John Cameron Mitchell

Started by WorldForgot, January 26, 2022, 01:15:17 PM

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WorldForgot

Always interested in the oddity of vulnerability, John Cameron Mitchell's personality, on-stage and on-film, is a near infectious ambition toward love - clouds above, looming, shifting and on the move against the light.



Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998 , 2001)
Shortbus (directed by) (2006)
Rabbit Hole (2010)
How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017)

Revisiting the Try-Outs For the Orgy --- Could John Cameron Mitchell’s Gleefully Sexual 2006 Film Shortbus Get Made Today?
By Mark Harris
QuoteA few weeks earlier, I had found myself sitting in a quiet, mostly empty restaurant across from John Cameron Mitchell. John and one of his producers, Howard Gertler, had approached me with an idea. They were about to undertake a movie project that was close to John’s heart, something that he had been thinking about for a while and was now, on the verge of his 40th birthday, about to make a reality — a sexually explicit, sex-positive comedy-drama about the moment we were in as New Yorkers and as sexual beings. A film that would explore all the possibilities — that is, as we defined “possibilities” 20 years ago.

To add a bit of context, it was about a year and a half after 9/11, and while I know that the first thing that comes to mind when I say “9/11” isn’t “sex,” the event had disrupted and altered everything — including, for some New Yorkers, that thing. A straight guy I knew had suddenly started sleeping with men in a casual, almost transactional way (he said it calmed him down); a monogamous wife had embarked on a series of one-night stands. Some people I knew didn’t feel like having any sex at all for a long stretch; others couldn’t get enough. And now, as the city and its residents were pushing forward and figuring out what life would look like in what was beginning to be called the post-9/11 era, John wanted to make a movie that would showcase the particular version of New York City in which he lived — a place that was open to more modes of pleasure than many had considered.

After 15 years of being devastated by the AIDS crisis, when sexuality was literally shadowed by the possibility of death, the city’s population was adjusting, first uncertainly and then with joy, to a new world of medicine and science in which HIV was chronic but not fatal. Sex, even sexual adventure, seemed possible again. The film that would emerge from that moment was, then and now, one of a kind — a come-one-come-all party of a romantic comedy with a gentle, good-hearted sense of humor, bondage, autofellatio, a tender view of the fragility and possibility of human connection, and cum shots.

(Oscilloscope Laboratories recently restored the film, which can be seen starting January 26 at the IFC Center in Manhattan.)

Drenk

Absolutely brillant as a rich alt-right troll in The Good Fight.
Ascension.