THEGAYUK

Tag: Film Review

All the latest film reviews for LGBT themed films and others.

  • FILM REVIEW | The Last Match

    ★★★★ | The Last Match

    It’s still very tough and even quite dangerous being gay in some places, none more so than in the oppressive machismo society of Cuba. So when two male teenage best friends acknowledge their attraction to each other, life starts to get very complicated for them, and we have the sense from the outset that it cannot possibly end well at all.

    Yosvani and Rey both play football every day on a scrap of land in the midst of a poor slum neighbourhood in Havana. Yosvani lives with his fiance and her unscrupulous black-marketeer father in a comfortable middle-class apartment. Rey, on the other hand, lives in a cramped shanty-like two room dump with his wife, their baby, and Theresa his shrill and demanding mother-in-law. It is she who actively encourages the young man to prostitute himself with male tourists willing to pay for a quickie or a whole night of passion.

    With no hope of anything approaching a real job on the horizon, he is happy to oblige but draws the line at doing anything he considers is ‘gay’. Which actually seems to be very little when we see him in action enjoying himself giving his all to Juan a handsome visiting Spaniard

    Rey’s few encounters with Juan make him overly confident and he ends up spending more money than he can afford to buy black-market shirts and sneakers from Yosvani’s father-in-law. He perpetually lives more than precariously on the edge and when he is flat broke he pawns Theresa’s few possessions which results in more anger from her until he redeems them again after he has turned another ‘trick’.

    It’s obvious from the word go that Yosvani and Rey much prefer hanging out on the soccer pitch together than spending any time at all with their respective partners. One night after the two of them have been on a drinking binge they lose their inhibitions and hesitatingly kiss each other and somewhat surprise themselves how much they like it. They like having sex together even more, to such an extent that they cannot get enough of each other. However, because of their home situations, they have to keep this budding relationship very much on the down low and they manage to do just this until one-day Yosvani’s father-in-law gets the wind of what is going on.

    It’s at about the same time that Rey suddenly gets a lucky break when a Scout offers him a chance to train to become a professional soccer player. This is another reason not to go public with their love affair but it’s actually too late as they are already at the point of no return. And then just as we had supposed, the inevitable ending is both tragic and sad.

    Directed and co-written by Spanish filmmaker Antonio Hens (‘Clandestinos’) this heartbreaking well-crafted wee drama is completely engaging as if so accurately portrays the price that young men have to pay when they discover their sexuality in such an unaccepting and intolerant culture. The hypocrisy that it is acceptable as a means to an end as long as you don’t enjoy it, makes this sad tale even more poignant.

    Hen’s young inexperienced lead actors did a fine and convincing job, particularly Reinier Díaz who nailed the character of Rey so perfectly. And less this should put you off going to Cuba, I should tell you that it was all filmed in Puerto Rico!

  • FILM REVIEW | Five Dances

    ★★★★ | Five Dances

    Alan Brown’s latest movie has one of the most accurate titles that pulls no punches and is exactly what it promises i.e five dances.

    Held together by the strands of a wisp of a tenuous plot, it is however still a sweet and sensual coming-out-tale thanks to the presence of a charming young dancer who proves he is quite a mean actor too, despite his inexperience.

    Four dancers and a choreographer are in a Manhattan studio learning a new piece of contemporary dance to perform at the opening night of a Festival. Amongst their number is naive 18 year old Chip who is fresh off the bus from Kansas having won a scholarship to study with the Joffry Ballet. The others assume that his parents back in the Midwest must be proud of him, but the reality is that his divorced alcoholic mother is about to be evicted so makes daily menacing phone calls to her only son.

    Chip is homeless so when Cathy one of the other dancers discovers this, she takes pity on him and takes him home and lets him sleep on his couch. Theo another of the quartet takes another type of interest in the newbie and late one night makes a pass at him. A totally confused (and virginal) Chip runs off but not for long as next night he is back and this time encouraging Theo to go all the way.

    That’s essentially it in terms of plot, but this one after all is all about the dancing, and in particular young Chip learning how to really express himself through movement. The choreography by Jonah Bokaer is exhilarating and so beautifully photographed to accentuate every graceful move, and it’s capped by a sensuous soundtrack by singer/songwriter Scott Matthew.

    Brown is quite the master at bringing every sinew of sexuality into stories of young love into his movies as he did so wonderfully well in ‘Private Romeo’. Here when Chip and Theo are making love it mirrors the dancing in terms of its intimacy and is sensuous rather than explicit. The whole cast dance like angels and young Ryan Steele as Chip maintains that purity and innocence when in the very sparse script he so cutely conveys his turmoil coming to terms with both his threatening mother and the fact that he now has his first ever boyfriend.

    You don’t have to be a contemporary dance fan to love this one, but if you are, it does help.

  • FILM REVIEW | After The Dark (The Philosophers)

    ★★★★★ | | After The Dark (The Philosophers)

    In After The Dark it’s the last day of term and Mr. Zimit, a Philosophy Teacher challenges his international high school students to take part in one final thought experiment: It’s the apocalypse and there’s a bunker that will save some of them. There’s twenty-one of them and only ten places in the bunker. Having more than ten people in the bunker will mean that all in the bunker perish. The class must decide who will get a place in the bunker and who won’t.

    To help the students decide, Mr. Zimit hands them cards with skills on (e.g. Organic Farmer, Structural Engineer, Poet, etc.) for their character in this thought experiment. He encourages them to make logical decisions.

    Later Mr. Zimit ups the ante by telling students that they are required to get at least one pregnancy going during the year in the bunker and asks the students to open their cards to reveal another aspect to their character (e.g. one is gay, one is sterile, one is a midwife, one will get cancer in 3 years time, etc.). Then they have to decide again with this new information who will get a place in the bunker.

    After The Dark is a superb film that uses the dialogue and snippets of action to keep the watcher hooked throughout. Set in the Indonesian city of Jakarta, there are some beautiful settings in this film including Prambanan temple. The cast are mostly unknowns, but fitted their individual roles and worked together well.

    There is good representation of gay people in this film. One of the students is a gay man who is out, accepted and valued by his fellow students (and there is another one that isn’t out at the beginning of the film).

    The lead male character who is identified as straight, opens up his Organic Farmer card to reveal that his character is gay. He gets a place in the bunker, but when it comes to pairing up to get a pregnancy going he says he feels he wouldn’t be comfortable sleeping with a woman as a gay man. This is followed by a short scene of him and the openly gay student getting it on and then shows them becoming close as a couple.

    After The Dark is a film that challenges what you believe about philosophy, logic, the survival of the human race and whether it’s important to exist or live. You’ll find yourself watching it again and again and thinking about it for days afterwards. It will be a great source of enjoyment and generate a good debate among the people you watch it with.

    After The Dark is a fantastic five star film, one that has been under-rated and missed by most. It is available to pre-order/order on Amazon.

  • FILM REVIEW | The Golden Hour

    ★★★★★ | The Golden Hour

    This story about Guatemalan teenagers trying to escape their life of poverty and illegally cross the Mexican Border after a long and arduous journey en route to the USA, is one of the saddest and most dispiriting I have seen in a very long time. It starts with three friends Samuel, Juan and his girlfriend Sara who disguises herself as a boy, but a native Indian called Chaulk also latches on to them soon after they set out.

    The first of their many frightening ordeals occurs in small Mexican town where the Police round them up and immediately deport them back to Guatemala, but not before they rob them of their few possessions and their boots. They quickly find their way back to the Border but Samuel has already had enough and wants to go home. Juan has taken an instant dislike to Chaulk who he thinks is after Sara, but she insists he travels with them, so they all set off again.

    It’s not too long before the train they have jumped on along with hundreds of would-be migrants is stopped by the Mexican Army, but this time the three of them manage to escape and seek refuge in a sugar plantation. Back on the train, and this time it is halted by a band of Drug Traffickers who relieve everyone of anything remotely saleable and capture all the women including Sara who is spotted despite her disguise. When the two boys try to save her they are viscously beaten up by the gang and left unconscious in the middle of nowhere.

    Chaulk revives first as Juan’s injuries are more severe and the young Indian carries him to safety and nurses him back to health. Soon they are back on another train yet again and are easily lulled into false sense of security by another Guatemalan kid who promises them a job with his Uncle as they will need money to pay smugglers for the final stretch of their journey. It is a trap and they are about to be held hostage for ransom but as this gang is led by a fellow Guatemalan, Juan is let free. However as he won’t leave without Chaulk as he had saved his life, he offers the Captors the few dollars he has to buy the Indian’s freedom.

    It is sadly not the end of all the dangerous obstacles they will have to overcome on this seemingly endless harrowing journey.

    The movie’s original title is ‘Juala de Oro’ which translates into ‘Golden Cage’ and this is exactly what the kids get for all their dreams. The US willingly accepts illegals cheap labour but will not allow them the proper papers to rise beyond this lowly position. Despite this, and the continual fear of being caught and deported every single day, there will be hundreds of thousands other kids like these, that will still risk their lives for the hope of a better existence.

    Directed and co-written by Spanish filmmaker Diego Quemada-Díez (who was a cameraman on many of Ken Loach’s movies) it has a beautiful backdrop of stunning Mexican and Guatemalan landscapes that sometimes makes you forget the sheer poverty and the hardships of its inhabitants. The movie relies on amateur actors, but it is the sheer power of the story that makes it so watchable and also the reason it has won several awards including Un Certain Regard at Cannes Film Festival.

    In Cinemas in the UK

  • FILM PREVIEW | Pride

    PRIDE tells the true story of how a group of lesbian and gay activists joined forces with a small Welsh mining community in 1984, supporting them during their darkest hour.

    Despite the subject matter, it is deliciously funny. Starring an ensemble cast including Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Andrew Scott and Paddy Considine, PRIDE received a standing ovation at Cannes this year and is being heralded as the British feel good movie of the year. PRIDE opens nation-wide on 12th September.

    Here is a link to the first trailer that has just been released;-

  • FILM REVIEW | Turtle Hill, Brooklyn

    ★★★★ Turtle Hill, Brooklyn | It’s a sunny Sunday morning in Brooklyn and Mateo wakes his boyfriend Will up with a cup of coffee and a cupcake with single candle alight on top.

    (more…)

  • FILM REVIEW | Hawaii

    When Martin (Mateo Chiarino) gets stranded in the small Argentinian country town he grew up he ends up sleeping rough by the river and goes looking for odd jobs to feed himself.★★★★★

    His search takes him to a large estate where he manages to get some work only to discover that it’s present tenant is Eugenio (Manuel Vignau) one of his boyhood friends. Eugenio is now an affluent writer working on a new novel and he is spending the summer looking after the large house in his Uncle’s absence.

    With sparse dialogue, in fact there is barely a word spoken in the first fifteen minutes in what is essentially a two-hander story, Martin withholds the truth about his rather desperate circumstances and pretends that he is living with his Aunt. The balance of power between the two men who are essentially from different social classes, is very potent as each of them tries gradually to relax the protocol between boss and worker. Particularly on Eugenio’s part when he begins to realise that the friendship he feels for his childhood pal is developing into desire.

    As the two men start to hang out together more when they have both stopped working, the few carefully chosen words they use to talk hold a myriad of feelings although it is very clear that neither of them have any idea of how the other feels about what is evolving here.

    This, the third full feature from writer/director Marco Berger is the most simplest of tales that he stunningly unfolds in an impeccably subtle provocative manner. With a series of incessant long stares and discreet longing glances there is obviously a powerful struggle that each of these men are dealing with as there relationship progresses over the long hot summer. Berger makes their story so completely compelling that we are invested in its outcome to the very end.

    Credit too for casting two very gifted actors for their talents and not for their pretty boy looks (not that they are by any means un-attractive) and for the keeping the nudity (seemingly somewhat obligatory in gay-themed movies these days) down to a bare minimum, despite the heavy eroticism of the piece.

    For me, this was filmmaker Marco Berger back on the form he showed in Plan B his excellent debut movie. His second film Absent aka Ausente may have won the prestigiousTeddy Award at Berlinale but it was a disappointing affair.

    Very hot.

    P.S. The reason for the title can only be revealed when you see the movie without spoiling the plot.

  • FILM REVIEW | Fruitvale Station

    Fruitvale Station

    In the opening sequences using grainy footage from onlookers cellphones we see how this story is going to end. Not long after 2009 has just been welcomed in by this happy boisterous New Year crowd travelling on the BART train in Oakland, California when Oscar Grant, a 22 year old African-American is shot in the back by a white Transit Police Officer.

    Oscar and his friends had been hauled off the train at Fruitvale Station as suspects in a fight that had just occurred, the fact that the men who had antagonised them were all white and were not pursued by the angry and aggressive police presence was no accident.

    In this stunningly powerful narrative the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant III is sadly a very true fact. What follows next is a dramatisation of what Oscar was up to the day he was killed.

    He was apparently no saint, but after a short time behind bars for dealing in marijuana, he was determined to make a go of things.When he loses his grocery store job and is almost desperate enough to start selling pot again, he throws away his stash as he knows that another arrest would take him away from his girlfriend and young daughter who is totally devoted too. It is in fact the women in his life, including his church-going mother, that are his driving force but in his determination to be the ‘man’ of the family he hides his financial struggles from them all behind a web of lies.

    It is a totally compelling movie on every level and even more so when you appreciate that this is the debut of writer/director Ryan Coogler, a 27 year old African-American from Oakland fresh out of Film School.

    What Coogler does so brilliantly is show that behind the statistic of another black man needlessly killed by an undisciplined white authority figure, that this was a very real person just at the start of what should have been a long happy life. There is plenty of emotion in his take on events, and very noticeably, no rage at all.

    Michael B Jordan (The Wire) turns in a terrifically sensitive portrayal as the good-natured Oscar, Melonie Diaz (Be Kind Rewind) is his supportive girlfriend Sophina, and in a powerhouse performance Octavia Spencer as Mum proves that her Oscar win last year (The Help) was no fluke. And credit to Forest Whittaker for taking this project on and producing it.

    In the light of the aftermath of the recent Trayvon Martin killing, this heartbreaking story has even more resonance now. The saddest aspect of all is that we know that many more young men will still needlessly lose their lives simply because of the color of their skin.

    Winner of Awards at both the Sundance & Cannes Film Festivals, this is totally unmissable, and easily one of the best ‘real

  • FILM REVIEW: Errodity(s)

    FILM REVIEW: Errodity(s)

    The only thing horrifying about Steven Vasquez’s new anthology of gay teen movies of the supernatural is some of the acting.★★ (more…)

  • FILM REVIEW | Getting Go

    For three weeks in the summer of 2012 filmmakers Cory James Krueckeberg and Tom Gustafson (the producer/director behind the cute ‘MARIACHI GRINGO’ and the gay cult film ‘Were The World Mine’) followed two guys all over New York with a camera and a script and nothing else. ★★★★★

    Tanner, a slightly nerdy recent college grad had devised a plan to shoot a documentary about the NYC nightlife scene in order to meet a really hot go-go guy that he has cyber-obsessed with. And this is the film about their film.

    They followed the couple filming each other all over the city in cafes and bars, rooftops, dance clubs, their own living rooms and bathrooms and eventually into their bedrooms too. As the story developed and the relationship between ‘Go’ and ‘Doc’ evolved in front of us, there is a very definite, and somewhat unexpected, shift in the power axis between the two men.

    This really is guerrilla filmmaking at its best. No crew, a kickstarter budget of $10K, one actor and one real life go-go boy in an innovative hybrid of documentary, narrative and art film that is such a delight.

    Following hot on the heels of movies such as Weekend, Keep The Lights On and Hors Les Murs this wee drama is part of a very welcome new movement of edgy queer cinema.

    By no means perfect (like the editing!) but it has many things to really love… such as a rather brilliant soundtrack of new music from gay musicians… not to forget the acting of these two young leads who are not exactly tough on the eye to watch even with their clothes on. It also packs an energy and excitement that is quite infectious.

    The future of gay cinema looks very promising indeed when new work like this is being made… and finding the audience it deserves.

    Buy now from Amazon

     

  • FILM REVIEW | Bright Days Ahead

    ★★★★ | Bright Days Ahead

    64-year-old Caroline has retired earlier from her dental practice than she had expected too after falling out with a colleague and she now finds herself at a loose end with too much spare time on her hands.

    She feels somewhat depressed and disorientated after the death of her best friend from breast cancer just three months prior, and this has made her even more aware of her own mortality. Her two grown up children with their own busy lives, want to encourage her to move on and so buy her a trial membership to a local seniors club that has the innocuous title of ‘Bright Days Ahead.’

    Caroline’s first nervous visit to the centre ends every badly when she feels patronised by the young woman running the drama classes, but when she gets home and neither she or her husband can work out their new wifi set up, she reluctantly agrees to go back and try the computer class instead. This is led by Julian an attractive 41 year old man who confides in her that he has a toothache and after Caroline takes him back to her ex-surgery to fix it for him, he returns the favour by making a pass at her.

    It’s not exactly the main reason why this man, who is the same age as her daughters, wants to bed her as he turns out that he is quite the ladies man with a small stable of regular ‘dates’. But even when she discovers this Caroline is more happy to indulge in some very hot love-making as she and her husband had stopped being physical with each other some time ago.

    The secret affair brings more than colour to Caroline’s cheeks as it makes her extraordinary happy and gives her such a sense of purpose that she throws herself enthusiastically into most of the activities at the Club and becomes friends with all the other women there. When word eventually gets out about her daily dalliances in Julian’s office etc, her classmates are in awe and egg her on. However Phillipe her husband doesn’t take too kindly at being cuckolded especially as in this small coastal town that they live in, news like this travels very fast.

    It seems like as a respected dentist, a loyal wife and a good mother, Caroline has always put the consideration of others first in her priorities, but now she has done a complete U turn and thought of nothing more than her own pleasure and happiness. With such a past track record, it’s obvious that she will end up doing the ‘decent thing’ in the end, but hopefully with the realisation that there is an alternative to the inevitable after all.

    The movie has received criticism that it portrays a very unrealistic view of old-age greatly enhanced by the fact that Caroline is played by the strikingly beautiful and exquisite Fanny Ardant. One would never ever dream of calling this great French actress a senior citizen no matter what her age. It is her very presence that so radiates in every scene on the screen, and so I for one am more than happy for Caroline to indulge in this fantasy, no matter how unrealistic it may be.

    A very light and enjoyable piece with one of THE grande dames of French cinema out from 20th June