Todd Stephens’
Another Gay Movie
Showing at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
April 25 - May 7, 2006
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

Reviewed by Frank J. Avella

From the very first vibrant and colorful frame of Todd Stephens’ ironically titled Another Gay Movie, it’s quite obvious that the audience is about to enter very gay territory indeed--But NOT traditional gay movie territory. Not by a long shot.

Another Gay Movie is a teen comedy specifically tailored for gay male tweens (but very likely to appeal to gays of all ages). Envision Porkys and American Pie, only gay.Think Not Another Teen Movie or Scary Movie, only gay. Are you getting the lavender picture?

Now, the stunner: the gay-ness is accepted, even celebrated in every frame. Imagine a queer flick where no character feels angst or shame about their sexuality. Gay is not only good, it’s the only way to fly!

Now, before one sounds the groundbreaking Brokeback-bell, the movie is also silly, gross, risque’ and raunchy. It features lots of yummy pretty boys, graphic nudity (how many of you homos are already hard?) but also contains scenes of scat, vomit, enema-related troubles and many other gross out sequences.

The good news is that as spoofs go, these scenes are side-splittingly funny, especially a moment involving the main teen, Andy, meeting up with his teacher, who’s online name is Rodzilla.

The basic plot is your basic teen sex comedy plot--with a gay twist, of course (have you been paying attention?) Four senior high school friends make a vow that they will finally have sex before Labor Day. The gaggle include: Andy (Michael Carbonaro) a ravenously horny bottom who’s mother’s garden vegetables keep vanishing; Jared (Jonathan Chase), a buff Varsity jock with a “small” problem; Griff (Mitch Morris) the nerdy romantic obsessed with bettering his butt-size and Nico (Jonah Blechman), the nutty and swishy movie fan. The film follows the outrageous antics of the gayboyz as their deadline date approaches.

Written with gay glee and deftly & deliciously directed by Todd Stephens (Gypsy ‘83), Another Gay Movie creates a new sub-cinema genre: the gay teen gross-out comedy farce. Like last year’s Hellbent, which sprinkled fairy dust on the horror flick, this film is a splendid creation for a huge niche’ audience. Marketed correctly, AGM should have young poofs lining up for blocks to see it!

All four actors have charm and comic-abilities to spare and, thank the gay gods, there is nothing tentative about their performances. Special kudos go to the commandingly capable Michael Carbonaro who is a hilarious scene stealer and facial contortionist and Jonathan Chase who brings a surprising poignancy to the stock jock part.

The supporting cast, which includes: Scott Thompson; John Epperson (Lypsinka); Stephanie McVay and George Marcy, all have a crazy-ass gay time of it. (Just how many times can a critic use the word gay in a review do you suppose?)

How can you not love a film with lines like: “All Catholics are bottoms” and “What’s a boy gotta do to get some mansnatch?”

See it for the hottie boys. See it for the steamy sex and naked butts. See it for the kink and raunch. Or see it because it isn’t just another gay movie, it’s a fabulously gay movie written and directed by an out and proud gay man celebrating all things...well...gay...

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's
Brothers of the Head (UK)
Showing at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
April 25 - May 7, 2006
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

Reviewed by Frank J. Avella

Brothers of the Head, the poignant and affecting fiction feature debut from Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) exhilarates the viewer with it’s frenetic camerawork, oddball docu-storytelling and intense performances.

This oddball work appropriates from several distinct genres to create it’s own. Imagine blending Zelig with Velvet Underground with The Elephant Man with Reds with Twin Falls Idaho, and (here’s the paradox) coming up with something alltogether original and dazzling.

Brothers of the Head takes you on a rocu-journey inside the lives of conjoined twins Tom and Barry Howe (real life identical twins Harry and Luke Treadaway), who are discovered by an 1970’s music promoter and fine tuned into a pop/rock act. Their story is told via “old footage” from a documentary that was shot at the time of their career genesis, along with present interviews with those who were closest to them.

It is an easy sell that these boys actually existed (plot spoiler--they did not) since the film unfolds in a most extraordinarily real manner. Definitely NOT a mock-umentary (a la This is Spinal Tap), the characters and situations are given quite serious due and envelop the audience into complete belief capitulation.

Both Treadaway brothers (in their film debut) deliver immensely searing and impressive performances. Luke is mesmerizing as Barry, the brazen, difficult one and Harry is perfectly piercing as Tom, the quiet ticking timebomb. The entire ensemble are to be applauded as well.

Tony Grisoni has crafted a clever and disturbing script based on the novella by Brian Aldiss who gets kudos for imagining this strange and surreal saga.

The original songs are reminiscent of the glam/punk early 70’s but have a style all their own. The lyrics are simultaneously satiric and sometimes sentimental.

Brothers builds to a truly haunting final image that makes quite an impression. This is an alltogether absorbing film that piques the viewers curiosity. You find yourself desperate to know more about the Howe twins...if only they actually had existed.

Seth Grossman’s
The Elephant King
Showing at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
April 25 - May 7, 2006
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

Reviewed by Frank J. Avella

Jake is a detached alcoholic whoremonger living in Thailand (so as not to face a jail sentence in the U.S.). Oliver is his introverted, possibly-suicidal younger brother. Jake coaxes Oliver to visit him in the land of the paradox. Glitzy American-influenced sleaze exists amidst stunning ancient temples. And before you can say: “I love you long time,” Oliver has fallen for sexy Thai-gal Lek. Back at home, the boy’s overly concerned mom is not very happy.

The Elephant King is an unusual and emotionally enveloping film that features a fascinating fraternal relationship at it’s core (although the brothers’ history could have been explored more).

Shot in a contemplative style reminiscent of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Elephant has quite a few inspired scenes--most of which involve an actual elephant! As a matter of fact the manner in which the elephant is treated reflects greatly on the characters and can be seen as a metaphor for the way the United States treats the rest of the world--never really bothering to learn about a culture and, instead, forcing ours on the respective country.

The film features a fierce performance by Jonno Roberts as the self-destructive Jake. Tate Ellington impresses as the quiet Oliver. And Ellen Burstyn delivers a thoughtful performance as their perpetually worried mother.

Rarely does a Western film address Buddhist notions of life’s impermanence and death as rebirth. And while The Elephant King could have explored these themes a bit further, it stands as a captivating curio.

Michael Skolnik and Rebecca Chaiklin’s
Lockdown, USA
Showing at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
April 25 - May 7, 2006
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

News From the Front

Reviewed by Wendy R. Williams

How’s it going with the war on drugs? Any victories in the field? Hey, wasn’t this thing supposed to be over in 1973 when then Governor Nelson Rockefeller decided to get tough and had the legislature pass the “Rockefeller Drug Laws,” - the drug laws which require mandatory fifteen year prison terms for the possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs.

Well, that war’s not going so well if you are a poor black male who lives in the projects. If so, you have an excellent chance of spending your young adulthood in jail as punishment for same the kind of “dumb fuck” kid behavior that has white suburban parents hauling their kids off to rehab.

Lockdown USA tells the stories of this war and covers a group of activists who attempt to get Governor Pataki and the legislature to overturn the law. The organizers covered in the documentary range from civil rights icon Ben Chavez to politician Andrew Cuomo to Hip-Hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons to whacked-out activist/comedian Randy Credico to Wanda Best, a wife and mother who finds herself raising five children by herself after her husband was sent to prison for fifteen years for signing for a cocaine-filled Fed Exp package while he was working a construction job. (Best refused to take a deal of less than a year in prison because he insists that he is innocent).

The documentary follows Russell Simmons as he holds a rally against the laws, featuring artists like P. Diddy and Mariah Carey. It show Russell’s numerous (back and forth, back and forth) helicopter trips to Albany to talk to Governor Pataki, Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno (as nice looking a group of successful middle-aged white men as you could hope to see anywhere – all white teeth smiling and silvery suits gleaming). And smile they did as they played sucker poker with Simmons, supposedly agreeing to a deal after an all night session, then remembering things a little differently the next day.

The documentary also shows the dirty underbelly of these drugs laws: the small towns who have embraced prisons as a new industry to replace lost farms and whose local politicians lobby vigorously against repeal. We also hear from prosecutors who say they need the threat of these laws to make small time offenders turn on drug kingpins. But if you turn off all the rhetoric and just look at who is actually in prison, one could certainly conclude that the real reason all of these “powers that be” do not want to repeal the laws is an underlying belief that anything that keeps a bunch of young black men off the streets can’t be all bad.

And in the end there is some hope. Some of the more draconian provisions of the laws have been repealed and Darryl Best has been released from prison. But mandatory sentencing still remains – people are sentenced to prison by the weight of the drugs they carried and judges still have their hands tied and are unable to make common sense decisions. Everything is left in the hands of young twenty- something Assistant District Attorneys, who are trying to make their bones by showing how tough they can be on crime. And I bet a lot of these young DA’s are going to grow up to look just like Pataki, Silver and Bruno and they will smile just as big as they dance their little side step.

Reviewed by Frank J. Avella

Middletown --the name of the small town in the gritty new film by Brian Kirk--is an unrelentingly grim yet powerful tale of two Irish brothers: one strongly persuaded, at a young age, to be a man of the cloth, the other stuck in the working man’s life of strife and survival.

Beginning in a deliberately mundane but compelling manner, this highly personal drama slithers itself under your skin and then explodes in astonishing ways as the favorite son returns home and we slowly witness the Old Testament spouting religious zealot he has become. Never has a priest or preacher in a non-horror movie appeared so frightening, so monstrous.

As the arrogant, hubristic Gabriel, Matthew Macfayden is wholly unrecognizable from his formidable and sexy leading man turn in last year’s highly successful Pride and Prejudice. Here Macfayden seethes with a growing wrath that is genuinely hair-raising. And while we are never really privy to why Gabriel has gone maniacal (although strict adherence to scripture is hinted), Macfayden provides us with enough of his inner life that the real answers are probably too terrifying to touch.

Middletown is admirably directed from a minimalist script by Daragh Carville. The camerawork is perfectly stark and evocative .

Daniel Mays is excellent as Gabriel’s far more human brother and Eva Birthistle proves formidable as his pregnant wife, but the film is, ultimately, a tour de force for Macfayden.

Alex Steyermark’s
One Last Thing
Showing at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
April 25 - May 7, 2006
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

Reviewed by Frank J. Avella

Cynthia Nixon is an amazing stage, film and television actress. She has proven her extraordinary diversity in such varied projects as: Sex and the City; Warm Springs (as Eleanor Roosevelt); Robert Altman’s Tanner on Tanner and her recent Broadway triumph in Rabbit Hole.

She is so good that I longed for her when she wasn’t onscreen in One Last Thing.

Now one can argue that the movie is about Dylan (Michael Angarano) and his last dying wish. That Cynthia’s Karen is merely his mother, but as I watched the saga of Dylan, my thoughts kept going back to Karen, who apparently lost her husband (a fleeting and unbilled Ethan Hawke) at a young age and is about to lose her son as well. I kept wanting to know more about her despair and pain. I couldn’t give a damn about the superficial supermodel (Sunny Mabrey) who Dylan ‘wishes’ to sleep with. and her stereotypical self-destructive behavior. (Are there ANY happy supermodels as portrayed in films?)

I kept craving more relationship-developing scenes with Karen and the football hottie (Johnny Messner) instead of being subjected to the inane antics of Dylan’s idiotic, insensitive friends (Matt Bush & Gideon Glick). With buddies like these, death must seem like a relief!

And while I appreciated Angarano’s performance, it was obvious that only Ms. Nixon was able to rise above the 80’s movie-of-the-week trappings dictated by the script.

I applaud director Alex Steyermark for trying to avoid the maudlin, but somewhere along the way sympathy was sacrificed. Except for Cynthia Nixon’s Karen whose face registered so much in one simple (seemingly invasive) moment of hurt than this film had the right to capture.

Richard E. Grant’s
Wah-Wah
Showing at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
April 25 - May 7, 2006
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

Reviewed by Frank J. Avella

Richard E. Grant’s Wah-Wah is a warm and loving remembrance piece that is rich with rewarding moments and stellar performances.

Actor turned writer/director Grant's first feature is quite assuredly helmed and although his script tends to lean too much towards the facile and cliche’, the fantastic cast are able to rise above it with ease.

The film is set is Swaziland, Africa and begins in 1969 during the final era of British rule there. The story follows young Ralph (at ages 11 and 14) and his coming-of age. The boy witnesses his mother’s adultery first hand and goes on to survive his parent’s divorce which leads to his father’s alcoholism and eventual remarriage. Along the way, Ralph matures and learns quite a bit about love from the mistakes all the adults around him make.

Wah-Wah pungently pokes fun at the silliness and snootiness of the upper class and their feelings of superiority. The title comes from new (American) wife Ruby’s disdain for the hoity-toity Brit slang that is constantly being used like: “toodle-pip” and “hobbly-jobbly.” To Ruby it all sounds like “wah-wah.”

As Ralph’s father, Gabriel Byrne works overtime to underplay his role and show us the struggle his character has with the bottle--and he succeeds magnificently. Miranda Richardson’s tormented mother, in less capable hands, might have come off as a one-dimensional bitch. Yet the luminous Ms. Richardson forces us to look past the obvious. Julie Walters, always a joy, makes the most of a far-too-underwritten part.

Playing the older Ralph, Nicholas Hoult has a winning smile and manages to hold his own opposite some of the best in the business--and that is saying a great deal about his talents.

But Wah-Wah belongs to Emily Watson who is finally able to sink her dramatic and comedic teeth into a part where she isn’t playing a tortured soul. Her Ruby is much more a thundering loon...an infectious one. It would be a just reward if Watson was able to snag a Supporting Oscar nomination come January.

The film ends far too abruptly as the focus is erroneously taken away from the central character.

Still Wah-Wah is a treat. The production values are all first-rate. And Grant should feel proud of his accomplishment and especially blessed to have assembled such an extraordinary group of actors on his maiden cine-voyage.

Marwan Hamed’s
The Yacoubian Building
Showing at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
April 25 - May 7, 2006
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

Reviewed by Wendy R. Williams

Welcome to Cairo! Its' the Paris of the Middle East, but inhabited by down on their luck aristocrats, religion-spewing newly-rich moguls, Islamic fundamentalists, closeted homosexuals and hordes of poor.

Marwan Hamed’s film, The Yacoubian Building, tells a story in the style made famous by Robert Altman. Based on the novel by Alaa Al Aswani's (an Arabic-language bestseller already in its 12th printing), the film follows the stories of various residents of a seedily elegant building in downtown Cairo.

Here is a quote from their press release:

“The most expensive Egyptian film ever made, The Yacoubian Building is a sprawling, star-studded epic that spans all the social classes populating contemporary Cairo. In three fast-moving hours, it dramatizes topical issues like adultery, political corruption, Islamist terrorism, and the hitherto taboo subject of homosexuality. First-time director Marwan Hamed crafts a gripping drama out of Alaa Al Aswani's novel, an Arabic-language bestseller already in its 12th printing.

"The famous Yacoubian Building was constructed in downtown Cairo in 1937 to house the city's upper crust. Today the tenants of its spacious apartments are a bit down-in-the-dumps, while its rooftop laundry rooms have been converted into homes for the poor. The main characters include Zaki Pasha (Adel Imam), an aging playboy who represents a vanishing world of gentility; a French singer and his former love Christine (Yousra); and Bosnaina (Hind Sabry), a pretty, disillusioned girl who lives on the roof. The growing influence of Islam in Egypt is dramatized through two controversial storylines. The doorman's son Taha (Mohamed Imam), frustrated in his attempts to move up in society, turns to religious fanaticism and ends up training for jihad in a desert camp. Meanwhile, the religious piety of Haj Azzam (Nour El Sherif), who has risen from shoeshine boy to rich businessman, is exposed as a sham that hides only self-interest. The film's frank treatment of homosexuality in the relationship between a newspaper editor and a young soldier is revolutionary in the context of Egyptian cinema. These interwoven dramas are as satisfying and enjoyable as a good, long read.” Deborah Young

In Youcoubian, the architecture of the building serves as a metaphor. With the poor segregated on the roof and the so-called rich in the formerly elegant apartments below, the building is a main character in the story. It is a classic upstairs downstairs story, but in reverse.The building and everyone in it is down on their luck and longing for the elegance of a past era. The inhabitants of the formerly rich downstairs apartments long for the grandeur that was Cairo in the 1930’s. And the poor on the roof long for centuries old grandeur when the Islamic world rivaled the Christian world. Everyone wants something they can no longer have and it is very telling that one of the most satisfying moments in the film occurs when an old man marries a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. But for her the marriage is an incredible gift; she is now off the roof and has a chance to live a life of faded elegance that she could only dream of before.

The film is beautifully filmed and acted. Viewing The Youcoubian Building gives the movie-goer a chance to visit a world and a life that they will (most likely) never see any other way. And The Youcoubian Building is most definitely worth the trip.