THEGAYUK

Author: Roger Walker-Dack

  • FILM REVIEW | The Last Match

    ★★★★ | The Last Match

    It’s still very tough and even quite dangerous being gay in some places, none more so than in the oppressive machismo society of Cuba. So when two male teenage best friends acknowledge their attraction to each other, life starts to get very complicated for them, and we have the sense from the outset that it cannot possibly end well at all.

    Yosvani and Rey both play football every day on a scrap of land in the midst of a poor slum neighbourhood in Havana. Yosvani lives with his fiance and her unscrupulous black-marketeer father in a comfortable middle-class apartment. Rey, on the other hand, lives in a cramped shanty-like two room dump with his wife, their baby, and Theresa his shrill and demanding mother-in-law. It is she who actively encourages the young man to prostitute himself with male tourists willing to pay for a quickie or a whole night of passion.

    With no hope of anything approaching a real job on the horizon, he is happy to oblige but draws the line at doing anything he considers is ‘gay’. Which actually seems to be very little when we see him in action enjoying himself giving his all to Juan a handsome visiting Spaniard

    Rey’s few encounters with Juan make him overly confident and he ends up spending more money than he can afford to buy black-market shirts and sneakers from Yosvani’s father-in-law. He perpetually lives more than precariously on the edge and when he is flat broke he pawns Theresa’s few possessions which results in more anger from her until he redeems them again after he has turned another ‘trick’.

    It’s obvious from the word go that Yosvani and Rey much prefer hanging out on the soccer pitch together than spending any time at all with their respective partners. One night after the two of them have been on a drinking binge they lose their inhibitions and hesitatingly kiss each other and somewhat surprise themselves how much they like it. They like having sex together even more, to such an extent that they cannot get enough of each other. However, because of their home situations, they have to keep this budding relationship very much on the down low and they manage to do just this until one-day Yosvani’s father-in-law gets the wind of what is going on.

    It’s at about the same time that Rey suddenly gets a lucky break when a Scout offers him a chance to train to become a professional soccer player. This is another reason not to go public with their love affair but it’s actually too late as they are already at the point of no return. And then just as we had supposed, the inevitable ending is both tragic and sad.

    Directed and co-written by Spanish filmmaker Antonio Hens (‘Clandestinos’) this heartbreaking well-crafted wee drama is completely engaging as if so accurately portrays the price that young men have to pay when they discover their sexuality in such an unaccepting and intolerant culture. The hypocrisy that it is acceptable as a means to an end as long as you don’t enjoy it, makes this sad tale even more poignant.

    Hen’s young inexperienced lead actors did a fine and convincing job, particularly Reinier Díaz who nailed the character of Rey so perfectly. And less this should put you off going to Cuba, I should tell you that it was all filmed in Puerto Rico!

  • Obituary: Dora Bryan

    The death of veteran actress Dora Bryan has been announced this week at the grand old age of 91 years old.

    This star of stage, screen and radio specialised in playing scatter-brained blondes and even though they were often small parts, she always managed to steal the scene.

    Her long and varied career saw her working alongside some of the greats in British entertainment. She was on Hancock’s Half Hour on radio, co-starred in British classic movies such as The Great St Trinians Train Robbery, and Carry On Sergeant appeared in numerous TV shows including The Last of The Summer Wine and Victoria Wood’s Dinner Ladies and she starred in the West End in shows like ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’.

    There was a serious side to her acting too and in 1962 she won a BAFTA Best Actress Award for her role in Tony Richardson’s gritty film A Taste Of Honey.

    To gay men, she was the complete epitome of camp and managed to be as outrageous as she could in all the great comic roles that came her way. None so more when towards the end of her career she played go to June Whitfield’s best friend in the Jennifer Saunders Absolutely Fabulous a role, which earned her another BAFTA Best Actress Nomination.

    This tiny woman was in her way, a legend, an Icon and a true star in the old-fashioned sense of the word. The world will be a sadder place now that she has gone.

  • Top 10 Best Israeli Gay Movies

    10 BEST ISRAELI GAY MOVIES (that even includes some which don’t end in tragedy!) (more…)

  • FILM REVIEW | Five Dances

    ★★★★ | Five Dances

    Alan Brown’s latest movie has one of the most accurate titles that pulls no punches and is exactly what it promises i.e five dances.

    Held together by the strands of a wisp of a tenuous plot, it is however still a sweet and sensual coming-out-tale thanks to the presence of a charming young dancer who proves he is quite a mean actor too, despite his inexperience.

    Four dancers and a choreographer are in a Manhattan studio learning a new piece of contemporary dance to perform at the opening night of a Festival. Amongst their number is naive 18 year old Chip who is fresh off the bus from Kansas having won a scholarship to study with the Joffry Ballet. The others assume that his parents back in the Midwest must be proud of him, but the reality is that his divorced alcoholic mother is about to be evicted so makes daily menacing phone calls to her only son.

    Chip is homeless so when Cathy one of the other dancers discovers this, she takes pity on him and takes him home and lets him sleep on his couch. Theo another of the quartet takes another type of interest in the newbie and late one night makes a pass at him. A totally confused (and virginal) Chip runs off but not for long as next night he is back and this time encouraging Theo to go all the way.

    That’s essentially it in terms of plot, but this one after all is all about the dancing, and in particular young Chip learning how to really express himself through movement. The choreography by Jonah Bokaer is exhilarating and so beautifully photographed to accentuate every graceful move, and it’s capped by a sensuous soundtrack by singer/songwriter Scott Matthew.

    Brown is quite the master at bringing every sinew of sexuality into stories of young love into his movies as he did so wonderfully well in ‘Private Romeo’. Here when Chip and Theo are making love it mirrors the dancing in terms of its intimacy and is sensuous rather than explicit. The whole cast dance like angels and young Ryan Steele as Chip maintains that purity and innocence when in the very sparse script he so cutely conveys his turmoil coming to terms with both his threatening mother and the fact that he now has his first ever boyfriend.

    You don’t have to be a contemporary dance fan to love this one, but if you are, it does help.

  • INTERVIEW | Chris Mason-Johnson, Director And Writer of Test

    Chris Mason Johnson’s new movie TEST (that we reviewed in THEGAYUK on June 23rd) finally opened in the UK on July 14th on VOD & the DVD will be available on July 28th and is set to repeat its Stateside smash success over here.

    It is the tender and heartbreaking story of Frankie a young male dancer in 1985, which had to deal with the early onslaught of the AIDS epidemic and see if he could find the resolve to take the first ever HIV Test that had just become available. It’s a stunning tale, powerfully told and will undoubtedly be on our list of Top Ten Movies of 2014.

    Director/writer Chris Mason Johnson took time out of his busy schedule to sit down with our movie critic Roger Walker-Dack to give this EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW to THEGAYUK.

    RWD: About a decade ago there were some tasteless and opportunistic gay movies that made AIDS another clichéd plot element, do you think the recent outpouring of movies on the epidemic are more responsible and relevant?
    CJM: It’s a hard subject to tackle. Sometimes it takes a culture a while to process and digest so maybe it’s time for people who experienced the sheer horror of it all and now have something relevant to say creatively to have their say.

    RWD: Did raising the finance through Kickstarter give you a freer hand creatively?
    CMJ: (laughing) You say that as if I had the luxury of being offered studio funding! Both of my movies were truly independent. Although you have much less money and a smaller audience as you don’t have enough funds to market it properly, the trade-off is that you have total creative freedom. What Kickstarter did give me was connections to an audience in a very personal way as many of the donors, whether they were giving $10 or $500, wrote to tell me why the subject mattered to them so much.

    RWD: You had such high production values in your film that the finished product is so good that it’s hard to believe you did it all on a shoestring.
    CMJ: Thank you. I am a filmmaker that really cares about image and the camerawork whereas a lot of other directors are just interested in the script and the acting, and see the camera as a means to an end. I am very much interested in the language of cinema and I try to write the script and film in that way.

    RWD: Congratulations on your truly wonderful new movie, We at The Gay UK repeated the well-deserved honour you got from the NY Times who very happily gave it a very rare 5 Stars. Setting this in a very crucial and tough moment in gay history in the context of this contemporary dance troupe was a major element in why this film succeeded on so many levels. Can you tell us about how your own background as an ex-dancer led you to making this decision, and how it affected the film?
    CMJ. Although I was a teenager when this all occurred I drew a lot through autobiography and what was happening to people close to me. As an ex-dancer, one of my pet peeves was that male dancers hadn’t been represented well in movies at all. They are either ultra straight or they are outrageously gay and something of a joke. I’ve never seen a male ballet dancer especially taken seriously in a movie.

    I wanted to tell the story of a group of young frightened men, well one in particular, that didn’t have a lot of language to deal with. Most of the movies dealing with AIDS up to now have been mainly deathbed stories, and I didn’t want to do another one of those. Drama is usually played out by dialogue and is talk, talk, talk, and my experience as a very young teenager in the early epidemic was that we didn’t say a word about it, as we were too petrified. Talking about it would make it real. So by using dance as a metaphor to tell this story, I could use all the facets of the body particularly, the vulnerability and the sensuality. I could represent that all through the image of dance without having the characters talk about it.

    RWD. One of your characters in your first movie in The New Twenty was also HIV +, and now after this latest movie, I am wondering how important that aspect of his character was to you.
    CMJ: It’s very important. To any gay man in their 30s and up, this was such a critical moment in our lives, with the fear and urgency of so much ignorance, fear and paranoia, it just left an indelible mark on who we are. Now with recent alarming rises in infection rates today, it’s even more important to remember these things.

    RWD: Your two lead actors were as hot as hell! And you took a major leap of faith in casting SCOTT MARLOWE a non-actor as Frankie, which really paid off. Can you talk us through your casting process?
    CMJ: I knew they had to be real dancers, as you cannot fake this kind of dancing, as there is a lot of pure choreography in the movie. I interviewed countless actors and dancers and looked for someone who was very natural and had a great sensibility. And when I found Scott we spent a whole six months whilst I was raising money constantly workshopping scenes as we developed the role of Frankie between us. He considered it acting lessons where I thought it was the rehearsal, so it was a kind of a win-win. He learnt that as an actor you cannot put on a show, you must feel and believe it to make it real.

    MATTHEW RISCH, however, is a classically trained actor and not only did he manage to fit in with the dancing but he really helped Scott with their scenes.

    RWD: They had a great chemistry together
    CMJ: I‘ve never experienced that before when it worked so well, even in the intimate sex scenes.

    RWD: No need for a ‘sex choreographer’ like they used when they filmed The Normal Heart?
    CMJ: (laughing) NO!

    RWD: The dancing was impeccable and completely moving. It was erotic with a touch of danger about it, is that how you intended we should see it?
    CMJ: I wanted it to be both erotic and macabre. I had written a lot of the detail into the script and I worked very closely with the very talented Sidra Bell, the choreographer who created all the dances in just 2 weeks. I was by her side the whole way through with my suggestions, as an ex-dancer who has worked with some major choreographers I knew what I wanted.

    RWD: Here in the UK at the same time in 1985 we had some 275 people diagnosed with AIDS (out of a worldwide total of 20303). We also saw the introduction of the Test that year too. Although you set your story so firmly in San Francisco, which then seemed to be one of the worst affected cities in the world, do you think a worldwide audience will relate to your film as well as American audiences have done so far?
    CMJ: I didn’t have any thoughts on that when I made is as I had no idea when I made it that it would get such a wide distribution. I’m sure that the backlash and the homophobia were the same for all of us as we were paranoid and constantly looking for signs of Kaposi Sarcoma. The sheer panic of not knowing what this fatal plaque actually really entailed beyond the media hysteria was by no means an American phenomenon.

    RWD: Certainly not. And the way that you so poignantly portray this in your movie was so spot on, that it brought back many personal uncomfortable moments that none of us would ever want to re-live.
    CMJ: Thank you.

    RWD: This movie certainly establishes you as one of the leading members of this new wave of ‘queer cinema’ alongside the likes of Ira Sachs, Andrew Haigh, David Lambert and Xavier Dolan. Is that important to you, and do you want to make more gay themed movies?
    CMJ: Yes, it’s important to me and it’s one of the main reasons that I started making films. When I questioned my motives for why I was taking on yet another difficult profession after dancing, and one of the reasons I decided was that core representation made a real difference in my life. Few positive influences as opposed to the many negative ones that I experienced when I grew up were extremely important and shaped who I became. It also mattered to me on a political and moral level.

    I want to keep on doing gay themes but I also like the idea of them becoming more assimilated with other content so that it is not so marginalised or ghettoised. I like to see gay characters who are not stereotypes, I like seeing a world of characters whose sexuality has not been explored much in cinema so far. So in terms of a being part of new queer cinema, I am honoured if I am considered a part of that.

  • FILM REVIEW | The Golden Hour

    ★★★★★ | The Golden Hour

    This story about Guatemalan teenagers trying to escape their life of poverty and illegally cross the Mexican Border after a long and arduous journey en route to the USA, is one of the saddest and most dispiriting I have seen in a very long time. It starts with three friends Samuel, Juan and his girlfriend Sara who disguises herself as a boy, but a native Indian called Chaulk also latches on to them soon after they set out.

    The first of their many frightening ordeals occurs in small Mexican town where the Police round them up and immediately deport them back to Guatemala, but not before they rob them of their few possessions and their boots. They quickly find their way back to the Border but Samuel has already had enough and wants to go home. Juan has taken an instant dislike to Chaulk who he thinks is after Sara, but she insists he travels with them, so they all set off again.

    It’s not too long before the train they have jumped on along with hundreds of would-be migrants is stopped by the Mexican Army, but this time the three of them manage to escape and seek refuge in a sugar plantation. Back on the train, and this time it is halted by a band of Drug Traffickers who relieve everyone of anything remotely saleable and capture all the women including Sara who is spotted despite her disguise. When the two boys try to save her they are viscously beaten up by the gang and left unconscious in the middle of nowhere.

    Chaulk revives first as Juan’s injuries are more severe and the young Indian carries him to safety and nurses him back to health. Soon they are back on another train yet again and are easily lulled into false sense of security by another Guatemalan kid who promises them a job with his Uncle as they will need money to pay smugglers for the final stretch of their journey. It is a trap and they are about to be held hostage for ransom but as this gang is led by a fellow Guatemalan, Juan is let free. However as he won’t leave without Chaulk as he had saved his life, he offers the Captors the few dollars he has to buy the Indian’s freedom.

    It is sadly not the end of all the dangerous obstacles they will have to overcome on this seemingly endless harrowing journey.

    The movie’s original title is ‘Juala de Oro’ which translates into ‘Golden Cage’ and this is exactly what the kids get for all their dreams. The US willingly accepts illegals cheap labour but will not allow them the proper papers to rise beyond this lowly position. Despite this, and the continual fear of being caught and deported every single day, there will be hundreds of thousands other kids like these, that will still risk their lives for the hope of a better existence.

    Directed and co-written by Spanish filmmaker Diego Quemada-Díez (who was a cameraman on many of Ken Loach’s movies) it has a beautiful backdrop of stunning Mexican and Guatemalan landscapes that sometimes makes you forget the sheer poverty and the hardships of its inhabitants. The movie relies on amateur actors, but it is the sheer power of the story that makes it so watchable and also the reason it has won several awards including Un Certain Regard at Cannes Film Festival.

    In Cinemas in the UK

  • FILM PREVIEW | Pride

    PRIDE tells the true story of how a group of lesbian and gay activists joined forces with a small Welsh mining community in 1984, supporting them during their darkest hour.

    Despite the subject matter, it is deliciously funny. Starring an ensemble cast including Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Andrew Scott and Paddy Considine, PRIDE received a standing ovation at Cannes this year and is being heralded as the British feel good movie of the year. PRIDE opens nation-wide on 12th September.

    Here is a link to the first trailer that has just been released;-

  • FILM REVIEW | Turtle Hill, Brooklyn

    ★★★★ Turtle Hill, Brooklyn | It’s a sunny Sunday morning in Brooklyn and Mateo wakes his boyfriend Will up with a cup of coffee and a cupcake with single candle alight on top.

    (more…)

  • FILM REVIEW | Hawaii

    When Martin (Mateo Chiarino) gets stranded in the small Argentinian country town he grew up he ends up sleeping rough by the river and goes looking for odd jobs to feed himself.★★★★★

    His search takes him to a large estate where he manages to get some work only to discover that it’s present tenant is Eugenio (Manuel Vignau) one of his boyhood friends. Eugenio is now an affluent writer working on a new novel and he is spending the summer looking after the large house in his Uncle’s absence.

    With sparse dialogue, in fact there is barely a word spoken in the first fifteen minutes in what is essentially a two-hander story, Martin withholds the truth about his rather desperate circumstances and pretends that he is living with his Aunt. The balance of power between the two men who are essentially from different social classes, is very potent as each of them tries gradually to relax the protocol between boss and worker. Particularly on Eugenio’s part when he begins to realise that the friendship he feels for his childhood pal is developing into desire.

    As the two men start to hang out together more when they have both stopped working, the few carefully chosen words they use to talk hold a myriad of feelings although it is very clear that neither of them have any idea of how the other feels about what is evolving here.

    This, the third full feature from writer/director Marco Berger is the most simplest of tales that he stunningly unfolds in an impeccably subtle provocative manner. With a series of incessant long stares and discreet longing glances there is obviously a powerful struggle that each of these men are dealing with as there relationship progresses over the long hot summer. Berger makes their story so completely compelling that we are invested in its outcome to the very end.

    Credit too for casting two very gifted actors for their talents and not for their pretty boy looks (not that they are by any means un-attractive) and for the keeping the nudity (seemingly somewhat obligatory in gay-themed movies these days) down to a bare minimum, despite the heavy eroticism of the piece.

    For me, this was filmmaker Marco Berger back on the form he showed in Plan B his excellent debut movie. His second film Absent aka Ausente may have won the prestigiousTeddy Award at Berlinale but it was a disappointing affair.

    Very hot.

    P.S. The reason for the title can only be revealed when you see the movie without spoiling the plot.

  • FILM REVIEW | Fruitvale Station

    Fruitvale Station

    In the opening sequences using grainy footage from onlookers cellphones we see how this story is going to end. Not long after 2009 has just been welcomed in by this happy boisterous New Year crowd travelling on the BART train in Oakland, California when Oscar Grant, a 22 year old African-American is shot in the back by a white Transit Police Officer.

    Oscar and his friends had been hauled off the train at Fruitvale Station as suspects in a fight that had just occurred, the fact that the men who had antagonised them were all white and were not pursued by the angry and aggressive police presence was no accident.

    In this stunningly powerful narrative the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant III is sadly a very true fact. What follows next is a dramatisation of what Oscar was up to the day he was killed.

    He was apparently no saint, but after a short time behind bars for dealing in marijuana, he was determined to make a go of things.When he loses his grocery store job and is almost desperate enough to start selling pot again, he throws away his stash as he knows that another arrest would take him away from his girlfriend and young daughter who is totally devoted too. It is in fact the women in his life, including his church-going mother, that are his driving force but in his determination to be the ‘man’ of the family he hides his financial struggles from them all behind a web of lies.

    It is a totally compelling movie on every level and even more so when you appreciate that this is the debut of writer/director Ryan Coogler, a 27 year old African-American from Oakland fresh out of Film School.

    What Coogler does so brilliantly is show that behind the statistic of another black man needlessly killed by an undisciplined white authority figure, that this was a very real person just at the start of what should have been a long happy life. There is plenty of emotion in his take on events, and very noticeably, no rage at all.

    Michael B Jordan (The Wire) turns in a terrifically sensitive portrayal as the good-natured Oscar, Melonie Diaz (Be Kind Rewind) is his supportive girlfriend Sophina, and in a powerhouse performance Octavia Spencer as Mum proves that her Oscar win last year (The Help) was no fluke. And credit to Forest Whittaker for taking this project on and producing it.

    In the light of the aftermath of the recent Trayvon Martin killing, this heartbreaking story has even more resonance now. The saddest aspect of all is that we know that many more young men will still needlessly lose their lives simply because of the color of their skin.

    Winner of Awards at both the Sundance & Cannes Film Festivals, this is totally unmissable, and easily one of the best ‘real

  • FILM REVIEW: Errodity(s)

    FILM REVIEW: Errodity(s)

    The only thing horrifying about Steven Vasquez’s new anthology of gay teen movies of the supernatural is some of the acting.★★ (more…)