2011 Greggys: Movies of the Year: Dramas “Weekend” and “Pariah” and documentary “We Were Here”

There were so many wonderful LGBT-themed movies this year including Beginners, The Wise Kids, Gun Hill Road, With You, Hollywood to Dollywood and Wish Me Away.

But there are three movies that left me absolutely spellbound, deeply moved and unable to get them out of my head. They are the dramas Weekend and Pariah and the documentary We Were Here and they have finished in a three-way tie in the race for the Greggy Award for Movie of the Year.

Sorry, just could not choose a first among equals in this bunch.

Superbly directed by Andrew Haigh, Weekend features breakout performances by Tom Cullen and Chris New who seem so natural and so inhabit their roles that you feel like you are eavesdropping on them most of the time.

The film follows Russell (Cullen) who, after randomly picking up an artist Glen (New) at a nightclub on a Friday night, unexpectedly spends most of the next 48 hours with him in bedrooms and bars, telling stories and having sex. As they spend more time together, sharing snippets of their lives, they begin to reveal the things that hold them back as much as push them forward and develop a deep connection that could resonate throughout their lives.

Glen gets most of the funny lines including his description of coming out to his parents when he was 16: “I told them nature or nurture it’s your fault so get over it!”

And boy is he opinionated saying that the gays in Britain don’t fight for gay rights  because they’re “too busy on Grindr or having their asses waxed to do anything.”

While Glen seems confident, he acknowledges over the weekend that he is trying to “redraw” himself but is struggling because “everyone keeps hiding my pencil.”

The film makes you really grateful for those unforgettable days in your life that leave you with a wonderful feeling inside whenever you think back in them.

I did not get to see the outstanding drama Pariah when it screened at Outfest last summer but I’m so glad a screener of it arrived in the mail last month. I’ve watched it twice and am in awe of the performance delivered by lead Adepero Oduye as Alike, a Brooklyn teenager who is struggling to find her identity as a lesbian.

She’s dealing with different scenes with friends and with a very tense situation at home where her controlling mother (played terrifically by Kim Wayans) is trying to do everything from picking out her clothes to picking her friends – anything so that her daughter will not be gay.

Oduye really inhabits this character and we root for her as she tries to navigate her increasingly complicated life. When we see her trash her room after a girlfriend breaks her heart, anyone who has ever been through that can completely relate.

One of the final scenes in which Aleke tries to get her mother to accept her for who she really is will have you reaching for the tissue box.

I’m very glad to see that this wonderful film earned Oduye an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best actress and it is my great hope that Wayans also gets recognition for her truly masterful performance.

Writer-director Dee Rees has really put herself on the nap with Pariah which will hit theaters on Friday.

Provided with a DVD screener, the first time I saw the documentary We Were Here, I sat in stunned silence for some time after it was over trying to process all I had seen. I then invited a friend over a few days later to watch it with me again and was even more moved. Then I saw if during a sell-out screening at Outfest over the summer and that time, I wept.

You could hear a pin drop inside the DGA Theatre during much of the screening except for occasional laughter and tears.

Produced and directed by David Weissman, it is the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco and explores how the city’s inhabitants were affected by, and how they responded to, that calamitous epidemic.

Weissman, the film’s editor and co-director Bill Weber and two of the seven people who are the voices of the documentary got one of the longest standing ovations that I can remember in more than a decade of attending Outfest.

Two of the interview subjects were at that screening: Eileen Glutzer was a nurse with many gay friends who helped to administer clinical trials of several AIDS drugs and and Ed Wolf who worked with AIDS patients back then and who has developed HIV-related curriculum and trainings for a large number of national and international organizations and institutions.

It was 30 years ago lat June that the first case of AIDS was officially diagnosed in San Francisco where at one time, an estimated 50 percent of the gay male population was HIV-positive. There were not the life-saving  treatments that there are today – only death. Young people who were born after the crisis need to imagine what it would be like if 25-50 percent of their Facebook friends died in a very short period of time.

This movie is a reminder of this horrific time and the footage and photos we see from that time are devastating. We see just rows and rows of obituaries of beautiful men, many so young, who died from AIDS before they even knew how to prevent getting infected.

So as you watch, you grieve for that time, for the people who never got to live out their lives. But you also learn about the heroes during this time, the people who stepped up during the height of the epidemic to help people die with dignity, to lobby politicians, to fight for research and treatment, and to build up institutions and strength in the LGBT community that continues today.

Eileen Glutzer says in the film that when her mother asked her why she was working with AIDS patients, she said she didn’t choose it – it chose her.

“What’s really important to me and this film is to not forget, to not forget anyone,” she said at the July screening. “This film helps keep their memories alive and that’s been very important to me.”
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