A look at the 1950s muscle men's magazines and the representative industry which were popular supposedly as health and fitness magazines, but were in reality primarily being purchased by the still-underground homosexual community. Chief among the purveyors of this literature was Bob Mizer, who maintained a magazine and developed sexually inexplicit men's films for over 40 years. Aided by his mother, the two maintained a stable of not so innocent studs.
Daniel MacIvor Joshua Peace Jack Griffin Mazeika Carroll Godsman Jonathan Torrens Thomas Wayne Harris Jaime Robertson Dick Sircom Thom Fitzgerald Orest Ulan Glen Deveau Andrew Miller Marla McLean Daniel McLaren Bernard Robichaud Marc St. Onge Steve MacLaughlin Andy Smith Michael Weir Marc Le Blanc Timothy Phillips Jonathan Langlois-Sadubin Lucy Decoutere Renee Penney Joe Dacey Megan Richards Liz Anderson Sarah Dunsworth Kathy Pederson Show All…
Alliance Atlantis Emotion Pictures La Sept-Arte Mikado Film Odeon Films Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation Téléfilm Canada Channel 4 Television Strand Releasing Odeon Film
肌肉派, 비프케이크
France
Festival de films gays et lesbiens de Paris
Canada
USA
France
Canada
France
USA
So many men in speedos, so many bulges, so much nudity, I’m in heaven!!
A rather interesting combination of documentary and narrative film all about the beginning, rise and eventual death of male physique photography. Both the interview segments and the narrative reenactments compliment each other very well, the production design of the narrative portions was excellent, it looks like something Todd Haynes or Douglas Sirk would’ve filmed, and the interview segments were very informative and nicely presented.
I find it hard not to like a movie that has so much male nudity.
Fitzgerald's blend of documentary and fictionalized reenactment recalls other NQC films like Velvet Goldmine, The Watermelon Woman, and Swoon, each excavations of the recent past that dig up the homoeroticism lurking just below the surface -- in this case, Bob Mizer's empire of physique magazines and posing films in the years preceding the establishment of the gay sex cinema. Just like Mizer's models, nearly all of the talking heads here are vocally straight -- most egregiously Jack LaLanne, who credits his wife here as 'his greatest success' -- so it's up to the colorful reenactments to show what the AMG was foremost all about: not a model service, not inspiration for wannabe bodybuilders, but as one-handed fantasy fodder for a…
| The short version: A bounty of bulges, a prancing parade of preposterous posing ‘pouches’ and yet…mostly uneventful. Beefcake comes off feeling like a lower tier afterschool special frankensteined with some lame interviews. While there is some (corned) beef in this cake, it’s served lukewarm/half-defrosted. A deep dive into the history of muscle mag mafia, this is not.
| The slightly less short version: I don’t mean to sound pretentious but the whole ‘dramatized documentary’ formula seems to have been contrived for an audience that scoffs at the idea of sitting through a documentary (Well that or children, but I doubt this subject matter is a cornerstone of education). Admittedly, I haven’t watched many of these, so if there is…
Writer/director Thom Fitzgerald based his screenplay on the Taschen book by F. Valentine Hooven III which included a pictorial survey of post-WWII male physique magazines. Fitzgerald focuses, in particular, on Physique Pictorial, a quarterly magazine published by Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild.
Fitzgerald combines stills and 8mm movie loops from the extensive AMG back catalogue; interviews with physique photographers like Dave Martin and Russ Warner, fans like Valentine Hoover and Wayne Stanley, and models like Joe Lietel and Joe Dallesandro; then dramatic reconstructions of stories from Mizer’s biography.
The film begins with 12 year old Mizer (Timothy Phillips) shooting nude photos of his school friends in his mother’s attic, using his mother’s wedding dress as a backdrop, the…
It's not exactly good but it's an engaging piece of US gay history that (thankfully) doesn't try to make grand queer theory statements about a horny, oiled-up magazine.
Watch on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOwHf0dijZ0
Put off reviewing this because I don't really have that much to say about the film itself. It tells the story of Bob Mizer and Physique Pictorial but in a very basic way that leans away from the most interesting aspects. Mizer's work was revolutionary, but the impact it had on gay audiences was far more interesting than what he was doing.
Reading F. Valentine Hooven's book that the film is based on makes this clear. What for us looks remarkably tame, but for the fifties was radical. "What was new about the work in Mizer's magazines was not something he was doing but something he was not doing. [...] Male nudity [had traditionally] always required a reason why. [...]"…
Look, if I want insubstantial beefcake, I go to the pages of Physique Pictorial, or the vast AMG film archives. However, if I'm coming to a docudrama like Beefcake, it's because I want a little more substance. Substance, or rather, depth, is something Beefcake struggles with, creating a little bubble of the 1950s posing pouch scene that never gets prodded or popped: not only is there but the slightest peek at the real intricacies of Bob Mizer's pseudo-pornographic enterprise, but very little commentary on what these images meant to queer people then, and now -- both subjects really worthy of discussion, in my opinion. That being said, Beefcake is still pretty fun, painting a sun-dappled picture of gay L.A. and…
A peculiar blend of archival and talking head documentary with stylised kitsch and courtroom drama about the deeply homoerotic concept of ‘all-American’ male bodies and society’s typically reactionary response to its sexualisation. A queer oddity relic from the ‘90s.
I've mapped the exact point where Todd Haynes, Gay Roger Corman, and Pumping Iron intersect, and it's... Canadian?
I enjoyed this docu-drama very much, and I appreciate how Thom Fitzgerald tried to stay true to the spirit of Bob Mizer's films. It's calculated camp, but it's all in good fun.
Docudrama about 50’s gay porn. The documentary sections work better than the stilted re-enactments. It’s an interesting story but they struggle to find a features worth of narrative in it.
HORNY!!!!!!!!!!!!but, also, very sweet :) would make a SWEATY double feature with 1991's Daddy and the Muscle Academy
Just fun!!!!! Silly!!!! Everything you were promised and more!!!! Very camp, very 90's TV movie-quality, very much a bunch of quirked up white boys busting it down sexual style
Queer Quest 2022
9 / 30
