Funny Foreign Lesbians Singing While Decked In Crazy Costumes...Good Times

The first 4 photos are just a taste of the off the wall costumes that the infamous Topp Twins wear on stage for their nothing but anti-normative performances. At first I had mixed feelings about this movie, I liked it but at the same time I didn't. Though once I thought more about the impact, intent, and path this movie took my opinion changed and i came to enjoy it.

The Topp Twins are a pair of Twins (Jools & Lynda) from New Zealand raised as just your everyday farm girls. As they aged they both identified as lesbians, and used their music to start a revolution in New Zealand and help promote same-sex couples rights [specifying on including lesbians with homosexual men in any rights, laws, etc that get written]. They're big break was back in the 1980's and the movie shows that without them, gay AND LESBIAN rights in New Zealand wouldn't have been recognized as soon as they were; who knows how long it would've taken the parliment to start recognizing the problems.

Though due to their serious efforts in fighting for their rights along with their outrageous outfits and typically comedic material they stretched outside the island of New Zealand and became internationally known. When they started they didn't really dress out of the ordinary [during the 80's] but then later decided to make their musical performances more than just any typical performance, so they then added in characters; that's right CHARACTERS, not just costumes. The twins didn't just have crazy costumes but funny characters each with a different personality to go with the costume.

These women will go down in history because of what they did for their, present, and future LGBTQ generations. And the best thing about them is they didn't JUST fight the man hand in hand with their music, they added in costumes and turned their movement into a comedy act while still getting their general point made.


*first photo http://cache4.asset-cache.net/xc/93040508.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=77BFBA49EF878921CC759DF4EBAC47D0F9A4C7BC9FC3D81B87CF30FFDE87024E7C84E4F3FE7D276CE30A760B0D811297
*second photo http://www.odt.co.nz/files/story/2009/04/jools_left_and_linda_topp_s_well_loved_cast_of_cha_1637841086.JPG
*third photo http://www.yourmovies.com.au/static/media/x300/250496_249887_2009_topp_twins_002_1_.jpg
*fourth photo http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2009/11/19/1225799/773335-the-topp-twins.jpg
*fifth photo http://www.christchurchmusic.org.nz/files/u776/Picture_2_3.png

Bakal Boys...Hmmmm Where Do I Start? Let's Just Say 'Interesting' To Be Nice

Ok I'm not gonna lie, this movie isn't all bad [I'll get to that] but the Bakal Boys was not as great as I anticipated. Maret, Lauren, Vania, & I all sawthe Bakal Boys together and I was really intrigued by the films write up on SIFF's website and a blog I found while Google searching the film [http://seattlest.com/2010/05/26/siff_review_-_bakal_boys.php] but when I saw the movie there were several things I disliked about it.

To start off I'll give a short explanation of the movie. It's about 2 boys [Utoy & Bungal] and their friends that I don't remember their names but weren't as important. These boys live in a very impoverished part of Manila Bay in the Philippines and in order to get extra money they go dive in the extremely dirty and poluted bay in search of scrap metal to sell to a junkyard and get paid based on the total weight of the items. One day the boys find an anchor, knowing that once they get it to the junkyard they'll get alot of money because it's very heavy they are so excited that they forget Bungal back out on the gulf that they dive at because he was sunbathing when they left. But once they get back out there Bungal is gone, no where to be found. This happend quite close to the beginning of the 1 hour and 20 minute film and literally for the rest of it Utoy is just in search of Bungal with no luck. Then the movie ends, point blank.

This movie was very confusing to me, I feel like the beginning when most of the activity was happening was very jumbled and would just skip around and not really give more detail for each scene. Then all of the sudden Bungal is just gone, at first I figured that this was a twist in the film and I was actually re-interested after this point. But then he's never found, say what? Are you serious? The whole movie focuses on finding Bungal and in the end there is no explanation as to why he went missing nor did they find him. I thought this was a really lame way to end the movie, actually a lame way to have created this movie in the first place. They could've done so much more and made it a very powerful movie.

The movie highlights on the low class of these people in this part of Manila Bay, starting with the children making it fun to find metal scraps to sell and make money for their family; which unless I was raised wrong, really isn't what normal children do. Touching on this same topic is done by looking at the run down huts they all live in along with the dirtyness of everything around them: their home's floors were either covered in sand/dirt or they were sand/dirt [I can't exactly remember], the water that the children swim in was extremely poluted and that didn't even phase the parents [they were more worried about them getting hit by boats, but still didn't do much to punish them probably because they bring things home to sell], and everybody wore the same clothes thus bluntly highlighting the families poverty.



So I don't 100% hate the movie, I just wish that the creators went further with their ideas because the concept of learning about this culture of people was very interesting to me. Learing about the way the people in this area live their daily lives was my favorite part of the movie, and when they put that on the back burner [in time forget about it] and then focus on the missing boy that never gets found it kind of ruined the movie for me and made it kind of bland. Like I said, I just wish they took it into a different direction by maybe just focusing on the culture and having Bengal's disappearence be a side story and then either find him in the end or gain understanding as to why he went missing.

*first photo http://static.blogo.it/cineblog/BasecoBakalBoys.jpg
*second photo http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TfkgevD-TyQ/0.jpg