Here are reviews of some of the movies that will be shown at Reeling: The Chicago LGBT International Film Festival Nov. 13-14.
A closing-night reception will be held at the Stan Mansion, 2408 N. Kedzie Ave. The movies being shown Nov. 14 are Ludwig II, Reaching for the Moon and Ian Harvie Superhero.
—Hawaii (Nov. 13): Hawaii is frustrating enough to give blue balls to female viewers! If filmmaker Marco Berger wanted to recycle a title that had been used before, The Big Tease would have been a better choice. Eugenio (Manuel Vignau) and Martin (Matteo Chiarino) look in each other’s eyes and crotches for a full hour and a quarter before a little drunken groping threatens to get something going; but that’s a false alarm and there’s another half-hour to go.
It wouldn’t be so bad if something else were happening, but Hawaii is a random collection of scenes of unconsummated sexual tension between the two men. Eugenio is a serious version of “the only gay in the village” in Little Britain sketches and Martin never questions his hermitlike existence or asks, “What’s there to do around here?” Despite a long list of things I disliked about Hawaii, I must admit to a certain fascination that kept me from being completely bored by it.
—Reaching for the Moon (Nov. 14): Reaching for the Moon might have been made in 1951, when its story begins, if they had made movies then about lesbian triangles without substituting a man for the woman in the middle. Miranda Otto even looks like Susan Hayward, who might have played Elizabeth Bishop then. A renowned poet (I had to look her up, too), she goes to Brazil to visit Vassar classmate Mary (Tracy Middendorf), who is living with Lota (Gloria Pires). Soon the shy, uptight New Yorker has replaced Mary in Lota’s affections and settled in, while Lota helps Mary adopt a child to keep her around too. What could go wrong, right? Surprisingly little for several years, it turns out, until Elizabeth becomes an alcoholic and Mary a bitch. Well-acted and beautifully filmed, the movie’s weak point is the screenplay, adapted from a novel based on Bishop’s life.
—Ian Harvie Superhero (Nov. 14): Why will a Reeling audience be watching, let alone laughing hysterically at, a stand-up comic talking about having sex with his girlfriend? A) Because he’s funny; B) for the guys, because he’s cute; and mainly C) because Ian Harvie is “the ‘T’ in “LGBT.” A frequent opening act for the film’s executive producer, Margaret Cho, who’d better bring her A-game when she follows him, Harvie is personable, filthy and self-effacing—but not self-deprecating. His solid hourlong set answers most of your F-to-M transgender questions in an amusing way before an appreciative audience in his Maine hometown. This would be one of my all-time favorite comedy concert films without the unnecessary 10 minutes of post-show material.
Visit reelingfilmfestival.org for more information.