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

Transformers: Age Of Extinction (Blu-ray Review)

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Reviewing Transformers: Age Of Extinction seems slightly pointless. It has an abysmal 18% rating on RottenTomatoes, with only 32 out of 178 that collated reviews saying it’s a decent movie. Despite that it’s currently the highest grossing movie of 2014 worldwide with over $1 billion in the bank (largely thanks to a gargantuan gross in China). So whether anyone says it’s good or bad seems a little irrelevant.

But just for the record, it’s not a good movie. [Read more…]

The Imitation Game (Cinema Review)

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Rule one of cinema? Show, don’t tell. This seems to have been totally ignored by Norwegian director Morten Tyldum, who chooses to take one of the most extraordinary British stories of the 20th century and make it in such a dull, flat way it stretches patience to snapping point.

The story itself has been the subject of a West End play in Breaking the Code, and a film already, Enigma, although the central character was fictionalized. Here we get the true story of Alan Turing, the mathematical and linguistic genius who cracks codes for fun. However during WWII the Nazis invent a machine so complex it codes vital messages with 19,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible answers. It’s impossible to crack, right? But with U-boats sinking ships in the Atlantic and the Luftwaffe creating havoc in the skies it’s vital that someone crack the code. [Read more…]

Portrait Of Jason (US DVD/Blu-ray Review)

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Much of queer history has been lost because by necessity it had to be hidden, but in more recent years there’s been a risk of many things disappearing simply because it’s marginalised and nobody’s been properly taking care of it. Portrait Of Jason was in danger of going that way, despite the fact it’s been acclaimed by many as one of the most important early gay-themed documentaries. Even the legendary Ingmar Bergman described it as “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.”

However, thanks to the likes of the Academy Film Archive, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, crowdfunding and the sterling work of Milestone Films, the movie has now been restored and given a proper release, allowing a new generation to take a look. [Read more…]

Open Up To Me (Fringe! Festival Review)

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You could be forgiven for thinking that the only type of film and TV that Scandinavian countries make are moody thrillers, but that’s solely because the more diverse cinema that comes from that area doesn’t get much of an international release. And on the evidence of Open Up To Me, that’s a shame.

Maarit (Leea Klemola) has transitioned from male to female and is now trying to find her new place in life, something not made easier by the fact that she’s now estranged from her former wife and daughter. She wants to help people and an unexpected opportunity arises when she almost accidentally poses as a therapist for teacher Sami (Peter Franzén), who’s in the midst of a marital crisis. [Read more…]

Dick: The Documentary (VoD Review)

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I think it’s fair to say that when director Brian Fender set off to make Dick: The Documentary he didn’t have a budget to rival Avatar or Man Of Steel. But then he didn’t need one, because what he did was take a very simple but surprisingly underexplored idea  – getting men to talk about their penises – and realised that doing something flashy would detract from looking directly at it (if you’ll pardon the expression).

The entire documentary is simply a selection of guys who strip naked, stand in front of a wall and discuss their dicks. We never see any of their faces, which is a smart move as while on the surface it makes the whole thing seem slightly voyeuristic, it ensures that the guys involved are less inhibited as they know that even though it’s being filmed they have anonymity. It also ensures the viewer sticks with the subject at hand and that the participants remain somewhere between individuals and archetypes. [Read more…]

Gerontophilia (DVD Review)

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Gerontophilia has been described by some as the most controversial film ever made by director Bruce La Bruce. That’s quite impressive for a filmmaker whose previous films have mixed Neo Nazis and gay porn, and zombies and gay porn. There’s not any gay porn at all in this one, so why has it courted controversy? Well it’s purely because it’s about one of the last taboos – relationships with a massive age difference.

Lake (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie) is a young man with a girlfriend who ends up getting a job in the old folk’s home his mother runs. He soon discovers he has a strange fascination with the home’s inhabitants, which he realises is a fetish about older men. He gets close to an 81-year-old called Mr. Peabody (Walter Borden), which soon goes far beyond the boundaries of Lake’s job description. As his relationship with Mr. Peabody grown deeper and more sexual, Lake decides he and his lover are going to get out of the home and head off across Canada, towards the Pacific Ocean. [Read more…]

Heterosexual Jill (VoD Review)

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Heterosexual Jill is the semi-sequel to Michelle Ehlen’s 2007 film Butch Jamie. That earlier film is a kind of reverse Tootsie, where actress Jamie tries to get work as a butch lesbian and ends up being cast in a male role. That leads to a liaison with Jill, who thinks Jamie is a man.

However you don’t need to have watched Butch Jamie to enjoy Heterosexual Jill. The film catches up with Jill five years on. She’s now decided that she wants to be straight and so has joined an ex-gay group in the hope of leaving thoughts of luscious ladies – and most particularly Jamie – behind. [Read more…]

The Gays (DVD/VoD Review)

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After watching The Gays I had visions of extreme right wing nutcases handing copies of the movie around and using it as evidence that everything they’ve always said about gays being deviant, sex obsessed, demon-possessed and keen to turn kids homo was all true. The film will certainly not win awards for political correctness, but it does have its moments.

The movie follows the Gay family – father Rob, transvestite mother Bob, and their sons (born through an anal pregnancy) Alex and Tommy.  As you might expect, they are the absolute extreme of homosexuality, with the parents teaching their kids how to seduce their teenage friends, giving them rim job GI Joes for Christmas and causing general same sex debauchery. [Read more…]

The Case Against 8 (DVD Review)

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For those of you who don’t keep up with the gay rights struggle in the US, in November 2008 a measure was put on the California ballot – Proposition 8 – that sought to add to the state’s constitution that marriage should be solely between one man and one woman. It was particularly contentious as for several months gay marriage had been legal in California, meaning that when the electorate voted for Prop 8, 1000s of same sex marriages were suddenly invalidated.

The Case Against 8 follows what happened after that, when it was decided that the best way forward to ensure marriage equality was legal in the most populous US State was to launch a court case that would seek to find Prop 8 as being against the overall US Constitution. [Read more…]

Family Guy – Season 14 (DVD Review)

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Having just ended on BBC3 in the UK, Family Guy – Season 14 arrives on DVD in the UK. It’s perhaps the most controversial season in the show’s history – which isn’t bad going for a series that’s previously had two episodes that were fully animated and then rejected by the Fox network due to worries about their content.

However the controversy this time wasn’t due to Family Guy taking on abortion or concern about jokes about Jews – it’s because they killed off one of the main characters. Yep, a few episodes in to Season 14 Brian the faux-intellectual dog bites the big one (or at least bites the tarmac, seeing as he gets run over). However it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock to discover that this might not be the last time we see him. [Read more…]