THEGAYUK

Tag: DVD Genre Romance

  • DVD REVIEW | Shelter

    Thwarted by his family circumstance and finding it hard to find his place in a small industrial Californian town, heartthrob Zach (Trevor Wright) is a trapped, talented artist.

    Stymied by his situation; a selfish and homophobic sister, a loveless relationship with his girlfriend and a father who is next to useless. With Art College and a new life calling him, Zach finds himself suffocated by his life with a hopeless acceptance. However, things begin to change when Shaun (Brad Rowe), Zach’s best friend’s brother returns to town. Life begins to click into place when a drunken night together shows Zach a new existence. One that offers a life unlimited.

    As the relationship develops between the two would-be lovers, the reality of his new secret life mounts pressure on his daily existence. Zach is torn between the release of who he wants to be and the pressures of his real life. Zach has become a surrogate father to his sister’s five-year-old son, the adorable Cody (Jackson Wurth) in-between his shifts flipping burgers. His small town, wrong side of the tracks existence and expectations battle directly with the possibilities that lay ahead with Shaun, Art College and escaping from his humble beginnings.

    What makes Shelter a wholly charming film to watch is its warmth and honesty. Its tentative steps and its revealing of Zach’s new potential is stunning. You know where you are with Shelter and you know where you’re going and clichés aside, it’s a magnificent film for many reasons. It’s a hazy, sweet, Gaussian, Californian coming out story. Filmed with a sensitivity that’s not often found in gay cinema. The sex scenes aren’t graphic, but leave enough to the imagination. It’s everything you wish your vanilla first time with a man might be. Its lack of reference to the gay scene or to gay culture makes it a film that can be enjoyed by most audiences, who appreciate a good romance. Filled with instamatic – esque shots of the Californian shoreline, crashing waves mix well with a thoughtful and provocative soundtrack.

    The camera does linger on Trevor Wright and he deserves the attention. Acting with an introspective knowing, Wright leads the story through and along with Brad Rowe gives great screen. Their chemistry is undeniable, their potential promising. It is an entirely shameful that Wright hasn’t garnered more film success because he is a riveting actor to behold.

    Shelter never fails to deliver what you’d expect from a coming out story, perhaps a little less complicated than real life situations, but definitely a film I’d revisit.

    Perfect if you like: Rainbows, Hollister and Hollywood endings.

    Dreadful if you like: Slings, fisting and earthy dramas.

    Buy on Amazon

  • DVD REVIEW | Shortbus

    ★★★★★ | Shortbus

    You’ll never look at a splatter painting in the way away again.

    If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to have your face stuffed into a film’s never regions, then Shortbus is the film for you to see. Stat.

    Director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig And The Angry Inch) bravely circumnavigates the world of sexuality in this stylish, almost uncomplicated observation of sexual dysfunction.

    “Shortbus” is a New York club where the focus is sexual liberation with a heady blend of punters. Transgender people, ageing homosexuals, hot young boys, a straight female sex therapist all looking to get their rocks off – a bit like Piccadilly on a Thursday night but more scintillating.

    The creators and actors of Shortbus have genuinely created and sustained characters the viewer can befriend and have some feeling for.  You can feel that the actual actors forged a real relationship with each other, which gathering from the DVD’s ‘extras’ they had to, as part of the film development process was having sexual relations with each other.

    Shortbus did give me a tingling sensation. Not just because you get to see: self-sucking, a blinding rim job, a 3-way, the national anthem sung into a sizable cock and Mr Cameron-Mitchell himself being sucked off by a supporting actor (no really) but it caused me to think of my own sexuality and my relationship to it.

    Sex is ‘in your face.’ It is about sexual roles. It’s about ‘this moment, now’. Being British, and naturally reserved such talk and this movie is better left after two bottles of Chablis and a handful of bar nuts.

    Some fantastic performances and an introduction to one Jay Brannan – who I suggest you get yourself into – socially so to speak. He has a Facebook, twitter, albums and tours his music about regularly.

    If you’re sexually revolutionised you might watch this and think, what’s all the fuss about, but worth a punt anyway. You can always pass it off as porn with a story line and real actors.

    If you’re a fan of the slightly psychedelic, smash colour, animatic world of John Cameron Mitchell you’ll love this movie. It isn’t one, however, to watch with your Mother. You get to see quite a bit of peen!

    Available to buy on AMAZON

  • DVD REVIEW | In Bloom

    ★★★★ | In Bloom

    This is the rather gritty story of a hip very young gay couple in Chicago’s ‘Boystown’ coming to terms with how tough one’s first love can be.

    Kurt is a small time drug dealer who supplies pot to his peers, whilst Paul his boyfriend of two years has a dead-end job in a local grocery store that he can hardly tolerate. When the long summer starts, they are having fun and very much into each other and seem the perfect couple, but some seven months later they have separated and can barely talk to each other.

    Everything had been going well with them until one night one of Kurt’s good-looking customers puts the moves on him, and although he initially resists Kevin’s advances, it does open his mind to the possibility that there is more to life outside of his cosy relationship with Paul. Suddenly that relationship starts to look painfully inadequate to him and in a fit of impulse, he starts a ‘break-up’ that he will only regret when it is far too late.

    If that is not bad enough, the real world outside is even scarier than usual right now as there is a serial killer on the prowl whose victims have all been young gay men from the area. With Kurt making late night deliveries to hip parties all over he is probably more at risk than most.

    This look at contemporary edgy youth culture is the work of filmmaker Chris Michael Birkmeier who based this work of fiction on his own story of when he broke up with his first ever boyfriend. The plot is steeped in innocence and naivete and full of well-meaning intentions. It’s a remarkable debut feature and as such one can overlook the slow-moving story line that almost grinds to a halt at times.

    Credit too for the great wee cast full of untried talent, and very good photography too.

    The comparisons between Mr Birkmeier and the French/Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan who picked up Awards at Cannes for his first movie at the tender age of 19, are natural. Especially when Birkmeier makes no bones about the fact that he is a big Dolan fan. But there is very little similarity in their work and this movie is of a much simpler construction and far more straightforward. The two young filmmaker’s works complement each other, rather than complete.

    No doubt at all that C M Birkmeier (as he bills himself) is one to watch in LGBT cinema, and I for one cannot wait to see how he follows this fascinating first movie.

    Available from Amazon and iTunes

  • DVD REVIEW | Weekend; Quiet, unhurried and self assured

    DVD REVIEW | Weekend; Quiet, unhurried and self assured

    It’s the kind of movie that Hollywood would run a mile from, and that’s a good thing.

    DVD REVIEW | Weekend

    It’s quiet, introspective, understatedly self-assured and unhurried. A story about Russell (Tom Cullen), who heads out to a club after a drunken house party with his straight mates. He meets Glen (Chris New). Expecting just a one night stand, their relationship turns into something else.

    Russell and Glen are two quite different characters – Russell unassuming, happy to mix in a world of mainly heterosexual coupled family and friends, in their semi detached suburban houses. Quitely apologetic about his sexuality, he lives alone, surrounded by second-hand goods. Even his prowling at the gay bar is underwhelming – resigned to settling for second best, happy to take second prize. Glen, louder, abrasive, politically aware, activist, assured and confident, all banter and words, knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to offend in getting his agenda across. The dramatic foundation of the film comes from the differences between these two newly acquainted lovers. Their differences and their arguments are intense, brief and affectionate.

    It’s clear that director/writer Andrew Haigh wanted to take his time to explore young British gay guys over a weekend of booze, drugs and hookups. To delve into their relationship hang-ups, their awkwardness with public displays and unpicking the sometimes complicated rules surrounding brand new relationships and one night stands. Whilst the rest of the cinematic world is bound up in fantasies of heterosexual picket fences and 2.4 children Weekend is the discovery of an alternative love story in 2012. Love Vs. Sex, Marriage Vs. “It’s Complicated” It’s gay life and it doesn’t apologise for that, it’s ok for relationships to begin in a seedy dark club, eyeing each others’ pink bits in the toilet.

    Oddly, the film has no soundtrack to speak off, no underlining of key moments, no underscoring of emotions. There aren’t many to underscore. Although Russell’s character is tragic, eking out a childhood in various care homes to living a single, footprint-less life in a tower-block in the suburbs, the film doesn’t allow him to wallow in this backstory. It’s merely presented as fact. The look and feel of the film are artistic and edgy. It looks like it’s been shot using an Instagram effect, pallid and washed out. The frames aren’t always ascetically pleasing, but technically precise, tightly focussing on the observations of its two principles. The editing mixes rough cuts to long extended views. In Hollywood, the creative team would probably focus on some outstanding cloud formations or an interesting arty, out of focus object. But Weekend makes no apology for its simple focus. It’s life. Dull and as messy as life can be on a wet, dreary, October weekend in England.

    It’s a confident and welcome move which relies on the superb acting from the two leads Tom Cullen and Chris New, whose performances felt somewhat improvised and therefore played with an edge of reality that you believe that they are in the throes of a brand new relationship. The film leaves a potent silence in the room as the credits roll. A quiet acceptance and understanding creeps over you as the film’s story sinks in and you almost ache at the end for a Hollywood ending. It never comes.

    In a brave and raw move, Weekend doesn’t provide our lovers with a happy ending or even a resolution. As with life, things are never wrapped up in a nice neat bow, ready for filing in ‘Happy ever after.’

     

    Available on Amazon | iTunes

  • DVD REVIEW | The Pass

    DVD REVIEW | The Pass

    ✭✭✭✭ | The Pass

    Two footballer players end up scoring with each other in Ben A. Williams feature film debut The Pass which is now out on DVD.

    The Pass take place in a ten-year time span which tracks the relationship between two Premiership football players. There’s always been some kind of chemistry and attraction between James (an electric and very good Russell Tovey) and Ade (Arinzé Kene – Hollyoaks – also very good). We meet both of them while they’re sharing a hotel room in 2006 in Bulgaria right before one of their first big matches. They’re both very young, and they’re also both very fit, masculine and extremely sexy, and they spend the first third of the movie in their tight white underwear. James and Ade are talking lads stuff, having a laugh about other players, and watching a video that was taken of another player having sex. The sex talk continues, and the banter goes something like ‘getting as hard as your sister sitting on my face.’ They’re playing around with each other; it’s hot, it’s erotic, it gets brutal and homophobic, plus, we find out later, it leads to more than just talk.

    The Pass takes us beyond the hotel room to tell us the story of the relationship between these two men, but especially about the relationship James has with himself. He’s all man, a star footballer, with all the trappings of stardom; money, women, celebrity, and eventually a wife with two kids. But he’s also battling with his sexuality, and even though he buys whatever, and whomever, he wants when he wants it, the thing he wants most is out of his reach. And when he’s questioned about his sexuality by a woman who has been paid to videotape having sex with him, he wants to go through with it, just to prove to the world (and obviously to himself) that he’s not gay. He’s a man who is not able to accept who he is and who he really wants to be with.

    The Pass is 88 minutes of purely charged up adrenaline. It’s a movie that’s full of dialogue, dialogue that goes from playful banter to sexually-charged hi-jinks, up to and including the final third scene of the movie, which involves a hotel bellboy that’s a bit over the top. But it’s not to take away from a movie that brings up a real issue – that there is not one out gay football player in the game now. Let’s hope this film opens up the dialogue that it’s fine for a player to come out of the closet. Originally produced for the Royal Court Theatre in 2014, The Pass makes an excellent transition to the big screen. Kene brings a real toughness kindled with a bit of softness to his role, but it’s Tovey who owns the movie. He’s never been better; his James is battling with his sexuality while at the same time trying to uphold his image. Tovey is electrifying and is at the top of his game (he will soon be seen at The National next month in the play Angels in America). This is one pass that you will want to catch.

    The Pass is available to stream and buy from Amazon and iTunes