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

Boys On Film 3: American Boy (DVD)

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Read our reviews of the other Boys On Film short film collections here.

With Boys On Film: Cruel Britannia out on May 28th, we’re looking at all eight of Peccadillo Picture’s collections of gay short films, most of which are well worth a look. We’ve already taken a look at Hard Love and In Too Deep, and today it’s time for American Boy, a collection of seven short movies all hailing from the US of A.

From thriller to comedy they’re an eclectic bunch and while overall it’s not quite as strong a release as the first two Boys On Film discs, there’s still a lot of interesting stuff and it’s a cut above a lot of the feature-length gay releases out there. Let’s take a look at the shorts: [Read more…]

Boys On Film 2: In Too Deep (DVD)

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Read our reviews of the other Boys On Film short film collections here.

Yesterday we took a look at the first of the first Boys On Film compilations of gay interest short films. We’ll be reviewing all eight of them ahead of the May 28th release of the latest disc, Boys On Film: Cruel Britannia, and today it’s time for the second compilation, In Too Deep, another great selection of bite sized gay movies covering all sorts of different themes and genres.

There are nine shorts on the disc, so let’s break them down: [Read more…]

Boys On Film 1: Hard Love (DVD)

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Read our reviews of the other Boys On Film short film collections here.

Anyone with an interest in gay cinema will know that the feature-length efforts that emerge each year are a very variable bunch, and it’s difficult to escape the feeling that a lot of the dodgier ones would have had difficulty finding a release if they’d been about straight characters. However there’s a huge amount of great work going on in the world of gay short films.

Peccadillo Pictures’ Boy On Film series is a wonderful showcase for these shorts, focussing on films about gay male characters and themes, and proving there’s an awful lot great filmmaking talent out there exploring gay issues. The eighth in the series, Boys On Film: Cruel Britannia, arrives on DVD on May 28th, but in the run up to that, Peccadillo has provided us with all the Boys On Film releases for us to review. [Read more…]

Nighthawks (1978)

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With the release of Weekend on DVD and Blu-ray, it seems a good time to revisit Nighthawks, a movie I’d be willing to bet served as a major inspiration for Andrew Haigh’s recent gay hit, but made 34 years before. Nighthawks is generally agreed to be Britain’s first ‘gay movie’, as while homosexuality had been seen on screen before, this was the first Brit flick to be told non-judgementally, from a gay perspective and not trading in crude stereotypes.

The film follows Londoner Jim (Ken Robertson), a teacher by day who spends his evenings cruising bars and discotheques (remember, this is 1978, when discotheques were cool!), picking up different men and trying to connect with them in various ways, whether it’s just for sex, attempting a fledgling relationship or becoming friends. He tries to keep his two lives separate, something that seems as much a necessity as something he actually wants. [Read more…]

Were The World Mine (DVD)

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Given how the musical is known for being popular with gay people, it’s surprising there aren’t more film musicals made with a gay bent. There have been a few, such as the superb Hedwig And The Angry Inch, but not as many as you might expect. Were The World Mine follows gay teenager Timothy, who’s routinely castigated for being a ‘fag’ by the rugby players at his school, even though he secretly lusts after one of them.

After being cast as Puck in the school’s musical production of ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’, Timothy discovers a way to make the plot of Shakespeare’s fantasy come true, spraying people from a flower so that they fall in love with the first person they see afterwards. Timothy soon manages to make his crush besotted with him, before spreading gayness around his small town  to give the small-minded townsfolk a taste of what it’s like to live in his shoes. [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…]

Shank (DVD)

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Most gay coming of age movies are rather predictable tales of teen angst. While they reflect a very real experience, they do have a tendency to feel very similar. Shank however manages to find a fresh urgency and danger in its tale of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality on the dangerous city streets. Filmed in and around Bristol, the movie follows Cal, who is part of a gang of vicious teen thugs. However when he’s away from his friends, he goes online to troll for men to have anonymous sex with, even if his partners are likely to be beaten up and robbed afterwards. [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…]

Mulligans (DVD)

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If they handed out Oscars for ‘Most Hand-wringingly Melodramatic Movie’, I think Mulligans might win. Jock Tyler (James) invites his university friend Chase to stay with him and his family over the summer. However Chase has a secret he hasn’t told James – he’s gay – but that’s not the only surprise James has in store, as it turns out that even though his parents have been together for over 20 years, his dad also harbours secret desires for members of the same sex and ends up sleeping with Chase. [Read more…]