Live Nude Girls Unite at a Psycho Beach Party!

ImageOut celebrates its eighth anniversary

If this headline didn’t get your attention, you’d better call an undertaker because you might be dead.  ImageOut, the biggest lesbian and gay film festival in Upstate New York, returns for its eighth year of educating and entertaining Rochester area movie lovers, running from Friday October 6 through Sunday October 15.  Last year’s festival attracted over 6,000 ticket buyers, and thanks to its success, this year’s program has expanded from seven days to ten, and features over 130 films from all over the world.

While the deadline for advanced tickets has already passed, you can still buy same-day tickets at each of the festival’s venues (10 screenings have already sold out, so make sure you get there early).  Ticket prices range from $6.00 to $10.00, but the closing night gala (Aimee and Jaguar) will set you back $20.00.  That’s because the ticket includes a dessert reception, cash bar, cabaret singing and admission to the George Eastman House.

Chutney Popcorn, the festival’s opening night film, is an interesting look at a sibling rivalry taken one step beyond the norm.  In her directorial debut, Nisha Ganatra (who also wrote and directed the film) stars as Reena, a motorcycle-riding henna tattoo artist and photographer in New York City.  She’s also Indian and a lesbian, and Popcorn shows the provocative clash between traditional and modern relationships.

Popcorn opens with Reena missing sister Sarita’s wedding.  Being late is one thing, but Reena’s mom hits the roof when she’s tardy and brings beautiful girlfriend Lisa along.  It becomes clear that Reena can do nothing right in the eyes of her mother and, as a result, she has developed a distinct jealousy toward sister Sarita.

Reena sees her big chance to win Mom’s approval when, after several months of unsuccessful attempts, Sarita announces she’s unable to get pregnant.  Much to the slack-jawed surprise of everyone, Reena steps in and offers to carry her sister’s baby to term, and then give the child to Sarita and her husband to raise.

Popcorn’s first act sets up the characters, while the second shows Reena trying to get pregnant (there are several funny turkey-baster scenes).  The third focuses on the havoc the pregnancy wreaks in the relationships of each character, especially between Reena and the permanency-phobic Lisa.

Another promising directorial debut can be found playing immediately after Popcorn.  Patrik-Ian Polk’s Punks is about a tight-knit group of four gay men (or “punks”) looking for love in West Hollywood.  What makes the film unique is the fact that the central characters are all black and Hispanic.

After a funny bit where the men shout out names of celebrities they’d be willing to have sex with, Punks shows the party thrown for Hill’s 30^th birthday.  Instead of feeling celebratory, Hill is down in the dumps after catching his French boyfriend making out with another guy.  He leans on his three close friends for support, and we quickly learn that they’re all just as unlucky in love.

Chris is a popular female impersonator, but none of the other guys have ever seen the boyfriend he swears isn’t imaginary.  Dante has an endless string of one-night stands, but can’t ever find the right guy to settle down with.  And despite the fact that Marcus hasn’t ever had a homosexual experience, he insists on being HIV-tested every month.

Most of Punks centers on Marcus’ relationship with his new neighbor, the hunky (but straight) Darby, a successful music producer new to the west coast.  This entertaining film is chock full of Chris’ musical numbers, in which he lip-syncs a large portion of the Sister Sledge catalog with his group, “The Ladies.”

While Punks is a modern look at minorities in same-sex relationships, the festival’s closing night film highlights a doomed liaison from the past.  Think it was tough being a Jew in Germany during World War II?  Try being a lesbian Jew, like Felice in Aimee and Jaguar (opening 10/20).  She spends her days working for a Nazi newspaper in order to give important information to the Jewish underground.  Felice’s evening are spent with a close-knit group of fellow lesbians.

Through one of these friends, Felice meets Lily, the unfaithful, bourgeois wife of a Nazi soldier.  The two women fall madly in love, writing letters to each other using the code names Aimee and Jaguar.  Of course, Lily doesn’t have a clue that Felice is Jewish.

A Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Aimee also won the top acting prize (shared by the two leading ladies) at the Berlin International Film Festival, which, ironically, is where the film is set.

If movies about doomed lovers from Europe float your boat, then head over to either of François Ozon’s films.  The reigning bad boy of French cinema has two features (and one short) playing in this year’s festival.  Based on a Rainer Werner Fassbinder play, Water Drops on Burning Rocks is Ozon’s feature directorial debut.  The film centers on the relationship between middle-aged Léopold and twenty-something Franz.  Their affair begins torridly, but quickly turns dull and routine, with Franz basically becoming Léopold’s houseboy.

Just a Franz appears to be ready to check out of the relationship, the situation gets complicated by the arrival of his curvy, sex-starved ex-fiancée, who shows up just before Léopold’s ex-lover – a man who became a woman to please her former boyfriend.  Hilarity, tragedy and a bizarre dance number ensue in this well-executed film debut.

Ozon makes quite a cinematic leap with his second feature.  Criminal Lovers is a sick, twisted and, at times, terrifying blend of Natural Born Killers and Badlands, with a little Deliverance and Hansel & Gretel thrown in for good measure.  The film opens with a sexually aggressive student named Alice playing a nasty prank on her impotent boyfriend Luc.  But this trick isn’t the only one playful Alice has up her sleeve.  She also convinces Luc to help her slaughter an Arab classmate named Saïd.

The teens hit the road, with Saïd’s body in their trunk, stopping only to rob a jeweler and exercise the five-finger discount at a supermarket.  But when they run into an isolated shack in the woods, the film takes a cold and chilling turn.  Lovers is a brilliant, stylish film that is definitely not for the faint of heart.

If non-fiction films are more your speed, ImageOut won’t let you down.  Shadow Boxers, a slick documentary about woman fighters, concentrates on a former kickboxing champion from Holland named Lucia Rijker.  She describes the sport as addictive and all-consuming, telling stories about other fighters who abandoned their men and their children to pursue success between the ropes.  Beautiful and well spoken (at least for now), Rijker gains both confidence and credibility with each opponent she faces.

But the real draw to Boxers is the way the boxing scenes are pieced together.  They’re elegant and hypnotic, playing out in slow motion over a hip-hop soundtrack.  Boxers also switches between color stock and grainy black-and-white film, which only adds to the film’s dream-like quality.  It starts to drag a bit toward the end, when the fights aren’t the focus.  It’s not a first-round knockout, but it’s probably an early TKO.  Even if you dislike the sport, you’ll still find the film enjoyable and entertaining.

First things first – Live Nude Girls UNITE! isn’t a sequel to Live Nude Girls, the 1995 sex comedy with Kim Cattrall and Dana Delany (thank God).  Unite! is actually a documentary about a struggling lesbian stand-up comedian who becomes a peep show dancer to make ends meet. While the film starts out as a goofy demonstration of women using their “feminine powers” (read: stripping for men) to get ahead in life, the film quickly changes focus to the strippers from a small San Francisco parlor who launch a six-moth battle to become the first unionized strip club in the country.

At the mere mention of the word “union,” the club’s management hires anti-union lawyers to break up the possibility of the dancers banding together.  UNITE! follows the trials and tribulations of the lengthy battle to unionize the club’s strippers.  There’s also an interesting subplot, where the filmmaker tries to hide her stripping (and lesbianism) from her mother.

UNITE! is a film that would make Michael Moore proud.  It effectively blends serious subject matter with a deft comedic edge.  There’s something very funny about seeing a wall of time cards with names like Velvette, Ginger, Sapphire and Isis, not to mention hearing the strippers chant, “Two, four, six, eight – don’t go in to masturbate” while picketing the club.

Its title taken from the Shel Silverstein song popularized by Johnny Cash, A Boy Named Sue is a documentary about a woman in the process of becoming a man.  The film begins in 1994, when Sue begins taking testosterone injections.  Within months, she begins to experience changes in her voice, muscle density, breast size and…ummm…other parts.

More interesting than the physical changes in Sue are the interviews conducted with her friends, especially girlfriend Lisi.  They are all concerned but supportive in her quest to become Theo.  The film plays out over six years, and viewers will see the relationship between Sue and Lisi affected in surprising ways.

 “There’s all different kinds of families,” exclaims a boy with two moms and two dads in That’s a Family, a documentary short made for and featuring children.  The film tackles relationships that include mixed races and religion, adoption, stepparents, physical disabilities, same sex relationships, single parents, grandparents as guardians and various combinations thereof.

There’s something refreshing about the honesty and innocence of children explaining the facts about terms like “birth mom,” “lesbian,” and “divorce.”  If everyone could live by the words, “You can be a rat and marry a mouse,” the world would be a much happier place.  Especially for rats and mice.

Meet U.B. Morgan and Jann Nunn, two gay filmmakers from California. And meet Bob and Mary Bradford, a live-action version of King of the Hill’s Hank and Peggy Hill.  What do the two couples have in common?  They’re the same people.  That’s right – Morgan and Nunn pose as a non-threatening, married Catholic couple from Midland, Texas to tour the Bible belt in a motor home in The Bradfords Tour America.  Along the way, they run into Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps, and make appearances in Branson, Missouri, The 700 Club’s studio audience and Liberty University.

While the point of the film is to point out that people from the South are largely ignorant when it comes to same-sex relationships, it comes as no big surprise.  It’s still pretty funny to watch these toothless wonders try to explain why homosexuality is deviant behavior.  The Bradfords comes off as a cross between a Michael Moore film and a Tom Green skit, accentuated by clips of Morgan emptying sewage from their motor home to drive home the argument.

Some of ImageOut’s best films have already sold out, but keep your eyes peeled – they could end up playing at your favorite theatre before you know it.  In Just One Time, a burly New York City firefighter named Anthony is marrying down-to-earth attorney Amy in ten days.  Although he’s madly in love with his fiancée, Anthony constantly pesters her to make his one dream come true – hot three-way sex with another woman.  Because he’s Catholic, Anthony feels his fantasy needs to happen before they get married, so the couple won’t be breaking their wedding vows.

Amy finally agrees, but only after she gets Anthony to promise to make her fantasy come true as well.  When the time comes to introduce the new person into their sexual routine, he is shocked to find out that Amy has brought home Victor, a neighborhood boy with a huge crush on Anthony.  She tells Anthony that it’s her fantasy to have sex with him and another man, and because he swore on his mother, Anthony has no choice to carry out his end of the bargain.  SECOND SCREENING JUST ADDED!

David and Jack are best friends, but Straightman’s opening scene shows you just how different their lives are.  David, an overweight Jewish comedian who is lucky with the ladies, is shown having a passionate one-night stand.  Jack, a burly construction worker with a fu manchu moustache, is shown fighting with his girlfriend, who he has become less and less interested in sexually.

When Jack’s girlfriend moves to California, the two buddies get an apartment together.  Despite David’s attempt to make the place a swinging bachelor pad, Jack starts to blow off his friend’s double dates for a string of anonymous sexual encounters with strange men.  This revelation puts a strain on their friendship and begins to affect David’s womanizing as well.  This screening is SOLD OUT.

Playwright Charles Busch’s screenwriting debut is great campy, B-movie fun.  Psycho Beach Party is a funny murder mystery decorated with surf music, cars with fins, poodle skirts, drive-ins, luaus and split personality disorder.

Florence Forrest, a cherubic, underdeveloped Malibu teen who is worried that something is wrong with her because she doesn’t like boys.  On a more disturbing note, Florence has a bit of an alter ego problem.  It seems that whenever she sees something circular, her personality changes from squaresville into an acid-tongued sexpot.  And to make matters worse, every time Florence becomes Ann, a grisly murder occurs.  Throw in a haunted beach house, guys rolling around in the sand and a butch police captain (played by Busch), and you’ve got a pretty nifty whodunit.  This screening is SOLD OUT.

Ever hate somebody for being too well liked?  Too beautiful?  Too perfect?  That’s the basic gist of Beau Travail, a strikingly beautiful film loosely based on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.”  In the film, a French Foreign Legion Sergeant named Galoup develops an irrational hatred toward one particular soldier named Sentain.  Galoup can’t stand Sentain’s popularity with his fellow soldiers and, especially, the Legion’s commanding officer.  His sweeping jealousy begins to affect everything in his life, turning Galoup into an entirely different person.

With Galoup’s sparse narration, and the presence of both soldiers and striking poetic images, Travail is reminiscent of The Thin Red Line.  The director’s need to let her camera linger on the soldier’s well-chiseled bodies seemed a little strange.  The troops were almost always shirtless, and the robotic manner at which they approached their tasks made parts of the film seem like a commercial for Gap Khakis.  This screening is SOLD OUT.

This year’s festival also offers an impressive collection of shorts from all over the world, highlighted by Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World (filmed using LEGO figures) and two appearances by The Ambiguously Gay Duo (as seen on Saturday Night Live).  There are also two hard-hitting documentary programs that tackle religion (“Religious Rights”) and transgender relationships (“Altered Sexes”), as well as one for the kids (“That’s a Family”).