THEGAYUK

Tag: Two Star Film Review

The latest two-star film review from THEGAYUK.

  • FILM REVIEW | Candid Love

    ★★ | Candid Love

    Filmmaker Kurtz Frausun’s voyeuristic record of an ill-fated relationship between two desperately troubled men is a disturbing sight that raises all sorts of questions.

    The first one of which is why they even allowed the intrusive camera into their lives at a time when they are both clinging on to the last vestiges of hope as their worlds continue to unfold in front of their (and our) eyes. Frausun even jumps in front of the camera at one point to question the morality of being a witness to this highly personal situation especially when it soon becomes apparent to us, if not the two men themselves, that it is doomed.

    Jon is gay and bi-polar and Daniel his partner is a recovering alcoholic and suffers from depression and has still not recovered from the love of his life who is his (ex) wife of 11 years. He doesn’t identify as gay per se but admits to dating gay men in the two years since his marriage fell apart. Jon is his second boyfriend and they are fast approaching their first anniversary when Daniel’s father is suddenly taken to hospital with an aneurysm.

    The ‘story’ starts after Daniel has rushed from the apartment he shares with Jon in Texas to his father’s bedside in Wisconsin. A quick session of events follow resulting in the father’s death and Daniel needing to deal with both planning the funeral and taking care of his mother even though it is clear from the morose and confusing phone conversations with Jon that his depression has really kicked up a notch or two and that he will not be able to resist slipping back into hitting the bottle again.

    In all of his conversations, first on the phone and then when he eventually comes back to Texas, he uses Jon as a verbal punching bag, although judging from his disclosures, sometimes in the past he resorted to physical violence as well. His is obviously a deeply unhappy man struggling with his mental health issues who makes no secret that his ‘relationship’ with Jon started falling apart just after two months and as he goes into detail of its disintegration, it’s remarkable that he even considers continuing wanting to be with someone he has such scant regard for and seems to positive loathe.

    Jon is not much better as all he does is complain to the camera about how miserably unhappy he is with the state of affairs between the two of them and the only thing that makes it all bearable is smoking. Legal and illegal cigarettes.

    It’s infuriating at times watching these two people’s obvious pain as they just stumble around directionless and as the totally unsatisfactory compromise that they clumsily piece together hasn’t a chance in hell in succeeding, doesn’t make their reality any less unpalatable. I simply have no idea why they put themselves through it all let alone why they allowed the camera to record it. I for one, wished they hadn’t.

    ‘Candid’ means straightforward and honest, and frankly, neither Daniel nor Jon were capable of really ever being this. Plus of all the emotions they showed in the 60 minutes of this film there was very little ‘love’, if any at all.

  • 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 | Blind

    Blond thirty-something year old Ingrid has lost her sight abruptly to an undiagnosed condition and now, depressed and unsettled, she just whiles away in the stark white high-rise apartment in Oslo that she shares with Morton her architect husband.

    ★★

    She refuses to ever venture outside at all and actually suspects that Morton actually sneaks back in the middle of the day and just spies on her silently. In the deliberate and slow pace at the start of this story we see Ingrid sitting with her laptop on the window sill peering out into the void and we are not sure what she is up to as we hear her thoughts in the voice-over.

    Turns out that she is actually writing a piece of fiction that she vividly imagines as she sits there in her darkness.  At the centre of her story is Elin a single mother who has recently moved to the city from Sweden and lives in an apartment building opposite the one that Einar lives in and spies on her all the time when he is not engrossed watching pornography on his computer. And then Ingrid writes her husband into the piece, and that’s when the movie goes in a totally different direction mixing imagination with reality.

    Saying it gets complicated is a gross understatement especially when the pace steps up with Ingrid’s imagination running wild and Elin, also blond and not physically dissimilar, starts dating Morton and goes blind too. For once I had no idea what to make of this all when I viewed it at Sundance last year, but people around me were quick to compare it to a Charlie Kaufman movie (Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, Adapation + Being John Malkovitch) which I guess makes a lot of sense.

    The reason that it was on my ‘watchlist’ in the first place is its because it’s the directing debut of writer Eskil Vogt who was responsible for one of my favourite movies of 2013 Oslo, August 31st.

     

  • FILM REVIEW | Silent Youth

    Marlo a young engineering student is taking a break from school and is visiting a girlfriend in Berlin.

    When she goes off to work, he takes off to explore the city. Crossing the street he momentarily links eyes with another man, and after the pass, they take furtive looks back at each other. Moments later as he crosses a bridge, Marlo espies the same young man, and starts to follow him. When he catches up he with him he hangs back for a few minutes before sidling up and tries awkwardly to start a conversation.  Both of them are unsure of themselves, let alone of each other, and even after they eventually decide to walk on together, very few words are exchanged.

    Kirill is Russian and has just returned to Germany after visiting his Grandmother and beyond saying that, he reveals very little about himself.  It’s a surprise then that after this he agrees to meet up with Marlo again and accepts his phone number.

    For their second outing Kirill’s father without uttering a word gives the two boys a lift to the Templehoff, Berlin’s old abandoned airport.  They wander aimlessly around the empty runways communicating intermittingly with brief snatches of conversation. Kirill, the more extrovert of the two, admits to having ‘tried it with a man’ then surprisingly fesses up to be the father of a baby girl who he is no longer allowed to see.  Poor reserved virginal Marlo who keeps stressing that his ‘girlfriend’ is just a friend has nothing to counter this new revelation with.

    Back at Kirill’s tower block apartment, the boys feast on bread and Nutella, before Kirill suddenly announces he wants to take a shower. Naked together the boys finally get physical but instead of this bringing them closer, once the lovemaking is over, Kirill seems more distant and odder than ever.

    There is a lot going on unspoken on in this movie as these two men deal with discovering their sexuality and sometimes it really is not clear what it is.  After watching these gentle souls very slowly interact with each and try to come to terms to discover what if anything is beyond all these awkward silences, you cannot avoid feeling a little numb even though it did almost redeem itself with its very sweet ending. All, however, a tad too slow for my liking, which is a pity as the two boy’s characters had great possibilities.

     

  • FILM REVIEW | Kissing Darkness

    ★★ | Kissing Darkness

    New gay film Kissing Darkness can be summed up as summer camp meets the Twilight movies.

    Five college boys decide to skip the gay pride festivities in their hometown of Los Angeles to spend the weekend in a cabin in the woods. They are young, cute, sexy and believe it or not one of them is straight Vlad (the very hot Nick Airus). He’s vile, unhappy, homophobic and luckily for us spends more of the film with his shirt off. Why he would want to go on a camping trip with four other gay men is beyond me. Of course, all of other men fancy him, but Vlad’s nipples aren’t the only things lurking around. There’s also Malice Valeria, a local woman (ghost?) who, after catching her boyfriend in bed with another man decides to bite Vlad (and the rest of boys one by one) to turn them into her slaves.

    In between all of this we see the men in the house in various states of undress, it’s pleasing to the eye and takes away from a story that’s pretty bad. Unfortunately, it’s all Kissing Darkness has going for it – the eye candy (did I mention how hot Airus is)?

    The plot is quite ridiculous, the acting mediocre, and luckily for us it’s only 87 minutes. Gay Director and writer James Townsend, who plays one of the boy’s lover in the film (he shows up near the end), has put together a film that’s so bad that it’s not even good. Hey, but at least there are lots of young male bodies to look at.

    The tagline of the film is ‘Love Has Never Been so Cruel’ – that pretty much says it all!

  • FILM REVIEW | Three In A Bed, Where is the chemistry?

    ★★☆☆☆ | Three In A Bed
    three in a bed film review

    After his mother dies, twenty-something-year-old struggling musician Nate has taken on her mantle and the responsibility of looking after his two self-centered sisters.

    When both of his sibling’s lives take a turn for the worse: one finds out her live-in boyfriend is cheating on her and the other discovers that the married man she has been dating has got her pregnant, they move in with him in his small one-bedroom apartment. It doesn’t give him much privacy or independence at a crucial time in his life when he is slowly discovering his sexuality.

    The object of his affection is Jonny the boy-next-door who quickly falls in love with a confused Nate, but when the going soon gets rough, Jonny runs off to France to drown his sorrows by getting a job erecting tents! Nate discovers that not only does he miss Jonny, but also that he finally has something to write a song about.

    This micro-budget romantic comedy set in Manchester and funded mainly by actress Jody Latham who plays one of the sisters, is full of good intentions and a great deal of enthusiasm. Sadly that does not make up for the painfully weak script or some extremely lame acting that makes one wince instead of smiling much of the 81 minutes. What was particularly disappointing was the lack of any real chemistry not just between the two men but with the siblings too and all the other characters.

    The movie has a happy ending for Nate but not necessarily for us. When there are three in a bed, sometimes that can be at least two too many.

  • FILM REVIEW | Hyena, Slick and Brutal

    The ‘hyena’ in this slick and brutal crime thriller is a burly bent copper called Michael Logan who plays so closely with fire, he is definitely going to get more than his fingers burned if things turn out as badly as they probably will. ★★

    (more…)

  • FILM REVIEW | The Third One

    ★★ | The Third One

    Argentinian director’s Rodrigo Guerrero’s second feature is a very slight and charming tale about a one night stand that may change a young man’s outlook on life and love.

    We first see 22-year-old near-naked Fede at his laptop on a chatline talking to Franco. The conversation soon gets very intimate and graphic and in case we don’t get where this is leading too, Guerrero has inserted some very short clips of gay porn films. Franco is in his early 40s and partnered and when all three men agree they like the look of how this hook-up is progressing they invite the young man over for dinner and more.

    There is no ambiguity to the invitation and over the course of the meal, the three men chat at length about their backgrounds, their families and their lives so far. It is all very innocent and so completely friendly in such a way that it actually seems like the couple are looking to adopt the younger man rather take him to their bed and sexually ravish him. But this is what happens once desert has been served but as the action is photographed mainly from the waist up it is sweeter and somewhat wholesome than salacious.

    There is a lot of grunting and groaning and smiling and then some penetration.

    Next morning with still no genitalia on view the men leave for work and the boy leaves for college after they all say their fond farewells and promise to repeat the night very soon. The closing credits roll as we see young grinning Fede day-dreaming in Class his mind still on the events on last night as if he had just lost his virginity. (Not true).

    Sweet film, very good acting, but it really only had the makings of a short, and certainly not a full-length feature to promote this overly optimistic idea that sometimes (!) online hook-ups can be like a fairy tale after all.

    Released by TLA on 8th December

  • FILM REVIEW | Who’s Afraid Of Vagina Wolf?

    ★★ | Who’s Afraid Of Vagina Wolf?

    Anna has just turned 40. She’s a chubby Cuban/American lesbian filmmaker, lonely, depressed and with more than a generous helping of self-pity that she loves to wallow in. At her birthday party to mark her entry into middle-age she wears a giant vagina costume which may get her the odd performing gig at a trendy museum but it isn’t going to get her laid tonight. Undaunted and back in her friend’s L.A. garage next morning where she has been living for some months now, she maps out her annual birthday goals. They are the exact same ones she has had for several years and never even gets close to achieving. She wants to a) make a movie, b) lose 20lbs and c) find a girlfriend.

    She thinks she may start on the third one just a few nights later at a screening of one of her Short Movies which seems to delight a very attractive girl in the audience. Katya is stunningly beautiful but she is also a bit of cold fish and a pretentious cultural snob. Nevertheless in conversation with her later Anna is so mesmerised by the fact that Katya is even spending time with her, she listens to the younger girl egg her on to make a new movie. Anna only agrees as she thinks this may be a way to get into the girl’s panties.

    To impress her potential girlfriend Anna decides to make an all-lesbian version of Edward Albee’s classic ‘Who’s Afraid or Virginia Woolf’ and encouraged by Katya describes the project as ‘a post examination of lesbo-phobia’. I’m not sure about that, but what I do know when this film about making a film gets to this part, it’s all downhill from now on. There was the possibility that this remake of one of Elizabeth Taylor’s Oscar-winning roles would be good as Guinevere Turner (The L Word) would be playing Martha, but as Katya persuades the love-smitten Anna to tone down all the famous histrionics, then that lost all of its steam too.

    This movie is based on the real life of its writer/director/star Anna Margarita Albelo who bears a passing resemblance to Lena Dunham (‘Tiny Furniture’ ‘Girls’) whom I am guessing she may aspire to be.

    However, unlike Ms Dunham who is a Golden Globe/Emmy-winning all-rounder gifted powerhouse, the very inexperienced Ms Albelo lacks her fine sense of humour and her talent to act. In this piece, she is sadly her own worst enemy as her stilted writing may have fared slightly better if her role had been played by a real actress.

    Full of good intentions this micro-budget movie had some potential especially when the cast also included Carrie Preston (‘The Good Wife’) and also young Agnès Olech who did a fine turn as Julia the girl who really fancied Anna, But for a comedy it took itself way too seriously which really dampened the humour. There is one moment that is funny for the wrong reason when Katya is trying to be deep and profound with Anna and says ‘Remember what Jean-Luc Goddard said and shit on your audience as much as possible!’. For the record, M. Goddard did not say that, but I must admit that occasionally it felt that Anna had believed he did.

    For the record, by the end of the year, Anna achieved two of her goals. I’ll leave it to you to find out which two.

  • FILM REVIEW | This Is Where I Leave You

    ★★ | This Is Where I Leave You

    The ‘leaving’ in the title of this rather frenetic comedy refers to death and divorce and a few other departures in between. Everybody in the Altman family has both issues and secrets and the set up for us (and them) to discover them all is when the patriarch dies and his widow (their mother) insists that they must all sit the traditional Jewish Shiva even though none of them has been inside a synagogue for decades.

    Shiva means sitting there together for 7 days without exception or excuse and talking about life and death, and this family have a lot of it on their minds. Four days prior Judd just discovered his wife in bed with his boss and had walked out on both his marriage and his job. Judd’s eldest brother Paul has been trying to get his wife Annie pregnant for some time now and maybe firing blanks, so she looks for an alternative ‘donor’ in her ex-boyfriend, who just happens to be Judd. The youngest brother Phillip who is still just a big kid at heart shows up with his older cougar girlfriend/future fiancé who he met when she was his therapist. The 4th sibling is Wendy, the mother of two, and whose workaholic husband has a cell phone attached to his ear permanently, whilst she is still carrying a torch over Harry the man next door who was her childhood sweetheart and who she dumped after a serious car accident which left him with brain damaged.

    The only one who seems prepared to talk openly and frankly is the mother who proudly flaunts her new breast implants and incessantly hawks the best-selling book that she wrote some years ago based on all her children’s secrets. Naturally, it turns out that she has a big secret too, but this, the most surprising one is not revealed until almost the end.

    It’s all a little too much with an over-abundance of clichéd plot strands that are at best mildly amusing but in reality, give the overall feeling of an ill-conceived TV situation comedy that is too eager to please. Its one big saving grace is the stunning array of talented actors that make up the cast and do the very best with the script that they have been served up. Jason Bateman as Judd stoically takes most of the heavy load as the main character, and Adam Driver, Corey Stoll and the wonderful Tina Fey play his siblings. Timothy Oliphant is the man next door, Dax Shepherd bares all as the cheating Boss, Kathryn Hann is the motherless sister in law and Connie Britton as the put-upon cougar girlfriend. Mother is played by the great (and elegant looking) Jane Fonda but there are moments when you are convinced that she has just phoned her performance in.

    It’s one of those movies you will be happy to watch on a wet Winter evening when there is nothing else that grabs you on the TV, as its really not bad. It’s just that it could/should have been so much better

    Opens on the 24th October 2014

  • FILM REVIEW | Wish I Was Here

    ★★ | Wish I Was Here

    Aiden is evidently a very lousy actor. He’s so bad that even though he lives in LA he hasn’t managed to score even a bit-part role for some years now.

    He does insist though that he must ‘follow his dream’ and selfishly refuses to give up even though his nearest and dearest must pick up the slack for him. His wife Sarah has a monotonous data-processing job at the Water Company just to put food on their table, and his father pays the fees for the private Jewish school that both of his children, Grace and Tucker, attend. This however now has to change as his father announces that as he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wants to spend all his money on alternative therapies, he can no longer fund the kids’ schooling.

    Aiden’s response to this new development is to try and get accepted as a charity case at the school hoping they may forgo the fees, and when this fails, decides he will home school the children instead. It’s something that he clearly has no skills for, but then again, it’s obvious that he’s not actually qualified to do much at all beyond attending auditions.

    Pre-teen Grace who is a very earnest honours student wants to continue learning how to become a devout Jew, whereas her younger sibling Tucker would rather play video games than participate in his father’s attempts to teach him anything. Meanwhile, Sarah has to work in a cubicle with a creepy man who insists on talking about what he calls his penis voice and when she complains to her boss, she is just rebuked and told that she should be grateful she even has a job. Aiden’s father’s treatments fail and his health is now declining rapidly and he is desperate to make amends with Aiden’s slacker brother who seems to hate the entire world, except for the cute woman next door. But somehow Aiden still manages to make most of this all about him.

    There are more than a few similarities between Aiden on screen and his creator/writer/director Zach Braff (although Mr Braff is a good actor) as both are well-meaning and full of good intentions but in this movie are ultimately doomed to fall well short of their goals. This comic drama about the angst of a middle-class Jewish family ‘struggling’ in LA is at best mildly amusing, but for the most part is very flat and annoying. The fact that Mr Braff totally funded his sophomore movie from Kickstarter donors may be the clue as to why this rather undisciplined story, free of any Studio input, seems to have allowed him to indulge him in taking swings at many of the things in LA that seem to really peeve him with such an unfunny script.

    There are touches of the disarmingly charming Braff who has delighted audiences in his TV sitcom Scrubs for years, but not even a glimpse of the wit or humour of Woody Allen that he claims to want to aspire too. The high points are the poignant performance by Mandy Patinkin as the father, and a resilient Kate Hudson doing her best with the little she had been given as Sarah.

    After being so enamoured with his debut movie Garden State, a break-out Indie smash ten years ago, I was so looking forward to Braff’s follow-up, and it is just a disappointment then to find it is so less accomplished and enjoyable than one would have expected.