GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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Gay
Life
 
In Memory Of 
Mike
Maffei |
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2009's Undertow (Contracorriente), the debut film from writer/director Javier Fuentes-Leon, may be the finest - and most unique - new queer film this reviewer has seen in some time. Undertow won the Audience Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and it is also Peru's entry for this year's best foreign film Oscar. The setting is a small fishing village on the coast of Peru. Miguel is a young fisherman with an adoring wife and a gay lover on the side. This could have been just another tragic tale of forbidden love in a town without pity but this is also a ghost story and the supernatural element takes us into another realm entirely. |
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| Howl is one of the most celebrated (some might say notorious) poems of the 20th Century. Setting the stage for the Beat Generation writers, Howl was their first major published work, pre-dating even Jack Kerouac's seminal On The Road. Written in 1955 by Allen Ginsberg, Howl pushed a lot of envelopes and a lot of buttons. Ginsberg was one third of the trinity of authors always associated with the Beats, the other two being Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg was openly gay and so were many passages in Howl. This offended more than a few delicate sensibilities and the poem was declared obscene. Many works of art went on trial during the last century and Howl's victory in court opened doors of free speech that reverberate to this day. Howl, the 2010 film co-written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and starring James Franco as Ginsberg, is a small masterpiece. | |||
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| Rob Williams is one of the most prolific gay filmmakers working today and his films get better with each successive title. His latest, 2010's Role/Play, is a love story between two gay men on opposite sides of the ideological fence. Steve Callahan stars as Graham Windsor, a closeted soap opera star who has just been outed in the worst possible way - a leaked sex tape, Queer indie favorite Matthew Montgomery co-stars as Trey Reed, a gay marriage activist. He is also weathering his own scandal. Trey is the poster child for gay marriage and he is in the middle of an ugly divorce. Williams' sharp script is an indictment of the fickle way queer media covers celebrities. | |||
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| Brokeback Mountain is the Citizen Kane of queer cinema. Some films make an impact on their first release only to be forgotten later. This one has lost none of its raw power. Brokeback Mountain was the breakthrough film that we awaited for decades. It was an exquisitely crafted movie, a critical and commercial success, and a surprise crossover hit. Conservative pundits and the family councils all went into apoplexy, jokes were made by comedians, and the mythology of the American cowboy underwent a major revision. But, above all, Brokeback Mountain was a love story that resonated with audiences both gay and straight. | |||
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According to popular
legend, playwright Tennessee Williams underwent psychoanalysis in 1957
to "cure" his homosexuality and the play Suddenly
Last Summer
was the result. This is inaccurate; the truth is much more complicated
than that. Many view Suddenly
Last Summer,
especially the film version, as being one of the ultimate artistic
expressions of a self loathing queer. The inclusion of a negatively portrayed
homosexual is hardly proof of this; Williams' fiction is populated with
far more grotesque examples of heterosexuals. |
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| Edwardian
England was not a good time to be gay. The climate was so bad that
noted novelist E.M. Forster began writing a book with a homosexual hero
in 1913 that he never published in his lifetime. That book, of course, is
Maurice
and, in 1987, Merchant Ivory Productions adapted the book to the screen.
The film
features superb performances and a meticulous attention to period detail.
It is a rich filmgoing experience and one of the most beautiful films in
all of queer cinema. |
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