THEGAYUK

Category: Film

  • MOVIE: Ab Fab Is Coming

    After many years of speculation, and many a gay man’s dream, it has been announced that there will be an Absolutely Fabulous movie made and it starts filming this autumn.

    Sitting with the cast of Loose Women Jennifer Saunders confirmed the film will start filming soon and that “It involves all the main characters and virtually anyone that’s ever been in the series.”

    Of course plot lines were being kept very close to the chest with Jennifer revealing “we’re in London and we might go to the south of France. I’m hoping we go to the south of France…”

    Fingers crossed then for another wine tasting session then!

     

     

  • FILM REVIEW | Hidden Away, A Spanish Teenage Gay Love Story

    Don’t be fooled into thinking that Hidden Away is just another boy meets boy love story with a less than great cover photo of its two male leads. It’s a very well told and acted Spanish teenage gay love story that’s very heartwarming and enduring as well. ★★★★

    Hidden Away is not told as a simple coming of age story, and it’s not told in chronological order, which makes understanding and piecing the film together a bit confusing. Director Mikel Rueda has decided to tell the story in a way in which is supposedly meant for the viewer to put themselves into the characters shoes. So it opens with Ibrahim, a 14-year-old young man, walking along the road hitchhiking, escaping from something which we won’t know until the very end. He’s from Morocco, but had gone to Spain a few years back looking for a better future. He’s been living in shelters, hoping to get his official papers so that he can stay in Spain. He lives in Bilbao, fully settled, attending school and living in a shelter for boys just like him. Then there is Rafa, also 14, Spanish, living with his parents. Rafa hangs out with boys just like himself, yet there’s one thing different about Rafa. He doesn’t like girls. There is one girl in particular who practically throws herself at him, but he just doesn’t reciprocate, much to the horror of his friends. Even though Ibrahim and Rafa’s paths initially cross (at one point in a club urinal), they don’t meet until a bit later in the film. And there’s a spark. A spark that at first betells an evolving and very close friendship between the young men, but then evolves into more than that. While there is no actual sex scenes in this film, Rafa and Ibrahim’s bond appears to be more than just physical, it’s emotional as well.

    Ibrahim gets mixed up with a local gang that gets him to sell drugs, while Rafa whiles away the time looking for any reason to be with him. They initially bond over a cigarette, but their friendship, and romance, blossoms after they spend a day together hanging out and going bowling. It’s a relationship that we know is too good to be true. And when Ibrahim receives a letter from the government wanting to extradite him back to Morocco, he sees no other way but to run away, with Rafa by his side.

    It’s the performances that make this film fantastic. German Alcaruz as Rafa brings an innocence to his part, a young man who knows what he wants and doesn’t care what his friends think. His facial expressions will melt your heart – Alcarazu gives a believable and touching performance. Adil Koukouh is also very good as Ibrahim. He’s bigger and more mature looking than Rafa, but he also has a special something that makes Rafa’s attraction to him seem very credible. Also very very good is Joseba Ugalde as Rafa’s best friend Guille. He knows he’s losing Rafa to Ibrahim and he’s OK with it, even when Rafa and Ibrahim have to go on the run, there’s a very touching scene when Rafa and Guille say goodbye to each and Guille tells Rafa that’s he doesn’t quite understand what is going on.

    Hidden Away is a bit difficult to comprehend in the beginning as the scenes do jump around, and the subtitles on this film are quite small and at times hard to read, but stick with it till the very end and you will be rewarded with a love story that’s unique in it’s telling and at it’s very core is a film that tells the story of young love, young love that we’ve all experienced.

    Hidden Away is now available to buy on DVD.

     

    by Tim Baros

  • FILM REVIEW | Hidden Away, A Spanish Teenage Gay Love Story

    Don’t be fooled into thinking that Hidden Away is just another boy meets boy love story with a less than great cover photo of its two male leads. It’s a very well told and acted Spanish teenage gay love story that’s very heartwarming and enduring as well. ★★★★

    Hidden Away is not told as a simple coming of age story, and it’s not told in chronological order, which makes understanding and piecing the film together a bit confusing. Director Mikel Rueda has decided to tell the story in a way in which is supposedly meant for the viewer to put themselves into the characters shoes. So it opens with Ibrahim, a 14-year-old young man, walking along the road hitchhiking, escaping from something which we won’t know until the very end. He’s from Morocco, but had gone to Spain a few years back looking for a better future. He’s been living in shelters, hoping to get his official papers so that he can stay in Spain. He lives in Bilbao, fully settled, attending school and living in a shelter for boys just like him. Then there is Rafa, also 14, Spanish, living with his parents. Rafa hangs out with boys just like himself, yet there’s one thing different about Rafa. He doesn’t like girls. There is one girl in particular who practically throws herself at him, but he just doesn’t reciprocate, much to the horror of his friends. Even though Ibrahim and Rafa’s paths initially cross (at one point in a club urinal), they don’t meet until a bit later in the film. And there’s a spark. A spark that at first betells an evolving and very close friendship between the young men, but then evolves into more than that. While there is no actual sex scenes in this film, Rafa and Ibrahim’s bond appears to be more than just physical, it’s emotional as well.

    Ibrahim gets mixed up with a local gang that gets him to sell drugs, while Rafa whiles away the time looking for any reason to be with him. They initially bond over a cigarette, but their friendship, and romance, blossoms after they spend a day together hanging out and going bowling. It’s a relationship that we know is too good to be true. And when Ibrahim receives a letter from the government wanting to extradite him back to Morocco, he sees no other way but to run away, with Rafa by his side.

    It’s the performances that make this film fantastic. German Alcaruz as Rafa brings an innocence to his part, a young man who knows what he wants and doesn’t care what his friends think. His facial expressions will melt your heart – Alcarazu gives a believable and touching performance. Adil Koukouh is also very good as Ibrahim. He’s bigger and more mature looking than Rafa, but he also has a special something that makes Rafa’s attraction to him seem very credible. Also very very good is Joseba Ugalde as Rafa’s best friend Guille. He knows he’s losing Rafa to Ibrahim and he’s OK with it, even when Rafa and Ibrahim have to go on the run, there’s a very touching scene when Rafa and Guille say goodbye to each and Guille tells Rafa that’s he doesn’t quite understand what is going on.

    Hidden Away is a bit difficult to comprehend in the beginning as the scenes do jump around, and the subtitles on this film are quite small and at times hard to read, but stick with it till the very end and you will be rewarded with a love story that’s unique in it’s telling and at it’s very core is a film that tells the story of young love, young love that we’ve all experienced.

    Available to by from Amazon

     

  • FILM REVIEW | Frequencies

    ★★★ | Frequencies

    This quirky and ingenious British film shows us a slightly dystopian future, where we are all born with a frequency that predetermines our future, our luck and affects our relationships.

    It follows Marie-Curie Fortune (aka Marie) and Issac-Newton Midgeley (aka Zak) as they grow, knowing their respective frequencies and how it will affect their lives, expect they seem to be continually thrown together as Marie tries to understand how they can only spend one minute together at a time, without some catastrophe happening.

    Think magnets, and how they repel and attract and you have an idea of how this film works – until it throws something else in the mix. The power of words and sound waves to alter this effect – certain words being able to raise or lower a persons frequency and enable two opposites to get close to each other.

    The film then goes on to look at how this power has existed since time immemorial and has been forgotten by the vast majority of the population…and there are darker ways in which to use this power.

    But music can provide a “reset” and counter-act the effects of the sound waves – whether used for good or evil!

    The film is lovely, it doesn’t go for the silver foil suits of other low budget sci-fi. Instead it places itself in the near future or possibly a parallel earth, leaving you a feeling of familiarity with the sets and clothes – and no doubt saving much needed cash.

    This gem is written, directed and produced by Darren Paul Fisher, who has had a hand in the In-betweeners and he does a mean turn here – playing with the ideas of words and sound waves leading to mind control but music being a reset on a button based in the soul.

    The grown up Marie and Zak are played well by Daniel Fraser and Eleanor Wyld, but the child and teen characters put in excellent turns.

    Overall, it can come off a little like a well-meaning episode of Doctor Who, but I for one don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

  • FILM REVIEW: From Beginning To End

    There is good taste, and then there is incest.

    It’s surprising that we can sit and watch a lot of suspect and even deviant behaviour amongst (consenting) adults on the silver screen, but this is one topic that we feel is just a tad too icky even for us. Especially when it comes in the form of a melodramatic Brazilian telenova that is short on both substance as well as clothing, and is to all intents and purpose nothing more than a pretty piece of soft porn.

    It starts with two young half brothers, one 6 years old and the other 12, who are a little too close to each other for our comfort zone, and for their mother too who suspects there may be more here than what meets the eye. Flash-forward to the boys as grown men, one of the fathers dies, then the mother passes away too, and the boys seek solace in each other. Well that’s their excuse as they have barely stopped lusting after each other since they were kids.

    We are convinced that it’s not just lust, but real love, which is put to the test when the younger brother who is a potential Olympic swimming champion is told by his coach that he must move abroad to train. To Russia no less. Oh come on coach, you mean to tell us there are no decent swimming pools closer to Brazil?

    Love conquers all though and even a very pretty girl cannot steal the old brother away from his one true love, and this all plays out to a rather deafening over-laden heavy strings soundtrack. And we guess they will happily ever after? Who knows? More importantly, who cares?

    Why see it at all? Well the boys/men are rather stunning beefcakes that even with this limited script prove that they can actually act, and also writhe around naked together looking very sexy but without doing the act (it’s soft porn after all). It was a big box office hit in Brazil when it was released in 2009, and it has now surfaced on Amazon where you can waste £4.49 and more importantly 90 minutes of your time.

     

  • FILM REVIEW: Girlhood

    Life is pretty bleak in this concrete jungle of soulless tower blocks of shabby apartments on this housing complex in a poor rundown suburb of Paris.

    Sixteen-year-old Marieme is hoping that one day she will break out of there so for a better life so she does her school work, plays American football, and then goes home to look after her younger siblings whilst her mother is out all hours doing cleaning jobs to keep the family together.

    However when Marieme learns that her grades are not enough to continue high school she gives up being a good girl and falls in with a gang of three girls who seem to wreak havoc wherever they go. At first, Marieme sits on the sidelines observing the girls led by a real toughie who calls herself Lady, but she soon gets drawn into their questionable activities when they slack off school every day. She swaps her braids for a more glam look and starts copying their more outrageous dress style. It’s not long until she is the one menacing other kids on their way to school to relieve them of every cent they have to fund the gang’s nefarious agenda.

    They use the money to check into a hotel to try on all the clothes they have stolen from the mall, get wasted on a diet of booze and pot noodles, and give a full rendition of Rihanna’s Diamonds. It’s their idea of a high life, sad as it is.

    Things change when Lady gets roundly beaten in a fight with a member of another gang, so an emboldened Marieme … known by the girls as Vic … steps up to the plate and takes on the victor and beats her up. It delights Djibril one of her brother’s friends who she has been hooking up with in secret, but it infuriates her bully of a brother, and when he threatens her, she knows it is time to leave home.

    In this situation the only way out is to start selling drugs, which she does for another gang in return for a share in a safe house in another neighbourhood. As tough she has become, this is very much a man’s world, and despite all her efforts, she is still a girl.

    It’s the third feature from French filmmaker Céline Sciamma and although it doesn’t quite have the same resonance of her award-winning Tomboy but it does nevertheless pack a powerful punch. It’s a bleak grim reality that these tough bad girls inhabit and come-of-age in but Sciamma does at least infuse it with a glimmer of hope…. and some compassion too. It’s zillion years away from the cosy life of Boyhood!

  • FILM REVIEW | Blackmail Boys

    When gay art student Sam ‘came out’ to his parents they disowned him and cut him off without a cent.

    Faced with high tuition fees, rent and living expenses to find in Chicago, he resorted to turning tricks as it pays so much better than any other manual labour. However when Aaron his long-term long-distance boyfriend moved to town and in with him, he resented the way that Sam earns his living.

    The first time one of Sam’s paying clients came for his weekly rough and tumble, the more worldly Aaron recognised him as an infamous gay-bashing bigot that had just written yet one more book denouncing the ‘evil ways of homosexuality. After his ‘appointment’ was over Aaron suggested that when the man came back for his next hook-up, that he should secretly film the whole naked encounter and use it to blackmail him. Not only would it possibly expose the hypocrite to the whole world, but if he wanted to buy the tape to keep them quiet, they could make enough money to insure that Sam could retire from his call boy career.

    It was a rather inconsequential plot for a lightweight movie made by the somewhat anonymous Shumanski filmmaking brothers from South Africa. Like their previous gay-themed movie Wrecked there is an abundant amount of full frontal nudity and explicit sex that at times just feels like porn with a plot. Its redeeming feature is its mumble core approach to filming (not often used in gay movies) that gave the whole piece an edgy feel to it.

    On the acting side indie actor/director Joe Swanberg who’s first ‘big’ feature Drinking Buddies was recently released to critical acclaim, plays the angry client Andrew Tucker. Looking at Swanberg’s resume to date you can see that he rarely keeps his clothes on through a whole movie, so it seemed no big deal for this straight actor to have explicit gay sex on screen. Interesting also to see young Nathan Adloff (playing Sam) in front of the camera after being so very impressed with his own writing/directing debut in a delightful sleeper from last year’s Nate & Margaret.

    It’s a harmless piece of boy-lite fare that by trying to push our buttons by what it thinks is daring, will only have us reaching for the remote control to skip over all those parts which fall flatter than some of the sexual encounters, to get to the end quicker.

  • FILM REVIEW: Drink Me

    ★★★ | Drink Me

    Young gay couple James and Andy seem to have everything, especially an extremely busy sex life.

    Life in the rather comfortable house they share couldn’t be more perfect and James wants to make it all even more permanent by getting down on his knees and proposing marriage. However timing is everything and Andy fesses up that he has just been laid off from his job, which puts a dampener on any ideas of paying for an expensive wedding right now.

    After he has trouble finding new work, money gets tight for the couple so James suggests taking in a lodger. Sebastian a handsome stranger moves in and all seems well until housebound Andy realises that the new member of the household is hiding a secret. He suspects that Sebastian could be the killer who has been stalking the streets of their neighbourhood and responsible for so many people seemingly disappearing into thin air. He will not have to wait long to find out the truth.

    This brand new thriller made on a micro-budget on by husband & husband team Daniel & Richard Mansfield is a rare genre i.e. gay vampire drama. Strangely enough it is not nearly as frightening as the overly dramatic soundtrack intonates it should be, and the slight plot unfurls at such a slow pace that there are neither any real scares nor surprises. It does however possess more male full frontal nudity than I have ever seen outside of a porn movie, and full credit to both director and cast, as they ensure that most of it is highly erotic.

    The movie following on from The Secret Path that the Mansfields made last year proves again that this young couple of talented British gay filmmakers are definitely a pair well worth watching.

     

  • FILM REVIEW: Tin

    This innovative independent film takes a simple storyline of intrigue and shenanigans and gives it a slight twist and does so on a micro-budget.

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  • Cate Stuns As Carol

    It was announced in Paris today that legendary gay auteur TODD HAYNES will be screening his new film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

    Carol based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr Ripley) stars the one and only Cate Blanchett stars in the titular role as a 1950’s-era married woman who begins a romantic same-sex relationship with a young store clerk played by Rooney Mara. It also co-stars Kyle Chandler and Sarah Paulson

    Haynes’s previous movies include Far From Heaven, I’m Not Here, Velvet Goldmine and he also directed the award-winning TV remake of Mildred Pierce.

    Carol will definitely be on our list of favourites at this year’s Festival and we will track its progress to a cinema near you hopefully later this year.

     

  • FILM REVIEW: A Second Chance

    It’s only the ‘goodies’ that get a second chance in this new rather overwrought melodrama from Danish Oscar winning director Susanne Bier as the ‘baddies’ evidently do not deserve to dig themselves out of the hell holes of lives they have ended up with.

    ★★★

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