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

Harvest (DVD)

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As the gay son of a farmer, Harvest is a movie that should have spoken to me – or at least if it was going to speak to anyone, it should have been me. Sadly though it didn’t.

The film is set on a large industrial farming operation on the very edge of Berlin. The farm takes in interns who learn the ropes and do exams to become fully qualified farmers (and yes, whilst not compulsory, you can indeed take exams to be a farmer – in fact you can take entire degrees in it). Jakob (Lukas Steltner) is one of the interns and while the bosses are happy with his work (despite the fact he spend a lot of time slacking off), he’s struggling with his studies. [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…]

Shelter (Blu-ray)

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The second of TLA’s Blu-ray releases (the other being Latter Days), the 2007 romantic drama Shelter gets an HD upgrade. The film stars Trevor Wright as Zach, a young man finding his feet in life in a small Californian town. Despite a desire to go off to art college, he’s slightly trapped by his sister, who relies on him to help her look after her son and treats him as if he’s obliged to be a surrogate father to her kid and has no choice in the matter.

Things begin to change when Zach’s best friend’s brother, Shaun (Brad Rowe), returns to the town. What initially starts out as a friendship develops into something deeper, with Zach finally finding someone he can express himself with and who seems to believe in him and his dreams. [Read more…]

Latter Days (Blu-ray)

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Gay movies go HD, with TLA releasing its first UK Blu-ray (alongside Shelter). This 2003 movie has undoubtedly become a bit of a modern gay classic, largely because it’s one of the few queer cinema efforts that has the slickness of a lot of Hollywood movies, and so it’s easily accessible even to those who cringe at the thought of anything low budget or arty. Latter Days manages its slickness largely because while it was made for very little cash, a lot of the crew have worked extensively on mainstream films and TV, including writer/director C. Jay Cox, whose job immediately prior to Latter Days was writing the Reese Witherspoon rom-com Sweet Home Alabama. [Read more…]

The Rum Diary (Cinema)

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On paper, The Rum Diary sounds like a sure-fire winner, but in practice it’s slightly more problematic than that. The film sees Johnny Depp returning to the work of Hunter S. Thompson and again playing the kind of Thompson alter-ego that he did so well in Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. Depp has been intimately involved with the movie, to the point where he was the one who told Thompson to publish it, as the writer had stuffed it in a drawer since the early 60s and never let anyone see it. Depp and Thompson were casting around for something else they could film after Fear & Loathing, and came across The Rum Diary, which was duly published and is Hunter’s only proper novel. [Read more…]

Close To Leo (DVD)

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Now nearly 10 years old (it was initially made for French TV in 2002), Close To Leo makes a welcome return to DVD. It’s one of the best movies ever made about HIV/AIDS, largely because it treats it as just one aspect of the characters’ lives, and is actually more interested in the issues the disease raises as people attempt to carry after the diagnosis, rather than being overly angsty about the infection itself – although with enough angst that it doesn’t feel flippant.

Told through the eyes of Marcel, who’s on the cusp or puberty, the film follows a family in Brittany after they discover the eldest son, Leo, is HIV+. Marcel isn’t supposed to know this, but he picks up enough to realise what’s going on, even if he can’t accept that he’s being left out of important family development. While Marcel initially reacts by rebelling, he eventually goes off on a trip to Paris with Leo, where the two attempt to bond. [Read more…]

Kill Keith (Cinema)

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It’s difficult not to read a synopsis of Kill Keith and feel that the whole thing is a very bad idea – a cheesy joke that shouldn’t have been stretched into an entire movie. However this movie about a serial killer targeting British light entertainment veterans isn’t half as bad as you’d think it’d be. That’s not to say we’re going to see Keith Chegwin walking the red carpet at the Oscars next year (I really don’t know what America would make of him if he did), but Kill Keith managed to keep a smile on my face far more than I ever expected it to.

The movie follows Danny (Marc Pickering, who some may remember as R Wayne in Peter Kaye’s ‘Britain’s Got the Pop Factor’), who’s working as a runner on a popular breakfast TV show. The male host of the programme is about to leave, and in a basement somewhere, a serial killer is torturing a TV executive to find out the shortlist for his replacement. [Read more…]

The Celluloid Closet (DVD)

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It’s a bit of a surprise that it’s taken so long for The Celluloid Closet to make it to DVD. The 1995 documentary, which looks at the history of gays and lesbians in film, won numerous awards and was a major success on its release, and yet it’s only just appearing on DVD now. Based on the book by Vito Russo, which was the seminal work on the subject, it’s a fascinating trawl through a topic that has always been present in cinema, but for most of its history was hidden away and never openly mentioned.

Starting right at the earliest days of moving images, The Celluloid Closet charts the different ways cinema has tried to deal with homosexuality, from Marlene Dietrich dressing in a tux and kissing a woman in 1930’s Morocco, to how The Hay’s Code insisted that any suggestion of homosexuality was stripped out of film adaptations of Tennessee Williams. [Read more…]

Pedro (DVD)

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Pedro is a movie with the best of intentions, but it rarely lives up to its potential. It tells the story of AIDS activist and The Real World: San Francisco contestant Pedro Zamora, who put a face on the disease for the American public in the early 90s and sadly died just after the MTV series aired. Zamora certainly had an effect, generating a public debate among people who’d never ‘known’ anyone who was HIV positive. It even went as far as the Oval Office, with Bill Clinton having been in contact with Pedro and now providing an introduction for the film on this DVD. [Read more…]

Out At The Wedding (DVD)

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Farce is a tough thing to pull off because it takes a lot of skill to build a situation that convincingly grows from a simple mix up to an impossibly complex, over-the-top situation, without seeming contrived or desperate. It’s a line that Out At The Wedding tries to walk with only middling success.

Alex has told her mixed-race fiancé that her family is dead, largely because she thinks her Southern patriarch father is racist. Obviously she hasn’t told her family that she has a non-white boyfriend, with the result that when she goes to her sister’s wedding, a mix-up ends up with everyone thinking she’s a lesbian. [Read more…]