The Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival was last month, but. Here’s the thing. I find it pretty hard to get excited about it because there is so much crap queer film. Plus, a huge part of the program is comprised of shorts, and there are many, many more crap short films than there are short films worth seeing. Add to that the fact that the majority of American queer film is terrible, so you can also cross off a whole bunch of features.
Since I’m a member of SIFF, though, I got some free ticket offers, and I went to two of them. First up was the awkwardly-titled The Man Who Loved Yngve, a sweet Norwegian coming-of-age film (high school kids in a rock band!) that just happened to include a gay love story. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was exactly what I look for in a queer movie, namely, a movie with characters who happen to be queer. Just like life. It won the juried award for Best Feature, so I guess it was a good one to opt for!
The second film was the sing-a-long West Side Story, which was fantastic of course. It’s one of the musicals I was obsessed with when I was a kid; I wore out the soundtrack & I owned a book that contained the script for it and Romeo and Juliet, so it was just neat to see it on the big screen, and neater still to see it with a largely queer audience.
wicked jaws 