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How ‘the Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love’ Conveys the Idea That Queer Women Are Everywhere

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How ‘the Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love’ Conveys the Idea That Queer Women Are Everywhere

The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love is probably not a film that may be on the tip of everyone’s tongues in the modern pop culture landscape, but that’s no comment on the quality of the project itself. Despite 1995 film getting a theatrical release from New Line Cinema’s arthouse division (Fine Line Pictures) and doing solid box office numbers, it hasn’t been a staple on modern home video formats nor has it been regularly utilized in recent years by its parent company. But there is lots to love in this directorial effort from Maria Maggenti, including the simple fact that its story quietly conveys the truth that queer women are everywhere.

This element of the story comes into play from the backdrop of Two Girls in Love. Specifically, this is a motion picture that takes place in a rural area in an unspecified part of the United States of America. The concept of plopping troubled lesbians into non-urban environments isn’t exclusive to this film (Donna Deitch went into similar territory with her landmark film Desert Hearts), but it isn’t the common route for American stories about queer girls. Typically, such stories are told in cities, places that are emphasized as havens for LGBTQIA+ individuals looking for tolerant places to call home.

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Those stories have plenty of value too, but queer people can exist anywhere, and so should cinematic stories about those individuals. Thus, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love firmly plants itself in a small Southern town, one where “Randy” Dean (Laurel Holloman) not only exists but is openly a lesbian at her high school. She lives with her two moms who also make no secret about their sexual orientation, to boot. Dean and her best friend Frank still have to deal with intolerant views from her classmates, but the concept of queer people just existing in these locales is treated as a natural thing right from the get-go in Two Girls in Love.


RELATED: How ‘Closet Monster’ Used Body Horror To Visualize Gay Repression

It’s also worth noting that this core idea of queer women being able to exist anywhere is reinforced through Maggenti’s screenplay refusing to assign a specific name to where Dean and her crush Evie (Nicole Ari Paker) call home. The generalized nature of this backdrop has a wide range of advantages, including emphasizing that the focus of the story is to linger on the titular ladies. However, it also suggests that this could be any part of the U.S. with more barns than skyscrapers. Rather than boxing the normalized widespread nature of queer women to being just limited to one Texas or Arizona town, Two Girls in Love is suggesting that this romantic tale could happen anywhere.

While the specific city this movie takes place in is more nebulously defined, Maggenti wrings the rural setting for unique backdrops that ensure Two Girls in Love has its fair share of distinctive imagery. Rather than holding hands on a Ferris wheel or a train, Dean and Evie bond lying together in the grass or just outside a rusty gas station that the former character works at. These locations are intentionally framed in a throwaway manner, they lack the glossiness or bright colors that someone like Pedro Almodovar may lend to scenes depicting queer romance.

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Leaning into the naturalistic flaws of these environments, though, makes the world that Maggenti has crafted feel all the more authentic. It’s like you could wander into this town on any road trip through Oklahoma. Thus, these unspoken details allow Two Girls in Love to reinforce its central concept during even the most relaxed of exchanges between its lead characters. The variety of economic classes seen in this small town also conveys the universal presence of queer women. Whether it’s the upper-crust neighborhood Evie calls home or the more rustic crowded house Dean resides in, every part of this town is bound to contain queer women.

It’s also worth mentioning that one of our leads here, Evie, is Black, a marginalized group that’s rarely seen in the spotlight in movies depicting rural America. Many high-profile features like Hillbilly Elegy don’t go out of their way to recognize the Black communities that do exist in rural parts of this country. By contrast, Two Girls in Love is cognizant of this reality and uses Evie’s presence to further expand just how omnipresent queer women are.

Even the film’s ending uses locations to communicate this crucial concept. The finale takes place in a run-down hotel room where Dean and Evie are hiding out. Important figures from both of their lives are banging down the door, wanting an explanation about their relationship and recent behavior. Eventually, the duo decides to open the door together, after which they embrace and find themselves so entranced in one another’s company that the bellowing judgments from parents, friends, and school peers all go silent.

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In the years since its release, Maggenti has commented in interviews how viewers have taken this conclusion to be a variation on traditional romantic drama endings, with the unique twist being that it’s a queer couple at the center of such a familiar conclusion. Whether intentional or not, the parallels here mean that the finale of Two Girls in Love can translate its commitment to showing the universal presence of queer women into a new form. Previously, this universality was reflected on a literal geographical scale to show that these members of the LGBTQIA+ community can exist anywhere in the United States.

Now, Maggenti is taking the hallmarks of romantic drama and utilizing them to demonstrate that queer women can also exist in any film genre. Often relegated to being the butt of jokes if they’re even recognized as existing at all in the domain of mainstream romantic dramas, the final moments of Two Girls in Love twists conventions on its head and reaffirm how queer women perspectives can go anywhere in art. While the focus in the film itself remains on Dean and Evie reciting a poem to one another in voiceover while physically embracing, on a screenwriting level, Maggenti is taking the thesis of this motion picture to new places.

In the years since The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love hit theaters, progress has been slow on living up to this movie’s idea, both in the United States and in cinematic narratives. Only a handful of motion pictures (like Alice Wu’s 2020 feature The Half of It) have explored queer women existing in rural spaces. A similarly meager amount of major movies have also taken the initiative to take queer women and place them into genres that usually erase such figures.

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At least The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love still exists and is now even more accessible than ever before thanks to its recent emergence on the Criterion Channel streaming service. Hopefully, a new generation of viewers, especially queer women, can have a chance to be entertained by a story that quietly communicates the truth about how queer ladies are everywhere.


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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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