Entries Tagged 'Movies' ↓

Film #2 of siff was a disappointment.

Dream Boy is billed as a “coming of age story” involving two gay adolescents who wrestle with their feelings, etc etc. Instead, it is a crybaby story of a miserable teen who is incapable of growing a spine and dealing with his various issues — particularly being molested (at 15-16..) by his father. Instead, he runs to his own demise. He doesn’t “come of age” — he doesn’t grow as a person, he learns nothing and is not a better person at the end of the movie than he is at the start.

I don’t want any gay teenagers to see this movie and think that it is uplifting or in any way a representation of how they should react to pressures and obstacles in their lives. You fight, you don’t flee with your wrists open. You stomp on the faces of people who wrong you, you don’t whimper and cower to them while they rape and beat you to death.

Horrible characters aside, the acting was bad, and the music was awful and overpowering (though perhaps that is more the fault of the weak film than the music, as likely any music would overpower it..)

I rate Dreamboy 1 out of 4 QQs.

UPDATE: I just read The Stranger’s review, which is on-target:

To reduce coming-of-age drama Dream Boy to its base parts: Shy Boy meets Country Boy. They make out. Then they go camping with Country Boy’s homophobic friends. Surprise! The friends are only homophobic because they’re self-hating gays, and secretly also want to have sex with Country Boy. Then there’s violence, and the movie is over. Shy Boy is Nathan (Stephan Bender), who spends the film staring at his shoes and wandering through endless montages involving cottonwood trees and alt-country banjo numbers. Country Boy is Roy (Max Roeg), who spends the film saying folksy words like “yonder” and looking conflicted about liking guys. Clumsy and clichéd from start to finish, this is one to miss.

Tonight I saw my first film of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) over at the Egyptian Theatre, which was a midnight showing of Epitaph, a South Korean horror film.

Yes, another horror film from Asia. Yes, it had a scary dark-long-haired girl. It also had a slew of weak Pscyho-esque sound effects which elicited a fair amount of inappropriate giggles from some already-plastered members of the audience. Aside from the cheese and clichés, it was very well done. Three separate stories interweave to form a cohesive and thoroughly creepy / disturbing vision.

Definitely worth seeing, and I am going to say no more in hopes of not ruining it. It’s only a matter of time before Jennifer Love Hewitt is cast in a horrific American remake of it.

I rate Epitaph 4 out of 5 terrified squeals.

This past Sunday I saw Latter Days. It has 7.6/10 on IMDB, 77% RT community rating, and has won three indie film festival awards. It is the pinnacle of gay cinema.

But it is still awful.

The movie begins with an introduction to Christian, a wannabe actor in L.A. working as a waiter. Sound cliché yet? Also he’s gay, and an absolute slut. A group of Mormons move in next door to him and his coworkers bet him $50 that he can’t manage to sleep with one of them — a bet which he takes, but later regrets when he falls in love with one of the Mormons.

Latter Days is 90 seconds of soft-core porn wrapped in 106 minutes of eye-roll-inducing garbage. The only emotion it evoked in me was pity for the guy who highly recommended the movie to a room full of us who were so obviously hating it.

I imagine that the target audience is not people who want to enjoy a quality film, but those who want to be reassured that the too-pretty guy who cheated on them with eleven other people will some day learn what it is like to be in love, and chase after them at the airport.

I rate Latter Days 1 out of 5 homophobic Joseph Gordon-Levitts.

Tonight, I watched the film Proof, with Hugo Weaving as Martin, an emotionally-vacant blind photographer; Geneviève Pico as his twisted housekeeper Celia; and a too-young-to-lob-phones Russell Crowe as Andy, a friend of Martin’s who describes his photographs to him with varying degrees of honesty.

Celia is obsessively in “love” with Martin, of which Martin is aware but refuses to acknowledge. Perhaps driven by Martin to make his existence more painful in an attempt to milk ANY sort of emotion from him, she re-arranges his furniture and holds back his dog when Martin calls for him at the park. A love triangle of sorts materializes between the three main characters — Martin adores Andy, horny-horny Andy wants into the pants of Celia, and Celia wants to carve her name into Martin’s chest. Hey, I said “of sorts.”

Honesty — trust, really, and its place in relationships — is what the film is ultimately about. In the end, the most important scene of the film shows us how a lack of trust can turn someone into an emotional cripple. How without understanding how to reconcile the ethical imperfections of people, one can become a shell of a person, incapable of healthy human interactions. Only after we have proof of our wrongs will the most stubborn and untrusting of us have a chance to redeem ourselves — hopefully, before too late.

Trust is a difficult thing to give openly, particularly if you have been stung in the past. It is the single most important thing that someone can earn of you, more so than love. Love can be volatile — as in the case of Celia, whose love has twisted her into a sadistic bitch — but someone in which you can place complete trust is beyond our concept of worth. Martin’s innate distrust, not the imperfections of Celia and Andy, is the cause of his troubles. Perhaps had he been exposed to the proof at a younger age that his limited senses required, he would have learned the value of trust and thus of love without trudging through so much misery.

I rate Proof 4 out of 5 deranged housekeepers.

From one of the greatest films of all-time:

Yesterday I met up with Graham for the first time — we planned to have some Thai food and see Sweeney Todd at Lincoln Square. But, what? I’ve already seen it! Yes yes, but I didn’t mind seeing it again (without chair-kicking fuckwits behind me) and Graham worked backstage of the show before and wanted to see the film version. Also, Johnny Depp.

We met at Bellevue Square, at a fountain outside of Macy’s. He came from the parking garage across the way and I from within the mall, so there was an awkward moment where I recognized him before he recognized me. I gave him a couple small gifts (a totally-gay deck of playing cards and some Japanese candy) for late-Christmas which broke the ice a bit before dinner.

Before we saw the movie, we walked a (round-and-)round-about route to a nice Thai restaurant in Bellevue named Chantanee. I had the “Princess Favorite Chicken” which was chicken in yellow curry with cashews, broccoli, and carrots. Tasty tasty! I’m not sure if Chantanee is better than Buddha Ruksa, but it easily beats the piss out of any Thai places near Southcenter, or what I remember of Sawatdee in Minneapolis. The staff was very friendly and we were out of there sooner than expected.

So, we arrived at the theatre about 45 minutes early and to kill time fed $4.50 of tokens into Jurassic Park III, a really bad light-gun game. We fought a Spinosaurus and the fucker went down three times before he finally died and our in-game avatars tried to hide their man-love feelings from each other as the credits ran. Graham had triple my score at one point, but if anyone asks, I let him win to be polite.

After the movie I waited for the 55x back to Seattle and as I boarded a bus the driver shooed me away from the fare box and instead asked me to sit up front and talk to him. That was a bit.. odd.. but I obliged. I guess he thought he was doing me a favor saving me $2.50, but I already paid up-front for my bus pass, so /shrug. He seemed a nice-enough old guy, though clearly a bit sad and lonely. We discussed my move to Seattle from Minneapolis, differences between the two cities and Bellevue, and the impending light rail system before he dropped me off and I walked home.

All in all it was an enjoyable evening. Graham is a very nice fellow. Bellevue is also surprisingly lovely — everyone I encountered was polite and friendly. Even the people with little kids went out of their way to be courteous.

Today I went out to see Sweeney Todd at the local suburban Minnesota theater — a Carmike Cinemas theater. The showing was at 4:05pm, so I arrived at 4:00 on the dot, moments before they began seating. I chose a seat, sat down, and waited. The fat cunts behind me talked obnoxiously-loudly about a friend of theirs getting suspended from school. They appeared to be at the movie with their illegitimate father, or perhaps the high school janitor that they exchange favors with for tickets to an R-rated movie on Christmas eve.

Anyhow, one of the trailers caught my attention. A band named “Three Doors Down” apparently shot a music video for a song of theirs, “Citizen Soldier” for the National Guard. It was three minutes of doom-and-gloom, with hilarious comparisons of National Guardsmen in Iraq with Minutemen fighting the British during the American Revolution. I am sorry, but being led into war with our President’s father’s old buddy is not the same as earning our nation’s independence from the British. How fucking tasteless and, frankly, pathetic. Is scouring high schools around the US for drop-outs no longer sufficient?

Thankfully, there was justice-poetic, as one of the next trailers was one for Stop Loss. I imagine that the rest of the theater, including the twitching jackasses behind me, didn’t appreciate the irony. Their loss.

So, 31 minutes later, at 4:36, the movie FINALLY started. I had lost count of how many trailers I’d seen — only the one for Stop Loss looked any good. Over all, it is a pretty gruesome flick. There is a lot of throat slitting, and it’s all very.. gushy. I’ve seen reviewers recommend that those who enjoy the SAW movies go see Sweeney Todd, but I disagree. I don’t think that they would be able to sit through the introductory song, much less all the ones that follow, and the plot would escape the average SAW-enthusiast. If you don’t mind a musical, like Johnny Depp, enjoy a good revenge movie and can stomach a bit of gore, I highly recommend that you go see it. I give Sweeney Todd 4.5 out of 5 buckets of mystery-meat.

Two posts in one day! I feel myself getting burned-out already.

I saw the movie Everything is Illuminated tonight, thanks to Netflix. I give it 3.5 out of 5 tired stares.

It started so well.. it was amusing, yet a little touching. You were drawn in fairly quickly by the various neurosis of the main characters. From “Alex”, the wig– uh, Ukranian Hip-Hop aficionado / translator and his physically abusive dysfunctional family to the obsessive-compulsive collector “Jonathan” played by the fabulously-gay hobbit Elijah Wood.

Half way through, however, it falls flat. Alex’s translations to and from Jonathan to various other characters no longer amuse and, in fact, hurt the movie. While sometimes he repeats verbatim what a character says — hearing lines twice is always a blast — often in the last quarter of the movie he completely fails to translate anything of meaning at all. Several paragraphs are reduced to three word sentence fragments. And yet, somehow, Jonathan intuits what is said. Magical.

And now, the part which will make people hate me.

I grow tired of the holocaust movies. I cannot name all of the ones I have seen, and though they all attempt to shamelessly tug at the sadness-strings to cheaply wring some tears out of you, every one of them evokes the same response from me. Anger. What the hell was ANYONE involved thinking? 1) Hey, herding people into train cars and making them drink urine sounds like fun. Oh wait, no, that NEVER sounds like fun. That sounds like twisted sadistic shit. 2) Hey, being herded into train cars and being forced to drink urine sounds like fun. Oh wait, no, there is no fucking way I should be forced to do this and perhaps I should fight back. 3) Hey, sitting back and watching people being herde– NO IT REALLY ISN’T FUN, DO SOMETHING TO STOP IT.

Passive resistance be damned — if you are herded into train cars and forced to drink urine you and the dozens, hundreds, thousands around you need to jump the nearest guard, take his weapon, and right the horrible wrongs occurring around you. Yes, the jews (and others) were victimized by the Nazis. Yes, that’s awful. No, it should never happen again. No, we should not herd every non-jew into a traincar of guilt and force them to drink their own pride. Pride is what we all need to avoid this ever happening again — not guilt or shame or sadness. I cannot fathom how much of ones own humanity the have to lose in order to allow themselves to be turned into sacrificial animals. I just don’t get it. How utterly oppressed by society, by government, by government, by government, even by friends and family must you be in order to lose that tiny part of you that whispers in your head.. “hey, being herded like an animal and forced to drink my own urine is wrong, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore?” I guess that movie came out after WWII, but I imagine that at least some people still thought it. That level of oppression and mind-manipulation scares the hell out of me.

For once I want to see a holocaust-related movie where there is a hero, not just victims and escapees. I don’t know if that is possible while still remaining true to history.