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

The Adopted (DVD)

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Melanie Laurent came to international prominence with a superb performance in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and was seen more recently in the Oscar-winning Beginners. Here she turns director for a family drama that’s involving if imperfect.

Marine (Marie Denarnaud) is a young woman who was adopted as a child and is now virtually inseparable from her adoptive sister, Lisa (Laurent). They’re so close that she is virtually the second mother of Lisa’s young son, Leo. Then Marine meets Alex (Denis Menochet), or rather he meets and pursues her. The two begin a fledgling relationship, which Lisa seems to resent, although their feisty mother is all for it. Marine starts to waver, unsure whether relationships are for her – despite the fact the rather charming Alex seems utterly devoted – but then a shocking event changes all their lives and forces Lisa and Alex together over the future of Marine… and her unborn baby. [Read more…]

Happy Feet Two (Blu-ray)

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In 2006 Happy Feet was a surprise hit, grossing almost $200 million in the US, but sadly this follow-up was a surprise flop, making just a third as much in North America as its predecessor. Many have suggested the problem is the amount of time between parts one and two, with six years being an age in the world of kids’ film. Whatever the reason it’s a great shame, as just like the first film, the initial sense of the whole thing being utterly ridiculous soon gives way to feeling entertained and charmed.

Mumble (Elijah Wood) is now grown up – although rather inexplicably still looks like an overgrown juvenile penguin – and has a chick of his own, Erik, a rather strong-willed youngster who unlike his father, isn’t that good at dancing, and hasn’t shown a huge amount of aptitude for anything else either, barring having a temper and getting into trouble. [Read more…]

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (DVD)

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Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark is a bit of a passion project for producer Guillermo Del Toro. The 1973 TV movie it’s based on made a huge impression on the Pan’s Labyrinth filmmaker as a child and he remembers it as one of the scariest things of his childhood. However what fuels childhood nightmares doesn’t necessarily translate to a remake for an adult audience, especially when you add in fairy tale lore that makes things seem sillier than they need to be.

While in the original it’s a grown women who has problems when she moves into a new house, in the new version it’s a little girl called Sally (Bailee Madison), who comes to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend (Katie Holmes) in a massive old house they’re renovating. Sally feels rather unwanted and initially takes a disliking to her dad’s girlfriend, Kim, however that takes a backseat when she starts to hear whispering coming through the heating ducts and then strange little creatures escape from a boarded up basement. [Read more…]

The Love Patient (DVD)

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There’s been an odd trend in recent years for comedies to be about unpleasant people who it’s difficult to like. Whether it’s Jason Bateman fathering Jennifer Aniston’s child without her knowledge in The Switch, or Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler trying to outdo each other in the impossible-to-empathise-with stakes in The Ugly Truth, there seem to be more rom-coms about assholes than ones about people you might actually like. The Love Patient seems to want to ensure that gay cinema doesn’t miss out on this trend.

The movie follows Paul, who’s feeling a bit down on his luck as the ex-boyfriend he still loves has found a new man and nothing else in his life seems to be going his way either. In his spare time, he volunteers at a medical centre (his sole redeeming feature), where he hatches a plan to make people care for him – pretend he has cancer. [Read more…]

Uncle David (DVD)

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It’s not often that a film can elicit two completely different reactions from me, but Uncle David managed it. If you asked for my knee-jerk feeling, I’d have to say I hated it. While watching it I found it slow, tedious, rather annoying and more than a little pretentious. Despite this, the movie has stuck in my head and kept me thinking about it for days afterwards.

The plot is relatively simple. David (David Hoyle) is a middle-aged man living with his young lover, Ashley (Ashley Greene), in a chalet in a remote, windy, British seaside town. While their life seems rather basic and deprived, David lives in a world of his own philosophical making, endlessly lecturing the receptive Ashley about his ideas on life, and how nearly everybody in the world is buying into what he believes is a corrupt and corrupting system. [Read more…]

Judas Kiss (DVD)

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If you discovered that you’d somehow managed to have sex with yourself, you’d be pretty freaked out, wouldn’t you? I would, but Zachary in Judas Kiss seems amazingly unphased by this and the other temporal peculiarities he faces, other than making a couple of irate phone calls. It’s a bit of a necessary evil in the film, as while Judas Kiss constantly fails to think through the implications of what it’s doing, the movie would stop dead in its track if it did.

Charlie David plays Zachary, a man who after a decade trying to make it as a film director and only managing to get a reputation as the best partyer in town, is now aimless and rather bitter. He reluctantly agrees to fill in as a judge for a film competition at the university he dropped out of years before. His first night back at his alma mater, he meets and sleeps with a young man (Daniel Harmon), only to discover the next day that the kid is one of the competitors he’s meant to judge. [Read more…]

Third Man Out (DVD)

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Private eye Donald Strachey is asked to look into an attack on a man called John Rutka, who’s famed for outing powerful people as gay. While Strachey and Rutka’s ideas on gay politics differ dramatically, the PI gets pulled into the case after his boyfriend is attacked and Rutka is killed. [Read more…]