Stonewall - A Film about the Stonewall Riots

Movies about racists can be quite interesting, as long as they're interesting racists. Boring racists, it must be said, are pretty tiresome.

I don't think a movie called "Stonewall" needs to have a thread title other than "Stonewall". If it leads people to learn more about gay history, so much the better.

No one suggested calling it something less than Stonewall. Merely suggesting changing the title since a lot of people who have never heard of the film til this thread think its about Stonewall Jackson instead. Adding in a Tag Line that could hint at the actual focus of the film would clear up the confusion.

Well, that should lead to people reading up about the Stonewall riots, not changing the title to "Stonewall: The movie about the gay riots in 1969 not that Civil War general that got shot by his own men."

But, that's not my point. Coming in here and expecting to be discussing a film about Stonewall Jackson isn't completely out of the realm of logical thought and, just because they had that train of thought, doesn't mean that they don't already know about the Stonewall Riots.

Both have the same name. Its not illogical that a movie about either topic could have that name. A thread title indication would be helpful for clarity's sake and, should you be a person that wouldn't need such an indication, bully for you and does it really hurt if its there?

edited 11th Aug '15 4:03:17 AM by InkDagger

Adding a subtitle doesn't hurt a thing, and in fact improves matters. There's probably a lot of folks down south who actually WANT a movie about Stonewall Jackson, and a subtitle telling them this isn't it will spare them from coming here and getting disappointed. Some of those folks might STILL be interested in learning about the beginnings of the gay rights movement, and just want to come here anyway.

As far as I'm concerned, people who want a Stonewall Jackson movie deserve to be disappointed.

edited 11th Aug '15 10:29:23 AM by higherbrainpattern

Which is to be expected from anyone vested in this particular movie being true to history.

I thought it only works if the racist in question has a really good Freudian Excuse.

You mean before it gets...stonewalled?

Or if the racism is only a part of the character and you realize they're still people too . . . too many people wanna fucking stereotype the other side while they're fighting against being stereotyped themselves. It's understandable, but it's part of the human SICKNESS, not part of the human CONDITION and it's better to let stereotypes go out the door entirely.

I mean, those women who started the Stonewall riot? They weren't JUST African American Trans Women. They were daughters and/or sisters. They were students. They were workers. They were people. Period. That's what we ALL are.

So... is Roland Emmerich after an Oscar or something?

This doesn't seem like his normal kind of movie.

Emerich is gay, if I remember correctly. Stonewall is considered the birth of gay rights. He's described it in interviews as a personal project. I think its easy to connect the dots a bit.

Oh I was unaware he was gay.

I was unaware as well. Maybe the trailers are bullshitting us and they'll play this one accurately after all. Or maybe he decided to inject a bit of himself into the situation with a white gay character instead.

Seems likely. Anonymous was Emmerich trying to make Shakespeare more Emmerich-y, i.e. upper class. There's a precedent.

Not a good precedent, however (especially after seeing the Brows Held High reviews of Anonymous...).

edited 14th Aug '15 12:03:47 PM by Quag15

Geez, half this thread has been spent talking about Stonewall Jackson....

To be fair, the trailers paint this as the version of events Jackson stereotypically would have preferred, instead of the reality that places two African American women who were born in the bodies of men at the center of change.

ETA: I say stereotypically because I'd never heard anything about racism in discussion of the original Stonewall. Contrary to what pop culture wants you to believe, the majority of the South was neither slave owners nor particularly affected by the existence of slaves other than the fact that them working the farms took work from people who would be paid for the same job. Only 5% of the farms there even owned any. Jackson was a WEST Virginian like me. Our state broke off of Virginia because of the war. Jackson didn't want VA to secede like the other southern states, but he was a Virginian through and through and supported his state even though he disagreed with them.

edited 15th Aug '15 9:50:24 PM by Journeyman

The Hatfields and Mc Coys came from your neck of the woods, Journeyman? Devil Anse Hatfield and all that stuff?

Can we... drop the discussion on Stonewall? We've deviated from the topic enough as it is. And this isn't even a tangent topic of the movie either.

Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Only reason I went on that last tangent was that I got a bit tweaked at all the assholes calling him racist while doing as little research on the subject as us Jackson enthusiasts have done on the riot this movie's based on.

I will just break, very briefly, the "no more Stonewall Jackson discussion" rule to point out a clarification that Stonewall Jackson never expressed ardent support or dislike for slavery. And while he did own many slaves, by all accounts (including the accounts of his actual slaves) he treated them in a very fairly (by the standards of the time) and was a friend to several freemen of his region. So he's a bit difficult to pin down when it comes to racism.

But yes, that is the last that I will say about Stonewall Jackson. carry on with the actual movie discussion.

I don't think there's much to discuss til the movie itself comes out. Right now trailers paint it as the usual Hollywood bullshit rewriting history, but that could be a smokescreen. We just won't know til later on.

Owning a person as property is about as far as you can get from "treating them fairly."