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

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (DVD Review) – Robbed of the Best Picture Oscar?

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For many Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri seemed to be the smart bet to win the Best Picture Oscar. While The Shape Of Water had made the early running, Three Billboards gained momentum through the Award season and seemed like it might cruise to a victory. In the end it didn’t get the big gong, although it did win for the exceptionally strong performance of Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell. Many were also surprised it lost for writer/director Martin McDonagh’s screenplay, although it is a couple of issues with that screenplay that may be the reason it didn’t win the biggest award.

McDormand plays the hard-bitten Mildred, a woman filled with anger at the local police’s inability to catch whoever was responsible for the rape and murder of her daughter. To try and force the authorities into action she hires three billboards on a rural road, putting up massive posters asking why there have been no arrests and specifically calling out police chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). [Read more…]

Love, Simon (Cinema Review) – Gay themed teen film fun goes mainstream

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You can’t win with a gay audience. Whenever a gay-themed movie or TV show comes along that’s given a higher profile/mainstream release, it ends up generating controversy. The problem seems to be that their rarity mean people want these releases to be all things to all men (or at least reflect their personal conception of what gay entertainment should), but often course one film/show can’t represent everything.

It’s already happened with Love, Simon, with some complaining that it’s ‘yet another’ coming out story (despite the fact that coming out is one of the few nearly universal gay experiences and that the films audience of teens – and not just gay teens – won’t have seen lots of coming out movies). Others have moaned that its mainstream sensibilities deny the oppression that many LGBT people face, even though Simon’s experience is probably closer to the reality for many young gay people in the West nowadays than a ‘right on’ tale of misery and oppression. [Read more…]

The Mummy (Blu-ray Review) – Tom Cruise is cursed (in several ways)!

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While Hollywood has become increasingly obsessed with interconnected universes, Universal Pictures has felt a little left out due to the lack of comic book characters they own the rights to. To make up for it, they decided to go back to the classic movie monsters that the studio had such success with in the 1930s (indeed, they created an interconnected world of them back then). They’ve been busy attempting to build a linked series of movies around them, called Dark Universe.

The Mummy was the film designed to kick off the Dark Universe, with a big budget, an a-list star and a property everyone knows thanks to its 1990s/2000s resurrection with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. The response from critics and US audiences was muted however, with American box office stalling (although it did manage $400 million globally) and an abysmal RottenTomatoes rating (currently 16%). That’s caused a bit of a rethink about how the Dark Universe is going to pan out, with Bride Of Frankenstein pushed back, and the likes of The Invisible Man (with Johnny Depp) and The Wolfman currently without a release date. [Read more…]

Assassin’s Creed (DVD Review) – Michael Fassbender brings the videogame to life

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After witnessing the aftermath of his mother’s murder as a child, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) has been on the run and fighting to survive, something that’s left him on death row. After his ‘execution’, he wakes up in a strange facility. The people who run it, led by Sofia (Marion Cotillard), have gotten hold of him because they want to awaken the ‘genetic memories’ he holds, which they can access through a machine called the Animus.

Once attached the contraption, he relives events that took place 500 years ago involving his ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha, who was part of The Assassins, a secret group fighting to stop the Templars taken over Christendom and ruling it with an iron fist. That involves a search for the Apple of Eden, where man’s freewill comes from. [Read more…]

Pushing Dead (BFI Flare Review) – A dark comedy look at living with HIV, starring Psych’s James Roday

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Many people will know James Roday from playing the cocksure, mischievous character is TV’s Psych. Here he takes on a slightly different character, playing Dan, a man who’s lived with HIV for over two decades, but still feels the stigma and never tells anyone about his illness. The only ones who are aware are Paula (Robin Weigert), the sister of Dan’s former lover; and his editor, the gruff Bob (Danny Glover), who’s having marriage troubles.

Dan is having more than a few difficulties himself. He’s a poet at a time when no one cares about poetry, and when he deposits a $100 birthday cheque in his bank account, he accidentally goes over the incredibly strict bar for being on a low income that his healthcare plan enforces. That means that rather than getting most of his HIV medication paid for under his insurance, he suddenly needs to come up with $3,000 a month. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t have $3,000. [Read more…]

Author: The JT Leroy Story (DVD Review)

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If you’d never heard of JT Leroy before watching this documentary, I wouldn’t be surprised if you paused it about halfway through to check Wikipedia to see whether all this really happened or whether they’re making it up. It’s an almost unbelievable tale that’s perfect fodder for a good doc, and Author provides it, even if you can’t help wishing there was a little more context.

If you don’t know, in the late 1990s and early 2000s Jeremiah Terminator Leroy was a bit of an enfant terrible of literature, gaining a huge following for his tales of living with a junkie truckstop prostitute mother, becoming a teen hustler and having to survive terrible abuse, all of which was semi-based on his own life. Initially terribly reclusive, Leroy eventually started making public appearances, gaining a cadre of celebrity fans and admirers – from Tom Waits to Courtney Love – and becoming a worldwide cult icon. He was gay, trans (today he might have been described as genderqueer as his gender identity shifted depending on how he felt) and looked almost like a teen Andy Warhol, complete with blond wig. [Read more…]

Four Moons (Cuatro Lunas) (DVD Review)

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It’s taken a while for Four Moons to get to the UK, but now it’s here and it’s worth the wait. The film is based around a concept that could have overwhelmed the movie itself, but thankfully it works due to care that’s taken with the stories it tells.

Four Moons follows four separate gay-themed tales, each focusing on a different time in life and the stages of relationships. The ‘New Moon’ is an adolescent who is just figuring out his sexuality and isn’t sure what to do with his feelings for his cousin. However, acting on those feelings may backfire and cause him major trouble. There are also two young men, one straight and the other closeted but just out of a relationship with a man. These old friends end up sleeping together and embark on a relationship, but tension quickly arises due to the fact one of them is adamant that no one else should ever know about what is going on, as he is terrified of what others will think and whether it will hurt his family. [Read more…]

Pitch Perfect 2 (DVD Review)

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The Pitch Perfect movies are proof positive that despite many people arguments to the contrary, originality isn’t the key to an entertaining film. Indeed, both films are just about as clichéd as it’s possible to get story-wise, following tried and tested formulas for this sort of film. However, despite that – or actually arguably partly because of the oddly comforting nature of that – they are huge amounts of fun.

This time around things have moved on a few years and rather than being a freshman, Beca (Anna Kendrick) is now getting ready to graduate and thinking about the future. Her a cappella group, The Barden Bellas, are now three time national champions, until disaster strikes when ‘Fat’ Amy (Rebel Wilson) suffers a major wardrobe malfunction while performing for the President, which results in the group’s tour being cancelled and threatened with never being able to compete again. [Read more…]

Fantastic Four (Cinema Review)

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When even a film’s own cast start mumbling about how they haven’t seen it, that it’s probably a bit rubbish, and that it’s not a critics’ film, you know you’re in trouble. Sure enough, this latest version of a story which had a perfectly decent outing all of 10 years ago turns out to be a dud. It’s the usual reasons to blame too – a dog of a script, wooden half-hearted acting and a boring story about saving the world. To be fair, the special effects are actually pretty good, and some minor characters put in a shift, but in the preview screening people started walking out after 10 minutes.

Do we really have to go through the whole set-up of how they become the Four? Apparently we do, so we get a full hour of Teller’s Reed Richards inventing a teleportal machine which sends sand, chimps and then humans to an undiscovered planet that turns out to have an inexhaustible supply of power. He teams up with Johnny Storm (Jordan, ok), Sue Storm (Mara, half-asleep), Victor von Doom (Kebbell, chewing scenery) and his old pal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell, adequate) to complete the work, but an accident sees Doom stranded on the planet alone while the other four return to Earth with strange powers. [Read more…]

Spooks: The Greater Good (Cinema Review)

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Having never seen the TV series I had no real expectations of the film version, or real knowledge, other than it is something to do with spies and MI5. It’s with great pleasure to report then that as a stand-alone spy movie, Spooks: The Greater Good works. It’s tense, looks great, pacy and well acted, satisfying on pretty much every level, as a decent espionage thriller should. It taps into our current fears of attack from abroad, especially ISIS, at times almost painfully so. It’s also the first film for ages to use its London locations to great effect without making everything look cheesy.

It begins with a great set piece. The most wanted terrorist in the world is being transported across London, but the armoured van is stuck in a pesky traffic jam. Out of nowhere come armed motorbike riders to free him. They know that watching in MI5 headquarters is Peter Finch, and tell him, either free the man or lots of innocent people will die. Finch lets the man go. [Read more…]