Cinemaqueer.com
GAY FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM



The What, Where, & When of Gay Buffalo
Serving Western New York
Home To My Reviews
Since 1998
Publisher: Tim Moran



Click To Search This Site









In Memory
Of

Mike Maffei
3/20/53 - 12/28/06

Mike was a beloved figure
in Buffalo's local folk music/coffeehouse scene. Mike lived for almost 17 years with AIDS. His activism was widely admired and to know Mike was to feel inspired.

more

Old Dogs & New Tricks, the brainchild of series creator Leon Acord, is a terrific web series that premiered in 2011 on YouTube. Its third season aired in 2014 and is now collected on DVD. I love this series and I’ll tell you the biggest reason why. This ensemble comedy features a group of gay friends in West Hollywood who are in their forties and fifties. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the more typical faire featuring 20-somethings in their underwear. A familiar formula is getting a facelift, and the 10-15 minute episodes are entertaining and addicting. Not to mention, sexy.

What gay man, especially in his youth, hasn’t been in love with his best friend? Or just wished he could have sex with him? Writer/director Mark Bessenger’s The Last Straight Man (2014) is an uneven but often fascinating look at two best friends - one gay and one straight - who meet every year, on the same day in the same hotel room, for a one night stand that lasts for 12 years.

While watching 2013’s Stranger by the Lake, there were times when I was reminded of The Garden Of Earthly Delights, painted by Hieronymus Bosch. The entire film takes place at a lake in south France that is a popular gay cruising spot. The beach is dotted with nude men sunbathing and there’s action aplenty in the surrounding woods. Promiscuity is on parade yet much of this is oddly charming. The forest is a carnal Disneyland, yet innocent as a Garden of Eden. However, like the right hand panel of Bosch’s famous triptych, there is also a dark side to paradise.
Brokeback Mountain is the Citizen Kane of queer cinema. Some films make an impact on their first release only to be forgotten later. This one has lost none of its raw power. Brokeback Mountain was the breakthrough film that we awaited for decades. It was an exquisitely crafted movie, a critical and commercial success, and a surprise crossover hit. Conservative pundits and the family councils all went into apoplexy, jokes were made by comedians, and the mythology of the American cowboy underwent a major revision. But, above all, Brokeback Mountain was a love story that resonated with audiences both gay and straight.

According to popular legend, playwright Tennessee Williams underwent psychoanalysis in 1957 to "cure" his homosexuality and the play Suddenly Last Summer was the result. This is inaccurate; the truth is much more complicated than that. Many view Suddenly Last Summer, especially the film version, as being one of the ultimate artistic expressions of a self loathing queer. The inclusion of a negatively portrayed homosexual is hardly proof of this; Williams' fiction is populated with far more grotesque examples of heterosexuals.

Edwardian England was not a good time to be gay. The climate was so bad that noted novelist E.M. Forster began writing a book with a homosexual hero in 1913 that he never published in his lifetime. That book, of course, is Maurice and, in 1987, Merchant Ivory Productions adapted the book to the screen. The film features superb performances and a meticulous attention to period detail. It is a rich filmgoing experience and one of the most beautiful films in all of queer cinema.
new phoenix theatre