OCTOBER
18-27, 2002

Introduction
Index of Films

10/18, Friday
10/19, Saturday
10/20, Sunday
10/21, Monday
10/22, Tuesday
10/23, Wednesday
10/24, Thursday
10/25, Friday
10/26, Saturday
10/27, Sunday

Print Version

CPArts

Queer Notions
Reel Affirmations Festival

23WEDNESDAY

Fun in Boys Shorts
This program of shorts looks at the fun and folly of being a teenage gay guy. Included are Canadian director Aaron Langvand's A Cowboy's Fairytale, American director Daniel Wascou's Passing Resemblance, and American director Ernesto Foronda's The Favor.
At 6 p.m. at the DCJCC. Free.

No Secret Anymore
American director Joan E. Biren's film traces the lives and love of '50s lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first public organization for lesbians in the United States.
At 7 p.m. at the DCJCC.

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead
In the real world, talentless Steve Guttenberg, whose grating performances have sunk more than three dozen features, would be collecting unemployment. But the reel world is more forgiving. The actor directed, co-scripted, co-produced, and stars in P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, a belated, misbegotten screen adaptation of James Kirkwood Jr.'s coyly bisexual '70s novel and play. Guttenberg mugging, whining, bellowing is the focal point of nearly every shot as Jimmie, a failed L.A. actor-writer (big stretch!) who, on New Year's Eve, loses his live-in girlfriend and captures Eddie (Lombardo Boyar), the Latino robber who, twice before, has burgled his apartment. After hogtying Eddie over the kitchen sink with his butt exposed a touch of sitcom S&M ostensibly straight Jimmie ponders appropriate retribution. A series of dialogues ensue in which Eddie's unabashed sexuality awakens appetites that Jimmie has hitherto repressed. In a misguided strategy to open up what is essentially a stagebound two-hander, Jimmie leaves the apartment for brief visits to a neighborhood market and a party at the home of his domineering aunt, excursions that dilute the flimsy tensions of Kirkwood's play. Marred by jarring shifts in tone from slapstick to bathos, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead is a mess, redeemed only by newcomer Boyar's canny underplaying. Reel Affirmations might have been wiser to revive the entertainingly excruciating Can't Stop the Music, the 1980 Guttenberg disco musical notorious for the worst-concealed gay subtext in Hollywood history.
—Joel E. Siegel
At 7 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre.

Between Two Women
In working-class Huddersfield in the '50s, a woman took care of the house and the children and had tea ready for her husband when he got home from the mill. Much to Geoff's annoyance, his wife, Ellen (Barbara Marten), starts dallying at their son Victor's school, chatting with his teacher, Kathy (Andrina Carroll), as Victor draws. Perversely proud of his working-class hopelessness, Geoff (Andrew Dunn) doesn't like Ellen talking to educated women, or for either Ellen or Kathy to encourage Victor to think he can be an artist rather than a factory worker. The two women become closer as Geoff gets angrier, but when the family returns from a tense seaside vacation, Ellen finds that Kathy has mysteriously left town. Kathy's affection for her new friend, though only discreetly hinted, was apparently more than she could endure. Steven Woodcock's film is impeccably low-key, evoking the drab, circumscribed lives of north-of-England factory towns almost too well. The only break in the psychic weather is a final plot development that seems incongruously sunny.
—Mark Jenkins
At 9 p.m. at the DCJCC.

Days
Thirtyish, HIV-positive Claudio (intense, dark-browed Thoms Trabacchi, a ringer for the young Montgomery Clift) leads a meticulously ordered existence, circumscribed by his job as a bank manager, his comfortable longtime domestic partnership with his lover Dario (Davide Bechini), rigorous gym workouts, and the exacting regimen of medications required to support his immune system. But a capricious sexual encounter with a handsome stranger in a public park changes everything. When Claudio accidentally re-encounters the young man, Andrea (Riccardo Salerno), in a restaurant, they embark on a tempestuous (and unprotected) affair marked by a spontaneity that Claudio has never before permitted himself to experience. Director Laura Muscardin chronicles her protagonist's days in a mosaic of crisp, tersely edited vignettes, capturing Claudio's troubled relationships with his concerned doctor, taunting friends, and emotionally volatile veterinarian sister. (Many of the sequences fade to blue, in homage, perhaps, to a work by the late Derek Jarman, the British filmmaker who died of AIDS.) The sex scenes in this intelligent, complex, and artful movie vibrate with a palpable passion rarely captured onscreen, underlined by the unspoken horror of a virus that can transform the ultimate expression of love into a death sentence. Marred only slightly by an abrupt ending that resolves matters too neatly, Days is arguably the finest AIDS-themed film to date.
—Joel E. Siegel
At 9 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre.

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