Any idea what the title of the film is?

From Peggy Rajski comes a powerful and disturbing story that handles the concepts of coming out of the closet and suicide with wry humour and pathos.

Since unleashing his outrageous debut No Skin Off My Ass in ‘91 and with successive art-porn assaults such as Hustler White and The Raspberry Reich in his filmography, Bruce LaBruce has gained international notoriety as the enfant terrible of Canadian gay cinema - a reputation that now encompasses horror, with his latest:

Otto; or, Up with Dead People

The awkwardly punctuated title (a nod to Herman Melville’s 1852 novel Pierre; or, the Ambiguities) refers to the two films within the film. The first one “Otto,” is a documentary about a boy who may or may not be a zombie. The second, “Up with Dead People” is a political zombie porno flick. Both films are directed by an avant-garde lesbian filmmaker character named Medea Yarn (an anagram for legendary experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, 1917-61).

Un-death is only the beginning of Otto’s identity crisis, however, as he’s also a zombie with an eating disorder. As a vegetarian in his previous life, he abbors consuming human flesh. Instead, he sustains himself on a predominantly roadkill diet. As an effiminate, vegetarian, gay zombie, Otto is particularly vulnerable to his human enemies, so in order to stay under the radar, he auditions for a role in “Up with Dead People” in the hopes that people won’t think he’s a genuine zombie, they’ll just think he’s playing one.

LaBruce exploits the zombie subgenre not merely as a convenient metaphor to comment on contemporary consumerism but to tackle issues very specific to contemporary gay culture. “the old horror monsters like vampires and werewolves, they’re more like individuals,” he explains “They’re on the fringe of society. They’re marginalized characters. But zombies are the ultimate conformist. They come in masses and they’re the ultimate consumers. Part of the thesis of the movie is that gays are now model consumers. Gay culture has become extremely conformist; gays are getting married and having children and they’re very upwardly mobile and bourgeois. But the zombie template fits AIDS as well because AIDS is viral. It’s the idea of the body decaying, and I’m shifting the paradigm so my zombie is the outsider, and, just as in Night of the Living Dead, where the rednecks are beating and burning the zombies, that’s essentially what has happened to homosexuals as well.”

LaBruce is confident that his traditional audience will accept his foray into horror, firmly convinced that “gays are very much into blood and guts.” But it’s the mainstream horror fans he’s more worried about. “They’re able to watch the most extreme torture porn and decapitation disembowelments, but then if they see two men kissing they’ll puke,” he says with a laugh “That’s what I’m expecting. One of my initial impetuses was I thought it would be really cool to make a zombie porn movie, partly because zombies are so rotten that you can just make your own orifice so it’s perfect for pornography.”

   

Emerson Thorsen, 13, lives with his parents in their eco-home in the wilds of Nova Scotia. He’s just had his first wet dream and completed writing and illustrating his first book, all 1000 pages of it. Meanwhile, the home-schooled youth can barely add 2 + 2, so his mother enrolls him in the local junior high. There, Emerson’s 42-year-old English teacher, Don Grant, has settled into a life of perpetual adolescence, paying regular visits to a park restroom for anonymous sex. In the classroom, Emerson stirs things up. Surprisingly, Don sees a bit of himself reflected in Emerson. Emerson, initially scornful of his teacher, soon develops his first crush on Don. The precociously confident boy, raised in a household of casual nudity and sexual openness, throws himself into this awakening of his heart with dangerous abandon. This is going to be a Whole New Thing. For everyone.

To its enormous credit, the movie remains on high ground. It recognizes that growing pains don’t inevitably lead to scandal and catastrophe. They are discomforts to be endured for as long as they last. If you’re lucky, they can also be valuable learning experiences. — The New York Times

Not your average teen movie. The entire drama unfolds with the sense that these are real people living real lives, not facile movie fictions. The cast is uniformly excellent, but (Aaron) Webber in his first feature role is a stand out, delivering a subtle performance that offers a fully realized portrayal of a smart, sensitive, confused, and sometimes bratty and obnoxious youth. — Pam Grady

Enter the Pirate Bay!

Sweden - cold, snowy… and bloody. Based on a book by John Ajvide Lindqvist a film will be released next month which tells a story of romance, violence and horror. Let the Right on come in (Låt den rätte komma in), directed by Tomas Alfredson. In a skid row of Stockholm lives Oskar - a typical 12-year-old outsider who finds security and care in the arms of Eli, a beautiful but strange girl. But she wants more than his love…

This is a typically laid-back Scandinavian coming-of-age film about a school trip to the Swedish wilderness. Vil Du Se Min Smukke Navle? (Do You Want to See My Beautiful Navel?) is pleasant and nothing to get too excited about. There is the usual experimentation with the opposite sex, a couple scenic views of Sweden, but nothing much happens. Happily, the dialogue is refreshingly free of clichés, and director Søren Kragh-Jacobsen — little more than a teenager himself at the time — gets fine performances from a mostly amateur cast. [All Movie Guide]

Some people think Genesis Children don’t has a plot at all but there is a at least some kind of central theme: A priest who teaches at the international school in Rome puts an advertisement in the local paper which is designed to entice boys from the school who are bored, or at least not content, and rebellious enough to take off on their own and skip school. The advertisement is in English, therefore all the responses are from English speaking students at the school. The priest plants the advertisement where one particular student will find it, but the other seven come across it on their own. 

When the eight boys (ages about ten to sixteen) arrive at the place indicated by the advertisement, they are lead to a secluded stretch of beach and left on their own for about a week. The Priest leaves one box of food, but does not tell the boys it is there. He does indicate by what he tells the boys when they first arrive that he expects them to learn something by way of this adventure, but is very ambiguous as to what he expects them learn. The movie is narrated by one of the boys, and if you pay attention to what he is saying, you will see something of what the boys are learning, or at least something of what they are thinking.

Punish Me, aptly photographed in rich black and white, is a deftly made German film that raises as many questions as disturbing thoughts, a film that in every definition is a film noir - and a superb one at that. Writer Susanne Billig and director Angelina Maccarone have concocted a tale of disparate matching between a 50-year-old woman and a 16-year-old boy, a relationship that builds on sadomasochism as a means of filling voids in each character. The story could easily have become ’sensational’ in less sensitive hands, but here, with the sound help of a superb and wholly credible cast, it asks us to examine the extremes to which people will go to feel complete.

Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the poor, African American and Latino gay and transgendered community involved in it. Many consider Paris Is Burning to be an invaluable documentary of the end of the "Golden Age" of New York City drag balls, as well as a thoughtful exploration of race, class, and gender in America… read more

Brennt Paris? Ja, Paris brennt. Aber die positive Antwort auf Hitlers insistierende Nachfrage vom August 1944 kam 40 Jahre zu spät und aus einer Ecke, aus der er sie sicher nicht erwartet hätte. "Paris is burning" hieß es auf dem Plakat zu einem jener legendären Bälle der schwulen, schwarzen Subkultur in Brooklyn, die in Jennie Livingstones gleichnamigem Film von 1991 porträtiert wurde. Dieser Titel geht auf René Clements Film Is Paris burning? von 1965 zurück, der mit einem ungeheuren Aufgebot an Stars (Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas, Jean-Paul Belmondo u.v.a.) das Drama um die Befreiung von Paris erzählte. Bedrängt von der Resistance und den nahenden alliierten Truppen weigerte sich der deutsche Kommandeur von Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz (Gert Fröbe) dennoch, Hitlers Befehl, Paris in Brand zu setzen nachzukommen. Er wollte nicht mehr sinnlos enorme Kulturgüter zerstören. Das Plakat zum Film zeigt einen deutschen Soldaten neben dem von Flammen umzüngelten Eifelturm. Das Plakat aus Brooklyn lässt den Soldaten weg und präsentiert - eine hübsche Obszönität - einen brennenden, stark phallischen Eifelturm, dessen Flammen, die wie Tropfen aussehen, von einer Tunte entfacht werden. Daran lassen sich gut - wie wir sehen werden - einige post-freudianische Spekulationen festmachen… Weiterlesen

A small-town loner’s fascination with the new kid in town leads him into something much more sinister than he could ever have imagined.

Based on Anton Dudley’s award-winning play. As the sun sets over a swampy Scotland bog, two boys meet in the darkness as part of a nightly ritual. Part character study, part love story, DAVY & STU is a heartwrenching look at the intensity of adolescent romance and forbidden love.

Die meisten dürften - im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes - schon mal von Conna gehört haben - er war nämlich die deutsche Synchronstimme von Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode I und was einen Freund von mir besonders interessieren dürfte: von Sora in Kingdom Hearts ;) Aber nicht nur das Synchronsprechen (sein Vater war die Stimme von Micky Maus! xD), sondern auch das Schauspielen liegt bei den Jascheroffs in der Familie… …kennen und lieben gelernt habe ich ihn in Jargo. Der Film ist zwar nur durchschnittliche deutsche Kinokost aber Conna in traditioneller arabischer Kleidung oder beim Farbenwundersex hilft doch mehr als gut über eine wenig innovative Storyline hinweg ;o)

 FarbenWunderSex in Jargo

Violent Femmes and wrestling boys. The same boys watching TV, huffing glue, jerking off, playing soccer, dodging water balloons, sharing headphones, and dancing, singing, and drumming at punk rock shows. Listed in this manner, the basic ingredients of Alexis Dos Santos’s Glue don’t sound that different from those of a dozen other teen films. But the way Dos Santos views such material is something else entirely. Glue is that rare kind of filmmaking so attuned to pleasure and spontaneity that it tickles your palate, opening up new possibilities about how to live. The film’s chief subject matter — bisexuality that takes exhilarating form before the constraints of adulthood can arrive — is ideally realized through Dos Santos’s sensual and whim-driven approach. Read More…