RIP Richard Glatzer, co-director of Still Alice (2014), the film that helped Julianne Moore win her first Oscar of many. Glatzer and his husband, Wash Westmoreland, had teamed up on The Fluffer (2001), Quinceanera (2005) and The Last of Robin Hood (2013), and Glatzer had directed the 1993 film Grief, fondly remembered for great performances by Jackie Beat and Carlton Wilborn.
Glatzer had battled ALS.
Check out this sweet post about Glatzer, who from what I've heard was someone everybody loved.
The new trailer for the other acclaimed Julianne Moore movie of the moment (directed by David Cronenberg!) is here, and Maps to the Stars looks really out-there...
Early frost
BOY CULTURE RATING: *** out of ****
In Still Alice, an articulate, accomplished linguistics professor (Julianne Moore) begins to forget things. She gets lost. She repeats herself. She suspects she could have a brain tumor, but the real answer is even more devastating—at the age of 50, she has early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
Her workaholic husband (Alec Baldwin), handsome son (Hunter Parrish) and warring daughters—one archly perfect (Kate Bosworth), one studiously rebellious (Kristen Stewart)—have to cope with this out-of-the-blue development, and must make choices about their own lives and about the woman who is at the core of their family.
Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland were hired to adapt the film from Lisa Genova's highly regarded novel of the same name, and wound up directing it. The partners in creativity and in love have crafted a no-frills, achingly intimate document of what often is a breathtakingly swift decline, one which allows Moore precious little space in which to do anything more than be. The result is a moving, unaffected, ephemeral performance of the type for which she is renowned, and a performance which could become the one that finally brings her the Oscar she's richly deserved for many years.
Baldwin, always so good, may have burned himself with his long stint on 30 Rock and as a frequent SNL host; he has snarky resting face, which distracts from his character and from the film. Stewart, on the other hand, gives a mature performance that perfectly complements Moore's. The others aren't really fleshed out enough to judge.
Ultimately, the film is so hands-off it sometimes feels a little underdeveloped. That hurts it as an overall artistic statement, making it feel like an unadorned TV movie at times, but that approach does nothing to damage Moore and Stewart's effortless shared depth.
Glatzer (L) & Westmoreland (R)
As a postscript: It may surprise some to know that Westmoreland's directing career was launched in gay porn in the '90s, and that his work with Glatzer includes the broadly comic The Fluffer (2001), set in that milieu. Less of a surprise is that the men co-directed the affecting drama Quinceañera in 2006.
KIMYE FINALLY GOT MARRIED.
Giovanni's Room shutters.
Winter Sleep, Julianne Moore, Jean-Luc Godard do bon @ Cannes.
A wall of wriggling penises. Don't know much about art, but know what I like.
Anti-gay priest took...it...out. Credit: Elaine Benes.
Right-wingers wanna impeach Virginia's AG over marriage equality.
Morgan Freeman...on helium!
Visit my (Work Unfriendly) sponsor, Mr. Man!
Sofia Vergara breaks up with her Republican boyf.
The New York Times really did not care for the new Adam Sandler flick.
Jeremy Hooper on fake debates engineered by anti-LGBT forces.
Logo distances itself from RuPaul, who in turn reads Logo.
Soap actor Matthew Cowles, husband of Christine Baranski, dies.
Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst wins Eurovision 2014. F*ck Russia.
Judge discovered on Manhunt decides to retire over it. Huh?
1st same-sex marriage in the South: We came, we Arkansas, we conquered.
Liaison—1st gay club in a Vegas casino—set to open in Bally's.
PUBIC-HARRY: One Direction superstar flashes major pube-age.
SCORCHED, FLAT EARTH: Sherri Shepherd's divorce gets nas-tay.
Madonna's next album cover? Plus, her dancing tween!
HOT WAX: That's Jon Hamm, dummy!
Dolly Parton's boobies and arms are inked, y'all.
Miley Cyrus sexes up G-A-Y.
David Cronenberg + Julianne Moore = must-see.
Nintendo vs. same-sex relationships. Aw, they're sowwy.
HAPPY MOTHER'S GAY: Starbucks has two mommies.
Superhot torso.
Brendan Fehr is in the closet.
Michael Jackson to sing beyond the grave.
Hottie Walter Delmar's butt portraits. (Work Unfriendly)
Model Brian Shimansky goes full-frontal. (Also Work Unfriendly)
Choke on your Chick-Fil-A, assholes.
Cholodenko with all right kids Hutcherson and Wasikowska at the L.A. premiere
I got to see a screening of Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right (opening July 9 in select cities) and am happy to report that the kids are more than just all right—they're pretty terrific.
Ruffalo & Moore at the premiere; Bening skipped for personal reasons
I was somewhat reluctant about a movie whose premise revolves around a lesbian longtime couple Nic and Jules (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) whose family unit is compromised when their sperm donor Paul (Mark Ruffalo) from over 15 years earlier comes back into their lives via their curious kids Laser and Joni (Josh Hutcherson and Mia Wasikowska) and begins an affair with one of them. If that example of "lesbians just need a man" isn't enough to turn you off, how about the odd fact that the women's stale sex life is spiced up by watching vintage gay male porn? (I'm aware some women are into this, but how many lesbians are?)
Coming together over dinner
Still, Cholodenko's character-driven script (she co-wrote with Stuart Blumberg) is so filled with insights into the emotions and quirks of the family and of its potential interloper that these potentially annoying aspects feel authentic.
I dreamt of terrorism last night. In my dream, I was in the elevator where I work, but there was no light in the elevator. This has happened to me once before, when an after-hours conductor beckoned me to get on before I realized there was no illumination. The sensation of being in pitch blackness as you're descending is completely disorienting; it was like my breathless descent on the similarly lightless stairs from the same building the day of a big black-out a few years back—it felt like being a sentient creature with no body, no sense of where I began or ended.
The rest of the dream was more literal, about a giant building across the street from where I work being demolished by a car bomb. I could see police in cars screaming for everyone to evacuate the sidewalks. I walked home and yet another bomb went off in the Hudson, leading to surprisingly speedy "tourrorism," masses of people taking souvenir pictures of the destruction.
What caused this paranoid dream was a sliver of the film A Single Man, directed, co-written and co-produced by designing man Tom Ford, which I saw at a screening last night. In it, gay college professor George Falconer (Colin Firth), who is nearly enveloped in grief after the unexpected death of his partner Jim (Matthew Goode) in a car crash far from their Los Angeles home, lectures his class on the ways in which fear is used by corporations and governments to control our lives. This shockingly modern theme was not out of place in the film despite its early '60s setting, and it had caused me to dream up a fear that most Americans have been encouraged to have, and that most New Yorkers have based on the likelihood that something like this will happen again.
My brain had taken the opposite message of the character's speech and of the film itself; maybe the fear that's harder to overcome than the propaganda fed to us by potential oppressors is the fear we dream up ourselves. We can be our own worst enemies. Certainly George Falconer must overcome himself more so than any other dreadful barrier as he sets out to determine where a sentient being like he begins and ends in a world recently clouded by darkness.
George lives in a cozy L.A. suburb, sticking out like a sore thumb among paired-off heterosexuals and their inquisitive children. His sexuality is an open secret, yet still a secret. Curiously, he lives in a modern glass house designed by his late partner, an architect, making his external life more transparent than his internal one.
