Stonewall (opens in Cleveland September 25th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[STONEWALL opens in Cleveland on Friday September 25th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Poor Roland Emmerich. The director of action blockbusters like INDEPENDENCE DAY, GODZILLA and DAY AFTER TOMORROW, gets little enough respect. Now he's being attacked for his “labor of love,” STONEWALL, a movie dramatizing events surrounding the 1969 Stonewall riots, the New York City uprising that's considered the catalyst for the modern Gay Rights movement.


The German-born director, who is gay, was so committed to the project that he financed it himself, along with friends, and stepped in as director when no one else would. “Nobody wanted to do it,” he said in an interview online, “and I was stubborn, and then I got it done.”

Stargate (April 2 at the CWRU Film Society, Strosacker Auditorium)

[STARGATE screens Saturday April 2 at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at the CWRU Film Society, Strosacker Auditorium]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

If you'd told me when STARGATE premiered in 1994 that it was going to be the cornerstone of a successful science-fiction franchise, I probably wouldn't have believed it, any more than I thought Battlestar Galactica would have an illustrious second life. To me, STARGATE was a nice try - a gangbusters first half of a really fun escapist fantasy that just didn't pay off. Obviously I'm not a good fortuneteller of the future (could've used a few stern warnings about my own), but I'll cling with my tattered, 20-year-old opinion here, take it or leave it.

Important thing to know, at least for me at the time, is that this was the big Hollywood entree for the filmmaking-writing team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, two guys who had previously done most of their work in West Germany, cranking out, no, not angsty cut-your-wrists Rainer Werner Fassbinder film-festival melodramas but imitation Tinseltown Lucas-Spielberg sci-fi kitsch, like MOON 44, done with ever-escalating budget and polish. I always thought of these guys as the ultimate fanboy backyard-filmmakers, but with real 35mm and backlots to play around on. When they came to the US the sheer joy of their finding their element - here and in the subsequent INDEPENDENCE DAY and the much-disliked GODZILLA remake - is almost enough to compensate for their chronic-fanboy mentality and material of the level of Perry Rhodan or pulp magazines of the 1930s.