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

A Horrible Way To Die (DVD)

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If a film is called A Horrible Way To Die, you’d expect it to mainly be about dying in horrible ways. However compared to a lot of horror movies, there’s comparatively little dying in this film, and what death there is, is more of the rather unpleasant kind than the truly horrible. However, while the title is unnecessarily generic and doesn’t really match the movie itself, it doesn’t mean the film is completely without merit.

Sarah (Amy Seimetz) is a young woman trying to rebuild her life after a disastrous relationship and a descent into alcoholism. However she’s now going to AA and seems to be getting back on the right track and is even thinking of getting back in the dating game with fellow AA member Kevin (Joe Swanberg). Meanwhile vicious serial killer Garrick Turrell (AJ Bowen) has escaped prison and is cutting a swathe through the local population, killing anyone who gets in his way. What will happen when his path crosses with Sarah’s? [Read more…]

Snowtown (DVD)

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Snowtown comes to DVD with a reputation for violence, intensity and people walking out of the cinema because they couldn’t stomach it. However if you’re expecting this to be gruesome, gory and basically the latest successor to Saw, you’ll be disappointed, as the strong reactions people have had to Snowtown are more to do with its psychological intensity and moral complexity than the on-screen violence – although it does have its moments.

Based on a true story and with a largely first-time cast and crew, Snowtown tells the story of teenager Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), living in a poor, deprived neighbourhood just outside Adelaide in Australia. It’s a place where abuse seems commonplace, with Jamie dealing with it not only from his mother’s boyfriend but also his own family. [Read more…]

How To Re-Establish A Vodka Empire (Cinema)

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Director, subject and star Dan Edelstyn sets off to the Ukraine looking into his family’s past, and to find out more about how his great grandfather was once a rich, factory owner, before the October Revolution came along in 1917. Once in Eastern Europe, Dan discovers his family’s past wasn’t just in sugar but also in Vodka. Dan returns to the UK with ideas of buying the still-standing distillery and reviving the old family business, but soon realises that’s way beyond his means. Instead he embarks on an odyssey to import the vodka into the UK and launch a new brand, hopefully helping the locals in the Ukraine along the way. [Read more…]

Booked Out (DVD)

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Booked Out is a sweet but small-scale movie that was always going to have difficulty finding large-scale distribution, and so it’s going with a rather charming DIY-feeling release strategy, with a DVD & Blu-ray release on Monday, alongside a cinema tour with accompanying Q&As all over the country between now and mid-April (you can find out more about that here).

The film follows artist and bookstore worker Ailidh (Mirren Burke), who’s seen a young man coming and going from another one of the flats in her building and so she manufactures a way of meeting him – by acting as if she’s accidentally dropped all her drawings on him. The man turns out to be Jacob (Rollo Weekes), and soon a friendship develops between the two of them, partly due to Ailidh drawing Jacob into helping her with fellow neighbour Mrs. Nicholls, whose husband died several years before, although she still acts as if he’s alive, well and in the house. [Read more…]

Love Never Dies (DVD)

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It strikes me that your appreciation for Love Never Dies may depend on your thoughts about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom Of The Opera, with the slightly odd thing being that the sequel may best be appreciated by those indifferent to the original. The reason for that is that those in love with Phantom will rile at the lack of the classic score and the rather different tone, while those who hate it tend to do so for reasons that have little to do with the show itself (and more to do with the sort of supposedly spectacle over substance musical entertainment it represents) and Love Never Dies will do nothing to change that. [Read more…]

La Cage Aux Folles (1978)

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The 1978 movie La Cage Aux Folles (itself based on a stage play) has had quite a life, getting two sequels, being remade as the hit 1996 Hollywood hit The Birdcage and also ending up as a massively successful Broadway musical, which gave us the song, I Am What I Am. The film that started all this off is fun but relatively small, but it stands loud and proud as one of the first movies that put gay characters front and centre, making them the heroes. Although there are several things that seem slightly old-fashioned about its attitudes to homosexuality, compared to nearly every other gay-themed movie of the era, it’s astonishingly progressive and fun. [Read more…]

Goblin (DVD)

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The Perkins family heads out to a small hamlet deep in the woods to spend Halloween and so the parent can discuss a possible big business opportunity. However Hollow Glen hides a secret – back in the dim and distant past a witch put a curse of the entire town in revenge for them burning her sickly child – an evil creature known as The Goblin will rise every Halloween and kill any infant in the vicinity, cutting a swath through anyone that has even the smallest whiff of little kid on them. And wouldn’t you know it, the Perkins don’t just have mom, dad and two teen daughters, but also a little baby that would make perfect goblin grub. [Read more…]

Le Clan (DVD)

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The 2005 French flick gets a welcome re-release. Le Clan follows three young brothers, with the narrative split into three sections, each focussing on a different brother, but carrying on the overall story.

Things start off with middle-brother Marc (Nicolas Cazale), who’s a bit of a hard nut and on the edge of the drug dealing world. When a deal goes wrong, his life is suddenly in danger, which may have dangerous repercussions for both him and his dog. Older brother Christophe is fresh out of prison and trying to turn his life around, getting a job in a meat packing factory. Finally there’s Olivier, who’s carrying on a secret relationship with another young man, trying to find his way to happiness against the backdrop of his slightly wayward brothers and harsh father. [Read more…]

Nurse Jackie – Season 3 (DVD)

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It seems to be the current law of US cable TV shows, that the main character has to be empathetic  but a bit of a bastard. Whether it’s Dexter, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire or pretty much anything else HBO or Showtime is putting out, love ‘em hate ‘em protagonists are the order of the day. That’s certainly true of Nurse Jackie, who’s loved by her colleagues, is great for the patients, but is also busy popping pills left, right and centre and will do anything to keep getting her fix.

Season 3 sees pressure coming down on Jackie to quit, with rumours reaching HR that someone in the hospital ER is abusing drugs, as well as increasing tension between Jackie and her husband. He desperately wants to believe she’s kicking the pills, which leads to lies upon lies and the cracks growing ever larger. [Read more…]

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Blu-ray)

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It’s become almost de rigueur to slag off the Twilight movies, with the usual tack being to criticise the films for not fitting into the horror/action/thriller tropes that fanboys feel movies about vampires ought to fulfil. Behind that is a rather unpleasant sense that the anger at the franchise stems from fury that someone has dared make a fantasy movie that isn’t designed for the geeks who like to should loudly on the internet. Perhaps worst of all is that these angry young men don’t even seem to appreciate that 90% of the major movies are made for them, so the vitriol they pour at Twilight, simply because it’s popular but not for them, is actually quite ridiculous. [Read more…]