I was in Ann Arbor last weekend for the first-ever conference on queer dance, co-organized by Clare Croft (whose dissertation I was pleased to advise at the University of Texas at Austin) and University of Michigan dance professor Peter Sparling. Two days of panel discussions, workshops, and film screenings were capped each evening by a [...]
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With only two episodes aired, it’s difficult to say where exactly Smash, the new NBC series about backstage Broadway lives, will take us. Executive produced and so far written by playwright Theresa Rebeck, the show responds to Fox’s Glee by embedding lavish musical numbers in its story of a lyricist-songwriting team creating a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe. [...]
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Dee Rees’s debut feature film is a terrific study of a teenaged girl who identifies as a lesbian, even though she lives under the heterosexual enforcement of an unhappy mother and a warm but philandering father.
Rees’s semi-autobiographical film does a beautiful job of narrating the double-life of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a very smart [...]
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Albert Nobbs has been Glenn Close’s passion project since she performed the title role in Simone Benmussa’s play, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, in New York in 1982. Her commitment pays off in a beautiful, starring performance in the film she co-wrote and co-produced. With her small eyes peering out of Albert’s guarded face, Close [...]
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Just a note to publicize an important new source of information on work by women and trans people in Canadian theatre . . .
The Feminist Spectator
Queer Performance: Women and Trans Artists
CTR 149, Winter 2012
Edited by Moynan King
CTR 149 includes performance texts by Jess Dobkin and Ivan Coyote along with critical essays and [...]
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Writer-director Alexander Payne’s films—if About Schmidt, Sideways, and now The Descendantsare any indication—are sensitive, expressive investigations into white, middle-class, heterosexual masculinity. George Clooney, recently nominated for an Academy Award for his role, for which he already won a Golden Globe, plays Matt King, a real estate lawyer in Hawai’i whose life falls apart when his wife’s injury in a [...]
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David Fincher’s tense, moody film adaptation of the popular Stieg Larsson book actually improves on the reading experience. Where the book offered a great story with plodding prose, Fincher’s film cuts the narrative to the bone while staying faithful to Larsson’s plot and characters. The film’s visual style makes it a pleasure to watch, evoking [...]
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Just a note to say that The Feminist Spectator blog won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2010-2011. I’m delighted by this honor. The Feminist Spectator is the first blog ever to receive the award in its 56 year history, and I’m only the seventh woman to win in the history of [...]
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I had the pleasure of seeing Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same at the Galway Film Festival in Ireland last summer. It’s now playing through January 12 at ReRunGastropub Theatre in DUMBO (more info below).
The film, written and directed by Madeleine Olnek, is a lovely, quirky, comic fantasia, with a beautifully understated performance by [...]
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