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

Because Of A Boy (You’ll Get Over It) (DVD)

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Vincent (Julien Baumgartner) is a French teenager who’s fairly popular in his school and a member of the swim team. However he’s also secretly coming to terms with being gay, despite the fact he has a girlfriend. When new boy Benjamin (Jeremie Elkaim) turns up, who has a bit of a reputation as a bad boy, Vincent is soon attracted to him. After Vincent’s attempt to kiss Benjamin turns sour, the new boy inadvertently lets Vincent’s secret out.

The teen turns up to school to find graffiti calling him a ‘fag’ scrawled next to his locker and plenty of people ready to laugh and try to intimidate in. As his outing spreads from school to his family, Vincent must face a lot of prejudice, but also begins to realise that maybe not everything about being open about your sexuality is a bad thing. [Read more…]

Big Miracle (DVD)

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Everybody love whales, right? Indeed they’re so adored that the original name of this film was Everybody Loves Whales, before being changed to the more generic and slightly meaningless Big Miracle. Indeed it’s a change that seems indicative of the slightly ballsed-up marketing this movie’s had, as it deserved to get a big audience and is just the sort of film many families will love. Instead of selling it properly though, it was merely slipped out and made just $20 million at the US box office. Hopefully it’ll find a bit more of an audience on DVD.

John Krasinski plays Adam Carlson, a news reporter for a small TV station who’s been sent to Barrow, Alaska to talk about what it’s like to live in the Arctic circle, in one of the most northerly towns in the world. Just as he’s about to leave, he happens upon three Gray Whales trapped in a small breathing hole in the ice. It’s too far for them to swim to the open ocean without drowning and their outlook seems bleak. [Read more…]

Prometheus (Cinema)

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After one of the biggest and most hyperbolic marketing campaigns ever, which did all but suggest that Ridley Scott’s return to sci-fi is a bigger deal than if Jesus returned, Prometheus is here. Ever since it was announced, there’s been a lot of talk about exactly how it’s related to Alien. Scott himself has distanced the film from his earlier effort, saying only that strands of ‘Alien DNA’ would be apparent and that it only becomes a prequel in the last few minutes.

Well, the truth is that this doesn’t just have ‘Alien DNA’, it’s a full-blown prequel. The reason for Scott distancing it is the same as it often is with marketing nowadays – the assumption the audience is stupid (which, to be honest, is often quite a fair assessment for a lot of cinemagoers). There aren’t any xenomorphs (well, pretty much), and so it appears Scott wants to make sure audiences aren’t expecting the iconic facehuggers and aliens and are then disappointed by their absence. [Read more…]

Redwoods (2009)

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If you like melodrama, then Redwoods is the film for you, which lays it on so thick you could almost choke on it, although thankfully has its heart in the right place. Everett (Brendan Bradley) and Miles (Tad Coughenour) are a gay couple who’ve lost the spark in their relationship but are held together by raising their autistic son.

When Miles and the kid head off for a week to visit his grandma, Everett is left alone to work and reflect. He soon bumps into Chase (Matthew Montgomery), who’s visiting Redwood country as he travels around writing a book.  The two men’s relationship soon blossoms into an affair, with Everett suddenly regaining the passion that’s long been missing from his life. However he knows at the end of the week his boyfriend and son will return, but the temptation is to leave them. Will he stay, go and will he even have the choice? [Read more…]

Like Crazy (DVD)

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Ah, young love. Like Crazy is the sort of film that will either have you reach for the sick bucket, or get you blubbing in the first 10 minutes due to the aching love on display. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones are Jacob and Anna, who meet at an LA university while the British Anna is in the US on a student visa.

Falling deeply in love, Anna overstays the limit of her Visa and discovers that after she pops back to the UK for a short visit, she’s now banned from going back to the States. Their passion still burns, but with both of them building lives for themselves in different parts of the world and Jacob unable or unwilling to move to Britain, keeping their relationship going becomes increasingly difficult. They eventually try to take decisive action to get her into the US, but will it work? [Read more…]

This Is What Love In Action Looks Like (DVD)

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It’s always good to see people standing up for a cause they believe in and forcing some change, especially when it so often seems there’s not much small groups of people can do. However with the right cause and the right way of doing things, you can make a difference, as this documentary proves.

In 2005 the friends of 16-year-old Memphis teenager Zach were shocked to find a series of MySpace posts saying that following his parents reacting badly to his telling them he was gay, they were sending him to a Fundamentalist Christian live-in programme, Love In Action, which would try to turn him straight. With Zach having already been packed off to the organisation’s centre, Zach’s friends decide to organise a protest. Their peaceful attempts to raise awareness of the centre’s existence and to try and help Zach soon become a major news story, forcing things to change. However with Zach inside the centre, he knows little about what’s going on in his name. [Read more…]

The Queen (Blu-ray)

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While the world of film loves to make royal biopics, nearly all of them are historic, with even something like The King’s Speech causing some to wonder whether its subject matter is too close to the present to make it suitable for a movie (seriously, some people complained about that). It’s very unusual therefore for a mainstream royal biopic to take on the current royal family, especially concerning events that are in the recent past. The Queen does though and does it very well, winning Helen Mirren an Oscar in the process. Now the film is making its first appearance on Blu-ray, just in time for the monarch’s Diamond Jubilee.

Following the death of Princess Diana, the Queen (Mirren) and royal family attempt to deal with what they believe should be a private matter between themselves and the Spencer family. However as attacks from the media and public begin to grow, and with new PM Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) advising her, the Monarch slowly comes to realise that her apparent inaction is becoming a threat to her position. [Read more…]

Nightbirds (Blu-ray & DVD)

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Until relatively recently Nightbirds was thought to be a lost movie from cult director Andy Milligan, who’s best known (although he’s not known that much, as his cult is pretty small) for slightly bizarre horror flicks. However at least one print remained, which Drive director and Milligan aficionado Nicolas Winding Refn managed to get hold of. He then approached the BFI about giving Nightbirds the first proper release it’s ever had, as it hardly even saw the inside of a cinema when it was first made.

This proved trickier than you might expect, as Refn’s solitary print was missing several key scenes, which had literally been cut out of it to make the six-minute trailer. However working with a company that had a copy of that trailer, they’ve managed to put the movie back together and create this new Blu-ray and DVD release. The real question though, is whether it was all worth it? [Read more…]

Ruggles Of Red Gap (Blu-ray & DVD)

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Back in the early part of the 20th Century, Hollywood really liked Ruggles Of Red Gap. Even though the original play only ran for 33 performances on Broadway, it spawned two silent movies and then this 1935 talkie starring Charles Laughton. The actor had just won a Best Actor Oscar for The Private Life Of Henry VIII, and many thought it was odd he chose such a straightforwardly comic role as a follow-up, something he wasn’t particularly well known for at the time.

Laughton plays title character Ruggles, the butler of a posh English lord who is lent to a rather unrefined but very rich American and his social climbing wife, who sees having a butler as a way of showing people how posh they’ve become. After a couple of adventures in Europe, Ruggles is taken to Red Gap, Washington, a pioneer town that doesn’t know quite what to make of this refined manservant. [Read more…]

Catch .44 (Blu-ray)

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Writer/director Aaron Harvey really wants to be Quentin Tarantino, and I mean REALLY wants to be. While many people have made films that can be considered Tarantino-esque, Catch .44 takes that to the extreme but falls short on just about every level. Despite trying everything from fast-paced dialogue that seems to be about random topics to dicking around with the timeline, all the film really manages to prove is that Quentin is a singular talent, and you can’t just copy and paste his style in a slightly amateurish way and expect it to work.

Three young women (Malin Akerman, Nikki Reed and Deborah Ann Woll) are in a cafe in rural Louisiana when one of them appears to start a stick-up, which soon goes horribly wrong. The film then jump around the timeline, gradually revealing how we got to the café and what happens after, which involves a sleazy drug kingpin (Bruce Willis), a brutal killer (Forest Whitaker) and a job to intercept a lucrative dope deal. However nothing is quite what it seems. [Read more…]