Thanks so much for sharing your movie-going experience and the Q&A session.
Mark Walker said:On a differet subject, I recently saw a beautiful modern dance video done to a REALLY leisurely version of "I Want to Dance With Somebody," (Yes, the song Whitney Houston did as a perky pop song early in her career.) Scott Matthew's version sounds more like it was on loan from Nina Simone than Whitney Houston.
What I did not know about that gay-friendly music video (Two or three of the hunky male dancers partner with each other rather than the female dancers in the video.) is that it is also something of an aperitif for a new film titled Five Dances, which is on the festival circuit now (October 2013) and will be released on DVD eventually by TLAReleasing.com
Here is an excerpts from wo different articles on the film which tells a bit about the plot and lead, who is openly gay:
When most of us non-dancers observe men and women flinging themselves across a stage it's typically an aspirational experience. We wish our bodies could do that. We wish our bodies looked like that. We wished our bodies felt like that. So when a filmmaker decides to record dance and dancers, it can turn into a problematic situation: how to avoid the simple fetishisism of the human form, the virtuosity of supple movement.
In Alan Brown's new film, simply titled Five Dances—whose last film, Private Romeo (and introduced us to Seth Numrich and Matt Doyle), subverted the Romeo & Juliet story by placing it in an all-boys' military school—we follow five dancers rehearsing five dances in a Soho loft rehearsal space. The star of the production is Ryan Steele, a young dancer who is currently a magnetic on stage in Disney's Newsies,performing nightly as one of the chorus boys (and is the dance captain). As Brown explains, he had an open casting, looking for professional dancers who could also act. After meeting Steele, he hired him on the spot. "I had never done that before," Brown explains. "Afterward, I went away and started refashioning the script. If we did not have Ryan, it would have been a completely different movie. He became the center of the story."
The dancers perform the work choreographed by contemporary dance's latest sweetheart, Jonah Bokaer, someone Brown has known since he was a dancer with the Merce Cunningham company.
Ultimately, however, it is a story of one boy's journey, at 18, who travels from Kansas to New York City, where he tries to find his tribe. Although the film shows the complications of all the dancers with one another—including Kimiye Corwin, Catherine Miller, and Luke Murphy—Steele does have a steamy scene with another of the male dancers, Australian Reed Luplau. It's one of the sexiest gay-male sex scenes that anyone has seen onscreen in some time.
“I don’t think it’s anything that’ll hurt my career,” Steele says about his very (ahem) physical sex scenes with his onscreen love interest, played by another real-life hoofer, Reed Luplau. “It just might give me a different sort of fan base.” Furthermore, he’s not the bashful type, because, as he puts it, he can’t be. “Dancers have a certain amount of comfort that’s a little weird to normal people,” he says. “We’re physical people. We’re always changing in front of each other. There are no secrets in a dance company.”
But beyond the physicality of Five Dances is a compelling story of an 18-year-old ballet dancer from Kansas who leaves his family behind in favor of sweat, competition, and a downtown Manhattan affair with another dancer—one that wouldn’t have been conceivable back home. Fortunately, Steele’s transition from the Midwest was less dramatic than that of his character. His parents have always supported his career and his sexuality, though he admits that in his early hometown dance classes, “we did a lot of punches and butched it up.”
Steele is part of a new generation of rising Broadway demi-stars obsessed over on theater blogs, not least because he and his partner, fellow thesp Matt Doyle (The Book of Mormon), make such a handsome couple. “Once I knew I was in, he bought me a first edition of Matilda for Christmas,” Steele says, referring to the classic children’s book by Roald Dahl that serves as the source material for the show. He insists there’s no competitive tension between the two: “What we’re doing is so different — I’m a dancer on Broadway, and he’s an actor–singer. It gives us something to talk about.”
Here is a link to the trailer for the film:
Has anyone seen Book of Love or Private Romeo? Both are directed by the same director, Alan Brown. Just wondering.
(Private Romeo is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, and I don't want to see any more LGBT folks committing suicide for a while...I imagine that happens if this is true to its Shakespearean origins.)
Based on the trailer and video alone, I know Five Dances will be a must buy for me when released.
More can be found out on the film's site: http://www.fivedancesthemovie.com/
Cheers!
Jason_V said:We watched Eating Out: Open Weekend last night to wrap out the series for us. There are some good things in this movie, and the entire series. The filmmakers seem committed to the idea of happy gay characters by the end of the films instead of angsty ones. Here's my problem, though: they come off as completely fake. These aren't real people in a real situation; these are stereotypes, beautiful people who whine about not being good looking or not being able to find boyfriends. Or hypersexual caricatures. There wasn't one time I felt like I was watching any semblance of people I would see or know in real life. It's movies like these that perpetuate stereotypes I'd rather not have to dispel every day (especially with body image...oy...).
The ending, I'll admit, was sweet and an appropriate way to end the picture. It's just not a very good production, acting or writing wise.
When I was young and saw the film, that moment passed right by and didn't register with me. I just thought Plato was deep into hero worship of Jim. As an adult, I couldn't believe that moment had passed me by all these years without making a deeper impression.Mark Walker said:RAH has provided "a few words about..." the James Dean Blu-ray Boxed set and even mentions
meeting and chatting Sal Mineo at a screening.
Lucky him!
Regardless of the "was he/wasn't he" debate about James Dean,
anyone who thinks openly gay Sal Mineo's charter, Plato, from Rebel Without a Cause
was not coded to read as gay needs to think about that locker shot:
I'm sorry for pulling one little sentence out of everything you wrote Mark, but if you're in Seattle, you just became my new best friend. My guess is either Seattle or Portland...I could be terribly wrong, though.Mark Walker said:(I work in a city that is a hipster paradise.)