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

Judas Kiss (DVD)

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If you discovered that you’d somehow managed to have sex with yourself, you’d be pretty freaked out, wouldn’t you? I would, but Zachary in Judas Kiss seems amazingly unphased by this and the other temporal peculiarities he faces, other than making a couple of irate phone calls. It’s a bit of a necessary evil in the film, as while Judas Kiss constantly fails to think through the implications of what it’s doing, the movie would stop dead in its track if it did.

Charlie David plays Zachary, a man who after a decade trying to make it as a film director and only managing to get a reputation as the best partyer in town, is now aimless and rather bitter. He reluctantly agrees to fill in as a judge for a film competition at the university he dropped out of years before. His first night back at his alma mater, he meets and sleeps with a young man (Daniel Harmon), only to discover the next day that the kid is one of the competitors he’s meant to judge. [Read more…]

Shelter (Blu-ray)

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The second of TLA’s Blu-ray releases (the other being Latter Days), the 2007 romantic drama Shelter gets an HD upgrade. The film stars Trevor Wright as Zach, a young man finding his feet in life in a small Californian town. Despite a desire to go off to art college, he’s slightly trapped by his sister, who relies on him to help her look after her son and treats him as if he’s obliged to be a surrogate father to her kid and has no choice in the matter.

Things begin to change when Zach’s best friend’s brother, Shaun (Brad Rowe), returns to the town. What initially starts out as a friendship develops into something deeper, with Zach finally finding someone he can express himself with and who seems to believe in him and his dreams. [Read more…]

Gigola (DVD)

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Director Laure Charpentier adapts one of her own controversial books for the screen, with this tale of gangsters, prostitutes and Sapphic desire in 1960s Paris. After her lover commits suicide, Gigola butches up, starts being emotionally aloof and becomes part of an underworld of prostitutes, gangsters and pimps.

Gigola seems to have a power to draw people in, whether it’s a hooker (Marie Kremer) who becomes Gigola new project, an older woman (Marisa Paredes) who falls for her, or a gangster(Eduardo Noriega), who may be the only person who can break through her hard veneer. All this while dealing with her needy mother and opium fiend father, and trying to save her childhood home. [Read more…]

Latter Days (Blu-ray)

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Gay movies go HD, with TLA releasing its first UK Blu-ray (alongside Shelter). This 2003 movie has undoubtedly become a bit of a modern gay classic, largely because it’s one of the few queer cinema efforts that has the slickness of a lot of Hollywood movies, and so it’s easily accessible even to those who cringe at the thought of anything low budget or arty. Latter Days manages its slickness largely because while it was made for very little cash, a lot of the crew have worked extensively on mainstream films and TV, including writer/director C. Jay Cox, whose job immediately prior to Latter Days was writing the Reese Witherspoon rom-com Sweet Home Alabama. [Read more…]

The Rum Diary (Cinema)

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On paper, The Rum Diary sounds like a sure-fire winner, but in practice it’s slightly more problematic than that. The film sees Johnny Depp returning to the work of Hunter S. Thompson and again playing the kind of Thompson alter-ego that he did so well in Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. Depp has been intimately involved with the movie, to the point where he was the one who told Thompson to publish it, as the writer had stuffed it in a drawer since the early 60s and never let anyone see it. Depp and Thompson were casting around for something else they could film after Fear & Loathing, and came across The Rum Diary, which was duly published and is Hunter’s only proper novel. [Read more…]

Close To Leo (DVD)

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Now nearly 10 years old (it was initially made for French TV in 2002), Close To Leo makes a welcome return to DVD. It’s one of the best movies ever made about HIV/AIDS, largely because it treats it as just one aspect of the characters’ lives, and is actually more interested in the issues the disease raises as people attempt to carry after the diagnosis, rather than being overly angsty about the infection itself – although with enough angst that it doesn’t feel flippant.

Told through the eyes of Marcel, who’s on the cusp or puberty, the film follows a family in Brittany after they discover the eldest son, Leo, is HIV+. Marcel isn’t supposed to know this, but he picks up enough to realise what’s going on, even if he can’t accept that he’s being left out of important family development. While Marcel initially reacts by rebelling, he eventually goes off on a trip to Paris with Leo, where the two attempt to bond. [Read more…]

Kill Keith (Cinema)

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It’s difficult not to read a synopsis of Kill Keith and feel that the whole thing is a very bad idea – a cheesy joke that shouldn’t have been stretched into an entire movie. However this movie about a serial killer targeting British light entertainment veterans isn’t half as bad as you’d think it’d be. That’s not to say we’re going to see Keith Chegwin walking the red carpet at the Oscars next year (I really don’t know what America would make of him if he did), but Kill Keith managed to keep a smile on my face far more than I ever expected it to.

The movie follows Danny (Marc Pickering, who some may remember as R Wayne in Peter Kaye’s ‘Britain’s Got the Pop Factor’), who’s working as a runner on a popular breakfast TV show. The male host of the programme is about to leave, and in a basement somewhere, a serial killer is torturing a TV executive to find out the shortlist for his replacement. [Read more…]

Unhappy Birthday (DVD)

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I think it’s safe to say that writers/directors Mark Harriott and Mike Matthews must like The Wicker Man. Unhappy Birthday comes across as a bit of a homage to the 1973 Edward Woodward movie, except with a more modern take on sexuality.

Rick is taking his girlfriend Sadie for a birthday weekend away, with their friend Johnny coming along as well. What Rick hasn’t told Sadie is that on the windswept island they’re heading to is a women he believes to be her long-lost sister, and that he’s going to surprise her by bringing them together. However the trio have more issues than just family reunions to worry about, as Rick is partial to sleeping with Johnny when Sadie isn’t around, and she is up the duff, even though Rick might be infertile. [Read more…]

The Cost Of Love (DVD)

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Dale works as a male escort in Greenwich, London, specialising in fulfilling people’s sexual fantasies, whether it’s to have him role play as a schoolboy or to look after a client like they’re a baby. However, away from his work he’s starting to weigh up his life. He’s approaching 30 and while he enjoys the freedom his lack of commitments allow, his real desires begin to leak out when his straight best friend, Raj – who Dale has been in love with for years – announces he’s going to get married. In amongst all this is Dale’s friend Sean, a flamboyant drag artiste, while up on the local heath there’s been a string of brutal gay hate crimes. [Read more…]

Were The World Mine (DVD)

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Given how the musical is known for being popular with gay people, it’s surprising there aren’t more film musicals made with a gay bent. There have been a few, such as the superb Hedwig And The Angry Inch, but not as many as you might expect. Were The World Mine follows gay teenager Timothy, who’s routinely castigated for being a ‘fag’ by the rugby players at his school, even though he secretly lusts after one of them.

After being cast as Puck in the school’s musical production of ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’, Timothy discovers a way to make the plot of Shakespeare’s fantasy come true, spraying people from a flower so that they fall in love with the first person they see afterwards. Timothy soon manages to make his crush besotted with him, before spreading gayness around his small town  to give the small-minded townsfolk a taste of what it’s like to live in his shoes. [Read more…]