Bent

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Bent_720p(480P)

source: Bent

I stopped watching this movie during the train ride to Dachau. It is a completely amoral film, and not because it shows amorality. Jagger, whom everyone is so crazy about, turns the two lovers in for money. No one is outraged. Then the Nazi makes the protagonist beat his lover, to whom he had declared his love only hours before. No one is outraged. We are supposed to feel pity at the forced degradation, not contempt at the protagonist that holds life to be more dear than dignity. I would have, and I swear to it, beaten the Nazi to a pulp, knowing that I would be killed. Death is a small price to pay for keeping your dignity. The protagonist collaborated with the Nazis in beating his lover! Where is the outrage? He's as bad as they! Then, I am told, he is redeemed by love, at the camp. I don't think so. Some things cannot be forgiven and forgotten so easily. Antonio

This film, based on the theatrical production, is a moving and powerful experience. It is both emotional and intense and its power moves even a cynic to tears. While hope bounds throughout the hopeless scenario, the overwhelming feeling is desperation and despair. Though the settings are largely historically inaccurate, they convey the mood of the era precisely. A must see for anyone in the GLBT community or anyone with an interest in the Holocaust. Never forget.....NEVER AGAIN!

I had seen the play on Broadway twice, once with Richard Gere and David Dukes, and once with Michael York and Jeffrey DeMunn. The movie is very faithful to the play and was just as interesting, which usually is not the case. Mick Jagger is great as Greta. All in all, I'd recommend this movie and did not find it pretentious in the least.

The play was great and I hoped the movie adaption will work. I'm glad to say it did. Some bits weren't perfect, but the movie is still very sad and bitterly romantic. How sad and heartbreaking... How could people do such things to other people?... Damn. Not an easy movie to watch, but still a must see. Great acting.

The premise grabbed me; it is about a gay man sent to the concentration camps during WWII. I was expecting some really good things from it; as a gay guy looking for "gay entertainment," I highly dislike movies that assume gay people must want to see lots of sex, or stories about AIDs. I figured this would be something far different from that kind of garbage. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement; it's a bad sign when I wished the SS would just shoot the main character and make it a movie about his boyfriend instead! I despised the main character...he was everything I could possibly dislike about a person all rolled up into one. He's a multi-time cheater on the same person, a coke-head, a jerk, very promiscuous, makes (unwelcome) decisions for other people...throw in some domestic abuse and you've just about covered it. He's someone I'd be ashamed to know...needless to say, it was impossible to sympathize with his wretched character. And I can't say I'm happy with the clear stereotypes of "gay life" being portrayed from the very beginning; they were horribly unflattering, and pretty much assume we're all drugged up "club boi's". In the end, this was just another gay sex movie, only it had what should have been a serious setting that could have made an important point. It failed.

This is a very wordy and long-winded response to guajolotl (guajolotl@aol.com)'s comment"Yetch!": In times of desperation and fear, people do awful, incomprehensible things. Everything you know is taken away, the comfortable fears of your daily life are stripped away in an instant and you are put in a situation you are completely unprepared for: you could die. People who live like us, who live safe, cannot comprehend the stark and brutal reality of facing your own death. A drag queen that descends from the air every night to serenade a drunken, orgiastic crowd of sexual outlaws may buy their own life with the lives of others. They may embrace a wave of evil and violence so that it doesn't pick them up and drag them under and do it with the same cool smile that they display on the stage. But their song is still bittersweet and regretful, they still have money and time and information for the people they betrayed. And on a train bearing you away from everything you ever knew or imagined for yourself, an outlaw who has lived running for a year before you were tracked down like an animal, you might simply sit (eyes to the ground) while they drag someone you love away. Maybe after taking home a cute blonde only to see his throat slit by storm troopers in your living room, you would listen when someone told you that in order to survive you needed to sit and listen to them torture your lover without moving to help him. And after hours of hearing his cries and screams and being unable to do anything (because there is no way this is your life and your out of you mind with fear and pain) you would say you didn't know your lover when his limp and bloody body was dragged before you. Maybe you would listen to a nightmare voice that ordered you to beat him because there was nothing else to hear. You would follow the one instinct that they had left you, the instinct to survive. By the time they tossed his body out of the train, would you have anything left to feel? When everything had been stripped away but your own life, what wouldn't you do to save it? And maybe your redemption would lie in love. Maybe when you saw someone (someone who had screamed at you and wanted you and needed you and laughed with you even in the face of death) refuse to let you go, run straight into the arms of death rather than let it shoot them in the back, you would finally become fully human again. The agony of that loss would rip through every part of you but you would feel it, you would know that you could feel. And when you took your own life it would be with the utmost dignity; you would stop fiercely clinging to the uncertain promise of survival and wrap your hands around the walls that bound you as you flew free.

If like me you live in Britain and stay up late you often find obscure films being shown on Channel 4 . One night I stayed up and by chance watched BENT. After I watched I realised I should try going to bed early BENT starts off bizarrely with transvestites parading around one of which is Sir Mick Jagger so I was expecting a sort of camp version of CABARET , but explicit scenes of gay sex followed and after that the film descended into a very pretentious and obvioulsy stage based drama where Clive Owen looks grim faced and keeps repeating " This can`t be happening " over and over again . And despite what other reviewers have said about this film I found myself feeling nothing except terminal boredom . In short this is the type of film that ruins the British film industry but which Britain continues to make despite a very limited market . And no I`m not being homophobic . If the characters had been , Jews , Slavs , trade unionists , communists or any other type of victim of Nazism I would still have hated this film