Tuesday, May 7, 2024

unknown filmmaker | Pepsi Max / 2009 [commercial advertisement]

tiger on the prowl

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown Pepsi Max / 2009 [55 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

We’re in an English pub, and Max is surrounded on both sides the small round table by his close male friends. Their conversation has obviously concerned his lack of self-assuredness regarding his sexual relationships. But one friend has just spotted a girl most certainly looking in his way.

     “Come on mate, you’re definitely getting checked out!”

     “I am?”

     “Now’s your chance.”


      “Have a Pepsi, Max,” his other friend suggests, producing out of nowhere a can of Pepsi Cola.

     Having finally been convinced that it’s now or never, Max rises and strides forward, suddenly on the prowl, his friends watching him in some wonder and admiration.

     The first girl we’ve seen looking their way, rather plain, puts away or her book and stands waiting in anticipation. But Max walks past her to where a truly foxy woman dressed in black with long strands of red and blonde hair awaits him full-on. 


 

      The boys are amazed by their sudden tiger. Yet Max walks past her as well, meeting up at the very end of the bar with a handsome, muscular young man who stands up in a friendly greeting.




     His friends look on in horror, their mouths falling open as we watch the final Pepsi credit: Get your kicks at www.Pepsi.co.UK.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

unknown filmmaker | Kingis Ice Cream / 2010

the delivery boy’s prize

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown Kingis Ice Cream / 2010 [1.12 minutes]

 

A cute delivery boy is bicycling through the Finnish countryside and suddenly in the middle of lane stops his bike, grabbing a white protective box from the bike basket. He jumps the nearby barbed-wire fence and races through the pasture.


     A moment later in this 1.12-minute-long advertisement, he is fording a rather wide if shallow stream, the container atop his head.

     He runs through another pasture and now approaches a seemingly industrial work place guarded by a fierce dog. Although the dog is chained he still comes rushing forward with threatening barks and growls. The young man tosses his container over a high fence and climbs it himself, landing near the box which has cracked open, spilling out the ice within. He pulls off his shirt and pants, rolling up some of the ice into his clothing along with the special Kingis Ice Cream treat he is delivering.


    Running only in his underwear down a small town street, he rings the doorbell of the house to which he has been ordered to make the delivery.

      A lovely young woman greets him at the door, clearly the daughter of the home owner. He opens his package of his shirt, taking out one of two of Kingis Ice Cream bars and hands it to her, which she gladly accepts, still apparently in awe of the delivery boy’s almost naked beauty.

     A second later, however, a young man, apparently her brother joins her at the door. He too is a good-looking, and as we can tell by the look he gives the delivery boy, who hands him the second ice cream bar, the son is quite impressed.


     Their mother momentarily joins them at the door, but as the two boy’s eyes meet, the young man of the house grabs the bar his sister holds and nods his head for the delivery boy to follow. To where he is taking him is not explained, but we know for certain that it is a private spot where the two can together suck on their chocolate ice cream bars and whatever else they might desire to attend their mouths and tongues. If the daughter doesn’t know what to make of it all, their mother clearly does, as her sly grin makes apparent.

     This ad is so very subtly sexy that I’m not sure US TV could air it. A young man in his jockey shorts going off with another boy for something clearly having to do with multiple pleasures may be something far different from eyeing a pretty boy or meeting up for a date as we’ve seen in gay US ads.

      But this Finland dessert treat certainly sold me on its excellent taste. I would love to try their ice cream bars at any time, night or day, particularly if I might be able to share one with such an attractive young deliverer.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Jorge Ameer | Popcorn & Coke / 2004

choosing popcorn over coke

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jorge Ameer (screenwriter and director) Popcorn & Coke / 2004 [8 minutes]

 

A moviegoer (Matt Leitch) show up to a movie house to watch a film. Matt (as we’ll call him, in the credits his name is the Unsuspecting Moviegoer) picks up a coke and a small popcorn at the concession stand and enters the theater.

 


    The entire theater is basically empty. There is a girl (Torie Tyson) in one row, and another cute guy (Gabriel Romero, described as Popcorn Guy in the credits) one row down. About four seats to Gabriel’s left sits the so-called Coke Girl (Bene Simskin). Matt choses to sit in a seat between them, one seat away from both.

      Almost immediately Gabriel has a fantasy of Matt signaling him over. Gabriel moves over, standing in from of the “unsuspecting” Matt, who suddenly pulls the angel down for a deep kiss.  


    In reality, however, the Coke girl gets up for another coke, Matt soon following her out. What’s a gay already steamed up over Matt to do but also get up and return to the concession stand, while Torie looks on in total disbelief at what’s going on off the screen, surely more interesting than one might be on it.

     Back in the lobby, Coke girl flirts furiously with Matt, while Gabriel discovers he’s out of money and can’t pay the salesperson (Jorge Ameer)

for his popcorn. Seeing his dilemma, Matt steps up to buy Gabe a container of what he wants and suddenly sees, as if for the first time, the hunk who stands in front of him. It’s love at first sight, while Coke girl goes sulking back to her seat. Although he may like coke and popcorn both, Matt clearly has a hankering for the hotter stuff this time around.


     British filmmaker Jorge Ameer has more recently collected this film with several others in a DVD anthology titled Straight Men and the Men Who Love Them, although it doesn’t appear there are too many real straight boys in the selected short films.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

unknown filmmaker | Renault Clio / 2008 [commercial advertisement]

parental pull

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown Renault Clio / 2008 [1.10 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

In this French-language 70-second commercial for the automobile maker Renault, a handsome young man drives up to a club in his supermini Renault Clio filled with friends of both sexes.

     Meanwhile, waiting in line outside a dance club are three elderly drag queens, obviously on a guest list to the club. As the car pulls up closer to the queens, the young blond youth is a bit confused and startled, calling out “Pappa?”


 


    The queen in a red-beaded dress, quickly attempts to hide her face, but she knows there’s no way of getting around it. The youth hollers out in French something like “Pappa, can you help get us in?”

     The queen smiles, proud of her son and his friends.

    The ends if a view of the car being parked, under which appear the words: “Bien dans son epoque, bien dans sa twingo,” “Good for its time, good for a dance’” the word twingo, also the name of a Renault city car, being a portmanteau of the words “twist, swing, and tango.”

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

unknown filmmaker | D&G Jewels / 2007

narcissus in a rush

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown D&G Jewels / 2007 [33 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

This represents one of many short gay commercial advertisements that were made beginning in the 21st century and earlier. In most cases, the director is unknown and the advertisements do not have titles. I have simply designated them by the product name and year in which they were made.

      In Dolce and Gabbana’s jewel and watch ad of 2007, a beautiful, well-dressed woman is planning for a night on the town, as is a young man dressed in a tuxedo. They’re both apparently in mid-Manhattan attempting to catch a taxi for their meet up, the camera showing headed in opposite directions seemingly toward one another.

 


      The woman attempts to hail a taxi but it passes her by as she stares into her bejeweled D&G watch. The young man has already checked out his male version of the watch. Both hurry ahead, realizing quite obviously that they are running late.

      The two rush forward in a series of brief spurts with the sound of a siren in the background, their eyes finally spotting their dates. Neither meet up with one another, but in a quick surprise, with almost doubles of their own gender against a field of neon blue light.

 


      The camera focuses in on the two lesbians, wearing, as one might expect, Dolce and Gabbana necklaces and bracelets.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

 

Chris Derek Van | Fear and Desire / 2024

sail away!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Derek Van (screenplay and director) Fear and Desire / 2024 [14.30 minutes]

 

This short film is basically a revisiting of the 2023 film, also by Chris Van, titled Bookend, which purports to be a memory of a figure named Giorgio who recalls a day in the 1970s on a nude Chicago Beach when he encountered a young boy who sexually enticed him.


     In this new version, instead of the same beach being almost golden in color and filled with visitors, this seems to begin early in the morning with the arrival of what one can only describe as a flirtatious and nearly androgynous young man, who dressed in swimming shorts, a beach coat, and a red bandana around his neck, runs into the water just to wade before he literally prances and dances around the beach, using the white poles that stand at regular intervals (presumably used to set up volleyball nets) as poles (almost like bar poles) in between and against which he runs and leans. 


    This young man with long hair is clearly an exhibitionist of sorts, performing for what we soon discern are other men, one in particular, who stand in the dunes just above the beach watching the growing activity below.

    The young boy soon tired, lays down for a while on the beach, again wades into the lapping tide, and dances. Finally, he moves further up to the watching man, moving bit closer as if to get a better view, before returning coyly—looking back ever so often—to the beach below.

    He repeats his movements, but is also clearly tiring of the inattention of others. At one point he engages a flabby middle-aged man in conversation at the water’s edge; but obviously nothing is made of it.

      The film also focuses, as did Bookend, on the pier, the gulls, the gradual gathering of other men, and even an occasional small sail boat further out in the water. But it’s central focus is the young man, who once more teases his voyeur by coming closer, almost daring him to take action. It appears to have no effect.

 

      The boy again runs between the white posts, showing off, asking for someone to come and take him away or, at least, to pay attention. Yet nothing occurs. The few men, women, and children we observe on the edges of the film’s frame seem preoccupied with their own activities. The mass of human flesh so apparent in Bookend is missing on this particular morning. The boy seems to be performing only for the single voyeur higher up in the dunes.

 

    He moves toward the voyeur once more. This time daring to come closer. The stranger stands firm, neither moving back or forward. And the young man dares come closer to him yet, daring to climb up the sand to actually approach the man. He kisses him and wraps his body around the elders, letting the stranger almost carry him off. The voyeur and exhibitionist have, at last, met up and presumably fulfilling both their disparate “fears and desires.” A small boat sails across the landscape hinting at the perfect interaction of motion, the waves carrying the small craft away just as the man has the boy.

    Only a few frames later, however, we see the young man once more far down on the beach near water’s edge. Does this represent a later time in the day or has he just as suddenly been rejected by the man who perhaps prefers his distance.

      A gull flies into the sun. The film comes to a close.

    Both this work and the previous Bookend are beautiful statements of youth and its desire to find fulfillment in the fleshy world of this Chicago beach. But something has clearly radically changed from the former flashback to the 1970s and what presumably is the empty space of today.

This young celebrant finds little reward in what has turned in a cold, almost empty world.

      Neither of this director’s films have yet to be listed on IMDb or mentioned on-line other than the site titled Khris on YouTube.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (May 2024).

Vittorio De Sica | Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief / Bicycle Thieves) / 1948, USA 1949

becoming the very thing you hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Gerardo Guerrieri, Oreste Biancoli and Adolfo Franci, based on a fiction by Luigi Bartolini), Vittorio De Sica (director) Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief / Bicycle Thieves) / 1948, USA 1949

 

For many years after its first American showing in 1949, De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief ranked as one of the favorites of international filmmakers alongside Potemkin, The Gold Rush, and other such classics. But since the 1960s the film has continued to lose favor among critics and filmgoers, in part, perhaps, because of its several sentimental nods to Chaplin and, more importantly, its loosely structured second half, as the father, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) who has had his bicycle stolen, travels with his son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola) around Rome in what appears almost a random search for the lost vehicle. It may also be that the gray, washed-our images of De Sica’s version of that golden, sun-lit city, which so perfectly captured the emotional conditions of its citizens of 1948, no longer speak as clearly to us today as they did to post-war audiences.


     And then, the story today seems to somewhat strain credibility, as the major hero is shown in very few moments of adult relationships, and, in the end, is redeemed and forgiven by his young child, transforming the work—a bit like the director’s later Miracle in Milan—into a social and spiritual fable.

      What many seem to forget today is that the bicycle Antonio and his son are so desperate to retrieve is not an object important in its own right, but is a symbol of everything the elder seeks to become: a virile male who can support and provide for his nearly starving family.

     From the very beginning of this work, the hero seems so defeated that he can hardly act. Even when his name is called out offering the possibility of a job, he does not respond, but sits in a kind of starved stupor nearby; only when a friend demands he report, does Antonio react; and even though he is offered what seems to be a good job, he appears someone defeated, particularly since it requires he have a bicycle, an object he has just pawned to help feed his wife, son, and baby.

 

     It is his wife (Lianella Carell), clearly, who is the stronger of the couple, seen from the beginning as carrying not one but two buckets of water from the local well into their shabby apartment. Antonio takes up one of the buckets almost as an accident. It is she who immediately goes into action, pulling off their sheets, washing them, and packing up the remaining ones, the remnants of her dowry, to pawn them in order to release the bike.

       The job is offered a nearly meaningless one: he is expected to travel throughout the city carrying movie posters to be pasted up at various locations to encourage the Roman citizens to attend Hollywood films such as Gilda, which he and his family, quite obviously, cannot afford to attend. But that menial job will help Antonio’s family eat, and, given their current situation, his payment seems like fortune.

       The fact, accordingly, that his red Fides cycle is stolen from him on his very first morning, says little about his attachment to the object, but everything about his position in the universe. And, although his friends reassure him that they will start a search for the bicycle the very next morning, we can perceive that both and Antonio and wife feel completely overwhelmed and despondent before they have even begun the search.

      De Sica reiterates this sense of complete defeat through the encounters of that next day, a Sunday, in which father and son seek out two major locations that are famed for selling stolen bikes. Even his friends suggest that the vehicle will have already been stripped, and that they should look for individual pieces, tires, frames, bells, and the pump rather than a whole machine.


      Through the search, the director takes us on a voyage where nearly all those the two encounter live similarly or in conditions that are worse than their own. At one point they follow an elderly man whom they have observed speaking to the thief into a church service led by impatient do-gooders, who lock the poor parishioners within to force them into religious participation before serving them up a charitable lunch. 

    When the father and son do encounter the man he believes to be the thief (Vittorio Antonucci), we discover that he lives in a destitute neighborhood in a room even less comfortable than their own home. In this rough neighborhood, the only thing the people have is one another’s allegiance, which, as in many gang neighborhoods of today, protects any criminals among them. Indeed, we suspect, almost everyone the father and son meet throughout the day may also be corrupt.

      Meanwhile, the searching duo are forced to squeeze into trams, walk for long distances, to stand in the rain, and are spurned by nearly everyone they meet. The child falls in the mud, is scolded by the elder, and, at one point, is slapped by his father even as he attempts to help. At another point, Antonio, going off for a moment alone, fears for his child’s life when a nearby gathering a people shout a warning about a boy who has fallen into the river.  He is relieved when he discovers it is not Bruno.

 

    What remains unspoken is that the child and man wander the streets of that dreary Roman Sunday with almost totally empty stomachs. But even in their attempt to ameliorate that situation with a pizza, they are unintentionally mocked by the waiter and a well-to-do family dining upon several courses who sit next to them in a small cafe.

      If one feels, at times, a sense of frustration with Antonio’s inability to successfully take action against the villain and his confederate, the old man, we also realize it is because the man has lost his fortitude before the voyage has even begun. He knows he will not find that magic machine that might lead him to be a familial success. Is it any wonder, then, that he feels attracted to steal, to become the very kind of person (a situation expressed best in the original English title in the singular, a mistranslation of the Italian which I, nonetheless, prefer) from whom he is seeking retribution?


      Bruno’s father, obviously, is inexperienced even in that act, and is easily caught. While fortunately he is released by the bicycle’s owner, he is nonetheless shamed in front of his son and mocked for his actions. As he turns toward home, empty-handed, he can have little self-respect left. He has only the love of his son, demonstrated as the boy takes the hand of his father. Hopefully, at home he will find the forgiveness and love of his wife. But their ability to survive remains in question, and that question can only damn the society which has so utterly neglected its own citizens. 

     Today, we might see this lovely film anew within the context of so many of the poor and homeless of our urban centers. But it is difficult to perceive it as the representation it was of those massive transformations taking place in Europe after the Second World War’s end.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2015). 

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...