QFest 2009, Pt. 2

I don't know if there's any relations but ever since the movie festival has commenced, I've been eating a lot of chocolate, burgers, ice cream and drinking a lot of diet coke. Famous Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr had opened a concession stand inside the park of Franklin Square called Square Burger that has pretty good burgers, hot dog, milkshake and ice cream sundaes, other than that I've been going to Five Guys Burgers and Wendy's. I probably should watch it a little more carefully.

Thankfully, the movie fest will be done tonight and I've already seen all of my movies and their themes can be categorized as comedies and manipulations.



With the extra tickets, the boyfriend and I went to see Fuerte de Carta (Chef's Special) on Tuesday. Chef's Special is about a gay middle-aged chef of a prominent restaurant, Maxi, who's ex-wife had died and he is left to take care of a rebellious teenage son and a curious younger daughter. While a handsome closeted Argentinean futbol-er had moved across the hall and became Maxi's love interest, Maxi is juggling his priorities between reinserting himself into his children's lives and managing a restaurant and pushing his staff into gaining a Michelin star.

I think this movie might have been inspired by Disney's Ratatouille. I loved gay Spanish movies like Reinas and Chuecatown and I know that I'm guaranteed to have a good time but them I was worried that it would be predictable since the premise was very close to Reinas but we still managed to have quite a few big laughs. They didn't try to make Maxi a lovable character, he came off as an older, bitter, bitchy queen of a gay man which is good, as it shows another facet of gay men and it just seems a little more sincere. A lady seating two rows in front of us was laughing outrageously and aw-ing a lot, we thought she might be a fag-hag who's over-compensating to show how much she loves gay men or maybe she was suffering from foreign film syndrome where everything is more compelling because it's removed and subtitled but generally I think we had a good time. B-




College Boys Life is a documentary about College Boys Live, a camera house business where young boys lived in a house together for free in exchange of having their lives taped 24 hours a day. It's like Real World but with all gay guys. Entrepreneur Zac and his boyfriend Jonathan opens up their luxurious home, rigged full of cameras, to shelter 3 boys for free, these boys were also given access to food and their own cell phones. In exchange, these boys will do ground keeping chores as well as chat online 2 hours for 5 days a week and the last half hour of every sessions, naked. These boys often come from broken home with poor dysfunctional families that gave them low self-esteems, so you can understand why they will do it uncompensated or at least undercompensated.

Watch while some voyeur become actual stalkers; house-mothers befriending these young kids then kicking them out after 6 months for fresher face and newer meat; Jonathan asking his audience to donate money to him for college while driving vintage convertibles; Zac pulling in $20,000 a month while justifying that it is a business that helps out young boys. His neighbors are trying to shut his business down because they are homophobic. Oh cry me a river, why don't you? Given, the kids entered the house and signed the contract willingly but they ARE kids and these kids in College Boys Live has nothing to do with "college" themselves. The fake chat dividers are awkward, some drama could have been staged but other than the subject being quite disgusting, it is a documentary after all and there is some production value there. C-




ZMD: Zombie of Mass Destruction is nothing less than awesome. It is by far one of the best zomedies I've ever seen, it is so good that I can't believe it is gay films. No offense to anyone but usually I have lower expectations with gay films but this one is plain good. It's scary; the director apparently like the old pre-heart-attack-lawsuits style where zombies are allowed to pop up out of nowhere and scare the living hell out of its audience. It's gory; hands are chopped up, guts flying, faces blown to smithereens. The special effects are decent, no Asylum bullshit. It's funny; the jokes are piling up so much that at times our laughter couldn't catch up.

ZMD is about a small island town in Washington State called Port Gamble is infected by the zombie virus and its villagers are slowly turning into zombies. Well, the usually gig but it's cute. excuse the poor clip below, the actual movie is much more exciting. If you like zombie films, watch it! We left the theater invigorated, I wouldn't mind if they came out with a sequel. B+






Lucky Bastard is about a young architect Rusty through random cruising in a convenient store in L.A. met this muscle blond Denny who turned out to be a former porn star and now full time meth addict. Rusty's specialty is house restoration, so when he met Denny he fell in love and his first instinct is to help him out. But then every corner you turn Denny is trying to manipulate Rusty into loving him and giving him money to buy meth, so what's Rusty to do?

Talking about predictability, this film is a big pile of bad acting and cliches. The only saving grace is the two leads are quite hot and muscled and there were a lot of nude scene (no naughty bits though). The climax scene of Denny explaining how he reached his new low of his life: "I was a jock in high school, I was quick... and fast, I got into a college with a sport scholarship, then I met this guy who treated me like a prince and took care of me, so I quit school... and after he dumped me for another, younger, guy, it was too late for me to go back to school and I lost my scholarship, and I got introduced into doing porn and that's when I was introduced to drugs." Wow, really? Isn't that how everyone get introduced to drugs? I was mortified when I saw my friend got a little teary eyed by the scene.

Other than trying to cramp too much into one scene, awkward logic, unconvincing acting and script, it's also a little boring. Hot bods and cute guys saved it a bit, so it's not all that bad. At least some people were touched, so what do I know, right? C-




I have little recollection on what happened in Eating Out 1 & 2, I just remember it was funny and Marco Dapper's fully nude scene is still etched in the brains of tons of gay guys. Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat has plenty of outrageously funny lines and full-frontal nudities. I guess they know what sells. Lanky Casey befriended sex crazed fag hag Tiffani right after he moved to L.A., after meet hunky Zach in the Larry Craig GLBT center, Casey and Tiffani created an online profile to stalk Zach using Tiffani's ex-boyfriend's pictures. The whole thing gets more complicated when Tiffani's ex-boyfriend came back into the picture and how can you base a relationship on a lit anyway?

This is a sneak preview, the sounds and the colors are not tweaked perfectly yet and there's not even a credit roll attached to it yet but the whole thing was quite funny thanks to Rebekah Kochan who plays Tiffani. The story is plausible and yet unimportant. There are tons of great clever one-liners like "That boy is dumber than a flock of Palins" that ensure hilarity. Bullshit ending but who cares? I'm sure I'll forget the story in a few weeks, but sometimes we just need some brainless comedies to with enough cute guys and full frontals to spike visual interests. Mink Stole who plays the aunt was there herself for Q&A, but there wasn't much questions because we all took the movie from its face values, it is what it is. B


So that's it for this year's QFest, I'm planning to see Harry Potter soon, but other than that I'm quite done with movies. At least for a while. TV on the other hand is a whole different story, I'll post about that very soon.