shorortqueerfilmreview - Tumblr blog

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

7/10 Thankfully it's only an hour and half and the time does seem to zoom by. It's just, fucking grim and boring. The performances, although believable, are very muted and however much it does feel realistic, are just so reserved. Look, it's a sad and beautiful little story about a gay couple who have been together for sixteen odd years, on a road trip in a campervan in Britain as one of them slowly succumbs to dementia. It would be heartbreaking if it wasn't didn't keep it's audience at such a distance, for some reason even the intimate moments felt so far away. I think it's certainly worth watching, and it's beautiful and heart-wrenching to see a story about older queers, but again, if they aren't dying of HIV they are killing themselves or dying of dimentia #killyourgays amirite? It's not gory or bombastic enough to elicit an overwhelming reaction, but its a sweet little tale. Tucci and Firth do the heavy lifting, but there's not much to lift (?) It seemed to get good reviews, but I put that down to the straights just frothing over the tragedy porn.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

6/10 An Argentinian (Brazilian, French) film about two young friends (and they were roomates) separated by time. Now we learn throuhg flashbacks, these two were intimate together as youths and have always had that attraction and close bond to each other, as one grows up being their authentic self and the other closeted. It’s not a remarkable story or overly bombastic, there’s not much in terms of twists or turns or even very dynamic, but its still a great little romance film with a happy ending.  • I like films with this silent, slow, indie lack of scoring I think, which seems to add gravitas to any mundane scene.  • The dynamic between the two, both as adults and as young teens is portrayed well and is believable, the narrative is cute, if not predictable, and the pacing works well. • Shots are framed well. •The relationship of the knowing mother and son and friend is sweet. There’s not too much to say here, either positive nor negative, take that as you will. Esteros wiki. 

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

7/10 This is a fun and cute little French films which comedically explores the autobiographical coming of age story of Guillaume Gallienne and unpacks themes of sexuality and gender.  Framed within the fourth-wall breaking trope of a theatre show, the story focuses on a young Guillaume and his femininity as a young straight boy.  I did enjoy the humour, the authentic storytelling and the theatricality, specifically his dress up play as Sissy, but I was somewhat startled by the revealing at the end of the main character’s heterosexuality. I know it is based on Guillaume Gallienne‘s anecdotal, life story, and he is a straight man, but still, disappointing. Shocking. Like, what? I don’t know, maybe not. Conflicting. It’s great that this discussion around gender and sexuality, concepts of masculinity and what does it mean to be a man is being presented, but I had come to love the character so much I just wish he was a part of the family. This is a great film and I really do recommend giving it a watch. It’s easy to enjoy, takes you on a engrossing ride and moves fluidly.

Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table !

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

2/10 What is Lucy Lui DOING in this movie?  Also, Jacki Weaver, it almost heartbreaking to see you go from an Australian national treasure, to global superstar (thanks to Animal Kingdom) to THIS. This movie is too long. It includes a complete version of “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” in its entirety. It is just so long and really has such a little story to tell. Weaver’s character doesn’t even really have a character arc or development, we are told she is the conservative Texan loveless parent that has been estranged from her son for being gay for 20 years, and yet she merely raises an eyebrow at drag queens performing at his funeral and doesn’t really ever say or do anything to demonstrate this. This is another gay film made for straights, as most of the story revolves around Weaver’s character being assimilated into the drag / queer performance bar family and then SAVING THE BAR FROM BANKRUPTCY BECAUSE SHE HAS CHRISTIAN CHOIR LADY SKILLS?  I just didn’t like any of this and found it fairly boring.  This is an odd one, maybe throw it on if you have run out of anything else. Weaver does deliver some ok lines, but again, why is she here? We end the film with the main focus on straights and straight happiness / relationships when there is plenty of trans and queer characters in this story we should have spent more time on.  Stage Wiki.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

8/10 A beautiful and bittersweet little Finnish romantic drama about about a young Syrian refugee, Tareq (played authentically, sweetly and gently by Boodi Kabbani)  assisting a father and son in the countryside fixing up and repairing their family holiday cabin. Leevi, the son (performed by Janne Puustinen) and Tareq begin a romantic affiar when Jouko (the conservative father, played by Mika Melender) leaves the two alone to complete some work, a cliche, but a welcome one. The romance is sweet, exciting and the sex scenes are intimate, authentically shot and erotic. The tension draws as the two hide their attractions from the Father/Boss character and read each other poetry, share their lives and the horrible experience of leaving his Syrian family behind, until the third act and finale, where the audience is left with just a moment in the reeds... and in the spa....and in the bed and... Sweet, heartbreaking, charming and lovely - give it a watch. It’s nicely paced, if not a little slow and steady and well performed.  A moment in the wiki. 

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

6/10 This cute ands goofy little Thai film is based on a true story, and I do admit I had a happy little tear run down my cheek in the end credits when the real footage of the Iron Ladies queer volleyball team played. This film is silly and the language (translation through subtitles) definitely has aged poorly (trigger warning for the use of the word “f*ggot” sprinkled generously throughout as well as misgendering and general transphobia and homophobia and just a bit of misogyny). Some of the editing, timing, pacing and deliveries is amateur and can be a bit cringey, but there is a lot here to enjoy and have fun with, and ultimately a story of empowerment and strength. The Iron Wiki.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

7/10 Spa Night is claustrophobic - shot in many beautifully framed close-ups, this film barely gives the viewer room to breathe or the cohesion and understanding of what is occurring within spaces. It can be frustrating or irritating, when you really want Andrew Ahn (director) to just zoom out, or to rotate or look differently. Joe Seo is David, a Korean American student struggling with adolescence, poor grades, his family splintering after their business goes bust and his coming to terms with his sexuality. Seo performs David with a timid, shy and tortured contemplation with plenty of relatable moments portrayed authentically and with nuance. The film has no score, and uses this silence in conjunction with thoughtfully framed shots to keep us sensually hooked both visually and audibly, however the “climax” of the film leave some ends untied and plot points unresolved, however this is a wonderful little film definitely worth a watch. The family dynamic and struggles of the immigrant experience are also valuable and worth engaging with. Spa Wiki.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

6/10 Malik returns home to France to live with his recently widowed mother and falls in love with her live-in handyman young boy Bilal. The film is wrapped in French, Tunisian and Arabic sensibilities and it’s interesting and engaging to watch the combination of all of these cultures and how they engage with queer people.  There’s also a main second-act / third-act plot about Malik’s coworker and close lesbian friend getting married to him so her inseminated baby she’s having with her girlfriend will have a father - again this feels very inherent to the cultures of the film, but I really enjoyed how queer people, all over the planet, no matter where they are from or when, come together and make beautiful motley crew families. We are resilient and full of love and flexibility.  This is a great story and I really enjoyed myself, but there are just some jarring edits and cuts in here, and some jump time, which can be disorienting. (Specifically, the courting or romance between Malik and Bilal seems to jump from about a 3 to a 10 VERY quickly, could have used a few more flirting scenes in there to build the dynamic more. The relationship of Malik and his mother Sara is brilliantly complicated but lovingly and tryingly performed by Antonin Stahly and Claudia Cardinale.  There’s also. a metaphor about a string or thread which Malik explains in the film, but is a fairly loose metaphor to include, and some flashbacks about his dying father toned all in cold blues which I wasn’t in love with greatly. The Wiki. 

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

7/10 I love Steve Coogan. I also love Paul Rudd. There’s a bitter, three-dimensional, intimacy here that’s both believable and tragic, raw and honest, revealing and tinged with sadness. Coogan as Erasmus Brumble is flamboyant and equipped with flippant, acidic one-liners, where Rudd plays the more brooding and slightly defeated Paul Morgan, Erasmus’ partner of ten years. You really get a horrible and heart breaking insight into this decade-spanning relationship. The film centres around that of Angel - Erasmus’ grandson, who turns up out of the blue, making the couple “grow up” and take stock of their relationship and themselves. I think there are some nice laughs here, there’s some great performances (even Jack Gore as Angel is not hate-able) but I have to say, I felt it when the Sufjan Stevens “For The Widows In Paradise, For the Fatherless in Paradise”  track started playing and the montage happened. I had a little cry.  That third act, it’s good. I feel as if a lot of films lose pace and focus by the third act, but this one builds so perfectly and really knows when to call it quits. I liked this, emotional and funny, not amazing, but just heartbreaking enough. There’s heart underneath this silly little film. Ideal Wiki.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

7/10 The first two acts of this Taiwanese gay romantic, youth drama is fantastic; set in the 80′s as the changing world is coming to accept queer people moreso, and Taiwan has just ended martial law, the first two acts explores the coming to terms sexuality of school friends, Jia-han and Birdy.  The mechanic that keeps the first two acts moving forward is the cut back and fro from Jia-han bleeding and crying, confessing something to the Christian school priest, Father Oliver, in his office, so we must summize that this romantic drama doesn’t have a happy ending. How did he get to this point, what happens? It is only once we move past this moment, the film begins to unravel and my interest waned.  I just want to say, I would DIE for Birdy and Jia-han - their romance is performed so incredibly well by Edward Chen and Jing-Hua Tseng and I FELT IT inside me. It was unrequited, it was forbidden and scary and dangerous and this film moved me, I wept. The first two acts are fantastic. I WEPT. I felt the resistance, the frustration, the terror of the unknown in this forbidden attraction - I could relate.  It’s in the third act, when we jump forward in time to a 30-something year old Jia-han and follow the sad conclusion of their falling out and reconnection that I feel really lets this work down. Did we need this component? Does it do anything at all to the narrative? It’s almost reductive. It took me out of the brilliant performances and energy of the couple in their youth and just wasn’t performed as well (by Leon Dai as middle aged Jia-han and Jason Wang as Birdy), and was lacking the initial chemistry of Chen and Tseng.  I highly recommend watching this one, however,  it’s really beautiful and moving, emotional and gripping. The camera colouring is deliciously 80′s with a Fujifilm tint to colours and a very honest and tangible performance. I have to mention the shower scene, which was upsetting and traumatic but so well performed and gripping.  Your Wiki Engraved Herein

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

6/10 Ok, so I’ve promised myself I would be kinder and nicer in these short reviews as I have noticed a growing trend of mysaelf being quite negative and mean. I don’t want to be that catty bitchy gay so. This is a cute little by-the-numbers queer film for a young audience which deals with homophobic bullying (spoiler alert, the bully is gay and in love with our main character) unrequited love for the straight boy and an inoffensive script which feels cobbled together from a thousand after school television specials.  Throw in some boxing, working in a fishery, sister with cancer, abandoned by deadbeat parents and Margaret Cho as the bartender and it’s a cute little drama which you can easily get through while you work from home or do the dishes or play around on your phone. Nothing is amazing, but nothing is too terrible that it sticks.

Alaska is a Wiki.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

6/10 I should really be kinder to Australian films, especially indie, queer Australian films, but, if the firsat word you thought of when you hear; “Australian coming-of-age queer indie” is “bleak” then you are correct. Why, WHY is Australian cinema so incredibly depressing?  Miles Szanto as Mik performs well, brooding and nuanced, troubled and very generous, but ultimately he is not enough to carry us from one tragedy to the next. There’s a death, there’s a hint at incest (deus ex machina-ed later, sort of) and there’s struggling with sexuality, drug abuse and lots of sex scenes.  The way this film portrays sexual fluidity / bisexuality is interesting, if not verging on the fetishistic, and we see a lot of skin throughout, but at some point I checked out. I asked myself “why” am I watching this? It felt like a very naive, very youthful media student project. There is just something not believable about these performances, it’s all very drama school.  I was kind of repulsed by the best friend r*pe scene at the end. It just felt like piling on trauma and shock value and hardly any of it feels believable.  Also, I’m Australian and I do not believe that every single Australian has a special connection to the sea and surfing. I have never been surfing in my life, why is everyone a surfer with a spiritual connection to the waves in Aussie cinema? Ridiculous. Ian Roberts makes a cameo as a dead-beat dad ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )  The soundtrack was.... interesting, with low-synth, mechanical, sweeping humms giving way to some cringe pop-rock, saccharine garbage at the end.  It’s a mess and it’s trying too hard to be edgy and grungy. It’s not even that sexy. Give it a watch, but I didn’t tell you to. I need to reset and stop writing negative reviews, I genuinely like cinema.  Ugh, sorry.  Wiki Kicks. 

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

0/10 This. Movie. Is. Harmful. I watched this so you don’t have to. Off the back of soulless, creatively-devoid Hollywood psycho-corporate CEO’s trying to emulate the “Love Actually” formula with derivative “Valentine’s Day” and horrific “New Year’s Eve” comes this absolute, bottom of the barrel, toxic display of complacency. “Mother’s Day” is an actively harmful film which should be used as an example of straight, white privilege and some of the most tone-deaf tokenism I have seen in a “contemporary” film. This movie is racist, whilst trying to address race. This movie is homophobic, in so many ways that feel inherent, systemic and that the queerness and race moments are written by and for white, straight people.  The presentation of people of colour are reduced to “mammy” caricatures (who is that black lady at the end looking after Jason Sudeikis’s white children?? Her one line: “I betta go find my babies” on MOTHER’S DAY is baffling.) POC are merely here to assist the white characters, which is no more obvious than when the film almost becomes self aware (so close) when Kate Hudson’s Indian-heritage partner Aasif Mandvi is packing to leave because his wife (in which he has a three year old child with) is ashamed to reveal her brown husband and CHILD to her mother and tries to lock them in the garage. This is real. This is played for laughs. It’s bananas.  The queer representation is no better. Sarah Chalke and Cameron Esposito play a married couple, with adopted child living in a mansion in suburbia and that still is referred to as an “episode of the Jerry Springer show” BY one of the queer characters (?) This was written on behalf of gay people.  The lesbians show ZERO affection toward each other, which is standard in Hollywood films, and it genuinely took me half the film to realize they were married parents and not sisters or roomates.  The movie writing machines have moved so far from the “Love Actually” formula through mutation that the stories make little to no sense (the parade float which is a womb, s used in a bizarrely low-stakes chase scene, but we see no parade. Jack Whitehall’s girlfriend comes around to marriage after meeting her estranged mother ((who KNEW about her daughter but chose to not reach out to her until this film?))  I’ve already written way too much on this, but it feels as if there is so much to unpack. I was pausing this to vent every minute or so.  Horrible film. Harmful. Stupid. Embarrassing. Julia Roberts is getting that bread here though.  Also, Jennifer Aniston’s character is so unbearable, so unstable and unlikable that the film accidentally breaks tropes by having you like the “replacement girlfriend, who is ‘younger, sexier’ but also just nicer, kinder, more empathetic and genuinely lovely. What’s going on? Mother’s Wiki.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

2/10 So, like, obviously this is made well - it’s as sparkly and glitzy and chintzy as you can imagine a contemporary Broadway musical, transformed into a Netflix film by Ryan Murphy that deals with over-the-hill delusional actors and high school drama where the jocks burst into choreographed hip hop dances and everyone sings their feelings so on their sleeves with seemingly no understanding of nuance, could be. There’s a song about twitter maybe. Nicole Kidman almost has nothing to do (except one “zazz” song which I thought I was having a fever dream), James Cordon is unacceptable and there’s an earnestness which feels so innocent and naive it makes me almost sick. This film is painfully saccharine and I already have a physical aversion to cheesy musicals, the opening song set the tone and the vibe and I knew I was in for a difficult watch. Also, what is wrong with Americans? Like theres a scene where they throw all this money into producing this inclusive prom and like, you could have done so much with those funds, it just is like, who gives a shit, people are dying Kim.  Of course, it goes without saying the messages underneath is one of acceptance and of love and yada yada yada - I did tear up in the final moments, the swelling of the music (methodically and formulaically designed to generate emotion) and the kiss, it was all enough to move me, but that all being said, this was too campy, too cheesy and just too long for my tastes.  It’s not a terrible movie, but my sensibilities lie elsewhere. There were a few lols which were delivered and comically timed well, but nowhere near enough to excuse the absolute lack of self awareness, I dunno, this is a bit of a cheap one but this film is neither indie, nor arthouse, so I didn’t really need to write about it here. Wiki. 

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

1/10 Ok, I gotta be honest, I didn’t make it all the way through this. I feel terrible, and I feel like perhaps not watching the entire film discredits me from having an opinion, or publishing my opinion on the internet, or writing a review, but, well, this is the lawless lands of tumblr so, here we are. This is definitely a product of the time (1971) but also, it’s just so difficult to get through. It’s mostly incomprehensible due to the transatlantic-esque accents and distorted 70′s audio and even with subtitles, I had no idea really what was going on.  I was also just, really bored.  I mean, cool, inclusion of queer people in the early 70′s - that’s great. Of course they are two dimensional catty purses and everyone seems to just emit casual racism and homophobia, combined with misogyny, but like, the 70′s maaaaaaan. Miss me with this gay shit, unless of course you are writing a PhD on queer filmic history and need a really early obscure reference, otherwise, wow, there is almost anything else.  Maybe I’m being too harsh, I feel bad. But, that’s honestly it. I had to walk away with about 30 minutes remaining. Some of my best wiki.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

8/10 This. Movie. Is. Great. Go give it a watch, right now. Drop what you’re doing. It’s a challenging and mature story set against a familiar, yet alien backdrop. I feel as though I definitely need more South African films in my life after watching this. I love the sweeping vistas and vast landscapes, I love the deafening silence and minimal score, I love the claustrophobic coming-of-age closeted teenage boy anxiety and tension in the brilliant performance of Brent Vermeulen.  This movie is hard and challenging but I also feel like adding the Gay Versus Religion trope into any story always equals drama, so I dunno, if you aren’t sick of that angle on things. Alex van Dyk as the orphan, off-the-rails outsider adopted boy is frustrating, unsettling and both written and performed non compos mentis. A beautiful film to watch, again, the cinematography and the colouring is just so incredibly stunning.  Die Stropers.

[shorortqueerfilmreview]

5/10 What can I honestly say about this film. Apart from having a wonderful British lineup of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Rita Rudner and others, it is pretty much a product of it’s time - 1992. The straight characters get to waltz around having affairs, fucking each other and young house assistants, publicly having sex on trains and rolling around in beds together, and Stephen Fry get’s HIV.  It’s like, I know, I know, but woah, cool, thanks.  It is what it is - a very British campy, romp, which I’m sure at the time was very raunchy. It’s still watchable, but I mean, there’s so much else to watch.  Peter’s Wiki.