Stonewall (2015)

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This is a full blown Roland Emmerich film. Technically great (as all Emmerich's films). But also VERY respectful to those of us who suffered - and still suffers - oppression due to our sexuality. It is certainly an utterly historically inaccurate film. Things happen - that could not - and did not happen.But hey: Do you remember the small child with cancer - saved in the last minute in 'The Day after Tomorrow'? And the American president - that has to lead the attach on the spaceship in 'Independence Day'? Far over the top! But so much over the top that it is obviously just the director playing with all of us. And I love it.The film is loaded with quite beautiful scenes with characters you either hate or love. I understand their feelings and actions. For a gay man like me, it is sometimes very emotional, not at least due to some great acting. Yes: these people actually do exist in the real world! So watch this film as an Emmerich experience. It does not show how it was - exactly. It may not be adored by the 'political correct' gay community, this film is far too mainstream in it's access to historical accuracy. But it is a great and very entertaining and beautiful movie. Far, far too underrated!

The film is derivative, as well as whitewashed. There are so many factual goofs, when it comes to clothes, music, etc. The filmmaker needed to spend some time doing research and fact checking. I also find fault with the film centering around a kid from Kansas. The uprising was started by Puerto Rican and African American drag queens, and there is strong support that the first police resistance was by a lesbian, not some white football player from the mid-west.I suggest watching the British 1997 film, which really feels so much more authentic.

What's with the bitchy reviews here? One reviewer even complains about a 'dull sex scene'! Did the negative reviewers expect porn? This film is about humans coming together to fight for their human rights, social and civil rights. And it's not a documentary! The movie itself is not a great and wonderful achievement in cinema art. What's great about it is the powerful message it brings into todays world when it is most needed.The message -- no matter who you are or where you come from and you know right from wrong - when you see or experience injustice, abuse, discrimination, take a stand and fight back. That's what is being brought to light in this film.The gay community are not outcast to be used and tossed out as trash by people of hypocritically high religious, political, and social standing. There are religious persons, political leaders, and greedy capitalist businesses that wrap themselves in the American flag, arm themselves with Jesus, the Bible, and guns and would be pleased and fulfilled with self gratitude to see the LGBT community tortured, destroyed, and killed. That's what this movie is about! It shows victims of life being forced to the bottom of society because they love differently. And once you are at the bottom 'to survive' is your goal and then you are labeled 'trash'. Your only defense is to fight back and crack a few skulls of the oppressors that pushed these people away and make them stay hidden. And that includes the family, the good religious families that see no wrong in destroying their own.Near the end of Stonewall there is a scene when Danny Winters tells Ray that when he was fighting back, pushing the cops away, screaming that they are people with rights - he felt most alive! He felt like a human with purpose! In other words he had found himself and he's not a bad person (as the people back in Indiana would have him feel about himself). And his trip back to visit friends in that cold hearted backward thinking state was a cathartic moment for him as then he realizes he's on the right path.Why so many are trashing this film is suspect. Did they actually watch the movie? This film will stay in your thoughts for quite sometime if you actually think about what life was and still is for the gay community!

Roland Emmerich's biggest mistake was calling the movie "Stonewall" and marketing it as if it were the actual story of the rebellion. It gave people the wrong expectation. It's not a movie about Stonewall. It's a movie about a Midwestern gay man whose story takes place on Christopher street at the time of the riots. It's also in part the story of the first person he meets in New York, played by Jonny Beauchamp, who steals the movie. It's basically a very oddball romance and coming-out story. People wanted an accurate historical epic about the importance of the riots, and the movie isn't that and was never meant to be. For what it really is, it's a very good movie. Like most "historical" movies there are inaccuracies. The worst distortion is giving Danny the "first brick." That's upset a lot of people, but in the dramatic structure of the movie it's as much about Danny's becoming himself--a gay man throwing away his shame--as it is about the situation he finds himself in. The police are depicted as "bad" in the black-and-white morality of an old-fashioned hero-versus-villain Saturday morning serial. But beyond those inaccuracies and the impossibility of recreating Christopher Street as it was (which seems to be especially upsetting to some New York viewers), the movie is as faithful to its surrounding event as any Shakespeare history play to its, including sympathetic depictions of a very diverse neighborhood of LGBT types. As a long-time gay activist, I liked the movie a great deal. It feels real as I remember things to have been 46 years ago. I felt a genuine emotional rush during and after the riot. The movie ends with typical historical clean-ups, telling us what became of the real people, like Marsha P Johnson and others who appear in the movie, and mentioning the additional nights of rioting and how they went on to be regarded in LGBT history. For me the saddest thing about this film is the divisions it's exposed among various components of the LGBT community. This history belongs to all of us, black, brown, white, gay, lesbian, transgender, drag queen, troll, twink, and so on; if we can't honor it in all of our variations, no one else will either. Go to see it as a good story well told, not as a factual documentary. I write this knowing some of you won't be able to, some of you won't want to, and some of you won't believe me. I wish there were something I could do about that, but there isn't.