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

CSI: NY – Season 7 (DVD)

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You have to wonder whether Melina Kanakaredes pissed somebody off in CSI land. After six years playing the female lead character of Det. Stella Bonasera in CSI: New York, she decided to leave the show. However, the fact she’s no longer in the series at the beginning of Season 7 isn’t even mentioned. None of the characters finds it odd or even comments on it. In fact it’s like she was never there.

Presumably the idea is to treat things as business as usual, but it does feel like a bit of a snub after audiences have gotten to know her over the years. The show just powers through this departure, with Kanakarades’ replacement, Sela Ward’s ex-FBI agent Jo Danville, not in her job more than five minutes before she finds a dead body on the floor of the Crime Lab. [Read more…]

Summer Storm

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Summer Storm (or to give it its proper German title, Sommersturm) is a Teutonic addition to the ever-expanding gay movie subgenre of coming out flicks. It’s little surprise it’s such a popular subject, as coming out in one way or another is one of the few things nearly always gay people share and which becomes a pivotal moment in their lives.

Teenagers Tobi and Achim are best friends who are heading off for a summer camp with their rowing team, ahead of a big competition. The boys are extremely close, even going as far as to wank off together, and believe nothing could ever come between them. [Read more…]

Shock To The System

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The second of four Donald Strachey movies starring Chad Allen (following Third Man Out) sees the gay actor back as the gay detective, this time delving into the exceedingly dodgy world of ex-gay therapy. Strachey is hired by a young man, Paul Hale, who almost immediately afterwards turns up dead, after apparently killing himself. While Donald isn’t sure exactly why he was hired, he starts to investigate the death, which leads him to the door of the Phoenix Foundation and its director Dr. Trevor Cornell, who practices controversial techniques that attempt to turn gay people straight. [Read more…]

The Artist (Cinema)

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I don’t know why people are saying The Artist should win at the Oscars. It’s obvious director Michel Hazanavicius doesn’t know how to make a movie. For a start, he made the film in black and white. Doesn’t he know the world got coloured in during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s? Plus, he’s so incompetent he forgot to record the dialogue, so he just plays some music and occasionally has a caption card come up on screen, as if that’s a sensible way of telling a story.

He doesn’t even manage to make it in the right aspect ratio, as it’s the same width-to-length as old style-TVs. Hell, it’s not even in 3D! Hazanavicius needs to go back to square one, watch some Michael Bay movies and learn how to make real, proper films with explosions and stuff. This is the 21st Century! [Read more…]

Final Destination 5 (DVD)

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I’m slightly worried I’m about to die. Before I even put the Final Destination 5 DVD in the player, I had a premonition that it would be about someone foreseeing a terrible event that allows them and a bunch others to survive, followed by an hour of death trying to claim the lives of those who managed to escape its clutches. As I knew all that before the film started playing, going by the rules of the franchise it surely means I’m going to die in an overly elaborate fashion anytime now!

This time around the disaster is a spectacularly collapsing bridge, and it’s a guy called Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) who’s having the premonition, which allows him to lead a bunch of his friends and work colleagues off the bridge just before all hell breaks loose. [Read more…]

Meet Me In St. Louis (Cinema)

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When people complain that modern movies are lacking in plot, I suggest they go watch Meet Me In St. Louis, a film that makes many modern blockbusters look like they’ve got Russian novels full of storyline. However the 1944 musical, which is getting a welcome Christmassy cinema re-release courtesy of the BFI, is proof you don’t need acres of plot to make a movie.

Here’s the story: The Smith family lives in St. Louis and the four daughters are really looking forward to the 1904 World’s Fair, which is due to be held in the city. However their father gets a job in New York and so they might not be able to go to the fair. And, um, well that’s about it! [Read more…]

The Terence Davies Trilogy

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Terence Davies recently returned to the director’s chair after an 11 year gap with The Deep Blue Sea, but he started out behind the camera with this trilogy of short films made in the late 70s and early 80s. Together the three short films make an intriguing piece, with each film having its own style but following the same central character at different stages of his life, from childhood to death, with a heavy interest in the nature of memory.

The trilogy kicks off with ‘Children’, about a young adolescent boy called Robert Tucker. The film show us vignettes of his life as an outsider at his school, as well as his burgeoning sense that he may be gay. At home his father is presented as a strange and rather terrifying presence, with Robert having conflicting feelings about his death. ‘Madonna and Child’ sees Robert as a middle-aged man, still living his mother (who he’s devoted to) and working in a dead end job. [Read more…]

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows (Cinema)

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This sequel has a lot of expectations to live up to. The first Guy Ritchie directed Sherlock Holmes amassed over $524 million at the worldwide box office and remains in the Top 100 grossing films of all time.

As you’d hope, in Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows the original bromance is back with a vengeance! Guy Ritchie has delivered once again (after a few turkeys mind!), as the on-screen chemistry between Jude Law and Robert Downey Jnr. is superb – reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The supporting cast is also tremendous in their roles, although some of the parts are just too small. Eddie Marsan as Inspector Lestrade is most notably missing screen time – blink and you’ll miss him – as is the excellent Geraldine James as the long-suffering Mrs Hudson (though I can’t help but think of her as one of the prostitutes from Band Of Gold!). [Read more…]

Gay Sex In The 70s

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The documentary Gay Sex In the 70s both does what it says on the tin and completely fails to at the same. Joseph F. Lovett’s doc is a mixture of interviews, vintage photos and footage that look at the idea that the gay rights movement in the 1970s led to increased visibility and a more stridently upfront attitude, which resulted in an explosion of gay decadence and sex, with men screwing each other all over the shop. This was then brought to an abrupt end by the emergence of AIDS in the early 80s.

It’s a potentially interesting subject, and indeed this documentary isn’t the first to paint the 70s as some sort of halcyon age of gay free love that’s gone forever. Its problem though is that it never seems to get to the heart of anything, merely hinting at things that it doesn’t develop. [Read more…]

Puss In Boots (Cinema)

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Shrek spin-off Puss In Boots has already had quite a lot of good reviews in the US, but it’s just the latest attempt by the liberal left in Hollywood to indoctrinate kids. Everyone knows that the natural state of cats is not to be in boots, but Dreamworks Animation and its media colleagues keep presenting this perversion of nature to us as if it’s something we should treat as normal. Not content with using the Shrek movies to warp young minds into thinking that cats in footwear are the equal of regular unshod felines, now they’re giving Puss In Boots a whole movie to himself!

It’s just plain wrong. It’s bound to cause children to start asking awkward questions about why Puss is wearing boots. It should be a parent’s decision how and when to broach such thorny subjects, not forced upon them by the all-powerful pro-shoes-for-cats agenda. Indeed it’s gotten to the point where right thinking people are afraid to stand up for what’s right and openly say Puss shouldn’t wear boots! [Read more…]