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

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…]

Friend Request (Blu-ray Review)

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After a brief chat following a lecture, college student Laura accepts a social network friend request from classmate Marina. However, Marina refuses to be someone who sits in your friend list and gets ignored, as she embarks on increasingly unhinged stalker behaviour, which culminates in her sending a video of her own suicide to Laura.

Death isn’t going to stop Marina though, as Laura’s friends start being attacked. As those she knows start dying around her, the authorities begin to think Laura must somehow be involved, but it becomes clear something more supernatural is at work. [Read more…]

Legends Of Tomorrow – Season 1 (Blu-ray Review)

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While Marvel has had great success in cinema but struggled more on TV, it’s generally been the other way around for DC. Arrow was soon joined by The Flash, then came Supergirl, online animated series and now Legends Of Tomorrow, with more shows planned. Legends certainly came with a lot of promise when it was first announced – a sort-of time-travelling equivalent of The Avengers – filled with lesser-known heroes (and villains), most of whom had been introduced in other DC shows.

Arthur Darvill plays Rip Hunter, who’s had a promotion since playing luckless companion Rory in Doctor Who, as he’s now a Time Master (not Lord), with his own equivalent of the TARDIS. Hunter comes from a future that has been taken over by the evil Vandal Savage, a 4,000-year-old immortal. Although he’s been banned from meddling in the past, Rip goes rogue, commandeering a time ship and heading to the 21st Century to put together a band of heroes, who will travel through time with him, trying to find Savage at various points in history so they can destroy him. [Read more…]

Jane Got A Gun (Blu-ray Review)

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Jane Got A Gun has had a few problems. That included a revolving door of actors getting involved and then backing out (including the likes of Jude Law, Michael Fassbender and Bradley Cooper), and director Lynn Ramsey leaving the production so late in the day that they didn’t know she was gone until she didn’t turn up for the first day of shooting. She was quickly replaced by Gavin O’Connor, who didn’t have a huge amount of time to prepare, which may explain why Jane Got A Gun isn’t all it might have been.

Jane Hammond (Natalie Portman) is a woman living on the rough, tough, wild west frontier of 19th Century America. Her husband (Roland Emmerich) returns home riddled with bullets after a confrontation with the violent Bishop Boys gang, led by the brutal John (Ewan McGregor). They know the Boys are going to want to track him down to finish off the job. Jane decides she needs help and so decides to enlist her ex-lover, Dan Frost (Joel Edgerton). [Read more…]

Eye In The Sky (DVD Review)

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When people talk about modern warfare, it tends to be in rather black and white terms. It’s either people concerned about collateral damage who tend to ignore the moral quagmire that killing a few innocent people may end up saving many more, or the more gung-ho attitude that ignores the guiltless that get caught up in it. Eye In The Sky attempts to explore the grey areas.

In Nairobi, a British and American task force are tracking some Islamic extremist terrorists, but are mainly doing so from afar, using drones controlled from the US and other tech piloted by a local (Barkhad Abdi) on the ground. They discover that three of their most wanted targets are together in a house. However, plans to capture them quickly change to the need for a possible kill-strike, when they realise there are bomb belts in the house and a suicide attack is imminent. Things get even more complex when a young girl enters the kill zone and they realise a strike is likely to kill her. [Read more…]

11.22.63 (DVD Review)

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For decades now, Stephen King has been getting away with premises that in most other people’s hands would have people rolling their eyes and saying it’s ridiculous. However, he manages to pull it off more often than not. That’s certainly true of the idea behind 11.22.63, where there’s a closet that takes people back to 1960. Why? Well, just because there is, of course.

That’s just one of a series of arbitrary rules around which this JJ Abrams produced eight-part adaptation of King’s novels weaves a story of time-travel, love, espionage and the Kennedy assassination. Jake (James Franco) is a high school teacher who discovers that there is indeed a portal to 1960 in the back of a diner. The owner of the restaurant (Chris Cooper) has been using it to try to prevent JFK’s assassination, something he believes will makes the world a better place. [Read more…]

Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice – Ultimate Edition (Blu-ray Review)

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As they say, ‘The higher you climb, the further there is to fall’. That’s a fair description of Batman v Superman, a film that you certainly can’t fault for its ambition, but which can’t reach the heights it strives for despite its best efforts. After an exceedingly mixed reaction at cinemas, the film comes to Blu-ray in an Ultimate Edition form, which adds in an extra 30 minutes of footage and adds back in some of the violence that US censors wouldn’t permit to get it a PG-13 certificate.

Some hoped this new version would rectify all the flaws of the theatrical cut. It doesn’t do that, but it does help a little, particularly with some of the subplots where the theatrical version had bits of them, but where they either petered out or didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It does add a couple of extra problems though. [Read more…]

High Rise (Blu-ray Review)

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Director Ben Wheatley was certainly ambitious when he decided to take on JG Ballard’s cult, 1975 novel, High Rise. It’s one of those books that for decades many have proclaimed unfilmable, but there’s no doubt Wheatley and his cast and crew have put their all into it.

Set in a dystopian version of the 1970s (or at least a hyper-real 1970s), Dr. Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves into a new, high-rise tower – supposedly the pinnacle of modernist living. His apartment is on one of the middle floors, while the poorer people live near the bottom, and the higher up you go, the richer and more rarefied the people become. [Read more…]

Burroughs: The Movie (Blu-ray Review)

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Virtually lost for many years except for bad quality bootleg copies, this ‘definitive’ portrait of writer William S. Burroughs has been properly restored and given a very nice Criterion Collection release. As notable as the film itself is the talent behind the camera – something even more remarkable as it started as a short NYU Film School project.

Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Only Lovers Left Alive) recorded the sound, while it was shot by Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede, Delirious). The director was Howard Brookner, who made Burroughs and another biographical documentary, Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, and then made his fiction film debut with Bloodhounds of Broadway, before tragically dying of AIDS in 1989. If he hadn’t passed away, it’s likely he’d have gone on to great things. [Read more…]

Triple 9 (Blu-ray Review)

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As the cast came together for Triple 9, it couldn’t help but feel this was going to be one hell of a movie. With the director of The Road and Lawless behind the camera, and a cast including Casey Affleck, Aaron Paul Kate Winslet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anthony Mackie, Gal Gadot, Norman Reedus, Teresa Palmer, Clifton Collins Jr. and Woody Harrelson, it certainly has plenty of pedigree.

However, the result is a rather overstuffed movie, which, as with many of its forebears, confuses grimness with authenticity, and people being miserable and unpleasant to one another with reality. Indeed, there are moments when objectively it’s about as realistic as Lord Of The Rings, but has such a determined po-face that it might convince you otherwise. [Read more…]