Reviews

This film is about the dismissive attitude of the police and prosecutors to the large number of murders of trans individuals. I learned a lot about the early transgender scene in New York from the 1960s forward, how their lives developed or ended in tragedies of drug overdoses, suicides and murders. At times I had difficulty understanding why we were tracing a particular investigative avenue, but in the end the various threads came together.

The death took place 25 years ago with little forensic evidence and to resolve the mystery it now requires a candid death bed confession.

I appreciate how the internal investigator carried herself through the film by not calling attention to her person and to her personal struggles.

Definitely a must see for those interested in the GBLTYQ's history in New Yok.

This documentary is going off madly in all directions at once. TH checks each and every politically correct box during the documentary with motherhood and Christianity thrown in for good measure. His current boyfriend is featured but we are left with no sense of their relationship. We do learn a lot more about his first love which I found disrespectful of the bf.

More importantly, I left without understanding his creative process or why he took to the road with his first draft of a musical. More disturbing was his lack of financial backing, the risks that he took with such a punishing schedule, and no apparent understanding of how to turn a solid profit on tour. Music is a business, but nowhere was that apparent.

Bright stars flame out so I left the movie house feeling somewhat sorry for the guy.

This is not a biography of Tom of Finland the provocative / pornographic artist.

Instead, it is the life story of the man whom we became known as Tom of Finland in later life. For much of his film, Tom of Finland is a soldier and then an advertising man who photographed men who would later be the subjects of his infamous sketches. The distinctive, stylized pencil work develops and is refined throughout the film. We can now understand whence came this erotic work and its distinctive style.

The story witnesses the transformation that uncompromising devotion and love can bring to gay male relationship. The English boy, Johnny Saxby, is a low class, unpolished, irresponsible, unhappy drunk barely coping with life and displays a downright cruel streak. He treats his local hookup as disposable and the Roumanian farm hand so badly that the latter starts a brawl. The Roumanian brings human kindness and romance into the farm boy's life for the first time. The grandmother, played by Gemma Jones, plays a severe hard boiled farm wife with exceptional skill. Alec Secareanu acts well throughout. His assertiveness comes from a sense of fairness; no one will take advantage of him. As for the livestock, they play an important part in story and character development.

Prom King deals with the follies of an intelligent young man trying to find love in lower Manhattan. His friendship with a late 20s / early 30s gay man helps hold the film together as the protagonist makes every mistake possible in his search for Mr. Right. The main character is not plausible. We are to believe that he was a socially adept high school student able to be Prom King and a hopeless social misfit when a university student. The movie tries to link the main character's interest in classic movies to his romantic adventures, but the effort is clumsy. It is unclear what, if anything he studies, at the unknown university he attends. He has no classmates, no homework, no exams, no libraries or study halls, no text books, no professors, no student clubs, no student athletic facility and a 4.0 grade point in something. The story is not credible. The quality of the photography is good and the actors do their part, but the story line is so unconvincing that the film is irredeemable.

This film is refreshing because it addresses the generational gap between those who lived through the plague before the HIV cocktail was deemed effective and those who came of age afterwards.

The protagonist is not a sympathetic character. He is unable to move beyond the era of his AIDS activism, to develop new relationships or to adapt to new social movements. The trauma of his 20s and 30s is unresolved. He treats everyone badly; he does not discriminate on gender, gender identity or race. I am not troubled by the slow pace of character development because his inflexibility is a function of his age. He does learn to juxtapose his experience with contemporary gay life. He also is able to find some resolution to what he has lost.

I would contrast this film with the generational conflict in When We Rise, the recent television mini- series.

This work should be shown to film students as an example of how not to direct a documentary.

Despite the Inferno having 87 pages, we see very few of them in detail. While the opportunity to view the manuscript magnified onto a movie screen is welcome, remarkably little time is spent showing it to us. Instead, we see lovely views of Florence, the Italian countryside, Scotland, opulent libraries, churches, and talking heads.

The talking heads have great credentials and offer wonderful insight. I did not pay to see their faces. Worse, two of them had painfully awkward mannerisms that distracted the viewer. The director repeatedly squandered the opportunity to illustrate the points the experts were making by showing the talking head instead of the manuscript.

The narrator asks how long it would have taken to complete the work. Instead of interviewing an illustrator who could estimate the time to do the work with the tools available to Botticelli (assuming no pause for the creative process), we see an illustrator using a software program to replicate the process on high end equipment in a fraction of the time for manual illustration using 15th century instruments.

A considerable portion of the film was filler. It was like watching the local news on a slow day when the announcers chatter to fill in the minutes. The most painful filler was the anonymous street interviews (general public? actors? actors recreating what the man on the street said?) which were inane.

To his credit, the director did present contradictory viewpoints.