Guy Shalem | Gaysharktank.com / 2010

lost in space

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dennis Hensley (screenplay), Guy Shalem (director) Gaysharktank.com / 2010 [14 minutes]

 

On the new interactive website which allows strangers via webcam to meet up, Brian tries his luck. The first six or seven images to popup, which include a man in drag, a female couple seeking a

gift of sperm, a buff bare chest, a black man, and others are immediately sent into limbo. But he does give a “thumbs up” to a Roly-poly sort of ordinary man—Brian being also nothing great to look at—named Frank.

     When Frank suggests he’s versatile and into “nipple play,” however, Brian backs off, suggesting he’s not really yet ready to hook up, but is just testing out the site. In fact, Brian is not really sure he’s gay, having only had an “incident” with his brother “Calvin,” after he touched his face.

    And just as suddenly the red-headed woman in drag is now in control of our viewing screen, knocking out person after person from view. She even encounters Brian’s wife trying to find out to where he might have disappeared. She spends the longest time with four guys on screen together.

     But when she begins to explain that she’s “looking for a long-term relationship and I’m dressed in drag because I’m sick and tired of dating guys when they discover I’m into drag quickly leave me,” the boys begin, one by one to drift off.

     This is after all a parody, in the manner of Saturday Night Live, so we might forgive this short film for featuring a black man peering into the house behind the man he has on-line to check out what he perceives as expensive artwork. He also insists that he’s not gay, but having been institutionalized he still has sex with men, but, he repeats, he’s not gay. Since the man with the paintings has a child, he quickly cuts the other discussant off.

     Brian, back on the screen, now hooks up with Salim, a bebopping Pakistani in the manner of Steve Martin’s “wild and crazy guy.” As Brian responds when Salim tells him he’s from Pakistan, “So you’re foreign!”

     The cheerful Gabriel Blow, ready to sing Cole Porter’s “Gabriel blow your horn,” is quickly blocked by a man who declares he’s depressed.

     Brian is now on line with our man with art and a kid, as he attempts to convince Brian to think of something like a long-term relationship with a child.

     The four guys are now on line with a transgender woman, who describes her newly constructed vagina as “toddler-new.”

    Salim also meets up with the four boys, delighted to see so many possibilities all at once. But when they begin to talk about his sweater as looking like it’s from Transylvania he begins to call them “bitch.” 

     And in the very next frame Brian’s wife, still searching, meets up with the foursome.

     Brian in communication with our drag queen is confused. “So you’re mainly a woman, right?” “No I’m a drag queen. I dress up in drag to entertain people.” Brian’s finally interested if she can keep her wig on along with the outfit and maybe tuck between the legs “we might be able to work our way up to a point that when your penis comes out, I could….” Goodbye Brian.

      Brian’s wife encounters the drag queen and a man about to show his penis.

      And immediately after Salim encounters the same guy with his Vaseline dispenser.

      A man with a teenage boy sucking a lollipop on his lap meets up with the foursome. Frank meets up with Brian’s wife. A black man with politics on his mind speaks momentarily to the man with the boy on his lap.

      Our drag queen meets up with Frank, immediately recognizing that they both have it difficult. “No one wants to date a drag queen and no one wants to date a ‘fatty.’” Frank argues that no one actually says that, reminding the drag queen that she can take her wig off, but he can’t remove his extra fifty pounds. “Well,” she interrupts, “you can if you….” “I come from a family of big people,” he insists. Her argument, “Honey, you’re fat. You got to stop eating.” “When I grew up, I didn’t get a ‘Have a nice day at school, honey,’ I got a chocolate cake.” And so it goes.

      Brian finally meets up with Virginia, his wife. “Where are you?” she asks. “I’m home,” he insists. “I was in the garage working and next thing you know, this happened.” Virginia begins to cry.

    Slowly all of them begin to realize that there is no one out there that they truly feel good about. But then Frank meets up with the Broadway-singing Gabriel. Brian is back with Salim, even if his wife is lurking in the background.

      The actors in this silly but sometimes quite funny parody of the 2010 website Chatroulette.com (I just checked; it still exists) are Geoffrey Arend, Lucas Bane, William Belli, Jordon Black, Alex Boling, Dan Bucatinsky, David Burtka, Drew Droege, Brian Gattas, Stephen Guarino, Brian Huskey (as Brian), Tony Johnson, Tar Karsian (as Brian’s wife), Clinton Leupp, Michael Medico, Tamara Mello, Brian Palermo, Sam Pancake, Jack Plotnick, Jai Rodriguez, Michael Serrato, and Roberta Valderrama.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Tania Karenni | La Repetición (The Repetition) / 2024

the knock at the door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tania Karenni (screenwriter and director) La Repetición (The Repetition) / 2024 [15 minutes]

 

Poor Daniel (Dano) (Ernesto Siller), not only is he an alcoholic just having completed his first month of quitting, but there’s a noisy party next door to which he’s been invited, but which for obvious reasons he has refused to attend. Fortunately, he has friends on the internet like Cinthia, Lolis, and Frida who give him constant support and encouragement by messaging him.

     But then I’d be suffering on the wagon too if I lived, like Dano, in such a wretched flat. And moreover, there’s that endless knock at his door that forces him to put on his earphones and turn up the music as high as he can. He knows that if he answers the door, it will begin the cycle all over again. Even the long showers which gay men are forced to endure in so many movies when they face deep threats does not seem to help him. It might as well be his first day of withdrawal.

      Yet he suffers it out for another two weeks, marking his calendar each alcohol-free day with an X. But then suddenly the urge returns and he can’t control it, and he downs can after can of beer.

       And then the cause of his drinking—unfortunately people always presume there’s a single cause for alcohol consumption and ignore the fact that for some it’s simply that, for a while at least, those who drink heavily simply enjoy the taste and feelings that liquor produces—is at the door again, yelling to open the door.

     When he does open up, we recognize the handsome intruder, Erick (Raymundo J. Cruz) which is at the heart of his problems. Erick wants sex, not just a gentle kiss or two and a good fuck, but wild, vampiric action, almost as if it was a rape. “Only with you, can I be myself,” Erick breathlessly mutters as blood flows from Dano’s shoulder.

     Whether he might actually be a vampire isn’t the issue. The problem is that after the night of lust, Erick puts his clothes back on and leaves, missing for endlessly long periods of time. Daniel never knows when and if he might return again.

    And so the cycle is repeated: tears, the drip on the kitchen tap, pouring out of the cans and bottles of whatever is left in the refrigerator, the messages of support, the days marked with an X, the attempt to refuse to answer the knock at the door. Who can resist when you know, as bad as it is, what is on the other side? Alcohol may be the only remedy for an endless appetite of the thrill of the brutal sex that Erick provides.

      

Los Angeles, August 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Don Roy King | The Admiral / 2020 [TV (SNL) episode]

back into service

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Che, Colin Jost, and Kent Sublette (head writers), Don Roy King (director) The Admiral / 2020 [TV (SNL) episode]

 

In this sketch from March 1, 2020, Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant redo a previous sketch titled The Corporal, this time trying to outdo and kill off each other, in Cinderella step-sister style, as they both attempt to woo an Admiral (Beck Bennett) in a 1950s-style episode of “Say, Those Two Don’t Seem to Like Each Other.”    

   McKinnon falsely praises her sister, noting that she is wearing “mother’s pearls,” while Bryant repeats the nicety, adding that she is wearing “father’s pearls.”

    Today is the day the Admiral is visiting to choose a wife, despite the fact that he’s never before even had a girlfriend. McKinnon is sure that she will be the “most sexually gor-geous,” Bryant, observing that her sister’s hair is “quite a mess” suggests she put on a hat, as she suddenly produces an anvil. McKinnon suggests her sister sign her birthday card, which Bryant immediately recognizes as a suicide note.

     Bryant one ups her, suggesting that her sibling is looking chilly: “Why don’t you put on this scarf?” she suggests as she holds up a boa constrictor. McKinnon, commenting on her sister’s bad breath, hands her a mint in the form of an “actual bomb.”

     Fortunately, the doorbell rings, bring a halt to the sisterly one-up-man-ship. They rush forward imploring the Admiral to pick one of them. But just before his difficult decision, in swishes John Mulaney, just back from war.

     The Admiral, with great relief, shouts out, “Well, hello sailor!”

     The sisters attempt to scare him off, but their brother reports that he’s just run home from the Pacific Theatre, and he’s awfully sweaty, which even further stimulates the Admiral’s admiration.

     The sisters, now quite jealous of their brother Julian, remind the Admiral that their brother was just a petty officer. But Julian declares that he got promoted—to “pass-around-party-bottom.” By this time the Admiral is absolutely drooling.

      Realizing that he’s gotten taller in his absence from home, Julian measures himself against the previous wall-marking, moving down and down while declaring he’s “up for anything.”

      The two ugly sisters, trying to get rid of their now “gay-hot” brother suggest to him that the Admiral has found him “annoying.” Not wanting at all to be annoying to a man in such a position, Julian declares he will just turn around against the wall so that the Admiral might ignore him, the sister’s quickly recognizing the dangers of taking such a stance.

      Julian, coming up with another plan, attempts to hide behind the couch by first pushing it up against the wall with punctuated ahhs and ooohs.

    They decide the shoot him, the machine doing away with the sailor suit’s arms and legs, while leaving their dear brother in a vest and shorts, making him even cuter than before.

      When the Admiral returns he inevitably chooses “the twink.”

      While this is clearly not a hilarious sketch, its gay jokes being, as IndieWire argues, lame and lazy, Slate found humor in Beck Bennett’s “ping-ponging back and forth between strict military discipline and the cartoonish lust of Tex Avery’s big bad wolf.”

      It all reminded me a bit of Guy Maddin’s Sissy Boy Slap Party (1994, 2004).

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Julián Hernández | Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo (Raging Sun, Raging Sky) / 2009

a desert of the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julián Hernández (screenwriter and director) Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo (Raging Sun, Raging Sky) / 2009

 

Julián Hernández’s 2009 gay masterwork, strangely enough, begins with an encounter between the film’s beautiful young hero, Ryo (Guillermo Villegas) who meets up in a sudden downpour with a woman, Tatei (Giovanna Zacarias), obviously seeking a hook-up, who immediately recognizes in the young man a desire equal to her own.

     But suddenly we see differences between them as the storm begins and she retreats to a covered doorway, while Ryo—in a somewhat gay-like rendition of Gene Kelly’s “Singing in the Rain”—accepts the full force of the raindrops while inviting her to join him. No umbrella in this movie, and no regrets for the sexual desires that Ryo has for all the human individuals. If he comes off, by film’s end, as not really bisexual, he is certainly open to the fullness of human sexuality.

      When they finally copulate, Tatei both laughs and cries out in delight and relief. Sex is everything in Hernández’s films, and there is no embarrassment for the sexual act, but simply joy or disappointment.

      As some critics have observed, by beginning his gay story of desire with a heterosexual encounter, Hernández normalizes the rest of the movie which some viewers might otherwise find shocking.

      For the young Ryo is basically gay, which the Aztec-like prophet Tatei seems to recognize her statements after the sexual encounter.

 

                       O, beautiful Ryo, the vigorous. A mighty companion will

                       come to you. And his vigor will be like a piece of sky.

                       That is, perfect, superb. Impetuous stream go find him.

                       Responsibility is in your hands. Be your eyes attentive. Be

                       careful. Don’t be afraid. Go and liberate the world of this

                       misfortune. Love will be your guide.

      Yet yearning itself seems to be the central subject of this film as the director turns almost all his public spaces, through his camera, into tactile realities. Hernández does not simply show desire between human bodies but between his primarily male figures and the entire space around them. Place itself becomes an important aspect of what these gay figures are seeking, and the languid movement of their actions against the rich velvety feel of his black-and-white images is as important to them as the sexual release they seek. In a sense, sex is not just the release of semen into other men (and women), but is an endless sensual encounter with the world itself.

      Ryo, armed with a cub-scout-like backpack (not unlike the young boy in search of his youthful belovéd in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom), seeks out love in the Mexican city in which he lives.

      He first encounters the dark-featured and slightly sinister-appearing Tari (Javier Olivan) on the street with its noirish-like neon lights, and they spend a quite delirious evening with one another.

      My poet-friend Paul Vangelisti told me that one time in Rome as a young journalist he attempted to arrange an interview with fellow poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini agreed to the interview, but strangely, asked Paul to meet up with him at the Coliseum at midnight.

      Paul arrived by taxi, standing outside the historical monument to death, hearing inside the moans, groans, and sexual rubbings of lust. Pasolini never showed up, but Paul believed he had been shown a kind of lesson, one which Hernández seems to have quite assimilated: life is all about eros, and eros occurs in the most unlikely of places.

      So too does Ryo enter a kind of coliseum in the large local porn house, the paint on its walls peeling, and the central film theater, showing openly gay sexual films, becoming a kind of pit of lust. But as in the real Coliseum, there are other levels to this palace of love, an older decrepit theater seemingly in the basement of the first, where serious seekers of intense gay sex descend, in an almost Dantean way, to find their pleasures.

      Tari, quickly spotting the young would-be camper Ryo, follows him, even stalks him in an attempt to reconnect.

       Below, the space is even more derelict than the one above, and we can hear and often see the gay sybarites, just as Paul heard from gay and heterosexual lovers outside the Coliseum, lustily involved in lovemaking.

       There is a moment when Ryo finally spots his former partner, and might even return to him, but suddenly a younger, far-more handsome boy, Kieri (Jorge Becerra) appears, and Ryo turns instead to him.

       If there was ever a cinematic representation of the power of the gay male gaze, Hernández captures it, as suddenly, freed from Ryo’s attention, Tari is almost literally devoured by the others who suddenly come out of the shadows to embrace him and perform fellatio. How could this not help but remind me of the 1995 ballet, Swan Lake, by Matthew Bourne that I saw the other evening, wherein, when the head swan attempts to reclaim the young Prince, the other swans turn on him and nearly devour the lovely young man whom they have all also been long desiring?

      Soon after, Tari is raped in a nearby park, and, at least metaphorically, loses his life, dragging his body through a swamp into which he is eventually buried. It is a desert of the heart of nothing else.

      While Ryo lies comfortably in bed with his new “knight,” Hernández explores far deeper issues of desire and love, by digging into Aztec myths, in which the buried Tari rises out of the cracked earth in an attempt to try to redeem his earlier lover, who seems also now to be nakedly tied down in his own demands of lust.

      It appears that both Tari and Kieri fight over the attempt to redeem the young adventurer. Whether or not they succeed or who wins over the other is not of importance, clearly, to the director. The only thing that truly matters is they both do care and try to hold onto his existence, even though we realize that Tari is not the right person for Ryo.

     Yearning has gradually turned into nurturing, to a matter of the boy’s survival, his right to survive in a world that tempts him with all the possibilities of eros and the suffering from that desire, a bit like the tortures suffered by Saint Sebastian in Derek Jaman’s work. The arrows of love do also kill, and in suggesting this, the director subtly calls up all the issues of AIDS. In the end Kieri offers his own life to save Ryo.

     Each segment of Hernández’s trilogy—A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2004), Broken Sky (2006), and Raging Sun, Raging Sky—won a Teddy Award (the premier gay-film recognitions) at its respective Berlinale premieres. Finally, today he has now been perceived by the more traditional film world as the significant filmmaker he truly is.

     His long list of mentors, Cocteau, Fassbinder, Tsai Ming-Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and to a certain extent Visconti and André Téchiné have all received their due. Let us hope Hernández soon garners the full attention his films demand.

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

Mark Levine | Follower / 2009

two bodies prepared to make love: a film about nothing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Levine (screenwriter and director) Follower / 2009 [15 minutes]

 

In Follower, writer/director Mark Levine has no story to tell. Indeed, nothing quite happens to the two lost high school boys, one of them, Eric (Artie Ahr), the leader if he can be described in that manner, still skate-boarding like he were a 10-year-old kid; the other boy, Matt (Patrick Stafford) basically just hanging out with his friend and passively following his suggestions.

      It begins with Matt walking out of his well-do-do home and wandering down a sidewalk to an underpath where he meets up with Eric, the two sitting down on the concrete, their backs against the wall as he pulls out a small bong, handing it over to Eric who lights up, inhales, and hands it back. The two enjoy a few inhalations and move on to a friend’s house, Dana (Laurel Vail), whose mother suggests their unannounced visit is impolite, but still invites them in. They join Dana in her room, each inhaling a few more rounds of marijuana while discussing issues about friends that are indecipherable to an outsider. Evidently Matt’s brother has stopped dealing drugs because of his girlfriend and, we gather, that they purchased their newest batch of pot from someone’s mother.

     At one point Eric signals Matt to ask a question of Dana, is it true she has some acid? She does, and they’re off, putting the tablets into their mouths as they walk towards Matt’s house.

     There Eric almost passes out on Matt’s bed, while Matt sits on the floor. That is until Eric, fed up with the music, shuffles through Matt’s collection of tapes, choosing one, putting it on and joining Matt on the floor, where he sprawls out next to him. Matt, with nowhere to put his feet, finally drapes them over his friend’s legs, but the carefulness with which he does this suggests that he is highly sensitive to the issue of touching his friend, not usually a sign of heterosexual disinterest, but of some sexual feelings which he doesn’t wish to admit to either his friend or himself.

      A short while later Matt is alone in his room. We hear a voice calling out to him: “Matt,” three times. The boy follows the sound to the bathroom where it is clear Eric is showering. He enters, wondering if something is wrong with his friend. But when he enters we see Eric standing naked with the shower door open. Although we cannot ourselves observe it, apparently Eric has an erection, for soon after Matt quickly strips down and joins him in the shower.

     The two beautiful boys stand closely facing one another before they kiss, and Eric goes down on Matt.

      In a version of gay male coitus interruptus we hear Matt’s mother’s voice, apparently having just returned home and curious about her son’s whereabouts. After a couple of queries, he responds that he’s in the bathroom. Eric stands and turns off the shower. Leaving the tub, he begins to dress.

      In the next scene the boys are in a car with Matt at the wheel, waiting at a red light in complete silence except for a song on the radio. Eric leans over and turns the radio to a rather louder song, but Matthew turns in back to the quieter one. Has the dynamics changed between them?

      The light eventually turns green and they drive off. Evidently reaching their destination, presumably Eric’s home, the two sit quietly in the car saying nothing as they stare mostly forward with a quick glance of Matt to Eric before turning back to look ahead. Eric takes out a cigarette, takes a couple tokes, and turns to leave, speaking the film’s final words, “See ya.”

      As I said, nothing truly happens in this film, or maybe everything does. Have they discovered something about each other and themselves? Will they carry through with their encounter or reject it as nothing meaningful, a result merely of the acid or marijuana they previously smoked. Have they possibly gone through these actions previously or is this the very first time?

      We have no answers, not even a hint since neither of these figures is developed as a true character. They serve simply as two beautiful bodies ready to join one another in a pleasurable act. We must imagine the next step. Or wipe away what we witnessed as unintentional voyeurs.

     It is as if the director were merely taunting us, giving us a temporary high the way the drugs function for these two young men. But after, alas, there is nothing. If Matt and Eric are merely followers of their momentary whims and one another, we desire to know what might happen next, while realizing it can only be the emptiness of the black screen upon which their director scrolls his credits.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 3, 2022).