Dreamways

Hm. We watched this movie at the beginning of last week, and I cannot recall this movie at all, except that love was described as defying the downward pull of convention’s gravity.

This Argentinian movie is about forty-year-old writer Pablo Pérez who is living with AIDS. Financially struggling, he relies on his father to fund his life. A gritty picture showing a year of his existence. The two main aspects are his coping with AIDS and his search for connections, if not love. He explores the worlds of sex / romance ads, as well as the world of leather. He gets his journal published, which results in his father banishing him. Pablo is oddly vacant. Not just floating along, but with seemingly little sense of self.  read more »

This 1970’s German movie shows the story of Martin, an actor, is arrested in Switzerland for relations with a minor boy. He and the prison warden’s teenaged son, Thomas, fall in love. The boy winds up being institutionalized for his homosexuality, where he is brutalized and his spirit broken. Martin gets Thomas out of the Joint and tries to obtain papers for him to live in Deutschland. Thomas runs off with a rich fellow, a troll, as it were. He later tries to suicide, is rescued, and again institutionalized. The movie ends with his having fled the psych hospital.  read more »

This French film is the story of three high schoolers, two boys and a girl, become entangled emotionally and physically in somewhat of a menage a trois. The hero fellow can’t deal with what he perceives as the girl’s infidelity. Good scenes of interaction, but the film lacked a sense of direction, I thought.

 

Starring Jennifer Aniston, Jean Cusack, Patricia Keener and Frances McDormand, this is a somewhat odd-for-Hollywood chick flick. Four friends, three wealthy, and Jennifer, a struggling teacher cum house cleaner. All struggle in / with relationship. It’s barely credible that the Aniston character would be chums with the other three. McDormand’s character’s constant anger is fascinating. The movie is un-Hollywood in that nothing is resolved at the end, there is no applauding crowd scene. Aniston’s character verges on being a cipher who has no core and moves along a blank to herself.  read more »

A German, gay coming-of-age movie, set in high school, competitive rowing circles. Tobi loves best friend Achim, who is straight. At a summer rowing camp, his life (and that of his unsophisticated Bavarian team) is rocked by the out „Gay Strokers“ team from Berlin. Tobi makes love with a Berliner, and is ill at ease with being gay. The movie is well crafted, the characters are complex, their collisions are interesting. It’s a good movie, a gay movie that is an „A“ movie.

Movie Associations.  Tobi is even the physical gestalt of Zigis, both of them the Tormented Golden Boys.  read more »

A superb movie, as far as I’m concerned. It is very reminiscent of The Crying Game, but it doesn’t feel derivative. It stands on its own. The star shining brightly is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who portrays drag queen turned footwear designer, Lola. He is beautiful, both as a gal and as a guy. He is so powerfully male in face and body, but is totally comfortable doing female things. His character is a look at Courage, with Feminine energies braver, more articulate that straight male energies, capable of movement.  read more »

A funny piece of gay film. Four gay fellows, upon graduating high school, make a vow to each experience anal sex with a guy before September, getting fucked being “real” sex. The movie is chock-a-block full of gay stereotypes, tongue-in-cheekily parodied. The four are white boys: a campy sort, a tall jocky sort; a be-spectacled intellectual sort, and an average Joe. In their frenzied quests for de-virginization, they talk about and encounter one stereotypical gay sex scenario after another. They all come to sexual naught, until the end, at a Labor Day party.  read more »

In this Belgian movie, two kids, she maybe 16, he older, live on the edge. They have an enfant, which he easily sells („I thought we’d have another!“) and then his life falls violently apart. He, Bruno, is a hustler, but does have a heart. He does stupid things, has few resources, but has Decency.

This year’s Oscar winner for best foreign movie. Tsotsi means „thug“ in whatever South African language the movie’s characters speak. Zulu?  Tsotse is a young man (late teens, early 20’s) who has lived since the age of nine or ten or so on the streets. His heart has hardened to such an extent that even committing murder for money does not stir emotions in him. He inadvertenly kidnaps a tiny infant, and this starts a slow process of his heart opening up. I found the movie deeply moving and profoundly disturbing.  read more »