Week Two Shorts

Right on Q

Following are reviews of movies premièring in the second week of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, July 10-16. Up to the day of the 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, and online at phillyfests.org (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Tickets are $10. All times are p.m.

= Recommended

Venue Codes: AB = Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St. | BBP = Black Box at the Prince, 1412 Chestnut St. | PMT = Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St. | WT = Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St.

Black./Womyn. | Breakfast with Scot | Citizen Nawi | Derek | Dolls | Fashion Victims | The Houseboy | The Lost Coast | Otto; Or, Up with Dead People | Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band | The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman | Sex Positive | She's A Boy I Knew | 25 Cent Preview | Were the World Mine

Philadelphia's own Tiona M. goes on a countrywide interview spree, picking the brains of nearly 50 women in this doc about the black lesbian experience. M.'s subjects range from reserved academics to tough-talking club kids, but ultimately, the film's revolving door of interviewees — combined with the obligatory dredging of trauma — dilutes its narrative focus, as individual experiences are periodically lost in a sea of generalities. Personalities come out more in the fascinating second half, as talk turns to hot-button community issues and dynamics. Contradiction turns out to be the heart of this ambitious film, although its tendency to overreach makes it a somewhat thin experience for the audience. —Elizabeth Tung (July 20, 4:45 AB; July 21, 5:00 BBP)

Anti-gay Christian crackpots were picketing this harmless little family drama before it was even finished, but regular people will have a tough time mustering an opinion. An ex-hockey player (Ed's Tom Cavanaugh) and his vanilla bean partner (Ben Shenkman) suddenly find themselves the temporary legal guardians of 11-year-old Scot, a boy who likes to sing Christmas carols and prance around in feather boas. Attempts to steer the kid toward less socially awkward hobbies (like pee-wee hockey) end up compounding the problem, until everybody realizes it was never a problem in the first place. Smarter than your average family flick but only funny here and there, Breakfast with Scot isn't worth rallying around one way or the other, but for a genre lacking in role models, it's a good place to start. —Patrick Rapa (July 18, 7:15 PMT; July 20, 4:45 PMT)

Nobody seems to know how to deal with Ezra Nawi. As a gay, Jewish, Iraqi-born Israeli activist with a penchant for dating younger Palestinian men, he seems to have enemies everywhere. The cops are always hassling him, homophobic passersby call him a pervert and his mom keeps praying for some grandchildren. Even filmmaker Nissim Mossek, who filmed Nawi over several years for the making of this occasionally riveting documentary, isn't sure what to make of his star. Is he a fool who lets his ego as much as his politics lead him to confrontation? Or is he a subversive folk hero, an oasis of idealism in a land torn apart by ancient distrust and modern circumstance? Without the intrusion of narration or the benefit of even a small history or geography lesson, we're left to decide and discern for ourselves what to make of the man and the machine he's up against. —P.R. (July 17, 5:00 AB; July 20, 2:30 BBP)

Derek

Fourteen years after his AIDS-related death, New Queer Cinema progenitor and pioneering activist Derek Jarman has been almost forgotten in this country, a tragedy approaching a crime. Isaac Julien's documentary would be worthy if it did no more than return Jarman to the public eye, but it's much better than that. Rather than go the talking-head route, Derek is strung together by two voices: Jarman's own, taken from an extended interview shortly before his death, and that of his collaborator and muse, Tilda Swinton, whose incantory narration calls up Jarman's spirit and not just the facts of his life. Paying tribute to the painterly sophistication of Jarman's movies as well as their explosive content, Julien evokes Jarman in toto. In a scant 76 minutes there's hardly time to touch on all of Jarman's works, but if Derek sends viewers running to the video store, so much the better. '—Sam Adams (July 21, 7:15 PMT)

Dolls

While it treads the familiar territory of young girls leaving childhood behind, Czech director Karin Babinská's debut is less a coming of age than a headlong plunge into it. A trio of friends on the road to Holland for one last summer fling find themselves tripping over the line between girlish sexual experimentation and adult risks and attachments: Karolina's flirtations leaving scars, full-bodied Vendula's body issues isolating her, and lesbian Iska no longer able to deny her urges. Babinská bulldozes nostalgia with unflinching frankness, her three leads wholly exposing themselves in more ways than one. —Shaun Brady (July 19, 4:45 PMT)

Fashion Victims

Ingo Rasper's charming farce skates by despite its focus on an odious central character. Clothing salesman Wolf Zenker (Edgar Selge) is bitter, mean-spirited and short-tempered, resentful of the gay colleague who's pushing a fashionable new line and blind to his son's homosexuality. The fuse is lit when son and rival strike up a romance, unaware that they share an antagonist. By the end, of course, dad learns to accept change in fashion as well as family, but the resolution doesn't feel forced or pat, and Florian Bartholomäi shines as the quiet but self-possessed son. —S.A. (July 19, 2:30 WT)

The Houseboy

Despite plenty of winter morning snuggle scenes and sequences of kitschy Christmas decorations, Spencer Lee Schilly's film is anything but a feel-good holiday flick. When Ricky's (Nick May) older and wealthier boyfriends leave him to house-sit over the holidays, he knows they plan to replace him post-Christmas. Instead of returning to his hostile mother in North Carolina, a suicidal Ricky decides to spend late December with Craigslist finds, who are consistently jerks and occasionally manipulative meth addicts. Nick May is painfully young and sweet in his flannel snowflake pants, and it's unusually heartbreaking to watch him feed his lovers' fish while crying. —Monica Weymouth (July 18, 9:30 WT; July 20, 7:15 WT)

Structured as an e-mail to its confused lead's long-distance fiancée, The Lost Coast suffers from the sort of top-of-the-head informality that distinguishes electronic communication from old-fashioned pen and paper. Gabriel Fleming's story follows a trio of friends over the course of a Halloween night (cue the over-literal character-revealing costumes) in San Francisco; Jasper, the allegedly straight e-mailer, and his gay friend Mark apparently have a not-quite-just-friends history together, while Mark's roommate Lily has observed their uncertain relationship since high school. Fleming aims for a mood piece but overshoots, gussying up an uneasy crisis of sexual identity in a mask of tragedy. —S.B. (July 17, 5:00 PMT; July 20, 9:30 WT)

Otto; Or, Up with Dead People

There's quite a bit going on in Bruce LaBruce's gay-zombie-movie-within-a-gay-zombie-movie, but it mostly comes down to two things. First, gay zombies are total hotties. Otto (Jey Crisfar), a for-real undead cast in a flick by an avant-garde lesbian filmmaker (Katharina Klewinghaus), does not at all suffer from grayed skin and blank (crystal blue) eyes. In fact, the only way to pull off eating a roadkill rabbit is probably in tight jeans and a form-fitting little sweater. Secondly, and most memorably, rotting flesh and the cavities it makes possible provide for some really unusual and disturbing sex scenes. —M.W. (July 19, 9:30 PMT; July 20, 9:15 PMT)

Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band

Pansy Division's name and punk billing can be misleading: They're punk in the way Ween is. But their story, that of an openly gay indie band with very gay lyrics breaking at the time mainstream America was starting to fall for acts like Green Day, is compelling and instructive in how much things have changed (they feared for their lives prior to going on their first tour). The Spinal Tap-esque list of drummers is fun if ultimately cliché, and the talking-heads interviews can become tedious. Ultimately it's the music — hearing the band evolve from a kind of sloppy novelty act to a well-oiled pop-punk machine and culminating with the current incarnation together performing the new "20 Years of Cock" — that makes Michael Carmona's doc so engaging. Which works out nicely since the band will be performing immediately following the screening. —Brian Howard (July 18, 7:15 AB; concert, July 18, 9:00 TT)

The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman

A hour and a quarter is barely sufficient to graze the surface of Temple prof Delany's many lives: science fiction pioneer, literary critic, writing teacher and an unrestrained memoirist of modern gay life. Strangely, it's the work that gets short shrift. Delany reads a few excerpts from his novels, but there's no real attempt to present his oeuvre as a whole — an especially odd omission since, as the movie points out, there are no shortage of Delany scholars who could have put his work in context. Those who aren't fans will have to settle for spending some time in Delany's endlessly engaging company, soaking up his accounts of copious public sex in the pre-Stonewall era (up to 5,000 partners a year, by his reckoning) and his vivid evocation of pre-Disney Times Square. —S.A. (July 18, 9:30 AB)

Sex Positive

The early days of the AIDS epidemic were fraught with scientific confusion, governmental ignorance and personal hysteria, which make up the three prevailing themes of Daryl Wien's debut film. Partly a documentary on the period, partly a profile of former sex hustler turned activist Richard Berkowitz, the film takes viewers through the decades-long realization that gay men needed to change their sexual habits to avoid the disease. The interviews, cinematography and images from Berkowitz' S&M days — like the ledger detailing hundreds of client's names, preferences and fees — are gripping, though, at the end, the story does veer away from its cutting cultural insight into a sort of pity-party for the main character. —Tom Namako (July 20, 7:15 BBP)

She's A Boy I Knew

Gwen Haworth understands a principal rule of storytelling: Don't give away the ending. In her documentary about transitioning from a man to a woman, Haworth starts at the beginning, when she was a boy — named Steven — who never felt quite right about himself. Through interviews with family and friends, voiceover narration, music and video montages from Haworth's youth, plus silly illustrations for the sake of levity, the young filmmaker tracks her own story through to the present day, never revealing a photo or video of herself as a woman until the very end. With this adherence to chronology, Haworth omits the opportunity to judge — her audience is there with her every step of the way. And by letting her loved ones do most of the talking, Haworth's struggle speaks for itself while avoiding the narcissistic pitfalls of memoir. It's her ex-wife, after all, who recalls a time when then-Steven hadn't "felt right as a man," and it's her father who tearfully admits that with the emergence of Gwen came mourning the death of Steven. —Carolyn Huckabay (July 19, 5:00 BBP)

25 Cent Preview

The neon-lit glare of San Francisco's less reputable byways are grittily captured by Cyrus Amini's casual DV drive-by, though its improvisational nature at times threatens to crumble from loose to ramshackle. Blank-faced Merlin Gaspers stars as Marcus, a young hustler sleepwalking through nights of bizarre johns, interrupted by dreamy, still-photo reveries with a casual girlfriend. The film's anecdotal structure captures the sense of time adrift in a haze of drugs and passionless sexual encounters, though the late appearance of a Catholic priest who molested Marcus as a child is an unwelcome dramatic contrivance, introducing a note of analysis into an otherwise wholly sensual experience. —S.B. (July 19, 9:30 WT; July 20, 9:15 AB)

Thomas Gustafson's musical resetting of A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in a private boy's school, where gay Timothy (Tanner Cohen) is regularly targeted by his rugby-team classmates. Twin Peaks' Wendy Robie plays an English teacher who, externalizing the play's mischievous spirit, casts Timothy and the supposedly straight object of his affection as the two leads in the school's annual production. Shakespeare's action soon spills off the stage and throughout the town, where a rash of homoerotic obsessions, pop songs and iambic pentameter break out. The Bard's frothiest work here becomes even more insubstantial, though it has a certain effortless charm. —S.B. (July 22, 7:30 PMT)

The World Unseen

Set in 1952 Cape Town, The World Unseen depicts a romance between two women of Indian descent in apartheid-era South Africa with its own firmly divided sense of black and white. Here, it's a community of long-suffering saints pitted against boorish oppressors and, as much as the right and wrong of the historical situation may be clearly delineated, it still comes across as an aggressive oversimplification. Shamim Sarif adapts her own novel, paralleling the central love story with other examples of loves destroyed by racist law. It's undoubtedly heartfelt but peopled with halo-bearing stick figures. —S.B. (July 18, 7:15 WT; July 20, 12:00 WT)