Movie Review: The 17th Annual CinemaQ Film Festival Offered Up an Embarrassment of Riches

For the 17th annual CinemaQ Film Festival from Denver Film, artistic director and festival founder Keith Garcia kept talking about the embarrassment of riches he had in choosing the films for this year’s festival, with plenty of great LGBTQ+ films to choose from. Whether that wide field of great queer films is a reaction towards the new political regime or not is up for debate, but the result was that this year’s festival was jam packed with brilliant and exciting films, all packed into one hell of a fun-filled weekend complete with Saturday morning cartoons, a house music dance party, and an abundance of delicious vegan food. Let’s run down the weekend and talk about some of the best films coming out of the festival, many of which will be available to you very soon.

Friday

Friday kicked things off with the traditional opening night party which, continuing with the traditions of the festival, featured a buffet of great vegan food. While previous years had been catered by SRYBB and Easy Vegan, I didn’t hear anything about a particular caterer this year. Still, the spread was delicious featuring BLT finger sandwiches, pizza mac and cheese, and these little sweet rice balls full of fruit that looked odd but tasted delicious. The opening night party was themed the “Double Rainbow” party in honor of opening night film Twinless, and guests were encouraged to dress up as a dynamic duo, not that too many did that. But it was an exciting celebration nonetheless. With three films on opening day instead of the usual one, Friday might have had the most solid lineup of films of the three days of programming.

It’s Dorothy

Filmmaker Jeffery McHale takes us back down the Yellow Brick Road for one of the most delightful documentaries of the year, tracing the cultural phenomenon of The Wizard of Oz from its origins in the 1900 children’s novel through the production of the 1939 film and on to every other iteration from The Wiz to Return to Oz and everything in between, and exploring the ways that the lead character of Dorothy Gale has become a cultural icon, particularly for Black and queer communities. Touching on all of the actresses to play the character, from the famed Judy Garland (the 1939 film) to Diana Ross (The Wiz), Fairuza Balk (Return to Oz), Nichelle Lewis (The Wiz on Broadway), Ashanti (The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz), and more, the film details how Dorothy has become this universal figure that so many people can relate to.

I don’t cry easily from sad movies, but inspirational movies, especially queer-themed inspirational movies, are another story, and this is pretty much the only movie of the whole weekend that had me bawling at how beautifully inspirational Dorothy had become for so many people. I was particularly interested in the film’s exploration of how Judy Garland became a queer icon, and the fact that she was so accepting of gay people at a time when few were. I wasn’t aware that Garland died the day before the Stonewall Riots and, while the film dismissed the idea that the two were intricately connected, it makes sense now that a bar full of queers might already have been having a bad day when the cops famously raided the bar.

Ultimately, it was a fascinating cultural deep-dive and a feel-good movie that is deeply moving and a lot of light-hearted fun. And the almost-stream-of-consciousness organization of the documentary worked for its fascinating narrative. I hope to see this film streaming somewhere soon, because there’s a lot of people who would really enjoy this documentary.

Rating: 93/100

Twinless

This year’s opening night film, Twinless, was a dark and demented comedy that seemed to surprise and delight the entire audience. In the film, Roman (Dylan O’Brien) has just lost his gay twin brother, Rocky, after a car hit him in the road and killed him. Struggling with his depression following the tragic accident, Roman turns to a support group for people who have lost their twin, and there he meets another member of the group named Dennis (James Sweeney, who also wrote, directed, and produced the film) and the two strike up an unlikely friendship.

That description didn’t have me that excited for the film, and I can’t imagine it sounds like the most scintillating storyline to you as a reader. I walked into this movie expecting a largely depressing downer of a film. But the problem is that, to tell you more about what makes this film so much fun, I would have to give you major spoilers for this movie, and I’m not willing to do that, especially ahead of the film’s upcoming theatrical run that starts next month. Just know that there are many more twists and turns that don’t come up in a spoiler-free description of the movie. The movie keeps changing your expectations of it, and every time you think you have a firm idea of what kind of movie you’re watching, it shifts those expectations considerably.

Dylan O’Brien does a remarkable job playing the starkly different personalities of two different twins, Rocky and Roman. Rocky is flamboyant and confident in himself, whereas Roman is more subdued, more masculine, and a little bit dumber. Seeing the two of them on screen, it’s really hard to believe that the two of them are played by the same actor.

James Sweeney is the mastermind behind the whole film, and he should be applauded for the twisted tale he weaved together as well as for his fantastic performance as Dennis. Dennis is far from being a perfect person and yet, even as his deepest flaws are uncovered, Sweeney seems to pull off the miraculous task of still making Dennis somehow relatable. Despite everything that happens in the film, the audience really does end up pulling for Roman and Dennis’ oddball friendship, which has a softness to it that you rarely get to see in a platonic male friendship.

Traditionally at CinemaQ, the opening night film is a big-name film that’s about to begin a theatrical run, and Twinless is no exception. The theatrical run of Twinless starts September 5, and that’s when the Sie Film Center is picking up the film. So I highly recommend that you catch this brilliant film early in its run so you can avoid all the spoilers, because this film is about to be the one on everybody’s lips.

Rating: 97/100

Queens of the Dead

In this film from Tina Romero—daughter of the legendary George Romero who founded the zombie genre—we get a drag-themed and very queer take on the traditional zombie apocalypse. It’s a night like any other in Brooklyn as a small company of drag performers try to put on a show where everything keeps going wrong. Dre (Katy O’Brien), the director of the show, is struggling with the fact that her star performer, Yasmine (Dominique Jackson), has pulled out of the show and her wife Lizzy (Rikki Lindhome) encourages her to bring in a retired star Sam, a.k.a. Samonce (Jaquel Spivey), to save the show. But once the show starts to kick off, a zombie apocalypse is unleashed on New York, and the drag troupe has to put aside their petty problems to fight off a horde of the undead in the most fabulous way possible.

This movie hit all the notes you would expect from a drag-themed zombie movie. There’s gore, there’s action, and there’s a bunch of queer drama queens being hilariously dramatic about everything. Plus, there’s the small but hilarious role of Pops (queer icon Margaret Cho) that adds a little star power to the film. The one straight character—Dre’s insufferable brother-in-law Barry (Quincy Dunn-Baker) who came to fix the toilet and got stuck in the middle of a zombie invasion with a bunch of queens—is a hilarious parody of straightness who becomes the butt of so many jokes in the film.

I didn’t even mind that so much of this movie makes very little sense. Why does the final fight with the zombies require a musical number? Because it’s a drag-themed movie, and they needed a big, drag musical number, that’s why. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense; you just go with it. Rather, my one and only complaint about this movie was the piss-poor sound mixing, which, at times, made the background music too loud to understand the dialogue. In one particularly important character moment at the end of the film between Dre and Sam, the dialogue is almost completely inaudible, ruining that scene entirely. The filmmakers should definitely take another look at that, because this movie is so much fun, I didn’t want to miss a second of it.

Rating: 94/100

Saturday

Saturday began with children’s cartoons and ended with gay porn, which I suppose is the natural progression of the life cycle. The first event of the day was a SaturGAY Morning Cartoon and Cereal Party, with a curated selection of classic queer-coded cartoons like Jem and the Holograms and Ranma ½ accompanied by a selection of sugary cereals that your parents wouldn’t let you eat. It was a fun event that perfectly segued into the more adult queer, animated film Lesbian Space Princess.

Lesbian Space Princess

In this delightful Australian animated film by Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese, we meet the young Princess Saira (Shabana Azeez) from the planet Clitopolis, a planet entirely full of lesbians. Saira has always lived in the shadow of her mothers, Queen Anne (Madeleine Sami) and Queen Leanne (Jordan Raskopoulos), who are always the lives of the party, and is always looked down upon by the people of Clitopolis. Of particular shame for Saira is the fact that she’s the first generation of the royal family who has been unable to summon her royal labrys, the ultimate weapon of lesbian kind.

That all changes when Saira falls in love with the sexy lesbian space adventurer Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel), whom she thinks is way out of her league. But after two weeks of dating, Kiki brutally dumps Saira, leaving her a crying puddle. But when the evil Straight White Maliens (comedy troupe Aunty Donna) need Saira’s royal labrys to power their chick magnet, they kidnap Kiki and hold her ransom for the labrys, Saira must overcome her agoraphobia and find a way to summon her labrys in order to rescue her ex-girlfriend. Along the way, she enlists the assistance of a problematic space ship (Richard Roxburgh), a songwriter named Willow (Gemma Chua-Tran), and a drag queen named Blade (Kween Kong). But, in the end, is Kiki even worth saving?

This movie had the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but then I wasn’t expecting subtlety from a movie called Lesbian Space Princess. I noticed a few people walk out of the theater about one third of the way into the film, which made me chuckle, because how did you not know what you were getting into with this film? It’s wacky and silly, but it’s also a whole lot of fun. You instantly develop sympathy for Saira and the way she’s treated by her family and the public, and what lesbian doesn’t relate to a sad, lonely girl who can’t get over her ex-girlfriend?

I had some mixed feelings with the way that the film treated Willow. She comes into the film as the perfect love interest for Saira, being the one person who can appreciate that Saira is more than people have made her out to be her whole life. Willow is a source of strength for Saira, and one that does a great job of boosting Saira’s self-esteem. Now, at the risk of getting too spoilery, I’ll say that the movie eschews its obvious romance plot in favor of Saira learning a lesson about how she needs to learn to love herself. While I appreciate that, it felt like a bit of a bait and switch to introduce the perfect love interest for the character and then just cut her out of the story before the big climax, never resolving that thread. 

But aside from that one qualm, this was a delightfully deranged little comedy that is a perfect self-parody of lesbian culture. Regardless of the ending, the journey is a lot of fun and worth the ride. I hope this film sees distribution in the U.S. because it deserves a wide audience.

Rating: 91/100

Heightened Scrutiny

In this hard-hitting documentary by Sam Feder, we follow Chase Strangio, a civil-rights attorney with the ACLU who, just last year, became the first openly trans person to make an argument before the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of United States v. Skrmetti. We follow Strangio in the months leading up to the Supreme Court case, in which families are challenging a Tennessee state law banning puberty blockers for transgender youth. Along the way, the film talks about the ways in which the news media has become a tool for the radical right wing in these cases as, more and more, courts have been citing the transphobic and easily debunked “journalism” of publications like the New York Times and The Atlantic.

This was the only film in the entire festival which, afterwards, made me say “I need a fucking drink.” While it’s a well-made and brilliantly compelling documentary, it was hard to sit in a theater and talk about the way that my rights are being taken away as a trans person. While the film was made before the SCOTUS handed down the ruling in Skrmetti, we as the audience knew the outcome of the case by now: The court upheld the Tennessee ban. But, of course, Strangio goes through the whole film knowing that the most likely outcome is that he will lose the case. As he speaks to a group of supporters outside of the Supreme Court, he doesn’t promise them that he will win the case; he merely promises that trans people will always take care of each other.

The festival facilitated a great talkback after the film featuring staff members of One Colorado, which I really appreciated. But that didn’t entirely mitigate the difficult feelings that the film gave me. While I certainly recommend this film to everyone, I urge trans people to take care of themselves and only watch this film if you really feel up to it and, afterwards, maybe give yourself a treat for having completed it.

Rating: 94/100

Queer Shorts Program

The Queer Shorts Program presented six intriguing short films: Gender Reveal, Rainbow Girls, Shelly’s Leg, The Eating of an Orange, Everywhere I Look, and Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites. Rather than do a full review of each, allow me to give brief highlights.

The opening film, Gender Reveal, was easily my favorite. It followed three queer people who were forced to attend a gender reveal party, suffering the condescension from straight culture towards queer people and the irritating heteronormativity of the event. But the event quickly descends into bloody chaos, making for a satisfying ending.

Shelly’s Leg interestingly told the story of an old Seattle gay bar by having actors act out old interviews verbatim, making for an interesting semi-documentary about lost gay culture. Animated film The Eating of an Orange stirred a lot of discussion with its bizarre and impressionistic imagery that was highly provocative. Everywhere I Look was about a trans woman who was estranged from her mother and visiting old places that her mother used to go to with her, but the lack of narrative made it confusing, and I didn’t really realize what was going on until halfway through the film. Grandma Nai… was an interesting concept about a ghost of a dead grandma watching her family from the afterlife, but the narrative was a bit confusing, and the queer elements were only barely hinted at.

Another short film, Auto Erotica: We Buy Gay Stuff, was played before Coming Attractions later in the day, and it told the fascinating story of a legendary gay vintage store in San Francisco. It was an enlightening little documentary and a reminder of why gay culture is so important to preserve.

Ratings:

Gender Reveal 92/100
Rainbow Girls 87/100
Shelly’s Leg 90/100
The Eating of An Orange 91/100
Everywhere I Look 77/100
Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites 79/100
Auto Erotica: We Buy Gay Stuff 92/100

Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

In this documentary by Elegance Bratton, we see the development of house music in Chicago. Starting with the tail-end of the disco era, we move through the “Disco Demolition” event held by radio DJ Steve Dahl, which led to violent anti-disco sentiment, driving the music underground. Following that,  a new type of music, called house, emerged from disco’s ashes in Chicago’s famed nightclub The Warehouse. We watch as this new genre spread from Chicago out into the greater world, creating a vast industry out of a small scene of Black artists who would never reap the full reward of what they created.

Move Ya Body was, in some ways, a fairly standard music documentary. But it had an interesting way of telling the story. Much focus was placed on the life story of pioneering house musician Vince Lawrence and how he and his friends pioneered Trax Records to get the music out to the world. It made it somewhat of a hybrid of being a documentary about the music and a documentary about Lawrence’s life.

As a rock fan, I was a bit dismayed to learn that rock music was largely the villain of this story. I knew that the anti-disco sentiment that started to emerge in the late-70s and early-80s had notes of racism, sexism, and homophobia to it, but this film really demonstrated the extent of that, and how the “Disco Demolition” crowd clearly targeted Black people because of their association with the music. I’d like to imagine that the world has plenty of room for rock to coexist alongside other genres, but it seems some people never felt that way.

While the subsequent house music party at the festival was a bit of a flop, with very few people dancing, the movie was a bigger hit and an insightful look into a genre I knew very little about going in.

Rating: 89/100

Coming Attractions: An Orgy of Gay Erotic Movie Trailers

In this collection of gay porn trailers from the 1970s and ‘80s, curated by Elizabeth Purchell, we get a glimpse into the ways that studios once advertised these explicit and lurid films to an audience hungry for more. Nothing about this was censored, and it literally became 76 minutes of watching gay porn.

Going into this one, I wondered if it would be hilarious or simply an uncomfortable thing to watch in a room full of strangers. In some ways, it was both. Some trailers were really hilariously done, while others were simply gay sex on display. Easily the most shocking entry was a Nazi-themed gay porn called Golden Boys of the SS, the trailer for which caused several people to leave the theater, seemingly in protest. But that’s the reality of what gay porn was in those days, and it was fascinating to observe it.

Still, 76 minutes is a long time to watch that many dicks, and after a while it seemed to grow a little repetitive. I’m not sure if this collection will be playing again anywhere, but it’s certainly an interesting glimpse into queer history, albeit a bit of a tiresome one.

Rating: 74/100

Sunday

Sunday started with an interesting event called Queer Elder Storytime, a conversation with important activists and organizers in the local queer community. While this sounded like an interesting conversation, it was hard to make it to all the movies and wake up in time for this event, so I sadly had to miss it, as interesting as it sounded. There was also a clothing swap and a vendor market that day, which were fascinating to check out. But, as always, the main attraction was the movies.

She’s the He

In this hilarious teen comedy, we meet two teenage “boys” named Alex (Nico Carney) and Ethan (Misha Osherovich), who are so close that their classmates mistake them for a gay couple, which limits the pair’s success with women. One day, Alex hatches a hair-brained scheme to pretend to be trans women to sneak into the girls’ locker room and hit on women, particularly Alex’s crush Sasha (Malia Pyles). But when Ethan discovers that he—or, more appropriately, she—is happier as a trans woman, the situation gets a whole lot more complicated.

I walked into this movie thinking that the description of the film opened up the opportunity for the movie to be very problematic. Frankly, I didn’t see how you could pull this film off without it being offensive to trans people. But I trust Denver Film and Keith Garcia enough that I figured this film had to have handled this well, and I was right. With a cast and crew of queer and trans people, the film managed to side-step any controversy by being genuinely funny and heartfelt. Even Alex, the one person in the movie who is actually faking being trans, finds his redemption by the end of the film, and it’s hard to hate him for what he does.

But, most importantly, as a trans woman myself, I can confirm that everything that Ethan says about what it feels like to be a trans woman is spot-on. I could relate to her journey strongly, especially when she talks about how she desires to join in on the way that women are platonically soft and affectionate with each other. In fact, Ethan’s interactions with her mother Mary (Suzanne Cryer) helped me deal with a lot of my complicated feelings about how my mother would have reacted to my transition, as I came out long after my mother died.

According to Keith Garcia, this film has yet to get a distribution deal, meaning that, unless they can get one, the film will likely not be seen by anyone except film festival audiences. Understandably, it’s got to be an uphill battle for a film positively portraying a trans woman to get distribution in Trump’s America. But that’s a complete shame because this a beautiful and funny film that deserves a much wider audience. Audiences that have seen this movie need to demand that someone picks it up because it’s far too good of a film to waste on just a few small screenings.

Rating: 95/100

Dreams in Nightmares

In this film from Shatara Michelle Ford, three queer, Black femmes—Z (Denée Benton), Lauren (Dezi Bing), and Tasha (Sasha Compère)—realize that they haven’t heard from their friend Kel (Mars Storm Rucker) in a while and embark on a road trip to find them. Along the way, they learn new things about themselves and where they’re going with their individual lives.

There were so many things about this film that made me want to like it, including the presence of a transgender woman character in Lauren, the positive depiction of casual polyamory, and the simple fact that it was a Black-focused film. But the film’s sluggish, meandering pace made it a tough slog to sit through at exactly two hours in runtime. It was also weird how the central plot of the story, the search for Kel, being easily resolved before the end of the film and with almost nobody mentioning that this inconsiderate person made their friends so worried they traversed the country looking for them.

The conflicts in the film were resolved in weird ways, and Tasha’s character never really got a chance to complete her character arc. There was also a weird scene where they stopped at a poetry reading for a long time and, even as a life-long performance poet, I found that sequence to be excruciatingly long. Overall, there’s a good movie in here, it just needs to be pared down from the sprawling two-hour mess that it is right now.

Rating: 71/100

Jimpa

In the closing night film, we meet Hannah (Olivia Coleman) and her nonbinary teenage child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) as they go to visit Hannah’s gay father, Jim (John Lithgow), known as Jimpa to his grandchild, who lives in Amsterdam. Frances idolizes their grandfather for his years of gay activism and wishes to stay for a year in Amsterdam with him to grow closer to him and be involved in a queer community. But Frances soon realizes that, like everyone, their grandfather is a flawed human being, and that their idolization glosses over some of those flaws.

This movie was sweet and, at times, very moving. It was an interesting look at the generations of queer culture and how so much has shifted from Jim’s generation to Frances’. It also demonstrates how older generations of queer people aren’t perfect and can, at times, hold problematic views of the younger LGBTQ+ community. But the long movie spreads itself a tad too thin and manages to cover too many issues at once, from polyamory to biphobia, leaving the film too little time to get into the proper amount of depth it needs for anything it explores.

I wanted to be excited for the all-star cast on this one, especially as I love Olivia Coleman and have since almost nobody knew her by name. But I’m a bit upset with John Lithgow at the moment over the fact that he’s been cast as Dumbledore in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series on HBO, one that seems to have become a referendum on whether the public accepts J.K. Rowling’s views or not. In many ways, Lithgow has proven to be as flawed as the character of Jim, which his an interesting parallel, but I remain upset with him.

While there are definitely positive points to this movie, it was a bit too flawed to be a satisfying closing night film. Again, there’s a great movie in here somewhere, but it needed to be pared down at the screenplay level, giving the film a chance to really dig into what was important.

Rating: 75/100

But while the closing film was a tad disappointing, it was an excellent weekend overall. I hope Denver never loses the CinemaQ Film Festival because these movies really need an audience, and I’d like to see them continue to get one.

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