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

Shank (DVD)

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Most gay coming of age movies are rather predictable tales of teen angst. While they reflect a very real experience, they do have a tendency to feel very similar. Shank however manages to find a fresh urgency and danger in its tale of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality on the dangerous city streets. Filmed in and around Bristol, the movie follows Cal, who is part of a gang of vicious teen thugs. However when he’s away from his friends, he goes online to troll for men to have anonymous sex with, even if his partners are likely to be beaten up and robbed afterwards. [Read more…]

Pedro (DVD)

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Pedro is a movie with the best of intentions, but it rarely lives up to its potential. It tells the story of AIDS activist and The Real World: San Francisco contestant Pedro Zamora, who put a face on the disease for the American public in the early 90s and sadly died just after the MTV series aired. Zamora certainly had an effect, generating a public debate among people who’d never ‘known’ anyone who was HIV positive. It even went as far as the Oval Office, with Bill Clinton having been in contact with Pedro and now providing an introduction for the film on this DVD. [Read more…]

Out At The Wedding (DVD)

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Farce is a tough thing to pull off because it takes a lot of skill to build a situation that convincingly grows from a simple mix up to an impossibly complex, over-the-top situation, without seeming contrived or desperate. It’s a line that Out At The Wedding tries to walk with only middling success.

Alex has told her mixed-race fiancé that her family is dead, largely because she thinks her Southern patriarch father is racist. Obviously she hasn’t told her family that she has a non-white boyfriend, with the result that when she goes to her sister’s wedding, a mix-up ends up with everyone thinking she’s a lesbian. [Read more…]

Mulligans (DVD)

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If they handed out Oscars for ‘Most Hand-wringingly Melodramatic Movie’, I think Mulligans might win. Jock Tyler (James) invites his university friend Chase to stay with him and his family over the summer. However Chase has a secret he hasn’t told James – he’s gay – but that’s not the only surprise James has in store, as it turns out that even though his parents have been together for over 20 years, his dad also harbours secret desires for members of the same sex and ends up sleeping with Chase. [Read more…]

Make The Yuletide Gay (DVD)

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Olaf ‘Gunn’ Gunnunderson (Keith Jordan) is an out and proud student at university, but hasn’t told his parents he’s gay. Although he doesn’t have any plans to tell them when he goes back home for Christmas (just in case they react badly), his situation gets more complicated when his boyfriend, Nathan (Adamo Ruggiero), turns up. Nathan doesn’t know Gunn isn’t out at home, and so has to pose as his boyfriend’s roommate, while Gunn’s parents encourage their son to get together with his old school friend, Abby. Nathan gets rather annoyed with this, especially as he can’t see Gunn’s problem with telling his parents the truth, which puts pressure on him to come out. [Read more…]

Little Ashes (DVD)

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I have a new theory. If you want to become really famous, you need to make a period movie where you’re a bit gay for a while but then decide that you’re actually straight, and if you’re playing some kind of artist, all the better. It’s worked for Hugh Grant with Maurice, Leonardo DiCaprio with Total Eclipse and now Robert Pattinson with Little Ashes. I’m not quite sure how the mechanism works exactly, especially as both Little Ashes and Total Eclipse were made before but released after the star’s breakout hit, but there definitely seems to be something going on. [Read more…]

I Dreamt Under The Water (DVD)

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I know the world can be a dark place, but some filmmakers and artists seem to believe that just because a story is unrelentingly bleak, it’s good or realistic. I Dreamt Under The Water suffers terribly from this. Angel’s lover dies in his arms from a drug overdose, and after that he descends into a hell of intoxication, public gay sex and life as a rent boy.

I’m sure if your lover died it’d be terrible, but here it just becomes tedious, mainly because the film is more interested in making you think the world is a terrible place than telling a story with momentum that actually seems rooted in the real world. Unfortunately, it’s difficult not to wonder whether the film got a release more because it includes brief hardcore gay sex shots, rather than the merits of the film itself.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Third Man Out (DVD)

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Private eye Donald Strachey is asked to look into an attack on a man called John Rutka, who’s famed for outing powerful people as gay. While Strachey and Rutka’s ideas on gay politics differ dramatically, the PI gets pulled into the case after his boyfriend is attacked and Rutka is killed. [Read more…]

Touch Of Pink (DVD)

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Gay, Canadian, Muslim Alim is living in London with his boyfriend, happy to be far away from the expectations of his Islami mother and family. When mum Nuru comes to visit, Alim tries to hide his relationship, but that proves tougher than he thought.

Gay movies are a strange breed, largely because they often try so hard to be resolutely ‘GAY’, that the end result is that nobody, gay or straight, can identify with what they’re seeing (it’s also true that a lot are made by people who shouldn’t have progressed beyond shooting holiday videos). [Read more…]

Saved! (DVD)

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Mary is a religiously devoted student at American Eagle High School, who decides that the only way to save her gay boyfriend from the fires of hell is to sleep with him (she reckons Jesus won’t mind if she does it to save his soul). However this leaves her pregnant and questioning whether the religious strictures that she believes can really be true. [Read more…]

Cruising (DVD)

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A serial killer is on the loose, murdering people involved in New York’s gay S&M scene. Det. Steve Burns is sent undercover into the world of leather bars and bondage to try and find the killer, but discovers that immersing himself in the gay subculture effects him more than he expected. [Read more…]