Christopher and His Kind brings Matt Smith (the Eleventh Doctor) to the role of Christopher Isherwood in this bit of autobiography that tells of Isherwood’s time in pre-Nazi Germany. The wide eyed Christopher heads to Berlin for the boys and has his fair share in the muscular hustler Caspar (Alexander Doetsch) and the youthful Heinz (Douglas Booth). He loses both when the Nazi’s come to power.
Smith (Thomas Dekker) is bisexual, just starting college, and contending with his straight surfer boy rommmate Thor (Chris Zylka) who’s sending all sorts of gay signals. Meanwhile his lesbian best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) is trying to break up with her crazy girlfriend who’s turned out to be a practicing witch. Then there’s his roommates best friend Rex (Andy Fischer-Price) who drops by for mixed signal underwear wrestling and the mysterious hookup on the beach (Jason Olive). And there’s the girl he hooks up with who knows more than she should as Smith starts to find wierder happenings going on around him as people disappear, mysterious messages show up and links appear to his supposedly long dead father as things spiral out of control heading towards a Kaboom.
A naked American is found wandering around Canada with Amnesia. James Brighton (Dusan Dukic) has no memory of who he is or how he ended up on the street, but does remember that he’s gay. Taken in by the Montreal gay community, it leads some to wander if he’s for real or it’s all a con.
In I Love You Phillip Morris, Steven Russell (Jim Carey) is a married cop indulging in a closeted gay life. After a nearly deadly accident, he comes out and starts a lavish lifestyle that he supports by being a con man. When caught and jailed, he meets Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a gay man in jail for having kept his rental car too long. Love for Phillip sparks one inventive con after another from Steven to let them share a cell on to freeing one or the other of them from prison and creating a lifestyle built on one con after another. Carey and McGregor are great and the movie is based on a real people, Steven who’s still in jail and Phillips who’s been released.
From 1997, Johnathan Schaech is Teddy, a con man on the run from a deal gone bad trying to sell rare birds in New York. He winds up in Australia, where he meets Angie, a strange woman who watches him shower and then hitches a ride with him. After a brief fling, Teddy finds himself knocked out and then wakes up in the town of Woop Woop run by Angie’s psycho father Daddy-O (Rod Taylor) in middle of nowhere Australia. Teddy finds that the bizarre townsfolk consider him married to Angie and that Daddy-O never lets anyone leave town and there’s no contact with the outside world. Pretty funny film and it finds lots of excuses to get Schaech in varying states of undress.
Jeffrey (Steven Weber) is a young gay man living in New York who’s terrified of all the things that can go wrong from having sex. As he makes the decision to just become celibate, he runs into Steve (Michael T. Weiss), who’s pretty much the man of his dreams. All his freinds (and a number of complete strangers) try to convince him that Steve’s the guy for him. Jeffrey starts to weaken, only to discover that Steve is HIV+, pushing his reluctance to get involved to new heights. A bit dated, but worth a look for the dancing cowboy waiters alone. And there’s Patrick Stewart as Steve and Jeffrey’s friend trying to get them together as he deals with his own tragedy and Nathan Lane as a sex obsessed priest taking Jeffrey’s confession.
I’ll Love You Forever. . . Tonight, a black and white film from 1992, follows Ethan (Paul Marius), a photographer, on a get away with his friend Dennis (Jason Adams) to Palm Springs where they meet up with other old and new friends (David Poynter, Roger Shank, Miles Wilshire) for assorted drama and romantic pairings. Probably notable for Thomas Jane in a bit part as a gay hustler.
The new Rob Williams film Role / Play centers around an outed soap opera star and a gay marriage activist. Graham (Steve Callahan) sees his career in ruins after a sex tape showing him with his boyfriend is leaked on the internet. Trey (Matthew Montgomery) is also having press problems when the story gets out that he’s divorcing his husband. The two seek refuge in a small resort where they meet and deal with their situations. David Pevsner is the resort owner and Jim J. Bullock is Graham’s agent. Good movie.
