Pornography: A Review Sunday, Sep 12 2010 

movies and queer culture thisgaudygildedstage 11:34 am

Last night PJ and I watched David Kittredge‘s Pornography, a 2009 thriller in the vein of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Here’s the trailer:

Pornography revolves around a 1990s gay porn star, Mark Anton, played by Jared Grey, who mysteriously disappeared a few years after his big debut. Since his disappearance, rumors have circulated that his disappearance was due to his death in a snuff film.

The movie is in three acts. Act one depicts Anton’s disappearance in 1995. Act two jumps fourteen years to follow a journalist, Michael Castigan, played by Matthew Montgomery, who is writing a history of pornography. Castigan becomes obsessed with Anton’s story and begins to investigate what happened. The third act also takes place in 2009 and focuses on another porn star, Matt Stevens, played by Pete Scherer, who dreams the details of Anton’s story and decides to make it the plot of his directorial debut. Acts two and three become increasingly suspenseful as Castigan and Stevens become increasingly unnerved by bizarre coincidences and visions that threaten their holds on reality.

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The Kids Are All Right: A Review Monday, Aug 30 2010 

movies and queer culture thisgaudygildedstage 2:26 pm

Over the weekend, PJ and I watched Lisa Cholodenko‘s The Kids Are All Right. We were particularly excited to see this movie, since it’s getting a lot of Oscar buzz, but also because it’s been rather controversial. I read one review, for example, in which the reviewer walked out halfway through the movie because she was so angered by its depiction of lesbian sexuality.

Here’s the trailer:

The movie stars Annette Bening as Nic and Julianne Moore as Jules, two lesbians who have raised two children together. Nic is a doctor and is somewhat stressed out and consumed by her job. Trained as an architect, Jules seems to float from one thing to the next professionally. At the start of the film she’s decided to begin a landscaping business.

More stress is added to their relationship when their oldest kid, Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska, decides to contact her sperm donor shortly after her eighteenth birthday. She doesn’t really care to meet him, but her younger brother, Laser, played by Josh Hutcherson, pushes her into it.

Mark Ruffalo plays Paul, the sperm donor. He’s thrilled to receive word that Joni wants to meet him. He’s a restaurateur, owns an organic local farm patch, and has a lot in common with Jules, as he’s also a bit feckless.

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Sex and the City 2: A Review Saturday, May 29 2010 

movies and queer culture thisgaudygildedstage 7:18 pm

Yesterday, PJ and I saw Sex and the City 2. We both loved the series and the first movie, so we were looking forward to the new one. Each of our heroines is facing a problem: Carrie is worried that she and Big have lost their sparkle; Miranda is being silenced by her boss; Samantha is going through menopause and is worried about what it’s doing to her libido; and Charlotte is scared that her husband will have an affair with their bra-less bosomy nanny. Along the way, Anthony and Stanford get married, and the “girls” get an all-expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi.

Here’s the trailer:

I enjoyed the movie, but everything we’ve heard about it has been negative. Reviewers have routinely been calling it one of the worst movies of the year. In writing about it, I recognize that I want to say two somewhat contradictory things about it.

First, Sex and the City 2 is not exactly the caricature that reviews are making it out to be. Lisa Swarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, for example, complains that, with the exception of Miranda, “not one of the fashion friends lifts her head out of her luggage to get a clue” (June 4/11, 2010, p. 95). Accordingly, Swarzbaum presents a satirically simplistic summary of each woman’s storyline. As she writes, “Charlotte is upset that motherhood is hard; Miranda is upset that she is unappreciated at work; Samantha is upset that she can’t outrun menopause.” But her darts are really aimed at Carrie, who’s problems she sarcastically reduces to being “upset that she’s got everything.”

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It’s Complicated: A Review Saturday, May 29 2010 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 6:24 pm

Last night, PJ and I finally watched It’s Complicated from Netflix. We both love Meryl Streep, so we should have been anxious to see it, but we’d heard so many mixed to bad reviews of the movie that we weren’t sure we’d enjoy it. Streep plays a Martha Stewart-type named Jane who becomes involved in an affair with her ex-husband, Jake, played by Alec Baldwin, who married “the other, much younger woman” after his divorce Jane 10 years ago. Comic mayhem ensues.

Here’s the trailer:

Contrary to some of the advance buzz, PJ and I both really enjoyed this movie. One of the criticisms we heard (from a friend) was that Jane’s life is too perfect. In particular, she lives in the perfect house and has the perfect job as a chief who owns her own bakery. While it’s true that Jane lives a life a luxury, I don’t see why this would be a problem. After all, movies are often an escapist art. And some people do actually live the life that Jane has.

Second, we heard that Jane laughs too much, which is also rather silly. She does laugh a lot, but in scenes in which it totally makes sense. As the trailer suggests, she laughs while she drinking with her girlfriends and she laughs while high with her architect/boyfriend. So, under the influence of alcohol and/or pot, she laughs a lot. Seems rather easy to believe to me.

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Be Mine: A Review Saturday, May 22 2010 

movies and queer culture thisgaudygildedstage 7:29 pm

Last night, PJ and I watched the 2009 movie  Be Mine on DVD. (In fact, I think it was a straight-to-video movie — is that what the “V” means on http://www.imdb.com?) It stars Dan Selon as Mason, a college senior who has never kissed a boy. The movie is told in flashbacks: we see how he met the guy he’s just married and how he went from never-been-kissed to totally in love. Here’s the trailer:

We tried to watch this movie once before, but the DVD was defective. The few minutes we saw the first time made us wonder if it was worth trying again. Overall, I’d say that Be Mine is a likable romantic comedy, but it feels more like the pilot for a sitcom than a movie — it’s all set up with very little dramatic/comedic action.

Basically, Be Mine follows Mason as he sees a guy he thinks is cute, admits that he’s never been kissed (much less had sex), and meets up with the guy again at a party that night. All of this is told in flashbacks; we learn right off the bat that Mason has married this guy, Reiley, played by Jared Welch.

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Eyes Wide Open: A Review Monday, Apr 26 2010 

movies and queer culture and religion thisgaudygildedstage 12:46 pm

Yesterday PJ and I saw Eyes Wide Open (Einaym Pkuhot), an Israeli film by director Haim Tabakman. It stars Zohar Shtrauss as an Orthodox butcher with a wife and kids who suddenly finds himself attracted to his apprentice, Ezri, played by Ran Danker. The movie explores what this means for Aaron, his community, and his family (in roughly that order). Here’s the trailer:

Shtrauss is great as Aaron, a man obviously torn between everything he’s ever known and lived and his desire for Ezri. He plays Aaron as a very quiet, insular man who suddenly blossoms when he meets Ezri. At first his responses to the younger man are tentative and shy, and Shtrauss is excellent in this segment of the film.

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The Art of Being Straight: A Review Sunday, Apr 25 2010 

movies and queer culture thisgaudygildedstage 11:52 am

Last night PJ and I watched The Art of Being Straight a 2008 comedy/drama about a young twenty-something who moves to Los Angeles after breaking up with his girlfriend. He takes an entry-level job at an advertising agency, where he starts getting hit on by one of his bosses, a guy named Paul. His response to these come-ons opens up the possibility that he might not be as straight as he and his friends had always thought. I really liked this complex look at sexuality.

Here’s the trailer:

The Art of Being Straight was written and directed by Jesse Rosen, who also stars as the lead character, Jon. Jon has a reputation among his friends for being a ladies man, the kind of guy who, somewhat inexplicably, is able to hook up with any girl he wants. When Paul, played by Johnny Ray, starts hitting on him, Jon’s surprised to find himself attracted to this older man. Although he admits to Paul that he experimented with a friend in high school, he had never gone all the way with a guy before. Equally surprising is that, while he’s not ready to date a guy, he is interested in hooking up more than once.

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Favorite Movies of 2009 Monday, Mar 22 2010 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 12:29 pm

I was in Germany during the Oscars telecast and didn’t get to see the show. Not that it mattered much, since everyone pretty much knew who was going to win beforehand. I really hope Meryl Streep wins another Best Actress Oscar soon — she’s deserved it now a couple of times in a row.

I always try to get my list of favorite pictures out before the Oscars, but this year I’ve been so busy with work and traveling that I haven’t had time to get it all together. So, I’m finally listing my top ten movies of the past year.

Number 1: The Hurt Locker

I reviewed The Hurt Locker here, so won’t rehash that here. But I will reiterate how impressed I was with this film. It took a subject I didn’t particularly want to see a film about and totally engrossed me in it. Furthermore, the final two scenes of the movie really threw me for a loop but totally recasting everything that we had seen before. It offers an interesting take on war and the obsession with it. It’s also an interesting exploration of modern masculinity. The entire cast is excellent, and I’m glad that Katherine Bigelow won the Oscar for Best Director. She deserved it.

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Young Victoria: A Review Tuesday, Mar 2 2010 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 3:15 pm

PJ and I recently saw Young Victoria starring Emily Blunt as Victoria. The movie depicts her life just before ascending to the throne and explores her complicated relationships with the people who are all fighting to control her as she prepares to assume her duties as queen. Here’s the trailer:

PJ and I were both a little surprised by the fact that we each liked this film more than we thought we would. What little I had heard about the film made it sound like people were rather underwhelmed by it. But I saw it as a more than capable biography of this woman’s rise to power, one that interestingly explored the difficulties of becoming queen at such a young age.

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Hunger (2008): A Review Saturday, Feb 27 2010 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 3:10 pm

Last night, PJ and I watched Hunger, a 2008 movie starring Michael Fassbinder as Irish republican Bobby Sands who died in a British prison after a 66-day hunger strike in 1981. Here’s the trailer:

If I remember correctly, we put this movie on our netflix queue after seeing Fassbinder in Inglourious Basterds. PJ read about this movie and put it on our queue. Neither of us knew much about “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland or about this specific story, the revolutionaries’ hunger strike as an attempt to force Margaret Thatcher’s government to treat them as political prisoners rather than common criminals.

So, we went into this film with very little knowledge about what it is about. I think that ignorance made the film even richer for us. It allowed us to just go along with the ride, so to speak. Apparently, Steve McQueen, the director, is known for his experimental/lyrical style of storytelling. For instance, although the film is ultimately about Bobby Sands’ hunger strike, that’s not where the film starts.

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