Crush

Phillip Bartell's "Crush" is a terrific, breezy, sweet short film that debuted at film festivals in 2000. Brett Chukerman is perfect as the Robbie -- the slightly alarmed, innocent, closeted young gay teenager spending the summer with his grandmother in a small town. When just-becoming-a-teenager Tina (the endearing and dead-on Ema Tuennerman) develops a crush on the piano-playing, sitcom-loving Robbie, you know it's got to end badly -- especially because they both have a crush on the same boy-band/teen actor! It's tenderhearted-teen-girl-gets-crush-on-closeted-gay-cutie, but the film is so wonderfully nuanced and manages to nail the closeted life right on the head that you don't care that it's got to end with some broken hearts. But don't worry: Bartell isn't cruel enough to let either our hero or heroine sit forlornly in the park! Love (and friendship) wins out in the end. Pay special note to the terrific soundtrack by Boris Worister, the bashful performance by Weston Mueller as hunk-a-licious Tim, and Jack Rogers as the clueless cute Casey. Bartell promises to turn "Crush" into a feature-length film, but it's perfect JUST AS IT IS!

This is the 4th best film on a DVD of shorts I rented. It's much too sentimental and cloying to be effective as a gay spin on the coming-of-age-tale. Director Bartel isn't very successful guiding his actors to believable performances. Production values are only fair. If this gets expanded to a feature like someone claims, beware. At twenty miutes it plays VERY slowly.

I was lucky enough to see the short, Crush, at the Queer Shorts at the Egyptian theatre on March 15. This film is amazing. Most short films that are more than 15-20 minutes tend to get boring, but this one at 28 minutes, was perfect. Basically it is the story of a young teenage boy that is discovering his sexuality. A girl later starts to get a crush on him & they become good friends. Later in the movie she learns that he is gay, and is hurt by this, but later she tries to hook him up with another guy at the school. The film was very funny at times, and got a lot of applause at the end. I highly recommend it.

A young 16 year old boy named Robbie is discovering he's into guys not girls. Also 12 year old Tina has a huge crush on him. They both live in the same small town who would probably not accept him being gay. Then Tina finds out. What will happen? The answer may surprise you. Sweet, warm and lovable film. There's no swearing, nudity or sex--just a long lingering gay kiss. The acting is as good as you can expect from a gay short. It's a relief to see a gay short that's not depressing or throwing explicit sex in your face. There was talk of turning this into a feature length film but luckily nothing came of it. It's perfect as a short.

Don't listen to that sourpuss. This is definitely the best short on the DVD. It is sentimental, but never cloying - and the performances are the best part. As far as production values are concerned, it's not, you know, 70mm Cinemascope or anything - but it looks terrific. I'd watch it if it were 10 hour long, it's so good. It's rare to see a warm, charming gay film with actual human characters - rather than caustic, venom-spewing queens. A lovely film, really.