Stonewall movie.

[marylander1940]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

 

[+ FreshFluff]

Interesting movie. Too bad they're painting the Mattachine Society as villains.

[+ quoththeraven]

Not only that, the movie whitewashed the role of trans women and drag queens of color. They're the ones who started the resistance, not the totally fictional cis gender white dude in the movie. As I understand it, only one of the actual instigators is even a character in the movie.

[thickornotatall]

We lived at 207 W 10th St...one block behind The Stonewall..The character..Marsha P Johnson was a real person..She roamed Christopher St from 6th Ave to Hudson St up to the docks...along with a white drag Q ..Bambi.....They made life very colorful....and at times inconvenient....blocking the sidewalks....stoned..begging...using the doorways for sex and bathroom breaks...a horrific smell...I suspect they cleaned up both characters for the movie...The night of the riot we were away in Ptown....but heard about it from friends....By the time we returned home the streets were cleared...I give those people so much credit for standing up and speaking out....The founders of the Gay Lib movement were true heroes....

We will see the movie as soon as it opens and see how accurate it is...I suspect lots of liberties have been taken...

BTW I had never been in The Stonewall...but walked past everyday on the way to school...very dark windows and sort of scary for a guy my age...I was too young to go to bars..but did make Christopher St a playground....and talent search...some awfully talented guys!

[bigvalboy]

We lived at 207 W 10th St...one block behind The Stonewall..The character..Marsha P Johnson was a real person..She roamed Christopher St from 6th Ave to Hudson St up to the docks...along with a white drag Q ..Bambi.....They made life very colorful....and at times inconvenient....blocking the sidewalks....stoned..begging...using the doorways for sex and bathroom breaks...a horrific smell...I suspect they cleaned up both characters for the movie...The night of the riot we were away in Ptown....but heard about it from friends....By the time we returned home the streets were cleared...I give those people so much credit for standing up and speaking out....The founders of the Gay Lib movement were true heroes....

We will see the movie as soon as it opens and see how accurate it is...I suspect lots of liberties have been taken...

BTW I had never been in The Stonewall...but walked past everyday on the way to school...very dark windows and sort of scary for a guy my age...I was too young to go to bars..but did make Christopher St a playground....and talent search...some awfully talented guys!

 

It will be interesting to here your take on the accuracy of the movie. There are other members who post here (some not as often) that have mentioned they lived in the same neighborhood as Stonewall, and were around the night of the riot. I would love to here from them also. Movies rarely are an accurate reflection of true events, for that I would not fault them. The product has to sell and appeal to a wide range of people. I'm grateful that it is making it to the screen at all. We shall see...

[TruthBTold]

I thought this article was interesting. It quickly covers a quick history of the movement and in particular the Stonewall riots. It quotes a couple of articles from the NY Daily News and the Village Voice. When you read them you can't imagine such articles being written today.

http://isreview.org/issue/63/stonewall-birth-gay-power

[+ FreshFluff]

It will be interesting to here your take on the accuracy of the movie.

 

Vanity fair calls it offensive and offensively terrible.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/09/stonewall-review-roland-emmerich

[bigvalboy]

Vanity fair calls it offensive and offensively terrible.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/09/stonewall-review-roland-emmerich

Thanks FF...excellent article. After reading it, perhaps I misspoke about being grateful that it made it to the screen at all.

[TruthBTold]

Here is a look at the movie posted on our PBS site. The author discloses that he had offered to speak with the movie's makers to give his remembrances of what had led to the riots and what happened after.

 

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/stonewall-movie/

[+ WilliamM]

As of this moment, Stonewall has a rating of 07% favorable from movie critics. You likely could not get a rating that low even if you tried hard.

[uwsman2]

Critics are treating it like a documentary and scoring it for historical accuracy. That's wrong and unfair. It's dramatic fiction told from the perspective of a fictional character created by the filmmaker and scriptwriter to express their intended themes. It should be judged on that basis. I haven't seen the film yet, just the trailor, and I will reserve judgment until I see it.

[edjames]

Lousy reviews! Compete and utter fiction.

Shame.

 

Review: ‘Stonewall’ Doesn’t Distinguish Between Facts and Fiction

Stonewall

 

 

By STEPHEN HOLDEN SEPT. 24, 2015

 

Photo

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/25/arts/25STONEWALL/25STONEWALL-master675.jpg

Jeremy Irvine, right foreground, and Jonny Beauchamp, center, star in “Stonewall.”CreditPhilippe Bosse/Roadside Attractions

• “Stonewall,” Roland Emmerich’s would-be epic film about a turning point in the gay liberation movement in 1969, is far from the first historical movie to choke on its own noble intentions. For its two-hour-plus duration, the movie struggles to fuse incompatible concepts.
   
  On one level, “Stonewall” is a sweeping social allegory whose central character, Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine of “War Horse”), is an all-American boy from the provinces (Indiana) thrown out of the house by his father (David Cubitt), a high school football coach, for being gay. Arriving in New York with little money and no fixed abode, Danny is radicalized by observing, then experiencing, police brutality.
  On another level, the movie wants to be as specific as possible in its reconstruction of chaotic events that took place 46 years ago and have acquired a mythic dimension that demands heroic enlargement. In hindsight, the Stonewall riots are rather like the Woodstock music festival later that summer. More people claim to have been present than could possibly have been there. But except for its identification of actual police officers, “Stonewall” doesn’t bother to distinguish among facts, fiction and urban legend.
  Early scenes jump between Danny’s final days in Indiana, before he is observed having sex in a car with a high school quarterback, and his new life in New York. Exiled from his biological family, he bonds with a group of outsiders, homeless drag queens and hustlers who live on the streets or pile, as many as a dozen at time, into a shabby apartment. The neighborhood center of gravity is the seedy mob-owned Stonewall Inn, which is subject to periodic police raids.
   
  The movie, filmed in Montreal, does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life in those days. In the summer of ’69, homosexual behavior between consenting adults was illegal in New York. At any moment, the police could descend on a gay bar, round up the customers and haul them off.
   
  By many accounts, the rebellion was led by drag queens and gay street people who for the first time stood up to the police, and “Stonewall” dutifully acknowledges their participation. But, its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it. A trailer that focuses on that moment has led some gay activists to threaten a boycott of the film. No matter how much Mr. Emmerich and Jon Robin Baitz, the estimable playwright who wrote the screenplay, insist that the movie pays tribute to a full multiethnic range of gay and lesbian characters, “Stonewall” falls short. Like it or not, symbolism matters.
   
  Had the movie’s central character been Ray, a.k.a. Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp), an androgynous, volatile Puerto Rican who unrequitedly falls in love with Danny, there might be no quarrel. Ray’s saucy “girlfriends” include characters with nicknames like Queen Cong (Vladimir Alexis) and Little Orphan Annie (Caleb Landry Jones), who are treated with respect but remain peripheral.
   
   
  AND,
   
  What ‘Stonewall’ gets wrong about NYC history
  By Lou Lumenick
   
  September 24, 2015 | 11:42am
   
   
  
  Jeremy Irvine (right) plays a Kansas farmboy who's new to New York in "Stonewall." Photo: Philippe Bosse
  MOVIE REVIEW
  Stonewall
   
  Running time: 129 minutes. Rated R (sex, profanity, drugs, violence).
   
  Did you know that a “straight-acting” Kansas farm boy threw the first brick in the riot that sparked the modern gay-rights movement? News to me, and probably most other New Yorkers.
   
  Roland Emmerich’s seriously misjudged “Stonewall” turns the transgender drag queens who helped change America into dress extras in what’s basically a Big Apple retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” revolving around a Caucasian gay man’s coming of age.
   
  Already accepted to Columbia University, teenage Danny (Jeremy Irvine) is kicked out of town by his football-coach dad after his high school teammates see him servicing the team’s hunky quarterback.
   
  Danny’s sleeping on a park bench in Sheridan Square when Hispanic transgender Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp) invites him to share a crash pad with his flamboyant pals (all played by non-trans actors) on Christopher Street.
   
  Modal Trigger
  The crowd fights back against the cops in “Stonewall.”Photo: Philippe Bosse
  Ramona has a crush on clean-cut Danny, whose own taste in men runs more toward Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a ripped gay-rights activist he meets at the Stonewall Inn. That’s the soon-to-be-infamous mob-owned drag bar managed by Murphy (Ron Perlman), who has half the officers at the Sixth Precinct on his payroll so he can disappear during police raids, where his customers are arrested and/or humiliated for wearing women’s clothing.
   
  Danny learns he’s not in Kansas anymore while turning tricks to support himself and getting beaten by leering cops while cruising the Meatpacking District. Nevertheless, Emmerich keeps returning to the Midwest for flashbacks, as well as for a lengthy epilogue.
   
  Back at the Stonewall, the NYPD’s public morals squad led by Inspector Pine (Matt Craven) stages an unscheduled raid while the regulars are mourning the death of Judy Garland. They’ve finally had enough, and their battle with the cops is the best-staged part of the film — even if the realistically detailed Sheridan Square set at a Montreal studio looks notably smaller than the real thing.
   
  Emmerich — a hugely successful director of disaster movies who happens to be gay — deserves credit for trying to call attention to the plight of gay homeless youth in this self-financed, if seriously flawed, labor of love. But with thinly drawn characters, uneven performances and tin-eared dialogue, “Stonewall’’ plays at best like a musical without the songs.
   
   
   
  

[+ stevenkesslar]

http://33.media.tumblr.com/fa265a36425e13682317666c2d8a66ff/tumblr_nn2a86lg8y1st09qzo2_r1_250.gif http://33.media.tumblr.com/c4522dd9312d54a1eb9fd1376f03f328/tumblr_nn2a86lg8y1st09qzo3_r1_400.gif

 

Obviously a bad casting choice.

 

No fucking way I'm sitting through a few hours of a movie with this guy in it.

 

Magic Mike, anyone?

[+ stevenkesslar]

It will be interesting to here your take on the accuracy of the movie. Movies rarely are an accurate reflection of true events, for that I would not fault them. The product has to sell and appeal to a wide range of people. I'm grateful that it is making it to the screen at all. We shall see...

 

After reading it, perhaps I misspoke about being grateful that it made it to the screen at all.

 

Emmerich — a hugely successful director of disaster movies who happens to be gay — deserves credit for trying to call attention to the plight of gay homeless youth in this self-financed, if seriously flawed, labor of love.

 

I'll go with your first instinct on this one, BVB. The caveats are I haven't seen the movie, and it sounds like just as a piece of film it sucks - so far it has a 35 score on Metacritic. Assuming what even a harsh critic points to - that the gay Director self-financed, it is a labor of love, and in the end it is a sympathetic portrayal of the plight of Gay youth, plus there's nice eye candy along the way, I wouldn't be too harsh.

 

In some ways, we can be happy that LGBTQ is mainstream enough that we now even get to have shitty movies made about us. And if they focus too much on the pretty but fictional White eye candy, and the eye candy boy turns out to have a sexual preference for other eye candy, is that really a shocker, especially if you assume the Gay guy who made the film might want it to at least break even?

 

One of my favorite picky bitch things to do after I see a "historical"movie is to research whether what it portrays actually happened. The amazing thing about "McFarland USA" is it was almost 100 % accurate, and the details it left out didn't change the narrative, and so can be easily explained away. I didn't like the fact that they fictionalized the white coach's history to make him look like a loser who had no choice but to take a job in a dump hole, when in fact he came to McFarland fresh out of Pepperdine when it was mostly white. It changed around him, and he obviously went with the flow to help young Mexican American kids achieve the American dream - what's wrong with that? "Selma" was tougher, in that a lot of people felt it completely misrepresented both LBJ, and the politics of inside/outside collaboration that made the civil rights movement so effective.

 

In that regard, the LGBTQ movie that really bothered me, and still does, is Dallas Buyer's Club. Here's why:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/10/what-dallas-buyers-club-got-wrong-about-the-aids-crisis/

 

I get the fact that Hollywood ought to be able to change facts for dramatic effect. So I'll go with the way they turned a Gay protagonist into a straight homophobe who ended up simply be sympathetic to Gay people. And the movie gets credit for humanizing the character Jared Leno won an Oscar for. And I'm all for the fact that Matthew McConaughey viewed it as great Oscar bait.

 

The bridge too far for me is that it turned the FDA into a villain, and that happened to occur right in the middle of the Obamacare debate, when there was a concerted national attempt by the entire Republican Party to convince people that government involvement in health care sucks. Obamacare and AIDS are apples and oranges, but coming from liberal Hollywood, I thought the message sucked. As the Post article above documents, the actual history is that the FDA went after Ron Woodruff because he sold dying people mostly useless crap. Meanwhile, while they were far from perfect, to me the FDA's efforts to fight a deadly plague that came out of nowhere were in large part commendable. The bizarre thing is that the whole movie demonized the FDA and AZT, and then in the closing credits, like an afterthought, it mentioned - oh, guess what? - AZT in an improved form ended up saving millions of lives. Never mind.

 

Unlike the Dallas Buyer's Club, Stonewall won't win Oscars. Hopefully both will open some minds. For me, given the choice between turning Jeremy Irvine into a young God boy, or turning the FDA into a villain, I'll take Jeremy Irvine in a heartbeat, wearing anything - or even nothing at all.

[fedssocr1]

Every review I have read has been completely scathing.

 

When you're telling a story of an actual historical event that really happened I don't see how you can make up so much of the story. A fictionalized account of this story was always going to be poorly received. Why not just make a documentary? What's the point of making up a story based on such an important event in the first place?

[Wolfer]

As an alternative to this one, if you're looking for a positive, well-made, heartwarming and historically inspired LGBTQ I suggest to look up "Pride":

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3169706/?ref_=nv_sr_2

 

I saw it at a film festival last year and I was floored by the end of it. It's such a good movie. No, it's an amazing movie.

[tyro]

Pride looks awesome.

T

[mike carey]

Having read a number of reviews but not seen the film, an observation. Mr Emmerich seems to have made a fundamental error in making an historical movie, and that is you can't change the basic story of what happened. The way he characterised the white boy from Kansas or Indiana (depending which review at the top or the thread you believe, and that is an indictment of one of the reviewers, but that's a separate discussion) does just that, it didn't happen that way and there are plenty of people still around who know that it didn't happen.

 

There are two ways you can inject fiction into an historical film that will work. One is what Peter Weir did in The Year of Living Dangerously where a fictional story was wrapped around a depiction of the Soeharto coup in 1965. The other is the way Costa-Gavras made Z and State of Siege that respectively told the stories of the colonels' coup in Greece in 1967 and the kidnapping of a US Embassy officer by the Tupamaros in Uruguay in the 1970s. He didn't misprepresent what happened, rather he told a story that fitted into a realistic protrayal of what had happened. Emmerich could have set his story against the background of what really happened but instead chose to change the history. I wish he hadn't.

[+ sync]

Having read a number of reviews but not seen the film, an observation. Mr Emmerich seems to have made a fundamental error in making an historical movie, and that is you can't change the basic story of what happened. The way he characterised the white boy from Kansas or Indiana (depending which review at the top or the thread you believe, and that is an indictment of one of the reviewers, but that's a separate discussion) does just that, it didn't happen that way and there are plenty of people still around who know that it didn't happen.

 

That much of a stray from reality renders the film pretty much pointless for me. Thank you Mike. You saved me from wasting the time and expense.

[mike carey]

That much of a stray from reality renders the film pretty much pointless for me. Thank you Mike. You saved me from wasting the time and expense.

Sync, that doesn't mean it can't be an enjoyable movie if you suspend belief and just watch it for what it is. I really didn't read the reviews with that in mind, everyone seems to have focussed on historical accuracy rather than whether it was a good story.

[+ sync]

Mike, I understand your point, but for me the subject matter is too sensitive for poetic license. Thanks, again.

[thickornotatall]

http://www.stonewallvets.org/ As I wrote in a previous post..we lived behind Stonewall on W 10th St....we were in PTown that weekend....No one will ever capture the real neighborhood...the people.....movies almost never do give accurate portraits..but maybe encourage questions...

 

 

 

http://www.stonewallvets.org/swpin.jpg

[RussJohnson]

Sync, that doesn't mean it can't be an enjoyable movie if you suspend belief and just watch it for what it is. I really didn't read the reviews with that in mind, everyone seems to have focussed on historical accuracy rather than whether it was a good story.

 

I read a review (and I will try to find it) that said it was also just a bad movie...

[+ stevenkesslar]

Sync, that doesn't mean it can't be an enjoyable movie if you suspend belief and just watch it for what it is. I really didn't read the reviews with that in mind, everyone seems to have focussed on historical accuracy rather than whether it was a good story.

 

I'm really belaboring my point, and I basically agree with Mike. If the target audience for this movie is heterosexual people, or even young gay kids who don't remember Stonewall, I can see how Hollywood would calculate that they would build it around an eye candy character that would be "an easy in" for straight people. Just like a movie that was hard to get made like Dallas Buyer's Club could rewrite history and create the needed bad guy by turning the FDA into the villain.

 

Perhaps the troubling thing about this is not that it shows how far we've come, but how far we have yet to go, that they couldn't simply calculate that they could make a good movie based on the actual characters who drove the story - lesbians, drag queens, and transgendered, most of whom were not white. If they couldn't figure out how to do that, maybe the best conclusion is what you came to, Mike: they should have just not made the movie, period. With a bunch of crappy reviews, the movie is probably gonna bomb anyway.

 

It sort of figures that this would be made by somebody with the best of intentions, who understands how to make big budget disaster movies. I like scripts and character development, and what always amazes me is that Hollywood figures out how to spend enormous amounts of money on special effects, and then forgets about the script. There are plenty of "blockbusters" that failed because they failed to tell a good story, although at least in a disaster movie, you can hide behind the special effects. I've seen several of Emmerich's disaster movies, and they were not noteworthy for character development, or accuracy of course. In this case there were no special effects to hide behind.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3248048/Stonewall-director-Roland-Emmerich-addresses-claims-whitewashed-historic-civil-rights-riot-film-tanks-critics-LGBT-advocates-endorse-boycott.html

[+ stevenkesslar]

Hate to be a dick about this guys, but let's have a big dose of historical reality.

 

It's all very nice that right now, before the movie has opened, there's 25,000 people that have signed a petition to boycott it, because it does not do an accurate job of representing the history of Stonewall. The very fact that there can be a movie, and that it can be that controversial, and that people can be upset that drag queens and lesbians are not being given the respect they deserve, is itself a huge sign of progress.

 

If you go back to the year Stonewall happened, let's remember that there was only one word to accurately describe the people the movie does not portray adequately: criminals. They were all criminals, and as criminals they all deserved to have their asses thrown in jail. Period. That was what the law said, and that was the law the cops were enforcing.

 

The Stonewall Inn was breaking the law because it did not have a state liquor license. Same sex sexual activity was not legal in New York until 1980. Same sex marriage became legal in New York in 2011. At the time the Stonewall riots actually occurred, it was a small thing, that did not get much press coverage, at least according to Wikipedia. My guess is it likely got way less coverage than the Rentboy.com bust.

 

Speaking of which:

 

https://www.change.org/p/new-us-attorney-general-stop-the-anti-gay-prosecution-of-rentboy-com

 

https://life.indiegogo.com/fundraisers/daddysreviews-clients-help-rentboy-staff

 

Challenge me if you think I'm wrong, but nobody alive in 1969 could have predicted that Stonewall would become the symbol for LGBTQ rights and for resistance that it is today. What was known at the time was that a bunch of criminals got busted, and my guess is most people thought they deserved to get busted, because they were worse than criminal. They were sick perverts. That's what a majority of Americans thought in 1969 about nice White homosexuals, not to mention Black drag queens.

 

From that perspective, we're way ahead of ourselves on the Rentboy.com bust. Nobody is saying rentboys or the people who hire them are sick perverts. But its a measure of reality to me, and the way history works, that 25,000 people will sign a petition to boycott a flawed movie made by a Gay Director about Stonewall, and meanwhile a petition that involves a Gay escort website and 7 people arrested for creating a "global criminal enterprise," whose lives are left dangling in the wind, including gay activists like Hawk, is having a hard time.

 

A lot of people don't necessarily want to be on the cutting edge of history when it actually involves taking a risk. Half a century later, when it's as safe as deciding whether you want to go see the Hollywood version of it, and whether you want salt on your popcorn, it's a bit easier.

 

I'm saying this partly to put a crappy movie in perspective, and partly to refocus on Rentboy, and also actually as a way to pat us all on the back. I have no idea how this Rentboy thing is gonna play out, any more than anyone in 1969 really knew that a shitty little bar in New York would become an eternal symbol for LGBTQ rights and lifestyles.

 

But like it or not, we have a front seat view to a little piece of history with Rentboy. To muddy the waters between Hollywood and reality even more, a few year's ago I read a really gripping profile of the SEAL that actually killed Bin Laden:

 

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a26351/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313/

 

The title itself says it all: "The Man Who Killed Bin Laden.....Is Screwed." Hollywood and history are not the same thing, are they?

 

This is a sad and fascinating article, but here's perhaps the most poignant part of it, to me, delivered with a perfect sense of historical irony:

 

"The Shooter is sitting next to me at a local movie theater in January, watching Zero Dark Thirty for the first time. He laughs at the beginning of the film about the bin Laden hunt when the screen reads, "Based on firsthand accounts of actual events." His uncle, who is also with us, along with the mentor and the Shooter's wife, had asked him earlier whether he'd seen the film already. "I saw the original," the Shooter said.

The original we are watching is neither as noble nor as dangerous as what was portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty. I'll argue Rentboy is like Stonewall, in that what we have is a bunch of people accused of being criminals, who we actually believe did no harm, and no wrong.

 

Anyways, hope you guys enjoy the movie. You get to see the original.