[Movies] Swiss Army Man (2016)

When it comes to those more art-style movies that seriously compete at film festivals, you can end up with some crazy stuff. And I definitely had that feeling when Tobie first showed me the trailer for Swiss Army Man.

The premise of the movie seemed pretty ridiculous - you have a guy trying to find his way home and finds a corpse. That corpse proves to be extremely useful for all sorts of functions like as a farting jetski or a seemingly spring-loaded  wood chopper. Why all this was happening or just how deluded the protagonist was for him to imagine these things were left in the full movie to explain.

I was not expecting to watch this movie with the office crew after work, but that's exactly what happened. I was intending to watch the movie together with Tobie but I certainly won't mind watching it again once we find the time for it.

Needless to say, I enjoyed it a lot.

[Movies] Whiplash (2014)

Every awards season, we end up with a list of movies that get a lot of nominations and thus seem like something worth paying attention to, however not all movies fall into our core areas of interest, so they end up getting bumped around the watching priority queue. This doesn't make the movies bad or something despite the awards nominations - they're just not movies that we can find a strong affinity for.

Whiplash is one such movie that was often cited in various Oscar-related press, but it's one that maybe we waited a bit too long before finally getting to watch. It was certainly a very intense movie, but the greatness of it is rather subtle and maybe hard for a lot of people to fully appreciate.

The movie is centered around the jazz scene, particularly focused on the education scene related to it. It's a movie about a young man trying to figure out his path and how his family tries to support him in their own way. And of course you have a rather harsh mentor figure that may or may not be good for his development. That's where the drama lies.

[Movies] Catfish (2010)

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Or so the "old" saying goes, if you consider 1993 to be old these days.

One's anonymity has always been one of the big draws of the internet. Maintaining your privacy and sometimes even your real life identity has been one of the pillars of the early internet as people learned to socialize behind the protective screens of pseudonyms, handles and alternate nicknames.

In recent years, the rise of social networking has lead to a new paradigm - one that calls for a more open internet where people's online identities and offline identities have aligned into one. Thus we have more and more people who maintain rather public profiles in order to better market themselves, sell their services, get hired or whatever.

But just because we live in an age of social networking doesn't mean that everyone is exactly who they say they are. If anything, the adage above will always hold true for a certain segment of the online population, and thus it remains important to keep your guard up in meeting new people online for the first time.

This movie acts as a stark reminder of that fact.

[Movies] Save Me (2007)

Queer as Folk revolutionized gay entertainment and brought the LGBT culture well into the forefront of public attention. Whether you're a fan of the UK or the US versions of the series, the show remains landmark in the memories of queers around the world. In turn, many of the actors who got involved in the series remain to be public figures to varying degrees, at least within the LGBT community.

I picked up a copy of this film because of the involvement of Robert Gant in the US version of QaF a few years ago. For those who remember, he played Ben, the love interest of Michael (Hal Sparks) during the tail-end of the series. Man, just writing about the show makes me want to schedule a repeat viewing, hehe.

Apart from that, the movie did get featured at the Sundance Film Festival, so I it seemed a worthy venture at the time.

Save Me is an interesting look at the world of those Christian gay "conversion" camps. Sorry, didn't mean to make it sound like a concentration camp, haha. Anyway, central to the story is Mark (Chad Allen), a wild gay man very heavily into drugs and sex, who is forced to go to this Christian ministry in an attempt to "cure" him of his ills. There he meets Scott (Gant) and the two eventually develop a bond of friendship that becomes a lot more.

Now typically such locations are presented in a rather harsh life - one of the strongest representations that come to mind were the Mormon-run versions of such places as depicted in Latter Days. The filmmakers tried to take a more neutral stance of a sort by presenting the ministry more as a well-intentioned group just operating within their own religious precepts with the residents being a bit more unruly, at least in the beginning.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I'm not too fond of Chad as an actor, or it may be more because of how annoying his character was. It may be more because of how his character was written given how quickly he started to embrace the teachings of the ministry instead of being the rebellious and skeptical queer who had been forced into the camp. That bit never really made all that much sense to me.

The movie didn't really need a strong plot to carry it along. To some extent, it just tried to present how the day-to-day activities of the camp would go and in that sense it kept things fairly progressive. The only thing that really pushed the "plot" along was of course the budding romance between Mark and Scott and with the minister's wife acting as a foil their relationship.

On the whole, the movie was a lot lighter than expected given the "heaviness" of the story. It had its slightly tense, religiously-influenced moments for sure but that didn't become the overall carrying tone. At its core was just the story of two guys meeting under unusual circumstances and getting to know one another and ultimately falling in love, for lack of a better term. You'll understand my hesitation to call it outright love once you see it.

Like many LGBT films, it has more than its fair share of deus ex machina moments in terms of plot development, but then beggars can't be choosers in this environment, I suppose. It's certainly worth taking the time to watch, especially if you're looking for another good quality pink film to add to your collection.

[Entertainment] Movie Awards Season

In case you haven't already noticed, I've recently developed a penchant for the TIME Magazine website, particularly as a source of analysis of current events and not necessarily as a news source - for that it's always best to scan or search Google News.

Recently they've published a string on interesting articles that I wanted to share with everyone about the various awards being given out for the entertainment industry. Enjoy!

• On the Golden Globes - Hollywood with a British Accident
  
• On the Sundance Film Festival - The Trouble with Sundance
  
• On the Academy Awards Nominations - A Nightmare for Dreamgirls

Enjoy!