queer cinema

Tuesday was supposed to be movie night... but alas, there wasn't anything showing that we either wanted to see or hadn't seen already (and nothing that would have been worth a repeat visit)... so we tried my local video store (not one of the big chain places, just the random small business kind), which I hadn't been to since it moved across and down the road to much, much, much smaller premises.

But the downside of going to the movies regularly is that you see pretty much everything you want to see when it's out, which means when you go to the video store, there isn't much to choose from.

In the end we didn't get anything, came back here and watched bits of my Oprah boxed set... but while we were in the video store I happened to notice the cover for Gay Sex in the 70's... I mean, c'mon, it's a little hard to miss... and once I'd seen that I realised that they had a small, but interesting looking gay section going on. Yay my local video store.

So, yesterday, since I got paid for my work last week I went out and borrowed a bunch of DVDs... and because the store has this whole "1 new release $7, any addition rental $2.75" thing it was actually cheaper to get four at once than it would have been to rent them like two at a time. Actually I wish I'd gotten at least one of the other titles now... but it's a bit late for that.

Two of the DVDs I got because I really wanted to see them, and have done for a while (Gay Sex and HellBent), but the other two were mostly rented off the covers... Stupid Boy especially...

I'm not going to do my full "Movie Night" review/rating thing on them, but I had a few thoughts I figured I would share...

Gay Sex in the 70's
I remember seeing some random mentions of this online a while back, so I really wanted to see this... it was actually quite interesting (although it really should have been called "Gay Sex in New York in the 70's" since that was what it was about), a little sad in parts, especially when they started talking about the less fun aspects of life back then. Scarily, the comments about being able to find sex anywhere, anytime, any place reminded me of a certain Blogger I read... and while I'm not sure if I wish I'd been born a decade or so earlier (and on the other side of the planet), it was interesting to see how that particular part of the gay community got from where they were then to where they are now. Unfortunately I did notice that I seem to have a slight thing for bad 70's mo's... either that or just hot 70's bodies, and I wasn't turned off by the bad facial hair. I was also really curious about a lot of the photos that were used during the documentary... photos of guys obviously having sex in the places they're talking about... and I don't think they were staged photos either... just somebody wandering around with a camera in the middle of a gay cruising area taking photos of guys having sex... good photos too actually... it's so not something you could get away with today, and I kind of wonder how the photographer got away with it back then.

Stupid Boy (aka Garçon stupide)
This one was very odd... but then you get that when you watch a DVD just because you think the boy on the cover is obscenely hot. The fact that it was from Switzerland should have given me some kind of tip off... but you have to love European gay flicks... you might not always know what the hell is going on, and they may sometimes talk you to death, but they'll usually show a decent amount of full frontal male nudity. The style of the thing was probably the weirdest part... it was kind of like a documentary (especially since the main character, Loic, kept having conversations with the guy behind the camera as though he was a character in the movie, which he was, we just never saw him) or a reality teevee show in parts, but one where the subject isn't aware that there is a camera... just weird really. The "star", Pierre Chatagny, is as pretty as all hell, but at time seems every single part of the title of the movie. Granted it was his first movie, and I think there was some parts of it that were very improvised (the discussions with the off-camera character particularly)... and I also wonder how staged some of the sex scenes were... or maybe he's just a better actor than I think he is...

HellBent
This was the other one I really wanted to see... especially since it never came to any cinemas here when it was out originally... not that I'm really surprised by that, I was actually more surprised to find it in the video store. It was about what I expected... A little cheesy, a little sweet, a little sexy, but actually more amusing than I'd expected... all in all a typical B-grade slasher type movie, but the whole gay theme was a nice addition. The one thing that did bug me (and would probably have bugged me if it had been a "straight" slasher movie) was that the villain, "The Devil", wasn't given any real kind of motivation or reason for wanting to slash up those particular boys... well, other than the fact that they walked through the park (his park?)... but, you know... like two lines of questionable dialogue about how there used to be a cult that worshiped in that park, or the old "they tell stories of a devil man"... ANYTHING... unless they were planning on saving that for a sequel (which the ending pretty much seemed to leave the door wide open for).

Dorian Blues
This was the only one I had left to watch today... and when I first started it I thought it was going to be one of those movies that you just cringe through rather than laugh... but maybe about quarter of the way in I started to enjoy it. It's a fairly standard "coming of age/coming out" kinda story... but it's a little quirky in spots... and I have to say it also touched a cord with me in a couple of other spots.

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