He's not at all giving of emotion toward Colin as their courtship — again, if we can call it that — turns into a serious but never sinister game of domination and submission. When Ray eventually brings Colin back to his ascetically composed apartment, he refuses to let Colin hang up his coat. He refuses Colin to have much volition at all. Ray also has a tattoo in the middle of his chest, inked with the names 'Ellen Wendy Rosie' for reasons never explained but all the more to add to his impenetrable allure. It's penetrating Colin — physically, psychically — that he eventually gets around to after some toying and coying. He won't let Colin sleep next to him, keeping him on the floor like a dog at the foot of the bed. Here's the kind of guy for whom Karl Ove Knausgård 's 'My Struggle' is light bedtime reading. Colin's mother is shocked when Ray makes him buy the groceries and cook his own birthday dinner. 'You couldn't upset me if you tried,' Ray, ever the implacable and gorgeous dominator, tells Colin at one point. What makes 'Pillion' so thrustingly good is how much the movie teases and tantalizes us, getting off on withholding, until finally unleashing in all its graphicness once Colin is face down, plunging his mouth on Ray's quite large, pierced cock, plunging ever deeper into Ray's expansive kinky social world. Scissor Sisters lead Jake Shears makes his acting entrance as one of the submissives orbiting Ray — and he ends up one of the stars of a very hot group sex scene splayed out over a picnic table, in which Ray fucks Colin face to face, eyes locked on eyes, for the first time. It warms the cockles of my heart still to think about Colin, having shaved his head and totally turned himself over to acts of devotion and in service of his master, wearing a locked chain around his neck, with Ray wearing the key around his own. 'Next to you, I'm nothing. When I'm yours, I'm the same,' Colin tells Ray, which sounds like the debased line of someone being desperately exploited by a partner. But Colin says it with the cadence of love, which his mother in her dying days simply cannot understand. Colin willingly puts himself in an abject position because what's happening between him and Ray is love, for him at least, even if that version of love doesn't comfortably conform to our understanding of what love is supposed to be, a system of back-and-forth flow in mutual directions. Colin craves Ray's command, and Ray would be lying if he said he wasn't feeling feelings about his boytoy, too. Which is when 'Pillion' takes an unexpected direction, Colin finally assuming more control over the relationship and becoming the emotional power bottom he was destined to be in their dynamic. What makes 'Pillion' work so well is that the film finally does give way to a big emotional release after so much cockteasing and edging of the audience and of Colin. Cinematographer Nick Morris has an eye for both sweaty intimacy in its hottest moments and the pooling reserves of desire and reined-in emotion that require a certain detachment. Until we are snapped back into what is ultimately a deeply moving love story, one where we become the submissives to Lighton's strange, beautiful, and sexy vision. It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all. 'Pillion' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A24 will release the film at a later date. 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