THEGAYUK

Category: Entertainment

  • SINGLE REVIEW: Will Young – Love Revolution

    Will Young winning the first Pop Idol instalment back in 2002 seems like a bizarre memory. It is hard to remember him emerging into the music industry under the wing of Simon Cowell because he has proven himself better than those means and shaken free of the stigma sometimes associated with the X Factor like shows. The second Pop Idol instalment with Michelle McManus is thankfully much more forgettable. Or regrettable, you can delete accordingly.

    ★★★★

    As an artist Will Young has mastered the art of producing a catchy yet vulnerable pop sound, maturing delicately with every new song. His last release Echoes back in 2011 promoted his growth as a talented singer songwriter with the likes of the breathtaking Come On and the underlining dance tones of I Just Want A Lover – the video for which saw him dancing around a supermarket car park partnered with a shopping trolley, unique to say the least. This intriguing music video history sets him aside from other mainstream pop acts around today. We have seen him moving from Blue Peter spoofs to taking part in dog training competitions, whilst causing a scene at an art gallery or making us cry in an emotional courtroom scene. Not forgetting about his portrayal as a pregnant man, of course. It all claps together in applause to his artistry.

    Enter Love Revolution, the new single and first release from his upcoming album 85% Proof (scheduled for release May 2015). It throws us a funkier sound that we haven’t seen from him in a while, slightly nodding back to the soulful elements of his 2005 album Keep On. If you think the song sounds familiar then you’d be right, as it is a reworking of the 2002 dance anthem Loneliness bought to us by German DJ Tomcraft. Much less Euro-Dance though, I’m afraid, but much more summer soul that will get you dancing around your garden in no time at all.

    The video depicts him as a preaching salesman trying to shift his Love Revolution products onto the apparent lonely singletons. It, albeit cheesy, is an entertaining clip that continues to set him aside from the generic pop routines around at the moment – and who here doesn’t enjoy a bit of cheese every now and then? If you said, ‘I don’t,’ then I have nothing more to say to you.

    The timing of this single could be considered apt against the likes of the recent Dolce & Gabbana debacle, or the risk of Northern Ireland’s anti-gay amendment passing, which could have seen it legal to refuse service to any LGBT person. Not to mention the American ‘gay curers’ who were about to embark on our dear nation to cure us all from being our-wonderfully-natural-selves. Let’s follow Will Young’s lead, start a Love Revolution and dance with whomever we want, yeah?

  • REVIEW | Horse Wows In NYC

    Trying to describe Scottish musician Horse McDonald in words is not the easiest thing to do.If you’ve met her, or seen her live, you’ll understand.

    ★★★★★

    As a performer, Horse is a tour de force. Called “One of the finest singers in Britain” by influential Q Magazine, Horse has been described as an artist “who wouldn’t have been out of place on the Stax or Motown labels in their heyday.”

    And tonight at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York is no different. A guest performer of her fellow Scot, Angela McCluskey,when she walks on stage all eyes turn as the lights focus on her and the audience sits up to take notice. Totally at ease with the surroundings, dark wood and great acoustics,she takes us on a musical journey, ably joined by Paul Cantelon on piano and Lili Haydn on violin.

    Holding the attention of a New York crowd is a feat in itself, and she managed to pull it off to the sell out show with her trademark songs, relentless energy and a voice that gets better with age.Like her strikingly unusual moniker, Horse’s voice is completely original; it’s raw and powerful, emotive and honest,

    The passion Horse sings with stems from legendary performers whom she credits as inspiration,from Joan Armatrading to Jose Carreras.Her intensity could also be credited to the material itself, which is largely autobiographical. “Careful was originally a love song but it is also the song that I sang to my mum as she was dying, so for me it has taken on a whole new meaning.”

    Although the vibe is open and unpretentious, the clientele isn’t there to dance or mingle, making it clear that Rockwood is all about the music and tonight the music was all about a woman called Horse.

     

    by Elsie Maud

  • TV REVIEW | Newzoids, Flat Dull and Unfunny

    Watching the leaders’ debate gave opportunity for more satire than ITV’s latest offering, Newzoids, in last night’s debut of this long awaited, much anticipated show.

    Promises of 80’s ingenious were expected, or rather hoped for, but Newzoids failed to deliver and don’t blamed the subjects, just because Margaret Thatcher isn’t around anymore doesn’t mean you can’t make political satire funny.

    And stop already with the inane Clegg/Cameron housewife/underdog situation, it’s been done… Done I tell you.

    In a Twitter age where we’re expecting fresh content every nanosecond, Newzoids, felt positively ancient as it dealt with the first leaders’ debate, Jeremy Clarkson and Russell Brand – these are all so last week/month/minute.

    Browsing my Twitter timeline it looked as though many agree that Newzoids is as awkward as the puppets’ CGI’d mouths.

    Apparently Spitting Image wasn’t an overnight success, so perhaps Newzoids will become a grower.

    And that Andy Murray sketch was just downright weird… So maybe…

  • Back Behind Bars… OITNB Is Back

    Your favourite inmates from Litchfield Correctional Institution are back for an all new season exclusively on Netflix beginning Friday, June 12th.

    Piper, Red, Crazy Eyes, Taystee, Poussey, Sophia, Nicky, Daya, Gloria, Big Boo, Pennsatucky and all of Litchfield’s ladies are back for more drama and laughter…as Alex makes her return and a new inmate, Stella (Ruby Rose) joins the gang.

    And there will be more! Netflix has announced a season four pick up for the series.

    Orange Is The New Black has garnered more than 20 awards including three Emmy Awards, two SAG Awards, two AFI honors, three Critic’s Choice Television Awards, one NAACP Image Award, one PGA Award, two GLAAD Media Awards, and is a recipient of a Peabody Award and a Television Critics’ Association (TCA) Award.

  • FILM REVIEW | The King Of Escape

    ★★★★ | The King Of Escape

    Tubby French tractor salesman Armand is having some sort of mid-life crisis.

    Openly gay with a penchant for mature married men that he picks up in a cruising area outside of the country town where he lives, his life takes a dramatic turn when he jumps to the defence of a teenage girl who is being attacked by four thugs. 16-year-old Curly is the daughter of Daniel one of Armand’s work rivals who is less than grateful for Armand’s bravery (in which he had paid the thugs rather than physically beating them off). Curly, however, is thrilled, and sees in Armand a knight in shining armour who she persuades to rescue her from her controlling father and an oppressive home life.

    What happens next in this wonderfully bizarre oddball comedy is a fair stretch of the imagination but thanks to the collection of odd larger-than-life characters, you cannot fail to be charmed. Bored Armand is easily persuaded by an excitable and very sexy Curly that he should try batting for the other team. He does manage to lose his ‘straight cherry’ helped by some magical enhancing roots he digs up in the woods where most of the sex (and there is a lot of it) takes place. Before he does take off however despite the fact that Armand is really a lazy slob, he still manages to persuade his straight boss with a deadpan face to let him give him a blowjob.

    When Daniel persuades the local police chief to put a tracking bracelet on Armand he retaliates by running off with the horny teenager with half of the local community in hot pursuit. However, when both the novelty and the effects of the chewing the roots wear off, Armand is very keen to dump his young new girlfriend and go back to his world of tractors and old men. There is a hilarious end to the story with a lot of the latter and all naked.

    The movie made in 2009 by writer/director Alain Guiraudie has now been released on VOD/DVD following the phenomenal success last year of his award-winning very explicit and controversial Strangers By The Lake. The abundance of sex in this earlier movie, however, is played more for laughs and cannot be described even in slightest as being mildly erotic or sensual. What Guiraudie does succeed at so well is making his gay characters devoid of any of the usual clichés and has them simply blending in with all the other locals without anyone raising an eyebrow about their sexuality.

    Be prepared to laugh a lot and also be shocked by all the nudity.

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Rise Like A Phoenix

    ★★ | Rise Like A Phoenix

    Things have changed a great deal since the days of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg and Tony Kushner’s brilliant Angels in America. HIV is something we can talk about more openly, people don’t die anymore, and, with treatment, can live a pretty normal life, though there is still a lot of stigma attached to it.

    Paul Emelion Daly’s new play, Rise Like a Phoenix, is billed as a comedy, but, apart from some admittedly hilarious one-liners, it actually takes itself rather seriously, maybe too seriously. As an HIV negative man, maybe I found it hard to identify with the five gay men, all of them HIV-positive, in Daly’s play, but I’m pretty sure that the majority of my HIV positive friends would have a problem too. Too many of the characters were fixated on the blame game, how they acquired the virus, who gave them the virus, and indeed, not giving too much away, much of the story revolved around a love triangle, in which one of the characters had unknowingly given it to one of the men, who then unknowingly gave it to another.

    I was hoping that a new play about HIV would take a more positive stance, but it seemed to me, that, for all the talk of the success of antiretroviral therapy, emotionally the play was still stuck in the 90s, with its reminders of those tombstone adverts. But the whole landscape has changed since then and we live in a far more positive world (in both senses of the word) than we did? Why was there no talk of TasP (Treatment as Prevention), of PEP or PrEP, the once a day pill that stops you getting HIV?

    I’m afraid I found it all rather dispiriting and negative.

    Performances were good, but Tim McArthur’s usually faultless sense of pace seemed to have deserted him this time round and the play dragged for too much of the time.

  • FILM REVIEW | Brotherhood

    ★★★★★ | Brotherhood

    Lars is a young Danish soldier who is resentful because he has been thrown out of the Army after being accused of making a pass at some of his men.

    Frustrated at being back home with his pushy interfering mother, and at a loose end and unsure of where his life is going, he becomes easy prey for a local gang of xenophobic neo-Nazi thugs looking for new recruits. Although somewhat reluctant at first, he naïvely allows himself to be drawn into the group and is soon recognised by the leaders as being a brighter than average convert who they want to install as a fully-fledged member.

    Lars’ quick rise through the ranks doesn’t sit well with everyone, particularly as he is foisted onto the group’s hard-nutted lieutenant Jimmy who is bitterly resentful of Lars for usurping the position that he felt his psychotic brother should have got received. The angry Jimmy is ordered to be his trainer but the hate he shows however soon turns into lust, which ultimately turns to love in this most unlikely setting.

    This award-winning movie shows the sheer brutality, and the depth and bitterness of the far right’s racism and homophobia in a powerful and moving way. It’s both explicit and shocking and its subject matter is unquestionably disturbing, but the way that this drama unfolds, juxtaposing vitriolic violence and hatred with its edge of tenderness in the love that comes through, makes this film totally unmissable.

  • FILM REVIEW | Drown, a film that sinks to new depths

    ★ | Drown

    Three lifeguards pal around until things turn ugly one night in the new film ‘Drown.’

    ‘Drown’ is a film with very ugly overtones. And it’s not even a positive portrayal of a young gay man who continues to get beaten up and up by an evil homophobic asshole. Handsome Jack Matthews plays Phil. He’s the newby lifeguard in a team that includes the unpredictable and very volatile Len (Matt Levett). They form a trio with fellow lifeguard nick-named Meat (Harry Cook), and together all three bond, in some sort of strange way.

    Len has some kind of strange fascination for Phil, it’s either because Phil is gay and Len doesn’t like it or because Len is secretly attracted to Phil, though won’t admit it to himself. Len is also jealous of Meat, because of his very large penis (not shown unfortunately). But when Phil beats Len in a Lifeguard competition, it causes Len to fume with anger and more jealously because he was beaten by a homosexual.

    Len’s anger grows even more after Phil’s very handsome boyfriend Tom (Sam Anderson) enters the picture.

    Drown is told in flashbacks beginning with their night out to celebrate Phil’s win. But it’s a night out that turns out to be both dangerous, and extremely absurd.

    In flashbacks taking us away from that night out, we see Len beating Phil up, but Phil denies Len ever doing so, and we’re not told why. Surely an extremely homophobic lifeguard with sadistic tendencies needs to be shown the door? And perhaps arrested? Meat is an accomplice to Len’s evil doings – he’s the bitch that Len seems to desperately want. Len even orders Meat to take off injured Phil’s clothes off on a deserted beach? Including his underwear. And most of the time the dialogue is ridiculous, especially in the moments when Len and Meat are discussing Meat’s large penis.

    I was just hoping Len would either put it in his mouth or take it up his arse, just to relieve some of his sexual anxiety. And while there are beautiful images of the men swimming, and sunsets, and a woman who swims and swims out to the ocean with the likelihood that she won’t be coming back used as a metaphor for Len’s personality, it all makes for a highly uncomfortable and almost unwatchable 93-minute film.

    Available from Amazon

    Order Drown from Amazon | Amazon Instant | iTunes

  • FILM REVIEW | Do I Sound Gay?

    When journalist David Thorpe found himself single again in his mid-forties he started to angst as to what could possibly be so wrong with him that he should be dumped so unceremoniously. His immediate thought was that the problem must be his voice, that he had always hated, and how it must now be a turn off for other men too. It propelled him into jettisoning his job working for a non-profit housing association and embarking on a journey to ask the world at large the question that had been nagging him for years… do I sound gay?

    ★★★★★

    Thorpe’s somewhat light-hearted investigation starts with him accepting that he dislikes gay-sounding voices, especially his own and he wonders if with professional help it can in fact be changed. A very pushy speech therapist has him working on his ‘nasality’ and long vowels to get a ‘go-too’ voice whatever that maybe. She, thank goodness, is not the only figure that Thorpe seeks advice from and his interviews with some legendary gay figures make both sound, and also hilarious, contributions to his quest.

    Satirist David Sedaris admits that his own remarkably effeminate sounding voice means that he is regularly mistaken on the phone as a woman. Disarmingly frank Sedaris confesses that he actually feels good when a stranger tells him that he doesn’t ‘sound gay’ even though he had believed himself to be ‘beyond all that’. Project Runway’s Tim Gunn says he was appalled when he first heard his voice, but has learned to live with it and love it even. ‘If people hear my voice and call me gay, I’ll say thank you. I’m proud of it’.

    Sex columnist Dan Savage adds a touch of seriousness to the topic by commenting that ‘hating your voice is the last vestige of internalised homophobia.’ On the other hand actor Jeff Hiller handles the reality of the roles that his ‘gay voice’ will limit him too with remarkable good humour and a healthy dashing of some wicked wit. ‘If the gay role is a meaty part, they will always cast a straight actor. If the part is a gay guy with a hot body then I obviously cannot play that. So I just play the sad self-hating bitter queens’, he says roaring with laughter and adding ‘ I’ll take those ugly girl roles because at least I get to work.’

    Thorpe sprinkles his immensely watchable documentary with some lively vox populi, and also his own friends are on hand to lend their voices too even though they do not share his concern that the subject matter is really that important. When at the end he pushes them to give an opinion of his newly trained voice they all tell him that they cannot notice any difference in how he sounds at all. However what they (and we) perceive by now is that his voice didn’t change, but he did.

    As his most entertaining journey draws to a conclusion Thorpe realised that there was nothing wrong with sounding like he does, and equally there is nothing wrong with being a gay man having a gay voice. He was very content to have taken on his quest summing it up his reasoning of ‘if you cannot handle the answer then it’s a question you’ve got to ask.’ We’re glad he did.

  • Netflix Reunited Fonda And Tomlin Over Gay Husbands

    Netflix has just released a trailer for a brand new comedy series about two women in their 70s who are left single when their husbands both come out as gay.

    Reuniting the totally fabulous LILY TOMLIN and JANE FONDA who had previously starred together in the hit movie 9 to 5 who now play Grace and Frankie whose lives are left dangling when their husbands (played by Emmy Award Winners Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston) declare their love for each other.

    The 13-part series that that is tipped to be one of Netflix’s biggest successes to date was created by ‘Friends’ creator Marta Kauffman,and is expected to air later this year, but no release date has so far been set.

    P.S. 2015 could prove to be a big year for Lily Tomlin as she also stars in Paul Weitz’s movie GRANDMA that was one of the biggest hits at Sundance Film Festival in January. Playing a lesbian on the screen for the first time Ms. Tomlin gives one of the best performances of her career in this darkly funny and also touching film of one long day in the life of one very frayed family. Due in our cinemas later this year.

     

     

     

  • BOOK REVIEW | The Art of Being Normal by Lisa Williamson

    ★★★★★ | The Art of Being Normal by Lisa Williamson

    I think it says a lot about me as an individual that my attention span in these social media days seems to have dwindled to the point where if it’s more than 140 characters, I get bored.

    I have a stack of great books waiting to be read, or started and tossed aside as one thing or another distracts me.

    That is until this book dropped through the letterbox.

    I honestly can’t remember the last time I relished an authors words so much, felt so deeply in-volved in the plot, felt it resonate on a personal level – basically, found that rare thing, a truly un-put-downable book.

    The storyline is one we can all understand to some point – the slightly kooky outcast group, not the A-crowd, but individuals who have their own voices. Think a good John Hughes film (Pretty in Pink, etc) Bullied at school? Tick.Small group of geeky friends? Tick. Fancy someone you can’t have? Tick. Odd family life? Tick.

    The list is endless, but Lisa Williamson, the book’s author, has the talent of drawing you in and making you feel this book could be about you (in a general sense) without detracting from her own storyline or making any of it seem trite or generic.

    Putting it bluntly, she makes you feel you belong to this story – and a bloody good story it is too.

    In a nutshell, it’s about 2 boys and their lives as they grow and meet. One is a troubled teen, shift-ing from school to school, not much of a family life, not much of a home, no real friends. The other is from a good family, good home, but has a deep secret and deals with it as only teenagers can, and do, daily.

    David Piper has the secret, he wants to be a girl. He’s obsessed to the point of writing everything down in his book, from his penis size to how visible his Adam’s apple is, all in the name of not wanting to look like a man.

    Leo Denton wants to simply be invisible. However, his first few days at his new school ensure that this is going to be impossible.

    After Leo stands up for David against the school bully, an unlikely friendship begins to form and grow – but the secrets they all have are about to come out and things will never be the same.

    This book isn’t another teen drama; it looks at the subjects it covers sensitively but also with humour. The subjects covered aren’t simple, and on some level may have been felt by most of us – being an outsider, wanting to belong, wanting to be invisible, fear of bullying, fear of our families, lack of friends… the list is endless but Lisa tackles these themes so well.

    If you are looking for a good holiday read, pick this. It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry, but it’ll never bore you!

     

    by Chris Jones