With GEOGRAPHY CLUB, from the Entin twins, the GLBT movie goes grandly Hollywood glossy

It may take until the close of this film, when the charming end-credits are rolling, that you'll realize you've just experienced the coming-of-age of the gay rom-com-cum-melodram. Yup. GEOGRAPHY CLUB -- a glossy, smart, sweet little high school movie -- gets just about everything right and entertains like crazy while doing it. A product of the Entin twins (Gary, who directed, and Edmund, who wrote the screenplay, based on the popular Brent Hartinger novel), the movie was produced by Michael Huffington (yes!) and Anthony Bretti, and they've stinted on nothing -- from the excellent cast to the cinematography, editing and all else technical. The movie looks surprisingly like a lovely, glossy Hollywood product that -- hey -- just happens to be GLBT-themed.

Of course, the question then arises: Is this what we need? While the answer is most likely: We need a lot of things, this is certainly one form of "equality" that should help make a difference for mainstream audiences. These young and talented twins (shown above, with writer Edmund on the left and director Gary at right), have somehow managed to juggle themes, characters and actors expertly and corral some terrific technical talent, too. The result is a beautifully inclusive movie that tackles the subject of the high school "outsider" and makes it seem fresh and appealing all over again.

The outsiders here includes guys, gals, gays and lesbians that come in cultures/colors of Asian, Hispanic, Black and White. Best of all, the movie offers in addition a violinist (or is he a violist? It's been a few months since I've seen this movie) who must be gay because he's, well, arty and odd. He's actually straight, but he wants and needs to be included in this group -- which makes it all the more wonderfully diverse. The kids are differentiated and performed with a light touch, and the movie moves along at a fast enough trot that there's little time to get picky.

Yes, there's a dose of the After-School Special in all this, but, damn, it's still done well enough to pass muster. The main story connects two closeted high-schools boys (Cameron Deane Stewart, above, left, and Justin Deeley, at right, the latter playing a popular football player) with a group of kids who've formed a kind of GLBT support group they call the Geography Club. "Nobody'll join, so nobody'll know our secret" is the kind of logic going on here (do school even teach geography any longer?). The Entins get the tone just right: a blend of sweetness and toughness that's reality-based enough to draw us in and hold us through thick and thin.

The movie's feel-good, all right, but it is also a little sad in the manner in which it addresses the reality of "the other." Identity, acceptance and especially self-acceptance are all given a good workout here. Thankfully, the filmmakers don't tie the whole shebang up into one neat package. We can't have everything we want, it seems. But we can work toward and then settle for a better situation. Geography Club is going to make a lot of moviegoers -- kids in particular -- very, very happy.

From Breaking Glass Pictures and running a sleek 83 minutes, the movie opens tomorrow, Friday, November 15, in New York (at the Cinema Villlage), Toronto (at the Carlton Cinema), Tempe (at the Harkins' Valley Art), and Stroudsberg (at the Sherman Living Room theater) and elsewhere soon. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters. SImultaneously, by the way, any outliers from the above locations, should be able to see the film via VOD.  (The film will not be available on DVD until March 2014.)

Allan Cubitt & Jakob Verbruggen's THE FALL offers some very dark goings-on in Belfast

Made for British and American television and first aired in both places (as well as Ireland and Israel) this past May, THE FALL (not to be confused with the wonderful film by Tarsem Singh) was executive-produced by its star Gillian Anderson and gives her one of her choice roles of late (certainly much better than her truncated appearance in last year's Shadow Dancer). Due to a recent casting fluke, however, what the series suddenly does is provide an up-close-and-personal look at the work of one, Jamie Dornan, who just bumped Charlie Hunnam from the title role in the upcoming, would-be sex blockbuster, Fifty Shades of Grey.

I wager most Americans will not previously have heard of Mr. Dornan (I certainly had not), and though Mr. Hunnam (a fine and versatile actor) was no household word, he was more of a known quantity than Dornan. (But, according to my daughter, Hunnam just didn't properly fit the physical characteristics of the Christian Grey character.)

In The Fall, which tells-- in five nearly hour-long episodes -- the tale of a family man/serial killer named Paul Spector (Dornan) and the crack investigator, Stella Gibson (Anderson) who has been brought in to help catch him, the emphasis surprisingly enough is on the murderer. We learn a hell of a lot more about Paul and his life than we do about Stella and hers -- which makes this series -- created and written by Allan Cubitt (above) and

directed by Jakob Verbruggen (shown at left) -- seem to me both a little lop-sided and an odd choice for an actress of Ms Anderson's caliber to have helped bankroll. While this eventually throws the series off balance, it certainly allows us to sink deep into the cesspool of Paul's sick thoughts and actions. (Considering that sinking, director Verbruggen favors an awful lot of overhead shots in which we look directly down, god-like, on our sad slice of humanity.)

I would guess that a series such as our own cable TV's Dexter has influenced The Fall, even if that serial killer comes across as at least partially heroic, since he kills other serial killers, while our boy here offs only innocent young women. (Though, in his mind, from the little we're allowed inside it, these gals are somehow guilty. Of something or other. And, yes, you can expect a little Friedrich Nietzsche tossed into the mix.)

Ms Anderson, above and top, is a fine actress. (If you've never caught her performance in Terence Davies' adaptation of The House of Mirth, you're missing something deep and wonderful.) Here, though, her Stella seems to exist primarily to score feminist points. While her take-down of one of her superiors (who seems bent on making her feel bad for not asking in advance if the policeman she decided to have sex with was married) is smartly written, it is also more of the mostly one-note characterization Cubitt has provided Stella, who besides swimming, fucking and mostly investigating (the latter quite well), has little inner life.

Paul, on the other hand, is given plenty of inner life, though most of it seems at odds with his outer version, and while we rarely get this close to a serial killer in movies or TV (would we want to, unless we're doing it for professional reasons?), I didn't always buy what I was seeing and hearing. Still, Mr. Dornan (above and below) makes a fine leading man, moment-to-moment believable and sexy as all hell.

The series offers an always interesting back and forth between perpetrator and investigator, and considering how very dark it is, Cubitt and Verbruggen do not unduly rub our noses in the violence and killing. There is a fair sub-plot involving the town's major Capitalist, a "bought" and therefore compromised police force, and the usual hookers-and-drugs number. Nothing much comes of any of this -- neither the sub-plot nor the major one -- and this is most likely to the series' great benefit.

In its refusal to give us closure on anything at all, it is more real that most of its ilk. Mainstream audiences will turn away angry because of this, but those with a taste for reality -- if not so much in the details as in the overall concept and conclusion -- will go away happily depressed. (That's Laura Donnelly as one of our boy's lovely victims, above.)

The Fall can be seen now via Netflix streaming or on DVD.

Paolo Sorrentino's THE GREAT BEAUTY -- Italy's entry for Best Foreign Language Film -- opens

Paolo Sorrentino is back. He of Il Divo, The Family Friend, The Consequences of Love and the woefully under-seen and under-appreciated This Must Be the Place has a new movie opening this Friday in New York (next Friday in L.A.), and it's Italy's submission as Best Foreign-Language Film. THE GREAT BEAUTY (La grande bellezza) is a film of exactly that. What else would anyone who appreciates international cinema expect of Signore Sorrentino (shown at left), who, to my mind, produces frame for frame the most beautiful compositions of anyone working in the medium today and then elides them into something both mysterious and spectacular. (His cinematographer here is the great Luca Bigazzi -- Kryptonite!, click and scroll down -- while the film editing is by Cristiano Travaglioli.)

More than any of the five films I've seen of this master (he's now made six full-length narratives, though I don't think his first, One Man Up, has ever been released in the USA, theatrically or on DVD), The Great Beauty seems to me to be the film that requires the most full understanding and appreciation of Italy, and specifically, Rome.

In this movie, the images pass by with great poise and sophistication, and the visual pleasure is non-stop. The meaning of those rolling images, however, is not so easily ferreted out. For old-time film buffs, an almost immediate reminder of Fellini and his La Dolce Vita and 8-1/2, as though The Great Beauty were an updating of these a half century later. And in some ways, it is. But Sorrentino is so much subtler a director than was Fellini that any comparison goes only so far.

Sorrentno's Rome, as experienced via that fine and hugely versatile actor he so often uses -- Toni Servillo (above)-- is a place of great beauty and desolation/desiccation, of wonder and horror. Yet the images this writer/director chooses and uses, instead of reducing their subject to the cliched visuals of Hollywood horror or beauty, instead often brings you both in the self-same shot. Intellectually, the movie is constantly pulling you up short, as well as pulling the rug from under your preconceptions.

Everyone is at once grand, foolish, awful and beautiful -- rather like life and that fellow/gal in the mirror we must daily confront. As our guide, Servillo -- playing a 65-year-old journalist/novelist named Jep Gambardella -- brings to the film the sort of quiet ease of a man who has seen and done most everything and now understands the fatuousness of so much that has passed for "life."

As befits his character, Servillo has seldom seemed this secure in himself and his place in the world of the film. He imparts a remarkable grace and stature to the proceedings. Whether he is putting an egotistical career woman in her place (then later dancing with her like a pro) or advising a foolish but wealthy mother what to do about her clearly unbalanced adult son, there is about the man a kind of weary wisdom that is both consoling and upsetting, as though he understands all and knows that there is nothing to be done about anything.

We get a look at journalism and performance art in a quietly hilarious interview with a dolt of a performance artist; then, in an even more hilarious scene (above) in which a child creates "fine art" (this will call to mind My Kid Could Paint That, and even more so the recent and much fawned-over documentary about artists and relationships, Cutie and the Boxer), we see what goes into the creation of "modern art"; religion shows its silly faces in both a Mother Teresa-like character and a prominent Catholic high-mukety-muk.

Love? Ah, yes: that, too. And it's a wild and deep and forever-with-us "first love."  Except that it proves as specious as all else. Even the old friend who now runs a strip club business (in which his middle-aged daughter does the stripping) proves more interesting and enduring than anything like "love." Boy, this is a dark movie, beautiful as it is. And the more I consider it, the darker it grows -- but so quietly and un-insistently that I can hardly wait to see it again.

The only thing missing (unless I myself managed to miss it) is politics. But then, Sorrentino gave us plenty of this with Il Divo. The music, as always with Sorrentino, is a blessing over the entire film, providing the kind of religious beauty and peace that religion itself cannot.

If all of the above sounds like a rave review, I must warn you that my spouse gave up on this film after about an hour and a half (the movie runs almost two and one-half hours). And I myself felt a bit flummoxed at the finale. I'd been unable to take my eyes off the screen for fear of missing any of that "great beauty," but what did it all mean? You got me. Since then, however, I've been thinking about the film, piecing it together, and now in writing this reviews, the movie has taken on even more meaning. I will indeed watch it again.

The Great Beauty, one of those rare new releases from Janus Films, opens this Friday, November 15, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema; on the 22, it opens in Los Angeles at Landmark's NuArt, and over the next few weeks it willl opens at another 15 - 20 cities. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates.

Linda Bloodworth-Thomason's BRIDEGROOM is both love story and cautionary tale for gay times

BRIDEGROOM begins with a four-story fall by a fellow who, had he lived a bit longer most likely would have become a bridegroom -- of another bridegroom, in a gay marriage that, from most of what we can ascertain from this very moving and provocative documentary, was "made in heaven," as the saying goes. The young man's name, not coincidentally, was Tom Bridegroom, and on the tombstone with which his fundamentalist Christian family has provided him in death, the word Bridegroom appears so large across the top that it seems to have a definite Christian connotation, as perhaps some kind of "bridegroom of Christ." Except that said family has refused to even acknowledge its son's homosexuality or allow his partner of several years to attend the funeral of his companion.

As directed by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (shown at left, and yes, she's the famous TV series-producer and friend of Bill & Hillary Clinton), the documen-tary tells the tale of Tom and his lover and companion Shane Bitney Crone, their histories, both growing up and then together -- once they had met, fallen in love and finally shared living quarters. The first half of the film is the strongest, as we get to know these two young men as they grew up in quite different situations: one a golden boy, the other more and more an outcast. By the time they finally meet, you're bound to feel they were, if not made for each other, then remarkably compatible -- something like salt and pepper or maybe cinnamon and sugar.

The film begins with Tom' accidental fall from a roof as he is photographing a mutual friend, then backtracks to the boys growing up, moving to California (Tom from Indiana, Shane from Montana) and finally tracking their life together, as first Shane and then Tom comes out to their respective families. Those families' reactions could hardly be more different, and the final half hour of the film becomes the kind of cautionary tale gays fear most: having no legal rights to anything to do with or about your partner, should something like death or traumatic injury occur.

The two young men come across as models of a stable, caring, loving relationship. Maybe just a tad too much so. When we finally learn that, on the morning of the day that Tom died, the guys had an argument, this comes as both a surprise and a relief. Up to now, what we've seen has been all too perfect. It would have helped matters had the filmmaker and any of the many friends interviewed come up with a negative or two, maybe a problem that had to be worked out, just to make these fellows a bit more plausible.

I don't doubt that Shane and Tom made up a rather extraordinary couple, but what we see here is a tad too close to love-story hagiography. Even the subject of that argument is never mentioned, only the fact that it happened and was settled and they were back to lovey-dovey by the time of the fall. Of course, death is indeed the great purifier: Parents who were nightmares in life suddenly become worth crying over; and spouses are often no different. When a relationship was a good as this one seems to have been, little wonder Shane (below) is still working on coming to terms with his loss.

Ms Bloodworth-Thomason uses her subjects and their interviews well, cobbling together a picture of society's outsiders as very much worth knowing. Because Tom is gone, Shane get most of the action footage, though both boys/men and their families seemed to have kept pretty good photographic records. There is, however, a little too much reliance on Tom's handsome face (below), which is used so much that it finally becomes something like filler.

Though only 79 minutes long (with a few of these devoted to a fast scroll of the thousands of Kickstarter contributors to the film), the final fifteen minutes seem extended beyond what is necessary. This is too bad because the documentary's first half is particularly strong, while its second half becomes, without undue drum beating, a case study in what can happen when there is no law in place to protect gay marriage. As one of the quotes on the poster above proclaims, this film just might have "the power to change hearts and minds."

Bridegroom -- in theaters only last month -- has arrived on Netflix streaming in very speedy fashion.and is definitely worth a watch. (It'll be out on DVD November 19.)

Note: the photo above of Ms Bloodworth-Thomason 

is by Craig Barritt, courtesy of Getty Images.

DOC NYC 2013, arriving November 14, boasts an amazing line-up, with MISFIRE--about the life and death of The Shooting Gallery--a don't miss!

Each year it gets bigger and better. That's DOC NYC 2013, the annual array of documentaries short and full-length, that -- in its way -- hands you the world in eight days. This year's line-up, which you can access by clicking here, is a full-out amazement. I spent an hour just clicking on each individual event/film, then hoping that they call get a chance to be seen, either in theaters eventually or via cable/TV. For folk who love the documentary form -- though that form continues to evolve immensely from year to year -- this is probably the highlight of the movie-going year.

Because TrustMovies has been away of late, and in any case is trying to shift his blog over to covering mainly what's good (or not) on Netflix streaming, he had to miss many of the press screenings for these films. One movie he did manage to see -- and revel in -- is the documentary titled MISFIRE: The Rise and Fall of The Shooting Gallery from director Whitney Ransick, shown below, a fellow who was actually a part of The Shooting Gallery when that much-loved, much-lauded and early New York-based "independent film studio" came into being-- mostly by chance and due to the work of a group filmmakers who had met while studying at the State University of New York, Purchase -- back in the early 1990s.

The Shooting Gallery (TSG, as it would eventually be known) lasted only one decade but seemed to almost single-handedly set the standard and tone for independent film, particularly that subsection set here on the east coast. What Ransick's movie does, and extraordinarily well, is show us how TSG came into being, what it accomplished -- often, it seemed by chance and sheer luck -- and how the differing goals of the men in charge (making movies or making money) probably doomed TSG from the outset.

Ransick uses a plethora of talking heads here, but fortunately they all talk well, smartly and honestly, about what TSG meant to them, what happened from their perspective, and why. We hear from everyone from actors like Robin Tunney (we also see the early Edie Falco, below, left, with Adam Trese) to directors (one of the founders, Bob Gosse), the casting director, the guy in charge of music, accountants, marketing mavens and so many more.

Their words and memories help create the picture of young movie-makers hoping to create art but settling for the best they could do on generally minuscule budgets. Given all the talent involved, the firm had but a single hit movie (but what a hit!): Sling Blade. (TSG also released You Can Count on Me, but I'm not sure how overall profitable that one actually was.) Film buffs will have heard of other of TSG's output --- Laws of Gravity and Niagara Niagara for two -- but even someone like TrustMovies, who closely followed independent film, managed to miss other TSG movies such as Hand Gun (below) and New Jersey Drive.

Along about the time of TSG's big hit, the group gets some excellent advice from Chris Blackwell of Island Records & Films: "Stay true to yourself and stay true to each other because, collectively, you'll be much stronger than you can be as individuals." Smart words, but hard to do when, from the outset, founder Gosse and co-founder Larry Meistrich had diametrically opposed views of what was important. (Meistrich and his friend Steve Carlis, TSG's CFO refused to be interviewed for the film, and while it is difficult not to see them as the villains here, Ransick and the others don't demonize the pair. They're viewed more in sorrow than in anger.)

The movie offers a lot of humor, too. One of the funniest segments recounts the filming of a short called My Birthday Cake (above), the day after the lead actor had been dumped by his longtime girlfriend.

What finally brought TSG down? Remember the dawn of the Internet bubble and all those come-to-nothing IPOs? Sure enough, Meistrich and Carlis went whole hog down that road. When bankruptcy arrived, the little company owed something like 72 million dollars. Talk about cautionary tales! And yet Misfire seems anything but a downer. Instead it's full of life and expectations, the thrill of creativity and exploration. It'll make you proud of and excited for these young filmmakers (shown above), now firmly into middle age or beyond (shown below), even as it leaves you with some pain and sadness for what might have been.

One of the crew is now in Brooklyn, making pies (which are said to be quite tasty). "It was great," he tells us of the TSG days, "but it wasn't as real as what I'm doing now." The movie, running 78 information-, surprise- and emotion-packed minutes, plays at DOC NYC one week from today, Sunday, November 17, at 7pm at the IFC Center. Click here for tickets.

I would wager that Misfire is sure to gain a theatrical release, as it's a must-see, not only for those in the industry but for anyone even remotely interested in independent film-making and its history -- from both the creative and business perspectives.

Streaming now: a small gem of loss and caring, Chris Eyre and Peter Vanderwall's HIDE AWAY

TrustMovies is traveling today so won't have much time for posting, hence this very brief reminder of a movie he covered a couple of years ago that is now among his most viewed posts and has received a large amount of comments: HIDE AWAY, the Josh Lucas starrer directed by Chris Eyre and written by Peter Vanderwall. This is a quiet, mysterious, beautifully crafted film that is a wonder to view, so beautiful are so many of its scenes and scenery. If you missed it during its brief theatrical run or on DVD, you can now catch it via Netflix streaming, and it is very much worth your time. Mr. Lucas continues to do exemplary work, and how good  to have another film from Mr Eyre, who long ago gave us the wonderful Smoke Signals. Simply for the sudden nighttime scene between Lucas and a frightened Casey LaBow (as the local market's check-out girl), the movie's a must-see. You can read my original review of the film here.