Giving a leading role to Jacki Weaver is something any filmmaker should be commended for. The veteran actress is a welcome presence anywhere, no matter the topic. Casting her as the lead in a fish out of water type dramedy? Well, that should be the main ingredient to a delicious cinematic dish. Unfortunately, Stage Mother ends up more like a fast food dish when you were hoping for fine dining. Does it mostly get the job done? Sure, but it also doesn’t particularly satisfy you. The premise, along with Weaver’s talents, ultimately keep this from being something that leaves an impression on you. Opening this week, it’s a missed opportunity for something wonderful. The movie is a dramedy, focused on a southern woman evolution in the Bay Area. When Maybelline (Weaver), a conservative, Texas church-choir director finds out that her son Rickey (Eldon Thiele) has passed away from a drug overdose,...
- 8/18/2020
- by Joey Magidson
- Hollywoodnews.com
Thanks to the ever-growing popularity of RuPaul’s reality game-show, drag has become increasingly present in the public eye. Once an underground LGBT culture, drag is now in most households, in our music, and also in our cinema.
Of course, drag has been in films since the creation of cinema with popular movies such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, With Love Julie Newmar becoming cult classics. Now it is part of the mainstream, we can expect more and more movies about drag culture, such as this charming new release.
Directed by Thorn Fitzgerald and starring Jackie Weaver, Stage Mother revolves around conservative mother Maybelline who has been estranged from her son after he came out as gay. Sadly, after his death, Maybelline heads to San Francisco to run his bar, Pandora’s Box. Whilst there, Maybelline has to confront her own prejudices whilst getting closer to...
Of course, drag has been in films since the creation of cinema with popular movies such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, With Love Julie Newmar becoming cult classics. Now it is part of the mainstream, we can expect more and more movies about drag culture, such as this charming new release.
Directed by Thorn Fitzgerald and starring Jackie Weaver, Stage Mother revolves around conservative mother Maybelline who has been estranged from her son after he came out as gay. Sadly, after his death, Maybelline heads to San Francisco to run his bar, Pandora’s Box. Whilst there, Maybelline has to confront her own prejudices whilst getting closer to...
- 7/25/2020
- by Sarah Cook
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
The late Richard Benner’s 1977 “Outrageous!” blazed trails as both a hit Canadian export and positive screen depiction of gay life, two relative rarities at the time. Even then, some gay viewers found the funny-sad friendship between a hairdresser/professional drag queen and a young schizophrenic woman a bit old-fashioned. But everybody was won over by Craig Russell’s stage impersonations of Hollywood stars — schmaltz and camp being a reliable combination for gay cinema with crossover ambitions.
That formula has scarcely altered 43 years later for “Stage Mother.” It’s the latest from Thom Fitzgerald, whose 1997 “The Hanging Garden” was also shot in Nova Scotia, and helped herald a new, perhaps more politically bold and artistically adventuresome generation of gay Canadian filmmakers. His more recent work has fitted into a time-tested mould of sentimental seriocomedy, however. This tale of a small-town Texas matron who inherits her estranged son’s San Francisco drag bar offers up smiles,...
That formula has scarcely altered 43 years later for “Stage Mother.” It’s the latest from Thom Fitzgerald, whose 1997 “The Hanging Garden” was also shot in Nova Scotia, and helped herald a new, perhaps more politically bold and artistically adventuresome generation of gay Canadian filmmakers. His more recent work has fitted into a time-tested mould of sentimental seriocomedy, however. This tale of a small-town Texas matron who inherits her estranged son’s San Francisco drag bar offers up smiles,...
- 7/2/2020
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
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