With BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, PJ Raval gives us a tiresome, boring, depressing--but undoubtedly truthful--documentary about certain senior gays

Should gays seclude themselves in a cocoon that includes only their own kind, or ought they engage with the wider world? That is the question that should, but never is, addressed by the new documentary by PJ Raval that opened yesterday in New York City and will hit other cities soon. In it, we meet and spend more time than we could possibly need or want with three gay men of different attitudes, histories and, for that matter, skin color. What they have in common and what we will all have, should we live that long, is age. These men are gay seniors, and, according to some reviewers, this makes the movie meaningful and important. Hogwash. What the movie really says -- without saying it or probably even realizing that it's there -- is that way too many gay seniors have lived a life relegated to their singular gay pursuits without at all engaging with the wider world.

OK: I do realize that the wider world has not and is not always so accepting. No matter what we do, say or deliver in this world, what those of us who are homosexual or bisexual will end up being hung for is our gayness. Still, there are plenty of gay men -- "out" gay men, too -- with lots of straight friends and interests in life that are wide ranging and do not include only -- as the three men shown here live it -- cross-dressing, running a bar devoted to gay drag shows, and working for SAGE and pushing for gay marriage.

Yet for whatever reason, Mr. Raval (shown above), the director and producer of this new documentary BEFORE YOU KNOW IT (as in, "before you know it, you're gonna be a senior, too"), has given us a trio of guys who do not seem to have any interest in anything beyond these immediate topics.  Perhaps they do, and the filmmaker didn't bother to ask them a single question that might lead to discovering this. This is what, for me, made this movie so annoying and finally boring. This, plus its repetitiveness and undue length (110 minutes).

Only one of our men -- Ty Martin, above -- seems fully energized and healthy, and this may very well have to do with his occupation: outreach manager for SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders). We see him at work in the office and promoting his organization at a street fair. We also see him connecting romantically with a fellow, Stanton, with whom he has long been friends. The film was shot during the time that gay marriage came into law in New York State, and Ty is all for marriage. Stanton, however, seems not to be, which creates a certain dissonance that is not explored more than cursorily. While Mr. Martin is by far the most active/positive of the three, one would still like to know more about him than only what his SAGE work and push for gay marriage provides.

The movie begins in Niceville (really!), Florida, where an old man (Dennis Creamer, above) shows us his racquetball championship award, his army uniform, and his closet full of women's clothes. Yes, he's a cross-dresser, and a widower who kept his homosexuality well-closeted from his wife and from everyone else -- friends, relatives -- in his circle. The Florida community is evidently uber-religious and right-wing, and so soon Dennis has gone online to find a gay-friendly senior home in Oregon, to which he goes and where he begins to spend part of each year. Dennis is by far the saddest of our guys because he seems to have few social skills and little interest in anything but cross-dressing. I am sure this cannot be true, but filmmaker Raval does nothing to dissuade us from the notion. When Dennis takes a "gay cruise" on a ship filled with mostly young gay guys, the movie reaches its nadir of depression.

In Galveston, Texas we meet Robert Mainor, above, who has owned for a long while the gay drag bar Lafitte ("The oldest gay bar," he tells us, "in the state of Texas, and the longest running drag show ever!"). Due to ill health, Robert is slowly turning over the operation to a younger relative, whom we also meet. We hear about Robert's deceased lover, Hal, watch a number of drag shows, go to the funeral service of a certain Aunt Helen, watch more drag shows and a gay parade or two (one of these is in Portland, Oregon, with Dennis).

The three stories are interwoven so that we go back and forth, back and forth, but never learn much more than we started with. The world of these men seems hugely guarded, fenced-in to an unnecessary proportion, keeping out perhaps the "negative" but also some of the positive that might become a helpful reinforcement. The movie brought to mind the most interesting article I've read in a long while about gays and "liberation," by Richard Kim in The Nation of May 5, 2014. Read it -- and think (if not weep) at the state of affairs of mainstream gay activism. See this movie, too, but try to regard it from a bit wider perspective than the filmmaker has allowed.

Before You Know It opened yesterday in New York City at the Quad Cinema, and will hit the Los Angeles area on June 13 at Laemmle's Music Hall 3 in Beverly Hills, before moving on June 20 to the Arena Cinema in Hollywood. To view all currently schedules playdates, cities and theaters, click here.

Gay movie marathon: LET MY PEOPLE GO! opens in theaters, GO GO CRAZY on DVD

TrustMovies has, over the years, insisted on a differentiation between a "gay" movie and movies featuring a gay theme. This week's theatrical opening of one film plus the DVDebut of another provide near-perfect textbook examples from each of the two categories, and the difference -- in quality, entertainment value, intelligence and just about everything else you might want in a movie -- is on full display. The film opening in theaters -- deservedly so -- is LET MY PEOPLE GO!,  a real movies done in fine style carried through with talent, taste, and the under-standing of how to back up that taste -- odd as it might be -- with appropriate images, story line, pacing and the like.

The other example is simply a "gay movie," low-end in every manner from cinematography to writing, acting, and general conception. The kind of dreck that gives "gay movies" their bad name -- even, perhaps especially, among gay audiences --  GO GO CRAZY is content to offer up nothing more than an idea that sounds like it could be sort-of fun (a mockumentary about a meager, would-be dance competition in a seedy Philadelphia gay bar) and then gives us exactly that with barely a trace of talent (in front of or behind the camera), little genuine humor or even a dash of pizzazz.

As written and directed by Fred M. Caruso (shown at right, of The Big Gay Musical fame), the movie is so bad that my companion beat a hasty retreat after maybe 10-15 minutes, muttering "This is awful!" Feeling duty-bound to sit through the whole thing, as I'd been sent a free DVD to watch, I also hoped the film would get better. It didn't. The big problem here is simply that everything we see and hear seems third-hand: the whole idea, the characterizations, dialog, situations and jokes. If you haven't seen and heard all this sort of thing before, a number of times, then you're probably very young. Or very forgetful. Or maybe just very forgiving.

This is  the kind of movie that was probably great fun to make for the participants but hell to suffer through for viewers. Among the better touches are the pretty good Russian accent of Michael Cusumano (above) and the very good impersonations and singing voice of Christina Bianco (below, an alumnus of the terrific Forbidden Broadway).

The worst offender is the drag queen known as Hedda Lettuce, limned by Steven Polito, below, about whom I have heard a good deal over the years and have actually seen a few times, though not at the great length shown here. Which proves too much of a bad thing. Ms Lettuce mistakes nastiness and a foul mood for humor. While these can sometimes align, in Go Go Crazy, we get much of the former and little of the latter.

Unfortunately, this movie takes us back to a time in gay life when almost no diversity of any sort was able to show its head. Instead, what we have here is one long, loud, time-tested cliché after another, endlessly on parade. The movie, from Breaking Glass Pictures and running 84 minutes, is available now on DVD.

****************

When is a cliché not a cliché? This question came to mind while watching a French film that deals heavily in them but manages to rise well above the obvious by playing its clichés faithfully, truthfully and for all they're worth. With LET MY PEOPLE GO! -- the new combination gay sex comedy/family film/bedroom farce/Jewish tradition movie -- co-writer (with Christophe Honoré) and director Mikael Buch (shown at left) creates a film that becomes unusual by virtue of its treating everything from comedy to family, religion to tradition with absolute seriousness, no matter how crazy things get. Consequently, he delivers a very funny film.

Let My People Go!, of course, makes one immediately ask, which people? Well, the Jews (there is a French-Jewish family at the heart of the movie) and the gays. One of the family's two sons (Nicolas Maury, above, left) is queer and has been living abroad with his Finnish lover who is not Jewish and consequently not quite good enough for mom (the wonderful Spanish actress Carmen Maura, above, right).

To try to explain the convoluted plot would take too much time and be a spoiler of sorts, anyway, so I will just say that it involves our hero's job as a postman (above) in Finland; a very large pile of money arriving in the mail; an untrusting lover (who's awfully cute, below),

a very randy lawyer (the indispensible Jean-Luc Bideau); various couplings, like the one below, that speed the plot along, defy logic and coincidence but are nonetheless very pointed and funny; and situations that show us quietly and sweetly how important family -- all kinds and extensions of it -- really is.

Alert viewers will spot a nice touch of Bambi and Cinderella in the film's beginning, indicating perhaps the kind of fairy tale to come. In the starry French cast look for the likes of Amira Casar (below, left), Clément Sibony (center) and Jean-François Stévenin (right).

Probably the film's single funniest episode involves a dream/fantasy that our hero has that shows his mom (below) hawking a new spray product that will bring out the Jew in you -- gal or guy, Juif or goy. M. Buch has concocted a wild little comedy that keeps you laughing hard, even as it manages to honor everything from gays to goys, Jews, traditions, and family ties both strict and loose.

Let My People Go! (running a swift 88 minutes, and a nice surprise from Zeitgeist Films, a company that usually offers more serious fare) opens this Friday, January 11, in New York City at the Quad Cinema, and on January 18 in the Los Angeles area at various Laemmle theaters.  Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates across the country.

Meet the filmmaker! Director Mikael Buch 

will have a Q&A following the 7:20pm show 

at the Quad on Friday, 1/11/13 and Saturday, 1/12/13.

Marco Berger's PLAN B: a long, sweet, faux flirtation that asks an incendiary question

On one level PLAN B, the recently released-to-DVD Argentine film by Marco Berger, is a fun and funny little movie about romance and revenge gone goofily awry.  When Bruno (newcomer Manuel Vignau), the hirsute, hunky but rather hollow young man who's been dumped by his girlfriend Laura (another newcomer Mercedes Quinteros) decides to get revenge on her and her new boyfriend Pedro (played by the very interesting, works-a-lot actor Lucas Ferraro), he suggests to Laura that her new guy looks gay -- and then begins a clandestine relationship with Pedro to try to prove his point. Berger's movie works perfectly well on this level, providing charm, smarts and even -- depending on your sophistication level and how many movies of this sort you've seen -- some surprises.

On another level (several of them, in fact,) the movie opens up a Pandora's Box of questions that, once asked, need to be further explored, if not answered fully, since those answers will most likely differ from person to person. Mr. Berger, shown at right, appears (on the basis of what we see and hear in Plan B) too smart a guy and too good a filmmaker not to know what he has wrought in his little rom-com-cum-stealth-missile. Is gay attraction and behavior absolutely built-in or can it be learned? Can two presumably straight guys fall in romantic love over the long haul merely by spending time together and growing attached?  If so, just how malleable is sexuality?

Over the decades, Kinsey and other sex researchers have tried to answer questions like these, but given the strictures places on sexuality by religion and social mores, not to mention mankind's (male version) tendency to want to appear as macho as possible, getting an honest reading on the subject seems well nigh impossible. All of which makes Berger's little effort the more subversively explosive.

The two men bond easily and quickly around a few subjects they find in common, particularly games and icons from their youth. Alcohol and light drug-use help, too, as do the very natural, laid-back performances from the two actos (Vignau is shown above, right, Ferraro at left).  It would make sense that neither of them would possess a trace of behavior that might appear gay -- why would they? -- so their increasing friendship seems both natural and suspect, particularly on the part of Bruno, since his original intent was to "reveal" his opponent.  Revelation can come in many different ways, of course, since we all wear masks.

As a filmmaker, Berger trusts his instinct to stay away from not only the overly expository but, surprisingly, even dialog itself. The first four minutes of the film are dialog-free -- all ambient sounds -- and often along the way, the writer/director opts for his characters to remain silent. When it does arrive, his dialog is always believable and cogent, but the film's most memorable scenes may be those that are nearly silent: at the beach, people-watching, or a character lingering over a letter until he fully comprehends it. As director, Berger also seems to enjoy showing us odd shots of local architecture -- why, I am not sure -- but these do not distract much from our enjoyment.

Plan B just may be the longest pre-coital romance in cinema history, and to the filmmaker's credit, this full-length flirtation works better than it has any right to. (Still, at 103 minutes, the movie would have profited by being cut by at least ten, so as not to test our patience quite so much.)  For a film with strong gay content, the movie is surprisingly chaste, which actually adds to its charm. When our boys wake up in the morning (above) they have their shorts on, of course, and nothing has happened -- except some typical early morning tumescence. Finally, it's the performances by Vignau and Ferraro that do the most to bring home Berger's message: "In order to understand you, people have to see through your eyes."  Plan B allows us to do this, and the view is alternately sad and warm, foolish and funny.

Wolfe Video, increasingly important as a source for GLBT films, is releasing Plan B, which became available for sale or rent on October, 26, 2010.