Netflix have not exactly gone overboard with adding new queer content this month, but nevertheless we still found some excellent movies in their library that we are happy to include in our Top Ten List for December : Here they are in alphabetical order:
CHERRY POP : if truth be known this funny wee film about some drag queens languished on a shelf for a couple of years until its star won Rupaul’s Drag Race. Bob The Drag Queen is a larger-than-life character who dominates this entertaining romp with her infectious humor which will please all drag aficionados, and others too who just love hanging out in anonymous seedy bars.
DREAMBOAT : For the past six years every September a European Cruise ship leaves Lisbon with some 2300 passengers for a week’s voyage to Gran Canaria. All of them are gay men with just one thing on their mind : to party. And of course to fall in love with Mr Right, and on the way have as much sex wth Mr Right Now too. The organizers set out to ensure that these seven days are sheer escapism from a world that is often hostile, especially for some of the passengers who live in countries where homophobia is still rife.
FIRE SONG: Even as queer cinema continues to keep evolving it is still something of a surprise to discover yet another new barrier has been broken with the first movie from an unexpected provenance. Writer/director Adam Garnet Jones has done just that by setting and actually making his feature film, a very tender coming-of-age drama, in a First Nation reservation in the North of Canada where he also hails from, with an entire cast of indigenous locals.
HEAD ON: this wonderful classic gay movie from 1998 stars the immensely talented (and extremely good looking ) Alex Dimitriades as a 19 year old Greek Australian youth who struggles with his sexual identity and who has one clumsy heterosexual and several homosexual encounters in this very explicit movie.
I AM THE AMBASSADOR : what started out as a small Danish TV project following the openly gay US Ambassador to their country, suddenly became very compulsive viewing around the globe. The very affable Rufus Gifford and his veterinarian husband Stephen DeVincent are shown going about their new life in Copenhagen where they represented the US in the not to-recent past when we still treasured and respected diplomacy in this country.
LAZY EYE: 40 year-old Dean is trying not to have a mid-life crisis, but his chances of succeeding are slim. He’s a very successful graphic designer in Silverlake California who is starting to loath his good paying clients because of their poor taste levels. Now because of the lazy eye he’s had from birth is playing up, his eye doctor has just prescribed tri-focal glasses which he is having great difficulty adjusting too. Then his rather solitary and seemingly empty life is suddenly disturbed by an email that arrives totally out of the blue. It’s from Alex an ex-boyfriend who broke his heart when he walked out of his life 15 years ago, and then totally disappeared off the grid never to be heard of again.
NAZ & MAALIK: Naz and Maalik are a couple of extremely likable teenage Muslim boys who have been inseparable best friends for years and are now trying coming to terms with both their sexuality and the fact that their relationship has now evolved into something more romantic and physical. After their night of passion together, we follow how this all continues developing the whole of the next day in this engaging wee drama from newbie filmmaker Jay Dockendorf which takes place as the boys cram a lot in on the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn which is very much their ‘hood.’
THE CROWN : there is never anything quite so queer as tales about British Queens, especially this delicious Award-Winning series that is telling the story of Britains’s much beloved reigning Monarch. The second season starts on Netflix on Friday 8th December : set you watches as you will not want to miss this.
THE FREEDOM TO MARRY : With Edward Rosenstein‘S documentary we know that it’s going to have a happy ending. He starts in earnest to trace the journey to 2015’s U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decision that literally legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 States overnight, a few months before Attorney Mary Bonauto makes her formal appearance before the 9 Justices who will go on to change the course of LGBT history. This profile however is not just about her, but equally important, it is that of Evan Wolfson the leading force behind the whole‘Freedom To Marry’ campaign who started the whole ball rolling some 32 years ago as a Harvard undergraduate.
THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES : we loved this documentary the moment we first saw it in Sundance in 2012 in those heady days when such excessive bad-taste was still just a laughing matter, about a woman who really thought she was royalty. The story starts pre-2008 when everything in the Florida mansion of the obnoxious billionaire timeshare mogul David Segal and his pampered blonde trophy wife Jackie was so perfect for them and their seven small spoilt-to-death children and whole menagerie of animals that including countless yapping dogs who pooped everywhere. However they, and their 19 staff, had outgrown the place so the Segals were now building the largest single house in the US. Planned to be over 90000 sq feet with some 38 bathrooms alone. It was inspired styled by the French Grand Palais, but actually they copied the top three floors of the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas! N.B. this will be removed from Netflix on December 13th as even they think you can have too much of a bad thing.
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Labels: 2017, culture, movies, Top Ten List
