Cam Archer | Bobbycrush / 2003

dreams of a 13-year old gay boy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cam Archer (screenwriter and director) Bobbycrush / 2003 [10 minutes]

 

Yet another very young boy, in this case only 13, desperately in love with his best straight friend. But this was is somehow different, if nothing else just in its intensity and, as Letterboxd commentator Chucho E. Quintero describes this 2003 work:

 

“It is, however, intoxicatingly sincere. There’s no filter between the emotions and the resulting images. Every frame (and every line of narration) is ripped from the pages of every gay kid’s secret journal. But most importantly, it was made by a 22-year-old film student in 2003, which means I can enjoy it as an unadulterated, nostalgic relic of the past, made with impressive naiveté.”

     Yet there is a great deal of fun in this work as well, as in the telling the movie crew itself helps Bobby (Jasper Bel) to put on his lip stick before he dances on his way to walk his friend Dylan (Cassidy Field) to school. Before we even meet Dylan, a rather drab shrimp of a blond boy, we see Bobby dancing down the street with cheerleaders accompanying him, an entire crew at his disposal to add a little rouge to his cheeks and fluff up his reddish mane.

     In the night, Bobby calls up Dylan—existing in a neverland half way between fantasy and reality—and in childlike imitation of a sex phone fiend tells his imaginary lover over and over, just how much he wants him and what he might do to him, including at one point both boys mouthing the clichés of the trade: “What are you wearing right now?” “Nothing,” “This gun’s for hire,” “O Jesus,” “Jesus Christ,” “O God.”

     Both boys dream of being Hollywood stars. But while Bobby is just happy to be near Dylan signing autographs, aware that everyone loves them, the other boy dreams of directing a naked woman.

      The female narrator (Brooke Lober) tells us that Bobby wanted to tell Dylan of his dreams, and that maybe they should start taking acting classes since he wanted them to be famous.

       But what Bobby didn’t know and what Dylan didn’t tell him is that Dylan had met a girl, Amy Brown. “She was a year older than him. They were inseparable.”

       That night, we are told, Bobby dreamt that he was in the woods, tied up. He had never dreamed this way before.

        “Bobby wrote about his dream and Dylan. He wanted Dylan to know how perfect they were together, and that maybe they should run away.”

        This time when Bobby calls Dylan and suggests he wants to “get off,” however, Dylan angrily replies that he doesn’t like boys, insisting that he’s not some stupid fag, demanding to know from Bobbie, “What’s your problem anyway?”

       “But I think about you, always.”

       “Don’t, don’t think about me. Ever.”

       And so it was over, reports the female narrator. “Bobby couldn’t have Dylan.”

       There was nothing left. Just the fantasy. The dream. It was all fading.

       “Bobby thought about suicide,” our narrator tells us. “He wondered whether Dylan would even notice. …He decided to live as long as he could… to dream. He still had his love for Dylan. He knew it would really never go away. He knew that Dylan wouldn’t understand. That Dylan didn’t know about things like love.”

       Bobby we are told dreamed a lot of things, of being loved, of being like the other boys, of being the other boys. But more than anything Bobby “wishes he could back in time, to the way things were and how he thought they would always be.”

       The narration and the language is just that of a 13-year old, his imagination limited to how things in his fantasies were and might have been. Yet it ends on a somewhat more profound note, linking us to Bobby, to most of our desires: “That’s all he wanted. To never be alone.”

        It is that simple. There is nothing more to say.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Edward Buxton | Finger Prick / 2021

have fun, stay safe

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Buxton (screenwriter and director) Finger Prick / 2021 [4 minutes]

 

With his mother knocking at the door, Alexi is in holed away in the bathroom testing himself through the finger prick method for AIDS, while talking to a beautiful man ensconced in his bathtub. Everything’s all right mum, he calls back to her pleading for him to open up; and no I’m not talking to anyone.

    Funded, in part, by BBC, this short piece, only 4 minutes in length, is on the one had a reminder for all actively gay men to get tested for AIDS. But at the same time, it quickly becomes a prelude to coming out, as the man in the bathtub, frustrated by the 26-year-old for not having talked with him for a long while, reminds the nervous young man that he really liked the sexual dalliance that has now caused his worry about the consequences. He reassures him that not only was it a wonderful experience which he thoroughly enjoyed, but there is absolutely no need for guilt. The time has come, moreover, he should tell his mum about his sexuality as well.

    As Alexi rightfully argues, it’s one thing getting a finger-prick home test for AIDS, but quite another to come out to one’s own mum!

    But the man in the tub argues that it’s going to be all right, and that, if nothing else, he always has him.

    When Alexei again assures his mum that he’s all right, adding that he’s got something that he’s got to tell her, the man in the bathtub has notably disappeared.

    In this wry little campaign for owning up for being gay and getting checked in case in doing it you got a dreadful disease, BBC and other such supporters surely got their money’s worth. Whether or not it will convince most young men to have fun and stay safe, I can’t say. I’m afraid not everyone has such a lovely conscience who promises to be there whenever he needs him for the rest of his life.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2025 | Reprinted by My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Michael Aiello | The Sunset Through the Blinds / 2017 [stop-motion animation]

remembering a time of forgetting

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Aiello (screenwriter and director) The Sunset Through the Blinds / 2017 [stop-motion animation]

 

In this short “poetic-narration,” the narrator describes a small bedroom room with two beds, green walls, a tiny closet, with posters on the wall where he hung out with a fellow student. There is not even a bedframe, just the mattresses on the floor.

     Since they had little money, most of their dates involved “hanging out at his place.” In that room they would sometimes make out, sometimes talk, sometimes cuddle. But mostly they watched TV on his laptop for hours at a time.

     What it remembers most is the light on the sunset on the blinds. “I had a habit of forgetting things when I was there,” notes the narrator, temporarily losing the memory of their difficult studies, his work at a demanding retail job. He’d forget even his long commute to city via the commuter train.

      He never felt to secure and calm in a place before, recalls our storyteller. “Time stood still there. I stood still.”

      But, as with all things, the quiet and stillness disappeared as did their friendship; both moved away and on. The narrator notes that he has lived in many other places since: the third floor bedroom of an Old Brighton house, the back room of a back-bay brownstone, the ritzy downtown Boston apartment. But no room, he insists, ever felt like the one he describes to us.

      He is seeking just such a room, knowing that if he went back to the old room, it would have changed, the new owner probably adding a bedframe, perhaps a bureau to help with the small closet and hanging new posters. He hopes that whoever lives there also feels the joy of the sunset through those blinds.

      With humorous stop-motion photograph, Aiello has created a piece of nostalgia we all have within ourselves, a place or moment in time, a person or sensation that we have lost but which, now and again, we return to discover ourselves at peace and joy with the world.

       This statement of memory is only incidentally a gay story. But even such tangential tales can be meaningful to queer life. In this instance, the gay individual, oddly enough, dearly remembers a time of forgetting.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

    

Daniel Yaqo | Heartdrop / 2025

 drop it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Yaqo and Matt Latreille (screenplay), Daniel Yaqo (director) Heartdrop / 2025 [17.25 minutes]

 

Alas, we’ve seen this movie so very many times. Dylan (Daniel Yaqo) and Max (Will Trineer) live in a small Canadian town and are quite clearly in love. Yet Max, the town jock, doesn’t at all feel that he can possibly acknowledge even a friendship with Dylan, who lives evidently across the street from him.

    Early in the film we see Dylan bicycle over to soccer practice just get a glimpse of his idol who can’t even wave a hello and needs to covertly send him a message on his cell phone. Dylan returns home without even a real-life moment of interchange, watching Max’s buddies deliver him back home late at 2:00 in the morning, after what was probably an evening of drinking and camaraderie, once again without the man who loves him by his side.

     We can see it all coming, what usually happens in such works. Dylan will spend the night and many another unhappily, all alone.  In this short work they keep sending silly photos back and forth as if that might serve as a relationship.

    We do observe a short afternoon and evening at the river or lake when they actually talk, kiss, chase after one another, and skip rocks across the water—you know, do what all gay boys do in these movies when they’re in love. But they soon go back to photographing one another, although time actually bothering to snap one of them together, and sending them back and forth as if they were talking.

     Once they return to their neighborhood, Max insists Daniel wait until he enters his house before showing himself on the block, a clue as if we didn’t have enough evidence already, that this relationship simply isn’t going to work if Daniel want’s to live an ordinary life instead of hiding out in shame.

     Yaqo’s work, however, makes the inevitable even worse, by constantly interrupting the visual narrative with a voice-over describing events as if the director can’t quite believe in his own power to portray events visually. The very fact that the narrative voice clearly is telling us a story of the past already makes it quite clear that their growing friendship did not survive, as if underlining the obvious and oft told plot just so the filmmaker can be sure we get the meaning of what is about to be “said”—all of which seems almost ludicrous when the narrator momentarily describes their growing relation as being “like a book you can’t put down, where every chapter brings a new revelation,” using a literary cliché to reiterate the already the clichéd of film’s plot. Believe me, I could put this “book” down.

    It becomes even worse, so the voice tells us, as they “remain in a gray zone of friendship, an undefined space where certainty and doubt danced in a delicate balance.” Some one should tell Yaqo that purple prose of worn-out tropes does not help keep a film afloat.

      Surprise: Suddenly Max disappears.

    Six months later he shows up, girl in hand, in the café where Dylan is working, the barista demanding immediately to know where he has been. Max plays dumb, seemingly having utterly no knowledge of who Dylan is or what he is talking about. “Who are you?” he blankly asks.

       But even after Dylan pretends it’s all been a mistake, and the couple sit down in the cute café, his girlfriend (Idaya Bello) clearly recognizes the tension between the two. And when Max won’t even explain that it existed, she leaves in anger, Max following her out.

       Soon after, Dylan receives a cellphone message to meet the amnesiac Max at the boardwalk, he needs to explain.

        By this time, I would have certainly turned off the phone, deleted the message, and gone back to work. But, of course, we’re curious where possibly this young director thinks he might take us now that we’ve reached a dead end.

        Max vaguely attempts apologize and even claim that, despite the fact that he was seeing the girl even while he was with Dylan, that straight relationship is now over and that he needs Dylan and is ready to move forward. But even this barista isn’t that stupid. He walks away from the offer of staring all over again.

        Still, our director can’t even leave the obvious alone at this point, tacking on yet another voice-over lecturette: “I learned that love should never be a question of convenience or experimentation for someone else. It should be a shared journey, not a solo quest dressed up as a duo.”

        If only the director had followed the advice of that last sentence when he made this little ditty, we might have kept his audience from walking away from his work just his characters have from one another.   

     

Los Angeles, November 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blot (November 2025).     

Wesley Ruggles | No Man of Her Own / 1932

no man of his own

by Douglas Messerli

 

Milton Herbert Gropper and Maurine Dallas Watkins (screenplay, based on a story by Benjamin Glaser and Edmund Goulding, based, in turn, in a novel by Val Lewton), Wesley Ruggles (director) No Man of Her Own / 1932

 

The highly underrated film No Man of Her Own (not to be confused with the 1950 Mitchell Leisen film) is based on a very simple principle that has been used time and again in theater art and movie making: a cad courts a beautiful girl, who not only gets him to marry her, but reforms him through love. Two of Broadway’s favorite musicals, later two very popular movies, Guys and Dolls and The Music Man share almost the very same story. The same tale, from a woman’s point of view, is retold in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941).

   The reason why it’s so interesting in this earlier film derives from its major actors: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. As a sophisticated gambler, Clark name in this film Babe Stewart, is almost literally swept off his feet by the smart-cracking beautiful small-town librarian Connie Randall (Lombard). And even though they marry on a toss of a coin, it is clear that even such a con-man like him will not survive long without her.

     Even though Babe bluffs that he’ll quickly ditch her, after their first long night together—when he and his cronies quickly fleece a wealthy fellow gambler—she sends him truly spinning by demanding that he get up early and go to work. Without day-time experience and, more importantly, with a job, he is forced to pay a friend for an office in Wall Street to hide out during the days. Strangely, without anything much to do, he dabbles in investments and, as we later perceive, achieves other financial success.

     When Randall finally begins to guess his true avocation, she switches his marked deck of card, forcing him to lose. She is also visited by Babe’s former lover, Kay Everly (Dorothy Mackaill) who helps wise-up Randall on her husband’s doings and his scuffles with the law. Yet love holds sway, even when Babe ponders a voyage to Rio de Janeiro with his fellow card sharks. Instead of leaving, the gambler unexpectedly turns himself into the police who have been trying to get something on him. He’ll serve several months in jail if after that they clear him and stop tailing his actions.

     Months later, he returns to his now pregnant wife, pretending to have just arrived home from his transatlantic voyage, without realizing that she knows of his deception, allowing the couple of live, presumably, happily-ever-after, he now actually playing the loving husband who works as a Wall Street exec.

     In short, the story is a standard fairy tale about the powerful effects of good and loving woman, like Randall, who are perfectly willing to be seduced if they can change their man’s ways—as the famous Frank Loesser ditty, “Marry the Man Today” promises. Even though, reportedly, Gable and Lombard sparked no romantic moments during the shooting of this film—Gable purportedly found Lombard far too bawdy and outspoken and she saw him as conceited—it is clear from this, their only film together, that they represented a kind of “pepper-and-salt” match.

 

    Yet, there’s something wrong with this picture that begins with its title. Who “has no man of her own” we must ask, when it is clear from the first moment that Randall and Babe meet, he will be her “man?” Doe the title refer to his ex, Kay? If so, nothing is made of it, and she quickly backs off from any challenges against Randall for Babe—even if the trailers (not from the completed film) tend to suggest this possibility.

    Nor was the original working title, taken from the story on which it was based, No Bed of Her Own any more illuminating. Once she marries Babe, his wife certainly does have “a bed of her own,” primarily since she spends most of the real movie time waiting for him as he serves his symbolic penance for his previously bad deeds in jail.

     And there are so many other questions. Why is such a dapper, wealthy man spending time with such thugs as Charlie Vane (Grant Mitchell) and other such small-time crooks? True, the money is easy takings given the braggart moneybags with whom he plays. But this high-time spender sems to have everything, including a beautifully furnished penthouse, while his partners live in fleabag hotel rooms.

     How could such an obviously sentimental figure as Babe, who so quickly falls in love, be a cutthroat gambler? Even if we accept him as a kind of Nicky Arnstein, of Funny Girl (1968), figure, things still don’t quite add up—particularly since he is so equally adept at Wall Street gambles.

     The director Ruggles makes absolutely no attempt to “explain” Babe’s bad-boy behavior and his truly quite speedy transformation into a loving “normalized” husband. Maybe it’s better that such fairy tales are not analyzed too carefully. Besides, as we’ve discovered in so many movies, Lombard, as daffy as she is, always gets her man. Perhaps it might be more appropriately titled, No Man of His Own, without suggesting any secret gay coding, but simply pointing to the fact that Babe is just what his name suggests, a kind of child who has utterly no control over his own adult male identity.

 

Los Angeles, February 21, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2016).