The Living End (1992)

(A talkie, courtesy of TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto)

I am older than the AIDS crisis. In 1981, when I was four, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) identified a virus in five homosexual men in L.A. When I was five, ‘AIDS’ replaced ‘GRID’ (gay-related immune deficiency) as the accepted term for the disease in the press. I grew into my teens with the knowledge that AIDS was something lethal and terrifying; an awareness supported by public health campaigns and the media. Dramatic works by artists and writers, gay and straight, helped me appreciate who and what its victims were—and weren’t. AIDS made young people die, and that was the point.

The Wolf Song (1929)

I’m straight, but I know damn well that Gary Cooper’s beautiful. You can’t miss his beauty in The Wolf Song, a film that places him: lithe, lanky, and naked, by the side of a stream; obscured by blades of grass. Cooper’s outdoorsman, Sam Lash, has decided to wash up. He’s smitten by a girl in Taos, the town where he’s staying, and bathing seems like the right thing to do, since Sam expects to get laid. He will.

Old San Francisco (1927)

The only thing I wanted to see in Old San Francisco was the earthquake. I was prepared to wait nearly 80 minutes for that scene; prepared to sit through whatever melodramatic junk that preceded it, letting curiosity sustain me through this empty-vessel of a movie. What I got in the end were buildings of plywood and glue, rattling and buckling inward like the knees of an old drunk; then the onscreen death, via crushing, of Anna May Wong.

Not good, not good at all.

And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

(A talkie, courtesy of TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto)

And Everything is Going Fine is about the life of Spalding Gray; a man who wrote and performed monologues on that same subject. “I can’t always tell when I’m making things up” he tells his dad, in one of the film’s many clips. “I can’t tell either,” says the elder Gray, who has since died.

A Screaming Man (Un Homme qui crie) (2010)

(A talkie, courtesy of TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto)

“The pool is my life,” says Adam, moments before it’s taken from him. He implores his boss, hotelier Mrs. Wang, to understand. He has tended her hotel pool for years; before that, he was a great swimmer, so renowned that people still address him as ‘Champion.’ It’s not a title spoken with awe, but with warmth and familiarity. Adam (Youssouf Djaoro) practically lived in pools as a young man; now he makes his living maintaining this one. And his beloved son, Abdel, works alongside him. He’s fulfilled.