A Revry original, Unconventional is a really well-liked queer dramedy that feels totally different from the usual stuff. The heart of the story is about two pretty eccentric queer siblings and their partners trying to build a family that doesn't follow the traditional rules. It takes a super raw and unfiltered look at queer life, diving deep into things like mental health, addiction, and how complicated identity and relationships can get. It’s not afraid to get messy or show people at their most vulnerable, and it really pushes boundaries while showing a lot of different queer experiences. The first season has nine episodes, and each one is about a half-hour long. The story centers on Noah, a grad student who’s been struggling for years to wrap up his PhD. He’s been with his husband, Dan, for nine years, and they’ve recently gotten married and moved to Palm Springs. While they're trying to figure out how to start a family and have a baby, they decide to shake things up by in...
Gays were everywhere in the movies, right from the beginning–this documentary shows two men dancing together in a short named “The Gay Brothers,” from 1895–and often they were hidden in plain view. Hollywood knew who was gay and who was not, and there were in-jokes like John Ireland’s line to Montgomery Clift in “Red River”: Sometimes directors deleted scenes with gay themes because of studio or censorship pressure. Throughout the documentary, the focus is on both stereotypes and the various ways that more creative directors and writers worked around the censorship of various decades to create implicitly homosexual characters, with considerable attention given to the way in which stereotypes shaped public concepts of the gay community in general. Overtly homosexual characters were not particularly unusual in silent and pre-code Hollywood films, and CLOSET offers an interesting sampling of both swishy stereotypes and unexpectedly sophisticated characters--both of which were doomed by the Hayes Code, a series of censorship rules adopted by Hollywood in the early 1930s. The film clips are fascinating stuff and are often highlighted by interviews of individuals who made the films. All are interesting and intriguing, but two deserve special mention: Harvey Fierstein, who talks about the hunger he had as a youth to see accurate reflections of himself on the screen, and Susan Sarandon, who makes an eloquent statement on the power of film as "the keeper of the dreams."
The film offers no "summing up," preferring instead to show only how far the portrayal of homosexuals has come and indicating how far it has yet to go. It is informative, funny, clever and revealing. It tells us about history and heritage. The general observations about film-watching apply to anyone. It's impressively detached and lets you draw your own interpretation. It's a documentary. Personally I am not familiar with most of these films, so for me, this was just apiece of history which sadly I wasn't able to connect much. (5/10)
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