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

The Lone Ranger Trailer & Poster

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The first trailer for The Lone Ranger has shown up online, but unfortunately at the moment the embed we have of it isn’t that great (we’ll hopefully be able to remedy that soon). The trailer premiered on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, although the embed comes from CBM. It’s interesting that the trailer plays up the action and intrigue, rather than the humour and wild west setting. Expect to see a lot more in the run up to the July 2013 release of the movie.

Here’s the synopsis: ‘From producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski, the filmmaking team behind the blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, comes Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer Films’ “The Lone Ranger,” a thrilling adventure infused with action and humor, in which the famed masked hero is brought to life through new eyes.Native American spirit warrior Tonto (Johnny Depp) recounts the untold tales that transformed John Reid (Armie Hammer), a man of the law, into a legend of justice—taking the audience on a runaway train of epic surprises and humorous friction as the two unlikely heroes must learn to work together and fight against greed and corruption.’

Take a look at the new poster below.

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Win A Signed Sinister Quad Poster!

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The producer of “Insidious” and “Paranormal Activity” delivers a chilling horror like no other with a movie that is being hotly tipped as the most effective edge-of-your-seat cinematic experience of the year.

Sinister (Momentum Pictures) is out at UK cinemas on Friday 5th October. And we’ve got a quad poster for the film, signed by the movie’s co-writer C. Robert Cargill to give away!

Desperately in need of a best seller to revive his struggling career, true crime writer Ellison (Ethan Hawke), moves his family to the scene of his most recent story; the unsolved, gruesome murder of a loving, happy suburban family.

Shunned by the local community and strained by his obligations to his family, the discovery of a batch of home movies in the attic offers Ellison shocking proof to the crime he is investigating. Ellison notices the same unidentified figure appearing in each of the 8mm films, leaving him convinced that all the incidents are linked by a truly bizarre connection. As his investigations uncover the terrifying truth he starts to lose his grip on reality and it soon becomes clear that he is placing his own family in harm’s way. [Read more…]

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Did George Lazenby Have To Prove He Wasn’t Gay To Get Bond Role?

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While in the old days of Hollywood, the tendency was towards aggressive publicity to hide a gay actor’s sexuality from the audience, George Lazenby has claimed that in the case of James Bond, producers were keen to ensure they didn’t let a gay 007 onto the big screen at all.

The Express reports that in the new documentary Everything Or ­Nothing, which is about the making of the Bond films, Lazenby says that during the audition process, producers devised a practical test to find out his sexuality. “They sent a girl up to my apartment to make sure I wasn’t gay,” he says. “A little while later they had their answer. I sure as hell wasn’t.”

Indeed playing the spy proved a good way for George to be as heterosexual as possible. “Suddenly I was James Bond and you can imagine what that did to me,” says Lazenby. “I don’t want to brag but I had at least one girl a day… There was a tent on set where the stuntmen used to keep the mattresses they fell on in fight scenes. It was a good place to take a chick if you were in a hurry.”

It seems slightly odd to send a random woman to someone in the hope that they’re so heterosexual they simply can’t help themselves but sleep with them, as it would appear Lazenby would not only have lost out on the role not because he was gay, but also if he didn’t like one night stands. At least it worked for him though.

Well, it worked briefly, as Lazenby only got to make one Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with most believing the former model to have been a bit of a failure in the role, with Sean Connery being lured back after George’s effort.

The documentary’s director, Stevan Riley, comments on Lazenby’s claim,  “I had no way of confirming if the story was true, I just left it in the edit and waited to see if Eon approved it.” Obviously they let it stand, so perhaps there is some truth in it.

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Why Are There So Few Documentaries About The AIDS Crisis In Britain?

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The HIV/AIDS crisis is something that everyone from all different walks of life has heard of. From television, book and films to magazine articles, everyone has a pretty good understanding of what happened during the 1980s.

For gay people especially, the crisis itself is now deeply rooted into our consciousness, whether we were there during the 80s or not. We’ve heard about the people who died, those who fought for funding to try and find a cure and/or proper treatment, and everyone else in between who struggled long and hard to help people who have been diagnosed with the virus, as well as the families of the people who lost their lives due to it.

It’s even deeply rooted into our minds when it comes to sex, as we all now know the importance of safe sex and what it could mean if that one time we weren’t safe, we became unlucky.

But for us Brits a lot of the information we get is from our American counterparts and about what happened over there during the 1980s. For example, in 2011 the documentary We Were Here looked at the AIDS crisis in San Francisco and interviewed a number of people who were there and experienced what happened.

By doing so it became the first documentary to take a deep look at what happened and the impact it had on the people living in San Francisco and how they responded to it. Today How To Survive A Plague opens in select US theatres, which looks at the crisis and the early days of the activist groups ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and TAG (Treatment Action Group). Those two looks at AIDS in America join the likes of the Oscar winning Common Threads: Stories From The Quilt.

However there has never been a decent-scale, feature documentary (that I know of, at least) that has taken a deep look at the crisis when it hit the UK. After all, HIV/AIDS has significantly impacted on a number of people over here and it has continued to do so since the 1980s.

We’ve all seen and heard about the safe sex advertising campaigns complete with icebergs, headstones and a deeply eerie narration from John Hurt, so we know it was just as bad over here. But do we know anything further than this campaign?

AIDS is still a problem now, with HIV infection rates remaining quite high and rising over recent years. It is definitely still an issue and we need to see and hear more about what actually happened to people living in the UK who were affected by HIV/AIDS during the early days of the disease, whether it was their friends, family or themselves that were affected by it, and whether it was slightly different or worse here than what people felt in other areas of the world. It is slightly ridiculous that for many British people, their knowledge of the AIDS crisis in the US is far greater than on what happened in the UK. Documentaries like these aren’t just about remembering our history, but also potent reminders of a disease that may not be the absolute killer it once was, but which we still need to be vigilant about.

Considering the success of the film We Were Here and the positive reaction it received, it would be interesting and helpful to see the effect a UK version had, told from a viewpoint that’s different from what we’ve already heard from over the pond.

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New The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Trailer!

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As we were all promised, today has seen the release of a brand new trailer for The Hobbit, giving us our best look yet at the movie, and suggests the film will have more humour and perhaps a lighter tone than the Lord Of The Rings (which mirrors the difference in feel between the books). It’s certainly familiar and yet still feels new. The movie, which is the first of three Hobbit movies hits UK cinemas on December 14th.

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Keep The Lights On UK Trailer – Take a fresh look at the much admired gay drama

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Keep The Lights On is undoubtedly the most buzzed about LGBT-interest title of the year (we’ve seen it and will be letting you know what we think soon), and will begins its UK roll-out soon with screenings at the London Film Festival, ahead of release on November 2nd. Now the film’s distributors, Peccadillo Pictures, have released a brand new UK trailer for the movie, so you can get a feel for the film.

Here’s the synopsis: ‘It’s 1997 and New York City is in a state of intense flux when documentary filmmaker Erik Rothman (Thure Lindhardt) first meets Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth), a handsome but closeted lawyer in the publishing field. What begins as a highly charged first encounter soon becomes something much more, and a relationship quickly develops. As the two men start building a home and life together, each continues to privately battle their own compulsions and addictions. A film about sex, friendship, intimacy and most of all, love, Keep the Lights On takes an honest look at the nature of relationships in our times.’

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See Daniel Radcliffe Talk About Teen Suicide For The Trevor Project

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On Friday we reported that Daniel Radcliffe was going to help host an online talk on behalf of The Trevor Project’s Talk To Me campaign. Now that chat has happened and it’s online, so we can see what Radcliffe and others have to say about the subject and the charity that Dan has been involved with for several years.

The Trevor Project is the leading US organisation providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth. The chat was timed to coincide with National Suicide Prevention Month, with Radcliffe using the chat to help look at ways of trying to prevent suicide and make life better for LGBT people, particularly young people in crisis. The Talk To Me campaign according to its website, ‘is The Trevor Project’s campaign for conversation. With 3 simple words – talk to me – you let a friend know that you CARE about them and are willing to listen without judgment. During National Suicide Prevention Month in September we encourage you to take the Talk to Me pledge and let the ones you love know you’re always available to talk.’

You can watch the chat above.

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Avengers Assemble (Blu-ray)

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We all remember the Battle Of New York, when Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow got together to fight off extra-terrestrial terrors coming through a wormhole, due to a plot by Loki. This documentary looks at what led up to that battle.

Well, okay, I’m sure you’re aware this isn’t a documentary, as we’re in a world sadly lacking in superpowered heroes (although the lack of alien terror-mongers is a bit of a plus), but as audiences proved earlier this summer, we do love to escape to a comic book world. Avengers Assemble is only the third film ever to gross more than $1.5 billion (and the first not directed by James Cameron). It’s an astonishing success, particularly as the movie made more than twice as much as any of the movies that led up to it (Iron Man 2 was the biggest previous Marvel produced movie, taking $623 million). [Read more…]

Lincoln Trailer – Daniel Day Lewis gets Presidential in Spielberg’s film

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It’s taken a long time to get a trailer for Spielberg’s Lincoln, but now it’s here, showing the director in full on soft-tint epic historical mode. It all looks very worthy and Oscar-bait, but we’ll have to wait and see if Spielberg can get over his tendency to get slightly boring when he goes back beyond the Second World War. The movie concentrates on the last years of Lincoln’s life, when with the Civil War raging, many believed the only way to end conflict and save the union was to rescind the Emancipation Proclamation (which freed slaves and was relatively flimsy legally, as it was a Presidential order that had never been backed by the Congress, Senate or courts). However Abraham pressed forward trying to find support for a Constitutional Amendment, which would ensure black people could not be enslaved in the US ever again.

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The Production Code May Have Come Down But We Still Aren’t Mainstream

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After the production code was brought in during the 1930s in Hollywood it became much harder to show several different things on the Hollywood Screen.

There were restrictions on the length of time a couple could be seen kissing, whether you could show a couple in bed together, even a scene from Disney’s Snow White had to be cut because she was shown in bed with the seven dwarfs, and then there was a complete restriction on showing homosexuals on screen due to what was known as ‘sex perversion’.

However after existing in Hollywood for over thirty years the final part of the code, which just happened to be the section concentrating on sex perversion, came down in 1968, finally allowing homosexual characters to be shown in Hollywood films.

There had been gay characters shown in films prior to 1968, but these films were from countries such as Italy and Great Britain (notably Dirk Bogarde in 1961’s Victim, the first English-language movie to use the word homosexual), but with the dominance of the Hollywood film they hadn’t made enough of a global impact.

After the production code had fully come down, gay people were finally being shown in some films, but we had a very odd portrayal as throughout the 1970s and 80s we were mainly shown in a negative light, usually as villains or victims.

As the 1990s came around gay people finally began to get a slightly better portrayal. We weren’t necessarily tragic or villains, as we were now cast in the role of the ‘gay best friend’ in several Hollywood rom-coms, where we minced about helping our girl friends shop for the perfect shoes. Hello stereotype. But we were far from leading characters.

Over this period of time we were getting more of a leading role in some independent films, such as My Own Private Idaho by Gus Van Sant, but these were seen by limited audiences and we were once again just missing out on the mainstream, and we weren’t leads in big blockbuster films.

It wasn’t until the 2000s with the release of Brokeback Mountain that we finally saw a mainstream Hollywood Blockbuster depict two gay men as the lead characters. Alas they were very tragic figures but it was a true portrayal of the time it was set in. But since this we have still not seen many big Hollywood films featuring unambiguously gay characters as leads.

Yes there was Milk and The Kids Are All Right, which both garnered success, but this is only two where there could have been many more.

Maybe its Hollywood’s fear of not appealing to a big enough audience or maybe it is the fear of actors not wanting to be seen as gay and alienate a large section of their audiences – we will probably never know.

But what we can see is that whilst these fears hover around behind the doors of Hollywood, it looks as though while we’ve made progress we really haven’t come tremendously far in the last 40 years. Maybe we will just have to wait another 40 until there’s real parity with straight characters, and live with the fact that we do have exposure in many indie films these days. Every little counts after all.

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