Big Gay Picture Show

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema and more

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema & more

American Gods – Season 1 (DVD Review) – Strange, surreal & TV’s most explicit gay sex ever?

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Quite a lot of people have tried to get Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel to the screen, but it’s never happened until now. Despite being beloved by a lot of people, you can see why the money men were nervous about ponying up the cash for a film or TV version, as the book is often strange, surreal and quite graphic, with various tangents and peculiar moments that could be unintentionally funny in the wrong hands.

However, executive producer Bryan Fuller was the right man to hire, as with the likes of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies he’s shown an affinity with unusual, multi-layered tale that often verge towards the surreal. He certainly brings that to American Gods, which is often perplexing and weird, and will annoy some due to the fact it obstinately refuses to fully explain what going on. [Read more…]

Continuum (DVD Review)

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You have to admire sci-fi that really wants to be intelligent, even if it’s not actually as smart as it thinks it is. That’s certainly true of Continuum (known as I’ll Follow Your Down in the US), which wants to bring together time-travel, wormholes and quantum theory to create a tale that considers the idea of what it would mean to change your past so that your present never happened. However it’s not really that smart and seems to ignore many of the most important implications of what it’s talking about.

Gabe (Rufus Sewell) heads off on a business trip but never returns, leaving his wife (Gillian Anderson) and young son Errol with no clues as to what happened to him – he never checked out of his hotel and has completely disappeared. 12 years later his wife still hasn’t gotten over what happened, while the massively intelligent Errol (now grown up to be Haley Joel Osment) is trying to make his way in the world as a young adult. [Read more…]

Shadow Dancer (DVD)

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Shadow dancer is a good solid drama set in the early 1990s. Colette McVeigh is an active member of the IRA and is on a mission to commit an act of terrorism in London. Due to unknown reasons, she has last minute thoughts about the carnage she is about to cause, places the incendiary device in the place least likely to cause harm and to arouse the least suspicion from her IRA colleagues. She is subsequently caught and interrogated by MI5 and sent back to Ireland as a mole, using her son as collateral.

The ensuing drama that unfolds relates to relationships between Colette (played brilliantly by rising star Andrea Riseborough) and her MI5 agent Mac (played solidly by Clive Owen) and the friction between her, her family and other members of the IRA cell, as suspicions start to arise and questions are asked. There’s also double dealing with and distrust within MI5

This bleak drama is set in the often rainy backdrop of damp Belfast, which sets the mood for most of the scenes. One of the most interesting and accurate facts about the film is the technology the agents were using in the 1990s, with large, clumsy PCs taking up half the desk, which also reminds us how recent the volatile peace treaty was signed.

Where the film works is in the often fraught relationships between all the characters, where mistrust of everyone is apparent, as the IRA try to find their mole, tensions rise as does the relationship between Colette and Mac, as well as with Mac and his colleagues

The star of the film is Andrea Riseborough, it is not the dialogue that drives her performance but the angst and frustration shown by her very movements in every scene. The supporting cast are all excellent in their roles too including the ever reliable Gillian Anderson.

Gillian Anderson Opens Up About Teen Lesbian Relationships

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She may have spent years flirting with David Duchovny in The X-Files, but before that actress Gillian Anderson had relationships with other girls when she was in school.

Anderson has been talking about this in an interview with Out Magazine, saying, “I was in a relationship with a girl for a long time when I was in high school.”

Having moved from England to the US when she was 11 she experienced a bit of a culture clash, and says that ended up beings voted ‘Most Bizarre’ and ‘Most Likely to Be Arrested’ in high school, noting that there was a bit of truth to both, “based on how I chose to look, dress, behave, you know—the relationships I was in at the time were freaking people out.”

However dating a girl doesn’t seem to have been a big deal for her at the time, as she says, “If I had thought I was 100% gay, would it have been a different experience for me? Would it have been a bigger deal if shame had been attached to it and all those things that become huge life-altering issues for youngsters in that situation? It’s possible that my attitude around it came, on some level, from knowing that I still liked boys.”

The entire interview is worth a read, so head over to Out to take a look.

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