Funeral Parade Of Roses is the next film in our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series!

In the neon-lit underworld of 1960s Tokyo, Funeral Parade of Roses follows Eddie (played by gender-nonconforming pop icon Pîtâ), a young transgender nightclub performer navigating love, identity, and rivalry in the city’s queer nightlife scene. As Eddie rises in popularity at a gay bar called Genet, she becomes entangled in a love triangle with Gonda, the bar’s manager, and Leda, her older rival and Gonda’s lover.

An electrifying and groundbreaking brew of French New Wave, underground documentary, and psychedelic experimentalism, Funeral Parade Of Roses has always been a favorite for audiences at The Frida Cinema! 

It’ll come as no surprise to any Jonathan Demme fan to find one of his films in our Unsung 80’s Soundtracks series. From the filmmaker who gave us Q Lazzarus’ “Goodbye Horses,” Bruce Springsteen’s Oscar-winning “Streets of Philadelphia,” and, of course, the electrifying sounds of Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, comes 1986’s Something Wild, a quirky romantic comedy that gradually turns into…well, something quite wild.

Jeff Daniels stars as Manhattan businessman Charles Driggs, a relatively square individual whose uneventful life is upended when he meets the mysterious and free-spirited Lulu (Melanie Griffith). After she impulsively “kidnaps” him from a restaurant, the two head out on a road trip that becomes increasingly unpredictable adventure when they cross paths with Lulu’s dangerous ex-husband, Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta). Funny, sexy, strange, and surprisingly unsettling, Something Wild is one of the great genre-shifting movies of the 1980s, and an early showcase for the late, great Liotta.

Demme fills his film with a remarkably eclectic mix of ’80s new wave, punk, rock, and pop, featuring Talking Heads, New Order, The Feelies, The Pretenders, and others. The music doesn’t simply serve as background decoration; it helps chart the film’s transformation from playful road movie to something darker. The soundtrack was released as a compilation alongside the film, and like so much of Demme’s work, it reflects a director with an unusually sharp ear for music, and a knack for finding exactly the right song for the moment.