THEGAYUK

Category: Film

  • FILM REVIEW | Love Or Whatever

    Like most Therapists who spend their working day advising people how to get their act together, Corey was not that hot at getting his own life on the right track. When he finally proposed to his muscle-bound airhead personal trainer boyfriend, Jon just freaked out and ran off into the arms (and bed) of the nearest woman. He had finally come of out of his gay closet to discover that he was bisexual, or maybe straight even. ★★★

    Corey crying his eyes poured out his woes to his best friend who was his lesbian sister Kelsey, who insisted that there was only one way forward for him viz. Grindr. And soon as she had taught her brother how to use this Gay dating app. the first man he spotted was the Pizza delivery guy. Pete is hotter than hell: handsome, intelligent, articulate and is running the pizza store whilst caring for his sick Uncle the owner. He’s a saint and too perfect to be true, but this is the movies after all.

    The two men have a very successful date and geeky Corey now has another muscle-bound super-fit boyfriend, but before they can even think about even living happily ever after, they must get through a couple of melodramas first. It turns out that Melissa, the woman who the newly proclaimed bisexual Jon is dating, is also a client of Corey’s and she insists on telling him every intimate detail of her new relationship not knowing that he was her predecessor. Eventually he tells her that his appointment book is full and she should go find another therapist.

    Meanwhile Jon decides he really prefers Corey after all so he comes back and they immediately jump in to bed only to be caught in flagrento by saint Pete. Before they can even get their underwear back on, in storms Melissa who had given Jon a lift and had been waiting in the car outside. And just before they can all say scream ‘How could you ? etc’, then into this now rather packed house comes Kelsey to say that she is broke and her coffee shop business is in Foreclosure and she’s leaving town.

    It’s a romantic comedy so you know that in this very lightweight fluffy piece it will work out in the end so everyone will have big smiles on the faces and a hot body to share their beds. Well most of them anyway. This one is cute, thanks mainly to a good cast, and not just the ex-underwear models who play two of the leads.

    As fun as it is you and perfect for a date night, you may still cynical just opt for the ‘whatever’ rather than ‘love’!

    Available to by from Amazon

  • FILM REVIEW | The Way He Looks

    FILM REVIEW | The Way He Looks

    The lazy summer is over and Leo and his best friend Giovana are back in High School for the new term when curly headed new boy Gabriel joins the class for the first time.★★★★★

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  • FILM REVIEW | The Fault In Our Stars

    16 year old Hazel Graze is permanently attached to an oxygen tank that now keeps her alive after her most recent bouts of cancer. If knowing that her days on earth are severely limited isn’t bad enough, she has to cope with her well-meaning parents and their enforced sunny dispositions to just get through each day. It’s no wonder that this sweet teenager is so depressed as she is dragged from counsellor to group therapy because the adults in her life tell her this is what she needs.

    It isn’t of course, but as stoic and brave as she is, Hazel is not sure that anything beyond her favourite post-modern novel (about cancer), will ever remotely make her happy. That is until one day in the Youth Cancer Group she meets Augustus. A clever tall and handsome 18-year old whose potential career as a baseball player was cut short when cancer took his right leg. He’s a carefree optimistic soul with a very quick acerbic wit who takes an instant shine to Hazel and pursues with an energy and enthusiasm that totally throws her.

    He takes her out on a few very chaste dates, reads the novel that she is addicted too and starts courting her with long late night phone conversations and they gradually morph into a couple in love. A few weeks into this budding relationship Augustus springs a surprise. He’s fixed it with the ‘Make a Wish Foundation’ for the two of them to take a trip to Amsterdam where Hazel can meet Van Houten the author of the book she will not put down. The elusive writer never produced the sequel he promised and Hazel has always been desperate to know what happened next in this unfinished story.

    Meanwhile, before she can go she has another close call with death when she suddenly gets very sick again. It turns out that she will recover to fight another day only to realise that Augustus’s cancer has reappeared and this time there is going to be nothing to stop it being terminal, and soon.

    If that is not enough grief, Van Houten is a major disappointment and breaks her heart too, and just to ensure that we use up at least two boxes of Kleenex watching this high-octane tearjerker, when the young couple are in Amsterdam they visit the Anne Franck house, giving us another reason to sob out loud.

    However what makes this melodrama work and keep our sympathy remaining high throughout is a beautifully understated and mature performance by Shailene Woodley who so carefully avoids any temptation to milk the part and make Hazel a tragic figure. She imbues her with such a serenity and a dignity, makes her warm and funny and never once makes this poor dying teenager a pathetic figure. She is a sheer joy to watch. Ansel Elgot has a slightly easy task as Augustus and he does it exceedingly well demonstrating such great chemistry with his co-star.

    Based on the best-selling novel by John Green who used his past experiences as a chaplain in a children’s hospital for the groundwork of his story. Adapted for the screen by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, who previously wrote ‘The Spectacular Now’ together, and it is director Josh Boone’s sophomore feature.

    Highly recommended.

  • FILM REVIEW | Gone Girl

    ★★★★★ | Gone Girl
    When the movie opens on a quiet July morning in a small Missouri town there is no visible indication we are looking at a man who has fallen on hard times.

    It turns out that Nick Frost has been virtually unemployed since being laid off from his job on a magazine in NY and is now penniless. He and his wife live in a large ugly suburban house that they lease using the remains of her depleted trust fund, and this morning on his 5th wedding anniversary he is feeling sorry for himself and sipping a shot of Bourbon in the small empty bar he owns with his sister. As he sounds off about the stale state of his marriage the telephone rings. It’s his neighbour telling him that the front door of his house is wide open.

    That’s not the only thing he discovers when goes back home, as the house is totally deserted and furniture is turned over and broken as if there has been a struggle of sorts. When the police check it out they find signs of blood and enough clues to be concerned for Amy’s safety and decide to mount a Press Conference the next day to appeal for help. Nick is joined for this by Amy’s psychiatrist parents who are famous authors having once made a fortune on a series of books called Amazing Amy that ruthlessly exploited their daughter’s childhood.

    Initially, there is an overwhelming abundance of sympathy and support for Nick from both the police and local community but as Detective Rhonda Boney keeps uncovering further clues that indicate that Nick may be responsible for his wife’s disappearance, the mood rapidly changes. Egged on by local TV pundits who have already declared that Nick is guilty of killing his wife, everybody turns against him. When his young mistress goes public about their affair it seems like now that a motive has been established, they can be no further doubt about his guilt.

    Things are far from what they seem in this latest movie from the master of suspense director David Fincher who excels at complicated thrillers such as this. By using a series of flashbacks he has shown that this once fairytale romance is now on the rocks, but even so, it’s impossible to comprehend the depths that Amy will go to resolve it in a manner that will try and exact such diabolical revenge on her unfaithful husband.

    It is one of those movies that is best enjoyed knowing little beyond these bare bones of the plot because what follows is so astonishing it will certainly stupefy you. Just when you think you have it all worked out, the story will twist another 360 degrees to confound you yet once again. It is however unquestionably one of the BEST movies of 2014.

    Ben Affleck is superb as put-upon Nick who you may dislike for wanting his own way, but even he doesn’t deserve the punishment Amy wants to exact on him. The movie, however, belongs to the British actress Rosamund Pike who, in an Oscar-worthy performance, is nothing less than outstanding as Amy. It’s an amazing revelation to see her being so brilliantly devious, manipulative, demented and stunningly seductive when she wants her own way. She is such a sheer joy to watch (apart from all the bloody bits naturally).

    Lest I should forget, there are also some great supporting turns that deserve mention too. Kim Dickens (TV’s Sons of Anarchy) as the Detective, Carrie Coon (TV’s The Leftovers) as Nick’s sister Margo, Neil Patrick Harris as Amy’s stalker boyfriend, and Tyler Perry for once playing it straight as Nick’s hot shot lawyer.

    The script, the first ever written by Gillian Flynn, and adapted from her own novel gave Fincher a great canvass to work with, but it is his superb attention to the most minute detail that makes it such the spectacular roller-coaster ride that it is.

  • FILM REVIEW | This Is Where I Leave You

    ★★ | This Is Where I Leave You

    The ‘leaving’ in the title of this rather frenetic comedy refers to death and divorce and a few other departures in between. Everybody in the Altman family has both issues and secrets and the set up for us (and them) to discover them all is when the patriarch dies and his widow (their mother) insists that they must all sit the traditional Jewish Shiva even though none of them has been inside a synagogue for decades.

    Shiva means sitting there together for 7 days without exception or excuse and talking about life and death, and this family have a lot of it on their minds. Four days prior Judd just discovered his wife in bed with his boss and had walked out on both his marriage and his job. Judd’s eldest brother Paul has been trying to get his wife Annie pregnant for some time now and maybe firing blanks, so she looks for an alternative ‘donor’ in her ex-boyfriend, who just happens to be Judd. The youngest brother Phillip who is still just a big kid at heart shows up with his older cougar girlfriend/future fiancé who he met when she was his therapist. The 4th sibling is Wendy, the mother of two, and whose workaholic husband has a cell phone attached to his ear permanently, whilst she is still carrying a torch over Harry the man next door who was her childhood sweetheart and who she dumped after a serious car accident which left him with brain damaged.

    The only one who seems prepared to talk openly and frankly is the mother who proudly flaunts her new breast implants and incessantly hawks the best-selling book that she wrote some years ago based on all her children’s secrets. Naturally, it turns out that she has a big secret too, but this, the most surprising one is not revealed until almost the end.

    It’s all a little too much with an over-abundance of clichéd plot strands that are at best mildly amusing but in reality, give the overall feeling of an ill-conceived TV situation comedy that is too eager to please. Its one big saving grace is the stunning array of talented actors that make up the cast and do the very best with the script that they have been served up. Jason Bateman as Judd stoically takes most of the heavy load as the main character, and Adam Driver, Corey Stoll and the wonderful Tina Fey play his siblings. Timothy Oliphant is the man next door, Dax Shepherd bares all as the cheating Boss, Kathryn Hann is the motherless sister in law and Connie Britton as the put-upon cougar girlfriend. Mother is played by the great (and elegant looking) Jane Fonda but there are moments when you are convinced that she has just phoned her performance in.

    It’s one of those movies you will be happy to watch on a wet Winter evening when there is nothing else that grabs you on the TV, as its really not bad. It’s just that it could/should have been so much better

    Opens on the 24th October 2014

  • FILM REVIEW | The Two Faces Of January

    ★★★★ | The Two Faces Of January

    After an overly long gestation period, this lesser-known psychological thriller from novelist Patricia Highsmith finally makes it to the big screen.

    The year is 1962 and the story opens on the sunny steps of the Acropolis where two American tourists, Chester McFarland and his much younger bride Collette, are having fun enjoying the splendor of the Ruins, whilst nearby Rydal a handsome charismatic Tour Guide has a small group of young wealthy debutantes eating out of his hands. At Collette’s insistence, Chester hires the guide to take them sightseeing although he quickly realises that the young man is not all he claims to be.

    It turns out that neither is Chester, and the past that he is running from is far more complicated and filled with danger. That night a Private Investigator turns up at Chester’s hotel room and threatens to expose him unless he repays the money he swindled from some Clients in a Ponzi-type scheme. After a struggle in which he kills the man, Chester realises that he will need to quickly flee Athens before the murder is discovered. So he turns to Rydal sensing that the young man will know someone who can get them new passports to replace the ones that the Hotel had taken off them when they checked in.

    As they all need to hide out until the new passports can be forged, Rydal suggests that they take the night ferry to the distant island of Crete. However when they arrive there the Hotel will not give them rooms without proper identity, so they catch a decrepit local bus into the remote heart of the island hoping that a more basic village inn would take them in regardless. As the journey gets more difficult and fraught the trio seem less elegant and assured particularly as there are strong undercurrents of mistrust developing between them, especially the two men. Rydal seems fixated with Chester who he thinks off as a substitute figure for his father whom is estranged from, whilst on the other hand, Chester suspects that the young man wants to steal Colette away from him.

    Suspicion leads to treachery and the pace gets more frenetic as they try to keep one eye on each other whilst keeping the other eye looking out for the authorities in hot pursuit as they start catching up on them. It’s very clear that it’s not going to end well for any of them.

    It’s hardly a Hitchcock masterpiece like his adaptation of Highsmith’s Strangers on A Train, nor is it Minghella’s take on the novelist’s Talented Mr Ripley but Oscar-nominated screenwriter Hossein Amini in his directing debut does an admirable job keeping the tension level high in this gripping thriller. The moody cinematography is particular is superb adding a very dramatic visual look to this period piece. Whilst the lead actors Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst may not have a great deal of chemistry as a couple, they put in really fine performances as the troubled McFarlands that one expects from these two talented actors The real joy, however, is Oscar Isaac who was completely mesmerizing as Rydal, and this following hotly on from his riveting turn in Inside Lllewyn Davies clearly shows that he is destined to be a major star.

  • FILM REVIEW | Map To The Stars

    Maps to the Stars can be described as a take-off on Hollywood and celebrity and the people who inhabit this world, and boy what a world it is.

    It’s a world created by David Cronenberg, who also directed. He’s the man who last brought us 2012’s Cosmopolis but he is more well known for the much better received A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Maps to the Stars is not a normal movie, in other words, it’s not what it says on the tin. It’s surreal, dark, black, and intense. It’s a movie that is desperately trying to show us the inhabitants of Hollywood, and their dreams, and their need for fame and validation.

    There are several lead characters in the film, but it mostly belongs to Julianne Moore. She plays ageing actress Havana Segrand. While she’s not that old, she can’t get the parts she used to get, but one part that she really wants is to play a part her late mother once played. Segrand seems to live in the shadow of her more legendary mother, who died in a mysterious fire, yet is not a stable woman – though she lives in a huge house that befits a famous film star. Even though Segrand is surrounded by people all the time, including her agent, her personal assistant Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikoska), and her visits to self-help guru Dr Sanford Weiss (John Cusack), she sees the ghost of he mother as a young girl around the house, and she doesn’t know why. Segrand is just one of the many strange characters in the film.

    There’s also the already-mentioned Agatha Weiss. Her story is even more bizarre. She’s been kept in a psychiatric asylum in Jupiter, Florida since she was a young girl, after a horrible fire that left her with scars on her hand (she wears gloves) and face. It was a fire that appears to be one that she started, as she has been ostracised and totally rejected by her family. This includes her father, who happens to be Dr. Sanford Weiss. She’s obsessed with trying to re-enter the family circle, which she does, and on top of all this, there’s something really strange about her.

    Dr Sanford Weiss is a famous television psychologist who offers New Age advice to his followers, as well as performing intimate bodywork on his celebrity clients, the rich and famous. He stars in his own television program that is constantly on in his household; he’s a strange egotistical man. He is also the author of best-selling self-help books with analysis for the troubled, which doesn’t help his 13-year old teenage son, Benjie Weiss (a very good Evan Bird).

    Benjie Weiss is a teen sensation, a Beiberesque movie star who is making way to much money. He’s spoiled and screwed up. He’s a teen heartthrob (having starred in the big hit ‘Bad Babysitter’ and fresh from rehab – at the tender age of 13). He visits a sick girl in a hospital, to boost his reputation, and is told by his agent that the girl in dying of AIDS, but actually she tells him that she’s got Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. He’s pissed off and tells his agent off for providing him with the wrong information. The girl eventually dies and Benjie is haunted by her ghost – a ghost that he sees almost everywhere he goes. It’s a metaphor for his stardom, an attempt to bring him back down to earth perhaps? But it doesn’t, it makes him a lunatic to the point where he thinks he’s strangling her but he actually strangles the co-star of a new film that he’s doing. He’s jealous that this co-star is stealing scenes from him. The strangulation is a chilling scene, and all too surreal by the reaction of his mother, Cristina Weiss (Olivia Williams). She’s not your typical celebrity mother; she’s a bit backwards and emotionally unstable, paranoid if you will, who is more concerned about her son’s ability to make more money than for his personal well-being.

    The Weiss family is one screwed up family. Robert Pattison shows up as perhaps the only sane person in the movie. He’s Jerome, a limo driver who happens to pick up Agatha when she arrives in Los Angeles. He’s not just a limo driver, he’s also a part-time actor and has fallen for Agatha, but also gets seduced by Havana. After their sexual romp all hell breaks lose and Agatha goes on a rampage.

    Maps to the Stars is an exaggerated take off on Hollywood and it’s denizens. It’s a film that is a distorted view on celebrity culture, but to the extreme, with highs and the very lows, with ghosts from their past thrown in for scary effect. It’s a film where the characters are all very unlikeable, so unlikeable that you sort of wish they would all kill themselves. Maps to the Stars uses Los Angeles and Hollywood as the backdrop, with parts of the film shot on the Hollywood walk of fame and under the famous Hollywood sign, to give it an authentic feel.

    Most people say that Hollywood is fake and artificial, which is observed well in this film. It’s fake, dark, make believe, artificial and over the top, with celebrities swallowed up by their obsessions with success, celebrity and money, and perhaps this is what Hollywood is all about?

    Available to buy from Amazon

  • FILM REVIEW | Ida

    ★★★★★ | Ida

    It’s hard to decide exactly what period this new cinematic masterpiece from Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski is set in with its austere dramatic settings that look like they have remained unchanged for centuries. This unforgiving bleak countryside that seems to have escaped any attempt at modernization is in fact 1962 but you have this sinking feeling that this part of rural post-war Poland is probably still exactly the same today.

    Ida is an 18-year-old Novice at a large decaying rather remote Convent and is just about to take her final Vows. The Convent has been her home since she had been abandoned as an orphaned baby, but now the Mother Superior tells her that she does, in fact, have one living relative, an Aunt who she should go visit before she makes her ultimate commitment to God.

    She has two major shocks awaiting her at the end of her long bus journey when she finally meets her Aunt. Not only does she discover that she is Jewish by birth, but she also quickly realises that her Aunt, is a former high-ranking Communist Party Public Prosecutor who has transgressed into an alcoholic chain-smoking woman who seems to bed every man she meets. The sheltered young nun-to-be, however, seems to take it all in her stride and announces that she wants to go back to her home village just once and visit her parents grave.

    An initially reluctant Aunt agrees to drive her there, as she needs to prepare Ida for the harsh reality of the situation. The parents had been slaughtered in the Pogrom in the War and even now the local anti-Semitic Communist population are in denial of their complicity as in many cases they then stole the lands left by the murdered Jews. This was the case of her own parents and it took the fearless tenacity of the Aunt to uncover the actual facts.

    Along with their road-trip, they give a lift to a handsome young saxophonist who is en route to play at a Ball in the next town. Ida doesn’t realise at the time that he will turn out to be one of the reasons that she questions her vocation and her ‘calling’ to serve God.

    The tense melodramatic story is as uncompromisingly bleak as the landscape it is set in, and it’s twisting plot lines as both women’s lives unfold in front of our eyes makes for compelling viewing. The reason for their sadness is understandable and the outcome is, therefore, inevitable as neither of them can really carry on as before with the knowledge that they have unleashed.

    It is unquestionable one of the most powerfully moving films of the year to date. Completely stunning on so many levels but even so, it is the superb black & white cinematography that so carefully framed each single shot that took this movie to a whole another level. Faultless award-worthy acting by two sublime actors Agata Trzebuchowska and Agata Kulesza who had great chemistry as the two completely different woman who really had so much in common.

    Completely unmissable.

    P.S. The rather surprising detail about this movie that will undoubtedly go down in the annals of Polish cinema as a national masterpiece, is that it’s director and co-writer Pawel Pawlikowskin was born there but has actually lived and worked in the UK and France most of his life. Interesting then seeing the country, as he must remember it from his own childhood.

  • FILM REVIEW | Reaching For The Moon

    ★★★★★ Reaching For The Moon | Elizabeth Bishop was something of a self-absorbed cold fish. When she finished her tenure as US Poet Laureate in 1950, she was 40 years old, alone in N.Y., and suffering with ‘writers block’. At the suggestion of her friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell she decides to go to South America for a long vacation.

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  • FILM REVIEW | Wish I Was Here

    ★★ | Wish I Was Here

    Aiden is evidently a very lousy actor. He’s so bad that even though he lives in LA he hasn’t managed to score even a bit-part role for some years now.

    He does insist though that he must ‘follow his dream’ and selfishly refuses to give up even though his nearest and dearest must pick up the slack for him. His wife Sarah has a monotonous data-processing job at the Water Company just to put food on their table, and his father pays the fees for the private Jewish school that both of his children, Grace and Tucker, attend. This however now has to change as his father announces that as he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wants to spend all his money on alternative therapies, he can no longer fund the kids’ schooling.

    Aiden’s response to this new development is to try and get accepted as a charity case at the school hoping they may forgo the fees, and when this fails, decides he will home school the children instead. It’s something that he clearly has no skills for, but then again, it’s obvious that he’s not actually qualified to do much at all beyond attending auditions.

    Pre-teen Grace who is a very earnest honours student wants to continue learning how to become a devout Jew, whereas her younger sibling Tucker would rather play video games than participate in his father’s attempts to teach him anything. Meanwhile, Sarah has to work in a cubicle with a creepy man who insists on talking about what he calls his penis voice and when she complains to her boss, she is just rebuked and told that she should be grateful she even has a job. Aiden’s father’s treatments fail and his health is now declining rapidly and he is desperate to make amends with Aiden’s slacker brother who seems to hate the entire world, except for the cute woman next door. But somehow Aiden still manages to make most of this all about him.

    There are more than a few similarities between Aiden on screen and his creator/writer/director Zach Braff (although Mr Braff is a good actor) as both are well-meaning and full of good intentions but in this movie are ultimately doomed to fall well short of their goals. This comic drama about the angst of a middle-class Jewish family ‘struggling’ in LA is at best mildly amusing, but for the most part is very flat and annoying. The fact that Mr Braff totally funded his sophomore movie from Kickstarter donors may be the clue as to why this rather undisciplined story, free of any Studio input, seems to have allowed him to indulge him in taking swings at many of the things in LA that seem to really peeve him with such an unfunny script.

    There are touches of the disarmingly charming Braff who has delighted audiences in his TV sitcom Scrubs for years, but not even a glimpse of the wit or humour of Woody Allen that he claims to want to aspire too. The high points are the poignant performance by Mandy Patinkin as the father, and a resilient Kate Hudson doing her best with the little she had been given as Sarah.

    After being so enamoured with his debut movie Garden State, a break-out Indie smash ten years ago, I was so looking forward to Braff’s follow-up, and it is just a disappointment then to find it is so less accomplished and enjoyable than one would have expected.

  • FILM REVIEW | The Perfect Wedding

    ★★★ | The Perfect Wedding

    Paul used to be a drunk. He also used to be Roy’s boyfriend. Two years later and both men have moved on with their separate lives. Paul goes to AA Meetings regularly and is now sober, thanks to Zack his Sponsor, and he lives at home with his very supportive parents in the their rather lush waterfront home in Florida.

    Paul’s sister Alana is engaged to be married and is coming home for the Christmas holidays to start planning a lavish June wedding. Besides her overly-enthusiastic mother, Alana also has her two best friends coming to help work out the details too, trouble is, one of them is Roy, her brother’s ex, and both men are nervous at meeting again for the first time after their messy breakup.

    Roy is also concerned that as he is still single, he may be perceived as a loser, so he persuades Gavin another ex boyfriend to tag along and pretend that the two of them are a couple.

    There was a time a decade or two ago, when almost every gay movie dealt with the ‘A’ issue i.e. AIDS.

    Thankfully at least cinematically we have moved on and this rom-com tackles three more big ‘A’s ‘ instead: alcoholism, adoption, and Alzheimer’s. It almost seems at times with this issue packed story that bestselling romantic author Suzanne Brockman had deliberately penned a script (with her husband Ed Gaffney) about two guys falling in love where being gay was so ordinary that it is almost over looked.

    The Gaffney’s actually wrote this for their gay son the actor Jason T Gaffney who did his mom and pop proud with his turn as Gavin who everyone seemed to fall in love with at some time or another.

    And in case you had guessed that Paul and Roy had seen the error of their ways and fallen back together, then you would have been wrong. The couple whose marriage rounds out this film (after Alana’s had hers) is that of Roy’s two exes who found each other irresistible.

    Thanks to some good performances, a very impressive location and some deft direction from newbie Scott Gabriel this small-budgeted indie movie is definitely one of the better ones of this genre. Touching and tender with very likeable characters that one wanted to find happiness… even if it’s the kind that only happens in the movies… and not a single stereotype in sight.

    It had plenty of eye-candy, and for once they didn’t keep disrobing when the story lagged at all.