Author Topic: NEW FEST: 20th Anniversary NY LGB&T Film Festival: "Were the World Mine" (2008)  (Read 37479 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Were the World Mine  (2008)


Review Summary

An outcast in his town's homophobic community, Timothy's spirit soars when his eccentric teacher casts him in A Midsummer Night's Dream. After discovering a love potion, Timothy puckishly begins to turn his closed-minded town gay. He soon commands the love he desires and deserves. But once he reluctantly returns the towns free will, negating the potion, he is surprised by what remains. ~


IMDb:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0476991/

If you had a love-potion, who would you make fall madly in love with you? Timothy, prone to escaping his dismal high school reality through dazzling musical daydreams, gets to answer that question in a very real way. After his eccentric teacher casts him as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he stumbles upon a recipe hidden within the script to create the play's magical, purple love-pansy. Armed with the pansy, Timothy's fading spirit soars as he puckishly imposes a new reality by turning much of his narrow-minded town gay, beginning with the rugby-jock of his dreams. Ensnaring family, friends and enemies in this heart-wrenching chaos, Timothy forces them to walk a mile in his musical shoes. The course of true love never did run smooth, but by the end of this moving musical comedy of errors based on director Tom Gustafson's prolific award-winning short film, Fairies, the bumpy ride comes to a heartfelt conclusion. With vibrant imagery, a first-rate ensemble cast and innovative music rivaling the best of pop/rock and contemporary Broadway, Were the World Mine attempts to push modern gay cinema and musical film beyond expectation.



http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2007/11/production_repo_20.html

"Were The World Mine"

Director Tom Gustafson adapts his short, "Fairies," into his feature debut. Using Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as inspiration, this comedy/musical follows a high school boy's discovery which leads to his uptight hometown becoming more open-minded.

After screening "Fairies" at 75 film festivals (including Tribeca in '04), Gustafson was still into the story and decided to expand it with the help of Shakespeare. "We went to the text of 'Midsummer' to figure out where we could pull lines of text to help create the story that we were trying to tell at that point," Gustafson says. "It's pretty amazing that we have a musical that's all original besides the Shakespeare text, which is public domain. It's really freeing, you don't have to go and track down a bunch of artists for the rights."

In the film the main character Timothy (Tanner Cohen) has the part of Puck in the school production of "Midsummer," but as the lead up to opening night grows closer, Timothy finds a potion -- similar to the one Puck has in "Midsummer" -- that makes people fall in love and uses it to make the most unlikely people (particularly same sex) fall in love with each other. The musical numbers (lyrics directly from "A Midsummer Night's Dream") are then incorporated through Timothy's daydreams.

To find financing Gustafson spent a year trying to interest the Broadway community, but after being promised the world by some only to find they could provide nothing, he decided to make the film with the little money he had, shooting it in Chicago last June. But looking back, Gustafson believes using the short as a launching pad for the feature made the whole process less daunting. "It's still scary as hell," he says, "but it was already an interesting story, and we could show the short to perspective financiers, instead of starting something completely brand new."

Produced by Gustafson, Peter Sterling and Cory Krueckeberg (who also co-wrote the film with Gustafson and was the production designer), the film was shot on Super 16 by D.P. Kira Kelly. The film is currently being edited by Jennifer Lilly. Executive producers are Reid Williams and Jon Sechrist.


Florida Film Festival
2008  Won Audience Award Best Feature
Best Narrative Feature
Thomas Gustafson

 Nashville Film Festival
2008  Won Best LGBT Film
Thomas Gustafson
Best Music in a Feature Film
Jessica Fogle
Cory James Krueckeberg
Tim Sandusky

Torino International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
2008  Won Audience Award Feature Film
Thomas Gustafson  

« Last Edit: February 18, 2012, 12:35:00 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline southendmd

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Thanks for that, John.

It's also playing at the Provincetown film festival in two weeks and I'm going!

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Were the World Mine
A Musical Dream Come True


"If you could make someone love you, would you?"

Click here and scroll to get the video trailer:
http://www.afterelton.com/blog/snicks/delirious-musical-were-the-world-mine-to-close-NY-LGBT-film-festival




http://www.newfest.org/cgi-bin/iowa/index.html



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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What a beautiful night! Jenny (newyearsday) took me to the most wonderful film, and we met a new friend, Don Bachardy, the star of this amazing documentary.

I hope you will have a chance to see this--it's just incredible!



The Trailer:
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/chris&don/


Chris & Don: a love story

(USA, 2007, 90 mins)
Directed By: Guido Santi, Tina Mascara

When 18-year-old Don Bachardy was introduced to 49-year-old Christopher Isherwood in 1950s Malibu, neither man knew it would be the start of a love story that would last for 30 years.

Chris & Don chronicles their years together, with the vibrant and engaging Don at this extraordinary documentary’s epicenter. Don, a UCLA student with artistic talents, became the ideal companion for Isherwood, the celebrated British writer best known for his Berlin Stories.

Despite their age difference, a relationship blossomed, and Don soon moved in with Chris. Growing up in the LA suburbs enamored with Hollywood, Don had crashed premieres to take photos with celebrities. With Chris, he suddenly found himself hobnobbing with all manner of luminaries from the arts and literary scene, such as WH Auden, Igor Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams.

Encouraged by Chris, Don developed his artistic ambitions in art school and eventually found his own fame as a painter, with Chris as his regular model. Open about their relationship at a time when homosexuality wasn’t discussed in polite conversation, Chris and Don weathered the various storms resulting from their different ages, classes, and backgrounds, and remained together until Chris’ death in 1986.

Combining interviews with Don, Chris’ personal journal entries, rare home movies, and archival footage, Guido Santi and Tina Mascara have crafted a very personal story, best demonstrated through the charming animated sequences depicting the horse and cat alter-egos the couple doodled on their personal letters over the years. Chris & Don is a touching, illuminating portrait of the enduring power of love.



A sleeper hit at the Telluride Film Festival, CHRIS & DON: A LOVE STORY is the true-life story of the passionate three-decade relationship between British writer Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin Stories was the basis for all incarnations of the much-beloved Cabaret) and American portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior. From Isherwood’s Kit-Kat-Club years in Weimar-era Germany (the inspiration for his most famous work) to the couple’s first meeting on the sun-kissed beaches of 1950s Malibu, their against-all-odds saga is brought to dazzling life by a treasure trove of multimedia. Bachardy’s contemporary reminiscences (in the Santa Monica home he shared with Isherwood until his death in 1986) artfully interact with archival footage, rare home movies (with glimpses of glitterati pals W.H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky and Tennessee Williams), reenactments, and, most sweetly, whimsical animations based on the cat-and-horse cartoons the pair used in their personal correspondence. With Isherwood’s status as an out-and-proud gay maverick, and Bachardy’s eventual artistic triumph away from the considerable shadow of his life partner, CHRIS & DON: A LOVE STORY is above all a joyful celebration of a most extraordinary couple.

CHRIS & DON will open on June 13 2008 at New York's Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, (212) 255-8800

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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"Need some gay pride?  Check this out: star-crossed lovers faced with the insurmountable odds of being out in the 1950s, with a 30-year age difference, and living in the scrutinizing public spotlight, give convention the middle finger to bask in the purity of a love lasting three decades.

And it’s a true story."



Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood in the early ’50s.



Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood sitting in front of a portrait of themselves painted by David Hockney (late ’70s).







For large format images of the thumbnails above, go to:

http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=chrisanddon&mode=downloads
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Chris & Don: a love story

New York Starts June 13
Huntington Starts June 13
Fort Lauderdale Starts June 27

Los Angeles July 4-July 11
Berkeley July 18-July 25
San Francisco July 18-July 25

Boston July 18-July 24
Philadelphia July 23-August 1
Chicago Starts July 25
Minneapolis July 25-August 1

San Diego July 25-August 1
Washington, DC July 25-July 31

Atlanta August 1-August 7
Kansas City Starts August 1
Seattle August 1-August 7
St. Louis August 1-August 8

Columbus, OH September 18
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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  • Those were the days, Alberta 2007.

It's also playing at the Provincetown film festival in two weeks and I'm going!


And so will I, we'll have to see if this one is still available.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/47836/

From New York Magazine:

Christopher Isherwood’s true love

By David Edelstein
Published Jun 13, 2008

Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s documentary Chris & Don tells the story of a gay English blue blood who in the fifties picked up a working-class stud muffin 30 years his junior on a Santa Monica beach and became obsessed with him. Primed as we are by a culture rich in both homophobia and dirty old men, we can be forgiven for anticipating a sordid cautionary tale. It’s a shock—a happy shock—when Chris & Don recounts a love that approaches the transcendental.

Chris is Christopher Isherwood, famous for Berlin Stories—which was the basis of Cabaret and inspires in Chris & Don an unfortunate tangent about how wrong Isherwood thought Liza Minnelli was for Sally Bowles. Don is Don Bachardy, an unsophisticated Californian given to movie-star worship—and most impressed, at first, by Isherwood’s acquaintance with Montgomery Clift. Eyebrows are raised when they move in together.

But a fascinating thread emerges in interviews with friends and in excerpts from Isherwood’s diary—read via the magic of movies by Michael York, who played the author’s alter ego in Cabaret. Chris’s ideal love would have to be someone outside his class, who wouldn’t remind him of everything he fled (going as far, you’ll recall, as Weimar). And in Don he recognized a fellow artist—albeit one with vastly different gifts. The young man evolved into a marvelous portrait painter, with an eye for the detail that turns a likeness into an X-ray.

Isherwood passed away in 1986, but Bachardy still lives in the house they shared and still paints attractive young men in stages of undress. He speaks in an English accent that is distinctly Isherwood’s. The creepiness dissipates the more you get to know him. After Bachardy became successful in his own right, he and Isherwood had periods of estrangement, took lovers, and pushed the limits of domesticity. But he was there at Isherwood’s deathbed, drawing him compulsively, then drawing his body for hours after his passing.

The sequence, like the movie, is stunningly open and heartfelt. We look at those final drawings of Isherwood and sense what Bachardy is doing: capturing surface details in a feverish attempt to go beyond them—to get to the core of his lover’s being. Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit.


« Last Edit: June 13, 2008, 09:43:09 pm by jmmgallagher »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0824,opposites-attract,464862,20.html

From The Village Voice:

Opposites Attract in Chris & Don
Portrait of the artist as a young man (and his lover as an old one)

by ERNEST HARDY
June 10th, 2008 12:00 AM


Chris and Don

With a glint in his eye and a grin on his lips, artist Don Bachardy looks into the camera and explains the dynamic of his three-decade relationship with the late literary icon Christopher Isherwood as if it were a fairy tale.

"His role," says Bachardy, "could be described as that of the arch villain. He took this young boy and he warped him to his mold. He taught him all kinds of wicked things." Pause a half beat. "It was exactly what the boy wanted. And we flourished."

With his elegant cadence, crisp comedic timing, and witty flipping of homophobic stereotypes—in his very choice and use of language—Bachardy is that story come to life: the student who eventually mirrored his teacher, the molded who became a duplicate of the mold.

Chris & Don: A Love Story is a charming, illuminating portrait of the complex and storied queer romance between Isherwood and Bachardy, who met on a Santa Monica beach in 1952, when Bachardy was a teenager and Isherwood already 30 years his senior.

Quilted from black-and-white home-movie clips, animated sequences that bring to life the duo's correspondence and pet names, and original footage of the elderly Bachardy going about his daily routine or walking through the art-filled Santa Monica home he once shared with his partner, Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's film uses standard documentary-filmmaking tools to celebrate three entities—Isherwood, Bachardy, and their relationship—that flaunted all the rules.

Individually, the men are fascinating in their own right, and Mascara and Santi flesh out their backstories in rich detail: Isherwood's aristocratic upbringing and his break from it—though his background forever influenced every aspect of his being—and his life in Berlin, which became the basis for some of his most celebrated work (The Berlin Stories); Bachardy's conservative, homophobic family life, and the electric-shock treatments that permanently debilitated his queer older brother.

But it's the relationship and life that the men forged together that are most extraordinary. Their cosmopolitan circle (glamorous and influential friends included Elsa Lanchester, W.H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell) was at the center of a bygone era of both hyper-literate high culture and outsider chic.

The terms on which the couple set up house not only reach back to the most ancient manifestations of queer coupling (the older man taking a younger partner under his wing, schooling him on life, culture, and sex), but also illustrate lingering issues with—or even within—the modern gay and lesbian community.

Theirs was an organic, constantly evolving companionship. They quite consciously shaped it, but also allowed it to find its own patterns and path. There was extraordinary vulnerability in their union ("Don might leave me," Isherwood is quoted as saying, "but I could never leave him. Not unless he ceased to need me"), only matched by extraordinary faith in their bond.

The relationship contained elements of the parent/child hierarchy (with the roles flip-flopping back and forth over time), but it was also an erotic quest that expanded to include other lovers—especially as Bachardy matured into his own man—and then retreated back to monogamous form again, at least emotionally. And as Bachardy grew into his own creativity, theirs became a conversation between artists, too. With the most delicate of hands, directors Mascara and Santi shape their investigative film into the revelation that all of this constituted Chris and Don's love story.

The recent California Supreme Court ruling overturning the ban on gay marriage brings gays, lesbians, and same-sex relationships one crucial step closer to legitimacy in the eyes of the law—a legitimacy that was unimaginable when our two heroes first met in the '50s. But as confetti and champagne toasts greet the news, it might be a good thing for gays and straights to glean some lessons from Isherwood and Bachardy's example: Make your own rules, set your own terms for connection, and be willing to let them evolve as you and your partner hopefully do.



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"