Danielle Ferland
The story of four characters whose lives intertwine amid the hustle and bustle of the Coney Island amusement park in the 1950s: Ginny, an emotionally volatile former actress now working as a waitress in a clam house; Humpty, Ginny’s rough-hewn carousel operator husband; Mickey, a handsome young lifeguard who dreams of becoming a playwright; and Carolina, Humpty’s long-estranged daughter, who is now hiding out from gangsters at her father’s apartment.
The story of the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, taking an unflinching look at the nation's sexual politics as gay activists and their allies in the medical community fight to expose the truth about the burgeoning epidemic to a city and nation in denial.
A cash strapped feminist filmmaker secretly takes a job directing a porn film in order to get her thesis film, "Feminism For Dummies" out of the lab. Soon, her own slumbering sexuality is awakened in surprising ways. This arouses the suspicion of her politically correct husband, Hugh, and leads to a madcap finale of mistaken identity that threatens to upend Gillian's best laid plans.
Before he broke out with the J.D. Salinger-esque Tadpole in 2002, producer-turned-director Gary Winick filmed this little-seen relationship drama. Fisher Stevens stars as the title character, a writer with one novel under his belt who can't seem to deliver the follow-up. Instead, he spends his time compulsively cheating on his photographer girlfriend, Cass (Annabella Sciorra); giving the runaround to his agent, Richard (Ron Rifkin); and trying to keep his landlord, Murray (Luis Guzman), at bay.
A bored wife, who is planning to run away from her minister husband, is taken hostage in a bank robbery. However, she sees the thrill in being involved in the chase and becomes an accomplice to helping the younger robber escape his pursuers. As things progress, she learns he pulled the robbery to get enough money to help his pregnant girlfriend leave a home for unwed mothers. The two have a brief flirtation, but it is clear the housewife just needs something to enliven her life.
The story of rock'n'roll singer Charles Valentine, who came from small-town Ohio and conquered New York. Charles' own narration is interspersed with interviews to people who know her — her friend Sarah, her brother Loren, her manager and more. Beauty, talent, charisma: Charles has it all, and it nets her a glamourous life. But is glamour enough for her? And what does glamour mean?
When Lenny and his wife, Amanda, adopt a baby, Lenny realizes that his son is a genius and becomes obsessed with finding the boy's biological mother in hopes that she will be brilliant too. But when he learns that Max's mother is Linda Ash, a kindhearted prostitute and porn star, Lenny is determined to reform her immoral lifestyle. A Greek chorus chimes in to relate the plot to Greek mythology in this quirky comedy.
The Narrator tells us how the radio influenced his childhood in the days before TV. In the New York City of the late 1930s to the New Year's Eve 1944, this coming-of-age tale mixes the narrator's experiences with contemporary anecdotes and urban legends of the radio stars.
