QFest Movie Shorts N-Z

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Published: Jul 7, 2009

Following are reviews of movies N-Z premièring at QFest, July 9-20. Up to the day of the 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, or online at qfest.com (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Tickets are $10. All times are p.m.

= Recommended
  = Highly Recommended

Venue Key: PMT = Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.; RE = Ritz East, 125 S. Second St.

El Niño Pez | No End | Off and Running | Out in the Silence | Pornography | Private Lessons | Prodigal Sons | Redwoods | Rivers Wash Over Me | Shank | Soundless Wind Chime | Training Rules | What a Difference a Day MaDE: Doris Day Superstar | We are the Mods | Wrecked

El Niño Pez

Director Lucía Puenzo's follow-up to her Cannes-acclaimed XXY is the story of a classic outwardly perfect/inwardly fucked upper-class family. Lala (Inés Efron) is the daughter of a Buenos Aires judge and in a secret love affair with the family's Paraguayan maid, La Guayi (Mariela Vitale), who is routinely raped by the judge. The fair-skinned Lala and the seductively olive-skinned Guayi have a plan to escape to Paraguay,which, as is the way with escape plans, goes horribly awry when passions bubble over, landing Guayi in a worse predicament than the one she left. The film can be slow-moving for a thriller, but is rarely unpleasant to look at and features Javier Bardem's brother Carlos as best friend Pulido. And then there's the business of El Niño Pez — the film's dip into magical realism. The Fish Child is a mythical boy who lives in the water and guides the drowned to the bottom, and his dream-sequence appearances feel otherworldly and tangential until they don't. —B.H. (7/18, RE, 2:15)

Lurking behind each piece of intensely good news is intensely god-awful news. That's the takeaway from Robert Cuzzillo's cycle-of-life drama, which follows young lesbians Giulia (Cristina Serafini) and Chiara (Irene Ivaldi) as they try to have a baby. They encounter all sorts of obstacles, like Italy's law that says homosexuals can't utilize artificial insemination and Giulia's well-meaning, sexist mother who thinks only a man can discipline a child, but nothing is quite as debilitating as when Chiara develops breast cancer. It happens just as Giulia receives word that she can travel to Holland for the artificial insemination procedure, rendering it even more heartbreaking. But not heartbreaking enough — only minutes after Chiara tells Giulia the horrible news, the two are canoodling in the park, healthy as ever. If Cuzzillo had only drawn out the pain more, he would've made one hell of a cathartic film. —Holly Otterbein (7/11, RE, 2:30)

Avery says she comes from a United Nations family. She is the black, adopted daughter of two Jewish lesbians — Travis and Tova — with two adopted and racially different siblings — Ravi and Zay-Zay. But Avery, a gifted runner with college in her future, is still a teenager and, with her parents' approval, she starts to investigate her African-American roots. When she finds herself unprepared for the emotional journey ahead, we watch Avery falter, fall and pick herself up. But this isn't a documentary about gay parenting, it's about the nature of family as told by an eloquent teenager who just wants to know who she is. —M.E. (7/19, RE, noon)

Filmmaker Joe Wilson travels back to his roots in this autobiographical documentary. Growing up in the small town of Oil City, Pa., Wilson remained closeted, but after college, Peace Corps and settling in Washington, D.C., he came out and wed Dean Hamer (the film's co-director). After publishing his marriage announcement in Oil City's newspaper, Joe received a torrent of negative, bigoted letters — and one he didn't expect. Kathy Springer wrote that her 16-year-old son, CJ, had recently come out and was being tortured daily by his classmates. Seeing a community in need, Wilson and Hamer, with camera in hands, headed north to see what they could do. Between interviewing ministers, rebuilding cars, restoring old theaters and battling both the school board and the antagonistic American Family Association (all while making a documentary about it), the newfound friends bring about the change that Oil City needed so badly. A poignant, personal and engrossing story. —K.P. (7/20, RE, 7:15)

Flamboyant, bitchy and graceful (if not quite out), Johnny Weir brings a queer sensibility to male figure skating, revealing an oddly defensive side to a sport always at pains to prove that its sequined and leotarded practitioners are not necessarily, you know, that way. David Barba and James Pellerito's documentary, a prelude to an upcoming reality show, picks up Weir's story after his flameout at the 2006 Olympics, charting his attempts to regain his balance and fend off American challenger Evan Lysacek. For all his skills on the ice, Weir seems like something of a child off it, which makes the movie's attempt to penetrate his snarky façade a tough battle — not least because the filmmakers' access to competitions is often limited to performances and press conferences. Weir's fans will no doubt enjoy, but those who aren't hip to his importance will have to take the movie's word on it. —S.A. (7/10, PMT, 5; 7/11, RE, 12:15)

 

Former TLA Video clerk David Kittredge generates an intriguing air of foreboding mystery during the first third of his debut thriller. Mark Anton (Jared Grey) becomes gay porn's It Boy in the mid-'90s before disappearing, lured into a Saw-like trap, whose outcome is left in doubt. Flash forward to the present, when a journalist (Matthew Montgomery) researching a book on the history of porn begins finding clues to Anton's past around his new apartment and having strange nightmares. Then the scenario shifts again ... Kittredge has obviously studied his David Lynch, Lost Highway in particular, but any atmosphere conjured by the initial mystery is dispelled when it becomes obvious that Pornography is intended as a treatise on voyeurism, castigating porn viewers for their desirous gaze and implicating them in the sad fate of their onscreen objects. Kittredge may have pilfered much from Lynch's filmography, but the finger-wagging is wholly his own. —S.B. (7/10, PMT, 7; 7/12, PMT, 2)

A poisonous crossbreed of Claude Chabrol and Michael Haneke, the second feature by Joachim Lafosse (Private Property) never establishes enough of an emotional foothold to make its twisted tale seem like more than a cruel exercise. A nubile teenager on his way to flunking out of high school, Jonas Bloquet takes leave of his strained family to spend the summer with a trio of adults whose life advice takes an odd and eventually perverse turn. Although the movie's imagination is commendably warped, it never gets under the skin. —S.A. (7/13, RE, 9:15; 7/15, RE, 9:30)

Filmmaker Kimberly Reed returns to her Montana hometown for the first time in two decades, back when she was still high school quarterback Paul McKerrow. Toting a camera to her class reunion, she apparently set out to capture her former classmates' shocked reactions to her sexual reassignment. But instead, she's met with warm memories and smiling acceptance (along with a few curious questions once the keg is tapped). That's when the film's attention shifts to her adopted brother Marc, whose erratic behavior stems from a brain injury. The story takes a strange twist when it's revealed that his birth mother was the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, leading to a meeting with Welles' muse Oja Kodar in Croatia. While Reed's narration suffers from the memoirist's narcissism, viewing Marc's every violent mood swing through its impact on her, the film ends up as a fascinating exploration of identities both chosen and applied. —S.B. (7/10, RE, 9:15; 7/17, RE, 5)

There's plenty to like about writer-director David Lewis' pastoral gay-affair flick: The actors are photogenic, the scenery is gorgeous and lovingly shot, the acoustic soundtrack is sensual and spare. The story concerns a spoken-for hunklet (Brendan Bradley) trying not to fall for the dull author (Matthew Montgomery) who moves into the forest mansion next door. You wanna root for a movie like this, where every actor is trying really hard to eat, walk, talk and emote like real people. Sadly, even pitifully, there are very few scenes in which they upstage the enormous trees in the background. Put some blame on the melodramatic and awkward script that can distort even the simplest earthly exercises into clunky Martian pratfalls. Like: You don't hum into a harmonica. You're thinking of a kazoo. —Patrick Rapa (7/17, PMT, 7:15; 7/18, RE, 2:30)

When Sequan Green's mom dies, he's Alabama-bound, forced to live with detestable relatives — a homophobic Tupac-and-titties-minded male cousin who rapes him nightly, an aunt who pretends she doesn't know — and suffer through an even shittier existence than one without a mother. Sequan (played by Derrick L. Middleton, who needs acting lessons), a rail-skinny black kid from NYC who wears vests and rainbow wristbands, is called a faggot and punched in the gut for much of the movie until he befriends Lori (Elizabeth Dennis), the slutty, drugged-up white girlfriend of the film's kingpin black villain. She opens Sequan's eyes to the possibility that his new life might not be so bad. He's wrong, of course, which gives the story real weight. But from the Erica Jong novel in Sequan's suitcase to appalling, inconsistent Southern accents and anemic character development, Rivers Wash Over Me loses its potential and winds up a caricature. —C.H. (7/13, RE, 7:15; 7/18, PMT, 12:15)

Set in working-class Bristol, Simon Pearce's Shank centers on three gay men, all of different ages, background and class. Cal is a gangbanger who, along with his crew, has a penchant for beating the shit out of people and taping it. It's exactly how he meets Olivier, a lithe French foreign exchange student who teaches closeted Cal that there isn't anything wrong with him, despite their violent meeting. Olivier's teacher, the depressed and repressed Scott, has already been a victim of Cal's self-loathing violence and warns Olivier to stay away. But Olivier has no reason to until the rest of Cal's gang out finds out about their dalliances. Shot in a jagged, shaky style, Pearce's debut is an auspicious one, but too much to handle for the rookie director. Storylines get picked up and lost again and shots and angles that should carry meaning have little. —M.E. (7/11, RE, 7; 7/12, PMT, 4:30)

The flashbacks and dream sequences in Kit Hung's first film are scary, yet captivating — like a scene from Pan's Labyrinth. It's too bad they don't quite fit. They're meant to illustrate Ricky's (Yulai Lu) dismay over his dead lover, Pascal (Bernhard Bulling), and if they were the most obtuse part of the film — instead of just the icing on a thoroughly bizarre cake filled with time travel, gay doppelgangers and the crooning ghost of a young Asian girl — they'd probably do so successfully. Instead, they distance us further from the humanity of Ricky and Pascal, and make us wish Hung would've spent more time on the storyline's relatable aspects, like Ricky's dying mother or Pascal's abusive ex-boyfriend, before pulling out his bag of metaphysical tricks. —H.O. (7/12, RE, 9:30; 7/16, RE, 5)

You wouldn't know it from its unpolished cut-and-paste opening montage (including a too-obvious shot of a locker-room sign reading "No Drinking, No Drugs, No Lesbians"), but Training Rules is as shocking as it is absorbing. Co-directed by Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker, the women's college hoops doc shines a light on Penn State coach Rene Portland and her longstanding, longer-hushed discriminatory practices. Portland, who brought unparalleled success to the Lady Lions and won herself two Coach of the Year awards, also banned homosexuality on her teams — explicitly and on record. But it wasn't until 2005 — when rising star Jennifer Harris was unfairly removed from the team, lost her scholarship, suffered psychological trauma and, with the help of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, filed a lawsuit against Portland — that the "Mommy Coach," who devastated so many young women's careers and self-worth, saw any consequences to her hateful, homophobic actions. —C.H. (7/18, PMT 4:45; 7/19, RE, 9)

The best part about this made-for-German-TV doc is its fabulous subtitle. Other than that, it's simply a glossy biography of the now-reclusive cinema sweetheart. Biography and a sojourn to Day's current residence of Carmel are intertwined with a somewhat creepy first-person narration "from Day," as told by devotee Kitty Que Sera. When the crew finally talks to Day for an extended period, it's during a radio show that Day frequently calls in on. When a member of the crew reads a letter to Day over the phone, he shakes with excitement and that's when you know this is a documentary for fans, and the enthusiasm is infectious. —M.E. (7/12, RE, 2:30, paired with Pillow Talk, see Agenda Lead on p. XX for more details)

E.E. Cassidy makes her directorial debut with this love letter — both to the '60s mod scene and movies like the mods vs. rockers Quadrophenia. Sadie is a quiet girl just looking to get out of high school unnoticed until she meets Nico, a girl with "a monster foot" who walks with a cane and stakes her claim on getting noticed. Nico introduces Sadie to mod culture, sex and drugs, simultaneously bringing her out of her shell and throwing her life off track. Mary Elise Hayden is particularly perfect as Nico — portraying her as the coolest girl in school, the one everyone else wants to be, but who, deep down inside, actually wants to be someone else. —M.E. (7/12, RE, 8:45; 7/13, RE, 5)

Harry and Bernard Schumanski's debut film Wrecked is raw and graphic. The movie ominously opens with the lead character, Ryan (Theo Montgomery), as he talks into a friend's camera about his ex-boyfriend Daniel's rabid drug habit. Later when Daniel surprises Ryan at his house, the begin a slow journey into a world of hardcore drug use and sex with no intervention in sight. It's a coming-of-age film where morals are messy, lives are altered and good intentions often go to naught. Unfortunately, the film suffers from a lack of character development and depth that affects the overall story. It's edgy and in-your-face, even if those feelings are forced. The Schumanski brothers use hand-held cameras to create as real an atmosphere as possible. But it's mostly all flash and no substance. —Chris Monigle (7/11, RE, 9:30; 7/13, RE, 5)

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