THEGAYUK

Tag: LGBT Movie Review

Read the latest LGBT+ film reviews from THEGAYUK.

  • FILM REVIEW | Hidden Away, A Spanish Teenage Gay Love Story

    Don’t be fooled into thinking that Hidden Away is just another boy meets boy love story with a less than great cover photo of its two male leads. It’s a very well told and acted Spanish teenage gay love story that’s very heartwarming and enduring as well. ★★★★

    Hidden Away is not told as a simple coming of age story, and it’s not told in chronological order, which makes understanding and piecing the film together a bit confusing. Director Mikel Rueda has decided to tell the story in a way in which is supposedly meant for the viewer to put themselves into the characters shoes. So it opens with Ibrahim, a 14-year-old young man, walking along the road hitchhiking, escaping from something which we won’t know until the very end. He’s from Morocco, but had gone to Spain a few years back looking for a better future. He’s been living in shelters, hoping to get his official papers so that he can stay in Spain. He lives in Bilbao, fully settled, attending school and living in a shelter for boys just like him. Then there is Rafa, also 14, Spanish, living with his parents. Rafa hangs out with boys just like himself, yet there’s one thing different about Rafa. He doesn’t like girls. There is one girl in particular who practically throws herself at him, but he just doesn’t reciprocate, much to the horror of his friends. Even though Ibrahim and Rafa’s paths initially cross (at one point in a club urinal), they don’t meet until a bit later in the film. And there’s a spark. A spark that at first betells an evolving and very close friendship between the young men, but then evolves into more than that. While there is no actual sex scenes in this film, Rafa and Ibrahim’s bond appears to be more than just physical, it’s emotional as well.

    Ibrahim gets mixed up with a local gang that gets him to sell drugs, while Rafa whiles away the time looking for any reason to be with him. They initially bond over a cigarette, but their friendship, and romance, blossoms after they spend a day together hanging out and going bowling. It’s a relationship that we know is too good to be true. And when Ibrahim receives a letter from the government wanting to extradite him back to Morocco, he sees no other way but to run away, with Rafa by his side.

    It’s the performances that make this film fantastic. German Alcaruz as Rafa brings an innocence to his part, a young man who knows what he wants and doesn’t care what his friends think. His facial expressions will melt your heart – Alcarazu gives a believable and touching performance. Adil Koukouh is also very good as Ibrahim. He’s bigger and more mature looking than Rafa, but he also has a special something that makes Rafa’s attraction to him seem very credible. Also very very good is Joseba Ugalde as Rafa’s best friend Guille. He knows he’s losing Rafa to Ibrahim and he’s OK with it, even when Rafa and Ibrahim have to go on the run, there’s a very touching scene when Rafa and Guille say goodbye to each and Guille tells Rafa that’s he doesn’t quite understand what is going on.

    Hidden Away is a bit difficult to comprehend in the beginning as the scenes do jump around, and the subtitles on this film are quite small and at times hard to read, but stick with it till the very end and you will be rewarded with a love story that’s unique in it’s telling and at it’s very core is a film that tells the story of young love, young love that we’ve all experienced.

    Hidden Away is now available to buy on DVD.

     

    by Tim Baros

  • FILM REVIEW | Hidden Away, A Spanish Teenage Gay Love Story

    Don’t be fooled into thinking that Hidden Away is just another boy meets boy love story with a less than great cover photo of its two male leads. It’s a very well told and acted Spanish teenage gay love story that’s very heartwarming and enduring as well. ★★★★

    Hidden Away is not told as a simple coming of age story, and it’s not told in chronological order, which makes understanding and piecing the film together a bit confusing. Director Mikel Rueda has decided to tell the story in a way in which is supposedly meant for the viewer to put themselves into the characters shoes. So it opens with Ibrahim, a 14-year-old young man, walking along the road hitchhiking, escaping from something which we won’t know until the very end. He’s from Morocco, but had gone to Spain a few years back looking for a better future. He’s been living in shelters, hoping to get his official papers so that he can stay in Spain. He lives in Bilbao, fully settled, attending school and living in a shelter for boys just like him. Then there is Rafa, also 14, Spanish, living with his parents. Rafa hangs out with boys just like himself, yet there’s one thing different about Rafa. He doesn’t like girls. There is one girl in particular who practically throws herself at him, but he just doesn’t reciprocate, much to the horror of his friends. Even though Ibrahim and Rafa’s paths initially cross (at one point in a club urinal), they don’t meet until a bit later in the film. And there’s a spark. A spark that at first betells an evolving and very close friendship between the young men, but then evolves into more than that. While there is no actual sex scenes in this film, Rafa and Ibrahim’s bond appears to be more than just physical, it’s emotional as well.

    Ibrahim gets mixed up with a local gang that gets him to sell drugs, while Rafa whiles away the time looking for any reason to be with him. They initially bond over a cigarette, but their friendship, and romance, blossoms after they spend a day together hanging out and going bowling. It’s a relationship that we know is too good to be true. And when Ibrahim receives a letter from the government wanting to extradite him back to Morocco, he sees no other way but to run away, with Rafa by his side.

    It’s the performances that make this film fantastic. German Alcaruz as Rafa brings an innocence to his part, a young man who knows what he wants and doesn’t care what his friends think. His facial expressions will melt your heart – Alcarazu gives a believable and touching performance. Adil Koukouh is also very good as Ibrahim. He’s bigger and more mature looking than Rafa, but he also has a special something that makes Rafa’s attraction to him seem very credible. Also very very good is Joseba Ugalde as Rafa’s best friend Guille. He knows he’s losing Rafa to Ibrahim and he’s OK with it, even when Rafa and Ibrahim have to go on the run, there’s a very touching scene when Rafa and Guille say goodbye to each and Guille tells Rafa that’s he doesn’t quite understand what is going on.

    Hidden Away is a bit difficult to comprehend in the beginning as the scenes do jump around, and the subtitles on this film are quite small and at times hard to read, but stick with it till the very end and you will be rewarded with a love story that’s unique in it’s telling and at it’s very core is a film that tells the story of young love, young love that we’ve all experienced.

    Available to by from Amazon

     

  • FILM REVIEW: From Beginning To End

    There is good taste, and then there is incest.

    It’s surprising that we can sit and watch a lot of suspect and even deviant behaviour amongst (consenting) adults on the silver screen, but this is one topic that we feel is just a tad too icky even for us. Especially when it comes in the form of a melodramatic Brazilian telenova that is short on both substance as well as clothing, and is to all intents and purpose nothing more than a pretty piece of soft porn.

    It starts with two young half brothers, one 6 years old and the other 12, who are a little too close to each other for our comfort zone, and for their mother too who suspects there may be more here than what meets the eye. Flash-forward to the boys as grown men, one of the fathers dies, then the mother passes away too, and the boys seek solace in each other. Well that’s their excuse as they have barely stopped lusting after each other since they were kids.

    We are convinced that it’s not just lust, but real love, which is put to the test when the younger brother who is a potential Olympic swimming champion is told by his coach that he must move abroad to train. To Russia no less. Oh come on coach, you mean to tell us there are no decent swimming pools closer to Brazil?

    Love conquers all though and even a very pretty girl cannot steal the old brother away from his one true love, and this all plays out to a rather deafening over-laden heavy strings soundtrack. And we guess they will happily ever after? Who knows? More importantly, who cares?

    Why see it at all? Well the boys/men are rather stunning beefcakes that even with this limited script prove that they can actually act, and also writhe around naked together looking very sexy but without doing the act (it’s soft porn after all). It was a big box office hit in Brazil when it was released in 2009, and it has now surfaced on Amazon where you can waste £4.49 and more importantly 90 minutes of your time.

     

  • FILM REVIEW | Blackmail Boys

    When gay art student Sam ‘came out’ to his parents they disowned him and cut him off without a cent.

    Faced with high tuition fees, rent and living expenses to find in Chicago, he resorted to turning tricks as it pays so much better than any other manual labour. However when Aaron his long-term long-distance boyfriend moved to town and in with him, he resented the way that Sam earns his living.

    The first time one of Sam’s paying clients came for his weekly rough and tumble, the more worldly Aaron recognised him as an infamous gay-bashing bigot that had just written yet one more book denouncing the ‘evil ways of homosexuality. After his ‘appointment’ was over Aaron suggested that when the man came back for his next hook-up, that he should secretly film the whole naked encounter and use it to blackmail him. Not only would it possibly expose the hypocrite to the whole world, but if he wanted to buy the tape to keep them quiet, they could make enough money to insure that Sam could retire from his call boy career.

    It was a rather inconsequential plot for a lightweight movie made by the somewhat anonymous Shumanski filmmaking brothers from South Africa. Like their previous gay-themed movie Wrecked there is an abundant amount of full frontal nudity and explicit sex that at times just feels like porn with a plot. Its redeeming feature is its mumble core approach to filming (not often used in gay movies) that gave the whole piece an edgy feel to it.

    On the acting side indie actor/director Joe Swanberg who’s first ‘big’ feature Drinking Buddies was recently released to critical acclaim, plays the angry client Andrew Tucker. Looking at Swanberg’s resume to date you can see that he rarely keeps his clothes on through a whole movie, so it seemed no big deal for this straight actor to have explicit gay sex on screen. Interesting also to see young Nathan Adloff (playing Sam) in front of the camera after being so very impressed with his own writing/directing debut in a delightful sleeper from last year’s Nate & Margaret.

    It’s a harmless piece of boy-lite fare that by trying to push our buttons by what it thinks is daring, will only have us reaching for the remote control to skip over all those parts which fall flatter than some of the sexual encounters, to get to the end quicker.

  • FILM REVIEW | 52 Tuesdays, Uplifting and Optimism For Trans Issues

    The closing gala film of the B.F.I. Flare LGBT film festival was an inspired choice and a fitting end to a spectacular program with a wide range of films including the premiere of Lilting with Ben Whishaw and James Franco’s intriguing Interior Leather Bar. The festival attracted huge audiences, great acclaim and was sponsored by big names such as American Airlines, showing how industry now has a commitment to supporting LGBT people.

    ★★★★

    (more…)

  • FILM REVIEW | Rent Boys

    ★★★★ | Rent Boys

    For well over the past four decades, Berlin’s Zoo Railway Station has been the main stomping ground for the city’s rent boys.

    Using archive footage from 1965 this fascinating documentary from gay activist filmmaker Rosa Van Praunheim paints the scene there as it has evolved until the present day. It is a desperately sad tale of the squalid and dangerous lives these boys lead in an occupation that at best leaves them scarred for life, and at worse cost them their lives.

    In the early days, in particular, most of the boys that hustled sex for money were victims of sexual abuse themselves and were plying for trade in their very early teens, and some even younger. Their tales were particularly harrowing especially when they were continuously exploited by paedophiles, and were completely unaware of all the inherent dangers of life on the street.

    Nowadays very few of the boys are German and are heterosexual immigrants from neighbouring ex-Eastern bloc countries who, discovering that they can make more money from one encounter with a ‘john’ than they could laborfor a month back home, are prepared to become ‘gay for pay’ for the financial rewards. They take the same risks, plus the possibility of being deported too.

    Van Praunheim profiled a few of the boys who had been working Zoo Station and the environs for some years now, and despite all the risks, still appeared reluctant to give it up. He went to the hustler bars and talked to the barkeepers who related about the abuse, the violence, the crime and the drug taking in a resigned almost complacent manner. He also followed the workers of SUB/WAY a support group who try their best to help the boys particularly to prevent the spread of AIDS & HIV, and dedicated and hardworking as they are, seemed to be making little headway in getting them off the streets.

    The boys’ stories are heart-rending and there isn’t one that has a happy ending. As they eventually drop out/leave fresher naive young boys take their places and the supply chain never seems to be broken. As Van Praunheim’s film shows, the price the pay for their seedy unhappy lives is far too high.

    Fascinating, but extremely disturbing to watch.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • FILM REVIEW | Straight Acting

    ★★★★ | Straight Acting

    To most ‘out’ gay men “straight acting” is a derogatory term that is the equivalent of self-loathing. This rather inspiring and enthusiastic wee documentary is one man’s journey coming out of the closet and seeking to define his own concept of being gay when he felt he didn’t fit in with any of the stereotypes that he had known to date.

    Spencer Windes was the middle child of a middle-class Mormon family who always did what was expected of him, most of the time that is. At 19 he went off to be a Missionary as his church told him to do, and then he returned home to find a girl, get married and start his own family. Trouble was it didn’t turn out quite like that as Spencer Windes was a deeply closeted gay man and he just hoped that Jesus would sort him out. And we all know how well that usually works out!

    At 31 years old, a deeply unhappy four times college drop out Spencer, now weighing some 300 lbs, was unemployed and still living at home. And then the planes crashed on that fateful day on 9/11 and this was the epiphany that changed his life. On the plane that crashed into the field in Pennsylvania one of the heroes who had tried to stop the terrorists was Mark Bingham. He was not only a big burly (handsome) man, but he was also openly gay. He was also a member of San Francisco FOG a new all openly gay Rugby Team, and that part blew Spencer away. To be out and gay was one thing, but to be able to play a rough contact sport like that was totally another.

    It inspired him to start losing waiting and sign up to join the LA Ironsides even though he had never played rugby in his life before. Much more importantly it opened his eyes to what was a startling concept to him (and other gay men who live rural lives in particular) to all the alternative gay ‘lifestyles’ that now existed, and which became the subject of this movie.

    He went to gay rodeos in the Mid West and met the riders, and to New York to meet gay hockey players and interviewed men who had also struggled with initially opening the closet door, but once they got a taste of what was the other side, came out fully. The universal message from them all was that they had found a gay lifestyle where they fitted in, and were now happy in the own skins at last.

    He also followed the journey of the (eventual) success of his own rugby team as it flew to London to complete in the Gay Rugby World Cup poignantly named after Mark Bingham, and there is one very emotional scene where Mark’s mother makes a wee speech to the hoards of excited gay rugby players.

    This is no dazzling or profound highly polished documentary but simply the highly personalised account of one very likeable young man’s journey of discovery that I think a lot of others struggling with their own identity would find both uplifting and touching. I really warmed to it, so much so that I can’t wait to start playing rugby! No really, I will.