This Weekend’s VOD Favorites
The Gay Cinema Video On Demand experience at TLAgay.com has your entertainment needs covered! We’re always working to expand selection of new and old gay-themed movies available for your viewing pleasure. Here’s just five of our current favorites, from various years, that you may have missed – ALL available to watch INSTANTLY! These aren’t our TOP 5, by any means – just a handful of flicks we want to highlight.
Like Cattle Towards Glow
Acclaimed author Dennis Cooper and co-director Zac Farley‘s Like Cattle Towards Glow is a 93 minute film consisting of five independent, thematically and emotionally interconnected scenes. The film is a complex, intimate, strangely serene, wide-ranging, and always challenging exploration of sexual desire as a hiding place. In these unique, stylistically and temperamentally diverse scenes, sex makes a promise of something so intense and untenable to the characters that they feel they must enter it in secret – through an act of violence, or under the guise of an unrelated transaction, or by rationalizing its dangers away with the help of politics, or through utilizing it remotely as material for a purely aesthetic project. Like these characters, and like sex itself, Like Cattle Towards Glow is as deep, knowing, and unknowable as it is raucous, original, and explicit on the surface. John Waters called it “a real French tickler for the fucked-up literary set.”
Boy Undone
Two young men spend the night together after meeting the previous evening in a notorious gay club. The next day, however, the host wakes to find the boy he picked up bewildered and confused, unable to remember his name or anything about his past. Lacking any type of identification or obvious clues, the boys begin to search for the truth among fragments of memories that may or may not prove reliable. A chilling homoerotic thriller from Mexican writer-director Leopoldo Laborde, Boy Undone is queer guerrilla filmmaking at its most intense, featuring brave, bare-it-all-style performances from the game young performer’s at the film’s center. Warning: this film features scenes of graphic sexuality and tons of full-frontal male nudity. Viewer discretion is advised.
People You May Know
Joe, Delia, Rodrigo and Herbert (Sean Maher, Andrea Grano, Nacho San Jose and Mark Cirillo) are very close friends in their mid 30’s. Delia and Rodrigo are married. Joe is Delia’s ex-boyfriend… but he turned out to be gay. Herbert, who is also gay, is starting a relationship with a much younger guy. During a boozy night, while Rodrigo is out of town, Joe and Delia end up sleeping together… and she gets pregnant. She wants to keep the baby since Rodrigo recently has found out he is sterile. Rodrigo feels betrayed by his wife and his closest friend. He cannot stand the situation and leaves her. In the meantime, Joe is in a weird and secret online relationship with Tom. They have not met in person yet… and they never will. People You May Know is a smart, sexy and sensitive bed-hopping comedy.
End of Love
Writer-director Simon Chung, whose 2005 film Innocence put him among the leaders of Queer Asian Cinema, raised the bar with this extraordinary tale of sexual obsession, unrequited love and psychological isolation – evoking imagery and themes that are equal parts sensual, eloquent and heartrending. Boyishly cute Ming (Chi-Kin Lee) is a 22-year-old Hong Kong male prostitute whose party-boy ways land him in a Christian reformatory camp. As the story unfolds recalling his relationship with his boyfriend and his ex-roommate – sharing both drugs and “clients” with the latter – Ming falls for Keung (Guthrie Yip), a handsome, former drug addict who has been assigned as his sponsor. When Ming and Keung each return to the outside world, they face an uncertain future both sexually and emotionally – and will need to rely on each other to weather any storm on the horizon. A hit at film festivals around the world, End Of Love abandons the usual themes of identity and coming out which are often characteristic of gay Asian cinema and presents a mature, involving and quite entertaining look at what it’s like to be young and gay in modern-day Hong Kong.
Atomic Age
Victor and Rainer (Eliott Paquet and Dominik Wojcik) are typical young French hipsters on their way to Paris, swigging Red Bull, bantering about the Stone Roses, and musing about what awaits them. Checking into a club, Victor hits on the girls, while Rainer spikily rebuffs the advances of a male admirer… and secretly pines for the love of his best buddy. Testosterone surges, bravado leads to a face-off… just another night on the town. Until it’s not. Co-starring Neils Schneider, writer-director Helena Klotz‘s Atomic Age is a gritty, stunningly shot character study perfectly capturing what it’s like to be a young man, fumbling their way through a sexual awakening, whilst negotiating the delicate bonds of friendship.