THEGAYUK

Author: Roger Walker-Dack

  • FILM REVIEW | Inside Llewyn Davis

    ★★★★ | Inside Llewyn Davis

    Poor Llewyn is both a loser and a user. Nothing is safe in his hands as his life careers from disaster to disaster whilst he goes from crashing on couch to couch in his long-suffering friend’s New York apartments. He even manages to lose one of his host’s cat that he lets escape into the streets.

    Inside Llewyn Davies is the Coen Brother’s wonderful take on the early 1960’s folk music scene in Greenwich Village that focuses on good-looking 30-something year old Llewyn whose songs are as bleak as his very messy life. He treats everyone so shabbily that it is a complete surprise that anyone puts up with him at all. There’s Jean, who sings with her husband Jim when she is not sleeping with Llewyn and half of the folk club circuit. She blames Llewyn for her pregnancy and although he unquestioningly accepts responsibility for paying for an abortion, in reality it may not even be his child.

    There’s Joy his resentful sister who allows Llewyn to crash in the Long Island house that had once been their childhood home just so that she can nag him to give up singing and go back to being a merchant seaman. And in uptown Manhattan, there are the Columbus scholars the Gorfiens whose cat he loses, but it also turns out that they were the parents of Llewyn’s late singing partner who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.

    Everybody on the folk club circuit is enjoying more success than Llewyn even though he think he has much more talent, but he fails miserably to earn their respect or worthwhile gigs or even a decent Agent.

    Why such a depressing tale should be so watchable is totally down to the Coen’s obsessive attention to detail. It’s a glorious period piece shot in smoky hues that makes it feel like a black & white movie that has been hand tinted with some color. The acting from this incredible ensemble is top-notch but the production design and cinematography deserves star billing too. The fact that we get so engaged in watching the story of a loser is because he is played by a remarkable relatively unknown actor Oscar Isaac (and local Miami boy) who was nothing less than sensational in this his first ever lead role.

    Rounding out the cast were the superb Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake as Jean and Jim, Garret Hedlund as Johnny Five, and John Goodman playing the obnoxious loud-mouthed Roland Turner.

    My initial reaction after viewing this, was one of stunned silence as I had simply not been prepared for what a downer the actual story was. Now on reflection, and I am wallowing in the memory of the sheer pleasure of what a powerful character study of such a flawed character it was in such a magnificent set piece. And lest I should forget there was all that music too that had been ex-produced by none other than T Bone Burnett.

    It won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is unmissable, as it could even be the best Coen Brothers yet. And that is really saying something.

     

    Available to buy / view on: Amazon | Amazon Prime | iTunes

  • FILM REVIEW | Ausgust: Osage County

    ★★★★★ | August Osage County

    Violet Weston is one acid-tongue angry old lady who misses nothing that goes on in her family and she insures that none of her nearest and dearest escape her unbridled wrath. Well, her husband Beverley an alcoholic and rather melancholic poet does, but his method is quite extreme as he disappears out of the blue, and then the police locate his body after he has taken his own life.

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  • FILM REVIEW | Unbroken

    ★★★★ | Unbroken

    For the third time in the last couple of months, THEGAYUK reviews another film starring the remarkably talented young British actor JACK O’CONNELL. We can tell you now that Hollywood now agrees with us; Mr O’CONNELL is going to be a MAJOR STAR. Remember you read it here first.

    For her third time behind the camera actress/ superstar, UN Special Ambassador, Honorary Dame of the British Empire, and mother of countless children, Angelina Jolie plumped for a rather old-fashioned WW2 drama. With a script from Oscar winners Ethan and Joel Cohen (who rarely write for other directors) adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling biography, ‘Unbroken’ is the inspiring story of the Italian/American Olympic Athlete Louis Zamperini who became a War Hero.

    Jolie starts her overly long movie with an exciting aerial gun battle somewhere in the Far East with Zamperini as the Bombardier helping to get his crew’s partially destroyed plane safely back to base after they have successfully bombed their target.The next time they are flying on a mission, they are not so lucky and end up floating in the middle of the ocean after their plane totally disintegrates.

    In a series of flashbacks Jolie fills in Zamperini’s young life up to that point, where as a troubled teenager constantly picked on for being an immigrant in small town California, and so his older brother persuades him to join him in his school’s track team. Zamperini shows such real talent at running that he is soon winning enough races to actually qualify to represent the USA in the 1936 Olympics in Munich. The next Olympics however in 1940 were due to be held in Tokyo, but little did Zamperini know at the time he would end up being in that city then, but for entirely different reasons.

    Zamperini and two other men, include Phil the pilot, survive the crash and floating aimlessly on a life raft have to deal with hunger, the relentless heat, dehydration, sharks and the occasional storm for 47 days adrift in the middle of the ocean. Zamperini who never stops praying, vows that if he ever gets home again he will devote his life to God.

    He and Phil are the only two survivors who are eventually picked up by the Japanese and held prisoner in the most horrific conditions and forced into hard labour. When they are transferred to a larger camp the two of them get separated and Zamperini gets singled out regularly for unprovoked and merciless beatings by a young sadistic Japanese guard nicknamed ‘The Bird’ who appears to have some fixation with breaking this American soldier who he obviously somehow feels threatened by.

    When the war looks like it is ending, the Japanese retreat taking all the Allied prisoners with them to an even more remote island, and the men fear that they will all be killed before they can rescued. The impending defeat encourages ‘The Bird’ to even increase his brutality of Zamperini to the point where he has the beaten young soldier holding up a heavy railway sleeper over his head which eerily looks like a cross at a crucifixion.

    The movie ends with the war and with Zamperoni being hailed as a hero as he finally arrives back home to his family in California. In real life he evidently became a Born Again Christian and tutored by the evangelist Billy Graham, he went back to Japan to spread the Gospel and forgive his captors. He died at the age of 91 years old earlier in 2014.

    Just like in the current ‘The Imitation Game’ Ms. Jolie and Roger Deakins her multi Oscar nominated her cinematographer makes her wartime setting a tad too picturesque a la Hollywood (Australia was used for locations). Despite the very detailed graphic scenes of the horrific violence that we expect these days, it was hard not to escape the notion that I expected Clark Gable or Errol Flynn or any other 40’s heartthrob to burst onto the screen at any moment. If I could pinpoint a particular reason why this very entertaining movie was not nearly as good as the hype, it would be the fact that Ms. Jolie allowed the Coen Brothers to spend too much time on the historical facts of Zamperini’s true story than focusing more on the characters that are a vital part of it.

    However there is one element that raises this movie to a much higher level, and it is the presence of its leading man Jack O’Connell. The camera simply loves this exceptionally talented young English actor who, with his matinee idol looks, is proving to be the most exciting new actor that the movies … and now Hollywood… have discovered this year. In ‘Unbroken’ we feel every moment of his pain in this raw and very natural performance that is nothing less than a sheer joy to watch. Having seen him in action three times in as many months (his second movie ’71 is still to be released in the US) I can only keep repeating my earlier claims that O’Connell is deservedly destined for major stardom.

    The movie itself may have been a tad disappointing, but O’Connell is anything but that.

  • FILM REVIEW | Interior Leather Bar

    ★★★ | Interior Leather Bar

    Director William Friedkin claims that he had to take his notorious movie Cruising about the gay S&M sub-culture to the US Ratings Board on 50 occasions before they would give him a ‘R’ certificate that permitted it to be shown in cinemas. Whether that is totally true or not is part of the myth around the over-rated but little seen psychological thriller released in 1980 to great controversy. The gay community were its fiercest detractors, but the critics slammed it too.

    To appease the censors Friedkin was forced to cut 44 minutes of what one assumes from his inference were graphic sexual acts. We will never be sure how accurate that is and gay filmmaker Travis Mathews and actor James Franco never bothered to check with Friedkin when they set about trying to re-imagine what the footage may or may not have contained to make this curious new documentary.

    Heterosexual Franco has a growing reputation for his limitless fixation with gay culture and he used his celebrity to pull this very spurious event together. On a day and a half, he and Travis gathered together a bunch of actors – some gay and some straight – stuck them in a warehouse with a script treatment and told them very vaguely to simply get on with it. Franco himself copped out of recreating the main role played by Al Pacino in the original movie and instead persuaded Val Lauren (who has just starred in Franco’s directorial debut ‘Sal’, about yet another gay figure Sal Mineo). Lauren was either alarmingly nervous about playing gay, even for pay, or just following a script, we never really know. But he was uncomfortable to watch, and like others, annoyingly kept repeating that he had only agreed to the project because of James!

    The gay members of the cast had joked that they had only agreed to take part in the hope of seeing Franco naked, but that wasn’t going to happen. He pontificated excessively before the shoot intellectualising about sex, but on the day itself he part filmed a scene where a couple of guys are going full at it, before totally disappearing. Incidentally most of the hour long running time is taken up with all the behind the scenes angst than the actual ‘missing footage’.

    This is not the first vanity project by Franco, He made an experimental film from scraps that Gus Van Sant cut from My Private Idaho, and the main question I can only raise about his intentions with all of this, and the making of this film is, WHY?

    Available to buy / view on: Amazon

  • FILM REVIEW | Mr Angel

    ★★★★ | Mr Angel

    Buck Angel is a brawny muscular red-headed good-looking bearded hunk. With his heavily tattooed body, his twinkling eyes and his infectious smile, he is in fact one very hot man. In our label-fixated society Buck is actually transgender, or as he loves to describe himself so succinctly, he is ‘a man with a pussy’.

    What strikes you immediately in this extraordinary wonderful documentary by Dan Hunt, is that before you start to try to get your head around all the gender-transitioning is how remarkably charismatic and engaging Buck truly is. He is full of charm, totally fearless with such a strong sense of purpose which we soon discover is something he achieved only after battling so many demons in his past.

    Buck has always identified himself as a male – even when he grew up – he was a rather stunning looking woman who carved a career out of fashion modeling. That in turn led to cocaine and then a rapid spiral downwards where he ended up turning tricks, more suicide attempts and then literally ending up in the gutter.

    Life eventually changed for him for the better after taking hormones and testosterone and he had a double mastectomy and ‘Buck’ was born. Not content with just being a male, he worked out aggressively and once he achieved a really great physique he launched into a career in porn. Here he carved out a unique niche for himself because as he kept saying ‘he never had bottom’ surgery.

    As we follow him making personal appearances at Sex Industry Trade Shows he is unabashedly proud about his career and although he repeatedly insists that he is not a sexual oddity, he definitely is challenging the accepted terms and classifications we are currently used too. For examples he shoots videos with gay men for the gay market, but as his partners are penetrating his vagina, doesn’t that make it ‘straight’ sex? And when he does another scene with a MTF person who still has a penis, isn’t that also heterosexual sex?

    I have to say that regardless of the technicalities of the actual penetration that takes considerable mind-blowing, you are firmly persuaded by a combination of Buck’s words, demeanor, attitude and spirit that he is very much a man.

    The documentary made over 6 years sees Buck now happily married to Elayne, a piercing expert, and they are living in Mexico with countless dogs. Buck is now re-positioning himself from sex-worker to sex educator as he undertakes a series of speaking engagements and advocacy about gender-roles in particular. I would normally be skeptical about how anyone can switch sides like this and be either accepted or respected, but it’s hard not to be swept away by the combination of Buck’s enthusiasm and the belief in has in himself.

    One of the biggest hurdles Buck had to overcome was helping his parents and siblings come to terms with his new persona. It’s not just the gender altering but it is also the porn career, which is hard for all of them to get their heads around. It is a remarkable journey that they all take together, and I defy anyone not to reach for the tissues when his father breaks down.

    This is not a film for everyone… Some of the imagery is very graphic. I do hope it gets the biggest audience it deserves.

    Full credit to Mr. Hunt for not only helping to start de-mystifying some of these questions, but more essentially for the respect that he accorded both Buck and his story.

    Available on Amazon