Reverend's Reviews: Firth Time on DVD

One of the best gay-themed films in recent years (at least since Brokeback Mountain) is making its debut on home video today. Tom Ford's A Single Man, adapted from the novel by Christopher Isherwood, is a suitably dramatic but also enormously stylish and disarmingly funny account of a gay man preparing to commit suicide in the wake of his partner's tragic death.

Taking place over the course of one day in early-1960's Los Angeles, A Single Man's strongest attribute is a magnificent, Oscar-nominated lead performance by Colin Firth as Professor George Falconer. I believe Firth would have won the Academy Award for Best Actor if a certain Jeff Bridges hadn't snuck in under the wire with Crazy Heart. Firth will have to content himself with his Venice Film Festival and BAFTA awards. His performance is subtle and frequently amusing as well as heartbreaking.

Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult provide excellent support. In addition to a director's commentary by Ford, the DVD has a great, 12-minute making-of documentary that includes insightful interviews with Ford and all the principle cast members. Worth noting among Firth's and Hoult's recollections is how "well put-together" fashion designer Ford was while shooting his first movie. Firth remarks that Ford "consistently looked better behind the camera than any of us in front of it."

As Ford himself notes, "Fashion is fleeting; film lasts forever." A Single Man deserves a prominent place in GLBT and general cinema history. If you haven't seen it — or even if you have — buy or rent the Blu-Ray or DVD today!

Congratulations to Terry A. of Chicago, IL, the winner of our "I Want A Single Man" contest, sponsored by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment!  Thanks to all who entered!

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.

Reverend’s Previews: Outfest 2010 Celebrates GLBT Diversity

This year’s Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, will boast 60 GLBT-themed feature films and 87 shorts from 23 different countries. The 28th edition of the oldest film festival in LA and the leading GLBT festival in the US will run July 8th-18.

Having had the opportunity to preview a number of the movies to be shown, I can attest that this year’s Outfest selections are generally more thoughtful and of higher quality than those I saw the past two years. As Outfest’s Executive Director, Kirsten Schaffer, rightly proclaimed, “This year’s incredible line-up celebrates all of the forward-thinking artists that push the boundaries for LGBT rights and equality.”

One such artist was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who is the subject of the Outfest Opening Night Gala film, Howl (the movie also opened the prestigious Sundance Film Festival earlier this year). James Franco of the Spider-Man series plays Ginsberg. Howl is the first dramatic feature from veteran documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who made The Times of Harvey Milk and The Celluloid Closet among several acclaimed prior films.

The opening night festivities will kick-off at 8:00 PM on July 8 with a special presentation of the annual Outfest Achievement Award to lesbian actress Jane Lynch. Currently enjoying huge success as the domineering cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester, on the Fox TV series Glee, Lynch has also given memorable performances in such diverse films as The 40 Year Old Virgin, Best in Show and last year’s Julie & Julia.

Each year, Outfest features a foreign film as its International Dramatic Centerpiece. Contracorriente (or Undertow) will be this year’s selection on July 13. It is set in an exotic Peruvian fishing village where love between two men is forbidden. The film was a rare gay-themed winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Audience Award in January.

There are too many movies that I’d recommend to list here, but a few highlights are:

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, an insightful and thoroughly enjoyable documentary about New Zealand’s legendary yodeling lesbian twins. Jools and Lynda Topp have been performing together since the 1970’s, and were pivotal figures in the 1986 passage of their country’s pioneering gay rights bill. If you want to learn the hysterical punchline to the twins’ joke, “Why can’t lesbians wear make-up when they go to Weight Watchers?,” see the movie!

Grown Up Movie Star, written and directed by the talented Adriana Maggs, is a smart, observant study of a teenage girl in rural Canada’s coming of age. Living with her closeted gay father doesn’t make things any easier for her. The movie also benefits from an excellent cast (newcomer Tatiana Maslany is a revelation as the teen, Ruby) and great, naturalistic — if dysfunctional — family rapport.

Children of God utilizes overlapping storylines and characters in its expose of closeted homosexuality and religious hypocrisy in the Bahamas. An attractive, interracial gay couple run afoul of the local fundamentalist pastor, who at one point privately sums up the motivation behind his anti-gay campaign thusly: “You have to give people something to hate; it brings them together.” The film is also worth seeing for its beautiful photography of sun-bathed, seaside locales.

Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, with its title taken from Bonnie Tyler’s hit song of the 80’s, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” is an admirably unsentimental documentary that turns its lens on 75-year old, transgendered drag performer Vicki Marlane. Still performing today after 59 years as a drag artist at Aunt Charlie’s in San Francisco, Marlane speaks candidly of her upbringing, legal run-ins, ill-fated love affairs and addictions. Marlane and the film’s producer-director, Michelle Lawler, are scheduled to appear at the Outfest screening.

Role/Play, the latest from Rob Williams, director of past gay hits Back Soon and Make the Yuletide Gay. It is a smart and sexy account of what might happen if a closeted gay soap opera star (hunky Steve Callahan) and an outspoken gay activist with marriage troubles (Matthew Montgomery, Callahan’s real-life partner) were to meet at a Palm Springs resort.

A Marine Story is timely to say the least, what with the current debate over revoking the US military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Based on actual events, the film focuses on a recently-discharged lesbian (a dramatically and physically strong performance by Dreya Weber) who discovers her troubles are just beginning once she returns to her hometown. Written, directed and even edited — all very well — by Ned Farr.

Standouts among the numerous recommended short films to be shown during Outfest are the cute and funny Go Go Reject, which features the adorable Heath Daniels as a stripper hopeful who is labeled as too skinny but who isn’t going to take “No” for an answer; Last Address, an unusual, quietly devastating travelogue of the final residences inhabited by New York City-based artists who died of AIDS; and Public Relations, an upbeat romantic-comedy in which two female personal assistants meet and fall in love.

For me, Outfest wouldn’t be complete each year without its Sing-Along Musical night at the Ford Amphitheater. The 2010 winner of the annual online vote by Outfest fans is Grease 2, the campy 1982 sequel to Grease. Hardly as well-received as its predecessor, Grease 2 is still entertaining and somewhat underrated. It stars Michelle Pfeiffer in her first big-screen lead role, as well as then-pretty Maxwell Caulfield, a then-hot Adrian Zmed and Judy Garland’s daughter, Lorna Luft. What’s not to enjoy? It will screen at 8:30 PM on July 15. Feel free to dress as a T-Bird or Pink Lady!

The hilarious-sounding new comedy Spork will wrap up Outfest during the Closing Night Gala on July 18. For a complete listing of films or to purchase tickets for screenings and related events, please visit the Outfest website or call (213) 480-7065.

Preview by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.

Miss Firecracker

Have a happy and safe Fourth of July holiday!From Movie Dearest

Reverend's Reviews: Vampires & Vigilantes

I feel way too old to have spent six hours in the past year or so viewing The Twilight Saga. While it is easy to understand the super-successful supernatural book and movie series' appeal for romance-hungry teenage girls, their shared plot is pretty insipid stuff for anyone over the age of 17.

Obviously, I'm no "Twi-hard." However, my allegiance in the heated teenybopper debate between "Team Edward" (those devoted to the sullen vampire played by Robert Pattinson) and "Team Jacob" (fans of hunky, frequently shirtless werewolf Taylor Lautner) is to the latter. Lautner has charisma that Pattinson sorely lacks, although The Twilight Saga: Eclipse gives Pattinson the opportunity to play a wider range of emotions than in the first two movies. He even gets to smile and laugh! I hope he charged the producers extra.

Kristen Stewart continues to be hamstrung in the central role of Bella. Her expression is most often one of eyes-downcast blankness, but when she becomes concerned or afraid she appears constipated. I'm also increasingly frustrated by Bella's powerlessness at doing anything to help her situation. This isn't Stewart's fault, of course. The character is written as a pawn in the jealous-romantic (and sort of homoerotic, especially during a scene set in a frigid camping tent) rivalry between Edward and Jacob and, by extension, vampires and werewolves.

Edward and Bella get engaged by the end of Eclipse, but not much else happens in the movie. There's a lot of talk about how "a war is coming" to the characters' town of Forks, Oregon thanks to a bloodthirsty band of powerful "newborn" vampires created by Edward's arch nemesis, Victoria (a good but too-brief turn by Bryce Dallas Howard). Every time the film develops momentum toward this showdown, though, it is interrupted by a father-daughter chat, a marriage proposal, or one of Jacob's temper tantrums. And when Victoria's "army" finally arrives, it's maybe a dozen-strong and hardly an imposing force. The "war" is over in five minutes. With all the money the Twilight movies are raking in, couldn't they have afforded to hire some more actors or at least add a hundred or so vampires digitally?

Eclipse isn't awful but, like its two predecessors, it is a largely listless, apathetic affair. The last film, New Moon, perked up in its final half hour thanks to the intervention of some accomplished actors — notably Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning — as evil but humorous members of the vampire ruling class, the Volturi. Fanning reappears in Eclipse but all too sparingly.

There is reason to hope, though, that the upcoming adaptation of the series' final book, Breaking Dawn, will be an improvement over what has come before. Oscar-winning gay screenwriter-director Bill Condon (Gods & Monsters, Chicago, Dreamgirls) has been hired to helm the two-part finale. Maybe he'll give Bella a song or two and finally allow Jacob and Edward to acknowledge their latent attraction to each other!

I'm also happy to announce that another film adaptation from what is currently a truly literate literary phenomenon (no, not Harry Potter) is now hitting movie screens. The Girl Who Played With Fire is the second work — following The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — in the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy. The film version is opening next Friday, July 9, in a number of US cities.

It depicts the continuing adventures of crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (once again played by the very good Michael Nykvist) and the brilliant, abused and vengeful computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (the still-excellent Noomi Rapace). Separated for two years, they set out together via cyberspace to take down a ruthless sex trafficker and his cronies. Salander remains fiercely bisexual, and the new film features a steamy tryst between her and her best friend, Miriam Wu (Yasmine Garbi).

Director Daniel Alfredson took the reins from Dragon Tattoo's Niels Arden Oplev for the sequel. Oplev had a better handle on the technological dimensions of the story and making them exciting for viewers. The first film also had a slightly more engrossing plot, with a decades-old unsolved mystery as its driving force. The Girl Who Played With Fire is essentially two hours of waiting for a "will they or won't they" physical reunion between Salander and Blomkvist. The movie ends in something of a cliffhanger that will presumably be resolved in the third and final film, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, which is scheduled for US release this October.

Still, The Girl Who Played With Fire is an effective cinematic take on a book series that has challenging things to say about women and men, sexuality, abuse and power. The Twilight Saga, which purports to cover some of the same territory, are simplistic children's storybooks in comparison.

Reverend's Ratings:
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse: C
The Girl Who Played With Fire: B

UPDATE: The Girl Who Played With Fire is now available on DVD and Blu-ray and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.com.

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.