Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I had a thought when watching the below trailer for Tom Hooper's upcoming period drama about transgender pioneer Lili Elbe. I came of age as a movie fanatic during the indie boom of the early to mid '90s. This kind of story was on the fringe back then. I mean, it always has been. Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda was shocking (but highly camp), Rocky Horror ended up having a huge cultural impact, but again tongue was firmly in cheek. John Waters films were for the delightfully depraved.
In the '90s we got a lot of trans and gay indie films that weren't quite as cheesy as what came before, but still not uber serious. The Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert, The Crying Game (to an extent), To Wong Foo and eventually Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It all played into the counter culture.
The thought I had watching this trailer was that this kind of story no longer counter culture, just culture. Sure, it's Tom Hooper super serious Oscar bait, but the fact that we have this story being told in such a way gently underlines how far ahead we've moved as a society.
I'm not the world's biggest Eddie Redmayne fan, but he did give two radically different performances in the last 12 months that have started turning me around on him (one, his Academy Award winning turn as Prof. Hawking in Theory of Everything and the other his demented random screaming hilariously cartoonish villain in Jupiter Ascending). He looks like he's gone back to his dry white toast style acting in the trailer below, but only time will tell.
Take a look at the trailer for The Danish Girl:
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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