He asks if he can be best man at their wedding and, later, delivers a very heartfelt toast in their honor. When that meeting doesn’t turn out as planned, he looks to Stella and Dot as his new mothers. “Pull up your pants, kid,” Stella shouts out the truck’s window, “You’re humping the wrong fire hydrant.” He’s hitchhiking to Canada to visit his sick mother. A dancer who “pushes the artform,” he is clearly a bone thrown to gay male viewers so that they’ll keep watching. My guess is that it wasn’t when Fitzgerald first wrote the play on which he based this film. I know, gay marriage is legal in Maine now. She breaks Dot out of the nursing home (a very funny scene) and they head to Canada to get married so that no one can legally split them up again. Stella, of course, doesn’t stand for this. Molly, a misguided but traitorous brat, thinks she is doing what is in Dot’s best interest and puts her in an assisted living facility. She also wants Grandma’s house and, taking advantage of her blindness, tricks Dot into signing over power of attorney. The scene is sweet without being sappy.ĭot’s granddaughter, Molly, seems oblivious about their relationship she thinks they’re just old friends. When asked what the clouds look like, Stella sees a donkey carrying two nuns and a beagle. They watch a sunset and Dot listens to Stella describe the colors. You will be moved by how Stella takes care of her. It is clear from the onset that her health is failing. Dot, despite her years, is still a sweet little Irish girl. She has short hair, wears a cowboy hat and a flannel shirt, swears like a sailor and, at one point, is mistaken for a man. Stella, the butch one, drives a pickup truck and swills Tequila. There’s a lovely moment later where they share a soaking wet kiss during a sudden cloudburst that evokes feelings of joy. The love they have for each other couldn’t be more obvious. Stella playfully pokes Dot with a vibrator. (Stella says that it’s a love scene and Dot remarks that it’s an awful long love scene.) They joke about how you can actually buy lesbian porn now in a gas station. Dot is almost blind, but she knows that Stella rented porn when she hears the moans coming from the TV. Still rambunctious in their golden years, these ladies belong together. They live in a small Maine town and they have been a couple for 31 years. Stella (Dukakis) and Dot (Fricker) are in their seventies. They deserved a better script, but these two seasoned pros light up the screen. This isn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last, movie that I remember mostly for its star performances. (Let’s, for no reason, pull out all the stops and really make this a tearjerker.) But I couldn’t stop thinking about how delightful the scenes were between Oscar winners Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker, and so I looked at the film again. I enjoyed the beginning but then lost patience with a good chunk of the film’s middle and, most of all, hated the ending. Cloudburst, from noted queer auteur Thom Fitzgerald ( 3 Needles, The Hanging Garden), won a lot of awards on the festival circuit and it is a noble but mixed effort to fill this void.įull disclosure: I first watched Cloudburst a few months ago. I can’t think of very many and most that come to mind are documentaries. There aren’t enough queer films out there that celebrate our elders and their longtime relationships. The script is based on a play written by Leo Marks, a wartime cryptographer for the Special Operations Executive, and later the author of a memoir about his wartime work, Between Silk and Cyanide (1998).Ī World War II veteran, a former operative for the SOE, seeks revenge on the driver and passenger of a hit-and-run automobile that struck and killed his wife.I wanted to love this movie. Cloudburst is a 1951 British crime drama film produced by Hammer Films, directed by Francis Searle, starring Robert Preston and featuring Elizabeth Sellars, Harold Lang, Colin Tapley and Sheila Burrell.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |