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By John Demetry
This goofy, sad rant against political and religious hypocrisy in the face of AIDS features a sardonically French voice-over narration, instructional video style re-enactments, and a word-association structural technique. It's freshly funny-and touching-in a enjoyably French way. However, it ultimately suffers from some of the elitist intellectual trappings that mar so many Strand Releases, especially American ones (Todd "[safe]" Haynes, check your pulse!). Fourier's Catholic-bashing jokes about the Pope are a prime example. Funny, maybe, but hardly radical, unlike, say, shorts by the likes of Francois Ozon (A Summer Dress) or Phillipe Barrassat (My Pal Rachid).
When Gray's technique focuses on the sexual tension between a gay guy and a straight guy road-tripping to visit the straight guy's girlfriend, he achieves some real small-scale beauty. (A straight couple in the audience walked out during a heavy-breathing, darkly lit hand job scene.) Just One Time is essentially offensive--a female fantasy of punishing her boyfriend who wants her to sleep with another women by making him sleep with another man. I always think Guillermo Diaz is an interesting actor, here as a neighborhood fag boi itching to move on from porn to the real deal-though again, only here with a straight guy who seems to have jumped out of one of his man mags. As funny as he is, stripping his clothes off and thanking the couple for the opportunity, my enthusiasm for him is probably more from his work in Araki's Nowhere, where he gets a soulful, heartbreaking scene confronting his junky boyfriend, than anything in this trite piece. This one is going to be turned into a feature. I don't look forward to it. "$30" has a very funny moment where a closeted gay boi runs into a glass door, thinking it's open, while the female prostitute his father has set him up with, falls to the ground laughing. So it feels somewhat like a betrayal to see her character left in the gutter after they bond, while he gets to frolic on the beach with a boyfriend gained because of the support this prostitute has given him. Hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold nonsense, but Sara Gilbert is good in the role, and gay boi is nice to look at. As mediocre as these shorts are, they're pristine jewels next to Jason Gould's Inside Out. Gould, the son of Elliot Gould and Barbra Streisand, might be remembered from his role as Babs' son in The Prince of Tides. He was very fine in the movie; beautiful, athletic, and perhaps drawing upon his sexuality to create a sensitive character nicely matched with Nick Nolte. Gould now comes off as a prissy, overacting spoiled brat as the star of his directorial debut. It's one thing to be flaming, it's another thing to seem phony while you're doing it; as if he thinks that's the only way the audience will get that he's gay. His once athletic body has sunk from his broad shoulders to a protruding paunch. What's so hideously funny about that is how he constantly tries to hide it. jogging with a fanny pack in the front. He edits and frames the final, "liberating" striptease to show off his ass (body double?) and his shoulders, but ostentatiously leaves his gut out of view. His dishonesty runs deeper still. He takes easy potshots at the Scientology cult on his child-of-a-celebrity quest for happiness. It would have been appropriate, and scathing, to goof on Scientology's reputation as the Hollywood Closet. But Gould is a wimp. His character wants to have a relationship with some guy who wants to remain discreet, and so can't date the son of two celebrities. Who would want to date a guy like that anyway? The answer, of course, is Gould, who has directed here an ode to the closet that eludes him.
Each of the collections had their ups and downs, but none so low as this.
And nothing in Boys Life 3 compares to the delicate sense of discovery
conveyed through water and steam imagery in Pool Days of the first Boys
Life. Or to the colorful, witty Trevor in Boys Life 2 that was so much
better than the similar, but overrated, My Life In Pink. Also, the party
kid scene got covered in Must Be the Music, heightened by director
Nickolas Perry's outsider longing.
Mysterious, beautiful, explorative, these earlier films marked the best tendencies of the American Queer cinema, while these new shorts show us their worst: self-indulgent tickets to bigger budgets with which to inflate the filmmakers' egos. What would Freud say about that? They should just order penis pumps on-line and leave filmmaking to artists. |
American queer cinema seems to be in trouble. I didn't get to see Urbania,
which Gregory Solman at 
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