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dunnadam
Reviews
Being Stavros (2014)
A short film that seems to be about opening your mind.
Entertaining enough, this short film is about what happens when you don't meet the traditional definition of beauty. While its true that Stavros shouldn't be ridiculed for walking down the street as the film clearly shows, the big revelation for me was that his crush was on Zac Efron in his High School Musical days and he wants to meet someone just like that. A film asking us to look outside the conventional measure of beauty is undermined when the hero is infatuated with the most conventional beauty of all. It was for me, as RuPaul says, the moment when the curtain was pulled back on the Wizard of Oz. All this isn't real, even this movie telling you to be more real.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (2007)
Sill pretentious film trying to be smart
I saw this film at the Toronto Gay and Lesbian film fest. It seems like such a mish-mash, like Cruel Intentions and Opposite of Attraction rolled together. In one scene, Dorian picks up a 13 year old hustler (who has more hair than me on his chest) and kills him. So I asked the director why. Really Dorian says like 17 times he is straight and would never sleep with a man, then has sex with approximately 100 men, why is he picking up a male hustler to begin with? And then he kills him for no reason, without saying a word. The director kind of laughed and asked the audience if anyone would explain it to me, like everyone in the theatre got it but me, which was lovely. The director also said he did not include nudity because he felt the new trend in gay films was showing nudity and there should be more stories. This to me sounds very gay republican circa 1985, saying "we're not all hairdressers". Then he casts the hottest guy I've ever seen as Dorian and talks about how he got an erection while watching the sex scenes in the movie. Perfect example of this whole film. Tries to make a point but gets mired down in the semantics.