INSTAGRAM: Is it okay for a straight guy to walk up and touch another guy’s ass at the gym out of (checks notes) respect and admiration?
SALT LAKE CITY TRIBUNE: Utah’s first gay bar is getting a permanent historical marker.
INSTAGRAM: One of my fave allies who encourages ogling.
TWITTER: Insanely, Jack Schlossberg has randomly accused anyone who opposed Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker (he’s almost a lock anyway) of racism. Oof.
INSTAGRAM: Lorenzo Salgado, who was murdered by ICE, was honored by Senator-elect James Talarico (D-Texas).
SNL: Talarico wowed on SNL, too!
KXAN: In last week’s blue wave, lesbian jurist Maggie Ellis was elected Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court — first woman to lead the Court, first out LGBTQ+ person to win election to any statewide office, first out LGBTQ+ person elected to the Court.
VIRGINIA MERCURY: The election also brought to Virginians the enshrining of marriage equality, voting rights and reproductive rights in their constitution.
TWITTER: “How does it feel being a loser, Mr. President?”
HUFFINGTON POST: Hakeem Jeffries is going to be the Speaker of the House — he’s got AOC, he’s got the votes. (Schumer might be a little wobbly.) In the meantime, Jeffries is described as a “hard yes” on impeaching Pete Hegseth.
INSTAGRAM: Neil Patrick Harris made a surprise appearance at Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody this weekend.
KVELLER: The story of Wilfrid Israel, the gay Jewish Socialist who “saved 10,000 Jews during WWII.”
DALLAS VOICE: NYC-based out author David Finkle is publishing the novel Dorothea Through My Eyes November 15:
“Finkle’s novel examines how ambition, identity and emotional distress can reshape relationships, raising questions about mental health, assumptions people make about others and the challenges of helping someone in crisis.”
BLEECKER STREET MEDIA: I went to a screening of The Liberation, a new drama starring Carrie Coon as Rita Cooper, a woman who’d survived the Holocaust as a child and who, in mid-life, walked away from her family in order to spend the rest of her life in a cult.
That this is a true story is already a gut-punch. That it was written and directed by Rita’s own grandson — Academy Award winner Guy Nattiv — soaks each minute of it with dread.
The film starts like a slasher, with two young women (The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young) arriving at the remote compound run by the spookily sensuous Ricki (an appropriately mesmerizing Lily James) seeking to reconnect with their mom, who has been absent from their lives for a couple of years. It quickly unravels into psychological thriller territory as it jumps back and forth between Rita’s hum-drum life with her kids and her husband (Coon’s real-life husband Tracy Letts) and her terrifying new life as Naia.
One thing The Liberation does well is portray Rita’s spiral in a way that feels absolutely credible — even relatable. As Coon said afterward in a spirited Q&A:
“I’m a wife and I’m a mother, and I’m a working person. The cognitive load of motherhood is very, very high, and I absolutely understood her as completely radical. Here she is, women have had credit cards for 10 years, they can’t really get a divorce, and this woman — improbably — leaves. A radical impulse! We forget sometimes that the rules we’re living by are completely made up … The idea that you would walk away from that? We could all do it, and we don’t do it.”
I was also left pondering what Rita’s Jewishness, her status as a survivor who saw members of her family dragged away from her, might have had to do with how susceptible she was to Ricki’s charm and coercion. Nattiv seemed to be hinting at this, and the Israeli Center for Cult Victims was thanked in the credits, suggesting there may be a special vulnerability. Nattiv also expertly depicted aspects of the off-grid life Rita sought as Naia and a concentration camp, as if she were returning to the sick comfort of the defining trauma of her childhood. She was held against her will, her hair was cropped short, she was (at first) forced to do work, she was stripped of her worldly goods and money and the film’s gripping final scenes hammer the point home even further.
There is also a lesbian vibe from Ricki — the camp is all women — who seems to be above nothing when it comes to seducing her supplicants.
It’s particularly harrowing when one of Rita’s own daughters starts to get caught up in Ricki as well, a twist and a twist of the knife that gives the film a thriller tone — yet another genre kissed.
Coon’s performance as a mouse who self-destructively roars is impressively tiny and internal and towering. When I saw her after, I couldn’t help but tell her, “That’s an Oscar [nomination],” to which she laughed and thanked me, but it’s clear why she was drawn to this tragedy.
Nattiv should be proud of creating a film that engrosses and provokes, and that adds new dimension to how cults have been portrayed on the screen.
The Liberation opens officially in select theaters January 8.