Like Me: Gal Amitai and Yoav Keren – Breaking Glass Pictures
Keeping pace with its free-spirited gay hero — a Tel Aviv high school senior named Tom — the indie drama Like Me (★★☆☆☆) makes broad, swift swings between emotional highs and lows.
In short order, Tom, portrayed by newcomer Yoav Keren, bounces from a threesome with a handsome gay couple, to being informed by his widower dad Gideon (Danny Geva) that, based on some tell-tale queerness Gideon found on the kid’s phone, he’s giving Tom two weeks to get out of the house.
Writer-director Eyal Kantor’s feature debut treads credible ground depicting Tom’s confusion as he processes being rejected by his emotionally distant dad. He still parties when he can with straight bestie Gilad (Mendi Barsheshet) and Gilad’s new Instagram-influencer girlfriend Noa (Roni Adler), but the hurt and anger seething beneath the smiles can surface when he least expects.
During a photo shoot, Rami (Gal Amitai), a smitten photographer twice Tom’s age, directs model Tom to pour that pain out, resulting in the most persuasively raw moments of Keren’s performance. Elsewhere, the actor appears in need of stronger direction to convey Tom’s complex, sometimes contradictory actions and urges.
Especially when those actions seem contradictory to common sense and reality, like when Tom intentionally trashes his bike, to create an excuse for running late on his Pizza Hut deliveries.
Sure, to embellish the fib, he lets the bike fall onto the pavement, where he tosses a handful of dirt over it and on his clothes and face. But he also violently kicks and stomps on the bike, his main mode of transportation throughout the rest of the movie’s shaky handheld shots of him biking the city streets.
Like Me: Mendi Barsheshet and Yoav Keren – Breaking Glass Pictures
Tom saves his tip, but the moment, rather than coming across as a clever payoff, points to the same awkward direction that continually centers Tom’s ungainly dancing as seductive or alluring. In fact, the movie opens on a short clip of Tom dancing, ends with an extended video of him dancing to funk-pop trio half•alive’s “Still Feel,” and several times features him dancing with friends at parties, or flirting with Rami during photo shoots.
Meant to express Tom’s queer joy and youthful independence, his freestyle moves don’t generally express any sexy sense of rhythm or physical confidence. Keren, who doesn’t dance like someone professionally trained, might have improvised Tom’s dance-like-no-one’s-watching flails and twists, and that’s fine. But the reliance on dance as a thematic touchstone perhaps warranted the contributions of a choreographer to find a language of movement that Keren actually speaks fluently.
As is, the desired effect doesn’t register decisively. The performance and staging are more convincing in scenes showing the intimate closeness between Tom and Gilad. Their attraction builds as the pair rehearse their amorous roles in a school production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. And Gilad takes it upon himself to teach his childhood friend how to caress a girl before moving in for a kiss.
The will-they-or-won’t-they stays headed in one predictable direction, but Barsheshet, playing the typically wishy-washy one in the relationship, adds a frisson of tension to Gilad’s dance with possible bisexuality. Tom’s own indecisive behavior — pining for Gilad’s attention, then running to Rami whenever Gilad ignores or mistreats him — also plays out honestly.
By comparison, the running subtext about how all these young people’s behavior is warped by their compulsion to craft stories for social media consumption feels forced and dated — like an ill-timed dancer, just missing the beat of a familiar tune.
Like Me is available on VOD and digital platforms, including iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, and local cable & satellite providers, and on DVD. Visit www.bgpics.com.
I first saw Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain in 2005, at a three-screen, not-for-profit cinema in suburban Washington state. I went with my then-boyfriend, and for the next two hours and fourteen minutes, I wept silently next to him.
At 16, I came into political consciousness as the second Bush administration fought to maintain a conservative bulwark against progress by endorsing a constitutional amendment defining marriage in strictly heterosexual terms. While I was out, I felt righteously angry that others felt I should hide who I knew myself to be.
Twenty years after the film's release, Brokeback Mountain returned to theaters. The end of June also marked a decade of nationwide marriage equality thanks to Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Supreme Court granted homosexual couples the "equal dignity" afforded to our heterosexual counterparts. Today, I go to the movies with my husband. And sitting in the cool, dark of the cinema last week, I reflected on the ways Brokeback Mountain helped change the national discourse and still resonates in deep, meaningful ways for people across the country.
Not every couple has a fairy-tale beginning, or meet-cute origin story to share in "Awww"-inducing social media posts. Romance, for some, blossoms under less decorous circumstances. That's the case for W. Tre and Free, the Black queer couple at a crossroads in Tarell Alvin McCraney's brilliantly observed, and deliciously frank and funny love story We Are Gathered.
Tre and Free met at an outdoor cruising spot inside a city park, where men gather in the dark for surreptitious, mostly anonymous sexual hookups. It so happens that, for this couple, lust at first sight led not only to quick sex, but also a genuine connection that then grew into something deeper.
Life is a cabaret at the titular bolero bar in GALA Hispanic Theatre's Botiquín de Boleros de Columbia Heights. Of course, for this lively, immersive staging, directed and choreographed by Valeria Cossu, we, the audience, are the patrons at the Columbia Heights Bolero Bar.
Seated at cabaret tables onstage, at stage level, or in regular seats throughout the house, audience members may find themselves in the midst of the action for Rubén Léon's heartfelt backstage musical revue, adapted by GALA artistic director Gustavo Ott.
Formerly a mainstay of D.C.'s diverse Columbia Heights neighborhood, the fictional boîte was "one of the hottest cabarets" in town, we're told. But due to the pandemic, it has sat dormant for years, until now -- now being November 2024, just ahead of a presidential election that will prove particularly pivotal for immigrants like some of the performers who call the club home.
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