Reviewing Movies

Quite a coup for a young Canadian Director to score Sir Ian McKellan to record a voice-over.

Judge Earl Lagatos has two faces. There is the upright public face he shows the world and the private man, estranged from his own Father who causes the death of one son after he announces at the dinner table that he is gay and drives the other to the streets of Vancouver. There Pip meets a gay hustler who fancies him, a young Catholic Priest whose intentions he suspects, and a young aspiring social worker who becomes his lover. His fourth encounter is with the taped memoirs of his deceased Grandfather, (recorded by McKellan), who at eighteen found himself in the middle of WW#1. Cut to WW#1 where Jason Lagatos meets a torch singer in Albourne, England and in France a wounded and dying medic officer. Pip first meets his grandfather via the tape on his eighteenth birthday.

Fledgeling director Richard Bell scores another coup in the person of Conductor Branwell Tovey who conducts he own score for the background music. Bell moves from a $500 two-hander to an $800,000 major motion picture.

Intended for adult audiences this movie confronts issues of gay prostitution, sexual predators, safe sex, and life on the street. For most of the movie the runaway Pip is a resentful, defiant, smelly street person; not an easy character to like. Persevere and you will at least understand why he got there.