Movies – Page 2 – Carrie Cuinn

Movie Review: Were The World Mine (2008)

Posted on April 6, 2020April 8, 2020 by Carrie Cuinn

This is a reprint; I first posted this review as part of “Fae Awareness Month” in 2011.

Tom Gustafson’s low-budget, independent, gay musical, Were the World Mine, arrived in 2008, swathed in lace and glitter and hot boy-on-boy action. Interspersed with the traditional Shakespearean scenes, acted out on a prep-school stage, are musically-enhanced fantasies that are some of the best moments of the film. Even when the film’s fairies aren’t in costume, the boys are still by turns argumentative, mischievous, aggressive, and tricky. Exactly as the Bard would have wanted them to be. How does the play – and more importantly, the mischievous fairies – fare as a small-town tale of homophobia and love?

Beautifully.

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Movie Review: Stray Dog (1949)

Posted on March 30, 2020April 8, 2020 by Carrie Cuinn

Every year on the anniversary of Toshiro Mifune’s birth, I tell everyone I can to watch Nora Inu (released in the US as Stray Dog). It’s one of my all-time favorite movies, one of the best noir movies to come out of Japan, and an incredibly strong example of Akira Kurosawa’s films. It’s also, strangely, the Kurosawa/Mifune joint people talk about the least.

First, let’s all remember the hotness that was Toshiro Mifune:

If you were expecting to see him in film-faux samurai garb, sorry to disappoint you. Mifune appeared in nearly 170 films as an actor, including 16 of Kurosawa’s, and most of them weren’t period pieces. He was an extremely versatile, expressive, and talented actor, with a wide range — which included dark, murky, detective film noir like Stray Dog. Continue reading “Movie Review: Stray Dog (1949)” →

Movie Review: Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives (2015)

Posted on March 23, 2020April 8, 2020 by Carrie Cuinn

Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives is basically a love letter to Adrian Bartos and Robert Garcia, who hosted “The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show” from 1990 to 1998, on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR. If you don’t already know the fundamental difference between a DJ who makes music, and a DJ who talks between playing tracks on the radio, this documentary won’t be for you. If you don’t already know the difference between rap and lyrical hip-hop, this won’t explain it. If you’re not intimately aware that the 90s rap scene in New York was unlike anywhere else in the world, well… you get the idea.

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Movie Review: “Pride” (2014)

Posted on March 16, 2020April 8, 2020 by Carrie Cuinn

I know this is an older movie, and in fact I’ve watched it a couple of times before, but I saw it again last week because it’s streaming free on Amazon Prime. Plus, it’s a great movie to watch when you’re stuck at home as a precaution against the plague because at its heart, it’s about found family and community building. It’s about the small ways we win even when we don’t succeed at defeating the big problems, and the repercussions of having hope.

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Movie Review: “Sonic the Hedgehog” vs “Onward”

Posted on March 9, 2020April 8, 2020 by Carrie Cuinn

I took my son to see two movies in the last week: Sonic the Hedgehog, a live action film with a CGI character based on the popular video game, and Pixar’s Onward, a computer-animated original.

Short version? If you can only see one of these movies, choose Onward.

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