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Aug. 6th, 2009 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nigeltdehaving recently expressed my dissatisfaction with the standard crop of coming-of-age gay movies (oh my god we are both so buff and/or nerdy-buff and we like to look at each other in communal showers, and your mother and jock friends are whores, and there is a lot of golden sunlight, and I resent both your promiscuity and bad acting but it's okay because I'm repressed and attracted to sensitive assholes, and also we are mfeo, and your female friend is keen to hook us up and also a member of a minority group, and I am freaked out by how much I enjoyed that initiatory sex, okay let's get married/part, wiser, having learned something important about ourselves, with fond memories of That Fateful Summer) I was rather trepidatious combing through a gigantic folder of GLBTI movies copied from the extensive hard drives of lainy122 looking for something to watch tonight.
Lucky me though, I found a wonderful little charmer of a BBC tv movie called When I'm Sixty-Four that has absolutely no pretensions to mean anything beyond its central romance but it's so well contexualised in the lives of its protagonists that it manages to play plenty of grace notes on age, loneliness, class, friendship, love, family, illness, all that nice stuff. The only misstep is the tacky homophobic kids that come out of nowhere, bizarre character assassination to give the third act some tension where there is scads of more organic stress to be had in the prospect of new love, risk at retirement age, and the abandonment of life and family, all of which is ignored for the chance to turn a thoughtless and self-centered asshole into a vicious and cruel one. Nevertheless, thanks to Paul Freeman's lovely wide smile and clever way Alun Armstrong shifts the focus of is character from his scary schoolmaster eyebrows to the hopeful purse of his lips this is a really delightful, easy, sweet-not-saccharine, thoughtful-not-dire movie and I recommend it to y'all. Just don't watch it with your granddad.
lainy122 looking for something to watch tonight. Lucky me though, I found a wonderful little charmer of a BBC tv movie called When I'm Sixty-Four that has absolutely no pretensions to mean anything beyond its central romance but it's so well contexualised in the lives of its protagonists that it manages to play plenty of grace notes on age, loneliness, class, friendship, love, family, illness, all that nice stuff. The only misstep is the tacky homophobic kids that come out of nowhere, bizarre character assassination to give the third act some tension where there is scads of more organic stress to be had in the prospect of new love, risk at retirement age, and the abandonment of life and family, all of which is ignored for the chance to turn a thoughtless and self-centered asshole into a vicious and cruel one. Nevertheless, thanks to Paul Freeman's lovely wide smile and clever way Alun Armstrong shifts the focus of is character from his scary schoolmaster eyebrows to the hopeful purse of his lips this is a really delightful, easy, sweet-not-saccharine, thoughtful-not-dire movie and I recommend it to y'all. Just don't watch it with your granddad.
