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I wish more people understood this simple fact!
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The Americans
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Directed by Jonathan Lisecki
United States, 2012
Philadelphia Film Festival
Jenn (Jenn Harris) and Matt (Matthew Wilkas) are 30-something friends from college. He’s gay, she’s straight. He’s just out of a long relationship, she’s had zero luck in her love life. Both feel the call of commitment, so they decide to have a baby through traditionally heterosexual means.
Every description for Gayby includes the phrase “the old fashioned way” in some iteration. While the awkward sex – especially the first time – between Jenn and Matt is truly hilarious, the film also has flashes of poignancy with its mostly tongue-in-cheek look at modern relationships.
‘Circumstance’ – The Personal, the Political and the Persian:
Circumstance
Written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz
France, USA, Iran, 2012
Coming out of a recent screening of ‘Circumstance’ (in the presence of Maryam Keshavarz, the writer/director) my friend and I, rather wowed, agreed that while heartache is universal, freedom is a privilege, a didactic take somewhat misrepresentative of the teenage same-sex melodrama not devoid of the occasional near-prurient moments of lingerie-on-nubile-flesh or insistent camera frolicking over the sensuousness of central character Shireen’s (Sarah Kazemy) visage. Despite these pre-eminently Western, rather clichéd visual tropes of framing feminine beauty (no doubt informed by the author’s American upbringing), Keshavarz’s feature debut, winner of the 2011 Sundance Audience Award, carries a refreshing, heart-rending sincerity, an unpolished and at times awkward poise befitting the characters beginner status, in life and in love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td-cYUVOg4Q
Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen are a pair of sixteen-year old Teheran schoolmates who tread a delicate ground of fumbling eroticism superimposed on a sibling-like bond. It so happens that underage same-sex pairing is not exactly the order of the day in present-day Teheran – the eponymous circumstance of the title, the make-or-break sine qua non of Atafeh’s and Shireen’s teenage love.
Lesbian Scene Analysis: ‘Game of Thrones S01E7 – You Win Or You Die’
The critically acclaimed HBO series, Game of Thrones, has been lauded for a great many things, and rightfully so. But amongst the few criticisms that this Golden Globe winning television series has attracted is one of irrefutable cogency – the show features an exorbitantly inordinate amount of female nudity. In her polemic against such indiscretions, Mary McNamara, TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, quite succinctly said, “Maybe it’s time to tone down the tits.”
Many make the claim that it somehow adds to the seedy atmosphere of the depicted era or that it accurately captures the rampant misogyny of the times, but there are even more, including McNamara, that believe that the show is taking advantage of HBO’s notoriously lax nudity restrictions and revels in gratuity in order to give the male viewer (pun intended) “more bang for the buck”.
As a heterosexual male, I readily, and sheepishly, admit that the show’s alleged nudity for nudity’s sake mantra doesn’t really bother me, but with the overwhelmingly copious amount in Game of Thrones, I can understand the distaste. If the gender roles were reversed, I know I’d feel more than a little unease.
In fact, McNamara writes about how, “There are no male brothels, no scenes of clothed women, or men for that matter, sitting around chatting in a room filled with naked men”. To her, the show’s nudity is fairly one-sided to say the least, and I find myself agreeing with her.
Inside Out 2012: ‘Keep the Lights On’; a powder Blue Valentine
Keep the Lights On
Directed by Ira Sachs
Written by Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias
USA, 2012
Keep the Lights On tells the story of Erik Rothman (Thure Lindhardt), a gay Danish documentary filmmaker living in late 90’s New York City. While not filming, Erik likes to patron the city’s phone-sex lines, soliciting no-strings-attached one-night stands with complete strangers. In one of those random encounters, he meets Paul (Zachary Booth), whom he starts a relationship with. But as the two men start building a life together, a not-so-hidden vice begins taking a heavy toll on their relationship, resulting in pain, loss, and desperation.
The most accurate way to describe Keep the Lights On and its many flaws is to compare and contrast it with Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine. In the aforementioned, the lead characters, played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, chronicles a relationship that also devolves into shambles.
The reason why Blue Valentine works is because it posits a genuinely tragic situation. In it, Gosling and Williams’ characters meet and fall in love in a touching, almost whimsical fashion. Their relationship blossoms organically and unimpeded by outside meddling, so when everything starts falling apart at the seams, we are left questioning why. We come to understand that it’s simply because they’ve grown apart from each other, and this brutal frankness and simplicity makes the entire affair more moving, creating a film of lasting emotional effect.
Clip from one of the greatest #gay films I have ever seen - Jean Genet’s ‘Un Chant D’Ampour’ #fb
Un chant d’amour
je adore cette film!!!
The media-driven stereotype of the LGBT community is largely of an affluent white community. The well turned out men of Queer Eye putting you in fancy clothes, decor and food. Will rooming with Grace in a Manhattan apartment. A trendy liberal in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. To the degree that society wants to think about homosexuals, they want gay to mean happy and fabulous. This isn’t the reality for many, especially LGBT youth from poor urban communities. It’s a sad fact that Black Protestant and Hispanic Catholic parents are often less accepting of homosexuality, leaving these kids in a bind. A few recent films have attempted to shine a light on this reality, though as one director noted, often reduced by distributors to “urban niche” (urban meaning Black and niche meaning LGBT) and not likely to have broad appeal.
Ricky D shows off his two pups
