Archive for the ‘Film’ Category

In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with the George Washington Bridge. Today I read a disturbing post on the NYT’s City Room blog about a pair of teenagers who broke into a vacant apartment in Brooklyn, doused a cat with lighter fluid and then set it on fire. According to the article, “[t]he […]


In which The Gay Recluse wins an Oscar. Recently we learned from US Magazine that “[a] few weeks after signing the lease on a $60 million Long Island mansion, [Angelina Jolie], 33, was spotted checking out a nice building in Manhattan’s uptown Washington Heights neighborhood Tuesday afternoon.” It makes us wonder how it came about […]


In which The Chaos Detective goes to Munich. Click through for “hi-quality” on YouTube or watch on Facebook. Stay tuned for the fifth and final installment of “City of Dreams.” THE CHAOS DETECTIVE City of Dreams (Part 1) City of Dreams (Part 2) City of Dreams (Part 3)


On Ludwig

18Dec08

In which The Gay Recluse loves Luchino Visconti best. In Ludwig, Luchino Visconti’s four-hour treatment of the 19th-century King of Bavaria, we are introduced to the king as a young man, but learn almost immediately — in what feels like a flash-forward — that he will eventually be dethroned by the state legislature for maybe being insane. […]


On Senso

09Dec08

In which The Gay Recluse loves Luchino Visconti. After scouring the globe, we were finally able to obtain — from South Korea! — a copy of Senso, Luchino Visconti’s 1954 film about the Austrian occupation of Venice during the war for Italian independence. In what is arguably the most operatic of Visconti’s films, we follow a […]


In which The Gay Recluse watches movies. Tonight we watched Seduced and Abandoned, the 1964 film by Italian director Pietro Germi. Set in a small town in Sicily, it follows a family with a 15-year-old girl who in a moment of passion sort of consents (but sort of not) to have sex with her older […]


In which The Gay Recluse turns to the mail bag. Chances are if you’re geigh, you’ve heard about this movie called MILK! You might even feel guilty if, like us, you haven’t gone to see it yet because you’re gay and it’s about someone who’s gay and you should be eternally grateful that Hollywood would deign […]


In which The Gay Recluse remembers Sergio Leone. Recently we watched the director’s cut of Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Lione’s epic Jewish/New York City gangster movie from 1984. When originally released in the United States, the producers imposed a chronological sequence onto the movie to shorten it, whereas Lione intended it to […]


In which The Gay Recluse loves Robert Bresson. In Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Robert Bresson offers us a portrait of a beautiful and painfully sensitive young priest who has just arrived to his new parish. For reasons that are never quite explained, the priest is mocked and detested by the local citizens; those […]


In which The Gay Recluse watches French film. In Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, the young (and kinda hot, in an aloof, cerebral way) lead is given to wandering the streets of Paris, looking into the eyes of men with whom he has the briefest and most exhilarating (but ultimately soulless) encounters. Surprise: at least superficially, this […]


In which The Gay Recluse loves Truffaut. So tonight we watched Day for Night, Francois Truffaut’s 1973 movie about movie-making. Although “day for night” apparently (because what do we know?) refers to a film technique by which a day shot is made to look like the night, it also — at least in the English […]


In which The Gay Recluse is disturbed, but not unpleasantly so. A few nights ago we saw Au hasard Balthazar, the 1966 film by Robert Bresson.* It’s about a donkey born on a farm in a small village in France, and a young girl who — at least for a little while — loves the […]


In which The Gay Recluse is entranced. Tonight we watched A Story of Floating Weeds, the 1934 film by Yasujiro Ozu.  It’s a silent movie, which takes some getting used to (and we say this with regret, not about the movie, but the state of our frenzied existence). Like the other Ozu films we’ve seen […]


In which The Gay Recluse provides a postscript to our gay alternative to this week’s Modern Love piece in the Times by Kayla Rachlin Small. (For those looking for our informal-but-telling quantitative analysis of Modern Love, click here.) Dear TGR, I loved your riff on “The Steep Price of Your Forbidden Kiss” (a title which, […]


In which The Gay Recluse reviews a film that needs to come out of the closet. The “director’s cut” of The Big Blue clocks in at 168 minutes, but don’t be too deterred: you can easily fast-forward through the dull parts and watch it in something closer to 90 minutes or so without losing anything […]


In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinion pieces in The Times. David Brooks/Remembering the Mentor The Short Version: Even though he was a Nazi, I loved William F. Buckley. In her words: “Buckley was not only a giant celebrity, he lived in a manner of the haut monde.” Score: F (Foolish) In this column […]


In which The Gay Recluse live-blogs the Super Bowl. 5:58. Our friend T___ arrives to give us haircuts. He tells us that his mother, who is only 64 years old, has just been diagnosed with an inoperable form of brain cancer. She has just begun chemotherapy, and to give him encouragement, we tell him about […]


First, it’s a great title for a documentary; just to say Gay Sex in the Seventies makes us a little more forgiving than is perhaps our natural tendency. Plus you get to see some great shots of vintage Big Apple; the west-side piers, the notorious truck bays across the highway, the Upper West Side when […]


As we watch the first few minutes of The Rainmaker (some fifty years after its release, in 1956), we are impatient and judgmental; the set is generic Hollywood Western, while the men in the family — a father and his two sons — come off as caricatures (stern older brother, mischievous younger, wise dad). Even […]


In which The Gay Recluse contemplates an uncommissioned masterpiece from the walls of an uptown subway station.