Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival
This video documentary was made for Canadian TV, but it offers so many insights into gay and lesbian stand-up comedians that its mainstream style is easily forgiven. David Adkin cuts between comedy bits and interviews with the performers backstage at the first queer comedy festival in Toronto. Lea DeLaria, Kate Clinton, and Scott Capurro are the brilliant headliners, and Christopher Peterson’s female impersonation is good shtick and great improvisation. One of the more obvious tricks–juxtaposing a performer’s tragic life story and a stand-up version of the same events–is annoying at first, but it quickly turns into a revealing look at the way comedy is created–not simply out of pain but out of politicized experience. This glitzy, funny look at the healing power of subversive laughter is entertaining, thought provoking, and inspiring. (CB) (7:00)
Girl Dreams
Gay Courage: 100 Years of the Gay Movement in Germany and Beyond
Lana Lin’s 56-minute Almost the Cocktail Hour is a personal meditation on writer Jane Bowles: a young New York woman revisits places Bowles lived, while we hear excerpts from her work on the sound track. We learn less about Bowles than about how unknowable she is–an increasingly common theme in personal documentaries–and the black-and-white cinematography wavers between movingly evoking impenetrability and becoming self-indulgent. On the same program is Jorge Oliver’s Written, a clever send-up of fundamentalist homophobes that uses the Bible to contradict them, though the images of stained-glass and candles are trite. Diane Bonder’s The Physics of Love is an interesting attempt to use physics principles such as Newton’s laws as metaphors for human interaction; at times suggestive, it can also seem strained. (FC) (3:15)
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Celestial Rhapsody
