Reeling: The rest of the fest

JUST LIKE HEAVEN Nina’s Heavenly Delights screens as part of Reeling.

With four more days of Reeling remaining, how does one choose from the 24 different programs jamming the queer film festival? Of course, you could gravitate to those perennials that feature gratuitous guy eye candy. Those flicks usually aren’t very good—witness last year’s Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, or this year’s trite closer, The Curiosity of Chance. But hey, they sell tickets. Instead, we take a look at some of the more refined choices rounding out this year’s fest.

Oscar Wilde’s most retold tale, 1890’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Thu 15), gets an intriguing 21st-century reboot from British filmmaker Duncan Roy. This time around, it’s not a portrait but a video installation of the dashing Dorian (David Gallagher of 7th Heaven) that bears the marks of all his sins while he remains young and beautiful. Stylistically striking—thanks to Roy’s split screens and jumpy edits—Gray nonetheless shortchanges its story by hitting plot points in shorthand and sacrificing characterization. Still, this confection is wrapped in some spellbinding techniques.

An entirely different kind of male objectification is on display in The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome (Thu 15). This collection of eight shorts from the early ’70s ranges from erotica (without a hard-on in sight) to fully engorged—er, engaged—porn, often mixed with trippy experimentalism or campy humor. “Hot Pants,” for example, consists entirely of close-ups of man’s torso as he grooves to James Brown; his tight pants slowly come down, his member springs up and a happy ending follows.

Saturday 17 brings two documentaries of broader interest to the LGBT communities: God Only Knows: Same Sex Marriage, a well-balanced Canadian experiment (sort of like the TV show Wife Swap) in which two dedicated Christians—gay, liberal Dylan and right-wing straight man Craig—take turns living with each other. The results are illuminating and sometimes surprising.

Though overlong, Red Without Blue peers at the fascinating lives of identical twins whose relationship is tested when Alex transitions into a female body as Clair, while Mark remains rooted in his gay male identity.

And the weekend’s feel-good crowd-pleaser? That’s U.K. import Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Sat 17), a frothy derivative blend of Billy Elliot, Bend It Like Beckham and Ratatouille (really, Ratatouille—there’s a even a kindly patriarch ghost chef), plus a dash of Indian-Scottish drag queens. Though spiced up with lesbian and Bollywood twists, Delights won’t offer any surprises, but it’s still a great date flick.

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