What about Desert Hearts, An Early Frost, and Mala Noche which came out that year? What about all of the films mentioned in the lists linked to in https://www.imdb.com/list/ls599530869/ and CherryPicks which came out around then? It was not that rare at all. Midnight Cowboy, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1969, had a scene where gay sex was going on just off scene.
The Town (2012)
I watched this on HBOMax last night. A decent action flick about a gang of ruthless bank robbers, directed by and starring Ben Affleck. Lots of bullets and blood.
I’ve never heard of any of those. Were they successful? Because My Beautiful Laundrette was a relatively successful movie in the UK.
I think I got to about 28 in there before I recognised one of those, and thus can only really comment that neither Fame, not Dog Day Afternoon, Tootsie or Yentl are gay love stories.
I’ve never seen that, but given the description, perhaps gay love story does apply, and thus I will qualify it with “UK gay love story”, and given that I was born in the UK, it was the only one.
The Dark Divide (2020, Tubi or Pluto) Blurb - After the death of his wife, nature writer Robert Pyle pushes himself to the limit by hiking through Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
I am not a huge fan of either David Cross or Debra Messing, but they knocked it out of the park in this. Essentially a tale about an Ivory Tower academic is sent trail camping alone in gorgeous untouched wilderness while dealing with his wife’s recent passing. The aforementioned acting and fantastic direction and story telling makes The Dark Divide more than the sum of it’s parts.
It’s not for everyone, the story takes time to develop and the sparse subtle humor will appeal to experienced hikers more, but the Rotten Tomatoes scores were 93%,67% and in the light of the next day I’m leaning towards the critics opinion on this one. Indeed life is both sublimely beautiful and utterly absurd all at once as this film shows you.
But in Dog Day Afternoon, they were robbing the bank to get the money for a sex change operation. That makes it closer to a “gay love story” than Midnight Cowboy.
I can’t comment on Midnight Cowboy, it sounds a lot like a movie of growing up and getting caught in a shitty world of homelessness and possibly abuse, but I get that from the description. But Dog Day Afternoon is a heist movie, right?
(My Beautiful Laundrette was a culture clash movie too, as a secondary part, maybe the gay love story is the secondary part of Dog Day Afternoon).
Wrong. The details of the bank robbery are the least important aspect of the story.
But that doesn’t make it a love story. Sonny’s relationship with Leon is definitely less important than the aspects of the bank heist and Sonny’s success in garnering public sympathy.
I never said it was. DDA is neither a heist film nor a love story.
A heist film involves intricate planning. Pulling out a gun and saying “give me your money” doesn’t make it. See: Topkapi, Ocean’s 11, Thomas Crown Affair, Italian Job.
I pulled out a lost one: 1966’s The Longest Hundred Miles. Originally a TV movie. It stars Katherine Ross, Ricardo Montalban, and Doug McClure. You may remember him from such shows as The Virginian and Stop The Planet of the Apes I Want to Get Off. I saw it on Saturday afternoon movie about 55 years ago and finally got my second viewing!
It is about a US corporal escaping the Bataan Death march and trying to get back to the American side. Along the way he picks up a ragtag bunch of orphans, a priest, and a nurse, and traveling the titular distance to a possible pickup by a US plane.
It holds up pretty good for how old it is.
I just finished watching The Smashing Machine (2025), a biography - at least a few years thereof - of Mark Kerr, an early fighter in Vale Tudo (in Brazil), Pride (in Japan) and UFC. It’s not really about his spectacular fighting career; mostly because he didn’t have one. The movie focuses on his addiction, getting clean and the volatile relationship with is wife.
Dwayne Johnson really disappears into his role. He’s got hair, no tattoos and some prosthetics to change his look and he does a really good job putting forth the requisite emotions of addiction, roid rage and probably a healthy dose of mental illness. They wrap it all up in a nice happy bow in the end but overall I was left feeling … eh, so what? I kept thinking, yeah I’m sure arguments like this happen all the time, they just don’t all happen in really nice houses with really beautiful people involved.
Long story short. Its a movie for hardcore MMA historians. Do you even know who Mark Kerr is? Do you know how to pronounce, “Bas Rutten”? Do you know what an oomaplata is? If the answer to any of these questions is anything short of a ten minute Ted Talk, then you don’t really need to see this movie.
Wow, that’s quite a recommendation!
I’m looking forward to seeing it, but not gonna schlep to a theater to do so. As a retired old fart, I consider leaving the house for any reason to be a chore, and prefer to get all my business done via electrons flowing up and down the wires coming into my house. I hope to see it when it’s available for streaming or online purchase.
Buy it. I’m going to.
Outerlands, FISA nominee for best first screenplay. A nonbinary San Francisco restaurant worker, nanny, and occasional drug dealer (played by Asia Kate Dillon of “Billions”) has a fling with a co-worker, who leaves her 12yo daughter with them for a couple of days, except the co-worker doesn’t respond to calls or texts, doesn’t come back in a couple of days, and it turns out she’s given up her apartment. It’s a film about abandonment and connection, and the acting is great, especially the 12yo.
Yeah, Smashing Machine was neat to see Johnson’s acting, but it wasn’t exactly a very interesting movie to me.
Johnson should really move towards acting, like actual acting. I think he’s pretty good.
I saw recently he has lost a bunch of muscle and weight. I figure he must be doing another movie where being a big guy is not what they needed.
When I see a guy like Dwayne Johnson or John Cena, I wonder what kind of enhancement drugs they take. Has to be something. Johnson looks bigger than when he was young and often has that vein-popping muscles he didn’t have. Same with John Cena.
I know several people have commented on this film already in this thread, and apparently (from an earlier comment) it has its own thread. But just to throw in my two cents, seeing as I just saw it…
I found it underwhelming. I was particularly underwhelmed by the narrative framing of the various perspective shifts. Did not add enough new and interesting information about the situation or characters for me to care. Possibly this film suffered from the fact that I find it hard to empathize or sympathize with my own nation’s national security architecture these days, right down to the middle-level functionaries in FEMA (DHS).
Not helped by the fact that the technical details of ballistic missile defense were not the least bit interesting to me, because BMD is something I had to learn about throughout my time in the Navy. In fact my first ship was involved in an early effort to track a North Korean missile launch. I also had to read up on all the propaganda about the Navy’s equivalent to the GBI portrayed in the film. I have been (relatively) steeped in this stuff for 20 years now.
Also, (nitpick) no way a military officer (whether a Captain in the Army/AF/Marines/Space Force/Whatever or a Captain in the Navy—it wasn’t clear) addresses a US Navy Chief Petty Officer as Petty Officer. It’s Chief. Even if she was Army and didn’t know that to start with, he’d have done told her the first time she made that mistake, and they have clearly been working together for a while (more than a day is all it would take). And if she was Navy… she wouldn’t have made that mistake in a million years (or 20 at least).
All in all, it was a snooze fest.
Iron Lung
My daughter was excited to see this indie sci-fi horror film based on a video game I’d never heard of and directed by, edited by and starring a YouTuber personality named Markiplier I was only vaguely aware of. As such, my expectations were pretty low. And I went in cold, having only seen the trailers which gave nothing away.
Well, it more than exceeded those expectations. It’s very much a bottle story - the protagonist is sealed into a metal submersible to explore an ocean of literal blood on an alien moon. He cannot see outside other than taking periodic grainy pictures, and he navigates using those and some basic proximity sensors. This is all in aid of saving the scattered remnants of humanity in an unspecified way.
In fact the virtue of this film is that the audience is as blind as the main character (we only see a few other people at all briefly in the film, plus a few more in flashback, plus various voices). He doesn’t know what’s happening and neither do we, but we can start piecing bits together. Or can we trust what we’re seeing and hearing? It’s a decent film at making you guess.
All things considered it’s a pretty good effort for a first-time movie director and actor, even if not perfect. There are some stretches where little happens - I thought these worked to build atmosphere but some people apparently found them boring. There’s a lot of dark scenes and close-ups of things dripping. And the ending gets chaotic in a bad way - I struggled to understand what the distorted voices were saying and why the Mcguffin was so important, so boo to the sound editor there.
But all in all I liked it, and the more I think about it the cleverer I find it. I think they went into the black on their $3m budget on the first day of release so that’s nice. Would recommend on the big screen - there are a lot of dark scenes that may be impenetrable on the smaller screens.
A Little Prayer; FISA nominee for best screenplay and best supporting performance. David Strathairn as a North Carolina patriarch who bonds with his daughter-in-law (Jane Levy of Don’t Breathe), and then realizes his son is cheating on her. Fantastic performances all around, a nice rhythm between tension and humor, and some lovely scenes. Still. Strathairn’s character is an old white dude who keeps centering the narrative on himself and his expectations, and while that was definitely one of the aims of the script (his wife even calls him out on it), it also undermined the payoff for me. I think I’d still recommend it though.
Sovereign. Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay, a tale of a loving sovereign-state dad and his doting son; the movie opens with two dead troopers, and you figure out pretty quickly who was involved. It also has a father-son in Dennis Quaid, the crusty family patriarch, and his doting newly-minted-officer son.
Offerman is pretty good, and he seems legitimately like those Sovereign YouTube video people I’ve watched; the rest of the actors are okay. The writing and plotting did not work for me, straight out of film school parallelism and callbacks, which made a few things very predictable and a bit cringeworthy.
Overall it was okay, but I don’t recommend it.
I submitted my Film Independent Spirit votes a few minutes ago, voting in 9 categories but skipping two because I didn’t see enough of the films. I’ve watched 19 films in four weeks, and abandoned two others, all but one of those films emotionally difficult, and after watching The Secret Agent tomorrow I think I’m done for at least a month.
May I ask why? It seemed to me that it tells a very powerful story that is relevant to our times. Certainly not a happy movie, but well executed, well acted, and quite emotional.