Oscilloscope Laboratories announced this past week that both DVD and Blu-ray editions of the documentary team of Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt’s award-winning film release of No Ordinary Man will be available on June 21.
Even Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, might have been stumped by the case of famed jazz musician Billy Tipton, who is the subject of the Chin-Yee/Joynt documentary.
Here are the elements of the case. Bill Tipton was a jazz musician whose career began in the 1930s, extended into the 40s as the leader of various dance bands, was a recording artist in the 1950s and then transitioned into a career as a talent agent as the effects of arthritis took its toll. Tipton was never “legally” married, but had five wives and adopted three sons … and died in 1989 at the age of 74 from a neglected peptic ulcer.
The day that Tipton died, literally while emergency attempts were being carried out, Billy Tipton’s life-long secret was revealed. Billy Tipton, jazz musician, husband and father, was a biological woman.
Spin back to Dorothy Lucille Tipton’s days in school. She developed a love for music as an accomplished piano and sax player and then migrated to jazz. That was going to be a problem … a female jazz player, it was never going to happen. So, Billy Lee Tipton (later just Billy Tipton) was born.
No Ordinary Man follows Tipton’s life and career through trans voices and presentations featuring activist Kate Bornstein, author Thomas Page McBee, acting talents Marquise Vilsón and Scott Turner Schofield, musicologist Stephan Pennington and academics Susan Stryker and C. Riley Snorton … among others.
This fascinating story opened at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall of 2020 during the peak of the Covid pandemic and, as a result, struggled to find venues, but wherever it played it scored well with the audiences and critics and pulled down a number of festival wins.
An ever-so-brief theatrical arthouse run took place in the summer of last year, yielding an ARR of 340 days. These DVD and Blu-ray releases from Oscilloscope Laboratories on June 21 will finally bring Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt’s No Ordinary Man to the wider audience it richly deserves.
Also on the release calendar from Oscilloscope is French Canadian filmmaker Jeanne Leblanc’s 2020 film, Les Nôtres. Again, both DVD and Blu-ray editions will be available on June 21.
A lyrical mystery, where the subject, a 13-year-old girl by name of Magalie Jodoin (Emilie Bierre — A Colony, The Far Shore) becomes more and more of an abstract and less a human being as the story unfolds.
She has recently lost her father, her relationship with her mother, Isabelle (played by actor/director Marianne Farley … her 2017 short film, Marguerite was Oscar nominated), becomes stressed and that’s when the troubles begin. She becomes pregnant.
The locals, people in her life, friends, family and on … and on, are concerned, but as the story unfolds, Magalie becomes a less a pregnant teenager and more of an enigma. Do “we” really want to know how this happened? Rape? Who? Perhaps this little drama will just go away … but what of Magalie? Who can she trust … who cares, in the end, about her?
Les Nôtres is presented in French with English subtitles.
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