}

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Stonewall: ‘Where Pride Began’


The video above is the trailer for the film Stonewall, which tells a story about the Stonewall Riots, providing context as well as drama. It’ll be in cinemas on September 25. The YouTube description says:
STONEWALL is a drama about a fictional young man caught up during the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine) is forced to leave behind friends and loved ones when he is kicked out of his parent’s home and flees to New York. Alone in Greenwich Village, homeless and destitute, he befriends a group of street kids who soon introduce him to the local watering hole The Stonewall Inn; however, this shady, mafia-run club is far from a safe-haven. As Danny and his friends experience discrimination, endure atrocities and are repeatedly harassed by the police, we see a rage begin to build. This emotion runs through Danny and the entire community of young gays, lesbians and drag queens who populate the Stonewall Inn and erupts in a storm of anger. With the toss of a single brick, a riot ensues and a crusade for equality is born.
It looks like it could be a good film. As always with films based on real events, as long as important facts aren’t distorted to make the story work, not being completely historically accurate won’t matter too much. That assumes that the performances, direction (and all the rest), are good, of course, because otherwise it won’t matter.

In any case, this is a story that needs to be told. I hope it’s a good telling.

Update: Jeremy Hooper shared his take on his site, Good As You, and it's pretty much mine, too.

2 comments:

rogerogreen said...

Here's a dissenting view: http://worldofwonder.net/so-stonewall-was-about-a-little-white-twink-from-the-midwest-ok-roland-emmerich-watch-the-trailer-for-stonewall/

Arthur Schenck (AmeriNZ) said...

Meh. Arthur’s Law, and all that. But, what strikes me about this movie is what it could do, as Jeremy Hooper put it:

"I caught the mid'90s Stonewall movie on cable late one night after my parents had gone to bed, and it clicked even more things… in my constantly clicking brain. These stories do that."

Exactly. I imagine some closeted gay kid, terrified that someone may find out, seeing this movie. Imperfect as I'm sure it is, if it helps even one closeted gay kid to feel OK, maybe even a bit stronger, then I can definitely live with the imperfection.