Halfway into the new pop tart cute Michael Cera vehicle, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, our intrepid slacker Romeo waltzes into the hyper campy pad he shares with his gay roommate, Wallace Wells, only to discover the acid tongued Wells going down on a boy tart. “Oh, you may just have seen a guy’s junk. And he’s very sorry.” The author of this sassy line, the sublimely insolent, scene stealing Kieran Culkin has been waiting a long time to grab his proper share of the spotlight – the years he spent playing second fiddle to older bro Macaulay, the failure of his awesome Salinger homage, Igby Goes Down, to grab the proper critical respect, likewise the tepid response to his furious, two fisted angry son who tears into Alec Baldwin’s bastard dad in last year’s underappreciated Lymelife.
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In Jonathan Ames' 1998 novel of manners The Extra Man, a young New Jersey private school teacher, Louis Ives, is fired when the school's uptight principal catches him posing with a bra over his street clothes in the faculty lounge. Embarrassed, in fact deeply humiliated, Louis is also freed to seek a different life across the river in sophisticated Manhattan, where he believes a young man who patterns himself after a character out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel may find his true calling. What Louis actually finds is a grubby job in the marketing department of an environmental magazine, and an even grubbier life as the roommate of an acerbically opinionated older bachelor, failed playwright Henry Harrison, who plies a kind of living as an escort for terribly old, terribly rich women.
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Director Steve Buscemi’s taut, no bull shit handling of a skinny young pot dealer’s struggle to avoid being a punk in a tough state prison cellblock is must viewing for a queer audience eager to get a non phobic treatment of the dicey issues of men abusing men behind bars.
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In the opening sequence of a new Swedish gay parenting film that deserves the same mainstream accolades being accorded The Kids Are All Right, a seemingly perfect queer couple, Sven and Goran, are cuddling in front of their bedroom window as below them hetero couples – the kind who in less enlightened times would be dismissed as “breeders” – are gathering the kinder during the closing moments of an outdoor barbeque sponsored by the neighborhood watch association.
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While it would be a little off the mark to call this long delayed first English language thriller from Spanish master Alex de la Iglesia the thinking person’s Inception, in truth this brazenly smart talky adaptation of Guillermo Martinez’s novel allows two brilliant actors – the mesmerizing and still cheeky John Hurt and Hobbit boy Elijah Wood – to fight and flirt through a jigsaw puzzle plot that violates a slew of American taboos, including the fiery crash of a busload of developmentally challenged kids in order to harvest their organs.
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It may be the smallest festival we tackle this year but don’t for a minute think that The Sausalito Film Festival (August 13 through 15^th at Cavallo Point, an eco-resort located at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge) is in any way lacking in juicy content. For my taste an-off beat fiction feature, Hello Lonesome – Adam Reid’s quirky tale of how six hard to please loners learn to partner up tops the list at this predominately doc inclined three-day gathering. Also Bay Area culture buffs will love Andrew Thomas and Toby Gleason’s The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi, with its fascinating vintage footage of the late jazz king, shot by Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason.
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Life During Wartime is a beautifully nuanced exploration about the limits of grief, the possibilities of redemption and forgiveness and a brilliant counter argument to the traditional American belief that one is always entitled to and capable of having a fresh start in a new place where no one even suspects your terrible secrets.
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From now through Labor Day the Castro does what it does best: showcase an awesome variety of contemporary and classic cinema. Beginning with a tribute to Dennis Hopper (Blue Velvet, River’s Edge/August 5^th; Rebel without a Cause, Hoosiers/August 6^th; and Giant/August 8^th ) continuing with a modern queer classic H.P. Mendoza’s musical Fruitfly (August 11-12) featuring the spectacular restoration of the great silent classic Metropolis (with new discovered footage/August 13-15), taking time out for a modern comedy double feature: Greenberg and Please Give and then wrapping with a nine day spectacular series: Blonde Bombshells (August 27 through September 4).
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“After all, I’m an asshole.”
A sentence that signals a revolution: for those who believe the spirit of the sixties isn’t conjured until Jack Kennedy is shot in Dallas, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (or Out of Breath) puts a rakish, brazenly insolent French petty hoodlum on a crime spree that in a breezy ninety minutes overthrows every stuffy rule holding back the new cinema: to paraphrase a contemporary critic: “where pretentious youth overthrow an even more pretentious establishment.”
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In Chinese director Lo Ye’s torrid new romance we are abruptly introduced to two young men driving through the rain; the guys stop to piss in a river; they push each other around on a small bridge like frisky schoolboys; before we can get our bearings the two are making rough passionate love in a dark room with dirty sheets.
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The Festival plays at multiple Bay Area venues from our beloved Castro Theatre (July 24^th thru 29^th), at the RODA Theatre in Berkeley (July 31^st thru August 3^rd), at the Cinearts in Palo Alto (July 31^st thru August 3^rd) at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center (August 7-8) and Smith Rafael Film Center (August 7^th through 9^th).
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In Sally Potter’s ambitious 1992 production of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (now enjoying a limited re-release) Tilda Swinton inhabits a title character whose androgynous beauty as a fawn like boy so charms an aging Queen Elizabeth I -- a real casting coup as the late, incomparable Quentin Crisp truly nails the gender divide embodied by the great queen -- that the monarch grants him immortality, “Do not fade, Orlando, do not grow old!”
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Beginning with a young man’s curiosity about the identity of his birth dad after jealously witnessing his best friend roughhousing with his live in pop, that young man, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) goads his older sister, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) to call Paul (Mark Ruffalo) the still eligible bachelor free-spirit who a generation ago made the almost whimsical decision to contribute to a sperm bank rather than a blood bank.
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1969: it was a hell-of-a year! Let’s see: Richard Nixon gets possession of the atomic football and ratchets up the war in Vietnam prompting an escalating series of demonstrations including the first candlelight vigils; the Woodstock Music and Art Fair succeeded and failed on such a colossal scale that for three mad days it was New York’s second largest city; acid rock, most particularly trippy midnight shows by the Jefferson Airplane,  was showcased weekly at Manhattan’s Fillmore East; what was possibly the worst professional baseball team ever: “the amazing” New York Mets won the world series; man walked on the moon, an event that is probably the most emblematic for filmmakers trying to capture the essence of that year; and, oh yes, thousands of gay men and women from every possible spectrum on the gender scale rebelled, rioted and taunted New York’s finest for six days in and around the Stonewall Inn in Sheridan Square.
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San Francisco’s feisty homegrown horror fest returns with three queer based if not necessarily queer positive bashes that should please both those thirsting for off-beat blood sports and decidedly weird film energy. Thirty-two film programs play the Roxie Cinema and the Viz Theatre (July 8^th thru 29^th) while a summer music fest of hot indie bands unfolds (July 9^th thru 13^th) at the Bottom of the Hill and The Parkside.
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What the Castro does best: Hollywood Does Hollywood (through Friday, July 9^th) with 19 features: all programs double features except for A Star Is Born (Sunday, July 4^th)
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Even another gritty, filthy behaving man/boy from the brilliant Casey Affleck can’t save this over-the-top, confusing and at times wretchedly exploitive melodrama from British director Michael Winterbottom. Based on a probably unfilmable novel from legendary tough guy pulp novelist Jim Thompson, Killer is told from the point of view of a small town Texas lawman, Lou Ford, who is having a very ripe affair with town madam, Joyce (Jessica Alba) while deferring marriage plans with girlfriend Amy (Kate Hudson).
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Howl: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman take some artistic risks and liberties as they embed us inside the mind of a mad homo poet, the twenty-nine-year-old Allen Ginsberg – played with a saucy élan by quick change artist James Franco, a casting choice that the late poet -- who liked to recall himself as a cute boy – would most definitely have given a hearty ommmm to.
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Lost in the Crowd: In Susi Graf’s beautifully lensed, heartbreakingly candid portrait of a handful of queer kid runaways, barely making it on the streets of Manhattan, a trans identified biological boy from Utah stands out. A self-confessed “freak,” who traded the sheltered life of a rich sissy kid for the hand-to-mouth existence of part-time sex worker, who alternates tricks with episodes of petty theft, Kimy is remarkably grounded and brutally honest.
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Deep Red: Highlighting the depth of terrific Jewish and specifically Israeli material at Frameline 34, Eddie Tapero’s morally challenging short finds two lovely Tel Aviv citizens building their honeymoon nest egg – they’re saving up to start a new life together in Berlin – their fast buck scheme is to have the curly haired, doe-eyed Gur (Yedidia Vital) perform as a high priced S/M call boy for horny old men, while boyfriend Yuval (Oshri Sahar) strips their flats of plasma screens and computers.
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Seldom has any edition of America’s favorite LGBT Film Festival matched Frameline 34 for the shear volume and variety of stories on thwarted love. From pre-Victorian ladies looking to marry within their gender while evading the brutal wages of primogeniture (The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (Castro/Opening night), to the absurdist two step involved in fulfilling lustful thoughts in a Jerusalem kosher butcher shop (Eyes Wide Open (Victoria/6-22), to the tribulations of a highly decorated female officer (A Marine Story (Castro/6-19) this year (June 17 through 27), there’s literally a story for every queer taste in venues from the Castro Theatre, the Roxie Cinema, the Victoria Theatre to Berkeley’s Rialto Cinemas Elmwood.
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>Perhaps the saddest of Frameline 34’s must see docs, Reed Cowan’s thorough autopsy of the role of Mormon elders in forging a religious coalition to overturn same-sex marriage in California, spends its first hour making the case that Mormon dollars accounted for as much as 70 percent of the Prop 8 campaign war chest, and as one out male, former Mormon Prop 8 opponent explains, we’re talking big bucks here, much of it bundled directly from Mormon congregations in Utah.
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Frameline continues to join the Sundance and Mill Valley festivals in showcasing the art of the short subject. Here are some suggestions from programs playing through Wednesday, June 23^rd.
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There’s one thing that survivors of weird families share: the ability to assess the emotional honesty of a story gleaned from within the bunker. Most sad sack family tales round up the usual suspects: cruel, emotionally or physically abusive, or merely absent dads. Occasionally there’s an author who’ll screw up the courage to assert that mom was a truly awful human being or at the very least an emotionally manipulative stinker.
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A queer activist buddy asked if I could take him to catch the new religious family melodrama, Holy Rollers, convinced by its somewhat misleading title that this might be another brand of the delicious fruit of Christians behaving badly.

Actually the forbidden fruit Kevin Asch’s film (screenplay by Antonio Macia) is seeking is the sweet/sour tang of secular party down freedoms tasted by a young rabbinical student (Jesse Eisenberg) in the lost world of pre-9/11 New York.
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If you want a hint at just how funny the new documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is consider some of the juicy tidbits that did not make it into Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s hilarious and harrowing look at female comedy’s original come back kid. That a twenty-something Joan notched an early stage role playing opposite an even younger Barbra Streisand – in one of her many autobiographies Rivers claims her character was a lesbian with a crush on Streisand’s character (a claim rebutted by the play’s author); that Rivers once sued a female impersonator for using some of her comedy routines in his Vegas act; that in 2009 Rivers served as a “pink carpet presenter” for the broadcast of Sydney’s annual gay Mardi Gras parade. Oy vey!
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A bold, acutely observed new family comedy from Nicole Holofcener (Friends with Money) will probably hit more than your funny bone if you, like me, have a craving for those perverse shameful little private moments that can sometimes cut to the core of a civilization. With Please Give Holofcener reaffirms her membership, along with Tamara Jenkins (The Slums of Beverly Hills/The Savages), in a small band of female comedy directors doing all they can to squeeze out a film or two a decade, but what films!
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In The Good Heart, the heroes of a most unlikely buddy movie bond in a hospital intensive care unit – Lucas, whose pale countenance and wafer thin body give him the aura of a religious fanatic as envisioned by a New Yorker cartoonist, is on suicide watch after being discovered sleeping in a box with a tiny kitten – Jacques – in the ICU after his fifth heart attack – sees the boy as the perfect foil for breaking hospital rules as he waits on the organ donor list. “Hey, could you do me a favor and disable the smoke detector?”
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Sitting down with Logan and Noah Miller – two insanely talented young men whose personal story overcoming poverty, an alcoholic dad and rejection in their chosen profession (professional baseball) can easily overshadow their singular achievements: a passionate, very old fashioned movie (Touching Home) about not giving up on their dad, and a darkly funny, extremely astute book about film and life (Either You’re In or You’re In the Way) – you struck by two things, one: they’re twins who love each other more than anything else in the world and two: they don’t appear in the least way neurotic.
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In this unsettling time when the only film about our eternal state of war that could command a Best Picture Oscar is one whose message is buried deeply inside the rituals of an adrenaline junkie bomb disposal officer (The Hurt Locker), Shout Pictures is releasing a disturbing Vietnam era chamber piece which has the definite potential to scare the horses, if not burn down the stables on the subject of gays in the military.
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The 53^rd San Francisco International Film Festival puts an unexpected emphasis on live stage shows and provides its usual array of world premiers and celebrity tributes. Among the most appealing on paper is the conversation with Oscar winner T Bone Burnett (Kabuki 4-24), a state of cinema address from longtime Lucas/Coppola collaborator Walter Murch (Kabuki 4-25) – harder to assess: A Drunken Evening with Derek Waters (Kabuki 4-26) or Utopia in Four Movements (Kabuki 4-25).
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“Not everyone digs underground movies, but those who do can dig them here.” This insidiously backhanded compliment could easily serve as an epitaph to a pair of Bronx born twin brothers, but as you’ll quickly discover watching Jennifer M. Kroot’s incisive, humane and at times hilarious portrait of George and Mike Kuchar, these guys are still very much alive and kicking and making almost indescribably crazy movies. Kroot’s It Came From Kuchar – with witty and wise guest star appearances from Kuchar fans John Waters, Atom Egoyan, Buck Henry and B. Ruby Rich – is virtually a 90 minute seminar on American filmmakers who defy easy labels.
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That Andrea Martin (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) gets a hefty share of the best lines in the observant, touchingly personal new relationship comedy Breaking Upwards is both a sign that the filmmakers were running a hot hand and that New York City is truly back as the home to some of the planet’s most neurotic underachievers, at least in the running off the tracks romance division.
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“I may have breasts and a cunt, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything in the world.” This saucy comment from Su Friedrich, one of my favorite road movie directors, opens Joan Braderman’s engaging portrait of a generation of feminists who launched what is generally regarded as the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. The Heretics specifically refers to a generation that found sisterhood along with cheap rent in lower Manhattan during the feisty early Seventies when as one survivor notes virtually anything seemed possible in the world of progressive women. The heretics of this film also comprise the Heresies collective which between 1977 and 1992 put out twenty-seven issues of Heresies a trailblazing feminist journal on art and politics.
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Towards the climax of Don Hahn and Peter Schneider’s candid, informative and quite unexpectedly moving account of the rise and fall and rise again of a great American institution some of us quite literally grew up regarding as “the Magic Kingdom,” a sublimely talented artist dies. Howard Ashman was only forty when he succumbed to complications from AIDS and as Hahn explains the former Broadway composer had by that time become a highly valued member of a very elite group who were about to bring Walt Disney Studios its greatest triumph since the death of “Uncle Walt.”
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In the zany new Italian-American family comedy, City Island, the Rizzo clan is having one of their typical polite meals featuring a sister/brother insult face-off. Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) and Vince, Jr. (Ezra Miller) trade adlibbed barbs before screen mom, Joyce (Julianna Margulies) steps into referee. The humor gets a major boost from Miller’s frenetic body language, jokingly pointing a fork at his sister all the while making silly faces and ingesting a huge sausage.
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In a mostly riveting operatic melodrama – that bids to be a minor key companion piece to Bertolucci’s The Conformist – Bellocchio gives us a mesmerizing, sweaty Duce, the ferociously virile Filippo Timi (with hair and raging hormones), who is a passionate Socialist, a motor mouth orator for whom every rally is a virtual duel to the death – the first act of Vincere (loosely translated as Win) is a frenzied reenactment of European civilization’s devolution from atrophied chivalry to the degenerate rhetoric of mass hypnosis.
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In the high stakes sexual melodrama, Chloe, a young woman who makes a very handsome income from Toronto’s carriage trade by bartering her striking bone structure, tasteful fashion sense, gift for gab and erotic availability meets up with an uptight control freak gynecologist in a bar that is the last word in icy intimacy. Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) doesn’t know what to make of this client, Catherine (Julianne Moore).
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This year the Sundance Film Festival has a new programmer (John Cooper) and a fresh vow of cinema relevance. We’ll see about that but one thing’s for sure the state of Sundance, artistically and financially, has a hell of a lot to do with the treats that will sustain art house maniacs. What follows are my hunches as to what may make it out of Park City and on to screens from forty feet to four inches.
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This lushly filmed Russian River love story will linger with lonely-hearts of all persuasions. Everett -- the risibly fussy and preternaturally boyish Brendan Bradley: in the film his character is aptly described as “twelve going on forty” -- is a young guy trapped in a suffocating marriage to the more than slightly anal Miles (Tad Coughenour).
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In Pedro: The True Story of Pedro Zamora, a twenty-two-year-old intensely charismatic, Cuban born AIDS activist learns just how sick he really is during a doctor’s appointment. Unlike most young men getting really bad news Pedro’s dilemma is complicated by the fact that cameras are rolling.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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