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David Ehrenstein

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Sex and the City

Urbania gives gay New York life a cinematic face you haven't seen before

By David Ehrenstein
Sep 28, 2000

Much has changed for urban gays in the 21 years since William Friedkin's Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller--set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York's West Village--was derided by gay rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly designed to exacerbate...
Raging Waters

Inspired by Patty Hearst, Cecil B. Demented rails against the dying of the cinema

By David Ehrenstein
Aug 17, 2000

For the first half hour or so of John Waters' latest film, Cecil B. Demented, I found myself reflexively evaluating it in terms of the guidelines we all -- critics as well as audiences -- have been trained to follow: "This isn't going to make much money, because it's not...
Don't Cheer, Don't Tell

Homosexual "reparative therapy" gets a mild drubbing in But I'm a Cheerleader

By David Ehrenstein
Aug 10, 2000

t would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I'm a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper into...
Coming to blows

Play It to the Bone prances, staggers, then goes down for the count

By David Ehrenstein
Jan 13, 2000

It's easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton's latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he'd already done for baseball in Bull Durham, for golf in Tin Cup, and for pick-up basketball in White Men Can't Jump. But somewhere along...