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By: RYAN LEE
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AFTER ENDURING 108 minutes of mediocrity watching the “The Next Best Thing,” Rossalind Luna says she felt cheated by the 2000 movie in which Madonna is impregnated by her gay best friend, played by gay actor Rupert Everett.
“I thought to myself, they left the best part out, the part where they have sex — that’s the funny part,” says Luna, who decided to recreate the absent love scene in a film short scheduled to show at Out on Film, Atlanta’s gay film festival.
Luna’s “7 Minutes Without Foreplay” is one of 27 shorts scheduled to be intertwined with 28 full-length features for the seven-day festival, which runs Nov. 11-17 at Midtown Art Cinema. Luna’s film is among the many Out on Film entries with gay male characters in mind. But the festival also offers “TransAmerica” as the featured trans-oriented movie and “Floored By Love” as one of the key lesbian offerings.
(Southern Voice plans to preview the best and brightest of the full line-up in its Nov. 11 issue.)
Luna lives in Atlanta and is the only local entry in the festival this year. “7 Minutes Without Foreplay” marks the first foray into filmmaking for the two-time Emmy award-winning producer for the Spanish-language television network Univision.
“I’ve written other feature film scripts, but I wanted to take a smaller bite of the apple for my first movie,” Luna says. “I just wanted to finish, because some people take on a feature film and it gets to be too much.”
The non-existent sex scene in “The Next Best Thing” inspired Luna’s 14-minute short, but it does not feature that movie’s characters or storyline. Instead, “7 Minutes” chronicles the first time gay character Charlie has sex with a woman, who happens to be his sister in-law, Lisa.
Charlie’s older brother, Bobby, frets throughout the film about his younger gay brother having sex with his wife, like if Lisa will moan with pleasure and whether Charlie is packing more heat than him.
Luna filmed “7 Minutes” in Atlanta, and she says it was important to represent her hometown of nine years, as well as her Hispanic heritage.
“I’m always trying to put Hispanics in my movies,” Luna says. “I think there’s a lack of Hispanics anywhere and everywhere in the media, and I need to represent, and that’s why the actors in the short, except for the bartender at the end, are all Hispanic.”
The director, who is currently working on a Latino horror film called “Noche,” or “Night,” says she is surprised to see no other Atlanta filmmakers in this year’s Out on Film, but added that she is proud to carry the home team’s banner.
“Atlanta is right up there in terms of places to make great movies; they just don’t know it yet,” she says.
PERHAPS THE FILM generating the most buzz heading into Out on Film is the opening night main feature, “TransAmerica,” which stars “Desperate Housewives” actress Felicity Huffman.
The normally glamorous Huffman, who recently grabbed a primetime Emmy award for her role as Lynette Scavo on the hit ABC show, plays a transgendered woman on the verge of full transition.
Huffman’s character, Bree, is days away from gender reassignment surgery when she abruptly learns that the lone sexual encounter she had as a man resulted in a child.
She reluctantly travels from California to New York to bail her son Toby (Kevin Zegers), out of juvenile hall. The two of them embark on road trip back to Los Angeles during which both characters confront their past.
Toby’s history of abuse and abandonment lead him to become an insufferable hustler, conniving and ungrateful toward anyone willing to help him. Bree’s desire to live and be viewed as a woman keep her from revealing her true identity to Toby, and she endlessly tries to ditch her son for fear he might interrupt her planned sex change.
The 100-minute plot contains some of the standard comedy-of-errors humor that accompanies stories about someone trying to conceal their identity. Other scenes are particularly moving and poignant, especially when Bree and Toby interact with their respective families.
But “TransAmerica” is also at times contrived and lacking, particularly Bree’s eventual desire to be Toby’s mother despite her son’s bi-polar, toxic treatment of everyone around him.
Even with a lacking plot and an ending that leaves loose ends, “TransAmerica” should be a standout film, if only due to Huffman’s award-worthy portrayal. Her appearance, voice, gestures and mannerisms are so exact that viewers may forget that Bree is played by a ...
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