Category: Uncategorized
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Is 2020 the Year of the Musical? – ‘Big Picture Film Club’
‘In 2017, pundits set their sights on La La Land, the little-jazz-musical-that-could, as taking Best Picture at the Oscars. Famously, that did not happen, but it marked a substantial reawakening for the movie musical culturally. The circus-based extravaganza The Greatest Showman followed a year later and, after a slow start, dominated at the box office, and its music infected the…
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It’s Time to Talk About Marielle Heller – ‘Big Picture Film Club’
‘On the 13th January, Issa Rae, the creator and star of HBO’s Insecure, announced the directing nominees for the 92nd Academy Awards. ‘Congratulations to those men,’ Rae jibed as the names of the depressing all-male line-up loitered on the screen. Moments like this have appeared more frequently over the past few years. At the Oscars…
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Little Women & Cinema for the Self Partnered – ‘Big Picture Film Club’
‘When Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women she didn’t want Jo March, her fiery, emboldened, and strong-minded lead, to be married by the novel’s end. This was, like Greta Gerwig’s new film adaptation stresses, a choice of her publisher and a sign of the repressive times she lived in. Alcott herself defied that rule in real life,…
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The Best LGBTQ+ Films of the Decade – ‘Big Picture Film Club’
‘If the 1990s gave us New Queer Cinema, and the 2000s gave us mainstream successes, like Brokeback Mountain (2005), then what did we find in the 2010s? Of course, more mainstream entries like Love, Simon (2018) or Dallas Buyers Club (2013). There was the return, whether we liked it or not, of Queer Eye (aptly dropping ‘For The Straight Guy’ from its title) which showed…
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‘Better Song to Sing’: Emerging Northern Voices
Last night, as part of Storyhouse’s #OurNorth season, Jon Paul Roberts moderated a panel with novelist James Rice, poet Ian Walker, and novelist Danielle Jawando on the topic of Northern Indentity. The discussion followed a screening of Educating Rita (1983) and looked into issues surrounding class, industry, literature, and resilliance in the North. The event…
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Singledom drops its first teaser trailer
Liverpools first queer web series, Singledom, is coming this October. Written and directed by Jon Paul Roberts, the show follows the life of ‘Jon’, a young gay man who is looking for love in all the wrong places. As he navigates his way through dating apps, hook-ups, and blind dates he tries to figure out…
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James Rice – ‘A writer is a thing you can actually be.’ (Interview) – ‘In The Red 14’
‘JPR: You’re still a young writer, but what advice would you give to young writers or new writers? JR: It’s always a hard one that. I always say the same thing. When I decided to write I always thought of it as ‘a writer is a thing you can actually be.’ There are writers.…
Jon Paul Roberts 