BOYS TO MEN
runs Sept. 7-12 at Egyptian
YOU’LL FIND ONLY one clinker in the four gay shorts that comprise the Boys to Men collection, and even that minor failure offers some voracious naked rutting, so all things considered you’re literally getting bang for your buck. Happily, it’s the concerns outside of titillation that will engage you in this compendium.
Any connoisseur of such queer film anthologies secretly hopes for a little flesh—and Boys delivers—but the real aesthetic pleasure here is the artful sense of purpose that distinguishes the other three selections. This modest but rewarding compilation has more than muscles on its mind.
Dan Castle’s . . . lost, the above-mentioned quickie—in both theme and running time—delivers a feverish one-night stand between two hot nude guys, then asks you to feel bad about it. Castle is trying to make a brief statement about the emptiness of such fraudulent intimacy, but you can’t take in such a familiar message when you’re just waiting for one of the actors to swivel and grant you a full frontal.
The films surrounding . . . lost accomplish a lot more. The Mountain King, written and directed by Duncan Tucker, features a romp or two without the pretense. Even if Tucker may be guilty of overreaching a tad in his metaphorical ending, he unaffectedly conveys a twentysomething’s telling encounter on the beach with a hustler. Trapped in a frustrated adolescence in her small Midwestern town, 12-year-old Tina (Ema Tuennerman, a real find), the heroine of Phillip J. Bartell’s Crush, screams at her doltish older brother, “You have no understanding of what makes me wonderful!” Her cute new teenage friend understands, and in return she soon understands not only what makes him special, but also the bittersweet costs and rewards of entering the vastness of adulthood.
The highlight of Boys is The Confession, which deservedly won the Best Gay Short award at Seattle’s Lesbian & Gay Film Festival last year and may, in fact, be the best gay short you’ll see all this year. Writer/ director Carl Pfirman takes the story of two longtime companions and one partner’s dying request for religious absolution to produce a snappy, yet restrained and gentle reflection on the vagaries of both love and faith. Bert Kramer and Tom Fitzpatrick are superb as, respectively, the frightened invalid and his bemused beloved.
Each film—even Castle’s stumble—forms part of a touching throughline exploring how people entrenched in the lifelong process of discovering themselves will inevitably lose something once-cherished along the way.
