VQFF

Review: Strong and Silent Types (VQFF)

This year I’ve only managed to see one film at the VQFF but it’s a collection of five shorts, so that makes it feel like I’ve seen a lot more.

Strong and Silent Types also could have been called Those Crazy Gay Drunks as it seemed like every other character was an alcoholic. Is there something I don’t know about gay men? Spoilers ahoy below!

In order:

Last Call. This is the one high-concept piece in which an alcoholic (!) gay man seeks to reconcile with the guy who left him some time before. He manages to convince the ex to meet him, drives off and promptly gets into some kind of horrible accident (that you don’t actually see). Instead of ending up under a sheet at the local morgue, Gavin finds himself in a bar that is empty save for one of those wise older women that exist mainly as supporting characters in morality tales. She pours him three shots, which he refuses as he no longer drinks. She insists and each drink causes him to flashback to key moments in his relationship with Mark, the acoustic guitar-playing, singing and wanting-to-adopt-a-child guy he used to be with. They are set to adopt but Gavin is, well, a drunk. Instead they break up.

Gavin laments to his mystic barkeep that it’s a shame fate had decided he was to end up dead after finally getting a chance to meet with David again (by this time he realizes the bar is some kind of way-point on his journey to the afterlife). She assures him that she can undo the accident if he drinks the last shot, which has the look of fresh Windex. He gulps it down and finds himself back in the car. He heads off to meet Mark but as he pulls up he sees his ex kissing another guy and handing off a small child to him. It’s clear that Mark has taken his pale blue Japanese guitar and started making music with someone else. Gavin then finds himself back at the bar where the woman, who confesses she has never been in love, and thus has no particular insights to offer, reveals that well, maybe you really are dead after all. Oops, my bad! But go on and leave the bar and get ready for the afterlife.

The afterlife turns out to be a really bright dock on the ocean with a bench where Mark is waiting with guitar. The End.

If you’re scratching your head at this point, you’re probably not alone. Even given its Twilight Zone pedigree, the story doesn’t make much sense. Feeding booze to a recovering alcoholic should serve some purpose beyond a plot device but nope, that’s all it is. The wise old woman turns out to not be very wise. In fact, she’s not really much more insightful than an eggplant sitting on the counter would have been. At least if the barkeep had been young and good-looking there would have been some eye candy. The ‘you’re not really dead — oh, wait, yes you are!’ seemed pointless but mostly I’m baffled by the ending, which seems to suggest that the afterlife is a fantasy world where you get exactly what you want. I suppose there’s an undeniable appeal there but Gavin would presumably know that Mark was really back on Earth boffing his new BF and raising the son he was too drunk to commit to having. That might prove a bit distracting in fantasyland. Thumbs sideways.

Little Love. This is a simple story of cheaters and their cheatin’ ways. It starts with three friends, two of whom are a couple. One half of the couple flies off on a trip, the hot Latino other half invites the mutual friend over and they boff in an energetic sex scene. The boring other half of the couple comes back, finds out and is all “I trusted you!” and then it’s over. That’s really it. There is no particular insight offered here and the piece is so short (10 minutes) that there’s no room for any kind of character growth or development. The message seems to be ‘don’t cheat on your friend with his super-hot Latino boyfriend’. Good advice! The worst part of this short film, apart from some stilted dialogue and somewhat wooden performances (except in bed, oddly enough) is the poignant piano or PP as I call it. This is heard throughout most of the shorts and is used to telegraph emotional moments, of which there are many, judging from the virtual poignant piano concertos taking place. You can hear a lot of the PP in the trailer for the film. At least there are no alcoholics in this short.

Disarm. A 30-something guy arranges to meet a 20-something guy through an online hookup site but instead of having sex, they engage in a wide-ranging conversation about sex, being gay, childhood, drinking and more. The 18-minute short is a character study and much of it a study of contrasts — the bitter older man still recovering from the wounds of his childhood and growing up gay, set against the glib young man who resolutely declares how masculine he is and how much he hates ‘fems’. They come to verbal blows, with the older man telling the young man that he both sounds and walks like a gay man — something the younger man obviously takes to heart as he ‘adjusts’ his stride after leaving the older man’s apartment. At times amusing and revealing, this is one of the stronger shorts in the presentation.

Promise. Oof. This one features an alcoholic, poignant piano, two essentially unlikable characters, a few unintentionally funny lines and a simulated rape. And it’s a comedy.

Just kidding about the comedy part.

This is a dour drama about a relationship falling apart. Stu (alcoholic) and Chris are about to get married but Stu has broken the somewhat arbitrary rules of their premarital open relationship by ‘double-dipping’ with another man by going back to him for another round of lovin’. This results in a lot of yelling, accusations both real and imagined and ends with Chris pulling off Stu’s clothes, throwing him on their bed and raping him over Stu’s loud and persistent protests. The film ends the next morning with the two of them meeting in the hallway of their home, both dressed for the wedding, though it is deliberately left as an open question of whether they will go through with the ceremony or not. “We have to,” Stu protests the night before, “all those people are showing up!” While the actors here are mostly fine, they are given dialogue that is pretty stiff at time and really, both of them come off as jerks you’d be happy not knowing, so I’m not sure what the point of the film was, except to perhaps show that not all gay men are witty and carefree like on Will & Grace. This may have worked better as a feature-length piece where the characters could have been fleshed out more. Hard to recommend.

Professor Godoy. The lightest and most daring short comes from Brazil. It features a classic premise, succinctly summed up by Van Halen as ‘hot for teacher’. In this case the teacher is a stern and exacting math professor at a private school, who tells us in the narration that he has always counted the exact number of steps to the school where he teaches ‘brats’ who ‘never grow older’ while he does. His dull routines change when one of his students, a young man named Felipe, starts including cryptic math-themed notes with his assignments that indicate an attraction to the professor. Godoy is initially repulsed, and rebuffs the attempts, until one night he finds himself waking up from a wet dream about Felipe. Awkward.

Even more awkward, Felipe shows up at Godoy’s home and gives him a slip of paper with an address on it, telling him to meet him in two hours (it’s okay, Felipe explains, they are no longer in school). Godoy says he will do no such thing and of course ends up sitting on a park bench at the appointed time. Felipe arrives and the film ends with a silent montage of the two on the bench, telling stories and laughing.

While the subject is provocative, the writer-director (who was at the screening and took questions after) plays it fairly safe — there is no sex depicted, not even touching or an errant kiss. Even at the end it’s ambiguous what sort of relationship the two men will have. Still, the actors are natural and the presentation is almost light enough that one might be inclined to call it innocent, if not for the actual subject matter. The director, Gui Ashcar, admitted in the Q&A after that the fantasy sequence — which consists of the two alone in the classroom, each at their desks and with Felipe advancing through a sequence of blackouts, toward Godoy — was originally meant to be less a fantasy and more explicit but as they were filming in an actual school, there was pressure to keep things a little more PG-rated. Another mark in the film’s favor is the beautiful cinematography, easily the best of all the short features. This was perhaps the only one to actually have the imprint of a director interested in telling a story, not simply teaching a lesson. Ultimately a pleasant diversion but not much more. Still, thumbs up.

Four VQFF reviews

Last week I went to four films at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and as one might expect, it was a mixed bag (or fruit basket, if you prefer). Below are my reviews.

Ciao

Here’s the description from the VQFF website: “When Jeff’s lifelong best friend Mark dies, he is left in charge of handling Mark’s possessions and tying up loose ends. Through a trail of Mark’s email correspondence, Jeff learns of Mark’s secret online romance with Andrea, a handsome Italian who is scheduled to visit the United States and meet Mark for the first time. With the trip already booked, Andrea decides to come anyway and learn more about his recently departed friend. In the midst of grieving, these two strangers share a single night of intimate conversation, good old American country music and sexual tension that leads to perhaps what is the most tender (yet still steamy) brief encounter ever portrayed in queer cinema.”

And my take: The premise is interesting but the execution is thwarted by stiff acting and a script filled with wooden dialogue and lots of not much happening. There are three main characters: Jeff, his adopted Asian sister and Andrea, the man from Italy. Jeff is an earnest but bland character and Adam Neal Smith’s portrayal isn’t bad per se, he just shows no real emotion until the very end and I suppose it’s meant to be seen as a cathartic release but it falls flat instead. Alessandro Calza fares better, perhaps because he can hide behind the facade of a character handling a non-native language. The sister has some amusing lines but again the acting feels rather wooden. As the tone is consistent across all actors, I wonder if it may have been an issue with the director’s handling of them.

Another negative was not that the film was low budget but that it didn’t acknowledge that and work within its limitations. There is a scene with Jeff and Andrea driving to the cemetery and apparently the production could not afford to have the car towed on a trailer. Instead the camera is placed in the backseat. While Calza is seen in profile while chatting, Smith never looks anywhere except at the road — which is understandable because he is actually driving — but as a result you never see his face for the entire scene. Why not shoot the scene with them walking in the cemetery instead or somehow frame it so you could properly see the actors? There were also a series of long framed shots or tracking shots of the city skyline at night that didn’t serve any purpose but to pad out the film’s length.

Perhaps the highlight of the film came during that “brief encounter”. When Jeff and Andrea started kissing some guy in the audience began applauding loudly, as if this heralded a great moment in gay cinema or something. Definitely the best laugh in the movie. 🙂

The Coast is Queer

“This year’s local shorts program could have been renamed The Coast is Brave and Outrageous due to the bold and shameless stories, like lisa g’s look at women in Riverview Mental Hospital in the 1940s and Clark Nikolai’s exploration of foreskin ‘docking’.”

My take: This is a collection of 13 shorts. I’ll highlight the ones I found most memorable (for better or for worse). Asylum is a surprisingly sympathetic look at the long-closed Riverview mental facility narrated by a former staff member, ending with a “twist” as a lesbian inmate checks out with one of the female staff, a rather surprising event during the 1940s. Another tale set in the 1940s (1948) is Caught, a silent look at two high school students — one a member of the drama club, the other a Bible group — whose innocent sleepover ends up being not so innocent. This is a wistful and well-shot drama, combining moments of comedy with the crushing pain of a love — and life — denied. Withchrave struck me as a pointless visual exercise, showing “witches” in various states of dress and undress cavorting, smoking and doing “witchy” stuff. Did I need to see a full frontal shot of a nude woman peeing? No, I didn’t. But hey, one more thing to scratch off the list of “things I never planned on seeing but saw anyway”. I guess this film was meant to evoke a feeling of sensuality or something so it’s perhaps not surprising that it didn’t click with me.

Galactic Docking Company was a rather randy but very funny short that combined stock NASA footage (mainly from Mission Control) with dockings involving rockets and love rockets, if you know what I mean. The combination of music and perfectly timed editing showing the reactions of the various NASA engineers made this a bawdy ol’ good time. Swans was essentially penis worship set to music that I found uninteresting despite being a personal fan of the subject. The lowlight of the collection was Cindy Doll. Before the shorts began, a number of directors spoke about their films and the director of Cindy Doll warned that her piece tackled a taboo subject and it might offend or make people uncomfortable. She invited people to discuss the film with her afterward. I correctly pegged it as a take on child abuse before it started. The film consisted of the director naked in a bathtub with the titular Cindy Doll. As the horrors of child abuse were depicted with the doll being stripped and spanked among other things, loud, discordant noises would occasionally blare out for some kind of effect (maybe this was the uncomfortable part the director referenced, as my ears were not experiencing what I would call pleasure). The director would regularly begin pleasuring herself with the doll, looking up at the camera with (guilty?) eyes. Um, symbolism! Maybe. The whole thing came off as self-indulgent twaddle. The only part that offended me was knowing I’d not get back the time I’d spent watching it. Here’s my advice: If you were abused as a child, see a therapist, don’t make a short film about it.

I’ll end with the highlight of the show, Coffee. This was one of the few professionally-shot pieces (several were done specifically for a Super 8 competition or by high school students as part of an anti-homophobia campaign — and those were well-done for what they were). The premise is simple — a lesbian and gay friend are having coffee at a cafe and it quickly becomes apparent that the woman’s recent failed relationship has pushed her off the deep end, as she has become obsessed with Kate Walsh from “Grey’s Anatomy”. The writing is sharp and funny and the two actors deliver their lines with expert timing. It was inspiring enough to make me want to finish “The Famous Polka”. It’s one of 10 different vignettes culled from a longer piece and can be viewed here. Highly recommended.

Otto; Or, Up With Dead People

“Film theorists claim that the zombie genre is a form of social commentary, relevant to our consumerist and apathetic present times. If so, then what comment does Bruce LaBruce make with his gay zombie flick? Attack the heteronormative establishment? Fuck your brains out (then eat them)? Whatever social messages might be gleaned from LaBruce’s work, the Canadian director brings us a perverse and satirical cinematic original.

Otto is a young neo-Goth loner and pretty hot for a dead guy. Wandering the streets of Berlin, Otto stumbles upon a casting call for a zombie film. After seeing his half-hearted audition, radical lesbian filmmaker Medea Yarn not only becomes convinced that Otto will be the next big underground movie star, but forces the lead actor, Fritz, to take Otto home with him. While Medea and Fritz struggle to finish their film, Otto searches for the human beneath the zombie.”

This was both a send-up and an affectionate (?) homage to zombie movies, gay porn and pretentious art films. Shot in Germany with a local cast, Otto features plenty of gore (mostly disembowelment and entrails, as one would expect in a zombie film), fleeting but explicit sex scenes and at times a hilarious take on the self-styled film auteur personified by Medea as she works to finish her underfunded “masterpiece”, “Up With Dead People”, a film chronicling the rise of gay zombies. Into this comes Otto, who fails to convince the director that he is in fact an actual zombie but gets cast in the lead role, anyway.

The film starts rather slowly and for the first 20 minutes or so felt more like a clumsy homage to art films than anything else but when the various characters intersect it pulls together and the rest of the ride is pretty enjoyable. There’s a graphic scene of zombie penetration that will likely put you off your lunch for a week or so and a sex orgy that is the film-within-a-film’s conclusion also has some very naughty bits that, while enticing, seemed gratuitous in the given context. I found the ending a bit confusing as it strongly suggests Otto is no longer a zombie, then seems to revert him back to a more undead state. As expected, the film’s ending is not exactly happy but appropriate. The actress that played Medea was probably my favorite, if only because she was so appropriately over-the-top with her views on the terrible capitalist society she is part of. She also gives a small girl eating chocolate the what-for in what may have been the film’s funniest moment.

Boycrazy

“Everywhere I go there’s a guy to catch my eye. It makes me kinda crazy, like I’m back in junior high.” Is Corey—the dreamy lead in Boycrazy—singing your song? If so, there are plenty of guys to catch your eye in this lineup of men’s short films.

Serving up the first piece of eye candy is Zak, an underappreciated topless waiter in Dinx. Filmmaker Michael Mew treats us to some homegrown guys, co-starring local drag diva Symone, in his new science fiction romance Q-Case. A chorus line of “show bears” dances in King County. And the quirky musical Boycrazy explores the pros and cons of single life.”

As noted above, this was four short films. Dinx features a cute and short protagonist who seems to suffer a dimensional rift that takes him back to his childhood while still dressed as a topless waiter. Much like that character, this film was cute and short, amusing but not laugh-out-loud funny. Q-Case is a parody of the X-Files with a definite queer twist. Perhaps not surprisingly, the central premise centers around anal probes. This was a solid effort, although the acting of several of the characters was leaning more toward the amateur side. The love interest of the alien/clone handled his part well and reacted perfectly to his precious shoe collection getting vaporized. I admit I also enjoyed the idea of the Mulder character getting a giant black drag queen as his temporary partner and voice of reason. King County is a series of scenes centering around a theater group auditioning actors for movies turned into stage musicals. Among some of the entries: Mommie Dearest, Fame (with bears) and most hilariously, a musical version of Top Gun featuring “butch lesbians” that has Maverick and Goose (or was it Ice?) singing and dancing on the flight deck. The actress playing Maverick looked similar enough to Tom Cruise to be somewhat disturbing. The final and longest piece was Boycrazy, featuring James May, an actor who could be Neil Patrick Harris’s younger brother. This is a musical about dating and relationships (online and otherwise) and is done in a style very similar to Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. The singing is uniformly excellent and the dance numbers, though not flashy, are energetic, as is the film as a whole. I really enjoyed this funny and sometimes insightful look at the trials and tribulations of men dating men — and not just because I have gone through some of my own recently (none set to music, alas).