The road to cinematic hell is paved with good intentions and bad choices

For those of us that were kids in the era of the Afterschool Special and sitcoms that would go serious for a very special episode, they're a relic of a time when serious social issues were approached in well-intentioned, but incredibly naive and horribly condescending ways. Looking back at those particular films and episodes of TV can be interesting, since they present reflections of the culture for the times in which they were created. The stories usually hinge on a generically straight-laced white character coming to the realization that death, drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, suicide, eating disorders, prejudice or any other topic people don't really like talking about actually exists in the world. While the films and programs are to be commended for putting those issues on the table to be discussed, especially to young kids and teens, some of those films have the implicit notion that these type of things don't happen to "normal" (white) people.

With the limited release of Stonewall, directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Jon Robin Baitz, it plays like an Afterschool Special made by people who went with the worst creative decisions at every step in the process. The film inserts fictionalized characters around the 1969 Stonewall Inn Riots, a seminal moment for the LGBTQ movement. Since the first trailer for the movie appeared online, Stonewall has been controversial for inserting a white protagonist, Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine), as a central figure in the event, instead of a character based on the real-life transgender women, lesbians, and drag queens of color that were present during the riots at significant moments. Emmerich didn't help things by stating that this was an intentional decision in order to have a character that straight audiences can sympathize with and root for. This has led to calls to boycott the movie on the grounds it's "whitewashed propaganda."

Since Emmerich is known for disaster movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, this is a change of pace from his usual fare. Stonewall is a passion project for the director, who is a gay man and invested millions of his own money to make Stonewall after no studio would take it on. However, the result is a film that's a boring mess which bombed hard at the box office over the weekend and has been critically drubbed. Stonewall is awfully written, with a cast that feels like they walked off the set of Glee, and is so wrong-headed in its take on the subject matter that it quite literally makes the same mistakes as another movie about an important event in American history made by a director of movies where things blow up.

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