ThomFitzgerald Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Same-sex love is most definitely in the air. I already wrote about Julianne Moore and Annette Bening were coupling up for a new film today, but they're not the only ones. In a Thelma and Louise meets The Bucket List move, The Hollywood Reporter posts that Oscar winners Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker will star in a new road trip comedy from Thom Fitzgerald called Cloudburst.

Dukakis and Fricker will play a couple who have been together for 30 years. Itching for a little adventure, the two "break out of a nursing home and head to Canada to get married, picking up a young, male hitchhiker along the way." I can't begin to count the ways these two films are great. Both have long-term lesbian couples, played by women with oodles of talent, and in this case, feature an older generation of actresses -- a theme which seems to be slowly gaining momentum in Hollywood as the boomers get older.

I've got to wonder -- are these gigs thanks to the anger incited by Prop 8? It's rare to get one LGBT film, let alone two at the same time. Whatever the case, it's a nice and refreshing change to see some originality heading towards Hollywood. Think Dukakis and Fricker can give Sarandon and Davis a run for their money?

In a lovely little film called The Hanging Garden, writer/director Thom Fitzgerald gave us a character at three stages of life, growing and changing and crashing into old conceptions of himself. The three Williams, at different ages, even appeared on screen simultaneously. Fitzgerald's latest triptych is more subtle in the way it sews together its three-paneled story, but no less successful. 3 Needles is a clever anthology, spaced across three continents, in which AIDS and money are aggressively juxtaposed against each other until the point -- the new possibility of bartering with the disease -- emerges. One third of the story takes place in a French-Canadian household, where Olive, played by Stockard Channing, purposefully contracts HIV as part of a bold insurance swindle. A world away, in Southern Africa, a cynical Afrikaans plantation owner called Hallyday (Ian Roberts) invests in AZT because 70 percent of his workers are positive, and the drug will keep them alive and working longer. In rural China, a blood smuggler called Jin (Lucy Liu) sells tainted blood to start-up hospitals that are not yet sophisticated enough to reject her.

Each story has the low-energy pitch of a routine business meeting where everyone knows more or less how things will shake out. Nearly every scene is shot inside a blah-colored office or a workplace -- we even see some bored-looking porn workers greet a nurse who arrives to give them a routine HIV test. Ten years ago, a movie with AIDS as its central subject would have found it necessary to deal with the horror of lesions, hospital goodbyes and grief. This film seeks to rob AIDS of its plague-mystique and drag it into the realm of the workaday and the banal, where most other aspects of a managed life reside. It mostly succeeds, although a burdensome narration (can you name the last movie that was actually improved by a narration?) and a remarkably aimless ending hurt the project a great deal. The African story in particular seems to have been considered a weak link -- it shows many signs of editing-suite triage. Thankfully, the other two parts of the film are good enough to make up for it.