Raw Love: In Martin Deus’ frisky short a gaggle of lovely lads from the Argentine give each other ceremonial hugs and kisses for their video scrapbooks. For one sensitive boy the occasional prompts memories of a soon to be lost special friendship.
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Pop Star on Ice: Hands down the most impressive and wildly entertaining non-fiction film in this last weekend of the festival is David Barba & James Pellerito’s intimate and exhaustively documented look at the life and career of US figure skating champion Johnny Weir.
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Shank: In Simon Pearce’s adrenaline rush exploration of boys doing boys in the gangland precincts of Bristol, England distraction – in the form of drugs, raw sex and the practice of using cell phones to record acts of ultra violence – is a way of life for a rag tag collection of young street thugs, who prey on the innocent, with particular attention to bashing queers.
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Twenty-nine programs give non-fiction lovers a feast of stories from San Francisco’s oldest drag performer (Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight) to a marathon cross-country trip exploring homophobia after the nasty defacement of a small car (Fagbug).
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Thirteen or So Minutes: In a nervy little talk fest that adherers to its own special clock two straight, well put together guys find a sinful attraction they never expected to encounter in another guy. Branden Blinn smartly cuts to the bedroom just as the shy bottom guy, Hugh (Carlos Salas) exclaims, “What just happened here?” to his self-assured top, Lawrence (Nick Soper).
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This 33^rd edition of Frameline’s LGBT festival (June 18^th through the 28^th at the Castro, Roxie and Victoria theatres and the East Bay Elmwood Theatre) is especially strong on dark themed shorts (Weak Species) and groundbreaking features.
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In a telling scene from one of the season’s best new American comedies – where an interracial couple takes to the road in search of a parental nirvana -- a loud woman, Lilly – The West Wing’s magnificent Allison Janney – gives a blunt assessment of her blossoming teen daughter that has a younger, very pregnant female acquaintance, Verona (Maya Rudolph), all but try to cover the ears of her own incipient bundle of joy.
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In the gorgeous widescreen b/w restoration of Calder Willingham’s witty send-up of hazing rituals at “The Southern Military Academy” (based on South Carolina’s notorious Citadel) a young cadet officer (a youthful Pat Hingle) sneers at two shaking in their boots cadet students, looking especially foolish standing in their pajamas minutes after lights out.
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his latest edition of San Francisco’s most bloody minded film festival leads with some surprisingly accomplished fare before settling in for fan friendly slasher sports and cheap sex. And it all un-spools at The Roxie (June 5^th through the 18^th) .
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If you have a yen for the sordid then you may enjoy the opening act of this austere Austrian fable where the fates of a Ukrainian call-girl and her bumbling ex-con boyfriend collide calamitously with the settled routines of a small-town cop and his desperate to become pregnant wife.
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Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep/Clean) tackles the awkward push/pull between progress (read globalization or worse “Americanization”) and history’s more complicated claims in a new film that opens with a dying woman, Helene (Edith Scob) hosting a final summer party at a sprawling estate that has been the center of her family for decades as well as the source of a rich legacy from her painter uncle (who may also have doubled as her lover).
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What do you do for an encore when your resume consists of having created the most successful Australian all-drag road movie; of following that with a dark satire (Welcome to Woop Woop) that scared its studio so completely that it languished for years in a pitifully mutilated condition before starting to emerge as an even more bizarre cult phenomenon; and finally when you manage to break your back, legs and pelvis and find yourself far from the maddening crowd in a pitiful drugged up state: why, if you’re Stephan Elliott – the mad genius behind The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert -- you take a deep breath and launch into an all-star remake of a classic Noel Coward vehicle, whose earlier incarnation was supervised by none other than a very young Alfred Hitchcock.
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Approaching a critical anniversary I’ve recently found myself on a most unappealing junk mail list: being solicited for “pre-needs” enrollment in one of two local crematoriums. It’s one of those times I wish I wasn’t a member of a society that always seems to get exit strategies all wrong. A beautiful new film from Japanese director Yojiro Takita – entitled Departures or literally Sending People Off – takes a philosophical and at times quite slyly funny approach to a category of labor that is even in Japan considered beyond the pale in polite society.
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For gay men the experience of wading through James Toback’s searing portrait of disgraced former boxer Mike Tyson may pivot around a moment when a seemingly psychotic Tyson bellows from the apron of the ring at an unseen heckler. “Come down here you punk ass white boy – I’ll fuck you until you love me, faggot!”
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In town to promote what some are calling their new soccer buddy comedy, Rudo Y Cursi -- nearly a decade after their mesmerizing debut as horny teens in this new century’s best road movie, Y Tu Mama Tambien, (their director/friend Carlos Cuaron insists that Rudo Y Cursi is most emphatically not Y Tu Mama Two) -- Luna and Garcia Bernal describe the tricky process of reprising their screen chemistry, only this time as two misfit half-brother, aspiring world class football players.
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This week a straight filmmaker -- with a Gus Van Sant like knack for placing oddly troubled young men at the core of his best stories – returns with a haunting family tale pivoting in cyber-space.
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Kirby Dick has never hesitated to take his camera places where the going gets rough...In Outrage he goes inside a shadowy institution that he argues is one of the most dangerous and least reported in America: the political closet. Beginning with the almost farcical fall from grace of former Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, after he was caught propositioning a Minnesota state cop in an airport lavatory, Dick ends by tip toeing close to a very powerful door, that of popular Republican Governor Charles Crist, jr.
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Didn’t think I’d ever get enough of big screen full frontal male nudity – not until I had to endure full disclosure at its nastiest in the vile new mall comedy, Observe and Report.  Writer/director Toby Hill’s sledgehammer subtle stab at social satire – featuring a charmless Seth Rogen as a supposedly bi-polar shopping mall security guard – has Rogen’s Ronnie Barnhardt in lethal pursuit of a middle-aged flasher (I regret to report that we get an extended peek at Randy Gambill’s privates) while heading into full meltdown in his personal and professional life.
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In Adventureland -- a sweet naïf (Jesse Eisenberg), his college money squandered by his downwardly mobile parental units, gets a summer survival course with lessons in dating, social drinking and how to protect the family jewels. When we first meet Eisenberg’s James he’s living under the illusion that he’s headed to Columbia University. Abruptly informed that mom and dad have tapped out the college fund, James is left to grab the only job open to an English major in 1987 Pittsburg: running a tacky game arcade at a third-rate amusement park, Adventureland.
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When the producers of American Idol secretly film a rejected male contestant sobbing his heart out in what he perceives to be the privacy of a hotel elevator you feel a shameful complicity with the infernal media hype machine; however when a sobbing Jason Tam absolutely “kills” with his tear-soaked audition for the role of Paul in the 2005 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line -- as seen in James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo’s Every Little Step --  you have the giddy sensation of being present at a transformative moment in American theatre, miraculously preserved on film.
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Gay boys growing through that “awkward phase” are not infrequently confronted with a too available sibling attraction. For straight boys the dilemmas are less erotically tinged, but hanging in the air can be the unspoken question – would my brother kill for me, if I turn out to be too soft to kill for myself? This question arises bluntly in a new film where a confused teen facing his Catholic Church conformation “becoming a man” vows confronts his home on leave black sheep bro.
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Docs, reunions and revivals spark the final four days: from the much anticipated return of “Diego” and “Gael” to a breathless resurrection of Noel Coward to the unbelievable rise and self-inflicted fall of “Iron Mike,” there are a bevy of appealing and downright appalling stories for almost every taste.
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This 2009 edition of San Francisco’s oldest festival kicks off with Peter Bratt’s (brother of star Benjamin) La Mission -- an emotionally volatile look at a macho dad’s breakdown after the coming out of his academically gifted son (Jeremy Ray Valdez). This one with its Mission District locales, powerful ensemble and timely themes promises to push the current movement towards San Francisco set feature films to a new plateau of excellence.
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>Hunger – the first fiction feature from acclaimed British documentary artist Steve McQueen – is an un-blinkered look at human cruelty at its most pitiless and diabolical. Set in 1981 in the notorious British run Maze prison – situated just outside of Belfast, Northern Ireland, this was Maggie Thatcher’s Abu Ghraib – Hunger is a thorough examination of the IRA prisoners’ hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands, that eventually resulted in the starvation induced deaths of ten Republican prisoners.
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Light and the Sufferer (just out on DVD) is a truly oddball work of the imagination starring red hot indie actor Paul Dano. Filmed shortly after Dano’s sensational debut as the imperiled teen in Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E., the seventy minute feature, adapted by Christopher Pedito from Jonathan Lethem’s story, follows two brothers, Don (or Light/Dano) and Paul (Michael Esper) as they pull off an insane rip-off of a paranoid NYC drug dealer. The boys are followed in their long night’s journey to dawn by mysterious cat like creatures, aliens known to Gotham residents in trouble as “sufferers.”
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In 1966 Jean-Luc Godard and his legendary producer Georges de Beauregard were desperate for an infusion of French government production dough. They needed to make a movie, quickly, it didn’t matter about what. Godard popped into a Paris bookstore and came out with a pulpy thriller, The Juggler, by American noir writer Donald Westlake. Originally dubbed The Secret this slapdash production – peopled by members of Godard’s “stock company,” actors who’d appear for next to nothing – was quickly re-titled Made in the U.S.A.  
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In the first act of this sumptuously filmed wartime romance from British director John Maybury (Love Is the Devil) the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys) is getting a thorough and possibly well deserved thrashing from a thuggish Navy lad, “Lick my bleeding boots!” Just when he needs it the most Thomas – depicted throughout as most definitely a lover not a fighter, with the morals of a minx in heat – is rescued by a lovely young soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy) who regards the poet with an affectionate disdain.
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The ever shortening window between a great movie’s life on the big screen and the DVD release means that many fans will clutch their copies of Focus Features’ Milk while the bio pic still graces more than 400 screens and is inching past a very respectable $45 million dollar worldwide box office gross, while many still bask in the afterglow of Oscar speeches by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and lead actor Sean Penn.
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I’ll confess my inspiration for buying Left of the Dial – the darkly funny, exhaustively observed HBO doc about the rise, fall and resurrection of America’s first liberal talk radio network -- from the used bins at Street Light Records was to watch the rise of America’s first Lesbian talk show star, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Sadly the personable and deeply talented Maddow is only a bit player in this verite film which turns into a fascinating if cringe inducing autopsy on how not to construct a liberal alternative to conservative radio bully boy Rush Limbaugh.
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The 27^th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival unfolds (March 12^th through the 22^nd) at multiple venues in San Francisco: our beloved Castro Theatre and the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas; Berkeley: the Pacific Film Archive and Wheeler Auditorium (on the UC campus); and San Jose: the Camera 12 cinemas.
Specifically queer films include an original Bay Area musical, Fruit Fly, the Festival’s Centerpiece program, a sprawling Thai soap opera, The Love of Siam, along with provocative entries in at least two shorts programs: It’s Easy Because You’re Beautiful and Times of Departure.
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If the Castro’s revival of the 1973 Oscar winning bildungsroman, Amarcord, is your introduction to the life is a carnival cinema of Federico Fellini, you’re in for a treat, or perhaps a rude awakening, or hopefully both. If Clint Eastwood’s Changeling presented Depression era Los Angeles as a virtual Fascist police state, then Fellini goes to the source with a warts and all, totally irreverent sideshow flavored send-up of his provincial hometown as it snoozed through Il Duce’s self-inflating political freak show.
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Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah begins in a suspiciously queer setting. At first all we see are harsh blue lamps, then four beefy male bodies, fitted out in silver necklaces and Speedos – these button men from the Naples' mob are sitting in a Castro like tanning parlor, making creative use of their downtime. One of the mobsters is having his nails done – then out of the blue, the four are shot to death, their primped and pampered corpses slumped over in grotesque postures.
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Deep in the heart of this perplexing, vexing, fitfully funny, overlong and yet dead on accurate guerilla manual for breaking into the fashion business, the titular star: the insecure, bitterly funny, and yes corpulent winner of the first season of the Bravo Network's fashion reality show, Project Runway, the fabulous Jay McCarroll, reveals his deeply conflicted love/hate relationship with being a grownup gay guy in effect designing circus costumes for grownup straight women.
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If you judge your movie fun by sheer body count then the new sex palace soap opera from Filipino auteur Brillante Mendoza provides a new sensation for darn near everyone of its leisurely paced 84 minutes.
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In Of Time and the City, Terence Davies – arguably Britain's greatest living, irredeemably guilt-ridden, poetically gifted and sublimely tormented queer filmmaker – pours every fiber of his being along with every trick he's learned in the past three decades to craft a brutally candid, thoroughly vexed, although at times loving visual poem to his dirty old hometown of Liverpool, which by a truly diabolical co-incidence happens also to have been the birthplace of my own, frequently maligned in these columns, born while Queen Victoria still reigned, British father.
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When I first met John Cameron Mitchell – prior to the 2001 debut of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Castro – I hadn't a clue that this deceptively elfin like performer (38 going on 18) had already logged a career's worth of star turn roles on various New York stages – from Larry Kramer's The Destiny of Me to the original cast of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Mitchell – who makes a long awaited return to the Bay Area for a Valentine's weekend spectacular stage and film show at the Victoria Theatre
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The 11^th San Francisco Independent Film Festival is smoking with adult film fodder – some of these little gems may never return to a big screen, so catch them while you can at The Roxie Cinema, Victoria Theatre and Landmark's Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, February 5^th through 22^nd.
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Filmed in an actual Paris school, with real kids (13-15) and their parents, The Class cuts a swath through the polarizing realities of contemporary French society – the realities that produced burning cars and pitched battles in working-class neighborhoods only a short time ago.
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In The Reader a fifteen-year-old German schoolboy becomes romantically entwined with a thirty-three-year-old female tram conductor – the affair, begun accidentally due to the boy's sudden illness, takes on literary trappings when the boy starts to read his homework assignments to his lover, the ritual becoming a part of the couple's nightly foreplay.
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Israeli director Yair Hochner's frisky erotic comedy, Antarctica, (opening Friday at the Lumiere) breaks the rules in several delightful ways. Rule number one: virtually any film of whatever genre, culture or quality will reveal itself pretty exactly in the first ten minutes. Antarctica spends a daunting fifteen minutes in the bedroom – framed in a series of visually engaging, split-screen montages – of a ferociously promiscuous modern dancer as he gathers a coalition of willing (one-at-a-time) young male partners for deep penetration exercises.
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1-Milk: Borrowing a trick from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard , where a dead man tartly tells the story behind his untimely demise, this Greek tragedy made in San Francisco – nimbly staged by Gus Van Sant from Dustin Lance Black's passionate, meticulously researched screenplay – becomes a humane political thriller with a grasp of the nuts and bolts of government intrigue , and its crushing impact on real lives.
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The 14^th edition of Berlin & Beyond – New Films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (unspooling at our magnificent Castro Theatre, January 15-20^th) – serves up two dozen feature films – six competing for the Best First Feature Prize, along with challenging work from master filmmakers: Doris Dorrie and this year's Lifetime Achievement recipient, Wim Wenders.
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This slick package of six shorts bounces geographically: South Florida, East Coast, West Coast, Norway and Brazil with sharply observed stories, director interviews (for four films) and an optional 19-year-old Latin boy host, Oscar Peralta, who is tastefully appealing without stooping to video lap dancing.
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If there's been a comedy/drama filmed in a gated community for LGBT seniors it has so far escaped my attention. But don't despair as we Boomers head grudgingly and most irascibly towards the predictable pratfalls of old age there are bound to be cameras rolling. So far the British have taken the lead in plumbing the depths of life's most awkward stage.
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There's a couple of scenes close to the conclusion of Che Part One where a wild eyed, bearded young man, dubbed "the Little Cowboy," suddenly pops up like an old Looney Tunes cartoon character, threatening to steal this humorless saga of the Cuban Revolution from its titular hero, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. In his eight pound, impeccably researched history, Cuba, British author Hugh Thomas describes the "the Little Cowboy" as a kid "with no political ideas and the intention of only having marvelous adventure." And for his less than three minutes of screen time the Little Cowboy – played with a manic grace by Spanish born actor Unax Ugalde – gives this history fable some sorely needed adrenalin.
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Swiss director Lionel Baier – who provided a weird ride through the dopey escapades of an irascible, prank prone teen in Garcon Stupide – returns to play almost equally volatile thirty-something intellectual who one day abandons his humpy live-in-boyfriend to search for his family's Polish roots.
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...But a movie that really gets the adult world of my childhood, a world of terrifyingly insecure men desperate to report for jobs they pretend are beneath them, while doing everything in their power to keep the women they love and fear in domestic bondage, that's impossible to ignore. The new Sam Mendes directed film, Revolutionary Road, is a rather good stab, by a team of talented artists, at getting the essence of a hopelessly brilliant book on to the screen in a style and length that's accessible to today's distracted, short attention span film goers.
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Of all the Christmas releases this passionately mounted evocation of a couple decades of the origins of African American blues is the probably most purely entertaining good time available for your ever shrinking movie dollar.
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I remember eons ago as a callow youth pondering a truly ghastly idea: what if Richard Nixon, as a final act of revenge, came out of the closet? While the deliciously entertaining docudrama, Frost/Nixon, never hints at such a truly revolting development, British screenwriter Peter Morgan's witty adaptation of his own successful stage play does make audacious use of a pair of suspiciously feminine Italian shoes to have his Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) needle British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) about being a little light in the loafers.
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The time is 1964 and the winds of change are blowing through St. Nicholas, a Catholic church and school in the Bronx, New York. A young priest, Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) appears to have those winds at his back until he encounters an unmovable object in the form of the school's scary principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep). In John Patrick Shanley's riveting new film, a faithful but consciousness expanding adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize winning play, a charismatic priest and thoroughly cranky old nun fight over the souls of a twelve-year-old black student and an overly sensitive young nun, but also over the terms under which the Church will attempt to remain relevant in a modern world fraught with the works of the devil: basketball, ballpoint pens, transistor radios and the depravations to the moral fiber posed by Frosty the Snowman.
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n the opening moments of Ciao director Yen Tan's (with co-writer Alessandro Calza) hypnotic minimalist fable about the role the dead play in life's necessary new beginnings, a man is seen racing down a narrow alleyway and then driving off in a late model automobile. We will never again observe Mark (Chuck Blaum) in the present tense but in a sense his spirit hovers nearby as his best friend Jeff (Adam Neal Smith) spends a miraculous two days becoming acquainted with a handsome young Italian, Andrea (Alessandro Calza) who Mark had invited to visit him in Dallas after a lengthy on-line correspondence.
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After pioneering seasons on Logo the smart/hip African American queer love boat, Noah's Arc, docks for the last time at Martha's Vineyard for the marriage of Noah (Darryl Stephens) and his hunky hubby to be Wade (Jensen Atwood). For those novices who missed the seventeen TV episodes, series creator Patrik Ian-Polk sets the stage with a whiplash of back-story as Noah's friends settle into Wade's family's beachfront summer home.
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A new series on here! TV – John Roecker's Everything You Wanted to Know About Gay Porn Stars *but were afraid to ask – is an intimate, brave and frequently witty exploration inside the heads of sixteen male erotic video performers, many with well known porn deplumes: Johnny Hazzard, Brad Benton, Nick Capra and Jason Ridge.
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This low-key spoof of the increasing fluid gender lines and the search for honest work in tinsel town finds an out of work butch dyke thespian, Jamie Klein (director Michelle Ehlen balances a slightly perturbed whimsy with a drop dead accurate Drew Carey impersonation) seeking to expands her career potential by playing a man for a no-budget indie whose director insists her "Steve" character kiss the girl while astride a step ladder or empty paint cans.
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Borrowing a trick from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, where a dead man tartly tells the story behind his untimely demise, this made in San Francisco Greek tragedy -- nimbly staged by Gus Van Sant from Dustin Lance Black's passionate, meticulously researched screenplay – becomes a humane political thriller with a grasp of the nuts and bolts of government intrigue and its crushing impact on real lives that rivals All the President's Men.
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After several years in a kind of self-imposed exile from Hollywood, Gus Van Sant returns with magnificent queer political epic that definitely haas a whiff of the Oscar sweepstakes. The still boyish veteran shared his thoughts about the incredibly long taffy pull it took to get Harvey on the big screen
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This week at the movies be prepared to lose your heart to a valiant young queer lad who figures out how to turn the tables on his prep school's thuggish rugby boys, with a little assistance from Mr. William Shakespeare. Were the World Mine opens on a kind of mock execution of the sort most of us endured in PE class, the dreaded dodge ball game where all of a sudden it's open warfare on the gay boy. Just as our hero to be, Timothy (the radiantly handsome, multi-talented newcomer Tanner Cohen) is about to be smacked senseless and given a honey of a shiner, the movie freezes on the movie playing within Timothy's about to be battered noggin, a movie where he turns into Shakespeare's sly trickster, Puck, spreading a special kind of fairy dust that will turn everyone it touches into a lover of his own sex.
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In I Can't Think Straight two bright young women, whose families hail from different ends of the old British Empire find themselves sharing a wonderful bedroom romp. The next morning, Leyla, an Indian Muslim with literary ambitions, discovers that her girlfriend to be, the about to be married London situated Jordanian Palestinian Tala, is already experiencing one-night-stand remorse.
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Of all the many wild and wonderful characters immortalized in the legend of Harvey Milk, perhaps none has the iconic weight of Harvey's motorcycle-riding, #1 dyke, campaign manager and City Hall aide, the redoubtable Anne Kronenberg.
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In publicity chats for A Christmas Tale, writer/director Arnaud Desplechin explains that he's out to upend the clichés of the American holiday family film where we endure the boring parts in anticipation of a character spilling his guts. "The son waits to tell everyone he's gay, but come on, we've already figured that out." Instead Desplechin serves up a stew of cross-generational pratfalls (one character literally falls flat on his face in the gutter), suicidal impulses, bad genes, fatal diseases enlivened with bed-swapping and a Gallic disdain for civility or fidelity.
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It's official, The Boys in the Band has now entered the cannon of great queer art, complete with a Tony Kushner authorized Good Housekeeping seal of approval. That last line is no joke, incidentally, the author of Angels in America provides a witty and incisive testimonial to the proud queer lineage of Crowley's still astonishingly funny and cathartic snapshot or urban gay life just before the dawn of Stonewall.
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An Argentine-born, Texas-raised, Chinese-named director's first feature, Veronica Chen's Smokers Only tracks the misadventures of a pair of sexy hustlers who meet at a bank machine and carry on a bumpy affair across nighttime Buenos Aires. Reni (Cecilia Bengolea) is a peevish, bored club singer whose unorthodox approach to her vocals is starting to piss off her fellow band mates; Andres (Leo Brezicki/a co-star in the American financed, Argentine filmed erotic thriller Testosterone) is gorgeous rent boy (half the movie finds him naked to the waist) who takes pride in the price he commands from his randy male clients, some of whom he provocatively seduces at their ATM machines.
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The San Francisco cinema season concludes with the American Indian Film Festival (November 7^th through 12^th at Landmark's Embarcadero Cinema Center; November 13^th through 15^th at the Palace of Film Arts with additional native youth screenings at Theatre 39 at Pier 39). The 33^rd edition of the AIFF includes over 80 films with a mix of fiction features, documentaries, live and animated shorts and music videos.
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In Milk, director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black's powerful new agit-prop memoir of slain San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, two of Harvey's real life boyfriends – Scott Smith and Jack Lira – illustrate how hard it is to marry a movement god and be the good male wife.
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At some point in Matt Wolf's loving film memoir (opening at the Roxie) Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell -- devoted to the most talented musician/composer you've probably never heard of -- a friend describes the late genius, an ahead of his time synthesizer of serious experimental tunes and disco dance beats, as the inventor of his own genre: "Buddhist bubblegum." Arthur Russell was once caught by a childhood friend listening obsessively to a Jackson Browne record.
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In the ambitious French produced animated collection, Fears of the Dark, (opening Halloween) an afraid of his own shadow student traps a praying mantis like creature in a bedroom that doubles as science lab producing a decidedly disturbing chapter in his love life. The shy boy unwittingly takes the bed to college where one day he meets this incredibly hot and suspiciously available coed who becomes his live-in lover. Things go swimmingly until the young woman develops a mysterious bug bite, whereupon her behavior under goes a sea change. Suddenly the lover insists the student surrender his entire life to their affair.
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In the first and far more enjoyable half of a movie that bounces between a scrappy remake of George Steven's oil fields epic, Giant, and a curiously tentative take on Stanley Kubrick's dark comedy Dr. Strangelove, a black sheep son (Josh Brolin) from Midland, Texas rebels against his aristocrat, disapproving dad, screwing up in every way imaginable until one day, out of the blue he gets religion and vows to out shine poppy in the family business, which happens to involve running this little old country.
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It seems churlish to complain about a film as personal and beautifully mounted as photographer Steven Sebring's portrait of the seventies punk rocker Patti Smith. Drawn from a decade's worth of intimate, mostly black & white, footage covering Smith's return to the lower Manhattan stomping grounds of her meteoric, if short lived, career as the queen of punk, mid way through, Patti Smith Dream of Life starts to feel like an extended hipster fueled Coke commercial – "I'd like to give the world a poem" – with guest cameos by that great Beat ad firm: Ginsberg and Burroughs.
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Towards the end of Brokeback Mountain Anne Hathaway has some terrifyingly vivid moments as a spurned wife getting even with her dead husband's boyfriend. In the new Jonathan Demme film Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway upstages her kid sister's nuptials with the same scene stealing moxie that earned Betty Davis a library of biographies.
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In many ways a counter intuitive tale about the mysteries of becoming famous in America, Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon reveals the many improbable ways in which gay male porn stars helped father and advance the gay liberation movement. With witty interviews from porn industry insiders and celebrity Wrangler fans, Jeffrey Schwarz's immensely entertaining doc tells the wildly improbable tale of a little blonde boy who grew up to be a male porn star in order to please his Hollywood producer daddy. It's the story of little Jack Stillman, whose Beverly Hills family had shed its Jewish roots to become good media savvy Episcopalians.
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Before the opening credits, a young man suffers a panic attack aboard Gotham's legendary "A" train precisely at the moment the train's doors open at the Howard Beach/JFK Airport station. Instead of hopping his LA flight (where job, wife and infant daughter await) Mikey (Matt Boren mimes a deeply depressed John Belushi) scoots back to the vast womb like Lower Manhattan loft ruled by his Bohemian parents (playfully imagined by the director's own father and mother, Ken and Flo Jacobs).
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This Pandora's Box of truth telling, the 7^th San Francisco International Documentary Festival (Roxie & Shattuck Cinemas/October 17^th thru November 6^th), features the most unfiltered, uncensored, un-expurgated celluloid reality checks this side of premium cable TV.
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In Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist two New Jersey bridge 'n tunnel kids test each other's coolness quotient for a long night bouncing between stops on the Lower Manhattan club crawl in the front seat of a barely functioning foreign car that keeps being mistaken for a gypsy cab. In Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's best selling teen novel Nick and Norah pour out their reluctant romantic hearts in dueling monologues.
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If you're a little apprehensive about the fight to save same sex marriage in California, a superbly crafted new documentary (opening at The Roxie) provides some lessons on how queer folks can prevail when our rights are put to a vote.  Mike Roth and John Henning's exploration of the Massachusetts marriage battle zeros in on an action packed two-year chapter involving a titanic grass roots campaign to block an anti-gay marriage amendment to the state's constitution.
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My dear old dad's philosophy came rushing back on the closing night of our LGBT festival as I laughed helplessly through a smart, moving new family comedy that makes a lavender hand cream loving sissy boy the aggressor in a hockey beat down. Like its seventies predecessor, the feminist inspired critique of alpha males -- the unfortunately homophobic Paul Newman vehicle -- Slap Shot, the new queer friendly Breakfast with Scot (BWF) is fiendishly clever in drawing us into the high sticking, eye gouging, puck-in-your-face heart of the beast. In the fifties, enduring dad's manly crush on New York Ranger goalie Gump Worsley via his Hallicrafter radio, I missed hockey's enduring hold on the male animal: what doesn't come across on radio is that hockey is, first and foremost, a blood sport.
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Mishima: With its sumptuous and yet emotionally distancing aesthetics this may be the chilliest modern classic from a major filmmaker. George Lucas and Francis Coppola lent their names and bucks to Paul Schrader's examination of a philosophy cited for it rigorous beauty, while many note its raison d'etre for the Japanese war machine. If only Schrader had been willing to crack open Noble Prize candidate Mishima's bedroom door.
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The 31^st Mill Valley Film Festival (October 2^nd thru 12^th at the Sequoia, the 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael) overcomes pricey gas and soaring bridge tolls with a sizzling lineup of furious fiction and artful documentaries. There are tributes galore: Paul Schrader has his Japanese shot masterwork Mishima get a rare public screening along with his latest, Adam Resurrected, with Jeff Goldblum as a shape-shifting, sexually nimble Holocaust survivor; Sally Hawkins in a new Mike Leigh comedy; Sweden's Harriet Andersson appears with Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly; Hollywood heavyweight writer Eric Roth (Forest Gump/The Good Shepherd); and Alfre Woodard appears along with a closing night screening of Tim Disney's American Violet.
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In The Pool, a startlingly brilliant career move from fact to neo-realist fiction, Chris Smith provides a satire resistant take on a poor Indian hotel worker's diabolically sly bid to gain access to what he considers his beach town's most alluring jewel, a neglected swimming pool, hidden away on a private estate on the edge of the jungle.
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In Choke the ultimate mama's boy discovers to his chagrin that he's impotent when afforded an opportunity with the woman of his dreams, who, as it happens, is also his Alzheimer's-afflicted mom's psychiatric nurse. Based on a black comedy novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, Choke gets its title from a truly tasteless scam that Victor (Sam Rockwell) employs to conjure up the bread to pay for his mom's care.
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Like his octogenarian American rival Sydney Lumet, the pioneering Claude Chabrol specializes in elevating genre subjects, surprising audiences with carefully calculated collisions between badly flawed and horribly matched characters. In A Girl Cut in Two, rising star Ludivine Sagnier walks a fine line as a skimpily attired local TV weather girl, Gabrielle Snow, who incautiously juggles affairs with two impetuous rogues: Francois Berleand is suavely imperious as a jaded older writer, while Benoit Magimel steals scene after scene as a creepily compelling, emotionally childish, spoiled playboy heir.
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I don't know if déjà vu is the right term for what I experienced recently watching Alan Ball's very dark subversive comedy about the perilous misadventures of a thirteen-year-old Lebanese/American girl going through a kind of erotic boot camp in the deceptively bland suburbs of Houston on the eve of the first Gulf War.
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Watching the vivid new docu-drama about the 1999 anti-globalization protests, Battle in Seattle, I swear I heard a turtle loving, tree-hugging African-American protestor scream at a baton-wielding riot cop, "Get your knee off my neck – I'm not a masochist!" Re-jiggering my DVD screener I eventually re-heard the line as the psychologically less intriguing, "I'm not resisting."
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In the clever, psychologically nuanced new Scottish romantic caper Mister Foe, a sad mother obsessed teen feigns some truly creepy behavior in the service of discovering just who was responsible for the drowning death of his mom. When we first spy him Hallam Foe – an audacious bordering on adult role for British heartbreaker Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot/Undertow) – is dressed up in animal skins and lipstick, perched in a tree house watching his dad (Ciaran Hinds) and step mom get it on.
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I wish the dutiful Dorothy Fadiman had spent even more time than she does on the grotesque realities behind the chicanery she hints at but never quite nails to the wall in her cut and paste like documentary, Stealing America: Vote by Vote. This doc argues that the House of Bush may have engineered an even more insidious electoral slight-of-hand in the state of Ohio in 2004 than the swamps of Florida yielded in 2000.
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The previous time I glimpsed Matthew Goode on screen he was torturing a boy – a disabled boy, masterfully underplayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Scott Frank's underappreciated The Lookout. This time Goode gets to kiss the boy – the chameleon like Ben Whishaw as the moody alcoholic Lord Sebastian Flyte in a splendid new big screen production of Bridehead Revisited. The last time we chatted Goode had a wool cap pull down over his freshly shaved skull, a hairdo crafted for his tough talking American bank robber. Now having grown out his hair and permitted to speak in his own Exeter accent, he's happy to speculate on the love between Charles and Sebastian
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Milk: Directed by Gus Van Sant, this home grown Greek tragedy – the city hall assassinations of supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone -- is fueled by Lance Black's passionate, meticulously researched screenplay. For decades the desire to create a fictional template for the slain gay politician's achingly brief career has tempted, absorbed and ultimately frustrated an array of talents from Oliver Stone to Milk biography Randy Shilts, to Van Sant himself.
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One of the decade's most cliché shattering comedies, Chuck & Buck begins with the awkward reunion of two childhood fuck buddies. Chuck, a 27-year-old record mogul, returns home for the funeral of his old friend Buck's mother only to discover that Buck is behaving as if they were still both eleven-years-old.
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Painter Julian Schnabel serves up a deft blend of fact and fiction in his screen adaptation of Cuban poet/novelist Renaldo Arenas' frank expose of the persecution of gays in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution. Schnabel gets an expressive performance from the Spanish heart throb Javier Bardem as Arenas, reinventing the bio-pic genre to depict the rags to rags saga of a resolutely non-conformist writer, who managed to get only one of his eight novels published on his native island and who died of AIDS, in poverty in New York City.
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A big budget Hollywood film that doesn't cue its viewers on when or whether to laugh or cry is rare enough, an all-star film that mixes gay and straight characters like different candles on a cake without stereotyping or pandering is practically unheard of.
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French phenom Francois Ozon discovered a dark little play by the master of domestic Sturm und Drang, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written by a then 19-year-old Fassbinder, the play is an amazingly prophetic look at the Svengali-like lover the adult Fassbinder would become.
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In their visually and emotionally evocative new film, Chris & Don: A Love Story, first time filmmakers Guido Santi and Tina Mascara plunk us down inside the life Isherwood would find when in October, 1952 the forty-eight-year-old expatriate novelist spied a slender eighteen-year-old boy from Glendale on a sexually active Southern California beach. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy would spend the next thirty-four years living out a love story that surpasses most fairy tales in its improbability and sheer romantic luster.
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Argentine writer/director Alexis Dos Santos creates a memorable adolescent protagonist: Lucas (the gorgeous, lithe, frighteningly articulate Nahuel Perez Biscayart) proclaims himself to be an orphan, even though both his parents are living – in a messy separation fueled by his dad's womanizing. Lucas is caught between creating poetic lyrics for the rock band he fronts with Nacho (butch soccer boy Nahuel Viale) and with juggling his burgeoning interest in Nacho and their shared girlfriend, Andrea (Ines Efron).
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Ever so often I'm way off base about a film and a DVD release allows me to correct a blatant miscarriage of justice. At first glance Sam Zalutsky's decidedly offbeat thriller – kicking off with hunks in bed and ending somewhere inside a queer Twilight Zone -- seemed an ambitious psycho mind fuck that tails off without resolution. On second glance Zalutsky's puzzle box -- detailing how one man's innocent obsession for another is trumped by far more sinister Venus flytrap sprung by a seeming busybody -- is a minor classic deserving of mention in the same sentence as Roman Polanski's The Tenant.
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The Swedish born Casper Andreas' frothy first film is as deceptive as it is entertaining. Americans used to the right wing propaganda that all Scandinavians are sex-crazed hedonistic socialists may be surprised at the conservative roots of a culture that has played so huge a role in leavening our own Puritanical heritage.
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In this age of cheap irony how many filmmakers will risk ridicule by trying to get us to cry over something as out of fashion as a crisis of faith? Antonio Bird's 1994 heartfelt if seriocomic undressing of a guilt-riddled young priest and his shacking up with his housekeeper older mentor – as the men cope with all measure of carnal indulgence in a sooty Liverpool diocese – feels even more spot on since the American Catholic Church's meltdown over wayward priests.
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Happy birthday! This year Gregg Araki's "New Queer Cinema" two lovers on a killing spree fable, The Living End, turns sixteen, but only in the sense that British auteur Ken Loach meant in his 2002 Scottish gang rumble should this be consider a sweet sixteen.
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In act one of The Good Shepherd, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is decked out as the lovely Miss Buttercup in a college production of HMS Pinafore when he gets a brazen proposition backstage that one-ups even the facile imaginations of Gilbert and Sullivan. It's the late 1930's and young Wilson, a poetry major at Yale, is invited to join the school's most infamous secret society – Skull and Bones – a group whose members carry their rituals and loyalties to the grave, members who include the elite players in our government: both John Kerry and George W. Bush are old Skull and Bones boys.
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In what may constitute a gay film first the lover of a successful Chicago architect, Bobby Riley, meets his previously closeted partner's brothers at a popular sausage bar, The Weiner Circle. In a scene that captures the zany charm of a film that resembles the pilot for an HBO sitcom, the lover, Andy (Mad TV's wonderfully deadpan Michael McDonald) chats with Bobby's youngest brother Luke (the droll mini-hunk Nathan Fillion) about Andy's claims on Bobby's sausage while another brother fetches their orders.
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It's hard to discuss a classic – a movie that's so seamlessly good that it appears to have beamed down from that other happier planet where we keep all our bad habits, realize our dreams and when we're bored simply hit rewind. The love affair between Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) and Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charbonneau) is cradled in a long ago Reno, Nevada where women and men smoke, and gamble, and f**k, and get on each other's nerves, and then lay back and slurp down sugary Coca Colas in those perfect little six and a half ounce green bottles.
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Jan (Busch in his first male screen role sports a ponytail and an odd Danish accent) answers an ad to help a dying woman (Polly Bergen) spend her last summer at the shore, in the company of her precocious grandson Gil (an incendiary screen debut by the hyper androgynous P.J. Verhoest). Gil is a bundle of annoying quirks – he badgers granny to watch Gone With the Wind, while refusing her wish that he take swimming lessons at the local pool. Jan approaches the boy with tough love but gradually we see him trying to draw out the best in an artistically precocious child without confirming his propensity for gender clichés. Finally and very reluctantly Gil accepts Jan as his swimming guru and ultimately, quite miraculously, navigates the pool with a panache that owes a debt to Esther Williams.
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One of those rare indie film Cinderella stories where a promising queer short actually grows up to be a nifty romantic comedy, The Coffee Date DVD special features include a deleted scenes section highlighting silly moments between straight actor Jonathan Bray and gay actor Wilson Cruz.
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Are there any gay surfers? Ed Aldridge says there's him and about two or three other blokes. Aldridge should know having spent the better part of a year scouring Australia to find enough openly queer board jockeys to populate his hilarious account of an adolescent struggling to come out (to himself) and exit a randy little island community just off-shore from Sydney. Aldridge's jocular commentary provides answers to such questions as why so many sixteen-year-old straight identified surfer boys were willing to be gay for precious little pay, why there are so few surfing scenes in the movie and finally why so much bloody tea pouring?
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Of all the cinematic buried treasures that have gotten lost in the low budget film of the week shuffle at the multiplex the fate of none is more perplexing and sad than that of The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros. Auraeus Solito's heartfelt tale of the tender, provocative, if thoroughly chaste romance that unfolds between a nelly boy and a rookie cop in a Manila slum is a keenly observed coming of age story that manages to tell a communal story too in a cheeky style reminiscent of My Beautiful Laundrette, while nimbly miming beats from a classic international thriller, The Third Man.
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The DVD release of Jenni Olson's splendid The Joy of Life mini feature is packaged with a lovely appetizer: three early short films – Meep! Meep! – Blue Diary and Sometimes –illustrating how Olson developed her talent for extremely short form storytelling. The DVD package also includes a guide to The Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier campaign.
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This collection from Wolfe Video spotlights quirky, misdirected, unrequited and just plain oddly expressed romance between strong willed females. Four of the six stories demonstrate an especially capable command of the short film format to give us real movies in miniature, stories that are over before we're ready to part with their often diabolically conflicted characters.
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This four-disc set from Picture This Video will rekindle memories of afternoons and nights gulping down boy shorts at The Castro. The twenty-five films, divided into thematic programs, are given quality transfers and on the later two discs informative filmmaker interviews. The DVD features are very user friendly allowing watching or dispensing with MTV style pretty boy hosts, as well as English subtitles for English language films, assisting not only the deaf but also serious viewers who cherish getting a film's text exactly right.
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Hands down the gay comedy riot of the year, the folks at TLA Releasing have given Todd Stephen's Another Gay Movie a deluxe DVD package that should make it a champion stocking stuffer. Fresh from a successful theatrical run where it wowed audiences in sixteen cities, Another Gay Movie is that rare piece of pop art that stakes equal claims on the loins, the brain and the heart. Seeking commercial vindication after the mishandling of his second feature, Gypsy 83, Stephens took aim at the hetero teen champ, American Pie, and if anything did it one better by providing a lovely cast who are in turns saucy, silly and sexy while exuding the rare chemistry of a quartet of guys who seem to genuinely like each other.
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The Mysterious Skin DVD, handsomely adorned by the film's striking poster art of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as hungry rent boy on the prowl, starts off with a gorgeous transfer of Steve Gainer's totally convincing cinematography of Southern California standing in for Scott Heim's Kansas of the late eighties and early nineties. Thank god they didn't have to go to Canada! The director/actors' commentary track is a bit of a mixed bag. While director Araki gives a convincing explanation of his use of subjective point of view - having the actors, especially the young child performers, address their toughest emotional scenes directly to the camera - the chat between Araki and his two leads meanders at times - they make the mistake of thanking too many colleagues and the joke that "this is my favorite scene" in the movie wears rather thin. An accompanying feature -- an offbeat reading from their own well thumbed copies of the novel by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet is oddly engaging and does give film fans a realistic take at how indie stars appear when they're not shooting a film and are left to their own devices when it comes to hair styles and costumes.
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In 1994 Michael Cuesta, a working still photographer in the cutthroat New York ad world, started doodling on a idea he hoped might be the springboard for his first feature film. Drawing on his Long Island boyhood, Cuesta imagined the fate of a fifteen year kid who becomes a virtual orphan while still living in the lap of suburban luxury. Howie's mother has been killed in a crash at Exit 52 of the Long Island Expressway, a monster highway that snakes the length of the island, and the boy now lives with his increasingly distracted contractor dad, Marty. When Marty isn't banging his girlfriend he's up to his elbows in a messy legal case that has the FBI on his trail.
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A film that derives it title from Milton's Paradise Lost promises a bumpy ride. John Huckert's debut feature Hard begins when Kevin, a red haired dewy eyed little lamb of a boy-man from Ohio, climbs into the shotgun seat of an SUV driven by a guy who calls himself "Jack." We learn that the vehicle was stolen, the identity appropriated from its possibly dismembered owner. Jack is a cool operator with the hard scrabbled country good looks of The Marlboro Man, the inner demons of Robert Mitchum's vengeful preacher in Night of the Hunter, and the audacious seductive charm of Robert Walker's cool psychopathic stalker in Strangers On A Train. Jack (Malcolm Moorman) is the devil in denim, a perfect storm of manly good looks who sweet talks his victims out of their clothes, their flesh and perhaps even their souls. Jack is, in short, the gay screen villain we all knew would show up some day. He's no stereotype. Ninety-eight percent of us would probably jump as eagerly as young Kevin into Jack's front seat.
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