gayspiritwarrior

I don't understand the complaint that it's not scary. I just watched it as an uninterrupted three-hour movie, and I found it gripping, atmospheric and scary the whole way through. I never saw it on TV, so I have a guess why people may not have found it scary there: commercials. If it was shown in two parts then each part was 1½ hours stretched out by 30 minutes of commercials to fill a 2-hour block, and there was at least a 24-hour break between halves. With that much interruption and delay it couldn't help but be watered-down. The directing, acting, and visuals were all first-rate. I'll recommend it enthusiastically to my friends.

Roland Emmerich's biggest mistake was calling the movie "Stonewall" and marketing it as if it were the actual story of the rebellion. It gave people the wrong expectation. It's not a movie about Stonewall. It's a movie about a Midwestern gay man whose story takes place on Christopher street at the time of the riots. It's also in part the story of the first person he meets in New York, played by Jonny Beauchamp, who steals the movie. It's basically a very oddball romance and coming-out story. People wanted an accurate historical epic about the importance of the riots, and the movie isn't that and was never meant to be.

For what it really is, it's a very good movie. Like most "historical" movies there are inaccuracies. The worst distortion is giving Danny the "first brick." That's upset a lot of people, but in the dramatic structure of the movie it's as much about Danny's becoming himself--a gay man throwing away his shame--as it is about the situation he finds himself in. The police are depicted as "bad" in the black-and-white morality of an old-fashioned hero-versus-villain Saturday morning serial. But beyond those inaccuracies and the impossibility of recreating Christopher Street as it was (which seems to be especially upsetting to some New York viewers), the movie is as faithful to its surrounding event as any Shakespeare history play to its, including sympathetic depictions of a very diverse neighborhood of LGBT types.

As a long-time gay activist, I liked the movie a great deal. It feels real as I remember things to have been 46 years ago. I felt a genuine emotional rush during and after the riot. The movie ends with typical historical clean-ups, telling us what became of the real people, like Marsha P Johnson and others who appear in the movie, and mentioning the additional nights of rioting and how they went on to be regarded in LGBT history.

For me the saddest thing about this film is the divisions it's exposed among various components of the LGBT community. This history belongs to all of us, black, brown, white, gay, lesbian, transgender, drag queen, troll, twink, and so on; if we can't honor it in all of our variations, no one else will either. Go to see it as a good story well told, not as a factual documentary. I write this knowing some of you won't be able to, some of you won't want to, and some of you won't believe me. I wish there were something I could do about that, but there isn't.

The people who say this isn't based on Lovecraft or the Cthulhu mythos are way off base, and they miss the point of this romp. Without H.P. Lovecraft's writing, this movie wouldn't exist. It isn't meant to be a "Lovecraft movie" or to be taken seriously. It's precisely what its writer and co-star intended it to be, a cinematic comic book and a tribute to Lovecraft as the father of modern horror and the progenitor of much of what we know as horror comics, both serious and humorous. The performers are all at least adequate, and the three leads are charming, portraying Regular Guys and a stereotyped comic book nerd with tongues firmly in cheek. It's obvious everyone who had anything to do with The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu had a ball, and so will you, unless you have no sense of fun at all.