Word: poisoner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CINEMA Want to see some cult classics? Take Poison for a start...
...With POISON, Todd Haynes has people swearing at him -- the right people, if you're looking for notoriety. Donald Wildmon, head of the right-wing American Family Association, has condemned Haynes' film for its "porno scenes of homosexuals." And the Advocate, a gay biweekly, has reported that the campaign against Poison was stoked by White House chief of staff John Sununu in hopes of embarrassing John Frohnmayer, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which helped fund the film...
Haynes dines on controversy. His previous picture was the rough, wickedly funny Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a sort of Valley of the Dolls (but with real dolls) that was suppressed by the Carpenter family. Poison is a more somber affair. The shock comes not from any graphic sex, for there is none, but from the pristine virtuosity of Haynes' craft. In three interlocking stories inspired by Jean Genet, this homoerotic Intolerance details the . toxicity of prejudice, fear and disease, as played out in a tumid hothouse of forbidden sexual longing. A scientist who turns leprous when he drinks...
...masterpiece. They treat film technique as a living language; they taunt, dazzle, delight. Best of all, they seem ready to spawn a receptive audience. On a spring afternoon in Manhattan, hundreds of smart-setters crowd the lobbies of the Film Forum and the Angelika, downtown temples of alternative film. Poison and Paris Is Burning are sold out hours in advance. The atmosphere is festive, with the feeling that something good might happen inside. The movies, all movies, could use a transfusion of hope...
...disreputable along with the good. Outrageous conduct might incur punishment somewhere down the line, but that was an important part of the story. Men could lead mighty armies, forge tribes into nations and still behave like swine; women could embody all the public virtues and pieties and then drop poison into wine goblets or turn into manipulative she-devils in the boudoir. Of course. What else...