Review: "Orlando, My Political Biography"

by Cláudio Alves

The future of cinema is in non-fiction. Though conventional narrative cinema still dominates the mainstream, it's within the documentary realm that the medium's most radical innovations tend to manifest, paving a path to the seventh art's tomorrow. That said, to consider cinema in binaries may be holding on to an outdated model. The way forward could entangle the cinema, as Iranian and Portuguese filmmakers have done for decades. In that regard, Orlando, My Political Biography is the future of cinema dressed in ruffs, non-binary, and transgressing past neat categorization.

Philosopher turned director Paul B. Preciado rejects structural dualities in search of something somewhere between academism and anarchic theater, a reflection of his and his subjects' essential queerness…

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Queering the Oscars: The Costumes of "Orlando"

by Cláudio Alves

Sandy Powell's career has been closely tied to queer artistry since its genesis. After completing her education, the costume designer soon started collaborating with multi-hyphenated gay icon Lindsay Kemp whose stage work she had long admired, and, later, her jump from theater to film would be predicated on another queer genius, Derek Jarman. They'd work on four projects – Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II, and Wittgenstein – and the costumer would continue, keeping his memory alive after the director's death in 1994. Since then, even as her profile grew into the mainstream, Powell remained faithful to the idea and ideals of queerness in cinema, often joining forces with artists under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, Todd Haynes most of all.

As Pride Month 2023 reaches its end, let's remember this Academy darlings' first brush with Oscar. It was in 1993 when Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando earned Sandy Powell a Best Costume Design nomination…

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Watch at Home (as if you had other options currently)

Happy St Patrick's Day!  It hasn't really felt like that holiday without bars open, has it? 

Time for our bi or tri-weekly listing of new titles to DVD and BluRay... plus a little new-to-streaming thrown in for good measure. Given that most of us are trapped at home withe coronavirus pandemic blu-rays and streaming are necessary. 

New(ish) to Blu-Ray and DVD
• Black Christmas - horror remake
• Bombshell - Oscar winner for Best Makeup
• Charlies Angels - another iteration
• Dark Waters - Todd Haynes legal drama
• Jumanji the Next Level - hit sequel
• Queen & Slim - polarizing crime romance
• Richard Jewell - Eastwood dud
• Spies in Disguise - animated
• Uncut Gems - critical darling
• 5B - a doc on the AIDS crisis in 1980s San Francisco.

New to streaming recently
We've freeze-framed a few titles at entirely random places...

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Posterized: Tilda Swinton's Greatest Hits

by Nathaniel R

Alien movie star Tilda Swinton is one of the true glories of modern cinema, and she's playing multiple creepy roles this weekend in her third Luca Guadagnino picture. After starring for the Italian director in I Am Love and A Bigger Splash she's the MVP of his new spin-off riff (it's hardly a 'remake') of Dario Argento's classic hallucinatory horror film Suspiria.

What's more this is not even the first time the actress has played mutiple roles sometimes of multiple genders in the same picture (see also Teknolust, Hail Caesar, Man to Man, and Orlando). Since Tilda Swinton works so often, her filmography is over 70 movies long. That means we can't do a comprehensive Posterized lest we be here for literally hours working in Photoshop, so instead we've opted for Swinton's largest and/or most essential roles.

How many of these 21 key Tildas have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

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The Furniture: Orlando's Otherworldly Pageantry

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Sally Potter’s Orlando is a work of otherworldly character. It does not take place in a fantasy land or on a distant planet, but all the same it does not really seem to take place in our own reality. This might seem an obvious thing to say about a movie whose protagonist is an Elizabethan nobleman (Tilda Swinton) who lives for centuries and abruptly becomes a woman midway through the story, but there’s more to it than that. Its mood is one of near-anachronistic magic, built with a narrative logic that resists the strict signposts of linear storytelling, and lit by a shimmering queer sensibility.

Each of the film’s changing atmospheres has something quite specific to say. The central Istanbul section, filmed in the ancient walled city of Khiva, Uzbekistan, uses architecture to isolate Orlando in the disorienting fog of war. A later chapter, labeled “SEX,” wraps the Lady Orlando and her lover, Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), in the windswept Victorian fantasy of a Bronte novel.

But the singular triumph of the production design team, led by Ben Van Os (Girl with a Pearl Earring) and Jan Roelfs (Gattaca), is the Elizabethan first act. Here is when the young Lord Orlando is the most vulnerable, the most restricted, and the most confused.  [More...]

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