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

The Three Musketeers (3D Blu-ray)

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I’ve said before that I think Paul W.S. Anderson is the best bad director there is, and he proves that again here, delivering a load of very good action set-pieces and individual scenes, but overall creating a movie that verges on the incoherent.

Logan Lerman plays D’Artagnan, a country boy who heads for Paris with the hope of being a musketeer like his father before him. However he’s arrived too late, as the legendary Porthos (Ray Stevenson), Athos (Matthew MacFadyen) and Aramis (Luke Evans) are out of favour and the musketeers are no more. [Read more…]

Jack Goes Boating (DVD)

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Philip Seymour Hoffman makes his directorial debut with a movie version of Robert Glaudini’s play, which he originally helped develop and starred in with his New York theatre company. As well as directing he plays Jack, a rather awkward middle-aged man who gets set up by his friend Clyde (John Ortiz) with his wife’s work colleague, Connie (Amy Ryan).

Connie is a rather neurotic woman, but there seems to be something between her and Jack. Very slowly the two socially maladroit people start to get closer to one another, while the problems between Clyde and his wife Lucy grow. [Read more…]

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Blu-ray)

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Lynne Ramsay became a true darling of the British indie film scene with Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. While I found things to admire in both those movies, I remained undecided about Ramsay as a filmmaker, as I personally found that overall both movie felt lacking. However, I do think her third film, We Need To Talk About Kevin, based on the bestselling book by Lionel Shriver, is very good, although perhaps not for exactly the same reasons Ramsay and the actors do.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is a movie that’s possible to take two completely different ways. It could be a mother trying to deal with a son who was simply born evil, or alternately it could be about a son who ends up bad because his mother never felt the bond parents are supposed to, or perhaps somewhere in between. In the cast and crew interviews that make up the special features, the actors suggest they believe it’s more about the mother not feeling the expected bond with her son and the incredibly smart Kevin reacting to it, but when I watched it, I saw the exact opposite. [Read more…]

Sleeping Beauty (DVD)

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Sleeping Beauty is not an easy film, I’m not even sure it’s a good one, but it does suggest Julia Leigh is a filmmaker to look out for in the future, even if her debut effort is more a series of effective moments than a truly successful complete film.

Emily Browning stars as Lucy, a rather disconnected young woman doing everything she can to make ends meet while also trying to study. However she doesn’t seem that interested in her life or those around her. She answers an advert for a very well paid job, starting off as a sexy silver service waitress at events for old horny men. However the job turns into something else, with Lucy agreeing to be a Sleeping Beauty, where she is drugged, falls asleep and is then visited by men. When she wakes up, she can’t remember what has happened, although the woman who arranges it all promises her ‘vagina is sacred’ and will not be penetrated. [Read more…]

Real Steel (Blu-ray)

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I’m not a big fan of the people who like to say everything about modern Hollywood is rubbish and films were better in the past (largely because if you look at it objectively, it’s nonsense), but one thing a lot of big Hollywood flicks do seem to have lost in the last few years is real heart. It’s as if a fear of being labelled sentimental or phoney has ended up with films that don’t even try to tug on your heartstrings or really engage you emotionally. It’s nice then when a film comes along that wears its heart of its sleeve and isn’t afraid to be a full-on, feel-good, heartwarmer. [Read more…]

Repo Man (Blu-ray)

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Repo Man is one of the cultiest of cult movies and has been ever since the day it was made. As director Alex Cox explains in the newly filmed introduction, Universal was initially intent on burying the movie (partially because some seemed to think the film was pro-Communist), but after the soundtrack started selling well, it got a wider release, found its audience and gained enough fans to keep it alive nearly 30 years on.

The film tells the story of Otto (Emilio Estevez), who quits/gets fired from his supermarket job and almost inadvertently ends up working as a repo man after a run in with an experienced repossessor called Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). That leads him into an increasingly bizarre world involving a car that disintegrates anyone who looks into the trunk, people looking for the body of a dead alien, blond-haired men in black and Otto’s punk friends/thieves. [Read more…]

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (DVD)

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Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark is a bit of a passion project for producer Guillermo Del Toro. The 1973 TV movie it’s based on made a huge impression on the Pan’s Labyrinth filmmaker as a child and he remembers it as one of the scariest things of his childhood. However what fuels childhood nightmares doesn’t necessarily translate to a remake for an adult audience, especially when you add in fairy tale lore that makes things seem sillier than they need to be.

While in the original it’s a grown women who has problems when she moves into a new house, in the new version it’s a little girl called Sally (Bailee Madison), who comes to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend (Katie Holmes) in a massive old house they’re renovating. Sally feels rather unwanted and initially takes a disliking to her dad’s girlfriend, Kim, however that takes a backseat when she starts to hear whispering coming through the heating ducts and then strange little creatures escape from a boarded up basement. [Read more…]

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Cinema)

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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel doesn’t have the catchiest title I have ever heard. However, based on the novel by Deborah Moggach, the film stars the ‘crème de la crème’ of our favourite geriatric British film and TV actors, and is directed by John Madden (Shakespeare In love, Mrs Brown and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin).

After the phenomenal success of Slumdog Millionaire, it was inevitable that at some point mainstream British cinema would be return to India. The premise of the film is that seven elderly people decide to up-sticks from the UK and go to India, moving into a hotel for the ‘elderly and beautiful’. However it doesn’t quite live up to the image of the photoshopped promos! [Read more…]

The Well Digger’s Daughter (DVD)

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Daniel Auteil has been one of France’s top stars for decades, and perhaps got his biggest international exposure playing Ugolin in Jean De Florette and Manon Des Sources in the mis-80s. Those films were both adapted from novels by Marcel Pagnol, and Auteil has chosen a 1940 film by the same man to remake as his feature-film directorial debut. Indeed Auteil must feel a true affinity with Pagnol, as he’s currently writing, directing and starring in three films under the title La Trilogie Marseillaise, based on stories by the author.

The Well Digger’s Daughter in set in France just before the First World War and follows Patricia (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), who is the titular offspring of a well digger, whose father places her on a pedestal. [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…]