“Queen of Katwe” begins with a few bars of “African music” – the sort of Disneyfied fare that is so insultingly generic that I burst out laughing before sobering up fast. It’d be a crying shame, I thought, if chess champion Phiona Mutesi got reduced to the “inspirational people of color” clichés that even now Hollywood hasn’t learned to sidestep. I needn’t have worried. Though this adaptation of ESPN reporter Tim Crothers’s eponymous nonfiction book certainly dips heavily into the inspirational sports playbook, it offers a depth and earned joy that makes Ugandan women its subject rather than its object. Chalk it up to the fact that, though this indeed hails from Disney, it is one of the most female-forward and people of color-led major studio productions ever to come down the pike. Continue Reading →
Archive | Film Matters
The Swoony Incongruities of ‘The Dressmaker’
“The Dressmaker” is the first feature in twenty years by Australia’s Jocelyn Moorhouse, whose career is a hodge-podge that doesn’t quite hold up to critical scrutiny. Yet, like much of the director’s fare – most notably “How to Make an American Quilt” and “Proof” (the 1991 film with Russell Crowe, not the dour Gwynnie 2005 vehicle) – this adaptation of Rosalie Ham’s eponymous 2000 novel offers much more satisfaction than many films that are easier to admire.
The inimitable Kate Winslet stars as the titular character, and it’s a role she was born to play. As Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage, she’s returned to Dungatar, Australia, in the mid-1950s after years in Paris where she’s been working as a haute couture dress designer. Clad in a skin-tight sheath, aviator pumps, and a red-lipsticked snit, she offers the loveliest of contrasts to her dusty, claustrophobically tiny home village, where one seems to know what to do with her, least of all her mum Mad Molly (Judy Davis), who claims not to recognize the girl. Continue Reading →
The Myth of JT Leroy
In 2005, JT Leroy died. Technically, of course, JT Leroy never existed. The transgender, HIV-positive, homeless child prostitute-turned-bestselling author was the fabrication of two San Francisco women whose machinations were exposed by journalists in 2005. But during the nine years that Jonathan “Terminator” Leroy “lived,” he presided as the little prince of U.S. literati and glitterati.
In last year’s excellent The Cult of JT Leroy, director Marjorie Sturm exposed the smoke and mirrors of this story, treating it as the country’s biggest hoax this side of War of the Worlds. As a San Francisco local who’d worked with mentally ill homeless people, Sturm had begun the documentary as an earnest homage. BUT upon the revelation that forty-year-old San Francisco resident Laura Albert and her twentysomething sister-in-law Savannah Koop had posed as Leroy (the former woman wrote his books and spoke as him on the phone; the latter posed as him in person), the filmmaker had whipped off her rose-colored glasses to give voice to the many who felt betrayed and manipulated. Continue Reading →