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Stop! That! Train!

Coming out of the same studio that gave us RuPaul's Drag Race, and stacked with a whole crew of former contestants, Stop! That! Train! plays like RuPaul basically taking a bow for the entire franchise she's built. It's not really a gay film in the traditional sense, but with so many drag stars from Ru's shows popping up alongside a few cameos from well known out gay actors, I figured it earns a spot on this blog anyway. The whole thing is completely over the top, packed with GenZ slang, loud flashy visuals, and humor that's constantly winking at you knowing how ridiculous it is. Going in you'd assume it's meant to be a laugh riot, and a lot of critics online seem to be eating it up, but I just couldn't get into it at all. I've never really been someone who vibes with campy silly stuff like this, so honestly my reaction doesn't surprise me one bit. The setup follows Tess and DeeDee, two low level stewardesses who sneak onto the fancy Glamazonian E...

No Skin Off My Ass (Canada)

I have realized that so called "New Age cinema of the 90's and the era and all that experimental filmmaking that falls into the same school as Andy Wharol's style of film making is totally not my scene. The logical side of my brain does try to reason behind the efforts that went into making the film and the whole thought process, but the audience in me just refuses to accept these films as they provide absolutely no sense of entertainment: physical , emotional or intellectual.

A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of “That Cold Day in the Park” then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his lesbian sister, who’s making a film. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. The two men eventually have a full blown sex scene by the end of the film.

Someone said this about the film "A gay roughie that's as tender as it is ugly, erotic as it is silly." I can see how this makes sense since our hairdresser is shown to have this weird sexual obsession to almost new-Nazi kind of personality with some punk demeanor. The hairdresser is an art-punk. The skinhead is so deep into the trappings of his adopted subculture that he has no real identity outside of it for most of the movie. At one point the film briefly touches upon fetishization of power, but my point is that why was the film maker trying to show. As I have mentioned such films are not my cup of tea and I wish someone told me before picking up this one to spend my 90 minutes on. (1/10)

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