ACOMSDave

Community Journalist

Family Matters

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Frans Gertenback, is an artist living in Ballyclare. His exhibition ‘Family Matters’ consists of video installations, portraits and a large number of abstract works.

The underlying concept is one of the influence of family on your life. This is both the immediate family (mother, father, brother,sister grandparents) and the extended family which we all have.

The video installations are short looped items and are thought provoking in terms of place, time and styles. The portraits cover early life and later life, whilst the abstract paintings are just that abstract; it is up to each individual to interpret these as they will.

The exhibition runs from the 3rd to 31st January 2019 at the Artledera Studio, 43 Rosemary Street, Belfast.

I came away from the exhibition with little backward thought, unfortunately for me. I did not find the xhibition thought provoking as intended; but as with all exhibitions, this is my review and opinion, and I would suggest you go along, make time for the ‘Family Matters’ exhibition and enjoy the body of work.

For me one item of the exhibition stood out, and that was a portrait of a man shown below.

Further Reading:

  1. Artcetera Facebook
  2. Belfast Art Map

Movie Lists

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After writing many reviews of moves, of all genres, I thought that I would try to provide a list of various genres of movies, with my recommendations. During the next year I hope to provide you with my suggested movie lists for these genres:

Movie Lists in a library

  • Action
  • Adult
  • Adventure
  • Animation / Anime
  • Biopic
  • Childrens
  • Comedy
  • Crime / detective /spy
  • Documentary
  • Drama
  • Horror
  • Family
  • Fantasy
  • Historical
  • Medical
  • Musical
  • Paranormal
  • Romance
  • Sport
  • Science fiction
  • Talk Show
  • Thriller / Suspense
  • War
  • Western

However, to start with, I must say here and now that I have not come up with definitive movie lists for each genre, because every movie has some merit, and deserves to be viewed in terms of its story, the action (or non-action) the director and especially the actors as just some things to look at.

There is one genre during the last year or two which has hit the headlines, mostly for good reasons; and this the genre of LGBT movies. You will notice it is not in the genre movie lists shown above, and that is because LGBT uniquely seems to encompass all of this list in various forms, but due to the homophobia that was rampant within the population and fanned by the media, it is only recently that we have seen so many positive movies with LGBT characters.

If you haven’t watched any of them, then I heavily suggest you do. They warrant viewing, and as the LGBT community has been recognised by so many as something which is part of human pysche. The following lists cover 2017 and 2018

2017

  • A Quiet Passion
  • Paris: 05:59: Theo & Hugo
  • 4 Days in France
  • Staying Vertical
  • My Life as a Zucchini
  • Frantz
  • The Assignment
  • BPM
  • Tom of Finland
  • The Ornithologist
  • The Ornithologist
  • Dream Boat

2018

  • Rafiki
  • We The Animals
  • Plaire Aimer Courir Vite
  • The Happy Prince
  • A Kid Like Jake
  • Bohemian Rhapsody
  • Howard – The Howard Ashman Story
  • Duck Butter
  • McQueenThe Gospel According to Andre
  • Mapplethorpe
  • Boy Erased
  • EveryAct of Life
  • The Death & Life of John F Donovan
Movie Lists in a penny arcade in Louisiana
Boys looking at penny movies in an arcade in Louisiana

Links to Out which reviewed these movies:

Cinema graphic to cover movie lists

Eating Out – a gay movie review

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Eating Out

 

 

Eating Out’s plot centres on Caleb (Scott Lunsford), a hunky straight boy, who after breaking up with his slutty girlfriend Tiffany (Rebekah Kochan), hatches a plan with his gay roommate Kyle (Jim Verraros) to pretend to be gay in order to catch the eye of the beautiful Emily (Emily Styles), the only problem is he is so convincing that Emily sets him up with her best gay friend Marc, who just happens to be Kyle’s dream man and so begins a comedy of errors. I have to say I love this movie, it’s funny, charming and sweet. Best performances come from Rebekah Kochan as Caleb’s ex and Jillian Nushban as Caleb’s acid-tongued younger sister Jamie.

Extras include a photo gallery and 5 trailers

Eating out ( tla releasing ) cert 15

 

 

 

 

[R McQuillan]

Lost Language of Cranes: The Devil’s Advocate – gay movie review

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Lost Language of Cranes
I sat down to write a review of “The Lost Language of Cranes in the middle of the night. And on the telly came a movie to which I was immediately attracted because there was a rather nice young man in it, who took his clothes ff quite a lot. He did this for an English painter who had gone to Italy to paint landscapes but had discovered the local attraction of greater interest, to wit: our young friend.

But – there’s more, his brother (the painter’s that is, who in another sub-plot is the model’s father) did something heroic against the Nazis In the war, and there is a move afoot to have him beatified (made a saint). The Catholic Church has sent a rather dowdy English priest to stop this cult because the painter’s brother although a great man was politically “difficult”

The first job our priest sets himself, however, is to disrupt the love between the painter and his model, preaching Catholic rhetoric at them.  He succeeds in this and promptly sets about undermining the notion that the painter’s war-hero brother is a saint. Here he comes a cropper, he discovers that the war hero was better than himself and the Church, and goes through a realisation that his role in the life of the village is really quite destructive. When he gets back to his Italian bosses he doesn’t recommend the war hero as a saint as a slight to the Church.

There was far more to this story that I have described, and the characters were far greater in their roles than the story demanded. When one turns one’s mind to the Lost Language of Cranes this was noised about by the media as being noteworthy, one realises in comparison the above-mentioned movie (The Devil’s Advocate – a 1980 West German Religious Drama starring John Mills) with what a load of bogus pomp it was – full of vacuous ambiguity which has been misread as art.

[Patrick James]

 

Director

Writers

Stars

 

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