Out Takes

This week on Out Takes, with the 92nd Academy Awards to be announced on Monday February 10, we throw caution to the wind and made our opinions known by casting our predictions for which films will take home the top Oscars.

We all have our favourites (Parasite, 1917 and Marriage Story), our frustrations on what missed out on a nomination (seriously, no female directors nominated in the Best Director category AGAIN?? Also #Justice4Jlo) and a few personal favourites we’d like to see come out on top (Saoirse and Taika, you can do it!).

Our guest was Cinema Nova CEO Kristian Connelly, who joined us as guest co-host to sort through this year’s batch of nominees plus provide some insight in to what’s happening behind the scenes in the local and international film industry.

This week on Out Takes, we celebrated Queer Screen’s 27th Mardi Gras Film Festival, which returns to Sydney this month with a fresh and thought provoking new line up of queer cinema.

Our guests were Festival Director Lisa Rose and Monica Zanetti, the director of ‘Ellie and Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt)’.

Shot entirely in Sydney and based on Zanetti’s stage play of the same name, ‘Ellie and Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt)’ is the first Australian film to open the Festival in its 27 year history. It tells the story of school captain Ellie, who falls for her rebellious classmate Abbie, and the supernatural plot to bring them together.

The Academy announced its fresh batch of nominees ahead of the 92nd annual Academy Awards later this month so to mark the occasion on Out Takes we turned our attention to this years bombshell batch of nominees.

Yes, the Academy has singled out some fine feats of film making but one thing is plain: this years nominees are decidedly male-centric and where the Academy has recently sought to champion diversity, this year’s nominees seem to eschew diversity altogether (#justice4JLo).

So, as a counterpoint, we also celebrated the theatrical release of Jay Roache’s ‘Bombshell’, the highly anticipated film looking at the accounts of several women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. We also got to speak with Australian queer and non-binary actor Liv Hewson (pictured right) who features in ‘Bombshell’ and who has also starred in numerous film and television projects here and overseas including the Netflix series ‘Santa Clarita Diet’. We spoke with Liv about their role in the star studded and Oscar nominated film and get their thoughts on what it means to be out, proud and non-binary in Hollywood.

For the first live Out Takes of 2020, we turned the spotlight on some of the most anticipated films headed our way in 2020: think new Disney blockbusters, star studded queer indie flicks and large scale musical adaptations.

We also cast our eye over a slew of Awards winners as we settle ourselves into this year’s Awards season. The Golden Globes, Dorian Awards and Critics Choice Awards all aired in January so we ventured into the new year by looking at the some of the most lauded and critically appraised cinema of the last 12 months.

We kicked off the first Out Takes of 2020 by taking one last look back at the year that was and put the spotlight on some of our favourite interviews and guests from 2019. This retrospective highlights the calibre of talent we tapped in to and some of the many great conversations we had on air with directors, actors, academics and more over the past 12 months.

If you enjoy this best of make sure to go back and check out the full programs on our podcast page and on Spotify.

The Out Takes waved goodbye to 2019 by looking at the year that was in queer cinema by counting down our favorite LGBTIQ leaning fare and celebrating the best films of the year.

We’ve spoke at length the past 12 months on what we’ve loved and loathed but as always our picks are guaranteed to stir up some debate in the studio and out across the airwaves… We also looked at some of the biggest cinematic trends of the year including some of the year’s most surprising hits and biggest flops (congratulations to CATS for just making the cut as one of the worst films of 2019, we salute you!). 

Did your favourite make the cut or did we miss mentioning a film that you loved? Let us know via the Out Takes Facebook page and check out more of our podcasts on Spotify

25 years after its initial release, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” finally reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

So for this Out Takes Xmas special, we made the yuletide extra gay by celebrating the camp filmic oeuvre of the Queen of Christmas herself, Mariah Carey: think melodramatic box office flops with a killer soundtrack like GLITTER (#justiceforglitter), under celebrated kitsch Christmas fare like A CHRISTMAS MELODY, and surprisingly high brow arthouse films like PRECIOUS and THE BUTLER.

We also looked at many of those iconic Mariah moments on and off the big screen and celebrated the Queen of Christmas in the best way possible – playing many of her much loved Christmas hits throughout the program. Happy holidays!

This week on Out Takes we celebrated our 200th episode!

To mark the occasion, we took a look back at our last four years as the home of queer cinema on JOY 94.9

When we first went to air some four years ago, we set out to bring the filmic landscape on the other side of the rainbow to JOY. Since then, we’ve donned ruby slippers with Judy and ballet shoes with Billy; we’ve been over the rainbow and star-crossed a few times; we’ve celebrated winter in Westbeth and burned in Paris; we’ve been to Arendelle and Oz and galaxies far away; we’ve gone looking for fantastic beasts and Cinderella’s missing glass slipper; we’ve travelled to Hollywood and gone globe trotting around the world: we’ve looked at national cinemas in France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Finland, Poland and a bunch of other places; we’ve spent the weekend with Haigh and been disobedient with Lelio and basked in the moonlight with Barry.

But to celebrate our 200th episode, we came full circle. In our first episode, now four years ago, we were joined by academic Ruby Rich, who coined the term “New Queer Cinema” in a now seminal paper for Sight and Sound. This week, as we take stock of our past four years on air, and the very many films that we’ve looked at, we were joined by Ruby Rich once again to speak about about the on going importance of queer cinema and how far it has come in the last four years.

It’s nearly the end of the decade so we took stock of the past ten years that was and looked back at the queer films that left a big impression on us from 2010 – 2019. It was a hard task with so many great queer movies vying for a place in our top ten so we compared notes and came up with a list that we think shines a light on many of the best LGBTIQ films from the past ten years.

We also noticed a common theme, that many of our favourite films have not only featured on Out Takes over the years but we’ve also been fortunate enough to speak with many of our favourite directors, writers and actors from many of the films on our list. Check out the Out Takes podcast feed for more great interviews and programs from the home of queer cinema on JOY.

Did your favourites make the cut? Was there anything that we missed? Let us know what you think – [email protected]

Disney’s FROZEN is the highest grossing animated film of all time. Now, FROZEN 2 is screening in cinemas around the world, and has already grossed over $738 million dollars internationally.

Disney’s FROZEN franchise is a certified box office success. But its also represents a watershed moment in Disney’s cultural and representational legacy. In fact, when FROZEN first hit cinemas, the internet was atwitter with conspiracies that Elsa might be gay. Six years later, Elsa’s sexuality is still unconfirmed. But there can be very little doubt: FROZEN 2 is a very queer film.

So for this Out Takes program, we journeyed deep into the heart of Arendelle and the Wonderful World of Disney to celebrate the theatrical release of Disney’s FROZEN 2. Our guest was Dr Eleanor Byrne, whose seminal thesis “Deconstructing Disney” explores the latent queer potential of Disney classics like SNOW WHITE, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, and now the FROZEN franchise. We spoke with Byrne about the way that gender and sexuality function in Disney films, and their potential for queer interpretation.