Showing posts with label Stonewall 2015 Movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stonewall 2015 Movie. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Video Beaverhausen Visits Stonewall

German director Roland Emmerich, who directed Independence Day and that awful '98 Godzilla remake, takes on Stonewall with his usual heavy-handed approach. Not a good thing when a movie about the start of the LGBT rights movement manages to piss off its LGBT audiences worldwide. Popular activist-blogger Joe My God called for a petition of this fiasco.

Met with such hostile reception and poor reviews, the film folded quickly at theaters on limited release. I was hoping to see it at Chelsea Cinemas in Manhattan when it was released, but the theater quickly dropped it like a hot potato.

I pre-ordered the dvd from Amazon in mid-November and it arrived yesterday. I must say it is, indeed, just awful. How Jonathan Rhys Myers and Ron Perlman got involved in this mess is anyone's guess. I hope they walked away with big paychecks.

Stonewall bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan is still around, still going strong and still a gay bar, now even presenting live entertainment. It is legendary and its longevity is such a comfort. The riot happened in '69, the night after Judy Garland died, the summer after I graduated high school. It was summer, it was hot and the patrons just were not taking any more abuse.

But this movie rendition of Stonewall has a bad script, clumsy direction and camerawork, and trivializes events. Better you should spend your time watching the 1995 British film of the same name.