Tag Archives: Films

The Dorian Awards

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Image-of-Oscar-Wilde-from-The-Dorian-Awards-website.
Credit: galeca.com

Now that we have well and truly been submersed in the lukewarm media bath that is awards season, I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight an award show that often goes unnoticed in all the excitement this time of year. We’re probably all aware of The Oscars and The Golden Globes, but there are many other awards that commemorate the artists, craftspeople, skilled technicians, composers, and other workers who collaborate to do this impossible thing of creating short-form or full-length screen content. I’m focusing on The Dorians this time around, but I will include links to other lesser-known award shows at the end of this post. As always, items that are available in our catalogue are linked throughout, so feel free to “check out” what these more obscure but just as valid awards have highlighted as the best of the best from 2023.

Dorian Awards

The Dorian Awards are nominated and selected by GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. The name was coined as an homage to poet, playwright, and author Oscar Wilde, the famed writer of The Picture of Dorian Gray and now something of a queer icon. Dorian Award categories include standards like Film of the Year, Director of the Year, and Film Performance of the Year, but they also spotlight LGBTQ storylines, characters, and creators.

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Artistically Astounding Animated Films

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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse movie poster
image via Wikipedia

…Can you tell I love alliteration? I also really love art, movies, and art in movies! I recently watched the new animated Spider-Man film, Across the Spider-Verse and let me tell you—the art and animation was as jaw-dropping as the prequel, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse.

Just like the prequel, the animation pushed the boundaries of the genre and of the silver-screen, was inextricable linked with the multiverse concept, various story beats, and character development, and visually conveyed the humour that Spider-Man is known for as much as he is for his web-slinging!

Because I’m a nerd, I’ve been eagerly exploring behind-the-scenes factoids on how the art of the film came together. Here are some fun tidbits on this movie:

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Big Men in Small Cars – Italian Movies in the ‘70s

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Fellini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Rossellini, Leone. Everyone listed here is a) an iconic and generally well-regarded Italian film director and b) absolutely not the subject of this blog entry.

Instead I’m going to look at a very different sort of Italian filmmaker and the films they made, none of which are likely being considered for their own Criterion Collection release any time soon. (One of my alternate title choices was Italian Movies: The Not Exactly Criterion Edition) I’m referring to the trend in Italian crime films from the late 1960 into the mid-70s called Poliziotteschi.

Before I jump in with a quick summary of Poliziotteschi for the few readers who aren’t already fans of these decades-old Euro-crime thrillers I should add that most of the films mentioned here are available for streaming on Kanopy through the library.

My love of Italian crime films did not fully bloom until fairly recently. A few years ago, I started bringing home some Italian made Westerns (aka Spaghetti Westerns) from the library’s movie collection. Once those were exhausted, it was followed by a steady flow of Italian crime films (Poliziotteschi) and Italian horror-mystery (Giallo) from the 1970s. Italian crime film directors of the day wore their influences on their sleeves. They watched American films such as Bullitt, The French Connection, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, Serpico and Death Wish and I assume thought to themselves “Why not us?”

The Italian film industry of the time seems to have never met a single mini-trend in popular cinema it didn’t try to exploit and make their own. With mixed results. American films provided the inspiration, Italian directors provided the formula: Watch, imitate, repeat (It’s a small feat of linguistic contortionism that I have avoided using “rip off” here) until some level of financial success followed. Once they had a hit, like a stunt driver in their films’ obligatory car chase scenes, they kept the pedal to the medal churning out film after film in a movie-making-mill. Each trend was ridden remorselessly hard until it was bled dry financially and creatively. However, the fact is, the creative teams behind these movies put their own wonderfully unique stamp on the films that weren’t found in their American counterparts.

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