2022 Entry #019 02-01-22 “Pariah” is a 2011 American drama film written and directed by Dee Rees (“Empire”, “When We Rise”). It tells the story of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old Black teenager embracing her identity as a lesbian. The film is a feature-length expansion of writer/director Dee Rees’ award-winning 2007 short film of the same name, which unfortunately I don’t have (yet). Spike Lee was one of the executive producers & filming took place in and around New York City, predominantly in the Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn. The movie premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Excellence in Cinematography Award.
This film hit me so hard! This is the power of cinema and empathy. The brutality in being denied by those closest to you – even lovers who can’t face who they are – is a universal story that I’m sure resonates with many people. I know it did for me. I wept during this film. I have no complaints about this film. Highly recommended!
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 95% based on 114 reviews, with an average rating of 7.87/10. The website’s critics consensus reads: “Pulsing with authenticity and led by a stirring lead performance from Adepero Oduye, Pariah is a powerful coming out/coming-of-age film that signals the arrival of a fresh new talent in writer/director Dee Rees.”
Incidentally, the first thing that I saw Adepero Oduye in was the Marvel Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” in which she played Sarah Wilson, Sam / The Falcon’s sister, and I loved her in that also.
2022 Entry #018 01-31-22 “Blue is the Warmest Color” is a an award winning 2013 romantic French drama film co-written, co-produced, and directed by Abdellatif Kechiche starring Léa Seydoux (“Spectre”, “No Time to Die”) and Adèle Exarchopoulos. The film follows Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a French teenager who discovers desire and freedom when an aspiring painter named Emma (Seydoux) enters her life. It charts their relationship from Adèle’s high school years to her early adult life and career as a school teacher. The premise of the film is based on the 2010 graphic novel of the same name by Jul Maroh.
I’ve been meaning to see this film for years. And though I considered skipping it today due to it’s nearly three hour run time, I accidentally started it and found that I couldn’t bring myself to stop. The film is very good, yet isn’t without some serious problems. The performances are all wonderful and the filmmaking is top notch but the movie features graphic, extensive sex scenes which are often, unfortunately, hard to take seriously. The graphic nature isn’t necessarily the problem, and that sex is featured in a film about sexual awaking and exploration of sexual identity is hardly surprising, yet the nature of the sexual acts, how they are viewed and explored is almost comical at times and uncomfortable at others. At first I thought this might only be my response to the piece but just skimming reactions online revealed that reams of clinical analysis featured much of the same feedback. Tellingly, Jul Maroh, the author of the graphic novel upon which the film was based, said, “It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians.” It is unfortunate that such a central part of the story is flawed, yet I think it is undeniably a film worth seeing and one that is also worthy of praise.
2022 Entry #013 01-30-22 “Wild Things” is a delightfully trashy 1998 American neo-noir erotic crime thriller film directed by John McNaughton and starring Matt Dillon (“In & Out”), Neve Campbell (“54”, “Three to Tango”, “Intimate Affairs”), Kevin Bacon (“Queens Logic”, “Beauty Shop”), Denise Richards (“Nowhere”), Bill Murray (“Tootsie”, “Groundhog Day”), Theresa Russell (“Black Widow”) & Daphne Rubin-Vega (“Flawless”, “Sex and the City”, “Smash”, “Rent: Live”, “Tales of the City” “tick, tick…BOOM!”). The story is set in south Florida, where a high school counselor (Dillion) is accused of rape by two female students (Campbell & Richards), but the police officers investigating (Bacon & Rubin-Vega) suspect something more is going on.
I’m sure this movie makes a lot of people’s guilty pleasure lists. Most of the characters (like “Basic Instinct”) are horrible people, but they’re so much fun! But why is the movie on this list? Spoilers follow, which frankly, are more fun to discover on your own if you’ve not seen it. But if you don’t care, then feel free to continue.
The film reveals (or at least implies) that Neve Campbell’s character, Suzie Toller, was lovers with Denice Richards’s character, Kelly Van Ryan, before the start of the film…and that she is also (secretly) Kelly’s aunt. The question of if that backstory is true or not is because this a twisty puzzle of a movie and it’s possible that some of that backstory is forged…and yet even if it’s all a lie…there’s more. During the film, Suzie and Kelly have sex, both with Dillon’s Sam Lombardo along as an instigator, and on their own. In addition to that, there’s a subtle homoeroticism between Lombardo and Kevin Bacon’s Sergeant Ray Duquette. In the film, Lombardo calls Duquette a cocksucker and the reaction from the Sergeant is priceless; and maybe it’s just me, but it left me feeling like Duquette has sucked off Lombardo at some point. If that seems too tenuous, there’s a famous scene later in the film where Lombardo returns to his cabin to find Duquette in his shower, with Kevin Bacon going fully frontal, and the two seem totally comfortable with this scenario. Mix this with Bill Murray’s sleazy lawyer character questioning if the student accusing Lombardo is male or female, Lombardo’s deck hands and him later putting Duquette in that role and there’s a lot of suggestion going on.
I read somewhere years ago that the creative team had toyed with making the men lovers but that they felt like that might cross a line, and as much as I would have loved to see it, they were probably right. The LGBTQ audience had started boycotting films that portrayed all the queer characters in movies as murderous, duplicitous monsters…and they may well have skipped this movie if that were the case here. And straight male audiences, tend to not go for gay male movie storylines; the inclusion and upset over minor gay characters in recent animated and comic book based films is unfortunately testament to that. And of course straight men and women generally find bi or lesbian women either titillating or completely non-threatening. Still, this movie felt like something a bit more than the usual girl on girl tease.
2022 Entry #006 01-28-22 “Foxfire” is a 1996 American teen drama film directed by Annette Haywood-Carter and is a modernized adaptation of the novel “Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang” by Joyce Carol Oates, which was set in the 1950s. This version moves the setting from upstate New York to the Pacific Northwest, centers the story on suburban families rather than the novel’s working class and changes the duration of the story from 3.5 years to just several weeks. This was the first film that I ever saw Angelina Jolie in and just like the film’s narrator, I fell in love with her, despite our sexualities not being the most compatible. 😉
Basically, Jolie’s heavily implied to be lesbian character shows up like the classically cool, archetypal drifter who saunters into town and shakes everyone up. Now, she doesn’t physically get the girl in the movie, but they clearly love each other by the film’s end.
I rented this movie when it was a new release; I watched it on April 5, 1997. I know this because I wrote a poem titled “Charming”, about the film’s characters, as soon as I finished viewing it. I liked it. It’s not a great movie in my opinion. It’s not life changing. But it’s good. I think the performances are what make it worth seeing, while I find the script to be weak at times. Oh. And I like (and own) the soundtrack.
Entry 17 on my LGBTQ pandemic marathon. Today I needed comfort food…and I also realized I’d not been watching any lesbian movies so I went for this borderline awful guilty pleasure which I love with almost every fiber of my being. ❤ 🏳️🌈 It’s one of those queer movies where it’s almost great, isn’t quite up to snuff but has it’s heart in the right place. I re-watched it last year or the year before for the first time in at least a decade so I hesitated to make it part of this new viewing party thing but I’ve decided I’m just starting from scratch and can watch anything I want. lol And I really needed this today.
For those wondering, the movie was released in 1992, when such films were far more rare and it was a passion project, which I can respect. The film score (which is available to stream on Amazon Music) is beautiful. And I have happy memories of seeing this with a dear friend on video in 1994. I’m glad it’s part of my collection.
Edit: I have a more indepth review of this from my 2026 re-watch.
