Our guide to the film offerings at Q Cinema 16, Cowtown’s big LGBT film fest
SORDID TALES | Del Shores will attend the screening of his standup film ‘Naked. Sordid. Reality.’ and sign DVDs at Q Cinema on Friday.
Q Cinema, North Texas’ long-running gay film festival, holds its 16th big event (for only the sec ond time, in the fall instead of the spring) and we watched a whole passel o’ the offerings. There’s something for every taste, so check out what works for you! Enjoy!
— Steve Warren
Bridegroom. This ironically titled documentary, expanded from a YouTube video by Linda Bloodworth Thomason (Designing Women), is the tearjerker of the year, an ode to the love of his life, Thomas Lee Bridegroom (1982-2011).
Two beautiful twentysomethings — Thomas and Shane — were together for six years and planned to marry when it became legally possible. But before they could, Tom died in an accident. After that his mother, who had pretended to accept their relationship, swept in and took his body, threatening Shane with violence if he showed up at the funeral.
There are plenty of photos and videos of their early lives and their life together, and testimonials from their friends; but above all Bridegroom reminds those of us without legal protection why it’s important to do everything we can to protect each other, before it’s too late. Friday at 6 p.m.
Del Shores: Naked. Sordid. Reality. One of the cool things about seeing this film is, you may have already seen it — live. Shores — a native of Winters, Texas — makes a habit of recording his DVDs in S4’s Rose Room, and the results are always a fun ride through his passionate, brittle, smart-ass of a mind, as he attacks homophobes, colleagues … anyone who stands in his way. But hey, he also loves them: They make up his act. Shores will sign DVDs from 7–8 p.m., with the screening to follow. — Arnold Wayne Jones
Queens and Cowboys: A Straight Year on the Gay Rodeo. Matt Livadary’s documentary about the gay rodeo circuit devotes amazingly little time to showing actual rodeo events. Instead, it does a wonderful job of telling the stories of a few human participants as they strive to reach their goals in 2012.
RIDE ’EM | The gay rodeo documentary ‘Queens and Cowboys’ screens Saturday, and features Dallasite Wade Earp.
Texan Wade Earp, a descendant of Wyatt, hopes to win the All-Around Champion award after being runner-up the last two years. Char Duran, a bull-ridin’ bull-dyke who’s been injured more times than Jackie Chan, hopes she can finally stay on a bull the full six seconds.
International Gay Rodeo Association events are equal-opportunity, open to men and women, gay and straight. Like many groundbreaking LGBT organizations the IGRA is graying — the average age of competitors is 42 — and facing declining membership and attendance. But this is a nice bunch of LGBTs doing what they love, portrayed in a well-made film. Saturday at 3 p.m.
Tru Love. There should be a sign at the entrance to this film: “Your estrogen level must be this high to see this movie.” Overwrought and overacted but underpopulated and underdeveloped, Tru Love resembles a 1940s melodrama with a lesbian twist, set in the present day.
Widowed Alice (memorable Kate Trotter, the love child of Bette Davis and Gena Rowlands) comes to Toronto to stay with her daughter Suzanne (Christine Horne, who bears a frightening resemblance to Katherine Heigl), but gets foisted off on Suzanne’s friend Tru (Shauna MacDonald, who also co-wrote and co-directed with Kate Johnston), a lesbian. Smitten almost instantly, Alice admits to being curious about lesbianism and indicates things might have been different if she’d grown up in another era. They take things slowly but Suzanne misinterprets an innocent kiss and freaks out, for reasons that are gradually revealed.
It’s an interesting twist. Instead of parents being unable to accept a child’s homosexuality, it’s the 30-something “child” who can’t accept her mother’s.
Someone needed to tell MacDonald and Trotter to bring down their acting about ten percent and not to be afraid to be still occasionally instead of always having something twitching to keep the screen alive. In spite of this Alice and Tru keep you on their side, while Horne is a hissable villain. The women must have been doing something right to make me care as much as I did. Saturday at 6 p.m.
Crazy Bitches. In the camp spirit of the Rita Mae Brown-scripted Slumber Party Massacre, Crazy Bitches populates a slasher movie with a lot of women in a remote location, then starts killing them off.
If you’re a fan of transgender actress Candis Cayne you won’t want to arrive late. She doesn’t last as long as Drew Barrymore in Scream, but she makes a strong impression as a major slut.
Then we start meeting more characters than our brains can accommodate. The former sorority sisters are like Mean Girls 20 years later. They’ve planned a ranch weekend in Nowhere, Calif., to celebrate Alice’s (Victoria Profeta) birthday. It’s all girls except Minnie’s (Liz McGeever) gay friend BJ (Andy Gala). He’s shooting footage for a mystery reality show because they’re staying in the Vanity Killer Murder House, where seven teenage girls were killed 15 years ago during a pajama party.
Cassie (Cathy DeBuono) is the group’s token lesbian, who’s after Taylor (Samantha Colburn), who’s more interested in ranch hand Gareth (Blake Berris), who’s interested in all the girls.
Also attending are Dorri (Nayo Wallace), who’s dying of cancer, and Princess (Mary Jane Wells). Creepily spying on everyone is another ranch hand (John W. McLaughlin), and a hunky hiker (Trey McCurley) keeps happening by with his dog. Alice arrives late. She’s having trouble with her husband, Eddie (David Fumero), who slept with her sister, Belinda (Guinevere Turner), among others.
The movie is two-thirds over before the first body is found, so there’s not much to scare the women for an hour, except BJ’s ghost stories and people appearing suddenly in windows and such. There’s talk of a dark and stormy night but we only hear one clap of thunder.
The denouement should come as a surprise, but I’ll be surprised if you even care who the killer is by that time. It’s hard to criticize Crazy Bitches for being awful when it’s supposed to be awful, but it’s a disappointing sophomore effort for writer-director Jane Clark, whose Meth Head was a highlight on last year’s festival circuit. Saturday at 8 p.m.
BFFs. This film makes two points, only one of them intentionally: Some friends should really be lovers … and some movies should really be stage plays.
There’s a lot of truth in this dramedy, but no truer words are spoken than near the end, when the facilitator of the couples retreat Closer to Closeness tells our heroines, “You talk too much.”
Kat (Tara Karsian) and Sam (Andrea Grano) have been best friends for 10 of their 40-some years. Neither has been able to sustain a relationship with a man. Kat just broke up with one and her mother gives her a retreat weekend in hopes of getting them back together.
Since Kat has sent the man packing, Sam suggests they go together, masquerading as a couple. It’ll be a vacation and they might get some laughs from the real couples with real problems.
About 20 minutes is spent introducing those couples — four straight, one gay and our faux lesbians — in two long scenes of non-stop dialogue. The gay men (Sean Maher and Russell Sams) are getting ready to adopt a child and want to work out their current problems before taking on new ones.
Some of the dialogue is good, especially in the conversations between Kat and Sam. Karsian and Grano wrote the screenplay to showcase their not-inconsiderable talents, but the best director couldn’t have made this look halfway cinematic and they didn’t get the best.
There are moments of real drama and genuine humor as everything seems to conspire to make the women consider taking things to the next level. Whether they will or not generates suspense, but it’s less important than the realization that gender doesn’t have to be a barrier if two people love each other in some way.
What might have been MTV’s Faking It with older, less attractive leads, contains surprising substance. It’s just in the wrong medium. Sunday at 4 p.m.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 10, 2014.