Gay Best Friend: Hedy & Graham in "Single White Female" (1992)

a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope   

You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out? It’s kinda long, but it’s full of suspense.Gay Best Friends aren’t often paired with gay panic. Especially in movies made more than 10 years ago, we either were taught to laugh at queer characters, cry for them or fear them. Single White Female asked us to do two of the three. The 1992 thriller didn’t just settle for giving our jilted protagonist, Allie Jones (Bridget Fonda), a supportive gay best friend (Graham, played by Peter Friedman). They also paired her with a roommate nursing a lesbian crush on Allie and refining her murderous skills (Hedra Carlson, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Broad doesn’t begin to describe the movie. While it swings for the fences with its queer characterizations, a large degree of camp shines through. This makes for a pleasurable “turn-your-brain-off” wild thrill ride...

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Link vs Link

• The Guardian ranks the best "Vs" movies after the success of Godzilla vs Kong. Really fun list
• /Film You've probably heard by now that Rian Johnson scored a massive deal for his Knives Out sequels. They'll be going to Netflix for um... $400 million. Daniel Craig will be reprising his role for new mysteries.
• AV Club Edward James Olmos talks about his "random roles" in this always engaging series

More after the jump including Lil Nas X, Olivia Colman, Kung Fu, Thandiwe Newton, and new projects from Sam Mendes and Alex Garland...

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Review: "Possessor" is a true provocation

by Tony Ruggio

A worm-infested apple doesn’t fall far from a rotting tree. In only his second feature film, baby Brandon Cronenberg proves he’s everything his father David was in his heyday: stylish, provocative, and interested in more than the gore and sleazy depravity that often grab headlines, although he’s clearly interested in those as well. Set in an alternate techno-horror 2008 of corporate espionage, where agents like Tasya (Andrea Riseborough) use brain-implant technology to “possess” other human beings for carrying out assassinations, Possessor is possibly the most graphic film made since Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Here it’s not so much what happens, but how it happens, how it’s framed on screen via some truly horrific and terrific practical effects.

When we meet Tasya, she’s at the top of her game yet beginning to slip. As Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character puts it, “the older you get, the harder it gets”...

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Greenberg's 10th and Gerwig as Muse

by Cláudio Alves 

Once upon a time, long before she was an Academy Award-nominated director and screenwriter, Greta Gerwig was the acting princess of mumblecore. Along with the Duplass brothers and Joe Swanberg, she helped solidify the identity of that often-maligned subgenre, full of naturalistic dialogue and very little in the ways of storytelling. The actress quickly transcended the limitations of mumblecore and became a starlet of the independent American cinema from 2010 to 2016, starring in such gems as Damsels in Distress, Jackie and 20th Century Women. 

Among her more frequent collaborators, Noah Baumbach stood out. She was his muse and he knew how to capture her talents like no other. Or was it the other way around? In any case, their first collaboration marked a turning point in both their careers. We're talking about Greenberg, which celebrates 10 years today…

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Over & Overs: The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

by Mark Brinkerhoff

The Coen Brothers have no shortage of veritable classics on their résumé (Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, etc.), but somewhat overlooked within their filmography are the quirky, sweet (read: non-violent, still absurdist) little diversions into optimism, vs. their patented nihilism. And so, sandwiched between the critical and commercial triumphs Barton Fink and Fargo, arrived The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coens’ mid-‘90s (25th anniversary, y’all!) ode to the zany, screwball comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

They had me at "You know, for kids.”

I was one of the few who saw The Hudsucker Proxy in theaters—it bombed…hard—at the mall where I worked as a teen (at Subway in the food court, natch). In fact, it wasn’t by chance that I saw The Hudsucker Proxy; I actually sought it out, for reasons I can’t totally recall. But loved it I did, from the very first watch... 

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