Queer Beacon

The Lookout (2007) - LightShed 5

Great script, mediocre movie.  In The Lookout, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a guy marked for life by a bad car accident, he goes from stud-hockey-player to janitor, and no one takes him seriously, not even his family.  In comes Matthew Goode hotting his way through town to lure Joseph into crime.

I was a little disappointed with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's acting (he gets a little better towards the end, but still...disappointing).  Jeff Daniels, who plays Joseph's roommate, was very good and so was Isla Fisher.  Matthew Good was hot but bad bad bad.

We had one gay character, I think.  I will talk a little bit about that after the jump -- my discussion will ruin the plot.  You can watch the trailer here.

[SPOILER AHEAD]

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen - 2006) - No Gay Content

What an excellent movie.  The Lives of Others got the Oscar for best foreign language film this year (I think Volver deserved to win, but to win, Volver needed to be nominated -- it wasn't; and Lives of Others is pretty darn good, so let's move on).

In The Lives of Others, we take a look at the nasty practice that East Germany's Stasi had in the 80s: watching over other people's lives, following their every move, phone calls, etc.  All to make sure they were not a threat to the system.  Sounds familiar? 

Here, Ulrich Mühe plays the officer in charge of following the lives of theater director Sebastian Koch and his wife, actress Martina Gedeck, and the movie shows how all of that ends up.

You shouldn't miss this one, it's a great movie.  No gay content, though.

Leeches! (2003) - No Gay Content

By Guest Reviewer Tottyland

The name David DeCoteau has never really been synonymous with quality and it isn't here. It's the usual silliness coupled with a lot of male flesh.

The plot, for what it is, involves giant leeches that are slowly taking out a college swim team. The chaps all die in long drawn out scenes usually with little on, while the girls are bumped off fast enough to avoid spoiling the real purpose of the film. Plot holes abound but that's to be expected (there is one major jump-off-the-sofa-and-shout-at-the-TV flaw). As a victim can escape the leeches just by moving away slowly, they have to be immobile so Josh Henderson's character gets tied up, Trevor Harris' passes out, and Matt Twining's can't get up a pool ladder. To top it all the plot twist at the end looks tacked on, and it probably is.

The cast consists of television stars like Josh Henderson, soap actors such as Matt Twining, and DeCoteau regulars like Michael Lutz, Greg Lyczkowski and Trevor Harris. You know what to expect: bad acting and lots of eye candy.

In summary, better watched with the volume down, with remote in hand.

IMDb page for Leeches! here. [QB Note: Tottyland is right on the money with his review, take a look at some of the scenes from "Leeches!":]

[More at Tottyland.]

Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno - 2006) - No Gay Content

By Guest Reviewer Jimbo.info

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, creator of Blade II, Hellboy and Mimic gets serious with Pan's Labyrinth, but doesn't discard his skill with fantastic visuals.  Contrasting childhood wonder with the horrors of reality, he brings us into the two worlds of an 11-year-old girl living through the Spanish Civil War.

In the girl's fantasy world a faun gives her three tasks that will allow her ascendance to her true father's side. As her tasks grow more difficult, so do the challenges of real life with an ailing mother, a vicious stepfather, and keeping a dire secret. Sergi López plays the girl's stepfather, a cruel fascist captain, with disturbing alacrity that I hope gains him deserving recognition.

This film is definitely one to see in the theaters if it makes it to your town.

Official Website, here.  Interview with Guillermo del Toro in The A.V. Club, here.

Little Children (2006) - LightShed 5

Don't you just love fall?  The crisp cool air (I know, corny) and all the great movies coming out.  There are so many good movies out there to be seen...and Little Children should really be on the top of your list.

In the movie, Kate Winslet plays a mom who is sort of sick of her day-to-day routine and of the suburban moms surrounding her.  She goes to this park with her little daughter and there she befriends Patrick Wilson's character.  He plays a stay at home dad and former jock who is sick of his wife (played by Jennifer Connelly) expecting him to be a big-shot attorney. 

Great acting.  Kate rocked.

Oh, and there's also a sex offender on the loose, which creates an awkward tension throughout the movie.  I was glad the sex offender did not prey on young boys (remember the distinction between gays and perverts has been recently blurred with the Foley scandal).

Anyway, we had gay content.  A narrator in the movie is telling us that Kate's husband is considering an affair, and the narrator goes on to say that that would be as unbelievable as someone telling Kate's husband that his neighbor is a transvestite and his co-worker likes to have rough gay sex in bathrooms.  We see those two hypothetical scenes.  Sort of neutral stance.

We see a lot of Patrick Wilson's butt and torso.  A lot.

Little Children is on theaters now in limited release. 

I have a bit of gossip, NSFW pics, and an additional gay content after the jump.  I will spoil the plot a bit though. 

The trailer is here:

The Line of Beauty (2006) - LightShed 10

What a great mini-series.  I saw the three episodes one right after the other at the Vancouver International Film Festival. 

At first I thought that maybe a big Hollywood movie production would have done a better job, but later into the mini-series I actually came to prefer this BBC production, it was a great way to look back at the years of Mr. Thatcher in England.

The Line of Beauty was adapted to screen from Alan Hollinghurst's Man Booker Prize winning novel.  The novel is beautiful, I had read it a while a ago, and I think Andrew Davies did a nice job translating it to screen.

In The Line of Beauty, we are in the 80s' under Margaret Thatcher and we follow Dan Stevens' character getting sucked into the high life of a wealthy family, the family of his best friend from Cambridge, played by Oliver Coleman.

We had loads of gay content, including quite a few candid sex scenes involving the main characters.

Our main character was gay.  Nick Guest (that's the name of Dan Stevens' character) was probably the sanest person in the whole story too, and I think that was the highlight for the gay content.  Granted, he snorted cocaine, and I would have preferred he didn't of course, but I guess it was the 80s, there was a lot of money around him, and I think coke was really big back then. 

Nick Guest's sexual orientation is known to everybody in the movie -- he was not afraid to flaunt it in many important social occasions, and most accepted his orientation with no problem, the ones who didn't were seen in a negative light.  Yay! 

You have got to see this one.  You can catch The Line of Beauty on Logo or get the DVD here. You should definitely check it out.

I will talk a bit more about additional gay content in the mini-series but that will spoil some of the plot.

The Last Kiss (2006) - LightShed 8

Have you guys heard the opening theme for Weeds?  The song is called Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds, I love it, it's about how people are so squared and lacking in diversity nowadays.  People grow up, get a higher education, family, and all end up looking just the same.  In The Last Kiss, Zach Braff's character is faced with the prospect of becoming one more example of what Reynolds sings about, of not having any more surprises in his life.  Sameness scares him, he might become just like any other guy and live a dull life. 

You may think that Zach's character is not at all actually concerned with looking and living like every other guy, that he is just concerned that he'll have to finally grow up and won't get to have (immature) fun anymore.

But I bought his desperation at the prospect of "no more surprises," his fear that everything will be super planned from now on. 

His life has been perfect.  He has a good career as an architect.  The girlfriend is pretty, smart, and nice, with loving parents (played well by Tom Wilkinson and Blythe Danner), and she is pregnant.

Zach meets this cute little girl in a wedding party, he is about to turn 30 -- he starts to wonder whether that is it for him, whether his life is over and from then on all he would have is dullness.  Should he give in to temptation and fool around?  Will that take him anywhere?

A date movie cannot get better than this.  I disagree with the few lukewarm reviews it got. 

The Last Kiss is a little on the somber side in that it is highly doubtful of happiness and the potential success of relationships.  Most of Zach's friends are also in bad shape one way or another, and the little development their characters get are meant, I guess, to show that Zach is not alone in his doubts and disenchantment with his future. 

The acting was very solid across the board, and the two main girls in the movie stole the show, they were awesome.  One was Zach's girlfriend, played by Jacinda Barrett, and the other one was Zach's girl-toy, played by The O.C.'s Rachel Bilson.  They both rocked.

And we had gay content.  In the first scene with gay content, we have two hot lesbians going at it, for the amusement of guys though...not ideal, to say the least, but I'll take it, it was positive.

Then, Casey Affleck sees Michael Weston's former girlfriend dancing with a guy (Casey and Michael are two of Zach's best friends).  Michael gets all jealous and Casey tries to calm him by saying that the guy the girl is dancing with is gay.  That he looks too good to be straight. 

And there's a little more.  We see that Zach Braff's neighbors are gay.  Yay.  Their being gay is not really spelled out, but they kinda behaved like a couple, a regular, common couple hanging out on their front porch a few times, and one of the gays even sort of helps Zach with a certain issue.  Go us!

The soundtrack?  Yummie.

What can I say, I love the stuff Zach is involved with, Garden State was one of the best movies of 2004 (certainly the most overlooked movie of that year), and Scrubs is still pretty funny.  Oh, and remember one of his breakthrough roles was in The Broken Hearts Club, where he played a gay guy (that movie was pretty bad though). 

Kudos for Paul Haggins, the writer (yeah, the guy was behind Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Casino Royale...)

Go see The Last Kiss in theaters.

Lady in the Water (2006) - No Gay Content

This is easily the worst movie from M. Night Shyamalan, but still, I liked it very much.

In Lady in the Water, Paul Giamatti is the superintendent of this building in Philadelphia.  Bryce Dallas Howard crawls out of the building's pool -- she is a water creature who needs Paul's help.

The movie is not scary at all, and it is silly at times, but it has an interesting take on people's roles, how each sees oneself and others.  The characters, Paul particularly, spend quite some time figuring out who is who and who is supposed to do what in life and in their quest to help Bryce.

Still the movie is as watchable as Freddy Rodriguez is, uh, watchable...(he plays a guy who works out just one side of his body for some reason).

No content for our gay movie review :-(

Watch the trailer here.

Lie With Me (2005) - LightShed 6

This one just broke the mediocre barrier, but it did.  It's a good movie.

Here, Lauren Lee Smith is a super slut.  She has never had an actual date.  All she wants is anonymous, protected (yay!), sex.  Think Sex and the City's Samantha and multiply that by a thousand.  That's Lauren Lee Smith's character. 

She goes around town whoring it up, and she meets Eric Balfour.  She has her first date with him and they like each other.  But will her whore instincts be stronger than what she has with Eric?

Eric is hot in Lie With Me.  This is one sexy movie.

"Down on my knees for the very first time I remember there was all this hair in my mouth. I didn't think that was what it would feel like and the guy kept forcing himself in my face saying "please, please, please." He sounded like a little girl...I didn't know if I was supposed to close my eyes or keep them open."  That's a line from out slutina. 

The soft, mellow tunes were excellent.

This is the first movie in our I Can't Believe It's Not Porn category. 

I have never seen so much penis and vagina in a movie.  Ever.  You will not believe the amount of dick time Eric Balfour gets.  You see his erect penis for chrissake!  Fully erect.  You can try to watch that scene here (probably not for long though -- it's really explicit, be warned).

We see another guy's dick too (that's Michael Facciolo, who seems better equipped than Eric by the way), and quite a lot of Lauren's vagina.

With all that sex going on, all we got was a tiny bit of content for our gay movie review.  In one scene, Lauren Lee's mother is talking about her new place and she mentions her new landlord is nice, and that he lives downstairs with his boyfriend.  Excellent, even if very short (that's why the LightShed score was not higher).

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) - LightShed 10

Excellent movie.  Just brilliant.  This is one of the most entertaining movies I saw this year.

In Little Miss Sunshine, we see a family of crazy people trying to get their little girl to a beauty pageant.  You will laugh hard.

We have Steve Carell as a gay professor who is depressed and had tried to commit suicide.  A grandpa, played by Alan Arkin, who snorts heroin.  A father, played by Greg Kinnear, who wants to be a success guru.  He's a loser, of course. 

Toni Collete plays a mom who tries to keep it together, Paul Dano is a teenager who vowed not to speak until he is admitted to the Air Force, and, finally, we have our beauty queen, played by Abigail Breslin.

Every single one of them is superb.  Even Greg Kinnear, whom I thought was a little limited, did well.

I knew that Steve Carell played a gay character here, but I was surprised with the amount of attention given to the matter -- it was all over the movie.  Very very nice.

When I first saw the trailer (watch it below), I was a little concerned that our gay would be the only screwed up one, who have attempted suicide and had an affair at work (kind of unethical, right?) and that he would be portrayed in a bad light.   

The scene you see in the trailer occurs very early in the movie and you think that grandpa Alan Arkin and the little girl would sort of be on the homophobic side.  In the trailer, grandpa says that there is another word for a guy falling in love with another guy, and, by his derogatory tone, I would be pretty sure the word grandpa is thinking of is not gay, it would be something along the lines of "faggot."  And the little girl, well, she is just a little girl, but it would have been nicer to hear something better than: "that's silly" as her reaction to a situation involving love and two men. 

But going into the movie, I think you would understand why I awarded a LightShed 10 to Little Miss Sunshine. I will discuss how Steve Carell's sexuality was portrayed in the movie but that will give away a bit too much of the plot.  I will not at all reveal the ending, but if you are like me and like to go into the movies without knowing a whole lot, stop reading here and be ready to run to the theaters on July 26, 2006, when this movie opens (that's a Wednesday  -- weird, right? The info is from the official web site).  Watch the trailer:

[SORT OF SPOILER AHEAD]