Boys (2014 aka Jongens/Wolfe DVD)/The Case Against 8 (2014/HBO DVD)

Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: D/C+ Main Programs: C/B

Here are two new titles about gay/lesbian life that are making the rounds...

Mischa Camp's Boys (2014) was actually a telefilm in the Nederlands getting a theatrical release in the U.S. and is now on DVD. There is nothing much graphic in this one about two young track stars (Gijs Blom, Ko Zandvliet) start to fall for each other in what we could constitute as a cycle of 'self discovery' films, but it often goes for non-narrative moments that are about the feeling and experience of such things instead of telling an outright story.

At only 78 minutes, that could work to its advantage or not, but the narrative we do get is weak and predictable, so this does not work as well as it could or should have. The actors and locales are not bad, but outside of that, there is nothing new or memorable to see here.

There are no extras.

Ben Cotner and Ryan White co-directed The Case Against 8 (2014) was made by HBO, but had enough of a theatrical release in the U.S. to qualify for a Best Documentary Academy Award. With Gay Marriage picking up acceptance and legal status across the U.S. (lagging behind the rest of the industrialized world), well-funded Right Wing interests decided to push an anti-Gay Marriage bill in liberal California of all places and to the shock of (a possibly naïve) gay community, it passed!

Reeling from the shock, a group of people decide to fight it in court as illegal, unconstitutional and illogical, with the twist being hat their lawyer lands up being the guy who defended George W. Bush over the 2000 Presidential Election (see Unprecedented elsewhere on this site), so he was already consider a political enemy by association of the gay community. However, turns out the same lawyer agrees Prop 8 is wrong and sincerely joins forces (politics making strange bedfellows, no pun intended) to fight it in court.

Some things have happened since this film was finished, but it is still a strong, well-rounded piece on how this all happened, recording the events well and why it is about the sanctity of all people who want to marry and not just a community that is always too easy a target. At about two hours, it is very thorough and always to the point. Definitely one everyone should see as important history in the making.

Extras include Deleted Scenes and a Hot Docs Panel with the Plaintiffs and Filmmakers.

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image presentations on both DVDs are just fine, with enough good shots to suggest Blu-ray editions would even look better, but there are more than watchable, while both also offer decent, lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks that have their share of silence and limited sound (the former is a documentary with mono, simple stereo and location audio that does not fill the multiple channels, the latter an often quiet drama) but are just fine for the old format codec.

- Nicholas Sheffo