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

REVIEWS

Cinema, DVD and Blu-ray reviews

American Translation (DVD)

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American teenager Aurore (Lizzie Brochere) gets her parents to agree to leave her alone in Paris while her father heads back to the States on business. The rebellious teen soon meets Chris (Pierre Perrier), a wanderer who gives her life a bit of excitement. They embark on a passionate affair that quickly turns into an all-consuming passion. Chris is a dangerous proposition though, who gets violently jealous if Aurore speaks to other men, but she’s smitten.

Chris has a secret though, he likes to pick up rent boys. While Aurore doesn’t seem sure about this, she goes along with it, allowing her boyfriend to go into his van with a trick he’s picked up. When she returns something terrible has happened and the rent boy is dead. [Read more…]

Dark Shadows (Cinema)

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Dark Shadows has always been a somewhat problematic proposition for a film conversion, especially as it’s been brought to the screen by people who are obviously in love with the original US soap opera that ran between 1966 and 1971. The show ran for over 1,000 episodes and featured a vast array of characters and all sorts of different supernatural shenanigans. Those then needed to be distilled down to a single movie that’ll work for a generation who’ve never seen the show.

It’s a challenge that Dark Shadows only partially succeeds in, with the whole thing having the whiff of being filled things Johnny Depp and Tim Burton wanted to include, but which might have been better to have dispensed with. [Read more…]

eCupid (DVD)

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Writer/director JC Calciano follows up his popular Is It Just Me? with eCupid, a rom-com looking at the gay seven year itch. Marshall (Houston Rhines) is about to turn 30, has been with his boyfriend for years, is stuck in a dead-end advertising job and feels like life has lost excitement. He’s yearning for a bit of fun and hotter guys in his life, especially as his boyfriend is so busy with his struggling business that it feels like they never have sex.

While surfing the web one night, Marshall finds a site called eCupid, but little does he know that agreeing to its terms and conditions will result in it completely taking over his life. Before he knows it, his boyfriend has moved out and eCupid is providing a succession of guys who are perhaps a bit more than Marshall can handle. Soon he begins to realise that the grass on the other side may be filled with hot guys and endless parties, but he may have been completely ignoring the joys of what he had already. [Read more…]

Mothman (DVD)

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It’s rather odd that a small, provincial supernatural legend has managed to spawn two films, especially as that legend is incredibly dumb. Buy hey, the 2002 Richard Gere movie The Mothman Prophecies was actually a lot better than it had any right to be. Sadly the same can’t be said for Mothman.

A group of teenagers are having a swim one night and telling scary stories about the local legend of the mothman – a man shaped killer creature said to live nearby – to one of their younger brothers. Deciding the kid isn’t scared enough, they start to prank him, pulling him under the water, but soon things have gone too far and he’s drowned. 10 years later one of the teens, Katherine (Firefly’s Jewel Staite), is now a journalist sent back to her hometown to report on the local mothman festival. [Read more…]

Shame (Blu-ray)

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A man is on a subway train and notices a beautiful woman sitting opposite. Their eyes meet, and each smiles at the other. When the train gets to her stop, she stands up. The man stands too, coming up behind her where their hands brush and a jolt of electricity passes between them. He follows her off the train but in the jumble of people loses her. In most films this would be the start of a great love story – two lost souls destined to find each other again. However even in the first few minutes it’s clear Shame will not be that kind of story, signalling right at the beginning that the Hollywood idea of sex and romance isn’t real. [Read more…]

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows (Blu-ray)

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All the way through 2010’s Sherlock Holmes, a shadowy figure lurked in the background who seemed to have a finger in every pie and used the mayhem Sherlock was involved with to his own ends.  In A Game Of Shadows that figure steps forward, with Jared Harris as Professor James Moriarty, who is Sherlock’s intellectual equal, even if he uses his brains for very different ends.

A series of explosions is rocking Europe and threaten to destabilise the already tenuous peace between the nations, with war a very real possibility. As you’d expect, Sherlock is soon deep in this conspiracy and has very quickly worked out that Moriarty is involved. However it’s not enough to know who’s behind it, as there’s no tangible evidence. As a result Holmes must investigate and work out Moriarty’s end game in order to stop the villain. [Read more…]

Jeff, Who Lives At Home (Cinema)

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A film starring Jason Segel and Ed Helms should be hilarious, right? Plus it’s directed by Jay and Mark Duplass, the brothers who had indie success with the likes of The Puffy Chair and Baghead, and are now making their first properly mainstream movie (the underwhelming Cyrus doesn’t really count). Sadly the results are less than the sum of the parts, with the movie being infuriating in parts and only sporadically entertaining.

As the title suggests, Jeff (Jason Segel) lives at home. He’s in his mid-thirties, has no job, doesn’t leave his basement all that often and spends most of his time trying to work out the ‘signs’ he feels are all around him, which will tell him what his destiny is if only he can interpret them properly. His mother (Susan Sarandon) asks him to go out and get some wood glue, however when he receives a wrong phone call for somebody called Kevin, he sees this as a sign, which leads him to get distracted from his task and ends up following someone with the word ‘Kevin’ on his basketball vest. [Read more…]

ID:A (DVD)

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Thanks to the likes of The Killing and Borgen, Scandinavian thrillers are the in thing at the moment. However these bursts in popularity for particular bits of world entertainment mean an awful lot of stuff gets released hoping to cash-in on the phenomenon, whether it’s top quality stuff or not. ID:A definitely feels like it come from the second rank of Scandinavian thrillers, despite the presence of Oscar winning director Christian E. Christiansen and Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa producing.

The movie opens with a woman waking up in a French river, with a scar on her stomach but no memory of who she is or how she got there. Adopting the name Aliena, she tries to work out who she is and soon becomes aware that mysterious heavies are looking for someone with her description. When she works out she could be Danish, she heads north, finding a clue on the way when she recognises the voice of famous opera singer Just Ore. [Read more…]

Clone (Blu-ray)

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Would you clone your dead lover if you could? Thankfully it’s not something we need to worry too much about at the moment, although it may well be something mankind has to face in the near future. That said, I have to hope that future isn’t quite like it is in Clone.

Rebecca (Eva Green) and Thomas (Matt Smith) have known each other since childhood and after reuniting as adults embark on an intense relationship. However things are cut short when Thomas is hit by a car and killed. Despite the objections of his mother, Rebecca decides to mother a clone of Thomas as she cannot let go of him. [Read more…]

Piggy (Cinema)

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Joe (Martin Compston) is a shy young man who seems somewhat scared of the grim London world around him. However his loving brother John (Neil Maskell) helps bring a sense of stability and happiness to his life, which is abruptly ended when John is savagely murdered.

Finding it difficult to come to terms with his loss, Joe is visited by an odd man called Piggy (Paul Anderson), who says he’s an old friend of his brother. Piggy is an avenger who knows the authorities aren’t going to do anything John death, and slowly works his way into Joe’s head, convincing him of the need to take direct action. Soon the two men are out on the streets looking for the five men responsible for John’s death. At first Joe finds it difficult to stomach the violence Piggy gets him involved in, but soon Joe get increasingly violent himself as his world begins to further unravel around him. [Read more…]