Meninos e Amores

These three directors are off to Good Beginnings. The three stories are remarkably well-done for independent productions and capture those traumatic feelings of "coming out" when you aren't really sure it's a good idea. I laughed at those veiled glances around the dressing room in "Pool Days"; I smiled at the notion that fans of Bette Midler, Judy Garland, and Barbra Streisand are assumed to be gay in "A Friend of Dorothy"(ie. browsing through the CD music racks); and I cringed over the "jock" in "The Disco Years" whose memory of sweet sex was now "blurred" by liquor. It all seemed so real. I look forward to more offerings from this trio of directors.

It's nice that these three young directors have produced films with good productions values and decent acting. There's some good work here.

Unfortunately they suffer from what afflicts much of modern gay cinema; recycled plots, too familiar devices (i have seen the "pool" setting way too many times in gay male films) and hackneyed scripts. Most egregious of all is "Dorothy" whose preposterous premise is that a cute young guy will have trouble getting laid in NYC due to a shortage of identifiable availabe gay guys in his vicinity.

In terms of cinema these shorts play like tacky little gay afterschool specials. Not a lot of imagination in their writing or execution; basically they follow a point-and-shoot, shot/reaction shot/master shot convention which becomes painfully dull after five or so minutes. There's hope for queer cinema in the works of Todd Haynes, Sadie Benning and the late, great Marlon Riggs...but not here. These films are incredibly middlebrow, singularly whitebread and their values basically pander to a gay bourgeois sensibility. Which is probably why they play so well at gay film festivals.

Three delicious gay-themed short stories in one. POOL DAYS about a young boy who discovers what steam rooms [my what gorgeous hunks] and shower rooms and locker rooms are all about. He makes an attempt to try it out but never really jumps in the pool. Too bad. In FRIEND OF DOROTHY [that's all about being a lover of Judy Garland] we follow another young boy who is desperately trying to get hit on while attending NYU. He finally does get his gorgeous roomy in a very sensual scene only to see him graduate. Can't believe that this cutie patootie can't get laid in the Village. He sits around in Washington Square Park and gets passed over. Not real. But, again, all the actors are gorgeous. Finally there's DISCO YEARS. Young boy meets another beautiful blonde beauty playing tennis, and finally they meet for a midnight nude dip in the pool and turn it into a one night stand of passion. But, after some accepting of his sexuality and confessing to his Mom, who seems a bit too strained and lost in her own world of disco, he ends up coming to terms with his life and dances his disco buns off. All three films are American produced and sometimes the acting is obvious, but the guys are gorgeous to look at and some of the leads do a decent job of it. I always wonder how they do those wet kissing scenes. If these actors are straight, how do they put so much into the sexual scenes as well? My hats off to their believability.

This trio of 30-minute short films on gay-related themes are all quite respectably executed. Each coming-of-age story is played out with pleasant charm and naturalness. This film deserves to be widely distributed and easily obtainable. However, it isn't. I had to order my video copy; none of the local video stores or even the libraries had it in stock.

I did not expect much from this since I saw Boys Life 2 first (which is very inferior to this one). I was pleasantly surprised however. This is an excellent series of short films (3 all together) that all deal with the coming out experiences of high school/college age young men. All three are well written and produced and the acting is excellent. Raoul O'Connell is completely gorgeous and charming in "A Friend of Dorothy", the second short, but all three actors are memorable.