Philadelphia's Lead Performances Stand Above Its Weakest Tendencies

The arc of representation for LGBTQA+ characters in high-profile American cinema is not one that shows constant increases in representation as the years go on, but rather an interesting spike in the 1990's followed by the 21st century sending the idea of queer characters getting to be regular participants in major American films crashing to the ground. A number of 1990's films like The Birdcage made one think things were turning around for the better but unfortunately, queer representation was limited to the arthouse sector in the 2000s save for Brokeback Mountain and (kind of) Bruno. It's only recently that major American studios have started to make a small sampling of non-arthouse fare with queer protagonists again, films like Love, Simon or the upcoming Kristen Stewart/Mackenzie Davis rom-com Happiest Season. 

Get In Tune With The Captivating Humanistic Beat Of BPM (Beats Per Minute)

What do you do when your government has abandoned you? What do you do when the pharmaceutical companies meant to create cures for what's killing you instead lollygag around? For those suffering from AIDS at the dawn of the 1990's, this could not be tolerated. Millions of lives had already been lost to this disease that was ravaging the worldwide population and yet those in power seemed to have made little to no progress in trying to help the sick and weary. Thus, the ACT UP group was started to champion the rights of AIDS-suffering individuals across the globe. BPM (Beats Per Minute) is all about following an ACT UP group located in Paris, France comprised of an eclectic coterie of people.

The 2008 Stage Version Of Rent Shows Why This Gut-Wrenching Musical Has Endured For So Long

It's interesting to me how a large amount of art can be dubbed both timely to the specific period it premiered in and timeless in the types of emotions and characters it grapples with. Rent, a Broadway musical penned by Jonathan Larson, is very much one such production, with its story chronicling the experiences of eight adults in their early twenties grappling with financial insecurity and the AIDS crisis being very much something that resonated powerfully with audiences in the mid-1990's. For decades at that point, the AIDS crisis had ravaged the LGBTQA community and instead of creating more empathy for members of this community, individuals like former President Ronald Reagan only made those suffering from AIDS and the LGBTQA community itself even more of a pariah in American society than it already was.