PLGFF, Week Two

[September 24th, 2008]

Chris & Don: A Love Story
Don Bachardy is a native Californian with a fluting British accent; this documentary shows he came by it honestly. In 1953, he began a romance with Christopher Isherwood, an English novelist (he wrote The Berlin Stories, which inspired Caberet) 30 years his senior. Directors Guido Santi and Tina Mascara chronicle the next 30 years with a mixture of home movies, readings from Isherwood’s diaries, and Bachardy’s own recollections. The movie neglects Isherwood’s sense of humor (my favorite anecdote has him rejecting the poet Stephen Spender’s appeal, “Let’s part like men,” with the rejoinder, “But Stephen, we aren’t men”) but compensates by bringing us Bachardy’s exquisite paintings, which Isherwood urged him to create. Chris & Don is the profoundly tender story of how one artist, through his love, created another. AARON MESH. 7 pm Wednesday, Sept. 24.

Save Me
Depending on your point of view, Christian “cure” therapies aren’t all bad—actually, they can be a wonderful place to pick up hot, single gay men. That’s exactly what happens in this predictable flick from director Robert Cary. Out of money, addicted to drugs and with no place to go, Mark (Chad Allen) is strong-armed by his brother into attending an all-male Christian retreat designed to “cure” his homosexuality. But it’s not long before Mark starts exchanging some very un-Christian glances with fellow future ex-gay Scott (Robert Gant). On the bright side, Judith Light gives a brilliant performance as Gayle, a Christian matron preaching homophobia insidiously disguised as God’s love. But otherwise, it’s mediocre acting all around, with a corny country music soundtrack to match. Allen, in particular, suffers from facial glitches. An actor whose looks can best be described as a weak solution of Seann William Scott, he can’t smile, exactly, or weep; instead, he just curls his upper lip and bugs his eyes out. Plus, many viewers will wish the film had been a little harder on so-called “conversion” programs. Although Mark and Scott get together in the end, Save Me offers no hard answers on whether such therapies are right or wrong. JOHN MINERVINI. 9 pm Thursday, Sept. 25.

Otto; or Up With Dead People
[DIRECTOR ATTENDING] Any movie with a running Maya Deren joke and wound-fucking is not exactly gunning for accessibility, but Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or Up With Dead People is not only one of the smartest films of the year so far, it is simply one of the most fun, too. Experimental filmmaker Medea Yarn (descramble that anagram for 10 points) casts Otto, who is either undead or just a schizophrenic sad sack, in Up With Dead People, her overwrought meditation on revolutionary gay zombies. LaBruce has an impossible-seeming knack for getting irreverent raunch and intellectual wit to cooperate, and Otto is a multivalent wonder. To use Medea’s uptown terminology, zombies are “empty signifiers,” liberators of narrative, floating metaphors that LaBruce can do with what he pleases. The result is a hybrid of porno and comedy and horror and Godard. It shouldn’t work, but LaBruce is so at ease with form and alive to aesthetic possibility that it does, and wonderfully. CHRIS STAMM. 9 pm Friday, Sept. 26.