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

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…]

Urbanized (DVD)

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Gary Hustwit has made a bit of a name for himself making documentaries about subjects that sound like they’ll be dull, but in his hands turn out to be far more interesting than you’d expect. His design trilogy kicked off with Helvetica, about a text font, and he followed that up with Objectified, about the relationship between manufactured objects and the people who design them. Just reading that sentence you could make you fall asleep, but believe it or not, the documentaries are fascinating.

Hustwit rounds out the trilogy with Urbanized, where he tries to outdo himself in making a documentary about a boring sounding subject, as it’s about urban planning. Once more though he proves that what may initially seem deathly dull is actually fascinating in the right hands. [Read more…]

Abduction (DVD)

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Will Taylor Lautner be a big star outside the Twilight franchise? Abduction was supposed to be the movie that showed us if he could succeed without turning into a wolf, but to be honest it’s still impossible to tell. That’s not because Taylor does anything wrong, but because Abduction is so busy getting from A to B to C that it doesn’t really give its star time to show off more than he’s quite god at fighting and stunts.

The young actor plays Nathan, who’s happily living his suburban teenage life when he and friend Karen (Lily Collins) come across what appears to be a picture of him on a missing person’s website. Suspecting his parents may have abducted him as a child, Nathan’s life really goes haywire when armed men suddenly invade the family home and kill the people he believed were his mum and dad. [Read more…]

Dolphin Tale (DVD)

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Based on a true story (loosely at least), Dolphin Tale is about a slightly lonely young boy (Nathan Gamble) who comes across a beached baby dolphin that’s managed to get its tale caught in a crab trap. After it’s rescued, the animal is taken to a marine hospital run by Dr. Clay Haskett (Harry Connick Jr.), who realises that the tale is too damaged to recover. While many vets would just put the dolphin down, he decides to amputate the tail and see if the animal, now dubbed Winter, will survive.

Nathan soon becomes Winter’s steadfast companion, and when it appears the dolphin’s lack of a tail could cause permanent nerve damage that will inevitably lead to death, the boy is inspired by a tragedy that’s happened to a member of his family to enlist the help of Dr. Cameron McCarty, to do something that’s never been done before – make a prosthetic tail for a dolphin. [Read more…]

To Kill A Mockingbird (Blu-ray)

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There are a lot of classic books that have been made into very good movies, and a lot of classic movies that are based on very good books, but To Kill A Mockingbird is a very rare beast – one of the greatest books of the 20th Century, turned into one of the greatest movies of the 20th Century. It’s an almost perfect movie adaptation, which understands perfectly what makes Harper Lee’s novel work and manages to bring that across into a different medium. And now it’s getting an HD restoration and upgrade to celebrate both its 50th birthday and Universal Studios 100th anniversary. [Read more…]