Queer Cinema(s)

LaBruce stars in this vaguely autobiographical look at a triple-X star-director caught in the downward spiral of his career. Remarks Googie, the art-house auteur who’s either exploiting LaBruce or launching his comeback, “He was actually attempting to break down the whole subject-camera relationship… It was as if he was an existentialist trapped in a porno star’s body.” Well, almost.

Just as LaBruce’s scrawny, hangover aesthetics challenge the conventions of gay porn’s Wonder Bread desire, his newly adroit camera unsettles narrative assumptions. A dense weave of self-reflexive interviews, cynical vignettes, and outrageous cameos by “Kids In The Hall” Scott Thompson and drag goddess Vaginal Creme Davis – along with moments stolen almost verbatim from films like Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Perry’s Play It As It Lays – Super 8 1/2 still manages enough rude sex to keep the whole unruly narrative in your face.Read More »

Quote:
LUSH AND GOTHIC, RARELY HAS EROTICA IN FILM BEEN SO STUNNINGLY PRESENTED.

Night is falling. A frightened Schoolgirl makes her way along the deserted cobbled street, glancing fearfully around her. She is being pursued, but by whom–or what? Swept away, she awakens in an eerie, candlelit mansion. Her captors, the mysterious Ladies of the Night. Ageless and deadly, they examine their newest plaything. Teasing, tormenting, seducing, they toy with their young victim. As her alarm subsides, she submits to their dark, haunting beauty more and more eagerly. Led to the underground Torture Chamber, flogged, paddled, and caned, she is driven to the brink of absolute surrender. With the approach of dawn, her torture intensifies, and the Vampires at last taste her Virgin blood.Read More »

Synopsis/Background wrote:
“Don.t let Hollywood fool ya! Gay porn filmmakers in the 1970.s were more creative. And Jack Deveau proves it. In this erotically experimental shot entirely in France, director Deveau has statues coming to life in a art museum, who instructs handsome Thomas Jeffries on his inmost desires.

While touring Paris, Thomas is cruised by an older man in a cafe, and then goes to the museum (after the guard has left and locked up). A handsome statue comes to life who embraces and kisses Thomas passionately before leading him into another room. Here, as Thomas lies on a pedestal in his underwear, where two men – a bearded Geek god, the handsome stayue that has come to life embrace Thomas.Read More »

Quote:
From sun-sparkled Naples to muddy medieval England for chapter two of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life — and with all the cornholing, golden showers, and silent-movie mugging Chaucer left out. The most amorphously anecdotal of the three, it’s also the one where the discrepancy between the movies’ notional life-affirmation and the brackish despairing of their execution emerges most grotesquely, every stab at “joyous” sexuality followed by the self-reflex of grotty degradation. Read More »

Quote:
A twentysomething bisexual takes many wrong turns down blind alleys in his search for affection and understanding in this drama from France. Antonin (Hubert Benhamdine) is a young man who is desperate for love and thinks he’s found it with Alex (Franck Victor), a handsome and talented musician. However, Alex is also a heroin addict, and when he succumbs to an overdose, Antonin is crushed and begins drowning his sorrows in anonymous and often degrading sex. Antonin becomes a prostitute and frequently finds himself infatuated with his clients, but most treat him with contempt except for Baptiste (Hicham Nazzal), who shows some compassion for the troubled young man. Sadly, history repeats itself and Antonin once again falls for a dope addict, a beautiful but damaged woman named Juliette (Caroline Ducey). The first feature film from photographer Hormoz, J’Ai Rêvé Sous l’Eau (aka I Dreamt Under the Water) also stars Christine Boisson.Read More »

Quote:
Scorpio Rising , a landmark in the American underground film, confirmed Kenneth Anger’s reputation as a major talent and, at the time of its release, created a stir which reached from the pages of New York’s Film Culture to the courts of California, where it was judged obscene. It is testimony to the film’s aesthetic power that 20 years later it continues to shock and dismay as many viewers as it amuses and exhilarates through its artfully subversive reinterpretation of the American mythos.Read More »

Quote:
As anyone who saw last year’s Being 17 knows, the great, undersung French filmmaker Andre Techine doesn’t direct like most 74-year-olds. It wasn’t just the racing camera and breathless pace that made that chronicle of the evolving bond between two rural high-school boys so vital; it was how alive Techine was to the possible twists and turns of male sexuality, as well as to the sometimes surprising leaps of the human heart. Though the movie was far from perfect, it was ripe with emotional and physical spontaneity — as open and vibrant a work as one could imagine from an artist of any age.Read More »

Quote:
Flesh was filmmaker Paul Morrissey’s first production for Andy Warhol. The story concerns a bisexual hustler (Joe Dallesandro) who does tricks so that he can pay for his wife’s lover’s abortion. The film made headlines when it was confiscated by the police during one of its earliest showings in 1970. Though this event is unlikely to repeat itself, Flesh is still explicit enough to elicit gasps from even the most jaded of underground-film enthusiasts. — Hal EricksonRead More »

Quote:
“Becoming someone else: oneself…, to pull out your heart and take off running.” This is the starting point in darkness and light that inspired French filmmaker Anne Fontaine to make Reinventing Marvin [+], premiered at the 74th Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section. An existential journey that starts as “a radical experience of exile” because “the poor, sad, gay child is totally out of place, is a stranger in his own home, within his own family.” This individual in internal exile is Marvin Bijoux (played at age 14 by Jules Porier and then by Finnegan Oldfield as a young man) who has an immense amount in common with the adolescent protagonist of Edouard Louis’s shocking autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, the bestseller from 2014 that served as the trigger for the script written by Anne Fontaine and Pierre Trividic, but the duo have deviated from the same by imagining his escape into a world that is larger than the small village he was born in.Read More »