THEGAYUK

Tag: One Star Film Review

The latest one-star film review from THEGAYUK.

  • FILM REVIEW | Burning Blue

    FILM REVIEW | Burning Blue

    ✮ | Burning Blue

    burningblue_art

    In 1995, I saw a play in the West End called Burning Blue. It was a brilliant telling of a story about the relationship between two gay men in the US Navy in the 1980s. It was brilliant, memorable, and award-winning. A new film version of the play has just been released and it’s quite the opposite.

    The play was written by David Milne Greer and is based on his experiences as a US Navy Aviator in the 1980s. The fictional story is about an investigation into a naval accident that turns into a gay witch hunt and is based on Greer’s knowledge of the treatment of gay men in the US Navy. Two Navy fighter pilots – Daniel (Trent Ford) and Will (Morgan Spector) – live and work aboard a Navy destroyer in very close quarters with other servicemen.

    An accident that involves Will is investigated by the higher ups and puts their unit under intense scrutiny. Complicating things is the arrival of a third pilot Matt (Rob Mayes), and he and Daniel fall in love, causing Matt to leave his wife. But this type of behaviour was not accepted during the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ era; homosexuality in the Navy was just not allowed, and there were serious consequences for out gay men. Needless to say, Daniel and Matt’s relationship can’t endure the Navy’s ant-gay policy, and then suddenly theirs, and Will’s, lives are changed forever when another accident happens.

    You would think a film about this timely subject would expertly crafted and well told. Well, it’s not. The pacing and acting of the movie are just horrible; scenes go on for a longer than they should, the acting (unfortunately), is stiff and wooden, and quite a few of the dramatic scenes are funny. Burning Blue has the look and feel of a Murder She Wrote episode, and it lacks the drama and intensity of the stage play. Burning Blue only gets one star – for tackling the theme of gay love in the military – but it tackles it very badly.

    Now available to watch on digital download on iTunes and  Amazon

  • FILM REVIEW | Dirty Grandpa

    Both DeNiro and Efron star in the new rude, crude, and obscene film ‘Dirty Grandpa’. ★

    We are ‘treated’ to seeing Robert DeNiro (as perverted frisky and unsexed Grandpa Dick Kelly – get it?) masturbate to an interracial pornography video the day after the funeral of his wife who he was with for 40 years.

    We also get to see Effon’s (James Kelly) brother pouring beer over his dead grandmother’s coffin, Efron wearing a bee thong with his arse out in the open (several times), which at one point comes off causing him to expose himself to a little boy, while simulation with the assumption of oral sex between the two (I’m not kidding here) and an endless, and I mean endless, supply of cock jokes, and cocks (one scene has Effron and DeNiro sharing a bed together in which DeNiro sleeps naked, and the next moment there is a penis in his face supposedly to be Grandpa’s).

    This is not to mention scenes of Efron in jail with a fellow cellmate feeling him up, the one gay character in the movie being made fun of because he is gay, two inept police officers who all but ignore the town’s drug dealer (Adam Pally) who happens to shoot guns in his tourist a/k/a drug shop, and an extremely horny young woman (Zoey Deutch) who has way too much sex talk with DeNiro.

    It all adds up to one dirty, and bad movie. The plot is this: after the death of his wife, Grandpa Kelly wants to head down to his condo in Florida, so he tricks grandson Jason into driving him down there, much to the dismay of Jason’s fiance Meredith (Julianne Hough), who’s he about to marry and with the wedding rehearsal just days away. On the way Grandpa and Grandson run into Grandson’s ex-schoolmate Lenore (Aubrey Plaza), with the aforementioned horny Shadia (Deutch) and the gay camp Tyrone (Brandon Mychal Smith) in tow.

    Shadia’s got the hot hots for Grandpa (to tick one of her ‘must do’ boxes) and Lenore will realize that she’s got the hots for Jason. It’s a road trip that ends in most of the character’s lives changed, as well as the audiences. You will walk out shaking your head and vow to never see a Zac Efron (and possibly a Robert DeNiro) film ever again. Thanks to Director Dan Mazer (The Dictator) and writer John Phillips for taking Efron and DeNiro to new lows in their careers.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW | Educating Simon, by Robin Reardon

    Sixteen-year-old Simon’s life is turned upside down when his mother announces that she’s met and is marrying her new partner. ★

    Brian, Simon’s future step-father is from Boston, USA. Brian can’t move to England too because of his daughter Persie. So Simon is forced to give up Tinkerbell, his cat and Graeme, his imaginary boyfriend. Moving to Boston puts the shared dream of Simon going to Oxford University at risk.
    The dream being shared by Simon and his deceased father. In Boston, Simon’s new life is busy both with school work and socially. As part of his school work he is assigned Toby/Kay to Mentor for a Spelling Bee. Toby/Kay is an eleven-year-old trans person, who feels like he was born in the wrong body and wants to start hormone replacement therapy before he hits puberty.Educating Simon was an idea with a lot of potential, but unfortunately none of its potential was realised.
    Main character Simon writes the story from his perspective in diary entries. His character is un-relatable and doesn’t cause the reader to care about him. The character was also inconsistent. Reardon sometimes getting the mentality, emotional maturity and behaviour of 16-year-old Simon spot on and other times getting it completely wrong.
    All the other characters felt two-dimensional. Toby/Kay’s storyline lacked depth and felt more like it was about having a trans representative than truly telling her story. Educating Simon is overwritten with pacing that crawled along like a snail. The book doesn’t really get started until at least fifty pages in. The sense of relief when the book finally ends was the main sense of enjoyment.
    It’s not the worse book I’ve ever read, but it’s pretty close. This isn’t Reardon’s first book and I would be willing read another on of his books but would have low expectations and be wary.
    Reviewed by Antony Simpson | @antonysimpson

  • FILM REVIEW | Boys In Brazil

    ★ | Boys In Brazil

    This painfully unfunny dramedy starts and ends with a group of four closeted gay friends at São Paulo’s Gay Parade, one of the largest in the world. As the Parade ends one of them is gay-bashed and after they beat the thugs off, the four make a pact that by the time of next year’s Parade they will all finally come out of the closet.

    Outrageously camp teenager Mauro has aspirations to be a Drag queen, something his devout evangelical parents are quick to put a stop too once they catch him midstream trying out his lip-synching routine. Their reaction is to drag around their local priest to exorcise the devil out of their son. Mauro’s rather shy best friend Rodrigo just needs a push to hook up with another handsome classmate, and telling his parents that he now has a boyfriend is rather a non-event.

    Mauro’s gay uncle Vicente who was also part of the group is a high-flying businessman who panics when his boss is in town from Paris and insists on having dinner with Vicente and his wife. Vicente’s best girlfriend is dragged into be his beard, but he needn’t have bothered as the boss turns out to be gay too. Who Vicente would have preferred to be dining with is Roger the rather hunky man he helped rescue from the gay bashing incident. Roger, however, is married and about to be a father a second time, and just cannot find the time to reach his part of the pact and come out to his wife. It’s not helped by the fact that his mother-in-law (played by a real-life drag queen!) practically lives with them.

    Then there is the angry and rather annoying self-righteous lesbian blogger who sits in judgement of them all and wants to publicly ‘out’ both Roger and Mauro against their wishes.

    The cliché driven very lame plot is packed full of old-fashioned stereotypes that seem so out of place in contemporary gay cinema. Even the coming-out aspect of the stories are handled so clumsily, that they are difficult to empathise with.

    I saw this one so you wouldn’t have too!

  • FILM REVIEW | Angel With Tethered Wings

    It seems like Steven Vasquez the director/writer/cinematographer/editor wants to corner the market in low-budget gay horror mystery movies the rate he is turning them out these days.

    This new one like his last recent one (Errodity) is essentially another piece of soft-core pornography, but this time with an extended and tangled plot, and where the script is as flaccid as the penises and the only thing stiff is the acting.

    It’s billed as a ‘back-from-the-grave revenge flick’, which is in three parts and is the story about a pair of gay twins, and their brother. I think. Anyway, there is a bad twin who is a callous producer of twink porn who owes the mysterious Carmine an awful lot of money that he plans to replay when a geeky Texan coughs up big time to have sex with the main porn star. The money disappears after the Texan has had his end away, and the rest of the movie is spent chasing the money and the Twink too.

    It’s not all played out chronologically so the rather lame story is not that easy to follow, and I wouldn’t be giving too much away by saying that soon after the Twink and his brother (!) come back as vampires, most of the cast get shot one way or another. Now that the Twink is dead he very sadly misses his boyfriend although they dated for just two days. However, the fact that he is played by a real (and hot) porn star Addison Graham makes that totally understandable. He actually puts in a very convincing performance even when he is fully clothed.

    Nearly everyone at one time or another gets completely naked and there are lots of full frontals and also some very noisy un-erotic simulated sex scenes, once even played out to some church lady singing ‘Ave Maria’.

    Making ambitious low budget gay movies like this is not easy and through sheer lack of resources often the script and the acting suffers. In this instance, it was both, and maybe if Vasquez hadn’t been trying to do everything behind the camera himself he would spot that too.

    If you are a fan of gay zombie B Movies then you may want to even try this, as there are not many others in this genre. If you are a fan of Mr Graham and want to literally see more of him (!) then you may want to check out some the steamy movies he stars in for Michael Lucas’s Studio.
    On Dvd/VOD July 13th from TLA

  • FILM REVIEW | Broken Gardenias

    ★ | Broken Gardenias

    Jenni is a misfit and a nerd. She is so clumsy that she breaks most of the plant pots at the nursery where she works and that really annoys her boss.

    Her self-absorbed roommates all but one ignore her, and she is totally friendless. It gets even worse after she is hospitalised and loses both her job and her home. Clutching one cardboard box of her worldly possessions she makes tracks to the nearest park and sets about hanging herself from a tree.

    Even this does not go to plan as she is cut down and rescued by Sam (short for Samantha) a feisty lesbian with a buzz cut and ripped jeans and a great big grin. ‘This’ she tells a downcast Jenni ‘is the face of a nice person’. Something she feels the need to point out after listening to the miserable girl pour out her tale of woe as it seems likely that she has never encountered a nice person ever before in her life.

    Part of the story is Jenni’s father who she hasn’t seen since she was brought to the city and dumped there when she was very little. He is still in Los Angeles. Maybe. Jenni is very sketchy about details, but that doesn’t deter Sam who declares that they will set off for LA in search of him immediately. Even the fact they do not have a car, or even the faintest idea where in the vast city he will be is considered irrelevant by the overly optimistic Sam.

    Their road trip is littered with characters that Sam just shrugs off, but which wind up Jenni even more. When they arrive in the city and the search for the father starts, Sam has a detour when she runs into an old fling who invites her… and Jenni… to a wild party. Whilst Sam goes off to make out with her ex, wide-eyed Jenni ends up tripping on a psychedelic cupcake and getting into some bedroom action that she didn’t didn’t count on. She freaks out and then as she has angered the owner of the house as well, runs off into the city and is really on her own now. The question is will she survive, and will she find her father? Even more important will we have lost interest just like Sam does?

    Broken Gardenias is billed as a dark comedy and is the work of first-time director Kai Alexander whose bio states that he spent his childhood with his parents who were part of a travelling circus which may account for the bizarre roster of characters the two women encounter. The script is by newbie writer Alma S. Grey who also plays Jenni.

    The sole bright spot of this film is the performance of Ashley Morocco as the bubbly Sam as asides from this the movie just simply fails to really engage, and for a comedy, it is painfully unfunny.

  • 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 | The Hundred Foot Journey

    ★ | The Hundred Foot Journey

    A more apt title for this preposterous and painfully unfunny comedy would be ‘Lost in Translation’. Based on a best-selling novel by Richard C. Morais this new movie from the Oscar-nominated king of syrupy schmaltz Lasse Hallstrom (Cider House Rules & Chocolat) and produced by Oprah Winfrey and Stephen Spielberg must have seemed like a fantastic idea on paper as they managed to persuade none other than Oscar Winner Helen Mirren to be their very uncomfortable looking star. After filming this very inane and somewhat patronising piece she could only have only ended up asking the same question as we do now i.e. whatever possessed her!

    The story is of an Indian family who has to leave Mumbai in a hurry when their restaurant is destroyed and the matriarch is killed after a political uprising. They seek asylum in London and settle in a cramped home next to Heathrow Airport right under the flight path. However it’s not the fact that they can almost touch the planes as they land that drives them out, but the cold and damp English climate and they set off in a dilapidated camper van to warmer climes of France.

    When their van breaks down outside Saint-Antonin-Noble-Vala small picturesque one-street village in the middle of nowhere, Father spies an empty restaurant for sale that he deems will be perfect for the family to establish their new Indian Restaurant. This village evidently only has one other eating establishment (other than the café where everyone has breakfast) and this is smack opposite their new venue. It is in fact just a hundred feet from their front door. This very popular fine dining establishment, which possesses a coveted Michelin star, and a fancy Chef, is run by a chauffeured driven Grand Dame who, for some inexplicable reason, is paranoid about the new competition from a fast-food Indian eatery run by a cook.

    The rivalry is petty and too silly for words and is as ridiculous as the silly French accent of the English speaking Madame Mallory. After a chance encounter, Hassan the Indian cook falls in love with Marguerite a sous chef who works for Madame and she encourages him to read a recipe book about fine French cuisine. Then after a few attempts at re-creating classic dishes and before you can say Nigella Lawson he is a cordon-bleu chef and immediately deserts his family to work for Madame herself. Next stop for him is Paris and an even fancier restaurant where as Chef de Cuisine he becomes an overnight sensation winning more Michelin stars with easy.

    However, fame and success isn’t everything for Hassan and as he misses his family he hurries back to Madame‘s country restaurant where he can get the taste of both Marguerite and fresh local produce once again.

    This rather innocuous tale is an excruciating 2 hours long and has no redeeming features other than the location of the small town, and the rather scrumptious food.

  • FILM REVIEW | Big Gay Love

    ★ | Big Gay Love

    Ringo Le’s comic drama admirably tackles the concept that even in our physique obsessed culture, gay men who are socially inept and more than pleasantly plump can still get their chance at a big romance.

    The lonely soul in this instance is Bob, who is a chubby successful party caterer in LA who has made enough money to buy his first house but desperately sad as he has no-one to share it with. For some reason (insecurity?) his only friends are a couple of vapid vain gym rats who are as self-centered as his mother who was once a famous Pin Up Girl.

    When at one of his own parties, he meets Andy a handsome beefy accomplished chef & restaurant owner, and budding writer to boot, who actually fancies him, Bob’s low-self esteem kicks in big time. The trouble is for Bob… and for us too… that once Le sets up the scenario the initially promising story disintegrates through a series of convoluted and somewhat ridiculous plot twists and the whole mishmash becomes one annoying big pity party for Bob.

    The cast includes the talented Jonathan Lisecki (the writer/director/actor of ‘Gayby’) and handsome Nicholas Brendon (from ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’) but with zero chemistry between them and a very stilted script, both of them looked as uncomfortable as we felt by the time the final credits rolled. They would be lucky to find a small gay love at best!

    Big Gay Love = Big Gay Yawn.

  • FILM REVIEW | You And The Night

    The opening sequence of French writer/director Yann Gonzalez debut feature starts with confusion that never really eases up through this avant-garde art-house film. ★

    CREDIT: Les Rencontres D’Après Minuit
    CREDIT: Les Rencontres D’Après Minuit

    (more…)

  • FILM REVIEW | Man At Bath

    ★ | Man At Bath
    Emmanuel is a man of very few words, a hustler and the live-in lover of Omar.

    They live in an apartment in a tower block in Gennevilliers, a working-class suburb of Paris. When Omar announces that he is going to New York for a week to work on a film project, an angry Emmanuel punishes him by brutally sexually assaulting him. After that, as Omar goes to leave, he tells Emmanuel to move out of the apartment by the time he returns from his trip.

    Emmanuel wiles his way seemingly having sex with half of the men in his neighbourhood, some for money, and others just for the hell of it. It’s hard to tell as he is one very emotionless cold fish. He does have the idea of trying to contact Omar in New York but as he is so detached from real life, he somehow thinks that the only way to do this is by the defunct Telegram system.

    Omar, on the other hand, is traipsing around New York videoing his friend Chiara Mastrioniani (playing herself) promoting her latest movie. Along the way, he manages to pick up a skinny Canadian film student who becomes an obsession for both his sexual appetite and his camera too.

    Despite trying to desperately read between the lines trying to discover any deep or disguised existentialist meaning, that sadly is the total sum of it. The movie is the latest from French filmmaker Christophe Honoré whose somewhat indulgent output in recent years has gone from quite bizarre (Beloved) to downright bad (Let My People Go) and this one fits neatly in both camps.

    I’m not sure if the whole affair was meant to be a vehicle to ‘legitimise’ the gay porn star Francois Sagat’s move into mainstream films because if it was, it was a complete and utter failure. I kept thinking back to Manhola Dargis of The New York Times when she once wrote about Janet Jackson: ‘how can I put it gently? She is a woman of very limited facial expressions!’ Ms Dargis has evidently not seen Mr Sagat on the screen, as he has none!

    When the very short muscular Sagat strips his clothes off every other scene despite his erect penis he fails to imbue the act with any sexuality at all, which doesn’t make this even a half-decent piece of soft porn.

    Evidently, the whole project had been commissioned by the writer/director Olivier Assayas on behalf of the Theatre de Gennevilliers, and Honore took his own inspiration from a local Impressionist painting entitled Man at Bath. The end result is hardly something that would make me want to visit Gennevilliers, or even sit through another Honore movie in the near distant future.