Memo from MD: It's an Honor Just To Be Nominated

Movie Dearest's sister site, The QuOD - The Queer Online Database, has been nominated for Best LGBT Blog in the 1st Annual TLA Gaybie Awards!

Click here to vote for the "most outstanding (or perhaps outrageous) work in gay-themed entertainment throughout the past year", including categories covering film, television, books, comics and, yes, blogs!

To say that I was surprised is an understatement, and I am thrilled that The QuOD was named alongside so many other well-known websites. Voting continues through the month of March, so vote as often as you like! Award winners will be announced April 15th.

Toon Talk: Fish Out of Water

Loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen classic The Little Mermaid, Ponyo (available this week on Disney Blu-ray and DVD) is yet another jewel in the crown of legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli. Marking his return to lighter fare following his darker and more mature Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo is a delight-filled feast for all the senses … and not just for its young target audience.

As is usual for his films, Miyazaki fills every corner of the screen with gorgeously intricate detail. His imagination practically seeps out of the edges, as one can see immediately from the very first sequence of Ponyo, a prologue set in a veritable octopus’ garden teeming with all sorts of exotic undersea creatures.

Here we meet the enigmatic Fujimoto, a human sorcerer who, à la Captain Nemo, has rejected mankind for what it has done to his beloved oceans. We are also introduced to the film’s heroine, a feisty little fish who swims off seeking adventure, only to find trouble in the littered waters of a nearby seaport village. She is rescued by a little boy named Sosuke, who names his strange new friend Ponyo.

But Ponyo is no ordinary little fish. She is actually the daughter of Fujimoto, with magical powers of her own. Once she gets a taste (literally) of human life, she wants to be a part of that world. Her overprotective father will have none of that, and he will do everything in his power to return her to him under the sea ...

Click here to continue reading my Toon Talk review of Ponyo at LaughingPlace.com.

Reel Thoughts Interview: A Show About a Show

The success of the musical [title of show] is a “bit of a Cinderella story,” according to its co-creator Hunter Bell. “I pinch myself every day.”

The show about two gay guys (“Two Nobodies in New York”) and their gal pals who decide to create a musical just to see how far they can take it is currently being staged by Arizona Theatre Company for its regional premiere. Bell (who was nominated for a Tony Award for writing the [tos] book) and composer Jeff Bowen wanted to enter the New York Musical Festival, but they discovered that it was more fun to write a musical about writing a musical. They made themselves characters in the story, brought in Susan Blackwell and Heidi Bickenstaff as secondary characters, and [title of show] was born.

“I’d love to say it was part of a master plan and moderate a seminar on getting your show to Broadway, but it began very simply with seeing an e-mail about an original musical theater festival in New York City,” Bell said. “We used that deadline just as a way to get us writing again. We found that the thing we loved most was us writing about us writing, and writing about the state of musical theater and pop culture and art.”

The show’s success is “a combination of dreaming and working our asses off,” Bell said. He also said it helped to align with a great creative team and producers.  Bell isn’t currently performing the role he created, but he’s busy helping theaters stage his labor of love.  Bell said he is looking forward to seeing different takes on the show by new actors. “The great thing is that in no way do people have to mimic us or our personas. People can walk in and see any size or shape actor playing these guys,” he said. “We weren’t your cookie-cutter kind of Broadway folk.”

The openly gay Bell added, “We were really proud that we were who we were on stage. I didn’t think we were flaunting our sexuality on our sleeves. We were just our awesome, fantastic selves.  After it opened on Broadway, it was not lost on Jeff or me, and it made us proud to create a Broadway musical with two male leads who are openly gay characters. It doesn’t happen that often. It wasn’t the point of the show, but it wasn’t ‘not’ the point of the show. We were just being our proud selves.”

Want more [tos]? Well, "[tossers]", look no further than the official [tos] website and The [title of show] Show channel on YouTube. The former features the hilarious [blog of show] that is regularly updated with material by Hunter, Susan, Jeff and Heidi. The latter includes [title of show] Tony fever and special guest star Cheyenne Jackson.

[title of show] is currently playing at Arizona Theatre Company in Phoenix through March 7. For more information and tickets, visit the theater's official website.

Interview by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reel Thoughts: Village of the Damned

Historians point to many reasons why the German people allowed Hitler’s rise and permitted the Holocaust to occur. Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke gives his own profoundly disturbing reasons in his award-winning black and white feature, The White Ribbon, by not directly addressing the question at all.

The film, nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and Cinematography, is set in 1913-14 in the village of Eichwald, Germany, where a series of seemingly random acts of violence threatens to topple the baronial and male hierarchy of the community. Told in flashback as the memories of the village’s schoolteacher (Ernst Jacobi as narrator, Christian Friedel on screen), The White Ribbon unfolds as a morality tale gone horribly wrong.

First, the local doctor is felled on his horse by a tripwire stretched across his garden entrance. Was he being punished for having a relationship with his midwife after the death of his wife, or was it for something darker and more disturbing? Then a farmer’s wife dies in an accident in the Baron’s sawmill. Soon, it is the children of Eichwald who become the targets of devastating attacks, beginning with the baron’s son. Are the other children somehow involved?

Haneke layers his film with deeper and more disturbing themes and situations, and it becomes apparent that the sins of the fathers (the doctor, the baron, his steward and the pastor) are being taken out upon their children, even as the pastor is meting out severe punishment to his own slightly creepy brood. He ties his eldest son’s arms to his bed when he fears the boy is masturbating and visits his harshest punishment onto his eldest daughter. The title of the film refers to white ribbons the pastor makes his children wear like scarlet letters, signifying the “purity” that eludes them.

The most disturbing scenes in The White Ribbon are not violence, but emotionally bruising scenes of the men in the village exerting their dominance over their women and children, most notably the doctor cruelly dismissing his lover, the midwife. Haneke seems to ask: Is it any wonder that this generation grew up to blindly follow Hitler and his perverse Pied Piper’s song?

The White Ribbon is a slow and methodical film that ends with many questions unanswered, but Haneke makes a compelling case that the misery, humiliation and hopelessness the people suffer in Eichwald made them eager for the deliverance that Hitler would promise a generation later.

UPDATE: The White Ribbon is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.com.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.