THEGAYUK

Category: Film

  • Four Must Sees At The Fringe! Queer Art And Film Festival

    The 4th addition of East London’s FRINGE! Queer Art & Film Festival is its largest event to date having spread to a whole week of activities. It is one of this Country’s leading exponents of edgy queer cinema proudly showcasing films that may otherwise never get screened, and yet so need to reach the audience that they deserve. Amongst this year’s premieres we have chosen 4 as THE GAY UK top tips for you to go see.

    BAMBI: This very exceptional story of an unquestionably remarkable woman and her transformation from little Algerian boy to respected Parisian Literature Professor via Music Hall Star is utterly spellbinding It quite deservedly won filmmaker Sebastian Lifschitz the TEDDY AWARD for Best LGBT Documentary at the Berlin Film Festival.

    THE DOG: A compelling documentary on John Wojtowicz a loud-mouthed obnoxious New Yorker who robbed a Bank to pay for his boyfriend’s sex change. His exploits were fictionalised and made into the Oscar winning movie ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’

    THE CIRCLE: Part documentary part fiction, this is a fascinating glimpse into the post WW2 mixed fortunes of a gay community in Europe before the onslaught of freedom that was about to occur with the swinging 1960s. Another TEDDY WINNER, this is also Switzerland’s official submission for a Best Foreign Picture Oscar Nomination.

    BOY MEETS GIRL: Eric Schaeffer’s refreshing and enchanting drama about three 20 year-olds looking for love in a small backwater town in Kentucky gently challenges us to suspend our preconceived views on gender labels and be as open to what happens as these lovelorn kids are. It’s warm and often very funny and an entertaining, intelligent, sensitive treatment of an oft misunderstood subject and probably the most enlightening and best movie that we have seen on it so far.

    FRINGE! Queer Art & Film Festival runs 3rd – 9th November. For tickets and venues checkou tfringefilmfestival.com

  • FILM REVIEW | Bumblef**k USA

    ★★★★ | Bumblef**k USA

    Newbie filmmaker Aaron Douglas Johnson’s debut feature is an unsettling docu-drama hybrid that arose from a very personal tragedy in his life.

    Johnson was born in a small town in Iowa and as an only child he grew up very close to his cousin Matt. By all accounts, Matthew, a devout Catholic and a passionate Republican, was a very popular member of his high school soccer team. Matthew was also gay, and at the age of 24 committed suicide after coming out of the closet in his hometown. This film, however, is not a biopic but Johnson’s attempt to try and get a better understanding of what it must have been like for Matthew to struggle with his sexuality in this small town in Middle America.

    The film successfully mixes a fictional story about Alexa a young blond Dutch woman who had befriended Matt on a Course somewhere and she has flown to Iowa from Amsterdam to make a documentary about her friends passing. Amongst all the interviews she films (unscripted and with very actual local lesbians and gays) she goes on somewhat of her own roller-coaster ride as she also starts to discover her own true identity as well.

    Settling into a house where she has rented a room for the summer, Alexa is so caught up in her own world that she is unaware that Lukas her landlord, a lonely man in his 40s, is immediately attracted to her. In fact, we soon discover that she has an unfortunate manner taking all kindnesses for granted and happily using and promptly discarding everybody who takes any interest in her.

    After her first night in Iowa, this somewhat confused girl wakes up in a strange bed without much recollection on how she ended up there. Her bed partner is Jennifer a local bartender/artist and the two women could not be more opposite. Not just because this is Alexa’s first time with a woman, but the fact out and proud lesbian Jennifer is an edgy positive woman who knows exactly what she wants out of life. And that doesn’t include sleeping with ‘straight’ women who end up running back to their boyfriends, as she has done that already.

    Alexa’s voyage of discovery will start at that moment when she cannot wait to get dressed and get out of Jennifer’s apartment. She’ll be back on and off, but not before she has a romp in a cemetery (well with a male grave digger) who, when he has finished making out with her in her room, is then unceremoniously kicked out by the Landlord at her request. Lukas will eventually try his luck after he has seen Alex dispensing sexual favours liberally with others, and when she resists, he rapes her.

    Johnson’s intriguing and thought-provoking film is somewhat disturbing. Not simply as the talking heads so poignantly articulate their own strife dealing, and overcoming, with some of the negative consequences after acknowledging the truth about their sexuality, but using a thoughtless and self-absorbed protagonist in the fictional story made it nigh on impossible to sympathise with her at times. It was, however, a very clever and unusual formula for reinforcing his key message i.e. it’s still tough being out and gay in so many places even today.

    Johnson should be applauded for honouring his cousin’s memory in this manner, and if this movie succeeds in just saving one more life, then it was all definitely worthwhile.

  • FILM REVIEW | Finding Vivian Maier

    ★★★★★ | Finding Vivian Maier

    A young graduate working on a history project bought a suitcase full of photographic negatives in a Chicago auction hoping that one or two them maybe useful in his research. However what John Maloof discovered that day in 2007 was a treasure trove of what is undoubtedly one on the finest collection of street photography ever made. They all turned out to be the work of one person a Vivian Maier, someone so totally unknown there wasn’t a single mention of her on Google or any other Internet search engine.

    A curious Maloof turned detective and his painstaking research helped him very gradually put together a picture of this mystery genius and at the same time discover and purchase even more of her work. Vivian Maier had been born in New York in 1929 and had then spent much of her childhood in France before returning to Chicago where she worked for almost 40 years as a Nanny. Every new discovery Maloof made about the unknown Maier was a shocking revelation as very few of the people she had worked for had any sense that this extremely odd woman they had hired to look after their offspring was a prolific obsessed photographer with such a remarkable eye. It seems most of her young charges knew as Nanny Maier dragged them through the seamier rough spots of the city clutching her camera looking for subjects as part of their daily constitutional.

    As Maloof pieced together Maier’s story like a jigsaw what emerged was a picture of a very eccentric loner and a compulsive hoarder who was an immensely private person. It’s only when he traces her steps in France does he discover that Maier knew that she was talented but apart from a brief correspondence with one printer did she ever talk about letting people see her work. The fact that news of the discovery of the 100000 plus negatives and the 700 plus undeveloped rolls of film had gone viral, there were still doubters from the people who knew Maier that she would have ever wanted this worldwide fame and recognition.

    This new documentary that Maloof wrote and directed, along with writer/producer Charlie Siskel, is exceptional for two distinct reasons. Firstly the very human story about this rather bizarre woman who was described as being ‘so awesomely unique’ and ‘a very closed cold person’ and who ended up losing one job with the mother explaining to her child ‘Vivian has got a little too crazy even for us’. The reminisces of the people who knew her are riveting and poignant. And then there is this whole superb body of work which is so exceptionally wonderful it stuns you into silence at times. Howard Greenberg a leading NY Gallerist who holds exhibitions of her work claims that no other photographer’s work has ever generated this much interest in his time.

    Credit to Maloof on several counts. Not only for recognising the significance of his find, and for his sheer doggedness and determination to ‘finding’ Vivian Maier, but also for the impressive way he put this all together in this, his first ever movie.

    There are so many components of this story that will keep you wondering and wanting to know more. Like why would this aggressively shy person produce so many ingenious portraits of herself that she could have been credited as being the creator of the ubiquitous selfie?

    Unmissable: and you will want to see it at least twice.

  • FILM REVIEW | Palo Alto

    ★★★★ | Palo Alto

    The directorial debut of Gia Coppola, Palo Alto is an exploration of high school teenagers experimentations with sex, drugs, and alcohol, and it’s an impressive debut.

    Coppola, the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola and Nicholas Cage, turns James Franco’s book of the same name into a gritty yet honest movie of a bunch of teenagers in a Palo Alto, California High School. Franco’s book was a series of stories, and Coppola’s film links them up beautifully to create a film that flows, with characters who we could all relate to.

    April (an amazing Emma Roberts) is the class virgin. April’s popular amongst her peers and is a star soccer player. She is also being chased by her creepy soccer coach Mr B., whom she babysits for (Franco, in one of his best roles in years). But Mr B. just doesn’t like April, he also ‘likes’ other girls at the school – he’s a paedophile.

    Meanwhile, Teddy (Jack Kilmer), and Fred (Nat Wolff) are the best of friends, yet it’s Fred unpredictable behaviour that at times becomes explosive and dangerous. And Teddy has a huge crush on April, and he is unaware of her relationship with Mr B.

    Zoe Levin plays Emily. She’s basically the school slut and sleeps with Fred. Teddy, taking a page from Fred’s book, is caught drunk driving and has to perform community service, in a library where Fred visits and proceeds to deface a book. Throw in a mix of more parties and more romances and what you have is a teenage high school film that is made for grownups.

    Coppola gives us a film that is seen through the eyes of the teenagers; their angst, their anxiety, semi-innocence, boredom and excitement. It’s a movie that feels real, with performances to match. Roberts, the niece of Julia, was the perfect choice for the role of April. She’s 23 years old but in the film looks like she’s 16. Kilmer (son of actor Val Kilmer, who has a cameo in the film as a stoned-out stepfather), is also very good as Teddy, tight friends with Fred yet trying to win April’s affections. And Franco is perfect as the lecherous soccer coach – his guilty smile and glint in his eyes say it all – he’s very handsome yet very dangerous. Franco trusted his book to Coppola to turn it into a movie, and she does a fantastic job. Not bad for a first-timer. Francis Ford and Sofia Coppola should watch their back, another Coppola family member is on the way up.

  • FILM REVIEW | The Imitation Game

    ★★★★★ | The Imitation Game

    Based on the real life story of legendary cryptanalyst Alan Turing, The Imitation Game portrays the nail-biting race against time by Turing and his brilliant team of code-breakers at Britain’s top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II.

    Via a series of flashbacks, the film spans the key periods of Turing’s life, from his unhappy teenage years at boarding school and the triumph of his secret wartime work on the revolutionary electro-mechanical ‘Bombe’, which was capable of breaking 3,000 Enigma-generated naval codes a day, to the tragedy of his post-war decline, following his horrific and shocking conviction and subsequent enforced chemical castration just for having gay sex. Finally pardoned in 2013 by the Queen, for the ‘crime’ of carrying out homosexual acts that he was tried for in 1951, Alan Turing’s role was pivotal in winning the Second World War.

    With such a fascinating story and a stellar cast (Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Mark Strong, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance) this is a film that is destined to be a major success. Already garnering critical acclaim, it’s not hard to see why. The script, period detail and performances are all exemplary. Cumberbatch is pitch perfect in his portrayal as Turing, portraying the strengths and vulnerabilities of a man with little social skills who is driven by his passion for his work and his intellect. He’s ably supported by Keira Knightley as the feisty Joan Clarke; a woman of great intellect who has to fight to the constraints of a society that devalues and oppresses women. Mark Strong as a particularly dashing MI6 agent and Matthew Goode as a fellow code-breaker, are equally strong.

    The script is actually very funny as well as being poignant and thrilling. This is a must see film of this autumn/winter.

    The Imitation Game is in cinemas from the 14th of November 2014

  • FILM REVIEW | The Last Impresario

    ★★★★ | The Last Impresario

    Gracie Otto’s affectionate documentary on the charismatic and adventurous English theatre and film producer Michael White is a movie long overdue. Despite his enormous contribution in a prolific career that spanned three decades he is as Anna Wintour succinctly put it, ‘the most famous person that you’ve never heard’. Ms Wintour also so accurately summed up his rich and tumultuous career by describing him as ‘a true Renaissance man’.

    Michael ‘Chalky’ White was born in Glasgow in 1936 to wealthy immigrant Jewish parents who packed him off to Boarding School in Switzerland at the tender age of 7. This small shy boy who suffered from asthma and couldn’t speak a word of French was something of a loner and although fiercely independent developed a skill in befriending everyone, a character trait that would end up changing his life.

    From Switzerland, he went to study at the Sorbonne which was followed by a stint as a Wall Street runner in the 1950s. Somewhere along the line this well-travelled young man discovered a passion for the theatre and landed himself a job with the impresario Peter Daubney in London producing international theatre seasons. At the ripe age of 25 White produced his first play in the West End. It was not a conventional drama but a production of Jack Gelber’s Living Theatre group called ‘The Connection’ and it depicted the life of drug-addicted jazz musicians. It had a mixed reception with its detractors up in arms about the debauchery on stage which showed men shooting up, something totally unheard of back in 1959 when every play was still censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.

    It was however not the last time that White would break all the rules as he pursued anything avant-garde and different than the norm in a career in which he mounted 101 stage productions and produced 27 films.

    He introduced London to art ‘happenings’ with Yoko Ono, contemporary dance with Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, discovered the ground-breaking ‘The Rocky Horror Show’, joined forces with Kenneth Tynan to produce the all-nude review Oh Calcutta’, gave Barry Humphries aka Dame Edna Everage his first big break. Then as his career moved into movies he produced ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’, John Water’s ‘Polyester’, and the classic ‘My Dinner with Andre’.

    Otto starts her movie almost at the end when after casually meeting White at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 she is intrigued about this charming septuagenarian who literally knows everybody worth knowing. And what’s more, they all totally adore him. From British royalty to the Hollywood A list via mega-rock stars to model superstars, White has hung out with them all, and many of them, including ex-wives and girlfriends, eagerly line up to give witness to all the joyous times they have spent together. Even Wintour the Ice Queen cracks a rare smile on her face when she talks about her times with White.

    White’s professional success (and sometimes failure) is because he is a gambler. Unlike any of his peers, he is happy to take a chance on people and their productions simply if he believes in them, almost in the same way that he bets on horses too. His personal ‘success’ is because he is an optimist and believes that everyone is his friend. ‘Some people have cheated me, but I have no enemies at all.’

    Now after a couple of strokes, although White refuses to acknowledge the ageing process, he is obviously not in a good shape physically or financially. Whilst he is happy to talk about his life (with the rare exception such as losing the lucrative rights to The Rocky Horror Show) he adamantly refuses to let Otto in to find out much about him as a man. Several colleagues drop very broad hints that part of his present demise is due to not just the excessive partying but the use of recreational drugs, but Otto chooses not to pursue any of this.

    His legacy will not just be all the thousands of photographs he took to chronicle his life with a whole galaxy or stars, or the correspondence with the rich and famous that he had hoarded for decades. It will be the way that his approach of leading with his heart and not his head completely propelled London into being a true world-class stage and discovering and giving a voice to such a remarkable array of talent. It also helped that he was also a professional charmer.

    The world is definitely a better place because of Michael White, the like of whom we will never see again.

  • FILM REVIEW | Tru Love

    ★★★★ | Tru Love

    When 60-year-old Alice comes to Toronto six months after becoming a widow, her daughter Suzanne a lawyer is too busy at work to be home to greet her mother.

    She asks her unemployed friend Tru to step in at the last minute to look after Alice but then is shocked when she later arrives home and find that the two women have very quickly bonded. When Suzanne goes back to the office again that night, Alice takes Tru out to dinner to thank her, and the conversation soon takes a very personal turn.

    Alice is fascinated to learn about 30-something-year-old Tru’s life as a commitment-phobic serial-bed-hopping lesbian’s seemingly carefree life. She admits to having similar feelings when she was young but confessed that back in those days one had either to get married or join a nunnery. This provokes Tru into joking that the latter would have been the same as being a lesbian. There is obviously an attraction between the two women, but both are afraid to act upon it.

    The relationship between Alice and Suzanne is, however, is tenuous, to say the least as if neither can deal with the other’s grief for the departed husband/father. When it is clear that Alice’s spirits are so lifted by just spending time with Tru, Suzanne steps in and meddles to try and ensure that she puts a stop to their budding relationship. It appears at first she is in denial that Alice could possibly be a lesbian, but it soon turns out that this lonely partnerless woman has another reason to resent Tru making her mother so happy.

    Tru on the other hand slowly realises that with this welcoming older woman she is capable of loving someone after all. Alice never doubts her feelings but in some wonderful scenes talking to her late husband (seen on screen) she does question if this invalidates her life to date as she has not been true to her own feelings.

    This very touching story is very much about the two women’s quite chaste love but also equally about Alice’s relationship with her own daughter which seems to have reached a very low point. It’s unexpected and sudden ending was not the best way to finish the story as it didn’t really seem to give closure to all of them, well, at least to the two younger women.

    It’s an entertaining spirited movie about a delightful May/December relationship. Shauna MacDonald who co-wrote and co-directed as well as playing Tru gave herself a part that could/should have done more, but she did at least enable Kate Trotter who superbly played Alice and was a sheer joy as so convincingly conveyed the spirit of a woman finally discovering herself.

  • The First Gay Best Picture Oscar At Last?

    There have been openly gay writers, directors and actors that have won Oscars, but never ever a Gay Themed Best Picture Oscar.

    In 2005 BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN came close getting 8 nominations, the most of any film that year, and then winning 3 of them, but being pipped at the post for the ultimate award despite it being the hot favourite. Will 2015 be the year this all changes? Four countries have ‘officially submitted’ gay movies for BEST FOREIGN PICTURE nominations and we think they all have a good chance of winning. Here they are :-

    SAINT LAURENT from France. At last an un-sanitised version of the great French designer and somewhat tortured genius. Directed and co-written by Bertrand Bonello and starring hunky Gaspard Ulliel, it’s been wowing wowing audiences in France, and we cannot wait to see it.

     

    DER KRIES aka The Circle from Switzerland. This stunning and emotional account of gay life in Zurich post WW2 is part documentary and part fiction and will have you reaching for your tissues. Winner of a TEDDY AWARD at the Berlinale (which is the nearest thing to an LGBT Oscar).

     

    THE WAY HE LOOKS from Brazil. We have just published our 5 Star review of this film that opens in UK cinemas on October 24th. We unashamedly LOVE this touching tale of a blind gay teenager’s coming-out story which also won a TEDDY AWARD at this year’s Berlinale. We talked with Director Daniel Ribeiro when he was in London recently, so look out for our exclusive interview coming soon.

     

    MOMMY from Canada.This is technically not a gay film but we have included it as it is the work of gay wunderkin director/writer/editor/actor/composer/costume designer XAVIER DOLAN. This is his 5th award winning feature film at the ripe old age of 25 years old and it received an unprecedented 15 minute standing ovation when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In this film Dolan re-visits the tumultious mother-son relationship theme of his very first movie ‘I Killed My Mother’.

     

    All OSCAR NOMINATIONS are announced on Thursday 15th January, and the WINNERS on Sunday February 22nd 2015.

     

    By Roger Walker-Dack

  • FILM REVIEW | The Overnighters

    ★★★★ | The Overnighters

    After North Dakota introduced the controversial technology known as fracking in 2008 it suddenly became the nation’s second largest oil producing State.

    So as the economic recession started to kick in really hard over the next few years, thousands of unemployed men unable to find work in their part of the country flocked to the new oilfields hoping to secure jobs. Many ended up the city of Willaston which is located in the oil-rich region in the west of the state. Totally unprepared for job searching which could take some considerable time or at which they could fail as they were totally unqualified, many of these migrant workers ended up being homeless and destitute.

    Their one chance of surviving and making their dreams succeed lay in the hands of an extraordinary local Lutheran Pastor who mounted what turned out to be a one man band to help these men try and succeed and move on. Pastor Reinke knew that the City permitted people to sleep overnight in their own cars if they were parked legally, but for the people that had come by bus and train, he went one step further and opened up the church premises and allowed them to sleep on any floor space they could claim.

    This program called ‘the overnighters’ was started in the dead of winter and the church’s congregation went along with their leader’s plan assuming that when the spring came, the men would move out and on. But each day more and more men arrived seeking refuge and the trickle turned into a flood. The Pastor suggested that the men make a voluntary contribution towards their keep, but insisted on them submitting to a background check and also attending church.

    As this influx of cars and men impacted the neighbourhood and at the same, the crime rate also rose the local paper started to voice the concerns of the community and published a few damning pieces on the Pastor’s activities. In a badly thought out move he panicked and invited one of the men who had been a convicted sex offender to stay with his own family to take the heat off for a while… but when word got out, it was the start of the unravelling of the whole program and the Pastor’s own life.

    Director Jesse Moss was his own one-man crew when he filmed this in 2012/3 and he gets up close and personal in telling the intimate stories of some of the men that are passing through in the hope of a better life. And although their struggles simply to survive are a powerful indictment on the effects of the downturn of a global economy on ordinary working men, it is the Pastor’s own somewhat bewildering and incessant crusade that is the main focus here. Reinke is resolute in his sheer doggedness to offer these men shelter and hope despite the overwhelming objections of the City, and of his own congregation who are angry at being railroaded into giving their support to something they can no longer tolerate.

    The Pastor’s very blinkered approach to expecting all of his neighbours to act as he believes Christians too unfairly casts them as the devil’s advocate when the refuse to go along with all his plans, and he eventually pays the cost of pushing them all too hard. There is more than hint that he has his own troubled past and on one occasion when he sympathies with one of the men who is baring his tormented soul, he remarks that they have a lot more in common than the other man would think. There are also the tell-tale signs of sudden flares of anger when Reinke believes that anyone has betrayed his trust in him. And then when the chips are down at the end of the movie, Reinke shocks his placid wife (and us) with a surprising confession.

    Moss’s movie never steers shy from showing the sheer despair of these men, and even of their guardian angel too. This compelling feature length documentary is quite an eye opener, in every sense of the word.

    In UK Cinemas 31st October

  • FILM REVIEW | The Secret Path

    This new gay love story from a married couple of newbie filmmakers Daniel and Richard Mansfield is quite unique.★★★

    Essentially a two-hander, its the story of a pair of lovers in their late 20s who are on the run having deserted the British Navy in the early 1800s. Having come ashore near the rather lush grounds of the estate of an abandoned country house, the two men live ‘rough’ during the day whilst at night they dig up dead bodies to sell and get some funds to move on.

    In a script that is full of more holes than any net these ex-Mariners may have found at sea, we are never too sure why they do little beyond walking around in circles or just lying on the grass cuddling each other.

    They make out occasionally in a manner that one can only suggest that their clumsiness is due to being new to man-on-man sex, or that they are used to doing it on rough seas which gave them a natural rhythm. What is for sure is that the whole place is haunted, and in this supernatural thriller where Theo alone keeps seeing dead people, we know that it cannot possible end well for him or for his lover Frank.

    It’s a bold move making a gay period drama, especially on a micro-budget, and these two Brit filmmakers should be applauded for their valiant effort. The combination of the jerky hand-held cameras and an ominously eerie soundtrack go a long way to making this wee movie more watchable. The two very likeable actors, Darren Bransford & Henry Regan, do well with their parts but they, like the script could have so benefited with both more substance and better direction. The whole thin plot was far too stretched out and made one’s attention wander a little too often in the middle section in particular.

    This new movie is due to be premiered at the GayWise Festival in London in November but before that will be available on VOD/DVD at Amazon.

  • FILM REVIEW | You And The Night

    The opening sequence of French writer/director Yann Gonzalez debut feature starts with confusion that never really eases up through this avant-garde art-house film. ★

    CREDIT: Les Rencontres D’Après Minuit
    CREDIT: Les Rencontres D’Après Minuit

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