Two Men Kissing (2008)

 
Two Men Kissing (2008)


 Director: Waide Aaron Riddle
Writers: Waide Aaron Riddle
Genre: Drama, Romance, Short Movie
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 8 min
Year: 2008



Stars: Jefferson Hendrick, Waide Aaron Riddle










In a single kiss, two men explore sexual emotion, sexual tension and the intensity of man-on-man bonding and loving.



Two Men Kissing from Waide Riddle on Vimeo.

Based on the award-winning 1995 poem, this film adaptation explores the moment of a single passionate kiss between two men.

Ageless (II) (2013)

Ageless from Heath Daniels on Vimeo.
"Ageless"
Love, sex and relationships are seen through the eyes of two men; one in his 50s, the other in his 20s. Their common struggles prove to be ageless.
A short film written and directed by Heath Daniels.
Shot entirely on an iPhone 5.

Starring:
Michael Massei
Michael Saul
Windham Beacham
Derek Villanueva

Tomorrow (2014)

Tomorrow (2014)

Director: Leandro Tadashi 
Writers: Joshua Paul Johnson 
Genre: Short Movie 
Country:  USA
Language: English
Duration: 13 min 
Year: 2014



Stars: Daniel Rashid, Zachary Roozen, Katie Bake

Clark has never said it, but he's in love with Trevor. It's one of those things that has clearly built up within an existing friendship which is itself so important that he's terrified of putting it at risk. They're both in their teens, on the cusp of going to college, which could tear them apart anyway. When Trevor asks Clark to put in a good word for him with the girl he fancies, Clark agrees - it's what friends do - and tries to hide his quiet devastation. But when the girl turns out to have other ideas, things really start to get complicated.

Situations like this do happen in real life but it's difficult to relate them in film - especially in the short format - without them seeming twee. There's not much to distinguish Leandro Tadashi's short in terms of plot; the background presents us with a house party that has a swimming pool and a band, quite unlikely in real life but an accepted part of the world of teen cinema - and of course, there's not an adult in sight.

What makes the film stand out, however, is the acting, especially Daniel Rashid's sensitive portrayal of Clark, which will hopefully see him getting a lot more attention from casting directors. With the dialogue necessarily flat, the film hinges on what he shows us with his face and body. The mixture of hope, fear, disappointment and excitement that ebbs and flows throughout the film is something anyone who remembers their first feelings of love will relate to.

It's the complexity of these emotions, and of the reactions of the other characters, that gives the film a measure of tension and unpredictability. Polished visuals sit appropriately at odds with the rawness of what its young hero has to confront. Everything here is technically impressive, especially for a small production. It's slight but perfectly formed.

Abrase (2015)

Abrase (2015)

Director: Toshadeva Palani
Writer: Toshadeva Palani
Genre: Short movie
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 8 min
Year: 2015


Stars: Christian Adams, Michael Bordenave

Powerful and psychedelic. Abrase is the transparent picture of the fading love of two men, remembered. Prepare yourself to be deeply lost in an ephemeral tale and efflorescent images. Sadly, this title does not have an official Internet address. All we know is that Abrase was directed by Toshadeva Palani, and starring Christian Adams and Michael Bordenave.

The fading love of two men, remembered. A relationship once vivid, now dissipating into a fog of partial remembrance; the memories of heartbreak and loss that bend and change as the years go by.

Abrase | Short Film from Toshadeva Palani on Vimeo.

The Young and Evil (2008)

The Young and Evil (2008)

Director: Julian Breece 
Writers: Julian Breece
Genre: Short movie
Country:  USA
Language: English
Duration: 15 min
Year: 2008


Stars: Vaughn Lowery, Diana Elizabeth Jordan, Reggie Watkins, Eric Pumphrey, Mark Berry

The five-year-old black gay short film, The Young and Evil, recently resurfaced online as a cautionary tale for gay men of all ages. The intention may have been to garner sympathy for the main character, instead it comes off as a horror movie chronicling the origin of a villain.

Directed by Julian Breece, the film tells the story of an 18-year-old black gay teenager Karel Andrews (excellently portrayed by Vaughn Lowery) living life on the edge. Burdened with caring for his debilitated mother and be an Out homosexual in an urban neighborhood, Karel adopts a lifestyle of dangerously causal unprotected gay sex. Upon hearing the news from a doctor that he tested HIV negative despite his risky sexual activity, the young man reveals that he actually wants to contract the virus.

“My favorite thing in this world is to get fucked,” he tells the doctor, “I like getting fucked so hard, I don’t know who I am when it’s over. I like high-risk, sometimes HIV infected cum. and I’m not giving it up.”

This is where the short film derails. One could speculate through subtext that Karel wanted to be punished for his sexuality, for being gay. One could speculate that Karel was turned on by the thrill-seeking adrenaline rush of engaging in high risk sex. One could speculate that Karel just didn’t care about life in general so he lived it like each day was his last.

The problem with all of that speculation is the filmmakers leave all of the heavy lifting for the audience instead of carrying the weight themselves. This is a trend that is heavily adopted in black gay short films and web series.

It’s never made clear why Karel lives the way he does. Throughout this short film we just see random scenes of a character likely created based on the writer reading a newspaper or blog headline. The internal conflicts and motivations of the main character is never really examined at all. This is a huge oversight given the fact that Karel is depicted to be so self destructive. It turns out the writers devoted most of their attention in building the character Naaman, played by Mark Berry.

As Karel continues his quest to become HIV positive (seriously, this is the ridiculous premise of the short), he finds his way into a dark candlelit sex party. It’s here that he sees Naaman, an older man in his 40s that Karel recognizes from an online video of men speaking on their positive HIV status.

Karel follows the live-in maintenance man of the complex, Naaman, down to the basement of the building where he tries to seduce him. The more reserved elder man of the two clearly recognizes the game that Karel is attempting to play, opting to try to talk sense into the teenager instead.

What follows is a amazingly brilliant, superbly acted and well written pair of scenes that (almost) makes us forget about the shortcomings of the previous dozen. Seeing Naaman reluctantly resist the young man’s advances as Karel quickly calls audibles to adjust his plays was more engaging than any scene in any black gay web series to date.

By the end, however, we’re still left scratching our heads. What did we just see and what was the point of it all?

Was the message: Avoid unprotected sex? If so, Karel was an HIV negative man who wanted to be positive, unprotected sex was the best means to an end in his case.

Was the message: Beware of older HIV positive sexual predators? If so, Naaman did his damnedest to avoid sex with the teenager at all costs until he reluctantly gave in to unrelenting advances. The younger HIV negative man was the predator here. On top of that, whose to say the older man didn’t eventually grab a condom before giving in when all was said and done? The scene cuts off before that moment so Karel may have done all that for nothing.

The only points and messages I could muster from watching this film was:

– Black Gay men love sex, lots of it. Especially unprotected sex.

– Black gay men are weak and self destructive. (even our Naaman eventually gives in to temptation)

This short had to potential to examine possible causes for dangerous lifestyles and behaviors. It could have examined the larger issue of depression in the black gay community. It could have delved into the pressures young black gay men face in urban communities, which often leads to depression and/or risky sexual activities.

The story of Karel was essentially the origin story of a killer or predator. In the context of the world created, we know that once he reached his HIV positive goal, he would continue to have unprotected sex and possibly infect others. That is the only thing that explains his intentional efforts to become infected himself, to infect others. If suicide was his goal, there are much more effective ways to kill yourself. Especially since HIV is not the death knell that it once was.

So if you view The Young and Evil as a horror film (with emphasis on ‘evil’), it works well as a prequel to a larger and more interesting story. Still, given its shortcomings, the skilled directing, strong acting performances and amazing last couple scenes of the film make this a must see.

Source: cypheravenue.com

Alex and the Imps (2015)

Alex and the Imps (2015)

Director: Ryan Grippi 
Writers: Ryan Grippi 
Genre: Short Movie 
Country:  USA
Language: English
Duration: 13 min 
Year: 2015



Stars: Josiah Jacoby, Klein Wong, Rodner Saldago, Kara Goldberg

Alex and the Imps is a coming of age story about a teen magician coming to terms with who he is and learning to love himself for it in a world where everyone is against him. Inspired by the "It Gets Better Project" this story is a salute to the unusual qualities in all of us that make us who we are.

VGL Seek Same

VGL Seek Same


Short Film, written and directed by Dorjan Williams

Director: Dorjan Javas Williams
Writer: Dorjan Javas William
Genre: Short movie
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 7 min

Stars: Kraig Million, Richard Ruskin, Dorjan Javas Williams

West Hollywood Motel (2013)

West Hollywood Motel (2013)


Director: Matt Riddlehoover
Writers: Matt Riddlehoover, Ethan James
Genre: Comedy
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 78 min



Stars: Matt Riddlehoover, Andrew Matarazzo, Amy Kelly, Phil Leirness








Director Matt Riddlehoover doesn't mind tweaking your expectations—delivering plenty of eye candy while he tries to deliver a message. In his last film, Scenes from a Gay Marriage, he included plenty of skin but also charming wit. Now he's back with a new sexy comedy that takes place in the various rooms of, as the title suggets, a West Hollywood Motel.

According to a press release, the characters include a medical student (Riddlehoover), his extrovert boyfriend (Andrew Callahan), an adulterous actress (Starina Johnson), her lover (Heather Horton), and a dutiful husband (Phil Leirness) whose wife (Amy Kelly) wakes to find she has a penis. It also  co-stars Jared Allman (Scenes from a Gay Marriage), Cesar D' La Torre (Logo's DTLA), Ben Phen (Interior. Leather Bar.), and newcomer Alec Houston Bell. While many people seem to be leaning toward the moody gay dramas about failed romances these days, there should still be room for these silly comedies about sex, love, and more.

Check out the naughty trailer below for a taste:

Source: OUT.COM

Blackbird (IV) (2014)

Blackbird (IV) (2014)



Director: Patrik-Ian Polk
Writers: Rikki Beadle Blair, Patrik-Ian Polk
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 99 min
Year: 2014



Stars: Mo'Nique, Julian Walker, Kevin Allesee, Isaiah Washington







BY DIEGO COSTA - Slantmagazine
APRIL 22, 2015

Blackbird opens with sexually repressed Randy (Julian Walker), a closeted black high school senior from a Southern Baptist family, singing a duet in his choir with another guy. The scene culminates with the two making out and taking their clothes off on stage and at least one member of the choir fainting in horror. Turns out this is just a wet dream, one of many that Randy will have throughout the film, which sometimes includes guys knocking on his window and asking, “Is this a gay party or can a dirty straight boy join in?” Randy tends to wake up from these dreams with jizz all over his hands, and stricken with the kind of guilt that gets him on his knees, begging the lord for forgiveness.

The dream motif actually turns out to be one of the Patrik-Ian Polk film's least hackneyed devices; after all, a gay boy in the most stifling of closets (this despite the realness of Randy's Joan Crawford eyebrows) can only gasp for air in the unconscious. The device recovers its usual triteness, however, once we hear an entire song about dreams, just in case we haven't understood that they're quite important for Randy, while watching him lose his virginity to some white dude in, of course, slow motion.

While this gospel Glee of a movie about gay alienation has its share of witty lines (“What do they teach you straight boys, nothing?”) and sweet tear-jerking scenes, Blackbird flounders by using a song in every other scene, or whenever it wants to evoke an emotion, and by casting Mo'Nique as yet another mother monster.

She slaps Randy in the face when he eats the pie she's baked for her missing daughter, and arms herself with a baseball bat when finding irrefutable proof that he's gay. To add to the film's TMZ-triggered problems, having Isaiah “Not-Your-Little-Faggot” Washington, as Randy's father, play the one gay-friendly voice in an ocean of homophobic hysteria is an embarrassingly forced mea culpa.

In its best moments, Blackbird exudes the cheekiness of But I'm a Cheerleader, as in Randy meeting a bona-fide gay, Marshall (Kevin Allesee), who ushers him toward his first sex-cruising experience at a park late at night. Randy asks, “Is this some kind of lovers lane?” But for a film that wants to be something of a teen musical, a coming-of-age story, and a gay fairy tale all at once, it's too often bogged down by an unnecessarily somber subplot about Randy's sister, which never quite fits the narrative, and worn-out images of Jesus freaks trying to pray the gay away through exorcism. Indeed, being a closeted black gay boy in Mississippi is surely suffocating, but Blackbird is, like its main character, too naive to understand or, at least, to deploy the reparative powers of camp.

No Match Found (2005)

No Match Found (2005)



Director: Brian Pelletier
Writer: Brian Pelletier
Genre: Short movie
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 10 min

Stars: Michael Ciriaco, Michael Dean Connolly, Nick Estrada

When Kevin discovers his boyfriend is cheating on thier anniversary, his friends come to the rescue to find him a quality person. Of course, the best intentions don't always have the best consequences and he swings from bad date to bad date only to discover what he's been looking for is right next door. Written by Brian Pelletier

The Awakening of Spring (2008)

The Awakening of Spring (2008)



Director: Arthur Allan Seidelman
Writer: Frank Wedekind
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 92 min
Year: 2008



Stars: Yuval David, John Aniston, Gary Bisig






Ducdebrabant from New York City, USA - IMDB

First of all, it's basically a photographed stage play, though it's all done in a studio (with neutral backdrops and extremely minimal scenery), not in a theatre in front of an audience. If that turns you off, okay, but it's hardly unprecedented.

Apart from that annoying clarinet, I quite like it. It's a nice to see the Wedekind play done straight (though liberties are taken, names are anglicized and marks become dollars), not to take anything away from the musical "Spring's Awakening." Although the attitude towards sex education may have changed, and our mores, and the amount of information available to children, human nature has not. The way the people grope for answers and try to understand their own feelings and impulses and physicality is timeless.

The acting under Seidelman's direction is very good. Jesse Lee Soffer is very charismatic, Constance Towers is excellent. Bridget Moloney does wonderful things with her little part. There is some tasteful and artistically justified nudity, none of it full frontal.

A clever idea of Seidelman's is to have the teachers (but not the headmaster) in the faculty meeting where Michael is expelled wear carnival masks. It allows them to be doubled (which one senses they are) by the young actors playing the students and thereby adds an extra dimension to the caricatures they basically are.

But over all, the spareness of the production, the fact that it focuses on the generations in the way it does, and the English names and places (New Hampshire is actually mentioned) cause it to dialogue with "Our Town." It becomes the more unflinching cousin of the Wilder play. The dead even come back.

Park Bench (2007)

Park Bench (2007)



Directors: Elias Benavidez, Jim Le
Writers: Elias Benavidez, Jim Le
Genre: Short movie
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 6 min
Year: 2007



Stars: Ian Delaney, Clayton Froning, Julia Graham







A timid young man yearning to connect and express his true attractions finds an opportunity to do so when a handsome stranger sits next to him on a park bench.

Miles Apart (2003)

Miles Apart (2003)



Director: Jonathan M. Guttman
Writers: Writer: Keith Humphrey
Genre: Short movie
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 19 min


Stars: Craig Burke (Jeffrey), Brad Schmid (Miles), Kathleen O'Neel Toleedo (Darleen), Megan Hamaker (Kathryn)

Miles Apart is a short gay movie about two gay men dealing with a parent who resents their homosexual relationship. Miles and Jeffrey are travelling to attend Kathryn's wedding. Kathryn is Jeffrey's sister. Jeffrey is gay and has been in a relationship with Miles. Jeffrey's mother does not approve of their homosexual affair.
Miles has reservations about having to stay at Jeffrey's home because of his mother's attitude towards their sexuality. Jeffrey convinces him to come along. They arrive and the mother is already very ignorant of Miles existence. She even asks them not to lock the door while in the room. At the dinner table she asks Miles to pray for the food with an ulterior motive. Miles starts to pray invoking his gay relationship with Jeffrey. The mother stops him and they argue. He goes away upset and Jeffrey goes after him. Miles asks that they leave but Jeffrey pleads with him to stay at least until they attend the wedding. He agrees and on the wedding day the mother treats them no different with the same homophobic discrimination.

The Sea In Your Eyes (2006)

The Sea In Your Eyes (2006)

Director: Aaron Salles Torres (as Aaron Sallfertorr) 
Writer: Aaron Salles Torres (as Aaron Sallfertorr)
Genre: Short movie
Country: USA
Language: English 
Duration: 27 min
Year: 2006


Stars: Kathleen Lawlor, Brekk Bailey, Brandon Anthony

Full short film by Aaron Salles Torres. The Sea In Your Eyes is the story of a mother-son relationship damaged by the loss of the father figure. Ella is unhappy. She has lost a husband years ago and is not satisfied with her present life. She has a son from her first marriage, Brian, and for years she unconsciously hoped he would replace her deceased companion. Brian always tried to please his mother and to be as much like her idealized memories of his father as he could. Something mysterious has happened, however, and Ella and Brian have not exchanged a word for years. But they still meet on one yearly occasion, the dinner party Ella gives to commemorate her birthday. This years dinner party is special because it is centered on a pivotal argument that will reveal the foundations of Brian and Ella's relationship.

The Sea In Your Eyes (2006) from Aaron Salles Torres on Vimeo.

Into It (2006)

Into It (2006)


Director: Jeffrey Maccubbin
Writer: Jeffrey Maccubbin
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 2006
Stars: Bradley Baloff, Richard Jones, Zach Welsheimer

Chicago filmmaker Jeffrey Maccubbin's newest work looks deeply into how two men strive to find peace with their innermost demons. Simon is a hustler caught in the underbelly of queer culture. Late one night Simon slips on the ice that throws him into the arms of Evan, the host of a cable show who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome. After a night of unbridled sex, Simon realizes that Evan's ticks have subsided. He believes that he is meant to save Evan from his afflictions, leading them to unabashedly dive into a sado-masochistic relationship. Simon basks in a world where sadness and depression have become his new turn on and where his emotional destruction is the only true way to give Evan his soul.

David Searching (1997)

David Searching (1997)


Director: Leslie L. Smith
Writer: Leslie L. Smith
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 101 min



Stars: Anthony Rapp, Camryn Manheim, Julie Halston

Movie about a young homosexual man's search to find himself by surviving heartbreak and relationship fears. He explores what it means to live for himself and others. His video camera and his roommate and best friend, a heterosexual female. David searches for love, creativity, and meaning with his video camera, though living life is much harder when not hiding behind the lens.

Scrooge & Marley (2012)

Scrooge & Marley (2012)


Directors: Richard Knight Jr., Peter Neville
Writers: Timothy Imse, Richard Knight Jr., Ellen Stoneking
Genres: Drama, Family, Music
Country: USA
Language: English 
Duration: 91 min
Year: 2012


Stars: David Pevsner, Tim Kazurinsky, Rusty Schwimmer







Dennis Harvey
Film Critic

Billed as “a holiday movie for all of us,” “Scrooge & Marley” is in fact very niche, being of and for that segment of the gay community that enjoys watered-down camp and syrupy empowerment messages, which are not to be confused with the good kinds of either. This spin on “A Christmas Carol” delivers a heavy-handed morality play that Dickens himself might have found gauche, sugar-coated with weak songs and broad performances. Playing scattered theatrical runs between now and Christmas, the pic figures to do modest but better biz from its home-format release next month.

Raining on his employees’ seasonal cheer (even firing one of them), Ebenezer, aka Ben, Scrooge (David Pevsner) shutters the gay nightclub he ripped off long ago from a former benefactor (the inevitable Bruce Vilanch) and settles in for a grumpy solo Christmas Eve. But he’s visited first by Marley (Tim Kazurinsky), his former partner in ruthless gay-community bilking, now a salvation-seeking denizen of purgatory.

As in the Dickens story, three more ghosts follow: Christmas Past (Ronnie Kroell), who helps Ben revisit his homophobic father and other contributors to his greedy, mean adult personality; Present (Megan Cavanagh), who shows how forgiving the people around him are; and Future (JoJo Baby), who promises Scrooge’s customarily bleak reward. Scrooge redeems himself, natch, though the maudlin final scenes are cringe-inducing.

Of course, it’s impossible to do a “Carol” without sentimentality — Scrooge’s whole journey is about thawing his heart. But “S&M” (get it?) is so crude and literal-minded in its gay reinterpretation that no genuine emotion can get past the script’s compilation of cliches. Execution isn’t much better, with a low budget that might’ve been turned to a more imaginative pic’s advantage, but here is charmlessly obvious, with tacky f/x and stagy interiors; indeed, the material could translate to a proscenium with little alteration.

Shot in Chicago, the pic clumsily uses frequent blackouts to transition between scenes in a mediocre tech/design package.
Source: Variety.com

Film:

Crutch (2004)

Crutch (2004)


Director: Rob Moretti
Writers: Paul Jacks, Rob Moretti
Genre: Drama,  Biography
Country: USA
Language: English 
Duration: 88 min
Year: 2004




Stars: Eben Gordon, Rob Moretti, Juanita Walsh






By Don Willmott on Tuesday 1st November 2005

Two facts to ponder: Crutch is "based on a true story," and Rob Moretti is not only one of the lead actors but also the writer, director, editor, and producer. The result: Crutch comes across as an extremely personal exorcism of Moretti's suburban gothic adolescence, for better and for worse. Like the scribblings in a teenager's diary, the film vacillates between insight and exaggeration.

Moretti has quite a story to tell. Sixteen-year-old David (Eben Gordon), the surrogate for Moretti, lives in a broken home with his rapidly deteriorating alcoholic mother (Juanita Walsh) and two sullen siblings. Dad (James Earley) lives across town with another woman, and the family's method for coping with all this drama is to maintain a chilly silence. When not scribbling frantically in his well-worn diary, David finds distractions with his pretty girlfriend Julia (Jennifer Laine Williams). Together, they sign up for an acting class led by new-in-town thirtysomething Kenny (Moretti) and his sidekick Maryann (Jennifer J. Katz). Within minutes, Kenny starts a not-so-subtle dance of seduction with David, who is too distracted by his family problems to pick up on the signals... at first.

Once David's mom is tossed into rehab, David, feeling adrift, starts clinging to Kenny, and before long, the two are happily intertwined in a drug-fueled affair. "I was impressionable," David says in his retrospective narration. Meanwhile, Maryann tells Kenny, "All I'm saying is that you should be careful."

Indeed. Kenny, who we learn was a successful actor who lost it all in a shameful spiral of drugs and self-hatred, is an utterly unsympathetic (but good-looking) lout, a sexual predator who spends half the film committing various felonies and misdemeanors, albeit with the consent of young David. Looking for advice as the relationship sours, David turns to Zack (Tim Loftus), a local bookshop clerk whose over-the-top swishiness, the likes of which hasn't been seen on screen since The Boys in the Band, stops the film dead in its tracks not once but twice. It's an egregious directorial mistake in a film that otherwise does a great job of capturing the gritty textures of a typical middle-class New Jersey suburb.

How strange it must have been for Moretti to write and then play the role of the man who seduced him as a teenager. Unlike the other characters in the film, the Kenny he's created is one-dimensional, a troublemaker who keeps making trouble and who doesn't earn a bit of understanding or forgiveness from the audience. You have to wonder if the man who inspired the character of Kenny will see this film and what he'll think of it. (For a much more nuanced portrayal of a suburban pedophile on the loose, see the fascinating L.I.E.)

Crutch does succeed in creating an intimacy with the audience. The story is so personal that you can't help but feel like a voyeur trapped in the small houses and apartments where most of the action takes place. When Mom splits open her chin in a drunken stupor and blood spreads everywhere as David helps her down the stairs, you almost want to wipe the blood off your own hands.

It's hard to believe that Moretti's real-life experience was quite as dramatic as the melodrama he's written, but Crutch has its moments, and at least you know that Moretti made it through his troubles and became a productive moviemaker. There could have been far unhappier endings.

Crutch in the clutch.

The Art of Being Straight (2008)

The Art of Being Straight (2008)


Director: Jesse Rosen
Writer: Jesse Rosen
Genre: Comedy
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 70 min
Year: 2008


Stars: Johnny Ray Rodriguez, Rachel Castillo, Jim Dineen

Variety Review by Dennis Harvey
Posted by JesseRosen on Mar 11, 2014 in A.O.B.S. Reviews, Reviews

“A low-key comedy high on charm and credible twentysomething observation, Jesse Rosen’s debut feature, “The Art of Being Straight,” stars the writer-director as a possibly-coming-out newbie in Los Angeles whose puzzling over his sexual identification isn’t helped by his jokily insensitive straight buds. Appealingly played, nicely executed pic has a shot at arthouse distribution in addition to select DVD/cable sales and further fest travel.

Twenty-three-year-old John (Rosen) has just moved to L.A. from New York, ostensibly “taking a break” from his longtime girlfriend. He moves in with college bro Andy (Jared Grey), whose pals incessantly do that kind of “That is so gay” banter that’s essentially harmless — unless you’re the only gay guy in the room. (Acknowledging there actually is a distinction, one eventually queries “Is it ‘gay’ like it’s lame or ‘gay’ like it’s homosexual?”)

A quiet, genial guy among these more boisterous types, John is hardly comfortable discussing his shifting Kinsey scale placement with them, and his new job as bottom-rung gofer at a major ad agency is fraught with sexual tension as a studly boss (Johnny Ray Rodriguez) barrages him with thinly veiled come-ons.

Meanwhile, lesbian friend Maddy (Rachel Castillo) suffers her own travails, questioning her relationship commitment with g.f. Anna (Emilia Richeson) while developing a crush on nice-guy neighbor Aaron (Peter Scherer). Her own low-rung job at an art gallery is made torturous by bitchy, pretentious co-workers and customers.

Maddy isn’t undergoing a major life change, just a wee bi-curious phase. John isn’t so much closeted as simply figuring himself out. His peers aren’t real homophobes, just guys talking typical guy-trash. Narrative developments feel true to an increasingly frequent real-world dynamic too seldom seen in drama: When gay guy (or girl) is just “one of the guys,” not the token “gay friend” or the straight woman’s non-threatening pal. Pic’s slice of post-collegiate L.A. life likewise feels casually on-target in portraying an aspirational milieu that’s more Silverlake than Beverly Hills or West Hollywood.”

Redwoods (2009)

Redwoods (2009)



Director: David Lewis
Writers:David Lewis
Genres:Drama, Romance
Country:USA
Language: English
Duration:82 minutes
Year: 2009


Stars:Matthew Montgomery, Tad Coughenour, Caleb Dorfman

Two people weary from life meet unexpectedly and, even though they only know each other for a couple of days, discover a mind-blowing love that Changes Everything. But one of them has unbreakable commitments elsewhere — forcing him to ask, "Do I dare pursue this mind-blowing love, even if it means hurting other people?"
Everett feels stifled with Miles, the man with whom he is raising an autistic son. But then Miles and their son go away for a week, and Everett meets Chase, a traveling novelist in town to research a book.

And so begins a brief, bittersweet love affair that will echo throughout the ages.

Look, if you simply can’t buy this premise of "soul-mates," of love-at-first-sight, you won’t like this movie. And truthfully? I don’t buy this premise either, not in real life, where I think "infatuation" is completely different from "true love," which is something that grows slowly over time.

But for some reason, I can suspend my disbelief long enough to buy it on movie screens — or at least I bought it here — even despite a wildly over-the-top ending. This is a fantasy, pure and simple, and it is exactly as ridiculous as the two movies I mentioned above.

It helps that the two leads, Matthew Montgomery (Chase) and Brendan Bradley (Everett), do a wonderful job of selling all this. Bradley, who is reportedly straight in real life, has an appealingly vulnerable quality to him — exactly what the role requires. And Montgomery, who is openly gay and well-known in indie gay film, is certainly my idea of a handsome stranger who would force me to Question Everything.

Keep in mind that Redwoods is a micro-budget indie gay movie, surely made on a shoestring. As such, the synth-heavy music is occasionally distracting, the story flags for a bit, and the dialogue is sometimes a little clunky (especially toward the end when they discuss Chase’s novel their relationship).

That said, this is night-and-day better than most similarly-budgeted projects: the script is solid, the acting is remarkably good (and consistent; unlike a lot of these micro-budget movies, there are no painfully wooden supporting players). And — I know this sounds like a small thing, but it’s not — the lighting, which is so often "off" in these indie gay movies, looks professionally done.

Better still, the movie takes great advantage of the redwood forests where it is set. Too many low-budget movies are set in the front room of the director’s house, and they feel weirdly claustrophobic. This movie took the exact opposite approach — small budget, but big scope — and it absolutely paid off.

Mostly, I appreciate that, more and more, we live in an age where gay movies don’t have to always be angsty and depressing, or preachy and pointed. There are no closeted boyfriends in Redwoods, no disapproving parents to come out to.

This a pure cheese, a frothy romance — a gay guilty pleasure! And in my book, that makes this the most revolutionary gay film I’ve seen in quite some time.

Source: http://www.thebacklot.com/