July 7-13, 2005

cover story

Week One Shorts

Following are reviews of movies premiering in the first week of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, July 7-13. Up to the day of show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9 p.m.) and online at www.phillyfests.org (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Regular admission is $9.50. Coverage continues next week.

All times are p.m. An asterisk (*) indicates scheduled appearance by director or other guest.

= Recommended

Venue Codes:
GY Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St.
PMT Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.
WT Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St.

ARISAN! Touted as Indonesia's first gay-themed film, Nia Di Nata's broad comedy inches forward without stepping on anyone's toes. Dropping closeted architect Sakti (Tora Sudiro) into an otherwise all-female kaffeeklatsch, the film treats him as one of the girls. While he struggles with coming out to a hunky client, they wrestle with issues from adultery to infidelity. Unfortunately, that's the only link between their situation; Di Nata's awkward, arbitrary cross-cutting saps the movie of momentum, which makes its upbeat conclusion feel more flimsy than feel-good. --Sam Adams (7/9, 7:30 GY; 7/14, 5:00 PMT)

THE BEST OF SECTER & THE REST OF SECTER Directing his first film, 1965's Winter Kept Us Warm, at the age of 22, University of Toronto grad David Secter set out to beat Orson Welles' record, and unfortunately ended up emulating Welles' career. In this brief documentary by Secter's nephew Joel, Winter (see review) gets credit for inspiring a generation of Canadian independents like Secter's UT colleague David Cronenberg (not to mention his former assistant Michael Ondaatje). But Secter's ambitions grew diffuse and unworkable; the New York-based film kibbutz Total Impact spent years working on a improvisational sex comedy called Getting Together, only to see it recut (by Troma, no less) and distributed as a teen drool-fest called Feelin' Up. ("We're not making a movie; we're making history," he says in an archival clip, unaware they were doing neither.) Secter doesn't have the stature of a tragic figure, and we don't get much sense of the charisma that could have convinced dozens of people to try an experiment in pansexual collective art. (Secter eventually dropped the idea himself: He's been married to the same man for 25 years.) Still, Secter will surely be an inspiration to those who value independence at any cost. --S.A. (7/9, 7:00 PMT*; 7/10, noon PMT*)

BASED ON A TRUE STORY The real-life inspiration for Al Pacino's character in Dog Day Afternoon, John Wojtowitz is just as voluble and volatile as his cinematic counterpart. Too bad for Dutch documentarian Walter Stokman, who gamely makes his attempts to secure an interview with the combative Wojtowitz the center of this forensic investigation. Although Wojtowitz doesn't dispute that he robbed a bank to pay for his lover's male-to-female sex change, he challenges Dog Day details large and small, but Stokman's fact-to-fiction comparison doesn't bear much fruit, and Wojtowitz's phone conversations remain cagey as he negotiates an ever-escalating fee. Stokman eventually discards his uncooperative subject, which is fair enough, but his attempts to question Wojtowitz's story after the fact are tinged with vindictiveness, and his epistemological voiceover takes on a sophomoric ring. --S.A. (7/12, 7:15 PMT)

BUTTERFLY "Cry to me whenever you want," says sassy street urchin Yip (Tian Yuan) to bourgeois schoolteacher Flavia (Josie Ho). "Just buy me beer." But no amount of tears, or beers, will solve Flavia's problem: She's a married mother whose lifelong attraction to women will no longer be suppressed. Yan Yan Mak's well-shot melodrama has empathy to spare, even for Flavia's uncomprehending husband, but the linkage of Flavia's first lesbian relationship with the Tiananmen Square demonstrations never jells, and the parallel storylines get tied in knots. --S.A. (7/12, 7:00 PMT; 7/13, 5:00 GY)

THE D WORD Originally filmed as five 10-minute episodes for Dyke TV, this daft lampoon of The L Word is satire at its ugliest. Grating like a "Weird Al" parody and even less socially astute, The D Word takes absurdity to an intolerable level. The tired storyline, centered on a lesbian couple's search for a sperm donor, is irritatingly spoofish and lacks the subtlety that makes for great send-ups. The alliteration of character names is confusing; the dramatic exchanges are more hyperbolic than a high school play; and the questionable talent seems as if it was plucked from a so-far-off-Broadway-it's-practically-Jersey audition. Laudable for its physical representation of dyke-next-door lesbians but deplorable in every other way, there is only one word to describe The D Word: dreadful. --Ashlea Halpern (7/9, 10:00 PMT; 7/10, 5:00 WT)

The Education of Shelby Knox

THE EDUCATION OF SHELBY KNOX Fifteen-year-old Shelby is a God-fearing, hair-crimping Texas teen until the Lubbock school district's abstinence-only approach to sex education sticks in her craw. In a town where one in 14 teenage girls gets knocked up each year, you'd think they'd be handing out condoms like Altoids, but that would entail adults admitting that, as one bored girl says, "The only thing to do in Lubbock is have sex." Especially once Shelby's activism begins to encompass gay rights, the adults aren't above hitting back; attempting to reconcile her religious faith with her lack of disgust for homosexuality, she's advised by a preacher who proudly calls Christianity "the most intolerant religion in the world." Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt's mind-blowing — which is to say profoundly depressing — study of red-state wrongheadedness is also an inspirational tale of fighting the odds. If a 15-year-old girl can stand up to them, what excuse does anyone else have? --S.A. (7/9, 2:30 WT; 7/11, 7:15 PMT)

Excavating Taylor Mead

EXCAVATING TAYLOR MEAD From cavorting through Ron Rice's Beat touchstone The Flower Thief to pitching camp in Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys, Taylor Mead defined a small sliver of a decade. Three decades later, he lives in a cluttered, decrepit nightmare of an East Village apartment, living off a fixed income and "the kindness of bartenders." Mead's personality, part wandering sprite, part horny queen, made him a star of American underground movies just as they were identified as such, but underground — or, as he puts it, "buried alive" — is where he's stayed. Ragged though William Kirkley's documentary is, the scenes of Mead walking lonely streets or feeding stray cats for company have an almost unbearable poignancy. Luckily, Coffee and Cigarettes came along and provided a happy ending. --S.A. (7/10, 9:45 PMT*; 7/13, 5:00 PMT*) (See Sam Adams' feature.)

Garçon Stupide

GARÇON STUPIDE A dark-eyed blend of wildness and innocence, Loïc (Pierre Chatagny) works an industrial job by day and goes cruising at night, using his mobile phone to take "pictures of things we've never seen." At first his desire extends only to inventive sexual situations and unusual body mods, but Loïc's curiosity grows more intense, and more dangerous; he starts stalking a married soccer star (Rui Pedro Alves) and maltreats the fragile young woman (Natacha Koutchoumov) with whom he often shares a bed. Lionel Baier's first feature is sometimes too eager to show its cleverness, as when he split-screens a male orgy and medical-museum oddities, but he moves the plot forward with Bressonian ruthlessness, and uses digital video as well as any movie since My Life on Ice. --S.A. (7/9, 10:00 PMT)

Gay Sex in the '70s

GAY SEX IN THE '70S From the Stonewall riots to the discovery of AIDS, Joseph Lovett's documentary traces the years from gay liberation to gay plague, when, as one subject puts it, pornography lost its interest because "real life was a pornographic movie." The good old days of bathhouses and the piers are remembered with no small fondness; one man recalls stopping for a blowjob on the way to Wall Street. But Lovett acknowledges that, even pre-AIDS, the revolution had a dark side, and that younger generations are still struggling with its positive and negative legacies. --S.A. (7/10, 2:45 WT; 7/11, 9:30 WT)

Girl Play

GIRL PLAY Anyone who's ever been trapped in a long-term relationship and wondered what they've been missing out on must see this movie. Directed by Lee Friedlander, starring real-life lovers Robin Greenspan and Lacie Harmon, and cherry-topped with a hilarious performance by Mink Stole as the harping Jewish mother, Girl Play tackles frigidity, fear of commitment, and other universal relationship issues with a tenderness that comes only from personal experience. The small cast and black-boxlike setup lends the film an air of theatrical intimacy, while the narrated flashbacks and erotic lovemaking scenes give it its celluloid edge. --A.H. (7/9, 7:30 WT)

GIRLFRIEND Gambling that homophobia leavened with dance numbers and screened by cultural remove can pass for entertainment, the festival has booked this bright-colored, black-hearted Bollywood spectacle in which female friendship threatens hetero romance. Of course, even though it depicts Tanya (Isha Koppikar) as a vengeful, possessive dyke who will do anything to stop her childhood friend's marriage to the piggish Rahul (Ashish Choudhary), Karan Razdan's film still finds room for girl-on-girl action; as per Indian custom, there's no nudity or even kissing, but plenty of arched backs and writhing under black satin sheets. Defensive laughter will no doubt transmute Razdan's excesses into instant camp — just wait until Tanya busts out her ninja moves. But while its aesthetics may be laughable, Girlfriend's existence isn't funny at all. --S.A. (7/12, 9:30 PMT; 7/14, 5:00 WT)

GOOD BOYS "If he loves me, why would he want to fuck me?" For Good Boys' Israeli hustlers, sex isn't something that lovers engage in, it's a commodity with consequences. Yair Hochner's debut is all about connections, from the chance one that brings the two leads together to those missed as they try to find one another again. Over the course of a night full of violence and complications, each man sees the new relationship as a possible way out of a mess that's become too habitual. Hochner wisely offers hope in lieu of resolution, overcoming the limitations of his amateur video look. --Shaun Brady (7/13, 9:45 PMT; 7/17, 5:00 PMT)

Guys and Balls

GUYS AND BALLS Not nearly as campy as its festival title would suggest, M…nner Wie Wir (Men Like Us) is simply the classic sports underdog movie writ gay. Ecki is a decent goalie for his city-league soccer team who is outed right after giving up the winning goal in the big game, and his teammates out him right off the squad. He vows to beat his old team with an all-queer crew in two months, and you know how it goes from here: Ecki assembles his ragtag group of soccer wannabes; at first, they're terrible, but then … There aren't many surprises to be had; in fact, Sherry Horman's film dribbles through almost every sports cliche along the way. But the gay angle is fresh and often funny, and a breezy, likable winner is the net result. --Ryan Godfrey (7/9, 9:45 GY; 7/13, 5:15 PMT)

HARDCORE The image of still blue sky tilts down onto Greek ruins; the camera pulls back to show that we've been looking at a poster, then further to reveal a pair of modern ruins: two blood-spattered young women. Dennis Iliadis goes out of his way to tweak the traditions by which Greece is usually represented, from the drug supplier who speaks only in horoscopes to the actor in ancient warrior garb who goes up in flames. But his saga of murderous lovers turned media darlings, packed with enough sickly green lighting and heroin-chic beauties to fill 10 PJ Harvey videos, feels borrowed from Western films and never evokes an alternative modern Greece. --S.B. (7/9, 5:15 GY; 7/11, 5:15 PMT)

HATE CRIME After one-half of a cloyingly happy gay couple is beaten to death, suspicion focuses on the pair's evangelical neighbor (Chad Donella), played so laughably tense that it appears he has to physically repress his deep, dark secret. (Give you one guess.) Set in a suburban idyll where prejudice is limited to fundamentalists and corrupt cops, Hate Crime shifts from well-intentioned moralizing to a repugnant justification of vigilante justice. Director Tommy Stovall dresses up a predictable TV cop show story as In the Bedroom soul-searching, but dispenses with ambiguity in such conventionally Hollywood fashion that it's nearly a Ron Howard film. --S.B. (7/9, 5:15 WT; 7/12, 7:15 WT)

HEROES AND GAY NAZIS The concept of gay Nazis is intriguing, but this documentary's focus wavers haphazardly between modern-day interviewees, speculation about homosexuality in the Third Reich, and neo-Nazi leader Michael Kuhnen, who died of AIDS in 1991 and seems multifaceted enough to warrant a doc of his own. Director Rosa von Praunheim is so concerned with not taking a stand on his subjects that he ends up warily circling them, listening to their justifications without providing much context. Reasons given range from fetishization to simple old-fashioned racist nationalism, but given the number of times Holocaust denial comes up, it doesn't seem enough to just take their word for it. --S.B. (7/9, 12:15 PMT)

THE JOURNEY Shot in the earthy tones of a Satyajit Ray movie, Lilly Pullappally's coming-of-age drama takes place in the South Indian sticks, where a childhood friendship between girls takes on sexual overtones as they age. Lovely but slight, The Journey floats on a mood of gentle naturalism, at least until it swipes the ending from The Graduate. --S.A. (7/9, 5:15 PMT; 7/10, 12:15 PMT)

THE JOY OF LIFE Looks like poetry, sounds like prose: Marrying Jenni Olson's images of depopulated San Francisco to Harriet "Harry" Dodge's memoirish narration, The Joy of Life combines intriguing but incompatible parts. Beginning with memories of failed relationships, Dodge's text then shifts abruptly to an essay on the Golden Gate Bridge's attraction to would-be suicides (a Ferlinghetti excerpt hides the lack of transition), while Olson's architectural imagery finds a mood and sticks to it, never developing beyond its initial vision. --S.A. (7/12, 5:15 PMT)

Keep Not Silent: Ortho-Dykes

KEEP NOT SILENT: ORTHO-DYKES Though not as revelatory as Trembling Before G-d, Ilil Alexander's documentary on ultra-Orthodox lesbians has the edge in terms of location: It's one thing to be gay in Crown Heights, another in Jerusalem. In some ways, stepping into the Haredic community is like going back to a time before Stonewall: rabbis counsel self-denial, while the husband of Ruth, whose lesbian affairs have threatened their marriage, tells her that sex is better since she stopped trying to enjoy it. But the sight of the "Ortho-dykes" meeting in a sukkah forecasts a change to come, even if they're filmed in silhouette. --S.A. (7/9, 2:30 PMT; 7/10, 12:30 WT)

THE MOSTLY UNFABULOUS SOCIAL LIFE OF ETHAN GREEN Developed from Eric Orner's 16-year-old comic strip about the gay singles scene, director George Bamber's anemic Ethan Green actually succeeds as an adaptation: Both comic and movie are well-intentioned but stereotyped, slapdash and only intermittently funny. Ethan (Daniel Letterle) spends most of the film grousing about the failure of the relationships he just finished screwing up. Although his shtick is not particularly charming, a few droll turns from Joel Brooks and Richard Riehle as "Hat Sisters" and Meredith Baxter as Ethan's ultrasupportive/militant mother are appreciated. Still, the few clever bits and characters don't add up to anything; they certainly don't earn the frantic, unnecessarily farcical closing set piece, which leads Ethan et al. to predictable and decidedly unfabulous fates. --R.G. (7/9, 7:30 PMT*)

NIGHT WATCH A night in the life of a male hustler, Edgardo Cozarinsky's first Argentinean movie in a decade conjures an effective atmosphere but collapses once it succumbs to the demands of plot. When the film is merely shadowing Victor (Gonzalo Heredia) or breathing in his surroundings, it's a delicate, observational gem, but once Victor starts imagining that someone's trying to kill him, the mood, and the movie, shatter. --S.A. (7/9, 12:30 PMT; 7/11, 9:45 PMT)

100% Woman

100% WOMAN This fascinating documentary shadows Canadian mountain-bike champion Michelle Dumaresq, the first openly transgendered woman on an international sports team, as she competes in local and national tournaments. Some challengers, noting her broad shoulders and brute strength, argue that because Dumaresq was born male, she should not be allowed to compete in the women's division. Doctors say she's lost her "male advantage" since the reassignment, but this does little to quell the rancor and jealousy that haunts her on a daily basis. Dumaresq comes across as a sensitive, amiable protagonist — so likable, in fact, she's befriended by the very teammates who want her barred from competitions. 100% Woman does a superior job examining issues of transgenderism in a traditionally masculine sports arena, and poses the question: If Dumaresq weren't winning, would the other racers even care? --A.H. (7/11, 9:30 PMT)

ORIGINAL PRIDE: THE SATYRS MOTORCYCLE CLUB Beer busts, sex bars and queer bikers: This low-budget documentary goes hog-wild for leather culture. Formed in 1954 on the heels of the Marlon Brando/The Wild One craze, The Satyrs Motorcycle Club is America's oldest continuously active gay biker club. Director and one-time Satyrs president Scott Bloom takes an up-close look at the social and political climate of the leather movement over the five decades since the club's inception. While theirs is a story worth recounting, it's hard to view Original Pride as anything more than your garden-variety documentary. Formulaic throughout, Bloom's doc picks a subgroup of the gay community, runs through its history chronologically and tackles the same issues (AIDS, police brutality, etc.) as any other gay-subculture doc. Pride has that "I just learned how to operate my video camera" feel, but cycle fetishists will love the vintage clips, grainy stills and Tom of Finland artwork. --A.H. (7/8, 7:15 PMT*)

Producing Adults

PRODUCING ADULTS A man terrified of losing the woman he loves to parenthood goes to extreme measures (slipping her the morning-after pill, undergoing a secret vasectomy) to impede her impregnation. The desperate woman, who happens to work in a fertility clinic with a gorgeous bisexual gynecologist, seeks corporeal and emotional comfort in the doctor. It's a recipe for disaster, but, fortunately, this sensual film from Finnish first-timer Aleksi Salmenper… exercises superior restraint and judgment. It's moving without being maudlin, dark without being tragic and human without being hackneyed. --A.H. (7/8, 9:30, GY; 7/16, 5:00 GY)

RTFM Dev (Polly Lister) has just finished developing a big Internet project and finally has time for her friends and for love, but that program has to share brain cycles with a cryptographic poltergeist, a newly sentient computer, and Dev's own tea-swilling inner child. It's hard to fault mega-hyphenate H.L. Winkler's ambition; this is certainly not your average shoestring lesbian romance. Perhaps it's appropriate that a film about a dot-com Web engineer itself feels like an indifferently coded piece of software: There are some nice ideas and forward-thinking features, some forgivable interface bugs, a few recursive loops that meander off into irrelevance and excruciating timing issues that threaten to bog up the works. Yeah, it's shot in Beta, but RTFM feels like an alpha release. --R.G. (7/8, 9:30 PMT)

SÉVIGNÉ Considering that it's been 10 years since her last movie, you'd think Marta Balletbò-Coll (Costa Brava) would have had the time to work out the kinks in this jumbled, colorful mess of a movie. Balletbò-Coll stars as Marina, a TV producer and would-be playwright whose work catches the eye of Julia (Anna Azcona), a stage star who hasn't acted since the death of her daughter. The film's screenplay, and Marina's play, are rife with mother-daughter issues, which might be reflected in the romantic relationship that develops between the two women if they weren't so close in age. (There are hints that Balletbò-Coll's role was written for a younger woman — perhaps herself, a decade back). But the resonances never come to anything, and the movie's eruptions of pathos seem wholly unearned. --S.A. (7/8, 5:00 GY; 7/10, 7:15 GY)

STRANGE FRUIT A loaded title, a half-cocked film. Writer-director Kyle Schickner has the right idea: an atmospheric, Grisham-y thriller about a big-city black, gay lawyer from the bayou who comes home to look into the lynching of an old friend, a case the police are calling suicide. There's a fine update/remake of In the Heat of the Night to be made on the subject, but here the caricature of Southern law enforcement strains credulity. Is there currently a place in this country where a black man can be sodomized with a tree branch and hanged outside a gay bar without rousing the police department to investigate and creating an international media shitstorm? Thankfully, no. --R.G. (7/11, 5:00 PMT; 7/12, 9:30 WT)

SUMMER STORM If they have afterschool specials in Germany, they're probably a lot like this. Tobi and Achim are best friends who do all the usual best friend things together, like wrestle and masturbate while thinking about girls. Except Tobi is really thinking about Achim, and Achim is an oblivious dummkopf. They're at co-ed rowing summer school in the woods, and while Achim is trying to finally paddle into his girlfriend's dugout, Tobi is getting in a few extra workouts with the Queerstrokes crew, whose tents are pitched next door. Unfortunately, writer-director Marco Kreuzpaintner hasn't made Wet Hot German Summer; it plays as a straightforward, well-intentioned and beautifully shot, but fairly dull, coming-of-age story. It scarcely seems possible, but camp has gone to earnest. --R.G. (7/8, 7:30 PMT; 7/10, 5:00 PMT)

THAT MAN: PETER BERLIN It's difficult to come to terms with the depth of '70s porn icon Peter Berlin's alien ascetic narcissism, as evidenced in Jim Tushinski's talking-head doc — the photographs he took of himself and covered his walls with, the obsession with his own (parodically bulbous) crotch. Eventually, however, Berlin's sexual solipsism starts reading as artistic, pure and almost noble: the hermit god in his mirror garden. When we learn of the 20-year domestic partnership that ended in his partner's AIDS-related death, it gives us the first glimpse of Berlin's contact with humanity and, perversely, it's a letdown. The god, like us, is mortal. --R.G. (7/10, 7:15 WT*; 7/11, 5:00 WT*)

VANILLA According to its press materials, Vanilla is "told through the eye of a rock & roll Cocteau," but the film itself is more akin to a philosophy-major Richard Kern. Writer-director Joseph Graham weighs down each of the featurette's 47 minutes with a straight-faced profundity born of the conviction that no one has ever thought to link sex and death before. That naivete extends to the persistent use of factory-preset computer effects, which tend to make even explicit sex scenes look like detergent commercials. --S.B. (7/8, 5:00 WT*; 7/10, 3:00 PMT*)

WE ARE DAD Now that Rosie is involved, Steven Lofton and Roger Croteau and their five foster children are officially causes célébres. A gay couple, Lofton and Croteau are unable to adopt the HIV-positive children they have raised from birth, and now that one of the children no longer has the virus, the state of Florida is considering letting another family adopt him. The case has attracted a fair amount of attention, including from the aforementioned O'Donnell and the ACLU, and really, anything Michel Horvat's documentary can do to make Bible Belt politicians look stupid and/or change some of the conventional wisdom about who can adopt is to be applauded. It's a shame, though, that Horvat's film relies primarily on previously shot television follow-arounds of the family, as well as lengthy interview footage with a sympathetic neighbor. Where are dad? --R.G. (7/9, 4:45 PMT*; 7/10, 5:15 PMT*)

When I'm 64

WHEN I'M 64 Alun Armstrong and Paul Freeman are terrific as, respectively, Jim, a retiring boys' school Latin teacher and Ray, a widower cabbie, who strike up an unusual friendship that blossoms, much to Ray's surprise, into something of a romance. The inexperienced "poofter" and the reluctant "yobbo" are surrounded by familial circumstances that simultaneously divide and unite their burgeoning relationship. Working for BBC2, director Jon Jones and writer Tony Grounds have created two lonely, compelling characters that are as easy to root for as they are utterly real. A remarkable telefilm that brings to mind a sunny Mike Leigh. --R.G. (7/11, 7:30 PMT; 7/16, noon WT)

Winter Kept Us Warm

WINTER KEPT US WARM Released in 1965, David Secter's first feature broke ground in terms of independent filmmaking, if not necessarily subject matter: Its story of a close (but not quite too close) friendship between two college boys is circumspect even for the times, although when one ditches his girlfriend to take the other to a Harry Belafonte show, the codes aren't too hard to decipher. Secter's first feature (see the accompanying documentary for the rest of the story) has a lovely 16 mm black and white feel, and its archaeology of obsolete slang is a positive delight. How many movies use "Do you like polkas?" as a pickup line? --S.A. (7/9, 7:00 PMT*; 7/10, noon PMT*)

ZONA ROSA "A little bit eccentric, a little bit bitchy." That's how the owner of El Antro, one of Mexico City's premier gay go-go clubs, views his role as a drag-queen hostess in a sexually repressed society. Zona Rosa takes a dressing-room peek at the male stripper scene and challenges the social stigma that all go-go dancers are gay egomaniacs and/or drug-addled prostitutes. Through interviews, handsome snapshots of Mexico City, and a mash of mariachi and techno music, Zona Rosa shifts a spotlight on issues of dehumanization not often considered when it comes to male strippers. One only wishes director Dan Castle would've conducted a more thorough investigation and ventured into clubs other than El Antro; when we find out later the Mexican government has done its part to pull the plug on the Zona Rosa, we'd have a better understanding of why. --A.H. (7/13, 9:30 WT; 7/17, 12:15 PMT)

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there