Category — Reviews: Movies

Last night I was lucky enough to attend a screening of Track Two, a 1982 documentary on the Toronto bathhouse raids. After nearly being lost to time and decay, the film has finally been digitized and made available in its entirety for free online, thanks to the generosity of Xtra! and the Pink Triangle Press.

The screening took place at Buddies in Bad Time Theatre and was sponsored by Queer Ontario and Xtra!, with proceeds benefiting the 519 Community Centre’s Seniors program. In attendance were two of the filmmakers, Gordon Keith and Jack Lemmon, as well as The Body Politic‘s Ken Popert and Gerald Hannon. It was a truly amazing experience to share a room with so many of Toronto’s gay liberation activists, without whom queers such as myself wouldn’t have all the rights we have today.

After the screening, I spoke with the filmmakers, who wanted to know how I, as a woman, felt about the movie. They said they had tried very hard to show lesbian contributions to the fight, and they were curious to know if they were successful. I told them that it was incredibly powerful to see the footage of lesbians taking to the street in defense of the men and the gay community as a whole. It was also thrilling to see interviews with some of my queer heroes, Pat Murphy and Chris Bearchell, and rousing speeches from Margaret Atwood and June Callwood.

Watch the entire film on YouTube, or read more about it and download a copy from Xtra!

The requisite squeeing fangirl post. Stark and I saw Star Trek (dammit, I keep typing “Stark Trek”) yesterday and had differing opinions on the film. Stark said “Meh,” I said “Wheeeeeeee! Saving the universe and getting in bar fights! Tribbles and booze and wild space adventure! Pyoo pyoo set phasers to stun!!”

Right before my trip to New York, Space Channel was showing a Star Trek movie marathon. We diligently powered through each of the movies up until I left. Sadly, I only got to watch up until the eighth movie before I had to leave the country, so I missed out on Insurrection and Nemesis. Oh well, I have heard I wasn’t missing much. Generally, I thought the entire series wasn’t all that great. Most of the movies amounted to just decent, extra-long episodes of the show. Which is not a bad thing, really. I mean, for the hilarious interactions of Bones/Kirk/Spock alone, they’re worth watching. The most movie-like of the movies was The Voyage Home, which had an engaging script, time travel with an amazing purpose, and great interactions between the cast. Chekhov getting captured as a Russian spy! Bones bitching about medieval medicine! Uhura being baffled by San Francisco! Kirk doing a terrible job of hitting on a woman and making her pay for his dinner! SPOCK MIND MELDING WITH WHALES!!! Awesome. Here are my ratings for the series:

I, Star Trek: Boring but inoffensive
II, The Wrath of Khan: Campy awesomeness. KHAAANNNNN!
III, The Search For Spock: Kinda rambling and slow, but generally decent.
IV, The Voyage Home: WHALES! BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
V, The Final Frontier: AWFUL. AWFUL. Never leave Shatner in charge of a story. Ugh.
VI, The Undiscovered Country: Definitely an improvement on V, but more like a long episode than anything else. Lots of boring galactic council meetings. Lucas should have learned from this. Space politics, like real politics, are BORING.
VII, Generations: I liked this movie. It was actually the first Star Trek movie that I ever saw in theaters, so I’ll always be fond of it.
VIII, First Contact: Borg queen! Borg queen! Data being smarter than everyone! Awww, Picard, you make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you say things like “Engage.” Purrr. And the day is saved by Picard’s hot biceps of power and righteousness!

In sum, STAR TREK RULES!
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For awhile there I was really despairing as to the state of Hollywood movies. So many of them seem to either be remakes, sequels, or just generally hackneyed crap. I was honestly convinced that the movie industry would crumble before Hollywood produced an original script and took some chances on something different. These three movies have shown me that it is still possible to have fun in Hollywood.
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Having heard mostly bad reviews for X-Men: The Last Stand since it came out, I had been hesitant to pay money to see it. Finally, it appeared on cable last night, and I got a chance to see what everyone had been so angry about. I have to admit, for about the first half or so I didn’t think it was such a crappy movie, and couldn’t understand why everyone had been so angry. I should note that I think that none X-movies have been very good and this one suffers from the same defects as the prior two movies. These specific defects alone wouldn’t have caused me to hate the movie, and there were some decent additions that made me think it wouldn’t end up being that bad, but on the whole, if I tally up the pros and cons for the series as a whole, I end up with way more bad than good. I’ll put the rest under the cut, in case anyone wants to avoid two year old spoilers.
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