Other gay-themed movies

[TOoP/Bruce]

I'd never heard of "Total Eclipse" or "Buck and Chuck" but will now definitely check 'em out.

I've seen Total Eclipse.  If you want to see Leo DiCaprio in the nude or pulling a cork out of bottle with his bare shoulder blades I can recommend it.  Otherwise, I thought the movie was so depressing that I gave my copy away to someone else who wanted it, since I knew I wouldn't ever watch it again.

[starboardlight]

Did anyone see Summer Storm, that came out earlier this year. It's a small film from France(?) about gay boys on a rowing team. Having been a rower myself, I really wanted to catch it, but it came and went in a week here in LA.

[Impish]

Can I add the Xmen series to this list? 

I just saw X-Men III this afternoon.  I was disappointed in it, but perhaps I should have stuck to my original plan and rent the other two first.....

[j.U.d.E.]

Did anyone see Summer Storm, that came out earlier this year. It's a small film from France(?) about gay boys on a rowing team. Having been a rower myself, I really wanted to catch it, but it came and went in a week here in LA.

Yes! I've seen (and recorded) it last week! I had heard about it a while ago, but like "Beautiful Thing" I thought this is yet another 'teenage' romance, which I wouldn't be able to relate to (my teenage years are well over..), but I was very pleasantly surprised!! By the way it's a German movie.

I have digital television for 2 months now or so and I have 6+ exclusively movie-channels. I get a programme every first of the month (yesterday for June) and mark in red all I need to see/tape. So I taped "Sommersturm" and "De-Lovely". I like them both a lot! I didn't know much about any of them, so discovering it 'unspoiled' was wonderful (I'm still grieving about the fact that I knew far too much about BBM before seeing it the first time..).

It's not out on DVD yet, I know, but, if you get a chance to see "Sommersturm" do! It is a beautiful little film. I won't reveal too much, but there are very sweet moments and watch out for the character called 'Leo'! MAJOR-CUTE! ;o)

~ j U d E

[Shuggy]

So I taped "Sommersturm" and "De-Lovely". I like them both a lot!

I was a bit disappointed by De-lovely. They downplayed his gayness in several ways: it was all off-camera, and definitely second-place to his marriage, which other biographies deny. And then they sneered at Night and Day for downplaying it more. According to one biography, "You're the Top" means just what it says. He also had some alternate words for use at private functions. If I can find them I'll post them here.

[starboardlight]

I was a bit disappointed by De-lovely. They downplayed his gayness in several ways: it was all off-camera, and definitely second-place to his marriage, which other biographies deny. And then they sneered at Night and Day for downplaying it more. According to one biography, "You're the Top" means just what it says. He also had some alternate words for use at private functions. If I can find them I'll post them here.

I agree. From the film, I thought his reluctance to leave Venic and later New York City were both times because he was emotionally invested in his relationships with the men he was seeing. I felt like his time in NYC, his relationship with the actor most likely was as significant to him as, if not more than, his marriage. I wished they'd gotten that balance. I also think though his wife, acted as if it was fine with her, his relationships with me must have affected her in some way in those years. After all in the social scene of NYC and Venice, he was known as a homosexual, so she would have had people treating her as his beard.

Speaking of Kevin Kline, I saw Sophie's Choice long ago, and always thought that there was a homo-eroticism in Nathan and Stingo. Did anyone else think so? In particular, the scene where Nathan showed up with presents for Sophie and for Stingo. It seemed to imply to me that Nathan had the same relationship with Stingo that he had with Sophie. Am I way off here, or did others think so too?

[Shuggy]

Our OutTakes GLBT film festival is now on. Some good movies that might not be released in your part of the US yet.


History:
Screaming Queens: the riot at Comptons Cafe documents a pre-Stonewall riot of drag-queens and gay hustlers at a popular meeting place in SF's Tenderloin in 1966. About five queens were the talking heads, none of the hustlers - probably couldn't be found (and probably aren't with us). A reminder of what the oppression was like in some of our living memories.

Gay Sex in the 70s should have been called Gay Sex in New York in the 70s (Stonewall to AIDS). Lots of flares, moustaches and blow-j^hwaves. Oh yes, BJs too. It covered very well the exuberance of the sexuality in those days. No dividing line between obsession, addiction and what everyone was doing, from the anonymous and risky sleaze of the trucks on the docks and the abandoned piers (falling through the floor into the river was one) to the public, exclusive and wealthy sleaze of Studio 54, with bathhouses and back rooms in between, and many a quickie in corners on the street. Quite a bit about Fire Island. About 10 survivors were the talking heads, including Larry Kramer, photographer Peter Bianchi, the gay doctor who noticed a disproportionate number of gay men in a cancer ward with a rare skin lesion, and the architect of Studio 54. One interesting point was that before AIDS appeared, there were a lot of STDs, but some doctors felt that they, being curable, were a small price to pay for the liberation people were experiencing. Condoms were unthinkable. With no test, by the time people were showing any signs, they had infected many others. It was the community itself (starting with Kramer) who did the hard yards of blowing the whistle on the epidemic and taking care of the dying. Not a sexual movie, it didn't deserve the late-night slot it got.

Original Pride: the Satyrs Motocycle Club of LA celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2004, the oldest gay club in the world. Lots of beer and bears (but not so called) and leather. Basically they used their bikes to get together without a venue. They were hard hit by the epidemic too, of course. They used to (maybe still do) have an annual gathering at a place called Badger Flat, featuring lots of beer, bonfires and a drag show. The drag was burlesque, of course, and always had a Kate Smith lipsynching "America the Beautiful". Over 50 years, they only had 200 members, but lots of hangers on. You got recruited without knowing it; some beer/sex buddies would just get you some time and say "You're now a Satyr".

Doco:
Chris Kris And I (NZ 10 mins) about 3 local guys in a menage-a-trois.

Comedy:
Gay Volleyball saved my life quite funny.

Feature:
Hildes Reise (Hilde's Journey, Switzerland, in German with French/English subtitles), about a poor carpenter whose former lover has died of AIDS and has to decide whether to carry our his last wishes and scatter the ashes in the sea off France, or accept his a fraction of his inheritance from the phobic relatives. A later and last lover takes matters into his own hands, so it's a sort of road movie. Quite appealing and engaging. We never see the deceased.
 

[twistedude]

Loved "Parting Glances," Breaking the Code" (hey, you didn't believe all that
 "Enigma" shit, did you)?--with Derek Jacobi, "A Man oif No Importrance,"
"Angels in America," "Gods and Monsters,"  "The Naked Civil Servant," (John Hurt's abouit my favorite actor.

[Shuggy]

Documentary

eXposed, a makiing-of about the gay porn movie BuckleRoos mainly over two weeks at a farm homestead outside Sacremento. Like all making-ofs (and unlike a couple of other docos I've seen about the making of porn), it doesn't ask any of the hard questions, eg about drugs, money or Viagra. (As far as money goes, it's telling that all the actors had other jobs: Marcus Iron is a landscape gardener. One of the others is putting himself through law school.) As porn it wasn't very satisfactory, sometimes deliberately obscuring the objects of attention. Still, it gave some idea about how the participants felt about themselves. For the crew it was very much just another job. For one of the actors, whose other job was HIV educator, it was a bit of a mission. For the producer it was art, yeah right, aint it always? Still it does seem they went to more than the usual amount of trouble to write a story that hangs together, and any porn movie that brings in the Mormons off the front doorstep is all right by me. Pity the Mormons looked about 15.

It got pretty self-indulgent at the end, when BuckleRoos won 11 GayNV awards, "more than any in the history of the awards" - all of six years.

[Shuggy]

Shorts:
A Crimson Mark (Korea 13mins) Two courtiers in the court of a boy king are in opposing (colour-coded!) factions of a dispute about an obscure piece of protocol. The growing love of one for the other confuses the issue.

Invulnerable (Spain, 25 mins) A schoolteacher is diagnosed HIV positive and has flashbacks of how he might have caught it and who he might have given it to.

Machulenco (Spain, but set in Argentina, 15 mins) If you know Bierce's "Incident at Owl Creek" you'll know the ending to this one, but there is a twist. A writer about to be executed needs time to visit his lover and finish his manuscript, "Machulenco", about a mysterious time/place where time is fluid and the imagination reigns. Uplifting and sad at the same time.

Marco Solo (Australia, a film school exercise, like many festival shorts, 9 mins) Nine year old Marco, Sicilian so of course Catholic, lives in Moony Ponds, Melbourne, so of course when he wants a room of his own, he prays to - St Edna.


Feature (Mild spoilerage)
When I'm 64 BBC TV (2004)







Story about a London taxi-driver, bit of a tough in his youth, who picks up a just-retired schoolteacher (never had any other life than the school) supposedly to take him to Heathrow for a trip to Botswana. We see the relationship develop across their classes in the face of the driver's family's incomprehension and homophobia and the teacher's commitment to his ageing father. It's a feelgood movie and a date movie (expecially for those over a certain age, but it would probably be good for younger gayfolk to see too).