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Old 02-14-2020, 06:04 PM
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David David is offline
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I’m a fan of Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011). The cast of stage-trained young actors does superb work—they carry the narrative burden, the poetry burden, and the emotional burden like old pros. The result isn’t stuffy or amateurish or in any way miscalculated; it’s euphoric. Despite its being set in a military academy during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, politics is blessedly kept to a minimum in favor of accessible and ultimately memorable storytelling. I highly, highly recommend.

I’m not crazy about a lot of the movies with gay texts or subtexts that draw everyone’s attention, like Visconti’s Death in Venice, the Jean Genet movie A Song of Love, Tea and Sympathy, King Ludwig (the Ken Russell nonsense, whatever its actual title is), Jarman’s Tempest and Caravaggio, Prospero’s Books, and the prestige stuff like Victoria/Victoria (most of which toys timidly with its themes). There’s a John Butler movie called Handsome Devil, filmed in Ireland and featuring a great rock soundtrack—the movie is pretty good but just doesn’t really dig in. It’s like Chariots of Fire or Rocky at the end, with a heaving sense of uplift to send everyone out of the theater skipping.

Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising is comically first-rate. I forgot about that one.
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