Change Your Image
johnphillip-chavez
Reviews
Noordzee, Texas (2011)
Growing up true to yourself, true to others.
A wonderful film about growing up gay and straight: discovering who you are, what love might mean, and learning to deal through trial and error with the world around you.
Set in a lower class neighborhood near the Belgian coast sometime around 1960, the story follows a boy, Pim, and two slightly older neighbor children Gino and Sabrina, from about the age of six or eight until their late teens.
Neglected by a mother who dreams of being swept off to romantic places, the younger boy is more or less adopted by the mother of the two neighbor children. The film resonates with an affectionate realism that does not treat kids as wholly innocent or without personal resources. It deals on every level with knowing who you are, and then dealing honestly with yourself and with others. In the course of the film, the children discard childhood fantasies in favor of a reality that provides scope for realizing their dreams.
The cast is outstanding. The performances of Ben Van den Heuvel and Jelle Florizoone (PIm); Nathan Naenen and Mathias Vergels (Gino); Noor Ben Tahouet, and Nina Marie Koortekaas (Sabrina) as the young / teen aged children are incredible, especially given the age of the actors. Eva van der Gucht and Katelijne Damen play the mothers, in difficult roles - the one flighty and negligent, the other tired and without illusions.
The cinematography is superb. It catches both the poetic beauty of the coastal dunes and wet lands as well as the drab reality of lower class neighborhoods in Belgium, with a color sensitivity that is at once realistic and emotive.
The movie could have easily settled into maudlin sentimentality or romantic excess, but steered a course through difficult subjects with a mixture of restraint and realistic optimism.
Following the showing, every person I talked with found the movie exceptional. Highly recommended.
Going Down in LA-LA Land (2011)
Great LA Serio-Comedy
Viewed at the Brussels Gay Film Festival
A very engaging story of lust, libido and love in LA.
The film was a very good take on LA - its quirky reliance on trendy remedies for modern woes, on drugs and on its special brand of eternally hopeful American aspiration as embodied in Candy and Adam - the one moving from opportunity to opportunity, the other sticking to some level of honesty, no matter how hard won.
The opening sequence of Adam driving through LA set the tone perfectly: brown skies, fabled landmarks, grungy strip malls and fabulous estates.
Candy and Adam - old film school friends - are each determined to make it big as actors, faced with the deadening reality of too many actors for too few roles. What they are really after, though, is family: they have their fraternal relationship, they long for a married one.
Matthew Ludwinski deserves a special mention for managing to be extremely sexy in a porn- fantasy way and at the same time extremely romantic in an honest way.
In this type of story it is often hard to see what the more successful character sees in the less successful character. But the film took the time to make Adam credible as an intelligent, interesting person and the chemistry between Adam and John was immediate and believable.
The film could have been a pat puff piece for the film industry, and the portrayal of the porn industry was a little soft-core: my one caveat. But the film it showed the downside of life in LA - drugs, hucksterism and sex - in a very real and sad way. The comment about not being able to come out of the closet because of the people whose livelihoods depended on a straight actor's persona, really touched a cord. The ending gained credibility from the gritty reality of the body of the film.
The audience - mostly European - roundly applauded the film.