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

Doogie Howser, M.D. – Season 1 (DVD)

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1989 was a more innocent time. It was a time when you could put a programme on TV about a 16-year-old doctor and rather than people going, ‘Hang on, this is a bit stupid’, it’d become a hit.

A very young Neil Patrick Harris plays the titular teen doctor, a genius who managed to get his doctorate at the age of 14 and now works as a 16-year-old surgeon in a hospital. Other than getting a few comments, nobody seems that bothered about being treated by somebody who should be at home popping pimples. [Read more…]

The Woman In The Fifth (Cinema)

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Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) isn’t having a good time. He arrives in Paris in the hope of reuniting with his daughter, but is soon thrown out of his ex-wife’s home amid accusations of prior violence and a restraining order. After falling asleep on a bus, he wakes up at the end of the line having been robbed of his suitcase and cash.

Still in hope of having some contact with his child, Tom manages to find a cheap room in a hovel and to supplement his income with a strange CCTV job that merely involves opening a door for people, without knowing what’s on the other side. He has hopes of finishing his second novel (even though he seems to remember little about the first), and putting his life back on track. [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…]

Cleopatra (Blu-ray)

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If you ask someone about Cleopatra, they’re more likely to talk about how it famously went over-budget and nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox than they are the movie itself. It’s known for its incredibly difficult production (you can read more about that fascinating story here), being a flop (which it wasn’t, incidentally) and for being the first movie where the main star pocketed $1 million upfront for a single movie.

Indeed Elizabeth Taylor ended up with a lot more than that. Her contract meant she got paid extra for every day production overran compared to initial projections,  so after an illness nearly killed her, production moved from England to Italy, the director and actors around her changed and other overruns added months to the production, it meant she got paid millions. Cleopatra is famous for perhaps being the most expensive movie ever made, if adjusted for inflation, and Elizabeth Taylor may well still be the best paid actress ever for a single movie, by the same measure. [Read more…]

Four Weddings And A Funeral (Blu-ray)

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“Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.”

It may be the most vomit-inducing line in modern cinema, to the point that it’s rather overshadowed people’s opinions of the movie. The fact is that beyond that moment, Four Weddings & A Funeral is a rather wry, witty, sweet and somewhat subversive romantic comedy. Indeed it’s the fact that it doesn’t take the usual route of generic rom-coms that turned it into a huge hit, which on its release became one of the biggest movies ever at the UK box office.

If you haven’t seen it, the title is very literal, as the film takes place over the course of four weddings and a funeral, as we chart the course of the relationship between Charles (Grant) and Carrie (MacDowell), who meet at the first wedding  and take a rather unusual romantic course through the other ceremonies. [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…]

Perfect Sense (DVD)

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Perfect Sense has a problem, which isn’t really anything to do with the movie. It’s to do with the fact that we like to pigeonhole film and so that when something comes along that doesn’t fit into any boxes, it tends to fall by the wayside. In the case of Perfect Sense the issue is that the plot synopsis makes it sound like a sci-fi flick, but it’s actually far from that. In reality it’s a rather touching, slightly arty romance, shot through with existentialist musings, but it’s a difficult sell, simply because it doesn’t sound like what it is.

Here’s the plot: Susan (Evan Green) is an epidemiologist, who’s asked to investigate a mysterious illness where people are losing their sense of taste. As this spreads around the globe, Susan meets chef Michael (Ewan McGregor), and the two begin an affair. However losing your sense of taste is only the beginning, and the strange illness continues to its course, slowly stripping people of their senses one by one. [Read more…]

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 3D (Cinema)

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I was seven-years-old when the original Star Wars movie came out, but for some reason after watching the first trilogy, I missed Phantom Menace on the big screen (I think I was off my tits at Mardi Gras in Sydney) and just never bothered to see the subsequent films. So I was really excited to be invited to the 3D theatrical re-release of the 1992 prequel, which is set 32 years BBY (before the battle of Yarvin)

Watching the current seven-year-olds having their picture taken with Storm Troopers in the foyer, a cute young bear asked if I’d take one for him and having obliged, he returned the favour saying that “we bearded geek types should stick together” –  I should have heard the alarm bells ringing and run to the barbers but thinking I’d pulled [Read more…]

Thelma & Louise (Blu-ray)

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21 years after the release of Thelma & Louise, it’s rather sad that women’s position in film, both in front of and behind the camera, hasn’t changed all that much. When it first appeared in cinemas, the film was treated like it was going to be a new dawn for women in the movies, but little has changed.

In fact, other than the great movie itself, Thelma & Louise’s most lasting legacy is Brad Pitt, who might never have hit the big time if he hadn’t gotten the chance to be unfeasibly hot and sexy in this (he very nearly didn’t, as William Baldwin initially landed the role, but dropped out after he was cast in Backdraft). Thank God he did get the role, as few people have ever been so breathtakingly sexy in what is actually a very small role. [Read more…]