I was up in the projection room, working a tech shift at aGLIFF while this film was running. The projection room isn’t exactly the best place to watch a movie, but I was able to catch the last half of it in the theater itself.
The pun in the title should give an indication about this film’s story. (Will be wonderful? Get it?)
At the end of the Wednesday night screening of Loggerheads at aGLIFF, nobody applauded. I think everyone was too bummed out to do so.
Loggerheads is one of those slow-moving films where everyone is miserable throughout.
Tess Harper plays Elizabeth, the wife of a preacher named Robert (Chris Sarandon), who worries about how her runaway son is doing. Bonnie Hunt is Grace, a woman wondering what happened to the baby she gave up when she was a teenager. Then there’s Mark, a drifter with a fascination for loggerhead turtles, who shows up at the beach where gay widower George owns a motel.
I could, and do, relate to Sommersturm.
The plotline is a familiar story to anyone who’s developed feelings for someone who can’t return them, at a time when such feelings are supposed to be directed elsewhere.
Teenagers Tobi (Robert Stadlober) and Achim (Kostja Ullmann) are best friends and members of a rowing team. As they train at a summer camp for a competition, Achim grows closer to his girlfriend Sandra (Miriam Morgenstern), which forces Tobi to contend with his feelings for Achim.
That Ootomo Katsuhiro, man — he likes to blow shit up.
Perhaps part of the awe of Ootomo’s films is the level of detail he puts in them. And no where is that demonstrated more fully than when everything blows up.
In one of the final scenes of Ootomo’s landmark anime film, Akira, a pipe billowing with steam breaks away from a gargantuan structure bellowing up from Neo-Tokyo’s underground. Viewers don’t really think about how big the pipe is until it crushes a large truck.
That sense of scale drives the last hour of Steamboy.
I originally saw Yossi and Jagger at aGLIFF in 2003 and rented it a while back before I started writing movie reviews in the old glob. I rented it again with the intention of writing about it here.
Yossi and Jagger was produced for Israeli television but screened in theaters. It won two awards from the Israeli Television Academy. The 65-minute film went on to screen at numerous festivals internationally, where it picked up more awards along the way.
The story follows the various love triangles formed at a snowy outpost in Israel.
When I first saw David Sutcliffe play Christopher Hayden (Rory’s dad) on Gilmore Girls, I thought he’d be convincing in a gay role.
Not long after I arrived at that conclusion, I learned he was shooting Testosterone in Argentina with Antonio Sabato, Jr.
Huh. Antonio Sabato, Jr. and David Sutcliffe. Two pretty hot guys. In a gay-themed movie. Sweet.
But sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
The Advocate gave James Marsden the cover of its May 24, 2005 issue and fawned over his on-screen kiss with Jesse Bradford.
Me? I went to see Heights because Jesse Bradford has an on-screen kiss with another man, period. Hell, I put up with the fifth season of The West Wing to watch Jesse Bradford.
I am not Jesse Bradford’s bitch — because you can’t pay me enough to see Swimfan — but put him in close proximity of a plot with gay themes, and I will watch it.
I learned of this documentary many months before it eventually played in Austin as part of the Texas Documentary Tour — I bought the soundtrack.
John Zorn wrote the score for the film, and anything he writes becomes part of his Film Works series of albums. I may have even reviewed the CD before it screened in Austin.
I’d been curious about Trembling Before G-d for a while, but I didn’t get around to watching it till I took advantage of a 2-for-1 Tuesday at Vulcan Video. (I rented the NOVA special The Elegant Universe with it.)
One of the DVD extras is a featurette about the cross-faith reaction to the documentary. The struggle of resolving a gay identity with a religious identity resonated beyond gender and sexual politics. One viewer raved about the film and rattled off all the ways she wasn’t its target audience — one parent a Protestant, the other Catholic, her husband from another faith, etc..
I feared the worst when first I heard an American version this film was made. Starring Jennifer Lopez. And Richard Gere.
Shall We DANSU? was a subtle film. Perhaps too subtle the first time I watched it.
(I’m using transliterated kana to distinguish the original Japanese movie from its US brethren, much in the same way The Ring is differentiated from RINGU.)
It drew comparrisons to Strictly Ballroom, and while the underlying setting was the same, Shall We DANSU? was the stylistic opposite of Strictly Ballroom. Still, I was expecting a bit of flash from Shall We DANSU? and came a way a bit disappointed.
Oh, c’mon — he gets shot? And he gets into a car chase? In the snow? Never mind the abuse the car takes rushing through snowy Russian streets — at what point does Jason Bourne bleed to death?
It takes some effort to suspend your belief while watching the big, ending action scene of The Bourne Supremacy. Of course, the movie’s star, Matt Damon, likened action movies to porno films, which themselves require some suspension of belief. (Oh my God … he can’t possible do that! Oh my God … he is!)