July 14-20, 2005

movies

Week In, Week Out

Following are reviews of movies premiering in the second week of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, July 14-19. Up to the day of show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9 p.m.) and online at www.phillyfests.org (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Regular admission is $9.50. Reviews (of first-week premieres are available at citypaper.net.) | All times are p.m. An asterisk (*) indicates scheduled appearance by director or other guest. Recommended

Venue Codes:
GY Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St.
PMT Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.
WT Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St.

ADAM & STEVE Probably the only thing you need to know about Craig Chester's directorial debut: It contains maybe the best scatological cowboy hoedown/dance-off scene since the Hays office started shutting that sort of thing down in the '30s. The rest of the film is merely a funny, charming and engaging variation of the traditional romcom, as nice Jewish boy Adam (Chester) and promiscuous doctor Steve (Malcolm Gets of Caroline in the City) go from meet-cute to meet-the-parents. You know the date-movie gods are smiling when the hetero romantic subplot with Chris Kattan and Parker Posey is practically not annoying at all. Ryan Godfrey (7/16, 9:45 PMT*; 7/17, 5:00 GY)

The Aggressives

THE AGGRESSIVES Beyond duct-taping one's breasts and copping a masculine strut, being an aggressive butch lesbian is more than just a drag persona for the women who live it day in and day out. Director Daniel Peddle tells the stories of six women from the urban butch community. The camera rolls as one stud takes her first steps outside a correctional facility, another enrolls for basic training and a third struggles to make it as a catwalk model. Surprisingly feminine in the bedroom and gushy around their girlfriends, the studs are confounding in their gender play. Drugs, hip hop, breakdancing and bling culture play no small role in The Aggressives, but by and large, it's a no-bullshit look at stud ethos and street life — and how the two infinitely overlap and imitate one another. Ashlea Halpern (7/15, 9:30 PMT*; 7/17, 7:15 PMT)

Before the Fall

BEFORE THE FALL Dennis Gansel's Before the Fall is shockingly light on bombast considering the hyperbolic nature of the various genres it patches together. Part boarding-school, male-bonding story; part Nazi-boot-camp tragedy, with bits of boxing films, war actioners and a considerable debt to Dead Poets' Society all mixed in, the film nevertheless manages subtle character drama even when it's fairly obvious where each of the characters will wind up. If never original, it is nonetheless a nuanced examination of several young men's induction into inhumanity, the minor temptations that allow for greater evils. Shaun Brady (7/14, 10:00 PMT; 7/15, 5:00 GY)

Beverly Kills

BEVERLY KILLS Aging drag queen Beverly Jackson (Gary Kelley) looks like Dee Snider and acts like she lives inside an off-off-Broadway adaptation of Mommie Dearest. After being rejected for a role in the musical Balls Out! (a few numbers of which are unnecessarily but amusingly included), she decides to take revenge by forming a murderous cult of celebrity impersonators. The central puppy-love story is too sickly sweet to hold much interest, but writer/director Damion Dietz's loyalties are given away by the title, and he plays the surrounding material like early John Waters remaking Hedwig. Dietz throws so many jokes that he can't help but land a few. S.B. (7/16, 5:00 PMT*; 7/17, 9:30 WT*)

CHICKEN TIKKA MASALA It's a toss-up whether Harmage Singh Kalirai's labored roundelay is more amateurish or dreadful, and ultimately it doesn't matter: Its lousiness and brainlessness are equally offensive. Chris Bisson, who looks dazed when he ought to be flustered, leads a cast of artless scenery-chewers as a British-Indian man whose family arranges his marriage without knowing he's gay (a word, incidentally, the film studiously avoids uttering). Rather than negotiate the tricky boundary between tradition and inclusiveness, Kalirai goes for easy laughs (fat, oversexed women; nutty grannies) until it's time to go wrap things up. Sam Adams (7/14, 5:15 GY; 7/17, 7:15 PMT)

Côte d'azur

CÔTE D'AZUR The gay fest circuit is clogged with frantic sex farces in which preconceptions tumble and everyone screws everyone, but there's thoughtfulness under Côte d'Azur's froth — not surprising since writer-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (My Life on Ice, Jeanne and the Perfect Guy) have a history of finding uncommonly thoughtful approaches to overworked genres. Here, Gilbert Melki (The Trilogy's corrupt cop) is the pinched paterfamilias, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is the adulterous mom, and Romain Torres is their curly-haired son, whose purported homosexuality has dad in a tizzy and mom playing tolerant. Suffice it to say no one's assumptions, not least the audience's, turn out right, and that Ducastel and Martineau earn the pansexual utopia others merely assert. Coming after more complex (and grossly overlooked) films, Côte d'Azur's breezy accessibility comes as a mild shock, but it's doubtful anyone will mind. S.A. (7/15, 7:45 PMT; 7/17, 2:30 PMT)

ETHAN MAO "Taking it up the ass is not as bad as you think," explains 18-year-old Ethan Mao (actor Jun Hee Lee). The part-time hustler is lying belly-down on a mattress, being rammed from behind by a balding suit-and-tie type. For a brief moment, you'll be captivated — titillated even — but it's all downhill from here. Although cinematographer James Yuan executes his nightmarish vision with Requiem for a Dream-style élan, flip-flopping from brain-scrambling snapshots to trippy out-of-body sequences, his ingenuity is lost on mediocre actors and a flimsy plot. One too many head-shakingly bad exchanges and you realize the only one taking it up the ass is the audience. A.H. (7/15, 5:30 PMT; 7/16, 9:30 GY)

EXPOSED: THE MAKING OF A LEGEND You'd be right to wonder if the world needs a behind-the-scenes documentary about John Rutherford's four-hour, cowboy fantasy porno extravaganza, but hot damn, here it is. Two surprises: One, BuckleRoos has the semblance of a story (involving a magical belt buckle, of course) and it's high-budget enough to warrant crane shots. Secondly, most of the people involved in such a fandango — as depicted by female videographer mr. Pam — are nice, normal guys whose job merely happens to be professional cornholing. Needless to say, everyone seems to love his work. R.G. (7/16, 7:00 WT*)

FAQs It would be hard enough to take seriously a film where every straight person is a gay-basher who is really queer; it's downright impossible when said film features a vigilante drag queen named Destiny with a .357 and an ever-growing posse of street urchins. So why isn't FAQs (a meaningless title, apparently) played for YUQs? There's a reasonable drama somewhere in Everett Lewis' tale of life on the gritty side of West Hollywood; the performances (particularly Allan Louis as Destiny and Joe Lia as India, one of Destiny's refugees) are actually pretty affecting. It's a shame that the story is awash in aimless, campless hyperbole and hysteria. R.G. (7/16, 7:30 PMT*; 7/17, 2:30 WT*)

FLOORED BY LOVE Looks like Canada hasn't given up on the After School Special approach just yet. This 50-minute Canuck telefilm bounces between two parallel stories of gay families that just barely cross paths in the closing moments. Director Desiree Lim has assembled a cast that could check most of the "ethnicity" boxes on the census form, playing nice people overcoming mild obstacles to their blandly pleasant lives with nice, socially acceptable solutions. How nice. S.B. (7/14, 9:30 PMT; 7/15, 5:30 WT)

FORMULA 17 As uninspired as its title suggests, D.J. Chen's debut follows guileless bumpkin Tien-Tsai (Tony Yang) into bustling Taipei, where his quest to lose his virginity is impeded by his insistence on finding true love first. His queeny roomie (Chin King, acting like shtick is going out of style) tries to steer Tien away from his crush on a notorious player, but has his own blind spots, like thinking that professing his love polylingually will keep his boyfriend from getting bored. It's sweet enough stuff, but nothing that hasn't been worked out in formulas 1 to 16. S.A. (7/15, 7:15 GY; 7/16, 3:00 PMT)

LEFT LANE: ON THE ROAD WITH FOLK POET ALIX OLSON Named one of the country's 10 most dangerous women by the Bible-beating Concerned Women For America, folkie Alix Olson is no stranger to criticism — lucky for her should movie reviewers be honest in their evaluation of this dyke-centric travelogue. Directed by Olson tour manager Samantha Farinella, the documentary is professionally filmed and carefully organized but has the distinct air of a PR vehicle. It follows Olson across America as she rages against the machine, the man, and the highway corporate monolith. Although Olson is funny and likable (as is her sassy grandmother, who talks dildos with the best of them), Left Lane adds little to conversations about feminism, the role of art in revolution, or life on the road. The one exception is Olson's provocative paean to Super Wal-Mart; its execution is so profound, you'll wonder if you've missed the rest of the movie's point. Rest assured: You haven't. A.H. (7/15, 7:15 PMT*)

LITTLE MAN At once explaining the gap since Claire of the Moon and rendering the inquiry moot, Nicole Conn returns with this heartrending, eye-opening documentary about Nicolas, the son born to her and her partner, Gwen, an amazing 100 days premature. (Unwilling to risk pregnancy in their 40s, they used a surrogate mother who, it developed, had only one kidney and a history of preeclampsia.) Not long ago, Nicolas would have simply been left to die, but the technology at their disposal is both awe-inspiring and frightening: Looking at a baby so small it's weeks before he weighs a pound, it's clear that the consequences of keeping him alive are so vast they can't be processed in the time it takes to make life-or-death decisions. Perhaps with a slight degree of self-serving, Conn casts herself as Nicolas' champion, Gwen as the reserved skeptic, with the strain on their relationship mounting as Nicolas lives through one scare only to face another. little man's explicit goal is to promote awareness of the decisions faced by the parents of vastly premature infants, in an area where, as one of Nicolas' doctors freely admits, "there is no data," and every case is an "uncontrolled experiment." But the deeper, more disturbing question is the one Conn asks in her narration: "When does caring become cruelty?" S.A. (7/16, 2:15 WT; 7/18, 6:00 WT)

MR. LEATHER Leather is a blanket term for people who like rough sex, its tentacles dipping into motorcycle culture, sadomasochism and other hyper-masculine deviations. First-time director Jason Garrett profiles individual participants from Los Angeles' 2003 Mr. Leather competition, which include an African-American, a submissive and a priest. We follow them as they buy outfits, argue with their boyfriends, prepare answers for the judges' questions, and ruminate on the far-reaching implications of SMBD culture. Mr. Leather broaches the idea that leather lovers are twice ostracized: first for being gay and again for being kinky. Coming out as a leather man is essentially a second coming out, and these contests lay the welcoming mat for gays exploring their fetishistic boot-licking fantasies. While the viewer never becomes emotionally invested in the contestants, Garrett admirably creates awareness of the troubles facing a vital subset of the queer community. --A.H. (7/15, 10:00 WT*; 7/18, 9:00 PMT*)

100% HUMAN Born Morten, wanting to be Monica, the subject of 100% Human chronicles her wait for gender-reassignment surgery in video diary excerpts that directors Trond Winterkjaer and Jan Dalchow unwisely intersperse with music-video cheese. An ungainly hybrid, it's about 40% engaging. --S.A. (7/17, 9:30 PMT)

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS Too vague for neophytes and too hand-holding for fans, Patrick McGuinn's portrait of Chicago smooth-pop duo The Aluminium Group offers fleeting pleasures better savored on the group's albums. Brothers John and Frank Navin craft suave electro songs admittedly inspired by '70s soft rock and take the stage in loaned Prada suits, but Happyness lacks any trace of the style that makes The Aluminum Group as invigorating as it is relaxing. --S.A. (7/16, 9:30 PMT*; 7/18, 6:30 PMT*)

THE RECEPTION John G. Young's talky character study features an intriguing circumstance: Jeanette, an often-drunk French woman and her codependent friend Martin, a black, gay painter, live in isolation in wintry upstate New York, where they are visited by Jeanette's estranged daughter, Sierra, and her new husband, Andrew. There are echoes of grand, theatrical dramas in the ways the four characters relate — it's not hard to be reminded of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or even Six Degrees of Separation. The Reception is not of that caliber; the dialogue is shrill where it should sear, and of the four characters, only Martin (Wayne Lamont Sims) is actually sympathetic. It's a shame he's also the one with consistently terrible judgment. --R.G. (7/15, 10:00 PMT; 7/17, 12:15 WT)

SAY UNCLE In the wake of the Michael Jackson trial and other Larry King fever-dreams, public hysteria over pedophilia should be fertile ground for satire. Even after the HIStorical acquittal, it's hard to dredge up much sympathy for a simpering man-child lacking the self-control to relate to other adults. Yet that's all that actor-director Peter Paige demands, playing a nice guy Peter Pan who's ultimately misunderstood, letting him off the hook as far as personal responsibility for his immaturity. Moral relativism be damned, Paige opts for sunny sitcom pastels where his subject calls for ever-deepening shades of black. --S.B. (7/14, 7:30 PMT*; 7/16, 12:30 PMT*)

SHAKESPEARE'S MERCHANT It's not a stretch to find gay undertones in Shakespeare, particularly in The Merchant of Venice, the Bard's play where manly love is perhaps put most directly in competition with a traditional marriage. So writer-director Paul Wagar's decision to pin the play's central romance on Bassanio and Antonio (rather than Bassanio and Portia) is a valid, interesting choice. Wagar doesn't run from the play's anti-Semitism either, stripping the text of much of its comedy and deepening the violent and racist themes of poetic injustice. The present-day California setting does the production no favors, however. When the cross-dressing female lawyer and her homosexual defendants demand public and institutional bigotry to rain down on Shylock, it's hard to buy the modern characters' obliviousness to the situational irony, delivered like a knife to the gut. --R.G. (7/14, 7:30 WT*; 7/15, 5:00 PMT*)

THIRSTY In their first feature, Temple grads Carolina Roca-Smith and Lauren Anderson explore the lives of three young women in transition, "thirsty" for emotional connection. It's a vague concept that undersells the individual stories. There's Eileen, a moody lesbian on a camping-trip-from-hell with her miserable father and stepmother. There's Marty, a certifiable neurotic who spends an evening fixating on the message she left on a recent date's machine and the onions mistakenly slapped on her drive-through dinner. Finally, there's Hannah, who, after an ugly breakup, moves into a new apartment and develops an unexpected attachment to her older roommate, Ava. These stories are interwoven through editing but their discrete narratives never actually intersect. Taken as a whole, Thirsty aptly depicts loneliness and isolation, but it lacks a sense of humor: Marty's one-dimensional obsessions are more tiresome than funny. On the other hand, both Hannah and Eileen are nuanced, complex characters that might, under other circumstances, merit their own feature-length treatment. --Elisa Ludwig (7/16, 9:30 WT*; 7/17, 2:30 PMT*)

Unconscious

UNCONSCIOUS It's 1913 in Barcelona, and as war approaches, everyone seems to be preoccupied with sex, hypnosis and above all Freud, who is about to visit the city. It's a sparkling gem of a setting for a mystery, as the pregnant Alma (Leonor Watling, the comatose dancer in Talk to Her) searches for her missing psychoanalyst husband in the city's seamy, steamy underbelly. The characters quote Wilde, Bronté and Shelley, and there's a masked ball right out of Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, but the real literary referents in Joaquín Oristrell's film are the clever, erudite quest fictions of Borges, Pynchon and Eco. The pleasures of Unconscious are more than intellectual, however; like great sex, it's funny, suspenseful and the ending is a doozy. --R.G. (7/14, 9:45 GY; 7/17, 9:30 GY)

UNVEILED Angelina Maccarone's dourly predictable drama stars Jasmin Tabatabai (Bandits) as an Iranian lesbian whose flight from persecution lands her in Germany, where she assumes the identity of a deceased male refugee. From there, it's all riffs on Boys Don't Cry, right down to the unwrapping scene. The Tehran-born Tabatabai, a German pop star, brings a dogged conviction to her role, but it can't save a movie which exists only as a vehicle for tepid speeches. --S.A. (7/19, 7:15 GY)

Women in Love

WOMEN IN LOVE What is monogamy and is it really a viable institution? Director Karen Everett turns the camera on her own love life (much to the chagrin of her lesbian cohorts) to explore polyamorous relationships and the sometime futility of committed partnerships. Women in Love is a painfully intimate work that documents San Francisco's budding lesbian scene in the me-me-me '80s. Jealousy and hormones rage in unison as Everett dives into an Ethical Slut workshop, a Loving More retreat and threesomes in the back rooms of dingy sex clubs. Peppered with stunning photography from On Our Backs' Phyllis Christopher and steamy scenes from Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano's by-women, for-women porn movies, it's a breathless homage to all things joyous and sad about relationships — gay or straight. Women in Love ends abruptly, as if Everett finally tired of the camera herself. It's a huge letdown after such an intense film, but isn't that apropos to the subject matter? --A.H. (7/16, 12:15 PMT; 7/18, 8:30 WT)

WTC View

WTC VIEW I'd guess that it's not difficult for New York actors to summon feelings of pain, loss and paranoia for a film about the first few days after 9/11. I know that it isn't at all hard to remember their distress as our own. And even though Brian Sloan's single-set adaptation of his own play feels stagy, the writing is strong and the subject matter and most of the performances ring utterly true. Michael Urie is terrific as Eric, a confused, angry gay man who needs to find a roommate for his flat, which comes with a view of the still-smoking ruin of ground zero. --R.G. (7/17, 7:15 WT*)