Eleven Met Out (Strákarnir okkar)

Grade: C+

Endearing but not terribly engaging, this tale of an out gay Islandic soccer player proves once and for all that gay sports figures have just as much right to be dull as their heterosexual counterparts.

Björn Hlynur Haraldsson strikes a handsome figure both in and out of full soccer regalia, but brings a blandness of personality that represents the film’s overall sense of itself. Neither broad enough nor sophisticated enough to generate much unforced laughter and neither insightful enough nor poignant enough to illicit much genuine pathos, the film manages to be sweet, well-meaning, occasionally pleasing if overall bland and uneventful. Gay Dads and Straight Moms both manage to be sexually inappropriate and selfishly self-absorbed around their kids, immediate and unqualified acceptance from some goes hand-in-hand with outrageous yet hard-to-take-seriously bouts of homophobia from others, lots of soccer players take their clothes off and there is mercifully little time ever spent on a soccer field.

Uncreatively filmed and a bit disjointed in storytelling, Iceland appears in a constant state of torrential downpour – not unlike this progressive-hearted and good-natured independent, the sun rarely ever shines terribly brightly.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0427906/

Half Nelson

Grade: A-

Standing behind his opponent, the wrestler wraps one arm under the opponent's armpit and places the hand behind the victim's head. The attacker then pulls back with that side of his body while pushing forward with the hand, bending the victim's shoulder back and pressing the chin against the chest.

A wrestling move that often paralyzes the opponent’s ability to move.

Ryan Gosling joins the ranks of one of the best we’ve got as an inner-city history teacher and functioning drug addict. Blood shot eyes and the occasionally coke-induced bloody nose doesn’t initially detract from his excellence as a teacher and never denies his compassion as a human being. When a favorite student discovers him in a highly compromised position, a story of lives knocked precipitously off track and potentially over the side of a cliff slowly and realistically unfolds. A student and mentor inexorably intertwined, this is a battle of real world survival in the face of serious character flaws and devastating odds. Passionate and charmed days of teaching and learning are seamlessly woven with latch-key afternoons, questionable friendships and alliances, troubled relationships and lonely isolation, uncontrollable and unquenchable nights of partying and Visine mornings.

As shown through Gosling’s kind yet tortured eyes and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s stark yet surprisingly gentle and often funny screenplay, addiction on maintenance is both desperate and demoralizing, a vice grip even the most honorable soul is powerless to break free of. A former recovering girlfriend adds to one’s sense of quietly personal devastation, a sidetrip to parentland as per usual telegraphs where the damage began.

Newcomer Shareeka Epps glows as a teenager whose mentor falls dramatically from grace and denies her seriously needed security and balance. While the relationship teeters on the edge of appropriateness, it is a friendship built on genuine connection and understanding, good-humored affection and mutually-panicked concern. The fact that adults and children often switch roles here only underlines just how childlike and primal the emotions of all us walking wounded truly are. Hope and hopelessness find their ways to the surface in equal and unexpected measure, as the various roles that drugs play in both these lives intersect in inevitable, uncompromising, empathetic and honest ways.

One wishes for a slightly accelerated pace, and the scenes between Gosling and Epps so crackle with tenderness, humor and power one can’t help but desire even greater definition, but the film’s decency, confidence and intimacy make a somewhat ambiguous finale – as with most fine works – something to be discussed and felt for days.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0468489/

Hate Crime

Grade: F

The real hate crime is being made to sit through this movie. I know, I know, that was way too easy.

Mind-numbingly manipulative, absurdly amateurish and preposterously pretentious, if not for its homosexual characters this one would be a shoo-in for next year’s Academy Award for Best Picture.

An idyllic gay couple – Robby and Trey – live an idyllic life in an idyllic suburb. They make love. They jog. They walk their little pug dog in the nearby park. They plan their commitment ceremony. They discuss adoption.

A Bible-thumping, homo-hating, closet case moves in next store. The music swells.

Robby and Trey play baseball in the backyard with their loving and adoring nephew, leaving the bat behind at day’s end. The camera focuses on the bat. The music swells.

The couple gets into a tiff about adoption, as all us gays and lesbians across the nation apparently do on a regular basis. Trey takes the dog for a “time out” walk in the nearby park. The music swells. He calls Robbie two minutes later on his cell phone to make amends, because we gays and lesbians also can’t stand to be mad at each other for more than two minutes. The music swells. Another call comes in, and Robbie puts Trey on tragic hold. The music swells. By the time the call is reconnected, it will be too late. The cell phone is seen majestically laying on the ground.

The music REALLY swells.

Writer/director Tommy Stovall has created a soporific gay/greek fantasy/tragedy filled to excruciating overflow with allegorical prototypes and summer stock situations – the pimped out black detective who accuses the victim’s partner of committing the crime, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, barely suppressing the word “faggot” desperately wanting to escape his lips; the fanatical preacher who spouts “gays are infecting the earth” rhetoric and has a website that includes its own “God Hates Fags” subsection; the loving and salty-talkin’ neighbor who thinks of the gay couple as “her own sons” and who has a dark secret of her own involving an abusive second husband and an act of retribution; the adoring and accepting mother willing to punch out anyone who dares suggest gays are bad; the evil, face scrunched, buttoned-to-the-collar son of a preacher with nudie pictures of men in the “private” section of his home computer.

The hate crime happens in the early evening, yet the inefficient suburban police don’t pick up the bloody bat from the park grounds until sometime the following morning, then blame the victim for a lack of evidence. The surviving partner returns home after his betrothed spasmodically dies in the hospital (no mere flatline will do) to find the wedding rings in the mail and a message about the wedding invitations on the answering machine – you just know one of those rings will end up on his dead partner’s finger. We discover the satanic next-door-neighbor has a hate crimes rap sheet.

Just when it seems as though we have reached the ultimate saturation point and there cannot possibly be one more overwrought cliché or inane bit of dialogue crammed into the Stovall songbook, a pocket tape recorder produces a secret conversation, a telephoto camera lens takes clandestine pictures of lurid activities, homes are broken into and church services are crashed.

When the protagonist joins forces with mother-in-law and neighbor-like-a-mother to hatch a plan of revenge and retaliation, the film makes the leap from banal and juvenile to masturbatory and gratuitous. When the flashbacks begin, and we see the bat smashing upside the victim’s head in graphic detail, this reviewer did something he hasn’t done in some 35+ years of filmgoing – I walked out of the movie theater. While it is theoretically possible (in some alternate universe) that the final 15-20 minutes contain some “Citizen Kane” brilliance or “Sixth Sense” revelation, ninety minutes of puerile storytelling and the offensive denigration of such important subject matter were simply too much to stomach. I give standing outside in the freezing cold waiting for my partner to finish the movie a C+ in comparison. Catching the flu would have proved a worthy trade.

The acting is uniformly atrocious, the film score unbearably punctuating, and the seats exceedingly uncomfortable. Run, don’t walk…

to your nearest computer, go online, and contribute the cost of your movies ticket(s), popcorn, Twizzlers, soda, transportation, babysitting and all other incidental costs to Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth’s Anti-Violence Project at www.ligaly.org or to the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project at www.avp.org.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0415833/