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Stop! That! Train!

By Golu
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...
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Seeing Heaven (UK)

By Golu
This was such a bizarre film. Certainly, you have to celebrate the film for being what it wants to be – it depicts a living, thriving gay subculture in terms of gay bars (even casual encounters in the bathroom), a gay porn industry and rent boys as a perfect norm; but there has to be something in a film to look forward to. Besides some very raunchy sex scenes, this film makes little to no sense at all. The story is just too monotonous and redundant to become anything but a huge letdown.

A beautiful young male escort, Paul, suffers from trip-like dreams he doesn't understand. These visions are shared by his clients, both scaring and exciting them. Paul is searching for his twin brother, whom he hasn't seen since childhood. At the same time, Paul meets Baxter, a producer of gay pornographic films who yearns to be able to make something artistic. Baxter is taken by Paul’s beauty and wants to make him the focus of his new film. As Paul thinks about Baxter’s offer, his pursuit of the visions becomes more dangerous.

Seeing Heaven seems populated entirely by pretty young guys who are frequently required to parade around with bared chests and/or no clothing. The main problem with this film is that it is slow and things seem to take forever to happen. Far too much of the film is taken up with scenes of people wandering around in their underwear and the hero’s continual indecisiveness over whether he is going to appear in the said artistically meaningful porn film. As we goes through these endless scenes, we just wish that the plot would get on with it and go where it is going to go. It fails to engage as a plot. There seems nothing at stake, no sense of any urgency that the hero has, as he tries to save his twin’s life. By the time the film reaches its end and we get to the big surprise revelation that there is no twin, that Saul only exists inside Paul’s head – a twist that has been borrowed from countless other films. This film shows why being artsy just for the sake of it is not good, especially at the expense of plot clarity and good dialog. The acting is basic and direction horrible. Half of the time I had to struggle to understand what the character is trying to say because they are too busy trying to be poetic when a simple line would have done the job of describing what he tries to say. (2/10)
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