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

La Cage Aux Folles (1978)

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The 1978 movie La Cage Aux Folles (itself based on a stage play) has had quite a life, getting two sequels, being remade as the hit 1996 Hollywood hit The Birdcage and also ending up as a massively successful Broadway musical, which gave us the song, I Am What I Am. The film that started all this off is fun but relatively small, but it stands loud and proud as one of the first movies that put gay characters front and centre, making them the heroes. Although there are several things that seem slightly old-fashioned about its attitudes to homosexuality, compared to nearly every other gay-themed movie of the era, it’s astonishingly progressive and fun. [Read more…]

Goblin (DVD)

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The Perkins family heads out to a small hamlet deep in the woods to spend Halloween and so the parent can discuss a possible big business opportunity. However Hollow Glen hides a secret – back in the dim and distant past a witch put a curse of the entire town in revenge for them burning her sickly child – an evil creature known as The Goblin will rise every Halloween and kill any infant in the vicinity, cutting a swath through anyone that has even the smallest whiff of little kid on them. And wouldn’t you know it, the Perkins don’t just have mom, dad and two teen daughters, but also a little baby that would make perfect goblin grub. [Read more…]

Le Clan (DVD)

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The 2005 French flick gets a welcome re-release. Le Clan follows three young brothers, with the narrative split into three sections, each focussing on a different brother, but carrying on the overall story.

Things start off with middle-brother Marc (Nicolas Cazale), who’s a bit of a hard nut and on the edge of the drug dealing world. When a deal goes wrong, his life is suddenly in danger, which may have dangerous repercussions for both him and his dog. Older brother Christophe is fresh out of prison and trying to turn his life around, getting a job in a meat packing factory. Finally there’s Olivier, who’s carrying on a secret relationship with another young man, trying to find his way to happiness against the backdrop of his slightly wayward brothers and harsh father. [Read more…]

Nurse Jackie – Season 3 (DVD)

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It seems to be the current law of US cable TV shows, that the main character has to be empathetic  but a bit of a bastard. Whether it’s Dexter, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire or pretty much anything else HBO or Showtime is putting out, love ‘em hate ‘em protagonists are the order of the day. That’s certainly true of Nurse Jackie, who’s loved by her colleagues, is great for the patients, but is also busy popping pills left, right and centre and will do anything to keep getting her fix.

Season 3 sees pressure coming down on Jackie to quit, with rumours reaching HR that someone in the hospital ER is abusing drugs, as well as increasing tension between Jackie and her husband. He desperately wants to believe she’s kicking the pills, which leads to lies upon lies and the cracks growing ever larger. [Read more…]

August (DVD)

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It’s always difficult expanding a short film into a feature length movie. If you add too much you’re in danger of losing what was special about the original short, but if you don’t add enough, the film feels stretched and thin. While August has plenty to recommend it, it does tend to suffer from the latter towards the end.

August is an expanded take on Eldar Rapaport’s 2005 16-minute short, Postmortem, and even keeps a couple of the same actors. Troy (Murray Bartlett) returns to LA after time in Spain and reconnects with Jonathan (Daniel Dugan), the man he had a painful break-up with before he left the country. They initially meet for coffee, but what starts as a seemingly innocent attempt to reconnect turns into a resurgence of their affair. However Jonathan now has a new boyfriend, Raul (Adrian Gonzalez), who seems to feel he was in a kind of competition with Troy even before he reappeared on the scene. [Read more…]

Trishna (Cinema)

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There have been various themes running through the incredibly eclectic films of Michael Winterbottom. He’s shown a deep interest in music (24 Hour Party People), delved repeatedly into foreign countries and politics (A Mighty Heart, Welcome To Sarajevo), and experimented with different naturalistic, almost documentary styles (9 Songs, The Road To Guantanamo).

There’s also been a bit of an obsession with the works of Thomas Hardy, as he’s made Jude, based on Jude The Obscure, The Claim, which took The Mayor Of Casterbridge to the 19th Century American frontier, and now Trishna, which is Tess Of The D’Urbervilles in modern-day India. With an almost improvised style, culture clash themes and mix of musical types, the film brings together a whole heap of Winterbottom’s interests. [Read more…]

Chicago Hope – Season 1 (DVD)

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For some reason in 1994, American TV decided that the world would only be interested in hospitals if they were located in Chicago. In the third week of September of that year, both ER and Chicago Hope debuted on different US TV networks, both set in the Windy City. While ER became a ratings sensation, Chicago Hope went slightly more under the radar, but nevertheless lasted a fairly impressive six seasons.

For the first time anywhere in the world, the first season of the show hits digital disc, taking us into the world of the surgeons at a private charity hospital, whose complicated personal lives are matched by a series of weird and wonderful medical cases. It’s a serviceable enough idea, and indeed it’s been done plenty of times before and after, however there’s not a huge amount about Chicago Hope that really makes it stand proud of the pack, even if it is fairly entertaining. [Read more…]

Jack Goes Boating (DVD)

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Philip Seymour Hoffman makes his directorial debut with a movie version of Robert Glaudini’s play, which he originally helped develop and starred in with his New York theatre company. As well as directing he plays Jack, a rather awkward middle-aged man who gets set up by his friend Clyde (John Ortiz) with his wife’s work colleague, Connie (Amy Ryan).

Connie is a rather neurotic woman, but there seems to be something between her and Jack. Very slowly the two socially maladroit people start to get closer to one another, while the problems between Clyde and his wife Lucy grow. [Read more…]

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Blu-ray)

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Lynne Ramsay became a true darling of the British indie film scene with Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. While I found things to admire in both those movies, I remained undecided about Ramsay as a filmmaker, as I personally found that overall both movie felt lacking. However, I do think her third film, We Need To Talk About Kevin, based on the bestselling book by Lionel Shriver, is very good, although perhaps not for exactly the same reasons Ramsay and the actors do.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is a movie that’s possible to take two completely different ways. It could be a mother trying to deal with a son who was simply born evil, or alternately it could be about a son who ends up bad because his mother never felt the bond parents are supposed to, or perhaps somewhere in between. In the cast and crew interviews that make up the special features, the actors suggest they believe it’s more about the mother not feeling the expected bond with her son and the incredibly smart Kevin reacting to it, but when I watched it, I saw the exact opposite. [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…]