In Choke the ultimate mama's boy discovers to his chagrin that he's impotent when afforded an opportunity with the woman of his dreams, who, as it happens, is also his Alzheimer's-afflicted mom's psychiatric nurse. Based on a black comedy novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, Choke gets its title from a truly tasteless scam that Victor (Sam Rockwell) employs to conjure up the bread to pay for his mom's care.
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Like his octogenarian American rival Sydney Lumet, the pioneering Claude Chabrol specializes in elevating genre subjects, surprising audiences with carefully calculated collisions between badly flawed and horribly matched characters. In A Girl Cut in Two, rising star Ludivine Sagnier walks a fine line as a skimpily attired local TV weather girl, Gabrielle Snow, who incautiously juggles affairs with two impetuous rogues: Francois Berleand is suavely imperious as a jaded older writer, while Benoit Magimel steals scene after scene as a creepily compelling, emotionally childish, spoiled playboy heir.
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I don't know if déjà vu is the right term for what I experienced recently watching Alan Ball's very dark subversive comedy about the perilous misadventures of a thirteen-year-old Lebanese/American girl going through a kind of erotic boot camp in the deceptively bland suburbs of Houston on the eve of the first Gulf War.
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Watching the vivid new docu-drama about the 1999 anti-globalization protests, Battle in Seattle, I swear I heard a turtle loving, tree-hugging African-American protestor scream at a baton-wielding riot cop, "Get your knee off my neck – I'm not a masochist!" Re-jiggering my DVD screener I eventually re-heard the line as the psychologically less intriguing, "I'm not resisting."
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In the clever, psychologically nuanced new Scottish romantic caper Mister Foe, a sad mother obsessed teen feigns some truly creepy behavior in the service of discovering just who was responsible for the drowning death of his mom. When we first spy him Hallam Foe – an audacious bordering on adult role for British heartbreaker Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot/Undertow) – is dressed up in animal skins and lipstick, perched in a tree house watching his dad (Ciaran Hinds) and step mom get it on.
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I wish the dutiful Dorothy Fadiman had spent even more time than she does on the grotesque realities behind the chicanery she hints at but never quite nails to the wall in her cut and paste like documentary, Stealing America: Vote by Vote. This doc argues that the House of Bush may have engineered an even more insidious electoral slight-of-hand in the state of Ohio in 2004 than the swamps of Florida yielded in 2000.
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The previous time I glimpsed Matthew Goode on screen he was torturing a boy – a disabled boy, masterfully underplayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Scott Frank's underappreciated The Lookout. This time Goode gets to kiss the boy – the chameleon like Ben Whishaw as the moody alcoholic Lord Sebastian Flyte in a splendid new big screen production of Bridehead Revisited. The last time we chatted Goode had a wool cap pull down over his freshly shaved skull, a hairdo crafted for his tough talking American bank robber. Now having grown out his hair and permitted to speak in his own Exeter accent, he's happy to speculate on the love between Charles and Sebastian
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Milk: Directed by Gus Van Sant, this home grown Greek tragedy – the city hall assassinations of supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone -- is fueled by Lance Black's passionate, meticulously researched screenplay. For decades the desire to create a fictional template for the slain gay politician's achingly brief career has tempted, absorbed and ultimately frustrated an array of talents from Oliver Stone to Milk biography Randy Shilts, to Van Sant himself.
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One of the decade's most cliché shattering comedies, Chuck & Buck begins with the awkward reunion of two childhood fuck buddies. Chuck, a 27-year-old record mogul, returns home for the funeral of his old friend Buck's mother only to discover that Buck is behaving as if they were still both eleven-years-old.
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Painter Julian Schnabel serves up a deft blend of fact and fiction in his screen adaptation of Cuban poet/novelist Renaldo Arenas' frank expose of the persecution of gays in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution. Schnabel gets an expressive performance from the Spanish heart throb Javier Bardem as Arenas, reinventing the bio-pic genre to depict the rags to rags saga of a resolutely non-conformist writer, who managed to get only one of his eight novels published on his native island and who died of AIDS, in poverty in New York City.
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A big budget Hollywood film that doesn't cue its viewers on when or whether to laugh or cry is rare enough, an all-star film that mixes gay and straight characters like different candles on a cake without stereotyping or pandering is practically unheard of.
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French phenom Francois Ozon discovered a dark little play by the master of domestic Sturm und Drang, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written by a then 19-year-old Fassbinder, the play is an amazingly prophetic look at the Svengali-like lover the adult Fassbinder would become.
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In their visually and emotionally evocative new film, Chris & Don: A Love Story, first time filmmakers Guido Santi and Tina Mascara plunk us down inside the life Isherwood would find when in October, 1952 the forty-eight-year-old expatriate novelist spied a slender eighteen-year-old boy from Glendale on a sexually active Southern California beach. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy would spend the next thirty-four years living out a love story that surpasses most fairy tales in its improbability and sheer romantic luster.
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Argentine writer/director Alexis Dos Santos creates a memorable adolescent protagonist: Lucas (the gorgeous, lithe, frighteningly articulate Nahuel Perez Biscayart) proclaims himself to be an orphan, even though both his parents are living – in a messy separation fueled by his dad's womanizing. Lucas is caught between creating poetic lyrics for the rock band he fronts with Nacho (butch soccer boy Nahuel Viale) and with juggling his burgeoning interest in Nacho and their shared girlfriend, Andrea (Ines Efron).
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Ever so often I'm way off base about a film and a DVD release allows me to correct a blatant miscarriage of justice. At first glance Sam Zalutsky's decidedly offbeat thriller – kicking off with hunks in bed and ending somewhere inside a queer Twilight Zone -- seemed an ambitious psycho mind fuck that tails off without resolution. On second glance Zalutsky's puzzle box -- detailing how one man's innocent obsession for another is trumped by far more sinister Venus flytrap sprung by a seeming busybody -- is a minor classic deserving of mention in the same sentence as Roman Polanski's The Tenant.
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The Swedish born Casper Andreas' frothy first film is as deceptive as it is entertaining. Americans used to the right wing propaganda that all Scandinavians are sex-crazed hedonistic socialists may be surprised at the conservative roots of a culture that has played so huge a role in leavening our own Puritanical heritage.
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In this age of cheap irony how many filmmakers will risk ridicule by trying to get us to cry over something as out of fashion as a crisis of faith? Antonio Bird's 1994 heartfelt if seriocomic undressing of a guilt-riddled young priest and his shacking up with his housekeeper older mentor – as the men cope with all measure of carnal indulgence in a sooty Liverpool diocese – feels even more spot on since the American Catholic Church's meltdown over wayward priests.
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Happy birthday! This year Gregg Araki's "New Queer Cinema" two lovers on a killing spree fable, The Living End, turns sixteen, but only in the sense that British auteur Ken Loach meant in his 2002 Scottish gang rumble should this be consider a sweet sixteen.
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In act one of The Good Shepherd, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is decked out as the lovely Miss Buttercup in a college production of HMS Pinafore when he gets a brazen proposition backstage that one-ups even the facile imaginations of Gilbert and Sullivan. It's the late 1930's and young Wilson, a poetry major at Yale, is invited to join the school's most infamous secret society – Skull and Bones – a group whose members carry their rituals and loyalties to the grave, members who include the elite players in our government: both John Kerry and George W. Bush are old Skull and Bones boys.
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In what may constitute a gay film first the lover of a successful Chicago architect, Bobby Riley, meets his previously closeted partner's brothers at a popular sausage bar, The Weiner Circle. In a scene that captures the zany charm of a film that resembles the pilot for an HBO sitcom, the lover, Andy (Mad TV's wonderfully deadpan Michael McDonald) chats with Bobby's youngest brother Luke (the droll mini-hunk Nathan Fillion) about Andy's claims on Bobby's sausage while another brother fetches their orders.
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It's hard to discuss a classic – a movie that's so seamlessly good that it appears to have beamed down from that other happier planet where we keep all our bad habits, realize our dreams and when we're bored simply hit rewind. The love affair between Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) and Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charbonneau) is cradled in a long ago Reno, Nevada where women and men smoke, and gamble, and f**k, and get on each other's nerves, and then lay back and slurp down sugary Coca Colas in those perfect little six and a half ounce green bottles.
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Jan (Busch in his first male screen role sports a ponytail and an odd Danish accent) answers an ad to help a dying woman (Polly Bergen) spend her last summer at the shore, in the company of her precocious grandson Gil (an incendiary screen debut by the hyper androgynous P.J. Verhoest). Gil is a bundle of annoying quirks – he badgers granny to watch Gone With the Wind, while refusing her wish that he take swimming lessons at the local pool. Jan approaches the boy with tough love but gradually we see him trying to draw out the best in an artistically precocious child without confirming his propensity for gender clichés. Finally and very reluctantly Gil accepts Jan as his swimming guru and ultimately, quite miraculously, navigates the pool with a panache that owes a debt to Esther Williams.
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One of those rare indie film Cinderella stories where a promising queer short actually grows up to be a nifty romantic comedy, The Coffee Date DVD special features include a deleted scenes section highlighting silly moments between straight actor Jonathan Bray and gay actor Wilson Cruz.
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