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Beefcake

1999, Movie, NR, 93 mins

Beefcake: Review

BEEFCAKE
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Long before Marky Mark dropped trou and announced the arrival of undeniably homoerotic imagery in mainstream culture, there was Bob Mizer, amateur photographer, super-8 filmmaker and the subject of this fanciful and highly entertaining docudrama. Mizer was among a handful of post-WWII photographers who specialized in frankly erotic photos of muscular young men wearing little more than baby oil and posing straps. Ostensibly inspiring physical-culture pictorials, the photos found enormous popularity as gay pin-ups at the time when gay men had little to choose from in the way of erotica. In 1948, Mizer founded the Athletic Model Guild, shooting handsome Hollywood drifters and would-be actors with an eye to promoting his models to other artists and physique photographers. A.M.G. failed as an agency, but took off as a studio in its own right; the photographs became its raison d'etre, and Mizer began publishing his own magazine, Physique Pictorial. But as the Guild grew — Mizer's home, which he continued to share with his mother, became a bustling menagerie of naked men, animals and tacky Greco-Roman props — A.M.G. ran afoul of California's harsh obscenity laws, and Mizer more than once found himself on the wrong side of a jail cell. Director Thom Fitzgerald (THE HANGING GARDEN) tears into this fascinating slice of gay Americana like a kid at Christmas, using everything at his disposal to bring his personal vision of Mizer's world (naughty but essentially innocent, nude but never lewd) to life in all its kitsch glory. Still images and Super-8 reels from the A.M.G. archives are wittily woven into the fictional story of Neil O'Hara (Josh Peace), a handsome innocent from Pugwash, Nova Scotia (Fitzgerald's homeland), who meets Bob Mizer (Daniel MacIvor) and becomes a popular A.M.G. model. Best of all, Fitzgerald includes interviews with real-life physique photographers (Mizer died in 1993), aficionados such as Valentine Hooven (whose book Beefcake, along with Mizer's own "documentary" Inside A.M.G., served as chief inspiration), and even a few models, including "Little Joe" Dallesandro and the ever spry Jack LaLanne. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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