PENNY DREADFUL SEASON 2

Harry Treadaway, Patti LuPone, Reeve Carney

PENNY DREADFUL. Season 2. 2015. Showtime.

During the first season of Penny Dreadful, the group of weird individuals banded together to fight a horde of vampires. In this season, their antagonists are a coven of really nasty witches. Alternately fascinating and a little bit silly (without being campy), the show still manages to be quite entertaining and watchable. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway of The Disappeared) has been importuned, to put it mildly, by his creation, "John Clare" (Rory Kinnear), to create a mate for him, and he chooses to revive the dead woman (now called Lily) whom once was the lover of Ethan Chandler/Lawrence Talbot (Josh Hartnett). Alas, Lily (Billie Piper), has little interest in John, but she does have a hankering for Victor, although even he is dismissed when her evil side becomes ascendant and she hooks up with Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), whose transsexual lover, Angelique (Jonny Beauchamp of Stonewall), comes to a sad end, no thanks to Dorian. Meanwhile Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) nearly pays for his sins thanks to the manipulations of head witch, Mrs. Poole (Helen McCrory of the BBC's Frankenstein). Vanessa Ives (Eve Green), who has become like a daughter to Malcolm, deals with her own inner demons and relates how she became a witch herself at the tutoring of a "cut-wife" played superbly by a highly-deglamorized Patti Lupone [Parker]. .

This was a fine season for the show, but there were some disappointments. Ethan never runs into Broma/Lily, which certainly would have been an interesting interlude as she's supposed to be dead, and he also never encounters Dorian Gray, with whom he had a sexual encounter in season one, either. While the character of Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale) is admittedly likable and Beale's performance is excellent, one wishes they didn't make him such a relentlessly stereotypical homosexual; he even pronounces his "r"s like "w"s as if he were a little girl! Lyle and Ethan have a lot of semi-amusing banter, but one wonders what the self-described "old queen" would think if he knew about Ethan and Dorian! The LGBT aspects of the show seem added more for spice than veracity or open-mindedness. Penny Dreadful is influenced by everything from Mary Shelley to Dark Shadows.

Verdict: Imperfect, but very well-acted by a great cast, and highly entertaining. ***.

STONEWALL (2015)

Danny gets his first view of Manhattan

STONEWALL (2015). Director: Roland Emmerich.

After he is discovered having sex with another man, Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine) leaves his small town and his coach-father's rejection and comes to Manhattan. There he meets an excitable drag queen named Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), who befriends him and falls for him unrequitedly. Ray is part of a group of gay hustlers, street people and "queens" who congregate on and around the Stonewall bar in Sheridan Square, a mafia-run dive that caters to different elements of the gay community. Danny, who is masculine and very handsome, has no sexual feelings for the effeminate Ray, but winds up in a brief relationship with Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who works for the early gay rights group, the Mattachine Society. After a series of misadventures, Danny winds up in the Stonewall during a police raid, but this time the angry patrons fight back and a riot ensues ... One would hope that a movie based on this seminal event in Gay Liberation would be better than this, but Stonewall seems overrun with cliches and caricatures. Many people objected to the fictional character of Danny -- white, masculine and good-looking (as if there are no white, masculine, good-looking gay guys!) -- because he doesn't typify the more outre customer of the Stonewall, but considering the fact that a great many white gay guys traveled from their small towns to make their way to Greenwich Village (including the Stonewall), this seems unfair. (And there have certainly been plenty of movies about queens and transvestites so why not equal time?) A bigger problem is that this fictional character takes center stage, throwing the first brick and shouting "gay power!" Worse is that Danny's misadventures in New York with pathetic old johns and sometimes obnoxious drag queens with attitude -- Ray's hopeless crush on Danny, for instance, although, oddly, I almost found myself hoping this unlikely couple would make it -- have been done so often that you think you're seeing something made twenty years ago. (Sheesh, we've even got the bit about the gay guy coming home to discover the man he loved has gotten married!)  Films have been made in which gay characters wind up at the Stonewall riots, and that's what this should have been -- but it shouldn't have been called Stonewall. Jon Robin Baitz' screenplay tries to touch all bases, but with so much time given over to Danny's less interesting and over-familiar life story, there's not much room left for the event itself. If Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman) -- who was involved in the bar, was said to be a criminal, and later became a gay activist -- were alive today he would undoubtedly file a lawsuit. Of the actors Beauchamp does a pretty fine job with Ray, and the British Irvine is credible as Danny, although at times he over-acts when his character over-reacts. He's another English actor who sounds perfectly American (a gift that doesn't always work the other way around.) Meyers is good as Trevor and successfully disguises his Irish origins. Perlman is certainly vivid as Murphy, and there are other effective performances among the large supporting cast. While this is not a terribly good picture -- a shame, considering its honorable intentions -- there are some good scenes, such as when white leather guys come to the defense of a black drag queen that Murphy is about to beat (although Keller's, where the scene takes place, was not a leather bar, and this is more of a "feel-good" moment than a real one). This is not the first fictionalized movie about the Stonewall Rebellion.

Verdict: For a movie based on a real event and certain real characters, this seems rather unreal at times. But some viewers may well find it inspiring and powerful although it, unfortunately, seems to catalog a variety of stereotypes. **1/2.